Eviction, A Novel, Chapter One (Exciting Science Fiction)

CHAPTER ONE
From the Book of the Goddess of the Passage:
In the beginning there was only Darkness and Light. The Darkness was perfectly dark and the Light perfectly light. In the first moment they were precisely balanced and the universe was serene and glittering.
The Darkness envied the Light its shining, and said, “Light, give me but a wink of light, and I will give you a nest of shadow, so that you too many enjoy basking in the heat of a thousand suns.” But the Light which could see all things said, “No, for light cannot be dark, nor can dark be light. Separate they must remain or all shall be nothing but a muddle of grey where there is neither light nor shadow. And the Light drew closer to better warm the Darkness, but as it came closer, the Darkness realized how different they were and how foolish its dream of shining. The Darkness realized that it would forever be without its own light.
The Darkness wept. Tears oozed out of the inky blackness and dripped down into the light, causing the light to refract into a million colors that swirled round and around in rivers of rainbow. And so that is how colors were born and how they came to be children of both the Light and the Darkness.
January 9, 2014
Freeman Bellefontaine was approaching the end of his two week shift. The platform was named Excalibur. An unlucky name, he thought. Why name what was essentially a giant drill after a sword no-one could pull out the rock? He touched the outline of the crucifix under his work uniform. Below him, the grey sea twinkled. Bellefontaine had endured a tough shift, with the drill bit frequently breaching unusual air pockets. It was like drilling into a sponge. The crew had struggled to maintain stable well pressure. And it was cold. Tiny icy fractures were forming in his bones. He tried to warm himself by imagining how good his wife’s French onion soup would taste when he was off this damned piece of unseaworthy junk. Just a few more hours.
Metal ripped and screamed. The entire rig shuddered as the massive drill bit snagged on something it could not bite through. His radio rasped and clucked with orders to man emergency stations. Cursing to himself, Bellefontaine rushed to his station, ready to assist with the manual override of the still sputtering drill, should the electronic shutdown fail. He ran to the fire station, threw an aluminum fire-protective vest over his clothes and grabbed a large fire extinguisher from its wall holster. For a moment, all was quiet, and then the platform shuddered as a massive wave of matter overwhelmed the capacity of the safety valves and overflow chambers and rushed up the well. Bellefontaine removed the safety guard from the fire hydrant and directed his aim at the well-head. “Blowout! Engage supplemental pressure systems! Evacuate non-emergency personnel,” he heard the captain bark over the command channel.
Bellefontaine took cover behind a large steel bulkhead. He waited for flames, scorching, an explosion. A long shudder rumbled through the rig. Bellefontaine shrank down, trying to make his large body a smaller target for any fallout. His heart became a steel fist, punching against his ribs, squeezing tight. Another girder-rattling rumble and he lost his balance and fell backwards. Something thick and wet was pouring down on his face and body. A stink like thousand year old rotting fish. He gagged and spluttered. Another shake sent him sprawling across the deck. He tried to scramble to his feet but slipped in the slimy mud now covering everything. He finally managed to get himself into a sitting position. Over the radio, he heard his unit leader ordering everyone to report in. As he grunted his acknowledgement, he started to feel a little calmer. Perhaps disaster had been averted after all. He rubbed his dirty bandana across his eyes, looked up, and was relieved to note that the blast of excess natural gas was burning off nicely. There was no inferno, no devastating explosion. Just a really big mess.
Blinking away some of the gunk, Bellefontaine noticed that there was something a little odd about the muddy concoction of rock and other debris that littered the platform. Bits of the sludge appeared to be moving. Slowly, Bellefontaine bent down and gingerly picked up one of the slowly creeping globs. It was cold as ice in his hands and when he rubbed some of the mud off, it appeared to be a lump of pale yellow jelly. It quivered and oozed in his hand, rapidly turning into drops of sapphire yellow that dripped onto the deck and started running towards the edge, as if determined to leap overboard. Without thinking, Bellefontaine whipped off his hard hat and scooped up some of the drops as they dripped over the edge of the deck. But to his amazement his hard hat instantly increased in temperature and the sapphire liquid rapidly boiled and then evaporated, leaving nothing behind. Bellefontaine took a couple of steps back, staring in disbelief at his empty hard hat. He glanced up and noticed that several more large lumps of the sludge were apparently dribbling towards the edge and falling over to plop into the ocean, forty stories below. Other crew members were standing around, watching the ambulating lumps in stunned silence.
