Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (465 page)

I try to look busy for a second, checking the place as she comes up beside me. Joey says hello. She answers him in a low alto voice—friendly, but with a hesitant sort of nervousness to it.

I didn’t put the nervousness there. She had it when I met her, so don’t blame me.

* * * *

I’m not bothered by sky-eyes or fiery mountains now. The Boys are picking out one of my favorite silly tunes, “Old Joe Clark.”

I went down to Old Joe Clark’s, Never been there before.

He slept on a feather bed, And I slept on the floor.

Oh, fare thee well, Old Joe Clark, Fare thee well, I’m gone.

Fare thee well, Old Joe Clark, Better be movin’ on!

She looks up at me.

“Hi.”

I look back down at her. “Hi, yourself. How’s the nursery?”

“Pretty good today, but we had a late afternoon rush. I hurried home and changed, but this saleslady came by and I couldn’t resist letting her show me some things. I bought some nice scents so…so…that’s why I’m late.”

She suddenly looks a little scared, as if she’s said something she shouldn’t have.

Oh, yes. Chuck hasn’t got a sense of smell and hates to be reminded of it.

Well, true I haven’t been able to pick up anything weaker than a six-day-dead steer in almost two years, but has Chuck really been so irritable that Elise should be frightened by a passing remark?

I shrug. “Have you eaten yet?”

“I had a snack earlier.” She looks relieved. “I can fry us up a couple of steaks when we get home, if you want me to.”

She wears her light brown hair in a permanent—swept around the ears like Doris Day. I always hated that style so Chuck tells her he likes it. She’s too damn pretty anyway. A flaw helps.

“Come on.” I grab her elbow and nod at Joey to take over watching the door. He’s flirting with a teenybopper but I take the hand stamp with me. No one gets brew here unless he’s been stamped. By me.

Elise steps a little ahead of me. She knows her walk drives me crazy, even after seven months or so of living together. It’s like the way she is in bed. Totally committed. Every move is a caress. If it’s not me or her plants she’s stroking, it’s the air, her clothes, the sawdust she’s walking on.

She’ll do. She’s unsophisticated and decorative. Ideally, I’d have found someone without any education, but hell, everyone’s been to college these days. At least she doesn’t remind me of things, and she tries awful hard to please me.

The thing I guess I feel guilty about is leading her on. She obviously thinks she’s going to work on me real hard and maybe I’ll ask her to marry me. She’s wrong.

I’ve already decided to marry her. But I have to keep up appearances. I’m the strong, silent type, remember? Chuck will have to be coaxed.

Damn it, I’ve got to stay in character! Would it do her any good to have Them catch up with me?

Old Joe Clark has got a house, Sixteen storeys high,

And every storey in that house, Is filled with chicken pie.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Her hand is on my arm, playing with the thick hairs that gather under the shirt cuff. Those deep brown eyes of hers—she uses them like fingertips to touch my face lightly, shyly, as if to make sure I’m really there—they show concern. Is it obvious I’m not myself tonight?

That jet, flying so high in the sunshine…young Allan Fowler coming by later, to pester me with his foolishness…then all this philosophical crap I’ve been internalizing all night. Yeah, I’m going to have to pay attention to the old facade.

The secret of lying well is to do as little as possible.

“Oh, I was just thinking about that song they’re doing now. We used to sing it when I was a kid. There’s about a thousand verses.”

I take a long pull from my beer.

“I didn’t know you used to sing, too. Is that when you learned the harmonica?” Her voice trembles just a bit, but the part of me controlling the mouth doesn’t seem to notice. I’m on automatic.

“Um, yeah. Some of the other kids with folks at the Institute and I, we formed the Stygian Stegosaurus Band. Thought we were pretty hot shit. We played frat houses and the like. Nothing serious. Father bought me a banjo, but it never really took like the piano.”

My next exhalation feels like a sigh. The song ends and so does the set. I look around and everything is peaceful, but I still check twice. When I was in the service I used to be able to smell trouble. Now I have to use my eyes.

