by Chad Oliver
Shackelford took Dawn’s hand as they walked, and found it to be steadier than his own. He still was uncertain as to what he intended to do now that he was here, but he was prepared to let events take their course. The two of them walked quietly along down the dirt road, still making no attempt at concealment, but not attracting attention. They reached the side of the house without incident and stopped.
“Little man,” Dawn whispered, “what now? If I may ask you!”
“I’d like to take a look in through the window, if you’re game.”
“I’m with you, Willie—but I feel like a fool.”
His heart hammering against his ribs with what seemed thunderous intensity, Shackelford inched along the wall until he was under one of the big double windows. He wiped the sweat off his hands on his jeans, held his breath, and looked in. Instantly, he stiffened, and ducked his head.
A strange new cold stabbed with icy silence through the night.
“Take a look, Dawn,” he whispered, “and then tell me who’s a fool.”
They looked together.
Inside the huge living room were three couples, including Fitz-James and a woman that Shackelford had never seen before. The men were all enormous, although Fitz-James was the biggest one there. The women were smaller, but still very tall for females. They stood on the thick white rugs, their glasses in their hands, talking and laughing in quiet, dignified tones.
Fitz-James had the plastic disc in his hand and they were all looking at it, smiling, sharing some secret joke. One of them turned toward the window, idly, and Shackelford and Dawn dropped back down out of sight.
They looked at each other in the shadow from the wall. Neither spoke, but they stood close together and both of them felt the same thing. An unbelief, a horror. An iron fist that smashed at the brain. An icy centipede that walked with a million frozen feet up and down your spine …
Quite suddenly, the night was alien around them. Their world, their civilization, their neat little value system that had everything in its proper place—all gone, extinguished, clicked out like a false light that had never burned. Instead—the Unknown. Two little mammals, tiny and afraid, peering in out of the night. Two little mammals peering in at—what?
Bill Shackelford clenched his fists as a sea of conflicts tossed within him. The sheer, unassuming familiarity of what was inside the room, a foot from his head, gave the greatest shock of all, he knew. If he had looked into a room and seen something totally alien, that would have been difficult enough to take. But to look into it and see an almost normal scene, subtly distorted in only one dimension—
His breath scraped out of his throat in a shallow gasp and he realized that he had been holding his breath. Almost instinctively, he put his arm around his woman. As the first shock of nonrecognition passed, a slow burning anger coursed through him. He felt cheated, tricked. He felt as though someone he had known all his life had suddenly dealt him a stacked hand in poker, or had inexplicably slapped him in the face.
He had been cut down in size, literally and figuratively, and he didn’t like it. And he felt somehow—cautiously, uncertainly—that something important was at stake here tonight under the Mexican stars, something far more significant than a little plastic disc or his own non-understanding….
He took a deep breath. “Dawn,” he whispered, “I’m going to go in there and take it away from them.”
She held on to him, knowing him, loving him, fearful for him. “It’s not worth it, Bill,” she whispered. “Nothing’s worth your getting killed, nothing, certainly not that little thing. Let’s go away from here, think it over, make plans—”
He looked at her in the darkness. “I can’t,” he said. “You know I can’t.”
She did know it, and she accepted it. “How?” she asked quietly.
He smiled, somehow feeling better now that the decision had been taken. “Nothing very heroic, hon,” he said, as they inched away from the open window. “I value my hide as much as the next man. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be here tonight—we’re guests, not trespassers. I think I’ll just drop in and pay a little social call.”
Dawn nodded—small and very young in the darkness, and yet filling the night with a dimension beyond mere physical size. “I’m going with you, Bill,” she said.
Shackelford pressed her hand. “Let’s go,” he said.
He knocked on the ranch house door, loudly, using the brass knocker. There was a sudden silence, a short pause. The night collected itself and stood still.
The door opened.
“Hello, Mr. Fitz-James,” Shackelford said pleasantly. “We were out riding and just happened to drop by.”
Thomas Fitz-James—big, gray-haired, charming—smiled his best smile. “So good to see you both,” he said. “Won’t you come in?”
They entered the ranch house, passed through the mirrored entrance hall, and walked into the huge living room. The three women were still in it, seated in great, upholstered chairs, their silken feet crossed gracefully on the thick white rugs. In the vastness of the room, they seemed quite normal in size. The men were nowhere to be seen.
Fitz-James made the necessary introductions easily and without strain, without offering any explanation of the women’s presence. He seemed thoroughly at his ease, insisted on mixing a drink for Shackelford and his wife, and filled his pipe with a precise care that indicated that he had no other problem in the world.
“Well,” said Fitz-James heartily, lighting his pipe and blowing blue smoke gently at the ceiling, “is this purely a social call, or can I do something for you?”
Shackelford sipped his wine, determined that if this were to be a play he would not fluff his lines. “As a matter of fact,” he said evenly, “I believe that you can be of some assistance to me.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You recall that small disc I told you about several weeks ago, the one that we found in the dig?”
“Why, yes, I seem to—”
“It’s all very strange,” Shackelford rushed on, ignoring the unfamiliar heart that thumped and pounded in his chest, “but that disc was lost shortly after I told you about it.”
