CHAPTER EIGHT:
Free Will’s a Bitch
Because Castine had been looking for it, Vickery had noticed the fleeting patterns of dust and dampness spread out on the face of the riverbed, and he remembered Plowman saying, crop circles without the crops.
Down on the flat surface now, he looked at the two strangers and remembered what the bearded man had asked.
“It’s not for sale,” Vickery replied shortly. He noticed that the man who had spoken was soaking wet. “What in hell happened here?”
“It was a UAP,” said the man’s companion in a shaky voice. Peering more closely at her, Vickery tensed. Cargo pants, khaki bush jacket—this was the Asian woman who had been the driver of the blue Jeep this morning.
“And it’s a crop circle now,” said Castine, “with what looks like double-dumbbell patterns and Fibonacci entourages extending God knows how far.”
As if he could no longer hold it back, the bearded man burst out, “Are you William Ardmore?”
Vickery answered, “Ardmore won’t sell the truck, trust me.”
The Asian woman stepped back and asked, in a tone of almost light-hearted exhaustion, “Are you Sebastian Vickery? You’re here with Agent Castine.”
“Try Rumpelstiltskin—” Vickery began, then stared past her and roughly pulled Castine backward by the elbow. Castine looked over her shoulder, gasped, and then began scrambling back up the cement slope. The two newcomers were already sprinting away south. Halfway up the slope, Vickery paused and looked back, his eyes wide and his scalp tightening.
Two enormous dark hands, each as big as a couch, were uncurling their fingers out across the wide pavement. Between them stood a skeletal figure with an oversized head, its lips and tongue and ears protruding grotesquely; its eyes were just oversized bumps in the rippling texture of its face. Pieces of the tripartite thing were falling away, and Vickery saw that they consisted of leaves and water spray.
It lifted the huge hands and turned its distorted and apparently blind head from side to side, and the tinny trilling sound sprang into audibility again but went silent a moment later; and then the thing broke up into clusters of soggy leaves rolling away in the wind.
Crouched a couple of feet above Vickery, Castine said, “Radiation, and I’ve got no meter—back to your place, quick.”
Vickery nodded and followed her up to the crest, where they crossed the narrow access road to the six foot wall of the trailer park.
Vickery had just crouched to make a stirrup of his hands to give Castine a boost when the woman and the bearded man came puffing up to the road.
“Check this out,” said the woman.
Vickery looked up from where he was crouched by the wall, and saw that the woman was holding a revolver; and that the bearded man, standing back from her, looked angry and chagrined.
Castine spread her hands. “What do you want, Yoneda?”
“I see you’re not carrying my gun now,” Yoneda said. “Where is it?”
“In the truck. Under the passenger seat.”
Vickery recalled that his own gun was in his jacket pocket, on the bed in the trailer.
“It better be nowhere else,” said Yoneda. Stepping to the side and addressing Tacitus too, Yoneda said, “I’m going to sit up on the wall, attentively, while the three of you climb over. Then we’ll go to Rumpelstiltskin’s place and talk of many things.”
“Whoever goes in first,” said Vickery, “turn off the fire under the pan on the stove.”
Yoneda tucked the revolver into her waistband and sprang, caught the top of the wall and swung one leg up, and a moment later was straddling it and holding the gun again.
She was panting, but her voice was steady as she told Vickery, “You can go in first. Your hands will be visible and I’ll have this gun aimed at the center of Castine’s back.”
“I gather you live in a trailer?” the bearded man said. “If you have a flashlight, and Miss Rayette here doesn’t object, could you look around under the trailer for a bomb, before we all go in? It would be what they call C-4, and it would look . . .”
“I know what it would look like,” Vickery said. “I’ve got alarms, but I’ll check.”
Yoneda nodded. “We’ll all wait on the pavement while you do.”
