Tripping, Jenny thought wildly. I’m tripping. What did I take with the wine besides the sleeping pills? She couldn’t remember having downed anything else, but she must have. It was the only possible explanation for what was happening to her now. Unless she’d gone completely over the edge. She’d been warned of the possibility these past couple of weeks, by well-meaning friends, and she’d laughed them off. She wasn’t laughing now, but she didn’t feel insane, either.
Stop trying to deal with the impossible, she ordered herself. Deal with what’s real, with what you can handle. Fact: there was a strange man stumbling around in her living room and he was stark naked and she was nearly so and she had to do something about it. She remembered fumbling through the night-table drawer and not finding what she’d been searching for. Not finding it because she’d moved the contents of the drawer into the living room so she could pack them. Her eyes searched the room. It would be over there on the breakfast counter, yes, with the rest of the sporting equipment.
Keeping her attention on the figure of the naked man, she ran for the counter and grabbed madly at the contents. Shoes, shirts, no gun. Where the hell was the gun? Please God, let me find the gun. She must have set it aside someplace. She scrabbled along the formica, brushing aside socks and shoelaces and monopoly cards, and finally picked it up. The heavy, cold metal felt familiar and reassuring in her hands and she was glad she’d taken the time to learn how to use it.
Moving back against the wall, she slapped at the light switch. The single overhead bulb came on. As the intruder turned to confront her she kept the muzzle of the forty-five pointed at his belly. His reaction to the sight of her holding the gun on him was not what she expected. There was no sudden drop into a defensive crouch, no shout of protest, no wild waving of hands. He didn’t even yell “Don’t Shoot!” He just stood there by the front door and stared back at her.
And he had Scott’s face.
Two
That wasn’t all that she recognized. Every inch of him screamed Scott. He was a perfect duplicate of the man in the photo album—no, he was the man in the photo album, down to the smallest mole and almost healed childhood scars. Same color eyes, same hue of hair, same damaged right fingernail that he’d smashed in a construction accident.
The only thing different was the look in his eyes. They seemed to go on and on into his head, transparent lenses of infinite depth and perception. She stared into them and found herself growing dizzy.
It was all too much to try and handle. Jenny was a strong, self-possessed woman (God knows how she’d had to be strong these past many weeks), but the man standing there before her, coupled with what she imagined she’d seen happening on the floor of her cabin moments earlier, completely overwhelmed her. She staggered sideways and crumpled to the floor. The gun fell from limp fingers. She was no longer afraid because she had passed beyond fear. There was no strength left in her.
The man stared at her a moment longer before walking over to pick up the gun. She forced herself to move, willed her muscles to function as she scrambled along the wall and away from the thing that looked like Scott. When she turned once to look back over her shoulder she found that he was pointing the forty-five at her. Her mouth worked but no words came forth. She still could not understand, could not relate to the figure that stood near her, but the gun was something else again. The gun she could relate to. There was nothing alien about the forty-five. It was the most real thing in the room—solid, threatening. She huddled in a ball against the knotty pine paneling and waited for whatever might come. Was he/it going to kill her now? She was terrified to find that she didn’t care. At that particularly down and dark moment in her life she would have welcomed the bullet.
Instead of pulling the trigger, the man turned and calmly resumed his examination of the living room. Finally he bent over and started to retrieve his steel marbles, or whatever they were. As he did so the muzzle of the gun dropped. At that point Jenny decided she wanted to live. She started crawling toward the front door.
Action—Reaction: he pointed the gun at her again. She froze and then retreated to her former place against the wall.
“Please don’t kill me,” she found herself mumbling. Her thoughts were beginning to clear as the incredible scene she’d witnessed earlier started to recede in her memory.
He didn’t reply, though she was sure he heard her. He lifted the gun and studied it closely, turning it over in his hands several times, running his fingers along the barrel, over the muzzle, the clip, and the trigger mechanism. When he concluded, he moved toward her again.
Something. She had to do something, to say something, anything, if only to hear her own voice. The silence was worse than screaming, worse than anything her words might provoke. Not that anything could be more terrifying than what she’d already seen.
“You’re . . . you’re not . . . Scott?”
The man halted, staring at her. At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then his lips kind of curled in on themselves, rippling like the gills of a fish. The mouth opened and an uncertain, feeble croak emerged.
“Skawwwt.” The expression on the familiar face didn’t change, but she received a feeling of self-disgust. He tried a second time. “Skaaht.” Again he moved toward her.
Jenny tried to make herself as small as possible, tried to shrink into a little ball of flesh, wishing she could turn herself into a spider so she could flee through one of the cracks in the pine. “No!” she shouted. It wasn’t a denial; it was a moan of terror.
The man stopped again, though whether because of her shout or for reasons of his own she couldn’t tell. He was very close to her now. The mouth moved again.
“Shieh kuang. Ts’ai na . . .”
He continued pouring out easy, fluent singsong sentences that were at once almost familiar to her and yet completely incomprehensible. It sounded like Chinese, but she was no linguist and couldn’t be sure.
