Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  “Like I saw scratched on the hull.”

  “Quite.”

  “Dreams of what?”

  She began to detach her helmet, lifting it off the neck ring and over her head. I was aware then, I think, of movement farther down that grotesque row. Just a subtle shifting of the light. That was almost subconscious; I was distracted by what she was saying.

  Which was: “Magnolia Jones, meet the Great Old Ones.”

  That was the first time I heard the name. But not the last. No, not the last.

  I responded as you would have. “Who?”

  “The ancients of days. Those who filtered down from the stars when the Earth was young. And who concocted life on Earth as a joke. Or a mistake, perhaps—”

  I saw the lash, an instant before it hit her face.

  Or would have. She had her helmet half-off, lifted in her gloved hands. I just balled my fist and punched down on the top of her helmet so it slammed back into place.

  And the lash—curling in that cramped space, it must have been eight, nine feet long—slapped against the helmet, and I saw some kind of venom squirt against the glass. Some of it caught my gloved hand, and it stung like hell, even through the tough vacuum-proof fabric.

  I dragged Peabody out of the way. Shocked, maybe a bit dazed from my punch, she was like a statue herself.

  And now I faced the thing that had emerged from the foliage. It was kind of a big mobile plant, coming out from that line of rough statues. Where it had been hiding, I realized with a kind of deep horror. Bent over under that low roof, it might have been ten feet tall. Up top there was a kind of funnel, like an immense, drab flower, from which that venomous sting dangled. A straight stem twisted and writhed as the thing tried to get closer to me. I saw that it was actually chained up. A plant that hid, waiting for prey. Waiting, maybe, for Peabody to take off her helmet so it could get at her face.

  I took in all this in about two breaths. That sting was winding back for another lash.

  I shot it with my reaction gun. My personal rocket pistol: call me Buck Rogers. I shot it in the funnel, which splashed and scattered, I shot it in the stem in two, three, four places. A kind of oil filled the air, droplets of it, leaking from the broken flesh.

  Peabody had recovered. “Thanks,” she said laconically. “If that had got me in the face—”

  “What the hell was it?”

  “A triumph of Soviet biological engineering. I imagine the cosmonauts were instructed to do experiments on how it adapted to weightlessness.”

  “Too damn well, I’d say. Why the hell would anybody engineer such a thing?”

  “Biofuels,” she said simply.

  “And do you think this is what killed off Gagarin and the rest?”

  “Oh, I doubt it very much.”

  That polite British understatement scared me more than all I had seen so far.

  “I can see the hatch to the next compartment. We go on.”

  She nodded. “We go on.”

  Without letting myself think about it, I shoved aside the crude statues, yanked aside the foliage to expose the hatch, and turned the next red wheel.

  And I saw, from the corner of my eye, that as Peabody passed the Great Old Ones statues, she gave them a kind of salute—a bow, like a zero-gravity genuflection, and a splayed-hand salute. A five-pointed star.

  I trusted her less and less.

  IV

  More forest. That was my first impression, as I pushed my way through the hatch.

  More of those damn trees, pine and fir. Another chamber, like a great green mouth, swallowing me up. How could there be so much vegetation? What was feeding it? Maybe this was a living version of the sense of space distortion I’d had since we’d swum into this pit in the sky. Just as this station was too big on the inside, so it contained too much life. If you could call it life.

  There was an odd glow too. Sometimes I thought there was a kind of sparkle about the needles on those pine trees—like the St. Elmo’s fire I’ve seen a few times on the rigging of splashdown recovery ships. And something more elusive. The air in there was wet, almost misty, and there was a glow about that mist, a color I couldn’t put my finger on.

  Peabody had pressed ahead. Now she called me. She’d come to a kind of clearing in the choked-up forest.

