by Rudy Rucker
“Where are we going?”
Frank looked evasive. “I thought we’d camp out.”
I stopped walking so suddenly that the person behind me bumped into me. “You think I’m going to get in your car and let you drive me out into the woods? Get this straight, Frank: I don’t trust you anymore. I think you’re dangerous. I came out here to work on a book, not to end up in a shallow grave. Let’s have dinner in a restaurant and I’ll stay in a motel.”
“The place I want us to camp is really terrific. It’s right by Devil’s Tower.”
“What’s that?”
“You remember Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, don’t you? Devil’s Tower is that awesome volcanic butte where the saucers land at the end. It’s only about a hundred miles from here. The northeast corner of Wyoming. There’s a nice National Park Service campground there, with lots of people around. I’m not going to hurt you, Rudy. I would never have taken your computer if Guster hadn’t gotten me stoned. I can’t handle drugs at all. That’s why I never, ever take them. That one night was an exception. I’m not a violent man.”
“What about when you threw the rock at Peggy Sung?”
“I told you before, I wasn’t trying to hit her. You’ve talked to her by now. Did she act like she thought I was trying to kill her?”
“No,” I admitted. “Not really.”
“All right then. Now come on out to my van. I’ve got lots of food and all the camping equipment. We’ll have a really good time.”
“You don’t want to show me where you live, do you?”
“I don’t live anywhere right now,” confessed Frank. “I’m planning to camp all summer.”
“The light dawns,” I said. “Okay, then, Devil’s Tower sounds fine. But—I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings—I think I’ll rent my own car. Just so I feel more secure.”
“Whatever you like, Rudy. And, dig it, I’ve got two tents. Give me a hug.” Frank gave me a warm, friendly hug. He stank pretty badly.
“Maybe I’ll buy a sleeping-bag of my own,” I suggested.
“Great,” said Frank. “We can get it in Spearfish. There’s a good restaurant there, too. The Bay Leaf. You can buy me supper and then we can drive the rest of the way to Devil’s Tower. You sure you don’t want to ride in my car?”
“I’ll feel better on my own.”
Frank was driving an old white Chevy van with a cracked windshield. He had a mattress in the back and a lot of bags of stuff. I rented a compact car and followed him down Interstate 90 to Spearfish. In Spearfish we went into the Wal-Mart and I bought a cheap sleeping bag. And then we drove down the main drag.
The stores in one block: The offices of the Northern Hills Advertiser and the Rapid City Journal. The Mile High Club, featuring 5¢ Machines, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Milwaukee. A dead store with ghosts of torn-off letters saying Langers. A Radio Shack. A store advertising CDs Tapes Books Coffee Bar, but in a state of Total Liquidation, with 25% Off Everything. A jewelry store featuring Black Hills Gold. The Spearfish Bootery. The Global Market, an import store with Goods From Planet Earth. Sharps Trading Company, a pawn shop with two tires with wheels, a used weedeater, and lots of antlers.
The Bay Leaf was down a side street. We parked and went in. The place was a nicely retrofitted old-time building. Although I was hungry, my stomach was feeling kind of gnarly. In a moment of boredom and blind greed, I’d slipped up and eaten some airplane food. I felt like a rat who’s eaten poisoned corn. But the Bay Leaf had some safe-sounding vegetarian dishes, and that’s what I ordered. Frank asked for a steak.
“You’re not drinking?” Frank said, noticing that I’d ordered ginger ale instead of wine like him.
“I quit about a year ago. It was the only way for me. I wasn’t enjoying it anymore.”
“That’s nice. Have you turned religious?”
“I do have a different view of God than I used to,” I said. “In a way it’s like something you told me that Herman said. The thing about the universe being filled with a God vibration. You don’t need any special technology to tune in on God. You only need to open your heart and your mind. God’s everywhere all the time, ready to help you.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Frank. “In fact the last time I went out with the aliens, this was in April—but I better not get ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning. Are you ready to listen?”
“For sure,” I said. “In fact—” I opened my backpack and took out my laptop. “I’ll type in what you say.”
