“Oh Christ!” But before Caleb Harris could go any further, Alma began to transfer images of Parma Quad 2, Antares, Subax-Rigel Quad 3 and Hillet in the Alphard Galaxy into his cerebral cortex. After the initial shock of feeling Alma in control of his mind, she calmed him and he began to enjoy the trip. It was, as Caleb later described to the President, a multimedia light and sound show that filled all the senses.
Fifteen minutes later he was huddled in the narrow hallway next to the men’s room, a pile of quarters stacked on the scarred shelf of the pay phone, using every ounce of clout he possessed to arrange a meeting with the President of the United States immediately.
He returned to the table smiling like the Cheshire Cat. “Fifteen minutes. Margo McNeil said she’d go out on a limb for you, not me. We get fifteen minutes. Seven-thirty tomorrow morning. Then he’s off to Camp David.”
“Is that Honey McNeil?”
“She’s Press Secretary now.”
“She remembered me?”
“Quite clearly. She said you were one of the few people who took time to talk to her when she first came to the network from Chicago.”
“She’s very bright. Didn’t she have a thing for Malcolm Teller once?”
“People gossip. Who’s to say?” Caleb shrugged and smiled.
“So you still take care of your own, huh?”
“I never approved of digging into personal lives as long as it didn’t affect the job.”
“And us?” Alma asked softly.
“We were discreet, weren’t we?” he said, reaching across the table to take her hand.
“Yes,” she answered. “And now how about we grab a quiet dinner someplace private. There is another part of this story that needs telling before tomorrow’s meeting. It’s critical that we convince President Teller to help us.”
“Well, all you have to do is get inside his head the way you did mine and convince him…”
“No,” she said, interrupting. “I can’t do that. It’s not allowed. Only in an emergency.”
“It seems to me that whatever you need of him, is important. Critical, you said.” He signaled for the check.
“But if I let him know what I can do . . ., well, eventually it will frighten him and those around him. Imagine having these powers in a negotiation or at a summit?”
“It would be invaluable,” he agreed. “Overwhelming. Yes, I understand.” The waiter brought their bill and Caleb signed it.
They walked out the front door into the warm spring night. “Is that little Lebanese place still open over on 17th Street?” Alma asked.
“Still there, pillows and all.” He hailed a taxi, but before they got in Caleb Harris held Alma with both hands, firmly grasping her elbows. “Thank you for coming to me. For trusting me.”
She smiled and touched his weathered, handsome face. She said nothing as she stepped into the cab, but her friendship swelled deep inside his sometimes cynical heart.
Scores of light years away, in the system surrounding the star called Scorpius on the ice planet Antares, an enormous Antarean Watership, crewed with a full complement of crystalline Parman guides, specialized Antarean medical and flight teams, forty-two humans and four off-planet humanoids, catapulted up from the planet’s core and cleared its gravitational pull. One of the Parman guides locked on to a tiny speck in the firmament: Earth’s sun. The Watership began to accelerate. The rite of return had begun for its special human passengers, taking them on a journey that many Antareans were beginning to believe had been decreed by the Master eons before humankind ever appeared on planet Earth.
CHAPTER SEVEN – UNDER SURVEILLANCE
When Jack Fischer and Ben Green took off for Boynton Beach in Jack’s car, while Joe Finley drove his rental car back down to Red Lake, Detective Sergeant Cummings was forced to make a quick decision. He chose to follow Jack and Ben, and while he noted the make, model and license plate of Finley’s car, he couldn’t help but feel frustrated in not knowing where that old man was headed.
The Boynton Marina is just south of the Boynton Inlet - a cut of water that connects the inland waterway with the Atlantic Ocean. Boynton Beach, a retirement community along Florida’s eastern Gold Coast, has its share of affluent homes and high-rise condominiums. With the phenomenal growth of South Florida, towns such as Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Lantana, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach have blended into one long, heavily populated retirement/resort town, each with a marina, condo developments, sandy beaches, shopping centers and a variety of restaurants ranging from expensive French chic to Pizza Hut and MacDonald.
