Part 4: Passing On
WINDLIKE, ghostlike, he raced around the earth.
When he was human, Earth was solid and horizon-bound. When he was saucer, it was a complex pattern of shifting triangles and cubes. Land was dully glowing chestnut and silver. Water was brightly glowing scarlet and gold. The three-cornered shapes and hollow cubes of land were smaller than those of water. The Gulf Stream was the same color as the rest of the Atlantic, but the cubes orbited more closely around the triangles.
Clouds of water were toadstools. Smog was a herd of shapes like porcupine fish. The clear air, of which there was very little, was like the snow on the screen of a malfunctioning TV set. Rain and snow alike were polyhedrons, but rain was azure and snow was burnt orange.
That was as “seen” from the stratosphere. When he raced close to the earth, the triangles and cubes merged, became still, became shades of green. The trees were upside-down pyramids, looking more like strangely shaped tumors of the earth than separate entities.
At times he slowed down and eased up to a house. He “looked” into the windows. Dogs resembled astrakhans; cats, gas jets; humans, the symbols on the dollar bill, pyramids with one great crimson eye, always expanding or shrinking.
Around and around, up and down. And nowhere another of his kind. He should have accepted the invitation of his “mother,” and thus he could have journeyed through space to the planet of some far-off star with her as a companion and guide. Now, if he lived a thousand years, and he would, he might never see another of his own. On the other hand (only a figure of speech, since he had no hands in this form), he might run into a dozen the day after tomorrow. The night after tomorrow, rather, since he flew only late at night. In the daytime of the United States of America, he walked on two legs.
He did not need sleep. To metamorphize was to lose the need for sleep. Something happened in his altered body which did away with the toxics accumulated as biped. The poisons streamed out behind as he soared, dark green, flattened spheres mixed with the sapphire quills that traced the change of angle in his flight.
A falling star, he shot toward his apartment, braked with a flare of white-edged blue comets, stopped before the open window, and entered. The transition was so quick that any human eye would have seen only a blur. And he was in the form which billions knew as Paul Eyre.
Being human had its advantages. When he sped like a saucer-shaped Santa Claus from pole to pole, he browsed on photons, gravitons, X rays, magnetic lines, and chronotrons. But they were tasteless. Not so the buttered toast, the crisp bacon, the fried egg, the cantaloupe, the coffee. Intake was delicious, and so was output. Before the change, he had excreted with haste and shame, though he had been too dull to know that was the situation. Now he experienced a near ecstasy; getting rid of was not the same as taking in, but it was just as pleasurable. He shaved, showered, and dressed, read for four hours and, at seven-thirty, walked out of his apartment. The day manager and the guards said hello and looked at him with a barely concealed dislike, fear, and awe. Ostensibly, they were there to protect him. Actually, they were protecting the others from him. The others were the rest of humanity.
Practically, they were incapable of protecting him or the others.
He walked out of the building. Across the street was another apartment building. It held rooms in which many dozens of people, around the clock, trained cameras or listened to wire taps or swiveled directional microphones. He had “seen” them at night, their pulsing eyes glowing. They were reporting to various agencies in Washington, in Europe, and in Asia. They spied on him and on each other.
He walked swiftly twelve blocks and turned into a driveway leading to a huge old mansion. Once it had belonged to a rich family, then it had been a funeral home, and now it was his headquarters. The crowd along the driveway and on the porch cheered as he walked among them. They reached out their hands, though they never touched him. He made a gesture that they should draw back, and they surged like a wave withdrawing from a beach. They loved him, and they hated him.
Of the thousand or so on the parking lot, the grounds, the sidewalk, and the porch, half were the lame, the halt, the blind, the dying. The others were relatives or friends or the hired, bringing those on crutches, stretchers, and wheelchairs. He could, and would, send most of the sick home with their diseases left behind as abandoned baggage. But what could he do for the others, those defined as healthy? What could he do for greed, hate, prejudice, and self-loathing?
Lepers all.
He stopped on the porch, turned around, and held up his hand. Silence floated. “Go home now!” he said. “Make way for the others!”
There were cries of joy and amazement. Crutches soared. Men and women danced and cried. Children stood up from wheelchairs. Some, still on stretchers, were rushed to waiting ambulances. They were the ones whose convalescence would take some time. A woman whose misshapen bones were beginning to jell cried out in fear. But she would be all right in a few weeks.
A man near the foot of the steps to the porch suddenly reached into his coat pocket and brought out a revolver. His face was pale and contorted.
“Die, you filthy anti-Christ!” he screamed. “Die and go to hell!”
Hate was snatched away by pain. He dropped the revolver and clutched at his chest. Two plainclothesmen moved toward him, but they were too late. He was dead on the sidewalk by the time they had reached him.
Paul Eyre murmured, “They never learn!”
* * * *
In the beginning, he had sat in a large office while the “patients” walked by or were carried before him. They had entered one door and without pausing or speaking proceeded to the exit. There was no business to transact except that of getting people in and out as swiftly as possible. Each was handed a card which stated that if the recipient cared to, he could send whatever sum he felt like sending to this address. Paul Eyre did not doubt that among his employees were agents of the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration. They watched him as if he were a hawk among chickens and he owner of the chickens. But their reports were monotonous, unspiced by irregularities.
After a few months, Eyre had moved out onto the porch. In warm weather, he looked at the passersby through screens. In cold weather, the porch was glassed in. Automobiles, trucks, and buses crept by on the horse-shaped driveway and the street while he looked at the pale and hopeful faces in them. To heal, he had to see them in the flesh, though a single glance sufficed.
