Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  The phone wakes me up. I use the remote to turn down Dave Letterman, and pick up. A voice I haven't heard for twenty years says, "Hello, Ray."

  At first, only the Enquirer and the Weekly World News were interested. But when the reports came back and the FBI slapped a security classification on them, and Elliot Mitchell started making a fuss because he was transferred to the Texas panhandle and his field notes and his twenty rolls of film and six hours of cassette recordings were "lost," Newsweek and Rolling Stone showed up. Tom Wicker's piece in Rolling Stone said it was all part of a government plot stretching back to Roswell, and that the U.S. Army was covering up tests with hallucinogenic weapons.

  Then the artifacts went on view, and ten types of expert testified they were "non-terrestrial." It wasn't a government conspiracy any more, it was a goddamn alien invasion, just like Nyquist and me had been saying. Mitchell had rewritten his field notes from memory, and sent photocopies to Science and Nature. He even got his name as discoverer on the new hyperstable transuranic element, which along with the bodies was one of the few tangible residues of the whole thing. I wonder how he felt when Mitchellite was used in the Gulf War to add penetrative power to artillery shells?

  Then the Washington Post got behind the story, and all the foreign press, and the shit hit the fan. For a while, it was all anybody talked about. We got to meet President Carter, who made a statement supporting our side of things, and declared he would see that no information was withheld from the public.

  I was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, back when that meant something. I did Dick Cavett, CBS News with Walter Cronkite, 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace, NBC Weekend News with Jessica Savitch. Me and Nyquist were scurrying to get our book deals sorted out, then our screen rights. People were crawling all over, desperate to steal our lives, and we went right along with the feeding frenzy.

  We wrapped each other up with restraints and gag orders, and shot off our mouths all the time. Mitchell was out of the loop: instead of deals with Hollywood producers and long lunches with New York publishers, he got tied up in a civil liberties suit because he tried to resign from the U.S. geological survey and the government wouldn't let him.

  Then the Ayatollah took the hostages, and everyone had something else to worry about. Carter became a hostage in his own White House and most of the artifacts disappeared in the C-130 air crash the conspiracy theorists said was staged. Reagan never said anything on record, but the official line changed invisibly when he became President. The reports on the reports questioned the old findings, and deposits of Mitchellite showed up on Guam and somewhere in Alaska.

  I did Geraldo with Whitley Strieber and Carl Sagan, and came off like a hick caught between a rock and a hard place. I had started drinking by then, and tried to punch out one or the other of them after the show, and spent the night in a downtown holding tank. I faced a jury of skeptics on Oprah and was cut to pieces, not by reasoned scientific arguments and rationalizations but by cheap-shot jokes from a studio audience of stand-up wannabes.

  I told my side of it so many times that I caught myself using exactly the same words each time, and I noticed that on prerecorded shows, the presenter's nods and winks—always shot from a reverse angle after the main interview—were always cut in at exactly the same points. An encouraging dip of the head laced with a concerned look in the eyes, made in reaction to a cameraman's thumb, not an already-forgotten line from me.

  Besides The Omega Encounter and Starlight, there were dozens of books, movies, TV specials, magazine articles, a Broadway play, even a music album. Creedence Clearwater Revival's "It Came Out of the Sky" was reissued and charted strongly. Some English band did a concept album. John Sladek and Tom Disch collaborated on a novel-length debunking, The Sentients: A Tragi-Comedy. That's in development as a movie, maybe with Fred Ward.

  Sam Shepard's Alienation, which Ed Harris did on Broadway and Shepard starred in and directed for HBO, looked at it all from the dirt farmer's point of view, suggesting that Nyquist and me were looking for fresh ways of being heroes since we'd lost touch with the land. The main character was a combination of the two of us, and talked in paragraphs, and the scientist—Dean Stockwell on TV was a black-hatted villain, which displeased Mitchell no end. He sued and lost, I recall.

  By then I was looking at things through the blurry dimple at the bottom of the bottle, living off the residuals from commercials and guest appearances in rock videos and schlock direct-to-video horror movies shot by postmodernist auteurs just out of UCLA film school, though I recall that Sam Raimi's The Color Out of Time was kind of not bad.

