The Second Ship Page 9

  He and his family had arrived from Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Bobby had asked her to go skiing with him, and although she protested that she didn’t know how, he promised to teach her. Allow her to humiliate herself was more like it.

  To be fair, he had spent the morning with her on the bunny slopes of Pajarito Mountain, the wonderful little ski area originally built by the lab employees. As thrilled as she was with learning the gliding wedge, the snow plow, the pizza slice, or whatever you want to call the uncomfortable beginner ski position, she probably would have terminated her ski career that day if not for Bobby’s patient instruction. By noon, though, that patience had worn thin, and Bobby suggested that the she continue her practice solo.

  Having fulfilled his duty, Bobby Jones spent the rest of the day swooshing down the black-diamond slopes with Kristin Beale, a sixth-grade girl whose long, blond hair would never know a ski cap, not even if her ears froze off and fell into the snow. Kristin had been born on the ski slopes, and it showed, which allowed the vacuity of her speech to go unnoticed.

  Her humiliation complete, Heather had worked on her skiing that year with passion that bordered on obsession. But by the time Heather had mastered the sport, her interest in the lovely Mr. Jones had evaporated. However, the motivation that had driven her—that she could feel like it was yesterday.

  So now that the otherworldly combination of high personal interest and event-driven need had superimposed themselves, Heather’s study drive was fearsome.

  Mark worried her, though. The seductive influence of his enhanced physical prowess only heightened his natural competitive drive. And basketball gave him the perfect outlet. Jennifer was furious at her twin and had hardly spoken to him in the last few weeks, convinced that his irresponsibility threatened them all.

  When Jennifer first learned that Mark had tried out for and made the Varsity A basketball team, she had confronted him.

  “Mark, are you crazy?

  “No, I’m good.”

  “I don’t care that you’re good. Our new gifts are too important to use for petty personal aggrandizement. I think we received them for a higher purpose.”

  “Higher purpose? Sis, you’ve been reading way too many comic books. I don’t have a gift. I have talent the ship just released. And I’m not about to sit around and hide it. I plan on living my life.”

  Jennifer clenched her teeth. “Mark. Think for a change. What’s it worth to become a big basketball star? Is it worth attracting all that attention? Is it worth the risk of getting our ship discovered?”

  “Yes, it is. Let me tell you something, Sis. Life is risky. We might get hit by a bus tomorrow. Someone might wonder why you’re leafing through every book you can get your hands on. Heather might slip up and let the cat in the savant hat out of the bag. The only really safe place is in a cozy straightjacket in a nice rubber room. If you want that, then go for it. Not me, though.”

  “Jumping off a cliff isn’t being a risk taker. It’s being an idiot.”

  Heather had stood there watching the confrontation, although she might as well have been invisible for all the attention her two friends paid her. It had concluded with Mark storming off as Jennifer yelled after him, “Don’t be an idiot!”

  Not that Mark would have liked helping with what they were working on anyway. She and Jennifer were on a mad quest to learn, each focused on her own areas of special interest. Heather worked her way through book after book of advanced mathematics and physics while Jennifer focused on computer science and data mining, that obtuse art of storing and categorizing data so that a search engine can find it. In addition, Jennifer had once again redone her data-tagging scheme, which forced her to rescan all of the books she had already memorized.

  What drove them was growing uneasiness with the work that was being done on cold fusion around the world. But they had to admit that they had discovered nothing that might indicate cold fusion technology presented any real threat to the planet. Quite the opposite.

  Heather had downloaded and read every available publication on the alien cold fusion technology. No matter how many times she reworked the equations, the technology still looked good. And the peer reviews by physicists and mathematicians around the world had been very positive.

  So why was she so scared?

  Outside, the wind howled so hard it shook the glass in her bedroom window. Fine pellets of sleet tapped the glass like cold, drumming fingers. Heather wrapped her thick robe more tightly around her shoulders, stretched, and then rose from the chair to peer out.

  The storm was getting worse. The first of the high-country blizzards for the year was getting ready to descend upon northern New Mexico. According to the local weather man, they could expect between twelve and eighteen inches by morning, which would close all the roads in and out of town. That meant no school.

  Heather smiled as she watched the sleet give way to large, thick flakes, now falling so heavily she could barely see the streetlight through the swirling whiteness. School might be closed tomorrow, but she would bet her left arm the ski area would be open.

  With a sigh of regret, she moved back to her desk. She would not be skiing tomorrow or anytime soon. There was just too much to do.

  A loud tap on her window caused her to look up. After several seconds, she shook her head and returned her attention to her studies. Another tap, this one much louder than the first, brought her to her feet.

  Frozen in place, her pulse pounding in her ears, Heather stared at the dark window. Snow that had caked the lower-left corner of the pane had been partially scraped away. A white piece of paper fluttered wildly in the cleared space, secured by a thick wad of chewing gum.

  Fascinated, Heather walked back to the window and opened it just enough to retrieve the scrap of paper. Her eyes focused on the typeset words that filled the partial page.