On the other hand, he did not have to see to kill. Snipers hidden in rooms many stories above him fell dead as they put their finger on the trigger. An automatic device set to gas him, operating by a time clock so there would be no direct human initiation, had gone up in smoke. A suicidal fanatic had tried to fly his nitroglycerine-loaded airplane into his headquarters, but it had blown up while over the Illinois River. A time bomb had exploded in the face of a man before he could get it into his car.
There had doubtless been many other fatal incidents about which Paul Eyre knew nothing.
That was, to him, the strange thing about his powers. He had not the slightest idea how they operated. There was no tickling, no tingling, no change in body temperature, no outward or inward manifestation of energy transmitted or withdrawn.
He had established, however, that he did not kill just because he disliked or hated a person. The power was activated only when a person was about to be an immediate physical danger to him.
He was an enigma for more than himself. Everybody, even the Indian in the remote Amazon jungle or the aborigine in the great Australian desert, had heard of him. They came from everywhere, and business in Busiris, Illinois, boomed. Every motel, hotel, and rooming house was jammed. Motels and restaurants were going up like telephone poles. The police department had had to double its traffic division, but there were no outcries from the taxpayers. Eyre was paying for the new personnel. There were protests from Eyre’s neighbors about the crowded streets, but nobody could do anything about this. And “the Eyrecraft industry,” as the local paper termed it, had brought prosperity to Busiris. It was the largest industry in the county, larger even than the giant Trackless Diesel Motor Corporation for which Eyre had once worked.
And so he sat on the porch, even during his lunch period, or paced back and forth while the sick were carried by. At seven in the evening, he walked off the porch. His staff would stay for another two or three hours to complete their work. But he was through for the day; ten hours and thirty-odd thousand people were enough for him. Too much. He was exhausted though he had done nothing except sit, walk, and confer with his manager and secretaries occasionally. He walked home without a bodyguard, though the sidewalks and streets would be crowded with the sick, waiting for him to see them.
He dined alone in his apartment except for the three evenings a week that his current mistresses visited him. These were beautiful young women who had their peculiar reasons for wanting to bed with him. Some were grateful because he had healed them or relatives or husbands. Some felt they adored him because he was a miracle worker. Some, he found out later, were agents for the AMA, the IRS, the FBI, Russia, China, Cuba, England, Israel, the United Arab Republic, Germany (West and East), and India. Some had even asked him to take refuge in their countries. Their countries had tried to kidnap him, with fatal results for the agents, so now they were trying to seduce him. He never turned them over to the FBI (in one case, the young woman was working for both Albania and the FBI). He merely told them to leave and quit bothering him.
Sometimes, he would go to the window and look down at the street. It was white with faces turned up to him as if he were the sun and they the plants. Their murmur came up to him even through the soundproofing. “Heal me,” it cried, “and I will be happy!”
He knew better, but he healed them anyway. He couldn’t help himself.
Somebody had once suggested that he fly over the world while the sick were brought out into the open spaces for him to look down upon. He had rejected this. Even if he could cover every square foot of the planet in a single day, he would have a million new patients the next day. But to travel by plane around and around the globe would be to lose all his privacy. How could he leave his quarters at night and girdle the earth, search the skies, sublunary space, Africa, Polynesia, and the South Pole? No, here at least, he had made arrangements to leave by the back window which faced a court where no one could come. No doubt, it was under electronic and photographic surveillance. But his watchers were government officials, and their reports were top secret. They didn’t believe what they reported. Some things are so impossible that to admit you believe them is to admit that you’re crazy. Between the two was a credibility fuse easily blown in human beings.
Why had Paul Eyre become the great healer? Why had he subjected himself to a boring duty which could never achieve its goal, the extermination of all physical diseases in mankind? For one thing, he didn’t have the heart to turn the sick away. For another, he was getting rich, and he needed much money to pay for the support of his daughter and his ex-wife. And, last but by no means least, he was, being human when in human form, gratified by the attention and the idolization. He was the most important man on the planet. Important in a way which the public did not even suspect. If they had, they would have tried to tear him apart, literally. He shuddered when he thought of it, not because the mob would succeed, because they wouldn’t. It was the vision of hundreds, perhaps thousands, dropping dead at the same time that sickened him. So far, the few known deaths, his would-be murderers, had been explained away as caused by excitement combined with a weak heart. Though none of his attackers had had heart trouble, fake medical histories had been supplied. The pathologists who did the dissections did not have to be bribed to validate these. They always found the heart ruptured, even when it looked healthy.
Eyre read for a while after eating the meal ordered from a delicatessen. (No need to test it; the poisoner would have died before he could touch the food.) He put the book aside and watched TV for half an hour, then turned it off. How trivial even his favorite programs seemed. Bullshit and nonsense, as his friend, Tincrowdor, was fond of saying.
Tincrowdor. Was he a friend? When Eyre had been held in prison, Tincrowdor had helped him. At the same time, Tincrowdor had thought of ways to kill him. But that, Tincrowdor had explained, had been done because he did not really believe that Eyre could be killed. Besides, the intellectual challenge had been too much for him. He had to try.
He went to the phone and called the switchboard downstairs. He waited, while the ringing went on and on. How many were listening in? At least a dozen American government agencies, the AMA, and half a dozen foreign agents. Trolls eavesdropping on the troll killer. Helpless to do anything but listen and then make their reports.
