Cargo Cult (17 page)

Barely aware of it, he drew his gun
and waved it at the empty room, shouting wordlessly at whatever the
hell might be there with him. He seemed to be in a cave, a very
regular cave, with a level floor and lighting panels in the roof.
The floor was wet and the walls were wet, as if water was seeping
through them. He seemed to be alone, although the lighting was so
dim, he couldn’t be sure. There was a barely audible hum that
seemed to be all around him.

After a long, long time, he
climbed, shakily to his feet and, keeping his back to the wall,
moved around the perimeter of the little cave, reassuring himself
he was alone. Feeling a little better, he went over to the middle
of the room to examine his car seat and other debris. It took him a
little while to realise that he had been cut out of his car as if
some gigantic apple corer had sliced cleanly through it from top to
bottom. It made no sense at all but that was what had happened.

But what could have done that? Who
could have done it? Who in the whole world had the technology to do
such a thing? He already didn’t like the apple corer idea. Using
that analogy, he was the core, the bit that was to be thrown away.
Maybe that’s why he was here in this damp cave. He’d been extracted
and was now in some kind of a human waste bin.

“What the hell are you talking
about?” he asked himself, aloud. “That’s the biggest load of crap
I’ve heard since I interviewed Douggie Mack!”

“To whom are you speaking?” Asked
the Agent who had silently materialised two metres behind him.

Spinning around in complete panic,
Barraclough yelled again and seeing the two-and-a-half metre
monster that loomed over him, began blasting away at it with his
handgun. The noise was incredible as he emptied a full clip into
the creature. Stunned and deafened, his nostrils full of the
gunsmoke, Barraclough staggered back from the creature until his
back hit the wall again.

The Agent stared down at him with
its unblinking steel eyes. In front of its chest, fifteen lead
bullets hung in the air. It studied them for a moment and then, all
together, they fell to the floor with a dull splatter. It took a
step closer to Barraclough. It looked like a gigantic, deformed,
but immensely powerful human being, wearing strangely ornamented,
scaly, black armour and a grotesque face mask. Hair, like long
porcupine quills sprouted from the back of its head, neck and
shoulders. It fixed Barraclough with featureless, grey eyes,
fascinated by him.

Frightened beyond anything he’d
ever known, Barraclough shouted again and tried to back into the
wall. “Get back!” he yelled, waving the empty gun at the unearthly
apparition in front of him. “What the fuck are you anyway?”

“You are frightened,” said the
Agent in its soft, deep voice. “Do not fear me. I am not your
enemy. I merely seek information about you.”

“Me?” Barraclough was regaining
control of himself. The thing that had snatched him didn’t seem to
want to hurt him, just yet anyway. With his returning composure
came a flood of questions. How did he get here? Where was he? What
the hell was that thing? How had it stopped fifteen bullets in
mid-air? It was like some awful sci-fi movie where mankind’s
monstrous descendants from the future come back in time with
incredible technologies and some hair-brained scheme to save
themselves by killing some key person from the past.

“I will probe your mind now,” the
Agent told him.

“No. Wait. You’ve got the wrong
bloke,” Barraclough said. It had to be a mistake. “I’m not special
at all. I’m just a copper. I don’t even have any kids. You’d better
get yourself back to the future and check your facts, mate. This is
all a big cock-up.”

“The future?” The Agent pondered
this for a moment. “I believe you are the one in error. The future
is not formed yet. The wave-front of random froth that makes this
universe, creates only an endless present, unravelling the past as
it goes. Unfathomable. For, even those few who can grasp the
mathematics, even my masters, can find no hint in all that dense
calculus of any meaning whatsoever.

“And so this now is all the world
we live in. The thinnest possible multi-dimensional surface. A
skein of information. A spider-web of relationships. And this
substance we feel, these memories we have, these galaxies of stars
are only lingering traces of earlier patterns, traces that will
blur and fade and become lost in the noise of that relentless
random restructuring of reality we call Time.”

Barraclough blinked. “Pardon?”

The Agent stared at him in silence.
“Prepare yourself to be probed,” it said.

