The Secret of Life

by Rudy Rucker

  “Go ahead, dammit. This was your idea in the first place.”

  Conrad measured out a length of tape and tried to tear it off the roll. The tape was tougher than he’d expected. He pulled harder. Just then his thumb slipped oddly. The thumbnail caught in a wrinkle of the tape—caught, bent, and snapped.

  “Shit! I just broke my goddamn thumbnail!” Conrad dropped the tape and put his tongue to the wound.

  “I broke it right down to the quick. I can’t believe I ...” He stopped talking then as he realized what had just happened.

  “It’s been like that all afternoon,” said Hank quietly. “I suggest you pocket that crystal, Conrad, and forget about trying to build anything with it. Sooner or later, you’ll find out what it’s really for.”

  “Seven o’clock!” called Caldwell from the kitchen. “Didn’t you guys want to watch the news?”

  Chapter 21:

  Saturday, August 6, 1966 Hank’s parents and one of his brothers were already down in the basement. “Conrad here wants to see the news,” Hank explained after the greetings. “Catch up on all the big doings.”

  “The local news is the only thing on right now anyway,” said Mrs. Larsen agreeably. “We still only have two channels in Louisville, Conrad. I keep telling Hank’s father he should get us an antenna to pick up the UHF channel, but he doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.”

  “There’s no sports on that channel,” explained Mr. Larsen. He was a distant man with a deprecatory chuckle. “Just violins.”

  The local news ran along uneventfully: a new candidate for mayor, problems with the sewage plant, a change in zoning, but then ...

  “A bizarre robbery at a farmhouse in Louisville’s East End last night.” The newscaster was a trim young woman with heavily coiffed brown hair. “When Mr. Cornelius Skelton called police officers at 3:00A.M. , they found a broken window lock and only one item missing: a large, semiprecious mineral crystal which had rested on Mr. Skelton’s mantel. Skelton asserted that he had ‘expected the robbery.’ The crystal was coupled to an alarm system—a very special system which included an automatic movie camera!

  Here is Skelton’s incredible film of the robbery taking place.”

  “Cornelius Skelton,” Mr. Larsen was saying. “Isn’t he the rich fellow who has that farm down the road?”

  “A jewel heist in our own neighborhood!” exclaimed Mrs. Larsen. “How exciting!”

  Caldwell favored Conrad with a hard, questioning stare.

  The film started: silent, black and white.

  A blurred shape, jellylike in slowed time. A young man’s back. He jerks grayly, then blurs out into cloud. He’s gone? No ... there he is again, at the bottom of the screen, tiny before the looming fireplace. He’s the size of a thumb! He wears a white bandit-mask, the little scuttler, and now he hurries off out of the picture, lugging Skelton’s crystal on his tiny back.

  The news show cut to Skelton’s face, in color. Old Cornelius looked as calm and gentlemanly as ever, laying down his bizarre rap in an emotionless Kentucky drawl. “I’ve said this time and again. A flahn saucer landed on my farm in the spring of fifty-six. It butchered one of my hogs and left a crystal in its place. I anticipated that the aliens might return for the crystal, and I rigged my camera accordingly. View the film with an open mind, and ask yourself if any human being couldshrink that way .”

  They ran the film again in slow motion. This time Conrad could recognize himself. The arms, the eyes. All of a sudden, he was starting to feel funny.

  The brunette came back on. “The incredible shrinking man? This afternoon, our WHAS news team showed Skelton’s film to Dr. Mario Turin, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Louisville.”

  Cut to a black-goateed man with a sliding smile. A mellow-voiced male interviewer, off-camera, asked the questions.

  “Dr. Turin, what do you think of Mr. Skelton’s assertion that his film shows an alien from outer space?”

  Turin smiled and jerked his head. “Cornelius Skelton is well known for his strong beliefs in UFO

  phenomena. I think it’s only natural that he would interpret his film in terms of extraterrestrial visitation.”

  “No, I don’t. I think it’s more likely that Mr. Skelton is the perpetrator—or the dupe—of a hoax. The

  ‘shrinking’ effect could easily be produced by an ordinary zoom lens. What we have here is an unusual film ... of an ordinary robbery.”

