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‘‘Characterize it any way you like. But don’t blame me when the scientific community holds you personally responsible for not exploiting, understanding, and studying this historical opportunity. What we need here, Renate, is a full-blown investigation.’’

  Renate grew still. ‘‘Dr. Conrad, we’re in an extremely dangerous situation, and in no position to conduct any such investigation. We should concentrate on devising the necessary protocols to see us through safely until the civilian evac team gets here. Then maybe we can consider further study. Until that time, I believe the last thing we should do is antagonize our unexpected visitor with premature research attempts that are unlikely to produce any useful results.’’

  His face settled. He turned to the observation window. The thing called to him. He didn’t know how, he didn’t know why, but he could definitely sense it in his head now; and while this worried and perplexed him, he also understood he had a responsibility. For whatever reason, he felt the thing had singled him out, and he knew he had to rise to the occasion. ‘‘Do what you want, Renate. But I’m going out to take a look at it. With or without your permission.’’

  An hour later, Lamar Bruxner called Cam and Renate into his office. The big bald man had a tight grin on his face. Renate sat stiffly, the corners of her lips turned downward, her eyes superalert, as if jolted by a megadose of caffeine. Cam, on the other hand, felt unusually calm.

  ‘‘We’ve just received a priority message from General Morris Blunt’s office at the Pentagon,’’ said Bruxner. In an aside to Cam, he added, ‘‘He’s the man who’s sending the expeditionary force, by the way, and he’s also the Pentagon’s liaison to the NASA civilian evac team.’’ He then addressed the two of them. ‘‘He’s now assigned a commanding officer, Colonel Timothy Pittman, of the Orbital Operations branch of the United States Air Force, to oversee any and all responses to the entity.’’ Bruxner peered at Renate, his lips bunching as if he were about to blow air between his teeth. ‘‘Contrary to the safety protocols we’ve been designing, Dr. Tennant, Colonel Pittman has now asked us to conduct a surface investigation, such as Dr. Conrad has suggested.’’

  Cam felt elated, unduly so, and knew the thing was calling him again.

  Bruxner turned back to Cam. ‘‘But not primarily because he thinks we can learn from it, Dr. Conrad.’’ His elation ebbed. ‘‘While Colonel Pittman is prepared to accept the possibly benign nature of the visitation, he won’t rule out that the entity poses a potential threat either, such as Dr. Tennant has theorized, especially because we’ve received nothing in the way of a communication from it, and have no idea what it’s going to do. Since such is the case, he thinks we should take a look, but with the focus on military reconnaissance, not scientific study. That’s not to say that the two don’t go hand in hand, and he understands there’ll be a strong scientific element to any such investigation.’’ In a more anxious tone, Bruxner said, ‘‘And I’m sorry, Dr. Tennant, but Colonel Pittman believes Dr. Conrad is the scientist best qualified for the job, as he’s already uncovered some information for Orbops that has possible military value, particularly his review of the Greenhow tapes.’’

  Cam’s elation ebbed some more, as he didn’t immediately agree with the apparent martial interpretation Pittman had put on his Greenhow tape review.

  ‘‘Ma’am, I’m afraid they’ve asked me to put Gettysburg at Dr. Conrad’s disposal, not yours.’’

  Cam turned to Renate. ‘‘I’m sorry.’’

  She took it better than he expected, nodding gracefully. But that didn’t hide the great misgiving in her face. ‘‘I just hope we don’t prompt retaliation. I’m perfectly willing to be blamed by the scientific community for not taking a historical opportunity. But I should hate to have on my conscience the deaths of all our team members. And I wouldn’t want to provoke a war with it.’’

  Cam said, ‘‘The odds that it means to wage war are so infinitesimal that they’re not even worth considering.’’

  ‘‘What makes you say that?’’

