by Ian Watson
“It’s like taking an encephalogram,” said Helen helpfully. “Or placing acupuncture needles, to read the body’s energy field. Only, using living biological equipment—extensions of the Biomatrix. This isn’t hostile to UFOs, you understand? We’re not setting traps. We’re just taking the pulse.”
“The pulse of a tiger,” growled Moller. “But we can do it. We are tigers too.”
“When we understand the pattern of your planet, we can begin to think our way into the soul of Earth and heal it. We can pour energy into the world pattern, then, through the biosensors you deploy. This will bring you friendly understanding of the Unidentified. You will gain knowledge from it.”
“Then there can be proper UFO landings, Mike. Genuine contact. Real visions giving proper guidance. We’ll have the chance of tapping UFO power positively. A visible God force. A new dawn.”
Michael stared at Helen. “Don’t you realize this would mean the end of human science?”
“Of the limited science we know!” snorted the Swede.
“It will be a magical time, Mike,” she assured him. “Just as Early Man knew it. It will be what the Aborigines call the Dreamtime, brought back to us again.”
“More like a new Stone Age, I’d say!”
“You won’t help? You won’t believe?” Bonaparte waved to the alien standing by the Thunderbird. It entered the airlock, cycled it and lumbered over to them. Michael felt scared. He feared the squashing power of the two great bulky beasts. He backed off. However, the other alien came not to him, but to Bonaparte.
“You don’t believe in our reality? In our truth?”
For a moment Michael said nothing. He stood there; his fingernails dug into his palms.
“No, I don’t,” he said at last.
Bonaparte burbled at the technician, which reached with its trunk to help Bonaparte unfasten the seals on suit and helmet.
“Bad, thin atmosphere. There is poison in it for us, Mikal. It is a slow, painful, messy death. You will see enough pain to believe that we are real. You will smell enough vomit and Voiding of the bowels.”
The helmet came off. A gluey rheum of turtle tears flowed from Bonaparte’s eyes. The alien’s throat crowed stridently.
As other seals came loose, the bulk of the suit flopped open. The technician nosed it apart till it lay surrounding naked Bonaparte in a flabby heap of tyres. Bonaparte subsided to its knees, hobbled by pain.
“For God’s sake don’t let him!” begged Helen. “You bastard! How can you do this—when they chose you?” Axel Moller bunched his fists, helplessly. “They’re such beautiful beings. A hundred of them died at Tunguska. They’d still give their lives for us—from pure altruism. And—you—kill—him!”
The alien vomited: a thick stinking green pool. It shook and whined.
“If we cannot persuade you,” honked the technician, “what use was there in our coming?”
Bonaparte began to grovel pitifully, squeezing its hind legs together. Abruptly its bowels voided, staining its hide and the floor.
“A long time dying, Mikal,” it wheezed. “This is only the beginning—”
When he was five years old, Michael had seen a ladybird dying slowly in a patch of DDT. Twitching, fumbling, trying to die. He’d tried to put it out of its misery by crushing it under his heel. His heel was only soft crepe rubber. The squashed broken thing just went on dying—only, more broken and agonizing than before, It had been a trivia! thing: the agony of a ladybird. Yet it had branded his soul. From then on, he’d had a horror of killing anything. Flies or snails. A rabbit with myxomatosis, wandering blindly around in the corner of a field. The creatures never seemed able to complete the act of dying at his hands. The time of their agony stretched out hugely, and it was he who drew it out: a torturer who loathed such suffering as the worst thing in the world.
Seconds were hours now. He was a little boy again, wanting desperately to help that ladybird, and only hurting it intolerably. He felt completely vulnerable to the other’s slow agony.
“We’d never have had Pearl Harbour bombed,” hissed Helen, “if we’d only trusted and believed. It was our fault. One Japanese guy cut his bowels out in front of the US embassy in the Thirties to persuade us that we must believe, stop treating Asians like gooks, stop banning them from the USA. Did you know that? He thought we’d understand. That was the strongest argument he could put—his own death by hara-kiri. It’s the same with the Gebraudi—because self-sacrifice is so deep down in them. Don’t you know what hell there’ll be if they don’t help us? Oh, the Gebraudi won’t bomb anywhere! The only violence they can do is wound themselves. They only use force against themselves. It’s our own UFO-evil that will bomb our hearts and souls.”
