Halifax Page 10

  Rom bounced up and down in his seat. He couldn’t have been happier. “I like it,” he said. “We can always use help. And it’s like we’re adding to our little family. It’s like getting a new brother and sister.”

  Izzy angrily shoved Rom towards Bobby and Bobby angrily shoved him back her way. Rom was no longer happy. “I get the front seat on the way back,” he declared.

  “No you don’t,” Nora announced. She may not have really known any of these kids but no snot-nosed freshman was taking the front seat from a junior. That was a rule observed across the universe.

  “See?” Rom said, perking up. “That’s exactly what a sister would say!”

  * * *

  “One deluxe dark double hot chocolate with caramel sauce and whipped cream,” the barista announced.

  “That’s me!” Rom said as he grabbed his steaming, sugar soaked drink off the counter.

  All of the kids were at Something’s Brewing, a small coffee shop popular with the local high school students and generally populated by people who ordered one drink and stayed for four hours to use the free Internet service. Any coffee shop was a favorite of the Halifax siblings. Caffeine was a stimulant lauded universe-wide and no being, human or otherwise, was immune to its addictive qualities.

  Rom pushed past the others and retreated to a small section that sold mugs with the shop’s logo, tins of mints, candies, and a selection of Halloween paraphernalia, such as the Court Jester’s hat Rom was soon trying on.

  “Rom, what are you wearing?” Farrell asked as he and the others waited for their drinks.

  “It’s Halloween tomorrow,” Rom announced. “Just checking out the costume possibilities.” He took off the Jester’s hat and replaced it with a tall and pointy crimson sorcerer’s hat. Farrell ignored his little brother and turned to the others.

  “I think you’ll understand it if I put it this way,” he said. He had been trying to explain to Nora and Bobby things about their planet and the universe that were almost inexplicable. He had the demeanor of a college professor trying to teach trigonometry to preschoolers and Nora and Bobby looked about as bewildered as two five year olds would. “Earth is like Australia. You know how Australia started as a penal colony where England sent all the prisoners it didn’t want anymore? That’s what Earth is.”

  “We’re a prison?” Bobby asked. He was a little insulted. “I thought aliens were coming here to shoot lasers at the White House and impregnate our women with their evil alien spawn.”

  “Actually, “ Izzy interrupted, “all prisoners are sterilized before they arrive. No little alien Bobby Juniors for you!”

  The barista who was frothing cream and dispensing coffee behind the counter put up two more drinks. “Iced soy latte and double cappuccino,” the young man said. He was juggling a dozen orders like the coffee making pro that he was. Farrell and Nora took the drinks and walked outside, leaving Bobby and Izzy waiting.

  “Why can’t we see them?” Bobby asked. “I mean, why don’t they look like aliens? Where are the antennas and the big scary eyes and stuff?”

  “All prisoners are given screens,” Izzy told him. “A screen is like a disguise. It’s an organic field that covers you with another image. It’s so effective you wouldn’t know an alien even if you were on your second date with one.”

  The barista put the last two drinks on the counter. “One large double espresso and one cinnamon latte.”

  “Screen or no screen, I’d totally be able to tell,” Bobby said as he took his drink and handed Izzy hers. “I’m Bobby Ramirez. I’d know an alien if I saw one.”

  “Oh, really?” Izzy asked. Izzy turned to the barista as he squirted whipped cream on another drink. “Hey Lars, I think your screen’s malfunctioning. Um, your tail’s showing.”

  Lars, the barista, looked back over his shoulder and his face flushed red with embarrassment. Indeed, a two-foot long tail, much like that of a rat, stuck out from under his white apron.

  “Oh wow, how mortifying,” the barista said, tucking the tail in as Bobby looked on in amazement. “Thanks, Izzy. Won’t happen again.”

  Izzy smiled at Bobby and walked outside to join the others. Bobby and Lars looked at one another, neither knowing what to say. Both uncomfortable. “Thanks, man,” Bobby finally mumbled, then caught himself. “Man? Er, dude. Whatever. Have a good one.”

