Worlds Away and Worlds Aweird

by James Hartley

  Who am I? I guess I’d better explain. I’m an agent. Sometimes I’m an investigator, and sometimes I’m a spy (if there’s any difference). I can’t tell you the name of the organization I work for. It’s a government agency, and just the name has a “Burn Before Reading” classification. But you can call us “the Agency.” Not the CIA, they’re “the Company,” and we’re even more secret than they are. Sounds like a bunch of little kids arguing about whose secret club is more secret, but they pay my salary, so I don’t complain. My name? Just call me Joe Hunter. It’s not my real name, but I’ve used it before, and it fits my job. I hunt for stuff. All sorts of stuff.

  Of course, a super-secret agency does not usually check out hit-and-runs, but one thing our agency does check out is flying saucer reports. You wouldn’t believe how many little old ladies I’ve checked out—the ones that published “I Was Kidnapped by a Flying Saucer” in the tabloids. All phony. Until now. Now we had the corpse of an alien. All I had to do was to find his flying saucer. Great!

  We would never have gotten into this if the County Coroner hadn’t decided to do an autopsy. Most coroners in small counties wouldn’t have bothered. There were witnesses who saw the car hit the victim, and the photos taken on the scene showed the neck bent at an impossible angle. Most coroners would have looked at the police report and the photos, wiggled the corpse’s head back and forth a few times to verify a broken neck, and said the hell with it. There was no ID on the body, so the police would have made a quick search for the victim’s identity, failed to determine it, and the corpse would be buried as John Doe. Why am I so sure they wouldn’t have found out who he was? Hey! It took me over a week, and they wouldn’t have spent two days on it. Even assuming they were as smart as I am…

  But this was a new coroner, fresh out of med school and residency, and he wanted to make a name for himself. Coroner for a sleepy little county wasn’t much, but he had the strange idea that a show of ambition would get him somewhere. It hadn’t in the year he had been there, but dreams die hard. So he took the body up to the examining room and started to do an autopsy, just like that Quincy show on TV. He never finished it.

  The corpse was a tall, blond, slender man, perfectly normal looking, except the ears were a little funny, sort of pointed. Inside, however, it was not human!

  Oh, there was a heart, and in almost the right place, but it was twice as big as normal, and an odd shape. I never got all the details, but apparently part of the heart connected to a second circulatory system that would cut in when needed, making the alien almost immune to fatigue. There were lungs, and a digestive tract, but none of them were human. Not as strange as the heart, but not human. Certainly strange enough to throw the coroner into a panic and make him call for help. At first he had no idea where to go, but he ended up calling one of his old medical school professors, one he had gotten on well with. That was fortunate.

  Very fortunate, because that professor had been doing some government work. He had been working with us. He knew us, and how to get in touch with us. Even more important, we knew him. We knew him well enough that when he told us that his former student had found the corpse of an extraterrestrial, we believed him. My chief believed him, and I got assigned to the case. As I said, super-secret agencies don’t go out investigating hit-and-run accidents as a rule. We have more important things to worry about. But accident victims are usually human. This one wasn’t.

  We were lucky. The coroner had started on the chest, so he hadn’t messed up the face any worse than the accident already had. We brought in an undertaker we knew and trusted, and he fixed up the face so we could get a picture. Then we (mostly me) took that picture and started scouring the town and surrounding area, looking for anyone who had seen the “person” in the picture. As I said, it took me a week.

  By the end of that time, I was well outside the town proper. I hit pay dirt on a little country road. I knocked on the door of a farmhouse and flashed my State Police badge and the photo at the housewife who answered. No, she didn’t recognize him. I thanked her politely and was about to leave, when a ten year old poked his head around her to get a look and hollered, “Hey! That’s Mr. Green!”

  I informed the ten year old that he was “Helping Greatly In A Police Investigation,” and got lots of useless information, and a few gems.

  Once or twice a week, “Mr. Green” walked past this house going into town. The boy was pretty sure he lived at another old farmhouse about a mile farther out. It was owned by a widow, and she rented out furnished rooms. Here, the housewife chimed in again and proceeded to tell me more than I wanted to know about the widow and her probable relationships with her roomers. Finally I got out of there, my ears buzzing with local gossip. If I had been on the local Vice Squad, it would have kept me busy for a month.

  I drove out the road another mile and found the house with a “Rooms to Let” sign in the front window. I had to ring the bell several times before it was answered by the widow, who wore an old robe that looked as if it had just been pulled on. She was fat, fifty, and frowzy, but the robe, and the pair of bare feet at the top of the stairs, told me she had something going.

  My State Police badge got me into the front hall. With most of these people a Junior G-Man badge from a box of Cracker Jacks would work, but we believe in authentic-looking fakes. One look at the picture and she told me, yes, that was Mr. Green, and he hadn’t been home for a week, and if she didn’t get his rent soon she would put his stuff in the barn and find a new roomer, and was anything wrong? Was he in trouble? She hoped not because he was such a nice man even if he was a little reclusive and what could she do to help me?

