Complete Stories (21 page)

It was a tiny Tulpan spaceship! From further in the future! Suddenly Jack felt strong enough to move. He seized the new little ship in his fist, and scrambled over to his own ship. There was good air inside. He closed the hatch and opened his hand.

The little ship’s hatch popped open, and a white puff of smoke drifted out. The smoke spread, tenuously taking shape …

“Fefferfuff?” Jack asked. “Is it you?”

“It is I, Jack-Stalk.” The voice was faint and windy. “Ö and I feeling sorry your jam, and noticing that universe not disappearing, we also breaking jump rules. Now to setting controls correctly and not like flaky shmoe. Lucy still waiting.”

The patch of pale haze drifted over to the control panel, tsk-tsking at what it found.

“But the engines are out of fuel,” Jack said weakly. He tried to peek into the tiny ship hovering in front of him. “Is Ö really in there?”

A tiny squeak of, “Hewwo, Earthwing,” floated out of the miniature hatch. Somehow, having Ö there made Jack feel that everything would be all right.

“Everything’s all right,” Fefferfuff said. “The ship is refueled. It running on water. Molecule size no problem. Now to setting controls as I say, Jack-Stalk. Please one sex-show, then I bringing you back like taxi as advertised.”

So Jack Stalk finally lost his virginity. Once to Lucy. And then, a month later, to Micha.

============

Written in Fall, 1980.

The 57th Franz Kafka
, Ace Books, 1983.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, near where this story is set. This is another time-travel-related tale with aliens, based on a seed idea from Martin Gardner. If you’re curious about why FTL can lead to time-travel, check out my nonfiction book,
The Fourth Dimension
.

A rock-concert. It’s Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Elvis is dripping sweat, bent over a white plastic J. C. Penney’s guitar. Superwimp! His amazingly deep and authoritative voice carries over the driving network of electric sound. “Waitin’ to de eyund of de woruld / waitin’ to de eyund o de woruld / waitin’ to de eyund odee world, deeyur Lord / I sincerely hope you’re comin’ ‘cause you cerntly started something.” NnnMmmMMmmMMMmMMMP NnnnMmmmMMmMMmMMMP. His rhythm guitarist shambles about, opening and closing his mouth like a chimpanzee eating a cigarette butt. The bassman looks like the equipment manager for a football team, all dressed in chinos and a yellow oxford-cloth button-down. But at the end of the song he jumps up and lands in a split.

The camera draws back and we see the audience. A sparse crowd here in this Mannheim concert-hall. Maybe three hundred people. A few of the greaser-hippies the Germans call “rrockerrs,” some punk-girls with black lips, punk-boys with short red and green hair, but mostly just average-type sales clerks and students.

“You’re a dismal bunch of punks,” Elvis says, not unkindly. People are smoking cigarettes. A little knot of GIs shares a hash-pipe.

The camera closes in on a slight, red-haired youth at the right edge of the crowd. On the sound track, Elvis starts one of his smeared-notes songs from
Get Happy
. The red-haired youth fiddles with his tape-recorder. Close shot of the turning reels. The reels speed up, the music too, an excited drone. Tape ends, flap flap flap, and everyone’s leaving the concert hall.

We follow the red-haired youth out onto the street. He’s alone, carrying his big tape-player on a strap slung over one shoulder. He wears black Levis and a shiny brown leather jacket. His skin is luminously pale, his hair short and spiky, his fingers long and mobile. A street-car screeches to a
gggkgreeeeeeessht
halt and he climbs into its yellow-green light.

Cut. The next evening. Shot of the red-haired youth handling an ancient glass vase. He sits by a window in a one-room apartment, the fragile cylindrical vessel in his hands. Close shot on the vase.

The glass is cloudy, old-looking and shimmering here and there with metal oxides deposited over what must have been centuries of burial. The surface is etched with thousands of tiny lines. The lines wrap around and around the cylinder. It is as if after having been blown, the vase was put on a lathe and shaved down. A diamond knife in some turner’s hand has etched a single groove around the vase from top to bottom.

Medium shot of red-haired youth walking across his apartment. One whole wall is books, one wall a workbench. Electronic components, computer circuitry. Orange light from the setting sun slopes in.

He flicks on his tape-deck. A man screaming in rising bursts and then a great rush of tight, happy sound. Blondie’s “I’m Not Living in the Real World.”