“Must be some kind of deep-sea jellyfish,” muttered the man next to him in a hopeful tone.
Bellefontaine shook his head. “That’s no jellyfish,” he said. He got on his radio and made contact with the Captain. “You need to get down here, Sir,” he said.
Within hours, members of the Special Science Division (“SSD”) of the CIA were on board the platform, wearing white HAZMAT suits. Oil drilling operations were shut down and all but non-essential oil workers were shipped back to the mainland. The SSD were taking swabs and samples from the deck, Freeman Bellefontaine’s hard hat and other areas. The white-suited workers moved about carefully, like the first explorers on some alien planet. McDermott Hargreaves, Chief Science and Operations Officer of the SSD, was accompanied by Quentin Tirrel, aka Q-Tip, his research assistant, so nicknamed for his long, pointy, shaven head. Initial tests from the mobile lab unit showed not a single molecule of any unusual substance remaining on the hardhat or any other contaminated area. There was no residue whatsoever. Whatever the oil rig workers had seen, not a single atom of it remained.
They would have to call in the Silver Shark, the Navy’s most high-tech submarine, and send divers down to the sea bed to find out what was going on. One of the surveillance cameras had caught a brief snippet of some of the yellow slime oozing across the deck. The Silver Shark and its elite squad of deep-sea divers and technicians would only be able to make it to the scene the following morning. Until then, McDermott could only watch frame-by-frame replays of that single twenty-three second clip. It was driving him crazy. He pulled up some satellite images of the sea bed. It was one of the deepest parts of the Gulf, but over three hundred million years ago, it had been dry land. Whatever was down there was beyond ancient. It was primordial, and had existed at the time of the dinosaurs. Finally, he fell into a shallow and unsatisfying sleep.
McDermott woke up the following morning to his cell phone bleating. It was Kristin. “We just arrived and are on deck two preparing the sub to go down deep,” she said.
“Great, I’ll be down in thirty,” replied McDermott, enunciating each word through a fog of sleepiness.
A pause. “Do you really think this might be something?”
“Doubt it,” McDermott responded drily. McDermott knew what Kristin was thinking, that he wouldn’t use the Silver Shark unless he had a good hunch that this may be the real deal. “Q-Tip has money on it being a Photoshop prank. I’m betting it’s an environmental activist geek with a souped-up gravity shotgun.”
Kristin sighed. Q-Tip and McDermott always had a running bet on the cause of the phenomena they were supposed to be investigating. This included a whole lexicon of code words that could be used to up the stakes on a bet. For example, if either introduced the other to a party to the investigation as “my learned colleague,” that was the signal that they were doubling down on their position, and the other
person had to work in the phrase, “it’s a pleasure” should they wish to concede. Alternately, the phrase, “it is our paramount concern” signaled that the stakes were being raised again by twenty-five percent.
The Special Sciences Division had certainly had its share of nutjob assignments over the years. The strange transmissions from space that turned out to be just a technician who had failed to properly calibrate equipment, due to a drinking problem. Some of their assignments had actually required the application of a scientific mind, but most of the time they could be solved by ordinary detective work. There had been a couple of interesting cases, usually involving black market genetics and illegal nanotechnology, but they were the exception rather than the rule.
He did not expect much more than an elaborate prank from this investigation either. While the sludge apparently moving against gravity was an impressive trick, he was well aware that such phenomena could be caused by careful manipulation of gravitational fields, reverse osmosis or any other number of ingenious methods. He was, however, looking forward to exploring the ocean floor in the Silver Shark.
