Across the Spectrum (26 page)

After that I found only government “Classified” stamps on
everything; layers and layers of encryption on a dozen dead links.

Okay, the US government didn’t want anyone replicating his
current work. So I hit the blogosphere looking for people who had tried to
reverse engineer his first oil-eating bacteria and the new bug-eating bug.

Nothing. All shut down. The same with generic rumor-mill
blogs. At the first mention of St. Rudi they disappeared.

No wonder he had massive Secret Service protection.

Strangely, at every place St. Rudi held a conference or met
with governmental officials I found an increase in UFO sightings. Coincidence?

Not bloody likely. I remembered Mom’s warning when I
suggested the crystal looked alien . . .

There was a lot the government didn’t want us to know. Like
the weekly report from the Center for Disease Control. I’d started monitoring
that site as soon as I’d decided on med school. I flipped through CDC lists of
outbreaks, projected vectors, and cure ratios.

Nothing new reported for six months.

Call me paranoid, but I decided to hide the crystal in a
niche at the back of the chicken coop.

When I came out and latched the cage, I noticed a big black
SUV parked across the street. I caught a glint of a camera lens or binoculars
in the setting sun. Maybe I wasn’t paranoid after all.

Two weeks later Rudi Czerna PhD died of mysterious causes.
No details, no rumors, just gone with only a bare bones (as in scrubbed clean)
single paragraph obituary. If anyone bothered to ask questions on the internet,
their email and blog got shut down within seconds. Who knows what happened to
the person behind the question? St Rudi became little more than a footnote in
the history books.

The government sealed his lab. Mom’s team at UNOMA
petitioned to get their hands on his notes and samples. They and every other
scientist in the world were denied access despite loud outcries that the
government didn’t really want a clean-up of the pollution or reversal of the
damage Rudi Czerna caused. What was the government trying to hide?

Mom asked if I still had the big data crystal safe.

She scared me.

“Helen is sitting on it, hoping it will hatch,” I mumbled,
referring to our oldest and crankiest chicken. She was also our best broody
hen. She’d sit on anything.

“Good. Give her this one to brood as well.” She handed me
another crystal, as big as the first one.

∞

Dad came home for my graduation and extended his leave to
a full year. He got to share a birthday with me. Then UNOMA and the Navy called
him back to corral more oil from abandoned, as in uncapped and unmonitored,
wells that continued to leak. The bacteria hadn’t eaten all of the oil-based
pollution after all. And now that uncontrolled but useful bacteria had been
eaten by another artificial bacteria.

I wondered if the world was coming to an end.

My dad died at sea of some mysterious illness. I cried and wailed
in private. I’d grown too good at hiding my true emotions to ever let anyone,
including Mom, know what I truly felt. Then I wrote six dozen letters because
the Navy wouldn’t let us bury him in a cemetery. They dumped him in the sea.
Oh, sure they had a respectful ceremony, but Mom and I, his
family
couldn’t be there. I wanted to
know why and no one, absolutely no one, gave a straight answer. If they
bothered to answer.

Mom and I paid an exorbitant fee for a grave marker for him
within walking distance of the house. An empty grave. “I didn’t want him buried
at sea,” Mom said and sniffed away her tears. “But he was a sailor born and
bred so I guess that was the natural place for him.”

Mom continued her work for UNOMA as a “site analyst.” I
suppose her PhD made her an ideal field agent. I thought her over-qualified.

Time passed in a blur of studies and exams and med school
applications. I got too busy to worry about the data crystals, by now
thoroughly buried under straw and chicken shit. The government picked up the
tab for both my undergrad and medical school based on my academic performance
and my side forays into bio-chem. I guessed they needed someone to replace St.
Rudi.

My scholarship committee handed me special lab work
commissioned by the FBI. Not the CDC. Not UNOMA. The freakin’ FBI. St. Rudi’s
sloppy fingerprints were all over the data.

The UFO sightings increased, and the CDC came back online
with no explanation for the year-long blank spot in their records.

