O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!
-ROBERT BURNS
IT ALL STARTED AT THE LITTLE BOOKSTORE where Adrian liked to browse when he had the time. Browsing in the chain superstores wasn’t the same. In the superstores you could find almost any kind of book you wanted, and anything you couldn’t find could be located by computer and made available a day or so later. That was assuming you knew what you wanted, or could find it in the current maze of instant literature. But there were so many books that you couldn’t browse in an eclectic jumble of old and new. Anyway, the superstores didn’t smell right. They smelled like, well, like department stores with air recirculating every thirty seconds. Bookstores should smell like old leather and good paper and printer’s ink and maybe a little dust.
The book was on a table labeled “Remainders—Cults, New Age, UFOs.” The books had once been stacked neatly—the proprietor of the Book Nook, a Mrs. Frances Farmstead of elderly years, but with a youthful devotion to books nourished by some sixty years of reading and handling, liked them arranged so that all the bindings could be read at a glance—but now they were jumbled in a heap as if someone else had already rummaged through them.
That honed Adrian’s edge of irritation over his inability to get any closer to the goal he had been pursuing since childhood, ever since he had looked up at the stars and, like John Carter, had wished him-self among them. The feeling of irritation had been growing in recent months. His ambition to be an astronaut had been grounded by the inarguable fact that he was physically unimposing, and his poor hand-eye coordination had always made him last to be chosen at pick-up games. But he had a nimble and inquiring mind, and he had settled for the next best thing: aerospace engineering.
He had worked his way through university, joined a major aerospace firm after graduation, and resigned after a dozen years of routine assignments that got him no closer to his goal of reaching the stars, through surrogates if not in person. He had set up a consulting business, and was able to pick and choose assignments that appealed to him and seemed to get humanity closer to freedom from Earth’s gravity. But even second-hand space adventuring was hung up on chemical propulsion and obsolete vehicles. His own ambition, like the space program itself, was drifting. Humanity needed something totally new. The irritation had brought him into the Book Nook time and again; browsing had proved, over the years, a treatment if not a cure. But now someone else might have found the one text the book gods had intended for him, for which their mysterious hands had guided him into the store. These remainders were all one of a kind, and once one was removed it was gone forever. Ordinarily he would not have chosen this particular table—he had a skeptic’s fondness for books whose naive pretensions or paranoid conspiracies he could ridicule to his friends or even to himself—but he was not in the mood for such cynical amusements. The jumble attracted him, however, and he worked his way through the pile, restacking them neatly on the table, binding up, in the way Mrs. Farmstead would have done herself. The UFO Conspiracy, UFOs: The Final Answer, UFO: The Complete Sightings, and Cosmic Voyage, along with The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians, The Truth in the Light, Psychic Animals, and other annals of magic and the occult. Adrian could feel Mrs. Farmstead’s approving gaze from the antique wooden desk at the front of the store.
He held a book in his hand, turning it this way and that. The book had lost its dust jacket, if it ever had one, but it had a pleasant feel to it, and the title was catchy: Gift from the Stars. Perhaps it was a Von Daniken clone; he always enjoyed their innocent credulity. He opened it. The book had a frontispiece, unusual in a cheap text like this. It showed the vast metal bowl of the radio telescope at Arecibo, with the focusing mechanism held aloft by cables strung from three pylons. The title page listed a publisher he had never heard of, but that wasn’t unusual: fringe publishers were common in the cult field. The copyright page said that the book had been published half a dozen years earlier. Adrian glanced at the first page. It was the usual stuff: have we been visited? Are there aliens among us?
He leafed through the book, half decided to put it down, when he came across an appendix filled with diagrams. Not diagrams of cryptic incisions on arid plateaus in Peru or carved around the entrances to ancient tombs. These seemed to be designs for some kind of ship. Not “some kind of ship,” he decided with the gathering excitement he recognized as the eureka feeling, but a spaceship, and not the sketchy drawings of some putative crashed UFO concealed in a hangar in New Mexico or Dayton, but engineering drawings such as Adrian worked with almost every day. He took it to the desk.
“Found something you like, Mr. Mast?” Mrs. Farmstead asked. She was old but cheerful about it, with a plump, grandmotherly face and gray hair braided and wound into a knot pinned on top of her head with an oversized barrette.
“Enough to pay good money for it,” Adrian said. Mrs. Farmstead didn’t accept charge cards, but she had been known to run an account for someone short on cash who had fallen in love with a book. “Any idea where it came from?”
“Of course I do,” Mrs. Farmstead said. She maintained careful records that kept her in the shop, Adrian suspected, long after the time of its official closing. “But you don’t expect me to look them up for a three-fifty remaindered title, do you, Mr. Mast?” Her sharp glance over plastic-rimmed glasses dared him to ask for special service.
“Not this time, Mrs. Farmstead,” he said, paid his money, and took his hand-written receipt and his newfound treasure and walked out of the store, feeling no longer irritated but elated, almost trembling, as if what he had found there would change his life forever.
——
Nobody was dependent on him except those space travelers not yet liberated from the surly bonds of the Solar System, perhaps not yet born; for a dream he had sacrificed hopes for wife and family. Who was he kidding? His problem was that the women he was interested in weren’t interested in him, and the ones who were interested in him he found less exciting than his work. Ordinarily, then, there was nothing to draw him back to his one-bedroom apartment, but now a curious anticipation hastened his step.
He delayed gratification by changing into comfortable sweat pants, getting a cold can of beer from the refrigerator and a bottle of peanuts from the pantry, and settled into his easy chair in the living room opposite the television set he turned on only for the news, the science channels and the sci-fi series. Only then did he open his Gift from the Stars.