The red-haired youth busies himself with his tools, mounting the vase into some kind of machine. When Debbie’s voice croons, “Didn’t I ever tell you I was gone?” he hits a button, snaring the phrase on a tape-loop. Eternal repeat on that: “Didn’t I ever tell you I was gone? Didn’t I ever tell you I was gone? Didn’t I ever tell you I was gone?”

There’s a whole console of buttons set into the back of the workbench. He hits another and overdubs a loop of live E. C. sneering, “Now I try to stay amused. Now I try to stay amused. Now I try to stay amused.”

More buttons, and more voices coming on, all on top of each other. Jagger: “Do the hip-shake, babe. Do the hip-shake, babe. Do the hip-shake, babe.” The Zap: “The torture never stops. The torture never stops. The torture never stops.” Marley: “Wake up and turn I loose. Wake up and turn I loose. Wake up and turn I loose.” Nina Hagen: “
Ich glotz Tay-Fow. Ich glotz Tay-Fow. Ich glotz Tay-Fow.
” Johnny Rotten: “And we don’t care. And we don’t care. And we don’t care.” More Jagger: “I’m always hearin’ voices in the street. I’m always hearin’ voices in the street. I’m always hearin’ voices in the street.” And more others, more and more cutting in and speeded up, making a…wild, high
buzz
, you understand.

But it won’t fly yet. Something’s missing. The vase! He’s got the vase mounted on a sort of lathe, and he’s setting a phonograph needle down on the spinning glass, dropping the needle down into the groove as if it were one of Thomas Alva Edison’s cylindrical phonograph records.

Macro-close-up of the phonograph needle in the groove. The needle vibrates back and forth with the groove’s slow meanderings. There is a steady tone feeding out from the needle. The winging welter of the music-loops damps down and the vase-glass recording comes up. A rumble as from a voice underwater. A squeak. A rumble.

Zoom back to the red-haired youth. Weird eyes on this kid. He’s so young…how can he know so much? His hands crawl patiently over the equipment surrounding the vase. Dreamy smile. Again an indistinct rumble from the vase, this time more voice-like. The youth wags his head and makes another adjustment.

Cut back to macro-close-up of the phono needle. The groove twists back and forth, the needle follows, and we hear a voice talking clearly.

“Ah noko landee cleek-ka-sneep. Orbaahm. Deedle?”

Soft
wah-wah-wah
and the phono needle changes its appearance. We zoom slowly back…vase still spinning. But only half of the vase is etched yet, and the needle has turned into the tip of a diamond knife, held in the hand of a tan-brown man with ultra-black hair, an Egyptian craftsman etching the original groove into the vase. He is talking, and as he talks the vibrations travel down his arms and into the etching tool he holds…he’s recording his voice though he doesn’t know it.

Here in the flashback we see it all, the pedal-driven lathe, the blazing square of sun lying on the floor like sheet-iron, the play of muscles in the turner’s back, his big liquid eyes and purple lips. He speaks again.

“Ahna bogbog du smeepy flan.”

Suddenly we notice who he’s talking to.

Propped up in a corner of the one-room workshop is a…giant beetle. Totem? No…it’s alive, but injured. Straw-yellow ichor seeps from a rent in one side of the soft belly. With a sudden screech, the creature begins to sing.

The noise is dense, concentrated…quintessentially evil, welling out of the swiveling, jewel-like little head, all emerald, carnelian, lapis lazuli. Outside the door we see part of what might be a wrecked spaceship.

The alien knows what it’s doing, beaming its groaning twitter straight at the craftsman’s body. The timeless humming of the alien’s soul is being etched forever into the spinning glass.

Close shot of the glass, the flash-forward (soft haw-haw-haw) to red-haired youth. He’s still got all his tape-loops running, and now on top of it is the horrible, insistent, mind-picking flicker of the ancient alien death-song. It adds up to something…unheard of.

The youth starts back from the bench. A stool crashes down. The sound is out of control, roiling about the room in booming crests so crushingly loud you begin to see them gel. (A buzzer goes off under your seat nnnNNNBBZEEEEEEE, just like at
The Tingler
.)

Red-haired youth slapping at switches, smashing machinery with a crescent wrench, trying to stop it, Stop It, STOP STOP STOP…Vase shatters, youth’s pants split open from a huge milky-white hard-on. He pumps it frantically with one hand, flailing at instruments with the other; it’s too much, too loud, too far.

Wild, high, buzzing stacking way up now. We cut to an outside shot of youth’s building. Everything motionless for two heartbeats, then a window explodes out in slow motion, and he flies through, bleeding, ejaculating. Suddenly the soundtrack is slowed down, too, and the mad sound breaks into manageable pieces.

