The Mothership (28 page)

“We don’t have to do much. They don’t want
to be seen, and they have the technology to stay out of sight. If they wanted
the world to know they’re here, we couldn’t stop it. All they’d have to do is
land on the White House lawn and it’s all over.”

“There are photos.”

He snorted. “Of blurry, out of focus blobs”

“You guys screw up the pictures, is that
it?”

 “It’s not us, it’s the cameras. They can’t
handle the extremes of light and dark, especially at night. If you photograph a
brilliant light against a dark sky, automatic cameras overexpose the bright
part, creating featureless blobs. What makes it worse is that the light is not
coming from the ship’s hull, but from the air around it, between the camera and
the ship. It’s what Dr McInness said, their acceleration fields cause the air
to glow. It screws the focus and the exposure. So we say UFOs don’t exist
because there are so many cameras out there, and no good photographs. Simple,
yet believable.”

“You make it sound like a game.”

“It’s no game,” Markus replied soberly.
“The truth is, we made a big mistake.”

Laura looked confused. “What mistake?”

“We dropped the big one, much sooner than
we should have. It got the attention of the Local Powers.” He cast his eyes
toward the night sky, where the real great powers were. “They’ll let us have
our wars, and slaughter each other, but nuclear weapons is pushing the
envelope. Before 1945, there weren’t many UFOs here. Earth was a back water.
Once we started nuking cities, sightings went through the roof. It took a
couple of years for them to get set up. I’m talking bases, people, equipment.
They’ve got logistics to manage, just like us. By 1947, they were here, in
strength, and have stayed ever since.”

“But wouldn’t every civilization get
nuclear weapons, eventually?”

“Sure, but peaceful civilizations wouldn’t
build them. Not us. We spent a fortune getting them early and then mass
produced enough of them to fry the planet many times over.”

“If I were them,” Beckman added dryly. “I’d
be watching us too.”

“You think they’re frightened of us?” Laura
asked.

Markus shook his head. “Suspicious,
contemptuous, but not afraid. They’re monitoring us so they know how close we
are to getting out there, where we could really make a nuisance of ourselves.”

“But, we wouldn’t nuke them.”

“We’ve already nuked our own kind,” Markus
said. “Of course they think we’d nuke them.”

“I’d nuke them,” Beckman said, then gave
them a cautious look, “If they attacked us.”

Markus raised his hands, vindicated. “There
you have it, the military mind.”

Beckman grunted. “It’s academic. They won’t
let us past Pluto.”

“They’ll let us into the Oort Cloud,” Xeno
corrected. “That’s still part of our Solar System.”

“So we’re prisoners?” Laura asked
astonished.

“Blockaded more likely,” Markus replied. “I
wouldn’t lose sleep over it. It’ll be centuries before we get out there, so we
can leave it to future generations to worry about.”

“But, we haven’t had a major war in decades.
A world war I mean.”

“What you mean is, you don’t remember world
war two, but it’s not your memory that counts. It’s theirs. The living memory
of our oldest people stretches back sixty or seventy years. A thousand years
ago our life span was thirty-five years. Now it’s eighty or ninety in developed
countries. In another thousand years, we might live to a hundred fifty, or
more. The thing is, we’ve good intelligence that alien life spans are measured
in centuries, so in their living memory, they’ve seen two world wars, dozens of
small wars, tens of millions of people killed, and our cities fire bombed and
nuked. That’s their personal experience of us, not what they’ve read in history
books. Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah,” Beckman cut in, “The sky is full of
old people in spaceships.”

Markus ignored him. “It means we need a
thousand years of peace, without war, without genocide, without nukes, before
we’re no longer dealing with beings who’ve seen our barbarism first-hand. We
may forgive and forget, but those civilizations observing our Earth won’t
forget.”

Laura looked thoughtful. “You paint a very
ugly picture of us, Mr Markus.”

“From a certain perspective, we look ugly.”

