Agent to the Stars Part 11

The phone call came at about a quarter past eleven. I'd just gotten back from the premiere of Call of the d.a.m.ned; I skipped the after-party because I didn't want to have to tell anyone what I had really thought of the movie. Elise was in Richmond, Virginia, on her book tour -- I remember her leaving a message and telling me she was thinking we should get a horse farm out there for when we retire. I mean, really -- what the h.e.l.l am I going to do with horses? But she's a horsy type. Never got over it as a girl.

I was sitting in my lounger with my second beer, listening to Fritz Coleman talk about one of those annual meteor showers. Persieds or Leonids. Can never remember which is which. Fritz was going on about it when the phone rang. I picked it up.

"h.e.l.lo," I said.

"Hi," the voice on the other end said. "My name is Gwedif. I'm a representative of an alien race that is right now orbiting high above your planet. We have an interesting proposition, and we'd like to discuss it with you."

I glanced over to the LED readout on the phone, which displays caller ID information. There wasn't any. "This doesn't involve Amway products, does it?" I asked.

"Certainly not," Gwedif said. "no salesmen will come to your door."

Thanks to the beer, I was just mellow enough not to do what I usually do with crank calls, which is hang up. And anyway, this one was sort of interesting; usually when I get random calls, it's some wannabe actor who's looking for representation. I was bored and Fritz had given way to commercials, so I kept going.

"A representative of an alien race," I said. "Like one of those Heaven's Gate folks? You following a comet or something?"

"No," Gwedif said. "I'm one of the aliens myself. And we pa.s.sed by Hale-Bopp on the way in. No s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps that we could see. Those people didn't know what they were talking about."

"Actually one of the aliens," I said. "That's new. Tell me, does this bit work with other folks? I mean, I'm loving it, personally."

"I don't know," Gwedif said. "We haven't called anyone else. Mr. Lupo, we know it sounds unbelievable, but we figured this was the best way to go -- cut the ooh-ah Spielberg stuff and get right to the point. Why be coy? We know you like to get right to business. We saw that PBS doc.u.mentary."

You remember that thing, Tom -- they had a film crew from KCET follow me around for a week about a year ago, when I was putting the Call of the d.a.m.ned package together over there at TriStar. They actually ran it in a theater before they ran it on TV, so it'd be eligible for Oscar consideration. I'm pretty sure they can write off any votes from the TriStar suits; the doc.u.mentary makes it look like I rolled them. Well, maybe I did.

Anyway, the 'aliens' saw it, and thus, the upfront phone call. And now they wanted to arrange a meeting. By this time I had drained the second beer and had gone to the fridge for a third. So I figured, what the h.e.l.l.

"Sure, Gwed -- you don't mind if I call you Gwed, do you?" I said "Not a bit," he said.

"Why don't you come on over to the office sometime next week and we'll set up a meeting. Just call the front desk and ask for Marcella, my a.s.sistant."

"Hmmmm, that'd be sort of difficult," he said. "We were kind of hoping we might have a chat tonight. There's a meteor shower going on."

I didn't really understand that last part, but I figured it was par for the course when you're talking to 'aliens'. "All right," I said. "Let's chat tonight."

"Great," Gwedif said. "I'll be down in about fifteen minutes."

"Swell," I said. "You going to need anything? A snack? A beer?"

"No, I'm fine," he said, "though I'd appreciate it if you'd turn on your pool light."

"Well, of course," I said. "Everyone knows to turn on their pool light when aliens drop by."

"See you soon," Gwedif said and hung up.

I hauled myself out of the lounger, clicked off the TV and went to the sliding gla.s.s door that leads to the pool area. The pool's light switch is right by the door, so I clicked it on as I headed out the door. You've never been to our place, Tom, but we have a huge pool -- Olympic-sized. Elise was a swimmer at UCSD and still uses it to stay in shape. I wade around in the shallow end of the pool, myself -- I float better than I swim.

