The Librarian: A First Contact Story (3 page)

1

Nick had been called back before he'd even made it to
8:00 a.m. that morning. Not an hour passed before he returned, roughly a mile
from where he'd last been, and he'd forgotten all about the radiation signature
he broadcasted for the whole world to see.

The first thing he needed to do required a lot of
energy and a lot of time: re-acclimating himself to Earth was painless but
long. That was okay, it left him time to put his thoughts together and come up
with a plan: take his human form, go home, and tell Jane the truth. The
alternative had been to let her believe he'd died alone in the woods, a fate he
wouldn't have wanted if Jane had gone missing instead of himself.

He hadn't factored in how tiring the whole process
was. It wasn't like he did it all the time, become an adult of the target
species and resume life as if nothing had happened. Barely conscious by the
time he finished, he groaned when he realized all he'd achieved was a passing
humanoid form. He tried to focus enough to gain his Nick body but just the
thought exhausted him. He
hadn't
forgotten about clothes, but those were
a problem for later.

He stopped trying to do anything else for just a
moment. He was contemplating the clothing dilemma and getting down to his car,
when the distant sound of helicopters found him. Trapped in his light form, he
had a split second to decide what to do. It took everything he had to complete
a projection of his human self, the last thing he remembered for a while.

2

"Negative, sir. The radioactive readings have
just dropped."

Someone has just put a lid on it,
General Mitchell thought as his eyes
followed the map displayed on the wall monitor. Three helicopters approached the
area, and just as the pilot reported, the red radioactive dot disappeared.

"How's the civilian evacuation going?" he
asked his officer, Captain White. She was as efficient as she was tiny, but
damn the man who doubted her expertise in hand-to-hand combat.

"We've gotten all of Lake Lena cleared, sir, and
the roadblocks two miles around have been effective. We still have a few
individuals signed up in the national park book still unaccounted for,
sir."

"Keep me posted. Has the media picked this
up?"

"They haven't showed up yet, but it's only a
matter of time, sir."

"Good. Troops on the ground?"

"Ready and waiting, sir."

On the screen, the first helicopter was just about to
pass the point of origin.

"We have a signal," the pilot said, the
monitor changing to show thermal activity. "It looks like someone's down
there… and he's not moving."

A hiker taking a break was the obvious answer. A hiker
with a nuclear device, though…

"Get Alpha team in position. Let's see what this
guy's hiding, shall we?"

3

A threat to National Security was a relatively usual
event, Special Forces Sam Lenox knew. A nuclear threat already on American
soil, though… that was a chilling thought.

Washington State parks were not completely isolated,
but at least if the device went off around here, the casualties would be far
fewer than in Seattle, or any larger city. Cold comfort, but then again, he
hadn't joined the Army for the fuzzy feelings.

He hadn't been in these woods since he was a teenager,
running around with his friends, having an occasional encounter with a bear,
and generally having a good time. Now, ten years later, he wished his
homecoming to the woods of his childhood was not linked to a terrorist with
nuclear destruction dreams.

None of the men in his unit made a sound. Inch by
inch, they converged in a loose circle around their target as the helicopters
flew over. At twenty feet from the individual, they stopped, waiting for
orders.

"Alpha team, this is Command Center. We've got
one possible hostile on ground. You're clear to go."

Lenox had been prepared to see a man with as little as
two assault rifles and a dozen grenades, and as much as a whole suit of body
armor and bombs ready to go. He'd been ready to lock eyes with a madman, with a
fanatic—or to look into the vacant eyes of someone who had reached so deeply
into insanity his eyes could no longer reflect any humanity.

What he
wasn't
expecting was looking at a naked
guy.

The man was breathing hard, a slight sheen of sweat
all over his face. Through the crosshairs of their highly attuned rifles, Lenox
could tell that their target was utterly exhausted. And although the man's eyes
were half open, looking in their general direction, he didn't do a thing to
either try to move or call for help. He sat there, hugging his knees, looking
lost.