“Hey!” Nuke said, looking up with mock
indignation, “I happen to like the way we look. They’re the ugly ones. Those
Zetas, with the big black eyes,” He shivered, “They give me the creeps.”

“You think this is funny?” Markus asked.

“We are what we are,” Beckman said. “If
they don’t like it, they can kiss my hairy butt and go back to Alpha Centauri,
or Vulcan, or wherever the hell they came from. If we want to nuke the crap out
of ourselves, that’s our business.”

“It’s that kind of attitude that’s got us
under the microscope,” Markus said.

“I don’t care,” Beckman snapped. “I’m not kissing
up to any bug-eyed midget on my own planet.”

“What if we scrap all our nuclear weapons?”
Laura said. “And have a thousand years of peace, then what?”

“Depends where our technology is,” Markus
replied. “You don’t see the US rushing to establish diplomatic relations with
remote South American tribes living on roots and dirt, do you? What would be
the point?”

“Yes we would,” Beckman said wryly, “If
they had oil!”

“The problem is, we don’t have the kind of
oil they’re interested in,” Markus said. “Open contact with alien civilizations
will be the most difficult experience the human race will ever have. We think
we’re the center of the universe, top of the food chain, but we’re not. Our
perception of ourselves will change and our core beliefs may be shattered.
We’re trained to think once we get interstellar travel, we’ll be out there
playing a leading role, uniting the galaxy, or some such nonsense. Our big
psychological problem is dealing with the fact that we’ll never be center
stage. That role was cast a hundred million years ago. Or a billion.”

“We’ll get a bit part,” Xeno agreed, “If
we’re lucky.”

“No matter how far we advance,” Markus
said, “Civilizations thousands or millions of years ahead of us will also be
advancing, probably at a faster rate than us, so we’ll never catch up. We
should be thinking about how we can craft a small peaceful place for ourselves,
where we’ll be accepted, where we can go where no Homo sapiens have gone
before, unarmed and respectful, and determined not to tread on anyone’s toes.
Leave the phasers and the photon torpedoes at home, because they’ll just make
people out there mad at us, and our weapons will be useless anyway.”

“If people like you have their way,”
Beckman said. “We’d just roll over and play dead when we’re told. I don’t see
it that way. I’m nobody’s doormat, no matter how advanced they are.”

“That’s because you refuse to accept our
place in the universe.”

“I know our place, but I happen to think
we’ve got a choice. We can look them in the eye, or we can grovel. Having self
respect doesn’t mean they’re going to exterminate us.”

“Why not educate the world now?” Laura
asked. “Get people ready for it.”

“Because they’re not ready,” Markus said.

“You mean, you think they’re not ready,”
Beckman said. “I’m ready.”

“There’s no hurry,” Xeno said. “There’s a
lot of science to be discovered before we go anyway. That’s if we’re smart
enough to figure it out.”

“You think we’re not?” Laura asked
surprised.

“Dolphins are smart,” Xeno replied, “But
they’re not smart enough to build a nuclear reactor. We need to be a lot
smarter to figure out how to build a starship.”

“God help our stupidity,” Beckman said,
“That’s if the Almighty can spot us in the crowd.”

“What crowd?” Laura asked.

“Groom Philosophy one-oh-one,” Beckman
replied. “Once aliens exist, God will have a few questions to answer. Like, is
man made in the image of God, or is ET?”

 “That’s easy. Woman is made in the image
of God,” Laura declared, “And man is there to take out the garbage.”

Markus smiled. “The tough question for the
zealots will be, does ET have a soul?”

“Surely scientific civilizations are well
past spiritualism?” Laura said.

“You’re an atheist?”

“I believe what I can put under a
microscope. I’m prepared to believe in God, if he’ll just give me a blood
sample.”

“Would you be surprised to know,” Markus
asked, “that we have reports of extraterrestrials indicating they have
spiritual beliefs?”

