Sideslip

by Ted White

  But no one could see that alien city, and believe it was just another clever set. Human beings don’t think that way. There was too much there that I just couldn’t take in.

  Beautiful? It wasn’t beautiful. Beautiful is a familiar word, used to describe familiar things. There was nothing familiar in this alien scene. -

  “Home, huh?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “Home.

  “Shalianna the Glorious,” she repeated. “For her glory we rule and plunder your pleasant little backwater planet. For her further glory,” and here bitterness crept into her voice, “I attempt to keep them from disposing of more of you than absolutely necessary. . . .”

  “Plunder? It isn’t really as bad as all that, is it?” I felt a bit surprised; sure, things were different here, the aliens had changed things merely by being. But there hadn’t seemed to be any signs of systematic looting. Apart from the alien presence, things weren’t that different.

  “No, I suppose it isn’t, at least if you listen to all the Second Level economists. To them it’s simple investment and return.” She walked over to the two windows and stared out at the two great cities. She spoke again, even more bitterly. “To others among us, it’s like your Spaniards looting the New World; the simple natives, the militarily superior invaders, the flow of goods always away from the natives.”

  She turned to me with a smile. “But there aren’t enough of us to change the policies of the Condominium. Shalianna has not yet achieved all the glory it desires. . ..”

  “You sound bitter,” I said.

  “I do, don’t I?” she replied. “And—I am. There are always a few like me, aren’t there? In your own history —a few felt sorry for the natives of this continent when it was invaded . . . ?”

  “Invaded? Oh, you mean the Indians.”

  “No, no,” she said impatiently. “I am not referring to Asia. This continent. When your race came it pushed the native race off its land and subjugated the native peoples. ...”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” I said.

  “So it is,” she agreed. “And now it is your turn. How do you like it now?”

  “Give me time to get used to it,” I mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” A phrase came to my mind, and without thinking, I said it: “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, anyway?”

  Her eyes had been focussed in the distance. Now she looked up, startled.

  Then she told me.

  She was a member of an influential minority party in the ruling hierarchy. This minority party was made up of a group of what were considered to be bleeding hearts. It tore them apart to see humanity—Earth’s humanity, anyway; there didn’t seem to be a lot of difference, although (she blushed) crossbreeding was impossible—to

  see us plundered and exploited. And these people were tolerated in the Condominium more or less contingent on the basis that they not interfere with the business at hand: namely, profits.

  “The Condominium’s a good idea, basically,” she said. “First Primes and Primes are Holders in it—what it is, in your terms, is a big corporation. The High Emperor Heldegon Seventh got himself deeply into personal debt about two hundred years ago. No one person being rich enough to bail him out, he simply sold the government to the highest bidders, in shares. Very much like your corporations. About 40,000 of us, actually.”

  She frowned. “Not enough, for the power they wield. Anyway, we get the profits of all governmental operations, and so ever since the establishment of the Condominium we’ve been rapidly expanding the bounds of what had been the personal property of the Egonite Dynasty. Up till now, anyway.

  “Heldegon? He retired, moved to the pleasure-planet Sarcenor, in the Hub. Finally committed suicide by trying to send himself through an experimental matter-transmitter. Sprayed himself all over the galaxy.”

  “Matter-transmitter?”

  “Sure. We desperately need a practical one. Space travel’s too expensive, even with the Four-Ply Drive. For sending cargo, that is. Or, in the case of your Earth, plunder.

  “Unfortunately, while we have it in an experimental form, no one has ever been able to reduce the malfunction rate below sixty per cent. There’s something about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, I believe your scientists call it. Random motion of electrons, anyway. Too often the transmission is simply never received, or only partly received. Messy; and far too impractical for commerce. But Heldegon gave his life, as they say, for science.”

  Sharna had gotten herself appointed to the New York legation through the pull of her political group. She was under a Lt. Kordamon, whom she described as “What you people would call a swine. His attitude towards you is not unlike your Nazis and their dislike . . . contempt? Their feelings, anyway, about the non-white races.”

  “They seem to be reciprocating your Kordamon’s feelings now,” I said. “I heard a rally—God, was it only a couple days ago? In Union Square. Screaming and shouting about our enslavement by an inferior race, and like that.”

  She gave a bitter laugh. ‘They may be right,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “ ‘Enslavement’? We’ve done that. And I am not so sure we are not also inferior.

  “Look at me, Ronald Archer.”

  Her eyes seemed to penetrate deep into my soul, and for a moment I was stricken by a childhood irrationality— that I had died, and was in Heaven, being examined by an Angel indeed. Her halo seemed to flicker a little when I wrenched my eyes away from hers.

  “You are not of this world,” she said. “Let us stop dallying about that. We do not know much, but we had no trouble prying from your Nazi captors that fact. They thought you insane, but we know you appeared, out of thin air, on Sixth Avenue.

  “At first we thought you had been brought there by a matter-transmitter which could send living matter. But that made no sense, for why would you materialize there?