  Conrad was finding it harder and harder to pay attention. It was unsettling enough to see himself on TV—and to have Caldwell angrily elbowing him whenever the Larsens looked away—but his head was filled with a funny, dead tingling, as if he’d just gotten a shot of Novocain in the center of his brain.

  It was an odd feeling, yet not totally unfamiliar. Conrad had felt this way once before: in Paris, right after he’d seen the picture of Audrey and him hovering off the Eiffel Tower ...

  That was the last time that one of my powers was publicly recorded. The picture of me flying was in the paper, and then I couldn’t fly anymore.His head throbbed thickly. It was the news report for sure. Somehow Conrad was programmed to change his special survival power each time he was unmasked. He was turning into a new “Chinese brother.”

  The news ended on a light note, and a vaginal-deodorant commercial came on, the one with Dorothy Provine. With the marijuana still in his system, Conrad slid into a heavy paranoid fantasy that Caldwell and the Larsens were all staring at him. In Caldwell’s case, this was no fantasy.

  “Let’s go out to the car,” said Caldwell, poking Conrad sharply. “I have to pick up Sherry soon.” He thanked Mrs. Larsen for the dinner and hustled Conrad out to the garage. He was really angry.

  “What do you think you’re doing, breaking into Mr. Skelton’s house?” demanded Caldwell. “He’s an old friend of the family! Have you turned into a junkie or something?”

  “How ... how do you know it was me?” essayed Conrad.

  “I know what you look like, even with a snot-rag on your face. And the way you and Hank have been acting, it’s been obvious that something’s up. What did you do with the crystal, sell it?”

  “No. I’ve got it right here.” Conrad took the crystal out of his pocket and opened his hand a little to show it to Caldwell. “I’m not giving it back, either. It’s mine.”

  “Whyis it yours, Conrad?”

  “Because ... because it comes from the same flying saucer thatI came from.” Conrad couldn’t hold the secret back any longer. “The flying wing! It put me down at Skelton’s the day you all moved to Louisville. I’m not really your brother. You were just hypnotized into thinking I am. The aliens picked the Bunger family because they had no friends or relatives.”

  Caldwell’s eyes were blazing—with anger, with fear, with hurt. Conrad backed away.

  “Don’t try to hit me, Caldwell, I have special powers. If you really can’t stand it, then go ahead and turn me in. My life here’ll be over, but if that’s what you have to do ...”

  Caldwell sat down on the MG’s fender and rubbed his face. “Conrad,” he said softly, “don’t tell me you’re not my brother. You’re the only brother I have. Even if youare an alien. Didn’t we grow up together? Don’t you look like Mom and Dad?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Maybe they even fixed it so that my body here has the right genes. I think they made the body out of pigmeat, as a matter of fact, but they could have doctored all the amino acids to match.”

  “A stick of light. I remember from my dreams. My race is calledthe flame-people . The other flame-people are in a saucer hovering out past the Moon. They monitor Earth’s TV and radio. They snuck me down here to find out what it’s really like. Instead of vaginal deodorant ads, you dig?”

  “How do you know they’re out near the Moon? Do you talk to them? Do you hear voices, Conrad?”

  Caldwell’s voice was taking on an air of strained normality. He’d decided not to believe the story.

  “I don’t hear voices, Caldwell, and I’m n
ot crazy. I don’t care if you believe me, just so you don’t turn me in.

  “Time to regroup,” said Hank, stepping into the garage. “Conrad’s television debut has left us all a bit bemused. My mother is askin’ questions.”

  “She knows?” asked Conrad, his voice rising.

  “She saw the crystal in my room today. She wants us to give it back.”

  “Wait,” interrupted Caldwell. “Did Conrad really shrink or not, Hank? He’s been telling me all this shit about—”

  “Flying saucers,” said Hank. “I’ve heard it, too. Idid see him shrink last night. But ...”

  “Can you do it again?” demanded Caldwell. You could see vague plans for the perfect bank robbery forming in his mind. “Because ...”

  “That’s what I was about to tell you,” said Conrad. “Ican’t shrink anymore. I’m programmed to like change powers each time I get exposed. I could feel it happening after Skelton showed the movie on TV.