Ten minutes later the four of them were in Vickery’s narrow living room. Vickery and Castine sat stiffly in the easy chairs, and the portly bearded old fellow was huddled on the couch. Yoneda was standing in the kitchen doorway rapidly tapping the old man’s revolver on her thigh; she had not stepped out to get to Vickery’s truck and retrieve her own gun, but she had leaned into the kitchen and turned off the fire on the stove.
The bearded man, who Yoneda addressed as Tacitus, was now wearing an old bathrobe of Vickery’s, for his wet clothes had proved to be dotted with tiny worms from the river and had been thoroughly rinsed off in the shower, and were now hung on a towel rack in the kitchen. Vickery’s jacket was dusty from his having crawled around with a flashlight under the trailer, making sure that no assassins had got past his alarms and planted a bomb; and none had. A layer of smoke under the ceiling glowed in the lamplight, for Yoneda and Tacitus had lit cigarettes; the air reeked of tobacco smoke and charred onions. There was no more beer, and a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and four already-replenished glasses sat on the coffee table.
Yoneda had several times opened her mouth as if to say something, then snapped it shut; finally she just shook her head and looked across the room at Tacitus. “Okay,” she said, “to start with, would people who might plant a bomb under this trailer be the same people who blew up that van this morning?”
Tacitus had combed his beard and scanty hair while Vickery had been rinsing off his clothes, but he was still nervously fingering his moustache. He paused and pursed his lips, clearly regretting having mentioned the possibilty of a bomb since there hadn’t been one.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I suppose so. It just seems like a day to be cautious.”
“You specified C-4.”
Tacitus let his hands drop to his lap.“Well, I gather that’s what people use these days. I didn’t want Mr. . . . our host to be looking for black bowling balls with burning fuses sticking out of them.”
Vickery wondered sourly if his crawl under the trailer had simply been humoring a deluded old man.
“We’ll get back to that,” said Yoneda. She swept a glance over all three of them, and took a deep breath. “Right,” she said. “So. What—happened!—down in the river?”
“I told you,” said Castine, “it was a crop circle, without the crops. The chirping noises, the distorted vision, the heat—that was probably the microwave radiation that cooks nodes in wheat stalks, in ordinary crop circle appearances. There’ll be a lot of magnetized iron pellets scattered around too. And there was probably some alpha and beta radiation—and—” She paused, glancing around defensively, then went on, “— what seemed to be changes in gravity.”
Vickery nodded. “There were.”
“Shit,” said Yoneda with evident resentment. “Yes, there were. And for a few moments there was—that—“ She raised her free hand and spread her fingers.
Castine picked up her glass and drank half its contents. “That thing with the big hands,” she said, exhaling. “I saw one of them in a crop circle in England two nights ago.” Nodding to Yoneda, she added, “I know I told you it was a witness who claimed to have seen it—I didn’t want you to think I was crazy.”
Yoneda waved the gun impatiently. “But what are they?”
Castine just shook her head.
Tacitus was bent down and tugging uncomfortably at the hem of Vickery’s bathrobe. Vickery had offered to loan the man a shirt and a pair of pants, but Tacitus had declined, and they wouldn’t have been wide enough for him to button or zip up in any case.
“Your clothes should be dry before too long,” Vickery told him. “And I did rinse all the worms off.”
Tacitus sighed and straightened up. “They are cortical homunculi.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Vickery. “I hope you didn’t swallow any.”
Tacitus pursed his lips irritably. “Damn your worms! I mean the things with the big hands and distended faces. When the extra-dimensonal intelligences fall into occupation of physical mass, they often helplessly assume what they comprehend as our physical appearance. According to reports, they can only sustain the form for a few moments. As was the case tonight.”
“Hah!” said Yoneda. “Our physical appearance? Some of your chess club pals must be very weird-looking dudes.”
“Okay,” said Castine, “that went right by me.”
“Do explain,” said Vickery.
Looking distinctly uncomfortable, Tacitus said, “The chess club is a group of militant space alien sympathizers, and they resent—”
“A chess club?” interrupted Castine.
