Chapter 1

Six students were abducted from a high school in Sandusky, Ohio, following a Halloween party. The crime made national news.

The Sandusky Police spent hundreds of hours interviewing witnesses. The missing students were seen leaving the party with two people who claimed to be students from a high school in Seattle. They had been dressed in intricate Halloween costumes which were engineering marvels having four arms and four hands with six fingers each. Each arm moved independently in lifelike fashion.

The two strangers gave their names as Hector and Mary but refused to remove their costumes or explain how they worked. Hector said that his father was an engineer with Boeing and that he and Mary were heading to MIT after high school.

The students and the strangers were seen leaving the high school parking lot in an unusual car—a beautiful sleek machine with gull wing doors, silver metallic in color. One of the witnesses to their departure used his cell phone to photograph the car. Unfortunately, the picture proved to be of little value. A search of automotive data bases found nothing resembling the ultra-modern car. The police concluded that it must have been a handmade, one of a kind vehicle; probably electric drive since it made no sound when it left the school lot.

A check with Boeing led nowhere. A check with the high schools in Seattle was fruitless. This lack of progress spread fear among many high schools. People around the country demanded that all police departments be provided with a copy of the grainy picture of the unidentified car. The weeks dragged on and still no progress was made in the case—until Mardi Gras.

Mary and Hector abducted the humans as part of a high school science project. During the course of their experiment, it had become necessary to kill the humans. However, the initial results of the study had proved promising so the alien duo was given permission to return to earth and abduct another group for more study. This time the experiment would have new parameters. To aid in next phase of the human study project, Mary and Hector recruited their friend, Worel.

Worel was a forceful, bombastic individual. He was both a scientist and an engineer. He believed that various solar systems in our galaxy—and maybe solar systems in other galaxies—should be seeded with humans. He was interested in nurturing various human environs in different ways and then evaluating the progress of each. Essentially he wanted to conduct proscribed experiments with human evolution. Worel figured that if he could seed twelve planets, he could experiment with each in different ways. And with so many experiments running over vast distances, he might be able to conduct his illegal experiments undetected. Worel was excited to be part of Hector and Mary's project.

The three friends would test the new group of six humans over the course of a year and then petition their alien congress to allow the solar systems to be seeded with humans in a broad experiment. If the congress voted to disallow human seeding, then the humans would likely be destroyed in accordance with the Prime Directive. Since this directive dictated that there can be no interference with the internal development of alien civilizations, returning the humans to Earth with knowledge that there was life on other worlds would certainly be a violation of the PD. Therefore, the humans would have to die.