Terra (26 page)

Rubbing his eyes, the scientist looked at the computer screens. Not just numbers; the same numbers. The same four numbers, over and over again. He phoned the SETI labs at Ohio State University, the Parkes Observatory in Australia and Jodrell Bank in England and was told that they were all indeed receiving the same signal. Then he made himself some coffee and phoned some rather more important scientists than himself to come in and help him, since he wasn’t being paid nearly enough to handle this sort of thing on his own.

At 5.45 a.m. the important scientists finished their coffee and played rock paper scissors to see who had to phone the government. The losing scientist drained his cup, took a deep breath and picked up the phone.

At 6.01 a.m. the first phone calls came from the TV news people. The signal was now so strong that anyone with a radio could pick it up, and people were wondering where it was coming from and what the four numbers meant. The government released a statement saying it was a routine communications test. Nobody believed this for a second.

At 6.44 a.m. the Air Force officers who, much to the scientists’ annoyance, seemed to have pretty much taken over the running of the Hat Creek laboratory realised that the four numbers were probably latitude and longitude readings. The numbers were giving a location, a special place on Earth where . . . nobody knew what would happen there, but it seemed obvious that something would, and soon. One of the Air Force officers hurried off to get a map while the scientists made more coffee.

At 6.52 a.m. the map location given by the mysterious signal was identified as an unremarkable stretch of road, passing through an uninteresting bit of countryside. The Air Force officers hurried back to the helicopter they’d arrived in, while the scientists played rock paper scissors to see which one would get to go with them.

At 7.25 a.m., somebody – nobody knew who, but they would be SO fired when they were found out – told the TV news people what was going on. The stretch of road was already crawling with news vans, cameras and expectant onlookers by the time the soldiers arrived to clear the area.

At 7.45 a.m. the signal changed suddenly. Instead of the four numbers there was now just one: nine. Over and over again, the number nine. Everybody now knew that whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen at nine o’ clock. Pessimists all over the world decided they had an hour and fifteen minutes left to live. A radio breakfast show D J played a record with a chorus that went ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it’ several times in succession until he was forcibly ejected from the building. He didn’t seem to care.

At 8.51 a.m., as more or less the entire population of Earth sat watching their TVs in varying states of fear and excitement, a missile early warning station reported that something had entered the upper atmosphere directly above the suddenly very special location. The military jet planes which had been circling the area for nearly two hours reported that they couldn’t see anything.

By 8.58 a.m. the soldiers had managed to clear a space about thirty metres wide at the location. While the TV news reporters babbled into their cameras, many of the onlookers started singing. Some sang solemn hymns, some – the ones who’d brought beer – sang rude songs. It sounded terrible.

At 8.59 and 50 seconds someone in the crowd started counting down from ten like it was New Year’s Eve. Nobody joined in, so after ‘Seven!’ he stopped.

At 9.00:00 . . . nothing happened.

At 9.00:02 Lbbp remembered to switch the invisibility shield off.

At 9.06 a.m. people were still screaming.

By 9.07 a.m. they’d started to calm down a bit.

At 9.08 a.m. the soldiers holding back the crowd began to notice that their mood had changed; no longer were they surging forwards and backwards, their singing and shouting had faded away and the air of fear and excitement had dwindled down into a sort of numb acceptance that whatever was going to happen, was going to happen.

So when at 9.09 a.m. a beam of white light burst from the underside of the strange hovering lemon-shaped object, there were no screams of alarm, just the sort of ‘ooh’ a crowd watching fireworks might make. Even the soldiers stood in silent anticipation, their weapons lowered.

The light faded.

The crowd – and via the TV, the human race – stared at the ground beneath the hovering object. Something was there. No, not something, someone . . . small, dressed in a curious shimmering blue garment, but definitely a person rather than a thing. What at first looked like a halo of light around its head proved to be honey-blonde hair, and the face beneath was pink, heart-shaped and . . . human?

‘Hello,’ said Terra brightly. ‘Perhaps you can help me. I’m looking for my mummy and daddy.’