I plopped down into a patio chair and sucked on my beer and thought about what I had just done. I never invite strangers over to the house, even sane ones, and now I had just invited someone who said he was a representative of an alien species over for a chat. The more I thought about it, of course, the more stupid it seemed. About ten minutes of this, I had become convinced that I had just set myself up for some sort of ritual Hollywood murder, the kind where the newscasters start off their stories by saying "The victim appeared to know his a.s.sailant -- there was no struggle of any kind," and then pan to walls, which are sponge-painted with blood. I stood up to go back into the house and phone the police, when I noticed a meteor streaking across the sky.

This in itself was no big deal. There was meteor shower going on, after all, and my house is high up enough in the hills that the light pollution isn't so bad; I'd been seeing little meteor streaks the entire time I was sitting there. But most of them were small, far off, and lightning quick; this one was large, close, and dropping its way through the sky directly towards my house. It looked like it was moving slow, but as I stared at it, I realized that it was going to impact in about five seconds. Even if I hadn't been paralyzed, staring at it, I doubted I could have made it into the house. It looked like I wouldn't have to worry about being murdered by psychopaths, after all -- I was going to be struck down by a meteor instead. At this point, some absurdly rational chunk of my consciousness piped in with a thought: Do you realize the odds on getting hit by a meteor?

About two seconds to impact, the meteor shattered with a tremendous sonic boom, the tiny pieces of the rock vaporizing in the atmosphere like a sudden fireworks display. I stared dumbly at the point of the explosion, blinking away the afterimages, when I heard a far-off whistling sound, getting closer. I saw it a fraction of a second before it hit my pool -- a chunk of meteor that had to be the size of a barrel, whirling end over end. The explosion of the meteor must have acted like a brake on its momentum, because if something that size had hit my backyard at the speed the meteor had been going, neither I nor any of my neighbors would have been around to tell the tale.

As it was, it hit the pool like a bus, and I was. .h.i.t by a tidal wave of suddenly hot pool water. Steam fumed from where it dropped, in the deep end. I regained enough of my senses to wonder how much the pool damage was going to cost me, and if meteor strikes were covered by my home insurance. I doubted they were. Several pool lights had been extinguished by the impact; I went back to the door and turned it off, so as not to have electrified water, and then turned on the main patio lights to get a closer look at the damage.

Miraculously, the pool seemed in good shape, if you didn't count the broken pool lights. The pool water was still bubbling where the meteor had gone in, but even so, I could see enough through the water to see that the concrete appeared to be uncracked. The meteor chunk had come in at just the right angle into the pool; the ma.s.s of the water, rather than the ma.s.s of the concrete, absorbed the impact. The water level of the pool was a good foot lower than it had been pre-impact, however.

If my neighbors heard anything, they gave no indication -- or the very least, I never heard them if they had. The walls around the backyard are twelve feet high; I had had them built around 1991, when my next door neighbor was a heavy metal drummer. I had gotten sick of listening to his parties and watching him and his women having cocaine-fueled orgies in the hot tub, and it was easier to build the wall than to get him to move. As it turns out, I needn't have bothered; about a week after the walls were up, his wife filed for divorce and he had to sell the house as part of the settlement. George Post lives there now. Plastic surgeon. Nice neighbor. Quiet.

After the water settled down for a few moments, I heard a small crack, and looked into the pool in time to see a thick liquid oozing out of the meteorite remains and floating to the top of the water. The stuff was mostly clear but oily-looking. s.p.a.ce phlegm. After a couple of minutes of acc.u.mulating, the phlegm did something surprising: it started moving toward the side of the pool. When it got to the edge, a tentacle shot out onto the patio concrete and the rest of the phlegm hauled up through it. When it was totally out, it launched up another tentacle that waved around for a second, then stopped and shot back down into the rest of the phlegm. It began to slide over towards me.

