Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (20 page)

She smoked cigarette after cigarette, rocking and staring at me, rocking and staring, from time to time spitting bits of tobacco onto the floor. She peered at me as if I were an interesting specimen that she was about to vivisect—as soon as she has finished her cigarette. I could tell that she would enjoy my screams. She would write an interesting paper on the way I died in agony.

But to my vast relief, she gave me a crooked smile and rasped in a deep Eastern-European voice that she believed me. She declared that she could tell when people were repressing, projecting, and transferring, and she was sure that I was not repressing, projecting, or transferring, she said, because we really were being persecuted. Even psychiatrists get persecuted sometimes, she added with a defensive tone. Then followed a long, long lecture, full of crazy things such as her desire to be a circus performer, the lady who stands on the back of a galloping pony, balancing on one foot.

“Oh, yes”, I agreed, nodding emphatically. “You’d be very good at it.”

She dropped from her chair, and now only the top of her head was visible above the desk. She rounded the corner, and I saw that she was less than four feet tall.

“You patronize me!” she screamed into my face. “You look down on people of my stature! Admit it, admit it!”

“No, no, please believe me, I don’t look down on you, except physically.”

“Vat do you mean by dat?” she snarled dangerously.

“I mean I didn’t choose to be tall,” I whined, “and you didn’t choose to be short.”

She began screaming at me again, spittle and tobacco flying in every direction.

At that point, DSI guards burst into the room. They had been listening through surveillance.

“Are you brainwashing this man properly?” they shouted.

Without answering the question, she glared at them and whipped off her sunglasses in order to stare them down. Their fear of her was too great, and they backed out of the room.

In a rage, she untied me, and stated that we would now go to inform the whole ship that DSI is the secret police. We ran out into the hallways and tried to engage passersby, but everyone shook us off. Suddenly, out of nowhere Elif Larson appeared with dozens of henchmen. They tied up the psychiatrist and did the same to me. We were hauled off to a torture chamber deep in the bowels of the ship, and there we were strapped to seats facing an enormous vidscreen. Madness ensued—madness, madness, madness! The worst tortures were the programs we were forced to watch. If we closed our eyes, buckets of cold water were thrown in our faces. We were forced to see everything—everything! Daylong interviews with television stars, Disney musicals, Hollywood love-stories.

“You cannot do dis to me!” screamed the little lady. “I am psychiatrist! I am
psychiatrist
, I tell you! I know vat you are doing to my mind!”

We were taken deeper into a special section of the ship, into a large white room without windows. From behind a curtain came the sound of whirring machinery, clanking metal, thuds, beeping, and other cyber noises: A screen lowered from the ceiling, and more programming was shown to us. We were forced to watch hours upon hours of mind-numbing golf games from the twentieth through the twenty-first centuries. The psychiatrist lost consciousness. I screamed; the psychological pain was so great. I begged them to kill me. But they would not let me die. I struggled and yelled until, without warning, the curtain was drawn aside, and I saw inside, controlling everything on the ship, the Wizard of Oz.

My beloved little Scottie dog was dragged in by his collar. He had been captured in the arboretum. Elf took out a pistol and shot him in front of my eyes.

“Noooooo!” I wailed.

“You’re not in New Mexico any more, Hoyos”, he cackled.

Suddenly, there was a tremendous roar and bang. The
Kosmos
lurched, and we all toppled to the floor, torturers, guards, the wizard, the psychiatrist, and myself. The ship had been rammed by an alien space vehicle. A crowd of little green men, shorter than the psychiatrist, stormed into the room. The aliens’ eyes were huge, black, and saurian, their bodies like spider monkeys.

“You must call us your Little Friends”, declared their leader. “We come in peace.”

At this, all the aliens burst into hysterical laughter. Then they pointed their rayguns at us and started firing. I crawled out of the room, and stumbled to my feet, trying to run away, trying to warn the others onboard, but then I saw that the bodies of my shipmates littered the floor everywhere. I dragged my bleeding body along the concourse, crying out, “The horror! The horror!” I woke up.

(
Ay, caramba!
)

Day 2252
:

On the first Monday of the following month, the condemned man enjoyed a last meal in the Indian restaurant (whew, hot, hot, hot curry!) and a modest glass of dry Madeira wine. Afterward, I went down to Stron’s room and knocked, since we had agreed to walk together to the auditorium on deck A.

