Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  “Get a grip,” Sikes muttered to himself as he slowed by a sign with a list of buildings and a confusing collection of arrows. He squinted through his sunglasses, trying to find Royce Physics Hall on the sign. Then he jerked upright as someone blasted a horn behind him.

  Sikes looked over his shoulder at two tanned weight lifters in a red Miata waving at him to get off the road. Sikes muttered some more and pulled over to the curb to let the little sports car pass. His own school experience still led him to strongly dislike anyone who could afford college and a sports car at the same time.

  The Miata squealed past him. The weight lifters laughed. Sikes gritted his teeth and memorized the car’s license plate. Maybe he’d run it through the computer later to see if there was a citation or two outstanding.

  Twenty more minutes of searching brought Sikes, now on foot, to the entrance of a pleasantly designed building constructed of deep red stone. Unusual for southern California, it wasn’t built in a Spanish design, but Sikes had no idea what other style it might be. Victoria would probably know, he thought. Or Grazer.

  Sikes shuddered as he thought of his fellow Detective Three. How could anyone know so much without also knowing the definition of an insufferable bore? After they had read Randolph Petty’s electronic mail on the computer last night Grazer had actually explained the development of the computer chip to both Kirby and Sikes for almost two hours. Kirby had taken the easy way out and fallen asleep, but Sikes, as the only adult in the room, had felt obliged to keep his eyes open.

  After the first hour of polite “uh-huhs” and “reallys” Sikes had perversely decided to not say anything more that would encourage Grazer. Incredibly, the man had continued talking without any feedback from Sikes for almost another whole hour. In desperation Sikes had called up humorous mental visions of Grazer at home, practice-lecturing his goldfish or even a sofa. Then he had begun creating even more diverting visions of what it would be like when Victoria came back from Switzerland.

  Whether Grazer had finally gotten the hint or his voice had given out, Sikes didn’t know. But when the detective had finally left, it seemed to Sikes as if his own dismal, cramped apartment was suddenly twice as large and soundproofed. Maybe I don’t have to move after all, Sikes had thought as he had gently wakened Kirby so he could make up the sofa bed for her. Maybe I just have to have Grazer over more often so I can appreciate what I’ve got when he’s gone. That final thought—appreciating what he had only when he no longer had it—had made him think of Victoria again, and he had spent another restless night searching for her imprint beside him in his bed.

  But this morning was far better than the previous morning had been. Sikes’s head felt its normal size. The sun was warm and not a glaring interrogation spotlight. He had his official notebook with its numbered pages in the inner pocket of his sports jacket. He had driven through the canyons with the Mustang’s top down. And he was about to interview his first potential witness to his first murder case, all on his own.

  Angie Perez hadn’t even asked for details when Sikes had spoken with her at the station house this morning. “If you think you’re on to something,” she had said, “go get ’em, Sherlock.” Then she had added, “Just remember that you only have until quitting time today before you start taking on other cases.”

  Sikes had groaned at the healthy dose of reality his new partner had inflicted upon him, but if the lead he had come up with last night did end up being worth something, he was certain he could talk Angie into giving him some more time. After all, the name of the game was solving crimes, and Sikes was determined to solve this one.

  As pleasant as Royce Hall had looked on the outside, inside it was falling into disrepair, the fate of all schools in a system that worried more about the next quarter than the next generation. But the signs on the walls made more sense than the signs on the road had made, and Sikes quickly found the minuscule office of the woman with whom Professor Randolph Petty had exchanged his final electronic letters—Amy Stewart.

  The door was open when Sikes arrived. Stewart’s name was handwritten on a piece of cardboard held in a metal frame above the door number. She was identified as a Tutorial Leader. At first it looked as if the room beyond the door was a locker of some kind and not an office. It was that small. But there was a narrow desk crammed into a corner, wedged between floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that sagged under piles of magazines and papers. There were a number of certificates and framed color photographs of people on the walls’ few unobstructed areas. And there was someone working at the desk, peering into an inordinately large computer screen on which a complex colored graph was displayed. Sikes had to knock twice on the door frame before that person realized she had company and turned around.

