The Chrysalis of Eternity

All that time is lost which might be better employed

- Rosseau

A soft, insistent buzzing came from his bedside table. The timepiece indicated he’d been asleep for five standard hours.

“No wonder it doesn’t feel long enough.”

“Yet another different cycle, my love.”

He found and cancelled the alarm, which immediately activated a commlink and the voice of John Smith sounded.

“Sleep all right, Brad?”

“Yeah, thanks, but not long enough. I didn’t ask – what’s the period here?”

“Sixteen standard hours,” the man laughed. Didn’t think to warn you. Want to go back to sleep?”

“No thanks. What’s on the agenda?”

“Well, Twinkletoes would like your company as soon as you’ve cleaned up and eaten. Join me, if you like. I’m eating at the same bistro – they serve a great mushroom omelette here.”

“Give me ten minutes,” Brad replied, getting out of bed. As his feet touched the floor, the opaque window cleared, and he could see pale early morning light filtering through the little complex. He showered and dressed and found John Smith at the same table where they’d lunched.

“Must take a while to adjust to this short day,” Brad observed over coffee, made from real beans according to John.

“I was born here, so no problem, but you’re right. It takes new arrivals a while,” he smiled at Brad. “Especially people like the Nimbians. Their planet has a period of over seventy standard hours – they can sleep for a day and a night without any encouragement. So, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“Our world. Does it warrant closer scrutiny?”

“That’ll depend on the Section Master, but I would imagine it’s already decided. Your Twinkletoes has some connections with GSA apparently.” He didn’t elaborate and it wasn’t long before John excused himself and departed for work.

The plaza filled up again; people were busily coming and going to whatever they did. Brad finished up and strolled around the square for a while, exercising his legs until he found himself at the entrance to the office block where he was expected. He entered.

Herre Ingolfur Sigurdsson greeted him as he approached the office door. It slid open before he could touch it. The squat, misshapen man approached with outstretched claw once more, and Brad shook it. The man was attempting to smile but, without speaking, ushered him into the back office.

“Good morning, Brad Coulson.” Tin-kelto was sitting in the same place, behind his array of monitors and instruments. “Did you sleep well?”

“Almost long enough,” Brad smiled.

“Ah yes. Prime has a thirty hour day, but you work odd hours anyway as a trainee Section Master, don’t you?”

“Actually, I’ve never adapted to Prime’s cycle. I still live more or less on Misran time,” he smiled.

“Well, how do you like what’s been achieved here so far?”

“I’m impressed, Tin. With the available resources, you people have done wonders. This is a real tribute to you.”

“What struck you the most – I don’t mean the engineering or technological stuff. What made the biggest impression apart from the infrastructural development?”

Brad was silent for a moment. He could feel Tin-kelto’s mind probing for the answer before he could properly formulate it; he was seeing the crowds thronging the plaza, the many cultures – and the small man had it immediately. He smiled and leaned back.

“Yes. Kahana was right – he said you’d see it. The mix – the cultural blend here. The Supreme Council always was very careful to keep the various cultures apart. Separate worlds for different language groups; dissimilar cultures discouraged from mixing with any other colonised planets; religious sects strictly separated. That was the status quo until fairly recently. They were preoccupied with keeping each race’s identity intact.”

“Sounds like a pretty bigoted system. Why?”

“Uncontaminated genes, Brad. You’ll see why. I didn’t expect the different races to get on as well as they apparently do. The human race is very adaptable – it’s one of their strongest qualities. Your experience on Misra with the unexpected appearance of the Norwegian colony of Ny Svalbard, where one planet is now host to two different civilisations, was an example of the current loosening up. I have to take credit for that – along with Kahana’s group. As I’m sure you’re aware, we’ve decided the time has come to let the cultures mix, interact. We need a large gene pool for what’s coming. That and the fact that mankind has relatively recently begun evolving at a lightning pace, telepathically speaking. It’s a galaxy-wide phenomenon. There’s a good reason for that, too. Outside influences.” He didn’t elaborate.

“I’ve heard one or two theories on that score myself,” Brad said.

Tin-kelto looked at him sharply. “Well, for one thing, it’s made it that much easier for anyone with the talent to travel via the network. GSA can’t keep tabs on them all the time – that’s the reason they’ve almost lost it, Brad. You joined at a crucial time.”

The slender little man leaned across to where a smaller monitor displayed a scrolling series of schematics and pressed a few keys. Turning back to Brad, he continued.

