Is Anybody Out There

by Nick Gevers

  “Sorry, I really don’t mean to interrupt, but did you just say the late 1940s?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was an alien attack here in the late ’40s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this all over the world, or just in one super secret place?”

  “All over the world.”

  “Funny, I don’t remember reading about that in history class. Must have been quite the cover-up.”

  “Shush, I’m explaining. Anyway, like I said, these aliens showed up and suddenly we were at war. Big time. There was a hell of a battle, and it lasted for months. In the end, we managed to fight them off—barely—but we did it. And then, six weeks later, when it finally seemed like everything was getting back to normal . . . the whole thing happened again. A second attack. This time from a completely different race of aliens. And even though it was unconnected to the first invasion, these new aliens had all the same goals: enslave mankind, conquer, pillage, etcetera. Again, we fought them off. It was an even rougher battle, took about a year, but somehow we came out on top. Now . . . as you can imagine, by this point humanity was starting to get pretty wary of visitors from other worlds.”

  “I bet.”

  “We began to assemble an army. A really big army. A military initiative like nothing ever dreamed of before. Everyone over a certain age was conscripted. Everyone on Earth.”

  “What age?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You said everyone over a certain age got conscripted. What age?”

  “I don’t know . . . twelve.”

  “Yikes.”

  “That’s right. Pretty scary, but there you go. Everyone over the age of twelve was now part of the largest military campaign ever devised: Operation Protect the Planet.”

  “That sounds . . . sorta green.”

  “Green?”

  “Like the name could be a slogan for an environmental movement.”

  “Sadly, it was anything but that. The O.P.T.P initiative required us to ravage our own world for resources. Everything we had, every industry, every occupation became twisted around defense and tactical planning.”

  “That can’t be all there was.”

  “Well, a small division was put in charge of farming. We had to eat, of course, but other than—”

  “So it was all . . . what? Guns and food? That’s all anybody did anymore?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Humanity struggled for a while to try to hold on to even a scrap of its culture, but eventually everything got erased. Art, music, diversity of language—all gone. Everything became homogenized. We became a people obsessed with a single goal: survival.”

  “Again, that’s just . . . horrible. Were there more attacks?”

  “There were lots and lots of attacks. They kept coming in waves, year after year. These alien species would show up one after another, decide they wanted what we had, and try to take it from us by force.”

  “That is so sucky.”

  “I know. But it kept happening. By the year 2200, things were pretty grim. The battles had been so constant—so ceaseless—that humanity had known nothing but warfare for generations. Many generations. Even the memory that we had ever lived any other kind of existence was fading. The ironic thing, of course, is that we were slowly turning into the same kind of creatures who kept invading our planet. We started to thrive on war. Hunger for it ourselves.”

  “This doesn’t sound like it’s going anywhere happy. I don’t know if I want to hear any more.”

  “Sweetie . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “You trust me, right?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “Of course I trust you.”

  “Then just listen for a teensy bit longer, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “All right, so humanity was in a bad place. Little by little they were transforming into one of the same kind of bloodthirsty races they’d been fighting against for so long. And they’d learned quite a bit in the two-hundred-and-fifty-plus years they’d been battling through this new way of life. And so, using captured and co-opted alien technologies, they’d just finished developing their own interstellar warships. They had built an entire fleet. Sadly, this was no longer just for defense, but to begin launching their own attacks on other worlds. Things were looking dark, very dark indeed. Everything was coming to a head, and it was on the eve of the big launch when it happened.”

  “When what happened?”

  “Someone invented time travel.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It was an accident, of course. They’d been trying to design a new weapon, hurrying to get it ready before the launch. It was a heavy-duty plasma cannon, something like that. But in the rush to get it finished, some slight miscalculations were made and the first time the weapon was test fired, it ripped a small hole in the fabric of time.”

  “I’m listening . . .”

  “They sent some probes through the rip and learned that this was indeed a doorway to the past. And after conducting a variety of experiments, it was discovered that with slight adjustments, they could use the device to pick exact points in time and space to travel to. This led to a great deal of debate. What should they use this for? Should they use it at all? And why were they even bothering to discuss it when there was war to be fought somewhere? And then, from somewhere in the back of the room, this one guy spoke up. He wasn’t too high in the chain of command, just a sergeant, but he had this bright idea . . .”

  “Which was?”

  “Instead of sending their brand- spanking new fleet out to other worlds to wage war, why not send them back in time instead? Back to the very first alien attack against Earth.”

  “You mean . . . a preemptive strike?”

  “They promoted that sergeant to general, and he led the fleet through the rip and thwarted the aliens just before they were about to attack. It was easy enough to do. Their technology was two- hundred-and-fifty years ahead of the enemy’s. Taking them down was child’s play.”

  “Good for them.”

  “Emboldened by their victory, they went on, continuing to travel through time and fought off every alien invasion that was ever to be. They cleared the path, allowing human history to progress without any outside interruptions.”

  “That’s kind of . . . cool.”

  “I think so.”

