Extinction Machine

Chapter Fifty

Turkey Point Lighthouse, Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 10:17 a.m.

“How do I know about Cumbre Vieja?” she asked, puzzled. “With you coming to me, I thought that meant someone in the government watched my shows, listened to my podcasts, or maybe read my books.”

“Others in our group have. I haven’t. Tell me something that’s going to lower my blood pressure and my sudden urge to reach for a pair of handcuffs.”

“Joe—it’s in all my stuff. I did an entire podcast about this stuff.”

“About what stuff? Stop talking around it.”

“I’m not,” she snapped, but then paused to take a calming breath. “Okay, so you came here to interview me but you haven’t done your homework. Typical government.”

“Can we save the target shooting for later?”

“Sure. I did an entire book about the dangers of WMDs based on retroengineered technologies.”

“Retroengineered from flying saucers.”

“Alien craft,” she corrected. “Most of them aren’t round. Only the small scout craft.”

“Really?”

“Most of the ships have been triangular. T-craft, they’re called. And there are some fully automated craft that are round—they look like glowing balls. It’s probably the basis for the myth of the will-o’-the-wisp.”

“Not swamp gas?”

“Swamp gas doesn’t change direction at right angles, accelerate and decelerate over specific locations, and—”

“Okay, got it. We’re off topic already.”

She nodded. “That might happen because everything you want to know has context and you clearly don’t know the context.”

“True, so you can be my study buddy, but let’s try to stay as close to a straight line as possible. We were talking about alien WMDs.”

“No, we were talking about weapons of mass destruction made by humans based on alien technology. That’s not at all the same thing. I’m talking about weapons that have been openly discussed in the media and scientific journals but which never seemed to go past the stages of basic research or early experimentation. Particle-beam weapons, cold-light phasers, satellite-killer superlasers, things like that.”

“The government is researching all kinds of stuff—” I began, but she cut me off.

“Of course they are, and some of it is the natural outgrowth of our own very human desire to kill each other.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way…”

“No? Remind me again which nations were formed without conquest and bloodshed?”

“Touché,” I said weakly.

“There are a lot of universities, private labs, and corporations doing advanced work funded by government dollars. Who has first dibs on any useful developments? The Department of Defense.”

“I know this, Junie, but nothing so far suggests that a race of evil alien space monkeys is behind it.”

“Joe,” she said with eroding patience, “please try to let this sink in—this is not aliens. This is us using their technology.”

“How? By discovering how to use their—what do I call them? Ray guns? Space bombs? I’m not trying to be a smartass here, Junie, but I don’t know the vocabulary for this conversation. Help me out. Pretend I arrived on the short helicopter.”

She laughed. “Okay, and I’m sorry if I get a little, um, passionate about this.”

“No, I get that. We’re cool.”

Junie nodded, collected herself for a moment, then launched in. “Let me begin by saying that I am a believer in aliens, alien visitation, and alien technology. I am not, however, the kind of person who believes everything. There are a lot of things attached to the world of ‘UFOlogy’ that I don’t believe in. Some of it are things that just don’t hit me, but I can’t prove or disprove—I’m just not sold on it yet. And, yes, the ‘yet’ was intentional.”

“I want to believe,” I said, quoting X-Files.

“Some of this stuff I don’t believe because I know it to be a lie.”

“Who’s putting those lies out there?”

“A lot of them are from people who want to belong to any group that will have them and they use false stories to latch on to the UFO community. It’s a very accepting community, even when it comes to outlandish stories. After all, no one has yet been able to provide the world with absolutely irrefutable proof of alien life and visitation. At least … no one has been able to survive an attempt to do so.”

“Yeah, we’re going to have to come back to that point,” I said.

She nodded, and continued. “I’ve been exposed to this world since I was little, I grew up with it. But my parents—well, adoptive parents—were both scientists. Especially my father. He was skeptical of everything that couldn’t be measured. He engendered within me a similar skepticism. I don’t take things at face value. Sure, I’ll discuss them on my podcasts and in my books, but I really don’t believe everything. However, just as science is unwilling to accept what can’t be measured, it cannot by its own structure discount anything that cannot yet be measured.”

“Meaning?”

