Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  More wonder: Heacock says, with an impish grin, that they made an error in timing: because they didn’t know precisely where Titan would be (or something like that), the Voyager made the ring plane crossing 49 seconds earlier than expected. Everyone laughs. The bird has been in transit for three years and the biggest miscalculation is 49 seconds. The next time I call the telephone company about a repair and they tell me it can’t be done, I will tell them anything can be done.

  I smile with pride at my lovely species. We ain’t so goddam dumb after all.

  (Middle of the day Tuesday, a slow time with everybody out to lunch, I went to the astonishing botanical gardens of the Huntington Museum with Jane Mackenzie and Bob Silverberg. We wandered through alien terrain straight out of a 1936 Frank R. Paul cover from Amazing Stories, a desert garden of a million kinds of seemingly extraterrestrial cacti. And Bob ruminated. “I was standing next to one of those scientists at the back of the auditorium during briefing,” he said, “when he was describing something incredibly arcane; and I looked at him. I was looking at something like 180 I.Q. and I knew that man was smarter than I. Far smarter. And I’m smart”)

  The briefing goes on. Norman Ness, from the Goddard Space Flight Center, principal investigator on the magnetic field team, explains how the Voyager passed through Saturn’s bow shock wave at 4:50 pm when Titan was inside the magnetic field envelope of the planet. He speaks of the solar wind, the flow of ionized gas given off by the sun that hisses through the solar system. There is no poetry in the words … only in the way he speaks of it. Norman Ness barely realizes he has looked on the face of the Almighty.

  The photos we’re seeing are four times as detailed as what came in over the tv screens real-time. Television’s scanning pattern permits only one-quarter of the information contained in the photos sent by the Voyager’s imaging systems to reveal itself when we see it on the screen. Even so, the details are remarkable.

  But most remarkable of all is the revelation that three components of the F ring seem to defy the laws of pure orbital mechanics: they are braided. Such a thing cannot be, yet we look at the photographs and we see that indeed, the rings do twine. Brad Smith of the University of Arizona is totally at a loss to explain it. He cannot even make a joke. This is the big time, something never encountered before. He looks like a man stunned by the hammer. He says that of all the improbables he might have postulated, even to the inclusion of eccentric rings, which have now been verified, the braiding is so far off the wall he could not even have conceived of it.

  We stare at the pictures.

  The rings twine around each other. The room falls silent for a moment, we hold our breath; we are living in one of those special moments when something is happening, something important.

  The celestial engineer has been cutting capers again.

  A photo of Mimas taken at 5:05 am Pacific Standard Time from a range of approximately 400,000 miles shows an impact crater 80 miles in diameter. It shows a rebound peak God only knows how high in the center of the structure. The crater is more than a quarter of the diameter of the whole damned iceball. It may be the largest impact crater, relative to the size of the object struck, in the solar system. What will the shock pattern on the other side of Mimas look like? What will it tell us about how big a projectile can be before it blows something like our moon to smithereens?

  That’s why you asked for your ring back and walked away fast when the feep didn’t understand.

  During the press conference—between 10:53 and 10:56 am— the mechanism making search-sweeps for new satellites apparently discovered S-16. Later it turns out to be S-10.

  Patrick Moore, he who knows more about our moon than anyone else writing about Luna, asks Smith about a small satellite that might be controlling the inside boundary of the C ring. Smith gets an expression that is the equivalent of crossing one’s fingers and responds that he hopes it’s there … because if it’s there it will go a long way to explaining how the rings hold together. He says they will modify the Voyager II search patterns to locate it … if it’s there.

  It becomes clear that the photos we’re being given for publication are merely bullshit PR. That as soon as this circus leaves town the scientists upstairs can employ full computer time to analyze the pictures instead of putting together “pretty pictures” for the press.

  And that’s exactly what happens.