  “One thing though . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, if they changed the past, wouldn’t that affect them? They were from the future. Wouldn’t they cease to exist?”

  “Time travel is a lot more complicated than that. And by traveling through it themselves, the fleet came to exist outside of time. This freed them up to continue protecting the Earth. To act as unseen guardians.”

  “And so . . . that’s it? That’s the reason why we’ve never had contact with aliens?”

  “And why we never will.”

  “It was all just . . . erased.”

  “Yes—well, yes and no.”

  “Yes and no?”

  “Nothing can ever be completely erased. You see, time traveling prevented the invasions, but those events did happen. And it left something hanging over us. Like a faint echo in our shared consciousness. A kind of residue.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, in the 1950s there was suddenly this huge glut of science fiction movies that started to pop up one after another. This was followed by comics, television shows, and more. There’d long been stories written about visitors from other worlds, but the ’50s saw such an explosion of that kind of material that it makes one wonder if there wasn’t something more at work here than just a trend. Maybe those stories needed to be told. Maybe there was an underlying urge to get them out there.”

  “Huh.”

  “Do you have a comment?”

  “That’s a . . . That’s a pretty complex theory. Did you just come up w
ith that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really? The whole thing? Just now?”

  “Yeah, it kinda popped into my head.”

  “That’s a little hard to believe.”

  “Not if it’s true.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If it’s true, then I didn’t make it up. I remembered it.”

  “That’s a little eerie.”

  “Also, if everything I said was right, then that dot you saw moving in the sky might not be a satellite after all. Or a comet, or even some aliens.”

  “You’re saying it might be the fleet.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was it you called them again? The O.P.T.P.?”

  “I believe so.”

  “It’s a funny name.”

  “I guess.”

  “Say . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m definitely okay with it.”

  “It?”

  “This. Doing this regularly from now on. Looking up at the sky, holding your hand. It feels good to me. Does it feel good to you, spending time this way?”

  “I think so. I just know you’re the one I want to spend that time with.”

  “Will you look at me when you say that?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re looking up. Look at me when you say that.”

  “You’re the one I want to spend that time with.”

  “Good. Better.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. It’s all in the eyes, you know.”

  “I know.”

  They stared at each other in silence for a little while, then stood together and went back inside.

  Good News from Antares

  Yves Meynard

  The El makes the same racket it always did, a tortured shriek as it slowly rounds the corner of the track between Van Buren and Quincy stations. Alone in his room, Gerrard feels the sound pulling him backward in time, like a wondrous device from one of his own stories, back to a year when all of space-time had lain wide open, for himself as well as the whole of humanity. In that year he attained the zenith of his career, at the ripe age of twenty-five. It might even have been in this very hotel; he doesn’t remember which one it was, but of course people would know. Long ago he tore up all the zines he had accumulated and threw them into the trash without regret, but in the hoards of collectors some must survive. Certainly there are many who would consider it a privilege to let him look at a copy of Second City Fandom. They’d treat him to dinner in the bargain, and spend the entire night drunk on nostalgia, trying to evoke a world lost forever. He’d rather get mugged.

  Downstairs, in the reception room that may or may not be the very one where he came close to the ultimate glory, his daughter is waiting for him. She is wearing the eggplant dress he loathes; her husband Walter will be hovering at her elbow, simpering and nattering, drinking too much. People must be crowding Alice, trying to let her success wash over them, just as Walter is doing. Many will be waving copies of Dark Nocturne brazenly in her face. Some may even be asking about her father, who was a writer too, wasn’t he, isn’t it marvelous how talent runs in the family. Gerrard wishes he could go down now and tell them all what he really thinks of his daughter’s writing, how mocked he feels that all she can offer the world is adolescent feel-good fantasy, dripping with just the right amount of simulated blood and fake angst. This, this is all that the world really wants: sparkly tales of blissful undeath, a retreat into its own navel.

  Gerrard feels himself settling down into the armchair, growing heavier by the second. He will not rise; maybe he will stay here the whole night, let himself fall asleep with the drapes drawn and the lights on. He isn’t asleep yet, but his eyes have closed. He dreams, aware that he dreams, able to nudge the dream along but no longer to control it.

  In Gerrard’s dream he leaves his room, walks along the corridor to the elevator. It strikes him how the art deco ornamentation on its doors gleams in the neon light. This is not the illumination the gilding was conceived for, yet the electrum glow is soothing to his eyes. There is no one about; the silence fills his ears like cotton. When the bell signaling the elevator’s arrival rings, it feels like a weapon cutting into him.

  The doors open and he steps inside the cabin. Next to the doors, the twin columns of buttons extend further down than he had noticed previously. After the numbers come M, L, LL; symbols he is familiar with. But there are further buttons: G, G1, G2 he can guess at, but what of that last one, square where all the others are round, stamped with a glyph that Gerrard cannot recognize as a letter? He pushes it, the doors slide shut and the elevator descends so swiftly that his stomach rises against his throat. He feels a touch of fear, but then he recalls he is dreaming.

