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 LOOK CLOSELY. THEY'RE HERE.

EDITED BY -
JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS
FEATURING
PHILIP K. DICK, GENE WOLFE, PAUL J. McAULEY,
PAT CADIGAN, and others
 A BOSTON PUBLIC UBRARY
$5.99 U.S.
$8.99 CAN
Copley Square

EAN
 THE OTHER CELIA
by Theodore Sturgeon
RESIDUALS
by Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman
EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING
by Ray Nelson
EXPENDABLE
by Philip K. Dick
THE REALITY TRIP
by Robert Silverberg
DECENCY
by Robert Reed
THE MINDWORM
by C. M. Kornbluth
POPEYE AND POPS WATCH THE EVENING
WORLD REPORT
by Eliot Fintushel
THE AUTOPSY
by Michael Shea
OR ALL THE SEAS WITH OYSTERS
by Avram Davidson
ANGEL
by Pat Cadigan
AMONG THE HAIRY EARTHMEN
by R. A. Lafferty
VM TOO BIG RUT I LOVE TO PLAY
by James Tiptree Jr.
THE HERO AS WERWOLF
by Gene Wolfe
MOTHERHOOD, ETC.
by L. Timmel Duchamp
Aliens Among Us
Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

UNICORNS!
MAGIC ATS!
BESTIARY!
MERMAIDS!
SORCERERS!
DEMONS!
DOGTALES!
SEASERPENTS!
DINOSAURS!
LITTLE PEOPLE!
MAGICATS n
UNICORNS n
DRAGONS!
INVADERS!
HORSES!
ANGELS!
HACKERS
TIMEGATES
CLONES
IMMORTALS
NANOTECH
ARMAGEDDONS
ALIENS AMONG US

Edited by Terri Windling

FAERY!
Aliens AMom uS

EDITED BY
JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

 If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed"
to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received
any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ALIENS AMONG US

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with

the editors
PRI^^^NG history
Ace mass-market edition / June 2000
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois.
Cover art by Walter Velez.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,
by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

http://www.penguinputnam.com

I
Check out the ACE Science Fiction & Fantasy newsletter
and much more on the Internet at Club PPI!

P JP ISBN: 0-44 1 -00704-X

ALIENS Ace Books are published

AMONG CE®
^y i^e Berkley APublishing Group,
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 987654321
 AchowM^ment is mak
for ycmission to rcyrini the following mdeml:

"The Other Celia," by Theodore Sturgeon. Copyright © 1957

by Galaxy Publishing Corp. First published in Galaxy, March
1957. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and the
agent for the estate, The Pimlico Agency.

"Residuals," by Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman. Copyright

© 1997 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Sci-
ence Fiction, June 1997. Reprinted by permission of the au-
thors.

"Eight O'clock in the Morning," by Ray Nelson. Copyright

© 1963 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Maga-
zine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1963.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Expendable," by Philip K. Dick. Copyright © 1953 by Fan-

tasy House, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, July 1953. Published by permission of
the author's estate and the agent for the estate.

"The Reality Trip," by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1970

by Universal Publishing & Distributing Corp. First published
in If, May 1970. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Decency," by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1996 by Dell Mag-

azines, Inc. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June
1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"The Mindworm," by C. M. Kombluth. Copyright © 1950 by

Hillman Periodicals, Inc. First published in Worlds Beyond,
December 1950. Reprinted by permission of the author's es-
tate and the agent for the estate.

"Popeye and Pops Watch the Evening World Report," by Eliot

Fintushel. Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines, Inc. First
published in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1996.
n Acknowledgments

"The Autopsy," by Michael Shea. Copyright © 1984 by

Michael Shea. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, December 1980. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the author and the author's agent.

"Or All the Seas with Oysters," by Avram Davidson. Copy-

right © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. First published in
Galaxy, May 1958. Reprinted by permission of the author's
estate and the executor of that estate, Grania Davis.

"Angel," by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 1987 by Davis Publi-

cations, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction
Magazine, May 1987. Reprinted by permission of the author.

"Among the Hairy Earthmen," by R. A. Lafferty. Copyright

© 1966 by U.P.D. Publishing Corporation. First published in
Galaxy, August 1966. Reprinted by permission of the author
and the author's agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

"I'm Too Big But I Love to Play," by James Tiptree Jr. Copy-
right © 1970 by Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc. First published
in Amazing Stones, March 1970. Reprinted by permission of
the author's estate and the agent for that estate, the Virginia
Kidd Literary Agency.

"The Hero as Werwolf," by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1975

by Thomas Disch. From The New Improved Sun (Harper &
Row, 1975). Reprinted by permission of the author and the
author's agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

"Motherhood, Etc.," by L. Timmel Duchamp. Copyright ©

1993 by L. Timmel Duchamp. First published in Full Spec-
trum 4 (Bantam Spectra, 1993). Reprinted by permission of
the author.
 CONTENTS

Preface ix
THE OTHER CELIA 1
Theodore Sturgeon
RESIDUALS 21
Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman
EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING 48
Ray Nelson
EXPENDABLE 55
Philip K. Dick
THE REALITY TRIP 62
Robert Silverberg
DECENCY 83
Robert Reed
THE MINDWORM 100
C. M. Kombluth
POPEYE AND POPS WATCH THE EVENING
WORLD REPORT 117
Eliot Fintushel
THE AUTOPSY 128
Michael Shea
OR ALL THE SEAS WITH OYSTERS 171
Avram Davidson
ANGEL 183
Pat Cadigan
AMONG THE HAIRY EARTHMEN 202
R. A. Lafferty
I'M TOO BIG BUT I LOVE TO PLAY 216
James Tiptree Jr.
viii Contents

THE HERO AS WERWOLF 236

Gene Wolfe
MOTHERHOOD, ETC 254
L. Timmel Duchamp
 PREFACE

Jihc iiea that aliens are in hiding among us — watching,

observing, maybe drawing up nefarious plans against us,
plotting in secret to conquer us, manipulating society in sub-
tle ways, perhaps even secretly ruling us already, directing
world events to further their own ends, alien eyes gleaming
from behind their human masks — is one that probably goes
way back into history, and probably even into prehistory —
back to a time when people from outside your immediate
tribal group were regarded with automatic suspicion, and not
considered to be really human, not like the People, not like
you and me. Even the Romans, at the height of an Empire
that anticipated most of the tropes of sophisticated urban so-
ciety thousands of years before we reinvented them, had this
same attitude toward outsiders, toward "barbarians" (so
named because they didn't really speak in a human tongue,
just made inarticulate animal noises that sounded to the Ro-
mans like "bar-bar-bar") — they weren't really human at all.
This attitude is convenient in some ways because, since
outsiders aren't human, it allows you to treat them with a total
lack of compassion or moral or ethical scruples, and you can
slaughter them or rape them or buy them and sell them as
you like and still consider yourself to be a good upright hon-
est citizen, operating completely within the Law (since the
laws that are designed to keep you from doing these things
to other humans don't apply to Them, the non-human Out-
siders), amindset common ever since in everybody from play-
ers in the African slave-trade to Hitler and the Nazis.
It's an attitude that has traditionally lead to paranoia,
though. Some of the outsiders are easy enough to spot, being
obliging enough to have different-colored skin, for instance —
but some of the outsiders look just like us. Why, if they dress
in human clothes and learn to speak in the human tongue,
you might not be able to tell that they were an outsider at
all! There might be one living right next door to you, and
X Preface

you wouldn't even know it! You wouldn't even know it—
until it was too latel For certainly these outsiders are hiding
among us for no good purpose — certainly they must be plot-
ting against us, planning our overthrow, sabotaging the pub-
lic works, poisoning the wells, setting fire to the cities, stealing
our women and children, introducing fluoride into the water
supply to pollute our precious bodily fluids . . .
Throughout history, the identity of these Outsiders in
hiding among us has changed; at one time or another in
European history, they were Christians, pagans, witches,
Jews, heretics. Communists.
Today, they are aliens.
The idea that aliens, creatures from outer space, are in
hiding among us is very wide-spread today, almost ubiq-
uitous, certainly as widely accepted as many more formally
organized faiths, and can be seen in everything from the
supermarket tabloids to television documentaries about
Roswell to The X-Files.
Print science fiction is where this idea got its start, though,
decades before The X-Files was even a gleam in some pro-
ducer's eye, and is still where the theme is handled with the
most imagination and ingenuity (including stuff far weirder
and more bizarre than anything you'll see on television), and
where it's explored in the most variety and depth (because
not all of those aliens are in hiding among us for sinister
reasons, you know, nor are all of them interested in admin-
istering anal probes or mutilating cattle <does it ever strike
you that it must be really dull in outer space, if this is all
you can think of to do on a slow weekend?>), with the most
sophistication and profundity and power.
And the most entertainment value as well — because, of
course, the colorful, fast-paced, and wildly imaginative sto-
ries that follow were written to entertain, not to warn hu-
mankind of some sinister alien menace . . . although many
of them will scare the pants off you nevertheless.
So sit back, relax, make sure the lights are on and the
doors are locked, and enjoy. And when your spouse gets
home, examine them with a suspicious eye. Are you sure
you know where they come from . . . ?
 THE OTHER CELIA