  Here, I could see more details of the workplace that this station was evidently intended to be. There was cosmonaut stuff on racks on the walls—spare pressure suits, bottles of water and air, instrument panels, electronics racks. Big TV screens which, no doubt, had once relayed images of US ICBM sites and naval bases. More mundane features. An exercise bike, a treadmill. Seats around a table, bolted in place so they didn’t drift off. Photos of wives and girlfriends and little kids, pinned to a notice board. Sunshine and pigtails. It was like an explorers’ shack, in the wilderness of space. It was kind of heartbreaking, when you thought about how these guys had ended up, obsessively cutting up their stuff to make those statues of the “Old Ones” that had, evidently, plagued their dreams.

  Peabody told me to take a look for anything like a lab bench. There must have been some kind of samples of extraterrestrial materials in here, she said. Maybe like meteorite samples. I took a look, at the little work tables, the instruments, microscopes and spectroscopes, the sample dishes held down by little clips. Everything was murky, covered in mold and slime and dirt. But I couldn’t see anything like meteorite rock. When I reported that back to Peabody, she wasn’t surprised.

  I thought I heard something, then, deeper inside the choking green. A kind of whimper. A child, an animal?

  But Peabody hadn’t heard, and now she was beckoning me farther in. Come see.”

  “See what?”

  “I found our cosmonauts.”

  If not for the coveralls and soft boots they still wore, I don’t think I’d have recognized the remains as human at all.

  Lodged in the foliage, they were two gray figures, spilling out of those uniforms. The bodies were bloated and swollen in some parts, shriveled in others. One had his head turned aside, and something of his face had survived. His mouth was stretched grotesquely wide, like a cartoon scream of agony. Bits of gray, like ash, drifted out of that mouth—the remains of his tongue, perhaps. His eyes were holes.

  They had bled out, these cosmonauts, and some of that blood had dried on the hull plate. I was distracted by little hard knots of white, stuck by the blood to the plate. They were human teeth.

  Peabody placed a cautious gloved hand on the head of one of the cosmonauts. At the touch it imploded, like a puffball fungus. We both flinched back. I had an immediate, visceral dread of breathing in any of this gray, ashy stuff.

  “I ought to take a sample,” Peabody said. “But I can see it’s the same symptoms as the 1882 infestation in Massachusetts.”

  “Only two of them.”

  “Yes. And neither is Gagarin; these two have nametags on their coveralls. We need to get to that third chamber.”

  But again that whimper. I glanced at Peabody; this time she had heard it too.

  “Something’s alive in here,” I said. I turned away, and pushed deeper into the foliage-choked chamber.

  And I found a dog.

  She was strapped into a kind of frame, what looked like the remains of a gutted electronics rack. She had tubes inserted into her body through crude, seeping wounds, tubes that led to flasks of what looked like water and some kind of gelatinous food, and to tanks of urine and feces. The food and water were nearly drained, and the waste tanks nearly full.

  And her head . . .

  The skin and flesh had been removed from one side of the skull. The brain was exposed under clear plastic. Electrodes dug into the soft gray matter. A thick cord of wiring led from the back of her head to a kind of distribution point on a control panel nearby. What looked like a power lead was plugged into one eye socket.

  And she seemed to be attached to the infestation of vegetation in the station too. Her frame rested on a kind of cradle
of wood, shoots and lianas curled up through the metal, and green tendrils snaked into the gray stuff inside her head, alongside the electric leads.

  None of this technology looked human, even though it had evidently been fixed up with scraps and materials from this human installation, this station. It was too advanced. As if a modern engineer had improvised a space rocket from the ruin of a James Watt steam pump, and placed her inside . . .

  Her. I knew who this dog was. I remembered the pictures the Soviets had put in the papers when she had had her few days of extraordinary fame. I recognized the long snout, the big perky ears, the one bright eye. This was Laika.

  She looked at me, and whimpered again.

  I cupped her face, the unharmed side, and stroked her neck. We always had dogs in Georgia. Whole happy packs of them. “So they got you back, did they, babe? But look what they did to you. Look what they did. Does it hurt? Well, it won’t hurt any more.”

  I raised my rocket gun.

  I felt cold metal in the back of my neck. “Lower it, Jones.”