Cummings kept his distance behind Jack’s silver Lincoln Town Car. His pulse quickened as he saw the car turn east off the main highway US 1 and then turn left into the marina. As he jockeyed for position to make the same turns, his radio crackled alive with the voice of his long-time partner, Detective Coolridge Betters.
“Car fifty-eight. You out there, Matt?”
“Dr. Betters, I presume?” Cummings answered after quickly snatching the radio mike off its mount.
“What’s up, Sarge? I got a message to get back to you pronto.”
“Go to our channel.”
“On my way.” They both switched their radios over to a little-used frequency that used to talk privately.
“Take this down, then grab an unmarked and see if you can pick up the trail,” Cummings said as he swung his Olds Cutlass into the marina parking lot. The sight that filled his eyes caused his heart to noticeably skip a few beats. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
“You want me to look for Jesus Christ?”
“What? No. They’re here, Coolridge. By God they’re here!”
“Hey Matt, what’s ‘here’?”
“Fischer—”
“Not that again. Look man, you’ve got ten months to retirement and…”
“Listen to me, partner,” he interrupted. “They came back today. The old guys came back.”
“What old guys?” Betters’s voice got serious.
“The old guys that were on the boat that ran you off the canal and made me the laughing stock of Dade County. Only now they’re here, and they’ve contacted Fischer and he’s taken them to the marina.”
“In Boynton?”
“Bingo, Sherlock. I’m looking at Fischer, Doyle and one of the geezers. The big one who went over the side last.”
“What’s goin’ on?”
“Another snatch I’ll bet. Okay. Another one of them is headed your way. Maybe to the Gables - to that Antares condo place they used last time. He’s driving a new dark blue Electra. A rental. Florida plate is ARM-335782. He left Boca about twenty minutes ago so if you stake it out on I-95 in North Miami, maybe Ives Dairy Road, you should pick him up in another twenty.”
“You want me to grab him?”
“Hell no. Just shadow…see where he lives and who he sleeps with.”
“You okay, Matt?”
“I haven’t been this okay in five years, partner. We’re gonna get them this time and shove it right up that DA’s pie-hole.”
“Yeah, well, just take it easy and don’t jump the gun.”
“I’m cool. This time I’m gonna have the proof and nail these mothers. Now go, and give me a shout when you pick up the trail.”
“You got it, Matt. I’m outa here!” The radio clicked off. Cummings knew their conversation could have been monitored, maybe recorded. He only hoped that friendly ears hadn’t made much of it and would let their lack of formal police radio talk without the mandatory “roger,” “over” and “out” pass as just two over-the-hill, about-to-retire cops chatting about the good old days.
Ben Green had also monitored the police conversation while Jack looked for Phil Doyle aboard the sleek forty-eight-foot Hatteras Terra Time. He sent the information along to Joe Finley, who exited from I-95 and drove south along Route 1 to his rendezvous with Amos Bright at the submerged Probeship. Detective Betters would have a long, unfruitful wait on the Interstate.
“Well
, I’ll be damned,” Phil Doyle exclaimed as he came out onto the fantail of the Terra Time and saw Ben Green standing on the marina dock. “Jack said he had a surprise, but I never expected…”
“Keep it down,” Jack whispered to Phil. “We don’t want the world tuned in to this.”
“Sure. So come aboard, Mr. Uh . . .” Doyle had forgotten Ben’s name.
“Ben. Ben Green.” The old man jumped spryly aboard the luxurious fishing boat.
“Yeah. Ben. Right,” Phil said. “You want a drink?”
The weather had become sunshine and fair skies. The marina was fairly quiet. By May most of the boats that winter in Florida have left for their summer homes in the northern waters of Chesapeake Bay, Cape Cod and Long Island Sound. One fishing boat, the Downtime, which moored next to Doyle’s boat, had just returned to dock. The catch consisted of one large barracuda, two good-size dorado and a thirty-pound snow grouper. The mate, a shaggy young man with a red beard and bare chest that was covered with fish scales, glanced up from his fish-cleaning chores to watch Ben come aboard his neighbor’s boat. Doyle took notice of the mate’s curiosity.
