I sell what all men desire.
-MATTHEW BOULTON
THE OBJECTS WERE BLACK AGAINST the overwhelming brilliance of the sun. Hovering just outside the coronasphere like moths drawn to a flame, their wings seeming to flutter in the solar wind, they maintained their positions and their existence against the elemental forces acting upon them. If they had been alive, they would have been unbelievable evidence of the variety of existence, but they were even more remarkable: they were machines built from alien specifications to liberate humanity from the Solar System in which it had been imprisoned. They were a gift from the stars.
Frances Farmstead replayed the tape, but this time she let it continue until the end, when a shape like a transparent shark drifted across the screen. The sun shone through the image almost undiminished, and the black moths could still be distinguished if she peered, but something halfway between an after-image and a sketch crossed in front of the sun and the mechanical creatures sucking its energy. It was a ship—or the Platonic idea of a ship—where no ship existed, like a reminder of a promise unfulfilled, like someone walking across her grave.
Frances looked around the shop as if comparing it with a bookstore she once had owned. But this was spacious where the Book Nook had been narrow and quiet, and the books that had stood at attention upon shelves and stared at the ceiling from tables had been replaced by the backs of videotapes and the jewel-boxes of CD-ROM disks. Between the shelves were classic movie posters framed in white: The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing, The War of the Worlds, Attack of the Flying Saucers, Independence Day, Contact, and Star Wars: The Final Victory.
Frances had outlived her husband and her son, and her daughter had stopped communicating after Frances had opted for rejuvenation, and now Frances had outlived the age of reading.
She sighed, as if coming to a decision, and spoke to her computer. “Phone Adrian Mast,” she said. She could hear the connection click and then the telephone begin to ring, but the screen remained blank. After three rings, the sound stopped and a computerized voice announced, “This number is no longer in service. For directory assistance consult your local website.”
“Directory assistance,” she told the computer. After a few moments the computer said, “Directory assistance has no listing for Adrian Mast.”
“Locate Adrian Mast using all available databases,” she said. She tried to suppress a feeling of alarm. The minutes passed slowly.
Finally the computer spoke. “I have identified eleven Adrian Masts, but none is the person you seek. As far as my resources can determine, that person does not exist and has never existed.”
Typical computer literalness: how could a person have never existed if the computer had parameters to match? But that misplaced irritation was only Frances’ effort to avoid panic. With Adrian she had hunted down the author of a UFO cult book in which Adrian had found what looked like, to him, working designs for an alien spaceship. Now Adrian had been eliminated from all the world’s records.
It was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Why should Adrian disappear? Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to delete all traces of him. As if Adrian were—what? The man who knew too much?
Frances looked up at the posters on the far wall and then back at the computer. She idly tapped a few keys and then deleted the gibberish that appeared on the screen. Once people had reasons to get rid of Adrian.
But that was ten years ago, and nothing had happened since. Well, a great deal had happened to the world, but nothing had happened to Frances and Adrian except that they had drifted apart, once their adventure had ended. The alien technology had worked; devices were orbiting the sun. Solar moths were transforming the sun’s energy into high-energy gamma rays and beaming them back to receivers in orbit where they were converted into antimatter. The entire process was marvelous beyond understanding, but seeing was believing, like the creation of an electric current when one rotates a wire through a magnetic field, or the illumination of an incandescent filament when a switch is turned. The documentary recently on her screen had mentioned “magic crystals” constructed of “strange matter,” and the only thing that made it credible was that aliens had sent the plans and human scientists had blinked and then said it was possible. Power was available almost everywhere for almost nothing because in space the antimatter was combined with matter to create energy that was beamed to receivers on Earth that rebroadcast it around the world…
That was all accomplished now, faster than anyone had thought possible, and everybody was rich and happy. The world was a different place. Space travel had been pushed aside, to be sure, but that was no reason for Adrian’s disappearance. He was only a small voice unheard against a general background of self-satisfaction.
Only—if this were a Hitchcock movie, something else should be happening about now.
As if that were a cue, the door swung open, and a man and a woman in one-piece gray suits, like ill-matched twins, were inside the shop, not so much entering as materializing. They displayed no weapons, but their hands alone looked lethal. “You’ll come with us,” the woman said as if there were no question of non-compliance.
——
The man seated behind the ancient metal desk was tall and thin to the point of emaciation. His dark eyes seemed too large for his face. Frances thought of the movie Freaks, but in real life people couldn’t stare unless they had paid admission. She looked away uncomfortably and studied the room; life was like a movie set—a person could tell a great deal about a character from his surroundings and even anticipate the actions that were going to happen. But this place offered few clues. It was a second-floor office in a twenty-five-story building in what had once been a thriving suburban business development. As the suburbs had sprawled farther into the countryside, they had dragged the administrative centers with them, but now the virtual office had replaced the old vertical units with their requirements for transportation and elevators and air-handling equipment and toilets and food and drink.
The office to which Frances had been escorted by the improbable twins matched its location. Its windows looked out upon buildings being razed and land returned to meadow and park. A shabby sofa covered in something that looked like green leather stood against one wall, and equally shabby side chairs occupied each end of a battered wooden coffee table. Above the sofa was a tattered poster of a bullfight in Mexico City. On the opposite wall was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
“Well, Mrs. Farmstead,” a voice said from behind the desk, “are you pleased with what you’ve done?” The voice was strangely familiar.
Frances looked back quickly. “Makepeace?”
The skeletal man nodded.
“What have they done to you?” The last time Frances had seen William Makepeace he had been an immense fat man, like Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, in a vast, empty hangar.
“The same thing they did to you,” Makepeace said. “Or we did to ourselves. We shed our weight with biogenetic help. With me the pendulum swung a bit too far; on you it looks good, and the rejuvenation process seems to have served you well.”
“I cut my hair,” Frances said absently, touching her gray bob. “But what are you doing here? The national government is virtually out of business.”
Makepeace looked down at his bony hands. “A good bureaucrat can always find work. A good bureaucrat is someone who does his job efficiently and quietly, accepts blame for whatever fails, and passes along any credit to his superiors. Now I serve the Energy Board.”