“Sadly, for the genetic considerations I mentioned, they decided to keep different societies apart. Makes it that much more difficult.”

“Difficult for what?” Brad asked.

“Sorry to be so cryptic, Brad, but you’ll see in due course.” He turned to his instruments again, then looked at Brad as he continued.

“Initially, there was another, more pressing reason. They wanted to develop and guide the human race until it achieved a more civilised, less self-destructive level. On Earth, people of different religions, cultures, languages – whatever the background, if it was different it was suspect and this led to almost continuous mayhem and bloodshed until the Council began its programme, retrospectively, to try to redevelop mankind on more constructive lines.

“That, in a nutshell, was the concept behind Soren Vinicius forming the Council in the thirtieth century, scattering mankind across the vast reaches of space in ever increasing numbers. Although the programme started in the thirtieth century, you and Linda were a part of that programme in the twenty first century, a long time before Soren ever lived. Misra was terraformed for you, to be supplemented of course, but that’s how it worked.

“It was just bad timing that the original GSA discovered a wormhole and sent that colonising expedition under Admiral Petersen along bypassing you pioneers in suspended animation. You were supposed to arrive on a virgin planet, and with the rest of the colonists you would have started another civilisation, but the mix was bad anyway. GSA’s recruits weren’t acceptable to the Section Master. That’s why we let you return to Earth, Brad. We tried to keep you both behind, but only managed to snag Linda; eventually Kahana got you back to Misra just in the nick of time, apparently. They were considering euthanising you, did you know?”

Brad nodded.

“Still, we did get you back and it worked out in the end – Misra is a growing society – a good one.” He stopped speaking and turned to his monitors again, manipulating the controls for a minute, and then turned to Brad again.

“Until now, all societies developed apart. So, now you’ve seen the first real mixing ground, Planet Phoenix. A more unlikely planet would be hard to find, not so?”

Brad nodded.

“That’s why we used it. After the ‘big bang’ as the Herre calls it, Hekla was written off by all except me, and your Caretaker friend Kahana.

“We would have liked more time to assemble many more cultures – after all, twenty odd is hardly representative of the eleven thousand inhabited planets in the galaxy, but time’s run out for us. We’re transporting in another eight consignments of humans from a variety of worlds tomorrow, by the way. Still, it’s already the most diverse assortment of members of the humanoid species ever assembled on one world, and that’s the key.”

“To what?” Brad asked, probing for the answer as Tin-kelto had probed him earlier. They continued to speak vocally, more out of habit as far as Brad was concerned, but at a cerebral level simultaneously. He could feel Tin communicating with Linda at the same time and it startled him at first. This small, strange man’s mental powers were formidable.

“The key, Brad Coulson, to winning the battle of the genes. And to a mystery we have here, concerning a missing time path. A temporal aberration – something has happened to cause a short but significant period of our history to vanish. No, not past history – that would simply be a matter of resurrecting records. This missing piece of history is in the future.” He paused, letting this sink in.

“I’m not quite with you, Tin. I know you can see forwards and backwards, but if it’s in the future, how do you know it’s missing?”

“There’s not a simple answer. In fact it’s a very complex problem. It’s worried us all, ever since it was discovered, by Kahana himself incidentally. As I say, it’s been a puzzle. There’s a gap between the time period beginning in one standard day from now and twenty years hence. We can look into any future scenario during the next sixteen hours, or beyond twenty years from then, but not during the intervening period.”

“Any ideas as to why?”

Tin-kelto shook his head sadly. “It’s something I’ve been working on for many years. I’ve been working my way backwards since the thirty-fifth, trying to make sense of it. I even went out to Prime and used the optical setup there – their observatory, but it didn’t clear anything up for me. The discovery was made a long time ago. It’s been pretty much on the back burner, but of course, the day is almost here when we’ll move into that timeframe, and it would be nice to know what will happen during those twenty years prior to events overtaking us, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, humanity managed for many millennia. Before any wormhole was discovered, man stumbled along somehow without really knowing what was coming, didn’t he?”

“He did, but not too successfully.” Tin-kelto paused, beckoning Brad to share his bench. They sat side by side for a while, mentally in contact, throwing random thoughts concerning the anomaly between them.

“Another disturbing aspect concerns the future after the twenty year period of missing history. There are different timelines – they diverge. I don’t fully understand it, neither do the Caretakers, but something crucial to our future must occur during that time, and depending on how we handle it, our future will follow one of these paths. We’ve looked into the future on a number of occasions, to exactly the same place and time. It’s our benchmark – our island in the ocean of time, and there are always discrepancies. Initially, the changes are subtle. Sometimes the people aren’t quite the same, no drastic changes, mind, but little differences.”

