Win didn’t know Robbie that well.
He seemed like a pretty stable person and levelheaded enough to keep himself, a teen, and a blind woman alive despite not having any evident survival skills. That took at least a little wisdom and probably a generous dollop of luck. Waking up in the middle of a metropolis was one such example of that good fortune. If he’d opened his eyes to a farmhouse like she had, it would have gone differently for him.
The point was, he didn’t seem like the kind of person who was susceptible to ridiculousness. Touré, perhaps, could encourage a wilder temperament in those around him, but she didn’t think Touré was really like that either. She may have been the only one of them—Touré himself included—who thought his trips into fantasy were masquerading as insight none of the rest of them had access to.
No, this came from Robbie; Touré just bought into it first.
She had to admit, the abduction part . . . made some sense. Even Ananda agreed that it fit the evidence. She then pointed out that taken to the North Pole by Santa also fit the evidence, so maybe that wasn’t as big a deal as they thought it was.
An obvious counterpoint to this argument was that while it may be true Santa could have abducted the seven of them instead of a space alien, Robbie didn’t punch Santa in the face. Nobody made that argument, though, because it was clear Ananda simply didn’t believe Robbie or Touré actually had had a physical altercation with their bogeyman.
Win wasn’t sure if she was ready to believe it either.
The idea that they had all been abducted created a whole raft of new questions that none of them could possibly answer, such as (1) Why them? (2) Where were they taken? (3) What happened to their memories? (4) Why didn’t they age? (5) Why were they put back again? . . . and so on. The problem was that there was no way to answer any of that without interrogating an actual alien. That should have been where the whole discussion ended, because any being who was capable of taking seven people—or eight, if the departed Raymond was properly included in their number—from the planet, years apart from one another, with nobody being the wiser . . . that being was going to be damn hard to catch.
But they still wanted to try.
“He came up behind us in the dungeon,” Touré explained, shortly after Robbie connected his alien to the man Carol supposedly encountered in the dorm. “We’ll have to go back down there and jump him when he does it again.”
“All seven of us?” Paul asked. “Don’t you think he’ll notice we’re all there?”
“We’re the idea guys, not the tacticians,” Touré said. “Maybe you and the goddess of the hunt here can stalk him.”
“Not if he can just disappear,” Paul said. “I have that right, don’t I? He can disappear?”
“He did a thing,” Robbie said, “with his arm, before he vanished.”
“A thing with his arm,” Paul repeated.
“Maybe he’s waving his magic wand,” Bethany suggested.
“No, he’s employing some sort of technology,” Carol said. “It makes a clicking sound.”
“How do you know that?” Robbie asked.
“I heard it. If we can take that away from him, we may be able to punch him in the face a few more times.”
“When did you hear it?” Robbie asked. “Not in the dorm. You would have said so.”
“Not in the dorm,” Carol said. She sighed, then, and shook her head. Win had seen her do this before. It usually meant Carol was debating something internally.
“Here?” Touré asked. “In the castle?”
“I don’t want you to think I’m in danger,” Carol said.
That was in response to Touré but directed at Robbie. Those two had an interesting relationship: very formal in many ways, but they took care of each other through tiny gestures of intimacy.
“He watches me regularly,” Carol said. “I never said so because I didn’t think you’d believe me.”
The concern on Robbie’s face was something to witness. He looked horrified at the prospect of Carol being harmed.
They’ve been through a lot together, Win thought.
Though Robbie’s concern was displayed entirely visually, Carol somehow seemed to hear it. “I’m safe, Robbie,” she said. “I have protection. The only reason I’m telling you this at all is that if he’s real and you want to catch him, I can tell you where he’ll be aside from the dungeon.”
“In the library,” Robbie said.
“Yes,” Carol said. “But first, you’re all going to have to introduce yourselves to Nolan.”
A week later, Win was huddled between a stack of books and an empty bookshelf at the edge of the balcony floor of the Hayden Library.
She was under a blanket, which seemed weirdly juvenile to her. Sure, the library was cold, so the added warmth was welcome, but the idea that a blanket might make it so the monster couldn’t see her was a notion she’d grown out of long ago.
She had a clear view of Carol and Nolan at a table near the window, thirty feet away.