“We know that there are billions upon billions of stars in this galaxy. We know for a fact that there are worlds orbiting many of those suns. We cannot state with any degree of scientific certainty that those worlds can or cannot support some form of life. We cannot state with any degree of scientific certainty that advanced life has not developed on any of those worlds. Or that these potential life forms have or have not developed technology allowing them to travel through the vast distances of space. Along the same lines, we cannot prove or disprove time travel or interdimensional travel. As our own science moves forward, we gradually—and reluctantly—reevaluate the limits of what we are able to believe because we can now prove it and what we are willing to believe because it now fits within the revised guidelines for possibility. In recent decades, with the marked decrease of the prejudice against quantum physics, we’re seeing proof that our universe is much larger and more complex than we ever thought.”

I nodded. “So far I’m absolutely sold on the statistical possibility of life in the galaxy. Drake’s theory, right? Which was recently updated.”

“Wow, look at you for knowing that.”

I spread my hands. “What can I say?” What I didn’t say was that Bug told me this a couple of hours ago.

“So, science can’t take a serious stand against the possible existence of alien life or discount the possibility that we’ve been visited by aliens. That’s point one. Point two is that there have been sightings and purported visitations throughout recorded history, and in virtually all world cultures. With me so far?”

“Yup.”

“Point three, there are instances of radical leaps forward in human development, particularly in certain fields of science that are not yet explainable.”

“The building of the pyramids,” I ventured.

“Are you trying to be the teacher’s pet?”

I said nothing. Was that a flirtatious twinkle in her eye when she said that?

“Point four. It is reasonable to postulate that nothing lasts forever, or to put it another way, everything breaks down. From plant life ending its life cycle to suns burning out. Manufactured items that are heavily used tend to ultimately break down because of that hard use. Point five is that vehicles built to cross the gulfs of space qualify as items being heavily used. We can expect that the demands of such travel might wear them out.”

“You’re building a case for crashes,” I said.

“Exactly. If you look at the great exploration fleets of human history, you see that a percentage of all long-range fleets fail. That’s true from the Phoenicians to Columbus to the NASA shuttle program. Friction, vibration, material fatigue, temperature changes, intended and unintended impacts, and other phenomena will degrade the internal and external integrity of any craft.”

“Still with you,” I said. “But if these craft crashed on earth and we’ve salvaged the wreckage, why don’t we have a fleet of saucers … er, triangle ship thingies?”

“Ah, that’s the right question and you get your first gold star.”

I tried not to preen.

Junie said, “Let’s look at it from the perspective of the target culture. If a wrecked Phoenician ship washed up on the shores of the Hudson River a couple of thousand years ago, how long would it take the Iroquois Indians to repair it and sail it?”

“Ah,” I said. “But we’re more educated than the Indians.”

“We’re more technologically advanced. The Iroquois were very smart—for their time and their place in their own history. Don’t forget that the United States Constitution was based in part on the Iroquois system of government. However, they lived in a resource-rich environment that did not require the development of certain technologies.”

“They didn’t even have the wheel.”

“They didn’t need the wheel,” she amended. “Now, spin that around, crash a World War II German Messerschmitt in Galileo’s backyard. Or Newton’s. These were clearly very smart men. Could they have repaired and flown that plane? What about a Los Angeles–class nuclear sub found damaged and drifting off the coast of Japan in, say, 1938. Or even Russia in 1944. They even had a fledging nuclear program by then. Could they have repaired it? Refloated it? Driven it?”

I sighed. “We can’t fix the crashed UFOs because we’re not smart enough.”

“Oooh, and he loses his hard-won gold star.”

“Wait—how?” I demanded.

“It isn’t about being smart, Joe. Look how smart Ben Franklin was. And Da Vinci. Yet they would be flummoxed by any fifth-grader’s entry in a school science fair.”

“Not if it was explained to them,” I said. “They could grasp the concept.”