“That’s a hefty snow grouper you got there, Billy.”
“He goes over thirty.”
“Where’d you get him?” Doyle asked as Ben and Jack entered the main cabin behind him.
“On the second reef north of the inlet.”
“You sure you didn’t drop a hook down on the six-hundred-foot wreck?”
Billy looked away. He was embarrassed. The regulars who fished these waters knew certain spots that would always produce big fish such as the snow grouper now being butchered on the dock next to Phil Doyle. It was an unspoken code that those spots were left alone as much as possible so that when charter customers, paying as much as five hundred dollars a day to fish these waters, had bad luck, the charter captains could go to the special spots and pick up a good fish or two. This insured return business and good word of mouth which was the life blood of the dwindling charter fishing-boat business. In this instance, Doyle was certain that the young mate had dropped a heavy line down to the wreck at six hundred feet just off the inlet. It was one of the few places that snow grouper still inhabited in these waters. The fish would bring five or six dollars a pound, maybe more if Billy could sell it in small chunks to the old people who came down to the dock to buy fresh fish. If not, he would take the grouper steaks and sell them to a local restaurant.
“Well,” Phil called over to Billy, satisfied that he had distracted the nosy young man from speculating about who Ben Green might be, “I’m sure glad to hear that. Maybe a good sign that the fishing’s coming back.”
“Maybe,” Billy answered, knowing he’d been let off the hook and grateful to Doyle for that gesture.
Below deck, Jack sipped a cold beer and lounged on one of the two sofas that lined the main cabin wall. Ben, momentarily in telepathic contact with Mary in Scarsdale, enjoyed a frosty Pepsi in the spacious galley.
“That kid is a royal pain in the ass,” Phil remarked as he entered the posh carpeted cabin. He smiled at Ben Green and sat down next to Jack.
“It’s nice to see you again, Phil,” Ben said as he enjoyed the emotions Mary sent him while she was reunited with their family seventeen hundred miles to the north.
“So what’s up?” Phil asked, looking from Ben to Jack and back to Ben. “I mean the last time I saw you, Mr. Green, you and a bunch of your buddies were cutting one hell of a trail into the wild blue yonder.”
“They’re back on a mission, Phil. We’re gonna help them.”
“Doin’ what?” He squinted and narrowed his focus at Ben. “We gonna gather up some more old folks for you?”
Ben laughed at Doyle’s description of their last meeting. “No. Something quite different this time.”
“Yeah.” Jack grinned. “This time the flow is in the other direction.”
As Ben and Jack related their plans to Phil Doyle, Detective Cummings waited patiently in his car, watching the Terra Time and waiting for his partner to pick up Joe Finley’s trail. The late afternoon sun would set, and night gather upon the sleepy marina, before Cummings realized no one was on the boat.
What he didn’t see was the submerged Antarean Probeship arrive after dark with Amos Bright and Joe Finley aboard. It parked silently underneath the Terra Time, picked up Ben, Jack and Phil as they quietly slipped over the side and boarded the Probeship through an open hatch. It then headed to the marina in Boca Raton where Jack docked his old charter fishing boat, the Manta III. They had a full night’s work ahead to prepare the equipment so that Amos might examine the cocooned Antarean army left behind on their last visit when they were unable to process them. If things could be arranged, the Watership speeding toward this part of the Milky Way Galaxy might fill its fluid storage compartments with the Antareans in that an army who had been asleep for five thousand years.
CHAPTER EIGHT – GRANDMA’S BACK
Mary had hours to spend alone with her daughter Patricia before two of her grandchildren, Pat’s daughters Cori and Beth, returned home from school. They sat in the breakfast nook of the spacious modern kitchen, sipping coffee, holding hands and trying to catch up on five years of separation. Pat, the proud mother, went on for twenty minutes about her daughters. Cori was the youngest, a student who had wanted to be a doctor for as long as anyone in the family could remember. Beth, on the other hand, lived in an adolescent dream world in which school was a bore and a waste. Tall, slender and quite beautiful, Beth bore a remarkable resemblance to Mary in her younger days. The oldest daughter, Cynthia, was just completing her third year at Emerson College as a communications major.