Now, stop that. Don’t think about the service! What’s gotten into you, anyway?

I’m tired of yelling at myself. What a rotten day.

I turn to talk to Elise…Now, what’s she got that look on her face for? What is it, amazement? Hope? Fear?

Oh, boy. What I just said.

Think…Father…I never mentioned my father before, though she used to try to draw me out about my past.

And the Institute! And music, my childhood…the piano.

There is a haze in front of me, a barrier of palpable grief. It hangs like a portcullis, cutting off escape. By touch I grab up the beer and swallow to hide the turmoil on my face. Think. Think.

The band’s name she’ll bleep out. Probably thinks it’s dirty. Must recoup the rest. How? Make the Institute…“the Institution” ?…A place for delinquents? Father could become “Father Murphy,” a kindly priest…

I can envision my old man grinning at me now. “See?” he’d say. “See how hard it is to maintain a good lie?”

I put the beer down without looking at her. “I’m going for a walk. Get some air. Tell Joey I’ll be right back, okay?”

I can see out the corner of my eye that she nods. I try to walk straight on my way out the door.

* * * *

…Her eyes were gray…When she laughed it felt like my chest was a kite and I’d light up into the sky…Parmin introduced us—I never knew a woman like her could exist…

“Go,” he said.

“But Parmin, Janie has her own work to do, and my team is expecting those B-1 and Trident parts to be integrated into the ships …”

“No. Your deputies can take over for a time, while the two of you go for a honeymoon. Am I not the expert? Have I not been watching your species for twenty of your generations? I will not have two of my department heads distracted later, while things are approaching completion.

“Go, Brad. Look into each other’s eyes, make love, get a baby started. The child will be born on a new world…”

* * * *

I rest my head against the cool, damp bricks. Around back of the Yankee Dollar, near the garbage cans, I try to keep from crying out loud.

The pain is hot. A searing, almost hormonal rejection, as if my body were trying to throw off a revolting insertion…a transplanted organ, or an alien idea. The agony is dull and sweaty, with a faint delusional quality, and the rejected organ, I realize, is my own mind.

My hands grope against the wall. Fingers dig into the recessed lines of mortar that surround each of the bricks, my anchors. The texture is hard, yet crumbly. Little fragments break off under my fingernails.

The gritty coolness crackles against my brow as I roll it against the masonry…feeling the solidity of the building.

It is comforting, that solidity. Good heavy brick. Bound by steel rods and thick goops of cement that permeate and bond—to hold up the roof. To stand. It’s comforting to think about bricks.

Think about bricks.

Bricks are hard because the constituent molecules are bound. They all hold together and gravity is defied. Randomness, too, is held off. Chaos is stopped so long as the molecules don’t leave their assigned places.

And they can’t do that. The vibrational energy they’d need would be too high. No way over that barrier, except if they all decided to tunnel. And brick molecules can’t all decide to tunnel at once, can they? Without someone to tell them to?

My fingers claw harder into the gritty mortar and a layer of skin scrapes away painfully. Don’t tunnel, I cry silently to the molecules. Don’t. Stay here and be content as a brick. A simple honorable brick among bricks, which holds up roofs and keeps the cold wind off people…

I plead desperately…and somehow I sense agreement. At least the wall doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In a momentary shiver, the fit is over. I’m left standing here feeling drained and a bit silly, with a dusty brow and filthy hands. I let the latter drop and turn to rest my back against the wall with a sigh.

It is a damp evening. Faint tendrils of fog creep across the twenty yards of parking lot between me and the far fence. The fog curls past like the fingers of an old blind woman—touching lightly the corner wall, the parked cars, the overflowing garbage cans—and moving on.

I start to cringe as a vaporous flagellum drifts along the wall to brush me. Don’t. It’s only fog. That’s all. Just fog.

I used to like fog. It always smelled good. Lots of negative ions, I suppose. Still, here next to the garbage cans the stench must be pretty bad. I wish I could tell.

