A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  I got up and stretched. I put my soda can in the recycle bin and the sandwich wrapper in my pocket. I walked back toward the center of town. The sidewalk clock outside Jason’s Reliable Jewelers agreed with what my watch said now: two-sixteen.

  I passed Patrolman Ed Blake, who waved and said: “Too hot to write tickets, Mac. I put in a dime where you’re overparked so I don’t have to ticket you on my way back.”

  “Thanks, Ed,” I said. “Guess I lost track of time.”

  I went into Druger’s News to buy a paper and get change of a dollar. Dave Druger said: “Thank God for air conditioning. Hottest day I ever recall.”

  “It’s as if the sun’s standing still,” I said.

  “You noticed that? Time often crawls but this is ridiculous.”

  In my office I drew the blinds to make it seem cooler while I did some work. At 4:28 by the electric clock on my desk, when I’d finished, I looked out between the blinds. The shadows weren’t where they should have been.

  I turned on the monitor and heard Bernie O’Neill race through the copy for Campus Clothiers, who had written it too long, as usual.

  “Now stay tuned for North News on the half hour,” Bernie said; he plugged in the cassette with the teletype sounds. “It’s 4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time by the newsroom clock but it’s high noon by the sun.” He’d cued a record to play a few seconds of the movie music from “High Noon.” I hoped he’d elaborate. As if he’d heard me he said: “There’s been no explanation for the phenomenon, which seems to be a local one. South of us in Utica, Rome and Syracuse we’re told the sun is where it should be at this time. To the north in Canada all is normal. Vermont to the east reports nothing unusual. WNOR News talked a few minutes ago to Clayton Harris, professor of physics at the University of the North, an expert in spectroscopy.”

  I made a mental note to give Bernie a raise, or at least a bonus.

  The taped voice of Harris said: “I can only conjecture that we’re experiencing a refractional effect. That is, atmospheric conditions may be such that although the sun appears to be at its zenith, it is actually in its proper position relative to us at this time and we are seeing a reflection. The heavy clouds on the horizon could be a factor.”

  Bernie asked: “Are you saying it’s an optical illusion?”

  “That would be a way to put it.”

  I’m sure Clay Harris went on but Bernie wisely stopped the tape at that point.

  “That was Dr. Clayton Harris of U North with his comments on our protracted noon, the longest lunch hour in the history of the Northland. The time is now 4:34 p.m., despite what the sun says, and the temperature is 96 degrees. We asked the State Police the extent of the illusion, if that’s what it is, and Capt. Hammond Parrish told us it seems to be limited to the St. Lawrence County area although he could give no explanation. We’ll be back with more local news after this message from Druger’s News, headquarters for periodicals, sunglasses and sunburn lotion.”

  I decided Bernie O’Neill deserved a raise and a bonus. My phone rang as the taped commercial played. It was Bernie: “Sorry I couldn’t report to you sooner, Mac, but I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “I heard.”

  “The State Police say Pirt’s been seen on North Arabia. He’s all right, apparently; Pirt seemed to be shooting the sun with a sextant and then breaking off to signal. Using a

  mirror, maybe. The trooper didn’t see any answering flashes.”

  I thanked Bernie and he was back on the air in seconds with the rest of the local news. It was routine—nothing about our undersized Summer Resident on a prehistoric hilltop taking readings and communicating with Lord knew who.

  I decided to go to North Arabia. First I called home. Tally said the drone of bees in the meadow was deafening and that Taffy, our Siamese, was walking round and round, howling. How about a big salad bowl for supper and maybe an iced honeydew? Not a word about the sun in the sky. Often Tally doesn’t notice the time and is surprised that my day is over before her afternoon has begun.

  I drove past U North and took the unmapped turnoff that led to North Arabia through the reforested area. The land fell away as the car climbed. The trees thinned and I looked out over the great valley that once was an inland sea. North Arabia, one of time’s untouched relics, thrust up out of the darker earth, higher than the highlands. Barren, corrugated by wind and rain, it was a piece of the Middle East in New York. The road, never much, became a track. I parked and walked.

