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  “Hello there,” the woman said, smiling warmly at Edna. “My name is Grace. It’s a great pleasure to meet you.” And then, reading the confusion on Edna’s face, she offered an explanation. “It’s our practice here on the farm to divide our time between a variety of partners. We have found this to be more fulfilling.”

  Edna started to laugh, half in shock and half in admiration. “You swap partners?”

  Tavon twitched his nose and grimaced as he guided Edna into the house. “I wouldn’t say swap is the right word. It’s a little more complex than that. But we don’t believe in your idea of marriage. It would be fairer to say we are married to many people at once. It’s what makes us happy.”

  Who was she to argue? She’d yet to hold down a successful long-term relationship. “Wow, that food smells incredible.”

  “My daughter Rose prepared it for you,” said Grace. “I’m not so good with human recipes and we don’t eat a lot of meat,” said Grace.

  “You didn’t need to cook it on my account,” Edna said.

  “We wanted to make you feel at home,” said Grace, leading her into the sitting room. A beautiful pale green three-seater couch dominated the lounge, matching single seaters on either side of it were spread around a neat little coffee table on a fluffy white rug. There was a compact cocktail bar in the corner. It looked like something off the cover of American Home.

  “We put your luggage in our guest room upstairs,” said Tavon. “First door on the left whenever you’d like to retire. Meantime, can I make you a Tom Collins?”

  “Marvelous,” said Edna. “Now please, both of you, tell me more about this lifestyle of yours. I’m intrigued. Don’t you ever get jealous?”

  Tavon chopped a lemon in half with the swing of a knife that looked powerful enough to butcher a calf. “Outherians got past that a long time ago,” he said. He grabbed some ice cubes from a small bucket and threw them into a tall glass, squeezed the lemon halves into it, added a generous splash of gin and sugar syrup and topped it up with a squirt from a gorgeous silver mesh soda syphon.

  “It’s one of the benefits of being able to see each other’s thoughts, you see,” said Grace. We never misunderstand one another.”

  Edna thought ‘seeing’ was an interesting word to use for telepathy.

  “Ours is a more collective form of love,” Tavon continued, handing Edna her drink. “I don’t want to sound overly critical, but the human state of marriage in my experience revolves around compromise, domination, frustration and fear.”

  “Each of us is not one person, but seven, you see,” said Grace.

  “Even when we are apart, none of us is ever truly alone,” said Tavon.

  “Yes, but I happen to enjoy being alone,” said Edna. “Not all the time, admittedly.” She took a sip. “Oh wow, that’s really good Lee, thank you.”

  “Our pleasure,” he replied with a knowing grin.

  “And can I just add, just so there are no misunderstandings — joining your carnal collective is not why I’m here,” said Edna. She was starting to feel like the night could get away from her unless boundaries were quickly established.

  “Relax,” said Grace. “You’re really not our type.”

  Edna laughed so hard she nearly spat her Tom Collins over the rug. “Where are your other selves, Grace?”

  “One of me lives in New York. Another here. We also have a life in Chicago and one in Akron, Ohio.”

  “Everyone always feels the need to say ‘Ohio’ after Akron,” Tavon added, “because nobody knows where the heck it is. I’ve got a house there too. I have funds invested in Firestone and B.F. Goodrich — and Akron, as they say, is where the rubber hits the road.”

  “Do you do the wife swap routine in Akron too?” Edna asked him. “I’d have thought that would raise a few eyebrows.”

  “It’s not such a problem in Chicago and New York,” said Grace. “But it’s true that Akron requires a more subtle approach.”

  “It’s why we move around a lot,” said Tavon. “And that is about to get a whole lot easier.”

  “True,” Edna agreed. “I can see now why you might be highly motivated to develop a quicker and more advanced method of getting around.”

  “Sex is the best motivator,” said Grace.

  “Though Americans treat desire as the devil’s temptation,” said Edna. “Like it’s something dirty to be feared and shunned, or limited to brief acts of procreation. It was so liberating to experience European attitudes to sex, even if I had to do it in the middle of a war.”

  “You’re right about that,” said Grace. “Religion has been given too much latitude.”

  “If you ask me,” said Tavon, “men in frocks should look in the mirror before throwing stones.”

  “Are you not religious in any way?” Edna asked them.

  “No,” said Tavon. “Humans cling to religion like an insurance policy. You treat God like an underwriter doing all he can to avoid a payout. We have a fundamentally different understanding of the ways of the universe.”

  A young girl appeared in the doorway. “Dinner is served,” she said.

  “Thank you, Rose,” said Grace. “Edna, I hope you’re hungry.”

  Without even needing to ask, Edna could tell Rose was not Tavon’s child, but they all seemed more than happy together. Rose looked no older than Tavon’s daughter Faye, though she knew looks were deceiving with the Outherians.

  Lee and Grace filled their plates with vegetables, but didn’t touch the meat. Rose, on the other hand, pulled the roast apart eagerly inside the roasting pan and filled Edna’s plate with the tender beef and gravy before helping herself to a large serve of the same.