Theodore Stumon

The late Theodore Sturgeon was one of the true giants of

the field, a man who produced stylish, innovative, and po-
etically intense fiction for more than forty years; a writer
who was as important to H. L. Gold's Galaxy-^ra revolution
in the '50s as he 'd been to John W. Campbell s Golden Age
revolution at Astounding in the '40s. Sturgeon 's stories such
as "It," "Microcosmic God," ''Killdozer," ''Bianca's
Hands, " ''Maturity, " ''The Other Man, " and the brilliant
"Baby Is Three " — which was eventually expanded into Stur-
geon's most famous novel. More Than Human — helped to ex-
pand the boundaries of the SF story, and push it in the
direction of artistic maturity. In Sturgeon 's hands, the SF
story would be made to do things that no one had ever be-
lieved itcapable of doing before, and several generations of
SF writers to come would cite him as a major — in some
cases, the major — influence on their work.
The sly little story that follows, a classic tale of aliens
among us, gives us a vivid glimpse of the strangeness that
underlies the everyday world. It's Sturgeon at the very top
of his form . . . which places it among the best work ever
done in the genre.
Theodore Sturgeon 's other books include the novels Some
of Your Blood, Venus Plus X, and The Dreaming Jewels,
and the collections A Touch of Strange, Caviar, The Worlds
of Theodore Sturgeon, Not Without Sorcery, The Stars Are
the Styx, and the posthumously published Godsbody. His
most recent books are a series of massive posthumous ret-
rospective collections, part of an ambitious and admirable
scheme to return every short story Sturgeon ever wrote to
print. The first five volumes of this sequence have been pub-
lished: The Ultimate Egoist, Microcosmic God, Killdozer!,
Thunder and Roses, and The Perfect Host You may be un-
able tofind these books other than through mailorder, so for
 Theodore Sturgeon

information contact: North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327,

Berkeley, CA, 94701.

IJ yok live in a cheap enough rooming house and the

doors are made of cheap enough pine, and the locks are
old-fashioned single-action jobs and the hinges are loose,
and if you have a hundred and ninety lean pounds to op-
erate with, you can grasp the knob, press the door side-
wise against its hinges, and slip the latch. Further, you can
lock the door the same way when you come out.
Slim Walsh lived in, and was, and had, and did these
things partly because he was bored. The company doctors
had laid him up — not off, up — for three weeks (after his
helper had hit him just over the temple with a fourteen-
inch crescent wrench) pending some more X-rays. If he
was going to get just sick-leave pay, he wanted to make it
stretch. If he was going to get a big fat settlement — all to
the good; what he saved by living in this firetrap would
make the money look even better. Meanwhile, he felt fine
and had nothing to do all day.
"Slim isn't dishonest," his mother used to tell Children's
Court some years back. "He's just curious."
She was perfectly right.
Slim was constitutionally incapable of borrowing your
bathroom without looking into your medicine chest. Send
him into your kitchen for a saucer and when he came out
a minute later, he'd have inventoried your refrigerator, your
vegetable bin, and (since he was six feet three inches tall)
he would know about a moldering jar of maraschino cher-
ries in the back of the top shelf that you'd forgotten about.
Perhaps Slim, who was not impressed by his impressive
size and build, felt that a knowledge that you secretly use
hair-restorer, or are one of those strange people who keeps
a little mound of unmated socks in your second drawer,
gave him a kind of superiority. Or maybe security is a bet-
ter word. Or maybe it was an odd compensation for one
 THE OTHER CELIA

of the most advanced cases of gawking, gasping shyness

ever recorded.
Whatever it was. Slim liked you better if, while talking
to you, he knew how many jackets hung in your closet,
how old that unpaid phone bill was, and just where you'd
hidden those photographs. On the other hand. Slim didn't
insist on knowing bad or even embarrassing things about
you. He just wanted to know things about you, period.
His current situation was therefore a near-paradise.
Flimsy doors stood in rows, barely sustaining vacuum on
aching vacuum of knowledge; and one by one they im-
ploded at the nudge of his curiosity. He touched nothing
(or if he did, he replaced it carefully) and removed noth-
ing, and within a week he knew Mrs Koyper's roomers far
better than she could, or cared to. Each secret visit to the
rooms gave him a starting point; subsequent ones taught
him more. He knew not only what these people had, but
what they did, where, how much, for how much, and how
often. In almost every case, he knew why as well.
Almost every case. Celia Sarton came.
Now, at various times, in various places, Shm had found
strange things in other people's rooms. There was an old
lady in one shabby place who had an electric train under
her bed; used it, too. There was an old spinster in this very
building who collected bottles, large and small, of any value
or capacity, providing they were round and squat and with
long necks. A man on the second floor secretly guarded
his desirables with the unloaded .25 automatic in his top
bureau drawer, for which he had a half-box of .38 car-
tridges.
There was a (to be chivalrous) girl in one of the rooms
who kept fresh cut flowers before a photograph on her
night-table — or, rather, before a frame in which were
stacked eight photographs, one of which held the stage
each day. Seven days, eight photographs: Slim admired the
system. A new love every day and, predictably, a different
love on successive Wednesdays. And all of them movie
stars.
Dozens of rooms, dozens of imprints, marks, impres-
 Theodore Sturgeon

sions, overlays, atmospheres of people. And they needn't

be odd ones. A woman moves into a room, however stan-
dardized; the instant she puts down her dusting powder on
top of the flush tank, the room is hers. Something stuck
in the ill-fitting frame of a mirror, something draped over
the long-dead gas jet, and the samest of rooms begins to
shrink toward its occupant as if it wished, one day, to be
a close-knit, formfitting, individual integument as intimate
as a skin.
But not Celia Sarton's room.
. Slim Walsh got a glimpse of her as she followed Mrs
Koyper up the stairs to the third floor. Mrs Koyper, who
hobbled, slowed any follower sufficiently to afford the most
disinterested witness a good look, and Slim was anything
but disinterested. Yet for days he could not recall her clearly.
It was as if Celia Sarton had been — not invisible, for that
would have been memorable in itself — but translucent or,
chameleonlike, drably re-radiating the drab wall color, car-
pet color, woodwork color.
She was — how old? Old enough to pay taxes. How tall?
Tall enough. Dressed in . . . whatever women cover them-
selves with in their statistical thousands. Shoes, hose, skirt,
jacket, hat.
She carried a bag. When you go to the baggage win-
dow at a big terminal, you notice a suitcase here, a steamer-
trunk there; and all around, high up, far back, there are
rows and ranks and racks of luggage not individually no-
of them. ticed but just there. This bag, Celia Sarton's bag, was one
And to Mrs Koyper, she said — she said — She said what-
ever is necessary when one takes a cheap room; and to
find her voice, divide the sound of a crowd by the num-
ber of people in it.
So anonymous, so unnoticeable was she that, aside from
being aware that she left in the morning and returned in
the evening. Slim let two days go by before he entered her
room; he simply could not remind himself about her. And
when he did, and had inspected it to his satisfaction, he
had his hand on the knob, about to leave, before he re-
 THE OTHER CELIA

called that the room was, after all, occupied. Until that
second, he had thought he was giving one of the vacan-
cies the once-over. (He did this regularly; it gave him a
reference-point.)
He grunted and turned back, flicking his gaze over the
room. First he had to assure himself that he was in the
right room, which, for a man of his instinctive orientations,
was extraordinary. Then he had to spend a moment of dis-
belief inhis own eyes, which was all but unthinkable. When
that passed, he stood in astonishment, staring at the refu-
tation of everything his — hobby — had taught him about
people and the places they live in.
The bureau drawers were empty. The ashtray was clean.
No toothbrush, toothpaste, soap. In the closet, two wire
hangers and one wooden one covered with dirty quilted
silk, and nothing else. Under the grime-gray dresser scarf,
nothing. In the shower stall, the medicine chest, nothing
and nothing again, except what Mrs Koyper had grudg-
ingly installed.
Slim went to the bed and carefully turned back the faded
coverlet. Maybe she had slept in it, but very possibly not;
Mrs Koyper specialized in unironed sheets of such a
ground-in gray that it wasn't easy to tell. Frowning, Slim
put up the coverlet again and smoothed it.
Suddenly he struck his forehead, which yielded him a
flash of pain from his injury. He ignored it. "The bag!"
It was under the bed, shoved there, not hidden there. He
looked at it without touching it for a moment, so that it
could be returned exactly. Then he hauled it out.
It was a black gladstone, neither new nor expensive, of
that nondescript rusty color acquired by untended
leatherette. It had a worn zipper closure and was not locked.
Slim opened it. It contained a cardboard box, crisp and
new, for a thousand virgin sheets of cheap white typewriter
paper surrounded by a glossy bright blue band bearing a
white diamond with the legend: Nonpareil the writers friend
15% cotton fiber trade mark registered.
Slim lifted the paper out of the box, looked under it,
riffled a thumbful of the sheets at the top and the same
 Theodore Sturgeon

from the bottom, shook his head, replaced the paper, closed
the box, put it back into the bag and restored everything
precisely as he had found it. He paused again in the mid-
dle of the room, turning slowly once, but there was sim-
ply nothing else to look at. He let himself out, locked the
door, and went silently back to his room.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and at last protested,
"Nobody lives like that!"
His room was on the fourth and topmost floor of the old
house. Anyone else would have called it the worst room
in the place. It was small, dark, shabby and remote and it
suited him beautifully.
Its door had a transom, the glass of which had many
times been painted over. By standing on the foot of his
bed. Slim could apply one eye to the peephole he had
scratched in the paint and look straight down the stairs to
the third-floor landing. On this landing, hanging to the stub
of one of the ancient gas jets, was a cloudy mirror sur-
mounted bya dust-mantled gilt eagle and surrounded by a
great many rococo carved flowers. By careful propping
with folded cigarette wrappers, innumerable tests and a
great deal of silent mileage up and down the stairs. Slim
had arranged the exact tilt necessary in the mirror so that
it covered the second floor landing as well. And just as a
radar operator learns to translate glowing pips and masses
into aircraft and weather, so Slim became expert at the in-
terpretation ofthe fogged and distant image it afforded
him. Thus he had the comings and goings of half the ten-
ants under surveillance without having to leave his room.
It was in this mirror, at twelve minutes past six, that he
saw Celia Sarton next, and as he watched her climb the
stairs, his eyes glowed.
The anonymity was gone. She came up the stairs two
at a time, with a gait like bounding. She reached the land-
ing and whirled into her corridor and was gone, and while
a part of Slim's mind listened for the way she opened her
door (hurriedly, rattling the key against the lock-plate, bang-
 THE OTHER CELIA

