by David Coy
“There’s someone here who wants to ask you a few questions, Phil,” Linda said into the speaker phone. “His name is George Greenbaum.” She saw the look of restrained excitement on George’s face as he leaned closer to the device. This was the ultimate for George. He would be speaking to an honest-to-God alien abductee—not after the fact but while it was happening.
The egg-timer had been George’s idea, and Phil agreed immediately when Linda told him about it. It was set for ten minutes. At the end of that time, they would hang up and not communicate again until the need to relate critical news arose or the time for the next scheduled call was reached in another twenty- four hours. The next call, and each call thereafter, would have a maximum length of five minutes. That would continue until Phil’s batteries were used up.
In addition to the speaker phone, they’d also added a larger, professional tape recorder that was turned on and running.
“I guess you’ve had better weeks, Phil,” George started.
“You bet.”
“The ship is alive, but how alive?”
“I can’t say for sure, but my gut tells me not very. There’s little activity visible. No gross motor functions we can see.”
“An automaton, some dim slave?”
“Slave. Probably some cognition—at least, a controlling mechanism of some kind. The smaller ships seem more ‘alert’.”
“Any sense of the overall structure, physiology, architecture?”
“I don’t have the right visibility. Mostly tubes and tunnel structures from our point of view. Some big chambers. We’ve seen no mechanical or electronic mechanisms, other than some components of the tools they use in surgery. Nothing but biotic controls around here.”
“Any feel for the size of the ship?”
“Huge. At least a hundred yards in two dimensions. Maybe more.”
“The goons you said are human.”
“Were human.”
“Were. Who gets to be one? How do they choose them?”
“Unknown.”
“Have you tried to communicate with them.”
“Negative.”
“Why not?”
“One: they don’t seem human enough. You can’t imagine one until you’ve seen it. They come pre-programmed. Two: they’re dangerous as hell.”
“Try it.”
“Why?”
“Do they still walk upright?”
“Yes.”
“Then there might be some humanity left.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“The aliens . . . describe them.”
“Witches.”
“Literally? Like cartoon witches?”
“No. Just disgusting. Very unclean.”
“They’re females?”
“Unknown. They just look like it.”
“Height? Weight?”
“Five and a half feet. Maybe a hundred pounds. Skinny. Hideous. Two hands, feet. Long fingers. Agile. Skin moist, cool, texture of soft paper. Short downward spines cover the entire body. Almost reptilian. Nekked.”
“Naked?”
“Nekked. There’s a difference.”
Linda and George both had the urge to smile.
“Okay. Nekked.”
“The language, is it spoken?”
“Assumed, but unknown.”
“You’ve never heard them speak?”
“Never.”
“The pupae. Can you get to them easily?”
“Yes. At least the ones we know about.”
George turned his eyes toward Linda.
“Can you destroy them?” he asked.
There was a pause at the other end.
“Why?”
George smiled ruefully. “Please . . . ”
“I don’t know,” Phil said. “The containers are tough, and there are thousands of them.”
“Think it over.”
“It could be difficult. Besides, my hunch is that they’d just start over.”
“Any ideas?”
“If I had a detonator I’d set off a bomb, if I had a bomb,” Phil said.
George smiled. “If I think of anything that might help, I’ll . . . uh . . . I’ll let you know,” he said. He knew it sounded silly before it was out, but it had an inertia all its own. It was, after all, what people said to be helpful.
“Thanks. You do that,” Phil said.
A little embarrassed, George drew his mouth into a line for a second. “We’ll talk again tomorrow,” he said.
“You bet . . . Linda?”
“I’m here.”
“Take us off the speaker.”
George took the hint and left the room. Linda picked up the receiver just the same. “Hi,” she said.
“My will is in the gun safe.”
“I know where.”
“There’ll be a snag getting payment from the insurance companies. They’ll want a body and a death certificate, but won’t have either. They’ll pay in seven years, at least a partial if you stay on top of them.”
The egg timer went off with a ding and intruded on the moment like the unthinking, unfeeling mechanoid it was. “That’s it for now, then,” Phil said.
“I love you, Phil.”
Phil paused. He didn’t mean to, it just happened. “I love you, Linda, more than anything,” he said.
She hung up and reached slowly over and turned off the tape recorder.
All I have is his voice, captured now on tape; that and some photographs are all I’ll ever have again.
By the time she got to the living room, her eyes were wet with tears. She sat down, plucked a tissue out of the box on the coffee table and dabbed her eyes with it. God, she was tired of crying. George sat cross-legged, his head propped sideways on his hand. He reminded Linda of every long-haired college eccentric she’d ever seen.
“Now what?” she asked with resignation.
George lifted his head up and took a deep breath and held it. Linda wished that when he spoke he would have the answer and would speak it gently and with confidence like a trusted friend; and one who knew the answer.
“Nothing very inspired at this point,” he said evenly.
It wasn’t a surprise, but it stung anyway.
“Yeah . . . ” Linda said. “Me, neither.”