Nolan was a damn wolf. As soon as Carol explained this, Win decided all four of them—Robbie, Carol, Touré, and Bethany—were entirely out of their minds and not to be trusted. Madness induced by overconsumption of Noot, perhaps. That they’d managed to survive on their own was a miracle.
Nolan was the reason it took so long to set this plan into motion. First, each of them had to meet with him someplace outside of the library. This was so the alien didn’t see them meeting the wolf, which was just flat stupid, because they didn’t know what he could and couldn’t see and hear, regardless of what part of the castle they were in. For all they knew, he heard their conversation on the roof and the follow-up one in the living quarters when they’d come up with this very plan. Meeting the wolf in the library was surely not going to be the part where they blew the trap.
They did it anyway. Carol found a place down the hall from the library—she’d trained the creature to use a certain door—and waited for him to discover her. Then, one by one, Win, Paul, Robbie, and Touré came through a second door and introduced themselves.
Nolan seemed okay with Robbie. But he didn’t like Paul—he appeared to remember their first encounter—and he would have probably torn out Touré’s throat if Carol hadn’t whacked him on the head with her cane.
He actively liked Win, which was strange; she had her hand on her knife the entire time and had thought very seriously about gutting him while the coywolf was licking her face. She thought it was a good thing Carol didn’t befriend a boar instead, because that would have been a different story. Win didn’t like the wolves, but she really didn’t like boars.
Once that was done, they put the rest of the plan in motion. Win, Paul, Robbie, and Touré would sneak into the library in the morning—again, one at a time—and take up tactical positions where they would remain until the early afternoon, which was when Carol usually arrived.
It was a ridiculous plan, and it wasn’t going to work. But with new snow outside and no need to go hunting or do much of anything else, they also had nothing better to do.
May as well humor them, Win thought.
Carol showed up on schedule, found her way to Nolan’s door and cracked it open, then took her seat and started reading.
Win wondered what Carol’s plan was if someone other than Nolan walked through that door. She decided Carol probably didn’t have one, because the woman was evidently working out the kinks on a death wish.
Nolan did walk through the door as expected and nearly blew the game right away. About halfway to Carol, he stopped and sniffed the air, identifying at least one of the others.
“Hey, puppy,” Carol said, waving a piece of meat in the air. This got him walking again. Crisis averted. Nolan curled up under the table like a good dog.
And so they waited.
After what had to be an hour ( fix the clocks was high on Win’s personal agenda for the springtime) she started to wonder at what point they should call this whole thing off. She was getting a cramp while waiting for the arrival of a figment of everyone’s imagination, and needed there to be an all-clear, never-mind, ha-ha-just-kidding signal.
Does the alien even show up every day? she wondered. Did anybody ask Carol this?
Win had convinced herself that he wasn’t going to this day, so when it finally happened, she thought her eyes were bugging out on her. The sun’s angle through the window indicated late afternoon and elongated shadows. About ten feet from Carol, between the light from two windows, one of those shadows started growing independently . . . with nothing to cast it.
It grew, driving out the light instead of the other way around. This wasn’t how shadows worked.
Then it gained some kind of form: a tall man in a black cloak.
I’ve seen you before, Win thought.
Nolan saw it and started growling. Carol couldn’t see it, of course, but knew it was there all the same.
“You’re back,” Carol said.
The wolf barked but didn’t advance. The bark caused the figure to raise its right arm.
Now.
Win loosed an arrow and at around the same time Paul, at the far end of the first floor, fired a shot with his rifle, both of them aiming for the right arm. Both appeared to find the mark.
“Ahh!” the alien shouted.
“Get him, Nolan,” Carol whispered.
Robbie and Touré jumped out from behind bookshelves a few yards away and broke into a sprint. The wolf easily beat them both.
Nolan launched himself at the alien, hit him right in the chest, and knocked him onto his back.
Robbie dove to the floor to grab the device the figure had dropped. Touré looked like he was trying to insert himself between the intruder and Nolan before deciding this was an incredibly foolish thing to do.
“Get it off me, get it off me!” the alien cried out in a very normal-sounding voice. He was hand-checking the wolf, who was a few seconds from making the alien impossible to interrogate, provided the intruder’s throat was where everyone else’s was.
“Nolan, down!” Carol said. She stood and tapped her cane on the wolf’s back to get his attention. It worked. He backed off the alien and waited for a treat. Then Touré was on top of the intruder. Paul, still nursing his knee, reached the scene last and pointed his gun at the alien’s head.
