Omega Sol

by Scott Mackay

  ‘‘No. I’ve got to go out. If I can uncover irrefutable proof that Alpha Vehicle means no harm, then maybe he’ll stand down and the human race can get on with the greatest thing that’s ever happened in its history. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.’’

  And he was fine. For a while. But then he realized he should have taken Lesha’s advice.

  For as he was in the rover with Lesha and Mark halfway to the Moon tower, his face started to tingle. Then his left eye went blind. Then his head throbbed with such severe pain, he slumped over in his chair and groaned. Lesha leaned over him in alarm. He heard her calling him through his suit radio, and he tried to speak, but couldn’t get the words out.

  Lesha turned to Mark and cried, ‘‘Turn around, turn around! They’re at him again.’’

  What was particularly strange as he drifted into a state of semiconsciousness was how he saw, in the vacuum above, the same cryptic written symbols he had seen when drawn against the other Moon tower yesterday.

  10

  As Colonel Pittman came over and looked at him in the infirmary after they got him back, Cam didn’t feel entirely human anymore, but more like a sea creature from the deepest part of the Mariana Trench gazing at the world with weird sightless eyes.

  Colonel Pittman came into view as if through a fish-eye lens. All Cam could do was stare.

  Lieutenant Haydn stood next to Pittman, his extremely fair complexion and white-blond hair bright in the overhead lights. Cam felt trapped by his own compromised condition, felt confused, was fairly certain the Builders had done this to him, but now couldn’t help wondering if something medical had happened to him as well; he kept thinking of the stroke his father had had.

  When Johnsie Dunlap came over and talked to Pittman, Cam had to rethink the stroke idea. ‘‘Of course, we have no advanced diagnostic equipment on the Moon, and from a clinical perspective, I can’t really determine what’s happened to him at all. He has a family history of stroke, but a lot of the clinical signs of stroke are missing. There’s no left- or right-side weakness. And he’s conscious, and his eyes move, and if you look at him, you can see that he’s listening to us, and understanding us. But he doesn’t seem to be able to move. Or register pain.’’ She poked his arm with a needle, drawing blood, and Cam didn’t feel a thing. ‘‘The best thing we can do is transfer him to medical care on Earth. And I don’t necessarily mean to Dr. Ochoa.’’ This last was said with a certain amount of sternness.

  ‘‘No. Dr. Ochoa will definitely be his physician.’’ Pittman peered at Cam more closely. ‘‘Any chance Alpha Vehicle did it?’’

  Johnsie looked more closely as well. ‘‘I can’t say. He was nowhere near Alpha Vehicle, and not really anywhere near one of the towers. But it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility.’’

  ‘‘Ms. Dunlap, you should have told me about the previous Moon tower incident sooner. You want us to start thinking Alpha Vehicle has gotten to you too?’’

  Johnsie said nothing. Cam felt his heartbeat quicken. She had told Pittman after all?

  The colonel said, ‘‘You can go now.’’

  Johnsie gave him a sour look and retreated.

  Pittman squared his shoulders and stared at him. Haydn was now checking something on his waferscreen.

  Under Pittman’s fringe of silver mustache, a consoling grin appeared. Yet for all this, Cam knew the colonel wouldn’t hesitate when it came to launching a first strike against Alpha Vehicle, especially if he found out the Builders were responsible for his own curious paralysis-like state. He remembered Lesha’s words. He’ll most likely call it an act of aggression and give the okay to retaliate. How could he make Pittman understand?

  With superhuman effort he willed the paralysis out of his arm, grabbed Pittman’s shirt, and focused his eyes. The grin slipped from the colonel’s face. ‘‘Ms. Dunlap?’’

  Johnsie came back and noted the movement. Her eyes widened but she said nothing.

  Pittman’s sympathetic expression came back. ‘‘Dr. Conrad, I would ask that you let go. And I just want you to know that Orbops and the United States government are proud of your sacrifice. Believe me, if it turns out Alpha Vehicle is responsible for this attack upon your person, we’ll make it pay, and pay dearly.’’