  “So we decided an experiment must have taken place. We are not ignorant of the Technocrats and their underground warrens. We analyzed the data—their patterns of research, the Communist raid on them, and you: what we knew about you, your clothing, your actions.

  “Your actions are those of a man who has not been on this world long. Yet, you are obviously human, a man of this world. Our medical examination showed that you have dental work typical of this culture, for instance.

  “Yet, you are not.

  “Where—when—are you from, Ronald Archer?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  In retrospect, I can only look back on those next few hours with the greatest wonder.

  Let me backtrack for a moment—

  When I was sixteen years old, I was already big for my age and overweight. I’d gone out for the school football squad, and I’d done passably because I had the weight to throw around. But I had little speed, and no agility. When I painstakingly typed my senior term papers, I used one finger and two erasers, and my papers were handed in in tatters.

  I was not by any means stupid, but I came from what we euphemistically call a lower-class background. My family had been a proud one, one of the first to colonize the Old West, but times had changed and my father had amounted to little. The Depression had pretty well taken that little away from him as well. We lived on the Lower East Side, under the tracks of the Second Avenue El, in a shabby apartment with the john in the hall.

  What I’m leading up to is this: I was never a football hero. I made few friends, and they were all misfits and oddballs like myself. If the Second World War hadn’t come along when it had, I might’ve ended up another dead-end punk, in jail with a couple of my former friends.

  My love life was sparse. There were girls in school whom I had mild crushes on at one time or another, but I had no money, and never asked them for a date. And the girls I liked were the kinds who liked dates where you did something.

  There were the other kind of girls, too, of course— although a surprising number of the girls
in my neighborhood were “good girls” and religious—but I never thought about those girls except when I was alone and needed to build fantasies around them and what it was said they would do.

  I lost my virginity in a whore house in Greenwich Village, one evening when I was sixteen and a bunch of us pooled our money for the experience. We were all virgins, although a couple of the guys tried not to show it. We walked tall, strutted ourselves in, up to little squalid cubicles, where we panted over- sweaty, bored slatterns old enough to be our mothers, and came away feeling obscurely cheated but unwilling to admit it for the world.

  That was my introduction to sex, and it was enough to tell me that whatever the magic rainbow might lead to, that was sure enough not It.

  I met a girl in France, during the Liberation. We spent four beautiful, sunny days together. Her home village was a bombed ruin, and we were camped close by. She and I would sneak off by ourselves to roll and tumble in the grass, a bottle of local red wine close at hand. We didn’t speak a word of each other’s language, and it never bothered us. Until the fifth day. It rained. And a young German soldier who’d gotten left behind, holed up in an old barn we’d ducked into for shelter—he shot her dead.

  How’d I get into telling you all this?

  Maybe just so you can see how it happened, with Shama and me. How it could happen—totally improbable as it was, and against all the rules of logic and law.

  The hairy people. That’s what she told me the Angels called us among themselves. Angels have no body hair, and for many of them we are as repulsive as a cockroach, in our own hairy way.

  Monkeys, we are, to the Angels.

  “Nothing is more repulsive,” she told me later, “than one of you men with a day’s growth of beard.” Hairy chests don’t rate too hot, either. Hair is no sign of virility.

  I hadn’t shaved. I hadn’t shaved since I’d stepped into this world. I have a heavy beard but it doesn’t grow too fast. In three days, though, I had a lot more than a five o’clpck shadow.

  So let me take things in order, from where I left off. She was looking at my face, staring at my thick bristles with a covert fascination—and when I caught her eye, she blushed, this time a full cherry-pink blush that spread down her neck and under her blouse.

  “When did I come from?” I repeated her question. “Sidewise, you might say.” It was becoming increasingly hard for me to keep it in mind that this girl confronting me was an alien creature, a member of the race which had subjugated man—an. Angel.

  In a few moments—the moments of our confrontation —an electricity had sprung into the air between us. I was suddenly reminded, for the first time in many long years, of the girl I had known in France. It had been as sudden then.

  There was a click, and the faintly golden halo disappeared from around her body. Sharna stepped forward and reached up a soft hand. She touched my bristling cheek.

  “So hairy you are,” she said, as if to herself. Her eyes widened and she stepped back again, suddenly aware of what she had done.

  “But—you are from another place?” She picked up the thin thread of her questioning again.

  I reached out and enveloped her hand with my own. “That I am,” I said. “I come from a world like this one —but one that has never known the Angels. An alternate world that was not invaded in 1938, a proud, free world— well,” I said, in sudden memory, “free of aliens, anyway —where man stands on his own two legs and takes no handouts from self-imposed masters. We’re developing our own space travel, our own atomic power—”

  Shut up, you fool, a voice said inside my head. And then, Now you’ve gone and done it—you’ve spilled the beans.

  But Shama was saying, “An alternate world! A parallel universe!” Her cheeks seemed flushed, her eyes sparkled. “How wonderful! And that means something else—it proves what we’ve known, what we’ve believed! We’ve said all along that just because you people are smaller, and hairy, you are not so different from us—you are human beings!”

