"It is tragically wrong to believe that the advancement of humanity must proceed at the pace of its slowest members."
-Zefram Cochrane
Chapter One
2053 (the close of the Final World War)
Welcome to the abandoned land
Come on in, child, take my hand!
The icy wind gusted harshly across the barren fields.
Beneath his feet, the frozen cap of ice and snow held the dust down, preventing it from blowing away in the force of the angry gale. The fine grit intermingled with the gray ice to provide footing; the mournful assembly could walk across the packed refuse without slipping, without fracturing hollow bones and aching joint, but still they moved slowly.
No trees interrupted the stormy vista. Instead, flatness prevailed everywhere the eye could travel. At one times, many years previously, great belts of pines and conifers had been planted to ease the earth-rending effects of the northern winds; but now, nothing stopped the powerful Zephyr as it tore across the great open spaces.
The ice was gray beneath, and the sky was gray above. It was like a great, concave bowl, set atop the Earth to trap everything within. In the distance, where the ground meets the horizon, the two blurred into identical nothingness, giving no hint that one ended and the other began. Unvarying gray, without the distinction of cloud or sun, it was a heavy presence that wore on everything struggling for life within its dome.
Zefram Cochrane wrapped his heavy coats tighter about his quivering frame. It was cold; there was no denying that, even though it had always been cold. The warm seasons were only a faint echo of their past brilliance, and perpetual winter plagued the land. Each person either adapted, or died; such was the state of affairs in the Year of Our Lord two thousand and sixty-one.
Cochrane had not intended to travel this season; in the aftermath of the Final World War, travel was difficult in the best of circumstances, and his work kept him busy in his mountain compound. But a week before—a week or so, if he was honest about the alcoholic haze—a radio message had reached his compound, and he had finally chosen to answer.
"Then the vigor of our eternal knowledge was destroyed within us," the Trusted Servant intoned as the meager assembly listened carefully. The Servant's voice was faint, and the wind howled with the madness of a missile, but no one suggesting erecting a shelter; it was not the proper way. "And weakness pursued us."
The assembled were a motley group, survivors of the great cataclysm who now waited their turn for death. It stalked them all; it was a daily struggle to cling to life in this, the abandoned world, and each knew that their success was merely a daily reprieve. Hunger, disease, plague and violence; one of these would eventually seize the living from this harsh, twilight existence.
"Therefore the days of our life became few." The Servant's voice was soft, but it resonated with a certain lyrical quality. He stood at the foot of the coffin, a man wizened many decades before his time, his beaten frame enveloped in furs from a pre-night era. "For I knew that I had come under the authority of death."
Zefram was now the last surviving member of the Cochrane clan. His parents had died during the twilight peace; his siblings fell during the wars, and his extended family disappeared in the conflagrations and the wintry holocaust that now doomed them all. This one, the last, was a second cousin; and Zefram knew that his own time was coming.
The coffin was a testament to the brute simplicity of life beneath the gray dome. Valuable materials were salvaged to lay the dead to rest; old, brittle wooden planks were nailed together into a rough box. It did not need to be large; like many inhabitants of the abandoned land, his cousin was physically stunted from the radiation and harsh existence. And there were no decorations; not even a flower adorned the casket.
"We have done every deed of the powers senselessly." The Servant's voice fluttered momentarily as a powerful gust of wind caused him to sway; his bodily presence was immaterial to the brutal frigidness of the air. "We were full of works that are not of the truth. And now we have known that we must surely die the death of nothingness."
Zefram had debated whether or not to attend. It would not have been unusual for him to pass; the great infrastructures of travel were destroyed, and transportation was nearly nonexistent. Many people could only travel by foot, and it was nearly nine hundred miles from his compound near the ghost city of Bozeman to this barren plain south of Yankton.
And as a rule, family did not matter much to him; in fact, Zefram had never met the man who had so recently died. But even for a man who had foresworn family, there was something oddly compelling about being the last survivor. Thus, he rolled out an old, retrofitted propeller plane, fueled it up with liquefied biomass, and made the flight down.
The Trusted Servant soon reached the end of his homily. "And the Lord laid the Kingdom at His feet, and renounced it, yielding sovereignty and rule unto the barrenness." It was a melancholic ending to a melancholic ceremony in a melancholic existence, but hope for salvation had long since vanished. The plaintive howl of a lone coyote only drove home the pervasive sense of hopelessness.