  When the doors open (this time without a bell), a strange and dark vista is revealed. The elevator has reached into tunnels dug into the rock beneath Chicago, below the level of the subway. Gerrard can hear the roar of a train passing; it comes from far above rather than in front of him. Slowly, he steps out of the elevator cabin. Behind him the doors remain open, promising a safe haven; he does not look back, but walks forward into the dim, steam-wreathed region. Lights shine somewhere in the distance, and shed just enough illumination for him to move about. He holds his arms forward, groping for obstacles, clutching nothing but moist air.

  After a time comes the awareness that he is no longer alone; looking to his left, he glimpses a half- familiar shape in the dimness. He moves forward, and the shape follows silently. Soon lights from ahead kindle a blue gleam on the figure’s swollen forehead, and he recognizes Exben the Antarean. Gerrard’s heart leaps painfully; he does not know if he is glad or horrified. Exben turns its head towards him, and Gerrard heaves a strangled sigh. Even now, even in his dream, he sees Exben as it was portrayed on the screen for twenty-five embarrassing episodes of Mission: Universe. Beneath the caked blue makeup, the pasty features of a character actor well past his prime, whose name always escapes Gerrard’s memory, twist in a leering smile.

  “Stars bring greetings, my friend,” says Exben, and Gerrard answers with the trite response heard on every episode: “And the Universe is one.” Long, long ago, he opened a story in this way. He was so young then that the words seemed fresh and full of wisdom to him. He thought he was spelling out a view of a glorious future, and thousands of others thought so too. They were even younger than he was, barely out of childhood; they, at least, had the excuse of innocence.

  For a minute Gerrard remains mute and motionless; Exben matches him. There is a faint hiss from the prosthetic nose’s thin nostrils as the actor breathes in and out. Finally Gerrard gives in; it’s his dream, after all. “It’s good to see you, Exben,” he says finally, and is surprised to realize he means it. “How . . . how are you?”

  “I am quite well,” answers Exben. “But I am concerned about you, my old friend. You are definitely not well.”

  “Stop it,” whispers Gerrard. “This is wrong. You’re speaking to me as if I was Major Vance. I’m . . . just the man who invented both of you. I’m dreaming all this.”

  “I am fully aware that you are not Major Vance,” says Exben, taking Gerrard’s hand. Exben has three digits only, long and many-jointed. In the television series he was given human hands, though he always wore gloves with odd markings, as a cheap token of alienness. These hands are not gloved. “As I am aware of your status. You grieve, friend Gerrard, so terribly.”

  Exben pulls him forward now, until they come to a better-lit area; a trio of parallel tubes hanging from the distant ceiling casts a bubble of radiance within the fog. Here Exben pauses and turns to face Gerrard fully. Gerrard can see, distinctly, the line where the rubber prosthetic skull meets the actor’s skin; here, on the jaw, a cluster of acne scars blotted with concealer still reveal themselves under the layers of makeup. Yet the fingers that grip his hand wrap themselves all the way up his wrist; the alien skin is cool, finely textured like chamois cloth.

  “I have spent many
years among humans,” Exben says. “You cast me among your species and gave me a mission; do you remember it?”

  Of course Gerrard remembers. It was in his second story of Exben and Vance that he came up with the idea: an alien given an all-important mission that, for once, wasn’t about war, about conquest or enslavement. The mission had been to understand humanity, because—how had he put it?—nothing could be more meaningful in the universe than to understand one another. Something like that. He should remember the sentence better, since it almost won him the Gernsback. That is what people vote for, he later came to understand: slogans, catchphrases, expressions of neat ideas that respond to their own prejudices. That year, it had been in fashion to seek fellow-feeling and understanding, because America was terrified of the Soviets and friendship seemed like an easy solution. But decades later, by the time the Caucasus oil-fields had collapsed and Andropov had been overthrown, the country felt invincible. No one cared for Exben’s mission anymore; not even Gerrard himself, truth be told. And soon after that had come the Clarke theorem and its implications, and the old universe had died.

  “I remember,” says Gerrard. “I gave you the mission and I saw you through it, until the last story.”

  Ten stories. This is his legacy to the defunct world of scientifiction, according to Chalmers in his Encyclopedia; the rest of Gerrard’s work dismissed in one word as “forgettable.” But the Exben sequence, that warrants a whole paragraph. Ten stories about an alien, and a human astronaut who endeavors to show him what it means to be human. Collected together in the late-seventies by an amateur press as Exben from the Stars, provided with appalling cover art and poorly distributed. Written over a span of twenty- five years, the stories improve greatly from first to last, says Chalmers. And Gerrard is forced to agree. The first one he can no longer stand to even glance at; only the last three, for him, hold any value anymore. Yet their popularity went steadily downhill after the second one. By the time of the last story, Gabriel Enders at the Magazine of Scientifiction was doing an old hack a favor, and made sure Gerrard knew it. And yet, and yet! That last story was far more ambitious, far more subtle and wise than any of Gerrard’s previous work. He has reread it, more than once, always after a long interval, and been surprised that he was the one to write it. It is something any writer of scientifiction could be satisfied with.