by Gene Brewer
At this point everyone breathed a sigh of relief. There was nothing more to be done with the text except show up and read it at the Security Council meeting tomorrow. There was some chatter about whom I should see next, what other preparations needed to be made. While this was going on I found myself thinking about the passage of time. What does “tomorrow” mean? Tomorrow it will be “today,” and then it will be “yesterday,” and on and on. How odd that the perception of time depends on whether you think about the past (which went by in an instant), and the future (which takes forever to reach). And yet time simply amounts to pages in a book. It can be stopped at will if you travel silently into the past or to some distant place. But what about the traveler? If I stayed in ancient Greece or Rome for an extended period would I be far older when I got back to the present? Isn’t this what Einstein said about travel near the speed of light? No, time travel is different from light travel. It takes no time whatever to get to the past. There is so much to learn! I could only hope the Security Council would understand that it could be far more rewarding to study the contents of the cone instead of how to make better weapons.
“Did you hear that, Dr. B?”
“Oh. Sorry. My mind must have been somewhere else.”
“That’s okay,” said the President. “Here’s the plan: we suggest you go from here to the doctors to make sure you’re ready for a strenuous day tomorrow. After that you can go to a room down the hall to make a video recording of your speech, just in case of any problem. If you’re unable to get to the UN we can show it to the Security Council.”
“You mean — ?”
“I only mean that no one can predict the future. A hurricane might come up the coast. The United Nations Building might be locked down by a bomb threat. You might fall and break an arm getting out of the shower. None of that is going to happen, of course, but with the future of mankind at stake, we can’t afford to take any chances.”
“Sure. No problem.”
The President shook my hand for the umpteenth time and looked me right in the eye. “Your part in this is almost over, Gene. I have absolute confidence in you. Get a good night’s sleep and don’t worry about a thing. You’ll do fine.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. I appreciate that.”
Mike took me down to the room with the men in white coats for a final physical and blood tests. After that it was Dr. Schultz again. I had grown to find him repulsive, but I went through the motions. Once more he tried to give me some sleeping pills, which I declined. “Dr. Brewer, this is a once-in-a-lifetime affair. You may find it difficult to sleep without something to help you. I would strongly encourage you to take these with you.”
I looked at the vial of tablets and snorted. I had prescribed the same thing hundreds of times to my own patients. Nevertheless, to pacify him, I took the pills even though I had no intention of using them. He seemed quite pleased (with himself).
After we finished making the video, Mike prescribed a good dinner and a restful evening of TV or anything else I found enjoyable. Maybe a visit from the Siegels, our oldest friends from our college years. “There’s nothing more to do, my friend. I’ll see you tomorrow morning at nine.”
“Nine?”
“We have plenty of time. Sleep late and have breakfast at home with your wife.”
Sleep late? I thought. When’s the last time I’ve been able to sleep late? “Are we flying on Air Force One, or what?”
“No. You and I will be with the President in a motorcade. As you know, the UN is less than a two hours’ drive from here.”
“We’ll be riding with the President?”
“No, and there are reasons for that. Besides the security considerations he thought you might prefer riding into the city alone with your wife.”
“Well, he’s right about that.”
Mike walked me to the house, where Flower came running out through the dog door. He gave her head a good scratch before heading back to the Nerve Center. “Have a nice evening,” he called out. I wondered how he would be spending his. How long had it been since he had seen his own wife and family?
Karen was waiting for me, as she always has. We were both looking forward to a nice, relaxing dinner. That’s when she told me that Will and his family would be eating with us. “That’s wonderful! We haven’t seen them for quite a while.”
“Are you sure this won’t interfere with your schedule? Don’t you have to rehearse your speech tonight?”
“No. In fact, they advised me not to.”
“Good. Then we can all relax tonight.”
I told her I had been thinking that maybe before anyone else comes we could try a trip to the past again.
“Oh, honey, I don’t know. I don’t think I have the knack for it. I can’t seem to visualize all the details about a room like you can.”
“I don’t think many people can. But here’s what I thought: maybe we could set up the dining room like we did before and take a picture of it. If you focus on the picture, maybe we could both get there.”
“What then? You can’t take a picture of something from the past, can you?”
“Maybe there are old pictures that we could look at. Like the Wright brothers on their first flight — something like that. What do you think?”
“Okay, I guess we could try it. But don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t work.”
“Sweetheart, I could never be disappointed with you.”
“Thank you. That was a nice thing to say.”
“Okay, where’s the digital camera? I’ll get it while you set up the table in some way it’s never been set up before.”
She went about that while I looked for the camera. As soon as I found it I took a picture of my study before hurrying back to the dining room to snap a picture there. Then we went back to the study and uploaded the photos onto my computer (we don’t have a smart phone) and printed them both.
“We won’t be able to hear each other, so we’ll need something to write with.” We grabbed a couple of note pads and pens. Okay,” I said, “we’ll just stare at this picture of the dining room for a minute and see what happens. The next thing we knew we were both hovering over it, staring at the table setting, which of course was identical to the printout. “Well,” I said. “That was easy.”
“I don’t believe this is happening!” she wrote.
