Prologue

He couldn’t possibly be dead; that much she knew for certain. The carrier beam broadcast by Professor Cullen Wisdom’s alien implant still registered, along with his heartbeat and several other vital signs. But what the hell had happened to the man’s locator signal?
    Dr. Wilma Gibbs, distinguished Caltech professor, Nobel laureate in physics, and current director of a government agency so secret that even the President of the United States had no idea it existed, shifted her considerable bulk to a more comfortable position and stared intently at the printout. The tiny veins in her broad, coal-black forehead stood out as she did her best to make sense out of it.
    “You’re absolutely certain the monitors are all working perfectly?” Wilma barked. “The locator signals never completely disappear, even when they’re abducted!”
    She lifted her massive head and fixed her eyes on Tom Johnson, her young assistant, who sat across the cluttered oak desk from her nervously fingering a sheaf of documents covered with mathematical symbols.
    “We’ve run five separate diagnostics, Dr. Gibbs, and they all indicate that everything’s operating perfectly,” Tom replied after a moment’s hesitation, scratching his neatly trimmed blond beard and averting his eyes so as to avoid the older physicist’s withering stare. It was a habit he’d developed in graduate school while writing his doctoral dissertation under her direction.
    “Any ideas?”
    “Well, maybe . . .”
    “Maybe what?”
    “Maybe Wisdom’s had another encounter with his alien girlfriend. The one he wrote about in his book. We know he’s lived in Tokyo for the last ten years as an expat English teacher. Maybe she’s traced him there. That shouldn’t be hard for one of them to do, especially since his implant was broadcasting loud and clear on all channels until the locator signal disappeared. The last place where we can clearly pinpoint him is in front of Shinjuku Station at about 8:30 a.m., Tokyo time, and there’s a faint indication that he left the station with a female companion. Maybe she switched him off so she can have him all to herself!”
    The gray-haired African-American physicist grinned that toothy grin that had so endeared her to the world press when she went to Stockholm to accept her Nobel Prize. “Well, I suppose that is a possibility,” she chuckled. “Lord, knows, anything’s possible when we’re dealin’ with these folks. Their technology’s ‘bout as far ahead of ours as it’s possible to get. Otherwise, we could home in on the carrier beam and get a fix on him.”
    Tom nodded as she handed him the printout. He stared at it intently for the better part of a minute, pursing his lips and absently pulling at his left earlobe.
    “Dr. Gibbs,” he said finally, looking up at her through thick, wire-rimmed glasses, “I wonder if it’s finally time to bring the President into the loop. I mean, maybe they’re about to begin Phase Two. Wisdom would be an obvious choice for it. After all, he is—or was—an anthropologist and could serve as a mediator between our two cultures. Cultures are still cultures, no matter how complex they may be technologically. Right?”
    The older scientist frowned. Her star pupil, who, she was convinced, would someday earn his own trip to Stockholm, was often right about things like this. It was this gut-level ability to come up with the solution to a problem before all the data were in that had endeared him to her in the first place. Her mind worked the same way. But somebody had to play Devil’s Advocate.
    “There’s also the possibility that it’s simply an operational failure,” she replied evenly. “You just said that cultures are cultures, and you know damned well that no culture, even theirs, can possibly be perfect. So far, we’ve only been able to tap into a handful of their implants. How do we know that such glitches don’t happen all the time?”
    “We don’t, Dr. Gibbs. But something tells me this was deliberate. I can’t explain why.”
    Wilma smiled at him again and stuffed the printout into her voluminous handbag.
    On the surface, she and Tom couldn’t have been more different.
    Thomas Fielding Johnson, Jr., had grown up in Marin Country, the only son of a wealthy San Francisco stockbroker, and had attended Stanford almost as a birthright, while Wilma Gibbs was the over-achieving granddaughter of an illiterate, East Texas share-cropper, himself the grandson of slaves, had attended Spellman on a full scholarship.
    Nevertheless, they’d both been seduced by the arcane world of theoretical physics, and both had received doctorates from Caltech, she more than a generation earlier, of course, back when black faces, male as well as female, had been scarcer than hen’s teeth on the famed Southern California campus. Later on, she’d been invited to join the Caltech faculty, and, by the time Tom surfaced in one of her seminars, shortly after she was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work on super-string theory, Professor Wilma Gibbs was a world-renowned theoretical physicist. However, she immediately recognized a kindred spirit, one who was every bit as bright as she was. (Indeed, she sometimes suspected that he was even brighter!) And so, when Wilma was tapped to be the director of MJ-12, as the agency was still called by insiders, despite several official name changes in the course of the past sixty-odd years, she could think of no one she’d rather have as her chief assistant than her former student and protégé, Dr. Thomas Fielding Johnson, Jr.
