Letters to the Cyborgs

by Judyth Baker

  Alt guffawed. “Isn’t that CUTE?”

  Crawley tried to think. His brain was trying to alert him, to tell him that something was wrong, terribly wrong.… He shut his eyes and squeezed his hands against his ears. Ah. Yes. They were lost in space. And here they were laughing. And that thing28 was flying right into the sun, just like a–

  “It’s a Phoenix!” he blurted out to Alt, who was sitting on the flooring now, gazing stupidly at his feet.

  “I never appreciated you properly,” Alt was telling his feet.

  “Listen, jerk,” Crawley said. “Listen to yourself! you’re laughing – and it’s a Phoenix–”

  “A Phoenix?” Alt murmured, getting to his feet. “Oh, the pretty thing that’s going at the sun.”

  Crawley could feel his head wanting to explode with laughter. He felt like an imbecile. He tried to talk, but his voice came out squeaky with merriment.

  “Solar system’s being destroyed,” he managed to say, then burst into a cackle. He shoved his fist into his mouth, desperately trying to stop the sound. He bit down, tasted blood. There were tears smarting in his eyes.

  “The solar system being destroyed,” he said again, pulling at the corners of his mouth with his nails. “Somehow–”

  “It’s important, isn’t it?” Alt said, smiling and patting Crawley on the back. “It’s okay. You can tell me. I like you, kid. I really really do like you.”

  “I think you’re wonderful, too,” Crawley said meekly. He smiled with happiness. His fingers were numb and icy against his mouth, and he wondered why he was tearing at his face with his hands. Then, fighting to remember, he jerked his eyes upwards, at the viewer. He saw a flowery-looking shadow, frilled at the edges, and hairy. It almost engulfed the viewer, but on the side viewer the uncluttered scene of the solar system and its strange visitor remained.

  The sun had received the Phoenix.

  Alt was singing something. He was not as happy as he had been. It was as if something in him had burned out. Crawley jerked his hands away from his mouth, let the laughter explode, with relief. He was so happy! Yet, before his eyes, billions of men were dying.

  “We’re men,” Crawley said viciously to Alt, kicking him. Alt looked at him like a heartbroken dog. “Get up,” Crawley said kicking him again. “Get up, you have to see this. Only–” He slapped his hands over his mouth, feeling the corners upturning with laughter once again. Alt was standing, almost solemn.

  “Look,” Crawley gasped, shaking his head monotonously to relieve it of the pressure. Alt was stamping his feet, trying also to look.

  “I understand,” he said, finally, to Crawley.

  “The sun is going Nova,” Crawley whispered.

  Over the central viewer all was darkness. Complex darkness, full of little wriggly things, as if a gigantic nose were pressed against the viewer’s round window with curiosity to see the contents of something tiny and held between two fingers, delicatekly, like a pea in its pod…29

  The sun was expanding. It was shooting out super-heat, super-light, a heat and light which eventually reached even the ship and its freezing occupants, postponing their death awhile.

  “So that’s what it’s like,” Alt said, grimly biting into his lower lip, grinding into it.30

  “The cute little people are probably broiling to death,” Crawley said, giggling.

  “If they only knew how nice it was to be out here,” Alt agreed, trying to stay erect, and somber.

  Tears of joy were flooding Crawley’s eyes. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that this would be the last thing that he would ever see, that man was being exterminated, that only a man could truly understand the enormity of that, and how infinitely sad it was.

  So, he thought, laughing, the Phoenix actually exists. It plunges into the sun, and from the sun comes…

  But he was watching, with joy, the new life bursting, not from the sun, but from the planets which surrounded the sun, which were one by one engulfed in its flaming mass. The slimy, parasite-ridden spheres that for all these long years had held their slowly-developing treasures, these slowly-growing treasures that needed only the sudden incubating warmth of the exploding sun to crack their iron shells, their icy shells, their slimy or gaseous shells.… And emerging, as the sun shrank back, sputtering and spent, the golden, red-feathered things, some large, from the large spheres, and some small, and razor-beaked, from the small spheres.

