It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to go?
It was, oh, I guess the middle of November 1966, that night, maybe seven p.m., dark out, of course, cold and quiet. The sky over Woodbridge, Virginia, was flooded with stars, so many stars the black night, clear and crisp, had a vaguely lit-up quality to it, as if ever so slightly green. Maybe just the lights from the gas stations and little shopping centers lining Route 1, not far away.
I was walking home alone from the Drug Fair in Fisher Shopping Center, up by the highway, where I’d read comic books and eaten two servings of ketchupy French fries, moping by myself. I’d stayed too long, reading all the way through the current Fantastic Four so I could put it back and not pay. I was supposed to have been home by six-thirty, so my mom could head out on her date.
Out with some fat construction worker or another, some guy with beery breath and dirty hair, the sort of guy she’d been "seeing" (and I knew what was meant by that), one after another, in the two years since she’d run off my dad, leaving me home alone to look after my two little sisters, ages three and seven.
I remember thinking how pissed off she was going to be.
I was standing on the east rim of Dorvo Valley, looking down into the shadows, thinking about how really dark it was down there, an empty bowl of land, looking mysterious as ever. Murray and I named it that when we’d discovered it three years ago, maybe a half-mile of empty land, cleared of underbrush, surrounded by trees, called it after a place in the book we’d been trying to write back then, The Venusians, our answer to Barsoom, though we’d kind of given it up after Pirates of Venus came out.
Murray. Prick. That was why I was at Drug Fair alone. There’d been a silence after I called his house, then his mother had said, "I’m sorry, Wally. Murray’s gone off with Larry again tonight. I don’t know when he’ll be home. I’ll tell him you called."
I felt hollow, remembering all the times we’d sat together at Drug Fair, reading comics for free, drinking cherry cokes and eating those ketchupy French fries. Remembered last summer, being here in Dorvo, the very last time we’d "played Venus" together, wielding our river-reed swords, lopping the sentient berry clusters from the Contac bushes we called Red Devils, laughing and pretending we’d fallen into a book. Our book.
Murray’s dad was the one named them Contac bushes, telling us they were really ephedra, and that’s where the stuff in allergy medicines came from.
But then school started, eleventh grade, and we’d met Larry. Larry, who was going steady with Susie. Pretty blonde Susie, who had a chunky girlfriend named Emily, who wore glasses.
Something like this had happened before, when we were maybe ten or eleven, and Murray had joined Little League, telling me it would help him find his way as an "all-around boy." This time, I think, the key word would be pussy, instead of baseball.
I stood silent, looking out across the dark valley, the black silhouette of the woods beyond, above them, the fat golden spire of Our Lady of Angels Catholic Church, floodlit from below, where I’d been forced to go before my parents split up. In the Dorvo Valley mythos, on our wonderfully complete Venus, lost Venus, we’d called it the Temple of Venusia, and the city at its feet, no mere shopping center, but the Dorvo capitol, Angor, portmanteau’d kiddy-French Angel of Gold.
I realized I’d better get going. Through the black woods, down the full length of Greenacre Drive, past Murray’s house, where his parents would be sitting, silent before the TV, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, across the creek, up Staggs Court to my furious, desperately horny Mom.
If I was lucky, she’d spend the night with whoever it was, and I wouldn’t have to lay in bed in the dark by myself, listening to their goings-on.
I blew out a long breath, a long wisp of warm condensation flickering like a ghost in the bit of light from the sky full of stars, and stopped, eyes caught by some faint gleam from deep in the valley of the shadow. I felt my heart quicken, caught in a mythopoeic moment. Look, Murray. A cloud skimmer. . . !
Yeah. Right. Where’s Murray now? In a dark movie theater somewhere, with his hand groping up a girl’s dress, like a real grown-up boy.
But the gleam was there, really there, and, after another moment, I started walking down through the long grass, stumbling over Red Devils and weeds, skirting around holes I could barely see, but remembered from long familiarity with the place, night vision growing keener as I went down in the dark.
Looking toward the phantom gleam, I thought to shade my eyes with one hand, occluding the Golden Angel, cutting off more light from the stars.
Stopped walking.
Thought, um, no.
I looked away, blinking like a moron. Looked back.
