The Alien MEGAPACK®

by Talmage Powell

  Graham was a little hysterical. All his life he had sought to push aside if only for a little while the veil over the face of truth. Now he had in his hands a creature that possessed knowledge beyond that of all the human race. True, the creature was dangerous, it was deadly, but it could be guarded, and Graham had no intention of destroying it until he learned what it knew.

  When the men of the guard came cautiously forward in response to the girl waving a tiny pocket handkerchief, they found the two men guarding very, very carefully what looked like a most unusual crystal ball.

  They’re still guarding that crystal ball, these two men and one woman, guarding it with their lives.

  The whole story of the unusual events in and around the town of Elm Point has long since died out in the newspapers. The public has forgotten what happened there.

  But two men and one woman have not forgotten. They live in an old house on a quiet side street in New York City, an old house that has a high stone wall around it, to keep out intruders.

  In one of the rooms in that old house is a large safe constructed of a special grade of beryl steel so tough that even a torch would not cut it. The combination to that safe is known to only three people on earth.

  Within that safe is kept a crystal ball. Daily they take the ball from its resting place and daily they force it to reveal to them more and more of its history. And a strange history it is.

  Some day they hope to learn from it a little of how the universe is constructed.

  THE BIG FIX, by Richard Wilson

  Originally published in Infinity Science Fiction, August 1956.

  I was meeting The Man in a cafeteria on West End Avenue—the rundown part of the avenue south of 72nd Street where all the garages and auto parts places are.

  I didn’t need a fix. I’d been off the junk for three months and I was all right. I was drinking a lot, but that was all.

  The meet in the cafeteria was set up by an old connection of mine who’d heard I was interested in this new stuff. My connection’s name was Rollo, sometimes called Rollo the Roller because he rolled lushes in the subway.

  Rollo and I had coffee while we waited for The Man. “He’s a funny one,” Rollo said. “Not like any other pusher I ever dig.”

  “You’re sure he’s straight?” I asked. “He wouldn’t be one of The People, would he?”

  “Nah, he’s no agent. Don’t you think I can make a cop or a Federal by now?”

  “All right. I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

  We sipped our coffee and talked in low voices. The cafeteria wasn’t a regular joint. It might be in time, and then it would be one till it got too hot, but it wasn’t now.

  I didn’t see the guy come in. The first thing I knew he was standing at the table over us. Tall, wearing a black suit like an undertaker or a preacher, but with a dark blue shirt and a white tie. He had a young-old face and his skin was a light tan. Not the tan you get at Miami Beach or from a sun lamp, but as if he had Chinese or Malay blood in him somewhere.

  Rollo jumped a little when he noticed him at his elbow.

  “Oh, hello, Jones. Creepin’ up on people again. Sit down. This is Barry.”

  I acknowledged the introduction. I was sure Jones wasn’t his real name any more than Barry was mine. I asked him if I could buy him a cup of coffee and he said no, and then Rollo left. Rollo’d mumbled something about business, but I got the feeling he didn’t like being around Jones any more than he had to.

  “I understand you are interested in my product,” Jones said. He had dark brown eyes, almost black. He didn’t talk like a pusher, but you can’t always make generalizations.

  “I don’t want to score any,” I said. “At least not right now. I’m off the stuff, but I take a sort of philosophical interest in it, you might say.”

  “I could not sell you any at the moment, in any case,” Jones said. “I do not make a practice of carrying it on my person.”

  “Of course not. But what is it? Rollo tells me it’s not the usual junk. I wondered if maybe it was yage.”

  Yage was something you kept hearing about but never saw yourself. It was always somebody who knew somebody else who’d tried it. Yage was the junkie’s dream. You never caught up with it, but you heard hints in conversation.

  An addict would give himself a fix of Henry, sliding the needle into the vein, and later, as his tension relaxed, he’d say to his connection, “I hear yage is the real kick—they tell me that compared to yage, heroin is the least.” And the connection would say, “That’s what they tell me, but I never seen any of it myself. They have it in the Amazon or someplace, I hear.”

  It’s always hearsay. But after a while you hear so much about it that you believe it’s got to be around somewhere, so you keep asking. I asked Jones.

  “I could show you yage,” Jones said, and I felt a tingle, like a kid promised his first kiss. “But it would disappoint you.”

  “Why?”

  “It is like peyote—just another herb. It has a similar effect to that of the Mescal cactus button, but since you would not seem to be a devotee of the Sun Dance I do not think it would interest you.”

  I went into a slump again when I heard him run down yage. I knew what peyote was. It might be all right for Indians, but it just made the average junkie sick to his stomach.

  “What would interest me, then?” I asked him.

  “I have a certain amount of a substance called uru,” he said. “It is—and I do not exaggerate when I say this—the most.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. Jones had been speaking the store-bought English of the educated foreigner and then he came out with this hep expression.

  “Tell me more, professor,” I said. “You’re ringing my bell.”

