Untitled (36 page)

  One amber light blinked and double-blinked in the box. Tenminute test. The coast was clear and the kid hadn't yet gone to sleep at his post up the dark lane, at the junction. We were as ready as we would ever be.

  The kid's role was relatively minor, but I still worried about him getting it right. You never know what to make of these teenage agglomerations of hair, leather, and studs. But he'd asked sensible questions about the reports of Visitors in this and that country: sometimes putty-faced midgets with enormous eyes, sometimes six or seven feet tall. I dare say they can take what form they like, I'd told him, and he seemed satisfied. Now Mackay was deeply indifferent to that kind of speculation, and Glass would naturally have made it a basis for mockery.

  Yes. Peter Glass was a man long overdue for the attention of the skies. Whenever some hint of the mysterious and wonderful came creeping shyly into the world, it was always he who'd rush to be interviewed and turn everything to mud with his touch. It was the planet Venus, it was a low-flying plane, the witnesses imagined it all, he was just lying, she is mentally disturbed, who can believe in little green men anyway?

  (A cheap newspaper phrase, that last. In the classic accounts They are never green.)

  It is particularly maddening when an encounter we
know
to have been physically real is explained away as hallucination. People who ought to be fighting at our side are seduced by talk of visitations and abductions being all a matter of strange psychological states blah blah blah which if properly studied might give new insight into the mind and blah blah blah. What is this stuff but a fancy version of "he's barmy and she made it all up"? Of course it must be said that some people do make it up. I loathe a hoaxer.

  The large oblong indicator at dead center of Mackay's panel went red and a low buzz sounded. I keep my distance from electronics hobbyism, but that one was obvious enough. The kid had clocked what was presumably the right car going by. Now he should be hauling out that big DIVERSION sign from the sodden undergrowth. A quiet country lane was about to become quieter.

  I always kept the pallid mask off until the last minute: it's hot and uncomfortable. Lights were flickering in the distance, approaching. Glass himself would be seeing those eerie reflections rise up the wet trees. Perhaps they would take on a new significance for him, now or in retrospect, because Mackay had flicked the first of his switches. Could the tiny hiss even be heard over the engine noise? A receptive frame of mind was needed.

  In the classic UFO encounter by road and by night, an unidentifiable light is seen above and the car ignition mysteriously fails. This will often be the preliminary to a "missing time" or even an "alien abduction" experience. We were certainly going to see to that. At the second click from Mackay's board the quartz-halogen cluster blazed intolerably from the sky (in fact from a cable slung precariously between tall trees on either side of the lane), and at the third Glass's ignition mysteriously failed.

  The sky-gods command powers beyond our scope, of course, and their servants down here must resort to earthly expedients. I think a priest might feel the same when he doles out the bread and wine and is sure it represents a truth, while doubting that the miracle of blood ever really comes to pass as it had in scriptural days. Mackay's opposite number in London had done his part well enough: the relay in the HT circuit and the tiny cylinder with its servo-operated valve just under the driver's seat. Of course it is the signal from the first switch that releases the gas.

  Longstead 42 is a transparent and almost odorless psychotropic agent, used to ensure the properly receptive frame of mind. Its effects do not last long, but Glass was still trembling and almost helpless in his stalled Volvo when we adjusted our bulging masks and came to him. The sequence of events, colored and exaggerated by the mild hallucinogen, must already have been etching itself deep into his memory . . . all the more so for its theoretical familiarity. His own scoffing researches would reinforce the impact of what happened now. I tried to be gentle with the hypodermic, but there was no need to conceal this injection. Unexplained scars and puncture marks are all part of the classic abduction experience.

  The kid's lightless motorbike was coughing at the gate as we helped Glass towards our mother ship. Mackay fingered his pocket controller, and the great inflated igloo pulsed in a riot of colored lights. A bubble marquee is perfect for this work despite the faint roar of the compressor: it even has an airlock. I myself found it a deeply moving sight. If only . . .

  He did not resist as we stripped him and settled him on an examination table of a design as unearthly as our resources could arrange. For him this would be a place of stabbing supernatural light, thanks to a few drops of atropine that dilated each eye to the full; and strange small Beings would hover around. The kid, who had changed into his own mask and white leotards before joining us now, was already short enough: but the deceptively high table made midgets of us all, while dry-ice fog confused the issue of how far down our legs might actually go. Truth is all a matter of presentation. Our putty-complexioned masks swelled at the top into mighty domes of intellect, and we peered through huge eyes of empty black glass.

  So we set to work, following the guidelines laid down by a myriad published cases. This is a hugely documented phenomenon. Mackay and I had had plenty of practice with communicants of both sexes, and we worked well together. Biopsies, minute incisions. Needles in Glass's navel, liquid drooling into his ear, surreal alien mechanisms blinking as they diagnosed and recorded nothing at all. Intermittent chemical blackouts helped break up the stream of his memory (partial amnesia is highly characteristic). There was a star map ready to show him, a patternless scattergram on which he could later impose any meaning he cared.