The flying saucer was a featureless disk, not quite sitting on the ground, maybe sixty feet across. The size of a house, anyway. Not shiny or it would’ve reflected more starlight. There were things in the deeper shadows underneath it, landing legs maybe, and other shadows, moving shadows, rustling in the brush nearby.
Near me. Something started to squeeze in my chest.
Something else started to tickle between my legs. A need to pee.
I slowly walked the rest of the way down the hill, until I was standing under its rim. The moving shadows in the underbrush were things roughly the size and shape of land crabs, a little bigger maybe, with no claws, though I couldn’t make out what was there in their place.
They seemed to be taking hold of the Red Devils, bending them down, pulling off the little berry clusters. What the hell would clawless land crabs want with Contac berries?
Robots. In a comic book, these would be robots.
Anyway, they seemed to be ignoring me.
I felt unreal, the way you feel when you’ve taken two or three Contac capsules, or maybe drank an entire bottle of Vicks Formula 44 cough syrup.
There was a long, narrow ramp projecting from the underside of the saucer, leading up to an opening in the hull, not dark inside, but lit up very dim indigo, perhaps the gleam I’d seen from the valley’s rim. I walked up to it, heart stuttering weirdly, walked up it and went inside.
In movies, flying saucers have ray cannons, and they burn down your city. And in my head, I could hear Murray, jealous Murray, girl on his fingers forgotten, wondering where I’d gotten the fucking nerve.
But I went inside anyway.
It turned out, the thing was like the saucer-starship from The Day the Earth Stood Still. There was a curved corridor, one wall solid, the other lattice, wall sloping slightly inward. A little vertical row of lights here, beside something that looked like a door. Around the curve. . . .
I caught my breath, holding stock-still, heart racing up my throat.
Held still and wondered again at finding myself here.
The thing didn’t look much like Gort from the movie. Not so featureless. Real joints at elbows, wrists, knees, hips, but there was nothing where i’s face should be either, just a silvery shield, a curved pentagonoid roughly the shape of an urban policeman’s badge, like the Boston metro badge my Uncle Al wore.
I stood in front of it, looking up. No taller than my dad, so only an inch or two taller than me. Looking up has to be an illusion. It looked a little bit like the robots I used to draw as part of the Starover stories I once tried to write, the ones that filled the background of all those drawings I did, of hero Zoltan Tharkie, policeman Dexteran Kaelenn, and all the odds-and-sods villains they faced together.
I remember Murray and I used to sit together at Drug Fair, tracing pictures from comic books and coloring books, filling in our own details, Tharkie and Kaelenn and the robots, Älendar and Raitearyón from Venus. I remember those two had had girlfriends, and . . .
Stopped myself, shivering.
I reached out and touched the thing.
Cold. Motionless.
My voice sounded rusty, as I whispered, "Klaatu, barada. . . ." Strangled off a fit of giggles with something like a sneeze. Patricia Neal, I remembered, couldn’t pronounce the words the same way as Michael Rennie, substituting Klattu, burodda in her quaint American drawl. Quit it! Jesus!
Nothing.
I turned away from the silvery phantasm, maybe nothing more than an empty suit of armor? Slid my fingers along the light panel. Just as in the movie, the door slipped open, and I went on through.
"Ohhhhh. . . !"
I could hardly recognize my own voice, shocky and faint.
There was another corridor beyond the door, and its far wall was transparent, like heavy glass, or maybe Lucite. There was smoky yellow light in the room beyond, lots of water, things like ferns. Something in the steamy mist. . . .
I put my nose to the warm glass, bug-eyed, remembering the scene from near the end of Tom Swift in the Race to the Moon, maybe my favorite book from the series, where they finally get aboard the robot saucer sent by the Space Friends.
Little dinosaurs. Little tyrannosaurs. Little brontosaurs. Little pteranodons winging through the mist.
"Not quite a brontosaurus," I told myself, voice quiet, but louder than a whisper. "Head’s too long and skinny. Not a diplodocus either. Nostrils in the wrong place." There were other things moving back in the mist. Babies, maybe? Hatchlings? Would that be the right word?
I walked on, slowly, going through another door, walking along another hallway. After a while, I began to wonder how they got all this space folded up into a flying saucer little enough to fit in Dorvo Valley.