  Pittman gently clutched Cam’s wrist and pulled it away. Johnsie said something to the colonel, but now it wasn’t only the paralysis; it was also a strange and entirely unexpected lack of understanding, for she seemed to speak in a foreign language he couldn’t decipher, like suddenly they had all decided to speak Greek. Lesha came into view. She focused on Pittman. Cam struggled to make Pittman understand one last time that he should under no circumstances launch a preemptive strike against the Builders, that what the aliens might or might not be doing to him was incidental, and that he really didn’t want to be the cause of a war, but all that came out of his mouth was a scraping sound that reminded him of water draining from a tub. At last the effort overwhelmed him and he gave up. Tears came to his eyes. Sweat bathed his forehead.

  Pittman backed away, the corners of his lips turned down, his eyes puzzled, as if he were embarrassed by Cam’s tears. He smoothed his Orbops camouflage shirt. ‘‘Needless to say, Dr. Tennant will be taking over the research end of things from here on in.’’

  Haydn pressed his black earpiece with two fingers, listened, then leaned forward and murmured a few words to Pittman. Cam couldn’t hear what he was saying. Pittman nodded.

  The two soldiers left.

  Cam closed his eyes.

  He might have slept.

  When next he opened his eyes, he was being wheeled along corridor 9 to the air lock. Lesha leaned over him. She carried his flight bag, and was smiling, even as she struggled to fight back tears. He tried to see who was wheeling him at the foot of the gurney, and caught a glimpse of Laborde.

  Lesha said, ‘‘Colonel Pittman’s agreed to an emergency evac in one of the military spacecraft. He’s not such a bad sort after all.’’

  But he couldn’t help thinking how he was going to be delivered to Dr. Jeffrey Ochoa, ostensibly for his own medical care, but in fact more for interrogation and study.

  He tried to tell her he didn’t want to leave, couldn’t leave, mustn’t leave, but the gurney rolled forward until they were at the air-lock pressure door. He heard hissing and clanking. The air lock opened and Laborde raised his hand, signaling to whoever was pushing him from the head of the gurney to stop. Cam glanced up, able to lift his head only marginally, and saw an Orbops pilot, the name Bynum stitched on his uniform. Lesha moved forward from the side of the gurney to say good-bye. She gripped Cam’s hand in hers.

  ‘‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.’’

  He tried to utter something, make one final protest that he should be left on the Moon, but the words simply wouldn’t come. The Builders weren’t letting him speak. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. His skin was so numb he couldn’t feel it. She patted his hands, gave him a small wave, and retreated into corridor 9. The air-lock door sank, and he was left alone with Laborde and Bynum.

  They wheeled him into the air-lock garage, where another pilot, Laurenzi, waited by a Moonstone rover. The blue lights were on in the garage, indicating sufficient pressure. They pushed him over to the Moonstone rover and got him into the back. Once this was done, Laborde returned to Gettysburg.

  Inside the rover, Bynum and Laurenzi clamped his gurney into special medevac braces. They then went to the front, where Cam saw screens, controls, and switches studding the rover wall. The two Moonstone pilots got the vehicle going.

  A short while later, the rover did a three-point turn and positioned itself at the surface-access air lock. No, no, no, he wanted to cry. He heard hissing from outside. Through the rover’s small bubble-shaped skylight, he saw the lights in the air-lock garage change from blue to red. Sounds from outside became muffled, then disappeared as the vacuum took over. They rolled forward. He saw the red light disappear, replaced
by black lunar sky.

  The launch was uneventful, the g-force relatively mild. He looked at the primary observation screen. He saw the lunar surface recede, change, lose definition. He felt the same way: receding, changing, losing definition.

  The module banked, and the sun, now that the Moon was further along in its phases, appeared over the horizon, brightening the spacecraft’s skylight.

  He was finally engulfed by weightlessness. He felt sick. For the next several hours he traveled in a cloud of nausea. For all this, he had a sense of anticipation, and began to theorize that the Builders, by rendering him helpless this way, were preparing him in some way for a new and heightened attempt at communication. He took a deep breath and tried to relax.

