The Librarian: A First Contact Story (2 page)

1

Jane was back in the interrogation room.
They
were back in the interrogation room. She was pretty sure they were asking her
something. She was pretty sure she wasn't answering them.

Nick, what have you done?

They had dragged her out of there while Nick had
looked at them with murderous eyes. She'd never seen Nick so angry before, but
then again, he'd never been in a glass cell before.

The hazmat suit was gone, her long hair a tangled mess
beyond redemption. Objects looked too bright, while sounds were too far. She
almost wished she still had the suit on, a layer of protection from this whole
madness. Maybe her sanity and the world as she knew it had been left inside it.

"We take it he does look like your husband?"
the woman asked, a Doctor Greenhorn or something. By the time she'd found her
voice, they hadn't let her speak a single word to Nick.

"He doesn't
look
like Nick. He
is
Nick!" Jane said, trying to understand at what point in their life Nick
had decided to go Rambo on the United States government. "I don't
understand, why do you keep saying he's an impostor?"

That look passed between the three of them again.

"Let me be very clear about this, Mrs.
Logan," Mitchell said, his hands clasped over the table, an air of utter
authority in his stance. "What you're about to hear won't ever leave this
base. We're telling you because the prisoner asked specifically for you. He
won't talk to us. He won't answer our questions. All he said was the only one
he would tell the whole story to was you. We would have preferred to spare you
the whole drama, and the security breach that you represent, but he left us no
choice. We do, however, apologize for the whole situation."

Nick had made
demands
? He was obviously not
getting a lawyer, and she had no illusions about this ending well, but did her
husband really need to make matters worse?

"Okay, let me go back to—"

"There are a few things you should know
before
you can talk to him," Mitchell said, his eyes somewhere between resigned
and calculating. "A few questions we need you to ask him, too."

"Ok—Okay. Can I write them down?"

Dr. Fox passed her a white sheet of paper, lending her
his pen as well. She stared at him for a moment, and wondered what he knew
about her husband that she didn't.

 "Around 9:00 a.m. today we had an event,"
Mitchell started, while Jane scribbled
9:00 am
. "Our satellites
spotted radioactive material half a mile from our north perimeter, about four
miles from the Olympia National Park. It showed up out of the blue, so to
speak, and we mobilized our experts and troops to neutralize the threat. As you
can imagine, we thought we were dealing with a nuclear device right on our
Base."

So Nick might have been in the wrong place at the
wrong time?
Hope was a
dangerous thing, her dad used to say, but it was hard to fight it when it grew
so fast in one's heart.

"What happened?" she asked, forgetting the
pen.

"We didn't find a nuclear device, Mrs. Logan. We
found a man, instead," Mitchell added, turning to Fox on his right.
"Doctor, if you please?"

Fox picked up an envelope, photographs coming out a
moment later, all neatly placed in Mitchell's hands, not letting her see yet
what was in them.

"The men on the ground reported a naked man,
sitting against a tree with his hands on his knees. But all our cameras
recorded was this."

He handed her the first photograph. She didn't
understand at first what she was looking at. Woods filled the background. The
tree trunk Mitchell had described stood in the middle. Four soldiers flanked
the tree, pointing their guns at it. But where the man should be, all that
showed was a white-yellow light. The more she stared at it, the more she saw it
was actually shaped in the form of a person sitting down, hugging his knees,
but it was too bright to clearly define all his contours. 

"I—I don't understand. What's this?"

"That's what we have on the containment
area," Greenwood said, taking another picture out of Mitchell's pile and
passing it to her. This was a surveillance kind of picture, the camera
positioned inside the glass room. And there it was, a walking glowing light in
the shape of a man. It was white-blue in this one.

"
What?
"

They were speaking English, but she was clearly not
following. She expected some weird story, sure, but
this?

"Off the scale radiation readings were coming off
him," Mitchell continued, "but by the time the special ops arrived
they had subsided. Now we get only normal radiation readings, but any attempt
to get any images out of him—"

"—Photographs, x-rays, ultrasounds, MRIs,"
Fox eagerly pointed out, his fingers flexing unconsciously. Mitchell silenced
him with a glare.

"Imaging is not possible."