  As when the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence!

  Isaiah 64:2

  As though she were in a dream, Heather’s gaze was drawn to the ground ten feet below her window. There in the swirling snow at the base of the streetlight, a solitary figure stood, ice caking his bearded, skeletal face, his eyes lost in dark sockets.

  And as the sound of her scream split the stillness of the house, the figure below grinned up at her.

  19

  By the time the police arrived, the man was long gone. Heather’s parents had neither seen nor heard anything out of the ordinary. If it had not been for the note and the chewing gum, Heather doubted the two officers would have believed her account of what had occurred.

  After taking statements, the officers took the gum and put it in a plastic bag. One of them examined the note.

  “Looks like our man tore this out of a cheap Bible. The type you find in drawers at two-star hotels.”

  Either the cop had some highly developed deductive reasoning or he had way more personal experience than Heather cared to think about. As she was about to settle firmly on the latter conclusion, the officer paused in his study.

  “Isaiah 64:2. Six letters, the number six, then two numbers that add to six. Mark of the beast, isn’t it?”

  Heather’s father raised an eyebrow. “Superstitious nonsense.”

  “Oh, I agree with you, Mr. McFarland. I don’t put a bit of stock in it. The question is, though, what about our man out there? Does he? Anyway, we’ll let the boys back at the lab take a look at it.”

  With a nod, the officers departed.

  “Their ‘lab’ is going to ‘look at it,’” her father huffed. “Unless I miss my guess, that stuff is going into a shoe box on a shelf.”

  “It’s all right, Dad,” said Heather. “I shouldn't have overreacted in the first place. I can’t believe I screamed.”

  Her mother shook her head. “Baloney. Any time a man climbs up to a young lady's second-floor window and starts sticking threatening-sounding notes to it with chewing gum,
it calls for a bit of overreaction.”

  Her father’s eyes tightened. “If he shows up again, he’s likely to come down with a case of forty-five-caliber lead poisoning.”

  “Dad, please. I’m sure he’s just some unhappy homeless person who needs help.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I hope he finds it before he threatens my family again.” With that, Heather’s father turned and left the room.

  Heather turned to her mother. “Dad wouldn’t really shoot him, would he?”

  “Don’t get paranoid, now, but pay attention, won’t you? At least until this guy is caught.”

  That didn’t answer her question, but Heather nodded anyway. “I will, Mom. Don’t worry.”

  Sleep seemed an unlikely possibility as Heather crawled back into her bed and pulled the down comforter up under her chin. But before she knew it, she found herself rising to greet the new day. Once again she had beaten the sun.

  She glanced over at the pile of books that awaited her and then at the snow piled on the outside of her windowsill. Something about snow, especially when it was falling heavily and piling high enough to call off school, made Heather feel like goofing off. All that study, and she still hadn’t figured out a reference in the ship's imagery that would give them a key to understanding the tiny component they were studying.

  They had tried to organize a good, specific query to the onboard computer system by coming up with a question about data transfer. Jennifer had gotten the idea, and Heather thought it a good one, that if they could get the ship to show them how it stored and transferred data, it would be a very basic starting point in understanding the underlying alien technology. But no matter how they phrased or visualized the question, the answering imagery was the same.

  It looked like a simple pair of transistors or electronic microswitches. The problem was there were no wires or connections of any type between the switches the ship described, merely some symbols and mathematical equations that Heather did not understand.

  It was frustrating because she thought they could probably build the switches themselves, given a good microscope, a computer, some small RadioShack stepper motors to accurately control the instruments, and an appropriate semiconductor material. But since it wouldn’t form a circuit, why bother? What was the point of a pair of tiny electronic switches that weren't connected to each other?

  The really annoying part was that they had gotten this far a couple of weeks ago. Despite Heather pushing herself through as many advanced mathematics books as she could read, she was no closer to understanding the mysterious equations than she had been when she first saw them.

  “Oh well,” she said to herself, sliding into her big, furry slippers and wrapping her flannel robe around her body. “It looks like a good cartoons and hot chocolate day.”

  The morning slipped away in wonderful wastefulness, aided along its path to Lounge Lizardsville by a breakfast of homemade biscuits and honey, followed by a pot of hot cocoa set on a coaster beside the couch. The television was tuned to the Cartoon Network as huge, puffy snowflakes drifted down outside the windows. By ten, Heather still had not dressed and had no intention of doing so anytime soon.

  At the moment, an epic battle of wits raged between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Having just plummeted to the bottom of the canyon—where he kicked up a small mushroom cloud of dust—the coyote had come up with a bold new plan.

  Heather had always related to the hapless fellow. After all, his plans were truly ingenious, sometimes awe-inspiringly so. Still, no matter how brilliant a scheme he put together, the stupid bird would somehow violate several laws of nature and leave the coyote to suffer the consequences.