"Command Center, this is Alpha leader. We've got
a strange situation going on here."

An extended silence on the other side met his leader's
words. Lenox didn't take his sight from the target.

"Alpha leader, what in God's name is in front of
you?"

Lenox glanced at his leader, and then crossed looks
with a couple of his teammates, all of them frowning. Sure, a naked guy in the
woods against a tree in the spot where a radioactive device had been detected
was weird, to say the least, but it was still just a dude.

"This is Alpha leader, we don't see any hostiles
in the area. Sir, I'm requesting permission to approach. I think a medical unit
should be on stand-by."

"Alpha leader, negative. What are your
readings?"

"Still within normal parameters. There are no
dangerous readings. I repeat, there are
no
dangerous readings. Sir, that
man doesn't look good."

A long pause came over their link once again. Lenox
remained still on his spot, puzzled at the turn of events. Not only about their
alleged terrorist, but also from Command Center.

"Alpha Leader, can you describe what you
see?" this time the voice was female. An older woman. His leader
responded, describing their situation, the lack of weapons, and their target's
difficulty in breathing.

"Alpha team, stand-by. We're sending Beta team to
assist you. And whatever you do, don't get any closer to that thing."

Lenox wouldn't leave his post for the following hour.
And five hours later, he would still be in a room, being debriefed about the
incident over and over again.

4

"They don't see it."

Mitchell turned to look at Dr. Greenwood, who promptly
sat on the nearest chair available, her hands shaking slightly. She had been on
the base when the first reports of a possible nuclear attack had arrived. And
like everyone else who had been a witness to the video feed from the field
mission, she'd been astonished. Heck, he felt like sitting himself.

The silence of shock had nothing on the silence of
incredulity. Mitchell knew his men were disciplined, but to
this
degree?
The glowing humanoid in front of them should have at least elicited a gasp, and
their caution level, their
threat
level, should have gone sky-high.

None of that was happening. By their own description,
they were seeing a
man.

"The question is," she said thoughtfully,
getting her self-control back, "
what
do they see?"

"By Alpha leader's description, we have a white
male, mid-thirties, finding it difficult to breathe," Dr. Fox said,
entering the room with excitement. His beard and glasses almost made him look
like a mad scientist. He'd been coming and going, setting up protocols to deal
with this thing, disheveling his hair in the process.

Mitchell eyed the helicopter's position getting closer
to their target, the Beta team ready to join the Alpha one.

"The real question here is," he said,
"what are
we
seeing?"

5

Captain Martin Clark had seen many things he'd wished
he could forget. Being a field medic was not for the faint of heart, and
although he could wash away the blood and clean the scrubs, he could not banish
the screams that still echoed in his head. Willing to help his fellow soldiers
even if it cost him a piece of his sanity was part of the job.  Certainly,
seeing a naked guy in the woods should be a piece of cake.

If only it were that simple.

His heart beat faster than it should as he approached
his would-be patient. He'd seen the feed from the base, knew that whatever was
in front of him was anything
but
human. He'd remained in the same spot,
in the same position, for close to forty-five minutes now. Clark had
volunteered to come and, as soon as Dr. Fox had cleared a quarantine area, he'd
been given green light to approach.

The silence on the Com line reminded him he was not
the only one on edge here. The whole Base seemed to hold its breath.

The hazmat suit was difficult to maneuver in.
Radiation levels had dropped to normal standards, but interacting with the
unknown entity sitting in front of him demanded the protection. In a helicopter
not fifty feet away, his colleagues were getting ready to transport their
otherworldly cargo in a special gurney.

A drop of sweat ran alongside his cheek.

You can do this, Martin.

 The Beta team had already made a search for any
radioactive device, but nothing had showed up. Command Center kept asking him
to be careful as he approached the man, everything they had agreed on as
protocol for this first contact getting jammed in his head. If this being
needed help—and by the looks of it, he desperately needed it—they couldn't
afford for the CDC to make a grand entrance. They had to contain it
fast
.

