by Ted White
“You don’t know, do you?” Bjonn said, breaking the silence. “You really don’t know why you wanted to go to Farhome.”
I tore my eyes away from the viewport. “I know,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“You’re an alien,” I said. “Your body is possessed by an alien slug, a parasite. It’s taken over your nervous system. You— Bjonn, the human being—don’t exist. The you I’m talking to is an alien creature—like everyone else aboard this shuttle. So tell me why I should tell you anything?” Did I have the creature just a little worried?
Looks passed between Bjonn and my other captors. I didn’t attempt to translate them.
“You were going to Farhome, then, because that’s where you figure it all started?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I said. Did he look relieved? What else was he afraid I might have thought of?
“Dameron,” he said, “you’re one of the most mentally unstable people I’ve ever met—and, believe me, I have met a few other extreme cases on Earth besides yours. Is your rampant paranoia so strong—are you so completely compulsive about space?—that rather than travel a few miles to ask your questions, you’d make a trip of many light-years? Do you realize that if you’d made that trip, the earliest you could have returned here would have been a matter of some thirty years? Did you expect events to stand still, to wait for you those thirty-odd years?”
Oddly enough, what flashed through my mind when he said that was an image of Dian; I could not imagine her thirty years older. “Is that your line?” I asked. “I’m a nut? Is that the way you plan to handle your opposition? By classifying me mentally unstable? How very pat for you, and you’re not even a licensed shrink. Are you going to have me put away somewhere, worked over chemically, electrically, and all the rest? Or will you simply force one of those slugs on me and lobotomize me that way?”
Bjonn gave me a patronizingly pitying look, and turned away. I was just as happy; it gave me a little more time to gaze out the viewport at space. I wouldn’t have another opportunity and I wanted to make the most of this one.
Time passed, and yet more time. I stared out the viewport an8 saw nothing—a nothing that extended across the infinity of the known and unknown universe. Scattered like glitter across the black and empty nothing were tiny and incredibly distant stars, pumping their energy out into nothing: slowly, infinitesimally, inexorably running down. Entropy. Out of nothing: something. And out of something, a return to nothing. One day the universe would run down and stop. Well, at least I’d never see it. I’d starve first. Much sooner.
I complained to Bjonn, and his reply was typical of him. “You’re the most compulsive man about food that I’ve ever met,” he said. “If the world was populated with nothing but people who thought as you do, it would come to a quick end.”
“It wouldn’t become dominated by your types,” I said, bitterly.
“Tad, do you honestly think that mankind always ate its food in the rigid, obsessive manner it does today? Or even that a man should?”
“Eating is a private and personal act,” I said. “There’s nothing more private and personal than eating.”
“Not even elimination—umm, ‘evacuation’ I believe is your word?”
I felt the blood leaving my face and hands. “You have a filthy mouth,” I said.
“Do I?” he replied. “I wish you’d think about that—about your choice of phrases.”
I did. When the implications sank in, I decided I’d been even more appropriate in my choice of words than I’d first thought. I said as much.
Bjonn sighed. “You know,” he said, after a pause. “I wonder if you realize that there is not one eating cubicle on all of Farhome. Had you thought of that?”
“No,” I said. “How could I know?”
“You could have asked. You might even have inferred it, from what you knew of me.”
“I should have realized,” I said, only half seriously. “You aliens never eat.”
He didn’t see the joke. “You’re a fool,” Bjonn said. His face was flushed and he looked more angry than I’d ever seen him. ”You’ve lived from infancy on a diet of tasteless, tube-fed pap. You’ve never left the teat. You connect yourself to an ‘evacuation unit’ and your entire alimentary tract is plugged in, part of the circuit of an obscenely sterile machine. You’re a product of conditioned reflexes, of compulsive habit patterns. No wonder you’re so deeply neurotic! The wonder is that everyone isn’t as sick as you are.
