by Rudy Rucker
“Four miles?”
“Two. Just enough to air my head out.”
Conrad put on an old pair of Mr. Bulber’s sneakers. They locked up the house and walked down to the dormitory so Ace could get his special shoes. He’d been on the cross-country team his first three years, though now he just ran for fun.
It was another sunny day, with big bright leaves beginning to drop. The path through the Crum was smooth and sandy; Ace set a nice, easy pace; and before long, Conrad started feeling good again. Although the Bulber-body’s joints ached a bit, it seemed to have stronger legs than the Bunger-model had. The stupid Bulber-face had put everyone off last night, but at least Audrey still liked him. Good thing she hadn’t been here. Aaauugh. Here he was, with who knew how much time left, wasting his energy on a stupid-ass party to impress some sophomore girls. He’d probably screwed up his cover, too. He was going to have to leave before Bulber came back from his trip—why not just leave right now?
They sloped up out of the woods and onto a dirt road that led among factories and warehouses. Since it was Saturday, no one was about; the junked machinery and the great brick-and-metal buildings seemed like relics of an unknown civilization. The road looped back into the Crum—water and leaves. Running like this, Conrad could, oddly enough, forget his body entirely. At some point the pain always grew so great that the brain simply put the body on automatic. The run ended with a final charge up a steep path up to Crum Ledge and Mr. Bulber’s house. There was a telegram sticking out of the mailbox. Audrey?
Conrad tore it open; it took a minute to grasp what it said.
M. MARK HZA234444898
US CONSULATE DGW22891
PARIS FRANCE SEPTEMBER 16 1966
CHARLES VENN BULBER LOST IN AVALANCHE ON MONT BLANC STOP BODY UNRETRIEVABLE STOP ADVISE DISPOSITION OF EFFECTS STOP
Just then Chuckie and Izzy pulled up in Chuckie’s car. “Hey, Conrad,” yelled Izzy. “Ready for da yard sale?”
“Where’s my XKE, Chuckie?”
“I…sold it. Turned out the guy wouldn’t pay six thou after all. I could only get three-five. But we’ve been into Philly, and I got your kilo. It’s in this shopping bag with your change. You get eighteen hundred back.”
“No,” said Conrad waving his hand weakly. “Wait.” He couldn’t catch his breath. If Bulber was never coming back at all, and all the mail was going through this address, then there was no reason that Conrad couldn’t just move into the Bulber role permanently here and—
“Unlock da door, Conrad,” yelled Tuskman, tugging at the knob as if to tear it off. “I been puttin’ up signs and I wanta get all the furniture out before—”
“Goddamn you,” husked Conrad, as loud as he could manage. “Shut the fuck up! And don’t call me Conrad anymore. I’m Charles Bulber, you hear me; I’m Professor Charles Bulber, and I want you off my goddamn fucking property!”
“Dat’s no way for a professah to talk,” chided Izzy.
“Cool it,” said Ace, who’d just finished reading the telegram for himself. “Conrad just got some weird news.”
Suddenly it was too much for Conrad, all the tension and confusion and bad vibes. A shaking traveled up from his knees and into his stomach, and then he was lying on the ground sobbing—or pretending to sob—into the crook of his arm.
After a while, Chuckie and Izzy left, and Ace helped Conrad into the house. He fixed them a couple of beer-with-tomato-juices while Conrad rolled a jay. Ace had thought to get the shopping bag from Chuckie. Soon Conrad’s spirits rose.
“Actually—it’s a gift from God, Ace. With Bulber dead, I could move in here for good—hell, I could pick up enough physics by next year—and then I could marry Audrey, and have kids with her, and be safe from the cops and saucers forever. But I had to fuck it up before I even started. Last night I told about ten people I wasn’t really Bulber; I was trying to impress those girls and—”
“Don’t worry, Conrad, I covered for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told everyone I was Conrad Bunger, too. And so did Izzy and Chuckie and Platter—that’s going to be like the big campus joke this week: ‘I’m really Conrad Bunger.’ You know: ‘Bird lives!’ James Dean is disfigured and in hiding!’ All those people last night thought you were just a silly middle-aged guy pathetically imitating us students. ‘I am Conrad Bunger,’ indeed. Have you looked in a mirror lately, Dr. Bulber?”
