He thought, "I don't want to stay this way, but maybe it has its compensations."
"We don't know everything," said Carly. "And we understand even less, but we were sitting here last night, roasting marshmallows."
"I found the bag, still half filled, ground into the dirt," Jack commented.
"I don't know about that," said Carly. "We were sitting here, and suddenly there was this light all around us, like a beam, except it was like a hundred cars with their headlights on high." She took a breath, but nobody interrupted her. "And then we woke up and it was morning. We couldn't remember anything. We don't actually know if we slept in our chairs ... or not."
"That's ridiculous. If you woke up in your chairs, where else could you have slept?"
"There's more," said Carly.
Their parents just stared at them.
"I'm not really Craig," she said.
"Of course you're Craig," said Jack.
"What I mean is that the person you're talking to right now, is Carly. Somehow, my mind got transferred into Craig's body. And his got put into my body." She pointed at her body.
It was silent. Their parents kept staring at them. It went on so long that she had to fill the silence.
"That's really all we know. We don't know how it happened, or where we were when it happened. We think maybe aliens abducted us, and they caused it. I know that sounds crazy, but that's all we can think of to explain all this."
Jack looked at Fran. He opened his mouth and started to speak. Then he closed it, and remained mute. Fran looked at him, and her face showed only confusion. At length, he opened his mouth again, and finally spoke.
"Maybe you're right. Maybe they are on drugs."
*****
The pan of eggs sat over ashes, its contents uneaten, and grown dry and cool as time had passed.
The interrogation had been unrelenting for a full hour. The kids had sat, helplessly, unable to answer questions.
"Was it acid?" asked Jack, at one point. "Did you take LSD?"
"No," they groaned, again together. Now Craig spoke up, in his sister's voice.
"We're not bullshitting you, Dad. I've never taken drugs in my life, and I'd bet my life that Carly hasn't either."
Jack blinked. Both of them had been talking about each other like that, referring to the other as if it were the person who should be making the noises coming out of their mouths. It was eerie, because they never screwed up. It was like they had practiced this bizarre prank for ages. He clung to the idea that this was all some kind of joke. Except that no crack had shown in their defenses for an entire hour. His stomach growled, and he glanced at the eggs. They were ruined. They'd chew like rubber now. And the sausage had had time for bacteria to grow on it that nobody should eat. He unconsciously used a coping mechanism by reaching for the pan and dumping the contents into the coals of the fire. It would be a cold breakfast for them all, this morning.
Fran suddenly spoke, addressing the person who looked like her son.
"If you're actually Carly in there, tell me where we went that day after I bought you your first bra." She looked over at the form of her daughter. "And don't you utter one word." She looked back at Craig's body.
"You mean to Zales?" asked Carly.
Her mother looked tense. "Why did we go there?"
"You said it was to celebrate me becoming a woman."
Fran blinked, and leaned forward.
"What did you want that I wouldn't buy for you?"
"I wanted to get my ears pierced, but you said I had to wait until I was fifteen."
Fran leaned back, so hard that the lawn chair rocked back, lifting the front legs off the ground an inch.
"Good Lord, Jack, they may be telling the truth!"
"Come on, Fran," he said. "It's not possible."
"I never told you about that trip to Zales. I never told anybody about it. It was something I wanted to be one of those little things between a mother and daughter."
"You got her a charm bracelet," said Jack. "I remember that."
"Yes, but I didn't tell you where we went ... or that other part."
Jack looked at the image of his daughter.
"She told him about it. You know how they are. They tell each other everything. They act the same. They say things at the same time. They're twins, Fran!"
"Ask him something only your son would know," said Fran, gesturing to their daughter's body. Her usage of the pronoun "him" was observed by all present. It was profound, in the minds of the two teens, and gave them their first spark of hope that someone might actually believe them.
"Okay," said Jack, aggressively. Then he went silent.
A full minute later Fran spoke again. "Jack?"
"I'm thinking," he growled. "It has to be something only Craig would know."
"Ask me about one of our hunting trips," said Carly's body. Carly had never been hunting. She didn't like guns. It was something her brother had teased her about.
Finally, Jack spoke.
"How many times have I taken a shot at a deer and missed?"
"Over all three hunting trips we've been on?" asked Carly's body.
"Yes, all of them." Jack folded his arms across his chest.
Carly's body ticked them off on her fingers.
"Four," said Craig, with Carly's voice.
"Four?" Fran goggled. "You missed the target four times? Where did those bullets go, Jack? You told me you always hit what you aim at."
Jack looked uncomfortable, but ignored her. He looked at his daughter.
"How many times have you missed?"
"Once," said Craig. "Unless you include that first time, when you said I had buck fever and couldn't shoot. You said I'd missed the perfect chance. Does that one count?"
"Jack, you never told me any of this," complained Fran. "I let you take him out there because I knew it was important to you, but you assured me that nobody could get hurt except the deer. If you two are just shooting willy nilly, those bullets could end up anywhere, Jack."
