Independence Day: Silent Zone (15 page)

"Don't stop, keep
on humming," Solomon commanded. "It's keeping it calm."

So, the physicist
from the atom-bomb project continued to hum. When he heard the slurping
noise
that signaled the separation of the two animals, he looked up and found
himself
face-to-face with the goop-slathered body. The creature's enormous
eyes, like
reflecting pools of mercury, were open and looking straight at him.
When a pair
of heavy eyelids closed slowly over these quicksilver orbs, Wells felt
as if a
heavy curtain were being lowered over him as well. The room lost its
shape, and
he felt himself sinking toward the floor.

He came to the next
morning, Dr. Solomon by his side.

"Welcome back.
You got a little squeamish on us last night and passed out."

Wells sat up and
accepted a cup of coffee, but as he brought it toward his lips, the
smell of it
struck him as repulsive, and he set it aside.

"I wanted to
thank you," Solomon continued. "It was a brilliant idea you had,
humming to the eebie like that. I guess music really is the universal
language."

"I was just
trying not to faint," Wells admitted, "but I'm glad I could help. Is
it still alive?" As quickly as he asked this question, Wells realized
he
already knew the answer.

"Yes it is, but
I don't know how long that will last. We can't figure out how to help
it. It's
been dropping in and out of consciousness all night. We've offered it
food and
water, but it hasn't accepted anything yet. We aren't even sure how it
eats
yet. If it doesn't die from its internal injuries, it's going to starve
to
death."

"That would be good
news, wouldn't it?" Wells asked.

"You're
quick." Solomon smiled. Like Wells, he was in his early forties, but
looked much older this morning after missing a night of sleep. "The
military is overjoyed to hear it won't eat anything. They think it
proves the
alien can't survive here, but I'm not convinced of that. The thing is
badly
wounded—of course it has no appetite."

Although Solomon's
idea had a great deal of common sense to it, Wells somehow got the idea
that it
was wrong. He sat staring into space wondering about this idea until
Solomon
spoke again.

"I'm off to try
and get some sleep myself. They're in there questioning the eebie now.
You
might want to get some breakfast, then go in and watch." With that, he
left the room.

Wells dressed himself
and went into the lobby. A large buffet table had been set up with food
passed
through the quarantine perimeter. Although he had not eaten anything
for well
over twelve hours, he found he was not hungry. In fact, the food
smelled rotten
and repulsive to him, and he quickly made his way to the observation
room in
order to escape the odors.

The
frail
creature lying passively on the operating table was awake. Its eyes
were open
but turned blankly toward the ceiling. Standing at what they felt was a
safe
distance, a pair of agents from Army Intelligence were trying
everything they
could think of to initiate communication with the alien. Wells sat down
and
watched them work for the next six hours. They asked it questions in
several
languages, waved their hands, snapped, drew simple pictures on a
tablet, then set
the writing instruments beside the creature. They played music on a
tape
machine, then made a whole series of ridiculous noises with their
mouths and
hands, hoping something would catch the thing's attention and elicit a
response. They showed it newly developed photographs of the crashed
spaceship
but got no reaction. When they had tried everything they could think
of, they
made way for another team. Wells, still sitting comfortably in the same
spot,
watched for another six hours as a second set of questioners went
through a
similar routine and achieved similar results. Eventually people began
to notice
this man who had not left his chair to use the bathroom, have a drink
of water,
or merely stretch his legs all day long.

The matter was
mentioned to Dr. Solomon, who came into the observation room and took
the chair
next to Wells, who barely noticed his arrival.

"Fascinating,
isn't it?" Solomon said in reference to the alien. Wells knew why he
had
come, but said nothing, felt nothing. "Dr. Wells, you've been sitting
here
an awfully long time. Why don't you come out into the lobby and have
something
to eat?"

"Not
hungry," Wells said matter-of-factly. It reminded the doctor that the
EBE
still had taken no food or drink. They had offered it lettuce, sugar,
milk,
bread, sliced peaches, and various meats, both raw and cooked. So far,
these
offerings had brought the only intelligible reaction from the
patient—it had
waved them away with a limp hand.

"It won't eat
anything," Wells said. "It's made up its mind not to eat
anything."

Solomon cast a long
sideways glance at his companion. "What does that mean,
made up its mind?
"

"The injuries
aren't enough to kill it. It's going to starve itself to death."

"What leads you
to that conclusion?"

"I
don't know. I just feel it. And the longer I sit here, the more
convinced I
am." For the first time in half a day, Wells broke his concentration on
the alien to look Solomon in the eyes. "I can tell what it's thinking.
It
could eat the food if it wanted to, it's not a matter of it being
poisonous. It
wants to eat, but it is forbidden. And these interrogators aren't going
to get
anywhere. The thing communicates telepathically. You ought to try
getting a
psychic or a mind reader in here."

"Dr.
Wells," Solomon whispered to avoid embarrassing his companion, "all
of us are running on jangled nerves in here. Several people have
noticed that
you've been sitting here for—"

"Wait!"
Wells's attention was once more riveted on the EBE. "It recognizes
something." Solomon looked through the glass and saw the alien in the
same
position he'd been in for hours. A man inside the room was holding yet
another
piece of paper in its line of vision. He was about to go on to the next
sheet
when the creature lifted an arm and seemed to grasp at the image. The
man
walked the paper back and forth across the room and the creature turned
its
head, struggling to keep its eyes on the picture. There was an audible
reaction
in the observation area. Finally something had worked. The agent turned
around
and showed them what had caught the alien's attention: a block letter
"Y."

Solomon looked toward
Wells. "I think it's time we had a chat with Blanchard. Please follow
me."

