by Ted White
“Umm, yes,” I said. “I have, umm, a decision to make.”
It was the right response. He gave me a nod. “I know it can’t be easy for you, Tad. But I want you to know, we’re all pulling for you.” What lurked behind his transparent sincerity?
I mumbled a few appropriate words and pushed out the front door.
The air was chill. “Crisp” has been a euphemism. A wind had come up, and it cut through my thin clothing. The night had a rawness.
My panic ebbed a little. The necessary caution involved in making my escape had quieted it, and my chance encounter—or was it chance?—with Benford had demanded a veneer of calm. But the chill air, and the shivers it produced, soon had me agitated again. Halfway down the path I glanced back up at the house. I couldn’t see the window of my room from this side; most of the others were dark. I wondered if everyone was asleep—and how long it would take to spread the alarm among them. By the time I hit the bottom of the hill, I was running.
I started the car and then glanced up through the transparent bubbletop—now completely unpolarized in the absence of sunlight—to see three lights suddenly wink on from the second floor of the house. It seemed to me for a moment that the lights were like the beams of searchlights, probing for me in the outside darkness. I felt a moment of déjà vu, and the panic came back, hard. I swung the car around on the empty highway in a tight arc that brought screams from the tires, and accelerated the vehicle like a manned projectile into the night.
The darkness enclosed me on all sides, the wide beam of my driving lights a bar of light that shone down a narrow rectangular tunnel through which I raced. A red light began flashing on my dash, and buzzer sounded. The car leapt and bounded like an earthbound missile struggling to become airborne. I kept my foot down flat on the go pedal until the red light remained steady and the buzzer was a constant keening sound in my ears. I kept my eyes on the road ahead, flicking them to the rearview screen for only split seconds; it was all I could do to keep the car on the obsolescent highway. But I saw no pursuing lights behind me.
Then I was in Cloverdale, its dimmed lights and sleeping buildings passed in a clangorous jangle. I had to slow as I went into the curve at the south end of town, but at that I’m sure I left long black ribbons of rubber on the wrong side of the road behind me.
When I got up the entrance-ramp and onto the automatic highway, the car slowed itself to half its former speed, the red light on the dash vanished, and the shrill buzzing stopped. I’d done all the running I could. Now all I could do was wait.
It was 02:40 when I turned the car in at Santa Rosa, but Bay Complex was as alive as it would be twelve or sixteen hours later. I found an infomat and placed a direct call to Tucker, in Oldtown Chicago. I wasn’t surprised when he came on looking fully awake and functional.
I had to explain my flight from Cloverdale, and the reasons for my call, and it was difficult to put into words the feelings, premonitions and intuitions I’d had. I had to justify the fact that, after less than twelve hours among the aliens, I had left them. I did not go into details about what I’d done; I simply described the parasite and let it go at that.
Tucker sighed, spoke a few mild expletives, and told me to get a room in a local hostelry. Call in my whereabouts to the local Bay Complex office, and he’d have a man out to see me the next afternoon. He seemed calmer than I’d seen him before; the sarcasm was missing, and with it his drawl. He acted almost human.
I found myself a room in a quiet hotel in San Rafael, called in to the local office, and went to sleep. It wasn’t easy getting to sleep—I had to resort to ten minutes of public-channel 3-D for a soporific—and when I did, I had long sequences of disturbing dreams each of which culminated in nightmares which jerked me awake, usually in an upright, sitting position, my heart racing as if I’d just run the two-minute mile.
I don’t remember the earlier dreams—only that I had them—but the final dream was quite enough for me. It concerned me as a small child, back when I still lived with my real parents. I recognized my mother immediately, but the man who was my father remained caught in the shadows until I followed him, deliberately tagging along after him, to where he could no longer hide his face.
It was Tucker’s face.
I screamed when I saw who he was, and the knife-edge of fear sliced through my heart, because I knew, suddenly and certainly, that this was a secret I was not meant to know. Tucker turned and looked at me and his eyes were glowing, rays of light streaming from them, pinpointing me, paralyzing me, holding me.