“What sort of differences, Tin?”

“Like name changes – I’ve had visual contact with the man in charge of the records division of GSA two hundred years from now, and on three separate occasions he had three different names, and the wording on documents and signs was influenced by something else each time. It would be Standard English one time, then a mixture of English and Russian the next. The third time the texts were incomprehensible – there was a very strange tongue mixed in there.” He paused, shifting on his bench, and then leaned forward, peering closely at Brad with his huge, beautiful pale eyes.

“Then we came across a future timeline that was as different as it could be. The universe still appeared the same, but there wasn’t a recognisable planet anywhere we looked. Thick, jungle-like vegetation covered every previously terraformed planet we scanned, and the few beings we managed to glimpse were very elusive. They hid from us. It was as if they could see us, which would be impossible. But we never managed a good look at them, but the scanners indicated other, well hidden advanced life forms with intelligence readings off the scale we use.” He paused again, breathing deeply. “There was definitely no recognisable humanoid species there.”

Brad sat still, absorbing this. He felt the hairs on his neck rising as Tin-kelto’s thoughts penetrated his mind. The little man sensed it and his thought pattern changed.

“Here’s another piece of a puzzle that might well play a crucial role, Brad. Take a look at this,” he said, opening a drawer and removing a velvet bag which he placed carefully on the desk. He gently withdrew an instrument that looked similar to an audio memory stick recorder.

“This is one of the items we managed to construct before my colleague from the far future died on me. He told me what it did, and said it would be an essential tool at a certain point in time. That time corresponds with the missing chunk we consequently discovered. The twenty year period that begins tomorrow.”

“What is it? What does it do?”

“It’s a universal translator, Brad.”

“Come on now, that’s nothing new. Hell, I have one in my backpack – it doesn’t look the same, probably a different model, but they’ve been around for centuries. I used one only a month ago on a planet near the border with Sector One – a Sino-Japanese culture that flowed over into our Sector.”

“Ah yes, but both Chinese and Japanese were original Earth languages. This instrument translates none of our known tongues.”

“Yes? What does it translate then?”

“We don’t know. What could that mean, do you think?”

Brad thought hard. He tried to probe Tin’s mind for a clue, but he was blocked out. He grinned at the little man.

“You’re testing me again,” he said.

“No testing, Brad. Looking at things with fresh eyes is how Kahana described it.”

“Well,” he mused aloud, “if no human tongue’s programmed into it, who did the initial imprints?”

“My revolutionary friend. He wouldn’t show me his source data. I thought it strange at the time, but he was very evasive about the instrument and the events surrounding the timeframe.”

“So, if it’s of no use now, with no Earth-derived languages, it could only be for some tongue evolved separately somewhere, possibly in the future. Maybe a hybrid language develops that eventually becomes so different as to stump a translator. Or maybe some race out in the far reaches of the galaxy suffers a catastrophic disruption – like an astronomical collision, or a nuclear war or something similar; the survivors are all too young to speak, and they evolve their own language separately from any Earth based tongue-”

“Very fanciful. A remote possibility, of course, but come on Brad, the thought’s trying to surface but you keep repressing it. Let it out – you have the answer inside that brain – I can see it there. And so can Linda, not so, my dear?”

“You know it, Tin. It scares us both; that’s why it’s buried.”

“Understandable, of course,” Tin replied. “Here, let me run a few examples of its vocabulary by you.”

He spoke at the instrument, which glowed briefly before emitting a series of high-pitched metallic clicking and whistling sounds.

“That, believe it or not, is a language. Humanoid in origin? I think not. Nor do our computers, nor do yours out on Prime – Kahana ran this by them secretly, a while back.”

Brad stood stock still. He could feel the dramatic impact on Linda, and he sensed the remarkable implications of the answer in Tin’s mind, but still he hesitated. There was one event in his life he’d hoped for but never thought he’d see, and it scared him.

The possibility of first contact.

“Yes, my friend, it is so. This is the next step in the evolutionary history of our species – our first contact with a purely alien culture. Not the first, note, but our first.”

“What? There’s been contact already? Anyway, are you basing this on a supposed missing portion of the future and a universal translator that can’t translate our languages? Come on, Tin, we need more proof than that before we know aliens are about to descend on us.”

