Smith's Monthly #4 Page 10

  “Like what we saw below,” I said.

  “At a vastly more frequent and violent scale,” she said. “The closer to the core of this galaxy, the nastier it gets for human life.”

  “So where do you think they went?”

  “Andromeda Galaxy,” she said without hesitation.

  The map of the galaxy shrunk down to the size of a small dinner plate on the wall allowing the closest neighboring galaxies to be shown. “Looks like they came in from the Large Magellanec Cloud and then headed to Andromeda and all of its satellite galaxies.”

  I had to admit that it looked that way.

  “Anyone go after them?”

  “Not that I know of,” she said. “Our ships don’t have the speed to cross that much distance in a time that would allow us to catch them, even if we were sure where they were headed.”

  “So how did they do it?” I asked. “Are we all genetically the same? Everyone on every planet?”

  “We all started from the same basic gene pool,” she said. “And no degradation over time. Every planet’s human and animal population started with the same genes, the same diversity, the same numbers. One hundred and forty-four thousand.”

  There was that number again. I just couldn’t seem to make any logical sense out of any of this. There was something very clear I was missing. I knew that feeling. I just had to find what was between the obvious.

  “Did they grow our ancestors or something?”

  She shrugged. “Lots of theories on that. But what we do know is that it took them six major visits to each planet to accomplish what they did.

  “Six?”

  She nodded. “On the first visit they shoved some asteroid or something large into every planet that caused a vast extinction event of most of the animal and plant life that was natural to the planet.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  She shook her head no. “On the next four visits they covered each planet with new plants at first and then stages of animal life that quickly took over, including early primates.”

  “How long between that last animal seeding and the introduction of humans?”

  “About three thousand years,” she said, not even breaking into a smile.

  I shook my head. “That is so against all science I know that it’s scary.”

  She nodded. “We are convinced they also seeded historical evidence on every planet of both human, plant, and animal history.”

  I started to open my mouth to object, then realized where I was sitting and that I was talking to a beautiful human scientist I was very attracted to on a spaceship light years from my home and even farther from her home.

  Historical evidence could be planted. Sitting here was very real and hard to discount.

  I closed my mouth and just sat there.

  “Hard to get a grasp on it all, isn’t it?”

  I laughed. “I imagine you grew up with this knowledge. I’ve just been coming to grips with it over the last two years that we have been out here exploring.”

  “That would be difficult,” she said, a look of worry suddenly in her green eyes.

  “I’m sure I’ll come to terms with it,” I said, even though I wasn’t so sure. “So how long do you think the Seeders were in this galaxy?”

  “Only about fifty thousand years,” she said.

  That number made no sense to me. “How many planets did they do this to?”

  She shrugged. No firm count. “Maybe upward of a million. No one really knows.”

  “In fifty thousand years? Holy smokes, how many Seeders were there?”

  She shrugged. “No one knows that either, but they just finished about five thousand years ago as far as we can tell.”

  That stunned me even more.

  “How long have the races in your sector been in space?”

  “About two thousand years,” she said. “We just missed them.”

  “And they didn’t leave a trace?” I asked, stunned at what she had told me.

  “Just us,” she said. “Just us.”

  SEVEN

  I SPENT A LARGE AMOUNT of time over the next few weeks with Jenny, not only learning more about the Seeders, but about her as well.

  She was single, had been married once and divorced when she left for space on this rescue mission. She liked my sense of humor and she loved my cooking. Luckily she was also an exercise buff.

  She also made a room heat up around me with a single touch of her hand on my arm. I was smitten, of that there was no doubt. And surprisingly, she seemed to like me in return.

  During that time Doc had also met a woman named Xin in the engineering department. He had been spending a lot of time with her as well.

  She was as tall and as thin as he was. She had bright brown eyes, dark skin, and a set of white teeth that could light up the blackest of nights when she smiled.

  At the start of our third month on the big ship, I cooked the two of them dinner on The Lady. Jenny had to work to finish an experiment and get in her exercise, but she made me promise to save her leftovers.

  Most of the conversation was about the new drive they were working on together. Even with my science background, I only understood about half of what they were talking about. Xin was as smart as Doc and they clearly spoke on their own level, sometimes only in half-sentences.

  Clearly Doc had been soaking up all the technology of a civilization a thousand years ahead of us and having no problems at all. In fact, it seemed, he was helping advance it.

  Somewhere in that conversation I asked Doc about The Lady’s new speed. Both Doc and Xin lit up like high school kids getting to talk about their favorite science fair project.

  “It seemed that because of The Lady’s small size,” Doc said, “compared to the huge ships like the one serving as our host, it is possible to go faster. Much faster.”

  “The size of the large ships takes too much energy to drive it forward through a trans-tunnel conduit,” Xin said, smiling at me with those bright teeth.

  Doc and Xin had come up with what seemed like a brand new idea of putting a trans-tunnel drive conduit through space inside of an already opened trans-tunnel conduit.

