7
The last thing to tend to was my trusty old F-150. I parked it in the equipment barn next to Dad’s old John Deere and popped the hood to disconnect the battery. I pulled a heavy tarp over the truck and wondered how long it’d be before I saw it again.
I locked up the barn and took one last look around the property. The keys in my hand felt heavy, a reminder of everything I was about to leave behind. I placed them in a magnetic box hidden under the back porch and took a deep breath. “That’s it,” I sighed. “I’m ready to go.” Not really, but it seemed like the thing to say.
“Very well.” Green Eyes took out one of those crystal slates and swept the area in a circular motion, then held it up to the sky. “We are clear of ground and atmospheric-based detection. There are no satellites transiting our departure cone.”
Without a word, Blue Eyes headed for the front yard. Green Eyes slipped the crystal into a pocket and gestured for me to follow. “If you please. We will not be detected, but we must move quickly.”
I nodded and followed them around the house, toward the tree line. As we rounded the front, I stopped dead in my tracks. Where there had once been nothing but grass and woods beyond, now sat a silvery machine that looked like it could’ve been a giant blob of liquid mercury. It was shaped like a teardrop, with a flattened base. There were no lights, no doors or windows. Suddenly an opening appeared near the pointy end of the teardrop. I assumed this was the front.
Their ship wasn’t that big, maybe twenty feet end to end. “Seems small for such a long trip.”
“This is a trans-atmospheric shuttle,” Green Eyes explained patiently. “You’ll find our home ship to be much more spacious.”
“Home ship?” I wondered. “Like a ‘mothership’?”
“That would be an accurate analogy, yes.”
“And where is it?”
“In orbit at what your astronomers refer to as a ‘Lagrange point’ near your moon. It is advantageous for a number of reasons, but for our purposes its greatest advantage is for avoiding detection.”
I knew almost nothing of astronomy, another gap in my understanding that was likely to be filled in soon. “Can’t it be cloaked, like this ship?”
“At lower power settings, yes. Once we activate the drive, it will become visible in the electromagnetic spectrum, which is why we have to carefully time our movements.”
“That’s what you were scanning for earlier. So there’s nothing up there near the Moon?”
“At present, your space agencies have nothing at Lagrange point two. That will inevitably change in the future, but for now that deficit serves our purposes quite well.” He waved me toward the open portal, which was almost at ground level.
I stepped inside and found it identical to the wrecked ship I’d found a few days ago, except of course everything seemed to be in place. It felt sterile, all soft off-white walls with metallic highlights. A sphere of dark metal sat atop a pedestal near the back of the cabin, behind a transparent screen.
There were a handful of contoured couches, with one mounted forward in front of a semicircular panel. Blue Eyes sat in this one, and the panel lit up with what I guessed were instrument displays. Ahead of him, the blank wall transformed into a wide oval window. “How is it we’re able to see through the wall?”
“Synthetic vision,” Green Eyes explained. “There are sensors embedded in the outer skin that can create a virtual window wherever you need it.” He pointed at the sidewall next to the seat I’d taken. “You are welcome to try it for yourself.”
I tapped the wall and a similar, if smaller, oval appeared. As luck would have it, I was looking straight at my house. “Why not put in windows? Seems simpler.”
“It is not from an engineering perspective, even with transparent alloys.” I had no idea that was a thing. “Windows create structural weaknesses in the pressure vessel.” He could tell I was skeptical. No matter how advanced they were, devices can break. “I can assure you this solution has proven most reliable.”
Looking around the small cabin, it still seemed like tight quarters for going most of the way to the Moon. “How long will it take us to get there?”
“A little less than one hour, by your measure of time.”
Time was another complicated subject I was going to learn much more about, though I didn’t realize it at that moment. “An hour? It took our astronauts a week to get there.”
“Three days, actually. They were using a primitive mode of propulsion.”
Primitive. A crash program that had dominated American culture for the better part of a decade, and in their eyes it might as well have been Vikings crossing the ocean in wooden longboats.
As Blue Eyes’ hands danced around the control panel, a subtle vibration began to build up around us. A barely audible buzz emanated from the floor. I felt a slight pull toward the rear of the craft, and I turned to stare at that odd metallic sphere on its pedestal. Whatever was happening, I could sense it was somehow at the center of it all. It left me a little queasy.
