Trespassers: a science-fiction novel

by Todd Wynn

  At first, Jeremy thought the light was growing brighter, but then he realized that it wasn’t a light at all. Everything inside that circle lost its color and definition, fading until finally the outside broke through. He was seeing the yard, and everything in it: the old wishing well with a rake propped against it, two big sycamore trees, and the woods just beyond them.

  Sara shut off the cube, and Jeremy watched the wall seal back together.

  “What do the others do?” he asked.

  Sara shrugged. When he turned to look her in the eye, she shrugged again, in case he hadn’t caught the first one.

  “I only tried two of them.” She slid the quoret back into its slot and pointed to the one next to it. “That one scared me. So I stopped experimenting.”

  “Scared you how?”

  “Do you know that water tower on Euclid?”

  “Yeah.” He knew it well. Everyone knew it. It had been hit by a tornado—twisted and crumpled but still standing. “My dad was the inspector who signed off on its structural integrity after the tornado.”

  “That wasn’t a tornado,” she said.

  “You did that?”

  Sara nodded. Jeremy knelt beside the box to get a better look at the cubes, tucked away in their felt stalls. He noticed that each one had an icon engraved on its tip, probably to indicate what it does. The one Sara just demonstrated bore the mark of two circles displayed at an angle, with one in front of the other.

  He feared there was something illegal about how these ended up in Sara’s possession. But he believed her story. He believed she didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  “We have to try these out,” he said.

  17

  The Comforts of Home

  “There it is,” Web said, pointing out the windshield. They had arrived.

  Mindy peered around the seat and got her first look—a huge, white patch of ground where heavy machinery crawled between large piles of limestone. The story Web had told was dead on: this place held no mystery. A passerby could take it all in with one quick swoop of the eye.

  As New Guy steered the SUV down the dirt path leading to the quarry, Stewart placed another call to George.

  “We’re coming Home,” Stewart said into the phone.

  “What’d you find out?” George asked.

  “You were right. It was just a few bags of equipment and supplies.”

  “Of course it was,” George said with a laugh. “Nobody jumps off a moving ship.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Stewart conceded. This should have made George suspicious. It was unlike Stewart to admit George was right twice in one conversation. “So anyway,” Stewart continued, “we should have the area cleaned by tomorrow night.”

  “Good, keep me posted.”

  As Mindy overheard this conversation, she was struck by three things. First, Stewart covered up the fact that trespassers did actually jump from the ship. Second, he made no mention of the heart-signal tracker. And third, she had no idea what he meant by have the area cleaned by tomorrow night.

  The SUV joined the rows of parked cars hidden behind large piles of limestone. Mindy stepped out and experienced her first mouthful of limestone dust—one quickly learns to look away from the wind and breathe through the nose. She followed the gang to a small corridor carved out of the towering rock. This modest opening was almost invisible against the landscape. As they disappeared into it, Mindy could feel her lungs restricting. She wasn’t sure whether it was from the limestone dust in the air, the claustrophobic corridor, or the anticipation of what lay ahead. Mindy was ready to take it all in, but there wasn’t much to take in, yet—just bare rock walls covered in white, powdery limestone.

  As Stewart reached the old dented door at the end of the corridor, Mindy was almost expecting a grand presentation, perhaps a swooping motion of the arm as he bid her an official welcome. Instead, he yanked open the creaky metal door and disappeared into the darkness. Inside, the lights flickered on from some cheap, unseen motion sensor. The room was small and ragged, adorned with a soda machine that generated an annoying hum and a small sliding window that gave a view of a small, barren office. A few generic posters hung on the wall with tattered edges and faded ink. They proudly informed anyone who cared about minimum-wage standards, right-to-work laws, maternity-leave regulations, and workers’ compensation rights. Mindy didn’t care about any of these things. She was expecting a grand fortress and instead she got this dump.

