by Ian Watson
“You were thinking about something else! Jesus Christ Almighty!”
“Yes, I see this situation's bad,” said Tom Zwingler anxiously. “But what about the other business? Have we missed our chance of the stars then? Have the Aliens packed up and gone home? Is that why we have to go back with empty hands?”
Amory Hirsch sneered.
“There's a big announcement upcoming on that one — and it ain't at all what you think.”
Helplessly, Zwingler gnawed at a fingernail.
“What are you talking about, Hirsch? What else is there to think except that it's the greatest chance Mankind has ever been handed on a plate!”
“On a flying saucer, you mean,” laughed Hirsch.
“But we found what we came to find, I tell you. Why should this mess down here stop us taking some Indians back to the States?”
Hirsch shook his head.
“Don't worry, fella. You'll hear all about the reality scene once we get on board that airplane out of Franklin. This sickness in South America may be adjustable. Essentially it all depends what you're prepared to throw into the other pan of the scales. History — politics — mass moods — it's all a question of balances. Finding the right pressure points. The Chinese were ready enough to blow the cover on their satellite, to brew this mess up for us. We only have to up the ante in the most effective way. Amusingly, we can have the Soviets on our side in quashing this revolution.”
• • •
It was several hours later that Sole and Zwingler listened disbelievingly to Canal Zone Radio, as the anti-hysteria package was launched. Archimedes had said he could move the world, if only he had a place outside of the world to stand, and a long enough lever. It seemed that the Aliens had been elected to provide that place outside of the world.
But what lever would be used?
“. . . Big news at this nine o'clock nightly newstime. The joint US–USSR declaration one half-hour ago that hostile extraterrestials from another star system are operating in Earth's near vicinity. It is now reported that the giant satellite visible over the Pacific Ocean and Siberia and Iceland, reported to have been launched last week by the Soviets — was a cover story agreed between the two major space powers to avoid world alarm.”
“Unbelievable,” muttered Zwingler, fumbling at his throat.
“. . . Hostility is now certain since the destruction of a joint US-Soviet spacecraft with the loss of three astronauts' lives, and the destruction of unmanned satellites crossing the path of the alien ship. The flooding of the Amazon basin caused by the destruction of a key dam by a nuclear weapon, reported by a Chinese satellite, is now definitely established in the joint communique as tallying with reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects in the area—”
“Damnable!”
“Take it easy, Zwingler,” shrugged Hirsch. “You're a passenger now. Just along for the ride. It was naïve to put your trust in unhumans, when you can't trust human beings. Wouldn't you say, naïve?” He thrust a polished marble face bluntly at his fellow passengers. “Unhumans sounds pretty much like inhumans to me, eh?”
“. . . Urgent consultations between the Soviet and American governments via the Hot Line taking place for several days now. The joint communique says it has been thought advisable to reveal the presence of this alien spacecraft, now that it is definitely proven hostile — in view of the widespread panic that might result from any further nuclear sabotage of major engineering works—”
“What stupid lies! Don't they think of the stars at all?”
“. . . Emphasized strongly in the communique, that any nuclear detonations should not be seen as indicators of any Soviet-American hostilities. Consultations are under way with other members of the Nuclear Club to avoid possible misinterpretations—”
“Surely the Sp'thra can't still be in Nevada!”
“Oh but they can,” crowed Amory Hirsch. “The inhumans can!” He smiled a waspish smile.
“. . .From Stateside meanwhile, news that the president will address the nation in one half-hour's time simultaneously with the Soviet Premier addressing the Russian people—”
“It's madness!”
“No madder than the madness riding Latin America right now. We reckon it's the proper antidote. The R base X for this revolution — the prescription.”
“It's criminal,” sputtered Zwingler. “It's the biggest mistake. What does the whole of Latin America matter beside the million worlds out there! We buy a stinking little peace by sacrificing the stars, when we could have bought the stars with half a dozen brains. It's so STUPID. Stupid!”
The jet passed high over Panama in the dark of the starry night, and on out over the Caribbean.