With six crosshairs at his back, Clark reached his
intended target.

"Sir? I'm Captain Clark of the U.S. Army. Can you
give me your name?"

His voice barely trembled. He swallowed, waiting for
an answer. It didn't matter that he rationally knew he was not looking at a
human, his medical mind started assessing him as one.

The man in front of him kept looking over his knees,
his lids half closed. If this were a normal rescue, few were the scenarios
Clark could imagine that would lead an adult man to be in shock and naked in a
national park. None of them were good. He couldn't envision what had led a
light being to be here in this state.
What happened to you?
He'd been
reported to be breathing hard. It wasn't as bad as Clark had imagined, but the
lack of response was not a good indicator.
Maybe he doesn't understand?

"Are you hurt?"

Silence.

"Do you know how you got here?"

Silence.

Okay…

"Is anyone else with you?"

He blinked slowly.

"I'm going to flash a light in your eyes,
okay?" Clark kept talking. It always helped with men who had suffered
trauma, even if Clark couldn't tell how much they were able to understand him.
Either way, it helped him, too.

"Pupils are reacting normally," he said as
much to his patient as to Command Center.

"Captain, that thing has pupils?"

"In my eyes, sir, it does," he answered,
knowing full well this might be an exercise in futility. Cameras showed nothing
but light coming off him. "Along with two very blue, very normal
irises." Clark stared at him for one long moment, trying to see the light
instead of the flesh. Did he know they were trying to help? Was he aware of the
magnitude of what it meant that he was here, right now, sitting beneath this
tree?

The man blinked slowly again.

"I'm going to reach and take your pulse, okay?
Then we're going to move you and hop you up to the helicopter. It may be fun,
you know?"

Clark did a quick evaluation, trying to move fast
despite the hazmat suit. When the other two technicians arrived, he was
half-way through. "Pulse is accelerated. I don't see any wound or head
trauma. I'm going to call you Joe, okay? I'm going to need you to tell me if
anything hurts while we move you or while we touch you."

'Joe' never said a thing. He didn't wince. He just
blinked passively, and let himself be put in a neck brace, be laid on a
quarantine gurney, and be secured by multiple belts. With the all-clear, the
Alpha team helped them carry Joe to the helicopter, while Clark gave the stats
to Dr. Fox at the base, all pretty much within normal parameters except for
that pulse. The whole thing didn't take twenty minutes. As field cases went,
this was his easiest one in a long time.

Pity he would never get to talk about it.

1

For someone who had just crossed a few thousand light
years and then some, time seemed to have contracted in an odd way. Nick's
awareness didn't really kick in until he was inside an MRI. The interaction
between the magnetic field and his attempt to gain consistency had finally
gotten his attention, and now that he was getting a good idea of what was going
on, he
knew
he was screwed.

He blinked a few times and took a deep breath, more
out of habit than because he needed to. Getting clothes now was no longer a
problem. He needed to get a hold of Jane, that was all that mattered.

His options were limited. Fight his way through by
opening a few holes and risk radiation poisoning to the poor soldiers stationed
here. Vanish without any reasonable hope that he would be able to re-form again
at home –or anywhere, for that matter—and spare everyone the explanation. Or
talk to them and in some miraculous way, get to talk with Jane.

"Are you awake?" a disembodied voice asked
over the noise of the machine. Unless the person was in the same room as he was
and he had some sense of the person's direction, there was no possible way he
could communicate verbally. No recording devices would pick up his
"voice", because he wasn't really talking, in a physical sense. He
was mentally projecting his voice—and his form—directly to the minds of those
around him.

"Sir?" the voice asked again. He nodded
slowly.

He raised his hand in a gesture of greeting, and
realized he had a pulse monitor attached to his index finger. It was odd to
realize he would be flat-lining on some screen somewhere. He hadn't been a
human for close to two hours now, yet the thought of not registering as
something
alive
made him uneasy.