No one moved, no one did anything—but the room was different.
“A shame, a shame,” said Fitz-James, shaking his head. “I hope that it has turned up again?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Shackelford said, “it has.” He paused and the thought flashed through his mind that this scene was supernally long and tiring and that it would never end. “One of your hands was in camp yesterday and told me that he had found it on the road and had turned it in to you. He had heard some of the students talking about it, and he suggested that perhaps you had forgotten about it.”
If you hadn’t been watching for it, you would never have detected the fraction of a pause before Fitz-James reacted. Then he snapped his fingers, his face lit up in a beaming smile, and he said: “Of course! How stupid of me. It was turned in to me, but it didn’t seem important and it slipped my mind. I have so many things to keep track of, of course—”
“Of course,” said Shackelford.
Fitz-James looked him in the eye, and his smile went no further than his mouth. “Do you want it?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Shackelford, without hesitation. “Yes, I’d like to have it.”
Fitz-James nodded, his eyes black. “I’ll get it for you,” he said, and walked out of the room.
Shackelford stood there and waited, with Dawn at his side. He did his level best to look nonchalant, but he knew he was failing miserably. The best he could manage was a sort of vacant smile on his face as he looked at the women in the room, and he sensed that Dawn was amused, despite her tenseness. He stood there, feeling very odd, and he kept thinking: a little insectivore sitting in his nest, trying hard not to notice the smiling, charming dinosaurs that ring him in….
“Here it is,” said Fitz-James, handing Shackelford the little cogged disc that had travelled further than Shackelford
knew. “Sorry I forgot about it.”
“Quite all right,” Shackelford assured him.
“And by the way,” Fitz-James said, puffing slowly on his pipe, “what was the name of the man who reminded you of it? I’ve quite forgotten, and I really should reward him.”
“Funny,” Shackelford said, meeting his gaze squarely. “I’ve forgotten too.”
Fitz-James didn’t press the point—he even seemed faintly amused, and that was far worse than his laughter. Shackelford and Dawn finished their wine and excused themselves, anxious to get out, get away.
“So happy you dropped in,” Fitz-James said with genteel heartiness. He shook hands, his great fingers closing like a steel vice around Shackelford’s palm. Shackelford kept his face expressionless. “I’ll see you again soon,” Fitz-James promised with evident sincerity.
“I’ll be looking forward to it,” Shackelford said, and they left.
The night was cold and clean and dusted with crystal stars. They walked back to their horses, trying not to run, mounted and started down the dark trail for camp. The plastic disc was secure in Shackelford’s hand, but his mind was less certain. He was two people. One sat in the saddle and felt the wind in his face, and the other watched sadly from a subconscious Somewhere. Watched the two horses stream over the earth in an easy gallop, watched the world that crouched around them. Watched the man and his wife, afraid in the night. Watched and asked: What have you done?
IV
It was the end of summer, a time of brief hiatus between research and the beginning of another autumnal grind. It was a time for relaxing a little, a time for seeing old friends, a time for going down to the bar and cussing the fact that you never had time to go fishing anymore. It was a time for going home. But Bill Shackelford was a long way from Illinois.
He walked rapidly across the almost deserted campus of the University of Texas in Austin, feeling the hot sun beat down on his back and trying not to think, for a moment, about the tiny plastic disc that had so altered his life. He looked at the Main Building as he passed by, and it amused him as always, with its little Greek temple perched as though in perpetual surprise high atop a towering skyscraper that in turn erupted violently out of a broad, rectangular conglomeration of fused classic and Spanish architectural disharmonies. Old B Hall squatted like an antiquarian collector’s item in the midst of modern university buildings, and two caretakers were engaged hopefully in trying to make flowers bloom between sterile cement walks. It was a pleasant place, Bill thought—and life was pleasant too, if he would just let it alone. He wondered, not for the first time, what it was that drove him on, and had driven him all his life. Science? Curiosity? Responsibility? A warped sense of fun?
Or was it fear?
He walked into Waggoner Hall, decided against the elevator which probably wasn’t working anyway, and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. He pushed through the double doors, passed along a wary line of desks belonging to Business Administration secretaries, and walked into the Anthropology Museum. Maria was there, and he lingered a minute or two longer than necessary, confirming his opinion that a really good-looking secretary never harmed any department.
He passed through the empty museum, hardly glancing at the familiar exhibits. Campbell and Krieger were both working with Joe Cason down at Falcon, so the museum was even quieter than usual. He came to the closed door at the end of the room, a door without markings on it of any sort, and knocked.
“If it’s Shackelford, go away,” a voice ordered.
Shackelford grinned and pushed open the door. He walked into the strange little office and there was Frank Johnston, glowering with sleepy malevolence from an ancient black leather couch.
“So it’s you, hey.”
“It’s me, Frank.”
Frank Johnston was as unusual as his office, which was a packed, untidy, wonderful hodge-podge of books, smelly pipes, magazines, weird statuettes and flint artifacts, pin-up calendars, and eccentric stuffiness. He was a short, bulky man, somewhere between fifty and eighty years old, with a shiny bald head, drooping bandit’s moustache, and piercing green eyes that were partially shielded by a bent and beribboned pair of rimless spectacles. He was what was popularly known as a character, and he was also just about the best, if the most unorthodox, research archeologist in America.
