Hard Landing

by Algis Budrys

  Henshaw, whom I had not actually seen since that one day long ago, was a peculiar person. He was black, first of all, and that tended to isolate him; he was a doctor of veterinary medicine, and that tended to isolate him further, from the ordinary run of black man. Then, his interests were very broad, and he acted on them; he had traveled to many parts of the world, he had studied far beyond the basic requirements of the DVM degree, he loved grand opera, he painted with quite a bit of skill and had studied painting – in short, and I have just touched on the high spots, he would have been thoroughly hated by the average person even if he hadn’t been black, which he was, and which he rubbed your nose in if he got the idea this made him in your eyes in any way inferior to you, honky.

  Of course, nevertheless, Yankee had chosen him to dissect Chaplain Joro because he was much less likely to be believed than a white man if he attempted to … spill the beans. That was many years ago, when Henshaw had first turned up, with the barest beginnings of a private practice among the poodles and kitties of Georgetown. He was Yankee’s family animal doctor, and of course had had his measure taken early by Yankee, as all who came in repeated contact with him did. I was taking a chance in contacting him with my problem, but I really had no choice. He was the only man besides Yankee who knew about me, and he was the only man who was a medical practitioner.

  I called a taxi, making my selection at random, and had myself driven out to his house in the middle of the night. I left a note in his mailbox while the taxi waited and had myself driven to the Willard Hotel, from which I took another taxi home. It was the best I could do. I did not think Yankee detected me. Then it was wait for Henshaw to come to me.

  He did. DVMs are not ordinarily asked to make house calls, so he had to presume that after all these years I had another corpse to dissect. The arrangement was that he would be on call in case we ever found another one. The fact that we never did was beside the point.

  We sat in my living room, I behind a desk, Henshaw draped over an upholstered chair, a black bag at his feet. I had not seen him since that day at National, long ago now. He had not much changed. He was a large man, who gave a sense of power and vitality, and who, besides his wife and six children, took an occasional flier on other women, very discreet. Every time he did it, he put himself further into my power; I kept a tap on his phones, of course. And Yankee must have done something analogous to that, from before the very beginning – kept the man on a string, until he needed him, and then one day called him and suggested he get in his station wagon and go out to Washington National Airport.

  And the man had gone, because he had no choice. But that was not why he had thereafter stayed a contingency employee of the NRPA all these years; no, not once he had seen me. Wild horses, I think, could not have kept him away. But of course I kept the phone taps anyway.

  I said: ‘Doctor, something serious is wrong with me.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘And that’s why you chose such a roundabout method of getting in touch with me? And asked me not to talk about it, on the phone or otherwise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sucked his front teeth. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Doctor, I want you to examine me and determine what’s wrong, if you can.’

  A peculiar look come over his charmingly ugly features. ‘You don’t want the services of a physician? Ah.’ Henshaw sat back and looked at me. He folded his hands on the knee presented by his crossed legs. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s been a long time coming. Your calling on me in this way. I didn’t know if you ever would. I wasn’t even sure I was right about you. But if I hadn’t gambled, would I have this opportunity now?’ He smiled without it getting to his eyes, which remained speculative and searching. ‘The opportunity to get his hands on a living one of you? How many men could say they had done that? No, I’ve waited’ – and now he did smile, genuinely – ‘patiently. And now I’ll have my reward.’ He reached down for his black bag. ‘All right, take off your clothes.’ And we began. ‘You know,’ he remarked, ‘it’ll be quite a novelty, having a patient who can talk.’

  Finally he was done, and I put my clothes back on. He toyed with the vials of blood he had drawn. ‘Fascinating,’ he said in a distracted voice. ‘Altogether fascinating.’ He put the vials away, carefully, in his bag. He looked up. ‘We’ll have to wait a few days until the lab results come back, before I can be sure. Even then, how sure can I be?’ He closed his bag and sat down in the chair again. ‘Systemically, you’re sort of human, but not very much. I don’t think we have to worry about what the lab will make of your blood. They’ll think it’s some kind of exotic animal – which, of course, is what it is, from the human point of view. And I can’t tell now what abnormalities are present, not that it’ll help a great deal when the results are in, because neither you nor I will ever know what the normal structure is – unless, of course, in the fullness of time I get a healthy one of you to examine, but I don’t think that’ll ever happen.’