  Within two days, they have analyzed so much of the material that they’ve revealed a wind on the surface of Saturn that blows at 1100 miles per hour. If that wind were here on Earth it would be blowing in a steady line from Philadelphia to Buenos Aires.

  And then comes the explanation for the anomalous “spokes” that were seen radiating out through the rings. It is an explanation so unbelievable that it can only be termed a Star Wars special effect.

  As the Voyager fell through the ring plane on the 12th, heading for its closest encounter with Saturn, a secondary experiment on board—”The Planetary Radio-Astronomy Receiver”—picked up enormous bursts of energy—static—identical to terrestrial thunderstorm noises … but a million times stronger than anything in the solar system.

  The bursts of energy coincided with the mysterious “spokes” seen in the rings.

  Putting the results together, the Voyager team has tentatively come up with an awesome mechanism operating within the ring, namely, electrical discharges—lightning—occurring over tens of thousands of kilometers.

  The Voyager was literally being shot at by Saturn as it flew past. The “spokes” seem to be—hold your breath—enormous linear particle accelerators!

  As best I can explain it to you (and most of this comes from Dick Hoagland), here’s what causes this phenomenon that cannot be explained within the parameters of known celestial mechanics.

  The density of material in the B, or center, ring is the highest. The highest number of, literally, icebergs per cubic mile. Because of the inevitability of Keplerian mechanics, the bergs closest to Saturn are orbiting faster. Any ice object with an eccentric orbit, even a few meters of eccentricity, will collide with other bergs. Because of the brittleness and cold of this ice they naturally fracture producing, well, producing chips off the old block. Then those fragments collide and chip again and again, getting smaller and smaller. These collisions continue in a never-ending rubble-producing process.

  But. When this occurs in Saturn’s two-hour shadow, when the fragments sail out into sunlight the smallest particles—micron-size, perhaps—are charged up by interaction with solar ultraviolet light and, because like charges repel as any dummy clearly knows, they literally try to get away from the rings. Producing a levitating cloud of charged ice crystals elevated above the average ring plane who knows how far … several miles to several thousand miles.

  Grabbed by Saturn’s magnetic field (magnetic fields and electrical charges, Hoagland assures me, go hand-in-hand), they are lined up in a linear feature tens of thousands of kilometers long, stretching from the outer edge of B ring in toward Saturn. Straight and narrow as a flashlight beam. These appear in the optical images as “spokes” which rotate anomalously around the planet defying all explanation. At this moment.

  Give them a week more.

  And so these electrified ice crystals apparently discharge along the length of the spoke creating, in effect, the solar system’s largest radio antenna as well as a natural linear particle accelerator.

  Even I, scientific illiterate, aware of the breakthroughs in particle physics that have come from such terrestrial plants as the Ba-tavia, Illinois proton synchrotron, can extrapolate what it would mean to harness that “spoke” mechanism to aid us in discovering precisely of what matter is composed, how it works, how it came to be.

  Explain that to the feep who said, “So what?”

  I overload. I cannot contain any more new information. I pack it in and lie down and turn on the radio.

  The news is all taken up with how high the stock market has jumped with Reagan’s latest fiscal pro
nouncements. And the war between Iraq and Iran. I close my eyes and slap the button off on the radio.

  I sigh deeply. Ain’t we a wonderful species.

  NIGHT OF BLACK GLASS

  When he finally made the decision to slip of! the end of the world, he took only one hundred dollars from the joint account, left Gwen no note, went to the Greyhound station and slipped fifty of the hundred through the window to the clerk, and said, “Send me as far as this will take me.”

  He wound up on the rocky coast of Maine.

  He had never been to Maine, and he had no particular interest in going to Maine; but he wanted to walk off the end of the world and Maine was as likely a departure point as any. Was there still a Timbuktu?

  He walked along the rocky beach. August. Still and salty. The sunlight shone off the softly undulating water like strips of mylar, catching his eyes painfully and then vanishing. The seagulls wheeled overhead, thousands of them, layabouts of the upper air, waiting for charity from the ocean.

