Mostly Harmless (23 page)

She knew there was something slightly odd about it.

Well, in fact, there were about a million things that were slightly odd about it, but there was one that was nagging at her and she hadn’t quite got it.

She sighed and yawned.

As she waited for the tape to rewind she cleared away some of the dirty polystyrene coffee cups that had accumulated on the editing desk and tipped them into the bin.

She was sitting in a small editing suite at a video production company in Soho. She had
DO NOT DISTURB
notices plastered all over the door and a block on all incoming calls at the switchboard. This was originally to protect her astonishing scoop, but now it was to protect her from embarrassment.

She would watch the tape all the way through again from the beginning. If she could bear to. She might do some fast forwarding here and there.

It was about four o’clock on Monday afternoon, and she had a kind of sick feeling. She was trying to work out what the cause of this slightly sick feeling was, and there was no shortage of candidates.

First of all, it had all come on top of the overnight flight from New York. The red-eye. Always a killer, that.

Then, being accosted by aliens on her lawn and flown to the planet Rupert. She was not sufficiently experienced in that sort of thing to be able to say for sure that that was always a killer, but she would be prepared to bet that those who went through it regularly cursed it. There were always stress charts being published in magazines. Fifty stress points for losing
your job. Seventy-five points for a divorce or changing your hairstyle and so on. None of them ever mentioned being accosted on your lawn by aliens and then being flown to the planet Rupert, but she was sure it was worth a few dozen points.

It wasn’t that the journey had been particularly stressful. It had been extremely dull in fact. Certainly it had been no more stressful than the trip she had just taken across the Atlantic and it had taken roughly the same time, about seven hours.

Well, that was pretty astounding, wasn’t it? Flying to the outer limits of the solar system in the same time that it took to fly to New York meant they must have some fantastic unheard of form of propulsion in the ship. She quizzed her hosts about it and they agreed that it was pretty good.

“But how does it
work?
” she had demanded excitedly. She was still quite excited at the beginning of the trip.

She found that part of the tape and played it through to herself. The Grebulons, which is what they called themselves, were politely showing her which buttons they pressed to make the ship go.

“Yes, but what
principle
does it work on?” she heard herself demand, from behind the camera.

“Oh, you mean is it something like a warp drive or something like that?” they said.

“Yes,” persisted Tricia. “What
is
it?”

“It probably is something of the kind,” they said.

“Like
what?
”

“Warp drive, photon drive, something like that. You’d have to ask the flight engineer.”

“Which one is he?”

“We don’t know. We have all lost our minds, you see.”

“Oh yes,” said Tricia, a little faintly. “So you said. Um, how did you lose your minds, exactly, then?”

“We don’t know,” they said, patiently.

“Because you’ve lost your minds,” echoed Tricia, glumly.

“Would you like to watch television? It is a long flight. We watch television. It is something we enjoy.”

All of this riveting stuff was on the tape, and fine viewing it made. First of all the picture quality was extremely poor. Tricia didn’t know why this was, exactly. She had a feeling that the Grebulons responded to a slightly different range of light frequencies, and that there had been a lot of ultraviolet around, which was mucking up the video camera. There were a lot of interference patterns and video snow as well. Probably something to do with the warp drive that none of them knew the first thing about.

So what she had on tape, essentially, was a bunch of slightly thin and discolored people sitting around watching televisions that were showing network broadcasts. She had also pointed the camera out of the very tiny viewport near her seat and got a nice, slightly streaky effect of stars. She knew it was real, but it would have taken a good three or four minutes to fake.

In the end she had decided to save her precious videotape for Rupert itself and had simply sat back and watched television with them. She even dozed off for a while.

So part of her sick feeling came from the sense that she had had all that time in an alien spacecraft of astounding technological design, and had spent most of it dozing in front of
reruns of “M
^*
A
^*
S
^*
H” and “Cagney and Lacey.” But what else was there to do? She had taken some photos as well, of course, all of which had subsequently turned out to be badly fogged when she got them back from the chemist.

Another part of her sick feeling probably came from the landing on Rupert. This at least had been dramatic and hair-raising. The ship had come sweeping in over a dark and somber landscape, a terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its parent sun, Sol, that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars of the mind of an abandoned child.

Lights blazed through the frozen darkness and guided the ship into the mouth of some kind of cave that seemed to bend itself open to accept the small craft.

Unfortunately, because of the angle of their approach, and the depth at which the small, thick viewport was set into the craft’s skin, it hadn’t been possible to get the video camera to point directly at any of it. She ran through that bit of the tape.

The camera was pointing directly at the sun.

This is normally very bad for a video camera. But when the sun is roughly a third of a billion miles away, it doesn’t do any harm. In fact it hardly makes any impression at all. You just get a small point of light right in the middle of the frame, which could be just about anything. It was just one star in a multitude.

Tricia fast-forwarded.

Ah. Now, the next bit had been quite promising. They had emerged out of the ship into a vast, gray hangarlike structure. This was clearly alien technology on a dramatic scale. Huge gray buildings under the dark canopy of the Perspex bubble.
These were the same buildings that she had been looking at at the end of the tape. She had taken more footage of them while leaving Rupert a few hours later, just as she was about to reboard the spacecraft for the journey home. What did they remind her of?

Well, as much as anything else they reminded her of a film set from just about any low-budget science-fiction movie of the last twenty years. A lot larger, of course, but it all looked thoroughly tawdry and unconvincing on the video screen. Apart from the dreadful picture quality, she had been struggling with the unexpected effects of gravity that was appreciably lower than on Earth, and she had found it very hard to keep the camera from bouncing around in an embarrassingly unprofessional way. It was therefore impossible to make out any detail.