  He glanced at the various screens—the Moon behind them, the Earth ahead of them—and there didn’t seem to be any change in size in either of them. But the Earth slowly got bigger until it was finally a massive blue orb ahead of them.

  He was certain Bynum would brake.

  But before any braking occurred, a bang came from the vessel’s right side, and the ship shook.

  A moment later, the red combat lights came on and the alarm sounded—high tone, low tone, back and forth. The ship rolled sideways, suddenly, violently, as though slammed by a great hand. All but the emergency systems died. The craft drifted.

  He heard Bynum and Laurenzi clicking through their crisis procedures, trying to contact Orbops, but the radio was as dead as everything else.

  Cam looked out the side window, a small slit of pressurized polycarbonate, and saw several Builder energy cells approach like big blue, glowing jellyfish. As they got closer, their luminosity increased. Cam heard a curious singing in his head, taut, austere, high tones weaving in and out of lower ones, two long and one short, like the original sound parcels from Alpha Vehicle. Was it language? What was the significance of the pattern?

  Bynum and Laurenzi ignored him as they struggled to get systems back online.

  The energy cells got closer, brainlike in shape, transparent, surrounded by turquoise plasma, dark blue bolts flickering inside. He looked out the opposite window and saw them coming from that side too. As with his visit inside Alpha Vehicle, he now felt an extraordinary peace, and understood that everything he had gone through, the two attacks and so forth, had to be part of his education. The blue glow permeated not only the windows but also the hull. It seemed even to penetrate to the learning centers of his brain, for he felt unusually receptive to everything.

  In the cockpit Bynum and Laurenzi barked numbers and codes into the radio, but Cam felt far away from it all.

  Then Bynum and Laurenzi abruptly slumped. He looked at them with growing alarm. Were they having attacks like his? And did this particular turn of events herald an attempt to communicate with the pilots, or maybe a wider military attack on Earth?

  He steeled himself as the blue light penetrated farther. Then, miracle of miracles, he felt his numbness disappear. He lifted his hand and realized he had regained the ability to move.

  He unstrapped his gurney and drifted free.

  He tested his ability to speak with his favorite Einstein quote: ‘‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.’’ Now he talked fine.

  In free fall, he maneuvered to Bynum, held his hand in front of the pilot’s nose, and checked for respirations. He was still breathing. He checked Laurenzi as well, and he was breathing too.

  He then looked out the window where he saw the energy cells clustering around the spacecraft. He felt infused with energy. Looking down, he saw blue beams intersecting his body at all angles, penetrating but not impaling, skewering but not injuring, just like Alpha Vehicle’s silver plasma, only different. Was it more preparation? Or a kind of fertilizer to the purple light that had penetrated his brain while in Alpha Vehicle?

  He maneuvered to the cockpit. The odd two-to-one music grew louder. The date on the pilot’s control monitor said yesterday, while the date on the copilot’s said tomorrow. Bynum and Laurenzi were unconscious. Out the cockpit windows, he saw more energy cells.

  Then the energy cells drifted away. The lesser their number, the sicker he felt, so that the numbness returned, and he began to find it increasingly difficult to move.

  He maneuvered into the cabin, lay in the gurney, and waited.

  Were they again trying to contact him? Probe him? Or, because he was in the vicinity, had the energy cells simply decided to come over and have a look? He glanced out the starboard window and saw five cells drift away. He managed to get himself strapped in—with Pittman already suspicious, he meant to leave no clues about this particular visitation.

  Five minutes later, Bynum and Laurenzi awoke.

  Neither of them said anything. It was as if nothing had happened.

  A moment later, he felt the g-force of routine braking.

  Bynum looked back and smiled. ‘‘We’ll be home soon.’’

  They landed in the Mojave Desert.

  An Air Force jet flew him under special military police escort to Baltimore. At the airport an armored truck, called out specifically for his arrival, took him to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where a dedicated wing had been set up for him on the fifth floor.

  Orderlies wheeled him to this wing, the back half of the fifth floor, just past the nursing station, where another two military police, assigned to him, stood guard in the corridor. He didn’t feel like a patient. He felt like a prisoner. Even an enemy combatant.