“Do it,” he said. “We need to get this book done. UFOs aren’t so popular anymore. And, face it, nobody but Frank Shook knows what they’re talking about. Everyone’s crazy or lying but me.”
“All of the other abductions are fake?” I asked.
“Sure,” said Frank. “That’s why those feebs never have any kind of story to tell. ‘And then aliens probed my rectum.’ Fuhgeddaboutit! But let’s stop bull-shitting around. First of all I’ll tell you how I got here from California.”
“Great.”
“On the way back from the Mondo party, I stopped at your house and I took your computer. The aliens had shown me where you lived and where you kept your extra key.”
“Yeah,” I said flatly. “The same aliens who followed me home in a car the very first time I went to see you.”
“Whatever that’s supposed to mean,” said Frank, momentarily very busy with his food. “Anyway, when I went into your house I only wanted to take my Saucer Wisdom manuscript, but I couldn’t find it. I was wasted, and Spun was acting weird. First he wanted to find your pot stash and then when he couldn’t find it he wanted to piss in your toaster. Like to punish you for hiding your pot and your manuscript. And then he wanted to steal your silver. I got Guster to drag him back outside. Your dog had just been watching us the whole time, but when he saw Guster wrestling Spun, he started barking. We had to bail. No way could I figure out how to print a Saucer Wisdom, so I just took the whole computer. I knew it was wrong, and I knew Mary would bawl me out. So I got Spun and Guster to leave me off at Peggy Sung’s. Peggy let me sleep on the floor, and in the morning she used your computer to print out a copy of your manuscript for me. I’ve still got it here.” Frank fished inside his tweed jacket and pulled out a well-worn sheaf of papers. “I’ve been taking notes on the blank sides. I’ve got some wild new stuff for you, by the way. Femtotechnology! Transhumanity!” He handed the notes to me. I laid them down on the table next to my place setting.
Just then our salads arrived. We worked on those for a minute, me quietly peering at the notes Frank had given me. “Where were we?” said Frank presently.
“At Peggy Sung’s,” I said, looking up.
“Right. I would have brought your computer back to you that morning, but I didn’t have my car. And Mary phoned up from the Gandys’ house; she said the cops were looking for me. I got worried you’d have me busted. I don’t think I mentioned this to you before, but I’ve already had two felony counts. One was for something I did to Kenny Natur’s car when I thought he was after Mary, and the other was for helping Spun grow magic mushrooms in the greenhouse. I never took them myself, you understand, but we were making good money off them.”
“What’d you do to Kenny Natur’s car?”
“I set it on fire. So even though my borrowing your computer was just a tiny tiny thing, with that and the car and the ‘shrooms, the California three-strikes law could have sent me up for some major time in the pen. So when I heard the cops were looking for me I panicked.”
“And then?”
“I got Peggy to let me use her TVs and cameras to attract a saucer. It wasn’t Herman and the starfish, it was some creatures like piles of rope. When I started trying to talk to them they began to etch my brain the way they always do, but I showed them Saucer Wisdom and it turned them right around. I asked them to drop me off at Mount Rushmore. Why? I’d alwa
ys wanted to see it, and I knew it was far away from California. The rope-thing I was talking to said that if he dropped me in a different place from where they picked me up, then there would have to be a time difference as well. Some kind of space vs. time bookkeeping thing. I said I didn’t care. But I didn’t realize the time difference would be two years.”
“You were in the saucer for two years?”
“No, I was in there for like maybe two days, same as usual. They showed me stuff about the physics of the future. Really startling. Femtotechnology. I wrote it all down on the back of your manuscript. But then when they set me down by Mount Rushmore I found out that it was June, 1996. I had two years of missing time.”
“And you’ve been in South Dakota ever since?”
“Well, as soon as I got to a phone I started trying to call Mary. It took awhile to find her. And then it turned out she’d given up on me. I guess she already told you.” Frank’s voice trailed off. Talking about Mary made him sad.
