Long Eyes and Other Stories

by Jeff Carlson

  Why did they come up the hill this evening? Because they heard me tinkering and were afraid I'd unleash another interrupt? I wish I was a better shot — I only tried to wound that stupid loudmouth when he grabbed me.

  The moon is quarter full and waxing. Last I remember it was August 16th but it may be September already. So near the equator there are no real seasons, and the constellations don't move half as much as when I was a boy much further north. The stars seem to say it's October but that can't be right.

  My old friends look cold and ugly tonight, glittering wildly like polished flecks of bone. What pressure storms are surging through the upper atmosphere?

  There's no way to build a shield. I wrote that on the wall in magic marker, just to be safe. Have to stop wasting time on the idea. If I had machining tools it would be different. If I wasn't alone. If I wasn't on this goddamn rock in the middle of nowhere. There's definitely enough metal to line the cafeteria walls and ceiling, armor it thick and deep, if I could dismantle the jeep and the truck and the panels of the main dish, make sheeting out of the fenders, cut and bend everything to fit, flatten every fuel drum and computer and appliance in this place.

  If if if.

  If this was one of those idiotic monster movies Blair insisted on playing every time it was his night to choose a DVD, we could probably wrap our heads in tinfoil and be safe. Metal umbrellas. The fence might have been easiest to mold into a shield, but the holes in the chain link are huge in comparison to most wavelengths in the solar spectrum — too much would pass. I considered a body suit or even just a spherical helmet made of interwoven layers of window screens, but this building has plastic filament instead of metal, rust-proof.

  I have another plan. An EM cone. I should be able to pull Dish 4 off the tower, rewire it to transmit. If I can generate a broadcast of matching amplitude and frequencies, precisely out of phase, I can neutralize the interrupt phenomenon locally. But I'll need power and working electronics.

  #

  Morning. It's stayed quiet. If Wolsinger and Blair are still in the area, I hope they'll avoid the locals.

  Scott McCay is dead. He has been for at least a week, by the look of him, though it's tough to judge given the condition of his body. There also are dead or feeble lizards and snakes everywhere. Something in their physiology. The birds are having a field day, feasting — but they’re flying a bit unsteadily, I think. Maybe only deep-water life forms are completely unaffected. People in submarines and bomb shelters.

  It's ironic that the next interrupt may actually help us. The locals might not decide we're at fault the next time they're lucid, if another flare hits soon enough. The brain requires days to fully absorb and organize new memories, and that process is being disrupted.

  How?

  Normal solar radiation can reach microscopic lengths on the nanometer scale and smaller, though the atmosphere typically deflects EM of these wavelengths — and the synaptic gap ranges between 30 and 40nm.

  Extreme flares must be overriding our bioelectric processes, like white noise. But if it's interfering with our ability to think, why aren't we left twitching and drooling on the ground? Or maybe we are. Maybe at times we're completely incapacitated. Sudden collapses might explain the bruises on my hip and chest, the abrasion on my cheek.

  Unless I got hurt fighting.

  I found McCay near the wooden shack that we paid the locals to put up for a garage, his skull smashed. Something had been eating at his neck and belly but I left him there. Securing the generators took first priority. All eight were already topped off and someone had taken steps to reinforce the surrounding fence. Me? Someone unused to that kind of labor — a sloppy but effective job of stringing razor wire and chaining the downhill corner that always sagged. Extra fuel had been siphoned from the drums in the garage.

  The garage. Was McCay trying to leave? I assumed at first that Wolsinger and Blair had wandered off in a delirium during the last interrupt. Where is there to escape to? Could we have had a plan, received a radio message?

  No matter how long I concentrate, I can't summon more than a few random images of the past days, and it's all confused with my long-term memories of this place. Finding food must be our main focus. I remember hunger and base gratification. But there is also frustration and fear. Could I be aware, however faintly, of being mentally stunted? Do I search and search for what's been stolen from me? For months after Jan left I felt like every organ in my body was packed with gravel, but this is horror on another scale — decay, repeated death.