Another robot, yet another door, and I found myself in a curved room with big windows on the outside. Ob Deck, the voice in my head called it, pulling another word from another book, as I pressed to the glass, cold glass this time, looking out on greenish night.
Dorvo Valley. Little land crab robots. Brilliant green light flooding up from the ground beyond the forest. Something odd. It isn’t that bright outside. Can’t be much more than eight p.m.
Little frozen image of my mother.
How long before she calls the police?
Thought dismissed.
What should I do?
Get out of here! Run home. Call the cops yourself.
I pictured that. Pictured them laughing at me as they hung up, as I turned to face my raging mother. You little bastard! she would say. Bob didn’t even wait for me.
Pictured that other scenario. The cops come, we go to Dorvo Valley. Nothing, not even a circle of crushed vegetation. And, either way, I go to school in the morning. Word would get out, one way or another.
The lights flickered suddenly, and a soft female voice said, "Rathan adun dahad, shai unkahan amaranalei." More flickers. Outside, I could see the little land crabs were making their way downhill, dragging their loads of harvested Red Devils.
Cold clamp in my bowels.
I turned and ran, through the door, down one corridor, through the next door, up another, around a curve, back through. . . . Ob Deck! Turned back, found myself facing a faceless robot. Still motionless. Started to whimper, "Please. . . ." There was a rumbling whine from somewhere down below, spaceship’s structure shivering. The lights flickered again, the lady’s voice murmuring, "Ameoglath orris temthuil ag lat eotaeo." More flicker. Something started to whine, far, far away, like the singsong moan of a Mannschenn drive.
I felt my rectum turn watery on me, clenched hard to stop from shitting myself, and snarled, "That’s just a fucking story! Think! Do something, you friggin’ idiot!" As if my father’s words could help me now.
I turned and looked out the window, just in time to see the ground under the saucer drop away. Suddenly, surrounding the dark woods, the map of Marumsco Village was picked out in streetlights. There was Greenacre Drive, where Murray’s parents would be finishing up their beer. Beyond the dark strip of the creek, halfway up Staggs Court, had to be the porch light of my house, where, by now, my mom would be about ready to kill me.
It shrank to a splatter of light, surrounded by the rest of Woodbridge, little Occoquan off that way. I squashed my face to the glass, looking north, and was elated to see, from twenty-two miles away, you could still make out the lights of the Pentagon, could see the floodlit shape of the Capitol Dome, the yellowish spike of the Washington Monument.
City lights everywhere I looked. Speckles and sparks and rivers of light, brighter and more numerous than the stars in the sky. I’d never flown on a plane at night before. I’d never . . .
I felt my face grow cool.
Watched the landscape shrink.
Suddenly, light appeared in the west, like sunrise.
No! I’m high enough up the sun is shining from where it’s still daytime!
Turned toward the blue. On the horizon, the curved horizon, there was a band of blue, above it only black, sunlight washing away the stars.
Curved?
Bolt of realization.
I can see the curvature of the Earth. That means . . . I shivered again. And then I wondered, briefly, if Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell were somewhere nearby, peering out through the tiny rendezvous windows of Gemini XII, watching my flying saucer rise.
Whole Earth bulging up below now, looking for a moment like the pictures sent down from Gemini XI, which had gone all the way up to an 850 mile apogee. It turned to a gibbous blue world, getting smaller, then smaller still.
Something flashed by, huge and yellow-gray.
Moon! It’s the Moon!
How fast?
That was no more than a five minute trip.
I tried to do the calculation in my head; couldn’t quite manage. I’d never been any good at math. A lot slower than the speed of light, anyway.
I remembered the final scene from "Invaders from Mars," where the little boy wakes up from his dream, and felt a cold hand on my heart. If I wake up now and it’s time for school, why don’t I just kill myself and get it over with?
But the ship flew on into the black and starry sky, and I realized, after my moment of inattention, I could no longer find the Earth or Moon. Where am I going?
And why?
I awoke from a dreamless sleep, and opened my eyes slowly, lying on my side, cramped and cold, against the curved Ob Deck bulkhead, staring at the motionless gort by the door. Whispered, "Gort. Merenga." Nothing.
I always wake up like that, always knowing where I am, never confused. Maybe because there’s that little re-entry period, those few seconds between waking up and opening my eyes, when I remember where I was when I went to sleep, so I know where I’ll be when I awaken.
