Dark Energy (4 page)

“What did I miss?” she asked breathlessly.

“They're cutting their way out,” a dozen people said at once. The caption at the bottom of the CNN screen read, Are They Cutting Their Way Out? Nice work, CNN.

The sparks reached the top of the rectangle and began moving across it.

An inset camera showed a group of two or three hundred soldiers advancing into the space below the rectangle.

There were alien letters written above the rectangle. Blocky and angular, and exactly the kind of font you'd expect an alien to use.

“Anybody good with languages?” I asked.

Brynne pointed to a girl. “Emily's amazing. Going to be the Bruner Scholar in languages, I bet.”

Emily shrugged as she looked at the letters. “There's only a dozen letters there, if they even are letters and not numbers. Either way, that's not nearly enough to make an educated guess.”

“Look at the angle,” Rachel said, changing the subject. “When it breaks loose, that thing is just going to fall out. I hope whoever's inside is tethered in.”

“You're hoping the aliens are okay?” another girl said with a sneer.

“Sure I am,” Rachel said.

I spoke up in her defense. “If they're nice aliens, then we don't want them to get hurt. And if they're bad aliens, we don't want them to get pissed off.”

“Besides,” Brynne said, “way to make first contact. Whoops! Fall to your death!”

“How are they going to get down?” someone else asked.

“Helicopters,” a girl said. “There are a bunch of them hovering over the ship.”

Kurt leaned forward on the couch behind me. “What if it's like the Blob?” he asked. “That was an alien. What if some jelly monster comes oozing out of the hole?”

“I don't think a blob could build a ship that intricate,” Brynne answered.

“And I don't think a blob could hold a blowtorch,” I said. “Do we have any scale on that door? Are these things people-sized or monster-sized?”

I started braiding Rachel's hair, because I needed something to do with my hands. It was a good thing it was her sitting in front of me and not Kurt. “If they have big gray heads and big black eyes, we're going to owe the conspiracy theorists an apology.”

“We already do,” a guy said. “Maybe not flying saucers, but the conspiracies were right on this one.”

I shook my head. “They're only right if these aliens match the theories—if they make crop circles or mutilate cattle or something. But yeah, if we get inside that ship and find big
cattle mutilation factories, then I'll agree.”

“No,” the guy said, and he pulled out his phone. “I looked it up yesterday. The two most commonly mentioned kinds of UFO are flying saucers and ‘cigar-shaped' UFOs. What is this if not cigar-shaped?”

He held his phone out to me and there was a shaky YouTube video of a gray cylinder.

“Okay,” I said. “So let's say that these aliens have been coming across the galaxy for years and have been abducting our farmers and probing our backsides. Then what's the deal with this one? Did it try to scoop up an Iowan and just drop too low? Were they playing chicken with a cornfield? Was this the new guy's chance to pilot the ship and he colossally screwed up?”

The cutting torch—if that's what it was, and that's certainly what it seemed to be—had moved on to the final side of the door. This was the moment of truth.

“I think that might be it,” Kurt said. “How often are you on a flight and they have a delay because of a mechanical problem? Only in this scenario, they've just flown all the way from Alpha Centauri and there's nowhere to land. Wouldn't you aim for somewhere nice and flat, like Iowa, and try not to crash?”

“Like the Sea of Tranquility,” Rachel said, turning her head and almost yanking the strands of hair out of my hands. She must have noticed my blank look. “Sorry. That's where
we landed on the moon—in the flattest, emptiest place we could find, so that nothing would go wrong.”

They were halfway through the last side of the door. “Well,” I said, “something went wrong this time.”

“What if it didn't?” Rachel said, looking back at CNN. “What if this is the best possible outcome?”

“Eighteen thousand people died,” a girl said.

“What if there are more than that on the ship? It's three miles long and half a mile wide. If you assume that each person has a cube ten feet by ten feet—and that's pretty generous given what things like submarines are like—you'd get a total of a hundred and thirty thousand people on there.”

“Why would you call them ‘people'?” the girl said with a sneer. I decided I didn't like her. She was wearing sunglasses in her hair, inside the school, in Minnesota, before lunch.

“Sorry!” Rachel said. “I should have called them aliens. I should have called them freaks. Or monsters or whatever else.”

“The point still stands,” Kurt said. “If there were a hundred and thirty thousand aliens in there and they were going to crash—”

“Then they should have crashed in Nevada,” William said. “Or Canada, or someplace without so many people.”

“Guys, look,” Brynne said, and pointed. The sparking light had gone all the way around the rectangle and was back in its starting position.

Everyone was glued to the TV. The boy at the end of the couch had stopped playing with Brynne's hair, and I'd long since pulled the braids back out of Rachel's. I could smell Kurt's aftershave behind me, could see Sunglasses Girl leaning forward, elbows on knees.

The shot was a close-up of the rectangle, taken from the left side. It was zoomed in so close that the camera shook a little. But as we stared, I realized that the movement wasn't just a jiggling camera—the rectangle was moving slightly. A slight jolt at first, and then a shudder.

