"What do you wear?"
"Rubber boots."
"Take them off."
"Why don't you do it?"
"We can't."
"What will you do to me when I'm naked?"
"We're naked."
I toppled to the floor. I just couldn't stand up anymore. I went down in a cage of supporting arms.
There was more fumbling and scrabbling with the hip boots. Finally they withdrew. I sat up, feebly waved around me. Nothing—the air was empty.
"Pull thy boots, child."
This voice was very different from the ones I had boon hearing. It was clearly ancient and full of authority.
"What will you do to me?"
"I can do with thee what I wish."
"I don't want to take off my boots! I want to go home! I'm a federal officer. My government will rescue me. We have planes—"
"You have no weapons, child."
"We have the bomb!"
"No, child, the bomb has you. Take off thy boots."
I would not.
There appeared to be an impasse. But then the boots started to get warm. In seconds they were hot. I smelled burning rubber.
I got right out of them.
A sort of chuckling followed, slow and low and terribly sinister. "Don't you remember us at all?"
I saw my red fire engine. It stood bathed in golden light, the lost treasure of my boyhood.
I reached out, put my hand on it. Yes, it was real, my own beloved fire engine, the one I'd lost when I was three.
All through my childhood I'd dreamed about it. How lovely it was, my heart ached to see it.
They'd—I remembered when I was very young . . . flying ...
The lights came on.
I was alone in a surprisingly small gray room. Although I was physically the only person here, I had no sense of being mentally isolated. Just beneath the surface, my mind was seething with voices, images, thoughts. It was as if I was skating the short-wave band with its static and half-heard messages from far away.
Then two blond people came into the room. I recognized both of them. One I had seen briefly on the train. The other was the woman in the flowered dress.
"We are here to assist you," said the man. He sounded as if he was reading a script.
Soon I would know the secret of the disappearances. What would Hilly find of me?
Late tonight they'd miss me at the Trout Valley Club and decide that the stream had taken me. They'd search its length tomorrow morning, looking in all the places where a fisherman's body is apt to lodge. Would they find even my rod and reel? I thought not. My guess was that the woman had policed the area after I was captured.
Hilly would guess what had happened.
The government would lose balance completely. If Stone went, then they were all vulnerable.
The woman came up to me, grasped me firmly by the shoulders and kissed me on the lips. Her kiss was dry and firm and gave the impression of something a loving father might do to calm a distraught ten-year-old kid.
She embraced me in a wooden hug. She said, "It's gonna be all right, buddy."
The man in the seersucker elbowed her. "You don't sound a hell of a lot like a frail," he muttered.
The woman sent him a hard look.
He had some white stuff in his hands, which he unfolded into a robe. It was simply cut and made of soft paper. The two of them raised it over my head and drew it down.
For a moment it clung to me, then it seemed to take on a static charge and stood out from my body. I tingled.
"Come on," the man said.
Why were they like this? Were they robots?
"We aren't," the woman snapped. Her voice sounded petulant and very human. But when I asked them their names they gravely shook their heads. "Your name dies with you," the woman said. "We don't remember."
We went down a hall that was more a tunnel it was so low. I could see that it was made of paper of the same type that formed the inner walls of the ship we had found. Light came through it from the outside. The yellow flowers pressed into the paper seemed almost alive, so vividly did they glow.
We entered a round chamber that contained a circle of what appeared to my eye to be plush first-class airplane seats. As a matter of fact they were airplane seats, familiar to me in every detail. I recognized the United Airlines logo on some of the headrests, TAT on others.
When the man shoved at my shoulders I sat down. Considering his strength there was really nothing else to do.
"Are you in pain? Are you prisoners?" The woman dropped a big hand onto my own. Her utter lack of grace was extremely peculiar. One expects a certain ease of motion from a woman.
How incredibly alien they were. Had I understood then who they were, I wonder if I would have acted differently. All of my life I have wished I knew what they thought of me. It must have been an incredibly funny, poignant experience—if they had the full range of human feeling available to them in those strange bodies.
"Open your mouth," the man said. "I will not."
"Goddammit, I knew it. Look, I gotta—" He threw himself at me. He was huge and as hard as stone. I was too spent to resist him, even for a second. With one arm around my chest he held me from behind. With his free hand he forced open my jaws. I tried to clench them but his fingers were powerful. The woman had a graceful little bottle from which she withdrew a
curved dropper.
My jaws were open, I was helpless. She put three drops of ice-cold liquid on the tip of my tongue. When they let me go I smacked and coughed. I spat.
"You can spit," the man said. "It doesn't matter."
"What have you done to me?"
"You needed that. You're going on a trip."
"I want to go home."
They pushed me into one of the seats. I quelled a wave of nausea, but it was followed by another, stronger one. The man reached around behind my seat and came out with an airsickness bag from the pocket.
transcontinental air transport was printed on it in red letters. I used it.
The air had changed. Far from being cold, it was now thick and hot. It was getting hard to breathe. Whatever was happening to me, my body was being taken to the extremes of endurance. In those days we knew nothing of hallucinogenic drugs.
