Close Encounters of the Strange Kind

by Michael Kerr

  The lift filled to capacity, and Bert Shaw, the attendant, had to ask two patrons to wait for the next one to arrive.

  The doors shuddered together and the brass, arrow-shaped floor indicator slid left to right above the doors, and the small numbered circles lit up in turn as the lift ascended. Inside, Ronnie was wedged in a back corner, behind the heavily laden trolley, as the stuffy car was hoisted up the shaft by singing cables, to stop at the second, third, fourth and fifth floors in turn to allow people egress.

  A little short of the sixth floor, the cubicle jerked to a halt, the lights dimmed, flickered on and off and then went out, entombing the passengers in a gloominess so profound that they might have been struck blind. It was a flawless, total darkness with not a speck of light to give any hope of ever seeing again. Ronnie felt a stab of claustrophobia, and realised that he was holding his breath in the impenetrable murk, as if it was a thick, oozing tar that he would inhale and choke on.

  A child’s scream deafened the other occupants.

  “Relax, folks,” Bert said, clicking a switch to illuminate the lift in a dim amber glow from the emergency lighting. “We’ll soon have this old girl up and running again.”

  Twenty minutes later they were still trapped. Bert had pressed the alarm button, and other staff knew of their plight. The doors on the sixth floor had been forced apart, and a ladder had been lowered to rest on the lift’s roof.

  It was Ronnie that climbed up on to the top of piled suitcases, to unlatch and push back the hatch and lever himself up and out of the slightly swaying car. Looking up, he could see a rectangle of light and the silhouetted shapes of concerned staff. One shone a torch down at him.

  “Quick as you can, Harper,” Ambrose Perkins – the young assistant manager of the hotel – called down to him. “We need to get everyone out as quickly as possible.”

  Good God! Ronnie thought as he saw the state of the single wrist-thick cable that was taking the full weight of the lift. There should have been two of them. One had obviously snapped, and the other was badly frayed and unravelling before his eyes. Even as he watched, the cable came apart with a loud twang, and the lift dropped a few feet before the screeching, antiquated brake system halted it.

  Ronnie fortuitously lost his balance and fell back into the lift, finding a soft landing on the obese American, and unknowingly escaping being decapitated by the whipping cable that had sliced through the air where his head had been half a second before.

  There were more screams and expletives.

  “Shut up,” Ronnie ordered, scrambling to his feet. “We need to get out of here, now, and in an orderly manner.”

  Two young girls – twins in matching blue pinafore dresses – were crying uncontrollably. Their parents were fussing over them, failing to lessen the fear that the youngsters were overcome by. Behind the girls stood a mawkish-looking young man wearing horn rimmed spectacles, who had, excusably under the circumstances, wet himself. The middle-aged and balding American had become less ebullient, and was now parchment-white and blinking rapidly.

  Ronnie could literally smell the fear around him, and knew that he was contributing to it. He had the chilling sensation of death being with them, courting them, and knew that it might yet claim several new souls.

  Without hesitation, Ronnie snatched up the nearest girl and lifted her up to the open hatch. “Go, quickly,” he said to her. “There’s a ladder. Climb up it to the people who are waiting on the floor above.”

  The shaking eight-year-old was still crying, but did as she was bid. One by one Ronnie helped all the passengers out, and even implored old Bert to leave the car before he did. But like the master of a sinking ship, Bert was not going to leave the helm until all others had abandoned the crippled craft that he had been in charge of for nigh on thirty years.

  As Ronnie grasped the ladder, the apparatus that had conveyed people up and down without complaint for decades, rebelled and broke free of all mechanical restraint. The lift fell away, gathering speed as its weight combined with gravity to pull it ever faster, to plummet down, sparks flying as the steel walls scraped against the old brickwork of the shaft, until with a mighty roar it exploded on impact in the basement of the building, sending up a thick plume of dust.

  With a deep sigh, Ronnie put the old memory of that terrible, fear-filled day aside and continued on his way, to reach the very spot where the lift had been reduced to an unrecognisable pile of twisted, crumpled steel, splintered oak panelling, and the inert, broken body of Bert. There was a far more sophisticated system in place these days, computer-linked and with fail-safe mechanisms to supposedly make a repeat of the events that took place in seventy-six impossible.

