by R. E. Klein
“Then the quicker they pull off the suit, the better he’ll be. If he’s alive, he has to eat. He has to breathe. Alive or dead—why should he stay in a space suit? It doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s what they said, Ellen. They burned it on my brain.”
“Richard. Bring Gordon back. Let the doctors look at him.”
“They must not pull off that space suit!”
“Why not?”
“Terrible things will happen if they do.”
“What?”
“I don’t know . . .” his voice faltered.
An early-morning breeze arose from nowhere. She held him, silently, and felt the air wash over them. Only they existed—herself, Richard, the wind, and, of course, the night.
The breeze stopped after a while.
“Where have you got him?” she asked softly.
“In an abandoned farmhouse a few miles outside of town.” He was calm now. “It’s fenced off from the public, surrounded by empty fields and sycamore trees. I used to play there as a kid. I drove a fair distance after I hid Gordon’s body. I left the ambulance on a side street and caught a ride here. Will you help me, Ellen?”
“What can I do?”
“We’ve got to get Gordon away from them. There’s no time now; it’s nearly daylight. It will have to be tonight. In your car. They won’t suspect a woman alone. We’ll put him in the trunk. You’ll drive him somewhere where they can’t find him, then phone me to join you. Meet me at the farmhouse as soon as it’s dark.”
“Richard, call the base. Tell them everything. They’ll listen to you.”
“What if they don’t listen?” His grip fastened on her arm. “We may have to hide out for a couple of days. Bring water and food—and blankets; it gets cold in that farmhouse—also, any money you have. If you get there before me, I’ve got Gordon inside, covered up. Don’t look at him.”
“What are you talking about? I’m a nurse. I’m used to . . . sights.”
“Not this one, Ellen. No one can look at this one and remain sane.”
“Richard!”
“I’ll try to be there before you. But if not, remember, whatever you do, don’t look at Gordon.”
“What you’re asking is crazy. We are breaking the law. You took an ambulance; you stole Gordon’s body. On top of that, you don’t even trust me to do the things I’ve been trained to do. I don’t care how bad Gordon looks. If I’m going to help you, I need to know what I’m getting myself into.”
“You’re right, Ellen. It’s better if I do it alone. I can rent a car, alter my appearance. I’ll call you once I’ve got Gordon safely away.”
She laid her arm on his shoulder. “How do I get to this farmhouse?”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Take Sycamore Road to the end. There’s a hole in the chain-link fence directly across from the road marker. You can’t see the hole till you get behind the trees. Once through the fence walk straight till you come against a wooden post. Then bear right. You’ll come upon the farmhouse suddenly out of the trees. Above all, make certain you aren’t followed. Got that?” She nodded.
“Ellen”—he took her hand—“I’m begging you to humor me in this other thing. Please promise me you won’t look at Gordon. Trust me, Ellen. Please.”
She bit her lip. “All right,” she said. “I promise.”
“It will be light in a few hours. I’ll have to hide somewhere.”
“Do you want me to drop you at that farmhouse, now?”
“No. I need to be close to a phone. Not your house—it will be watched. I’ll try to get them looking in the wrong direction.”
She was beginning to see him now in the pale flush of the false dawn. He looked tired and—frail, so frail. He held her close for an instant.
“Richard—” she started to say.
But he was gone.
She had seen it dozens of times in patients that sustained injuries. The wild talk, the paranoia.
“But at least he’s alive,” she said aloud. Richard was in trouble; that was all that she knew. If he went to jail for breaking the law—well, so would she. She sat for a moment on the park bench—their park bench—and smiled. This day was to be their honeymoon.
• • •
The first thing she did when she got home was to put together a bag of groceries, along with a parcel containing a flashlight, blankets, and her old Girl Scout canteen, all of which she stowed in the trunk of her car, beside her beautifully packed suitcase. She slept some, and spent the day in her apartment, resting to be refreshed against the night. Drake, the government man, stopped by at noon but left after a few minutes. As the day wore on, she was aware of cars and vans moving down her street, parking along the curb and waiting.
Just before sunset, she drove to the hospital and stopped inside at the nurses’ station to extend her leave of absence, then headed downtown.
When she had driven the length of the business district, she turned suddenly down a residential street, making certain no one followed her. Cautiously, she guided her car back to the main street, then onto the highway. Except for an occasional car coming the other way, hers was the only car on the road. Finally she reached Sycamore Road.
The October sun scorched the fields red as it settled into the Earth. She left her car alongside the culvert where the street dead-ended and forced her way beneath a forest of branches till she came up against the chain-link fence, invisible behind the clusters of dusty sycamores.
She found the hole only because Richard had told her where it would be, drowned in foliage. Beyond the hole she waded through a wilderness of closely packed trees, bushes, and vines, suddenly coming upon something wooden, nearly smothered in the mounds of dusty vegetation, and knew it must be the farmhouse. Brushing aside the creepers, she gained the porch and pushed her way in through the partially opened wooden door. It was an old, shabby farmhouse, of one big room and several smaller ones, nearly dark for the foliage outside, full of dust, dry as October. And something else, not of the farmland.
