Hard Landing Read online

  OPENING STATEMENT BY YANKEE

  The Navy man shaking me by my shoulder and saying my name over and over was apologetic. And he was very cautious: ‘We have a man here who turned up in the middle of the night. We don’t know who he is. The C.O. thinks we should wake you.’ And he retreated across the room while I woke.

  And awake I did, slowly – that is, externally I was slow. But I was processing the information quite rapidly. Paramount was the fact that instead of handling it routinely, the C.O. was awakening me. So the odds were overwhelming that the man was not mental; the odds were overwhelming that the C.O. at least felt that with a member of Congress on the base, he had to include him in whatever it was, or risk censure for not having done so. That made it serious. So I woke up slowly, but by the time my feet hit the deck, I was ready for anything.

  After a quick shower and hasty breakfast, I followed the Navy man to the door of the mystery man’s room, where we were met by an armed party. After my nod, we went in.

  The man seated there had a definite air about him. He was dark, handsome in a hawkish way, dressed in some sort of fatigue uniform, and as he stood up I saw that he was tall. He extended his hand. ‘Hello.’ His voice was almost accentless, but a little stiff, as though he were first thinking out his phrases in some other language. ‘My name is Ditlo Ravashan. Captain Ravashan, I think you would say, except that I have no vessel any longer.’ He said that, and then he smiled. I studied his hand. Then I took it, and as I took it, I felt for the first time the incredible power of the man. It was as if steel – warm steel – had closed around me. If he did not want to give my hand back, I simply could not take it. But he gave it back.

  I looked at him. And I knew – I don’t know how, but I knew – what he would claim about his origins. I gave him my name and my position in the U.S. Congress, while looking directly into his eyes. They were brown, and there was little to see that was different, though they tended more toward the maroon than was common in a white man. And they were as steady as mine. And he grinned suddenly, a sharp broadening of his smile into something else entirely. ‘You’ve guessed,’ he said approvingly. ‘You’ve actually guessed! From very small clues indeed! Bravo! But to remove any lingering doubts,’ he said, ‘I brought in a body – another of my crew. It won’t take much cutting to determine we are different from you, inside.’

  ‘No, I don’t doubt you,’ I said, making up my mind. If it was true about having a body, there was no longer any doubt. He’d brought it to us to spare the need for cutting him. I could hardly blame him. ‘All right – leave us alone,’ I said to the Navy party. ‘All of you,’ to the C.O. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust them. It was a matter of need to know, that’s all. And they went, although the C.O. was frowning and hesitating. A better man would have stayed, but the better man had been discharged after the end of the war.

  Ravashan and I looked at each other across the room. Then we sat down on opposite sides of the table. ‘What do you want, Ravashan?’

  Ravashan grinned. ‘Don’t you want to know how I got here, where my ship is, and so forth?’

  ‘I’ll learn all that, in time,’ I said. ‘You obviously didn’t plan it; you’re improvising. That’s the primary fact.’

  Ravashan sat silently for a moment, looking at me. And in that look, I read him for what he was – an uncommonly clever individual, sizing me up, and not realizing that I was more clever than he. And he was clever – far cleverer than any man I knew, in his situation. I respected him for that. More important, I prepared to enjoy our association, and he did not disappoint me for a long time.

  He began to speak; of long voyages, at first:

  ‘We range,’ he said, ‘over a fair part of the immediate Universe. Well, we should – we’ve been at it for a long time. Long time. You have got to understand that, nevertheless, we haven’t even scratched the surface of the stars in this immediate vicinity. There are very many of them. But in those stars, we have found only one race that was in space before us. Those are the Methane-Breathers. We … traffic … with them. We are not enemies. But we are not friends, either. If we had an interest in the same worlds, I think we would be deadly enemies. But never mind that for now.