She kept looking at them, trying to make sense of it.
She'd gone from identity theft, to Nick missing, to national security, to
terrorism and nuclear devices, all in the space of an hour. She kept looking at
the image, the looks on the soldiers' faces, the trees behind. And that man,
hugging his knees.

"You must be mistaken," she heard herself
saying.

"I assure you we've done the research—"
Mitchell said.

"No, I mean. Nick is in that cell, and somehow
you got this mixed up—even if I can't even fathom how you ended up telling me
this—this
story
. Is this like some joke? Some test, maybe?"

"Mrs. Logan," Mitchell said again.
"This isn't a mistake. We tracked a nuclear threat. We found that 'man'
for lack of a better word. He looks like your husband, he asked for you, and in
every single monitor, camera, or recording device, what shows up is this. We
don't know what we have on our hands, but we know we need some answers."

Jane looked at the picture again, Mitchell's finger
signaling the bright man in the middle.

"But I saw Nick…" she whispered, frowning.

"We all see the same man, yes," Greenwood
said, taking out one of the pictures Mitchell had picked from their house.
Nick's dark hair was tousled by the wind, his blue eyes unfocused, his thoughts
hidden to the camera and the world.

"But… I—I mean, why Nick? Have you found my
Nick?"

Grim looks all around. Even Fox with his eagerness
didn't open his mouth.

"You've just told us that the man in the cell is
Nicholas," Mitchell said patiently, signaling again the photograph she was
still holding of the light-man pacing in his jar.

"Wait… wait-wait-wait. You can't think this
is
Nick! I've known Nick since college. I know Nick's middle school friends. I
met his parents. He—he even had his appendix out—"

"We know," Fox answered, his graying hair
matching his graying short beard. "We've researched Nicholas Logan all day
long. We have medical records, dentist records. Birth certificate, school,
college, work… But we cannot find traces of what happened to him after he
parked at the beginning of Lena Lake trail No. 810 this morning. And when we
found that man, he asked to talk to you."

"But… But he's
not
Nick. This—this
creature?
What
is he?"

"We have many questions, Mrs. Logan,"
Mitchell agreed. "He said he would answer them for you, so you can see
where we're going."

She shook her head, slowly at first, and with more
speed as seconds went by. "No.
No!
I should be out there, looking
for him. You can't—you can
not
detain me here, make me talk to some being
that… that
looks
like Nick. You'll just have to find someone else."

"Think of it this way," Dr. Greenwood's
voice said in a practical tone. "No one knows where your husband is except
the man in that cell. He's the shortest way to get his whereabouts. If I were
you, Mrs. Logan, I'd be talking to him right now."

2

The more they told Jane what they needed to know, the
more the reality of it sank in. An unknown intelligent being had taken Nick's
appearance and had asked for her specifically, and she was going to talk to
him.

It.

Whatever.

She'd been offered coffee, tea, water, even chocolate.
She'd refused it all. There was no way she could eat right now. They had also
given her a long list of questions that went from the usual who are you and
what do you want, to the surreal ones—what did you do to Nick, why do cameras
see one thing and we another. But most of all, in her mind, only two questions
kept coming back: Why Nick? Why us?

Alone in the interrogation room, the last thing that
was on her mind was the strangeness of the place. They had given her a couple
of minutes to compose herself and collect her thoughts, which under the
circumstances was laughable. No amount of minutes would ever be enough.

Why us?

She tried to answer that question with no hopes of
getting it right. Nick was a college professor who taught sociology and
politics courses from time to time. He wasn't into aliens or fairy tales. Hell,
he wasn't into hiking and camping either these past years. He'd done it when he
was a kid, but not anymore. Not until today.

And her? She was but a librarian who loved to watch
movies and bake, who had bumped into a guy one rainy afternoon twelve years ago
without knowing how much she'd love him. But that was it, that was the extent
of their fairy-tale love. They had very ordinary lives, very ordinary friends,
very ordinary jobs.

Maybe it was just plain bad luck.

She could picture it, actually. Nick, hiking in the
woods, not a soul around, his sense of direction as awful as his attempts at
baking. And then… and then he was gone.