“You think yours is the only way! You have the audacity to suggest that if we don’t eat as you do, that we must not eat at all. And that from you—from an algae-eater who has never tasted fresh-cooked meat, never chewed crisp raw vegetables, whose palate has never known flavor, never savored the delicacy and the vigor of real food, of anything but homogenized pap! Your food, Dameron—do you know what it is?” A vein throbbed on the side of his forehead. His eyes were burning with intensity. “Your precious food is grown in algae vats. And you know what nourishes those vats, Dameron? Your own feces—your own wastes. Sewage: that’s what you eat, Dameron, and that’s what you are—you’re a closed circuit, a sewer!”
One of the others reached out a hand and touched Bjonn’s arm. He said something too low for me to hear. Bjonn stopped himself, and I watched him brake his emotions to a shuddering halt. Slowly the violent-color left his face, and the vein receded. His expression softened. He laughed a weak laugh, a timid bark.
“Sorry, Dameron,” he said. “You’ve just had a concrete demonstration. I’m as human as you are. It just takes me a little longer to get wound up.” His voice shook a little.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think so. But it was a nice try. You almost had the part down cold.”
His eyes, when he locked them on mine, were as gray and cold as a winter sky.
Chapter Nineteen
There were two men waiting for us when the Shuttle landed. One was Tucker. The other was—Ditmas.
Both gazed at me as a scientist might at a misbehaving guinea pig: condescendingly, but with annoyance and concern.
I couldn’t take my eyes off Ditmas. “You said I killed him,” I breathed in an undertone at Bjonn. The alien from Farhome was standing closely at my side. “You said he was dead.”
“You did kill him, didn’t you, Tad?” he replied.
“I thought I did.”
Ditmas stepped forward. “Hello, Tad,” he said. His voice seemed choked, and I had the fleeting thought that this was not Ditmas at all, but a ringer brought in to confuse me. In the next instant, however, I knew with chilling certainty that the man was indeed Ditmas, whom I’d killed and left without ID in a San Rafael hotel room. His nose was pink and purple: pink where new flesh had somehow grown, and purple tinged with yellow-green where the bruises remained. Somehow he’d been brought back to life and carefully repaired.
“Ditmas is another little advertisement,” Bjonn said, “for our way of life.” He accented the last word a little to underline the intentional irony of what he’d said.
“Hello, Ditmas,” I said. I wondered what else I could say. “I—I’m glad you’re not dead.”
“Yes,” said Tucker, joining the conversation, “it takes a certain responsibility off your shoulders, doesn’t it?”
It took a while for that one to sink in. I’d been living with the thought of myself as a murderer for a matter of what my chronometer assured me had been days, now. I hadn’t liked it, but I accepted it. I had killed a man. I felt no pride in the accomplishment, but I accepted it as an additional fact in my internal reference file on Tad Dameron. Along with the statistics of my height, weight, spectrum, age, and so on, next to my other achievements to date, I’d entered the notation struck and killed Ditmas, along with the hour and date. And, lurking in the back of my mind all the while, the unspoken correlative of apprehended for murder on the—the day of the—the month of the year—. The blanks had just been waiting to be filled in.
; But Ditmas wasn’t dead.
I felt a weight lifted from my head and shoulders, as I processed and assimilated the new data. Ditmas wasn’t dead.
“You’re right,” I told Tucker. “It makes it a little easier for me to live with myself.”
I surprised a startled look on Bjonn’s face, a look that spread in ripples of relayed reaction to the others, Tucker last among them, his eyes momentarily widening a little as he noted it.
Then I added, “It’s nice to know that, in addition to your other talents, you can’t be killed. Makes world conquest a little easier, doesn’t it?”
Tucker narrowed his eyes at me and resumed his once-characteristic pose of shucks-now cynicism. The only difference now was that he was better at it, and it fit him less well.
They took me to Bay Complex in an official aircraft. I didn’t try to talk to them. I felt surrounded by my personal demons: Bjonn, the original alien, the one who’d taken Dian; Tucker, the father-figure I hated; and Ditmas, the good buddy who had everything going for him where I didn’t, the one who had turned death back into life. Once they’d been human beings—or at least there had been a time when I’d thought of them that way—but now they were alien figures, the symbols of my torment, and they had me boxed. I tried not to think about what they’d do to me, at journey’s end.
