by Mick Farren
When he continued to fall for what felt like a major slice of time without hitting anything, Jim started to rethink his situation. Perhaps he was in free fall. Perhaps the UFO was switching him between external and internal gravity. As if as a reward, or punishment for his deduction, a searing flash of static blinded him, leaving him in a kaleidoscope of dazzling afterimages. He fell heavily, maybe a foot or more, to a metal floor. The impact was bone-jarring, but did no damage. Jim groaned and rolled over. His shoulder hurt, his elbow was throbbing, his ego was bruised, and he was angry at the inhospitable reception. Slowly he climbed to his feet, wondering what the next indignity might be.
The air was breathable and warm, although it was a little too humid and smelled of something industrial. He slowly turned, half crouching in the stance of a circling wrestler, arms slightly in front of him, ready for anything. He spoke tentatively, more to observe what might happen than to actually communicate with anyone. “You know something? This is really not my idea of being piped aboard.”
As he spoke, the lights came up and the air changed. The atmosphere turned clammy, and the unidentified industrial smell was replaced by something more like battery acid. The light was, in every sense, unearthly. The blue glow looked like the interior of a iceberg. It seemed to have no direct source but somehow suffused the entire chamber with a soft luminescence. The nature of the light made it hard to judge distances; had Jim not been well versed in hallucination, he might have thought something was wrong with his eyes.
He seemed to be standing on the curved bottom of a ribbed metal cylinder, like the inside of some large storage tank, perhaps about twelve feet in diameter. The arching ribs of the cylinder and sections of the wall plates were engraved with lines of unreadable ideograms. Aside from the extraterrestrial script, it all seemed a little mundane, but Jim reserved judgment. Although the script meant nothing to him, the individual characters bore a distinct resemblance to the crop markings he had seen on the way to the Crossroads. He shook his head. “If you want to leave us notes in the cornfields, you really ought to learn to write English. Or send us a dictionary.”
Immediately the final phrase came back at him, loud and squeakily metallic, something between a mimic and an instant replay: “If you want to leave us notes in the cornfield, you really ought to learn to write English. Or leave us a dictionary.”
This mimicking voice had a Mickey Mouse pitch, like his own voice on helium. Jim blinked. A second level of alien bullshit? His mood was turning surly. He needed a drink. “What did you say?”
“What did I say?”
Jim sighed. “Don’t give me fucking Ray Charles.”
The disembodied squeak also sighed. “Fucking Ray Charles.”
Jim knew he was being mindfucked. “Yeah, I get it.”
“Yeah, you get it.”
“How long do we have to play this game?”
“Until you feel ready to step through the membrane.”
This actual reply to a question took Jim by surprise. “The membrane?”
“The membrane.”
Jim wasn’t sure if the parrot routine had started again. Without his saying a word, the voice answered him. “No, this isn’t the parrot routine. If you don’t like it where you are, pass through the membrane.”
“What membrane?”
“Look to the end of the chamber, schmuck.”
Raising an eyebrow at the jibe, Jim looked to the far end of the chamber. What could only be described as a circular translucent membrane, some four feet across, had appeared in the center of the circular end wall. Its outer surround was a beveled ring of shiny, copper-colored metal. The membrane itself was filmy and insubstantial, a pulsing, mother-of-pearl gauze. Tiny sparkles of bright energy danced up from it and vanished, like bubbles from a fresh glass of champagne; Jim couldn’t tell whether the thing was solid, liquid, a heavy vapor, or something else entirely.
“You want me to go through that?”
“Unless you intend to remain here in the lock. If you do that, you will probably become exceedingly uncomfortable. Hungry, thirsty, claustrophobic, resentful—all the things that afflict humans when they think they’re not getting enough attention.”
“Okay, okay, I get the picture.”
“Okay, okay, you get the picture.”
Jim knew he had no chance of beating the helium parrot, so, taking carefully measured steps, he gingerly crossed the chamber until he was standing in front of the membrane. He leaned forward and peered closely at it. It seemed vaguely moist. “I’m supposed to climb through this?”
“You’re supposed to climb through that.”
“It’s all a bit Freudian, isn’t it?”
“This is all a bit Freudian, isn’t it?”
Jim tried another tack. He shouted as loud as he could. “Hey, Long Time Robert, are you in there?”
The membrane vibrated and a large pair of lips, more than a foot across, appeared in three-dimensional relief on its surface. The lips formed words and shouted back at him. “Hey, Jim Morrison, are you out there?”
The air temperature was dropping, the smell of battery acid growing stronger. Jim had no choice. He wondered what the aliens might bring into play next if he continued to resist. He was feeling distinctly like a B. F. Skinner lab rat, without the benefit of any jolts to the pleasure centers. For all he knew, the next item on their menu might be direct cortical shock, or something even more unpleasant. It was becoming clear that, no matter how he might twist and turn, the ETs were going to have their way with him.
The lips of the membrane pouted sexily. “That’s right, Jimbo. We’re going to have our way with you.”
