The Metrognome and Other Stories

by Alan Dean Foster

  "That's for sure," David put in, evidently relishing his family's notoriety.

  "And they're right, for the most part," his mother went on. "For hereabouts, we are somethin' out of ordinary. Of course, we think everybody else around is a bit crazy, so there's a nice balance struck."

  "Four days," Calumet grumbled. "I suppose we can wait, but " He indicated the empty living room " what if more of their types show up?"

  "Now, I have to admit, that's a problem," agreed Shattuck, speaking around the stem of his pipe. "Soviets, you think?"

  "Possibly," replied Chester guardedly. "One of them, their leader, was our driver. They knew exactly what was going on all the time, through him. But we have nothing far to indicate who they were working for." He indicated the fluorescent alien craft.

  "That would have been worth anybody's trouble. Sure it might have been the Soviets, maybe the Chinese." his surprise, he found he was chuckling. "Or perhaps the French, or the Rockefeller Foundation, I don't know. Whoever it was will find out how monumentally unsuccessful they were.

  "So if you don't mind, just as a precaution, we'll post a suitable guard around the ranch for the next four days."

  "You don't mean you're going to let them keep it up there?" a startled Calumet broke in.

  "What difference will four days make, Mr. Calumet?" Chester wanted to know, speaking in a sharp military manner for the first time. He was feeling a little lightheaded. "Remember the unfavorable publicity we could generate. We don't want Mr. Wheaton flying back from San Francisco with a planeload of panting photographers drooling at his heels.

  "When the proper time comes, I want to see the public informed of our discoveries through scientific journals and channels, as I'm certain you do not through the National Enquirer. Besides, it appears that the device likes it here. Any attempt to move it before we understand what motivates it and we could all be lying like logs out in the yard there.

  "Anyhow," he added at the crestfallen expression on the young scientist's face, "I don't see why we couldn't set up a few trailers here where you could study the device without having to move it . . . if the Shattucks will give us permission." He faced the rancher.

  "Long as they don't go breaking it apart until after the twenty fifth," Shattuck finally agreed. He knocked his pipe against a post, worked to refresh it. "After that they can take it apart to their heart's content." He turned and stared at the subject of the discussion.

  "It sure seems a shame, though, as pretty as it is." He let out a deep sigh, then turned back to Chester. "Not that we object to being protected, you understand, but be sure your people stay outside our fence. I don't want them scaring the cows and tramping through the winter garden."

  "Don't worry, Mr. Shattuck," Chester reassured him, glad to be on familiar ground again. "They'll be stationed well away from the house. Remember, we don't want to draw attention to you."

  "That's okay, then," Shattuck agreed. "You can put your trailers over there, behind the greenhouse."

  Chester turned, squinted into the darkness at a dull white building across from the house. He hadn't paid much attention to it before.

  "There are water outlets back there," Beth Shattuck told him. "You can hook your trailers up to them if you like . . .Tank's plenty full."

  "Thank you. That's very hospitable of you," confessed Calumet, inclined to be friendly now. "What do you grow in your greenhouse, Mrs. Shattuck?" he asked . politely. "Tomatoes, house plants?"

  She shook her head once, pulled out a pipe that matched her husband's, and began filling it. "Nope Tropical orchids. You'd be surprised what the market for fresh grown orchids is in Dallas Fort Worth. I've been experimentin' with some intriguing cross pollination. I'll show you later if you're curious. Right now I'd better go, catch up on my beauty sleep. I need all I can get these, days." She turned and walked away, leaving the suave chemist standing open mouthed.

  The past several days Joe Chester had slept soundly. Tonight his sleep was especially deep, since he could rest secure in the knowledge that tomorrow the troublesome, fascinating alien device would be safely on its way via military helicopter to the Manned Space Center in Houston, allowing him to spend at least a portion of the holiday with his family.

  So the shattering roar and subsequent rolling concussion came as even more of a shock than it would have in the weeks previous. Chester, wartime reactions still active, threw himself out of bed. He was on his feet and stumbling outside before the trailer cot had ceased trembling.

