Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  Is that an ending? If it is, what has the rest of my life been? An epilogue, like on some Quinn Martin series episode, with William Conrad reporting that I am still at large, still running off my mouth, still living it down?

  Or has it just been an interlude before the sequel?

  I wake up the next morning with the shakes. There's not even fumes in the tequila bottle I clutched to my chest all night, and nothing but warm cans of Dr Pepper in the motel vending machine, so I drive the mile into town and buy a twelve pack of Bud, giving thanks to California's liberal liquor-license laws. I'm coming out of the 7 Eleven when two men in sunglasses fall in step with me on either side, and I don't need to see their badges to know what they are.

  They make me leave my beer in the car and take me across the dusty highway to the town's diner, an Airstream trailer with a tattered awning shading one side. The older guy orders coffee and pancakes, and grins across the table while his partner crowds me on the bench. I can't help looking through the greasy window at my car, where the beer is heating up on the front seat, and the older guy's grin gets wider. He gets out a hip flask and pours a shot into my coffee, and I can't help myself and guzzle it down, scalding coffee running down my chin.

  "Jesus," the young guy, Duane Bissette, says, disgusted.

  He's ihe local field agent, blond hair slicked back from his rawboned face. He hasn't taken off his mirrorshades, and it shoulder harness makes a bulge under his tailored suit jacket.

  "Judge not," the other guy says, and pours me another shot, twinkling affably. He has curly white hair and a comfortable gut, like Santa Claus's younger brother. He's hung his seersucker jacket on the back of his chair. There are half-moon sweat stains under his arms, and sweat beads under his hairline. "Ray's living out his past, and he's having a hard time with it. Am I right, or am I right?"

  I ignore the rye whiskey in the coffee mug. I say, "If you want to talk to me, talk to my agent first. Murray Weiss, he's in the Manhattan Directory."

  "But you're one of us," the older guy says, widening his eyes in mock innocence. "You got your badge, when? '77? 78?"

  It was 1976 and I'm sure he damn well knows it, done right out on the White House lawn, with a silver band playing and the Stars and Stripes snapping in the breeze under a hot white sky. The Congressional Medal of Honor for me and Nyquist, and honorary membership in the FBI. I'd asked for that because if it was good enough for Elvis, it was good enough for me. It was the last time I saw Nyquist, and even then he was ignoring me with the same intensity with which I'm right now ignoring that rye.

  I say, "Your young friend here was polite enough to show me his badge. I don't believe I know you."

  "Oh, we met, very briefly. I was part of the team that helped clean up." He smiles and holds out his hand over the coffee mugs and plates of pancakes, then shrugs. "Guerdon Winter. I'll never forget that first sight of the crater, and the carcass you had."

  "You were all wearing those spacesuits and helmets. 'Scuse me for not recognizing you."

  The FBI agents looked more like space aliens than the things we killed. They cleared out everything, from the scanty remains of the mothership to my collection of tattered paperbacks. I still have the receipts. They took me and Nyquist and Mitchell and put us in isolation chambers somewhere in New Mexico and put us through thirty days of interrogation and medical tests. They took Susan's body and we never saw it again. I think of the C-130 crash, and I say, "You should have taken more care of what you appropriated, Agent Winter."

  Guerdon Winter takes a bite of pancake.

  "We could have had that alien carcass stuffed and mounted and put on display in the Smithsonian, and in five years it would have become one more exhibit worth maybe ten seconds' gawping. The public doesn't need any help in getting distracted, and everything gets old fast. You know better than me how quickly they forget. You're the one in showbiz. But we haven't forgotten, Ray."

  "You want me to find out what Mitchell is doing."

  "Mitchell phoned you from a pay phone right here in town ten days ago, and you wrote him at the box number he gave you, and then you came down here. You saw him last night."

  Duane Bissette stirs and says, "He's been holed up for two years now. He's been carrying out illegal experiments."

  "If you were following me you could have arrested him last night."

  Guerdon Winter looks at Duane Bissette, then looks at me. He says, "We could arrest him each time he comes into town for supplies, but that wouldn't help us get into his place, and we know enough about his interrogation profile to know he wouldn't give it up to us. But he wants to talk to you, Ray. We just want to know what it is he's doing out there."