Win stayed where she was, with another arrow nocked.
“God, he smells,” Touré said.
“Guys,” the alien said, “we’re all friends here.”
“I don’t think so,” Paul said.
Touré backed away to give Paul and Win clean shots if necessary. The alien raised his hands.
“Look, I’m Noah, okay?” he said. “Call me Noah. And you’re Paul, and that’s Touré, and Robbie, and Carol. Win’s on the balcony. I know all of you, all right?”
“We don’t know you,” Paul said.
“No, I guess not. You wouldn’t. Look, I can explain all of this. But you gotta do me a favor first.”
Paul looked at Robbie. “Can I shoot him?” he asked. “I feel like I want to shoot him.”
Robbie shrugged. “Yeah, maybe,” Robbie said.
“Just keep me out of the light,” Noah the alien said. “That’s all.”
“Are you gonna melt?” Touré asked.
“No, I’m not gonna melt, Touré. Come on. It can’t be allowed to see me here. If it does, it’s going to kill all of you, just like it did everyone else. Okay? So put me in a dark room somewhere and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Get up,” Paul said.
The alien got to his feet, albeit very slowly. He moved in a decidedly human way, although Win had to admit, she didn’t know what an alien way to move around might look like.
Robbie stepped up, slowly, and pulled back Noah’s hood.
Noah had a big, bulbous green head, black eyes, no nose, and a tiny mouth, just the way Robbie had described it. The raised hands consisted of elongated fingers—only three of them, and a thumb—with an extra knuckle.
“Well?” Carol said.
“It’s an alien, all right,” Paul said.
“What do you mean, it’s going to kill all of us?” Robbie asked Noah.
I thought Noah was just part of your fever dream, Touré, Win thought.
“Dark room first,” Noah said. “Someplace without windows.”
Finding a room away from any windows wasn’t all that difficult.
There was the entire labyrinthine tunnel system, which appeared designed specifically so no MIT student ever had to contend with direct sunlight and fresh air, but it lacked room for a proper interrogation.
What they used instead was a lecture hall in the chemistry building. It was an area Robbie and Touré had already searched and was just an underground tunnel stop away. The wolves didn’t know the building, because the tunnel was the best way to get to it without coming in through the outside and the wolves didn’t use the tunnels. (Carol wanted to take Nolan with them, which would have meant introducing one of the pack to a tunnel. It took them a little while to convince her that was a bad idea and to send him back instead.)
It was a raked auditorium, with the chairs looking down on the lectern. That was where they put Noah. Since he’d insisted on there being no sunlight in the room, they were using torches to see by, which just made the alien seem that much creepier.
Touré fetched Bethany and Ananda, while Paul and Win debated tying Noah to a chair.
“We don’t even have rope,” Win was saying. “What are you going to use?”
“My belt is a rope,” Paul said.
“Guys, you really don’t have to, I can’t go anywhere,” Noah said. Then he coughed. “Believe you me, I would if I could.”
He shook his right hand, where the arrow and/or bullet had struck him. He’d been wounded, but not seriously. When they picked him up off the ground, there was a small pool of yellow liquid left behind on the floor.
Bethany was right, Robbie thought. He bleeds yellow. We’ll have to apologize to her.
The device Noah had dropped and Robbie had picked up was a small metal stick with a plunger button on the end. It looked like the back half of a large syringe or a bomb trigger in a movie.
Robbie said, “What’s this do?”
“Push the button,” Noah said. “Find out for yourself.”
“Will it send you back to wherever you came from?”
Noah shrugged. He had almost nothing one might call shoulders, so this looked really odd.
“Will it send me to wherever you came from?” Robbie asked.
“Give it a try,” Noah said.
“Don’t,” Carol said. She was sitting next to Robbie in the front row, as if patiently waiting for the lecture to start.
Noah laughed. His speaking voice managed to be simultaneously deep and nasally; his laugh was kind of a low chortle. It was the only sound he made that didn’t come off as exactly human, like whatever translation program he was using couldn’t interpolate laughter.
“I’m kidding, Robbie,” he said. “Press the button or not, it won’t do anything. It only works on me, and I have to be holding it. Please don’t lose it, though.”
