Revolution (4 page)

What the
hell for?

I shook
my head looking at it sitting there.

"It's
not mine and I don't want to look at it."

Yes you do.

"Uh
uh, no I don't."

You need
to, Sean. You know that thing's not gonna to let go of yah unless you take a
peek.

"I
said I wouldn't."

Why?

"Because
I told the buyer I would just hand it over, no looking. I promised."

Who
cares, man?

I opened
and closed my fingers over the thing again as I sucked cold air through my
teeth.

Sean?

"I'm
thinking. I'm thinking."

Fuckin
open it!

My hand
slammed down on the envelope.

I felt
around, pressing through the paper, on an outline of something small and square
and flat inside.

History
or bunk, the sensation of a lifetime or a hoax, it didn't matter. Because
someone was still willing to pay a very high price for it, and that did matter.

And it
was at that point that I found out just how good it feels to own something that
no one else can have.

Biting
my lip I slipped my fingers under the flap of the envelope and reached inside.

I didn't
know what to expect, a static tingle maybe, at least something special upon
touching it.

But I
didn't feel a thing as I gripped it under my fingernails and dragged it out
into the open.

Face
down I left the old black and white Polaroid on the desk for a while longer
before I dared turn it over.

And when
I did I sat back, took deep drag on my cigarette, and looked down at the face
of man from another world.

#

Charlatan,
hoaxer or plain self deluded, George Adamski, "professor" to his
followers, met a "man from another world" in the Catskill Mountain,
Northern California, on November 15
^th
, 1952.

That man
was Orthon.

Adamski
wrote a best seller, 20,000 in hardback, that stamped him onto the map of the
weird and the wonderful forever. His photographs of flying saucers were first
printed in Fate Magazine, which brought him to the attention of his would be
publishers.

The only
other person, apart from Adamski himself, who had ever seen Orthon, was Lou
Zinsstag, Adamski's then secretary. And it was Adamski, of Polish and Egyptian
descent, who had let Zinsstag glimpse this very photograph.

It was
unique. One of a kind.

And no
copies of it had ever been made.

And no
one knew what had happened to it after Adamski died in 1962 either.

Until
now.

#

I sat
there looking down at it, careful only to touch the edges in case the sweat
from my fingers damaged the emulsion. The picture was already faded, more grey
and white than black and white. But the image was clear enough.

A young
guy in profile with fair-hair cut short, maybe twenty-four, twenty-five. But
the guy looked much like any other guy to me. His eyes were Asiatic, though
thinner and longer than normal, his nose slimmer, his jaw-line longer than you
might expect. Still, if you met him on the street, there wasn't much about him
that said
I am from another planet
.

No
second glance required.

It was a
hoax. It had to be.

A few
bucks had been passed on to some no Joe schmuck, his picture had been taken in
1952, and that was that. I was convinced of it. Rumor and legend had done the
rest.

My buyer
was wasting his money.

Still,
no one had ever come forward and claimed,
that's me. I'm the guy in the
picture
. Then again, since the picture was never made public, what was
there to come forward for?

The
whole thing felt like a snake eating itself out of existence.

It
didn't matter.
The Turin shroud is a fake
, I told myself,
a
fourteenth century fake. But that doesn't make it worthless. It's still
priceless.

Well
this picture wasn't the Turin shroud, and the guy in it sure wasn't Jesus
Christ either. But it was worth something, even if only for the legend behind
it.

It's a
funny thing about not seeing something you're convinced exists. I grows in your
mind, until it becomes an unbearable mystery that blooms out like a wet crystal
of gentian violet staining every brain cell in its path.

What if
some geek decides to steal it?

"Now
why would anyone want to do that? I mean it's just an old photograph, right?
There's nothing about it that says Orthon, Man from Venus, now, is there? Who
even knows about it?

Andresen
for a start.

"Shut
up!"

And
every freak with a spare meat cleaver sniffing around for blood, just itching
to chop his way into the history books.

Now I
knew that I couldn't trust letting it out of my sight.

I sat
down to think about it some more and swung back and forth in my good old
battered desk chair.

What
makes anything worth anything? The cost of the paint for the portrait, the
canvas it was painted on, the cost of a lump of granite some ugly museum piece
was chiseled out of?

Because
it's one of a kind, that's why.

Yeah,
that's it. Because it's one of a kind. I mean, look at a Picasso. Everyone
suddenly wants one and then price shoots up. Nobody likes the damn things, and
most of them end up slammed inside a vault where no one can see them anyway, or
a gallery where folks duly come along to see what kind of an idiot with too
much money has decided to buy, and the fact that the idiot only bought it
because it's the only one of a kind of that particular Picasso. It's like a
runaway train. It's the principle of feedback.

 But
Orthon was no Picasso. The eyes maybe, the nose, the thin lipped mouth, the
extended jaw line, but he was no Picasso.