I pushed myself to a sitting position, back to the wall, something in the back of my neck making a little gurgle as I stretched, like my spine was knuckles wanting to crack.
Seemed more real, now that I’d been asleep, putting a bracket around the night before. I was here. Period. Unlike the hazy wonder of the dream where we flew past Jupiter, some time around midnight. It’d been a fat, slightly flattened orange ball, not at all the way I would’ve expected.
Three hours, I remember thinking. That’s fast. What, fifty thousand miles a second? More? We went by something that looked like a ball of pink twine, and that’s when I discovered if I put my finger against the window glass and circled something, it’d get bigger, that another tap would make it small.
I’d picked out five little crescents. Circled and tapped. Figured out the red potato must be Amalthea, the pink ball Europa. Maybe the scabby yellow one was Io? Those other two, two similar-looking gray cratered bodies, looking pretty much like the Moon, those would be Ganymede and Callisto, but I couldn’t figure out which was which.
Murray would know. Murray out at night in the summertime, pointing at this star and that one, naming names, mythological and scientific, every kid in the neighborhood but me impressed as all hell. Once, I’d caught him in a mistake.
And he’d said, "I don’t know if I want you for a friend anymore."
After that, I kept my mouth shut.
The lights flickered and the woman’s soft voice said, "La grineao druai lek aporra. . . ." Trailing off, like she had something else to say, but couldn’t quite get it out.
I stood, turned and looked out the window.
It was like a featureless yellow ball, hazy maybe, circled by a striated yellow-white ring, grooved like a 45rpm record. Colored like those records I’d had as a child, like the one with "Willie the Whistling Giraffe." I’d loved that song, and listened to it so much I could still sing all the words. I was startled to find out, years later, it was written by Rube Goldberg.
Saturn was growing in the window, growing slowly and . . . I realized it should already be going past, shrinking away. "We’re slowing down." I glanced at the robot, as if looking for confirmation.
Nothing.
When I looked back, a smoky red ball was in the window, starting to slide past. It stopped and stabilized when I circled it with a quick fingertip, movement transferring to the sky beyond, Saturn starting a slow slide across the fixed stars.
"Titan."
Nothing.
"God damn it, Titan!"
Like I wanted something from myself then. But all I could do was remember, remember Captain Norden from The Sands of Mars reminiscing about the cold, howling winds of Titan, remember Tuck and Davey from Trouble on Titan and their homebuilt oxygen-jet, flying the methane skies.
What would I remember about all this, years from now?
I had a glimpse of the man I might have become, some fat guy in a crumpled suit, selling who-knows-what. All the men on Staggs Court. All the men in America in 1966.
The woman’s voice said, ". . . kag at vrekanai seo ke egga." The lights flickered again, like punctuation. I tapped Titan to release the image and pressed my nose to the glass.
Ought to feel colder than this. Saturn’s pretty far from the sun.
There. A spark of pale yellow light.
It grew swiftly, filling the window without interference from me, gliding to a stop just outside. It was a cylinder of gray rock, things visible on its surface, structures, and I could see it was revolving slowly around its long axis.
Revolving so there’d be artificial gravity inside, centrifugal force. It’ll be hollow, I thought. Maybe this was what Isaac Asimov had termed a "spome," short for "space home," in some F&SF column or another? No, that’s not right. Where the hell . . . Asimov’s article was in that book my dad brought home, Kammermeyer something . . . "There’s No Place Like Spome"? Dad had gone to a meeting of the American Chemical Society a year or two earlier, had come home snickering about the little fat man with what he’d term "a thick New York Yid accent."
I remembered him saying, "Asimov? Now I see him in a different light!" When I was little, we’d lived in a neighborhood full of Russian Jews, somewhere in Boston, Brookline maybe, and he’d done a good job of picking up the accents, and those special cadences. It’d become the basis for some family in-jokes.
The thing rotated toward us, though it had to be my flying saucer flying around I guess, then a four-mandibled parrot’s beak opened, spilling bright yellow light, and we flew right in.
Flew right in, swooped over green landscape, found a flat white field, concrete I figured, and slotted in to a landing, one of the few vacant spaces in a parking lot full of flying saucers just like mine.
A flicker of lights.
