by Ian Watson
Shriver smiled wryly. “None of that was coincidence, John.” Deacon noted the switch to familiarity, as though the American considered that Deacon was now quite firmly enmeshed in his world. “Equipment has a long history of gremlins so far as UFOs are concerned. Films turn out blank. Tapes mysteriously erase themselves. It’s as if there’s necessary plus and minus. You find out about Mike, the primed contactee—and God knows how many other thousands of people are primed like him! Mike transmits his information; it comes to light Immediately you lose the hard evidence. A bit of electronic darkness descends.”
Deacon scratched his head. “What you gain on the swings, you lose on the roundabouts?”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” nodded Shriver.
Michael hesitated, regretting his outburst and wanting to make up for it. “Maybe this is a bit like the ‘unreportability’ between normal and abnormal consciousness you were talking about?” he suggested. “The communication barrier?”
“Hmmm. There’s something else that worries me rather more. Michael, do you like Blake’s poetry?”
“Not much,” frowned Michael, “I couldn’t stand poetry at school.”
“How about Blake’s Prophetic Books? You know, those long free-verse tirades about the Elemental Gods? You might have glanced through them some time?”
“I doubt it. I usually remember what I’ve read. They don’t ring a bell. Why?”
“The reason I ask is simply that your Space People and their blessed planet have names straight out of those poems. That’s where you’ll find Luvah, and Tharmon. Actually it’s Enitharmon, which seems like a nice unconscious joke to me: ‘Is there any Tharmon?’ Ulro too, their world. I’d be most surprised if you find that anywhere in the Pleiades.”
“It isn’t a very likely locale,” commented Shriver. “The Pleiades is a comparatively new star cluster, full of young suns. It’s unlikely to have evolved any life yet.”
“Ulro is a kind of Hell invented by Blake. A ‘Seat of Satan’. Blake also calls it a ‘False Tongue’, by which I take it he means a Home of Lies. False Witness.”
“But those are the names they told me! A person doesn’t lie under hypnosis. You said that a hypnotized subject is pedantically truthful. In every detail.”
“Ah, of the truth he believes,” said Deacon. “Whatever you two saw the other night, I fear that the earlier episode—”
“Quite,” said Suzie.
Shriver rubbed his hands. “Whereas for me this makes the whole episode Mike describes more authentic, not less. The love episode on board a flying saucer—or a medical examination or whatever—is a pretty standard contact experience. There must be several dozen such accounts—and that’s leaving out all the succubus and incubus matings of the Middle Ages! It’s a sort of rite of passage. Michael is fed some information that pushes him through a psychological puberty. He’s transformed, even if he doesn’t remember it consciously. The event presents itself in sexual terms: plausible enough, in a growing lad! But the old UFO hoodwink factor is still at work. The planet Ulro is a hoax. His Space Lady is a hoax. Why’s that? Can our dear Phenomenon only do something constructive, if it presents it as a phoney? Friends from outer space, indeed! I’m glad you ran those names to earth, John. Likewise, your tape got erased.”
“Oh, come now.” Deacon shook his head. “Whatever Michael and Suzie saw in the evening that brought his memory back happened hours after the taping.”
“The taping happened before the visible event,” agreed Shriver. “Yet the event was already being triggered, through Mike—because of the trance. Obviously it’s all linked: the previous ‘seduction’ incident, the trance and the loss of the tape, then the subsequent ‘remembering’ event.”
“Everything’s linked—for you,” scoffed Suzie.
“Can you really imagine it’s a coincidence, John, that the trance and the UFO event—involving two people, not to mention plenty of witnesses—both happened on the same day?”
“If there’s a strong enough source of psychological disturbance,” ventured Deacon, “one that affects both people Involved…”
“Plus the Fire Brigade?”
“I ought to tell you something,” Michael blurted, “Because it’s got to do with Luvah, and there is a psychological disturbance affecting us both. You don’t mind too much, love?” He took Susie’s silence, unfairly, for assent. “I saw the doctor about six months ago, when Suzie and I first started to, well, go together.”
“Christ, Mike,” she squirmed.
