by Rudy Rucker
Figure 4: A Shortcut Through Paratime.
“How did video lead to your meeting the aliens?”
“I’d rather show you that when we go back to the cabin. If we go.”
Frank set down my pen and ate and drank in silence for a few minutes. Finally he looked up and asked, “What do you plan to do with the stuff I tell you, Rudy?”
This was the question I’d been expecting. I was in fact looking for a new non-fiction writing project, and it had crossed my mind that I might be able to make a book out of Frank Shook’s experiences. I was a little worried about what might happen to my reputation if I became tarred with the ufology brush, yet the very perverseness of writing a UFO book attracted me. And, of course, there was always the chance that it might make money.
“Well, you haven’t really told me very much yet,” I said. “But I imagine you’re wondering if I might write about what you say. Would you mind if I did?”
“I’d want some of the money. I don’t want you taking my ideas and giving me nothing.” His face was suddenly grim.
Would this be worth it? What if Frank Shook started claiming that everything I ever wrote from now on was taken from him? “An idea is one thing, but a book is something else,” I said carefully. “Everyone has ideas, but almost nobody can write a book. We might be able to make some kind of deal, but if you think you won’t feel comfortable about it, then it’s probably better if I leave you alone and let you write your own book.”
“Listen to the hotshot. Herr Doktor Professor Rucker. All right, how about two percent?”
I’d been bracing myself for a much higher request, and this caught me off balance. But not totally. “Two—two percent of my income on the book? Domestic or worldwide?”
“Two percent of domestic is fine. But you have to give me all the money you get from—from Finland.”
“Two percent domestic plus all of Finland.” I said. I looked hard at Frank Shook, trying to figure out if he was putting me on.
“Is it a deal?” he pressed.
“I can visualize it,” I said finally. “Yeah. If I sell the book, I could easily give you two percent of my advance.”
“And all the money you get from Finland goes straight to me.”
“Fine! But later you can’t start trying to change the terms and asking for more. And remember that if I don’t write a Frank Shook book, or if I can’t sell it, then you don’t get anything, okay? And no trying to collect from me for all the other books I ever write in my lifetime. No saying that my science fiction ideas come from you. Like for instance, two-dimensional time happens to be something I’ve already thought about before, although in a different way, and when you see in my next SF book, I don’t want you getting all greedy and paranoid and trying to bug me about it.”
“It’s not really the money I’m after, Rudy. I just want you to promise me something so I’ll know you’re on the level. It’s a matter of respect. If you give people information for free they don’t value it. Two percent domestic and all of Finland.(4) It’s what my wife and I decided to ask for. And now you said okay, so I guess we have a deal. Are you ready to go to my cabin?”
(4) I never did learn the reasons behind Frank’s interest in Finland.
“Sure.” I called the waiter and paid the check.
“I didn’t tell you everything about paratime yet,” Frank said as we waited for the change. “Your mind can come unstuck from the human timeline and move around in paratime. I think dreams take place in paratime. That’s why so many people dream about seeing aliens. Like human time is a big kelp stalk and the aliens are fish floating next to it.”
Figure 5: Humming-bird Alien.
He picked up my fountain pen, tore the last drawing off my pad of paper and started to draw a new picture. I tucked the finished drawings into my briefcase.
“Actually I think of the saucers as humming-birds,” Frank was saying. “Like a humming-bird sipping nectar from a bottlebrush flower.”
A bottlebrush, I should explain, is an introduced Australian plant common in California. Its large red flowers are cylindrical spikes with densely-packed radial stamens arranged like the bristles of the kind of brush you’d use to clean baby bottles.
“The alien saucers fly in and out along perpendicular paratime axes to keep probing into the world,” continued Frank, still drawing. “But since the world’s time is so folded and wadded-up, the aliens can pretty much just turn their beak a little bit and probe into the past or into the future.”
“You keep talking about flying saucers,” I said. “Are you really telling me that the aliens come in physical metal machines?”
“The saucers aren’t machines, they’re energy. Of course energy can look like matter. Einstein says, eh Rudy? And matter can look like a machine. So anything’s possible.”
The waiter was there with the change. I left the tip and we went outside. San Lorenzo looked much stranger than it had before.
“You might as well drive,” said Frank Shook.
“You didn’t drive? How did you get here?”
“Maybe a saucer brought me? Just kidding. Mary dropped me off before she went shopping. Pull out here and take a right.”
Driving
We drove out of San Lorenzo and took a series of smaller and smaller roads. Frank started messing with my radio, tuning it in on what sounded like static, then turning the hiss down very low.
“One of the big innovations of the twentieth century is speed,” he said presently. “Like cars. Driving around in a car changes your relationship to space and time. It’s funny how they merge together.”
This was an oblique invitation for me to resume my questioning about three-dimensional time, but for the moment I decided to back off and ask something normal. Our luncheon conversation had gotten so unreal so fast that I felt overextended. “What do you do for a living?”