“I’m afraid you’ve become a tad sceptical, Brad. I sensed it yesterday, when you doubted my ability to look directly into the future. Have you become cynical since your travels around the Sector? You were so open-minded in all the long years before you joined the Service.”

Brad stared at him for a while, his mind wrestling with the ideas formulating there.

“How is it you can see into the future, Tin? Can you travel forward in time?”

“Yes. I’ve done so, Brad. Apart from the relentless steady progress forward, the only apparent direction of travel in time is backwards. As you know, travelling through wormholes, whether the dangerous cyclical types that Earth uses to move their exploratory ships about, or our controlled network, time is lost with each trip. If you move between worlds instantaneously, shifting at speeds faster than light, of necessity you go back in time – the further you travel, the more time you lose, as you both well know.

“However, you and I, along with GSA hierarchy, can use the network without any time loss by controlling the settings provided by whoever constructed the network. That mystery is still puzzling me too. Will they ever reveal themselves to us? And is the network connected to other galaxies? There’s a connection with GSA Headquarters out on Prime, and that’s in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Strictly speaking, it’s another galaxy. But I digress.

“As for seeing ahead, we rely on future technology just as you do with your GSA observatory out at Prime. Nobody knows how it works, but we know how to operate the system. It’s optical, and works in exactly the opposite direction to the Prime observatory. If you want to look, say two hundred years ahead, it’s necessary to focus on a planet two hundred light years away.

“Normally, with the light from that planet taking two hundred years to reach the optical receiver, you would see the planet as it was two centuries ago, or see back in time. But this instrument inverts the process. It warps the timeline, and what enters the receiver is from two hundred years ahead.

“Kahana once put forward a theory about it – he always talks about time being irrelevant. I don’t know, really I don’t. The principles are too far advanced for me – the technology came from a long, long way ahead of us here and now, even ahead of my origins.”

“Well, there was a lot of speculating about the so-called fourth dimension when I was still on Earth, back in the twenty first century. Nothing ever come of their theories?” Brad asked.

“You’re right - there were many theories put out on old Mother Earth. Speculation there was that there are myriad dimensions. One theory I discovered was quite interesting - the nine-dimensional theory. It postulated that there are nine perpendicular dimensions, divided into three categories: space, time and interspace, each comprising three dimensions.

“Time, t, the fourth dimension, is perpendicular to the other three – the conventional x, y and z co-ordinates. It’s not a straight line, like the other three, but cyclical, overlapping itself in regular loops. The bottom of this spiral would represent the past, and the top would extend into the future. From above, this spiral would appear as a circle, so dimension t could be considered the temporal circumference – and I fear I’ve lost you both. Should I stop?”

“Apologies, Tin. I’m not from a scientific background. I hate to interrupt you, but you’re correct. You lost me way back at nine perpendicular dimensions.

“Same here, Tin. Appreciate the effort, but you’re dealing with dummies here, with apologies to you, husband.”

“Neither of you is a dummy – far from it. But the theories, and there are literally thousands of them, are just that – theories. None has been proven. Time is a mysterious dimension – all standard physical laws fall away when you try to examine it.

“Anyway, it took a long time to figure out what we were seeing, but once we knew, it was just a matter of scanning and monitoring the same planets for clues to how things were going to turn out. This is where the anomalies begin to appear – different timelines for the same planets manifested themselves relatively recently. That’s the puzzle.”

“Where did you get the instrument, Tin,” Brad asked.

“My friend from far in one of those futures again, Brad.”

“He must have arrived with a warehouse full of goodies,” Brad observed.

“No really. It was all in his head. We used raw materials from this planet and ‘borrowed’ some equipment from Prime. Using his knowledge, we put together quite an array of instrumentation over a period of about twenty standard years. He was a special person – humanoid in every appearance but for his head – it was even bigger than mine,” he laughed.

“Mine caused some comments when I first arrived here – I used to mingle with the residents, but they felt uncomfortable – I could feel it. The Herre, his compatriots and I stay apart from the masses.

“It’s all right,” he added, “Linda and you both – don’t feel put out. We’re happy in our seclusion, believe me. We both have too much to do here to worry about the reactions of people out there.”

“Tin, I mean this – I feel quite at ease in your presence. In fact, I feel far more relaxed and welcome than I do in the company of most people.”

“I know, Brad, but I’m not what you’re seeing,” he said. “I shield how I appear to everyone – if you saw the real me, you’d probably react as they did when I first arrived. Don’t worry about it. By the way, your friend Kahana does the same thing – most Caretakers do. He would vaguely resemble some giant insect type from Mother Earth if you could see the real him.”