The first chapter was titled “Where Are They?” Although it seemed to be a discussion of aliens and the possibility that they might have visited the earth in ages past and even might be keeping track of us now, Adrian recognized a subtext the ordinary reader would never have noticed. A conclusion seemed to say that evidence of alien visitation may have been deliberately concealed by nameless government agencies, but that other alien contacts had occurred, or were yet to happen, that anyone with an eye to the sky or a mind to understand could be aware of. Read with greater sophistication, however, the chapter suggested that the evidence for alien visitation was not only thin but probably nothing more than the connecting of random dots; that aliens were the modern equivalent of angels and demons; and that belief in alien visitation and abduction was a substitute for antiquated religions, whose answers no longer seemed appropriate to contemporary questions.
Between the lines, however, Adrian detected an argument for the existence of aliens. Logic said that with all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, a good number of them would nourish life and a good number of those would develop technological civilizations capable of interstellar travel. Good scientists had agreed on all that. Surely there must be aliens older, wiser, and more advanced than humanity. But, as Fermi asked, where are they? Why aren’t they here by now?
The UFO believers, of course, thought they were here, observing us, maybe abducting people for their experiments, maybe having accidents that left their spaceship wreckage and alien bodies strewn across remote areas of the world to be hidden by government agencies concerned about popular panic or paranoid about alien takeovers, or committed to their own research and fearful of the release of dangerous information…. But Gift from the Stars suggested, subtly, that aliens had their own reasons for not visiting Earth, reasons that we could never know, unless, perhaps, we should go visit them.
The question Adrian had to answer was more immediate: why should the book he held in his hands be titled and written in such a way that it was virtually indistinguishable from a hundred, maybe a thousand, other books on UFOs and aliens? The only reason he could think of was that the author wanted to hide a message that would be found only by someone capable of noticing and understanding it. Like concealing a diamond in a heap of glass imitations. What better hiding place for obscure revelations than among the books that the only people who would take seriously were the people that nobody took seriously?
Unable to restrain his impatience any longer, he turned to the appendix. Here were the drawings he remembered. They could be for any kind of vehicle, a submarine, say, or an airplane without wings, but the design had non-aerodynamic extensions as if intended for use where fluid resistance was non-existent. The drawings were curiously uneven as if they had been prepared by some gross process different from the customary draftsman lines. Gaps in the drawings seemed to indicate details yet to be added or filled in according to individual preferences. But Adrian identified what was clearly a propulsion system based upon the reaction mass being expelled through nozzles at the rear of the vessel. The storage space for fuel seemed too small, however, and the reaction chamber itself seemed oddly shaped and also curiously small.
Adrian turned more pages. The book had a second appendix in which he discovered the design for an engine in which two substances would be combined and the energy obtained used to accelerate another substance through oddly shaped nozzles and past some kind of magnetic fields until it was released. A final sketch made sense of the limited storage space and the engine. It was a design for a container in which the substance within would never touch the sides. The substance was a plasma contained by magnetic fields maintained by some kind of permanent magnets built into the vessel, or perhaps the vessel itself was magnetic. A companion design showed how solar energy could be transformed into—what else could it be?—antimatter. Its combination with matter—perhaps hydrogen encountering anti-hydrogen—would convert the mass of both entirely into energy and provide the means by which humanity could reach the stars.
Would it work? Somehow he doubted it. It was all too pat, like a science-fiction gadget. But maybe that’s what all advanced technology looked like—not magic but obvious. And, like a cultist’s scenario, it all made sense, granted the premise, and was not that much different from imaginative concepts discussed in aerospace engineering circles. The difference was that these looked as if they were working designs, not concepts, and even, somehow, as if they were antiquated, like museum pieces or redesigns of historic airships such as the Wright brothers’ first craft. It would work, all right, probably better than the original, but it hinted at the existence of methods far more effective. Were those beyond the understanding or the technological capabilities of less-advanced species?
Adrian shook his head. He was allowing his imagination to take him into theories as weird as those of any UFO true believer. But that was what the book had done to him: he had picked it up as a minor contribution to a neurotic belief system and it had evolved into a document addressing his deepest needs. And, although the text did not say so, the title suggested that somehow these designs had come from somewhere else, perhaps from aliens. Perhaps they were, indeed, a gift from the stars.
——
Adrian showed the book to Mrs. Farmstead. “You said you could tell me where this came from.”
“Yes,” she said, peering up at him owlishly over her glasses, her plump face framed in coils of gray. “But surely one of these is enough.” She looked at his face as if reading his need. “Oh, all right, since it’s you, Mr. Mast.” She ran a hand-held optical scanner across the ISBN number on the title page and then punched a couple of keys on her computer. “It arrived six months ago in a box of remainders from a jobber. Cheap.”
“All cult books?”
“Most of them, I expect.”
“Could we find out who wrote it?”
She pointed at the name on the title page: George Winterbotham.
“Could you find an address for him?” Adrian asked. He apologized. “I know this is a lot of trouble.”
Mrs. Farmstead seemed about to say something but instead turned back to the computer and called up Books in Print. Nothing. She tried several library databases, including the Library of Congress. Nothing. She laughed. “This may be the only copy in existence.”
Adrian grimaced. “That may be more accurate than you think.”
She looked at him. “What are we doing here, Mr. Mast? Is it illegal?”
“It may be dangerous,” he replied, only half in jest, “but it’s not illegal unless it is illegal to publish a book revealing information that some people might want withheld.”
“Trade secrets?” she asked. “In that?”
He had hoped to keep Mrs. Farmstead out of it. Something about this situation had a wrongness to it—the information that should not be in a book like this, the accidental way it came into his hands, the curious anonymity of its author. He flipped the book open to its appendices. “There are these,” he said. “They’re spaceship designs.”