Dying ladybird! Dying alien! Michael couldn’t match this trump card. Something within him stretched—and snapped.
It was all true. He began to cry. He begged:
“Save him. Help him. Let him live!” The alien was a thing no longer. Bonaparte was a person: real and true and living. “Our friends… they’re beautiful. I didn’t realize!”
Later, the technician returned.
“How… how is Boon-ap-aat—?” asked Michael humbly.
“He is very ill, naturally. But he will get better. Now I must show you how to fly your car, Mikal from Earth.”
The technician led the three of them through the airlock. The white vinyl driver’s seat of the Thunderbird had been bolted back in place and the passenger seat removed to make space for an alien driving instructor.
“It is time to be on your way, Helen and Axel. Your biosensors are all loaded, on the back seats and floors.”
Helen—a small figure, rather drab, rather homely, rather brave—walked to her Pontiac. “Take care!” she called. She backed the car out and turned into the open exit tube. Nodding more curtly to Michael, the Swede got into his Volvo and followed after the Pontiac. No exhaust fumes came from either car. They were sealed; powered by reaction mass—by the total energy conversion of, perhaps, plain water…
The triangular door of the exit tube closed. When it reopened a few minutes later, the tube was empty.
“I have to hypnotize you, to make the learning faster and easier. Normal functions remain unimpaired, I promise. Do you agree?”
Michael nodded lamely. Since the alien still waited for an answer, not understanding the gesture, he said aloud: “Yes.”
The alien slipped the glass block out of his leg holster. He fitted this into what looked like a large, boxlike inspection torch that was resting on the hood of the car.
“Please watch.”
A bright green beam of light shone into Michael’s face. The light was flickering very rapidly, too rapidly to notice at first. Yet as Michael stared into it, increasingly he became aware of all the individual pulses of light… He felt fully alert and brisk, supremely receptive—though in a passive,volitionless way. He noticed, peripherally, how the movements of the aliens in the blue-green chamber over on the far side of the wall had somehow lost the knack of fusing smoothly and were jerking along instead, like frames in an early movie. But this didn’t worry him.
Soon enough, he was learning how to fly the Thunderbird.
Twenty-One
The VC-10 which Deacon boarded in Cairo was crowded with a large party of Kenyan athletes and many tiresomely boisterous expatriate children returning to their English boarding schools. As they flew to Rome, then Paris, Deacon turned the leaves of the Lemegeton of Solomon.
The curious diagrams in the book—those shapes supposed to conjure demons—still looked to him like fragments of circuit designs torn asunder from some giant plan… of mind. Patterns of relationships, bits of a mental map. Each of the “demons”—AGARES, AINI, ALLOCEN, AMDUSCIAS, seventy-two of them in all, through to ZAGAN and ZEPAR—apparently stood for a particular para-psychological type: bestowal of unusual power in some normal (or quite abnormal) area. Love, warfare, skill in mathematics or poetry, in dowsing for treasure, foretelling the fu
ture and understanding the language of birds and beasts, in knowledge of powers in plants and stones, in fire-raising, the influencing of people unawares, in invisibility, speed-learning, the raising of mirages.
Here were fragmentary sketchmaps of a more evolved mind that could manipulate reality directly by seizing hold of its underlying forms, precursors of some kind of superconsciousness which men could tap into, for good or ill. He remembered Tom Havelock’s comment weeks ago that symbols might have some sort of objective reality…
And one of those diagrams had been programmed into Michael’s mind as part of a UFO control panel.
At last south-east London spread below, dull under clouds. Rain flicked down the window.
The jet descended, bumped, roared its tail engines, taxied. Grey concrete, grey buildings, even the grass looked grey. He hadn’t changed his clothes for the last five days. His most recent shave was twenty-four hours out of date. Sticky stubble grated against his collar, but he couldn’t bear to loosen collar or tie and so appear even more seedy and reprobate. He was a tramp in an airliner.
