The Eagle Has Landed

by Neil Clarke

  I had nothing to say to that.

  She sipped her tea again, one pinky finger extended in the most unselfconscious manner imaginable, just as if she couldn’t fathom drinking her tea any other way, then spoke brightly, with perfect timing: “But if you stay the night, I’ll be sure to put you in the room with all the pods.”

  There was a moment of silence, with every face in the room—including those of Earl and Peter and Carrie, who had just come up from downstairs— as distinguishedly impassive as a granite bust of some forefather you had never heard of.

  Then I averted my eyes, trying to hide the smile as it began to spread on my face.

  Then somebody made a helpless noise, and we all exploded with laughter.

  Seventy years later:

  If every land ever settled by human beings has its garden spots, then every land ever settled by human beings has its hovels. This is true even of frontiers that have become theme parks. I had spent much of this return to the world I had once known wandering through a brightly-lit, comfortably-upholstered tourist paradise—the kind of ersatz environment common to all overdeveloped places, that is less an expression of local character than a determined struggle to ensure the total eradication of anything resembling local character. But now I was headed toward a place that would never be printed on a postcard, that would never be on the tours, that existed on tourist maps only as the first, best sign that those looking for easy travelling have just made a disastrous wrong turn.

  It was on Farside, of course. Most tourist destinations, and higher-end habitats, are on Nearside, which comes equipped with a nice blue planet to look at. Granted that even on Nearside the view is considered a thing for tourists, and that most folks who live here live underground and like to brag to each other about how long they’ve gone without Earthgazing—our ancestral ties are still part of us, and the mere presence of Earth, seen or unseen, is so inherently comforting that most normal people with a choice pick Nearside. Farside, by comparison, caters almost exclusively to hazardous industries and folks who don’t want that nice blue planet messing up the stark emptiness of their sky—a select group of people that includes a small number of astronomers at the Frank Drake Observatory, and a large number of assorted perverts and geeks and misanthropes. The wild frontier of the fantasies comes closest to being a reality here—the hemisphere has some heavy-industry settlements that advertise their crime rates as a matter of civic pride.

  And then there are the haunts of those who find even those places too civilized for their tastes. The mountains and craters of Farside are dotted with the little boxy single-person habitats of folks who have turned their back not only on the home planet but also the rest of humanity as well. Some of those huddle inside their self-imposed solitary confinement for weeks or months on end, emerging only to retrieve their supply drops or enforce the warning their radios transmit on infinite loop: that they don’t want visitors and that all trespassers should expect to be shot. They’re all eccentric, but some are crazy and a significant percentage of them are clinically insane. They’re not the kind of folks the sane visit just for local color.

  I landed my rented skimmer on a ridge overlooking an oblong metal box with a roof marked by a glowing ten-digit registration number. It was night here, and nobody who lived in such a glorified house trailer would have been considerate enough to provide any outside lighting for visitors, so those lit digits provided the only ground-level rebuttal to starfield up above; it was an inadequate rebuttal at best, which left the ground on all sides an ocean of undifferentiated inky blackness. I could carry my own lamp, of course, but I didn’t want to negotiate the walk from my skimmer to the habitat’s front door if the reception I met there required a hasty retreat; I wasn’t very capable of hasty retreats, these days.

  So I just sat in my skimmer and transmitted the repeating loop: Walter Stearns. I desperately need to speak to Walter Stearns. Walter Stearns. I desperately need to speak to Walter Stearns. Walter Stearns. I desperately need to speak to Walter Stearns. Walter Stearns. I desperately need to speak to Walter Stearns. It was the emergency frequency that all of these live-alones are required to keep open 24-7, but there was no guarantee Stearns was listening—and since I was not in distress, I was not really legally entitled to use it. But I didn’t care; Stearns was the best lead I had yet.

  It was only two hours before a voice like a mouth full of steel wool finally responded: “Go away.”

  “I won’t be long, Mr. Stearns. We need to talk.”