T
here were two things Mrs Bradbury hadn’t done for a long time. One was argue with Mr Bradbury. The other was laugh.

The initial searing pain of their tiny daughter’s disappearance had long since faded to a dull ache of loss which they knew would never go away. They’d had no more children; neither of them had ever even suggested it. It wasn’t so much that the Bradburys didn’t want to be parents again; it was more that they didn’t feel that they deserved to be.

The small upstairs room which had been set aside to be the nursery still looked exactly as it had twelve years previously. The nameless baby had never slept there; she was still sleeping in a basket beside Mrs Bradbury’s bed at the time of her disappearance. The cot still bore its first clean sheet, the little dangly musical mobile had never turned, the cupboards still contained the few toys that her parents had bought for her, alongside the empty spaces meant for the toys that they’d intended to buy.

Mr and Mrs Bradbury would occasionally admit to each other that keeping the nursery like this was foolish; to be reminded of their lost baby every day only made it harder on them and it really was time to convert the little room into an office, or spare bedroom, or something. That would be the right and sensible thing to do, they would agree. Yet it never happened; neither of them could bear to change a single thing in that room. So there it stayed, as perfect and as empty as it had ever been.

Mrs Bradbury would only go into the nursery now to clean it; she would be sure to do this when she was alone in the house. She didn’t want her husband to find her sat crying on the floor, as would always happen for a few minutes before she collected herself and finished the job in silence.

On this particular morning Mrs Bradbury finished cleaning the nursery, wiped her eyes, blew her nose and went downstairs to make some coffee. She was working from home today and had the house to herself. The TV was on in the living room but the sound was turned down. People on TV annoyed Mrs Bradbury. Always talking, talking, yammering on about things that just didn’t matter at all. So few things really mattered. Mrs Bradbury knew that now.

Mrs Bradbury was still wiping the last smudges of moisture from her eyes as she passed through the living room on her way from the kitchen.

The people on the TV were particularly over-excited this morning. Newsreaders whose faces on other days were smooth masks of professional calm babbled away to the camera and each other, their eyes glinting with both terror and joy. Reporters in the streets tried to interview passers-by, but the conversations all seemed (Mrs Bradbury still had the sound down) to dissolve into hysteria. And it was all because of – what did that caption say? Appearance? Mysterious? Extra-what?

Then she saw the shape.

The shape that had appeared to her every time she closed her eyes in the last twelve years. Except now it wasn’t flickering away inside her head or tormenting her in a dream. It was right there on her TV screen.

Mrs Bradbury’s coffee cup slid from her fingers and landed with a thud-splash on the carpet. She didn’t hear it.

M
r Bradbury very nearly hadn’t made it into work that morning. The traffic had been – quite literally – crazy, with people leaping out of their cars for no obvious reason and screaming at each other. Mr Bradbury turned the radio on to see what was happening but couldn’t make sense of anything anyone was saying. One station was just playing an old REM song over and over. By the time he arrived at his office building he was feeling agitated and bewildered.

The front lobby of the building was deserted; usually there was a uniformed guard to greet him but today there was no sign of him at his desk; just a half-full cup of still steaming coffee and a half-eaten breakfast muffin.

Going up in the elevator Mr Bradbury heard waves of unusual sounds as he passed through each floor of the building. Singing, crying, laughing, screaming . . . What was going on?

The elevator arrived at his floor and the door opened. A wave of noise hit Mr Bradbury as he ventured into the office.

He saw his boss yelling frantically into a phone, his jacket off and his tie loose (already?); he saw his own secretary waving at him, with a huge smile and tears streaming down her cheeks; he saw two of his colleagues beckoning him towards the TV, he saw . . .

Mr Bradbury stood silent and open-mouthed amid the commotion. A single tear rolled down his cheek. His fingers fumbled inside his pocket for his phone. He dialled his home number without looking, his eyes still fixed upon the TV screen. He heard a click and knew his wife had picked up the phone.

They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t have to.

T
wo days later, Lbbp was wishing he’d borrowed a bigger ship.