At last, a boozy male voice answered. “Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor, poet laureate of B-T-A-O-C, speaking.”
If the unwary caller asked what the letters meant, Tincrowdor would reply, “Busiris, the asshole of creation.”
“Come on over,” Eyre said. “I’d like to talk to you.”
“You’re not mad at me?”
“I just want to talk. That is, if you’re fairly sober.”
“I’m fairly,” Tincrowdor said. “Tell your gorillas not to shoot.”
“They’re just here to watch me,” Eyre said, “not to protect me. You could come in with a bazooka, and they’d only ask you to produce your ID.” Which was not much of an exaggeration.
* * * *
Before Tincrowdor arrived, another visitor phoned from the lobby. This was Dr. Lehnhausen, the righthand man of the President of the United States. Eyre was surprised, though not very much. Lehnhausen had made unannounced trips before, flying in secretly from Washington, talking to him for an hour or so, and then departing as swiftly as he had come.
A minute later, Eyre admitted Lehnhausen. Four men stood guard, two by the door, one at the elevator, and one at the end of the hall, near the fire escape.
Lehnhausen was a tall, dark man with a slight German accent. He waved his hand at Eyre and said, “How are you, sir?”
“I’m never sick, and I’m always busy,” Eyre said. “And you?”
“That depends upon what you tell me,” Lehnhausen said. “I’m here to ask you to reconsider your decision. He told me that he hoped you would remember that you are an American.”
How I would have thrilled at those words only a year ago! Eyre thought. The President himself asking me to do my duty, to defend my country.
“I never said no,” Eyre said. “I thought I’d made that clear. What I did say, and you were there and know it, is that it’s not necessary for me to live in Washington or to be advised by a bunch of generals and bureaucrats. I will defend this nation, but it will be done automatically. And it doesn’t matter where I am.”
“Yes, we understand that,” Lehnhausen said. “But what if the President believes that it is necessary to launch an atomic missile attack before another nation does?”
“I don’t know,” Eyre said. He began to pace back and forth and to sweat. “I have tried repeatedly to explain that I have no control over this, this power. Anything that is an immediate threat to me seems to be killed. An atomic war would threaten me, even if the attack were launched from this country at another one. The enemy would retaliate, of course, and that would be a threat. To stop this, I, or whatever is working inside me, might decide that the man who gives the word to attack should drop dead before he can give that word.
“This means that whoever starts to give the word, to press the button, would die. Which means that there is no need for the President to order an attack. The attack he would be trying to forestall would never come. The enemy executive would die before he could give the order. The man succeeding him would die, and so on.
“So, there is no call for the President to give his order. Do you see what I mean? God knows I’ve told you enough times, and I find this visit unnecessary and annoying. I can’t seem to get the truth through to you people in Washington.”
Lehnhausen said, bitterly, “What you have done is to nullify our atomic potential. We can’t use it, and that places us at a disadvantage with nations which have a greater potential in conventional means of warfare. Both the Soviet Union and China can assemble far larger armies than we can. The Soviet Union’s navy is larger than ours. Russia could take over Europe at any time, and there is nothing we could do about it. And China could take over Asia. Then what would happen?”
“I don’t know,” Eyre said. “Perhaps I—this thing in me, rather—might decide that an invasion of the Old World by these two powers would be an immediate threat to me. It might kill the Chinese or Russian leaders before they could give the order to attack. I don’t know. I do know that it would probably decide that an invasion of this country by any power would be an immediate threat. In which case, there wouldn’t be any invasion.”
“But there might be one of the Old World, and you’d do nothing,” Lehnhausen said.
“You make me sound like a traitor,” Eyre said. “Can’t I convince you that I have absolutely no control? Anyway, you have told me that the foreign governments have found out all this, and they won’t attack because they’re afraid that their executives would drop dead if they did order one. Not that they are going to. All this is hypothetical.”
Lehnhausen said, “You were a minuteman once. You resigned when the organization was declared an illegal one. I would think. . . .”
“I’m not the Paul Eyre of that time.”
“Sometimes we wonder if you’re Paul Eyre at all,” Lehnhausen said.
Eyre laughed. He knew what Lehnhausen was thinking. Tincrowdor had explained to him that some of the higher-ups had to be convinced that he could change into a thing that was alien to the Earth. And some of them would then conclude that the real Paul Eyre had been killed and his place taken by this thing. This thing, this creature, “this monster from outer space,” had come to take over the Earth or, at least, to wreck it so that it would be helpless before the invasion that would follow.
“Science fiction stories and horror movies have conditioned people to think along these lines,” Tincrowdor said. “I’ve thought the same thing myself, but I’ve observed you closely. You’re the original Paul Eyre all right. At least, half the original. You may be possessed, but you’re not wholly possessed.”
For the first time, Paul Eyre fully realized that he was the only free man on the planet. He could do anything he wished and nobody could stop him. He could move to any country he wished, and the authorities could not stop him. Neither the U.S. nor the country in which he wished to live could do a thing. He could live where he chose, steal, rob openly, rape, and murder, and he would be unhindered.
He had no wish to do any of this, which was fortunate. But what if somebody else had had his experience? What if some immoral man had encountered that creature in the woods near that farm?