“How do you know?”
“You know books. I know spaceships,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever introduced myself: I’m an aerospace engineer. I work in designs like these.”
“How very odd,” she said and leafed through the appendices. Her expression told him they meant nothing to her. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“I’d like to find the author and ask him where he got the designs.”
“I see,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “But why would he publish them in a book like this?”
“Exactly,” Adrian said. “It suggests that he wanted someone to find them, someone who would understand what they were—”
“Like you, Mr. Mast?”
He nodded. “And nobody else would know they were there, particularly nobody who might want to keep them from the public.”
“And that nobody, or even a group of nobodies, might be dangerous to someone who found out what they didn’t want found out.”
“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Farmstead.”
“Well,” she said and turned back to her computer. “I don’t like people who want to keep things from being published.” She tapped several keys. “We can look up the publisher.”
The publisher, at least, was listed on the Internet. He had two books under his name, both UFO texts. Neither one was Gift from the Stars. Before Adrian could stop Mrs. Farmstead, she had typed in a telephone number. Somewhere a phone started ringing.
“Hello?” she said into a speaker so that Adrian could hear. “Is this Joel Simpson? The publisher?”
“Yes,” came the hesitant reply. “Who’s calling?”
“I have a customer who is trying to find another copy of a book published by you half a dozen years ago.”
“I’ve only published two books,” Simpson said.
Mrs. Farmstead raised her eyebrows at Adrian as if to say, “He’s lying.”
“Gift from the Stars.”
“There must be some mistake. I never published a book by that title,” the voice on the other end said. “Who is calling?”
“Sorry for the trouble,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “It must have been another publisher with the same name.” She pressed a button that closed the connection. “Well, Mr. Mast? You may be right.”
“I wish you hadn’t made that call,” Adrian said. “I have a feeling that somebody got to Mr. Simpson and scared him into suppressing the book and reporting anybody who inquired about it. Maybe this is the only copy.”
“I never told him my name.”
“There’s such a thing as caller ID and even tapped telephone lines.”
“I never thought of that,” she said. “The way you talk about it, it sounds like some kind of conspiracy.”
“I hope I’m wrong,” he said. “I hope I haven’t been reading too many of those cult conspiracy books.”
“No matter,” she said, her plump face tightening into a look of determination, “we’re going to get to the bottom of this, no matter what.”
“We seem to have run into a brick wall,” Adrian said.
“There are ways around a wall,” she said darkly. “As you said, Mr. Mast, books are my business. Just give me a few hours with this computer, and I’ll find the author for you—or, at least, where we can locate the author.”
“We, Mrs. Farmstead?”
“I told you that I don’t like people who want to keep things from being published,” she said. “I don’t like people who threaten other people, either.”
“I won’t turn down your help,” Adrian said. “But I never intended drawing you into this.”
“I am in, Mr. Mast,” she said, “and unless you forbid me from helping, we’re in this together. But tell me: what is it we’re trying to do?”
“We’re trying to discover where these designs came from and whether there are more of them,” Adrian said. “And then we’re going to build a spaceship and go to the stars.”
“That’s worth taking a few risks for,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to go to the stars.” She turned back to her computer.
That night the Book Nook burned down.
——
Next morning they traveled stand-by to Phoenix. Adrian paid for the tickets with cash that he had withdrawn from an ATM, but he had to give their real names to the young woman who sold him the tickets and demanded photo id. He had tried to persuade Mrs. Farmstead not to go along, but she was determined.
“Your bookstore has just been burned,” Adrian said. “Somebody doesn’t want us to follow this up.”
They were sitting in the coach section, Mrs. Farmstead in the window seat, Adrian in the seat next to her, leaving the aisle seat empty. They had their heads close together like conspirators.
“Nonsense!” Mrs. Farmstead said. “The building was nearly one hundred years old, and the wiring was almost as old. It was an accident waiting to happen.”
“But right after your telephone call?”
“People have a dangerous tendency to connect events, Mr. Mast—”
“Call me Adrian,” he said.
“All right,” she said, “and you can call me Mrs. Farmstead.” She looked at him over the tops of her glasses and smiled. “Misconnecting events is what’s wrong with UFO fanatics. They get cause and effect all mixed up. Just because two events happen, one following the other or next to the other, doesn’t mean they’re related. Ad hoc propter hoc, it’s called.”
“So you think—?”
“Coincidence,” she said. “That means, “happening together.” I’ve spent a lot of time with dictionaries. I like words, Adrian, and I think they need respect.” They were passing over southwest Kansas with its circular green patches below attesting to the existence of central-pivot irrigation. “Now that’s cause and effect, Adrian,” she said, pointing out the window beside her. “Like the book that has sent us off on this adventure. Either those drawings are intended to make otherwise unlikely comments seem more believable—”
“Not that, Mrs. Farmstead,” Adrian said. “I know legitimate designs when I see them.”
“Or, as you suspect, someone has tried to hide a golden acorn on the forest floor.”
“That’s a good image, Mrs. Farmstead. Only”—he hesitated—“this may be dangerous business.” He held up a hand to stop her response. “I know: you think recent events are unrelated, and that there’s no danger from people who don’t want that acorn found. You may be right. But you may be wrong, and you shouldn’t have to take that chance.”
“At my age, you mean?” she said.
“At any age. You should be home taking care of cleaning up the site of your store, or collecting your insurance.”
“And sitting in my rocking chair?”
“Rebuilding. Restocking. Whatever.”
“I don’t choose to retire and, to tell you the truth, I was getting a little bored with the book business. People don’t buy good books anymore. Hardly any books at all to tell the full story. Maybe the fire was a blessing in disguise. It may have liberated me to do something important, like giving humanity the stars.”
