Cargo Cult

by Graham Storrs

  Sheila wished for the thousandth time that Mike Barraclough was still out there at the farm. No-one on the spot seemed to have a clue as to what was going on. As far as she could tell from their reports, a dozen or so women, who all looked like Loosi Beecham, had kidnapped a busload of geriatrics and laid siege to a semi-derelict farm out in the bush. They may also have kidnapped about twenty UFO cult members who were squatting at the farm, or they may actually be in league with the cultists. It seemed reasonably clear though that the women, using only some kind of hand-gun, had won hands-down in a shoot out with Brisbane’s finest. In a pitched battle, where not one single kidnapper was reported injured, they had killed three policemen, injured six others, and blown a dozen police cars to pieces.

  She now had two police SWAT teams on the ground and scores more police mobilising. Before the morning, that farm would be surrounded by heavily-armed men, backed up with armoured cars. Until then, Sheila just hoped that nothing else happened that the troops already in position couldn’t handle. Meanwhile, she had one more tactical briefing and then maybe she could get a few hours’ sleep before dawn.

  She pushed through the busy operations centre and entered the briefing room. There were several faces among the dozen or so people in the room that she did not recognise so they spent the first few minutes introducing each other. As well as the usual suspects, she met a big, square-jawed bloke from the Disaster and Major Event Planning Branch, a weasely little bloke from Specialist Services Branch, an overweight woman from the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, an even more overweight man from Forensic Services Branch and the Deputy Chief Executive (Operations), looking like he would rather be at home in bed, like his boss, the Commissioner. There was someone from Media and Public Relations Branch, of course, but also a well-dressed young woman from the Human Resources Division, eager to help in any way at all, and even someone from Finance Division, wearing the compulsory suspicious frown.

  Sheila ran through what was known so far and told them what she was doing and what she planned to do. They listened attentively with a general air of approval. With an expectation of this being over relatively quickly, she smiled at the assembled management and asked for questions.

  “Er, Chief Inspector,” the young woman from HR Division said. “It’s really not my field of expertise or anything but doesn’t it seem a bit odd that these kidnappers all look like Loosi Beecham?”

  Yes, Sheila agreed, it did seem odd. “I’ve got one of my detectives following up that angle. These women seem to have appeared out of the blue about 24 hours ago when they robbed and vandalised a department store in town. They then left a trail of minor incidents until they hijacked the bus in the early morning.”

  “But doesn’t it just seem really odd?” the woman insisted.

  Yes, agreed Sheila, it did seem really odd.

  “And what about that Detective Sergeant? The one who went missing during the pursuit...?” the HR woman went on.

  “Mike Barraclough,” Sheila supplied.

  “Hmm. That was odd too, wasn’t it?”

  Yes, agreed Sheila, that was odd too.

  “I mean, it was like someone cut through his car with a gigantic can opener and scooped him out.”

  There was, Sheila agreed, some anomalous damage to the Detective Sergeant’s car.

  “And now he’s missing. Don’t you think that’s really, you know, really...”

  “Odd?” Sheila suggested.

  “Yes. Odd. It is odd isn’t it?”

  Oh yes, Sheila agreed, it was odd all right.

  She waited for the woman to ask her another bloody stupid question but none came. So she turned to the fat bloke from Forensic Services. “Do we have anything yet on the weapons these women are using?”

  The man looked very uncomfortable. He had some notes with him in a manilla folder and he stalled briefly by pretending to look at them. He cleared his throat. “Not exactly,” he said.

  “Not exactly?” asked the Deputy Chief Executive (Operations).

  The fat Forensics man cleared his throat again. “Well, my people are telling me the perpetrators are using some kind of particle beam weapon which causes the molecular structure of objects to fail catastrophically.” He looked around the room, nervously taking in the impatient, hostile expressions that were forming on the faces of the hard-bitten, no nonsense, practical police officers all around him.

  “That’s odd,” said the HR woman.

  The Forensics man shuddered. “I’m having them go over the data again,” he said quickly, heading off a general eruption. “It’s just speculation at the moment, of course.”

  “Of course,” said the Deputy Chief Executive (Operations), in a voice which clearly indicated that Forensics had better have a more convincing story than that next time he saw them.

  “What about CIB input on the perpetrators?” Sheila asked the fat woman from the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence. She knew it was a waste of time. Her own private opinion was that they would only have a clue as to what was going on after they’d stormed the farmhouse, arrested the lot of them and interrogated them.

  The fat woman also had notes. She looked at them briefly and looked up. “We don’t know anything about a Loosi Beecham lookalike gang. We don’t know anything about an all-female terrorist group. We have no reports of any Loosi Beecham lookalikes entering the country in the past 30 days. We have been in touch with the FBI and they have confirmed that Loosi Beecham herself is in Los Angeles right now shooting a film about Albert Schweitzer and they believe she has not been in Australia in over a year.” She delivered her intelligence with a level expression. It may be all negative, her eyes said, but her people had worked damned hard to get it.

  “What about the cult?”

