Independence Day: Silent Zone

by Stephen Molstad

  *

  It was during the exhumation of the second alien that Wells became centrally involved. The second exoskeleton remained lifeless as it was lifted onto a gurney and wheeled into the operating room. But when Solomon inserted his scalpel into the seam and began slicing away the ligament holding the skull halves together, the tentacle-arms lifted weakly off the ground and tried to push the doctor away from the table. Suddenly Solomon understood the relationship between the two types of alien beings, explaining to his crew and the onlookers that the EBE inside seemed to be manipulating the larger body, which , was being used as a biological suit of armor. Intent on reaching the hidden creature before it died, he called for help from the observation gallery. He wanted volunteers to restrain the extremities while he split open the torso. Wells was among the volunteers. He was given a pair of gloves and assigned the task of holding a tentacle against the tabletop. He grasped the serpentine appendage in two places, sinking his fingers deeply into its spongy flesh. As Solomon resumed work with his scalpel, Wells could feel the thing writhing weakly beneath his hands—a sensation which caused him to grow increasingly lightheaded. He was on the verge of fainting when the ammonia vapors lifted into the room and momentarily cleared his head. The creature inside began to struggle harder. There was a loud sound of cracking bone as the shell was fully retracted. Wells glanced at the tabletop and saw the goo-slathered alien wriggling around the chest cavity of its host animal. He felt his fingers losing their strength and his knees beginning to buckle. Fighting to maintain control, he focused his eyes on the edge of the table and began to hum the first melody that came into his head. Concentrating on his song, he kept himself conscious long enough for the medical crew to begin lifting the smaller body out of the larger one. Taking a deep breath, he raised his eyes to watch this part of the operation.

  “Don’t stop, keep on humming,” Solomon commanded. “It’s keeping it calm.”

  So, the physicist from the atom-bomb project continued to hum. When he heard the slurping noise that signaled the separation of the two animals, he looked up and found himself face-to-face with the goop-slathered body. The creature’s enormous eyes, like reflecting pools of mercury, were open and looking straight at him. When a pair of heavy eyelids closed slowly over these quicksilver orbs, Wells felt as if a heavy curtain were being lowered over him as well. The room lost its shape, and he felt himself sinking toward the floor.

  *

  He came to the next morning, Dr. Solomon by his side.

  “Welcome back. You got a little squeamish on us last night and passed out.”

  Wells sat up and accepted a cup of coffee, but as he brought it toward his lips, the smell of it struck him as repulsive, and he set it aside.

  “I wanted to thank you,” Solomon continued. “It was a brilliant idea you had, humming to the eebie like that. I guess music really is the universal language.”

  “I was just trying not to faint,” Wells admitted, “but I’m glad I could help. Is it still alive?” As quickly as he asked this question, Wells realized he already knew the answer.

  “Yes it is, but I don’t know how long that will last. We can’t figure out how to help it. It’s been dropping in and out of consciousness all night. We’ve offered it food and water, but it hasn’t accepted anything yet. We aren’t even sure how it eats yet. If it doesn’t die from its internal injuries, it’s going to starve to death.”

  “That would be good news, wouldn’t it?” Wells asked.

  “You’re quick.” Solomon smiled. Like Wells, he was in his early forties, but looked much older this morning after missing a night of sleep. “The military is overjoyed to hear it won’t eat anything. They think it proves the alien can’t survive here, but I’m not convinced of that. The thing is badly wounded—of course it has no appetite.”

  Although Solomon’s idea had a great deal of common sense to it, Wells somehow got the idea that it was wrong. He sat staring into space wondering about this idea until Solomon spoke again.

  “I’m off to try and get some sleep myself. They’re in there questioning the eebie now. You might want to get some breakfast, then go in and watch.” With that, he left the room.

  Wells dressed himself and went into the lobby. A large buffet table had been set up with food passed through the quarantine perimeter. Although he had not eaten anything for well over twelve hours, he found he was not hungry. In fact, the food smelled rotten and repulsive to him, and he quickly made his way to the observation room in order to escape the odors.