“My oath – like a sort of humanised praying mantis? So I really did have glimpses of his true form then,” Linda observed. “Thought it was my imagination.”

“You know Kahana better than any human ever has, Linda. After all, you spent a hundred and fifty standard years with him. He’s humanoid in origin; we all are, of course, but hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and a little interference have altered the Caretakers quite a bit. My race, extinct now, originated even earlier. A powerful telepath would see us as we are.”

Tin-kelto was silent for a while as he worked on his instruments.

“Ever really wonder about the Section Masters, Brad?”

The question threw him for a moment. He gathered his thoughts before replying, although Tin-kelto was scanning them as he thought.

“Yes, I have, Tin. Why do you ask?”

“What have you wondered? Forgive me for asking these questions – you’ll see where I’m headed soon enough.”

“Well, I presume they’re too busy to bother with the more mundane things, like spending time to meet me for example. They must be very busy – with an area as vast as one whole Sector to control, it’s a wonder anything gets done. I don’t know how they keep track of it all, but Kahana said they’re falling behind, and that’s why I was brought in.”

“Partly true. Kahana brought you in. What would you say if I told you the Section Master for Sector Twenty Four thinks you and Linda are still on Misra? That he doesn’t know about you joining GSA? And that Kahana deliberately misled both him and you, and the chase after Pablo the Vorkutan was the chance he needed – a ploy to get you here without attracting attention? The charade I mentioned yesterday, in fact.”

Brad was stunned; temporarily speechless. He stared at the pale, slender little man sitting next to him, while the whole time Tin-kelto’s hands fluttered from keyboard to knob to pad. His eyes, though, stared straight into Brad’s, and he felt a great uneasiness start to spread through his mind.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Afraid not, Brad.” There was a long silence, while Brad felt Tin-kelto’s thoughts. It frightened him, and he could feel Linda’s anxiety spreading through them both as well. He could feel his hands starting to shake.

“Calm, Brad. We all need level heads in the days coming. I mean it when I say the Section Master doesn’t know about you. We want to keep him in the dark about a lot of things from now on – you’ll see why.”

Brad whistled through his teeth, a tuneless expelling of breath.

“No wonder I was never called to a scrutiny committee as Kahana said I would, before being accepted. I thought everyone was just too busy. Man, this is not good – I’m getting very nervous about you and Kahana, Tin. You’d better tell me what the hell’s going on, and soon.” He tried to look menacing, but Tin-kelto gave him a disarming smile.

“Relax Brad. Kahana, in conjunction with a few of the other Caretakers, has formed a local chapter of ‘Caretakers with Conscience’ – a group that’s sent representatives back here from way in the future. They’ve decided to bring certain matters to a head. There’s something that’s been worrying us all for a very long time. That’s why you’ve been seconded to me – you’re part of my team now. Big team - just the two of us. Or three of us, sorry Linda. You’re just as much a part of all this. No, don’t worry Brad, your status with the Caretakers is still the same, it’s just that the task now confronting us needs someone with your mobility and skills. This is what you’ve been groomed for, Brad and Linda – both of you. For a very long time, in fact.”

He stopped talking, but his hands still flew across the various instruments scattered across his desk.

“Tin, you say we’ve been groomed for this, yet you only recently discovered whatever it is that’s causing you and Kahana mild panic. That doesn’t make sense. I’ve been with Kahana for only two years. What’s the story here?”

Tin-kelto leaned back, finally removing his long arms from the desk. He smiled at Brad, an encouraging, reassuring look that calmed him down immediately.

“Time, the enigmatic factor – that’s the key to all of this. What’s the date right now? Whose scale are you using? Based on what?”

Brad remained silent.

“What if I told you that the Standard Date back on Earth right now, at this exact moment, is AD 1546? Right back in the age of Portuguese exploration; Copernicus recently shocked the Church by declaring the planet is not the centre of the universe; the city states of Italy are at their creative peak; the Russian empire is doubling in size under Ivan the Terrible; the Aztecs are being slaughtered by the Spanish in the name of God; in short, the normal amalgam of mayhem and creativity characterising mankind’s evolution is right on track.”