In a corner of the main big room something lay covered up by an old blanket. She could just make out what must be the bulge of the helmeted space suit. Dust motes floated in the disturbed air, almost like stars swirling. Maybe it was the flat, dead air that made her feel a giddy sense of motion. She took a breath to steady herself. Richard would join her soon. Maybe by then he would have come to his senses. Maybe even now he was reporting to the base. Maybe.
The sun had gone out of the room, and she switched on her flashlight, scattering shadows, playing the beam around the room, all except for the corner. Everything of value had long ago been removed or rotted away. What remained were the broken things that peel off people’s lives. The frayed and tattered ghosts of what might have been window curtains. The skeleton of a bureau. The fragments of a chair. For a moment she darted the beam onto the wrapped thing in the corner. And Gordon.
Why was she here—alone with a corpse? Why was she breaking the law? For what? To humor a man in shock, a man with delusional fantasies?
But the man was Richard.
She stared at the splintered walls, the floor littered with blown leaves, the dark mass of foliage growing through the glassless window and partially opened door. And she thought of the tattered things that peeled off her life—her life before Richard.
She hadn’t wanted to become a nurse. She wanted to study art. Medicine was too close a reminder of what happened on that field trip with the Girl Scouts. A nurse can always get a job, her mother told her. You have to take care of yourself because you might never know. She went on to nursing and found she enjoyed it. Nursing became her life. And now Richard was her life, just as her Girl Scouts had been, and her years at college.
The room grew colder. She wrapped herself inside a blanket and made herself comfortable on the floor.
It hadn’t been a bad life so far. The only really bad thing that ever happened to her was on that field trip to the science fair; that is w
here she saw those things—babies that should have been teething and crying, but floated white and wrinkled in jars of alcohol, curls of unraveled skin fluttering dreamily from tiny exposed bones. Because of this she nearly fell apart; she left the Girl Scouts, and her mother kept her out of school for a semester. Years later she became a nurse.
Now she thought of all the happy movies she ever saw, and the funny things that happened to her at nursing school, and how good it would be when she and Richard were married. She yawned and wrapped her blanket more tightly around her. She forgot the jars of alcohol, and she forgot Gordon.
She woke because something was making sounds. Stray shafts of moonlight found their way down to Earth to steal through the gaps among the dusty foliage and into the farmhouse, so the room was not wholly dark. Moreover, her flashlight, still turned on, lay on the floor a few inches away, fruitlessly scattering its beam against the splintered wall.
Something was making sounds, a kind of heavy breathing, painfully loud in the compressed silence. Her mouth went dry; icy spasms invaded her back. She couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t move. Yet her body shook; her whole body shook. The sounds grew louder. The flashlight lay a few feet away. Could she crawl over and get it? Did she want to see what breathed?
She made her body move, but it shook so she could not at first hold the flashlight. Chilling waves coursed up and down her trembling body as she made her fingers grip the handle.
Rising to her feet, she deliberately aimed the beam straight at the sound. The blanket over the body was heaving up and down. She looked at her watch and mentally made a note. At 3:10 A.M, her training told her, the body began to breathe. Gordon’s covered body stirred with motion. Like rats crawling under the blanket. Ghostly fear gave way to the rational. Maybe that’s what it was—rats. As awful as it was, she had to know. Gingerly she crept over, her flashlight gripped in one hand, the other hand extended till, with thumb and forefinger, she lifted a fold of the blanket. The flashlight beam illuminated a glimpse of padded space suit, the shoulder and chest—the fabric alive—rippling back and forth—like wet glistening skin. The head, still in shadow, was turning slowly into the light. But before this happened she fainted onto the floor.
It took her a while to remember where she was when she awoke. And when she did, she didn’t want to. It was still dark, and something stood over her. It was better, her mind screamed, to lie here, and never to move, never to move or think or be, because this is a thing that should not happen. But maybe it could. Something made a noise.
“Gordon?” she whispered.
“They nearly had me.” Richard’s voice. “I couldn’t get away till a few minutes ago. They tried to follow me, but I lost them. I’m sure I lost them. Ellen, where is he? Why have you moved him?”
“Moved him?” was all she could say. “Moved him?”
“Gordon. He’s gone.”
• • •
“We’ve got to find him. How? How?”
“It’s out of our hands now. Call the base. Let them deal with it.”
“No. No. I can’t. Whatever they did to him up there, they must have done for a reason.”
“It must be a horrible reason.”
“Whatever it is, we’ve got to find him. What happened tonight?”
“I fell asleep. I woke up when I heard the breathing. I pulled the blanket back a little. Gordon’s space suit was . . . quivering like live skin.”
“Did you see his face, Ellen?”
“No. I fainted.”
“Thank goodness.” He slammed his hand against the wall. “Who are they?” he exploded. “What do they want? Maybe it’s some experiment in genetic engineering. Maybe they want to make Gordons out of all of us!”
“You say we need to find him. How will we find him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want you even to look at him. I don’t want anyone to look at him.”
She put her arms around Richard’s shoulders.
“Let’s wait till morning, darling. We can’t do anything till morning.”