  A few presses of the Pepsi-machine buttons in just the right sequence, she thought, and the face of the contraption would crack open and unveil a staircase leading to a double-o-seven type of lair. She clung desperately to this hope, to fend off the rising concern that this really was all there was to it.

  As soon as the rickety door slammed shut behind them, Stewart pulled an ID card from his pocket and waved it at a blank spot on the wall. Mindy felt the floor vibrate, and the whole room began to lift. The doors, the poster-lined walls, even the soda machine, it was all rising above her. Suddenly her bearings returned, and she realized that the room wasn’t ascending; the floor was descending. Like a sturdy cargo elevator, it was gently lowering them to a subterranean level.

  As she stared up at the bottom of the Pepsi machine that was now overhead, she realized just how antiquated the secret-staircase idea had been. This truly was much better.

  “Did you want a drink?” Web asked, having noticed her staring at the machine.

  “Oh . . . no.” Then a thought occurred to her. “But . . . does it actually work, though? I mean, could someone buy a drink from there?”

  “Of course,” Web replied. “The Pepsi man comes on Thursdays to stock it.”

  Then, the bottom of the wall appeared, like a curtain rising to unveil the next treasure. This treasure was a broad hallway that led to a thick double door, resembling a bank vault. The walls were powdery white, but there was no limestone dust down here. It was just a paint job in keeping with the theme.

  Stewart led the way to the bank-vault door, where he promptly turned to the others, gave a quick bow, and swooped his arm in a ceremonious arc.

  “Welcome home, Mindy Craddock,” he announced with a smile.

  Web gave a little golf clap, and even New Guy cracked a warm smile. Stewart hit the lone button on the wall, and the doors parted in the middle, retracting with a muffled hiss.

  Four steps later, she was finally inside, and the thick doors hissed to a close behind them. Mindy was absorbing images that most of her Redundancy Department colleagues only dreamed about. She was already wondering how she would describe it to them, if she was allowed to describe it at all.

  The grandeur of this place surpassed her imagination. It was unlike any place anyone’s imagination had ever conjured. You didn’t just walk into it. It enveloped you. The farther you went, the safer you felt. It defied logic for a structure to be so cold and so inviting at the same time.

  The floor was coated in a pleasing mix of dark, overlapping colors that had an almost three-dimensional feel. The walls were very much the opposite. They were gray. But Mindy noticed something quite odd about them, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She stopped in her tracks to get a better look. It was as if the paint was so deep that the longer she looked, the deeper she saw into it.

  “Marvelous,” she thought to herself.

  “What’s that?” Web asked.

  Oops, she had said that out loud. “It’s like the wall’s not there,” she explained.

  “It’s there,” Web chuckled. He tapped the wall with his fingertips as his voice took the tone of a tour guide. “It’s a depth paint. It’s designed to allow your eyes to see distance. It actually covers the full range of the human eye . . . which means you can focus on it just as if you were looking at the night sky. It reduces the fatigue on your eyes from being indoors.”

  Mindy nodded at these words, but she didn’t take her eyes off the wall. She was feeling the wonderful effect that he described.

>   “You can also look at it up close,” Web explained, putting his head near the wall to demonstrate, “and your eyes can focus on it just the same.”

  “It feels good,” Mindy admitted, as she soaked it in.

  Web liked Mindy. In their brief time together, mostly traveling in an SUV, he had found that he could talk to her about food, which was not as easy as it might seem. He couldn’t talk to New Guy or Stewart about food. New Guy rarely said more than two words about anything, and Stewart was the type who didn’t care what was on his fork, as long as it was nutritious, not too sweet, and reasonably easy to chew. From a conversational standpoint, this did not mesh well with Web who was simply too passionate about food to allow the assertion that potatoes taste just as good from the microwave.

  Web often felt that if he didn't keep a tight leash on his passion for eating, he would swell to the size of a hot-air balloon, which was something he was determined to avoid. Avoiding it had become a full-time job. Diets didn’t work for him. He settled into the technique of leaving food behind. Whenever he ate, he made a conscious decision not to finish, and he took great pride in walking away.