“But Kahana told me that he set the time and distance settings before I left him, on Epsilon Indi.3. I specifically asked him. Why did he do this? I mean, he must have known the settings weren’t valid. He wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”

“Calm down, Brad. It doesn’t matter to us – time is, as Kahana is so fond of saying, irrelevant eh, Linda? It’s irrelevant to us three in particular. The fact that out there,” he gestured upwards with one long arm, “out there the planets we terraformed and populated are still the same. I’m just making a point about the irrelevance of time; if we were to leave for Earth right now, through the Gateway programmed by me on the surface, without any GSA overriding settings, we would arrive in 1546. So, in fact, that’s the date there, as far as we’re concerned.”

“Why are you keeping the fact that I’m here, we’re here,” Brad added, apologising mentally to Linda, “why keep it from the Section Master?”

“Because he wouldn’t sanction it. In fact, if he knew, he would stop us from going any further with our task.”

“Which is?”

“Preserving the human race, ultimately.”

There was a long silence. Brad could tell Tin was serious – his thoughts all pointed to some dramatic event that he covered well.

“You’re serious; I can feel it, but what danger is the whole of mankind in? And how are we going to save it? Isn’t this a little melodramatic? Why would the Section Master stop us, Tin?”

Tin-kelto got to his feet with an effort and shuffled slowly across to a door behind him.

“Come, follow me,” he said, moving through the door which slid open silently.

They were in a small, brightly lit room with a circular corridor sloping gently downwards. As they entered, a glass bubble-like vehicle appeared and glided to a halt. Tin-kelto led the way in – they sat and the car sped silently down the long, brightly lit tube, moving freely a few centimetres from the smooth surface.

“This doesn’t show up on any schematic,” Tin said quietly. “It’s my personal transport.” They sat in silence for the rest of the trip, moving ever further down a long slope.

When the vehicle stopped, Tin again led the way, this time through a heavy steel door that opened as he approached. Brad followed into a dimly lit ante-room with a huge glass wall looking out into a steaming tropical jungle.

The scene could have been Earth in the dawn of evolution, when vast forested areas covered parts of the planet. There appeared to be no living creatures anywhere, but Brad couldn’t see further than twenty metres anyway – thick, heavy-leafed plants covered the ground and rose to a great height in every direction.

“What’s this place, Tin?” he asked, staring in wonder at the lush greenery that contrasted so vividly with the surface of the planet.

“A nursery, Brad. This is where our team of geneticists is busy preparing to reprogramme the future of our species. Mankind, I’m talking about.”

“Why? I mean, why now? What result are you looking for? What prompted this, at this juncture in history?”

“Too many factors involved. Come, let’s go in and meet the inhabitants of Eden – that’s the name the Herre gave it. He evidently has quite a sense of humour. He forbade any apple trees to be planted here – not that there were any planned, of course – this vegetation was grown using seed and plant material from a vast distance away. Further than we could imagine, and I can imagine great distances, believe me. But come, follow,” he said, as a section of the thick glass slid quietly aside and a blast of hot, moist air smelling of rotting vegetation hit them.

They walked along a well-worn path into the jungle, and within seconds Brad could no longer see the lobby through the glass. The light became a shade dimmer, but hot, bright overhead lamps kept the temperature and light at more than comfortable levels. His uniform kept out the heat, but his head sweated profusely with little rivulets soon running down his neck.

After a few minutes of slowly shuffling along, Tin-kelto stopped and motioned Brad alongside him.

“There – under that fernlike tree. See it?”

Brad peered at a thin, sticklike creature nestling below the leaves. It looked like a large, elongated insect with a wide, flattened head and modified limbs that terminated in many-fingered claws. It vaguely resembled the larger stick insects he’d found in the African bush, when he and Linda lived on their little farm back in the twentieth first century.

“Open your mind, Brad,” Tin-kelto suggested, and immediately he felt powerful, jumbled emotions and the searching, querying intelligence of the creature pouring out at him. Tinged with fear, it prodded his mind and he had great difficulty in blocking out its insidious probing, like tentacles spreading out in all directions.

“This is one strange creature. What is it?” Linda was probing the thing herself, with the same results as Brad. They felt a combination of fear, love, peaceful greeting and hostile aggression all at once – a mishmash of emotions that blanketed them completely. Both of them had difficulty freeing themselves from its influence.

“And that’s just a juvenile,” Tin-kelto said with feeling.

“A juvenile what?” Brad and his wife asked simultaneously.

“Alien. It’s a juvenile alien. This is mankind’s first contact with an alien race, and it comes at a time when the final pieces of a larger puzzle are falling into place. The alien control of mankind is about to undergo a slow process of disentanglement, and you two will be involved in a manner you never would dream.”