And what kind of a world would it be if everybody had his powers? Nobody would dare to threaten anybody else. But what about a quarrel in which both thought they were right? This was the usual situation. Would both arguers die? Not unless each intended physical harm to the other. Which meant that the violent one would be the one to die.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Eyre said. “I’m getting tired of being bugged by you and the other government officials.”
That includes the President, he thought. But he could not bring himself to say it. He still had some awe of the chief executive.
“I don’t want to see you again, or hear from you any more, unless it’s a national emergency. And I doubt that there’s any need for that even then. The emergency will be over before you’re aware of it.”
“You’re not God!” Lehnhausen said. “Even though there are some fanatics who claim you are!”
“I’ve publicly rejected those nuts,” Eyre said. “It’s not my fault that they pay no attention to what I say.”
He looked at his wristwatch. “I have an appointment. So why don’t you go now?”
“You’re just a citizen. . . !” Lehnhausen said and stopped. The eyes behind the thick glasses were bulging, and his face was red.
He swallowed, took out a handkerchief, wiped his glasses and his forehead, put the glasses back on, and tried to smile. He held the handkerchief in a tight fist.
“You’re safe unless you try to use violence,” Eyre said softly.
“I had no such intention,” Lehnhausen said. “Very well. If you won’t do your duty. . . .”
“Can’t, not won’t.”
“The result is the same. But, as I started to say, the President would like at least one assurance from you. The election will take place in a year, and. ...”
“And you want my promise that I won’t run for president,” Eyre said. “But I told him that I had no such ambitions.”
“People have been known to change their minds.”
“I’m neither qualified nor interested. I’d make a mess of things. There was a time when I was ignorant enough to believe that I could do better than anybody else in the White House. But my horizons have broadened since then. I’m still ignorant, but not that ignorant.”
“We know that you’ve been approached by the Democrats, the Socialist Labor Party, the Communists, and the Messianists. If you. . . .”
“If I did run, it’d be as a Republican,” Eyre said. “And the first thing I’d do would be to get rid of those people who are trying to kill me. You’d be among them.”
Lehnhausen turned pale, and he said, “I deny that!”
“I suspect that the man who tried to kill me this morning was one of your agents. That anti-Christ business was just to make people think he was a religious fanatic.”
“You’re getting paranoiac,” Lehnhausen said.
“A paranoiac is one who has no rational basis for suspecting persecution. I know that you’ve been trying to assassinate me.”
“Assassination implies a political motive,” Lehnhausen said. “The correct word is murder.”
“You have a political motive,” Eyre said. “But it’s not the main motive. Good-bye, Mr. Lehnhausen.”
Lehnhausen hesitated and then, slowly, pulled a paper from his coat pocket. “Would you sign a statement that you will not be a candidate?”
“No,” Eyre said. “My word is good enough. Goodbye.”
* * * *
“That’s the first time you ever asked me about my middle name,” Tincrowdor said. “Hadn’t curiosity ever entered that dull mind of yours before?”
“I always thought it was an Indian name and that you had Indian blood and didn’t want to admit it,” Eyre said.
“I do have Miami Indian ancestors,” Tincrowdor said. “But I’m not the least bit ashamed of it. Queequeg, however, is supposed to be a Polynesian name, though it certainly doesn’t have that melodious vowel-filled substance which distinguishes all Polynesian words. I think Melville made it up. In any event, my father read a lot, even if he was an electrical engineer. His favorite book was Moby Dick, and his favorite character was the giant harpooner, Queequeg. So he named me after the son of the king of the island of Kokovoko. It is not down in any map; true places never are. So says Ishmael.
“If I’d been given any choice in the business, I would have taken Tashtego as my name. That Indian stuck to his job to the last, nailing up the defiant flag of Ahab even as the Pequod sank, and catching the wing of the sky hawk between the spar and his hammer, taking a living bit of heaven with him down to hell. A fine bit of symbolism, though rather too obvious for anybody but Melville to get away with it.
“On the other hand, my father probably knew what he was doing when he labeled my character before it was formed. Queequeg thought much about his death, and so do I. Queequeg prepared his coffin while he was still living, and so do I. His was stiff wood and carved with many strange symbols. Mine is fluid alcohol, and the carving is done with the bending of the elbow. Both of us float alive in our coffins.”
Tincrowdor poured himself another drink, sniffed at it, and said, “Zounds! This is the best the world, and Kentucky, offers.”
“Let’s get back to the subject,” Eyre said.
“The only true subject is oneself, and I never get off it. So where were we?”
“Extrapolating. And I wish you’d quit drinking. You said your memory and your creativity have been much better since you started seeing me. Your drinking had caused brain damage, and I had reversed the irreversible. Yet you continue to destroy your brain.”
“Why not, as long as I can still be healed by coming into your holy presence? When you go forever, I’ll quit. Or try to.”
“And you think I’ll go?”
“I would advise you to leave now. I don’t mean tomorrow morning. I mean right now. You’re staying for only two reasons, neither of which should be considered. One, you can’t shuck off guilt because you’ll be deserting your family, which you have done, anyway, and the sick people of this earth. Forget them. They’re going to die anyway, and you can never cure all of them or anything but a small portion. Earth breeds sick humans faster than a dozen Paul Eyres could heal them. Second, you could stay here a thousand years and no mate would come. So get out to the stars and look for one.”
Tincrowdor swallowed three ounces, smacked his lips, and said, “I forgot. There are two other reasons. Third, let humanity go its own way. Let it choose its own destiny, miserable as that probably will be. Man was not meant to be a flying saucer. Fourth, if you hang around this planet, you will inevitably be killed.”
