Just Plain Weird (17 page)

         
“Eliza move away from him.”

         
This time she took offense. She sighed in disgust, and said, “Geez, I never realized I was such a nuisance.”

         
After she stepped away, I did start to feel pretty calm, although not entirely at ease.

         
“Anything else?” Mr. Laughton asked.

         
When I hesitated to answer, Eliza started to glare at me.

         
“Now what?” she demanded. “What could I possibly be doing that’s bothering you? I’m a mile away, and my hands are in my pockets. What?-- I’m breathing too loud?”

         
“No, it’s nothing.”

         
“It’s not nothing, if it’s bothering you,” Mr. Laughton said. “Remember, we need your mind completely clear.”

         
“No, it’ll be okay,” I said. “It’s no big deal. It’s just a little distraction.”

         
“Travis, what is it?” he insisted.

         
“Yeah, Travis, what is it?” Eliza asked, daring me to answer.

         
Now I was getting downright defensive. “Really, I’d rather not say.”

         
“Look,” Eliza said, “If you want, I’ll leave, and go sit in the garage.”

         
“Well, that doesn’t seem quite fair,” Mr. Laughton said, and then turned to me. “After all, this involves Eliza very much, and she should be here.”

         
I really had to think fast now. There was no way I wanted to admit the truth to either one of them: that the living room was a little chilly and Eliza’s tee-shirt was thin and she wasn’t wearing a bra and her-- flesh was-- reacting, and that was the sort of thing that, once I noticed it, I would find extremely distracting, given the fact that I was I normal fifteen-year-old male and had about a gallon of testosterone racing through my veins.
 
All of this, of course, would normally be private, but because this confounded artifact appeared to be reading my mind, all of a sudden my every passing thought had to bear public scrutiny.

         
“Listen,” I said. “If this thing really is reading my mind-- and only God knows why it would bother-- don’t you think that something so advanced that it can defy the law of physics-- don’t you think it could tell the difference between a wish and a passing thought?”

    
    
“It’s impossible to say for sure, Travis,” Mr. Laughton said. “This technology was designed for aliens, there is no doubt about that, and it is impossible to tell how the minds of those aliens worked. Maybe they were incapable of having anything but wishes.”

         
“Yeah, but something this advanced must have fail safes to avert accidental commands.”

         
“Yes, that’s probable, but we don’t know that until we run a series of controlled tests. Until we run exhaustive tests, we can’t hope to have a good understanding of how this all works. Now,” he went on, “you’re obviously stuck on a thought that you would rather keep quiet.”

         
“Uh, yeah,” I admitted.

         
“A thought, I take it, that would embarrass you?”

         
“Definitely.”

         
“Can you reason around it?”

         
“Oh, I’m trying,” I assured him, and then I had an idea. Maybe if I wished that she were wearing a bra… no sooner had I had the thought than an incredibly comical look passed over Eliza’s face. She looked uncomfortably at her father, and then glanced at me, her pale face starting to turn pink.

         
“I-- I think I’ll go up to my room,” she said, “while you two do whatever you think you need to do.”

         
“Eliza, are you sure?” he father asked.

         
“Yeah, I think it’s for the best,” she said, and hurried out of the room. Before she disappeared through the doorway, she pulled open the top of her shirt and peeked underneath it.

         
“Well, then,” Mr. Laughton said, clueless, “I take it that all the distractions are gone now.”

         
“Yeah,” I said, more than a little relieved.

         
“All right, let’s try something, then. Why don’t you try concentrating on the view screen? See if you can--”

         
Before he had a chance to finish, the view screen appeared at the front of the living room; it was showing the topographical map of North America.

         
“Can you switch it to the star field?”

         
The map changed to the star field. It was very easy to accomplish, actually; all I had to do was see it in my mind, and poof there it was.

         
“Can you change the point of view?”

         
Slowly the star field change as the point of view rotated from a point in space to an aspect that was closer to earth. The stars seemed to move minutely until they lined up in more recognizable configurations.

         
Mr. Laughton was enthralled, gazing up at the screen.

         
“Amazing,” he murmured. “All right, now clear your mind. I really don’t know what else to suggest. There’s very little we know about the artifact, and so it’s difficult to know where to start.”

         
“We could always ask it something,” I suggested.

         
“Can we?” he wondered.

