by Don Webb
I came to again. They had tied me to a tree. Night had fallen and two moons rose. One was pink the other yellow and brown like a giraffe. Both circled that world closer than our moon does Earth or perhaps they’re much larger.
Near me stood ten breadboxes. The snow creatures danced around a pyre. In the center of the flames lay the one I shot. They howled. They seemed happy. Maybe I’d shot the boss.
I could move my left hand. I reached my jeans’ pocket and found a piece of the windshield. I began cutting my bonds. The snow creatures were passing around a bowl full of drink. I cut myself free and ran for my truck. The ground looked level enough to drive on.
Something was in the cab. I put the glass between my knuckles. I pulled my door open. The old guy slammed my briefcase shut. He said, “Sorry about all this” then hit a button on his little box.
The New Mexico highway patrol dug me and my truck out of the ruins of the substation. They said I was drunk—talking incoherently. Soft-n-Fresh paid all my hospital bills then let me go.
I went out to the bakery to pick up my last check. I decided not to tell them anything. What could I say? The fat kid took my stuff to my beat-up old Impala while I was in the front office. He stared at me funny as I drove off.
I could barely pick up my briefcase at home. I set it on the table. I opened it. The snow creatures had paid for the bread. The briefcase was full of gold nuggets. None were smaller than my thumb.
First thing I’m going to do is move someplace warm.
THE MARTIAN SPRING OF DR. WOODARD
Warm. Alive. Humming. It pressed upon her groin. Her outer lips opened and the saucer sent a tiny probe to rest on the gristly button of her clitoris. Sharon came slowly and powerfully. The small saucer settled slightly—abandoning itself to its work. Her arms and legs writhed about seeking a lover to hold. The white-hot energy flowed through her again. She clutched her sheets hard to hold onto this world to keep from dissolving in the pleasure. The saucer lowered its vibration to something bone-shaking and her labia fell out wet around its base hugging the shiny metal with her granular pink folds. Another orgasm intense as the second rushed through.
(It will kill me this time.)
The saucer lessened its pressure preparatory to leaving. A gentler orgasm answered it—almost the response to a lover’s kiss. The saucer rose a few inches above Sharon’s cunt. She felt her own juices drip in a fine rain on her thighs. It darted off behind her chest of drawers. She lay still for a while, enjoying the electric aftershocks of lovemaking.
(This isn’t getting my work done.)
She rose and stripped the orange satin sheets off her bed. They were too damp and would be unpleasant when she returned to bed in three hours. She had given herself over to such hedonisms after the saucer had come to stay. It was good to feel good.
In the shower she resisted her vagina’s call for more stimulation. Her limbs were weak enough as it was. She busied herself with thoughts. She had little to think of—little new to think of until the saucer had arrived and changed her life into science fiction. Every year the same classes. English masters to sophomores, English zero—composition—to freshmen. She waited every year for some old fart to die or retire so she could aim for a tenured slot. Her mind had been alive the first year she came here. She’d added two women to the “Masters” list. Shelly and Woolf. And she’d had to fight to do that.
Now her mind was alive again. Mainly she thought about the saucer. Where did it come from? Why is it here? Why me? She began reading a great deal of scientific material. First the pop things: Asimov and Sagan. Now she’s on the Scientific American level. All her politics had been the vague institutionalized leftism of the academic. Now she saw how small our planet is, how much it needs to be managed. She wrote a New York Times Op Ed piece condemning the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest.
The Tenure Committee thought it was an attempt to gain attention.
She’d begun to read science fiction, too. Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ.
She turned off the water, toweled herself, put on her navy-blue terry cloth robe. She started the cocoa and sat down to the English Zero essays. Five paragraph exposition. Her five-principle hypothesis on the origin of the six-inch saucer.
1. It was constructed by a love-sick engineer in the EE department. Confused by dopplering radio sources during the night of the falling stars, it wandered over to the field I stood in.
