Prologue
The night Harry Reynolds was abducted by the aliens, he was sitting on his toilet with a copy of the Weekly World News and a bad case of constipation.
Even so, Harry Reynolds was ready for ‘em.
He figured the little buggers would eventually get around to picking him up. Harry knew they were around—had known since the big flap started in the early fifties. Harry Reynolds had seen a few of their saucers from time to time, zipping over cornfields or rising up from behind trees, but that wasn’t what made him sure that creatures from outer space were buzzing around earth, checking out missile silos, playing chicken with commercial airliners, and poking instruments up horror—writers’ assholes.
He knew, because he’d heard them on his shortwave radio.
Harry was a ham—radio operator, had been since the fifties, when he’d gotten out of the army with his right leg left behind in Korea. Back then, he’d done a lot of sitting; they didn’t have artificial legs as good as what they had now, and he just wasn’t real used to his wooden one. So he tinkered with electronic gadgets a lot, built himself a sweet little shortwave radio from a Heathkit, and started broadcasting and intercepting broadcasts like a regular deejay of the night sky, bouncing his handle—Aardvark—through the airwaves. Even then he’d been interested in flying saucers, so when he started getting strange broadcasts, unusual beeps and hums, weird chatterings that sure as hell weren’t English or any foreign language Harry had ever heard—he pegged ‘em quick. Regularly, he’d even do special broadcasts for the UFOs, giving them his address and inviting them over for beers, trying to explain this and that—things they might not understand in easy American. That gave him a reputation amongst other ham operators. Pretty soon, he was Klatuu—named after the Michael Rennie character in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Harry didn’t mind. It got him a lot of attention.
Unfortunately, no little green men in shiny suits ever came by for some Bud and bullshitting.
Still, Harry knew they’d come. They were out there, sure as hell—all the fancy brains in the world had worked hard to prove that there were no such things as flying saucers, but they’d failed. Harry still heard their messages on the band, and he believed lots of the people who’d seen them, who’d talked to them. Harry read the UFO journals, and he checked out the UFO books from the Dubuque Library System, so he was up on the latest, which seemed to be that his Long Distance Audience—that was what Harry called the extraterrestrials—had taken to picking people up in the flying saucers, doing tests on them, sometimes even making them pregnant. Fascinating stuff, yes sirree, Bob, and too bad that they hadn’t made that Whitley Strieber feller or that Maximillian what’s-his-name pregnant. Now that would be a story!
No, Harry Reynolds figured the aliens would get around to him eventually, and he figured that when they did he had a pretty good chance to get some proof that they really existed. Wouldn’t that make the other ham radio boys at the lodge sit down with their jaws between their knees!
So, when the aliens finally did get around to abducting him, old Harry was ready for them with a device he’d constructed in the basement workshop of his little house just outside of Dubuque. Harry knew there was no telling when the aliens would take him, so it was no good hauling the thing around in his pocket, or around his neck. ‘Sides, they’d see it and take it off, real quick.
Instead, he designed it special, just the right size and weight to fit inside his hollow, fake right leg.
Then, when the aliens came for Harry Reynolds and plucked him from his white—tiled bathroom right outside Dubuque, Iowa, they had no way of knowing what was in store for them.
As soon as he’d driven home from his printing shop in his ‘76 Chevy station wagon, Harry Reynolds knew that something weird was going on.
He pulled into his garage, got out of his car and, in the spring dusk, went to his front yard checking to see if he’d seen what he thought he had.
There seemed to be some kind of aura around his house.
Now, standing in the grass (that needed cutting—he’d have to fire up the old Toro this weekend) he looked at his boxy cinderblock-and-brick home, squinting real hard at the edges, where chimney and roof and siding and tall radio antennae gave way to grass and trees and the gentle cobalt of the fading sky. Here, he’d fancied he’d seen, as he pulled up in the driveway, a periphery of light—a shifting gentle spectrum of light, as though some pixie had just zapped 3210 Elmore Drive with a magical spell.
“Damnedest thing!” he said, staring a moment longer, then giving up. He was going to have to put this on his shortwave radio show tonight. Course, he put near about everything on his radio show, and then would gab into the wee hours if some fellow ham operator was unlucky enough to get buttonholed by his signal. “Mebbe the Centaurans did it.”
Harry shrugged, then stumped back to the wagon to get the bag of groceries he’d picked up at the Val-U-Mart, the limp of his false leg only slightly evident. The cats were waiting for him at the side door, meowing up a storm.
“Whoa there, Joker! Hang onto your bonnet, Bessie!” he said, as they performed their evening feline come-ons with Harry’s legs. “You happy to see me ... or you just hungry?”
Both, actually. He kept his cats inside when he was away, letting them roam outside only when he was at the house. It wasn’t that he didn’t figure they could take care of themselves—he just liked to know where they were when he got back, otherwise he’d worry and ruin the evening. He’d had cats run off when his wife was alive, never to return, and it hadn’t been too bad. But now that Carolyn was never going to return, well ... maybe he just liked to know that somebody was home waiting for him.
Harry opened up a can of Figaro Seafood Supreme, and divided it up amongst the black Manx and the female striped tabby, wincing at the awful smell. Then he changed their water dish, and set it carefully down onto the kitty smiley—face place mat in the corner where the cats huddled and gorged. Later, he’d spill some Meow Mix into their communal dry—food bowl, but only when they got peckish. Cats appreciate you more if they have to work a bit to get their food.