  Freezing air formed a weathery gauntlet that stunned his still warm skin even through the long woolen under wear. The numbness gradually gave way to a steady pounding.

  A soft susurration rose from the surrounding knot of trailers as others came awake, uncertain queries volleying from trailer to trailer. A glance up and down the road showed distant lights winking on. There were two battalions of crack but nonetheless trigger ready troops stationed around the ranch, and they would need to know soon what was going on.

  "Oh, my God, no!" an agonized voice sounded nearby. Then Calumet was rushing past him, clad in pajamas and robe, his bare feet kicking up dirt and gravel behind him as he ran toward the barn.

  Goldberg and Tut appeared shortly thereafter, the big physicist struggling to clear his eyes and adjust his glasses simultaneously. Goldberg simply stared, her mouth moving slowly. She shivered a little and looked her age.

  A light had gone out of the barnyard.

  In its explosive departure the spacecraft had taken the front half of the barn roof with it. Bits and pieces of wood were still raining down on them, clattering like hail on the metal roofs of the trailers and bouncing off the sprawling ranch house nearby. From the front porch the two dogs were barking and whining piteously.

  Looking toward the house, he saw that all three Shattucks were standing there, gazing at the barn. At least, he reflected with stunned relief, they'd elected to display the device on the barn instead of their home.

  "Due west," a shrill soft tone sounded behind him. Following Goldberg's instructions, he turned his eyes to the western sky. A bright star was rising heavenward there, shrinking in intensity as he watched. It was gone quickly.

  Goldberg sat down on the hard earth, her old flannel nightgown crumpling devotedly around her, and sobbed. Chester had no words to assuage the loss of a lifetime's opportunity.

  Tut was trying to comfort her, but Chester could sense that the younger man was having difficulty holding back tears himself.

  As was often true of people in shock, Chester was unaware of his own paralysis. With the clarity of the stunned he noted how only wisps of hay were falling now. He noticed as well that there was no fire in the combustible soft and that none of the fallen fragments of wood were so much as scorched. Their mechanical visitor's method of propulsion was as infinitely cold as the reaches it was once again traversing cold and silent.

  There'd been no muted roar of pitiful, primitive rockets, no whine of energy building. The initial crack had been the sound of bare wood and metal giving way. The subsequent booming had been produced by air rushing in to fill the path displaced by the craft's departure. Again he looked at the vast hole in the barn and marveled at the acceleration achieved so rapidly.

  A dejected figure was walking toward him, head staring dully at the ground. Calumet had both hands in the pockets of his robe, a picture of dejection too severe for the cold to affect. He stopped, noticing that the Shattucks had moved to stand midway between their home and the barn. Chester strolled over to join them all.

  "Well," said Beth Shattuck to the distraught Calumet, "it appears like you were right, after all."

  "Right?" he muttered, seeming to only half hear her.

  "Yep. About it bein' dangerous." She pointed for; ward. "Look what it went and did to our barn. Come on, J.W.," she urged her husband, "we'd better go reassure those fool cows or they'll give nothin' but Bu1garian buttermilk for a month."

  The three Shattucks started for the remains of their b
arn. At least three and maybe four small gray black cats of dubious pedigree trailed in their wake.

  Again Chester stared upward in the direction taken b the vanished visitor from another world, another system. He found that he had to look away. The stars beneath that cloudless big country sky were pressing unbearably close all of a sudden.

  "What do you think happened, Mr. Calumet Jean?"

  Somehow the chemist heard him and gave an indifferent shrug. "It was a robotic lander, probably similar in function to our advanced Viking landers. It set down here, gathered the information it was designed to, and left. Now it's on its way home, that's all." His gaze turned starward, unafraid.

  "The operative question is, How long did it take coming? If it was ten years or something equally reasonable, we may finally meet some of those beings we always told ourselves are running around bumping in each other like crazy out there. If it took a thousand then neither you nor I will be around to see it."

