The next morning Rosa got three texts from her dad, to go with the seven he sent the previous night—tips on comportment (read: don’t embarrass me) and advice to start a journal because it would help someday when she wrote her memoirs. Rosa loved her dad—he was the best—but she got some satisfaction from muting her phone and dropping it in her bag.
She went downstairs and found Trevor waiting in the hall. They both looked at Eddie’s door, uncertain whether they should stop for him or not. They left without knocking. When they got to breakfast Eddie was there. They slid their trays in next to him, and he jerked his head and grunted at their appearance but didn’t lessen the rate at which he was eating.
“You think it’s okay if I go in and ask if the lockdown is over?” he asked when they were done eating and stood to leave.
He didn’t know how to handle it, either.
“Yeah,” Trevor said, maybe too quickly. “Walk with us.”
Eddie shook his head. “I’ll catch up with you,” and he stood there till they walked off. When they were outside, Rosa looked back through the window and saw him wrapping biscuits in a napkin and sliding them in his pocket. Not knowing where his next meal would come from, afraid of being hungry. She wished she hadn’t seen that.
Nobody was on the sidewalks as they walked to the administration building.
“This is a little spooky,” Trevor said, and Rosa nodded.
Ruth in the front office looked up from sharpening a pencil when they walked in. The pencils were all short, and exactly the same length. She’d been sharpening pencils for a while. “Any word?”
“Um?” Rosa said.
“The gravity,” she said. “You don’t know anything?” They shook their heads and looked at each other, confirming their ignorance. “It got worse overnight.”
“Do you know where Reg Davis is?” Rosa said.
“He’s not one to check in. But everybody who can squeeze in is down at the Flight Control Room.”
“Thank you,” Rosa said. They turned to go as Eddie walked up.
“Is the lockdown still on, then?” he said.
“Oh, definitely,” Ruth said.
“Oh.” He turned but didn’t look them in the eye. “Guess I’ll go back to the apartment.”
The apartment. He already wasn’t calling it his. Rosa and Trevor exchanged a glance.
They walked out of the office, and Ruth returned to sharpening pencils that already had lethal points.
“She seemed a little on edge,” Rosa said.
“Hey, stay with us,” Trevor said as Eddie started to walk away. “There’s something I don’t understand.”
Eddie stopped and looked at him warily.
“This gravitational anomaly isn’t large, right?” Trevor said. “Or we’d be aware.”
“Yeah,” Rosa said. “I think it’s just the fact that it’s there at all.”
Trevor made shut-up eyes at her, and she remembered that they were trying to draw Eddie out. Rosa sat on a ledge by the sidewalk, and the guys hopped up, one on either side.
“Gravity is the only force that exists across dimensions,” Eddie said. “The strong force and weak force stay in the dimension that generates them, right?” They nodded.
“Suck it, strong force,” Trevor said.
“But gravity can cross dimensions. It’s the only force that peeks around the edge.”
Rosa nodded. “The point is that a gravity leak isn’t coming from anything we can see or hear. It’s coming from, or through, another dimension.”
“Gravity exists across the dimensions,” Trevor said excitedly. “So if something is right there, parked right next to us, the only way we’d know it is a …”
“Gravitational anomaly,” they all said together.
“It got bigger overnight,” Eddie said. “A bigger anomaly means that whatever is out there, it just came closer.”
A shiver ran down Rosa’s spine. “That’s why they’re down at Flight Control,” she said. “Something is out there, and it’s coming this way.”
They ran to the last building, the big one that oversaw the launch pad. A guard outside recognized them but stopped them anyway. “Reg Davis,” Rosa said, although they didn’t want Reg—they wanted to see what was going on. He hesitated, then pointed to a staircase. They followed it up and came to a glass-fronted room that overlooked Flight Control from the back, like an observation gallery in an operating room. They squeezed in. Rosa couldn’t see the screens below at all—her eye level was filled with blue sleeves. She bet Eddie could see them, though. She tugged on the back of his red T-shirt.
“What’s on the screens?”
