by James Gunn
“I've heard talk of a new disease,” a woman had said. “Worse than AIDS. Takes you in weeks not years. Nobody is saying anything officially, but I have it from the best authority...."
“What about that new volcano in the East Indies—and the old one in Chile?” a man had said. “I don't want to be an alarmist, but several eruptions the size of the one in Washington in the early 1980s could actually change the climate, and an explosion like those in the South Pacific in the 19th century...."
“I say we've got to start building nuclear reactors again. With oil at one hundred fifty a barrel and natural gas going up more all the time, we've got to start getting over our neurotic fear of radiation."
“Not to mention the pollution from coal-fired generators. They keep talking about doing something for acid rain, but the lake where I used to fish in Vermont...."
“I just heard the other day that the average temperature has increased by two degrees since the turn of the century. That may not seem like much, but it means a radical change in climate."
“Like drouths in one place, you mean, and gulleywashers in another?"
“And the violence of storms. The more heat, the more energy. It's gotta go somewhere. Do you know that hurricane winds have averaged fifty per cent higher in the past dozen years? We may have to adjust to higher winds, with occasional gusts that blow us around—if they don't blow us completely off the planet."
“Talk about plague, talk about hunger—that's just nature's way of adjusting the population to the resources available. Malthus was right. There's six billion people around. And the population will double again in the next thirty-five years."
“Watch the skies, I say. There are things up there that can kill us: comets, giant meteors, cosmic rays, solar explosions.... I heard the other day that the center of the galaxy might have exploded and we wouldn't know it until the wave of radiation hits us and sterilizes the Earth just like a test tube in an autoclave."
“It could happen just like that. Tonight. December thirty-first. What does it matter? The sun could explode. A meteor could strike. The bombs could fall. The human species would be just as dead."
“And we'll be dead a long time."
“My dear,” a woman had said to Hays, clutching her forearm in a gesture of familiarity she had not earned and breaking Hays out of her reverie, “you were superb tonight. A tremendous performance. I tell you I really felt cold, like I was sitting up there under the glacier with you."
“Thank you,” Elois had said, and moved on.
Parties, she had thought, were such sweet sorrow.
Josh had caught up with her in the corner farthest from the bar, near George's orange tree that he tended every morning and evening. It actually bore real oranges.
“Well, Josh,” she had said, smiling at him, “we did it again.” She had felt a kind of conspiratorial warmth toward him. He'd had some bad luck lately, but he was a truly talented director; unlike these others, who fed, like vampires, off the creativity of others, Josh had suffered with them through the difficult times and steered them back on course when they strayed from his vision. He had earned the right to be here, even the right to be a friend.
“You brought it off,” Josh had said. “I want you to know that.” He had raised a finger to his nose. “And I want you to know that I know."
“What do you know?” The finger to the nose had alarmed her; she had felt a chill in her bowels. Surely everybody knew about Susan and George, and everybody knew that she knew and didn't care. She dreaded the possibility that Josh thought she was upset about George's infidelity but was able to cope with her marital problems and get on with her job.
“Hampdon didn't come up with that revision on his own,” Josh had said, nodding wisely. “It had to be you."
Elois had shrugged, relieved. “Give the young man some credit."
“Oh, he wrote it all right. I give him credit for that. But he would never have done it on his own."
“Maybe George gave him a few pointers."
Josh had looked at her oddly. “I might have thought so,” he had said, “but George was so upset about it I knew it had to be you. Besides, it had your touch."
“Well,” Elois had admitted, willing to accept this small accolade in lieu of the embarrassment she might have suffered, “I might have expanded a bit on my comment to you that day. But he did it all; let any suggestion that someone else might have been involved die here."
“It will.” Josh had taken her hand. She hadn't minded that. He was a dear. Every relationship was conditioned by whether the other person was male or female, but to her Josh seemed totally non-sexual, however he might appear to others. “I won't mention it to another soul. I just wanted you to know that you're a bloody genius."
