by Sladek, John
He looked again, taking a closer look at the book of fables, open on the polished oak table for anyone to see. Fables! Wasn’t that like the human race, to waste their time on fables, when death rose like flying dust all about them. He knew now his own function, a useless robot, destined to keep opening the cabinet of himself and taking another look. But what use were fables, when silence, all through the fort, told him that this planet held no life. How did they all die? He wasn’t sure about death, it wasn’t as clear as life. Some may have died skewered by the black lines of bullets across the page, or some torn and tumbled by the jagged edges of explosions, red and orange with radial lines around the large red BLAM! Could any number of fat books of fables now bring them back for his inspection? He doubted it, even as he stepped forward to inspect the Table of Contents. It was almost completely blank by now, with the two remaining fables huddled at the bottom of the page, barely breathing. Turning quickly to the bayonet bookmark, he read THE EMU, THE AUK AND THE PASSENGER PIGEON: ‘One day the emu, the auk and the passenger pigeon were arguing about the meaning of life. The passenger pigeon was easily the most clever, and the other two were finally struck speechless by the brilliance of his argument. Then, just as he spread his wings to make a final dramatic point, the pigeon slipped, fell over, struck his head on the fender, and died. “Pity,” said the Great Auk. “Last of his kind, wasn’t he?” “I think he had a wife somewhere,” replied the emu. “But they haven’t been living together for years. Still, we’ll never see his like again. What an argument!” The Great Auk preened. “Oh, I don’t know. There’s such a thing as being too smart for your own good.”’ The next story, THE FOX AND THE ERASER, was fading fast. ‘One day a fox, finding a vain and idle eraser, decided to play a trick on the slow-witted object. “Can you erase anything?” he asked. “Of course I can.” “Then how about erasing this fable?” “Nothing easier. If I can’t erase this fable, I’ll give you anything you like – my daughter’s hand in marriage.” “Agreed,” said the wily ox, and the era immediately busied himself with the able. In nc tim at al, th e hd cmpltly obltrtd evrythng but –’ The blank page was thinner, and the whole book seemed to be wearing away to dust. Erasers have a terrible way, he recalled, of working at pictures as well as words. The shine vanished from the oak, and the oak from the fort, and the fort from the terrible silence, as he took another look.
SPACE SHOES OF THE GODS
AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL REVELATION
Why do so many ancient legends speak of gods who fly in flaming chariots? Why is the Great Pyramid built strong enough to withstand an H-bomb blast? What possible connection can there be between Easter Island, Stonehenge, and the messages received on my Aunt Edna’s ouija board? Orthodox scientists are unable, perhaps unwilling, to answer such daring questions.
Of course it’s never easy to abandon our old misconceptions and accept fresh ideas. Scientists bitterly attacked Galileo when he proved that the Leaning Tower of Pisa was a pendulum. They pooh-poohed Darwin’s revolutionary notion that mankind is descended from the beagle. They laughed themselves sick at Edison’s light bulb, as they will at any brilliant idea eons ahead of its time.
My idea, for instance. I do not expect understanding from the narrow-minded men of the scientific establishment. They are too busy pottering around with test tubes in musty laboratories to listen to anything new and important. Rather, my article is directed to those young, adventurous minds who are not afraid to believe the impossible. I am in the position of the first beagle who dared to walk on his hind legs, so to speak. No doubt there was some smart beagle professor standing by, to call him a crank and a dreamer. All the same, he took that first great step.
Today we are taking another great step, a giant step from Earth1 into the vast spaces of space. Yet how much do we really know about this universe of ours, with its dozens on dozens of galaxies, each packed with scores of literal stars?
Earthbound science has no answers. But a few far-sighted ‘cranks and dreamers’ have ventured to say that:
a. There are certainly other civilizations in the universe exactly like ours, if not more so.
b. They are trying desperately to get in touch with us, perhaps to borrow money.
c. They must have landed here on Earth in the prehistoric past.
d. Wherever They landed, They were worshipped as gods by the natives. Their modern equipment, which would seem prosaic to us, must have been fearful magic for our ancestors. Imagine, for example, how the simple Egyptians might have reacted to gods carrying ball-points, credit cards and contact lenses!
e. For some reason, the space gods wearied of all this worship, and departed.
