Time Pressure

by Spider Robinson

  I passed everything, in most cases by the skin of my teeth, but overall well enough to stagger through another semester of academic probation. Frank passed everything but not by enough and failed out.

  If you want to really get to know someone, spend two weeks awake with them. I only saw him twice after that—he made the fatal mistake of trying to ignore an inconvenient asthma attack—but I will never forget him.

  And I was not going to leave Mucus on a snowy mountainside with his only bodily fluid turned to green fudge in his belly.

  As the trail made the sharp turn to the left, I saw a weasel a few meters off into the woods. He looked at me as though he had a low opinion of my intelligence. “You’re out here too, jerk,” I muttered into my scarf, and he vanished.

  There was something electric in the air. It took me awhile to realize that this was more than a metaphor. I became aware of an ozone-y smell, like—but subtly different from—the smell of a NiCad battery charger when you crack the lid. You know the smell you get when you turn on an old tube amplifier that’s been unused long enough to collect dust? If you’d sprinkled just a pinch of cinnamon and fine-ground basil on top first, it might smell like the air smelled that night, alive and tangy and sharp-edged. I knew the stimulant effect of ozone, had experienced it numerous times; this was different. Better. I knew a little about magic, more than I had before I’d moved to the North Mountain. Nova Scotia has many kinds of magic, but this was a different kind, one I didn’t know.

  I stopped minding the cold and the snow and the wind and the steepness of the trail. No, I kept minding them, but I became reconciled to them. Shortly a unicorn was going to step out from behind a stand of birch. Or perhaps a tornado was going to take me to Oz. Something wonderful was about to happen.

  A part of my mind stood back and skeptically observed this, tried to analyze it, noted that the sensation increased as I progressed upslope (ozone was lighter than air, wasn’t it?), wondered darkly if this was what it smelled like before lightning struck someplace, tried to remember what I’d read on the subject. Avoid tall trees. Avoid standing in water. Trees loomed all around me, of course, and my boots had been breaking through skins of ice into slushwater for the last half klick. (But that was silly, paranoid, you didn’t get lightning with snow.) That part of my mind which thought of itself as rational urged me to turn around and go back downhill to a place of warmth and comfort, and to hell with the silly glue-dispenser and the funny smell and the electric night.

  But that part of my mind had ruled me all my life. I had come here to Nova Scotia specifically to get in touch with the other part of my mind, the part that perceived and believed in magic, that tasted the crisp cold night and thrilled with anticipation, for something unknown, or perhaps forgotten. It had been a long cold winter, and a little shot of magic sounded good to me.

  Besides, I was almost there. I kept on slogging uphill, breathing big deep lungfulls of sparkling air through the scarf, and in only a few hundred meters more I had reached my destination, the Place of Big Maples and the clearing where I boil sap.

  That very afternoon I had hiked up here and done a boiling, one of the last of the season. Maple syrup takes a lot of hours, but it is extremely pleasant work. Starting in early Spring, you hammer little aluminum sap-taps into any maple thicker than your thigh for an acre on either side of the trail, and hang little plastic sap-trap pails from them. You take a chainsaw to about a Jesus-load and a half of alders (I’ll define that measurement later) and stack them to dry in the resulting clearing. The trail is generously stocked with enough boulders to create a fireplace of any size desired. Every few days you hike up to the maple grove, collect the contents of the pails in big white plastic buckets, and dump the buckets into the big cast-iron sap pot. You build a fire of alder slash, pick a comfortable spot, and spend the next several hours with nothing to do but keep the fire going…

  You can read if you want, if the weather permits—it’s hard turning pages with gloves on—and toward the end of sap season you sometimes can even bring a guitar up the Mountain with you, and sing to the forest while you watch the pot. Or you can just watch the world. From that high up the slope of the Mountain, at that time of year, you can see the Bay off through the trees, impersonal and majestic. I’m a city kid; I can sit and look at the woods around me for four or five hours and still be seeing things when it’s time to go.