Eyre started a little and said, “How could they do that?”
“I don’t know, but they’ll figure out a way. Man’s stupidity is only exceeded by his ingenuity. You’re a challenge to our survival, and think tanks all over the world are working three shifts a day contriving means for your destruction. Somebody is going to come up with the solution, and you’ll be dissolved.”
“I don’t see how.”
“You’ve been given godlike powers, but your imagination hasn’t been improved much. Of course, you can’t see.”
“Can you?”
“Don’t look at me so narrow-eyed. I’m no danger to you. Not now. I quit thinking up ways. At least, I’m not telling anybody about them.”
“All right,” Eyre said. “I am sick of this never-ending task. It’s no joy to go to bed knowing that thousands more are waiting in motel rooms to see me in the morning, that thousands more are traveling to see me the morning after. Yet, I feel that the poor devils need me, and my conscience would hurt me if I abandoned them.
“But I also feel that I am neglecting my main duty. I should be out there, looking for someone with whom I can be a true mate. Someone, or something, with whom I can share an ecstasy that you . . . human beings, I mean . . . can never know.”
“One is a duty; the other is a joy. That’s what you mean,” Tincrowdor said.
“And my manifest duty,” Eyre said.
“You talk as if you’re a nation, not a person,” Tincrowdor said.
“I could bear nations within me.”
“Yes, you could” Tincrowdor said, looking as if surprise had sobered him. “You could carry millions of saucer-gametes within you. Fly over a populated city, release the yellow cloud, and hundreds, maybe thousands, would become impregnated or spermified, or however you want to put it. And that would mean the end of the human race. As we know it, anyway.”
“That is what I don’t understand,” Eyre said. “For the sake of efficiency, the gametes should be distributed among a dense population. Why was the yellow cloud released when I was the only one who could be affected?”
“We have to assume, for logical reasons, that it was an accident. You fired at what you thought was a quail, but it was the, uh, saucerperson. Your shotgun pellets wounded her and brought forth the gametes before their time.”
“Yes, but why didn’t I drop dead before I fired? And what about her wounds? When I saw her later, in her other form, she didn’t have a scar.”
“The latter first. She, and I suppose you, have wonderful self-healing properties. If you can heal others, why not yourself? As for her vulnerability, perhaps the saucer form doesn’t have the killing powers that the human form has. The gamete that fused with you has the power to protect itself while it’s in a fragile form, that is, yours. The adult form, or at least the saucer form, doesn’t have this. Why, I don’t know, since you have it when you revert to the human form.”
Tincrowdor took another drink and then said, “But perhaps you’re not an adult yet. Or perhaps the adult just doesn’t have the ability to kill by thought, or however it’s done. Remember, when she fled the prison yard with machine gun bullets flying around her, the guards shooting at her didn’t drop dead. I find that significant.”
Eyre tried to keep the alarm out of his voice.
“Then why haven’t they tried to kill me when I’m in that . . . saucer . . . form? They must be watching my window. They’ve seen me shoot in and out of it and they’ve tracked me with radar. I know that, because I’ve fed on the radar waves.
“What happened? Their instruments were missing every other wave? They didn’t get a complete echo?”
“I don’t know. But they must have thought something was wrong with their equipment.”
Tincrowdor laughed. He said, “They didn’t shoot at you because it never occurred to them that you might be lacking your powers when in that metamorph.”
“Then nobody knows?”
Tincrowdor hesitated and said, “I know. At least, I suspect.”
“And you’ve told nobody?”
“Nobody.”
Eyre was not worried that their conversation was being monitored. He didn’t care that the phones were tapped, but he could not endure being overheard when he was talking to the women who visited him. Two men came in twice a day and swept the apartment for electronic bugs, and he himself checked it out in the evening with equipment supplied by the FBI.
“Cross your heart and hope to die?” Eyre said, grinning.
“I’m afraid that I would die,” Tincrowdor said.
* * * *
While racing as a tiny satellite of the earth and while sitting or walking in his apartment, Eyre had tried to communicate with the entity in his brain. Silence was the only response. Silence and emptiness. He did not feel that he was occupied. He was alone. Singular.
Yet he knew about the tests which the now dead Dr. Croker had made. The first of these had revealed that his blood and other tissues were swarming with microscopic creatures. They looked more like yellow bricks with rounded edges than anything. Then these were gone, presumably excreted, except for one, which had been located in his brain.
It was this organism which had given him his powers to kill, to cure, and to metamorphose. This, according to Tincrowdor, was a sort of gamete, analogous to a human ovum. Eyre, though composed of trillions of cells, was another gamete, the sperm. The saucer-gamete had fused with him to make a new individual. The fusing was not, however, necessarily physical. It could be solely psychical. Or it could be psychosomatic.
Whatever its final stage in him, it seemed to carry ancestral memories, and it seemed to communicate these to Eyre through dreams. Time and again, while sleeping, he had visions of a glimmering green city, many-domed, many-towered, far away beyond fields of red flowers. Sometimes he had seen creatures that looked like leocentaurs, half human, half lion. Sometimes, he was a female leocentaur and he, or she, mated. Sometimes, he was in saucer form and voyaging between stars, pulling himself along on the crumpled fabric of space and eating light and other forms of energy.
