Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  “You do?” Hoped leaped in Wendell’s stomach like a hungry puppy.

  Jason smiled cheerfully. “Sure. You’re possessed. There’s a lot of that going around right now.”

  “Possessed? You mean by some sort of demon?” Wendell hadn’t really considered the option.

  “Demon, dybbuk, spirit,” Jason said, and shrugged. “It all depends on your outlook. I can’t say what it is for certain on such short observation.”

  “Well, what should I do?” Wendell asked.

  Jason admitted that although his church was very strict about exorcisms, he personally was fascinated by Wendell’s case and wouldn’t mind a little field experience.

  The alien noted the Earthling’s dawning awareness of and pathetic attempts to cope with the foreign consciousness in its body. If the Rigelian had had a sense of humor it would have been amused. As it was, the alien merely added the datum to its already copious file and continued to observe. Of course the Terran would fail in its investigations. It was hopelessly primitive and its powers of concentration were minimal at best. In the Rigelian’s opinion, the Terran race would be vastly improved by accepting the rule of superior beings with an evolved sense of organization.

  The next morning, Jason the seminarian arrived at Wendell’s apartment. In his arms were a three-foot white candle in the shape of a cross (“I got it from a vendor on Telegraph”), a jar of pickled garlic (“We can always eat it.”), the Bible, and a dogeared paper-back copy of The Exorcist.

  “Have you ever done this before?” Wendell asked.

  “Oh, no. But I’ve talked about it a lot with my roommates after lights-out, and I’m a big movie fan. Is it all right with you if I run out for a smoke before we begin? Is there anywhere I won’t be seen?”

  Wendell gave him a saucer and planted him on the fire escape. When the seminarian came back inside a few minutes later his breath alone could have exorcised demons.

  Jason cleared his throat a few times and they got down to business. Wendell sat in a chair in the middle of the room. Jason lit the cross-candle and raised it over his head three times. He picked up the Bible and put it in Wendell’s lap. For good measure he put the jar of pickled garlic on top of it. Now he flipped through The Exorcist, pausing at one of the red-flagged pages.

  “God and lord of all creation,” he intoned, “let your mighty hand cast out this cruel demon from your servant, Wendell.”

  He slapped his own slightly clammy nicotine-stained hand over Wendell’s forehead. “It is He who commands you, oh fetid and evil one, tremble in fear, Oh Prince of Evil, and begone! Come forth, yield the . . .”

  “Mustard plaster,” said a high, quavering voice.

  “What?” said Wendell and Jason together.

  “Use a mustard plaster. Or Ben Gay, that’s good too.”

  The voice was familiar. “Mom!” Wendell cried.

  “Wendell, you remember me!”

  “Of course I do,” he said, feeling insulted. “But mom, you’re dead.”

  “It’s not so bad, honey. Could be worse. Listen, Wendell, I know you think there’s some demon or something possessing you, but I’ve looked around and I don’t see anybody in here besides me. You’re probably just overstimulated. Did you have any sugar? You know how you get with glucose.”

  Wendell sighed. “No, mom.”

  “Well, all right. If you really think there’s somebody or thing here, just tell it to leave. Go on, dear, speak up for yourself. Be mommy’s great big man.”

  Wendell opened his mouth to defend his masculinity, when to his horror he recognized the earnest baritone of his high school history teacher, Mr. Severinson.

  “Have you been reading trash again, Wendell? I told you . . .”

  Jason had picked up the cross again and was intoning, “It is He who commands you, He who expels you, He who . . .”

  “. . . not to hang out with these hippie types and learn to direct your energy.”

  A new voice, flat and nasal, chimed in. “A personality change is often the first sign of the fragmentation of the already fragile ego.”

  Wendell allowed himself a tiny smile. It was the voice of his first—and favorite—psychiatrist, tiny Dr. Gow. The one who had arranged his permanent disability status.

  “Hey, you quack,” cried Wendell’s mother. “Get away from my precious boy or I’ll fragment you.”