  "I wonder if it set down here accidentally." Chester murmured. "In a way they might be as disappointed as we were after the first couple of Mars landings." He nodded at the barn. "It couldn't have learned very much sitting up there."

  "That all depends on what you want to study," countered Calumet. "I'm not so sure its touchdown here was as random as we might think. It was an incredibly sophisticated device. Can you conceive of an average family reacting to it as the Shattucks did? Their one reaction to it was that it was beautiful.

  "Then we have the matter of the chicken stealing coyotes which the device paralyzed, not to mention those thugs on their way to your base. I'd give twenty years of my life to have a look at the sensing equipment inside that thing.

  "Somehow it must have made up its mind that it liked the Shattucks and this location and that it wasn't going to be moved. Furthermore, it was apparently intelligent enough to decide that the theft of chickens was detrimental to the family. Or that might just have been some sort of experiment. We'll never know. Not now."

  "It's gone," noted Chester perfunctorily, "and there's nothing we can do about it. I'll make a report, calm the troops guarding the ranch, and then we can all go home, I guess. It's finished."

  "I wonder," Calumet murmured, gazing heavenward,

  "What?"

  "Oh, nothing, really. It's just that it's not every night you see a new star recede into the firmament-funny coincidence."

  "What is?" a puzzled Chester wanted to know.

  Calumet looked at his watch. "That in a couple of hours dawn will break on the morning of the twenty-fifth." His smile was crooked. "Maybe we weren't meant to have too close a look at our guest this time around. Merry Christmas, Major."

  Calumet wrapped his robe a little tighter around him and walked toward the big trailer that held sleeping quarters for the three scientists. Chester headed for his own and the field telephone inside.

  He hesitated with the door half open, even though he knew that the heat from the little electric heater was being sucked voraciously into the open air. His eyes went for the last time to the empty path the departed device had taken on its homeward course to no one knew where.

  "And to all a good night," he whispered softly as he closed the door quietly behind him, shutting out the sky.

  COLLECTIBLE

  It's hard to see horror in bright sunshine, when it's warm and all you're wearing are shorts, a tank top, and sandals. It's hard to see horror when everyone around you seems to be having a great time, laughing and taking life easy. But it's always present. Even at its nicest, the world isn't necessarily an inherently benign place. The best we can do is try to shut out the bead and concentrate on the nice. Because if we don't, we end up turning ourselves over to an uncaring reality, to madness or hopelessness or worse.

  There's plenty of terror amid the sunlight. It's just that most of us manage to shut it out. Occasionally, though, it impinges on our consciousness whether we want it to or not. The old drunk shambling across the street in front of the car. The bag lady sifting through garbage in hopes of finding something salable. The husband who goes berserk and murders eighteen family members in Arkansas. The teacher who finally has had too much and shoots a tormenting student.

  That's true horror. Not bloodsucking aristocrats who turn into picturesque flying mammals or vast shapeless eminences from imaginary universes.

  The line that separates the real world from unreality is thin and easily snapped, like cheap elastic. What is real and what is hallucination is not a matter of physics but of perception. Darkness is not always the catalyst for dreams. Life is as real as an individual desires it to be, or as insubstantial. .

  She saw Ehahm na Eulae clearly for the first time when she discovered Frank and her best friend, Maureen, in bed together. It was a nebulous, leering aquamarine smudge on the wall above and behind the water bed. Its long snout hung over the custom headboard, the sinuous body plastered against the woodwork and wall and ceiling like a huge, torpid spider. Clawed forelegs cupped the matching built in bookcase at either side of the bed. Membranous wings scratched by livid arterial lines covered the ceiling from wall to wall.

  Clearest of all the dimly perceived features were the dragon's eyes, bulbous citrine orbs cut by deep crimson slits: whip scar pupils. Vitreous yellow bulbs, they seemed to float freely in their sockets like quicksilver on glass, mocking her. The triforked red tongue flicked nervously at her, and the armored tail caressed the ceiling.