  There was no sign of Pirt. The trooper could have seen him from the road on the other side, far below.

  I climbed and slid, getting fine sand in my shoes. At well after 5 p.m., clock time, the sun burned straight down.

  I was wet through when I reached the top, gasping, my tongue furry. From the height I saw in all directions the land I loved, baking and shimmering, the St. Lawrence River and Canada beyond, obscured by low clouds. But though I was at the highest point, there was no sign of a small man-child. I could have been the first one there, my tracks the only human disturbance since time began.

  I sat and suffered the heat. I scooped up sand I could scarcely hold and let it trickle through my fingers. Damn the boy! Where had he gone and what had he done before he went?

  “Hello, Uncle Mac,” he said from behind me. I hadn’t the strength to turn around. Then he was in front of me, grinning, the whole St. Lawrence Valley shimmering behind him. He had no sextant, no heliograph. He stood brown in a pair of faded khaki shorts. They were too big for him. An old web belt kept them up.

  “Were you signaling from up here? Somebody thought he saw you.”

  “I was talking to my friends, yes,” Pirt said.

  “With what?”

  “Belt buckle.” Shiny old brass belt buckle.

  “Who are your friends?”

  “The ones who stopped the sun,” he said.

  We didn’t talk about it any more then.

  “It’s time to go home,” I said. “Tally’s making a salad. And honeydew melon.”

  “I like honeydew melon. Could I have ice cream in it?”

  “Sure. We’ll get some on the way.”

  At midnight by our kitchen clock the sun was overhead and the thermometer said 108.

  The hum of bees was subdued but steady, as if they had adjusted to the new way and were doing the minimum required of them now that they’d noticed. Taffy the cat, exhausted by her pacing, had curled up in the forbidden chair, and was asleep but dreaming and complaining, the black end of her tail twitching.

  Pirt had eaten Tally’s salad and put away two ice cream-filled honeydew halves and was listening to the radio. Tally and I played cards. Nobody felt like going to bed. The phone rang.

  It was Bernie O’Neill, still at the station.

  “What are you doing there?” I asked him.

  “I wanted to see this through.”

  “There’s certainly sun enough to see by. I’m getting a little bored with it.”

  “You’ve been listening to the news?”

  “And I’m no wiser. What does Professor Harris have to say now?”

  “Harris took his phone off the hook hours ago. Listen, Mac, there’s stuff I haven’t put on the air, like the Golden Spaceships.”

  “The what?”

  “You remember the Awaiters; one of them called up. Said he’d seen a fleet of Golden Spaceships over Higley Flow.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first thing the Awaiters saw.”

  “Right. But he said one ship drifted down and became transparent and he saw people inside.”

  “Yeah? What were they doing?”

  “Smiling, waving, friendly. Talking to him.”

  “He understood them, of course.”

  “Of course. They told him they had a message of love and deliverance for the Awaiters and they would go away soon but they had an emissary on Earth. They told the Awaiters to seek him out because he would fulfill their prophecies by smiting the sinners and showing the true way to salvat
ion.”

  “You paraphrase, of course, if you were talking to the chief spokesman for the Awaiters, Busky Kimp.”

  “That’s him. I’ve got it on tape in his own quaint speech.”

  “Quaint but not without a certain sophistication. Did Busky say who the emissary was?”

  “Somebody named Bert. That’s what he said. I asked him to spell it and he said B as in Behold, E as in Ecclesiastes, R as in Revelation, T as in Thessalonians.”

  I felt a chill. “B as in Boy?”

  “That’s the letter. I thought to myself that maybe he hadn’t heard too well, that maybe it wasn’t B as in Boy but—”

  “P as in Pirt. He’s right here. Thanks, Bernie. I appreciate—”

  “Sure. I’ll knock off now. I’d better sack out on the reception couch if I’m to be any good for sign-on.”

  “I’ll bring coffee at a quarter to six,” I said.

  At about 2 a.m. and as quickly as happens in the tropics the sun set, or went down, or out, or however to describe it. Merciful darkness enclosed us.