  The frail creature lying passively on the operating table was awake. Its eyes were open but turned blankly toward the ceiling. Standing at what they felt was a safe distance, a pair of agents from Army Intelligence were trying everything they could think of to initiate communication with the alien. Wells sat down and watched them work for the next six hours. They asked it questions in several languages, waved their hands, snapped, drew simple pictures on a tablet, then set the writing instruments beside the creature. They played music on a tape machine, then made a whole series of ridiculous noises with their mouths and hands, hoping something would catch the thing’s attention and elicit a response. They showed it newly developed photographs of the crashed spaceship but got no reaction. When they had tried everything they could think of, they made way for another team. Wells, still sitting comfortably in the same spot, watched for another six hours as a second set of questioners went through a similar routine and achieved similar results. Eventually people began to notice this man who had not left his chair to use the bathroom, have a drink of water, or merely stretch his legs all day long.

  The matter was mentioned to Dr. Solomon, who came into the observation room and took the chair next to Wells, who barely noticed his arrival.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it?” Solomon said in reference to the alien. Wells knew why he had come, but said nothing, felt nothing. “Dr. Wells, you’ve been sitting here an awfully long time. Why don’t you come out into the lobby and have something to eat?”

  “Not hungry,” Wells said matter-of-factly. It reminded the doctor that the EBE still had taken no food or drink. They had offered it lettuce, sugar, milk, bread, sliced peaches, and various meats, both raw and cooked. So far, these offerings had brought the only intelligible reaction from the patient—it had waved them away with a limp hand.

  “It won’t eat anything,” Wells said. “It’s made up its mind not to eat anything.”

  Solomon cast a long sideways glance at his companion. “What does that mean, made up its mind?”

  “The injuries aren’t enough to kill it. It’s going to starve itself to death.”

  “What leads you to that conclusion?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel it. And the longer I sit here, the more convinced I am.” For the first time in half a day, Wells broke his concentration on the alien to look Solomon in the eyes. “I can tell what it’s thinking. It could eat the food if it wanted to, it’s not a matter of it being poisonous. It wants to eat, but it is forbidden. And these interrogators aren’t going to get anywhere. The thing communicates telepathically. You ought to try getting a psychic or a mind reader in here.”

  “Dr. Wells,” Solomon whispered to avoid embarrassing his companion, “all of us are running on jangled nerves in here. Several people have noticed that you’ve been sitting here for—”

  “Wait!” Wells’s attention was once more riveted on the EBE. “It recognizes something.” Solomon looked through the glass and saw the alien in the same position he’d been in for hours. A man inside the room was holding yet another piece of paper in its line of vision. He was about to go on to the next sheet when the creature lifted an arm and seemed to grasp at the image. The man walked the paper back and forth across the room and the creature turned its head, struggling to keep its eyes on the picture. There was an audible reaction in the observation area. Finally something had worked. The agent turned around and showed them what had caught the alien’s attention: a block letter “Y.”


  Solomon looked toward Wells. “I think it’s time we had a chat with Blanchard. Please follow me.”

  *

  An hour later, Wells went inside the observation room a second time. His clothes were wrinkled, his eyes were red around the rims, and he needed a shave. Without hesitating, he quietly brought a chair across the floor and set it close to the alien’s bedside. Unlike the interrogators before him, he took a seat, folded his hands in his lap, and merely sat there.

  “Where are you from?” he whispered softly. He wasn’t asking a question, just listening to the words. He knew he had to translate them into a language this creature from another galaxy could understand. Where are you from? he asked again, trying to push the idea out of his head and into the space separating their bodies. Where are you from? over and over, as if it were a matter of will, a matter of concentrating hard enough to find and flex those mental muscles mind readers must have. His instinct, or whatever was leading him, told him the creature communicated by ESP, which turned out to be pretty close, as close as his earthbound imagination could have taken him.