  ‘I really don’t care about any of that.’

  ‘I didn’t think you did. I’m stalling for time.’ He pulled at his lower lip. ‘All right. You’ve got some sort of severe circulatory problem. I can’t tell how severe, because I don’t know what your normal blood pressure is … and neither do you. Shame you weren’t a doctor. On the other hand, you wouldn’t be here, would you? The point is it’s obviously severe, or you wouldn’t have those symptoms. And those symptoms are incapacitating you. Now – what’s causing the symptoms? That’s much more interesting. And even less ponderable, for the moment at least.’

  He got up from the chair and walked around my apartment, while I watched him with every fiber of my being. He cupped his hands together behind his back and went from wall to wall, without ever really seeing them. ‘You’re a very sick boy,’ he said to the empty air. ‘Very sick. And I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to help you.’ He turned back to me. ‘Not that anyone else could help you as much as I can. But that may turn out to be cold comfort.’

  ‘I may die.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you may die. But you knew that, or you would not have called even me.’

  – Never revealed.

  STATEMENT II, DITLO RAVASHAN

  The next several days were not pleasant for me, waiting. And the dizzy spells and cramps were worse than they had ever been. When Henshaw arrived at my office, I was more than ready for him.

  He sat down, taking a sheaf of paper out of a file folder – the lab report. He flipped it open and read it silently – again, I presumed – and then looked me in the face.

  ‘You know what a T-cell is?’ he asked, and before I could say no, he shook his head. ‘No, you don’t.’ He put the laboratory report aside. ‘All right. About five years ago, a doctor happened to mention a peculiar thing to another doctor. He had begun getting a number – small, but a number – of examples of a mysterious viral infection from Haitians, hemophiliacs, homosexuals, and h’infants. He mentioned it because he had thought of this cute way to describe the correlation. What was not so cute was that the disease resisted all attempts to handle it; his patients, every one of them, were either already dead or were dying. And actually he was a little bit scared.

  ‘So you can imagine how he felt when the other doctor said he was seeing the same thing.

  ‘They were at a medical convention, so they checked as best they could. And a significant number of other doctors said they were seeing it too.

  ‘The other thing was, it wasn’t the disease itself that killed people. There didn’t seem to be a clear-cut disease, as a matter of fact, although their blood workups all showed the same pattern. But the patients died of half a dozen different diseases; cancers and lung diseases, mostly – not particularly frequent cancers. What the viral infection could do, it shut down the immune reaction. After that, it was just a matter of time. The first disease that came along after that, the person died.’

  ‘How many died?’ I asked.

  He shook his head w
earily. ‘All of them. After a time, all of them die. There are no survivors.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘None. At all. Nobody knows much about it yet. But nobody survives it. And we can’t be sure, but I think it attacks h’aliens, too. I think you’ve got it.’

  I looked at him incredulously. ‘You think I’ve got it? Why? Surely you must—’

  ‘Be mistaken? Maybe.’

  There was something about the way he said it, the way he looked at me. ‘But you think I’ve got it.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘How did I get it?’

  ‘Well, I gather your sexual habits—’ He shrugged. ‘Sex seems to have something to do with it.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, if that’s all it takes, this town ought to be a hecatomb!’

  ‘No argument. Perhaps in time it will be.’ He shook his head. ‘I know you won’t take much of an interest, but this does look very bad for the future of the human race.’ He laughed without humor. ‘And I can’t tell anybody about it. Well, it’ll emerge among the more sensitive part of the human community soon enough, I’m sure. It’ll be among the heterosexuals; white male Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexuals. That’ll take care of it … raise an outcry like you couldn’t believe.’