Then Harry put away his groceries, fired up some burgers under the broiler, and got his mail. Bills, Fate Magazine, the latest Weekly World News, but nothing from his children, Hattie and Ted, married now and living on opposite coasts. He’d hear from them on Father’s Day, and that was about their only spring ritual communication. Oh, well ... They had their own lives to lead. They regarded their father as a bit of a crank— an unfortunate box of peculiarities, stacked away in the Midwestern closet of their childhoods.
Harry ate his burgers with a can of Hormel Hot Chili dumped on them, while he perused Fate. Good magazine, but not the magazine that good ol’ Raymond Palmer had started up years ago. Too much goddamn psychic nonsense, for one thing. This issue had an article on the lost continent Lemuria, a piece on dowsing and a long previously unprinted interview with the late J. Allen Hyenk which looked interesting, but all the rest was either crystal-brained New Age garbage or Harry’s perpetual bugaboo, psychic predictions and the like. Bad as astrology. Goddamn stuff just didn’t make sense, but people ate it up like Post Toasties!
Finished with dinner, he put the dish in the sink, and belched loudly. “Beans already workin’, cats!” he said, addressing his startled pets. “Better let you out. Goddamn beans are mighty tasty, but they make the only gas I know that sinks to lower extremities! But maybe we’ll dynamite the blockages and get the mail movin’ again, huh?”
He turned to run some water over the dish so the chili stains wouldn’t dry, (wash the sucker later) and was staring out the back window, when he thought he saw a flash of light in the trees behind his house, and thought he heard a faint confluence of whispers that died away almost soon as they had begun.
A shiver raised the hackles on the back of his neck. What the bejesus was goin’ on out there?
He let the cats out, and he followed them into the backyard. The sun was long since gone, and deep Iowa night had set in. It had gone cold with a brisk spring chill already, and Harry shivered as he stepped out past the rusted swing set and the broken barbecue into the smell of new grass.
“Anybody out there?” he called. But the light was gone and the only sounds were from leaves rustling and branches clicking with the breeze. “If it’s you Centaurans, come on out. I’ve been waiting for you and I ain’t gonna hurt you, you should know that.”
Harry was sure that the extraterrestrials probably didn’t come from either Alpha or Beta Centauri, but he liked the sound of the word, so that was what he called them. Up above him now, only a few clouds obscured the stars. Harry Reynolds looked up at them for a moment, and got that shiver again, that shiver of wonder ...
“You suckers are up there,” he whispered. “I know you are. You may wait to come down and not show yourself until next century, when I’m six feet under ... but people that remember me will say, Goddamn. Crazy ol’ Harry Reynolds was right!”
With only a short-sleeve shirt on, no undershirt either, Harry got cold fast and retreated back into the house.
He was in the mood, no question.
He was in the mood to broadcast!
A wisp of acrid smoke coiled up, wreathing the round fluorescent work-lamp for a moment, then disappearing into the cellar darkness. Harry examined his soldering work carefully through a magnifying glass, then fitted the circuit board carefully back into the bulbous box that was his shortwave radio. A minor repair. You had to expect this kind of thing when you built your own radios from the get-go. He applied screwdriver to screws, putting the casing back together.
Around him in his basement hung his tools, arranged like bats hanging from a cavern ceiling. Harry had built all this himself, and he kept it neat and orderly. From time to time, he dabbled with inventions. Nothing serious. Better mousetraps, a new kind of catalytic converter for old cars, an electronic cat-door, stuff like that. Mostly, he enjoyed the electronics, playing with resistors and capacitors, transistors and wire, like a kid with Legos.
Harry hauled his shortwave set up from the basement, balanced it on a knee as he switched off the workshop light, then carried it on up to where he spent most of his widowed time: the attic. When he and his wife and kids had moved here in ‘59, this had been a normal A—frame attic, insulation between the rafters and all. Above Carolyn’s objection that they needed the space for storage, Harry had claimed it, and then applied his carpentry know-how to create a study. He’d always found his basement a little oppressive. The pounding of kids’ feet and intrusions of his wife for laundry chores, along with countless other bothersome things all intruded upon his concentration and privacy terribly. But up here. ...
Even now, with everyone gone but his cats—when too late he realized those interruptions were cherished reminders of companionship—when he pulled down the folding stair steps and clambered up into Contact Central, he was in another world.
He put the squat radio down, plugged in the AC, jacked in the mike, and put on his headset. His swivel chair whined metallically as he leaned forward to fiddle with the controls and fine-tune the frequency for tonight’s transmission. Signals beeped and slurred at various volumes across the band as he turned the dial, like “Saturday Night Live from Babel.” His favorite channel, though, was free.
He switched open the mike, leaned back in his chair and began.
“UFOs, alert! UFOs, alert! All Centaurans and you other human and humanoid hangers-on, listen up! This is Klatuu, broadcasting at a frequency of 51.2 milahertz. FCC License Number ... shit, I can’t remember. Well anyway I’m legal, boys, and you’re not!”
