by Algis Budrys
That eye – those eyes – were a peculiar shade of brown. I wondered if he might not have on a pair of tinted contact lenses, which were just coming into limited use at the time.
‘Are you crazy?’ I asked.
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Well, if I am – and I might be – I’m not really the right person to ask, am I?’
‘Where is your ship?’
‘If there is one, it’s lost in the bogs.’ He waved as if he knew which way the room faced; in actual fact, he waved at the North Atlantic. ‘Somewhere out in the bogs. We would have hidden it, and we would have done a good job.’
‘We?’
‘Oh, the other man and I.’
‘The other man was moribund.’
‘But he would have been alive at the time.’
‘Would have been.’
He laughed again. ‘Yes. Would have been.’
‘You’re really not saying anything, are you?’
‘Well, yes and no.’
I was not prepared to take any more of that. The man had an accent, and he had somewhat peculiar eyes, but the rest of him as far as I could tell was as normal as normal could be. We could have spent a year in that room together, and if he wanted to keep playing verbal games, and if I kept to playing verbal games, we would be no further along at the end of that year than we were right that minute. I pushed back my chair. ‘This really isn’t very satisfactory. I’ll be back,’ I said, and left. The man was smiling at me as I went.
They had taken away his first-aid kit; the armed guard outside his door had it. I examined it. It had several things in it which were obviously machine-produced, and the lettering was (A) machine-produced and (B) unreadable except for the Johnson & Johnson. But that, too, could easily have been produced on Earth. Nothing said the gadgets actually had to do anything. All it told me, really, was that someone had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to create the kit.
But that, too, depended on the scale of size. For a national government, for instance, or even one considerably down the ladder from that, it would have been nothing. Perhaps more important, even for one man with hidden motives, if it had to be consistent with his story, it could certainly be done. In other words, the first-aid kit, for me in my situation, answered no questions definitively; rather, it perhaps raised a few additional ones. Or perhaps not.
I gave it back to the guard, a little annoyed that I had ever looked at it at all.
‘What do you think?’ the congressman said to me.
We were sitting in the adjacent room, just the two of us, not much different from the room with the man in it – except that I was facing the door, I suddenly realized, and the congressman was between me and it – and the congressman was pretending it was just a casual question. Well, I’d tell him the truth. Anything else was too dangerous. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I know less, I suppose, than I did before I got here.’
‘You suppose. Yes. It all has a tendency to raise more questions than it answers, doesn’t it?’ The congressman suddenly turned a smile on me, and I felt peculiar. Later, I finally decided it was because it was a perfectly friendly smile, and it chilled me to the bone.
‘You know what I think? I think you will give him to me.’ The congressman was quite serious.
‘What?’
‘Look at it from all sides,’ the congressman said reasonably. ‘This isn’t really a Navy matter. It would be different if the Navy knew more, perhaps. But all that happened was that the man turned up at your main gate in the middle of the night. He said only the minimum to the enlisted personnel, he said only enough more to the officers to work his way swiftly up the chain of command, and he still isn’t saying much, is he?’
‘Not now, no.’
The congressman waved his arm – in much the same way that the man had. ‘That’s as may be. The fact is, he isn’t talking.’
‘Sir, I—’
‘The chances are excellent he’s a man with a hidden agenda. Period. The chances that he’s actually the captain of a flying saucer are—’
‘That’s not the point! He’s—’
The congressman steepled his fingertips and looked at me. ‘That is the point, Commander. That’s very much the point. The man might be any number of things, of which the least likely is that he’s the captain of a flying saucer. Furthermore, he’s begun backing away from that claim. I think you should go back to Philadelphia, report to your admiral that the man was unbalanced – which he almost certainly is, wouldn’t you say? – and let it go at that. I’m sure the Navy has a great many other things on its mind. For instance, the next appropriations bill.’
‘Sir, I don’t think that’s quite the truth.’
‘Oh?’ The congressman looked down at his hands. ‘Do you know what the truth is? Suppose I told you that in fact Congress has a subcommittee devoted to investigating flying saucer claims, and that the duty of every member of Congress is to bring in any scrap of evidence he happens to come across?’
‘Is that true, sir?’
The congressman spread his arms. ‘You see?’
I shook my head. I felt I was getting deeper and deeper into a morass. ‘I don’t know—’
The congressman looked at me as if I were not too bright a child but he was choosing not to point that out to me. ‘Commander,’ he said, ‘there are only two basic explanations for the man. One, he is what he at one time was saying that he was. In which case, do you suppose the Navy is superior to the national legislature in dealing with it? Or the man is a hoax, in which case the Navy wants to be rid of him as soon as possible. Now, isn’t that a fair summary of the situation?’
‘Congressman, I—’
Now the congressman looked closely at me, and I knew I had crossed a line I devoutly wished to get back to the safe side of as soon as possible. ‘Commander,’ he said softly, ‘do you perhaps have a hidden allegiance which makes you so stubborn?’