  He saw a brief, savage scene of fury between the large, female-breasted ones and the smaller, sharp-beaked males. The male who emerged from the moon-egg so long encircling the earth met the female, who came forth, dripping and glorious, from her own shell, ripping her blunter beak at the male, disembowelling him…

  Some of the males from the outer moons of Jupiter escaped the huge Phoenix which leapt out of that magnificent egg, which killed and tore to pieces almost all the other she-birds who still sat, dazed and angry, on the summits of their shells, still weaker than this mighty one who almost immediately flew, and, flying, collided with one she-Phoenix after another, destroying, destroying…

  “We are seeing the end of the solar system,” Crawley repeated, suddenly beginning, despite his happiness, to feel a fresh flow of despair.

  “My God,” Alt was saying, “Crawley, look at THAT–”

  “Another legend,” Crawley babbled, jerking out the appropriate words, his tongue forming them, but now no one listening, or able to understand. They were both overwhelmed with … and visible Mad Joy.31

  “LOVE! LOVE!” Alt wept, falling upon his face.

  Icicles were forming on Crawley’s face, but his lips, too, babbled words of love. His words came from an old text he had once read to amuse himself while enduring the long hours of silent waiting on Interspacial Training.

  The happiness was splitting his brain, cleaving his tongue. Darkness and the cold collided in his body with his joyously beating heart, the nerves that raced message after message of impossible good tidings through his vibrating body.

  “I HAVE SEEN THE ANGEL OF THE LORD!” Crawley’s tongue said.

  BubbaBubba whistled. He rolled the pea-sized capsule around and around; then, witless as all pacquilas, he let it sit on the Report, and the capsule was transported with it, in another instant, to the beloved High Feeler.

  The High Feeler smiled. He brushed the speckle of dust from the Report’s tube, and, Smiling Broadly, thrust the Report into his orifice. Then, having Understood, he closed his receptors to stimuli and he Rested.32

  Endnotes

  1. Operative, instead of operating: an example of one of Lee’s words that I didn’t quite catch.

  2. I probably did a lot of capitalizing that Lee would not have done.

  3. Lee said Neptune glowed, which is a remarkable coincidence, as this gas planet does, indeed, glow.

  “Neptune is the smaller of our solar system’s two ice giants. It is a very cold planet, with an average temperature of -329 degrees Fahrenheit. Neptune is made up mainly of hydrogen, helium, water, silicates, and methane. The methane gas absorbs all of the red light, which gives the planet’s surface a blue glow. Thick clouds cover Neptune’s surface and move at very high speeds of up to 1,300 mph. These winds created the largest storm ever recorded, called the Great Dark Spot of 1989, which lasted about five years. Neptune also has very thin rings made up of ice particles and dust grains that could be clumped together by a carbon-based substance.” Ref: https://engineering.purdue.edu/vossmod/neptune.php

  4. Lee uses “once” instead of “one.”

  5. Lee uses “don’t “ instead of “doesn’t.”

  6. There is a tiny “500” above the word “the” which marked 500 words in the story so far. We needed to know how many words were in the story for any prospective publishers.

  7. Though Lee said he named ‘Alt’ after Alton Ochnser, he describes him here as a young man. How odd. Ochsner was slender and black-haired when he was young.

  8. Sanelacium does not exist as a word, but solacium do
es. It is related to ‘console’ and refers to something that is comforting. Can we consider, since it is associated with Dreamglo, that it is some kind of psychotrope?

  9. “he had the book instead.” Lee loved to read and here he shows it.

  10. The story reaches 900 words here, according to the number over “together.”

  11. A sentence that needed to be revised!

  12. An animal that does not exist, nor did the word exist: Lee made this up.

  13. “Grateful/gratefully” shows up frequently in this story.

  14. I was curious as to why Lee was describing God as “The High Feeler” and Lee –laughing – said, “Didn’t God promise everybody eternal happiness if they made it to heaven? But how can they make it to heaven if they have to go through life on earth first?” Lee said Unnah could hardly bear to write a letter because he was all about “joy” and “fun.” In fact, Unnah would go crazy trying to get through just one ordinary day in a busy office on earth, which was full of tedious duties and bureaucracy. “Busy work,” Lee said, was driving sane people to drink and drugs every day. Then they could not go to heaven when they died. That was unfair! All of this simply provoked us to laughter.