The chill in the chamber was deepening. Jim knew that aside from staying where he was and being freeze-dried, he was out of options. “Okay, you win. I’m coming through.”
The lips’ pout turned into a happy smile. “Okay, we win. You’re coming through.”
Jim hesitated. “Only. . .”
“Only what?”
“You’ll have to lose the lips.”
“You don’t like the lips.”
“I’m not climbing into a mouth. Not even the illusion of a mouth.”
“Does it make you feel too much like a human blow job?”
“You read my thoughts, damn it.”
“Of course we did.”
The lips vanished. Jim placed the palm of his hand flat against the membrane, but then quickly pulled it away as a sharp jolt of static twitched painfully up his arm. “Damn!”
The Mickey Mouse voice was back, and with a definite contempt in its tone. “You’re not going to let a little shock stop you, are you?”
Jim snapped back. “To hell with this.” He didn’t bother to feel his way. Suddenly angry, he violently punched his entire forearm clear through the membrane, and fuck the aliens if they didn’t like his attitude. The membrane resisted slightly, but he continued pushing until his arm had penetrated right up to the shoulder. At that point, the resistance seemed to reverse itself and the rest of him was jerked through by a sudden, wet kiss suction. He experienced a moment of panic as the stuff of the membrane closed around his face, but then he was through and into another moment of complete disorientation and darkness.
Jim was outraged. “Wait a fucking minute, will you?”
A bright white overhead spotlight snapped on. This light wasn’t at all diffused or hazy and its source was clear and obvious. Jim, though, didn’t have time to waste considering light sources. An alien—Jim Morrison’s very first—was standing in the exact center of the beam. Jim’s alien was barely three feet tall. Its skin was gray. Its body was slight, fragile, and resembled that of a long-armed fetus. It had only three fingers on each hand. Its head was huge, hairless, with no ears and only the slightest approximation of a mouth and nose. Its eyes, in total contrast, were huge and ancient, without iris or pupil, like the eyes of some vast, distant, super-intelligent mega-guppy. It was the classic extraterrestrial of abduction paranoia, dubious amateu
r video, autopsy hoaxes, and tabloid reportage, the gray alien that was the bad guy of UFO folklore. At least Jim now knew what he was dealing with. Unless, of course, the familiar form was simply a new level of deception.
The alien was holding a small vial filled with blue-green liquid in one of its three-fingered hands. “Wanna drink, pal?”
Mercifully, the alien’s voice was a far cry from the helium squeak. In fact, its tonal tailoring was coming from entirely the other end of the spectrum. The incongruity of a pint-sized alien using a voice from the staccato school of Mickey Spillane/Humphrey Bogart wasn’t lost on Jim, but he reserved comment. “Do I what?”
“I’m offering you a drink, kid. Don’t you want it? Isn’t that what’s been gnawing at your guts since you took it on the lam from Doc Holliday’s?”
“I’d say gnawing at my guts was something of an overstatement. I’d like a drink, but . . . ”
“We understood you were a world-class alkie, kid.”
Jim was starting to have trouble with this tough-guy voice coming out of the slight spindly frame. “That was then, this is now.”
“You telling me you weren’t as drunk as a skunk back at Doc Holliday’s? Or at the orgy before that?”
Jim really didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. “What the fuck are you running here? Some interplanetary twelve-step inquisition?”
The alien’s face didn’t alter, but the voice took on an aggrieved tone. “Listen, pal, all I was trying to do was offer you a drink.” It held out the vial again. “You want it or not? It’s good stuff. I kid you not. Make you see stars.”
Jim suddenly laughed. “Ah, what the hell.” The alien was only offering him a drink. The gesture was culturally fundamental. Why not take it on face value, even if the face in question was an unreadable ovoid the color of a button mushroom, with a texture to match? He took the vial and threw the contents back in one gulp, like a lumberjack downing his first shot after a hard day’s logging. The instant the booze hit his metabolism, Jim saw not only stars but also suns and ringed planets. For a moment, it seemed as though the top of his head had lifted off of its own accord, flipping up like the lid of a pedal bin, to relieve the intolerable pressure in his brain. He doubled over, his throat burning and his stomach contemplating convulsion. As a confirmed shot-and-beer motherfucker, Jim had always found cocktails a little too Dorothy Parker. He’d been around the block enough times, however, to know that what he’d just consumed could qualify as the transcendentally perfect gin martini. The only mistake was that the stuff had the impact intensity of drag strip accelerant. When he finally straightened up again, his voice was a rasping wheeze and he had tears in his eyes. “Sweet God Almighty! That was intense.”
“Kinda strong for you?”
“Maybe the recipe needs a bit of rethinking.”
“But you feel better?”
Jim took a couple of deep breaths. The battery-acid smell seemed to have stayed on the other side of the membrane. “Yes, I definitely feel better.”
The alien nodded. “That’s good. We like to make you humans feel at home.”