Noah looked at Win and Paul. “So what’s the consensus?” he asked. “You tying me down or not?”
Win turned to Robbie. “What do you think?” she asked. “He’s your prisoner.”
“Leave him be,” Robbie said.
“Okey-doke,” she said.
“I’ll just keep my rifle trained on him, if that’s okay with everyone,” Paul said.
Ananda burst into the room then, trailed by Touré and a worried-looking Bethany. “Where is it?” Ananda asked. She headed straight for the stage. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “Look at you.”
Paul and Win stepped back to give Ananda room for whatever perambulations were going to be a part of her process. They’d all seen her work before; she was a whirlwind pacer.
“Hi, Ananda,” Noah said.
She gasped. “It speaks,” she said.
“We told you he did,” Touré said.
“Yes, well, you’ll excuse me for mistaking that for exaggeration.”
After circling Noah a few times, she stepped closer.
“May I?” she asked him, holding up a hand.
“Sure,” Noah said, “whatever you gotta do.”
She touched Noah’s face and head, then stood behind him and pulled gently on his skull.
He laughed. “It’s attached,” he said.
She moved next to him and touched his chest, on one side and then the other. Then she felt along his back.
She leaned in close and sniffed the side of his face.
“You’re wearing a device,” she said. “It’s providing ammonia to you through the hole in your face. Can I call that a nose?”
“You can call it what you like,” he said. “And you’re right about all of that. Prolonged exposure to oxygen will end up killing me, so I’m sort of hoping you guys’ll let me go after this.”
“Well,” Ananda said, stepping back and turning to address the lecture hall. “He’s impossible.”
“How do you mean?” Win asked.
“He’s a bipedal alien with rubbery skin who speaks the vernacular flawlessly, and so he’s clearly a regular man in a costume. Yet he’s breathing pure ammonia, has only five ribs per side, three fingers and a thumb per hand, and no beating heart where a human being’s beating heart would be.”
“So he’s an alien,” Bethany said. She was sitting one row behind Robbie, next to Touré. He noted that she had her gun in her lap.
“Yes,” Ananda said. “Except it’s ridiculous that an alien would actually look like this. Imagine the vast number of evolutionary pressures on this planet, over hundreds of thousands of years—millions, even—necessary to produce us, a bipedal apex species. He was standing? And walking?”
“Yep,” Paul said.
“Then his musculature is such that it would allow him to survive in this gravity, at this atmospheric concentration, and balance on two legs. The number of variables is preposterous. He would have to have evolved on a planet the same size as ours, with an ammonia-rich atmosphere, and would have somehow had to win the same historical lottery we did, just to develop the intelligence necessary to understand speech. Aliens are not impossible. Aliens that look this much like us are the stuff of bad dreams suffered by people with overactive imaginations, and special-effects artists.”
“Can I speak?” Noah asked.
“Go on,” she said.
“You’re right,” he said. “She’s right. It’s practically impossible, which is just another way of saying highly unlikely. I mean, I don’t know, maybe being a biped with opposable thumbs is a requirement for interstellar travel. But, look—I’m real, this is really me, and this is really me talking. I’m not saying I learned the language. I’ve got a really great translation package, that’s all. But I get what you’re saying, Ananda, I do. I’m a scientist too, and believe me, you guys weird me out just as much as I do you.”
Ananda looked as if she had ten things to say all at once and yet couldn’t figure out which to say first, and didn’t know how to proceed from there. She shrugged and faced the room. “I cede the floor, but not the argument,” she said. “Who wants to go first?”
At no time in his life did Robbie consider himself a leader. Even way back as far as grade school, he was the kid in the back who thought not socializing was less of a hassle than actually having friends. A group dynamic in which he was the one who made the decisions was just out of the question. Even in the dorm, when it was four—and then three—of them, he was always just one voter.
It made no sense, then, that when Ananda asked who was going to be leading the interrogation of the extraterrestrial in their midst, everyone turned to him.
But he wasn’t going to let the opportunity to interrogate an alien pass him by.
“Yeah, all right,” he said. “Let’s start with an obvious one: Why did you abduct us?”
“No, that’s the wrong question,” Noah said. “You don’t wanna ask me that first, Robbie.”
Paul, off to one side of the stage, said, “Answer the man’s question,” in a low growl, over the top of his rifle.
