Asimov's Science Fiction (15 page)

In the seventies, some parishes still offered "the cup" to adult laity. During communion the Sunday before my mother died, our parish priest startled me when, after placing the Host on my tongue, he touched the chalice to my lips. I had never tasted wine; alcohol was banned from our house. For days afterward I debated whether it had tasted like blood, which was illogical, even within the context of the ritual. After all, the wafer never tasted like "flesh." At Mom's funeral, crying, staring at my lap while the priest spoke his useless words, a ghost of the wine's bitter taste returned.

The beetle-looking thing stepped haltingly away from the office on its jointed stilts.

"What is it?" I whispered.

"I don't know for real sure," the woman said. "I call them hunters. Keep down and keep quiet, or you'll see why. That one does nothing but stand quiet as a tombstone, right up till you hear those three echo sounds. It comes a little bit more alive with each one. Those sounds, they're like a doorbell. Somehow that one there answers it and opens the door. But that's not all it does. I believe it transmits some kind of signal to the others, whenever a fresh victim turns up. That's what you are, kid. The fresh victim."

I didn't like her calling me kid, especially since she didn't look all that much older than me, with her little upturned nose and brown freckles. While she whispered, the beetle walked into the middle of the runway and stopped. Each leg had a joint about in the middle, like a knee, except they bent the opposite way a human knee would bend, inward instead of outward. Now the knees all bent at once, and the beetle squatted low to the tarmac. After a moment, the air in front of the thing became blurry, like the way air looks above a hot road in the distance, almost a liquid appearance of rising heat. In no time the air swirled into a white mist screen, hanging there on the tarmac, wafer thin.

"That's the door."

Out of the mist three more of the beetle things came stalking forth. One ran directly to my Cessna. I mean, it really was like a giant silver bug, moving in that quick scuttle on its set of backward-jointed legs. The sound of those legs clacking on the tarmac gave me an awful feeling. It was such an
alive
sound. A cable extended from the nose of the thing's body and probed through the open door of my plane. I imagined it was sniffing around, trying to pick up a scent. Trying to pick up
my
scent.

The cable withdrew from the cabin—and it was holding my lunch bag. It brought the bag close to its body for a moment, then dropped it. The other two beetles had remained motionless after their initial appearance. The cable slithered back inside the third one and it clickity-clacked back over to join them. They stood in a close circle, motionless, as if discussing what to do next. After a moment, my head started to hurt. I closed my eyes, like that would help. It didn't. The ache worsened, a drilling, hot, yellow pain.

The freckle girl nudged me. Her eyes were the blue you see in a fire. "Now you listen to me," she whispered. "We can block whatever it is they're doing in our heads. You just got to concentrate real hard on something else. I mean concentrate like you're gonna bust a vein. Do that and it backs off."

"I don't
understand.
" My voice trembled.

"Do
it. Concentrate."

Shapes, vague and eager, humped foreward in my mind. A sound like a crowd of foreign voices rose up. I couldn't understand any individual word. I concentrated, imagining a fence between me and the shapes. It was the old wooden slat fence from my backyard, leaning and half rotted, that couldn't keep out so much as a bunny rabbit. But I made it strong by concentrating on every detail. I was aware of the questing shapes trying to nose through the fence to get at me. But as long as I didn't give them my attention, as long as I focused on the fence, they became less urgent, less potent. The crowd murmur reached an inarticulate peak then subsided, like a wave crashing against and withdrawing from a breakwater. My mind became quiet, and I let go of my rickety fence and came out of myself, blinking, rubbing my eyes.

"Howzit?" the freckle girl asked.

"Okay, I think. What are those things doing now?"

"Giving it up, I hope. Lot of time, what I think happens is the new arrivals are so confused they tend to hang around the aerodrome. Easy pickings."

"Like me?"

"Yep, like you."

"What do they do if they catch you?"

"Carry you through the door. I've seen it. I'm not always so dumb I try to
save
anybody. But heck, you looked so dang pathetic, I almost couldn't bear it. My name's Maggie, by the way. Maggie Farmer. I haul the mail. Or used to, I guess."