I took the crystals with me to med school. I tried accessing
them—four of them now, all birthday gifts from Mom—on every computer at home or
university with no luck. Each one was just too big or too sophisticated. So I
petitioned for use of the university’s biggest computer, the one used for sophisticated
experiments and was denied. It was fully booked by the government.

I couldn’t even use it for my secret work for the FBI. Then
my third year they handed me soil samples from five different locations. None
of them identified. As usual I slipped into a lab around 2 AM with the sealed
tubes. The security officer knew me and only took a cursory look at my
government ID. My student credentials didn’t give me access to this wing.

I scrolled through test after test, comparing, separating,
diagnosing . . . not enough of the bacteria that gave soil the
organic chemicals to nurture plant life, in any of the samples.

I sat up straighter, swallowed my yawns and tested again.
And again. The soil was almost dead. And then I spotted another spike in the
chemical graphs. Something that should have been worm poop and beneficial,
wasn’t. It looked frighteningly familiar.

I needed a more powerful microscope and a data file left
over from my high school research and the old CDC articles. The crystal was in
my backpack, as always. The only microscope powerful enough was on the other
side of a locked door, accessible only with a faculty ID key.

Strangely, my government ID opened that lock—but not the one
with the super computer. I set everything up, pulled up the slide and compared
it to old data on my class work computer. Another slide, and another. All
looked exactly like the second bacteria St. Rudi had invented. All had strange
similarities to the flesh eating bacteria that periodically spilled out of
remote jungles.

The bugs that were supposed to eat the oil-eating bugs, had
decided that humans were nasty bugs too and should be eaten.

I held my breath as I sent a message to my superior at the
FBI. He acknowledged receipt and told me agents would get to this information
immediately. Nothing to worry about. They would handle it.

Upon pain of death or life imprisonment I must tell no one
what I found.

My birthday rolled around again with no further word from
the FBI about the bacteria. Mom brought me a cake. It wasn’t much bigger than
two cupcakes, just enough for the two of us to share. She’d saved her personal
gas ration coupons for months to drive up to the University from the Bay, using
personal resources for her government vehicle.

“Do you like it, Hope?” she asked as we savored each bite.

“Oh, yes, this is the best cake I’ve had in years. I just
wish Dad could have shared it with us.”

We both bowed our heads in a moment of private remembrance.

“I took a bit of it up to the cemetery and left it at his
grave marker for him.”

“Thank you for visiting Dad’s headstone. Next year maybe I
can schedule time and fuel rations to go with you.”

“We’ll try, Hope.”

“Yeah, maybe. My schedule is really tight now. It’ll be
worse when I’m an intern. Speaking of which . . . I need a couple
hours of lab time tonight.” I’d found a way to network with the big computer
and hoped to finally access the crystals that nestled on a long chain under my
T-shirt. Arranged properly, they worked better than a heavily padded bra to
enhance my figure. With one snugged on the outside of each breast, and one
below, worn with loose tops, the only people who looked close were guys who
were more interested in sex than what was really hiding in my undies.

“Do you have to go right now?” Mom looked disappointed,
older, and more careworn than I remembered.

“No, we can have a cup of tea together.”

We chewed in companionable silence.

“Mom, how did Dad die? I mean, really die. The Navy didn’t
tell us much. Just that it was a sudden illness.”

“CDC told me a long complex name for a disease I’d never
heard of.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Maybe I can look it up. It should be on his death
certificate . . . ”

“The government kept the original.”

“Mom, what aren’t you telling me?” Probably the same things
no one would tell me when he died.

Maybe the same things the FBI wasn’t telling me about my
research conclusions.

“It was ugly and messy and they buried his ashes at sea.”
She clamped her mouth closed and finally looked at me, defying me to break her
seven-year wall of silence.

I’d heard that phrase before. Ashes.

Cremation used up a lot of fuel. The government only
authorized the procedure when a body was still contagious after death and
needed sterilizing..

Obviously, to me anyway, Mom had a gag order from the government.
I did too.

