The Cure (24 page)

“We can’t use a rental car. We’d have to show our driver’s licenses, and we’d be traced right away. Any idea how to steal a car?”

Erin frowned and shook her head.

“Isn’t this kind of thing done all the time in the thrillers you read?”

“Yeah. They pick locks too. I don’t know how to do that either.” Her eyes narrowed. “And now that I think about it, transportation isn’t the first order of business, after all. We have no idea how long it might take us to figure this out. So we need to get out of here. We’re sitting ducks.”

Hansen didn’t respond. He tilted his head to the ceiling. Without a car, where would they go? They were in a sparsely populated part of Tucson with only a sprinkling of buildings and roads, and with long stretches of flat desert terrain in between. The motel was the only decent hiding place for quite a long stretch if they were on foot.

His pulse quickened as he arrived at a solution. “They didn’t show
my
picture on TV,” he pointed out. “The motel clerk doesn’t know me from Adam. And no one knows I visited your room last night.”

Erin looked confused. For once, her agile mind hadn’t raced ahead to the punch line.

“So let me get out of here and get a room of my own. At this motel. Then I can sneak
you
in. When the bad guys crash through the door to this room, they’ll find it empty. They’ll assume you ran off during the night and continue their search elsewhere, while we lay low here for another night.”

“Brilliant,” said Erin admiringly. She leaned forward and wasted an additional twenty seconds kissing him with enough passion to melt his socks.

“Go!” she said when their lips had parted.

“Perfect,” said Hansen wryly as he took the short walk to the door. “You get my motor revved up and then kick me out.”

He opened the door and surveyed the area as well as he could. He didn’t see anything suspicious. He knew it was still possible the room was being watched, but he had no other choice but to assume otherwise. He made his way to the small lobby and paid for a room, wanting to glance around furtively the entire time he was checking in, but fighting off the impulse so he wouldn’t look like the fugitive he was.

When he had been given his plastic room key, he retrieved Erin and escorted her to the new room, making sure to stay out of sight of the lobby and the petite woman in her midthirties manning the desk. Entering the new room was like a magic trick. It was identical in every way to their last one, down to the framed painting of a desert sunset hanging on the wall, except the bed was now perfectly made and the towels were fresh and folded.

“I did a lot of thinking while you were gone,” said Erin the moment the door was closed. “And I think I’ve come up with a workable plan. How much money do you have left?”

“Seventy-three dollars,” he announced after a quick count.

“That’s all?”

“I just paid ninety in cash for the room.”

She pulled a wad of bills from her pocket. “I have seven hundred and eighteen,” she said. “Or at least the various men whose wallets I took had this much. So I guess we should add petty theft to the charges against me.”

“So we have seven hundred and ninety-one dollars all together.”

“Not bad. But here is the question: Is that enough to buy an old beater of a car?”

Hansen shrugged. “Hard to imagine you could get a car that actually still ran for such a low amount. But I really don’t know.”

“It only has to run for a day,” she said. “And it can be rusted, dented, it doesn’t matter.”

“So how do we buy this hypothetical car?” said Hansen.

“We need the Internet, and we don’t have it. So you need to get the motel clerk to let you use their computer for a few minutes. Whatever you have to do. Charm her. Lie to her. Be creative.”

“And then Google ‘cheap used cars in Tucson’ and see what I get?”

“Exactly. ‘For sale by owner.’ Try to get it for five hundred or less, because we want to keep some money—just in case. Don’t bother coming back to the room after your Internet search. Just find a cheap car, and tell the seller you’ll take it if it can leave their premises under its own power. Then cab it over there.” She paused. “But make sure to meet the cab somewhere out of sight of the lobby.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Yes. Once you have the car, there’s a Walmart a few miles from here. Buy some shears and a razor so we can cut our hair. And hair dye. And see if they have any temporary tattoos we can apply. Or get an ink paint set and we can free-form it. And clothing. And anything else you can think of that can help us disguise ourselves.”

