"How much did they weigh when you found them?” she asked.
"That one, not too much,” Ken said. “Coyotes got to him. I had to do some reconstruction to make him look normal. Truth is, if that'd been the first one I found, I would have thought it was just pieces of an animal."
"Well, it was,” Fara said. “Just the animal was from another dimension.” Delighted with this idea, she laughed. Ken grinned with her. “What do you call this one?"
"Mary, because of Frankenstein."
Fara put Mary back on the shelf. “So what did the intact ones weigh?"
"Thirty, forty pounds. Wouldn't have figured that was the first question a physicist would ask."
"I've got others, believe me,” Fara said. “But I'm curious about their weight because it helps me to ballpark what kind of energy they need to travel this way."
"So how much?"
"A lot. Did they have any tools, or machines, anything like that?"
Ken was shaking his head. “No, I always expected to find some, but they all turn up naked and dead. I've never seen a living one, and I've never seen a dead one with any kind of clothes or anything."
She picked up Bobby. “Amazing. Wonder what they're doing here."
"I don't know,” Ken said. “It started maybe seven years ago, and I've seen a bunch of dead ones. A guy I know, Little Boozy—"
"You mentioned him yesterday."
Way to go, dope, Ken thought. “That's right, yeah. Well, Little Boozy sees ‘em all the time run over on the road. These are the guys he thinks live at the bottom of Wamplers Lake."
"Actually, that's not any stranger than believing that they travel from other dimensions,” Fara said, and although it pained Ken to admit it, she was right, which meant that except for the fact that he had a professor on his side, he and Little Boozy were in equal measure proponents of loony theories. Oh no, he thought. This contact with conspiracy nuts has finally done me in. Before you know it, I will not only believe in the Reptilian conspiracy, but at the same time I will start thinking Mystery Hill is a hoax. And then my transformation into a credulous idiot will be complete.
Fara was watching his face. “Something I said?” she asked.
"One of those moments when you realize something about yourself,” Ken said. “In my experience those moments are almost always a mixed bag."
She put Bobby back on his side of the chessboard. “Yeah,” she said.
"So okay,” Ken said. “You told me about your grammar, I showed you my aliens from another dimension. What do we do now? Is this when the feds show up and disappear us both, or do we get to talk to them?"
"I'm thinking we should try to talk,” Fara said. “I'm not quite sure it's going to work, though. Can you give me a hand with something?"
Usually Ken opened Mystery Hill at nine sharp, but what with the extraterrestrial hallucinogens and the possibility that he might be talking to aliens during the course of the morning, he decided to take the day off. While Fara wrestled with crates in the back of her car, he went down and chained off the driveway, hanging a closed-see you tomorow! sign in the middle of the chain. He always spelled tomorrow wrong on the theory that if he made the place seem more rustic, tourists would be more likely to stop there. There was no draw quite like the chance to feel superior. Then he called Jamie and told her not to come in, which broke her heart not at all once he told her he'd pay her for the day. “Stay away from that shit Little Boozy is peddling,” he told her. “If I ever see you pogoing on my minigolf course, we're going to have a problem."
"You're not my dad,” she said, and hung up on him.
Glad that he'd never had kids, Ken walked out of the office to discover Old Vera of the Forked Tongue standing on the other side of the driveway chain. She appeared indignant.
"What do you mean, closed?” Vera demanded as soon as she saw him.
"You can read, Vera. Come back tomorrow."
"I most certainly will not.” Vera commenced trying to heave one of her substantial thighs over the chain.
Now what have I done to deserve this? Ken wondered, although he knew perfectly well. Twenty-five years ago, when he'd been more foolish and Vera more attractive, she had been one of his Reptilian-groupie liaisons. Now he was paying for his sins, because Vera of the Forked Tongue not only believed in the Reptilians, she professed to believe she was one. Hence her moniker. She appeared at Mystery Hill according to some schedule that made sense only to her, and every time she managed to fill Ken up with an emotional stew of regret, annoyance, and pity.
