Chapter 1: Leaving on a Jet Plane

Thomas Christopher swam through the fog of sleep and eventually surfaced. The first two hours of sleep for him required the ground to shake to wake him up. The light knock on the door came again. Why weren't they using the bell?

Would a burglar be so persistent? A "no-knock" raid was just that -- they'd have come through like gangbusters. He threw on a robe and checked outside. Two men in suits stood outside, patiently knocking again. Still, while Bel Air was considered a "safe" suburb of LA, he left the chain on when he opened the door.

"Dr. Thomas Christopher?" the man in the lead asked.

That put Thomas back in a familiar neighborhood. "Yes, I'm Dr. Christopher."

"If you'd invite us in, we have a proposition to discuss with you." The man displayed what was clearly a badge labeled "Federal Bureau of Investigation."

"I'm not dressed."

"There is a certain degree of time pressure here. Invite us in if you're interested."

A robe was decent enough, so he unhooked the chain and let them in and if they were scandalized by his bare feet, what of it?

Thomas was a bit short of average height, although his arms were longer than average, reaching half way to his knees. He was trim and kept in shape by playing handball or tennis with his peers or students -- whoever was available. Sandy brown hair, cut like a businessman would have it, pale blue eyes that only seemed weak if you didn't look too hard.

"I will make this short, Dr. Christopher. If you're interested in a project that is of the utmost important to national security, involving one of the greatest discoveries of all time, please say you're interested. Otherwise, we won't take up any more of your sleep."

The two Federal agents might have been stamped out by a cookie cutter, dressed in single-breasted blue pinstripe suits, with white shirts, black ties and no visible jewelry. If you looked close, you could see they were armed. Big stocky men, half a foot taller didn't intimidate Tom, not even a tiny bit. Even armed, they didn't.

"What kind of discovery? What kind of project?"

"The classified sort of project. Where you promise the sun, moon and your first born as a security deposit. Where violations are treated with serious jail time -- not slaps on the wrist. Yes, or no, Dr. Christopher?"

"How long is this likely to take? I have finals to give next week."

"Yes or no, Dr. Christopher?"

Thomas deliberately turned away from the men and went into the kitchen. He pulled a Coke from the fridge and downed it in four gulps. "I'm never much good without coffee in the morning. This is a field expedient," he explained. He was watching carefully when he used the term; there were no change of expression on either man's face.

"The last time, Dr. Christopher. You aren't going to get more information unless or until you sign that national security agreement -- or we depart. This offer will never be made again."

"I'll sign. If this is crap, I'll crap on you."

The man held out his hand and the other placed a leather folio in it. Thomas was a careful man and though the words of the agreement were almost unchanged after ten years he still read them carefully. Only the penalties had changed, really. The crossed American flags, the red and blue ink and remarkable brevity and clear language for a government document was unchanged.

He signed it and waited curiously. "Dress," he was told. "Pack for two weeks, do not pack any electronics, not even a shaver. Arrangements will be made to proctor your exams for you."

Did they know he was going to do research instead of teach this summer? He expected they did.

They drove through the night to LAX, to a military hanger. He was escorted up the ramp of a C-130, and directed to a seat. The two agents vanished and an Air Force captain appeared. "You see nothing, you say nothing, and even if your wife appears, you don't know anyone here. Do crosswords." He handed Thomas a crossword puzzle magazine.

"I have my work," Thomas told him.

"Anything you write on this flight will be collected and will go into a burn bag. Attempt to evade the security and you'll spend a lot time with a fellow named 'Spike' -- you'll not find him very collegial ... but the odds are he'll take a shine to you."

Four men and a woman joined him over the next hour. Three of the men he didn't recognize -- but he knew the woman. The woman looked at him and he looked at her. They'd known each other for a couple years and loathed each other. He wondered what sort of a project needed a linguist and a tendentious anthropologist?

The last fellow he also recognized and he was recognized in turn. The two men traded bland stares and then ignored each other. Jack Grimes was an MD, and a good one. He was also about a half dozen other things.

They flew steadily east, until somewhere over the middle of the country. Then they started circling, and the sounds came signaling that they were undergoing midair refueling. That brought a frown to Thomas' face; they had used less than half of their fuel, not all of it. They hadn't needed to refuel. If they were going out of the country, it would have made more sense to refuel just before they left US airspace.

The answer left some of the other passengers airsick. After the refueling, they dropped like a rock. Then the plane leaned back at about a thirty degree angle of climb, and went up as not nearly as fast as it had descended, but fast enough. Then they starting making circles in the sky. The circles tightened until they were very small indeed. Thomas put his brain in neutral, trying not to be airsick as well. He's never been airsick before, but they certainly stretched the limits this time.

Then they straightened out and flew level for the better part of an hour and a half.

Before they turned onto the final portion of their course, the Air Force captain came to collect any remaining cell phones and GPS devices. The captain was blunt.

"Possession of an unauthorized cell phone, GPS or other electric-powered device will henceforth be the cause of immediate incarceration. Prison sentences will be indefinite -- the President and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court will have to certify that you can no longer harm the defense of the United States. That might be a while in coming. It's not worth the risk."