  If it continues, I suppose we may begin to lose our established memories as well. The brain is a lot like a computer. These constant shocks can't be healthy. I'm going to seal this journal in a waterproof CD-ROM container and chain it to my wrist.

  #

  Eating lunch in the shade of the dish array, greasy canned stew. The roof is like a stove top. The heat started my head thumping an hour ago and it's not even noon. I feel like I've been working here forever. My time sense doesn't seem completely reliable anymore. At least my coordination's still good. I ripped the guts out of Dish 1. The spectrometers were designed to withstand the EM fields generated by our own equipment, and over-engineered like most of our toys. They should still work.

  Had to stop and write down what's happened, in case there's another interrupt. I used two more bullets in the pistol this morning. The body of the loudmouth was gone, dragged away, and three people I vaguely recognized came out of the jungle — a scrawny old goat rancher flanked by his daughter and son. A year ago during the meet-and-greets, the same trio stood in the same formation, always in the very back, murmuring among themselves, the son too angry.

  Today they were armed with gardening tools, and the rancher's hoe had gummy blood stains on it. That shouldn't have relieved me, but I was glad to know I wasn't the one who killed McCay. I fired over their heads and they ran. I've wasted every other minute since the looking behind me, listening, waiting for a rifle shot and sudden agony. Stupid bastards.

  If I am the one who took care of the generators, that must be as far as I got last time. If I—

  #

  There was another interrupt, a brief one. I'm sure it's the same day because the canned stew I was eating has drawn a knot of flies but isn't baked hard yet. And no beard. It was incredibly strange reading over this journal. I am a stranger to that earlier self. How many times have I felt orphaned, doomed? Now at least I have this signpost. This bible.

  I became a thinking human again at the far edge of the roof, pacing, the sun dropped low enough to stare me right in the face. My teeth ached from chewing on the chain around my wrist, like a dog. What if the interrupt had lasted longer? Would I have jumped eventually, two stories or not? Starved? Or could I have figured out how to open the stairwell?

  I sat there and cried for twenty minutes.

  Pulling the spectrometers is only the beginning. I'll need a functioning computer to regulate my broadcast, and an auto switch to stop and start it in time with the flares. Otherwise I'll simply blast myself with an interrupt of my own making. And of course one dish won't be enough. I have to produce a second EM cone to protect the generators or else they'll fry while producing the current I need. I suppose I could live on top of them, under the same dish, but then I'd need to construct a shelter and run water from the building...

  My safe zone will be small, no wider than the dish and maybe ten feet long, room for a few people and supplies.

  Please let this work.

  #

  Wolsinger's gone crazy. He got into the building without me noticing and I almost shot him. The sun had set and he was only a shadow, and he didn't answer when I shouted. He didn't even look up from his desk. I asked where he'd been, if he was okay. He just sat there holding his armrests like he was afraid he'd float away. When he did talk, his voice never rose above a mumble. I actually laughed at first. I thought he was saying that the villagers were doing this to us, until I realized he meant a different "they" altogether.
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  He said it was in our recordings, a carrier wave from somewhere in Epsilon Eridani. We didn't remember because the aliens didn't want us to. They were making the sun pulse in an abnormal pattern, blinding us, destroying us.

  I spent an hour digging through our printouts to prove him wrong. There was no signal. There was nothing. Wolsinger didn't help, just sat there holding onto his chair and shaking his head. He said the computer records would show it if the aliens hadn't burned out our hard drives. He said he remembered.

  I need his help, his hands. He said yes. Can I trust him?

  His eyes are too large, red, always blinking. I made sure to keep the pistol out of his reach. Delusional paranoia. It has to be. Something in his brain. Even if he had seen an extraterrestrial message before the first interrupt, he couldn't know now. What's happening is a natural occurrence.