I got a sudden lump in my throat. This was the biggest thing that had happened in history, and I was surrounded by strangers. I needed human connection. I needed someone I cared about and who cared about me.

I took Rachel's hand, and she squeezed back.

And then the door fell away.

T
he shape in the doorway was strapped into a harness. It held what looked like a large sledgehammer in its hand. Everyone in the room gasped, and Rachel and I fought to see who could break the other's fingers.

The shape, to put it simply, was human. Two legs, two arms, short hair that was as platinum blond as Brynne's, and an albino complexion. It was covered with what looked like mummy bandages everywhere but its face, hands, and feet.

The man—at least it looked like a man—hung there in the shadow of the ship, staring out at the people below.

Wolf Blitzer was giving a speech that was obviously rehearsed—someone had probably been writing it since the ship landed. CNN clearly wanted this to go down in history as one of the greatest moments on TV, and undoubtedly it
would, but it felt completely manufactured.

In the darkness behind the man, I could see more shapes—different shapes. They might have looked like people, too, like humans, but it was hard to tell with the poor light and the shaking camera.

“What were you saying about them not being people?” Brynne asked, breaking the silence in the room.

“But how can they be people?” Kurt asked.

“Aliens look like people all the time,” someone else said. “I mean, in movies.”

“Maybe it's an alien taking a human form,” William said. “Like in
GalaxyQuest
. Those aliens were really octopus things.”

“Maybe it's an android,” Sunglasses Girl said. “Like in that book.”

“Maybe it's really just human-looking,” Brynne said. “Evolution could have produced similar species on two different planets. The fact that we look the way we do allows us to have opposable thumbs, decent-sized brains, walking upright.”

Rachel nodded. “And maybe it's not that big of a coincidence. Maybe these aliens sought out a world that was like their world. We're always looking for Earthlike planets. Maybe they were, too. Maybe they were looking for a species that looks like them.”

“Or maybe,” the conspiracy theory guy said, “they've
visited Earth before. Maybe they look like humans because they have human DNA.”

We watched the TV as the alien was hauled back into the spaceship. The screen left an inset image of the opened door and then had a wider shot of the helicopters that were hovering near the door. There was no way for the helicopters to get right next to the opening, not with the curve of the ship—their rotors would hit the hull.

“So what happens now?” Sunglasses Girl asked.

“We wait and see who comes out on a long rope,” I said.

“What about a fire truck?” Kurt asked. “Or would the ladder be too short?”

I answered. “Either way, I think it's safe to say that this is not a good way to start an invasion. If they were launching one, they'd come out in force, guns blazing. Not single file on a long rope.”

No one responded, and I wondered if I was being too optimistic. Maybe the aliens just needed to open a hole to get fresh air, or to see what the world was like out here. Maybe there were more holes near the ground that were ready to be opened, and the aliens would come scurrying out like ants with laser guns and we'd all be dead.

One hundred thirty thousand. That was a big number. That was a colossally big number. We didn't have a hundred and thirty thousand troops on the ground. We didn't even have that many onlookers, probably.

“They must be miserable in there,” I said.

Rachel glanced halfway back at me. “What do you mean?”

“My dad said the cylinder shape is to make artificial gravity. It spins, and people walk around the inside of the cylinder. But they're not spinning now.”

Rachel nodded. “So they're walking on the walls and ceilings.”

“And what's going to be upside down? Toilets? Algae ponds? Arboretums? I don't know,” I said. “And there's no place for a hundred and thirty thousand aliens to just sit and wait. They must be desperate to get out of there.”

“Then what have they been waiting for?” Sunglasses Girl asked. “Why are they just now cutting their way out?”

“Maybe they couldn't get to the tools,” Kurt suggested.

The TV camera switched back to a full shot of the door, and we saw more movement inside. A male with a snow-white beard was being lowered to the ground in the harness. He was dressed the same as the first man, in a weird wrapping of rags or bandages.

This was it. There was going to be an alien foot touching Earth dirt, and even though he looked perfectly harmless, I couldn't help but think that this was all wrong and that he needed to be reeled back into the ship, and the ship needed to take off and fly into the stars, and then we could all pretend that none of this had ever happened.

But he didn't stop descending. In fact, he was moving
faster, and now someone else was following on another rope—just as wrinkled as the man, but with short white hair and the obvious curves of a human woman.

The camera changed again to show a group of people waiting below, staring up at the mummified aliens. There were five of them, two men in military uniform, one woman in a business suit, one bald man with a paunch, and the vice president.

I wondered why they'd send the vice president, when no one liked him. It must be because he was expendable, and no one knew if these aliens were going to come out and start killing everyone. Or spreading plagues.

“Hey,” I said, “why is no one wearing breathing masks? Have we learned nothing from 1492?”

Brynne glanced over. “They breathe our air. That's interesting.”

“Like I said,” Rachel said. “Maybe they've been looking for a planet just like ours. Maybe their own planet was destroyed or something.”

William rolled his eyes. “Or maybe they're here on purpose to spread germs. Look at them—they're dressed like hospital patients.”

I didn't know what kind of hospitals he'd been visiting, but unless they were in ancient Egypt, he was full of crap.