Nobody paid attention to the administration of utilities as long as whatever they supplied was cheap and uninterrupted. But Frances had heard of the Energy Board. She remembered vaguely that it was governed by five Chairs representing his or her continent and overseeing its distribution of the energy stolen from the sun.
“You asked me if I was pleased with what we had done, Adrian and I, and I presume you mean the world we created when we released the alien designs. And my answer is that the world has managed to absorb alien technology without a tremor.”
“Proving that you were right and the rest of us were wrong,” Makepeace said.
“So it would seem. Has the world ever been in better shape? Energy is being broadcast from mountain-top receiving stations, global warming is being reversed, pollution is being cleaned up, and the quality of life around the world is being raised to Western standards. People everywhere are happy and prosperous, education is universal, the arts are flourishing, the ghettos are being depopulated and demolished, the birthrate has dropped to a supportable level—what’s not to like?”
“A virtual paradise,” Makepeace said, as if in agreement.
Frances looked at Makepeace. “Virtual? Maybe that’s the right word: utopia may not be here yet, but it isn’t unimaginable. The only thing on which we haven’t made any progress is spaceflight. No matter what we do, nobody will let us build a ship.”
“You can’t expect people to get excited about space when they have everything they need here on Earth,” Makepeace said.
“That’s one of the problems with paradise, isn’t it?” Frances observed. “No one wants to leave.”
The ceiling lights above them went dark. Frances twitched, but Makepeace sat unmoved, as if the occurrence were commonplace. The only light came through the windows behind him.
“If it’s paradise,” Makepeace said, “why are violent crimes and acts of terrorism on the increase?”
“That’s news to me.”
“And to most people. In good times bad news seems to drop below the horizon. Nobody notices.”
The overhead lights came on again.
“Or maybe it doesn’t get reported,” Frances said.
“Censorship, Mrs. Farmstead?” Makepeace said. When he shook his head, it looked as if it might fall off his pipe-stem neck. “No need, and no means. The Energy Board is in the business of distributing energy, and it has no facilities for controlling the media. And even if it could, so much is available on the Internet that omissions in the media would be obvious. The answer is that nobody is paying attention.”
“Except you.”
Makepeace nodded carefully. “A few bureaucrats like me are paid to keep track and to ask why these things are happening.”
“You didn’t bring me here to get my opinion,” Frances said flatly. “Adrian Mast has disappeared,” Makepeace said.
“So I found out. And there is no proof he ever existed.”
“No electronic proof,” Makepeace said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not easy to delete physical evidence, written documents, files, that sort of thing,” Makepeace said. “No one can work magic. But we’ve become dependent on electronic information, and a search program with instructions to eliminate anything it finds can remove the most available evidence of a life. But why would anyone do that?”
“I thought it was you,” Frances said. She made a sweeping gesture that included the office and the bureaucracy it represented.
Makepeace shook his head. “Maybe it was Adrian himself.” Now it was Frances’ turn to look skeptical.
“Aliens?” Makepeace suggested.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Frances said. “Why would they send us plans if they were here already?”
“To throw us off the track?”
“I still think it was you,” Frances said, “or someone who looks a lot like you, or like you used to look. But whoever it was, I’m going to find out.”
Makepeace looked as pleased as his death-mask face could manage. “I hoped you would, Mrs. Farmstead,” he said.
——
Frances studied the cabin nestled in a grove of oak trees. A lot had happened to her and to Adrian in ten years, as well as to the rest of the world. Consultants seldom needed to meet in person with their clients anymore, and Adrian had retreated from his urban apartment to this rustic isolation. Frances had visited his apartment a couple of times, but Adrian’s move had been part of the distancing process that had resulted, over the past half-dozen years, in little more than holiday greetings. She hadn’t even known he had moved until she had inquired for him at his former building.
Now she wondered whether she had identified the situation correctly. Maybe it wasn’t a Hitchcock scenario after all; maybe it was a horror story or a mystery. It was important to get the genre right. Otherwise you wouldn’t know what to look for or how to behave.
The cabin had no close neighbors. The taxi that had brought her had passed a few farmhouses along the way, but none were near enough for its occupants to keep track of Adrian’s coming and goings. Here, far from the city, Frances missed its busybodies. In the police shows, neighbors witnessed whatever happened at any time of day or night; the difficulty was persuading them to talk. Maybe that was what Adrian had been looking for: anonymity. The only community that mattered to him was scattered around the world, and had only a faint hope of coming together, some day, out among the stars.
Finally, after circling the house and finding only a browsing rabbit to startle into leg-kicking terror and a quail that exploded from some underbrush, Frances decided to go in. The door was unlocked. In the movies an unlocked door was a cue for the detective to draw his pistol and sidle cautiously into the room beyond, steadying his weapon with both hands, aiming first one way and then the other. But she had no weapon, and she swung the door open and walked in, uncertainty fluttering in her stomach.
The doorway opened directly into a living room. It had smooth painted walls, casement windows, and a hardwood floor—not at all like the inside of a cabin; it was one thing to desire the rough-hewn honesty of a cabin and another to live in one. The only concession to tradition was a big fireplace set into the left wall; in front of it was a rag rug and a sofa upholstered in multi-colored tapestry, with matching chairs at each end. A desk, with a closed laptop computer on top, stood against the opposite wall. Beside the desk, a lawyer’s bookcase with glass fronts held three shelves of eclectic books. No one else was in the room, and everything was neat, the way Frances remembered Adrian’s apartment, as if the cabin had been untenanted since he left or was taken.
Two doorways, one with a closed door, occupied the far wall. She opened the door to the one on the left. Beyond was a bedroom with an adjoining bath. The bed was made and the bedroom was empty and neat; so was the bath, with folded towels draped in racks. The shower was dry. The other doorway led to a kitchen and breakfast table with four chairs. For the first time Frances noticed something out of place; the remains of breakfast dishes cluttered the table: a bowl, a box of cereal, a mug, a spoon. The bowl was empty, but the mug was half full of cold coffee; a sheen of oil floated on top.