“Aaargh, where’s my dirk when I need it?” he grumbled as he knotted his bright red tartan necktie in preparation for departure.

“What’s a dirk?” I asked.

“A clever weapon we Scots devised for inflicting pain on invaders.”

“Don’t tell me you forgot to smuggle one on board?”

“Tried to, but they spotted it at security in Africa. Confiscated it. Didn’t want me hijacking the ship.”

“They took your ammunition too, I presume.”

“A dirk is a knife, laddie, more precisely a dagger.”

“Oh.”

I flipped open my blazer and exposed the kit strapped to my belt. I unbuttoned it and showed him my old fold-knife. He grinned. “Boys’ own adventures, eh?”

“Yup.”

“How’d you smuggle that little item onboard?”

“Being a cripple has its advantages.”

He laughed. “I sure wish I was deformed.”

I closed it up again and buttoned the kit. Back to nice, harmless astrophysicist.

As we climbed the staircase from B to A, he said, “Now here’s a thought for you: Let’s suppose there’s intelligent life on AC-A-7. Objectively speaking, wouldn’t that make
us
the invaders?”

“You have a point. The AC-A-7-lings’ view of the matter would be different than ours.”

“Precisely. Fortunately, that’s probably not going to be a problem. There hasn’t been a sheep-bleat from the planet, ever. None that’s detectable by any instrument mankind has invented. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean they aren’t communicating, if they’re there. They could be using waves we can’t measure.”

“Stron, if there is someone waiting for us on AC-A-7, and you think we’re the invaders, why did you agree to be part of this expedition?”

“Ach, I wanted to make sure the aliens have some idea of their options, reassure them we’re not
all
arrogant exploiters. I come as a
person
, not as an ambassador of the human race.”

“ ‘Greetings, fellow sapient beings, I come in peace!’ That approach?”

“Right, that approach.”

“Very nice, but can you really side-step your species of origin?”

“Yes, I damn well can. I’m no puppet of official policy. If we meet any little green fellows, I’ll introduce them to Stron McKie, not to my species.”

“Hopefully they’ll get the distinction.”

“Why wouldn’t they? I can be a charmer, you know.”

“Er . . . yes.”

As we shuffled and bumped our way along Concourse A in the direction of the auditorium, which was in the forward part of the ship, Stron nattered a steady stream of quips. But I could tell he was nervous by the way he kept yanking tufts of white hair out of his ears.

Approaching the wide entrance doors, we realized there would be a good crowd in attendance since a fair volume of conversational buzz came from within, and more people were converging from both directions of the main concourse, as well as its cross-avenues.

“Well, Neil, here we are. Get ready for battle.”

“I wish we’d painted ourselves lurid colors, Stron, and brought our claymores.”

He grimaced and pulled out a few last strands of hair. “Nay, nay, the wrong approach entirely. Tonight we are going to be dignity incarnate.”

He slipped past me and entered the auditorium alone, lest we be identified with each other and a conspiracy suspected too early in the game. I stood outside for a few minutes, shaking hands with people, making chat and observing Stron from the corner of my eye as he took his seat in the front row, beside three of the five Nobel men. Pagnol and Teal were also in the row, along with a few other scientific luminaries.

The auditorium seats six hundred. Large as it is, it’s a room without echoes, due to the acoustic-friendly walls and carpet. The rows slope gently down to an orchestra pit (empty now, though it is sometimes used by musicians for pick-up concerts). The seats are maroon fabric over soft padding, as comfortable as an armchair. And tonight, it looked like a majority of them were filled. I estimated that two-thirds of the passengers and crew were present. This surprised me greatly, since my talk as advertised would be on the topic of “Psychological Physics”.

During the planning stage, I had taken the precaution of throwing a handful of stardust into the eyes of dear Dr. Larson, explaining to him that I would begin the talk with the astrophysics of our journey, then tie it into my own early work that had made the ship possible, and then bring the presentation to a climax by using a simile—the comparison of the mutual gravitational pull of bodies in a solar system to the mutual influence that members of a community have on each other. The celestial titans, I would assert, maintain each other in a delicate equilibrium, much as we sustain each other onboard the
Kosmos
. The talk would end with a ringing call to a renewed sense of responsibility for each other’s well-being. In a word,
Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft
kinesiology.