This was the late 1940s, remember. ‘A hidden allegiance’ meant the Soviet Union, and there was no surer way to spend the rest of one’s life essentially as a hunted animal than to become identified with that. You think it’s bad now; that was the day of Joe McCarthy. I straightened up as though jolted with an electric current, and said ‘No, sir!’ as brightly and innocently as I could manage. And on that question, I made it my business to manage every volt that I could, plus some extra I usually didn’t use.
‘Then what’s the problem, Commander?’ The congressman was looking at me hard.
‘Sir, I have a responsibility to my mission—’
‘And how would you be failing to meet it?’
‘Sir, I came down here—’
The congressman shook his head in mild exasperation. ‘And you will go back up, and make your report. The base commander certainly won’t contradict it. A couple of enlisted men will be transferred, but in fact they don’t know – nobody knows – what actually transpired here. The junior officers he talked to don’t know for sure. The base commander doesn’t actually know for sure. And you don’t know, do you? Do you, Commander?’
He was right. I didn’t know. I suspected. And what I suspected was that the man was playing some game far beyond me; that he hadn’t come down in a flying saucer, which was ridiculous, but that he was playing some elaborate game. Which, in fact, was more properly in the hands of the national legislature than it was in the Navy’s.
‘And what do I do with the corpse?’ I asked.
‘Why, you give it to the man. He’ll know what needs to be done with it. Give it to the man, packed in dry ice. Give us the use of an ambulance for a few hours, and it’ll then be as if it had never been. The water will have closed seamlessly.’
And that is how it was. The driver returned with the ambulance from National Airport in Washington, the man and the congressman and the corpse having gotten out there and from there could have gone anywhere, and it was not until I was in the helicopter going back to Philadelphia that it gradually dawned on me my Navy c
areer was irretrievable blighted. Because the admiral commanding the Philadelphia District could not know for certain that I was telling him the whole truth, but on the other hand he did not dare put me on trial to determine that fact. So he made sure I never advanced beyond commander, because a man who might know as much as I did could not be trusted with higher command. Oh, I might in fact be under the protection of persons in the Navy higher than he, but if they moved to intervene on my behalf, they would show their hand. So they would not move to intervene on my behalf.
And so forth. You see what I’m saying? It was impossible for anyone to deal with Ravashan – or whatever his name was – and remain untainted. And it was impossible to get at the truth of the man. And that was that. The base commander died a long time ago, of old age, and the junior officers have many other things to think about, and the enlisted men are scattered, and none of us is getting any younger.
For that matter, you don’t know that what I’ve told you is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, do you? It is, but you don’t know that, do you?
And Commander Dowright smiles bitterly.
– Statement taken in 1973. A.B.
FOOTNOTE
Commander Dowright was quite correct. Whereas up to then his fitness reports had been outstanding, they show a peculiar shift after his visit to NAS Atlantic City. It is not something one can put his finger on legally; the words of praise are still there. But when you put them all together, they give a sense that they add up to ‘a loyal and thoughtful officer, considering what he is.’ It is not necessary, of course, for the reports ever to say exactly what he is.
– A.B.
CARS
It was a ’39 Chevrolet, I found out later, four-door, with the six-cylinder inline nailhead engine – stick shift, of course – a car there, with a man behind the wheel, watching me as I walked up.
‘It’s all right,’ Margery said to me. ‘He’s a friend.’ That seemed hardly likely, since he didn’t even know me. What she meant was, she was willing to vouch for him. The other thing was that she had uttered an undoubted cliché; I had heard it issue from the mouths of actor after actor, and if I had heard it so often, how many additional times must it have been uttered? But then I realized something else. Margery was no dummy, but she was a rustic, and I was going to get just so much a range of utterances out of her. Well, so be it. There are worse things to be than a rustic.
‘All right.’ I nodded; that was twice I’d gotten nodding right. As for whether she was trustworthy enough to vouch for anyone, that was an order of question that was beyond me to judge. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And?’
‘He wants to talk to you about a job.’
‘Really?’ He was in his middle twenties, I found out, a spare, blue-jawed man with black hair that hung over his forehead in oily spikes. He was wearing farm clothes – a blue chambray shirt and bib overalls – and a cigarette dangled out of a small, thin-lipped mouth. I went around to the driver’s window. ‘Hello,’ I said, watching him carefully. ‘I’m Jack—’
‘Mullica,’ he said. His mouth twisted into a mirthless grin. ‘My name’s Roland Lapointe. Get in.’ He gestured toward the passenger seat in front and waited for me, his eyes appraising me while I made up my mind. I finally walked around to the other side of the car and got in. Margery got into the backseat, and Lapointe drove out of the farmyard. The engine ticked over flawlessly; Lapointe, or somebody, had taken very good care of it during the war.
‘That’s the ticket,’ Lapointe was saying. ‘I like my people to do what they’re told.’
I glanced at him. ‘Your people.’
‘When you work for me, you’re my people.’
‘And what makes you think I’ll work for you?’
‘Haven’t got much choice. Can’t expect Margery to keep feeding you for free. Can’t expect to live in the barn forever – it’s all right now, but winter does come.’
‘I could get another job.’
‘Not if I say no. Nobody’ll give you a job if I say not to. Now, suppose you sit and think about that until we get to where we’re going.’ His voice was flat; he might have been giving the time of day.