  I told her that he had been hit by a car and killed and that I was investigating the case. Close enough. I told her I needed to go through his room, that I would take care of his stuff, and that I would see if something could be done about back rent. When I asked how much the back rent was, she quoted a highly inflated figure. But I had the Agency pay it, what the heck? It’s government money, and the Agency budget can’t even be found, let alone audited.

  She took me upstairs, went briefly into her room to get the master key, and let me into Mr. Green’s room. The bare feet at the top of the stairs had vanished.

  Mr. Green’s room was disappointing. There was some clothing hanging in the closet and some underwear and socks in the drawers of the battered bureau. No card stating that the bearer was a member of the Martian Secret Service—somehow, I didn’t really expect one. I had already noticed the trash basket out in the hall, empty. Presumably he put it out on cleaning days and it got emptied, and it had been sitting there empty for a week or so. Too bad, going through the trash was often a valuable source of clues. Secretly, I was just as happy, since if I had wanted to make a career out of sifting trash, I would have joined the Department of Sanitation.

  When I looked under the bed, I found the usual cardboard suitcase, so I pulled it out and packed the clothes in it. It didn’t look like there would be any trouble with his belongings. I could carry it all.

  Before packing, I checked the suitcase over carefully, but there were no obvious secret compartments. The lab would take the thing apart anyway, so I didn’t try too hard. I packed all his clothes in the suitcase, and then I searched the room.

  Let me explain something about myself. I am what is called an “Intuitive.” I have hunches, and far more are correct than could be explained by the workings of probability. The Agency is aware of this talent and encourages me to use it. I may be wrong sometimes, but on the whole, I do better than most of the other agents. The guys razz me a bit now and then—I use the name Joe Hunter, and around the office this often comes out as “Joe Huncher”—but they respect success, and don’t make a big deal of it.

  So I started searching the room, and I got a hunch.

  The radiator was an old-fashioned type, set back into the wall, with a grill over it flush with the wall. But the grill had been bent, and not well straightened. The top edge was pulled out
so it would be easy for something to slide inside and get down behind the radiator. I looked through the grill at the bottom, but there was nothing there. A lot of people would have stopped there.

  Not me. I had a hunch. With me, a hunch is like a mental itch, and it won’t go away until it’s scratched. I got out my Swiss Army knife, flipped open the screwdriver blade, and took off the grill. Still nothing visible, but still itching. Fortunately the weather was warm, and the heat was off, so I was able to put my face right up against the radiator and peer between the sections. Start at the top of one opening, and slide down. Nothing. Move to the next opening, and the next. Finally about two-thirds of the way across, I saw something stuck in back, and the itch stopped. I unbent a coat hanger and used the end of the wire to tease the something down until it slid out under the radiator and I had it.

  It was an empty envelope. It was addressed to Alan Green (Aha! Mr. Green had a first name), care of Postmaster, in the nearby town. No return address, but the postmark was fairly clear. Riverdale, Colorado. There was even a zip code. I had a feeling—didn’t need a real hunch on this one—that I would be going to Colorado, but I didn’t mind. This was going to be easy.

  Easy, hah! Riverdale, Colorado, hah! The little town that wasn’t there. I checked every reference source available to the Agency, and there is no Riverdale in Colorado. I checked all the historical records, and as far as I could find out, there has never been a Riverdale since Colorado was settled. A dead end.

  We checked out the zip code, but that was phony too. It was an unused number. If the zip code meant anything at all, it could narrow down our search a lot. It would have been from Colorado if it had been real, and it identified a particular part of the state. They might have picked a zip code that could have been assigned to their actual location. So I called for help, and we went over that part of Colorado with a fine-tooth comb.

  First the bad news. There was no place called Riverdale, or anything like Riverdale, in the area indicated by the zip code on the envelope. One might have concluded that the choice of state was also phony, but then we would have nothing to go on, so we decided to comb all of Colorado inch by inch. I know, I’ve got to be kidding. Colorado is a pretty big state, and a lot of it is impassable mountains. So what? Look, we had positive proof of aliens from outer space here on Earth, and we were prepared to expend any amount of effort searching for them. So we started searching. And now, the good news, we found it.

  Yeah, we found it. Purely by accident. Two of the guys pulled off the interstate for a rest stop. The way I heard the story, they got back in the car, and the driver started to pull back onto the interstate and continue. His partner looked at the map, looked around, and told him to wait a minute. The map showed the road they were on going east from that exit, but not west. The road, on the other hand, quite obviously went both ways. All the signs for gas and services directed people east, but the road looked just as good, maybe even a little better, going west. Just no signs to indicate that there was anything to be found in that direction. So of course they went west, and of course they ended up in Riverdale. Maybe I’m not the only one in the Agency to get hunches.

  That part of Colorado is right on the edge of the Rockies. Part of it is fairly flat, but part of it runs up into the mountains. Riverdale is a ways up the slope, about twenty miles from the interstate, with a road full of twenty miles of absolutely nothing in between. Beyond Riverdale, the ground is all broken up, full of valleys, canyons, and ravines, some of which could have concealed anything.

