By Robert Haisty
We unsnap our seat belts and lean back. I am hoping for two things: to get away from the gray Chicago rain and to finish my report for the Baltimore meeting. But by the time we reach cruising altitude I’m sure neither is going to happen. There’s no break in the clouds, and already I know the old guy in the window seat is going to be a talker.
I halfway expected it—as soon as I saw him plop through the forward cabin door, hold out his boarding pass to the blond stewardess, and say something that made her dimple sweetly. It’s that feeling you get when there are at least fifteen empty seats in front of you, but you know, sure as prunes, he’s going to walk past every one of them and stop at your row with a little smile, and you were saving that seat in case Miss Galaxy came by.
He isn’t really doing anything—just sitting there. Why do I find myself staring at him? On closer study, he doesn’t even look so old; it’s just that he seems archaic, somehow—and cautious. Imagine a thoroughly circumspect turtle eyeing over his shoulder the galloping approach of a half-grown Great Dane puppy.
He nods, grins. “You travel much?”
“Not a whole lot,” I mumble halfheartedly. “Do you?”
“Oh, yes indeed. I’m on the move constantly.”
He sits quietly then, and I optimistically begin sorting out my notes for the report. But as soon as the stewardess has dropped off a gin and tonic for him and a vodka martini for me—and a faint, wistful scent of orange blossoms for both of us—he lowers his seatback, turns toward me, and starts. “Yeah,” he says with an ironic chuckle that there could have been any question about it, “I travel all right.”
He has a voice that sounds deceptively unobtrusive, quiet even; yet it carries handily above the roar of the engines—not an easy man to ignore. And immediately, as if he were the Ancient Mariner and I, the Wedding Guest, I find myself putting my papers aside to listen to him.
“I’ll tell you this: When you make as many towns a year as I do, you get so you can taste things in the wind. You pick up on all kinds of stuff. I once read: The constant traveler grasps propositions too subtle to describe. Too fleeting to hold. He knows things others do not.’ “
“Like what?” I know I rolled my eyes disbelievingly toward the heavens before I could stop myself. But he doesn’t pay any attention to that, or to my question.
“I’ve come to realize it gradually,” he says. “Through God knows how many thousand lonely breakfasts, up too early for the body to respond; trying to come back to life on coffee too strong, pale eggs too runny, with too much black pepper, and the morning paper. Then out of the red-clothed breakfast grill and into the city, still sleeping in the morning haze all cities seem to gather. Thirty years of it hasn’t stopped that gnawing in the gut of a morning. That’s the loneliest time there is. Not the nights. At night, people draw together. You get a feeling of order. We’ve conquered the night with soft electric lights and whiskey sours. Old travelers get together in quiet little bars and wear the night away. We don’t say much. We don’t really have to.”
The Constant Traveler stops talking and pulls an orange out of his pocket, digging a stubby thumb into the peel. The aroma makes me think of the stewardess, and I wish I had ordered two drinks. He offers me part of his orange, and involuntarily I start to reach for it, then draw back.
“Hey!” he says. “Were you born like that?”
“Like-?”
“With three fingers.” He leans forward to look across at my left side. “On each hand?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I was. Sure.”
“Well I’ll be. Cause you any problems?”
“No. No, of course not.”
“Well,” he says, laughing, “long as you’re not a piano player.”
“No problem there. I’m what you call tone deaf.” I shouldn’t have said it, because instantly his eyes dart to my ears, and I know he is studying them now.
He starts to say something else but apparently thinks better of it. Instead he forces himself to gaze at his knees and says: “Well, I’ll be double-dipped damned.”
I try again to withdraw to my papers, but it isn’t easy.
“Now then,” he says, “you travel around some, don’t you? Haven’t you noticed the difference lately?”
“The difference in what?”
“The feeling. In the air.”
I shake my head. “What does it feel like?” I shouldn’t have asked.
“Listen,” he says. “Not long ago I was in New Orleans. It was the end of summer, actually—one of those muggy nights you can’t stir with a stick. And we were sitting out on a veranda bar, listening to the mournful honks of the riverboats, trying to drink ourselves out of a mood we didn’t like, but getting worse into it instead. Anyway, here’s the story:
“There were four of us at the table. Ralph Turner and Bill Ryan—they’re copies of me, though we don’t really look a lot alike. But we all have graying, thinning hair and what I guess you’d call travel-worn faces. The other guy was new to me. His name was Frank Burgeston, and there was kind of a keenness about him. As tall as Ralph, he was powerfully built and in excellent physical condition. He had a longish face, but it wasn’t thin. His eyes, behind hornrimmed glasses, seemed to burn with a restless energy. And my offhand remark that night triggered something in them.
“ ‘I get a funny feeling,’ I had said, breaking a long silence that ensued after we finished ordering drinks, that something’s going to happen pretty soon.’