  “You need to talk. I need you to go away.”

  “It’s about Minnie and Earl, Mr. Stearns.”

  There was a pause. “Who?”

  The pause had seemed a hair too long to mean mere puzzlement. “Minnie and Earl. From the development days. You remember them, don’t you?”

  “I never knew any Minnie and Earl,” he said. “Go away.”

  “I listened to the tapes you made for the Museum, Mr. Stearns.”

  The anger in his hoarse, dusty old voice was still building. “I made those tapes when I was still talking to people. And there’s nothing in them about any Minnie or Earl.”

  “No,” I said, “there’s not. Nobody mentioned Minnie and Earl by name, not you, and not anybody else who participated. But you still remember them. It took me several days to track you down, Mr. Stearns. We weren’t here at the same time, but we still had Minnie and Earl in common.”

  “I have nothing to say to you,” he said, with a new shrillness in his voice. “I’m an old man. I don’t want to be bothered. Go away.”

  My cheeks ached from the size of my triumphant grin. “I brought yams.” There was nothing on the other end but the sibilant hiss of background radiation. It lasted just long enough to persuade me that my trump card had been nothing of the kind; he had shut down or smashed his receiver, or simply turned his back to it, so he could sit there in his little cage waiting for the big bad outsider to get tired and leave.

  Then he said: “Yams.”

  Twenty-four percent of the people who contributed to the Museum’s oral history had mentioned yams at least once. They had talked about the processing of basic food shipments from home, and slipped yams into their lists of the kind of items received; they had conversely cited yams as the kind of food that the folks back home had never once thought of sending; they had related anecdotes about funny things this coworker or that coworker had said at dinner, over a nice steaming plate of yams. They had mentioned yams and they had moved on, behaving as if it was just another background detail mentioned only to provide their colorful reminiscences the right degree of persuasive verisimilitude. Anybody not from those days who noticed the strange recurring theme might have imagined it a statistical oddity or an in-joke of some kind. For anybody who had been to Minnie and Earl’s—and tasted the delicately seasoned yams she served so frequently—it was something more: a strange form of confirmation.

  When Stearns spoke again, his voice still rasped of disuse, but it also possessed a light quality that hadn’t been there before. “They’ve been gone a long time. I’m not sure I know what to tell you.”

  “I checked your records,” I said. “You’ve been on the Moon continuously since those days; you went straight from the development teams to the early settlements to the colonies that followed. You’ve probably been here nonstop longer than anybody else living or dead. If anybody can give me an idea what happened to them, it’s you.”

  More silence.

  “Please,” I said.

  And then he muttered a cuss word that had passed out of the vernacular forty years earlier. “All right, damn you. But you won’t find them. I don’t think anybody will ever find them.”

  Seventy years earlier:

  We were there for about two more hours before George took me aside, said he needed to speak to me in private, and directed me to wait for him in the backyard.

  The backyard was nice.

  I’ve always hated that word. Nice. It means nothing. Describing peop
le, it can mean the most distant politeness, or the most compassionate warmth; it can mean civility and it can mean charity and it can mean grace and it can mean friendship. Those things may be similar, but they’re not synonyms; when the same word is used to describe all of them, then that word means nothing. It means even less when describing places. So what if the backyard was nice? Was it just comfortable, and well-tended, or was it a place that reinvigorated you with every breath? How can you leave it at “nice” and possibly imagine that you’ve done the job?

  Nice. Feh.

  But that’s exactly what this backyard was.

