Blonde Bombshell

by Tom Holt

  “Out of town,” George repeated. “You’re aliens, aren’t you?”

  The man on the bed grinned, then took a flat plastic box, a bit like an old-fashioned data-storage pad, from his coat pocket. He thumbed a button and turned it so George could see. There was a screen; on it, in English:

  WHY ALIENS DON’T EXIST: A Summary of the Blindingly Obvious, by George R Stetchkin

  “Your article in the Fall 2007 edition of Science Now,” said the man on the bed. “I enjoyed it. I thought you made out a really strong case.”

  “Yes, but—”

  The man on the bed pressed a few more buttons. The screen now showed:

  WE ARE ALONE. George R Stetchkin explodes for ever the belief that life exists on other planets

  “A bit on the sensational side, but basically sound,” the man went on. “Or there’s my personal favourite.” He thumbed again. “Your piece in the 2009 Proceedings of the Oslo Institute of Cosmology. ‘All in the Mind: A Psychological Explanation of Alien Abduction Myths’. The way you demolished Rostovseff was quite magnificent.”

  All quite true. “I was wrong, though,” George said, in a little tiny voice. “Wasn’t I?”

  The man shrugged, and put the pad back in his pocket. “I think it was a bleak day for science when you abandoned pure research for corporate finance. Still, I imagine it pays better.”

  Also true. “All right,” George said wearily, “what do you want?” The man smiled at him. “It’s not so much what you can do for us as what we can do for you,” he said. “This business with the banknotes.”

  He had George’s undivided attention. “Well?”

  “A clue for you,” he said. “Just a little hint, to set you on the right track. Weigh some of the other notes, the ones that weren’t taken. Then divide by—”

  Hitherto, George had been able to count the moments of pure pleasure he’d experienced in his life on the fingers of one hand. Now he’d need his left thumb as well. He mimed a cavernous yawn. “Done that,” he said. “It’s the security strips, right? Someone’s taking out all the aposiderium and adding the plastic to the other notes in the vault.”

  The man’s mouth was open, but no words came out. He nodded.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” George went on. “You people. You’ve got some kind of teleport technology, which is something like a million years in advance of what we’ve got. So it must be you. Yes?”

  The two men looked at each other. “Sort of,” said the man on the floor.

  “Yes and no,” said the man on the bed. “Depends what you mean by—”

  George made a faint growling noise at the back of his throat. He didn’t notice the way the hair on the back of the two men’s heads stood up as a result. “Don’t mess with me,” he said. “It can’t be us, so it must be you. Well?”

  The man on the bed pursed his lips. “Us as individuals, no. Us sort of collectively—”

  In George’s mind, the penny didn’t just drop, it buried itself Lincoln’s-nose-deep in his intuition. “There’s more of you,” he said. “Here on Earth, right now. And it’s the other bunch who’s—”

  The man on the bed nodded to the man on the floor, who drew the gun and slipped a replacement box into the slot at the back. “I’m not authorised to make admissions on that score,” said the man on the bed. “However, if I neither confirm nor deny what you just said, you’re free to draw your own inferences. Meanwhile—”

  Zap. The man on the floor shot George in the back of the head. For a split second he swelled like an angry frog; then the door was visible through his face; then he was gone.

  “Thanks for your time,” said the man on the bed. “We apologise” George opened his eyes. He was in the canteen at the Credit Mayonnais HQ — “for any inconvenience” — back in Novosibirsk, and the waiter was walking towards him, with a tray of coffee and lemon cheesecake.

  George blinked. He must have fallen asleep. He’d had the strangest dream. He looked down at the coffee, then up at the waiter. “The bill, please,” he said.

  “Already paid, sir.”

  “Huh?”

  The waiter drifted away. George stared at the coffee, then drank it. Better. He ate the cheesecake. Better still.

  I fell asleep, he told himself. I had the weirdest dream.

