And when he’d asked for my help in getting him out of that place, I’d had to go along with him. “Sure, why not?” I’d told him. “Maybe I can speed it up. Have you seen the new Space Center at the Lake? There are a lot of people you used to know there. NASA people. They’d love to see you again, Smiler.”
What I didn’t say was that the Space Center at Lake Okeechobee also housed the finest space medicine team in the world, and that they were longing to get their hands on him. But he was dying and a Brit, and so the British had first claim, so to speak. No one was going to argue the pros and cons about a man on his last legs. And if that makes me sound bad—like maybe I’d gone over to London to snatch him for the home team—I’d better add that there was something else I hadn’t mentioned to him: the Center Research Foundation at Lakeport, right next door. I wanted to wheel him in there so they could take a look at him. Oh, he was a no-hoper, like I’ve said, but….
And maybe he hadn’t quite given up hope himself, either, because when they were finally through with him a few days later he’d agreed to come back here with me. “What the hell,” he’d shrugged. “They have their rocks, dust, gasses, don’t they? Also, they have lots of time. Me, I have to use mine pretty sparingly.” It was starting to get to him.
In the States Smiler got a hero’s welcome, met everybody who was anybody from the President down. But that was time-consuming stuff, so after a few days we moved on down to Florida. First things first: I told him about the Foundation at Lakeport. “So what’s new?” he laughed. “Why’d you think I came with you, Yank?”
They checked him over, smiled and joked with him (which was the only way to play it with Smiler) but right up front shook their heads and told him no, there was nothing they could do. And time was narrowing down.
But it was running out for me, too; and that’s where I had to switch my memories off and come back to the present a while, for I’d reached the first checkpoint. I was driving up from Immokalee, Big “C” Control (“control,” that’s a laugh!) Point Seven, to see Smiler at Lakeport. The barrier was at the La Belle-Clewiston crossroads, and Smiler came up on the air just as I saw it up ahead and started to slow her down a little.
“You’re two minutes early, Peter,” his voice crackled out of the radio at me. “Try to get it right from here on in, OK? Big “C” said ten-thirty a.m. at the La Belle-Clewiston crossroads, and he didn’t mean ten-twenty-eight. You don’t gain anything by being early: he’ll only hold you up down there two minutes longer to put you back on schedule. Do you read me, old friend?”
“I read you, buddy,” I answered, slowing to a halt at the barrier’s massive red-and-white-striped pole where it cut the road in half. “Sorry I’m early; I guess it’s nerves; must have put my foot down a little. Anyway, what’s a couple minutes between friends, eh?”
“Between you and me? Nothing!” Smiler’s voice came back—and with a chuckle in it! I thought: God, that’s courage for you! “But Big ‘C’ likes accuracy, dead reckoning,” he continued. “And come to think of it, so do I! Hell, you wouldn’t try to find me a reentry window a couple of minutes ahead of time, would you? No you wouldn’t.” And then, more quietly: “And remember, Peter, a man can get burned just as easily in here….” But this time there was no chuckle.
“What now?” I sat still, staring straight ahead, aware that the—tunnel?—was closing overhead, that the light was going as Big “C” enclosed me.
“Out,” he answered at once, “so he can take a good look at the car. You know he’s not much for trusting people, Peter.”
I froze, and remained sitting there as rigid as…as the great steel barrier pole right there in front of me. Get out? Big “C” wanted me to get out? But the car was my womb and I wasn’t programmed to be born yet, not until I got to Smiler. And—
“Out!” Smiler’s voice crackled on the air. “He says you’re not moving and it bothers him. So get out now—or would you rather sit tight and have him come in there with you? How do you think you’d like that, Peter: having Big “C” groping around in there with you?”
I unfroze, opened the car door. But where was I supposed to—?
“The checkpoint shack,” Smiler told me, as if reading my mind. “There’s nothing of him in there.”
Thank God for that!
