Transreal Trilogy: Secret of Life, White Light, Saucer Wisdom

by Rudy Rucker

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “I’m having dinner at the Larsens’. And then—I don’t know.” Conrad remembered the seven o’clock news. He’d be on it for sure, the size of a thumb. And the radio Hank had been working on all day. What if they started picking up saucer transmissions? “I’ve got to do something with Hank tonight.”

  “Well, stop by if you go cruising. Bring us some beer. Sue’s always been hot for Hank, you know. She says that’s the main reason she went out with you.”

  They kissed some more in front of Sue’s house, and then Conrad headed over to the Larsens’. With the Bunger boys as well as her own four children to feed, Mrs. Larsen had opted for a buffet-style presentation. A meat loaf and a great bowl of potato salad sat on her kitchen table with the plates and flatware. Caldwell was on the back porch, already eating.

  “Say, bro.” Caldwell looked as tired and happy as Conrad felt. “Food’s in there.”

  “I see it. Where’s everybody else?”

  “They’ll trickle in. The parents already got their food. They’re downstairs watching TV. Give me the keys before I forget.”

  “OK.” As he filled his plate, Conrad realized how hungry he was. He took double portions and sat down next to his brother.

  “How was your day with Dee?” asked Caldwell.

  “It was good. We smoked some grass and went wading. How about you? What was the problem with Tacy Leggett?”

  “Oh, there was no problem with her. We got in her bed and pumped away for a while—but then we fell asleep.”

  “And her mother found you?”

  “Her father. He didn’t say anything, but when I came out of her room, he was sitting in the living room drinking a Bloody Mary and cleaning his shotgun.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He made me sit down with him and talk about duck hunting. It got old real fast.”

  “So Tuck picked you up.”

  “Yeah. We went out to Harmony Landing and played golf. Saw some old friends. I’ve got a date with Sherry Kessler for tonight.”

  “A girl a day,” marveled Conrad. He ate in silence for a minute, then remembered about Skelton again. “What time is it? I gotta watch the local news.”

  “Ten to seven. Hank wants to see the news, too. He’s in his room building a radio. What are you two guys up to, anyway?”

  “I’ll tell you later. It’s kind of complex.” Conrad was still a little apprehensive about telling Caldwell that he wasn’t—strictly speaking—his real brother.

  Just then Hank came out to the kitchen to eat. “Hey, Paunch,” he called out. “You get in Decca’s pants?”

  “They got stoned and went wading,” clucked Caldwell. “These hippies don’t have enough sense to get laid.”

  “How about the radio?” Conrad demanded. “Does it work?”

  Hank’s face took on a strange expression. “Why don’t we go back to my room, and I’ll show you what’s happened. Just let me fill up my plate here.”

  The crystal sat on a square of pegboard, surrounded by bright little doodads: striped-sausage resistors, plastic-disc capacitors, buglike transistors, and wires of every color. The largest component was a many-finned variable capacitor from an old truck radio. Conrad remembered the day Hank had gotten that capacitor. The truck had been an abandoned hulk in a nearby quarry—Hank and Conrad often went there on weekends to look for the girlie magazines that the quarrymen sometimes left.

  “Why aren’t any wires connected to the crystal?” asked Conrad. “Why don’t you even have it fastened down?”

  “That’s just it,” said Hank, his voice a tense, exasperated whisper. “Look at my thumb, fucker.” He held out his thumb for inspection. There was a charred blister on it. “And the other hand, too.” Hank’s left palm was crossed by a deep, scabbed scratch. “Every time I try to do anything with that bastard-ass crystal, I get hurt.”

  “The crystal attacks you?”

  “No!” Hank caught himself and forced his voice back to a whisper. “I burned my thumb with the soldering gun; and I scratched my palm with the screwdriver. But it’s the crystal’s fault. You don’t believe me? Go ahead and try for yourself. It’s weird. See that masking tape? Try and tape the crystal down onto the pegboard. I dare you.”

  Conrad picked up the roll of tape and stared uncertainly at the crystal. “If I try, I’ll get spastic and hurt myself.”

  “Go ahead, dammit. This was your idea in the first place.”

