The Second Ship (2 page)

Chapter 2

Heather McFarland had always been an early riser, but the dreams were leaving her wide awake long before dawn. She couldn’t even remember what the dreams were about, only the dread they left in their wake.

This morning, the digital clock on the microwave read 4:43 a.m. when she came downstairs. Far too early, even for her. The nightmares had started shortly after summer break began, and after a week, she had stopped trying to fall back asleep again after they awakened her. The general sense of wrongness that lingered made that impossible. She hoped they would stop before school resumed next week.

She prepared her morning pot of herbal tea and carried it to the back deck, looking out to the east as the sun crested the mountainous horizon. There was something about the sunrise in the high country of New Mexico that was pure magic. Perhaps it was the way the air was so thin a mile and a half above sea level that the sun's rays sparkled and danced across the rock cliffs, tinting them the pink of a dew-covered rose. Or maybe it was the way the reds and yellows of sunrise splashed the eastern sky. The tang of the high pines hung in the morning air, which was cold at this hour even in early August.

White Rock had been her home all her life, the bedroom community for the Los Alamos National Laboratory providing homes for her closest friends, although many of her school chums lived a few miles away in the Los Alamos city limits. Heather chuckled to herself. Los Alamos and White Rock were beautiful towns situated in the stunning surroundings of the high canyon country of northern New Mexico, but the term “city” was a little generous for their sizes.

Despite the lingering worry from the dream that tickled at the back of her mind, Heather still could barely contain her excitement. Today, Jennifer and Mark were scheduled to return from their family summer vacation. While a cruise up the coast of Alaska sounded fun and she did not begrudge them those activities with their own family, she had missed the twins immensely these last three weeks.

They still had a few days to work on their rock climbing before school started and basketball stole all of Mark’s time. He’d been heavily recruited as a sophomore to join the high school team this year. They’d just have to pry Jennifer from her books and convince her that living up the last bit of summer was more important than reading about the latest computer theory. “Doc” could probably be coaxed if they let her bring a book along for the trip.

By the time Heather was into her third cup of herbal tea, she was almost relaxed enough to consider a trip back to bed. Then, the sound of dishes rattling in the kitchen announced that her mother was up and breakfast would soon follow. The screen door opened and her father stepped out, a mug of steaming coffee in his hand.

“Good morning, sweetheart.”

“Hi, Dad.”

Gilbert McFarland was tall and slender, with brown eyes and a mouth upturned in a perpetual smile. His thick brown hair was hidden under the constant, old floppy fishing hat he wore that sported an assortment of hand-tied flies and a button that proclaimed, “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish...”

“It looks like it’s going to be another beautiful day.”

“Yep, but you’ve missed the best part of the sunrise.”

“Your mom and I saw it through our bedroom window.”

“That hardly counts. Glass filters the view.”

“Hmm. Not everyone is born to rise before the sun. You hungry?”

“I’m getting there.”

“Good. Breakfast’s almost ready.”

Heather followed her dad back into the house. Her mother, Anna, moved through the kitchen and breakfast nook with an efficiency that made everything seem as if it positioned itself of its own accord.

“Well, you’re looking a little tired this morning,” her mother said, touching her forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine, Mom. I was just a little bit anxious to get up this morning.”

Her mother smiled knowingly. “As if we don’t all know the reason. I suppose I should set out a couple of extra places for breakfast.”

Heather was about to say she wasn’t sure what time the Smythes were returning when the doorbell rang. The Smythe twins had been eating breakfast, and any other meal they could get away with, at Heather’s house for years. Mrs. Smythe’s cooking was legendary for being inedible. She didn’t even like eating her own cooking, so she hardly blamed Mark and Jennifer for taking advantage of the McFarland hospitality. The favor was returned in the form of regular barbecues Mr. Smythe hosted at the Smythe abode.

Heather opened the door and then stepped back. “Wow. You guys look great. I didn’t think you could get a tan in Alaska.”

Mark grinned. “Don’t kid yourself. I did some rock and glacier climbing. You’d love it there.”

“Good atmosphere to catch up on some reading too,” said Jennifer as she gave Heather a quick hug.

Heather laughed. “You guys hungry?”

“Starved,” Mark said. “Mom almost got up and made omelets this morning.” The look of horror on his face made Heather laugh even harder.

Her mother met the twins with huge hugs, immediately ushering them to their chairs and passing around the pancake platter, which everyone set about doing their best to empty. By the time breakfast was over, the family had heard all about cruising Alaska, followed by Jennifer’s excited summary of the biography she’d read about Madame Curie.

