Little Green Men (7 page)

Was it saying hello? All right, not the Gettysburg Address, but a start.

"Ha-lo," said Banion. "My. Name. Is. Jack."

"Kamu."

"You Kamu?" said Banion, now struggling to keep it together, straining at his wrist straps. "Me Jack."

Amidst this witty repartee, Banion felt a distinct chill and, looking down at his feet, noticed two things: he was naked, and his ankles were also fastened to the table, with his legs spread apart in a way that reminded him unencouragingly of a dozen movie scenes, with the sound of a cackling villain in the background holding some gruesome weapon.

"Can I" - he wriggled -
"help
you in some way?" The third thing approached toward his legs. It was holding something that did not bode pleasant. Banion stared. "Whoa. Hold on."

Banion tried to sit up, in the process discovering there was a strap across his chest.

"Now see here - I'm an American citizen!" Still the thing approached.

"Hey, the president is coming to dinner at my house next week!" Banion came to.

He looked up and saw the trunks of trees stretching up into a sky the color of late afternoon. The
cheep cheep
of a cricket made him yelp with fear.

He was alone.

He was dressed.

He took a deep breath. Instead of the piney scent of forest, he tasted ammonia and cinnamon.

He shuddered again, stumbled like a drunken man to a tree, leaning on it for support. He was at the edge of a clearing. He walked into it and leaned over to examine the grass. There were three circular spots where the grass was flattened, each about a yard wide. Yes, that was right. The craft had been resting on struts. These must have been where the .
..

"Easy,"
he told himself, as if preparing to tee off. It all had to have been some kind of neurological episode. You've been working hard. Too many synapses firing at the same time. You came into the forest looking for the balls. You tripped. You hit your forehead. Yes, that was it. And you had a weird, very weird, dream.

He felt his forehead, hoping to find a lump. He found it smooth and bumpless. And he had no headache. But, focusing on this aspect of his self-diagnosis, he became aware that he did feel pain somewhere else. A distinctly uncomfortable feeling that reminded him of how he'd felt after the colonoscopy, a feeling of stretching . . .

"Oh. My. God."

Banion burst through the woods onto the fourth fairway and made for the clubhouse with the speed of Pheidippides carrying news of the victory at Marathon. This was an unusual sight at Burning Bush.

A foursome teeing off stopped and stared.

"Clear the area!" Banion shouted at them without breaking stride. "Run for your lives!"

"What's the matter?"

"Aliens!"

"What did he say?" "Wasn't that Jack Banion?" "Did he say 'aliens'?"

By the time he reached the clubhouse, he was drenched in sweat.

"Oh, Mr. Banion," said the attendant. "Speaker Meeker and Justice Fitch were looking for you. Are you well, sir?"

"Call. . . uh . . . uh . . . call . . . uh . . ."

"Mr. Banion?"

"Call. . . the . . . uh . . ."

"You better lie down. I'll get you some water."

"No water! Police. Call. . . police. Attack
..."

Heart attacks were not uncommon at Burning Bush, where the average member's age was well into the sixties. The manager dialed 911 and requested an ambulance.

"It'll be right here," he told Banion. "Lie down on the floor, sir."

"No no no."

"Lie down, sir." He ran off to get the defibrillator kit, berating himself for not having paid close attention during the instruction on its use.

"What's the matter?"

"Mr. Banion, he's having a heart attack. Get a blanket, elevate his legs." Or was that for shock?

The assistant dashed off. How awful. And Mr. Banion was one of the younger members.

The ambulance arrived in under ten minutes.

"No, I said
police!’
cried Banion, now in a very bad temper from arguing with the manager and his assistant, who had been trying to wrap him in blankets while hovering over him with the defibrillator kit, which Banion was not about to let them use on him. No, damnit, he did
not
have pain in his left arm. They must evacuate the course without delay! They might still be out there!

"I don't
want
an ambulance!"

People who have had cardiac episodes often say that. Two emergency medical service technicians strapped a blood-pressure cuff on his arm, lifted his shirt, and attached electrodes to monitor his heartbeat. Another held a clipboard and barked medical history questions at him.

"I'm okay. They
...
put something . . . I'm all
right.
Call the
police.
The military. Call
the Air Force, maybe they're sti
ll in the area!"

"Who?"

"Them! The aliens! In the spaceship, there in the woods, off the fourth fairway."

One of the medical technicians leaned closer to sniff Banion's breath.

"I am not drunk."

"Sir, we're going to take you to the hospital now. Your blood pressure is very high."

"Of course it's high! Call the police! Clear the golf course! Oh. my God!"

"What, sir?"

"The Speaker! Justice Fitch! They may be after them! They're seizing the government! Take the cart! Quickly - tell them! They're in danger! It could be a takeover of the whole country!"

"It was about fifty feet across," said Banion, sitting in the passenger seat, belted in by Bitsey, glassy-eyed from the sedative they'd given him at the hospital. "Maybe sixty. I ought to draw a sketch. Do we have colored pencils at home? The lights were colored."

"Jack." said Bitsey. naturally concerned for her husband, but at the moment preoccupied with what (on earth) excuse she was going to make to Tyler for their not showing up at his - lord - intimate dinner tonight for Sir Hugh and Lady Bletch, "rest. Don't talk."

"God. Bits.
They exist.
They exist."

