Continuum 4, page 3
part #4 of Continuum Series
The weekend after that, he visited Venus, but he did not stay long in its heavy, cloud-laden atmosphere. As he shot through it, battling against titanic winds and tiny particles whose nature he did not know, he detected something living far, far down. It was shadowy and huge, vaguely spindle-shaped, and it radiated danger. He curved upward in a burst of speed which brought him near the burning point. His panic did not subside until he had put himself far above the atmosphere. When he had regained his apartment and his human form, he wept and sobbed. Whatever his own powers were, he would have been caught like a mouse by a cat and destroyed in some horrible manner if he had not reacted so swiftly. That thing would have ingested him but would not have killed all of him. A piece of him would have suffered hell for eons before his last spark had fallen into darkness.
He rarely needed sleep, but this morning he was squeezed with fatigue. He lay down on the bed without putting on his pajamas and slept, though not well. Twice he woke up moaning with horror as something black and shapeless tried to pull him into itself.
The horror weighed him during the days and nights that followed. For the first time, he did not feel safe when in saucer form. If such a thing could exist on Venus, what might he find on Jupiter or Pluto?
One Saturday morning he made up his mind. He would leave Earth and the human race and go seek another of his kind. He needed the companionship they could provide, though he had no idea of what its nature would be. Whatever it was, it surely must be superior to that which men and women had given him. Or, to be fair, that which he had given them. Something in him had made him a loner, no matter how gregarious he might seem to others. He had had no true friends, people with whom he felt comfortable and intimate. His efforts at conversation had been ludicrous and boring. He felt at ease only around machines, which explained why they had taken so much of his time or why he had given them so much time. He could handle them, could analyze their malfunctions and repair them. But his acquaintances, his fellow workers, his family were enigmas. He was out of phase with them, and the one with whom he had been most intimate was a stranger whom he hated and who hated him. If he had had his present perceptiveness when he had married Mavice, he could have saved the marriage and even been happy with it. But it was too late for that now.
Maybe his meeting the saucer-sphinx thing in the woods had not been an accident. Maybe it, she, rather, had sensed that he could make the transition to nonhuman form easier than most humans she had surveyed. His roots were shallow and in loose soil; being torn from humanity would not be difficult or too painful for him.
There were too many maybes. He wanted certainty and knowledge, and the only way for him to gain these was to venture out after those who could give him facts.
And so, having decided, he picked up the Sunday morning paper and saw that which changed his mind again.
7.
He read the story on page two of the A section and then phoned downstairs for Chicago and St. Louis papers. These had the same story but in more detail than the local journal.
Flying Saucer seen in Los Alamos Area
UFO Lands in New Mexico
Radar and eyewitnesses see visitor from space?
“Yesterday, April 1 (April Fool’s Day), at 5:32 p.m., MST, a busload of government workers saw…”
“… radar detected and held on its screen for two minutes a UFO…”
“… the pilot reports seeing the object land on top of a hill…”
“… officials refuse to make any comment…”
Eyre read everything about the “conventionally shaped UFO” and then turned on the TV. Not until the five o’clock news was there any mention of the UFO, and that was a brief comment by a broadcaster who obviously thought it was a hoax. But there was a photograph of a blurred object supposedly taken by a guard near the test area. This had been the scene of a number of hydrogen bomb experiments in the late 1960’s.
Eyre thought several times about leaving at once, even though it was daylight. What difference did it make now if he broke his vow to himself not to change shape until the sun had long been down? He probably wouldn’t be coming back, and so what did he care that passersby might see him? Let them talk. The story wouldn’t increase the amount of attention on him, anyway.
But he did not follow his impulse. He might not find her (why did he think of it as her when it might be another male?). If she were gone, had come to Earth for only a little while, he would have to go after her. But he might not find her. He had no way of determining toward what sector of space she would be flying.
However, it did not seem likely that she would stay for only a little while. She might be ready to “give birth” to a cloud of gametes and so was looking for a concentration of humans. But if this were so, why had she picked out the remote and sparsely populated Los Alamos atomic testing grounds? Had she been attracted by some residue of radiation?
As soon as night came, he would go. The skies were starting to cloud and rain was predicted. It would be dark enough for him to leave then; he would go so fast that the human eye would not recognize him as anything but a streak. The human mind would classify him as an illusion, a temporary aberration of the eye. What did it matter what they thought?
A few minutes before the sun touched the horizon, he phoned Tincrowdor. “Hello, Leo. Paul. I’m going.”
There was a pause, and then Tincrowdor, in a strange voice, said, “I thought you would. But listen, Paul, I…”
“Never mind. Goodbye.”
“But, Paul…!”
Eyre hung up the phone and undressed. The phone began ringing. Tincrowdor was probably calling back, but he would have nothing to say that needed hearing. He would say that Eyre’s first duty was to humanity (despite the many times he’d argued against that). He would remind Eyre that it was his presence that ensured against atomic war or even a large-scale conventional war. He would… what did it matter what he would say?
And so he slipped into his other form like a hand into a glove and flung the gauntlet of himself against the night.