The final prayers were spoken, and the lonesome mourners broke up. A handful gathered in small groups, exchanging only short words before bowing their heads into the wind. They disappeared quickly, their tattered cloaks blending in to the permanent twilight, hidden behind the swirling flakes of ash.
Others meandered around the prairie cemetery, taking a moment to read the decaying gravestones that stood, half-tilted, in the frozen ground. Many were a century and a half old, from a long-gone era when the frontier was new and held unbounded promise for the downtrodden. But nearly half were recent, dating from after the great nuclear salvos, when the people were driven back to the land.
For his part, Zefram Cochrane wandered off a short distance, into the unvaried field of ice and crud that stretched everywhere. The wind bit him sharply, with flecks of ash slicing at him, but he ignored it; his skin was tough and leathery, his body accustomed to the exposure, and his thick buffalo-skin robe seemingly impervious.
He looked up at the sky, the great gray dome above, and imagined he could see the stars beyond it. They were there, he knew, hidden on the other side of the great barrier, but at times like this it seemed to be an impenetrable gap.
He knew that humanity was dying. Birth rates were nearly zero, and life expectancy had plunged into something almost prehistoric. At the ripe age of twenty-nine, Zefram was already in his middle ages by contemporary standards. He had been born during the twilight peace of the wars, in 2032, but physically he already resembled an old man.
Humanity had maybe a generation of survival left.
Cochrane was no fool. He had no illusions of saving mankind—the species was long past salvaging. All he wanted was to escape, to leave this cruel world behind and to die as far away as possible. If his trans-light drive did not work, he would strap himself into a sub-light rocket and greet death in the darkness of space.
From inside his robe, Zefram withdrew his battered flask, and unscrewed the lid. The pungent aroma of homemade liquor punched through the wind, and tilting his head back, Zefram let the poisonous liquid pour into his mouth. It burned, it stung, and it knocked him momentarily oblivious.
The relief was fleeting, but the pain remained. The stabbing knife that ripped through his abdomen; the burning sensation in his brain; the mental traumas inflicted during his three decades of fleeing from death.
All he cared about was escape.
Seasons turn, and years progress, but the land remains the same. The great dome of gray skies and black storms stays overhead, encompassing all that remains within its deadly bosom, suffocating dreams of a reality beyond it. Rolling waves of thunder dislodge frozen clumps of snow and ash, the refuse of a thousand lives, sending them hurtling to the barren landscape below. Winter brings little variation in the perpetual cold, and the ravines provide scarce solace from the scourging wind that howls across the denuded plains.
For Zefram Cochrane, time passed in a blur, the snatched moments of wakefulness between induced dreams of slumber and mayhem. His body burned with the pain of decaying life. His bones ached, and his muscles grew slack; his abdomen fought with the fiery lances of acidic wreckage, and only the heavy robe protected his weakening body from the brutal, inescapable cold. Only his mind wore on, unrelenting in its thoughts, suppressed only by the enveloping warmth of homemade liquor.
Lily ran the compound with the hard force of one accustomed to flogging on the half-dead remains of life. In their moments of useful sobriety, she sent the motley workers deeper under the bluffs, cutting through the limestone to craft a new retreat within the warm embrace of rock and earth. The geothermal heat sustained their lives, providing warmth and power, and natural caves were laboriously transformed into underground gardens to provide the rare foods needed to ward off malnutrition.
So, too, did she dispatch scavenger parties far and wide, scouring the landscape for the debris of civilization: the vast mountains and plains of asphalt and concrete, steel and rebar, wooden beams and strong plasticines, and endless acres of charcoal for fuel. These could be recycled, melted down in a homemade foundry and converted to dozens of uses, each of which Lily picked from Cochrane's mind during moments of lucidity.
And so it was that this little community clung to life on the banks of the Yellow Medicine Creek.
Years previous, when Lily and Zefram had left the camps and struck out into the wastelands, they had taken with them the few engineers they could find—a handful who, like Cochrane himself, could only attribute their knowledge to practical apprenticeships learned from past masters. They took the ideas gasping for life inside Zefram's mind and converted them to real items, dozens upon dozens of ingenious inventions to help the community survive.
And under the organizational guidance of Lily, work continued on the superluminal warp drive. With the theory waiting to be proven, the engineers turned their skills to building a craft from scratch.