I wanted to run. I was only a frightened boy and I wanted to run away. But he wouldn’t let me. His gaze pinned me down and while fear climbed into my throat and choked my breath, he smiled at me. It was a terrible, knowing smile, inhuman—alien.
Then he opened his mouth, reached up his hand, bent forward as if to regurgitate into it, and then stood up again, impossibly tall, towering over me.
He held his hand down to me.
In it was a pulsing, living object of translucent white jelly.
It formed a mouth and smiled at me.
I woke up to find myself sitting up in the middle of the bed, my heart pounding and my face streaked with running sweat. The images were still fresh in my mind, the sense of shock still immediate. I thumbed on the light and staggered over to the ‘fresher. My mind was confused; I could not distinguish fully between what had really happened and what I had only dreamed. I knew I’d been offered one of those alien slugs—and it seemed at that moment as likely true that it had been offered me by Tucker as that it might have come from Lora.
Why?
I stepped from the ‘fresher in the eating cubicle—the reverse of my more usual procedure—and after I had re-stoked my body I found myself better able to think again.
Item: dreams are commonly understood as a man’s attempt to deal with the emotionally unacceptable—or, alternatively, to understand something which he has not yet fully admitted to himself.
Item: I am gifted with a remarkable sense of intuition. Intuition is simply another word for deep-consciousness reasoning powers—for the ability to encompass a wide variety of data and process it unconsciously, receiving the results of that processing as a “hunch” or a “feeling” without conscious reasoning to back it up. I always play my hunches and I’m rarely wrong.
Item: my intuitive powers sometimes work best when my conscious mind is laid low by shock, fatigue, or the like. As it had been, the night before.
Conclusion: I’d observed more than I’d realized. My deep-consciousness was doing its best to push an emergency response up to where I’d notice it and act upon it. And just what was it I’d noticed?
Tucker had been taken over by the aliens.
I had to think of them as aliens now—not simply as human hosts to alien parasites. That notion was too unwieldy. Their behavior was alien, their goals alien. Forget what they had been—a flash of Dian perched on my office console, swinging one leg—they were aliens now. Inhuman, presumably hostile, and increasingly dangerous.
I’d sensed this all along. Or, more properly put, my deep-consciousness “computer” mind had noticed this quality of alienness all along, and had started ringing bells to bring it to my attention as soon as it could.
It was as I’d first told Dian. I’d recognized a quality in Bjonn—a defining quality in all the aliens—which distinguished them from normal humans. A sort of too-intense quality, a behavior which seemed a little out of kilter, responses which didn’t seem to quite fit the situations. Their gaze was too direct, too obviously in violation of one’s privacy. They spoke too directly, as well—while at the same time usually evading the very questions one asked. Lora—I’d almost come to think of her as human again, on that trip back. She’d made it easy for me to talk to her, or to want to talk to her. But—she’d been the one who came at last to seduce me with her alien offering. It made me snort a little at my own naïveté she’d made me want to talk to her, indeed! She’d probably all b
ut plied me into confessing everything. Who knew what alien mentality directed her now? Who knew what roles she was being manipulated through in order to charm and disarm me?
And now Tucker.
I’d seen it the night before, when I’d spoken to him: the unreasonable calm. The wakefulness at an hour when he, of all people, would be sleeping. The direct gaze. (The infomat diluted the intensity of that direct gaze, but it had been enough to perturb me, somewhere deep.) All the signs were there, but I hadn’t been looking for them then; I’d had no idea they’d reached Tucker. It had been there, before my eyes, and I had not understood it, not then.
But now I did. And cursed myself. I was a fool.
There was a tap at my door.
I glanced at my chronometer: 13:30, local time. Afternoon. (The room had no windows; the day, therefore, was arbitrary in its divisions. My timepiece said afternoon, so it was afternoon. Had it for some reason stopped hours earlier, I would have found it to be morning.)
A man from the Bureau, then.