Adrian had been interrupted just after breakfast but before he had finished his coffee. She went back to the living room and sat down in one of the tapestry-covered chairs, frustrated. So big a problem; so little information. She thought back to her earlier observation about the cabin: identifying the genre was essential. Each had its peculiar protocols, and if you didn’t ask the right questions, the answers you got would be either irrelevant or misleading.
So, she thought, this was a mystery, and she needed to ask questions about motivation. The first possibility was that Adrian had left of his own volition interrupted by a message or a messenger, with a summons so urgent his morning coffee couldn’t be finished. But what was so urgent that a man as organized as Adrian couldn’t finish his coffee? Or leave a message? The second possibility was that he had been abducted. The room revealed no sign of a struggle, but that wasn’t conclusive: he could have been surprised at the door or compelled to leave by overwhelming odds or weapons.
She looked from the fireplace to the computer on the desk against the opposite wall. She stood up and walked to it, released the catch, and raised the monitor into place. She pushed the power button. When the icons swam into view, she called up Adrian’s files. A numbing array of folders appeared on the screen. Adrian had been busy. The titles seemed to describe reports related to his consulting business; a few of them seemed to deal with his plans to build a spaceship. She could come back to those later, if necessary.
She returned to the icons and clicked on his e-mail server. Unlike the programs themselves, this one required a password and clicking on “okay” did no good. She tried several passwords, including her name, her birthday (did Adrian know it?) and his, recalling that unlike Adrian she had sent him greetings on those occasions, “Winterbotham,” “Cavendish,” “stars,” and “space.” Then she tried “giftie,” and the files opened.
There were a few messages waiting to be read, all dated in a two-day period that began six days earlier and ended four days earlier. The date Adrian disappeared and the date he had been eliminated from humanity’s electronic memory? Frances scanned the messages; all but one related to Adrian’s consulting business, and the remaining message said only “Haven’t heard from you in a couple of days. Are you okay?” It was signed “Jessie.”
The register was empty of messages sent and received earlier than six days previously. That was suspicious. Of course Adrian could have deleted his messages as they were read or sent, but that didn’t make a lot of sense. At least some of the messages related to his business must have been worth keeping, but someone else, particularly someone in a hurry, would have deleted everything.
But what they might not have known was that deleted messages remained in the trash until they were squeezed out by new deletions. Frances was about to retrieve them when she was interrupted.
“What are you doing here?” a woman said.
——
Frances turned to see the shape of a woman outlined in the doorway. As the woman moved into the cabin with athletic grace, Frances noted with a pang that she was slender and dark-haired, and, with a sharper pang, young and attractive, in a tomboyish way. Frances pushed those feelings away: she would never be any of those things again.
“I might ask you the same question,” Frances said.
“I’m Adrian’s girlfriend.”
Frances looked her up and down. She was dressed in jeans and a yellow t-shirt. Adrian was fifty-one, and this woman could not be more than, say, twenty-five. Frances could sense the young woman flushing under the scrutiny, but Frances didn’t care. More was at stake than the feelings of a stranger. “I doubt that.”
“Well,” the woman said defiantly, “we’re very close.”
“For people who have never met,” Frances guessed.
It must have been shrewd, because the young woman flinched. “We were e-mail correspondents. When he stopped responding, I decided I’d better check up.”
“‘Haven’t heard from you in a couple of days. Are you okay?’” Frances quoted.
“How did you know?” the young woman asked.
Frances gestured at the laptop. “You look like a Jessie.”
“That’s me,” the woman said. “Jessica Buhler.”
“And you flew halfway across the country to check up on your e-mail friend?”
“How did you know?” Jessica said.
“You don’t get a tan like that around here,” Frances said. “Florida?”
“California. Near San Diego. But you haven’t told me who you are.”
“A real friend of Adrian’s—Frances Farmstead. Like you I got concerned when I couldn’t get in touch with Adrian, and I got really concerned when I discovered that he didn’t exist.”
“He didn’t exist?”
“Not according to all the electronic records.”
“No!” Jessica said. And then, “Adrian has mentioned you.” Now it was Jessica’s turn to appraise Frances. “He said you’d helped track down the author of the UFO book with the diagrams. That’s how we got acquainted, on a serve-list for spaceship enthusiasts.”
Frances wondered, for a moment, why she hadn’t been included on such a list. “You don’t look like a spaceship enthusiast.”
“What does a spaceship enthusiast look like?”
“Strange,” Frances said. “Like me.”
“That’s odd,” Jessica said. Then, “I mean, why should someone who wants to build a spaceship be strange?”
“You look like someone who could get plenty of satisfaction right here,” Frances said. “You wouldn’t need to leave Earth.”
“You don’t know me. The question is—where is Adrian?” Jessica continued. She looked around the room as if he might be lurking somewhere.
“That’s what a number of people would like to know. The government suspects aliens; I suspect the government.”
“Aliens!” Jessica echoed.
“That’s the way I said it,” Frances responded. “Oh, aliens might have the motivation; they sent us a ticket to the stars and we cashed it in for creature comforts. They could be screwing things up, casting an occasional sabot in the machinery of our joy. But why send us a design if they’re already here? And they sure aren’t going to be interacting from a distance of dozens of light years. On the other hand, Adrian might be an annoyance to the people who don’t want our peace disturbed.”
Jessica stood as if poised between attack and flight. She had, apparently, never before considered either of these possibilities. “Aliens!” she said again. Then, heading for the door, she called over her shoulder, “Maybe that explains it.”
“Explains what?” Frances called after her. When Jessie didn’t reply, Frances trotted to catch up.
Jessica led the way to a meadow beyond the circle around the cabin that Frances had made before she entered. “This!” Jessica said, pointing.
Frances stood beside the young woman, panting. In front of them was a circle of burnt and blackened grass, about fifteen meters in diameter. Frances looked at it, puzzled.
“See?” Jessica said.
“You see,” Frances said, absently, “but, as Sherlock Holmes said, you don’t observe.” What she couldn’t see was the scenario this evidence fit. Oh, clearly it would fit an alien abduction category, but the questions to be asked seemed to hang in the air, unsupported, and to suggest no good answers. It was the wrong genre.
