IGMS Issue 5 Read online

  "Taking a chance on what?" said a new voice. I turned, and there she was, standing outside the jail cell. She looked radiant. I might have been angry, but seeing her again made me realize I did want to take that chance.

  I tried to look angry. "Take a chance on breaking out of this joint," I said.

  "Don't bother. The charges have been dropped." She handled some papers to Brahm, who looked them over.

  "She's right. You're free to go." He opened the cell and Audrey stepped in.

  "It seems we're famous, Danny," Audrey said, "And the city didn't want to press charges against one of its most famous visitors." I must have given her a confused look because she punched me in the shoulder and said, "The object you found -- the one Professor Cauldwell suspected might not be a natural phenomenon -- we're pretty sure it's an alien starship."

  I had to sit down. "I thought you guys were pulling my leg. What on earth makes you think it's an alien space ship"

  "It's no joke, Danny," Audrey said as she sat down beside me. "These last three days have been so hectic I've hardly gotten any sleep. After Professor Cauldwell confirmed the finding, he went ahead and alerted other astronomers and astrophysicists. I helped coordinate the effort from up here. Dozens of experts have looked at this object and most of them agree that it is not natural. And they've not only come to the same conclusion, they've improved upon it.

  "Remember when I said that the star was missing the characteristic hydrogen lines in its spectrum? Well it turns out that an antimatter photon propulsion system would produce visible light in the spectrum just as you discovered. And this light would lack the characteristic hydrogen lines in the spectrum."

  "And from all that you guys figure it's an alien starship?"

  "No, there's more. The simplest explanation might be that it is some stellar event that we'd never before witnessed. So we decided to attempt to prove ourselves wrong by measuring its movement against the background of stars. By looking at the light, and measuring its relative movement against stars that appear to be in its vicinity and its Doppler shift, we've been able to determine that it's moving away from us, and between two stars at a rate of about one-tenth the speed of light. This is all consistent with an antimatter photon propulsion system.

  "And you discovered them, Danny!"

  We sat there in silence for some time. It was a lot to take in. I had never expected to find myself in a situation like this one, but then again who ever does.

  "So what now?" I asked.

  "Let's go look at them again." As excited as I was about the possible discovery of other intelligent life in the universe, it didn't measure up to the possibility of once again being alone with Audrey in the observatory. That could bring us closer. We could talk, get to know each other better. But there was one problem.

  "You seem to forget the reason I'm sitting in this cell in the first place is because I went out there without a permit."

  Audrey brushed my concern away. "You've been granted a waiver," she said. "You're famous now, Danny. It's all over the news!"

  When I was younger, I often imagined what it might be like to be elected to some high office, and hold my first press conference. In my imagination, it was anything but the cliché repartee between speaker and press. I would dazzle them with my skillful answers, I would impress them with my all-encompassing knowledge, and I would have them rolling in the aisles with my humor and wit.

  It should come as no surprise, therefore, that when Audrey and I stepped out into the main city concourse to make our way back to the observation station and the press hounded us with questions, I said I would be glad to answer a few.

  It should come as even less of a surprise that most of the questions were far over my head and Audrey had to handle them.

  "If this all happened 300 years ago, why is it we didn't discover these aliens sooner?" one reporter asked.

  "Because the light from this starship's propulsion system is just reaching us now," Audrey said, "The star from which it appears to be leaving is 300 light years away from us. That star could be its home star and it's possible that the starship is leaving its solar system. But until it turned on its engines, so to speak, there was nothing to detect."

  "Do we know where it's going?"

  "Based on its current vector and assuming that doesn't change, it appears to be heading toward another star, several light years away from the home star. Keep in mind," she continued, "that because what we are seeing actually happened centuries ago, it is possible that the star ship is well underway by now. It may have reached its final destination. We have no way of knowing."

  There was a murmur among the throng and then one of the reporters asked, "What are you calling these aliens?"

  Feeling that I could handle this one, I said, "To be honest, I haven't thought of a name yet, but I'll let you know as soon as I do."

  "Would you like to see the starship for yourself?" Audrey said, before another question could be squeezed in. The press must have liked that idea because they grew even rowdier. "We're heading back to the observatory now. Anyone who'd like to come along is welcome to join us."

  So much for the quiet alone time together. Alien starship or not, I wanted to be with Audrey. But she clearly had other interests. And though gravity on the moon is one-sixth that of Earth, I felt crushed.

  The station was like a completely different place when we got there. Aside from the ungainly pack of reporters that followed us out, the observatory was buzzing with other people, most of whom I assumed were astronomers like Audrey. They took holographs of me and Audrey together, and they took more when each of us peered into the eyepiece of the great telescope. When it was my turn, the scene looked no different to me, but it suddenly took on new meaning. That wasn't a star I was seeing; it was a ship (or the exhaust thereof) and some life form had been curious enough, and talented enough to build it and head out for the stars. We humans had not come close to doing that yet.

  "It hardly looks like they're moving at all," I said.