    As soon as his initial shock and disbelief wore off, Tom had jumped at the chance to be part of something he’d heretofore dismissed as science fiction. Now, after two years of working with him in the supercharged, super-secret atmosphere of MJ-12, she had no reason whatsoever to regret her decision. The boy had performed brilliantly. Her only complaint was that he still couldn’t bring himself to get over being a graduate student and call her “Wilma,” even in private!
    “Okay, Tom,” she said as her mind drifted back to the present, “Let’s brief our colleagues. Most of ‘em are out in Nevada at the Groom Lake test site and shouldn’t be hard to get a hold of. But I’m not quite ready to go to the White House, not until we make better sense out of this.”
    The Director reached into her bag again and withdrew a small, irregularly shaped metallic object, one side of which was covered with tiny, multi-colored bumps.  She pushed it across the desk.
    Tom picked up the device, turned it over a few times, and then handed it back to his boss.
    “Yes, I guess we need to take the thing apart one more time,” he said, reading her thoughts. “Wisdom’s locator signal has got to be in there somewhere.”
    Wilma nodded slowly.
    They’d both spent more hours than they cared to count in the lab tinkering with what she’d come to think of as the “gizmo.”  It had been salvaged earlier that year by an MJ-12 team from a disk that had crashed in a remote region of northern Montana, less than thirty seconds before the craft vaporized. Late one evening, as they passed the object back and forth, Tom had accidentally discovered that if he tapped one of the bumps a few times a human subject’s image would appear on one of the lab monitors. It was hit or miss at first, but as time went on they were able consistently to access the data broadcast by a small number of implanted abductees.  Cullen Wisdom was one of first they’d been able to identify. They couldn’t actually read the squiggles that accompanied his and the other images they’d accessed, but they somehow “knew” what they meant. Wilma’s best guess was that the object was a receiver tuned to a particular batch of alien subjects, perhaps those  “serviced”  by the crashed disk.
    In any case, although they’d taken the device apart hundreds of times, it steadfastly refused to yield any further information. Oh, they could disassemble it, all right, but its components were impervious to x-rays, MRIs, and PET scans, as well as to high-speed drills, lasers, saws, acids, heat, and everything else they could think of using to penetrate its secrets.
    Nevertheless, one more attempt certainly wouldn’t hurt.   
    Wilma returned the alien device to her bag, gave it a firm pat, and then heaved herself out of her chair. Tom was already at the office door, holding it open for her.
    “Yes indeed, my well-brought-up young friend, we’ve got more work to do. That gizmo’s gonna tell us where Wisdom is if I have to zap it with an atom bomb!” she said, as they walked toward the elevator. It was early evening, and the lights were beginning to come on,  but the rolling Virginia countryside was still faintly visible though the tinted glass that formed the corridor’s exterior wall.
    As they stood waiting for the car, Wilma suddenly smiled the kind of smile mothers smile when their favorite offspring says something exceptionally clever. It reinforced Tom’s very private assessment that his mentor was, in a great many respects, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen; her unlined ebony face glowed with a unique inner radiance that set her apart from all other women of his acquaintance, including those who were less than half her age and size.
    “You know, Tom,” she said softly, “the more I think about it, the more I think you may be dead right.”
    “That we should go to the President, after all, Dr. Gibbs?”
    “No,” she sighed, shaking her head; someday he had to loosen up! “I meant the part about poor Dr. Wisdom being an ideal candidate for a Phase Two operation. Yeah, he’d be just the sort of person I’d pick if I were in their shoes, or whatever they call those things they stick their little feet into! Which means we’ve gotta find out what’s happened to him. Meanwhile, I want you to alert our people in Tokyo.”
    “I’ve already called them. The section chief said they’d launch a quiet investigation immediately. Hope you don’t mind my jumping the gun on this.”
    The elevator door opened, and he stood aside to let her enter. After the car began to descend, she turned to face him and flashed one of her famous grins. “If you hadn’t called ‘em, I’d have thought you were slipping. Let’s hope the poor guy’s still in Japan somewhere.”
    “Or at least on this planet,” Tom added softly as the car reached the lobby.