Secretly I had back-up data crystals of all my FBI work
stashed with lab partners. All close friends. I trusted them more than the FBI.
They trusted me enough to ask me to store their back-up crystals without
looking at them.

I saw conspiracy but remembered my gag clause.

The wonderful cake suddenly tasted like sawdust.

Roaring thunder filled the sky. We jumped at the sudden
noise. Mom clasped her chest and looked around in panic.

Concern for her overrode my curiosity.

She leaped to her feet and began pawing through her tote
bag. “Go, go look now, Hope. Before it’s too late. If there is any hope at all . . .
”

“Mom . . . ?”

“Hope, please go. It’s important.”

I looked out my dorm window, keeping half an eye on her as
she put her car keys in her pocket.

An endless flash of lightning lit the sky with layers of
white and green streaked with red and orange fire.

Something dropped from the middle of a dark cloud that
marred the glorious skyscape. Something heavy. I heard it thud into the ground
before the image of an egg shape registered in my brain. It buried itself in
the open lawn of the quad, three stories down.

I glanced over my shoulder to check on my mother. She nodded
encouragingly, so I raced down the stairs and outside barely ahead of my classmates,
my friends. My gaze locked onto the overlapping scales of pale green and white
poking above the disturbed dirt.

The piece couldn’t be very big, judging by the size of the
crater, or rather the lack of size. Twenty feet across and maybe five deep.
Even the little bit of the green and white egg that I could see should have
displaced sixty times as much dirt as it had. Something inside those scales had
a power source to slow its passage and gentle the landing.

Every science fiction movie I’d ever seen, and all the books
I’d read seemed to be coming true. The crystals around my boobs warmed and
glowed green through my sloppy white T. Were they the same shade as the tip of
the . . . egg?

I skidded to a halt at the edge of the crater. “Stop, Hope,”
John, my primary lab partner and sorta boyfriend, yelled, holding an arm out to
keep me back. “It’s probably radioactive.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied, pushing him aside. With more
curiosity than caution I slipped and slid down the shallow crater wall. My speed
increased the deeper I went until I was nearly running when I bumped up against
the chest high top of the green and white thing. It looked like an
artichoke—what I could remember of artichokes from fifteen years ago.

“Not a meteorite,” I called up to my comrades. My crystals
positively hummed with joy. When I peered at them in question I noted for the
first time, that the crystal facets resembled the overlapping scales of the
artifact.

“Is it a bomb?” John asked.

“I don’t think so.” Tentatively I stretched out my hand,
hovering over the tip while I bit my lip and gathered my courage.

My mother’s words came back to me.
Please go. It’s important
.

“What does she know?” I whispered. More than she let on.
Than she had
ever
let on. Much more.

My fingers began to tingle. I jerked them away just before I
made contact with that strange tile. Or was it a leaf? I presumed it was metal.

The distance I put between myself and the
thing
set my ears to ringing with the
lack of noise. Even my necklace was quiet, like it held its breath in
anticipation.

Noise? The growing crowd of spectators at the rim of the
crater stared in gape-jawed silence. My ears tried to tell me that a sound was
missing.

I forced my hand back toward the tip. A faint humming grew
louder and more distinct the closer I got. My data crystals resonated at the
same frequency, seeking . . . seeking kinship, contact,
something. I freed them from my shirt.

Then the crystals lifted away from my shirt like iron
filings attracted to a magnet.

In the far distance I heard sirens and the whop-whop of a
helicopter. Miles away, approaching fast.

“We’ve got to get this into the lab! John, help me.”

“Um . . . ” He looked everywhere but at me.
“Uh, Hope, I don’t think so.”

“Do it. Now!” Mom said with authority. She stood on the
bottom step of my dorm, a pistol in her hand, nearly as big as a hand cannon.

Where had my Mom gotten a gun? And why?

“We can’t let the government hide this one away. It was sent
to us so we can use it.”

“Ma’am, I don’t think so.”

Mom raised the gun and pointed it directly at John. “That
was not a request.”