Gift From The Stars (6 page)

Waiting at the back of an unused hangar at the airfield was a fat man sitting at a folding table. Mrs. Farmstead nudged Adrian and said, out of the corner of her mouth, “Sidney Greenstreet.” The fat man didn’t laugh like Greenstreet, however, from the gut, his belly shaking. He didn’t laugh at all. Sitting behind a portable table, he scowled at Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead as if assessing what kind of punishment he could mete out to the civilians who had made him travel all this distance and put up with such discomfort. It
was
discomfort. He overflowed the metal chair he sat on, gingerly, as if it were about to collapse beneath him.

“Well,” Adrian said, “then it’s all true.”

“Truth depends on where you stand,” the fat man said.

“Or sit,” Adrian said, looking around for other chairs. There were none in that vast expanse of empty hangar. Greenstreet was going to make them stand in front of him like convicts awaiting judgment. “Let’s have some truth, then. I’m Adrian Mast, and this is Frances Farmstead, and we’ve been looking for Peter Cavendish and the alien plans for building a spaceship. Now, who are you and why have you asked us here?”

The fat man was wearing a dark suit. It had a matching vest; nobody wore vests anymore, but his had a purpose. He reached into a vest pocket, retrieved a calling card with two fingers, and flicked it onto the table in front of Adrian. Adrian picked it up and looked at it. It read: “William Makepeace.” And under that: “Consultant.”

“William Makepeace,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Wasn’t that Thackeray’s name?”

“My parents were great readers,” Makepeace said.

“And what gives you the authority to summon us here?” Adrian asked.

“I’m in charge of the Cavendish affair,” Makepeace said.

“It’s an affair, then,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “like an Agatha Christie mystery.”

“An affair,” Makepeace said, “is something less than a case and something more than a situation.”

“Hah!” Adrian said.

“Let us be reasonable,” Makepeace said. “You are idealists; I am a pragmatist. You deal in dreams; I deal in what is. One of us has to convince the other.”

“You first,” Adrian said. “Are the spaceship designs authentic?”

“As far as I know,” Makepeace said. “But I’m no expert in alien communications, nor in deciphering codes, nor in spaceship design. I’ve been told by those who ought to know that they seem genuine.”

“And will they work?”

Makepeace shrugged. It was like a tide of jello under his coat. “We haven’t gone that far.”

“Why not?”

“That part was unimportant.”

“My god! What was important?”

“You want to go to the stars,” Makepeace said. “I see that. Sensible people, of whom I am one, want to see that we don’t destroy each other. We don’t care if you go to the stars, Mr. Mast, as long as we can survive in some approximation of civilization.”

“What in the name of everything holy does that have to do with building a spaceship?”

“Nothing,” Makepeace said, “but our experts point out that the antimatter collectors—” He stopped as Adrian jumped. “Yes, they are designs for antimatter collectors, according to people who ought to know. If we built them, Mr. Mast, what do you think would happen?”

“Besides getting us to the stars,” Mrs. Farmstead said.

“Quite right,” Makepeace said. “Besides that.”

“I suppose they would lead to the development of new energy systems, maybe generation in orbit,” Adrian said.

“You are quick, Mr. Mast. No wonder you caught on to the designs in
Gift from the Stars
. But what comes after energy generation in orbit?”

Now it was Adrian’s turn to shrug. “I give up. What?”

“Cheap energy, for one thing,” Makepeace said. “Our experts predict that we could beam down energy from orbit at a fraction of the cost of current sources.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Adrian asked.

“What do you think will happen when entire industries get displaced, virtually overnight?”

“It’s happened before,” Adrian said.

“But not so quickly, and not in a way that will transform the balance of power. Do you think that the energy-producing nations won’t fight, maybe resort to financial strategies that would upset the world’s economy, or terrorism, or even war?”

Adrian shook his head. “Buy them off. Buy them up. Cut them in. Give them free energy. Give them a share of the process. Anyway, oil and gas are far more valuable as biological raw materials than as fuel.”