His own little lemon-shaped spaceship was now quite cramped and uncomfortable, being fuller than it had ever been before, but Lbbp was determined not to let that ruin what promised to be a very special day. One way or another.

Lbbp and Terra had been joined on board by a very impressive and serious young Ymn in a smart blue uniform who had been introduced to them as Major Hardison, and a rather less smartly dressed and considerably less serious Ymn called Professor Steinberg. Professor Steinberg, they had been assured, was one of the very cleverest Ymn scientists on the whole planet Rrth, but today he was simply overcome with excitement. He talked and giggled almost non-stop while on board the ship, asking questions in his funny up and downy Ymn voice that neither Terra nor Lbbp had time to answer before he asked another. They’d used the Interface to install Ymn language learning patches before leaving Fnrr, but they still had a lot of difficulty understanding Professor Steinberg. Occasionally Major Hardison would shoot Professor Steinberg a stern look, and Professor Steinberg would fall silent for a moment. Just for a moment.

The days since their arrival on Rrth had passed in a flurry of meetings, examinations and interviews, with impressively commanding Ymns in blue and green uniforms, clever-sounding Ymns in white coats, and finally an extremely important-seeming Ymn in an expensive-looking grey uniform, who was addressed by his many helpers as Mizzer Prezden. Mizzer Prezden had his picture taken with Terra and Lbbp and then asked Terra if she still wanted to find her parents. When Terra replied that yes, she did, Mizzer Prezden asked one of his helpers if Terra’s parents had been identified and contacted, and he was told that yes, Mizzer Prezden, they had. More pictures were taken and Mizzer Prezden said how much he wished he could travel with them in Lbbp’s ship to the meeting; one of Mizzer Prezden’s helpers persuaded him that this would NOT be a good idea, Mizzer Prezden, and Mizzer Prezden agreed, although his disappointment was obvious. As she waved goodbye, Terra reflected that maybe Mizzer Prezden wasn’t really that important after all.

The location of Terra’s parents’ house had been kept absolutely 100 per cent classified and top secret, so naturally by the time the little spaceship arrived overhead, the street was crammed with news reporters and onlookers.

Terra looked down from one of the ship’s windows and frowned. She didn’t like those machines that some of the crowd were pointing up at the ship. She knew they were just for taking pictures but there was still something threatening about them. ‘Make all these silly people go away,’ she muttered crossly.

Major Hardison coughed. ‘Um, that could be difficult, ma’am.’ He’d been calling Terra ‘Ma’am’ all day. Terra had no idea what it meant but she had decided she rather liked it. ‘The street is a public right of way; I could request a special security order but it would have to be . . .’

‘Oh I’m sorry,’ smiled Terra, ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’

Terra nodded to Lbbp, who had already reconfigured the displacement field generator to its external setting. There was a hum, a flash, and the street below them was deserted. The old Bsht-Pshkf manoeuvre, as it was now known on Fnrr.

Bsht. Lbbp missed Bsht.

Professor Steinberg burst out laughing, but Major Hardison seemed very concerned. ‘Where have they gone?’

‘Somewhere else,’ replied Terra matter-of-factly. ‘They’ll be all right.’

And indeed they were all right, although they weren’t really dressed for mountain climbing and it took them AGES to get back down again.

The little ship descended silently to hover a few metres above the surface of the street. Terra could see a tall Ymn standing in front of the house’s main door. She breathed hard.

Major Hardison insisted on being the first to go down to speak to the Bradburys, but seemed very nervous about using the gravity beam to do so. Professor Steinberg, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to give it a try. He chortled all the way down to the ground and as soon as he touched down, shouted something about ‘another go’.

Terra watched Major Hardison walk up to the tall Ymn. At first she thought he was handing something over to him but then she saw that the two Ymns were just holding each other’s hands and sort of wobbling them a bit. She’d seen Ymns doing this a lot since their arrival; she supposed it was some sort of greeting. She liked it; it looked friendly.

Lbbp put his hand on her shoulder.

-
Are you sure you want to do this?

-
I can’t disappoint them now. Not today. Not again.