Transmission

A scaled shape came up out of the water, teeth snapping in a lunge that sent Kevin backpedaling, barely fast enough to avoid it. He would have thought of alligators if Ted hadn’t given them all a warning earlier. This creature’s snout was too long and pointed, its shape a bit too sleek. The caiman kept coming, moving out of the water low to the ground, its tail dragging an S-shaped track behind it.

“Help!” Kevin called. He wanted to turn and run, but he guessed that the moment he tried to, the thing would be on him. Instead, he continued to back away, while the caiman advanced with a growl that promised that Kevin would be its next meal. Kevin felt the press of a tree against his back and knew that he’d missed the trail, which meant that the caiman was gaining ground. It opened its jaws, showing what seemed like endless teeth—

The roar of gunfire came, so loud against the jungle that Kevin thought he might go deaf. The caiman made a hissing sound of pain, then slumped. Kevin slumped too, only the tree holding him upright as Ted moved into view with a rifle raised to his shoulder. He only lowered it once he seemed certain the beast was dead.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Kevin managed to nod, in spite of the fear that still gripped him. “I think so.”

“What were you doing? I thought I told you not to wander off.”

Kevin wanted to say that he wasn’t a little kid. Instead, he nodded to the pool of dark water. “I had to, I sensed… I think that it’s in there.”

He saw the soldier blink, then look toward the water. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Kevin said. “I don’t know how I’m sure, but it’s there.”

To his surprise, Ted didn’t question that any further, just called for the others. They came, in just as much of a hurry as when they’d found the initial signs of damage. They weren’t quite as quick to plunge into the water, though, obviously afraid of what might still lurk there. Eventually, Ted and three other soldiers, two Scandinavian and one American, stepped into it, wading around with a tarpaulin for a net.

“We have something,” Ted called back, and they wrapped it around the thing, hauling together to lift it, dragging it from the water. It seemed to take forever, and Kevin found himself expecting something huge as they worked to pull it out, a dozen of the scientists moving to help them.

When it finally rolled out from the tarpaulin onto the ground, it wasn’t what Kevin expected at all. He’d been thinking it would be bigger, for one thing. His imagination had told him that there would be a vehicle bigger than a car, maybe close to the size of a house. He’d thought it would be silver and shining, or so black that it looked like the space through which it had flown.

Instead, a perfectly round sphere of rock sat there, still slimy with the water, but smooth beneath. It looked as though someone had fired a rocky bowling ball across the universe, or perhaps shot it out of some great cannon toward the Earth.

Even so, the scientists clustered around it until Kevin could barely see it because they were so many of them.

“Is this it?” Professor Brewster asked. “Let me through, let me through. Have we found it?”

“We found something, definitely,” Dr. Levin said. She sounded as though she was trying to force herself to stay calm, not get too excited. “Now we just have to work out exactly what.”

Ted was shaking his head. “Before we do any of that, there’s at least one other thing that we need to do. We need to get it back.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kevin didn’t want to take his eyes off the rock while they carried it back on a kind of stretcher, not entirely sure what to make of it as they walked it back through the jungle to their base camp. He was both excited and puzzled, caught between the joy at having found what the alien signals had pointed them toward and the surprise of it not being the great silvery spaceship that he’d imagined it might be.

It felt weird, having actually found it, even though they’d all come here to do exactly that. It felt as though it shouldn’t be there, but it was, and now Kevin could barely contain his excitement at the possibility of seeing what lay inside.

“We’ll open it up when we get it back, right?” he asked Dr. Levin, who seemed to be looking on with the air of someone waiting for Christmas.

Beside him, Dr. Levin nodded. “That’s the idea. There will be a lab waiting for us at the UN compound outside Bogota, and we’ll see what’s inside.”

He could hear her trying not to get too excited by it all. In fact, most of the scientists there seemed to be just as happy to have found this strangely smooth rock as they would have been if they’d found some kind of intact alien spaceship, bristling with advanced technology. Maybe it was just that they were scientists, and a rock seemed more real somehow to them. They were probably used to testing rocks from outer space, being from NASA, while spaceships seemed impossible to them.