  “She’s having a growth spurt,” said Grace. “She likes her food.”

  “A girl after my own heart,” said Edna.

  SIX

  Saturday December 6, 1952

  Tavon was swinging slowly back and forth on the porch rocking chair when Edna appeared bleary-eyed and half asleep to light a cigarette.

  “Those things will kill you,” he told her.

  “You might be right,” she conceded. “I find myself waking up with the craving. And I can’t help but remind you of your views on the pleasure principle.” She lit the end of her cigarette and drew back, sighing in contentment at the feeling of the smoke hitting her lungs. “Though I did change brands after someone showed me an old magazine advertisement claiming more doctors smoked Camels than any other cigarette.”

  “Camels are the worst of them all,” said Tavon.

  “Yeah. It’s why I went for Lucky Strikes. Because, you know — they’re toasted.”

  “I love this time of morning,” he said. “Everything is so quiet. I can hear our neighbors’ kettle whistling and their house is a mile away.”

  Following an eventful afternoon in the lab and a pre-dinner cocktail that had set her head spinning, Edna had hit the sack early. It was probably just as well, because there were no curtains or blinds on her bedroom window and she woke as the room filled with light at the break of dawn. She sat down next to Tavon in a chair of the non-rocking variety and took in another lungful of tobacco smoke.

  “The pursuit of pleasure can never be an end in itself,” he told her. “We take pleasure where it is freely available, but we also embrace the pain that comes with physical existence. I think you humans delude yourselves into thinking it’s possible to live a life free of pain. That’s a fantasy.”

  “Are you saying that’s why I smoke?”

  “You start off thinking of something as a reward. Once that pleasure becomes an addiction you feel the need to reward yourself more and more often. Your mind and body trick you into thinking your happiness depends on it.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake Lee, it’s too early in the morning for psychoanalysis.”

  “I never used to like the sunlight,” he said. “Not when I first arrived on Earth. The old Lee Tavon has always loved it, but the Outherian part of me still has a fear of sunlight.”

>   “Because of the sun that destroyed your world?”

  “Yes. But also because prolonged exposure to our sun was deadly long before our world came to an end.”

  “What did you call yourself on Outheria?”

  “My name was Brynthalnak.”

  “That sounds suitably foreign. Almost Scandinavian.”

  “I sit here each morning to face the sun and, in so doing, face my fear. Embrace the pain,” he said.

  “How’s that coming along?”

  “A little better each day.”

  Edna took the hint, stubbed her cigarette under her heel and they sat in silence until the heat of the sun began to make her sweat. “When you’ve finished torturing yourself, do you think you could make me a cup of coffee?” she asked.

  Hot mug in hand and feeling the first rush of a caffeine hit, she remembered she had questions about the previous day’s events. “You said your doorway is a link to another world. Tell me more about that.”

  “We call it the dark space dimension.”

  “You mentioned that when I first interviewed you last year. You called it a sphere within a sphere.”

  “Dark space exists both here and there. It is in both dimensions at once. But in the dark space dimension its principles are reversed. Or more specifically, inverse. For us, space expands across vast distances. In the dark space realm, the opposite is true. There is almost no space between every point in the universe. It is a singularity. It is the place where a Big Bang will never happen and it exists to balance this world across the dimensional multiverse.

  “This singularity is connected to all things here. By tapping into its power, we can bend space in this dimension to travel vast distances in an instant.”

  “I guess that makes sense, although I suspect that if I asked you the means by which you achieved this bridge between the two worlds, I would find the answer a lot harder to understand.”

  Tavon nodded. “It is enough for you to know that the bridge exists. That place, that other world, is also a place where every event in this universe is recorded. Tapping into that record is how Outherians can see events in the recent past and the near future. This has been known on Earth for thousands of years. It is a touchstone of Indian mysticism. In Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, it’s called the Akasha. Hindus call this the essence of all things. Buddhists say Akasha is split into limited space and endless space, which is close to the Outherian understanding, though we regard those two as being separate halves of the whole.”

  “Are you telling me those Indian beliefs are a result of the influence of ancient alien visitors?”

  “That’s right. These visitors once lived openly on Earth. They are here still, except now they no longer wish to be known to humanity. These are the people whose blood is shared by the man who is half human and half alien, now kept in hiding inside the Vatican.”

  “Paolo Favaloro. I’ve read about him in the files at Verus HQ. His people are called the Ryl. They built the flying disc that Majestic captured. They call it FS-1. And you’re saying the Ryl are still here on Earth — are these the people who’ve been contacting you?”

  Tavon shook his head. “The Ryl are elusive. They remain reluctant to show themselves.”

  “Then who are you talking to?”

  “They are from a binary star system called Zeta Reticuli, which exists in the Milky Way galaxy and is about 40 light years from Earth.”

  “They speak to you?”

  “Not with words. They are inside my head,” said Tavon. “They came again last night. They know you’re here. They are very interested in you.”

  A cold chill ran down her throat. “What do you mean?”

  “They want you to come with me to see them. They told me they live like us, underground. But their home is hidden deep inside the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia.”