Without a sound the walls of the room became clear. At first I did not understand what I was seeing. A huge shining strip of light curved off into the sky. Beneath it there shone the amazingly complex surface of a gigantic sphere colored in a thousand shades of tan and green and blue.
Then I saw that it was all surrounded by reefs and oceans of stars, stars in endless numbers, stars beyond belief in a billion colors winking, as if God's own treasury had been spilled.
We appeared to be in the rings of Saturn. How far from earth would that be? I couldn't even begin to remember. However, I was completely convinced that we had come an awfully long distance in a very short time.
In the middle of the clear wall was a round doorway. It did not appear to open into the view around us at all, but revealed broad plains beneath the light of a strange, brown sky. It looked like a patch pasted on the wall of stars.
I had no intention of going through that door.
Chapter Twenty-six
The Chronicle of Wilfred Stone
The next second I was standing in a desert. It was strewn with sharp black boulders that shone dully in the weak light. A forlorn breeze fluttered my paper garment. I was aware of the fact that Saturn was a ball of gas, so I did not imagine myself to be there. I didn't know where I was. They had removed me from reality. A few minutes before I had been struggling in the depths of a cave, now I was on a desert worse than the Sahara.
I have wondered at those events, trying to determine if they were physically real or if they happened in some other way. I was here, and the grit underfoot was real and the air was crackling dry and the sky was brown.
I staggered a few steps, hitting my naked foot against one of the stones. I sat down, rubbing my an
kle. I looked around.
In a way that is almost impossible to describe, this place was unfamiliar. Even the details were wrong.
Perhaps especially the details. The shape and color of the stones, the quality of the sand, all of it was wrong.
Even the air against my skin felt different.
I wasn't really thinking anymore. I was just here, my eyes looking out into the open.
Which was, of course, the whole point. My humanity had dropped away. I was still conscious, but I was an animal again.
And I was so lonely. I raised my head to the brown sky and keened. My sound was the only noise in the place. It seemed to be coming at once from far away and from deep within me, deeper than I had ever been. I took a breath, did it again. My spirit rose with the sound, for a moment to fill the empty air with the magic of being.
Then it died away and I was little again and it was getting dark.
I suspect that we made such sounds when we lived in the forest. Grabbing a rock I stood up. I threw it a tremendous long distance. It landed with an empty thud.
I raced across the plain, dodging and skipping with a grace I had never before possessed.
When I came to a high point I stopped. Seeking for the scent of water, I smelled the air.
A growl of frustration came from my throat. The sound startled me. At first I thought there was some kind of animal behind me. Then I thought, "No, that is how you're supposed to sound."
I was me, me alone. No name, no education, no expectations. Just me.
The sky was pale and unmarked by clouds. Not far above the horizon there was a powdery brilliance, which I presumed was the sun in deep haze.
Next I scanned the horizon, looking carefully for some sign of life, a swatch of green, perhaps, or the glitter of water. Then I looked for smoke or just the outline of a building.
The place was completely empty and entirely silent.
Again I smelled the parched air. I was already quite thirsty; I couldn't live like this for long. The air was so dry that it was leaching moisture from my body. My hands looked like paper, the skin puckered and shriveled. I touched my face, feeling fissures that had never been there before. And my nose was cracked inside.
Where would I go, naked except for a flimsy piece of paper? Graceful or not, my feet were thoroughly banged up from the mad run. I don't think there was a single rock that wasn't sharp.
For the most part the desert seemed absolutely flat, but off to my right the land rose. I could not judge distances. The views, though, seemed much longer than they had any right to be.
I walked in the direction of the rising land. At least this would keep the sun behind me. What had appeared to be the gentlest of rises soon became quite steep. I wasn't going to be able to keep this up forever. My chest and head ached, my legs felt like lead, my feet were on fire.
Very suddenly I started to have trouble seeing. At first I didn't understand why, because I did not realize how fast night came. By the time I realized what was wrong the sun was already on the horizon.
It seemed as if the air literally absorbed light. The instant the disk of the sun disappeared it was absolutely dark. There were only one or two bright stars visible through the dusty haze.
God, this place was ugly.
I sat down. There was no point in walking farther without light. The dark was like ink, like something you could feel.
I wished they'd at least left me my lighter. Then I was crying bitterly. The tears came without warning. I had been left here to die. It was so damn unfair and I was so far from home.
Later I heard something, or thought I did. Now that it was dark I didn't want this. I didn't want to hear anything that I couldn't see. The sound was low and slow and high in the air. It was as if some tremendous thing was floating through the sky above me, breathing.
The breathing got louder and louder. I felt like it was right above me, huge. I cringed, waiting for it to land on me.
Instead it went away. I let out my breath.
No sooner had I begun to relax than there was a tremendous rattling noise in the distance. It got closer and closer and lower and lower and I could hear the breathing again, fast and excited. There was urgency in it, like a starving prisoner inhaling the aroma of the jailer's soup.
A new sound started up, sharp scraping. It was very regular, as if somebody was slashing knives together.
