ADAMS, Douglas - Mostly Harmless
Page 22
from New York. The red eye. Always a killer, that.
Then, being accosted by aliens on her lawn and flown to
the planet Rupert. She was not sufficiently experienced in that
sort of thing to be able to say for sure that that was always a
killer, but she would be prepared to bet that those who went
through it regularly cursed it. There were always stress charts
being published in magazines. Fifty stress points for losing your
job. Seventy-five points for a divorce or changing your hairstyle
and so on. None of them ever mentioned being accosted on your
lawn by aliens and then being flown to the planet Rupert, but she
was sure it was worth a few dozen points.
It wasn't that the journey had been particularly stressful. It
had been extremely dull in fact. Certainly it had been no more
stressful than the trip she had just taken across the Atlantic and
it had taken roughly the same time, about seven hours.
Well that was pretty astounding wasn't it? Flying to the outer
limits of the solar system in the same time that it took to fly to
New York meant they must have some fantastic unheard-of form
of propulsion in the ship. She quizzed her hosts about it and they
agreed that it was pretty good.
`But how does it work?' she had demanded excitedly. She
was still quite excited at the beginning of the trip.
She found that part of the tape and played it through to
herself. The Grebulons, which is what they called themselves,
were politely showing her which buttons they pressed to make
the ship go.
`Yes, but what principle does it work on?' she heard herself
demand, from behind the camera.
`Oh, you mean is it something like a warp drive or something
like that?' they said.
`Yes,' persisted Tricia. `What is it?'
`It probably is something of the kind,' they said.
`Like what?'
`Warp drive, photon drive, something like that. You'd have
to ask the Flight Engineer.'
`Which one is he?'
`We don't know. We have all lost our minds, you see.'
`Oh yes,' said Tricia, a little faintly. `So you said. Um,
how did you lose your minds, exactly , then?.'
`We don't know,' they said, patiently.
`Because you've lost your minds,' echoed Tricia, glumly.
`Would you like to watch television? It is a long flight.
We watch television. It is something we enjoy.'
All of this riveting stuff was on the tape, and fine. viewing
it made. First of all the picture quality was extremely poor.
Tricia didn't know why this was, exactly. She had a feeling
that the Grebulons responded to a slightly different range of
light frequencies, and that there had been a lot of ultra-violet
around which was mucking up the video camera. There were
a lot of interference patterns and video snow as well. Probably
something to do with the warp drive that none of them knew
the first thing about.
So what she had on tape, essentially, was a bunch of slightly
thin and discoloured people sitting around watching televisions
that were showing network broadcasts. She had also pointed the
camera out of the very tiny viewport near her seat and got a nice,
slightly streaky effect of stars. She knew it was real, but it would
have taken a good three or four minutes to fake.
In the end she had decided to save her precious videotape
for Rupert itself and had simply sat back and watched television
with them. She had even dozed off for a while.
So part of her sick feeling came from the sense that she
had had all that time in an alien spacecraft of astounding
technological design, and had spent most of it dozing in front of
reruns of M*A*S*H and Cagney and Lacey. But what else was
there to do? She had taken some photos as well, of course, all
of which had subsequently turned out to be badly fogged when
she got them back from the chemist.
Another part of her sick feeling probably came from the landing
on Rupert. This at least had been dramatic and hair-raising. The
ship had come sweeping in over a dark and sombre landscape, a
terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its
parent sun that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars
on the mind of an abandoned child.
Lights blazed through the frozen darkness and guided the
ship into the mouth of some kind of cave that seemed to bend
itself open to accept the small craft.
Unfortunately, because of the angle of their approach, and
the depth at which the small thick viewport was set into the
craft's skin, it hadn't been possible to get the. video camera to
point directly at any of it. She ran through that bit of the tape.
The camera was pointing directly at the sun.
This is normally very bad for a video camera. But when
the sun is roughly a third of a billion miles away it doesn't
do any harm. In fact it hardly makes any impression at all.
You just get a small point of light right in the middle of the
frame, which could be just about anything. It was just one star
in a multitude.
Tricia fast-forwarded.
