Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (13 page)

Whatever the problem was, they would soon have it in hand, thank God. As the van made a final turn on the lawn and stopped, I read on its side
MOBILE
MEDICAL
UNIT
, followed by an assortment of random numbers and letters. Only a matter of minutes now. It would be good to talk to another human being, after what I had been through.

The black man walked up to the front door of the van, and the white-jacketed driver got out and began talking to him. Two more men in white medical uniforms climbed out of the rear of the van and joined them. It looked as if they might be arguing. The black man was shaking his head. Then one of the men went back into the van and returned carrying an empty stretcher. The black man took it from his hands and leaned it against the side of the communications van. The conversation seemed to become desultory; the medical personnel peered nervously at the crater and at the man in the bulky suit standing motionless at its edge. Everyone was once again inexplicably immobile. The elation I had felt a few moments before was showing cracks of anxiety. The men on the lawn threw occasional expectant looks at the gate. They were waiting for something else.

At least another five minutes must have passed this way. Then the gate swung open again, and a black sedan pulled through and drove directly up to the other vehicles. The driver climbed out of the sedan, taking an uneasy look at the crater. He went around and opened the trunk, from which he pulled out two large green canvas sacks. At a sign from the black man, he dumped these on the lawn next to the car and returned to the driver’s seat. The three medical men, with apparent reluctance, climbed into the sedan. Why were
they
leaving? I needed them. One of them paused halfway into the car, pointed at the medical van, and said something. The black man nodded curtly in reply and turned away. The sedan turned on the lawn and drove off toward the gate. The men on the lawn all watched as the gate opened, admitted the car, and closed again behind it.

The moment the gate was closed, they all turned back toward the crater. The man in the driver’s suit immediately stepped back onto the invisible surface and began to make his way back up the invisible steps and through the invisible door of the building. They were keeping everything a secret from the outside world. But how could they keep it a secret once they had to take care of me? I hated the sight of those medical men disappearing behind the gate.

The three men on the lawn were pulling at the sacks. Out of one of them they produced another spacesuit, which the black man began to put on, somewhat uncertainly. Meanwhile the man in the western shirt was opening the other sack. From it he pulled out and carefully unfolded what appeared to be a large net.

A
net?
Goddamn it! They had sent away the only vaguely medical-looking people I had seen and were coming to get me with a stretcher and a
net!

The original astronaut had made his way back into the next room again. He was shouting at me.

“I’m back, buddy. Can you hear me? We’ve got medical help here. We’ll have you out real quick now. You O.K.?”

“I’m great.” I was feeling my way along the wall between the two rooms. I reached the corner formed with the front wall of the building and turned along it. I remembered that there were two, perhaps three, windows. I reached the first of them and lifted. It slid open. I swung first one and then the other leg up over the sill so that I was sitting on it. Then, twisting around so that I was lying with my belly on the sill, I carefully lowered myself out the window until my feet settled on the soft invisible lawn below.

I
walked over to the edge of the crater and stepped onto the visible rim. The surface was charred black and hard like cinder, and I thought I could see it smudge slightly under my steps. It was immediately easier to walk: even though I could not see my own feet, I could now at least see the ground beneath them. As I continued past the charred rim out onto the soft green lawn, I found that I could distinctly see the grass crush each time I placed a foot down and then spring up again as I raised it. This annoyed and disappointed me; I was already beginning to understand that if I was not going to be entirely visible, it was better not to be visible at all. Anything in between was unsatisfactory, combining all the disadvantages of both conditions. But I was encouraged to see that no grass stain seemed to be adhering to the soles of my shoes.

I had not really made any reasoned decision to escape rescue; I was simply acting out of instinct — out of anger and fear, I think. It was the net mainly. The sight of the net had sent me charging through the window and across the lawn, pushing aside the paralyzing terror of sickness and death. I did not yet quite realize that I was a sort of fugitive, but I knew that for the time being I would stay clear of these people, see what they wanted, not let them know exactly where I stood. I would leave myself a choice for now.