“Ah, Mr. Mast, that requires forethought and rational decision-making, and the nations of the world aren’t good at those things.”

“Maybe they could see that cheap, inexhaustible energy makes everything possible,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “from feeding the hungry and housing the homeless to raising their standards of living to the level of the western nations without destroying the world’s resources, without pollution. We could clean up the environment. We could do anything.”

“Cheap energy could make a heaven on Earth,” Adrian said. “It could solve all our problems.”

“Mr. Mast, Mrs. Farmstead,” Makepeace said pityingly, “that will never happen. People aren’t willing to give up their little disputes, their ancient hatreds, their petty jealousies. And, you see, antimatter makes one other thing possible.”

“What?”

“Bigger and better bombs. Big enough to shatter this planet, I’m told. Do you have an answer for that?”

Adrian looked down. “No,” he said. “You just have to have faith that people are better than that, that they will see the promise and hold off on the destruction. That’s your job, you and the people you work for, to convince them.”

“I haven’t convinced you.”

“We’re on the side of the angels,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Or the aliens.”

Makepeace spread his arms out, palms up, as if helpless in the face of irresistible facts. “But we can’t take the chance. Sure we could have a lot more of everything or we could end up with nothing at all. In that scheme of things, the status quo wins every time. So, you see, you have a choice. Either you give up this foolishness or—”

“Or what?” Adrian said fiercely.

“Or we will have to discredit you,” Makepeace said. “We can do that, you know. The resources of the government are massive; they can be mobilized to make you part of the UFO fringe cultists. You will be destroyed, along with that book you have in your possession and whatever copies you may have made.”

Adrian shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Mast?” Makepeace said. “I hope you haven’t done something foolish.”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘foolish,’” Mrs. Farmstead said. “You know those old movies where the hero leaves the information in the hands of his lawyer, in case he gets killed, or in a safe-deposit box?”

“Ridiculous,” Makepeace said.

“That’s what we thought,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “They’re always killing the lawyer or looting the safe-deposit box, or the newspaper editor is part of the conspiracy. So we put everything on the Internet this morning.”

“Bah!” Makepeace’s relief was clear. “The internet is filled with junk nobody believes.”

“We know,” Adrian said. “So we labeled the statement as a NASA news release—we didn’t know then that it was SETI. But first we inserted the designs into NASA’s database.”

For the first time Makepeace looked uncertain. “You can’t do that!” He shivered as he considered Adrian’s confidence. “They can be found, erased.”

“By now they’re all around the world. People must be accessing the database already.”

“The designs can be discredited, ridiculed.”

“Scientists and engineers will recognize their validity just as I did.
Particularly scientists and engineers in other countries. You’ll never know who might be taking the designs seriously. As in the race for the atom bomb, the U.S. can’t afford to come in second.”

“The genie is out of the bottle, Mr. Makepeace,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “I think you’d better make your three wishes.”

“You poor, stupid people!” Makepeace said. “You don’t know what you’ve done!”

“We’ve just given humanity the stars,” Adrian said. “It’s your job to see that humanity doesn’t destroy itself first.”

“And how do you propose we do that?”

“I suggest you mobilize all those resources you were talking about, get them behind the release of the designs, take credit for it, swing public opinion into the realization that this is a legitimate gift from beneficent aliens, and we have been given the chance to make everybody rich and happy.”

“And let some of us go to the stars,” Mrs. Farmstead said.

“Oh my god!” Makepeace said and put his face down into his hands. Then, slowly, he pulled himself to his feet and plodded toward the hangar exit like a man who had just realized that he was old and fat and would never feel any better than he did now.

Adrian looked at Mrs. Farmstead. “Well, Frances,” he said. He held out his arm and she took it. “I hope I may call you Frances.”

“Any time, Adrian.”

“What we opened may be the genie’s bottle, or it may be Pandora’s box,” Adrian said. “Whichever it is, we’re going to live in interesting times.”

