Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (23 page)

“It’s a big universe,” Sikes said, feeling foolish for refusing to accept her word. Though not as foolish as he would feel if he did believe in spaceships. “There’re bound to be millions of things out there that we don’t know anything about.”

Stewart nodded. “I agree with you one hundred percent. But this object
isn’t
one of them. Because just as it does not exhibit any of the characteristics of an asteroid or a comet, it
does
exhibit many of the characteristics of a self-propelled space vehicle.”

Sikes shook his head. He
couldn’t
accept her reasoning. It was impossible. It
had
to be.

Amy wasn’t finished with him. “Detective, this thing has performed
three
course corrections during the time I’ve tracked it. Asteroids don’t correct their courses. I plotted its general trajectory and checked back for other exposures that might have caught it in the past few weeks, and it
wasn’t
there, indicating that it’s undergone even more extensive course corrections in the past. This thing just
appeared
sometime in the past ten days, and it’s got somewhere specific to go.”

Sikes countered with the most important question he could think of—the one that most made him want to discount what Amy claimed. “So how come you’re the only one who knows about it? I mean,
if
that is some sort of bizarre spaceship heading for us, why haven’t the big observatories called press conferences? Why is it just you and no one else?”

Amy met his gaze directly, thrillingly. “You said it yourself. It’s a big universe. Telescopes can only watch so much of it at any given time. And as I told you, other than a couple of experimental rigs like the one I’ve put together, there’s only
one
thirty-six-inch telescope actively involved in the full-time search for objects like this.” Amy stood up and rubbed at the back of her neck. “Back in January, 1991, an asteroid passed within 170,000 kilometers of the earth. That’s closer to us than the moon, for God’s sake. And you know when we found out about it?” She didn’t wait for Sikes to answer. “Three days
after
its closest approach, when someone finally got around to developing the plates. We don’t see a tenth of one percent of what’s out there.”

Sikes stood up as well. He wasn’t sure what to do next, but he knew it was important that he take the lead. Time was running out for his investigation. “Do you think anyone else
is
going to be able to see this thing?”

Amy hit a key that made her screen slowly dim until it was blank, except for a moving watch face. “It’s big enough that it’s bound to screw up a lot of time exposures eventually. But it’s going to pass through Earth’s orbit so far away that I doubt anyone will realize what they’ve seen until it’s on its way out of the system again.”

For the first time Sikes thought about what was going to happen to this object. He found it somehow terrible that if it were a spacecraft of some kind, it would just pass by, as if it were ignoring Earth.

He saw that Amy was watching him again with that same peculiar intensity and urgency. “Now you understand, don’t you?”

But Sikes wasn’t sure what she meant. He looked at his watch in frustration. Angie’s deadline was approaching rapidly, and his most promising lead had just gone down the proverbial rabbit hole.

“Give me the benefit of the doubt for a minute,” Amy said quickly. “Let me construct a hypothesis. What if the object
is
a spaceship? Since it didn’t originate in this system, then it was built by creatures who have solved engineering problems that are hundreds if not thousands of years in advance of our science. Think of just the energy source it must have to let it cross between the stars. Think of . . .” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m getting carried away, and you obviously think I’m nuts. The point is, even if there’s only a one percent chance that my analysis is correct, would you be willing to gamble away a chance to discover the secrets of that kind of technology?”

Put that way, without requiring him to accept that the thing definitely
was
a spaceship, but only to consider the
possibility
that it might be, Sikes found Amy’s scenario easier to deal with. It still wasn’t convincing enough. But it was easier.

Amy pounced as if she had spotted a weak point in his armor. “Here’s your bottom line, detective. It doesn’t matter what you think about what I’m telling you. What matters is that I told Dr. Petty exactly what I’ve told you. He believed. And someone else must have believed it, too.”

“Who else?” Sikes asked.

Amy paused as if she didn’t want to answer. “Whoever killed him, of course,” she said at last. Then she pulled a short red jacket from a pile of books on the floor and lifted the purse that was hidden under it. “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “You coming?”

Then she walked out of her office, and Sikes followed. He wasn’t willing to let Amy Stewart go yet. Professionally or personally.

Sikes felt ancient as he walked among the students on the UCLA campus. They all looked to be fifteen years old, full of superhuman energy. He felt out of place, as if he didn’t belong there, even with the authority his badge gave him.

Amy seemed to know where she was going, so he walked beside her in silence. Her airless office
had
become oppressive. The bright October sunshine and lush green leaves of the trees that lined the concrete pathway they walked were a welcome break.

“How long have you been enrolled here?” Sikes asked, to hear her voice again.

“That doesn’t sound like an official question.”

“It isn’t,” Sikes admitted.

Amy slowed and looked at him. “Anyone ever tell you you look like Mick Jagger with short hair?” she asked unexpectedly.

Sikes made a face. He got that all the time. “That doesn’t sound like a scientific observation.”

“It isn’t,” she said, then she picked up her pace again.

Sikes wanted to ask Amy if she liked Mick Jagger but decided she had been making a point about the boundaries his questions must fall within. He wondered if she had felt the same rush of instant attraction he had felt when they had seen each other for the first time. Probably better not to know the answer to that one, he thought. But there were many other questions for which he
did
need to know the answers. He glanced at his watch again. It was becoming a nervous habit. But there were only a few hours before he had to report back, with or without making progress. He touched the sleeve of Amy’s jacket to slow her stride.

“Leaving the spaceship stuff aside, what makes you think there’s a connection between what you’ve observed and Dr. Petty’s death?”

This time Amy stopped on the path. “I thought
you
were the one who said there was a connection. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

“Well, yeah,” Sikes said, momentarily thrown off balance. This was the second time he had begun to suspect that she was hiding something. “My connection was that he had important ‘material’ and that he was killed the night he was going to meet with someone about it. So what I really wanted to know was, what was the content of the ‘material,’ which you’ve told me, and who did he meet with?”