Laura hesitated. “I would, or perhaps
they’re not as far ahead of us as you think.”

“One day, we may have to face the
possibility that man is just one of millions of species that have a spiritual
nature. If we have a soul, ET does too. You see, we’re not just interested in
their technology, we’re also trying to figure out how they tick. That’s why we
have philosophers on the payroll, as well as physicists.”

“So where does that leave religion?” Laura
asked.

“If you believe Christ is our planet’s
World Savior,” Markus said, “then it stands to reason every inhabited planet
has its own World Savior, who will teach them what they need to know. What they
teach may not work for us, but it will work for them. The moral of the story is
no nukes or missionaries in outer space. Which is why they haven’t landed here
to teach us their religions or conquer us. And that’s why if we ever get out
there, we can’t expect to convert other species to our beliefs.”

“Tough break for the fanatics,” Beckman
said, “so wound up with their petty little prejudices. The whole universe can’t
be infidels, or born agains.” He glanced at his watch surprised how late it
was. Dawn was barely four hours away. “It’s late, and we’ve got a long trek
tomorrow. Better get some rest.”

Laura was about to object, but saw the
others stretch out to sleep. She lay down, wondering if there really were no
nukes or missionaries in space. And if they didn’t want contact because mankind
was so backward, what was the ship doing here?

What had changed, after tens of thousands
of years?

* * * *

The point of light
marking the tunnel exit seemed as far away as ever. The tunnel was clear of
obstructions, but their progress was slow because they had to feel their way
forward through the darkness. Vamp and Dr McInness walked together while Timer
lagged behind, checking his radio every few minutes, hoping to find an
alternative to walking into certain captivity.

“You’re wasting power,” Vamp complained.

“Either the batteries are dead, or we are,”
Timer snapped.

“We’ll have some explaining to do,” Dr McInness
said, “but they won’t boil us in oil.”

“They’ll chop us up like bugs!” Timer
declared.

“Unlikely. They already know how the human
organism functions, probably better than we do.”

“I hope you’re right,” Vamp said.

“Anyone advanced enough to get here will
have highly evolved legal and ethical standards. Torture will certainly be
unacceptable to them.”

They walked on in silence a moment, then
Vamp asked, “How did they get here?”

“I wish I knew.”

“I thought you were king of the eggheads,” Timer
said.

“Only on this planet, which is a tiny
kingdom. The problem is the distances are so great, and yet nothing can travel
faster than the speed of light. It’s a paradox that makes interstellar travel
appear impossible.”

Vamp gave him a bemused look he couldn’t see
in the darkness, “But that ship is here, Doc, so it’s not impossible.”

“True. There’s definitely a way of crossing
vast distances without going faster than the speed of light.”

“Wormholes?” Timer suggested.

 “I very much doubt it,” Dr McInness said.
“They’re not practical. Say we wanted to create a wormhole to a star ten light
years away, assuming we knew how to generate a unidirectional gravity field.
Gravity can warp spacetime, but gravity’s influence travels through spacetime
at the speed of light, so it would take ten years to open the wormhole. That
can’t be the answer.”

“Why not leave the gravity wormhole
thing-a-me on all the time?” Vamp asked, “Like a freeway.”

“It’s a thought, but the energy required to
keep a network of wormholes open would be so enormous as to make it
uneconomical.”

“Well they got here somehow,” Vamp said,
her eyes locked on the distant point of light at the end of the tunnel.

“So no ideas, Doc?” Timer asked.

“If I had to guess, I’d say the clue lies
in inflation.”

Timer blinked. “You want to increase the
price of space travel?”

Dr McInness chuckled. “Not that kind of
inflation. I’m talking about what happened to the universe just after the big
bang. It briefly expanded, very rapidly, much faster than the speed of light.
It shows two points in spacetime can be moved apart faster than the speed of
light, by the movement of spacetime itself. I’ve always thought that was the
key.”