Planet Fever

by Stier Jr. , Peter

  “Your call,” Captain Jager—I mean Ronald Reagan—whispers. “If you stay, who knows? If you bolt, they’ll track you down and they’ll probably make you go through all this again—ad infinitum.”

  “What the hell are they doing?”

  “Shit, man—mind surveillance. Exterminating free will. Rendering you helpless. And attempting to use you to track back to us. You’re in the lion’s den, bubba—and don’t forget that!”

  I am about to ask Captain Jager another question when I hear the footsteps grow close. I slip back into the faux office and take a seat on the sofa. From outside the door, I hear the Doc’s muffled voice—and the words “bilocation”, “neo-hypnosis”, and “severe neurosis infiltration.” Another man’s voice—muffled—except for the word “invalidate.” A third muffled voice—that of a female.

  “Why not (inaudible) another chance (inaudible)?” she says.

  Slight argumentation, then the door opens, Dr. Sydney Götzefalsch spills in, smiling ear to ear. Trailing him is, of course, Mona Malena—blond this time, and behind her struts a dyed-in-the-wool military-looking man.

  The Doc clears his throat. “Meester Beekaver, I am shure you remember your sveetheart—und dees ist Col. Vest veet dee Air Force.” He points to the military man.

  Mona, as though on cue—hugs me and brandishes melodramatic tears in her soft eyes. “Oh Eddie, why? You know we care. Why mescaline?”

  I’m watching a bad play in which I am taking part. Man—these people can’t even act well!

  “You can write your damned review later, you abominable fall guy!” Jager, er, Reagan chimes in. “Just play along.”

  “May I?” the Colonel inquires to both the Doc and Mona the blonde. They nod and Mona wipes away some tears.

  West takes a knee before me, puts his hand on my shoulder and states (with counterfeit hard-boiled sympathy): “Son—you are a hero.”

  WEST SPEAKS but his words begin to turn into meaningless gibberish as his face contorts and writhes. “Yooouur goonnna berrooao mmmerrrbbb errrr….”

  My peripheral vision tunnels inward and the Doc, Mona and Col. West begin to fade away like afternoon shadows into night. The plunking of rain hitting the roof and the glowing fireplace tell me I’m back at Jager’s—or rather I’m now only in the cabin.

  Captain Jager hums as he taps away at his typewriter.

  “Cracker-Jack job, man! This time we reverse-triangulatedyour mind-vectors and narrowed down the location where they are operating from—a location in the vicinity of Edwards Air Force base, 83 miles outside that god-awful and wretched city of Las Vegas.”

  “We’ve done this before?”

  “Yeah, in a prior draft that’s already been edited out.”

  “Oh,” I mumbled.

  He continued typing, then muttered, “But we need to figure out who this ‘HAL’ rube interrogator is and where he is operating from, what his score is.”

  I vaguely comprehended what he was talking about: two different entities were loosely coordinating with one another to give me the ‘ol screw-job.

  My short-story The Clandestine Rogues from Vegas-51 popped into my mind.

  In the story, a covert operation along with a group of rogue inter-dimensional aliens from a planetary system called “Vegas-51” had cut a deal, whereby the U.S. “interests” would gain use of advanced technology and the Vegas-51 rogues would grab most of the valuable resources the earth had such as diamonds, gold, coal and plastic they needed to stage their own coup back on Vegas-51.

  Why did the Vegas-51 rogues not simply overrun the technologically inferior humans and grab their loot? Because the crazy earthlings had one trump card up their sleeve: the atomic bomb.