"I'm Paul."

"Glad to meet ya."

"So why do you hang around here? Aren't you scared?"

"Heck yes, I'm scared. Not as scared as you, I bet. But if there's a way to escape, it's right here. The whole world is like this aerodrome—empty. When I first got here I had a bad feeling about Quillayute, and I kept going, flew my ship as far as Astoria, then inland to Portland. There isn't a soul around, as near as I could determine. Except for maybe the handful of folks that dropped out of the same hole we did and then didn't get caught by the hunters. Maybe some of them are still out there. What I want, I want to go back to the other world, the one that's filled up with people. That's why I keep coming back. This was the way in, so it's got to be the way out, too. Right?"

"US 246. Was that your, ah, ship crashed in the trees?"

"Yes, but it's no reflection on my piloting skills, and don't think it is. Truth is—" Maggie's face blushed, which made her freckles stand out even more, and she looked both angry and embarrassed. "Truth is, I ran out of fuel. The damn doorbell was going off as soon as I landed. Guess that ship with the tail that looks like a vee had just dropped in, and I didn't even know it. I was already running on fumes, coming back from Oregon. When I heard the chime, I didn't know if it was the first one or the third one. I throttled up without thinking. Lucky for me, if you want to call it luck, is the hunters got their hands full with the folks from the vee plane, and that gave me time to climb down from the crash and hide."

"There was a little girl—" I started to say.

"Hold it. They're moving."

The three machines scuttled off in three different directions. One of the directions was
our
direction.

"Shoot," Maggie said.

"Maybe we should run."

"Those things go like race horses. Just keep your dang head down and pray, if that's what you do."

I kept my head down but my eyes open. My heart was beating like crazy. What would happen if one of those things carried me through what Maggie called the "door"? That's when I noticed something. The white mist doorway was gradually shrinking.

Like the popcorn cloud over the field.

What if the cloud was all that was left of another doorway? Was it a trap, deliberately created by the beetles, or just some kind of lucky accident for them, regularly delivering up victims? I remembered the feeling of being pulled in, as if by a force of gravity.

The backward-jointed legs of the nearest beetle swished in the undergrowth. It paused every few yards and swiveled its dome, maybe sweeping the area with some kind of sensor.

Hunting for us.

Maggie squeezed my shoulder. I looked over. She was staring at me with those blue-fire eyes, and I knew what her look meant. The beetle was going to get us, and there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it. I was so frightened my body was paralyzed, and I felt cold and hot at the same time.

Then a girl screamed.

The beetle on the verge of discovering us pivoted and scuttled back to the runway. All three were converging—and the one that had gone hunting in the direction of Maggie's mail plane emerged from the forest holding a child coiled up in its tentacle. It wasn't the girl I'd already talked to, it wasn't Amanda. It must have been her sister, Tammy, the one who'd stepped in a hole and couldn't run. The girl had lost a shoe. Her white ankle sock made her seem even more vulnerable. She flailed and screamed.

"Oh, my God," Maggie said.

I hated myself for not acting, for not trying to save that child. With a huge effort I fought through my fear and tried to stand up, but Maggie grabbed my hand and wouldn't let me. Her fingers were cold and her grip was like steel bones, digging in.

"You can't help her," she said.

I twisted my hand, trying to break free, and I saw Maggie's face. She was in agony, tears streaming down her cheeks. Then the captured child's sister bolted onto the runway and ran straight at the monster that was about to scuttle through the shrinking doorway, where the other two had just gone. Amanda had a short, broken-off tree branch in her hand, a club. Her yellow ponytail bounced as she ran.

"Dang,"
Maggie said, and before I knew what was happening she had dropped my hand and was up and running, sprinting toward the field.

The beetle hesitated when the sister appeared. Maggie intercepted Amanda, snatched her up around the waist without breaking stride, and continued across the field toward the trees behind the dilapidated hanger. The girl fought her all the way, but Maggie wouldn't let go.

The beetle coiled its tentacle in, like tightening a watch spring, then snapped it straight out—flinging its screaming captive into the diminishing white screen of the doorway. Tammy's scream skirled away, like something spinning down a deep well.

