I GUESS THIS is as good a place as any for your suspension of disbelief to snap through like an overstressed guitar string. I don't blame you a bit, and it only gets worse from here. Con-men work by getting you to swallow the hook a little at a time; first you are led to believe a small improbability, then there are a series of increasingly improbable complications, until finally you believe something so preposterous that afterward you cannot fathom your own foolishness. My writer friend Snaker says the only difference between a writer and a con-man is the writer has better hours, works at home, and can use his real name if it suits him.
So I guess I'm not a very good con-man. Without the assistance of Gertrude the Guitar, anyway. I'm giving you a pretty improbable thing to swallow right at the start. It's okay with me if you don't believe it, all right?
But let me try to explain to you why I believed it.
Despite the fact that I was then a
1) long-haired
2) bearded
3) American-born
4) guitar player and folksinger
5) college dropout
6) sometime user of powerful psychedelics and
7) bonafide non-card-carrying member of the completely unorganized network of mostly ex-American hippies and back-to-the-landers scattered up and down the Annapolis Valley—despite the fact that I could have called myself a spiritual seeker without breaking up—nonetheless and notwithstanding I did not believe in astrology or auras or the Maharishi or Mahara Ji or Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed or Jahweh or Allah or Wa-Kon-Ton-Ka or vegetarianism or the Bermuda Triangle or flying saucers or the power of sunrise to end all wars if we would all only take enough drugs to stay up all night together, or even (they having broken up in a welter of lawsuits years earlier) the Beatles. I did believe in mathematics and the force of gravity and the laws of conservation of matter and energy and Murphy's Law.
I was pretty lonely, is what I guess I'm trying to tell you: the hippies frowned on me because I didn't abandon the rational part of my mind, while the straights disowned me because I didn't abandon the irrational part. I maintained, for instance, an open if rather disinterested mind on reincarnation and ESP and the sanity of Dr. Timothy Leary, and I was tentatively willing to give the Tarot the benefit of the doubt on the word of a science fiction writer I admired named Samuel Delany.
That's part of what I'm trying to convey. I had read science fiction since I'd been old enough to read, attracted by that sense of wonder they talk about—and read enough of it to have my sense of wonder gently abraded away over the years. People who read a lot of sf are the least gullible, most skeptical people on earth. A longtime reader of sf will examine the flying saucer very carefully and knowledgeably for concealed wires, hidden seams, gimmicks with mirrors: he's seen them all before. Spotting a fake is child's play for him. (A tough house for a musician is a roomful of other musicians.)
On the other hand, he'll recognize a real flying saucer, and he'll waste very little time on astonishment. Rearranging his entire personal universe in the light of startlingly new data is what he does for fun. One of sf's basic axioms, first propounded by Arthur Clarke, is that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Confronted with a nominally supernatural occurrence, a normal person will first freeze in shock, then back away in fear. An sf reader will pause cautiously, then move closer. The normal person will hastily review a checklist of escape-hatches—"I am drunk"; "I am dreaming"; "I have been drugged"; and so forth—hoping to find one which applies. The sf reader will check the same list—hoping to come up empty. But meanwhile he'll already have begun analyzing this new puzzle-piece which the game of life has offered him. What is it good for? What are its limitations? Where does it pinch? The thing he will be most afraid of is appearing stupid in retrospect.
So I must strain your credulity even further. I don't know what you would have done if a naked woman had materialized in front of you on a wooded hillside at night—and neither do you; you can only guess. But what I did was to grin hugely, take ten steps forward, and kneel beside her. I had spent my life training for this moment—for a moment like this—without ever truly expecting it to come.
If it helps any, I did drop Mucus on the way, and forgot his existence until the next day.
My first thought was, those are absolutely perfect tits.
My second was, that's odd. . . .
The nipples on those perfect teats were erect and rigid. Nothing odd there: it was freezing out, she was naked. But the rest of her body was not behaving correspondingly. The skin was not turning blue. No sign of goosebumps. A slight shiver, but it came and went. Teeth slightly apart in an idiot's smile, no sign of chattering.
It wasn't the cold stiffening her nipples. It was excitement.
What sort of excitement do you feel while you're unconscious? I wondered.
It seemed to be equal parts of triumph, fear, and sexual arousal. A sort of by God, I made it! Or have I? excitement, like someone disembarking from her first roller coaster ride—and finding herself in Coney Island, one of Brooklyn's gamier neighborhoods.
My eyes and nose found other evidences of the sexual component of her excitement—
—I looked away, obscurely embarrassed, and glanced back up to the other end. Her face was vacant, but that did not seem to be its natural condition. A lifetime of intelligence had written on that face before some sort of trauma had stunned it goofy. I guessed her age at forty.
So one way to approach it is to go through a long logic-chain. This woman had materialized amid thunderclaps and bright lights. Could she be an extraterrestrial? If so, either human stock was ubiquitous through the Galaxy, or there was something to the idea of parallel evolution, or she was in fact a three-legged thing with green tentacles (or some such) sending me a telepathic projection of a fellow human to soothe my nerves.
