Anyway, I asked some of the patients why they were so eager to see her again, expecting them to say she was going back to K-PAX soon and they wanted to be first in line. But it was more than that. Part of it was the motherhood thing, and part was her television interview. They didn’t like the host’s grilling her about who she’s had sex with, or who was the father of her child. Beyond that, they were concerned that there may be some Badguys who were watching us from afar, ready to step in when we got completely out of hand, and they thought she might be able to do something about that. The fact is, I think they gave a fuck.
Whatever the reasons, they wanted her back. And so did I. There were innumerable things I wanted to talk to her about. For example, I hadn’t had the chance to warn her that Messrs. Dartmouth and Wang might want to see her at midnight on Friday in order to perform classified acts on her to keep her from leaving the Earth with 100,000 Earth people, particularly if any of them were American citizens who were planning to diminish the GDP. In fact, I had come to believe that these agents of the government would stop at nothing to hold on to the beliefs and values they (us?) held dear.
As far as the patients were concerned, I desperately wanted to give her one last chance to talk to each of them. If she could get to the heart of their problems, maybe some would change their minds about taking the long, and perhaps dangerous, voyage with her.
While I was dwelling on this hopeful dream, Rocky came up. “She back yet?” he asked me for about the tenth time.
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m going to get even with her for this.”
“Get even with fled? For what?”
“She said she would look into my head and find out how to help me feel better. She hooked me up to something, all right, but she never told me what she found out. And now she’s disappeared again. That was a rotten thing to do.”
“She what? She hooked you up to something?”
“That’s right. And most of the others, too.”
“What did she hook you up to?”
“I don’t know. Some cone-shaped thing.”
“And she told you it would look into your head?”
“Yes. Why? Did she do something to us she shouldn’t have?”
“Nothing harmful, I’m sure. Anyway, I think she’s coming back, Rocky. At least one more time. But if she does, there’s no guarantee she can do anything for you anyway.”
“Yes there is.”
“What makes you think so?”
“She told me she could.”
Darryl came up. “She told me, too.”
Claire, who had been taking notes on a yellow pad a short distance away, called over. “I’m not a patient,” she reminded me, “I’m a staff physician. But fled said she would help me with some personal problems I’ve been having.”
“I thought you said fled was no more alien than I am.”
“She’s not. She’s just a lot smarter than the rest of you are.”
Barney came up behind me. “You should talk to her, too, Dr. B,” he advised me in all seriousness.
Rick wasn’t far behind him. “She didn’t tell me nothin’.” Translation: she could do something for him as well. By now, almost everyone on the lawn had turned up to assure me that when she returned, fled had a cure for everyone. I didn’t know whether to believe any of them or not, except for Rick.
Or did she mean she could do something for all of them by providing them with a radical change of scene?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The phone woke us up at 5:30 Monday morning. I thought it might be Smythe again with the early results of the baby-naming contest, and decided to let the machine answer it. My wife, however, who always thinks it might be an urgent call from one of our kids (we still call them “kids” even though the youngest one is nearly thirty), picked up the phone. In a few seconds she handed it to me and went back to sleep. It was our son-in-law. I had never heard him so excited (though he’s always excited about something).
“What’s up, Steve?” I asked him without much enthusiasm.
“Fled just left! She came last night for a picnic!”
“That’s great, Steve, but couldn’t it wait until—”
“Ah thought you’d want to be among the first to know that the speed of light is equal to the expansion rate of the universe! In other words, light doesn’t travel at 186,000 miles per second through the universe at all. The universe is expanding at that rate in all directions, and photons just go along for the ride! This explains everything! Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light because if it did, it would escape the bounds of the universe, which is impossible! Einstein was right, but for the wrong reason!”
I knew what he was saying, more or less, but was a bit annoyed to get the information second-hand. “I thought fled wasn’t interested in stuff like that.”
“She isn’t. Ah guess she just wanted to get me off her back.”
I had no trouble believing that. “When did you say she came for this picnic?”
“Last night! Or this morning, actually! About two a.m.!”
“She came for a picnic at two in the morning?”
“Yep. We were in bed, o’ course, but we all wanted to talk to her about different things, and we got up right away. She was hungry, so we all went out to the back yard and had some fruit and veggies.”
“In the dark?”
“Not exactly. We lit some candles. It was pretty nice, actually. You ought to try it sometime.”
“I’ll think about it. Do you know where she’d been?”
“South America. Her last field trip, she said. Anyway, Ah asked her a bunch of questions Ah’d been saving for her. She told me enough stuff for a dozen papers. Of course everything she said needs to be confirmed experimentally. But shit—”
“Did she tell you anything else? Like where she’s leaving from?”
“Well, no. Nobody asked her that. Rain happened to be home, and Star kept taking pictures of her with the rest of us, and we took some more of him and Rain with fled. I’ll send you a few. She gave him a hair from her head, too. And then Abby talked to her about what might happen to the Earth and what the options were….”
“Options? What options?”
‘There ain’t any. She said the only way we’re going to survive is to evolve.”
“How long will that take?”
“We’re way overdue.”
“Did fled tell you where she was going when she left you?”
“Back to the hospital, Ah think.”
“Then I’d better get going!”
Steve doesn’t always take a hint. “The other reason Ah called was to thank you for getting her to come over. It was amazin’! Think about it, Gene! Light isn’t movin’ at all! It’s just going along with the expansion of the universe. That’s why it zooms off in all directions at the speed it does. Anything else travels at a slower speed depending on its mass. Neutrinos travel a little slower than light because they have a little dab of mass. It’s a little more complicated than that, o’ course, but basically, the heavier a particle, the slower it goes.”
“O’ course.”
“And get this: black holes don’t just keep light from escaping. They actually stop the expansion of the universe in their immediate vicinity! Which is why no light can come from them!”