Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (26 page)

"That's what he said? Two centuries?"

"Sure, but I seriously doubt anyone believes that, including the professor himself. It's infinitely more likely that someone simply buried the thing, although I can't imagine how." I chuckled. "If it had really been there that long, I guess it
could
be a crashed flying saucer."

"And you think the scientists looked nervous?"

"One engineer kept looking over his shoulder during his interview as if he were expecting feds to be sneaking up from behind."

Joe muttered something under his breath and I got such a strong feeling he needed to be alone, my refurbished legs carried me off almost before I could say goodbye.

The Cloudman's reaction was so out of character, it threw me for a loop. I went home, flipped on the TV and was just in time to catch a new report on the "Champlain Flying Saucer."

The mini-subs had already cleared a few square feet of the machine's surface and there was a live, underwater picture of what that surface looked like. The metal had a slightly rippled pattern, like the friction-reducing texture on the skin of a submarine. But on the very fringe of the cleared area, there were a series of faint impressions that suggested letters or numbers of some sort.

Maybe I was seeing things, but one of those shapes sure looked like a "V" with a cloverleaf blob in the middle.

The live report went on and on, but the reporters had run out of news and were just repeating themselves and interviewing each other. The scientists refused to make further comments. They still looked nervous, but the nervousness somehow had a whole different flavor.

That did it. I turned off the TV and stared at the blank screen.

For God's sake, Greg, I told myself. What are you so damn afraid of? Joe has done nothing but good things for you. So stop thinking and get off your ass and
do
something.

Every once in awhile I actually listen to my own advice. So I decided to take on a major housecleaning project just to get my mind off all the things I didn't understand.

Besides, with functional legs, there was one mystery I
could
solve: I could finally find out what the hell was stored in the attic. My excuse for going up there would be to stow away some odds and ends (like my crutches).

It might seem odd, but I'd never in my whole life been up there. The attic had been strictly off-limits when I was a kid—too dangerous, my parents had claimed—and my dad had even kept the pull-down staircase padlocked to keep my hyper-curious brother out. The door was still padlocked, but now I had the key.

For me, this was something of a rite of passage. I stood on a kitchen chair, unlocked the overhead panel, and tugged on the cord until the old hickory stairs reached the hallway floor. Mustiness wafted down from above. With a silly sense of achievement, I climbed.

They say a great deal of house-dust is shed human skin. If so, some giant must've been homesteading my attic for centuries.

My flashlight spotted the chain for a dangling light-fixture and when I pulled, I was surprised that the bulb worked. I took one look around, shook my head in dismay, and started organizing the place. The ocean of time had left vast deposits up here and had apparently left them at random. Fifteen minutes into the chore, I moved an enormous birdcage aside. Who, among my relatives, had ever owned a peacock or possibly a falcon? Beneath the cage was a gray, nearly flat cardboard box.

Inside the box were old photos of the earliest settlers in this neighborhood which included my grandparents (on my Dad's side). I suppose "old" is redundant; there will never be any
new
photos of these people. The pictures had browned with age but they were still clear enough, and the bare bulb overhead was bright enough, to show details. It was those details that had me sitting down on the rough wooden slats of the attic floor, my mouth hanging open.

The photo at the top of the pile, a nice example, showed my grandfather, Arthur Burns, standing next to the Cloudman. The pair had their arms around each other's shoulders and the Cloudman looked every bit as old and odd as he'd looked two hours ago!

I'd been working so hard to think about anything else and here it was again, staring me in the face. Just how
old
was Uncle Joe? And exactly how odd?

My father wasn't evasive on the phone when I called him up, but he sure as hell wasn't forthcoming.

"I'm sorry, Greg," he finally declared. "I see what you're getting at, of course, but any . . . secrets up at the Cape aren't
my
secrets, if you get my drift."

"Damn it, Dad, at least me tell one thing. Did Grampa Arthur ever tell you why he had such a close relationship with Uncle Joe?"

"What . . . whatever makes you think he did?"