"Nobody got hurt!" snapped Jack. "We were in the middle of the woods, for Christ's sake. It's no big deal."
"If it's no big deal, then why didn't you tell me?" argued Fran.
"Because no man wants to admit that he missed," he finally said.
"So you lied to me because you wanted to look all macho." Fran looked disgusted.
"I didn't lie. I just didn't tell you everything," he complained.
Fran looked at her son's body.
"Did he tell you that he couldn't shoot a deer, or that he missed when he tried to?"
Carly shook her brother's head.
"We never really talked about the hunting trips. I mean he said it was fun, and that cleaning the deer is messy. I think he just told me that part to creep me out. He said they ate the heart raw, because the Indians claim that will make you more of a man, or something."
"That wasn't really true," said Carly's body. "We never really ate anything raw. You were right. I was just messing with you."
"Son of a bitch!" barked Jack, who was suddenly ghost pale. "It's fucking true!"
That fact affected the adults so much that Fran didn't even scold him for using language like that in front of the children.
*****
It is one thing to accept a premise as fact, on a cerebral or academic level. It is another entirely to accept it on an emotional one. This phenomenon leads to situations in which you know something is true, but have a hard time believing it anyway. If you need more detail, or are a researcher, I'll hook you up with the Austin family. Well, I'll tell them what you want. Don't be surprised if they aren't interested in trying to prove things to you that took them months to adjust to themselves.
During that first day, there was very little "adjusting" and a lot of questions. Pretty much everybody asked questions. Both teens and adults had questions, but of a different variety. The kids were asking questions from a viewpoint of, "What do we do now?" For the adults, there wasn't anything to do, exc
ept try to understand how this had happened. And that diversity of viewpoints was, quite possibly, what led to the eventual resolution of the whole mess.
What was that, you ask? Well, you will learn of that in due time. To be fair - and by "fair" I mean to put you on the same shale-covered mountainside that the kids were on, where every step might cause you to slip and fall off the mountain - you are going to have to take the same journey they took. Thank your lucky stars it isn't literally the same journey. But don't get all miffed and stop reading because you're too impatient to know how things turned out. As I said earlier, this could happen to you, and it would be handy if you knew what to do about it.
The adults ran out of questions first. Unfortunately, the plethora of questions - from both viewpoints - did not generate many answers. To distill it all down to the common denominator, we'll just say it was basically like this:
"What are we going to do?" asked the kids.
"The only thing you can do is go on with your lives until we can figure out whether or not this situation can be resolved somehow."
"I can't live life as Carly," groaned Craig. "She's a girl!"
"There's nothing wrong with being a woman," sniffed Fran. "You're a beautiful young woman, now. You should be proud of your femininity."
"I am not a young woman!" barked Craig. "Being stuck in my sister's body does not make me female!"
"Well you're going to have to learn how to act like one," said Jack. "Because if you don't, people are going to think there's something wrong with you."
"There is something wrong with me!" wailed Craig.
"What I meant," said Jack, calmly, "is that if you can't act like your sister, you're going to end up in the loony bin, and there won't be anything your mother or I can do about it. Not right away."
This gave Craig pause.
It was clear that Carly wasn't excited about impersonating a male either, when she said, "And that means I have to act like Craig?" His voice, powered by her mind, sounded sad about that, but both Fran and Jack had already begun adapting to the situation, and their reaction to the bizarre visual things going on around them had already lessened.
"Yes," said Fran. "At least for now. Don't worry. Your father will think of some way to fix all this, and then you can have your body back."
"Me?" croaked Jack. "I have no idea how to fix this!"
"You'll figure it out," said Fran, with complete confidence.
"Really?" That was Carly, making Craig's voice sound like an alto.
"No pressure there," said Jack. Sarcasm dripped in his voice.
"What if he can't?" asked Craig, who had tensed Carly's entire body. "What if this is ... permanent?"
"Then you'll just have to do the best you can," said Fran.
"What does that mean, Mom?" asked Craig.
"What it means is that, if it's permanent - and it could be some temporary result of the al-" She stopped. Everybody knew she'd almost said "aliens" and everybody knew why she'd stopped. "It could be a temporary result of whatever happened to you," she finished. "But we won't know which it is until some time passes. So until then, the two of you need to teach each other how to act, so that nobody outside this family finds out that this happened. It's hard enough for your father and me to believe this. Nobody outside our family ever would. And I do not want my children confined in some institution."
"The booby hatch," said Jack, as if her statement needed clarification.
"Stop that!" snapped his wife. "You'll scare them."
Jack laughed. It was both explosive and completely inappropriate for that particular situation. The other three were shocked, and it was obvious on their faces. He didn't bat an eyelash, though. Instead, he just stared at his wife.
"You think they aren't already scared?"
"You're not helping," she said, her voice level.