When she didn’t respond he swallowed and tried again. “Izvanit’yeh. Gd’yeh . . .”
And so on again for the same length of time in yet another strange tongue. Russian? Maybe, but how could she tell, and what difference did it make anyway? He kept talking, burying her beneath a barrage of strange phrases and exotic accents, stopping and starting anew each time he saw that he wasn’t getting through to her.
“Niwie radhi—perdao—przpraszam—scuzat-mi—min faddkik—var venlig . . .”
“Our Father who art in heaven,” Jenny began to mutter, trying to shut out the incomprehensible din, “hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth . . .”
She hardly dared to open her eyes because he was leaning over her now, that familiar and yet utterly alien visage only inches from her own face. She cried out and fell away from him.
Startled, he jumped backward, cleared his throat, and kept going. “Excuse me,” he said with perfect clarity. “As the secretary-general of the United Nations, an organization of one hundred and forty-seven member states, it is my . . .”
He droned on, but not in Scott’s voice. It sounded like the voice of an older man, slightly accented. When he finished, he reached for her.
Wondering why she hadn’t done so earlier, she fainted.
The explorer examined the limp female form with interest, noting the continued strength of the body’s vital signs while storing this phenomenon of self-induced unconsciousness for future reference. Some kind of defensive reaction, he surmised. Definitely not an expression of either greeting or hostility. Convinced the condition wasn’t being faked, he turned away from her and walked back across the floor toward the breakfast bar. He set the seven small silver spheres on the smooth surface and placed the gun next to them.
As he did so, he caught sight of himself in a full-length mirror. After another backward glance to assure himself of the native female’s continued immobility, he walked up to the mirror and began to examine the form he had chosen to reconstruct and inhabit in detail.
Plain
, straightforward, functional, mammalian, and primitive. Externally it was quite simple. Internal evaluation revealed that it was full of hidden and unsuspected complexities, including many of which the bipeds themselves were apparently as yet unaware. For a solid form, the explorer concluded that it showed a good deal of potential. The neurological system in particular was rich with promise.
Locomotion was achieved by means of electrical stimulation of masses of thick fibers arranged around a barely adequate skeletal superstructure. He experimented with the process, hopping from one foot to another, working the muscles of face and arms. The movements were clumsy at first but the explorer was a fast learner and the system was not difficult to master. His proficiency increased with practice and, if after five minutes of hard work he still wasn’t ready to enter any break-dancing competitions, he was at least confident of his ability to manipulate the body without damaging it.
Its means of storing energy was equally as primitive as the basic design, however, and he soon found himself having to call a halt to any further physical activity until he could replenish his limited store of oxygen. Breathing hard, he rested an arm on the blender on the breakfast bar and watched with interest as the mechanical device whirred to life. When he removed his arm the blender ground to a halt. More activation of movement via electrical impulse, although in the case of the blender the motive force was supplied by fibers of copper instead of protein.
Another boxy machine rested nearby. He traced the likely source of power and plugged in the cord. The microwave oven began to hum. Instantly he analyzed the radiation it produced, found it to be simple and of low-intensity, and wondered what function the device served. When he pulled the plug the radiation ceased and the light inside the oven winked out.
His eye was caught by a device radically different in design from any he’d yet encountered. The super-eight projector was much more intriguing in appearance than the blender or oven. He crossed to the little table it rested on. A touch, and film began to move through the projection gate. Bright light threw an image on a screen across the room.
He moved his hand and the light went out, taking the moving images with it. It took a moment longer for him to locate the on-off switch and divine its function. With a flip of the switch, the movies resumed.
He was mildly startled to see moving images of the body he presently inhabited cavorting across the white plastic. Skaht—no, Scott, the female had called him. He studied the images intently, observing how the man moved, how he utilized the small muscles of his face to form expressions the meaning of which he had yet to learn.
Scott was doing something to the roof of a building, the same building the explorer now stood within. It was bright daylight. Something made him turn and look up from his work. He waved with one hand. He was wearing chinos, loafers, and a red-checked shirt. A baseball cap clung precariously to the back of his head.
The explorer glanced toward one of the half-filled cartons sitting on the breakfast bar, saw that it contained the same clothes the Scott on the screen had been wearing when the film was being shot. Only the baseball cap was missing.
The screen briefly went dark, then sprang to life with new footage taken of the cabin from a point farther away. A vehicle pulled into view. The explorer recognized the land machine resting in the storage building outside. Jenny sat in the driver’s seat of the Mustang as it spun tight circles in the dirt in front of the cabin, kicking up dust and dry grass. She was smiling and laughing when she finally brought the car to a halt only feet from the camera.
Another shift of subject matter and Jenny was gone. The explorer looked at where she lay slumped on the floor before returning his attention to the screen. Scott was grinning into the camera. He still wore the baseball cap. In one hand he held the forty-five.
As the explorer watched silently, Scott turned to take careful aim at a row of beer cans aligned atop a wooden railing. Each time he fired the gun produced an impressive roar. The impact of something small and unseen striking the cans and knocking them off the rail was unmistakable.
