by Rudy Rucker
Audrey was quite upset over these messages. “How did this nut get hold of our phone number?” she cried. “What if he comes after you!”
“It sounds pretty bizarre,” I agreed. “I have met him, though, and he didn’t seem physically threatening. It was after that talk I gave in San Rafael a couple of years ago. Frank Shook. He must have seen the Post review, remembered that I live around here, and looked us up in the phone book.”
“Oh, why did you have to write that stupid review. What do you care about flying saucers!”
I rewound the tape and played the messages again. I still wanted to know about three-dimensional time. And I was intrigued that this man flat-out said he’d talked with aliens. “You know, I think I should go over to Frank Shook’s house on Thursday. That would be day after tomorrow. It might be really interesting. If I go, I can call you as soon as I get there and give you his number and have you call me back. That way he’ll know that someone knows I’m there, and if I want to leave, I’ll pretend you said I had to hurry home.”
“Don’t do it,” said Audrey. “What if he wants to kill you?”
“I don’t think he’s that kind of guy. A little weird, sure, but he smiles a lot and—and he’s full of interesting ideas.”
“The smiling ones are the worst kind!”
I listened to the messages for a third time. “Did you notice he says ‘our cabin,’ Audrey? That probably means he has a wife. It’s a good sign if he has a wife.”
“How do you know that when he says ‘our cabin’ he isn’t talking about himself and the termites that live in his gunjy saucer-nut brain?”
A Prayer
Tuesday night, for the first time in years, I dreamed I saw a flying saucer. It was transparent, sketched in lines of pale light against a blue sky. Its form was the traditional saucer shape of gently curved disk with domed central cabin.
Wednesday I went out walking in the hills with my orange and white collie-beagle dog Arf. It was a calm, warm spring day. Arf and I found a little meadow by some oak trees, and we laid down there in the coarse green grass. Staring up into the blue sky, I remembered my dream of seeing the saucer. But maybe the aliens didn’t use saucers. “The aliens are everywhere,” Frank Shook had said. “They’re all around us.”
Over the years I’ve occasionally had the feeling of seeing things out of the corner of my eye—fleeting things that rush past too fast to observe. Might there be creatures who move across time as readily as we move through space?
The shadows beneath the oaks were pierced by bright shafts of sunlight, alive with drifting motes of dust and pollen. I remembered a passage in Diogenes Laertius’s third-century The Life Of Pythagoras: “The Pythagoreans also assert that the whole air is full of souls.”
The sky looked so big and blank—both full and empty. There was nothing between outer space and me, nothing between me and the Sun and the worlds beyond. The faint noises of the woods and meadow began to seem alien, began to stick together in new shapes. I had to fight back a spasm of fear.
Now I grew angry at myself for being afraid.
It would be madness to start being scared of being outdoors alone. Solitude and nature are precious to me. I would never want to be some timid person whose idea of hiking is walking around a mall, whose notion of the seaside is a Fisherman’s Wharf, whose concept of adventure is Disneyland, whose fling with sin is Las Vegas. Yes, I did want to pursue Frank Shook’s notion of aliens all around us—but not if his strange ideas ended up frightening me into being one of mass culture’s obedient sheep.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” an inner voice seemed to say. “Trust in God!”
God? These days it was highly unusual for me to think of that topic. As the son of a minister, I’d been hustled off to church Sunday after Sunday, year after year. But from my teen years on, the rituals had struck me as empty. I felt that people went to church simply because it made them feel good to be in a crowd of like-minded individuals. And with the coming of the religious right and televangelism, my indifference to Christianity had soured into fear and contempt.
In my twenties and early thirties, I’d become interested in mysticism. I adopted the notion of a supernal yet immediate One Mind, a cosmic White Light that shines through ordinary objects like sunlight through stained-glass windows. In my usual scholarly fashion, I read up on mysticism, enjoying such classics as Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy and D. T. Suzuki’s An Introduction To Zen Buddhism. I even reached the point of mentally codifying mysticism into three concise statements: “(1) All is One, (2) The One is Unknowable, and (3) The One is Right Here.”