“Rein it in, pastor. I’ll answer—it’s just not the best place to start.”
“Okay,” Robbie said. “What happened to the rest of the human race? Did you do that?”
“That’s the question. And no, I did not! I love you guys. But I was there when it happened, and I tried to stop it. You’ve seen the sparkling, right? What do you call it? The shimmer? Good name, very spooky. That’s the alien you’re looking for.”
“The lights are an alien intelligence?” Ananda asked.
“They are indeed. I know that bugs you, but it’s true.”
“And they’re who you’re hiding from?” Robbie asked. “Here in the dark?”
“Yeah, but not for my sake. For yours. Just one of them wiped out the entire human race, and as soon as it figures out how you guys survived, it’s gonna take out the rest of you. It’s not going to hurt me, but if it sees me, it’ll put two and two together and work out that you were off-world when it happened. Once the mystery is solved, you’re no longer interesting. Then it’ll be boom, bye-bye to the rest of humanity.”
Carol grabbed Robbie’s hand and squeezed. He didn’t know if that was because she believed what she’d just heard or the opposite.
“The entire human race . . .” Robbie said. “Just one of them did that?”
“What are they?” Bethany asked quietly. She was speaking to Robbie, not to Noah.
“Does anyone here know what a tachyon is?” Noah asked.
“Yes,” Ananda said.
“Faster-than-light particles,” Touré said. “But they’re, like, made up.”
“They’re hypothetical, not made up,” Ananda said. “There’s a difference.”
“But it’s not a thing, right?” Touré asked. “Nothing goes faster than light. I thought we all learned that.”
“You guys are cute,” Noah said.
“Hey,” Win said. “How about a little less condescension from the spaceman?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not possible to take a slower-than-light particle and accelerate it past the speed of light,” Ananda said. “There’s no prohibition on particles that exist at that speed.”
“There you go,” Noah said. “Look, it’s stupid complicated. If I tried to explain all of it to you, I’d be dead before I got to the important stuff. The speed of light is the speed of massless particles. Anything with a positive mass can’t go faster. Particles on the other side . . . We’ll call it negative mass. It’s not really accurate, but it’s close. Since human beings never got this far with the science, you don’t have any words that really describe this properly.”
“So the shimmer is another alien,” Robbie said. “And it’s made up of . . . what’s the word?”
“Tachyons,” Touré said.
“Yes and no,” Noah said. “There are other particles on the other side of the light speed barrier. Tachyons are one, but there’re others. Incredibly high-energy stuff. But yes, these creatures are made from those kinds of particles.”
“But we can see it,” Ananda said. “How can we see something that is gone before light reaches it?”
“Good, good. Smart. But you’re not seeing it. What you’re seeing is . . . like a contrail, sort of. The evidence that something wasthere. Tachyon-type faster-than-light particles don’t interact with us usually. But like I said, they’re very energetic; they can excite an electron on the way by. Again, I’m dumbing this down. Not because you guys are dumb; you’re just missing about ten generations of physics.”
“Is that how they killed everyone?” Robbie asked. “Exciting the particles, or . . . I guess I don’t really know what we’re talking about.”
“Kind of. These are beings made of energy. Sometimes they radiate that energy. If you’re near them when that happens, there isn’t going to be very much of you left.”
“Turning bones to powder?” Win asked.
“Among other things. And given how fast they move, they could sweep the whole globe in a matter of hours and nobody would be able to stop them. That’s what happened before, and I’m sure that’s what happened here, too.”
“Before what?” Robbie asked.
“I told you, I’m a scientist. I’ve been studying this race of . . . we don’t even have a name for them. Tachyonites. Let’s call them that. I’ve been studying them for a while, and this isn’t the first planet I’ve seen one of them do this. Not my home planet, thankfully, but others. I always got there too late and had to piece it all together after the fact. They’re traveling extinction engines. This time, I thought I might be early enough to help.”
“The anomalous object,” Ananda said. “You put that there.”
“It’s a prototype. It was supposed to prevent the mass extinction here. It didn’t work, obviously, but I made some adjustments.” He looked at Robbie. “Okay, ask me now.”
“What? Oh. Why did you abduct us?”
