by Ian Watson
“Suppose Michael did draw a gravity field diagram just now, as you say…”
“You’d better believe it,” chuckled Shriver.
“Only, as you also say, such a thing doesn’t exist. So where did he get it from, for you to recognize it?”
“Oh, do you think he read my mind just now? No way. That’s what Mike actually saw, back then. It’s the real McCoy. Mike got it from the same place as he got those Blake names—courtesy of the Phenomenon. Our ‘aliens’ may claim it’s against their ethics to reveal themselves, or similar crap to excuse them vanishing into the wide blue yonder whenever us poor guys seem to be getting close, but oh boy, this Phenomenon sure doesn’t mind fishing in all our heads. Quite a few people around the world are heavily into thinking about UFOs using gravity fields. I could list a string of books and articles—and how many people do you reckon have read these and been influenced, eh? I guess William Blake casts an ever wider net. He saw real visions, didn’t he? He met angels and demons walking around: obviously the dear old Phenomenon at work. Then he made a poetic mythology out of it. It’s all—shall we say?—in the public domain, psychically available for plagiarizing by the UFO force.”
“Supposing that UFOs really are these tulpa things,” spoke up Michael, “and supposing that an act of thought produces them… Well, the trance recreated exactly the frame of mind I was in the first time, when Luvah’s saucer landed—and history repeated itself that very evening.” He stared at Deacon. “Why not again? If you hypnotize me? If you order me to make an event happen?”
“Throw a pin to find a pin?” Deacon smiled appreciatively. “What an intriguing idea.”
Rain lashed down. It was a wet Autumn. Rivers, and drains, would soon be overflowing.
Seven
Three weeks passed before the attempt could be made; two sessions were called off when Michael developed raging headaches. And Deacon had devoured a small library of material about the Phenomenon by now, recommended and partly loaned by Shriver. It had him by the nose—and his nose said that there was an authentic ASC, and Altered Stale of Consciousness, as genuine and alien to ordinary consciousness as the hypnotic state, the meditation stale or the LSD “trip” state; one which could be labelled for convenience “UFO-Consciousness”: the altered state of mind in which it became possible to encounter, and even to generate, UFO phenomena. If Air Forces spent tens of thousands of dollars on trying to chase these things, and if he could come up with a practical hypothesis…
It was sunny enough when they began, but very soon clouds rolled in again, bringing another wet afternoon. Rapidly the weather worsened, and the sky grew obscure.
“Four, three, two, one. Wake up!”
Michael blinked. “Nothing happened? I am remembering everything?”
“The lot.” Deacon switched off the recorder.
“I’m afraid I’ve got another headache.”Michael smiled faintly. “Just a mild one, this time. I’ll go and fetch the coffee!”
Nothing.
Nor had anything happened with Suzie. She was his friend again, but not his lover. She made it plain that she wasn’t going to allow her sex life to be a reportable experiment. So he still did not know, about that aspect. For her, the project with John Deacon was taboo; any mention of it made her coldly angry. It was a sort, of infidelity which Michael perversely refused to quit…
Deacon, left alone, wandered to the window and stare out into the rain. A sense of nervous regeneration, some boost of energy that the rain front had swept before it, was thoroughly dampened now. What had he been expecting anyway? What kind of folly was this? Bottled up with this… this choirboy with a sex problem, fondling his head, trying to invoke—what? He was still staring out as Michael backed in through the door, a steaming paper cup in each hand.
Through the rain outside glided a huge bird. It was not exactly gliding, though; it was simply floating, ever so slowly. Far too slowly. Not even flapping its wings.
Deacon wiped the window furiously, though the skin of rain was on the outside. The view blurred and wavered like an unfocused TV set.
“Christ, what’s that—an albatross?”
Michael hurried to his side.
“It looks more like a pterodactyl,” Michael whispered. “Something extinct.”
The crested, beaked head. The squat body, slung beneath leathery bat-like wings which it held outspread on taloned fingers… Thirty yards away, it seemed almost the size of a man. Deacon wanted to smash the glass out with his fist. Except… that he wouldn’t care to risk letting it hear.
