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Six

 

September 12

"I'm tired." Marian half-sat, half-fell into the chair.

Aaron looked up from the screen. "Why? You haven't done a damn thing all day."

Marian fixed him with a glare.

"Oh, that's right, you were on the treadmill today."

"Yeah." She leaned back, letting her arms flop to her sides. "'A little faster, now, Marian, just a bit faster, thank you, please concentrate and breathe deeply, thank you, a bit faster now.' Linda was absolutely a hundred percent right. I want to slug 'em. So what torture did they have for you?"

Aaron grimaced, held up a hand with two bandaged fingertips. "Blood alley."

"Eeeeyew." Marian hugged herself. As bad as running the treadmill was, having fingers pricked and those huge needles shoved into an arm time after time was far worse. And this had been going on for three months.

"What'cha readin'?" She came around beside him as much to change the subject as to find out anything.

"New York Times online ." He tapped a key and the front page formed—minus about a third, as if someone had cut the lead article out. "The new news unfortunately was about us. So, naturally, they zapped it all out."

"Even with the hole, it's still strange to see a color photo in the Times," she said. Marian zoomed in on the photo, which showed a banner someone had draped on the Statue of Liberty.

"'Free the Chunnel 7,'" she read. She looked at the gray hole. "I wonder what they're saying about us we don't need to know."

Aaron snorted. "Probably more crap. Cheryl says the censorship is one of the levers the lawyers are using to pry us free. I like having my bed made up every morning and all, but I feel like a prisoner."

"I suppose. But, Aaron, where do we go? You want to be released into your wife's custody?"

"I—" Aaron looked away. "I'd rather go with my sister. But she's out of touch in the depths of Alaska. They won't let me use the phone so I can't call her." He looked at her. "Where would you go? Your sister?"

"I'd rather be released to the custody of my cats." Marian closed her eyes. "I miss my cats. And I can't call Shirley to make sure they're all right—"

Aaron nudged her, pointed. Earl was walking slowly, barefoot, head down, face creased in a frown. She glanced at Aaron, then stepped over in front of Earl, who kept going until he bumped her. He looked up, startled.

"Penny for your thoughts," she said.

"I'll double her price."

"Still the big spender, eh?" Earl said to Aaron.

"You just look so deep in thought. Is something wrong?"

He looked directly at her a few seconds, then let out a half-laugh. "No. Just . . .puzzled, worried. I was thinking about, about something . . . when this memory intruded. I was eleven years old when I saw this . . . big, black locomotive chugging along, indistinct in shadow of the full Moon. In my mind I saw a monster, hulking, dark, forbidding—and yet pathetic. It was old, snuffling along, looking for morsels, too old and tired to chase me. I thought I could hear it weeping as it passed, forlorn and alone, looking for shelter, a place . . . a place to die." He crossed his arms, looked into the distance. "I was thinking about that tiny room again, the egg-shaped room of the Holn, the place of formless specters and soft rustlings. I saw shadows moving around me again, but they changed into this engine-shadow and the sounds of it cut through as sharp as a knife—why, with nearly eighty years of memories in my head, does that particular one suddenly spring to mind? It's so real, I can feel the rumble of the machinery, smell the smoke, taste the metallic tang of the air. They must have messed with my mind, stirred it up like a bowl of blue Jell-O—"

"Gosh," Marian said quickly, "they had trains when you were a kid?"

Earl looked at her.

"Probably hadda walk ten miles to school every day, too," Aaron said.

Earl moved his gaze to Aaron, who grinned.

"You young whippersnappers," Earl said in a quavering voice, waving a hand, "no respect for your elders. In my day, they'd of tanned me alive if I'd-a talked like that. Young hoodlums."

"That's all right, old man," Marian said, taking his arm, "come and have some tea. And tell us all about your boyhood."

 

* * *

 

"Aren't we lucky that an HDTV crew happened to be there when the Holn landed?" Ben Danthen gestured toward the wall monitor. "Otherwise, we wouldn't get to see the twelve-millionth replay."

Members of the task force were slipping into the other chairs in the conference room, some watching the commercial-station's replay. Miranda was already there, half-listening to the conversation as she stared out of the large picture window on the opposite wall where Sandia Lab's namesake peaks rose in rugged splendor under an intensely blue sky. She'd tried to sketch the scene, but the lines on her notebook screen weren't taking the right form.

Avram, across from Ben at the table, scraped his pipe. "Believe me, no video in the world holds a candle to the real thing."

"Oh, yeah." Ben sat up. "You were there. I never did hear how that happened."

