by Jerry
I wanted to know who Prof thought Pirt was—a descendant of the captives or a terrestrial throwback?
Prof said a case could be made that Pirt lived simultaneously on two worlds—three if you include ancient Earth. He was not a clone or a simulacrum but a product of the oneness of all time in the infinity of the universe. Something like that; Prof had put it better. Thus Pirt could by turns be primitive, sophisticated, earthy, alien, stupid, brilliant, caring, callous, a child, a man, or combinations of all these.
Could Pirt be in two places at once?
Why not? It did not matter how close or far apart those places were—on Earth and on the alien planet, in the present and back in caveman time, here in the house and out on the dunes of North Arabia!
Prof waxed philosophical. It was as if Pirt lived in the Eternal Now, he said; there was neither past nor present, only this moment in time. Thus we could understand why he sometimes was unaware of cause and effect, of how a present act was related to the past, or that he might be responsible for the consequences of a past action, or that something he did now might have future repercussions. In that respect Pirt was like an animal—not immoral but simply amoral, primitive.
The aliens must have programmed Pirt to live among us for a time and then leave, carrying knowledge about us they could have gathered no other way, Prof said.
I thought: Poor Pirt, unwitting betrayer! Pitiable man-boy, younger than most of us, older than any. Bearded youth, ancestor-child, anachronism in our midst. He’d been loved and feared by us just as he’d troubled his foster mother in that city slum. Our ignorance of what he was, or had been changed into, matched hers. She had let him be sent away. What would we do?
I couldn’t tell the chasers from the chased. Nor did I know who was good and who bad. Nobody wore white except the Phantom Snowmobile Rider, as usual.
But I’d better rewind this part of the account before it’s as confused as the scene I’m trying to describe.
First the telephone call.
It was the news phone but Bernie was on the air so I answered. A woman’s voice I didn’t recognize said: “The caveman’s going to the spaceship.”
When I said “What?” she said “Oh you’re not—Never mind. Just tell Bernie,” and hung up.
Before I had time to think there was a call on the other phone, the business number.
“Be at the nineteenth century spaceship,” Pirt said in a voice he failed to disguise.
I said: “What’s up, Pirt? When?”
“Oh, Uncle Mac, just get over there, please,” he said, reverting to his little boy voice but adding a newsroom word: “Soonest.” He hung up.
I tried to reach Tally but she wasn’t home. Bernie came off his shift. I grabbed him and told him about the calls. We got in his car and raced toward the abandoned water tower. “I’ll take the Back Hannawa Road,” he said. “Less traffic.”
Everybody and his cousin seemed to be taking the short cut that morning. Bernie gave up trying to pass cars and trucks and motorcycles after he realized we were all going at maximum speed anyway.
“Hey, there’s Busky Kimp,” Bernie said, waving at a gaudy pickup two vehicles ahead. He mentioned other names, all belonging to Awaiters who were either riding with Busky in the truck or going the same way on other sets of wheels.
Bernie parked at the edge of the road so we could look down on the big open area the tower dominated with the river running alongside it. The road was about level with the base of the solid part of the tower, the part that sat on tall wooden legs. Thus we were looking straight across at a door, or hatch, in the fuselage of what my imagination had chosen earlier to think of as a crude space-traveling machine, maybe of Verne vintage.
Little did I know then, as they say in the old novels! Had I but known!
A tiny figure scrambled out of the bushes atop long hills of sand shaped like solidified ocean rollers that were a backdrop to the abandoned tower. The figure, in a running crouch, went to one of the supports and began to climb. Unclothed, it looked like an ape but of course it was Pirt. Under the hair was the civilized skin he’d worn for a season with the summer parents who’d taken him in with love and hope. Pirt, undepilated, had reverted to what he’d been before he assumed his little-boy guise to take us in for whatever his reasons were. But maybe he didn’t need reasons, only a loyalty to something I’d never understand.