  "He believes you have the map," Duane Bissette says.

  I remember the scrap of paper Mitchell gave me last night and say, "You want the map?"

  "It isn't important," Guerdon Winter says quickly. "What's important is that you're here, Ray."

  I look out at my rental car again, still thinking about the beer getting warm. Just beyond it, a couple of Mexicans in wide-brimmed straw hats are offloading watermelons from a dusty Toyota pickup. One is wearing a very white T-shirt with the Green Lantern symbol. They could be agents, too; so could the old galoot at the motel.

  I know Duane Bissette was in my motel room last night; I know he took Mitchell's map and photocopied it and put it back. The thing is, it doesn't seem like betrayal. It stirs something inside me, not like the old excitement of those two crystal-clear days when everything we did was a heroic gesture, nothing like so strong or vivid, but alive all the same. Like waking up to a perfect summer's day after a long uneasy sleep full of nightmares.

  I push the coffee away from me and say, "What kind of Illegal experiments?"

  If Mitchell hadn't been a government employee, if they hadn't ridiculed and debunked his theories, and spirited him off to the ass end of nowhere—no Congressional Medal ceremony for him, he got his by registered mail—if they hadn't stolen the discovery of Mitchellite from him, then maybe he wouldn't have ended up madder than a dancing chicken on a hot plate at the state fair. Maybe he wouldn't have taken it into his head to try what he did. Or maybe he would have done it anyway. Like me, he was living in After, with those two bright days receding like a train. Like me, he wanted them back. Unlike me, he thought he had a way to do it.

  Those two agents don't tell me as much as I need to know, but I suspect that they don't know what it is Mitchell is doing. I have an idea that he's building something out in the desert that'll bring those old times back again.

  Driving out to Mitchell's place takes a couple of hours. The route on the map he gave me is easy enough: south along Pearblossom's two-lane blacktop, then over the concrete channel of the aqueduct that carries water taken from Washington State—did you see Chinatown? yeah, there—and up an unmade track that zigzags along the contours of the Piñon Hills and into a wide draw that runs back a couple of miles. The light in the draw is odd. Cold and purple, like expensive sunglasses. Either side of the road is nothing but rocks, sand, dry scrub, and scattered Joshua trees.

  I start to feel a grudging sympathy for Agent Bissette. No matter how he hangs back, it's impossible to tail a car out here without your mark knowing. I have the urge to wait for a dip that puts me momentarily out of his sight and swerve off into a patch of soft sand, sinking the rental like a boat in shallows, creating another unexplained mystery.

  Mitchell's place is right at the top of the draw, near the beginning of the tree line. In the high desert, trees grow only on the tops of the mountains. The FBI parks under a clump of stunted pines and lets me go on alone. I'm lucky they didn't want me to wear a wire. They'll just wait, and see if I can cope with Crazy Elliot. For them, it'll be a boring afternoon, with maybe an exciting apprehension about nightfall.

  Me. I'm going back to the Days of Sharp Focus.

  The rye in the coffee has burned out and I've not touched the soup-warm beer on the passenger seat. I can feel the heat steaming th
e booze out of my brain. I'm going into this alone.

  I get out of the rental, aware of Winter and Bissette watching me through the tinted windshield of their Lincoln Continental. Of Mitchell, there's not a trace. Not even footprints or tire marks in the sandy track. I crouch down, and run a handful of warm sand through my fingers, making like an Indian tracker in some old Western while I ponder my next move.

  There are tine-trails in the sand. The whole area has been raked, like a Japanese garden. I can imagine Mitchell working by night, raking a fan-shaped wake as he backs toward the paved area I see a dozen yards away.

  I walk across the sand, and reach the flagstones. This was the floor of a house that's long gone. I can see the fieldstone hearth, and the ruts where wooden walls had been.

  Beyond the stone is a gentle incline, sloping down maybe twenty feet, then leveling off. Down there, protected from sight, Mitchell has been building. I look at his paper, and see what he means. The FBI think it's a circuit diagram, but it really is a map. Mitchell has made himself a maze, but there's nothing on his map that shows me how to get through it.

