Liquid Blue, Book 1, Part I

Liquid Blue

  Book 1, Part I

  By S.A. Mulraney

  https://samulraney.com

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  ©2014 Scott Mulraney

  All rights reserved.

  Prologue

  Thursday, November 1, 2014

  Sandia National Laboratories

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  8:46 pm

  Dr. Nigel Llewellyn scratched a note onto the pad on his desk. He had to remember lunch with Jenkins on Tuesday of next week. It had completely fled his mind yesterday, but that was sort of the way things went lately. At least everything that wasn’t tied to his present project. He leaned back in his chair, tapping his pen to his chin. There was so much to remember. So much that he had to keep track of. There was no one else who was as efficient.

  He glanced around his office. It was dark, and the only light was that from his desk lamp and the faint glow of the light in the hallway. He should really set up a cot or something. It wasn’t like he slept much anymore. Besides, he really had nothing at home that he didn’t have here. At least not since Mary died.

  His wife of forty-five years had been diagnosed with cancer and died all within a 6-month span of time. Less than a year later, he could admit that he would never recover from it. He sunk himself into his work at a breakneck pace for a man of 76. His coworkers tried their best to persuade him to leave at a reasonable hour every day. They didn’t understand. Home was where Mary had been. For forty-five years he had gone home at 5, willingly, knowing that whatever work he had would still be there the next morning. But now, he had nothing to draw him away. The house they had called home for at least 30 or so years was now just a reminder of happier times. And going home at the end of the day did nothing but remind him of how miserable he was. He’d built his life around her and now that his foundation was gone, he could feel his life slipping away.

  He glanced at a collage of pictures on his office wall. He wiped the tears out of his eyes. There was a picture of the two of them taken in 1973. Young, fresh, fit, and happy. The boat on Lake Havasu. Hiking the Canyon. Vegas before what happened there stayed there. The children. Their children. The children still made him happy, but he couldn’t stand the look on their faces when they visited. It was just too clear to them that the loss of their mother had shattered him. No one ever said anything. They all just tucked it away and smiled their sad knowing smiles and he’d grown to loathe the silent pity.

  “It’s time to go home,” he said to no one.

  Standing, he took his coat from the rack next to the desk and hesitated. He looked around and found his briefcase. It was open, with a smattering of papers scattered into it. He stacked them neatly and closed the lid. A distinct odor came to him as he shut the lid and he let out a little gasp. Opening the lid, he wondered if perhaps one of the cats had left him a present. A mouse or maybe even a bird? How could he have not noticed that stench before? He opened the lid again and leaned close. It wasn’t the brief. He shivered at the sound behind him, but spun around standing upright as if to attention.

  There, now blocking the doorway and the light from the hall was a large hooded figure in long robes. Dr. Llewellyn dropped the brief and let out a weak cry. He moved quickly behind the desk.

  “Who the hell are you? How the- how the hell did you get into my office? The door…it’s…locked. Who the hell are you?”

  His voice grew weaker as he spoke. He realized that this (was it a man?) thing before him was what smelled so foul. Like a mix between rotting carcass, vomit, and wet dog. He felt his legs growing weak. The phone. He needed to call for help. The creature moved toward him. He reached for the phone, but there was no tone when the receiver reached his ear. The man (no it wasn’t quite a man) had closed the gap between the doorway and the desk, holding up an arm into the light of the desk lamp. It was the phone cord, neatly unplugged from the wall.

  But, it wasn’t the plug that Dr. Llewellyn was now staring at. It was the arm and the hand that held the plug. It was like nothing he had ever seen before.

  “Halloween was last night,” he said weakly.

  The thing moved swiftly into the light of the desk lamp. It was no man. No costume was that elaborate. The hand that held the cord was covered in short dark bristly hair, with no sign of a nail or claw of any type. There were four fingers that he could see, with what was possibly the thumb looking more like a long dexterous tail that came out of the wrist area. The thing moved its free appendage up to pull the hood back. Dr. Llewellyn’s legs finally gave way and he collapsed into his desk chair.

  The thing that stood before him did not blink. It eyed him with the deepest black eyes he had ever seen. The head was covered with short hair, baboon-like in its flatness, and tapered to what appeared to be a snout. There was no definition in the cheeks, but the head was extremely large in proportion to the body. It spread its lips the slightest and Dr. Llewellyn shuddered at the sight of what appeared to be rows of hundreds of teeth in a mouth that consumed the majority of the thing’s face.

