by Ian Watson
Their headlight beams crept closer, lighting far less space. A bubble of vacuum shrank about them.
The car hummed. It sang. Michael pressed the accelerator pedal and the car lifted vertically from the ground for a moment, then was pushed back again. The suspension creaked. He shoved the pedal right to the floor. The creaking stopped, but the car failed to rise. Their headlamps played now upon a formless solid ink a few feet from the bumpers; though the darkness came no closer.
“For Christ’s sake don’t let your foot move—hold on.”
Shriver hissed, as though the blackness was swallowing the sound of their voices too. Michael thrust his foot against the floor. His ankle and calf were already trembling, dissolving. Bones be rigid, he willed, flesh be firm. He held on.
“You’re doing fine, Mike. You’re keeping it off us. The crater floor ought to be clear ahead. I don’t remember any wreckage. We can’t fly out because it’s holding us down. But it can’t overcome the G-point either—and we can drive out.”
“No we can’t! We’re in flight mode.”
“We damn well can. We can let the gravity point draw us out. Tilt the point forward a fraction. Not too much or the Dark will crush our tail. Tilt the wheel… Hold it there. We’re moving, Mike. We are moving. Stones are creeping past. I can see ’em. We’ll get out—”
A shock ran through the car; the hood dipped to the left.
“We’ve burst a tyre. No sweat, We don’t need tyres. Let the point source pull us.”
Shock; the hood dipped to the right.
“Don’t panic, you can drag us out. Slowly, slowly.”
Michael wanted to say, but I feel like a jellyfish; only his jaws wouldn’t unbind. He heard a gargling noise in his throat.
“All right—keep on,” urged Shriver.
Shock. Shock. The rear tyres burst.
Stones and the pockmarks of microcraters still crept past, though.
“Don’t slacken off that pedal! Not for a fraction of a second, you hear me? Fine, you’re doing real fine.”
Deacon licked his lips; he thought he tasted blood on them.
Slowly, interminably, the car crept forward. The chassis had begun to croak faintly like a pond of distant frogs.
Deacon saw the minute hand moving slowly round the clock. Quarter past, sixteen minutes past.
“We’re losing fuel!” he cried.
“Using it, you mean. The stronger the G-field, the faster the reaction mass goes!” Complete conviction sounded in Shriver’s voice now that they faced this blackness, this negativity; absolute certainty that the gravity drive was authentic—and alien. Their death would be the same death that the aliens had died.
“We’re hardly moving,” mumbled Deacon.
Seventeen minutes, eighteen minutes past.
“You fool, we’re under full power. There’s just nowhere to go. Not yet! Except just a little—way—ahead. A little—at—a—time. I can see the damned clock as well as you!”
Nineteen minutes.
“When we do reach the edge, Mike, be ready for us flying up fast. And how.”
• • •
At last a seam of light was prised loose from the Dark. Sunlight existed again, a rising sword thrusting the black weight aside. Their hood nosed forward into it.
Abruptly the car tore free. It was fleeing from the crater. Already high above it. Pitching, rocking, as Michael clutched flabbily the steering wheel. The face of the Moon was a mile behind, five miles behind… At last he let his foot off the accelerator, moaning as muscles knotted in cramp. He kneaded and massaged his leg. In free fall they flew on, faster than escape velocity. Away from the Moon, but away from Earth too. The Earth now rose, white on blue, around the bumpy bend of lunar horizon.
Far behind them the dark floor of Tsiolkovsky stirred and rose. A shadow of bat wings flew westward across craters in the direction of Gagarin, Cyrano, Paracelsus. The source of the shadow rushed up after them…
“Shit, it’s following us.”
“It’ll cut us off,” squeaked Michael. “It’ll get between us and the Earth.”
“Bring us round gently, under full power. I’ll watch it.”
