“Could I send you one on a trial basis when it is ready? No obligation, of course.”
The priest shrugged his shoulders. “Do what you will. I must leave now.”
Hugo Dowd hesitated, then said, “I will be back tomorrow to work with you, Mr. Maize, as long as Father O’Toole has no objections.”
“Fine, fine. I feel we are on the verge of something great—a real breakthrough to the last outpost of darkness.” Maize walked over to a great, glowing globe, spinning it until the South American land mass came into view. “Prayer will bring civilization with it, Father. You wait and see!”
* * * *
Father O’Toole departed New York three days later; Hugo Dowd stayed on, working with Maize and his assistants in great offices on the 107th floor. Once the priest left, Arthur Maize detected an almost immediate change in Hugo. Maize commented on this one day while they worked.
“You know, Hugo, you are a much better fellow on your own, without the good Father. That first day you came here, you barely talked and, when you did, I sometimes had trouble understanding your words.”
“I…Father O’Toole helped me a lot. I hope he’s right in letting me stay here alone.”
“Why wouldn’t he be? Besides, you’re hardly alone.” Arthur Maize grinned. “Tonight’s Wednesday, and I don’t go home on Wednesdays. I’ll introduce you to some friends of mine. Fellow like you should get to know a few girls in New York.”
Hugo Dowd had taken to wandering the streets of the city with Maize, stopping in churches and temples where the Automated Prayer equipment was functioning. What he saw of the city, everything he saw, continued to amaze him—and to frighten him just a bit. If there were no pythons here to drop from low-hanging branches, there were other dangers as sudden and as deadly.
That Wednesday night Arthur Maize took Hugo to a party in the Old Village section. There were several girls present, hardly out of their teens; afterward, Hugo had to wait in the street while Maize finished his business with them upstairs. “You should have stayed,” Arthur Maize told Hugo when he finally emerged.
“I hate this city,” Hugo said, as they strolled uptown.
“Hate it? The city is beauty, the beauty of God’s creatures.”
“The jungle is the true beauty of God’s creatures. The jungle is as it all was created. You have no religion here. Father O’Toole was right!”
“No religion! Then who do you suppose buys our models? Atheists?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know who buys them. I only know the churches you’ve shown me have all been empty.”
“They don’t need to be filled anymore, Hugo. The prayers go on anyway. God is glorified by automation.”
“Yes,” Hugo Dowd said, and did not talk anymore.
* * * *
They continued to work together, with Hugo transcribing the portions of the Amazon worship ceremony that Maize wished to record. During the day, the two men generally worked in a roomful of white-coated technicians, but at night there were generally just the two of them to listen to the playbacks of their daily recordings. Often in these after-hour sessions, a section would be improved or rerecorded. Gradually, the Mass of the upper Amazon was taking shape.
But for Hugo, the days and nights were filled with terror and frustration. Once he sought out a church that did not use Arthur Maize’s electronic prayer services, and knelt with the tiny congregation for a time. But when he returned to the street, to the constant bustle of people in motion, the old terror was on him again. He went back to his hotel room, took the double-edged hunting knife from his suitcase, and attached it to his belt. He was beginning to feel that this place, too, was a jungle.
* * * *
“We’ll be finishing it up tonight,” Arthur Maize told him finally. “Let’s have a last run-through before the tape goes down to Father O’Toole.”
“He will never use it.”
Maize smiled. “The Lord works in strange ways.” He hurried to get out the splice master.
Hugo watched him as he worked, then said at last, “Do you really believe in God? Could you really believe in Him and carry on this…business?”
Arthur Maize smiled. “Are you thinking of the God is dead sort of thing? It was quite an important movement for a few years in the ’60s, until people like me came along. You see, with automatic prayers, it doesn’t really matter, does it? You can have it both ways, without any lost time.” He switched on the main speaker and the opening prayers of the Amazon Mass filled the studio.
“Lost time,” Hugo Dowd repeated.
“In the twenty-first century, time is the most important commodity.”
“And the machines do our thinking and say our prayers and maybe someday…”
“All to give us more time,” Arthur Maize agreed. “Time.” His finger was on the recording switch, in the event they needed to cut in on the tape.
The voice on the tape was intoning the Gloria, and Hugo said, “Time for what?”
Arthur Maize blinked. “For what?”
And because there was no answer, Hugo Dowd’s hand came up from his belt, fast, so that Arthur Maize never really saw the knife.
* * * *
Hugo Dowd never returned to the jungle mission of Father O’Toole, and after a time the little priest ceased to await him. He went on about his work with the natives, much as he had always done, and when the packaged tape finally arrived from Automated Prayers Ltd., he played it more out of curiosity than anything else.
It was an accurate rendering of the native service, except for one thing. There was a high-pitched scream that marred the sound track just at the Gloria. If he’d been paying for the tape, Father O’Toole would have returned it as defective. As it was, he only put it at the bottom of his desk and forgot about it.