Avram shrugged. "Just another random event. My eventual destination was the Santa Fe Institute, and my wife and I used the trip as an excuse to take a leisurely drive through the Southwest. Just as we came over the top of this long hill, I saw something spitting fire in the sky. Damn near drove under a big truck watching it."

On the screen, the ship split apart as the crew section—and, later, museum—slid down the boosters to ground level. "When we heard the ship had landed, we asked where, and someone said some rangeland just off Interstate 25 toward Waldo, New Mexico. Our next question, of course, was, 'where's Waldo?'"

Avram and several eavesdroppers laughed. "I took the nearest exit but it wasn't marked, so I didn't know the name. I didn't have to drive very far to find the rather astonished, and somewhat frightened, astronomy club, watching that ship descend with gaping mouths." He shook his head. "What a sight."

Constance leaned back in her chair. "I never quite understood how one small group of people could get them to land when all those government officials were making all those grandiose plans."

"They lost patience, essentially," Ben said. "That's what they said later. They were ready to land, but the squabbling on the ground kept them orbiting a week. With the exceptions of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Rwanda, and, for some reason, Wales, every country wanted the first alien contact to be on its soil. Our own government had prepared an elaborate site at Edwards Air Force Base where access could be controlled despite pleas from scientists, New Agers, UFO believers, science fiction writers and the Dalai Lama. So, when that amateur astronomy club simply invited the Holn to land, they accepted. Much to the chagrin of everyone else."

"There's the traffic jam on 1-25 just after," Orlando said, jerking a thumb at the TV.

"You mean the I-25 parking lot," Avram said. "I couldn't get my car out for a week."

"And then we had, of course, a Holn on the range."

"Ben, if you don't stop that, I'm going to swat you." The speaker was a dark blonde with thick shoulder-length hair cut in bangs across her forehead, long face and an overbite that put just a touch of lisp on her S's. She dropped a shoulder bag on the table and pulled out the chair next to his.

"Before you sit and swat, let me introduce you to Dr. Sena. This is Wanda Bettemeyer, your new liaison."

"Please, my name is Miranda." She stood to shake the other woman's hand. "Welcome to the pit."

Wanda smiled as she sat. "We were the center of the universe for a while. I guess it's your turn."

Miranda gave a small snort. "No thanks for that." She raised her voice. "All right, everyone seems to be here." She introduced Wanda. "We'll put her on the hot seat immediately."

"Well, the JPL gang loaded me down with all sorts of stuff. I sorted through it, and decided to start with the computers—"

"Does that have anything to do with us?" Dr. Innes said from his seat down near the end.

"We think it forms a base for Holn philosophy and biology," Wanda said, evidently not rattled by the interruption. "It has to do with the basic operating functions of their computers. Human-made computers use a binary system, ones and zeros, off or on, yes or no, male or female. The Holn have a trinary system: on, off, and neither on nor off. One, zero, neither one nor zero."

"Neutral," Lindsey suggested.

"In sense, yes, but maybe not. Hmm, I'll use Dr. Gottleib's metaphor of a computer—the machine itself as a whole. In one state, it's on, being used; in another state, it's off, not doing anything, just sitting there. According to the Holn, though, there's a third state, when it's no longer being used at all, as when it's obsolete. It can still function, but no one has a use for it because the programming or the hardware is no longer needed. That made things complicated. Neither side could make sense out of the other's computations because the systems are so different. Right now, there's only one human computer on Earth that can compute like a Holn machine. Sort of. Just up the road in Los Alamos. A polyglot affair, with boxes and wires and circuits all over the place. And frazzled programmers."

She studied her laptop screen a moment. "Now, I'd like to slip into biology," she said, tilting her body slightly as if actually prepared to do so.

She reached into the bag, pulled out several DVDs and dropped them on the table. "The details are in these reports.

"Holn cells come in threes. They operate only as a triad; if just one is missing, the tri-cell does not work. In the center are their DNA connections. Now understand, I'm using the word DNA as a label, not a description. Holn structural molecules are different, forming different bases, but we call it DNA for simplicity. Where ours is a double-helix strand, theirs forms a triangle. A triangular helix? Anyhow, when you look at it end-on, it forms an equilateral triangle. Human DNA uses four molecular combinations to form the chain, the Holn chain uses six. With six basic molecules and three strands to connect to, think of the combinations possible."

Matt whistled. A couple of others let out their breaths. Even Dr. Innes raised an eyebrow.

