Independence Day: Silent Zone by Stephen Molstad

Author:Stephen Molstad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Published: 1998-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

An hour later, Wells went inside the observation room a second time. His clothes were wrinkled, his eyes were red around the rims, and he needed a shave. Without hesitating, he quietly brought a chair across the floor and set it close to the alien's bedside. Unlike the interrogators before him, he took a seat, folded his hands in his lap, and merely sat there.

"Where are you from?" he whispered softly. He wasn't asking a question, just listening to the words. He knew he had to translate them into a language this creature from another galaxy could understand. Where are you from? he asked again, trying to push the idea out of his head and into the space separating their bodies. Where are you from? over and over, as if it were a matter of will, a matter of concentrating hard enough to find and flex those mental muscles mind readers must have. His instinct, or whatever was leading him, told him the creature communicated by ESP, which turned out to be pretty close, as close as his earthbound imagination could have taken him.

The creature rolled its head to look at him. Behind the almost-human face, the cranium was a thick, translucent plate extending straight back. Through the walls of the skull, Wells traced the lacy pattern of veins and watched small clots of tissue contract, then release. The way the eyelids closed over the surface of the moist mirror-black eyes, the way it had turned its head, and manipulated its fingers, everything indicated that this exotic creature possessed an intelligence similar to our own.

Wells decided on another approach. He tried sending eidetic imagery or mental pictures. But how to translate the question Where are you from? into images? He worked at it for a few minutes but found himself trying to mentally broadcast pictures of stick-figure bodies, simple houses, a question mark. He knew it was wrong, that his logic was too abstract, too human. Then, all at once, it hit him. He knew how to ask the question.

He thought of his own home, the two-story structure he shared with his wife in the hills outside of Santa Fe. He meditated on this idea for some time, leading the alien on a tour of the house. He concentrated not only on what the place looked like, but also his feelings for it. Exploring his own heart, Wells lingered on the comfort he felt in this place and his strong sense of possession for it. He moved into the living room, empty now but still echoing with the warmth and laughter of visiting friends, and sat down in his favorite chair, remembering the feel of the upholstery under his hands. Without warning, this meditation was ended as his mind was abruptly plunged into a completely new reality. The frail creature on the table took the scientist on a tour of its own.

Even before he recognized that there was no light, he could feel the heat. Blast-furnace heat, the limit of what his body could withstand, came at him from all directions.

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