  It was early afternoon, a bit muggy, and as far as he could see up the beach, he was alone. The sunlight flashed in his eyes and he looked away; he looked down.

  A pair of broken sunglasses lay half-buried in the sand.

  He stopped and looked at them.

  He remembered the fight with Gwen, the afternoon he had slapped her, and her sunglasses had flown off her face, and he had crushed them with his foot.

  That hadn’t been the beginning, but it might have been the beginning of their final moments as a unit.

  “I thought you said jealousy simply wasn’t in your nature?” She said it with vehemence, with betrayal ringing in her voice, far back in her throat, clogging back the tears.

  “It’s not jealousy, God damn you! It’s … it’s that you couldn’t restrain yourself. There’s no macho in it. I don’t feel cuckolded, I feel pissed off. I’m angry!”

  “Angry? I’m angry, too. You just hit me in the face.”

  “Yeah … well…”

  She tried to turn away, but her frustration stopped her. “That’s the best you can do, right? ‘Yeah, well… ?’ That’s all I get for a punch in the mouth? ‘Yeah, well … ?’ That, and a bruise starting tonight?”

  Billy Dunbar sat down on the edge of the pool, dangling his feet in the water, and talked to the empty air. “Jesus, Gwen; I was only away for three weeks. Why the hell did you have to get it on with Vinnie. Couldn’t you wait for me to come back, couldn’t you wait to talk it out, to try and find a way through this?”

  She stood behind him, staring down at the broken glass and the twisted frame of the sunglasses. It was uncomplicated symbology.

  “I’ve waited two years, Billy. I’ve waited and I’ve tried to talk to you, and every time we started, when it got too hot for you, off you went. Off to sleep, off to work, off to the bathroom to sit in there and work crossword puzzles till I forgot where the starting place was. That’s all the waiting anybody should have to do.”

  “But, Vinnie, for Christ’s sake! He’s been sniffing around you like a hyena for the last six months.”

  “And you knew it.”

  “And I figured you wouldn’t be co-opted that easily. I thought we still had something going here.”

  “It was going, Billy; and it went.”

  “Yeah … well …”

  And that had been the end of it.

  Oh, it had crawled along for another six months, a thing that had had its back broken; but it was finished.

  And he had taken one hundred dollars, and he had gone to the bus station, and he had slept most of the way to the edge of the world where now he stood staring down at the uncomplicated symbology lying in the sand at his feet.

  He hunkered down and looked at the plastic frames, the one empty eye circle, the broken glass in the other—that had once caught sunlight and thrown it back. He picked it up and held the twisted thing in his hand, warm from the sun of August in Maine.

  Then he slipped them into the side pocket of his light wind-breaker, and stared out at the ocean.

  The thought came to him that it was raw justice that he should come to the edge of the world and find himself at the ocean. He had never liked the ocean. There was an undercurrent of genuine fear when he thought of the great waters lying at either end of the continent.

  The ocean, the sea, the great waters didn’t give a damn for the little two-footed things that came down to the shore to fish and skip flat stones. The deeps held secrets like haughty society doyens, and they only gave them up when accompanied by death. He had lived in California for a while, after he’d come back from the Nam. And one night, with a woman he had met in a bar, he drove to Malibu during a spring thunderstorm. The Pacific had been deranged, rising up and hurling itself at the beach with the sound of great armies in conflict.

  The woman had been a little drunk, had pulled off her shoes, and had rim down the crumbling hillside to the beach. Into the darkness. He had screamed for her to come back, that he wasn’t going down there. He didn’t scream that he was afraid, that he knew this insensate beast was furious, would sweep over them as if they were driftwood. He knew the ocean could simply belch once and swallow the whole fucking state. And he wanted to get away from there.

  He stood on the hillside above the conflict and screamed for her; but she had run up the beach, or into the water, or had vanished into the night … and he was too terrified to stay.

