Making the Galaxy Great

Less than two minutes after Colonel Williams left the room, there was a sharp rap on the door and Agent McCauley walked in and tossed a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt on the bed.

“Put those on. 31 waist, medium shirt? And here — sign these.” She placed several sheets of paper on top of the clothes.

Jason looked through the papers. There were little yellow flags marked “Sign Here” attached to several of the pages. He started to read the first one and McCauley said: “They basically swear you to secrecy or your life is over.”

Jason stared at the papers while he contemplated being killed or put in jail by his own country. “This place is full of technology from across the galaxy but you’re still making me sign papers?”

“Bureaucrats dine on paper,” said McCauley. “And our funding comes from bureaucrats. In secret, of course.”

Jason signed the documents, then slid the shirt over his head. When he picked up the jeans he stared expectantly at McCauley.

“What?” she said.

“A little privacy?”

McCauley huffed loudly and turned away. “My God, are we in grade school? You weren’t so worried about privacy the other night with your little friend.”

Jason frowned darkly as he quickly slid out of the bedsheet and into the jeans.

“So, I guess we’re going to be partners?” he said doubtfully. “What do we do next? Do I get a tour of this place?”

“It’s not a museum, Fleming.”

“But since I’m, you know, part of the team now . . .”

“I have to go see the Colonel. I’ll call Michael to take care of you till we can get you home.”

After McCauley left, Jason tried to leave the room himself but the button that made the door open didn’t respond when he touched it.

When Michael returned, he motioned to Jason with the expression of a kid about to dip his sleeping friend’s hand in warm water. “Come on,” he practically whispered, “I’ll show you around a little. Can’t show you much. A lot of it I’ve never even seen. You know how secret bases are — lots of secrets. But I can show you a couple of things that are totally the shit.”

They stepped out into a corridor painted in almost impossibly white white, then turned left through a doorway and headed down a set of stairs.

“We’re underground, aren’t we?” asked Jason.

“Yep. About four floors down. Well, five now.”

They walked through another door and into a hallway lined with rooms designated by a number — which Jason took to be the floor number since all the doors had the same number — followed by a letter of the alphabet. Under each letter, there were characters that reminded Jason of the rune-like writing on the document he’d seen in the hologram, and other characters that were even stranger — more like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Jason pointed to them. “Alien alphabets?”

“Yeah. The one that looks like Elven—”

“Exactly!” Jason exclaimed.

Michael nodded excitedly. “I know, right? Anyway, it’s Marjan. And the two right below it are Haku and Yrrean. We have to put them on the same line or . . .” He made a gesture with his hands that might have indicated either an explosion or a dance. Jason was inclined to assume it was the former.

“So . . . they don’t like each other?”

Michael shook his head. “It’s hard to believe they ever managed to get into space at all, since they were at war for centuries.”

“They’re from the same planet?”

“It’s called Dalus. There’s just one big continent and no oceans. The Haku live in one hemisphere and the Yrreans on the other and apparently it’s mostly mountains and desert separating them. These days, they have a peace agreement and all that, but from what I can tell they still trust each other less than they trust us.”

They had started walking down the corridor. “So other planets have different races, just like Earth,” Jason observed.

“Not different races; different species. We’re closer to chimps and bonobos than the Haku are to the Yrreans. Weird, huh? Two advanced humanoid species from one planet. Oh, and you saw them both the other night, I heard.”

“The one who knocked you over was Yrrean,” Michael explained. “The other one — he was a lot stockier, right? — was Haku.”

“The Haku . . . he was strong. He jumped over this ditch that I swear was five yards wide. Like he was jumping over a puddle.”

Michael nodded thoughtfully. “Possible. Dalus has about 15 percent more mass than Earth, so they’re really strong when they first get here. But it fades pretty fast — just a few weeks and they’re not much stronger than the average human. So that guy was probably fresh from the home world.”

“So are there Haku and Yrreans here, at this facility?”

“Naturally.”

“Do you ever worry about them having a rumble in the halls or anything like that?”

“Nah, we’ve got soldiers all over the place. It’s the ones outside the facility that I worry about.”

“Like the two I saw.”

Michael nodded. “Just a few of them. They have to have special permission to go out and observe us. Some of them get Marjan plastic surgery to make themselves look more human. Pretty convincing, from what I’ve seen. And they all have a microchip so we can keep track of them.”

“Like pets,” Jason mumbled. It was difficult learning that the world was even more complicated than he thought.

Michael stopped in front of Room 5D, then pressed a button on the wall and the door opened.

Jason frowned. “I couldn’t get the button on my door back there to work.”