  Sap takes a lot of boiling, and then some more. Raw maple sap has the look and consistency of weak sugar water, with just a hint of that maple taste. That afternoon had been a good run: I had collected enough to fill the pot, maybe fifty liters or so—then kept the fire roaring for hours, and eventually took a little more than three liters down the Mountain with me in a Mason jar. (Even that wasn’t really proper maple syrup—when I had enough Mason jars I would boil them down further [and more gently] on the kitchen stove—but it was going to taste a hell of a lot better on my pancakes than the “maple” flavored fluid you buy in stores.)

  At one point I had scrounged around and picked some wintergreen, dipped up some of the boiling sap in my ladle and brewed some fresh wintergreen tea with natural maple sugar flavoring, no artificial colour, no preservatives, and sipped it while I fed the fire. Nothing I could possibly have lugged uphill in a Thermos would have tasted half so good. I had not felt lonely, but only alone. It had been a good afternoon.

  I remembered it now and felt even better than I had then—good in the same way, and good in a different and indefinable and complimentary way at the same time. This afternoon the world had felt right. Tonight felt right, and about to get even better—even the savage weather was an irrelevancy, without significance.

  So of course luck was with me; Mucus was just where I’d hoped to find him, half-buried in the heap of dead leaves beside the stone fireplace, where I had for a time today lain back and stared through the treetops at the sky. I didn’t even have to do any digging: the flashlight picked him out almost at once. He was facing me. His features were obscured by snow, but I knew that his expression would be sleepy-lidded contentment, the Buddha after a heavy meal.

  “Hey, pal,” I said softly, puffing just a little, “I’m sorry.”

  He said nothing.

  “Hey, look, I came back for you.” I worked my nose to crack the ice in my nostrils. “At this point, the only thing that can hold me together is Mucus.” I giggled, and my lower eyelids began to burn. If I felt so goddam good, why did I suddenly want to burst out crying?

  Did I want to burst out crying?

  I wanted to do something—wanted it badly. But I didn’t know what.

  I picked up the silly little moose, wiped him clean of snow, probed at the hard little green ball in his guts, and poked at his nostrils to clear them. “Forgive me?”

  But there was only the sound of wind sawing at the trees.

  No. There was more.

  A faint, distant sound. Omnidirectional, approaching slowly from all sides at once, and from overhead, and from beneath my feet, like a contracting globe with me at the center. No, slightly off-center. A high, soft, sighing, with an odd metallic edge, like some sort of electronically processed sound.

  Trees began to stir and creak around me. The wind, I thought, and realized that the wind was gone. The snow was gone. The air was perfectly still.

  When I first moved to Nova Scotia they told me, “If you don’t like the weather, sit down and have a beer. Likely the weather you was lookin’ for’ll be along ’fore you finish.” No climatic contortion no matter how unreasonable can surprise me anymore. This was the first snowstorm I’d ever known to have an eye, like a hurricane; fine.

  But what was disturbing the trees?

  They were trembling. I could see it with the flashlight. They vibrated like plucked strings, and part of the sound I was hearing was the chord they made. Occasionally one would emit a sharp cracking sound as rhythmic accompaniment to the chorus.

  Well, of course they’re making cracking sounds, said the ration
al part of my mind, it’s a good ten degrees warmer now—

  —ten degrees warmer?

  A thrill of terror ran up my spine, I’d always thought that was just an expression but it wasn’t, but was it terror or exhilaration, the cinnamony smell was very strong now and the trees were humming like the Sunrise Hill Gang chanting Om, a vast, world-sized sphere of sound contracted from all sides at once with increasing speed and power and yes I was a little off-center, it was going to converge right over there—

  Crack!

  A globe of soft blue light did actually appear in the epicenter, like a giant robin’s egg, about fifty meters east of me and two or three meters off the ground. A yellow birch which had stood in that spot for at least thirty years despite anything wind or water could do obligingly disintegrated to make room for the globe. I mean no stump or flinders: the whole tree turned in an instant into an equivalent mass of sawdust and collapsed.

  The humming sound reached a crescendo, a crazy chord full of anguish and hope.