  “Dear god,” he said. It blinked its white-less eyes, raised its right appendage, pointing at Dr. Llewellyn, and spoke in a short deep tone that was half bark.

  “Doctor Nigel Llewellyn,” it said.

  “Oh…my god,” Dr. Llewellyn said.

  The thing repeated his statement, still pointing at him.

  “Y…yes. Yes, I am Doctor Nigel Llewellyn,” he said, nodding his head frantically.

  The thing quickly reached into his cloak. This was where it was going to go bad, thought Dr. Llewellyn. This was where the freak pulled off the mask and pulled out the gun. He braced his hands against the chair. He wished his heart would stop racing. He wondered if the bottle of aspirin in his left-hand drawer could stop the heart attack.

  The thing pulled a small four-inch square cube from within his cloak. He reached out to the desk lamp and pulled it closer, illuminating the intricately inlaid box of a pewter-like metal Dr. Llewellyn had never seen before. The creature placed the box on the desk and took a careful step backward, gesturing at the box. Dr. Llewellyn eyed the thing, but inched his chair closer, the scientist in him momentarily overwhelming the frightened child.

  He looked suspiciously at the box the thing had laid before him. The creature watched him with as much interest as he was giving the box. The metal had an organic sensibility to it, as if it was taking something from its surroundings. He couldn’t tell whether the surface was opalescent, or whether the material itself was actually changing before his eyes. The creature reached out and pinched a corner of the box. The material suddenly sagged like a silk cloth over a smaller misshapen object that lie beneath. Instinctively, Dr. Llewellyn reached out to remove the cloth. The thing moved swiftly and forcefully, brushing his hand aside as if scolding a child. Dr. Llewellyn flinched, then smiled sheepishly at the thing. He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to see it smile back at him with that mouth or those teeth.

  “By all means, please…” Dr. Llewellyn said, gesturing to the object.

  The thing reached out and pulled a corner of what had been the gray box. It seemed to flatten and shrink to the size of a large coin when he did so, but Dr. Llewellyn was not as interested in that as he was with what had been uncovered. There, before him on the desk was a small mechanical-looking object that glowed with such a fearsome blue that the entire room was aglow and he had to shield his eyes while they adjusted. When he could take a good look, he found it to be like a child’s toy of unknown use. The spectacularly blue materials appeared to be suspended in the center of the object. It was relatively square, with a metal frame and glass-like walls. On the top of the frame was an extraordinarily clear miniature monitor that blinked unreco
gnizable digits and graphs. There wasn’t a single button attached to the screen. Inside the glasslike casing, the blue material appeared to change from liquid to gas and back again at will, all the while filling the container. The blue shifted and swirled with an energy of its own. Dr. Llewellyn leaned in to get a closer look. The creature watched with what Dr. Llewellyn could only imagine was contentment.

  “What is it?”

  The creature reached out a furry hand and motioned Dr. Llewellyn away. It then glanced around the room, as if searching for something. He saw a library cart, which had become a permanent resident of Dr. Llewellyn’s office since he had borrowed it so often. They had even put his name on it. The creature wheeled the cart out to the center of the room and eyed it up, looking from the desk to the cart and back. They were about the same height. As far as the thing was concerned, the cart would do just nicely. He returned to the desk, leaned over the mechanism and started tapping the screen with the thin tail-like thumb appendage. Dr. Llewellyn leaned in to get a better look, but the language (if it was a language at all) of the screen and the rapidity with which the thing changed screens made it a fruitless task to follow. The creature looked around at him and grunt-barked. Then he stood to one side so that Dr. Llewellyn had a clear view of the mechanism.

  The creature looked at Dr. Llewellyn, pointed to its own eyes, and pointed to the mechanism. It was an unnecessary gesture. Dr. Llewellyn had no plans of looking away. It leaned in to press the screen one last time and stepped away. There was some furious motion within the liquid/gas and a deepening of the color blue. Then, as Llewellyn watched, there appeared to be something happening outside of the box. Something was wrong with the space immediately next to the object. As if something was on the other side of a screen, pulling. Then it happened. A spider web of blue flashed across the box’s surface and, in a flash of light, it was gone. As quickly as it had gone, it was back with an accompanying flash of light, resting atop the library cart without having disturbed a single book.