He swiveled a bit, leaning toward the mike, hand against his head and a finger in his ear, better to appreciate and adjust the resonance of his voice. It had a tendency to squeak out of its baritone when he got excited. His fellow ham operators used to call him “Klatuu the Mouse” back in the sixties when this was a real problem.
Harry was sixty years old, but he’d never smoked, he didn’t drink much more than beer, and that just on weekends, and he’d always done his own physical work, so he was in pretty good shape all-in-all. He had a stubby nose and big brown, owlish eyes that now sprang open incredibly wide as he talked. When he was younger, he’d worn a goatee, because he’d seen a lot of UFO experts wearing them, but now his chin was bare, except for evening stubble.
“I know you’ve been sniffin’ around my house, I’ve seen your lights, I’ve heard you—hell, I sense you’ve been here. I just wanna make sure you know that the invitation’s still open, like it’s always been, ever since my first broadcast to you from Contact Central. Come on over, and let’s talk a while, real personal. I know you don’t want most folks to know that you’re around, but you can trust Harry Reynolds.” Harry looked up at the star-chart he’d tacked onto the tilted ceiling, just one of the posters and maps and photographs papering the room, all related to UFOs. “I’ve been waitin’ to talk to you guys for a loooong time! ‘Cause I knnnnnooooooww you’re ouuuuuut there.”
That last was his signature ... kind of like Jack Benny’s “Well...“ or Steve Martin’s “I’m a wild and crazy guy.” The reason the other hams liked him, the reason they listened to his “show” whenever they could, separate from actually talking to him, was that Harry Reynolds had a sense of humor. He took UFOs dead serious when tit came down to tat—but in the meantime, he could joke about them, and he did.
“Lemme see ... long as I got your ear. Last Sunday night, I was talking about...“ he eye-scanned a stack of books on the table before him. “Ooh, yeah! That goddamn new book by that goddamn Scarbaloney goof.” He picked the hardcover book out of the stack and read the title. “Above Us Only Sky, by Dr. Everett Scarborough. Yeah. Doctor of Quackology! Who does this bozo think he is? You gotta wonder from just the title! A quote from a pinko like John Lennon. Listen, I know this Scarborough jerk, I’ve read his books, all of ‘em. Yeah, yeah, I know he’s the doo-doo head who helped convince the government to wrap up Project Blue Book in ‘69. I know he’s today’s leading UFO skeptic, kinda the Amazing Randi for us saucer buffs. But ever think about it ... This garbanzo bean-head has been making a killing, writing and lecturing and consulting ... Hell, I hear some loony network is thinking about a TV show based on his so-called UFO investigation work. The dough must be rollin’ in!”
Reynolds flipped through the book, muttering the doctor’s name over and over again, so that the Centaurans and his other listeners wouldn’t think he’d gone away.
“Yeah. Yeah, here we go—this is the kind of attitude that really gets me miffed.” He began to quote from the book. “’Credulity. If I could sum up the entire reason for this twentieth century phenomenon, I would simply use the word “Credulity.” As a scientist, I use the rigorous standards and methods of my training as a yardstick for all my investigations. These scientific investigations reveal absolutely no shred of evidence that the earth is being visited by denizens from other planets, other dimensions, other shopping malls. People experience what they want to experience. People believe what they want to believe. And some people simply want to believe in creatures from outer space. Deep psychological problems? Inadequacies? Paranoia? Mental disorders similar to schizophrenia that our doctors haven’t categorized yet? Who knows. But the common denominator is simple. Credulity.’”
Harry Reynolds took a deep breath and then continued. “Now this really steams me!” The sentence came out close to soprano. Harry stopped for a second, got control of himself.
“Centaurans, you listening? Course you are. This is the kind of dope who’s going to make things hard for you, when you finally decide to announce yourselves to the world at large. I got a real good idea. You know, we earth people, in our literature—we’ve got this interesting legend. Roman legend ... no ... GREEK. Yeah. Well, you see, the Greeks, they had a bunch of gods. Uh, like Zeus and Aphrodite and Odin. Yeah. And they made mankind, but they had a real warped relationship with humans and animals ... like old Zeus liked to come down and have sex with swans. But if a guy ... a guy like this Doctor Scarborough ... got a bee up his ass, thought he was hot stuff, the gods didn’t like it, they thought he was getting uppity, had too much ... um ... hubcapz. Yeah, it’s like pride and arrogance, only more so. So the gods would take the guy a peg or two down, put his face in the mud. Sometimes they sent the Furies after him. Sometimes they blinded him.
“Maybe that’s what this Scarborough guy needs, huh? Pick ‘em up in one of your saucers, give ‘im a ride. Freak him out just a little bit, so he’s not such an uppity snot anymore. Do him some good, I think.” Reynolds chuckled. “Course, I want you to come see me first. ‘Cause I knooooooow your ouuuuuuuut there!“
He continued his commentary for another half hour, finishing up his devastating book review, touching on a few entertaining highlights on the day at the printing shop, discussing his long-entertained notion of self-publishing his own book on UFOs (it had been turned down by thirty publishers). Then he finally described the aura he’d seen around his house when he’d got home and the lights and sounds he’d heard from the woods.
“Well, gotta go, friends. My bowels are acting up—and it ain’t in no comedy!” he said, finishing.