"Vera,” he said. “If you fall down and break your arm, I'm not driving you to the hospital."
"Today's the day, Ken,” Vera wheezed. “I finally figured it out."
Having no choice, Ken took hold of her leg just above the ankle and moved it back to the other side of the chain, careful not to upset her balance. When he let go of her leg, it stayed in the air for a moment before she shifted her weight. Remarkable balance for a woman of her size, Ken thought. He looked at her and wondered what it was about her life that had brought her to this pass. She was about his age, but since he'd first known her had put on maybe a hundred pounds and taken to dressing like Madame Blavatsky. Necklaces and bracelets rattled and clinked every time she moved or drew breath. Some of her hair was twisted into dreadlocks, some of the rest beaded and braided. Over her shoulder she carried a cloth bag stuffed with books and journals filled with ramblings and calculations about the Reptilians.
"What day?” he asked, because he couldn't help it.
"The day they show themselves,” Vera said.
"Vera, you've said that a hundred times in the last twenty years. Literally,” he said.
With great and withering hauteur, she said, “The scientific method demands great dedication, and progress through trial and error. I have had hypotheses, and they were wrong. I admit it. But now I am right, and I am coming over this chain, Ken Kassarjian, so you'd better just get used to the idea."
"No,” he said. “We're closed today."
Vera looked as if he'd slapped her. Then her shock mutated into a knowing leer. “So it is today,” she said. “That's why you're keeping everyone out. You know, don't you, Ken?"
"Vera,” Ken began, and then was briefly distracted as the lizard-man tea sparked up for a second and the entire Pink Floyd song “Vera” ran through his head. He looked up. It was in fact a sunny day. “Yikes,” he muttered to himself.
"Ken, what the hell is wrong with you?"
He snapped himself out of it. “Nothing. Come back tomorrow."
"Ken, no, it's today. You owe me this, Ken."
He started walking away, not wanting to look at Vera because he knew she would get theatrical. “You owe me this, Ken!” she yelled. “If you know something, you owe me!"
"Tomorrow, Vera,” he said without looking back. Feeling bad about himself, he walked back up the driveway and found Fara out behind the barn setting up a shiny metal contraption unlike the one he'd seen the day before.
"Who was that?” she asked.
"That,” he said, “was Vera of the Forked Tongue. Did you see her?"
"I did. Are there many like her?"
"Too many. But she and I have a history, so she feels entitled.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he wanted to kill himself.
"A history,” Fara repeated, with a sidelong look and the faintest hint of a smile.
Ah well, Ken thought. Honesty's the best policy. “I've been around long enough that I had lots of chances to do dumb things. Couldn't pass all of them up."
"Persuasive,” she said, and went back to her machine.
Time to change the subject, Ken thought. “What do you call this thing?"
"This thing is a Lacoste A10. For measuring fluctuations in gravity. I've also,” she added with a wink, “customized it a little."
"Fancy,” Ken said. “Lacoste like the shirts?” He was having a hard time imagining Izod gravimeters.
Fara laughed. “No, but one of my
colleagues did paint an alligator on the side of his. I've got a bunch of other basic mass-spring doodads in the van, but I like this one,” Fara said.
"So, customized. As in, talking to them?"
She was fiddling with a display. “That's the idea."
"Huh,” Ken said. “Now when you do this, is it going to come across as fluctuations in the gravity over there?"
"I hope so. But gravity might not do over there what it does here. Physical laws might be different. Although,” Fara said, looking off into the distance for a moment, “if they can exist here, things must not be all that different there. Unless some kind of conservation of, what, form, is operating. Wow."
"You lost me."
"Well, what if they occupy a certain ecological space over there, and they are more or less reconstituted to occupy the analogous space here? What if there's a sort of universal trans-brane grammar of phylogeny, so that if you're....” She caught herself, which was a good thing, because Ken never would have caught her. “Never mind. Probably things are just similar enough over there that they can survive here."
"They don't actually survive too well,” Ken pointed out.