Hard to believe? Orthodox science may try to dismiss such notions with a wave of its oscilloscope. But then orthodox science still cannot explain away certain facts …
The Evidence
Last year, English miners opened a seam of coal 15 million years old. Inside, they found the clear fossil imprint of a modern zipper.
How could it have got there? Did an ancient space visitor with zipper pockets on his uniform fall asleep in the English jungle, never to awaken? Was he left behind by the expedition? Could he have been murdered by one of his space brothers?2
Conventional scientists have their own ‘explanation’ of this strange anthracite evidence. They call it a fossil fern. But they have yet to explain what a fern was doing wearing a uniform with zipper pockets.
In the same way, conventional archaeologists have tried to explain away a remarkable cave drawing found in Blague, France. They call it ‘a hunter shooting game with a bow and arrow’. But the hunter’s bow looks astonishingly like a modern sextant, to the unprejudiced eye of this non-scientist. The drawing can only be a space navigator taking bearings on a woolly mammoth. Museums are filled with similar archaeological mistakes; Stone ‘spearheads’ which, as anyone can see, are actually stone letter-openers.
The ancient world abounds in such unexplained mysteries. How could the simple inhabitants of Easter Island have carved their enormous stone faces and heaved them into place, without the aid of rock drills and bulldozers? How could gigantic pyramids have been built by the primitive, cave-dwelling Egyptians? Science has not begun to unravel the mystery of the pyramids, nor even to solve the riddle of the Sphinx.
A mined edifice in Peru bears a weird inscription: two horizontal lines crossed by two vertical lines. In other words, the figure for tic-tac-toe, a game played by the latest giant computers. Likewise the Ankara Museum displays clay tablets pierced with holes – the same holes used in modern IBM cards. Could this represent the payroll arrangements of our cosmic visitors?
Peculiar Roundnesses
The jungles of Costa Rica are littered with mysterious stone balls, some of them larger than Volkswagens. I spoke with the amateur archaeologist who is studying these curious rock spheres in connection with his search for Martin Bormann.
‘I can’t really understand these odd orbs,’ he confided. ‘According to a local legend, these uncanny globes fell from the sky. The native name for them translates as “strange spheroids”. Could they be small planets from some lesser solar system? At this stage, we can’t rule out anything, even the possibility that some vanished race of giants played marbles here.’
Two intriguing ideas. Controversy rages on between the odd-ball planet theory and the lost-marble theory, but one question must be answered:
If these are tiny planets, what has become of their even tinier inhabitants?
The roundness theme appears again in the art of many cultures. Australian aborigines, among others, have drawn circles on pieces of wood. A ceremonial frieze of ancient Mexico, which is covered with circles, undoubtedly depicts traffic lights, ball bearings, embroidery, hoops, curly hair and many other items not re-discovered until the twentieth century.
My list could go on to include hundreds of these anachronisms, but I will end it with an object in my own collection. Not long ago I acquired a small Indo-Sumerian statue of bronze. P
urblind anthropologists would probably call it a ‘fertility goddess’, ignoring certain features which are obvious to any child:
On the chest of the goddess are two distinct, modern doorbells.
The Legends
In the light of evidence like the above, we might re-examine some of the legends of the so-called past. Take the Nordic sagas for example. There we read of strange gods who drank from horns. Virgil, too, speaks of dreams coming through a gate of horn, while the Book of Revelation describes gates of pearl. From Shakespeare we hear the legend of the base Indian who threw away a pearl, while many Indian myths speak of peculiar gods. Can all this be coincidence? No, it is far more likely that these myths convey primitive ideas of television, twin-tub washing machines and electric toothbrushes.3 This is confirmed in Genesis, where we read of an angel (a technician) who guarded the gates of Eden (spaceship) with a flaming sword (soldering iron).
