The trailer shuddered, its outer skin convulsing, reforming itself—but into what, Kevin couldn’t see. He felt a faint vibration through his feet. Then a not so faint vibration. The muddy ground outside the trailer started rising.
“Well kick me in the head and call me a crash test dummy.”
A trio of red lights started flashing, and a whining like the teeth of hell came from directly under his feet. The floor dropped. It felt just like being in an elevator.
When Kevin looked out the window, his mouth fell so far open that his gum tumbled out onto the floor.
Pulverized rock, glowing ember-red, swept past the windows. The trailer leveled off at five hundred feet below ground. Occasionally there would be a bump or lurch, but for the most part the ride was smooth.
Kevin had one memory he would always cherish: the dumbfounded black coverall guys looking down into the hole, their faces bloodless, white.
After that, remote cameras provided the only view of the world above ground. Kevin had disentangled himself from Mind—easier now with practice, so his only sources of input were those monitors and the instruments that delineated the trailer’s configuration and performance as it burrowed through the rock.
“Where’s the energy for all this stuff coming from?” Kevin wondered aloud as he moved around the trailer—or what had once been the trailer. It was Gadget City now, every machine humming and flashing with power. He just didn’t buy Mind’s easy answer.
Until he went to the bathroom.
The bathroom wasn’t the bathroom anymore. Behind the door, which appeared unchanged, a large black cylinder squatted. Transparent coils fed it from above, pumping what looked like molten metal into the top of it. Below, other coils carried away something darker, cooler. And a tiny chamber at the base seemed to be collecting small amounts of something from whatever was flowing through the coils.
Cables slithered out of the black cylinder’s base, leading toward every part of the trailer.
Kevin scratched his head.
This must be where they did it, where they accomplished what Earth scientists still could not. Somewhere inside that cylinder, energy was being produced—enough energy to work all these changes, to alter every atom in the trailer. To move it through rock as easily as a submarine moved through water.
Fusion or witchcraft? Kevin shrugged. This was going to make him rich. He could hire a tutor to explain it to him afterward. Another question was beginning to bother him even more urgently.
“So, what if I have to take a dump?” he asked, slamming the bathroom door in disgust.
Appendage 2 came around twice, urging him to reconnect with Mind. Kevin refused. He meant to go on refusing.
“There’s enough of you critters in my brain already,” he told the big bot, which rotated one hundred and eighty degrees and moved away, looking sullen.
The trailer increased its speed and started moving in wide circles, as if searching for something. Kevin hardly noticed. Watching the remote views, he saw the swarms of uniforms—black coveralls now absent, replaced by blue and brown and even Army green—bustling about the edge of the crater where his mobile home had rested for six and a half years. It made him feel powerful, to be able to observe them without being observed, to know the answers to so many of the questions that burned in their minds.
But not all the answers.
The floor tilted again; ridges popped up beneath his feet, enabling him to keep his footing. The trailer churned downward through denser rock. For a while the ride was smooth, but then there came an increasing number of jarring impacts.
Then a final lurch, and silence.
Kevin’s stomach surged up into his mouth as the trailer crashed into something hard. Kevin was propelled across the room and into a big balloon-like thing that suddenly appeared from nowhere. It softened the impact, and when the trailer came to rest at a thirty degree cant, Kevin wasted no time getting to the door.
Stepping outside…
Dank. A sharp, flinty odor hung in the air. Water dripped in the distance. The air felt cold, clammy.
“Light. I need light.”
The trailer’s deck light came on, brighter than it had ever been before. Around him, a subterranean cavern sprang out from the darkness, complete with stalactites and stalagmites and sparkling, quartz-encrusted walls.
“Megacool,” said Kevin. He chomped on his gum, which tasted a little gritty since he’d picked it up off the floor.
“But what the hell are we doing here?” He walked off a few steps and turned back to look at the trailer. Fleetjet 2000, all the way. An old ’92. In deplorable condition. It looked funny, sitting there on the wet cavern floor. But Kevin saw no sign of damage. In fact, it had already leveled itself.
He blinked. Something was happening around the trailer’s underbelly. Things were dropping down to the cave floor—what they were, he couldn’t tell. They moved, shimmering, and then the cave floor beneath the trailer took on a violet glow. The glow spread outward in an expanding ring, and everywhere it passed, the rock sprouted complex structures that gleamed with processed metal and flashed with electronic displays. Great chunks of the floor rose up, altering from raw stone into polished slabs of every shape and size and color. Stairs led up to these elevated structures, their steps perfectly shaped for human use.
[This will be our Centerplace,] a voice said in his mind. Kevin shook his head. He realized he already knew the answer.
Centerplace.
[This is where we are safe, where we come to rest. There is much to be done.]
Kevin tugged at his ear. “You asking me or telling me?”
[No compulsion is required. We wish to help your race advance without disturbance. You will be our conduit. You will act in the best interest of your race.]
“Did you ever think maybe I don’t like my race that much?” Meekly. Taxes. Bills. Hell, what was he saying? This was his ticket out. Still, it wouldn’t pay for Mind to know this.
“Look, I just get the funniest feeling you aren’t telling me everything. Like why you’re really doing all this. Like what you’re getting out of it.”
[As we said, we only want to help you—]
“Look, Bud, my race wasn’t born yesterday, and neither was I. So give it up and tell me, or count me out.”
Mind hesitated, which he found reassuring. Kevin had a feeling they’d be working with each other quite a lot in the years to come. It was nice to know he (she? it?) could be rattled.
[There is one slight benefit to us, should we succeed.]
Kevin sighed. “I knew it. What is it? Face-eating? You want to control our minds, steal our women? Train us to become your riding animals? What?”
[Nothing like that,] Mind said. [It was a contest.]
“A what? Did you say a contest?”
[The Allied Starfarers hold a competition every few of your millennia. The group to first locate, then contact, and finally advance to starfaring status any protointelligent species is the winner. I am Mind, Group 3. My group has advanced to Phase 2, the first to do so. We are only a few centuries from winning.]
“And what’s the prize?” Kevin asked. “A trip to Disneyland?” And who are you calling protointelligent?
Again, a brief hesitation.
[The victor is held in the highest esteem. It’s quite an ego boost, too.]
Kevin laughed, but then he stopped laughing. He was thinking about those contests where engineering students from Stanford and M.I.T. and such tried to make robots that could pick up plastic discs or brush a chipmunk’s teeth at fifty paces. Could the aliens contacting him be the equivalent of college students?