  He couldn’t help thinking that the thing was once again prompting him. ‘‘Because it’s already sacrificed the element of surprise. If it had any military intent, why would it forfeit that supreme advantage? Believe me, war with humans is the last thing on its mind.’’ He lifted his chin and looked at the pair, even as he sensed the thing talking to him once more, revealing to him in mental snippets and impressions some of its true nature. ‘‘My guess is that it’s so advanced, and so far removed from us technologically, it probably hasn’t taken much notice of us at all. If it has, it’s as an inconsequential species of our planet’s overall biosphere, nothing more. So I wouldn’t worry about war. It would be like us going to Antarctica and declaring war on penguins.’’

  4

  Cam, Lesha, Mark Fuller, and Blaine Berkheimer left the exit bay in a Class II rover early the next day, following the road along the shadowed western base of Bunker Hill. They had to use the rover headlights to see where they were going. The road was a rutted track, the lunar particulate compressed from constant use.

  Cam inspected the wreckage of the SMCP as they drove by. One of the larger landers looked like a squashed bug, a huge boulder sitting on top, its landing legs in rough formation but now bent, unable to support the weight of the boulder. A small orbital ferry had been toppled on its side so that Cam saw its various undercarriage fixtures. A two-man sled had lost its main engine and now looked like a hollowed-out cigar.

  They continued on. Radio channels were open. The airwaves hissed with white noise. They rounded the southern end of Bunker Hill. As he came out from behind the slope, he got a clear view of the entity, which, for the purpose of a convenient referent, they had now dubbed Alpha Vehicle.

  Alpha Vehicle represented the fundamental ideal of positively curved space: the sphere. In its elegant simplicity, it reinforced Cam’s growing notion that he was dealing with an advanced species. It shimmered like a mirror, yes, but seemed to possess a refractive quality as well, so that its silver tone was tinged with a variety of other visible light spectra, including violet, pink, and blue. It defied gravity, hovering two meters above the ground. It possessed an immense solidity and, as with his initial impression, seemed to be spinning in all directions at once. Yet for all its solidity, it didn’t cast a shadow, and that got him thinking of hyperdimensionality again, his own field of endeavor, how theoretically, in certain higher dimensions, light could travel easily through solid-body objects uninterrupted, the way neutrinos from the sun traveled through the Earth.

  They drove to within five hundred meters, stopped, and got out.

  They scanned Alpha Vehicle with a variety of instruments.

  It was Mark Fuller who summarized its essential naked-eye characteristic: ‘‘It just sits there.’’

  Yet Cam had the sense that it was more than just sitting there; that it was in fact trying to talk to him again, and he found this so odd and unnerving that for several seconds he couldn’t move.

  A short while later, the crew moved in for some closer observations. As the distance shrank, the object loomed larger and larger. Getting a better look at it now, Cam saw that its silver surface had a liquid quality, was perfectly smooth, and reflected the Moon’s surface, the dark vacuum of space, and the approaching rover with the concave mirrorlike quality of a giant ball bearing.

  As they got within fifty meters, Cam heard a strange hiss in his radio, like an audiotape sped up a hundred times, the hiss demarcating itself into delineated sound parcels, a pattern: two, then one, over and over again.

  ‘‘Stop the rover.’’

  Blaine braked, and the rover came to a stop.

  Cam listened to the noise.

  Alpha Vehicle rose above them so that looking straight up, he saw he was underneath its equatorial regions. Being so close to it, he fully appreciated its size, thirty stories high, and also thirty stories wide. He got off the rover and approached. He looked up at the silver surface and saw his own small reflection, foreshort
ened and twisted as if through the lens of a peephole.

  The noise faded.

  ‘‘All right, crew, let’s set up.’’

  The crew got off the rovers and busied themselves with their instruments.

  Cam, meanwhile, stared at the entity.

  He felt hypnotized by the thing. He moved closer. The closer he got, the more spellbound he felt.

  He heard Lesha’s voice through the radio, asking him not to get too near. Even when Lamar Bruxner came on from Gettysburg Tower, distressed by his boldness, the support chief’s worries dwindled to insignificance. Cam was too fascinated by Alpha Vehicle. Too enthralled to care about the support chief’s worries. The thing was indeed calling to him—there could be no doubt of that now—and he meant to answer it.

  The object remained stable, unmoving, its surface unblemished.