  It was a couple of acres of trimmed green lawn, bordered by the white picket fence that signalled the beginning of vacuum. A quarter-circle of bright red roses marked each of the two rear corners; between them, bees hovered lazily over a semicircular garden heavy on towering orchids and sunflowers. The painted white rocks which bordered that garden were arranged in a perfect line, none of them even a millimeter out of place, none of them irregular enough to shame the conformity that characterized the relationship between all the others. There was a single apple tree, which hugged the rear of the house so tightly that the occupants of the second floor might have been able to reach out their windows and grab their breakfast before they trudged off to the shower; there were enough fallen green apples to look picturesque, but not enough to look sloppy. There was a bench of multicolored polished stone at the base of the porch steps, duplicating the porch swing up above but somehow absolutely right in its position; and as I sat on that bench facing the nice backyard I breathed deep and I smelled things that I had almost forgotten I could smell—not just the distant charcoal reek of neighbors burning hamburgers in their own backyards, but lilacs, freshly cut grass, horse scent, and a cleansing whiff of rain. I sat there and I spotted squirrels, hummingbirds, monarch butterflies, and a belled calico cat that ran by, stopped, saw me, looked terribly confused in the way cats have, and then went on. I sat there and I breathed and after months of inhaling foot odor and antiseptics I found myself getting a buzz. It was intoxicating. It was invigorating. It was a shot of pure energy. It was joy. God help me, it was nice.

  But it was also surrounded on all sides by a pitiless vacuum that, if real physics meant anything, should have claimed it in an instant. Perhaps it shouldn’t have bothered me that much, by then; but it did.

  The screen door slammed. Miles the dog bounded down the porch steps and, panting furiously, nudged my folded hands. I scratched him under the ears. He gave me the usual unconditional adoration of the golden retriever—I petted him, therefore I was God. Most panting dogs look like they’re smiling (it’s a major reason humans react so strongly to the species), but Miles, the canine slave to context, looked like he was enjoying the grand joke that everybody was playing at my expense. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t even really a dog . . .

  The screen door opened and slammed. This time it was George, carrying a couple of tall glasses filled with pink stuff and ice. He handed me one of the glasses; it was lemonade, of course. He sipped from the other one and said: “Minnie’s cooking yams again. She’s a miracle worker when it comes to yams. She does something with them, I don’t know, but it’s really—”

  “You,” I said wryly, “are enjoying this way too much.”

  “Aren’t you?” he asked.

  Miles the dog stared at the lemonade as if it was the most wondrous sight in the Universe. George dipped a finger into his drink and held it out so the mutt could have a taste. Miles adored him now. I was so off-center I almost felt betrayed. “Yeah. I guess I am. I like them.”

  “Pretty hard not to like them. They’re nice people.”

  “But the situation is so insane—”

  “Sanity,” George said, “is a fluid concept. Think about how nuts Relativity sounded, the first time somebody explained it to you. Hell, think back to when you were a kid, and somebody first explained the mechanics of sex.”

  “George—”

  He gave Miles another taste. “I can see you trying like mad to work this out. Compiling data, forming and rejecting theories, even concocting little experiments to test the accuracy of your senses. I know because I was once in your position, when I was brought out here for the first time, and I remember doing all the same things. But I now have a lot of experience in walking people through this, and I can probably save you a great deal of time and energy by completing your data and summarizing all of your likely theories.”

  I was too tired to glare at him anymore. “You can skip the data and theories and move on to the explanation. I promise you I won’t mind.”

  “Yes, you would,” he said, with absolute certainty. “Trust me, dealing with the established lines of inquiry is the only real way to get there.

  “First, providing the raw data. One: This little homestead cannot be detected from Earth; our most powerful telescopes see nothing but dead moonscape here. Two: It, and the two old folks, have been here since at least Apollo; those photos of them with Armstrong and Aldrin are genuine. Three: There is nothing you can ask them that will get any kind of straight answer about who or what they are and why they’re here. Four: We have no idea how they knew Asimov, Sagan, or Bradbury—but I promise you that those are not the most startling names you will hear them drop if you stick around long enough to get to know them. Five: We don’t know how they maintain an earth-like environment in here. Six: About that mailbox—they do get delivery, on a daily basis, though no actual mailman has ever been detected, and none of the mail we’ve ever managed to sneak a peek at is the slightest bit interesting. It’s all senior citizen magazines and grocery store circulars. Seven: They never seem to go shopping, but they always have an ample supply of food and other provisions. Eight (I am up to eight, right?): They haven’t noticeably aged, not even the dog. Nine: They do understand every language we’ve sprung on them, but they give all their answers in Midwestern-American English. And ten: We have a group of folks from our project coming out here to visit just about every night of the week, on a rotating schedule that works out to just about once a week for each of us.