“I work part-time for a toy company that makes a New Age toy called the Lotus Light. It’s a little flashlight with a cone attached to the lens; the cone is filled with water and glitter dots. And under the cone there’s a turning disk with five colors to change the color of the light. It costs ten to twenty dollars. A high-end product. We’re selling them through health food stores and through sex shops. You’re a professor up at San Jose State, right?”
“Yeah. I teach computer science. Object-oriented programming, software engineering, how to write a Windows app, computer graphics, like that. I used to be a pure mathematician, but when I came out here in 1986, I let the chip into my heart. It feels nice to be teaching something so practical. And of course I still write science and science fiction.”
“Do you think you can sell our book?”
“Maybe. If there is a book. It might be worth a try. There’s such a big interest in aliens these days. I think it has something to do with the Millennium. But, Frank, I have to tell you out front that I’m really doubtful about UFOs. I’m just glad that you’re not fingerpaint-the-walls-with-your-own-shit crazy.”
“Thanks, Rudy, I appreciate your high opinion of me,” he said with a laugh. We were starting to feel pretty comfortable together. “In about a mile and a half you’re going to take a left on a little road just after a curve sign. It comes up fast, so be ready. And once we get to my house, I’ll try and contact a saucer.”
I was getting nervous. “Don’t you think your experiences might be dreams, Frank? Or fantasies? Isn’t that more likely than there being a whole other order of reality? Now, I’d like to believe that there’s more to life than the same old same old. I’m spiritually dry, and I need to hook into some enlightenment. But I’m skeptical. You’re gonna have to help me out with this.”
Frank answered right back. “Believe me when I say I’m not imagining things, Rudy. I know that I’ve encountered aliens. I’ve been in the saucers with them, and I’ve traveled through three-dimensional time. Of
course you’re skeptical. There’s a lot of bad information associated with ufology. My boss who runs the toy company, he was at the Tucson Gem Show last week, and he said some people were selling things that were supposed to be alien remains from Roswell. I bet they were nothing but dried-up sea skates.”
“Roswell’s the place where they were supposed to have had a saucer crash back in the 1940s?”
“Right,” said Frank. “But I happen to know for a fact that there’s no way a flying saucer ever could crash. Any more than a fish could drown. A saucer could no more crash than a breeze could—could shatter. No more than a shadow could blow away. A saucer is like a place where the water bulges up over a rock in a stream. Slow down, here’s my road!”
Turning left into this last small gravel road, I felt a disorienting sense of altered reality—as if it were me making a higher-dimensional bend away from normal time.
Chapter Three: Calling The Saucers
Frank’s House
The first property on Frank’s road was an ugly mess; all of this lot’s trees had been lumbered off and the brush had been bush-hogged and chipped. The owners’ little house was a shack on stilts above raw red dirt scarred and flattened by tire-tracks. Someone’s idiotic pioneer fantasy of “clearing the land.” There was a bonfire in the middle of the rutted mud. A listless thin-faced man stood by the fire. He stared at us, but he didn’t wave.
“He and his family are Okies,” said Frank non-judgmentally. “The Gandys. As soon as they moved in, they sold off their timber. You can get over a thousand dollars for a big redwood. That’s Hank standing there, he’s Dick’s kid brother. Dick’s wife Sharon used to get drunk all the time and come on to me, but then she joined AA. Now it’s like slowly she’s getting a personality.”
We drove on; the forest resumed. The road twisted three times, and then we were at Frank’s house, a meager wooden box with tiny windows and an entrance deck of weathered gray boards. There was an old-fashioned aluminum TV aerial on the roof, all spikes and loops.
We parked on the side of the road behind a battered brown Nissan and walked the few yards down to the little deck. The air was a bit hazy with the wood smoke from the Okies’ bonfire, but other than that it felt like being in the heart of a primeval wilderness. Redwoods towered above us, and there were brambles and ferns on the ground. Frank had a few tomato plants growing in buckets covered over with chicken wire to protect them from the deer. There was a rickety picnic table and a wood crate with an upside-down orange cook-pot sitting on it.
A dog began barking inside Frank’s house, and now the front door flew open and a yellow, snout-faced bulldog came running outside. I stood very still.
“We’ll have to see if she likes you,” said Frank. “She decides right away.”
The dog came to me and sniffed me. She sniffed for a long time—I had the smell of Arf on me—and then she went to Frank for some petting.
“She thinks you’re okay,” he said, and pushed open the door to go inside. Frank’s ugly dog ran back in ahead of us, which I was sorry to see. I’m allergic to dogs in close quarters; I co-existed with my pet Arf by making him always stay outside. As we went in, I noticed that Frank’s door had no lock and no knob, only a spring to hold it shut. The bottom of the door had been chewed and clawed away by the dog; it was patched with a piece of plywood.
I followed Frank inside, my senses tuned to an anxious pitch of alertness. I found myself in what seemed to be a combination bedroom and living-room. The air smelled like dog and mold; the lighting was very dim. The main feature in the room was an unmade double bed next to the door, right under the small, curtained windows. Big cushions on the bed indicated that it could also be used as a couch. On the other side of the small room, almost touching the bed, was a spherical wood-burning stove and an armchair. The stove had three welded-on legs and a crooked flue made of black metal tubing.
