Yngve, AR - Alien Beach

by Alien Beach (lit)

  Alien Beach, he thought. Whatever it takes.

  DAY 115

  The large TV screen in the mess barrack showed the first images of the mass suicides.

  Then more suicides were reported, and still more. The casualty figures climbed by the dozens and hundreds for each new report from the cult compounds scattered across the globe.

  "This is terrible!" Edmund exclaimed to Carl. "All because of your spreading of rumors to the public! You must immediately denounce the rumors, before thousands more die!"

  "And then what?" Carl said, cold with terror, wishing it was all just a bad dream. "Now I really need proof."

  "What proof?"

  "Proof to show the world. The only way to end the rumors before they cause more destruction."

  "You're mad!" cried the bishop.

  Ignoring him, Carl went out to the beach, found a Sirian and asked him to send a message to the lander in the lagoon. The reply came within the hour: a meeting was to take place after sunset.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Carl and the other scientists gathered at the site of the tree-like, four meter high antennas the Sirians had erected on the beach. At the erection ceremony, a lightning-bolt had escaped the antenna-sprouts and burned a palmtree; now, months later, that palmtree was dead and had toppled to the ground. The amphibian group, the whole dozen, surfaced and walked up to the site.

  "Ranmotanii, Oanorrn... do you know why I have called for you?"

  "Yyes, Caarl-Ssayerrs. One oof ourr peeoplle haave toold yyou who thhe Annncestorss aare. 'Wwhat haappens happeens'... llike sso onne laand-hummman saaid."

  " You are the Ancestors. Or rather, you will be."

  "Yees."

  "There is much that we must decide upon, because your group is in danger now. Right now, land-humans are killing themselves because they think you have promised them immortality."

  The Sirians had access to most media; they knew, all right. "Thhen you land-humans doo nnot knoww enoughh aabout thee Anccestooors."

  To the scientists, an undercurrent of sadness could be heard in Ranmotanii's voice.

  "Tell us everything we need to understand them."

  The Sirians had an internal discussion, which lasted a few minutes; the scientists began to grow restless.

  "Carl," Stone said, rubbing his cold hands in the rising and falling night breeze, "what did Ann really tell you? I thought this 'Ancestor' talk was just a bunch of religious phrases, you know, like we say 'Oh my God' but we don't mean it..."

  "You ought to know better, Stone. These beings are on a level where practically everything is meant seriously. They don't joke about death for instance, because they don't fear death anymore. They have so few internal conflicts, because they don't fear being wrong anymore. They have no sense of being alone anymore, because they are never alone. They are not afraid of us, because they have a powerful ally we can't even see.

  " Takeru! Have your measurements registered any weird patterns from the clouds above the island? Electromagnetic anomalies that can't be caused by the weather, or particle emissions coming straight out of the air?"

  The team's master engineer consulted his pocket computer, where summaries of his surveillance data were listed. "Well, there have been a few anomalies every month, but almost negligible, could even be isotopes from jet aircraft passing by..."

  Takeru meant it; the results had been vague and inexplicable... until now. The rational part of his brain was at odds with his emotions; he no longer managed to keep the conflicting sides split apart. Mats' medication barely kept him stable now; Takeru was aware of actually coming together, but he felt like coming apart.

  "Hasn't the weather struck you as odd lately?" asked Carl.

  "It has. The clouds up there are caused by heat that doesn't emanate from the sun - even now, in the middle of the night that air is being warmed up. First I thought it was all the air traffic heating up the stratosphere, but the extra heat is much more than airplanes could emit, and it seems to come from nowhere. Either that, or the heat sources are so small they don't show up on my instruments, smaller than a millimeter - but there's nothing there except air and vapor."

  "Can you count the heat sources?"

  "I told you, Carl - the heat is there, you could go up in a balloon and feel it yourself - but the sources cannot be pinpointed! My theory is that the Sirians have a space probe which shoots high-energy laser beams into the atmosphere, but so thin we can't see them."