A womanly voice, full of warmth and welcome, "Todos passageiros sai. . . ." Then the saucer groaned and shivered as the boarding ramp slid down. It only took me a minute to realize that if I could find a land crab, I could follow it down to the hatch; maybe fifteen minutes after that, I was standing outside.
There was a cool breeze blowing across the concrete apron, and it smelled sweet here, making my nose itch. Alien pollen? I’m allergic to a lot of stuff. I whispered, "What if I get sick?" My voice sounded funny, here in the silence. I shouted, "Hello-oh?"
Not even an echo, my voice carried away to nowhere by the breeze. "Anybody. . . ." Of course not. I started forward, walking between two other saucers, stopped suddenly, feeling a cold knot in my guts, looking back toward my saucer, realizing how easy it would be to get lost here.
Does it matter?
How would I know if my saucer is ever going back to Earth?
From where I stood, I could see beyond the last row of saucers. There was a tall chain link fence, topped by razor wire; beyond it, a dark green forest.
Nothing moving.
No dinosaurs, big or little, in the woods, no pteranodons in the sky.
Sky? Well, not exactly.
Overhead, the main thing was a long yellow stick of bright light. In a story, that’d be a fusion tube or something, an "inner sun" for this long, skinny ersatz Pellucidar. Beyond, to the left and right, were two green bands, the same color as the forest. Between them were three more bands of black.
In one of them, you could see Saturn, its brightly backlit rings looking like ears, or maybe jug handles. And that bright star? That’d be the sun I guess. Glass? So how come I didn’t notice any windows from the outside? How come it just looked like rock?
My memory started picking through stories, right then and there.
Something moved in the distance. I looked, and felt cold when I saw what it was. One of those brontosaurus-things, full size I think, but with a too-skinny head, snaky neck dipping so it could browse among the treetops. Glad for the razor wire. Cold but elated. As if. . . . As if !
The was a deep bass thrumming noise, almost like a long, low burp. The bronto looked up. The inner sun suddenly brightened, filling the landscape with a violet dazzle.
I blinked hard, eyes watering, looked up again and realized that Saturn was gone, that I felt something else in my guts, a pulling and twisting. Dizzy. I’m dizzy. Like the ship is maneuvering violently, and I just can’t see it because there’s nothing to see.
Then there was a great big ripping sound.
A white zigzag crack appeared in the windows, going from one to the other, as if it were a rip in the sky itself, though my mind served up an image of what it would be like as the glass blew out and the air roared away to space, carrying off forest and trees, brontos, flying saucers, Wally and all.
The crack opened like white lips, revealing a blue velvet throat beyond, into which, somehow, the ship seemed to plunge, then the fusion tube dimmed, back to yellow again, back to being a soft inner sun, all the odd twisting and pulling stopped, and there was only the soft breeze.
In a story, I thought, we’d be going faster than light now.
And then I said, "Damn! This is the coolest thing that ever happened to anyone! Murray would be so fucking jealous!"
Yeah, right. I could almost see his bemused, angry smirk, fading into the blue velvet hypersky as he turned away, forgetting about me, about Venus, about all the things we’d done together, all the dreams we’d had.
On Earth, in only a little while, people would stop wondering what’d become of me, and go on with their lives.
Some days later, I couldn’t tell you how many days, already a good bit skinnier than I was the night I’d decided to cut through Dorvo Valley on my way home from Drug Fair, I sat beside a little deadwood campfire on the concrete apron beside my trusty flying saucer, roasting up a few fresh breadfruit for supper.
Mangosteen! That, I’d remembered, was from a kiddie book I’d found in my grandfather’s attic, when we went up for the funeral, four, five years before, The Hurricane Kids in the Lost Islands. I’d been looking for the sequel ever since, where Lebeck and DuBois send their boys off to the Land of the Cave Dwellers.
Breadfruit? Probably not. Probably no breadfruit back in the Jurassic.
Sudden image of myself finding the little gate, sneaking out into the edge of the Big Woods, finding all sorts of stuff. Nuts mainly, and these things. Ferns. A tree I recognized had to be a gingko. Little lizards, maybe skinks, anoles, some kind of snake.
I fished one of the breadfruits out of the fire with a stick, held it down and cut it open with another stick I’d managed to break off at an angle and sharpen by rubbing on the pavement. It had mealy yellow-white flesh inside, like badly overcooked baked potato, steamy now, odorless, smelling just the way it would taste when it cooled enough to eat.