She had felt the glow of his admiration and let it flow through her. It had sustained her through another hour of enforced hospitality and meaningless conversation when all she really wanted to do was to lie down and sleep for a week—maybe even to the end of the year, hibernate like a bear and wake up to find that this was 2001, or that the world had ended and she had missed the fireworks.
The first reviews had come by fax from cooperating newsrooms about 1:30 and they had been glowing, as Elois had expected. George had read them aloud to his appreciative audience, rolling the adjectives around his tongue like olives and spitting out the nouns like pits. Everybody had laughed and cheered, and everyone had been toasted again.
By two in the morning, when people should have started drifting away, leaving their thanks and congratulations and goodbyes behind them like confetti, the party had seemed to get a new surge of adrenaline when a couple of guests broke out their own supply of methamphetamine and the pipes to smoke it in. It hadn't been George—he knew how Elois felt about drugs—and she had looked around for him to subtly direct the indulgers elsewhere. But he had disappeared. So had Josh. Even Fred, who would have been no help anyway, had been gone. She had been all alone with the problem and she had not felt up to it. It wasn't, she reflected wryly, in character for the role she was playing.
She had started to look around for someone else, anyone else, when she had seen Susan standing nearby. “Where's George?” she had asked, barely considering the impropriety of the question.
Susan had shrugged.
“No, I need him,” Elois had insisted.
“Why should I know where he is?” Susan had asked innocently.
Elois had looked at her and realized that Susan truly didn't know where George was, and what was more, she didn't care. She was not a good enough actress to dissemble. And that meant that George had taken up with someone else. Suddenly a great burden of uncertainty had descended upon her like the glacier in The North Wind. She could endure knowing who George was with and what he was doing, but she couldn't stand not knowing.
Carefully, as if she were drunk but determined not to reveal it, Elois had walked to the carved double doors and slipped between them. She had had no coat and the August nights had turned unusually cold, just like the play, but she had not thought about that. She had wanted to get away from everything her life involved.
Surrounded by the middle-aged crazies, Elois realized how foolish she had been to wander out into the Park alone so late. A street light cast enough illumination over her shoulder to reveal the faces of the men and women who formed the part of the circle she could see. She did not look behind her—she knew instinctively that would be a sign of weakness—but she knew the circle had closed there as well.
She noted the sameness of the features, the lack of emotion, the rigidity of the eyes. What set them off; what was the signal for the cold frenzy with which they committed their deeds?
Fear, she thought. Fear. Just like hers but unfocused. But they didn't attack. Why didn't they attack? Then it came to her: They were waiting for a sign from her, for her to try to get away. And she realized what she had to do.
Her features smoothed into immobility; her eyes froze. Stiffly, as if she were sleepwa
lking, she moved forward, reached the edge of the circle, and inserted herself between a man and a woman, turned like an automaton, and waited. An absurd phrase entered her mind but didn't alter her demeanor: If you can't beat them, join them.
The circle wavered, as if uncertain in its mindless gestalt how it should act, and then, one after the other, the contemporary Maenads turned, broke the circle, and moved in different directions until they all were gone but Elois. She waited for a moment and then, moving like the others, returned back the way she had come.
She was shaking when she reached the street. It had been, she thought, the greatest performance of her career.
Emerging onto Central Park West, she realized that she did not want to return to her apartment. The party might still be going on, and she could not make herself return to it. Instead, she got her car from the garage. For several minutes she sat at the wheel, staring blindly at her reflection in the rearview mirror, and then she started it up and drove slowly and aimlessly before she realized that she was near Fred Hampdon's hotel. Only then did it occur to her that she had not been driving aimlessly. All along she had known she would end up here, but she had not let herself think about it.
She hesitated for several minutes outside the hotel before she summoned the strength to move. How would Fred respond? What would she do if he turned her away? How would she excuse her presumption? And then she knew that there were worse fates than embarrassment. She had almost experienced one of them, and she had been living several of them.