In the late hours of artificial night—the skies themselves were locked in perpetual twilight—Lily stayed up with the engineers, discussing the next step in their endeavor. If Cochrane's drive is a success, they reasoned; now that we can go somewhere, we have to decide WHERE. There was no discussion of leaving, and returning; there was no discussion of disseminating the technology to other scattered pockets of shattered humanity. There was only a discussion of loading their community onto a superluminal craft and not looking back.
April 3, 2063
"To the Phoenix!" Zefram bellowed as he raised his dirty glass high. The brown contents looked muddy in the weak artificial lighting. "May she take to the skies, and not blow up under my ass!'"
A chorus of approval roared back, and Cochrane slammed the liquid down his throat, grimacing as it burned its way down his esophagus. They had saved the good stuff for this final prelaunch party; but for homemade hooch, 'good' was a distinctly relative term. The vile liquor sent stabs of hot pain through his abdomen, causing Zefram to bend over.
Never mind the pain; another toast was coming, and he was ready. This time Lily took the lead. "To the Phoenix!" Lily shouted loudly; she was a small lady with a powerful voice. "And to getting the hell outta Dodge!" Another chorus of approval saluted the sentiment.
The party was already in full debauchery. Cochrane's mountain-side compound had nearly a hundred people, some of whom were scientists, others engineers; some were mechanics, and a few were bums, exchanging menial labor for security and food. The ramshackle bar couldn't hope to contain the revelry; it had spread throughout the compound, and was close to sprawling into the dark, night woods that surrounded them.
Zefram bit his tongue to ward off the pain, and the worst of it passed as the harsh liquor settled into his system. At times, he wished he didn't like it so much; alcohol gave him the strength to face this horrid existence, but it also leeched the life from his body. Unlike others in the compound, he had never turned to hard drugs for solace—their chemical laboratory did a booming side business producing methamphetamines—but the alcohol was the one high point in his life.
He was an uncertified genius; in the wreckage of the world, there existed no institution that could certify anyone. He was largely self-taught; in his youth, he had attended early grade school, but then the wars came home, and his family joined the caravans of refugees that flowed across the continent. It was fluke that had saved him; their particular caravan included a former professor of theoretical subspace physics. Zefram had learned his craft in a thousand wretched camps before a wave of cholera took away the old man.
Lily had been with him from the beginning. She was the one who listened, wide-eyed, as he tried to explain his baffling ideas around anemic campfires; she was the one who dragged him from alcoholic stupors, force-feeding him to keep him from slipping into tantalizing coma. Together, they had decided to do this, to make the faster-than-light engine that was embryonic in Zefram's mind.
At the ripe age of twenty—by the standards of the moment, it was nearly middle-age—Zefram had departed the camps with Lily, a handful of followers, and a cargo of scrap. With this, they entered the mountains, seeking an old missile silo that rumor claimed was still unfired. And they found it, and began building.
And now, the Phoenix was ready for its first flight. In two days, Zefram would travel faster than any person had ever traveled; he would return if he was lucky, and also not return if he was lucky. Either way, for him, the flight would be a success.
Another toast carried through the mountain air, and Cochrane poured himself another finger of the vile liquor. It slid down his throat, scorching a path to his belly, where the fire burned hot. He found himself unable to control his shakes, but didn't care. His vision blurred, and his head felt heavy. The world became a swirl of shadows, and the earth moved beneath him until it stood parallel to his body. Gratefully, Zefram let himself disappear into the darkness.
April 5, 2063
The pounding assault of a dozen hard pains threatened Cochrane's sanity as he strapped himself into the ramshackle cockpit. A lifetime of hard living—the physical deprivations, the mental strains, the chemical soup that served as air—had taken a toll on him, and he had briefly considered allowing someone younger and stronger to pilot this experimental flight. But in the end, despite waves of crippling sting that arched his body in two, he had announced his intention of commanding the rocket on its one-time flight. No sense of noble self-sacrifice, nor any sense of grand prestige, fueled his decision; rather, Cochrane knew that if this flight failed, his life was over anyway. It was better to die this way, he supposed, than face down in Yellow Medicine Creek, choking on the poisoned bile of his innards.
Two others, Lily and another technician, dangled halfway in the cockpit, helping Cochrane's fumbling fingers with the belts that would hold him motionless. It was a harsh fit, but nothing had been designed for comfort; the seat itself had been salvaged from a fighter jet, crashed some miles distant beneath the icy waters of Wood Lake, and was bolted in with reprocessed steel. Once in, Cochrane would not move again until he was cut out.