He loved it. He ate it up. He unleashed all his powers of promotion and advertisement. And now the splendid night had arrived.

One of the event’s organizers, Dr. Skinner, the director of DSI, walked me down the center aisle toward the elevated stage. In passing, I noticed Dwayne in the back row, hunched over a book. Pia waved shyly from mid-audience; Maria smiled maternally at me; a few isolated individuals began to clap. A smattering of applause accompanied me up the three short steps to the stage. My heart pounded.

The podium was a nostalgia item, a historic work of art, a platinum and polyplast sculpture representing a soaring rocket ship penetrating outer space. The rocket’s exhaust trail formed the podium’s trunk, the rocket itself was the support of the reading platform, which was a tilted transparent disk, representing our home solar system, with an illuminated sun the size of a grapefruit designed to throw light on a speaker’s papers. The planets orbited it in slow motion as smaller, colored spheres.

Skinner took the podium and began his introduction. Blah-blah-blah—my awards, prizes, honors, achievements, books—blah-blah-blah. Why does that sort of thing make my flesh crawl? Maybe because it’s too much like the hawker’s prattle of an auctioneer? Does it threaten my humble persona? Or does it unmask my secret pride? Anyway, throughout the preamble, I stood to the side, smiling inanely like an old crackpot, with my fingers fidgeting nervously behind my back. Thunderous applause followed. I shook hands with Skinner and stepped forward to the podium.

For a few seconds, I paused, and in my mind’s eye, I saw a boy dancing in a desert, singing and shaking his bells. I pushed away the thought and began.

Let me say in summation, and with only a modicum of pride, that I shone. I was articulate in a way that flowed naturally, balancing scholar and showman so subtly that none in the audience (save for my co-conspirators) suspected a vaudeville act. I was witty. I was Nobelish. I was twangless. I gripped them and moved them. Step by step, I led the audience through the outline I had given to Elf.

When I had reached the point in the talk where I was to compare solar systemic equilibrium to the equilibrium desirable in human communities, I paused for dramatic effect. During this brief hiatus, I looked around the hall significantly. You could have heard a gyroscope topple over. There in front of me sat a scattering of peers, gazing up with fond interest. There in the back row sat Dwayne, who (to my irritation) was still hunched over, reading a book. There in the middle sat Pia, beside a flight officer whom I took to be her “special friend”. The breast logo on his uniform sparkled with its three little stars. Beside him were two other sparkling officers, and there were more like them throughout the audience. To my extreme left, in the front row, sat Elf and the director of DSI, side by side, leaning forward slightly, smiling their encouragement at me because they knew that the big juicy plum of the evening would now be presented. The famous scientist would deliver their agenda in an irresistible package.

“As we have seen,” I began, “the mutual gravitational pull of bodies in a solar system is a magnificently balanced symphony of physical forces. Our home system is most impressive to us in this regard, because we know it best; it is ours. The Alpha Centauri system presents an even greater complexity. These two systems are involved in a choreography of celestial titans, with their planets revolving on their own axes even as they circle their respective stars, which are in kinetic balance within the larger body of our local star cluster, within the massive spiraling of our galaxy, which is locked in the mutual gravitational pull of members of our own local galaxy cluster, which in turn dances with super-clusters, onward and outward with the expanding universe, and all of it splendid and beautiful. All of it is the courtship and marriage of unimaginable forces maintaining each other in a delicate equilibrium.”

I paused and caught my breath.

“It has sometimes been said that these colossal forces are similar to the mutual influence that members of a human community have on each other. Insofar as we do affect each other, this is true. Yet the simile is weak, and threatens to become superficial, for not a single human being onboard the
Kosmos
can be reduced to an unthinking force. We can harness the atom, but we cannot attempt to absolutely control men’s wills, nor their capacity for rational thought, nor their hunger for freedom, without grave risk to man himself. To condition him, to determine him according to arbitrary theories of his nature—his perpetually elusive and mysterious nature—is to deform him.”