“That’s eloquent, Mrs. Farmstead,” Adrian said.
“Besides, as you said, your area is spaceships. Mine is books. How far do you think you’d have got looking for spaceships?”
He thought about it. “You’re right about that. You found the publisher and his address.”
“But not the author,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “The book must never have been registered with the Copyright Office.”
“But it had a copyright notice.”
“That’s the law. You can copyright it by putting on the notice, but you don’t have to complete the registration. The author may not even have wanted it copyrighted. The publisher may have printed the notice automatically.”
“So,” Adrian said, “what do we do next?”
“We find the publisher and force him to reveal what he knows.”
“The name and location of the author?”
Mrs. Farmstead nodded. “And that’s what we’re going to do. But I’ve got a question for you: if your suspicions are correct, what does it mean?”
“I don’t even like to talk about it—it’s too bizarre.”
“Trust me. I’ve read a lot of bizarre scenarios while I was waiting for customers.”
Adrian looked out the window past Mrs. Farmstead. Time had passed, and they were flying over the mountainous northern corner of New Mexico. “I’ve got a theory,” he said, “that Winterbotham, or whoever he really is, was in a position to intercept a communication of extra-terrestrial origin.”
“From aliens?”
Adrian nodded.
“What kind of communication?”
Adrian shrugged. “Radio. Gravity waves. DNA. Some kind of message, anyway. It may have had some general images or it may have consisted only of the designs. Or Winterbotham may have received or deciphered something that looked vaguely like a spaceship and the engines that powered it, and invented the rest. Only somebody—maybe the people he worked for—didn’t want him to publish it in some normal fashion, and he had to sneak it out in a way that wouldn’t be suspected.”
“That’s bizarre, all right.”
They were silent for a long time, thinking about the bizarreness of their mission.
“The only thing that makes it seem at all plausible,” Adrian said finally, “is where we found it.”
“And your belief in it,” Mrs. Farmstead said.
“There’s that,” Adrian agreed. “That most of all. Trained people recognize authenticity. There’s something about all this that speaks to me.”
“Like books and art,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Only sometimes even the authorities fail to recognize fakes.”
Adrian nodded. “I didn’t say it was infallible. Sometimes wish-fulfillment gets in the way. But there’s more: the fact that there may be only one copy. The anonymity of the author. The denial of the publisher.”
“The burning of the Book Nook.”
“Even if we call that an accident,” Adrian said. “My theory is that if the designs are real, aliens have sent us the means to reach the stars.”
“Why would they do that, Adrian?”
“That’s the question,” Adrian said. “And there’s no way to get the answer unless we build the spaceship and go visit the aliens. There may be people who don’t want us to go. Or don’t want the world to have the technology implied by those designs. And they’re the ones we need to watch out for.”
By that time they were preparing to land in Phoenix, and there was no more time for speculation.
——
Joel Simpson lived in a small town in northern Arizona. Adrian had rented a car in Phoenix. He and Mrs. Farmstead had argued about that and the need for Adrian to produce a driver’s license, until Adrian had pointed out that his name had never been associated with the book or Mrs. Farmstead’s store or her telephone inquiries. They had driven north on Highway 17, through deserts and national forests, past Indian reservations, through Flagstaff, and close by the Lowell Observatory where much of the world’s apprehensions about aliens had started with Percival Lowell’s observations of the “canals” on Mars and his speculations about intelligent Martians nourishing their dying planet. Adrian wanted to stop, but Mrs. Farmstead vetoed the idea.
“The fewer marks we leave along the trail, the more difficulty anyone will have trying to follow us,” she said.
They came to a stop, toward evening, in a little town not far from the Grand Canyon. Mrs. Farmstead wanted to make a side trip to see the gorge carved out by the Colorado River over the ages. “I’ve always wanted to see it,” she said. “I never thought I’d be this close, and I may not have another chance.”
Adrian vetoed that notion. “We don’t have time. Maybe in the morning.” But he knew, and she knew, that if their mission were successful they would be leaving in a hurry.
Mrs. Farmstead looked at the town with what Adrian interpreted as dismay. There was a business section two blocks long, with a grocery store, an official building of some kind, two filling stations, one with a café attached, and several vacant storefronts. This was a town that was being emptied of its citizens like water evaporating from a desert pond. “In a town this size,” she said, “strangers will stick out like weeds in a flower bed. And all we have for an address is a post-office box.”
“We’ll stop at one of the filling stations for gas and ask for a motel or a bed-and-breakfast,” Adrian said. “Say we’re going to head on over to the Grand Canyon in the morning.”
Mrs. Farmstead looked at him with admiration. “Nothing like sticking close to the truth,” she said.
They chose the nearest filling station. A talkative clerk told them about the best bed-and-breakfast this side of Flagstaff, run by his aunt Isabel and if they told her that Sylvester had sent them, she’d be sure to treat them right. “And give him a fee for touting the place,” Mrs. Farmstead told Adrian later. Now she said to the clerk, “Isn’t this the place where that fellow publishes those UFO books?”
The clerk looked blank.
“I’ve read some of them,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Simpson, I think his name is?”
“Never heard of him,” the clerk said.
His aunt was more helpful. “Simpson? He must be the odd duck who believes in flying saucers. I’ve heard he had something to do with books. He lives the other side of town.”
“How would we find it?” Adrian asked.
Mrs. Farmstead added quickly, “If we wanted to look him up, maybe say ‘hello.’”
“I’d have to draw you a map,” Isabel said. “No house numbers in a town like this.”
Adrian looked from the map to Mrs. Farmstead. “Thanks,” she said. “Maybe we’ll drive past there on our way to the Canyon in the morning.” She gave Adrian a nudge.
