The Way the Future Was: A Memoir (34 page)

And then there were the ones who were simply uncritical, and maybe a little ill-informed: a lady at a cocktail party who said, gosh, she'd seen plenty of UFOs in her time; there were quite a lot of them, flashing red and green lights, almost every night, over near where the helicopters landed. ("You mean you saw flashing red and green lights over near where the helicopters land and you call them
Unidentified
Flying Objects?") And there was the New Mexico state cop in Socorro, showing Jack Williamson and me around the site where his colleague, Lonnie Zamorra, had had a famous sighting just a short time before. He also had seen UFOs, he said proudly, pointing off past the drive-in theater in the general direction of White Sands Proving Ground. He had seen one just the night before. It started out as a fairly bright yellowish light, zigzagged around the sky, growing dimmer and oranger, and finally disappeared. Jack and I looked at each other. As former Air Force weathermen, we had launched enough pilot balloons to recognize the description at once.

I must not give the impression that every UFO person I met was wicked or dumb, or even careless. George Earley is not at all like that. Neither was the aforementioned Lonnie Zamorra. I didn't ever meet him face to face, but I spoke to him by phone, talked to his colleagues on the police force and people in the town, and I have to say he has the best testimonials to his honesty of anyone I can think of. ("Lonnie could be wrong, but he'd
never
make anything up.")

Barney and Betty Hill, the famous "interrupted journey" couple from New England, were not only decent and respectable people but, in the short time I spent with them, made me think of them as friends.

I believe that Lonnie Zamorra saw something; I just don't think it was an alien spacecraft. The late Dr. Donald Menzel thought it might have been a dust devil, which fits the facts at least as well as an alien spacecraft does. With the Hills, the story is a little more complicated. As it is reported, they were taken from their car one night, hypnotized, introduced to aliens in a spaceship, commanded to forget the whole experience, and returned to their car. Obediently, they had no conscious recollection of any of this. Then, much later, Barney had occasion to visit a shrink, who put him under hypnosis for other reasons, and the whole story came out. (And was confirmed by Betty, also under hypnosis.) What Barney said to me was that he was sure
something
had happened that night, but he was not entirely sure whether it happened in objective reality or only in their minds. And if he wasn't sure, how can any of the rest of us be?

The Hills offered me a chance to listen to their tapes next time I was in Boston, for what help it might give me. We actually made a date to do it. But my plans changed, I didn't go to Boston when I thought I would, I put off making a special trip; and then I learned that Barney had died. I wish now I had gone a little farther out of my way, not only to hear the tapes but because I
liked
Barney and Betty Hill.

UFOlogists complain that there is damn-all thorough and objective independent investigation of the saucer situation. They're absolutely right. The only people who are motivated to put a lot of time into it are those who are already believers. Skeptics and the uncommitted may poke around in the field for a while as I did, but then they get bored—as I did. J. Allen Hynek is one skeptic who became a believer. He is a smart, sane, and well-informed person, and he has a project which I would like to see tried. The FBI, says Hynek, graduates a new class of agents every few months. For a graduation exercise they assign them an event—maybe a real crime, maybe a made-up incident—and the whole class swarms out over the area, interviewing everybody to put together a synoptic report of the whole occurrence. Well, says Hynek, since they're doing that anyway, why not one time turn all that talent loose on a reported sighting? Talk to
everybody
. Balance the accounts against each other. Resolve the contradictions. Sift out the facts. And, for once, see for sure whether the thing happened or not.

This strikes me as an eminently workable idea; I've already written my own congressman to tell him I'd like to see it done, and maybe one day it will be. I wish it had been done with the Hills, or Lonnie Zamorra; and I'll admit that in my heart I kind of wish that it had proved them right. I wish, in fact, that I could believe
any
of the stories about sightings of alien spacecraft, because it would give me pleasure to have some proof that we are not alone in the universe.

But I don't.