He signed off, figuring he’d do the chat rounds in a couple of hours, get feedback from anybody who’d listened to his show ... Maybe even zero in on some saucer broadcasts. Tonight definitely had that touch of weird to it.
Then he went down, grabbed his World Weekly News and headed hopefully for the crapper.
“UFO SHOCKER,” screamed the headline.
“HEAD BANGERS FROM OUTER SPACE”
“You Centaurans,” said Harry Reynolds, rocking on the commode with laughter, as he read about a UFO heavy metal concert in South America, his belt buckle jingling on the tile floor. “What comedians!”
He turned the page, where he started to read about the pregnant hundred-year-old woman. (“And Dad’s a hundred and four!”)
That was when he started feeling groggy.
He looked up, and noticed that the bathroom light looked a little funny. He’d been sitting on the can now for about fifteen minutes. About five minutes into the session, he’d noticed the light waver a little. And the house had creaked a bit. It was nothing to get excited about; it wasn’t exactly a new house, and it made odd sounds from time to time. But the lights—he kept those in pretty good repair, what with his electrician’s sensibilities. He felt ludicrous and vulnerable now, his Lee jeans and boxers around his ankles, and the lights going funny—
He put the World Weekly News down and moved to get off the commode, when the faint spell hit. It wasn’t really like he was paralyzed—it was like the air had suddenly turned to Jell—O, and he just couldn’t move real quick. The very act of simply pulling up his pants was a daunting proposition. He blinked, and just stayed in that bent-over position, happy to be able to breathe.
What the hell...?
The sounds were an odd swirling of little feet and little voices. First, they sounded like they were coming from the living room. But then they altered subtly in texture, echoing and booming nearer, like steps coming through a tunnel.
The sounds were coming closer. They were coming toward the bathroom! Fear like he’d never felt before engulfed Harry Reynolds. These sounds were touching something deep and primal—an ancient alarm signal that never goes off in most people! Sweat popped out in beads on his face, and he strained again to reach down and pull up his pants. He had to get up! Had to close that door! Through the fog of his slowed perceptions, the ringing klaxon inside him demanded: CLOSE THAT DOOR! LOCK IT! it screamed. THEY’RE HERE, HARRY. THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU!
He touched his belt. His fingers curled around the top of the blue jeans. Even as he felt the fabric on his fingertips, he knew there would be no time. With all his might, he pushed himself away from the toilet, toward the door. He sprawled across the tile floor, hands outstretched toward the door, the pink tassels of the bathmat looming like a jungle before his left eyeball. He’d left the bathroom door ajar, and now he had to close it, lock it!
Through the clear tar of the air, he wallowed, reaching, reaching for the door.
His fingers were just a moment from the wood, when a hand reached around the doorjamb.
It came around, below the knob. Harry could see long, delicate digits move into a slow grip like spider’s legs.
Sheer terror stopped him from further movement. Harry Reynolds could only stare up helplessly as the being entered the room. All language had fled his mind, so he did not think the word alien or visitor or any of the many synonyms he’d used over more than thirty years of fascination with the UFO phenomenon. His mind was in pure R-complex now, back to its prehistoric beginnings, locked in flight-or-fight mode, but unable to jerk out of paralysis.
The door opened, and the being at the other side swam into view.
The creature was perhaps three feet tall, and humanoid purely in dwarfish standards. Its limbs were slender and garbed in a dark blue jumpsuit of some sort that seemed to absorb rather than reflect the bathroom light. Some kind of cap was perched atop a narrow insectile head, but this was not what caught Harry’s attention. It was the eyes.
The eyes were like gigantic onyx almonds. They looked down at Harry with a bottomless strangeness from a grey—tinged skin pulled tight over a delicately boned skull.
For a moment, Harry was lost in wonder at those eyes. They looked like the darkest corner of space. Space beyond time, beyond being, space that was somehow alive.
The creature moved further into the room, stopping by the sink. Another one moved in, identical to the first. Beyond the door, out of sight, Harry could hear others, chattering softly.
In the hand of the second was a wand, and suddenly Harry’s fear was back again, full force. Because the tip of this wand began to glow, to pulse a cherry red, like the tip of some red—hot poker. And the creature was moving it toward Harry’s face.
Suddenly, Harry realized he was screaming.
It didn’t sound like him. It came out, unbidden and urgent, like a spike of vomit.
The creatures stepped back, blinking their eyes, seemingly surprised by Harry’s reaction. Another one entered the room. The one with the wand leaned over and said something, though its lips did not move. “Please be quiet. You are alarming us!”
Harry could not stop screaming. A tiny part of his mind watched himself, wondering that after thirty years of waiting for just this moment, why he should react this way. That tiny part, though, was fading, fading into the scream ...
They weren’t out there anymore. They were here!
The wand lifted. It floated as though adrift in antigravity, and gentled down to touch the forehead of Harry Reynolds.
The night flowed in through the bathroom window, swirled around him, and zipped him up into seamless darkness.
Spicy cardboard.
That smell. In the darkness, that smell came first, like a beckoning finger hooking into him and dragging him out of unconsciousness.
When Harry Reynolds woke up, he wasn’t screaming.