“I’m afraid I seem cursed with a case of premature ejaculation.”
“Uncool! That’s really gauche.”
“Well, I’ve said it now. It’s just a nuisance to us, really. We rest a bit, then it’s okay.” He grinned sloppily. “It’s as if my first one’s for the fairies… But I know why, now. That first experience, right? The shock of it. Then the way they suppressed it.”
“If—it—happened, Michael!”
“But I know that something did happen.”
“Encounters do have a lot of physical side effects,” offered Shriver diplomatically. “Frequently long-lasting.”
“I’m positive it’ll be all right now I’ve remembered.”
“Maybe we ought to find out!” flared Suzie. “Maybe we could use this settee? Get out the stop watch. I’m sure we need a couple of impartial observers! I’ve had enough of this. Are you coming, Mike?”
“I can’t, love. I need to know.”
The door slammed, hard enough to jar the windows.
“That’s a pity,” sympathized Shriver. Gisela had quit his own life for much the same reason.
“She’ll get over it,” consoled Deacon, wondering what it felt like to have someone close storm out on you; Mary was too much the good shepherd of her flock. Would it have happened if there’d only been himself present, and not the American as well? Momentarily he felt angry at the intrusion, which he’d permitted at Michael’s special request—but also, he knew, because sheer curiosity about a “UFO-watcher” outweighed his suspicions; curiosity and the hint of a possible new page for the anthology of altered states of mind…
• • •
First, a shot of sodium amytal in Michael’s arm, to give a tighter grip on the trance. (Deacon knew that it was wrong to fed this way—to invest prestige in a hypnotic session. But he felt trapped. Challenged. Tantalized. Over and beyond the fascination of the possible new ASC was the fact that he’d lost control last time, that it was impossible he could have lost control.)
“State?” he demanded…
“… And Tharmon asks me to sit in this padded seat next to one of the portholes. Both men sit at the controls. Luvah isn’t here. She went down to the ‘Drive Chamber’ under the control room…”
Id-power, thrust beneath the “surface” by the Superego twins…
“Outside, there’s a bright red fog. When it clears we’re already in the air. I don’t hear any noise or feel any thrust, but the moors are really flying by, down below—
“Why didn’t you describe this part last time?”
“It wasn’t there.”
“You mean that it didn’t happen originally? It only popped into your mind as a fresh ingredient the other night?”
“No! They made me forget it! Even more than I had to forget the rest.” The recording needle quivered into the red as Michael’s voice rose.
Shriver tapped a finger to his forehead, signalling for a pause, and Deacon tapped Michael on the side of the head.
“You’ll sit there quietly. You’ll hear nothing till you fed my finger on your head again—”
“Ask him if he can see any writing or any symbols or graphic shapes or anything like that in the control room,” Whispered Shriver.
“There isn’t likely to be a printed label on the repressed material! You have to work out its symbolism in its own terms—like the name ‘Enitharmon’.”
Shrugging, Deacon put the question.
And Michael reported:
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“There’s a kind diagram, a circuit diagram on Tharmon’s control board. Little lights are bobbing about on it. Either Tharmon controls them by twisting the knobs, or else they tell him when to twist them—”
Shriver held out a notepad. “Can you draw it?”
Michael ignored the question, since Deacon hadn’t asked it; but as soon as it was repeated he took the offered pad. Neatly, he sketched:
“Ah!” breathed Shriver.
• • •
The saucer flew south at high speed, over largely unlit countryside, till it reached the outskirts of London. Slowing then, it dipped, edge on, towards the city centre. The world hung on its side, yet “down” was still faithfully underneath his seat. The tall cylinder of the Post Office Tower stuck out from the other sideways office blocks and buildings like a long boss from a shield—and interfered with them. Rays from it were disagreeing with their craft. Away spun the saucer, speeding north again, back to the Yorkshire moors, “Rather a pointless journey,” remarked Deacon.
“Not necessarily, John. They travel from one microwave tower to another. They’re following a communication network, a sort of main nerve of our technology, don’t you see?”
