Alien Abduction, page 23
Secondly—although this is more tentative, as well as weirder—I think they have a mathematics and a physics that are different in kind from ours. That may not make sense, but maybe the fact that it doesn’t make sense says more about the limitations of the human imagination than we’d probably like to believe. At any rate, for as long as they were using me, the aliens kept making me pick out textbooks in pure and applied maths, and they can’t just have been measuring the extent of our progress. If what we know about maths and physics were mere objective knowledge—a simple recognition of the way logic works and the way the universe is put together—they could have found out how far we’d got by looking at a handful of textbooks. The fact that I had to keep on looking at more and more books of that sort suggests to me that there was a puzzle there: that there was something distinctively human about our maths and our physics, with which the aliens had trouble getting to grips. I suspect that it wasn’t just simpler than theirs but qualitatively different, maybe because their senses reveal things to them that ours don’t.
Thirdly, I think they have a particular fascination with human games and sports. Again, you might think that reading a few rule-books would tell them all they needed to know, and that a couple of journalistic accounts and autobiographies would have filled in the psychological margin easily enough. In fact, I read almost as many books about games and sports as I did about chemistry, biology, politics and war—not just one edition of Wisden or Timeform’s Racehorses of the Year, but twenty, not just one biography of a chess grandmaster or one guide-book to playing poker, but dozens. Is that, I wonder, because they’re games and sports fanatics themselves, or because they don’t play games and sports at all? I don’t know exactly what interest they have in that aspect of our experience, but it’s considerable—and maybe it makes their total lack of interest in fiction even more remarkable.
I might, of course, have been a specialist instrument. Maybe I just happened to be the reader assigned to maths and sports, while there was some other poor soul sitting in a library in Manchester or Edinburgh who was spending his entire time reading Mickey Spillane, Barbara Cartland and Iris Murdoch, or plowing through endless histories of the Napoleonic wars and the Third Reich. Who can tell? I tried to ask Amelia, of course, but it was so difficult to get time with her alone. I might have brought it up in the UFO investigators’ meetings, but I could never bring myself to tell them my story, in case they didn’t believe me. Can you imagine what it would have been like to reveal my secrets to a bunch of losers who were considered to be certifiable lunatics by most of their fellows, and have them deride it as madness? Of course you can—and that’s why AlAbAn is such a wonderful thing, and why we all owe Walter such a tremendous debt for moving on from that first group, starting up a much more useful one, and keeping it going all these years.
By the time AlAbAn grew out of the ashes of the old UFO-spotters group, of course, the aliens had let me go. They only used me for four years, and then they released me. I don’t think they’d found out all they wanted or needed to know, but they released me anyway. I don’t think I’d outlived my usefulness, either, although I have to admit that I was a bit of a wreck by then. I don’t think they were being kind—but they were being reasonable. They figured that I’d done my bit, and was entitled to my freedom. It was someone else’s turn to take up the burden of an empty passion for print.
I remember going to the library the first night I didn’t have to, not out of habit or because I didn’t know what else to do with myself, but because I wanted to see Amelia, I wanted to stand at the issue-desk and look her in the eyes. I wanted her to see me as I really was, free at last from my affliction—and I wanted to thank her properly, for the help she’d given me in getting through it. That was the night I saw the engagement ring on her finger, sparkling in the harsh and unrelenting gleam of the neon striplights.
“I’m better now,” I told her. “I won’t be coming here any more.”
“It won’t be the same without you,” she replied.
“I could come here if I wanted to,” I told her. “If I had a reason to come, I could come.”
“Have you a reason?” she asked.
“Is that an engagement ring?” I asked.
“Yes it is,” she said. “I’m getting married in the spring.”
“To Walter Wainwright?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “It’s not anyone at the UFO group. In fact, my fiancé doesn’t entirely approve of the UFO group. I might give that a rest for a while.”
“Me too,” I said. “It isn’t really my sort of thing. They aren’t really my kind of people. I’m glad you told me about it, though. It helped me. You helped me. I’m very grateful for that.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “It’s a librarian’s job to help people with their research. I like to help when I can—and you always put the books back exactly where they came from. There are plenty of people who don’t.”
I reached out my hand then, and she shook it. I saw her again, of course, now and again, even before AlAbAn was formed, but I never really saw her. I never really took her in. It was rather like the reading I did while the aliens had me—not just with Amelia but with other people too. I saw them, but I didn’t take them in. I didn’t register them properly. I didn’t read them, or get any benefit from them, or react to them in any kind of meaningful way. It wasn’t passion I was short of, but I wasn’t really capable of owning my passions then. Getting your freedom back is only part of the process of self-liberation, you see—you have to learn to use it. That took some time.
