Gift From The Stars (8 page)

There were a few messages waiting to be read, all dated in a two-day period that began six days earlier and ended four days earlier. The date Adrian disappeared and the date he had been eliminated from humanity’s electronic memory? Frances scanned the messages; all but one related to Adrian’s consulting business, and the remaining message said only “Haven’t heard from you in a couple of days. Are you okay?” It was signed “Jessie.”

The register was empty of messages sent and received earlier than six days previously. That was suspicious. Of course Adrian could have deleted his messages as they were read or sent, but that didn’t make a lot of sense. At least some of the messages related to his business must have been worth keeping, but someone else, particularly someone in a hurry, would have deleted everything.

But what they might not have known was that deleted messages remained in the trash until they were squeezed out by new deletions. Frances was about to retrieve them when she was interrupted.

“What are you doing here?” a woman said.

Frances turned to see the shape of a woman outlined in the doorway. As the woman moved into the cabin with athletic grace, Frances noted with a pang that she was slender and dark-haired, and, with a sharper pang, young and attractive, in a tomboyish way. Frances pushed those feelings away: she would never be any of those things again.

“I might ask you the same question,” Frances said.

“I’m Adrian’s girlfriend.”

Frances looked her up and down. She was dressed in jeans and a yellow t-shirt. Adrian was fifty-one, and this woman could not be more than, say, twenty-five. Frances could sense the young woman flushing under the scrutiny, but Frances didn’t care. More was at stake than the feelings of a stranger. “I doubt that.”

“Well,” the woman said defiantly, “we’re very close.”

“For people who have never met,” Frances guessed.

It must have been shrewd, because the young woman flinched. “We were e-mail correspondents. When he stopped responding, I decided I’d better check up.”

“‘Haven’t heard from you in a couple of days. Are you okay?’” Frances quoted.

“How did you know?” the young woman asked.

Frances gestured at the laptop. “You look like a Jessie.”

“That’s me,” the woman said. “Jessica Buhler.”

“And you flew halfway across the country to check up on your e-mail friend?”

“How did you know?” Jessica said.

“You don’t get a tan like that around here,” Frances said. “Florida?”

“California. Near San Diego. But you haven’t told me who you are.”

“A real friend of Adrian’s—Frances Farmstead. Like you I got concerned when I couldn’t get in touch with Adrian, and I got really concerned when I discovered that he didn’t exist.”

“He didn’t exist?”

“Not according to all the electronic records.”

“No!” Jessica said. And then, “Adrian has mentioned you.” Now it was Jessica’s turn to appraise Frances. “He said you’d helped track down the author of the UFO book with the diagrams. That’s how we got acquainted, on a serve-list for spaceship enthusiasts.”

Frances wondered, for a moment, why she hadn’t been included on such a list. “You don’t look like a spaceship enthusiast.”

“What does a spaceship enthusiast look like?”

“Strange,” Frances said. “Like me.”

“That’s odd,” Jessica said. Then, “I mean, why should someone who wants to build a spaceship be strange?”

“You look like someone who could get plenty of satisfaction right here,” Frances said. “You wouldn’t need to leave Earth.”

“You don’t know me. The question is—where is Adrian?” Jessica continued. She looked around the room as if he might be lurking somewhere.

“That’s what a number of people would like to know. The government suspects aliens; I suspect the government.”

“Aliens!” Jessica echoed.

“That’s the way I said it,” Frances responded. “Oh, aliens might have the motivation; they sent us a ticket to the stars and we cashed it in for creature comforts. They could be screwing things up, casting an occasional sabot in the machinery of our joy. But why send us a design if
they’re already here? And they sure aren’t going to be interacting from a distance of dozens of light years. On the other hand, Adrian might be an annoyance to the people who don’t want our peace disturbed.”

Jessica stood as if poised between attack and flight. She had, apparently, never before considered either of these possibilities. “Aliens!” she said again. Then, heading for the door, she called over her shoulder, “Maybe that explains it.”

“Explains what?” Frances called after her. When Jessie didn’t reply, Frances trotted to catch up.

Jessica led the way to a meadow beyond the circle around the cabin that Frances had made before she entered. “This!” Jessica said, pointing.

Frances stood beside the young woman, panting. In front of them was a circle of burnt and blackened grass, about fifteen meters in diameter. Frances looked at it, puzzled.

“See?” Jessica said.

“You see,” Frances said, absently, “but, as Sherlock Holmes said, you don’t observe.” What she couldn’t see was the scenario this evidence fit. Oh, clearly it would fit an alien abduction category, but the questions to be asked seemed to hang in the air, unsupported, and to suggest no good answers. It was the wrong genre.

She looked up and started back toward the cabin, ignoring Jessica trotting along beside her, trying to talk about aliens, when she saw the smoke. She ran as fast as she could, but Jessica got there before her and stood looking at the flames already rising above the back of the cabin.

