"Chief of staff in the side pocket!"
A startled Britt Arledge, urbane elder statesman and confidant of the President of the United States, turned toward the unexpected shout. Rolling along parallel to the laboratory floor, at about his waist level and seemingly immune to gravity, was a basketball-sized, mottled white sphere. The orb submerged without impact into his torso before vanishing.
"Join me in my office and I'll explain." Kyle Gustafson led the way out of the crowded lab, past electronics racks and grinning technicians. He ignored his former boss's dour expression until they were behind a closed door. "The so-called Galactic mother ship is like that demo."
"A cue ball with glandular problems? This is why you urgently summoned me from the White House?"
"Not a pool ball, a hologram." Kyle perched on a corner of his desk. "It explains a lot."
Britt found a chair. "Not to me."
"From the day the Galactics arrived, I've never liked the explanation for their mother ship parking in a lunar orbit. A safety precaution, we're told, because it's antimatter-powered. Being a big prop, meant to intimidate us, is a much more credible reason for putting it where we can't easily examine it."
Britt crossed his arms across his chest but said nothing.
"If the aliens, as they claim, do react antimatter with matter on their ship, it would produce telltale gamma radiation. Gamma rays don't penetrate the atmosphere, so to maintain their lie they can't allow high-altitude gamma detectors. That's why, shortly before announcing their arrival, they destroyed the space shuttle carrying a new gamma-ray observatory to orbit. That's why they exploded the Russian rocket with the backup instrument." Kyle waved off an objection while Britt was still formulating it. "No, I haven't confused an inability to measure with proof there is nothing to be measured. We've surreptitiously flown gamma-ray detectors on weather balloons. The data we can collect that way are nowhere near as good as the lost observatories would've gotten, but we've seen no unexpected gamma radiation from the moon's vicinity."
"Anything else?"
The untimely on-orbit deaths over the past few months of older, less-capable gamma-ray-sensing satellites was only circumstantial, not conclusive. "Recall what we've learned from Swelk." He glanced reflexively at his office safe, wherein sat a copy of the CIA's most recent eyes-only report on the alien's ongoing debriefing. "You know I've been perplexed by our observations of the F'thk. It's no wonder I've been confused by their 'biological' indications . . . Swelk says they're robots. I'm convinced that the mother ship, like the F'thk, is a special effect. Swelk said the starship from which she escaped spent time on the moon before coming to Earth. That's a ship we know exists—we have the cracked runways to prove it. A lunar stopover gave them the opportunity to set up lasers to project the hologram—like my cue ball, only much larger. Of course the Krulirim need lots of lasers, and big ones at that, to simulate a mother ship orbiting the moon."
"Of course."
Kyle winced at the sarcasm. "You disagree?"
"I'm unconvinced. Say it is an enormous hologram. Why would a hologram be visible to radar?"
Kyle nodded. "It wouldn't. But the Krulirim could have easily put a radar buoy in orbit around the moon, a buoy around which the hologram would be centered. The buoy would dynamically generate a radar echo in response to any incident radar pulse."
"And this buoy, naturally, would be visibly obscured by the hologram." Britt stood.
Such a buoy, even unobscured, would likely be too small to be seen from Earth, even by the Hubble. Kyle kept that complication to himself as an unnecessary distraction. "It's not as if we lack evidence. We know the aliens destroyed the Russian's Proton launcher, and how they did it. The manner of that rocket's destruction matches everything we know about the Atlantis disaster. We know the aliens are filling our cities with spying devices. And an ET defector, looking nothing like the 'official' F'thk emissaries, practically landed in my yard. She's proof."
"I concede alien hostility, and I don't forget for a moment it was your skepticism which led us to that fact. But none of the evidence relates directly to the mother ship. Maybe it has great shielding, or the antimatter reactor is shut down for maintenance. Maybe the ETs are lying, but only about using antimatter. Proving or disproving such ideas is more in your bailiwick than mine.