I can't even begin to tell you what was going through my mind at that moment, Tom. You know those dreams where something horrifying is coming at you, and you're running as fast as you can, but you're moving in slow motion? It was like that feeling: disa.s.sociated horror and utter immobility. My brain had stopped working. I couldn't move. I couldn't think. I'm pretty sure I stopped breathing. All I could do was watch this thing work around the patio to where I was standing. For the third and final time that night, I was utterly convinced I was going to die.

The thing stopped short two feet in front of me and collected itself into a compact Jell-O mold shape. A bowling ball-sized protuberance emerged from the top and launched itself up to eye level, supported by a stalk of goop. And then it talked.

"Carl? It's Gwedif. We talked on the phone. Ready to take a meeting?"

Tom, I did something I've never done before. I fainted straight away.

I was down for just a couple of seconds; I woke up to find Gwedif looming over me. I caught a whiff of him: he smelled like an old tennis shoe.

"I'm guessing that wasn't planned," he said.

I rolled away from him as quickly as I could and reached for the nearest dangerous object. My beer bottle had broken, so I grabbed it and held it in my hand, jagged end out.

"Eek," Gwedif said.

"Stay away," I said.

"Away put your weapon," he said. "I mean you no harm."

The line floated in my head for a second before I attached it with what it was from: it was a line of Yoda's in The Empire Strikes Back. It knocked me off kilter just enough that I relaxed just a little. I lowered the beer bottle.

"Thank you," Gwedif said. "Now, Carl, I'm going to move toward you, very slowly. Don't be frightened. All right?"

I nodded. Slowly as promised, Gwedif moved over to reaching distance.

"You okay so far?" Gwedif asked. I nodded again. "All right, then. Hold out your hand."

I did. Slowly, he pulled a tentacle out of his body and wrapped it around my hand. I was surprised not to find it slimy; in fact, it was firm and warm. My brain looked for a concept to related it with and come up with one -- those Stretch Johnson dolls. You know, the one where you pulled on the arms and they stretched out for a yard. It was something like that.

My hand wrapped in his tentacle, Gwedif did the unexpected. He shook it.

"Hi, Carl," he said. "Nice to meet you."

I looked at Gwedif, dumbfounded, for about 20 seconds. Then I started to laugh.

What can you say about the experience of meeting an entirely new, wholly alien, intelligent species of life? Well, of course, Tom, you know what it was like; you 've done it, too. But I think by now you may have noticed that I plowed you right through that first meeting with Joshua, and I did it for a reason. I wanted to give your conscious brain something relatively familiar to work on, while your subconscious was grinding its gears on the existence of an alien. I don't know if it was fair to do it that way; it might have been a sort of coitus interruptus for appreciating the wonder of the moment. What? Well, it's good to know it doesn't bother you, then.

Personally, it took me a good hour before I finally calmed my brain down enough that Gwedif and I could start having a real conversation. During the interim he answered my semi-coherent questions, allowed me to touch him, literally sticking my hands into him on one occasion, and otherwise talking me down back into a rational state of mind. I was like a kid with a new toy. You're looking at me like it's hard to believe, Tom. And it is, I suppose; you folks at work only see me in control, and that's also for a reason.

But there's no way that I could contain my enthusiasm and excitement! Only one person on the planet gets to be the first person these aliens would meet, and it was me. I didn't yet understand why, or for what purpose, but at that moment I didn't care. The answer to one of the biggest questions humanity had ever asked -- are we alone in the universe? -- was sitting, globular and stinky, in the living room of my house. It was....indescribable. A boon of monumental proportions. About half an hour in, as the implications sank in, I wept with joy.

We talked all through the night, of course; I too excited to sleep and Gwedif, apparently, doesn't need it. When 9 o'clock rolled around, I called Marcella and told her I was taking a sick day. Marcella was concerned; she wanted to send a specialist over. I told her not to worry, that I could take care of myself. Then I went to sleep, but woke up two hours later, too excited to stay in bed. I found Gwedif outside, by the pool.

