Alien Gifts Read online

  -5-

  Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind:

  Humans contact UFO's by conventional signals or telepathy

  Scout glanced across at Evie, sitting silently beside the viewport, Galileo nestled, purring, on her lap. Her mind stirred in response and she turned to him, smiling.

  "You're sure you want to do this?" he asked again. "You know it may not work."

  Evie nodded. "I know, but I have to try. Just one more time. I know there were others. Once in a while I'd feel them, just the potential, unrealized."

  Scout sighed. "I suppose I know what you mean. Like the radio signals."

  "Exactly. They told you there was potential on our planet, but it wasn't the right kind of signal. You thought we couldn't communicate."

  "Until you."

  Evie smiled. "Until me."

  Galileo rose and stretched languorously, then made his way over to Scout, jumping into his lap and settling down for another nap. Scout stroked the weird creature's fur awkwardly, as Evie had taught him, although he didn't know if he'd ever understand the attraction.

  Evie giggled, apparently picking up on his skepticism.

  Ship announced.

  Scout ran his finger down a holochrom slide. "They may not open for you, even now. It'll be disappointing," he warned.

  "But I understand it so much better now. And you'll help me." Evie crossed to sit in the skimchair beside him and patted the long, knobbly digits of Scout's hand.

  "I'm not supposed to," he grumbled good-naturedly.

  Evie smiled. "You weren't supposed to come back for me, either. And that's worked out all right."

  Scout snorted. "Yes, I only came this close to a military execution for 'abducting' you."

  "I put in a good word for you," she protested.

  In truth, she'd plead his case so vigorously, portrayed her loneliness and desperation so eloquently that some of the judges had been moved to tears. They'd finally deemed his actions an "altruistic rescue endeavour," and dismissed all the charges. And the flight home before that, teaching Evie to use her powers as they were meant to be used—there was nothing in the galaxy he'd trade for that.

  "Oh, all right. You win," he said with a smile. "It's worked out."

  They sat in silence for a time after that, as the craft plied the silent ocean of space. For a while Evie dozed, and Scout sat blissfully with the cat on his lap and the soft jara waves of Evie's dreams lapping against his mind. He woke her when Earth sprang into view, a blue-green button tucked into a black velvet cushion.

  Evie fetched them each a jarakiva booster while Scout laid in the same globe-encircling route he'd used to search for Evie so long ago.

  "Keep to the course, Ship. Not too fast." He swiveled his skimchair to face Evie.

  Scout smiled. He hadn't noticed her lighting the tachee meditation lanterns. Her alien face took on a strange beauty in their muted glow.

  He took her hands as the spicy fragrance swirled around them, the heat of her skin no longer uncomfortable to his. "Ready?"

  She took a deep breath. "Ready."

  Together they opened their minds to the planet below, seeking out every consciousness in the waiting millions. Evie's mental touch, Scout knew, was gentle, coaxing, like a mother's for her children. He concentrated on supporting her, buoying up this alien mind he had begun to love when it brushed against his so many years ago.

  Far below them, scattered among the millions who could not answer, minds began to open like flowers under the soft persuasion of sunlight. Minds answering Evie's call, reaching out to Scout, out to each other in bewilderment and joy and sudden release. Evie smiled at Scout, and he nodded, hoping they'd done the right thing. A new race was blossoming, and a new set of encounters was about to begin.

  o~o~o

  The Cache

  The GPS beeped. A few feet in front of me, Ricky whooped, startling something small in the underbrush. It skittered away, unseen, through the carpet of dead leaves. The dog immediately shoved his nose under some brush, straining at the leash. I tugged him back.

  “Don’t drop it!” I yelped, because as usual, the kid seemed unable to keep himself still like a normal human being. I already regretted letting him carry my GPS. He looked ready to dash into the underbrush himself in search of the cache.

  “I’m not going to drop it, Danny,” he reproached me, holding it out so I could see how tightly he held it, and that the strap was still looped around his wrist. I took his hand and turned it so I could see the screen.