This is the last of them. Tomorrow I’ll have to go out again and . . . I felt a little sick. Last time, blundering around in the woods, picking nuts and berries and whatnot, there’d been that soft rumble, I’d looked up, and suddenly wet my pants.
The allosaurus didn’t even notice, didn’t look up as I’d crept away, back through the gate, closing it carefully behind me. I’d cooked and eaten, silent with myself, sitting bareass while my underpants and jeans dried by the fire, draped over my constant companion.
I looked at it now, little humanoid robot, two feet tall, looking just like a toy from Sears I’d had when I was eight or nine, electric igniter in one hand, fire extinguisher in the other. It’d come toddling up just as I’d burst into tears beside my pitiful pile of dry sticks, just as I’d screamed, "Fuck it!" and thrown my pathetic attempt at a fire drill as hard as I could at the nearest flying saucer hull.
I said, "What d’you think, Bud? Why’s this starship got a Jurassic biome inside?"
Silence.
"Yeah. Me too."
I picked up the now merely hot breadfruit and scooped out some tasteless muck with my upper front teeth. "Mmmmm . . ." blech. Even butter, pepper, and sour cream wouldn’t’ve helped. Not much, anyway.
"What d’you think, Buddy? Thanksgiving yet?" Probably not. It hasn’t even been a week. But I pictured my little sisters, Millie and Bonnie, sitting down to turkey dinner with Mom. Bonnie probably misses me. Millie was probably glad just to get my share.
Christmas. I wondered what Dad would get me? I’d asked for a copy of Russian in a Nutshell. Two years. Then what? No college for me. Bad grades and no money.
Vietnam?
Maybe. Some of my friends’ older brothers had gone. At least one boy who’d picked on me when I was little was dead now. I remembered reading an article in the Post a while back, about how so many good American boys were being corrupted by little brown Asian prostitutes, which made me think about Glory Road.
Murray and I had talked about that the next day, and he’d given me a funny look, kind of a sneer, before changing the subject. Remember when we debated Vietnam in eighth-grade Social Studies class? I’d said I wasn’t worried. It’ll be all over, long before I turn draft age, toward the end of 1969. Yep. All over.
And, just like that, there was a deep bass thrum, like a gong gone wrong. When I looked up, the blue velvet sky was broken by a long white crack, white lips opening, spitting us out into a sky full of stars.
I got up, throwing the half-eaten breadfruit aside, running for the flying saucer’s ramp. Behind me, I could hear the sharp, fizzy hiss of my little buddy’s fire extinguisher, as it sprayed away the flames.
Down on the yellow-gray world, I crouched in the shade of the flying saucer’s hull, looking out toward the horizon, across a flattish landscape floodlit from above under a pale, blue-white sky. I’d run off the bottom of the ramp when we landed, had run right out there, bounding high, realizing the surface gravity of this place was maybe no more than half that of Earth.
But then the light from the vivid spark of a tiny blue sun had turned to pins and needles in my November-white skin, forcing me back into the shade. My face, when I touched it, was already starting to peel.
Jesus. Stupid.
And what if ? What if a lot of things. What if the air here had been deadly poison? What if there’s some disease here a human being could catch? What if I’m already dead and merely waiting to fall down?
Yeah, yeah, I know. The guy in the story never dies. Except the one in that Faulkner story the teacher made fun of, when we studied it in tenth grade English Lit class. What’re we supposed to imagine? she’d said. He’s carrying paper and pen, taking notes as he jumps in the river and drowns?
From space, the planet had looked like a yellow-gray ball, almost featureless. Oh, there was a tiny white ice cap at the visible pole. A few pale clouds near what looked like some isolated mountain peaks. A canyon here, a dune-field there. Mars without the rust?
Arrakis, I thought. I’d enjoyed the five-part serial in Analog, though I was mighty pissed off about the stupid format changes Campbell was playing with, going from digest to some standard magazine size, then back again, fucking up my collection. I remember I wondered if the Dune world had started out as Mars, if maybe Herbert realized at some point that the solar system was too small for the story.
I thought about my bedroom. My bed. The little desk. Bookcases full of children’s hardcovers, the stuff from Grandpa’s attic, the paperbacks and magazines I was buying down at Drug Fair, Amazing and Fantastic, Worlds of If. . . .