“You should see the Earth from space!” I wrote back. “The nice thing about this is that we can stay as long as we want.”
“I can see us both, but we can’t see us,” she replied. “It’s kind of scary. Can we go back now?”
“Sure. This was just a practice run.” I held the other picture in front of us, the one of the study, and instantly we were back. I noted that the clock read exactly the same time as when we left. “After the speech tomorrow we’ll have at least a year to learn to do this better. We can practice it until it becomes second nature.”
“I hope it’s more than a year.”
I hugged her. “Me, too.”
I won’t bore the reader with the details of the family talk we had at dinner. Our son Will was deeply immersed in his life and career, writing papers and treating patients, some of whom we discussed briefly over dessert. Neither of us wanted to talk shop that evening, nor did he or his wife Dawn want to know what I was going to say the next afternoon. It was their older daughter Jessica who asked me point blank whether the aliens were going to destroy the Earth.
“Not if the people I will be talking to are reasonable, and if I convince them that it’s time for human beings to stop killing each other and focus on the future.”
“What if they’re not reasonable or you can’t convince them?”
I told her truthfully: “I don’t know, sweetheart. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Anyway, we have a whole year to figure it out.”
My granddaughter is no dummy. She ob
served that we should get started right away. “Otherwise there’d be too many dead people by Christmas.”
“Yes,” I said, not wanting to be untruthful, but also not wanting to terrify anyone. “I’ll do the best I can, honey. But it’s really not up to me.”
Allyson started crying. “I don’t want all my friends to disappear from the Earth!”
I could only offer, sympathetically, “I’ll tell them that.”
There was no more talk of the United Nations the rest of the evening, and soon after dinner the children went to bed. The adults stayed up a while longer, but I excused myself early in order to try to get a good night’s sleep. Before turning in I looked at my new supply of meds, kindly provided by my next-door colleague. Reluctantly I took one of the little pink pills and quickly passed into the land of oblivion.
MESSAGE DAY
Day Eight was a blur from the moment I woke up until I found myself sitting at the round table in the United Nations Security Council chamber. I remember little incidents, of course, like getting into the motorcade on the road outside the Nerve Center (Will and his family returned home after an early breakfast, and we left Flower with a neighbor). There were about a dozen big black limousines, along with Dr. Greaney and his staff in the ever-present ambulance; our car was near the rear. I don’t know which one held the President (the Vice-President had returned to Washington), or anyone else. Karen and I must have been the last to embark because we were moving almost as soon as we were ensconced in the limo, which, we were informed, was nicknamed “the Beast” because of its five-inch-thick windows and other amenities. We settled back and looked out the smoky windows like any tourist. Perhaps the President did, too, though I suspect he was on a phone or working at a desk the whole way. In any case, I doubt his heart was pounding like mine. Not long after we left, I noticed that we were driving down the same highway that Walter, the corpse, and I had traveled seven days earlier. I couldn’t be sure, but I could swear that the tree he had vaporized had reappeared.
I held a copy of my speech the whole way, had been planning to look through it again, but I just couldn’t do it. The truth is I wanted to forget about it. I thought about going back in time to watch the signing of the Declaration of Independence or something, but I would have had to go alone at this point, so I stayed and held hands with my wife the whole way. We weren’t alone, of course. The ever-present Secret Service agents sat in front and behind us in their usual attire. The highways were empty all the way except for the motorcade. Occasionally I saw several red flashing lights a couple of blocks away, presumably where the regular traffic was being held back. The whole trip took barely an hour and a half, but it seemed more like a minute. By noon we were settled into a small, comfortable dining room, where we presumably enjoyed a light lunch, though I can’t remember anything we had. The President had joined us by that time, and he related a few stories about certain speeches he had delivered and how nervous he was at times. “Learning to give speeches requires a lot of practice in seeming to be relaxed while being scared shitless,” he informed us.
“Tell me about it,” I replied dismally.
“Jack Kennedy was a master at that. Everyone in his shoes, or your shoes, is scared, even terrified, under extreme conditions like these. Why? Because you can never be sure that you’re right. On the other hand, there is a living ex-President who got the willies with every speech he made.” He shook his head. “You have to admire his courage. Press conferences, too. Of course it has a lot to do with self-assurance. If you have doubts about yourself they show, and you have to try to overcome them beforehand, mainly by being well-prepared.”
“I haven’t done that yet, Mr. President. Can we postpone this for a few years?”
“I’ve always appreciated your sense of humor, Dr. B. What would the Bullocks say about that?”
“I think they would take a dim view of any delays.”
“That’s what I thought they’d say.”
Otherwise it was probably a nice lunch, with pheasant or the like. I remember ruefully thinking that a year from now we had better not be killing birds, or anything else, to eat. That, of course, assumed we would survive Year One, which was a dubious proposition at best. Just before two o’clock I went to the bathroom, and when I came out Dr. Utt handed me the cone, reluctantly, I thought, encased in a plastic cube with locked door. Immediately thereafter we were on our way to the Security Council chamber, leaving my wife behind with Mike and the First Lady. Only the President, our U.N. representative, the Secretary of State, and I represented the U.S., or more properly, the Earth. I suppose, in fact, we were representing the Bullocks, or perhaps the entire universe. Karen waited with the others in an ante-room, which, she told me later, was equipped with a closed-circuit television monitor so that they could watch and hear the proceedings.