I took a wide circle around the man in the business suit and his cowboy companion and stepped up carefully behind them. As I had thought, they were studying architectural plans of the building. I joined them in their study, keeping a good eighteen inches back for fear one of them might make some abrupt movement and collide with me. I suddenly became quite conscious of my own breathing; it seemed extraordinary that they did not notice it. I conceived a strong desire to clear my throat, and when I swallowed, the noise sounded to me like an explosion. But they remained oblivious to me.

They had the roll of papers open to the floor plan of the ground floor, and I set about systematically memorizing it. I would have liked a look at the second floor as well, but I never got more than a glimpse at it.

The man in the western shirt, who was actually holding the plans, was maintaining a continuous conversation with the two men in diving suits. “All right, Tyler, you’re right in front of the entrance now. Remember, you’ve got two steps up and you’re on a kind of little landing in front of the door. Morrissey, you leave that door open for Tyler?” He had the kind of southern accent and gregarious manner you associate with the army, commercial airline pilots, and CB radios. His extra bulk stuffed his elaborate shirt and gave his face a porcine expression, and, despite his continual joviality, made his little eyes seem wary’, almost mean.

The other man, although he was plainly in charge, rarely spoke, and when he did it was to issue a brief command in a quiet, emotionless tone. Although his features were perfectly regular — many people would no doubt describe him as handsome — there was something reptilian about the creasing, hairless flesh of his face and head. I disliked him from the first. He turned away from his subordinate to look at the horizon, and I could see in his left cheek an almost imperceptible twitching movement; he was probably angry, I thought. Removing his headset with deliberate precision and placing it in the side pocket of his jacket, he turned slowly back to the other man and spoke in a soft but unpleasantly intense tone.

“Clellan, you know Morrissey and Tyler better than I do. I want you to find the most appropriate method of impressing upon each of them the critical importance of locating the man in the building. It is of very great importance to me; it is of very great importance to the government of the United States; it is of very great importance to the person in the building; it is of very great importance to Morrissey and Tyler. I am relying upon you, Clellan.” He turned and walked over to the communications van, which he entered through the side door.

“You men hear that? You hear what the Colonel says?” asked Clellan a little uneasily. “We’re not screwing this one up. You forget about the cat, Morrissey. But don’t forget about the cat, if you get me. Is he still not answering?… Well, keep talking to him. He has to be in there. Can you hear him moving or anything? … Listen, the guy may be in pretty bad shape. Hell, he
must
be in bad shape — or we’d be looking at him.
Jeeeesus! …
He might have passed out. Tyler, when you get the door open, you wait this side of it until Morrissey finds the guy. Then you move right up with the net. Even if he’s not moving, you get that net over him right away, hear? … You don’t know what’s in this guy’s head. It’s not good for him or anybody else if he gets crazy and wanders off. I hope to tell you it won’t be good for you guys.”

By this time they were in the reception room, and Tyler was bent over the door to Wachs’s office. He had a large ring with keys on it, and he was evidently searching for an invisible keyhole in the invisible door. A difficult task — and with those enormous gloves, perhaps an impossible one.

“Don’t forget to try the doorknob,” Clellan was saying. “Oftentimes, you’ll find the keyhole right in the doorknob… You got it? … Above the doorknob? … How many inches? There may be other locked doors. … You’ve got to try both keys. One opens just the front door; the other opens everything else in the building except the laboratory. The laboratory should be the only one we don’t have. Only the guy who ran the place had that key — that was for security.” This seemed to strike Clellan as hilarious for some reason, and he exploded into loud laughter. The Colonel, who had returned from the van and stood beside him again, turned and looked at him impassively. Clellan became silent.

“You got it?… O.K., ease that door open real slow. He could be lying there on the floor right behind it. We don’t want to hurt him. Tyler, make sure you keep that net folded up and out of sight. The main thing is, don’t upset him.”