We were met by an official Bureau car, big and black and built to seat eight. Counting the driver, my captors and the two guards who’d accompanied me from the Longhaul II, we were seven. They let me have the back seat all for myself.
The day was drab and dreary. Long banks of fog rolled against the mountains, higher clouds scudded low across the sky, and above them hung a dismal overcast. Someone had put a gray lid on the world, and all the color was draining out. I felt gray myself.
It started to rain while we were still heading north on the automatic highway. The front spoiler buffeted most of the rain up and over the car, but the windshield still picked up spray. The side windows were useless, streaked with water on the outside, misted with condensation on the inside. It didn’t change the view much; the grayness just became more blurred. The men on the seat facing mine—my two nameless guards—stared past me at the back window as if they might somehow see something beyond it. Their eyes grew fixed and unfocused.
The tires sang monotonously on the wet pavement, somehow counting each tiny drainage groove as it was crossed, and adding it to their soprano tone. The air inside the car was close and a little too warm. It wadded up in my head. I felt life and purpose draining out of me, leaving me a husk, an empty shell, a zombie-creature waiting for its jellylike new tenant.
Then the tune dipped and deepened, the car slowed its head-long pace, and we were rolling down the exit ramp. Cloverdale. Again.
It came to me then, how close I was—to total and utter defeat. I had already given up—it was hard to know when I’d first given up—but always I’d sensed a grace period a little time yet before the end.
Now the time was running out.
I did not shift my position, but I felt myself growing alert. From somewhere deep inside me nerved were drawing taut, muscles coiling. My brain came awake. I felt myself poised on the edge of eternity. Below was a bottomless black gulf. There was no other side. I was all but balanced on that edge. Could I cheat eternity? Could I move back again without losing my footing and falling?
The blackness seemed to rise up, like a thing alive—like no thing alive—totally empty, totally devouring.
A part of me accepted it, and was willing to meet it. I felt at once supercharged with energy, and very weary. Things had to break soon. The balance had to shift—in one direction or the other.
And we were already through Cloverdale.
The big car jounced and swayed on the old road, but its tires still keened to themselves, and the distance grew quickly shorter. A couple of miles? A mile? Half a mile?
The driver swore out loud. The car slowed, went into a momentary skid that threw the rear out across the road and then swung it back in again, and then stopped. I peered forward. Both my guards angled in their seats for a look.
“This damned rain,” the driver was saying. “These cars aren’t built for such slow speeds; the rain-shield doesn’t work.” The front windows were heavily beaded with water.
“Use your manual wipers,” Tucker said. His voice was peevish. “That’s what they’re there for.”
“That’s just it,” the driver complained. “They’re not working. I’ve gone this far, but now I just can’t see well enough. I’ll have to get out and clean the windshield myself.” His tone indicated that this was not his job and it was a damned shame someone else hadn’t volunteered to do it.
The guards were still looking forward. I took my chance. With one foot on the crumbling edge of the black abyss, I made my leap. I was out the door and into the Roadside drainage ditch in one quick jump. The ditch wasn’t part of the plan—but then, I hadn’t much plan. I stumbled, rolled over, and was on my feet again without pause. Behind me I heard exclamations and a heavy grunt. Doors were popping open.
A hand closed on my ankle as I was scrambling up the low embankment beyond the ditch. Fear clutched my vitals in the same moment. I kicked backward with my free foot and felt the solid connection. The hand let go; the fear did not.
I didn’t look back. Rain was falling all around me, and the light was muted, as at dusk. The palms of my hands were gritty with mud and my legs were streaked with it. I ran.
Tall dead grass whipsawed at my legs. My feet stumbled over the hidden furrows of the uneven ground. I was running blindly, without any backward glances, but there was some sense in the course I’d picked. The land fell away in a downward slope, and no more than forty yards ahead trees threw up a barrier against the broken field. There, at least, I might find cover. Beyond that I had no idea.