She found herself outside Hampdon's door. She raised her hand to knock, hesitated, and then rapped once and then, when no answer came, twice more. She was turning away in the institutional hallway with its muted red carpet when the door lock clicked behind her. She swung back to see the door open and Fred appear in the dim light behind it. He was clad in his pajama bottoms and looked ruffled and young and so appealing that she had to swallow hard.
“Elois?” he whispered.
And then a voice came from the room behind. “I told you not to answer the door. For god's sake, Fred, tell whoever it is to go away."
Elois froze where she was standing, feeling almost like the mindless Maenads in the Park. It was a man's voice. And the man was George.
When she got back to her apartment, she told the stragglers at the party firmly that the party was over and it was time to go home. And when the guests had gone and even the waitresses had been shooed out the door, Elois picked up George's orange tree, carried it to the balcony behind the bar, and dropped it carefully over the edge into the empty street.
CHAPTER TEN
August 24, 2000
Sally Krebs
The saucer-shaped spaceship sat on top of the hill as if it had been built there. Sally Krebs saw it first from above as the CNN private jet banked over the site remote in the Tunguska region of the central Siberian plateau. The ship shimmered in the near-Arctic sunlight as if it were made of some alien matter eager to slip the surly bonds of Earth and regain its rightful place among the stars.
“Look at that thing!” the cameraman said, as he tried to get a shot through the window. “I thought UFOs flitted around in the dark, like. You know, like nobody should be sure they saw them or be sure if they was really there. That thing looks like it wants to be seen."
“This is Siberia, not Manhattan,” Sally Krebs said. “This is the kind of place where a mysterious explosion could send a pillar of fire into the air that could be seen hundreds of kilometers away and make a noise that could be heard as far as a thousand kilometers, and level a forest for one hundred kilometers around. And nobody would get around to investigating it for thirteen years."
“You think there's some connection?” Sid asked.
“Between Tunguska and now? No, that happened in 1908, and not more than a couple hundred kilometers from here, but the point is this area hasn't become a lot more accessible since then. No trains, no air routes anywhere near, almost no roads."
They could fly overhead but they couldn't land. They spotted a few villages within a ten-kilometer radius, but no airports. Eventually they found a runway north of the Arctic circle at Igarka after their Intourist guide and interpreter had spent nearly an hour on the radio persuading the local authorities that they had authorization from Moscow. By then the fuel supply was getting low and the strip below was too short and barely distinguishable from the surrounding tundra. But they helped the pilot get the plane down in one piece by holding their breath and squeezing hard on their armrests.
Sally sat silently in her seat when the jet finally stopped. Sweat trickled down her sides under her shirt and her legs felt as if the blood had drained from them, and she wondered, not for the first time, what she was doing in this business that sent her so far from home and comfort and safety. Here she was, in a region of Siberia that might never have been visited before by an American woman, facing a trek across the wilderness, with three men and a camera, to explore an alien artifact. It wasn't fair, she thought, and then she took a deep breath and said to herself, “This is adventure.” And this was what the business was all about.
Her stiffened backbone sagged again after hours of negotiation to find a vehicle they could rent that would transport them at least 500 kilometers through the Siberian wasteland. Alexei, the interpreter, did most of the talking, but Sally had to be there; she could not allow the interpreter to assume the leadership of her project. As it turned out, Alexei's credentials had no influence on the skeptical Igarkans. The authorities finally produced a battered relic of a Red Army jeep on which, years before, someone had mounted a wooden shell to keep out the Arctic blasts—after Sally had accidentally displayed her briefcase with its CNN insignia. Alexei said they were afraid she was a witch who could curse them, but Sally had been through it before: even in the depths of Siberia, people were intimidated by the power of television.