She looked up and started back toward the cabin, ignoring Jessica trotting along beside her, trying to talk about aliens, when she saw the smoke. She ran as fast as she could, but Jessica got there before her and stood looking at the flames already rising above the back of the cabin.
“My god!” Jessica said. Frances brushed past her. Jessica tried to grab her arm. “What are you doing?”
Frances ran to the front door, raised her arm across her face and over her mouth and nose, and went through the open front door. The room was filled with smoke pouring through the kitchen doorway. Frances felt her way to the desk. She grabbed for the computer. It was hot, and she almost dropped it as she picked it up, but she yanked it free from the cord plugged into a wall socket. She turned and staggered toward the front door.
As she was fumbling her way through the smoke, a hand reached out to guide her into the sunlight and the open air. She stood, shaking, gasping for breath, the laptop dangling from her right hand.
“That was crazy!” Jessica said.
“We had to have it,” Frances said. “It was our only clue. And somebody wanted it destroyed.”
“Or some thing,” Jessica said.
——
They stood outside the Visitor Complex, the evening sun over their left shoulders, sinking toward the remote Gulf. They knew it was the Visitor Complex because the signs along Highway 3 had announced it for the past few miles, and the sign high on the building read:
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER
and under that
VISITOR COMPLEX.
But under that someone had stenciled:
ABANDONED IN PLACE
The entrance to the facility was overgrown by vegetation and cluttered with debris. The Space Center had indeed been abandoned and apparently for several years. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire met the building on each side, and the doorway had been covered with plywood and nailed shut. Frances saw no way into the building or around it. Maybe Jessie could scale the fence, but Frances knew her limitations. And once they were inside, the Space Center was too big to cover on foot.
“Are you sure this is the place?” Jessie said.
“Clues never produce certainty,” Frances said. “The detective accumulates evidence and plays hunches based on subconscious juggling of that evidence, like Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe.”
“Who?” Jessie asked.
“Never mind. Anyway, we’ve been over this too often: Adrian was exchanging e-mails with people about alien spaceship design and petitioning the Energy Board for the resources to build one.”
“And then there were those curious messages chastising humanity for not getting construction started,” Jessie said.
“No way those could be from aliens,” Frances said decisively. “Not in English. Not from the distance of the stars. Not signed ‘KSC.’ That could stand for a lot of things, but the most obvious meaning is ‘Kennedy Space Center.’”
“Only it’s abandoned.”
“Just as the world has abandoned space,” Frances said. “This has to be the place. It just feels right.”
It had felt right all the way down from Atlanta in the rented car, to Macon on 75 and on 16 to Savannah and then down the coast on 95 to Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, and Cocoa, before switching to Highway 3 and heading back north to KSC. It had felt right when they passed a junkyard that looked like an old Emshwiller painting, with a Redstone rocket, several dilapidated rolling camera platforms, and the remains of what looked like a supersonic transport. A junkyard, that was what the space program had become, and now the facility that had made it possible had been abandoned in place.
The only thing that hadn’t felt right was Jessie Buhler beside her all the way, talking, insisting that she couldn’t go back to California without finding out what had happened to Adrian. But now here they stood, not far from what felt right, and they couldn’t get in.
Still chattering, Jessie pried at the plywood without success. Finally she gave up in frustration. “If you’re right about this place,” she said, “there must be an entrance where people can drive in and out. They would need food and other supplies, and that requires frequent and easy access.”
“They might use airplanes or helicopters,” Frances said. “Landing strips may be abandoned, but they’re still in place.”
“People would notice air traffic,” Jessie said. “But not a car or truck.”
Frances looked at Jessie with a newfound respect.
“So let’s look,” Jessie said, getting back into the car.
They drove back to the road. The Space Center was on a barrier island between the mainland and the thin strip of beach that ran from Cape Canaveral down to Melbourne, with the Banana River on the east and the Indian River and a National Wildlife Refuge and its swamp on the west. One road entrance was overgrown with vines and clearly had not been used since the station was abandoned. An alligator was sunning itself on another, and nothing could persuade Frances to disturb it. A fallen tree blocked a third entrance, and a fourth, available only from Titusville, was cluttered with debris that may have been left when the Indian River overflowed or a hurricane had passed.
The entrance from Titusville was guarded by the omnipresent chain-link fence and a sliding chain-link gate with a drab beige booth beside it. Frances edged the car up to the gate, trying to avoid the worst of the debris. The gate looked rusty and dirty as if it hadn’t been used in months or even years. “Take a look,” she told Jessie.
“Why me?” Jessie asked.
“You’re younger and quicker,” Frances said.
Carefully searching the ground before each step, Jessie finally reached the gate. She looked back. “It’s locked,” she said.
“Give it a yank anyway,” Frances said.
Jessie pulled at something Frances couldn’t see and then turned around holding something in the air. “Either it was broken or only meant to look locked.”
“The power must have been shut off long ago. Push the gate open,” Frances said.
Jessie pushed. The gate slid back smoothly as if it had been oiled recently. “Looks like you were right,” she said, as Frances rolled the car through the opened gateway and Jessie got back inside.
“Either that or someone else is holed up here,” Frances said. She stopped the car on the other side of the gate. “You’d better shut it.”
“Not me,” Jessie said, shivering. “I hate wild animals. And anyway, we may need to leave in a hurry.”
They headed across what once had been a bustling complex specializing in hurling men toward the moon. Now it was a vast, silent sea of concrete in which their car moved like a tiny bottle tossed into the ocean.
Only it wasn’t empty. Weeds, some of them as tall as bushes, had grown up in cracks. Little brown wild pigs scattered in front of them as the car approached, and here and there a wild boar snorted at them, trotting from behind a building to assert its territorial rights. Armadillos lifted their heads from their inspection of the ground and sidled away when the car got close; alligators didn’t seem to care, although they heard a distant roar. Vines and small trees reached from the Indian River to reclaim the land from civilization’s efforts to pave it into submission. Woodpeckers pounded trees for insects. Rattlesnakes sunned themselves on ledges and in empty patches of concrete. Eagles soared overhead, and occasionally, winging through the darkening sky, a snowy egret. Insects splattered against the windshield and threatened to invade the interior through closed windows.