Deacon dabbed his mouth, and tried to think clearly about the nature of tulpas. Tibetan adepts were supposedly able to sit in their cells and create autonomous thought creatures with independent—and often malign—lives; creatures which could travel about the real world. It was also said that adepts could create thought landscapes. In his cell the Tibetan monk could think an entire forest into being, which he could then journey through, thus proving the superficiality of our perceptions. Yet the mind creation was regarded as none the less real, for all that! Even Westerners had vouched for the reality of these creations. If the forest in the room was real (as real, the Tibetan lama insisted, as any other illusory reality!) why not a phantom journey to the far side of the Moon, occurring within a parked car—or even, for all Deacon knew, in a car racing at this very moment at speed along a motorway? Why not a phantom journey which had its own equal force of reality, one where driver and passengers could all be crushed to death against lunar lava or burst open in the emptiness of space at the very same time as the car impacted with a juggernaut lorry somewhere in England, upon the surface of the real Earth?
“Have you thought,” said Michael, “that we brought it here ourselves? The destroyer! We’re its sensors, aren’t we? The Gebraudi never considered that. Or else they took the risk. We snuffed them out—me and Helen and Axel…”
Deacon groped for the entry point to this tulpa reality, but couldn’t locate it. He could remember every moment of their journey with entire clarity from first stepping out of the smelly lift in the multistorey car park, before they had even set eyes on the Thunderbird. He could discover no seams in cognition, no gaps in the continuum of reality…
Who was projecting the tulpa reality? Not himself! Michael? Barry? Or was it all of them together, unwittingly, possessed by the deep-down Joke?
If they died here, it was real…
He groped fiercely for the exit point, staring out of the window, willing himself to see another reality in which they simply drove along an ordinary road. Where would they reenter? London, Leicester, Leeds, somewhere on the Yorkshire moors? Meanwhile Michael kept the accelerator fiat on the floor, using up their fuel far too fast, and the American stared through the rear window at that tiny pursuing black shape which he only saw as it occluded one star then another, speeding after them across the star field.
Twenty-Seven
Eight minutes to midnight. Only eight “minutes” of reaction mass remaining.
Night was swinging across North America—by now the nearest landmass—as they re-entered the atmosphere. Ionized air shimmered in a ball around the car; sparks and milky streamers of white hair spilled out a meteor trail. Cocooned in their own gravity pocket, the atmosphere scarcely slowed them. The muzzy terminator was nearly at the Rocky Mountains. They headed down upon the mountains and across, bellying out from their panic dive.
“I’ve lost the black thing… The destroyer. I think it’s gone back to roost in space…”
Barren brown ground swelled up: mountains, canyons, plateau.
“Don’t we use reaction mass decelerating?” Shriver asked suddenly.
“Hell, yes.” Michael pressed his foot to the brake pedal. As rapidly as their speed slackened, however, so did time on the clock contract. He eased off the brake. They slowed less rapidly, more economically. He squeezed and eased.
There was desert below them. Alluvial wasteland fanned out from high faulted escarpments towards sand hills. A dry lake glinted with baked salts. Buttes poked up. Broad flat basins opened between rubbed-down hills. A railway line land highway stretched thinly ahead; an aqueduct pipe led the way west. Matchstick trucks were crawling along the highway, pitching their desert crossing for sunset.
Two minutes to midnight.
“Listen, Mike, it’s the Mojave Desert we’re over. We’ve got a
whole lot of military installations up ahead. George Air Force Base off to the south-west about sixty, seventy miles. Edwards AFB is right ahead along this road, about a hundred miles. We’re really close to Muroc! If only we can put down there—if we can be seen bringing this crazy flying car right in on the main test runway!”
It would be a disaster, Deacon knew at once, an earthquake in human history. He was about to remind Shriver of his very own words. The irrational and the absurd would well up as they had done already once this century in Hitler’s Germany. Weltmlehre. Bohlweltlehre. Frozen heavens and hollow earth… Only this time there would be evidence. Or would there be?
Shriver was intoxicated now. The hollow in his own life had been filled up at last—out of the vacuum of space.
Yet how could Deacon himself deny that they’d indeed been to a solid, authentic Moon? Could he still pretend, seeing not some English motorway below them but an interstate highway running over the Californian Desert, that they’d “only” been outside normal cognition, outside ordinary space-time relationships, ordinary causality?