“We are lifting off,” Green Eyes said with a gesture toward my synthetic window. The house, the barn, the farm all fell away into the darkness. Beyond were lights from surrounding farms and scattered neighborhoods, with Indianapolis glittering in the distance as we gained altitude.
An amber light flashed above us and my heart about stopped. Were we in trouble?
“Acceleration warning,” my companion said. “Please remain confined to your couch until it disappears.”
My entire body lay in this strange, semispherical couch. There were no rests for my head, arms, or legs, just one continuous cushion, like a high-tech beanbag. Its pliable padding seemed to absorb me as we zipped through the clouds into the night sky. I could tell we were going incredibly fast, but barely felt the acceleration. “Shouldn’t we be feeling g-forces or something?” I didn’t have to be a pilot or Indy racer to understand what those were. Every car accident I’d ever worked had been a firsthand demonstration of the effects of sudden acceleration—or rather, deceleration.
“This is what the couches are for,” he explained. “The cushions are made of an acceleration gel, a safety feature which augments the inertial dampening field.”
Inertial dampening . . . I had only the vaguest idea of what that could mean and it seemed impossible. How could they get around basic physics? Again, I suspected the answer to my question had to do with that sphere in back.
The sky ahead had become impossibly clear and black. Looking to my side, more lights from dozens of cities receded behind us as the horizon curved away beneath a faint greenish-yellow glow. I was seeing the Earth’s curvature and its thin sheath of atmosphere for the first time. We were already in space, after barely a minute’s travel.
“How fast are we going?”
“At present, thirty thousand kilometers per hour. Now that we are above the atmosphere, we will continue accelerating until we reach our home ship.”
“So how does this thing work?” I guessed that rockets weren’t involved, judging by their moon landing comment.
Green Eyes swiveled in his couch to face me. The amber light was still glowing overhead, and he was careful to keep his head and limbs inside the gel cushion. “What is your understanding of physics?”
“Thin,” I said. “I understand acceleration and inertia in principle, mainly from dealing with accident victims. I know that it’s impossible to go faster than light, that speed has an effect on time, and that quantum physics is supposed to be as bizarre as it sounds. That’s about it.”
“It is enough to start,” he said with another disarming smile. “While you don’t necessarily need to know precisely how all of this works, it will be useful if you have some basic comprehension.”
“Like knowing how my truck works, even though I take it to someone else when it needs service?”
He nodded appreciatively. “A fair analogy.” His eyes turned to the pedestal behind us. “That sphere is the basis of our propulsive force and the source of our inertial dampening field. Those forces are inextricably linked. The sphere is a stable isotope of an element your scientists call moscovium. Its atomic number is 115 on your periodic table—which is an excellent method for categorizing elements, by the way. 115’s basic form is highly energetic, with a half-life of milliseconds. Synthesizing a stable isotope is currently beyond human abilities, though we don’t believe it will remain out of your reach for long.”
“How long is ‘long’ by your standards?”
“By your time reference, less than a century.”
I blinked, hard. There was one more mental adjustment I would have to make. Human perceptions of time were nothing on a cosmic scale.
Green Eyes ignored my double-take and continued. “It won’t be possible to grasp the potential of element 115 until your scientists arrive at what they term a ‘unified theory.’ It is the ultimate pursuit in their understanding of physics.”
I tried to recall the concepts our “Physics for Physicians” professor had tried to get across to us during my second year of vet school. It was an elective, mostly to teach us the effects of radiation on living things, but we couldn’t get there without first going over some fundamentals. “I’ve heard of that, but I still don’t know what it means. All I remember is there are a couple different competing theories of physics which don’t work together.”
“That is mostly correct, by current human understanding,” he said. “Independent of each other they are perfectly adequate, though there are certain aspects of each theory which are in conflict. What you call ‘relativity’ explains the behavior of gravity and its relationship to time and space, but it cannot fully explain behavior at the subatomic level. Likewise, your ‘quantum’ physics explains atomic and subatomic actions quite well, but it does not work at larger scales. A unified theory would explain how these two conflicting theories remain correct in isolation, while filling in the gaps of understanding between them. This is essential for manipulating gravity, which is the key enabling technology for interstellar travel.”