I slid back the door and found myself staring into Ditmas’ smiling face.
“Hi yuh, Tad,” he said.
“What are you doing here?”
“They sent me out to see you—to debrief you.”
I waved him in and closed the door. “I was expecting a local,” I said.
“Sure, I know. I think they figured it would be better to send somebody you knew—know what I mean?” He settled himself on my bed.
“Why here?” I probed. “Why not down at the office?”
“Hmm?” he looked up as if he hadn’t heard me. “Why what?”
“Why debrief me here? Do you have a recordomat?”
He shrugged. “You can just tell me,” he said. “We’ll get the prelims down later.”
“No good,” I said, shaking my head. I stalked around until I was directly in front of him, looking down at him. Deliberately, I looked him in the eye.
He stood up, suddenly decreasing the distance between us. I think he expected me to step back. I didn’t. We were uncomfortably close.
“What’s gutting you, Tad?” he asked. His tone was deceptively quiet, deceitfully pleasant. It might’ve worked, had I not already looked into his eyes and seen the truth.
“You,” I said, matching his tone with my own forced-calm. No warnings. “You, Ditmas.” Then I hit him.
This time there was no panic involved; this time I knew exactly what I was doing.
I was dealing with an alien. That had been a foregone conclusion. Tucker had set me up. I knew too much. If they’d reached Tucker, they’d be all through our Bureau by now, and it was a cinch they’d have the local office.
Ditmas had been a surprise, though. I hadn’t been expecting him, and he threw me off for the first few moments—no doubt as they’d expected. Ol’ buddy Ditmas. Pleasant surprise. Sure.
My fingers were stiff and straight, thumb in, wrist straight, fingertip to elbow one smooth line, as I drove my hand into his upper belly, just under his left rib cage. The nail on my middle finger caught in the fabric of his blouse, and later I found the nail was ripped and torn and it hurt some. Just then he was jackknifing over, his face meeting my up-driven knee, the cartilage of his nose smashing into his skull. Something—maybe his jaw or chin—struck the nerve on my knee and strummed it like a hot wire. But I followed through with my other hand: a swift finishing chop on the back of his neck. When I stepped back, he crumpled lifelessly to the floor.
I learned to fight in the den. There were twenty-seven of us, ranging in age from five to twelve. I was not yet seven, and small for my age. I learned that in my position a kid had two choices: either accept the beatings and squeal a little to make the older kids happy, a self-perpetuating sort of misery which one or two of the other kids almost seemed to enjoy—or make it a point to get back at my tormentors so that they’d learn to leave me alone. I opted for the second choice. One of the eleven-year-olds picked a fight with me the first night I was there, while I was lying on a bunk over two other young kids and crying to myself. He grabbed one of my legs and before I had any idea what was happening the floor came up and hit my face. My nose bled and I dripped all over the floor and myself, all the while crying, while the sadistic eleven-year-old worked me over. He was fat, had pimples, and seemed to think it was important, to impress upon me the pecking order of the den. The way he saw it, I was bottom man on the list.
I cried myself to sleep that night, and my bunk was filthy with dried brown stains of my nosebleed the next morning. But I waited for my chances, and caught the fat kid in the ‘fresher the next afternoon, after calisthenics. I jammed the catch on the door from the outside with my shirt, which I’d taken off for that purpose, and I opened the maintenance locker and changed the setting on the ‘fresher controls. I damn near burned that kid alive in flesh-dissolving enzymes, and when I let him out he was missing not only the largest portion of his epidermis—his dermis very shiny and pink—but most of his arrogance toward me. Just to impress the fact on him, I tripped him—an easy task, since he still had his eyes screwed shut—and had the pleasure of watching him smash his own face against the tiled floor.
After that I didn’t have too many fights to worry about. Occasionally we’d get a new kid, and if he was older or bigger, he usually felt he had to beat up on someone with a reputation in order to establish his own. Mostly he’d pick me, and usually he’d lose. I was a pragmatic kid and I’d learned in a few easy steps that it wasn’t how you played the game; what counted was winning. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a bully; I was a loner. I let the others alone and all I asked was to be let alone in turn. Since I had to earn this right the hard way, I’d learned the proper methods. And I’ve never forgotten them.
