The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  In Alexander’s age, we had knowledge…and we had delusion. And we preferred the delusion.

  You cannot understand Alexander Drier’s life without understanding that.

  You cannot understand his final gesture without understanding that.

  Of course, Alexander’s time is still our time. Which is why some of you are most interested in reading about a high-ranking government coverup of alien experiments on pregnant human women.

  I can’t help what you want. I knew that going in.

  But that’s not what happened.

  Space Baby Speaks First Words at Birth!

  Warns of Threat From Space, Parents Say

  The first tabloid reporter arrived in town one day after the birth, the first delegation from the networks right behind him. Not long after it hit the web, the pilgrims showed up. They came in motor homes, in vans, on motorcycles, and on foot: the four-man Sweethaven Sheriff’s Office had to import a couple of dozen state police just to keep the kooks and the loonies and the just plain curious at bay. Most just wanted a glimpse of the child. A few—thankfully, very few—had darker things in mind; gene-splicing their mythologies, they arrived with rifles and pamphlets and hate-filled eyes, muttering black fantasies about an Antichrist seeded from the nonexistent Dark Side of the Moon.

  I didn’t get to meet him until his tenth birthday, but I can only imagine how frightening a time it must have been: Alexander’s parents and the rest of the immediate family barricading themselves behind drawn curtains, looking out upon the steadily increasing madness of a crowd that seemed to represent all the rest of the world.

  Alexander’s mother, Faye, was so serene about the whole thing that she seemed to be in denial. She just held the baby and sang to him, making almost no reference to the mad scene just beyond the driveway.

  “It’s funny,” she said at one point. “We don’t know him, really. We don’t know whether he’ll be good or bad, smart or dumb, brave or afraid…the kind of things he’ll be interested in or the kind of things that’ll bore him silly. He’s a stranger to us. An alien, for real.”

  Mark Drier winced as he glanced at the window. The blinds were drawn, but he could still see the crowds, growing larger every hour; some of them chanting, some of them singing, some of them shouting in rage. “Better not let them hear you say that.”

  Many years later, telling me the story, Alexander’s Uncle George shook his head with awe as he remembered what Faye said at that moment: “Them? Who cares about them? They’ll go away.”

  She was right, of course; the crowds began to diminish as soon as even the dimmest pilgrims began to realize that they weren’t about to get beamed aboard any orbital crockery. And the tabloids went after fresher stories the first time a Sheen misbehaved in Hollywood. But her prophecy couldn’t have seemed likely to Mark Drier that morning…not with the house being monitored by ten TV networks, the phone unplugged to keep it from ringing off the hook, and Grandma having a quiet mental breakdown in the bedroom upstairs. At the moment, he knew only that nothing would ever be all right again.

  Alexander wasn’t deformed, at least, not in the sense that I’m deformed. He had two of everything he needed two of and one of everything he needed one of. And it was all functional. It all worked. He was even beautiful, in the sense that all healthy babies are beautiful. But his head was unusually large: it mushroomed above the temples, bulging up and out like a sack stuffed with more than it was designed to hold. (The doctors had feared water on the brain, but it just happened to be the shape of the kid’s head; the only problem it caused was in delivery, and that had been handled by the caesarian.) His eyes were about three times larger, proportionally, than the norm for a baby of that size; and they were all black, with no whites showing at all. His nose, as if to compensate, was unusually small, little more than a nostrilled wrinkle in the center of his face. His mouth was a slit with thin, pursed lips. His ears were little round buds with holes. His hands were odd too: there were five fingers and a thumb on each, with the fingers all disproportionately long.

  Still, that, by itself, wasn’t the problem. At least, not as Mark Drier saw it. He was not a weak man. He could have dealt with birth defects.

  The problem was that everybody in America had already seen that face. They’d seen it staring at them from movie posters, from bestselling books, from artist’s renditions on the covers of supermarket tabloids. It was a face so frequently depicted in the mass media that even people who refused to subscribe recognized it as a well-known inhabitant of our shared popular culture: the face described by the growing subculture of folks who claimed to have been abducted and experimented upon—usually in the form of anal probes—by creatures from outer space.

  It was, in short, the face of a Roswell Alien.

  Mark Drier peered out through the curtains again. The view out there was just as disturbing. Even as he watched, a flyspecked yellow schoolbus crammed with doughy, pasty-faced adults pulled up at the curb. An inordinate number of the faces at the windows had open mouths. He couldn’t quite tell whether they were shouting, or just chronic mouth-breathers. Their expressions were both ecstatic and dull: like sheep having a party. He shuddered. “I don’t know, Faye. That’s a mob. We may have to start planning escape routes, in case they rush us.”

  “They won’t,” Faye said placidly.

  “They’ll do what they want,” Mark said. “Don’t you see? Some of them came all the way across the country! They’re not going to let a front yard and a few closed doors stop them now!”

  She considered that. “Then we’ll just have to go outside and tell them they’re disturbing the baby.”

  “And what makes you think they’ll listen to that?”