A horn honked outside and Heather’s father rose, wiping his chin with a napkin. “Oops. My ride’s here. Gotta run.”

“Have fun at the lab today,” said Heather.

“Always do.”

While he had never gotten a doctorate, or even a master’s degree, Heather’s father was one of those indispensable people at the lab known as a tech. So was Mr. Smythe, who currently waited outside in their driveway. It was his week to drive the carpool.

Heather’s dad had a knack for building any mechanical contraption to exact specifications, given the most cursory information. His real title was machinist, but he had turned the job into an art form. He loved the lab, which provided him access to an unequaled machine shop and the opportunity to make an assortment of oddities for the scientists.

While her father was master of all things mechanical, Fred Smythe was lord of electronics. Together, there was nothing they could not create or improve upon. It was only fitting that they were next-door neighbors.

As Heather’s dad reached for the front doorknob, it burst open, and he was almost bowled over by Fred’s blocky form as he raced into the living room. Before Heather’s dad could react, Mr. Smythe grabbed the remote and brought the old television set to life.

“Gil, get your butt in here. You’ve got to see this!”

The CNN logo accompanied by “Breaking News” formed a banner along the bottom of the screen. The camera suddenly cut away from the news anchor to the president seated at his desk in the Oval Office, backdropped by the presidential seal and an American flag.

The president began speaking directly into the camera.

“My fellow Americans. It is with great pleasure and excitement that I come before you today with an announcement, an announcement for which you have unknowingly been kept waiting almost sixty years. Through multiple presidencies, several wars, the landing of men on the moon, up through today's troubled world situation, a matter of unfathomable scientific importance has been preciously guarded by this government.

“As will become clear in moments, this secrecy was required so the government could investigate the national security and public safety ramifications of this discovery. However, recent breakthroughs promise such huge benefits to mankind that I, in consultation with key congressional leaders, have decided to make them public.”

The president paused momentarily, and Heather wondered if he had lost his place on the teleprompter. Then, taking a deep breath, he continued.

“In late March of 1948, just outside Aztec, New Mexico, the United States military discovered a crash site for a ship of unknown origin. That origin has since been conclusively determined to be from a star system other than our own. In short, it is a spaceship from another world, constructed using advanced technologies, many of which we still cannot fathom.

“For the past several years, a team of our top scientists has studied this ship under a program called the Rho Project. I will now turn this briefing over to the lead scientist on the Rho Project.”

The McFarland household erupted into pandemonium, with excited shouts eventually drowned out by bellows for quiet from Misters McFarland and Smythe.

On the television, the president’s image had been replaced by a speaker standing at a podium in a press conference room. The speaker was immediately recognizable to anyone from the Los Alamos area: Donald R. Stephenson, deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in charge of special projects, many of which were unnamed. Apparently one of those projects was about to make a name for itself.

Looking at the man had always made Heather feel uncomfortable somehow, as if those sharp eyes were picking her out of the crowd, drilling through her, reaching into her very soul. He was a wiry, slender man with a sharp face, a high forehead, and an intense mouth that looked as if it had never been forced to twist into a smile. His brown hair still showed no sign of graying or thinning, even though he was in his mid-fifties.

Timeless. That was how Heather thought of Dr. Stephenson. No age fitted him. It was like the way the funny Pat character on the old Saturday Night Live reruns was gender-ambiguous. You certainly couldn’t tell by looking.

Dr. Donald Stephenson was widely regarded as the smartest man on the planet. He had gotten out of the army in his mid-twenties and quickly attained doctorates in astrophysics, mathematics, and chemistry from MIT. Three Nobel Prizes before he was forty had been enough to propel him into his current high position at the laboratory. Heather had heard from her father that if the man were not so completely dislikable, he would no doubt have been named director instead of deputy director, not that he showed any interest in moving away from the projects he kept under his strict control.

Both her father and Mr. Smythe despised the man, although that was a sentiment so widely held among the scientists and technicians around the laboratory that it raised no eyebrows. To her it seemed that Donald Stephenson reveled in making others hate him.

Now before a roomful of reporters, he spoke steadily as a sequence of slides flashed on the screen behind him, scenes filled with a cigar-shaped ship draped with instruments, workers moving along catwalks that clung to its surface, a ramp extending up into the interior. There were no shots of the interior of the spaceship.

Although Heather was too excited to follow the droning monologue, the gist of it was clear. Recent breakthroughs in deciphering some of the alien technology had yielded results so important and startling that they could not, in good conscience, be kept from the world, results that had ramifications on both energy production and on the health of the world's population.