“When they say ‘abandoned,’” Jessie said, “they meant returned to nature and the native populations. It certainly doesn’t look as if anybody has been here.”
“Don’t forget the gate,” Frances said, but she looked lost as well. Where on these roads, among these enigmatic structures, would a band of kidnappers hide?
She felt the abandonment of this place, the loss of purpose that the buildings and the stretches of concrete had once symbolized, the bustle of people and vehicles that had expressed the human will to conquer space, the roar of massive engines that had shouted their defiance at the Earth that kept its offspring tied to its apron strings.
Over on the Cape side, a couple of hundred yards from the beach and the blue Atlantic Ocean beyond, were the remains of a launch pad. Half-a-dozen twenty-foot concrete and metal arms supported a doughnut ring of concrete and exposed metal. The metal parts wore a patina of age and despair. An “abandoned in place” sign was stenciled on one of the slabs. Another slab had a plaque attached to it. Frances didn’t get close enough to read what it said. The entire place filled her with melancholy, like a Space Age Stonehenge raised to forgotten gods, and the plaque, she had the feeling, was inscribed with the names of ancient heroes.
Frances pulled to a stop, with their backs to the ocean, facing the vast Space Center complex with its roads and runways and buildings. “I don’t know where to look,” she said. “We could spend a week here and still not exhaust the possibilities.”
“What about that place?” Jessie said, motioning toward a huge square structure that towered in the middle of the Center, dominating the entire complex. “It’s big enough to hide a small city.”
“That must be where they assembled the big rockets,” Frances said. “Well, why not?”
She headed back toward the massive building. It loomed even bigger as they approached, until the top reaches seemed to disappear into the blue sky. Most of it was white with darker panels. As they got closer, they could see some low outbuildings. On one side a gigantic American flag, perhaps two hundred feet tall, had been painted. Then came a dark panel inset with a lighter rectangle and, on the other side, a huge NASA symbol, once dark blue, now faded. Temporary structures surrounding the building had deteriorated and some had fallen apart, but the main building still seemed solid and as resistant to time as a latter-day Great Pyramid.
Another chain-link fence surrounded the building, and turnstiles guarded the entrance. One of them had broken, however, and lay on its side beside the fence, its metal pipes reaching helplessly toward the sky, the entrance it had once sealed gaping beside it.
“The Vehicle Assembly Building,” Frances said, as if that were the answer to a crossword puzzle. “The VAB. That’s what they used to call it. Shall we go in?” She got out of the car without waiting for an answer.
The doorway to the VAB had been covered by plywood, but the wood, like the turnstile, had fallen away, leaving a dark, forbidding rectangle. Frances stepped through gingerly, Jessie following closely behind.
Inside the building, rain was falling. Frances waited just inside the doorway until her vision returned. Light filtered from louvers high above, shining through the mist of descending rain and the clouds that had formed in the remote upper reaches of the vast spaces enclosed there. When the shower eased, Frances could see the inside of the building, though the far walls and the distant ceiling faded into gray nothing.
She felt again as if she were in a cathedral built for an outworn worship. She shook herself and began noticing details: a wide avenue traversed the middle and on each side platforms, catwalks, what seemed like elevators, and cranes, a lot of them, and two huge cranes high above that crossed a gulf.
“Adrian!” she called out in desperation, knowing that they could never exhaust the hiding places in this incredible structure. The name echoed back to her from near and far, rolling around the cavernous interior and returning to her moment by moment.
“Please don’t do that again,” Jessie whispered. “It sounds so mournful. Like a lament for the dead.”
——
Frances moved down the wide thoroughfare that ran through the middle of the building. Tools and leaves and other debris were scattered across what once must have been scrubbed as clean as her kitchen floor. In the distance loomed a tall structure. As Frances got closer, she realized that it was a rocket on a platform, solid boosters attached to an external tank. She craned her neck to look up at the top. All it needed, she realized, was a space shuttle and transportation to a launching pad and it could be launched.
“What is it?” Jessie asked.
“Either a rocket that was abandoned when the rest of the place was shut down,” Frances said, “or something that a bunch of amateurs are trying to cobble together from left-over parts. Either way, anybody would be out of their mind to trust their lives to it.”
Her words echoed less stridently from the partitions around them. For a moment they obscured the noises someone was making on a nearby catwalk. Then they heard footsteps. Coming closer. Jessie squeezed Frances’s upper arm. Frances did not turn around.
“That’s right,” someone said. “It’s an exercise in faith, like lighting a votary candle.”
“Adrian?” Frances said.
“You’ve found me,” a voice said softly.
Frances turned. Adrian looked much the same as she had seen him last—was it four years ago? Maybe a little older around the eyes, a little grayer around the edges. But his blue eyes were still as steadfast and concerned. “Adrian!” she said. “You’ve put us to a great deal of bother. Why didn’t you let us know?”
Adrian spread his hands in a universal gesture of helplessness. The gesture also happened to indicate the space around them. Occupying that space, a few paces away, were four men and a woman, dressed in white, uniform-like coveralls. Frances had been so focused on Adrian’s footsteps that the approach of the others had gone unnoticed. They looked grim and determined, a bit like Adrian himself when he was thinking about spaceships.
“They talked me out of it,” Adrian said.
“I suppose they were the ones who came and took you away,” Frances said. Adrian nodded. “Against your will?”
Adrian hesitated. “Against my better judgment.”
“Which means,” Frances said, “that they had been in touch with you earlier, and that you had disagreed about the next procedure.”
“They were—persuasive,” Adrian said. “Not that I was opposed to their goals. Only their methods.”
“They’re space-nuts, too?” Her epithet concealed a deeper pain. What was there in a few humans that yearned for liberation? Was it the eternal wanderlust or something deeper?
“Including someone I want you to meet,” Adrian said. He turned toward the steep stairs down which he had come.
Standing at their foot was a man in slacks and jacket who looked familiar. “Cavendish?” Frances said.
The man nodded.
“Last time I saw you was in Menninger’s Clinic in Topeka,” Frances said.