  But he knew it wasn’t true. All right, he admitted, I was abducted by— One word, thirty years. A bit like teleportation; the A word, if he allowed it to take shape in his mind, had the power to drag him back three decades, to a suburban park in the small Russian town where he’d grown up, where, on the evening in question, he’d been walking his dog before going home to dinner. Gradually, like a long-buried sliver of shrapnel working its way through the skin, the word forced itself to the surface. Abducted by aliens— Six o’clock on a warm summer evening. Twelve-year-old George Stetchkin stooped to pick up a stick, and threw it. Rags, his Lithuanian terrier, chased after it, barking. The stick described an orthodox Newtonian parabola through the air, hit the ground and bounced. Which it shouldn’t have done, because sticks don’t. But this stick did. It bounced, skipped high in the air, started to climb. Rags did an all-four-paws-off-the-ground flying leap and just managed to snap hold of the very end of it. The stick continued to climb. Rags, a tenacious and serious-minded animal, held on tight. The stick wobbled, dipped, straightened up and continued to rise, with Rags dangling from it.

  That’s not right, George thought. He started to run. The stick was gaining both height and speed. Bu the time he got there, Rags was two metres off the ground, his hind legs paddling furiously.

  George (no athlete) threw himself into the air and just managed to get his thumb and forefinger round Rags’ right hindpaw. He felt himself rising, looked down and saw the ground below getting perceptively further away. He was flying.

  Immediately he let go, and landed hard on his left knee. Something gave way, and he yelled at the pain, which was suddenly more than he could possibly be expected to cope with. Before it overwhelmed him, he caught a fleeting glimpse of his dog, ten metres or so up in the air, hanging from a rapidly accelerating stick, which seemed to stretch impossibly — from thirty centimetres to a metre, just for a fraction of a second — before disappearing in a brief, vast flash of light and a crack like God’s leg breaking. And then nothing, except a blue sky, an absence of dog, and the agony of a dislocated knee.

  He never saw Rags again. Many years later, as a junior science specialist in the Russian Air Force, he managed to get access to a restricted file concerning an incident that took place at those coordinates, on that day. Routine telemetry from an orbital observation platform had recorded an unexplained incursion. The readings were hopelessly garbled; they appeared to show a metallic object 20.72 centimetres long, powered by some kind of unbelievably advanced energy-exchange technology, entering Earth’s atmosphere somewhere over the Bering Strait; by means unknown and inexplicable it contrived to reach the surface without burning up, dropped harmlessly out of the sky, stayed there for about ten minutes (during which time its molecular signature changed, from titanium alloy to an organic cellulose compound not entirely unlike wood), then took off again, having somehow acquired an accompanying life-sign that didn’t correlate with any known terrestrial species; in 12.86 seconds it accelerated from approximately fifty metres per second to a velocity in excess of the speed of light, and was travelling faster than the orbital platform could track by the time it punched a tiny hole in the ozone layer and broke orbit. The report’s conclusion: this orbital platform is seriously buggered and should be decommissioned immediately, before it starts a war or something.

  Great, thought the young Lieutenant Stetchkin. Aliens stole my dog.

  But he couldn’t accept that. It was so fundamentally, grotesquely, indecently not fair that he refused to countenance the possibility. And so, for the next ten years, he devoted all his time, energy and prodigious intellectual gifts to proving, conclusively and beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were no such thing
s as aliens; that mankind was a unique anomaly; that no other world anywhere in the universe could possibly support any kind of life whatsoever, and especially not the sort of life that’d be capable of shooting a spaceship disguised as a bit of old stick into a suburban park and stealing an innocent child’s pet dog. Finally, he published his finest work, the Oslo paper the strange man had referred to. He came within a hair’s breadth of a Nobel prize, was offered enough chairs to fit out a football stadium and promptly quit academia and took a job in a bank. Naturally, everybody asked why. He never told them. To do so would be to admit that he’d managed to convince everybody on Earth except the one person who mattered. Himself.