“We’re sort of night-owls,” he said. “Do you suppose we could have a key to the outside door in case we come in late?”
“A key?” Isabel said. “Nobody locks their doors around here.” Adrian looked at her with astonishment.
“How wonderful!” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Come on, dear.” They had introduced themselves as mother and son, and now, being maternal and filial respectively, they linked arms and walked out into the narrow street, redolent with the smell of desert wind and cactus. Adrian half-expected to see tumbleweed rolling down the street.
Simpson’s house, if that was what it was, was dark except for a single lighted window, perhaps a study or a bedroom or a living room. The night was black, but they could make out the outline of the building—it seemed square and low, perhaps adobe or imitation adobe. When the light went out, Mrs. Farmstead reached into her handbag and pulled out a flashlight.
“You are resourceful,” Adrian said.
“A woman living alone has to be prepared for anything,” Mrs. Farmstead said. She led the way to a detached garage.
“We’re not looking for a car, Mrs. Farmstead,” Adrian said.
“A small publisher can’t afford to pay for storage,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “and it makes sense to keep his records where he keeps his stock.”
The side door to the garage was unlocked. Isabel had been right about doors. They entered quietly, and Mrs. Farmstead played her light around the inside. The only trace of an automobile was old oil stains on the concrete floor and a lingering odor of gasoline. But one wall was filled with books on rough shelves; sealed cardboard boxes were stacked against the back wall; on the near side were a gray metal desk, a telephone, a fax machine, and a gray metal filing cabinet.
Adrian inspected the books, and Mrs. Farmstead looked through the files in the cabinet, starting with the bottom drawer. “Simpson was right,” Adrian whispered. “There’s only two books: The Aliens Are Here and UFOs and What They Mean. No Gift from the Stars.”
“Means nothing,” she said. “No Winterbotham file either, but then there wouldn’t be, would there?” She riffled through the files in the other drawers. “It would take days to go through all these. I’ve always wondered about movies, how they can come up with the incriminating file in a few minutes.”
“Wouldn’t there have to be tax records?” Adrian asked.
“Ah!” she said and turned to look for files marked by the year. She chose the one for six years earlier. “Ah-ha!” she said. “Publishing costs for Gift from the Stars, and payment of one hundred dollars to someone named—”
“Peter Cavendish,” a voice said from the door.
They jerked and turned. A small man in a red-and-black plaid robe over blue pajamas stood in the doorway with a large shotgun in his hand. It was pointed at Mrs. Farmstead.
——
The garage was redolent with the electric scent of tension, but Mrs. Farmstead stared coolly. “You’re very quick to reveal information you’ve been asked to forget!”
The barrel of the shotgun began to droop. “What do you mean?” the stranger asked.
“Maybe you’d also tell us where we could find Peter Cavendish?” Mrs. Farmstead continued.
The shotgun barrel lifted again. “Why would you ask that?”
“The people we work for would like to know how much you’d reveal to strangers.”
“You mean you work for—?”
“What do you think? You know what you were told: To turn over all copies of the book and wipe out all evidence of its existence. Well, we’ve discovered that at least one copy of the book has survived, and people are making inquiries. And now we find, Mr. Joel Simpson, that a record of the author survives in your file.”
The shotgun pointed to the stained floor. “I didn’t know,” Simpson said. He was thin and nervous. “I wish you people would make up your minds—the IRS says I gotta keep the information, you say I gotta get rid of it. What’s a guy to do?”
“Bull!” Adrian said, entering the conversation for the first time. “The IRS doesn’t care anymore. You just forgot.”
“Just like you’re going to forget Peter Cavendish,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “And just to prove it you’re going to tell us where he is.”
Simpson’s eyes got suspicious. “If you’re one of them, you know where he is.”
“Of course we know,” Adrian said. “We just want to know if you know, so that when we tell you to forget it, you’ll know what to forget.”
Simpson turned that over in his mind without seeming to unravel it. “He’s in a mental hospital in Topeka, Kansas,” he said.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Now forget it! Forget Peter Cavendish! And forget you ever saw us!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Simpson said. “You bet. I never want to see any of you again. You’re worse than aliens.”
“What do you know about aliens?” Adrian asked sharply.
“Nothing!” Simpson said. “Nothing at all! I’m sorry I ever heard of them. I’ll burn my books.”
“Too much of a giveaway,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Keep everything as it was. Just forget the rest!”
“Yes, ma’am—and sir.”
Outside, in the car, Adrian said. “Quick thinking back there.”
“I read a scene like that in a spy novel,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Ian Fleming, maybe. I’ve read so many I get them mixed up. You were quick on the pick-up.”
“Do you think he’ll notify anyone?”
“Not for a while. Then maybe the shock will wear off and he’ll begin to think about it, maybe wonder why we were sneaking around in the middle of the night, maybe analyze your nonsense about revealing Cavendish’s whereabouts so that he would know what to forget.”
“It was all I could think of at the time,” Adrian said.
“Don’t apologize for anything that works.”
“Maybe he doesn’t have a contact.”
“Not likely,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “They always leave a number to call in case people start making inquiries or start nosing around. Sooner or later he’ll think to check.”
“So sooner rather than later we’d better get out of here,” Adrian said.
When they got back to the bed-and-breakfast, Isabel wasn’t around. She was in her room asleep, they hoped. They messed up their beds to look slept-in, Adrian left money for the night’s stay on the end table in the entry hall along with a note Mrs. Farmstead had written saying “Decided to make an early start for the Canyon. Here’s money for the rooms. Thanks for everything,” and they tiptoed out, easing the door shut behind them.