-oOo-

Wayne and Drukk walked into the
kitchen to find Sam practically prostrating herself in front of a
nondescript looking bloke in a green polo shirt.

“Hi,” said Wayne.

John looked around, smiled his
nondescript smile and gave Wayne a blast of his electrifying,
mesmeric eyes. At the same time, Sam seemed to snap out of her
little trance. She jumped to her feet and hastily adjusted her
clothes and hair as if she’d been caught having sex with the man
rather than just listening raptly to him. She felt herself blushing
and couldn’t understand why.

John, meanwhile, had noticed Drukk
and rose to his feet, looking the alien up and down with a look of
just as much astonishment as Wayne was showing. “You’re that
woman,” he said. “That celebrity woman. What...?”

“I am Drukk,” said the Vinggan,
totally unaffected by John’s hypnotic gaze.

“She wears the orange clothing,”
said Sam, helpfully.

John gave Sam a puzzled look, at
which she just smiled and shrugged. He turned back to Drukk,
holding out his hand. “I’m John,” he said.

“The guru guy,” added Sam and Wayne
together.

Drukk saw the outstretched hand. He
knew this convention now and confidently put out his own hand,
letting it hover a few inches from John’s before withdrawing it.
Confused, John also withdrew his hand.

Wayne jumped into the ensuing
silence. “Listen, Sam, I’ve got to tell you something about
Loosi.”

“I agreed he could call me that,”
explained Drukk.

“Loosi Beecham! That’s it!” John
burst out. “My God! Loosi Beecham! Here!”

Hearing the commotion, a number of
John’s rather vague followers began to drift vaguely back into the
kitchen, presumably abandoning whatever vague projects they were
loosely engaged on at the time.

“What is it?” Sam demanded around
John’s outburst. “She’s all right isn’t she? She isn’t worse or
anything?” Her realisation that she had completely forgotten the
plight of this poor injured woman astonished her. How could she
have done that? How long had she been listening to John talk while
Ms Beecham stood outside in the sun with a concussion?

“Of course she’s all right.” Wayne
was warming to his announcement. “She’s better than all right.” He
looked Sam directly in the eye, something she couldn’t remember him
ever having done in his life. “Sam, Loosi Beecham is an alien from
the planet Vingg.”

There were gasps and mutterings
from around the room. All eyes that weren’t already there,
swivelled to the beautiful blonde stranger in the tight orange
dress. An alien? A real live alien, here among them?

In any other company, Wayne’s
announcement might have caused howls of laughter and yells of scorn
and derision. However, in the present company, all it generated was
an awed silence.

“Cool!” said Jadie from the
doorway, pretty well summing up the general consensus.

“We knew you would come,” said the
girl, Laney, in a small, emotion-filled voice and began to cry.

“We’re ready,” said another. “We
waited.”

Someone stuck his head out the
kitchen window and shouted, “Hey! They’re here! They’ve come!” Then
there was a great hubbub as people came running from everywhere and
tried to get into the kitchen. There was laughter and shouting and
a group in the corner started singing
Swing Low Sweet
Chariot
. Vague but happy people edged closer to Drukk, reaching
out their hands to touch him.

Sam looked about her trying to work
out what she should do. Her two stories had suddenly become
horribly conflated. That poor, deluded woman had suddenly become
part of this insane cult’s own delusions and now the two insanities
were feeding off each other in a way she wasn’t at all happy about.
Uppermost in her mind was the indisputable fact that Loosi Beecham
was not an alien from the planet Vingg and that this could
therefore only end badly. Perhaps very badly.

“Wait! Wait!” It was John, holding
up his hands and sweeping the hypnotic beam of his eyes across his
flock, rapidly gaining their full attention. Even the choir in the
corner sputtered to a halt. For the first time, John looked
nervous. His unassailable composure was gone and a rather furtive
anxiety seemed to have replaced it.

“Patience, everyone, please.” He
looked around to ensure they were all hanging on his words. “I know
we all want the Sky People to come. I know we all long for their
Gift. But we must be sure. We must be certain. We cannot let
ourselves be fooled by impostors. There is too much at stake.”
Again, he swept his gaze across them all. He seemed to be thinking
fast. “I will speak in private with our visitor. I will ask her
questions only a true representative of the Sky People could
answer. I know the secret signs our friends from the sky have
prepared. I will not be fooled by false Gifters.”