  “. . . Lord grant that this vileness be gone . . .”

  “It’s always hippie trash and garbage.”

  Wendell squirmed as the voices of three long-dead great-aunts whom he’d dubbed “The Harpy Trio” chimed in. And above them in the background, was that the trilling laugh of crazy Marsha, his second cousin-by-marriage? And behind her, the whispered suggestions of a stranger who had once tried to pick him up at a movie? Lecturing, declaiming, chiding, urging, while in the background, like a mad leitmotif played much too fast, ran the theme song to a cartoon show he had watched every Saturday morning when he was nine.

  He struggled to free himself from the chair and the voices, the snakepit of the past. His head was beginning to feel very noisy and crowded but not in any good way.

  The Rigelian had been relaxing for a moment, contemplating the coming invasion. It would be a snap. Such confused, chaotic animals, humans. So easily dominated and organized.

  The swarm was poised on Rigel 9 awaiting the scout’s signal. Soon the attack forces would be launched across the dark vastness of space and nothing would be able to stop them.

  “Excuse me.”

  The alien stared in amazement at the short, round, neatly coiffed, impeccably attired female human addressing him. She was unmistakeably noncorporeal, an interesting fact. The alien had thought that Homo sapiens were only able to communicate while in the body. Obviously, this was not always the case.

  “Would you mind telling me just what you think you’re doing inside my son’s head?”

  Other post-life incarnations began to manifest themselves.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t have your own head to hang around in?”

  “Unhand this young man.”

  “You leave Wendell alone. He’s a nice boy.”

  “Very sensitive.”

  “Sweet.”

  The alien tried to defend itself. It feinted with its jagged pseudohorns. It gnashed its long and pointed pseudoteeth. All to no effect. Never had it encountered anything like this . . . this collective energy.

  Wendell’s mother raised her wide leatherette purse and whirled it on its chain strap around her head like a lariat.

  Mr. Severinson pulled a sleek can of mace from the pocket of his tweed jacket. Dr. Gow brandished The Ego and The Id in his left hand and Beyond the Pleasure Principle in his right. Crazy Marsha whipped out a set of steaming orange hair rollers.

  The alien screamed and ran toward the deepest recesses of Wendell’s mind. But Wendell’s posse of spirits pursued it relentlessly.

  “Get out of here!”

  “Beat it.”

  “Hit the road, Jack!”

  They showed it terrible things: failed exams, late-night lectures, fumbling sexual encounters, toilet training.

  The alien reeled under the onslaught, sustaining lacerating bruises to its psychological matrices.

  I must get away, it thought. Back to safety, back to Rigel 9. Must warn the others. The humans have a secret weapon lodged in their brains. Memories capable of triggering the emotions. Oh, awful, horrendous, unthinkable. How do they bear the pain? I must flee. Nothing is worth this. Not even fingers.

  Meanwhile, outside, in Wendell’s living room, Jason droned on, improvising, “Ad hominum, donutum, inadvertum.” In the middle of a particularly intense excoriation he was overtaken by a sputum-spraying coughing fit.

  “Yuck,” said the phantom mob behind Wendell’s forehead.

  There was a scurrying, a great whoosh and gabble, tinny giggles, and a wheezing bagpipe arpeggio which slowly died away to silence.

  The Rigelian wandered ove
r the streets of Berkeley, a transparent wisp sailing on its pseudowing. I must go home, it thought. Yes, quickly now, I must tell them, warn them, before it’s too late.

  But slowly, horrifyingly, the alien realized that in the turmoil of escaping from the earthling’s brain and in the agony of its injuries it had somehow forgotten the all-important command for intersystem transport.

  I had it here a minute ago, it thought. Was it on a slip of paper? Perhaps I wrote it on my pseudofoot. Didn’t there used to be a pile of stuff here? Maybe the cat ate it. Or gave it to Susan. I could call her, she’s a programmer, she could look for it with a search program. No, better yet, I’ll call Information. No, they take too long. Maybe Jason stays up all night. I’ll bet he knows . . .