  Cautiously, I obeyed. And when I turned around, just as cautiously, I saw Peabody, sitting there beside her backpack nuke, pointing a revolver at me.

  So. I knew she’d been lying to me, on some level, since before we launched. Now the game was on. It was almost a relief.

  “You won’t shoot,” was my opening gambit. “Because if you do you’ll blow a hole in the side of this station and kill yourself.”

  She smiled. “Funnily enough we thought of that.”

  Supercilious Brit.

  “Soft-nosed bullets, low velocity. Designed to kill people, not blow up space stations. The choice of whether to test the design is up to you.”

  I looked down at poor Laika. “Why don’t you want me to kill the dog?”

  “Because, obviously, she’s become an integral part of the system. Oh, I imagine she was retrieved here as an extension of the experiment that sent her into orbit in the first place. A study of the effect on the body of years in space. But of course the Zarya has . . . evolved. And so, it seems, has she.

  “Look at her, Jones—you’re enough of an engineer to see it. The ship itself is alive now, in a sense. Infested, transformed, a blend of the human, the technological, the biological—an amalgamation of the terrestrial with the alien. Inextricable. And Laika has clearly become a part of the systems that keep this place running. Her brain is being used as a natural processor to—”

  “What do you want, Peabody?”

  She said nothing to that. Even then, I suspected there were many more layers to this than I was guessing. That maybe she was betraying everybody, the military as well as the Lovecraft people. Not to mention me.

  Time to go fishin’ again, Mags, as my pappy used to say.

  “Look—you can’t kill me, Peabody. Not without killing yourself. Good luck with getting back to the Gemini alone, let alone piloting it downstairs.”

  She frowned. “My personal safety isn’t the only consideration.”

  “How did I know you’d say something like that? Come on, Peabody. You’re no strip-cartoon fanatic. Your life is a consideration, at least. Think how valuable you are to the cause.” Whatever the hell that cause was. “Maybe you’ll achieve a win-win, maybe you’ll reach your goals and survive. But to do that you’re going to have to start telling me the truth. And time’s running out, remember. You still want to be out of here before totality—right?”

  She thought that over. At my side, Laika whimpered again, and I stroked her again.

  “Very well,” Peabody said, at last. She sighed. “You’re going to have to see the bigger picture, Jones. Keep your small mind open.”

  I shrugged. “Shucks, I’ll try.”

  She looked at me, intent. The gun not wavering.

  “Here we are out in space, Jones. I know you have an orderly mind. And I bet you like to think that the universe is just as orderly, don’t you?

  “Well, it’s not. We suspected the existence of—anomalies—in the solar system even before we ventured into space ourselves. Look at the 1882 incursion. How could all that stuff get here? And since we sent out probes it’s all been confirmed. The solar system is riddled, like Swiss cheese, with . . . holes, Jones. Tunnels that connect here to there, out beyond distant Yuggoth.”

  “Yuggoth?”

  “The Ninth Planet . . . Oh, it’s not just a question of short cuts—of all those four hundred billion stars in the galaxy suddenly bumping up against the gardens of the sun. It’s a question of categories of existence clashing. Places where different kinds of reality mesh, like the components of a machine. The flaws, the gateways, are called time-convergent funnels. Or more strictly, chronosynclastic—”

  “Gardner.”

  “What?”

  “In the transfer van. He said the same thing, or quoted it: ‘It come from some place whar things ain’t as they is here . . .’”

  She nodded. “You get the idea. Well, for a long time—longer than you will guess, Jones—these flaws have allowed various entities to, um, influence the story of our Earth, and ourselves. Zellaby, who died in the Midwich changelings incident, wrote of an ‘Inventor’ who repeatedly meddles with life on Earth. Like dropping cultures into an already crowded petri dish. I think it’s more random than that, and multiple agencies are involved, but that’s the essence. Invasions from space.

  “As for the Great Old Ones, they may have been the first of all. First discovered, scientifically anyhow, by the Dyer expedition to the Antarctic in the 1930s, in a layer of Precambrian rocks, a billion years old.”