McDermott and Q-Tip had temporary lodgings in the officers’ quarters. McDermott placed a quick call to Q-Tip to summon him down to Deck Two, and was happy to hear that Q-Tip was already up and chowing down some breakfast in the mess hall. Q-Tip promised to score him a breakfast burrito and some coffee. McDermott had a quick shower, threw on a particularly holey pair of jeans and an awful red, reindeer-embellished sweater that a grandmother had knitted for him several Christmases ago. Over this, he added an oversized, fleece-lined raincoat that he had picked up at an army surplus store, donned his ubiquitous brown leather boots and raced down to Deck Two. For once in his life, he didn’t get lost and amazingly found the color-coded lines drawn on the decks that led to specific destinations very clear. Out on Deck Two, which was open to the elements, the grey rain pounded down. Over two hundred meters below him, the steel sea seethed and twisted and slapped the sodden air, as if it were trying to rise up and drown out every dry part of the world. McDermott stared out at the thrashing waters and for a moment felt a twinge of seasickness. Then he noticed Q-Tip gesticulating wildly on the far side of the deck and hurried over.
“Hop in fool,” said Q-Tip, grinning broadly at his boss’s sodden appearance. The sub captain announced that all was ready to go. McDermott hurried in and the crew latched the hatch. The captain beckoned McDermott over to a seat in the middle of the front row of the small vessel. Q-Tip handed him his burrito and coffee. McDermott took a big bite of the burrito and shot Q-Tip a grateful look.
The captain brought up a map on the computer screen. The position of the sub on the deck was indicated by a small blinking green dot on the vast, spider-like platform. Below them, were the treacherous peaks of the undersea mountains. “The blue line indicates the perimeter of our designated search area. We will initially check the drill site. Later, other expeditions will explore in a series of concentric circles around the bases of the mountains, and then systematically explore each of the peaks. We have enough oxygen for an eight hour mission, with one hour held in reserve. The captain swiveled his chair to face the three unkempt members of the science team. “Does anyone have any questions?” he barked.
“No, not unless my learned colleagues have anything to ask,” said McDermott with a deadpan face. Kristin snorted.
“What is of paramount importance is that we explore any caves and crevices,” said Q-Tip with a smirk. “Will we be able to do so under these weather conditions?”
The captain frowned at him. “We’ll do what we can. It depends upon the structure and composition of the substrate. If it is igneous rock with no signs of stress fractures, that will be fine. But any caves composed of shale or any softer minerals may be too dangerous to enter into.”
“Got it,” said Q-Tip quickly. “We’re ready to rock ‘n roll.”
“Great,” responded the captain, and started rattling off orders into his comm unit. The craft shuddered as it started lumbering forward on its tank-like traction system. The traction system had two different modes, one for crawling on land and another which involved the use of large, sucker-like grippers which worked by creating small, instant vacuums that kept the craft glued to the sea floor.
The passengers were silent as the cables in the sea craft elevator groaned and creaked under the
weight of the sub, crew and several tons of equipment. The sounds grew more muffled as the elevator descended to the ocean surface. The elevator lurched to a halt and the sub briefly floated free inside the elevator. This was a tricky moment as the sub had to immediately steer out of the elevator cage, which, while lined with rubber bumpers could seriously damage a craft if a strong wave caught it at the wrong moment. The captain had the engines going and the rudder correctly set before the cage clamps released the sub, which immediately roared out into the roiling waters and rapidly submerged.
The sea was far rougher than what McDermott had thought it would be. He felt his stomach twist and hoped he would not get sea sick. The thought of the stench of vomit filling the close confines of the tiny craft only made his guts twist a little more. McDermott took a deep breath and stared at the map on the screen, which showed the tiny blinking green dot hovering above the jagged peaks, a champagne bubble about to be swallowed by a sharp-toothed monster. McDermott sighed. Within another minute they had descended over two hundred feet, with the surface turbulence far above them.