  “Blazes,” Llewellyn said. The thing grunted a bark as if in agreement.

  Dr. Llewellyn approached the cart, leaning in to look closely at the unit, still glowing as bright a blue as it had before. It was so extremely simple, but it left him with so many questions.

  “What powers it?” Dr. Llewellyn asked.

  The creature just blinked.

  “I can’t imagine you’ve come all this way to show me something you cannot explain. There has to be more. Please…”

  Dr. Llewellyn had tears on the brink of his eyes. He was living the high point of his life, right at this moment, and he knew it. Standing there, next to this beast thing that smelled like ten-day-old sick who could say only his name and bark like some sort of bizarre circus creature. This was the liaison sent to Earth. Sent to him, Nigel Llewellyn, one of the most renowned physicists in his field. He, of all people, was responsible for the first contact. It was his name that would be synonymous with the moment. This night, November 1 of the year 2014, would be forever remembered as the night we made contact with another sentient life force in the galaxy. And, as the emotions of the moment began to overwhelm him, he looked at the thing, trying to make it understand.

  “This is all a bit much,” he said. “I’m just one man.”

  “Doctor Nigel Llewellyn,” the creature said.

  “Yes…yes I am, but…” he stared at the object on the desk. “Do you understand anything I say?” and he gestured to his mouth. The creature cocked its head ever so slightly.

  “You’ve learned to say my name,” he said, “Doctor Nigel Llewellyn.”

  “Doctor Nigel Llewellyn,” the thing repeated.

  “Is there nothing else you can tell me?” Dr. Llewellyn said, again gesturing to his mouth. The thing looked away from him for the first time. It gazed around the room.

  Dr. Llewellyn thought quickly. He needed to get some form of rudimentary conversation out of the beast.

  “Can you explain,” and he pointed to the screen on the mechanism, “the digits that appear here? Dammit, I’m a scientist. Think!”

  He grabbed a pad and pencil from his desk and began drawing dots and Roman numerals, 1 to 10. The thing watched with what appeared to be some curiosity. Dr. Llewellyn handed it the pad when he was done. It gave it a cursory glance and gestured for the pencil. Next to each dot, the thing drew a corresponding mark; its soft awkward thumb coiled around the pencil. It looked as if a pencil the size of a bal-peen hammer would have been a better fit. The creature handed the pad back to Dr. Llewellyn. The marks were rather simple. Next to the single dot and Roman number one was a circle with a single perpendicular arm extending from it. Next to the two dot, it had drawn a circle with a perpendicular arm and a 90-degree arm. Then a 180-degree, and a 270-degree arm until the number five. Five was a circle that was half filled. Six was five with the extended arm and so on. Ten was a completely filled in circle. Dr. Llewellyn nodded as he looked at it and smiled.

  “That’s a start,” he said. “I really know a lot of people who would like to have a word with you. Will you stay?”

  The thing seemed to understand this, and moved over to the mechanism, pointing to it. It then pointed to the desk and then the cart. Dr. Llewellyn watched, nodding as he did so.

  “Yes, it went from there to there.”

  The thing raised one fat hairy finger.

  “One?” Dr. Llewellyn said. “One,” he said again, and held up his own finger. The thing barked.

  “One,” Dr. Llewellyn repeated again to himself. “One length? Is that what you’re saying? That distance was one length?”

  He looked at the distance. It was somewhere between six and seven feet.

  “That’s an odd distance.”

  The creature barked and held one hand on top of its hairy skull. Dr. Llewellyn figured it was between six and seven feet tall. It was the length of one creature. Perhaps it was the length of all adult creatures, Dr. Llewellyn thought. How strange to base a measurement of length on the sentient form itself. How very egocentric.

  “So, then you simply plug in the distance on this…”

  The thing moved very quickly across the room and crouched down behind the cart. It made no sound. Dr. Llewellyn looked around the room, confused. The sound of footsteps echoed down the hall. There was a knock on the door.

  “Dr. Llewellyn?”

  Dr. Llewellyn dropped the pad and pencil he was holding and crossed the room to the door. With sweaty palms, he unlocked it to find Jimmy, the nighttime guard standing on the other side. He only opened the door a few inches.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” Dr. Llewellyn said, weakly.

  “Everything ok, Dr. Lew? It’s awfully late for you. I thought I heard you talking.”