And now here was the Leader coming forward to greet her, smiling and sticking his hand out.

That was all he was called. The Leader.

None of the Grebulons had names, largely because they couldn’t think of any. Tricia discovered that some of them had thought of calling themselves after characters from television programs they had picked up from Earth, but hard as they had tried to call each other Wayne and Bobby and Chuck, some remnant of something lurking deep in the cultural subconscious they had brought with them from the distant stars that were their home must have told them that this really wasn’t right and wouldn’t do.

The Leader had looked pretty much like all the others. Possibly a bit less thin. He said how much he enjoyed her
shows on TV, that he was her greatest fan, how glad he was that she had been able to come along and visit them on Rupert and how much everybody had been looking forward to her coming, how he hoped the flight had been comfortable and so on. There was no particular sense she could detect of being any kind of emissary from the stars or anything.

Certainly, watching it now on videotape, he just looked like some guy in costume and makeup, standing in front of a set that wouldn’t hold up too well if you leaned against it.

She sat staring at the screen with her face cradled in her hands, and shaking her head in slow bewilderment.

This was
awful
.

Not only was this bit awful but she knew what was coming next. It was the bit where the Leader asked if she was hungry after the flight, and would she perhaps like to come and have something to eat? They could discuss things over a little dinner.

She could remember what she was thinking at this point.

Alien food.

How was she going to deal with it?

Would she actually have to eat it? Would she have access to some sort of paper napkin she could spit stuff out into? Wouldn’t there be all sorts of differential immunity problems?

It turned out to be hamburgers.

Not only did it turn out to be hamburgers, but the hamburgers it turned out to be were very clearly and obviously McDonald’s hamburgers which had been reheated in a microwave. It wasn’t just the look of them. It wasn’t just the smell.
It was the polystyrene clamshell packages they came in which had “McDonald’s” printed all over them.

“Eat! Enjoy!” said the Leader. “Nothing is too good for our honored guest!”

This was in his private apartment. Tricia looked around it in bewilderment that had bordered on fear but had nevertheless got it all on videotape.

The apartment had a water bed in it. And a Midi hi-fi. And one of those tall electrically illuminated glass things that sit on tabletops and appear to have large globules of sperm floating in them. The walls were covered in velvet.

The Leader lounged against a brown corduroy beanbag chair and squirted breath freshener into his mouth.

Tricia began to feel very scared, suddenly. She was farther from Earth than any human being, to her knowledge, had ever been, and she was with an alien creature who was lounging against a brown corduroy beanbag and squirting breath freshener into his mouth.

She didn’t want to make any false moves. She didn’t want to alarm him. But there were things she had to know.

“How did you … where did you get … this?” she asked, gesturing around the room nervously.

“The decor?” asked the Leader. “Do you like it? It is very sophisticated. We are a sophisticated people, we Grebulons. We buy sophisticated consumer durables … by mail order.”

Tricia had nodded tremendously slowly at this point.

“Mail order …” she had said.

The Leader chuckled. It was one of those dark chocolate, reassuring, silky chuckles.

“I think you think they ship it here. No! Ha-ha! We have arranged a special box number in New Hampshire. We make regular pick-up visits. Ha-ha!” He lounged back in a relaxed fashion on his beanbag, reached for a reheated French fry and nibbled the end of it, an amused smile playing across his lips.

Tricia could feel her brain beginning to bubble very slightly. She kept the video camera going.

“How do you, well, er, how do you pay for these wonderful … things?”

The Leader chuckled again.

“American Express,” he said with a nonchalant shrug.

Tricia nodded slowly again. She knew that they gave cards exclusively to just about anybody.

“And these?” she said, holding up the hamburger he had presented her with.

“It is very easy,” said the Leader. “We stand in line.”

Again, Tricia realized with a cold, trickling feeling going down her spine, that explained an awful lot.

She hit the fast-forward button again. There was nothing of any use here at all. It was all nightmarish madness. She could have faked something that would have looked more convincing.

Another sick feeling began to creep over her as she watched this hopeless, awful tape, and she began, with slow horror, to realize that it must be the answer.

She must be …

She shook her head and tried to get a grip.

An overnight flight going east … The sleeping pills she
had taken to get her through it. The vodka she’d had to set the sleeping pills going.

What else? Well. There was seventeen years of obsession that a glamorous man with two heads, one of which was disguised as a parrot in a cage, had tried to pick her up at a party but had then impatiently flown off to another planet in a flying saucer. There suddenly seemed to be all sorts of bothersome aspects to that idea that had never really occurred to her. Never occurred to her. In seventeen years.

She stuffed her fist into her mouth.

She must get help.

Then there had been Eric Bartlett banging on about alien spacecraft landing on her lawn. And before that … New York had been, well, very hot and stressful. The high hopes and the bitter disappointment. The astrology stuff.

She must have had a nervous breakdown.

That was it. She was exhausted and she had had a nervous breakdown and had started hallucinating some time after she got home. She had dreamed the whole story. An alien race of people dispossessed of their own lives and histories, stuck on a remote outpost of our solar system and filling their cultural vacuum with our cultural junk. Ha! It was nature’s way of telling her to check into an expensive medical establishment very quickly.

She was very, very sick. She looked at how many large coffees she’d got through as well, and realized how heavily she was breathing and how fast.

Part of solving any problem, she told herself, was realizing
that you had it. She started to bring her breathing under control. She had caught herself in time. She had seen where she was. She was on the way back from whatever psychological precipice she had been on the brink of. She started to calm down, to calm down, to calm down. She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes.

After a while, now that she was breathing normally again, she opened them again.

So where had she got this tape from, then?