“It must be a kite,” said Michael anxiously. “Someone’s flying a kite.”
“In this weather? Talk sense!”
Then the flying thing swung its head in their direction, and they saw its eyes. They were glowing, garish red eyes, not much smaller than a car’s brake lights and quite as bright…
Abruptly the flying thing banked up and away, dissolving into murk.
“A harpy,” mumbled Michael. “Something mythological. From long long ago…”
“Damn it, we couldn’t see properly! It was… It was—”
“It just was, and we’d better believe it.” There was hysteria in Michael’s voice. “It was an object. It flew. We can’t identify it. What more do you want? I’m scared, John. Was that a UFO? A vicious harpy with no arms and a tiny little brain—!”
• • •
Suzie was lying on top of her bed listening to a Bruckner symphony; the peristaltic waves of the Romantic sublime rolled on and on. The sky and her room were dark, yet she made no move to switch a light on. Rain whipped her window. The stylus tracked across the final groove, the arm lifted off, returned; the longest theme in music began at! over again.
Someone knocked on her door.
“Is that you, Mike?”
The handle rattled. The knocking resumed. Slipping off her bed, she turned the latch.
Two men wearing dark blue uniforms with air force wings stood in the corridor. One of them carried a black briefcase with bright metal catches. Their faces seemed stained with liquid suntan; they were long tapering faces. A pair of life-size Action Men dolls, she thought. Foreign-looking: Italian, or even Persian.
“We’re sorry to bother you, Miss,” said the man with the briefcase in a cheery voice with a note of homely Cockney in it. “We’re British Air Ministry investigators. I’m Flight Lieutenant Baker. This is Warrant Officer Jones. We’d like to ask a few questions about your flying saucer sighting a few weeks ago.”
“According to what your boyfriend told the papers—” the man called Jones butted in, in an excessively loud voice, so loud that it seemed to embarrass him; he didn’t complete the sentence but stood shuffling from side to side. She stared at them in the weak light spilling from the corridor. As Baker slid a foot forward she noticed how clean and dry their shoes were.
Baker held up his briefcase and fiddled with the catches, as though he wasn’t sure how to open them. Finally he succeeded, drew out a long printed form and rested it on the side of the briefcase in mid-air. More fumbling, then, to get a ballpoint pen to work; he scribbled jaggedly to and fro, messing the top of the form, all the time edging into the doorway till he was practically thrusting her back with the extended briefcase.
“He’s interested in these things, right? He likes to poke his nose into them?”
“I didn’t ask you in!” she protested.
“Oh—” Baker looked nonplussed, and leaned against the door-jamb, “Never mind, Miss. Let’s see, when were you born?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I’d say you’re about twenty.” He scribbled. “Did you have any major childhood illnesses? Diphtheria, smallpox, TB—?”
“That’s ridiculous—those have all been wiped out years ago! You might as well ask if I’ve had the Black Death. What on earth—?”
“Wiped out, eh?” boomed Warrant Officer Jones. He leered at her, “Do you really think so?”
She took a dee
p breath. “What sort of joke is this?”
“We’re British Air Ministry investigators,” repeated Baker. “I’m Flight Lieutenant Baker, we’d like to ask you—”
“You’d better co-operate,” blared Jones; and shut up just as suddenly.
Baker said slyly, “We know that there was a full moon on the day, but tell me this, Miss: were you also having a period at the time? And does your period coincide with the lunar cycle? You’ll pardon the impertinence. If you can just tell us that, we’ll buzz off.”
“You’re filthy! How dare you come asking that sort of thing!”
With a shrug Baker twisted the briefcase round to face her; the little scrawling he had done on the form was huge and childish, illegible. The print itself was too small to read, in bis shadow.
“Look here, Miss, we need to file a report to Central, seeing as your boyfriend’s interested in these things, right? Tell you what, you just put your moniker here at the bottom then we’ll fill the rest in ourselves. Make it up, eh?” He winked.