  "Believe me, they are. One tenth the speed of light is about 108 million kilometers per hour. The fastest drone ships that we've sent out can't do much better than 100,000 kilometers per hour."

  "Still, to me it just looks like they're drifting."

  "Maybe that's what you should call them, " Audrey said.

  "Drifters?"

  "Why not?"

  "Do you think we'll ever get to meet them?" I asked. It was hard to hear with all of the commotion and I desperately wished for some privacy.

  Audrey's face darkened a bit. "Probably not. That's the irony of the whole thing. We have what seems to be irrefutable evidence of intelligent alien life, and we will probably never know more about them than we do today."

  "Why not?"

  "That starship was on its way before we'd even colonized the moon! So it's not like we can go and catch it, even if we had the technology to do so, which we don't."

  "And so that's it?"

  "It's a lot Danny. It answers a question that we've wondered about for ages. Not only that, but we can see from the ship itself that they've developed a working antimatter propulsion technology capable of boosting them to a measurable percentage of light speed -- which means that it can be done."

  "But we'll never know who they are or why they're drifting between the stars?" It was sad in its own way.

  "Never say never," Audrey said. In the light she looked as she did the last time we were here, dancing across the catwalk. "In a way, we're lucky that they're so far away. Their existence is much less of a threat now than it would be if people felt that they could come here. And we can still attempt to learn about them. It'll be a tough job, but it's also the discovery of a lifetime, worthy of every effort."

  We sat down in front of the telescope and I was steadily nerving myself to the task of talking to Audrey about us, about learning more about one another, about our future. It was hard to tune out all of the activity going on around us.

  "There's somethin
g I need to tell you, Danny," Audrey said.

  Maybe she was about to say the same thing to me?

  "I'm leaving the moon," she said. She looked down at the grating of the catwalk lattice. "Professor Cauldwell is forming a commission that will explore the possibility of building a large-scale detection system. The idea is to focus it on the region of the Drifters and see if they send anymore ships. "

  "And he wants you? Even with all of these other astronomers?"

  "He needs me for PR purposes. Co-discoverer of the Drifters. Good for fund-raising. But the truth is, I want to help. This is what I have been preparing for my whole life."

  "So you're leaving?" I said. I could feel my heart beating within my chest and something about it didn't feel right. "For how long?"

  "The commission is just the beginning, Danny. The real work comes afterward. A detection system like this will be most efficient if we build it in the outer part of the solar system. This could take twenty years," she said, and the words echoed with the sound of a stone door sealing a tomb. My heart fluttered, and I chewed on my lip, and told myself that I wasn't in love, that I'd never been in love. But nothing I could do seemed to prevent the tears from coming.

  I blinked repeatedly and said, "I think I managed to get some of that moon dust in my eye." I rubbed away the tears.

  "I know this is happening so fast," Audrey said, "And I won't be leaving right away. But just knowing the amount of work involved, the travel. I can't --"

  I gathered my composure as best as possible and said, "I was going to tell you that I was heading back to Earth, too. All this excitement and publicity is a little too much for me." I forced a laugh.

  "What will you do?"

  "Oh, I'm sure I'll find something. You know, lobby some cause, run for office maybe, discover more alien life forms in the universe. The usual."

  Audrey laughed. She stood up, put her arms around me and we were soon hugging and kissing. Another holograph was taken. Champagne was being passed around. My face was wet once again, but this time I realized it was her tears, not mine. "Good luck to you, Mr. President," she said.

  "Good luck to you, oh learned astronomer."

  When I kissed the learned astronomer, I never expected to fall in love, discover intelligent alien life in the universe, and end up in jail. But it's what you don't expect that makes life interesting. I never did get to see the Intrepid, yet I discovered the Drifters. Go figure.

  When I returned to Earth, I was something of a celebrity and that was something I could handle -- for a while. I was interviewed by news agencies the world over. I received messages from scientists, politicians, clergy, sports and movie stars. Several years after I returned to earth, Audrey left on an expedition to the outer solar system to do preliminary testing of a new detection system. I imagine she is still there today, working on the detection system she was so eager to be a part of.

  I told my story far and wide, in much the same way that I have told it here. And this is where the story ended, and slowly my life returned to its (relatively) quiet ways and I faded out of public view.

  After I returned to Earth, I never saw Audrey again. Not once.

  That's not to say that I never look for her. Even today, after the kids have been put to bed and the wife is busy working on her next book, I head out into the big corn field behind my house, listening to Bing Crosby sing "Far Away Places." And when the sun has set, and the Milky Way spills its dusty light across the sky, I turn off the music, tilt my head back, and look up in perfect silence at the stars.

  The Polka Man

  by William John Watkins

  Artwork by Kevin Wasden

  * * *

  Whenever I hear an accordion now, it sounds to me like angels screaming. I used to like accordion music back when the band came into my Uncle Jack's bar on Saturday nights and played polkas for the miners and their wives to dance to. But I was very young then, and that was before I met the Polka Man.