“Every time a Tachyonite interacts with another life-form, it leaves behind a signature on the atomic level. It’s not something anyone on this planet would have been able to notice; you have to be able to detect tachyons in the first place, and nobody on Earth figured out how to do that until, like, Earth year 2041. Way too late. All seven of you guys—eight, actually—had traces of that signature. Poor Raymond, by the way. That was rough. I tried to talk him down, but I think I just made it worse. He totally snapped. Good kid, too.”
“I don’t understand,” Robbie said. He looked around the room to see if he was the only one. It was a tough room to read, though: Everyone was on some level of shocked and confused simply by default. “Are you saying we had encounters with the . . . Tachyonites? Are you saying we met them before you abducted us?”
“This is where faster-than-light particles get interesting,” Noah said. “They travel in an inverse direction through time. What I was detecting was traces of your interaction with them now. It faded, but when it faded, it was toward your past, not your future. And that’s what tipped me off something was gonna happen.”
“You took us from our homes,” Paul said.
“Yeah, I did,” Noah said. “Sorry. Like I said, I’ve seen what these aliens can do up close. I was here already, doing a biological study . . . like what you guys do. Oceanographers, essentially. Same deal. Been here for a couple hundred Earth years. Just collecting data. Raymond was the first one I detected the traces in. I hung on to him, stuck him in stasis, and went looking for anyone else. You seven were the only other ones I found.”
“Did you . . . probe us?” Touré asked.
“Dude, grow up,” Noah said. “Noninvasive tests, okay? I don’t know anything about those guys complaining about anal probes and all that, but it wasn’t me.”
“What was stasis like?” Robbie asked.
“Uh, kind of like suspended animation, only not really. Temporally locked. If you’re wondering if you’re missing a hundred years of memories, you aren’t. You’re missing probably a few hours, tops.”
“Suspended animation that killed our electronics?”
“Anything with batteries died over time, but not from the stasis. I had to remove them; they created interference.”
“Hey, I have a question,” Bethany said. “I have a question.”
“Go ahead, Bethany,” Noah said.
“Whoa, it knows my name,” she muttered. “Okay, why’d you put us back in our own homes and all? Was that to trick us?”
“Because of Raymond,” he said. “He was the first one I took, so he was the first one I put back, but he didn’t take it well. I didn’t even think about putting him back in his home, but in my defense, it wasn’t there anymore. I thought if you guys started out somewhere familiar, you’d have a chance to, I don’t know, ease your way into things. Better than he did, anyway. And it worked, right?”
“It was terrible,” she said, quietly.
“I know. But it was gonna be terrible either way.”
“What year is this?” Ananda asked.
“Oh, easy one. It’s, um . . . it’s 2127. March, I think. You want the exact day? I’d have to look it up for you.”
“That’s good enough,” Robbie said. “You found traces of tachyons in us, kidnapped us, and then buried a machine in Cambridge. Why’d you do all that?”
“Why? I like you guys. As a species, I mean. When I picked up traces, I tried to understand the when and the where and all that, but I also knew that regardless of when and where, the whole human race was about to get wiped out and I wanted to stop it. My device is kind of like a roach motel for Tachyonites, or it was supposed to be. But like I said, it didn’t work.”
“It’s a prison?” Carol asked.
“Should’ve been. I was trying to catch it before it did what it did. But I messed up.”
“Everyone was trying to get away from it,” Win said. “On the roads, everyone was leaving town. Was that your fault?”
“Yeah, sure, indirectly. I didn’t mean for them to find it. I stuck it in the foundation of a building around 2022. In 2043, they decided they didn’t want that building anymore, they found my tech, and it went south from there. All they were able to figure out was that it had something to do with tachyons, which it does. It’s kinda like a Thermos, with a layer of tachyon-reactive . . . never mind. It’s advanced. I’ll give you the poop on it later, Ananda, if you guys survive this.”
“‘Survive’?” Robbie said.
“‘If’?” Touré said.
“Yeah, like I said: It’s still going to wipe you guys out soon, but let me finish. They unearthed my roach motel and, after doing a bunch of tests, figured out it was extraterrestrial and thought it might be a bomb. The attack came during the total evacuation of the area. I think that’s probably a coincidence, but maybe not. I was too busy trying to understand why my trap didn’t work. But the good news for you guys is, I think I got it right this time.”
Paul laughed, then went and sat down in the first row. “I know what comes next,” Paul said. “You’re going to tell us we’re bait, aren’t you? To see if your toy works?”