He lay, he realized, elevated from his surroundings, on some sort of horizontal cushion that was like an examination table. His eyelids fluttered open fully. His shirt was off, but his jeans were on. He looked around him, first focusing on the array of blinking lights which were hung in screens and panel displays, some on what appeared to be controls—and some embedded in three-dimensional patterns, like floating holograms. Then he realized that he wasn’t alone. His company shifted into view.
The ones hovering over him were taller than the ones who had come into his bathroom. There were three of them, and he had the odd feeling that they were female. Their heads were more humanoid, less triangular, and their eyes, though certainly slanted, had pupils. Their jumpsuits were more metallic looking, silver sheaths over slim bodies.
The table on which Harry lay was against the wall of a circular room perhaps twenty-five feet in diameter. He could see, in the dark side of the room, the dim outlines of a round passageway. A door?
“What are you doing?” he said as one of the beings turned to a globular outgrowth attached to the wall.
He could talk. He was still terrified, but he could talk! The return of his tongue—his most cherished physical commodity—reduced his sense of impotence. Everything remained foggy and uncertain, a dreamlike quality draping over the reality, but he had some kind of control.
The closest of the creatures turned to him, curiosity filling its eyes. “We will not harm you,” it said, but its mouth did not move. Harry felt as though the words bloomed like audial flowers in his brain.
He lifted his head, but the strain of just speaking exhausted him, and he lay back, still confused. He could only watch what the creatures were doing.
The globular unit at the wall seemed to be an item of furniture. The creature pulled out a drawer from it, and on this drawer rested the gleam of metal, the shiver of crystal. The creature picked up a long, needlelike instrument that seemed to sparkle of its own accord. Carefully, gracefully, the instrument was carried over to Harry. He could see it glitter by his eyes, and caught the reflection of a hypodermic—like end nearing his neck, by the base of his ear.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to do this!”
They ignored him. He felt a sharp bite on his neck and could feel the metal going in, as though it were an insect proboscis probing for a vein. Deeper, deeper, deeper ... And the pain did not stop. The sensation of the metal intrusion jabbing up into his brain stopped, but the pain in his head screamed and seared. He slipped into unconsciousness once more, and then abruptly he was back awake, the cardboard smell in his nostrils again.
Cardboard and roses, this time.
Two of them leaned over him now. Some kind of tubing dangled down from the ceiling. It was coiled, and had a metal device on the end, like something out of a dental nightmare. One of the creatures grabbed the device, and turned on a switch. The instrument hummed and began to glow a bright green. The creature carefully made a scan of Harry Reynolds, from cranium to abdomen, the device beeping and humming with an unearthly awfulness. The three other aliens in attendance watched the operation intently.
“Would you STOP THIS!” screamed Harry. “Talk to me—don’t dissect me.”
They tilted up their heads and looked at him, like he was the oddest and most astonishing thing in the universe. Then they started chattering amongst themselves.
“You turkeys! Stop hurting me! Let’s communicate! For years I been defending you, and now you do this to me?!”
He tried to get up, but found he could barely move.
“What kind of things are you?”
All of his life, he’d cherished the odd and unusual. But this wasn’t just weird—it was goddamn scary!
One of them came and leaned over him. Its breath smelled foul, like machine oil mixed with garlic and strained through old cardboard. “Please be still,” it said, its voiceless words filling his head. “You are the Honored One.”
“Yeah! My ass!” And then such a wave of dread consumed Harry Reynolds that he thought he was going to die. He felt cold ... Cold, and alone ... The lights glowed around him like dead diamonds. Cold and lonely ... adrift not just in an uncaring universe ... but a malevolent universe.
Harry moaned, unable to scream: vocal dry heaves.
Another device lowered from the dark, misty ceiling, like a periscope with claws. The creatures conferred amongst each other, then they turned back to Harry, their tender hands drifting toward his pants. In a few deft motions, they had undone his belt, unzipped his zipper and pulled down his jeans and underpants, exposing his genitals. The cold and fear had shrunk them, and now with this new blast of chill, they dwindled further. One of the aliens took the newly lowered device from the ceiling, and adjusted the cuplike object at the end.
Harry could only stare, horrified, the “No!” caught in his throat like a chunk of gristle.
The sheen of stainless steel, slivers of razor-sharp glass, pinpoints of needles: the end of the thing, opened, was like a robotic porcupine. The creature guided it down so the cup fitted over Harry’s penis and scrotum. Harry sensed the sharp parts of the device more than felt them. Still, it was like imminent fellatio from a moray eel!
“No!” he whispered.
The creature touched a section of the shaft of the instrument, and lights—red, yellow, blue—rotated, whispering a soft whir. It started as a tickling that reached and shivered the short hairs of his very soul. Then the penetrating pain began, worse than anything before. It felt as though his privates were being fed to a food processor, resurrected, then fed in again. Somehow, through this blinding pain, Harry remained conscious. Tears leaked from his eyes and his back arched, but otherwise he could not move.
And through it all, he was aware of those dark alien onyx eyes on him, staring dispassionately.
Mercifully, his mind managed to tear away from consciousness, and he slipped again into nothingness.
When Harry woke up again, his muscles were braced as though for pain, he was breathing hard and was aware of the sweat on his face and chest.
The visitors no longer hovered over him. Two were by the nearby control boards, and the others were gone.
