by J D Ventura
“This is not at all funny, Sam! You don’t get to laugh at this! Is your dementia so advanced right now that you are already completely crazy or are you just an asshole who is messing with me? Yucking it up with your comrades. How much did they pay you to sell your wife and your country down the river!? Was it for money? That’s not you, Sam, so it must be your mind. You’re losing your mind, babe, and they are manipulating you. Clearly they are taking advantage of you, Sam. We have to get the hell out of here. There is still time for you to cooperate-”
“Claire-”
“And they said that if you cooperate they could reduce your sentence, our sentence-”
“Claire-”
“And I am sure if we got a good lawyer, someone who specializes in these types of espionage cases, that maybe-”
“Claire, the game show wasn’t broadcast from Earth.”
He might as well have broadsided her head with a shovel. It would have had the same effect. She stopped talking and just stared at him, half-expecting for him to start laughing again. He sat silently, his face serious and convincing, as if he just told her something irrefutable, like the temperature outside, or his birth date.
She retreated to the sofa and sat down across from him again. “What are you saying? Sam, what are you talking about?”
“The broadcast was not from here.”
“And by here you mean…this planet?”
“That’s correct.”
“Sam, you’re not making any sense, babe.” She started to cry again. His dementia has gotten much worse. It’s delusion, in fact. How am I going to get us out of this nightmare? She pulled her cellphone out of the pocket of her jeans but there was no signal. She imagined Martin and Bill and Summer listening to the second hour of their inane, pre-recorded chit-chat until, after the conversation looped back to the beginning, they’d realize they’d been duped. How quickly would they come looking for her? Did the guards at the shack have more than just Tasers? How was she and her clearly psychotic husband going to escape from a bunch of Russians, hunkered down in some militarized bunker beneath the Murrays’ otherwise lovely five-bedroom neoclassical suburban manse?
The door to the room slid open and in walked Marcus and Luanne Murray. And, behind them, Director Gunderson. Claire’s mood swung again at the sight of them. She lunged toward Lu, her eyes wide and her arms outstretched. Sam grabbed her arm and stopped her advance. “You asshole! This is all your fault. You convinced him to come here. He trusted and you were lying! You preyed on a weakened, sick man and now there are CIA agents five miles from here waiting to arrest all of you.”
Lu very matter-of-factly offered, “They’re actually six-point-two miles from here, my dear.”
Claire laughed at this. A pitchy peal that revealed her tenuous embrace of reality. “Really, bitch? Is that all you’re going to say for yourself? You won’t be so smug when they throw you and all your friends in jail. And for what? For some decades-old space noise that a demented NASA engineer convinced you is a – let me get this straight – is an episode of The Price is Right from Mars!? I was impressed with your little robot animals, but your intel is pretty screwed up and I, for one—”
Claire’s face flushed and her head throbbed. Her breathing became shallow and the room started to tilt to the right. “I think I’m fainting,” she said before falling to the floor.
When she came to she was lying on a simple bed, made of the same mystery material. Something resembling a blood pressure cuff was wrapped around her arm. Several clear tubes led from the sleeve around her right bicep to what looked like a transparent computer terminal standing by her bedside. A blond woman dressed in one of the white uniforms waved her hand over the terminal’s screen and it glowed and flickered. A light within the wall near the door was flashing red.
“How are you feeling, Claire?”
“Where’s Sam?”
“I’m right here, babe.” She turned her head and saw Sam, lying beside her on a similar bed, connected to another terminal operated by a tall, brown-haired man.
She sat up quickly, but the woman put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Almost done, Claire. Just a few more minutes and you’ll be good to go.”
“Good to go where?” Claire asked the woman, before directing her stare and her question toward her husband. Sam sat up then and turned to the man and the woman, “Can you give us a minute?”
“Sure,” said the man. “Just don’t take the cuffs off until we get back, okay?” The man and the woman left the room and Sam stared at Claire, a strange mix of exasperation and relief on his face.
“Claire, you need to trust me, now. Blindly trust me. We’re out of time. I’ll explain on the way.”
The door to the room opened and Stephanie walked in. Over her shoulder she could see Marc standing in the hallway, the blue lighting now replaced with red.
“Sam, you can remove the cuffs now. We have 15 minutes. Meet us where we showed you.” Stephanie looked at Claire and an offered an apologetic smile. “I’d really like to continue our friendship,” she said, before turning and sprinting down the hall.
They both stood to face one another. “I’ll explain on the way, Claire. Please trust me, we have to go. Now. Can you trust me?”
Claire put her hand defensively over her stomach. It felt like the moment before judgement was passed. She awaited her sentence.
“They’re leaving, Claire, and they have graciously invited us to go with them.”
She was weeping now. Her tears fell on both their hands. She was exhausted and confused. He wiped her cheeks, pushed her hair away from her face and kissed her. “Claire, they can cure my dementia. They have the medical technology, where they’re from. And, even if they couldn’t, I have to do this, Claire. The scientist in me can’t say no. Not to this.”
“No they don’t Sam. Their lying to you. Sam, I can’t. Please don’t make me. Please don’t make me go.”
“Why can’t you, sweetheart? Are you afraid?”
Jenny’s hair whipped in the wind as they stood on the railing. Her eyes sparkled with life. Fearless. Young. Free.
“You were right, Sam. Somehow you knew. I’m pregnant, baby,” she blurted, sobbing. “And I kept drinking and popping pills because none of it made any sense. I am so sorry. Oh, God, if I hurt her.”
“Her?” Sam asked, his eyes filling with tears.
“I don’t know how I know, but I know it’s a girl. And I want to name her Jenny.”
Sam stood up and hugged her. “I love you so much, Claire. Jenny it is.”