Except Tom had known which way he was traveling since before high school, without needing to have a GPS or even a compass.

He settled down to patiently wait some more.

Along about noon they landed and went directly to a hanger before they were allowed deplane. Then they were put in a bus without windows, traveled a half hour, and then unloaded in a large building where they were led to elevators and dropped a couple of hundred feet.

"Get some rest," they were told. "It's about 4 PM locally and there are a couple hours of downtime. We'll get you up in a few hours, feed you and do the initial briefing. You'll know more about your schedule in due course."

He didn't smile or let on. He'd been awoken at two in the morning; they had been on the way to the airport at a quarter of three. Take off about five, four hours in the air, an hour refueling and going in circles, then two hours to their destination. He was morally certain they were in the Central Time zone, so add two more hours. It was about two PM, not four.

On the other hand, the military don't like being told that they are wrong -- until it was announced what the real time was, it was four PM.

They fetched them for dinner as a loose civilian group. There was no interest in enforcing military discipline which Thomas considered a good sign. He was curious about what people would wear. They were all good Californians -- slacks and nice shirts and blouses, sensible shoes.

An oriental man stood in the front of the dining room and when everyone was seated he was quick. "I imagine you're all hungry and curious. Right now, get something to eat, we'll talk when everyone has had some sustenance."

It stood to reason that the government knew Thomas' checkered history. At one time he'd been fascinated by everything in the world and had wanted to try it all. It had been a freak; a one in a million accident. He'd ridden in a Humvee to a meeting with a tribal chief in Tikrit, Iraq. At one point he leaned down to accept a present from the chief's ten-year-old daughter, her shy six-year-old sister at her side.

One of those ugly yellow and black flowers opened six feet behind them, turned everyone around into gruel -- except Thomas who was shielded by the older daughter's body. How do you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning after a young woman dies in your place?

Thomas hadn't walked away from the blast. He had some burns; he'd needed new eardrums ... and a lot of counseling. He didn't shave and do anything else that required him to look into a mirror for more than a year.

Adventurism for adventure's sake died that morning. He still did things, exciting things -- but intellectually exciting. This was the first time he'd left LA in eight years.

He found he'd eaten a steak dinner flying entirely on autopilot. For dining room food, it had been surprisingly good.

Now, the oriental fellow, an ethnic Chinese if he was any judge -- and he was -- rapped a water glass with a knife and got everyone's attention.

"I'm Dr. Fred Tang and I'm a sort of half-baked expert at getting research teams on long assignments to work together -- and avoid killing each other. I'm half a project manager and half your ombudsman. Come to me if you're on my team and have an issue.

"What I'm going to cover is the basic discovery. I'm not going to bore you with any more but one additional warning. We're serious about security. This is currently the highest research priority in your nation and mine. Don't screw up. One last time -- if you're not prepared to give this your very best from the git-go, you're in the wrong place."

The phrase "in your country or mine" was downright fascinating. The US cooperated with Taiwan on a regular basis. Dr. Tang's accent was that of a native of Beijing. The US and Beijing cooperated on practically nothing, and certainly nothing of national security importance.

Dr. Tang launched right into his briefing.

"About six weeks ago an American exploration crew found something remarkable. Subsequent investigation has learned we had no idea what 'remarkable' was until just recently.

"The site is currently within the territorial waters of the United States. What the US was looking for and why they were looking where they were looking isn't germane. As of now we aren't planning on bringing any of you to the physical site. The environment is stable, but there are ongoing risks. However, people are working there even now."

"I'm going to take a moment here to digress into politics. What I'm going to say won't set well with most of you. I am Dr. Fred Tang, a professor of physics, but also Dr. Fred Tang, a colonel in the People's Republic of China's Liberation Army.

"I am not going to try to soft soap or minimize what's happened. My government has an active and effective intelligence service. Even so, it took a few weeks for the agents in place to convince the politicians of the importance of what the US had found.

"My government was facing what was certainly an existential threat. The best result that could be expected was to become a technological and economic backwater. After all the progress we've made in the last twenty years, that wasn't acceptable to the government.

"I and my associates are here for the simple reason that my government threatened to detonate a very large H-bomb on the site. And, it was decided, we'd drop more bombs on American cities, because it was unlikely the US wouldn't retaliate.

"Obviously this was an exceedingly unpleasant threat.

"China is not like the United States and the PLA is quite different from your military. Its structure is quite different from your military's. It is accurate to say that the PLA has tentacles all through Chinese society. The party, the government -- and business. In China it is redundant to refer to the 'military-industrial complex' and the PLA in the same sentence. The PLA controls a significant fraction of my nation's industrial output -- although it is true that since economic liberalism that has declined.

"Again I make no apologies for the actions of my superiors. The leadership of the PLA decided that the threat was too severe and argued that no such threat should be permitted; the party leadership panicked and refused to withdraw the threat out of fear of embarrassment.