  In other words, we would jump like we normally did and then while in transit open up another trans-tunnel conduit inside the original and jump again to increase our speed by some factor.

  Doc and Xin were leading a research team on the idea and it seemed likely it could increase speeds to levels I didn’t want to much think about. Doc and Xin both said The Chairman was behind them all the way and had been diverting resources to their new department.

  “So how fast could we get home?” I asked.

  I knew by our old drive that the time was about thirty hours from this place in space. We really didn’t have much to go home for at this point except to report into parents that thought we were on a remote research station for a few years and out of touch.

  “Six hours,” Doc said, smiling.

  “Six hours? That’s a lot faster than thirty.”

  Doc smiled. “And if we can figure out a few more details, we might be able to open up many, many trans-tunnel conduits inside each other. If we figure that out we could be home from here in minutes.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Then the two of them went off into the details and I was soon completely lost.

  I picked at the peach cobbler I had made for dessert while I half listened and half watched them talk.

  Then, suddenly, out of the blue, what had been eating at me since we came aboard finally came to the surface like a dolphin jumping.

  “Culture,” I said out loud.

  Suddenly I could see all the details right there between the pieces of information just as I had found all the energy between matter and dark matter.

  Both Doc and Xin stopped talking and looked at me with almost identical puzzled frowns.

  “Xin, what planet are you from?”

  “We called it Earth like most every other human planet.”


  I nodded. “And Jenny is from an Earth as well.”

  “So?” Doc asked. “Common term in all languages.”

  “Xin, your culture is pretty much capitalistic and democratic, right?”

  She nodded, frowning.

  “As is most of our planet and all of Jenny’s and most of all of the planets we visited.”

  Now Doc clearly saw where I was heading. And he was frowning.

  “How is that similar growth possible,” he asked, “when one-hundred-and-forty-four-thousand humans were planted at a caveman level and left to develop over centuries?”

  “It’s not,” I said, “without guidance.”

  “And who did the guiding?” Xin asked, frowning as well.

  “The Seeders,” I said, smiling and shaking my head at how really, really simple it was. “They’re still here.”

  “So how come there is no evidence of them anywhere?” Xin asked, her frown covering her entire face. Clearly I was questioning something she didn’t like to look at too closely.

  “Oh, there is,” I said, standing. “We’re just not looking in the right places. Sort of like finding energy where there isn’t supposed to be any.”

  I headed out the airlock and into the big hanger. I had to talk with Jenny.

  Behind me I heard Doc shout. “Thanks for dinner!”

  EIGHT

  I PAGED JENNY once I got off the landing deck and she agreed to meet me in her office.

  She showed up only a minute behind me, her hair pulled back and a white towel draped over her shoulder. She was dressed in her exercise clothes, a gray tee-shirt under a dark sweatshirt. She had on sweat pants as well and tennis shoes and still looked like she had a slight sheen of sweat on her neck.

  She looked even more stunning that way than in her white lab coat.

  “How was your dinner with Doc and Xin?”

  “Over my head, mostly,” I said, laughing. “Those two are really making some trans-tunnel breakthroughs with speed.”

  “How much speed?” she asked, suddenly very interested.

  “They tell me that it could be factors of thousands of times faster,” I said. “Maybe more.”

  “You’re serious?” she asked, leaning forward.

  I knew exactly what she was thinking. With that kind of speed, it would be possible to follow the Seeders.

  “We can talk to them later,” I said. “But they seem sure and The Chairman is backing them with a department full of help.”

  “Wow,” she said softly, leaning back and wiping off her face with the towel.

  “But we may not need that kind of speed to actually talk with the Seeders,” I said.

  Now she put the towel aside and leaned forward. “Too much to drink or just a new theory?”

  “Nothing to drink and not so much a theory,” I said, smiling at her. “More just observed facts that the Seeders, at least some of them, never left.”

  She just shook her head. “Then where are they?”

  “Right here. We’re Seeders. Or we will be when we get a little more advanced.”

  She shook her head. “That theory has been considered and discarded a number of times over the years.”

  “No hard evidence, right?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  Even though your culture has pretty much invented everything needed to be a seeder. And you built ships that held over three million humans on short notice.”

  Again she nodded, a little more slowly.

  “Looking for Seeders seems to have always been an outwardly directed hunt. But all of us looking didn’t know where to look. One of my specialties is being able to see things where there isn’t supposed to be anything.”

  “So what evidence have we all missed for a thousand years of studying this?”

  I could tell I was on the edge of insulting her, but I kept on.

  “Assume the Seeders are humans just like us. Any evidence would be human evidence.”

  “We’ve thought of that,” she said. “I can give you some of the papers discounting those theories.”

  “Written by Seeders, of course,” I said, smiling at her frown.

