“Glad I caught you guys,” he said. “Once again, thanks. It’s been… something.”
“Don’t you have to write a report on this? I mean, were you supposed to report to work anywhere…?”
“Yes,” the pilot said, “but my flight is this morning and I’ll be right on time. No report needed. And you can be sure that I won’t elaborate too much on what — well — let me put it this way. Those pilots who report having seen UFOs out there … tend to have short careers. And this weekend — if I reported this… Well, I won’t. There isn’t a soul in the world who really needs to know the details. Anyway, I’m on my way to the airport now, with the rest of my crew.”
“Uh, were they… was everybody else… okay?” Dave asked carefully.
The pilot laughed. “I talked everyone round,” he said. “All is well. But I’ll not be forgetting these last few days in a hurry. I actually went out there earlier, out into the garden, and just stood looking at the sky — I fly large metal objects for a living, and I think nothing of it, it’s an everyday thing — but now, all of a sudden, it seems to me like I’ve never really done it before. Not truly. Not being aware of what I was actually doing, or of how improbable it was… or of how trivial it all seems, now, after a real miracle just happened.”
“Are you going to be okay? Flying?” Dave asked carefully.
“Oh, yes,” the pilot said. “Once I’m in the cockpit of the plane it’s going to be the familiar routines that kick in. I’ll be fine. But still and all… there was… there was the Moon.” He lifted his hands in a gesture that was pure helpless wonder, unable to articulate further the things that he was thinking. “Are your… friends… still around?” he inquired at length, glancing around him and lowering his voice as if he were asking for classified information from an intelligence operative.
“Disappeared around midnight last night,” Dave said.
“Well, if you ever run into them again, be sure to give them my regards,” the pilot said. “Thanks again, and good luck!”
“One down on the good side of the ledger,” Dave muttered as the pilot walked away.
“But here comes trouble again,” Xander said in a low voice.
A corpulent man in a crumpled business suit, his hair in a severe crew — cut, stalked purposefully toward poor Luke. He was a head taller and twice as broad as Luke, and the hands that emerged from the sleeves of his suit jacket looked like small shovels; Xander, himself of a wiry build and looking like a child next to the approaching brute, felt an irrational urge to step out in front of Luke to protect him.
“You’re Luke Barnes?”
“Y — yes,” Luke said, unsure if it was entirely safe to admit this but resigned to the fact that his name tag confirmed his identity to whoever cared to establish it. “I’m Luke Barnes. How can I be of assistance?”
The man in the suit threw out one his massive hands, and Luke actually ducked away for an instant before he became aware that the hand in question was holding a business card that looked lost and tiny in the grip of those sausage — sized fingers.
“Thaddeus Smyrnoff, CEO of All Steel Incorporated and prisoner of this hotel for the past three days. I had a very important meeting with possible investors in my company on this past Saturday, the sole reason I had taken time off work to be in town, and I was prevented from being at this meeting by the staff of this hotel and other guests whose activities may have been a direct cause of my situation. You may consider this your first and only notification of my intent to sue this hotel and possibly the event it has been hosting this weekend for damages and loss of income. Good day to you, sir.”
“The event…?” Luke echoed, blindsided.
Thaddeus Smyrnoff reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled and badly folded copy of Libby’s Saturday newsletter — with ABDUCTICON plastered firmly across its title page.
“I have the evidence,” he said. “I will be passing the details on to my lawyer.”
He turned and stalked off, and Luke stared after his retreating back, open — mouthed, holding onto the business card by pure reflex.
“They’re going to fire me now,” he said, after a moment. “For sure.”
Xander snorted. “Please. For all his huff and bluster, I’d like to see him go into any sane lawyer and offer up a case.”
“Was he one of the doc’s headcases?” Dave asked warily. “He might well have a case of claiming he was given sedatives or something…”
“Dave, it all falls down the moment someone chirps that we went to the Moon,” Xander said. “No court in the land is going to take this seriously.”
“But I saw people taking pictures,” Luke said faintly. “I can’t see them all disappearing. And if there’s visual evidence…”
“Where there’s photos there’s Photoshop,” Xander said. “And if it’s video… you can CGI your way out of anything these days.”
“You make it all sound so fake,” Dave said unexpectedly, and a shade defensively.
Xander shrugged. “It’s worse than that, it’s dead, Jim. All you’d have to do is call The National Inquirer and give them an anonymous tip about how a whole hotel was, you know, abducted by aliens and taken on a joyride in the solar system over the course of a wild weekend. Which immediately makes a judge put it in the same folder with the case of the nun who swears she bore Elvis’s love child. And after that, no ‘real’ news organization is going to touch it — except to point and laugh — and if the media don’t treat it as ‘real’ news, the courts are hardly likely to take on something considered to be ridiculous. Judges take their dignity too seriously for that.”
“But we did go,” Dave said, suddenly reluctant to let go of the smallest incandescent iota of his out — of — planet experience.
Xander looked at him, eyes shining. “And we all know that,” he said. “But there is, I suspect, precious little that anyone who is not One Of Us is going to believe if they are told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about this weekend. That’s the joy of it, in a way. It’s ours, only ours, and nobody else believes. The truth is out there, it always has been, and we’ve seen the future, and man, I’m still high from all of it. And a little scared, to be sure — perhaps we know too much. But nothing will ever take this away from me. And it’ll never…”
A gaggle of young con — goers, average age about twenty one, trooped past the trio at the door, and halted beside them. One of the group, his hair a vivid shade of green, turned to Xander with an expression of such glowing delight that it was impossible not to smile back, and Xander did, giving him a broad grin. Nothing more needed to be said, it was all understood between them, and it seemed to come as a direct validation of what Xander himself had just been saying. But then one of the group stepped up and stuck out his hand for Luke to shake — and the manager did so, instinctively, without quite knowing why.
“Thanks, man, you were great,” the kid said enthusiastically. “It’s a pretty cool hotel, this, I don’t know how you pulled it all off — where are the droid dudes, anyway? — but you were really cool with it all. It’s been the best con, ever. Um, do you know how to get in touch with those guys? I mean, can we do this again next year? That would just be frigging awesome.”
“Probably not,” Xander said. “We had our shot. But I know. They came to me, too. Awesome doesn’t begin to describe it.”
“There’s always hope,” said one of the other kids. “We’ll be back next year anyway. Who knows who else might come along for the ride.”
“My roommate was supposed to come, but had to cancel at the last minute, family emergency,” a third one from the group crowed. “Man, is he going to be steamed he missed this one. Can’t wait to tell him all about it.”