  15. I added the semicolon to break up this run-on sentence back in 1963.

  16. Lee said he acquired this word (inimitable) just before meeting me. He would use it again when he asked me to marry him the first of one hundred times ( see p. 363, paper back edition, Me & Lee).

  17. Is Untarah both male and female? This sentence probably means that Bubba-Bubba gives what it catches to Unnah, who gives them to Untarah, as Untarah was introduced as a female in the first paragraph about Unnah.

  18. It seems Lee was trying to create an adjective out of the word ‘oval,’ since ‘ovule’ is the female reproductive organ of a flowering plant. A word I didn’t catch in typing Lee’s rewrite.

  19. An error that is odd, since it cannot be Crawley who just shouted.

  20. Remarkably, Lee seems to be mentioning a situation that could be caused if a warp-drive failed, some three years before Star Trek used the idea. (Star Trek began in 1966.)

  21. Lee uses many commas that I find unnecessary.

  22. I think I wrote this entire sentence.

  23. Page 12 has an “x” on each side of the number. That probably meant it had to be re-typed (too many errors still to be fixed from Lee’s manuscript). “I said, it don’t work” (instead of, “I said, it doesn’t work”) is an example of a grammatical error I didn’t catch when typing this ‘final’ edit for him. After reading it, apparently I scrolled back up and put x’s on each side to remind me that this page needed retyping.

  24.“It don’t work” is grammatically incorrect. Sometimes Lee also made this mistake, common in the South, orally.

  25. My addition to Lee’s original sentence was not a good idea.

  26. Only “und” remains, due to damage of the manuscript at this point.

  27. Damage to the manuscript required guesswork here.

  28. Lee said this was because their ship was so close to the ship sent out to make the Report to the High Feeler: the levity and laughter so important to Unnah’s notocord health was apparently contagious, or maybe “Joy” was leaking into space and affecting Alt, Crawley, and even the engines of the ship, while for Unnah the leakage meant he was suffering and would die. Lee said that Unnah and Bubba-Bubba had followed HER for at least a billion years.

  29. “Thing” should have been capitalized. This was probably a typo on my part.

  30. This no doubt is Unnah’s pet, BubbaBubba, looking into the ship’s window. The laughter and “joy” of the High Feeler’s Recording team was contagious.

  31. I have wondered, reading this, if this sentence had any influence on me, later, when I actually, in grief and anger, badly bit down on my own lip at Katzenjammer’s ( that incident is described in my book Me & Lee). I regret having inserted some words of my own into Lee’s story, thinking to improve it and thus removing some of the (better) simplicity.

  32. The top and bottom of the final page were cut off so that the first line at the top is missing. The various pages of “Her Way” were originally kept in two separate places as a white original, plus a carbon copy (typed on both pink and plain white sheets of paper). Over time, some pages were further separated from each other through accident or by design, as I did not keep all my evidence files and memorabilia together, fearing that they would reveal information I preferred to keep hidden. Today it seems almost a miracle that all 18 pages, except for one line, and a few words, survived. Indeed, at the end, no more than three or four pages were together. The last page was missing for a long time until a small box that had come to us from my deceased mother, full of various scraps of memorabilia about me, was opened. My daughter had kept the box, which had been in my mother’s garage and in her attic until she decided to remove what she deemed was salvageable.

  To my dismay, she and one of my sons went through the box and discarded what they considered too damaged to save, because it had been invaded by mice while stored in the garage. Thus, a few items of clothing that I had kept from 1963, which Lee had given me, as well as the swimsuit that I had kept many years, and which is seen on the cover of Me & Lee, were all discarded as worthless (!), though the see-through nightie and a black oriental-looking shirt that Lee had obtained for me – identical to a red one that I owned – were rescued. The box had been given to my mother to hold onto when I moved from Bradenton, Florida in 1994. I had returned to Bradenton in the mid-1980’s after divorcing Robert Baker, to raise my four remaining children in home territory by myself. After so much fruitless hunting, there was the last page, which I did not hear about until it had been ‘sanitized’ by cutting off the top and bottom, which, I was told, were mangled by those pesky mice.