  Wendell leaned against the cushions of his old flowered sofa and took a deep, careful breath. He felt purged, as though he’d just had a really good rolfing. And he was blessedly alone. Jason had taken his cigarettes, his pickled garlic, his cough, and gone. The apartment was silent, no voices, no memories, no cats or kittens. It was almost holy.

  The stillness was a perfect repository for thought. Wendell sat, comfortably at one with his mind. Just think, he mused, something or other was inside my head with me, trying to eat my brain. Seriously weird. But it’s gone. Jason and my personal demons sent it packing, and now I’m okay.

  He opened his eyes, stretched luxuriously, and looked around. The saucer that Jason had used for an ashtray was sitting, abandoned, on the windowsill. Grey and white ashes had coagulated in its center declivity.

  Wendell stared at it. He shut his eyes. He opened them and looked at the ashes, hard.

  He didn’t feel the slightest urge to pick the saucer up, to dump its contents in the garbage, to rinse it off, dry it, or put it away in the cupboard.

  Really okay.

  He was free. The exorcism, or whatever, had worked. No boojums or dybbuks or Republican cleaning fascists were playing hide-and-go-seek inside his cerebellum. He felt sure of it.

  He kicked off his shoes and left them in the middle of the living room floor. He unbraided his hair and, giggling with relief, shook his head. He pulled off his socks, rolled them into a ball, and bowled them down the hallway. As he watched them roll to a stop he pounded his hands against the cushions with glee.

  The phone rang. But Wendell was too busy thinking to answer it. There was work to be done. The apartment really needed shaping up. For starters, a pulley system from the pantry to the living room, yes, wall to wall. He would devise a clip that would roll along the tiger tail wire and hold chip bags at the same time, and maybe an insulated noose to carry soda cans and keep them cold . . .

  As Wendell planned he intoned his new mantra: “I think therefore I am and I am because I think.”

  Nodding, he extended his long pointed pseudotail and scratched his back contentedly.

  FORTITUDE

  by David Brin

  Humans were delighted to have encountered another, more advanced intelligent race. But the aliens were thinking, “Well, there goes the neighborhood!” Fortunately, Earthlings discovered they had a card trick to play . . . what might be called a royal flush.

  ***

  David Brin’s roster of accomplishments might run longer than his story here awaiting the reader’s attention, but here goes . . . He is a scientist (Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at San Diego), speaker, technical consultant and world-known author. His novels have been New York Times bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. At least a dozen have been translated into more than twenty languages. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. His 2012 novel Existence extends this type of daring, near future extrapolation by exploring bio-engineering, intelligence and how to maintain an open-creative civilization. His post-apocalyptic novel, The Postman, became a 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner. Brin serves on advisory committees dealing with subjects as diverse as national defense and homeland security, astronomy and space exploration, SETI and nanotechnology, future/prediction and philanthropy. He has served since 2010 on the council of external advisers for NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group (NIAC), which supports the most inventive and potentially ground-breaking new endeavors. In 2013 David Brin helped to establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD, where he was honored as a “distinguished alumnus” and where he was thereafter a Visiting Scholar in Residence. He has had other visiting scholar positions including one at Bard College, in 2015. His non-fiction book—The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?—deals with secrecy in the modern world. It won the Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association. As a public “scientist/futurist” David appears frequently on TV, including, most recently, on many episodes of “The Universe” and on the History Channel’s best-watched show (ever) “Life After People.” David’s science fictional Uplift Universe series explores a future when humans genetically engineer higher animals like dolphins to become equal members of our civilization. He also recently tied up the loose ends left behind by the late Isaac Asimov. Foundation’s Triumph brings to a grand finale Asimov’s famed Foundation Universe. As a speaker and on television, he shares unique insights—serious and humorous—about ways that changing technology may affect our future lives. Brin lives in San Diego County with his wife, three children, and a hundred very demanding trees. And for more, much more, go to http://www.davidbrin.com/about.html

  The aliens seemed especially concerned over matters of genealogy.