  The following is an excerpt from The Clandestine Rogues from Vegas-51

  S. Tokley Parey, leader of the Vegas-51 rogues and a pompous ass, discusses (via a payphone somewhere in the Detroit, Michigan area) the operation with his brother-in law, who is scouting the Andromeda galaxy for possible leads:

  “Those wily bastards are willing to blow the entire planet up if we try the same stuff we pulled 4000 years ago. These are not the same band of psychopaths we were dealing with back in the day when all their leaders wanted was to be considered Godlike in front of their own people and have us to help raise monuments in their honor. Nice idea, by the way, convincing them that our hyper-dimensional navigational/energy converter pyramids were for them. Then the freakin’ weirdos used them for tombs. They were finally appeased when your kid sister Sphinxette-Anne made that strange cat-structure in the sand for ‘em … how is she, by the way—she must be in her mid 8000s by now? … No—this current crop of humans is crazy. They want our power so they can overrun and dupe their own people. If no deal—well—they’ll simply blow themselves into oblivion. Yeah—these maniacal nut-jobs have invented a game whereby two mega-powers pretend to be at odds with one another so they can tell the people they need to amass piles of nuclear weapons so neither side would want to strike the other. Mad, right? That’s what I told them, and they went ahead and actually called this ruse ‘MAD’—Mutually Assured Destruction. I let ‘em know we wouldn’t be destroyed, because of our inter-dimensionality. Nah, we’d be on Mars within a fraction of a second if they so much as thought about ‘pushing the button.’ But they kept the ruse going—telling their people to be afraid of each other so they don’t have to let them know about us. Exhausting, but clever. They think pandemonium would ensue if their people found out about us, even though we’ve been coming here for millennia…. No—these new breed of puppets are paranoid psychotics who are in fact cowardly ninnies, afraid of losing whatever perceived power their fragile pansy egos have. No gusto like Alexander, Nebuchadnezzar, or Charlemagne—those were class acts. If it weren’t such a pain in the ass to get to that nice little planet outside Pliedes-1, I’d say screw these rascals—I’d rather deal with those Pliedien smart-alecky amorphous slugs any day. So anyway, to appease the nincompoops, we just gave the humans some of our outdated junk-tech we were going to discard into their sun anyhow. They’re using it to hypnotize their people. How’s sis? Dammit, I ran out of coins.”

  Private Investigator Max Lodes stopped playing the tape of the Tokley conversation. Thanks to the dame at the phone company, who owed him a favor, he had been able to get more intel for his ongoing investigation of Tokley and his Vegas-51.

  This case far outreached the typical banality of surveilling a cheating husband, which was what he had originally been hired to do.

  Lodes had stumbled onto something much greater than that—he had pieced together something really big: an alien entity working with a clandestine operation on Earth that consisted of technocratic minions who had been conspiring to assume control of the planet. This organization had been developing telepathic weapons to hypnotize the populace. That was what had been encoded in the tape when Lodes played it backwards—he could now see it as plainly as the sun in the sky. The governments of the Earth had been fully infiltrated and created fictional “cover stories” to disguise their shenanigans.

  Lodes decided to figure out “how” they were overlaying these fictions into the populace at large—what was the technological apparatus they were using and where was it located.

  After roughing-up a couple of the Governor’s “plumbers” who had been sent to “fix Max Lodes’ plumbing,” Lodes decided to give the good Governor Blooperhickencraft a special visit.

  He floated a hot-air balloon above the Governor’s mansion, then bungee-jumped to his terrace, peeking in on the man, mid-liaison with some brunette, who looked like her dad would be pleased with neither the man he voted for governor of his fair state, nor his teenaged daughter’s exploits.

  Lodes removed his winged-tip shoes, slowly opened the sliding glass door and tiptoed to where Governor Blooperhickencraft and the teenybopper were doing their own sleazy version of the can-can. He tapped the Gov on his shoulder, boxed his ears, slap-jacked him across the face, slid the rug out from under his fe
et and stepped on his neck. The information came easy this point on from the chubby, pathetic man….

  The catalyst for mind-control over the population was a cornucopia of pharmacological toxins administered within the food and water, under the auspices of medical treatment and clean teeth—in addition to the electronic onslaught via “entertainment.”

  Basically, the population was being drugged up, hypnotized and then manipulated into believing anything the overlords implanted into their mind. Once the mind was “docile” enough, and operating at a lower frequency, the electronic bombardment would ensue via television, satellite, and the new technology called “wireless,” as well as other “classified” hyper-glyphic sound cannons and psychotronic frequency transmitters. These nonstop barrages acted as a supplement to an individual’s “waking state” and created a perceived reality, akin to a dream, that was perceived as utterly real. Then they could really rip everyone off.

