16
Inferno’s Pulse
THE SHADOWS GREW.
In front of the Ice House, the old-timers sat on benches smoking their cigars and corncob pipes and talking about the meteor. Heard it from Jimmy Rice, one of them said. Jimmy got it straight from the sheriff’s mouth. Hell, I didn’t get to be seventy-four years old to be kilt by no damned rock from out yonder in space, I’m tellin’ you! Damn thing just about fell right on our heads!
They all agreed it had been a near miss. They talked about the helicopter, still sitting in the middle of Preston Park, wondering how such a thing could fly, and would you get up in one? Hell no, I ain’t crazy! was the unanimous answer. Then their talk drifted to the new baseball season, and when was a southern team going to win a series? When time runs back-assward and horses stand on two legs! one of them growled, and kept chewing on his cigar butt.
In the House of Beauty on Celeste Street, Ida Younger frosted Tammy Bryant’s mouse-brown hair and talked not about the meteor or the helicopter but about the two handsome men who had gotten out of it. The pilot’s a hunk too, Tammy said. She’d seen him when he went into the Brandin’ Iron for a hamburger and coffee—and, of course, she and May Davis just had to go in there for a bite of lunch too. And you should’ve seen the way that damn Sue Mullinax flounced herself all over the cafe! Tammy confided. I mean, it was a disgrace!
Ida agreed that Sue was the nerviest bitch who ever tied a mattress to her back, and Sue’s butt just kept getting bigger and bigger and that’s what so much sex’ll do to you too.
She’s a nymphomaniac, Tammy said. A nympho, plain and simple.
Yeah, Ida said. Plain-lookin’ and simpleminded.
And they both laughed.
On Cobre Road, past the Smart Dollar clothing store, the post office, the bake shop, and the Paperback Kastle, a middle-aged man squinted through his wire-rimmed spectacles and concentrated on inserting a pin through the abdomen of a small brown scorpion, found dead of Raid inhalation in the kitchen this morning. His name was Noah Twilley, and he was slender and pale, his straight black hair lank and going gray. His skinny fingers got the pin through, and he added the scorpion to his collection of other “ladies and gentlemen”—beetles, wasps, flies, and more scorpions, all pinned to black velvet and kept under glass. He was in the study of his white stone house, thirty yards behind the brick building with a stained-glass front window, a stucco statue of Jesus standing between two stucco cacti, and a sign that read INFERNO FUNERAL HOME.
His father had died six years ago and left the business to him—a dubious honor, since Noah had always wanted to be an entomologist. He had made sure his father was buried in the hottest plot on Joshua Tree Hill.
“Nooooaaaahhh! Noah!” The screech made his backbone stiffen. “Go get me a Co-Cola!”
“Just a minute, Mother,” he answered.
“Noah! My show’s on!”
He stood up wearily and walked down the corridor to her room. She was wearing a white silk gown, sitting up against white silk pillows in a bed with a white canopy. Her face was a mask of white powder, her hair dyed flame red. On the color TV, the Wheel of Fortune was spinning. “Get me a Co-Cola!” Ruth Twilley ordered. “My throat’s as dry as dust!”
“Yes, Mother,” he answered, and trudged toward the staircase. Better to do what she wanted and get it over with, he knew.
“That meteor’s doin’ somethin’ to the air!” she hollered after him, her voice as high as a wasp’s whine. “Makin’ my throat clog up!” He was on his way down the steps, but that voice followed him: “I’ll bet old Celeste heard it hit! Bet it made her shit pickles!”
Here we go, he thought.
“That prissy-pants bitch livin’ out there high and mighty, not carin’ a damn about anybody else, just suckin’ the guts out of this town. She did it, y’know! Prob’ly killed poor Wint, but he was too smart for her! Yessir! He hid all his money so she couldn’t get none of it! Foxed her, he did! Well, when she comes to Ruth Twilley askin’ for money and down on her hands and knees, I’m gonna snub her like she’s a snail! You listenin’ to me, Noah? Noah!”
“Yes,” he answered, down in the depths of the house. “I’m listening.”
