by Gene Brewer
Finally there was Jennifer in California, knee-deep in testing another new AIDS vaccine. Even though we both knew that Homo sapiens might not have much time left on Earth she spent the whole conversation talking about a cure for that awful disease. It’s amazing how life goes on even when a potential catastrophe is at hand. But she closed with, “Good luck, Dad. All my patients are pulling for you!” How cheering it was to hear that!
Lunch came as I was hanging up, but we were only halfway through it when Mike called. “I hope you enjoyed your meal,” he said, knowing we hadn’t, “but I think you’d better get back here as soon as you can.”
“What’s up?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
I swallowed a mouthful of grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, stuffed my mouth with salad, patted my wife on the head, and headed for the trailer. Again, thank God, no word from the Bullocks. When I got to the trailer Mike was waiting just inside the door with a man wearing a white coat. He was the famous Dr. (x4) Uttley, a computer scientist who headed one of the major technological companies. As we proceeded to the far end of the corridor, Dr. Utt, as he preferred to be called, felt the need to inform us that he was an adopted Vietnamese. Nevertheless, he spoke English without a trace of an accent. “I was only two when I got here,” he explained, almost apologetically.
We entered a tiny room (Room 1), about the size of my study, which contained a small table and a few folding chairs. The walls were stark white. Sitting on the table was the cone-shaped device I had hoped never to see again, clean and shiny once more.
“You’ve already watched the projections of the thoughts of some of your former patients, right?” he said.
“Yes, and I hope I don’t have to watch them again.”
“And also a greeting from prot and your daughter Abby, as well as Giselle and her husband and children on K-PAX.”
“Yes, fled showed me that when she first arrived on Earth.”
“What you apparently didn’t realize is that there is far more on this instrument than the things you’ve seen.”
“It never occurred to me to look for anything else. I was so appalled by what I saw in the minds of my patients that I — ”
“Exactly. But take a look at this.” I noticed then that the device was resting on a circular sheet of plastic of some kind, with dozens, maybe hundreds, of compass directions delineated on the sheet. He switched off the overhead light and turned the device to face a certain direction, about 190 degrees, just west of due south. On the opposite wall (where a kind of curved screen had been set up) there suddenly appeared a white light. Dr. Uttley drifted effortlessly into his ponderous lecture voice. “Now bear in mind that the K-PAXians have been around for several billion years longer than we have. Not as long as the Bullocks, but far longer than us. So maybe they have a general-issue format that they put on all these devices. But some if it is specific for Earth. What you’re going to see next will probably blow your mind.” He turned the device a fraction of a degree further around the circle. When he stopped, a beautiful picture of a bright red apple appeared on the screen.
I was puzzled for a moment until the camera, or whatever it was, began to move in. As it got closer and closer to the apple’s skin I could see movement. Closer and closer, and we were inside the skin, and there were molecules of various sorts, presumably carbohydrates and proteins and, of course water: the two hydrogens forming an angle with the oxygen atom were unmistakable. And then we closed in on the oxygen atom. In a matter of seconds we passed through the cloud layer of electrons and entered a vast blackness, where we stayed for several seconds. In the distance appeared the nucleus with its distinct protons and neutrons (they weren’t so distinct, actually — they sort of merged together to make a whole. I had seen animated, computerized versions of this sort of thing before, but this seemed to be the real thing. We all gaped in awe as we dove into the nucleus itself, and suddenly there were tiny, bright units of three, moving around each other at high speed. The quarks grew bigger and bigger until the camera, or whatever it was, closed in on one of them. The bright spark faded again into utter blackness. We waited, expecting to see nothing more, but suddenly a whole universe appeared, and we moved rapidly through the galaxies, coming to rest on a solar system, then an Earthlike planet, closing fast on a continent surrounded by water, and finally ending up focusing on an apple, where the movement came to a stop.
“What does it all mean?” I asked dumbly.
Dr. Utt, almost unable to speak, whispered, “It means there is no end to space. It goes on forever. Some of us have believed this for a long time, but we’ve never actually had any evidence for it.”
“So it’s ‘turtles all the way down,’” I mumbled, gazing uncomprehendingly at the apple. Suddenly I thought of Steve. “My son-in-law is a scientist, and he believes in something called string theory.”
“Apparently that theory is wrong.”
“He’s not going to like that.”