  Then I read in Variety that Oliver Stone has a treatment in development raking the whole thing up, blaming it all on J. Edgar Hoover, Armand Hammer and Henry Kissinger. There was an article in the New York Times that Norman Mailer had delivered his thousand-page summation of the phenomenon, The Visitation. And that's where I got the idea to get in touch with Mitchell and make some cash on the back of Stone and Mailer's publicity, and maybe Mitchell had been reading the same articles, because before I can begin to think how to try and track him down, he calls me.

  I drive past the place I'm to meet Mitchell and have to double back, squinting in the glare of the big rigs that roar out of the darkness, all strung up with fairylights like the spaceship in Closer Encounters. I do what sounds like serious damage to the underside of the rental when I finally pull off.

  The ruins are close to the highway, but there's a spooky feeling that makes me leave the car's headlights on. Out across the dark desert basin, where the runways of Edwards Air Force Base are outlined in patterns of red and green lights a dozen miles long, some big engine makes a long drawn-out rumble that rises to a howl before cutting off.

  I sit in the car and take a few pulls on my bottle to get some courage, or at least burn away the fluttering in my gut, looking at the arthritic shapes that Joshua trees make in the car headlights. Then I make myself get out and look around. There's not much to the ruins, just a chimney stack and a line of pillars where maybe a porch stood. People camping out have left circles of ash in the sand and dented cans scattered around; when I stumble over a can and it rattles off a stone, I realize how quiet the desert is, beyond the noise of the trucks on the highway. I get a feeling like the one I had when the three of us were waiting that last night, before we blew up the mothership, and have to take another inch off the level of the tequila to calm down.

  That's when my rental car headlights go out and I almost lose it, because that's what happened when they tried to kidnap me, the lights and then the dashboard on my pickup going out and then a bright light all around, coming from above. That time, I had a pump-action shotgun on the rack in the cab, which is what saved me. Now, I have a tequila bottle with a couple of inches sloshing in it, and a rock I pick up.

  A voice behind me says my name, and I spin and lose my balance and fall on my ass, the tequila bottle emptying over my pants leg. A flashlight beam pins me, and behind it, Elliot Mitchell says, "This was the last socialist republic in the USA, did you know that? They called the place Llano del Rio. This was their meeting hall. They built houses, a school, planted orchards. But the government gave their water rights to the local farmers and they had to move out. All that's left are the orchards, and those will go because they're subdividing the desert for housing tracts to take LA's overspill."

  I squint into the light, but can't see anything of the man holding it.

  "Never put your faith in government, Ray. Its first instinct is not to protect the people it's supposed to serve but to protect its own self. People elect politicians, not governments. Don't get up. I'm happier to see you sitting down. Do you think you were followed here?"

  "Why would I be followed? No one cares about it anymore. That's why I'm here."

  "You want to make another movie, Ray? Who is it with? Oliver Stone? He came out to see me. Or sent one of his researchers anyway. You know his father was in the Navy, don't you, and he's funded by the UN counterpropaga
nda unit, the same one that tried to assassinate Reagan. The question is, who's paying you?"

  "Crazy Sam's Hardware back in Brooklyn, if I do the ad."

  I have a bad feeling. Mitchell appears to have joined the right-wing nuts who believe that little black helicopters follow them everywhere, and that there are secret codes on the back of traffic signs to direct the UN invasion force when it comes.

  I say, "I don't have any interest except the same one that made you want to call me. We saved the world, Elliot, and they're ripping off our story . . ."

  "You let them. You and Nyquist. How is old Nyquist?"

  "Sitting in a room with mattresses on the walls, wearing a backward jacket and eating cold creamed corn. They made him the hero, when it was us who blew up the mothership, it was us who captured that stinking silver beach-ball, it was us who worked out how to poison most of them."

  I put the bottle to my lips, but there's hardly a swallow left. I toss it away. This isn't going the way I planned, but I'm caught up in my anger. It's come right back, dull and heavy. "We're the ones that saved Susan, not her lousy husband!"