“My god!” Jessica said. Frances brushed past her. Jessica tried to grab her arm. “What are you doing?”

Frances ran to the front door, raised her arm across her face and over her mouth and nose, and went through the open front door. The room was filled with smoke pouring through the kitchen doorway. Frances felt her way to the desk. She grabbed for the computer. It was hot, and she almost dropped it as she picked it up, but she yanked it free from the cord plugged into a wall socket. She turned and staggered toward the front door.

As she was fumbling her way through the smoke, a hand reached out to guide her into the sunlight and the open air. She stood, shaking, gasping for breath, the laptop dangling from her right hand.

“That was crazy!” Jessica said.

“We had to have it,” Frances said. “It was our only clue. And somebody wanted it destroyed.”

“Or some
thing
,” Jessica said.

They stood outside the Visitor Complex, the evening sun over their left shoulders, sinking toward the remote Gulf. They knew it was the Visitor Complex because the signs along Highway 3 had announced it for the past few miles, and the sign high on the building read:

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

and under that

VISITOR COMPLEX.

But under that someone had stenciled:

ABANDONED IN PLACE

The entrance to the facility was overgrown by vegetation and cluttered with debris. The Space Center had indeed been abandoned and apparently for several years. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire met the building on each side, and the doorway had been covered with plywood and nailed shut. Frances saw no way into the building or around it. Maybe Jessie could scale the fence, but Frances knew her limitations. And once they were inside, the Space Center was too big to cover on foot.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Jessie said.

“Clues never produce certainty,” Frances said. “The detective accumulates evidence and plays hunches based on subconscious juggling of that evidence, like Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe.”

“Who?” Jessie asked.

“Never mind. Anyway, we’ve been over this too often: Adrian was exchanging e-mails with people about alien spaceship design and petitioning the Energy Board for the resources to build one.”

“And then there were those curious messages chastising humanity for not getting construction started,” Jessie said.

“No way those could be from aliens,” Frances said decisively. “Not in English. Not from the distance of the stars. Not signed ‘KSC.’ That could stand for a lot of things, but the most obvious meaning is ‘Kennedy Space Center.’”

“Only it’s abandoned.”

“Just as the world has abandoned space,” Frances said. “This has to be the place. It just feels right.”

It had felt right all the way down from Atlanta in the rented car, to Macon on 75 and on 16 to Savannah and then down the coast on 95 to Jacksonville, Daytona Beach, and Cocoa, before switching to Highway 3 and heading back north to KSC. It had felt right when they passed a junkyard that looked like an old Emshwiller painting, with a Redstone rocket, several dilapidated rolling camera platforms, and the remains of what looked like a supersonic transport. A junkyard, that was what the space program had become, and now the facility that had made it possible had been abandoned in place.

The only thing that hadn’t felt right was Jessie Buhler beside her all the way, talking, insisting that she couldn’t go back to California without finding out what had happened to Adrian. But now here they stood, not far from what felt right, and they couldn’t get in.

Still chattering, Jessie pried at the plywood without success. Finally she gave up in frustration. “If you’re right about this place,” she said, “there must be an entrance where people can
drive
in and out. They would need food and other supplies, and that requires frequent and easy access.”

“They might use airplanes or helicopters,” Frances said. “Landing strips may be abandoned, but they’re still in place.”

“People would notice air traffic,” Jessie said. “But not a car or truck.”

Frances looked at Jessie with a newfound respect.

“So let’s look,” Jessie said, getting back into the car.

They drove back to the road. The Space Center was on a barrier island between the mainland and the thin strip of beach that ran from Cape Canaveral down to Melbourne, with the Banana River on the east and the Indian River and a National Wildlife Refuge and its swamp on the west. One road entrance was overgrown with vines and clearly had not been used since the station was abandoned. An alligator was sunning itself on another, and nothing could persuade Frances to disturb it. A fallen tree blocked a third entrance, and a fourth, available only from Titusville, was cluttered with debris that may have been left when the Indian River overflowed or a hurricane had passed.

The entrance from Titusville was guarded by the omnipresent chain-link fence and a sliding chain-link gate with a drab beige booth beside it. Frances edged the car up to the gate, trying to avoid the worst of the debris. The gate looked rusty and dirty as if it hadn’t been used in months or even years. “Take a look,” she told Jessie.

“Why me?” Jessie asked.

“You’re younger and quicker,” Frances said.

Carefully searching the ground before each step, Jessie finally reached the gate. She looked back. “It’s locked,” she said.

“Give it a yank anyway,” Frances said.

Jessie pulled at something Frances couldn’t see and then turned around holding something in the air. “Either it was broken or only meant to look locked.”

“The power must have been shut off long ago. Push the gate open,” Frances said.