  “Amy Stewart?” he asked.

  The woman at the computer looked up at Sikes over the thin red frames of her large round glasses. Sikes stared back, at a loss for words. He realized then that he had had no expectations as to what kind of a person Amy Stewart might be. Perhaps, because Petty had been seventy-two years old, Sikes had expected Stewart to be of similar vintage. And perhaps, because the letters had indicated that she was an academic, he had expected her to be someone indistinguishable from the dusty piles of books that she worked with. But he hadn’t expected the striking young woman who looked at him now.

  Dimly he knew that she was waiting for him to say something more, but Sikes was at a loss. If he had had to put out an APB on her, he would have failed. She was female, most assuredly, but . . . Caucasian? Hispanic? Native American? He couldn’t be sure, there were elements of so many different origins in her golden complexion, intense dark eyes, and jet-black hair feathered close to her skull. Her eyebrows were almost nonexistent, adding a look of permanent and childlike anticipation to a face graced with lips that made Sikes think only of adult pursuits.

  “Yes?” the woman said.

  “Umm,” Sikes replied, two years worth of interrogation classes suddenly flushed from his mind.

  Surprisingly, instead of turning back to her computer in impatience, the woman flashed Sikes a sly smile. “I’m Amy Stewart. That is who you’re looking for, isn’t it?” Her subtle accent was as unidentifiable as her heritage, and that smile further delayed the return of Sikes’s verbal abilities. He fished around in the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out the leather folder he found there. Then he held it out to her.

  “I’m, ah, Detective Sikes, LAPD?”

  She looked at what Sikes held in his hand. After a moment all his credit cards fell from it and clattered on the floor.

  “Uh, wrong pocket,” Sikes said. He found his badge folder and brought that out, then squatted down to gather up everything that had fallen from his wallet.

  Amy Stewart leaned back in her chair. Her smile grew broader. Two credit cards fell out of Sikes’s hand.

  “First day?” she asked.

  Sikes decided her low, husky voice was as striking as her appearance. “Almost,” he mumbled.

  “Well, I don’t drive. I have a green card. And I’m sure the statute of limitations has run out on any major felonies I’ve committed, so what can I do for you?”

  Sikes got to his feet and jammed his wallet and its debris into an outside pocket on his sports jacket. He’d worry about sorting it out later. “I’m, uh, I’d like to ask you a few questions. If that’s all right?”

  Without consciously looking for it, Sikes noticed a small flicker in her eye. Maybe it was a tic. Maybe it was a hidden reaction to the idea of answering questions for the police. He tried to discount it. But it was exactly what the textbook said he was supposed to be looking for.

  “About what?” she asked. Her voice was as easy as before. No sign of tension.

  “About who,” Sikes said. He pulled out his notebook and pen to give his hands something to do. “Randolph Petty. You exchanged some—”

  Amy Stewart pushed her chair back with noisy force and got to her feet. “Who are you really?” she demanded.

&
nbsp; Sikes stepped back from her. The astronomy student was surprisingly tall, almost his height. “I told you. Matt Sikes. I’m a detective.” Hold on, he thought. This isn’t supposed to be happening. I’m supposed to put her on the defensive.

  Amy Stewart held out her hand. “Give me that badge again.”

  Sikes was over the impact of her appearance. Warily he opened his badge case and gave it to her. She studied it intently, looking from the ID photo to Sikes and back again. She handed the case back to him.

  “Where’s Dr. Petty?” she asked.

  Sikes took the case and returned it to a pocket. “That’s what I want to talk with you about. I’ve got some bad news.”

  She swayed slightly.

  “Dr. Petty was killed two nights ago,” Sikes said, as gently as he could. There was never an easy way to say such a thing.

  She stumbled forward.

