“Will be on the last recording!” Lazz finished, just as excited as I was.
The elevator had started to rise while we had been scanning the crowd, but instead of continuing up to the top, we stopped, about ten meters up in the air. Looking down from where we were was an odd experience. Because of all the foliage, we could only see a few dozen Travelers scattered around the base of the elevator, but somehow we knew that we were the center of attention of the whole ship.
Our new escorts moved to the edge of the platform, blithely perched millimeters from a fall, and faced in opposite directions to speak in ringing squeals that echoed all around.
“This is the Witness. Our Journey has purpose.”
Then the elevator began to drop again and Lazz and I both looked up helplessly. Now what?
We returned to ground in moments and reversed our parade-like trek to return to the sculpture wall, and then it was back through the claustrophobic corridor to the airlock leading into the screening chamber, and we were issued a peremptory command: “Enter. The Journey continues.” The outer airlock door opened.
I was starting to get more than a little nervous for some unknown reason, and I could tell by Lazz’s tensed posture that he felt the same way.
“No,” I countered. “We must return to our home.”
“You are here to witness. Then you will be returned.” One and Two were taking turns. “The Witness is honored and must not be harmed.” A pause and then again: “Enter so we may continue.”
Lazz and I locked eyes. I nodded towards the waiting airlock.
“What do you think?”
After a moment he sighed. “Well, this is the price I pay for black-mailing my way along. It’s your call. I’ll do it if you will… besides, I have to admit, my curiosity cat is looking to loose a few lives.”
“I have to know,” I admitted. “Besides, I really don’t feel worried.” Lazz mumbled something and I asked: “What?”
“Umm… never mind.” Lazz shook his head. “I was just thinking about some land sales in a geographically disadvantaged area… Go ahead. After you.”
Once again we entered the viewing room and stripped off our suits before settling in expectantly in front of the screen.
Lazz leaned over. “Well, at least we’re ‘honored’ and ‘not to be harmed’. I just wish I could let Liza know I’m okay.”
I heard the edge in his voice, but I could understand it. He knew what Liza had to be going through, and I knew it also.
I remembered well how I had felt one night when Ellen had been late coming home. We had had plans to go out to dinner, and when over an hour had passed without a call, I had begun to seriously worry. Ellen had had a thing about being punctual, or calling if detained. If she was due someplace where she had never been, she would prefer to sit for ten minutes outside the building and wait rather than risk being late. I had tried calling her personal phone several times but had only reached a recording that kept repeating that the carrier was “unable to connect due to network difficulties”.
When she had finally called, from a land-line at a service station, her first thought had been to reassure me, because she had known how much I had been worrying. Then she had explained that her car had broken down in the middle of a record thunderstorm and on a back road. And by a supreme act of cosmic malice, the road had been washed out both ahead of her and behind her. On top of that, the storm had knocked out power to the cellular towers in the area, and she had been forced to walk several miles in the pouring rain to get to a service station.
When she had finally come home, drenched and miserable, I had immediately scrapped our restaurant dinner plans and sent her packing to a shower, while I had cooked a good hot meal for us to eat by the fireplace. It had always amazed me that she had been worried about me! But that night had turned into one of the most wonderfully intimate evenings we had ever shared.
As I sat next to Lazz waiting for the aliens’ next move, I envied him again and wondered if I’d ever have any evenings like that again.
The screen suddenly flashed back to life and we found ourselves looking out into space from a vantage point I presumed was the front of the ship, since the space station was off to the side as expected. But as we watched, the station moved, or rather we did.
“This is what was,” came a simple explanation from above.
The scene speeded up and we moved away from the station. The massive globe of the Earth brushed the upper portion of the screen momentarily, but disappeared behind us. Our vantage point changed and we were looking back from the same place and I saw that the pyramids were back down in travel position as we accelerated away from the space station.
“Son of a bitch!” Lazz blasted and got to his feet. “They space-napped us!”
I realized immediately what had happened. While we had been starting down that elevator, they had been folding down the pyramids and launching us gradually to simulate the increasing gravity as we descended on the elevator. We had never noticed it because once underway, we had been under the same level of gravity as we would have been from the rotation of the ship.
Lazz’s jaw was clenched and he was glaring up at the low ceiling, but before he could say anything I grabbed him and tried to pull him back down into his seat.
“Sit down!” I wasn’t alarmed. Even if we were a long way from understanding each other, I had a gut feeling we had nothing to fear from the Travelers. And in a strange way, the maneuvers we had been going through were very reassuring, because they reminded me that the Travelers were not some sort of super-beings able to control gravity and all sorts of unimaginable forces. They were more advanced than we were, but not so much that we couldn’t catch up.
Lazz was resisting me and I pulled harder. “Will you relax? They said we would be safe and that we would be returned, and I believe them. Obviously they’ve got something else to show us.” My eyes were locked on the screen. I looked up as Lazz finally calmed down and dropped back to his seat.
“What is now?” I asked.
The scene shifted and I found myself staring into what had to be the sun.
“How close are we?” I asked, feeling like an idiot as I did for not being more specific.
But our hosts knew what I meant, and the screen changed to show a diagrammatic representation of the solar system that looked like it could have come out of any elementary school book on Earth. A small pyramid was almost halfway between the orbits of Earth and Mercury and heading towards the sun. If I strained, I could almost imagine that I saw it move.
“Slingshot effect?” Lazz murmured next to me, yielding to curiosity. “Even if our sun is a wimp compared to theirs, it’s got a pretty good gravity well to use.”
“Yeah, but how good is their insulation?” I wondered. “And how come we’re along?” But something else bothered me. “And if they have such a good drive, whatever the hell is powering this thing, why do they need a gravity well for acceleration?”
“Maybe they use the sun for a different kind of boost?” Lazz wondered. “I’ve read several old science fiction books about that.”
“And maybe we were right before.” Something kept nudging my mind and I reached down to type: “Please show an image of the history wall outside. The last six panels.”
“Huh?” Lazz stared at me. “What are you up to?”
As the screen changed obligingly, I bent forward to ask: “Please display only the bottom portions of each panel and expand them in size.” Again the screen cooperated, and I peered closely at the declining numbers of Traveler figures at the base of each panel. At first, I didn’t see anything new; just a tragically shrinking population as resources declined, and the Travelers cut their population. But finally I saw what I had been missing.