"I'm just admiring my work," he said. "I don't know if you can appreciate it, but this" -- he produced a tentacle and motioned at the pool -- "took some doing. You try to shoot a pod into a swimming pool from 50,000 miles out. And not have it do major damage. And have it look like a natural meteor on the way down."

"It was a nice touch," I said.

"It was, wasn't it?" Gwedif agreed. "A pain in the a.s.s, you should pardon the expression, as I obviously don't have an a.s.s to have a pain in. But we have to do it that way if we want to land near a city. You can fool some of the Air Force all of the time, and all of the Air Force some of the time, but you can't fool all of the Air Force all of the time. Better this way than shot down by a Stealth fighter. Of course, there is the problem of getting back. That thing" -- he pointed to the detritus at the bottom of the pool -- "isn't moving anywhere it's not hauled."

"So how are you getting back?" I asked.

"Well, we've scheduled a rendezvous near Baker for later tonight. There's nothing out there in the desert, so we don't have to worry about rubberneckers. Even so, we'll probably light up the radar something fierce. It's going to have to be quick in, quick out. I was hoping I could get you to drop me off."

"Of course" I said.

"And also that you'd come with me," Gwedif said.

"What?"

"Come on, Carl," Gwedif said. "You can't possibly think I came this far just for a quick h.e.l.lo. We have serious stuff to talk about, and it will go much, much faster if you come to the s.h.i.+p."

Even though I had known Gwedif for a very short time, I could tell that he was holding back on something. He wanted to have me come to the s.h.i.+p, all right, but I had a feeling it was for more than just a chat. I had the immediate brain flash to the alien abduction cliché, strapped down to the table while a blob of Jell-O readied the rectal probe. But that wouldn't have made any sense. You don't act all friendly with someone just to get them for lab experiments. They would have just grabbed me.

And anyway, I wanted to go. Are you kidding? Who wouldn't?

That morning, I phoned for a taxi and went to a used car lot in Burbank to get a cheap, non-descript car. I paid $2,000 and got a twenty year-old Datsun pickup. I then went to a pick-a-part place and pulled the license plates off of a wreck. Finally, I pried the Vehicle Identification Number off the dashboard. I didn't know if Gwedif was right about the radar being lit up when they came to pick us up, but I didn't want my own car there if anyone came to investigate.

At about eight o' clock we set off down the 10, towards the 15, out to Baker in the middle of nowhere. Gwedif spread himself out under the bottom of the truck seat and popped a tendril over the back to see and talk. The truck wasn't worth nearly what I had paid for it; it almost died twice on the way out, and once I did an emergency stop into a gas station to add water to the radiator.

About five miles to Baker, Gwedif had me exit the 15 and take a frontage road for a few miles until we came to an unmarked road heading south. We drove along that for another four or five miles, until literally the only lights I could see were my headlights and the lights of the stars above me.

"All right," Gwedif said, finally. "This is the place."

I stopped the pickup and looked around.

"I don't see anything," I said.

"They're on their way," Gwedif said. "Give them another three seconds."

The ground shook. Thirty yards to the left of us, a black, featureless cube 20 feet to a side had dropped unceremoniously from the sky. The ground cracked where it landed.

"Hmmm...a little early," Gwedif said.

I peered over to the cube, which, disregarding the fact it had just fallen from the heavens, was severely lacking in grandeur. "Doesn't look like much," I said.

"Of course it doesn't," Gwedif said, transferring from behind the seat. "We'll save all the pretty lights for when we want to have our formal introduction. For now, we just want to get up and out without attracting attention. Ready?"

I started to open the door.

"Where are you going?" Gwedif asked.

"I thought we were leaving," I said.

"We are," Gwedif said. "Drive into it. We can't very likely leave this car in the middle of nowhere. Someone might find it. That's why I had them send an economy-sized box."

