Fade Out

by Patrick Tilley

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Connors.

  Behind him, Wedderkind cried out sharply as if in pain. ‘Meshuggener!’

  Over his shoulder, Connors saw three jeeploads of cadets put daylight under their wheels as they shot up the slope and on to the plateau. ‘It’s okay, look, there’s some help on the way.’

  The roughnecks’ jeep slid to a halt. Lee and the four others in the back piled out with sledgehammers and watched as T-Bone put his foot on the gas pedal and reversed in four-wheel drive.

  Connors grabbed Kinner’s arm. ‘Can you block that jeep?’

  ‘Yes, sir-r-r,’ said Kinner. He stepped on the gas so hard he nearly lost his distinguished passengers overboard. Ahead of them, Friday struggled to his feet but before he could move out of the way, T-Bone ploughed backward over Friday’s front right leg and rammed into his feelers and eye pod with a sickening crunch.

  ‘Hang on tight!’ yelled Kinner.

  As T-Bone curved away backward over the uneven ground, Kinner hit him with a glancing blow that shot T-Bone out of his seat and put his jeep into a slow roll. Connors was better braced for the impact. While Wedderkind was still picking himself up off the floor, Connors thumped Kinner on the back and dropped out of the jeep.

  ‘Don’t stop till you get to Rockville.’

  The cadet put his foot down and carried Wedderkind out of cursing range. Connors ran back to the roughnecks.

  ‘Okay, just hold everything right there!’

  Lee Ryder pointed a huge finger at him. ‘Shut your ass, Connors.’

  As Aaron and Fish blocked off Connors, T-Bone ran limping from the overturned jeep.

  ‘Better hurry, Lee. We’ve got trouble from the Air Force.’

  ‘No sweat,’ said Lee. ‘We’ve got them outnumbered.’

  Lee, Cab, and Dixie only had about thirty seconds before the cadets surrounded them, but to Connors it seemed like thirty minutes as Friday was struck with a rapid series of massive, alternating blows every third one of which was delivered by Lee with the force of a huge piledriver.

  When the cadets made their grab, Connors tensed up in anticipation of a barroom brawl. Nothing happened. Lee just dropped his sledgehammer and offered no resistance. The other five did the same. Connors pushed his way through to confront Lee.

  ‘Do you realize you may have just screwed up this whole operation?’

  ‘Tough shit…’ growled T-Bone.

  Connors ignored him. ‘But why, Lee? I mean, what were you trying to prove?’

  ‘Nothin’. I just wanted to get in a few licks for Max.’ Lee stared back at Connors.

  Connors looked at the other five. A few licks for Max… It was as simple as that. They were all quite unrepentant. And with good cause. What the hell could he hit them with, destroying extraterrestrial property? The worst that could happen would be losing their jobs with the CIA. Big deal… ‘Get them out of here,’ he said wearily.

  Connors turned to look at Friday. His black crystal skin had caved in like the laminated windshield of a car. Patches of frost had formed on the three unbroken body panels and two of his legs. The battering had obviously knocked his cooling system out of action. Kinner returned with Wedderkind, Tompkin, and Davis. Neame and the three other engineers were in a second jeep behind them. They got out to survey the damage.

  ‘Meesemachine die verbrecher… how could we hire such people?’

  ‘There wasn’t a lot I could do, Arnold.’

  ‘Well, you tried, anyway…’ Wedderkind gave Connors a perfunctory pat on the back.

  Thanks a bunch…

  Friday hauled himself more or less upright and began to crawl back towards Crusoe, trailing his three broken legs behind him. The four feelers were flattened and twisted. The eye pod had taken a brutal battering.

  Wedderkind turned to Tompkin. ‘What do you think, Vic? Is he going to make it?’

  Tompkin looked doubtful. ‘I would guess that whoever designed Friday must have envisaged the possibility of his losing a leg or two. It’s the damage to the carapace, eye pod, and pedipalps that may be more serious.’

  ‘There’s also the small problem of how he is going to open the hatch without the right number of serviceable feet,’ said Connors.

  ‘I would think that situation must have been foreseen too,’ said Tompkin. ‘In any case, we’ll soon know the answer.’