Our main courses arrived and we ate for awhile. Frank raised his glass of wine, toasting my ginger-ale. “Thanks for coming out here, Rudy. It’s good of you. I’ve been scared to call you. And ashamed. But then in May I saw Freeware. I saw how you used a lot of my ideas in there. So I figured you must feel a little bit obliged to me after all. And I asked Mary to call you.”
“What have you been living on for the last year? How did you buy your car?”
“Mary sent me a little money. My half of what we’d owned. And I worked for six months at one of the local schools here, call it Black Hills High. I was a tech in their IRC—Instructional Resource Center. That gig got me through the winter, and winters are a biiig deal here. The Black Hills High IRC had lots of cameras and TVs, but I didn’t have my own key, so I was only able to get in touch with the aliens one more time, which was great, although it led to my getting fired. And that’s where my second batch of notes for you comes from. They’re about the transhuman condition.”
“But you lost the IRC job?”
“It’s all the fault of that feeble butt-fucker who cut off his balls and organized the Heaven’s Gate suicide thing this spring. As if a saucer were a metal machine that would follow in the wake of a comet. Why not a water-skier behind a sailboat, asshole? Why not an armored knight on a horse? Or a jet-plane or a sled or a bicycle or a surfboard? That’s how much sense it would make to try and use a tin-can spaceship to travel across the galaxy. And when I tried to tell the people at the IRC about it—” Frank’s voice had risen and people were staring at us.
“Calm down, Frank.”
“Would you gentlemen like dessert?” said the waiter.
“We better take off and make sure we get a campsite,” said Frank, suddenly collecting himself. “Give my friend the check.”
So we drove westward into the setting prairie sun. All the rolling fields were green as could be, tender and spring-like. Cows were everywhere. We got off interstate 90 at a town called Sundance and headed north on a two-lane road towards the Devil’s Tower.
Devil’s Tower
I’d wanted to visit Devil’s Tower ever since I saw it on a commemorative stamp when I was about twelve. Back then I had trouble believing there could be such a thing. Apparently the way it formed is that a pimple-like plug of lava bulged up to the surface of the ground without quite breaking through, the lava hardened, and over the millennia the steady little Belle Fourche River carved the dirt around the lava away, leaving a shape a bit like a giant tree-stump.
Following Frank’s white van towards Devil’s Tower, I kept thinking of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of the scene where the government has barricaded off the great butte in order to keep average people from seeing the saucer magic, but the hero and heroine plow through fences and barriers to force their way in. How persistent and attractive this myth is. The government stands for—what? Your social conditioning? Your self-imposed limitations? What is it that prevents most of us from being able to see the UFOs?
Intellectually analyze things as I might, the stops on my emotional calliope were pulled flat out. I was Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon fearlessly driving onward, on towards the heart of the mystery, filled with thoughts like, “I’m breaking through, I’m going all the way, nobody’s going to stop me from learning the truth!”
And indeed I was here for a UFO investigation, and I was pushing past a lot of barriers in order to finish my book about Frank Shook. Despite the fear of being called foolish, despite the terrifying dreams, despite the arguments with Frank, despite Frank’s treachery and his disappearance, yes, despite all this, here I was, on the home stretch, and I was really going to write Saucer Wisdom.
The Devil’s Tower came into view—unmistakable, wonderfully stark, a frozen icon of upward thrust. There was a historical marker by the side of the road. Though Frank drove on, I pulled over to read it. I’d catch up with him at the park gate. I was sure he’d wait there for me so he wouldn’t have to pay.
According to the marker, there’s an Indian legend about the Devil’s Tower. A bear was chasing seven sisters. The girls jumped up onto a big tree-stump to escape. The stump grew and grew as the bear clawed it; the stump grew so much that it propelled the girls up into the sky, where they became the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster. More facts: The Tower is about 800 ft from base to top. The first person known to have climbed it was a white rancher, on July 4, 1893. He fashioned a ladder by wedging sticks into one of the tower’s long cracks. Since then tens of thousands of rock climbers have climbed the Devil’s Tower. Out of respect for the Native American religion, it’s customary not to climb the Tower in June.