Out in the sun, the land crabs had buckets and little self-propelled wheelbarrow things, were shoveling up patches of mauve sand. Melange? Whatever it was, it went no more than a few centimeters deep. I sniffed, but couldn’t smell anything like cinnamon. Whatever this place was, it mainly smelled like fireworks. Gunpowder. It smells like gunpowder.
From the Ob Deck, I’d been able to see something that looked like a city, way off on the horizon, low white buildings, dazzling in the sun. A circle of my fingertip had brought them close. Adobe? No sign of movement, some of the buildings looking weathered and worn, the ruins of Koraad perhaps.
Miles off, anyway. I could wait ’til nightfall, and it’d take maybe three or four hours to get there, tops. Yeah? And what if the starship leaves without you? What then? I thought about Galactic Derelict suddenly. No. I never wanted to be one of Andre Norton’s dickless boys. Let’s have a Heinlein adventure, at least.
Or maybe I can grow up to be John Grimes after all? Is there a beautiful spy somewhere waiting for me? Jesus. Grow up. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to last another week!
What if this was a Larry Niven story? What if we land on a planet that has a habitable point? I pictured myself running down the ramp, out onto the sand. Then the deadly winds of We Made It would come up and there I’d be, on my way to fucking Oz.
After a bit, I turned and went on up the ramp. Look out the window. Watch the baby dinosaurs or something. One thing you know: The saucer will leave, the starship will fly, and, sooner or later, we’ll be somewhere else. And another thing: Who owns all this shit? The robots? Not bloody likely, cobber. Maybe this thing is like some super-sophisticated Mariner probe. And, sooner or later, it’ll take its samples on home.
What happens when they find me in the collection bag?
Watching the land crabs gather up Spice, I suddenly wished for . . . something. Anything. Wished I’d see a sandworm in the distance. Wished for Paul Atreides to come riding up? No. Chani, maybe?
I’m guessing it was maybe three weeks before we made the next landfall–no, planetfall’s the right word–three weeks in which I got really sick of plain breadfruit. Somewhere along the way, I got up the nerve to cook and eat a few little lizards, which turned out to be mainly bones, and salty as kippered herring snacks, finally moving on to a two-foot brown snake I’d caught.
Didn’t taste like chicken, more like fish I guess, but the oily juice that cooked out of it made the breadfruit taste okay.
The next planet was . . . what’d we used to say in junior high? Cool as a moose. I crept down the ramp, uselessly cautious, and stood there with my mouth hanging open. What can I say? Earthlike but alien?
The spaceport, if that’s what it was, was just a plain concrete apron, not much bigger than the helicopter pad next to the Pentagon, sitting next to what looked like a walled city. Not a medieval city, not an ancient Roman city. The walls were plain and unadorned, no crenellations, no battlements, no towers. White concrete walls, pierced by a few open gates on the side I could see. Egyptian Memphis, I remembered, had been called something like Ineb-Hed by the natives. White Walls.
The buildings I could see over the wall were low and white and square.
Overhead, the sky was dark green, green as paint, with little brown clouds floating here and there. The sun, if sun it was, was a dim red ball, halfway up the sky, banded like Jupiter, with mottled splotches here and there. Sunspots? Starspots? Maybe it’s a planet, and that’s reflected light.
Away from the city, the land was all low forest, things not much like trees, grayish, bluish, a reddish-purple that I realized with a flush of pleasure might be the heliotrope of Amtor. Things moving in the shadows, inside the forest. Pod-shaped things. Plants with lips.
The land crab robots were coming out of the saucer now, forming up by rank and file, so when they set off, heading for the nearest city gate, I walked along beside. What the hell? If they start to leave, I’ll follow them back. Safe enough.
It was gloomy in the city, a city full of gray-green shadows. Gloomy and motionless, reminding me of the scene where Gahan of Gathol walks into a seemingly deserted Manator. Sure. And the land crabbots’d make pretty good Kaldanes?
That filled up my head with long-running images of Ghek, crawling through the Ulsio warrens of Manator.
I looked in an open doorway, yelped, tripped over my own feet, and wound up on my knees, staring, heart pounding. Jesus Christ! Well, at least it wasn’t moving.
