Joe Haldeman

by The Coming

  The president gave a neutral, optimistic speech, blessedly free of spoonerisms and hysteria. The secretary-general of the UN followed, speaking in his native Bantu. Except for glottal clicks and such, it was pretty much the same speech as Davis had given. A great opportunity awaits us; we welcome our friends from space with open arms. Now that they’ve destroyed our other arms.

  There were lots of vehicles parked behind the bleachers—white NASA vans, a couple of military trucks, two ambulances, and a fire truck. She wondered whether one of them might conceal a last-resort bomb, and if so, who controlled the trigger.

  And how big a bomb? A high helicopter showed the NASA causeway as crowded as a subway station, all the way to the dikes; over a million people waiting to watch the alien craft land. She was glad not to be there.

  The cube shifted to a shimmering telescopic view of the alien craft, which had begun to de-orbit somewhere over Australia.

  It might pass by overhead on its way to the Cape. She went out on the balcony to check the sky, but it was the usual gray blanket.

  The partying students were gone, and had not left a mess behind. Kids nowadays. She heard muffled news broadcasts from apartments all around her, and kept the door open so she could listen for Marya or Pepe on the cube.

  Not hearing Marya was no surprise. She hadn’t had a chance to disappear after the “accidental”

  broadcast, and even if the FBI didn’t take her, the network would probably have fired her or put her on ice for a while.

  Overhead, the familiar double crack of a sonic boom; a spaceship on its approach path to Cape Kennedy. She went inside and sat in front of the cube.

  There was Pepe, on the dais with nine other notables, behind the president, who slowly got to his feet. They all did the same.

  The ship was dimly visible, descending. Rory realized she was holding her breath.

  It touched down precisely at the end of the runway, about the size of a regular shuttle. It would have to be, of course, if this were a hoax—they couldn’t have secretly built a spaceship from scratch. It was prettier than a regular shuttle—shiny, like chrome, and somehow it didn’t use a braking parachute to slow down.

  It rolled to a stop a few hundred meters from the dais, and then, with a slight hissing sound, continued on to stop directly in front of the president. A door opened in the side of the craft and a stairway unfolded to the ground.

  Two human-looking figures walked down the stairs. They wore shimmering silver skintight suits, obviously male and female. They didn’t walk like people who’d been in zero-gee, Rory noticed. Then she noticed they were both beautiful, despite complete hairlessness, not even eyebrows. A nice touch.

  When they stepped off the staircase, it folded back into the ship. As they walked toward the dais, the ship started to hiss again, and rolled slowly down the runway.

  They walked up the steps in no rush, the woman leading, and when they got to the dais, they ignored the standing notables and went straight to the microphone.

  The woman spoke first: “We are not aliens from another planet. We are aliens from earth. We come from five hundred years in your future.”

  The man continued: “It was the largest engineering enterprise in the history of humanity. The energy we displayed approaching you was only a small fraction of what was required to bend space and time and send us back. That required the total destruction of a small star, the kind you call a brown dwarf.”

  “We bring a message of hope and caution,” the woman said. “The message of hope is that we are here, and therefore you do have a future. Knowing that is going to change you. The catastrophic war that seems about to begin will evaporate—and a series of things will happen, starting today, that will make war impossible within the lifetimes of most people now living.”

  “It’s been decided,” the man said, “that we cannot—and we know from historical record that we did not—tell you what these things are. You have to find them out for yourselves. Experience them as they happen.”

  “This has never been done before,” the woman said. “We have to assume that so long as the two of us conform to historical record, subsequent events will occur as our history books record them, and there will be peace. But history does not allow us to remain with you, visitors from an impossible time.”

  The man gestured at the spaceship. “Likewise, we have to dispose of the spacecraft. If one country took possession of the ship’s secrets, it would dominate the world.”

  The ship had reached the end of the runway. It pivoted slowly and then started to roll back toward them, the hiss of exhaust building to a scream. It was already airborne as it passed the reviewing stand, and it arced upward into a vertical climb with such acceleration that within seconds it was a dot, and then it disappeared. Then it exploded, a brilliant perfect sphere of light, in total silence, outside the atmosphere.

  “Now there is only one artifact from the future, besides our clothing,” the woman said. She held up an ordinary data crystal, and stepped forward to hand it to a technician surrounded by cameras. “Show this a few minutes from now.”

  “Of course, we are both also artifacts from the future,” the man said, “though we’re just people.” The woman joined hands with him. “You have many ways to extract information from us.”

  “There was no way,” the woman said, “to make us not know things that might be potentially dangerous to your survival.”

  They looked into each other’s eyes and said in unison, “So, goodbye.” They both slumped to the floor.

  The next few minutes were a fast confusing drama of swarming medics, stretchers, helicopters, but Rory hardly noticed it, lost in thought.

  She saw what Pepe had meant. Sure, it was a hoax, audacious and mind-bendingly expensive. But of course she wouldn’t blow the whistle. There was a big chance it might work; it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So long as the secret was kept.

  All she wanted to know was how they managed it; how could they put all the pieces together without somebody spilling the beans? Who was in on it? Certainly not fools like Davis.

  She watched the crystal the “dead” woman had handed the technician, and it indeed showed their landing, speech, and “death.” At least she hoped that was part of the choreography, and they hadn’t called upon two people to sacrifice their lives to make the hoax more realistic. The introduction to the scene was convincingly futuristic to her eyes and ears; the voice-over with an unearthly accent, the beginning and ending shots showing a planet of peace and plenty. Cities floating in the air over forests and fields restored to nature. But then the throwaway spaceship showed how big a budget they’d had to play with.

  The sun was breaking through the clouds, a rare thing, everybody off the roads. She decided to take a walk. Go up to the astronomy building and see what happens. Maybe reckless, but she had a feeling that the government was going to be a little too busy to pick on her for a while.

  The building was deserted. Everyone was probably down at the Cape.

  Pepe’s office was still unlocked. Feeling a little bit guilty, voyeuristic, she went in to snoop around.

  On a worktable under the window there were three neat stacks of paper, the last assignments and finals for Pepe’s three classes.

  There was a letter to his secretary, detailing the disposition of these papers, thanking her, and saying goodbye. He would be in touch.

  Rory had a feeling that he would not be.

  Coda

  In a quiet corner of Barcelona, the man who was not Pepe Parker relaxed in a situation of modest wealth and perfect privacy. He had a cook, a servant, and a gardener, and walls of books in various languages.

  Buried in the basement, there was a weapon that would turn a man into a torch.

  With his full white beard and darkened skin, no one would connect him with the youthful Cuban scientist who had run the Coming Committee and mysteriously disappeared.

  He spent most of his time reading, in the garden when it was fine,
or in front of the fire when it was cool. Sometimes he dined out with beautiful women who thought he was a retired scholar, independently wealthy. Which was true, as far as it went.

  In a safe-deposit box at Banco Nacional de Catalunya, there was a single sheet of paper which only he could read. It had a schedule of conservative stock purchases, and the names of the winners of the Kentucky Derby for the next fifty years.

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