  Ronnie walked past the site of Bert’s demise and took the stairs up to the lobby. It was full of tourists checking in; a thriving mass of people looking forward to their annual summer vacation at the seaside.

  Walking out through the rear doors, Ronnie skirted the swimming pool and made his way through the gardens to the waist-high gate that opened onto the beach. It was a beautiful day. He would sit awhile in one of the hotel’s deck chairs, which were all a uniform jade green, and stencilled on the underside with the legend: PROPERTY OF THE MAJESTIC HOTEL.

  Comfortable, almost dozing, Ronnie listened to the surf fizzing up on the golden sand. It was cheering to hear the laughter of children, and to see couples strolling hand in hand. Summertime lightened peoples’ spirits, banishing the grey, cold days of winter into the distant past for a few months.

  Ambrose Perkins, who for the previous twenty years had been the manager of the Majestic, looked up from his desk to where a calendar with a picture of two bottle-nosed dolphins leaping from the ocean hung on the wall.

  “Twelfth of July,” he said to Vicky Carmichael, his secretary. “What do you suppose Ronnie Harper might be up to?”

  Vicky smiled. She had only been at the hotel for three years, and in that time had met Ronnie just the once, the previous year.

  “He spoke to me, back in ninety-four,” Ambrose said. “Told me that the handrail on the balcony of room 321 was unsafe. I had it checked out, and it was loose. If someone had leant against it with too much weight, then we would have made headlines that we don’t need, and would have lost a lot of business. And way back in eighty-two, he turned the power off, and maintenance found a fault that could have burned the hotel down.”

  “Would you like a nice cup of tea?” Vicky said.

  Ambrose grinned. “Does that mean you also make nasty ones on request?”

  “You’re about as funny as toothache,” Vicky quipped, heading for the door.

  Left alone, Ambrose closed his eyes and let his mind whisk him back to this fateful date in nineteen-seventy-six. On that now long gone day, one of the porters, Ronnie Harper, had become a hero in the true sense of the much abused word. Ambrose had been called to the sixth floor, to oversee the rescue of passengers and two staff members who were trapped between floors in one of the lifts. It should have been a simple procedure, even when the cables had snapped. But sometimes fate conspired with other forces to cause disaster.

  After helping all the passengers up on to the lift’s roof, from where they climbed to safety by means of a ladder, Ronnie had been arguing with Bert, trying unsuccessfully to cajole him into leaving the lift. Had he not wasted time, then he might have lived.

  Ambrose would carry the sight of the lift dropping away for the rest of his days. He could see the frozen expression of astonishment on Ronnie’s face as they locked eyes for a split second that seemed to last a small eternity.

  Turning to look out of the office window, unable to concentrate on work on the anniversary of the disaster, Ambrose knew that Ronnie would be somewhere on the premises. He always appeared on the twelfth, and Ambrose had the feeling that the late porter was not yet at rest. In fact he was positive that Ronnie Harper did not even realise that he was dead.

  10

  MAROONED

  Had the escape pod been any ne
arer, then it would have come apart as the blast of the shock wave struck and expanded out into space as an invisible ring of superheated gas. As if in the eye of a cosmic hurricane, an absolute stillness ensued. The mother ship had become a brilliant red ball; an artificial sun that mushroomed out, burned up and was no more.

  It felt no emotion at the destruction of its fellow beings, only a certain abstract wonderment at the predicament it found itself in. Motivated by an instinct to survive, it switched on the distress beacon, climbed into the cryo freezer and initiated the sequence, closing its eyes as the capsule filled up with life-sustaining gel.

  “Dearly beloved we are gathered here...”

  Zak leaned back, put his feet up on the console and sipped at the autochef’s conception of what coffee should taste like. Christ! What he’d give for a cup of real java. He tried to imagine the aroma of roasted Colombian coffee beans, but came up woefully short. This trip had been a pain in the ass. Less than seventy-two hours out from Velos, BIC – the Biologically Integrated Computer – had gone off-line, and it had taken Marla over three hours to sort out the glitch and stabilise the primary drive.