  Friday lurched sideways and blundered into a stake. He backed off, felt his way around it, then zigzagged off to the right of Crusoe and walked slap into another stake.

  ‘They must have blinded him,’ said Davis.

  ‘Savages,’ muttered Wedderkind, ‘Savages…’

  Connors thought back to what Wetherby had said about the characters in Robinson Crusoe, and the savages who had finally succeeded in killing Friday. Was this the role that Man had been assigned in this updated version of the story?

  ‘You’re all talking as if he’s alive,’ said Neame. ‘It’s a repair problem. Crusoe’s bound to have a few spare parts tucked away somewhere.’

  ‘Is that all you feel about it?’ snapped Wedderkind.

  ‘Well, I don’t feel any moral outrage, Arnold. It’s just a piece of machinery. I admit that I no more enjoy seeing him smashed up than I would enjoy watching those goons go ape over a computer or a Steinway concert grand. But I don’t look on him as one of the family.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ said Wedderkind. ‘Maybe we all should.’ He turned his back on them and hurried after Friday.

  ‘I think we’re crazy to let him go back to Crusoe.’

  Connors looked at Gilligan. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because now this has happened, Crusoe may not feel like swapping Dan, Chris, and Max. In fact, the three of them may not be hostages at all.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Specimens – in which case, I think we deserve a specimen too.’

  They got into the jeeps and drove over to Crusoe. Wedderkind was standing at the edge of the hull already. Despite what Neame had said, Connors had come to regard Friday as something more than a machine. Faced with the sight of this broken body struggling towards safety, Connors’ feelings were a mixture of sympathy and fear. Within him, there was a desire to help. Yet, at the same time, he felt exultant at the near destruction of this object which stirred up a host of irrational fears within him.

  Friday dragged himself over to Crusoe and climbed up towards the dome like a rundown clockwork toy. Halfway up the curving hull, his remaining right legs locked solid and his two undamaged left legs buckled under him. Friday keeled over in slow motion, then slid sideways down the hull onto the earth at the rim of the spacecraft.

  Connors eyed Neame. ‘Looks as if he’s here to stay.’

  Friday didn’t move as they crowded around him. Tompkin hooked a stethoscope into his ears and sounded him out carefully. He looked up at Wedderkind and shook his head.

  ‘Great…’ muttered Neame to Gilligan. ‘Now we can take him apart.’

  Another jeep carrying Brecetti, Lovell, Armenez, and Page pulled up behind them. They joined the group and surveyed the damage.

  ‘Look,’ said Page. ‘He’s turning grey.’

  Page was right. A grey opaque film was spreading outward from the damaged body panels, dulling the deep brilliance of the black crystal the way a cataract clouds a human eye.

  ‘Arnold, can we take him over to the lab?’ asked Neame.

  Wedderkind nodded. Gilligan waved to the driver of the nearest jeep and got him to back up. Dark brown blotches started to appear on Friday’s greying skin.

  ‘You’d better hurry,’ said Page. ‘It looks as if that crystalline coating is unstable. If he’s made of organic…’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ said Neame. ‘You’ll bring us bad luck. Jess, Lew, give us a hand with this thing.’

  Vincent and Hadden moved to help Neame and Gilligan.

  ‘Okay, spread out. Get a grip under the body somewhere and lift on three, right? One, two, three – ’

  Gilliga
n was holding two of the stiffened right legs at the point where they joined the body. When they were halfway to the jeep, both legs snapped clean off.

  ‘Goddammit, Steve, the idea is to get this thing back in one piece.’ The words were no sooner out when the eye pod Neame was holding sheared away from the body. Before anyone could grab him, Friday slipped out of Vincent and Hadden’s grasp, hit the ground and split apart like a cheap plaster ornament.

  ‘I thought that might happen’, said Page.

  Neame turned on Page with a snarl. ‘Listen, if you’re such a fucking wise guy, why don’t you help pick this thing up?’

  ‘Gentlemen, please!’ protested Lovell.

  ‘Creep…’ muttered Neame.

  ‘Cool it,’ said Connors. ‘If you guys don’t get this together fast, we’ll need a vacuum cleaner.’

