WYNNE WHITEFORD
Born in 1915, Wynne Whiteford has been an aircraft assembler, reporter, editor, and a prolific writer since the 30s. His first science fiction story was “Beyond the Infinite,” which appeared in Adam and Eve in 1934, but he seemed to catch fire in the 50s, and his sf stories such as “The Non-Existent Man” were selling to overseas markets such as Amazing. In the late 70s he began writing his Kesrii series of stories, and from 1980 to 1990 he turned his hand to writing novels, which include Breathing Space Only, Sapphire Road, Thor’s Hammer, The Hyades Contact, Lake of the Sun, and The Specialist. He was awarded the Epicurean and Cultural Society Short Story award in 1987, the Ditmar award in 1990, and the A. Bertram Chandler Award for lifetime achievement in Australian science fiction in 1995.
He writes: “As a child, I was stirred by stories my father told me of a six-months expedition through the center of Australia to Darwin and back, when the Government had visions of opening the inland to settlement. Fortunately, it didn’t happen, and the unique outback environment has survived, but my father’s experiences ignited my imagination, feeding the lure of places over the horizon.
“Eventually, I found my own adventures in far-off lands, returning home to my stringybark forest to weave past, present, and future fiction from fragments of the endless variety of human activity all over our planet.”
In the story that follows, Whiteford returns to his native country — and to the outback, where the otherworldly remnants of the Dreamtime can be found in the very rocks themselves.
* * * *
The Director lifted his eyes from the spread-out map and looked at the other three men around the table. “Agreed, then? We make a series of test bores at intervals of two thousand metres along the anticline from here” — he gestured with his pencil — “to here.”
There was a perfunctory murmur of assent from the Chief Geologist and the Accountant. Both were older than the Director, but they had given up trying to compete with his inexhaustible energy. He looked intently at the gaunt, sun-mottled man at the left end of the table, noticing the pulse beating almost imperceptibly near his temple.
“Something wrong, Kel?”
Kel seemed to snap back into the present moment with an effort, running a hand through his greying hair. “Not too happy about the area, that’s all.” As he looked at the Director his eyes, normally steady and controlled, were momentarily wide and haunted.
“But you’ve worked up that way before.”
“Yes. With no luck.”
The Director spread out his hands. “So it’s a calculated risk.”
Kel shrugged resignedly, and the Director closed the meeting. But as the Accountant and the Chief Geologist were preparing to leave he caught Kel’s eye and made a hold-on signal with his finger. Kel spent a little time getting his papers together, wishing a goodnight to the other two as they went out through the door. As soon as they were out of sight he froze, and both he and the Director stood looking at the closed door as the footsteps faded along the passageway.
“Time for a drink, Kel?” asked the Director as the sound of the elevator door clashed along the passage.
“Thanks, Don.” Kel stood staring through the window across the panorama of Melbourne, with its higher towers gilded by the late afternoon sun. He could see the bay to the left through the clefts between the buildings, and away to the right a jet was landing at Tullamarine.
The Director walked across the room and handed him his drink, noticing the unexpected tremor in his hand that sent tiny waves across the glass.
“Kel,” he said, “we’ve been together since we started this game. Something’s bugging you. What is it?”
Kel looked at him thoughtfully before answering. The Director was a big man with an easy smile, somehow boyish until you looked at his eyes. They were small, bright eyes, somehow older and harder than the rest of him.
“I’ll tell you, Don. But I don’t want it on record.”
“Sure.” The big man shrugged, then turned suddenly and switched off an unobtrusive tape recorder on top of a filing cabinet. Kel stared at it as though he hadn’t been aware of its presence, and the Director touched the eject button, extracted the cassette and laid it aside, looking expectantly at Kel.
“You mentioned somewhere there was an Aboriginal site in the area?” said Kel.
“Oh, that? Only the one. Took the trouble to get any sacred sites identified first — otherwise a claim might go in after we’d hit the jackpot.”