8.
Around and around over what he thought was northern New Mexico, he sped. The earth was a shifting pattern of triangles and cubes, glowing brightly, varicolored, the hills blocks of silver nudging the chestnut triangles around them. And then far away, tiny, a light like that from a firefly’s tail glowed. On, off. On, off. Dash, dot. Dash, dot. The longer pulses looked to him as if they were scarlet musical quarter notes written against an azure page so pale that he could see the vague geometrical forms of the earth behind it. The shorter pulses looked like six-branched candelabras enveloped in silver fuzz.
They gave him no shock of recognition. They were not what he had expected. Certainly, they were not radiations from his “mother,” the creature that had passed him in space as she traveled toward some planet circling some far-off star. But then he had seen her moving, and the shape of his kind (his kind!) changed with velocity. No, it did not actually change, but his perception of her had changed as she changed vectors. This one must be resting on the ground.
She was, he thought excitedly, waiting for him.
But why here? Why hadn’t she sought him out in his apartment?
Eyre could “see” in all directions and so perceived his downward angle of flight as double amphorae burning blue. Among them were little novae of green sputtering off into violet; these indicated that he was not just flying in a calm mood; he was thrilled with delight.
The pulses came faster, merged into expanding and disappearing obovoids and then became a many-rayed star with a yellow center. If he were in human form, he knew, he would see simply a saucer shape, light-gray, two feet in diameter, four inches high at the thickest part, the center. It would be lying in the middle of a plain over three miles wide; the wavering bands of purple would be cacti.
Or would it? A many-rayed star with a yellow center. There was something about that form and color that was familiar or at least should be familiar.
Where?
Suddenly, he knew.
He pulled up and away, but it was too late.
Here was only one light, now, the blinding raving light of a sun. Or of atomic energy loosed, matter turning into energy, expanding.
Even as he raced away, its tongues lapping at him, he thought, How did they do it?
9.
He had escaped being consumed, but he had not gone unhurt. The fireball had never enveloped him, but he had gone out of control for a while, turning over and over, falling, smashing into something, ricocheting high, regaining control, speeding, the air turning black around him, which meant that he was close to turning into fire himself from its friction.
And then the thing behind him had dropped away and was gone, and he was going home, mortally wounded.
No, he could not return to his apartment. There was no one there to ensure that his death would not be useless.
He would not be able to metamorphose into his human form again. That meant that he could not find out how they had tricked him. But there would be at least one human being who was going to inherit.
There might be more than one. He had passed over many towns and cities and lonely farmhouses on his erratic, sinking path homeward. Behind him, mixed with the double amphorae, was a trail of tiny but brightly golden nautilus-shell forms. When he was human, they would look like bricks. They were issuing from the ripped open shell of himself, and most of them had escaped before he became aware of them. Then he had squeezed down on something inside him and blocked off the little he had left. He was saving the residue.
Presently, as he thought he was out of strength and must fail, a hexagonal form loomed, and he was through it. It would be a window, the main one in Tincrowdor’s bedroom. The sound of shattered glass and of a heavy object smashing into the floor, ramming into the wall, should bring Tincrowdor if he were home. He hoped he was home. Even if he were not, he would find Eyre here and would touch him, and there would be gametes all over the room and over himself.
The surface beneath him shivered with long flat waves of silver. The sound of approaching footsteps. Then, in the doorway, which was to him an iris, a figure appeared. It was pyramid-shaped with a great eyelike protuberance on top. Comets like those from a Fourth of July sparkler sprayed from the top of the eyes. They would be the words of an excited man, and the man would be Tincrowdor. In the center of the eye was a dirigible shape, glowing green, the shape of human maleness. The dirigible bore in its center an X formed by two bottle shapes. How appropriate to Tincrowdor, he thought. No one else in the universe had that identifying shape.
“Goodbye, Tincrowdor,” he thought. “Pass it on.”
The shapes dissolved; the colors faded. Dimly, he could see the creature with the lion’s lower body and the beautiful torso and head of a woman, and, even more dimly, the red fields and the green city. And then they, too, bleached out.
10.
The man said, “The President did not want to commend you by letter or phone. Why I don’t know, so don’t ask me. I was just told to deliver the message verbally.”
Tincrowdor stood looking out of a window of the living room. The man sat on a sofa with a cup of coffee in one hand. Morna, Tincrowdor’s wife, was not home. The man had made certain of that before he came to the house.
Out there in the moonless night was a field, and in the field was a towering and very old sycamore tree. Near its roots was a smooth place over which new grass was growing. Below the grass lay a hard shell ripped open at one end and within were decaying meat and worms. Only Tincrowdor knew that it was there because he had buried it, and he intended to tell no one about it. He did not want to repeat Eyre’s history.
Was his blood swarming with millions of tiny yellow brick-shaped things? Probably. He had no intention of getting a doctor to examine his blood. This time, events would take a different course.
He turned and said, “So you don’t know what the message means?”
The man looked alarmed. “If you try to tell me, I’ll get up and walk out.”