Harry realized that he could move—he was no longer in pain. He simply felt very confused and deeply troubled. He lifted his head and saw that his pants were still lowered. He perceived little red dots covering his genitals, but there was no blood. His Midwestern modesty winning over his paralysis, he lifted himself and pulled his jeans up to cover himself.
The creatures at the control board did not seem to notice that he was awake. They stared intently at their screens or readings or whatever, ignoring Harry.
Harry shivered on the examination table, getting hold of himself. The pain, dread, and terror still hung on him like a shroud, but somehow other emotions, as well as ego, had reasserted themselves, and were in control again once more.
Harry Reynolds felt ashamed. Deeply, inexplicably ashamed. He knew then, at that moment, how violent a degradation rape must be for a woman. There was pain and abuse here, yes ... but it was more than that, something deep and unexplainable, and so troubling that Harry did not care to explore it. He focused instead on his other, more familiar feelings.
First, there was outrage and anger. And then ... then there was betrayal.
It had been so long ago that Harry Reynolds had started looking up at the sky and wondering about other superior life forms that he’d forgotten the purity of his initial, almost religious attitude. For so long, he’d reached out, shaming himself in the eyes of people—reached out for them with his radio signals, his heart on his sleeve.
And now, this.
Somehow, though—something, inside him, feared that something bad would happen. Korea and the army had drained Harry’s innocence, and the embittered side of him knew that the possibility the aliens weren’t saintly emissaries from paradise definitely existed.
They had done nothing to assuage his anger and his sense of betrayal.
On Harry’s left pants’ leg at the inseam, was a zipper. He’d fixed these jeans himself, special—just like he’d fixed all his pants, so he could get at his false leg, if he needed to adjust it or take it off or something, without actually shucking his whole pants. He found the zipper tab and carefully, soundlessly pulled it up all the way to his crotch, laying bare his leg.
Good. The aliens hadn’t fooled with it. A quick glance up showed the two remaining creatures involved with their work.
Harry returned to his fake leg. His right leg had been amputated just above the knee by a MASH unit (and he never could watch that TV show) after a Chinese shell had blown most of it off anyway. For years he’d relied on a clunky, VA-provided wooden leg that needed a crutch as a complement. But in the late sixties, he had gotten one of those articulated plastic—jobbies and never looked back. Supposedly, with the new ones you could play basketball, they were so good. But Harry didn’t play basketball. He figured out pretty fast how the things worked (and cursed himself for not inventing them earlier) and started perfecting his own type—one with a compartment.
He thumbed the tab, and the springs pushed out a lid that lifted. Harry waited a moment for his fingers to stop trembling, then lifted out his invention.
The smallness of this compartment in the calf was the key to the nature of the device; you could only fit one thing inside, and Harry wished to conceal several things. He called it his Swiss Army Camera.
One of Harry Reynolds’s consuming life-passions was to get a picture of a UFO. Those first two times he’d seen the things, he’d only had words to recreate them. And should he ever be actually picked up by aliens, he wanted to take their pictures. But then, he thought it over, he also figured an audio recording wouldn’t hurt either. But when he had this secret compartment on his body, the first two things together couldn’t fit, so he built a casing that slid in perfectly, and built inside of this a camera and a tape recorder.
Harry assayed the situation. He figured he had time to take a couple of pictures. He took off the lens cap, and clicked off a few shots—the camera automatically adjusted its own f—stop. He took out the roll of film and stuck it into the pocket of his jeans, just in case he ever got out of here—which he rather doubted. What he had planned next, the fucking buggers wouldn’t like at all.
In his paranoid nightmares, Harry Reynolds had foreseen this possibility. He’d been following the reports of alien abductions carefully, and knew how upset the abductees were with the experience. Harry figured that there was two possibilities—either naiveté on the part of the Visitors (and hadn’t he tried to educate them in his broadcasts), or malevolence. With what had just passed, he had to opt for malevolence. The fuckers were gonna pay for betraying his hopes and dreams and violating his body. Apparently not only the planet earth stank—so did the whole universe!
In the army and in Korea, Harry Reynolds’s specialty was munitions. He’d built model rockets for his son, but he didn’t go in much for weapons. Still, when he made his decision, it was easy enough to construct the thing with a safe little ball of plastic explosive and a firing wire. It had slipped into the extra space of his camera casing, easy as you please. He’d also made sure that it was damn hard to accidentally press the button that would set off the timing device—you had to pull the camera button up, twist it around just so, and then cock it before it would engage.
Harry Reynolds did this, anger and outrage still swelling in him, the pain in his head and his groin still throbbing.
He set the camera—grenade. There was a five second fuse.
Harry carefully studied the panel where the aliens stood. He could lob the thing right underneath, and the bastards wouldn’t be able to touch it. And when it blew up—Harry had no idea where he was. He supposed he was in one of their ships. There was a possibility that the ship was in the air, and his little present would send it plummeting. His pain and his upset were such that he didn’t care. Maybe this would lob a present into the laps of UFO fanciers——a crashed saucer, courtesy of Harry Reynolds!
Wherever he was, he had to strike back. Every part of him demanded it. And if he died—well, from what he heard, if aliens got hold of you once, they liked to come back and mess you over some more later on. He didn’t want to believe it was that bad, but now he knew it was worse than he could possibly imagine. Better to die than to again go through what he’d just experienced.