  Then not giving her a chance to go on, I said, “Just look at the cultures. Now I know math, and I wouldn’t want to even try to calculate the chance that every culture on every Earth-like planet would become over centuries of war and fighting democracy and capitalism based. Or that every planet would develop along the same exact lines and at the same speed.”

  “They were directed and helped,” she said. “That’s your theory?”

  I laughed. “It’s the only thing that explains anything I’ve seen in the last two years. They are still here and still helping and you’ve met them.”

  “And just how are you so certain of that?” she asked, clearly upset.

  “Because I’ve met one as well.”

  I glanced up at the ceiling and said just slightly louder, “Am I correct, Mr. Chairman?”

  At that moment Benson shimmered into view, pulled over a chair and sat down next to me.

  “What gave me away?” he asked, smiling and ignoring the completely shocked look on Jenny’s face. Her mouth was opening and closing and nothing was coming out, sort of how I felt when I first met her.

  “A couple of slips,” I said. “You knew about me and Doc ahead of time.”

  He laughed. “I had hoped you had missed that. Not sure what I was thinking on that.”

  “And the look in your eyes when you looked at the planet below. It was a personal failure to you.”

  He nodded, his eyes again filled with sadness. “It was. This area of the region is mine to watch and I just couldn’t mount a rescue operation fast enough, get the right people on advanced enough planets involved quick enough, get them here fast enough. At least we saved some of those poor souls.”

  “How long ahead did you know what was going to happen?” I asked, my voice respectful.

  “A good three hundred years,” he said, his voice soft.

  Then he looked directly at me and shook his head. “I knew from the moment you two started building your ship that you would be problems.”

  I laughed. “Your secret is safe with us. But I’m betting the problem is Doc and Xin, right?”

  He nodded. “They are a rare combination and very advanced. This galaxy isn’t supposed to develop that kind of speed for another two thousand years. It’s about then we’ll be needing help in Andromeda.”

  “Can’t use a little help a little earlier?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Seems like we’re going to get it even if we don’t need it, huh? But before then, we could use a little help here in the Milky Way. There are a lot of wars going on right now on the developing planets. And there’s only so many of us to go around who stayed behind to help here.”

  “So how long until you teach us that teleportation trick and the long age secret?”

  “You agree to become a Seeder and it might be a lot sooner than later,” he said, smiling.

  With that he smiled at Jenny’s open mouth and stood. “I’ll let you explain what just happened to Jenny,” he said. “I’ve got a war to try to stop about fifty light years from here. We can talk tomorrow if you want.”

  With that he vanished.

  I turned to face Jenny and her shocked expression. “I told you that you had met some Seeders.”

  “But…”

  “That’s all right,” I said, laughing. “Let’s go find you a shower and some dinner and we can talk about being recruited by the Seeders.”

  She let me lead her back toward her apartment without saying a word the entire way. I knew what it was like to have my entire worldview shaken up.

  Visiting Earth-like planet after Earth-like planet had done that to me.

  Watching Benson and his people save an entire planet of people had done that.

  And meeting Jenny had done that to me as well.

  She would recover, just as I had done, as soon as she realized that what she had searc
hed for her entire life had always been right there in front of her.

  USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith returns with a second novel in the world of Thunder Mountain from the second issue of Smith’s Monthly.

  Historical interior designer April Buckley and architect Ryan Knott are hired to design and furnish a huge lodge to the year 1900 standards. The two that hire them are Bonnie and Duster Kendal, two of the world’s great mathmaticians.

  Only problem: The lodge can’t be built. It can’t exist. Yet somehow it does because they built it. And fell in love in the process.

  MONUMENTAL SUMMIT

  PROLOGUE

  July 21, 2015

  BONNIE AND DUSTER KENDAL sat at a wooden lunch table on the large wooden deck of the Monumental Summit Lodge in the Central Idaho Mountains.

  The July day was almost perfect in temperature, the air dry, with a slight breeze through the pine trees on the hills around the lodge. A thousand feet below them was the Monumental Creek Valley. And on a clear day like this, they could see east over varied mountain ranges all the way to the Montana border. It was very clear where the Middle Fork of the Salmon River cut through the center of the mountains.

  On either side of the lodge rose tall rocky peaks that gave away just how high in the mountains this lodge really was. The one to the right was called Thunder Mountain, the peak that gave the entire region its name.

  Duster had on his standard long oilcloth dark-brown coat and cowboy hat and Bonnie wore a silk blouse under a light dress jacket over jeans. Duster wore cowboy boots and looked like he had stepped right out of the past, while Bonnie wore comfortable tennis shoes.

  Both had dark-brown hair, Duster’s short, Bonnie’s long and tied back off her face. Looking at them, you would have never known they were two of the greatest mathematicians alive.

  All the rooms in the lodge were booked for most of the summer, but that didn’t matter to them. They had to see this, so they had left early in the morning and had enjoyed the drive up here on the narrow, one-lane paved road that wound its way through the trees up the side of the mountain.