  Sikes grabbed her. He felt her tremble along the length of him, and the shock of her was as if he had been tasered. Their faces were inches apart. He could smell a scent rich and herbal coming from her hair. He guided her back to her chair, bending over her as he carefully lowered her to it. She gripped the arms of her chair, and Sikes felt her strength return. Regretfully he let go of her and stood back. He could still feel her against him. Sweat formed on his brow.

  “Are you . . . are you okay?” Sikes asked. His voice was unexpectedly dry, as if he and not Grazer had done all the talking last night.

  Amy Stewart gazed around the small room as if she had been sucker punched. “How?” she finally asked.

  Sikes found a second chair, moved a stack of books from it, sat down, and told her.

  When he was finished she tensed as if she were fighting back tears. Sikes told himself that he must remain emotionally detached from her—she could be a source of a motive in a murder case. But her obvious distress was getting to him. Unless she’s faking it, Sikes cautioned himself. That possibility was enough to shock him back into being a detective. He began to watch her more closely.

  “So why did you come to me?” she asked. Her taut fingers were like claws on the arms of her chair. She didn’t look at Sikes.

  Sikes reached into his jacket and brought out five folded pieces of letter-sized paper—the printouts he had made at the station house of the letters Grazer had saved to floppy disk. “These,” Sikes said. “Your last computer letter to Dr. Petty and his reply to you.” He offered the pages to her.

  But the astronomy student had no interest in looking at them. “So you’ve come to me because I might have been . . . one of the last people to talk with Dr. Petty?” Her voice ended on a rise, as if that’s what she hoped had brought Sikes to her.

  “No,” he said, studying her. “It’s because I think that the material you and Dr. Petty mention in these letters might have been the motive for his murder.”

  Amy Stewart’s face fell forward into her hands. “That’s impossible,” she said in a muffled voice. “How could . . . how could anyone do that? For what?”

  Sikes forced himself to remain sitting. She might be a suspect, he kept telling himself. This might be an act. But he wanted reach out to comfort her.

  “I was hoping that’s what you could tell me,” he said, allowing her time to regain her composure. He glanced through the printouts, reading the phrases he had underlined. “Your letters say something about ‘the material.’ How critical it is. How important it is that the original computer records be protected so others can verify them. How cautiously you will have to proceed to publish this information.” He flipped a page. “You seem quite upset that Dr. Petty hasn’t responded to you as quickly as he said he would. You keep stressing how significant ‘the material’ is.” He flipped over two more pages. “And then Dr. Petty sends you back a quick note saying he has passed along ‘the material’ as he said he would and has arranged a meeting to discuss it”—Sikes looked up from the printouts and found Amy staring intently at him—“on the night he was murdered.”

  Amy said nothing.

  Sikes asked her the question. “Ms. Stewart. What is ‘the material’?”

  Amy looked up at him and bit her lower lip. Her cheeks seemed flushed.

  Sikes tried again. “Is it something valuable enough that Dr. Petty might have been killed for it?”

  A breath escaped her.

  “Ms. Stewart, please. If Dr. Petty was killed for something he got from you, you might be in danger, too. You have to tell me what it is.”

  Amy Stewart stared at Sikes in apparent indecision. He was caught by the intensity of her gaze. He had no explanation for the way she was making him feel. He had no desire for it. But he also couldn’t stop it.

  “Can you tell me?” Sikes asked, not certain if he knew to what the question referred.

  “Better than that,” Stewart said finally. “I can show you.”

  Thanks to his Uncle Jack, Sikes could recognize all of the constellations and knew the names of hundreds of stars, but the dense star field on the computer screen was a mystery to him. He couldn’t find a single familiar pattern.

  “I don’t recognize anything,” he said.

  Amy turned to him with a look of surprise. She had left her office for a few minutes—leaving Sikes nervously wondering what kind of idiot he would look like if she didn’t return—to wash her face, she said. But Sikes could still see the turmoil in her face. The old guy had definitely meant something to her.

  “Why would you expect to?” she asked.