The noise stopped, and the bed slid out of the machine.
Two men moved to help him sit up, their movements slow and easy, and their
hazmat suits appropriately in place. Lights no longer blinded his eyes, and as
a dozen men and women stood staring at him in a half-circle, he felt
self-conscious.

Way to go, Nick.

First contact was supposed to be a quiet affair, true,
and as far as small groups went, this was a fairly good size. They definitely
knew he wasn't one of them, and that this was not some sort of prank. They
didn't know his intentions though, and that made the fear in their eyes
understandable.

At least he could talk to them
.

"My name is Nicholas Logan. I need to speak with
my wife."

2

General Mitchell watched as people in the containment
area moved around the MRI machine. Something was happening, and two minutes
afterwards, that something came in the form of their non-human being sitting
up.

Mitchell was about to press the mic button and attempt
to speak with their glowing guest when Greenwood pressed her hand to his wrist,
stopping him. "Wait. He's communicating with them. Let him finish."

Great, he could be taking over their minds for all we
know.

A couple of the doctors raised their heads to one of
the cameras. "He says you won't be able to hear him?" one of them
asked, curiously.

"Is he talking to you?" Mitchell asked back,
all eight doctors turning to the cameras, nodding.

"We can see and hear him like a normal man. But
he says there's no way we'll get him on video or audio. That nothing will
record his voice. "

Not going to record you, my ass.

Mitchell turned to his nearest officer. "Get me
the fastest typist in the Base,
now.
"

I'll give you recording…

3

"Why do we see a human being, but our computers
don't?"

The doctor in front of him, one eager Dr. Fox, was
running a reflexes test, trying to get his knee to jump. He barely felt any
pressure as the tiny hammer connected to what should have been a knee. Nothing
happened.

"I'm projecting an image of who I used to be so
it's easier to stay in a… material way, I guess. It's the only way I can talk with
Jane."

"Does she know?"

"
I
didn't know this morning. I'm pretty
sure she would have said something if she'd noticed it."

Fox smiled at that, pushing his glasses up the bridge
of his nose. "Are there others like you?"

"I need Jane here, doctor. We all do if you want
to hear that answer."

4

"Let me get this straight," General Pearls
said over the line to Mitchell, "You're telling me that this man was a
Sleeper
?"

"All we've got is that he claims he didn't know
he was what he was until this morning, sir," Mitchell answered. Both men
went silent.
How many of you are out there?

Worse: were all of them waking up today?

5

If memory served Dr. Greenwood right,
Sleeper
was a term used for agents who were planted in a country, and did nothing but
live their lives until they were needed. Or if one was inclined to read
fiction, a Sleeper agent could very well be unaware of this very fact,
hypnotized or brainwashed to forget it. Until someone, somewhere, used a
trigger word, and the Sleeper would go and potentially kill someone else.

Greenwood watched the interaction between Nicholas
Logan and Dr. Fox, and thought about the old movies she used to watch when she
was just a psychology student. Now she knew better. Such kind of hypnosis was
unlikely but not impossible. One had to choose the right subject, work with him
for a very long time, and then give the mind a story that would make sense. It
was unreliable as hell, and largely thought of as unpractical—not to mention
unethical—but as an information-gathering mission, it sure could work.

From the few experiments she'd read about, it was
incredibly disturbing for the subject. She could guess why without much
imagination. The thought that someone had
implanted
ideas foreign to one's mind was frightening at best, downright chilling to the
bone when one thought about it for a minute.

This man, though, this being captive in their medical
wing, was not exhibiting the classic signs of anxiety she would have expected
from someone who had been captured, and who essentially had to tell some very
stressful news to his wife. Logan looked remarkably calm.

"What is he up to?" Mitchell whispered
beside her. His ever tactical mind had observed the same fact, probably a lot
faster than hers had.

"You come back to enemy lines for two
reasons," she explained, her eyes following the glowing image as it sat
and talked to the doctor. "To get someone to safety, or to warn them to
get out of the way."