All was calm and quiet and the sub smoothly continued its rapid downward descent. The sub turned on its outside lights and opened the blinds on the plexiglass and graphene windows. Where the headlights had scratched away the tar-like darkness, a previously hidden world burst into life all around them. Schools of fish could be glimpsed in the distance. A stingray glided past with its pale belly and long slitted mouth turned towards the window, an apparition that was swiftly swallowed by the absolute dark beyond the reach of the lights. Nobody spoke. The pale grey lunar landscape of the sea floor stretched in front of them as far as the craft’s headlights could penetrate. Below them, large red lobsters slowly clambered along the ocean floor. A dark grey shark flashed past, its body flexing as if it were made completely of rubber.
McDermott had ended up in this job after his wife had lost her grueling battle with cancer, and he found he no longer had the stomach for doing advanced biological research with its attendant animal experimentation. In his wife’s last days, the pain had worn her down until all that was left of her was a certain animal will to live. She had been absorbed by that super-human will, and ever since then, pain in all its manifestations was something he avoided.
He had still gone to work but did nothing but stare at the primates in their cages. One morning, his coworkers had arrived at work to find that all the primates had apparently escaped, with McDermott asleep on the floor of the animal enclosure. The primates were never found again and suspicion had fallen on him. A rumor went around that McDermott had collaborated with an activist group to spirit the animals away to a secret sanctuary. Due to his status as a goliath intellect as well as his recent bereavement, his friends managed to pull a few strings and got the pending disciplinary charges against McDermott dropped. A good friend of his, Mike Stransky, realizing that it was only a matter of time before McDermott imploded, had sent in the application to SSD on his behalf. His friend had known that he needed to hustle McDermott into a new position before he was fired from his job in primary research.
And Mike had done him a really good turn. The job was perfect for him, involving a lot of international travel and encounters with many strange and amusing people. Sometimes, even a little scientific analysis was required. As CSO he had come to think of himself as an avuncular mentor to earnest young recruits. These neophytes always joined with high expectations and left a few years later with their dreams of discovering alien life broken down and recycled into a new appreciation for the chicanery and foolishness of men.
Then Q-Tip’s cell-phone started chirping the theme song for Barbarella.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got coverage down here!” said Kristin.
“Nah…sorry everyone…just my cell phone alarm.” And then everyone started talking at once, pointing and staring. Eventually they reached the site where the massive drill head had struck the spot containing the yellow goo. The drilling had immediately been shut down after the blowout, and the massive drill head was quite still. There was no yellow goo to be seen. Clang. Groan. The sub alighted on the seabed. Without the forward movement, the space inside seemed much smaller. McDermott shivered.
“Send out Arronax,” said McDermott. Arronax, named after the protagonist in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, was a highly advanced, powerful aquatic robot that was housed in a small,
externally accessible compartment of the vessel. “We need to excavate around the site of the drill bit to figure out what the drill hit.” The captain nodded and everyone watched, holding their breaths as Arronax started propelling itself toward the drill bit. All eyes were on the monitors showing a close up view of its digging mechanical arms, which were soon obscured in a cloud of dust and debris that rose up in a large plume from the ocean floor. Just as McDermott was about to give the order to have the bot fire its engines to clear the cloud, Arronax suddenly disappeared from the view shown from the main camera on the nose of the ship. A cacophony of expletives ripped loose from the throats of all aboard.
McDermott was surprised to hear his own voice rise above the din. “Quiet everyone!” he roared. “Look at camera five!” Camera five showed the view from the camera positioned on the bot’s head. Arronax had apparently quietly fallen through into a small, subterranean cavern, and its lights illuminated the interior wall of the cave, which appeared to be lined with a thick layer of the yellow substance. As the bot’s camera panned upwards to illuminate what should have been the hole it had fallen through, it became clear that a thin film of yellow was already starting to repair the breach.