An hour later, Wells
went inside the observation room a second time. His clothes were
wrinkled, his
eyes were red around the rims, and he needed a shave. Without
hesitating, he
quietly brought a chair across the floor and set it close to the
alien's
bedside. Unlike the interrogators before him, he took a seat, folded
his hands
in his lap, and merely sat there.

"Where are you
from?" he whispered softly. He wasn't asking a question, just listening
to
the words. He knew he had to translate them into a language this
creature from
another galaxy could understand.
Where are you from?
he asked again,
trying to push the idea out of his head and into the space separating
their
bodies. Where are you from? over and over, as if it were a matter of
will, a
matter of concentrating hard enough to find and flex those mental
muscles mind
readers must have. His instinct, or whatever was leading him, told him
the
creature communicated by ESP, which turned out to be pretty close, as
close as
his earthbound imagination could have taken him.

The creature rolled
its head to look at him. Behind the almost-human face, the cranium was
a thick,
translucent plate extending straight back. Through the walls of the
skull,
Wells traced the lacy pattern of veins and watched small clots of
tissue
contract, then release. The way the eyelids closed over the surface of
the
moist mirror-black eyes, the way it had turned its head, and
manipulated its
fingers, everything indicated that this exotic creature possessed an
intelligence similar to our own.

Wells decided on
another approach. He tried sending eidetic imagery or mental pictures.
But how
to translate the question
Where are you from?
into
images? He worked at
it for a few minutes but found himself trying to mentally broadcast
pictures of
stick-figure bodies, simple houses, a question mark. He knew it was
wrong, that
his logic was too abstract, too human. Then, all at once, it hit him.
He knew
how to ask the question.

He thought of his own
home, the two-story structure he shared with his wife in the hills
outside of
Santa Fe. He meditated on this idea for some time, leading the alien on
a tour
of the house. He concentrated not only on what the place looked like,
but also
his feelings for it. Exploring his own heart, Wells lingered on the
comfort he
felt in this place and his strong sense of possession for it. He moved
into the
living room, empty now but still echoing with the warmth and laughter
of
visiting friends, and sat down in his favorite chair, remembering the
feel of
the upholstery under his hands. Without warning, this meditation was
ended as
his mind was abruptly plunged into a completely new reality. The frail
creature
on the table took the scientist on a tour of its own.

Even
before
he recognized that there was no light, he could feel the heat.
Blast-furnace
heat, the limit of what his body could withstand, came at him from all
directions. And it was getting hotter the deeper he went. It was a
cave, and he
sensed the presence of other bodies moving around him, with him,
hundreds of
them. They were deep below the surface of a ruined planet, miles deep
already,
and following the sloped floor of the cave deeper still and closer to
the
center. This tunnel connected to others, which branched into others.
The entire
mantle of the planet was perforated by a great system of these caves,
from
ruined crust to molten core, and was home to billions like him. Long
before,
they had lived above ground in a lush infinite garden. Now everything
was gone,
dead, and they lived here. The rocky ground burned his feet, but
instead of
turning back, the pain only made him increase his speed. Running blind
through
the dark, he felt the space around him open up and knew they had come
into a
large cavern. He smelled the walls thick with food, lush carpets of a
plant
that felt like moss or lichen in his hands as he tore a heavy sheet of
it free
from the scalding rock wall, then immediately dragged it tugging and
stumbling
back into the passageway. Up one slope, then another, towing his heavy
treasure
closer to the surface. When the heat grew less intense, so did his
urgency. The
number of bodies around him grew, a dense crowd of them swarmed in like
piranha
from every direction and began ripping into the carpet of lichen. He
stopped
pulling and joined the fierce scramble, kicking and pushing his way
deeper into
the orgy until he found an open space and dived toward it, his mouth
open wide,
and sucked in a mouthful of the still-warm vegetation.

Wells found himself
once more looking into the eyes of the visitor. He felt his scalp damp
with
sweat and his heart pounding. His first impulse was to recoil, to run
from the
troubling vision he'd been shown. But he fought it down. He could
barely
believe that the serene and noble creature before him could have come
from such
a repulsive place. Despite the troubling vision he had just seen, Wells
smiled.
He had broken through and established communication.

Later, his report to
the military staff went poorly. The officers were only mildly
interested in
what Wells had learned and angry that he hadn't asked the questions
they had
previously agreed upon. Although the vision of the EBE's home planet
might
prove to he useful at some future date, it did not address the burning
question
of
why.
Why had these creatures come to earth and
what did they want? To
make matters worse, the scientist's behavior during the session was
erratic. He
rambled in his descriptions, became emotional, and frequently lost his
train of
thought. This led the soldiers to suspect his trance-vision was nothing
more
than his own hallucination.

Solomon intervened
and explained his suspicion that Wells was suffering from dehydration.
He had
taken no food or water for almost forty-eight hours. Still, when
someone
brought him a glass of water, he adamantly refused it. By the end of
the
thirty-minute meeting, Wells had lost the confidence of those in
charge. The
decision was made to keep him away from the creature until his mental
state
improved. Others could use the same techniques to communicate with the
EBE.

Others did try. They
worked for days, without success.

On
the
afternoon of the fourth day, as Wells slept in one of the unused rooms,
Solomon
entered quietly, followed by a team of assistants. Wells bolted out of
his
sleep, knowing why they had come. Before he could get to his feet, the
men
grabbed him and pinned him down while Solomon used a hypodermic needle
to
inject a sedative into his arm. When he woke up twenty hours later, he
was in a
new room strapped down tight to the bed with a drip IV stuck into his
forearm.
When Dr. Solomon came in, he found Wells feeling rested and alert.
Although he
still refused to eat anything, the fluids in his system had brought him
back to
his senses.

"No one else has
had any luck," the doctor told him. "And the creature seems to be
getting weaker. If you're feeling up to it, the generals want you to go
back
inside."