  Arriving at Gully’s River West. Below that, it displayed the coordinates.

  I eased the gadget away from the kid. He relinquished it reluctantly. “Okay, we’re here. Now, you’re not going to find the cache by jumping up and down like a maniac. This is the part of geocaching where you really have to pay attention and concentrate.”

  I expected my words to fall on deaf ears, but surprisingly, Ricky stood still.

  “So once the GPS says we’re here, it’s gotta be somewhere close, right?” he asked, peering into the forest around us.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to find. It could be up in a tree, or hidden inside a rotted log, or tucked under some bushes in a container covered with camo—”

  “How big is it?” Ricky interrupted me.

  I sighed. “One second.” I punched commands on the GPS and details of the cache came up on the screen. “Hmmm. This might be a tricky one. All it says is, ‘Low to the ground, it will be found, you won’t need a shovel, but dig around.’ It’s a container about four inches by five inches.”

  “How big is that?”

  I demonstrated, cupping my hands.

  Ricky frowned. “But it’s not actually buried.”

  Duffy, the big lab, must have understood the word “buried” because he started pawing at a spot on the ground. Geez, his paws were muddy enough already from this sorry excuse for a trail—not much more than a path—without having him start an excavation project. My truck would be a mess. I yanked him back. I’d done that so many times already today that my shoulder throbbed. “No, you’re not allowed to actually bury geocaches,” I said, “because they’re usually not on your own land. The idea is not to disturb anything—”

  “Okay, Danny, I’ve got it.” He bent down, staring at the ground, taking small slow steps.

  I have to admit I was kind of amazed. When Celia suggested I take her dog and her kid geocaching with me, I’d expected a total nightmare. I loved Celia, but I wasn’t exactly in love with her dependents. The house always seemed to be full of kids and dogs, even when it was just Ricky and Duffy. I haven’t been around a lot of nine-year-olds, so maybe they’re all like that, but let’s just say if Ricky was twins I would have been out of there long ago, Celia or no Celia.

  Duffy whined and pulled at the leash, wanting to follow the kid, so I slipped the clasp loose. He wouldn’t stray too far and my shoulder needed a break. He proved me wrong immediately by plunging into the brush where we’d heard the noise earlier. I shut my eyes and sighed.

  “Hey, Danny, is this something?”

  Ricky had pulled aside a low-hanging pine branch to reveal a discarded water bottle. Mud spattered the outside, so I guess he might have thought something could be hidden inside.

  I shook my head. “Naw, that’s just garbage. We’re looking for a box, remember? And a geocache is going to be closed up tight so that the stuff inside doesn’t get wet. That bottle doesn’t even have a cap.”

  The kid let the branch fall back into place. “This is hard.”

  “We’ve barely even started looking. Listen, think about where you would hide something around here if you wanted to make it kind of hard to find, but not impossible.”

  Duffy barked, once, and I heard a rumbling whine that could be the motor of an ATV. Geez, even in the woods that dog could find a car to chase. It sounded like he’d managed to get a good distance away in only a minute.

  “Duffy, come back
, boy,” I yelled.

  “Here, Duffy, Duffy, Duffy,” Ricky hollered, cupping his hands around his mouth.

  "Keep to the side of the trail. I thought I heard an ATV coming,” I warned him, but no vehicle materialized.

  The dog barked again.

  “Why’d you let him off the leash, Danny? Mom never does that.”

  I sighed. “I was asking myself the same thing.” I called the dog one more time but there was no sound of him crashing back. “Just keep looking, and we’ll get him after we find the cache. He won’t go far.”

  Whoever had hidden this cache was a jerk, because it sure wasn’t easy to find. My back was aching in minutes as we looked under every bush and low branch, pushed aside drifts of fallen leaves, and peered into the dark recesses of hollowed-out deadfall. My backpack felt like it held lead weights, not a few sandwiches and hiking supplies. I’d hoped the cache wouldn’t be too hard to find and the kid could spot it himself. Then we could eat the lunch Celia had packed for us and be home early with everyone happy. I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

  Duffy barked again and Ricky stood up, stretching on tiptoes to see over a tangle of scrubby bushes. “Duffy sounds like he found something. Maybe it’s the cache!”