“Okay, but I don’t want to drill anywhere near it. Right?”
The big man looked at him fixedly for a few seconds, his eyes exploring the tanned face. They’d moved a long way apart, he thought, since the old days when they’d gone drilling together.
“Not worried about spirits, Kel? Blackfellows’ curses?”
“Hell, no. No reasonable person believes that sort of claptrap today. Although ...”
The pause lengthened out. “How d’you mean, although?”
Kel swallowed some of his drink. “I was thinking. We know a lot more today than they knew in the dark ages. Even a lot more than anyone knew twenty years ago. But we don’t know it all.”
The Director had a curiously controllable face, like an actor. He looked at Kel with his lower lip thrust forward slightly, one eye half-closed, the opposite eyebrow lifted high.
Kel gestured with his glass. “When I say I don’t believe in ghosts — I mean nothing is ever going to convince me that the spectre of Captain Cook or Ned Kelly still roams about. But look, Don, something bloody odd happened to me years ago when I was doing a geophysical survey down south of the Kimberleys.”
“What were you after?”
“Oil — when I was working with the other crowd. That was when they were all carving up the North-West Shelf, and everyone was looking for oil in the most unlikely places. I had three blokes with me — Gil, the fellow who fired the charges for underground echoes, Pete and Djerri, who were all-rounders. Pete was what you’d call a good instinctive mechanic. Djerri was an Aborigine, who knew the country — there were times when he found things to eat that the rest of us wouldn’t have been game to touch.”
The Director moved some papers on the table with his left hand so he could glance at his wristwatch. Suddenly he sat down at his desk, lifted his phone and punched out a number. His face seemed to soften for a time.
“Hi, Kit. Been held up a bit... Right. See you.” Replacing the phone, he pointed to one of the bubble chairs. “Better sit down, Kel. I want to hear this.”
* * * *
It was about this time in the afternoon (began Kel). We’d been doing a run of test bores along an anticlinal fold that looked a vague possibility, but with no luck. It outcropped in a long, low ridge that had resisted erosion, and at a high point we found four stone slabs set upright, about the height of a man.
The sight of them, from a distance, seemed to upset Djerri, whose people had belonged to one of the coastal tribes that knocked around the Wyndham area. He said the stones had been put up, or looked after, by a tribe called the Ungarinyin, and he was hesitant about staying with us as we drove up along the ridge for a closer look.
The ridge wasn’t very high — we were getting well inland where the Kimberleys were starting to flatten out into the Great Sandy Desert — and Gil and I were able to drive along the crest in the Landcruiser, Pete and Djerri following in the heavy truck with the drilling rig.
Very desolate there in the late afternoon. Nothing in any direction except reddish sand sprinkled with saltbush and a bit of spinifex struggling to survive. No birds. You know, you get birds of some kind in every part of inland Australia, but there were none here. Didn’t even see any lizards. Only sound was the eerie sighing of the wind.
There was an outcrop of rock near the upright stones, and in a sheltered hollow Pete found paintings on the rock surface — vaguely human figures with round heads, no mouths, and marks around their heads that suggested lightning. They reminded me of something I’d seen, somewhere, but couldn’t recall.
“Wandjina!” shouted Djerri, stepping back.
I stood looking at the painted outlines for a long time. They’d been carefully done, with smooth, confident lines that suggested the artist knew what it was all about. But they’d been painted so long ago that centuries of weathering had almost obliterated them in places. It was obviously Aboriginal work, but there was something about the figures that looked alien.
“What’s wandjina?” I asked Djerri.
His dark, red-streaked eyes looked startlingly wide. As far as I could determine from what he told me in short, disconnected sentences, all that part of the Kimberleys was aware of the Wandjina cult, a belief held not only by the Ungarinyin, who lived around the immediate area, but by a couple of other tribes called the Worora and the Wonamble, or something, that used to control the area nearer the coast.
“Some of this white paint doesn’t look all that old,” I said.