She kept babbling on, and Noah let himself ponder what life might be like if that meteor had struck smack dab over the ceiling of her bedroom. There was not a plot on Joshua Tree Hill that was hot enough.
Across Inferno and Bordertown, other lives drifted on: Father Manuel LaPrado listened to confessions at the Sacrifice of Christ Catholic Church, while Reverend Hale Jennings put a pencil to paper at the Inferno Baptist Church and worked on his Sunday sermon. On his porch, Sarge Dennison napped in a lawn chair, his face occasionally flinching at unwelcome memories, his right arm hanging down and his hand patting the head of the invisible Scooter. Rick Jurado stacked boxes in the stockroom of the hardware store on Cobre Road, the Fang of Jesus heavy in his jeans pocket and his mind circling what Mr. Hammond had said today. Heavy-metal music blared from a ghetto blaster through the corridors of the ’Gades’ fortress at the end of Travis Street, and while Bobby Clay Clemmons and a few other ’Gades smoked reefers and shot the shit, Nasty and Tank lay on a bare mattress in another room, their bodies damp and intertwined in the aftermath of sex—the one activity for which Tank removed his football helmet.
The day was winding down. A postal truck left town, heading north to Odessa with its cargo of letters—among which were a high percentage of job applications, inquiries for employment, and supplications to relatives for extended visiting privileges. Of all people, the postman knew the pulse of Inferno, and he could see death scrawled on the envelopes.
The sun was sinking, and on the First Texas Bank the electric-bulb sign read 93°F. at 5:49.
17
The Baseball Fan
“I KNOW THIS IS an open line,” Rhodes said to the duty officer at Webb Air Force Base. “I don’t have closed comm equipment, and I don’t have time, either. My ID is Bluebooker. Look it up.” He held on to the phone as the duty officer verified his code. From the den he heard the television channel being changed again: the canned laughter of a sit-com. About six seconds passed, and the channel was changed once more: a baseball-game commentator, and this time the TV was left alone for a little longer.
“Yes sir. I copy you, Bluebooker.” The duty officer sounded young and nervous. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“I need a transport aircraft waiting with a number one priority. I need it fueled for cross-country, and I’ll be giving the destination in the air. Alert Colonel Buckner that I’m coming in with a package from our incident site. I need videotape equipment on board too. My ETA into Webb will be between two and three hundred hours. Got that?”
“Yes sir.”
“Read it back to me.” He heard the channel change: a news broadcast, something about hostages in the Middle East. The duty officer read everything back correctly, and Rhodes said, “Fine. I’m signing off.” He hung up the phone and strode into the den.
Daufin sat on the floor—cross-legged this time, as if it had figured out that its crouching posture put strain on a human’s knee joints. The creature’s face was about twelve inches from the TV screen, watching a news story about floods in Arkansas.
“I wish we’d get some of that rain,” Gunniston said, drinking from a can of Pepsi.
Daufin reached out and touched the TV screen. The entire picture warped out of shape; there was a crack! and the channels changed: Woody Woodpecker cartoons.
“Neat-o!” Ray was sitting on the floor, not too close to Daufin but not so far away, either. “She’s got a remote control in her fingers!”
“Probably some kind of electromagnetic pulse,” Rhodes told him. “It may be using the electricity in Stevie’s body, or maybe it’s generating its own.”
Crack! Now there was a western movie on TV: Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven.
“Man, that’s about the coolest thing I’ve ever—”
&n
bsp; “Shut up!” Jessie’s control had finally snapped, and she could stand it no longer. “You shut up!” Her eyes were bright with tears and anger, and Ray looked stunned. “There’s nothing ‘cool’ about this! Your sister’s gone! Don’t you understand that?”
“I … didn’t mean to—”
“She’s gone!” Jessie advanced on Ray, but Tom quickly stood up from his chair and grasped her arm. She pulled free, her face strained and agonized. “She’s gone, and there’s just that left!” She pointed at Daufin; the creature still stared at the TV screen, oblivious to what Jessie was saying. “Jesus Christ …” Jessie’s voice faltered. She put her hands to her face. “Oh my God … oh God …” She began to sob, and Tom could do nothing but hold her while she wept bitter tears.