  Sikes felt foolish. The words had slipped out of him. He’d forgotten he was just an amateur who only looked at the stars through a pair of binoculars these days, and lately only when he could persuade Kirby that there was something worth seeing. Amy Stewart was halfway through her Ph.D. in astronomy and physics. Who was he trying to kid?

  “Well,” he said in a voice that was awkward and stumbling once again, “I know a bit about . . . where things are and that.”

  Amy studied him for a few moments, then looked at her computer monitor. The image was high resolution, almost as clear as a large film transparency. No wonder the screen is so big, Sikes had thought when the first star field had come up and he realized the detailed work it was used for.

  Amy pointed to a large glob of white, bristling with spikes of light and ringed by a halo, that Sikes recognized as a low-magnitude star that had been too bright for a long exposure. “This is Bellatrix. Is that any help?”

  Sikes stared at the screen, trying to figure out if the orientation of the field was standard. He pointed to a second overexposed star on the opposite side of the screen. “Betelgeuse?” he asked.

  “Very good,” Amy said, clearly surprised.

  Sikes traced his finger across the screen, drawing the constellation’s imaginary link lines. “So this is the top half of Orion.” He pointed below the screen. “Alnilam and Rigel are way down here, and right about where this keyboard is, that’s where the nebula is.” He now knew why such a familiar constellation had looked so odd—there were too many stars. “So all the other stars in there, they’re magnitude six or dimmer. Stars not visible to the naked eye.”

  Amy stared at Sikes again and tapped her finger against the side of her keyboard.

  “Is something wrong?” Sikes asked.

  “How did you get assigned to investigate Dr. Petty’s death?” There was a definite edge of suspicion in her voice.

  “My partner’s name was next on the rotation,” Sikes said, trying to understand her sudden change in mood. Sitting so close to her, two chairs pulled up to her narrow desk, it was easy to pick up on her feelings. And her perfume. And the heat of her body so near his. “Why?” he said, making a heroic effort to sound unaffected.

  Amy hesitated. “I don’t know. An astronomer dies. The officer assigned to investigate knows astronomy. Seems like an odd coincidence to me.”

  Sikes realized that now she was watching him for a reaction. He tried to think of a question that Angie might ask. “Do you have some reason for thin
king that it’s not a coincidence?”

  Amy thought that over. “I’ll show you what I’ve got here. Then you can tell me.” She turned to the screen. “This is a plate taken six days ago as part of an asteroid mapping project.”

  “Dr. Petty had an asteroid named after him,” Sikes said. “I saw the certificate in his house.”

  Amy flinched, and Sikes decided not to interrupt her again.

  “It was his specialty,” she said after a moment. “Deep-space tracking. He developed most of the search algorithms and observation techniques used in the field today.” She typed something on her keyboard, and the star field shrank to about a quarter its original size and slid up to the left-hand corner of the screen. “Since he retired, Dr. Petty was part of an unofficial group of astronomers and space researchers who lobbied for the creation of Spacewatch—an automated asteroid tracking network to identify Earth-crossers.” She glanced at Sikes. “You understand ‘Earth-crossers’?”

  “Asteroids that, um, cross the Earth’s orbit?” Sikes guessed.

  Amy nodded. “Back in eighty-nine one missed us by about a hundred million kilometers.” She eyed Sikes. “At the speed it was traveling, that meant it missed us by about a day. One day. It was somewhere between one hundred to four hundred meters across, but if it had hit, it would have been like a thousand-megaton bomb. Flatten everything for a hundred and fifty miles. Could have taken out any city on the planet. Tens of thousands dead, if not millions.”

  Sikes whistled silently.

  “So far we’ve got good data on about a hundred of them. But the best guess is that there could be at least a thousand. And for all that, there’s only one observatory doing any crucial work in the field. Kitt Peak’s got a thirty-six-inch Newtonian and a CCD camera. If we had three more telescopes around the world, we could probably track ninety percent of the Earth-crossers in a decade. And it would only cost about two million a year. Less than the cost of a science fiction movie for the whole ten-year effort.” She typed again, anger evident in each keystroke. A second small star field appeared on the screen, opposite the first.