He hit the button, and was gratified to hear the timer engage. He counted.
One second.
Two seconds.
Three seconds.
“Chew on this, spacewarts!” he growled softly and tossed the camera-grenade.
The device hit the floor right between the aliens at their posts. They neither moved nor reacted, even though the clack of impact was loud. They just stood there, staring into their control panels as the grenade slid into the dark space beyond them, beneath the ledge of instruments.
Four seconds.
Harry, though surprised at their lack of response, did not watch any further. He turned his back on them and curled into a ball, hands and arms wrapped over his head.
Five seconds.
The room shook.
The blast was deafening. A flare of heat blasted Harry’s bare back, and then he was pelted by debris.
He braced for a half—suspected lurch of the ship as it lost control and plunged for the ground. Or maybe even for the quick death that awaited him if they were in outer space and the grenade had cut a hole into vacuum. But neither thing occurred—the floor remained steady.
He waited a few more moments, and then turned to check the damage.
Black smoke coughed from the wall, speckled with sparks from the electrical fires, dying down. But the smoke was sucked away by the hole the grenade had blown in the wall, and above the acrid fumes rode the familiar smell of fresh air and—
No, it couldn’t be!
Manure?
It smelled like Iowa farmland! Could the ship have been on the ground all this time?
A flash of hope spurred Harry up onto his feet. His instinct for survival had returned, and now he knew he had a chance. But he had to get out of here ... He just prayed that the hole he had blown in the side of the ship was big enough to get through.
By the fitful sparks of the dying fire and the lights that still flashed, Harry could see that the explosion had literally blown the heads off the aliens. Whatever satisfaction he felt, though, departed as he realized that the things shouldn’t be standing at all—and that a few of the guttering electrical fires actually sparked in them! Fascinated, he was drawn forward.
From charred torsos emerged burnt insulation, the color—coded spaghetti of wires, the blackened shapes of cogs and gears. Were they robot drones? Were the aliens that had picked him up actually mechanical creatures?
Further inspection proved that they were indeed robots. But by the sputtering flickers of the lights, Harry Reynolds’s electronic expertise rapidly determined another fact.
These things were robots, all right, and the stuff they were built out of was as American as Radio Shack.
“What the hell is going on!” he murmured.
Then he looked down and saw the cable connecting the “alien” robots to the control panel. One of the “alien’s” hands twitched in the same pattern, over and over again. Reynolds had seen these kinds of things in Disney World! They weren’t even legitimate, self—contained robots!
He looked over to the closed doorway, half expecting Allen Funt to come charging in, screaming, “Smile! You’re on ‘Candid Camera!’”
It was then he heard an alarm finally cough to life. Though muted, it sounded just like the Volunteer Fire Department’s siren down the road. The smoke was clearing away from the hole in the wall. The explosion had torn away the instrument panel, revealing guts of cheap forty—gauge wire. This wasn’t any alien ship! This was some kind of elaborate hoax.
He stepped forward toward the hole. It was big enough to step through. He could see a smudge of dawn paling the horizon through a copse of nearby trees. Off to his left, he made out the bulky form of a grain silo.
Harry knocked away a splintered section of old wood and corrugated cardboard (so that was where the smell had come from!) and then fitted himself through the hole, coughing a little from the smoke. Outside, the grass was littered with blown-out debris, and the morning cold made Harry shiver, but nonetheless it was good to know he was on solid, genuine earth ground!
“Hey!” cried a voice behind him. “Hey! You! Stop!”
He turned around, and saw the door opening up like the iris of an eye. Then he saw a brief flash of suit.
But Harry kept on going. He had the feeling that if this was one of the guys who had kidnapped him, they wouldn’t be too thrilled with him, now that he’d blown up part of their grim little play.
A haziness still hung inside his head, and he realized that a lot of what had happened to him was because they’d drugged him. But they’d left his Chuck Taylors on, and the adrenaline from the past couple of minutes was enough to boost him on. He ran far enough away from the building to see that it was a barn, but he didn’t stop long enough to study it. He chuffed along around it, running from that suit.
Gotta get help, he thought, gotta find the cops.
Around the bam, a large farmhouse came into view, but that wasn’t what attracted his attention. On a square stretch of tarmac the size of a basketball field was a Bell Air Force helicopter, and beside it was a military jeep.
Harry was seriously considering trying to hotwire the jeep when a man opened the back door of the farmhouse and stepped out toward him. He wore the blue uniform of the air force. His hair was short, gray, and grizzled, and he had a puzzled expression on his face. But he was unarmed, and regarded Harry with such surprise, even shock, that Harry didn’t think he could possibly have anything to do with the business in the barn.
“Help!” Harry said, “There’s a man after me! The aliens ... They aren’t aliens...! Help me ... Gotta get out ... “
“Who are you?” asked the man. Harry could see by the arrangement of the colored bars that the man was a full colonel.
“Reynolds,” he returned. The mere sight of a military uniform triggered ingrained responses of respect. “Harry Reynolds, sir! I’ve been abducted! And ... And I don’t know why!”
A pained expression crossed the colonel’s face. “That explosion.“
“Yeah. I escaped. But there’s a guy, he’s—“
Even as he spoke, a young man wearing a suit rounded the corner and ran at full gallop.