In coming weeks, those results would be carefully released to a select group of the world's scientists for verification and to allow for external analysis of whether the breakthroughs were safe for rapid dissemination to the governments of the world.

The slide show ended. Dr. Stephenson’s steel gray eyes swept the room. “I will now take your questions.”

Bedlam. It took a full five minutes to get the reporters settled down so individual questions could be heard. After that they came hot and fast.

“Why keep this from the American people all this time?”

“Will independent scientists have access to the starship?”

“Shouldn’t this discovery be turned over to the United Nations?”

On and on went the questions, many of which were deferred to the political leadership to answer. It was immediately clear, however, that despite the US government's declared willingness to share technologies from the project, that openness did not include access to the starship itself.

As the news conference ended, a slow shudder crawled along Heather’s back, up her bare neck, and into her hairline. For a split second, it seemed that she would recall the details of last night’s dream. Then the feeling was gone, replaced by the lingering sense of dread with which she had awakened.

Chapter 3

Why anyone even bothered to open school on schedule defied rational explanation, considering the demonstrators and nutcases that had descended, like locusts, upon Los Alamos. The start of junior year should be exciting, but all Heather could muster, as her mom's van weaved its way slowly through the throngs of demonstrators, was dismay.

To be fair, the demonstrations were not aimed at the school, nor were the demonstrators even allowed close to the school grounds. Still, the disruption threatened longtime residents' comfortable way of life.

Military security had been beefed up all around the national laboratory, but in the towns themselves, madness reigned. News reporters from nearby Santa Fe and Albuquerque stations arrived first, followed by national news teams in top-heavy satellite vans. Meanwhile, hordes of sundry groups filled hotels and campgrounds for miles around.

Los Alamos was full, White Rock was full, Santa Fe was full, Taos was full. Even all the hotel rooms of Albuquerque had been filled, and that herd of humanity now jammed the sidewalks, alleys, and streets of Los Alamos. Heather didn’t know how many forests must have been felled just to supply the wood and paper for the handheld signs, but it couldn’t have been good for global oxygen production.

Everywhere she looked there were signs, some of which were being used as pugil sticks to attack opposing sign bearers.

Mark leaned across the seat and prodded her with his elbow. “Now there’s something you don’t see every day.”

A man in a long robe and a sign that proclaimed, “Jesus loves us, not aliens!” was engaged in a wrestling match with a fellow wearing a shirt sporting a classic green alien figure with crossed bandoliers, twin six guns, and lettering that proclaimed him “El Vato Verde... Roswell, New Mexico.”

Heather averted her gaze as the El Vato guy pulled the other fellow's robe off, held it up over his head, and went running down the street waving it like a lasso to a loud chorus of catcalls from the other marchers.

“You’d think after a couple of weeks it’d calm down,” said Jennifer, “but it’s getting worse.”

Mark snorted. “I’d say this is just the beginning. Dad says both city councils, for Los Alamos and for White Rock, are considering curfews after dark.”

Heather moaned. “Oh that’s just great. Isn’t this going to be a wonderful school year? No football, basketball, or any other after-school sports. And forget about dances. We’re going to be restricted to the school grounds all day.”

“I don’t know,” Jennifer replied. “It’ll probably be good for the student body to pay more attention to their studies and a little less to all the extracurricular activities.”

Mark stared at his twin sister. “Oh, yeah. That sounds really, really fun.” He turned back to Heather. “You know, when we first heard about the starship, I thought it was cool. But now it looks like it’s just going to be a giant pain in the butt.”

Heather’s mother angled the Windstar van into the school parking lot, bringing it to a stop with a squeal of protest from brakes that her father had been promising to get fixed for the past month.

“Okay, kids. Enough complaining. Grab your stuff, get in there, and try to enjoy yourselves. This is high school. It’s supposed to be fun.”

The three grinned at her, nodded, and waved as they slung backpacks over their shoulders and then merged with the mass of other students making their way through the high school doorway.

Entering the bustling hallway was like leaving the Kansas farmhouse for the rainbow-colored Land of Oz. Students high-fived friends not seen all summer, smiled, chattered, and gave out hugs.

Heather stepped to one side, a grin spreading across her face, as she was jostled from side to side by students scurrying in search of assigned classrooms and lockers. She felt like she was in the midst of a salmon spawning run. The principal and teachers looked like bears wading out into the stream to sweep the fish to their ultimate destinations.

“Heather,” Mark yelled back at her. “Come on. We’re going to be late for math.”

Heather leaped back into the stream of young humanity, allowing it to propel her down the hallway toward her first period class. She only hoped her luck would be better than the salmon’s.