  ‘We explore the stars for many reasons, but the main one is commerce. Natural resources. And the occasional customer.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘We have, as you can imagine, things for sale. Machinery, technology packages, even gadgets. All, of course, more advanced that anything your race possesses. In return, we take a certain spectrum of natural resources. Sometimes, too, we find articles of native manufacture for which there is a market … much as your more advanced nations will buy certain goods from less advantaged cultures, because they are cheaper for the disadvantaged to make, or because the goods are somehow cute. I’m sure you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’ But I barely noticed the insult. Why should I? I had already established that I was more intelligent than he. What was important was his talk of advanced machinery and consumer goods. True, they would collapse the domestic manufacturing capability if introduced at random. But they did not have to be introduced at random, if one were careful. And the man who controlled the flow … the man who controlled the flow would become the most powerful man on Earth. The most powerful man on Earth. But all I said was ‘Yes.’

  He said: ‘There’s a catch, unfortunately.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘It’s illegal. Even my telling you this is illegal. We take an oath. We are not, under any circumstances, to communicate the truth of ourselves to the natives. We are not for a moment to even consider it. It’s too soon in your development.’

  I looked at him. He looked back. I said: ‘Why, then, are you breaking your oath?’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you? If you were me, and faced years of a wasted life now?’ He took a breath. ‘When I obviously was born to engage life?’

  I grinned mirthlessly. In some ways, we were very much alike. He went on: ‘So I need protection not only from your people but from mine. Oh, not for a while. But if we are to do each other any good, then in time I may have advanced the Earth to the point where an official commercial envoy lands. And at that point, I had better not be the individual who took so many risks with the secret of our existence.’ He grinned wryly. ‘Precisely because I would have gotten away with it. That they dare not forgive.’

  I stopped him then and called the C.O. I could not, of course, exercise any duress over the commanding officer, and I could not keep him from informing his superiors … in fact, he had so informed them even before waking me. What he had informed them of was that he had an unaccounted-for personnel who had told a good enough story to get on the base … with a corpse. That had been enough for the Navy to send a specialist, who was on his way and would arrive shortly, and depending on what the specialist recommended, further action would be taken. Presumably, that included giving the C.O. a discharge if he had pulled the wrong chain frivolously. Well, that was right, proper, and did not perturb me – though it obviously perturbed the C.O. I did not think the story that this man might be from off Earth had gotten beyond the confines of the base as yet, and even on the base the number of persons who knew even a wildly distorted version was minimal.

  Furthermore, I did not know if an un-Earthling had ever previously been encountered, but that did not mean much; you can trust any branch of the service above a certain level of rank to keep its secrets. But a secret like this had the quality that, except in very special circumstances, it could be bandied about and still it was too huge to be believed.

  What I wanted to make sure of, nevertheless, was that all the enlisted men were not in communication with the news media. Enlisted men have an almost unique ability to make trouble, in a clumsy, sloppy way that is almost impossible to deny because you can’t be sure what it is about, so muddled does it become. And as for the news media – even in those early days I regarded it with suspicion on the one hand and co
ntempt for its manipulability on the other. And, as I rather thought, the C.O. had secured the base, and would only gradually release the men who had seen or heard anything, transferring one to Alaska and one to Hawaii, one to Norfolk, and so forth. And really, what did they know; what hard facts did they possess? Good. With that assurance, I dismissed the C.O. and returned to my un-Earthly man.

  We reasoned on what sort of questions the investigating officer would ask when he got there, and how my man would respond. And also I thought it likely I foresaw what I would do next. So that was that.

  Ravashan would be loyal to me, I thought, above all other things on Earth … and for that matter, when push came to shove, above all things off Earth, too, though I did not make that clear to him. I did not at once know exactly how he could best serve me. But serve me he would. Plainly he was too precious to let slip away, and I could always think of something later. And so, in that room, the two of us struck a bargain that endured for many years. It did not, of course, endure forever. But nothing is forever.

  – From a private tape

  OLIR SELMON

  I was terrified. Every noise of the night seemed monstrous. I saw nothing in the dark; I collided with a hundred things in the first five minutes, and to this day I can only guess at what they were.