  By the time they got him cleaned and in fresh pajamas, it was close to midnight, late, but not so late that Dr. Jeffrey Ochoa didn’t stop by to pay his patient a first visit.

  Dr. Ochoa was around forty, had coppery hair, and a neatly trimmed beard. The expression on his face, if he had one at all, showed a trace of mild professional curiosity. He gazed at Cam for several seconds, like a medical examiner about to make a Y incision in the chest cavity of a cadaver, then turned to the guard.

  ‘‘Corporal Fountas, you may go.’’

  ‘‘Yes, sir.’’ The guard left.

  When he was gone, Ochoa walked to the door and closed it. He then came over and stared at Cam for a long time. At last he said, ‘‘Can you hear me?’’

  But Cam couldn’t move or speak.

  Ochoa finally sighed. ‘‘Dr. Conrad, I don’t know if you can hear me or not. But we’re concerned about you. We know your spacecraft was disabled on the way in. Greenhow picked up the whole visitation with its sector C satellites. So please don’t try to hide it from us when and if you come out of this thing, the way you tried to hide Tau Ceti and your Moon tower attack, because that will just further confirm for us that Alpha Vehicle has somehow turned you against us. And don’t look so anxious. Rest assured, we’re going to do everything we can to help you, at least within the parameters of the military necessities of the situation. But I’ll be honest with you. Helping you may sometimes take a backseat to getting information out of you, because we’re now faced with an ominous escalation by Alpha Vehicle, what with the building of the Moon towers and the launch of the energy cells. And that means things may have to be accelerated at this end as well. Particularly with you.’’

  He lifted his chin and appraised Cam calmly.

  ‘‘As you seem to have a special relationship with Alpha Vehicle, the president’s task force has assigned me to find out what I can from you, using whatever means I deem necessary. And that means certain chemicals and perhaps even a few surgical techniques that might end up altering the structures of your brain. One of the things we’re trying to find out is why the Builders have chosen you in the first place, and not anybody else. I’m sure you’re just as puzzled as we are. And it concerns the president greatly that they might plan to use you against us in some way as well. So we have to get to the bottom of it all, and I’m sure that as a scientist you can appreciate that a disciplined investigation is the order of the day. Unfortunately, certain of the chemicals I might use to loosen your tongue could cause permanent brain damage, and
I should warn you that you may never be the same again. But that’s the price we sometimes have to pay for the sake of our country. When the president is faced with a crisis of this magnitude, he has to decide in favor of saving many lives instead of just one. It’s really starting to seem as if the Builders, as you call them, mean to be our enemy. It’s believed they wouldn’t have mobilized all those energy cells otherwise.’’

  Cam was now in the grip of a mounting terror. His worst fears were coming true. The powers that be were going to characterize the Builders as enemies, no matter how hard he tried to dissuade them.

  Dr. Ochoa continued. ‘‘For now, we’re just going to run some tests on you, starting with a brain scan at seven a.m. tomorrow. We’re going to take a conservative approach, at least for a while. We’re going to see if we can identify anything useful by employing diagnostic and rehabilitative techniques. If we can get you talking again, that will be a big step. Once we do that, we’ll hear what you have to say. We’ll analyze it. And only if we’re dissatisfied with the intelligence you give us will we resort to the more drastic measures I just told you about.’’ He raised his index finger. ‘‘But just remember this: no hiding things on us anymore. I guarantee, that will just make matters a lot worse for you.’’

  11

  Back on the Moon, Lesha attended a special briefing by Dr. Renate Tennant in the common room the next day. The poses of the various individuals gathered, both military and scientific, made her think more of a tribunal than of a briefing. All the chairs had been put in the middle of the room, while the tables had been shoved against the walls. The scientific staff sat in the center and the military personnel stood around the perimeter, brutal-looking in their black armor. One table had been placed at the front, like a judge’s bench. Colonel Pittman and Renate Tennant sat at this table, a podium next to them. The faces of the scientific staff—Mark, Blaine, Lewis, Peggy, Silke, and Maribeth—looked drawn.