  “You tell me more, my friend,” he came back. “What is your great interest in this will-o’-the-wisp yage that so excites you, although you claim to be off the stuff’?”

  I could almost hear the quotation marks he put around the phrase.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”

  So I went into the crazy old dream—the feeling that there’s something better someplace, something you can take or leave alone, that doesn’t leave you with that wrung-out, hopeless horror of junk sickness when you can’t get the stuff.

  I told him about the other addicts—how they feel this kinship that’s not like any other relationship anywhere—how you have that exalted feeling of mingled hope and despair when another junkie is coming with a fix for you—and how by just drifting around in a strange city you find yourself drawn to the right district to score the stuff. How it’s almost telepathic.

  I told him what they said about yage, that some South American croaker had isolated from it a fix he called telepathine. How it was supposed to be some kind of miracle dope that you could take when you wanted it without actually needing it, and it would open up the world for you so you’d be close, really close, to others like you. So your mind would be their mind. A union more terrific than any other kind—as far beyond even the ideal sexual climax, for instance, as sex is beyond a bow or a handshake. So there’d be a togetherness you couldn’t achieve any other way. So you wouldn’t be so…alone.

  I felt embarrassed after talking like that, even though Jones listened as sympathetically as anybody could, so I got up to get another cup of coffee at the counter.

  “Okay,” I said defensively as I spooned in the sugar. “I’ve told you about me. Now what about that stuff of yours—what do you call it again?”

  “Uru,” he said. “It is what yage is said to be, but is not. You would like it. But you tell me you are ‘off the stuff’.”

  “Off the old stuff. It’s no good and I’ve licked it. Off with the old,” I said, beginning to feel a little high already, “and on with the new. Uru, eh?”

  This might be it. The most. The big fix. I had to have
it.

  “You shall try it,” Jones said. “You shall judge for yourself. Then if you want more I will provide it for you. There will be no charge.”

  Right away I got suspicious. Nobody gives anything away. I could be a come-on. Jones might figure I’d like it so much I’d have to have more and then I’d pay and pay. But on the other hand maybe he figured wrong. Nothing is habit-forming once. I didn’t know anything about this uru, but I knew all there was to know about everything else.

  “Okay,” I said. “When?”

  “I will call you,” Jones said.

  I gave him my number.

  * * * *

  He had a place on East 45th, a ratty old brownstone. It didn’t look as if he’d lived in it long. But that was to be expected; if you were a pusher you had to keep on the move. After a while a landlady got suspicious about all the queer characters visiting this one guy and the next step was the cops.

  Jones had called me the day after our talk in the cafeteria, setting up a meet for that afternoon. I’d had a dream about uru, a wild and wonderful dream that made it impossible for me not to go. I’m a hunch-player, anyway. So I went.

  But I was cautious enough to leave my money home and not to wear my best clothes. Then if it turned out that Jones was pulling a lush-worker switch, feeding junkies a knockout fix and rolling them, I wouldn’t lose much.

  He was wearing the same black suit. His closet door was open and I could see that there were no clothes hanging in it. Maybe he hadn’t unpacked yet, though I didn’t see a suitcase anywhere.

  I didn’t think much about these things at the time. Jones smiled and shook hands with me. Then he excused himself and went out into the hall. So far so good. No smart pusher keeps the stuff in his room. Possession carries a stiff rap.

  I had my works with me—needle and eyedropper—but Jones told me I wouldn’t need it. I was surprised. If his place wasn’t a shooting gallery, what was it? A weed joint? Weed was no good—that was fag stuff. Marijuana, bennies, goof balls, nembies—that stuff was nowhere for a cat who’d been mainlining it for a decade. I told that to Jones.

  He smiled and told me to relax. He meant it literally.

  “Lie down on the bed,” he said. “Take your coat off. No, don’t roll up your sleeve.”

  He pulled down a blue shade over the single window and the room got dim. Sunlight squeezed through the cracks at the edges and made shimmering little patterns on the walls and ceiling.

  He took a cigarette holder out of his pocket. It was green, like jade, and carved around its fat middle was a design of some kind. I couldn’t make it out, even when I held it in my hand.

  Jones put a cigarette in the holder. It looked like an ordinary king-size smoke and I told him so.

  “That is correct,” he said. “It is not the cigarette that provides the effect, but the uru in the holder. The smoke travels over the uru and activates it. Enough of it is absorbed by the warm smoke for the desired result. Do not inhale too deeply the first time.”

  I took a short drag, half suspecting he was conning me. Nothing happened right away. It didn’t taste any different from any cigarette smoked through a holder. I took another drag, deeper this time.

  I was off.

  I became a tiny replica of myself, swimming effortlessly within my own eyeball, looking down the length of that other me lying on the bed. My feet looked a mile away. I moved them and it seemed to take almost a minute for the impulse to communicate itself from my mind along the vast body.

  Then I lost interest in my body as the flecks of sunlight on the ceiling became tiny planets, whirling in perfect, intricate orbits around a fiery blue-white sun.

