"Hold on," Ike said. "You say "shared experience," but it"s not a shared experience; I don"t share it; there are others who don"t; and what justification have you for claiming it"s shared? If these phantoms, these "guests," are impalpable, vanish when you approach, inaudible, they"re not guests, they"re ghosts, you"re abandoning any effort at rationality-"
"Ike, I"m sorry, but you can"t deny their existence because you are unable to perceive them."
"On what sounder basis could I deny their existence?"
"But you deny that we can use the same basis for accepting it."
"Lack of hallucinations is considered the basis from which one judges another person"s perceptions as hallucinations."
"Call them hallucinations, then," Helena said, "although I liked ghosts better. "Ghosts" may be in fact quite accurate. But we don"t know how to coexist with ghosts. It"s not something we were trained in. We have to learn how to do it as we go along. And believe me, we have to. They are not going away. They are here, and what "here" is is changing too. Maybe you could be very useful to us, if you were willing to be, Ike, just because you aren"t aware of-of our guests, and the changes. But we who are aware of them have to learn what kind of existence they have, and why. For you to go on denying that they have any is obstructive to the work we"re trying to do."
" "Whom the G.o.ds would destroy they first make mad,"" Ike said, getting up from his seat at the conference table. n.o.body else said anything. They all looked embarra.s.sed, looked down. He left the room in silence.
There was a group of people in CC Corridor running and laughing. "Head "em off at the pa.s.s!" yelled a big man, Stiernen of Flight Engineering, waving his arms as if at some horde or crowd, and a woman shouted, "They"re bison! They"re bison! Let "em go down C Corridor, there"s more room!" Ike walked straight ahead, looking straight ahead.
"There"s a vine growing by the front door," Susan said at breakfast. Her tone was so complacent that he thought nothing of it for a moment except that he was glad to hear her speak normally for once.
Then he said, "Sue-"
"What can I do about it, Ike? What do you want? You want me to lie, say nothing, pretend there isn"t a vine growing there? But there is. It looks like a scarlet runner bean. It"s there."
"Sue, vines grow in dirt. Earth. There is no earth in Spes."
"I know that."
"How can you both know it and deny it?"
"It"s going backwards, Dad," Noah said, in his new, slightly husky voice.
"What is?"
"Well, there were the people first. All those weird old women and cripples and things, remember, and then all the other kinds of people. And then there started being animals, and now plants and stuff. Wow, did you know they saw whales in the Reservoirs, Mom?"
She laughed. "I only saw the horses on the Common," she said.
"They were really pretty," Noah said.
"I didn"t see them," Ike said. "I didn"t see horses on the Common."
"There were a whole lot of them. They wouldn"t let you get anywhere near, though. I guess they were wild. There were some really neat spotted ones. Appaloosa, Nina said."
"I didn"t see horses," Ike said. He put his face in his hands and began to cry.
"Hey, Dad," he heard Noah"s voice, and then Susan"s, "It"s OK. No. It"s OK. Go on to school. It"s all right, sweetie." The door hissed.
Her hands were on his head, smoothing his hair, and on his shoulders, gently rocking and shaking him. "It"s OK, Ike..."
"No, it"s not. It"s not OK. It"s not all right. It"s all gone crazy. It"s all ruined, ruined, wasted, wrong. Gone wrong."
Susan was silent for a long time, kneading and rocking his shoulders. She said at last, "It scares me when I think about it, Ike. It seems like something supernatural, and I don"t think there is anything supernatural. But if I don"t think about it in words like that, if I just look at it, look at the people and the... the horses and the vine by the door-it makes sense. How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave? Who do we think we are? All it is, is we brought ourselves with us... The horses and the whales and the old women and the sick babies. They"re just us, we"re them, they"re here."
He said nothing for a while. Finally he drew a long breath. "So," he said. "Go with the flow. Embrace the unexplainable. Believe because it"s unbelievable. Who cares about understanding, anyhow? Who needs it? Things make a lot better sense if you just don"t think about them. Maybe we could all have lobotomies and really simplify life."
She took her hands from his shoulders and moved away.
"After the lobotomy, I guess we can have electronic brain implants," she said. "And sonar headbands. So we don"t b.u.mp into ghosts. Is surgery the answer to all your problems?"
He turned around then, but her back was to him.
"I"m going to the hospital," she said, and left.