  But as Cam neared its south pole he noticed an imperfection. A node appeared, reminding him of a volcano, warping its silver skin so that it deepened to a cerulean blue. His reflection shattered into a dozen tinier ones, and he saw iterations of himself arranged like the petals of a flower along the slopes of this volcano. He stopped. He backed up and stared at the thing, made dizzy by the way it reflected everything, and by the way he had to hold his head straight up. The node followed him; it was rounded, calm, yet ominous. He backed up some more. The node trailed. Its base now narrowed, its peak rose, and the thing reached for him.

  ‘‘Guys, I think . . .’’

  He stepped back, startled, and tripped over impact debris. He fell to the ground while the node reached. He heard Lesha’s voice, frightened, telling him to get out of there. He caught a glimpse of Mark Fuller rising from his console, the bend of his knee straightening with a sudden jerk as he caught sight of the struggle happening twenty meters away. Cam pushed back, but before he could get up, the node lunged, and the silver appendage went right through his suit, then his chest.

  It penetrated but did not impale. It pierced but did not draw blood. He was skewered but not injured. It was physics twisted on its side, two solid body objects occupying the same space at the same time, and he was surprised, shocked, alarmed, frightened, but also intrigued.

  The appendage flexed within him and lifted. He left the ground. He glanced back and saw Mark and Blaine loping toward him in the weak lunar gravity.

  ‘‘It’s all right,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m okay.’’

  They felt far away.

  The node lifted. He traveled up Alpha Vehicle, his arms dangling, and checked his biomonitor screen. His respirations were nil, brain activity was dead, and his heart had flatlined. According to the small screen he was clinically dead. But he knew he wasn’t. He didn’t feel alarmed. He felt at peace.

  He gripped the silver appendage, and his hands went right through it. His radio died. He was lifted higher and higher. As the node came to Alpha Vehicle’s equatorial regions, it drew him inward. He sank toward its surface, but did so willingly, again trusting that the thing had in some way selected him, a notion that wouldn’t let him alone. He looked at Alpha Vehicle and saw that a deep pit had developed. The node drew him into the pit. He should have been afraid, but he wasn’t. He heard several tones fluctuating back and forth in sequences of twos and ones again. The node pulled him into the pit and Alpha Vehicle closed over him.

  He thought it would be dark. But it was light. And he had a perplexing view of the solar system—time and space warped and shifted so that he could see all nine planets, the multitude of moons, the asteroid belt, and the sun, all at once. Beyond the solar system he saw stars, all delineated one from the next, and they had planets as well, and these planets had moons. The weave and warp of space inside Alpha Vehicle was unlike anything he had ever experienced, and it again reminded him of his own work on hyperdimensionality, trying to create hyperdimensional fields known as anti-Ostrander space, a field with the possibility that the space within might be bigger than the space without.

  It wasn’t only the planets of his own solar system, or the planets of other systems, or every star in the Milky Way, but also the galaxies of the universe—a backdrop of spirals, ellipses, and irregular conglomerations. Also protogalaxies, Alpha Vehicle probing light generated thirteen and a half billion years ago, just after the Big Bang, so that he knew it wasn’t only the warp and weave of space inside Alpha Vehicle, but also a change in the way time was fluxing.

  He felt an affinity for it all because this was what he had theorized about, the fluid nature of time and space, viscous layers, hyperdimensionality, phenomena comprehended through the arcane language of higher mathematics and potentially viewed through the lens of a practical anti-Ostrander space field, just as he had hoped to develop with Stradivari. He was just wondering if the thing had in fact generated an anti-Ostrander field when a purple point of light raced toward him out of the cluster of protogalaxies, came right for his head, struck him in the bridge of his nose, and seemed to make a curious numbing sensation right above his brow. Then there came a little head pain, but this was quickly soothed by more numbness, and a few seconds later, he had the bizarre sensation that his body was expanding, that it was reaching out in all directions to encompass the things he was seeing.