Should she even get into it? The doctors had told her they didn't quite know what to make of it. They had taken X rays. They showed no contusions, subdural hematomas. He was not drunk. Anyway, Jack barely drank at all. A glass of wine, rarely. Hardly the type to get blotto all alone on the golf course. His blood work was normal. No family history of mental problems. The doctors told her that he had babbled at some length about being . . . how to put it. . . violated. There was no obvious, urn, tearing of tissues. Bitsey shuddered. It was too disgusting.

"We'll say you had a golf-cart accident," she said. "It changes everything. We have to revise our thinking about the universe, religion. My God, Bits."

"You ran into a tree and got a bump."

"But why the medical experimenting? They must be part of an advance team, studying us." 'A bad bump," Bitsey said. 'Advance team for what, though?"

"I'd better call Chip. I don't think you should do the show tomorrow."

"Subjugation? Colonizing? Enslavement?
G
od."
"He'll get someone to fill in."

"You should have seen the ship, Bits. It was like something in a movie."

"Maybe he can get Evan Thomas to fill in for you." "They made my balls act in this strange way." "Jack,
enough."

"They were trying to draw me in. Me. It wasn't an accident. They wanted me."

"No, not Evan Thomas. He's got his eye on your show as it is. All that angling to fill in for you last summer when we were in Turkey?"

"So why me?" Banion murmured.

"1 know - Rick Simmons. I'll tell Chip to get him."

"They could have had the Speaker of the House and a Supreme Court justice. But they picked
me."

"Jack, stop it."

"I don't know if I can, Bits."

"Of course you can."

"I'm just one man. There might be thousands of them out there."

"We'll discuss it
in the morning."

"Millions."

Banion was sitting at his desk, immersed in a book by a former Army colonel who claimed personally to have witnessed alien corpses that had crash-landed at Roswell, New Mexico, when Renira buzzed to tell him that there was a reporter from the
Post
on the line wanting to talk with him about "last Sunday at Burning Bush." Banion scowled owlishly and pondered: should he take the call?

Nothing
was secret in this town. So who had blabbed? Not the manager or the assistant. Burning Bush staff were as discreet as the deaf-mute slaves in the palaces of the caesars. That foursome he'd shouted at to clear the area? The ambulance crew? Someone with a police scanner listening as they radioed ahead to the hospital that they were bringing in a lunatic raving about aliens? The doctors? Surely the Hippocratic oath also extended to doing no harm to your patient by leaking embarrassing details to the press. At any rate, there was now a reporter on the line. Best just stick to the cover story.

"This is John Banion."

"Patrick Cooke, with the
Post.
How are you?" They were always so friendly, these piranhas.

"Tip-top. What can I do for you?"

"I'm following up on a report we had that you had an unusual experience at Burning Bush last Sunday."
"A
very unusual experience, yes."

"How's that?"

"I bogeyed the fourth hole."

He could hear the clicking of Cooke's keyboard.
Every thing you say will be used against you.

"You're doing better than I am. So you ended up at the hospital?"

"I was in shock. I've never bogeyed the fourth."

"You, um,
reported that you'd been abducted by aliens? Three of them, in a spaceship?"

Blast. He had details.

"I
don't remember that part. That
would
be a story. The fact of the matter is, I was in a golf-cart accident." "You were in a golf-cart accident?"

"I'm embarrassed to say. Yes. There's a sharp turn on the path, with a tree on the right. I wasn't paying attention, and I must have gone off the road. I don't remember much. Must have got a nasty bump. Anyway. I'm fine. A bit busy, actually, right now."

Clickety-click.
It was like listening to teeth that were eating you.

"Someone at the hospital" - so they
were
the leakers. Hippocritical Hippocrats! Banion decided his next column would be an attack on the medical profession - "told me that you said you had been, this is a quote, 'raped by aliens.'"

"Ululant nonsense."

"Sorry?"

"Mr. Cooke, I happen to be a close friend of the chairman of the board of
The Washington Post.
She is coming to dinner at my house next week, with the president. My guess is that she would be possibly even more embarrassed than you t
o read a remark - no doubt unat
tributed - in her paper, whose mission,
1
believe, is to convey responsible information to the public and not mischievous gibberish. Or, for that matter, confidential medical data."

"So you deny having reported that at the hospital?"

"1 was in an emergency room being tended to and medicated for a possible subdural hematoma, Mr. Cooke. In such circumstances, I could not affirm or deny the correct spelling of my own name.
However,
I will mention our conversation to your chairman when I speak to her later today. My wife and I are on her benefit committee for the myoplasmitis luminosa dinner in December. Good
day."

Banion felt a Pyrrhic sense of triumph on hanging up. Cooke would probably not run the item he had hoped to, but Banion had certainly not won him over to his admittedly intimate cult of personality. Cooke was probably telling everyone in the newsroom,
"What
an asshole." Banion knew that he was not especially popular among the foot soldiers of the fourth estate. They viewed him as an aloof, supercilious mandarin. He viewed them as a bunch of uncouth, envious hacks. The arrangement suited Banion perfectly. Let him who would turn down a guest slot on his TV show cast the first stone.

Still, it was with a squirrely stomach that he opened the next day's
Post
the moment it landed on his stoop at 5:30
a.m
. Nothing. Wait - a brief item on page three of the Style section, slugged "Teed Off."

Sunday
Host
John O. Banion
was taken to the hospital Sunday afternoon after reportedly driving his golf cart into a tree. A hospital source said that he appeared somewhat disoriented, but was released after
tests showed no serious injury
. Substitute Host
Rick Simmons
filled in. Banion is expected to return to the show next week.