He bent toward her, his face flushed with excitement. “Just like yesterday. It’s views of space. I don’t see any little green men.”
“There’s Reg,” Trevor whispered. “Do you think he’ll kick us out if he catches us in here?”
“I don’t think so,” Rosa said. “Yesterday he wanted to let us see everything.”
There were speakers embedded in the walls of the overflow room, so they could hear Smithson and Templeton barking orders in Flight Control, overriding the whispered conversations and general rustle of shifting feet.
Eddie leaned down and whispered right in Rosa’s ear, “Come on.” He took her hand so they didn’t get separated, and it was warm and dry and wrapped perfectly around hers. Rosa reached back and pinched Trevor’s sleeve and pulled him with her in Eddie’s wake. When they got to the glass wall, Eddie pulled Rosa in front of him so she could see.
The big screens were before them at eye level, and to the right they could see out the window to the empty launch area a mile away. Young and Moloney, Richtig and Doepker had gone. Someday Rosa and Trevor would be Team 3—Hayashi and Clayborn. They would be authorized to negotiate for Earth. It was an immense responsibility, and Rosa’s dad would probably still be sending her texts to keep her from screwing up. And, she thought, she might need them.
“Anybody got a mass on whatever’s out there?” Templeton barked.
“Approximately 5.9723e24 kilograms, sir,” someone shouted from one of the workstations.
There was a momentary hush, both below and around them. Because 5.9723e24 kg is Earth’s mass.
A couple of people stood at their stations, leaning forward, tapping keys, scrolling furiously. “The sensors are going nuts,” the man next to them breathed. “Jesus.”
“Talk to me!” Smithson shouted.
“My god,” Templeton said. “Are they bringing their planet?”
“There’s a small presence at seventeen point two degrees northeast, five thousand meters out,” someone shouted. “And closing.” They all turned to stare at the launch pad. There was nothing there.
And then, with an audible hiss, there was. A spacecraft hurtled down the runway. It slowed before it was halfway down the tarmac, and then turned, pointing back up the runway toward the northeast. That was the direction from which it had arrived, but it sure wasn’t where it had come from.
The place erupted. NASA was going to need a second swear jar.
And then again silence, because the hatch opened. Everyone stared at the giant screens in the Flight Control Room as an arm waved from the spacecraft, and then a man’s head emerged. He swung down from the cockpit and flexed his knees a couple of times as though testing the ground, then unstrapped his helmet and tossed it back in the craft. He moved to the side, and a woman came out, put her palm down on the ground, looked up at the sun, and shook her head. Two more men got out behind her—Richtig and Doepker. They all tossed their helmets and gloves in the craft and walked toward the building, swiveling around like tourists.
“I thought Team 2 launched,” Trevor said. “We saw them launch.”
“Director!” someone shouted.
“I see them,” Smithson’s voice said through the speaker. “But I don’t believe it. How did they do that?”
The guy next to Rosa grinned. “Teams 1 and 2 took off at separate times in separate crafts, and are returning weeks earlier than expected—in a craft we’ve never seen before.”
“That’s not ours!” a woman said, shouting across him. “Somebody somewhere built that, and it wasn’t us. Proof there’s intelligent life out there.”
“We already knew that,” Trevor said.
“Yeah,” she said, “in theory. But we only had mathematical proof.”
“Until right now,” the guy said.
“Mark this moment,” Smithson said. “The history of humankind just changed forever.”
“Get a med crew down there,” Templeton barked. “Make sure they’re okay.”
Rosa, Eddie, and Trevor watched the screen as Teams 1 and 2 shook off the med team’s assistance, but let the medics drive them up to the building and hustle them into the Flight Control Room. The technicians stood at their stations and applauded as the dazed team members strode slowly forward, staring around them as though they’d been gone for a century.
“I don’t understand how you did it,” Smithson said, shaking their hands and gripping their shoulders, one by one, “but by god I’m glad to see you again.”
The room hushed to hear what they had to say.