  "We do register radio traffic between the Mars mothership and the lander craft here, Ranmotanii. Are you using some kind of energy transmission from the mothership to cause those strange clouds?" Stone asked.

  "Nnno... Anccestoors aare up thherre... annd they heat uup thhe atomms iin thhe aair ass theey mmmoove. Wwhen Ancesstors slllow dowwn, yyou wiill ssee bluue llight..."

  Stone shook his head: "No. No, this is impossible. I won't believe in things I can't see. I didn't even believe atoms really existed, until they invented a camera that could take pictures of them."

  Carl said to Oanorrn, who was waving for attention: "You must show us. Can you make the Ancestors do something - that only they can?"

  The wrinkled alien with the whites of his eyes shot through by capillaries nodded, once. He gestured at the humans to move away from the antenna cluster, and urged his flock closer. Namonnae and Tmmtenaa got the scientists to shut down most of the nearby spotlights; the beach became almost dark. The Sirians quickly formed a standing ring around the cluster. Without a signal, the ring of humanoids began to dance. Their flat, long feet moved in slight, measured movements, so that the circle rocked in unison - clockwise, counter-clockwise, in a pattern.

  They started chanting up at the sky, with inhuman intonation: "Chiiiskr-r-r-r... chiiiskr-r-r-r mmer-r-r-r-lleee!"

  A series of popping energy charges sounded from the alien antennas; the metal crown of the tree began to glow with blue radiation. Almost instantly, the sea breeze grew into a roaring gale that whipped the palmtrees; the whirling cloud cover blurred into a haze. The amphibians continued their dance, gazing up at the sky with expectant faces.

  Carl's group stood paralyzed, set apart from the Sirians, when the lights began to appear.

  "Lightning balls!" shouted Stone, throwing himself down on the ground. A swarm of small, fuzzy blue spheres, fainter and smaller than old light-bulbs, scattered from the antenna crown and shot outward over the heads of the Sirians - who shouted out loud and threw their arms up in triumph. The lightning balls zipped silently back and forth across the beach, at velocities akin to a jet aircraft smashing the sound barrier. Streams of them flew past Carl's head at close range - he barely perceived them at first, except as blue beams.

  Glowing apparitions. How many were there? They were everywhere around them - the balls split up like particles in an ultra-slow cyclotron collision, slammed together and fused, disappeared in a flash, re-appeared an inch further away, froze still, then shot away like bullets. It was impossible to count them - there could have been anything between a thousand or a billion. Ann instinctively reached out to touch them - and she saw a fuzzy bullet of blue light fly right through her hand. She felt the briefest burn of heat in her hand, but no mark was left on it.

  Carl remembered he ought to be breathing, gasped out loud - and the light show just vanished. Gone. The strong wind stopped dead. The blue glow around the antenna cluster died away. Mats Jonsson checked his watch; the phenomenon had lasted no more than twenty seconds. A smell of sharp, stinging ozone hung in the air. Stone looked up from his lying position, felt at his baseball cap to see if his head had been burned. No one had been hurt. The Sirians kept chanting to the sky, oblivious to the shocked scientists who staggered together, shaking like leaves.

  The man who shook the most was Bishop Edmund Soto.

  He held a crucifix to his lips, and croaked: "But where were you? Where were you when they asked me: 'Why won't he show himself to us?' Why have you failed us for so long?"

  Andrea came
over to Edmund and took his hands.

  "It was not God we saw, Edmund. It was traces made in the air by another, higher life-form."

  "Don't you think I understood that?" he told her, prying his hands from her hold. His eyes gleamed in the dark round face, mad with despair. "I have attended hundreds of funerals in my homeland... I have promised weeping mothers that their sons, shot and tortured to death by thugs, were going to a better place. But did any one of all those murdered sons appear to his mother in the form of a blue lightning ball? Not one!"

  He fell to his knees in the sand, utterly devastated. The scientists, moved to see the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize suffer such anguish, genuinely wanted to say something to comfort him. There was nothing they could say.