  Conrad measured out a length of tape and tried to tear it off the roll. The tape was tougher than he’d expected. He pulled harder. Just then his thumb slipped oddly. The thumbnail caught in a wrinkle of the tape—caught, bent, and snapped.

  “Shit! I just broke my goddamn thumbnail!” Conrad dropped the tape and put his tongue to the wound. “I broke it right down to the quick. I can’t believe I…” He stopped talking then as he realized what had just happened.

  “It’s been like that all afternoon,” said Hank quietly. “I suggest you pocket that crystal, Conrad, and forget about trying to build anything with it. Sooner or later, you’ll find out what it’s really for.”

  “Seven o’clock!” called Caldwell from the kitchen. “Didn’t you guys want to watch the news?”

  Chapter 21: Saturday, August 6, 1966

  Hank’s parents and one of his brothers were already down in the basement. “Conrad here wants to see the news,” Hank explained after the greetings. “Catch up on all the big doings.”

  “The local news is the only thing on right now anyway,” said Mrs. Larsen agreeably. “We still only have two channels in Louisville, Conrad. I keep telling Hank’s father he should get us an antenna to pick up the UHF channel, but he doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.”

  “There’s no sports on that channel,” explained Mr. Larsen. He was a distant man with a deprecatory chuckle. “Just violins.”

  The local news ran along uneventfully: a new candidate for mayor, problems with the sewage plant, a change in zoning, but then—

  “A bizarre robbery at a farmhouse in Louisville’s East End last night.” The newscaster was a trim young woman with heavily coiffed brown hair. “When Mr. Cornelius Skelton called police officers at 3:00 A.M., they found a broken window lock and only one item missing: a large, semiprecious mineral crystal which had rested on Mr. Skelton’s mantel. Skelton asserted that he had ‘expected the robbery.’ The crystal was coupled to an alarm system—a very special system which included an automatic movie camera! Here is Skelton’s incredible film of the robbery taking place.”

  “Cornelius Skelton,” Mr. Larsen was saying. “Isn’t he the rich fellow who has that farm down the road?”

  “A jewel heist in our own neighborhood!” exclaimed Mrs. Larsen. “How exciting!”

  Caldwell favored Conrad with a hard, questioning stare.

  The film started: silent, black and white.

  A blurred shape, jellylike in slowed time. A young man’s back. He jerks into grayness, he blurs into cloud. He’s gone? No—there he is again, at the bottom of the screen, tiny before the looming fireplace. He’s the size of a thumb! He wears a white bandit-mask, the little scuttler, and now he hurries off out of the picture, lugging Skelton’s crystal on his tiny back.

  The news show cut to Skelton’s face, in color. Old Cornelius looked as calm and gentlemanly as ever, laying down his bizarre rap in an emotionless Kentucky drawl. “I’ve said this time and again. A fla’hn saucer landed on my farm in the spring of fifty-six. It butchered one of my hogs and left a crystal in its place. I anticipated that the aliens might return for the crystal, and I rigged my camera accordingly. View the film with an open mind, and ask yourself if any human being could shrink that way.”

  They ran the film again in slow motion. This time Conrad could recognize himself. The arms, the eyes. All of a sudden, he was starting to feel
funny.

  The brunette came back on. “The incredible shrinking man? This afternoon, our WHAS news team showed Skelton’s film to Dr. Mario Turin, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Louisville.”

  Cut to a black-goateed man with a sliding smile. A mellow-voiced male interviewer, off-camera, asked the questions.

  “Dr. Turin, what do you think of Mr. Skelton’s assertion that his film shows an alien from outer space?”

  Turin smiled and jerked his head. “Cornelius Skelton is well known for his strong beliefs in UFO phenomena. I think it’s only natural that he would interpret his film in terms of extraterrestrial visitation.”

  “But you don’t agree with Mr. Skelton?” The interviewer’s voice was smooth and comforting. It reminded Conrad of the time Platter had come to get him at Chuckie’s. His head felt so numb!

  “No, I don’t. I think it’s more likely that Mr. Skelton is the perpetrator—or the dupe—of a hoax. The ‘shrinking’ effect could easily be produced by an ordinary zoom lens. What we have here is an unusual film—of an ordinary robbery.”