"Listen to me," he replied, his voice just as firm and level. "The single thing they need to concentrate on most in the world is that they do not want to end up doing something that will lead to the kind of questions that will, in fact, land them locked up in a room with rubber walls. Political correctness isn't what's needed here. Raw truth and a clear understanding of the dangers they face is what they need to guide their actions right now. And this beginning time is the most dangerous time of all, because they aren't used to this yet. They need time and training to be able to pull this off. We can't just hide them away, because that would cause its own set of questions. They can't avoid their friends forever, because that would cause questions. In fact, the only way I think we're going to pull this off at all is to just move, where nobody knows us and nobody will see any differences between how they used to act, and how they act now!"
"Calm down, Dear," said Fran, soothingly. "It's not as bad as you think. Both of them are bright, intelligent kids. They understand the stakes. They'll do whatever is necessary to protect themselves. And everybody knows that teenagers are erratic and unpredictable. If there are any little slips, people will think it's that."
"Or we can say we were messing around," said Craig, who was already imagining what kind of "slips" he was likely to make. Like going into the guys bathroom in a public venue, without thinking about it.
"See? They'll be fine, Darling. Don't get your blood pressure up."
"If this isn't an excuse to have high blood pressure, there is no good excuse," said Jack, still fired up.
"Of course there's no excuse to have high blood pressure," said Fran, firmly. "Don't be silly. Speaking of which, did you take your medicine this morning?"
"No," he said, a little grumpily. "My morning routine was, shall we say, interrupted?" There was more sarcasm in his voice.
"Well , go take it," she said. "I don't want to have to deal with this alone, and have the fuss of burying you piled on top of it."
Her calm, matter of fact attitude was a little unnerving. It almost suggested that possibly having to bury her husband was the least of her concerns, at this particular moment.
He stalked off towards the tent. Fran turned back to her children.
"This isn't the end of the world," she said, her voice low. "You two might as well have been each other anyway. You know what I'm talking about. You finish each other's sentences. You like the same things and you think the same way. With a little practice, this won't be as hard as you think. And it really may be temporary, some kind of shock to your psyches or something. For now, just talk to each other and teach each other how to be each other." She looked confused. "Did that make sense?" she asked.
"Yes, Mom," said both teens together.
They looked at each other. They were used to doing that ... saying the same thing at the same time. It was not something that had genetic roots, regardless of what their parents thought. When they had been small, they had noticed the reaction of the adults around them when, occasionally, completely by accident, they said something together. They thought that reaction was funny. And it got them extra attention. So they practiced doing it. And, perhaps, unknown to them, there really was some genetic component to it, because after a while, they didn't have to glance at each other, or make any signal to pull their pranks. After a while, it just became natural. It wasn't magic or anything. They simply understood what the likely answer to a question was, or the likely remark to some stimuli, and then said it at the same time. If they were right, it sounded like "Twin Speak" and if they were wrong, nobody noticed.
The same thing happens with siblings who aren't twins. They answer or say things at the same time. Sometimes they say the same thing. If you're the parent of multiple children, you've heard it happen in your own family.
In any case, not to belabor the subject, by the time Jack got back from taking his blood pressure medicine, Fran had more eggs cooking, and the kids had their heads together, talking quietly.
"We're not going back home early," announced Jack as he approached his family.
"I don't remember anyone saying we should," said Fran.
"Don't you want
a doctor to examine them?" he asked, frowning.
"What good would that do?" she asked. "Their bodies aren't injured, and a doctor can't see their minds. A doctor wouldn't believe them anyway. You know that."
"I don't want to take them to a doctor," he said. "I just thought I was going to have to talk you out of that. And I assumed they'd want to go home."
"Why? What can they do at home that they can't do here?"
"And without any of our friends showing up before we're ready for that," added Carly.
"Oh," said Jack, trying to salvage his dignity. "Good, then."
"And we mustn't let this destroy our vacation," said Fran. "We haven't finished recharging. We may as well try to get used to it as soon as possible."
"Isn't that what we're doing?"
"We planned to hike the Cascade Canyon trail today," said Fran, ignoring his barb. "I think we should still do that."
"So do I!" argued Jack.
"Then stop stomping around and making decrees, like you're the king of the world, or something," said Fran. "The children have enough to worry about without their father going all macho on them."
"I'm not going all macho!" he groaned.
She gave him a long, level stare. "Oh yes," she said. "I forgot. You already went all macho on me back after that hunting trip."
Jack stomped over to his son and took him by the shoulders. Then, remembering that this wasn't his son, he moved to Carly's body and did the same thing. Still, it was very strange, and it gave him pause.
"Craig?" he asked.
"Yeah?"
It was Carly's voice, but the instant reply reassured him that he was, in fact, talking to his son.
"Let this be a lesson to you. It is impossible to understand a woman. My children have been abducted by aliens, and their minds have been switched, and what's my wife all fired up about? She's all fired up because one day, five years ago when I brought home a deer to put meat in the freezer, I forgot to tell her I missed when I fired at the first one!"
Fran sniffed. "You didn't forget to tell me ... you decided not to."
"It was four years ago, Dad, not five," said Craig, who couldn't have told you why he corrected his father in this situation.
Alien Exchange Program Page 3