“ ‘So you feel it, too,’ Bill said dryly, lighting a cigarette.
“Old Ralph drew long and hard on his pipe, then cupped it in his hands as he let the smoke slowly roll out. For the first time in ten years I suddenly had the desire to smoke again. Ralph poked at the pipe with a matchstick, sending a small aromatic cloud across the table. He glanced up quickly when a slight breeze shook the strings of red and yellow paper lanterns hanging in shallow parabolas above the tables. Ralph looked across at Bill, then quickly back down to the checkered tablecloth, a little embarrassed at what he was saying: “Yeah. Me too. I can’t seem to shake the damned thing.’
“But it was Frank’s eyes, and the way he said what he did that set my backbone crawling. ‘I can tell you a little more about it,’ he said flatly. ‘You aren’t the only ones, you know. I got the same thing in Cleveland, St. Louis—all over.’
“ ‘Earthquake?’ I said. ‘Brushfire war?’
“Frank shook his head slowly. ‘No,’ he said. We were silent for a while. Then I shoved my chair back and stretched my legs straight out in front of me, wiggling my toes inside my shoes to get some blood flowing. ‘Aaaaggghhh,’ I said. ‘Come on, you guys. What the hell’s the matter with us? So we think we all have some kind of premonition. So what? You know we just talked ourselves into it—with the help of the goddamned humidity. Or maybe because the market is so lousy.’
“The drinks arrived then, and there was another long silence. When Frank finally spoke he gave me another bout of gooseflesh, though all he said was, ‘I’m afraid there’s more to it than that.’
“He turned away from us then, to gaze for a moment through the open door as the bartender inside deftly capped a tray of drinks with cherries and lemon twists. Our eyes shifted automatically to catch the play of ripples along a pair of long, finely turned thighs in black net as the cocktail waitress executed a little dip that turned into a smooth, practiced lifting of the heavy tray when she straightened. Then she moved out on her next sortie. Was it really just my imagination that the mood of the whole place was quiet, and heavy, and waiting?
“Frank seemed uncomfortable about what he had just said, as if he had revealed more than he intended. Yet I had the distinct impression he wanted to tell us something else. But he kept watching the rhythmic swings of the waitress, and to change the subject he said, ‘There’s some beautiful bilateral symmetry for you.’ He turned back to the table. ‘Do you guys know, one of the top textbooks in the world on crystallography uses a full-page color photo of the sexiest bikini model you ever saw to illustrate bilateral symmetry? That’s what I call forward thinking.’
“ ‘Jesus! You spend your time reading about crystallography?’
“ ‘It is one of the things,’ Frank said, ‘that interest me. Fascinating, in fact.’
“ ‘I’ll tell you what fascinates me.’ Bill chuckled. ‘Ralph, when she comes back, let’s ask her if she’s bilateral.’
“Everybody laughed, but our mood would not stay up. It drifted, like a curled leaf floating on a pond— blown first out, in aimless patterns, then back, then out again. We sat for a time, pensive.
“ ‘I think we drink too much, and too late at night,’ Ralph said. ‘Bad for the liver, you know. Back in Milwaukee they say, Dir ist wohl eine Laus über die Leber gelaufen.’
“’A louse must have walked across your liver.’ Frank echoed, smiling for the first time that night. But then, falling back into his deep mood, he shook his head again. ‘Look around this place. Now, you can say it’s their livers, or too many positive ions in the air, or the phase of the moon—but there’s not a person in here that doesn’t act like doomsday.’
“ ‘Yeah sure,’ Bill grunted. ‘Let’s say that it must be the ions.’
“ ‘Or,’ Frank replied, a little sharply, ‘let’s say it isn’t.’ He hesitated a minute, then said, ‘Listen, let me tell you something that happened a few years back. See, I used to play trumpet in a pretty good symphony orchestra. Well, after the concerts there would always be a reception for the guest artist. And one night—after a particularly good performance—a stranger at the party dropped a verbal bomb.
“ ‘I remember he was a short, heavyset man with dark, bushy hair and quick brown eyes. New in town, he had been invited by a neighbor, and he certainly had not intended to stir up a hornet’s nest. He simply remarked that, yes, the performance had been brilliant, and wasn’t it unfortunate that the piano was a little out of tune.’
“ ‘Is that all?’ Bill asked, like the rest of us listening, more than a little puzzled by Frank’s tale.
“ ‘All! You wouldn’t believe how upset musicians can get over something like that. He might as well have said the conductor couldn’t keep time. So the thing grew and grew, and there were two armed camps: those who said the piano had been in perfect tune and those who said, come to think of it, they had noticed it was a little off. Finally somebody remembered the tape recording of the concert, and the tapes were put through an elaborate analysis with oscilloscopes and tone generators.’
