Mission

by Patrick Tilley

  He nodded. ‘Yes. Like in Star Trek.’

  I had to laugh. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘From you. The images were in your mind.’

  ‘It must be hard to keep a secret when you’re around,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Not really. I’ve just got good antennae. I can sense that you’re bursting with questions you want to ask me and I’d like to answer them but – ’ He shrugged ruefully. ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘You mean you can’t describe the indescribable,’ I said. Thinking – Here we go. The classic cop-out.

  He smiled. ‘No. It’s not a cop-out, Leo. As long as you are locked into the physical world you will never be able to comprehend mine. You communicate with other human beings through the spoken word, and it’s possible to reach them on another level through music. But can you go beyond that? Can you imagine beings who use a form of language which begins where music leaves off? The answer is “No. You can’t.” Your brain contains censor blocks which prevent you from reaching this level of understanding. Man is capable of soaring flights of imagination but he can never fly high enough. That’s why we have to come down to earth. But you must remember that the Star Trek-Star Wars terminology is no more than a verbal shorthand to help you understand what I’m talking about. Because the only way we can communicate is by using words and concepts you are familiar with.’

  ‘Like you did before.’

  He smiled. ‘Yes. But this time, I’ll try and spare you the parables.’

  Reading this, you may think that I was handling the situation with an incredible amount of cool. Not so. My insides were quivering like Jello. But the truth was that, after the initial shock had worn off, The Man was a very easy person to be with. But don’t misunderstand me. He was no pushover. And I was well aware that being around him could be bad for your health. The point I’m trying to make is this. You read about someone like him, or some other youthful over-achiever like Alexander the Great and one gets a feeling of awe. But in the case of The Man, that feeling of awe is the result of two thousand years of relentless brainwashing by the people running the road show. Meeting him face-to-face was something else. Because, to all external appearances, he was just like any other ordinary human being. It was true he had the kind of eyes that could burn a hole right through you, but apart from that he was no more remarkable than any of the hundreds of people you pass every day in the street on your way to work. If the sky over Sleepy Hollow had split open in a blaze of light and I had been deafened by heavenly organ music, or a Stan Kenton version of The Last Trump, I might have felt differently but here he was, sitting on the sofa in my living-room with his feet up on the coffee table. Splitting a bottle of wine with me.

  Respect? Sure, that was something I felt even though he had gone out of his way to make me feel at ease. Caution? Yes, certainly. Especially now that I knew he could read my mind. And also because I had no way of knowing what might happen from one minute to the next. A sense of wonder? Yes, that too, for the first fifteen minutes or so. You have to remember that I’d spent most of the week being amazed at what had happened the previous Saturday at the hospital. These days, things change so rapidly, people learn to adjust. And let’s face it, awe is a difficult thing to sustain. Especially for a New Yorker.

  ‘Let me try and get something straight,’ I ventured. ‘Does the fact that you went back to first-century Jerusalem when you disappeared from the hospital morgue mean that time is …?’

  ‘Simultaneous? Yes …’

  Just like that.

  The news was stunning. My mind couldn’t react to all the implications. I just accepted the fact meekly. ‘So, does that mean that birth, life and death are simultaneous events?

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. In the same way that the beginning, middle and end of a book exist between the front and back covers – but you only live your life story one page at a time.’ He eyed me with a smile. ‘Does that bother you?’

  ‘I’m trying not to think about it,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the starship.’

  ‘You mean the longship? The vessel that came to rescue me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But first, you have to remember what I told you about word images. Because no matter how I phrase it, this story is going to end up sounding like a cross between a movie scenario written by George Lucas and Tolkien’s Silmarillion.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll try and read between the lines.’

  He paused and rubbed his forehead. ‘I’m trying to figure out how to give you this without the trimmings …’ He sat up, put his glass on the table and his feet on the floor and used his hands to underscore what he was saying. ‘Three of us were sent here to make contact with a group of – let’s call them “colonists” – beings like us that came to Earth a long, long time ago. There was no response to our signals on the way in, or after we’d gone into orbit so I came down with one of my crewmen to find out what had happened. The landing module – and remember these are your words I’m using – developed a malfunction on touchdown. As a result, the two of us were marooned. The second crewman, who was piloting what you would call the command module, went to get help. And that took about thirty earth-years to get here.’

  The words came out as casually as if he was telling me how the car he was driving had stalled on the exit ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge on the way in to the office in Manhattan.

  I tried to accept it in the same way. Even so, my eyes were like saucers. ‘I see. So what does that make you – some kind of spaceman?’

  ‘Not really,’ he replied.

  ‘What are you then?’ I said gingerly. ‘An angel?’

  He smiled. ‘Don’t let it worry you. Let’s just say that I’m from out there somewhere.’

  ‘You mean from another galaxy?’ I insisted.

  He shook his head, ‘No. From another universe.’

  I nipped the soft skin of my left hand with the thumb and forefinger of the right, digging in the nails until it really hurt. To convince myself, once more, that I really was sitting there having this conversation. That it was not just a dream. At the back of my mind there lurked the idea that some prankster might have popped acid into my jar of instant coffee. But on the other hand, I had had a reasonably sane conversation on the telephone with Miriam, and there were none of the sensory or colour distortions associated with a normal trip. I focussed my attention back on to what The Man was saying.