  It was at this point that Alpha Vehicle revealed something of itself to Cam. It intimated to him, perhaps by manipulating the synaptic nerves in his brain, that it was a vehicle of quantum potentiality. He found himself grinning as he thought of this ability, to be all things, in all places, at all times. It could change. Shift. Perhaps even mutate to suit any occasion or environment. It was a plugged nickel before it had been stamped. A blank waiting for an impression. A mission waiting for its purpose.

  After that, his view of the universe disappeared and was strangely replaced with a nearly filmic map of his own personal life.

  He saw his mother, his father. He saw the car accident, his father having a stroke at the most inopportune moment so that the car ended up in the Buffalo Bayou outside Houston. Couldn’t save his mother, but managed to save his father, even though his father’s stroke had been a massive one. Saved him for only one more miserable year before another stroke took him for good. Then the caskets. First his mother’s. Then his father’s. He felt the old heartache again.

  Then plunging forward. All his years at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The teaching posts. The publishing. The indifference of the scientific community. The development of a small and imperfect anti-Ostrander space field generator based on the highly experimental Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. And more indifference from the scientific community. And always the—the gut feeling, yes, that’s what it was—that he was onto something, a fundamentally different way of looking at the universe. Alpha Vehicle seemed to dwell on this—his gut feeling about the universe—and it was as if the entity was methodically sifting his mind for clues about it.

  Then—suddenly, unexpectedly—Lesha Weeks.

  Lesha, materializing from some secret place in his subconscious, never before acknowledged; Lesha with her blond hair and blue eyes. The beach girl who had come to work for him. He saw her at Brookhaven National Laboratory studying the latest microscopic black-hole findings on her laptop, then opening a Tupperware container of vegetable curry, stuff she made at home, too yellow, for she liked turmeric a lot; then giving him a sideways glance as her fork was poised halfway to her mouth; and seeing an acknowledgment in her wide blue eyes, that there might be some tension of a sexual nature between them after all. And then attending that convention together in Los Angeles, the black-tie dinner, the closing ceremonies, him in his tuxedo, Lesha wearing a blue evening gown that matched her turquoise eyes, and how sorry he had felt at the end of the evening when she had gone to her room with a curious line of regret etched across her brow, and he had gone to his. No. He couldn’t deny it. The best discoveries were usually the most obvious. Even her last-minute application for Stradivari, once she had found out he would head the project, was an indication she felt something for him. He only wished he
had figured it out sooner.

  Without knowing how, he found himself on the lunar surface again. On his hands and knees. And Lesha was there, hand on his shoulder, the touch electric through his pressure suit. Globules of the entity shimmered like magic on the ground beneath him, silver, reflective, plasmalike. He knew that they had been left there on purpose by Alpha Vehicle. He once again saw an opportunity, and had the presence of mind to take it. He unhooked a sampler from his belt and pressed the intake button. He collected his samples and stood up.

  Cam looked up at Lesha. Then at Alpha Vehicle.

  And realized it was a misnomer.

  It was so much more than just a vehicle.

  Johnsie Dunlap, the nurse practitioner, assessed his condition once he returned to Gettysburg. She was a black woman in her early fifties, hair cropped closely to her head, eyes big, shaded with gold makeup.

  Her eyes narrowed when he told her about the biomonitors.

  ‘‘No brain activity either?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘No. Everything was flat-lined.’’ And he had to admit, he was as flummoxed as she was, and found it extremely odd that Alpha Vehicle had singled him out this way.

  ‘‘Yet you remained conscious.’’

  ‘‘I remember everything. Most of all, I remember how I felt. At peace. And detached. It was as if I saw things from an entirely different perspective. I don’t know how Alpha Vehicle did it. How could it drag me up there? How could it get inside my head?’’

  ‘‘We haven’t the diagnostic instruments at Gettysburg to make that determination.’’

  ‘‘Yes, but why me?’’

  ‘‘Why not? Maybe they recognize something in you. You’re an accomplished scientist. You’re not a run-of-the-mill layman. If they’re going to choose anybody, they might as well choose someone with a wide understanding.’’

  ‘‘I’m not as smart as all that. I really didn’t get what they were trying to say to me.’’

  Johnsie paused. ‘‘You saw the solar system?’’