“Sign a blank form I haven’t even read?” She flipped the light on, and Baker smartly pulled the form away.
“You do ask a lot of questions,” he snapped in a petulant, threatening tone. “So why shouldn’t we? What time is it?”
“It’s time you went!” Suzie swung the door, to force them out. The door resisted her for a while, but at last the spring bolt clicked and she thrust the lock catch down.
She wasn’t certain when they left; she couldn’t hear any footsteps. She was still trembling with rage and fright as the record ended again, and began again.
Eight
Mary led the two wet students into the lounge, and pulled the curtains. There were brown leather Scandinavian armchairs and sofa; fleshy flowerless geraniums; a glass cabinet containing her collection of Goss Ware—a hundred miniature Victorian beakers, jugs and cruets with town coats of arms on them… So this was the Cupid of John’s obsession, she thought—the pretty Gaveston to her husband’s pathetic Edward. His channel to the infinite. At least his girl was with him!
Suzie stared back in a hostile yet curiously begging way, deeply resenting this house and anyone in it, yet hoping it might hold some kind of cure.
“What’s this nonsense about conjuring up a pterodactyl?” Mary demanded.
The boy smiled primly. A coy mincing simper.
“It doesn’t matter! I’ll fetch John—he’s upstairs.”
John was not upstairs.
As Mary retraced her steps she heard the back door bang. She found her husband standing in the kitchen in wet slippers; the uppers were dark with damp. His hands were dirty. Turning to the sink, he washed them vigorously.
“Shep was being a nuisance. He wanted to be out.” He fumbled with a towel. Only when she told him that his protégé was in the house did he really sharpen up and gain precision.
“Something happened? Ah!”
She followed through into the lounge and watched him closely, as Suzie Meade resentfully told of the visit by the Air Force investigators, their disconnected behaviour, their threatening manner, their idiotic obscene questions.
“I did telephone the Air Ministry,” Michael said. “Then the Military Aeronautical Information Service. They put me on to the Ministry of Defence. But of course there weren’t any investigators! They flatly denied it.”
“Did you phone the Police?” Mary asked. “They sound like a fairly disgusting couple of perverts.”
“They were so wrong,” moaned Suzie. “A brand new briefcase, that they didn’t seem to know how to open. And bright clean shoes.” She glanced at Deacon’s feet. “It was pouring outside, but their shoes weren’t even wet.”
“A hoax,” soothed Mary. She offered Suzie a drink, and poured gin, ignoring the men.
“It couldn’t be a hoax!” shuddered Suzie, “Why should anybody bother?”
Deacon shook his head firmly. “Men in Black. That’s what they were—MIBs.”
Michael nodded. “I knew they had to be. As soon as I heard. I wanted you to explain it to her, John. Though I had the devil of a job persuading her!”
“What on earth are Men in Black supposed to be?” asked ,Mary.
“I’ve been finding out a lot about them lately. They’re definitely a part of the Phenomenon. They look a bit oriental—typically they’re short people with sallow skins. Clothes and equipment are all perfectly new, though often they don’t seem remotely at home with it. They turn up, usually in pairs, in the wake of UFO sightings when there’s been some publicity. Sometimes they pose as Air Force officers. They ask the damnedest questions. They scare people. They tell them to keep their mouths shut. I’d give you any odds those two characters were MIBs. Did we,” he whispered across to Michael, “trigger them too?”
“They weren’t dressed in black,” protested Suzie.
Deacon nodded, “They’re just called that because they often drive around in black cars and wear black suits—though obviously not when they’re impersonating officers in uniform. The American Air Force apparently got quite worried about these impersonations! Nobody ever pins them down. They just drive off and vanish. It can be pretty scary.”
“I suppose they’re really the Venusians in our midst?” asked Mary acidly.
“Venus is five hundred degrees Centigrade, dear, and the pressure would crush you flat. You’d be boiled, squashed, corroded and poisoned in ten seconds. They certainly don’t come from anywhere ‘out there’. They belong in the same constellation as ghosts and poltergeists, angels and demons and fairies. Why, that creature we called up in the rain—”
“Called up? You seriously believe that you two saw anything other than a perfectly ordinary bird?”