  ‘… and so the crucial question was – what did we do until the rescue ship got here? The only way we could survive was by incubating inside a host body, like yours. Only there was no guarantee that we could escape from it unharmed.’ He shook his head, remembering. ‘The problems … I can’t tell you.’ He unclenched his fists and tapped his chest. ‘You can’t know what it’s like to be trapped inside one of these things.’

  ‘How could I?’ I said. ‘I’ve never known any other kind of existence. At least, not one I can remember. Was it bad?’

  ‘Horrendous,’ he replied. ‘A thirty-year nightmare. And it still isn’t over.’ He made a fist. ‘They promised me. Go through with the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and that’s it. Next stop home. Instead of which, I end up in the twentieth fucking century.’ He saw the look on my face. ‘I’m sorry. I guess I’m not supposed to talk like that. Your brain just went into spasm.’

  I swallowed hard. ‘Listen. As far as I’m concerned, you can say whatever you like. I just think you ought to know that there are a few words in my memory bank that are not meant to be used in polite company. They don’t upset me but there are a lot of people around who have very firm opinions about you. And they wouldn’t be at all happy to hear you talk like that – even though the Book says that you came on a little strong now and then.’ I smiled at him. ‘Maybe some of the flavour got lost in translation.’

  ‘We lost a lot more than the flavour,’ he said. He relaxed a little. ‘But you’re right. There were times when I got a littl
e up-tight. I didn’t realise how hard it would be to get through to people. But that bit in the Temple was special. I was trying to get myself arrested. The vessel that had come to rescue me was in solar orbit between Earth and Mars. Just one of a whole fleet of ships strung out between here and the Time Gate. Everybody was waiting. I had to get them to kill me.’

  My brain tried vainly to grapple with these new disclosures. Every time he spoke, the cosmic canvas he was painting got bigger and bigger. I battened on to his last words. ‘Why was it you had to die?’

  ‘Because it was the only way I could escape from this thing.’ He tapped his chest again. ‘Joshua’s body.’

  ‘But why did someone else have to kill you?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you just jump off a cliff? Or cut your wrists?’

  He shrugged. ‘Good question. All I can say is that was the way it had to be done. There were reasons. Let’s leave it at that.’ He poured out some more wine.

  I wanted to ask him what those reasons were but I decided to wait until he volunteered the information. After all, it was just a bare seven days since he’d been crucified and although his body had been miraculously healed, the event was clearly very much on his mind. I tried a slightly different tack. ‘Tell me, if the main reason for the Crucifixion was to enable you to get out of your body, or rather, Joshua’s body, why are you back in it now?’

  ‘Ahhh, it’s not the same,’ he said. ‘It’s been – how shall we say – reconditioned? Unlike yours, it is no longer subject to the physical laws that govern Time and Space but, apart from that, under normal circumstances it’s virtually impossible to spot the difference. That was the whole point of the Resurrection. It was to prove that I had power over death. That I was able to come back as a fully functional, three-dimensional human being. But nobody warned me that time-travel was part of it. That’s why I’m not sure what I’m doing here. When I found myself on that slab in the morgue instead of on board the longship, I was somewhat dismayed – ’

  ‘Dismayed?’ I interjected.

  He smiled. ‘I’m thinking of my image. When I’d recovered from the surprise, my first thought was that there had been a technical hitch. Riding a beam is not the most foolproof method of transportation. But now that I’m back here again, I’m not so sure. The odds against hitting the same time-slot as a result of a malfunction are astronomical. I have a feeling that this may be another part of the mission they haven’t told me about yet.’ He shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be the first surprise they’d sprung on me.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘The breakdown of the landing module was rigged. I was dumped here. They broke the news to me about a year ago when the rescue fleet entered the galaxy.’ He gave me a wry smile. ‘Looking back, I suppose it was the only way to get me to go through with it.’

  I swallowed what was left in my glass. My face must have shown that my brain was going into overload.

  ‘I guess it must be difficult for you to take all of this on board,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ I admitted. ‘We’ve barely started and already we’ve opened up several king-sized cans of beans. I just hope we’re going to have enough time to go over some of these areas in more detail.’

  ‘Maybe we will, maybe we won’t,’ he said. ‘At the moment, I have no way of telling. Cross-time communication is possible but unless the longship knows exactly where I am, we can’t make contact. In any case, it’s just acting as a relay station. The control point for this phase of the mission is on the other side of the Time Gate.’ He paused. ‘I think I just lost you again.’

  ‘Totally,’ I replied. ‘I’m way in over my head. But don’t worry. Just keep going. I’ll try and sort it out later. The exercise will be good for my brain. You mentioned this Time Gate before. What exactly is it?’

