He left the small office. “Thanks, Whitney, you’ve been very helpful,” he said as he passed the front desk. He paused at the glass double doors serving the motel lobby. “And I’ll make sure you get the fifty-thousand-dollar reward. For now, though, do me a favor. Don’t leave this office until I give you the green light. Hopefully, it won’t be too long. And light up the No Vacancy sign.”
Whitney swallowed hard. “Will I be in any danger?” she asked.
“Stay put and you’ll be just fine,” he said reassuringly. “I promise.”
And with that he pushed through the lobby doors and began dialing his cell phone.
31
HANSEN PURCHASED THE items in his cart and returned to the Blue Medusa in the Walmart parking lot. As he entered the car, he wondered what Drake was doing right now. A being he had worked with far more closely than any human.
While Drake had helped him achieve unbelievable things, Hansen had also often been relegated to the position of a lowly hired hand. But this couldn’t be helped. Someone needed to take care of mundane interactions with humans, since it was always best to keep Drake’s interactions with members of the host planet to a minimum.
Besides, if it weren’t for him being Drake’s errand boy, he never would have had the chance to meet Erin Palmer.
But Hansen had been worried about his alien associate for some time now, even prior to this attack, which elevated his anxiety to the stratosphere. Drake had seemed to be getting more and more unstable as the psychological burden of living among the constant savagery of humanity took its toll. And now this. Not only having to witness, and escape, a brutal attack, but being forced to go on the run. Being hunted like an animal.
And the attack in Yuma wasn’t the first time Drake had experienced such savagery up close and personal. As Hansen pulled out of the parking lot, vivid memories of Drake’s first exposure to human ruthlessness came to the forefront of his consciousness.
* * *
TWO YEARS HAD gone by since Hansen had met with Fuller and Fermi. Two years in which he had worked harder than ever before, and during which progress was slower, and more painful, than ever before.
The Wraps had been right to intervene when they had. If he didn’t know for sure that he was on the right track, he would have given up months earlier, as stubborn as he was. This was sheer torture, made even worse by knowing that beings existed somewhere close by who could give him the answers he needed instantly.
Generous funding had magically appeared, as promised, to support Hansen and to purchase expensive equipment for his advisor’s lab. Even so, his advisor was embarrassed by Hansen. He appreciated the funding, although he was convinced a crackpot who knew nothing about physics was responsible, but insisted that Hansen would never earn his Ph.D. unless he switched gears immediately. Unless he got with the program and worked on something that wasn’t unanimously thought to be preposterous.
Hansen had finally broken up with Morgan, and while he did date on occasion, he hadn’t found anyone special. He still lived in an apartment, and he was soaking up as much knowledge as he could from some truly brilliant professors, skeptical of his own work though they might be.
Steve Fuller hadn’t attempted to communicate with him even once since that first meeting, but Hansen felt certain he was being observed, at least periodically. But he couldn’t bring himself to feel outraged. They’d be fools to trust him entirely.
Not that he wasn’t trustworthy, but too much was riding on him keeping quiet. He could only imagine how often the Wraps and their computer were helping to break up terrorist plots around the world, carefully tracking WMD in the hands of crazed regimes, and using inconceivable computing power to predict pockets of global tension and suggest ways to defuse them before they spiraled out of control.
The Wraps were like benevolent fairy godmothers watching over humanity, guiding them away from the self-destruction an even greater computer on Suran had predicted with such certainty. Given the importance of Fuller’s operation, and the lives it was saving in both the short and the long run, Hansen would have kept tabs on someone like himself if he were in their shoes, making sure he didn’t betray them.
When he had started to pry, Fuller could have just put a bullet in his head. So the fact that his head still only had the usual five openings, and not a bullet-shaped sixth between his eyes, made the prospect of being under surveillance a lot easier to bear.
And instead of eliminating him as a risk, Fuller and Fermi had vindicated his beliefs and given him a purpose. He would be instrumental in making epic breakthroughs in quantum physics for mankind. Yes, he was just repeating what members of the Seventeen had discovered hundreds of thousands of years earlier, and other races, perhaps, millions or billions of years before that. But it was like watching a stunning magic trick performed by a master illusionist and being the first to figure out how it was done. There was still some satisfaction to be had from this endeavor.
And by pushing the boundaries of current knowledge, he was hastening the day when humanity would reach a stage of maturity and scientific development that would allow them to be welcomed as the eighteenth member of galactic society.
Hansen was in his apartment one morning, staring off into space and hoping that some divine intervention would give him insight into a problem that had stumped him for weeks, when there was a single light rap on his door.
He threw it open, expecting to see a solicitor. Instead, the first thing he saw was a yellow spiral notebook, being held open and thrust toward his face. DON’T SAY A WORD was written in big capital letters on the page facing him.
Hansen’s breath was knocked out of him just as surely as if he had been hit in the stomach. The notebook was being held up by twelve thin, supple tentacles, protruding from the midsection of the man standing there.
At first he thought it was Fermi, whose visage was seared into his memory, but it was not. It must have been one of the other three Wraps on Earth. They were artificially constructed to look like humans, and the surgeons and genetic engineers responsible back on Suran had obviously not seen any reason to deviate much from a single template.
The Wrap turned to a blank page and scribbled more words hastily, his tendrils balletic in their movements. He held the page out to Hansen.
DRIVE ME SOMEWHERE WE CAN TALK. BUT STAY SILENT IN YOUR CAR.
Hansen nodded, and without saying a word, grabbed his keys and wallet from a table near the door and closed it softly behind him.
The Wrap transferred the notebook to a ham-fisted human hand and his tendrils retreated under his shirt. His face was bruised, his clothing was filthy, and he smelled of petroleum. He looked as though he was burned in several places.
Hansen could only imagine what had happened, but whatever it was, it was very bad. The Wrap got into the passenger seat of his car, and Hansen turned on the radio, pretending he was alone and out for a drive.
He chose a destination almost immediately, and fifteen minutes later he and his guest were sitting on a bench in Schenley Park, a four-hundred-and-fifty-acre municipal park that bordered the campuses of Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh Universities. The bench had a view of a tranquil man-made lake surrounded by lush trees, dense with dark-green leaves.
“My name is Drake,” said the Wrap a moment after they had lowered themselves to the bench, apparently satisfied that it was finally safe to speak. “I need your help.”
Just as with Fermi, he had a slight accent, impossible to place, and a way about him that Hansen’s subconscious suggested was wrong. Something he wouldn’t have picked up on nearly this quickly had he not been exposed to it before.