by Rucker, Rudy
“We’ll shift shapes,” said Alan. Driven by a mixture of nostalgia and a desire to agitate Bill, he took on a form remembered from his boyhood.
“My first flame,” explained Alan, cocking his now-narrow head at an impudent angle. “Christopher Morcom. He died of TB at nineteen.”
“That’s young even for me,” said Burroughs sourly. “And I don’t dig fantasies of boyish innocence. We’re all little shits from the start.”
“I’ll sophisticate myself for you,” said Alan, running his hands over his slender cheeks, and aging himself into his mid-twenties.
“I’ll match that play,” said Burroughs, reducing his apparent age from forty to about twenty-five. But still he kept the same Burroughs face. He could afford to. As yet he wasn’t on the U. S. skughunters’ radar.
Meanwhile Susan took on the look of a strong-browed, short-haired woman with full lips. “Bebe Barron,” she said. “She’s an electronic composer who’s a friend of mine. She and her husband Louis are making the soundtrack for a science-fiction flick. They’re awesome. Louis wires up these crufty, dirty circuits, and Bebe finds the music.”
For his part, Naranjo made himself starker and fiercer, with slashes of facial tattoos along his cheeks. Like a warrior-spirit version of himself. “I’m heading for Santa Fe,” he announced, fitting the two bricks of heroin into a knapsack. “Meeting a guy. With any luck, this is my last deal. Straight arrow from here on in. Give me a ride, Ranger Rob. You can drop the others in Los Alamos on our way.”
So the fat, oily Ranger Rob drove Bill, Alan, and Susan to Los Alamos. The ranger gave Alan’s bottom a lingering pat as the computer scientist disembarked. And then he continued towards Santa Fe with Naranjo.
“I remember a good diner along here from when I was a kid,” said Burroughs, as he, Suan and Alan they tramped along a slushy strip of drive-ins. They were dressed in the sturdy aviation clothes they’d lifted along the way, each of them in a leather flight jacket. Like a team of acrobats.
“The Big Bow Wow,” continued Bill. “Specializing in chili and sopaipillas. These puffy Southwestern pastries? Unspeakably toothsome with honey. We’ll kill some time at the Bow Wow with a newspaper, and comb the classified ads.”
“Looking for what?” said Susan.
“Aren’t you teeping us?” said Burroughs. “Alan wants to get a job at LANL. The Los Alamos National Labs. And I’m thinking we ought to find an apartment.”
“All three of us together?” said Susan.
“Cheaper that way,” said Burroughs. “And we men can protect your dank furrow.”
“So delicate of you to say that,” said Susan, her voice modulating to a harsh shout. “So refined. It’s been all of two days since those pigs incinerated my poor husband.”
“Have you seen his ghost again?” asked Alan.
“Not since that first night,” said Susan. “After he saved us from the blizzard, he dropped out of sight. Even though he could have helped us in Mexico. But you know Vassar. Always gadding about. Always a new idea.” She looked tired and wretched in the day’s fading gray.
“I’m sorry,” said Bill with atypical empathy. “I overplay the tough guy routine. I’m jonesing because my skug won’t let me get loaded on Naranjo’s brown nod.”
“I’m willing to be your friend,” said Susan. “And Alan loves you. So I wouldn’t mind living with you two boys till the Apocalypse comes down. Might not be long.”
“Were you really playing acousmatics last night?” asked Bill. “After Joan shot me? To drive off the police?”
By way of answer—on non-answer—Susan distended her skugger mouth into a duck-leg trumpet and made an impossibly weird sound. Alan echoed her. For a moment, the two of them stood there blaring like Judgment Day angels.
They made their way to the Big Bow Wow and sat dipping their sopaipillas in honey and scanning the Los Alamos Monitor for rentals and jobs. A black and white TV on the wall was pumping out news updates, a steady flow of aggression and fear. Some pundits thought the skuggers were saucer aliens. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover pegged them as marijuana addicts.
The waitress was a chatty woman with a halo of dark curly hair and a pink round-collared blouse.
“Looking for a place to live?” she said, noticing them reading the ads. “With the world coming to an end? I’m Tina. Maybe I can help.”
Bill didn’t respond to the overture. Instead he asked for more coffee.
“The three of you want to rent together?” pried Tina when she returned with the pot.
“Bill and I are homosexuals,” said Alan. “And Susan’s a widow. A mènage a trois. Do you mind?”