ing the door open, slamming it shut), another part studied

a mental photograph of her face.
What raised its veil of the statistical ordinary was its
set purpose. Here were eyes only superficially interested
in cars, curbs, stairs, doors. It was as if she had projected
every important part of herself into that empty room of
hers and waited there impatiently for her body to catch up.
There was something in the room, or something she had
to do there, which she could not, would not, wait for. One
goes this way to a beloved after a long parting, or to a
deathbed in the last, precipitous moments. This was not the
arrival of one who wants, but of one who needs.
Slim buttoned his shirt, eased his door open and sidled
through it. He poised a moment on his landing like a great
moose sensing the air before descending to a waterhole,
and then moved downstairs.
Celia Sarton's only neighbor in the north corridor — the
spinster with the bottles — was settled for the evening; she
was of very regular habits and Slim knew them well.
Completely confident that he would not be seen, he
drifted to the girl's door and paused.
She was there, all right. He could see the light around
the edge of the ill-fitting door, could sense that difference
between an occupied room and an empty one, which ex-
ists however silent the occupant might be. And this one
was silent. Whatever it was that had driven her into the
room with such headlong urgency, whatever it was she was
doing (had to do) was being done with no sound or mo-
tion that he could detect.
For a long time — six minutes, seven — Slim hung there,
open-throated to conceal the sound of his breath. At last,
shaking his head, he withdrew, climbed the stairs, let him-
self into his own room and lay down on the bed, frown-
ing.
He could only wait. Yet he could wait. No one does any
single thing for very long. Especially a thing not involv-
ing movement. In an hour, in two —
It was five. At half-past eleven, some faint sound from
the floor below brought Slim, half-dozing, twisting up from
 Theodore Sturgeon

the bed and to his high peephole in the transom. He saw

the Sarton girl come out of the corridor slowly, and stop,
and look around at nothing in particular, like someone con-
fined too long in a ship's cabin who has emerged on deck,
not so much for the lungs' sake, but for the eyes'. And
when she went down the stairs, it was easily and without
hurry, as if (again) the important part of her was in the
room. But the something was finished with for now and
what was ahead of her wasn't important and could wait.
Standing with his hand on his own doorknob. Slim de-
cided that he, too, could wait. The temptation to go straight
to her room was, of course, large, but caution also loomed.
What he had tentatively established as her habit patterns
did not include midnight exits. He could not know when
she might come back and it would be foolish indeed to
jeopardize his hobby — not only where it included her, but
all of it— by being caught. He sighed, mixing resignation
with anticipatory pleasure, and went to bed.
Less than fifteen minutes later, he congratulated himself
with a sleepy smile as he heard her slow footsteps mount
the stairs below. He slept.

There was nothing in the closet, there was nothing in the

ashtray, there was nothing in the medicine chest nor under
the dresser scarf. The bed was made, the dresser drawers
were empty, and under the bed was the cheap gladstone.
In it was a box containing a thousand sheets of typing
paper surrounded by a glossy blue band. Without disturb-
ing this. Slim riffled the sheets, once at the top, once at
the bottom. He grunted, shook his head and then proceeded,
automatically but meticulously, to put everything back as
he had found it.
"Whatever it is this girl does at night," he said glumly,
"it leaves tracks like it makes noise."
He left.
The rest of the day was unusually busy for Slim. In the
morning he had a doctor's appointment, and in the after-
noon he spent hours with a company lawyer who seemed
determined to (a) deny the existence of any head injury
 THE OTHER CELIA

and (b) prove to Slim and the world that the injury must
have occurred years ago. He got absolutely nowhere. If
Slim had another characteristic as consuming and compul-
sive as his curiosity, it was his shyness; these two could
stand on one another's shoulders, though, and still look up-
ward at Slim's stubbornness. It served its purpose. It took
hours, however, and it was after seven when he got home.
He paused at the third-floor landing and glanced down
the corridor. Celia Sarton's room was occupied and silent.
If she emerged around midnight, exhausted and relieved,
then he would know she had again raced up the stairs to
her urgent, motionless task, whatever it was . . . and here
he checked himself. He had long ago learned the useless-
ness of cluttering up his busy head with conjectures. A
thousand things might happen; in each case, only one
would. He would wait, then, and could.
And again, some hours later, he saw her come out of
her corridor. She looked about, but he knew she saw very
little; her face was withdrawn and her eves wide and un-
guarded. Then, instead of going out, she went back into
her room.
He slipped downstairs half an hour later and listened at
her door, and smiled. She was washing her lingerie at the
handbasin. It was a small thing to learn, but he felt he was
making progress. It did not explain why she lived as she
did, but indicated how she could manage without so much
as a spare handkerchief.
Oh, well, maybe in the morning.

In the morning, there was no maybe. He found it, he found

it, though he could not know what it was he'd found. He
laughed at first, not in triumph but wryly, calling himself
a clown. Then he squatted on his heels in the middle of
the floor (he would not sit on the bed, for fear of leaving
wrinkles of his own on those Mrs. Koyper supplied) and
carefully lifted the box of paper out of the suitcase and
put it on the floor in front of him.
Up to now, he had contented himself with a quick rif-
fle of the blank paper, a little at the top, a little at the bot-
10 Theodore Sturgeon

torn. He had done just this again, without removing the

box from the suitcase, but only taking the top off and tilt-
ing up the banded ream of Non-pareil-the-writers-friend.
And almost in spite of itself, his quick eye had caught the
briefest flash of pale blue.
Gently, he removed the band, sliding it off the pack of
paper, being careful not to slit the glossy finish. Now he
could freely riffle the pages, and when he did, he discov-
ered that all of them except a hundred or so, top and bot-
tom, had the same rectangular cut-out, leaving only a
narrow margin all the way around. In the hollow space thus
formed, something was packed.
He could not tell what the something was, except that
it was pale tan, with a tinge of pink, and felt like smooth
untextured leather. There was a lot of it, neatly folded so
that it exactly fitted the hole in the ream of paper.
He puzzled over it for some minutes without touching
it again, and then, scrubbing his fingertips against his shirt
until he felt that they were quite free of moisture and grease,
he gently worked loose the top comer of the substance and
unfolded a layer. All he found was more of the same.
He folded it down flat again to be sure he could, and
then brought more of it out. He soon realized that the ma-
terial was of an irregular shape and almost certainly of one
piece, so that folding it into a tight rectangle required care
and great skill. Therefore he proceeded very slowly, stop-
ping every now and then to fold it up again, and it took
him more than an hour to get enough of it out so that he
could identify it.
Identify? It was completely unlike anything he had ever
seen before.
It was a human skin, done in some substance very like
the real thing. The first fold, the one which had been re-
vealed atfirst, was an area of the back, which was why it
showed no features. One might liken it to a balloon, ex-
cept that a deflated balloon is smaller in every dimension
than an inflated one. As far as Slim could judge, this was
life-sized — a little over five feet long and proportioned ac-
cordingly. The hair was peculiar, looking exactly like the
 THE OTHER CELIA 11

real thing until flexed, and then revealing itself to be one

piece.
It had Celia Sarton's face.
Slim closed his eyes and opened them, and found that
it was still true. He held his breath and put forth a care-
ful, steady forefinger and gently pressed the left eyelid up-
ward. There was an eye under it, all right, light blue and
seemingly moist, but flat.
Slim released the breath, closed the eye and sat back on
his heels. His feet were beginning to tingle from his hav-
ing knelt on the floor for so long.
He looked all around the room once, to clear his head
of strangeness, and then began to fold the thing up again.
It took a while, but when he was finished, he knew he had
it right. He replaced the typewriter paper in the box and
the box in the bag, put the bag away and at last stood in
the middle of the room in the suspension which overcame
him when he was deep in thought.
After a moment of this, he began to inspect the ceiling.
It was made of stamped tin, like those of many old-fashioned
houses. It was grimy and flaked and stained; here and there,
rust showed through, and in one or two places, edges of
the tin sheets had sagged. Slim nodded to himself in pro-
found satisfaction, listened for a while at the door, let him-
self out, locked it and went upstairs.
He stood in his own corridor for a minute, checking the
position of doors, the hall window, and his accurate ori-
entation of the same things on the floor below. Then he
went into his own room.
His room, though smaller than most, was one of the few
in the house which was blessed with a real closet instead
of a rickety off-the-floor wardrobe. He went into it and
knelt, and grunted in satisfaction when he found how loose
the ancient, unpainted floorboards were. By removing the
side baseboard, he found it possible to get to the air-space
between the fourth floor and the third-floor ceiling.
He took out boards until he had an opening perhaps
fourteen inches wide, and then, working in almost total si-
lence, he began cleaning away dirt and old plaster. He did
 I
12 Theodore Sturgeon