“Oh, Ace.”
“I know, you don’t deserve a friend like me. What are you going to do with all this Acapulco Gold?” The bagful of mixed money and marijuana had spilled out onto the kitchen floor. Big bills, big buds, gold and green.
“I’m sure as hell not going to hand it out at Collection. I mean, then I’d have to change my face again, and who knows if I could find another niche as perfect as this. I’ll stay away from the students, and start learning science. I really always wanted to be a physicist anyway. I guess I’ll freeze the dope. Or why don’t I divide it in five, and each of us takes one section, and in return you guys really really forget about this whole thing.”
“It might work. But why don’t you want to go back to the saucer, Conrad? Isn’t it fun out there?”
“I…I really don’t know. I don’t remember that much about it. You know the story. They set me down here when I was ten, with fake memories, and it all came out more or less by accident. I only really saw another flame-person once—that was the one who tried to get me in the graveyard. He seemed OK; when we touched it was like talking. But I could pick up a real feeling of envy off him. Life on Earth is a lot more interesting than being an energy-pattern in a flying saucer. I’m kind of in a position like a conscripted sailor who jumps ship to live on a tropical island. Or like a spy who defects and begins to believe in his cover.”
“But what about back on the homeworld? Maybe it’s real nice there. Do you know where it is?”
“No. I don’t even know what kind of world it is. Your guess is as good as mine.” Conrad was moving around the kitchen now, straightening up. “I’ll tell you why I want to stay here. It’s simple. I want to stay on Earth because I’m in love with Audrey Hayes. That’s the secret of life, man. Love. I want to live out a normal human life here; I want to live a nice long life with Audrey. Maybe she’ll marry me and move into this house!”
Someone was knocking at the door. It was Platter, bearded and grinning. He looked like a stoned yak. Conrad ushered him in. “Ron, I’m going to do better than repay you for that weed from last night. I’m going to give you a whole one-fifth of my kilo.”
“Far-out! And I thought you were going to hand it all out at Collection.”
“No, no,” said Conrad quickly. “I’ve decided to go for the long haul. Low-profile. I don’t need to talk to Collection at all.”
“But listen! I was just at the Student Council meeting. After that big party last night, everyone wants you to speak. We scheduled you for September 22, and the college already approved it! You can talk on the secret of life!”
Chapter 27: Sunday, September 18, 1966
Conrad kept to himself for the next week and a half. Giving a speech on the secret of life was something he’d always wanted to do—and he hoped to be ready for it. Dee’s simple summation, “All is One,” seemed like the core of it, but the problem was that sometimes the phrase was—just empty words.
“All is One,” Conrad would repeat to himself, jogging along the route that Ace had showed him through the Crum. Sometimes it would click, and sometimes it wouldn’t.
Odd things kept happening at Mr. Bulber’s house. Sometimes Conrad would come back, and it would look as if someone had been there, moving things around. Paranoia or truth? Other days, there’d be a car with strangers parked across the street. Scary, but what could he do? Nothing except hope that, when the heavy shit came down, he’d have another power up his sleeve. Meanwhile, Conrad kept
on thinking, thinking about the secret of life.
He got a lot of books out of the Swarthmore library: Einstein’s essays, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, good old Nausea, and Kerouac and Suzuki and Eddington and Daumal. There was still so much to learn. He’d really wasted his three years here so far—he didn’t know much of anything, and the books were hard to understand. They were just marks on paper. Most days, hungry for reality, he’d wander off into the Crum woods.
He’d go down the hill behind Bulber’s, say, and smoke a joint and sit there, staring at bugs on a rock. The bugs were alive, people were alive, the flamers were alive—but what was it all for? When he was high enough, he thought he knew; he’d have that fine merged feeling he’d had that day with Dee, and everything would fit together.
