Part the third

If you missed the second part of the story, click here.

The beginning is here.

As they discuss pop culture, we careen down a hill into a deep canyon. The car skids on the gravel road, twisting through the turns, throwing me against my seatbelt. I grip the handle above the door and make deals with God. When we start back up the other side, Rogers mashes down the gas pedal. The tires spin in the gravel and we tear up the hill. Behind us, the flashes of headlights get closer. We fly through several more hairpin turns and onto a narrower road. This one is riddled with potholes. I bite my tongue, twice.

Finally, we skid to a stop in the shadow of a low outcropping of rock. “Come on, we have to go on foot,” Rogers says.

“You go ahead,” I say, not moving from my seat. “Alt and I will just drive back to town. Your frenemy back there will probably follow us, and you can get away.”

“No, you have to come with me. If they get ahold of you, they’ll use you to blow this job. Come on.” Both men are already out of the car, and Rogers has yanked one of the back doors open. He reaches in and grabs my arm, pulling me out of the car as easily as I remove a bag of groceries.

“I don’t get it,” I say as we run across the rough ground, our way lit only by a thin sliver of moon. “What’s to stop them from just planting stories?”

“If GRC can show they made things up, TOG will be fined. They need to make it look like one of us screwed up and blew our cover.” Rogers leads the way up a rough track, and I increase my pace to keep up. Alt huffs and puffs behind me.

“But you kind of did, right? I mean, Alt found your signal.” I glance back, but the other car is still in the ravine.

“Way to rub it in,” Rogers complains. “We miscalculated. By our estimates, the kind of computing Alt did should have been three to five years in the future.”

“Ahead of my time,” Alt pants, plodding up the hill behind me.

We get to the top of the hill and it’s as if we’ve climbed on top of a massive table. The flat expanse of the prairie stretches away for miles. “There’s nowhere to hide up here,” I cry. The dry air rasps through my throat.

“We don’t have to hide. There’s the ship.” Rogers stops and points up at the sky. I don’t see anything, but I feel a deep rumbling in my teeth. Alt stumbles up next to me, leaning over with his hands on his knees, chest heaving.

“I don’t want to go on the ship!” I say. “What part of that conversation do you not remember?”

Rogers shakes his head. “No time for argument. Come on.”

The rumbling slides up into an ear slipping whine and something grabs my shoulders, lifting me. As my toes leave the earth, I open my mouth to scream, but I can’t pull any air into my lungs. Pressure builds in my chest, and my vision starts to grow dark around the edges.

From far away, I hear a voice yell, “Damn it, Rogers, you won’t get away with this! I’ll see you in small claims court!”

* * *

When the gray recedes, I’m seated at a table in a conference room. Heavy curtains cover one wall, and a screen hangs from the ceiling at the far end. Three women and two men in business suits sit at the far end, arguing in furious whispers. Alt slumps in a chair next to me.

“Alt, are you ok?” I grab his arm and shake it.

He blinks a few times and looks around groggily. “I need a drink.” His voice is raspy, and he coughs a few times.

Across the table, Rogers pours water into a glass and slides it over to Alt without a word. He pours a second one for me and gives us a weak smile.

I gulp down the water and slide my glass back for a refill. “What’s going on?” I ask, jerking my head toward the suits.

“They’re deciding what to do about this whole mess.” Rogers rubs a hand over his face. “You two shouldn’t be here. I’m in really big trouble.”

“Oh, come on,” Alt says. “You aliens abduct people all the time. You aren’t going to probe us, are you?”

Rogers shakes his head. “That’s propaganda spread by TOG. They’ve been trying to ruin our operations on this planet for decades.”

“Wait a minute!” My voice ratchets up and the suits all turn to stare at me. I stare back for a minute, then smile and wave. They go back to their angry conversation.

Leaning toward Rogers, I whisper. “Where are we?”

“We’re on the mothership,” Rogers says, as if it were obvious.

I look around the room again. “This looks like every client conference room I’ve ever been in. I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t you remember getting sucked up out of the desert?” Alt asks, coughing again. His voice is hoarse, but his eyes sparkle. “It was like a scene from a Close Encounters or ET. Tractor beam people hauler.” He turns to Rogers. “Is there a window?”

Rogers stands and beckons us to follow him. We cross the room, to the thick floor-to-ceiling curtains. He gives me a concerned look. “You aren’t afraid of heights, are you?”

I roll my eyes. “Just show me.”

Dramatically, he yanks the curtain aside.

Fog.

I look at him. “Am I supposed to be seeing something?”

He looks out the window. “Well, crap, we must be in the clouds. Yeah, look! Down there.” He points.

I lean forward, nose against the glass and look down. Far below, there’s a break in the clouds, and I can see a small patch of fields and roads, like the view from an airplane. I nod. “Ok, then, we’re in the mothership.” I return to my seat and gulp another glass of water. “I don’t suppose you have any whiskey?”

Throat clearing from the other end of the room ends our discussion. Rogers ducks his head, but Alt and I stare at the suits.

“They don’t look like aliens,” I whisper to Alt.

“Neither does he,” Alt replies, nodding at Rogers.

Rogers makes a shushing noise. I glare at him.

One of the suits stands up. She looks like a woman in her late fifties—salt and pepper hair styled in a short, conservative helmet. She wears a pale blue suit with a straight skirt, matching jacket and a string of pearls over a white scoop-necked shirt. “I am—” she stops, with her mouth open, then closes it. After a moment she tries again. “You may call me Carol. My real name is not easy for Terrans to pronounce. I am the program director for the Terran Development project, also known by its code name, which translates roughly to—” She stop again and looks at her colleagues. “I’ve never said it to a Terran before, and now it just sounds silly,” she mutters. The others make “go ahead” noises, and she turns back to us. “Well, it’s Project Hot Dog Eaters.”

Alt and I gawk at her.

“Because you Terrans eat hot dogs. We’ve never met another species who—” She stops again and takes a moment to fiddle with a tablet device on the table. With a nod to herself, she tries again. “Let’s just call it Project Earth. Our job,” she gestures to the other suits and Rogers, “is to develop civilization on this planet to the point where it will benefit the rest of the galactic economy. Then we’ll bring you into the marketplace.”

I jump up. “Yeah, we’ve heard all this already. If TOG blows your cover, their planet will get approved first and you’ll get bupkus. Yada yada. What happens to us in that case? Does the universe just forget about little ole Earth? That might be the best possible outcome for us. I mean, think about the colonization of Africa and America.” I look at Alt. “None of that worked out too well for the natives. Maybe we want TOG to win.”

The suits erupt into speech, arguing in their ear-splitting language. I turn to Rogers. I’m tired, and this kind of thing is way above my paygrade. Maybe I can get Sonia to help me pass this off to someone from the United Nations or CNN. She has lots of high-powered connections.  “Can I go home now? I have to work tomorrow.” I glance at my watch. “I mean today.”

“Actually, Simmons said you could have today off, remember?” Rogers smiles. He scoots his chair back from the table and leads us out of the room. The suits hardly notice and make no effort to stop us. “I’ll find you two a place to sleep, while we take you home.”

He drops me off in what looks like a normal hotel suite. Even the bathroom looks like it was lifted from a Holiday Inn, with the sink in the main room and a shower and toilet in a tiny enclosed area. “Get a few hours’ sleep,” Rogers says before closing the door.

Somehow, my body takes this as a command, not a suggestion. I barely make it to the bed before I’m out.

The last part of the story is here.