“Got your letter,” the great man said, without getting up from his couch. “Very dull. Sit down. What’d you find, an ancient uranium mine, living proof that Atlantis was under the Rio Grande? How’s your wife?”
Shackelford sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk, which squeaked with the surprise of long disuse. “I don’t know what I found, Frank,” he said slowly. “I thought maybe you could tell me.”
Johnston’s bushy gray eyebrows lifted a good inch and a half. “Thought you young fellows knew everything. Had to come to the old man, hey?”
Shackelford nodded. “I’ve about decided I don’t know anything,” he admitted. “We did find a Folsom point down there, the first one from Mexico, but I don’t think that’s very important now.”
“Out for bigger game, eh?” the old man said cynically.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
Bill Shackelford took the cogged plastic disc out of his pocket and handed it to Johnston. Johnston took it, adjusted his glasses, stared at it, and then slowly sat up on the couch. The smile was gone from his face. He breathed heavily, and a chill settled cautiously in the stuffy room.
“What do you want, Bill?” the old man said. “Where did you get this? What do you want?”
Shackelford was somewhat taken aback by the intensity of Johnston’s response, but he felt a sudden reassurance in it. He had gambled, and he had won.
“You do know what it is, then,” he stated.
Johnston heaved himself to his feet, wheezed, and made a long ceremony out of lighting his pipe with a singularly foul brand of tobacco concocted from some Indian formula. He didn’t answer for a long minute, his sharp eyes flickering from the innocuous little disc to Shackelford and back again. He sat down again, his face very pale in contrast to its usual ruddiness.
“I’m afraid to answer that question, Bill,” he said. “I’m being honest with you, and I’ll give you some advice: throw that thing away, forget about it, get into another profession, and enjoy your life while you can.”
Bill stared at the man. Was this Frank Johnston talking, the man who had such a contempt for authority that he had once shot a blunt arrow at the chairman of the department, and thrown a graduate student out of a first floor window? “I don’t understand, Frank,” he said. “After all …”
“After all nothing,” the old man snorted. “I know you don’t understand, and I say that’s good. Don’t try to. Go away.”
Shackelford looked at him, feeling the cold sweat in his palms as they gripped his chair. “I can’t do that, Frank,” he said, “and you know it. I’ve come to you as a friend, not as an archeologist. I need help, and whether I get it or not I’m getting to the root of this thing. There’s more to it than just the disc, you see.”
“Ummm,” said the man behind the pipe. “Gone that far, hey?”
“Yes,” said Shackelford, and told him the whole story of what had happened in Mexico. He wondered briefly at Johnston’s devil’s grin at the account of the disappearance and recovery of the disc, but hurried through his story to the end, including the impossible giants that frequented the Fitz-James ranch. “There’s a game going on, Frank,” he concluded, “and I don’t know the score. I don’t even know who’s playing. I think you do.”
“Hmf,” observed Frank Johnston, filling the room with rank blue smoke. “Maybe you’re making more of all this than necessary, Bill.”
“How, dammit? If you can explain—”
“Look at it this way, Bill. You found an intrusive plastic disc in an Indian village site, and it was filched by the man who owned the property the site was on. Maybe he collects discs, maybe he’s psycho, you s
ee? Funny things happen sometimes. Okay, so you go to see him and find tall people in his living room. To borrow a pet phrase of another member of this department, so what? If you were that tall, wouldn’t you want to associate with people on the same scale?” He eyed Shackelford narrowly. “Wouldn’t you? What’s so upsetting about all that? That’s my explanation, and I’d say you’ve gotten yourself all worked up over nothing, d’you see?”
Shackelford fished out a cigarette, lit it, and added more smoke to the little room. “Frank,” he said slowly, “do you believe that?”
Frank Johnston snorted. “Rubbish. Of course not.”
“Then what do you believe? I’m a big boy now; I want to play.”
“I warn you: you won’t like this game. You won’t like it at all.”
“I’m going to play, Frank. I might as well know the rules.”
Frank Johnston sighed. “I suppose so,” he said. “You’re a fool, of course, Bill, but I’m proud of you, if that means anything at all.”
Shackelford waited.
Frank Johnston leaned forward on the old black couch, his bandit’s moustache quivering indignantly. “What would you do, Bill,” he asked, “if I told you that we of this earth are not our own masters, and never have been?”
Bill Shackelford sat back, the cigarette forgotten in his hands. His throat was very dry. To suspect something, to have a vague indication, was bad enough. But this bland question …
“I don’t know,” he replied slowly. “You’d have to amplify it some. First: what, precisely, are you saying?”
“Do you have trouble with the English language?”
“I mean, is this the sort of thing Charles Fort talked about—”
Johnston slammed his big fist down on the couch, making a thump and a puff of dust. “Don’t be an ass.”
“Well, do you mean that Somebody—or Something—has taken over the Earth and is running it as a sideshow? People from space, maybe, or little green men?”
