Astounding! by Kim Fielding Read Free Book Online Page B

long time ago and nobody was supposed to know. Nobody has, until now. And you don’t believe me anyway.”
    The guy’s tale might be crazy, but it clearly felt real to him, which meant his distress was no less painful than if he’d been suffering from a sane malady. Carter wanted to comfort him, but all he could do was shrug. “I’m sorry.”
    “I appreciate that at least you’re listening to me. Thank you.” John’s smile was weak but genuine.
    Someone abruptly turned on the café sound system, making Carter jump. The song that played loud enough to be heard over the espresso machine wasn’t in English, and he didn’t recognize the tune. But he liked it and tapped his fingers on the tabletop. He could feel John’s scrutiny but wasn’t especially bothered by it. Really, few people noticed him under ordinary circumstances. Catching a handsome man’s attention wasn’t a bad thing—even if the man thought he was ET.
    Which reminded him. “Do you want to go home, John? Like the aliens in your stories?”
    “Yes,” John whispered.
    “But you can’t?”
    John shook his head.
    “Why not? You can’t just… phone?”
    “You—humans—you launched your first vehicle into orbit, which caught our attention. We’d known you were here long before that, but until you ventured into space, we didn’t consider you very important. You understand?”
    Carter did. It was a premise he’d seen in more than one story. As long as the hairless apes stuck to crawling around on their own planet’s surface, alien civilizations paid about as much attention as a human might pay to ants hurrying along the sidewalk. But if those ants got into the kitchen—if humans launched Sputnik—suddenly they became a hell of a lot more relevant. “So we sent up a rocket…,” he prompted.
    “And I was sent here to investigate you.”
    Carter rubbed the back of his neck. “Investigate like an anthropologist, or investigate like the FBI?”
    “More… more the latter, I guess. I was supposed to live among you. Learn what kind of creatures you are and what your potential is. And I was supposed to send a message when I was ready to leave. This was long before the Internet, of course. And anyway, we’re not good at that sort of technology. We don’t use machinery.”
    “So how were you supposed to contact them? Crop circles?”
    John actually chuckled at that. “No, although that’s a pretty good idea. But I was going to send a coded communication in your printed materials. In your magazines. We knew from some preliminary studies that humans printed stories about visitors from other planets, and we decided my message could hide among those stories without alerting you to my presence.”
    “Ah.” Carter picked up his cup but discovered it was empty. “Hold that thought,” he said. He stood and walked to the counter, where the barista was happy to give him a refill. When Carter returned to the table, John looked at him gratefully, as if he’d half expected Carter to take a runner out the front door.
    “Okay,” Carter said, sitting down. “So your pals were going to subscribe to Astounding! and— But my rag didn’t even exist back then. I wasn’t even born.”
    “I know. But we agreed on the type of publication. There were many pulp magazines in the 1950s. My people would monitor them all.”
    Carter decided not to ask how they would monitor. Intergalactic newsstands, maybe. “And they’d see your secret message and swing by to pick you up.”
    “Yes. But we didn’t understand humans at all, and we made two mistakes. I made two mistakes. It was my plan.”
    The coffee burned Carter’s tongue when he sipped at it. A species advanced enough to conquer space should be able to figure out how to serve coffee and pizza that didn’t scald away the taste buds, but apparently not. “What were the mistakes?”
    “I didn’t understand how difficult it would be to get published. My people don’t write fiction. I didn’t