They sat looking in opposite directions with nothing to say. Linda knew that if you didn’t have a fixed and clear direction, any direction would do. She blew her nose, got up and went outside.
Linda walked out into the center of the little front lawn; and shielding her eyes with her hand, tried to look up at the sun. The star obliterated her vision, washed it away with light.
Phil is up there. He’s right there in that bright light and I can’t see him.
She tried and tried, bringing her sun-blinded eyes back to the white hole time and again, and time and again the light rebuffed her without pity, slapping her away with its fierce energy.
“That’s not a good idea. It’s not a good way to do it,” George said, standing next to her. He glanced up at the sun and squinted painfully as if to test the forgone conclusion.
“Clever sons of bitches. The energy from the sun makes one hell of a defensive cover. And if the ship is organic or mostly organic, it probably wouldn’t show up very well on radar, if at all.”
Linda only half heard him. “Phil is up there,” she said.
* * *
She made sandwiches later while George talked to his buddies at the USC labs. They’d been promised the results of the tests on the fluid and tissue scrap that afternoon. When Linda looked over at George, he was sitting on the edge of the sofa, furiously taking notes with the phone clamped between shoulder and cheek.
He came into the dining room with a stack of loose notes. He was so pre-occupied, reading and thinking, he nearly missed the chair when he sat down.
“Well?”
“It’s interesting,” he said absently, fingering his notes.
The absent-minded tone of voice and the word inte
resting made her anger flare.
“It would be interesting if it was on TV, George! It’s damned horrible is what it is. Why don’t you just say it’s horrible?”
George looked down over the rim of his glasses, adding to the eccentric professor look.
“Okay . . . it’s horrible,” he said.
Linda could have slapped him. She tossed her fork down on the plate with a clank and got up from the table. When she made it as far as the sink, she stopped and leaned against it.
“Linda, I’m sorry. It’s been tough, I know,” he said.
George waited patiently. Linda stared out the window for a full minute before she turned around and sat back down.
“Sorry,” she said into her plate.
“It is horrible and I don’t have any answers,” he said. “I feel like a dodo bird waiting for the club to fall. I’m afraid and confused, too.”
Head down, Linda chewed her tasteless food. She was ashamed of the outburst. It wasn’t his fault he was a dweeb.
“You said it was interesting,” she said finally, still staring at her plate. “What did they find out?”
Her voice was so low that he could barely hear it. He cleared his throat and began slowly shifting his notes around, not really looking for anything. “Well . . . the DNA was very interesting. It’s mostly human. That’s not comforting, but it fits. If the aliens are as adept at biological manipulation as Phil says . . . I don’t know . . . I have no idea how they’d do that . . . ” His voice trailed off and he shuffled aimlessly through his notes some more.
“The DNA in the tissue sample,” he continued, “does have an amphibian-like profile, just like the guy in Kernville suggested. I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that.”
Linda looked up and grinned at the thought. It was probably the last thing that chicken-shit wanted to hear.
“I doubt that,” she said.
“Right . . . the fluid looks much like blood with very few red blood cells. Massive amounts of what look like white cells and protein plasmids that could be anything. It doesn’t have the physical characteristics of any blood they’d ever seen . . . how did he put it . . . ” he shuffled papers for the exact words and found them. “‘It’s a composite of blood-like elements’, is how he put it. Overall, both the tissue and the blood confused the hell out them. I guess you might expect that, too. They wanted to know if asking them to analyze the samples was a test of some kind. They asked me if I made the blood stuff in the kitchen. I think they were serious about that.”
Linda smiled and the smile chased away the last of her funk. “Right. We made in the blender—a little frog juice, a piece of meat, a cup of water,” she laughed.
“Right. I almost wish we had. The good news is that the DNA in the tissue sample is clearly both human and amphibian. And you can’t fake that like you might mix up a fake solution. We have the physical sample, its color, texture and the chemical DNA locked in the cells that are locked in the sample. Jeff thought it was quite interesting.” When he said interesting, he smiled a little.
“So now what?”
“We get pictures of the ship through a telescope. If we can find it, and photograph it—and I mean good, really good photos—and with the taped phone calls and physical evidence— blood stuff, tissues, the lab report . . . ”
He stopped himself in mid-sentence as if he’d just
remembered something more important he had to do. “ . . . and we get shut down anyway,” he said. “It sounds just like a damned hoax.”
He dropped his notes in a pile on the table.
“All the goddamned hoaxes make everything a hoax!” he fumed.
Linda leaned back in her chair and cocked her head at George. She swallowed a mouthful of food then clamped her hands with her legs and leaned forward with the most intense look George Greenbaum had ever seen. Her spooky, multicolored eye blazed at him. Her voice was perfectly modulated and the effect sent a brief chill up his spine.
“It’s not a hoax,” she said. “I know it and you know it. And as long as we know it, there’s hope.”
George shuffled his papers around without purpose. She was right, but she was also naive. It was her very fire, her enthusiasm, that would work against them. He shook his head quickly and his confidence flew off like water from a dog’s coat. Here it was, finally, in perfect form—but when you drew it out on paper, really looked at it hard, it had all the best attributes of a real wing-dinger—a lollapalooza of a hoax.
