Fishers of Men
by Briar Gray
"Say you had a time machine." Marcus was waving his hands around like a madman.
"It's a time machine?" Agent Cal Rosen asked, sitting up in his chair.
"What? Christ. No. Just listen a second, would you?"
Cal sat back, disappointed.
"Say you had a time machine and went back to the stone age and gave a caveman instructions to build a convertible."
"He wouldn't have the materials."
Marcus pointed a finger at Cal's face. "What if you could teach him how to get those, too?"
"I'm not sure where this is going. Lot of variables here." Cal looked around the engineer's wreck of an office and pretended he wasn't disgusted.
"He wouldn't even know what he was building, right? You could show him every step, but until he was finished he wouldn't even know what he had. And it would be so alien to him, he wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. Well, that's what it was like for us."
"The problem would be one of motivation." Said Cal. "Why would your cave man cooperate?"
Marcus sipped from his coffee thermos, pulled it back, closed one eye, looked inside the empty container, frowned.
"Well that wasn't much of a problem for us."
"Human curiosity?" asked Cal.
"Well, yes. And this." Marcus shoved a manila envelope across the desk. Cal picked it up.
Marcus added, "That's a protected document by the way."
Cal paused and nodded. He flipped the envelope over, scraped away a thin layer of paint revealing a small copper wire, and twisted it off with his fingernails. Now it wouldn't ignite into flames when he opened it. Inside was a collection of aerial photographs.
"They were taken by a--"
"U-2 reconnaissance aircraft." Cal interrupted. "I used to work with them."
The photos showed a complex of buildings surrounding an open field. In the center was a shape familiar to a sparse few, except the two men in this room and maybe a dozen others. "You already field tested the reproduction?"
"This isn't us." said Markus. "These were taken over what was reported to be a prison labor camp in southern Lithuania."
"In the Soviet bloc." said Cal. "Christ. Was there a leak?"
"I assume that's why you're here. If not, it means someone higher up knows something they aren't saying."
"Like what?"
"Like, that there was a second crash. Somewhere in Soviet territory. That concerns me, Agent Rosen. It concerns me a great deal. You know some of the papers reported we pulled bodies out of the thing when we found it on that farm. We fed the press that story. Sometimes it's better to make your lie bigger than to make it more believable. All we found when we opened it up was a box. We call it Pandora's Box. Inside was roll after roll of microfilm."
"Instructions, right? Instructions for how to construct the space craft sitting in our hanger?"
"Sure. That was there. Among other things. Weapons. Medicine. Communications technology. Whoever sent this just pushed us ahead fifty years. Maybe a hundred. Most of the time we don't even know what we're building till we finish it. You asked about motivation? That's simple. First, you give the tribe living in the cave down the river a convertible. The Soviet's have one. We have to have one too. That's just the way it is."
"It makes sense now. Marcus, I was sent here to ask about a new test pilot. They want to push forward."
"I was hoping they'd shut us down after what happened."
Cal sighed. "I heard there was an accident, I'm very sorry."