  Another thing he had pride in was this building. He had much more to show Mindy. Every detail was up to a standard beyond compare. Even the hinges on the doors were works of art that satisfied form and function to the highest level. When a door was pushed shut, one was convinced that a nuclear explosion couldn’t rattle it. In this place, the only things that would ever need replacing were the humans.

  Stewart led the way into his office.

  “Don’t tell anyone what we’re on to here,” Stewart ordered, as soon as Web had shut the door behind them. “We’ll get that heart-signal generator working, and then we’ll head back in the morning to lay the trap . . . just the four of us.”

  Mindy was thrilled to be counted in the four. Apparently, she had passed the on-the-job interview. There were now 218 people on staff at the Limestone Deposit Survey Group.

  Stewart tapped a smart board mounted into the wall. Its screen came to life. He wrote OFF THE RECORD at the top with his finger. Below that he wrote GEORGE.

  “Okay, what are we telling George?” he said, mostly thinking aloud. “As far as he knows, it’s cargo dumped in a field. We’ll keep it at that for now.”

  “Write overtime on there,” Web said.

  Stewart rolled his eyes, “That’s taken care of, I told you. Don’t worry about it.”

  “That’s also what you said last time.”

  “This is different,” Stewart insisted.

  “Last time you said overtime is taken care of. And you said don’t worry about it. I didn’t worry about it, and overtime wasn’t taken care of.”

  “Excuse me,” Mindy said, raising her hand. “I have a question about something you said earlier.”

  “Sure,” Stewart dropped into the chair behind his desk.

  “Well, on the phone, you said we would have the area cleaned by tomorrow night. What does that mean?”

  “It’s protocol,” Stewart explained. “Whenever there’s an unauthorized alien encounter, we have to make sure that no public suspicions were aroused. So, like . . . if these had actually been supply bags dropped from an alien ship, we would have to go locate each one of them, make sure nobody stumbled across them, and make sure nobody gets the wrong idea about what they are or where they came from.”

  “And by wrong idea, you mean right idea,” Mindy added.

  “Exactly. They can be duffle bags dropped from a cargo plane or a military supply pack that fell off an Army convoy. . . . It doesn’t matter what people think they are, as long as they don’t think they’re from outer space.”

  “But these aren’t supply bags,” Mindy said.

  “No.”

  “Well, one probably is,” Web inserted.

  “Yes,” Stewart said. “One is probably a supply bag. But the other four are some very desperate trespassers.”

  “So, how do we cover that up?” Mindy asked.

  “We don’t have to,” Stewart explained. “They’ll be covering themselves up. What we do is get that heart-signal generator working and draw them right to us.”

  “And then what?” Mindy asked.

  “Then we find out what all this is about.” He turned to Web. “How’s that signal coming?”

  “Almost finished,” Web reported. “I just have to get started on it.” He knew not to bore them with the technical breakthroughs he had made on the ride over.

  “Perfect,” Stewart said. “Get to work on it—all night if you have to. We want that thing ready in the morning.”

  “Can I ask one more question?” Mindy said. Stewart’s eyes let her know to proceed. “Why aren’t we telling anyone else about this?”

  A grin broke across Stewart’s face. She would have to be satisfied with that, because it was all she was going to get. The answer was right out the door, around the corner, and up the hall. It was the large corner office with the bird’s eye view—that’s right, it was an underground office with a marvelous panoramic view, thanks to high-tech fiber optics that piped in crystal-clear images from ten stories above the ground, generating the illusion of a picture window. It was that office that Stewart was chasing, not just for the office itself, but more for what it represented. It was currently unoccupied. While the work crew was putting the final touches on the interior, a decision was being made about who would take possession. It was clearly down to two candidates: Stewart and Renny Cooper—an agent far below Stewart’s caliber. Stewart had done more for the Limestone Deposit Survey Group than twenty Renny Coopers. Stewart belonged in that corner office, and he was eager to prove it. Stewart was known as a rising star in the Limestone Group, but for Stewart the rise was never rapid enough. This particular case felt like a big opportunity. He could feel something big at the end of it. He could feel a corner office.