A tear rolled down her cheek. And another. She wiped
them off her face, except for the first one that actually managed to land on
the paper sheet in front of her. She took a deep breath, shuddered a bit. Nick
could really be gone, yes, but if there was any way that he was alive out
there, she had to do her hardest to find him.

And
hardest
meant marching through those halls,
passing through the hazmat hive, and asking the man behind the glass what had
happened to her husband. She stood up and was ready to go at the same time the
door opened.

Showtime.

3

Unlike the first time Jane had walked through that
maze, the halls stopped being stark and defined, and instead became a blur of
closed doors and motionless soldiers, shadows that her yes barely registered. A
strange buzzing had taken residence in her ears, drowning every sound, even her
heartbeat. By the time she reached the holding area, the hazmat suit became a
necessity. The men stared at her as they parted, making her feel exposed. She
reached the hexagonal cell with a dry mouth and slightly trembling hands. And
inside that gigantic jar, looking very much like a trapped butterfly, was
something
that looked like Nick.

The world smashed into her senses in high definition
as she focused on his eyes, the sound of her heartbeat impossibly loud in her
ears. By the corner of her eye, she caught a monitor, something bright enough
in it that she turned to look. A bright man stood there, pressing his right
palm against the glass in the same way Nick was, even wearing the same clothes.
She blinked once, and made herself turn to look at Nick again, at those blue
eyes of his.

She had it all mapped out in her head. She knew the
questions. She knew the answers she needed. But when she saw Nick's eyes—those
vulnerable and familiar eyes—she felt her heart sink. She could do this to a
man who pretended to be Nick. She couldn't do this to a man who told her he
loved her by just looking at her.

She stopped, swallowed, and was ready to turn around
and bolt. The soldier behind her held her in place.

"You don't have to do this," Nick said from
his cell, reading her too well. "But I would really,
really
appreciate it if you could hear this from me."

She stared at him, trying to find the differences,
trying to see the being behind Nick's eyes. She didn't find a thing out of place.

"You're… you're
not
Nick," she
whispered, barely shaking her head. "Are you?"

"That's… a rather complicated answer." He
smiled sadly, his hand becoming a fist, lightly punching the glass. "Jane,
there's something I need to tell you."

1

Nicholas Logan was not having a good day. He'd been in
a cell for most of it, was barely clothed in a hospital gown, and had no idea
of what was going on outside his confinement. He'd been stared at, poked at,
and pretty much threatened for the past twelve hours. And he'd been so close to
losing it, it wasn't even funny.

Having Jane in front of him, fearing what he was,
doubting who he was, hardly made things easier.

"Until this morning, I knew I was Nick. That I
was your husband. That I was human. The life we know? The person you married?
That was all true. That
is
still true. But then things got a little…
bigger.
"

She moved a step back, her eyes growing slightly
larger. He wasn't sure how to do this—never had to do this before, but having
Jane looking at him with fearful eyes had not been part of his plan.

"Bigger. Bigger
how
? And what hap—
happened
this morning?"

Jane…
She was stuttering. She never stuttered. He wanted to shatter the
walls and hold her, tell her everything was going to be back to normal in no
time. But he couldn't. He owed her so much for their life together, that
telling her the truth was the least he could do.

 "I got called back."

2

"I never made it to Upper Lena Lake this
morning," Nick started, feeling a million years old. A million
human
years
old, anyway. He sat down on the makeshift bed, the white lights of the cell
making him feel colorless. Gray.

"I didn't know it right that moment, but I was
looking for a quiet, secluded place. One where no one would notice when I had
to go back."

"Go back?" Jane asked, moving closer to the
glass as if she could see him better that way. The moment their eyes met, she
hugged herself, bracing for his answer. Bracing to be hurt. "Go back
where
?"

He looked at her. Looked at the fear in her eyes, the
way her arms awkwardly crossed in front of her despite the bulk of the hazmat
suit, in a classic Jane posture of I'm-not-buying-this-crap. They had already
told her
something
, that much was obvious. She didn't know who he was
anymore, and he couldn't blame her.

"Back to the stars."

3

"You went back to the 'stars'? Where does that
leave my husband? Where's Nick? What did you
do
to him?!" Jane
shouted, the fear being chased away by anger.