“Haw,” guffawed Tina. “Putting it right out there.” She leaned over the table, lowering her voice. “I spotted you boys for queers. So, guess what, my girlfriend and I have a granny cottage to rent! Half a mile down the road. We’d be glad to take you in. You’re the right kind of grannies. You got jobs?”
“Not yet,” said Alan. “That’s quest two.”
“They’re hiring some tech staff at the National Labs,” said Tina. “Some big-ass LANL project gearing up. It’s about those skug things?”
“The Venusian sea-slugs, you might say,” said Bill. “The Happy Cloaks. We’re experts on them. From way back East.”
“I want to apply to be a skug-hunter,” said Alan. “Yes indeed.”
“Me too,” said Susan. “But I wonder if LANL will hire us. Since we’re from out of town. There seems to be lot of paranoia just now.”
“LANL needs warm bodies,” said Tina. “They’re so gung-ho that they’re doing interviews tomorrow, even though it’s Sunday. I hear they’ve got a special watchdog thing to keep out any skuggers who try to sneak in.” Tina gave them a cool, thoughtful look. “It’s called a skugsniffer? He’s a captive skugger, and he uses telepathy to detect any other skuggers among the applicants.”
“You know all that?” said Susan, taken aback. “What kind of blabbermouth security people does LANL have?”
“Los Alamos is a company town,” said Tina, twinkling. “Everyone knows everything. Or tries to. It’s kind of a status thing. And if you’re a waitress...” She gave a cute shrug.
“So where’s this granny cottage of yours exactly?” said Alan, not wanting to get any deeper into secret-sharing.
“I’ll draw you a map,” said Tina. “Maybe you passed my place on your way in. My girlfriend’s at the house right now. Sue Stook. She runs a vet business out of the house. I can phone her. Blonde, tough like a cowhand, cute. She’s a top.”
“I’m a top these days,” said Alan, enjoying the word. “Right, Bill?”
“And I’m the lowliest baboon of them all,” said Bill, bending his long, thin lips into an imbecilic, self-satisfied simper. “My dance-card filled in by my superiors.”
“Is that really true?” asked Tina, leaning closer. “About baboons?”
“Why do you think they have those hairless, mauve rear-ends?” said Bill. “It is as Allah wills.”
By nightfall, they’d settled into Sue and Tina’s granny cottage. Even though it was snowing again, Alan was grilling them a steak on the open porch in back. It wasn’t so much that he was hungry as that he enjoyed performing so traditional an American activity.
“Feels like a vacation,” said Susan. “Vassar would like it here. In the flesh.” Her round chin quivered. “Oh, Alan, How can a human body disappear from one day to the next? And the Earth just keeps rolling on?”
“I like the idea that Joan made it all the way up,” put in Bill.
“But Vassar’s gone,” wailed Susan. “I want him to visit me again.” She raised her voice as if calling to someone in the next room. “Vassar! Vassar!”
Silence. “Ned made it all the way up, too,” put in Alan, just to say something.
“Up to where?” said Susan, almost in tears. “What are we even talking about?”
“The ancient Egyptians called it the Western Lands,” said Bill, slipping into his own kind of academic mode. �
�The high heaven beyond the ordinary afterlife.”
“Did you see the high heaven while you were dead on the floor in Mexico City?” asked Susan.
“I saw a cyclone in a circus tent,” said Bill. “And at the tip-tiny top I saw a bright hole. If a ghost makes it through, they’re off the slaving wheel for good. And Joan did go through.” He scowled at Susan. “After she shot me with the dime-store cap-gun you handed her, Susan, and thanks very much for that, by the way.”
“Joan had us ensorcelled,” said Alan. “It wasn’t Susan’s fault. And anyway you needed to pay your karmic debt, Bill. I’m just glad your brain healed.”
“Wal—I’m used to harsh rushes,” said Bill, with an assumed air of pride. He jiggled the ounce of brown heroin he was still carrying in a cellophane cigarette pack. “I could ride a harsh rush right now. Too bad I can’t execute the physical motions to snort this fine Mexican H. I’m, like, paralytic. My skug’s like an internal parole officer. And that, in my measured opinion, is a sufficient reason for annihilating all of the skugs on Earth. Not that I feature working for the US Army here.”