"This is maybe not the time to tell you this,” Fara said as she sighted down a thin tube pointed in the direction of the barn, “but absence of evidence is not, as they say, evidence of absence. Could be there's a million of them running around in the woods and you and Boozy have just seen the ones that didn't make it. Could be they wanted you to do everything you've done, et cetera. Or not. I don't know, and you don't either."
"Okay, Professor,” Ken said.
She looked up at him. “What?"
He was annoyed but couldn't say exactly why, because she was probably right, or at any rate could be right. Still, there were ways to say something, and he'd been seeing the dead lizard-men for years. Maybe she was just trying to get his goat because of Vera.
"Nothing,” he said. “If you talk to them, ask them if they'll tell us how to come over there for a visit. But only if we get some kind of survival course first. I don't want to visit another universe if I'm just going to get hit by a car full of alien tourists. Also ask them why they don't have any clothes on."
"If the connection works,” she said, “you can ask them yourself."
She plugged her laptop into a socket on the side of the Lacoste, turned both machines on, and started running three or four different programs. “Okay, here goes,” she said after a minute. It occurred to Ken that he still hadn't had any coffee. There wasn't any place close enough to walk. Maybe Jamie would bring him a cup. He was about to unlock the office and use the phone in there when he remembered that she wasn't coming in. Then he was about to ask Fara if she wanted a cup, but before he could, she said, “Hey, it worked."
"What? What worked?"
"This worked. This talking-to-another-universe thing we've been doing."
Ken experienced that dangerously polyvalent kind of exasperation that you only feel toward someone you either a) love or b) like a lot in a way that in unguarded moments you might admit means you want to love. He was dangerously near to needing saving, and not from a tourist-trap groupie this time. Fara Oussemitski was a creature of another ... well, phylum, he thought, since the word was in his head. Phylogeny? Phylum? They were related, right?
"You serious?” he said.
"I sure am.” She was toggling back and forth between a couple of different programs on her laptop.
"Well, holy sheepshit, Doctor Oussemitski. I guess congratulations are in order."
"You guess right. Hey, Ken, run into the barn and see how far off your plumb bob hangs."
He did, a little goofy because she'd called him Ken. Here you are participating in a communication with an alien race, he thought, laughing at himself, and you're all calf-eyed over this girl. The plumb bob was hanging fourteen degrees off. “Yow,” he said, and went back outside to make his report.
"And the average is what?"
"About eight degrees."
"Yeah,” she said, eyes still on the monitor of her laptop. “Whole lot of chatter all of a sudden.” Then she sat up straighter and said, “I'm such an idiot."
Ken did his best to look doubtful.
"Which way is the plumb bob off? I mean, what direction?"
Closing his eyes to envision the inside of the barn, Ken oriented himself and pointed to the south-southwest. “About there,” he said. When he opened his eyes he gave himself a fright because he was pointing right at the shed, and momentarily he thought that the shed door was going to burst open and disgorge a horde of avenging lizard-men. Hey, fellas, he was already explaining in his mind. I didn't kill ‘em (well, there was that one last October, but I thought it was a turkey), and if you want something to get good and worked up about, have I introduced you to my neighbor and distant acquaintance Little Boozy Boswell?
"What's over that way?” Fara asked. “Other than the shed. I'm guessing if they were coming into the shed, you'd have had communication with them already."
"I was just thinking that,” Ken said. “All's that's out there is woods. A creek or two, couple of ponds. Farther back there's some houses."
She looked skeptical. “Let's take a walk,” she said.
"Are you ... wait a sec. You think that when the plumb bob is off more it means some of them are coming over?” It made a certain kind of sense.
Fara was already headed around the shed and into the brushy margin of Ken's property. “That's exactly what I'm saying,” she said over her shoulder. “I think that your baseline disturbance is just noise from the open channel. Small fluctuations probably mean some kind of communication, and big ones signal arrivals or departures. Argh, I wish there was some way to monitor that plumb bob so we could know how long the big disturbances go on."