  What a crock of shit this job was. Could he really have been the captain of the Charon for almost four years? Piloting the aged body-disposal freighter on its twice-monthly trips to the designated release site on K-300 – a lifeless planetoid in a godforsaken backwater of the quadrant – was beginning to addle his brain.

  “You okay, Zak?” Marla asked from where she was sitting in front of the main view screen watching the funeral service on F deck, which she knew from past experience would run to exactly fifteen minutes.

  “No, Marla. Ferrying stiffs out here for a living isn’t my idea of fun. I might make this my last trip.”

  “And do what?”

  “Maybe go back to Earth. A couple of years in hyper sleep followed by a change of scenery would hit the spot. I have friends back there. I could work on one of the moonside space rigs.”

  “I’ve never been to Earth, Zak. What’s it like?” Marla said as she tapped in the release code and made ready to eject the cargo of deceased Velosians out into eternity.

  “You’ve seen all the virtu-reality stuff,” Zak said. “Now that they’ve equalised the atmosphere again, the people are moving back outside the envirobubbles. They say that there’s even life in the oceans. Can you believe that?”

  “When you’re ready,” the chaplain said over the audiocom.

  Marla hit enter, and the disposal sequence began. BIC confirmed the procedure:

  F DECK VIEWING AREA BULKHEAD SEALED.

  INNER HATCH OPEN.

  DEPRESSURISATION CONFIRMED.

  After double-checking the pressure readouts, Marla tapped enter again. Down in the bowels of the ship, the outer hatch slid open and a klaxon sounded.

  OUTER HATCH OPEN.

  Marla authorised the procedure and watched as eighty-five translucent cylocoffins were jettisoned, to slowly drift away from the hull like glittering teardrops.

  PROCEDURE COMPLETE.

  OUTER HATCH CLOSED.

  PRESSURE EQUALISED.

  “Amen,” Zak said, manually rotating the Charon and fixing a course back to Velos, before cutting the override and handing full control of the ship back to BIC. He felt instantly more buoyant and relaxed, now that they’d dumped their load and were heading for home.

  “You want fresh?” Marla said as Zak finished the gritty dregs of the now cold coffee substitute.

  “Yeah. It’s evil-tasting stuff, but beggars can’t be choosers,” he said, smiling at his first officer.

  Marla was twenty-three; a tall, shapely blonde with cerulean eyes and an IQ that invalidated the old Earth tale that all blondes are dumb. Her only faults – if viewed as such – were a lack of ambition and limited imagination. Marla could have been heading up engineering on one of the sleek long-haul spaceliners, travelling the quadrant first class, but chose to slum on a ‘dead run’ freighter that should have been decommissioned over twenty years ago. Truth was, she valued the laid-back environment and relative solitude that life on board Charon offered. As Zak, she wore T-shirt and shorts, only wearing the funereal black issue garb of the company at launch and landing. There was plenty of time for sleep and recreational activities, and no pressure to socialise with the relatives of the deceased, who were confined to the passenger deck, well away from the bridge.

  Death was a dying industry, Zak thought, excusing his own pun. With medical advances, the average life span was now one hundred and thirty and rising. And planet colonisation was big business. There were now an estimated fourteen billion homo sapiens spread around a score of worlds in this small corner of the Milky Way.

  “There you go,” Marla said, handing him a freshly concocted brew.

  “Thanks,” he said, and turned his attention back to the screen on which he was putting together a request to cancel his contract with Space Eternal Inc.

  Once sown, the seed of returning to Earth was now germinating, and its growth could not be reversed. Zak accepted that he was in a rut, albeit a comfortable one. All he would miss on Velos was Marla. They were close, coexisted smoothly, working well as a team. They even spent much of their downtime on Velos together, and had cohabited in the same living module for awhile, though now lived just a short aircab ride away from each other in Homeport. The present arrangement suited them both, allowing each to keep their independence and own mental ground, while enjoying each others company on a regular basis.