“I am most assuredly going for those LANL job interviews tomorrow,” said Alan. “The National Labs are the blokes who built the hydrogen bomb, you know. Top-drawer mad scientists. I’ll be in good company, albeit as a fifth columnist.”
“Fifth columnist meaning that you hope to undermine the LANL project and turn everyone into a skug?” said Bill, drily. “As I’ve asked you before: Doesn’t this strike you as anti-human?”
“You’re only playing the spoiled child because you can’t sniff your silly heroin,” said Alan. “But think it through—surely you don’t expect that opiates do wonders for your personality? Or for your sexual performance? Do remember that we’re here together as lovers, dear.” Alan stretched out his shapely arms. “We’ve yummy young bodies, too. Fresh and pert. We should enjoy them.”
“Indeed,” said Bill with a grudging smile. “I only wanted to make the point that the skugs are mind parasites. I didn’t quite grasp this at first. But we’ve seen the skugs’ ilk before. Hypnotic propaganda loops. Addiction demons. Possession by ugly spirits. The skugs are an unusually virulent type of mind parasite—as biologically real as typhus bacilli. Opportunistic creatures sliming into us like liver flukes.”
“Timid goooooose,” said Alan, streching out his neck to a length of three feet in mime. “What’s so wonderful about our current society, Bill? The rulers are set on to murdering me, and I shouldn’t doubt that you’re on the kill list too. If we can spread the skugs planet-wide, we’ll be safe, and we’ll raise humanity to a new level. Why must the masses remain stupid and dull?” Alan glanced over at Susan. “Which side do you plump for, my dear?”
“I’m a composer,” said Susan. “Not a yakker like you two. One real plus about being a skugger is that I can use my body as an instrument. As for LANL, I want to get my hands on their big new computer. It’s called MANIAC?”
“Operated by Alan’s hebephrenic mad scientist peers,” put in Bill.
“By the way, MANIAC is a joke name,” said Alan, setting the steak on the kitchenette table. “Purportedly it’s an acronym for Mathematical Analyzer, Numerator, Integrator, and Computer. In reality, the engineers wanted to cock a snook!”
“Way too British,” said Bill.
“Like I say, I want MANIAC to run some sound-synth programs,” said Susan. “Higher acousmatics. We’ll simulate musical instruments weirder than anything anyone can build.”
“Do as you like, you two, but I won’t be carrying the bomb-factory lunch pail,” said Bill. He gestured at the pastel plywood kitchen with the speckled linoleum floor. “I’m a lord of this mountain redoubt. Restored from exile. As you know, I attended the Los Alamos Ranch School when I was fifteen. I still remember our school song.”
Bill cleared his throat, then sang with raspy energy, throwing back his head for the final line, savoring it.
Far away and high on the mesa’s crest
Here’s the light that all of us love best
Los Aaallll-amos.
“What was the school like?” asked Alan.
“I had to do exercises before breakfast, clean my plate at meals, stay out in the cold all afternoon, and ride a sullen, spiteful horse. In the school song, the light on the mesa’s crest—that prefigures the atomic bomb, you understand. Note that in 1942, the Army tore down my school and set up their Manhattan Project right where I used to have my oatmeal. All of time is one instant, no? I learned this in the Beyond, my little ones. The atomic bomb is the orgasm, is the bullet, is my brain.”
“So, oookay,” said Susan, rolling her eyes. “Alan and I go off to apply for work tomorrow. And you’ll be here alone, Bill, and—?”
“Well, if I can’t get loaded, I might as well write a fresh segment of my perennial memoirs. I’ll lead off with some snappy boyhood sex-talk, milk my routine about shooting Joan, segue into multiple degeneracies among the skuggers, and culminate with Joan’s apotheosis. Coda: my mad, bony, street-preacher rant about seeing beyond the veil. I found a pen and a pad of paper here already. Mektoub. It is written. Or will be soon.”
“Let’s go to bed, my darling scribe,” said Alan.
The next day was clear and sunny, colder than before, and with the mountain skies a pale manganese blue above the coruscating snow banks. Sunday morning. Their landlady Tina appeared at the door of the granny cottage, bearing a pan of home-made cinnamon buns.
“I’m on second shift this week,” said Tina. “So I thought I’d nip back here and nose into your plans. I see you found the spare nightgown, Susan. Very yummy. I’m glad you three are here. I noticed you guys through the Bow Wow windows yesterday before you came in. In the slush, with your matching coats. No bags. Like gunslingers.”