  The globe of light was a softly glowing blue, actinic white around the edges, and otherwise featureless. It threw out about as much light as a sixty-watt bulb. The sawdust that fell on it vanished, and the instant the last grain had vanished, the globe disappeared.

  Silence. Total, utter stillness, such as is never heard in a forest in any weather. Complete starless Stygian darkness. It might have taken me a full second to bring the flashlight to bear.

  Where the globe had been, suspended in the air in a half-crouch, was a naked bald woman, hugging herself.

  She did not respond to the light. She moved, slightly, aimlessly, like someone floating in a transparent fluid, her eyes empty, her features slack. Suddenly she fell out of the light, dropped the meter and a half to the forest floor and landed limply on the heap of fresh sawdust. She made a small sound as she hit, a little animal grunt of dismay that chopped off.

  I stood absolutely still for ten long seconds. The moment she hit the earth, the stillness ended and all the natural sounds of the night returned, the wind and the snow and the trees sighing at the memory of the effort they had just made and a distant owl and the sound of the Bay lapping at the shore.

  I held the flashlight on her inert form.

  A short dark slender bald woman. No, hairless from head to toe. Not entirely naked after all: she wore a gold headband, thin and intricately worked, that rode so high on her skull I wondered why it didn’t fall off. Eurasian-looking features, but her hips were Caucasian-wide and she was dark enough to be a quadroon. Smiling joyously at the Moonless sky. Sprawled on her back. Magnificent tits. Aimlessly rolling eyes, and the blank look of a congenital idiot. Arms outflung in instinctive attempt to break her fall, but relaxed now. Long, slender hands.

  Well, I had wanted an evening’s entertainment…

  CHAPTER 2

  I GUESS THIS is as good a place as any for your suspension of disbelief to snap through like an overstressed guitar string. I don’t blame you a bit, and it only gets worse from here. Con-men work by getting you to swallow the hook a little at a time; first you are led to believe a small improbability, then there are a series of increasingly improbable complications, until finally you believe something so preposterous that afterward you cannot fathom your own foolishness. My writer friend Snaker says the only difference between a writer and a con-man is the writer has better hours, works at home, and can use his real name if it suits him.

  So I guess I’m not a very good con-man. Without the assistance of Gertrude the Guitar, anyway. I’m giving you a pretty improbable thing to swallow right at the start. It’s okay with me if you don’t believe it, all right?

  But let me try to explain to you why I believed it.

  Despite the fact that I was then a 1) long-haired 2) bearded 3) American-born 4) guitar player and folksinger 5) college dropout 6) sometime user of powerful psychedelics and 7) bonafide non-card-carrying member of the completely unorganized network of mostly ex-American hippies and back-to-the-landers scattered up and down the Annapolis Valley—despite the fact that I could have called myself a spiritual seeker without breaking up—nonetheless and notwithstanding I did not believe in astrology or auras or the Maharishi or Mahara Ji or Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed or Jahweh or Allah or Wa-Kon-Ton-Ka or vegetarianism or the Bermuda Triangle or flying saucers or the power of sunrise to end all wars if we would all only take enough drugs to stay up all night together, or even (they having broken up in a welter of lawsuits three years earlier) the Beatles. I did believe in mathematics and the force of gravity and the laws of conservation of matter and energy and Murphy’s Law. I was pretty lonely, is what I guess I’m trying to tell you: the hippies frowned on me because I didn’t abandon the rational part of my mind, while the straights disowned me because I didn’t abandon the irrational part. I maintained, for instance, an open if rather disinterested mind on reincarnation and ESP and the sanity of Dr. Timothy Leary, and I was tentatively willing to give the Tarot the benefit of the doubt on the word of a science fiction writer I admired named Samuel Delany.

  That’s part of what I’m trying to convey. I had read science fiction since I’d been old enough to read, attracted by that sense of wonder they talk about—and read enough of it to have my sense of wonder gently abraded away over the years. People who read a lot of sf are the least gullible, most skeptical people on earth. A longtime reader of sf will examine the flying saucer very carefully and knowledgeably for concealed wires, hidden seams, gimmicks with mirrors: he’s seen them all before. Spotting a fake is child’s play for him. (A tough house for a musician is a roomful of other musicians.)

