by Gene Brewer
I froze. “A ride to where?”
“Around the galaxy.”
I had very mixed feelings about that — I desperately wanted a cup of tea, for one thing. And to see my beautiful wife, get some reassurance that everything would turn out okay. “Uh — ”
“The cone has some representative depictions. Would you like to see the real thing? Believe us when we say that you won’t regret it.”
Should I trust the reassurances of an alien? “I only have half an hour… .”
“Don’t worry about that. Here we go!”
The next thing I knew I was looking at the Earth from somewhere in the vicinity of the moon. The only thing I could think to say was, “Oh, shit!”
Walter snorted, “If that’s what you wish to call it.”
As all the astronauts know, the sight was breathtaking. I actually found myself tearing up at the beauty I saw and felt. The Earth is, in fact, a rich brown and a deep, beautiful blue, with puffy white clouds hovering over parts of it. It reminded me of my favorite marble, a shooter I had as a kid. How I wished I could be back there! I stared and stared at planet Earth, thinking of the myriad life forms occupying our small, lovely world. I couldn’t get enough of it. Yet, I knew that a huge part of that life force might soon disappear. Namely, us. Then there would be no one to see this sight ever again. Or, at least, no Homo sapiens. My tears gushed from my eyes and fell onto my shirt.
“If that doesn’t make you want to stop the killing, what would?” Walter asked.
“I’ve never killed anyone in my life!” I yelled, though (I assumed) there were no sound waves to carry the message.
“You’ve never eaten a hamburger? Swatted a fly?”
“Well — ”
“It’s part of your violent nature,” he barked. “It’s time for you to evolve.”
Suddenly I realized that I was somehow hanging in empty space! How could tears be falling from my face? How could I be breathing in a vacuum? How could I even be here?
I heard Walter’s high-pitched voice: “When will you realize that we learned how to overcome these obstacles long ago? You have a unique opportunity here. Why not just relax and enjoy it?”
My muscles refused to unclench. “Easy for you to say.”
“And for you in a few million years, if you are willing to end the murder and mayhem, of course.”
The next thing I knew we were hovering above a planet (or moon?) quite unlike our own. As on Earth, the sky was blue, and the vegetation green, but the landscape was absolutely flat and I could see for hundreds of miles, perhaps, and there was no sign of a human being anywhere — no cities, no buildings, no man-made objects of any kind. Instead, the wide-open fields were scattered with animals of many kinds, and birds (or the equivalent) many and varied, flying from tree to tall tree in pairs or flocks. The most noticeable feature, however, was the abundance of flowers of all sizes and colors, as well as the flitting of millions and millions of insects. It was a strangely calming and pleasing sight (though I couldn’t hear any buzzing). The sun was brighter than ours, and it moved across the sky at several times our sun’s rate of speed (actually, of course, the speed of the rotating Earth). It looked like a hot summer day on our own planet. My muscles finally began to unwind. I gawked at everything going on below, and in a while that yellow-orange sun set, while another one, bigger, and redder in color, rose on the other side of the horizon. “As you may have guessed, we show you this to demonstrate that life exists on countless planets, some like your own, most not. This one is typical for those with climates similar to that of Earth.”
“Where are the humans?”
“There aren’t any. Nor are there on most other planets or moons.”
“They never evolved?”
“Is that so hard for you to imagine? Homo sapiens has arisen on very few planets. And on those that have, most destroyed themselves before they could eliminate everything around them.”
“You mean you destroyed them?”
“That was not necessary in most cases. Wars, overpopulation, destruction of the environment, man-made diseases, and so on. In the cases where we had to step in, the sapiens, or sapiens-like beings, were virtually the only species left on their planets before the end came. You know how people are.”
“But it isn’t always that way, is it?”
“Not always. Would you like to see an example of a successful human-populated system?”
Before I could blink an eye we were somewhere else. This time it looked considerably cooler (thought I couldn’t feel anything). As promised, there were people engaged in various activities. They were wearing coats of various colors, which didn’t seem to be made from skins or furs. Perhaps they were sewn together from plant materials. Some appeared to be quite elderly, yet still very active. None of them appeared to notice me (of course they wouldn’t notice Walter). But the part I could see resembled a countryside on Earth, rather than a cityscape. The vegetation was quite different, however. Sparser, I would say, and more rugged. There were various animals in the trees — not birds, more like mice. The colors of the vegetation were a little unusual, especially the shimmering blues and yellows of the trees and grasses. “Where are we?”
“A planet circling what you call Betelgeuse. One of the stars of the “Orion” constellation. But this is only a small fraction of the place. Let’s do a flyover.” And fly we did, at the speed of a jet plane or the like, from an altitude of perhaps a thousand feet. There were mountainous areas where I saw no humanoids at all (it was surely colder, and the air might have been too thin), tropical areas, deserts, and huge lakes containing God-knows-what creatures — but no apparent oceans like those on Earth. Dotting the planet were a great many small fields planted in various crops, apparently. There were a variety of small animals, but no fences of any kind. Most of these regions contained structures that looked like Indian pueblos, but there were no actual towns or cities anywhere. On this world the sky was greenish and the sun a brilliant blue, but smaller than ours, and evidently a little farther away.