  The creature rolled its head to look at him. Behind the almost-human face, the cranium was a thick, translucent plate extending straight back. Through the walls of the skull, Wells traced the lacy pattern of veins and watched small clots of tissue contract, then release. The way the eyelids closed over the surface of the moist mirror-black eyes, the way it had turned its head, and manipulated its fingers, everything indicated that this exotic creature possessed an intelligence similar to our own.

  Wells decided on another approach. He tried sending eidetic imagery or mental pictures. But how to translate the question Where are you from? into images? He worked at it for a few minutes but found himself trying to mentally broadcast pictures of stick-figure bodies, simple houses, a question mark. He knew it was wrong, that his logic was too abstract, too human. Then, all at once, it hit him. He knew how to ask the question.

  He thought of his own home, the two-story structure he shared with his wife in the hills outside of Santa Fe. He meditated on this idea for some time, leading the alien on a tour of the house. He concentrated not only on what the place looked like, but also his feelings for it. Exploring his own heart, Wells lingered on the comfort he felt in this place and his strong sense of possession for it. He moved into the living room, empty now but still echoing with the warmth and laughter of visiting friends, and sat down in his favorite chair, remembering the feel of the upholstery under his hands. Without warning, this meditation was ended as his mind was abruptly plunged into a completely new reality. The frail creature on the table took the scientist on a tour of its own.

  Even before he recognized that there was no light, he could feel the heat. Blast-furnace heat, the limit of what his body could withstand, came at him from all directions. And it was getting hotter the deeper he went. It was a cave, and he sensed the presence of other bodies moving around him, with him, hundreds of them. They were deep below the surface of a ruined planet, miles deep already, and following the sloped floor of the cave deeper still and closer to the center. This tunnel connected to others, which branched into others. The entire mantle of the planet was perforated by a great system of these caves, from ruined crust to molten core, and was home to billions like him. Long before, they had lived above ground in a lush infinite garden. Now everything was gone, dead, and they lived here. The rocky ground burned his feet, but instead of turning back, the pain only made him increase his speed. Running blind through the dark, he felt the space around him open up and knew they had come into a large cavern. He smelled the walls thick with food, lush carpets of a plant that felt like moss or lichen in his hands as he tore a heavy sheet of it free from the scalding rock wall, then immediately dragged it tugging and stumbling back into the passageway. Up one slope, then another, towing his heavy treasure closer to the surface. When the heat grew less intense, so did his urgency. The number of bodies around him grew, a dense crowd of them swarmed in like piranha from every direction and began ripping into the carpet of lichen. He stopped pulling and joined the fierce scramble, kicking and pushing his way deeper into the orgy until he found an open space and dived toward it, his mouth open wide, and sucked in a mouthful of the still-warm vegetation.

  *

  Wells found himself once more looking into the eyes of the visitor. He felt his scalp damp with sweat and his heart pounding. His first impulse was to recoil, to run from the troubling vision he’d been shown. But he fought it down. He could barely believe that the serene and noble creature before him could have come from such a repulsive place. Despite the troubling vision he had just seen, Wells smiled. He had broken through and established communication.

  Later, his report to the military staff went poorly. The officers were only mildly interested in what Wells had learned and angry that he hadn’t asked the questions they had previously agreed upon. Although the vision of the EBE’s home planet might prove to he useful at some future date, it did not address the burning question of why. Why had these creatures come to earth and what did they want? To make matters worse, the scientist’s behavior during the session was erratic. He rambled in his descriptions, became emotional, and frequently lost his train of thought. This led the soldiers to suspect his trance-vision was nothing more than his own hallucination.

  Solomon intervened and explained his suspicion that Wells was suffering from dehydration. He had taken no food or water for almost forty-eight hours. Still, when someone brought him a glass of water, he adamantly refused it. By the end of the thirty-minute meeting, Wells had lost the confidence of those in charge. The decision was made to keep him away from the creature until his mental state improved. Others could use the same techniques to communicate with the EBE.