There were some formalities, of course. The chair, in this special case the Secretary General of the United Nations himself, introduced us and briefly explained the situation. There wasn’t a murmur in the chamber — I presume the delegates had already been thoroughly briefed about what was about to transpire, and any gasps of disbelief had been wheezed long before. While this was going on I felt myself beginning to tremble, and my chest rising and falling. I told myself to relax, it would soon be over, but it didn’t help much. I looked around and found myself in the UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL CHAMBER. The huge round table had an opening at one end, like a donut that someone had taken a bit out of. When I saw the enormous mural on the back wall, the full gravity of the situation fell on me like the Great Pyramid of Cheops. I couldn’t believe I was there. The delegates, however, seemed to ignore me, as if I were somewhere in the past and invisible. All of a sudden the President literally punched me in the arm and grinned at me. That did it. I relaxed immediately. I could almost see myself tightly gripping the speech, as if I were coming back from the future, a disembodied observer watching myself preparing to make the most important speech ever made. It was such an impossible sight, almost like a dream, that I found myself grinning and, in fact, I almost laughed out loud.
At last, at long last, it was time to go on. I need not recite the whole event here — God knows it has been reported in thousands of newspapers and websites — but I will recount the reactions of the various representatives of the fifteen governments representing the peoples of the world. (At that moment, incidentally, I wasn’t the slightest bit nervous — all the preparation had paid off, and I had worried myself almost sick for nothing.) The first thing I concluded was that all of them were taking me seriously — no one was looking around at his or her colleagues, yawning (though I held back a few after the lunch we had), checking watches, etc. In other words, everyone else was quite aware of the seriousness of the situation, the stakes involved. In fact, they all had a copy of my speech in front of them and had probably read it before I even started. For a moment I thought this strange: if I were giving a speech, why did they need a copy? Or if they had a copy, why was I giving it? But I soon realized that there were certain formalities that had to be observed, that there should be no misunderstanding of the words that I, as a kind of representative of everyone in the universe! was bringing to them.
Indeed, when I gave them the background of my encounters with Walter (his occupying a corpse and all the rest, with video accompaniment), I think I detected a muted hint of wonder, or even envy. Maybe everyone secretly wishes he could have an encounter with an alien — which may say something about our own world (are we all hopefully wishing for something better?). When I mentioned (briefly) that I had gone to distant places, and to times past, there were eyebrows raised, but I again sensed that the reaction was one of surprise, not doubt, especially when the videos were shown of the Taj Mahal and the other structures disappearing and coming back without harm to anyone (though I had been told there was still some uncertainty in the minds of many that they weren’t photo-shopped, or faked in some other way, just as some s
till believe that no human ever went to the moon). Indeed, I knew for a fact that there are people who still think the Earth is flat, or has existed for only a few thousand years.
I reached forward, unlocked the hard plastic cover, retrieved the cone, and turned it slowly a fraction of a degree at a time. Instantly the walls were filled with equations, videos of solar systems forming, time-lapse pictures of animals evolving and atoms colliding, and a dozen other remarkable visuals. Everyone stared in silence, though there was the occasional “Ooh,” just as any ordinary citizen might have uttered.
I returned the cone to its case, and proceeded immediately to the matter of what the Bullocks wanted of us: not to kill at least 20% of the people who had been murdered at the hands of their fellow men over the past year. Though they had almost certainly been apprised of this demand earlier, there were still grumblings and mumblings among the VIPs assembled for this meeting. “Impossible!” someone shouted in a foreign language.
“Then we’ll all die!” I responded without thinking. The President frowned a bit, but said nothing. I realized, as I often do, that I should have kept my mouth shut.
I don’t know exactly what the protocol was — I was under the impression that no discussion would take place immediately, though these were certainly extraordinary circumstances. In any case a delegate, speaking English with a French accent, informed us, in beautiful, dulcet tones, that even if the world wanted to comply with the demands of the “aliens,” (said with a hint of a smirk) the problem was that there was still considerable doubt among the delegates about the authenticity of the Bullocks (and, by implication, the authenticity of me). I felt a certain amount of chagrin, of course, and I whispered to the President the suggestion that I give them further details about my travels. He shook his head, leaving me to fend for myself. Before I could respond, however, every delegate’s seat started rising slowly toward the heavens. There were screeches of terror, demands to be put down, but every chair around the table (except mine and those of the others in our party) rose well above the floor and continued rising, everyone hanging on for dear life, until they reached the ceiling. Some of the grizzled veterans, who could have fearlessly faced down a rival in a duel, were wailing, though a few actually seemed to be enjoying the ride, laughing all the way. After hanging near the ceiling for several minutes, all the chairs suddenly plummeted toward the floor, with renewed screeching, before stopping and softly landing where they had started. There was a brief hiatus as medical personnel rushed out to revive a man from somewhere in the Middle East, I think, who had fainted. After that, the Secretary General quickly restored order.