this meticulously, because when he finally pierced the tin

sheeting, he wanted not one grain of dirt to fall into the
room below. He took his time and it was late in the after-
noon when he was satisfied with his preparations and began,
with his knife, on the tin.
It was thinner and softer than he had dared to hope; he
almost overcut on the first try. Carefully he squeezed the
sharp steel into the little slot he had cut, lengthening it.
When it was somewhat less than an inch long, he with-
drew all but the point of the knife and twisted it slightly,
moved it a sixteenth of an inch and twisted again, repeat-
ing this all down the cut until he had widened it enough
for his purpose.
He checked the time, then returned to Celia Sarton's
room for just long enough to check the appearance of his
work from that side. He was very pleased with it. The lit-
tle cut had come through a foot away from the wall over
the bed and was a mere pencil line lost in the baroque de-
sign with which the tin was stamped and the dirt and rust
that marred it. He returned to his room and sat down to
wait.
He heard the old house coming to its evening surge of
life, a voice here, a door there, footsteps on the stairs. He
ignored them all as he sat on the edge of his bed, hands
folded between his knees, eyes half closed, immobile like
a machine fueled, oiled, tuned and ready, lacking only the
right touch on the right control. And like that touch, the
faint sound of Celia Sarton's footsteps moved him.
To use his new peephole, he had to lie on the floor half
in and half out of the closet, with his head in the hole, ac-
tually below floor level. With this, he was perfectly con-
tent, any amount of discomfort being well worth his
trouble — an attitude he shared with many another ardent
hobbyist, mountain-climber or speleologist, duck-hunter or
bird-watcher.

When she turned on the light, he could see her splendidly,

as well as most of the floor, the lower third of the door
and part of the washbasin in the bathroom.
 THE OTHER CELIA 13

She had come in hurriedly, with that same agonized

haste he had observed before. At the same second she turned
on the hght, she had apparently flung her handbag toward
the bed; it was in mid-air as the light appeared. She did
not even glance its way, but hastily fumbled the old glad-
stone from under the bed, opened it, removed the box,
opened it, took out the paper, slipped off the blue band
and removed the blank sheets of paper which covered the
hoUowed-out ream.
She scooped out the thing hidden there, shaking it once
like a grocery clerk with a folded paper sack, so that the
long limp thing straightened itself out. She arranged it care-
fully on the worn linoleum of the floor, arms down at the
side, legs slightly apart, face up, neck straight. Then she
lay down on the floor, too, head-to-head with the deflated
thing. She reached up over her head, took hold of the col-
lapsed image of herself about the region of the ears, and
for a moment did some sort of manipulation of it against
the top of her own head.
Slim heard faintly a sharp, chitinous click, like the sound
one makes by snapping the edge of a thumbnail against
the edge of a fingernail.
Her hands slipped to the cheeks of the figure and she
pulled at the empty head as if testing a connection. The
head seemed now to have adhered to hers.
Then she assumed the same pose she had arranged for
this other, letting her hands fall wearily to her sides on the
floor, closing her eyes.
For a long while, nothing seemed to be happening, ex-
cept for the odd way she was breathing, very deeply but
very slowly, like the slow-motion picture of someone pant-
ing, gasping for breath after a long hard run. After perhaps
ten minutes of this, the breathing became shallower and
even slower, until, at the end of a half-hour, he could de-
tect none at all.
Slim lay there immobile for more than an hour, until
his body shrieked protest and his head ached from eye-
strain. He hated to move, but move he must. Silently he
backed out of the closet, stood up and stretched. It was a
14 Theodore Sturgeon

great luxury and he deeply enjoyed it. He felt moved to

think over what he had just seen, but clearly and con-
sciously decided not to — not yet, anyway.
When he was unkinked, again, he crept back into the
closet, put his head in the hole and his eye to the slot.
Nothing had changed. She still lay quiet, utterly relaxed,
so much so that her hands had turned palm upward.
Slim watched and he watched. Just as he was about to
conclude that this was the way the girl spent her entire
nights and that there would be nothing more to see, he saw
a slight and sudden contraction about the region of her
solar plexus, and then another. For a time, there was noth-
ing more, and then the empty thing attached to the top of
her head began to fill.
And Celia Sarton began to empty.
Slim stopped breathing until it hurt and watched in total
astonishment.
Once it had started, the process progressed swiftly. It
was as if something passed from the clothed body of the
girl to this naked empty thing. The something, whatever it
might be, had to be fluid, for nothing but a fluid would
fill a flexible container in just this way, or make a flexi-
ble container slowly and evenly flatten out like this. Slim
could see the fingers, which had been folded flat against
the palms, inflate and move until they took on the normal
relaxed curl of a normal hand. The elbows shifted a little
to lie more normally against the body. And yes, it was a
body now.
The other one was not a body any more. It lay foolishly
limp in its garment, its sleeping face slightly distorted by
its flattening. The fingers fell against the palms by their
own limp weight. The shoes thumped quietly on their sides,
heels together, toes pointing in opposite directions.
The exchange was done in less than ten minutes and
then the newly filled body moved.
It flexed its hands tentatively, drew up its knees and
stretched its legs out again, arched its back against the floor.
Its eyes flickered open. It put up its arms and made some
deft manipulation at the top of its head. Slim heard an-
 THE OTHER CEIIA 15

other version of the soft-hard cHck and the now-empty head

fell flat to the floor.
The new Celia Sarton sat up and sighed and rubbed her
hands lightly over her body, as if restoring circulation and
sensation to a chilled skin. She stretched as comfortingly
and luxuriously as Slim had a few minutes earlier. She
looked rested and refreshed.
At the top of her head. Slim caught a ghmpse of a slit
through which a wet whiteness showed, but it seemed to
be closing. In a brief time, nothing showed there but a
small valley in the hair, like a normal parting.
She sighed again and got up. She took the clothed thing
on the floor by the neck, raised it and shook it twice to
make the clothes fall away. She tossed it to the bed and
carefully picked up the clothes and deployed them about
the room, the undergarments in the washbasin, the dress
and slip on a hanger in the wardrobe.
Moving leisurely but with purpose, she went into the
bathroom and, except from her shins down, out of Slim's
range of vision. There he heard the same faint domestic
sounds he had once detected outside her door, as she washed
her underclothes. She emerged in due course, went to the
wardrobe for some wire hangers and took them into the
bathroom. Back she came with the underwear folded on
the hangers, which she hooked to the top of the open
wardrobe door. Then she took the deflated integument
which lay crumpled on the bed, shook it again, rolled it
up into a ball and took it into the bathroom.
Slim heard more water-running and sudsing noises, and,
by ear, followed the operation through a soaping and two
rinses. Then she came out again, shaking out the object,
which had apparently just been wrung, pulled it through a
wooden clothes-hanger, arranged it creaselessly suspending
from the crossbar of the hanger with the bar about at its
waistline, and hung it with the others on the wardrobe door.
Then she lay down on the bed, not to sleep or to read
or even to rest — she seemed very rested — but merely to
wait until it was time to do something else.
16 Theodore Sturgeon

By now, Slim's bones were complaining again, so he

wormed noiselessly backward out of his lookout point, got
into his shoes and a jacket, and went out to get something
to eat. When he came home an hour later and looked, her
light was out and he could see nothing. He spread his over-
coat carefully over the hole in the closet so no stray light
from his room would appear in the little slot in the ceil-
ing, closed the door, read a comic book for a while, and
went to bed.
The next day, he followed her. What strange occupation
she might have, what weird vampiric duties she might dis-
close, he did not speculate on. He was doggedly deter-
mined to gather information first and think later.
What he found out about her daytime activities was, if
anything, more surprising than any wild surmise. She was
a clerk in a small five-and-ten on the East Side. She ate
in the store's lunch bar at lunchtime — a green salad and a
surprising amount of milk — and in the evening she stopped
at a hot-dog stand and drank a small container of milk,
though she ate nothing.
Her steps were slowed by then and she moved wearily,
speeding up only when she was close to the rooming house,
and then apparently all but overcome with eagerness to get
home and . . . into something more comfortable. She was
watched in this process, and Slim, had he disbelieved his
own eyes the first time, must believe them now.
So it went for a week, three days of which Slim spent
in shadowing her, every evening in watching her make her
strange toilet. Every twenty-four hours, she changed bod-
ies, carefully washing, drying, folding and putting away
the one she was not using.
Twice during the week, she went out for what was ap-
parently a constitutional and nothing more — a half-hour
around midnight, when she would stand on the walk in
front of the rooming house, or wander around the block.
At work, she was silent but not unnaturally so; she spoke,
when spoken to, in a small, unmusical voice. She seemed
to have no friends; she maintained her aloofness by being
uninteresting and by seeking no one out and by needing
 THE OTHER CELIA 17