Jim looked at the empty vial. “You certainly do.” The alcohol burn had given way to a warm and not unpleasant glow. “Yes, you certainly do.”
He handed the vial back to the alien, who took it and placed it in thin air beside him, as though he had set it on an invisible shelf. The vial remained standing for a few seconds and then vanished. Jim maintained his cool, refusing to look surprised. “That’s a pretty neat trick.”
“We gotta million of them.”
“So what happens next?”
“Well it’s been nice meeting you, Jimbo, but we gotta get you on to the medical examination.”
Jim’s glow crashed and burned like a vampire in the sun. “Medical examination?”
“The medical examination. Everyone gets the medical examination. I mean, we’re aliens, ain’t we? That’s part of what we do.”
Jim dug in like a recalcitrant mule. He’d heard too many anecdotal reports regarding the role of body cavities in alien medical work. “No way.”
The alien raised a hand. “Hey, pal, don’t be telling me ‘no way.’ I just do the meeting and greeting. If you got a problem, take it up with the croakers. Don’t be busting my balls, okay?”
“So where are these croakers? The sooner I put them straight, the better.”
“You want to talk to a sawbones about this?”
Jim nodded. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I want.”
No sooner had he spoken than a second alien appeared beside the first one. In every respect, the two of them were identical, and Jim looked curiously from one to the other. Finally he focused on the new arrival. “Your friend here tells me that you’re the one I need to talk to about the medical exam. If it’s all the same with you, I really think I prefer to pass, particularly as I’m already dead.”
The huge black alien eyes looked straight into Jim’s; the voice was that of a robot with just the faintest trace of an Austrian accent. “The medical examination is nonnegotiable.”
Semple found herself in the calm center of frenzied chaos, the eye of a uniquely disorganized show-business hurricane. Even though she had died well before television had locked its grip on planet Earth, she knew enough from her irregular observation of the lifeside to recognize that she was inside a TV studio. In addition, her intricate familiarity with human nature at its worst told her that it was controlled by a megalomaniac, some kind of panic-prone neurotic who believed that any problem could be solved by inflicting screaming, hysterical abuse on his underlings. The name Fat Ari hardly did the man justice. He was huge in every direction. He stood well over six feet tall and was twice that around. The full horror of his stacked tires of flesh was fortunately swathed in a flowing, lavishly embroidered red-and-gold caftan that could have been the bell tent of God. He even seemed exempt from the ancient Egypt look. Perhaps, as the King of the TV Slave Salesmen, he actually had the juice to override the fixations of Anubis and dress as he pleased.
Semple and the other women from the jail stood in a roped-off area to one side of the set waiting for their call. Aside from a couple of walk-through rehearsals, and then actually being paraded for sale on the show itself, their part was, by this time, all but done. Until Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club went on the air, their primary tasks were not to get in the way and not smudge their makeup. The latter was not, in fact, as easy as it sounded. Even standing was made difficult by the spindly five-inch clear-plastic heels on which they were forced to balance. Here was another small factor where Fat Ari seemed to feel free to buck the mandated Egyptology. Fat Ari’s merchandise all seemed to conform to a more twentieth century, Times Square hooker authenticity, screw the trappings of the nineteenth dynasty. Unfortunately, Semple was about the only one in the batch who actually knew how to walk on high heels; the rest tended to reel and teeter unless they kept perfectly still.
Since they were to appear on the show naked but for shoes, the exteriors of Semple and her companions had been layered with cosmetics from head to toe, from glitter nail varnish to a special color-blended rouge that had been liberally applied to their nipples. They could neither sit nor lean. Although crowded together, they could not touch each other, and if they so much as sweated under the studio lights, a bad-tempered makeup boy would rush to powder them down.
The boy was something of an ordeal all on his own. He had the knack of maintaining himself in a state of perpetual snit. While he powdered, he mercilessly berated the woman on whom he was working, and even those around her, in a low querulous voice. He was also armed with a flashlight-sized version of the prison guards’ Lucite shock prods, and if Semple or one of her companions especially aggravated him, he would administer a waspish, stinging jolt to a part of her anatomy where the resulting red mark would not be visible on camera. The entire production of Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club seemed to be run on the dynamic of intimidation and spite.
That Semple
and the others were merchandise had been made abundantly clear from the moment their prison escort had accepted a receipt for them from a harried associate producer and they had become the property of Fat Ari. After being stripped of even their prison kilts, run through a fast shower and blow-dry, they lined up for a perfunctory camera test. Three times, they were made to walk past a static camera, nude and unadorned. After that, Fat Ari and his director went into a two-minute huddle over the results, looking from the screen to the real woman and back again. Finally Fat Ari made an angry, disparaging gesture and stalked toward the women as if, whatever the current problem might be, it was definitely their fault.
“For my sins, you are all going to appear on tonight’s show. Personally, I would rather have hot needles jabbed into my eyes than let a substandard collection like yourselves loose on an unsuspecting public, but since the incompetence of my staff leaves me no other alternative, there are some things you need to hear before the worst happens.”