  Conrad was finding it harder and harder to pay attention. It was unsettling enough to see himself on TV—and to have Caldwell angrily elbowing him whenever the Larsens looked away—but his head was filled with a funny, dead tingling, as if he’d just gotten a shot of Novocain in the center of his brain.

  It was an odd feeling, yet not totally unfamiliar. Conrad had felt this way once before: in Paris, right after he’d seen the picture of Audrey and him hovering off the Eiffel Tower.

  That was the last time that one of my powers was publicly recorded. The picture of me flying was in the paper, and then I couldn’t fly anymore. His head throbbed thickly. It was the news report for sure. Somehow Conrad was programmed to change his special survival power each time he was unmasked. He was turning into a new “Chinese brother.”

  The news ended on a light note, and a vaginal-deodorant commercial came on, the one with Dorothy Provine. With the marijuana still in his system, Conrad slid into a heavy paranoid fantasy that Caldwell and the Larsens were all staring at him. In Caldwell’s case, this was no fantasy.

  “Let’s go out to the car,” said Caldwell, poking Conrad sharply. “I have to pick up Sherry soon.” He thanked Mrs. Larsen for the dinner and hustled Conrad out to the garage. He was really angry.

  “What do you think you’re doing, breaking into Mr. Skelton’s house?” demanded Caldwell. “He’s an old friend of the family! Have you turned into a junkie or something?”

  “How do you know it was me?” essayed Conrad.

  “I know what you look like, even with a snot-rag on your face. And the way you and Hank have been acting, it’s been obvious that something’s up. What did you do with the crystal, sell it?”

  “No. I’ve got it right here.” Conrad took the crystal out of his pocket and opened his hand a little to show it to Caldwell. “I’m not giving it back, either. It’s mine.”

  “Why is it yours, Conrad?”

  “Because—because it comes from the same flying saucer that I came from.” Conrad couldn’t hold the secret back any longer. “The flying wing! It put me down at Skelton’s the day you all moved to Louisville. I’m not really your brother. You were just hypnotized into thinking I am. The aliens picked the Bunger family because they had no friends or relatives.”

  Caldwell’s eyes were blazing—with anger, with fear, with hurt. Conrad backed away.

  “Don’t try to hit me, Caldwell, I have special powers. If you really can’t stand it, then go ahead and turn me in. My life here’ll be over, but if that’s what you have to do…”

  Caldwell sat down on the MG’s fender and rubbed his face. “Conrad,” he said softly, “don’t tell me you’re not my brother. You’re the only brother I have. Even if you are an alien. Didn’t we grow up together? Don’t you look like Mom and Dad?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Maybe they even fixed it so that my body here has the right genes. I think they made the body out of pigmeat, as a matter of fact, but they could have doctored all the amino acids to match.”

  Caldwell lifted his face up from his hands and looked at Conrad with curiosity. “If you’re wearing a fake, pigmeat body—keep in mind that I think you’re out of your gourd, Conrad, but just for the sake of argument—if the body standing here in front of me is a costume, then what do you really look like?”

  “A stick of light. I remember from my dreams. My race is called the flame-people. The other flame-people are in a saucer hovering out past the Moon. They monitor Earth’s TV and radio. They snuck me down here to find out what it’s really like. Instead of vaginal deodorant ads, you dig?”

  “How do you know they’re out near the Moon? Do you talk to them? Do you hear voices, Conrad?” Caldwell’s voice was taking on an air of strained normality. He’d decided not to believe the story.

  “I don’t hear voices, Caldwell, and I’m not crazy. I don’t care if you believe me, just so you don’t turn me in.

  “Time to regroup,” said Hank, stepping into the garage. “Conrad’s television debut has left us all a bit bemused. My mother is askin’ questions.”

  “She knows?” asked Conrad, his voice rising.

  “She saw the crystal in my room today. She wants us to give it back.”