I don't know what strains your credulity. The idea of other planets full of human beings, while admittedly possible, strained mine. How did they get there? And why didn't their evolution and ours diverge over the several million years since we took root here?
Parallel evolution—the idea that the human shape is an inevitable one for evolution to select—had always seemed to me a silly notion, designed to simplify science fiction stories. Certainly, the human morphology is a good one for a tool-user, but there are others as good or better. (Whose idea was it to put all the eyes on one side of the head? And who thought two hands were enough?)
And I had difficulty believing in aliens who'd studied us closely enough to notice the behavior of nipples, but not closely enough to know that normal skin turns blue in temperatures well below zero. If what I saw was a telepathic illusion, how come it was semicomatose? To lull me into a false sense of . . . no, the thought was too silly to finish.
And if she was an alien, what had happened to her flying saucer, or rather flying robin's egg? Could she be smart enough to cross countless light-years, and clever enough to escape the attention of NORAD, and dumb enough to crash land in front of a witness?
No, she was not an E.T. (As no one but an sf reader would have phrased it in 1973.) But she was certainly not from my world. I knew much more than the average citizen about the current state of terrestrial technology, and no culture on earth could have staged the entrance I had just seen.
Hallucination was a hypothesis I never considered. At that time of my life, at age twenty-eight, I had experienced the effects of alcohol, pot, hash, opium, LSD, STP, MDA, DMT, mescaline (organic and synthetic), psilocybin (ditto), peyote, amanita muscaria, a few licks of crystal meth, and medically administered morphine. I knew a hallucination when I saw one.
So that left . . .
I did not go through this logic-chain, not consciously. I just knew that I was looking at a time traveler. Which both mildly annoyed and greatly tickled me, because I had not until then really believed in time travel. There are certain conventions of sf that are, in light of what we think we know about physics, preposterous . . . but which sf readers are willing to provisionally accept. Faster-than-light travel is, so far as anyone knows, flat-out impossible—but skeptical sf readers will accept it, grudgingly, because it's damned difficult to write a story set anywhere but in this Solar System without it.
Time travel too is considered flat-out impossible (or was at that time; physics has gone through some interesting changes lately) but tolerated for its story value. It's a delightful intellectual conceit, which gives rise to dozens of lovely paradoxes. The best of them were discovered and used by Robert Heinlein: the man who met himself coming and going, the man who was both of his own parents, and so forth.
That was, of course, why I did not truly believe in time travel, for any longer than it took to finish a Keith Laumer novel: its very existence implied paradoxes that no sane universe could tolerate. A culture smart enough to develop time travel would hopefully be wise enough not to use it. The risk of altering the past, changing history and thereby overstressing the fabric of reality, would be too great. What motive could induce intelligent people to take such a hideous gamble?
The clincher, of course, was the question, where were they? If (I had always reasoned with myself) time travel were ever going to be invented, in some hypothetical future, and used to go back in time . . . then where were the time travelers? Even if they maintained very tight security, you would expect there to be at least as many Silly Season reports of encounters with time travelers as there were of encounters with flying saucers (in which I emphatically did not believe)—and there weren't.
Since I had long ago relegated time travel to the category of fantasy, it was slightly irritating to be confronted with a time traveler. . . .
But I'd have bet cash. I could see no other possibility that met the facts. I was, further, convinced that she was one of the earliest time travelers (from the historically earliest point-of-origin, I mean), if not the very first.
She certainly seemed to have screwed up her landing—
I worked off one mitten and the glove beneath, quickly placed the back of my hand against her cheek. Its temperature was neither stone cold, nor the raging fever-heat mine would have had if I had been naked. Her skin temperature was . . . skin temperature. The same as my hand was in the instant that I slipped off my glove, but hers remained constant. Curiouser and curiouser. It occurred to me sadly that in her time Nova Scotia might be as overpopulated as Miami, its irresistible beauty no longer protected by its shield of horrid weather.
I hastily began to cover up my hand again. The instant my skin broke contact with hers, she made the first sound she had made since she had crashed to the forest floor. In combination with the happy-baby smile on her face, it was a shocking sound; the sound an infant makes when it is still terrified or starving, but too tired to cry any more. A high-pitched drawn out nnnnnnnnn sound, infinitely weary and utterly forlorn, punctuated with little hiccup-like inhalations. For the first time I began to consider the possibility that she was seriously hurt rather than stunned. Perhaps some unexpected side effect of materializing in my tree had boiled her brains in their bone pot. Perhaps she had simply gone mad. Perhaps some important internal organ had failed to complete the trip with her and she was dying.
Or perhaps her body's dazzling climate-control system took so much power under these overloaded conditions that there was none to spare for trivia like reason and speech. For all I knew, she had been expecting to materialize in Lesotho or Rio de Janeiro. (She could have been a Hawaiian who only moments before had dropped money into a wishing well and prayed to be somewhere cooler.) In any case, it was time for me to stop observing and marveling and do something resourceful.
Total elapsed time since her appearance, perhaps half a minute. Trip time to house (carrying load, downhill, on ice and loose rock, in the dark, during a snowstorm which was already back up to its original, pre-miracle fury), at least half a century.