  Neither Frank nor Maureen noticed Ehahm na Eulae. They had neither the inclination nor the sensitivity to see him. Pearl had seen him several times lately, but never before in such detail. Wrinkled covers and sheets fell away from Frank's naked torso as he sat up fast. He brushed long black hair, away from his eyes and forehead, stared at her, and mumbled "Well, shit . . ."

  How eloquent you are, Pearl thought wildly. How predictable. He was no prize . . . but Pearl was no prizewinner. Frank had been far better than nothing, a great deal better than the men she'd become used to. She'd had silly, little girl hopes, fast fading now.

  And Maureen . . . helpful, friendly Maureen . . . lay, lazily alongside traitorous dreams and smiled slyly, her grin a mixture of innocence and snollygostery.

  To lose Frank was bad. To lose him to the one woman Pearl thought she could trust was worse. Emotional critical mass. Critical mess, she corrected herself hysterically. You read too goddamn much. She whirled and fled down the hall.

  "Pearl . . . wait! Pearl, honey!"

  Putting a restraining hand on his chest, the slim girl next to him ran her fingers through the curls there. "Forget it, Frank. There's nothing you can do now. Nothin I can do." She shrugged indifferently. "You can try to help someone like Pearl all you want, but some people are just born sorry."

  "Yeah, but I . . ."

  "There's nothing we can do," she repeated firmly. He allowed himself to be pulled down.

  Halfway back to her own apartment Pearl stopped running. It was a foggy morning, and the beach on her left was still deserted. Stooped and jacketed against the Pacific chill, the lonely figure of some retired man stood silhouetted against the early morning light. He held a metal detector, moving the dish shaped end back and forth across the bronze sand. Back and forth, back and forth, looking more insect than human, he formed a solitary icon of the elderly beach culture.

  Waves massaged the tide line, sucking out and digesting the detritus of the weekend: beer cans; lost rubber sandals on their way back to Taiwan, forgotten toys, banana peels, thousands of fading cigarette butts, Popsicle sticks, sticky paper cones that had once held miniature cumulus shapes of cotton candy.

  Her apartment did not face the ocean, but from her single window she could smell the distinctive sour seaweed odor. She mounted the two flights of stairs, pushed against the recalcitrant door, and stumbled inside. The secondhand alarm clock on the dresser insisted it was seven in the morning. She had thirty minutes to get to work. No time for breakfast, even if she had been hungry. Just coffee.

  A switch an
d several minutes turned the coils of the hot plate red; she, it, and the clock were the only alive occupants of the apartment. The hot plate and the ancient refrigerator filled what would have been the closet. There was a tiny bathroom nearby with a stall shower, john, and sink. The white porcelain was badly wounded, ugly black streaks and circles showing through.

  Filling a cup with hot water from the pot on the hot plate, she added instant coffee and a little sugar, moved to the chair facing the window. Cream was a luxury not to be thought of.

  She sipped tiredly. The water purchased by the beach city was highly mineralized. It gave the coffee a strong alkaline taste she could never get used to.

  The window looked out on the apartment building across the alley. Yellow roll up shades walled off the window directly opposite her own. She'd never seen they open. If humanity resided anywhere beyond that impenetrable barrier of faded yellow paper, she had no idea what it might look like.

  Nor would she ever inquire. Prerequisites for communication in the megalopolis of Los Angeles were a willingness to initiate conversation and a car. Pearl had neither.

  To her surprise, she found her hand was shaking. She'd thought Frank and she had it all together, and that had been helping her get it all together. Now her life was back where it had been last year, one of a karma kind with the broken windows in the back of the building that the garbage men consistently refused to pick up and that, the building's manager obstinately refused to break up and place in cans.

  She surveyed her collection slowly, savoring each item so painfully paid for, and managed to smile. Her stopped shaking. A hobby was good for the soul, she'd been told. It also gave her something else to think about', besides her life, which had taken on all the aspects of permanent residence in a dentist's chair. A friend had suggested the hobby. That friend was dead, killed a year ago by a drunk driver, her body and mind shattered like, the windows back of the building's garage.