It was so simple to him now, so clear. The cries of wolf had damned them all; the real wolf could never, ever be believed.
He wondered if some strange, unknown dynamic—one that applies only to intergalactic conquest—had worked its rare and nefarious purpose to set humankind up for an attack just like this. Maybe that’s the way it worked with murder on the interplanetary scale. The ones who got conquered by another race somehow fool themselves into thinking it can’t happen. Unbeknownst to the victims, decades of dreams, tales, imaginings, stories, movies and lies all worked to some horrible advantage for the aggressor. It can’t happen because somehow imagining every possible way it could happen makes it not possible. All that imagination, and playing it out, and testing it, and nay-saying and scoffing makes the lame-minded victims perfectly numb to the possibility and, thus, easier, perfectly stupid prey. Maybe they picked us for destruction just because we wouldn’t believe it, even when it was happening, he thought. How ironic. We’ve waddled along and quacked or gobbled or whatever it is dodos do and thought everything was just fine. We’re so thick and pea-brained stupid we don’t even know a club when we see it.
He shook his head again and saw himself as if he was watching from across the table. He just shook his head and shook it. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d wanted to. It was instinctual. He’d seen albatrosses in the Philippines shake their heads just like that, with the same back and forth, monotonous frequency. The albatross was related to the dodo. That was the first thing you learned when you arrived.
“You’ve lost it,” Linda said. “You’ve really lost it.” She looked at him even harder and got up from the table. “How dare you . . . ”
He stretched his mouth back over clenched teeth and the competent, eccentric professor look gave way to one of total angst and weakness.
“There’s nothing we can do,” he said to her back as she stomped off. “Not a goddamned thing. We’re doomed. It was meant to be.”
“You’re full of shit,” she said over her shoulder. What she thought, but did not say was that George Greenbaum was a coward.
It just made sense.
* * *
Tom Moon drifted toward the bright, clean light like a moth on a gentle breeze. When he reached it, it vanished and revealed the alien world of the ship like some sticky brown residue. When he saw where he was, he wanted to turn and fly back to the safety of the dark nothingness on those petal-soft wings.
In his mind, he whined the word help over and over and over.
He was restrained but could see a good part of the laboratory by moving his eyes. He couldn’t see his body but knew he was stretched and clamped and attached to the inside of the strange cage just like the others. He looked over at the blank, mindless face of the man in the cage next to him then turned his eyes away. The horror of the place was there in that face, gathered up and reflected back. When he closed his eyes to block it out, the ghostlike image was still there.
He could feel the cruel presence of the cage all around him, like a living thing with its talons, claws and tendrils piercing, pulling and tearing his body. When he tried to move his legs, the talons dug deeper. There was pain where the claws and tendrils held him, but not too much. He thought they must have given him a big shot of something.
The witches moved around him quickly and Tom Moon spun in his own fear like a wounded animal.
There were monsters and parts of monsters everywhere and the groaning and whining sounds were louder and worse than the sound in the place where t
he aliens cut out the worms. He wished he could block his ears.
He felt a movement in his gut, a quick little squiggle, like a piece of wire being twirled. It was followed by a feeling of fullness, like he’d just eaten two or three cans of something. The cage shifted and he was suddenly looking down at the filthy floor of the chamber through the weird parts of the cage-thing. He felt a tickle in his throat, and he gagged, and retched up a potful of dark liquid. He felt a buzzing chatter at the back of his head then saw stars and bright shapes that moved back and forth like colored sheets in the wind and filled him with unexplained terror. He cried out like a child and the sound was new and foreign in its intensity, even for Tom Moon.
He faded in and out of the dark universe of the chamber as if that ugly place was turned on and off by the hand of some wizard. When he was aware enough to sense it, he felt his skin being removed and another time he watched as his arms, held in place by the strange grabbers of the cage, were cut off like unwanted branches on a tree. Once, when he could still see, he saw a monster’s leg extending out where his own arm used to be. It had three toes on it that looked like they’d been carved out of potatoes with the skin left on. He wondered how they would move, and like magic, they did.
He knew then that the powerful leg was his own. He made it flex and felt the massive strength in it as the muscles tightened like steel coils against the restraints.
Now I really am a galumpnuckler.
He would have smiled but the apparatus that was his face could no longer shape a smile. He felt another buzz and a familiar hiss at the back of his head, and the universe exploded with black stars. He fell into that darkness as surely as if he’d fallen from a high ledge. He fell and fell.
Except for his eyes, his spinal column, most of his nervous system, and a few organs especially suited for this particular design, Tom Moon was gone.
* * *
God will give me the strength, Gilbert thought. God has brought me to this place for His purpose. These demons shall be his allies and be bonded to me, the broker of His plan. I will say the words and they will be heard. His will be done. The pain is nothing. Only the words are important.
He strained against the silence in his voice, pushing it aside slowly like a heavy stone door. His lips squirmed and contorted with the effort.