“Men of the tribes touch up the figures sometimes,” explained Djerri. “Part of rain-making ritual.” He began to move away, pointing to the round-headed figures. “The Wandjina were heroes who came from the sky, or some people say, from the sea, back in the time of the ungud — what you might call the dreamtime.”
When he told me that, I realised where I’d seen something like these paintings before. On a TV program, a fellow called von Daniken had shown rock paintings of non-human figures with what looked like space helmets and flames around their heads. Some had been painted in the Sahara, some in Central Australia, and somewhere else. Of course, there had to be a simpler explanation than the coming of beings from space, but in this empty wilderness the painted figures had a chilling force.
Well, I was in trouble. I wanted to drill right there, because it was the highest point on the anticline and would give us the best chance of striking any oil, if it had been trapped under the upfold. But Djerri didn’t want any part of it, and neither did Gil.
Odd guy, Gil. Thin, wiry, with a sun-blistered forehead and peeling nose, and eyes that seemed to stick out when he was excited, as he was now. He was the sort of fellow who’d like to see the National Trust elevated to a totalitarian dictatorship. You know — the status quo, period.
Well, we sorted it out in a way. Djerri simply quit. No ill-feeling about it. He borrowed one of the two trail bikes we used for reconnoitering, took some food and a bag of water with him, and strapped them onto the pillion with bungee cords. Sitting astride the machine, he looked up at me.
“Be careful, Kel,” he said. “I’ll see you back at our last camp.” And that was it. We shook hands, and he started the engine and rode off, following our tracks back. He didn’t look back at us — just kept riding at the same even speed, holding his shoulders high the way his people do, until his red shirt and battered, wide-brimmed hat dwindled to a speck in the distance, partly obscured by the trail of fine red dust he raised behind him.
“All right,” said Gil as we watched him go. “It’s okay with me as long as we don’t drill right on the site.”
“Good!” I said. Although the sun was well down toward the horizon, I decided to begin a test bore straight away, rather than have an argument flare again tomorrow morning.
We manoeuvred the truck into position and put out its stabilisers, and lined up the drilling rig. We began drilling a short distance away from the upright stones.
As the drill ground its way down into the dry red soil, I stood looking around me. The hot wind whispered through gaps in the eroded rocks along the ridge. Below, nothing in sight grew higher than the stunted saltbush and, whichever way I looked, nothing moved between me and the heat-haze that blurred the horizon.
Pete, the mineralogist of the team, was excited about some bits of weathered black glassy rock he’d found near the paintings.
“It shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“It is obsidian, isn’t it? Volcanic glass. Form of rhyolite. See?”
“Well, don’t worry about it. It could have been brought here from somewhere else.”
Pete went on collecting pieces. “I don’t get it,” he kept muttering to himself. He was a careful type, stocky, solid, almost obsessive. I walked back to the drilling rig, which Gil was now operating in the absence of Djerri, listening to the laborious puttering of the engine and the sound of the bit grinding its way down into the dry red soil.
“Look at this!” called Pete suddenly. His dark eyes looked at me over the tops of his glasses. “These things look as if they’re parts of something. Here —” He scrambled to his feet, holding the pieces of dark glassy material in his hands. “They all have a convex surface and a concave one, as if they’re parts of a hollow cylinder that’s been shattered. Sure, the edges are worn away by the abrasion of windblown sand, and some of the pieces are missing.”
“That bit looks like a section of a hollow ball,” I pointed out.
“There’s another like that. I reckon the original thing was a cylinder with rounded ends.”
I studied the pieces for a long time. “Could it be part of a volcanic gas bubble?”
“Out here? Where’s the volcano? Anyway, the bubble’d have to blow up to a certain size, and hold stable pressure for a long time while the stuff solidified.” He shook his head. “No. This thing’s an artifact.”
“Cut it out, Pete. Look at the erosion wear on the edges. Looks as if it’s been sand-blasted for thousands of years. Artifact? Who d’you think made it? The Wandjina?”