Ah. Now, the next bit had been quite promising. They had
emerged out of the ship into a vast, grey, hangar-like structure.
This was clearly alien technology on a dramatic scale. Huge grey
buildings under the dark canopy of the Perspex bubble. These
were the same buildings that she had been looking at at the end
of the tape. She had taken more footage of them while leaving
Rupert a few hours later, just as she was about to reboard the
spacecraft for the journey home. What did they remind her of?
Well, as much as anything else they reminded her of a
film set from just about any low-budget science-fiction movie of
the last twenty years. A lot larger, of course, but it all looked
thoroughly tawdry and unconvincing on the video screen. Apart
from the dreadful picture quality she had been struggling with the
unexpected effects of gravity that was appreciably lower than that
on Earth, and she had found it very hard to keep the camera from
bouncing around in an embarrassingly unprofessional way. It was
therefore impossible to make out any detail.
And now here was the Leader coming forward to greet
her, smiling and sticking his hand out.
That was all he was called. The Leader.
None of the Grebulons had names, largely because they
couldn't think of any. Tricia discovered that some of them had
thought of calling themselves after characters from television
programmes they had picked up from Earth, but hard as they
had tried to call each other Wayne and Bobby and Chuck, some
remnant of something lurking deep in the cultural subconscious
they had brought with them from the distant stars which were
their homes must have told them that this really wasn't right and
wouldn't do.
The Leader had looked pretty much like all the others.
Possibly a bit less thin. He said how much he enjoyed her shows
on TV, that he was her grea
test fan, how glad he was that she
had been able to come along and visit them on Rupert and how
much everybody had been looking forward to her coming, how
he hoped the flight had been comfortable and so on. There was
no particular sense she could detect of being any kind of emissary
from the stars or anything.
Certainly, watching it now on videotape, he just looked like
some guy in costume and make-up, standing in front of a set
that wouldn't hold up too well if you leant against it.
She sat staring at the screen with her face cradled in her
hands, and shaking her head in slow bewilderment.
This was awful.
Not only was this bit awful but she knew what was coming
next. It was the bit where the Leader asked if she was hungry
after the flight, and would she perhaps like to come and have
something to eat? They could discuss things over a little dinner.
She could remember what she was thinking at this point.
Alien food.
How was she going to deal with it?
Would she actually have to eat it? Would she have access to
some sort of paper napkin she could spit stuff out into? Wouldn't
there be all sorts of differential immunity problems?
It turned out to be hamburgers.
Not only did it turn out to be hamburgers, but the hamburgers
it turned out to be were very clearly and obviously McDonald's
hamburgers which had been reheated in a microwave. It wasn't
just the look of them. It wasn't just the smell. It was the poly-
styrene clamshell packages they came in which had `McDonald's'
printed all over them.
`Eat! Enjoy!' said the Leader. `Nothing is too good for our
honoured guest!'
This was in his private apartment. Tricia had looked around it
in bewilderment that had bordered on fear but had nevertheless
got it all on videotape.
The apartment had a waterbed in it. And a Midi hi-fi. And
one of those tall electrically illuminated glass things which sit on
table tops and appear to have large globules of sperm floating
about in them. The walls were covered in velvet.
The leader lounged against a brown corduroy bean bag and
squirted breath-freshener into his mouth.
Tricia began to feel very scared, suddenly. She was further from
Earth than any human being, to her knowledge, had ever been,
and she was with an alien creature, who was lounging against a
brown corduroy bean bag and squirting breath-freshener into his
mouth.
She didn't want to make any false moves. She didn't want
to alarm him. But there were things she had to know.
`How did you... where did you get... this?' she asked,
gesturing around the room, nervously.
`The decor?' asked the Leader. `Do you like it? It is very
sophisticated. We are a sophisticated people, we Grebulons.
We buy sophisticated consumer durables... by mail order.'
Tricia had nodded tremendously slowly at this point.
`Mail order...' she had said.
The Leader chuckled. It was one of those dark chocolate
reassuring silky chuckles.