I left the car door open—to appease Big “C”? To facilitate his search? To make up for earlier inadequacies? Don’t ask me—and hurried in the deepening gloom to the wooden, chalet-style building at the side of the road. It had been built there maybe four years ago when Big “C” wasn’t so big, but no one had used it in a long time and the door was stuck; I could get the bottom of the door to give a little by leaning my thigh against it, but the top was jammed tight. And somehow I didn’t like to make too much noise.
Standing there with the doorknob clenched tight in my hand, I steeled myself, glanced up at the ceiling being formed of Big “C”’s substance—the moth-eaten holes being bridged by doughy flaps, then sealed as the mass thickened up, shutting out the light—and I thought of myself as becoming a tiny shriveled kernel in his gigantic, leprous walnut. Christ…what a mercy I never suffered from claustrophobia! But then I also thought: to hell with the noise, and put my shoulder to the door to burst it right in.
I left the door vibrating in its frame behind me and went unsteadily, breathlessly, to the big windows. There was a desk there, chairs, a few well-thumbed paperbacks, a Daily Occurrence Book, telephone and scribble pad: everything a quarter-inch thick in dust. But I blew the dust off one of the chairs and sat (which wasn’t a bad idea, my legs were shaking so bad), for now that I’d started in on this thing I knew there’d be no stopping it, and what was going on out there was all part of it. Smiler’s knowledge of cars hadn’t been much to mention; I had to hope that Big “C” was equally ignorant.
And so I sat there trembling by the big windows, looking out at the road and the barrier and the car, and I suppose the idea was that I was going to watch Big “C”’s inspection. I did actually watch the start of it—the tendrils of frothy slop elongating themselves downwards from above and inwards from both sides, closing on the car, entering it; a pseudopod of slime hardening into rubber, pulling loose the weather strip from the boot cover and flattening itself to squeeze inside; another member like a long, flat tapeworm sliding through the gap between the hood and the radiator grille…but that was as much as I could take and I turned my face away.
It’s not so much how Big “C” looks but what he is that does it. It’s knowing, and yet not really knowing, what he is….
So I sweated it there and waited for it to get done, and hoped and prayed that Big “C” would get done and not find anything. And while I waited my mind went back again to that time six years earlier.
The months went by and Smiler weakened a little. He got to spending a lot of his time at Lakeport, which was fine by the space medics at the Lake because they could go and see him any time they wanted and carry on examining and testing him. And at the time I thought they’d actually found something they could do for him, because after a while he really did seem to be improving again. Meanwhile I had my own life to live; I hadn’t seen as much of him as I might like; I’d been busy on the Saturn’s Moons Project.
When I did get to see him almost a year had gone by and he should have been dead. But he wasn’t anything like dead and the boys from Med. were excited about something—had been for months—and Smiler had asked to see me. I was briefed and they told me not to excite him a lot, just treat him like…normal? Now how the hell else would I treat him? I wondered.
It was summer and we met at Clewiston on the Lake, a beach where the sun sparkled on the water and leisure craft came and went, many of them towing their golden, waving water-skiers. Smiler arrived from Lakeport in an ambulance and the boys in white walked him slowly down to the table under a sun umbrella where I was waiting for him. And I saw how big he was under his robe.
I ordered a Coke for myself, and—”Four vo
dkas and a small tomato juice,” Smiler told me! “An Anemic Mary—in one big glass.”
“Do you have a problem, buddy?” the words escaped me before I could check them.
“Are you kidding?” he said, frowning. But then he saw me ogling his huge drink and grinned. “Eh? The booze? Jesus, no! It’s like rocket fuel to me—keeps me aloft and propels me around and around—but doesn’t make me dizzy!” And then he was serious again. “A pity, really, ’cos there are times when I’d like to get blasted out of my mind.”
“What?” I stared hard at him, wondered what was going on in his head. “Smiler, I—”
“Peter,” he cut me short, “I’m not going to die—not just yet, anyway.”
For a moment I couldn’t take it in, couldn’t believe it. I was that delighted. I knew my bottom jaw must have fallen open, so closed it again. “They’ve come up with something?” I finally blurted it out. “Smiler, you’ve done it—you’ve beaten the Big ‘C’!”
But he wasn’t laughing or even smiling, just sitting there looking at me.