2. Unbelievably ancient, the saucer belonged to the culture that existed on the fifth planet (between Mars and Jupiter). It lay fossilized in an asteroid till it was burned free by the asteroid’s descent into the earth’s atmosphere.
3. Extremely tiny beings inhabit this space ship. They’re recharging its battery with my nervous energy. (Charge away.)
4. It’s a probe. Whether or not it’s functioning as its makers intended is indeterminable.
5. It is a figment of the imagination.
(No.)
She graded the thirty-two essays. She made her bed and lay down. She waited for a moment to see if the saucer would visit her again. Then drifted off to sleep.
* * * * * * *
Earlier in the term—a fortnight after the saucer came to visit her—she’d found the note from Nadine Older.
Nadine was all the things that she had been: pretty, smart, quiet, and the possessor of an elfin sense of humor.
She was still all those things. Wasn’t she? Pretty except for an ugly birthmark that wandered down her forehead and across her left eyelid. She knew the engineering students called her “Mikhail Gorbachev.” Nadine could’ve been from her clone tank except Nadine lacked a blemish. It’s rare to see a beautiful mind in an English Masters class.
The note was to “Bob.” It read, “Dr. Woodard is an O.K. teacher especially if you like spotty warthogs.”
Sharon Woodard folded up the note and put it in her purse. It’s still there.
* * * * * * *
By midterm the saucer’s nightly ministrations had transformed her. She spent long hours in the library. She read everything. She talked. She smiled. She found she could will people to come over and talk to her. Even her classes noticed. She sparked them to life with her quick thinking, her ability to improvise endlessly.
She wrote a few poems for the inevitable small magazine published on campus. Neoneoneon. They weren’t good poems—chips off the old Thoreau—but she was writing again.
She was reaching everybody. Was she reaching Nadine?
She assigned Milton’s “Lycides” for the Masters class, told the Zeros that she wanted a three-page paper on what they did over break (mainly she wanted them to demonstrate the seventeen uses of the comma) and went to the school pub with Dr. Brandon.
There’d been a brief and boring affair with Brandon the first year she taught here. Brandon’s public self was correct politics, parafeminism, and an endless devotion to Beat writing. Brandon’s private self was junk food, avoiding the writing of anyone younger than he (47), and a bedroom traditionalist. That means two minutes in the missionary position—then roll over and go to sleep. He also snored.
They split a pepperoni pizza and a bottle of white wine. He told her about the end-of-term bash that some friend of his in the Geology department had every year. A form of teacher-student bonding he called it. These psych profs.
She walked home. She had an intense session with the saucer, mounting it and flying around the inside of her ivy-covered house like a witch on her favorite broomstick. The next morning slightly hung-over she decided on having a bash.
* * * * * * *
The party would be the last Friday before Dead Week. The Masters class should’ve turned in their last papers by then and the Zeros would have a final counting only fifteen percent of their grade in a week. On Monday she invited her sixty students. On Tuesday she went to the red brick pseudo-Spanish psych building to get some information from Brandon.
“The party’s this Friday at 7:30. I have about sixty students—I
guess about forty will show up. How much beer do you think I should buy?”
Brandon revealed that the surprising ratio of a half-gallon per student was necessary. (God, they drink like fishes when it’s free.) She calculated the number of kegs. She invited Brandon, who declined, but advised her in the inevitable Brandon manner on the kinds of potato chips, peanuts, and dips she would need to “do it right.”