  I know now where the old timbers of the house have gone. Mitchell has cannibalized everything carriable within a mile, and some things I would have sworn you'd need a bulldozer at least to shift, but he must have had a few truck-loads of chickenwire, wood, and just plain junk hauled out here. The archway entrance is a Stonehenge arrangement of two 1950s junkers buried hood-first like standing stones, with their tailfins and clusters of egg-shaped rear lights projecting into the air. A crosspiece made of three supermarket shopping carts completes the arch.

  There are other old cars parked and piled in a curving outer wall, built on with wire and wood. And all over the place, sticking up through the sand, are sharp spars and spines that sparkle in the sun.

  I know that glittery look, a glinting like the facets of an insect's eye or 1970s eye makeup under fluorescent disco lights. It's Mitchellite.

  I walk up to the gateway and stop, careful not to touch the spars. They dot everything—stone, wood, metal—like some sort of mineral mold. Crusty little alien points that seem to be growing out of the ordinary Earth stuff. About ten years ago, a couple of crazy English physicists claimed you could use Mitchellite to get unlimited energy by cold fusion and end up with more Mitchellite than you started with, but they were debunked, defrocked, and for all I know defenestrated, and that was the end of it. But maybe they were right. It looks like the Mitchellite is transmuting ordinary stuff into itself.

  There's an iron crowbar, untouched by Mitchellite, propped against a stone. I pick it up, heft it in my hands. It has a good weight. I always felt better with a simple tool, something you could trust.

  Planks are set between the half-buried cars, a path into the interior of the maze. They are pocked with Mitchellite spars that splinter the rotten wood from the inside. I smash down with the poker and split a plank, scraping away bone-dry wood fragments from the Mitchellite nerve-tangles that have been growing inside, sucking strength from the material.

  It looks fragile, but it doesn't crumple under my boots.

  On the other side of the arch hangs a shower curtain that leaves a three-foot gap beneath it. I push it aside with the crowbar and step into the maze.

  The structure is open to the sky, mostly. The walls are of every kind of junk, wood, lines of rocks or unmortared concrete blocks, even barbed wire, grown through or studded with Mitchellite. A few yuccas rise up from the maze's low walls, their fleshy leaves sparkling as if dusted with purplish snow. The floor is made of Mitchellite-eaten planks. There are stretches of clean, unmarked sand. But by each of them is propped a rake, for obscuring footprints. By the first rake is a pane of glass in the sand, and in the hollow under the glass is a handgun wrapped in a plastic baggie, and a handwritten note. In case of F(B)IRE smash glass. So that's what the crowbar is for. I leave the gun where it is and turn and stare at the maze again.

  After a while I fish out the map and look at it. It takes me a while even to work out where I am, but with a creepy chill I realize I'm standing on the spot where Mitchell has drawn a stick figure. In the center of the map is a white space, where there's another, bigger stick figure. Dotted throughout are smaller figures, drawn in red. I know what they're supposed to be. Some are drawn over black lines that represent walls.

  I call out Mitchell's name.

  The maze funnels my own voice back to me, distorted and empty.

  "Ray, come on, what are you waiting for?"

  It was obviously a doorway. Mitchell bent down low—the round opening was the creatures' size—and squeezed into the ship.

  I hesitated, but thought of Susan, and the things that had taken her.

  "I'm coming, Mitchell."

  I followed the geologist. Inside, was another world.

  "I'm coming, Mitchell."

  I know at once what he's done. This isn't really a maze. It's a model, twice as big again as the real thing, of the aliens' ship.

  My knees are weak and I'm shaking. I'm back on the mandala path. I'm above myself and in myself, and I know where to go. I know the route, just as I know the ache that sets into my knees after a minute, an ache that grows to a crippling pain. Just as I remember finding Susan. And finding out later what they'd done to her.

  Mitchell took the lead, that time. I followed, forgetting Nyquist chicken-heartedly frozen at the entrance, not daring to go further.

  Remembering, I follow Mitchell's lead again. Around and inward, spiral across a DNA coil or a wiring diagram, a bee-dance through catacombs. The route is a part of me.