  Neame and the others turned back to look at Friday’s fractured body. Whatever had been packed inside had collapsed into a meaningless junkheap of gooey crystals, honeycombed with decay. Brown blotches spread rapidly through Friday’s greying skin, then spots of dark, fungoid yellow began devouring the brown. But as always, there was a twist. Friday was not only decomposing, he was disappearing.

  Connors sniffed the air. ‘I know that smell… what is it?’

  ‘Jasmine,’ said Davis.

  Connors shook his head. ‘Crazy…’ He watched the group slide Friday’s fragments into clear plastic bags and place them carefully on a thick sheet of foam in the back of one of the jeeps. Neame spent several minutes manoeuvring a leg segment into a bag. Although it was heavily pitted with brown and yellow blotches, he managed to get it as far as the jeep in one piece, but as he laid it down it crumbled apart like a dried corn husk. Neame thumped the side of the jeep in anger and jarred some more fragments into dust.

  ‘That was a dumb thing to do,’ said Gilligan. He had just spent ten minutes picking up those particular pieces.

  Neame slapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Jeez, I’m sorry, Steve. Hell, this whole thing’s pointless.’

  ‘Not completely,’ said Page. ‘Microscopic and chemical tests of the fragments will at least give some indication of what Friday was made of.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong, the process hasn’t stopped. Look –’ Neame held up a small bag of powdered fragments, ‘– it’s still decaying. It’s even started to eat away the plastic bag.’

  ‘Has anybody got any ideas on what we can do?’ asked Wedderkind.

  ‘What can we do?’ said Neame. ‘We’re screwed both ways. If we drive back to the lab too fast the fragments will shake to pieces. If we drive too slowly, there’ll be nothing left by the time we get there.’

  Connors turned to Page and Armenez. ‘I think it’d be a good idea if you got this batch over to the lab while these guys pick up the rest.’

  Page was already in the jeep before Connors had finished speaking. Armenez helped Neame lay a second sheet of foam over the bagged fragments, then climbed aboard. Neame went back to help the others.

  A fast drive across the plateau was normally a real boneshaker but with some prompt pathfinding by Page the ride back to the lab was almost as smooth as Sonja Henie on ice. Unfortunately, almost was not quite good enough. When Page and Armenez peeled back the top layer of plastic foam, there was nothing left. Friday’s decaying fragments had gnawed through the plastic bags and had gouged out deep holes in the foam layer underneath before eating themselves out of existence.

  The remaining consignment was conveyed with equal care and speed but, once again, only the plastic bags made it as far as the field lab. A microscopic analysis and tests on the bags, the pitted foam sheet, and the soil on to which Friday had fallen revealed nothing. No new chemical compounds, no mutant molecules, no alien organisms. Nothing that could tell them how he was made or how he moved or whether he had ever been, technically, alive.

  Even in his manner of dying, Friday had still managed to outsmart them.

  Connors left Wedderkind to commiserate with the research group. He found Allbright about to have lunch in his trailer and was invited to join him.

  ‘I’d like to thank you for straightening out that situation on the plateau.’

  ‘I wish we could have got there sooner,’ said Allbright.

  ‘Yes…’ Connors pressed his lips together. ‘Still – I don’t think any of us anticipated this kind of reaction from anyone on the project.’

  ‘I should have.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Connors. ‘I think we were lucky you managed to lay hands on three jeeploads of cadets so quickly.’

  ‘Yes…’ Allbright’s eyes didn’t waver.

  ‘And we have at least learned one thing from this fiasco. When it came to the crunch, Friday was surprisingly vulnerable.’

  It was this discovery that had spurred Connors into some fertile speculation. Crusoe and Friday had both demonstrated an uncanny ability to render useless most of Man’s most sophisticated technology, yet Crusoe had been brought to the surface by good old-fashioned gelignite stuffed down a hole in the ground, and Friday had been run over by an automobile. In spite of the much-quoted idea of a telepathic link, neither Crusoe nor Friday appeared to have been forewarned of the roughnecks’ intentions – or to have been able to turn them off the idea. Admittedly that was in line with Wedderkind’s theory of a benign mental contact, which used suggestion, not coercion. And yet, and yet… The knowledge that Crusoe, if he had wanted to, could have immobilized the roughnecks’ jeep with his force field slapped a big, complicated question mark over everything.