In the past six months, these dreams had ceased. Did that mean that the entity was no longer separate but had fused with him? And if it had, why did he, Eyre, feel unchanged, totally human? That is, he did when he was in bipedal form. When in saucer form, he felt almost all nonhuman, though if someone had been able to ask him his name, he would have replied that it was Paul Eyre.
Tincrowdor had said that it was not true that Eyre was unchanged. He had a perceptiveness and a compassion he had lacked before. But that could be due to the shock of the events he had experienced. These had shaken loose qualities which had always existed in him but which, for some reason probably grounded in his childhood, he had suppressed.
“Possibly,” Tincrowdor had said, “the entity is dominant when the saucer form is used. It takes over your brain then, though the possession is so subtle that you think you are in control. When in human form, you are dominant, though it is evident that the entity still uses its survival powers. However, these may be potentialities which have always existed in the human psychosoma but which only a very few have been aware of or have been able to use. Examples: so-called witch doctors or medicine men in so-called primitive societies.
“It is possible, as I’ve said, that these powers exist only when you’re in human form. When in saucer form, you rely on speed to survive. The only way to find out is to make a test. And you can’t do that, because if you’re powerless, then you’ll be killed. Knowledge, in this case, would not be worth the price.”
This was the dilemma which occupied much of his human time. When hurtling through air or just above it, when racing across the fields or skimming cities, he did not think of it. He felt too much joy to let terrestrial concerns into his consciousness. The joy was, it was true, tempered by a dull sadness on not finding a mate. But this intrusion took place only when dawn threatened the mid-west and he returned home.
Tonight, after Tincrowdor had left, he sped out of the window and soared vertically upward. For the first time, he determined to leave the sublunary space and to visit the moon itself. Perhaps there might be one of his kind there, though something told him that the chances were not high. It was an easy and swift journey; he was not handicapped by complex problems of orbital computation and power expenditure. All he had to do was point himself at the moon, overtake it, match his velocity with its, increase or decrease his velocity, and circle around and around it, swoop down, nestle for a while, soar up again, and streak for earth. The whole trip, according to the clock in his apartment, had taken three hours and four and a half minutes. An hour of that had been spent exploring the moon’s surface.
The following Saturday and Sunday, he visited Mars and its two moons, Deimos and Phobos.
The weekend after that, he visited Venus, but he did not stay long in its heavy, cloud-laden atmosphere. As he shot through it, battling against titanic winds and tiny particles whose nature he did not know, he detected something living far, far down. It was shadowy and huge, vaguely spindle-shaped, and it radiated danger. He curved upward in a burst of speed which brought him near the burning point. His panic did not subside until he had put himself far above the atmosphere. When he had regained his apartment and his human form, he wept and sobbed. Whatever his own powers were, he would have been caught like a mouse by a cat and destroyed in some horrible manner if he had not reacted so swiftly. That thing would have ingested him but would not have killed all of him. A piece of him would have suffered hell for eons before his last spark had fallen into darkness.
He rarely needed sleep, but this morning he was squeezed with fatigue. He lay down on the bed without putting on his pajamas and slept, though not well. Twice he woke up moaning with horror as something black and shapeless tried to pull him into itself.
The horror weighed him during the days and nights that followed. For the first time, he did not feel safe when in saucer form. If such a thing could exist on Venus, what might he find on Jupiter or Pluto?
One Saturday morning he made up his mind. He would leave Earth and the human race and go seek another of his kind. He needed the companionship they could provide, though he had no idea of what its nature would be. Whatever it was, it surely must be superior to that which men and women had given him. Or, to be fair, that which he had given them. Something in him had made him a loner, no matter how gregarious he might seem to others. He had had no true friends, people with whom he felt comfortable and intimate. His efforts at conversation had been ludicrous and boring. He felt at ease only around machines, which explained why they had taken so much of his time or why he had given them so much time. He could handle them, could analyze their malfunctions and repair them. But his acquaintances, his fellow workers, his family were enigmas. He was out of phase with them, and the one with whom he had been most intimate was a stranger whom he hated and who hated him. If he had had his present perceptiveness when he had married Mavice, he could have saved the marriage and even been happy with it. But it was too late for that now.
Maybe his meeting the saucer-sphinx thing in the woods had not been an accident. Maybe it, she, rather, had sensed that he could make the transition to nonhuman form easier than most humans she had surveyed. His roots were shallow and in loose soil; being torn from humanity would not be difficult or too painful for him.
There were too many maybes. He wanted certainty and knowledge, and the only way for him to gain these was to venture out after those who could give him facts.
And so, having decided, he picked up the Sunday morning paper and saw that which changed his mind again.
He read the story on page two of the A section and then phoned downstairs for Chicago and St. Louis papers. These had the same story but in more detail than the local journal.
flying saucer seen in los alamos area
ufo lands in new mexico
radar and eyewitnesses see visitor from space?
“Yesterday, April 1 (April Fool’s Day), at 5:32 p.m., MST, a busload of government workers saw. ...”
“... radar detected and held on its screen for two minutes a UFO. . . .”
“... the pilot reports seeing the object land on top of a hill...”
“... officials refuse to make any comment. ...” Eyre read everything about the “conventionally shaped UFO” and then turned on the TV. Not until the five o’clock news was there any mention of the UFO, and that was a brief comment by a broadcaster who obviously thought it was a hoax. But there was a photograph of a blurred object supposedly taken by a guard near the test area. This had been the scene of a number of hydrogen bomb experiments in the late 1960’s.