  Others did try. They worked for days, without success.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, as Wells slept in one of the unused rooms, Solomon entered quietly, followed by a team of assistants. Wells bolted out of his sleep, knowing why they had come. Before he could get to his feet, the men grabbed him and pinned him down while Solomon used a hypodermic needle to inject a sedative into his arm. When he woke up twenty hours later, he was in a new room strapped down tight to the bed with a drip IV stuck into his forearm. When Dr. Solomon came in, he found Wells feeling rested and alert. Although he still refused to eat anything, the fluids in his system had brought him back to his senses.

  “No one else has had any luck,” the doctor told him. “And the creature seems to be getting weaker. If you’re feeling up to it, the generals want you to go back inside.”

  *

  As soon as he stepped inside the glass room, Wells could feel how close to death the alien was. He brought a glass of water to the creature’s side and, still struggling to control his own hydrophobia, held it in front of the huge black eyes, mentally imploring the creature to drink.

  He felt the thing’s response: it was a command to take the liquid away. Wells complied, handing the glass to one of the soldiers behind him. Although he knew the frail body before him needed water, he empathized with its refusal. But the tone of the command was troubling. Wells got the sense of being “spoken to” as an underling, an inferior being, as if the scrawny half-dead form on the table were a delirious lord barking orders to a serf.

  Following the script prepared for him, he got down to the business of asking the questions to which the Army needed to know the answers. He queried the creature about why it had come, about the chain of command among its species, about its military capabilities and whether other ships had entered earth’s atmosphere. But the only answer Wells received was a vision of something that looked like an enormous Y. Perhaps owing to the visitor’s weakened physical state, the vision had none of the power of its previous communication. It was a blurred mental image of a branching structure in the middle of a barren landscape. The blinding light of a sun washed the vision out, causing the scientist to squint. He assumed the place was somewhere on the ruined surface of th
e planet he had been shown before. He could feel the alien’s desire to travel to this place, but that was all the information he could gather. And it wasn’t what he was after.

  He returned to the question of why the creature and its companions had come to earth. Having found the window or channel which allowed him to interact with the foreign being, he began to move more quickly, with more confidence. He sensed the alien understood his questions, but was too weak to answer. Wells sat back in his chair and contemplated the possibility that it was too late, that the creature had passed the point of being able to communicate. Although he was quickly learning how to share the creature’s thoughts, he couldn’t feel them with the same intensity he had previously. Then he had another idea, one he wasn’t particularly anxious to try out. He looked at the hand resting on the table. It had two plump, opposable fingers, each about six inches in length. The hand was still covered with the piss-smelling goop that lined the chest cavity of the larger, tentacled, exoskeletal suit. Wells drew a deep breath, reached out, and laid his hand over one of the alien’s fingers. He squeezed it gently, feeling the resinous substance squish into the gaps between his own fingers. A moment later, the second finger closed around Wells’s hand, gripping it with the strength of a small child.

  Why have you come here? Who are your leaders? What do you want? The questions traveled through one body and into the other. For two full hours, they sat motionless and in outward silence while the observers behind the glass looked on. Then the creature opened its hand and took it away. Wells whispered something to it, then came out of the room.

  *

  “Our friend,” as Wells began calling the EBE, was a scientist-explorer, as were the other beings who had died in the crash. They had stumbled upon our planet during what seems to have been a random search through the universe. They somehow picked up energy, possibly radio waves, emanating from earth and came to investigate. One thing had been made perfectly clear—these aliens wished only to observe. They had taken great care to avoid being noticed and, although they did not seem to fear humans, wanted no interaction with them. They seemed to be just as interested in other animals and even plant life. “As a matter of fact,” as Wells said, “I got the sense that our good friend found me physically repulsive. It was as strange for it to touch me as it was for me to touch it.”