The explorer watched this demonstration of casual marksmanship with particular interest. Then he walked back to the bar, picked up the automatic and aimed it at a window, pulling the trigger as he’d seen Scott do. The resultant noise was louder than expected, as was the weapon’s recoil. A small, starred hole appeared in the cabin window. He turned quickly to Jenny, but the sound hadn’t awakened her. Thus reassured, he turned his attention back to the still unspooling home movies.
The target practice sequence had given way to wavering shots of the cabin and the lake. Many of them included Jenny in the picture. In one series of shots she was seen trying to hand-feed some animals, who were eying her warily. Eventually a couple of squirrels took the peanuts she was handing out. Her reaction was to squeal with childlike delight.
Something superfast and loud thundered by overhead, shaking the cabin windows and drowning out the sounds from the tiny projector speaker. This was followed by the sound of something traveling lower and slower. Helicopters, though the explorer didn’t know that. He listened until the mechanical noise drifted away to the east. The film ran out. He turned the projector off and regarded the woman lying on the floor for a long moment.
Then he turned and walked over to the window with the new hole in it. Across the lake and beyond a few low intervening hills the forest fire continued to rage. Now four more helicopters came into view, traveling just above treetop level. As they flew toward the flames the explorer was able to study this new type of flying device at his leisure.
When he’d seen all he wanted to he returned to the breakfast counter and picked up one of the gray spheres, then walked through the front door out onto the porch.
He stared across the quiet water of the bay toward the conflagration, put the gun down carefully on the porch railing. In his right hand the gray sphere started to glow, humming softly. The glow intensified rapidly, becoming as bright as the light of a small sun.
Air retreated from it, the wind blowing the explorer’s hair straight up. The skin on his face stretched taut, new muscles tightening instinctively with the effort he was putting out as he concentrated on the sphere. Alive with a strange, cold fire and perfectly attuned to its owner, it rose from his fingers to hover in the air six inches above his open palm.
Sphere and owner communicated. Information was exchanged. Soon conversation was all one-way as the explorer imprinted his thoughts and observations on the malleable interior of the gray marble.
“Emergency transmission. First Lander to Base Ship. Standard communications inoperable. Observation craft destroyed. Environment benign save for instinctively hostile reactions of dominant local species. Form of reaction equally primitive but effective.
“Do not undertake retrieval in this area. Avoidance of intensification of hostilities is paramount concern as per all relevant directives. I have completed temporary endomorphic assimilation with genetic duplicate of local dominant life form. Code is not complex but variations are interesting, untapped potential of system more so. Will study while proceeding to retrieval point. Proceed standard as per . . .”
Jenny moaned to herself, lifted her head and opened her eyes. Something, there was something important, but she’d forgotten it. Something had happened. She’d started watching those damned old home movies against her better judgment, and she’d had too much wine to drink, and something else. Something crazy insane impossible . . .
She remembered, wildly searched the room. There was no sign of her imagined intruder. A dream, sure, wine and sleeping pills and emotional upset and that’s all it had been, a cockeyed dream.
Which didn’t explain the intense glow that was lighting up the front porch.
She got on her knees and crawled toward the nearest window. Halfway across the floor she remembered that she didn’t have anything on below the waist except a pair of panties and that her knees weren’t exactly callused. Carefully she climbed to her feet and walked the rest
of the way.
Maybe this was all part of the nightmare. Maybe she’d just left the porch light on when she’d come inside to reminisce, just reminisce and get good and drunk.
She pressed her face against the glass, looked to her left, and sucked in her breath. The Scott who wasn’t Scott was standing next to the railing. His hair was flowing skyward, as though he was standing on a powerful fan. Floating just above his outstretched right palm was a tiny burning globe. A strange musical sound came from the naked figure and the globe seemed to respond to it. All her fears returned tenfold. But she couldn’t stop staring.
“Rendezvous third dawn-break, original retrieval area. Emergency transmission concluded.”
The musical emanation stopped. The glowing sphere began to rise, slowly at first. When it reached a point some hundred feet or so above the calm water of the bay, it suddenly accelerated. Save for the miniature sonic boom it produced as it shot heavenward, she would have thought it had simply disappeared.
The sound broke her paralysis and she was able to start backing toward the bedroom, feeling her way as she retreated through the bedroom doorway, her eyes never leaving the front entrance until she was safely inside. She closed the door behind her, locked it, and began searching through her clothing. When she didn’t find what she was looking for there she moved on to her purse, then her jacket. She finally found the car keys in a side pocket, right where she’d left them. She held them as tightly as she would have the forty-five.
Without pausing to slip on her pants, which she tossed over an arm, she opened the bedroom window and climbed over the sill. It was only a short drop to the ground.
There was gas in the tank. She’d filled up before turning off the highway, not wanting to find herself stuck at the cabin without a quick way out. Her intention had been to be ready to flee from unbearable memories. Now she found herself running from something much worse.