  The flame-people want me to survive, but I have to keep quiet. We don’t want everyone on Earth to know about us, because—”

  “Oh, I don’t want to hear any more about it, Conrad,” interrupted Caldwell in sudden revulsion. “You are so fucking nuts.” He got in the MG and fired up the engine. “Open the garage door, would you, Hank? I’ve got a date.”

  “Where are you going to sleep?” asked Conrad solicitously.

  “Wherever I get laid; wherever I pass out. Get out of my way.”

  Hank opened the garage door, and Caldwell backed out. He looked like he couldn’t decide what to think. Big brother. He really cared. Conrad ran over to the car, and the two brothers shook hands.

  Caldwell was shaking his head and grinning by the time he drove off.

  “I wonder what your new power is going to be,” mused Hank.

  “I don’t know. It’s not really clear to me how many more chances I’m going to get. One more fuck-up, and they might just come get me.” Conrad reached into his pocket and felt the magic crystal. “Why don’t I take a walk, and you tell your mother I’ve gone to give the crystal back? Then maybe later we can go over to Pohlboggen’s. She’s hot for you, and Dee’s got more grass.”

  “No way. I’ll be over at the Z.T.”

  Conrad followed Hank’s street out of the subdivision and crossed Route 42 to get to the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery. “Old Rough-and-Ready” himself was buried there, along with his wife, and about ten thousand World War II soldiers, each soldier with an identical white headstone. The stones seemed almost to glow in the gathering dusk. As Conrad walked among them, they kept shifting into new alignments, like the atoms in a crystal.

  Crystal.Conrad took the troublesome stone out of his pocket and peered at it. It lay still in his hand, mockingly inert. What was it for? Why had the flame-people left it?

  Here I am, a creature made of pigmeat and a stick of flame. I used to say that I was looking for the secret of life, but now ...

  What could the secret of life mean, anyway? Conrad looked at the vast world around him, remembering Audrey, remembering today’s outing with Dee.How could any one formula ever sum it up?

  The secret of life—big deal. Conrad thought of a poem he’d read in some beatnik anthology: The beach night of eternal star Sea of possibility and infinite spacetime Mists on the Earth—What a laugh To sell answers in paperback, When you see God Only piss to mark the spot.

  Chapter 22:

  Saturday, August 6, 1966 Conrad lay there, on the cemetery grass, not thinking anything in particular. As full darkness set in, lightning bugs appeared, blink-------------blink--blink--------------------blinking around the cedars and the weeping willows. The stars were out, high overhead. Every now and then you could see the abrupt streak of a meteorite. It was peaceful, peaceful lying there, alone in the Louisville night. Conrad held the crystal in his right hand; somehow its sharp planes and skewed edges made for a perfect fit.

  A quarter-hour passed, then another and another. Conrad still felt a little high, lying there in the dry grass, too high to fall asleep. It would be nice with Hank and Sue and Dee later—they could all go to a drive-in or—

  ZZZZOW.

  A tumbling pattern of red lights swooped down out of the sky and thudded into the ground a hundred meters from where Conrad lay. The object was a good-sized pyramid with a bright light at each of its five corners... .It was a UFO!

  There were houses all around the Zachary Taylor cemetery—and everyone’s lights were coming on.

  Conrad wasn’t the only one who’d seen the pyramid land. Was it the flame-people? This ship certainly didn’t look like the good old flying wing, but maybe it was a scout ship or ...

  One side of the pyramid furled open. A rod of light darted out, a rod of light with a knob at one end.

  Dogs were barking, and some of the humans were out in their yards yelling. A police siren sounded in the distance.

  Moving rapidly, the stick of light floated over the low cemetery wall and disappeared. One of the barking dogs gave a shrill yelp of terror and fell silent. Conrad stared at the scout ship, unsure whether to run or to keep watching. Just then he noticed a dark shape moving toward him through the gravestones.

  A big dog, it looked like, in the light from the houses, a big black dog trotting toward Conrad with a frightening singleness of purpose. The alien had taken it over. It was coming to get Conrad.

  Now the dog was only ten yards off. Something glowed at the back of its neck—a large parallelepiped crystal resembling the one Conrad held clutched like a sword hilt in his fist. Moving instinctively, Conrad raised his fist to the back of his neck and ... drew out a rod of light. Yes. Drew it out like a sword from a scabbard, pulled his flame-person self out of the human spine where it lived!