The crowd, on the whole, seemed
happy with this. After all, thought Sam, they were quick enough to
believe Wayne, whom they had never met before, so why shouldn’t
they believe their guru guy?

“Leave us now,” said John, looking
a little too relieved that he still had control of the situation.
His followers began to drift out of the room again. “Leave it to
me,” he said to their departing backs. “I will not fail you.”

Eventually, only Sam, Wayne, Drukk
and John remained in the room.

John turned to Sam. “I’m sorry,
would you mind leaving too.”

Sam, began to protest. She needed
to be here. She had to get the story. But in the full light of his
extraordinary eyes, she felt her will crumbling. She was one the
verge of turning to go when Drukk spoke up.

“I wish these two humans to stay,”
he said. He wasn’t absolutely sure that these were the same two
humans that had brought him here but he thought he recognised Sam
from the colour of her business suit and Wayne from the row of
symbols across his front. He wasn’t quite sure why he wanted them
with him except he knew they had not yet tried to hurt him and they
did seem willing to help him in his search for a religious
leader.

John looked Drukk in the eye and,
using the full force of his hypnotic power, said, “No. They must
leave.”

Totally impervious to the effect,
Drukk merely replied, “No. They must stay.”

John was seriously taken aback by
this. All his life, he’d been able to make just about anybody do
just about anything simply by looking them in the eye and asking
them to. He had never, ever seen someone just shrug off a direct
order like that. For an instant, a tiny curl of fear licked at his
insides. Then he pulled himself together. No. It just couldn’t be!
The Sky People couldn’t really have come. Could they?

“Very well,” he said, shakily.
“Won’t you all sit down, please?”

-oOo-

Barraclough opened his eyes and
looked up into the darkness. Man, what a dream! Alien abduction! He
laughed out loud. And there had been more. What was it? Oh yes.
Multiple Loosi Beechams trashing Steiner’s department store. But,
hang on, hadn’t that really happened? He’d been in the office when
the call came through. He’d gone to the Royal and picked up Douggie
Mack and his mate. He’d interviewed them. Wasn’t that all real? All
right, so where did the dream start? He’d been chasing a busload of
old folks who’d been kidnapped by the Loosi Beecham mob. He’d
spoken to them. He’d stood in the road in the sun in the middle of
bloody nowhere and the bus-driver had been wetting himself. Surely
that wasn’t a dream? It seemed so real. Where was he, anyway? This
didn’t feel like his own bed.

He reached out a hand to turn on
the bedside light but there was nothing there. Fear and adrenalin
surged through him. He tried to sit up but he could not move.
Not a dream
, he realised.
Not a dream
. None of
it.

“Who are you?” he shouted into the
darkness. “I’m a police officer, you fucker. Every cop in the
country is going to be looking for me.” He panted into the
blackness, straining against a force that seemed to lay on him like
a lead blanket. “At least turn the bloody lights on, mate!”

Instantly, there was light.
Barraclough screwed up his eyes against the sudden, blinding glare
and, when he could open them, there was that big, ugly black thing,
just standing there, staring at him.

He was no longer in the little
cavelike room. Now he was in a large, cavelike room. He could move
his head but that was all. He looked down at his naked body.
Nothing lay on top of him. No straps bound him. There wasn’t even
anything under him. He just floated in the air, flat on his
back.

“The probe is complete,” the Agent
said.

Barraclough remembered. “You... you
probed my mind?”

The Agent shrugged. “It didn’t take
long.” It moved closer. “You are a most interesting species but I
still cannot see your value to the Vinggan machines. Even as slaves
you would have limited utility.”

“What?”

“You have a question?”

“You bet I have a question? I’ve
got a question all right! Have I got a question for you, mate!”

“Well?”

But Barraclough had so many
questions that he foundered on his total inability to pick one
above all the rest. Which question do you start with when the whole
Universe no longer makes sense?