Yet that’s what the Inconceivable is, he realized. It is and yet it isn’t; at the same time. It isn’t to be thought of in terms of NASA and “The Eagle has landed” but in Sheikh Muradi’s terms—those of Mu’awanat, magical annihilation of space on the journey to Arif to knowledge; in terms of Karamat, wonders; of the journey to fairyland, which isn’t located somewhere in consensus spacetime but rather somehow, outside ordinary cognition; to be thought of in terms of flying carpet journeys to—
“Bagdad,” pointed Shriver excitedly.
“What did you say!”
“That town down there. Back there. It’s called Bagdad. They mined gold. What’s the matter with you, John? I know exactly where we are. Next on there’s Ludlow, then Daggett and Barstow… I don’t figure we’ll make Edwards but we should make George AFB down by Victorville. Stick to the highway then peel off to the left when I say so.”
“Can they see us up here? The drivers?”
“Doubt if they’re looking up, Mike. People don’t look up much. They’d see a lot more if they did.”
“Trip up and bruise their noses!” snapped Deacon.
“Cut it out, John. We’re nearly home—”
“You might be.”
“—and we have a gravity-drive spacecraft with us.”
“Only if they see us landing. It mightn’t work ever after—like the old grandfather clock. That’s why you want to get to an air base, isn’t it? The ordinary road won’t do. They’d say the truck drivers were drunk or dizzy or saw a mirage.”
One minute remained. Shriver paid no attention.
“We’ll make it, Mike. We’ll bring this bird down in style. Peel away to the left now—ten o’clock to the highway.”
“But it’s a wilderness. Then mountains.”
“The Ord Mountains. We’ll cross ’em.”
“No, we ought to land on the road.”
“Do as I tell you, boy! This matters.”
So Michael swung the wheel away from the highway and they turned towards the Ord Mountains, across the sunset wasteland.
For a moment the car fell forward instead of flying. The hum of the drive picked up again. Michael feathered the brake pedal.
“I’m going to land.”
Again the drive cut out. They could all feel their stomachs falling. They flew again, but down.
“Mike, I beg you—!”
“I’m going to.”
By now they were eight or nine miles south of the highway; and fifty feet above a scrubby monotony of brownish-green creosote bushes. A few yucca daggers poked up, their black shadows pointing eastwards. In the west the Sun of warmth and life was setting, something golden, warm and calm. Again the drive cut out, and again they fell, to within a few feet of the ground. The drive picked up for a second or two. Michael stamped the brake. They hung briefly, all forward motion stilled. Then the car fell the last few feet into the creosote scrub, jarring them all. A kangaroo rat jumped from the shade of a bush back to its burrow…
Silence, and stillness. A few faint creaks of metal.
“Empty,” whispered Michael, as much of himself as of the car. He leant his head on the steering wheel and shivered.
“It’ll never go again,” said Deacon quietly.
“Nonsense,” snorted Shriver. “Shift your butt, John. I want out.”
Deacon opened the passenger door and stepped out. He tripped on some burroweed; his feet were uncoordinated. The air felt oven-hot after the cool car. Peeling his jacket off, he hung it over his shoulder. Loosening his tie, he kicked his legs out to stretch them. For a moment he thought he heard the car hum again, but it was only some grasshoppers singing in the bushes.
All four steel-ply tyres were shredded: knotted cords wrapped round the wheel rims. Torn by moon rocks while a black bat the size of a football field had tried to press them all to death… Flies buzzed in Deacon’s face, attracted by his sweat.
Shriver poked about the hood, then the trunk. He ran his fingers over the steel. Crouching in the grit, he squirmed under the car.
“It’s very neatly welded…”
Scrambling out again, he snapped a long twig off a prickly bush and stuck it up the exhaust pipe. It bent back and snapped.
“Our own gravity-drive spacecraft! And we got it back!” He dusted himself.