"It gets more interesting." She pulled a glass toward her. Timothy poured water from a pitcher.

"Thanks." She drank half the glass. "Three cells, right? OK, in one cell is the DNA code from the father carried in the sperm, in another is the DNA code from the mother carried in the egg. The third is an amalgamation unique to the individual Holn. One question we have yet to solve, though, is in replication. The Holn cells lack mRNA. From what we can gather, replication is assisted by protein chains. The sticky part is those mama and papa cells. The way it looks now, they replicate exactly the same every time without the faults you'd expect from being zapped by errant gamma particles, say. The offspring cell, however, is subject to random errors.

"Anyhow," she said, still peering at the screen, "gestation is approximately twenty-six months, and one mother bears two young but they are not identical twins." She looked up. "Again, we run into this triad business. The embryos form in three discrete parts and join into one unit only after fourteen months. A child Holn reaches adult size in about eight years, but not adult maturity for another thirty to thirty-five years. However—and this might be a key—they are not gender specific. Primary and secondary sexual characteristics do not show up until maturity. Although the children have ninety-nine percent of the physiology of the adult, they do not know if they will be male or female until they reach their form of puberty. In other words, there are three parts to the whole: male, female, and neither male nor female."

Matt straightened. "On, off and neither on nor off."

"Precisely."

"So you're saying," Miranda said, looking up from the scribbles that were evolving slowly into the form of a Holn, "they might have turned the human adults into children thinking they were studying a third and separate part of human culture."

"I don't think it can be discounted. This seems to suggest bias might have entered their studies, just as contemporary anthropologists sometimes let cultural bias creep into theories about earlier civilizations."

"I am puzzled about something," Dr. Innes said. "Dr. Danthen—"

"Ben."

"Ben, thank you, in one of your reports, you said no Holn came out of the ship and nothing was taken in. Is this possible for six years?"

"Yeah, we kept asking if they wanted anything, perhaps a snort of fresh ammonia, but they always declined. Said all they needed they had on board."

"Food?" Constance said.

"The Holn didn't eat, at least in our sense of sitting down and masticating bulk material. Refueling was more direct, nutrients in discrete packets." He shrugged. "Quantum eating, we dubbed it."

"Nothing was left at the site?" Matt said.

Ben waved hand. "Not a thing. And nothing entered or left the ship the whole time." He scratched his bearded chin. "Except the children."

"Did they take off and come back to leave the children?" Lindsey said.

"No," Wanda said. "The children were removed from the ship just before takeoff."

"An air horn or something started blasting about ten minutes before ignition." Ben shifted position. "And that sucker was loud, driving back the National Guard troops. Sometime during that period, the children were deposited in a depression well away from the ship's exhaust. How, when, we don't know. Nobody saw it. Any tracks left by tires or runners were obliterated by the rocket blast and later the trampling feet of the people at the site."

"What about before?" Dr. Innes said. "Just before they trapped the people inside, I mean."

Ben reached over to his laptop and pushed a button. The picture on the wall monitor switched from talking heads to a shot of the flat cabin. "Video from one of our surveillance cameras, this one pointed at the door of the museum. See that kid in the fluorescent orange shorts? He was the last human to get out before the door slammed shut. Indeed, in slow-mo, we can see the door slide right behind him, almost catching an ankle. Then the cabin immediately starts to rise, but it was halfway up the booster array before anyone realized there were still people—humans—inside. You can see some of the shouting and gesturing beginning here. Confusion quickly gave way to panic, mostly out of fear the ship was about to take off with them too close."

No one spoke as the cabin reached the top of the boosters and settled on top. "This is the way the ship sat for four days, June 5 to 9. The morning of June 10, they took off."

"Communications?" Miranda said.

"Not a peep after, but forty-five seconds before the doors shut, the datastream they'd been sending since a week after their landing stopped. Last words were 'The home grows distant.' A reference to the mother ship, we think."

"I'm still reluctant to accept that the Holn could learn enough about human physiology in six years to pull off a feat like this," Dr. Innes said. "As has been pointed out, we have been studying this subject for thousands of years and still do not know all its secrets."

"Time," Wanda said.

"Pardon me?"

"You need to understand the time frame here," Ben said. "The original race left the original planet in the original mother ship—a term, by the way, the Holn find highly amusing—about the time the Earth had cooled enough to allow single-cell organisms to survive. By the Cambrian explosion, the Holn had joined the original race on the ship, which had added two more species by then and added four more after the Holn joined. About the time ol' T. Rex was chomping around, the ship had changed course, eventually bringing it to this sector of the galaxy. About the time Socrates was trying to convince everyone they didn't know anything, the ship made another shift in course because the stellar group wherein our Sun resides showed promise. This decision paid off a couple thousand years later when they began receiving coherent energy waves—our radio broadcasts, the first echoes of what was to become an electromagnetic beacon in the wilderness.