  He gaped. I knew we had him. Why should he be so loud in his filthy skepticism if he were not already close to belief, just waiting for the sign? Recorded messages of peace and millennial warning washed over him, the voices digitally processed into eerie tones appropriate to the farther stars. Never again would he be able to say with sincerity that it was all ridiculous, that in all probability the quote UFO abductees unquote are merely drawing attention to themselves with lurid fantasies.

  The culmination is the terrible Probe, the thing that bulks large in the encounter/abduction story which I believe has sold more copies than any other. It is a huge ugly object, like a phallus designed by H. R. Giger in a bilious mood: thirteen inches long, vaguely triangular in cross-section, gray and scaly, tipped with a jagged cage of wires. (The shaft is actually painted fiberglass.)

  It is a necessary part of the experience that the victim should feel himself anally penetrated by this probe. Of course we relied on suggestion: after showing him the thing, and turning him over to obstruct his vision, I would actually insert a finger. The greased rubber glove was already on my hand.

  But there was a hitch before the Probe came into play. The head-masks do not make it all that easy to see to the left or right. We had blacked Glass out again to allow a quick breather and a cup of tea from the thermos . . . and there was a confused sound. I fumbled impatiently with the mask and at the same time felt a small sharp pain in my thigh, some stinging insect, perhaps.

  When I'd finally pulled the stifling thing off my head I saw that Mackay had fallen over. The fog lapped around him. I thought at first he must have had an accidental whiff of the blackout agent. Everything was blurring and the tent walls shimmered. The kid smiled at me. It is not possible that the mask could smile.

  I told him to take that stupid thing off. I do not know whether I meant the mask or the smile. He invited me to remove it for him, and though I first reached out in blind anger at his playing around, I was suddenly afraid that if I touched it the great head would be built of living flesh. No. I said something loud, perhaps not an actual word. Was Glass's body melting and oozing off the table? No.

  There is a gap here. Partial amnesia is highly characteristic. Things tilted heavily in and out of focus. I remember the feel of another insect and knew this time it was a needle. By then I was pressed into the cold soggy fabric of the tent floor, choking in our artificial fog. Insistent fingers tugged at my tight white alien costume.

  Everything inside my skull was whirling in tight, chaotic patterns, led by a silly persistent worry about whether the syringe had been properly sterilized (I was always very conscientious about this). What did I know about the kid? It was his first outing. I had barely seen him before. They can take what form they like.

  Those eyes.

  He said . . .

  I do not recall all the words. That scopolamine cocktail is meant to be disorienting. The thin voice conveyed that we were playing a dangerous game. More than once he said: "My sister." I thought of sister worlds, sister craft gleaming silver as they made their inertialess turns and danced mockingly off the radar screens. He said: "In an institution." Would that have been the Institute of UFO Studies? At another point he said: "You bastards" and "did all this to her" and "waiting a long time for this . . ." The words of the sky-gods are always enigmatic, and perhaps we are only their bastard offspring.

  It was so hard to think. All this is confused in a red blur of pain, because to impress his seriousness upon me he then made scientific use of the Probe. Nor was there any reliance on suggestion or on a greased and rubber-sheathed finger. "This is for her. You hear me? This is for her." Did I hear that? At the time I could not begin to appreciate it as an exalting, a transcendent experience. I am sure that no chemical agents assisted the loss of consciousness which duly followed, although not soon enough.

  Waking up on chill plastic stretched over mud, racked with cramps and another, deeper ache . . . is not an experience to be recommended. The "kid" was long gone. I never knew his name, if on Earth he ever went under a name. I tried not to be consoled by the discovery that Mackay too had been warned, every bit as emphatically as myself.

  Under a dismal gray moon we limped somehow through the clear-up procedure and left Glass to sleep it off in his wretched Volvo, itself now stripped of our London man's gadgetry. When he uncoiled himself in the small hours, he would be awakening to his new membership in the ranks of abductees, the sufferers from "missing time." Would he proclaim it or would he lie by silence? Who cared? Glass was no longer important.

  The truth is what's important. After a longish period of convalescence and keeping a low profile (even my once-friendly family doctor was terrifyingly unsympathetic about the injury), I now see myself in the position of a worldly priest who has at last received his own sign. But it's a sign like the miraculous appearance of the face of the Virgin Mary in one's toilet bowl. The kind of thing that will do to win peasants: meaning so much to the recipient, but just another tawdry, commonplace sensation to the world at large. For this muddying of the waters I blame the people who have made up garish UFO encounter tales without ever having a genuine experience like the one we gave to Glass. Oh, I do loathe and despise these hoaxers, almost as much as the narrow-minded skeptics themselves.

  Meanwhile, how can I hope to publish
this
truth and have its very special status believed? How can it help me to my rightful position among the elect when They finally beam down in glory from the stars, with all their wonderful cargo? How?

The questions that were never asked may be the most important. You don't think of this. You never do. When you were little, your mother used to tell you that asking too many questions could get you into trouble. You realize now that not asking enough has landed you in the same boat, in the same river of shit without the same paddle. You phone your mother long distance to tell her this, and she says, "Well, two wrongs don't make a right, dear," and gives you a dessert recipe that is quoted as being Prince Charles's favorite in the September issue of
Royalty
magazine.