by Clyde Key
* * *
Ed took his seat and looked out the window. Snow covered the ground outside, and drifts were swirling everywhere so that a person couldn’t see very far. “My gosh, but that does look real!” exclaimed Ed to the man in the next seat.
“Sure does,” said the man. “I could almost forget it’s August outside.”
As the train began to accelerate, Ed settled back and tried to relax, but he couldn’t. There was just too much to think about. First, he was sure aliens were out of the compound. And it wasn’t just the aliens in the communications chain, either. He was quite sure from the intelligence reports that several alien globes were zipping everywhere around the southwest at high speed. If anybody saw one and realized it, they would just assume they were seeing one of the aliens permitted outside. But then, Ed wouldn’t know the difference either if he saw one outside. All the globes looked exactly alike to him, with no identifying marks at all, and so did the aliens. How could anybody tell one of those bags of manure from another?
Then he caught himself staring out the window again. The very realistic landscape was passing by at a leisurely pace, not the hundreds of kilometers per hour the magtrain must be going by now. Then Ed saw a child, a boy of six perhaps, playing in the snow apparently only a few feet away from the train. Ed waved before he even thought about it. The child smiled and waved back and Ed grinned broadly too. Then he realized how absurd that was. There was no child playing outside in the snow. Reality was that he was riding a magtrain at around 800 kilometers per hour through a tunnel bored deep underground and it was sizzling southwest summer up on the surface.
Ed saw the passenger in the next seat was watching him, quite amused. “Yeah, it got me,” Ed mumbled. “I don’t know how they make that seem so real. The last time I rode the train, the scenery was good but it had no depth to it like this.”
“It’s holograms,” said the other passenger. “I know because I work for the mag authority. We just got it upgraded. The technology has been around for a long time but it’s always been too expensive ‘til lately. Now we have people riding the train just for the view. We’ll have tropical islands in the winter.”
“You know, I could have sworn the kid in the view saw me and waved back when I saw him. Could that have been?”
“Sure. That’s a takeoff on some old virtual reality technology. Don’t tell anybody, but there are sonar sensors in the seat and in the wall that can tell if you wave at a character in the scenery and cause a reaction.”
“How do you know so much about all this?”
“Like I said, I work for the authority—chief engineer for the southwest lines. I installed a lot of this stuff.
“You said something about sonar. Is that anything like the sonar they say the aliens use to get around?”
“Exactly. Probably.” The mag engineer smiled and waved at a figure appearing outside the train. “I get a kick out of this too.”
“I’m curious about something,” said Ed. “Could you make some kind of generator that would put out false sonar signals to confuse the aliens?”
“You mean The Visitors—excuse me—Veezee?”
“No. Actually I mean aliens. That stinking scum has no business here, the way I see it and I don’t intend to pander to their little egos.”
“Oh. That’s the way I feel about it too, but for a while there I thought you were probably a government agent of some sort. The idea of those things running loose everywhere scares the soup out of me, but I’ve learned better than to open my trap too soon. I did once before and wound up enduring a thirty hour course on Visitor Sensitivity—and that was before those things had even arrived!”
“Hey, I am in the army but that’s not quite the same thing. Now back up just a bit,” said Ed. “On that sonar thing—could you build something for the army? Something that would do a real number on the aliens?”
“I think so. Maybe I could do something by combining sonar transponders and our virtual reality software. I bet I could make one of them think he was somewhere else entirely.”
Ed took a pad and pen from his pocket and wrote his name and the address of the Kingman Base, and handed it to the other passenger. “This is how to get in touch with me. I’d really like to talk about this more sometime soon.”
The engineer looked at the paper before he folded it and stuck it in a pocket. “My name is Victor Herman. You can reach me most of the time at the Magport Authority office in Flagstaff.
Herman got off at Oklahoma City, but Ed thought about the conversation for the rest of his ride. Ed smiled at the thought of a machine that would have aliens sloshing around and knocking each other down like comic show characters.