  I blundered on. And as I blundered, I went through the first of what I would go to sleep with every night for the rest of my life. I conducted an enquiry: Why did the engines suddenly begin to fail? What did I do wrong in attempting to restore the balance? When had they actually begun to fail … was it, for instance, as soon as we started them up at home? Had they never actually been right, and I, fool, had not noticed? Had we in fact been lucky to reach this planet at all, before the trouble became too catastrophic? Could I, in short, have done anything differently; and if I had, would it have made a difference? I could not know … all my life I would continue to ask these questions.

  And I tried to convince myself that in fact it had not happened – that I was sleeping aboard the ship, and would waken at any time now, and shake my head ruefully, and go on about my duties, safe and sound. But I was not safe and sound, and I knew it.

  I blundered on. And on. It seemed to me that I would never get out of this trackless maze of sharp objects in the dark, of unknown voices crying who knew what, in response to what, with the object of what. And why did the engines fail? And Joro. Poor, luckless Joro.

  It was dawn, gradually filtering through the trees, that brought a measure of a sort of calm. First of all, I could see the trees, at last, and pick my way among them, so that the innumerable bristlings of branchlets and twig stickers lessened to almost nothing. I was bleeding, lightly, from a hundredfold pervasions of my skin, and my coverall was punctured and stained with blood and sap, but all of me was functioning, and with dawn the quality of noises, too, went through a diminishment, so I found that I was clearly less nervous, and that, too, helped calm me. But what was I to do? Where was I to go?

  Indeed, my options seemed so few. So very few. Here I was, stranded for life, with nothing beyond what I could carry, and who would give me shelter, who would give me a place of livement, when the situation would produce questions I could not answer? What was I to do? Where was I to go? And, asking myself these questions, I moved on, with neither plan nor direction, with no purpose beyond sheer survival, and what good, really, was that?

  I confess it freely – if I had had a weapon, at certain points on that first morning, I would have, indeed, turned it on myself … if I could have thought of a way to do so and yet conceal the weapon after my death. It is good that doctrine does not allow us to salvage weapons, for surely a weak being might not, in the last extremity of despair and spiritual debility, take as much care for the last part as he should, and would leave a mysterious and rankling corpse, and beside it a weapon of great puissance and intrigue; it was good that the doctrine did not permit us to salvage weapons, I repeated to myself, and sobbed.

  It became clear to me, too, that we had fallen into a very peculiar part of the planet. It was good for nothing. Fenced off on the seaward side by cranberry bogs, fenced off on the west by unguessable territory that eventually became America as most people knew it, ending to the north but where the trees were short and spindling, the soil was essentially sand; I could understand, I suppose, why it was the only stretch of the Eastern Seaboard for hundreds of miles in either direction that showed almost no lights at night – a blotch of darkness upon the lacy webworks that otherwise adorned the edge of this continent. We were come upon a wasteland … as was calculated, true, when emergency landing areas were designated, but in fact ‘emergency landing area’ was a sort of joke, wasn’t it, intended to somehow give the impression that things were somehow under control somehow even after a crash, but they were not under control, were they? No, they were not under control; nothing was under control.

  I came to a field, in the midst of nowhere. I had been moving through scrub pine, precisely – tedious, unsatisfactory stuff, surely useless for any purpose but to break the hearts of people who tried to find some purpose in it. And suddenly, without warning, I came to a clearing.

  Thunderstruck, I barely managed to keep myself back in the trees, and peered out at what this might be. And what this might be was an opening in the pines – not so much a field as an opening, unlinked to anything, really, at one margin of which was a small dwelling place that seemed to be cobbled together of whatever came to hand rather than planned, and a truck, very old and badly dented, and motionless forever, I suspected, for the tires were flat, and the windshield was opaque with fractures. It sat at the end of two ruts that disappeared among the trees; only that much road had sufficed to bring it here, to die.