  ‘It’s the movable interface between your world and mine,’ he said. ‘Between temporal and non-temporal space. The secret door through which we enter and leave the cosmos. Which opens only for the brief moment of our passing then vanishes with its closing. Invisibly sealing the fabric of the physical universe which will never again be opened at that point in space for the rest of time. It is thus that the Empire is protected from the forces that seek to destroy it.’

  As I listened to him, I was praying that he would hang around until Miriam got there. I wanted someone else listening in. Let’s face it, this was pretty wild stuff. I knew that no one, in their right mind, was going to believe my unsupported testimony. On the other hand, after listening to us, they might throw us both in the nut house. I perceived a partial answer to my predicament. ‘Uhh – would it be okay with you if we got some of this down on tape?’

  ‘Yes, sure, go ahead,’ he said.

  I went to fetch the small IBM dictation machine that I carry around in my Samsonite, checked that it was working, and laid it on the table between us. Then I took a deep breath and started in again. I’d lost all count of time, and was hopelessly tangled in the various threads of the story. It was just too big to handle. In the end, I opted for the simplest question I could think of. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘There’s something Miriam wanted to know. What have you been doing all week?’

  ‘Trying to convince my friends in Jerusalem that I’m a real live person,’ he replied, ‘and not some kind of ghost.’

  ‘I can understand their problem,’ I said. ‘Let’s face it, this is a pretty fantastic situation.’

  ‘It is for you perhaps, but I lived with these people,’ he said. ‘Some of them were family. I told them I would be back. I explained what was going to happen – and yet most of them still can’t believe it.’ He shook his head despairingly.

  I chewed over my words carefully then finally screwed up the courage to say, ‘This must have been a really bad time for your mother.’

  He nodded, and drank some more wine.

  ‘Did she know who you really were?’

  ‘Yes, from the very beginning,’ he said. ‘But sometimes she, uhh –’ There was a slight break in his voice. ‘ – she found it hard to cope.’ He turned away and stared out of the window.

  I didn’t say anything. We just sat there and let the silence settle round us. The late afternoon sunlight angled in through the windows and highlighted his profile. He certainly wasn’t any Robert Redford. A real writer would be able to give you a couple of pages of deathless prose describing him from head to foot but I’ll keep it short and sweet. He looked like a cross between Martin Scorsese and Robert de Niro. The dark, heavy-browed look combined with de Niro’s coiled-spring leanness.

  I thought back over what he had told me so far, and what had happened since that fateful Saturday at the Manhattan General and it occurred to me that he still had not positively identified himself – and indeed never did. He didn’t need to. The instinctive knowledge of who he was had welled up from somewhere deep inside me while at the same time, another part of me was trying to stop me from accepting it. Trying to bury the feeling of certainty under layers of doubt. Looking for a way to avoid getting involved.

  Intellectually, it was an intriguing idea to be sharing a bottle of wine with The Man while Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin had search parties out looking for him. It didn’t require a rational explanation. Our minds had been conditioned by several decades of science fiction and fantasy literature and the concept of time-travel had been with us, on paper at least, since about 1840. But no one in their right minds would believe that it could actually happen. Especially the scientific community who, faced with the latest findings on the Turin Shroud, had withdrawn into a baffled silence. I found it hard to imagine The Man agreeing to submit to tests under laboratory conditions in the way Uri Geller had. But even if he did, how could he prove that he had journeyed from the first century to the twentieth and back again? Wouldn’t we turn out to be just one more generation of vipers looking for an empirically provable sign?

  The Man came out of his reverie. ‘Tell me, Leo. Is everybody like you nowadays?’

  ‘How do you
mean?’ I said.

  ‘Well, in the way you’ve just accepted me being here and the things I’ve told you.’

  ‘I accept that you’re here,’ I said. ‘And that you were also at the hospital. But it’s still giving me a few problems. As for the rest, I’m not too sure just how typical I am. I like to think I’m open-minded and I suppose, because of that, I don’t have any preconceived ideas about you. It’s the same with those endless arguments over the existence, or non-existence of God. It’s an interesting idea but I have to tell you that religion is not something I have a lot of time for. That goes for a lot of other people too. But there are millions of others of various persuasions who take it very seriously indeed. And the irony is, you could be in big trouble with both groups if you went about telling people who you are.’

  ‘Tell me something new,’ he replied.

  ‘No, really, it’s a lot harder now,’ I said. ‘Since you died, there have been quite a few freaks who claimed they were the Messiah, uhh – not that I’m trying to suggest that – ’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I know that.’

  ‘You see,’ I continued, ‘Miriam and I know what happened. We don’t need convincing. We saw it with our own eyes. But if you decided to make your presence known to a wider audience, we could encounter a serious credibility problem. Take the Jews for instance. If my people didn’t believe you were you then, what’s going to make them believe you are you now?’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘I see what you mean …’

  ‘It’s the same with the Christians,’ I said. ‘There are plenty of them around but they can’t even agree amongst themselves as to who you were, what you did, what you said, or whether you meant it. I think I’d better tell you that while you’ve been away they’ve been rewriting the script. The Ten Commandments are out, and faggots are in. People still believe in you but they might not be too happy if they knew you’d come back. I have a feeling that most of them would prefer the myth to the real thing.’