"I found some old pictures in the house. Every time Grampa and the Cloudman are together, they've got their arms around each other like long-lost brothers."

My father broke a short but awkward silence with a growl of irritation.

"Damn it! I thought we'd taken all the . . . mementos
with
us."

"Mementos of what, Dad?"

"Talk to Joe first, son, then call me back and—oh hell! Just tell me what he
said
. We'll take it from there."

I didn't want to confront Joe. I may not be as brainy as my brother Tim, but I'm not completely stupid. All the signs were pointing to utter strangeness and I wasn't ready to go there yet. So I drove to the supermarket (thanks to my therapists and their horrible exercises, I'd been able to drive my own car for some time). I made every effort to shop like a person who wasn't suddenly living in the damn Twilight Zone. But by the time I returned home, I understood the basis for the phrase "scared stiff." Fear was making its own kind of skeleton inside my body.

And there was a man waiting for me, sitting on my front stoop. When I saw who it was, I pulled into the driveway in a kind of numb, frigid shock.

"Joe. What are you
doing
here?"

The Cloudman's folded easel was resting against the front wall of my house along with a huge bundle wrapped in Joe's plastic tarp. I stared at the easel and decided that I'd never seen anything look so out of place. Then I looked again at my visitor and realized how very wrong I was.

Joe just regarded me for a minute before he responded. "Beautiful afternoon to you, young Gregory. May I come in? I've a vast favor to ask."

"Of course, of course. Let me, uh, just grab my groceries from the car . . ."

"I would be honored to assist. Your legs are holding up, no?"

"Yeah. They're still holding me up all right."

I walked into the kitchen, Joe right behind me, and the back of my neck felt cold as an ice-cube. I wouldn't have placed my bag on the counter more gently if it had been full of loose eggs.

"Can I . . . fix you something to drink, Uncle? I don't have any of that Juicy Juice you used to like, but there's some cherry cider?"

"That sounds delicious," he said. "But too much sugar makes me giddy. Would you mind terribly thinning it down with plain water?"

"Not at all." I remembered exactly how Ma used to ruin his juice.

My hands shaking, I poured my guest his weak drink, little more than colored water really, and put away the perishables.

"Let's—" my voice had come out squeaky so I tried again. "Why don't we, uh, sit down in the living room and talk."

The sight of Joe perched on the couch opposite my leather chair gave me what my brother likes to call "cognitive dissonance" but I think "the willies" comes closer. The yeasty scent was stronger indoors and not quite as pleasant . . .

My guest and I studied each other for at least a minute and I tried to remember that I'd known the Cloudman my whole life. Then he noticed the photos I'd left scattered on the coffee table between us. He made a "may I?" gesture with his bushy eyebrows and when I nodded, he picked up the stack and went through them slowly, one at a time. His wrinkled cheeks widened in what, for him, was a broad smile.

"Those were grand years, Gregory, if lonely at times. Art was my friend and mentor. He set me up here. Did you know that?"

"Joe—honestly, I don't know anything about anything and that apparently includes Grampa."

"Art was a good man with a surprisingly . . . flexible mind. I was lucky that he was the one who found me."

"Found you?"

"Ah, Gregory! You have become afraid of me. The truth is not so dreadful and I intend to explain. I believe you have inherited many of Art's finer qualities and I urgently need an ally."

"For what?"

"You must understand that we came here initially, my . . . ah, what would be the word? Wife? Husband? Fellow city-state? Let's say my ‘mate.' Drawn by your radio signals, we came to study the intelligent inhabitants of this world and—"

"This world?" I don't know why I said that, I already knew that Joe hadn't been born on Cape Cod. But what had to be the truth simply wasn't possible, not in real life. Not in
my
life.

"Think of us as . . . in this one case, I think the term "anthropologists" would be apt. My mate remained in the Craft Major and I took the Craft Minor down to the surface, to explore."

I was starting to feel very detached and light-headed. I wondered, almost idly, if I was about to pass out.

