Year Zero (2000), page 5
10
When the silver light first came creeping through Molly's window at half past midnight, she naturally assumed that it was a sign from Heaven, to reassure her that the angel had got home.
When the duvet slid away and she rose into the air, levitated three feet above the dirty sheet, she took it for a miracle. Even when she floated out of the window, which had opened of its own accord in spite of the fact that the sash was nailed shut, she wasn't in the least anxious. Not that she'd expected any kind of recompense for helping the angel out, of course; she'd had far too much experience of life to expect that virtue would ever be rewarded, even in Heaven.
When she saw the slowly-rotating saucer-shaped UFO hovering above the B&B, however, she realised that Heaven had nothing to do with it. It was just another bloody abduction. Francine, who seemed to have got so far into the habit of pinching everything Annie had that even Annie's death hadn't stopped her, had been telling anyone who would listen about her own abduction experience for a fortnight.
Like everyone else, Molly had assumed that Annie and Francine were out of their minds—and Francine's highly-coloured protestations about what the men in black had done to her after her return to Earth had made that conclusion seem perfectly secure—but now that she was actually being sucked up into the belly of the saucer, she had to concede that maybe Annie and Francine had been entitled to get excited.
Oh well, she thought, as the aperture closed soundlessly behind her, I might not have had as much recent practice as Francine, but once you've been on the game you never lose the knack. There nothing so very terrible about a rectal probe. She was just trying to put a brave face on it; Molly hadn't forgotten that Annie had carted off to the hospital only a couple of days after her last abduction experience, when her HIV finally went full-blown. Annie had been dead within a week, having already shed most of her flesh and all of her resistance. Opinions in the B&B had varied as to whether the UFO or the world was to blame; Molly had come down on the side of the world.
The advantage Molly had over Annie and Francine was that she'd had the chance to hear both their stories several times over. The salient details had been traced and retraced so often that she knew exactly what the score was. When the little silver guys with the big almond eyes came to peer down at her, she just smiled and said "Hi," and when the cold probe went up her arse she didn't bat an eyelid. She didn't gag when they slipped the wriggly things into her more accommodating orifices and she didn't writhe when they attached the electrodes to her scalp. If she hadn't been incapable of speech by that time, she might even have apologised for the fact that her brain had been worked over by all the LSD and Es she'd done while she was heavily into the rave scene, but she knew they'd probably figure it out by themselves. If they didn't like it, they ought to go fishing in better neighbourhoods.
The only real surprise was that the aliens injected the biochip into her left breast instead of the nape of the neck, where Annie and Francine had got theirs. That was bound to cause embarrassment, if anybody demanded that Molly show them the sore spot. If Francine could be trusted, somebody would—but Molly knew that she'd have the option of playing dumb. For some reason she'd never quite been able to fathom, men usually believed her if she played dumb.
Forewarned being forearmed, Molly knew that she only had to wait until the examination was concluded, and that she'd be returned to her bed safe and sound. According to Francine, who'd spent hours on the abductee helpline, only one subject in five got recalled for a more extensive examination, and six or eight months was a more common interval than the six days they'd allowed her and Annie. The silvery guys obviously had a heavy schedule—as you'd expect, if they were really trying to catalogue the whole human race before reporting back to Epsilon Eridani IV or Tau Ceti II, or wherever.
Molly estimated that the whole thing took about an hour, although she knew that her time-sense might have been cunningly distorted. The aliens could do that, according to the abductee helpline. On the basis of her research, Francine had assured Molly that the aliens were easily capable of ensuring that people would forget the whole experience, or remember it only fleetingly, as a dream, but that they'd stopped bothering since hypnotists had found a sure way to penetrate their deceptions.
"The reason I can remember it so very clearly," Francine had assured Molly a dozen times over, as well as everyone else who'd listen, "is that I'm an abnormally sensitive person. If I'd been able to get my regular fix I'd have breezed through the whole thing, but it's been slow out on the street since the local trainspotters started taking plate-numbers."
Molly had never thought of herself as an abnormally sensitive person, so she half-expected to have forgotten the entire business by the time she woke up again, but she must have underestimated herself, because she remembered every last detail.
Unlike Annie and Francine, of course, Molly would never have breathed a word to a living soul voluntarily. Unfortunately, she wasn't given that opportunity. She hardly had time to get her knickers on before the men in black came knocking at the door.
Molly knew that it had to be Francine who'd ratted her out. Francine was the only one in the B&B who kept her eyes resolutely fixed on the sky when she couldn't roust up any business, and the only one who had the phone number of Croydon's equivalent of Area 51. Francine was also the only one whose door didn't open, even by a crack, when the men in black started banging on Molly's door, proclaiming loudly that they were from the DSS Investigations Department. They obviously hadn't the faintest idea how to go about building a viable cover; everybody in the B&B knew the faces and inside leg measurements of the local DSS's ball-bearing secret agents, and everybody knew that civil servants couldn't arrest anybody who refused to be arrested, unless they had a warrant.