This got a laugh from Gil, and Pete dropped the subject.
There was a noticeable change in the sound of the drilling rig. The engine speeded up, although the amount of red soil coming out of the hole dwindled. Gil swung the bit out of the hole and switched off the motor.
“Hit something,” he said. “Couldn’t be a different stratum yet.”
The slanting light of the reddening sun left the hole completely dark. Gil walked round to the cabin of the truck and returned with the big five-cell torch, directing its beam down the hole.
“What the hell — Say, look at this! It’s more of that damned rhyolite, or whatever Pete called it.”
I took the torch from him. “Looks like the same stuff, but I think you’ve cracked it.”
“Can’t understand why the drill didn’t grind it to powder.”
“Want to drill beside it?”
“No. Reckon we could dig it out.”
We dug it out, while the swollen red sun flattened out into a broad oval on the mists of the skyline. We worked quickly, because the dark really jumps on you that close to the equator.
The thing shook all of us, when we got it out into the light. Against all reason, we had to admit that it did look like some kind of artifact.
It was a cylinder about ninety centimetres long and nearly thirty in diameter, with rounded ends. It reminded me of those glass balls the Japanese use as floats on their fishing nets, but it was too thick and heavy to serve that purpose — it would have sunk like a rock in water. One end was marked with a twisting, whorl-like pattern. Pete voiced the thought that was forming in my mind.
“Looks as if it’s been sealed off. Heated, spun around, and sealed.”
“Wouldn’t that have left a pip of glass sticking out, like an old-fashioned light globe?”
“Could have been ground off. Let’s take it around to the front of the truck and look at it in the headlights. Careful, though, the drill’s cracked it — see?”
The sun was down now and the quick purple dusk of the desert was already sweeping over us. Gil was carrying the cylinder, and Pete went round to the driving side of the cabin to switch on the headlights of the truck. A second before the powerful lights blazed out, Gil tripped over a piece of equipment lying in the shadows and sprawled headlong. The glassy cylinder struck the end of the heavy steel bull-bar across the front of the vehicle and burst with a report like a gun shot.
We were never quite able to agree on what happened next. The way I saw it, at the instant the lights came on the broken shards of the cylinder were still rocking on the ground, and a twisting cloud of whitish vapour seemed to swirl upward from them. It didn’t spread out indefinitely, as I expected, but seemed to spin like a whirlwind, although there wasn’t enough wind about to generate a vortex.
It spun upright, about the height of a man, then it moved quickly away from us, first travelling down the beam of the headlights, then abruptly veering sideways into the dark.
“What was it?” Gil’s voice was an octave higher than I had ever heard it.
“Say,” said Pete in a stunned monotone, “you don’t suppose...” He let his voice trail away.
“Suppose what?” I broke in sharply.
“You know those corny old Arabian Nights yarns about genies in bottles?”
“Rot! Only a whirlwind. A willy-willy.”
Pete looked unconvinced. Gil licked his finger and held it up.
“The wind’s coming this way. It went across that way.”
“All right,” I snapped, “so it was an eddy.”
“An eddy ? Who are you kidding, Kel ?”
By now it was almost dark outside of the zone of the headlights. Pete reached in and switched them off. Then, after a few seconds of near blackness, he switched them on again, and no-one commented. The wind stirred fitfully through the clefts in the rocks, and none of us seemed inclined to move away from the bright path of the lights.
“Well,” I said at last, “we can’t stand here all night.”
“Wait,” said Gil, and taking the big torch he climbed on to the roof of the Landcruiser. “Switch off the headlights now,” he called down to us.
He swung the long beam of the torch in a slow careful arc. Once, the light seemed to pass a drifting wisp of fog-like vapour at an indeterminate distance, and Pete and I both asked “What’s that?” in a sharp tense chorus.
Gil whipped the beam back, waving it from side to side in gradually widening sweeps. But now there was nothing.