  “It is the only way we can be sure with whom we are dealing,” said the spokes-being for the Galactic Federation. Terran-Esperanto words emerged through a translator device affixed to the creature’s speaking-vent, between purple, compound eyes. “Citizen species of the Federation will have nothing to do with you humans. Not until you can be properly introduced.”

  “But you’re speakin’ to us, right now!” Jane Fingal protested. “You’re not makin’ bugger-all sense, mate.”

  Jane was our astronomer aboard the Straits of Magellan. She had first spotted the wake of the N’Gorm ship as it raced by, far swifter than any Earth vessel, and it had been Jane’s idea to pulse our engines, giving off weak gravity waves to attract their attention. For several days she had labored to help solve the language problem, until a meeting could be arranged between our puny ETS survey probe and the mighty N’Gorm craft.

  Still, I was surprised when Kwenzi Mobutu, the Zairean anthropologist, did not object to Jane’s presence in the docking bubble, along with our official contact team. Kwenzi seldom missed a chance to play up tension between Earth’s two greatest powers—Royal Africa and the Australian Imperium—even during this historic first encounter with a majestic alien civilization.

  The alien slurped mucousy sounds into its mouthpiece, and out came more computer-generated words.

  “You misunderstand. I am merely a convenience, a construct-entity, fashioned to be as much like you as possible, thereby to facilitate your evaluation. I have no name, and will return to the vats when this is done.”

  Fashioned to be like us? I must have stared. (Everyone else did.) The being in front of us was bipedal and had two arms. On top were objects and organs we had tentatively named ears and a mouth. Beyond that, he (She? It?) seemed about as alien as could be.

  “Yipes!” Jane commented. “I’d hate to meet your boss in a dark alley, if you’re the handsomest bloke they could come up with.”

  I saw Mobutu, the African aristocrat, smile. That’s when I realized why he had not vetoed Jane’s presence, but relished it. He knows this meeting is being recorded for posterity. If she makes a fool of herself here, at the most solemn meeting of races, it could win points against Australians back home.

  “As I have tried to explain,” the alien reiterated. “You will not meet my ‘boss’ or any other citizen entity. Not until we are satisfied that your lin
eage is worthy.”

  While our Israeli and Tahitian xenobiologists conferred over this surprising development, our Patagonian captain stared out through the docking bubble at the Federation ship whose great flanks arched away, gleaming, in all directions. Clearly, he yearned to bring these advanced technologies home to the famed shipyards of Tierra del Fuego.

  “Perhaps I can be helpful in this matter,” Kwenzi Mobutu offered confidently. “I have some small expertise. When it comes to tracking one’s family tree, I doubt any other human aboard can match my own genealogy.”

  His smile was a gleaming white contrast against gorgeously-perfect black skin, the sort of rich complexion that the trendy people from pole to pole had been using chemicals to emulate, when we left home.

  “Even before the golden placards of Abijian were discovered, my family line could be traced back to the great medieval households of Ghana. But since the recovery of those sacred records, it has been absolutely verified that my lineage goes all the way to the black pharaohs of the XXth Dynasty—an unbroken chain of four thousand years.”

  Mobutu’s satisfaction faded when the alien replied with a dismissive wave.

  “That interval is far too brief. Nor are we interested in the time-thread of mere individuals. Larger groups concern us.”

  Jane Fingal chuckled, and Mobutu whirled on her angrily.

  “Your attitude suits a mongrel nation whose ancestors were criminal transportees, and whose ‘emperor’ is chosen at a rugby match!”

  “Hey. Our king’d whip yours any day, even half-drunk and with ‘is arse in a sling.”

  “Colleagues!” I hastened to interrupt. “These are serious matters. A little decorum, if you please?”

  The two shared another moment’s hot enmity, until Nechemia Meyers spoke up.

  “Perhaps they refer to cultural continuity. If we can demonstrate that one of our social traditions has a long history, stretching back—”