He had been all dark and lean and muscular, Smiler, but was now pale and puffy. Puffy cheeks, puffy bags under his eyes, pale and puffy double chins. And bald (all that shining, jet-black hair gone) and minus his eyebrows: the effect of one treatment or another. His natural teeth were gone, too: calcium deficiency brought on by low grav during too many missions in the space stations, probably aggravated by his complaint. In fact his eyes were really the only things I’d know him by: film-star blue eyes, which had somehow retained their old twinkle.
Though right now, as I’ve said, he wasn’t laughing or even smiling but just sitting there staring at me.
“Big ‘C,’ “ he finally answered me. “Beaten the Big ‘C’….”
And eventually the smile fell from my face, too. “But…isn’t that what you meant?”
“Listen,” he said, suddenly shifting to a higher gear, “I’m short of time. They’re checking me over every couple of hours now, because they’re expecting it to break loose…well, soon. And so they’ll not be too long coming for me, wanting to take me back into that good old ‘controlled environment,’ you know? So now I want to tell you about it—the way I see it, anyway.”
“Tell me about…?”
“About Luna II. Peter, it was Luna II. It wasn’t anything the people at Lakeport have done or the space medicine buffs from the Lake, it was just Luna II. There’s something in Luna II that changes things. That’s its nature: to change things. Sometimes the changes may be radical: it takes a sane man and makes him mad, or turns a peaceful race into a mindless gang of mass murderers, or changes a small planet into a chunk of shiny black slag that we’ve named Luna II. And sometimes it’s sleeping or inert, and then there’s no effect whatever.”
I tried to take all of this in but it was coming too thick and fast. “Eh? Something in Luna II? But don’t we already know about that? That it’s a source of peculiar emanations or whatever?”
“Something like that.” He shrugged helplessly, impatiently. “Maybe. I don’t know. But when I was up there I felt it, and now it’s starting to look like it felt me.”
“It felt you?” Now he really wasn’t making sense, had started to ramble.
“I don’t know”—he shrugged again—”but it could be the answer to Everything—it could be Everything! Maybe there are lots of Luna IIs scattered through the universe, and they all have the power to change things. Like they’re catalysts. They cause mutations—in space, in time. A couple of billion years ago the Earth felt it up there, felt its nearness, its effect. And it took this formless blob of mud hurtling through space and changed it, gave it life, brought microorganisms awake in the soup of its oceans. It’s been changing things ever since—and we’ve called that evolution! Do you see what I mean? It was The Beginning—and it might yet be The End.”
“Smiler, I—”
He caught my arm, gave me what I suspect was the most serious look he’d ever given anyone in his entire life, and said: “Don’t look at me like that, Peter.” And there was just a hint of accusation.
“Was I?”
“Yes, you were!” And then he relaxed and laughed, and just as suddenly became excited. “Man, when something like this happens, you’re bound to ask questions. So I’ve asked myself questions, and the things I’ve told you are the answers. Some of them, anyway. Hell, they may not even be right, but they’re my answers!”
“These are your thoughts, then? Not the boffins’?” This was one of his Brit words I used, from the old days. It meant “experts.”
“Mine,” he said, seeming proud of it, “but grown at least in part from what the boffins have told me.”
“So what has happened?” I asked him, feeling a little exasperated now. “What’s going down, Smiler?”
“Not so much going down,” he shook his head, “as coming out.”
“Coming out?” I waited, not sure whether to smile or frown, not knowing what to do or say.
“Of me.”
And still I waited. It was like a guessing game where I was supposed to come up with some sort of conclusion based on what he’d told me. But I didn’t have any conclusions.
Finally he shrugged yet again, snorted, shook his head, and said: “But you do know about cancer, right? About the Big ‘C’? Well, when I went up to Luna II, it changed my cancer. Oh, I still have it, but it’s not the same any more. It’s a separate thing existing in me, but no longer truly a part of me. It’s in various cavities and tracts, all connected up by threads, living in me like a rat in a system of burrows. Or better, like a hermit crab in a pirated shell. But you know what happens when a hermit crab outgrows its shell? It moves out, finds itself a bigger home. So…this thing in me has tried to vacate—has experimented with the idea, anyway….”