“No, no, no. It’s not like that at all.”
“How is it, then?”
“For starters, if you don’t do anything at all, it’s going to kill you. You’re not bait, because you’re already in mortal danger. I’m offering a lifeline to you, the last of the human race.”
He stopped, perhaps for dramatic effect. Noah might not be human, but he seemed to know a lot about theatricality.
“Has it started to get aggressive yet?” Noah asked. “The lights?”
He looked around the room. No one wanted to answer.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything. I can tell by the way you’re looking at each other, it has. Well, that’s going to keep getting worse. What it’s doing is conducting experiments to work out what makes you seven different. It’ll eventually get tired of trying to solve that puzzle and just clean up after itself and move on. Then we both lose out. I miss out on an opportunity to gain valuable information about these creatures, and you miss out on living. Your other option, what I’m offering, pastor, is a chance to maybe not die.”
“This device of yours,” Ananda said, “does it kill them?”
“I don’t know how to kill something like this. I can trap it, is all. The trap won’t even hold it forever, but it’ll hold it for long enough to get it off the planet and a very long way from here. Maybe I’ll throw it into a sun, I don’t know. I can buy you time and distance is what I’m saying. Can’t guarantee it will last forever, not until we have a better idea of the Tachyonite’s motivation. Figure that out and we can move the human race off the extinction list.”
“Sounds great,” Paul said. “I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Neither do I,” Carol said.
“It’s your choice,” Noah said. “I’m just laying out the options. And, I mean, I apologize about the whole abduction thing, but you have to realize that I saved your lives when I did that. Don’t hold that part against me.”
“Robbie?” Carol said. “What do you think?”
Robbie didn’t know what he thought yet and hated that the others wanted to know. It was all a lot easier when this was just a crazy idea he’d had about an alien hiding in the shadows.
“You let us catch you,” Robbie said to Noah. “You’ve been helping us all along. You gave Bethany a wheelbarrow and unlocked the door on the supermarket roof. Am I forgetting anything?”
“Elton?” Win said.
“No, the horse was just good luck,” Noah said. “There’s a few dozen of them running wild west of here if you’re curious. But yes to everything else. If you want to know why I haven’t just popped in and said hello, that’s what I did with Raymond, and he did not handle it well. I tried to open up a dialogue with Carol, but I think we all know how that went. You guys had to work it out on your own. Hopefully, before the Tachyonite decided to get rid of you.”
Robbie nodded. He looked around the room to see if anyone else had more to add, but they were all looking to him. Their leader, apparently.
“Okay,” he said. “What do you want us to do?”
What Noah wanted them to do was simple enough: gather at his device, all seven of them, at a particular time.
It was a slightly problematic ask, only because they had no timepieces, and he couldn’t give them more than a certain occasion to be named later.
“I’ll know when,” he said. “The problem is in the detection. I’m looking for that moment when the . . . What were those things, the, um, the jewelry? . . . Mood rings. It’s like mood rings. I’ll be able to detect when the creature’s about to attack because its energy levels will crest. Again, I can’t explain it any better without a ton of detail, and the truth is, I’m about a half an hour away from the oxygen eating through my skin here.”
“How long will we have?” Ananda asked. “Once you’ve notified us.”
“An hour, maybe two. Think of it like a grenade. The Tachyonite has to be near the device when it’s about to blow. If one of you isn’t near it, there’s a risk the grenade will go off around that person first instead, and then we’ve lost our window, because it’s only vulnerable to the trap right at that moment.”
“This is happening soon?” Robbie asked.
“Not sure. Could be a week or a month. Maybe two. Look, I really have to go, man. Can I have my doodad?”
Robbie looked around the room for someone to decide this for him. Nobody did, so he stood up and handed it over.
“Thanks,” he said.
He pulled something else out of his cloak and tossed it to Ananda.
“If that box gives you a solid red light, it’s time to go,” Noah said.
“What do the other lights mean?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about those.”
That just about guaranteed it would be all she was going to worry about, but maybe Noah knew that.
“You’re not coming back when it’s time?” Robbie asked.
“I will, but not until it’s over. Like I said, if it sees me, you’re done where you stand. Okay? See you guys on the other side.”
He raised his injured right arm and pushed the button.