Hansen’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Maybe you’re beginning to rub off on me, but if they haven’t raided your old room yet, we can plant some things to misdirect them.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I get some black hair dye and some blond hair dye. You can cut your hair and dye it black here, while I leave an empty bottle of the blond hair dye in your old room to throw them off.”

Erin’s eyes brightened. “I like it,” she said. “Maybe we’re in the wrong line of work.” Then, with a broad grin she added, “And I like that I’m rubbing off on you. I guess we’ll just have to make sure we keep rubbing.”

27

HANSEN WAS STUNNED
by the number of cars one could purchase for under a thousand dollars. There were dozens of them on the market in this general location. Some as low as three hundred and fifty dollars, which he didn’t get at all. It seemed to him they’d be worth more in scrap metal than that, but what did he know?

He found a twenty-year-old Chevy Malibu with over a hundred and seventy thousand miles on the odometer. It had faded and peeling electric-blue paint, stained, threadbare cloth seats, bald tires, crank-handle windows—one of which no longer cranked—and a nonworking air conditioner. It was hideous. If it had been a mythological figure it would have been named the Blue Medusa, and this is what he decided to call it. But on the bright side, it
would
allow them to remain completely off the grid. And it was only five hundred dollars, on the nose. The question was, would it actually still drive?

Hansen was relieved when he pulled it off the small slab of desert that served as a front yard to the seller’s run-down house. The car didn’t exactly purr like a kitten, but he was able to get it to sixty without any pieces falling off, so he was satisfied. If it could only continue to work for six or seven hundred miles they were in good shape.

As Hansen made his way to Walmart, his mind returned to his first meeting with Steve Fuller. And with someone who had called himself simply, Fermi.

*   *   *

HANSEN’S SENSES SLOWLY
returned. He had no idea how much time had passed since his visitor, Steve Fallon—no, that wasn’t it—Steve Fuller, had jammed the business end of a needle into his leg. Just as he was about to open his eyes, Fuller waved smelling salts under his nose and he was jolted awake as though he had been hit with a cattle prod.

Hansen found himself in what looked like a glass conference room with a large oak table in the center. The man who had visited him lowered the smelling salts he had been holding and took a seat across from him at the table.

“Sorry about the abduction,” said Fuller. “But I think you’ll appreciate the necessity soon.”

“Where am I?”

“At a very secure, very secret facility. You haven’t been out for long. We used a private aircraft to fly you here from Pittsburgh.”

Hansen noted that his hands weren’t tied, nor was he restrained in any way.
Was this really happening?

“What is this all about?” he demanded.

“It’s about your work, Mr. Hansen. You have some very unusual theories regarding quantum physics and quantum computing that are very much out of the mainstream.”

“If you think my theories are ridiculous, just say so. You won’t be the first. Or the hundredth. But you
are
the first to try kidnapping. You could have just sent a nasty e-mail and saved yourself some trouble.”

Fuller smiled. “I see you’re able to keep your sense of humor about this. Very admirable. But to continue, your unique outlook prompted you to search for a quantum signature in ways others would not have. And you found one. And you keep pressing about it. And pressing. And trying to convince other physicists around the world to take you seriously. You make a pit bull look like a toy poodle.”

“Yes, I’m stubborn. So what? I’m convinced that I’m right.”

Steve Fuller leaned forward and considered his guest for several seconds. “You
are
right, Mr. Hansen. There is no doubt about it. Or can I call you Kyle?”

Hansen stared at him. “You can call me anything you like if you can tell me why you’re so convinced I’m right.”

“Because you’re picking up an actual, working quantum computer. One that works on principles based on your evolving theory. The only one on Earth. One brought here by four aliens from a planet thirty-seven light years away.”

Hansen shook his head as if to clear it. He opened his mouth to speak.

Fuller held out a forestalling hand. “This is a bold statement. So I would expect a certain degree of skepticism.” He nodded through the glass wall at a man who had been standing outside the room, still as a lizard. Hansen had been so off balance and so focused on what Fuller was saying he hadn’t even noticed him.