“I was cured,” Cavendish said simply. “With the help of some biogenetic materials.”
“But not cured, apparently, of your interest in alien spaceship designs,” Frances said.
Cavendish fidgeted. “Not of that,” he said.
“Careful, Frances,” Adrian said. “He still gets agitated.”
Cavendish held up a hand. “That’s okay.” But his head began to twitch.
“Did you figure it out?” Frances asked.
“Frances!” Adrian cautioned.
“Why they sent the designs?” Frances continued.
Cavendish held out his hands to show that they were steady. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Why did they send the designs? Why didn’t they just come here? What do they want from us?”
“And the fact that there are no answers doesn’t bother you anymore?” Frances asked.
“Of course it bothers me. But I can think clearly now, and I understand that there are answers. We won’t find them, however, until we build the ship and go where the answers are. That’s the only way we can find peace.” His breath came out at the end, in an explosive rush, as if he had been holding it in all the time he spoke.
“That’s the way it is,” Frances said. She motioned toward the partially assembled rocket. “But you don’t intend to go anywhere in that, I hope.”
“That’s just for practice,” Cavendish said. “When we finally get the resources to build the ship, we’ll need experience, won’t we? So we sneak a little power, at night, when nobody’s paying attention.”
“And how is all this going to get you anywhere?” Frances asked. This time she was speaking to Adrian.
“I don’t know,” Adrian said.
“Did you know that they removed all proof of your existence?” Frances said. “At least the electronic part.”
Adrian looked accusingly at Cavendish. “You didn’t!”
Cavendish shrugged. His head had stopped twitching. “We were practicing again. One strategy we have considered is to make ourselves sufficiently irritating that the Energy Board will protect itself.”
“With the pearl of space?” Adrian asked.
“What about the power stoppages?” Frances said. “The sabotage? The upsurge in violent crime?”
Cavendish looked surprised. “Not us! But that would add to the irritant factor.”
“I’ve noticed a few outages,” Adrian said, “but I thought—”
“It was normal,” Frances concluded. “Right. But Makepeace doesn’t.”
“Makepeace?”
“He’s working for the Energy Board now. He wanted me to find you. He says there’s a lot of unusual activity going on that nobody notices because of the good times.”
“Shouldn’t you introduce me to your companion?” Adrian said. “What’s she doing here?”
Jessie stepped from behind Frances looking a bit sheepish. “I’m Jessie.”
Adrian raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”
“Jessica Buhler.”
“Who is Jessica Buhler?” Adrian asked.
Frances turned accusingly toward Jessie, but before she could say anything they heard the roar of jets outside.
——
The distant entrance to the Vehicle Assembly Building was filled with tiny black figures. Frances looked around. The coveralled space-nuts had disappeared and so had Cavendish.
“Why did you do it?” Frances asked Jessie.
“Why blame me?” Jessie said defiantly. “Maybe that man—Makepeace—put a tracer on you!”
“You’re the plant,” Frances said. “Why?”
Jessie looked contrite. “All right, I might as well admit it. When I started, it was just another job, and by the time I got involved it was too late.”
“Involved?” Frances said. “If I’d known—” Jessie said. “If I’d known you—and Adrian and what was at stake—”
“You set the fire?” Frances said accusingly.
“Not me,” Jessie protested. “Maybe somebody else.” She took a ragged breath. “What I found out is that I’d like to build a spaceship. I wish I could be one of you,” she said softly. “I know it’s too late, but that’s what I’d like.”
Frances noted the way Jessie looked at Adrian and felt a pang of jealousy. There was something attractive about a man who cared more about an idea than about relationships.
Adrian had been looking back and forth between the two of them. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. He motioned toward where the black figures had turned into people, men and women, in form-fitting gray uniforms. They were approaching rapidly, spread out across the broad aisle like a military outfit, trotting.
Frances shook her head. “That never works,” she said. “In the movies and the TV shows, the pursuers always catch up. Sometimes the culprits get away temporarily, but they get caught in the end, and that’s when people get hurt.”
“This isn’t the movies, Frances,” Adrian said.
“I know, Adrian, but movies are a lot easier to understand. A lot of wisdom has been written and filmed, and you might as well take advantage of other people’s analyses. Anyway, your friends or kidnappers—Cavendish and his crew—ought to have a chance to escape.”
“That’s true,” Adrian admitted. “But what about—?” He nodded in the direction of Jessie.
“I’ve done all the betraying I’m going to do,” Jessie said.
“Good,” Frances said.
The people in the gray uniforms, looking like clones of the ill-matched twins who had sprung into Frances’ store the day before, surrounded them. There were eight of them. Even as young and athletic as they seemed, they were breathing hard.
“Welcome to the Vehicle Assembly Building,” Frances said. “May I show you around? Those are bridge cranes, those big ones up there, and over there, that is an external tank mated to a pair of solid-rocket boosters but without, I am sorry to say, the orbiter—”
“Which one of you is Adrian Mast?” one of the women asked.
“I’m Adrian Mast,” Adrian said.
“You’ll come with us,” the woman said. She was tall and slender but she held herself like an acrobat.
“By whose authority?” Adrian asked.
“By the authority of the Energy Board.”
“The Energy Board has no police powers.”
“This is an administrative action taken to prevent an interruption in service.”
Adrian looked at Frances. “Shall we go?”
Frances stepped forward. “You’ll have to take me, too,” she said.
“I have no orders—” the woman began.
“Me, too,” Jessie said.
The woman shrugged. “Come with us.” She turned and the three of them followed her out down the long, broad aisle toward the entrance, the other uniformed personnel slightly behind them like an honor guard.
A jet helicopter stood outside the VAB, its rotors idling. It was painted Energy Board gray with a silver lightning bolt on the nose. So was a small jet airplane parked beside the helicopter. The honor guard escorted them to the airplane and their leader motioned them up the lowered stairs. After their brief exposure to Florida sunshine, the interior seemed dark, and even darker after the stairs were raised behind them, closing them into the ship. Almost immediately, it began to taxi.