I felt my eyebrows jump. “You can manipulate gravity?”
“We are doing so right now. This ability also enables a number of safety features, such as inertial dampeners. This is why you do not feel our acceleration, which would be fatal without a dampening field.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. No matter how marvelous their technology, sometimes things don’t work the way they’re supposed to. If they did, these guys wouldn’t need a medical corps. People, and I assumed aliens, got sick, had accidents, got injured by malfunctioning equipment. “So we’re utterly dependent on that gravity ball back there to push us along. What happens if it breaks?”
“It is not pushing us so much as it is bending the gravity fields around us, in essence moving local space out of our way until we reach our desired location. The vehicle you encountered experienced an anomaly with its gravity drive system. It is rare, but when it occurs the results can be catastrophic.”
I didn’t need any convincing, and tried not to think about what would happen if the magic space ball suddenly decided to stop working.
There were too many questions boiling inside me and I couldn’t focus long enough to express them in anything resembling organized thoughts. When they fired that ball up, it seemed to mess with both my gut and my head. “How do you ‘move space out of the way’? There’s nothing there.”
“There is much more than you realize. While space may seem physically empty, a vacuum, it has a structure that you cannot perceive. Your scientist Einstein realized that space and time are inextricably linked in a continuum defined by gravity. There are certain races in the Union who are capable of sensing this continuum.”
“You mean they can see gravity?”
“Not in the way you might suppose, but close enough.”
I took an educated guess. “Like seasonal bird migrations. They know where they’re going over thousands of miles by sensing changes in Earth’s magnetic field. Some are amazingly accurate, returning to the exact same location at the same time every year.”
“That is an excellent analogy. The race I spoke of were among the first to harness 115’s potential; the beings you encountered at the accident site.”
“The little gray men. Does their species have a name?” They’d only spoken of these varied alien species in general terms. “Or is that not a thing in the Union?”
“It is,” he said, “and they do. You can think of them as Reticulans. It is derived from Zeta Reticuli, your name for their star system.”
“Reticulans. Got it.” And since we were on the subject, if we were going to be traveling halfway across the galaxy together, I needed to know my escorts by something other than eye color. “I still never got your proper names.”
Green seemed amused. “You should be warned, our names confer somewhat more information than you are used to. They trace family lineage back several generations, to the beginning of our Diaspora.” He held a hand to his chest, as if we were meeting for the first time. “I am Byyruumn-Kchajkk-Urtserr-aan-Tykkggetta. A mouthful, as you might say.”
He wasn’t kidding. “Yeah, we’ll have to shorten that into something I can remember. How about Bjorn?” Simple and Scandinavian, which given his appearance made it a no-brainer. It also kind of fit with the first syllables of his name.
“Bjorn.” He seemed satisfied with my suggestion. “Yes. I wholeheartedly approve.”
I jerked a thumb at Blue Eyes up in the cockpit. “What about your partner? I’d ask him myself, but he seems kind of busy right now.”
“He is. I don’t think he will mind my speaking for him. You may call him Savvuun-Jkaech-Yrsuun-aan-Kvallbara.”
I couldn’t help but snicker. “I could try calling him that, but it would be embarrassing. Think he’d mind ‘Sven’?”
“I do not,” Sven called from over his shoulder.
I rubbed my hands together. “Glad we could get that out of the way. Now, about translations. If your language is this hard, what will the others be like? I need to be able to talk to my patients.” Not to mention get along in the Union in general.
“You will have that ability, once you’ve been fitted with a translation wafer.”
“A wafer? Like an implant?”
“Yes, but do not be alarmed. It is a commonly used tool among our citizens. While the Union does not strictly require it, you will find it to be essential. It allows your brain’s auditory region to process foreign speech and translate it into your native tongue. The only limitation is the translator’s ability to learn your language, which will improve with time.”
“How long should I expect that to take?”
“Not long at all,” Bjorn said. “The wafers already contain basic English grammar and syntax. It will need only to master your local dialect. The more you utilize it, the higher fidelity of translation.”
I assumed the basic foundations of our language—and who knew how many other human languages—had come from their observations of us. Maybe they’d had more direct interaction with us than they let on.
Maybe I wasn’t the first human to be admitted to the Union?