no one. She evinced no outside interests, never going to

the movies or to the park. She had no dates, not even with
girls SHm thought she did not sleep, but lay quietly in the
dark waiting for it to be time to get up and go to work.
And when he came to think about it, as ultimately he
did, it occurred to Slim that within the anthill in which we
all live and have our being, enough privacy can be exacted
to allow for all sorts of strangeness in the members of so-
ciety, providing the strangeness is not permitted to show.
If it is a man's pleasure to sleep upside-down like a bat,
and if he so arranges his life that no one ever sees him
sleeping, or his sleeping-place, why, batlike he may sleep
all the days of his life.
One need not, by these rules, even be a human being.
Not if the mimicry is good enough. It is a measure of
Slim's odd personality to report that Celia Sarton's ways
did not frighten him. He was, if anything, less disturbed
by
her. her
He nowknew than whathe'd
she been
did inbefore he hadandbegun
her room to spy
how she on
lived.
Before, he had not known. Now he did. This made him
much happier.
He was, however, still curious.
His curiosity would never drive him to do what another
man might — to speak to her on the stairs or on the street,
get to know her and more about her. He was too shy for
that. Nor was he moved to report to anyone the odd prac-
tice he watched each evening. It wasn't his business to re-
port. She was doing no harm as far as he could see. In his
cosmos, everybody had a right to live and make a buck if
they could.
Yet his curiosity, its immediacy taken care of, did un-
dergo a change. It was not in him to wonder what sort of
being this was and whether its ancestors had grown up
among human beings, living with them in caves and in
tents, developing and evolving along with homo sap until
it could assume the uniform of the smallest and most in-
visible of wage-workers. He would never reach the con-
clusion that in the fight for survival, a species might
discover that a most excellent characteristic for survival
18 Theodore Sturgeon 1
among human beings might be not to fight them but to join
them.
No, SUm's curiosity was far simpler, more basic and
less informed than any of these conjectures. He simply
changed the field of his wonderment from what to what
'/?
So it was that on the eighth day of his survey, a Tues-
day, he went again to her room, got the bag, opened it, re-
moved the box, opened it, removed the ream of paper, slid
the blue band off, removed the covering sheets, took out
the second Celia Sarton, put her on the bed and then re-
placed paper, blue band, box-cover, box, and bag as he had
found them. He put the folded thing under his shirt and
went out, carefully locking the door behind him in his spe-
cial way, and went upstairs to his room. He put his prize
under the four clean shirts in his bottom drawer and sat
down to await Celia Sarton's homecoming.
She was a little late that night — twenty minutes, per-
haps. The delay seemed to have increased both her fatigue
and her eagerness; she burst in feverishly, moved with the
rapidity of near-panic. She looked drawn and pale and her
hands shook. She fumbled the bag from under the bed,
snatched out the box and opened it, contrary to her usual
measured movements, by inverting it over the bed and
dumping out its contents.
When she saw nothing there but sheets of paper, some
with a wide rectangle cut from them and some without,
she froze. She crouched over that bed without moving for
an interminable two minutes. Then she straightened up
slowly and glanced about the room. Once she fumbled
through the paper, but resignedly, without hope. She made
one sound, a high, sad whimper, and, from that moment
on, was silent.
She went to the window slowly, her feet dragging, her
shoulders slumped. For a long time, she stood looking out
at the city, its growing darkness, its growing colonies of
lights,down
drew each the a symbol of life
blind and went and
backlife's usages.
to the bed. Then she
She stacked the papers there with loose uncaring fin-
 THE OTHER CELIA 19

gers and put the heap of them on the dresser. She took off
her shoes and placed them neatly side by side on the floor
by the bed. She lay down in the same utterly relaxed pose
she affected when she made her change, hands down and
open, legs a little apart.
Her face looked like a death-mask, its tissues sunken
and sagging. It was flushed and sick-looking. There was a
little of the deep regular breathing, but only a little. There
was a bit of the fluttering contractions at the midriff, but
only a bit. Then — nothing.
Slim backed away from the peephole and sat up. He felt
very bad about this. He had been only curious; he hadn't
wanted her to get sick, to die. For he was sure she had
died. How could he know what sort of sleep-surrogate an
organism like this might require, or what might be the re-
sults of a delay in changing? What could he know of the
chemistry of such a being? He had thought vaguely of slip-
ping down the next day while she was out and returning
her property. Just to see. Just to know what if. Just out of
curiosity.
Should he call a doctor?
She hadn't. She hadn't even tried, though she must have
known much better than he did how serious her predica-
ment was. (Yet if a species depended for its existence on
secrecy, it would be species-survival to let an individual
die undetected.) Well, maybe not calling a doctor meant
that she'd be all right, after all. Doctors would have a lot
of silly questions to ask. She might even tell the doctor
about her other skin, and if Slim was the one who had
fetched the doctor. Slim might be questioned about that.
Slim didn't want to get involved with anything. He just
wanted to know things.
He thought, "I'll take another look."
He crawled back into the closet and put his head in the
hole. Celia Sarton, he knew instantly, would not survive
this. Her face was swollen, her eyes protruded, and her
purpled tongue lolled far — too far — from the comer of her
mouth. Even as he watched, her face darkened still more
20 Theodore Sturgeon I
and the skin of it crinkled until it looked like carbon paper
which has been balled up tight and then smoothed out.
The very beginnings of an impulse to snatch the thing
she needed out of his shirt drawer and rush it down to her
died within him, for he saw a wisp of smoke emerge from
her nostrils and then —
Slim cried out, snatched his head from the hole, bump-
ing it cruelly, and clapped his hands over his eyes. Put the
biggest size flash-bulb an inch from your nose, and fire it,
and you might get a flare approaching the one he goi
through his little slot in the tin ceiling.
He sat grunting in pain and watching, on the insides of
his eyelids, migrations of flaming worms. At last they faded
and he tentatively opened his eyes. They hurt and the after-
image of the slot hung before him, but at least he could
see^
Feet pounded on the stairs. He smelled smoke and a
burned, oily unpleasant something which he could not iden-
tify. Someone shouted. Someone hammered on the door.
Then someone screamed and screamed.
It was in the papers next day. Mysterious, the story said.
Charles Fort, in Lo!, had reported many such cases and
there had been others since — people burned to a crisp by
a fierce heat which had nevertheless not destroyed clothes
or bedding, while leaving nothing for autopsy. This was,
said the paper, either an unknown kind of heat or heat of
such intensity and such brevity that it would do such a
thing. No known relatives, it said. Police mystified — no
clues or suspects.
Slim didn't say anything to anybody. He wasn't curious
about the matter any more. He closed up the hole in the
closet that same night, and next day, after he read the story,
he used the newspaper to wrap up the thing in his shirt
drawer. It smelled pretty bad and, even that early, was too
far gone to be unfolded. He dropped it into a garbage can
on the way to the lawyer's office on Wednesday.
They settled his lawsuit that afternoon and he moved.
 RESIDUALS

Paul J. McAukv & Kim Newmm

Bom in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now
makes his home in London. He is considered to be one of
the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few
Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well)
who are producing that sort of revamped, updated,
widescreen Space Opera sometimes referred to as ** radical
hard science fiction, " and is a frequent contributor to In-
terzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The Mag-
azine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's Sci^ce
Fiction, When the Music's Over, and elsewhere. His first
novel. Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick
Award. His other books include the novels Of The Fall, Eter-
nal Light, and Pasquale's Angel, two collections of his short
work. The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The In-
visible Country, and an original anthology coedited with Kim
Newman, In Dreams. His acclaimed novel, Fairyland won
both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell
Award in 1996. His most recent books are Child of the River
and Ancient of Days, the first two volumes of a major new
trilogy of ambitious scope and scale. Confluence, set ten mil-
lion years in the future.
Kim Newman made his original reputation as a film critic,
is a commentator on films on British television, and has pub-
lished several books of film criticism, including Nightmare
Movies and Wild West Movies. Of late, though, his career
as a fiction writer has also shifted into high gear — and he
has published a number of novels in the '90s, many of them
gaming novels published under his pseudonym of ''Jack
Yeovil. " Novels published under his own name include The
Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, and Anno Dracula. He has
also published a critical study. Horror: 100 Best Books, writ-
ten in collaboration with Stephen Jones, and an original an-
thology, coedited with Paul J. McAuley, called In Dreams.
He won the British Science Fiction Award for his story "The
22 Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman

Original Dr. Shade, " and has been a frequent contributor to

Interzone, and to various British anthology series. His most
recent books include the critically acclaimed The Bloody
Red Baron. He lives in London, England.
In the wry but suspenseful story that follows, they join
forces to spin a thrilling tale of secret alien invasion, warn
us to keep watching the skies, and examine some of the un-
expected consequences of world-shaking events, some of
which may not even arise until years down the road . . .

kJu ][is way out, the motel guy switches on the TV and
the AC without bothering to ask if I want either. The unit
over the door rattles and starts to drip on the purple shag
carpet. On a dusty screen, a cowboy hunkers down over
the Sci-Fi Channel station ident, squinting from under a
Stetson. It ought to be like looking at myself because the
cowboy is supposed to be me. But it's not.
The Omega Encounter is always playing somewhere on
a rerun channel, I guess, but here and now it's like an
omen.
I'm still living off the Omega residuals because it's my
version of what went down, officially adapted from the "as
told to" book Jay Anson did for me. Nyquist sold Starlight,
the book
times Tom Fuckin'
as much Wolfe wrote with him, for twenty
to Universal
There's a little skip where there used to be a shot of a
fly-blown, bloodied rubber cow carcass. It could be a cen-
sor cut or a snip to reduce the running time. When E.W.
Swackhamer directed Omega, there were thirteen minutes
of commercials in an hour of TV; now there are eighteen,
so five minutes of each hour have to be lost from every-
thing made before the nineties.