  * * *

  “You start with the eyes,” Rom said. “You can see the infinitesimal yellowing of the sclera from ultraviolet rays and long term exposure.” He was sitting with the others on a wall outside the coffee shop and was wearing the sorcerer’s hat he had been trying on earlier. It was drooping at the top, though, and looked more like the hat of a sloppy elf than a fearsome wizard.

  Rom’s intense gaze was fixed on a middle-aged man sitting with a friend about ten feet away from them. The man was eating ice cream and enjoying the pleasant fall day in the sunshine of the quaint Cahuenga Village, having absolutely no idea that every bit and piece of him was being visually dissected by a teenage visitor from outer space.

  “Over time,” Rom continued, “the nose lengthens and narrows and the tip begins to droop.” Nora grimaced as she looked at the man’s nose. No ones nose, no matter how perfect, should be examined closely.

  In between spoonfuls of his chocolate chunk ice cream the man offered up a warm smile to his companion. To Rom, though, he was offering up the opportunity for scientific examination. “The enamel on the teeth erodes and the gums begin to recede,” Rom said. “The health of the gums are also an early indicator of heart disease.”

  Rom then turned his attention to the man’s dark brown hair. It was speckled with a few strands of grey. He may not have even noticed his grey hairs, but Rom did. “Hair doesn’t actually turn grey,” Rom informed the other kids. “It becomes translucent, a failure of the melanocyte stem cells to maintain melanocytes.”

  He wasn’t finished yet. If the man knew what Rom knew he may have thought twice about sitting outside, uncovered, his pale skin baking ever so slowly in the sun. “The normal aging process is only one factor,” Rom said. “It’s the mole on his arm that’s the killer. Literally.”

  The other kids leaned forward to try to get a good angle to see the small mole on the man’s forearm just below the bend in his elbow. It was just a splotch and was barely noticeable. It looked harmless. Moles always do. “It’s a malignant melanoma,” Rom declared. “And because of it he’ll die in two years, seven months, five days, and roughly three hours.”

  Nora looked incredulous. This was a real person they were talking about and they were talking about his impending death so casually it alarmed her. “What if he’s hit by a car tomorrow?” she asked.

  “It’s science and biology,” Rom told her. “I’m not a fortune teller. If he gets hit by a car tomorrow he dies tomorrow.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Bobby announced as the man and his companion got up and walked down the sidewalk. The man was walking, it seemed, towards an untimely death. “I don’t think you can really tell when someone’s going to die just by looking at them.”

  Izzy shook her head. She’d seen this so many times before. She didn’t like when Rom did it but she couldn’t deny his ability to do it. “He’s always right,” she said. “He’s one sixteenth Parcivian. Parcivites are obnoxiously smart.”

  “Do you want me to tell you when you’re going to die?” Rom asked Bobby.

  “No!” Bobby exclaimed. He scooted away from Rom and suddenly had no interest in making eye contact with the young alien, even as Rom stared at him, studying him.

  Nora turned to Izzy. “So are you like your brother, Izzy? Are you some super genius, too?”

  “He is not my brother,” Izzy said emphatically.

  Bobby looked between the three Halifax kids. “You guys aren’t related?”

  “No!” Izzy declared quickly.

  “Well, we sort of are,” Rom chimed in. “We’re like an adopted family.”

  “No, we’re not,
” said Izzy.

  “Yes, we are,” Rom argued.

  “Not,” Izzy said again. “So not.”

  “You’re a different kind of alien,” Bobby said as he rested his chin on his hand and stared at Izzy like a talk show host interrogating his subject. “That’s cool. So what are your superpowers? Can you fly? Twist around like a pretzel? Any x-ray vision? Can you see through my clothes?”

  Farrell laughed at the last comment but kept quietly sipping his coffee, listening and observing the others, waiting in anticipation of Izzy’s response. He knew her feelings could be so easily hurt. Izzy, however, didn’t appear to take any offense.