The final pre-launch checks had been completed in the early morning hours, before the pilot had been reared from his somatic sleep, and now the compound's personnel—the workers, the technicians, and the various detritus of humanity that bummed a meager living in the valley—moved away, seeking to place distance between themselves and the volatile fuel of the converted ballistic missile. If the missile failed to lift off, it would do them little good; if the missile failed to lift off, another radioactive crater would dot the broken landscape.
Lily gave the belts one final tug, and gave Cochrane the "all clear" signal; already, as the machinery and electronics warmed up, it was impossible to speak. Cochrane had been fitted with dampening muffs to protect his hearing from the high decibels, but little could save his fracturing head from the rumbling vibrations. He could not take anything that would numb his senses; for the first time in years, no haze coated his brain in softness.
Lily pulled herself out the hatch, and with a muted ferocity, slammed it shut. Cochrane knew that, on the other side, she was welding the titanium sheeting shut; upon reaching the vacuum of space, the cockpit would be forcibly airtight. A tank of carefully-cleansed oxygen was strapped to Cochrane' seat, the breathing regulator taped firmly to his face.
It was time. Zefram cringed as he reached forward and toggled the primary ignition.
But when he flipped the first lever, the aging power plant didn't explode. Instead, it fired properly, venting the cryogenically-frozen oxygen into the hydrogen peroxide. Cochrane flipped the second lever, and the fuel was lit.
The powerful thrust poured downward through the missile's body and vented outward, propelling the rocket upward in opposite reaction. It built up speed as it rose, rising above the billowing cloud of water vapor that quickly crystallized in the frozen summer-time air. The assembly of humans, watching from a distance, followed the rocket with their eyes as it tore its way through the drifting flakes of ash.
Within minutes, the missile disappeared into the perpetual cover of gray clouds and broiled sky.
Cochrane was spellbound.
The trip through the lower atmosphere had been terrifying. Amidst the dust-cloaked darkness, the rocket had been battered by the brilliant vehemence of the rendered skies. Electrical storms abounded, with great bolts of lightning lashing out around him; massive cracks of thunder reverberated through the thin skin of the missile. Super-heated pockets of gas warred with frozen clumps of upswept pyroclastic debris. Dervishes swirled throughout, and the visage shifted violently from black to white to gray, with ionized hues of red and green streaking devilish glows of color amid the maelstrom.
As he exited the ionosphere, some 120 miles above, the battering slowed to an infinitesimal crawl. Below, he could see the pounding surf atop the black clouds; he could see rivers of light, shooting from terminus to terminus; he could see the anger and fury embodied in the broken skies. But it was all beneath him.
Looking out horizontally, he could see the upper layers of the stratosphere, natural and untouched by the cacophony below. Brilliant bands of light blue, slowly growing darker as they rose higher, merging into new shades of sun-kissed sky that extended above for hundreds of miles. Calm, supple, moving only gently, the great expanses dwarfed the world he had left behind.
Softly wrapped amid the upper reaches, as the sky began to blend with the heavens, Cochrane could see the impression of the moon, a faint whitish crescent that reflected the glow of the sun, and Zefram realized with humbleness that he was the first person in decades to clearly see this once-constant companion. Behind it, reaching above, the highest reaches of the troposphere intermingled with the gentle darkness of space, and Cochrane watched with awe as the first twinkles of starlight came forth.
Soon, as the rocket rose majestically higher, Cochrane left the comforting hues behind as he exited the highest reaches and faintest echoes of the troposphere below. Still rising, he entered the brilliant darkness of the night sky. To one side, the sun—the yellow, life-giving star—burned brightly, cascading heat that even now touched the sides of the cockpit, bringing warmth into the absolute chill of outer space.
On the other side, a never-ending montage of stars awaited. Minuscule pinpricks, bright disks, hazy clouds of far-distant nebulae lit up the skies. Constellations long-unseen beckoned to him, recalling long-forgotten memories of generations past; the rise and fall of the Hunter, marking the turning of seasons for eons past; the Ram and the Harvest Maiden. If he twisted his head, he could see the blue band that was the cross-section of the galaxy itself encircling the heavens.