By then I'd broken cover, too, and was running full out. It was like my body was doing something my mind hardly knew anything about. The beetle was halfway to the trees, in pursuit of Maggie and the sister, when it sensed me and turned. I guess it sensed me, because I was yelling all kinds of raging profanities at it, making as much noise as possible. I
wanted
the damn thing to sense me, to come after me and leave Maggie and the girl alone.

When it did, I veered toward my Cessna, pouring everything I had into my legs, sprinting for my life. I didn't look at the beetle again until I was inside the trainer with the door shut. The beetle came on fast, legs a blur of furious energy. I turned over the prop, shoved the throttle in, like I wanted to ram that knob right through the instrument panel. The tac pegged into the red zone, and I kicked in the right rudder pedal, turning my flimsy little airplane around on the ramp. The other-world door and the metal beetle racing toward me meant I couldn't use the runway, so I powered along next to it, the Cessna jolting and bouncing, half out of control, gaining speed, prop kicking bits of gravel against the cowling.

I was up to forty-nine knots—too slow, but I pulled back on the yoke, anyway. The Cessna lifted indecisively, the tricycle gear touching back down a couple of times, like the wheels didn't want to let go of the earth. The beetle extended its tentacle and whipped it against the fuselage. It sounded like a hammer striking sheet metal, and the trainer yawed wildly across the runway toward the trees. Climbing sluggishly, I cleared the tree line with only a couple of feet to spare.

Blue sky filled the windows. I banked right, my wing pivoting over the airport. The door and the third beetle were gone. The one remaining, which I'd originally mistaken for a storage tank, had returned to its place between the hangar and the fuel island. It was almost as if none of it had happened. There was no sign of Maggie and the girl. In the trees they wouldn't have been visible, and I allowed myself to believe they had gotten away—that I had given them that chance. But for a minutes, hanging up there in the safety of the sky, I felt guilty. How could I save my own ass and leave them down there? But then I let it go, because I had to concentrate.

The white popcorn cloud hung motionless in the clear air above me, its original Mickey Mouse head shape remarkably unaltered, except in size. I banked steeply and climbed in a spiral toward it, praying that I was right in thinking the unnatural behavior of this cloud indicated it was somehow related to the white mist doorway the beetle had opened on the runway.

The altimeter indicated seventy-seven hundred feet. In the time it had taken me to climb that high, the cloud had further diminished in size. If I had been looking at it from the ground I probably could have covered it with the end of my thumb. Up close, it was barely as wide as the trainer's wingspan, about thirty-some-odd feet across. I ascended into it without much hope, expecting only wisps of white vapor to blow past my windshield

Instead, it totally engulfed my plane.

The world turned white. My instruments went haywire again. the magnetic compass swung and bobbed without direction. I lowered my head and fought my inner-ear instinct to roll left. I held on, held on... and then the mist blew away, and I was staring at the massive rock and ice face of Mount Olympus, unstable air buffeting my Cessna.

I was back.

Thirty years later, I simply wanted to find
something
that worked—a practical ritual I could believe in, something to resurrect the events at Quillayute. Migraines plagued me. Body aches, intestinal agony. Burning pain throughout my body. Doctors investigated all these symptoms and more, to the limit of my insurance coverage, then stopped. They could find nothing to pin a bill to. I may have displayed symptoms of cancer, but no cancer was evident. I may have displayed markers of Fibromyalgia, prostatitis, even brain tumors—but there appeared to be no causal events. Insurance coverage does not recognize symptoms without cause. And yet, my body was so clearly betraying me. Only one doctor used the word that must have been on everyone's mind:
Psychosomatic.
Ironically, he's the one who prescribed Demerol.

Pain can be inspirational, and I wanted to believe.

It took only a few days to track down the 150 trainer I'd flown back in 1982. November 60558 was registered to a dentist in Redmond, Washington. At first he wasn't inclined to part with it. I overcame his reluctance with money, depleting twenty-seven thousand dollars out of my pension fund. But what did I care? I would probably be dead long before I ran out of money.