  “I’m half Doroan and half Orlian,” Izzy told Bobby. “I guess you’d say my gift is being really sensitive. That’s the Orlian side of me. I can, I don’t know, pick up on feelings.”

  “You can read minds?” Bobby said.

  “If I could read minds we would have already found out who our Cambian has infected by now,” Izzy replied with a hint of annoyance. “No, I just can sense things. Feel emotions. Know what someone wants or is afraid of. It’s like I can see the person beneath what they show the rest of the world.”

  Izzy turned to look at Nora, right into her eyes, but Nora quickly and uncomfortably turned to Farrell. “What about you, Farrell?” Nora asked him. “Any special powers?”

  “Actually, I have two,” Farrell said. “Incredible good looks and magnetic charm.”

  “No seriously,” Bobby said. “You’re half what and half what?”

  “Farrell?” Izzy asked. “He’s not half anything. Isn’t it obvious?”

  Nora looked at Farrell. He wasn’t obviously anything other than intriguing to her. She was about to follow up, to ask another one of the many questions she liked to ask even if she didn’t understand why she wanted to know so much, when Bobby suddenly jumped up, squirming, and yelled at Rom.

  “Stop looking at me!” he said.

  * * *

  A tiny light in a sea of other tiny lights slowly came into focus. It was nothing more than a pin prick, a speck indistinguishable from the other specks to the naked eye, but a light that continued to be the brightest star in the sky to Farrell and Izzy and Rom.

  Farrell stepped away from the huge telescope he had trained on the sky and the fixed point in it. The Halifax siblings had brought Nora and Bobby to the Griffith Observatory high on a mountain overlooking the city. They all stood on the platform in front of the Zeiss Telescope, a reflector telescope tilted to peer out into the stars through an opening in the observatory’s copper dome.

  “That’s Ryden,” Farrell said, motioning towards the night sky, somewhere millions of miles away in the direction the telescope was pointed. “That’s our planet. It was the prison planet before Earth.” It was a planet, the little light in the sky. It was their planet.

  Nora looked through the telescope. She couldn’t tell one planet from another. They all looked the same. “I don’t see it,” she said. Farrell moved in close to her, leaning down with his head right next to hers, brushing against her cheek. The touch of his skin almost shocked Nora. A current of energy, or a surge of chemicals, rushed through her body.

  “Follow the line of stars from the bottom left,” he said quietly. “One…two…three. It’s just past the third star.”

  “I see it now,” Nora said. She pulled away from the telescope and looked at Farrell. Brushing up against someone’s cheek was a much different sensation than battering them with a lacrosse stick. It was a different sensation and not an unpleasant one. It triggered that elusive, inexplicable moment when you begin to see someone in a whole new light.

  “Let me see,” Bobby said, pushing in between Nora and Farrell, disrupting the small connection they were having.

  “Ryden was a lot like Earth,” Farrell told them. “It was a peaceful planet filled with families and politics and business and…life. After thousands of years as a prison planet, though, it had become polluted by wars and cruelty and hatred and the Committee decided it was beyond hope.”

  “What’s the Committee?” Nora asked as Bobby stepped back from the telescope and Rom climbed up on a step to get a view for himself.

  “The Committee is like the prison review board of the galaxy,” Izzy said.

  “They pass judgment on criminals,” Farrell added. “Hand out penalties. They gave Ryden the ultimate punishment. They sentenced the entire planet to death.”

  Rom looked away from the telescope. His face was flushed and red with anger and Rom was rarely angry. It was unsettling to the others to see him growing in fury. “The Committee didn’t think Ryden was worth bothering with any more,” Rom said. “They thought is cost too much to maintain and that no one there could be rehabilitated even though most of the inhabitants weren’t even prisoners. They were the descendants of prisoners. They were innocent.”

  “So they destroyed it,” Izzy said. Just like that. She was beyond understanding it. “Destroyed it and the eight billion beings that lived there. Including almost everyone we knew.”

  “But it’s there,” Nora said, pointing to the telescope that itself was pointing to Ryden in the night sky. “I just saw it.”