Mary felt a void in her life, having missed so much of grandmotherhood. Ben tried to sooth her from a distance, but also felt regrets.
“And how is Richard doing?’ Mary asked after Pat paused to get more coffee.
“Just great. He’ll be a full partner in a few years. The market is booming.”
“Market” What about the law?”
“He’s specializing in corporate mergers, so he spends a great deal of time with underwriters and bond people. It’s all very complicated.”
“Is he happy?”
“He loves his work.”
“And you, darling?”
“Me? I’m fine, Mom. I’ve been thinking of going back to work or maybe school . . .” Pat brought the coffee carafe to the table. “You know, Mom,” she said as she filled their mugs, “when you had gone we were told there had been some kind of accident. They said that several people had drowned and were missing,” she said sarcastically. “Until that Mr. Fischer brought us your letter we didn’t know what…” Pat paused. Her tone grew angry. “Why in the name of God did you do it? How could you just go off like that and not say anything?” Then Pat’s eyes filled with tears as she recalled their grief when they’d thought Mary and Ben had died.
“I’m sorry, dear. There was no other way. It had to be a secret.”
“For a month? The letter was almost worse. You were out there,” Pat gestured toward the window. “We couldn’t talk. . .we couldn’t anything . . .when would we ever see you again?”
“I’m here now.”
“But it wasn’t fair. Not to me or Melanie.”
“Yes. I understand. How is your sister?” Mary asked. She had not had a good relationship with her other daughter.
“Off on another of her expeditions. The Great Barrier Reef this time. She’s a Ph. D. now. Marine biology. Something to do with sea mammal viruses.”
“Anyone special in her life?”
“Every day it’s someone special. One man? Not my sister.”
“Pat, darling…I’m sorry we left that way.” Mary stood up and walked to the sunny window. She paused there for a moment and then turned. “No. That’s not exactly true. I guess you could say we made a selfish decision about our own lives and we hoped that you would understand.” Pat went to her mother’s side.
“Of course we re
ad the letter over and over. But it was, in a way, as though you and dad were…were dead - gone out of our lives. Then when Mr. Fischer explained all the details about the cocoons and the Antareans, we were happy for you but it was hard to imagine we would never see you again. Can you understand how frustrating that was? To know you and Dad were out there someplace and we couldn’t know . . .” Mary took her daughter’s hands and held them to her breast. She telepathed calming love to Pat.
“Do you feel our love for you?”
“Yes, Mother. It’s wonderful.”
“Have you felt that during the past five years?”
Pat looked at her with surprise. “Why, yes. How did you know? Many times. It was as though you and Dad were here with us. The girls, especially Beth, often said, out of the blue, ‘I have this feeling that Grandma and Grandpa are still with us and that they love us.’”
“We do. And those feelings, the way you feel my love now, is what we send to you from across the galaxy. We are with you, my dear Patricia. We will be with you always.” The two women embraced. It was then that Pat noticed the enlargement near the base of her mother’s skull.
“What’s this?” Pat asked, gently touching the rounded ridge that ran along Mary’s spine and up onto the top of her head. Most of it was hidden by Mary’s hair.
“An implant,” Mary answered, stepping back from Pat and turning so her daughter might get a better view of the enlarged brain.
“They did this to you?”
“I volunteered. It had to be done to those who wished to command.”
“Why? What is it, this implant?”
“There are some things that we are not allowed to tell. If you can wait until the girls and Michael come home I’ll tell you as much as I can. What happens here, with my family, with you . . . well, you see a great deal depends on how you react to our new lives; to the things we’ve seen and done and must now do.”
For the first time Patricia Keane realized that her mother, once a quiet, even at times subservient wife, mother and homemaker, was now vitally alive, strong and in control of the situation. The past five years had changed Mary Green in ways Patricia didn’t understand. For a fleeting moment the word alien passed through her mind.
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