"Hey! Look out!" they shouted. He did not know what they saw him walking into-a herd of sheep, a troop of naked dancing savages, a cypress swamp-he did not care. He saw the Common, the corridors, the cubes.
Noah came in to change his clothes that he said were mud stained from tag football in the dirt that had covered all the Astroturf in the Common, but Ike walked on plastic gra.s.s through dustless, germless air. He walked through the great elms and chestnuts that stood twenty meters high, not between them. He walked to the elevators and pressed the b.u.t.tons and came to the Health Center.
"Oh, but Esther was released this morning!" the nurse said, smiling.
"Released?"
"Yes. The little black girl came with your wife"s note, first thing this morning."
"May I see the note?"
"Sure. It"s in her file, just hold on-" She handed it over. It was not a note from Susan. It was in Esther"s scrawling hand, addressed to Isaac Rose. He unfolded it.
I am going up in the mountains for a while.
With love, Esther.
Outside the Health Center, he stood looking down the corridors. They ran to left, to right, and straight ahead. They were 2.2 meters high, 2.6 meters wide, painted light tan, with colored stripes on the gray floors. The blue stripes ended at the door of the Health Center, or started there, ending and starting were the same thing; but the white arrows set in the blue stripes every 3 meters pointed to the Health Center, not away from it, so they ended there, where he stood. The floors were light gray, except for the colored stripes, and perfectly smooth and almost level, for in Area 8 the curvature of Spes was barely perceptible. Lights shone from panels in the ceilings of the corridors at intervals of 5 meters. He knew all the intervals, all the specifications, all the materials, all the relationships. He had them all in his mind. He had thought about them for years. He had reasoned them. He had planned them.
n.o.body could be lost in Spes. All the corridors led to known places. You came to those places following the arrows and the colored stripes. If you followed every corridor and took every elevator you would never get lost and always end up safe where you started from. And you would never stumble, because all the floors were of smooth metal polished and painted light gray, with colored stripes and white arrows guiding you to the desired end.
Ike took two steps and stumbled, falling violently forward. Under his hands was something rough, irregular, painful. A rock, a boulder, protruded through the smooth metal floor of the corridor. It was dark brownish-gray veined with white, pocked and cracked; a little scurf of yellowish lichen grew near his hands. The heel of his right hand hurt, and he raised it to look at it. He had grazed the skin in falling on the rock. He licked the tiny film of blood from the graze. Squatting there, he looked at the rock and then past it. He saw nothing but the corridor. He would have nothing but the rock, until he found her. The rock and the taste of his own blood. He stood up.
"Esther!"
His voice echoed faintly down the corridors.
"Esther, I can"t see. Show me how to see!"
There was no answer.
He set off, walking carefully around the rock, walking carefully forward. It was a long way, and he was never sure he was not lost. He was not sure where he was, though the climbing got steeper and harder and the air began to be very thin and cold. He was not sure of anything until he heard his mother"s voice. "Isaac, dear, are you awake?" she asked rather sharply. He turned and saw her sitting beside Esther on an outcropping of granite beside the steep, dusty trail. Behind them, across a great dropping gulf of air, snow peaks shone in the high, clear light. Esther looked at him. Her eyes were clear also, but dark, and she said, "Now we can go down."
The Helping Hand.
NORMAN SPINRAD.
FIRST CONTACT WITH EXTRATERRESTRIAL CIVILIZATION.
Houston. NASA has confirmed that the anomalous radio pulses emanating from Barnard"s star that NASA SETI researchers discovered nearly a month ago are definitely artificial.
"We haven"t decoded the signals yet, but they clearly are data packets," Dr. Henry Brancusi, head of the NASA team, declared. "They repeat every 33 hours. Most peculiar. As the closest candidate for a star with a habitable zone, Barnard"s was one of the earliest targets of the first SETI researchers, but nothing had ever been detected before. It"s as if they"ve just gone on the air."
-Science News * * * *
s.p.a.cE TELESCOPE DETECTS INHABITED PLANET.
Lunagrad. The Greater European s.p.a.ce Agency has confirmed the existence of a technological civilization on the fourth planet of Barnard"s star. The GESA ma.s.sive optical array on the far side of the moon has detected a ring of satellite-sized objects in perfect Geosynchronous...o...b..t around the planet.
