Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

The sanctity of an entire world at stake, and from this moment on, nothing would be pretty.

“Did you feel that?”

Bloch was stretched out on the big couch. He remembered closing his eyes, listening to the AM static on his old boom box. But the radio was silent and his mother spoke, and opening his eyes, he believed that only a minute or two had passed. “What? Feel what?”

“The ground,” she said. Mom was standing in the dark, fighting for the best words. “It was like an earthquake… but not really… never mind…”

A second shiver passed beneath their house. There was no hard shock, no threat to bring buildings down. It was a buoyant motion, as if the world was an enormous water bed and someone very large was squirming under distant covers.

She said, “Simon.”

Nobody else called him Simon. Even Dad used the nickname invented by a teasing brother. At least that’s what Bloch had been told; he didn’t remember his father at all.

“How do you feel, Simon?”

Bloch sat up. It was cold in the house and silent in that way that comes only when the power was out.

She touched his forehead.

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“Are you nauseous?”

“No.”

“Radiation sickness,” she said. “It won’t happen right away.”

“I’m fine, Mom. What time is it?”

“Not quite six,” she said. Then she checked her watch to make sure. “And we are going to the doctor this morning, if not the hospital.”

“Yeah, except nothing happened,” he said, just like he did twenty times last night. “We backed away when the glow started. Then the police came, and some guy from Homeland, and Mr. Rightly found me that old sweatshirt—”

“I was so scared,” she interrupted, talking to the wall. “I got home and you weren’t here. You should have been home already. And the phones weren’t working, and then everything went dark.”

“I had to walk home from the zoo,” he said again. “Mr. Rightly couldn’t give me a ride if he wanted, because he was parked over by the crash site.”

“The crash site,” she repeated.

He knew not to talk.

“You shouldn’t have been there at all,” she said. “Something drops from the sky, and you run straight for it.”

The luckiest moment in his life, he knew.

“Simon,” she said. “Why do you take such chances?”

The woman was a widow and her other son was a soldier stationed in a distant, hostile country, and even the most normal day gave her reasons to be nervous. But now aliens were raining down on their heads, and there was no word happening in the larger world. Touching the cool forehead once again, she said, “I’m not like you, Simon.”

“I know that, Mom.”

“I don’t like adventure,” she said. “I’m just waiting for the lights to come on.”

But neither of them really expected that to happen. So he changed the subject, telling her, “I’m hungry.”

“Of course you are.” Thankful for a normal task, she hurried into the kitchen. “How about cereal before our milk goes bad?”

Bloch stood and pulled on yesterday’s pants and the hooded Cornell sweatshirt borrowed from the zoo’s lost-and-found. “Yeah, cereal sounds good,” he said.

“What kind?” she asked from inside the darkened refrigerator.

“Surprise me,” he said. Then, after slipping on his shoes, he crept out the back door.

Mr. Rightly looked as if he hadn’t moved in twelve hours. He was standing in the classroom where Bloch left him, and he hadn’t slept. Glasses that needed a good scrubbing obscured red worried eyes. A voice worked over by sandpaper said, “That was fast.”

“What was fast?” Bloch asked.

“They just sent a car for you. I told them you were probably at home.”

“Except I walked here on my own,” the boy said.

“Oh.” Mr. Rightly broke into a long weak laugh. “Anyway, they’re gathering up witnesses, seeing what everybody remembers.”

It was still night outside. The classroom was lit by battery-powered lamps. “They” were the Homeland people in suits and professors in khaki, with a handful of soldiers occupying a back corner. The classroom was the operation’s headquarters. Noticing Bloch’s arrival, several people came forward, offering hands and names. The boy pretended to listen. Then a short Indian fellow pulled him aside, asking, “Did you yourself speak to the entity?”

“I heard it talk.”

“And did it touch you?”

Bloch nearly said, “Yes.” But then he thought again, asking, “Who are you?”

“I told you. I am head of the physics department at the university, here at the request of Homeland Security.”

“Was it fusion?”

“Pardon?”

“The creature, the machine,” Bloch said. “It turned bright blue and the pond was boiling. So we assumed some kind of reactor was supplying the power.”

The head professor dismissed him with a wave. “Fusion is not as easy as that, young man. Reactors do not work that way.”

“But it asked for water, which is mostly hydrogen,” Bloch said. “Hydrogen is what makes the sun burn.”

“Ah,” the little man said. “You and your high school teacher are experts in thermonuclear technologies, are you?”

“Who is? You?”

The man flung up both hands, wiping the air between them. “I was invited here to help. I am attempting to learn what happened last night and what it is occurring now. What do you imagine? That some cadre of specialists sits in a warehouse waiting for aliens to come here and be studied? You think my colleagues and I have spent two minutes in our lives preparing for this kind of event?”

“I don’t really—”

“Listen to me,” the head professor insisted.

But then the ground rose. It was the same sensation that struck half a dozen times during Bloch’s walk back to the zoo, only this event felt larger and there wasn’t any matching sense of dropping afterwards. The room remained elevated, and everyone was silent. Then an old professor turned to a young woman, asking, “Did Kevin ever get that accelerograph?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, see if you can find either one. We need to get that machine working and calibrated.”

The girl was pretty and very serious, very tense. Probably a graduate student, Bloch decided. She hurried past, glancing at the big boy and the college sweatshirt that was too small. Then she was gone and he was alone in the room with a couple dozen tired adults who kept talking quietly and urgently among themselves.

The head physicist was lecturing the bald man from Homeland. The bald man was flanked by two younger men who kept flipping through pages on matching clipboards, reading in the dim light. An Army officer was delivering orders to a couple soldiers. Bloch couldn’t be sure of ranks or units. He had a bunch of questions to ask Matt. For a thousand reasons, he wished he could call his brother. But there were no phones; even the Army was working with old-fashioned tools. The officer wrote on a piece of paper and tore it off the pad, handing it to one scared grunt, sending him and those important words off to “The Site.”

Mr. Rightly had moved out of the way. He looked useless and exhausted and sorry, but at least he had a stool to perch on.

“What do we know?” Bloch asked him.

Something was funny in those words.

Laughing along with his teacher, Bloch asked, “Do you still think our spaceship is different from the big probe?”

As if sharing a secret, Mr. Rightly leaned close. “It came from a different part of the sky, and it was alone. And its effects, big as they are, don’t compare with what’s happening on the other side of the world.”

The professors were huddled up, talking and pointing at the ground.