  Humankind has always studied the sun, hoping to interpret the moods of the gods, and we know from ancient writings that our star has roiled and flared for millennia. An uncontained hydrogen reactor of such enormous scale could hardly be expected to do otherwise. Modern civilization with all its tools and sciences rapidly added to that knowledge, measuring random eruptions and recording a phenomenon known as solar maximum: extreme flares that occurred roughly every eleven years.

  We assumed it had been happening like clockwork forever. But we only truly became aware of the phenomenon after we had power grids and communications to be disrupted — little more than a century. A hundred years is less than a blink in the life of the sun, and all of human history is hardly more.

  It did seem as if each maximum came a bit sooner and did worse damage than the previous one, yet the few people who sounded an alarm were dismissed as nuts, Chicken Littles. Of course each max seemed worse — each decade we had more satellites and technology to be affected. No one worried much.

  The maximums must have been a recent instability. Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere are obviously being wildly compressed and distorted, allowing exceptional amounts of EM to strike the planet's surface. The sun may be older than we assumed. We are still only guessing about so much of astrophysics. And if it is pre-nova, the onslaught of particle radiation may continue until it ultimately explodes in ten thousand years. Or this could simply be a natural period of adjustment, "blowing steam," as the sun stabilizes itself. The lizards and snakes I've seen dead or crippled — cold-blooded life everywhere must be affected in the same way, except the amphibians capable of hiding underwater.

  Maybe now we know what happened to the dinosaurs, and why only frogs and turtles still survive from those days. Crocodiles. Sharks and fish.

  Maybe we're re-entering a phase of solar activity that kept complex brain function from arising for eons, which is why early humans appear to have been stuck in a series of long evolutionary ruts despite having a skull capacity equal to ours.

  I've read enough anthropology to know it's the big question. Why did we take so long to become what we are today? For uncounted millennia we were brutes, with only the most simple tools and societies, and then in the space of four thousand years we built empires and cities and blanketed the entire planet with electricity and highways and super-agriculture. Maybe those few thousand years were an unusually quiet time for the sun. Maybe there were other bits of peace here and there, just enough for us to evolve as far as we did.

  If so, my EM cone will be a very temporary solution, even if I had unlimited fuel. Maybe Wolsinger and I can rig a portable model on the jeep, locate more supplies, reach the caves in the mountains to the south. I can't see them but I know they're there, sixty or seventy miles by road. Central America is just one big spine of rock.

  What's left of the human race will have to go underground, deep down, become moles and morlocks. Give up the stars, the sky, the rain and trees and everything we've ever known.

  #

  Remember this. Remember it always.

  Your name is Roell Washington Carver Lloyd. You were born on July 21, 1969, just a day after a human being first walked on the face of the moon. Your mother, Marilyn, was forever proud of that. None of your professional accomplishments meant so much to her. Even as cancer ate out her bowels she still bragged to you, to her nurses, to other patients, that you had been a moon baby. She made you feel special. She wanted to name you Apollo or Armstrong or even Rocket but your father said those were white names. His name was Ed, which he hated. White as can be. He wasn't so proud of you for being book-smart. He wanted you tougher, better at sports, and made you waste a million afternoons throwing balls and bouncing balls and running with balls. But he raised you well enough, you and your sister Korba, in Richmond, California, which is very very far from here. Too far to walk. Too—

  If I forget all of that I probably won't remember how to read, either, so what's the point?

  #

  I think eight days have passed since I wrote anything. My beard growth fits that time and the moon is going on full now. I found the generators rigged to come on one after another as they run out of fuel, and the last two are equipped with big auxiliary tanks. A stranger that was me had calculated their running time in grease pencil on the side of the last tank — eight hundred hours, roughly thirty days, somewhat less depending on how much power I use drawing water from the well.

  A heavy-duty power line was strung from the generators to the cafeteria, where the first dish was bolted to the wall and floor. I suppose mounting it on the ceiling was too much, and it doesn't matter. The EM cone can be pointed in any direction. But I still haven't cobbled together a working computer. I found several PCs pulled apart beside the crude shell of the jeep's hood. Looks like another interrupt caught me in mid-task, and probably burned out everything I'd salvaged. They're coming more often and lasting longer now.