“Oh. Well, that’s sort of their cover, you see.” Ignoring a derisive snort from Yoneda, Banach went on doggedly, “They resent your, what they believe are your intentions toward the aliens. You being, I gather, Air Force Intelligence.”
Vickery was sure the old man’s story was a lie, a clumsy one, and he could see that Castine and Yoneda thought the same but were willing to let it stand for the moment; and he wondered what sort of group, if any, old Tacitus might actually be a member of.
Yoneda flicked ash off her cigarette and stepped forward to pick up her glass from the table. “So that thing in the riverbed is what aliens think humans look like?”
“Yes,” said Taictus, “and in fact it’s a more accurate likeness, from one perspective, than the way they used to appear. Their forms are made of whatever mass is at hand—dust, clay, leaves—and until a few months ago the forms were a crude mimickry of our external appearance: oval heads heads on slender four-limbed bodies. But lately—”
“The grays,” said Castine. “The typical image of aliens, like in Close Encounters.”
“Exactly,” said Tacitus. “And not a bad sketch of the human figure, really, from the outside, considering that they’re not accustomed to comprehending physical shapes at all.”
Vickery looked up from refilling his glass and nodded. “I always thought those aliens you see in pictures were too human-like to be how real aliens would look.”
Castine was frowning at Tacitus in amused puzzlement. “You said that thing in the riverbed was a more accurate likeness of us.”
“Yes, in an essential way. What we saw down there is the human form as comprehended from the inside, in the somatosensory cortex of the brain. The areas of the body that are allotted more sensory nerves there—hands, lips, tongue—are understandably taken to be bigger.”
Yoneda stepped into the kitchen and dragged a chair into the living room and sat down. “Comprehended from the inside,” she said. “What does that mean?”
Tacitus spread his hands. “They have begun to perceive human brains.”
“It didn’t,” said Yoneda hesitantly, “have, uh . . . gender.”
“Thank God,” muttered Vickery, trying not to imagine how the thing would have manifested that.
Castine rolled her eyes and nodded.
“Male and female characteristics appear to cancel out,” said Tacitus, “in their view. It may be that they don’t have any referent for sexuality.”
“Do they ever,” asked Castine hesitantly, “have a hundred hands, rather than just two big ones?”
“It would be an effect of the same cause,” Tacitus began.
But Yoneda gave Castine a sudden sharp glance. “In Wiltshire, you arrived at that crop circle with a . . . team, right? It must have been a good ten or fifteen minutes after the circle was formed. The big-handed thing hung around that long? And none of your team even saw it?”
Vickery could think of nothing he could say that would help Castine out; and spilling his drink or faking a coughing fit would be transparent attempts at distraction.
“It was a broad pattern,” said Castine, with at least no haste or change of expression, “and the middle of the night. I walked a good distance into it—”
“They don’t last ten minutes,” said Tacitus flatly, leaning forward. “They don’t last one.”
Castine raised her eyebrows. “This one did,” she insisted.
“This morning!” said Tacitus with imperfectly suppressed excitement, “a certain state was . . . forcibly imposed on me, though before that it had always occurred only when voluntarily sought. And immediately after that the things appeared in the sky.”
He stood up quickly from the couch, and Yoneda raised the gun, but the old man simply crossed to the window and picked up the canvas leaning against the bookcase below it.
He stepped close to the nearest standing lamp and peered at the umber and tan and silver brush-strokes in the desert landscape. After a few seconds he put it down and stared at Vickery.
“You too!” he said. “Was it simply because the three of us were there, or,” he added with a glance toward Castine, “did one of you enter the retro view deliberately, triggering me, and probably the other as well?”
Vickery cocked his head. “Sorry? What?”
“Did you once,” Tacitus asked, almost in a pleading tone, “drive down a freeway offramp into a region of insanity?”