“Hmm. The mentally disturbed sometimes get scared of invisible ‘rays’. Not that Michael is…”
“Right. He isn’t.”
“I suppose this ‘bouncing back’ from London is another built-in denial signal. His fantasy’s circular, just as ‘Ulro’ only means ‘Earth’.”
Shriver shook his head. “Speaking as an ex-pilot, missions don’t always turn out the way you’ve been briefed… But that isn’t the real point of the flight, John. It’s primarily to persuade Mike. To condition him. Tie’s the target, not London. The rest just fits in like so much stage scenery. Tharmon and Company chase the microwaves—well, hell, they talked of the threat of nuclear war, and all your early warning radar data in England does go by microwaves through those towers—so, fair enough. And they spun him this tale about saving some human genetic stock. Again plausible flapdoodle. The important things here are sexual Initiation and the paranormal flight, as they affect him, Like I say, it’s a rite of passage for the boy—to prime him. It was exactly the same for witches in the Middle Ages: sexual antics and a broomstick flight off to some place of power. Magic and devilry were the frame of reference then—and the affect was: psychic transformations, of a kind. With your poor witches, like as not, ending up hoodwinked and on a bonfire. But they didn’t imagine their experiences hysterically. Those ready happened. The Phenomenon induced them. Today the frame of reference has altered.” Shriver grinned down at the notepad, almost gleefully.
When Michael woke from the trance, he remembered everything; and the tape recorder remembered, too.
“Will you just look at this ‘circuit diagram’?” urged Shriver. “Do you still think Mike imagined the whole thing? Co you know what this is? This just happens to be an excellent schematic for the field-energies of a spacecraft powered by a bipolar gravity field.”
“A what? What are you talking about?”
“Oh I agree, John, there’s no such thing. But if there was, what Mike drew just now would be it! Look, the top dot in the middle circle is a gravity point source projected ahead of the craft—into which it’s constantly pulled. The lower dot is the same thing in reverse: a repulsion point source trailing the craft, shoving it away. It’s this that digs those funny forked holes in the soil at spots where UFOs have supposedly landed. Farmers fall into them now and then. So they call the Army in, and it all gets passed off as mining subsidence or an unexploded bomb that somehow rusted away to nothing… This is the UFO’s main propulsion system—always assuming that you can generate point sources of gravity and antigravity!
“The other dots and bars are secondary field inducers and stabilizer inducers, to trim the craft and give the crew a constant, reasonably level one-G inside. They need that, or they’d be alternately flattened and torn to shreds. Remember how Mike mentioned ‘down’ as staying constantly below, even when the craft tilted? They didn’t even need seat belts, eh? I guess the craft was swinging to the right when Mike drew this, so the gravity field isn’t symmetrical, and the little bars along the main axis are all canted to compensate.
“Now, that red fog he mentioned around the craft, and the visual blurring, are both by-products of these fields. You get local condensation—the air dropping below the dew point; and visible light gets red-shifted by the intensity of the G-field. Sunburn, by the way, is caused by the associated electromagnetic radiation; that’s induction heating…”
The American chuckled bitterly. “So there’s your theory of the gravity-powered spacecraft, for what it’s worth—the uniquely logical way to fly. Now here we have a classic gravity field diagram! Perfect match.
“It’s still baloney, John. We’re dealing with an illusion of a ‘spacecraft’ generated by the UFO entity or entities. It’s all manufactured by some idiot-savant ‘UFO programme’ scripted God knows when, why or how, but still ticking over merrily, still being triggered. Do you know what Tharmon and Luvah and company may be? Tulpas. Have you ever heard of tulpas?”
“Tibetan… somethings,” nodded Deacon. Yes, he’d heard of them. Tulpas belonged on another page of the Aquarian anthology. “Part of the old Lamaist mind-science, right? Living creatures created by a prolonged act of thought.”
“That’s it. Materializations.”
“And they’re supposed to be actual tangible things, not like children’s imaginary playmates—which is all eidetic imagery—or hypnogogic hallucinations. Other people can see them and touch them. They’re supposed to be able to function independently in the real world.”