For a moment, Cochrane even forgot the pulsating pain in his head and the waves of misery buffeting his abdomen. The vista was stunning, and it humbled him to realize that he had risen to the stars that had tantalized humanity since time immemorial. Years, decades, centuries and millennia, billions upon billions of people looking upward and trying to decipher the secrets…
Oxygen was precious. Regretfully, Cochrane tore his attention away from the stars. He toggled a row of switches, and was rewarded with a sharp, jaw-rattling jolt from beneath; the lower portion of the ballistic missile was severed and tossed away. From here forward, it was unneeded and would only get in the way.
Not knowing what would come next, Cochrane took a deep breath. He was remarkably serene, possessing an unaccustomed sense of peace. He flipped the second lever.
And when he flipped the second lever, the Phoenix wasn't ripped apart into a light-year long trail of debris. Instead, thermonuclear energy raced through power shunts and into the warp chamber, charging the coils and forcing them to emit a calibrated displacement field.
And the Phoenix slipped past the light-speed barrier.
The flight was a success.
The flight was a success.
The flight was a success. Zefram still struggled to say the words. A part of him had never seriously believed that his theories would work; even to him, it seemed like crack pipe gibberish. When he strapped himself into the decaying thermonuclear missile, he assumed that he was going to his death; that he would be blasted across the heavens, torn apart into his constituent molecules.
But when he flipped the first lever, the power plant didn't implode. Instead, it fired properly, into a controlled reaction, feeding into the nacelles.
And when he flipped the second lever, the Phoenix wasn't ripped apart into a light-year long trail of debris. Instead, the nacelles emitted a calibrated displacement field that warped the local gravimetric norms. Two seconds of faster-than-light travel, and it had taken him the remainder of the day to fly back to Earth and land the nose cone. As Cochrane walked away from the landing, on the high plains of central Montana, a sense of peace and awe had overcome him. He had just gone where no one had gone before.
Two propeller-driven scout craft located him and flew Zefram back to the compound, where the constant debauchery had renewed itself. In addition to the drugs and alcohol, the food stores were cleaned out for a feast, and the revelry reached new heights. Their many long years of sacrifice and hard work had been a success; having cracked the secret of faster-than-light space travel, escape finally beckoned to them.
But unusually, Cochrane did not join in the carousing. Instead, he wandered off into the woods, following a path worn by centuries of Crow and Shoshone tribes-people. It skated down a short incline, wrapping around a couple copses of dense forest, and down the rocky bank of a crick.
It was here, a little later, that Lily found him. Cochrane was sitting still on a rock, his body hunched forward; as she approached, he shifted slightly to skim a rock across the water's surface.
"People have been looking for you, Z," Lily said softly, cautious about disturbing the volatile man. "You're the man of the hour, after all."
Cochrane waved to a perch beside him, and Lily took the seat. "You ever wonder about us, Lily?" he asked melancholically.
She had known the man for a long time; had seen him through many moods and episodes, but nothing quite like this. "What's bothering you, Z?" she asked.
Cochrane waited a long moment to respond. "What do you think it's like to travel faster than light?"
Lily shrugged her shoulders. "You tell me."
"I will," he answered. "It's like nothing. Just…nothing. The universe was pitch black…I've never felt so isolated. I gotta tell you, Lily, I kinda liked it. No worries, no hassles, no problems…just me. Free to simply be."
"But you came back," Lily answered. "That has to mean something."
A three-eyed fish swam through the water, but neither human flinched; it was the new norm, in the dusk of the apocalypse. "I'm not sure it does, Lily," Zefram replied at last. "All those people back there—" he gestured with his head. "They suddenly seem so small…not physically, I mean, but…mentally, almost. Like fish in a fishbowl. And the thing about a fish is, you can't free it from water."
"Are you thinking about leaving them behind?" Lily asked quietly.
Cochrane skipped another stone across the water. "I'm thinking about all of it, Lily," he replied slowly. "The thing is, I never really expected this blasted engine to actually work. But now that it does…it's sinking in that we're going to leave humanity behind."
"You've said it yourself, Z," Lily replied. "The human race doomed itself. Even if we could save them—which you know we can't—they're not our responsibility. If we flee…so be it."
A shout arose from the party, and Cochrane glanced backwards, as if he could see the revelers through the woods.
"Z." Lily's voice was cool as it penetrated Cochrane's reverie. "Z, what's that?"