The rest of the week seems to go by quickly. The party replaced the recent extraterrestrial core of her thoughts. Her excitement made saucer sex better, a change she would’ve thought impossible. The party: how to have things just right, how the students will think of her as a great gal as well as a fine teacher. Maybe the three or four English majors will overcome their shyness and talk with her about the rewards, spiritual and financial, of teaching. (The long and the short of it.) Of course, she mustn’t let them monopolize her time. She must mingle with the others, even the engineering students and the athletes—two groups whom she felt had the greatest antagonism to her and her course. Maybe she could reach the engineers with her newly-won knowledge of physics, cosmology, and information science. Tuesday afternoon talking with a History teacher, she learned that students’ opinion had labeled her “the most interesting teacher on campus.” According to the History teacher, whom Sharon knew very slightly, “the campus connoisseurs prefer Lone Star Draft. Just think of the initials L.S.D.” Sharon liked the phrase “campus connoisseurs “ linking it with the previous labeling. She thought that the fellow might be having her on about the L.S.D. Nevertheless, she planned to buy two shiny sixteen-gallon kegs Friday afternoon. No use taking chances, the fellow might be right as well as phony.
Thursday night the saucer skimmed over her bush several times before settling down to work. These butterfly passes got her real hot and the instant the saucer settled on her she came. It rocked back and forth as it vibrated. Perhaps it was trying to overwhelm her—drive the party from her mind.
(This time I surely will die.)
It didn’t depart after the fourth orgasm as it usually did. On the tenth orgasm Sharon lost consciousness.
* * * * * * *
She was inside the saucer. Whether she had shrunk or it had grown was unknown. It skimmed along over a barren red landscape. They crossed a vast canyon—bigger than anything in Sharon’s life. The saucer lit on a table-like rock. Sharon desaucered.
Wait. Watch.
Other saucers, hundreds of them, skimmed over the horizon. They formed a single long line several (apparent) meters above her. First one flashed. Then another. Then both. Then a third. She realized she was seeing binary counting. The flashings became too quick to follow. After they had run through the numbers possible they ran through patterns—powers of 3, 5, and 7. Finally the primes—up to six-figure binary-notation primes.
The saucers reformed into a plane and ran through several simple geometric figures, a visual demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem, and the simpler curves. The saucers regrouped again into the Platonic solids.
Finally one saucer (her saucer?) hovered over her
head. She felt herself drawn out through her head. All her thoughts and feelings going into the saucers which arranged themselves into a complex hyperspiral to model her pattern. Although she was completely inside the pattern, she somehow saw the pattern, her body on the red ground far below, and the two moons passing overhead.
Then each saucer communicated to her at each point. They were small living beings not artifacts, born in the fluxions of a nebula light years away. More than this—other than the feeling of reaching—they could not communicate. She couldn’t change the morphology of her mind. Her cells didn’t float freely in space.
* * * * * * *
She woke exceptionally clearheaded. The saucer was hovering over her head. It ducked quickly behind the chest of drawers. It was Friday, the day of the party. She didn’t need to go in. She’d canceled her classes, but she was dedicated to her office hours even if her students weren’t. Everything spoke to her. The cottonwoods around the English building acquired a fantastic ornateness, a life bomb exploding with a fluorescence of new branches and foliage. Each wisp of cotton, the trees’ seeds, was a tiny star falling on the arabesques of Bermuda grass. She saw the environment she wanted to save was here, too. With a sense of loneliness she went inside the dark English building.
Images from her own bad poetry loomed around her: the echoes of her steps on the terrazzo floor, the sunlight on the stairs, the solid wall of leaf outside her window.
It was 9:00. She was early. She realized she wanted to remain in her office all day in case any student wanted to ask directions to her house or just came by to talk to her. She had been too shy to talk to her professors as an undergraduate. But she wasn’t one of those formidable old men, she couldn’t understand why none of the students come to see her. She always mentioned her office hours in class. Far too often, judging by the bored looks and rolled eyes. The first time a decade ago when she’d said them, the students wrote them down with such zeal that she was sure she would be besieged by visitors. None had shown up until after the first test. Then the athletes came in to complain about their failing grades. Their bodies radiated hostility like a heater in a winter bathroom, but she was so glad to have a visitor that she even raised their grades—though not as much as they seemed to think they deserved—and kept them there talking to her long after they’d shown a desire to leave. Shuffle their feet on the floor, prepare to stand, stare at the seeming jungle beyond—tired of the missionary. After that no one came, not even after the other tests.