J
I don't unpack, except for the bottles of Cuervo Gold
Tequila I bought at the airport, and sit up on the bed, watch-
ing two days of my life processed and packaged as a
sixteen-year-old movie-of-the-week.
 RESIDUALS 23

It's gotten to the part where I find the first of the mu-
tilated cattle. I'm showing one to Mr. Nyquist, played by
Dennis Weaver the way he plays McCloud, shrewd and up-
right. To tell the truth, Nyquist was always half bombed
even before it all started, and had a mean streak in him
that was nothing to do with drink. The bastard would hit
Susan when he was loaded, going off like a firecracker
over the slightest thing and stomping out, banging the screen
door hard, leaving her holding her cheek and me looking
down at my dinner. He was crazy even then, I guess, but
still able to hold it down.
The movie makes me a lot more talkative than I ever
was around Nyquist. Susan is Cybill Shepherd in her post-
Last Picture Show, prc-Moonlighting career slump. I am
Jan-Michael Vincent in his post-birth, pre-death career
trough.
I watch until I follow the slime trails in the grass and
see the lights of the mothership off in the distance hover-
ing above the slough, and then I flip channels because I
can't stand to watch anymore.
They didn't have the budget to do the aliens properly
on TV and only used long shots, but I still don't want to
watch. I can take the expensive computer-controlled mod-
els in the movie because they're too real in the way Main
Street in Disneyland is too real. So perfect a reproduction
it doesn't fool anyone for a second. But show me a cou-
ple of out-of-focus midgets jumping around inside silvered
plastic bags in slow motion with the setting sun behind
them, and my imagination fills in the blanks. The sour reek.
And the noise the things made as they hopped around, like
they were filled with Jell-O and broken bones.
QVC is less of a blow to the heart. I drink tequila out
of the bathroom glass and consider calling a toll-free num-
ber to order a zircon chandelier. Then I drink some more
and decide against it.
Despite Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford (as Nyquist),
and five million preinfiation bucks of ILM, Starlight: The
Motion Picture was a box-office disappointment. By the
time the effects were developed. Omega had spun off a
24 Paul J. McAuley & Km Newman

mid-season replacement series with Sam Groom (as me)

and Gretchen Corbett that got canceled after three episodes.
The aliens were old news, and everybody knew how the
story came out. In Starlight, I'm rewritten as a codger farm-
hand who sacrifices himself for Boss Man Ford, stealing
the film with a dignified death scene. Richard Famsworth
got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but
lost out to the gook in The Killing Fields.
I give up TV and call my agent, using the room phone
because my mobile doesn't want to work out here in the
desert, all that radar, or the microwave signals they send
to the secret Moon colony (ha ha), and I tell him where I
am. He says to watch my ass, and that when I get back he
thinks he might have another hardware store commercial
lined up ("fix your Starship, lady?"). It's just for New York
cable, but it'll pay the rent a while. He doesn't think I can
pull off this reunion, is what it is, and I tell him that, and
then I hang up and I watch an old Saturday Night Live for
a while.
I was on one show for about five minutes, in a Cone-
head episode with Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin. Can't
hardly remember that night — I was drunk at the time — but
now I guess those five minutes are always showing some-
where, just like everything else that ever went through a
transmitter. If aliens out there have been monitoring our
broadcasts like they did in old movies to explain why they
speak perfect English, just about the first question we'd
ask them was if they taped those lost episodes of The Hon-
eymooners. I watch Chevy Chase do Jerry Ford falling over
just about everything in the studio set, and drink some more
tequila, and fall asleep a while.
It's been a long day, the flight out from New York de-
layed two hours, then a long drive through Los Angeles,
where I've never driven because I was chauffeured around
when all the deals were in the air, and which is ten times
more packed with traffic than I remember, and out into the
high desert along Pearblossom Highway with all the big
trucks driving in bright sunlight and blowing dust with their
headlights on.
 RESIDUALS 25

The phone wakes me up. I use the remote to turn down

Dave Letterman, and pick up. A voice I haven't heard for
twenty years says, "Hello, Ray."
At first, only the Enquirer and the Weekly World News were
interested. But when the reports came back and the FBI
slapped a security classification on them, and Elliot Mitchell
started making a fuss because he was transferred to the
Texas panhandle and his field notes and his twenty rolls
of film and six hours of cassette recordings were "lost,"
Newsweek and Rolling Stone showed up. Tom Wicker's
piece in Rolling Stone said it was all part of a government
plot stretching back to Roswell, and that the U.S. Army
was covering up tests with hallucinogenic weapons.
Then the artifacts went on view, and ten types of ex-
pert testified they were "non- terrestrial." It wasn't a gov-
ernment conspiracy any more, it was a goddamn alien
invasion, yji^i like Nyquist and me had been saying. Mitchell
had rewritten his field notes from memory, and sent pho-
tocopies toScience and Nature. He even got his name as
discoverer on the new hyperstable transuranic element,
which along with the bodies was one of the few tangible
residues of the whole thing. I wonder how he felt when
Mitchellite was used in the Gulf War to add penetrative
power to artillery shells?
Then the Washington Post got behind the story, and all
the foreign press, and the shit hit the fan. For a while, it
was all anybody talked about. We got to meet President
Carter, who made a statement supporting our side of things,
and declared he would see that no information was with-
held from the public.
I was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, back
when that meant something. I did Dick Cavett, CBS News
with Walter Cronkite, 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace, NBC
Weekend News with Jessica Savitch. Me and Nyquist were
scurrying to get our book deals sorted out, then our screen
rights. People were crawling all over, desperate to steal our
lives, and we went right along with the feeding frenzy.
We wrapped each other up with restraints and gag or-
26 Paul J. McAuley & Km Newman

ders, and shot off our mouths all the time. Mitchell was
out of the loop: instead of deals with Hollywood produc-
ers and long lunches with New York publishers, he got tied
up in a civil liberties suit because he tried to resign from
the U.S. geological survey and the government wouldn't
let him.
Then the Ayatollah took the hostages, and everyone had
something else to worry about. Carter became a hostage in
his own White House and most of the artifacts disappeared
in the C-130 air crash the conspiracy theorists said was
staged. Reagan never said anything on record, but the of-
ficial line changed invisibly when he became President.
The reports on the reports questioned the old findings, and
deposits of Mitchellite showed up on Guam and some-
where in Alaska.
I did Geraldo with Whitley Strieber and Carl Sagan,
and came off like a hick caught between a rock and a hard
place. I had started drinking by then, and tried to punch
out one or the other of them after the show, and spent the
night in a downtown holding tank. I faced a jury of skep-
tics on Oprah and was cut to pieces, not by reasoned sci-
entific arguments and rationalizations but by cheap-shot
jokes from a studio audience of stand-up wannabes.
I told my side of it so many times that I caught myself
using exactly the same words each time, and I noticed that
on prerecorded shows, the presenter's nods and winks — al-
ways shot from a reverse angle after the main interview —
were always cut in at exactly the same points. An
encouraging dip of the head laced with a concerned look
in the eyes, made in reaction to a cameraman's thumb, not
an already-forgotten line from me.
Besides The Omega Encounter and Starlight, there were
dozens of books, movies, TV specials, magazine articles,
a Broadway play, even a music album. Creedence Clear-
water Revival's "It Came Out of the Sky" was reissued
and charted strongly. Some English band did a concept
album. John Sladek and Tom Disch collaborated on a novel-
length debunking. The Sentients: A Tragi-Comedy. That's
in development as a movie, maybe with Fred Ward.
 RESIDUALS 27

Sam Shepard's Alienation, which Ed Harris did on

Broadway and Shepard starred in and directed for HBO,
looked at it all from the dirt farmer's point of view, sug-
gesting that Nyquist and me were looking for fresh ways
of being heroes since we'd lost touch with the land. The
main character was a combination of the two of us, and
talked in paragraphs, and the scientist — Dean Stockwell on
TV — was a black-hatted villain, which displeased Mitchell
no end. He sued and lost, I recall.
By then I was looking at things through the blurry dim-
ple at the bottom of the bottle, living off the residuals from
commercials and guest appearances in rock videos and
schlock direct-to-video horror movies shot by postmod-
ernist auteurs just out of UCLA film school, though I re-
not bad.that Sam Raimi's The Color Out of Time was kind of
call
Then I read in Variety that Oliver Stone has a treatment
in development raking the whole thing up, blaming it all
on J. Edgar Hoover, Armand Hammer and Henry Kissinger.
There was an article in the New York Times that Norman
Mailer had delivered his thousand-page summation of the
phenomenon. The Visitation. And that's where I got the
idea to get in touch with Mitchell and make some cash on
the back of Stone and Mailer's publicity, and maybe
Mitchell had been reading the same articles, because be-
fore Ican begin to think how to try and track him down,
he calls me.

I drive past the place I'm to meet Mitchell and have to

double back, squinting in the glare of the big rigs that roar
out of the darkness, all strung up with fairylights like the
spaceship in Closer Encounters. I do what sounds like se-
rious damage to the underside of the rental when I finally
pull off.
The ruins are close to the highway, but there's a spooky
feeling that makes me leave the car's headlights on. Out
across the dark desert basin, where the runways of Ed-
wards Air Force Base are outlined in patterns of red and
green lights a dozen miles long, some big engine makes a
28 Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman

long drawn-out rumble that rises to a howl before cutting

off.
I sit in the car and take a few pulls on my bottle to get
some courage, or at least bum away the fluttering in my
gut, looking at the arthritic shapes that Joshua trees make
in the car headlights. Then I make myself get out and look
around. There's not much to the ruins, just a chimney stack
and a line of pillars where maybe a porch stood. People
camping out have left circles of ash in the sand and dented
cans scattered around; when I stumble over a can and it
rattles off a stone, I reahze how quiet the desert is, beyond
the noise of the trucks on the highway. I get a feeling like
the one I had when the three of us were waiting that last
night, before we blew up the mothership, and have to take
another inch off the level of the tequila to calm down.
That's when my rental car headlights go out and I al-
most lose it, because that's what happened when they tried
to kidnap me, the lights and then the dashboard on my
pickup going out and then a bright light all around, com-
ing from above. That time, I had a pump-action shotgun
on the rack in the cab, which is what saved me. Now, I
have a tequila bottle with a couple of inches sloshing in
it, and a rock I pick up.
A voice behind me says my name, and I spin and lose
my balance and fall on my ass, the tequila bottle empty-
ing over my pants leg. A flashlight beam pins me, and be-
hind it, EUiot Mitchell says, "This was the last sociahst
republic in the USA, did you know that? They called the
place Llano del Rio. This was their meeting hall. They built
houses, a school, planted orchards. But the government
gave their water rights to the local farmers and they had
to move out. All that's left are the orchards, and those will
go because they're subdividing the desert for housing tracts
to take LA's overspill."
I squint into the light, but can't see anything of the man
holding it.
"Never put your faith in government, Ray. Its first in-
stinct isnot to protect the people it's supposed to serve but
to protect its own self. People elect politicians, not gov-
 RESIDUALS 29

emments. Don't get up. Fm happier to see you sitting down.