The statistics are against it. Even without a full-dress FBI investigation, confirming witnesses should have turned up to Zamorra or the Hills. None ever did. And with all those thousands of sightings, there should have been
one
that simply could not be dismissed. But there isn't.

Logic is against it, too. Put it this way: if there really is an intelligent alien race capable of building ships of any of the sorts described, they would have to be pretty smart, right? At least as smart as, say, you and me? Well, then why don't they act that way? I promise you that if I were an alien intelligence interested in finding out about the Earth, I would find a hell of a lot better way to do it than those dummies have.

So, after a couple of years of this, I wrote George Earley a letter:

Dear George:

I kept my promise. I looked into the evidence. And I still don't believe.

You can't stay in the same house for more than a quarter of a century without putting out some sort of roots into the community, and by the early 1960s I had acquired a couple. We had a bad fire around then: a defective electric-blanket switch started a bed smoldering when no one was looking, and by the time anyone perceived something was wrong, the master bedroom was in flames. Luck was with us. We had elected to have our fire on a Thursday evening at eight o'clock, which was when the local volunteer fire company held its monthly meeting, so they were all right on the scene. As soon as the alarm went in they were on their way, only a block away. They saved the house. In the process several thousand sheets of paper in my office just above the burning room were seriously scorched or trodden by firemen's boots, and the whole house was well soaked; it took us a year to rebuild, and a lot longer to deal with the consequences. (Some manuscripts were destroyed forever; and for years after, on wet nights, you could smell the char.)

But they had done a fantastic job, and I owed them something. Money? Well, sure, I made a contribution. But what they needed more than money was manpower. So I joined up. For the next few years I woke with the sirens and got myself thoroughly smudged, scraped, frozen, and exhausted in several score fires, great and small. It was interesting. It was socially very useful; but I sure don't want to do it any more.

Being a volunteer fireman did have some fringe benefits. At the beer busts after the monthly meetings, from time to time someone would bring along a reel of Tijuana's best imported porn, the first I'd seen since Army days on Mount Vesuvius. And my local volunteer company, like nearly every other volunteer fire company anywhere in suburbia, had been just about one hundred percent registered Republican. As a known Democrat, I broke the line.

This meant something to me, because I was gung-ho for the Democratic Party. I can't say I always thought the Democratic candidates for office were really very good. I only thought what I have always thought about party politics in America; bad as the Democrats often were, point for point and office for office the Republicans were usually just that tiny bit worse. On those grounds I had been a Democratic County Committeeman for several years—the absolute lowest elected office in America.
*
I worked hard, took no bribes, got the vote out; and after some years of this was rewarded with a political patronage plum. It was the best job I ever had in my life. I held it for only two weeks, and had to quit because of pressure from my family; but if I had my druthers I'd probably have it still. Our local leader was a street-smart old Irishman from Jersey City, with the brain of a Mayor Daley in the body of a retired jockey. He called me up and said, "Fred, you been doing a great job and I wanna show the Party's appreciation. You show up at Freehold Raceway Monday morning and they'll put you to work. Say I sent you."

"But I already have a job editing a magazine, Artie."

"You call that a job? I'm talking twenty bucks for fifteen minutes!"

"What kind of job is that, Artie?"

"It's better if we don't go into that part right now," he explained. "Just show up."

So I showed up. The job turned out to be collecting urine samples from the trotting horses.

Look, I have as many middle-class hang-ups as the next man, and I had never considered a career in horse piss. Apart from anything else, it was easy to imagine the comments, the jokes, and oh! the belly laughs from all my friends. But the money was good. I liked being around tracks. It piqued my curiosity. And, considered objectively, what was so bad? After changing diapers for ten years, a little horse urine didn't seem too frightening. Besides, there was not much chance I would get any on me. The specimen goes into a sort of aluminum soup can on a five-foot pole. All you really have to do is hold the can in the stream long enough to collect an ounce or two. . . . Well, no. There's more to it than that.