“‘All that, just to-’
“ ‘It was important to us! Anyway, the results bore out the stranger’s contention. Several notes had been out of tune, but so slightly it was generally regarded as an incredible feat that human ears had detected them.’
“Frank paused then for a long sip of his drink. By reflex, we all reached for our glasses, swirling the remaining bits of ice gently before we drank. High to our left a tiny point of light came into view and moved steadily through the bright stars until, crossing in front and continuing westward away from us, it appeared for a while to be stationary, then it was lost in the background. Probably a 707. It was so high we heard nothing of it, only the faint sounds of trucks in the distance; then a boat. I wondered again about the point of Frank’s story. Everything is moving in its proper course. I mused. Why do we look for witches among the milkmaids?
“Then Frank replaced his glass on the table and sat with the tips of his fingers touching. ‘At the time the tapes were being analyzed,’ he said, ‘we were also checking out the stranger. What we discovered was that the man was an incredibly skillful lip-reader. And that he had been totally deaf since early childhood.’
“ ‘What!’ we all shouted at once.
“ ‘Well, I can tell you, we asked the same thing,’ Frank said. ‘Besides that, we were mad as hell because we thought he had been playing a stupid joke on us. But you know, when we confronted him, he was completely shocked. He said he hadn’t realized we were not aware of the problem with the piano. We asked him how, then, in God’s name, he had known the piano was out of tune. “Why,” he said, surprised we should ask, “I saw it in your faces.” ‘
“ ‘Jesus!’ Bill gulped. ‘Who ever heard of anything like-’
“ ‘I learned a lot from that man,’ Frank said. ‘A lot. He showed me how there are many inputs to our senses that don’t register in our conscious minds but show up in other ways. The main thing is to develop confidence in what you perceive. It’s more than intuition. Intuition is like smelling. This is more like tasting. It’s knowing—a sensation of being aware.’
“ ‘And you think we’re sensing the integrated reading from thousands of faces with ... an awareness . . . that something is not right?’ Ralph asked quietly, almost as if he’d been afraid to voice it.
“ ‘Why don’t we go ahead and say it,’ Frank replied flatly. ‘What we’re talking about is the end of the world—at least the world as we know it. You know, there’s been a group somewhere hollering about it ever since man learned to talk. Now nobody anywhere is saying a thing. Because this time it’s for real.’
“We nodded, shuffled around in our chairs. ‘Yeah,’ Frank agreed. ‘That’s about it. But you feel so damn foolish coming right out and trying to talk about it. Do you see a giant fireball, or what?’
“ ‘No. Nothing like that. I think—I know—they’re on their way. An invasion. I don’t even think there’ll be much violence. Just such superior beings ... it won’t be our world any longer.’
“Well, I remember we didn’t say much after that, but shortly finished our drinks and went up to what was —for me, at any rate—a restless night. I was glad to get back on the road. And I really don’t know what made me want to talk about it today. After all, nothing’s happened.”
The Constant Traveler’s story has filled most of the flight. We must be just minutes out of Baltimore. I glance at my watch. It’s about ten minutes. “How long ago was all that?” I ask him as I collect my papers.
“Oh, let’s see ... New Orleans ... it must have been three or four months.”
“Well, that was quite a night you guys had, huh?” I grin at him.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it was.” He looks a little sheepish.
I finish gathering my things and snap the case shut. Outside it looks completely black. We must be in some heavy clouds, but the flight has actually been very smooth. Better get my jacket down; they’re just about ready to call the approach.
I hate landing in the rain, especially at night. It’s like being thrown out of the womb at the wrong time. I hate the smell of wet coats; having to stand in a little pocket of people under a roof that’s too small; the schishing sound the tires make on the water. All the lights are smeared.
And of course the baggage is taking longer. He waits with the ease of habit. The others are shifting their feet, turning at every new noise, checking their watches. Finally our bags come down.
“Say, do you want to share a cab?” he asks. “They’ll be hard to come by tonight.”
“No, thanks. I’m renting a car. Not staying in the city.”
“Oh, okay,” He seems disappointed.
“Can I drop you somewhere?” I ask, a little more kindly.
He waves negative with a palm vertical. “Wouldn’t want to take you out of your way.”
“Come on.” We lift our suitcases at the same time and turn down the long corridor to the transportation area. “I’d be glad to have the company.”
The little hotel where he is staying is several blocks off the main route. It’s an old section, pretty run down, but it feels comfortable. There are a few islands like this one left in every city, and these old salesmen know them all.
It is still raining—cold and steady. He turns his collar up, pulls the checkered travel hat down tighter, thanks me again, and dashes for the front door. There is a quick shaft of light, making silver wires of the raindrops, and he’s gone. In a few minutes he’ll be at Old Fashioneds, surrounded by the red-amber glow of antique polished mahogany; warm, out of the rain.