Castine’s gasp was faint, but Tacitus spun toward her, nearly losing Vickery’s bathrobe. “You did! And now you can see the infrared past, as you surely did in England two nights ago.” He laughed harshly. “The three of us in that state this morning—a triangle of retro points puncturing the fabric of now, a localized radiating discord like conflicting radar waves—we called them into the sky!”
Yoneda was staring blankly at Tacitus.
Castine cast a desperate glance at Vickery, who didn’t move for a moment and then sat back and smiled wryly.
“Yes, we did,” Vickery said, “three years ago. You?”
“Also three years ago.” Tacitus returned to the couch and sat down. “And now we are not secure in our slots in sequential time, eh? We . . . rattle from side to side, a bit.”
“Yes,” said Vickery. “Only toward the past, though—there seems to be some kind of temporal headwind.”
“I think,” said Tacitus, “there must not be many of us.”
“There was another,” said Castine softly, “who drove down an offramp like that in 1960, but he was killed a couple of years ago. Yes, it’s probably just the three of us now.”
“We few,” said Tacitus, “we unsteady few.”
Yoneda waved Tacitus’s gun. “Okay, you’re all going to—”
A low buzzing noise interrupted her, and in the next moment Vickery had vaulted up from his chair and snatched the revolver from Yoneda’s hand. He glanced at the bookshelf over the door, on which stood three glass figurines shaped like monkeys; the one on the left, with its hands over its eyes, was glowing red.
“Under the trailer for real this time,” Vickery said, and took hold of the doorknob.
Before he could turn it, though, Tacitus caught his elbow. “I’m afraid I must deal with this.”
Vickery looked past Tacitus to Castine, who shrugged and nodded.
“I can’t let you have the gun,” said Vickery.
“I don’t need it.” Tacitus stepped past Vickery, took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
Vickery was now standing beside the doorframe with the gun raised. The evening breeze, cool on his damp face, smelled of car exhaust and the river, and there was no one visible now on the lane between the trailers. Tacitus shuffled forward onto the landing, and called in a loud voice, “Stoy! Vlast’yu direktsya! Voz’mi svoye ustroystvo idi—Eto pod kontrolem.”
Looking past Tacitus’s shoulder, a few seconds later Vickery saw a young man in a dust-streaked black windbreaker staighten up as he hurried away from the base of the trailer, and then another, who was carrying a box. Both had fair hair cut short. The first man turned around and called, “Kto ti?”
Tacitus stepped forward so that his face was clearly illuminated by the porch light. “Anatoly Kazakov. Kto-to bol’shim avtoritetom. Prover’te, chto ya govoryu, prezhde chem pytat’sya snova.”
One of the men barked a question in the same language; Tacitus replied curtly with what might have been a series of numbers.
After a moment’s hesitation and a brief exhange of whispers, the two men hurried away into the shadows of the narrow lane; their backs were briefly lit by a streetlight, and then Vickery heard a car start, and wondered if it was the BMW that had raced away from Giant Rock after the explosion this morning.
Tacitus stepped back inside and closed the door, and when he turned to the room his face was bleak. “U menya ne bylo drudgogo vybora,” he whispered; then, focusing on the others, he said, “I had no choice.”
Vickery reached up to the glass monkeys with his free hand and re-set the motion detector, then walked back to his chair and sat down, holding the gun in his lap. “That was Russian.”
Tacitus nodded and spread his arms. “You see before you an orphan.”
“What did you tell them?” asked Castine.
“I told them to stop—by the authority of the Directorate— and take their device and leave, that the situation had changed and was under control. I gave them my name, my real name, and told them to verify what I said before they took further action.” He shook his head. “Idiots. They’ll be reprimanded for leaving.”
“Which Directorate?” asked Vickery.
Tacitus walked around the table and sat down on the couch. Raising his glass of bourbon in his trembling right hand, he said softly, as if to himself, “Mais ou est l’Union d‘Soviet Socialiste Republiques d’antan?”