  “Bastards stole my dog,” he muttered through a mouthful of cheesecake.

  Quite. And now they’d shot him and put him in a box, and it seemed more than likely that they were the ones looting all the money, too. Well, he wasn’t in the least surprised. People who’d steal a kid’s dog were clearly capable of anything.

  Which left him with a problem. He knew the truth. Aliens were beaming the aposiderium out of the banknotes and reintegrating the leftovers. Convincing the world’s bankers was another matter. In its own right the concept was a bit on the rich side. Coming from the man who’d conclusively proved that there are no little green men from outer space, it was going to be harder to swallow than a nail-studded olive. The irony, he thought. In the nastiest, most spiteful way possible, it was more or less perfect.

  Just a minute, he thought.

  The waiter had left a receipt. He picked it up.

  (1) coffee $3.99

  (1) cheesecake $6.99

  Debited to the account of the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes

  He read the words over a few times. They were everyday, familiar words, put together in accordance with the usual conventions of commercial grammar and syntax, and he didn’t understand them. A be-kind-to-animals group he’d never even heard of had just treated him to a drink and snack (nearly seven dollars for cheesecake? What a rip-off), but how could they? They couldn’t have known he’d even be there. The only people who’d have known that were—

  He tried his phone, but it wasn’t working. He summoned the waiter and called for a laptop, then did a KeyHole search. No such body as the Global Society for the Ethical Treatment of Dumb Brutes. He overrode a few security lock-outs and did a UniBank search. That was slightly more helpful. The GSETDB had an account with the Credit Mayonnais. It had been opened at 09:01:21 that morning, and $10.98 had been paid into it, in cash, at the bank’s central branch in New York. He called up the CCTV footage, and saw the two men he’d just spent time with. He called up the references they’d given for opening the account. They turned out to be entirely non-existent, though the bank’s database had accepted them quite happily at the time.

  $10.98. Exactly enough to cover one coffee and one cheesecake. He went back to the main screen, just in time to see the words Account closed appear. Well, he thought. Attention to detail, or what?

  So that was the sort of “people” he was up against. Ruthless, powerful, manipulative, seriously resourceful, extremely thorough and almost touchingly considerate space aliens with advanced teleport technology and a craving for aposiderium. He put a call through to his boss at the bank.

  “I know who’s doing it,” he said.

  He could visualise his boss’s eyes widening like ripples in a pool. “Who?”

  “And how they’re doing it,” George went on, “which is rather more important.”

  “OK,” his boss said. “How?”

  “So what we need,” George said, “and I know it won’t be easy, but if that’s what it takes then that’s what it takes—”

  “George—”

  “Electromagnetic shielding,” George said. “Preferably in the form of a coherent stasis field, though I guess we could get away with an oscillating pulse if we absolutely have to, provided we can keep the frequency up above—”

  “George.”

  “They’re using teleportation,” he explained. “I know, it’s not possible here on Earth, but where they come from, apparently, it’s no big deal. It was some kind of teleport device they used when they abducted me.”

  “Abducted…”

  “That’s right. After they shot me in the bar.”

  “George.”

  “What, sorry. Yes?”

  “You’re fired.”

  Short pause, comprised of silence as dense as the heart of a neutron star. “What?”

  “You’re fired,” said George’s boss. “Sorry, but we did warn you. We told you, lay off the booze or we’re going to have to let you go. You’re a very clever guy, George, but at a time like this we just can’t afford to have a babbling drunk running our security operation. There’ll be an extra something in your severance package, but that’s it. The end of the line. Sorry.”

  “Yes, but I’m not—” The phone went dead. George swore at it, then typed in his access code to open a line. His codes didn’t work. That quick.

  Dimly, through the red mist of rage and frustration, he could just about see the man’s point. Electromagnetic shielding, for crying out loud. It was a technical possibility, but so was three million red-headed women joining hands to form a human chain across Denmark. From his boss’s perspective, which was more likely: that the money was being stolen by teleport-capable aliens, or that George Stetchkin had finally disappeared down inside the bottle and pulled the cork in after him?