Back in my car, the radio was on. In the Midwest you can either listen to country music or you can listen to golden oldies of rock. From coast to coast, there are no other options. The heavy metal band Great White was playing “Once Bitten Twice Shy.” Their big hit. It had never sounded so good to me. I noticed that they had worked in some fairly convincing Stones riffs. Ironically enough, the very next song on the radio was a real Rolling Stones song, “Beast of Burden,” as if to demonstrate that Keith Richard’s tasty, tart playing always delivered more than mere “Stones riffs.”
Frank—my Keith Richards of saucer abductees—was waiting for me at the park entrance. We went in and drove to the Belle Fourche campground down in a river-meadow at the bottom of a slope leading up to the Devil’s Tower. We claimed a campsite and sat on the ground, staring up at the Tower.
From this close I could see that the Tower is not so much a stump with grooves as it is a bundle of columns. The columns are hexagonal, sometimes pentagonal, maybe thirty feet across, and the tower itself is—I counted—some sixty columns wide. I thought about that for awhile, wondering how such a structure would form.
“I’ve got it!” I exclaimed to Frank after a few minutes. “I bet the columns formed as Bénard convection cells in the quiescently cooling magma.”
“Come again, Professor?”
“Like when you see mist on the river in the morning, it’s divided up into cells? Or if you get some hot miso soup and let it sit for a minute, there’s a big honeycomb pattern that forms in the soup particles? Maybe ten of these roughly hexagonal cells? The thing is, Frank, whenever you have a fluid that’s cooling off, the hot stuff has to rise and the cool stuff has to come down. And so that it doesn’t have a traffic jam, the fluid self-organizes into cells that are vortex rings. Like smoke-rings. Each cell’s flow moves around and around, like ants crawling up the side of a bagel and down through the central hole. The warm stuff rises up along the outer edges of the ring, and the cool stuff falls down along the central axis. That’s a Bénard convection cell.”
Frank didn’t look all that interested, but I kept talking. This was a new idea for me, and I was having fun working it out. “I think it must be that for each fluid there’s a certain size convection cell that’s the best fit for its density and viscosity and
so on. You don’t get just one giant Bénard convection cell, you get a bunch of smaller ones of the size the fluid likes. Now, the lava that formed the Devil’s Tower was slowly cooling off for a really long time, and while it was cooling it self-organized into a pattern that was a bundle of long thin Bénard convection cells. Vortex tubes with the hotter lava moving up along the edges and the cooler stuff moving down the centers. And it froze into that pattern. Which is why it looks the way it does now. Dig?”
“In this pamphlet it says, ‘The cooling igneous rock contracted, fracturing into columns,’” said Frank, looking at the National Park Service folder we’d gotten at the gate. “It doesn’t say anything about your cells.”
“I bet the cells determined where the fractures went,” I claimed. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“You wanna talk about physics, have I got physics for you,” said Frank. “You should read my femtotechnology notes before it finishes getting dark. I’ll set up the tents while you do that. We can talk about femtotechnology tomorrow and we’ll do transhumanity on Sunday.”
So that’s pretty much what we did. Frank really did have two tents: a large three-man job that he slept in, and a mesh-roofed one-man mummy-tent that he let me use. He offered to let me have the big tent if I liked, but I liked the idea of sleeping with nothing between me and the stars but a layer of mesh.
Chapter Ten: Notes On Femtotechnology
There’s actually two separate trails around the Devil’s Tower: the Red Beds Trail and the Tower Trail. The Red Beds Trail is a low, three mile path that goes through woods and red-dirt washes, while the Tower Trail is a tight loop right around the base of the great butte itself. Saturday morning Frank showed them to me on a map and explained his plans.
“Let’s do this like pilgrims to a shrine,” said Frank. “Today we’ll circle around the tower at a respectful distance. We’ll use the lowly Red Beds Trail. And then tomorrow—if all goes well—we’ll approach the central mystery and walk the Tower Trail.”