The Snowmobile Rider glided up. The all-white figure simply appeared, outlined against sky on the crest of a wave of sand. Later I saw the tunnel that ended there after its passage through the earth from Sunday Rock. But at the time the machine seemed to materialize out of air, a wondrous effect as by a stage magician.
I’d had my suspicions but now I knew who the Snowmobile Rider was. I’m fairly certain nobody else did. My means of identification was, I trusted, unique.
When the Phantom Snowmobile Rider whispered onto the scene, silent as the wind, goggled, costumed, and started firing, presumably everybody’s attention was on the weapon. This was the thing that looked like an off-center headlight, the alien gadget that sent out superheated particles capable of instantly fusing sand into glass.
The rider maneuvered the machine to certain angle and a beam of something brighter than lightning shot out and consumed a brace for one of the wooden supports of the water tower.
Horatio Glassblower and his Pyrex Permabulator, I thought. Only it wasn’t a he or a. his.
Naturally everybody was watching the action. Everybody but me. My gaze was drawn to the callipygian curve of the rider’s rear, the sweet bend of her bottom. I recognized it, even under the white nylon that encased it. It was the tush of my Tally. I’d have known it anywhere.
What I could not understand was why my dear wife should be shooting at our quasi-adoptive son, Pirt.
Pirt by this time had hauled himself up the underpinning of the tower to the hatch. He’d been quick, sure-footed and sure-fingered. Pirt disappeared inside the hatch and it occurred to me that maybe the one-gal Pyrex posse hadn’t shot to kill. It was possible she had been speeding him on his way before she sped off herself apparently unrecognized except by me.
Others were shooting, first at Pirt, then at the tower, including some of the Awaiters but not Busky Kimp, who stood watching everything with a sad face.
Flame spouted from the tail of the tower-spaceship. The exhaust became painful to watch. The wooden undergirding burned away and the tower, transformed, hovered atop the inferno.
Pirt and his craft lifted off then, the pillar of fire a roaring background to potshots from below.
“I got him, the bastard,” a World War II sharpshooter said with satisfaction. Maybe he did, but it didn’t slow Pirt or change his trajectory.
I seemed to get a message in a tinny voice broadcast as from a weak transmitter; “Remember me sometimes. Welcome the next stranger.”
Fat chance, brother, I thought, and looked around for Tally. She and her machine had disappeared in the low scrubland between the tower and the road.
A dozen or so Awaiters were making their way back down the long hill. The pilgrims, their promised land snatched from them, were returning to the shacks and tents they thought they’d abandoned forever.
Prof detached himself from a little swarm of sightseers and said to Bernie and me: “The comet they once thought to ride became a red herring. Sad, sad; like the fiery tears of St. Lawrence.”
“What?” Bernie said.
“Tears of the saint are said to presage disaster. ‘Disasters in the sun’—Hamlet. You’re not taping me, are you?”
“I know better than that. But go on; I’ve got a good memory.”
“Meteor swarms have been seen during church festivals in August. The festival of St. Lawrence. An Arabian legend says shooting stars, maybe comets, are fiery projectiles angels fling at interlopers storming heaven.”
“I like that,” Bernie said. “But I hope the angels don’t shoot down Pirt.”
“I doubt that Pirt, unlike some,
is trying to get to heaven.”
A second group of Awaiters unknotted, revealing Busky Kimp. They started down the road, moving slowly. Bernie
called: “Busky! Where are you going?”
“Going with these good people.”
“But it’s all over. What’s left for you?”
“There’ll be another day. My friends will take care of me till then.”
“Nobody’s mad at you?”
“For what?” Busky asked. “For my public relations efforts? These good folk had the word before I joined them. It’s them converted me, Bernie. Turn that thing on if you want. I don’t mind telling the world the Benign Visitors will be coming for us in their Golden Spaceships. We just got the day wrong.”
One of the Awaiters in the group Busky had been in called to him: “Come along, Brother Kimp.”
“Explaining about the postponement,” Busky told him.