• • •
And so the sanity filters were selectively removed, one by one. Excited American — and Russian — voices told about the immensity of the interstellar globe orbiting the Earth. UFO sightings were reported from Los Angeles and Omsk, from Tashkent and Caracas. Mysterious charred holes in superhighways. Jets crashing unaccountably. Brought down by who knows what?
Their jet veered out over the Gulf of Mexico towards the American South.
“The Russians?” Amory Hirsch retorted to Zwingler's persistent, peevish questions. “Well, for one thing they're implicated with us right up to their necks in this brain trading business. And two, it was the Chi-Coms who scooped all the political kudos by detecting that nuclear blowout at the dam. And three; well, frankly the trading didn't go too well after you left. Sure, we traded, they traded. But the return in technological data was shaping up as inadequate. The addresses of a few mangy stars. A few crutches to help us hobble round the solar system a bit faster. But not nearly fast enough to escape our own death sentence from any number of exponential causes. Crumbs from the rich man's table! Hell, Tom, don't you see, we're the HUMAN RACE. Soviets and Americans alike. Screw this stupid revolution. How could we be bothered to jockey for influence over a few hundred million miserable gauchos or whatever you call 'em? Maybe the Chinks can be bothered to. Call themselves the ‘Middle Kingdom’? They're bloody earth-bound peasants, is all! But Soviets and Americans, we're both of us frontiersmen at heart. We're not donkeys to be lured a few idiot steps by hanging a carrot before our noses. We turn right round and KICK the carrot out of the hand that mocks us with it.”
“I still don't see it,” Zwingler moaned.
Amory Hirsch leaned forward patronizingly.
“Tom, you and Leapfrog — that's the short term view. A new spacious view is in order.”
“Short term!” Zwingler clutched for his lost ruby moons as though for prayer beads, but didn't find them. There were no adequate prayers.
• • •
Flying towards the gulf ports, they picked up more of the progress of the crusade of hysteria from KCTA in Corpus Christi. Amory Hirsch laughingly revealed the codename of the operation — a farrago inspired by memories of the Orson Welles terror broadcast of 30 October 1938 — and Sole winced as he remembered his own instinct about the alien TV broadcasts. This was destined to be a much more sophisticated and professional performance than the Welles broadcast back in the Stone Age of media awareness — for this tragic farce they had some actual aliens as actors.
It seemed, though Sole couldn't swear to it, that the jet was flying more leisurely the closer it got to the USA — maybe they flew slower so as not to trigger any missile sequences set to the superspeed of flying saucers. But there were no flying saucers — they were a myth, a lie. Only one scout ship existed, and that still on the Nevada airstrip, if Amory Hirsch's word was to be trusted. With one great globe in space with its crew of sad haunted travelling salesmen.
So the Globe had shot down Russian and American satellites with laser beams?
“Has it shot down any?” clamoured Zwingler.
“Course not,” smiled Hirsch, though even as he said it a cloud of doubt passed over his face, as if Welles Farrago was too realistically scripted for him to doubt. Then he winked supe
rciliously. “This is all cereal packet stuff strictly for the kids. The real difficulty is synchronizing our retaliatory blows — not using the hammer to stun the fly — on the other hand not using the fly swat to zap the elephant with—”
“It's disgusting,” Zwingler shouted at him, losing control. “All I know about flies and elephants is this, Mister Hirsch, I might have swallowed a fly or two in my time, but I do most strenuously strain at this elephant of dishonesty and deceit!”
“Sorry you feel that way, Tom,” smirked the other man, “but it's policy.”
• • •
The President talked about:
The coming together of Earth's people — in the face of the inhuman adversary. Impossibility of comprehending the intentions or the powers of the truly alien. Their proven hostility attested to publicly by the United States and Soviet Union standing shoulder to shoulder as brothers. By the wanton destruction of the Amazon Development Project with atrocious loss of life and property damage — immediate aid to be rushed to the survivors through the agency of the United Nations, since the Brazilian people had been taken in by irresponsible Chinese lies and propaganda. The assassination in space of two Americans and one Soviet cosmonaut, to whose bravery all homage — write them down in the roll of honour of Planet Earth, Colonel Marcos Haigh, Major Joe Rohrer, Major Vadim Zaitsev. The lasering out of orbit of Earth Resources Satellites — the sabotaging of Earth's efforts for betterment by a superior and haughty technology — like vicious children pulling the wings off flies . . .
