Starman: the gap is still stationery. saturn is about to go behind it
Starman? Give me a break.
DavidNuq: Is that significant?
Starman: nasa has asked parkes to try to send a signal to the cassini probe through the gap. it’s between jupiter and saturn now. the probe will acknowledge receipt of the message. if so, that will give us something coming back the other way which should carry some information. there aren’t any radio signals coming from any celestial objects behind it so far, but even if cassini can only confirm after it has reappeared, that will be something
DavidNuq: Good idea. Have there been any other observations?
Starman: nothing so far. siding springs is trying everything they have. will let u
know
DavidNuq: Everything’s quiet here, except for the Plant.
Starman: yes, wish id been there. must have been quite a sight. ill see if i can get there later
DavidNuq: Ok.
Starman: by the way, im back on tv. prof montgomery is out of favour again now we know it certainly isn’t a dust cloud. ill be on the late news
DavidNuq: We’ll look out for you.
The printer attached to the laptop was spitting out many sheets with columns of numbers on them. "Max is sending me the data from Parkes and Mt Stromlo," said David. "Apparently they’re supposed to mean something." He scanned the list of numbers carefully, but he was no astronomer. He relied instead on the abstract Max had thoughtfully added at the top of each page. "Everything’s still quiet up there," he said, indicating the ceiling.
"It hasn’t been too quiet down here," I said, and I told him what had happened in the study. He didn’t care less about the talisman, but picked up when I mentioned that Joanna no longer produced any sparks on my lesions.
"Then it must have been static in the lab," he said. Perhaps I still showed some doubt about that, because he added. "Emily, they’re just lesions. The doctors were right, they’ll clear up in a few days."
Starman: s springs reported saturn just got occulted.
"Huh?" I asked.
DavidNuq: Emily said Huh?
Starman: tell her it means saturn just passed behind the gap
DavidNuq: Is the Gap showing any signs of moving at all?
Starman: no. steady as a rock. bizarre. its either in geostationary orbit or we're looking at something utterly out of this universe.
"Can I type something?" I asked. David stood aside and my head replaced his in the little box on the screen.
DavidNuq: How long will the Gap be here this time?
Starman: no way of telling. indefinitely by the looks of it. its been almost 7 hours now
Just great.
There was a knock on the front door. We looked up, startled.
"Pizza’s here," called out Heather.
DavidNuq: Pizza’s here. Shall we eat yours?
Starman: J
DavidNuq: I’m serious.
I decided to pay for the pizzas and joined Heather at the front door with my purse. There was a heavy-set young man standing there, pizza boxes in hand. He wore a jacket with the pizza company’s logo and the name Steve printed on it. Next to him stood our friendly police sergeant, hand again close to his gun, scowling at us. Behind them, out in the street, the crowd still mingled. A few flashbulbs went off when I appeared. The pizza boy turned towards them and then back to us. He grinned nervously.
"Hi," he said to Heather. "Er – you ordered some pizzas?’ He looked at the docket. "One supreme, one veggie, one ham and..."
Then he looked at me more closely. "It’s you," he said.
It was indeed. I knew this already, but it was thoughtful of him to remind me.
"You’re the chick on the news."
What an interesting phrase. Given the number of people in the world, there must be a large number of "chicks" on a large number of news services all over the globe at any one time. But I had become the chick on the news, at least as far as this guy was concerned. No doubt he had seen the broadcast of my less-than-amiable interview in the car park at the university. It had featured high up on the headlines, just under the big story about the appearance of the Gap itself.
I said nothing, just opened my purse.
But at that point he wasn’t interested in money. He was looking past us at the scene in the living room. I looked too. David was there, shuffling the paper pouring out of the printer and tapping on the laptop. The Maestro wandered past, still in his white robes, sniffing loudly and scratching his backside. Joanna was just visible in the kitchen, clearing out some of Mike’s foliage she had found in the pantry. And beside me was Heather, a hill of shocking pink, wide-eyed at the sight of the cooling pizzas.
"Just having a few friends over," I said nonchalantly. "How much?"
"Er - $21.95."
I took out twenty-five dollars and said, "Keep the change." I had delivered pizzas myself once, and knew how welcome tips were.
He turned his attention back to me and gawked a bit at the sight of the wad of hundreds I still had in my purse.
"Casket win," I said.
"Lucky."
His eyes never moved from me as he put the money away. His attention was starting to make me nervous. A little warning light blinked on and off in my brain:
CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION
But it refused to give any details. I guessed the crowd was making me nervous.
Heather had meanwhile grabbed the boxes and opened them for inspection. "Is there extra cheese on this?" she asked.
"Did you order it?" he asked, a trifle patronisingly I thought.
"I ordered the three cheese special on the supreme." If Heather said so, it had to be true. She never made a mistake with food. "This is a standard supreme."
"Sorry," the guy said. "It’s been a crazy night at the store. All the excitement of that thing in the sky, you know." He turned back to look at me one more time.
But Heather had not finished. "Did you charge us for it? Let’s see the order slip."
