Hard Landing

by Algis Budrys

  Mullica’s hours in the Chicago public relations office of one of the major automobile manufacturers were nominally nine to five. He usually got in about nine fifteen, getting back some of the three A.M.S on the road. He never saw Selmon in the morning; probably he had to be at work by eight-thirty.

  At night on the platform, Selmon would open his paper as soon as he was through the turnstile. He would read it at his end of the platform, holding it in front of his face. Mullica would stand just where he had stood every time since years before Selmon. Mullica opened his paper on the train, and when he was nearly finished, the sound of the wheels echoing back would tell him they were off the viaducts and beginning to run between the weed-grown cutbanks of the right-of-way in north Shoreview. He’d fold his paper, get up from the warped, timeworn cane seat, and go stand in the chipped brown vestibule waiting for the uncertain brakes to drag the train to a halt. He’d get off, walk the three blocks to the condominium, greet Margery if she was home, have a drink looking out over the lake with a closed expression, and do the crossword puzzle in ink before throwing the paper out. He wished Selmon would play by the rules and move away. But Selmon wouldn’t. He continued to work somewhere in the Loop at something, and to live somewhere two miles south.

  AN OCCURRENCE EARLY ON A MARCH EVENING

  Mullica never saw Selmon in Shoreview on weekends. Margery liked to go shopping in the big malls at Old Orchard and Golf Mill; Mullica had a Millionaires’ Club membership, and sometimes they’d sit there after shopping, sipping. Sometimes then Mullica would be able to just stare over Margery’s shoulder and think about any number of things. At times, he thought of Selmon. He wondered if he hid in his home on weekends, and if he had found a wife, and, if so, how they got along. He wondered if Margery might run into her someday and if, by some coincidence, they might get friendly enough to talk about their husbands. But it seemed unlikely; Margery didn’t get along with women.

  And then it was early March, forty-two months since Selmon had turned up. Mullica stood on the platform, his hands deep in his pockets. It was a cold, raw day. He watched Selmon stubbornly unfolding his paper against the wind, and clutching it open as he began to read. Then, just as their train began to pull into the station, Selmon saw something in the paper that made him turn his face toward Mullica in the twilight in a white blur of dismay, his mouth a dark open oval, and Mullica thought for a minute Selmon had felt a vessel exploding in his brain.

  The train pulled up and Mullica stepped aboard. He moved down the aisle and took a seat next to a window. He looked out at Selmon’s spot as the train passed by it, thinking he might see Selmon lying there huddled in a crowd, but he wasn’t there.

  Mullica put his zipcase across his knees and opened his paper, sitting there reading from front to back as he always did, while the train crossed the river toward the Merchandise Mart. He stopped to look eastward along the river, as he always did, year round, enjoying the changing light of the seasons on the buildings and the water and horizon. The riverfront buildings were just turning into boxes of nested light, their upper story glass still reflecting the last streaks of dying pink from the sunset, and the stars were beginning to appear in the purplish black sky above the lake.

  Page two had the story:

  Not-So-Ancient Astronauts? ‘THING’ IN JERSEY SWAMP IS SAUCER, EXPERT SAYS

  PHILADELPHIA, MARCH 9 (AP) – Swamp-draining crews in New Jersey may have found a spaceship, declared scientist Allen Wolverton today.

  Authorities on the spot immediately denied that old bog land being readied for a housing development held anything mysterious.

  Local authorities agreed a domed, metal object, fifty feet across, was dragged from the soil being reclaimed from Atlantic coastal marshes. They quickly pointed out, however, that there is a long history of people living in the swamps, described as the last rural area remaining on the Eastern Seaboard between Boston and Virginia.

  The area was populated and prosperous in Colonial times, the center of a thriving ‘bog iron’ mining industry. Local experts were quick to point to this as the likely source of the object, citing it as some sort of machinery or a storage bin.

  ‘There was whole towns and stagecoach stops back in there once,’ said Henry Stemmler, operator of a nearby crossroads grocery store. ‘Big wagon freight yards and everything. There’s all kinds of old stuff down in the bogs.’