“Those names,” cried Zwingler. “I remember them. From Nevada.”
“Nonsense, Tom,” Hirsch laughed. “You're hallucinating. Take any of those Indian drugs?”
On the final approach, as they watched the sprawl of Houston coming up below them, KTRH announced the detonation of a one-kiloton tactical homing missile upon a ‘flying saucer’ temporarily grounded in the Nevada desert . . .
While the wheels jolted down upon the runway, Amory Hirsch laughed triumphantly and polished his hands.
A moment later, word came of the Soviet orbital bomb that wrecked the Unhumans' transpolar globe, cracking it open like an egg and spilling its yolk across the sky above the Solomon Islands . . .
“Bastards — dumb fucking bastards — vicious stupid shits . . .” cursed Tom Zwingler monotonously while the jet slowed to a halt, till the NO SMOKING sign blanked out.
TWENTY-THREE
“WE'LL WALK FROM here on.”
“Sure?”
Sole nodded.
They got out of the lowslung blue Ford car with the legend USAF stencilled on its front doors. The toothy Negro sergeant who'd been driving them backed into a gateway then sped off back the way he'd come, negotiating the country lanes with a faint squeal of tyres.
“Over there, that's Haddon.”
Sole pointed at the Unit half a mile away on top of the rise, backed up against its own dense mini-jungle of fir trees.
“My little Indians—” he shrugged.
He indicated the straggle of the village across the barren fields behind them.
“That's my place — with the blue VW. You head on over there, Pierre. Eileen'll be waiting. I — I'll catch you up.”
His own home?
Containing a woman Eileen whom he happened to be married to — yet her voice over the comsat telephone link the other night had sounded like such a cleverly personalized answering service! Containing a boy, Peter, who more closely resembled the looks of this other bitter empty man he stood with on the country lane . . .
Sole pushed Pierre gently towards the stile leading on to the field path. It wasn't an affectionate push, however — there couldn't be any affection any more. But it was gentle.
Pierre gave Sole a puzzled look, but climbed the stile without asking any questions, and set off along the stiff mud track.
And Sole was alone.
The English countryside seemed as blank and stripped-bare as the face of the Moon, after the Amazon rainforests. The sky with all its empty dry air rubbed its nothingness over him coldly. He set off towards Haddon Unit, through the dead fields.
He had never felt quite so nervously aware, as he walked, under the clear empty eggshell sky, of being located on the surface of a gross statistical accident — as well as of being encompassed by the ghosts of billions of casualties who might have lived, but never had — of other Soles who might have been born, but weren't — and whose exclusion bracketed his own existence about till it too seemed unreal — a life lived in brackets. He was filled with a haunting consciousness of every twig and stalk of grass crisp and clear in their total arbitrariness — bracketed into existence by the exclusion of so much more, infinitely more. Every clod of earth shaped itself into a grinning hunchback gargoyle as he walked. The blue of the sky behind barren branches became stained glass in some empty cathedral of the void — a fan of peacock plumes courting nothingness,
He swung a carrier bag stuffed with clothes, conscious of many other Soles carrying out different projects and making different choices in this dead random zone.
• • •
Beyond that peacock blue that Sole saw as a stained-glass window and a display of plumes, in the blackness which that blue had become by the height of a thousand miles, Major Pip Dennison floated in his michelin-man suit — veteran of five hundred South-East Asian combat sorties and a duty tour in Skylab, author cum laude of a PhD thesis on the math of orbital trajectories. His faceplate reflected the blue disc of Earth with its white whorling streaks of cream meringue — a soda fountain in space.