McDermott started slowly panning camera five around the cavern and then froze on something a few feet away. It was a creature, curled in a fetal position, embalmed in the yellow like a fly trapped in amber. The creature was pale below the yellow gel that surrounded him, not that McDermott knew it was a male, but somehow to assign the female gender to such a monster was anathema to him. It was large, about twice the size of a fully grown man. Its two foreshortened front limbs ended in four incredibly long, partly webbed, multi-jointed fingers, except each was tipped with what could only be described as a claw. Its overall anatomy reminded him of a dinosaur, except this creature was almost bird-like with its long slim bones, and, of course, the wings. The wings were of snowy white feathers. But none of this made this being any less disturbing, for it was the skull that he found most terrifying. The head was shaped like that of a T-Rex, except with larger, bird-like eye sockets, and large fangs and a powerful jaw that must have snapped closed like a falling guillotine.
Everyone stared, slack-jawed. To McDermott, the silence felt thick, like it was slowly expanding inside the tiny craft and inside his mind until he felt like he was going to suffocate. He wanted to scream but no sound came out his mouth.
“Far out, dood,” drawled Q-Tip, cracking the silence, and in that moment McDermott could have hugged the young slacker.
“What. Is. That.” Kristin stammered.
Q-Tip caught his eye and McDermott found himself exhaling. “That, my dear, is a Q-Tipauraus, named after the legendary and fearless explorer who just discovered it.”
Kristin snorted.
McDermott checked that they were shooting in high def and manipulated the bots controls so that it slowly did a 360 of the whole cavern, or at least that much of the cavern revealed by the bot’s headlights.
“How big is this place?” asked Kristin, some of the panic creeping back into her voice.
McDermott advanced the bot a few more feet, slowly. It was impossible to tell how far the cavern went.
Kristin froze. “Wait a minute, Mickey; is it a good idea to intrude into…a tomb?”
McDermott paused. The zoologist was awake in him now, his brain alive with a million new possibilities that this species meant for the evolution of life on Earth. He hadn’t considered, or hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility that these creatures might represent a higher intelligence.
“What did you say?” he asked slowly.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go poking around in their tomb,” said Kristin.
“Tomb…” said Q-Tip. “How do we know they’re even dead? Maybe they’re in suspended animation or something.”
McDermott paused, thinking carefully. He zoomed in on the skull of the nearest creature. Its empty eye sockets stared back blindly. It would have had eyes big as pebbles. He imagined all of these astonishing creatures rising from their jellied crypts together, powerful thighs thrusting, white wings beating like demonic swans. He felt his chest constrict again and forced himself to take a long, slow
breath. “Guys, there’s no way these creatures could still be alive while missing their brains. Let’s do a quick X-Ray of one of the specimens just to put your minds at ease.”
Two minutes later they had their answer. The craniums of the creatures showed up as white spaces on the electronic X-Ray, indicating the presence of air as opposed to brain matter. “Awesome!” McDermott cried with bravado, but he was starting to feel his guts turn into chains of dread. There was something wrong, something very wrong about all this. How could these creatures have existed on the Earth with nothing showing up in the fossil record, to date? Their bone structure was unmistakable, a strange blend of dinosaur and avian. There was nothing human about them, no opposable thumbs, and no true arms. It looked as if the whole structure of their bodies had evolved over three hundred million years ago during the Jurassic period, shortly before the Jurassic-Triassic extinction event.
“We need to remove one of the specimens for further study,” McDermott stated flatly. His two colleagues looked at him, stricken. They all knew that specimen collection and removal were standard procedure. But this was different. Deep down, they both felt it would be akin to grave-robbing, but their science did not have language for that. And all they had left was science, for beyond the thin light of the known, of the scientific, was an immense and unknown darkness in what had previously been considered well-charted waters. The very planet they called home harbored dark secrets and a forgotten past that was wholly alien to them.
“You’re not bringing one of those things aboard this vessel,” roared the captain.