  I woke in a protected corner of the cafeteria near the water tanks, in a crude nest of blankets, surrounded by fruit and some of those meaty leaves the size of my head. And I had what must be a weapon. A metal table leg. The pistol is gone. I think I was dreaming of Jan.

  Once upon a time I enjoyed solitude, the peace and clarity of my work, but even Wolsinger would be a happy sight now. Maybe he won't be crazy this time. I've never been this alone before. I talk just to hear a voice.

  Obviously I don't fully understand yet what we may or may not be capable of during the interrupts. The memory was so vivid, I could almost smell her.

  #

  Your wife Janice grew up an inner-city black, poor, exposed to gangs and drugs, but had more style than an egghead from Cal Tech could ever quantify. You made a great team. She was popular, graceful, and pretty, sometimes even stunning in the right dress. You gave her structure, paid the bills on time, remembered anniversaries. For a while that was enough.

  It wasn't that you took her for granted — you were simply miserable at some of the things she needed, crowds, dancing, chitchat. And you were discovering new miracles every day that transported you twenty or fifty or a hundred and fifty light-years away. You made the safe choice, stuck with the things you understood, and eventually she left you for it.

  Janice is probably dead. Things must be impossibly bad in urbanized areas.

  Uncontrolled fires would barely be the beginning, entire cities roasting alive. Not enough food to go around. No water. And San Francisco already had its share of brutes and killers before people lost the ability to reason.

  She might have been here with you and had some chance at survival if you'd been a better husband.

  Survival. No one is going to live to a ripe old age if we're taking as much radiation as I suspect. We might have fifteen, twenty years, then slow and ugly deaths — and that also matches the fossil record. As far as we can tell, nobody grew old in the distant past. Some of us will also surely develop cataracts before then, and what kind of life will it be, fighting for safety, scratching for food?

  Why do I bother? Jan would say because I'm a control freak, won't let even the sun tell me what to do.

  I had to
laugh at that but my voice sounded like a tortured ghost, screeching and echoing all through the building.

  Wolsinger hung himself in the stairwell, triple-cinched a tough extension cord and then jumped. Maybe Blair did something, too. Mom ate a bottle of pills and I hated her for it. The doctors said she had a good chance but she didn't want to lose her hair, lose her dignity, suffer through the cure.

  I hated Jan for quitting, too.

  Hated my father. He also quit in his own way, quit before I was fifteen. It seemed like he put more energy into his stupid basketball games than he gave his own son, football, baseball. He could rattle off a million team statistics and scores but never remembered any of the things I cared about, things that were real and useful.

  The EM cone will work, I'm sure of it. And if I do only have fifteen years, at least that's an eternity compared to a life span of days. Life spans. Just thinking about it makes me feel schizophrenic. I'm so tired.

  #

  More interrupts, two weeks' worth of beard but the moon's in the same phase as when I last recorded it, still waxing full. Madness. Clearly it's waxing again. It's been twenty-eight days and this time I'm going to write before shaving.

  Self-awareness came back in jolts and stabs, blurred vision, some dizziness, as if my brain were a rusty engine. The burst of fear-adrenaline squeezing through my heart and limbs probably helped clear my head. I was sitting with a woman in the nest of blankets by the water tanks, a tangy flavor in my mouth and tough, half-eaten roots in my hand.

  It was the rancher's daughter. I'll call her Bonita. Apparently about a month ago I shot at her as she threatened me with some kind of gardening tool, but I didn't know that as we sat there staring at each other. I recognized her from long-term memories but hadn't had a chance to read these notes yet. Bonita couldn't have remembered our confrontation either. Despite that and despite having no language in common, we immediately began to argue. She was understandably shocked, vulnerable. I was apologetic and kept my distance, kept my hands up, palms open, my voice low and comforting.