Drinking Heavy Water

Chapter 3

Three

“McGowan’s assembling a contact team.” The radio made Bakula’s voice a little thin, even confined in my pressure suit helmet.

I’d grown tired hauling around the pressure suit and the life support pack. I’d felt isolated from the fine sand of the beach and the wave-tossed bay that separated Tritium Base from the endless pearlescent ocean. I’d walked another alien universe, but I couldn’t touch it.

Bakula’s words made the granite walkway beneath my feet feel so immediate I might have been wearing sandals. Fine black wind-driven beach sand hissed against my fishbowl helmet and the metallic recycled air filled my nose, but this so wasn’t a simulation. I felt fully present, overwhelmed by the towering cliffs, amazed by humanity’s sheer effrontery at building Tritium Base looming above the ocean.

Montague had contacted eighteen alien intelligences. They had cataloged dozens of interactions with things that might have been intelligent, but were so different from us we could never hope to communicate.

That tiny red square of sail?

That wasn’t made by a possible intelligence made of cosmic rays and hydrogen and birthed in the microsecond aftermath of the Big Bang. It wasn’t a moss whose flickering colors commanded chemistry, or a gaseous maze-maker, or an eternally blazing fire that did five-dimensional calculus and something that might be charcoal poetry.

A sail meant something sort of similar to us.

Similar enough that we had a chance of achieving communication.

A contact team? My soul thrilled and trembled. I’d seen them first, they couldn’t make me go back inside! I’d aced the First Contact training.

“Security First McGowan requests that you remain outside,” Bakula continued.

My eyes remained focused on the growing square of red-and-white striped sail. “You couldn’t pull me away with a tow chain,” I muttered.

Bakula chuckled. “I’ll relay that verbatim, if you like?”

I shook myself. “No! I’m sorry, that’s a yes. Tell McGowan yes, I’ll be here.”

Bakula’s voice dropped. “Keep your cool, Redding. They’ll need twenty minutes to get everyone suited up and outside. McGowan said something about putting you on the team. Don’t blow it.”

I took a deep breath. “Right. Thanks, Bakula.”

“But if you’re going to completely freak out anyway, please do so in the next thirty seconds or so. That’d give me time to suit up and take your place.”

I chuckled. The sail wobbled up and down as it rode the wind and water. “I think I’m going to disappoint you.”

“Drat.”

“Before you go. Can you patch the real-def video through to me?”

“Sure. We’ve got a lovely view from the summit. You lucky monster.”

My helmet went black for a fraction of a second, almost instantly replaced with a view from the camera on the peak of the extraction plant, high enough to show a view down into the boat.

My first thought was: Viking longboat. Maybe an ancient Greek trireme. Including the three massive oars on each side, moving in careful synchronization straight towards Tritium Base.

The base was silver-white, and stood on top of a cliff. I’d heard from one of the security officers on hovercraft patrol that you could see the base for kilometers.

According to the metrics at the bottom of the display, the boat was maybe six or seven meters long. The sail obscured the mast, but the raised prow and bow seemed designed both to slice through the water and act as vantage points.

And the alien in the prow?

What I could see looked humanoid. One arm held the prow while the other shaded its head against the spray.

I pushed down my disappointment.

At least it was inhumanly bulky. Was that fur?

Or was it wearing fur?

I couldn’t help imagining that somehow, Viking explorers had fallen through an inter-universe rift and found themselves in the far future. I pushed away that idea as quickly as it appeared. You can’t use Portals to travel through time, not even if you carried a bolognium device through one and made it bizarrely and uniquely malfunction like in all the serials.

If I discovered an alien race, I wanted it to at least have tentacles or suckers.

Still, they were my aliens. I needed a closer look.

“Any drones yet?” I asked Bakula.

“Negative,” Bakula said. “It’s too windy for microdrones, so we’ve dispatched the minis.”

Minidrones would need a couple minutes to get out to the boat, and they couldn’t approach as close. Our visitors might not notice a drone the size of a gnat, but they’d notice one as big as my hand.

The creature in the prow raised the limb over his head, exposing his face.

And yes, it had a face.

The summit video showed bare brown skin. A nose, a mouth, two eyes.

If that alien got a haircut, a shave, and a modern shirt, he could walk past my childhood home and I wouldn’t look twice.

Maybe our visitors weren’t alien at all. Had someone else figured out how to open Portals?

Or maybe they knew us a whole bunch better than we knew them.