  ‘How long have I got?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. A month, maybe. Maybe a week. Whatever your particular disease is, it seems well advanced.’

  ‘A week.’

  ‘It’s hard to tell.’

  ‘A week,’ I repeated. I looked around the office. ‘Well.’ The thing was, how did we do a funeral in which the corpse was totally destroyed? Because if it wasn’t, some medical examiner whom we did not control would grow very interested.

  ‘Henshaw, you’ve got to help me.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he agreed. He shook his head. ‘Funny how it leads you to this day. Life. I decided I was different, and I was different, but it didn’t help after all.’

  ‘What are you taking about?’

  ‘I didn’t take any precautions while examining you. Why should I? But the fact is, just by some minor action I don’t even remember, I may have contracted it. On the other hand, maybe not. But we can’t be sure. I called the lab and made careful inquiries, though, and none of their technicians got any of your blood in a cut. So that’s probably all right.’

  ‘Wait a minute—’

  ‘Oh, it’s not as bad as all that,’ Henshaw said. ‘For example, you apparently had a long interval between exposure and reaching a critical stage. And someone exposed to you might have even longer – after all, you are an alien, and any number of things might have happened. No, I might not have been exposed at all. But on the other hand—’ He shrugged, not too casually. ‘On the other hand, we’re not even sure what to look for, exactly, in the blood of someone who hasn’t reached criticality. So I can’t be sure. So I can’t stick it in my wife or anybody else, anymore, forever.’ He laughed, not amusedly. ‘Ain’t that a bitch? Of course, your case is considerably worse than that, so I don’t expect you to sympathize.’

  And I don’t suppose I did. His case was even funny, in a way … spending the rest of his life wondering when the disease would break out in him, nagged by the thought that he might not have it at all. But not daring to take the chance. Yes, it was funny. But I thought it best not to laugh. The wave of dizziness would have been overwhelming.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we don’t want to tell [and he gave Yankee’s real name].’

  No, we didn’t. I had been very right to take precautions. But I said: ‘Well, that’s interesting. Why not?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ he said. ‘All I can see coming from it is a million questions, including among others what in the hell I was doing visiting you in your apartment. I’m not supposed to know you, beyond one contact a long time ago. And of course that was true, until recently.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you what he’s like.’

  No, he didn’t. He was right. The questions would never stop. The trust, once thought to be broken, would not be restored. It was even possible an accident would befall Dr Henshaw. I had no reason to believe that – but in the case of Yankee, the fact that I also had no reason not to believe it was something to be considered. ‘All right. Makes sense. And it certainly makes no difference to me, at this point.’

  So we left it at that. I sank back in my chair, and the world whirled and spun.

  And the time came. I could not walk anymore, and my body would convulse in cramps that were indescribably painful. It was more than a week after the last time Henshaw and I spoke. It was less than a month.

  Henshaw came for me. I looked around the apartment one last time. Then I emptied my pockets, because when I left this apartment for the last time, I would disappear without a trace. Disappear permanently, but in any case, without a trace.

  I hoped Yankee would reason that my people might have come for me. I chuckled a little bit.

  The NRPA would go on; in time, it might even develop a new parent organization. I laid my wallet down on top of the little pile on my desk, patted my pockets, and extracted one last item – a Democratic National Committee matchbook. I looked at it, smiled briefly, and laid it down. It gave the address – the Watergate complex – and a phone number.

  Henshaw looked at it. ‘What the hell are you doing with one of those?’ he asked, a little incredulously. ‘I didn’t think you gave a damn about our politics.’

  I laughed. ‘I didn’t get a chance to try it. There’s a hot rumor around that a call girl ring is operating out of one of the spare offices there.’

  ‘You’re shitting me.’

  I shrugged. ‘That’s the word. But what’s the difference? Neither one of us is ever going to give it a try.’ I turned to leave the apartment, and stumbled into his arms.

