Three months after the asteroid was destroyed in a spectacular explosion between Earth and its moon, there are still after-effects from the near disaster; some known by scientists and space observers and some unknown. The most highly educated and qualified people are still studying the events that transpired; some from NASA in Houston, more from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and many more from around the world. Most of the asteroid’s pieces spread out in an enormous cloud after it exploded and are now racing toward the Sun but a large number of them hit the moon and created new craters. The meteors that impacted ranged from basketball sized rocks to a few that were as big as a house. For the first few weeks after the impacts there was a cloud of dust that had taken time to settle back down to the lunar surface, blocking any view from Earth. What concerns the scientists now is that the combined impact of these meteors may have altered the moon’s orbit, and they were focusing range-measuring laser beams at it to gauge any changes that may have occurred, even down to the nearest foot.
For the most part the people of Earth knew something unusual happened in space; that an asteroid had barely missed the planet and blew up, but the U.S. Government asked that the JPL and NASA not to say anything about the presence of anybody from another planet. Jarvick had spent the last few months meeting with people from these agencies and was asked to keep a low profile. He had lived with his brother, Jim and his wife, but felt like he was intruding too much; and after getting closer to Cindy, she and Jarvick moved back to her place in San Diego. With the JPL being located in Pasadena, he had rented a small apartment nearby and spent three or four days there and the rest at Cindy’s. It was much closer than Phoenix and Jarvick had struck up a friendship with Terry Anderson, the chief at the Lab. He and Jarvick were working with another man, a Japanese immigrant by the name of Binchiro Watanabe, who told everybody to just call him “Ben”. His area of expertise was metallurgy and the composition of moons, planets, asteroids and whatever bodies existed in the solar system.
Even though Jarvick was a detective by trade, the other men found him extremely intelligent and were fascinated that someone from another planet had traveled such a great distance and knew so much about space travel. The JPL hired him as a consultant knowing he would need a job, and everyone at the lab was thrilled that they had an “alien” on the payroll. Jarvick had spent many hours over that last months with these men talking about where he was from and using computerized charts to locate his home planet. They wanted to know everything about it, especially the practice of sending one twin to Earth because of the telepathic connection. There was even talk of conducting experiments with him and his brother at a later date.
Jarvick had met with some other government officials to discuss the presence of other aliens that had come from Gavilon. He assured them that the practice of separating twins had stopped twenty years ago upon the development of the drug that disabled the telepathic connection that was inherent in them. It is made from the seed pods of the Pyka tree, only grown in the Eastern Province on Gavilon; it had been found growing on the western shore in an old growth forest that followed the Nidak River. Most of the food grown on Gavilon is produced in this province and the main source of water is the massive Nidak, which begins in the Central Mountains and makes its way westward toward the sea. A large part of the Eastern Province is farmland except the southern tip, where there is a Solinium mine, and the western shore, where the Directorate ordered that the natural habitat be left in place. The Pyka produces these seed pods only every two years, and they are collected and taken to the Western capital of Vendorra for processing.
Jarvick had run out of his pills months ago and was relying on his training and discipline to keep from connecting with Jim, but it was getting more difficult every day. Sometimes he would catch a thought or two of Jim’s and he would do the same, at which point one of them would apologize and break the connection. There were also times where they would have a long conversation about something and ignore the people around them. One time Jim and his wife Sylvia were at a restaurant and Jim had a thousand yard stare on his face and wasn’t listening to anything his wife was saying. He and Jarvick were talking about the absence of any further contact from Gavilon when Sylvia waved her hand in front of his face and said “Hellooo, Earth to Jim.” Jarvick laughed and broke the connection, but was still concerned that there had been no ship sent to find out what happened to him.