  The CIB woman’s challenging eyes wavered a little at this. “We don’t know anything about them. We’ve liaised with ASIO and they say they don’t know them either. I’m trying to confirm that.”

  Sheila, smiled and pulled a copy of the St Stephen’s parish magazine out of her own folder. She passed it over to the CIB woman. “You might find this helpful,” she said. “There’s an article about them on page 5.”

  “Bloody Hell,” muttered the Deputy Chief Executive (Operations). He turned to Sheila and his mouth made a smile without his eyes joining in. “Rather a lot of unanswered questions, don’t you think, Chief inspector? And the media seem to be getting more hysterical by the minute. I think it would be best if you went out there yourself and made sure that this is dealt with quickly and cleanly. We don’t want this dragging on for too long, do we?”

  Sheila understood completely. “No sir,” she said.

  “Good,” he said to the room at large. “Has anyone got anything else? Right. Let’s talk about resourcing...”

  -oOo-

  The kangaroos stopped when night fell. They were still a little short of the farm but they’d travelled a long way and it would be easier to grab a human or two in the daylight. The humans, they knew, tended to huddle in groups at night and, in the last century or so, had taken to locking themselves away inside buildings. During the day, however, they wandered around and were quite often seen alone or in small numbers. That was the time to snatch a couple.

  “What are you going to do when we get home, Boss?” asked one of the big bucks, lying on the ground with his long legs stretched out.

  “First thing is, I’m going to get away from you guys and talk to someone with some brains.”

  The big buck chuckled. “No, seriously. What are you going to do?”

  “You think I’m not serious? After three hundred years with nothing but you for company I feel like my brains are turning to bat droppings!”

  There was a long silence.

  “When I get my own body back,” said one of the bucks out of the darkness, “I’m going down to Poppopoppipoppa City and I’m going to have sex with five women and five hermaphroids at once!”

  “Man, I miss those hermaphroids!”

  “I�
��m going to find the cops who sent me down,” said another, “and I’m going to hang them up by their dorsal manipulators while I boil their insides with a microwave laser.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to pull all their secondary genital grapples off and make the bastards eat them.”

  “Hey!” Shorty shouted, gaining instant silence. “You want to know what I’m going to do to the next idiot who opens their stupid mouth while I’m trying to get to sleep?” A long silence was her answer. “Good. Now get some rest. We’re going human-hunting in the morning.”

  -oOo-

  Detective Sergeant Barraclough and the Agent had stopped moving too.

  “There is a cordon of armed humans all around the vehicle we seek,” the Agent said, softly. It gestured with one hand and a small relief map of the area appeared in the air before them. Barraclough could see the bus parked in front of a cluster of farm buildings. A line of police cars were parked beyond the bus, a couple of them still burning. Further out, there were more police vehicles, including helicopters, vans and a mobile command and control unit. Nearby were two more helicopters and some more vehicles, which Barraclough took to be the press. Several people were around and inside this cluster of vehicles. Many more were spread out in a rough circle around the farm. The amazingly clear little map showed where the Agent and he were standing, just a few hundred metres from the nearest policemen in the cordon.

  “Come on!” said Barraclough. “These are my friends. It’s OK.” He set off at a run in the direction of the nearest policeman. He had barely gone five paces before the Agent grabbed him from behind and lifted him off his feet. He struggled and squirmed but he felt like a five-year-old in the grip of an adult—one who worked out a lot. He raged impotently. “What are you doing, you big bloody galah? These blokes are on our side.”

  “Be quiet human. There will be panic if I appear to your friends. They will most likely fire their weapons and it is possible that some of them will be injured or killed.”

  “Then let me go and explain things to them. It’ll be all right.”

  “My decision is final, human. If you do not comply, I will be forced to restrain you. It is against my code of ethics to endanger sapient life unnecessarily.”

  Barraclough sulked. “Your code of ethics didn’t stop you kidnapping me though, did it!”

  The Agent was unperturbed. “That was necessary.” It set Barraclough down and the policeman stayed where he was put. “We will stay here tonight and approach the humans in the morning.”

  Barraclough was still sulking. “Oh great. Now I get to spend the night doing it tough in the bush. You might be a big, black Godzilla thing, but I’m only human, you know. I need...”

  He broke off as a large dome appeared around them. It cut the endless noise of the cicadas off completely and he could no longer feel the warm breeze that had been blowing. The dome shimmered slightly although he could easily see through it.

  “We are now invisible from the outside,” the Agent told him. “We are also secure from most meteorological effects as well as from wild animals below thirty tonnes in size.”

  Barraclough just humphed in response. “So, unless there’s a giant tsunami and we get attacked by blue whales while we’re submerged, I suppose we’ll be all right then.”

  “I feel you are not content, human.”

  “I should be out there helping my mates sort this out. They don’t know they’re up against aliens.”