The woman was descending faster than the man, and she passed him as she traveled the ten stories to the ground.
Wolf Blitzer was using the word
momentous
a lot. Momentous occasion. Momentous events. Momentous news. It was all very momentous.

I looked behind us and saw the crowd had grown to nearly forty people, including the teachers, cafeteria staff, and the janitor. Everyone wanted to see this. Everyone had to be able to say, “I remember where I was when the aliens touched the ground.”

And I'd say, “I was on a couch, holding the hand of a girl I barely knew, in a town I didn't know, surrounded by people who weren't my family.” But somehow, in a totally cheesy way, it made me feel bonded to the people around me. I was holding Rachel's hand as if she were my best friend in the whole world. Which maybe she was. None of my friends from my old school had called me since I left. Then again, I hadn't called any of them, either.

The camera zoomed out to show row upon row of soldiers, their guns trained on the aliens as they descended. The woman landed with an ungraceful thump, hitting the ground hard on her heels and falling on her butt. The man landed a moment later, correcting the other way and stumbling forward onto his hands and knees. The cameras zoomed in closer, giving us a better view of their pale, ghostly skin, which was barely darker than the white bandages wrapped around their bodies.

The man and woman slowly stood up, looking repulsed
by the dirt and shaking the filth from their clothing. They began to brush at each other—the man indecorously swatting at the woman's bottom. The room chuckled uncomfortably.

“A generation ship,” Rachel murmured, and then turned to me. “Maybe it's a generation ship. Maybe they haven't ever seen dirt before.”

“What's a generation ship?” William asked, a little disdain in his voice as he stared at the scene.

“It's when you know it's going to take longer than a lifetime to get somewhere—it's going to take generations—so people grow up and have babies and live and die all on the ship, and it's a whole new group of people who get to the planet. Maybe these people have never been off the ship.”

The group of five diplomats—if that's what they were—began walking forward to meet the aliens. The vice president was in the front, and I noticed he was wearing gloves as he stretched out his hand.

There was the typical
I don't know how to shake hands
stuff that you see in every single alien movie ever, and there was a lot of talking back and forth, but no one seemed to understand each other. The vice president placed a hand on his chest and did something with his hand on his head, almost like he was indicating he wore a crown, but that couldn't be right. Or maybe it was. Maybe it was easier to signal
king
than
democracy
. Then again, who's to say that alien janitors didn't wear crowns and their kings didn't all carry mop scepters.
Interstellar communication at its finest.

Still, it was apparent from the communication that the aliens were impressed with the dress uniforms of the military men, and the alien woman's hands moved from a dangling award on one of their chests to the dangling tie around the vice president's neck and back again. Then she noticed that the man in the back had the same kind of tie, only his was striped instead of silver, and that seemed to impress her even more. The alien man was the first to approach the woman in the business suit, and he pointed to the tiny flag pin on her lapel, and then at the many pins on the military uniforms, then the men's ties, and he gave her an encouraging
Try harder next time
smile.

And then it was all gestures up to the ship above them, and the harnesses were being pulled back up, and the aliens seemed to be gesturing very quickly. The vice president was holding his hands out plaintively, and it was clear that no one was understanding anyone.

“Any lip readers in the room?” Sunglasses Girl asked.

A boy said, “It looks like he's saying, ‘Welcome to Earth.'” But I didn't think it looked like that at all. To me, it looked like he was saying, “Polygamy, polygamy, polygamy,” and given what the news said about our vice president, I wouldn't be surprised if he was.

The alien man launched into what must have been a prepared presentation, because the alien woman stepped back
and let him play this elaborate game of interstellar charades. First, he stretched his arms wide and pointed to the sky. Then he pointed to his ship and made a snaky motion with his right hand. After that, he put his hands to his head, like he had a headache, and then darted his fingers from his head to the heads of the five-person delegation. He reached out for the alien woman, took her hand and did the same
She has a headache
sign with her hands, and then drew lines from her head toward their heads.

“I'm no interpreter,” I said, “but I'd bet five bucks that they're saying they have knowledge they're going to share.”

“I hope we learn each other's languages soon,” Brynne said. “I don't think we'll get a lot of astrophysics insights from a game of Guess What I'm Thinking.”

The next two people down the rope looked younger. The male was enormous, built like a fullback, with broad shoulders and a broad chest and broad everything. The female was short, but beautiful. Neither of them had the wrinkled, careworn look of the older pair.

They landed and the girl fell, but the guy grabbed her harness and kept her from hitting the ground. She smiled at him. I wondered if they were a couple. Or maybe brother and sister.

The next man was carrying two large packages that looked to be about the size and weight of bowling balls, and the woman following him had two packages of her own.

Wolf Blitzer got very excited about this and a commentator—a man who had formerly worked at NASA and had written a book—was listing all the possible things that they could be holding. But we never got to see what they were, because the first four aliens now followed the delegation into a tent that had been erected nearby and the harnesses went back up into the ship, and the remaining two stood there against the cold breeze, shivering, but never unwrapping their packages.

Wolf Blitzer: “Well, that was really momentous. Truly momentous.”