Crack! A surfing competition appeared, and Daufin’s eyes widened slightly, following the rolling blue waves.
Rhodes turned toward his aide. “Gunny, I want you to get out to the crash site and hurry them up. We need to get out of here as soon as we can.”
“Right.” He finished his drink, dropped the can into the trash, and put on his cap as he went out the door, heading for the helicopter.
Rhodes wished he were anywhere else but here, and his mind drifted to the farm where he lived with his wife and two daughters, near Chamberlain, South Dakota. On clear nights he studied the stars in his small observatory, or made notes for the book he was planning on life beyond earth; he wished he was doing either, right now, because he had no recourse but to take the creature to a research lab, no matter that it wore a little girl’s face. “Mrs. Hammond, I know this is tough on you,” he said. “I want you to know th—”
“Know what?” She was still enraged, her face streaked with tears. “That our daughter’s still alive? That she’s dead? Know what?”
Crack: a “Mork and Mindy” rerun. Crack: a financial news show. Crack: another baseball game.
“That I’m sorry,” he went on resolutely. “For what it’s worth, I’ve got two daughters myself. I can imagine what you must be feeling. If anything happened to either of them … well, I don’t know what Kelly and I would do. Kelly’s my wife. But at least you understand now that she—it—isn’t your daughter. When the crew finishes up at the crash site, we’ll be leaving. I’ll take her—it—Daufin—to Webb, and from there to Virginia. I’m going to ask Gunny to stay with you.”
“Stay with us? Why?” Tom asked.
“Just for a short while. A debriefing, I guess you’d call it. We’ll want to get statements from all of you, go through the house with a Geiger counter, try to find that black sphere again. And we don’t want this information leaking out. We want to control—”
“You don’t want it leaking out,” Tom repeated incredulously. “That’s just great!” He gave a short, harsh laugh. “Our daughter’s been taken away by some kind of damned alien thing, and you don’t want the information leaking out.” He felt the blood charge into his face. “What are we supposed to do? Just go on like it never happened?”
Crack: not a channel changing this time, but a bat connecting with a baseball. The crowd roared.
“I know you can’t do that, but we’re going to try to ease you away from this situation as best we can, with counseling, hypnosis—”
“We don’t need that!” Jessie snapped. “We need to know where Stevie is! Is she dead, or is she—”
“Safe,” Daufin interrupted.
Jessie’s throat seized up. She looked at the creature. Daufin was staring at the baseball game, where a runner had slid into home plate. The ball was thrown back to the pitcher, and Daufin’s eyes followed its trajectory with intense interest.
And then Daufin’s head racheted toward Jessie: a slow, halting motion, as if she was still unsure of how the bones fit together. “Safe,” she repeated. Her gaze locked on to the woman. “Ste-vie is safe, Jes-sie.”
She managed a soft exhalation of breath: “What?”
“Safe. Freed from in-ju-ry or risk, al-so se-cure from dan-ger or loss. Is that not a cor-rect in-ter …” Daufin paused, scanning dictionary pages in the massive, perfectly organized library of her memory banks. “In-ter-pre-ta-tion?”
“Yes,” Rhodes replied quickly. His heart had jumped; this was the first time the creature had spoken for over an hour, since that stuff about “oscillating tympanum.” The TV channels had occupied her, and she’d been going through them again and again like a child with a new toy. “That’s correct. How is she safe? Where is she?”
Daufin stood up awkwardly. She touched her chest. “Here.” Touched her head. “Somewhere else.” Her fingers fluttered in a gesture of distance.
No one spoke. Jessie took a step forward; her little girl’s face watched her, eyes shining. “Where?” Jessie asked. “Please … I’ve got to know.”
“Not far. A safe place. Trust me?”
“How … can I?”
“I am not here to hurt.” It was Stevie’s voice, yes, but it was whispery and ethereal as well, the sound of cool wind across reeds. “I chose this one … but not to hurt.”
“Chose her?” Rhodes asked. “How?”
“I call-ed this one. This one answer-ed.”
“How do you mean, ‘called’?”
A hint of frustration passed over the face. “I …” She spent a few seconds finding the proper term. “I sang-ed.”