Kristin sighed. For a moment she had hoped that McDermott would follow his gut and leave these ghastly creatures buried in the seabed where they belonged, but this challenge from the Captain would invoke his anti-authority orneriness and result in the exact opposite of the Captain’s order being accomplished.
“This is a scientific mission,” McDermott shouted back. “You’re just the driver. My orders on scientific matters take precedence.”
“But sir,” protested the Captain. “There isn’t even space in the specimen holding chambers to hold a skeleton of that size.”
“We’re not taking the entire skeleton.” McDermott said, in a slightly softer tone. “We’re just taking the skull.”
For a moment the crew was silent as they digested the implications of this statement. Kristin felt sick. She couldn’t believe that McDermott would actually authorize dismembering the body. But she couldn’t afford to be the squeamish one. As the only woman scientist in the SSD she knew she always had to appear twice as tough as any man. She swallowed hard and fought back the bile she could taste in the back of her throat.
“Don’t do it man,” said Q-Tip. “It don’t feel right. We have no idea what the hell these things are. Besides, dismembering the skeleton may cause damage to the specimen.”
McDermott stared at Q-Tip angrily, but then he smiled. “You’re right, Q-Tip. We’re not going to dismember the skeleton. We’re going to tow the whole damn coffin back to the surface. That yellow goo is apparently self-healing, and it’s protected the skeletons for millions of years under miles of ocean. It can easily withstand a little trip to the surface.”
Kristin watched in horror as McDermott operated the underwater plasma cutters to hack out one of the skeletons. As McDermott had predicted, the bits of gel debris that were ripped loose under the intense heat of the plasma flame coagulated around the three feet thick, jelly-like pupa that encased the skeleton. Once Arronax had the skeleton firmly gripped in its claw-like pincers, it started moving towards the hole it had fallen through. But the ceiling of the subterranean crypt was now flush with more of the yellow jelly. Without inviting comment, McDermott fired the bot’s plasma cutters at the jelly, which dissolved under the searing heat, and forced the bot through the partial opening, dragging the pupa behind it.
Everyone aboard stared in amazed horror at the sight of the enormous skeleton slowly gliding through the cold, dark water, the headlights of the bot lighting it up like a great, glowing yellow sapphire, the monstrous skeleton silhouetted in horrible detail inside it. It looked like the Halloween decoration of someone with lurid tastes and too much money. Inside the tiny submarine, no-one spoke as the vessel
slowly poked its way through the billions of gallons of water above it. Everyone’s eyes remained glued to the monitors. Kristin had a bad feeling. No-one else seemed to notice it, but she had a strong sense of a powerful presence in the tomb of the monsters, of something long-slumbering that had been awoken. She forced herself to take slow, calming breaths. But nothing could make her shake the feeling that the slasher party they had had on the ocean floor had ripped loose some essential and ancient knot that had bound the Earth to humanity. That the Earth had been severed from its moorings, and they were all now set on a collision course with some cruel fate.
McDermott radioed ahead to have all but a skeleton crew on hand. Kristin half-expected Q-Tip to make a joke about a skeleton needing only a skeleton crew, but he was silent, his faced scrunched up as if he were afraid to relax a single muscle. They would need to keep a lid on this discovery until the scientists had figured out exactly what was going on. Next, McDermott composed an encrypted email to his boss that would go out as soon as satellite communications came in range, explaining the magnitude of the discovery, documenting the expedition and attaching all footage taken throughout.
As they approached the surface, McDermott allowed his excitement to surge through him. He reviewed the footage of the skeleton, zooming in on the joints in the legs. They were highly evolved joints, with cartilage pads that allowed for powerful and varied movement in almost three hundred degrees. McDermott frowned. These joints were more advanced than the most advanced avian dinosaurs which also existed at the time. It would have taken several evolutionary steps to get to this point, but the monsters appeared to have taken several such steps in a huge, flying leap. How was that possible? How could there have been no fossil records discovered before finding the tombs. And then there was the fact that the area where the tombs were located had been on dry land three hundred million years ago, when these, these…he struggled to find the right term for these phantom dinosaurs…phantosaurs?...had been interred there.