They headed back to Flagstaff, bypassing the Grand Canyon and the Lowell Observatory once more, before turning east on Highway 40. Mrs. Farmstead dozed in the passenger seat until the sun came up just before they reached Gallup.
“A mental hospital, Adrian?” she said. “I think I was dreaming about mental hospitals and a patient named Cavendish.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too. But it figures, doesn’t it? Where’s a better place to stash Cavendish? Where he can talk all he likes about aliens and messages from outer space and spaceships.”
“We’ve got to figure out a plan of action,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “and how we’re going to protect ourselves.”
By the time they arrived in Albuquerque their plans were complete, and all they had to do was check in the car and catch the first flight to Kansas City. Adrian used their own names again, trying not to glance around the pueblo-style airport to see whether someone was watching. “In movies,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “people always give themselves away by acting as if someone were watching them. Almost as if they expect to be nabbed, and, of course, they are.”
“By now, of course,” Adrian said, “they may have traced the license plate on the rental car and have my name. They could be here in a few hours, maybe, but surely not before we’ve left. I wish we’d thought to make up fake IDs.”
“In novels,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “pursuers never get thrown off the scent. They’ll be waiting for us in Topeka.”
“Life isn’t a novel,” Adrian said. “In a book people get caught because the plot gets more complicated if they’re caught, and if the pursuers were thrown off, that would be the end of a story, wouldn’t it?”
Mrs. Farmstead nodded. “But it helps to anticipate the worst scenario. That way we won’t be surprised.”
“We’ll have our insurance,” Adrian said.
At that moment their flight was called and they passed through the metal detectors and onto the plane, not looking back.
——
Topeka had three major mental hospitals, the Veterans Administration, the state, and the Menninger Foundation. The first two had developed mostly because of the psychiatrists and reputation accumulating around Will Menninger’s pioneering work. They weren’t far apart, but Adrian thought random inquiries would only tip off pursuers. Maybe he and Mrs. Farmstead could think of a way to narrow the search.
“He probably wouldn’t be a veteran,” Adrian said.
“But a government agency might be able to put him away there,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Maybe manufacture documents? Pull strings?”
“Possibly,” Adrian conceded. They were sitting in another rented car in a large shopping center, having already spent some time in a computer service center. On this occasion, Mrs. Farmstead had signed for the car in Kansas City, leaving a different trail to slow potential pursuers. “But government red tape might make it nearly impossible to contact a patient, at least in the time we have.”
“Before they catch up with us.”
“Or intercept us. As for the state hospital—I don’t know the rules in this state, but wouldn’t he have to be a resident before he could be admitted?”
“You’d think so,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “That leaves—”
“The Menninger Clinic.” He glanced into the rearview mirror and then back at Mrs. Farmstead. “Do you ever feel like we may be fleeing from phantoms?”
Mrs. Farmstead nodded. “The guilty flee,” she said. “But the worst case scenario—”
“I’m tired of subterfuge,” Adrian said. “Let’s play it straight.”
Ten minutes found them on the campus of the Menninger Clinic. It was an attractive place, not like a hospital or institution at all, with trees and lawns and garden beds and buildings scattered here and there, and the breezes and green odors of a park. In the middle of everything was an office building. After five minutes of winding roads, and half an hour of questioning by security guards, they finally reached a reception desk.
“We’re looking for a patient named Peter Cavendish,” Adrian said. “We’ve been told he was hospitalized in Topeka, and we thought he might be here.”
“Are you relatives?” the pleasant young woman asked.
Adrian shook his head. “We came across a fascinating book he wrote, and we thought we’d take the chance we might be able to meet him while we were passing through.”
“A book?” She turned to her computer and clicked a few keys. “Yes, we have a Peter Cavendish, but you need a written request in advance that must be processed by the resident’s treatment team.”
Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead exchanged glances.
“Golly,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “we’re only going to be in Topeka a few hours.”
“It might help Mr. Cavendish to talk to someone who has read his book,” Adrian added.
“And admired it,” Mrs. Farmstead said.
The receptionist hesitated. “Let me call his attending psychiatrist, Dr. Freeman.” She turned to her telephone and soon began talking to someone. She swung back to Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead. “What’s the name of the book?”
Adrian hesitated and said, “Gift from the Stars.”
The receptionist gave the title into the telephone and listened while Adrian’s breath caught in his chest. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll get an orderly to take you to the unit.”
The building looked like a two-story brick apartment building. Inside, it was like an attractively laid-out and furnished home. They waited in an off-white “day room” with a cream-colored sofa and brown, tapestry-covered easy chairs, framed landscapes on the wall, and a television set in one corner, while the orderly disappeared down a hallway. He returned in a minute or two with a medium-sized man in a dark shirt and slacks and a cheerful Scandinavian sweater; it was white with red reindeer. The newcomer had his hands in his pockets. He seemed to be middle-aged, perhaps in his fifties, with blond hair and blue eyes and a calm expression. Adrian wouldn’t have given him a second glance on the street unless he had looked closer and noticed the stiff, almost apprehensive set of the man’s shoulders and the way his eyes kept scanning the room but never looked directly at Adrian or Mrs. Farmstead.
“Peter Cavendish?” Adrian said.
The man nodded.
“I’ll be in the next room if you need me,” the orderly said. Cavendish looked after the orderly until he was clearly out of earshot and said, “Are you from them?”
“Them?”
Cavendish’s glance flicked back and forth. “You know. Them.”
“No,” Adrian said. “We just came to see you. We read your book, Gift from the Stars. We wanted to talk to you about it.”
“They don’t want me to talk about it.”
“They’re not here. You can talk to us.”
“How do I know it’s not a trick?”