Do you think you were followed here?"
"Why would I be followed? No one cares about it any-
more. That's why I'm here."
"You want toHemake
Oliver Stone? cameanother
out to movie,
see me.Ray? Who one
Or sent is it ofwith?
his
researchers anyway. You know his father was in the Navy,
don't you, and he's funded by the UN counterpropaganda
unit, the same one that tried to assassinate Reagan. The
question is, who's paying you?"
"Crazy Sam's Hardware back in Brooklyn, if I do the
ad."
I have a bad feeling. Mitchell appears to have joined
the right-wing nuts who believe that little black helicopters
follow them everywhere, and that there are secret codes on
the back of traffic signs to direct the UN invasion force
when it comes.
I say, "I don't have any interest except the same one
that made you want to call me. We saved the world, El-
liot, and they're ripping off our story ..."
"You let them. You and Nyquist. How is old Nyquist?"
"Sitting in a room with mattresses on the walls, wear-
ing abackward jacket and eating cold creamed com. They
made him the hero, when it was us who blew up the moth-
ership, it was us who captured that stinking silver beach-
ball, it was us who worked out how to poison most of
them."
I put the bottle to my lips, but there's hardly a swallow
left. I toss it away. This isn't going the way I planned, but
I'm caught up in my anger. It's come right back, dull and
heavy. "We're the ones that saved Susan, not her lousy hus-
band!"
"We didn't save her, Ray. That was in your TV movie.
The Omega Encounter. We got her back, but the things
they'd put inside her killed her anyway."
"Well, we got her back, and if fuckin' Doc Jensen had
listened, we would have saved her, too!"
I sit there, looking into the flashlight beam with drunken
tears running down my face.
30 Paul J, McAuley & Kim Newman

"How much do you remember, Ray? Not the movies,

but the real thing! Do you remember how we got Susan
out of the mothership?"
"I stay away from shopping malls, because they give me
flashbacks. Maybe I'm as crazy as Nyquist. Sometimes, I
dream I'm in one of those old-fashioned hedge mazes, like
in The Shining. Sometimes, I'm trying to get out of the hos-
pital they put us in afterward. But it's always the same, you
know."
Mitchell switches off the flashlight. I squint into the dark-
ness, but all I see is swimming afterimages.
beside me. tomorrow," Mitchell says, and something thumps
"Come
It is a rock, with a piece of torn paper tied to it. Under
the dome light of the rental car, I smooth out the paper and
try to make sense of the map Mitchell has drawn.

Two days. That's how long it took. Now, my hfe is split

into Before and After. What no one gets is that the thing
itself — the event, the encounter, the invasion, the incursion,
the whatever — was over inside two days. I've had head
colds and belly-aches that lasted a whole lot longer. That's
what marks me out. When I die, my obits will consist of
three paragraphs about those two days and two sentences
about everything else. Like I said about Jan-Michael, I have
a post-birth, pre-death rut for a life. Except for those two
days.
After about a decade, it got real old. It was as if every-
one was quizzing me about some backyard baseball game
I pitched in when I was a kid, blotting out all of the rest
of my life — parents, job, marriages, kid, love, despair — with
a couple of hours on the mound. I even tried clamming up,
refusing to go through it all again for the anniversary fea-
tures. Iturned my back on those two days and tried to fix
on something else worth talking about. I'd come close to
making it with Adrienne Barbeau, didn't I? Or was it Heather
Locklear? Maybe it was just in one of the scripts and some
actor played me. I was doing harder stuff than alcohol just
then.
 RESIDUALS 31

That phase lasted maybe three months. I was worn down

in the end. I reaUzed that I needed to tell it again. For me,
as much as for everyone else. I was like those talking books
in that Bradbury novel — yeah, I admit it, I read science fic-
tion when I was a kid, and doesn't that blow my whole
story to bits, proving that I made it all up out of half-
remembered bits of pulp magazine stories — my whole life
was validated by my story, and telling it was as necessary
to me as breathing. Over the years, it got polished and shiny.
More than a few folks told me it sounded like Bradbury.
"A million years ago, Nyquist's farm was the bottom of
the ocean," I would always begin, paraphrasing the open-
ing of my book. "Susan Nyquist collected sea-shells in the
desert. Just before I looked up and saw the spinning shape
in the sky, I was sifting through the soft white sand, dredg-
ing up a clam-shaped rock that might once have been
alive ..."
whatNo,thisI'mis not
aboutgoing
at all.to tell it all again here. That's not
Do you know what a palimpsest is? It's old parchment
that has been written on once, had the writing rubbed out,
and been written on again. Sometimes several times. Only,
with modem techniques, scientists can read the original writ-
ing, looking underneath the layers.
That's my story. Each time I've told it, I've whited out
the version underneath. It's built up, like lime on a drip-
ping faucet. In telling it so many times, I've buried the ac-
tual thing.
Maybe that's why I've done it.
Regardless of the movies, it wasn't a B picture, with
simple characters and actions. Okay, there were aliens
(everyone else calls them that except Strieber, so I guess I
can too), a woman was taken, and we poisoned most of
them and dug out dynamite and blew up their spaceship
(I've never liked calling it that — it was more like one of
Susan's shells blown up like a balloon, only with light in-
stead of helium or air). We saved the world, right?
Or maybe we just killed a bunch of unknowable Gan-
dhis from the Beyond. That's what some woman accused
32 Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman

me of at a book-signing. She thought they'd come to save

us, and that we'd doomed the world by scaring them off.
That gave me a shock. I tried to see the story the way
she might.
It didn't play in Peoria. The woman — ^pink bib overalls,
bird's-nest hair, Ytlma-from-Scooby-Doo glasses, a "Frodo
Lives!" badge — hadn't seen the visitors, the ahens.
She hadn't seen what they'd done to Susan.
But I was up close.
The little fuckers were evil. No, make that Evil. I don't
know if they were from outer space, the third circle of Hell,
or the
but Land of Nod, but they weren't here to help anyone
themselves.
What they did to the cattle, what they did to Susan,
wasn't science, wasn't curiosity. They liked taking things
apart, the way Mikey Bignell in third grade liked setting
fire to cats, and Mikey grew up to get shot dead while
pistol-whipping a fifty-two-year-old married lady during a
filling station hold-up. If the visitors ever grow up beyond
the cat-burning phase, I figure they could do some serious
damage.
I am not just trying to justify what we did to them.
Now, without trying to tell the story yet again, I'm tap-
ping into what I really felt at the time: half-scared, half-
enraged. No Spielberg sense of wonder. No TV movie
courage. No Ray Bradbury wistfulness.
"Inside the Ship was all corridors and no rooms, criss-
crossing tunnels through what seemed like a rocky rubber
solid stuff. Mitchell went ahead, and I followed. We blun-
dered any which way, down passages that made us bend
double and kink our knees, and trusted to luck that we'd
find where they'd taken Susan. I don't know whether or not
we were lucky to find her or whether they intended it. I
maze. know if we were brave and lucky, or dumb rats in a
don't

"Mitchell claims the thing told us where to go, flashed

a floor-plan into our minds, like the escape lights in an air-
liner. Iguess that's his scientific mind talking. For me, it
was different. I had a sense of being myself and being above
 RESIDUALS 33

myself, looking down. We didn't take a direct route to Susan,

but spiraled around her, describing a mandala with an un-
even number of planes of symmetry. It was like the New
Math: finding the answer wasn't as important as knowing
how to get there, and I think Mitchell and I, in our differ-
ent ways, both flunked."
I didn't say so in the book, but I think that's why what
happened to Susan afterward went down. When we dragged
Susan, alive but unconscious, out of the hot red-black half-
dark at the heart of the ship we were too exhausted to feel
any sense of triumph. We went in, we found her, we got
her out. But we didn't get the trick quite right.
Here's how I usually end it:
"Nyquist was shaking too bad to aim the rifle. I don't
amount to much, but while I can't shoot good enough to
take the eye out of the eagle if you toss a silver dollar in
the air, nine times out of ten I'll at least clip the coin.
Mitchell was shouting as he ran toward us with two of the
things hopping after him. The reel of wire was spinning in
his hands as he ran. Nyquist snapped out of it and tossed
me the gun" — in his version, he gets both of the critters
with two shots, bing-bang — "and I drew a bead, worried
that Mitchell would zigzag into the line of fire, then put a
bullet into the first alien. Pink stuff burst out of the back
of it in midleap, and it tumbled over, deflating like a pricked
party balloon.
''Even from where I was, I could smell the stink, and
Nyquist started to throw up. The second critter was almost
on Mitchell when I fired again, the hot casing stinging my
cheek as I worked the bolt, and fired, and fired, and kept
shooting as Mitchell threw himself down in a tangle of wire
while the thing went scooting off back toward the ship. My
hands shaking so bad I sliced my hand bad when I trimmed
the wires back to bare copper. Mitchell snatched them from
me and touched them to the terminals of the truck's bat-
tery.
"We didn't have more than a dozen sticks of low-grade
dynamite for getting out tree stumps, and Mitchell hadn't
had time to place them carefully when those things came
34 Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman

scooting out like hornets out of a bottle. And Mitchell

hadn't even wanted to do it, saying that the ship must be
fireproof ed, like the Apollo module, or it wouldn't have sur-
vived atmospheric entry. But it was our last best hope, and
when the sticks blew, the ship went up like a huge mag-
nesium flare. I put my hands over my eyes, and saw the
bones of my hands against the light. The burst was etched
into my eyeballs for months. It hardly left any debris, just
evaporated into burning light, blasting the rock beneath to
black crystal. You can still see the glassy splash where it
stood if you can get the security clearance. There was a
scream like a dying beast, but it was all over quickly. When
we stopped blinking and the echo was dead, there was al-
most nothing where the ship had been. They were gone."
Is that an ending? If it is, what has the rest of my life
been? An epilogue, like on some Quinn Martin series
episode, with William Conrad reporting that I am still at
large, still running off my mouth, still living it down?
Or has it just been an interlude before the sequel?

