Xenophobia (11 page)

Something was wrong.

Bower walked out behind Jameson.

There, in the cloudless blue sky, sat the alien spacecraft hundreds of miles above Earth’s atmosphere. Although Bower wasn’t sure quite what she had expected, the sight before her was like nothing she could have ever dreamed of. At first glance, she assumed she was looking at the moon, with its soft bluish white surface visible in the daylight, its dark side hidden by the bright sky, but this was no thin crescent, no silver arc reflecting back the sunlight from the depths of space, this was a living organism.

Tentacles rippled around the edge of the alien craft, fine cilia waving with the light. The alien spaceship reminded her more of a single-celled bacterium than a machine that traversed the stars. Fascinated, she stood there in awe with the soldiers. Like a waxing moon, part of the craft was hidden in shadow, but those surfaces that caught the sunlight showed up in astonishing detail, revealing the craft’s elongated shape.

The craft pulsated, its cilia moving in waves like the wind rippling across a field of wheat. Shapes formed like fingerprints and then faded away. The very structure of the craft seemed to change, as though it were not a fixed shape. The alien vessel appeared to ooze through space.

“Mother fucker ...”

Bower wasn’t sure who had spoken. Normally, she wasn’t one for profanity, but under the circumstances she was inclined to agree. Of one thing she was sure, humanity had no idea what it was dealing with. There were no parallels. There was no point of comparison, nothing to draw upon. Whatever these aliens were, whatever they represented, however they thought, whatever their motives, Bower was sure there was no earthly equivalent.

“How?” She began. She’d intended to ask an intelligent question, but just that one word came out. Her mind was awash with doubt.

Leopold stood beside her.

“I take it you guys haven’t seen the freak show before?”

Bower turned to him wondering what stunned look sat on her face. Although it seemed like a cliche, she was aware her jaw had dropped and her mouth was open.

“Yeah,” Leopold continued. “It kinda has that effect on everyone the first time.”

“What do you know about it?” Jameson asked, stepping backwards next to them. His eyes never left the craft as it rose slowly above the uneasy quiet of the city. Bower could see his professionalism kicking in.

Leopold spoke with the precision of a reporter providing a sound bite.

“The mothership is the size of Connecticut. NASA has said there’s no cause for panic, but you try telling that to a bunch of rednecks crowing about anal probes, or a bunch of Arabs that won’t let women drive, or a Buddhist monk or the Pope, a Pacific island chief or a corrupt politician from Russia. Don’t panic, my ass. Hysteria has seized the world. You think Malawi is all fucked up. You should see Yonkers.”

In any other context, Jameson probably would have laughed, but it was apparent Leopold wasn’t joking.

“They’re saying it’s the end of the world, but that’s not the worst bit.”

Bower didn’t say anything, she couldn’t think of anything worse.

“The worst part of all this is those nutters that are trying to bring about the end of the world. For them, this is somehow a biblical prophesy coming true, something about a dragon with seven heads.”

Jameson turned to Leopold. There was no grandstanding on Leopold’s part, these were raw facts.

“NASA released images of the craft a few days ago, just before the UFO moved in from somewhere near the Moon. The press ran with the scientific opinion that their presence was benign, but it didn’t seem to matter, all it took was a few fringe groups to run with worst-case scenarios about the aliens being monsters from hell and fear ran rampant through society. The general population freaked out at the thought of a strange alien spaceship flying overhead with impunity. It’s Sputnik all over again.

“And it’s not just that the alien spacecraft looks scary, it’s that the appearance of this grotesque craft has shattered the illusion of control we have in life. We like to think we’re masters of our own destiny, but that thing has proven otherwise, showing just how impotent and insignificant we really are in this vast universe.”

Leopold stuttered, which seemed out of character for him, making Bower wonder how deeply all this affected him personally.

“At first ... At first, it was just the wackos, you know, the cults. The isolationists, shacked up in some barn in the middle of farmland, waiting for the Messiah or some shit. Men, women, children ... Jonestown all over again. But then they started finding normal folk, people that just snapped. Murder-suicides. Poor bastards never reached out to someone. They should have. They should have said something. They should have talked to someone about what they were feeling. They shouldn’t have felt helpless. They shouldn’t have felt alone. There were people all around them who cared, they just couldn’t see it.”

Tears were rolling down his cheeks. Bower went to say something, but Leopold cut her off.

“Life should never end that way. Life is too precious. No matter how dark the night, the world keeps turning, there’s always a dawn. Even if someone’s on the other side of the world, they’re never more than a phone call away, you know.”

Jameson’s head hung low. Bower felt a lump in her throat.

“I ... I should have been there. Not half a world away, drinking myself silly in some shitty bar in a country on the verge of war. But, no, I had to be someone. I had to prove something. I was driven, driven by what? Driven to what? To be the big man, the foreign correspondent for a throw-away thirty second slot in the late edition of the News?”

He paused for a second, and Bower wondered who he’d lost. She couldn’t be sure, but she suspected it had been his parents.

“Funny thing, this alien spaceship. Makes you see life in a different light. It’s as though someone’s lifted the rose-colored glasses and I’m finally seeing reality for what it is.”

He wiped his eyes.

“It’s not their fault,” Leopold continued. “The aliens, that is. Hell, they haven’t done anything other than to show up at the party. It’s us. Self-obsessed. For tens of thousands of years we thought the cosmos revolved around us, the sun and all the stars rising and setting on our egos. Oh, Copernicus might have shifted the bounds, putting the sun at the center of the solar system, but we still think everything revolves around us.”

He paused for a second, as though he was waiting for her to correct him, but Bower didn’t know quite what to say.

“Look at how stupid we are. They come in peace. We go to pieces. They must think the whole bloody planet is an insane asylum.”