"It was done very quietly, but the party no longer runs China. The PLA assumed control briefly, appointed a trio of non-party mayors of some of the major commercial and industrial cities to run things in the interim. We did withdraw the nuclear threats against your cities -- but kept the threat against the site. We simply asked to become equal partners in the research.

"There were a number of sidebars to the agreement, but I must say that all parties have been surprised at how well the agreement is working out. At the working level there have been no significant disagreements -- no more than two scientists with differing approaches who are running a project." He grinned, and there was nervous laughter from the audience.

"This is one of many reasons this project is secret. The leadership of the PLA is orchestrating a slow transition in the government, preparing the people slowly and carefully for the changes. There have been several retirements of senior party leaders announced; there will be more. Later, if any of you are curious, I will arrange a briefing detailing our new government structure.

"Your government didn't feel the need to inform its general populace of the threat to incinerate a number of your cities -- no matter how quickly the threat was withdrawn. Please ... even the dimmest bulb in this audience must understand the reasons our two governments will be dealing harshly with any security breaches -- real or imagined. For your own sakes, don't transgress. I assure you, you will have enough on your plate to make up for it."

"Now I will return to the topic of real interest.

"I'll make a series of brief declarative statements. US National technical means detected an anomaly. Subsequent research has confirmed that there is an object that appears to be a vehicle, not a base, about five hundred feet beneath the ocean. Which ocean you don't need to know. The top of the site is about three hundred feet beneath the surface of the ocean, but extends vertically about a hundred and twenty feet deeper. The vehicle is buried under about a hundred feet of sediment, thus the base of the vehicle is about two hundred and fifty feet below the ocean bed and some five hundred and fifty feet below mean sea level.

"The vehicle is air tight, even after all this time. It is a serious understatement when I say that the vehicle has a very robust self-repair ability."

Tang looked around for a moment. "The vehicle is about the size of a football stadium. It has nine levels, and is arrow-shaped -- a blunt, rounded head that widens to about twice the width as the blunt end at what we are sure the rear of the vehicle. It ends in a section much narrower than the rest of the head -- like the section on an arrowhead that the arrow is tied to the head.

"We were lucky there, as the excavation of the vehicle is still in the early days. An educated guess was made based on early scans of the area, and we uncovered the approximate shape of the rear of the vehicle.

"A week ago the decision was made to open the vehicle, over the vociferous objections of many of us. However the rewards appeared to justify some risk. We prepared what amounts to a series of airlocks. People entering the vehicle would pass through a number of chambers where they would be thoroughly decontaminated, coming and going, several times. The air pressure is pumped to zero three times and the air at each stage is recycled. The last two stages we used the vehicle's own atmosphere. It is estimated that quantity of air exchanged between the two environments is less than a tenth of an ounce -- two or three grams. The air was zapped with hard radiation, ultra-violet, radio and microwaves -- across the spectrum radiation that was believed to have been sufficient to sterilize what little air was exchanged several times over.

"It is impossible to tell how long the vehicle has been there, but the upper limit is about five million years and the lower limit about three million -- depending on how fast the vehicle was buried.

"There were no signs of a crew -- although we've only explored a few percent of the vehicle yet. Of course, given the time span that has passed they could have dried up and vanished.

"Obviously this is a momentous discovery.

"Now if there are any minds out there that I haven't blown, I am going to do so now.

"The US Government isn't stupid. Trying to keep something like this to itself would cause rifts within even the most solid alliances -- and your traditional alliances would never survive being excluded with China included. Some nations however, aren't likely to be able to deal with the nature of the discovery. The US has fallen back on some of its more trusted, longer-term allies. Canada and Britain. Germany and Japan, and Australia for the most part. A great many former partners aren't being included, such as the Low Countries, France, and the southern tier of NATO members.

"Now, I'm going to speak a few dozen words of heresy."

"There are a number of obvious research priorities. But the top priority, far above all the rest is language translation. The technology ... I don't know how to explain this. Evidently we are further along than we thought. Still, there are many areas of sophistication that these aliens held over us.

"Consider for a moment, a modern integrated circuit. If we were to go back in time a mere century -- our simplest integrated circuits would be total mysteries to a researcher of the time. They didn't have the technology to detect devices on a nanoscale. They didn't have microscopes capable of 'seeing' a VLSI device and they didn't have the analytical tools and techniques to tell them the composition of the devices, much less how they were made.

"Modern plastics would have baffled them -- as would modern metallurgy. Our understanding of molecular biology, genomics ... a thousand areas would have left them in the dust.

"The aliens haven't left us in the dust. Our equipment can detect their microcircuits -- even ones that have unexpected biochemical components. There are frequent new approaches; there are frequently areas that they've greatly refined over ours. There are areas of knowledge that they are exploiting things we don't understand -- but we feel that if we apply ourselves, we will understand then.

"Our people originally said they were a million years ahead of us. That has slowly shrunk; the best guess these days is a few thousand years of refinements -- applications of technology -- not that many major fundamental breakthroughs. There undoubtedly are such, but they don't predominate. Refinements of technology for the most part.