They sat together on Ellen’s blanket, his arm around her waist. The night air blew through the partially opened door.
“I never told you, Ellen, but I used to have dreams about beings that changed people into monsters. When I was eleven, I was horrified nearly into a nervous breakdown by a science fiction picture I saw.
“And there was the principal of the high school I went to—I used to work for him—cut lawns, clean up. One day he invited me inside the house and showed me what was in one of the closets. It was nothing but a bag of golf clubs. But those golf clubs scared me half out of my mind. We moved right away to another neighborhood, another school. But for months I expected the principal to come and take me back to that closet.”
His arm grew tighter around her. “All my life I’ve been afraid of—I don’t know what.”
“I have been too, darling. I saw something at a science fair that frightened me so much my mother kept me out of school.”
“Gordon, too, was terrified as a child; he wouldn’t say how or what did it. He became the class clown; otherwise, he would have exploded, he told me. Want to hear something else? I’ve had a phrase in my head, nearly as long as I can remember: Fear rules the universe.”
She moved closer to him. “Richard, that sounds so familiar . . . I’ve heard that, too, or maybe I dreamed it. It’s so odd. You and I and Gordon . . .”
“I’m not even sure why they kept us in the space program. Both of us made a lot of blunders early on, but everyone just seemed to ignore them.”
“Richard, there’s someone outside.”
“What?”
“I hear someone outside. Listen.”
Something cracked a dry board on the front porch.
“He’s come back. I hadn’t thought of that.”
The partially opened door began to open wider.
Richard snapped off the flashlight. “It’s better if you don’t see him. Gordon, Gordon, in here!”
The room erupted with blinding light.
“Richard!”
“Close your eyes, Ellen. Don’t look at him. Gordon, in here.”
“Who are all these men? Let go. Let go I say!”
• • •
She sat in a black-padded armchair in a white room, empty of furnishings save for a desk, a larger chair, and meaningless modern art on bleak white walls. Behind the desk, on the larger chair, sat a man with a smooth and quiet voice.
“Feel okay now?” he asked. The nameplate on the desk said COLONEL SHELDON.
“Yes. Much better.”
“It’s always upsetting to be arrested.” He smiled, and studied his watch. “That was nearly three hours ago. You were fed, made comfortable, treated well?”
“Very well.”
“Well enough to talk to me?”
She nodded.
He opened a manila folder before him on the desk, consulted the sheaves of paper inside, then returned to her.
“I understand you are a nurse. Did you examine Major Gordon’s body?”
“No.”
“Did you, ah, study his face?”
“I haven’t seen it. Richard—Major Lockyer—told me not to look.”
He wrote something down.
“Miss Crane, what has Major Lockyer told you of his work here?”
“He said he pilots spaceships.” She knew it sounded wrong even before she saw the raised eyebrows.
“Spaceships. I see.” He wrote something more. “It makes sense now. Miss Crane,” he said gently. “You know, don’t you, that your fiancé is addicted to watching cheap science-fiction movies?”
“No.”
“Then you probably are not aware that he suffered a nervous breakdown from watching a science-fiction movie when he was eleven years old.”
“Yes. He told me about that.”
“Did he tell you that when he was sixteen, he was expelled from school for insisting that the principal was an alien from outer space?”
“That seems to be his pattern, Miss Crane, to retreat into science fiction when life becomes unbearable. Miss Crane, the Air Force doesn’t conduct spaceflights. And spaceflights don’t originate at Air Force bases. Your fiancé and Major Gordon were testing an experimental plane. There was an explosion, which killed Major Gordon. Major Lockyer adverted to science fiction because he can’t accept the fact that his best friend is dead.”
“No,” she said. “Major Gordon is changed into something horrible. I saw his space suit. It was like skin.”
“You saw this?”
“Yes. The skin moved back and forth.”
He consulted the sheaves of paper once more. He seemed annoyed with her when he finally answered.
“Miss Crane, that space suit is made of a synthetic that looks like skin. It has a built-in respiratory process. It is supposed to move.”
“But the whole body moved after I fainted. The whole body walked out the door!”
“I’m afraid Major Lockyer carried it away while you slept.”
“Gordon—”
“Gordon is dead, Miss Crane. The body needs to be buried. We need to find out from Major Lockyer where he hid it. Did he say anything—I mean anything short of science fiction—as to why he took the body?”
“No, only that the space people told him he had to keep Gordon inside the space suit. May I see Major Lockyer now?”
He closed the file on the desk.
“Major Lockyer is restricted to base pending further investigation.”
“When can I see him?”
“I’m afraid not for a while.” He smiled and took her hand. “I wouldn’t worry much. We’ll soon have him well again. Good night, Miss Crane. Someone will drive you home.”
She let herself be led from the room at the base, conveyed to a jeep, driven to her apartment. All the time she was as silent as the man who drove her home. It was not until she was inside her apartment with the door safely locked that she felt she could breathe freely. Now as she stood by her bedside, the useless suitcase again on the bed, the picture of Richard, unwinking from the nightstand, she pondered the question she was reluctant to ask.