One Foul Step from the Abyss
Edgar Lopez, a rotund man about to crest the final hill that separated middle age from senility, scratched his chin in amazement. “Thirty years I’ve worked here…” he muttered to himself and the glazed donut sitting on a cheap paper napkin in front of him.
“What’s that, Ed?” Gabriella, one of the college interns, called from her desk a few feet away. In the astronomy world, Edgar was something of a legend. He had worked at the Apollo Observatory and Space Research Facility longer than the handful of interns had been alive. He had a well-earned reputation and a list of awards and achievements that would make any scientist blush.
Despite his history, he didn’t feel like a legend. He felt like a failure. A stack of field reports sat on Edgar’s desk and stared at him. It was his last day, and Edgar had resolved himself to let his paperwork rot.
“Ed?” Gabriella asked again, this time with a hint of concern lacing her otherwise beautiful Spanish accent.
“Oh, nothing,” he told her politely, “just wandering off. You know how it gets.” Gabriella nodded and returned to her computer screen. “Oh, Gabriella?” He peeked his head over his monitor with the flash of an idea running through his head.
“Yes?” the eager intern replied. Edgar wasn’t sure, but he vaguely remembered that Gabriella was only a sophomore at the university and a foreign transfer at that. She would blindly follow him anywhere… and she wouldn’t be missed.
Edgar rose from his desk with the lumbering speed of a limp sloth. A lifetime of watching the stars through a telescope had added more weight to his belly than glazed donuts and coffee ever could. “Come with me,” he told her. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Gabriella verily leapt to her feet and grabbed a field report clipboard from a peg on the wall. “Yes, sir!” she chirped at his heels. While everyone called him Ed when he was at his desk, the moment he stood up changed the rules. Since the observatory was located on the grounds of an active military base, proper protocol had to be followed everywhere outside the offices.
Edgar made his way down a long hallway surrounded by computer monitors and busy interns. He smiled to himself and basked in the realization that he would never have to return to the observatory again. In just a few short hours, his time would be up.
Edgar and Gabriella arrived a few moments later at a large black door two floors beneath the office area. Large red letters across the top of the door told them where they were: the Deep Space Tele Relay.
“I don’t think I’m allowed to go in there, sir,” Gabriella said apprehensively. “Professor Moun-”
“Never mind your professors,” Edgar interrupted. With a heavy hand he unlocked the door and flipped on a light switch. A long hallway with several glass doors presented itself.
“What is this place?” Gabriella asked as she followed Edgar into the hallway.
“The Deep Space Tele Relay was built in 1978 after the Wow! Signal was picked up by the Big Ear Radio Telescope at Ohio State. It took a while to get it calibrated, lot of tinkering and the like, but we had it operational by the eighties.” Edgar stopped in front of a sliding glass door and pointed to the banks of computers and technicians working inside. In front of the four rows of computers was a giant screen with dozens of technical readouts and constantly changing charts and graphs.
“What does it do?” she whispered, peering through the glass like a little girl at a puppy store.
“After the Wow! Signal, we knew we weren’t alone. The public knew it too, but for whatever reason, they didn’t seem to care as much as us nerds here. We built the relay to send messages to the exact location where the Wow! Signal originated.” Edgar kept walking down the long hallway to another heavy black door.
The intern stopped in her tracks, and her voice caught in her throat. “I-I was taught that we never heard anything after the Wow! Signal. None of the radio arrays ever picked up anything like it again. That’s what we were all taught.” Gabriella shook her head, and a creeping sensation in her stomach told her to turn back. None of it made sense. The black door at the end of the hall lurked like a huge monster from her nightmares ready to devour her.
“Don’t believe everything your professors teach you, Gabriella,” Edgar said with a casual laugh. He punched in a long sequence of numbers on a metallic keypad next to the door. A series of clicking sounds emanated from the mechanism, and for the first time that day, Edgar smiled. “A few years after the Wow! Signal was recorded, the deep space tele relay located the origin. It was moving at an incredible speed, so it was hard to track at first.”