"OK, Joe, I can guess what you're going to say next. It wasn't hard to put together. You're such a . . . an unusual person to begin with. Then I tell you about a strange discovery of something that looks like a damn spaceship and you start acting weird and suddenly leave the beach for the first time ever and show up at my house. That thing up at Lake Champlain—it
is
a spaceship and it's
yours
? Right?"

"From your description, I'm certain it's our Craft Major."

This confirmation, totally expected though it was, turned my arms into an instant forest of goose bumps. And I still couldn't accept it. If there were any such thing as a visitor from another planet, surely they wouldn't look so human? I mean Joe looked odd, but not odd enough. And surely they wouldn't have human senses or know English and eat bananas or turn out to be painters and baby-sitters?

And what a bizarre, unbelievable twist on the idea of First Contact! What happened? Did the Cloudman mosey down the ramp of his starship, walk up to the first human he saw and say, "Take me to your beaches."

But if he
were
an extraterrestrial . . .

"You say you came here to study us, Uncle Joe? Must be a long study."

"Far longer than we'd planned, my dear Gregory. When I took the Craft Minor too close to one of your cities, it was terrible! I was unprepared for the
cacophony!
"

"What do—"

"My people are sensitive to . . . certain electromagnetic patterns. Your cities are awash in such fields, building and collapsing endlessly. Beings on my world communicate with similar, but more organized patterns. It was like listening to a million insane voices at once. I became disoriented and couldn't adjust in time."

"So we're noisy neighbors?" I realized that I was, all at once, handling this much better. Or maybe I'd gone into a new level of shock. At least I was no longer freaking out. And I was actually getting involved in what Joe was trying to tell me rather than, say, running around in circles and screaming.

"Ah, Gregory, that was a dark time! When I got close to Boston I lost control of my vessel and—well. My people are very, very durable, we can survive more acceleration than you could imagine, but we are not utterly proof to sudden impacts. I was injured in the collision and had to make considerable . . . adjustments before I could leave the wreck of my craft.

"Then, once outside, I simply couldn't manage the overall signal level, not at first. And the oxygen here is uncomfortably diluted and the gravity somewhat feeble. Still, like a fool, I ignored my own injuries and other warning signs and set out to do my work. My ship's communication system was ruined, so I left a visual message at the crash-site and changed into a flying form to—"

Jesus! "A
flying
form? What kind of creature are you, Joe?"

"I told you already: I am a city."

"But what does that mean?"

"Do you really want to know? You may find the information a bit disconcerting."

"Tell me."

"Very well. Life, on my world and yours, began in the oceans. But the seas of my planet are relatively shallow with constant volcanism beneath. One-celled life had to react almost instantly to an unstable, unsafe environment or die. For those early eukaryotic cells—cells with a nucleus—survival long enough to reproduce was almost a miracle. And mitosis itself, especially cytokinesis, where the cell actually divides, had to be extremely rapid."

"You seem to know a lot about biology, Joe."

"For good reason, my friend. As I was saying, on my world, radical evolutionary experiments, unless they were a spontaneous success, were doomed to failure. Multicelled life appeared again and again and it never thrived. But the simple protozoa
themselves
evolved; they grew larger and stronger and developed primitive organs of locomotion and specialized sensory organs.

"Eventually, conditions stabilized somewhat and successful multicelled forms emerged but by then they were actually at a disadvantage because they were, at least initially, more vulnerable than their solitary cousins."

"Then how did complex creatures ever get started?"

"Not easily. After millions of years, your years, the single-celled animalcules learned how to form cooperative colonies. Such colonies were finally able to leave the seas and live on dry land. Slowly, each colony developed a kind of . . . group consciousness and group purpose that greatly enhanced the chances of survival. And survival was even further enhanced when the colonies learned to communicate and develop social relationships with each other. And they developed a way of reproducing as a group, duplicating the many genetic benefits of Earthly meiosis. My mate always maintained that our evolution reached its pinnacle when we learned how to love."