We didn’t sleep much that night. It was bad enough when it was dark, but when the moon came up it was worse. We found ourselves peering out at the pallid landscape until the clumps of saltbush seemed to flit about at the edge of our vision.
“Just thinking,” mused Pete in a dreamy voice, “why did they put genies in bottles?”
“Look!” I exploded. “That’s enough thinking for tonight. Let’s get some sleep.”
A few minutes later Gil suddenly sat up. “What was that?”
“What?”
“That sound. Like a sort of whisper.”
“Probably a bat.”
“No. It was like a voice.”
“What’d it say?” I kept my voice hard and derisive.
“It was like a whisper in a different language.”
“Abo’s language?”
“No. Not like any language I’ve ever heard.”
Angrily, I got up. The embers of the little camp fire were still glowing unevenly in the faltering wind. The landscape was bleached with moonlight. I walked over toward the drilling rig.
Nothing.
I turned. I was not quite sure, but something seemed to move between me and the fire.
You know the way you can look down through clear water to the bottom of the stream, and the bottom seems to shake as a ripple passes over the water? It was an effect like that, as if there had been a visible ripple in the air.
I walked cautiously back to the camp fire and found Gil standing.
“I heard it again,” he said.
He bent down and picked up the big torch, then began to walk away from the fire, down the moonlit slope toward the scrubby saltbush, swinging the beam of the flashlight from side to side. Then, when he was about fifty metres away, he screamed.
It was a strange chopped-off scream. It brought Pete to his feet. We both began running toward Gil. He seemed to stagger sideways, as if he were fighting something we couldn’t see. The beam of light flailed wildly, and then abruptly he dropped the torch. It lay on the ground, its beam cut short by a clump of saltbush. “Gil!” I shouted as we ran.
Before we could reach him, he fell, then quickly came to his feet again, moving away from us in a lurching run. I picked up the torch and swung its beam onto his staggering figure.
There was something wrong with the way he ran. He ran without swinging his arms in rhythm with the movement of his legs, and the length of his stride kept changing, as if he were experimenting with it. The height he lifted his feet kept changing, too, as though he had never run before. Yet his movements, though badly coordinated, had unbelievable energy.
“Gil! Gil!”
He ran in a wide circle in great, leaping strides, his head on one side, his arms swinging randomly like the arms of a doll, a marionette.
A marionette! That was the effect, exactly. As if something else were operating his body — something able to move it, yet utterly inexperienced in controlling this type of body.
He raced back towards us. I shone the torch beam full in his face, but he gave no indication of noticing it. His eyes were fixed and blank, like the eyes of a dead man.
He lurched past us in that ghastly, leaping run, leaning sideways as he veered in a curve, then straightening up, lengthening his already too-long stride. Once, he crashed through a clump of saltbush, sprawled to the ground, rolled to his feet and raced on.
“Into the Landcruiser, Pete!” I shouted.
As we climbed aboard, he said, “She’s low on fuel.”
“We’ll have to chance it.” I started the engine.
“Okay.” Pete jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “We’ve got a full jerrycan in the back, if we’re stuck.”
With the lights on high beam, I drove after the distant racing figure. He was heading southeast, and we could see his course by the disturbance of saltbush and spinifex.
“Look,” said Pete in an awed voice, “how the hell does he keep going so damned straight? Like a plane following a beam.”
“I was noticing that. It’s as if whatever took control of him started by running around learning to make a human body work. Or maybe the way a migrating bird flies around to get its bearings before taking off on a long flight. Now, he seems to be heading straight for some definite goal.”
“But what? What’s out this way? Nothing but desert.”
I thought for a moment, then said, “If you go far enough southeast from here, you have Uluru and the Olgas, unmistakable landmarks, and Haast’s Bluff, the old meteor crater — but they’re hundreds of kilometres away. He’d never get that far.”
Pete grunted. “I’m not sure, the way he’s moving.”