While this enormously interesting exchange was taking place, I looked out at the crowd on the street. Camera flashes were popping off. Some of the reporters yelled out questions when they saw me. I ignored them. A couple of police officers were directing traffic past the house: the crowd had spilled out into the road. Two more were vainly trying to tell people to go away: "Nothing to see here" and so forth. There was a guy hanging over the fence, with a mullet hairstyle, dressed in grubby t-shirt and track pants, grinning widely. He called out: "Hey, Emily! Why don’t you walk through me?" I ignored him too. But that little warning light in my head was still blinking on and off.
Then I noticed a disturbance in the general mill. A young man had appeared on the edge of the crowd, yelling incoherently while trying to struggle through to the front gate. The police were on him quickly, but he pushed against them. I finally caught what he was saying: "That guy stole my pizzas!"
The sergeant on the porch turned at that and yelled out to his constables: "What’s going on there?"
"This guy reckons that guy stole his pizzas," one of them called back.
The sergeant looked at the pizza man beside him. "Is this true?"
"No," the guy said. But he glanced nervously at the man in the street.
"Bring him up here, constable," the sergeant called out. The police guided the man into the garden and they arrived, puffing hard, beside us.
"Now, what’s going on?"
The front porch was getting crowded. Heather had pulled back slightly to take another look at the pizzas, probably counting the mushrooms by now. I was still in the doorway. The sergeant, the pizza man, the other man and one of the constables now stood before me. No one was smiling.
Behind us, Joanna stepped into the hall. "Is there a problem, Emily?" she asked. This was her house, after all.
"I don’t know," I replied.
"I was delivering these pizzas," said the other man. "I had to pull up down the street because of the crowd. Thi
s guy jumped on me, grabbed my jacket and the pizzas, and punched me." He pointed at the name on the guy’s jacket. "That’s my name. I’m Steve."
The sergeant frowned. "Well?" he asked the pizza man, who said nothing.
"Ask him for his identity badge," Steve said. "We all carry one." He reached into his jeans and pulled out a plastic badge that matched the logo on the jacket.
"Ok, ok," the impostor said, taking a step back. "I did it. Sorry. I just wanted to see her."
He indicated me: the chick on the news. He was prepared to steal and assault someone just to catch a glimpse of me, the celebrity of the hour. This was a first. I can’t deny I felt a little flattered, even if he was a fruit loop.
"Well, now you’ve seen her," said the sergeant, taking his arm, "you’re under arrest."
He didn’t take that too well, though. Perhaps he hadn’t thought his plan through enough, hadn’t seen past the initial step of robbery with violence to the unexciting but no less important phase of languishing in jail. I bet he hadn’t even thought to bring his toothbrush.
"You can’t arrest me!" he shouted. "It’s her you should be arresting. She’s the alien!"
Had someone said that to me a few days ago, I would have dismissed it as an honest mistake. But now, a part of me considered that perhaps he had a point. I was certainly less human than I had been lately. Nevertheless, his statement was not likely to win much sympathy given the present circumstances.
"Is that so?" said the sergeant. "Well on this planet we don’t arrest aliens for no reason." He went to haul the guy off the porch.
The guy shouted again, no words, just a loud yell that took us all by surprise, and wrenched his arm free. He dived through the door at me. I ducked sideways, barrelled into Heather who had time to yell "Watch the pizzas!" before the guy had passed by and down the hall.
The sergeant followed him, pushing me aside. The other policeman, sensibly, started to run around the side of the house to cover the back. Things became confused.
Joanna squealed as the guy’s shoulder connected with her chest and she collapsed against the wall. He continued his flight, entering the living room just as David walked into his path carrying his pile of papers.
He held up his arms to stop him, but could not halt the force of his charge. The papers went everywhere as David was thrust aside, falling across his laptop.
The sergeant fell over David, landed heavily on top of him and both of them struggled and thrashed for a second on the floor as the guy left the living room, raced through the kitchen and out the back door.
I stopped to check on Joanna, who waved me off. "I’m ok," she said. "Just help me up."
But she had been knocked fairly hard and, after I had helped her to stand, she stayed there breathing heavily for a few moments. The sergeant finally untangled himself from the computer cables and continued the chase. David followed.
There were various noises and shouts from the backyard. I helped Joanna onto the sofa just as the sergeant came back into the house and stormed over to me. "What the f...flying hell is that thing in the back yard?" he yelled.
"Oh," I said, deliberately flippant because if I wasn’t I would have started tearing my hair out, "you’ve met Mike."
"The guy disappeared into that jungle you’ve got out there. How far does it go?"
David then re-entered, shouted "Get out here!" and ran back. I started to follow, but the sergeant said: "No, just stay here, please. This guy could be dangerous."
I said, "I’ll risk it," and left the room, with Joanna behind me.
On the back veranda things looked calm enough. David was standing at the foot of the steps, peering into the black, ominous bulk of Mike. The two policemen – the one who had chased the guy around the back and the other who had already been stationed there – were beating at the edges of the scrubby tangle, flashing their torches into it. The beams revealed nothing.