Laughter feels dry and artificial, yet I laugh. Here I am, suffering something akin to a psychotic break, and I’m worried about my damned sense of smell!

* * * *

Parmin spoke so slowly toward the end, but cheerfully in spite of the pain.

“… The machines I have shown you how to build will do their part. My former masters, those who hold your world in secret quarantine, will be taken by surprise. They believe you will be incapable of any such constructs for hundreds of your years. You are all to be congratulated for making them so quietly and so well.

“Using these machines will be another matter entirely, however. These devices must be talked to. They must be coaxed. Their operators must deal with them on a plane that is at the meeting of physics and metaphysics—at the juncture of mathematics and meditation.

“That is why I selected men such as you, Brad. You fly jet aircraft, to be sure. But more importantly, you fly the same way you play the piano. All of our pilots must learn to play their ships, for persuading them to tunnel between the stars will require the same empathy as the pianist, who coaxes hammer strokes on metal wires to tunnel glory into a human brain.”

* * * *

My diver’s license says I am Charles L. Magun. For well over a year I’ve repaired motorcycles for a living, and brought in a few extra bucks on the side keeping kids from wrecking themselves too badly in places like the Yankee. I have a live-in girlfriend who’s been to college, I guess, but is no threat. She’s quiet and nice to have around. I have some redneck pals who I bike and lift weights with and everyone calls me Chuck.

But I remember forging Chuck’s birth certificate almost two years ago. I set him up as a role, I recall, someone They’d never find because They were looking for somebody else. I remember diving into Chuck and burning everything that came before, old habits, old ways, and most of all the old memories.

Until tonight, that is.

Okay, let’s be rational about this. What are the possibilities?

One is that I’m crazy. I really am Charles L. Magun, and all that shit about having once upon a time played the piano, done calculus, piloted jet planes, piloted…other things…that’s all a crock of madman’s dreams.

It’s amazing. For the first time in two years I can actually stand here and dispassionately remember doing some of those things. Some of them. Stuff not directly associated with the breakout. They seem so vivid. I can set up a hyperdimensional integral in my head, for instance. Could Chuck do that?

But I also remember, from long ago when I was a boy, those weird old men who used to come to the Institute bugging Dad and the other profs, to try to get someone to listen to their ideas for perpetual motion machines and the like. Their fantasies seemed sophisticated and correct to Them, too, didn’t they?

The irony isn’t lost on me—using a memory of the Institute to demonstrate that it’s possible for me to falsely remember learning calculus.

Droll.

All right, perhaps I did construct Chuck. Maybe I was someone like who I think I was. But maybe everything that I’m currently afraid of is a fantasy. Maybe I simply went crazy some years back.

Look at me, spending an entire evening in a nonstop internal monologue, describing everything I think and feel as it happens, and every whimper and moan is out of some goddamn psychodrama, I swear. Like this paranoid delusion of vengeful creatures I call Them…

Oh, something terrible must have happened to me two years ago or so. But might it be something more mundane, like an accident? Or a murder? Maybe I created a terrifying and romantic fantasy to cover memories of the real trauma…something of this Earth, hidden under a bizarre mask of science fiction.

No one I know has even heard of the Cabal, or the Arks, or Canaan, or even a fiery crash on a mountainside just a hundred miles from here. I remember we Broke Out a bit early because elections were coming and the old administration was sure to lose. We thought the new crowd would be sure to blow the whistle. But not a word of any “secret project under the Tennessee hills” has ever hit the press. There wouldn’t be any point in secrecy any longer, but there’s been no word.

When you get right down to it, the story I remember is pretty damn preposterous.

* * * *

A cool breeze is blowing now. The last drifts of fog fall away in tatters, fleeing into the gloom just past the streetlamps. The wind feels fresh on my face.

A third possibility is that I didn’t make any of it up. I’m the hunted last survivor of a secret plot against a powerful outsider civilization, and my enemies will stop at nothing to catch me.