Another day—it was Sunday the eighteenth—Conrad sat all afternoon gazing at Crum Creek, wondering at the way a given bulge in the water could always be there, yet always be made up of different molecules of water. The bulge was a definite form, an object, yet it was utterly insubstantial. There was no molecule you could point to and say, “This is an essential part of the bulge.” On a longer time-scale, Conrad mused, human bodies were just as insubstantial—eat and shit, cough and breathe—the atoms come and go. But his flame-stick—what was it made of?
Focusing inward, Conrad could sort of feel the rod of light running down his spine. The flame was something other than ordinary matter, or it wouldn’t fit inside his flesh so easily. Plasma, ether, hypermatter? Try as he might, Conrad couldn’t pull it out as he had in the Z.T. graveyard. He needed the crystal to get the flame out; the crystal was an essential part of him. Crystal and flame, projector and image, body and mind, log and fire. That was one direction; what was the other? What did the flame do for the crystal?
Thinking hard, Conrad got an image of his flame-stick as a kind of recording device. His human thoughts and impressions were constantly being coded up as patterns in the flame, coded, perhaps, as tiny knotted plasma-vortices. The crystal could hold a transmitter, a transmitter designed so that whenever Conrad touched it, his memory patterns would be read off and beamed up to the saucer for the flamers to enjoy. Conrad recalled reading that mystics sometimes speak of humans as “God’s eyes.” Perhaps this was literally true. Perhaps he himself was nothing more than an alien movie camera.
When Conrad got back to Mr. Bulber’s that evening, he found that all his preliminary notes for his speech had been stolen. The FBI was onto him for sure. He picked up the phone and listened. It gave off a tinny echo. Bugged? He’d resisted using the phone so far. But, hell, if the feds were onto him so bad they were going through his papers, then what difference did anything make anymore? He decided to go ahead and call up his parents. They’d be worried about him. His father answered.
“Hello?”
“Dad? This is Conrad.”
“I don’t know who you are, but I wish you’d leave us alone. We’ve been through enough.”
“No, Dad, it really is Conrad. I’ve been hiding out. Remember how you used to lie in the wading pool and call me Sausage?”
“It’s Sausage!” old Caldwell called to his wife. “Pick up the extension, Lucy!”
“Conrad?” came his mother’s voice then. “Is it really you? Where are you?”
“I better not say. I’m OK, though. I’m in disguise.”
“Is all this business about the flying saucers true?”
“I think it is. I think they sent me down here to find out what people are like. But I’m scared that the police are going to kill me.”
“Why can’t you turn yourself in peacefully?” asked his mother.
“Don’t do that,” put in Conrad’s father. “I think they really might kill you. They’ve been by here a lot—the FBI and the Secret Service. Those fellows mean business.”
“I’m still your son anyway,” blurted Conrad.
“We know that,” said his mother. “And we still love you.”
“I think my phone is tapped, Conrad,” said his father. “So we better keep it short. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“One thing, Dad. What’s the secret of life? What does it all mean? What are we here for?”
There was momentary silence. Crackles on the phone line. “Damned if I know,” his father said finally. “Nobody knows. It’s just—here we are, and we have to take care of each other the best we can.” Pause. “Does there have to be a reason?”
“Thanks, Dad.” Again the fleeting feeling of understanding it all. “Thanks a lot. I guess I better hang up now.”
“Take care, Conrad,” said his mother. “Please try and find some way to straighten all this out.”
Conrad phoned Audrey next.
“Hi, Audrey.”
“Conrad! You finally decided it was safe to call?”
“I decided it didn’t matter. Either they’re onto me or they aren’t. This isn’t going to change anything. I was going to write you another letter, but I needed to hear your voice.”
“Well, here’s my voice,” said Audrey gaily, and sang a note. “LOOOOO!”
“Very pretty. Are you going to come down for my speech?”
“Of course, Dr. Bulber. What is the secret of life?”
Conrad sighed. “I had some notes, but somebody snuck in and stole them. I bet it was the cops.”