Eyre thought several times about leaving at once, even though it was daylight. What difference did it make now if he broke his vow to himself not to change shape until the sun had long been down? He probably wouldn’t be coming back, and so what did he care that passersby might see him? Let them talk. The story wouldn’t increase the amount of attention on him, anyway.
But he did not follow his impulse. He might not find her (why did he think of it as her when it might be another male?). If she were gone, had come to Earth for only a little while, he would have to go after her. But he might not find her. He had no way of determining toward what sector of space she would be flying.
However, it did not seem likely that she would stay for only a little while. She might be ready to “give birth” to a cloud of gametes and so was looking for a concentration of humans. But if this were so, why had she picked out the remote and sparsely populated Los Alamos atomic testing grounds? Had she been attracted by some residue of radiation?
As soon as night came, he would go. The skies were starting to cloud and rain was predicted. It would be dark enough for him to leave then; he would go so fast that the human eye would not recognize him as anything but a streak. The human mind would classify him as an illusion, a temporary aberration of the eye. What did it matter what they thought?
A few minutes before the sun touched the horizon, he phoned Tincrowdor. “Hello, Leo. Paul. I’m going.”
There was a pause, and then Tincrowdor, in a strange voice, said, “I thought you would. But listen, Paul, I. ...”
“Never mind. Good-bye.”
“But, Paul. . . !”
Eyre hung up the phone and undressed. The phone began ringing. Tincrowdor was probably calling back, but he would have nothing to say that needed hearing. He would say that Eyre’s first duty was to humanity (despite the many times he’d argued against that). He would remind Eyre that it was his presence that ensured against atomic war or even a large-scale conventional war. He would. . . what did it matter what he would say?
And so he slipped into his other form like a hand into a glove and flung the gauntlet of himself against the night.
* * * *
8
Around and around over what he thought was northern New Mexico, he sped. The earth was a shifting pattern of triangles and cubes, glowing brightly, varicolored, the hills blocks of silver nudging the chestnut triangles around them. And then far away, tiny, a light like that from a firefly’s tail glowed. On, off. On, off. Dash, dot. Dash, dot. The longer pulses looked to him as if they were scarlet musical quarter notes written against an azure page so pale that he could see the vague geometrical forms of the earth behind it. The shorter pulses looked like six-branched candelabras enveloped in silver fuzz.
They gave him no shock of recognition. They were not what he had expected. Certainly, they were not radiations from his “mother,” the creature that had passed him in space as she traveled toward some planet circling some far-off star. But then he had seen her moving, and the shape of his kind (his kind!) changed with velocity. No, it did not actually change, but his perception of her had changed as she changed vectors. This one must be resting on the ground.
She was, he thought excitedly, waiting for him.
But why here? Why hadn’t she sought him out in his apartment?
Eyre could “see” in all directions and so perceived his downward angle of flight as double amphorae burning blue. Among them were little novae of green sputtering off into violet; these indicated that he was not just flying in a calm mood; he was thrilled with delight.
The pulses came faster, merged into expanding and disappearing obovoids and then became a many-rayed star with a yellow center. If he were in human form, he knew, he would see simply a saucer shape, light-gray, two feet in diameter, four inches high at the thickest part, the center. It would be lying in the middle of a plain over three miles wide; the wavering bands of purple would be cacti.
Or would it? A many-rayed star with a yellow center. There was something about that form and color that was familiar or at least should be familiar.
Where?
Suddenly, he knew.
He pulled up and away, but it was too late.
There was only one light, now, the blinding raving light of a sun. Or of atomic energy loosed, matter turning into energy, expanding.
Even as he raced away, its tongues lapping at him, he thought, How did they do it?
* * * *
He had escaped being consumed, but he had not gone unhurt. The fireball had never enveloped him, but he had gone out of control for a while, turning over and over, falling, smashing into something, ricocheting high, regaining control, speeding, the air turning black around him, which meant that he was close to turning into fire himself from its friction.
And then the thing behind him had dropped away and was gone, and he was going home, mortally wounded.
No, he could not return to his apartment. There was no one there to ensure that his death would not be useless.
He would not be able to metamorphose into his human form again. That meant that he could not find out how they had tricked him. But there would be at least one human being who was going to inherit.
There might be more than one. He had passed over many towns and cities and lonely farmhouses on his erratic, sinking path homeward. Behind him, mixed with the double amphorae, was a trail of tiny but brightly golden nautilus-shell forms. When he was human, they would look like bricks. They were issuing from the ripped open shell of himself, and most of them had escaped before he became aware of them. Then he had squeezed down on something inside him and blocked off the little he had left. He was saving the residue.
Presently, as he thought he was out of strength and must fail, a hexagonal form loomed, and he was through it. It would be a window, the main one in Tincrowdor’s bedroom. The sound of shattered glass and of a heavy object smashing into the floor, ramming into the wall, should bring Tincrowdor if he were home. He hoped he was home. Even if he were not, he would find Eyre here and would touch him, and there would be gametes all over the room and over himself.
The surface beneath him shivered with long flat waves of silver. The sound of approaching footsteps. Then, in the doorway, which was to him an iris, a figure appeared. It was pyramid-shaped with a great eyelike protuberance on top. Comets like those from a Fourth of July sparkler sprayed from the top of the eyes. They would be the words of an excited man, and the man would be Tincrowdor. In the center of the eye was a dirigible shape, glowing green, the shape of human maleness. The dirigible bore in its center an X formed by two bottle shapes. How appropriate to Tincrowdor, he thought. No one else in the universe had that identifying shape.