  “What about your quest to incarcerate Douggie Mack? You seemed very dedicated to this objective not long ago.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ve finally got Douggie in perspective.” He sat on the ground with his head in his hands. It had been a long time coming but he was just beginning to realise the enormity of what he had become involved in. Aliens were on the Earth. Creatures from other worlds were running around loose in the Queensland countryside—disguised as Loosi Beecham. Yeah, well, maybe that was a bit too weird, but... aliens! And they’d taken a bus out into the country. No. Whichever way he went with this, the banality of it all kept him from experiencing the full force of the awe and wonder he knew he ought to be feeling.

  “Agent?”

  “Yes, human.”

  “You’re, like, a proper alien aren’t you? I mean, you’re big and ugly and sinister and all that. You’ve got a mission. You’re a serious kind of bloke—well, thing, anyway.”

  “I think I understand,” the Agent said, its deep, deep voice reinforcing Barraclough’s impression. “You want to know why the Vinggan’s are such imbeciles?”

  “That’s it exactly! You see, people have always said that any race advanced enough to travel here across interstellar space is going to be as superior in intelligence and morality as it is in technology. Yet...”

  “What you have failed to understand is that large groups of sapients can develop science and technologies well beyond the capacity of individual members to understand. You humans have probably already done so. Can you explain to me how even something as simple as your weapon works? You probably think you can. But do you know how to mix the explosive that was used to propel the bullets? Do you know the composition of the many different alloys that were used in the weapon’s construction? Could you even tell me how the lead of the bullets is produced? Which ores? Found where? Mined how? Processed how? Shaped how?

  “And yet it is a very simple and primitive weapon. Somehow, your species has the knowledge and understanding to make all of the many complex devices it uses without any individual having the ability to make any of them from the raw materials. It is the same with the Vinggans. They are an old race. They have had many thousands of years for their science and technology to far outstrip their native abilities. It is true that, because they are a very average sort of species, it has taken them a lot longer than you might think to get so far. They've also had a lot of help lately.”

  “But what about the ethics and morality of a species?” Barraclough insisted. “Shouldn’t they outstrip the limitations of the individual too?”

  “No. There is a small tendency, observed in the less savage species, for the moral code of the society to be, on the whole, somewhat more benign than that of the average individual. But, unlike science and technology, there can be no accumulation of ‘moral knowledge’, no building on the discoveries and successes of others, no codification that isn’t simply a reflection of whatever ethical system particular groups of individuals can agree on at particular times. The fact is that there is no underlying ‘moral reality’ the way there is a physical reality.”

  Barraclough was horrified. “So space is full of low IQ moral idiots in charge of super technologies?”

  “Yes indeed. Welcome to the galaxy, human.”

  -oOo-

  Sam was worn out. Discussing anything with that moron Braxx was like trying to argue with a heavy rainstorm. You could reason all you liked. You could appeal to its sense of fair play. You could scream and shout till you were hoarse. But the bloody thing just kept pouring down over you as if you didn’t matter a damn. Which, in Braxx’s world view, she eventually realised, she didn’t. No human did. The human race was inferior to the Vinggan race, therefore humans could be, and should be, pissed on from a great height.

  “Why are we even talking to this narrow-minded fascist?” she demanded of John. “I am not going to be organised into labour parties to build a temple to the Great Spirit. I’m not going to be organised into anything by this pack of walking Barbie dolls. Build her a temple? I wouldn’t spit in her mouth if her bloody teeth were on fire!”

  John jumped into the lull that Sam’s outburst had engendered. “Actually, er, Braxx, I was wondering what happened to the plan to fly us all off into space to a better world where you would bestow your magnificent technology upon us and we’d live in Paradise forever more?”

  “What plan?” asked Braxx.

  “Oh for God’s sake, John,” said Sam in total exasperation. “These are not your stupid Sky People. These
are, well, something else. Something real. They haven’t come here to fly you off to Heaven, you moron. They’re here to invade the bloody planet, or something.” She turned her glare on Braxx. “Isn’t that right, mein bloody Führerin?”

  Braxx smiled a beatific smile. He’d been doing a lot of that and it was getting right up Sam’s nose. “Please calm yourself. We are not here to invade your miserable mudball. We are here to bring you salvation. We are here to bring you and all your race to the understanding which bringeth joy. We wish to convert you to the worship of the Great Spirit.” He thought for a moment. “And maybe to civilise you a bit too, since we’re stuck here. It would be nice if we could get you to at least act sane, even if you’re not.”

  “What do you mean, stuck here?” demanded John.

  Braxx looked a little sheepish. “Small problem with the old spaceship,” he confessed. “Drukk hasn’t got a clue how to fix it. So I suppose we’re here for good. The Great Spirit plots a complex course to our final happiness, as they say.” He shrugged, to show how helpless even he was when it came to Destiny. “But I’m sure we’ll all get along just fine once you’ve got the hang of a few basics.”

  “You mean your spaceship is...?”

  “Smashed beyond repair, yes. I’d send Drukk back there to see if he could do something, you know, but the computer’s, well... Let’s just say it makes you humans look pretty well normal by comparison.” Braxx laughed heartily and the other Vinggans joined in. Sam and John looked on appalled.

  Gradually, the laughter subsided. “So, you see, we’re here for good.”