What
about a stolen Picasso? A missing Picasso? A Picasso that no one knew about,
but which was rumored to exist? A Picasso hidden away in some dingy basement, a
Picasso that can only be looked at under torchlight, never on public display,
because there's always some psycho with a cleaver ready to acquire it for some
idiot buyer with too much money.

It's
ownership that pushes the price through the roof, and that price is only a
measure of want, of need, of compulsion and obsession. How many men or women on
the street couldn't give a shit for a Picasso? How many of the few who knew of
the hidden Picasso would pay
anything
to get their hands on it? Who
would be willing to keep that secret hidden away for fear of it being
slaughtered for it?

#

No
copies.

Something
jerked inside of my skull like a hornet sting.

Here I
was in possession of the most sought after piece of underground mumbo jumbo
memorabilia there ever was, and it was the only one of its kind.

I dropped
it back in the envelope, safe, sound, secure, out of sight out of mind. And
after I did that I swear to God I had to take a second peek, just to make sure
it was really in there.

It was.

Thoughts
crashed in and tugged away again before I had time to make any sense of them,
images and blurs jiggering with lethal little spikes of orange and violet that
somehow I just knew were tattooing the real truth all over my brain.

I needed
prints made. Ten say, but no negatives.

This was
already turning tricky.

I didn't
want to let the thing out of my sight.

I could
take it to a developer, have reproductions made from the original. But that
would mean having to let go of it.

But what
if something happened to it, it got lost, destroyed, and my take on it gone
with it?

And
already I could see some lethal concoction spilling over the emulsion and the
whole image of Orthon sliding away in a rip tide along with my money.

And what
if some geek decided to steal it?

A
dangerous geek.

But why
would anyone do that? It's just an old photograph. There's nothing on it that
says Orthon, I am a Man from Another World. So who would know?

Those
creeps are everywhere.

I jumped
up and pushed my fingers through my hair.

I
couldn't trust letting it out of my sight.

I was
shaking with every thought.

I had to
keep it safe.

Okay, so
how many knew I had it? Mrs. Andresen for one and me made two, only two. And
she wasn't about to talk.

Or had
she?

I stood
up and went over to the coffee pot on my filing cabinet, the one with the
busted locks. I pulled open the top drawer and yanked out a mug. But my eyes
kept swinging over to that envelope on the desk behind me.

Pouring
the coffee I turned my back on it for a few seconds.

What
about the door?

I had
visions of a wild-eyed maniac bursting through the wall, an axe in one hand,
and his mission statement written in green ink in his other.

"But
no one knows it's here."

"Except
for the ads, the small print, the web pages. Jesus Christ, half the fucking
planet knows I was looking for it!"

Looking
for
it, but they don't know I
have
it.

Secrets
and lies.

"Give
me a break."

No one
wants it except the buyer, and it hasn't cost me zilch so far. I don't even
know if it's the right one, or even if it existed in the first place.

So it's
a fake.

"What
difference does that make?"

#

I had to
think.

I could
scan it. I could stick it on the computer. I could fire it into hyperspace and
firewall the damn thing from here to Mars. I could shield it from key loggers
and malware, spyware, snoopers and hackers, from all those creepy little shits.

They'll
figure it out, Sean. They'll
know
you're hiding something.

Yeah,
and then it'll be all over the internet and each downloaded copy dissipating
the power of the original. Christ, even the Pentagon can't keep hackers out.

You
can't do it. You can't upload it. You can't even digitalize it.

"I
can't do anything with it."

I spilt
coffee over my hand.

"Shit!"

I licked
it off and sucked the sting went out of my fingers.

#

Scan it?

"Nah,
the heat of a scanner might melt the damn thing and turn it into fudge."

I put
the coffee down on the desk and lit another cigarette.

Think.

I have
it and nobody else does. That's makes a difference.

And I
could lose it.

Or get
killed for it.

"Shut
up!"

I
inhaled the smoke deeper. The ashtray was mountain of cigarette butts spilling
all over the desk.

I calmed
down. I
had
to calm down. And after a few deep breaths I felt better. I
stubbed my cigarette out and lit another.

"Besides,
who's even heard of Adamski?"

Well,
since his flying saucer photographs adorn the walls of every nut on the planet,
not to mention enthusiast, I'd say about whole the world.

I poured
another coffee.

This was
turning tricky into impossible.

I could
stick it in a vault. It might be safe there. But then what about me?

What if
anyone finds out I have the damn thing?

Deny
deny deny.

"But
that would only make it sound as if I have something to hide, which I
have."

Tell
them that it's worthless then.

"Same
goes."

Go
public.

"Get
fuckin real. And lose everything I've worked for? What about the book?"

My arms
flew wide as I addressed an audience of stale air.

I could
just see it now. My book dead, dud and buried even before it had a chance to be
born. And if no photograph I had no story.

Don't
hand it over then. Don't give it to the buyer.

"It's
too dangerous to keep."

I've got
it.

"What?"

 We'll
go out and burn it in the desert together.

"But
that would mean I would have to give the buyer his money back, and bang goes my
commission with it."