Joe Haldeman - The Coming

“I guess I could go to the FBI. Tell them what I know, what I don’t know.”

“No! Please!” He snapped open his attaché case and checked its contents. “Let’s make a deal.”

“I’m listening.”

“Just watch what happens today. Afterward, we can talk forever about it. If you want to blow your whistle then, I won’t stop you.” He closed the case. “Right now I have to catch that helicopter and go join the festivities.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a key ring. “Here—stay at my place. You know where it is?”

“Still over at Creekside?”

“Yes, 203. Your place might not be safe.”

“Okay. You’ve got a deal. But tell me this… do you know who they are? The aliens?”

“I… I really can’t say.”

“But they aren’t actually aliens, are they?”

He looked at her silently for a second. “As alien as me.”

They both heard the whisper of the helicopter approaching, the pitch of the blades deepening as it landed. He kissed her on the cheek and ran out the door.

As the helicopter faded, she crossed the hall to her old office. It was locked, but her old key worked. She said, “Lights.”

Nothing had changed. Neater than possible, but she had straightened up for the expected interview. A layer of dust.

Would she ever work here again? She’d know in a few days.

Her shelves of old books seemed untouched. On impulse, she took the latest acquisition, the volume of century-old photographs from Life magazine, turned off the lights, and locked the door behind her.

It was about a mile down to Creekside. She was tired, but didn’t dare use a cab; most of them weren’t set up to take cash, and the ones that did took pictures of their suspicious customers. But at least the sidewalks wouldn’t be deserted, not with revelers rolling from party to party.

How many people, though, were sitting at home, terrified, waiting to die? On her way downhill, she passed two churches and a mosque, and they were all doing a brisk business.

A block from Creekside, she stopped at a convenience store and bought an overpriced bottle of domestic champagne.

It came out of a barrel of ice water. The clerk dried it off for her and put it in a bag. “I hope we have something to celebrate tomorrow,” he said. “I hope we’re here tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said. “If they wanted to destroy us, they would have done it by now.”

He nodded and took her cash, and clumsily counted out change. “Do I know you from somewhere, ma’am?”

“No. Just passing through.”

She crossed the bridge over Hogtown Creek and hurried into the apartment building. There were a lot of people sitting, partying, on the grassy banks of the creek, and she didn’t want to be recognized.

She tried four entrances before she found the one with P. PARKER, 203. Whatever his real name was.

She’d expected a spare bachelor flop, appropriate for a man with no history. But it was an eclectic, even baroque, collection of furniture and decorations from all over the world.

Japanese screen, coffee table from Bali or someplace, Mexican bullfight poster, a cuckoo clock from Germany or Switzerland. A pile of cushions in front of the cube, imported from exotic Taiwan. There was something odd about the collection, which suddenly struck her: everything was the same age. As if he’d gone into Pier Three and said, “I’ll take this, this, and this.”

No champagne flutes in the kitchen, but she did find two wineglasses of Waterford crystal. So it wasn’t all Pier Three. She popped the cork on the champagne and poured herself a glass, and put the bottle in the refrigerator.

It was empty, and spotless.

She checked the cupboards and there was no food, not a can of sardines or a box of cereal. Just matching plastic salt and pepper shakers.

Nothing sinister about that. A lot of bachelors ate in restaurants all the time, or brought takeout home.

She took the champagne back to the living room and turned on the cube. It didn’t respond to the clicker, but the manual controls were clear enough. She put it on CNN and turned the sound down to a whisper. She set her glass on the Balinese table and curled up on the Taiwanese pillows and opened the musty old book.

That was also a world-changing time, World War II. The stridently upbeat tone of the magazine probably meant people were as worried as the young man who sold her the champagne. But that was protracted—she checked the dates, six years—and the enemies were just people, beatable. Not aliens who could destroy your planet on a whim. Or said they were.

She put her book down, finished off the glass in a couple of gulps, and went to refill it. From the kitchen she could hear a commotion going on outside. She filled the glass and took it out onto Pepe’s balcony.

A circle of young people was dancing in the creek, laughing and singing. About half were naked, in spite of the cold water. Crowds on both banks were clapping and shouting. “Take it off, take it off.”

Well, they were expecting a message of peace and hope in a few hours. What would they actually get?

She closed her eyes and suddenly opened them, just in time to keep from dropping the expensive crystal over the balcony. Her arms and legs were heavy with fatigue. She went into Pepe’s bedroom and manually set the clock to wake her at five forty-five, not trusting the voice controls. Exactly three hours of sleep. She was unconscious before it said two forty-six.

When the clock woke her she staggered downstairs and got breakfast from machines, guaranteed bad coffee and a candy bar. They didn’t have any Mars bars, unfortunately, so she picked one at random. Did they still make Mars bars? She hadn’t bought a candy bar in twenty-some years. The chocolate was unpleasantly rich and sweet. But it would get her through to the end of the world.

She was mildly surprised not to have been rousted out of bed by FBI agents. Whatever Pepe was, he was evidently not on their side.

She turned on the cube and switched it to Channel 7, hoping to catch Marya. Some male voice-over was describing the procession of notables, showing footage of one helicopter after another alighting on the same landing pad, dropping off this or that president or prime minister or movie star. A large stand of bleachers filled up with people not accustomed to sitting in bleachers. The rising sun was behind them; the sky was salmon deepening to perfect blue.

At precisely six, a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter, number 1, came in and disgorged President Davis and his retinue, including a squad of heavily armed marines. Rory smiled at that. They wouldn’t be much help against planet-busting aliens, but they might prevent him from sharing the fate of his predecessor. She had been following his career from Cuba; he was the least popular president since Nixon. A majority of the House and Senate wanted him impeached, if not actually hanged, but they were putting it off for a few days. Maybe the aliens would vaporize him and save them the trouble.

After the old man was safely installed on the dais in front of the bleachers, seated uncomfortably close to the secretary-general of the UN, the cube switched to a telescopic view of the alien ship. It didn’t seem fundamentally different from a human spaceship, which could just be form following function. Or perhaps they wanted to reassure us.

Or, most likely, it was a human ship, part of the biggest hoax in history. With Pepe somewhere near the center of it.

Her certainty had grown as the evidence accumulated that Pepe had obviously been planted in her department, set up to be her second-in-command. If it was a hoax, it was an enterprise larger than the Manhattan Project. The early data could have been faked, someone hacking the input from GRS-1 and its lunar counterpart. But eventually other telescopes picked it up. It did come from outside the solar system, though perhaps not from nearly as far or going as fast as they thought.