  My Uncle Jack bought his bar with his "leg money." That was what he called the compensation the Red Circle Coal and Navigation Company gave him for the loss of his leg. Generally, all the Red Circle gave disabled workers was a pink slip, but his accident was so spectacular and public opinion so obviously on his side, that they had no alternative but to pay him off.

  And, of course, he did manage to save the life of a minor mine official, which every miner who came into the bar berated him for, even ten years later. That the rescue was inadvertent counted for nothing with them. Instead of knocking the old fool out of harm's way scrambling out of the tunnel a half step ahead of the explosion, they held generally that he should have "stopped and thrown the bastard back in."

  His failure to do so was considered the loss of a golden opportunity, since men from The Office rarely came any closer to the miners than the pay window, and the drunker they got, the more they moaned the loss of such a chance to get even. But even when they'd been laid off, and the joking had a bitter, belligerent tone, Uncle Jack never complained about it, any more than he complained about the loss of his leg.

  He was remarkably good natured about the leg, considering how much it pained him in the mornings, and sometimes late at night, and always when the damp rolled up the valley. It always looked painful to me, a red, blunt, angry stump just below his knee. But he always gave me a rueful grin when I mentioned it, and said "Well, it was only half a leg really, and they paid for a whole one," as if he'd expected worse.

  In fact, I never saw him angry about it at all, until the Polka Man came in. I called him that even before I knew his name because he came in carrying something that looked like a new kind of accordion and I thought he was there to play, even though it was early afternoon and not even Saturday.

  It was probably just wishful thinking. I loved polkas then; I never heard one without a hurricane of excitement around it. The minute the accordion would riffle through its notes opening up, miners would get up and fling their wives and girlfriends around, and it was all shouting, and the stamping of feet, and laughing. And of course, they always played a polka when a fight broke out, which is always exciting for a kid.

  I didn't know then that it was all just a way of forgetting the desperation of their lives for a minute, so it always cheered me up when I heard a polka, and I needed cheering up.

  I was nine then, and in love for the first and last time. Her name was Grace Powers, and her father ran the bank. There's no more painful kind of love than first love. You're always too young to know what to do about it, even if you have the chance, and you rarely have it, because first love is almost always unrequited. Mine was more unrequited than most.

  First, as is almost always the case, she was beautiful, or at least I thought so then. It seemed to me she was the blond haired little girl from every magazine I'd ever seen, and I wanted her more than life itself, though I had no idea what to do with her if I got her. I doubt that I would have thought to kiss her, and wouldn't have known how to do it right anyway. I believe all I wanted was for her to say she loved me.

  My fantasies always ended that way, after some great act of heroism on my part. Still, my daydreams about her always seemed incomplete, like the Coming Attractions they showed on Saturday afternoon at the Palace. But then, in those days, even the movies rarely went further than innuendo, and I was far too young to even know something was being hinted at. Still, I knew there was something more I wanted, I just didn't know what it was.

  Of course, what makes first love so valuable isn't that it's free of lust, but that it's free of the taint of knowledge, like Adam and Eve before the serpent showed up and told them the "game" they'd been playing all along was dead evil.

  The Polka Man told me that.

  Not that I understood him then. I didn't understand what he meant any more than I understood what he was offering. But my Uncle Jack knew. From the first minute the Polka Man came in, I could see in my uncle's eyes that he knew him. And feared him.

  It was a great shock, seeing fear i
n my Uncle Jack's eyes. I was afraid most of the time, but it was inconceivable to me that there was anything Uncle Jack could be afraid of. But I had no doubt he was afraid. He had that look people get when they look at an overwhelming natural force, like a fire, or a really big storm coming in.

  "What do you want?" he said. He didn't give the Polka Man time to answer. "You'll not get it," he said. "One was enough." I never heard so much anger in his voice, and I certainly couldn't understand why he would be mad at the Polka Man. Uncle Jack was always nice to old people, and he'd have made a hefty profit if he didn't set up one on the house every time an old timer came in.

  Besides, the Polka Man was as harmless looking an old man as I ever saw. He had a Santa Claus sort of face but without a beard, and a big smile, and his eyes were amused even though they looked sad deeper down, like he'd suffered a great deal but hadn't lost his sense of humor about it. He was short, and not plump but sort of soft looking. Even the fat miners had a frame of muscle underneath like a steel girders, but he was nothing like them. Nor was he that unused kind of soft like Mr. Powers, the banker, or the men from The Office at the mine who we'd see on the way to church on Sunday.

  He had a hearty voice, a kind of musical voice, like women's laughter, and he had long, women's hands. "I've come to play," he said.

  I could see Uncle Jack was still afraid of him, but he started coming round the bar. I'd seen him do that before when somebody got dangerous and he had to throw them out. He only had one leg, but he could use it better than a cop used his billy club, and even the meanest drunk usually went backing out with his palms up in front of him when Uncle Jack came around the bar. I expected the Polka Man to pick up his accordion and scramble out, but he held his ground as if he wasn't in the least worried about anything Uncle Jack could do, because it had all been done to him already.