Finally we are confronted with the ‘wild’ tales of the early Spanish conquistadores, who swore they found in America men with feathers growing right out of their heads! Who were these odd feather-headed strangers, and what were they doing on our planet?
The Lost Galaxy
By now it must be plain that many of our space gods were tourists. In the distant past, Earth was no doubt a tourists’ paradise, an unspoiled wilderness where the featherheads could get away from their own crowded galaxy. They may have built themselves a few amenities, such as the pyramid saunas of Egypt, or Stonehenge (a luxury motel), but they left most of the planet delightfully wild.
What spoiled it for them? The Deluge? The sinking of the luxury liner Atlantis? Whatever the reason, our cosmic tourists departed, leaving behind only a few traces: a zipper jacket in England, marbles in Costa Rica, a crumpled kleenex (now to be seen at the Stockholm Museum of Antiquities, in a wastebasket near the door).
Some uncanny tourist instinct must have told them that Earth was doomed.4 The natives were getting too civilized. All too soon earthlings would cover the paradise planet with highways and fuming traffic; fill its air with thundering jets carrying earthling tourists; and pack its universities with so-called professors who scoff at my theory.
The space gods have left our solar system and gone back to work. But someday – when we have finally rid this planet of evil, pollution, war, disease and skeptical scientists – then our gods will return.5 They will bring us all the benefits of their superior civilization. They will shower us with plenty of valuable cargo.
Notes
1. The question of giants in the Earth will be taken up in a later monograph.
2. Just such a space-brother murder could well account for the strange legend of Cain and Abel. I have communicated my suspicions to Scotland Yard, urging them to examine the coal deposits for fossil fingerprints. So far, they have remained ominously silent on the matter.
3. Further confirmation is provided by the certain knowledge that Shakespeare’s base Indian threw his pearl before swine. This proves that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Bacon, a space visitor.
4. ‘Tourist instinct’ is an example of clairvoyance, or ‘knowing’ that something will go wrong just before it does. I refer the reader to an interesting experiment at Earl University, where a researcher asks subjects to drop buttered toast and predict whether it will land face-down or face-up. So far, the experiment is a failure, Dr Bormann reports. But he adds, ‘The interesting thing is, I just knew it would fail.’
5. Some doddering scientists sneer at the idea of travel between stars. The nearest star, they say, is 25 trillion miles away. They forget that monorail trains are capable of astonishing speeds (over 200 m.p.h.!). Doubtless, despite the skeptics, we’ll have a regular train service to Alpha Centauri and other stars, by the end of the century.
THE POETS OF MILLGROVE, IOWA
Throw Away That Truss
The Astronaut was almost happy about having decapitated a mole while shaving. He’d always wanted to use one of those peculiarly shaped patches that come in the Bandaid assortment. But when he dug down in the flight bag and came up with the tin box, he found it empty.
‘Jeanne,’ he muttered.
‘What?’ Jeanne spread a drop of enamel on her toenail and thrust out her foot to inspect it.
‘Did we carry an empty tin Bandaid box all the way from California?’ Without waiting for the obvious answer, he went into the bathroom, stuck a piece of toilet paper over the wound, and began brushing his teeth electrically. The noise cut off the radio’s words from the bedroom, and he found himself alone with his face.
The Astronaut’s face, if shaved by a Gillette blade, could have aroused bubbles of admiration from the head of an oil millionaire’s daughter: ‘Hmmm, not bad-looking, either!’ (But not, he thought, with a piece of bloody toilet paper glued to it.) It featured a square, pink jaw terminating in a chin like a ripe apricot, superbly cloven. His nostrils were slightly flared, sensing danger, his eyebrows seriously straight and incapable of mockery, and his forehead – whatever a forehead should be – intelligent, he guessed. Even his teeth were proper reminders of death, orderly rows of military tombstones.