  "We didn't save her, Ray. That was in your TV movie. The Omega Encounter. We got her back, but the things they'd put inside her killed her anyway."

  "Well, we got her back, and if fuckin' Doc Jensen had listened, we would have saved her, too!"

  I sit there, looking into the flashlight beam with drunken tears running down my face.

  "How much do you remember, Ray? Not the movies, but the real thing? Do you remember how we got Susan out of the mothership?"

  "I stay away from shopping malls, because they give me flashbacks. Maybe I'm as crazy as Nyquist. Sometimes, I dream I'm in one of those old-fashioned hedge mazes, like in The Shining. Sometimes, I'm trying to get out of the hospital they put us in afterward. But it's always the same, you know."

  Mitchell switches off the flashlight. I squint into the darkness, but all I see is swimming afterimages.

  "Come tomorrow," Mitchell says, and something thumps beside me.

  It is a rock, with a piece of torn paper tied to it. Under the dome light of the rental car, I smooth out the paper and try to make sense of the map Mitchell has drawn.

  Two days. That's how long it took. Now, my life is split into Before and After. What no one gets is that the thing itself—the event, the encounter, the invasion, the incursion, the whatever—was over inside two days. I've had head colds and belly-aches that lasted a whole lot longer. That's what marks me out. When I die, my obits will consist of three paragraphs about those two days and two sentences about everything else. Like I said about Jan-Michael, I have a post-birth, pre-death rut for a life. Except for those two days.

  After about a decade, it got real old. It was as if everyone was quizzing me about some backyard baseball game I pitched in when I was a kid, blotting out all of the rest of my life—parents, job, marriages, kid, love, despair—with a couple of hours on the mound. I even tried clamming up, refusing to go through it all again for the anniversary features. I turned my back on those two days and tried to fix on something else worth talking about. I'd come close to making it with Adrienne Barbeau, didn't I? Or was it Heather Locklear? Maybe it was just in one of the scripts and some actor played me. I was doing harder stuff than alcohol just then.

  That phase lasted maybe three months. I was worn down in the end. I realized that I needed to tell it again. For me, as much as for everyone else. I was like those talking books in that Bradbury novel—yeah, I admit it, I read science fiction when I was a kid, and doesn't that blow my whole story to bits, proving that I made it all up out of half-remembered bits of pulp magazine stories—my whole life was validated by my story, and telling it was as necessary to me as breathing. Over the years, it got polished and shiny. More than a few folks told me it sounded like Bradbury.

  "A million years ago, Nyquist's farm was the bottom of the ocean," I would always begin, paraphrasing the opening of my book. "Susan Nyquist collected sea-shells in the desert. Just before I looked up and saw the spinning shape in the sky, I was sifting through the soft white sand, dredging up a clam-shaped rock that might once have been alive . . ."

  No, I'm not going to tell it all again here. That's not what this is about at all.

  Do you know what a palimpsest is? It's old parchment that has been written on once, had the writing rubbed out, and been written on again. Sometimes several times. Only, with modern techniques, scientists can read the original writing, looking underneath the layers.

  That's my story. Each time I've told it, I've whited out the version underneath. It's built up, like lime on a dripping faucet. In telling it so many times, I've buried the actual thing.

  Maybe that's why I've done it.

  Regardless of the movies, it wasn't a B picture, with simple characters and actions. Okay, there were aliens (everyone else calls them that except Strieber, so I guess I can too), a woman was taken, and we poisoned most of them and dug out dynamite and blew up their spaceship (I've never liked calling it that—it was more like one of Susan's shells blown up like a balloon, only with light instead of helium or air). We saved the world, right?

  Or maybe we just killed a bunch of unknowable Gandhis from the Beyond. That's what some woman accused me of at a book-signing. She thought they'd come to save us, and that we'd doomed the world by scaring them off.

  That gave me a shock. I tried to see the story the way she might.