But as my thirties stretched on and gave way to my forties, my theories about mysticism had come to seem like a dry, academic game. What good, after all, was some metaphysical notion of a One Mind? My mother grew ill and died; my father had a debilitating stroke; my own health became less reliable. I was haunted by one of the last things my father had said to me before his stroke crippled him: “Rudy, all I know about life is this: you get old and you die.”
Lying there on the hilltop with Arf, I felt the sun beating down on my closed eyelids, filling my eyes with bright light. God is everywhere, I thought, trying the notion on. God can hear me. And finally, for the first time in years, I let myself pray. “Dear God, please be with me. Protect me and let me do your will.”
Chapter Two: Frank Shook Time
San Lorenzo
Thursday morning, June 2, 1994, I set off to meet Frank Shook. His home town—which we’ll call San Lorenzo—is tucked into the Santa Cruz mountains at the base of the San Francisco peninsula. I took a two-lane road through the woods to get there.
It was, as usual, a perfect California day. The road rose and fell, now down in the shade of redwoods, now up on a ridge with oaks and manzanitas. From the highest point I could see across the small dark-green mountains to the Pacific Ocean. The waters were softened by mist, and on the high, distant horizon was the dark finger of the Monterey Peninsula.
I found Carlita’s Mexico City Style Mexican Food easily enough. It stands right by an old concrete bridge where the state highway crosses the stream called Boulder Creek. I parked and went inside; the place was nearly empty. No sign of Frank Shook. A waiter offered to seat me, but I decided to wait outside. It was about 12:50.
I sat there on a bench in the sun, looking things over. Across the street were some other establishments. The Heron’s Healing Beak: Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine. Pot Of Gold: A Coffeehouse & More. Four young men were slowly playing basketball in front of the San Lorenzo Recreational Hall. Next to that was the San Lorenzo Fire Department, with an iron bell hanging from a low-mounted log cross-bar. Further up the street was Wilson’s Super, a beat-up old supermarket with a neon liquor sign.
A few San Lorenzo citizens passed by. I was feeling keyed up, and took close notice of each and every one of them.
First came a grunger woman with cowboy boots and round granny shades. She wore a tie-dyed stocking cap, a striped jersey dress, and a sweatshirt tied around her waist. Her white legs looked very bare coming out of the scalloped boot tops.
Next was a big-stomached young man, carrying a baby in a back carrier. He was bearded and pony-tailed, perhaps a computer hacker. There’s a lot of programmers who telecommute from the low-rent Santa Cruz mountains.
Some geezers swung a big white American car into the Carlita’s parking-lot. In the back seat of the car were suits and dresses hanging from a suspended rod. The couple got out and walked across the lot to the restaurant. He: plaid shirt, jeans with stitching, gray helmet-hair. She: white hair, kind face, pink turtleneck, blue sweatpants, sneakers. They looked like they might be itinerant New Age healers.
More time went by.
A county bus pulled up. A burr-cut boy in a red T-shirt leaned eagerly forward to get aboard. Meanwhile a longhaired boy was unlashing his bicycle from a rack on the front
grill of the bus. Six teens got off the bus in a pack, lighting cigarettes and peering through slitty sunglasses.
Here came a compact car driven by an old woman sitting low down in her seat and barely able to see over the steering wheel through her thick glasses. Something about her mild, round chin made me imagine her saying, “Good golly.”
The next car was a whipped-to-shit van—all that was visible inside was a big beard, a nose, the brim of a high-hat. A tough mountain hippie. Even tougher was a hugely mustached man in a shiny green vintage car, a fixed-up tricked-out classic with fender-skirts. He was chewing gum a mile a minute. There’s a lot of illegal methedrine labs in the mountains; I wondered if he was from one of them.