ABOUT “CASSIDY’S SAUCER”
This unique tale of alien invasion was commissioned by Hoch’s friend and editor of The Saint Mystery Magazine and Fantastic Universe, Hans Stefan Santesson.
First Publication—Flying Saucers in Fact and Fiction, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson, Lancer Books, 1968.
CASSIDY’S SAUCER
Harry Cassidy was just finishing his second cup of morning coffee when the telephone rang. He’d long ago decided that being interrupted at breakfast was part of the job of editing a small-town newspaper, and it no longer bothered him. A barn fire, probably, or perhaps an accident out on the turnpike. Some of those college kids on their way back to campus in the middle of the night.
“Cassidy here,” he said into the receiver.
“Did you see it?” The voice was a familiar one—Mabel Parkins down at the office. She was a fiftyish woman who liked to bleach her hair and work in a newspaper office, and she was the closest thing to an assistant that he had. Assistant, secretary, and general gossip.
“See what, Mrs. Parkins?” He never used her first name, as if in some way the Mrs. served to help remind them both that she still had the state.
“It! The flying saucer! Everybody in town saw it, for gosh sakes! I tried to phone you, but there was no answer.”
“Some nights it would take a cannon to wake me, Mrs. Parkins. Where was this saucer?”
“Over the college buildings first, and then it came in low toward town. A glowing silver circle, not a sound out of it! Honest, it was almost skimming over the treetops when I saw it!”
“I’ll be in soon, Mrs. Parkins. Round up what eyewitness accounts you can.”
“The whole town saw it!”
“Yes. Well, I’ll be in.” He hung up the phone and went back to finish his coffee. It was the third report of flying saucers over Lockridge in the past six months, but he had seen none of the objects personally. He had a newsman’s natural skepticism of such reports, and yet a good many people were beginning to believe there wa
s some truth in them.
Driving down Main Street to his office he was aware of the clusters of townsfolk talking over the night’s event. The story was certainly there for him if he wanted it. Saucer reports were so numerous these days that the magazines and wire-services rarely came down to check them out unless there was some special angle. Maybe he could build it up, put the town of Lockridge on the map.
“I’ve got some good leads,” Mabel Parkins said, meeting him at the door with the spiral notebook she always carried. “There’s a professor out at the college has a theory about the saucers.”
Harry grunted and picked through the morning mail. “What’s his name?”
“James Sight. Professor Sight. He’s head of the biology department. He saw the saucer last night, along with most everyone else.”
“I’ll talk to him. Scientific opinion might be valuable.”
“And somebody from New York called for details. Some sort of Committee for Flying Saucers. Something like that.”
“They check the reports. I suppose the Air Force will send somebody too.” He was searching in the desk for a pack of cigarettes he’d purchased the day before. “Did anyone get a picture of this thing?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Well, ask around, Mrs. Parkins. It would be nice to have one on tomorrow morning’s front page.” The paper came out twice a week, and this would be a busy day. “Meanwhile, get what you can from the witnesses. Write up your own account of what you saw.”
“It was all glowing, and…like, pulsating. Low, almost as if I could reach out and touch it. I didn’t see any windows or motors—just this glowing light above the trees.”
“Write it up just like that. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
“You going out to see Professor Sight now?”
“I’ll take a ride out there. Maybe I’ll see some saucers on the way.”
“Not in the daylight,” she said as he went out the door.
* * * *
The trees were nearly bare along the college road. Autumn had taken a firm grip on the region, with topcoats now visible everywhere and a faint haze of burning leaves in the air. As he turned into the faculty parking lot by the administration building, it seemed to Harry Cassidy that he’d left all thought of flying saucers and invading spacemen far behind. Here he was back on the campus of Lockridge College, cheering the team on to Saturday victory, drinking beer at the fraternity party, dancing with some lovely girl at the senior ball. A long time ago.
“Professor Sight?”
“Yes.” A younger man than he’d expected, but with a bushy growth of brown beard that seemed almost like a fragment of uniform on the campus these days.
“You must be Mr. Cassidy, from the newspaper.”
“Guilty.” Harry sat down and took out his cigarettes. The office was cramped but comfortable. He’d been in many like it during his college days.
“And you’ve come to talk about flying saucers.”
“About one saucer in particular,” Harry told him. “The one everybody saw last night.”
“Yes, yes.” Stroking his beard, as he might stroke the arching back of a cat.
“Did you see it yourself, Professor?”
“I saw it.” His gaze was far away, as if he were seeing something in another world.
“And you have a theory?”
“Yes.” He jumped up now, and pulled open a file drawer. “You see these photos? A group of about 18 lights, flying in formation. UFO specialists call them the Lubbock Lights, from their appearance over Lubbock Texas, on the night of August 31st, 1951. These photos remain some of the most nearly authentic we have of the saucer phenomenon.”
“And?”
Professor Sight smiled slightly. “What does such a formation suggest to you?”