I wake up the next morning with the shakes. There's not

even fumes in the tequila bottle I clutched to my chest all
night, and nothing but warm cans of Dr Pepper in the motel
vending machine, so I drive the mile into town and buy a
twelve pack of Bud, giving thanks to California's liberal
liquor-license laws. I'm coming out of the 7 Eleven when
two men in sunglasses fall in step with me on either side,
and I don't need to see their badges to know what they are.
They make me leave my beer in the car and take me
across the dusty highway to the town's diner, an Airstream
trailer with a tattered awning shading one side. The older
guy orders coffee and pancakes, and grins across the table
while his partner crowds me on the bench. I can't help look-
ing through the greasy window at my car, where the beer
is heating up on the front seat, and the older guy's grin gets
wider. He gets out a hip flask and pours a shot into my cof-
fee, and I can't help myself and guzzle it down, scalding
coffee running down my chin.
"Jesus," the young guy, Duane Bissette, says, disgusted.
 RESIDUALS 35

He's the local field agent, blond hair sUcked back from his
rawboned face. He hasn't taken off his mirrorshades, and
a shoulder harness makes a bulge under his tailored suit
jacket.
"Judge not," the other guy says, and pours me another
shot, twinkling affably. He has curly white hair and a com-
fortable gut, like Santa Claus's younger brother. He's hung
his seersucker jacket on the back of his chair. There are
half-moon sweat stains under his arms, and sweat beads
under his hairline. "Ray's living out his past, and he's hav-
ing a hard time with it. Am I right, or am I right?"
I ignore the rye whiskey in the coffee mug. I say, "If
you want to talk to me, talk to my agent first. Murray Weiss,
he's in the Manhattan Directory."
"But you're one of us," the older guy says, widening his
eyes in mock innocence. "You got your badge, when? '77?
'78?"
It was 1976 and I'm sure he damn well knows it, done
right out on the White House lawn, with a silver band play-
ing and the Stars and Stripes snapping in the breeze under
a hot white sky. The Congressional Medal of Honor for me
and Nyquist, and honorary membership in the FBI. I'd asked
for that because if it was good enough for Elvis, it was
good enough for me. It was the last time I saw Nyquist,
and even then he was ignoring me with the same intensity
with which I'm right now ignoring that rye.
I say, "Your young friend here was polite enough to show
me his badge. I don't believe I know you."
"Oh, we met, very briefly. I was part of the team that
helped clean up." He smiles and holds out his hand over
the coffee mugs and plates of pancakes, then shrugs. "Guer-
don Winter. I'll never forget that first sight of the crater,
and the carcass you had."
"You were all wearing those spacesuits and helmets.
'Scuse me for not recognizing you."
The FBI agents looked more like space aliens than the
things we killed. They cleared out everything, from the
scanty remains of the mothership to my collection of tat-
tered paperbacks. I still have the receipts. They took me
36 Paul J. McAuley & Km Newman

and Nyquist and Mitchell and put us in isolation chambers

somewhere in New Mexico and put us through thirty days
of interrogation and medical tests. They took Susan's body
and we never saw it again. I think of the C-130 crash, and
I say, "You should have taken more care of what you ap-
propriated. Agent Winter."
Guerdon Winter takes a bite of pancake.
"We could have had that alien carcass stuffed and
mounted and put on display in the Smithsonian, and in five
years it would have become one more exhibit worth maybe
ten seconds' gawping. The public doesn't need any help in
getting distracted, and everything gets old fast. You know
better than me how quickly they forget. You're the one in
showbiz. But we haven't forgotten, Ray."
"You want me to find out what Mitchell is doing."
"Mitchell phoned you from a pay phone right here in
town ten days ago, and you wrote him at the box number
he gave you, and then you came down here. You saw him
last night."
Duane Bissette stirs and says, "He's been holed up for
two years now. He's been carrying out illegal experiments."
"If you were following me you could have arrested him
lastGuerdon
night." Winter looks at Duane Bissette, then looks at
me. He says, "We could arrest him each time he comes into
town for supplies, but that wouldn't help us get into his
place, and we know enough about his interrogation profile
to know he wouldn't give it up to us. But he wants to talk
to you, Ray. We just want to know what it is he's doing
out there."
"He believes you have the map," Duane Bissette says.
I remember the scrap of paper Mitchell gave me last
night and say, "You want the map?"
"It isn't important," Guerdon Winter says quickly.
"What's important is that you're here, Ray."
I look out at my rental car again, still thinking about the
beer getting warm. Just beyond it, a couple of Mexicans in
wide-brimmed straw hats are offioading watermelons from
a dusty Toyota pickup. One is wearing a very white T-shirt
 RESIDUALS 3^7

with the Green Lantern symbol. They could be agents, too;

so could the old galoot at the motel.
I know Duane Bissette was in my motel room last night;
I know he took Mitchell's map and photocopied it and put
it back. The thing is, it doesn't seem like betrayal. It stirs
something inside me, not like the old excitement of those
two crystal-clear days when everything we did was a heroic
gesture, nothing like so strong or vivid, but alive all the
same. Like waking up to a perfect summer's day after a
long uneasy sleep full of nightmares.
I push the coffee away from me and say, "What kind of
illegal experiments?"

If Mitchell hadn't been a government employee, if they

hadn't ridiculed and debunked his theories, and spirited him
off to the ass end of nowhere — ^no Congressional Medal
ceremony for him, he got his by registered mail — if they
hadn't stolen the discovery of Mitchellite from him, then
maybe he wouldn't have ended up madder than a dancing
chicken on a hot plate at the state fair. Maybe he wouldn't
have taken it into his head to try what he did. Or maybe
he would have done it anyway. Like me, he was living in
After, with those two bright days receding like a train. Like
me, he wanted them back. Unlike me, he thought he had a
way to do it.
Those two agents don't tell me as much as I need to
know, but I suspect that they don't know what it is Mitchell
is doing. I have an idea that he's building something out in
the desert that'll bring those old times back again.
Driving out to Mitchell's place takes a couple of hours.
The route on the map he gave me is easy enough: south
along Pearblossom's two-lane blacktop, then over the con-
crete channel of the aqueduct that carries water taken from
Washington State — did you see Chinatown? yeah, there —
and up an unmade track that zigzags along the contours of
the Pinon Hills and into a wide draw that runs back a cou-
ple of miles. The light in the draw is odd. Cold and pur-
ple, like expensive sunglasses. Either side of the road is
38 Paul J. McAuley & Km Newman

nothing but rocks, sand, dry scrub, and scattered Joshua

trees.
I start to feel a grudging sympathy for Agent Bissette.
No matter how he hangs back, it's impossible to tail a car
out here without your mark knowing. I have the urge to
wait for a dip that puts me momentarily out of his sight
and swerve off into a patch of soft sand, sinking the rental
like a boat in shallows, creating another unexplained mys-
tery.
Mitchell's place is right at the top of the draw, near the
beginning of the tree line. In the high desert, trees grow
only on the tops of the mountains. The FBI parks under a
clump of stunted pines and lets me go on alone. I'm lucky
they didn't want me to wear a wire. They'll just wait, and
see if I can cope with Crazy Elliot. For them, it'll be a bor-
ing afternoon, with maybe an exciting apprehension about
nightfall.
Me. I'm going back to the Days of Sharp Focus.

The rye in the coffee has burned out and I've not touched
the soup-warm beer on the passenger seat. I can feel the
heat alone.
this steaming the booze out of my brain. I'm going into
I get out of the rental, aware of Winter and Bissette
watching me through the tinted windshield of their Lincoln
Continental. Of Mitchell, there's not a trace. Not even foot-
prints or tire marks in the sandy track. I crouch down, and
run a handful of warm sand through my fingers, making
like an Indian tracker in some old Western while I ponder
my next move.
There are tine-trails in the sand. The whole area has been
raked, like a Japanese garden. I can imagine Mitchell work-
ing by night, raking a fan-shaped wake as he backs toward
the paved area I see a dozen yards away.
I walk across the sand, and reach the flagstones. This
was the floor of a house that's long gone. I can see the
fieldstone hearth, and the ruts where wooden walls had been.
Beyond the stone is a gentle incline, sloping down maybe
twenty feet, then leveling off^. Down there, protected from
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