“But
,” Bower pleaded, “
there must be someone down here who has kept their head about them.”

“Oh, there’s a bunch of scientists banding together to represent humanity, only they don’t. They’re the minority, the level heads. Even they are victims of this madness.”

“I don’t understand,” Jameson said.

“Fear spreads like wildfire. We’re like a herd of buffalo spooked by lightning. The thunder breaks and we charge headlong off the cliff, blindly following whoever’s in front of us. Stampedes trample the weak, they bring out the worst in humanity. There’s only so much rational thought when the supermarket shelves are bare. There’s only so much restraint when the gas pump runs empty. There’s only so long we can hold out against our base survival instincts, then we’re just animals fighting to survive. It’s trample or be trampled.”

Leopold put his hands on his head, pulling at his hair in frustration as he turned to one side, making as though he was going to scream.

Jameson took charge. He seemed to understand what was needed. He barked orders at his soldiers, his gruff voice snapping Leopold back to reality.

“Elvis, take Smithy, Brannigan and Phelps, and see what sense you can get out of any refugees coming up from
Lilongwe. We need to know if the UN still holds the airport.

“Bosco, I need that goddamn radio fixed. We need to get in touch with the Navy, get them to send in a couple of helos for evac.”

Elvis strutted over, his chest bare, sweat dripping from his muscular frame.

“They ain’t gonna send shit with RPGs lighting up the sky,” he added with his Memphis swagger. He picked up his backpack and his M4 rifle, handling them as though they were weightless.

Jameson considered his words, replying, “Then we get clear of Ksaungu. If we can, we make for Lilongwe and grab the last stagecoach out of Dodge. If we can’t make Lilongwe, we find ourselves some clear ground and call in the cavalry.”

“And if the radio doesn’t work?” Bosco asked.

“Same as usual. We hump over the mountains,” Jameson said.

“Fucking-A,” Elvis replied. He seemed to relish the prospect of marching for hundreds of miles through the jungle. He was already heading out through the restaurant, three other soldiers following hard behind him.

Bower appreciated Jameson’s resolve. He was breaking them out of a slump, not letting his men lose focus.

“You can join us,” Jameson said, reaching out a hand to Leopold. For a second, the older man hesitated, then he reached out and shook the soldier’s hand.

“I appreciate the gesture, but I’m here for the duration.”

Jameson nodded respectfully.

Leopold looked back at the alien craft. Whatever its path, it wasn’t passing directly overhead, its orbit took it from the south-east to the north-west but its passage was further to the west, somewhere out over Zambia.

“I’ll be all right,” Leopold added, looking at Bower, speaking as though she needed to hear reassuring words. Kowalski walked up grinning as though he were on holiday. Between him and Leopold, Bower knew exactly what was happening.

Leopold seemed to be able to switch off his concerns. It was a facade, she’d seen him coming apart at the seams just moments before, but now he was calm and collected. Like all of them, he’d been in Africa too long. He’d learnt to disconnect himself from reality and deal with the harsh cruelty of war, but that meant suspending the normal feelings of empathy one human being felt for another. It wasn’t calloused, she had to do the same thing whenever she operated, to do any less was to jeopardize someone’s life during surgery. But Leopold had extended this front to dealing with the alien. He buried the raw feelings about his family that just moments before had threatened to boil over.

As savage as a war zone was, it was a known quantity. The prospect of a world torn apart on contact with a vastly superior alien species represented too many unknowns. Unknowns unsettled even the bravest souls. As much as Bower wanted to think of herself as coldly logical, she knew there was a bias at play, skewing her perception as much as his. And
Kowalski was too calm, making out as though there was nothing exceptional in the sky at all. Jameson might not show it, but he too must have felt the fractured tension.

At that point in time, Bower could have said, ‘I saw a unicorn dancing in a rainbow this morning,’ and no one would have batted an eyelid. It was shock, not the shock of physical trauma, the shock of sensory overload. Bower had seen this once before, during her first parachute jump.

Standing there in the sweltering heat of the courtyard, her mind flashed back to that tandem jump from ten thousand feet. The air had been surprisingly cold when the door to the small Cessna opened. With stainless steel carabiners locking her jumpsuit to the instructor behind her, the two of them had shuffled awkwardly toward the open door. He told her it would be just like their rehearsal sitting on the tarmac. All she had to do was swing her feet around, out of the open door, and rest them on the wheel, but her mind shut down. She could hear people talking to her, reassuring her she’d be fine, but her body felt numb.

Bower remembered nodding. Those few seconds felt like a dream. The instructor positioned himself behind her, his legs straddling her back. She could remember the countdown from three, which seemed a ridiculously small number to start from. Why not five? Or ten? But she’d known it was a token gesture, something to provide a semblance of sanity when jumping out of a perfectly functional aircraft, and then it came, the sensory overload. The instructor pushed forward, tumbling headlong out of the plane with her hanging from his straps.

Apparently, they had 30 seconds of free-fall before the chute opened, but Bower’s mind had overloaded. There was too much coming at her. All she remembered was sitting on the edge of the plane and then the chute opening above her. At the time, she had marveled at how far away the plane was when the parachute opened, her mind jarred by its apparently instantaneous motion. It was only when she reviewed the video from her helmet cam that she realized she’d blacked out. She’d never lost consciousness, her mind had simply refused to process the events that appeared to lead only to her demise. It wasn’t until the chute opened that her subconscious returned control to her.

And here she was, looking in the eyes of a perfectly rational reporter in a war zone, a veteran of too many conflicts, struggling with the implications of a vast alien spacecraft looming overhead. Leopold smiled, as did Kowalski. Bower smiled too. They were three lunatics trying to find whoever was in charge of the asylum.