I glanced at him again. As far as I could tell, he also hadn’t changed expression once while speaking. I got the definite impression Lapointe was a genuinely tough man. Maybe not the brightest. But his outstanding quality would always be his toughness; it would carry him far. Doubtless, it had carried him far already. The important thing was, he was tougher than I.
Well, come to that, Margery was tougher than I. The jury was out on Margery’s father, but the likelihood was that he was at least as tough as I. So as far as I knew, every single inhabitant of Earth was tougher than I. It made a fellow proud to be a soldier.
We drove along. Lapointe turned several corners, and we left unpaved surface and pulled onto a main road, though it was still only two lanes of asphalt. We passed several farms. Then we came to a corner. We pulled up outside a structure I recognized as a garage.
There were two things out front that were gas pumps, obviously, and then there were actually a couple of buildings – a small one in front and a much bigger one about twenty-five yards back from both roads, set behind the small building and separated from it by a drive way. The small building had a window with oil jars in it, and in front of the building were several oil drums.
I studied it with some intensity. We don’t depend anywhere near as much on individual transport as Earthpeople do, though there was a time when we did. Now our cars and trucks run on a modification of a spaceship engine. The roaring, stinking, polluting Earth car was utterly foreign to me. And utterly intriguing. The idea of getting into your own vehicle and roaring off at speeds of about a hundred miles per hour and going on for miles – far more miles than apparently made sense in a culture with plentiful trains, planes, and buses – and having a garage on practically every street corner in most parts of the nation … well, it was grotesque. And it was quaint. And it was, in its own way, glorious.
We forget, now; so much is different. But that was the time when America was the undoubted leader in the world, and gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon, and cars – new cars – cost a thousand dollars, and the United States was about to buy a highway system that would cover the country from one end to the other, replacing a highway system that was the envy of all other nations. I understood, even then, that without question the best way to understand these people was to understand their infatuation with cars. And apparently I was going to get my chance.
‘All right,’ Lapointe said. ‘What I’ll want you to do is tend the garage. Pump gas, fill tires, hand out road maps, tell people the John is out of order. You won’t be a mechanic. I’ll take care of that. You’ll sleep inside at night, you’ll get three meals a day, and a dollar a day. Sundays we’re closed.’
‘You’re offering me that job.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know how to drive.’
Lapointe turned in his seat and looked back at Margery.
‘So teach him,’ she said. ‘How hard can it be?’
Lapointe looked at me. ‘Um.’
Lapointe had gone into the other building. Margery and I were alone. ‘Listen,’ Margery said to me, ‘he’s all right. He’s hard. But he’s all right.’ And she had brought my kit; the coveralls, and the kit. She sat on the corner of the battered desk in the garage, with her pants down around her ankles, while I worked on her. There was something a little bit evasive about her all of a sudden, and that had to be Lapointe, but she flexed and moved the leg almost normally, and she spoke to me in a tone that was much gentler than the one she used to use.
‘You keep your nose clean, and you’ll be all right,’ she was saying. ‘Don’t jump to any hasty conclusions. And I’ll be around. You got any questions, you ask me first. Got that?’
I cocked my head. ‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘Nothing’s wrong unless you screw up. And you won’t screw up all
the way; you’ve got sense, even if it isn’t horse sense.’
‘Look, Margery—’
‘I owe you more than you can imagine,’ she said, sliding off the desk and pulling up her pants. ‘You can’t dream how much what you’re doing to my leg means to me. But that’s not the only thing in the world. Anyway, I got you the best job you could possibly get. You’ll learn to drive, you’ll get a Social Security card, pretty soon you’ll blend right in with us Americans.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked with a sinking feeling.
‘Jack,’ she said, looking at the floor, ‘you wouldn’t fool a four-year-old right now. There’s only one place you could have come from, and that’s a Russian ship. Probably a submarine. All right? Get this through your head – we don’t care. You obviously aren’t here to commit sabotage. Chances are you’re glad to get away. I know I would be – it doesn’t sound like a decent way for the ordinary guy to live, communism. All right; fine. We’ll help you. And if some of the things we ask in return aren’t exactly legal, well, what’s legal?’
It was my turn to look down at the floor. ‘I see.’
‘So you keep your nose clean, and we’ll gradually make an American out of you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And I really do thank you for my leg. I didn’t know you people could do that. I’m grateful.’
‘Yes, well.’
‘And if you want to bed me, that’s all right, too.’ Both of us were looking at the floor.
Things were going too fast for me. ‘I – what about Lapointe?’
‘Lapointe is my brother. Half-brother. We’ve got the same mother. Came out of the barrens, settled with old man Lapointe first, when he died she moved in with my old man. One day Pop woke up and she was gone. Found out she hitched a ride on the highway. Last anybody here has seen of her.’
‘My God.’
Margery shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago, now. She wasn’t the first funny thing that came out of the barrens.’ She looked at me. ‘Wasn’t the last. Though I will say, it wasn’t usual for somebody from the barrens to name themselves for the Mullica River.’