It wouldn't have been so bad if the men in black had looked like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, but these were British men in black, and they had a thoroughly British idea of who the scum of the universe were. They had probably been to public school, although that didn't excuse the moustaches and the pin-striped ties. The senior man's moustache was a pencil-thin thing that would have suggested queerness if he hadn't been so obviously interested by the sight of the bare flesh above and below Molly's knickers; his junior had a bushier one whose lop-sidedness suggested that he hadn't quite mastered the art and science of Bic topiary.
From the moment the senior man bundled her into the back of the black Rover 2000, copping a feel of her bum in the process, Molly was absolutely determined not to co-operate.
She knew that it would be useless to deny everything, and risky to be economical with the truth, but it was a matter of principle. If they used truth serum there was every chance that they'd find out about Elvis and the secret experiments in rejuvenation, but Molly figured that they probably knew about that anyway. They wouldn't be interested in the angel.
11
Once they were under way, driving south at a very respectable speed—because all the commuter traffic was heading the other way—the man with the pencil moustache said: "I'm afraid that I had to lie to you back there. I'm not from the DSS, and you've no need to worry about your benefits."
"You don't say," Molly replied, insouciantly. "Wow, you really had me fooled. I'm so stupid. Francine only told me about your last visit seventeen times, and even from here I can tell that she was entirely mistaken about the pin-sized prick. Her sense of proportion goes right out the window when she's full of dope—so to speak."
"I can understand your being annoyed, " the man in black admitted, his voice becoming even more treacly although he must have figured out that he was being subtly insulted, "but this is a matter of national security. More than that—the future of the entire human race might be at stake."
Thanks to her brief encounter with the angel, Molly knew that the virtuous members of the human race didn't actually have a future as such, on account of there being no time in Heaven, but she wasn't about to tell that to the man with the pencil moustache. Her first priority, she figured, was to avoid the possibility that they'd do an amateur mastectomy in order to recover the biochip. Her tits might not be her best feature, but she didn't like the idea of not having a matching pair.
"Well," Molly said, defensively, "I expect you've heard it all before. Haven't we all? Unfortunately, it's all a bit vague. Big round thing with lights around the rim, slowly rotating.
Beam of light comes down, then I'm floating up into the belly of it—rather like being born, only backwards. Little guys with big eyes staring at me all the time. The memory's fading already, to tell you the truth. If you hadn't come for me, I'd probably have thought that it was all a dream, courtesy of a dodgy kebab and Francine's fairy tales."
"It was no dream, Molly," the man with the pin-striped tie assured her, "and Francine's story was no fairy tale. We've known about the aliens since Woking in 1897, although the bloody Americans wouldn't take a blind bit of notice for fifty years, until they got a crasher of their own. They even accused us of faking the autopsy record, just because we hadn't got it on film. Who were we supposed to get in—Georges Melies?"
"Is that how it's pronounced?" Molly said, trying to sound irredeemably dopey. "Well, I wish I could help, but it's all very hazy. They probably drugged me. I'm really not sure how much of it really happened and how much was just suggestion, from hearing Francine's story over and over and over and ..."
"I understand," said the man in black, hurriedly. "It's not uncommon for abductees to be disorientated. We can put you under hypnosis, if that will help."
"They tried that last time I was in the Maudsley for treatment," Molly told him, blandly. "The hypnotist was very nice. He specialized in breast enlargements, I think, when he wasn't doing his bit in the bin. I was a terrible subject. He said that I was constitutionally unable to relax because of what speed and ecstasy had done to my nerve-ends. I'm sorry, but I really don't think I'll be any use to you."
"Are you a regular drug-user?" the man in black inquired, in the slightly defeated manner of a dedicated seeker after truth confronted with the witness from Hell.
"I had to give it up a couple of years ago," Molly admitted.
"The doc told me that if I carried on, I wouldn't have enough self-control left to keep from wetting the bed at night. I'm straight now, apart from the Prozac and the tranks—but I'd rather you didn't tell anyone about the tranks. I buy them over the counter at Boots, pretending they're for an allergy. Not that I'm not allergic, you understand—it's just that the allergy's not the real reason I buy the tabs. Did you know that all the best antihistamines are also major tranks, on account of being chlorpromazine derivatives?"
"No," said the secret agent, glumly. "I didn't."
"I'm afraid I won't be nearly as much use to you as Francine was," Molly said, with a sigh. "She's so much younger than I am, and she gets out so much more. Isn't it a pity the aliens never abduct intelligent people like you?"
That was a step too far. Molly knew from bitter experience that even civil servants could spot a wind up eventually, and that they never liked having the piss taken out of them, presumably because they were too tight-arsed to have any to spare.
"Don't mess us about, Molly," her interrogator growled, still using her first name because he wanted her to think that they knew everything about her, although all they really knew was where she lived. "This is serious. The greys have been watching us for more than a hundred years, and we have reason to believe that they're about to move to the next phase of their plan."
"They seemed more silver than grey, actually," Molly observed.