  It didn't play in Peoria. The woman—pink bib overalls, bird's-nest hair, Velma-from-Scooby-Doo glasses, a "Frodo Lives!" badge—hadn't seen the visitors, the aliens.

  She hadn't seen what they'd done to Susan.

  But I was up close.

  The little fuckers were evil. No, make that Evil. I don't know if they were from outer space, the third circle of Hell, or the Land of Nod, but they weren't here to help anyone but themselves.

  What they did to the cattle, what they did to Susan, wasn't science, wasn't curiosity. They liked taking things apart, the way Mikey Bignell in third grade liked setting fire to cats, and Mikey grew up to get shot dead while pistol-whipping a fifty-two-year-old married lady during a filling station hold-up. If the visitors ever grow up beyond the cat-burning phase, I figure they could do some serious damage.

  I am not just trying to justify what we did to them.

  Now, without trying to tell the story yet again, I'm tapping into what I really felt at the time: half-scared, half-enraged. No Spielberg sense of wonder. No TV movie courage. No Ray Bradbury wistfulness.

  "Inside the Ship was all corridors and no rooms, crisscrossing tunnels through what seemed like a rocky rubber solid stuff. Mitchell went ahead, and I followed. We blundered any which way, down passages that made us bend double and kink our knees, and trusted to luck that we'd find where they'd taken Susan. I don't know whether or not we were lucky to find her or whether they intended it. I don't know if we were brave and lucky, or dumb rats in a maze.

  "Mitchell claims the thing told us where to go, flashed a floor-plan into our minds, like the escape lights in an airliner. I guess that's his scientific mind talking. For me, it was different. I had a sense of being myself and being above myself, looking down. We didn't take a direct route to Susan, hut spiraled around her, describing a mandala with an uneven number of planes of symmetry. It was like the New Math: finding the answer wasn't as important as knowing how to get there, and I think Mitchell and I, in our different ways, both flunked."

  I didn't say so in the book, but I think that's why what happened to Susan afterward went down. When we dragged Susan, alive but unconscious, out of the hot red-black half-dark at the heart of the ship we were too exhausted to feel any sense of triumph. We went in, we found her, we got her out. But we didn't get the trick quite right.

  Here's how I usually end it:

  "Nyquist was shaking too bad to aim the rifle. I don't amount to much, but while I can't shoot good enough to lake the eye out of the eagle if you toss a silver dollar in the air, nin
e times out of ten I'll at least clip the coin. Mitchell was shouting as he ran toward us with two of the things hopping after him. The reel of wire was spinning in his hands as he ran. Nyquist snapped out of it and tossed me the gun"—in his version, he gets both of the critters with two shots, bing-bang—"and I drew a bead, worried that Mitchell would zigzag into the line of fire, then put a bullet into the first alien. Pink stuff burst out of the back of it in midleap, and it tumbled over, deflating like a pricked party balloon.

  "Even from where I was, I could smell the stink, and Nyquist started to throw up. The second critter was almost on Mitchell when I fired again, the hot casing stinging my cheek as I worked the bolt, and fired, and fired, and kept shooting as Mitchell threw himself down in a tangle of wire while the thing went scooting off back toward the ship. My hands shaking so bad I sliced my hand bad when I trimmed the wires back to bare copper. Mitchell snatched them from me and touched them to the terminals of the truck's battery.

  "We didn't have more than a dozen sticks of low-grade dynamite for getting out tree stumps, and Mitchell hadn't had time to place them carefully when those things came scooting out like hornets out of a bottle. And Mitchell hadn't even wanted to do it, saying that the ship must be fireproofed, like the Apollo module, or it wouldn't have survived atmospheric entry. But it was our last best hope, and when the sticks blew, the ship went up like a huge magnesium flare. I put my hands over my eyes, and saw the bones of my hands against the light. The burst was etched into my eyeballs for months. It hardly left any debris, just evaporated into burning light, blasting the rock beneath to black crystal. You can still see the glassy splash where it stood if you can get the security clearance. There was a scream like a dying beast, but it was all over quickly. When we stopped blinking and the echo was dead, there was almost nothing where the ship had been. They were gone."