  Carl clasped his chest, fearful that his pounding heart would burst with the excitement. He had been utterly wrong about the Sirians; they weren't schizoid at all. If there had been any lingering doubt in his mind about them, now it had vanished - they were everything they claimed to be. When he saw Ranmotanii walk up to him, Carl had to repress a childish impulse to kneel down and kiss the old amphibian's feet.

  "How... how is it done?"

  "Wwwith ccertain mmmachiiines..."

  "Can they... see us... now?"

  "Yyyes, innn theirr ceertain wway."

  "Can I... communicate with them? If I send a radio message, could they answer it in a way I can understand?"

  Ranmotanii seemed to hesitate. "Rissk iiis thhat noot."

  "I think... yes, one of us had the camera going when it happened. I am forced to show the videotape of this event to my leader, the President of the United States."

  "Doo nnot liie too himm," Ranmotanii sang. "Eeven whhat yyou sayy aand thhink, thee Anceestors knnow. I do nnoot knoww iif thhis inffformatioon comes too ssoon forr youu to uunderstaand."

  My God, Carl thought, this is unreal. They don't believe in their gods... they build them.

  "Tell us everything about the Ancestors."

  The Sirians gave the scientists a few new, portable devices, which spoke synthetic English and projected film-like images on any surface. Again, there was a distinctly censored quality to the knowledge imparted. But what was told, was more than enough. Each of the dozen team members fully realized what it was like to be a tiny ant walking on the skin of a cosmic giant, scrutinized by trillions of invisible eyes. Two of them panicked, and had to be sedated. One of them decided to get stone drunk. Another immediately resigned from the project as soon as he understood what was going on.

  Carl stood firm under the pressure.

  Lazar stood.

  Ann stood.

  Takeru stood.

  Mats stood.

  And Edmund stood, perhaps taller than ever. "My God may have abandoned me, but he is still greater than this," he told himself.

  Seabound exit from the cult compound was blocked by half a mile of chain-link fence, topped with razor wire. The soldier himself had helped building it a month ago.

  He made his way along the beach, until he came to the spot where the fence ran into the sea. He stepped out into the surf, prepared to make a swim past the fence. A rumble came from the sea, louder than the waves... the soldier looked and saw a moving light in the dark sky. The rumble took shape, became the familiar pounding noise of a helicopter... no, it was too loud for that...

  The landing party took him by surprise: blinding searchlights were switched on just fifty meters away and pinpointed the huddling soldier. A fifteen meters long, bulky landing vessel clanked to a halt on the flat beach. Its stern opened into a ramp; out of the boat rolled a small tank, followed by armed troops wearing night-goggles.

  They had him cornered; the helicopter closed in above his head, whipping up sand and water droplets; from somewhere, a megaphone voice barked at him. The squinting soldier raised his arms in surrender.

  It was almost one o'clock in the morning, local time.

  He said nothing, made no resistance. It was over. The soldier was arrested and brought to a waiting helicopter, which brought him to the U.S.S. Powell. The flight took just a few hours.

  DAY 116

  The jetlag from flying halfway around the world put quite a strain on Carl's energy. He tried to rest as much as he could in-flight.

  One of the benefits of old age, he mused - it became easier to doze off and take convenient naps. When he exited the plane at the airport in New York, one of the President's closest aides rushed to meet him. A half-dozen Secret Service men escorted them to the waiting limousines. The President was waiting at the U.N. headquarters, with the Secretary General and the Security Council.

  "Mr. Sayers, I assume you have ordered the ECT team to keep quiet to any outsiders about -?"

  "Yes. All communications to and from Alien Beach have been cut for now."

  Carl wondered if the aide was trustworthy, then told himself to lay off the paranoia; it didn't matter. Inside his limousine, he received a secured phone line with a TV camera linkup. The President's face seemed drawn on the car's small monitor, eyes haunted and restless. Suddenly it dawned on Carl: a race that could read thoughts was a politician's natural enemy.