“DNA scan,” Michael informed him. “Everyone who works here has their DNA stored so they can be identified. A lot more difficult to fake than optical scans or fingerprints. In fact, you’re about to get yours scanned and stored.”

They walked into a small room with a single table and chair. A poster from a French musical hung on one wall, and on another was what looked like a flat screen TV. There was no other furniture.

“Michael, after the day I’ve had, I really don’t want a giant Q-tip in my mouth.”

Michael giggled. “Dude, we don’t use those. Here.”

He took Jason’s hand and placed it on the tabletop, then touched the screen on the wall. It lit up and became a touchscreen. Michael quickly worked through several screens, then told Jason to hold his hand still.

Jason thought he felt a slight tingle in his fingertips.

“Okay,” said Michael. “You’re in the system.”

“Just like that.”

“Yep.”

Michael started to reach for the button to exit the room but Jason asked if he could do it. When he did, the door opened.

“Let me show you a couple more cool things,” said Michael. He took Jason to room 5B, which was much larger than room 5D. They entered just in time to see a tall, fair-haired man with a comically incompetent goatee aiming a hose at a person standing at the far end of the room in a thin gray suit and helmet. The helmet looked like a typical bicycle helmet with a piece of clear plastic wrapped around it and attached to the top of the suit.

Suddenly flames leaped out of the hose and Jason leaped backward. “What the—?”

“All right then. This time, move toward me,” the blond man barked in a clipped and distinctly German accent. “Ready? Okay.”

The individual in the suit ran toward him as he fired the flame thrower again. The flames stopped when the tester in the suit was just a yard or so in front of the flame thrower.

“How did it feel?” asked the German.

The helmet came off, revealing a young woman of possibly Middle Eastern ancestry. “It is still very stiff. Very difficult to move,” she said in an accented voice.

“The Yrreans are showing us how to design new fabrics at the molecular level so they have special properties,” said Michael. “As you can see, Rolf and Amaia are testing a completely flameproof fabric.”

“It’s also blast-proof up to about a quarter of a megaton,” added Amaia in cheerful French accent. “Imagine if we could outfit first responders with gear like that. Unfortunately, it still needs work. It’s difficult to move in.”

Jason could do little more than stare. “I see . . . yes. Wow.”

When they stepped back out in the hall, he asked Michael: “Where are all these people from? I mean, those accents . . .”

“All over,” said Michael. “Mostly the US and Europe. Japan, too. And Australia. We used to have Chinese and Russians, too. This facility was originally supposed to be kind of a U.N. for working with the aliens.”

“Originally? But not now?”

Michael frowned, an expression that seemed unnatural on his round, boyish face. “Above my pay grade.”

Jason turned to a different topic. “So, how long has this been going on? All the way back to Roswell?”

Michael grinned once more. “Even longer than that. FDR negotiated our first treaty, with the Haku. Ever heard of the Battle Over Los Angeles? That was a huge goof. Some Army pilots accidentally sent a Haku shuttle into the sky and anti-aircraft guns tried to shoot it down. Fourteen hundred rounds and they never hit it because of the way the field drive bends space time around the hull.”

Jason stared down the hall at the signs in three different alien languages. He was not convinced he wasn’t dreaming. Reflexively, he stopped and put his hand on the back of his head.

“Oh yeah,” said Michael. “Looked like you got hit on the head, too, and it had started bleeding a lot. We went ahead and patched that up, too. You’re welcome.”

“Umm, thank you,” said Jason vaguely. They may have patched his skull, but his brain was starting to hurt.

They stepped across the hall and into Room 5A, where something that looked suspiciously like a small engine, about the size of a typical lawn mower motor, was sitting under bright blue lights on a small platform. Jason watched for a moment as a short, long-haired man in a blue lab jacket used a remote control to activate the motor, which instantly began turning a series of gears that were attached to it via a belt drive. The belt wasn’t made of rubber, but of some shiny iridescent material. After a few seconds, the man turned the motor off and typed something on a tablet.

“What kind of engine is that?” Jason heard himself say.

The lab tech turned to him with a glint in his eye. “It runs on water,” he told Jason. “We’re adapting it from a Haku machine that runs some kind of irrigation system back on Dalus. We’re trying to make it smaller and lighter. With any luck, it’ll replace gasoline and electric engines within 20 years.”

Jason stared in wonder. What a breakthrough! But then he began to imagine problems.

“How do you get it into production? And who produces it? Every car company in the world’ll be fighting for it.”

“Mr. Rutherford, who is this man?” said a voice behind them.