         
“Why not?” I said. “If it understood that I wanted ice tea, maybe it understands a lot more.”

         
“All right, try that.”

         
“Where are you from?” I asked aloud.

         
The view screen switched from one star field to another, this one filled with stars I definitely didn’t recognize. At the center of the screen, four red indicator lights surrounded a binary star system.

         
“Fascinating,” he said. “Ask it how long it traveled to get to its present location.”

         
I thought the question this time. The star field vanished, and the screen looked like a huge computer monitor screen across which was written in strange symbols some kind of formula.

         
“All right, that’s no help. Can you ask it to translate the answer into earth terms-- in English?”

         
The formula disappeared and was replaced with a simple answer: “.0000837 seconds.”

         
“That’s not possible,” Mr. Laughton said, the expression on his face duller than usual.
 
“How many light-years are we talking about?”

         
The answer came back: “11654.9874 light-years.”

         
Mr. Laughton gawked at me, and I just shrugged my shoulders.

         
“All right,” he said after a moment. “We’ll really have to give that some thought later. Maybe something is being lost in the translation, here, but I can’t see how anything can travel that far in a fraction of a second.
 
Ask why it never chose to communicate with us, with Eliza or me.”

         
The response: “No purpose.”

         
“No purpose?” he wondered. “What does that mean?” he asked me, as if I really had a clue. “Let’s word this differently: ask why it chose you communicate through you.”

         
The answer: “Searching.”

         
“Searching for what?”

         
“Pilot.”

         
“Ah,” Mr. Laughton said as if he suddenly understood it all. “It makes perfect sense, don’t you see? The exchange of telepathic communication between pilot and ship would be instantaneous-- much faster than having to go through any computer, no matter how advanced. It would also give the ship the benefit of animal instincts. There must be something about Eliza and me that disqualify us as possible pilots. So it appears that our artifact is an orphan-- one half of that which is needed to function fully…. Ask it what happened to the last pilot.”

         
When no response was forthcoming, Mr. Laughton concluded that the artifact didn’t know.

         
“Ask it what its primary function is?”

         
Answer: “Exploration and searching.”

         
“Searching for what?”

         
Here the answer that popped into my mind was so stunning I could hardly repeat it.

         
“What’s wrong?” he asked, when he noticed my shock at the answer. “What did it say?”

         
“I can’t be understanding this right, either,” I told him.

         
“Why?-- What did it say?”

         
“It says it’s searching for the creator.”

         
“Really?”
 
His eyebrows jumped up.
 
He mulled it over for a moment, scratching his chin and frowning deeply.

         
“Well, let’s not get carried away by that one. It could mean something entirely different. Its response could be open to interpretation. It could simply mean its inventor or--” he struggled to come up with other explanations.

         
“Or it could mean God,” I said.

         
“I’m not saying that that is impossible, Travis, just very unlikely. Something might be lost in the translation, here. I hardly think that extremely advanced beings would end up searching earth for what they perceived as being the Almighty.”

         
“Well, if they didn’t know where He was,” I countered, “why would earth be excluded from their search?”

         
“Good point,” he conceded.

         
“I could just ask it,” I said.

         
“Go ahead.”

         
When I asked it to define ‘the creator,’ the artifact responded: “That which is responsible for everything.” The information from the artifact was coming through faster now, and with greater clarity. When I relayed everything to it, I did so with greater confidence that I was understanding everything correctly. “It seems,” I went on, “that they began much the same way we started out. Just a bunch of simple people that had faith and believed in one God, the Creator. As they developed, they had difficulties, like us: wars, famine, natural disasters, hatred…. Everything. But eventually they overcame all of it. There were no more wars. There was no more hatred. All those things they believed their God wished them to overcome, they overcame. It finally came to a point where there was no longer any goals to achieve. In the meanwhile, they awaited the promised return of their creator. They waited what amounts to thousands of our years, and yet their creator never returned. Finally, they decided to go looking for him, to show him what that had accomplished and to see if there was anything else He wished them to do. They have explored thousands of star systems in the search, but have yet to find him.”

         
“All right, now,” Mr. Laughton said, “this is getting a little too weighty.” Here he considered something, and as he did so, he assumed an air I judged to be somewhat shifty. “Let’s ask it something more-- practical, shall we? Ask it how to set its temporal coordinates.”