Tyler seemed to be holding the door open just enough for Morrissey to squeeze through. They were taking no chances of my slipping away like the cat. When Morrissey was inside, Tyler pulled the door shut, keeping hold of the invisible doorknob, so that his arm remained oddly extended as if he were waiting to shake hands with someone. With his detector Morrissey was poking gingerly at the floor all around the door.

“Jesus, Morrissey, he has to be in there somewhere,” Clellan was saying. “Keep looking. And be careful. Don’t step on the poor bastard. Any contamination? … Nothing. Keep sweeping it, though. The guy himself could be contaminated from somewhere else, even if the room is clean. All right, Tyler, you better get in there too. Go in easy and lock the door behind you.”

This took Tyler several minutes. Morrissey was meanwhile moving along the front wall of the room, waving his detector back and forth, colliding awkwardly with the furniture. At one point his detector encountered something soft near the floor, and he thought he might have me. “Move in easy! Come up with that net, Tyler!” Clellan began to yell. It turned out to be a small couch.

Clellan was growing unhappier by the minute. “Jesus. Where is the fucker. You sure you heard someone before, Morrissey? … Tyler, I want you to move north along the west wall. About ten feet and you come to another door. Then right around the corner another door in the north wall. I want you to get to those doors and tell me if they’re locked, hear?”

Tyler began to retrace his steps to the west wall. Morrissey was moving systematically with his detector back and forth across the room, as if he were mowing a lawn. When he came to the desk, he laid down his detector and patted the entire surface with his hands; then he climbed laboriously down onto his hands and knees and reached under it. As he worked his way through the office he encountered many things, some of which he had trouble identifying. (“Maybe it’s encounter a human form. When he had completed his search of the room, he laid down his detector and looked at Tyler, who had by then located the doors and determined that both were unlocked and one was ajar. Then both men turned and looked at us expectantly. Standing in midair in their white spacesuits, they seemed like supplicants from another planet.

“Damn!” barked Clellan.

“Disappointing,” said the Colonel, at almost the same instant, in an eerily flat tone.

Transmitted over the radio, this had the effect of causing both men to twitch in midair in unison.

The Colonel and Clellan looked at each other, and then each of them made some adjustment to his headset, which apparently shut off transmission.

Clellan spoke first: “We don’t know for sure that there was ever anyone in there, sir. In fact, it’s pretty unlikely, when you think about it. We’ve only got Morrissey’s word on it. It’s pretty strange in there. Maybe Morrissey’s head doesn’t work so well in there.”

The Colonel was silent for a long moment; he seemed to be considering this.

“That’s a possibility, of course,” he said at last. “But I am inclined to accept Morrissey’s report… Of course, you know him, and you’re in a better position to assess his reliability. He’s your man.”

The Colonel spoke slowly in a detached tone as if he were giving most of his mind to thought rather than speech.

“I would, by the way,” he went on, “like to see everything we have on both Morrissey and Tyler. And on the man in the communications van— ‘Gomez,’ isn’t it?”

He became silent again, narrowing his eyes and wrinkling up his pallid face, and then continued. “No, there certainly seems to have been a cat; and a human being — no matter how much more extraordinary it seems— is logically no more unlikely than a cat. In any case, Clellan, we lose nothing by assuming that there
is
a man in there. And if there is, the potential benefits are incalculable.”

He paused again as if trying nonetheless to calculate them.

“Incalculable. The scientific implications alone… Standing here now, we can hardly begin to conceive of the scientific and medical uses of a totally invisible, complete, living human body. Even the most obvious experiments would yield information never before obtainable. Devising ways to take advantage of the opportunities would become almost a discipline in itself.”

A moment before, having looked at the building plans more than long enough, I had been about to leave my new friends, but the conversation had suddenly taken a turn that held my interest totally, and I remained standing there with them, absolutely still, trying to hold my breath during the pauses.