“No sweat,” Tincrowdor said. “Well, you tell the President that mum is the word and that he doesn’t have to worry about me. Not that he doesn’t know that already. And tell him that I’m not sorry that he can’t give me a medal. I wouldn’t accept it. But you can tell him that if I’d known he was going to use my plan, I… well, anyway, tell him for me that he’s a big liar. He promised…”
The man looked bewildered. Tincrowdor said, “Never mind. Just tell him I said thanks for nothing.”
The man put the cup down and rose. “Is that all?”
“That’s all I have to say or ever will say on the subject. Which I’ll bet you’re dying to know. Which would be what would happen if you did know.”
The man’s eyebrows rose. He picked up his hat and said, “Goodbye, Mr. Tincrowdor.” He did not offer to shake hands. But he hesitated at the doorway.
“Did you know Paul Eyre very well?”
“As well as anyone could.”
“I’m asking because he cured my wife’s terminal cancer, you know.”
“I didn’t know, but I can see why you can’t restrain your curiosity.”
“That was strange!” the man burst out. “Disappearing like that and no trace whatsoever! And guarded by two dozen men! FBI, too! Do you think that he just took off? Or did some foreign agents…?”
“I wouldn’t care to speculate.”
“Well, at least the world will never be the same again.”
Tincrowdor smiled and said, “You never spoke a truer word.”
“A man like him never truly dies. He lives on in us.”
“In some of us, anyway,” Tincrowdor said. “Goodbye, Mr. Sands.”
After the man had left, Tincrowdor poured himself another bourbon. Well, he thought, Eyre certainly knew whom he should revenge himself on. Came straight here. He couldn’t have known, but he must have guessed that I originated the trap. But the President told me that the plan was rejected. And, later, I was glad that he had turned it down. I didn’t really want to be responsible for Eyre’s death.
When in the saucer form, the power to kill or cure by thought, or whatever, doesn’t operate. So, catch Eyre in that form. And the bait? What he desired most, a mate. That rhymes, doesn’t it?
Eyre told me how he perceived things, and so I knew he’d never be fooled by just a simulacrum. It would have to contain something living. And the shell did. It held a swarm of bees.
Eyre had been fooled long enough to get caught. The atomic bomb buried under the earth beneath the dummy had been triggered by a device connected to the radar. The image registered by the radar was the only one that would set the bomb off.
There were outcries from governments about illegal experimentation with bombs, even though the U.S. government had said that it was an accident. This was for public consumption. After the governmental heads had been informed, secretly, that Paul Eyre was dead, the objections were dropped, the excuses accepted.
Radar had tracked Eyre into the area of Busiris, Illinois, and he could imagine the consternation that must have caused. But when no remains were found, it had been concluded, or at least he supposed it had been, that Eyre had fallen into the river or somewhere in the woods around Busiris. A quiet search had been conducted without success. Months passed, and with these the jitters of the officials had evaporated.
There had been one thing which Tincrowdor had not understood. Eyre had had no mate, so how could he release a cloud of gametes? If the saucer person released these, and there had been no cross-fertilization, then the gametes would contain only the genes of the mother.
After some wrestling with his mind, he had concluded that that did not matter. The being with whom a gamete fused would eventually find a mate. Or, if it did not, then it would pass on its gametes to another, who would in turn find a mate.
Or perhaps there was no mating, no cross-fertilization, not as terrestrial science defined it. Every adult form generated gametes in its body, and the purpose of these was to locate and fuse with a being of an entirely different genus. Maybe with a being of an entirely different kingdom, since the saucers might, for all he knew, be vegetables. Or some type of creature neither animal nor vegetable.
Whatever the theory, the reality proceeded unhindered.
He went to the window and lifted his glass in toast to the inert and invisible mass under the trees.
“You win, Paul Eyre. You and your kind. Soon to be my kind.”
The door opened, and his wife, Morna, entered.
He said hello and kissed her, thinking as he did so of that night when he had rubbed the yellow mercury stuff on her hand while she slept.
He did not know whether he had done it from love or hate. But he did know that he did not want to go into the unknown alone.
Poul Anderson
To Promote the General Welfare
THE Constitutional Convention had recessed for the midwinter holidays, and Daniel Coffin returned to his house at Lake Moondance. In this part of the lowlands the season brought roaring, chill rains, winds which streaked along mountains to make forests creak and sough, dazzlements of light and hasty shadow as the cloud deck swirled apart, reformed, and broke open again upon sun, moons, or stars. To travel by aircar was not predictably safe; thus, custom was for folk to stay home, visit only near neighbors, in revelry draw closer to their kindred.
Last year he had not done so, but had been the guest of Tom and Jane de Smet in Anchor. His place had felt too big and hollow, and at the same time too full of ghosts. Soon afterward, though, his eldest granddaughter Teresa and her husband Leo Svoboda had suggested they move in with him. It was partly kindness to an old man they loved; their dwelling was no mansion like his, but it was comfortable and they were prospering. Yet there were enough mutual practical advantages — such as centralizing control over the vast family holdings, now that improved transportation made it possible — that they were not offending him with charity. He was glad to agree.