  I looked at this, not knowing what to do. I was afraid: to commit, finally, to having intercourse with these people; to having to speak their language; to masquerade as one of them. That was very hard to contemplate. Anything – almost anything at all – and I would delay the moment. And then a dog began to bark, and I retreated back into the woods, and went around the field, and went on; I went on I don’t know how long, and came to another place, somewhat like the first but even smaller, in a bare clearing, no truck, no dog, no road at all leading up to it that I could see, and I circled around it and drew closer, eventually: a hovel, without any sign of life – perhaps, I thought, abandoned; a place, I thought, where I might rest and plan my next move, and I pulled aside the rotting blanket that hung over the entrance and ducked quickly inside.

  There was only the one room. In the little bit of light that came in the one window, I saw a camp stove, very old and battered, and a chair, and a rickety old chest of drawers, and a cot, bare except for a stained uncovered pillow and a blanket only marginally newer than the one which hung in the doorway. There was no one inside – perhaps had been no one in a long time, I thought, but I suddenly did not care. I think I realized, somehow, that if I were asleep it would not be my fault what happened from then on.

  I laid myself down on the cot, and wrapped the blanket around me, and thought that it had been such a long time since I had slept, and so much had happened, so much had changed forever since the last time I had closed my eyes … and I slept.

  I do not know how long it was before I heard a voice say: ‘Wake up. Wake up, now.’ I opened my eyes, hardly knowing where I was, or who, and peered across the tiny room in a growing heart-stopping panic, and saw an old man sitting calmly in the straight chair. He held across his lap a rifle – a single-shot .22, I later learned, with which he hunted small game – and despite this he did not look particularly menacing. He was very old, really, to my far younger eyes. He looked at me and said again, ‘Wake up, now.’ And then he laughed, and though technically I could not be sure, because laughter after all might be subtly different here, in fact I was positive, from the first moment I saw him, that he was hopelessly crazy; and I was right … the laughter was too free, too delighted by very small things; he was as … batty as a bedbug.<
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  Which is not to say that most of the time he was not as sane as anyone. It was, however, to say that his bridges were down, and had been replaced by extravagant structures which were much more daring, if less well able to carry a load, than normal.

  His name was Jack English, and he was of an indeterminate age but probably sixty-five or so. He had lived in this spot in the pine barrens for a very long time, as far as I could tell, and I believe at one time he had had a wife, but twenty or twenty-five years ago she had disappeared, and he did not expect to see her again. He laughed again.

  He lived, as I said, in the pine barrens, and like most people who lived there he lived on land that was not his own, but did not seem to belong to anyone else, either, and he lived in a house that, basically, he could walk away from in ten minutes, move a mile in any direction, and duplicate in very short order. He had no power or running water, of course; the result was the only constraint on him – that he live near a creek. But he had not actually moved in over twenty-five years.

  He told me this, and more, as the morning wore on. I sat on a box, and he sat in a chair.

  We conversed. That is, he asked me who I was and what I did; what had brought me to the pine barrens – which was the first I knew of them – and what had brought me to his dwelling place in particular. But when I tried to tell him – that my name was Charlie Mortimer, that I was part of a special Army detachment, that I was lost – he would laugh and call me a liar. Maybe my name was Mortimer, though he doubted it, but that I was part of the U.S. Army he doubted very much, for I carried no military gear, and he doubted if I could be so lost as to be completely separated from the rest of my group; he doubted if I was lost at all. What did I want with him, specifically; why had I come to his dwelling place? And when I tried to tell him I had not come to his dwelling place except by accident, he just laughed and laughed. And finally he said, in his crazy way: ‘You know what I think, Mr Mortimer? I think you came down in a flying saucer, and you’re trying to fool me. That’s what I think. Either that, or you’re an escaped prisoner. That’s what I think. And you know what, Mr Mortimer? I don’t give a shit, really, as long as you don’t pull nothing stupid.’