Alarmed, Harry turned to run. But the colonel raised his hand and spoke in a reassuring tone. “Stay put, Mr. Reynolds. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
The suit stopped a few yards away from them. He lifted a walkie—talkie and spoke into it. “Junior here. I’ve got him, right by the pad.” He was a tall man with short hair and a deeply pitted face that was sallow against eyes alive with blue, reflecting the awakening dawn.
A filtered voice murmured, “I’ll be right there.” It was a woman’s voice.
Harry didn’t know what to do, and so when the authoritative military bass instructed him to stand still, he did just that, until he could figure out something better.
“Mr. Reynolds, I’m sorry about all this. I’m going to put things right immediately, I promise you,” the colonel said. “Just stay here a moment—we’ll get you out of this chilly morning in a moment.” The air force officer turned to confront the man in the suit. “Woodrow. I demand to know what’s going on in this establishment! This is a civilian, man! With rights!”
The man in the grey suit sighed, rocked back on his feet, getting in control. He actually shook his head and laughed. “I don’t believe it. I don’t fucking believe it! You must have had a bomb. Where the hell did you get a fuckin’ bomb?” he said to Harry.
A door in the side of the barn opened and a blonde woman in a lab smock walked out toward them, carrying a clipboard. She wore glasses, was in her thirties, very pretty. But her mouth was set into a hard, severe frown.
“I’ll get to the bottom of this, Mr. Reynolds,” said the colonel. “But you’re shivering. Here—“ The colonel walked over to the jeep, pulled an army blanket out. “Wrap this around you for the time being while I kick some ass.”
What Harry wanted more than anything now was just to get away, but the colonel’s tone was so reassuring he figured he was in good hands.
The colonel wheeled upon the woman in the lab coat.
“Well?”
“Big trouble,” she said in a small voice, looking distinctly troubled at the man’s presence. “Snafu. How could we know Mr. Reynolds received Treatment Express Double A. Drugs, subliminals, the works—“
“Jesus Christ!” said the suit. “Not in front of the mark!”
The woman seemed to turn even paler, even colder. “You don’t understand. It doesn’t make any difference what he hears now. The process was interrupted mid—procedure. We’ve got an abort situation on our hands.”
“Colonel,” said Harry, sick to his stomach, but grateful for the blanket. “I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m a veteran. I’m a citizen. I’ve got rights. And as an employee of the U.S. Government, it’s your duty to see that I am placed under proper protection!”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Reynolds,” said a voice from the back of the farmhouse. Startled, Harry turned to see a man standing there in a bathrobe, smoking a cigarette. “We all work for the U.S. government.” The man, fortyish, gray at the temples and smiling, turned to the young man in the suit. “Justine, Mr. Reynolds is ambulatory. Could you correct this, please?”
“You bet,” said the suited man, and before Harry could move, the man ran up to him, struck him at the juncture of his neck and head with the metal walkie—talkie. Abruptly, Harry found himself face-first in the dirt and grass, groaning, his head feeling as though someone had driven a spike through it. He rolled around, groaning. But he remained conscious, and he could hear everything that the people had to say.
“That wasn’t necessary!” said the colonel.
“Yeah,” said the man in the suit. “But it felt good. You should see the mess back there. How the hell—“ Harry could feel himself being roughed up, searched. Someone tugged hard on his right leg—and then yanked it off. “What have we here? A goddamn fake leg! Hey, beautiful, a really wonderful research job you did on this bozo. He smuggled a goddamn grenade inside a prosthesis!”
“That’s not what concerns me now,” the colonel’s bass rang challengingly. “Cunningham, can you fix him up? Can you make him forget all this? You guys are the Editors.”
“I’m afraid the negative reality-input is too great. I don’t even think we can implant a screen.” The woman’s voice was cold, monotone. “He’s seen too much, done too much. Drugs and hypnotherapy, compu-suggestion; far too risky.”
“Wha——“ groaned Harry through the fog of pain.
The colonel said, “The Publishers will not be pleased.”
Harry lifted his head a bit, rolled over. He could see the four of them, standing around him like judges, trying him for a crime he did not commit. “Help,” he managed to say. “Hosp—“
The man in the bathrobe stooped down. Reynolds coughed from the gust of smoke the man blew into his face. “Harry, we had high hopes for you. High hopes. You coulda been a star.” The man made a tsk—tsk sound, stood, and flipped the cigarette away. “Terminate,” he said to the younger man, then walked away.
“Jesus,” said the colonel. “Wait! I do not authorize this! I will report that other options were available.”
Harry made a superhuman effort to stand. But his leg was gone, and he flopped back onto his back, groaning.
The man in the suit stepped up closer to Harry, while the woman watched, the impersonal expression on her face replaced by a gleam of sudden interest, even enthusiasm in her eye. The man they called Justine reached into his suit jacket, and pulled out a silenced .38 caliber Smith and Wesson automatic.
“It’s time for the big sign-off, Klatuu,” said the man, a death’s—head grin on his face. “Your ratings were just terrible.”
The first bullet thunked hard into Harry’s chest, driving the breath out of him. He saw a gout of blood splash over the woman’s shoe.
The second bullet was just a whisper to him as the darkness set in, and by the time the third and fourth bullets struck him in the head, everything was as black as the nothingness between the night-time stars.