The man walked into the room and took a seat beside Steve Fuller. He looked very average: average height, weight, and coloring. No remarkable features good or bad. Thinning hairline. About forty years old. But there was something off in the way he walked, the way he sat, the way he carried himself. Hansen couldn’t put a finger on it, but it made him slightly uneasy.

When no one spoke, Hansen decided to break the silence. “Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is unpronounceable. On Earth, I go by the name Fermi.”

Hansen’s face crinkled up in confusion.
On Earth?
Part of him wanted to laugh out loud, but part of him knew on some primal level that this really was an alien.

“I thought it would speed things along for you and Fermi to meet,” explained Fuller. “If a picture paints a thousand words, then a few minutes with Fermi cuts through the most stubborn skepticism.”

“I had extensive plastic surgery on my home planet, combined with sophisticated genetic engineering, to pass as a human. And as you can see, or hear at any rate, I can speak your language fairly well, with limited accent.”

As he said this Hansen realized he did have an accent, but it was subtle and impossible to place.

“But evolution has honed your mind to be a remarkable tool to understand posture, body language, and other subtle cues to your fellow human,” continued Fermi. “So the longer one spends with me the more wrong I seem. This can’t be helped. I can pass a cursory examination, and if I don’t move much and keep silent, I can go out in public, be a passenger in a car, or even an airplane. But extensive interaction, other than over an audio-only phone, doesn’t really work.”

The man claiming to be an alien was wearing a light blue button-down shirt. He unbuttoned it to just above his chest, exposing a mass of flesh about the size of a flattened-out baseball. It was repulsive.

“My genetic material isn’t exactly the same as yours, but its principles are analogous. My colleagues and I each were subjects of extensive reconstructive surgery and genetically engineered alterations during a period of over seven of your years. My species has had many thousands of years to perfect the engineering of our genetic material and can do tricks you have yet to even guess at. We were each genetically engineered to produce this growth that you see here.”

“What is it?” said Hansen, his voice betraying just the slightest hint of disgust.

“Think of it as a gill. There are trace elements of your atmosphere that are poisonous to us. And we like less nitrogen in our air. So the air we breathe is shunted through this bio-filter, ensuring we get the mixture we require.”

Hansen raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Just because the man said it didn’t necessarily make it true.

“We have vestigial appendages that are somewhat analogous to your hands,” said Fermi. “Which we’ve engineered back to functionality and converted into replicas of your hands. Even so,” he added, unbuttoning his shirt farther, “our own version of hands are indispensible to us, since they give us far better fine-motor control than the ones engineered to mimic yours.”

As he undid the fourth button down, twelve thin tendrils crept out in perfect coordination from two slits near where a belly button should have been. Hansen’s mouth fell open. While Fermi’s human hands had seemed clumsy while unbuttoning his shirt, the movements of the tendrils were fluid and elegant. He picked a pen up off the table with the tendrils, each moving independently, and spun it effortlessly in an intricate pattern that was mesmerizing.

“For us, a precision task like threading a needle could not be simpler. Your hands have greater strength, because your distant ancestors needed to swing from trees.” A small smile played over his face. “There are no trees on our planet.”

Hansen’s eyes narrowed as he considered the smile he had just seen. In addition, he remembered Fermi had nodded appropriately to something he had said. How could this be? While an alien could learn English, no alien could possibly learn involuntary facial expressions. If Hansen were impersonating an alien who laughed by emitting a high-pitched growl, he couldn’t train himself to do this if he genuinely was caught unprepared by something truly funny—he would revert to human laughter instead.

So was this just an elaborate hoax?

Despite the impossibility of mimicking spontaneous human expressions, Hansen was largely convinced it was not. There was still something off about Fermi’s mimicry he couldn’t put his finger on. And no special effect or artifice could possibly have created the tendrils he was seeing.

“You smile and you frown and you nod,” said Hansen. “If you really are an alien, how is that possible?”