About 11:00 William Derenberger, the Old English specialist, poked his head in and asked about coffee. Sharon responded enthusiastically and he was gone. W.D. was a homosexual with a 6 Kinsey rating and the only member of the department who hadn’t put the make on her.
He returned with two large green mugs full of steaming coffee.
A lacuna of idle chit-chat.
Sharon confided that she was worried that no one had dropped by. W.D. told her that was normal, that they would be there. Then he told his droll stories of his year-end bashes. He used to have them, but all the fuss. He couldn’t be bothered anymore.
She started to invite him but two ugly possibilities appeared to her. She might spend all her time talking to him and neglect the students or, worse still, W.D. might try to pick up one of the football team.
She had to leave at 3:00 to get the beer. She had to drive through a part of town unfamiliar to her. She’d lived in this town, in this not-too-large town, for ten years and she hadn’t been down all the roads. She needs to work on that.
(Two moons in an alien sky.)
She bought the beer and left a large check as deposit for the kegs. She was home by four, putting a string of Chinese lanterns across the midline of the back yard.
At 7:20, ten minutes before the party was officially slated to begin, the doorbell rang. “Thank God.” Two of her best students were there, Mary Jenkins and Suzy Floyd. Both were the perfect American nymph as epiphanized in TV commercials. Sharon ushered them through the house and started them on a game of lawn darts. The doorbell rang again and Sharon ran. A group of Zeros, the foreign language contingent, smiled their best smiles at her. She led them to the back wondering if this was the correct moment for the rehearsed piece of joviality. Who’s ready for a beer?
In minutes everybody came. Sharon busied herself by giving everyone his first beer or soda—then letting them help themselves. She had to get another box of Dixie cups from her kitchen. Upon returning she saw Nadine Older at the keg and realized she had come in without speaking to her hostess. The snub wouldn’t ruin her party.
The students had arrived in groups of two and three, and for the most part tended to stay that way. Occasionally the groups would merge for a few minutes of conversation or to exchange members. Sharon circulated from group to group intensely aware of the uneasiness her presence generated.
After everyone—including Sharon—ha
d had two or three beers the latent hostility began to recede and signs of acceptance, signifiers of friendship began to be offered. Sharon put on a Timbuk3 album.
(Now they won’t think I’m a spotty warthog.)
Some of the students were inside and she went to check on them. A couple of the English majors were shelf-reading her library.
“Like to look at any of ’em, Tom?” She said with what she hoped was geniality, but could be read any number of ways.
(I ought to be able to control my texts.)
In reply Tom pulled out The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs. Sharon smiled, but she was too shy to discuss Burroughs with him.
She retreated to the back yard to the keg. She decided not to get too looped. She tossed her Dixie cup back. The breeze shifted and Sharon smelled pot. She had no objection to marijuana but having pot at a party given by a faculty member for students was distinctly bad politics. The blue vapors rose from behind the yew bush. She walked quietly. She’d just tell ’em to cool it.
There were three students in the darkness. One was Nadine. Nadine was reciting a poem about the spring melting of the Martian polar caps. Too beautiful. Too good. Nadine in contact with one of the saucer people? Why her?
(Why not?)
Sharon went back and started the second keg. She didn’t have to use words. If only she could set up the pattern she could say what she wanted to Nadine. No falsehoods only a set of one-to-one correspondences.
She got to talking with one of the boys. Turned out to be from her hometown of Doublesign, Texas. They talked about the high schools, the skating rink, the parks, and the politics. A good time was had by all.
Sharon renewed the dips. Some of the people were drifting away. One by one they came by and thanked her for a good time. She spotted Nadine at the keg. Red-eyed Nadine, her sclera betrayed a strong dose of the weed. Sharon felt she was falling into the geology of those eyes. She went over to Nadine.