  “It wouldn’t be that far from the coordinates,” I said, but the kid was right. The dog’s barking had taken on an insistent tone. A come-here-and-look tone. I stretched a kink out of my back. “But okay, let’s go and get him, and then we can concentrate on the cache better. If we go back a bit, I think there was a clearer—”

  But Ricky had already pushed into the brush, heedless that there could be thorns or mudholes or insect nests that I’d have to rescue him from. No sense in calling him back, so I shut up and followed him. Duffy’s barking was easy to follow, and once through the initial bushes the space opened up a lot, the way it tends to under an evergreen canopy. Brown and orange needles carpeted the ground, which was also sprinkled liberally with pinecones and dotted with lichen-smeared stones. We still couldn’t see Duffy.

  Typically, Ricky started running, even though the ground was uneven and I figured a half-buried root would send him flying any second. “Slow down. Duffy isn’t going anywhere.” He didn’t stop, though, so I broke into a half-jog to keep him in sight. Celia might forgive me if I lost the dog—might—but not if I lost the kid.

  Only a minute or so later I heard Ricky yell, “Duffy!” and then I saw him, too. He ran toward Ricky, then turned and rushed back to whatever he’d found. Mud spattered all up his legs and the underside of his belly, and his golden snout had a generous coating as well. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, heaved a deep breath, and pressed on.

  “Danny, this is so cool!” Ricky hollered back to me. I wondered whether the dog had found a dead bird or an ancient cow bone. The kid would think almost anything was cool.

  But as I got closer I saw that it was neither of those things. I couldn’t exactly say what it was, either. The dog barked again and Ricky bent down toward the thing. “Don’t touch that!” I yelled, and he jumped back.

  He glared at me as I caught up to him and the dog. I shook my head. “I just want you to be careful until I see what this is,” I said, but he still looked mad. I ignored him and looked at the thing poking out of a muddy hole in the ground.

  It looked kind of like an oxygen cylinder you’d use with a cutting torch—a big grey canister, or at least the top half of one. About three feet of it showed above the ground, but I couldn’t tell how deep it went. It was about eight inches in diameter, and on the side facing us, a groove with a narrow slot at the centre ran the length of the thing. It was too dark inside the slot to see anything. On top of the cylinder, instead of pressure gauges and regulators, a ring of dark glass surrounded something that resembled a small solar panel. I walked all the way around it. On the far side, a little hatch stood open, revealing an LCD-type screen about three inches square. The strangest thing about it was that despite sprouting out of the muddy ground like some weird plant, there wasn’t a speck of dirt on it.

  “Is it the geocache?” Ricky asked, breathless.

  “No way,” I said. “It’s nothing like the description and it’s nothing like any cache I’ve ever seen.”

  “Maybe it’s a bomb.”

  My heart gave a big bang in my chest because although I hadn’t thought of that, it did kind of look like some kind of missile. After a second I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Who the hell—the heck—would put a bomb out here? There’s nothing to blow up except a bunch of trees.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  I squatted down and put out a tentative hand to touch it. It was cold enough that the air close to it felt noticeably chill. When my fingertips got within about two inches of the surface, it beeped one strident, high-pitched note, and blue-white light flashed from the glass ring at the top. Startled, I tried to stand and jump back at the same time and ended up falling on my butt in the mud. Ricky burst out laughing and I bit down on a word Celia wouldn’t have liked.

  “We’d better get out of here and leave this thing alone,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell Ricky, but the thing had me sort of spooked. I shook my hand. My fingertips tingled with cold, even though I hadn’t actually touched the cylinder. There had to be a logical explanation for it, but it gave me a vibe I didn’t like.

  “Aw, Danny, it’s cool,” Ricky protested. He walked around it, peering at it like I had. He stopped on the side bearing the screen and squinted. “Maybe this is something to do with the cache,” he said. “These look like more cordates.”

