With some complaint, the Chief Executive rose and got dressed: just slacks, sneakers, and a sweatshirt bearing the presidential seal. He made his way down from the living quarters to the Oval Office with a minimum of fuss. The mention of CIA director Gordon's name gave the President the only clue as to what this might be about.
He'd been briefed in the past week on what the CIA had dubbed "the Betaville Three." Unknown persons having arrived by unknown means from somewhere unknown. The President hadn't taken that much notice. He'd been told this kind of stuff — top-secret paranormal crap — usually came up about twice in a four-year term. It was something he had to deal with, but his predecessors had told him it always turned out to be just that: crap.
In other words, the President had been briefed on the Betaville Three, but that didn't mean he believed.
His plan was to bound into the Oval Office, quietly agitated, his way of showing displeasure about the ungodly hour.
But when he came through the door and caught his first look at the three visitors, now without their hoods, standing in the middle of the office, he stopped in his tracks.
Hunter was back to his full X-Forces regalia: cape, boots, helmet, the works. Zarex had recalled his star duds from the twenty-sixth; they were cleaned and pressed and, if anything, seemed even smaller on him. Tomm had also managed to scare up a new cassock. This one was jet black, with a built-in shiny white collar, smartly pleated cuffs, and slightly flared shoulders. It was a hard concept to grasp, but for once the diminutive padre actually looked, well… religious. In an interstellar kind of way.
The President just stared at them for a moment, then shut his mouth and continued on to the safety of his desk. He sat down, at the same time silently counting the number of armed Secret Service men crowded into the room. There were thirteen in all.
Not a good number, he thought.
He took his glasses out, put them on the end of his nose, and then looked up at Gordon.
"OK, Steve, this better be good."
Gordon was a man who rarely looked flustered or nervous, but he was a bit shaky at the moment.
"Mr. President, something very grave has come up," he said. "I believe you must be briefed on it immediately."
The President looked at the three visitors.
"Does the CIA want Halloween moved up a couple weeks?"
No one laughed.
Gordon started again. "In the past twenty-four hours, we have made a series of rather startling discoveries. The first one is that these three gentlemen here are not from this planet."
Gordon stopped there for a moment. The President rarely showed emotion; it was his best political trait. He barely blinked when Gordon dropped the ET bombshell. Gordon plowed on.
"These gentlemen have been able to work a piece of unknown technology that had stymied us for years. And what I'm afraid I must report to you, sir, as a result of this, we have some information that is rather frightening to contemplate."
The President finally blinked. He knew Gordon fairly well. The CIA man was not one to speak foolishly.
"Mr. President, if what we have learned today proves to be true by any stretch of the imagination, then the people of this planet, as well as people who might be living on other planets in this solar system, have been the victims of a great injustice. An injustice of enormous, monumental proportions."
The President didn't move. "I wasn't aware that there were any other worlds out there," he said dryly. "I learned in grade school that our planet was the only one—"
"Sir, that is the prevalent opinion only because no one has ever bothered to invent something that could actually look for other things up there," Gordon said sharply. Then, curiously, he added, "Much beyond the moon, that is."
The remark went right over the President's head, so Gordon just kept on talking.
"Mr. President, as crazy as it sounds, there is a chance that we are prisoners in our own solar system. We are living in a concentration camp of sorts. We were sent here, thousands of years ago, by persons unknown. We have been kept here, and intentionally delayed in our cultural development, by these same jail keepers."
The President cleared his throat. Gordon is looking a little pale these days, he thought. He is one of our oldest civil servants. Maybe old Gordo has finally flipped his wig.
"Well, this is all very interesting stuff, Steve," the President finally replied, "but do you have any… ah, proof!"
Gordon saw the disbelief in the President's eyes, disbelief tinged with pity. Time for his secret weapon.
He looked over at Zarex, who simply snapped his fingers. Before any of the Secret Service men could react, the large holo-capsule was sitting on the President's desk. Zarex leaned over and punched the capsule's ancient controls. Two seconds later, the female holo-spy was standing in the center of the room.
A couple of the Secret Service men dropped their guns, stunned at the apparition. The President looked very startled, to say the least.
"Gordon, is this some kind of—"
But the President never finished his sentence. The holo-girl interrupted him.
"This is no joke," she told the President sternly, as Gordon had asked her to do. "What is happening here is real. Hard to believe, maybe, but real. You must come to grips with it."
The President's face went from pale to beet red.
"Is this our technology?" he demanded of Gordon.
The CIA man shook his head no. "This technology is actually from the very distant past. And a complicated one at that. We've spent the entire day trying to understand each other. Her extent of this knowledge is somewhat limited. But please, sir, listen to what she has to say."
The President shifted uncomfortably in his seat. This was not quite the sort of paranormal crap he'd been expecting.
"All right," he finally croaked. "By all means, go ahead."
The holo-girl snapped her fingers, and a three-dimensional map of outer space appeared in the air in front of her — another startling moment for the President and his security men. The map showed a star system with a yellow sun and many planets orbiting it, virtually along the same orbital plane.
"Your planet, all the planets in this system, even the star itself, are all part of an enormous prison," the holo-spy began. "This system was engineered thousands of years ago and towed way out here in what was, and still is, considered unknown space. Your decedents were transported here against their will, and space guards were hired to keep them from escaping. They did this by intentionally slowing down the rate by which your society would develop. The people who programmed me believed that every planet in this system was encompassed in a time bubble. Time bubbles do not stop time completely, but they do slow it down drastically. This would explain why you are less advanced than just about every other place in the Galaxy. However…"
She paused for a moment, eyes darting back and forth, obviously accessing other memory circuits.
"… even though you are probably being held back by this constraint, there have been times in your history when you have reached a certain pinnacle of advancement. When that happens, the people who imprisoned you here send their hired guards to wipe you out. They turn your civilization over as if it never happened, leaving very few survivors. Then you start life all over again."
The President's face was ashen by this time. His security team looked the same way.
"Why are you in prison?" she went on. "I don't know. I was not programmed with that information. Why didn't this oppressive civilization just kill you off eons ago? Again, I am not programmed to know. I do know they never wanted you to know why you are here or even that you were in a prison at all."