Linda rather tersely said, “Just see if you can keep that boat on course. Bye."
The next day we went to the gun range. Gary seemed not to have a problem with guns in general and learned to shoot as quickly as he'd learned pool.
Ellen at first handled the guns as if they were coated in slime. Her aversion caused her to be unprepared when the .9mm pistol bucked, but a few snickers and a laugh from Gary stiffened her resolve to master her weapon.
By noon they were both hitting the black with reliability using either handguns or rifles, so the instructor set up the pop-up range. I went through it first to both demonstrate and requalify to the instructor's satisfaction.
Both Ellen and Gary had difficulty with the idea of shooting at images of people, and neither of them was able to fire at all when faced with the image of a hostage situation, even though there was plenty of targetable bad guy visible.
The instructor tried reasoning with them, then I did, then we set them back in the range to try again. Gary's hand was shaking, but he managed to pull the trigger and put a round through the bad guy's exposed shoulder.
"Good,” I said. Gary looked at me. “Gary, your bullet would have disabled the guy's knife arm and shaken him loose from his hostage. Others could have gotten to him or had a clear shot at him, and that's good enough for today."
"But you shot him in the head..."
"That's what we'd do, Gary. I used a head shot in this scenario and so did the instructor, but your shot would also accomplish the end of the situation."
When Ellen's turn came, her hand wasn't shaking. She'd found a way out of killing the guy and quickly put one round almost in the same patched-over hole that Gary's bullet had made.
For the rest of the afternoon it was like that. Faced with a necessity to kill the bad guy in the target or perhaps have the bad guy's gun used on them, they both faltered. While it spoke well of their regard for life it didn't quite get the job done. We took a break at a diner nearby.
"Look,” I said, “This all assumes that you will have to use whatever's at hand to end a crisis. If that bad guy doesn't die, someone else—someone totally undeserving—very likely will. When we go back, I want you both to pot that nasty son of a bitch according to the script and get this whole mess over with."
Ellen said, “I'll try, Ed. It's just..."
"No, ma'am. You will, damn it. If you have to make 'it's just a target' some kind of mantra in order to do it, you will shoot as necessary. You're full of no-kill conditioning and that's just fucking wonderful, but that philosophy won't always work on a world like this one. These scenarios are cuts of history, people. Shit like this has happened too often and has to be anticipated."
Gary was stirring his tea and staring into the glass. I rapped on the table with my own spoon and his head came up.
"Gary, you'll go first. You'll put a round in his forehead.” I tapped Ellen's forehead and added, “Right here. Dead center."
Gary blanched and stared at me. I used that moment to continue.
"We'll say that I'm already dead and that you have a chance at him. If you don't shoot, he's going to kill everybody in the room because he'll figure that even if they aren't aliens themselves, they're working for the aliens. Even the children will have to die, just in case they're aliens, too. He's a psycho, Gary. He thinks he's gonna go to some idiotic version of heaven for doing this and he won't stop unless you stop him. You."
I looked at each of them. “If you can't do it, you aren't ready to try to live and work among Earth people after the news is out. Every paranoid and halfwit nutcase out there is going to zero in on aliens. Some will get through, eventually."
When we returned to the range, each of them made the required shot. Both were shaking and had to sit for a while afterward to reorganize themselves. Once we were back at the house I let Linda know what had happened. She didn't seem at all surprised by any of it and didn't offer any explanation.
Gary and Ellen had been issued cover ID's, of course. The matter of my helping Ellen to acquire a viable cover ID had been no more than a part of my pre-recruitment testing. Her name really was Ellen, sort of. It was E'lahyan. Gary's real name was G'haray. I met several of the Amarans and they all had an ‘h’ sound somewhere in their names. It seemed to have to do with family ties and lineage.
Ellen's cover included fake employment as an insurance investigator, as did Gary's. It was sufficient to explain their income and our frequent absences for up to a week at a time.
Her real job was to appear as necessary to try to explain technical stuff to politicians and others involved in the project. I was her escort and was issued a cover ID of my own for use at such events. Security concerning the project itself was as tight as I'd ever seen it, even in the Cold War days.
Gary's ongoing role was that of our liaison with the ship and our emergency escape ride—as he was for a number of others in our region—and a sometimes-visitor to the house.
He went with us to Orlando and some of the other meetings and generally found ways to be useful when he was ashore. When Sharon once asked him to help her unload supplies he wound up sometimes also helping her make ceramic and stoneware stuff, as well, and it was through those efforts that he developed an interest in creating his own designs.
We put a few of them on our website and they sold instantly, so Gary put up his own website and let WiccaWorks handle the sales end of things. He went to a number of art shows and returned from one with a lady friend.
The woman's name was Alanah and she was an Amaran located in Sarasota, Florida who had simply been trying to alleviate boredom by painting. Someone had entered one of her paintings in an art show and she'd found herself in demand at other shows, like the one to benefit the St. Petersburg aquarium.