“This is amazing,” a team member said. “And you can’t imagine how much we appreciate that welcome. I was a little afraid you’d shoot at me when I poked my head out of the spacecraft.”
Everyone laughed.
“That’s Young,” the guy next to Rosa whispered. “He’s senior.” She nodded. She’d seen their photos on the wall in the lobby, but it wasn’t like she would instantly recognize him. Not like his colleagues did.
“I’m speechless,” Young said. “It’s a thrill to see you all, but completely disorienting.”
There was a little stir at that. It made sense to Rosa—something had clearly gone haywire with their mission. Young looked across the banks of computers.
“Our Flight Control Room looked like this about thirty years ago,” he said.
The place went silent.
Young glanced at Moloney. “We’re going to have to scrap the mission,” he said, and she nodded. “But we should get acquainted before we go,” he said with a smile. “One thing I already know is that you people are an awful lot like us.”
“Young?” Smithson said.
Young stuck out his hand to shake again. “Are you called Smithson?”
Smithson stared at him for a beat, then said, “I am.”
“We bring you greetings from Earth.” Young grinned. “I always wanted to say that.”
The crowd began to buzz.
“Um, we’re on Earth,” Trevor murmured.
“You’re not the Young we sent out, are you?” John Taylor Templeton said.
“No,” Young said, his voice disappointed. “You have one of me? It’s a shame I missed myself. That would have been something.”
A few of the assembled scientists scrambled onto chairs to see better. Nearly everybody put their phones on hover so they could take video of the scene at the front of the room, or selfies with the visitors in the background.
“I’m glad we’re up here,” Rosa whispered. “Downstairs they probably can’t see past all the phones.”
Young rubbed his forehead. “Is there one of everybody here? I mean, is your personnel exactly the same as ours?”
A woman at the left station in the front row called “Kendra Alexander.” “Steve Yoon,” the man next to her said. The two IA teams at the front of the room shook their heads at one another as one by one, everyone in the room called out his or her name. When they were done, Young massaged his forehead again and Moloney rubbed her neck.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you all,” Young said. “But man, is it weird.”
Everyone laughed again.
“Hey, Steve!” Moloney called. “You owe me twenty dollars.”
“Cool!” Steve Yoon said. “Here, I owe you fifty.”
Everyone laughed again.
“I’d sure like an explanation,” John Taylor Templeton said. “You went to a lot of trouble to reach us.”
“Yeah,” Young said. “Well, the trip isn’t so bad. Developing the technology was the tough part.” He glanced at his team members. “It was a biological research mission, but we’re going to have to scrub it. We needed an Earth with life, but not human life. Certainly not identical life.”
“We can locate other Earths,” Moloney said, “but we can’t get precise readings of the development of their life-forms. We just have to land and take a peek.”
“Your world have an epidemic?” Smithson said.
“No,” Young said, “we’re good. It was a research mission.” He glanced around the room again. “I’d love a tour of this place, though.”
Smithson and Templeton began talking with the four visitors, showing them around the Flight Control Room. A big professional camera swooped in, and the brass posed together by the NASA and IA logos on the wall, then it snapped some photos of the room at large.
“We have some things to learn from you,” Templeton said, and Young nodded.
“I hope they let us stay for a good visit,” he said. “I’d love to see the town. Do you have a Joe’s Café?”
“Best ravioli in a hundred miles,” Templeton said. “And Joe plays his tenor sax when it’s not too busy.”
Young shook his head. “Just unbelievable. It’s like landing on Earth.”
“This is Earth,” Smithson said.
“Well, you know. Like our Earth,” Moloney said.
“Hey,” Templeton said. “We got conflicting readings from a couple of locations. We sent a team to each of the points of origin. Are either of them going to land on you?”
The alien teams exchanged a glance.
“What was going on with that, anyway?” Smithson said.
Rosa looked back at Eddie and Trevor, because she’d wondered that herself.
“We fly through the extra dimensions,” Moloney said. “Our passage temporarily opens a window into the part of the universe we left. You would get gravitational readings, but they’d only last briefly.”