  Humanity was, for all intents and purposes, sleepwalking through life.

  “Where are they operating from?” Lodes demanded, his foot still on the hyperventilating Blooperhickencraft’s neck.

  “No clue. Honest. They just promised me all this if I looked the other way and kept my mouth shut.”

  Lodes noted a wet spot emanating on the crotch of the Gov’s tight-whites. Lodes eased off the man’s neck, procured a box of Tic-Tacs from his own sports coat breast pocket and popped one into his mouth.

  He looked over at the teenybopper, who was sitting on the bed flipping through a Teen Beat magazine, doing her best “looking bored” routine. Lodes shook his head and walked back to his winged-tips. He slipped them on and left the place, a bit more disgusted than when he first arrived.

  End of Excerpt

  That was one of my better yarns. I must’ve intuited something was going on in Las Vegas, and maybe that’s why I titled the story the way I did. But how much of this ham was real, and how much of it was code, and how much of it was just plain balderdash? At this point, I couldn’t tell.

  Something strange was going on. That was a fact.

  THE CAPTAIN checked his pistol. “Well—now you know what to expect. When you’re with the Doc, or Colonel West, or in the interrogation zone sitting in that Lay-Z-Boy recliner, which is where you actually are right now, they’ll either try to nullify you or attempt another mind-job on you.”

  “So that’s why while I’m getting interrogated everything’s in present tense.”

  The strands of the story—my real story, not just my work-in-progress—were loosely coming together. I was still in that chair being interrogated—that’s why most of the narrative was in past tense, because I was recounting the events—and these other forces were able to break into my thoughts.

  One thing I was still unsure about was Mona.

  Captain Jager nodded, somewhat relieved I wasn’t a complete buffoon. “That’s right. We pre-programmed this episode as your safety mechanism, so you wouldn’t go completely schizo. Your brainwave patterns are suggesting to them that you’re concussed, drunk, and on powerful psychedelic drugs. They have no idea that this is a prefabbed memory uploaded into your brain.”

  “So they’ll assume that on my way to Fillono’s, I camped out somewhere, got shit-faced, decided to dope-up on mescaline, then maybe stumbled around and hit my head. Blacked out. No reading.”

  “Indeed—but these ‘episodes’ are growing more frequent…. Shit man, you’re more concussed than Steve Young and you’ve put back oceans more booze than an Irish poet…. That’s the risk—they know that you’re becoming more of a liability. Less of an asset. At the very best, you’re becoming recklessly useless. Eventually,they might….”

  “Clip my wings. Got it. They’re getting impatient. So I gotta give them something.”

  “Whynot.” The Captain dropped the empty shells from the cylinder and began reloading. “Also, you won’t remember me in the morning. The only evidence of my existence will be a coded voice in your head that sounds like Ronald Reagan. But you will remember that you’re a deep-cover operative on a mission to infiltrate the N(aI)IS. And when you really find yourself in a state of confusion, you will hear a series of ‘code-questions’ and then see the eye of the enemy.” He snapped the cylinder shut with a theatrical flourish.

  I’M IN the Lay-Z-Boy recliner.

  Silence.

  I close my eyes and attempt to recall anything. Rain. Dangerous driving conditions on a sketchy mountain pass. A near-death wipeout…. That must be it: I’m dead—or in the token “middle zone” between life and death, the finite and the infinite….

  “Perhaps, Mr. Bikaver, you are correct.” The interrogator is reading my mind. “Does this frighten you?”

  I’m not certain whether he means if I am frightened of the possibility of being dead, or the fact that my interlocutor can read my mind. Or is he reading my mind? Maybe I am narrating this to him in a hypnotized state.

  A thought: suppose he’s bluffing—and he introduced the thought into my mind then commented upon it—to make it seem as though he were reading my mind … like a pre-hypnotic suggestion…. Uh-oh, my brain is beginning to reverberate. There’s a magnetic pressure zooming in and out. Nausea kicking in. A ringing in my head is growing louder and louder.