  The smoke in the room climbed up in a graceful dance and became a dust-cloud in the sparkling solar system. The dark head of Jones came into view among the tiny worlds, not obscuring them. The little jewel-like planets were a shimmering crown hovering about him.

  He spoke then, and his words echoed to me as if through the vastness of infinity itself.

  “Barry,” the voice said, powerful but warm, far away but deliciously close, awesome but comfortable. “Barry, my good friend.”

  I could see the great face, both with my real eyes and with the eyes of that tiny other me swimming within. It was a mighty face, but reassuring—the face of a kind father and loving wife and adoring son all in one. The face was smiling a dear familiar smile.

  But the lips were not moving. The voice was that of a mind, reaching out through vastness and into my own thoughts.

  “You are not alone,” the mind-voice said, and it was what I had been waiting to hear. “You are one with all good things. The door you have been seeking is open. You have only to walk through.”

  I had been swimming, but now I walked. It was like no other kind of walking. It was like ice-skating in a way, a smooth, effortless glide. The tiny me walked, glided, out of my body and up, up in a curl of smoke, across a million miles of blackness toward the shimmering worlds.

  “I found the door,” I thought, and knew the words were being communicated to him. “I thank you and I am walking through. It is a beautiful world you have. It sparkles so. I love it.”

  I could say these things to him with my mind, meaning them, unashamed of the innermost feelings that would have been throttled off unspoken if I’d had to use the vulgarity of speech.

  He understood that, too, and his smile became warmer. There was a bond here I’d never experienced, a warm gushing of myself to him and to this world he’d opened for me. The warmth was reciprocated instantly. His face showed it, his mind told me and the glittering worlds seemed to join in his message of esteem and one-ness.

  There was more; but later I couldn’t remember it all. The beauty of a thing can’t be recreated in its absence. Only the memory of it lingers. But the memory of an exalted experience has a beauty of its own.

  After a while I came back. Back to my gross self lying on the bed, the jade-green cigarette holder in my fingers, a long ash on. the end of the cigarette. So I had been away only a minute or two in our time. It had seemed hours in his.

  Gradually the sparkling worlds reverted to patches of sunlight and the dust-cloud to tobacco smoke.

  Jones stood near the bed. Gently he took the holder from my fingers and snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray.

  “You are pleased,” he said, speaking with his voice now. “You have told me that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Oh, yes.” I wanted to say much more, but the inhibition of speech was on me now.

  “I understand. Do not talk. You are still too close to it. The change is too great. But some of it remains with you, does it not?”

  I nodded. It did. There was no great letdown. No harsh awakening to the detested world of everyday. It must have been because I carried over with me enough of the memory to cushion the shock of adjustment. I sat up. I felt fine.

  “You have had only a glimpse,” he said. “You must go now. But perhaps you will come back?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “Of course. I will call you.”

  He helped me on with my coat. I went down the stairs and out into the sunlight.

  * * * *

  Jones didn’t call for days. I hardly left my room, waiting for the phone to ring. Once I walked over toward 45th Street, but I turned back before I got there. Jones had said he’d call me and I didn’t want to get him angry with me.

  Rollo came over to my place one night. He had some junk left over from scoring and offered me a fix. I didn’t want it.

  “Still off the stuff?” he asked.

  “Off that stuff,” I said. “That stuff is nowhere.”

  “You sound like you’re somewhere else. Did The Man make it for you on the yage kick?”

  “Yage’s over the rainbow,” I told him. “Uru is here and now.”

  “Uru. Is that what Jones
serves? Never heard of it. Mind if I shoot a little old-fashioned horse here? I got trouble finding a vein lately. Maybe you’ll help me.”

  He rolled up his sleeve and took out his equipment. He tied a handkerchief around his arm to make the veins stand out and I helped him locate one. I cooked up the stuff and shot it home for him. He cleaned out the needle under the faucet and we sat down and had cigarettes.

  “So tell me about this uru,” Rollo said.

  “It’s truly the most, man,” I said.

  But I couldn’t go on. Rollo was a lush-worker, a cheap hood. I’d feel self-conscious trying to describe how it was. Telling him would be like dirtying it up. So I generalized.

  “It’s a real bang,” I said. “A speedball with a jet assist. It’s gone, brother. It takes you there, but there.”

  “You sound like a teahead,” he said. “Is that what it is, tea?”

  So I told him that was about right and he went away feeling superior. He used the white stuff and I was only a viper. So he thought. Let him think what he wanted. I’d been with it; I knew, and that was enough. It was like being one of the elite.

  The phone rang and sweat came out in my palms as I picked it up.

  It was Jones, asking if I wanted to travel with him again.

  Travel. That was a new one. But it certainly described it. I told him yes, trying not to let him know how eager I was. But I had the feeling he understood, even over the phone. And it didn’t matter. I didn’t have anything to hide from him. He was my friend.