I stop to light a cigarette, hold the smoke deep for a minute, then direct a slow, thin stream at the windshield wipers before I pull back out into the street. I have had an uncomfortable feeling about it for quite a while, and now I’m sure. They do sense it. They don’t know we are here, of course, but they know something is. And they’re definitely not ready for our migration. If we come in now they will damage themselves trying to resist.
It may be a struggle for me to convince the rest of the Encroach Team, but they’ve got to be convinced. We certainly have no wish to destroy this planet or any of the beings on it. But if Encroach debates too long, it’ll all be over. At best, we’ll barely be able to get word back to leader Twelve in time to stop them. Miserable communications lag! Will we ever break the c-cubed velocity barrier? It’s a good thing we decided to have a final meeting—and that group from Cappadocia finally agreed to come. With Encroach so scattered and not allowed to use normal communications channels, I’d never be able to get an agreement in time to stop the migration.
As it is, maybe I won’t have too much trouble. After all, what is one cycle to us? But think what one hundred seventy-two of their years can do for them. They really do have a remarkable degree of perception already—even, as he said, a rudimentary awareness sense, though they do not seem to understand the Schuman resonances at all. It’s even possible we could wait for two cycles. In any case, it would be unthinkable to do it now.
* * * *
The group from New Zealand does not agree. Neither does the one from Galapagos. Some of the others are undecided. It’s definitely not going to be easy. And the time we’re losing!
“I never heard of such a thing. Are you questioning whether we can handle them? When have we ever had any trouble controlling the Originals?” There is much nodding of agreement with New Zealand.
“After all, we had a full report from Exploration before anything was planned.” One of the Central European groups is heard from. “This is no time to be calling it off. Too late anyway.”
“With all due credit to Exploration,” I tell them, “they have not encountered this degree of development in our other galaxies. It simply is not obvious on a casual encounter. There is real sensitivity here. They are beyond accommodation.”
“And in another cycle or two they may be beyond anything,” Galapagos retorts. “I don’t think we have a choice. There’s no place else to go. You know how long it took us to find this planet. We certainly can’t risk being burned out with no place to — “
“What risk?” I interrupt. “They are not progressing faster than we are, certainly. We’ll be able to come in next cycle if we have to. And I’m convinced they will be able to accept us by then. It should be interesting; they are so much like us in many ways. Take away their extra finger, their peculiar ear structure, and they’re even ahead of us in certain things. The sounds they call music, for example—”
“We agree with Central USA.” The African groups stand up. “We’ve seen it too. There is no question of their sensitivity. It must be allowed to develop before we approach them. They must be able to understand—to accept us.”
“Agreed!” shouts Far North.
“If we are going to call it off,” Encroach Leader says, “it has to be done immediately. Let’s have the vote now.”
“I think you’re imagining things,” Galapagos mutters. “And I’ll tell you something else. Disengagement won’t be trivial.”
* * * *
Galapagos was right about that. We carried the vote, though it was closer than I had expected. But it has taken until Friday to work out the details of the disengagement. I am thoroughly tired by the time I finally get to the airport.
He is there. The Constant Traveler. He lifts the arm resting on the bar a couple of inches in greeting. “Hello, Traveler,” I tell him. “Is this a coincidence, or is somebody following somebody?”
He grins, showing the wide gap in his front teeth. “Pure, plain coincidence. Happens all the time, believe me.”
“Well”—I signal for a beer—”I don’t know about that.”
“Oh, yes,” he assures me. “When you’ve traveled more you’ll know what I mean. You keep running into the same people.”
“How was your stay?” I reach for the beer.
“Great. Made a couple of good sales. Hey! How about that market? Up nearly sixty points this week.”
“Yeah!” Suddenly I am not so tired anymore. “Interesting, isn’t it.”
“Interesting, hell. It means about three thousand bucks to me. Say, what flight are you on? Going back to Chicago?”
“No. Another direction.”
“Too bad,” he says, just before he drains the glass and pops it down on the bar with a loud, long sigh of pleasure. “Sorry I won’t be having your company.” He slides easily off the stool and picks up his case. “But I’ll see you again somewhere. Better run. I got a plane to catch.”
I watch him walk out into the main corridor, then angle off to the left and merge into the stream of shoulders, heads, and assorted luggage moving to the flight gates. I am sorry to see him go. He’s like part of the furnishings. But just before he said good-bye there was an instant when he looked at me, wanting to say something—and in that instant he, a superbly trained professional, knew he had violated security. He is a machine-tool salesman like I am a Xeninian sheepherder!
That story of his—fantastic. It bought them one hundred seventy-two years, anyway. But there was no Frank. And no Bill. And no Ralph, or New Orleans bar. There was a light in the sky, all right. Was there really a deaf man? Perhaps.