Six Blind Men & an Alien (13 page)

    He withdrew a small device from a pocket and began manipulating it.

    "I am summoning my ship," he explained. "It was much farther up the mountain. I would have moved it had our party gone that high." He stood still for a moment, staring at the device. "It is here now," he said. He manipulated it again, and his ship suddenly appeared about a hundred yards away.

    "It’s like magic!" I said.

    "The cloaking mechanism bends the light around it, so it becomes invisible to the eye. But any instrument designed to detect metal would have found it." He put the device away. "I am truly sorry that you were awake for this. I possess nothing that can wipe the experience from your memory, nor would I use it if I had such a thing. But I strongly advise you not to mention it. No one will believe you, and you will lose all credibility within your field."

    There was no sense arguing with him. He was right.

    "What about your tracks?" I said. "It will be obvious that you picked up the body and carried it to your ship."

    "There are hundreds of tracks here. Every one of you stood next to it at one time or another. Mine will just be added to the rest. Besides," he added with a smile, "what ship? No one else has seen it, and I will be gone in a handful of minutes."

    "But we have films!" I said.

    He withdrew another tiny mechanism from a different pocket. "Not any longer," he said, holding it up. "Bonnie Herrington and Jim Donahue will find that they stood next to a very powerful magnetic field. They won’t know when or where, but they will know that it wiped their film and pictures."

    "But why?" I asked. "You’re getting the body. Why not leave us with proof that it existed?"

    "If I did, and those films and photos gained credibility, your race would drop everything else and concentrate on reaching the stars. You’ll get there one day, but you have more immediate problems facing you."

    "Isn’t that for us to decide?" I said.

    "Not any longer."

    "Some of us know," I said. "We’ll tell others."

    "They won’t believe you," replied Jaka. "But I will soften the blow for you."

    "What are you talking about?" I demanded.

    "You shall see in a minute."

    He lifted the creature’s body-the
real
Jaka was obviously much stronger than the image he projected-and loaded it into his ship. I made no attempt to stop him. How could I? It was
his
pet, and he was far stronger than me.

    A moment later he emerged with a dead, mummified leopard in his arms. He carried it over to the spot where the creature had been and laid it down on the snow.

    "What’s this all about?" I asked.

    "Congratulations," he said with a smile. "Your party has accomplished its purpose and found Hemingway’s leopard."

    "They found an alien," I said stubbornly.

    "One story will make you famous, one will receive nothing but ridicule," he said. "What you tell them is your decision."

    His ship took off a few minutes later.

    I looked down the mountain and saw my party approaching. They had left behind an alien creature, and were about to find a leopard in its place. I could tell them how it came to be there, but I doubted they’d believe me until they realized that every other possible explanation was even more unbelievable. Njobo probably hadn’t contacted his superiors yet; he enjoyed being the sole authority figure too much. And Bonnie, Ray and Jim had been paid to take photos of Hemingway’s leopard, so while this would cost them a better story, it wouldn’t cost them any money. The only person who had mentioned our discovery to any outsiders was me, and I could contact the handful of people I’d called and say that someone had pulled a joke on me, or I’d been drunk, or anything else that might get them mad but wouldn’t make them doubt my explanation. It all depended on the complicity of my party. Just how much were they going to insist upon telling the truth?

    I could hear Ralph Galler’s chopper approaching the mountain, and I deactivated my cell phone to buy us a few more minutes to reach a decision before he landed.

    As the others reached me, eager to once again see the most remarkable discovery of their lives, I wondered which story we would tell when the helicopter arrived.