  “Wait,” interrupted Caldwell. “Did Conrad really shrink or not, Hank? He’s been telling me all this shit about—”

  “Flying saucers,” said Hank. “I’ve heard it, too. I did see him shrink last night. But—”

  “Can you do it again?” demanded Caldwell. You could see vague plans for the perfect bank robbery forming in his mind. “Because—”

  “That’s what I was about to tell you,” said Conrad. “I can’t shrink anymore. I’m programmed to like change powers each time I get exposed. I could feel it happening after Skelton showed the movie on TV. The flame-people want me to survive, but I have to keep quiet. We don’t want everyone on Earth to know about us, because—”

  “Oh, I don’t want to hear any more about it, Conrad,” interrupted Caldwell in sudden revulsion. “You are so fucking nuts.” He got in the MG and fired up the engine. “Open the garage door, would you, Hank? I’ve got a date.”

  “Where are you going to sleep?” asked Conrad solicitously.

  “Wherever I get laid; wherever I pass out. Get out of my way.”

  Hank opened the garage door, and Caldwell backed out. He looked like he couldn’t decide what to think. Big brother. He really cared. Conrad ran over to the car, and the two brothers shook hands. Caldwell was shaking his head and grinning by the time he drove off.

  “I wonder what your new power is going to be,” mused Hank.

  “I don’t know. It’s not really clear to me how many more chances I’m going to get. One more fuck-up, and they might just come get me.” Conrad reached into his pocket and felt the magic crystal. “Why don’t I take a walk, and you tell your mother I’ve gone to give the crystal back? Then maybe later we can go over to Pohlboggen’s. She’s hot for you, and Dee’s got more grass.”

  “Sounds good. See you in about an hour. You’re not really going to Skelton’s, are you?”

  “No way. I’ll be over at the Z.T.”

  Conrad followed Hank’s street out of the subdivision and crossed Route 42 to get to the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery. “Old Rough-and-Ready” himself was buried there, along with his wife, and about ten thousand World War II soldiers, each soldier with an identical white headstone. The stones seemed almost to glow in the gathering dusk. As Conrad walked among them, they kept shifting into new alignments, like the atoms in a crystal.

  Crystal. Conrad took the troublesome stone out of his pocket and peered at it. It lay still in his hand, mockingly inert. What was it for? Why had the flame-people left it?

  Here I am, a creature made of pigmeat and a stick of flame. I used to say that I
was looking for the secret of life, but now…

  What could the secret of life mean, anyway? Conrad looked at the vast world around him, remembering Audrey, remembering today’s outing with Dee. How could any one formula ever sum it up?

  The secret of life—big deal. Conrad thought of a poem he’d read in some beatnik anthology:

  The beach night of eternal star

  Sea of possibility and infinite spacetime

  Mists on the Earth—What a laugh

  To sell answers in paperback,

  When you see God

  Only piss to mark the spot.

  Chapter 22: Saturday, August 6, 1966

  Conrad lay there, on the cemetery grass, not thinking anything in particular. As full darkness set in, lightning bugs appeared, blink————-blink—blink———————blinking around the cedars and the weeping willows. The stars were out, high overhead. Every now and then you could see the abrupt streak of a meteorite. It was peaceful, peaceful lying there, alone in the Louisville night. Conrad held the crystal in his right hand; somehow its sharp planes and skewed edges made for a perfect fit.

  A quarter-hour passed, then another and another. Conrad still felt a little high, lying there in the dry grass, too high to fall asleep. It would be nice with Hank and Sue and Dee later—they could all go to a drive-in or—

  ZZZZOW.

  A tumbling pattern of red lights swooped down out of the sky and thudded into the ground a hundred meters from where Conrad lay. The object was a good-sized pyramid with a bright light at each of its five corners—It was a UFO!

  There were houses all around the Zachary Taylor cemetery—and everyone’s lights were coming on. Conrad wasn’t the only one who’d seen the pyramid land. Was it the flame-people? This ship certainly didn’t look like the good old flying wing, but maybe it was a scout ship or—

  Conrad jumped to his feet, not certain whether to watch or run. If the UFO was from a different alien race, would they be friend or foe? If it was from the flame-people, what did they want? Unconsciously, Conrad’s fist clenched around his magic crystal. The thing felt warm to the touch.