  We drove to a Virginia farm, long abandoned, the track running through shrubbery and fallen fences, until we stopped at what remained of the yard. Henshaw shut off the engine and looked at me. Then he said ‘No point stretching it out’ and opened his little black bag. He took out a hypodermic and a bottle, and filled the hypodermic. ‘Cyanide,’ he said. ‘It’ll kill you very quickly.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Anything you want to say?’

  Was there anything I wanted to say? To have come all this way, and to end like this. I remembered the chaplain, and how I had questioned him as he was dying. ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I had asked him, and he had finally answered, ‘Hurt.’ Or perhaps not. Really, it occurred to me, it was a question to ask a child, not a dying man.

  ‘No,’ I said. It hadn’t been a bad life, everything considered. I was beginning to recall one of its more pleasantly outrageous moments, with a woman beneath my face and another kissing her while I fingered – but that was when I felt the needle go into my arm, and very soon thereafter I was dead.

  Henshaw pushed me out of the car, and drove it a little ways away. Then he got out, opened the trunk, and took out the two five-gallon cans of gasoline. He doused me with one of them, and set it alight. Then he retreated to the car until the flames died down, and poured the second can over what remained of me, and lit that, going back to the car again. Finally he came back and stirred the remains, until you could not have said what it was that had burned there. There were some bone fragments, but beyond seeing to it they were scattered, Henshaw did nothing further. He did not need to. And so I departed this life, far from home. But whether I was home or not, I had had a good life. A somewhat shorter one than I had anticipated, but I had had the money, I had had the girls, and nobody told me what to do. Is there, really, anything else? Are you sure?

  – Never revealed. A.B.

  CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN FUNCTIONARIES

  #1: I don’t get it. I went into the apartment, and there’s nothing unusual there but a pile of clothes, with the stuff piled on top.

  #2: You’ve got no clue as to where the occupant’
s gone?

  #1: None whatsoever. Everything’s got a light film of dust on it, so he’s been gone at least a week.

  #2: All right. Inventory the stuff, and come back in. Then I’ll pass the word up.

  #2: Well, the shit hit the fan when I made my report. He wants you to get together a crew of trustworthy guys, break into the Watergate, and scour Democratic National Committee Headquarters ASAP.

  #1: You’re kidding.

  #2: No, I’m not.

  #1: Christ, there’s never anything in a national committee headquarters! It’s a clerical office, for Christ’s sake!

  #2: Buddy, you know that and I know that, but apparently he doesn’t. So I suggest you do exactly as instructed. Put together a crew – get a bunch of those Cuban exiles or somebody else that’ll tend to be loyal. And get in there!

  #1: Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.

  MORE CARS

  So for a while, I was Christie. Once a month, or sometimes twice, I drove into Newark, and parked the car in another garage, and a man handed me a sealed envelope which I took back to Roland, riding the bus. ‘The trips fascinated me at first. There was so much to see – the farms, and the gradually larger and larger villages, and finally the city, which was actually a whole group of cities, of course; the only way you could tell you were in Newark, finally, was by a sign on one side of a street. This was before they finished the New Jersey Turnpike – in fact, it was before they finished a whole bunch of things. The Adams Burlesque Theatre was still going in downtown Newark; ah, it was all right. They stripped down to nothing sometimes. And the comics were great; really great. I even saw Joe Yule, who was Mickey Rooney’s father. ‘But truth to tell, it began to wear thin after a while. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I got to Newark once or twice a month, but it was as if I were on an elasticized string; I always went back. And the thought of spending the rest of my life on the edge of the barrens was more than I could comfortably live with. ‘My English got good; I was reading a lot. My favorite was the car magazines, of course. I even wrote some letters, and they printed them; it was mostly pointing out errors in the journalism, at first. ‘I wasn’t getting anywhere with Margery, either. I began necking with her, timidly at first and later with considerable warmth, and she enjoyed it as much as I did, but that was all. Roland Lapointe just shook his head. ‘Look, you do know what it’s for, don’t you?’ was as far as he went in commenting. I nodded, my face flaming, and he threw a bolt into a bucket on the other side of the garage and walked out.