  I’m sure that if the phenomenon had occurred in Westchester, Bethesda or Burbank, some place convenient to a major news center, we’d have heard about it endlessly. But because it had taken place in a relatively remote area the national media kissed it off as a trick of refraction and treated it silly season style—something to end a newscast with.

  It was all over in 14 hours, causing no more excitement outside the North Country than a new flying saucer sighting. After all, nobody got hurt. The worst I heard was a report of exhaustion among laying hens.

  ((Hello! Again! Call me Omniscient Observer or call me O2 but don’t call me late to Armageddon. There’s a simple explanation for the phenomenon your narrator has chosen to call the Long Noon. I could give it to you at this point but I am aware that to you all points in time are not the same, as they are to me. So I’ll let the explanation come from MacSwan at a time geared to his understanding and therefore to yours. But it may be appropriate now for me to tell you the story I call “Of Time and the Pig.”

  ((The city man, on vacation in the country, was watching a farmer feed his pigs. The farmer picked up a pig, held it in his arms and let it eat from a big bowl. When the pig had had enough the farmer put it down and picked up the next pig and fed it the same way, and so on. Finally the city man could stand it no longer. He said, “Look, I’m no expert on feeding pigs, but isn’t that an awful waste of time?” But the farmer replied, “What’s time to a pig?”

  ((Do you like that story? It’s in one of our standard tapes, “A Concise but Comprehensive Cultural History of Terrestralia, Copiously Anecdoted.” Not that I equate you Terrestralians with pigs. I cite the story only to illustrate my difficulty in differentiating between past and future. As I have said, or will say, time is such a constant for me that I tend to forget your present can be my past, and that the things you’re going through, and worrying about in what you call now, are over and done with for us.

  ((So time is full of wrinkles, paradoxes, redundancies, tautologies. It’s taut for some, looser for others. Hang loose, I say. And Terrestralia is an untidy place, full of misconceptions, unanswered questions. That’s how life can be on Planet 3—unstructured, so much left to chance. I much prefer Summa, the other place I look after, where everything runs by the book and nothing is chancey. In Summa everybody knows his future and does exactly what’s planned for him. It’s a neat place and now I’ve got to get back to it. Meanwhile I return you to MacSwan, the man with the avian name, but hang loose and don’t feel that you have to believe everything he tells you. Remember, he once made a living telling fairy tales.))

  Miss Loretta LaJoie called me up. “Benign Visitors, are they?” she said. “Figments dreamed up by Benighted Visionaries is what they are. And the Awaiters are Visionary Dreamers, if that’s not a tautology.”

  I couldn’t get a word in. She went on: “You must remember BVD’s, but do you know what the initials stood for originally? BVD’s—Better Ventilated Drawers. That’s right. It would do the Awaiters a world of good if somebody knocked a little sense into them—ventilated their dreams before they get hurt, the deluded lambs! I recognize people’s rights to their own ways of worship, and even taking some parts of the Bible literally, but this nonsense—my Lord! Benign Visitors? Damfoolishness!”

  Later I looked up benighted. Miss Lorretta had it exactly right—“to benight” is to involve in the night, or error or superstition; and “benighted” is to be involved in obscurity.

  The Long Noon was a contact, she said, but not with the Awaiters. The contact had been with Pirt, or with Busky Kimp, she wasn’t sure which, she told me.

  And actually the sun had not stopped. Miss Loretta said, nor had the Earth’s rotation been interrupted. Just as the sun moving through the sky is an illusion resulting from the rotation of the Earth, the rotation hadn’t been stopped. We’d have known it if it had—didn’t I remember “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” with everything flying through the air, including poor George McWhirter Fotheringay?

  “That scientist on WNOR was right to say it was all refraction,” Miss Loretta went on. “It was an alien scout ship we saw, so bright it dimmed out the sun, which kept moving as always.”

  “We were seeing the scout ship of an alien civilization?” I said when I was able to interrupt. “Brighter than the sun? Talking to Pirt or Busky Kimp? For 14 hours?”