Teaching wasn’t a problem—not the kind of teaching I was doing by then, at any rate. Setting up a private life to fill all the time that I was no longer spending in the library was something else. I did manage it in the end, though. I met Jenny; I took possession of my passion; we got married; I met Walter again; I joined AlAbAn; I finally told my story. That was a liberation too, of sorts. As you all know perfectly well, though, you’re never entirely free of the aliens once they’ve had you, even if they haven’t planted bugs in your eyes and your brain. Sometimes, you have to tell your story a second time, and a third…and even when you can give the meetings a rest for a while, you can’t let them alone forever. Once the aliens have turned you into an obsessive-compulsive personality, you can’t help repeating yourself, never letting go of one ritual without taking up another.
I lost my passion for print, mind. That was one passion I didn’t manage to turn into a possession or begin to master. In fact, I developed something of an allergy to text—not a physical allergy, like hay fever, but a mental allergy, a kind of late-onset dyslexia. I don’t mean that I couldn’t read; I could read perfectly well when I had to, but the only reading I could do was functional reading. I could look things up when I needed to, read forms and street-signs and mark the kids’ work, but I couldn’t read for the sake of interest. I couldn’t read fiction, or biographies, or maths and science books, and I certainly couldn’t read anything remotely to do with sports and games. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t take the meaning in. It made me feel sick—not in the sense that I wanted to vomit, but in the sense that my flesh would rebel against the dominion of my mind.
Jenny could never accuse me of having a passion for print. Throughout our marriage I couldn’t even read a newspaper. I watched the TV news instead, but that only encouraged her to think that I was boring. I never told her my story. I never took her to an AlAbAn meeting. I wanted to keep all that away from her, because I didn’t want her to worry about the fact that I still had alien bugs in my eyes and my brain. She might have worried, you see, that the aliens were still using me, even though they weren’t forcing me to consume print any more. She might have thought that they were using me to study her, as intimately and minutely as any human being could be studied. I didn’t want that. I think I might have been a little bit anxious about it myself—she often complained, poor dear, that I didn’t pay enough attention to her, that we were never quite intimate enough, no matter how much we loved one another.
If the aliens had still been using me, I think they’d have made more varied use of me. I’d have traveled far more, and been a lot more sociable. If the aliens had wanted to use me as a direct observer, as well as a reader, they’d surely have given me more equipment. They’d have given me more zest for life, more curiosity, more skill in observation. I’m fairly sure that they really did let me go, that they really were being discreet in not interfering too much with the pattern of my life. It was in their interests, I suppose, that I didn’t attract too much attention to myself, but I don’t believe they were only thinking of themselves.
I might have made more of my life, of course, if they’d never taken me in the first place. If I’d had a chance to get better at my job, I might not have come to hate it quite as much, but it’s not a good idea to blame all one’s misfortunes on others. We have to take responsibility for ourselves, and if we don’t make as much of our freedom as we can, when we get it, we only have ourselves to blame. I can’t complain. If only I’d made more of my opportunities, or even taken in a little more of what I read while the aliens’ passion for print had me in its grip, and worked around it a little more skillfully, who knows what I might have been able to accomplish?
When I finally got to hear the story of Amelia’s abduction, I realized that she’d coped with it much better—although, in fairness, it was a more exciting experience than mine. Most of the stories I’ve heard at AlAbAn, come to think of it, have been more exciting than mine—but we can’t all undertake odysseys to the remoter regions of space and time, can we? Some of us are picked to work at home, and that’s our lot. Some of us get cancer, like poor Jenny, and die.
If the aliens want to take me again, for some other purpose, they’re very welcome. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, but I’m in pretty good condition otherwise, for my age, and they have the technology to fix us up if they want to. I’d really like to find out more about them, if I can—not just by means of all the stories people bring to AlAbAn, fascinating as they are, but in a more intimate sense. If they really can and do live with a different mathematics, even if the differences are far more abstruse than two and two making five, I’d be interested to try and get a grip on that, if only for a moment. It would be really something, I think, to be able to make an imaginative leap like that. I’ve tried—God knows, I’ve tried—but I’ve never been able to do it.
I often go driving at night, even when I’ve nowhere to go—and sometimes, even when I do have somewhere to go, like tonight, it’s the drive rather than the destination that draws me out. Once the aliens have got into your head, you never can settle for conventional destinations, conventional motives or conventional passions.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MAKING SLOW PROGRESS
As he and Milly drove back to Salisbury after listening to Neville’s story, Steve couldn’t help thinking about Janine sitting in the passenger seat of Walter Wainwright’s car, perhaps taking Walter into her confidence regarding her troubles, and telling him things that she’d never told Steve. He didn’t suppose for a moment that Walter Wainwright would make a pass at her, or that she would be anything less than scandalized if he did, but the notion that they might be in the process of building some kind of intimate relationship, however Platonic, troubled him anyway. Janine, after all, didn’t really belong at AlAbAn; she was only there in order to exact some strange kind of fee from Steve and Milly by listening to their stories, and disapproving of their togetherness in the meantime. Walter Wainwright surely ought to disapprove of that, and certainly ought not to be assisting in such a malign project.