"I'm going to propose an alternative scenario, one drawn from the skills I use every day." Britt met Kyle's gaze. "It's a much simpler explanation than yours. We have only Swelk's word for it that she was defecting.
"Did you ever consider that she may be lying?"
A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma . . . Winston Churchill's description of Russia fit the baffling Galactics at least as well. And the mad scientist for whom she was waiting.
Darlene was a career diplomat and the senior-ranking State Department representative to the American commission that routinely coordinated with the Galactics. None of that experience had prepared her for cloak-and-dagger operations. That Kyle was no more plausible than she to play agent only deepened the mystery.
Searching the crowded Metro parking lot, Darlene's head swiveled to and fro in a manner she felt sure must somehow look furtive. Per Kyle's odd request, she wore a head scarf and large-lensed sunglasses.
A nondescript boxy sedan pulled up to the region of curb labeled "kiss and ride"; the passenger-side window slid down. The mad scientist was behind the wheel. "Can I give you a lift?" Kyle asked.
Darlene got in and removed her scarf. "Government license plates. A motor-pool vehicle?"
"Swapped for my car inside a mall's covered parking garage. Any overhead observers are very unlikely to know where I am." The clearly implied watchers were Galactic. He merged expertly into the heavy traffic streaming from the commuter lot.
"And per your invitation, which you so interestingly and oddly had FedExed, I'm meeting you at a station that required me to change trains in an underground Metro stop. That makes my whereabouts equally disguised." She tucked the scarf into her purse. "Where are we going that's so secret?"
He pulled onto a highway, heading northwest into rural Maryland. "Let's just say a pleasant drive in the country."
"A few days ago a Galactic lifeboat crashed and burned near your house. Now you're playing spy. I doubt those situations are unrelated."
"We'll see."
She twisted her neck to examine a loosely closed box on the backseat, a container from which emerged scratching sounds and soft thuds. "What's in there?"
"Kittens for a friend. She's from out of town, and misses her own pets." He pointed to a sunlit wooded hillside aglow in red and gold. "Check out those leaves." He turned onto a shoulderless two-lane country road. She gave up with a sigh, silently admiring the fall foliage until after almost thirty minutes Kyle pulled into a small graveled lot.
Behind a low, hand-stacked fieldstone wall, amid a sea of fallen leaves, sat a picturesque white farmhouse. The sign dangling by two chains from the crosspiece of a wooden post declared, simply, Valley View—1808. She guessed that was the construction date rather than an address.
Valley View could have been a bed-and-breakfast . . . except for the four alert-looking men who paced nearby. One watched the new arrivals, one studied the road, and two peered intently into the nearby woods. From the corner of an eye she saw Kyle observing her, a slight smile on his face. Wondering how she'd react to a B&B?
The crash of the Galactic lifeboat could not have been kept secret. A whisked-away survivor was another matter. She turned to Kyle. "A CIA safehouse, I presume."
Swelk was sunken deep into what she'd been told was called a beanbag chair, the single piece of Krul-friendly furniture in the house. There were engine noises outside. Footsteps in the front hall revealed that one of her guardians—or were they captors?—was striding down the front hall. The unseen door opened with a squeak. The mutters of human conversation were too faint for her pocket computer to translate.
Perhaps only a change of shift. Leaving one stalk to monitor the entrance to her room, her attention and two sensor stalks remained fixed on the flat-screen television that hung on the wall. The only signal source was something called a DVD player. There was little else to do between questionings. Her lack of access to Earth's broadcasts and its Internet shouted distrust.
Knowing what her people were doing, she could not fault her hosts for their suspicion.
"Kyle!" she yelped in delight as her new friend entered, box in hand. She struggled out of her hollow in the beanbag. A human female accompanied Kyle, her eyes opened wide.
"Swelk, this is my friend and colleague Darlene Lyons, from the American State Department. Darlene, I'd like you to meet a real Galactic."