Something whizzed through the air just above me, so close that my hair was touched with a breeze.
Involuntarily I shrank away—and saw a red glow out of the corner of my eye. I looked. Redness spread along the horizon on my left. A moment later a huge red star popped up and the place was bathed in dim, bloody light.
There seemed to be a forest of thin trees all around me. It took me time to understand that I was looking at tall, black legs, many of them.
It took every ounce of my composure not to scream. I was under what appeared to be a gigantic insect of some kind, perhaps a spider. The rattling noise started again. I could see sharp mouth parts working.
Jumping, twisting, turning to avoid the legs I made a dash to get away from the thing.
It rose up into the air, making a gigantic leap. I had to scramble to avoid it landing right on top of me. Again I ran. This time I threw stones at it.
It leaped.
I evaded, but barely. I scrambled up the rise on the theory that those jumps would be harder uphill. They weren't. It sailed high into the red air and came down on top of me.
Legs clutched, mandibles scraped—and I was caught. I grabbed a rock and hammered against one of the limbs. For all the good it did I might as well have been trying to break steel pipe.
I fought against its quick, clever legs. Finally I went wild. I hit, kicked, bit. The jaws were slashing and I could see a bright green tongue darting in and out of its mouth. I was brought closer and closer to being sliced to pieces.
I could not possibly taste good to the thing. It was sure to tear me to pieces and spit me out. I was furious at dying so pointlessly.
Then the legs pressed me against the wide open mouth and I began to die.
As I sank away I saw around me a starry night of home. I was back at our old house. We were playing on the porch, my sister and I. I saw her beside me, attending to her beloved doll Ricardo. That word—I hadn't thought of it since I was tiny. The moment was bathed in a light that seemed to contain some essential emotion of loss and urgency.
There was between me and the thing that was devouring me a kinship of tremendous power. It pushed my fear aside and I lay like a raptured lover in the forest of legs.
If this was death, from where did love emerge? I was dropped on the ground from a distance of a low feet—put down gently. For an instant I saw the complex face of the thing that had held me. It looked like nothing so much as a tremendous mantis. But those eyes—huge, reflecting the red air—were not blank. I was shocked.
Somebody was looking at me. Joy rang out. There was peace, wisdom and then a cock of the head: the irony of our situation. Soundless in the charged air, laughter.
I was left collapsed on the ground, drained now not only of my culture and my name but also of my physical strength. Bit by bit I was being demolished, reduced to the simplest nub of self.
I lay staring at the sky. Did I sleep? I don't know, but when I finally felt like getting to my feet I was stiff and ached in every joint.
Keeping the red sun on my right I forced myself up the rise. As I walked I understood that I had been brought a long distance. Before me there stood the most tremendous cliff I'd ever seen. It seemed to go up for thousands and thousands of feet.
On its highest ridge there was a very distinct blue glow. The glow was pulsating. Life. So the attack had not been an attack at all. Somebody had simply been helping me. The cliff was not sheer. There were plenty of footholds, and I had already reached a dizzying height when the red sun sank below the horizon.
Again darkness came abruptly. I was left hugging the wall in fro
nt of me, afraid to go another inch.
I don't think it was dark for more than ten minutes. When the pale sun rose again I resumed my climb.
There were moments of dizziness when I would have to stop. I wasn't in shape for a climb like this. My throat felt as if it had been packed with powdered glass. My head pounded.
Not only was I thirsty, I was also becoming hungry. I kept remembering that beef stew I'd had for lunch. Once I even sucked a bit of it from between two teeth. When that happened I hugged the rock and cried like a baby.
The loneliness came again, and stopped me for a long time.
The higher I went the more difficult the climb became. Worse, the soil up here was friable and there wasn't a single stable handhold. I had to dig down then haul myself up as the dirt collapsed around me.
Above me the blue glow was massive. I tried to call out but it was no good. I hadn't a trace of a voice.
At this height the cliff was more like a sand dune. To make headway I had to lie against it and squirm. I was so frustrated that I would have been in tears, but I had no tears.
It took me some time to realize that I'd made it.
Before me was a sparse but huge park. I dragged myself onto the surface, which I found to consist of tightly matted grass, bright green. I inhaled it, chewed at it trying to get some moisture. It was very dry.
I pulled myself to my feet. Off to my left there was a stand of tall, narrow trees. They were really huge, a hundred and more feet high by my estimation.
Directly ahead I saw a truly welcome vision, a cluster of buildings. They were obviously adobe. It looked very much like a Hopi town. I started stumbling forward.
A smell came to me on the air—or rather, a sensation. This was dampness. It loosened my drum-tight skin. It filled my nose with life, made my lungs open.
As best I could I ran.
Then I saw it. A fountain. It was made of black, shiny stone, round, with water playing out of a nozzle in the center.
I plunged my head in and opened my mouth. The water was glorious, cold and pure and perfect. I could feel my skin drinking, my mouth, sucking and drinking. Never had I experienced such raw pleasure. It was ecstatic, delicious, almost sexual in its intensity.