“It’s hard to think of poor old Amelia once having had a stalker,” he said to Milly, to break a silence that was on the point of becoming awkward.
“No, it’s not,” Milly said, continuing a habit she’d lately developed of contradicting Steve’s harmless conversational remarks. “She must have been quite pretty back in 1962, or whenever, and even if she hadn’t been, men were no different then than they are now. A public library’s the sort of place that attracts weirdoes—mercifully.”
“Why mercifully?” Steve asked.
“If they weren’t attracted off the streets,” Milly stated, confidently, “they’d all be stalking female traffic wardens.”
“Except for the ones hanging around the schools,” Steve said, reflectively. “Mind you, the perverts peering in through the railings are harmless by comparison with the sex-bombs who are already inside. Hell hath no more demonic temptress than a year eleven siren with a crush. Poor Neville must have found himself on the wrong end of one of those from time to time.”
“He was safely married for most of his career,” Milly observed. “Whereas you’re single, and still the right side of thirty. The little harpies probably see you as a legitimate target—just as the aliens did.”
Steve knew that the last remark was the first cast in a fishing expedition, but he wasn’t about to rise to the bait. “It must be much worse for you,” he said, dryly. “Everybody thinks that traffic wardens are legitimate targets, from pervs with a passion for women in uniform to road rage sufferers armed with machetes.”
“I’m just glad that you fit into the former category, darling,” she said. “Mind you, if you’d met some of the traffic wardens I’ve met, you might lose your passion for women in uniform.”
“If you’d met some of the school kids I’d met,” Steve countered, “you’d know that I’d lost it long ago.”
She looked at him sideways then, and he could see the temptation in her eyes. What she wanted to ask, by way of a casual joke, was: Well, if it’s not the uniform you’re kinky for, what are you doing with me?—but she didn’t dare. She seemed far less confident now of the destiny that she had hitherto credited with responsibility for their relationship—a relationship that was far from having attained a stage at which remarks like that could pass automatically as jokes. Steve couldn’t see any prospect of getting to that sort of stage any time soon, if ever, and he suspected that Milly couldn’t either. At present, there were far too many meaningless things he couldn’t bring himself to say to her, even when wit or curiosity prompted him, just as there were too many things she couldn’t bring herself to say to him, even when the conversational flow or the logic of a situation licensed them.
Moving back to safer conversational ground, Steve said: “I think Neville’s still after Amelia, you know. She’s a widow now, and he’s a widower, so he must figure he’s in with a chance again—but good old Walter is still around to confuse the situation, just as he was always around in the old days. There is something between Walter and Amelia, I’m convinced—and probably always has been, even though they both married other people. Maybe they were abducted together. Has there ever been an account of a double abduction, in the time that you’ve been attending meetings?”
“No,” Milly said. “It’s always been one at a time. Mind you, I’ve never heard Walter’s own story, or Amelia’s. According to your theory, there couldn’t be any double abductions, could there? If it’s all a matter of private dreams reflecting the uniqueness of the individual, no one could ever share an abduction experience with anyone else, even if they had the most intimate relationship in the world.”
“Maybe not,” Steve conceded. “There’d be no barrier, of course, to someone including another person in their own abduction experience, but there’s no way that the other person could have the same experience. Unless, of course.…” He trailed off.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Steve,” Milly said. “It’s all very well wanting to think your ideas through before offering them up for my sagacious judgment, but leaving your sentences dangling like that is annoying as well as untidy.”
“Sorry,” Steve said. “What I was thinking was that maybe, in certain circumstances, one person might be so keen to forge a bond with another person that they’d actually appropriate the other person’s experience, and confirm—maybe even sincerely believe—that they’d experienced it too.”
“Are we talking about Walter and Amelia or about you and me?” Milly asked, immediately.
“I was just thinking,” Steve said. “Hypothetically.”
“Is the reason you won’t tell me any details of your experience because you don’t want me to have the chance of appropriating it for my own selfish ends?” Milly persisted. “Do you think I’m planning to adopt you as a character into my experience?
“No,” Steve said. “That would be absurd. We both know perfectly well that we began formulating our experiences before we’d met, so it would be blatantly anachronistic for either of us to include the other in our stories. Mine’s a solo flight, just like all the rest.”
“So’s mine,” Milly conceded, a trifle reluctantly. Steve guessed that she was wondering whether that concession further weakened her argument regarding the existence of some mysterious bond between the two of them, which might somehow justify their having done the dirty on Janine.
“It would be interesting, though,” Steve said, attempting to defuse the tension filling the car, “to know what did go on between Walter and Amelia, if anything. Why didn’t they get together, I wonder, if they had so much in common? It’s pretty obvious why Neville couldn’t come between them—but if Amelia was as attractive as she probably was, and Walter as handsome as he probably was, you’d think they’d have made an ideal couple.”