"I'm right in front of you," Nick answered,
taking a deep breath. "Jane, I didn't have a choice. I had to go, but then
I came back. I'm still me."

"You'd think I would've noticed if my husband
glowed in the dark in the family pictures," she shot back, her eyes hard,
her arms still crossed.

Winning an argument with his wife required hard facts
and subtlety.
And patience,
he told himself.
You owe her that much.

"I was human. What you saw, what we talked about,
everything we shared—that was real. I was that man, I'm
still
that man.
Look, I can honestly tell you I have no idea how to do this. Jane—"

"Do you really want me to believe you lied to me?
We've known each other for twelve years, and you just—you just
deceived
me all that time?"

"I didn't know! Jane—Love, I
didn't
know."

They stared at each other for an eternity. He wanted
to shake her. If she didn't believe him, then this whole thing had been for
nothing.

"Do you have to look like him?" she
whispered a moment later, her eyes moving down his body, to the ridiculous thin
hospital gown and his bare feet. She hugged herself tighter.

"It's the only human form I know…" The fear
was back, and Jane looked sideways, to the monitor where his light form was on
display. He could project his looks and his voice to any other living being. He
couldn't fool a machine, though. "I won't be able to keep it up for much
longer."

"What happens after 'much longer'?" The
question came from the speakers inside his cell, a crude reminder that he was
far from alone with his wife. He sighed, his eyes going to the floor so he
wouldn't glare at them.

"Once I can't hold this form, I'll… vanish. I'll
go back. And Jane, I need you to know the truth before that happens."

She openly stared at him then, almost as if looking
for a flaw. "Okay. Okay… tell me one thing before that. Did Nick suffer?
When… when you took over his body?"

He closed his eyes at how powerless he felt to make
her understand. He chuckled without humor.

"You think this is funny?" she asked,
getting as close to him as she dared. 

"I've been sitting in this place for twelve hours
demanding
to talk to you against all odds, because… well, because you're
my wife, and if there's a person in the whole universe who can tell who I am,
that would be you. God Jane, I love your stubbornness, you know I do, but I
never thought I would have to work against it
so hard.
"

She narrowed her eyes, her arms relaxing an inch.
"So? Did he suffer?"

He took a deep breath. "It wasn't like that. I… I
remembered.
You know that feeling when you wake up and you think it's
Monday but it's actually Sunday? You have this momentary disorientation when
you
know
one thing but suddenly you remember the actual day? That's what
it felt like."

She frowned. "You're comparing my husband's life
essentially disappearing, to getting mixed up about what day it is?"

He winced internally. He'd seen Jane angry before—the
time he'd forgotten the birthday dinner with her mother; the time he got the
52" TV without consulting her—but this kind of angry was
different.
Stronger
.
Despite her fears, despite his glowing self on the monitor, she was talking
to him because she was seriously worried about him.

I love you.

"I didn't disappear," he said instead,
thoughtful. "I just remembered there was more to my life. Like childhood
memories coming back after someone tells you about them. And when I was hiking
on that trail, thinking about Upper Lena Lake and bears and you… I suddenly
remembered that I had another… I guess another life. I got called back. There
really was nothing I could do."

He was talking to a wall, both figuratively and
literally. Even if there had not been a glass barrier between them and fifty
people watching their conversation, an impossibly deep abyss opened between
them.

I don't have that much time to fight you, Love
.

"Ask me anything," he offered. "God
knows our Army friends have been doing that all day long. Let me
prove
it
to you."

She opened her mouth and said nothing. She looked at
him as if he were a stranger.

"You—you love to watch musicals and make me sit
through them at least once a month," he started, desperate for details
that would matter to her. "You think New Year resolutions are a waste of
time, so you have mid-year resolutions instead. We do the whole ceremony,
countdown to midnight, fancy dinner, the whole nine yards, even if you hardly ever
followed through." She took a step back.

"Stop it," she whispered, without real
conviction.

"Theory of evolution? It drives you nuts when
people say it's just a theory. But nothing beats how angry you get at people
who trash books."

"Stop it, please," but he was in a roll. He
couldn't stop telling this because the more she heard him, the better chances
he had she would
believe
him.