As her eyes adjusted to the interior, Frances noticed the skeletal man sitting in a swiveling leather chair a few feet away. “Makepeace,” she said. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Frances,” Makepeace said, “you’d better be seated. We’ll be taking off soon. And Adrian. And Jessica.”
“You know Jessie?” Frances said, seating herself opposite Makepeace, while Adrian took a seat beside her and Jessie, the one beside Makepeace.
“She’s one of my best,” Makepeace said.
Jessie looked embarrassed.
“Though perhaps no longer,” Makepeace said.
“I quit,” Jessie said.
The airplane turned and almost immediately accelerated and within a few hundred yards lifted its nose into the sky. When the cabin had quieted down, Adrian asked, “What is all this about?”
“The Energy Board wants to speak to you,” Makepeace said. “Why?”
“Maybe they wish to sponsor your spaceship.”
“Why should they do that? Why now? Why in person?”
Makepeace folded his hands together over his stomach. It may have been a gesture left over from the days when he had an ample belly on which to rest them. “The Energy Board gets nervous when something unpredictable happens. There have been outages, outbreaks, violence, your disappearance. What if they are linked?”
“In what way?”
Makepeace shrugged. “The Energy Board may have other sources of information. Maybe not. Maybe they hope you will be able to provide some. Maybe they hope you will give them wise counsel.”
Adrian laughed. Frances was proud of him.
When the plane was over the African coastline, the engines suddenly cut off.
——
Frances clenched the arms of her seat as her body attempted to fly. The gentle vibration that had become a part of their existence was gone. “What’s going on?” she said, trying to steady her voice.
“One of those outages Makepeace mentioned,” Adrian said.
The compartment was eerily silent. “You mean,” Frances said, “this plane operates by broadcast power?”
Adrian nodded. “And steam. But there must be a backup—”
Just then the engines sputtered and caught, cut out, and caught again. The airplane steadied, pressing them back into their seats, and began climbing toward its lost altitude.
Adrian pointed out the window toward the right-hand engine. “The exhaust isn’t steam anymore. We’re flying on fuel reserves.”
A woman’s voice came over the speaker. “Everybody okay back there?”
“Okay,” Makepeace said.
“Sorry about the power loss,” the voice said. “We’re shifting back to broadcast power. We should be at our destination in half an hour.”
Frances looked down into the dark continent below. The moon was full, but the land was still only scantily visible. If the sun had been shining she could have seen the green of West Africa, restored in only a few years to nearly its virgin state before the rape of European empire builders. If she had been able to see farther, she might have observed modern cities rising to the north and south, and if she had been able to see beneath the jungle canopies, villages with air-conditioned huts, multi-channeled television sets, and modern schools.
The blessings of alien technology had been bestowed with a lavish and indiscriminate hand. Half an hour later the plane swiveled its engines and lowered itself, in the night, onto a landing pad on top of Kilimanjaro.
They were ushered through corridors and anterooms into a large office. One wall flamed with the disk of the sun. Frances had to turn her head to shut down the glare until the man at the clean, transparent desk waved his hand and the image dimmed. How appropriate, Frances thought, that this structure, raised to the sun, should display on its office wall the source of its power, which this man could control like Apollo scattering largess to mere mortals.
The man at the desk introduced himself as the Energy Board Chair for Africa. His office was large and eclectic. His desk, fashioned from clear plastic, occupied one corner, and old-fashioned maroon-leather chairs surrounded a clear-plastic conference table. But the floors were covered with multi-colored African throw rugs, and spears and a bark shield hung upon the wall opposite the mural. The anomaly was the absence of windows as if what happened inside the room was more important than anything outside.
“You think of me as powerful,” the Chairman said from behind his bare desk, which itself symbolized his ability to command service, “but I am a mere functionary, no more important than a conduit.” He was a large man with big shoulders and a torso spreading around the middle; he wasn’t a man that anyone would call a “functionary.”
“More like a switch,” Frances said, “that can be turned on or off, as during our flight.”
“That was not our doing,” the Chairman said.
“For someone without power,” Adrian said, “having people summoned from halfway around the world displays real persuasion.”
“You are not here of your own free will?” the Chairman asked. “You felt coerced?”
Adrian looked at Frances and then at Jessie standing a foot or two behind. “It didn’t seem wise to refuse.”
“I must speak to my emissaries,” the Chairman said. “I apologize for any intimidation you may have felt, but the matter seemed urgent.” He waved a black hand at them. He seemed good at that, as if he was used to waving a hand and accomplishing miracles. “But first, let me say that you should be pleased with what you accomplished a decade ago.”
“It worked out okay, didn’t it?” Adrian said cautiously.
“Better than it had any right,” the Chairman said. “Your instincts were correct, and those who feared that cheap power would upset the world’s precarious political balance were wrong.”
“As they often are,” Frances said.
The Chairman sighed. “True. Responsibility shrivels the imagination and enfeebles the will.”
“While we who have little to lose can dream wildly and act boldly,” Adrian said.
“Just so. Won’t you sit?” The Chairman waved a hand at the conference table. “Join me in some refreshments?”
“Coffee, perhaps,” Frances said. She sank into a chair facing the muraled wall, expecting to see black moths encircling the sun and maybe the outline of a shark. Cups of coffee appeared almost instantly, served by silent young men and women in gray uniforms. “It’s been a long day.”
Adrian sat next to her; Jessie sat opposite. Jessie had been silent since the first moments on the airplane, contemplating her sins, perhaps, and how she might atone. Makepeace had been left behind in the anteroom, but Jessie, for some reason, had been allowed to accompany them.
The Chairman eased his large body into the chair at the head of the table, like a tribal chief into a throne. He inclined his head. “We want you to understand that we recognize you as the architects of this world.”
“We?” Frances echoed.
“The other chairs and I.”
“We may have given it a shove,” Adrian said. “No more. We didn’t design it.”
“No,” the Chairman said, “what you designed was a spaceship. Like this.” He waved his hand, and the mural on the wall opposite transformed itself into a view screen with a close up of the sun’s surface. It was a scene Frances had viewed before. The black moths that were the alien-designed photon collectors were fluttering in front of the sun and then the outline of a ship ghosted across.
“Like that, but not that,” Adrian said.