“Birds?”
A nod. “In fact, some Air Force investigators suggested birds as an explanation of this sighting. To me, a biologist, they suggest living things, very definitely. Not spacecraft controlled by living creatures, but living creatures themselves.”
“Creatures that glow?”
“Creatures that glow. Like the ectoplasm of some astral body. Consider this, Mr. Cassidy—consider that we are being invaded by creatures from outer space surely, but that these creatures do not come in space ships.”
“You mean the saucers are people?”
“Not people as we know them, certainly, but people nevertheless. It is only the talent of the artist that has given us the idea of spacemen as humanoids, or as long-legged freaks. In a truly advanced space civilization, people might exist as pure energy—a glowing mass of brain tissue, able to expand and contract at will. Certainly the idea of astral projection is not new even on earth. It could be an everyday fact on some distant world.”
“How would they have gotten here?”
“Such creatures might easily travel across the universe at the speed of thought.”
“And where would they stay?”
“By night they would travel—as we have seen. By day, they might seek shelter in the host body of some animal. Or some human.”
“You mean they’d take over a body?”
“Not necessarily take it over, though if my theory is correct these creatures certainly would have the power to do so. No, the ectoplasmic mass might only remain within the body, unknown to its host.”
“You really believe all this?” Harry asked.
“It’s one explanation,” the professor answered with a shrug. “There may be better ones, but I haven’t heard them.”
Harry Cassidy had made a few notes as he talked, and now he glanced down at the pad. “Man by day and saucer by night. Sort of a were-saucer, like a werewolf.”
“Not really,” Professor Sight replied, unsmiling. “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing you want to put in your paper.”
“If the saucer…the creature…is living here in Lockridge, why isn’t he seen every night?”
The bearded man shrugged. “I know nothing about their life habits. Perhaps their astral bodies glow more brightly at certain times of the month.”
“And what do they want?”
“To conquer us, I suppose. In time.”
“Very interesting.” Harry got to his feet. “I may want to talk with you again, Professor, especially if we locate any pictures of our saucer.”
Professor Sight followed him to the door and shook hands. “I’ll be happy to be of any help I can. There’s something here, in Lockridge. It’s not good.”
* * * *
Harry Cassidy drove back to his office through a gentle misty rain that had just begun to fall. He’d fully expected to sit down at his typewriter and turn out a lengthy sidebar feature on Professor Sight’s theory, but somehow by the time he came to do it the whole thing had palled. He sat staring at his typewriter for a long time, until he heard Mrs. Parkins returning.
“Did you find any pictures?” he called out.
“Maybe one. A teenage girl snapped it with a cheap camera. I’m having it developed now. How was Professor Sight?”
He glanced at the blank sheet in the typewriter. “Nothing we can use.”
“No? He told me a little about it, and it sounded sort of interesting.”
“Did he?” He started pacing the floor, vaguely uneasy. “Look, most of the stuff is written for tomorrow’s issue. Write up your saucer story and give it a column on page one. OK?”
“You’re leaving?”
“I’m getting a cold or something. It’s not the first time you’ve gotten it out without me.”
“You should have somebody to look after you.”
“Sure.” He’d heard that line before, too.
“I’ll phone you in the morning,” she said.
But Mrs. Parkins didn’t phone. Instead, it was a sergeant from the State Police who got him out of bed at 5 a.m. His voice was gruff and to the point.
“Mr. Cassidy? Afraid I have some bad news about an employee of yours.”
“What? Who?”
“Mrs. Mabel Parkins. Her car went off the road about twelve miles east of here. She was dead when we reached her.”
“Dead?”
“I’m sorry. We haven’t been able to reach her husband. I was wondering if you’d like to claim the body.”
He stared at the telephone in his hand. Then, “Yes, of course. How did it happen?”
“We’re not certain. There’d been reports of a glowing object in the sky—you know, a flying saucer. We think she was chasing it.”
* * * *
Finally, much later in the day, he reached the newspaper office and shuffled through the mail and deliveries. The place was unusually quiet, almost like a tomb. He’d known her such a long time.…
The developed photographs were there, the saucer picture among them. The lab had blown it up to eight by ten, and it was sharper than he’d had any right to expect. Yes, a definite glow, more or less circular, just passing over the naked limbs of a tree. He stared at it for a long time, and then, gradually, he started to remember. He remembered the tree, and the girl with her camera flashing, and most of all the way the moon had looked.
* * * *
Professor Sight was pouring a bit of brandy for them both. “It’s good to see you again so soon, Mr. Cassidy. I was terribly distressed at the news of your Mrs. Parkins. She seemed such a nice woman on the telephone.”
Harry sipped the brandy, savoring its warmth. “You shouldn’t have told her about that theory of yours. It sent her chasing after objects in the sky. Chasing after dreams.”
“But don’t we all chase after dreams, Mr. Cassidy?”
The Future Is Ours Page 5