  Dissenting is Wolverton, a lecturer at Philadelphia’s Franklin Planetarium. ‘Our earth is only one of thousands of inhabitable planets,’ he declared. ‘Statistically, the galaxy must hold other intelligent races. It would be unreasonable to suppose at least one of them isn’t visiting us and surreptitiously observing our progress toward either an enlightened civilization of peace and love or total self-destruction.’

  There was a blurred two-column wire photo of two men standing in some underbrush, staring at a curved shape protruding from the ground. There were no clearly defined features, and the object’s outline was broken by blending into the angular forms of a dredge in the background. It might have been anything – the lid of a large silo, part of an underground oil tank, or the work of a retoucher’s brush. In fact, the paper’s picture editor had obviously decided the wire photo would reproduce badly and had his artist do some outlining and filling. So the result was a considerable percentage away from reality.

  Mullica read the other stories on the page, and on the next page, and turned it.

  It was night when the train reached Borrow Street – full dark, with only a few working bulbs in chipped old white enamel lamps to light the winter-soaked, rotting old wooden platform.

  It’s all going to hell, Mullica thought. No one maintains anything that isn’t absolutely vital, but the fare keeps going up and up.

  No one manned the station except during morning rush hour on the southbound side. The cement steps from the northbound platform up to the frontage street were a forty-foot gravel slide with broken reinforcing bars protruding through it rustily to offer the best footholds.

  Mullica began to move toward the exit gates in the middle of the platform, lining up with the others who’d gotten off. They were all head-down, huddling against the wind, concentrating their minds on getting through the revolving metal combs of the gate and picking their way up the incline. And then because he had not quite put it all out of his mind, and his skin was tight under the hairs of his body, he had the feeling to turn his head. When he did, he saw Selmon still standing where he had gotten off, his paper half-raised toward Mullica, his apparition coming and going in the passing window lights as the train went on. Mullica could see he was about to call out a name nobody knew.

  Mullica stopped, and the small crowd flowed around him inattentively. He walked back to Selmon. ‘They’ll find us!’ Selmon blurted. ‘They’ll trace us down!’

  Mullica looked at him carefully. Then he said ‘How will they do that?’ picking and arranging the words with care, the language blocky on his tongue. He watched Selmon breathe spasmodically, his mouth quivering. He saw that Selmon was years younger than he – though they were the same age – and soft. And yet there was advanced deterioration in him. It was in the shoulders and the set of the head, and very much in the eyes, as well. Selmon clutched at his arm as they stood alone on the platform. Selmon’s hand moved more rapidly than one would expect, but slowly for one of their kind of people, and uncertainly.

  ‘Arvan, it’s bound to happen,’ Selmon insisted to him. ‘They – they have evidence.’ He pushed the paper forward. Mullica ignored it.

  ‘No, Selmon,’ he said as calmly as he could. ‘They won’t know what to do with it. There’s nothing they can learn from it. The engines melted themselves, and we destroyed the instruments before we left it, remember?’

  ‘But they have the hull, Arvan! Real metal you can touch; hit with a hammer. A real piece of evidence. How can they ignore that?’

  ‘Come on. Their investigators constantly lie to their own populace and file their secrets away
. They systematically ridicule anyone who wants to look for us, and they defame them.’ Mullica was trying to think of how to deal with this all. He wanted Selmon to cross over to the deserted southbound platform and go home to his wife. Mullica wanted to go home; even to have a drink with Margery, and then sit in his den reading the specification sheets on the new product. It was some twenty-five years since he’d been a navigator.

  ‘Arvan, what are we going to do? How can you ignore this?’ Selmon wouldn’t let go of Mullica’s forearm, and his grip was epileptically tight. He peered up into Mullica’s face. ‘You’re old, Arvan,’ he accused. ‘You look like one of them. That haircut. Those clothes. All mod. A middle-aged macho. You’re becoming like them!’

  ‘I live among … them.’

  ‘I should have spoken to you years ago!’

  ‘You shouldn’t be speaking to me at all. Why are you here? There’s the entire United States. There’s the whole world, if you can find your way across a border. A whole world, just a handful of us, and you stay here!’