“Sinister fugitives,” said Bill, lighting a cigarette.
“Glamorous,” said Tina. “You have no idea how dull and straight Los Alamos can be. Oh, I should tell you that over the years some used clothes have accumulated in your closets. Businessy kinds of things. Help yourself. And the interviews are at the LANL main auditorium at 10 am. They’ve definitely got that skugsniffer I was talking about. So be ready for him.”
“We’ve had dealings with a skugsniffer before,” said Susan carefully.
The sentence hung in the air for awhile, nobody wanting to touch it.
“I sure hope you’re not scheming to rat someone out,” added Susan.
“I’m no kind of straight arrow,” said Tina with her frank, country smile. “I’m for letting it all come down. I don’t care what you guys are.”
“Just as a matter of interest, let me tell you a little about the skuggers versus skugsniffers thing,” said Susan. “One of the big deals with skuggers is that they have telepathy with each other. A skugsniffer is an enslaved skugger who teeps the presence of any nearby skuggers. And then the cops know to kill the skuggers.”
“Is there any way to trick a skugsniffer?” asked Tina, intrigued.
“If skuggers know a telepathy scan is coming, they can put up a mental block and the skugsniffer might not notice them,” said Alan.
“I’d be surprised if that move still works,” said Bill. “Respect the slyness of the pig, Alan. The twinkle of the trotter. A mental wall—that could be seen as a tip-off.”
“Perhaps one could run a second-order imitation game,” mused Alan, thinking aloud. “An inner emulation. And—” He stopped himself. “But, as Susan says, this is all quite hypothetical. No point rattling on ad infinitum, eh? Did you say 10 am, Tina? Perhaps the widow Green and I will be on our way.”
“I’m writing today,” said Bill with a let’s-get-down-to-it air of anticipation.
“I love all this bohemian stuff,” said Tina.
“I’d be grateful if you could bring me a sandwich, a tot of bourbon, and some coffee later on,” Bill told Tina. “I’m happy to pay.”
“Sure,” said Tina. “I can do that. I’ll come around noon.” She too
k her leave. “Good luck, you three.” She paused and turned back. “Oh, one more thought for you, Susan and Alan.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell the LANL security where you’re actually living. In case they were to come for you. Give them a fake address. Say you’re at, I don’t know, the Cowboy Motel up past the Big Bow Wow.”
Alan and Susan dressed up like office drones and set out on foot along the two-lane highway that bisected the town. It was hard, packed snow embossed with tire tracks. There wasn’t much traffic.
“So what about the skugsniffer?” asked Susan.
“We’ll get ourselves an alternate pair of personalities,” said Alan. “We’ll pose as normal people.”
Susan laughed. “And don’t forget we need new ID.”
“I have an idea for that. See the filling station ahead? We’ll kidnap a brace of sojourners and glean what we need.”
“Kidnap?”
“I’ll teep you the details.”
Alan and Susan picked their way along the road’s pleasantly crunching snow to the gas-station. While Alan bought a red metal can and filled it with gas, Susan watched the flow of customers. And then she teeped Alan that she’d found the right pair: a sportive boy and girl in their mid-twenties, adventurers in a station-wagon with knobby tires. They had rough wooden skis on the roof, a duffel-bag in back, and Colorado plates.
“Oh, please can you help us?” called Susan, mincing over to them. “My husband and I ran out of gas, and we need a lift down the road, it’s just a mile.” Not pausing for an answer, Susan turned to Alan. “Come over here, dear! I’ve found our saviors.”
The raffish blonde couple were named Peter and Polly Pfaff. Everything was fine with them. “We’re heading for some back country further on,” said Peter cheerfully. He had sunglasses and a short, blonde beard. “But we thought we’d put in a day near Los Alamos first. You know about Nordic skiing?”
“I’m more the espresso and jazz type,” said Susan. “It must be nice to be so vigorous.”
“We pack up some food and camping gear, and then we’re into the boonies with a topo map,” said Polly. She had her hair in a long pig-tail wrapped around her head. Her lips were white with waxy balm. “But today we’re just going for a day-trip. A stony, twisty canyon-run at the Bandelier National Monument. We’ll go in overland. The army has the main road into Bandelier blocked up. Maybe we’ll ski up the river, if it’s solid.”