“Too bad.” Uttley gazed lovingly at the apple for a moment before crooning, “Shall we move on?” Another short turn of the cone and there appeared a pastoral scene, vegetation of all kinds and various small animals, including a variety of insects, which changed rapidly as time passed, and the animals grew bigger. The time-lapse “photography” continued, and various other creatures appeared and disappeared, until finally some easily-recognizable dinosaurs showed up. Eventually there was a flash of light followed by something like a huge dust storm, and they, too, finally disappeared. Other kinds of animals became evident, and there was movement, and birth, and death, and then came the apes, and other hominids, which quickly became humanoid and, unmistakably, Homo sapiens appeared on the scene. Small groups became tribes, and these became villages, and finally towns and cities, and farms and factories. We all watched in frank fascination — I wondered whether Dr. Utt and Mike were thinking the same thing I was: how long would we humans last before we also disappeared, like so many of our predecessors — as the cities and the buildings and factories became bigger and bigger. Sometimes there were periods when the various structures were destroyed by war or natural disaster, but always they were rebuilt and grew.
At some point I realized that we had already passed the present time, and I became very much afraid for our species, but more and more time passed and man-made things became less and less recognizable, and even the people changed somewhat: they had become smaller and uniformly bald, even the women. The only constant was that there were more and more of us and fewer and fewer of every other species. Spacecraft began leaving the Earth for unknown destinations (though most people were left behind), until the Earth itself was engulfed in flames, presumably because the sun had expanded to a great size. Finally the burning ended, and there was only a blackened, waterless rock — no Earth, no people, no anything.
I could feel my voice shaking as I observed that at least we weren’t going to die out in a year or two.
“I wouldn’t count on that,” said Dr. Utt. “I think this depiction merely represents a hypothetical future, one of many possibilities.”
I could feel my shoulders drop. I thought I had just been led to believe that we would go on and on until the end of time. “But doesn’t this video thing mean that they think we’re going to survive well into the future?”
“Not necessarily. The fact is, there are several more scenarios implanted in the device. In none of them is the outcome as good as this one. Would you like to see some of the others?”
“Do they show how the Bullocks will destroy the human race?”
“No. We think they depict the most likely outcomes if we were left to evolve on our own. Besides, this was probably produced some time ago, long before the Bullocks’ arrival.”
“I think I’ll pass on that.”
Mike nudged me, and I told Dr. Utt what Walter had said about the key to our survival being on the cone. He stared
at me for a moment. “Then it probably involves our DNA. Something like 40% of this thing appears to be a description of how every human gene works, what would happen if any of them were mutated in any number of ways. The information in it would fill a library. It would take a supercomputer just to organize and catalog it, let alone figure everything out.”
“You mean it tells us how to manipulate our DNA?”
“Yes, that’s what we think. But not right away, of course. The scientists who are working on this have years, maybe decades, or even centuries, of analyzing to do.”
“We may not have centuries, or even decades. We may only have a year.”
“In that case, we’d better get started as soon as possible. I’m only here because we thought you should have a look at it before we took it away. It’s technically yours, after all, though fled probably meant it for all of us.”
“I don’t care what you do with it, just as long as you find the key to our survival somewhere on the damn thing.”
Dr. Utt went on dreamily, as if I hadn’t said anything. “There are many other things depicted on this incredible device. There are mathematical formulas which no one understands, strange music scores, pictures and descriptions of what may be medical devices, and so on. Chemistry and biology texts which mankind probably won’t produce for centuries. There are mind probes, if we can call them that, of various species inhabiting the Earth. Anthropologists are going to be beside themselves.”
“How nice,” I responded a bit sarcastically. “But — ”
“I wasn’t sure I should mention this, Dr. Brewer, but, as I said — uh — fled probed the minds of several of the people and animals she met while she was on Earth. One of them was yours.”
“I don’t want to see it!” I shrieked.
“Okay, okay,” Dr. Utt said sympathetically. “But we thought you should know.”
“Thank you! Now I know!”
Mike sighed as Dr. Uttley went on. “And many more things we haven’t even looked at. It’s a universal encyclopedia! Everything is on there. It may even have a primer for light travel, if we can figure out how to read it. We’ve only had a day or so to analyze it.”
“But prot wouldn’t tell me how that’s done. Neither would fled.”
“The emphasis here is, ‘if we can figure out how to read it.’ He shook his head in awe. “We probably won’t be able to understand light travel until we’re ready to use it responsibly. But this thing will vastly increase our knowledge and understanding of all the sciences, and everything else. Right now it’s too much to comprehend, let alone really appreciate.” The voice of the lecturer was replaced by that of a whimpering old man. “I’m not sure we can interpret much of it in only a year. We’d need a Rosetta Stone.”
I bowed my head. When I looked up, they were both staring at me. I knew what they were thinking. I said, “We’re probably too late. I shouldn’t have buried the damn thing eight years ago, should I?” Mike and Dr. Utt bowed their heads, too.
“Okay, I think we’re finished here,” said Mike.
Dr. Uttley cradled the cone-shaped device in his arms, as if it were a newborn baby, and headed for the door. “There are a couple dozen people in white coats who are impatiently waiting for this thing.”