“Our fault entirely,” the man said. “We got the spaceships confused, that’s all.” He looked at the smoldering place where the water tower had become a rocket ship. “That little craft could never have taken all of us.”
“Coming, brother,” Busky said.
Bernie asked Prof: “What do you think of that?”
“People change,” Prof said. One P.R. man of another. I wondered if Busky had been one of Prof’s sources along with the National Enquirer.
“Here comes the law,” Bernie said.
Sheriffs patrol cars and emergency vehicles, sirens wailing, sped up the long hill from town. The Awaiters moved to one side of the road to let them pass.
Then the sirens were drowned out by the roar of a snowmobile engine. Racing toward us from the other direction was the Phantom Snowmobile Rider, white-clad as always but no longer a silent wraith.
Our group scattered off the road but I didn’t go as fast or as far as the others. The Phantom Rider sped along the shoulder, engine racing and gravel scattering, and made a 180-degree turn around me. “Hop on,” said a gruff voice. I did, clasping my arms around a thoroughly familiar waist. We headed south, toward the woods, in a torrent of noise.
“That was some entrance,” I yelled.
“What?”
“How come all the noise?” I shouted into her ear.
“No planned theatrics,” she yelled back. “Lost my muffler in the gully.”
We were out of sight of the group at the takeoff place and off the road, in Whiskey Flats Forest, speeding along a narrow track of sand.
Tally unwound a long white nylon muffler from her neck and it fluttered behind us like a pennant. “You want dramatics, I’ll give you dramatics,” she said buoyantly. I hadn’t seen her this carefree in a long time.
Now she pulled off her helmet and her long platinum hair whipped out like another banner. “Unmask and behold,” she cried. “Mac the Wife!”
A pile of rocks loomed ahead and I thought we’d crash but a quick turn took us through a low opening.
We sped through a long tunnel into a huge chamber. Both were lit by their own inner fires. “Something in the beam . . . merges with the rock . . . makes it luminous,” Tally shouted.
She slowed down in the big chamber. The roar of the machine echoed and reechoed.
We headed for a small cave-within-a-cave. I caught snatches of what Tally was saying: “. . . my brother . . . my lab . . . old talc mine . . . experiments . . . broke through . . . explored . . . Lost Cave of the Adirondacks . . . wait till you see . . .”
At home that night I asked Tally: “Aside from carrying on your twin brother’s work, why was riding that machine such a fixation with you?”
“Half brother, not twin,” Tally said. He was the engineering professor who’d invented the machine at U North and then disappeared into the midwest.
Tally went to the fainting couch. She patted a space for me to join her. “Without getting complicated or metaphysical,” she said, “riding that machine gave me an unbelievable sense of freedom from tension. My blood pressure went way down—I measured. I began to feel better as soon as I got into that white jump suit.”
“That’s a pretty good reason,” I said.
She nodded. “But the best one is simply that I never have migraine when I ride that machine.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Just great.” After a moment I asked: “Did you see Busky attach the tunneling device to your snowmobile?”
“No. I found it one night at the workshop; he obviously knew where that was. There was also a note from the aliens, or whoever they are.”
“A note? What did it say?”
“Something like ‘A gift to Earth from Friends.’ I don’t recall exactly.”
“And you tunneled out caves with it? Did you come across anorthosite?”
“I did some experimenting. I didn’t find anything. It’s all rather hazy in my mind.”
There was something else I wanted to know. “Why did you risk being recognized when you snatched me back there? Surely everybody now knows who the Snowmobile Rider is.”
“I didn’t exactly think everything through,” she said. “But making all that racket I was afraid it would be easy to trace and capture me. If the law was going to get me, I wanted to be with you.”
Tally put her head on my shoulder. She sighed and went on: “There was another reason. Having lost the muffler anyway, it was a kind of noisy exultation. I’d won my husband back from Pirt.”
“But you never lost me to Pirt,” I said.
“I suppose not, but you see the unhealthy effect he had on me. Maybe it was only a symbolic victory. Anyway—” she stuck her chin up and shook out her long hair “—it felt good.”
