“Dad is. Well, sort of. I don’t think he believes her story, but he’s getting a lawyer for her. She’s doing okay, though, really,” Aimee said. “They’re keeping her in quarantine.” A roll of her eyes showed what she thought of that. Cal was inclined to agree with her assessment. “She was worried about you, though.”
“About me?” He gestured around himself. “Aside from being currently unwelcome at NASA, I’m okay. Tell her that I’m still working on what we were talking about. Tell her I’m doing everything I can to get her out of there.”
Aimee perked up. “What are you working on? Can I help?”
It was sweet of her, sweet enough to make him smile. “I don’t think so. I’m trying to find more proof about what happened to your mom. It’s pretty dull stuff, and it involves rather advanced science—”
“I’m going to be an aerospace engineering major at MIT,” Aimee interrupted, looking unimpressed. “For my senior science project I did an analysis of how the life-support systems on Sagittarius might have functioned differently with only one person on board and how that affected my mother’s trip home.”
Cal blinked. “I stand corrected.” He should have known better than to underestimate any daughter of Catherine’s. “If you’re already familiar with the life-support systems, then I think I have something for you to do.”
Aimee’s initial assessment, after three hours going over some of Cal’s printouts, was filled with outrage. “How the hell is NASA ignoring this? Like, okay sure, they want to use the evidence that Tom Wetherbee survived the explosion to keep Mom locked up, but look at this. Right here, before the explosion. Look at those heat readings in the air lock. It’s just like Mom said. Doesn’t that seem high enough to suggest two living things were in there?” Cal could sympathize with her frustration.
“I know. It seems like a strong indicator, but it’s too easy for them to dismiss as a malfunction.” Cal sighed. “I’ve got to find something completely incontrovertible. Something a layperson could look at and instantly understand.”
“You need a picture of a little green man,” Aimee grumbled.
“Pretty much, yes.”
“So let’s find one.”
“I wish it were that simple.” Cal pushed back from his computer. “I’ve been over the video footage we have—and there’s not much of it. The video feed from when your mom did actually see them is long gone. There’s nothing else there.” He looked up to see Aimee texting. Inevitable, as she was still a teenager, he supposed. Smart or not, she couldn’t be expected to stay focused forever.
Or so he thought.
“Sorry,” she said, “I had to cancel some plans. I’m going to get my computer and bring it back. We’ll save time if we’re both going through the electronic records.” Then she paused. “If that’s okay?”
“Uh. Sure, why not?” A new set of eyes couldn’t hurt. And maybe, just maybe, Aimee’s inexperience would be an asset here—fewer preconceived notions.
Two heads, it turned out, weren’t necessarily better than one. Three days later, they were comfortable enough with each other to be frustrated and irritable. At least Aimee had been able to keep Catherine updated on their progress and was able to reassure her that Cal was fine.
“Are you sure we can’t get our hands on more data? Anything?” Aimee asked for what Cal thought might have been the hundredth time today.
“I had to go digging to get what we’ve got now.” Cal was deliberately not thinking about the penalties for revealing classified information to a teenage girl. If this all went south, he’d be revealing it to a much larger audience. The Times reporter was still an option.
“Why is so much of it missing?”
“Ask your mother,” Cal snapped, then immediately regretted it. They didn’t know for certain that Catherine had deleted any of the data. It could have just as easily been Tom.
“I would, but I don’t know when your bosses will let me see her again.” Aimee didn’t seem angry so much as tired. They both were. They’d been beating their heads against this for days and weren’t getting anywhere.
“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.” He hadn’t been able to contact Catherine in over a week, and he was startled at how much he missed her. He kept seeing the fear in her eyes as NASA security led her away. And always, always, the clock was running in the back of his head, counting down the minutes until his crew was out of his reach and beyond his help.
Aimee interrupted his thoughts. “Okay. So, if we can’t get more data, then we just have to find new ways to look at what we do have.”
Cal raked his hand through his hair. “I dunno, Aimee. Maybe there’s just nothing here. We don’t know what these things are, or what we’re looking for. Maybe we don’t have the technology to even prove they exist.”
“We do. We have to.” Aimee hummed to herself thoughtfully, tapping at her keyboard. “Maybe we literally need a new way of looking at what we have. What was it Mom said they told her? The adults needed protection from daylight, and they took it off so she could see them? She said it was like a shield. I’m guessing technological, some sort of cloaking device, or… I don’t know what. But it blocks the visible light spectrum—so cameras are no good. But… they were still giving off heat. We’ve got those measurements.” She looked away from the monitor. “There was a spectroscopic camera in the Habitat, right?”
“Yes, but…” Cal paused. “I didn’t think to—” He grasped what she was getting at. “You’re saying to check other spectrums visually.”
Aimee nodded, already typing furiously. “What were the time stamps for the increased heat signatures in the Habitat air lock when Mom and Richie were working on it?”
Cal checked his notes and gave her the numbers while she called up the imaging program. “Okay,” she said. “Here we go…” Cal came around to stand over her shoulder, looking at the monitor.
Aimee sighed. “No, there’s nothing—” As she spoke, there was movement in the frame. “What is that? That’s not Richie, is it?”
Whatever it was, it radiated heat, but more to the point, as they looked through the infrared spectrum, it was visible. The shape was humanoid in the loosest sense—there was what appeared to be four limbs, and something that might be a head.
“That’s not Richie,” Aimee repeated, more certain.
“It’s not anybody from the crew. Wetherbee was the tallest crew member at five foot eleven; your mom’s five eight. That thing… it’s at least seven, maybe eight feet.” Cal couldn’t stop staring, his heart thumping painfully in his chest. “Got you,” he murmured. “Got you, you bastard.”
“That’s—that’s an alien. That’s a real alien.”
Cal put his hand on Aimee’s shoulder. She sounded about as stunned as he felt. “And you found it, Aimee.”
“Mom found it.”
“Either way, I have to get to Johnson.”
Aimee turned and looked up at him, the fright in her eyes reminding him of her mother. “What will you do if they don’t believe you? What if they lock you up, too?”
“Listen.” Cal crouched to Aimee’s eye level. “If I haven’t called you in… say, two hours, call this number.” He texted her the contact information. “That’s a direct line for a science writer at the New York Times. Give her my name. Tell her what we’ve found.”
“I’m a kid; she won’t believe me,” Aimee protested.
“You show her that video. She’ll believe you.” He stood. “Hopefully it won’t come to that.”