  On the other hand, he’ll recognize a real flying saucer, and he’ll waste very little time on astonishment. Rearranging his entire personal universe in the light of startlingly new data is what he does for fun. One of sf’s basic axioms, first propounded by Arthur Clarke, is that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Confronted with a nominally supernatural occurrence, a normal person will first freeze in shock, then back away in fear. A sf reader will pause cautiously, then move closer. The normal person will hastily review a checklist of escape-hatches—“I am drunk”; “I am dreaming”; “I have been drugged”; and so forth—hoping to find one which applies. The sf reader will check the same list—hoping to come up empty. But meanwhile he’ll already have begun analyzing this new puzzle-piece which the game of life has offered him. What is it good for? What are its limitations? Where does it pinch? The thing he will be most afraid of is appearing stupid in retrospect.

  So I must strain your credulity even further. I don’t know what you would have done if a naked woman had materialized in front of you on a wooded hillside at night—and neither do you; you can only guess. But what I did was to grin hugely, take ten steps forward, and kneel beside her. I had spent my life training for this moment—for a moment like this—without ever truly expecting it to come.

  If it helps any, I did drop Mucus on the way, and forgot his existence until the next day.

  My first thought was, those are absolutely perfect tits.

  My second was, that’s odd…

  The nipples on those perfect teats were erect and rigid. Nothing odd there: it was freezing out, she was naked. But the rest of her body was not behaving correspondingly. The skin was not turning blue. No sign of goosebumps. A slight shiver, but it came and went. Teeth slightly apart in an idiot’s smile, no sign of chattering.

  It wasn’t the cold stiffening her nipples. It was excitement.

  What sort of excitement do you feel while you’re unconscious? I wondered.

  It seemed to be equal parts of triumph, fear, and sexual arousal. A sort of by God, I made it! Or have I? excitement, like someone disembarking from her first roller coaster ride—and finding herself in Coney Island, one of Brooklyn’s gamier neighborhoods.

  My eyes and nose found other evidences of the sexual component of her excitement—

  —I looked away, obscurely embarrassed,
and glanced back up to the other end. Her face was vacant, but that did not seem to be its natural condition. A lifetime of intelligence had written on that face before some sort of trauma had stunned it goofy. I guessed her age at forty.

  So one way to approach it is to go through a long logic-chain. This woman had materialized amid thunderclaps and bright lights. Could she be an extraterrestrial? If so, either human stock was ubiquitous through the Galaxy, or there was something to the idea of parallel evolution, or she was in fact a three-legged thing with green tentacles (or some such) sending me a telepathic projection of a fellow human to soothe my nerves.

  I don’t know what strains your credulity. The idea of other planets full of human beings, while admittedly possible, strained mine. How did they get there? And why didn’t their evolution and ours diverge over the several million years since we took root here?

  Parallel evolution—the idea that the human shape is an inevitable one for evolution to select—had always seemed to me a silly notion, designed to simplify science fiction stories. Certainly, the human morphology is a good one for a tool-user, but there are others as good or better. (Whose idea was it to put all the eyes on one side of the head? And who thought two hands were enough?)

  And I had difficulty believing in aliens who’d studied us closely enough to notice the behavior of nipples, but not closely enough to know that normal skin turns blue in temperatures well below zero. If what I saw was a telepathic illusion, how come it was semicomatose? To lull me into a false sense of…no, the thought was too silly to finish.

  And if she was an alien, what had happened to her flying saucer, or rather flying robin’s egg? Could she be smart enough to cross countless light-years, and clever enough to escape the attention of NORAD, and dumb enough to crash land in front of a witness?

  No, she was not an E.T. (As no one but an sf reader would have phrased it in 1973.) But she was certainly not from my world. I knew much more than the average citizen about the current state of terrestrial technology, and no culture on earth could have staged the entrance I had just seen.