  Even his own benefactor might turn on him.

  "Carl, my friend," greeted the President's image on the monitor, making Carl even more suspicious. "The U.N. Security Council has been up for hours over this new information. We've turned every fact over again and again... but we've come nowhere. The U.N. membership nations are bound by the agreement with the Sirians to protect and escort them during their stay... which means that every one of those nations may become the target of a nuclear attack from King Khadi's rogue alliance."

  "Will the core of the Security Council hold together?"

  "If it broke up, where would the members go? And reject the chance to befriend the mightiest civilization in the world? The permanent members are terrified of staying, but even more terrified of leaving."

  Just months ago, "the mightiest civilization in the world" would have meant the USA. Not anymore.

  "Tell me what to do, Carl. Nobody on Earth knows them better than you do. Is there any way we can make them help us out of this crisis? Or more to the point: do they want to?"

  "They have been perfectly straight with us from the start; they really are just on a visit. When they leave, it will be for... thousands of years, maybe, or forever. I'm not even sure they'll leave our mind-recorders intact."

  "Self-destructing. Figures."

  "After they've left, mankind will have to face itself again. But the very knowledge of the Sirians being out there, will prove a uniting influence. It could bring the world's peoples together. That's the vision I have always believed in - one world, one humanity. The world leaders must explain this to the peoples of the world... and then maybe the peoples of the rogue states will understand that their leaders are deceiving them."

  "These are not exactly working democracies. King Khadi or the Iranian ayatollah don't care one damn bit if their peoples disagree with them, because they're convinced that they are doing God's business waging war against the Sirians."

  "You've been talking to Khadi?"

  "A secret meeting - me, the Chinese Prime Minister, and a few other Security Council members. We talked with him for three hours. God, how we tried to convince him that Allah might have created life on other planets than Earth - but no! That old crank had made up his mind! I quote: 'The Sirians are not humans, they are Satan's creations and must be destroyed!' The Iranians wouldn't even talk to us."

  Carl silently wished that it was all a bad joke, that the fate of mankind couldn't be depending on a few pig-headed old men with a 13th-century model of the cosmos. But it was crass, unfunny reality.

  "They must come to their senses, or their underlings will do it for them."

  "How?"

  "You must let me talk freely to the world."

  "What will you tell them?"

  "I'll show you when we meet."

  The U.N. Security Council was shown the video
tape from Alien Beach. They said nothing, perhaps out of of fear - fear of an unseen power that might or might not be listening to every word and thought that escaped their minds.

  One member hinted, finally, that Carl was running the errands of the aliens, that he might be an unwitting stooge serving them falsified information. Carl shook his head.

  "You don't understand how big this is. They haven't even told us half the truth. The Sirians we see, the beings of flesh and blood, aided by semi-organic machines... are just parts in a greater cycle. A cycle their culture has built up over tens of thousands of years. At a certain stage of development, their outlook on life, reality... changed completely. And all that went before that change... is just childhood, a passing phase. The phase we're in now, the human race."

  "This is madness, not science!" objected a council member, frightened by Carl's strange speech. "Are you going to let this man tell these outrageous stories? To the public?" he asked the President.

  The President sighed; his shoulders rose and sank slowly, limply.

  "I will. In this case, the people should judge his words, not us."

  The protesting council-member was talked into accepting Carl's proposal. They decided upon a time; just soon enough to allow Carl a few hours' rest. Then the council members took their phones and called the embassies of the Saudi alliance in person. Everyone, including the enemy, was to hear this.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  DAY 116

  "This is Christiana Mahnpour live for CNN, from the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Today's extra session of the General Assembly is in a state of total confusion - no agenda has been set yet, and the Secretary General is being besieged by requests from the delegates to make speeches and declarations.

  "The delegates are spreading conflicting rumors among each other. According to some sources, there has just been an emergency meeting with the U.N. Security Council, where a representative of the scientists on Alien Beach disclosed a 'critical discovery' concerning the Sirian visitors.