The egg had hatched: a fabulous monster, a roc, a pterodactyl… Deep down, she had known all along that John was only a tourist of altered states of consciousness, of the tropics of the soul, snapping away at the various prodigies and marvels of Yoga, Tantra, Hypnosis, and ESP with a camera. He was the Bouvard and Pécuchet of the mental Beyond, and now he was making errors as grotesque as ever Flaubert’s two bourgeois clerks did when they got free rein… It wasn’t so much that he was erecting a pseudoscience as cosmetic for a wretched, squirming affair with this pretty boy; yet he was in a doting relationship with the boy now—feeding on his immaturity, and in the process warping both himself and the boy, whom his attention naturally excited. The spectacle sickened her.
“What if MIBs are tubas, John?” (The boy called him John.) “That’s why their clothes look so brand new, why they talk nonsense, why they can’t open a briefcase properly. Because they’re imperfectly programmed. Their reality has mothholes in it—”
“What are tulpas?” She poured the girl another gin. Michael did his best to answer the question; she only listened for a while, before interrupting.
“Obviously two not-so-funny jokers live somewhere in this town.”
“That’s a point,” nodded Deacon—more in Michael’s direction than in hers. “It would be more economical to suppose that MIBs are actually human beings who get used. Without their even knowing it! People who’ve been… infiltrated, pre-programmed. People who can be activated—”
“By somebody else in a UFO-conscious state, you mean? Did we do that to Suzie?”
“Who can be made to hire costumes, rent cars, buy briefcases, make phone calls—without even knowing it! I wonder if a lot of human beings have got such programmes planted in them—buried deep down? How many ‘mad’ assassins—Sirhan Sirhans or Jack Rubys or that South American who tried to knife the Pope—say a voice ordered them to do it? They couldn’t disobey it They had no idea what was going on, no memory of the episode afterwards. They were in a trance, robotized. Why dismiss what they say out of hand? What if we’re all just really some sort of advanced thinking robot, or being used as such! Seemingly free to do what we want most of the time, yet liable to be switched on to some other purpose entirely? What if we’re all just cells in something larger, a collective wi
th a purpose and ethics of its own? Do we feel qualms about trimming our fingernails or our hair?”
Mary listened, appalled. Suzie darted her a look, briefly, of angry sympathy.
“We need to dig deeper,” Deacon said to Michael. “We need to find out if you have any prior ‘programmes’—preceding your flight at sixteen!”
“Right!”
“Maybe we’re not meant to think about this. I don’t mean ‘there are things men should not know’. But maybe this over-programme isn’t written In such a way that we can appreciate the programme. It’s a sort of higher order information. Yet we do catch glimpses—as we see UFOs! Then the MIB aspect, all the negative features, home in automatically, confusing, scaring, destroying, cancelling understanding. So the real nature of the over-programme remains aloof. So it works smoothly—to what end?”
“That’s pretty scary,” Michael agreed, infected with excitement—Mary could well see—by the sheer madness of John’s improvisations, “Didn’t Barry say one of the UFO theories has other dimensions coexisting with our own? What if it’s the mind that coexists? What if there’s another sort of mind coexisting with ours: working through it, inhabiting it, using it? Why, maybe there’s the origin of ‘The Joke’ you’ve found deep down in hypnosis—the hidden observer apart from the conscious personality!”
The door flew open; Rob stood there, just briefly—“I heard a cry in the garden!”—before he was gone again.
When they reached the kitchen door, Rob, out on the dark wet lawn, was already clutching at a sobbing, whimpering Celia. She broke away from him, stumbling off towards the bottom of the garden. Bursting through rotting chrysanthemums, she sank to her knees in the mud of the border, against the fence. Low, slatted, in indifferent repair, this fence gave on to a boarded-up waste ground of wiilowherb, saplings and tumbled stones.
“Take a torch, John!” ordered Mary.