“If someone was there to explain the concept. And if they spoke the same language and used the idiomatic references particular to that era and location. What if that fifth-grader was from one of the regions of China where only five hundred people speak their dialect? The cultural differences would significantly decrease the likelihood of a meaningful exchange. Now step back and expand that communication gap. A theoretical physicist, born and raised in an affluent family in New England working at the Large Hadron Collider to a member from a Amazonian tribe whose people have never before held a conversation with an outsider. That tribesman may be the leader of his people, a shaman whose understanding of healing might be the result of ten thousand years of word-of-mouth training, and it might involve plants and compounds found nowhere else on earth. Tell me, Joe, where is the basis for understanding? How long before that tribesman can calibrate that collider?”

“You think the gap is that wide?”

She laughed. “I think the gap is about a million miles wider, and this is not a two-way conversation. The aliens are not guiding us through this step by step.”

“Surely we’re starting from a more viable point than a guy whose culture hasn’t invented any machines. If a Roman chariot-maker found a bicycle wheel he might eventually make a breakthrough in his understanding of materials, design, and other areas. That’s basic human reasoning. What if he found an antigrav hoverboard, like the ones in Back to the Future? There’s no design corollary in his experience, none in any culture he would have exposure to even though Rome was the center of the civilized world. The item would sit there, maybe for centuries or even thousands of years before someone figured out how it works.

“Is that what’s happening now?”

“To a degree” she said. “We’ve recovered so much from the crashed vehicles, and some of it we’ve been able to figure out. Basic things like chairs, control panels, stabilizers. Mostly stuff that’s pure mechanics. However the deep science has been a lot more elusive because it doesn’t fit any of the design philosophies we understand. Even when we reassemble some of the parts, we can only guess what the result is or does.”

She bent forward and rested her elbows on her knees.

“Joe … tell me the truth,” she said. “Is all of this just nonsense to you, or do you believe?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I started the day with a hangover and a belief that we were alone in the universe. Since then a lot of very bad things have happened and most of them seem to be tied to a book I never heard of that’s supposed to be filled with information about alien spacecraft. Maybe I’m inching my way toward believing, but right now I think I’m too scared and too confused to know what to believe.”

Her eyes searched mine. “You’re telling the truth.”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

We sat there, looking into each other’s eyes for almost a minute. The room grew quiet around us. Ghost looked from me to her to me, as if he was watching a Ping-Pong match, or following a conversation, but we weren’t saying anything.

Before I could open a new doorway into the conversation, my cell rang again. Church.

I excused myself and stepped outside to stand among the flowers while I took the call.

“Tell me this isn’t more bad news,” I said.

Church said, “How often do I call you because I enjoy small talk?”

I sighed. “Okay … hit me.”

“We received another video. Like the first it came from an untraceable source. And, like the first one, it shows the president,” he said.

“What’s the message this time?”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll send the video. In the meantime, what is the sit-rep there?”

“Miss Flynn is being cooperative. We can do the conference call as soon as you’re ready.”

“Watch the video first.”

Church disconnected but my screen display told me I’d received a video. I plugged in an earphone so I could watch it silently.

It opened on a tight shot of the president’s face, then pulled back to show him sitting on a nondescript chair against a blank wall. There was a small table placed between them on which was a small black box. The president said, “You must find the Majestic Black Book.”

The image abruptly changed and the screen was filled with an image that was frighteningly familiar. A circle divided into concentric rings and sections. The diagram of pi. It was the same image that had been stamped onto the White House lawn, but it was not a picture of the lawn. This was a precisely drawn image, possibly a computer graphic.

“You must find the Majestic Black Book.”

Blank faces, toneless voices. Then the president half turned and pressed a button on the top of the black box. Red numbers appeared on the face of the box. The display read 4320:00. Then the numbers changed.

4319:59

4319:58

A countdown. Seventy-two hours. Four thousand and twenty minutes, ticking away with silent, inevitable precision.

Simple.

Eloquent.

Terrifying.

“Holy shit,” I said. Around me there were beautiful wildflowers and a sky bright with clean sunshine. The Chesapeake was blue perfection and the air was as clean as any I’d ever breathed.

But there was nothing right about any of it.

4319:51

Then a series of numbers ran across the bottom of the screen. I recognized the pattern. A radio frequency restricted for military use. The one we use for the most severe catastrophic events.

It was a very clear message. Get the book, broadcast the fact on that frequency … and keep a billion people from dying.

Clear. Simple.

Good Christ.

I hurried back inside.