I stared down at the still figure of Ditmas on the hotel-room floor. I hadn’t wanted to kill him. I hadn’t realized my own strength.
The last time I’d hit someone else was better than seventeen years ago. I’d still been a kid, then, fighting to keep my own against a bigger kid. I had not raised my hand against a single person since.
It wasn’t the same now. I’d reacted as I had years before, but with the power, the muscles, and the frame of a grown man and not a half-grown boy. I’d had sixty pounds additional weight behind my blows, and, truthfully, any one of them might have been enough in itself. Driven deeply enough, and at the right upward angle, a single thrust of the hand under a man’s rib cage can rupture his heart. The splintering of a man’s nose, if the blow carries bone and cartilage back into his skull, can penetrate his brain. And a precisely placed blow to the nape of the neck can break it. Any one or all, the result was the same. Ditmas wasn’t breathing anymore.
Chapter Seventeen
I stared down at the man’s body and knew real fear.
This time you’ve crossed the line, Dameron, a voice inside my head told me. This is murder.
I stared down at the man’s body. Somewhere within it lurked a white jellied lump of protoplasm, its ganglious pseudopods shriveling at this very moment.
Ditmas was an alien. It wasn’t murder; Ditmas was an alien.
Sure, fellow, but he looks like a human named Ditmas who worked for the Bureau of Non-Terran Affairs, and you can bet that’s the way the police will look at it.
I thought about cutting him open and looking for the parasite. I didn’t have the nerve.
I was shaking. I stared down at the man’s body and I couldn’t see it clearly and then my knees began to buckle.’ I made it to the bed, sat down on the edge, and then threw up. On Ditmas.
I killed him. What can I do now?
I stared down at the man’s body, and I shook with fear.
My body rebelling, I stripped the alien of his identification as Ditmas. I was nearly sick twice more as I moved him about, turned him over, and breathed in the stench of my own vomit and the discharge from his bowels. Once as I shifted him his jaw sagged open and I thought I saw something white in the back of his mouth. I let him fall back as
he’d lain before, his face to the floor.
I’d had time to think a little, to turn over the possibilities in my mind. Hotel rooms are cleaned only when the room is unoccupied. If I left the body here, it would register as occupied. Therefore, no cleaners. And probably no discovery of the body for days.
That might give me some time. I’d need it.
I used Ditmas’ credit card when I took the tube to Oakland. I used Ditmas’ card when I took the HST to Hawawii to the shuttleport. And I used Ditmas’ card and Bureau Clearance for the hop up to the Moon.
I’d put a few of the pieces together, you see.
Ditmas had already told me he was going out with the next expedition on the Longhaul II, and that it was leaving soon. That meant he’d be expected on the Moon, and that clearance for the trip up was prearranged. What was simpler, then, than for me to take his place?
Farhome.
Everything pointed back to Farhome. The aliens came from Farhome. I had to go there. Farhome was where the answers lay.
Simmons wasn’t there this time. My identification as Ditmas took me through the Bio-Customs without delay, however. Then I was on my own. On the Moon.
Did I say Lunaport was small? It had always seemed that way to me: small, cramped, almost provincial. Man’s major outpost on the Moon. But Lunaport exists in three dimensions, like some of those new cities they’re carving out of nowhere in Africa. Conceived as a cube, rather than a flat map, Lunaport exists almost entirely beneath the lunar surface, twenty levels deep. That doesn’t mean much when you stack it against the average city building, Earthside, fifty to a hundred stories high. But Lunaport is a cube—more or less; I doubt its perimeters are that geometrically precise—and there are no open avenues, no parkstrips, malls, or canyon-like streets. It’s packed densely with little cubicle-like rooms, narrow institutional corridors, and boxlike lifts. It’s twenty small cities packed on top of each other.
And me without a native guide.