It was a paraphrase of a line from the French of Francois Villon, and Vickery mentally translated it: But where is the USSR of yesterday?
Tacitus looked up. “The Soviet Military Intelligence Directorate, Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye.”
“The GRU,” said Yoneda. “Not a—a militant chess club.”
“No,” said Tacitus, “that was a hasty improvisation . . . there is such a chess club, but I’ve never had any contact with them.” He yawned, and Vickery knew it was from tension, not weariness. “It is said,” Tacitus went on, “that in the GRU complex on the Khoroshevskoye Highway in Moscow there is an incinerator—a crematorium—for traitors. Ivashutin said it was just for burning documents, but I wonder if it is my destination now.”
Vickery recalled the van that had been blown up this morning by Giant Rock. What this potbellied old man was saying now might be true.
Vickery gestured toward the floor of the trailer. “Why would the GRU want to kill me?” he asked. “How would they even be aware of me?”
Tacitus’s head swung from side to side as if, thought Vickery, he were looking for some way forward. “I didn’t abandon it,” he muttered at last. “It left me abandoned.”
Tacitus leaned back now and stared at the low ceiling. “There was to be an operation at Giant Rock this morning. We—they!—knew that the U. S. Office of Naval Intellience was sending two agents and a backup van.” He gave Yoneda a wan smile. “I knew from the start that you were ONI, not Air Force Intelligence.” He shook his head and went on, “I’m not operational, I was told to go and observe, and to identify Pierce Plowman if I saw him—I’ve met him a couple of times.” He looked at Vickery. “I photographed the license plates of all the vehicles there, and when you fled, pursued by what I took to be an ONI vehicle, I relayed both numbers to my handler. And the policy of the Directorate, it seems, is to eliminate every ONI agent involved in, ah, UFO investigations; as well as anyone who seems to be of value to those investigations.”
“Good God,” said Yoneda with a visible shiver, “you guys are barbaric!”
“Regrettably inclined toward a blind clean sweep these days,” admitted Tacitus.
Vickery turned to look at Yoneda. “Why did your lot kill Frankie Notchett?”
“Frankie is dead?” exclaimed Tacitus. “When?”
“I don’t know anything about that—” Yoneda began.
“Sometime during this last week,” said Vickery.
Yoneda finished her sentence, “— I only knew someone by that name was apprehended.”
Tacitus was staring at Vickery. “I spoke to him no more than a month ago! Are you certain?”
Castine nodded. “Oh yeah.”
Tacitus swiveled his head toward her. “You saw the body?”
“Uh,” said Castine, “no. We—we saw his ghost, actually, this afternoon.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” breathed Yoneda.
Tacitus switched his attention from Castine to Yoneda. “Rayette,” he said, “you don’t believe in ghosts?” When she just cocked her head mockingly, he said, “You should. You saw one half an hour ago.”
“What, the thing with the hands? Made of leaves and dirt? Whatever that was, it came down in that glowing ball.”
“It came down as that glowing ball,” Tacitus corrected her, “dying. I believe the three of us here,” he added with a wave toward Vickery and Castine, “poisoned it when we . . . impinged on its identity this morning. And when we three came into mutual proximity again this evening we provided the place for it to die. They are purely deterministic, they have no metaconsciousness, and overlapping with free wills awakens them, so that they die.”
“Free will’s a bitch,” Castine observed, then looked sheepishly at the floor.
“I was going to try cooking something again,” said Vickery, standing up, “but since Mr. Tacitus’s comrades might come back at any time, I’m afraid we’re all leaving.”
“Not my comrades any longer,” said Tacitus mournfully.
Castine too had stood up, and Vickery handed Tacitus’s gun to her. “Watch them while I pack. Tacitus, you can get dressed. Your clothes are wet, but at least they’ve got no worms on ’em.”
“Small mercies,” whispered Tacitus, standing up.