  Selmon shook his head. ‘I was in Oakland for a long time. Then I bumped into Hanig on a street in San Francisco. He told me to go away, too.’

  ‘He spoke to you?’ Mullica asked sharply.

  ‘He had to. He – he wanted me out of there. He’d been in the area less time than I had, but he had a business, and a family, and I was alone.’

  ‘A family.’

  ‘He married a widow with children and a store – a fish store. So I agreed to leave. He gave me some money, and I came to Chicago.’

  Well, if navigators could write public relations copy, copilots could sell fish. What did engineering officers do to make their way in this world? Mullica wondered, but Selmon gave him no opportunity to ask.

  ‘Hanig had seen Captain Ravashan. In passing. He didn’t think Ravashan saw him. In Denver. That was why he left there and came to San Francisco. And then I came to Chicago, and almost the first week, I saw you. I – I think we’re too much alike when we react to this world. We wander toward the same places, and move in the same ways.’

  ‘Does anyone know where the chaplain is?’ Mullica asked quickly.

  ‘Chaplain Joro?’ Selmon asked. He and Mullica looked into each other’s eyes. ‘No, I don’t think there’s much doubt,’ and for a moment there was a bond of complete understanding between the two of them. Mullica nodded. For over a quarter of a century, he saw, Selmon as well as he had reflected on the matter. It had seemed to him for a long time that there were only four of them now.

  Selmon looked up at him in weariness. ‘It’s no use, Arvan. I—’ He hung his head. ‘I have a good job. It doesn’t pay much but I don’t need much, and it’s secure. So I decided to stay. You never asked me to leave.’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘I’m very tired, Arvan,’ he whispered, and Mullica saw the guilt in him, waiting to be punished.

  But there was no telling whether any engineering officer could have solved the problem with the engines. Mullica had never thought much of Selmon, but Ditlo Ravashan never questioned his ability in front of the rest of them, and there hadn’t been any backbiting after the crash.

  ‘This isn’t anything, Selmon. There’ll be a flurry, but it’ll blow over. Somebody’ll write another one of those books – that planetarium lecturer, probably – and everyone with any common sense will laugh at it.’

  ‘But they’ve never had evidence before!’ He was almost beating at Mullica with his newspaper, waving his free arm. ‘Now they do!’

  ‘How do you know what they have or haven’t had? They must have. They have enough films, and enough unexplained things in their history. They must have other pieces of crashed or jettisoned equipment, too. They just don’t know how to deal with them. And they won’t know how to deal with this, either.’

  ‘Arvan! An intact hull, and instruments obviously destroyed after the landing! A ship buried in a swamp. Buried, Arvan – not driven into the ground. And five empty crew seats behind an open hatch!’

  ‘A hull full of mud. If they ever shovel it all out, it’ll be weeks … and all those weeks, their bureaucracy will be working on everyone to forget it.’

  ‘Arvan, I don’t understand you! Don’t you care?’

  ‘Care? I was a navigator in the stars.’

  ‘And what are you now?’

  ‘What are you, Selmon?’ Mullica pushed him away, but Selmon still clung to his arm. They staggered on the platform.

  ‘Arvan, we have to plan. We have to find the others and plan together,’ he begged, weeping.

  ‘Four of us together,’ Mullica said, saying the number aloud for the first time, hearing his voice harsh and disgusted, aching deeper in his throat than he had become accustomed to speaking. ‘So they can have us all – a complete operating crew. An engineer, a navigator who knows the courses, a pilot, and a copilot lifesystems man. To go with the hull and their industrial capacity. You want us to get together, so they can find us and break out uncontrolled in our domains.’

  Four men with similarly odd configurations of their wrists and ankles. Four men with similar skin texture. Four men with high blood pressure and a normal body temperature of 100; with hundreds of idiosyncrasies in cell structure, blood typing, and, most certainly, chromosome structure. Four such men in a room, secretively discussing something vital in a language no one spoke.

  ‘Arvan!’

  ‘Goddamn it, Selmon, let go of me!’ Mullica shouted in English. ‘Fuck off!’