Noah’s disappearing act was fascinating. It was as if he walked backwards into a darkened room until overtaken by that darkness, except that there was no room to back into, and the darkness came from within him.
They all stood there awhile, just staring at the spot he’d vacated.
“Yellow spots,” Bethany said, pointing at the floor. “See?”
Noah had dripped some blood next to the chair.
“Saw that,” Robbie said.
“Told you I winged him in the driveway.”
“Yep.”
Robbie sat back down next to Carol.
“So,” he said, “are we going to do what he says?”
“I thought you already made that decision,” Paul said. “I wouldn’t have let him leave.”
Robbie turned to Paul. “Nobody here was stopping you from making that decision,” he said. “If you had something to share, there was time for it.”
“Sure,” Paul said.
“No, really,” Robbie said. “I’m not the last word here. I think we should do it, but there are seven of us and nobody elected me. So I’m asking what you think. All of you.”
None of them wanted to go first. It was an odd new dynamic for the Apocalypse Seven, Robbie thought. They never really had to vote on many things before this, because in the past there was always a clear expert on the subject—whatever the subject—among them, and everyone else was willing to defer. They didn’t have a first-encounter-with-an-alien expert, though.
“Touré?” Robbie asked. “What do you think? Do we do what he said or not?”
“It’s a lot to take in, dude,” Touré said. “But I vote yes.”
“Yeah, so do I,” Bethany said. “Anything that stops those lights.”
“Carol?” Robbie asked.
“I don’t trust Noah,” she said. “But if you do, I’ll go along.”
“I’m not sure I trust him either,” Robbie said. “Win?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Something smells funny.”
“That’s just how he smells,” Touré said.
“Ha, not what I mean. You mentioned him, when you were feverish. Do you remember?”
Touré looked shocked. “No—did I?”
“Yeah, by name. You kept talking about having to get back to the gang, and Noah was one of the people you named. He said we were only missing a couple of hours from our memories, which I took to mean the time he abducted us and the time he put us back. I’m just wondering if it was more than that.”
“Maybe Touré’s fever helped him remember whatever Noah erased,” Robbie said.
“I’m saying, it could have been more,” Win said. “We have no way of knowing, not when we’re dealing with someone who can vanish like he just did, someone who can alter our memories like he already admitted he was capable of.”
“That’s fair,” Robbie said. “Does that mean you’re not in?”
“No, I’m in, for now. I just feel like we’re missing something.”
“Okay. Ananda?”
“I’ll do it,” she said. “It’s a risk of death versus a virtual guarantee of it. But I reserve the right to change my mind.”
“Sure.”
Robbie turned to the pastor, sitting in the first row.
“No,” Paul said. “Absolutely not.”
“This will only work if all of us participate,” Ananda said. “You heard what he said.”
“I did. The space alien said a lot of stuff. About the only thing I’m willing to believe is that he’s really a space alien. For the rest of it, I’ll hold out until a better explanation comes along.”
“I understand it if this is troubling for you—” Robbie began.
Paul cut him off. “No, it’s not that, kid. I know where you’re going. You all think I’m just some Bible-thumping yahoo. Maybe that’s what I am, but this isn’t about that. I’m not going to debate divine intent or whether the thing that just vanished is a devil or whether space aliens have souls. It’s not about any of that. This is about free will. I think I have it, and I think what I just heard said otherwise, and so I am exercising that free will by rejecting the premise.”
“You’re thinking we don’t have a choice?” Robbie asked.
“No, you’re not looking big enough. You want to tell me the shimmer is the afterimage of an alien who moves backwards through time . . . no. The Lord gave me free will, and that free will resulted in my being chosen to remain on this Earth for reasons only He understands. I accept that even if I don’t understand it, because I am in control of my decisions. Now I’m hearing that the spaceman saved my life and dropped me into the future because he could detect some kind of trace evidence that I was going to be in the future. That’s the description of a world where our fates are predetermined, and I can’t abide that. So, no sir. You can count me out.”
With that, Paul got up and left the auditorium.
They all sat in the near darkness in silence for a little while.
“I’ll talk to him,” Win said.
“No, I will,” Ananda said.
“Give him some time,” Robbie said. “Maybe he’ll come around.”
Ananda held up the box Noah gave her.
“We don’t know how long we have,” she said.
“I know. Give him some anyway. He’s a reasonable person.”