Today, however, his face showed classic lines of ‘nervous tension’. He and Jeanne had travelled two thousand miles to his home town, where he was born but not raised, so that he could give his speech at the Millgrove Harvest Festival. So that Jeanne could paint her nails and worry about losing her tan. His own tan was turning yellow, he noted, unplugging the razor.
‘– a modern miracle!’ the radio blurted.
The Astronaut rolled deodorant under each arm and behind his knees.
For Teenagers With Troubled Skin
He had left her alone in the MILLGROVE MOTE, as the faulty neon sign told her, and Jeanne, examining her toes, remembered she had nothing to read. There was only the worn and stained copy of Popular Mechanics by the toilet. Seated, wearing her patented lastex with fiberfil inserts, kolitron panels, nickel-chrome and neoprene clips, six-way stretch girdle that b-r-e-a-t-h-e-d, Jeanne read how to build her own. She yawned over elaborate schematic diagrams and finally turned to: ‘Honey, I got the job!’ – a man embraced a woman who smiled and raised one foot from the floor. The woman, smiling, embraced the smiling man with his hand, embracing her, clutching a rolled-up newspaper. Smiling, they embraced. He embraced this woman with her foot raised in salute.
Jeanne saw the man had chosen one of the following occupations:
Accounting
Advanced Mathematics
Advertising
Air Conditioning
Tool Design
Welding Processes
Yard Maintenance
Zoo Sanitary Engineering
But after all, as the magazine indicated, life is what you convert it into, what you Bild-UR-Self. The radio played the opening chords of a song about a hot rod, and Jeanne’s girdle s-i-g-h-e-d.
Nothing to Buy
‘It don’t make you – you know – sterile, does it?’ asked the grinning sheriff.
The Astronaut shook his head, then turned its profile to the older man and bent over his coke.
‘That’s all right then.’
In the rear of the store the druggist, Bud Goslin, his glasses glittering, moved among his glittering bottles of vitamins. He hummed a tune the Astronaut could not identify.
The Kind of Girl Tab Hunter Wants
Jeanne picked at the polish on her toenail. At home, the water in the pool would be turning brown and filthy, like the ook in the bottom of the golf bag in the garage. Nola has the key, she thought. Nothing can possibly happen. I’m getting a cold.
The radio gave a recipe. Jeanne wondered how Fritz, her dog, was getting along.
She saw what she had done and took out the bottle of polish remover.
Sodium Propionate Added, to Retard Spoilage
The Astronaut’s gesture took in rubber syringes, steel nail files, lavender soap, paregoric, kleenex, comic books, morphine, green stamps, and the hidden drawer of co
ndoms.
‘There is a certain poetry in all this,’ he said. The grinning sheriff nodded, and he went on, ‘a certain poetry. Yes, a certain poetry. You know?’ The grinning sheriff and Bud Goslin both nodded.
Teen Queen Screen Dream was the magazine the young girl held. Dropping a quarter in Bud Goslin’s hand, she glided toward the door.
‘All the nice young nooky come in here,’ said the sheriff, grinning at his lemon phosphate.
‘I know, I know.’
Bud Goslin came from behind his counter and rushed at the kids sitting in the floor.
‘If you kids don’t want to buy any,’ he said, ‘you can’t sit here reading them all day.’ He snatched the comics from them and herded the boys out the door. The air-conditioning made a faint coughing sound.
‘Christ, I wish I was thirty years younger. All the nice young nooky come in here,’ said the grinning sheriff.
What am I doing here? the Astronaut asked himself. This is not my town. I was not raised here, only born here.
But he felt the same about the town in which he was raised. This is not my town, what am I doing here? he thought, in London and New York and Menominee, Wisconsin.
In front of the courthouse stood a raw wood platform, from which the Astronaut would ‘launch’ his speech, as the mayor put it. Jeanne would not be there, for reasons of her own. They would give him the key to the city, and the poets of Millgrove would read poems in his honour. He would give his speech, and then they would hang him, as in Untamed Town, the innocent man they hang, and all day he listens to them building the raw wood scaffold …