Gabriella’s eyes grew wide. “What source? A pulsar? A quasar? Those don’t move, do they?” Everything she had learned in all her advanced astrophysics and astronomy classes was rapidly dissolving into useless dribble inside her brain.
Edgar chuckled and turned to face her with a hand on the doorknob. “Everyone expected the source of the signal to be a quasar. You’re right… quasars don’t move. No, what the tele relay discovered was a vehicle traveling at near the speed of light.”
“My god…” Gabriella gasped. She muttered something inaudible under her breath in Spanish. “Why hasn’t the world been told? Why are you keeping it a secret?” For a brief moment, she thought of fleeing the observatory and running straight to the press.
Edgar laughed and pushed open the door. A world of strange sounds and flashing lights spilled into the otherwise dark hallway. Gabriella’s senses were completely overwhelmed. “Come with me,” Edgar commanded with just enough authority in his voice to ensure that Gabriella obeyed. All thoughts of running vanished the moment she took a step.
“The world isn’t ready to know, Gabriella,” Edgar explained as he walked into the laboratory. Dozens of scientists in white lab coats worked at stations with computers, beakers, slides of organic material, and all other sorts of equipment. Despite the door rarely being opened, none of the scientists seemed to notice the new arrivals.
“How long has this been down here?” Gabriella wondered aloud. She stepped out of the way of a scurrying scientist and noticed a smell she certainly knew but had trouble identifying. The scientist bowled past her to a large metal box with a series of complex locks. Once he opened the door, the man placed what looked like a tissue sample inside and locked the container once more.
“Watch. I think you’ll enjoy this part.” Edgar pointed to the box and took a step closer. After a moment, the device began to hum and vibrate with energy.
“That smell…” Gabriella remarked, still struggling to place it in her mind.
Edgar gave the woman a fatherly pat on the back. “We were surprised too,” he said. “The material they use to coat their communications smells like cedar mixed with dark chocolate. Altogether quite pleasant, if you ask me. We call it Gwycin Gel.”
“Wait…” Despite her advanced intellect and years of training, her mind couldn’t grasp the realities of what she was learning. “A substance to coat communications?” She shook her head. Then her eyes went wide and she gasped. “Who is they!” she practically screamed. “Who are they?”
Several of the scientists at nearby stations turned for a moment to regard her outburst, but none of them were bothered enough to speak. Edgar turned the intern to face a large poster hanging inside a protective glass case. “Have you heard of the Greys?”
Gabriella’s eyes devoured the information on the poster faster than her mind could process it, turning the images and captions into a blurred mess of science fiction delirium. “You can’t mean…” she sputtered.
“Oh yes,” Edgar reassured her. “The Greys are very real. When we finally locked onto their ship’s signal back in the early eighties, we couldn’t believe it either.”
“Roswell?” Gabriella asked with eyes wider than flying saucers.
Edgar shook his head. “Just another CIA hoax,” he explained. “The Greys had never been to Earth before 1986—or so they tell us. Honestly, we don’t know. All the evidence leads us to believe that none of the UFO stories you’ve ever heard are true, but in the end, we have to take them at their word.”
Gabriella looked back to the poster and the half-sized drawings of little grey aliens that fit the international stereotype so perfectly. A million questions whirled through her head at once. “Where did they land?” seemed like the most pertinent inquiry to rise above the maelstrom of her thoughts.
“Not far from here, just an hour or so south of the base.” Edgar motioned for the intern to follow him deeper into the complex, and the wide-eyed girl readily obeyed. “Ever heard of Hanger 18?” he asked.
Gabriella followed the man down a long hallway. “Only on the History Channel when they talk about…” she had a hard time saying it, despite knowing it was all true. “Aliens…” The word left a sour—yet intoxicating—taste in her mouth.
“That’s where they docked their ship,” Edgar explained as though he was stating something as banal and mundane as the color of the carpet.
“What ship?” Gabriella shouted, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.
“Shhh.” Edgar placed a hand somewhat forcefully on her shoulder and stared into her brown eyes. “You know…” he began slowly, drawing the intern’s intense gaze into his own. “Would you like… to meet one of them?”