“Good-bye, Tincrowdor,” he thought. “Pass it on.”
The shapes dissolved; the colors faded. Dimly, he could see the creature with the lion’s lower body and the beautiful torso and head of a woman, and, even more dimly, the red fields and the green city. And then they, too, bleached out.
* * * *
10
The man said, “The President did not want to commend you by letter or phone. Why I don’t know, so don’t ask me. I was just told to deliver the message verbally.”
Tincrowdor stood looking out of a window of the living room. The man sat on a sofa with a cup of coffee in one hand. Morna, Tincrowdor’s wife, was not home. The man had made certain of that before he came to the house.
Out there in the moonless night was a field, and in the field was a towering and very old sycamore tree. Near its roots was a smooth place over which new grass was growing. Below the grass lay a hard shell ripped open at one end and within were decaying meat and worms. Only Tincrowdor knew that it was there because he had buried it, and he intended to tell no one about it. He did not want to repeat Eyre’s history.
Was his blood swarming with millions of tiny yellow brick-shaped things? Probably. He had no intention of getting a doctor to examine his blood. This time, events would take a different course.
He turned and said, “So you don’t know what the message means?”
The man looked alarmed. “If you try to tell me, I’ll get up and walk out.”
“No sweat,” Tincrowdor said. “Well, you tell the President that mum is the word and that he doesn’t have to worry about me. Not that he doesn’t know that already. And tell him that I’m not sorry that he can’t give me a medal. I wouldn’t accept it. But you can tell him that if I’d known he was going to use my plan, I . . . well, anyway, tell him for me that he’s a big liar. He promised. . . .”
The man looked bewildered. Tincrowdor said, “Never mind. Just tell him I said thanks for nothing.”
The man put the cup down and rose. “Is that all?”
“That’s all I have to say or ever will say on the subject. Which I’ll bet you’re dying to know. Which would be what would happen if you did know.”
The man’s eyebrows rose. He picked up his hat and said, “Good-bye, Mr. Tincrowdor.” He did not offer to shake hands. But he hesitated at the doorway.
“Did you know Paul Eyre very well?”
“As well as anyone could.”
“I’m asking because he cured my wife’s terminal cancer, you know.”
“I didn’t know, but I can see why you can’t restrain your curiosity.”
“That was strange!” the man burst out. “Disappearing like that and no trace whatsoever! And guarded by two dozen men! FBI, too! Do you think that he just took off? Or did some foreign agents. . . ?”
“I wouldn’t care to speculate.”
“Well, at least the world will never be the same again.”
Tincrowdor smiled and said, “You never spoke a truer word.”
“A man like him never truly dies. He lives on in us.”
“In some of us, anyway,” Tincrowdor said. “Good-bye, Mr. Sands.”
After the man had left, Tincrowdor poured himself another bourbon. Well, he thought, Eyre certainly knew whom he should revenge himself on. Came straight here. He couldn’t have known, but he must have guessed that I originated the trap. But the President told me that the plan was rejected. And, later, I was glad that he had turned it down. I didn’t really want to be responsible for Eyre’s death.
When in the saucer form, the power to kill or cure by thought, or whatever, doesn’t operate. So, catch Eyre in that form. And the bait? What he desired most, a mate. That rhymes, doesn’t it?
Eyre told me how he perceived things, and so I knew he’d never be fooled by just a simulacrum. It would have to contain something living. And the shell did. It held a swarm of bees.
Eyre had been fooled long enough to get caught. The atomic bomb buried under the earth beneath the dummy had been triggered by a device connected to the radar. The image registered by the radar was the only one that would set the bomb off.
There were outcries from governments about illegal experimentation with bombs, even though the U.S. government had said that it was an accident. This was for public consumption. After the governmental heads had been informed, secretly, that Paul Eyre was dead, the objections were dropped, the excuses accepted.
Radar had tracked Eyre into the area of Busiris, Illinois, and he could imagine the consternation that must have caused. But when no remains were found, it had been concluded, or at least he supposed it had been, that Eyre had fallen into the river or somewhere in the woods around Busiris. A quiet search had been conducted without success. Months passed, and with these the jitters of the officials had evaporated.
There had been one thing which Tincrowdor had not understood. Eyre had had no mate, so how could he release a cloud of gametes? If the saucer person released these, and there had been no cross-fertilization, then the gametes would contain only the genes of the mother.
After some wrestling with his mind, he had concluded that that did not matter. The being with whom a gamete fused would eventually find a mate. Or, if it did not, then it would pass on its gametes to another, who would in turn find a mate.
Or perhaps there was no mating, no cross-fertilization, not as terrestrial science defined it. Every adult form generated gametes in its body, and the purpose of these was to locate and fuse with a being of an entirely different genus. Maybe with a being of an entirely diferent kingdom, since the saucers might, for all he knew, be vegetables. Or some type of creature neither animal nor vegetable.
Whatever the theory, the reality proceeded unhindered.
He went to the window and lifted his glass in toast to the inert and invisible mass under the trees.
“You win, Paul Eyre. You and your kind. Soon to be my kind.”
The door opened, and his wife, Morna, entered.
He said hello and kissed her, thinking as he did so of that night when he had rubbed the yellow mercury stuff on her hand while she slept.
He did not know whether he had done it from love or hate. But he did know that he did not want to go into the unknown alone.