  ‘Do you think Crusoe might respond to the same treatment?’ asked Allbright.

  ‘He might,’ said Connors. ‘I imagine a lot would depend on how big a stick you hit him with. Lee Ryder suggested filling Crusoe’s inner hatch with nitroglycerine, which would detonate when the spheres rotated but before the inner sphere had time to depressurize. Crusoe must have heard him, because after the time Spencer’s oxygen supply ran out, the hatches never opened again.’

  ‘Do I gather from what you say that “brute force” is now an acceptable concept?’

  ‘It’s never been unacceptable to me, General. I’ve always regarded its controlled application as one of the options open to us in this type of situation. However, I think Arnold and the others may have some trouble taking the idea on board. But there are ways around that.’

  ‘Several,’ said Allbright. ‘What do you want me to do about Max’s roughnecks?’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘Under guard in one of the trailers.’

  ‘I’ll call up McKenna and have them transferred. If they stay here, some of the research group may try and put litmus paper in their cornflakes.’ Connors swore quietly to himself. ‘I don’t understand how dummies like that could be recruited by the CIA.’

  ‘They all had good combat records,’ said Allbright.

  ‘Yes, I know, but the point is they still fouled up.’

  ‘Maybe they did, but the net result is that we now only have one problem instead of two.’

  ‘I wish I felt so optimistic,’ said Connors. ‘Crusoe could be full of those damn things, and the next one out may not be so cuddly.’

  ‘So what do you plan to do?’

  Connors finished the piece of steak he had on his fork before replying. ‘If we set aside the people killed in the air crashes, we’ve lost four men. One killed, three missing and presumed dead, another has lost half his face and all his fingers, and six more have just hammered their way out of the CIA pension fund. Okay… we can argue that our casualties are due to our own clumsiness. Crusoe isn’t rampaging up and down the countryside dispensing death and disaster but it poses a threat all the same. There’s the constant possibility of another prolonged period of fade-out. Arnold still maintains that the problems created by Crusoe stem purely from his self-protective posture. He may be right. There’s still no percentage in it for us. Scientifically, Crusoe may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but politically,
militarily and economically, he is a total, unmitigated disaster.’

  Allbright smiled. ‘I appreciate your concern. I was under the impression you might have been pleased to see some of the hawks humbled.’

  ‘There’s one thing you should never forget, General. To get his half of the Nobel Peace Prize, Kissinger bombed Le Duc Tho all the way from Hanoi to Paris. It’s no secret that I’m one hundred per cent behind the President’s drive to remove the threat of a nuclear holocaust and see an end to all wars – but don’t get me wrong. This nation must remain strong – but that strength is meaningless unless America also occupies the moral high-ground.’ He grinned. ‘Until we reach that lofty position, I believe in carrying a lead-weighted olive branch.’

  ‘Okay, you’re reclassified. What next?’

  Connors pushed his plate away and draped an arm over the back of his chair. ‘I know, deep down, that this is the most fantastic thing that ever happened to any of us, but when you consider the problems it’s landed us with, I mean, really – who needs it?’

  Certainly not the Air Force. Which was probably why Allbright didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

  Connors leaned forward on the table. ‘I’m flying back to Washington later today with a new batch of tapes. In my report to the President, I will recommend termination of the Crusoe Project.’

  ‘Immediately?’

  ‘I’m prepared to give Arnold’s team another week. There’s always the chance that they may come up with something.’

  ‘Does the research group know of this decision?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll break the news to them when it’s official.’

  ‘And then?’

  Connors smiled. ‘I imagine the ball will be in your court.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Allbright.

  ‘Well, we just can’t leave him here to become a tourist attraction,’ said Connors. ‘We’re going to have to blow him out of the ground. The problem is, we don’t know what we’re letting ourselves in for. It’s impossible to predict how Crusoe will react to an attempt to destroy him – although he didn’t exactly rush in to defend Friday. But if we go in, we have to get it right first time. We may only get one bite at this apple – so we can’t piddle around with high explosives. It’s going to have to be a nuke. Right?’