Standing, the chimerical alien rose only to Darlene's waist. Its torso was a flattened black spheroid perched atop three spindly legs. No, make that limbs—the appendage Swelk had extended in greeting was as much an arm as a leg. It had a clearly prehensile end, suggesting a cluster of three opposable hands, each with three opposable fingers. Three objects vaguely suggestive of untrimmed rubbery celery stalks protruded from the top of the body. Two stalk tips seemed to be studying her. "I am pleased to meet you," said a box on the counter, speaking moments after the ET emitted a burst of vowelless and incomprehensible sound. "I am called Swelk, from the Krulchukor ship Consensus."
She dropped in shock into a nearby chair, rationalizing that it was diplomatic to come closer to the little alien's level. Kyle, thankfully, interceded to bring her quickly up to date. Swelk's defection and the intentional destruction of her lifeboat to cover her escape. The xenophobic tendencies of the Krulirim. The long-extinct fossil species from Krulchuk serving as the prototype for the tall centauroid robots presented to humanity as interstellar emissaries: the F'thk. The giant mother ship orbiting the moon a mirage meant to intimidate. The movie company aboard the Consensus, conspiring to provoke nuclear war as the ultimate special effect.
Her mind whirled. "So there is no Galactic Commonwealth?" she finally managed.
"Not known to my people," answered the alien's translator.
Over the alien's head Kyle quizzically raised an eyebrow. The alien's third eye stalk could surely have seen the gesture, but would the ET have understood it?
His hopefully subtle signal was unnecessary. It had become clear that the F'thk were lying . . . why should she not be as skeptical of this new alien? Swelk's whole species was until now undisclosed.
Squealing, Swelk flexed a sensor stalk toward the cardboard box Kyle had set down. A coal-black kitten, not yet grown into its ears, was bursting through the flaps. Arching its back, the cat fluffed up its fur and hissed at the alien. "What's that?" yelped the translator.
As Kyle tried to calm the feline, Darlene worked scenarios in her mind. That the Krul was being truthful was only one possibility. Ostensibly friendly F'thk had privately told Darlene and other human diplomats that the many-specied Galactic Commonwealth was riven by factions. If that much of the F'thk story were true, Swelk could be an agent, planted by one side. If so, to what end?
"It's a baby animal, a young cat." Kyle offered a sack of kitty treats to the alien. With his other hand he stroked the kitten soothingly, as Swelk now cautiously extended an extremity. The black cat sniffed daintily, then licked the offered treat. A loud purring began.
If Swelk were telling the truth, the aliens could be vulnerable when their single starship landed at one Earth city or another. But if she were lying . . . then the ship they might attack would be a mere landing craft from a miles-wide behemoth in lunar orbit. What retribution would the ETs exact?
And if there were, after all, a Galactic Commonwealth, a sneak attack on its emissaries was likely, at a minimum, to disqualify Earth's application. Without pretending to understand the interspecies politics of the supposed Galactics, Darlene could understand some aliens opting for the familiar. Maneuvering the humans into discrediting themselves could be an easy way for one faction to maintain the often-comforting status quo.
Kyle released the kitten; as it sidled toward the alien, still holding a treat, a second kitten, this one a gray tabby, scrabbled from the box. With a manipulation no human arm could have duplicated, Swelk's extended limb extracted and extended another morsel without dropping the sack or the piece already being sniffed by the black cat. "What are they called?"
"You can name them," answered Kyle.
He hadn't brought her here to play with the kittens, cute as they were, nor had he lightly disclosed what must be an extremely closely held secret. So why was she here? As an unofficial second opinion, perhaps. As different as were their professions and interests, she and Kyle shared what she considered a healthy dose of skepticism (which, Darlene had good reason to suspect, her Foggy Bottom associates more often considered an annoying contrariness).
The respect was mutual, and the opportunity for a career diplomat intriguing. She scooped up the curious tabby, for which the antiques-furnished salon was entirely unprepared. "Swelk, I'd like to learn all about your people."