"How did he get in there?" I asked. Mike was a complete tangle of vegetation, with no large gap anywhere.
"He just dived off the veranda into it," said David. "He must still be in there somewhere."
The sergeant emerged from the house and took charge. "Get back, everyone," he said. "Fraser, cover the back fence."
The officer called Fraser scratched his head. "How do I get through this lot?" he asked.
"Don’t be stupid, man!" called the sergeant. "Go through the neighbours’ property!" Fraser shrugged, settled his cap on his head and climbed over the neighbouring fence.
The Maestro emerged from the house and stared hard at the tangle of Mike. "Something is wrong?" he asked calmly.
Joanna had turned the veranda light on but it cast almost no illumination over the backyard. The sergeant breathed in and out a few times, then pulled out his walkie-talkie and started being official into it. He was calling for reinforcements.
Whoever the guy was, he had vanished. What was nagging me was whether he was just a nut who wanted to get close to someone he believed was an alien, or whether he really did know something about me I didn’t. His actions certainly did not lead one to suppose he was in a healthy state of mind.
"One thing is for sure," said Joanna, "I’m not going in after him."
"Not a good idea, I think," agreed the Maestro.
The sergeant broke off from his walkie-talking to say, "No, ma’am. You stay away. Don’t worry, we’ll get him out of there."
"Um – I wouldn’t advise that," said David, coming up to stand beside us. "We’re not entirely sure what this thing is."
"What do you mean?" asked the sergeant.
Then we heard something. A sound, quite loud, coming from Mike, or somewhere underneath him, a sort of rustling noise, or maybe a rasping, like dry branches rubbing together.
"Can you hear that?" asked Joanna.
"That must be him," said the sergeant. "Constable, can you tell where it’s coming from?"
The other policeman, still down near Mike and flashing his torch around, waved the beam vaguely. "No, sergeant," he said.
"Useless as a dog with two legs," I head the sergeant mumble, as he started down the steps into the garden.
The sound stopped.
The centre of the mass of vegetation started moving. Branches rattled and writhed; leaves rustled. Then something emerged.
"Look!"
A man’s head and shoulders. It was very dark out near the middle, but the porch light managed to throw enough to reveal the phoney pizza man, still in his bright red jacket. He was struggling out of the vegetation, flailing at the branches.
"Help!" he cried.
"Stop there!" called the sergeant. "An officer is coming to assist." He began to struggle into the tangle of vines.
David ran down the stairs. "Please don’t do that," he said, grabbing at the sergeant.
"Back away, sir!" the sergeant shouted. "You’re interfering with an arrest."
David glanced back at me. "I don’t like this," he said.
The Maestro was standing next to me, and I felt his hand on my shoulder. "It will be all right," he said. "Watch."
Then it happened.
The man was snapping a branch in two when part of Mike seemed to move of its own accord. A long vine twisted around the man’s chest and lifted him up, pulling him out of the rest of the undergrowth. It was like some great tentacle, raising him up and holding him aloft, while he writhed and screamed and shouted.
"Holy crap!" said the sergeant, stopping in his tracks, up to his waist in Mike already.
Then the Thing appeared again.
Now, we aren’t certain if this was the original Thing, the one that tried to pull me further into the circle in my house, or some other Thing that had decided to inhabit Mike. We could not even agree if it was the same type of Thing at all. As before, words failed an adequate description. But someThing appeared and, just as suddenly, the man disappeared.
He was there one moment, gone the next, sucked or pulled or tugged or moved into nothingness as quickly a
nd as quietly as a candle going out. His voice cut off abruptly. The Thing itself vanished with him. The wayward vine that had lifted him up fell back. And that was that.
The sergeant wrenched his gun from its holster and pointed it where the man had been. But of course, by then it was too late. He paused for a second, realised where he was standing, and backed out of the foliage hastily.
"Everyone move back!" he called. "Fraser? Are you there?"
From the back fence a weak voice called out "Yes, sergeant!"
"Get back here!" He pulled out his walkie-talkie again and gibbered into it.
The rest of us remained calm, if a little shaken. Joanna stood there with one hand to her mouth, staring wide-eyed at the spot where the man had disappeared. The Maestro was waving his walking stick triumphantly, absolutely delighted, a huge smile on his face. David came over to me and took my hand.
"Ok," he said, his voice trying to convey assurance. "Ok, now we know what was going to happen to you this morning."
"Where’s he gone?" I asked, although I had a better idea than anyone. He had gone in, into the dark place in the centre of the circle, into the nothingness from the threshold of which I had barely escaped, to that space that was no space inside our own space.
David tried to help me into the house, but the sergeant stopped him. "One moment, sir," he said. "Do you know what happened just then?"
David nodded. "I think so. But that’s not going to help anyone. I’d suggest you cordon off this whole section of street."
The sergeant’s walkie-talkie squawked. He pressed the button angrily. "Get everyone away!" he shouted into it. "This whole block is to be sealed off. No one allowed in. And get the Chief Inspector down here ASAP."
Plato's Cave Page 17