“Are you getting the idea?”
“What idea?”
There was a brief pause, apparently long enough for them to get over a fit of pique related to my stupidity. “Have you noticed how peaceful this place is?”
“You mean they never kill anything in order to survive?”
“Only the plants. You like it here?”
I had to admit that I did. “And this is what Earth should be like?”
“Only if you want to survive. Now to complete your education, we’re going to see a somewhat different planet, one that you may find more familiar.” The next thing I knew we were obviously somewhere else. There were people, or people-like beings here, too, but of a different sort. There were cities and towns, too, but most of these had been destroyed or abandoned. In most places there was no sign of any living thing at all, plant or animal, except for groups of men and women (I supposed) and their various war machines. Highly advanced devices, I would judge, for all the good it did to the possessors, since both, or all, sides, had access to the same kinds of equipment.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me that this is what our world is coming to.”
“At the rate you’re going, this will happen in just a few more years. When your ideologies become a bit more polarized or you start running out of certain resources you think you can’t live without.”
“So why haven’t you come to destroy this race?”
“We waited too long, and it happened too fast. Even if they survive this latest conflict, this world is no longer habitable for them. And believe it or not, after they have gone, most of the other animals will come back. And we’ll restore the ones who can’t. It will be a paradise again some day, much like the other planets you saw.”
“But why can’t you just leave us alone like you have these people, to live or die on our
own?”
“Look around you. Is that what you would prefer to ending the killing?”
“How can I convince you that a political solution to a problem like this takes — ”
“Killing isn’t a political problem. It’s a human problem.”
“You people don’t give an inch, do you?”
“We’re not ‘people.’”
“Can you just tell me how many of these three kinds of worlds there are in the galaxy? I mean — ”
“The first planet we saw is the predominant type of the inhabited worlds — no human-like species. On many, the dominant species are insects. On others, various other animals. There are some, by the way, that harbor only microorganisms! Of course they aren’t ‘micro’ from their point of view. The second category — the planets with humanoids — comprise the remaining inhabited planets in our galaxy. Out of these, nearly all the human-like beings evolved into warriors. Only a few figure it out in time to survive themselves. Does that answer your question?”
“I suppose so,” I replied sourly.
“One last trip and then we’ll take you home.”
“Where are we going? Is there another kind of planet? One without any kind of life at all, maybe?”
“Of course. There are many of those. But that’s not where we’re going.” Almost immediately, it seemed (though it could have been years on Earth, for all I knew), we were zooming across the surface of a planet I had never seen, but which nevertheless seemed familiar. The sky was a lavender color, there were few trees, little water anywhere, and several purple moons dotted the sky. A huge red sun lay close to the horizon, but its light wasn’t strong enough to brighten the landscape much. A few small elephant-like creatures roamed the fields of grass and grains of some kind, as well as an abundance of cows and what appeared to be a variety of apes. Birds filled the lavender sky.
Suddenly we slowed down, and sitting or lying below us were several people, who also looked familiar. Of course I recognized my daughter Abby, and the boy must have been little Gene (who wasn’t so little anymore). Prot was there, too, as well as a couple of my former patients. “Abby!” I called out.
“She can’t hear you,” Walter said.
“What? I don’t understand. Is this all just a dream?”
“No. It’s real. But we traveled here in a — Well, that would be impossible for you to understand. Let’s just say it’s a different dimension. We can see everything, but to them we are invisible.
“Is that why we can’t hear them?”
“You can’t hear, feel, smell, or taste anything, but light is different from sound and all the rest. It transcends dimension.”
“I’ll take your word for that. But this is K-PAX, isn’t it?”
“Do you know of anything else like it? And by the way, our travels have taken no time at all. When we get back to Earth, it will be the same moment as when we left.”
“No time — But that’s not possible, is it?”
He roared in obvious exasperation. “Of course it’s possible! Haven’t you learned anything? Do you still doubt that there are things in the universe that you don’t understand?”
“Uh, no. Not really.”
“We’ve brought you here so that you can see that prot and K-PAX actually exist. They weren’t figments of your imagination.”
I watched as Gene chased some sort of animal around and around, and vice versa. Even the creature seemed to be laughing. I looked at Abby, who was eating a purple fruit or vegetable and smiling happily. In fact, I had never seen her so happy when she was on Earth. Again, the tears started to flow.
Walter ignored my blubbering. “Now there is one last thing to show you before we return… .”