We followed the bounding figure for several kilometres, but although he must have seen our lights throwing his shadow ahead of him he gave no sign of awareness of our presence.
Then, just as I was deciding to drive alongside him, the engine of the Landcruiser spat, stuttered and fell silent. As we rolled to a stop, Gil’s figure went leaping on toward the southeast.
Pete clamped the pourer onto the jerrycan, and we tipped the fuel into the tank. “That’s enough,” I said, “we can put the rest in later.”
While Pete was stowing the half-full can back aboard, I tried to start the engine again, but without success. “Damn! We’ve got a vapour lock. Have to tip some juice into the carby.”
I began taking off the air cleaner while Pete returned with the rest of the fuel. A glance ahead showed that Gil’s figure was very far away.
With the carburettor bowl filled, the engine started at once. I replaced the air-cleaner, and as I spun down the wingnut holding it Pete replaced the can. I could not see Gil’s figure now.
We drove on, sometimes losing the trail where the saltbush was sparse. Eventually, though, we picked it up, following it even where it crossed a shallow, dry water-course by what looked like a single leap. Ultimately, we came on Gil, sprawled on the dusty floor of another erosion gully.
“He’s dead,” said Pete, shining the beam of the torch on the inert figure. Gil lay like a broken marionette flung aside by a destructive child. His shirt and jeans were spattered with blood from his encounters with the saltbush.
“Let’s get him into the Landcruiser,” I said. We carefully picked up the lifeless body and carried it to the car. Only after we had placed it in the back seat a chilling thought struck me.
“Let’s get the hell out of here, Pete! That thing that took hold of him — it might reach for one of us!”
We sprang aboard, I started the engine and swung the car around. As we headed back, Pete glanced through the back window.
“D’you reckon the thing’s still out there, somewhere?”
“I’m not going back to look,” I said.
We drove through the night and morning, taking the body back to our main base. Heart seizure, the verdict. Well, that would have been right. You couldn’t drive a human body at that speed, for that long, without the heart packing up.
Pete and I never mentioned that wisp of vapour we thought we saw. And we never mentioned the strange dry whisper we thought we heard.
Ghosts? Spirits? No, I don’t believe in them. Not the classical kind. Unless, maybe, you include the Wandjina from the time of the ungud.
But whirlwinds? They put a fright into me even now — even in broad daylight.
* * * *
Most of the way down to the parking area under the building, the Director was silent, expressionless.
“I don’t know, Kel,” he said at length. “It could have been a combination of things. Hallucinations — and there could have been some obscure virus that got into the fellow who died. Something like rabies, say?”
The elevator reached the basement and they walked out into the underground carpark where both their cars were at the far end. As they passed the ramp leading up to the dusk-lit street, a sudden gust of wind whirled a man-sized column of spinning dust around the angle of the wall. The Director leaped sideways with a sharp cry, and when he looked at Kel his face was pale.
“It’s all right.” Kel’s own face had whitened and his voice creaked like a rusty hinge, but he managed a half-smile. “I don’t think they come this far south.”
For a few seconds they looked at each other. Then they both joined in a shaky laugh, and walked quickly toward their cars.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
I had been exploring the sparsely settled part of South Australia around the north end of the Flinders Ranges. The track ended at a dry watercourse lined with river gums. I left the car, walked along the silent creek bed. I felt alone on the planet. Then I came to an outcrop of rock with Aboriginal paintings protected by an overhang.
Most resembled others in various parts of the outback — X-ray type pictures of animals — but dominating them were von Danikenesque figures of mouthless, staring-eyed beings from the Dreamtime. They had a disturbingly alien look.
That night, the dark, unpolluted sky of the outback blazed with an uncountable multitude of stars that reached down almost to the deserted horizon. They seemed to make the outside universe more within reach than elsewhere, and I thought of the long-ago artist at the rocks. Did he feel an uncanny sense of something out there, centuries before the X-Files?
— Wynne Whiteford