  “If they think he’s a space baby, capable of shooting deathrays from his fingers, they just might. But I don’t think it’ll be a problem. They’ll get tired. They’ll feel silly. They’ll go home. And they’ll leave us to the business of being a family.” She smiled, and touched noses with the baby. “It’ll work out. He’s beautiful.”

  Nobody said anything to that.

  Then Faye looked at them, and in a voice filled with soft sweet steel, a voice that damned them for not responding, repeated, “He’s beautiful.”

  The gathered Uncles and Aunts hastened to assure Faye that they agreed. Mark joined in last—reluctantly, and unpersuasively, and with what must have been shame for not being able to feel it the way she did.

  Space Baby Foretold In Bible!

  Will He Start World War Three?

  I’m going to have to take a break to ward off the expectations of an unfortunately large percentage of the people reading this account of Alexander’s life.

  Alexander was not an alien. He was not a half-human, half-alien. He was not the result of genetic manipulation by aliens who wanted an emissary on Earth. He was not the spawn of a UFO abduction his mother repressed. He learned to speak at about the same rate all children do. And he wasn’t the harbinger of a message from space, though come to think of it that eventually turned out to be a little closer to the truth. He was a boy: one who may have been a little different from the rest of us, but one whose genetic birthright, however bent, was still entirely Homo sapiens. He came out the way he did because of an extremely rare, but identifiable and very well-documented genetic condition that affected his fetal development, subtly distorting his body in ways that mirrored the by-then well-established folklore of the UFO conspiracy buffs. A search of medical literature was able to find six other cases within the past three centuries: even photos of one poor boy from the early 1900s who spent most of his short life in a freak show in South America. Of course, in today’s media-conscious age, there was no way that the malady in question would continue to go unnamed, and so Alexander got the honor of being immortalized in the medical textbooks before he was even old enough to recognize his mother’s face. Drier’s Syndrome, they called it: and if there was any upside to the public’s insistence on believing that the child was somehow a
visitor from outer space, it was the degree to which that rescued him from a lifetime of being known as the kid with the disfiguring disease.

  But he was human, all right. Gloriously human. There will not, at any point in this narrative, be a surprise revelation that he was ever, wholly or in part, anything but.

  So those of you who followed the various events of Alexander’s life in the kind of newspapers that run front-page headlines about miraculous chocolate diets, can go indulge your little fantasies elsewhere. Because that’s not what happened.

  Space Baby Turns Toys into Gold!

  Parents Now Wealthy, Friends Say

  Alexander occupied such an important part of my life that I find it hard to feel anything but contempt for anybody who had trouble loving him. I suppose that’s the main reason I’ve always been so hard on his father: why I still automatically think of him as a cold and distant man, unable to forgive his son for being less than normal. I’m also aware that it’s the way some biographers have portrayed him—some of them, God help me, even using interviews with me as a primary source.

  But it wasn’t like that. In the lonely, hysterical days immediately following Alexander’s birth, Mark Drier was a frightened man, desperately searching for the plan that would render everything all right—and who can’t be hated for coming up with the wrong idea when nobody, with the possible exception of Alexander’s mother, knew what the right idea was.

  He found her in the upstairs den, which was the brightest room in the house: a perfect place for a young mother to breastfeed her baby. The baby was, like all babies, trusting, hungry, squirming, and needful. I’d like to think that as Mark looked at his child that day, he felt not instinctive revulsion, but also the awe fit for all new life abroad in the world. He may even have felt the joy of fatherhood. But he was a practical man, and love must always make room for practicality…especially with buses of UFO-Abduction Faithful still converging on town from every direction.

  Again: I wasn’t there. I can’t re-create the conversation precisely. But I know the people. And it happened something like this:

  Mark said, “We’re going to need money.”

  Faye smiled. “Well, we knew that going in, hon.”

  His hands curled into fists. “Please. Babe. I’m not talking about Diapers and Dip-Tet money. I’m talking about independent wealth. I’m talking about guard dogs and chain-link fencing: the kind of money capable of keeping out the wackos for the rest of our lives.”

  “We can handle the wackos,” she said softly. “They’ll get bored. Didn’t you hear what Sheriff Dooley said? Some of them are going home already.”

  Mark shook his head. “Some of them, maybe. Maybe even most of them—if they behave the way mobs usually don’t. But all of them? At home and in school and for the rest of his life? How do we stop some especially dangerous nut, who may be just getting the idea today, from coming after our boy with a gun maybe fifteen years from now? Do you honestly think that everybody who’s run out of money or vacation time, and has to go back home to East Calabash or whatever, is just going to forget this kid they were so sure came from outer space? Be real! They’ll be back when you least expect them—and if not them, then somebody else. We can’t live an ordinary life that way. Hell, I won’t be able to hold onto my job as it is—we can’t expect me to just go on selling hardware when every yahoo in the country’s going to flock to my store to see if I have antennae hidden under my hairline. We need money, babe. If only to protect us from what he’s going to bring.”

  Faye remained as perfectly serene as before, but there was an edge to it now: a willful defiance of the places this conversation was headed. “So what do you suggest?”

  He was unable to meet her eyes. “The Enquirer’s willing to pay us five million for an exclusive interview—as long as we tell them what they want to hear.”