Cochrane turned his head to see where Lily was pointing. High above, in the dusty night skies, three lights shone brighter than the rest. He squinted his eyes, and realized that they seemed to be growing; as if they were coming down.
"It's probably nothing," Cochrane said gruffly, ready to brush it off. Any number of atmospheric phenomena could produce such an image, and even ten years after the Wars had ended, weapons still occasionally arced through the skies.
And it could always be a collective hallucination. Or some combination of the above; the sheer amount of chemicals and radiation unleashed on the planet often caused brains to go haywire.
But as he watched, the trio of lights continued to grow larger, washing out the faint starscape behind them. And it seemed to be coming straight at him; it wasn't a missile arc, intended for some far-distant target. In fact, it seemed as though the lights were coming down directly on his head.
Cochrane and Lily watched, momentarily spellbound, as the lights kept growing above them. Finally, a powerful gust of chilled air hit the humans; on it, they could hear the faint—but unmistakable—sound of engines roaring in breaking thrust.
Together, they leapt to their feet, and dashed back up the ancient path. The revelry had stopped; nearly a hundred humans stood together, staring upwards with eyes wide and mouths agape. The thing was scarcely above their heads now, and its shape began to form in the dark night.
It was like nothing Cochrane had ever seen before; it was like…two tripods, with one inverted and set atop the other. In the middle, it was wide and broad, more than large enough for human habitation. He did not, by any means, recognize every aircraft design on Earth; but this one somehow seemed to be outright alien.
It landed on a barren piece of ground with uncharacteristic tenderness, and the thrumming of its engines reduced to a soft hum.
Without realizing it, Cochrane stepped forward, taking his customary place in front of his people.
A piece of the aircraft's hull began to slide open.
Cochrane had a decision to make.
On one leg of the lower tripod, several panels slid open, and a light shone out from the entire of the alien craft. He watched, unmoving, as a robed being stepped into the entrance.
It was human—but somehow, as if struck with a blast of precognition, Cochrane knew that it wasn't. Something had happened, something that could change the world and save the human race.
Still struck, Cochrane moved one foot forward, then another, and approached the alien ship. The first being stepped down, and a second one appeared in the entrance, then a third. With the rough semicircle of humans on one side, and the alien craft on the other, Cochrane met the strange being in between.
They came to a stop, maybe a meter apart. Cochrane stared unabashedly at the being; it was so familiar, so human, but it carried an aura of another world. Its face—two eyes, a nose, and a mouth—was impassive, almost as stoic as a stone, but an uncanny depth sparkled in the being's eyes. Its body—a central torso, two arms, two legs—were covered in cloaks, but they were far nicer than any Cochrane had seen; and the hood covered the being's head, covering his ears.
Cochrane watched in stunned astonishment as the being suddenly pulled back the hood, revealing tall, pointed ears.
It lifted its right hand, and split its fingers two-by-two into a 'v', and then the being spoke. "Live long and prosper," it said, its English nearly perfect.
Only half-aware, Cochrane raised his own hand, fumbling to duplicate the gesture.
Cochrane had a decision to make.
Without understanding how, he knew that these beings were of a different world. Extraterrestrials, aliens, strangers from the sky…they were not human, and they were not from Earth. And if one group of aliens existed, then how many more might? The universe must be teeming with intelligent life.
And if they had come here, all the way from a different system… their technology must be amazing, far more advanced than that of Earth. Advanced enough, perhaps, that it might even save the human race from its doom? Advanced enough to clean the skies, renew the soil, and heal the waters? Advanced enough to cure the plagues, the epidemics, the hunger and starvation?
Maybe Cochrane didn't have to flee; maybe hope existed after all for the battered remnants of humanity.
Behind him, the others stayed still, frozen in the moment. They were a motley lot; dirty and bruised, shrunken and malnourished, many spotting bandages and splints. Their clothing was torn and patched, torn and patched again, the original colors no longer visible. Everyone looked old; no children could come from the wombs of the barren, and life accelerated quickly in this harsh existence.
Cochrane looked sheepishly at his hand as his fingers refused to duplicate the alien greeting. It even felt alien.
Cochrane looked at the alien ship, recognizing the promise it held. His instincts surged, telling him that these aliens had the technology to save humanity.
And it was right in front of them, free for the taking. He could reach into his pocket, and pull out the plasma pistol hiding on his hip; or he could reach out an open hand.
Cochrane made his decision.