He shuddered, his whole body trembling like jelly.
“Experimented?” It was all I could find to say.
He gulped, nodded, controlled himself. And he sank what was left of his drink before going on. “In the night, a couple of nights ago, it started to eject—from both ends at once—from just about everywhere. Anus, throat, nostrils, you name it. I almost choked to death before they got to me. But by then it had already given up, retreated, retracted itself. And I could breathe again. It was like it…like it hadn’t wanted to kill me.”
I was numb, dumb, couldn’t say anything. The way Smiler told it, it was almost as if he’d credited his cancer with intelligence! But then a white movement caught my eye, and I saw with some relief that it was the boys from the ambulance coming for him. He saw them, too, and clutched my arm. And suddenly fear had made his eyes round in his round face. “Peter….” he said. “Peter….”
“It’s OK,” I grabbed his fist grabbing me. “It’s all right. They have to know what they’re doing. You said it yourself, remember? You’re not going to die.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “But will it be worth living?”
And then they came and took him to the ambulance. And for a long time I wondered about that last thing he’d said. But of course in the end it turned out he was right….
The car door slammed and the telephone rang at one and the same time, causing me to start. I looked out through the control shack’s dusty window and saw Big “C” receding from the car. Apparently everything was OK. And when the telephone rang again I picked it up.
“OK, Peter,” Smiler’s voice seemed likewise relieved, “you can come on in now.”
But as well as relieved I was also afraid. Now of all times—when it was inevitable—I was afraid. Afraid for the future the world might never have if I didn’t go in, and for the future I certainly wouldn’t have if I did. Until at last common sense prevailed: what the heck, I had no future anyway!
“Something wrong, old friend?” Smiler’s voice was soft. “Hey, don’t let it get to you. It will be just like the last time you visited me, remember?” His words were careful, innocent yet contrived. And they held a code.
I said “Sure,” put the phone down, left the shack and went to the car. If he was ready for it then so was I. It was ominous out there, in Big “C”’s gloom; getting into the car was like entering the vacant lair of some weird, alien animal. The thing was no longer there, but I knew it had been there. It didn’t smell, but I could smell and taste it anyway. You would think so, the way I avoided breathing.
And so my throat was dry and my chest was tight as I turned the lights on to drive. To drive through Big “C,” to the core which was Ben ‘Smiler’ Williams. And driving I thought:
I’m traveling down a hollow tentacle, proceeding along a pseudopod, venturing in an alien vein. And it can put a stop to me, kill me any time it wants to. By suffocation, strangulation, or simply by laying itself down on me and crushing me. But it won’t because it needs Smiler, needs to appease him, and he has asked to see me.
As he’d said on the telephone, “Just like the last time.” Except we both knew it wouldn’t be like the last time. Not at all….
The last time:
That had been fifteen months ago when we’d agreed on the boundaries. But to continue at that point would be to leave out what happened in between. And I needed to fill it in, if only to fix my mind on something and so occupy my time for the rest of the journey. It isn’t good for your nerves, to drive down a midmorning road in near darkness, through a tunnel of living, frothing, cancerous flesh.
A month after I’d seen Smiler on the beach, Big “C” broke out. Except that’s not exactly how it was. I mean, it wasn’t how you’d expect. What happened was this:
Back in 2002 when we went through a sticky patch with the USSR and there were several (as yet still unsolved) sabotage attempts on some of our missile and space research sites, a number of mobile ICBM and MIRV networks were quickly commissioned and established across the entire USA. Most of these had been quietly decommissioned or mothballed only a year or two later, but not the one covering the Okeechobee region of Florida. That one still existed, with its principal base or railhead at La Belle and arms reaching out as far as Fort Myers in the west, Fort Drum north of the Lake, and Canal Point right on the Lake’s eastern shore. Though still maintained in operational order as a deterrent, the rail network now carried ninety per cent of hardware for the Space Center while its military functions were kept strictly low profile. Or they had been, until that night in late August 2024.