  So he had dashed back to the car and had driven away; leaving her there.

  He remembered that now. And Gwen. He had dashed into the night and left her behind. He had finally come to a place where he could ran no farther. Raw justice had brought him to the place he feared the most.

  No. There was one place he feared more.

  It no longer existed, it was gone into ashes and charred bodies; but in his memory it still stood. In Vietnam.

  The town had once had a name, but if he had ever heard it, he could not remember. It had been six kilometers from Bien Hoa City, during the Tet period in 1968. His rifle platoon had been pinned down by sniper fire, and the tanks of the 2nd Battalion,

  47th Mechanized Infantry were still fighting it out at the prisoner compound east of Bien Hoa City. They were all alone. Cut off and one by one being turned into meat for the earth’s dining table.

  Lying in the ditch with three men he didn’t know, he heard the whump of a grenade launcher and the insect whine of the incoming round … and he knew this one was for them. He tried to scream Get out! but they wouldn’t have heard it: he was already out of the ditch, scrambling through the saw-grass and the mud away from them.

  When it hit, they went up and sprayed. Parts hit him in the back and knocked him flat. He wouldn’t lie there; he kept scuttling on all fours, leaving his rifle behind, leaving the crater behind, leaving the wet things in the saw-grass to drain into the hungry earth.

  The ocean was only the second most fearful place in the world. Even here at the edge, only second most terrifying.

  Billy Dunbar sat on the rocky beach and thought of flight.

  He had walked into Wiscasset for something to eat late in the afternoon. A sandwich, an Indian pudding, three cups of coffee.

  He sat alone on the beach. Once, a little girl wandered past, stopped and looked at him, and sat down beside him. He looked at her, not wanting to get involved: there was always the chance her mother was somewhere nearby, watching; there was always the chance someone would think he was bothering the child. So he just looked at her.

  She had Dutch bangs that came down to her eyes. She was wearing a playsuit. Perhaps ten years old.

  “I am going to make a big boat,” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “And then I am going to sail it to the moon,” she said.

  He smiled. “You can’t get there from here.”

  “Can too.”

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  She thought about it for a moment. Her face worked itself into a scrunch of concentration. Then
she bit her hp and said, “I will use magic stuff.”

  “Ohhhh,” he said, “well, now, that makes a lot of sense. And what will you do when you get there?”

  “I know ‘zactly what: I will get a cheese sandwich.”

  He nodded, losing interest. “Good thinking.”

  After a little while, she went away, and he was alone once more; as night descended gradually, dimming the ocean and shrouding the land behind him. He continued to stare out across the edge of the world, hoping his thoughts would come together and he would get an idea where to go and what to do.

  But this was the edge, and there wasn’t any other place to go.

  He was thirty-eight years old, he had left behind everything that had made itself available: family, home, wife, career, friends. He was approaching the midpoint and he was alone.

  But he knew that somewhere behind him he had missed the question, and the answer.

  The moon was shaped like the blade of a scimitar. It cast very little light. He thought about the little girl with the Dutch bangs. A cheese sandwich. He smiled, thinking that very soon she would cease being a kid and turn into a human being; and then all the rest of her days would be spent chasing the memory of what she had left behind.

  Something moved out on the ocean.

  At first he thought it was flotsam, something the deep had thrown up. He wondered whose death had made it possible. He watched as it moved in toward shore. The waves slid quietly toward the beach and vanished in the rocks and sand, but the tide seemed to come no closer.

  It was a woman. She came walking in from nowhere, coming straight for him. He couldn’t make out her features, or what she was wearing. Just a woman, with hair wet and hanging like seaweed. He watched, feeling the fear building in him again. Who walks out of the ocean in the night?

  When she was close enough he saw she was wearing a dress, and she was barefoot. The dress was soaked through and her legs were dripping with mud and sea-scum. She stopped in front of him and looked beyond, toward the land.