  That didn’t mean much to me. “Seems kind of early.”

  She raised a cultured eyebrow. “Kind of early, Jones, yes. Life on Earth was only just beginning to experiment with body plans more complicated than the amoebas. The fossils Dyer’s people found—” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, at the chamber we’d left, the statues.

  “The Old Ones?”

  “They came here from somewhere else. They may have—I would say probably—kick-started the evolution of complex life on Earth, and exploited it, but didn’t meddle with its evolution beyond that. This is the secret of life, Jones. Our life.

  “And they stayed here, ever since. They built cities. And they suffered extraterrestrial invasions of their own. The spawn of Cthulhu. The Mi-Go—you know them as the Yeti—”

  “But humans evolved regardless.”

  “Yes. But we’re aware of incursions by other kinds of beings, which surely did affect our evolution. There’s an abnormal humanlike skull, twelve million years old, found in Kenya—much older than the conventional chronology. Fendelman Industries, linked to the HPL—we use them for missile-guidance systems—is putting a lot of money into studying that one. Five million years ago, a ship apparently from Mars crashed to Earth under modern London— it’s thought that Piltdown Man may have come out of that.”

  “Piltdown? I thought that was a hoax.”

  “Of course you did. And, just recently, the space probes have detected slightly younger magnetic anomalies, a pair of them—one in the Olduvai Gorge, in Africa, with, remarkably, a match on the Moon.”

  “Tycho.”

  “I mentioned that, didn’t I? Olduvai, you see—right on the spot where the Leakeys have shown that modern hominid evolution was kick-started, and the right timing, too, three million years ago.”

  I thought that over. “Magnetic anomalies. Pilots know about those. We call them dragons, popcorn, echo haze.”

  “Sure. And the records kept by the airlines and air forces have been analyzed by the League and other agencies, in our search for such anomalies. We found one just last week in Maine, a town called Haven . . .

  “And we’re not alone, in suffering these incursions. Even on Mars, Jones! Even there the Inventor has been tinkering! Since 1956, our resourceful Robinson Crusoe has been sending back reports of some tantalizing archaeology. A worldwide catastrophe that Ivor Dare of Cardiff dates back two hundred thousand years, caus
ed by some kind of hive mind from space, perhaps.”

  “Ancient history, Peabody. And time’s running out.” Again Laika whimpered, and again I stroked her. “Not long now, girl.”

  “All right, all right. Look—of more immediate concern are the incursions that are happening right now. I mentioned the Midwich event in middle England: that one began with something like a meteor fall. And five years ago we had an unusual pattern of meteor strikes in the oceans. All in the deeps. There has been some . . . interaction since.”

  “Interaction?”

  “Well, to be blunt, a US Navy carrier called the Keewenaw has been lost, near the Marianas. Harriman Nelson is still urging attempts at contact. Ideally we could form an alliance with these particular visitors—even use them as a picket around R’lyeh.”

  “Woah. What’s R’lyeh? . . . Never mind.”

  “Anyhow, you can see what we’re having to deal with here—”

  “How come nobody knows about any of this? We’ve got the radio, television.”

  She snorted. “Do you ever watch television? Sports and soap operas. Consumed by a population already sedated by cheap alcohol and fast food. Television was designed to distract, not inform.”

  I shook my head. “Yet some do get to report this stuff, in a way. Lovecraft for one. That copy of Amazing Stories—”

  “Oh, certainly. There has always been a dribble of truth escaping in quasi-fictional accounts. Lovecraft himself saw it all clearly, with the mind’s eye, at least. It’s probably safest if you believe that all the fiction you read is true, and all the factual content is a lie. Fiction is truth: truth is fiction. Hmm . . . That could be pithier. Ignorance is strength, perhaps.” She actually made a note of the phrase in her notebook.

  I thought the light was diminishing. I didn’t know if we ourselves would pass into the zone of totality ourselves.

  I said: “Tell me about the Color.”