Once back on the oil rig, McDermott became busy supervising the transport of the specimen to a temporary lab that was being housed on the third deck of the platform. He was in full explorer mode thought Kristin, glancing behind her as she hurried through the whipping rain to carry out her instructions to set up the lab. McDermott bellowed orders and gesticulated in short choppy motions to the crew slowly lowering the specimen onto a golf cart-like transport vehicle that would carry it up to the third floor. As Kristin scurried towards her destination, a messenger rushed out to McDermott.
“Sir,” he said, “the Platform Captain wants to see you. An unusual signal has been picked up, and it appears to be transmitting from the site of the drill head. The Captain will see you up in the communications center on Deck Four.” McDermott winced and swallowed hard. He nodded dumbly and then followed the man, leaving Q-Tip in charge of transporting the specimen.
When McDermott entered the communications room, the comm tech had placed the signal on the speakers that outfitted the room. The sound was low-pitched and harsh; it sounded like a scratchy recording of a wild bird call, punctuated by scary sounding clicks and hisses. Kaaaaaaay-click-click-kraaaaayissssssssss-click-click-click-click-click, and then it started over again.
“Are you sure this is coming from the excavation site?”
“You mean the spot right under the drill bit where you dug out that huge monster?” asked the Captain.
“Yes, sir,” said McDermott smartly.
“That is indeed the source of the signal,” replied the Captain. “We were able to triangulate the source. It’s accurate to within a half-inch.”
For a few moments they all stood there, frozen, listening to the repeating signal, until McDermott felt like he was listening to a strange, terrible heartbeat.
Other exploration teams were sent down to the sea floor to do further recon of the tombs and to search for the source of the signal. No device capable of sending any signal was ever found, but a smaller, nimbler robot than Arronax was sent down the rabbit hole. It explored and documented its journey of over two kilometers into the subterranean tombs, at which point it had to return or risk running out of power. The tombs were all identical.
And then a technician at NASA finally noticed that there appeared to be a relay station on
Neptune that was picking up the signal and then beaming it on out of the solar system. That was when the President was notified.
The President, for his part, displayed a rare fit of rage upon being informed of this development. “If it’s not bad enough that I can’t get a damned budget passed and we have a school shooting every week, now I have damned ET breathing down my neck,” he had snapped to the director of NASA.
“I understand, Sir. This will be kept so Top Secret that not even the NSA, the FBI, DOD or CIA will know about this.”
The President sighed. “There’s no way we can keep NSA out of it. If I forget to pop my vitamin pill they know about it. You said earlier that this was picked up by some low-level engineer?”
“Yes, Sir,” said the NASA Director. “But we believe we can trust him. We have the guy sequestered. He is under twenty-four hour surveillance. His whole team is getting the same treatment.”
Silence.
“Sir,” he continued more urgently, “the signal is leaving Neptune and is on its way to the Vega system, approximately twenty-five light-years away. NASA together with SSD, the Special Sciences Division, an elite team of scientists here at NASA that investigates various paranormal phenomena has already sent you its report. We will keep this under wraps, Sir, you have my word on that.”
“I am holding you accountable for the absolute secrecy of this development. Do you understand me?” demanded the President. After the NASA director had stammered his reassurances, the President hung up the phone and stared at his assembled advisors. For a moment he felt like laughing hysterically. Let the aliens come, he thought. The President smiled broadly at his inner circle. “Cheer up everybody. If the aliens do arrive, at least they won’t be Republicans seeking re-election.” This elicited a few chuckles.
“And they have no lobbyists,” quipped his Chief of Staff.
“And, even better, if and when they ever do arrive, it will probably be decades into the future. And then it will be somebody else’s problem. This information never leaves this room,” said the President, taking the time to look each of the three assembled people in the eye. “You cannot tell your spouses. Not even the family goldfish can know.”
The smiles vanished as each returned his cool, brown-eyed stare, and promised to keep the secret