`I think you think they ship it here. No! Ha Ha! We have
arranged a special box number in New Hampshire. We make
regular pick-up visits. Ha Ha!' He lounged back in a relaxed
fashion on his bean bag, reached for a reheated french fry
and nibbled the end of it, an amused smile playing across. his
lips.
Tricia could feel her brain beginning to bubble very slightly.
She kept the video camera going.
`How do you, well, er, how do you pay for these wonderful
...things?'
The Leader chuckled again.
`American Express,' he said with a nonchalant shrug.
Tricia nodded slowly again. She knew that they gave cards
exclusively to just about anybody.
`And these?' she said, holding up the hamburger he had
presented her with.
`It is very easy,' said the Leader. `We stand in line.'
Again, Tricia realised with a cold, trickling feeling going
down her spine, that explained an awful lot.
She hit the fast forward button again. There was nothing of any
use here at all. It was all nightmarish madness. She could have
faked something that would have looked more convincing.
Another sick feeling began to creep over her as she watched
this hopeless awful tape, and she began, with slow horror, to
realise that it must be the answer.
She must be...
She shook her head and tried to get a grip.
An overnight flight going East... The sleeping pills she
had taken to get her through it. The vodka she'd had to set
the sleeping pills going.
What else? Well. There was seventeen years of obsession that
a glamorous man with two heads, one of which was disguised as
a parrot in a cage, had tried to pick her up at a party but had
then impatiently flown off to another planet in a flying saucer.
There suddenly seemed to be all sorts of bothersome aspects to
that idea that had never really occurred to her. Never occurred
to her. In seventeen years.
She stuffed her fist into her mouth.
She must get help.
Then there had been Eric Bartlett banging on about alien
spacecraft landing on her lawn. And before that... New York
had been, well, very hot and stressful. The high hopes and the
bitter disappointment. The astrology stuff.
She must have had a nervous breakdown.
That was it. She was exhausted and she had had a nervous
breakdown and had started hallucinating some time after she got
home. She had dreamt the whole story. An alien race of people
dispossessed of their own lives and histories, stuck on a remote
outpost of our solar system and filling their cultural vacuum with
our cultural junk. Ha! It was nature's way of telling her to check
into an expensive medical establishment very quickly.
She was very, very sick. She looked at how many large
coffees she'd got through as well, and realised how heavily
she was breathing and how fast.
Part of solving any problem, she told herself, was realising that
you had it. She started to bring her breathing under control. She
had caught herself in time. She had seen where she was. She was
on the way back from whatever psychological precipice she had
been on the brink of. She started to calm down, to calm down,
to calm down. She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes.
After a while, now that she was breathing normally again,
she opened them again.
So where had she got this tape from then?
It was still running.
All right. It was a fake.
She had faked it herself, that was it.
It must have been her who had faked it because her voice
was all over the soundtrack, asking questions. Every now and
then the camera would swing down at the end of a shot and she
would see her own feet in her own shoes. She had faked it and
she had no recollection of faking it or any idea of why she had
done it.
Her breathing was getting hectic again as she w
atched the
snowy, flickering screen.
She must still be hallucinating.
She shook her head, trying to make it go away. She had no
memory of faking any of this very obviously fake stuff. On the
other hand she did seem to have memories that were very like
the faked stuff. She continued to watch in a bewildered trance.
The person she imagined to be called the Leader was ques-
tioning her about astrology and she was answering smoothly and
calmly. Only she could detect the well-disguised rising panic in
her own voice.
The Leader pushed a button, and a maroon velvet wall
slid aside, revealing a large bank of flat TV monitors.
Each of the monitors was showing a kaleidoscope of different
images: a few seconds from a game show, a few seconds from a
cop show, a few seconds from a supermarket warehouse security
system, a few seconds from somebody's holiday movies, a few
seconds of sex, a few seconds of news, a few seconds of comedy.
It was clear that the Leader was very proud of all this stuff and
he was waving his hands like a conductor while continuing at the
same time to talk complete gibberish.
Another wave of his hands, and all the screens cleared to
form one giant computer screen showing in diagrammatic form
all the planets of the solar system and mapped out against a