"About the time we landed on our Moon, the Holn left the mother ship—destination, they weren't sure. It wasn't until they got close to Pluto's outer orbit before they were able to resolve the size and location of their destination. On the long trip in, they analyzed the by-now thousands of signals and picked what they thought was the dominant language. Their English is astounding."

Ben rubbed his nose. "So you see, they've had plenty of time to cogitate and learn. Many of those coherent energy waves contained information about human physiology. They've had a lot more than six years to learn this stuff. What's a few years taken off of a human being to them? Nothing. They did some research into the human form but—unlike us—they're too kind to kill their lab animals. So they just let them go, not realizing what they had done to them."

 

* * *

 

[["Welcome to Crosshairs, I'm Maynard Allbright, the right guy on the right, and he's Kensington Turrell, the wrong guy on the left. In the crosshairs is Dr. Avram Rolstein, administrator of the Holn Effect Task Force, back in Washington after meeting with his task force last week. Dr. Rolstein is a popular man these days and it's only with difficulty we've managed to sit him down between us in this studio so we can wrest some information out about an event that's reverberating around the world. And in this country, the debate is so intense it's shoving the presidential campaigns right off the TV screens.

"So, doctor, about those seventeen people, and the fact that all you scientists agree they are human—"

"We have not reached a consensus on that, although we are close. Besides, if three scientists ever agree completely on anything, it's a cult."

"I see. As I was saying, what's missing In these discussions, so far, and in general, is an examination of motive. What possible reason would visitors from outer space have for turning adult humans into child . . . somethings?"

"Some people would have you believe it was an experiment on laboratory animals, some would have you believe, as you've said, to plant some kind of alien life form on the planet. We don't know. We're searching all the records to see if the Holn mentioned something, dropped a subtle hint somewhere we missed—"

"Benign, you still say?"

"So far, Mr. Turrell. Six years they sat on that patch of New Mexico soil and didn't do a thing except talk. Never a threat, never a sign of weapons, although we certainly pointed a few at them—"

"You don't think they brought their own?"

"Undoubtedly, but we never saw them."

"All right, you're saying they sat out there for six years without giving a hint of what they're doing. Surely, though, they were aware of what their presence was doing to us. The Millennium Riots of 2004 should have been a clue. What have they said about that, Dr. Rolstein?"

"They asked many questions, and we explained as best we could. We tried to be honest about how the two groups who'd been camping out by their ship disagreed—"

"Two groups of whom?"

"The Enlightenment Network, Mr. Allbright, is certain these are the Wise Old Aliens come to solve all of our problems. The other, the Armageddon Group, is convinced the landing is a sign of the Last Days of Man. Their disagreements sparked two days of riots, forcing the arrival of the third group, the National Guard with their canisters of tear gas. Well, the Holn mulled it over, but never, ever made any judgment about what they were seeing. They just said it was all very interesting."

"Interesting enough to capture innocent humans and make them inhuman—"

"Come, Maynard, don't bring up that alien life form folderol again. We're trying to figure motive here—"

"It's simple, Kensington, when you strip it all down to basics: subjugation or eradication of the human life form. And here NASA sits on its collective posterior and refuses to go after them—"

"With what?"

"Dr. Rolstein, NASA is supp—"

"No, wait, you tell me how we're supposed to chase the Holn. We're down two shuttles and the others fly irregularly. The Delta Clipper and its successor programs have been abandoned, the so-called international space station is unmanned more than it is manned and moon bases remain a pipe dream. Plus, the SETI project that might have given us an earlier warning of their approach was hobbled back in 1993."

"It wasn't a good expenditure of taxpayer money—"

"Mr. Allbright, after all that's happened, are you going to sit there and say the project was a waste of money? After the Cold War was over, Congress kept prattling on about how space projects are too expensive and should be cut so we can rid ourselves of the big bad deficit. Well, the space budget was torn to shreds and we still have the damned deficit. The reason the space program is dying is because chowderheads like you two and your clones in Congress don't think there's anything out there worth studying."

"Dr. Rol—"

"You've got it backward, Mr. Not-so-bright. There're plenty of things out there for us to know. It's just that, as the Holn might have discovered, there's nothing down here worth studying."]]

 

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