You can see into the apartment, the machinery is wrecked, a fire is starting, but the sound keeps on. It’s a self-perpetuating vortex pattern now, riding on the energy gradient of the day/night twilight zone. We can see the smoke twirling in
significant
patterns, and overlayered there are purple-to-ultraviolet moirés.

Camera pulls up to a hundred meters and we look down to see the paisley streamers flowing out on the gentle evening breeze. The youth is flaring like a sparkler, still falling, and on the sidewalk we see a man and his dog go up in light. Down the block we see it happen again, and again, and with each flash, the paisley moiré gets a little brighter, the sound a little stronger. Three little children run down the street, screaming, but unharmed.

Cut.

New Jersey. The refineries like giant chemistry labs. Ten-wheel trucks roar past. A solitary figure by the side of the Jersey Turnpike here at the Newark exit. Sunset.

He has colorless blond hair, steel glasses, wears baggy old clothes. White painter’s clothes. The drafts from the trucks’ passings flutter the loose fabric this way and that.

In front of his solar plexus, like a dish-antenna, he holds a piece of cardboard. “EXIT 9.” The lettering is dark and crooked.

There is a lull in the traffic now. He sets down his sign and lights a cigarette. Behind him we see the stark silhouette of a cracking tower, totem woven of five hundred pipes. In profile, he inhales deeply.

Something is bothering him. He brushes at his eyes…smoke? Insects? He throws down his thin cigarette and begins slapping at his head and shoulders. There is a wild, high buzzing. As the noise peaks, the hitchhiker melts into a blob of blinding light.

A semi rumbles past, brakes groaning, horn blasting fear. It says “PYRAMID” on the side.

Cut to the truck-driver’s face. Likable Italian kid, twenty, curly black hair, trying to keep his rig under control.

“Waxman,” he hollers to his sleeping partner. “Hey, Waxman! We gotta pull …”

The wild, high buzzing has not stopped, and now it builds to a new peak. The curly-haired driver’s face glows and runs like molten steel.

Aerial shot of the PYRAMID semi-tractor-trailer jack-knifing, rolling, bursting into flame. Wild, high buzzing, rhythmic, never repeating.

We continue to rise, looking down at the big pile-up. Cars and trucks keep coming. The passengers go up in little puffs of white light, flashbulbs popping off in the dinky-toy cars far, far below us, still rising, rising to look down at all America, one-quarter dark.

Time speeds up and we see the terminator, the edge of night, sweep across the country east to west. There is a jumping twinkle in the moving twilight zone, fleeting specks of light like phosphorescent plankton at some surf’s lapping line. Pht, pht, pht, pht, pht. The wild, high buzzing, far and faint.

We come back down in California, just before the terminator gets there. Across a beach and through the dish of a radio-telescope. The percussive sounds of a woman’s foot-steps hurrying down the hall. Clip clip clip clip. (Think of those little jolts traveling wavelike up her leg-flesh, up to her ripe ass and crinkly hole and fur-burger deluxe…just think about it!) Knock knock.

We see a door open. A fat man looks up. He wears a long-sleeved white plastic shirt with a pen in the pocket. He holds a sheaf of computer print-outs. The day’s last square of sunlight lies warm on his lap, and he’s been thinking about sex, but only says, “Yes, Dr. Schmid? What is it?”

The woman steps forward and leans over the desk. She’s dressed casually: jeans, tube-top, wedgies. Bushy-brown hair, all frizzed out. No lipstick on her full lips. We look at her from behind.

“It’s these readings, Professor Akwell.” She hands him a roll of paper with squiggles on it. “These peaks are utterly anomalous. It’s as if some vast pulse of energy swept across the country during the last three hours. See this? And this and this?”

The professor feeds the paper tape slowly through his fingers. “Do you have an audio conversion?”

“Not yet, but …”

“I’ll want to hear the fine-structure energy-analogue.”

“Of course.” She’s around behind the desk now, leaning over his shoulder. It is almost dark outside and, again, the wild, high buzzing mounts.

The professor swivels and looks up at her. Nice full braless breasts right at eye-level. His heart beating, ka-thumn ka-thumn. The buzzing coming and going, a syncopated sound with crests inside the troughs.

He pushes up her tube-top. She smiles and leans forward. He tongues and sucks at her hanging milky-white bubs, takes a stiff, dark-pink nipple in his mouth.