 "I called you
Love
after we watched that
ridiculous British movie on our honeymoon, and it fits you so perfectly well I
never stopped. Last night, last night you said—"

"
Stop it!
"

Words died in his mouth.

"I can't do this," she said, suddenly
turning away from him. They didn't let her go, of course, the guys in the
hazmat suits. He'd been very clear he wouldn't talk to anyone but her, but he'd
never assumed she wouldn't want to hear him out.

"What do you need me to do to prove I'm still
me?" he half shouted, placing his hands against the glass, the closest he
could get to her. She wouldn't look at him. "Jane? Please? Just ask me
anything…"

She looked at him then, shaking her head. They were
both at a loss for what to say. They finally let her walk away after a tense
minute, muttered promises that she would come back sounding hollow.

So much for telling the truth.

4

"Yes, sir, he's talking to her," General
Mitchell said, the first bit of good news he'd been able to pass along to the
higher command chain. It had been a long day, and it was shaping up to be a
longer night. The fact that Mrs. Jane Logan had just decided she didn't want to
know the answers they needed was but a slight delay. They could give her a
couple of minutes to get some sense into her, but that was it.

The man on the other side of the line was not as
confident. "Keep me updated. And Mitchell, make sure she understands
what's at stake here. God, I hate civilians…"

Being from a military family himself, Mitchell
couldn't agree more.

In the monitors, Mr. Nicholas Logan paced in his cell
as he'd done since he'd been placed there. They couldn't hear him or see him as
a human, but his form was distinctively humanoid and his body language was easy
enough to read. He didn't like being there anymore than they liked having him
there. The personnel outside the cell transcribed whatever was being
communicated. That he could make a room of people see and hear what he wanted
unnerved the General beyond measure.

Beside the General, his merry band of doctors followed
their "visitor" with the same interest, if for different reasons. Dr.
Greenwood watched the monitors with narrowed eyes, doing what she knew how to
do best: cut people's psyches to bits and get a profile out of them. "He
won't keep talking if she doesn't want to hear it."

"Maybe we can offer to pass along the
message," Dr. Fox said, a practical approach for a practical mind.
"He
is
running out of time, if we're to believe his words."

"Is he going to run out of time and explode with
a big bang, though?" Greenwood asked, her dark eyes reflecting dark
thoughts. They couldn't figure out the radiation reading they had gotten
earlier, and that made them understandably nervous. Logan had refused to tell
them why or how, or if he could control it at will.

"He wouldn't risk bringing her here just to kill
her in a fiery display of love," Mitchell pointed out.

"But do we know that for sure?" Greenwood
answered, looking at the monitors intently. "What does an alien mind know
about human love? We like to believe it's universal and that it will conquer
all, but it's our brains that are wired for love. We can't even find a vein on
that being's arm. For all we know, he might be
playing
with us."

"You're right," Mitchell agreed, "But
we have to consider something else, too," he said, turning to look at her.
"He didn't ask to speak with 'our leader'. I agree there's something else
going on, but I wouldn't dismiss feelings just yet. He came back, after all. He
came back for her."

5

Jane's retching echoed unceremoniously off the walls
of the bathroom stall. Outside, she imagined the couple of armed guards heard
it without wincing.

Nick was dead.

That being inside those glass walls was not Nick.
Maybe it had been. Maybe Nick had truly become a light being of some sort, but
for all intents and purposes, Nick was gone. No more valentine pictures, no
more birthday parties, no more kisses and holding hands. That life was over.

That blue jacket beside the door was never going to be
worn again.

6

"If you could only show us where you went,"
a technician was saying, clearly at the end of his patience. The monitor inside
Nick's room displayed an interactive star chart.

"It doesn't matter," he whispered, his eyes
following the path where Jane had been allowed to go.

"Look, she might not be ready to hear this now,
but she's going to want to know at some point. And if you're running out of time…"

"She has to hear this from me," Nick said
for the millionth time. "You cannot record it, okay? Things like
coordinates won't matter to her, anyway."

God Jane. This morning you would have laughed at the
thought of all of this… Just let me talk to you. Just one last time, please.
Let me tell you what happened.