"It can"t be anything else," said Leonid Vyshinkov, director of the MOA station. "We are looking at a high technical civilization. There is no further reason to doubt that we are indeed receiving a message from intelligent beings on the fourth planet of Barnard"s star."
-L "Espresso * * * *
INTERSTELLAR PRIME TIME?.
New Hollywood. Jack Kovacs, head of Universal-Toho-Disney Productions, announced today that UTDP technicians had succeeded in decoding the transmissions from Barnard"s star.
"It"s television, what else?" Kovacs told reporters. "Scientists may have been trying to get fancy equations out of it, but I knew that couldn"t be the bottom line, I mean, if we were transmitting to them, wouldn"t we send something with real production values? The broadcast quality isn"t exactly professional, but we"re bringing it up to industry standards in the processing lab, and we"re going to release it on November 12."
-Variety * * * *
SECRETARY GENERAL DEMANDS FREE RELEASE.
OF BARNARD TRANSMISSION.
New York. United Nations Secretary General Wolfgang Steinholtz demanded today that Universal-Toho-Disney Productions release the television transmission from the Barnards that they claim to have decoded through the auspices of the United Nations International Press Agency, rather than selling commercial rights to the program for outrageous prices as planned.
"It"s perfectly disgusting to engage in such profiteering with the greatest event in human history," he declared! "This message was meant for all mankind. The Barnards certainly could never have intended that their transmission become the property of a television studio."
"This Secretary General guy"s got to be coming from outer s.p.a.ce himself," said Jack Kovacs, President of UTDP, when reached for comment in New Hollywood. "What does he expect us to do, give away the biggest world audience share in history? The rights to this are gonna be worth at least a billion and a half dollars!"
Kovacs went on to express indignation at the public outcry. "It"s not as if we were ripping off the Barnards or something," he insisted. "We"re setting up an escrow account for them even though we don"t have to. And we"re giving them 17 percent of the producer"s net profit. Even major stars don"t get a sweet deal like that. Does that sound like we"re a bunch of sleazebag schlockmeisters?"
-The New York Times * * * *
OPENING CREDITS.
FIRST CONTACT.
A Universal-Toho-Disney Production Produced in conjunction with the people of Barnard"s star FADE IN.
A planet floating in s.p.a.ce, fleecy cloud-cover over blue seas, green-and-brown continents, looking very much like another Earth, but with different continental outlines, less water, more land.
A series of helicopter shots. Thick jungles of fluffy green trees like enormous dustmops. Rolling savannas covered with lumpy yellowish moss. Seacoast swamps, where tangles of vines drip from huge bushes rooted in the mud. Mountain meadows dotted with cl.u.s.ters of round blue cacti. An enormous canyon with a lucent blue river at the bottom and waves of vegetation foaming down its soft ancient slopes.
Another series of shots, these of wildlife in medium close-up. A large six-legged purple herbivore cropping moss. A bright yellow bird with two pairs of wings. A monstrous blue-and-red striped upright biped with four brawny arms ending in cl.u.s.ters of razor-sharp claws. A silvery torpedo-shape with six great fins, leaping and whirling out of the surface of the sea.
Cut to a full shot of two upright creatures standing hand-in-hand-in-hand-in-hand. Two pairs of arms, one pair of legs, round roly-poly bodies like teddy bears. One wears a bright blue togalike affair, the other a white suit with an extra set of long, belled sleeves, and a short black cloak. What is visible of their skin is covered with short, l.u.s.trous, golden fur.
They have ovoid heads with large membranous ears, like the wings of golden bats. They have faces. Two large eyes with thin red sclera and large black pupils, set too close together under bushy red brows. Big round light-purple lips that iris open and shut continually as if blowing fat wet kisses. No nose, but a mobile tubular projection covered with black fur depending from their stubby chins like elephants" trunks.
They look quite alien.
Alien, but cute.
They look into the camera, they touch the tips of their trunks together, they stretch them out toward the viewer as if in greeting.
A tracking shot on a small group of the same creatures, naked now, loping across a savanna, carrying rocks and short sharpened sticks. Some have single mounds on their chests that may be b.r.e.a.s.t.s, others bulbous yellow protuberances high up on their torsos that may be p.e.n.i.ses.