“If it’s the genie’s bottle, let’s be sure we make the right wishes,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “If it’s Pandora’s box, we must remind ourselves to be patient.”

And they walked out of the hangar into a night in which the stars seemed close enough to touch.

I sell what all men desire.

M
ATTHEW
B
OULTON

Part Two

POW’R

THE OBJECTS WERE BLACK AGAINST the overwhelming brilliance of the sun. Hovering just outside the coronasphere like moths drawn to a flame, their wings seeming to flutter in the solar wind, they maintained their positions and their existence against the elemental forces acting upon them. If they had been alive, they would have been unbelievable evidence of the variety of existence, but they were even more remarkable: they were machines built from alien specifications to liberate humanity from the Solar System in which it had been imprisoned. They were a gift from the stars.

Frances Farmstead replayed the tape, but this time she let it continue until the end, when a shape like a transparent shark drifted across the screen. The sun shone through the image almost undiminished, and the black moths could still be distinguished if she peered, but something halfway between an after-image and a sketch crossed in front of the sun and the mechanical creatures sucking its energy. It was a ship—or the Platonic idea of a ship—where no ship existed, like a reminder of a promise unfulfilled, like someone walking across her grave.

Frances looked around the shop as if comparing it with a bookstore she once had owned. But this was spacious where the Book Nook had been narrow and quiet, and the books that had stood at attention upon shelves and stared at the ceiling from tables had been replaced by the
backs of videotapes and the jewel-boxes of CD-ROM disks. Between the shelves were classic movie posters framed in white:
The Day the Earth Stood Still
,
The Thing
,
The War of the Worlds
,
Attack of the Flying Saucers
,
Independence Day
,
Contact
, and
Star Wars: The Final Victory
.

Frances had outlived her husband and her son, and her daughter had stopped communicating after Frances had opted for rejuvenation, and now Frances had outlived the age of reading.

She sighed, as if coming to a decision, and spoke to her computer. “Phone Adrian Mast,” she said. She could hear the connection click and then the telephone begin to ring, but the screen remained blank. After three rings, the sound stopped and a computerized voice announced, “This number is no longer in service. For directory assistance consult your local website.”

“Directory assistance,” she told the computer. After a few moments the computer said, “Directory assistance has no listing for Adrian Mast.”

“Locate Adrian Mast using all available databases,” she said. She tried to suppress a feeling of alarm. The minutes passed slowly.

Finally the computer spoke. “I have identified eleven Adrian Masts, but none is the person you seek. As far as my resources can determine, that person does not exist and has never existed.”

Typical computer literalness: how could a person have never existed if the computer had parameters to match? But that misplaced irritation was only Frances’ effort to avoid panic. With Adrian she had hunted down the author of a UFO cult book in which Adrian had found what looked like, to him, working designs for an alien spaceship. Now Adrian had been eliminated from all the world’s records.

It was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Why should Adrian disappear? Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to delete all traces of him. As if Adrian were—what? The man who knew too much?

Frances looked up at the posters on the far wall and then back at the computer. She idly tapped a few keys and then deleted the gibberish that appeared on the screen. Once people had reasons to get rid of Adrian.

But that was ten years ago, and nothing had happened since. Well, a great deal had happened to the world, but nothing had happened to Frances and Adrian except that they had drifted apart, once their adventure had ended. The alien technology had worked; devices were orbiting the sun. Solar moths were transforming the sun’s energy into high-energy gamma rays and beaming them back to receivers in orbit where they were converted into antimatter . The entire process was marvelous
beyond understanding, but seeing was believing, like the creation of an electric current when one rotates a wire through a magnetic field, or the illumination of an incandescent filament when a switch is turned. The documentary recently on her screen had mentioned “magic crystals” constructed of “strange matter,” and the only thing that made it credible was that aliens had sent the plans and human scientists had blinked and then said it was possible. Power was available almost everywhere for almost nothing because in space the antimatter was combined with matter to create energy that was beamed to receivers on Earth that rebroadcast it around the world. . . .