“No idea,” Amy said, jamming her hands into her pockets. She started walking again, and they passed a large bronze bear in a courtyard. Then they climbed a few steps and were on a broad walkway that ended at a large stone-sided building.

But Sikes didn’t want to continue his interrogation indoors. He asked her if they could sit for a moment, outside, where they wouldn’t have to worry about anyone overhearing them. Amy didn’t seem to care one way or another. She just wanted fresh air. They sat on a concrete bench off the path, ignored by the nonstop parade of students.

“Why did you give the material to Dr. Petty in the first place?” Sikes asked.

“I didn’t know what else to do with it.”

“Why not call a press conference? Phone up “Sixty Minutes” or something?”

“I’m just a graduate student, detective. Who’s going to listen to me? Dr. Petty’s reputation was strong enough that he could have called the media and gotten away with it. But I couldn’t.”

Sikes realized there was something more hidden between the lines in that answer. “What do you mean by ‘gotten away with it’? Get away with what?”

Amy hooked one arm over the back of the bench and half turned so she could face Sikes. She held a hand at her forehead to shade her eyes from the sun. “Ever hear of the SETI Protocol?” she asked.

Sikes shook his head.

“It’s like a contingency plan,” Stewart explained. “An informal international agreement that was originally drafted by the State Department of Advanced Technology and amended by astronomers around the world. Basically, it sets out the procedures to be followed if and when signals are ever detected that might indicate the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization.”

“SETI,” Sikes said. “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence?”

“That’s it,” Amy agreed. “The Protocol’s been ratified by almost every country capable of supporting a national astronomy program, except this one. And the steps it lays out are pretty straightforward. Essentially, the Protocol calls for immediate public disclosure and the creation of a civilian group of scientists who would then control all attempts to communicate with the signal source.”

Sikes screwed up his face. “Scientists spend their time thinking about stuff like that?”

Amy moved again to angle her eyes out of the sun. “You’d be amazed what scientists think of in their spare time.”

“So does your object qualify as a signal source?” Sikes asked, enjoying the warm sunshine and finding himself more and more drawn into this strange conversation with this very appealing woman and thinking less and less of his impending failure to crack his first murder case.

“It’s as good as any.”

“Then why the need for secrecy? Why not do what the Protocol says—contact lots of astronomers or the State Department or something?”

Amy made a sound that was almost like a snort. “Did you believe me when I told you what I had found? No, of course you didn’t. So what makes you think the State Department’s going to believe me? Half the astronomers in the world aren’t going to believe me.”

“I don’t get it,” Sikes said. “If you show the experts your plates and your polarized radio . . . stuff, they’ll look at it, and it’ll convince them. Right?”

“That would take weeks, detective. The object will be long gone by then.”

“So?”

Amy shook her head. “Look, if I had detected intelligent signals coming from near another star, no problem. I’d post a couple of notes on Internet telling other astronomers where to look, and in a couple of weeks or months everything’d be fine. Or maybe if I’d found a crashed spaceship, I could just start taking people to it and let them look at it. In both cases my conclusions would be based on reproducible evidence. It wouldn’t be going anywhere. People might scoff at me at first, but all they’d have to do is examine the evidence themselves.”

Sikes saw what she was getting at. “But in this case the evidence is going to disappear.”

“And forever after I’d be the wacko student who saw a UFO and wrecked her career. Dr. Petty would have kept that from happening.”

Sikes knew what it was to face ridicule, and he could sympathize with her, yet there still seemed to be something she wasn’t telling him.

“But that’s not the whole thing, is it?” he said. “I mean, if you’ve been able to figure out so much about this thing in only a few days, somebody else must be able to do it, too. If it were me, I’d be jumping up and down and screaming and raising such a big stink that
somebody
would have to take a look in the same direction.”

Amy looked at him, and this time it was with sadness. “You still don’t get it, do you? That’s what Dr. Petty was going to do. And look what happened to him.”

Sikes lost it. She had been dragging him around the same bush for the past hour. “So what
did
happen to Petty?” he said in frustration.
“I
don’t know. That’s why I’m here listening to this crazy story you’re dishing out. On the one hand you’re acting like it’s the biggest discovery in all history, and on the other you’re telling me you can’t breathe a word of it to anyone else.”

“Because I
don’t
want what happened to Dr. Petty to happen to me!” she retorted. “Didn’t you hear what I said about the Protocol? It’s been ratified by every country in the world
except
for the United States. The U.S. government has refused to let an international group of civilians take responsibility for communicating with other civilizations. The government wants the military to do it.
Our
military. Do you realize the implications of that? Just try.” Amy’s face flushed as if she were about to cry. “I went to Dr. Petty because I thought that
he
could stand up to them. He could get the word out, and more people would listen to him than me, and others would take plates, and . . . and who knows? Maybe even beam some lasers or some radio bursts at it and try to get it to change course. And if it
did
keep going, and it left the system, and there wasn’t definitive proof of what it was, and the military wanted to come after someone for breaking the regulations that say we’re only supposed to report these things to the government,
they wouldn’t be able to do a thing to Dr. Petty.
Christ, detective, it would be like locking up Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking.” Amy took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes. “Don’t you see? Dr. Petty was supposed to be
untouchable,
and they
killed
him.” She covered her eyes with one hand. “Because of what I found . . . because of what I found by
accident,
they killed him.”

Sikes forgot all about professional detachment. He slid across to her and placed his arm around her shoulders. There was only one question left to ask. The only question that was important.

“Who
killed him?” he said. “Who killed Petty?”

Amy drew back from him. “Who do you think?” she said bitterly. “It was the government. Our own goddamned government.”