Before he could leave, however, I blurted out, “It may well be too late for us to get much use out of this,” I said. “Fled must have known this. I wonder why she gave it to us now?”
Dr. Utt stopped as if he had run into a wall. For a moment he said nothing, then turned back to me. “As you said, the key to our survival may be on here, if we only knew what it is and where to look.”
“Maybe the Bullocks would be willing to tell us that much,” I said hopefully.
“There’s something else, too,” Mike added. “There’s so much useful information on the cone that no reasonable human would want to take a chance on losing this opportunity, even if it means we have to stop killing each other.”
“Not everyone on Earth is reasonable,” I reminded him.
He shrugged. “Perhaps that’s where you come in, Gene. All you have to do is to convince the rest of the world that this tremendous knowledge would be of more value to us than all the killing.”
Dr. Uttley nodded impatiently before running out the door. I wished I could have followed him. This was an aspect of my dilemma that I had frankly not thought about. It’s bad enough that I had to make a speech to the principal representatives of all the world’s people, but to convince them to be reasonable was something else entirely. No matter what I told them it might not be enough. I felt like some mental patients must feel, those who are suffering from an acute inferiority complex, who know they can’t succeed no matter what they do or how hard they try.
Mike must have sensed my renewed feelings of uncertainty and doubt. “We have you scheduled with the psychological support group tomorrow, Gene. Maybe we should move it up a little?”
“Is there a backup for me in case I can’t do it? If I get sick or something?”
Mike sighed deeply. “We’ve been over this before, Dr. B. There would be no point in a backup. For whatever reason, the Bullocks came to you, and you alone. Not even the President can do this.”
“Somehow that doesn’t increase my confidence.”
“It’s just something you’ll have to deal with. And you know that everyone involved has faith in you and will do everything possible to help you through this ordeal.”
“What else have we got scheduled that I don’t know about?”
“Have you seen today’s New York Times?”
“No.”
“The world seems to be going through the classic stages related to dying. Right now it’s in denial. Despite what I just told you, a lot of people are questioning your authority, even your veracity. Some are wondering why a retired psychiatrist with no leadership or political experience has been called upon to speak for them. Even though there’s credible evidence to the contrary, they are wondering whether you are faking the whole thing for some reason. Maybe to get attention. Some people even think you might be crazy. We may have to have another press conference, or something like it. The President is still deciding how best to handle this.”
“But after denial comes anger. What does that mean in this context?”
“It may mean that someone will try to kill you or a member of your family.”
I froze again.
“But don’t worry; you’re under maximum security watch. There is no more reason to worry about your assassination than that of the President himself.”
I remembered all the Presidents who have been assassinated, or almost so, over the years. “How comforting.”
“I’m going to tell you a secret, Gene. Every President initially worries about the possibility of assassination, even before he is elected. But my study of history and getting to know a couple of Presidents tells me that there is so much to do that this feeling quickly fades.” He patted my arm, as if I were a little boy. “It’s simply not going to happen.”
“What about the rest of my family?”
“We haven’t told you this yet, but they’re all being protected by our security forces. Mainly Secret Service but also plainclothes FBI and local police. We’re throwing everything we have into your security and that of your family. Right now no one in the world is more important than you. You’re all safer than the Pope. (I recalled the assassination attempts on various Popes.) Besides that, it would be very difficult for anyone to determine who your family is and to assess their comings and goings before the Security Council meets. It’s only a few days from now. After that, the whole situation will change.”
I wondered whether to tell Karen that our kids and our grandchildren were under threat, no matter how minimal. “Okay, I’ll take your word for that. But I’ll still worry about it.”
“Fair enough. Now why don’t you
go back and say hello to your wife. Have a cup of tea or something, and we’ll reconvene in half an hour.”
Still dazed by what I had seen and heard, I stumbled past the guards, neither of whom I recognized. Both ignored me. I got halfway across the yard before I heard Walter’s voice. I had almost forgotten about them. “You haven’t seen the best part.”
“Huh?” I remembered to speak out loud. “The best part of what?”
“Your Jones was right. The K-PAXians want you to know what’s in store for you if you are able to give up your endless lust for blood. The universe is so vast and so full of wondrous things that if you get a taste of it you might be persuaded to re-think your self-centeredness in order to see more of it. It’s like behaving so that you will get a good Christmas present.”
“You know about Christmas?”
“We know everything there is to know about you. All your comforting myths.”
“Yes, of course. But why are you telling me this? I had the feeling you’d just as soon we were gone.”
“We’ve seen a lot of your world in the past few days. Despite all your faults, you do have some virtues.” I waited, but there was no further elaboration; I thought they had disappeared again. It suddenly occurred to me that the Bullocks might be convinced that our newly-discovered “virtues” might make us worth sparing. But if they heard this, they chose to ignore it. Instead, they said, “Want to go for a ride?”