  The voice is now inside my brain: “Mr. Bikaver, you preferred to do this in an externally audible manner because you could not handle this means of communication. Unless you want me to continue in this fashion, I suggest you desist from entertaining your own thoughts and hypotheses and stay focused on the interview at hand.”

  “Eh—yeah. Sorry about that. As you know, my mind wanders.” The pressure dissipates and the ringing fades. Much better. “What was the question?”

  “What happened on the way to Fillono’s?” It asks, not from within my mind.

  MY HEAD pounded and occasional drops of rain clinked on the metal roof of the pick-up. Upon opening my eyes, I breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn’t driven over a cliff.

  My location: the middle of a “washout” area/utility road on the pass. A half-pitched orange tent flapped around in the cool mountain breeze like a bizarre flag. Someone had aborted pitching it midway. That someone was me, I deduced—for my shoes, pants and flannel shirt were caked in mud.

  On the seat there was an empty bottle of Wild Turkey, my little first-aid kit with all the contents spilled out, an empty pill container, and a feather. The rearview yielded more clues of what had happened: a welt on my forehead. I had hit my head either during the spinout or after, and at some point I had consumed a fifth of booze, attempted to set up the tent, and ended up passing out in the cab of my pick-up.

  I got out, walked over to a tree, leaned one arm against it and vomited under the canopy of the large Douglass firs swaying in their steady, nonchalant magnificence. For a brief second, I wished I could join this tree’s kingdom plantae.

  Another memory from the night prior flashed into my mind: my conversation with this tree whilst attempting to pitch the tent. This giant tree had learned of the top-secret operation I had undertaken and was privy to the fact that I was a deep-cover operative who had infiltrated a high-level, multi-galactic cabal that had—via stealth—snatched all the earth, the land, the airwaves and the spectra in which thought-operations occurred. In other words, I was spying on the N(ai)IS.

  I recalled the tree absorbing what I was saying, then with a stoic casualness stating, “Heard it all before, pal.”

  I found a stream and splashed ice-cold water over my face and head, then rinsed out my mouth. Feeling a little more alert, I went back to my half-baked campsite, grabbed the tent and tossed it in the truck bed.

  It was time to continue my journey, but my keys were missing. I checked the glove box, under the seats, the visors, the ground and the vicinity. I had a hazy memory of throwing them off into the wilderness after my conversation with the tree, but I wasn’t about to root around looking for them. Instead, I got a flat-head screwdriver and removed the steering wheel
cover to unscrew the ignition plug. The plug dangled from the unit, and I shoved the screwdriver in and gave it a turn. Miraculously, the truck started up.

  I continued on my way to Fillono’s Utopia.

  THE ROAD was wet, but manageable. I drove easy, admiring the splendor of the mountains. The pass winded its way downward and the valley floor had a majestic array of yellow and white wildflowers, green grass and trees. These juxtaposed themselves to their jettisoning, white-capped and barren-topped Rocky Mountains—one of which I was traveling down….

  The sun poked through the clouds and it was around noon when I rounded the last bend of the pass and saw a rustic wooded sign on the side of road reading: Whynot—1 mile. I grabbed a pair of aviator sunglasses from the visor and figured I was about ninety seconds away.

  Around the count of eighty-eight seconds a hand-painted sign pointed to the turn-off. I veered off the highway and drove up the side road that was enclosed on either side by giant fir trees. The road continued for a half-mile before it reached a fork with a sign right in the middle:

  I turned right and trucked toward a traffic gate, where there was a guy with disheveled blond hair wearing a mountain vest and painter’s pants, along with clutter boots with long red laces.

  He exited the booth and smiled an Esquire-wristwatch-ad-model smile. “How’s it goin’ bud? You just here for the day or longer?”

  “Uh—I was hoping I could talk to an old pal of mine who lives here. Fred Fillono.”

  “Oh, right on…. You’re buds with the lead dog—nice. Tell you what—follow this road, and when you see a sign that says Longer follow that. Buck will tell you where to park your truck and get you all set up at the info shack. You’ll be good to go. I’ll talkie him now to let him know. Cool?”