  The dog charged now, and as it leaped, Conrad stepped sideways and slashed downward with his sword of light. It burned the dog in half; for a moment, Conrad thought the fight was already over.

  But now alien energy came oozing out of the dog’s spine, energy that rejoined its crystal to form a sword-thing like Conrad’s. The glowing shape flung itself at Conrad; he hacked and parried as best he could.

  It was strange-feeling, this battle—Conrad had double perspective on it. On the one hand,Conrad was the human being wielding the sword; on the other hand,Conrad was the stick of light in the human’s hand. He could feel it either way. Each time he touched the other flame-person, a tingling buzz rushed through him like an electric shock. The main thing was to keep the other from hurting his human body. If he lost his meat, he’d have to go back to the saucer. Thrust and slash, dodge and duck. It was all happening too fast to analyze.

  Suddenly the other flame-person knotted itself into Conrad’s sword and began to pull. It was talking to him, Conrad realized—that buzzing was a kind of talk.

  Come on, Conrad, it was saying,it’s time to get you out of here. People are going to recognize you from TV, and your next powers are going to use up so much of your crystal-energy that ...

  Conrad braced himself and refused to budge. Just then, four or five spotlights focused on him and the scout ship pilot.

  “DON’T MOVE OR WE’LL SHOOT!” Cops—squad cars full of cops.

  Oh, #*!%, buzzed the other flame-person.I give up. It swooped back to the red-flashing spacecraft and, as suddenly as it had come, the UFO tumbled back up into the sky.

  WOZZZZ.

  Conrad’s bright sword flexed in exultation. Conrad’s human body sighed in relief. The big dog lay there on the ground before him, cut right in two. With the same automatic motion that he’d used before, Conrad raised up his stick of light and slid it down into his spine. Like a sword-swallower. Click. He felt whole again. Good and—

  Fly, thought Conrad.Shrink! Nothing doing. He pocketed the crystal and raised both hands high as if to surrender. The cop cars were about twenty yards off—they couldn’t get any closer, with Conrad in here among the gravestones. Each gravestone cast a dark shadow. It was obvious what to do.

  Con
rad twitched his left hand and dived down to the right. In a shadow. Good. He scuttled backward, shifted to a new shadow, scuttled further. Further. Bright lights, dark shadows. Someone fired a shot, someone screamed not to. There were more cops, circling up on Conrad’s position from behind.

  “WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED!”

  Cops in front of him, cops behind him. By now, they’d lost track of exactly where he was, here in a patch of shadow behind one of ten thousand identical gravestones.If only I looked like a cop.

  The crystal twitched in his pocket, and then Conrad felt his clothes shifting, felt the flesh of his features crawl. All right!

  “He’s not over here!” called cop-voiced Conrad, getting to his feet. He could change his face!Third Chinese brother!

  “I’m going to check over by the wall!” His handcuffs jingled, and his pistol slapped against his leg. The other officers wandered this way and that.

  There was a low stone wall around the cemetery. Conrad found a spot with no people close by and rolled himself over the wall.Mr. Bulber , he thought, as he dropped out of sight.I want to look like Mr.

  Bulber.

  When he got back to his feet, he was a nondescript guy in his early thirties—a carbon copy of his Swarthmore physics teacher, Mr. Bulber. Mr. Bulber had the virtue of being very normal-looking: prim mouth, neatly parted dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, charcoal-gray suit ...

  More and more people were coming to see what was up, but no one noticed “Mr. Bulber” walking off.

  As he walked, Conrad drew out his wallet and took a peek. Money in there, good, and, even better, IDs withCharles Bulber on them.

  Conrad started walking along Route 42. But where to? Probably the cops or someone had gotten footage of him dueling with the other flame-person—which meant that his old cover was thoroughly blown. Plenty of people in Louisville would recognize Conrad Bunger from the pictures. He wasn’t going to be able to look like his old self anymore at all. It was time to get out of town.

  Some teenagers threw a beer can at him from a passing car. Of course. Whowouldn’t throw a beer can at Mr. Bulber, all neat and square in his charcoal-gray suit? He’d want to pick a new body-look before long; but, for now, this was good and innocuous.