  “So much for the raw data. The theories take longer to deal with. Let me go through all the ones you’re likely to formulate.” He peeled back a finger. “One: This is all just a practical joke perpetrated by your friends and colleagues in an all-out attempt to shock you out of your funk. We put it all together with spit and baling wire and some kind of elaborate special-effects trickery that’s going to seem ridiculously obvious just as soon as you’re done figuring it out. We went to all this effort, and spent the many billions of dollars it would have cost to get all these construction materials here, and developed entirely new technologies capable of holding in an atmosphere, and put it all together while you weren’t looking, and along the way brought in a couple of convincing old folks from Central Casting, just so we could enjoy the look on your face. What a zany bunch of folks we are, huh?”

  I felt myself blushing. “I’d considered that.”

  “And why not? It’s a legitimate theory. Also a ridiculous one, but let’s move on.” He peeled back another finger. “Two: This is not a practical joke, but a test or psychological experiment of some kind, arranged by the brain boys back home. They put together all of this trickery, just to see how the average astronaut, isolated from home and normal societal context, reacts to situations that defy easy explanation and cannot be foreseen by even the most exhaustively-planned training. This particular explanation works especially well if you also factor in what we cleverly call the McGoohan Corollary—that is, the idea that we’re not really on the Moon at all, but somewhere on Earth, possibly underground, where the real practical difficulty would lie in simulating not a quaint rural setting on a warm summer day, but instead the low-g, high-radiation, temperature-extreme vacuum that you gullibly believed you were walking around in, every single time you suited up. This theory is, of course, equally ridiculous, for many reasons—but we did have one guy about a year ago who stubbornl
y held on to it for almost a full week. Something about his psychological makeup just made it easier for him to accept that, over all the others, and we had to keep a close watch on him to stop him from trying to prove it with a nice unsuited walk. But from the way you’re looking at me right now I don’t think we’re going to have the same problem with you. So.

  “Assuming that this is not a joke, or a trick, or an experiment, or some lame phenomenon like that, that this situation you’re experiencing is precisely what we have represented to you, then we are definitely looking at something beyond all terrestrial experience. Which brings us to Three.” He peeled back another finger. “This is a first-contact situation. Minnie and Earl, and possibly Miles here, are aliens in disguise, or simulations constructed by aliens. They have created a friendly environment inside this picket fence, using technology we can only guess at—let’s say an invisible bubble capable of filtering out radiation and retaining a breathable atmosphere while remaining permeable to confused bipeds in big clumsy moonsuits. And they have done so—why? To hide their true nature while they observe our progress? Possibly. But if so, it would be a lot more subtle to place their little farmhouse in Kansas, where it wouldn’t seem so crazily out of place. To communicate us in terms we can accept? Possibly—except that couching those terms in such an insane context seems as counterproductive to genuine communication as their apparent decision to limit the substance of that communication to geriatric small talk. To make us comfortable with something familiar? Possibly—except that this kind of small mid-American home is familiar to only a small fraction of humanity, and it seems downright exotic to the many observers we’ve shuttled in from China, or India, or Saudi Arabia, or for that matter Manhattan. To present us with a puzzle that we have to solve? Again, possibly—but since Minnie and Earl and Miles won’t confirm or deny, it’s also a possibility we won’t be able to test unless somebody like yourself actually does come up with the great big magic epiphany. I’m not holding my breath. But I do reject any theory that they’re hostile, including the “Mars Is Heaven” theory you already cited. Anybody capable of pulling this off must have resources that could mash us flat in the time it takes to sneeze.”