Except for their watches, the Amarans had no special means of casually identifying themselves to each other. They weren't all blonde, so blending in wasn't a big problem.
Gary had spotted Alanah's watch instantly as she had been talking to someone about a painting and had made a point of checking the time within her range of vision. Alanah had suddenly remembered something she needed to retrieve from her car and Gary had offered to walk with her for safety's sake.
He didn't bring her to visit often, but from our few talks she seemed like a nice person to me. She had the usual Amaran characteristics of height and attractiveness and could have passed as a sister to Ellen.
The Amarans had chosen the first factory and training site based on a number of factors ranging from accessibility and plate tectonics to political and social environment and they would not budge from their decision to place the site near Carrington, North Dakota. Their polite but very firm attitude was that Earth could move it once we owned it and could figure out how to do so on our own.
United Nations members suggested dozens of plans for security and logistical support for the site, but at the end of six months of their wrangling over details the United States flatly stated that it would provide both the land and the security and the other nations would provide personnel. The major players agreed with many stipulations and the matter was settled enough to proceed.
Over the next few months the negotiations and the factory project were made public as an almost-done deal. A few nations, notably France, had said that they would refuse to participate unless the Earth factory would be built on their soil.
France had been excluded from further negotiations pending a change of heart, and once the matter became public, they found themselves facing revolution again. There were riots in major French cities for a solid week. The French government nearly toppled and many key people were replaced quickly so that the heads of state could blame someone else and apologize as necessary.
A few of the excluded nations made threatening noises about trade restrictions and other retaliatory measures against some of the others, but when one middle-eastern nation threatened to use nuclear weapons in terrorist attacks it was literally engulfed and absorbed by several of its ne
ighbors. A few lines changed on the global map and none of the threateners were heard from again.
The public, of course, went moderately insane over the whole affair. Some treated the Amarans as if they were visiting rock stars and others seemed to believe they were invaders or worse, but most settled down after a while and simply accepted that Earth had a corporate future among the stars.
There were a few failed assassination attempts and a few attempts that ended in death and/or injury, and, as expected, all of those attempts were based in various religious beliefs or forms of insanity. The two deaths were Earth cops who had been trying to disarm volatile situations. Only one Amaran was injured slightly in a bomb blast that went off too soon.
One TV preacher got the idea of a “Mission to Amara” going well enough to rake in several millions of dollars in only a few weeks. Although that preacher had no idea how to deliver missionaries to Amara without the Amarans’ assistance and although the Amarans had flatly refused to have anything to do with him, he continued to collect money for the effort until the Amarans hired attorneys to stop him from financially victimizing people in their name.
The idiot thought that he could ignore the judge's ruling to cease and desist because the word “religion” had been tacked onto the money-grubbing effort.
He was wrong, and they arrested him, but he jumped bail and tried to move the money and himself to an island nation that had no extradition agreement with the United States.
I was pleased to be one of those who helped negotiate his return to the States one night. In other days and places we had called such doings ‘extractions’ and they'd amounted to clandestine entry, containment of the extractee, and an escape back into the West across a Communist border. This extraction lacked only the Communist border. We'd even been heading West from the island.
At the Miami pier we joined a disembarking tourist group, provided the televangelist with a phony passport and some of his own luggage that had been retrieved from his massive estate in South Carolina, took some pictures of him walking with the tourist group, called the FBI to report that he was trying to re-enter the country under an assumed name, and held him until they arrived.
The FBI later said that it had acted on a tip that had panned out, and that was the truth. We'd told them nothing about our intentions and our people had disappeared by the time they arrived at the pier.
The televangelist went to prison and a very public effort was made to return as much of the money as possible to people who could prove their donations, but the bulk of the money remained unreturned after several months. I have no idea what happened to the money after that, but the amount of media scrutiny would have made those involved rather cautious about its disposition.
After the Pope announced a campaign to “embrace and enfold” Amarans as potential converts, some of the more violent furor died down and a number of the Protestant religions, notably the Baptists, decided to do the same. The only problem was reaching the Amarans in order to try to convert them, but the evangelists did manage to locate a few.
To my knowledge not one Amaran was converted to anything, but it gave most of the religious nuts a focus other than trying to ‘destroy the infidels'.
Things were fine until one of the pious idiots referred to the Amarans as “spiritually ignorant, unclean heathens in desperate need of salvation” on a syndicated topical-news show with a wide audience. The term stuck in the pointy little minds of most all of the pious, self-righteous idiots able to secure air time and was repeated ad nauseam for weeks until the Amarans had had enough.
The Amarans abruptly said they'd be putting their factory mission on hold until the religious drivel that was being used to polarize and milk the public stopped. The governments immediately stopped apologizing for the televised religious idiots and hustlers and took measures to end their manipulative rantings.