  If you got to Riverdale by accident, you’d never notice anything wrong. A couple of gas stations, a diner, a bar, a few stores. And a Post Office. Complete with a sign telling the world that this was the United States Post Office for Riverdale, Colorado, and giving the zip code—the same phony zip code that was on the envelope. When our agents pulled in, there were a few people on the streets, about what you’d expect in a place like that. Except they were all kind of tall and slender—men and women both—and all the ones whose hair was visible were blonde.

  Of course our men tried to get on the radio to call for reinforcements, but the radio was dead. Later we found out that several people had heard them calling HQ, and had heard HQ answer, but the two who were in Riverdale will swear up and down on a stack of Bibles that they didn’t hear a thing, that the radio was dead. They gave up on the radio and tried a couple of pay phones, but they couldn’t seem to get a line out of town. So they hopped back in the car and headed back toward the interstate. Twenty miles.

  Now the question arises, why didn’t one of them stay in Riverdale while the other left to get help? Agency policy dictates that one should have stayed, but they both left. Neither of them can explain it. It “seemed to be the right thing to do” according to one. Twenty miles back to the interstate, and the radio came alive when they were almost there, just before they would have found a phone anyway. Their call put every agent in that end of the state on Red Alert, and within a half an hour, a dozen cars had converged on that exit. I was in one of them.

  The two agents who had sent out the call sat and waited until there was a good force assembled, and then led the way back up the road to Riverdale. Why didn’t they go as soon as they had sent the alert? I don’t know, and they don’t seem to either. Altogether, what with the twisty mountain roads, and waiting for reinforcements, it was nearly two hours from the time they left Riverdale until the time we all got back.

  Did I say you’d never notice anything wrong in Riverdale? Well, you might not have before this mess started and Alan Green got killed. But when we got there in force, we noticed one thing wrong. One big thing. No people. None. The whole place was deserted. The aliens had had two hours, and they had pulled out.

  In the investigation that followed, we were forced to the conclusion that they had made our agents. Made them and hypnotized them. That was the only explanation why the two who found Riverdale cleared out and delayed coming back, even getting the group at the interstate exit to “wait for a few more.” Me, I don’t know. I was one of the last to arrive, and I was only there a couple of minutes before we left, so I couldn’t say if there was any kind of compulsion. Nobody got any black marks on his record for it, but I suspect the original two may have some dark gray marks in the minds of the supervisors. I haven’t noticed them getting any really good assignments lately…

  When we got back to Riverdale, the place was deserted. We mounted guards around the town and closed down the road. Then, over the next week, we took the place apart looking for clues. I mean, we literally took the place apart. When we got through, there wasn’t a single brick on top of another in the whole place. Before, it didn’t exist in the sense that it wasn’t on any map. After, it didn’t exist period.

  We also checked out the road on the other side of town, but that was a dead end, in several senses. About a mile west, the pavement ended. The dirt road continued for another couple of miles, getting narrower and rougher until the cars wouldn’t make it. Several agents went in on foot, but in another half mile they couldn’t even see where the road was, so they came back. We let the road go while we looked for clues in the town. It wasn’t until after the town was completely demolished and analyzed, with pretty much negative results, that we got around to the road and tried to trace it farther. It also occurred to someone that, while we hadn’t noticed any side roads along the stretch from the highway to the town, the people had to have gone somewhere, and maybe we had better check that possibility out too.

  Have you seen those weird-colored aerial photos they do with infrared film? Either aerial or sometimes satellite? The photos show land in various shades of yellow and orange, depending on what’s growing, and show bodies of water as black. Well, there have been some further advances in this field, most of them highly classified, and we had access to the latest and greatest techniques. So we called in a few choppers and had them cover the area. Sure enough, the road to the west of town continued well beyond the point where we had lost
it. It ran on for another few miles, and then down the side of a medium-sized canyon, and up to the front of a large house in the canyon. Bingo!

  We put that house under full surveillance and got ready to move in. I told you, at the investigation we concluded these aliens had hypnotized our agents, and we decided to take that idea seriously. The radio dead spot around the town was gone, or had never really been there, but we took in satellite radio links so we could talk to headquarters better than we could to someone down by the interstate. We set up the same kind of watch around the house. There were at least a dozen video cameras trained on the house at all times, and the pictures were being watched by trained observers over two thousand miles away, out of range—we hoped!—of any hypnotism. The road was blocked, again with remote observer backup.

  The day we were going to move in, we went even further. We scrambled a squadron of SAC’s finest fighters. I mean, these were extraterrestrials, so they must have gotten here on a spaceship, right? We wanted air cover if their ship tried to take off. I think we had ideas of forcing it down again if it did. Figuring the Air Force’s track record on flying saucers, this seems kind of silly in retrospect, but we did it.

  Finally everything was ready, and we went in. Our first clue that something was fishy came as we were inching along that almost nonexistent road, trying to follow the aerial photos. We had the remote observer cameras on, and one of the guys in D.C. asked us rather sarcastically what the heck we thought we were doing? Why didn’t we just follow the road? On a video screen two thousand miles away, the underbrush we were fighting our way through wasn’t there, and we were walking along a smooth, well-graded dirt road. Damn! Hypnotism again. Even knowing about it didn’t clear it up, but having the guys in D.C. guide us let us make better time than trying to follow the aerial photos.