“Right. They’re independent, importunate sly bastards. Tenacious of the false life they’ve been given. Conceivably the ufonauts, and even the UFOs themselves, are really tulpas. It isn’t such a mad idea. Translate it out of the jargon of mysticism into scientific terms, and you get something like remote-control holograms. Solidograms—that draw their raw material from the air and the sea, from kidnapped humans, from stolen cattle. But what projects them? And from where are they projected?”
Billows of cumulus were drifting eastward, aerial mountains of ice cream. To the west, dirtier sky was advancing along an oblique, sharp divide as a warm front moved in, bringing sheet clouds, rain streaks, thick nimbus. Deacon? tried to imagine a hologram projected into the heart of one of the mighty cumuli, condensing and compacting it till it became a tiny flying saucer with a living crew, newly born, programmed with ghost identities: Tharmons and Luvahs bent on a genetic crusade on behalf of their non-existent world of Ulro. Succubi from space. Sent, in reality, for what purpose? Simply to spread confusion? A confusion as great as their own?
Briefly he pitied these putative ufonauts—transients plucked from chaos only to be dissolved back into it again.
Then the effort of imagination failed. He only saw a trio of serene cauliflower heads sailing away eastwards before the storm…
Yet this image made more sense to him, in a curious sort of way, than an actual gleaming starship whirling down out of the sky.
The simplest explanation of Michael’s experience belonged to a pretty threadbare psychological paradigm—the psycho-sexual. If, however, the Phenomenon could be seen as a new ASC—of a new order which somehow extended out beyond the mind into the real world, as tulpas were supposed to…?
“What do you really think they are, Barry?” he asked the American.
“Oh, I don’t. As I told Mike and his young lady, neutrality’s my strong suit. But one thing I’ll say is, they’re like subatomic particles. As soon as you think you’ve pinned ’em down, they split up and something new and paradoxical emerges! I don’t expect a final theory of UFOs. Frankly, I’d distrust one. I’d consider it planted by the Phenomenon to sow confusion—”
“I hardly see how!”
“That’s my personal feeling. As to what other people believe they are… Well,
primo,” Shriver ticked off on his fingers, “genuine alien spaceships, gravity-propelled, investigating us, invading us or just plain visiting us for fun. Two, Earth-based spacecraft from some non-homo sap civilization that predates us by millions of years and arose in the depths of our own seas. That isn’t so ridiculous! We know damn all about the ocean depths. Three, how about energy lifeforms inhabiting space that wander into our ecosphere now and then? Or four, ancient alien mindforms that got marooned here? Maybe several different races of them all at war, under the banners of God and Satan. This brings in Theosophy and Atlantis: higher vibrational levels, higher ‘octaves’ of matter, co-existing dimensions. We have to suppose our own world is interpenetrated by a different, and inhabited ‘vibrational’ space. Which, needless to say, fails to explain the apparent stupidity of those inhabitants! Unless their logic is entirely foreign and ethereal, or unless they’ve actually devolved from a once-high peak into imbeciles, who retain all their former technical toys!
“How about time-hopping intelligences harking back from our own far future…? Shall I go on? I seem to be running out of fingers.”
The sky had grown dark. Abruptly scudding rain washed the window, imposing a rippling, hobbling second sheet between themselves and the now murky fields.
“How did you get into all this?” Deacon asked.
“I was a Captain in the Air Force. My Dad was a successful realtor—real estate. He invested wisely. Then both my parents and my kid brother got killed in an automobile smash, and I left the Air Force. Hell, I was just helping kill people. So it seemed. I set off to chase this pest instead. I tell you John, it offends me deep down. I’m going to catalogue these damned tar babies, because they’re a Ministry of Misinformation all around us. But I won’t get tangled up in them, like some other Brer Rabbits of the Flying Saucer brigade!”
It was a typical conversion pattern, then. The shock of losing all his family. The search for another family, whose bonding was along other than military lines. A yearning for salvation from some kind of God-force in space; a lurking fear that the order of things was somehow inimical and menacing… Despite the American’s pretence of detachment, he was stuck in his own personal tar baby without even realizing it, thought Deacon.