  “Now you stop putting words in my mouth, young man,” Loretta said. “Nobody was ‘talking for 14 hours.’ Even I can’t do that. The scout ship was recharging its solar batteries. The brightness was the ship absorbing all that accumulating energy. And when the sun went down, so to speak—went below the horizon—it ended. That’s all.” I wanted to know how come the phenomenon was so localized that nobody saw it outside our area.

  “Because that’s where the scout ship was—right here above us.”

  “But—”

  “The other thing I wanted to say—” and Loretta went on to talk about poetry and glassmaking.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  “No, you wait. The clue is in Coleridge. Kubla Khan. A sunless sea. Caverns measureless to man. A miracle of rare device. It’s all there for anyone to read.”

  “Miss LaJoie—” I said.

  “People say there can’t be caves up here because there’s no soft limestone for the water to seep through and hollow out. Nonsense. That’s nature’s way and it takes forever. So the aliens gave the Awaiters a tool to make their own caves, to slice through the earth, hollow it out instantly to prepare for the main event, so to speak.”

  Visions of the old Buck Rogers comic strip zapped through my head. “You mean the aliens gave Busky Kimp a disintegrator—something that could wipe us all out?”

  “They didn’t give it to Busky. They gave it to the Snowmobile Rider.”

  “Another nut,” I said.

  “Busky only attached it to the Snowmobile Rider’s machine, like an extra headlight. And it’s not a disintegrator, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s a tunneler. A portable glass furnace. That’s why the Rider wears that white suit, as protection against the terrific heat generated in carving the caves of glass.”

  “Glass caves?”

  “Tunnels, anyway.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Do you expect me to believe in Captain Horatio Glassblower, the Phantom Snowmobile Rider, and his Caves of Glittering Glass? Victor Appleton, here we come!”

  “Don’t be facetious. You communicators are supposed to have open minds. Tell me, what do we have more of in the North Country than anything else?”

  “Dimwits and dingbats?”

  “Sand. Dig down anywhere and there it is. And what is sand good for?”

  “Beaches.”

  “Making glass. All the key ingredients are in the ground under our feet—quartz sand, dolomite, feldspar.”

  “But tunnels of glass? How fragile ca
n you get?”

  “Pyrex is fragile? How about rocket exhaust systems?”

  “All right. Where do these caverns, these tunnels, go?” But Loretta LaJoie had told me all she wanted to tell.

  I had to get away from the office. I went to see Prof. On the way to Prof’s house I was aware of sand everywhere I looked. Piles of sand, churches and public buildings made of red Potsdam sandstone, desertlike stretches of dune. Sand piled high outside highway department garages, sandy beaches, sand, sand.

  I drove up the hill past the nineteenth century spaceship and took the turn to Higley Flow.

  It was the wrong time for chess but Prof was always agreeable to conversation. I told him what Loretta had said about the Awaiters and the portable glassmaker that now seemed to be so much more than a soundless snowmobile.

  Prof listened, nodding, but I could see that he wanted to talk. He obviously had his own theories but they were conditioned by his many years as a ghost, a man in the background. Even now in retirement he gave no clue whether the views he voiced were his, or those of his sources, or an amalgam. In short, he gave me an unattributed background briefing and, in a nutshell, it came out something like this:

  The aliens First arrived on Earth between ten thousand and a few billion years ago and commandeered an ancestor of Pirt to see how our planet was getting along, evolution-wise.

  The aliens always have laboratory ships roaming the universe and they kept the caveman aboard one of them, watching him evolve over the millennia. The aliens returned to Earth every so often to compare the captive with his Earthly cousins—the dawn men who’d remained here. But somewhere along the line they forgot about him. That was understandable. They had scores of lab craft out there still and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that headquarters lost track of a minor experiment now and then. Prof chuckled; he explained that he had been going to say the aliens were only human.

  So the Awaiters were not as nutty as one might think. There really were watchers up there. Of course they weren’t in golden spaceships and there was nothing religious about them.