"I wish I'd known," I said. "I would have brought the Mercedes."

"I wish you had," Gwedif said. "Air conditioning is a good thing."

I turned the wheel and drove gingerly towards the black cube. When the b.u.mper nudged against the cube's surface, I lightly tapped on the gas pedal. There was a slight resistance, and then almost a tearing as the cube's surface enveloped the pickup.

Then we were inside the cube. The inside was dimly it, from luminescence coming off the walls. The s.p.a.ce was utterly nondescript, the only architectural feature being a platform ten feet up that I couldn't see onto, since we were underneath it.

"When do we leave?" I asked.

Gwedif stretched out a tendril to touch the nearest wall. "We already have," he said.

"Really?" I said. "I wish this thing had windows. I'd like to see where we're going."

"Okay," Gwedif said. The cube disappeared. I screamed. The cube reappeared, transparent but visibly tinted.

"Sorry," Gwedif said. "Shouldn't have made it completely clear. Didn't mean to freak you out."

I gathered my wits, rolled down the window, and stared down at the planet, which was tinted purple by the shaded cube.

"How far up are we?" I asked.

"About 500 miles," Gwedif said. "We have to go slow for the first few miles, but once we're up about 10 miles, n.o.body's looking anymore and we can really pick up speed."

"Can I leave the truck? I mean, will the floor support me?"

"Sure," Gwedif said. "It's supporting the truck, after all."

I opened the door and very carefully placed a foot on the cube floor and added weight to it. It felt slightly spongy, like a wrestling mat or a taut trampoline, but it indeed held my weight. I stepped fully outside, leaving the truck door open, and walked away from the pickup. I looked up, and I was able to see through the platform; on the other side of it were two other blobs, also with tendrils extending into the walls -- the pilot and co-pilot, I a.s.sumed.

After a few minutes of walking around, I had Gwedif make the cube totally transparent. For the briefest of seconds, I felt a surge of panic again, but it was immediately replaced by the most astounding sense of exhilaration -- a G.o.d's eye view of the planet, unenc.u.mbered by s.p.a.cesuit or visor. I asked Gwedif if there was artificial gravity in the cube and he said that there was; I asked him if we could cut it off so I could float, but he demurred. He said he'd prefer not to have the pickup floating around aimlessly. They did decrease the gravity to match the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p that we were going to; suddenly I was 40 pounds lighter. After a few more minutes I asked them to retint the cube -- my forebrain had accepted I was safe, but the reptile regions were having trouble with it.

The flight was a little under a half-hour long; we slowed appreciably as we approached the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p although I of course didn't feel the deceleration. But I saw it -- one moment I was staring at the blackness of s.p.a.ce, and the next a huge rock came hurtling at me, not unlike the meteor had the night before. I cringed involuntarily, but suddenly it appeared to stop, hovering what seemed a few miles away.

"There it is," Gwedif said. "Home sweet home."

It was impossible for me to judge how big this asteroid-turned-s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p was. As we got closer, I guessed that it must be close to a mile in diameter, a guess that was confirmed by Gwedif to be in the right ballpark. The asteroid appeared to have no non-natural features, but as we approached, I saw featureless black streaks dotting the surface. We were heading towards one.

"Does the s.h.i.+p have a name?" I asked.

"Yes," Gwedif said. "Give me a second to translate it." He was quiet for a moment, then, "It's called the Ionar. It's the name of our first sentient ancestor, like an Adam or Eve for you. It also means 'explorer' or 'teacher' in a loose sense of those words, in that Ionar, realizing he was the first of his kind, learned as much as he could about the world so that his" -- another pause here -- "children could know as much as possible. His exploration is our culture's first and greatest memory epic. We thought that his name would be a good one for this s.h.i.+p. Provident. That reminds me, we should plug your nose before we go out into the s.h.i.+p."