  “That your son’s a creature from outer space.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Mark pleaded. “I hate the bastards. But I can’t think of any other way. And if they’ll be saying it anyway…we might as well get paid for it, so we can get the boy what he needs.”

  “Chain-link fence,” she said, without raising her voice. “Guard dogs. Isolation from other children.”

  “Safety,” he countered.

  She considered that for several seconds, glancing from the earnest face of her husband to the oddly-shaped head of her child. She’d been raised on a small family farm. She’d seen her parents struggling through droughts; she’d lived through foreclosures and years of lean, grinding poverty. She’d even had to quit the university after only two years, when her student loans were cut. She knew what it meant to need money and not have it. Nobody can say how much the idea tempted her; nobody would have blamed her for going along with it.

  But then she said, “No.”

  “Come on, Faye. Be realistic—”

  “I am being realistic. I’m refusing to lie.”

  “It’s a white lie.”

  “It’s a cruel lie,” she snapped. “He’s our child. Our human child. And it’s our job as his parents to stand up for what he is, not for what some trash newspapers want him to be. I want him to grow up knowing we defended him!” She took the now-sleeping child from her breast, handed him to her husband, and for the first time, spat out her anger, “You want realistic? Call him by name. I haven’t heard you do that yet. You want realistic, call him by name!”

  Face of Space Baby Found on Moon!

  Is He Reincarnation of Ancient Lunar Pharoah?

  Alexander was lucky, in some ways. Some places would have put the kid in a museum and charged visitors admission to see him—and if you think that’s overstating the situation, kindly look up the case of the Dionne Quints. But that’s not what happened.

  Sweethaven came to see the hordes of morbidly curious as invaders—uncouth, unwanted barbarians who parked on lawns, peered in windows, and dropped their garbage in the streets. What’s more, they came to see the Driers as hometown heroes being victimized by outsiders. There may have been a few voices raised against the child, at first (most of them taking refuge in the fiction that he was brain-damaged, and that he’d have been better off in an institution anyway), but as the months went on, and most of the nine hundred people of Sweethaven got to see him up close, even that faded away to silence, replaced by the determination to protect him at all costs.

  Mark Drier did not lose his job at the hardware store; he had to miss a lot of time at first, whenever the Nuts and the Media got too obnoxious, but his boss covered for him, and paid him full wages even when Mark couldn’t make it in more than one or two days at a time.

  Nobody denounced Alexander from the pulpit. At least, not in Sweethaven: there were some churches down south that preached about him as if he had 666 stamped on his head, but Sweethaven’s Reverend Wallace Vukcevich assured his flock that he’d seen the boy and that he seemed a perfectly fine baby, odd looks and all.

  In the early months, there were two, and only two, acts of serious violence directed against the Drier family. One time, a mentally disturbed woman from Boca Raton, Florida, pulled out a gun and started shooting at the house—but she got off exactly one very wild shot before being wrestled to the ground. It didn’t even hit the house. Another time, when Faye was taking Alexander to the doctor for a routine examination, a car filled with tabloid reporters deliberately sideswiped the car so they could force her to stop and get a close-up picture of the baby. The good people of Sweethaven took both incidents very personally. The Boca Raton woman was charged with Attempted Murder, Illegal Possession of a Firearm, Reckless Endangerment, Trespassing, and everything else the local courts could think of; she got the maximum penalty on every count and was awarded a long string of consecutive sentences. The reporters would have been lucky to get off with just that: this was only a few years after the similar incident that caused Princess Diana’s death in France, and the small mob of local boys on the scene had a pretty poor opinion of the kind of louts capable o
f taking that kind of risk with the life of a baby. The tabloid stringers spent almost as much time in the hospital as they later did in jail.

  As ugly and upsetting as both incidents were, they only served to cement the town’s resolve: Alexander may have been one strange-looking kid, but he was one of theirs…a feeling that only grew as he developed a personality, and turned out to be pretty normal after all. He was a child. He learned to smile, to giggle, to say his first words, to crawl, to walk, to manipulate his parents with well-placed tantrums…and that most human of all skills, to ask questions.

  Which brings us to the moment he’d later describe as his earliest memory.

  Like most of the rest of us, he saw it on television.

  He’d watched TV before, of course. His Mommy was not above occasionally using it as a babysitter. He liked cartoons. He didn’t understand why grownups watched the things they watched, which mostly seemed to be other grownups bantering in living rooms. He certainly didn’t understand the attention his Mommy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunt gave the program on TV now, which was mostly a bunch of serious-looking people speaking in grim, measured tones. Why was this fascinating enough to keep the grownups from playing with him?

  “The arrogance of it,” Mark Drier said. “The infernal…gall.”

  “It’s just symbolic,” Uncle George said. “They’re not actually erasing the accomplishment.”

  “Oh, come on, George! They’re doing worse! They’re pissing on it! They’re telling the whole world that the whole thing was nothing more than a big joke!”

  Alexander, who was too young to understand any of this, who was indeed frustrated by his family’s helpless fascination for something beyond his comprehension, merely wandered from one relative to another, trying to interest them in more enjoyable activities…until the network commentary switched over to the live feed, and something truly interesting showed up on-screen.