The following Sunday the President of the United States preempted all religious broadcasts by every individual or organization known to have said even one derogatory thing about the Amarans or to have used any of the “unclean heathen"-type labels to describe them. In other words, the Prez preempted every damned one of them. It was shutdown time.
He began with, “My fellow Americans, the Amarans will henceforth be given equal time for rebuttal and the exact same audiences which have been hearing religiously-based slander about them from biased and questionable sources..."
There was a bit more, but the Prez eventually turned the broadcast over to an Amaran, who introduced himself and spoke for forty-five minutes. He explained that the Amarans’ mission was a business venture and that Amarans were quite happy with their own religions without saying anything about their religions.
He also pointed out that philosophies and religions from less-developed worlds would appeal to Amarans about as well as Earth's more primitive cults appealed to our own investment bankers and Wall Streeters.
It was all very rational and reasonable and filled the remainder of the hour, after which the show was re-aired without interruption for the entire day on all the religious channels. The helmet-haired preachers in thousand-dollar suits and the other pious manipulators of peoples’ minds were told that such interruptions would occur again as often as necessary to end all deliberately manufactured controversy about the Amarans.
It took everybody almost a year to finish constructing the facility with people from an international consortium created specifically for that purpose. As the bugs were ironed out between member nations the consortium's role was expanded into management of the project, as agreed upon by a majority of the co-signatories.
I met a few new people along the way, but nothing much changed about my role in proceedings until Linda went through her surgery in August and Clark became my interim Control.
Gary, Ellen, Alanah, and I met Clark at the ship the day before the operation commenced and spent the morning with Linda, then she was prepped and delivered to the doctors. We were allowed to watch the operation on the wall of the dining room. They used a field effect to place Linda in a limited stasis and began the sixteen-hour operation at four in the afternoon.
When I had heard from Linda that it would take an estimated sixteen hours I wanted to meet the team of doctors involved, mostly to make myself feel better about the whole damned idea. That's a long time to be standing in one place doing surgery, and especially the sort of microsurgery that had been described.
Linda had laughed softly and said there'd be only one doctor after the initial team opened her up and had a look around. She called Elkor to come to her room in his ‘doctor outfit'. What entered the room would have scared the pee out of a kid watching a horror movie.
Elkor's ‘doctor outfit’ appeared to be an eight-armed, faceless, robot replica of the goddess Kali mounted on a pair of miniature tank treads. The arms folded or laid neatly down the sides of the machine's body when not in use, but in a striking demonstration of facility Elkor extended all of them at once and juggled jellybeans completely around his metal body before launching them all back into the jar at the same time from more than six feet away.
Elkor said, “As you can see, I'm pretty good with my hands."
The comment startled me. As some of the others laughed, I was peering at Elkor's ‘doctor outfit’ as if I might actually see something more about him. I hadn't anticipated meeting an Elkor with a sense of humor, and I looked at Ellen with a very 'what the hell?' sort of glance.
She smiled slightly and shrugged and said, “I told you. I only introduced some containments to protect the primaries."
"This is surgery, not juggling,” said Clark.
Elkor seemed to think a moment, then asked us all to donate a hair from each of our heads. Once he had them, he said, “Watch."
His implement-"hands” moved at phenomenal speed, braiding the hairs tightly together into one three-inch piece of work in less than three seconds. He then disconnected one of his viewing appendages and handed it to Clark.
Clark
looked through the mini-microscope and muttered, “Good-god-damn..."
As the scope and braid were passed around, even the Amarans were astounded at the result. The hairs had been neatly, tightly braided and sealed at the ends.
Elkor reattached his microscope appendage and handed the braid to Linda.
"I hope this will instil your strongest confidence in my abilities. Please take it as a token of all of our heartfelt wishes for your best recovery."
It was the sort of gesture and gathering of words you just don't expect to hear from an eight-armed robot with surgical tools for hands. Linda wiped a tear away, as did some of the others of us as we agreed in a motley chorus that ended with Clark's, “Damn right! You're gonna be walking to work, lady!"
Elkor then displayed on the wall a simulation of the operation, complete with depictions of the microsurgery that would re-link the nerve tissues and hopefully restore Linda's lower body functions.
"I can reconnect everything,” said Elkor, “But I can not guarantee success. That will be up to Linda's ability to make use of the restored connections. She will also experience unusual sensations until her brain re-learns how to process the input from her lower extremities."
"What kind of unusual?” I asked.
Elkor said, “All kinds. Heat, cold, pain, numbness. Any tactile sensation a human can feel she is likely to feel at some point after the operation."
He went on to say that after sixteen hours of forced sleep she was likely to wake up within a couple of hours of the operation's completion. That would put her wake-up at about eight in the morning. He suggested that we think about visiting Linda no earlier than ten.
Chapter Fifteen
Our concern could only bolster us for a limited time. As the fifth hour of the operation commenced on the wall, we had run out of conversation and nobody had the temerity to suggest changing the channel to something more interesting.
Book 1: 3rd World Products, Inc. Page 16