“You had nothing to do with it?” the Chairman asked.
“No,” Adrian said, “and you could have found that out without bringing us halfway around the world.”
“But then,” the Chairman said, “I wouldn’t have been able to look into your faces when you said it.”
“A dubious pleasure,” Frances said.
“But maybe you consider yourself a judge of veracity,” Adrian said. “Would I be sitting here if I weren’t?” the Chairman asked. “The problem we face is: if not you, who? And how?”
Frances looked toward Adrian and then back at the Chairman. “I think of it,” she said, “as a reminder. Of a broken promise.”
“We made no promises,” the Chairman said.
“The promise was implicit,” Frances said. “We get designs that we could not have developed on our own—”
“At least at this stage in our technological development,” Adrian added.
“—And we’ll build a spaceship,” Frances continued. “We’ve taken the designs and applied the energy source to Earth’s problems. They’ve worked better than anyone expected.”
“The petty squabblings over wealth and its unequal distribution have diminished to almost nothing,” Adrian said. “The age of peace and plenty are at hand.”
The Chairman looked pained. “Then why do we have these outbreaks of violence, divorce, sabotage…?”
“Makepeace told me about that,” Frances said, “I didn’t tell him what I thought was behind it: human perversity.”
“Perversity?”
“The species didn’t survive by getting fat and happy,” Frances said. “When times get too easy, humanity starts making trouble for itself.”
“There have hardly been enough fat and happy times in human history to test that hypothesis,” the Chairman said. “In any case, the unrest is not species-wide.”
“Like talent of any kind,” Adrian said, “it emerges sporadically and unpredictably, but it emerges all the same.”
“And even with the rest,” Frances said, “let individual lives get too uneventful and people will move, quit jobs, start affairs, get divorced….”
“Ask them about the aliens,” a voice said from the direction of the wall screen, as if the sun itself had spoken.
——
The Chairman moved his magical hand and the sun disappeared to be replaced by a screen segmented into four. In each segment was a different person: a slender Asian woman in a silk gown, a plump white male in a business suit, a youthful-looking man with a brown face, wearing a casual white jacket, and a middle-aged woman in gray slacks and blazer.
“These are the other Chairs,” the Chairman said. He did not offer to introduce them, and it was an indication of their anonymity in this uneventful world that Frances knew none of them. She knew only that, like the Chair for Africa, they occupied sites on the tops of mountains, where atmospheric losses of power beamed from satellites were minimal and terrestrial broadcast was easiest.
“Ask them about the aliens,” the Asian woman said again.
“Are aliens behind these events?” the Chairman asked.
“That wouldn’t make sense,” Adrian said. “Why would they send us designs for a spaceship if they were already here?”
“To deceive us?” the man with the brown face suggested.
“And give us a power system that could fuel a ship to the stars—or a world to peace and plenty?” Adrian said. He shook his head.
“Beware of aliens bearing gifts,” said the plump man in the white suit.
“Maybe they’re acting from a distance,” the woman in slacks and blazer suggested.
“At the distance of the stars, even the nearest of them?” Frances said.
“No way they could find out what was going on here, much less act in time to be effective.”
“Agents?” the Asian woman suggested.
Jessie spoke for the first time. “They do have agents,” she said. Everyone turned toward her in surprise. Even the faces on the wall seemed to look in her direction. “They’re the agents of an idea, and the idea is spaceflight. Freedom. Answering the call. There’s nothing as transforming as an idea.”
“She’s right,” Adrian said. “What you have is what seems to be a single phenomenon with multiple causes. One of them is the space community that wants to build a spaceship and find out what the aliens want. Another is the restless element of society that can’t stand good times. There may be others. The spaceflight group deleted evidence of my existence. Another group is behind the power outages, probably by computer viruses.”
“But there is a solution,” Frances said.
The faces turned back in her direction.
“You can ride it out,” Frances said, “and maybe that is the least risky option. The space-nuts will get old and die off. The malcontents can be rooted out and punished. But the final result may be a species that has lost its soul.”
“Humanity can’t go to the stars when it can’t afford it,” Adrian said, “and when it can afford it, humanity has no incentive to go. The apparent paradise on Earth may actually be a dead end. The malcontents may be the true spirit of humanity—always looking for something they haven’t got.”
“The other option?” the Chairman asked.
“Let them go!” Jessie said.
Adrian looked at her, and said with growing enthusiasm, “She’s right.
Give the space-nuts the resources to build a ship and offer the malcontents an opportunity to sign on. That’s always worked for humanity, as long as there was another world to discover, another frontier to pioneer.”
“It wouldn’t cost you much,” Frances said. “The energy moths are self-replicating and by the time construction on the spaceship gets going you won’t know what to do with all the excess energy.”
“Materials can be mined in space,” Adrian said. “Asteroids. Comets. Hydrogen from Jupiter for reaction mass, if that is needed.”
“Let us go,” Jessie said.
“Us?” Frances echoed.
“I want to go, too.”
“But what about the aliens?” the Asian woman asked.
“We’ll never know, will we?” Frances said. “Until we go.”
“Do we risk something by going?” Adrian continued. “The people who go risk a lot. The people who stay behind risk a bit less, but still enough to concern them. Maybe the designs are a trick, some nefarious plot to trap humanity. But they’ve made us stronger; they’ve unified us by removing the inequalities that kept us apart. So not going is a bigger risk.”
The faces on the wall seemed to exchange glances with the Chairman before he waved his hand and they disappeared to be replaced by the image of the sun. “The one function we have,” the Chairman said, “is to transmit power. We have decided that you should have it.” He held up his hand as they started to speak. “Your argument about ridding ourselves of the malcontents was persuasive. We have no desire to contact aliens, no aspirations for the transcendental. We are content to be no more than we are, the transmitters of power to those who need it, the conservators of human happiness.”
“You have conserved our happiness,” Frances said.
The Chairman waved his hand once more at the wall, and once more it responded with the sun girdled by energy-absorbing black moths. And when the design for the spaceship ghosted across the screen, it seemed to those who watched that it was already transforming itself into something substantial enough to carry humanity to the stars.