“Do we look like tricky people?” Mrs. Farmstead said. She leaned forward, her hands spread open as if to show that she was concealing nothing. “I sell books. He designs airplanes.”
“And spaceships,” Adrian said.
Cavendish looked at them for the first time, and his face relaxed, as if he had been wearing a mask and the fasteners had broken. Adrian realized that Cavendish had been holding himself together. Tears appeared on the lower lids of his eyes. “You’ve come to rescue me,” he said.
“The orderly said you could walk away any time,” Adrian said. “That’s what they tell you,” Cavendish said darkly.
“But we have come to rescue your ideas,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Could you tell us about the book?”
“It’s all true,” Cavendish said.
Adrian nodded. “We believe it. But what part—”
“Everything. The aliens are here. You may be aliens for all I know.”
Cavendish’s body tensed again.
“We’re just people,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Like you.”
“That’s what they’d say, wouldn’t they?”
“I’m interested in the spaceship designs,” Adrian said. “I’m an aerospace engineer, and I think I could build a spaceship from those designs.”
“Yes,” Cavendish said. “I got them out of there, you know.”
“From the NASA project?” Adrian guessed.
Cavendish looked puzzled. “From SETI, of course. Cosmic rays. Energetic stuff. Too energetic to be natural, the physicists told me. Figure it out, it makes a picture. Right? You’ve got to decipher the code. But they make it easy. They want you to figure it out.”
“Anti-cryptography,” Adrian said.
“But then you don’t know,” Cavendish said. He looked bewildered.
“Do they want you to come? Why don’t they come here instead? Why don’t the others want the information to get out? What will happen to the world if everyone knows?” He was getting agitated. “Why did they tell us? Why do they want us to come? Do they want to torture us? Dissect us? Make us slaves? Eat us?” Tears began trickling down his face.
“It’s all right, Mr. Cavendish,” Adrian said. He felt like backing away from the man standing in front of him, looking almost normal but acting strangely.
Mrs. Farmstead had better instincts. She moved forward and put her arm around Cavendish’s shoulder and led him to the sofa. She sat down beside him and held his hand.
“Are there any other drawings?” Adrian asked.
“They destroyed them,” Cavendish said more quietly. “The other aliens. The ones who are here. The ones who don’t want us to go.” He glanced around slyly. “But I hid the real ones.” He looked apprehensive again. “Maybe they’re right, though. Maybe it was all a mistake.”
A change in the light and a puff of breeze alerted them more than the muffled sound of the door opening behind them. “I think you’ve talked long enough, Peter,” a calm voice said.
——
Cavendish jumped up nervously as Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead turned toward the door. A tall, sandy-haired man in a tweed jacket and imitation horn-rimmed glasses stood framed in the doorway. He looked a bit like Cary Grant but sounded more like Clint Eastwood.
“Fred,” he said, and they turned to see the orderly in the entrance to the hall, “I think Peter has had enough company for one day. Take him back to his room and give him a Xanax.”
“Yes, Dr. Freeman,” the orderly said. He took Cavendish’s arm and they disappeared down the hallway. Cavendish gave a single anguished look back at them before he returned to his unnatural calm.
“So,” Adrian said, turning to the psychiatrist, “you’re Cavendish’s physician?”
Freeman nodded. “And who are you?”
“My name is Adrian Mast. And this is Mrs. Farmstead.”
“Frances Farmstead,” she said.
“We were hoping to get some information from Cavendish about a book he published half a dozen years ago,” Adrian said.
“The famous book,” Freeman said.
“What’s famous about it?” Adrian asked. “As far as I know there’s only one copy, and we’ve got it.”
“Peter talks about it a lot,” Freeman said. “Maybe we’d better sit. We may have more than a little to talk about.” He walked into the room and sat down in one of the easy chairs, and motioned Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead to the facing sofa. “You’re not casual visitors as you suggested to the receptionist.”
Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead looked at each other. Adrian said, “Not casual—in the sense that we weren’t just passing through. We sought Cavendish out. But casual in the sense that we represent nobody but ourselves and our curiosity.”
“Curiosity about Gift from the Stars?”
Adrian nodded. “Do you believe in the book, Dr. Freeman?”
“I’ve never seen a copy.”
Adrian looked at Mrs. Farmstead. She unzipped her large purse, rummaged around in the central pocket, pulled out the book, and handed it to Adrian who passed it on to Freeman. The psychiatrist turned it over in his hands and then opened the cover to the title page and to page one. “Now I believe in it,” he said and held up a hand, “though not in the sense you mean. But, more to the point, you believe in it.”
Adrian cleared his throat nervously. “At this point I have the urge to convince you that we’re not crazy. We’re not UFO believers. We don’t think aliens are zooming around, abducting people, maybe even passing for humans. But could some of the book be derived from reality rather than imagination?”
“Anything is possible, Mr. Mast,” Freeman said carefully. “You can find truth in some unlikely places and, as the French say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. But this is the sort of book I’d expect a paranoid schizophrenic to write, if one wrote a book. Not many of them do; they don’t have the attention span. But Peter wrote this book before he came to us.”
“And how did he come to you?” Mrs. Farmstead asked. “Was he more disturbed then? Did he have any explanation for his condition?”
“Those are not the kind of questions I feel free to answer. Speaking as his physician.” Freeman put his hands together. “You’re the ones who need to justify your presence here.”
“Turn to the appendices,” Adrian said. He waited while Freeman leafed to the back of the book. “Those are spaceship designs. I’m an aerospace engineer, and I would stake my reputation on the fact that those designs are genuine. I could build a spaceship from these if I could find something more detailed. And if I could develop the technology they imply.”
Freeman nodded slowly. “I’ll take your word for it. Not that I believe it. I have no proof, you see.”