What you have to do is know when the flow is going to commence, and how to coax the horse into making nice for daddy when he doesn't particularly want to. In case the problem ever comes up for you, I will pass along my hard-won knowledge. Female horses sort of squat down on their hind legs before they do it; watch for the squat, stick in the pot, and you're home free. With male horses you can tell at once when something is about to happen, as that majestic equipment starts to engorge; the horse is going either to urinate or to make love. At that point you want to be fast on your feet whichever way it goes.

Usually a horse who has just trotted six furlongs is about ready to relieve himself. Unless he has done it on the way back to the barn—bad luck!—you can count on something happening in the first five or ten minutes. If not, you have to use psychology.

I became quite good at chirping, whispering, and shuffling the straw in the stall with my feet. I don't know why that worked, but it usually did. I never had a failure, never had a real bad time; but then I never happened to get an Ohio horse. Ohio horses had a very bad reputation in Freehold. In Ohio there was a compulsory urine test for every horse. In order to make sure they got samples, Ohio urologists equipped themselves with electric cattle prods. Zap the horse where it counts, and urine flows. The other thing that happens is that for the rest of that horse's life, if he sees you coming toward him with a specimen can, he will try to kill you.

Easy work, warm summer afternoons in the open, all the tips I could use on the races—that was one fine job. But Camelot ended. I had expected to have one day a week off, which I could use to go in to New York and edit
Galaxy
, but it turned out that wasn't possible. And the public pressure from my family in particular got hard to bear, especially when the kids started answering the phone with, "This is the residence of the peepee collector."

So I gave it all up to concentrate on editing
Galaxy
, and often I've wondered if I made the right decision.

Thinking about the stables leads me for some reason to the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conferences.

That's a cheap shot, isn't it? And irreverent, too. Milford is supposed to be the great sacerdotal shrine of science-fiction writers. After you attend it you are allowed to wear a green turban and call yourself
hajj
, and for the rest of your life you are just that little bit likelier to appear in Orbit, and to have an edge in the voting for Nebula awards. There are writers who swear that they owe Milford all they own of the power to express themselves. And there are writers who come away from it gaunt and stary, and don't write at all for weeks or months afterward. One or two have hardly written at all after an exposure to Milford, and they of the best and most prolific. Even in the case of Damon Knight, Mr. Milford himself, you can divide his writing life into two periods: the copious and good, and then, later, the sparse and maybe less good; and the dividing line is pretty close to the time when he began running Milfords.

Now, most Milfordites would deny that any of this is true, or anyway, that it is relevant. A characteristic of in-groups is that their members do not ordinarily think of themselves as in-groups. There was never any organized conspiracy at Milford to vote themselves awards. (One writer did, in fact, telephone a lot of Milford associates to ask them to vote for him, and he did by a narrow margin win a Nebula that year; but that's just one individual.) But the objective facts speak for themselves. Milfordites were activists, and voted heavily in the Nebula balloting. Milfordites won a large proportion of the awards. When I first observed this and pointed it out, I got an immense amount of flak from Milfordites, including Jim Blish. Happened I saw Jim in Washington shortly thereafter, at a time when that year's balloting had been completed but the results had not yet been made public. I asked him to tell me who had won, and, quite properly, he refused. I then asked him to tell me at least how many of the awards had gone to Milfordites. He hesitated, and then grinned and shrugged. "Well, all of them," he said.

The Milford Workshop came about when Jim, Judy Merril, and Damon Knight found themselves all resident at once in the tiny town of Milford, Pike County, Pennsylvania. All of them knew something about writers' workshops. Either they had personal experience, or they had heard the accounts of friends who had been deeply involved—Fletcher Pratt, for instance, was a mainstay of perhaps the best of the lot, Bread Loaf. They felt there was money to be made from a summer workshop. Milford was resort country, which was ideal for the purpose. They were none of them more affluent than they wanted to be; and so they issued a call to all sf writers who were interested to sign up for a week or so in the beautiful Delaware Valley.