Now all of a sudden a very striking trio of people appeared: a beautiful dark-skinned woman and a handsome man—both holding hands with a short androgynous figure whose sex I really couldn’t decide upon. The three of them were dressed in odd, shiny clothes. It crossed my mind that they might be saucer cultists. Friends of Frank’s? I must have been staring at them too hard, for they paused and stared back at me, giving me such a cool and thorough looking-over that it felt like an insult. I smiled and nodded awkwardly; they ambled away.
Across the street the basketball kept bounce-bounce-bouncing, with the four players slowly gangling around. No hurry. But where was Frank Shook?
A bearded man with dark curly hair walked past me and started to do something to the public phone in front of Carlita’s. He wore black cut-off shorts, a purple T-shirt, a black baseball cap, and he was carrying a white envelope in his mouth. There were lots of things hanging from his belt: tools and a portable phone? For a minute I thought he might be a particularly brazen phone phreak stealing long distance time. But then he walked down the street and got into a van—aha!—Pacific Bell. In the Santa Cruz mountains, even the people with straight jobs look weird.
It was 1:10 now. I checked inside Carlita’s one more time; Frank still wasn’t there. But as soon as I came back out, I bumped into him. He looked even thinner than the last time I’d seen him, his skin more dry and leathery. The lenses of his glasses were smudged; the eyes behind them bright and odd. His hair had gone a bit gray and could have used a washing.
“Hi Rudy, am I late?” He smiled and shook my hand. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.” We went into the restaurant, got an isolated table in the corner, and ordered some food. Salad, chicken soup and iced tea for me; an enchilada platter and a Dos Equis beer for him.
Paratime
“So where to begin?” said Frank.
“Let’s start with the aliens,” I suggested, setting out my fountain pen and my paper. I like to use a good pen; it’s a writer’s little extravagance. The paper was an ordinary pad of blank unlined paper which I’d gotten from school. “What is it like when you see them?”
He smiled nervously. “I’m still getting used to the idea of telling you about this.” His Adam’s apple bobbed.
“You’ve never told anyone?”
“Oh I’ve told lots of people, but never a scientist like you. A skeptic. Someone who’s going to try and analyze the hell out of it. If I tell the average person in San Lorenzo that I’ve seen aliens, they’re not all that excited. Usually they say they’ve seen aliens, too. But when I listen to their stories, I can tell that they only imagined it. I only know one other person who sees aliens like me. Peggy Sung. She’s this very grasping, materialistic woman who lives just down the road in Benton. But for God’s sake let’s not start in on her.”
“So tell me how it is when you see the aliens.”
Frank took a deep breath, looked around the room, exhaled. “Time stops. And they appear. I have my adventures with them, and then they put me back where I started and time starts up again.”
“Time stops? Does anyone else notice?”
“My wife Mary can tell when it happens, but you probably wouldn’t be able to. There’s a tiny little glitch in the continuity, but you have to know how to look for it. They could come for me right now. I’d just be sitting here with you aaand—” He moved his right hand slowly through the air “—time would stop and I’d go away and then I’d be back here finishing up my sentence. At least I might finish my sentence. If I happened to remember what I’d been talking about. Which is not all that likely. Some of my adventures are real doozies.”
“I don’t get what you mean. If time stops, then how can anything happen?”
Figure 1: A History Of Paratime
“Time doesn’t stop for me. The aliens can make my time axis run perpendicular to regular time. We get into what I call paratime. Here, let me draw you a picture.” He took my pen and began to draw on my pad. “Think of all space as a point, and think of human time as the line going up the page. Now suppose that at each instant of our time you can find a different time direction that goes off at a right angle. A perpendicular paratime axis for each moment of human history.”
Just then the food arrived. Frank kept right on drawing, adding more and more detail, moving the pen with an easy, practiced hand. While I watched him, I began to eat. My chicken soup was thick with meat and vegetables; the salad was fresh and well-dressed. I was enjoying myself.
“What are all those little drawings?” I asked Frank.