The heat began to make Deacon sick. Over the broken hills to the south hung massive, motionless cumulus thunderheads, stained pink by the Sun sinking down to the horizon, swelling and trembling. He leaned back against the car. The metal felt warm already. If he’d been dropped here at midday he wasn’t sure he could have survived. Shriver seemed not to notice the heat. He could probably have picked up red-hot metal and not noticed till his hand burnt off. Hot breezes began whipping the dust and grit through the bushes in whirling scurries. Soon no doubt it would become freezing cold, when the sun disappeared.
Deacon felt the weight of Solomon’s Lemegeton in his jacket. The Book of the Spirits. Only by magic could cars fly. Yet what was meant by magic? Shriver must realize the trap, now that the magic excursion outside ordinary consciousness had expired…
As Deacon clutched his jacket feebly, his field of vision narrowed down to a little cactus—a tangle of prickly pads rooted in coarse light soil. He saw it at the end of a visual tunnel. All the little tufts of bristles—the glochids from which rose each spine, needles sheathed in tissue paper. A half-moon scab bit into the edge of one pad. Beetle work. Was the cactus aware of him on some vegetable wavelength? Did it detect a web of coherent, invisible energies in its environment? Devas, otherwise known as devils, alias UFO entities—all of which were simply empty names springing from alternative frames of reference?
Was there really some more primary reality that the cactus existed in, beyond all these human frames of reference? Deacon thought he would never believe the world again, never trust that it was entirely there. The cactus didn’t need to believe; it simply existed in a primary way. As this desert too existed.
Yet in this desert had landed a flying car that crushed its creosote bushes flat, smearing them with moon dust! Now that the car was inert and drained, had it simply readjusted itself, had it recaptured orthodox reality? Was that dust on its torn tyres moon dust or just desert dust?
As the sun slipped below the rough barren horizon the wind blew stronger. Deacon half shut his eyes. Spines, pads, tissue paper…
Michael climbed out. The Moon was visible high up in the sky, a piece of mottled eggshell hanging in the deepening blue.
Michael pointed.
“It’s still there! It’s still coming!”
They all saw it then: the black bat wings hanging high over the desert.
“It’s only a bird,” said Shriver, helplessly. However, the shape grew larger as it sank down towards them. It took on no extra details, only size and density. Such huge density, as of a rock in the sky—a sculpture in black lava of something winged
, sinking gently. It looked very much smaller than when it fell upon the Moon. It was just a shred torn off the bat thing, keeping the same entire shape as before. If those were wings they did not need to beat or flutter for it to fly. They did nothing, they just were. As Deacon stared, he felt he was seeing some ultimate reality, some void-reality up there. Compared with which neither Michael nor the American existed. Nor the ruined, drained car. Nor the desert. Nor he himself. He didn’t exist, he thought coldly. Only that void had existence.
“We’ll split up! Scatter! Head for the highway—three different ways. Meet up there. Confuse the damned thing.” Shriver dragged his fingers one last time, yearningly, across the Thunderbird, His hand wished to stay attached to it forever. He tore it free and took off through the scrub, casting heartbroken anguished glances back at the Ford as he ran.
“Get yourselves out of there!” he cried; as much jealousy as concern was in his voice.
Michael fled to the north. Deacon followed, more slowly, trotting north-east.
• • •
Shriver stared back from the side of a small butte and saw the blackness sink lower. It had no distinct body or head or wings. It was all the same substance. Without detail, it was the destroyer of details.
It sank down upon the desert floor where the Thunder-bird sat abandoned.
“No!” he shouted at the dark thing, “Not the car! Me—instead! I’ll give you myself instead!”
A muffled thump sounded from under the black mass. Its edges lifted and fell, then the whole mass rose twenty or thirty feet up to drift slowly north-east.
Even from a distance Shriver could see how crushed the Thunderbird was now. He wept from frustration.
After a time he squared his shoulders and hiked on. The desert darkened more. He should be a few miles clear of the half million acres occupied by the Marine Corps Desert Station. If any night patrol of Marines were out practising how to defend some Middle Eastern oilfield against Bedouin guerillas, though, and they happened upon a grown man, an ex-Air Force man, weeping—he’d be so ashamed.