  He whimpered, and the sound attracted the waiter.

  “Can I get a drink around here?” George asked.

  “Certainly, sir,” the waiter replied, and brought him a glass of water.

  11

  ?????

  The director of the Institute for Interstellar Exploration had turned round three times and was just about to go to sleep when the Box buzzed him.

  “Sorry to call so late, sir,” said a worried-looking face on the screen. “But we thought you should know. We’ve just had the first telemetry from the Mark Two.”

  The director lifted his head and peered at the screen over the edge of his basket. “Well?”

  “There’s something odd, sir. Maybe you should—”

  “Don’t do anything,” the director barked. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  He jumped up, paused in front of the mirror to straighten his collar, and hurried into his study. “Screen,” he snapped, and a metre-square section of thin air glowed blue. “Show probe sensor data.”

  A voice from nowhere said, Restricted access. Please state your user code and password.

  “Seven-four-four-five-five-three-three-A,” the director recited; then, “Spot.”

  The thin-air screen blazed like fire and turned white and two-dimensional. Numbers formed, like bugs splattered on the windscreen of a faster-than-light lorry. The director looked at them and scowled.

  He wasn’t supposed to have private access, of course, but since he’d designed the system himself, including all the security protocols and lock-outs, it hardly mattered. What did matter was that he should know what he was walking into when he arrived at the office.

  They couldn’t have found out, he told himself. Could they?

  Odd, young F’siernrtf had said; odd. A curious word to choose. He thought about it some more as he programmed the co-ordinates into his home teleport station (wasn’t supposed to have one of those, either). No, he decided, they couldn’t have. Otherwise, he’d have been woken up by the muzzles of Internal Affairs blaster rifles, not the weebling voice of his junior assistant. He shoved his CoinStar and a few data chips into his briefcase, took a last look at the data on the screen and said, “Off.” The screen vanished. “Delete communications log entry,” he added, and a non-directional bleep confirmed that his order had been obeyed.

  Could they?

  One last chore. He went into the kitchen and filled Spot’s bowl with dried apricots and ManChow chunks. The human was still asleep, snoring gently, his
squeaky rubber phone gripped tight between his hands. The director smiled in spite of himself, then went back into the living room and activated the teleport beacon. A single clear note told him it was ready.

  He hesitated. Internal Affairs, he thought; now there’s a nasty bunch of alphas for you. Just suppose they had found out. What could be more convenient than an unfortunate teleport malfunction, resulting in the guilty party’s molecules being scattered across three continents? No fuss, no scandal. It was what he’d do, if he was IA.

  He shook himself. Mild paranoia, he decided, brought on by —what? Guilt? Fear of being found out, more likely. Besides, IA were brutal, unimaginative and scarily straightforward in their approach, but they weren’t the sharpest teeth in the jaw. The only way anybody would catch him would be if he gave himself away; by acting out of character, for example. He stepped on to the teleport pad and growled, “Activate.”

  A split second to travel halfway across the planet in kit form, a slightly larger split from the same second to pull himself together, or at least to reassure himself that the machine hadn’t decided that his head would look so much better growing out of the small of his back, the inevitable lurch of nausea as the contents of his stomach caught up with the rest of him, and he opened his eyes and looked round the operations room. It hadn’t been so crowded since launch day. Obviously, he hadn’t been the only one to get an early-morning call.

  His room, though, because it was his operation. “‘Well?” he snapped. No need to direct the enquiry at anyone in particular. His staff were well trained. It was somebody’s job to answer him, and that somebody would be standing by the pad, ready and waiting.

  “On screen now, sir,” said a voice at his side. He didn’t recognise it, and didn’t bother to look round. “Preliminary scans show no sign of—”

  “Yes, thank you, I’m not blind.” The screen teemed with numbers, like flies on a —