  “Well, yes,” I said, in growing puzzlement. “The last time I looked, I was still human, but what—?”

  “I mean—human, by our standards. Human, as we are human!”

  “And just what was it that brought this point home to you, anyway?” I asked. The excitement was building now, glowing in her eyes and arcing the gap between us.

  “We have maintained all along—our minority party— that you should be invited to join our Condominium as equals, instead of being made a slave race. But the others, they who prefer to view through their profit ledgers— they said your race was only a step above the monkeys, hairy like the animals, and possessed of little ability or intelligence.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Dumb luck we managed to build all these cities, and all. Plonk a million of us monkeys down on a planet and we’re bound to come up with the works of Shakespeare—purely by accident!” She gave me a questioning look, and I shook my head. “Go on,” I said. “What makes the difference, then?”

  “Why, these things, what you have said: a machine that can pluck a man from another universe—and in that universe, your people, free of our restraint, have attained space flight, nuclear energy—the marks of true intelligence: manipulation of the total environment. They prove your race a race of men!”

  I was still holding her hand. Suddenly I felt clumsy, and I started to release it. But as I did, she raised her hand and slid it up my arm, and, without either of us quite initiating the act, I found her moving into my opening arms.

  In that moment the tension which had built between us peaked, and in that totally unexpected embrace, my last barrier went down. I began to feel emotions washing over me that I hadn’t permitted myself in many years.

  I put my arms around her, leaned down—only so little, so much less than I ever had before!—and met her up-tilted lips with my own.

  Her body moved eagerly against mine, and I felt the embrace against me, stirring me, quickening my blood and my breath. Her arms tightened momentarily, and then she leaned back against my arms and looked up into my face.

  Her eyes were deep purple, the irises shading off at the outer rims to a sandy gold. Her pupils were slitted, like a cat’s. I could almost sense her purring. Her gaze probed deep into me.

  She put her hand again to my cheek, in a soft caress. “So fine and hairy,” she murmured again.

  And that is how sunshine, against all probability, the rules of law and logic, came into my life again.

  Who can explain good fortune, without explaining it away? I cannot explain what happened. I can say, it was the result of two lonely people coming together. Me, I had been a long time alone. Usually I felt no loss—and when I did, it was the loss of sunshine from the springtime of my life, not a loss of the here and now. I was not married, nor did I ever expect to be. Mine was—and how gradually it had crept over me, to keep me from ever really becoming aware of it—mine was a sterile, empty life, spent doing mean little chores for small and unpleasant people sopping up the gravy from the empty plates of the greedy attorneys and those other fee-chasing vultures of mankind who suck for nourishment at a man’s wounds and come to him in the times of his troubles to demand his earnings from him for assistance.

  Mine had been a life without sunshine.

  And Shama’s? A woman, young—a girl, really—with a soft and open heart, finding herself among the vultures of her own kind, employed by them to assist in the rape of a planet—who can say what bitterness she had endured, what loneliness she had surely known.

  And now I had come: a romantic figure, a man from another universe, yet one of these people her kind had enslaved. Big, as big as her own people, a man who might represent the key to a dream she nourished for the freedom of Earth.

  God, I cut a mean swashbuckle.

  But I am being bitter again, which is what I meant about explaining it all away. Now, when I can look backwards and catalog my feelings, my experiences, I can do this. Thank God I could not and did not, then.

&n
bsp; There is something about every meaningful affair I have ever had: a point in common. Each was fast—and filled an eternity.

  When I met that girl in France, there was a communication that passed between us in the instant of our first kiss. Those had been jubilant times, and the townsfolk had cheered our coming, men had raised their hands and shouted, and womenfolk rushed forward to give us eager kisses.

  It had not been my first kiss from a joyful and grateful girl, and this one had started no differently. But it had been a moment of communication—a moment in which we first became really aware of each other, felt the reality of each other, and entered into each other’s lives. From there it was a lover’s whirlwind. Within two days it was as though I had always known her, and she was the whole of my life. In five days—I crushed the life from that lone German sniper with my bare hands, totally unaware of any weapons he might’ve had on him, feeling within me that even this terrible and final act of vengeance was no answer to the sudden meaninglessness of my life. And I had stood in the rain afterwards and gotten soaked head to toe without knowing it, blind and deaf until the others found me.

  With Shama—how can I say it so that it does not sound cheap, an easy lay, a one-night stand? It was inevitable that we would go to bed together, inevitable since our first kiss that we would make love together, consummating the first promise of our initial touches.

  That it happened so quickly, so easily, I can explain only to those among you who have experienced this for yourselves. The “love at first sight” which is not foolish infatuation but an awareness of another person that is all but terrifying in its depth and complexity. It is a part of a great desire to know everything about the other, to share all that is oneself. I’m putting this crudely, because I am a dumb stupid detective who serves summons papers and spies on wayward spouses. I can’t spell out the feelings, the openings between Sharna and myself, and the inevitability of our ending up in bed together.