“It would appear like a flicker to your sensors,” Doepker said.
“The gravitational flutters,” Templeton said.
“Once we realized that happens, we started using it as a safeguard,” Young said. “We knew this planet was advanced—we just didn’t know how advanced. So we sent two craft out to punch through the extra dimensions and set up gravitational anomalies. If you were advanced enough you’d investigate, and it would draw your best people away from your planet.” He shrugged.
Smithson looked taken aback. “You faked the location of the anomaly?”
“Yeah,” Young said. “Sorry about that. But you thought it was prudent.”
“I … Ah,” Smithson said. “Well, it’s nice to know I’m director over there, too. Do send me my greetings.”
“Will do,” Doepker said, smiling. “You’re deputy director, actually. Lamar Sensenbrenner is director.”
Eddie gasped. Rosa tugged on his sleeve, but he stared over her head into the room below.
“Do you have a Lamar Sensenbrenner?” Doepker said, scanning the crowd.
Smithson frowned. “I’ve never heard of him.” Smithson and Friesta Bauer shook their heads.
“Huh,” Doepker said.
“Do you think he’s why you’re ahead of us?” John Taylor Templeton said.
“No way,” Young said. “Our ascendance would have started before him.” He scratched the back of his hand. “I assume you’ve done all the things you can to get an educated citizenry? Fully funding schools and libraries, making sure talented students get to great colleges? The no-brainer stuff?”
“Yeah,” Templeton said heavily. “We’ve for sure got some no-brainers.”
“Eddie,” Rosa said, turning to face him. They were squished in close, so she was staring up at him from under his chin. “Isn’t that the guy …” She trailed off, unsure of how to finish.
“That my old man killed?” he whispered, his lips brushing her ear. “Yeah.”
She stared at him.
“I think it’s time we contacted Director Sensenbrenner,” Young said to Moloney.
“Oh my god,” Rosa whispered. “He would have been the director of IA?”
“Yeah,” Moloney said downstairs, her voice coming through the speakers in the wall. “Do you have a quantum interface for communication?”
“Uh, no,” John Taylor Templeton said.
Young looked disappointed. “We’ll have to route the call through the craft, then,” he said, pulling what looked like a phone from his jacket. “We’ve got to contact our director.”
“I hope he says to eat at Joe’s before we go,” Richtig said, and everyone laughed.
Young told his phone to expand and it did, pulling into tablet size.
“Whoa,” Trevor said.
Young touched the screen, typing something—entering some data.
“It doesn’t move,” Rosa whispered. “It’s hanging in the air but he can push against it.”
She could feel Eddie nod, but none of them looked away from the scene below.
Young typed, then waited, then typed again. “I’m letting him know it’s an advanced civilization,” he said. “We have a case full of bacteria on the craft that we wanted to release somewhere.” He paused as he typed again. “And watch how it played out. It causes a mutation in plants that causes extremely rapid growth. You plant—bing—you harvest. If we released it at home, it would increase our food supply immeasurably. No more famine.”
“That’s fantastic,” Smithson said.
“Only problem is that if you eat one of the plants, you get cancer,” Moloney said. “Almost every time.”
Smithson grimaced.
“We want to release it somewhere and watch the animals. See if the population develops an immunity—if the creatures that survive pass on a resistance to their offspring.”
“And if enough animals survive to keep a species going,” Doepker said. “That’s the part we can’t do in a lab.”
Young stared at the screen of his tablet.
“Eddie,” Rosa whispered. He leaned over her to hear better. “He looks like someone hit him in the solar plexus. You kind of do, too.”
And he did. Sensenbrenner’s name had been a gut punch.
Young tilted the tablet so that Moloney, Richtig, and Doepker could read it.
“Can I treat you to ravioli tonight?” Smithson said.
“I’m afraid not,” Young said, and his voice was strained.
“I wonder why they didn’t just talk,” Eddie said. “Sensenbrenner could communicate directly with our people. You’d think he’d want to.”
“Yeah,” Rosa said. “You’d think he would.”