“That’s terrific,” I said. “I suppose you’ll keep on riding the machine then—out of uniform.”
“It’s a lot cheaper than what I take for the migraine,” she said. “And it’s probably less dangerous than the drug. You’re not going to ask me to stop riding, are you?”
“No, no.”
Tally laughed. “Eccentric Housewife, Unmasked as Phantom, Still Rides by Night’ ? I wouldn’t do that to you, Mac.”
I had to admit I felt relieved.
“I’ll still ride the machine, without the costume—and in a respectable, ladylike way,” Tally said. “With a six-pack of beer behind the seat. That’s the way, isn’t it?” She yawned.
“Time for bed. You must be worn out.”
Tally looked at me speculatively, then nodded. “Bed, yes. But I have something to tell you first. I’ve put off talking about it long enough.”
“What’s that, hon?”
“Maybe it will explain why I took those potshots at Pirt there at the spaceship.”
“I thought you were just speeding him on his way, but if it was more than that it’s understandable,” I said. “You were in disguise—the epic masked rider. He’d killed your fawn. Vengeance is sweet, even if symbolic. Besides, you didn’t kill him, or even hurt him.”
“You’re sweet, dear, but it’s not that simple. I never told you about the night you were off at the broadcasters convention.”
“Something about Pirt?”
“We were both lonely, I guess, me with you gone and Pirt so far away from any kind of real folks. I was in bed and Pirt came into the room and crept in with me. He said something in that little-boy voice of his and snuggled down under the covers.”
Tally held him in her arms. He was cold and she warmed him. It made her feel warm herself.
She felt motherly and life-giving when he reached for her breast. It was cozy and basic there under the covers and it seemed perfectly natural for him to nuzzle and then suck. We’d had no children and this was a part of life she had missed—a baby nursing at her breast.
“It was a very special sensation,” Tally said. “Quite different from when your mouth is there, dear. Sexy, of course, but mother-infant sexy is a way to describe it. For a moment or two it felt so natural, and probably I just would have gently disengaged him. But then—”
Not on
ly was his mouth at her nipple and hand at her breast. She became aware that this was not a little boy in bed with her; it was a small but mature man.
Shocked, she didn’t move for a moment. Then she rolled out of the far side of the bed. She ran to the bathroom door, closed and locked it. “You’d better be out of there when I open the door,” she yelled, and he was.
Tally had tried to tell me half a dozen times. “I just couldn’t,” she said now. “The time wasn’t right, or the words weren’t, or he was there.” Of course there was also my reaction to be considered. I’d have to live with Pirt, knowing how he’d acted toward my wife, for the rest of the summer, or send him back immediately.
So Tally said nothing and thereafter there was a wary truce between them.
Finally I asked: “There at the spaceship, were you trying to kill him?”
Tally said nothing.
“You don’t have to answer,” I said.
She was silent a moment longer. Then she said: “I know I don’t.” Another pause. “Then I won’t.”
Probably the alien-in-chief—was it he who objected to being called a Benign Visitor?—wanted to apologize to anyone his people had inconvenienced or hurt during the aliens’ stay on or near Earth. He was showing good public relations in scheduling a meeting with us; his people might want to come back some day. Good manners, anyway.
I’ll call him A., for alien, because he didn’t tell us his name. He may not have one. I also call him he, for simplicity. He could be either sex, or any.
He invited Bernie O’Neill, whose broadcasts he must have heard; Busky Kimp as a representative of the Awaiters who got to ride neither a comet nor a Golden Spaceship, and me, author of the supposedly confidential account of how Pirt spent his summer vacation. He told us he had also invited Prof and the Snowmobile Rider but they had declined.
The fact that he didn’t arrange to have Pirt present showed good taste, I felt. Pirt was well out of it. He was aboard the aliens’ mother ship, parked invisibly in half-space, where no Earthman (me, for instance) could get at him. Half-space sounds like something a typewriter does, but that’s what A. called it.