  Curled into a tight ball on the couch, sipping happily at a fresh cocoa refill—“Thanks, Mom”—Heather watched as the coyote finished painting a perfect picture of a black tunnel through a rock wall. The wall, which lay along the bird's projected path, completely blocked the road so that when the bird came running down it, he would speed directly into the trap, pre-tenderizing himself in preparation for becoming roadrunner stew.

  It was really impossible to get too much of this stuff. Sure enough, as she and the coyote watched in anticipation, the roadrunner screeched down the road directly up to the cliff. Then—once again thumbing his pointy nose at the pile of physics books that lay upstairs on Heather’s desk—the bird passed harmlessly through the fake tunnel, continuing out the other side.

  And, as could be expected, the coyote raced after the roadrunner, only to splat against the black paint on the near side of the rock wall. He stumbled around afterward in a dazed fashion until he fell off the cliff, generating another small mushroom cloud at the bottom.

  Fire exploded in Heather’s brain as everything clicked into place. Of course. The wall had two sides.

  She jumped up and raced for the telephone. Hearing a familiar hello on the far end, she barely managed to keep her excited voice low enough that her mother did not hear.

  “Jen! Jen, you won’t believe it. I can barely believe it myself, and all because of a cartoon. Never let anyone tell you cartoons are mindless.”

  “Heather, I have no idea what you’re talking about or where this is going.”

  Heather paused and took a deep, gulping breath. “I figured it out. I know what the microswitches do. I know how they work. With Mark’s help, I think we can make them.”

  20

  Abdul Aziz was not a religious man, although he often wished he was. How many years had it been since he had heeded the call to prayer, since he had even set foot inside a mosque? Allah would not look kindly upon his laziness in such matters, but perhaps his service for all of his Muslim brethren would rate some measure of reward in the afterlife. Egyptian born, Syrian trained, experience hardened in a way that few could have survived, Abdul could hardly believe the good fortune that had crowned him this day.

  Direct action. Seldom in the world of international espionage were governments willing to take direct action to achieve their purposes. It was messy. It often left a trail. No, mostly they preferred to work slowly over a number of years to infiltrate and acquire the information they desired.

  The now-defunct Soviet Union had been the master of this tactic, although the newly capitalistic Chinese Communists were giving the former Soviets a run for their money. Even his own government was reluctant to take direct action far from its own borders, although that reluctance certainly did not extend to his country’s immediate neighbors.

  But this Rho Project declaration by the United States government presented such a grave potential threat to the entire Muslim world that there was no time for anything less than direct action. The potential threat was abundant justification that any and all means be used to attain knowledge of what the United States had learned over the last sixty years—information the United Sates still refused to share freely with the world.

  Abdul Aziz was that means, and now he had what he had come for, although even his masters would be shocked at the import of the information. Perhaps Allah would make a place for him after all, despite his shortcomings.

  He smiled to himself. Never had he crossed a border easier to penetrate than the border between the United States and Mexico. The desert was his home, and this desert might as well have been an oasis when compared to the great Arabian Desert in which he had lived a goodly portion of his life.

  And once across that border, he had not paused longer than it took to highjack a car and dump its former owners beneath six inches of dirt, somewhere in the desert between El Paso, Texas, and Alamogordo, New Mexico.

  Now, as he glanced around at the wet mess in what had been a comfortable living room in a quiet Los Alamos residential neighborhood, Abdul shook his head. Getting back across that border was not going to be so easy. Inshallah, God willing, it would happen. At this point, whether he lived or died made little difference. No one would stop him before he returned to his hotel room and broadcast the e-mail message that would change the world.

  Unlike so
me of his associates, Abdul did not enjoy killing. He was merely indifferent to it. The reason he was so much better at it than most was because he had no more emotional response to carving up a child than to preparing a steak for dinner. Even less, since the steak at least made him hungry. All those who had lusted after the kill had not lasted nearly as long as Abdul had, allowing their lust to force them into mistakes that he never made. At least until today.

  But this was no mistake of emotion. It was one required by his mission. Tonight there would be no time for cleanup, so he had not bothered to avoid the mess.

  He glanced over at the armchair that held the body of Dr. Sheldon Brownstein, formerly the number three physicist working on the Rho Project. Beside him, bound and gagged with duct tape, were the bloody bodies of his wife and two children, a boy and a girl, ten and eight years old respectively. Tomorrow these bodies would be found and all hell would break loose, but tonight, Abdul Aziz had what he needed. He would deal with tomorrow when it arrived.

  Abdul nodded at Dr. Brownstein with grudging respect. The man had been strong, unwilling to break until after Abdul had finished with his wife and started in on the children. But finally the information had come, flowing out of the man’s lips so rapidly that Abdul had to tell him to slow down, to ensure the digital recording was intelligible.

  Switching on the television, Abdul swept the room one last time with his eyes, not that he thought he had missed anything. He merely wanted to remember this, the place where he had changed the history of the world. Perhaps one day even the Americans would thank him for what he had done. A thin smile spread across Abdul's hawk-like features. He would not hold his breath for that day.