  Zak was thirty, stood six-two, and had the craggy good looks of a view screen star, and knew it. He should have been content with his lot, but wasn’t. There had to be more to life, although what he didn’t know. He always thought the grass was greener someplace else. Whatever grass was.

  The chaplain made his way up in the throughdeck elevator and asked permission to enter the bridge. Marla let him in.

  “Did you catch the service?” he said, overtly letting his eyes feast on Marla’s bare thighs and ample breasts.

  “Yeah, you gave them a neat send off,” Marla said. “Coffee?”

  “No thanks. That synthetic shit’ll take the lining off your stomach,” Faraday said as he pulled the white acriform collar from the neck of his black jumpsuit. “I think space has the perfect ambience for funerals, don’t you? It’s as though the loved ones of the dearly departed can watch them actually enter heaven.”

  Zak almost choked on his coffee. “What would they think if they saw the mountains of cylocoffins that end up on the surface of K-300? That ain’t heaven, rev, it’s a freakin’ dumpsite, and you know it.”

  “You’re a cynical bastard, Zak,” Faraday said, shaking his head as if admonishing a choirboy for singing off key. “I’d rather think of it as a gathering of the deceased; a resting place with no equal. They used to bury corpses in the ground, to rot in wooden boxes, or cremate them. Now, they are preserved for eternity in indestructible cyloware coffins, in a place of serenity among the stars.”

  “Dead is dead,” Zak said. “This operation is purely commercial. The whole funeral package costs a lot more than a new hovercar. It’s a rip-off in my book. The majority of people that don’t have the credits have to be vaporised and don’t get such a theatrical entry to heaven or hell.”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” Faraday said, crossing himself before accepting a cup of iced water from Marla, and sipping the bland liquid. “You get what you pay for, Zak. That’s what makes the worlds go round.”

  Cal Faraday was seventy-three, still only middle-aged, but going a little grey at the temples. And his face was heavily lined, which Zak put down to the thirty years that he had been a chaplain on Zanos, the prison moon. Working on a maximum security facility planet had to take its toll.

  “Well, thanks for the water and your candour. I’ll leave you two to fly this tub home. I’ve got VirtuDisks of the funeral to hand out as mementos to the relations,” Faraday said, tossing his cup into the disposal chute. “Ciao.”

 
“You were trying to needle him,” Marla said as the multi-denominational ecclesiastic returned to his waiting flock.

  Zak nodded. “Damn right I was. He rattles my cage. He’s on the board of Space Eternal Inc. The old charlatan makes millions of credits a year, and is reputed to even own a huge chunk of Earth; almost half of what used to be North America a few centuries ago, before the Viral Wars.”

  “I don’t think he’d do these trips if he was that well-heeled.”

  “He does the odd one, just to keep his hand in. I think he feeds off grief, and enjoys the sense of occasion. Getting up in his pulpit and performing is a drug. He’s used to captive audiences.”

  Zak and Marla showered together, made out under the hot spray, and then grabbed some sleep.

  The first few hours inbound passed without incident. They were both up, eating an offering from the autochef when the mainscreen came to life, accompanied by BIC’s metallic verbal communication:

  ACOUSTIC TRANSMISSION RECEIVED.

  “From Velos?” Zak asked.

  NEGATIVE.

  “So, who is it?”

  SOURCE NOT KNOWN.

  “Get specific, you dumb computer.”

  SIGNAL REPEATS AT INTERVALS OF 9.3 SECONDS.

  NOT RECOGNISED AS BEING OF HUMAN ORIGIN.

  “What’s the message?”

  INDECIPHERABLE.

  “Speculate BIC, for Christ’s sake.”

  PATTERN SUGGESTS DISTRESS SIGNAL.

  “Put it on audio.”

  White noise hissed through the speakers. BIC screened out the background static and a guttural series of snarls and clicks flash froze Zak’s and Marla’s spines.

  “What the hell was that?” Marla whispered. “It sounds alive. But that wasn’t a language.”

  “Identify,” Zak said.

  NOT POSSIBLE. SUSPECT IT TO BE ALIEN LIFE FORM.

  “It could be anything, Zak,” Marla said. “We can’t alter course and disrupt the flight because of a few weird noises.”