  “Oh, everything’s fine, Jimmy. I fell asleep at my desk. You probably heard me swearing to myself. You are right, it is awfully late. I should just have a cot put in.”

  “Don’t know if the bosses would care for that, Dr. Lew. Oh, what’s that smell, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “That? Oh, I think it must be the trash. Cleaning people seem to keep forgetting about me.” He smiled and laughed, but he didn’t think it was convincing.

  “You sure everything’s ok?”

  “I’m fine, Jimmy. I’ll be out of here in no time at all.”

  “Ok, Dr. Lew. I’m going to swing back in another twenty minutes. If you’re not out of here by then I’m gonna call the cab myself.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy. I’ll be fine.”

  Dr. Llewellyn closed the door and listened as Jimmy the security guard walked down the hall. The young man had no clue as to the importance of the encounter he had just interrupted. Monumental, Dr. Llewellyn thought to himself. He turned back into the room.

  “He’s…gone,” the words had barely left his lips. It was true in more than one sense. The thing was gone. He stood alone in his office, bathed in the light of the blue mechanism that seemed to be contentedly swirling and swishing in silenc
e on the cart. There, beside the mechanism, lay a stack of thin black cards. He lifted one and it weighed less than a normal sheet of paper would. At first he could see nothing on the cards. Then it caught the light from the mechanism. There, etched into the surface of the card, was a schematic. This one was some sort of key. He recognized some crudely drawn Latin. Alpha, beta, gamma, chi with subsequent numerals in sharp relief. He picked up the next card. It was a diagram of the mechanism itself. It seemed to be explaining the structure of both the metal frame and the glass-like casing. The third seemed to be an attempt to place the creatures themselves. It was clearly a star chart, though it was beyond Dr. Llewellyn where in the night sky it might be. The moment hit him again. He was perusing a mini alien library. One that was more than likely created specifically for them. The questions were overwhelming him. He sat down, realizing that the odor that the thing had brought with it had disappeared completely. So civilized, and yet so foul. Well, perhaps I smelled to him like a big pile of waste. It was all relative.

  Everything was going to change. Everything. He would have to tell someone. Who could he trust? Who would take this seriously? Not that fool Williams over in transportation research. He would light a fart on fire to get an extra mile per hour. No, this would need someone special. Someone he could trust.

  It was too late to think this through. Jimmy would be back soon. He had time. This wasn’t going to go away. He stared at the mechanism, knowing at that very moment that he would dedicate the rest of his functional life to figuring it out. It was so beyond them, and he knew it, but it was like building the first car, or plane. No, he thought, this was more. This was clicking the flint against the stone. This was fire that had literally been handed down to them from the heavens. Instructions included.

  He stood and rifled through the cards on the cart. There had to be hundreds of them, all neatly stacked. The impossibly thin, but equally strong cards each contained a lifetime’s worth of knowledge. He restacked them and held them in his hands. This was power. This was dangerous. What the hell had made them do this? It was like going back in time and handing Neanderthal man a rifle. What had they hoped to accomplish from this? It all clouded his mind. It was all just too much to think about. He would share this tomorrow. Tomorrow would be the day. It was late. It was time to go home, where the memories would possibly distract him in a way he had never hoped. He might not sleep that night, but there would be other nights. He had some time. He had something to live for. A knock at the door startled him back to himself.

  “Dr. Llewellyn?”

  “Coming, Jimmy, I’m just grabbing my case. Wait for me, I’ll be right out.”

  “Ok,” Jimmy said.

  He placed the cards on the cart, pulling out the last one and holding it up to the mechanism so he could see. A bright blue square was etched in one corner. It was an exact model of the mechanism. Next to it was another blue square, this time without the mechanism around it. Next to that was an extraordinarily detailed map of Earth’s solar system. He had seen it so many times drawn so simplistically, that he almost didn’t recognize this intricate rendering. It looked as if each of the asteroids had been plotted in the belt. All moons were equally represented, though in finite detail. And, there, quite distinct in the picture was a small arrow next to the fifth and largest planet in the solar system. That was where this was all headed. The blue liquid gas was going to take man to the stars, but first he would have to find more, and the thing-creatures had provided the treasure map. The arrow marked Jupiter. The future of man lay in the bowels of the fifth planet from the Sun.

  Chapter 1

  September 22, 2074

  0600 hours

  Residential Unit 6

  Delta 7 Module, Callisto