“Any more than you have proof of Cavendish’s—condition,” Adrian said. He almost said “insanity” before he realized that psychiatrists probably found that word offensive.
“Could it have been induced?” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Is Cavendish on drugs? Was he placed here?”
Freeman shook his head. “He is on drugs, of course. He needs to be calmed occasionally, as you saw just now, and we’re trying to restore his sense of reality by restoring his chemical balances. But paranoid schizophrenia is a genetic predisposition sometimes triggered by an emotional crisis.”
“Not by drugs?” Adrian said.
Freeman chose his words carefully. “He came here talking about aliens and conspiracies, referred to us from a hospital in California. This is a place less conducive to theories of persecution. It was thought he had a better chance of recovery.”
“And what if we told you that there may be evidence of a conspiracy to suppress the distribution of this book?” Adrian said. “Maybe Cavendish isn’t crazy.” There, he had used a word even more likely to offend.
Freeman didn’t seem offended. “He suffers from schizophrenia. You can take my word for that. And for the fact that I’m not a member of any conspiracy. I am trying to cure his condition, not cause it.” Freeman stood up. “I think you’re reading far more into this than is there. Peter Cavendish was a member of a team searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. He had the background and ability to draw these designs, even make them plausible, perhaps even workable. But, like you, he surrendered to his desire that what he wanted to be true was really true. To oversimplify, the conflict created in him by this self-deception, and the necessary supporting details of a conspiracy to keep him from going public, triggered a psychotic reaction that brought him here. When he is able to recognize that, he will be on the road to recovery.”
“You mean,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “when he’s willing to accept your version of reality.”
“The world’s version,” Freeman said.
Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead stood up. Adrian shook his head as if trying to avoid the inevitable. “I hope,” he said, “you won’t find it necessary to report this incident.”
“There is nobody to report it to,” Freeman said, “except the team that supervises Peter’s case. I have to note your visit, but if I can I won’t elaborate on your beliefs. In return I’ll need something from you: by your support for Peter’s delusions, you have given his treatment a setback, and I would like your promise that you won’t disturb him again.”
Adrian and Mrs. Farmstead nodded.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Farmstead,” Freeman said. “Mr. Mast. Give up this notion. You’re only wasting your time.”
“Goodbye, Dr. Freeman,” Adrian said, “and thanks for your consideration.” He reached out his hand. Freeman looked at it for a moment and then, with a start, returned the copy of Gift from the Stars.
——
Adrian sat disconsolately at the counter in the coffee shop, a cup of black coffee cooling unnoticed in front of him. “So Cavendish is crazy, and so are we for chasing after something as weird as this.”
“You’re taking Dr. Freeman’s word for it?” Mrs. Farmstead asked. “Aren’t you?”
“Well, maybe. Freeman could be working for the people who stopped Cavendish’s publication, who wanted him hospitalized. But he seems genuine.” A wicked smile creased her face. “But just because a person is crazy doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a few sane thoughts. Like Dr. Freeman said about the stopped clock.”
Hope flickered in Adrian’s eyes. “That’s right.”
Mrs. Farmstead took a sip of her hot tea. “Dr. Freeman suggested that maybe the stress of writing the book, of inventing what he wanted to be true, set him off. But what if it wasn’t that—what if it were the predicament of knowing he had stumbled onto some fantastic truth and then it was suppressed?”
“And of not knowing the right thing to do,” Adrian picked up excitedly. “Maybe, he thought, the people who wanted to destroy the information were right. Why were the aliens sending the plans? What did they want from us? Why did they want us to have a spaceship that could reach the stars? Why didn’t they simply hop in their spaceships and come to visit us?”
“Exactly,” Mrs. Farmstead said. “Those aren’t easy questions. They might make anyone flip out. That’s what Cavendish kept trying to say.”
“I’ll admit,” Adrian said, “questions about the aliens and their motives have run through my mind, too, while I’m trying to go to sleep and sometimes when I wake up during the night.”
“And like the bumper sticker when I was young,” Mrs. Farmstead said, “‘just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t after you.’”
“But if that were the case,” Adrian said, depression edging back, “you’d think that somebody would be tapping us on the shoulder about now.”
“Mr. Mast, Mrs. Farmstead,” a voice said behind them. “That sounds like a cue.”
They turned. Behind them was the orderly named Fred. He had been wearing white pants and a white jacket at the Clinic, but now he had changed into a rumpled brown jacket over his white pants, and he looked like a bookish graduate student.
“You?” Adrian said.
Fred nodded. “You know how much orderlies make? They paid me pretty good just to keep my eyes open and let them know if anybody came around asking about Mr. Cavendish. Look, there’s somebody who wants to talk to you.”
“Suppose we don’t want to talk to him?” Mrs. Farmstead said.
Fred shrugged. “Up to you. But sooner or later you’re going to talk to him, and the sooner it is the sooner you can stop looking over your shoulder.”
“Are you threatening us?” Adrian asked.
Fred spread his hands. “You see any threats? You know, working around a mental institution you get some insights into behavior. I’ve learned this much: it’s better to face the unknown than to run from it.”
“And where do we do this?” Adrian asked.
“Is this where some goons throw us in a black limousine and whisk us off to Washington?” Mrs. Farmstead said.
“You been watching too many thrillers,” Fred said. “You can go wherever you want, or you can follow me to Forbes Field, where a man has just arrived in an Air Force jet. He’s waiting for you.”
Adrian looked at Mrs. Farmstead, and Mrs. Farmstead looked at Adrian. Adrian shrugged. “Let’s get it over with,” he said.
By the time they reached Forbes Field, the sun was setting. It had been a long day that had started far from this spot, and there had been little sleep and less food. They were tired and hungry.
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.