"Get your department to put in a camera,” Ken suggested.
"Sure, but I mean right now. If we see some of them, and we can correlate the last arrival with the end of the big disturbance, then—agh.” Not looking where she was going, she'd walked into a low-hanging branch. She stumbled, and Ken caught her.
"Tenure,” she said. “If I can make that correlation, I get tenure."
Ken couldn't quite believe what he was hearing. “Tenure?"
She shook her head and rubbed at the spot on her hairline where she'd hit the branch. “Oh. Did I not say the part about the Nobel Prize and becoming an international celebrity for discovering sapient life in another universe? Thought I did. Hey, we have to hurry.” She took off through the trees, and Ken followed.
* * * *
Truth be told, the moment at which Ken Kassarjian first observed the presence of a living sapient extraterrestrial organism was a little anticlimactic. He was out of breath, his mind was scattered by his infatuation with Fara Oussemitski, and he'd just slapped at a mosquito behind his right ear. Then Fara stopped dead in front of him and he almost barreled into her while simultaneously trying to get a look at whatever had caught her attention. Which, as it turned out, was a lizard-man. Then another. Then two more.
Well, I'll be darned, Ken thought—but he was also thinking that this proximity to Fara was mighty nice, and that the combination of bug dope and whatever she put in her hair smelled better than it had any right to.
"Shit,” Fara said. “I don't have my camera."
It was all Ken could do not to burst out laughing. Some remnant instinct toward woodland silence, left over from his teenage years when he hunted a lot, kept him quiet, but Fara looked over her shoulder at him, saw the expression on his face, and said, “Shut up."
The lizard-men heard her and stood looking at the two of them. One of them said something to the others. Its voice sounded a little like R2D2. Then all four of them were off like they were spring-loaded, scattering into the trees.
"Some alien hunter you are,” Ken said.
"I'm a physicist,” she replied with wounded dignity, and stalked off in the general direction of the minigolf course. As Ken turned to follow her
, he saw out of the corner of his eye the unmistakable form of Little Boozy Boswell, motionless in the dappled shadow of young pine trees growing up in the clearing made by the fall of their ancestors. All of his exuberance, his flirtatious happiness at being alive this morning, drained right out through his gut. Keeping a stone face so Boozy wouldn't think he'd been spotted, Ken walked off, but already he was dreading what he knew would come next.
* * * *
And it didn't take long. The next morning, while Fara was off somewhere compiling the results of the previous day's soon-to-be-immortal endeavors, and Ken was sitting in the office counting up receipts and having a cup of coffee, he heard the signature death rattle of Little Boozy's F-150. “Hey there, Ken,” Little Boozy said as he burst through the office door. “I got me an idea."
"Does it involve gangsters?"
"Does it what?” Ken watched the wheels grinding in Little Boozy's head. “No, I got an idea. What if, and I'm not saying this is true, but what if we could find out where the lizard-men were coming from?"
"And how would we do that?” Ken asked.
Little Boozy glared at him. I know I shouldn't, Ken thought. I'll go to hell for it. But it's just too much fun.
Plus there was way too much at stake. Who knew how the lizard-men would react if Little Boozy wanted to start trapping them, or ranching them or something?
"Well,” Little Boozy said irritably. “What's that professor been doing? Ain't she looking for them?"
"Boozy, you know as well as I do that a hundred people a year show up looking for aliens. Old Vera of the Forked Tongue showed up again today. So as far as the professor is concerned, she might be. She hasn't told me much. Why don't you go ask her yourself?"
As he heard himself say this, Ken realized it might be a serious tactical error. He hadn't told Fara about Little Boozy's surveillance, and he had no idea how she would react to Little Boozy if he approached her in a belligerent mood.
"I just might do that,” Little Boozy said, but Ken could tell he was vamping. Boozy knew Ken was lying, but he didn't know that Ken knew he knew, and he didn't know that Ken knew that Little Boozy was trying to sucker him. I'm no genius, Ken thought, but all it takes is the right frame of reference to make me look like one.
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