  Stewart’s problem wasn’t with Renny Cooper specifically. It was with the idea of Renny Cooper. Stewart had been with the department from the beginning, back in the early days, when they had to make it up as they went along. The early guys who laid the foundation were being pushed out by a flood of executive stiffs who were good at corporate ladder climbing. Renny Cooper wouldn’t know the first thing about confiscating a spaceship, but he sure knew how to take credit for someone else’s confiscation. It seemed that Renny was getting a pat on the back for every ship that Stewart brought in, and Stewart couldn’t figure out how. Renny wasn’t even in the normal chain of command—he reported to some office in Washington that had planted him here about eleven months ago. Stewart reported to George, just as he always had, just like in the early days before the Limestone Group had an official name or its own high-tech building . . . before the US government decided the regulation of alien visitors was too important to be left to those who actually knew what they were doing. Yes, Stewart had a chip on his shoulder. But the whole Limestone Deposit Survey Group was behind him and would cheer when he threw Renny Cooper out.

  18

  The Quorets

  Sara followed Jeremy down a path that weaved through the forest behind his house. Jeremy was happy to push low-hanging branches out of the way for her, and Sara was pleased to follow him through the overgrown trail. For the first time in eight months, Sara was able to hide from the overwhelming mystery of her life and find refuge with this boy who was no mystery at all.

  His genuine simplicity captivated her. She didn’t think he was dumb, not at all: just simple. He was able to rise above all the complication and see things in a simple way. That was his genius. And that’s exactly what she needed now.

  She could feel the smile on her face as she watched his back move through the trail. She noticed how careful he was to move debris out of her way and how he never stopped talking. The talking started out as nervous chatter, but quickly grew into a comfortable dialogue. Clearing the debris was fulfilling a natural instinct, and it sure felt good. It felt like holding a car door open, which felt like a date
. And that’s probably why he liked it so much.

  Sara and Jeremy were striding into the heart of Camp Whatever. This was the name Jeremy and his mother had settled on, after Jeremy’s father had changed the official name for the twentieth time. Almost twice a week Jeremy’s father would come up with a new perfect name, but none of them stuck like Camp Whatever.

  “That’s the soccer field, over there,” he said, pointing through the brush to a large clearing. “And that’s the cafeteria.” He pointed in the other direction.

  Through openings in the thicket, Sara could see wooden stakes in the ground. Most of them had fallen over, and the faded ribbon had migrated horribly out of shape. It had once outlined the walls of a structure that was never to be built. The dream was starting to rub off on Sara. She could see lunches being served and milk cartons lining the tables.

  Around each turn, Jeremy explained each section, according to his father’s grand design. There were swimming pools and horse stalls and wheelbarrow races, if only theoretically.

  “That must be the bonfire,” Sara said, nodding toward a huge wall of rotting wood on the far end of the clearing.

  Jeremy laughed. “Yeah, that would make one heck of a fire.”

  Jeremy had decided that this secluded patch of forest would be the best spot for experimenting. He didn’t like the idea of what the cubes might do to the house.

  “So, what is it?” Sara asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This part.” She threw her hand up at the field. “What’s this supposed to be?”

  Jeremy took another look at the clearing, seeing it through his father’s eyes.

  “This is it,” Jeremy announced, borrowing his father’s familiar words. “This is what separates our camp from the rest of the summer camps.” He shifted back to his own words. “That’s what my father likes to say, anyway. This is where the main cabins would be. He wanted the kids to participate as soon as they arrived. He wanted to put them into groups and have them paint their own cabins. And they could pick whatever colors they wanted.”