The thing, when I got close to it, was about three feet tall, looking like it was made of black leather. There were staring black leather eyes. Black leather fangs. Black leather hands shaped like a three-fingered mechanical grab.
I touched it, wondering what the hell I’d do if it woke up and turned out to really be a thrint. Fuck. I’d do whatever it wanted, I guess, and that would be that. It didn’t budge, no matter how hard I pushed, nor did it have a bit of give to it. Cold black metal, glued to the ground.
Statue, maybe? Or just another switched-off robot?
What the hell is going on here?
Where is everyone?
Back out on the street, the land crabs were gone. Okay. Look around a bit more, then get the hell on back to the saucer. I went on up the street to the end, where it came to some kind of octagonal plaza. There was something that looked like an empty fountain in the middle, beyond it a domed building made mostly of glass, lots of tempting shadows inside.
The glass doors, when I tried them, swung right open, so I went on in.
Inside it was all broad aisles, floor carpeted in a patterned nappy monochrome the same color as the sky, and lining the aisles were . . . I don’t know. Exhibits? Things like pictures anyway. Dioramas. Blocks of stuff like glass or Lucite, with motionless objects inside. Animals, I think. Some things that could only have been machines. Things that were clearly paintings of the "thrintun," looking like they were walking around the city, doing whatever.
So are those the aliens? Are they all in some kind of stasis? Suspended animation?
I suddenly found myself wishing there’d been more variability in the stories I’d been reading since I learned how to read. But the stories had been pretty much self-similar, as though the writers, without any source of new ideas, could only copy each other, over and over again.
In the middle of the building, taking up a big space under the dome, was a flat, tilted spiral shape, made of what looked like metallic dust, hanging motionless in the air. Like the Andromeda galaxy, blue and red and white and . . . my mouth went dry. Star map!
I walked round and round the thing, peering inside, trying to recognize something, anything, but it looked like every spiral galaxy illustration I’d ever seen. All of them. Or none. For all I knew, it could be NGC 7006 and here I was, beyond the farthest star.
On the other side of the spiral was an aisle lined with things that looked like model spaceships. Some of them looked pretty much like what humans were building, back on Earth. Look here. It’s a couple of thrintun sitting in a sort of Gemini capsule. Not quite, but close. And this? A thrint climbing down on the dusty surface of some moon or another?
The ships got more and more advanced, until I suddenly wondered where the flying saucers were. Ah. Right here. Right at the end. Here’s a flying saucer, surrounded by thrintun with things like guns, surrounded by thrintish tanks and cannons . . . surely, standing on the rim of the saucer, I’d see one of my familiar gorts?
On the ground under the rim of the saucer were models of about two dozen creatures, every one of them different.
Yep. That’d be the thrintun being welcomed to the Galactic Federation, right? Pleased at how clever I was, I started walking back toward the useless star map. Hey, if I’m lucky, it’s my galaxy, and I’m not so far from home after all. Right. What the fuck am I going to do, walk back to Earth?
I stopped by the model of the moon lander. Maybe that was their moon? It was a pretty primitive spaceship, looking a lot like the earliest designs of the Apollo lunar excursion module. Moon. I tipped my head back, trying to look out through the dome, wondering if I’d spot a crescent somewhere in the dark green sky.
Very dark green sky.
Felt my mouth go drier than I would’ve thought possible. No sun, though I could see a flush of red in the sky, off to one side. So how the fuck long have I been in here, anyway?
I walked back up the aisle, around the spiral galaxy, back down the other aisle and out the door. Despite the fact that it was starting to get a little cool out, I felt myself start to sweat, armpits suddenly growing spongy and damp. Well. Started to walk back the way I thought would lead to the spaceport. Just get outside the walls. You’ll find it.
I started to run, making little gagging sounds, throat suddenly sore, feeling like I was going to start crying, like a little kid lost in a supermarket.
And my little flying saucer popped up above the walls right in front of me, hung there for just a second, then dwindled away into the dark green sky and was gone.
I stood there, looking up, feeling the hot tears start down my cheeks, vision blurring, and whispered, "I always do something stupid, don’t I? Just like Daddy says." I rubbed the tears from my eyes, suddenly angry, and thought, There you go, champ. Murray’ll be so jealous now, won’t he?