In his wallet was an extraordinary visa from Egypt with fingerprints and photograph on it, an identity card issued by the Consul in Cairo, a special permit to enter the UK, a letter of authorization to Immigration, and five pounds sterling (to be refunded)…
His visit to the Embassy in Garden City had been so embarrassing that after a while he became anaesthetized, a human parcel to be probed and prodded, left standing in corners or resting endlessly on hard seats till eventually relabelled.
He had told the Consul a story about amnesia; overwork. He must have thrown his passport into the Nile, without registering at any hotel. He sincerely hoped the tension had all been released by his absurd flight from England.
Police checked; his passport wasn’t lodged with any hotel desk. The Embassy checked. No John Deacon had flown out of Heathrow in the past week; so he must have given the airline a false name. His wife supplied a list of personal questions to identify him. “How did our dog die?” was one.
He was lectured, like a little boy before a headmaster, by a Consul maybe ten years younger than himself. Deacon, the parcel, submitted to all this tamely, the price of help-within comprehension. Though, when he got back to the Sheikh’s house where they let him stay while inquiries were pressed, he had telephoned Reuter’s Cairo office.
On board the VC-10 the stewardesses kept a frigid watch on him, as though he might suddenly molest one of the schoolboys, shout racial abuse or fumblingly try to hijack the plane.
• • •
“Was there any need,” asked Mary tightly as she drove the car northwards, “to have reporters meet you? Did you think I was going to spank you in public?”
“I had to set the record straight with myself! I told a lie in Cairo, at the Embassy. Just so I could get back here with the minimum of fuss. You can’t know how humiliating it was.”
“Can’t I?”
“Only the Sheikh and Salim knew the truth. But as they say, the truth conceals itself! Maybe I ought to have been bolder… I was just redressing the balance, a little, at this end.”
“The facts are that you went to the Bank, John. I know because I went along and checked our account. You drew out just enough for a one-way ticket. Two hundred pounds that we can ill afford!”
“Oh, I might have got there by plane. That doesn’t matter, you see! That wasn’t how I got there.”
“How can you pretend that your flight to Egypt was courtesy of flying saucers, when you didn’t even travel in one?”
“I travelled in a UFO-conscious state. It’s the same thing, as I told the gentlemen of the Press.”
“God, John, you’re about to fall off the edge of a cliff. I’m trying to keep a grip on your collar. Yet you tear it out of my hand as though you hate me! Have you any idea how this’ll come over in the newspapers?”
“Those reporters struck me as a fairly shy bunch. I always thought all reporters were brazen extroverts.”
“Probably they were as embarrassed as I was. Cub reporters set loose on a crackpot tale. That doesn’t stop them going to town on it,” All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, she thought bitterly. John’s cranium gleamed stickily; but the fairy only gave one wish…
Deacon patted his pocket complacently. Wherein reposed the Little Key of Solomon. Muradi, he was now convinced, had been an honest intermediary.
“Sorry, darling. I can’t give up. Not now that I’m so close.”
“You utter fool.”
Twenty-Two
Michael bumped down on the moor road exactly one day after he’d been taken from the Earth. His bicycle wasn’t lying there any more.
He drove to a disused little quarry over the moor in Goosedale and hid the car among a mass of leathery rhododendrons. It was a three-mile walk back.
He stepped out joyfully. He’d lost a kind of virginity up on the Moon, been initiated into a splendid, appalling secret. The world smelt different now. Invisible lines of force were everywhere, binding together the vegetation, the birds in the trees, worms underfoot, all the works of the human race into a plenum, a whole which—alas—was purblind due to men. It threw up miracles and atrocities alike as it struggled towards knowledge, its higher centres crippled and dwarfed by the death programme. Orgasm was once called “the little death”… and he had always died too soon, full of anxiety. Humanity was crippled by anxiety too, full of self-hatreds, out of touch with the rhythms of life. Thus had grown up an epileptic palsy which bred monsters, at the very same time as the life programme projected, inchoately, signs of transcendence in the sky, sometimes even coming down to Earth to try to deliver a message: from life to itself. Men’s eyes saw, from time to time, but the hands were forever fashioning more weapons in the service of death.