  The deeper inside the maze I get, the more Mitchellite there is. The original wood and stone and wire and concrete has been almost completely eaten away. Purple light glitters everywhere, dazzling even through my sunglasses. Without them, I'd be snow-blind in a minute.

  When the process is finished, when there's nothing more of Earth in the maze, will this thing be able to fly? Will Mitchell carry the war to the enemy?

  "Ray," someone—not Mitchell—shouts, from behind me.

  It's the FBI. I thought I was supposed to haul Mitchell out on my own. Now the pros are here, I wonder why I've bothered.

  I feel like a sheep driven across a minefield. A Judas goat.

  I got into the maze and I'm still alive, so Guerdon Winter and Bissette know it's safe.

  I turn, shading my eyes against the tinted glare that shines up from everything around me. The agents are following my footprints. Bissette doesn't duck under the crossbar of an arch nailed up of silvery grey scraps of wood, and scrapes his forehead against a Mitchellite-spackled plank.

  I know what will happen.

  It's like sandpaper stuck with a million tiny fishhooks and razor blades. The gentlest touch opens deep gashes. Bissette swears, not realizing how badly he's hurt, and a curtain of blood bursts from the side of his head. A flap of scalp hangs down. Red rain spatters his shades.

  Bissette falls to his knees. Guerdon Winter plucks out a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sweat-stained seersucker jacket. A bedsheet won't staunch the flow.

  "You can't go on," Guerdon Winter tells the junior agent, who can't protest for the pain. "We'll come back for you."

  Naturally, Guerdon Winter has his gun out. When Mitchell and I went into the mothership, we didn't even think of guns. I left my shotgun in the pickup, and Nyquist held on to his rifle like it was a comforter blanket and wouldn't give it up to us. Some heroes, huh? Every single version of the story rectifies the omission, and we go in tooled up fit to face Bonnie and Clyde.

  The FBI has made a bad mistake.

  They've changed the story again. By adding the guns, and maybe themselves, they've made me lose my place.

  I don't know which way to go from here.

  My feet and my spine and my aching knees were remembering. But the memory's been wiped.

  Bissette is groaning. His wound is tearing worse—there are tiny particles of alien matter in it, ripping his skin a
part as they grow—and the whole right side of his head and his suit-shoulder are deep crimson.

  "Ray," prompts Guerdon Winter. There's a note of pleading in his voice.

  I look at the fork ahead of us, marked with a cow's skull nodding on a pole, and suddenly have no idea which path to take. I look up at the sky. There's a canopy of polythene up there, scummy with sand-drifts in the folds. I look at the aisles of junk. They mean nothing to me. I'm as blank as the middle of the map Mitchell gave me.

  Then Winter does something incredibly stupid. He offers me a hip flask and smiles and says, "Loosen up, Ray. You'll do fine."

  I knock the flask away, and it hits a concrete pillar laced with Mitchellite and sticks there, leaking amber booze from a dozen puncture points. The smell does something to my hindbrain and I start to run, filled with blind panic just the way I was when I followed behind Mitchell, convinced alien blimps would start nibbling at my feet.

  I run and run, turning left, turning right, deeper and deeper into the maze. The body remembers, if it's allowed. Someone shouts behind me, and then there's a shot and a bullet spangs off an engine block and whoops away into the air; another turns the windshield of a wheelless truck to lace which holds its shape for a moment before falling away. I leap over a spar of Mitchellite like an antelope and run on, feeling the years fall away. I've dropped the map, but it doesn't matter. The body remembers. Going in, and coming out. Coming out with Susan. That's the name I yell, but ahead, through a kind of hedge of twisted wire coated with a sheen of Mitchellite, through the purple glare and a singing in my ears, I see Mitchell himself, standing in the doorway of a kind of bunker.

  He's older than I remember or imagined, the Boy Scout look transmuted into a scrawny geezer wearing only ragged stained shorts, desert boots, and wraparound shades, his skin tanned a mahogany brown. I lean on the crowbar, taking great gulps of air as I try and get my breath back, and he looks at me calmly. There's a pump-action Mossbauer shotgun leaning on the wall beside him.