  Selmon jerked backward. He stared as if Mullica had slashed his throat, and as he stepped backward he pushed Mullica away, pushing himself back. His mouth was open again.

  Hopeless, hopeless, Mullica thought, trying to regain his balance so he could reach for Selmon, watching Selmon’s wounded eyes, his newspaper fanning open ridiculously, stepping back with one heel on thin air.

  He hit the tracks with a gasping outcry. Mullica jumped forward and looked down. Selmon sat sprawled over the rails, his paper scattered over the ties, in the greasy mud and the creosote-stained ballast, looking up at Mullica with the wind knocked out of him. The distant lights and violet sputtering of the next train were coming up the track from the previous station. Mullica squatted down to reach for him, holding out his hand. Selmon fumbled to push himself up, staring at Mullica. Neither spoke. Groping for something firm to grasp, Selmon put his hand on the third rail.

  The flash and the gunlike crack threw Mullica down flat on the platform, nearly blind. But I think I will still be able to see him anytime, Mullica thought in his native language as he threw himself up to his feet and ran, ran faster than anyone had ever seen Jack Mullica run, caroming through the exit gate and up the weathered steps, realizing he had never at any time let go of his zipcase, and thinking, Now we are three.

  TRANSCRIBED CONVERSATION; ALBERT CAMUS; WILLIAM HENSHAW:

  CAMUS: You’ve seen one of these before, haven’t you?

  HENSHAW: Prob’ly. You know, I can never get used to how cold it gets in these places.

  CAMUS: Rather have it cold than hot. Look, if you’re going to let me assist you in the first place, talk to me, will you?

  HENSHAW: I can talk some. And you can watch anythin’ you can see. Can’t at all limit you from thinking.

  CAMUS: I can see you know exactly what to look for.

  HENSHAW: What you see is somebody who knows what to expect. What to look for may be somethin’ else again.

  CAMUS: Well-made point, Doctor.

  HENSHAW: Reach me that thing over there, will you?

  CAMUS: You know, if I saw him on the street, I wouldn’t think twice. But now look at that.

  HENSHAW: You’d figure that jaw came from a malocclusion, right? And that skin color – just like a normal Caucasian maybe a little toward the extreme with his oxygen metabolism, right? But now you take some of them scrapin’s and stick ’em under a microscope, and—

  CAMUS: Yes, I’ve done that.

  HENSHAW: Figured. That’s why I let you stay. Might as well. Her
e – you see that wrist? What do you figure that to be?

  CAMUS: A thick wrist. I never would look at it.

  HENSHAW: Yeah. But let’s just flap this back a little, and—

  CAMUS: Holy cats! Right. There’s your proximal row. You

  HENSHAW: see that bone? That’s what he’s got instead of a navicular. Great blood supply, too. First of all, he can’t break it anywhere near as readily as people do. Second, if it breaks, it heals nice and slick. But how does he break it? Look at all those cushions in the cartilaginous structure. And let me tell you something else – all the joints are engineered like that. These people don’t get arthritis, they don’t get sprains, they maybe once in a blue moon get breaks. It’s like those teeth: never seen a dentist’s drill. This is a healthy, healthy guy.

  CAMUS: And it all still fits inside a normal shape, more or less.

  HENSHAW: Fits exactly. He’s the normal shape for what he is.

  CAMUS: What is he? You know, down in South America lots of millions of years ago, they had things that were shaped almost exactly like

  HENSHAW: camels, but they weren’t mammals, they were marsupials, and their skeletons weren’t put together like camel skeletons. I went to that museum they have down there in Guayaquil and looked at some of those bones; looked stranger than anything we’ve got lying here in front of us today. But once the musculature was on the bone, and the hide was on the muscles, if you saw that thing walk out from behind a rock at you, it was a camel. They had tigers like that, too. Things evolve to fit needs in the ecology. Life needed camels in the high-altitude deserts, and the camels needed tigers to prey on them. Time passed, they went away. Now down there they got llamas and guanacos and jaguars, and if some marsupial medico had to take ’em apart, wouldn’t he be surprised.