This elation tided him through other embarrassments, at home. For he had gone off without a word and not come back that day or that night. His father had found his bicycle upon the moor road in the evening, and called the Police. He had actually cycled into Swale, lied Michael, and locked up his bicycle (or so he thought—someone had obviously taken it) then caught the bus to Otway and the train to Sandstairs. He’d been in Otway overnight, at a youth hostel; he missed the last bus home. He’d had to see Suzie. Love, Impulse. He had a day’s stubble on his chin…
Recriminations followed. Because he hadn’t even bothered to phone from Otway.
It was a tight, horrid morning—when a few hours earlier he had been on the far side of the Moon, talking with aliens, learning to fly over Tsiolkovsky… No connection existed between the two segments of experience. Home and mother and father became increasingly unreal as the morning wore on. They were the dream.
Ordinary life was a dream. A solid, real dream—a dream none the less. It was so hard to step outside the ordinary, which sucked you back so cloyingly, reasonably and anxiously. What had really happened Could simply not be said. He had no alibi save Suzie Meade, adolescent passion, callousness.
His mother stared, red-eyed, into a garden sunbright with daffodil trumpets, mere wax or plastic to her eyes now, drained of joy; while he wolfed toast and coffee that she’d duly made for him. It was so long since he’d last eaten, from Axel’s food hoard on the Moon. She sat (black curls overcast by grey) so absorbed in her own unhappiness that it seemed impenetrable. To reach out a hand… To comfort… To apologize. No use! A lie had come between them; she sat on the far side of it, in the falsehood of the ordinary, the illusion of the normal…
If he took her to the Thunderbird or brought the Thunder-bird to the house and… went off with her into the sky—she would be rained, devastated. She would scream for help, from the ordinary world.
He spread ginger marmalade thickly. Daffodils wagged in a rising breeze. A thrush trod the lawn, tap dancing to pull out a writhing worm and chop it with stiletto stabs. His father came back from the telephone and hugged his wife in her isolation. “Why? Why?” The question had no answer to it, save for an
answer so absurd that it was no answer. When you rode the route back from fairyland, thought Michael, if you as much as touched the ground with your foot everything would turn to dust and you would suddenly be very old… If you wed a fairy bride and as much as hinted at her origin she would flee from your arms. Gold would become lead, the magic ring brass, rubies mere coloured glass.
No alibi existed for this world, except Suzie convalescent in Sandstairs by the sea.
“Alibi”—Elsewhere. That was where the flying saucer and all its avatars came from: from elsewhere—out of the essential elsewhere implicit in any whole system. So the Gebraudi aliens had shown. A system could never know itself wholly within its own terms. Yet it was driven to do so—its very failure being the force that evolved it. So the Unidentifiable quantity within the system became briefly visible, only to flee constantly away. You could only learn by going elsewhere too, to the blind side of the Moon. In everything there was a zone of elsewhere. In every kettle of boiling water were a few microscopic crystals of ice; in every ice cube in the refrigerator were a few atoms at boiling point. Or else the world simply wouldn’t be. It would lock rigidly—and lose its existence. The UFO was the boiling atom in the ice cube, the seed of ice in the kettle. It was the invisibility at the edge of the universe—without which there would be no universe. It was the indeterminacy of the particle—without which there would be no matter. The Gebraudi understood this far better than the Human race did. All those biopacks loaded in the Thunderbird, in tune with the Biomatrix behind the Moon, were sense organs to perceive the hidden rhythms of the world. While men built missiles to destroy it.
“Fro very sorry,” Michael apologized to them, dabbing at his mouth. “I really am.”
He went to bed exhausted and slept, wounding his mother even more. Because he could not have spent the night in a youth hostel, to be so tired.
• • •
He dreamt of being on the Moon again with Bonaparte. He awoke within the dream, realizing that this was a dream and he was still asleep. He tried to tell the alien that it was actually a dream being in his own mind as he lay abed in Neapstead, Yorkshire. Bonaparte was wearing no pressure suit, yet he wasn’t dying! As soon as Michael pointed this out the alien started to bleat and choke and die again. Still aware it was a dream, Michael willed Bonaparte fiercely to stay healthy and coherent so that he could question him; question his own alien knowledge, the alibi zone within the mind which mind must straggle in vain to know. The struggle turned into Bonaparte’s death throes. Michael could no longer keep himself awake within sleep, or preserve the alien’s health. Ordinary dreaming flooded back.