  “It’s not there anymore,” Farrell said, suddenly looking as sad as Rom looked angry. “It takes years for light to travel across the universe. Looking at the sky is like looking at an old photo album. Some of the people in the pictures were kids when a photo was taken but now they’re grandparents. Some of the people died a long time ago. That’s the sky. It’s an old photograph. One day someone will look through that telescope and that light, Ryden, will be gone.”

  Bobby turned to Farrell, almost turning on him, bursting with aggression. “This Committee killed eight billion people, or whatever, and you work for them?”

  Farrell put his arm on Bobby’s shoulder, trying to calm him down, trying to reassure him that he, Farrell, wasn’t the bad guy. “It’s not the same Committee any more. The former Committee members were…fired. We work for the new Committee.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Izzy said. “To prove we can make this work. This can be a successful prison planet.”

  “We’re not the only division on Earth,” Farrell added. “There are other groups like ours. We’re all here to make sure no rogue aliens give anyone a reason to destroy this planet. We don’t want the same thing that happened to Ryden to happen to your planet.”

  Nora looked through the telescope again. The image of Ryden faded, flickering in and out. She was looking at what had once been the home of billions of people. There, but not there. Like people in a black and white photograph. There, but not there.

  * * *

  “This place is seriously serious,” Bobby said. He was in the Garage. He was surrounded by blinking, beeping, fantastic machines and it was almost more than his little alien conspiracy loving heart could take. “Wait until I tell the guys in my club.”

  “You can’t tell anyone,” Rom said. “If you do we’ll have to kill you.”

  “Why are you guys all so eager to kill me?” Bobby asked, but Rom didn’t respond. The answer, to him, was self-evident. Instead Rom continued to show Bobby around the Garage. He was full of pride for all that he had created.

  Nora was there, too, but was much more subdued. Whatever it was that had Bobby so excited was the same thing that had her feeling uneasy. She looked around the Garage and was lost in its expanse and its otherworldliness. She had never been in a place like it before and there was a reason for that. Nora had never thought about aliens. It had never occurred to her to think about aliens. She lived in a very earthly world full of very earthly problems. She had popular girls to contend and compete with. She had a cranky boyfriend. She had a drunk mother. She was worried about her grades and her friends and her weight. Why would anyone ever think about outer space?

  Bobby, though, could think of nothing else. He had spent too many years looking up at the sky wondering who might be looking back. He had spent too many hours looking at a
computer screen searching Internet chat rooms and alien conspiracy websites and searching for clues and proof and others who believed what he believed. That they were out there. And now, here he was in the Garage, with one of them.

  An array of children’s toys, the ones favored by Rom, were strewn out across Rom’s workstation under one of the massive screens that filled the walls of the Garage, one with an image of some far away galaxy. Bobby reached down and picked up a Rubik’s Cube. Its multi-colored squares were just waiting to be turned, a puzzle to be solved.

  “I love these things,” Bobby said. He was about to start twisting its sections around when Rom grabbed it out of his hands.

  “Don’t ever touch that!” Rom warned him. “It’s not a toy. It’s been modified to control satellites circling the globe. One wrong turn and you could send the entire Defense Department’s group of satellites into the Atlantic Ocean. Or even worse, we could lose our ESPN feed.”

  Rom moved down the workstation and Bobby followed. He was entranced by what he was seeing and eager to see more. They reached a white box that had a black panel with small holes. It was about the size and shape of a toaster oven. Light shone through from behind the holes in the panel and illuminated small translucent pegs of orange and red and blue and yellow that were plugged into the different holes. It was an older toy called a Lite Brite and the pegs formed a picture of Earth on its panel.

  “Now this may look to you like a simple child’s toy, but it actually tracks nascent black holes on Earth,” Rom said. He then pointed to one yellow peg in particular. “That one there is the black hole in the Bermuda Triangle.” Rom said the last two words slowly and ominously, trying to frighten Bobby, but Bobby had probably read about things much more frightening in the school paper. Black holes? Whatever?