Dissolve to another tribe of Barnards harvesting a field of blue-headed grain in whirlwind four-handed style, using short stone scythes. Dissolve to a village of mud huts. Dissolve to a town of low brown stone buildings all crowded in against each other. Dissolve to a great warren of wood-and-plaster buildings piled high up against a cliff. Dissolve to a great freestanding metal and concrete city in the same style. Dissolve to a fleet of trimaran barges lumbering through heavy seas under round balloon sails. Dissolve to a four-winged aircraft like an ungainly ornithopter, piloted by a Barnard in a tight black flight suit. Dissolve to an aerial shot of a complex highway system, with thousands of round six-wheeled cars careening around it at breakneck speed.
A rapidly cut tour montage of the wonders of Barnard civilization. Great gleaming cities. Endless fields of straight-rowed crops. Huge floating platforms clogging the surface of the sea. Strange machinelike factories puffing out clouds of thick brown smoke. Ungainly-looking squat rockets blasting off the pad. The planet seen through the porthole of some sort of s.p.a.ce vehicle.
Two naked Barnards pummeling each other with four pairs of fists. Two squads of Barnards in leather armor slicing each other to bits with short recurved hand-swords. Two armies of Barnards laying each other waste with guns. A village set ablaze by the napalm projectors of big round tanks crunching through it on six enormous bladed wheels. A fleet of ominous black warplanes circling a burning city like angry dragonflies. A roiling, boiling mushroom-pillar cloud.
A series of slow dissolves revealing endless variations on rubble and ruin. Burned-out skeletons of buildings. Vast vistas of charred fields where nothing lives. Huge smoking craters. Frozen lakes of fused black gla.s.s. Forests burning. Rivers churning with debris.
Dead birds falling out of a poisonous brown sky. A sh.o.r.eline choked with the rotting carca.s.ses of sea animals. Decaying jungles of dead vegetation. Mobs of refugees, their golden fur gone all mangy and falling out in patches to reveal angry pink skin, fleeing a series of dead cities under ominous black-and-brown thunderheads.
Darkness. Sheets of dirty gray rain. Howling blizzards. Great glaciers creeping out of their mountain strongholds and onto the plain in time-lapse majesty. Snowdrifts piling up to hide the corpses of cities, jungles, savannas, sh.o.r.eline marshes, animals, Barnards, a whole formerly living world.
Cut to the opening shot, the fourth planet of Barnard"s star, verdant and vital, as it floats in the blackness of s.p.a.ce, looking very much like a second Earth.
The fleecy white cloud cover slowly turns an ugly chemical brown that diffuses out to enrobe the planet in a mist of foul choking smog. Brilliant b.a.l.l.s of light explode on the surface, one, two, three, then dozens, scores, hundreds, as dark black fountains pour radioactive soot into the atmosphere. Whole swatches of continents are set ablaze. The atmosphere darkens, turns a uniform gray, begins to blacken.
Then it suddenly clears as if the special-effects department has just turned off the smoke machine, and we see the planet below with a sudden new clarity. Continents gleam a skeletal white. Great icebergs drift in the equatorial seas. Jagged ranges of cold gray mountaintops peak up out of the endless ice sheets.
A series of low helicopter shots. Nothing but snowdrifts and ice sheets at first, but then, here and there, huge metal domes dug like enormous igloos into the snow, few, and scattered, and pathetic in all that dead white immensity.
A series of quickly cut shots of the interiors of the domes, grim corridors full of mangy, diseased-looking Barnards, huge chemical vats, Barnards eating what looks like slices of gray plastic, a family of Barnards crowded into a tiny steel-colored cubicle, Barnards unmistakably defecating into the recycling vats.
Cut to two Barnards standing hand-in-hand-in-hand-in-hand, staring at the camera, their fur falling out now, ugly sores along their trunks, their eyes watery with rheum.
Slowly, without taking their eyes off the camera, they let go of each other"s hands, get down on their knees, hang their heads in an unmistakable gesture of shame.
Then they hold all their arms out before them, turn up their fleshy palms as if to catch something falling from the heavens. Slowly they raise their gaze skyward, and lift up their trunks imploringly, like elephants reaching for the peanut held by a small child just beyond their grasp.
The camera follows the line of their eyes, the line of their trunks, upward, into a brilliant starry night. The angle reverses, and now we are looking down at two lorn golden creatures kneeling on an endless sheet of ice, gazing up longingly out of the desolation at us, their scabrous trunks reaching out desperately for whatever we have to give.