  “Coordinates,” I corrected him, but went around to the other side to look again. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he was right—the screen showed numbers that could easily stand for latitude, longitude, and elevation. Underneath those, a row of symbols I couldn’t read crawled across the screen.

  “Didn’t you say that sometimes a cache has two or three parts, and it’s like following a treasure map? You have to get one part to get the co-or-din-ates for the next part?” He pronounced coordinates very slowly, but he got it right. Apparently he sometimes did listen to what I told him.

  I pulled out the GPS. “Yeah, but they’re supposed to say if they’re part of a series.” I pulled up the map of the area. It showed only two caches, the one we’d been looking for and another about half a mile to the south. “I don’t think that’s it.”

  “Put the numbers in and see where they lead,” Ricky said. “You can do that, right?”

  “They probably don’t lead anywhere. They might not be the right kind of numbers.”

  “Come on, Danny, just try it, please?”

  “Why don’t we go back and find the cache we’re actually looking for? We were probably just about to find it when Duffy started barking.”

  “Come on, please? Maybe this is a secret one that nobody knows about.”

  I wiped a hand across my face, mainly to stop myself from explaining that a geocache no-one knows about kind of defeats the purpose. It wouldn’t do any good. Once the kid had an idea in his head it was hard to dislodge it. Easier just to humour him.

  “Okay, okay. Put the leash back on Doofus while I do this.”

  “Haha,” he said, but he took the leash and secured the troublemaking dog.

  I punched the numbers from the little screen into the GPS and was only half-surprised when it did plot a course from our current position to the point the numbers indicated.

  Ricky must have read something on my face. “Can we see where it goes?”

  “It’s probably just some kind of survey equipment. Not likely it leads anywhere interesting. If we go back to the other cache there’ll be cool things in it and you can pick something to keep. Remember I told you, people leave little treasures to swap.”

  “I know, but this is more exciting. It’s a mystery.” And I knew that, in his mind, the lure of a dollar-store toy or a keychain couldn’t compare to this.

  I squinted up through the trees at the sun. I c
ouldn’t use the weather or the time as an excuse to say no. “Okay, it says it’s about a hundred meters away...that’s about three hundred feet. I guess it’s not that far out of our way.”

  “That doesn’t sound very far at all.”

  “Yeah, if there’s any kind of path between here and there. We’re not going crashing through a ton of underbrush. I’ll make you a deal. We’ll start out, but if the going is too hard we give it up, okay?”

  “Deal.”

  Stifling a sigh, I hitched my backpack up higher on my shoulders and pointed him in the direction the GPS laid out. Celia’s lunch would have to wait a little longer.

  The GPS route led us back to the path we’d followed earlier in the day and it looked like we could continue to follow it. Duffy wasn’t too happy about being back on the leash, and strained ahead until I thought my arm was going to pull out of the socket. He had his nose down like he’d caught a scent, but luckily if I let the leash out long enough that he could walk ahead of me, beside Ricky, he eased off a little.

  Normally, I love being in the woods. The shady quiet, broken only by the sound of your own footsteps on the path and a few birds and small animals. The warm, moldery scent of pine and earth and bark and leaves. The cool air giving way to warm spots when the sun breaks through the overhead canopy of greenery. It was one place where I felt at peace, and I usually only wanted the company of a good friend or two, if I wanted any at all. Ricky and the dog—well, they were here with me today on sufferance, but I had to admit that it hadn’t been all bad. It was obvious that Ricky appreciated the forest, so that gave us something we could relate on, even if I still thought he was mostly a little pain-in-the-butt.

  Since we’d found the cylinder, though, the walk wasn’t the same. My fingers continued, weirdly, to tingle and ache with that burning cold. The woods were too quiet now, as if every bird and animal that normally lived here had fled. Ricky was too excited by the adventure to pick up on anything. The dog seemed intent on following something only he could scent on the air.

  Once again, I thought I heard an ATV somewhere nearby and tugged on the collar of Ricky’s jacket to nudge him off the path, but no vehicle came into sight. There must be a network of trails in the area.