“
Figure 2: 3D Time Prevents Time-Line Crossings
Those are different ways that people have become aware of paratime,” he answered. “The closest thing our planet has to cavemen today is the Australian aborigines. And the aborigines have this thing they call Dreamtime. A timeless time that’s outside of history. I figure that’s paratime. Same thing for the Egyptian pyramids. A pyramid is a kind of time-machine, isn’t it? And in the Bible where Jesus tells the good thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise,” that’s His way of talking about paratime. And that medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, he was totally into paratime. All of Man’s time is one Now. It’s everywhere if you know how to look.”
“Were you already thinking about paratime before you met the aliens?”
“Oh yeah! I’ve always been able to step out into paratime. A little bit, anyway. I used to be so dumb—” Frank chuckled and shook his head. “I used to think that it was just me zoning out. But really I was having flashes of perpendicular time. Of course it wasn’t till the aliens started coming for me that I really got anywhere with it.” He turned his attention back to his drawing. “The aliens first noticed Earth after we set off the first atom bomb in 1945. They saw the radiation pulse, and they started coming here, and now they’re all up and down Earth’s timeline.”
“I don’t want to sound like I’m hassling you,” I said after studying the picture for another minute. “But what you’ve drawn here looks like two-dimensional time. One regular timeline plus a perpendicular time-direction you call paratime. How do we get to that three-dimensional time you were promising me?”
Frank nodded, took a few bites of his enchilada, and started a new picture. “Yes. The thing is, Rudy, I simplified my picture so that you could understand it. Of course there isn’t just one direction of perpendicular time, there’s lots of them. Has to be. Because when a saucer goes forwards and backwards through paratime, there has to be at least three dimensions of time to keep the saucer from running into its past self.” He finished the sketch, tore the page off my pad, and passed it to me.
“I see,” I said. “And you’re saying the aliens can do time-travel?”
“Oh yeah, that’s one of the main things we do when they abduct me. We go and look at the future, even though we always stay right here in California. It’s a funny thing how we never go anywhere else. The thing is, travelling across space is as big a hassle for the aliens as it is for us. An inch for us is an inch for them, a trillion miles is a trillion miles. And even the aliens can’t go any faster than light. But once they actually get somewhere—like the Bay Area—they’re free to explore the place’s whole his
tory. They can visit the past and the future. Going forward and backwards in time is easier for them than flying to a new place.”
“So not only can they stop time, they can jump into the past or the future,” I said. “Can you tell me any more about that works?”
Frank began another picture, talking all the while. He was getting really excited. “The way that the aliens stop time is that they hover at one moment of our time by circling around that instant in higher-dimensional time, see. Like a corkscrew or a Slinky.” He handed me a drawing and started on the next.
“And when the aliens want to look at our future, they get there by using a shortcut: they take a straight line through paratime that skips over our zigzags. I didn’t mention the zigzags yet, did I? Earth’s timeline is as shaky as a hound-dog sniffing out a rabbit track. Because of quantum mechanics. Earth’s time is so crinkly that a thousand years of it is only a few minutes across in paratime; it’s like the way you can stuff a quarter-mile of kite-string into your pants pocket.” The new drawing was already done.
Figure 3: Stopping Time with Paratime.
“I like this, Frank.” A big smile had crept onto my face. “Of course I don’t really believe you. Are you a scientist?”
“Not really. I took physics in high-school. I didn’t go to college. I watch Cosmos and the National Geographic specials on TV. And I’ve read some books. Bertrand Russell’s The ABC of Relativity and Lancelot Hogben’s Mathematics For the Million, ever hear of them? And I read a book called Quantum Reality, I forget the author, it has two globs like a figure eight on the cover. And of course there’s your book The Fourth Dimension. It’s a gas to be talking science with you, Rudy. Though, to be honest, the closest I come to any kind of in-depth technical knowledge is in the area of VCR players and video cameras. Which is how I met the aliens.”