The door opened and Stephanie reentered the room, looking anxious and purposeful. “Time’s up. They’re coming…with soldiers.”
Sam grabbed Claire’s hand and pulled her out of the room. The three of them ran down a long hallway that opened to a large underground hangar. Ten of the largest helicopters she had ever seen, all made of that strange material, were powering up, their gigantic blades whirling. Sam got on the one closest to them, climbing in after Stephanie, and then extended his hand to Claire. She looked at it, paralyzed. “Claire, grab my hand!”
Stephanie yelled over the roar, “Sam, we have to go right now!”
The craft raised several feet off the floor, as the entire ceiling of the room opened to reveal a long, illuminated vertical shaft. A hatch at the top of the shaft slowly opened revealing the night sky. The helicopter was now several more feet in the air, the landing gear well above Claire’s head now. Sam let out a panicked wail. “Claire, I can’t do this without you. Please trust me! Get a running start and jump!”
The wind was whipping through Jenny’s hair and she turned to Claire, “On the count of three...”
Three, two, one. Claire sprinted forward, arms swinging and leapt. Sam’s hand grabbed on to hers and, for a desperate moment, she felt the familiar heartbreaking slip, the connection about to sever, the exact measu
re of a lifetime’s worth of heartbreak.
And then Sam pulled her with all the strength he had and hoisted her into the helicopter. The door slid shut behind her, as the craft ascended up the shaft and through the open roof, hurtling into the night.
Unlike other helicopters Claire had flown on previously, she could not hear the roar of the rotors or the engine. There was no need for headsets. She could hear Sam and the crew perfectly, as if they were sitting in a library.
“Remember a long time ago, you asked me what my dream was, what I hoped from my life’s work,” Sam asked.
“Yes,” she said, as the choppers buzzed low, in formation, over the rolling hills below. “You told me you dreamed of one day discovering a habitable planet.”
He smiled at her, his eyes filling with tears. The fact that she remembered was just one example of how much she loved him and the love on his face now flushed her face with emotion, too.
“I did better than that, babe,” he said, his voice hitching, a sob sticking in his throat. “I found an inhabited planet.”
“Sam, what are you saying?” she was crying now, too, her heart torn, half believing she was losing her husband to his disease and the other half exalting in the joy of what he believed he had done.
“These people – and they are people – they aren’t Russians, Claire. They’ve been here for decades, living among us. The Russian stuff is a cover, in the event their U.S.-based mission here was ever discovered.”
He took hold of her trembling hands. She was afraid to know the truth. But the shock had worn away, replaced by an apprehensive determination to understand exactly what was happening. “What’s their mission, Sam? Why are they here?”
“They were here to prevent us from ever finding their planet. When their moles at NASA realized that I had, they got me interested in the house; pushed me to leave. Gunderson and Lu were embedded agents at NASA. They wanted us close while they debated what to do with me. With us. The Village was their base, Claire. When Stephanie mentioned the riff between her and Marie, it wasn’t about the actual wall around the neighborhood, but the figurative wall between our planets. The two of them represented two factions. Stephanie’s group wanted to stay, to break down the proverbial barrier between our two worlds and allow me to take the project public, or at least back to NASA command. And-”
Stephanie interrupted. “Claire, I really shouldn’t have told you about the tension between Marie and me. And that business about the wall was a sloppy metaphor for what we were really arguing about. I really like you, Claire, and I lobbied the Council hard to not wipe your memories, but instead invite you to come with us. Lu even decided to release you after the party while we continued to deliberate whether to invite you off world.”
“And it was Stephanie who wrote that on your arm, not me. They needed to test your blood to be sure you could handle space travel and that’s when they found out you were pregnant.”
Claire looked down at her lap and began sobbing. “I kept drinking and I should have stopped. I knew and I kept doing it. I’m horrible.”
Sam knelt before her. “Listen to me. You were under an incredible amount of stress. We’ll deal with it now. Together.”
Claire sniffled and regained her composure. Stephanie was now sitting beside her. In her hand was a computer tablet.
“Sam, we need the code, before we leave the atmosphere.”
“Wait, wait,” objected Claire. “So Marie’s side won? And, did you just say ‘off world’?”
“Okay, one thing at a time,” said Sam. “Babe, remember I told you a password. The night we had dinner in Grover. Well, I can’t remember it. Not even under hypnosis. I thought I took all the files about the project with me when I left NASA, but my memory isn’t what it used to be, and there was a backup of all my work that I forgot to delete. We need that password now. Right now.”
“Jeopardy?” Claire said, looking at Sam and then to Stephanie. Stephanie looked at Sam and he gave her an affirmative nod. She typed the word into the tablet and, after thirty seconds had passed, looked up at Sam, her face awash with relief. “It’s done. No trace.” Stephanie then picked up what looked like a phone receiver on the wall near their seats. “We’re good here. Data deleted. Initiate base liquidation and launch sequence.”
Claire, teary-eyed, turned to Stephanie, who was still typing on the keyboard. “So, if you leave, aren’t you afraid we’ll find you again?”
“We’re not leaving entirely. We’re just redeploying assets. Moving around minimizes are chances of being detected. However, we have several thousand outposts on Earth,” Stephanie said with a coldness that felt both efficient and official.
Claire was crying again as the copters broke through the cloud cover and the blades of the crafts retracted into the ships. A bluish blackness appeared above them.
“Ever been to outer space?” Sam asked her, placing his hand on her stomach.
“Nope,” she said, a half-laugh, half-sob hitching in her throat.
“Me either. Are you afraid?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Me, too. And little Jenny, is she afraid?”
Claire looked up at the stars and the moon, as the ship ascended into the endless darkness above. “Not a damn bit.”