"Only when the light's bright," he countered. "We suspect that they're worried. We think they've been expecting us to wipe ourselves out for the last fifty years, but now that the collapse of communism has reduced the probability of nuclear war to one in a million they might be considering direct action. We think they might be preparing to use what they've learned about human physiology to engineer a doomsday bug. That's probably why they've stepped up the anatomy lessons lately. We think AIDS might have been a trial run, maybe even a failed attempt."
The Rover turned into an underground car park beneath what looked for all the world like any other Croydon office-block. You had to give some credit to British Military Intelligence, Molly reflected. The stupid Yanks had built a huge fenced compound in the middle of the Arizona desert, where it was bound to stick out like a sore thumb from any viewpoint in orbit, but anyone looking at this place from any angle whatsoever wouldn't be able to distinguish it from your average bog-standard insurance company. If only the spies inside could keep a little more closely in touch with the manners and mores of real DSS personnel, the set-up would be perfect.
Unfortunately, the room they took her to wasn't nearly as cosy or as user-friendly as an actuary's office. It might have been mistaken for a hospital operating theatre, except for the disquieting fact that the straps they used to secure her to the table after they'd stripped her were thicker and tighter than the ones in Torquemadam's Berwick Street Boudoir, where Molly had once done a demanding but fairly rewarding stint of dressing-up and domination.
The men in black had enough sensitivity to bring in female officers to search her teeth for new cavities and her cavities for new teeth, but that didn't make Molly feel any better about the ordeal. They put lead-lensed spectacles over her eyes while they X-rayed her head, but they didn't take any noticeable precautions lower down. They vamped a whole half-pint of blood and various other fluid samples, but so far as she could tell they didn't find the biochip. One of the female officers was kind enough to replace the filling that she had accidentally knocked out of one of Molly's molars, carefully and without any fuss, but the rest of the procedure seemed distinctly lacking in respect for her person.
When they were finished, they put a thin sheet over her, but she still felt awkwardly naked underneath it. She tried to go to sleep, but they weren't quite ready to let up yet.
12
When the two men with moustaches continued with the interrogation they read the questions from a series of forms, running through them at the double with quasi-military precision. There was nothing on the list about Elvis or angels, and if they had sneaked any truth serum into her veins it was obviously from a dud batch. She shaped her answers to give the impression that she was an unobservant, unintelligent and thoroughly confused person, but couldn't help feeling just a little annoyed by the ease with which the ruse succeeded.
"You didn't have to keep me strapped down once you'd taken the X-rays," Molly complained, when they finally set her wrists and ankles free and allowed her to gather the sheet around herself. "I could have answered the questions perfectly well while I was massaging my pins and needles."
"It's just routine," the man with the pencil moustache assured her. Like Molly he was putting on an act, but unlike Molly he wasn't succeeding. He was too transparent to persuade anyone with half a brain that he wasn't the kind of person to be stimulated by the process of strapping a woman down and tormenting her.
"We're truly sorry for the inconvenience, Molly," the agent went on, heaping lie upon lie, "but we need to figure out exactly what the greys did to you if we're to have any chance of finding out why. We're all in quarantine here until we're sure that you're not carrying any unknown viruses or prions. The important thing now is to think ahead. I suppose you know that they sometimes come back for a second look."
"Their procedures aren't exactly secret any more," Molly observed.
"On the contrary," the man in black replied. "The best place to hide a tree is in a forest, and the best place to hide the truth is in a mass of confused data. We think they let people like your friend Francine remember more precisely because they're irredeemable gossips and congenital liars. They favour trailer trash in the States for exactly the same reason. But we're just as clever as they are, because we know that they make the occasional mistake and we know that whenever they lift somebody with a little bit more common sense it gives us an opportunity. The question is, Molly, are you one of those people? Are you the kind of person who could help us—not just by tipping us off next time you catch a glimpse of them at work, but by keeping your wits about you if they come back? Can you probe them while they're probing you?" He didn't sound hopeful. He might as well have been reading off his crib-sheet.
Well, Molly thought, I'm not doing such a bad job of probing you while you're probing me. All she said aloud was: "I could try." She tried to sound woefully unconvincing, and she could tell that he took the bait—but there was still a gleam in his eye. Molly knew better than to be flattered by that. It wasn't her faded beauty that had turned him on.
"Okay, Molly," he said, brimming over with false generosity. "Consider yourself recruited. If they come back—and I say if because the odds are they won't, so you shouldn't worry too much—it would be a really good idea if you were to make a proper study of your surroundings. Forget the big staring eyes and try to concentrate on the walls and the equipment. Try to memorise any symbols you see. It'll be hard, because they don't write in any script you'll ever have seen, but if you can make accurate drawings of any symbols you see that'll be a great help. If they say anything to you—they probably won't, even if they do come back, but if they do—we'd really appreciate it of you could remember exactly what they say, even if it isn't in English. And if they put anything inside you, try to remember exactly where they put it. That's very important—it's nothing to worry about, but we do need to know."
"That's not going to be easy," Molly said, trying to imply that for someone like her all that remembering would be absolutely bloody impossible—although she was still offended by the ease with which he seemed to take the inference.