  “That’s hours away,” Edna realized.

  “We won’t need that long,” said Tavon.

  SEVEN

  Sunday December 7, 1952

  “Edna. It’s time.”

  She sensed the silhouette of a figure outlined in the doorway of the bedroom before she was fully awake. For some time, she stared at the door unable to move. She couldn’t remember where she was. She knew it was Tavon speaking to her, but his voice seemed different. Her thoughts hovered in that zone between dreaming and waking until the recollection made her sit bold upright in bed.

  He was taking her to meet his aliens.

  “Let me pull on some clothes,” she told him.

  “Be quick. I’ll wait downstairs.”

  But moments after he left, another figure appeared in the doorway. Grace stepped silently into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “He won’t let anything bad happen to you. But if you’d rather not go, I will be happy to tell him.” Her eyes were wide with concern. Edna realized her feelings of trepidation had to be obvious. “He chooses not to see it, but I know this fear is real for you.”

  Edna stood up and grabbed a pair of trousers. “Is it the same fear stopping you from revealing yourselves to the rest of the world?” she asked.

  “What you feel now is natural,” said Grace. “To discover your most fundamental beliefs are founded upon a false premise is not an easy thing to confront.”

  “Which is why I’d be a hypocrite to sit here and give in to that fear. I just wish it didn’t have to happen in the dead of night.”

  “This is the time the world is lost in slumber. It’s when all things strange are possible. You remember this much from your nights as a reporter.”

  “That’s true,” Edna admitted.

  “The hours between two and four in the morning are when the power of collective subconscious rises to its most potent.”

  Edna stepped slowly and carefully down the stairs. There were no lights on anywhere in the house and she didn’t want to slip and break her ankle. He was waiting in the sitting room.

  “Do we need to go back underground?”

  “No,” said Tavon. “But we do need to be standing on the Earth. We’re still refining the parameters of the translation field. It remains unpredictable inside wooden structures. I don’t want us impaled upon the floorboards when we return.”

  “No,” she agreed, “that doesn’t sound good at all.”

  He took her by the hand and walked out the back door, then unrolled the transport pad on a patch of grass. He had given another mat to his visitors the previous night. They had agreed to place it at their destination. Which meant neither she nor Tavon knew exactly where they would end up.

  Tavon wanted her to go first. Trying hard not to think of herself as a human guinea pig, she took two quick steps and leapt directly into the energy field over the rubber pad. The same series of sensations fluttered through her head — pleasure and peace quickly followed by dislocation — before she came out the other side into a clearing surrounded by tall trees and lit only by the Moon in the sky above. She stepped forward and then off to one side, knowing Tavon would be following her. He collided with her just the same, sending her sprawling to the ground.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, helping her up.

  She gazed up again. “It’s remarkably bright, isn’t it? The Moon?” Then she realized there was another light above them, much brighter than a star, that appeared to be moving.

  “Here they come,” he said.

  “I thought you said they live here.”

  “Maybe not right here. But close. They’re secretive. Wary of us. Of you especially.”

  He meant humans.

  The light quickly grew brighter and larger as it descended upon the clearing. It turned from white to orange and then a deep red as it came close to the ground and stopped in the air about 50 feet directly above their heads. Suddenly Edna heard a loud squealing noise in her head. But when she tried to lift her arms to block her ears, she found she couldn’t move a muscle. This panicked her and for a moment she found it impossible to breathe.

  Two orange l
ights beamed down from the bottom of the ship and illuminated the ground in front of them and from these beams two figures emerged. They were slightly shorter than she and Tavon, no more than five feet high at most. But as soon as they appeared, she felt a sense of peace flood through her body and she found she could breathe easily again.

  “Don’t be scared. We cannot hurt you,” one of them assured her. She couldn’t tell if the words were spoken aloud or simply implanted in her head. “We thank you for coming here.”

  She tried to open her mouth but no words would come.

  They appeared to anticipate the question. “We have lived here for a long time. The Shawnee called us the star people. We call ourselves the Grar.”

  Edna tried to take note of the way they looked, though the more she tried to focus on them the more ill-defined they became. They were dressed in light blue clothing that covered most of their thin bodies. They looked mostly human, but their eyes were different, out of proportion with the size of their heads in being far larger than any person she had ever met before.

  “Always remember you are never alone,” they told her.

  It was an oddly imprecise message to impart considering they had gone to such trouble to be here, but it was all they wished to say. They were back inside their ship and gone moments later.

  “How odd,” she heard herself saying, staring once more at the Moon and seeing it suddenly as she had never done before, not as a disc but as another world orbiting the Earth.

  She knew beyond all doubt the star people had been there too.

  EIGHT

  Friday July 3, 1953

  It wasn’t yet noon, but the men of Majestic-12 weren’t holding back on the booze. The suite in the Hamilton Hotel wasn’t as large as their former meeting place at the Mayflower, nor was the hotel management as liberal in providing complimentary food and drink, but on this occasion Vannevar Bush was picking up the tab as a business expense and the bar had been well stocked.