«We are here.»
It was a sound Johnny could hear. Somewhere in the back of his mind, despite his fears, he was a little disappointed. He had been half-expecting to «hear» a telepathic voice in his mind.
«Where are you?»
«You are looking at us.» The voice was flat and unemotional. «We are the two shining globes that you see.»
«You?» Johnny squinted at the shining ones. «You’re the aliens?»
«This is our ship.»
Johnny’s heart started beating faster as he realized what was going on. He was inside the ship. And talking to the aliens!
«Why wouldn’t you talk with the other men?» he asked.
«Why should we? We are not here to speak with them.»
«What are you here for?»
The voice—Johnny couldn’t tell which of the shining ones it came from—hesitated for only a moment. Then it answered, «Our purpose is something you could not understand. You are not mentally equipped to grasp such concepts.»
A picture flashed into Johnny’s mind of a chimpanzee trying to figure out how a computer works. Did they plant that in my head? he wondered.
After a moment, Johnny said, «I came here to ask for your help…»
«We are not here to help you,» said the voice.
And a second voice added, «Indeed, it would be very dangerous for us to interfere with the environment of your world. Dangerous to you and your kind.»
«But you don’t understand! I don’t want you to change anything, just—»
The shining one on the left seemed to bob up and down a little. «We do understand. We looked into your mind while you were unconscious. You want us to prolong your life span.»
«Yes!»
The other one said, «We cannot interfere with the normal life processes of your world. That would change the entire course of your history.»
«History?» Johnny felt puzzled. «What do you mean?»
The first sphere drifted a bit closer to Johnny, forcing him to shade his eyes with his hand. «You and your people have assumed that we are visitors from another star. In a sense, we are. But we are also travelers in time. We have come from millions of years in your future.»
«Future?» Johnny felt weak. «Millions of years?»
«And apparently we have missed our target time by at least a hundred thousand of your years.»
«Missed?» Johnny echoed.
«Yes,» said the first shining one. «We stopped here—at this time and place—to get our bearings. We were about to leave when you threw yourself into the ship’s defensive screen.»
The second shining one added, «Your action was entirely foolish. The screen would have killed you instantly. We never expected any of you to attack us in such an irrational manner.»
«I wasn’t attacking you,» Johnny said. «I just wanted to talk with you.»
«So we learned, once we brought you into our ship and revived you. Still, it was a foolish thing to do.»
«And now,» the second shining sphere said, «your fellow men have begun to attack us. They assume that you have been killed, and they have fired their weapons at us.»
«Oh no…»
«Have no fear, little one.» The first sphere seemed almost amused, «Their primitive shells and rockets fall to the ground without exploding. We are completely safe.»
«But they might try an atomic bomb,» Johnny said.
«If they do, it will not explode. We are not here to hurt anyone, nor to allow anyone to hurt us.»
A new thought struck Johnny. «You said your screen would have killed me. And then you said you brought me inside the ship and revived me. Was… was I dead?»
«Your heart had stopped beating,» said the first alien. «We also found a few other flaws in your body chemistry, which we corrected. But we took no steps to prolong your life span. You will live some eighty to one hundred years, just as the history of your times has shown us.»
Eighty to one hundred years! Johnny was thunderstruck. The «other flaws in body chemistry» that they fixed—they cured me!
Johnny was staggered by the news, feeling as if he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, when the first of the shining ones said:
«We must leave now, and hopefully find the proper time and place that we are seeking. We will place you safely among your friends.»
«No! Wait! Take me with you! I want to go too!» Johnny surprised himself by shouting it, but he realized as he heard his own words that he really meant it. A trip through thousands of years of time, to who-knows-where!
«That is impossible, little one. Your time and place is here. Your own history shows that quite clearly.»
«But you can’t just leave me here, after you’ve shown me so much! How can I be satisfied with just one world and time when everything’s open to you to travel to! I don’t want to be stuck here-and-now, I want to be like you!»
«You will be, little one. You will be. Once we were like you. In time your race will evolve into our type of creature—able to roam through the universe of space and time, able to live directly from the energy of the stars.»
«But that’ll take millions of years.»
«Yes. But your first steps into space have already begun. Before your life ends, you will have visited a few of the stars nearest to your own world. And, in the fullness of time, your race will evolve into ours.»
«Maybe so,» Johnny said, feeling downcast.
The shining one somehow seemed to smile. «No, little one. There is no element of chance. Remember, we come from your future. It has already happened.»
Johnny blinked. «Already happened… you—you’re really from Earth! Aren’t you? You’re from the Earth of a million years from now! Is that it?»
«Good-bye grandsire,» said the shining ones together.
And Johnny found himself sitting on the desert floor in the hot afternoon sunlight, a few yards in front of General Hackett’s command car.
«It’s the kid! He’s alive!»
Getting slowly to his feet as a hundred soldiers raced toward him, Johnny looked back toward the star ship—the time ship.
It winked out. Disappeared. Without a sound or a stirring of the desert dust. One instant it was there, the next it was gone.
It was a week later that it really sank home in Johnny’s mind.
It had been a wild week. Army officers quizzing him, medical doctors trying to find some trace of the disease, news reporters and TV interviewers asking him a million questions, his mother and father both crying that he was all right and safe and cured —a wild week.
Johnny’s school friends hung around the house and watched from outside while the Army and news people swarmed in and out. He waved to them, and they waved back, smiling, friendly. They understood. The whole story was splashed all over the papers and TV, even the part about the disease. The kids understood why Johnny had been so much of a loner the past few months.
The President telephoned and invited Johnny and his parents to Washington. Dr. Gene Beldone went along too, in a private Air Force twin-engine jet.
As Johnny watched the New Mexico desert give way to the rugged peaks of the Rockies, something that the shining ones had said finally hit home to him:
You will live some eighty to one hundred years, just as the history of your times has shown us.
«How would they know about me from the history of these times?» Johnny whispered to himself as he stared out the thick window of the plane. «That must mean that my name will be famous enough to get into the history books, or tapes, or whatever they’ll be using.»
Thinking about that for a long time, as the plane crossed the Rockies and flew arrow-straight over the green farmlands of the midwest, Johnny remembered the other thing that the shining ones had told him: