The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “You’ve noticed, haven’t you?”

  I shielded my eyes from the glare of the late afternoon November sunshine and looked across at Jimmy-James. “Noticed what?”

  He looked across at two of the creatures gliding along the other side of the street. “They’re slowing down.”

  I followed his gaze and, sure enough, the creatures did seem to be slower than they had been at first. But it was more than that. They seemed to be more cautious. I mentioned this to JJ and Abel, and to Ed and Estelle who were leaning on what remained of an old hitching rail at the edge of the sidewalk.

  Ed snorted. “That don’t make no sense at all,” he said. “Why would they be cautious now, when they’ve been here two goddam days.”

  “Ed, watch your mouth,” Estelle whined in her high-pitched voice.

  “He’s right,” agreed Jimmy-James.

  “Who?” Ed asked. “Me or him?”

  “Both of you.” JJ got to his feet and strode across to the post behind Ed and leaned. “They are getting slower and they do seem to be more . . . more careful,” he said, choosing his words. “And, no, it doesn’t make any sense for them to be more careful the longer they’re here.”

  “Nothing for them to be nervous about, that’s for sure,” Abel said. “They’ve got us wrapped up neat as a Christmas gift.”

  The aliens had effectively cut off the town. There were no phone lines and the roads were . . . well, they were impassable. It was Doc Maynard had seen it first, trying to get his old Ford Fairlane out to check on Sally Iaccoca’s father, over towards Bellingham. Frank Iaccoca had taken a bad fall – cracked a couple of ribs, Doc said – and Doc had him trussed up like Boris Karloff in the old Mummy movie.

  The car had cut out three miles out of Forest Plains and there was nothing Doc could do to get it going again. So he’d come back into town for help, without even taking a look under the hood, and Abel, Johnny Deveraux and me had gone out there to give him some help. Johnny, who works at Phil Masham’s garage, had taken some tools and a spare battery in case it was something simple he could fix out on the road. Doc Maynard was not renowned for looking after his automobile.

  When we got out there, Johnny tried the ignition and it was dead. But when he made to move around to the front of the car to open the hood he suddenly started floundering and dropped the battery. That’s when we found the barrier.

  A “force field” is what Jimmy-James called it.

  Everything looked completely normal up ahead in front of Doc Maynard’s Fairlane but there was no way for us to get to it. It felt like cloth but not porous. JJ said it was an invisible synthetic membrane – whatever that was – and he reckoned the creatures had set it up around the town to protect their spaceship. Sure enough, the same barrier travelled all the way around town . . . or so we figured. We tried different points on farm tracks and woodland paths and each one came to a complete halt.

  Like it or not, we were caught like fish in a bowl. But that didn’t seem to matter . . . at least not until JJ took a look in the creatures’ “book”.

  “There he goes, if it is a ‘he’,” said Jimmy-James, pointing to the creature with the box of cotton candy. The funny thing was that the box now looked to have a lot less of the stuff in it than it had done at first. The first time we’d seen it, the thing had looked to be almost full.

  “The other thing,” said JJ in a soft voice that made you think he was realizing what he was about to say at exactly the same time as he said it, “is they seem not to be touching people with those . . . those veil-things.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I guess that was what I meant about them being more cautious. Part of it, anyway.”

  Ed snorted. “Maybe it’s a case of the more they see of us the less they like.”

  Estelle rubbed Ed Brewster’s oiled hair and puckered up her mouth. “I’m sure they like what they see of you, honey,” she trilled without changing the shape of her mouth. “Anyone would.” It sounded as though Estelle was talking to a newborn babe sitting in a stroller. Ed must’ve thought so, too, because he told her to can it while he readjusted his quiff.

  “We need to get a look in that box-thing,” JJ said.

  “How we going to do that?” I asked. “And what good is it going to do us anyway? Just looks like a load of gunk to me.”

  JJ stepped away from the rail and out onto the street. “That’s just it,” he shouted over his shoulder as he strode across to the creature with the box. “None of us has seen what’s in there, not up close.”

  We watched the confrontation.

  Jimmy-James stopped right in front of the creature and it turned around. Almost immediately, the little veil-arms wafted out as though blown by a breeze and settled on JJ’s shoulders, the wailing sound rising a pitch or two in the process. Then it started to back away, its arms still blowing free.

  JJ shouted over to me to come on along. Ed Brewster stood up and moved alongside me. “I’m coming, too,” he said.

  “Now you be careful what you’re doing, Ed, honey,” Estelle warbled.

  “I will, Estelle, I will,” Ed said, with maybe just a hint of a sigh. And the two of us walked onto the street to join JJ. Which was how we got into the creatures’ spaceship.

  The alien with the book kept on backing away from the three of us and we just kept on walking after it. Eventually, we reached the ship where we discovered two more of the creatures standing by the ramp.

  The creatures then backed on up into the ship. We kept on following.

  A few minutes later the three of us were standing amidst a whole array of what looked to be lumps of foam, all of various size, piled up on or stuck against other lumps. Some of the lumps were circular – cylindrical, JJ said – and others looked like tears of modelling clay thumbed into place by a gigantic hand without design or reason.

  Up inside the ship, the things’ wing-arms were fluttering faster and more frequently than ever . . . and the alien that we reckoned to be recording the whole visit was mightily busy, removing small pieces of foam with the tendrils and absorbing them. When I glanced inside the box, I saw there was hardly anything in it.

  Over to one side of the crowded room a wide lamp-thing stood by itself. Standing beneath the lamp, two aliens were seemingly absorbed in another of the boxes, their wings-arms fluttering like a leaf caught in a draught. This particular box was completely full, a collection of multi-coloured shapes and lumps and pieces, all pressed into each other or standing alone.

  “We need to get a look at that,” JJ whispered to Ed and me.

  “Leave it to me,” Ed Brewster said. He walked across to the box and lifted it with both hands. “Okay if I borrow this for a while, ol’ buddy?” he said, waving the box in front of the two creatures.

  The things didn’t seem to do anything as Ed stepped back and moved back alongside us, although their arms were fluttering faster than ever. Then, suddenly, the little arm-wings dropped limp and the two creatures turned around. As they did this, the creature standing in front of the other two in the centre of the room waved its arms and then it, too, spun around.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jimmy-James said. “I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this.”

  As we ran down the platform leading back onto Sycamore Street I asked Jimmy-James what he’d meant by that last remark. But he just shook his head.

  “It’s too fantastic to even think about,” was all he’d say. “Just let me take a look at the box and then maybe I’ll be able to get an idea.”

  We high-tailed it back to Jack and Edna Bannister’s house down on Beech Avenue and, while me and Ed drank cup after cup of JJ’s mom’s strong coffee, JJ himself pored over the contents of the alien box. It was almost three in the morning when a wild-eyed Jimmy-James rushed into the Bannisters’ lounge and slammed the box onto the table. Ed was asleep, curled up like a baby on the sofa, and I was reading the TV Guide.

  “I have to look at the other box,” he said. “Now!”

  Ed
smacked his lips together loudly and shuffled around on the sofa.

  I looked up from a feature on Gilligan’s Island and was immediately surprised to see how much Jimmy-James resembled that hapless shipwreck survivor. “What’s up?”

  JJ shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. I noticed straight away that they were shaking. “A lot, maybe . . . maybe nothing. I don’t know.”

  “You want to – ”

  “I’ve been through all of the usual coding techniques,” JJ said, ticking off on his outstretched fingers. “I’ve applied the Patagonian Principle of repeated shapes, colour motifs, spacing . . . I’ve run the Spectromic Law of shading relationships and the old Inca constructional communication dynamics . . .”

  I held up a hand and waved for him to stop. “Whoa, boy . . . what the hell are you talking about?”

  JJ crouched down in front of me and looked up into my eyes. “It makes sense,” he said. “I’ve made it work . . . made the patterns fit.”

  “You understand it?” I glanced across at the box of jumbles shapes. “That?”

  JJ nodded emphatically. “Yes!” he said. Then, “No! Oh, God, I don’t know. That’s why I need to check. And I need to do it tonight. Tomorrow may be too late.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re – ”

  The resident genius of Forest Plains placed a hand on my knee. “No time,” he said. “No time to talk. It has to be now.”

  I studied his face for a few seconds, saw the look in his eyes: there was an urgent need there, sure . . . but there was something else, too. It was fear. Jimmy-James Bannister looked as scared as any man could be. “Okay, let’s go do it.”

  He stood up and looked at Ed. “What about him?”

  “He’ll be fine. We expecting any trouble in there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  And we went.

  The ship was silent and dark. JJ borrowed his old man’s flashlight and the two of us crept up that platform and into the depths of the creatures’ rocketship. The place was deserted, which was just as well. It didn’t take too long before JJ found the second box – the one the creature had been using all the time – and he scooped it into his arms and rushed back out of the ship.

  We were back in the house almost as soon as we had left. The whole thing had taken less than ten minutes.

  I watched as JJ sat in front of the new box – now containing but a few lumps and dollops of that clay-stuff – wringing his hands and muttering to himself. I couldn’t stand it any more and I grabbed a hold of JJ and shook him until I could hear his teeth clattering. “What the hell is it, JJ . . . why don’t you tell me for God’s sake.”

  He seemed to come to his senses then and he quietened down. Then he said, softly, “It’s the aliens.”

  “What about them?” I said.

  “They’re . . .” He seemed to be trying hard to find the right words. “They’re palindromic.”

  “They’re what?”

  “They run backwards . . . their time is different to ours.”

  “Their time is different to ours? Like how different?”

  “It moves in a different direction . . . backwards instead of forwards – except to them it is forwards. But to us it’s – ” JJ waved his arms around like he was about to take off. “Well, it’s ass-backwards is what it is.”

  “What the hell is all the goddam noise about?” Ed said, turning over on the sofa. He reached for his pack of Luckies and shook one into the corner of his mouth, lit it with a match.

  I didn’t know what to say and looked across at Jimmy-James. “Maybe you’d better tell him – us!”

  JJ sat down at the table next to the two boxes, one full and one almost empty. He smiled and said, calmly, “It’s this way.

  “I’ve broken the basics of their language. It wasn’t really too difficult once I’d eliminated the obvious no-go areas.” He pointed to the almost empty box. “This is the ‘book’ they’re using now . . . the one that’s recording everything that happens here . . . here on Earth.”

  “Looks like a mound of clay to me,” Ed said, blowing smoke across the table and shuffling one edge of the box away from him.

  “That’s because you’re you,” JJ said impatiently, “because you’re from Earth. To them, it’s the equivalent of a diary . . . a ship’s log, if you like.”

  Ed settled back on the sofa. “Okay. What’s it say?”

  “It starts at the very moment they opened the doors. It says they found a group of creatures standing outside watching them disembark . . . get out. These creatures, their record says, held instruments . . . they thought at first the things might be gifts.”

  I frowned. “When was that? I never held no instrument.”

  JJ leaned forward. “That’s just it. You didn’t. It didn’t happen. At least it didn’t happen yet.” He lifted the box onto his knee and pointed at the shapes inside. “See, it’s all arranged in a linear fashion, with each piece linking to others, building across the box in waves and doubling back to the other side. It’s like layers of pasta furled over on itself. But see the way that it’s arranged . . . you can pull pieces out of place and the gap stays. It’s an intricate constructional form of basic communication. I say ‘basic’ because I’ve only been able to pick up the very basic fundamentals. There’s much much more to it . . . but I don’t have the time to work it out. Not now, anyway.”

  Ed tapped his cigarette ash onto the carpet and rubbed it in with his free hand. “Why don’t you have the time? What’s the panic?”

  “The panic is that the record goes on to say how surprised they all were to find creatures – ”

  “Not half a surprised as we were to see them!” I said.

  JJ carried on without comment. “It goes on to say how they came out and stood in front of us and nobody – none of us – moved or did anything. We just stood there. Then we all moved away and went to some structures. They walked around and looked at the outside of these structures and then went back into their ship. They were concerned that they had somehow created the situation by their ship’s power.”

  “Huh?”

  JJ waved for Ed to keep quite and continued.

  “Listen. Then it says that, after some early investigations – they say that much more research has to be carried out – after these early investigations, we came on board the ship and borrowed their log.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve got the log,” I said. “For what good it’s doing us.”

  “But none of that other stuff happened,” JJ said. “This stuff in here . . .” He pointed at the individual pieces of clay . . . lifted one end of the carefully interwoven sheet of linked pieces and tiny constructions. “This only amounts to less than one single day. The creatures have been here almost three days now. There’s no mention of all the other things that have happened. And bear this in mind . . . the stuff in here is what’s left, as far as we’re concerned.”

  I figured someone had to ask so it might as well be me. “How do you mean ‘what’s left’?”

  “I mean, we’ve been watching the creature remove stuff from this box all the time he’s been here, right?” I nodded and saw Ed Brewster do the same. “And,” JJ continued, emphasizing the word, “what we have here, now – and which represents what’s left in the box after he’s been removing the clay stuff for almost three days – is a record of when they first arrived. The creature has been removing the stuff from the top – I’ve watched him . . . so have you, Derby; you, too, Ed – and leaving the stuff at the bottom completely intact. And that stuff records them arriving.”

  Ed and I sat silently, watching Jimmy-James. I didn’t have the first idea of what to say and I was sure Ed didn’t either. JJ must have sensed it because he started speaking again without giving us much of a chance to comment.

  “Derby, the creatures . . . have you noticed how they seem always to be turned away from you when you go up to speak to them?”

  We’d
already figured that the clear part of the mushroom tops more or less worked as the things’ faces. And it was true, now that Jimmy-James mentioned it, that the things always had that part of themselves turned away whenever you went up to them.

  “That’s because at the moment you start trying to communicate with them, they’ve actually just finished trying to do the same with you.”

  “That sounds like horseshit,” Ed said. “Not even Perry Mason could convict somebody on that evidence.”

  “And have you noticed how they keep facing you when they move away? That’s because, in their time-frame, they’re approaching you.”

  Some of it was beginning to make some kind of sense to me and JJ noticed that.

  “And we’ve all commented on how their attitude to us is changing,” he said. “You said they seemed to be getting slower . . . more cautious.”

  “That I did,” I remembered.

  “Well, they’re getting more cautious because where they are now is they’ve just arrived. Where they were when we first saw them was in their third or fourth day around us. They were used to us then . . . they’re not now.”

  “Okay, okay, I hear what you say, JJ,” I said. “Maybe the creatures’ time does move in reverse, if that’s what you’re saying. I don’t understand it, but then I don’t understand a lot of things. The thing that puzzles me is why you’re getting so hot under the collar about this. Everything’s going to go okay: we saw them ‘arrive’ – which you say is when they left – and nothing happened in the meantime. All we have to worry about is our future which is their past . . . and they’ve come through that okay haven’t – ”

  I saw JJ’s face screw up like he’d just sucked on a lemon. He reached over and pulled the full box across to the edge of the table, held up another of those interlaced jigsaw puzzles of multicoloured clay pieces. “This is the previous diary,” he said, “the one before the one they started after they had arrived.