  33. I believe Lee’s story influenced my decision to place many words in all caps, and to capitalize many other words, and to use a lot of dashes, when I began writing my own science fiction stories. One story in the collection of Letters to the Cyborgs dates from 1963. It was included in this collection, with a few sentences inserted to make it relevant to the Cyborg material, just as it was written. In that story, about trapping monkeys in the jungle by using hypnosis, my own writing style in 1963 has been preserved. That story came straight from an English writing assignment written using green ink and a fountain pen from spring, 1963, at University of Florida. I kept that story because coincidentally, Lee also used a fountain pen and green ink well into 1963, and in April 1963, I refilled my fountain pen with Sanford green ink from Lee’s own bottle. Notations that Lee wrote in green ink can be found in the Warren Commission’s handwriting analysis records. For that merely sentimental reason, I inserted the monkey story inside the final Cyborg story as a “relic” from humanity’s past, thus linking me and Lee in a way you would never guess, unless you read these very lines.

  Her Way: more comments about Lee’s science fiction story.

  Her Way was intended for publication. Lee had revised it twice, after which I typed it for him as “editor,” with many corrections. The original had been typed on good white paper. A xerox copy would have been sent to a possible publisher. The white original also had a carbon copy to prove it was the original. In this case, the carbon copy was made on cheap pink paper that belonged to my fiance’s parents’ real estate company. All pink papers in my evidence files are linked to the years 1962-1967 and came from the same ream of pink paper.

  Most of the original pages survived the 50+ years they were preserved, but in a few cases, only the pink carbon copy survived. Water was spilled over many of my files and records, and other records were ripped up by vandals, when I was living in Dallas in 2001. (I have always wondered why the vandals destroyed my files, records, papers and computer, but did not steal anything).

  There remained a few grammatical errors in “Her Way” which I did not catch, but today I look upon as a bit of interior evidence of how many writing errors there were in
Lee’s story. But at the same time, the variety and color of his verbiage is delightful and original. His vocabulary for this science fiction story came at a price, seeing how short his life was. From reading an almost endless stream of science fiction, philosophy, biographies and books on history, Lee constructed this improbable and alien world, filled with humor and a dizzying flow of words that catch the imagination. There’s a sort of religious aspect to this story, as well, but don’t be fooled. Lee writes it all with tongue in cheek.

  Lee H. Oswald: What He Read

  and What He Thought

  Lee’s idealism underpinned his interest in writing science fiction and about governments in the future. Evidence that he was anti-communist can be seen in his sketch outlining “a system opposed to the Communist” (system) to which he appended his idealized Utopian system. Lee called it “The Atheian System.” Nevertheless, the Warren Commission, which published Lee’s material, told the world that young Lee Harvey Oswald was just another evil Communist madman. In fact, even while Lee was inside the USSR, he never joined the Communist party, even though, for drama, he declared in his “historic diary” (which he wrote in mere days, as if he had been at it for 30 months) that, “I want citizenship because I am a communist and a worker.…” Lee told me personally, in no uncertain terms, that he had pretended to be a communist to gain entry into the USSR as a spy, in his role as “defector.”

  Lee had previously been writing a book about conditions in the USSR. In 1962, he asked a public stenographer, Virginia Bates, to type up “a manuscript he was writing” for a book. Mark Lane, who interviewed her,i learned that the Secret Service had never interviewed Bates, even though her story reached newspapers soon after the Kennedy assassination. Bates said he told her about his wife, and also that he had been in the Marines. She said he told her he “had applied for a visa to go to Russia,” and “how much he liked America.…” Even though this woman told newspaper reporters that Lee was writing an anti-communist book, they reported that Lee was “an admitted Communist sympathizer” as can be seen in the article on the previous page.