Rhodes felt close to pissing in his pants. An alien in the skin of a little girl stood before him, and they were talking. My God! he thought. What secrets she must know! “I’m Colonel Matt Rhodes, United States Air Force.” He heard his voice shake. “I want to welcome you to planet Earth.” Inwardly he cringed; it was corny as hell, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
“Pla-net Earth,” she repeated carefully. Blinked. “In-sane forms here, par-don my terms.” She motioned toward the TV screen, where a baseball manager had his face right up in an umpire’s and was giving him a royal chewing out. “Ques-tion: why are these beings so small?”
Tom realized what she meant. “No, those are just pictures. On TV. The pictures come through the air from a long way.”
“From oth-er worlds?”
“No. This one. Just other places.”
Her eyes seemed to pierce him. “Are not the pic-tures true?”
“Some of them are,” Rhodes said. “Like that baseball game. Some of them are just … playacting. Do you know what that means?”
She thought. “Pre-tend. A false show.”
“Right.” It had dawned on Rhodes, and the others too, how strange everything must appear to Daufin. Television, taken for granted by humans, would merit explanation, but along the way you’d have to explain about electricity, satellite transmissions, TV studios, news broadcasts, sports, and actors; the subject could be talked about for days, and still Daufin would have more questions.
“Don’t you have TV?” Ray asked. “Or somethin’ like it?”
“No.” Daufin studied him for a few seconds, then looked at Tom. She touched the air around her eyes. “What are these? In-stru-ments?”
“Glasses.” Tom removed his and tapped the lenses. “They help you see.”
“See. Glasses. Yes.” She nodded, putting the concepts together. “Not all pre-sent can see?” She motioned to Rhodes and Jessie.
“We don’t need glasses.” Again, Rhodes realized that the idea of eyeglasses was a tricky subject involving magnification, the grinding of lenses, optometry, a discussion of visual sense—another day-long conversation. “Some people can see without them.”
She frowned, her face briefly taking on the appearance of a nettled little old lady’s. She understood absolutes, yet there seemed to be no absolutes here. Something was, and yet it was not. “This is a world of play-act-ing,” she observed, and her attention drifted back to the TV set. “Base-ball game,” she said, locating the term in her memory. “Play-ed with a bat and ball by two teams on a field with four bases ar-rang-ed in a di-a-mond.”
“Hey!” Ray said excitedly. “They mus
t have baseball in outer space!”
“She’s reciting the definition from the dictionary,” Rhodes told him. “She must have a memory like a sponge.”
Daufin watched another pitch. She couldn’t comprehend the purpose of this game, but it seemed to be a contest of angles and velocities based on the planet’s physics. She lifted her right arm in imitation of the pitcher’s, feeling the strange tug and weight of alien anatomy. What appeared to be a simple motion was more complex than it appeared, she decided. But the game’s apparently mathematical basis interested her, and it would merit further thought.
Then she began to walk around the room, her hands occasionally touching the walls or other objects as if making sure they were real and not figments of playacting.
Jessie was still balanced on a thin wire, and to fall would be frighteningly easy. Watching a creature wearing Stevie’s skin, hair, and face, strolling around the den as if on a Sunday visit to a museum, battered feverishly at her mind. “How do I know my daughter’s safe? Tell me!”
Daufin touched a framed photograph of the family that sat on a shelf. “Be-cause,” she said, “I pro-tect.”
“You protect her? How?”
“I pro-tect,” Daufin repeated. “That is all to know.” Her interest went to another picture, then she drifted out of the den and into the kitchen.
Rhodes followed her, but Jessie had had enough; she slumped into a chair, mentally exhausted and fighting off fresh tears. Tom stood by her, his hands rubbing her shoulders and trying to get his own mind straight, but Ray hurried after the colonel and Daufin.
The creature stood watching the cat-clock’s eyes tick back and forth. Rhodes saw her smile, and she made a sound like a high, clear chime: laughter.
“I think we’ve got a lot to talk about,” Rhodes said, his voice still shaky. “I guess there are quite a few things you’d like to know about us—our civilization, I mean. And of course we’ll want to know all about yours. In a few hours we’ll be taking a trip. You’ll be going to—”