The trip to the UFO site was a nightmare of jolting along barely defined roads and wilderness trails, her feet on sleeping bags and provisions and cans of gasoline, a tripod-mounted camera nestled between herself and Sid. Alexei and the Igarkan driver sat in front. The night was short, only a couple of hours—a bit like the trans-Atlantic flight east—and they stopped only to relieve themselves and to open a package of Russian sandwiches: heavy dark bread and greasy sausages. Sid knew enough to let Sally fend for herself, but Alexei helped her in and out of the jeep and showed her to the best bushes where he gallantly turned his back and guarded her privacy. He even offered the first swallow from the bottle of vodka he pulled from his sleeping bag.
Sally wanted to tell him, bluntly, that this was business and they all were equal. But getting out of the one right-hand door to the jeep, stiffened as she was by the long ride, wasn't easy, and she was going to need his cooperation before this crazy assignment was completed. Moreover he was strikingly handsome. Still, she knew from the way he touched her that he had the wrong idea about who she was and what she wanted. That could be trouble—and yet she wasn't sure it was entirely the wrong idea. His dark, brooding Russian expression and his liquid grace were compelling, and if his European gallantry wasn't simply a courting maneuver, he might be an exciting lover. She also told herself that she was unlikely to see him again after this assignment was over.
On the other hand, Sid might carry back stories that would change her image with the people who made assignments.
They got lost three times and had to retrace their paths, the jeep's radiator boiled over twice and the engine stopped completely once until the carburetor was removed and cleaned, and they had to cut their way through brush and small trees innumerable times. Finally, three days after they set off from Igarka, they pushed their way through brush that had overgrown the trail and emerged onto a broad dirt road. It had been constructed within the last year, Sally thought, and it had experienced considerable recent use. At one end of the road, still a couple of kilometers away, stood the hill with the spaceship sitting on top of it like two metal saucers placed rim to rim.<
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At the other end of the road was a village. They went there first, wanting to get some information about the spaceship before they approached it, but the peasants were wary. They had seen Red Army vehicles before, apparently, and nothing good had come with them. Even if none of the strangers wore uniforms or carried weapons, the villagers preferred not to talk to them. But they admired the camera and when Sid began to tape scenes of the village, they jostled each other in their eagerness to get into the pictures.
After that, as if Sid's activities had delivered them from an oath of secrecy, they began to answer Alexei's questions.
Eventually, however, he turned to Sally frustrated and puzzled. “Yes,” he said, “they know about the spaceship. How could they deny it? They built the road. But, they say, there are no aliens."
Sally shivered as if a blast of arctic air had blown down from Igarka. Something was wrong here. Perhaps the aliens had not yet emerged. Perhaps the aliens had brainwashed the villagers, making them forget all about their existence. If so, where were they now?
Perhaps the villagers were the aliens.
“Let's go see,” she said, and they got back into the jeep and headed down the broad dirt road that led to the enigmatic spaceship on the hill.
The word about the spaceship sighting had come from New York in the form of a telephone call to the high-ceilinged room in the Ukraine Hotel on the banks of the Moscow River. Moscow was filled with diplomats and news crews, and Sally had been relegated to the outer circle, more than two kilometers from Red Square.
The building itself was an impressive pile of stone and concrete in the Stalin pseudo-gothic wedding-cake style to be found all over Moscow and Eastern Europe. But there still had been a large, older woman sitting at a desk by the elevator on every floor, as much to keep track of the comings and goings of the guests and to control contacts by Soviet citizens, as to provide hotel services. A big, decent-enough restaurant, when it had the ingredients, led off the cold, polished-marble lobby, but each floor still had its small, Russian buffet where women not far removed from their villages served tea from giant kettles. Gorbachevian reforms had revolutionized the Soviet state and Yeltsin's experiments in free-enterprise had begun the transformation of the Russian economy, but basic habits were hard to change. Sally sometimes wondered about the listening devices cunningly concealed in selected rooms and whether successors to the KGB still listened because nobody had told them to stop, or whether the words fell into empty rooms.