“Unless you lost them. Did you get stoned today?”
“No. But I had a lot of good ideas anyway.”
“Well, you see, Conrad? Now just keep thinking, and I’m sure your speech will be wonderful. I can’t wait to see you.”
“Me too. Will you stay the whole weekend?”
“Maybe.”
“I love you, Audrey.”
“I love you, too.”
As Thursday drew closer, Conrad wrote more and more. He got a notebook and carried it with him everywhere. If only he could break through and find the truth! On the one hand, he didn’t want to jeopardize his seemingly solid position as tenured physics prof. Maybe, just maybe, despite all his worries, the police really weren’t onto him. Maybe he really had just lost those earlier notes, maybe he was only being paranoid. But no matter what, he wanted his speech to say something meaningful. Things looked calm now, but who could tell when the end would come? He’d come here to learn from people; surely he could give them something back.
But what, after all, was the secret of life? Drink, and weed, and love, and life, and running, and talk, and water, and air—there wasn’t any secret when you got down to it. Like his father had said, “Does there have to be a reason?” This was correct, when his father said it. But said in a certain other way, it was wrong.
To say, “There is no secret of life,” in that certain other way means something like, “Get back to work, and watch TV, and believe everything the man tells you, and use vaginal deodorant spray—this is all you get—go to church and cough up some money, it’s all bullshit, use women like objects (snigger), don’t read—stop looking for more—matter is everything, there’s no soul, there’s no God up there, there’s just a mean old man keeping lists like Santa Claus, death is horrible, buy lots of things to forget about death, commit brutal sex-murders, go to war, build bombs, rape the Earth, try to kill everything with you when you die—only your body matters—winning is everything, don’t let people push you around, don’t listen to others, friends are to get things from—get your head out of the clouds—art’s a waste of time, so is philosophy, science will soon solve all mysteries, art is what they used to have, no room for art in today’s modern age, technology is the thing, science is for making more goods, goods to help us try and buy off death a little longer, medicine is the only science that really counts, how much is that in dollars—follow the rules—innovation is too risky, don’t step out of line, what if everyone did that, shape up or ship out, you’re in the army now…”
Easy to say what the S
ecret isn’t but what is it? It’s not a Secret at all, is the main thing, and it’s not anything occult or unusual. It’s everywhere all the time, like an ether-wind blowing through our minds and bodies, it’s God, it’s simple existence, can’t you see it? No word can really capture the Secret, practically any phrase will do. All is One, All is One, ALL IS ONE. One what? One of…uh…those…uh. IT isn’t like anything else, and IT’s like everything else, because IT is everything, IT’s the underside of everything—like a papier-mâché topographical map that you turn over, and underneath IT’s all brown paper. There’re no gods and devils down there, no spells and spirits, there’s just…oh…clear light, man, light so bright it’s dark. Love is a kind of merging, love is humanity’s concrete symbol for the Secret, two into one, holding nothing back, together at last, tear down the walls and let it flow. It’s all in forgetting your individuality, forgetting you’re alive so that IT can remember ITself. The Secret. Some Secret. Dear God.
On the last couple of days, Conrad scribbled page after page of stuff like that—hoping somehow that the intensity of his longing could bring the secret out into print. He wrote in the house, he wrote in the woods, he expanded and condensed. Finally he had something typed up; he couldn’t tell anymore if it made sense or not. And then it was Thursday.
Chapter 28: Thursday, September 22, 1966
“You should just get high, Conrad, and let the marijuana do the talking.” Platter and Ace and Conrad were walking up from Bulber’s house to Clothier Hall, the big gray stone building where Collection was about to take place. Platter was stoned—he’d been stoned since last Saturday—but the other two weren’t.
“This is too serious for that,” said Ace. “I got a feeling.”
“Me too,” said Conrad. “I’m scared shitless. You guys sit with Audrey, OK?” Audrey had come down last night so she’d be here for Conrad’s big speech on the secret of life. “In case something happens. She’ll be in the front row. She went there early to save places.”