His umbilical tether snaked away, reflecting the harshest of sunlights, towards the hanging shuttle craft from which other gossamer lines also spun away to other rubber blobs of humans. Half a dozen spacemen had landed on different parts of this vast rent metal fruit whose segments had sprung apart through the rumpled rind, bursting deep black-shadowed canyons and crevasses down into it. Like wasps they had flown out to suck the juice from the spoilt fruit.
Flies to a hunk of rare venison hung up there to mature, in the icebox of space.
Pip consulted the Roentgen counter strapped to his wrist. The rate of rotting of this venison was subject to an inverse law. Only when the radioactive rot had ceased would the whole carcass be ripe for the picking. What a feast in the sky it would be — this split orange, burst egg, hunk of venison.
First they would pick over this north side of the fruit. Later, they would head round it to the hole punched in the south side three hundred feet deep by five hundred wide — that million-degree axeblow that had split the enemy's skull — watching their Roentgen counters as they worked.
Yet a thought daunted Major Dennison, as he looked down the steel crevasse. Could some alien beast have survived the axeblow and loss of air — and still be alive somewhere down there?
The pit yawned darkly. They said, didn't they, that a spaceman was only a deepsea diver keeping the pressure in, instead of out? What octopus tentacles might reach for him out of the injured darkness? Pip shivered in his well-heated suit as he unclipped his tether and clamped it magnetically to the metal rind. Elsewhere on the ruptured surface, half a dozen Americans and Russians belayed their tethers too . . .
Pip angled his light down and snapped a holograph of the chasm with fat buckled tubing gleaming at the bottom of it. He let the camera hang loose and checked for a second time the handiness of the improvised weapon they had all been issued with — an explosive pellet thrower powered by compressed gas.
“Dennison about to descend,” Pip told his throat mike.
“Good luck, Pip,” a voice buzzed in his ear. “Good hunting.”
Pip swung his body round and started climbing upward. The change of orientation put Earth's soda fountain a thousand miles below his feet, blue oceans whipped with cream.
• • •
Sole's intentions were as ice-sharp as the winter day, as he pushed the main door open and walked into the heat inside.
The Christm
as tree was gone. Balloons gone. Streamers gone.
No one saw him as he fitted his key into the first security door and passed through to the rear wing.
He took the lift down and stepped out into the corridor, hurried to the first window.
Inside the Embedding World the wall screen was dead and the four children lay sleeping on the floor in a neat row.
Gulshen's leg was encased in plaster. Rama's hand was wrapped in bandages. Vasilki's brow was bandaged and her face badly bruised.
Vidya was the only unblemished one. Yet he did not sleep quietly. Even through the tranquillizers and barbiturates his lips moved. Muscular tics twisted them.
Sole barely registered the peculiar circumstances. A glance showed him that Vidya was safe and that was all he cared about. He walked through the airlock ignoring the speech mask hanging up, dropped the carrier bag beside the boy and bent over him.
“Vidya!” he called tentatively.
The boy moved fitfully and his lips twitched but he didn't open his eyes.
Drugged, Sole noted with distaste. He glanced at the video pickups. Possibly they weren't switched on, and if they were switched on nobody would be watching, as there was nothing to record.
He emptied the clothes out of the carrier bag and began dressing Vidya. Amusing to think of the boy waking up fully dressed for the very first time — maybe feeling bound up in a bit of a strait jacket at first — then the huge enlargement of his vistas dawning on him . . .
• • •
Pierre's footsteps crumpled the gravel as he skirted the blue Volkswagen and went round the side of the house.
He looked in through a window, saw a boy wriggling about in an armchair before the TV set — crossing and uncrossing his white matchstick legs under him restlessly. The boy's face shocked him. The soft foxy features. His own childhood face, from a green buckram photograph album.
But Chris had never said anything. Hadn't even hinted. How long was it since that time in Paris? It was possible.
His own child? It might explain Chris's ambivalent attitude — the sense Pierre had ever since he became conscious of Chris there in the jungle, that Chris had been thrashing out some private dilemma that had nothing to do with Indians or Aliens or even his experiments at the Hospital.