"Since his wife's not going to vanish with him,
either she's in danger, or we all are," Mitchell concluded with a grim
tone.

6

"Married in October, ten years ago. No children.
No pets," Mitchell's officer read out loud from a list of condensed facts,
her hands steady despite knowing they were talking about an alien on their
Base. For the past hour, somewhere in Washington DC, every single piece of data
about one Nicholas Logan married to one Jane Logan was being analyzed and
scrutinized as if there were no tomorrow. Jurisdiction fights had already
ensued, a headache for General Pearls who supervised from the Capital City.

"His parents died in a car accident five years
ago, her parents died of natural causes three and two years ago. No siblings
for either of them. She's a librarian at a small private library in town as an
acquisitions assistant; he's a sociologist who has published well-respected
papers and articles in his field, and is a professor at Seattle University. No
tickets, no unusual records. She's still at work today. From phone
conversations we're monitoring, she thinks Nicholas Logan is on a hiking
trip."

"Don't let her out of our sight."

"No, Sir."

7

"Are you hungry? It's noon now," Fox said
while flashing a light in Nick's eyes. He didn't blink.

 "No." It had been three hours and still no
sign of Jane. By this point, he'd resigned himself to answer in a yes-or-no
fashion, and plain refused to answer anything remotely interesting about his
intentions.

"Tired?"

"Not anymore."

Placing his hand on Nick's wrist, Fox continued to
take his pulse. Again. "Amazing," Fox whispered, his eyes glued to
the heart monitor that was still flat-lining in silence. "I know what I
see is one thing and what I hear is another." He let his wrist go, and
went for a syringe. "Are you in any pain?" Dr. Fox asked as he tried
to take a blood sample. How many times had they tried to do this while Nick was
unconscious was anyone's guess. All the same, it was going nowhere.

"No. I don't feel any pain."

"Hmm…" Fox said, his clever eyes reaching
conclusions Nick could only guess. "I keep thinking that if I convince
myself there's blood actually filling this vial, I'll see it."

"You're not seeing what you wish to see,"
Nick explained. To him, the needle was going right
through
him, not into
him. "You're seeing what I have energy enough to project. Like the pulse,
or my breathing, I keep thinking I have them, so I project them. Blood being
drawn, on the other hand… is just not happening in
my
head."

"Is there any kind of sample we can take?"
Fox asked, retrieving the needle and placing it on a hollow metal container.
The sharp scalpel beside it was not lost on Nick. 

"No. Even if you were to cut me in half… I'm
sorry to tell you, but… this form? It won't last long enough for you to see
under a microscope if you did that. I would vanish, probably." To be
honest, he had no idea what would happen if he were cut in two. Either he would
keep his form anchored enough for it to not matter, one side vanishing and the
other staying as a half of a human body; or he would, indeed, vanish
completely. He didn't want to risk it, and by the look on Fox's face, neither
did he.

"Let's get you somewhere more comfortable,"
Fox said with a smile.

8

"Any luck finding the real Nicholas Logan?"
Mitchell asked, circling Logan's name on a notebook, over and over again. His
lunch rested untouched on a tray beside him.

"No, sir. Besides his car and his name signed in
the entry book of Trail No. 810, we haven't found anyone, yet."

"Keep me posted."

"Yes, sir."

9

"No, General," Mitchell said, his eyes glued
to the monitors as he spoke over the phone. "He keeps refusing to answer
our questions until we have his wife here. He claims she doesn't know a thing,
but for all we know, she could be one of them."

"Let's wait and see what she does," the
General said on the other side, several muffled conversations on the
background. "I don't want two of those things in the same state, but we
cannot afford to upset a living nuclear weapon. Until we get intel, though… we
don't want to terminate it."

The phone went silent. On the screen, General Mitchell
followed their new guest. He projected himself as a human to the point that
physicians would actually get stats from him. He played with their perceptions
but could not fool machines. So Mitchell kept looking at him through the
monitors, unwilling to let himself be deceived.

What are you? And what do you want?