A sharp pain started lancing my chest with every gulp of air I took through my open mouth. My gasps were a roaring noise in my own ears. I felt doomed to ineffectuality, like a runner trapped in a nightmare.
I crashed in through the trees, ripping my thin tunic on a shrub of some sort. It was already wet enough to fall apart. I kept on running, blundering between the trees as they grew thicker, caroming from one to another, heedless in my panic. Then I tripped, and fell headlong.
I let out a cry—half a sob of anguish, half a forced exhalation—and then lay silent. Around me, water dripped in random patterns from leaf to leaf. I was lying amid the curled brown leaves of summer. They were soggy. It was almost winter now.
The woods were quiet. As I subdued my heavy breathing and tried to force my mind out of its desperate panic, I heard no sounds of pursuit.
Carefully, fearfully, I rolled over onto my back and sat up. When I was a boy in the den they used to kid me about the bottom bunk. You had to look out for the things that lived under the bottom bunk, they said. It sure was too bad about the guys who had to sleep on the bottom bunk. I had the bottom bunk. I knew there was nothing under it. Nothing but tile and plastic and maybe dust. But when the lights were out I had to steel myself to reach over the edge with my hand. Things might lurk in the dark unseen.
I felt that way now.
I didn’t want to see what was behind me. I was afraid to look. I was afraid that when I turned over the first sight I would see would be Bjonn’s impassive face. Or, worse, a grinning Ditmas, just standing there. Right behind me. Right over me. I didn’t think anyone was there—I hadn’t heard anyone—but I had to steel myself to roll over and look.
Nobody was there.
I felt like laughing, but I didn’t laugh. I had the idea I was on the verge of hysterics. Putting my hand out on the wet trunk of a tree, I climbed cautiously to my feet. As soon as I put weight on it, my right ankle protested. In shooting spasms it informed me that I’d twisted it, and pulled or sprained it. I told it to shut up.
Where were they?
They wouldn’t just let me run off without doing anything about it. They coul
dn’t. They had to be planning something. If they weren’t chasing around after me, playing this wet game of hide and seek in the weeds, it had to be because they had a better way of catching me. An easier way.
I wondered what it was.
I thought of going out to the edge of the trees for a look, and that’s about as far as I went in that direction; I gave it a thought. Then I started hobbling in the opposite direction, still downhill, deeper into the woods. Overhead, the rain made pitter-pattering noises on the leaves that sounded like hundreds of tiny animals scurrying this way and that. I wondered for a moment if they were running messages, keeping tabs on me. I wondered if there was any reason why the alien parasites had to restrict their jellied presence to human hosts. But that was a dark and alarming fantasy, and I shut it out before it had me believing in it. The rainy woods were too dark, too gloomy, for thoughts of tiny scampering spies to be at all amusing.
The land dipped, suddenly, into a narrow fold through which a stream ran. I made my way down to its bank, old and mossy, knit together by gnarled and naked tree roots, and stared at the rushing water.
It was neither a broad stream nor a deep one. But the bed was at least four feet below the overhanging bank in most places, and sometimes more. I looked down and thought about the mud and dirt with which I was covered, but I had no very strong inclination to clamber down that bank and wash myself in the stream. Romantic notions from the 3-D aside, the water looked cold, even colder than I felt, and I was already chilled to the bone and wet through. The thought of jumping down on my sprained ankle didn’t encourage me either.
I had the choice of turning upstream or down.
I turned downstream, to my left. That meant north, away from Cloverdale, and somehow that seemed backward to me. North is up on the maps, and rivers flowed south. But nobody ever told this stream that.
The way along the bank wasn’t difficult. The leafy trees—almost equally divided between those which held their leaves and those which hadn’t—thinned out and were mixed with and almost replaced by evergreens. Here and there the mossy bank was carpeted with a spongy layer of needles.