“I made the stove out of a buoy that Mary and I found on the beach,” Frank said, noticing my interest. “We think the chimney pipe makes it look like a chicken. See the round magnets I stuck on it for eyes? I got those from broken loudspeakers.”
A figure appeared in a hall door on our left and Frank greeted her. “Hi, Mary. I brought Rudy Rucker home. Mary, this is Rudy, Rudy this is Mary.”
Mary was an slender woman with pale skin and gold-framed glasses. Her dark hair was pinned up into a casual bun. She wore heavy boots and a green cotton jumper over a yellow T-shirt. She smiled shyly and waved hello. Her nose was a little crooked.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Frank’s been telling me about aliens and flying saucers.”
“Are you going to write the book?” she asked me. “It’s all he’s been talking about.”
“Um, we did discuss it,” I said, trying not to sound very committed. “Deciding to write a book takes me awhile. It’s not something I rush into.” I was worried that Frank wouldn’t be able—or willing—to tell me enough that I could use. Then I’d try and drop the project, but he’d keep phoning me to ask about it. Over time the ever-more-frequent calls would go from friendly to impatient to querulous to strident and on into full-blown paranoia about me sneaking around to write this great earth-shaking opus without him so that I could hog all the credit for his brilliant discoveries and—oh man, what was I doing here?
“We’re only asking for two percent!” Frank’s wife was saying. “That’s not so much is it?” She didn’t say this in a challenging way; it was more like she really wanted to know.
“No, no, two percent wouldn’t be a problem at all. Frank and I already talked about it, and I think his offer is very generous and reasonable. Um, say, do you have a telephone? I wanted to let my wife know when I got here. She might need for me to come home a little early.”
“Frank made us take out the phone,” said Mary. “We were getting these like prank calls or wrong numbers from people who’d hang up. And the rest of the calls were from telemarketers. As if we’re going to be making all kinds of donations. I don’t miss the phone, really.” She had a cheerful voice that rose and fell animatedly.
“Peggy Sung was harassing us,” said Frank darkly.
“I really don’t think Peggy would act like that,” said Mary in a reasonable tone. “It was probably telemarketers. I hear they hang up all the time; a lot of the time they’re just making calls to find out when people are home. We could have called Pac Bell to put a trap on the line to find out for sure, but you didn’t want to.”
“Telemarketers don’t hang up,” insisted Frank. “It was Peggy Sung, I tell you. She’s the only one it could have been. The aliens don’t make phone calls. And the government doesn’t care about them.” Frank’s attention wandered back to me. “In case you were wondering, Rudy, the government doesn’t know jack shit about the aliens—and they don’t want to know. Why would they? Robbing the treasury and getting re-elected is all that matters. And most ufologists don’t vote.”
“You just think it’s Peggy because you have a bad conscience about her,” said Mary, stubbornly sticking to her original point.
“I really did want to let my wife know when I got here,” I repeated.
“Well, you should have called her from Carlita’s,” said Frank shortly. “This won’t have to take all that long. Let’s go into my lab and I’ll show you how I get in touch with the aliens. I checked just before I came to meet you, and the Crab Nebula is coming in nice and clear on channel six.”
This sounded completely ridiculous. Was Frank Shook perhaps planning to show me a science fiction video and expecting me to take it for a live transmission? He didn’t have a phone for me to call Audrey, and my eyes were starting to itch with an allergic reaction from the dog and mustiness. All this just so that I could be harassed about some crackpot book project that was likely to scuttle whatever small scientific credibility my life’s work had earned me? “I think I’ll go home now,” I blurted. “This isn’t go
ing to work out. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Come on, Rudy, lighten up,” said Frank. “Would you like a soda?”
“No thanks.” I had images of Mary dosing it with some mountain-hippie brain-rot to make sure that I could see the aliens, too.
Frank peered into my face. He looked reassuringly calm and competent. “Rudy. You’ve come all this way. Let me give you the demo. I know that you’re going to like it. I guarantee that in ten minutes you’re going to be glad you stayed. Please?” Something clicked in me then and I felt like I was really seeing him for the first time. I decided to trust Frank Shook.
“Oh, all right,” I said. After all, I’d come here to experience something new. “Let’s do it.”
Cosmic Snow and Video Feedback
The little hallway off the main room led to a kitchen, a bathroom, and Frank’s small “lab”—really just a home office. There was a desk littered with papers, tools, connector cables and dirty dishes. Singularly for Silicon Valley, there was no computer. But there were three televisions lined up along the wall in front of the desk. A video camera was mounted on an aluminum tripod in front of the television on the left and another camera stood in front of the television on the right. The video cameras were mounted on the tripods in odd way; the swivel pan mounts were twisted around so that the cameras were nearly upside down. A third video camera rested on Frank’s desk. Some bookshelves filled with dusty paperbacks were attached to the wall behind the desk. The room’s only window was covered by a light-tight shade that was pulled down. Frank stepped nimbly forward and turned on the middle TV. It was seemingly not tuned to any channel. Its screen showed dancing black and white dots.