Suddenly I found myself in a bedroom. Sitting on the floor was a child, about four, who was making something with a set of Tinker Toys. The boy seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t identify him. After a few seconds of this the scene shifted to what appeared to be someone’s backyard, and the same boy, now six or seven, was riding a tricycle around it as fast as he could go. Again I tried to identify the boy and, when I couldn’t, I took a closer look at the setting, which seemed very familiar. And then I understood: it was my own backyard as a child, and the boy was me.
Another minute or so and the scene again shifted to a later time, and I was on a hospital visit with my father. The patient was an older man, very old, in fact, and it seemed to me that he was probably near the end of his life. My father spoke to him, acted as though the visit was routine. They chatted about the Yankees. The man smiled as they discussed yesterday’s game, which the Yanks had won 10-3. Dad smiled, too, and so did I. I was about eleven then, and already a fan. When I mentioned the home run by Yogi Berra, the old man held out his hand for me to shake. He smelled bad, and I didn’t want to take it, but Dad nodded to me and I did. It was rough and leathery (I remembered), and he held it for a long time, as if holding on to his youth. Or life in general. Until now I had, of course, forgotten that scene, but it all came back very clearly. I think the guy died a few days later. It’s countless incidents like this that make up a life, I thought, like pages in a book.
The scene once again became our backyard. Older now, I was playing basketball with a few of the neighbor kids. My younger self shot and missed. I felt a peculiar mixture of disappointment and elation. And something else, too. Awe and wonder that I was actually revisiting my own past.
“Do we see a glimmer of hope?”
“You mean — ”
“Once you begin to accept the fact that you humans know nothing, and with a different mindset you could know everything, you’ll finally be on the path to your salvation — if you want to put it in terms you can vaguely understand.”
As usual, I didn’t understand, not even vaguely. It occurred to me that the Bullocks weren’t very different from what we might call “God.” In fact, talking with the Bullocks felt almost like praying. “Walter — can you do anything?”
“Certainly not. Only what is possible.”
“And all the things we’ve just done are therefore possible.”
“Obviously.”
I went for the basket and lost the ball. “I didn’t think time travel was possible.”
“It isn’t. Not in the way you mean. You can’t interact with yourself in the past. You can’t kill Hitler, which is something most human beings would dearly love to do. You can’t even communicate with anyone. Try to imagine the havoc if you could. Again, you’re invisible to any other beings. Call it a law of nature.”
I thought about that for a minute before asking the obvious, not really wanting to know the answer: “Have we been visited by humans from the future?”
“That would be entirely possible if you have a future.” He paused, apparently to let that sink in. “But if you were being visited by future Earth beings, you would never know it.”
“But if they did visit us, they could watch us no matter what we’re doing?”
“As we said before, sapiens, future beings, whether from Earth or from distant places, are not titillated by your sexual contortions any more than are you by the propagation of your insects or worms.”
“If we can visit the past, can we also visit the future?”
“The laws of the universe preclude this. Even if they did not, are you sure you would want to visit your future?”
“What about the present?”
“No. But you can visit the immediate past, as long as it’s on a different time page.”
“Time page?”
“Time is like the pages in a book. Each page is a quantum of time. You can travel at will back through the pages of time and return to the time page you left. All of this is on the cone.”
“I don’t think I can take much more of this.”
“You’re ready to return?”
“Yes.”
The next thing I knew we were standing in my own backyard, and the leaves were quite unchanged and still beautiful. Or at least I was standing there. I don’t know where Walter was.
I went into the house, where Karen and Flower were waiting for me. “I need to call the President,” I said breathlessly.
“Why? What happened?”
When I told her what I experienced on the way from the trailer, she just stared at me as if I were crazy. “What’s the matter — don’t you believe me?” I asked her.
“Of course I believe you. But I wouldn’t mention this to the President or anyone else.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ll think you’re crazy.”
“But it really happened! I can still see it. It was incredible!”
“Gene, listen. What if the public found out that you are claiming that you went to all those planets, and traveled back in time to your own childhood? What would you think if someone reported this? I’ve heard you denigrate people who claim they’ve been taken aboard a space ship and examined by aliens. Or anything else of that nature.”
“But this really happened!”
“Did it, sweetheart?”
I pondered that for a moment, wondering whether it was possible that — “Well, I think it happened. I’m almost sure it did.”
“Yes, but who would believe it? What about your credibility when you go to the UN?”
“Okay, yes, I see what you mean. Maybe I shouldn’t go on a talk show and broadcast this. But I think I should tell the President, at least.”
“Maybe you should see what Mike says about it.”
“All right. I’ll call him.” I picked up the phone but put it down again before I could punch in the number. “But don’t you see? If the Bullocks can come here and make trees disappear, make an entire species disappear, probably, then maybe they can do the things I experienced, even if we don’t understand how they do it.”
“Tell that to Mike.”
Flower sidled up to me while I was redialing. I scratched her ears and she plopped down for more. “You believe me, don’t you, old girl?”