Alien Abduction, page 7
Unfortunately, that Saturday’s game was an away fixture, and by the time Steve got back to Salisbury Janine was beginning to wonder, audibly, whether she really wanted to spend as much time hanging around waiting for him to favor her with his belated presence. He assured her that winter was not far off now that Autumn had begun, and that the season would be over soon enough. They patched things up on the Sunday, but they didn’t meet up again until Wednesday, when the survival course made little progress, being mostly concerned with nutrition—highlighting the deficiency diseases that might result from inadequate vitamin provision—and the elements of paramedical improvisation, which Steve had previously thought of as “first aid”.
On Thursday, Steve picked Janine and Milly up in quick succession on the way to the AlAbAn meeting. Milly seemed to be in a much more buoyant and frivolous mood than she had been on the previous occasion, presumably because Steve was no longer an unknown quantity and she no longer felt the need to be wary of him. She asked how their survival course was going in a flirtatious manner, and Janine countered by asking Milly, in a much more earnest tone, whether she’d thought any more about going to A level evening classes.
“I don’t know,” Milly said, dubiously. “I don’t really rate the tech, you know. I did a martial arts course last year, remember, and I was a bit disappointed. I wanted to learn to hurt people, but it was more about learning how not to hurt people.”
“A levels aren’t quite the same thing, are they?” Janine said. “You get a much better class of homework.”
“You’re only saying that because you were too scared to let me practice on you.” Milly retorted. “Ali let me throw her—mind you, she’s not much bigger than you are, so it wasn’t hard. If you’d been going out with Steve then I could have borrowed him, and found out whether big people really do fall harder.”
“I’m not exactly a rugby player,” Steve pointed out. “You’d be taller than me if you wore high heels.”
“I think the answer I was looking for,” Milly said, “was: You’re welcome to throw me any time, darling.” She giggled as she said it, revealing that she had a rather infectious laugh
“That might have been the answer you were looking for, darling,” Janine said, stifling the infection that made her want to giggle in her turn, “but if you’d got it, you’d both have been in trouble. You’d do better to set your eyes on Walter Wainwright, Milly—an affair with an older man would do you good, or at least calm you down.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Milly said, breezily. “Amelia looks innocent and harmless, but so did Lucrezia Borgia.”
“According to the head of history at school, Lucrezia Borgia was much maligned,” Steve put in. “She really was sweet and innocent, but horribly exploited by her relatives and direly besmirched by historians.”
“Is the head of history one of the ones you seduced?” Milly asked, clinging insistently to her flirtatious vein. “Jan told me all about your checkered past.”
“Good god, no,” Steve said. “And it’s really not that checkered.”
“Are you going to tell, your story tonight, Mil?” Janine asked—a question that immediately dampened the mood. Milly took some time before muttering a denial. Steve glanced sideways, attempting to judge whether the move had been deliberate, but Janine wouldn’t meet his eye.
They got to the meeting a little earlier than they had the previous week, although Steve wasn’t consciously aware of having pressed the accelerator any more firmly, and had time to watch the greater number of the faithful arrive. Janine drew Milly aside when they’d collected their cups of tea, so Steve slipped into scientific observer mode and studied the AlAbAn regulars—especially Walter Wainwright, who was busy greeting people as they came in. After watching him for a few minutes Steve decided that his initial judgment had been a little hard on Walter Wainwright, even if he did turn out to be an ex-Man from the Pru. On observing him more intently, Steve decided that Walter was neither as much of a lech nor as much of a con man as he’d first elected to believe. Beyond the insistent amiability and quasi-paternal attitude there was an aura of authority and competence, and there was a genuine warmth in the way he addressed people.
Walter Wainwright must have observed Steve observing him, because he came over just as Janine returned from her intimate chat with Milly. “It’s good to see you again, Steve,” he said. “I’m glad you decided to return—I’m always disappointed when people don’t give us a second chance. It’s good to see you too, Janine. I saw your parents on Saturday, and mentioned that I’d seen you. I hope I didn’t put my foot in it—they seemed rather surprised that you’d been to an AlAbAn meeting.”
“I hadn’t had a chance to mention it to them myself,” Janine said, vaguely. “I really must give them a ring some time soon—thanks for reminding me.”
Steve knew that Janine was rather dilatory in the matter of keeping in touch with her parents, although he wasn’t sure exactly why. On the one occasion when she’d taken him to meet them, on a Sunday when he didn’t have a game, they’d all gone to the local pub for lunch. It had seemed to him to be a fairly comfortable experience, as such experiences went, but Janine had been very glad when it was over. Steve had remarked that Janine and her parents didn’t see eye-to-eye on a good may issues, especially the propriety of working as an “office skivvy” for Thomas Cook’s, but they hadn’t seemed to be any harder on her than the average concerned parent Obviously, they’d expected better of her, and would presumably have been more content if she’d had a job more akin to Steve’s, but he’d seen far worse performances at every parents’ evening he’d ever been forced to attend.
“Is there anything you’d like me to say to them if I see them this weekend, my dear?” Walter said, radiating concern, “or anything you’d particularly like me not to say.”
“Nothing at all,” Janine said, with a furtive smile. Steve took this to mean that she was perfectly prepared to let her parents suspect that she might think she’d been abducted by aliens. From her point of view, he supposed, that was probably an alternative preferable to letting them believe that she was in a steady relationship with a man who thought that he’d been abducted by aliens
Steve couldn’t resist saying: “Do Janine’s parents know that you believe that everyone in the world has been abducted at least once, Mr. Wainwright?”
“Call me Walter, Steve,” the old man replied. “And yes, of course they do. I don’t hide my opinions. It wouldn’t do me any good if I tried—it would only lead to people in the pub pointing at me slyly and whispering: That’s nutty old Walter Wainwright—he thinks that everybody in the world’s been abducted by aliens. It’s better to be open about such things, don’t you think?”
“I guess so,” Steve agreed, wondering whether the old man was hinting that he ought to be a bit more open about things, even though he couldn’t possibly know how open Steve was or wasn’t.
“Friends of Milly’s are particularly welcome here,” Walter added. “We’re all very fond of Milly.”
“She’s been my best friend for years,” Janine said. “This is the one thing we haven’t shared, until now. She’s never told me what happened to her, though.”
“It often takes time,” Walter said. “We all had to wait until we were ready, and we understand perfectly why it takes some people longer to reach that point than others. You must both take all the time you need. Excuse me, please.” Walter allowed himself to be drawn away by Amelia Rockham.
Janine was still smiling, and Steve could see that she had no intention of explaining to Walter that she was only here to keep Steve company.
“You want your parents to worry about you, don’t you?” he said.
“You’re the one who thinks that a little mystery spices up a relationship,” she retorted. “Let’s sit down—we’re about to start.”
They took their places on the Naugahyde settee, which was already beginning to feel like “their” seat. When the preliminaries were over and newcomers had been duly advised of the rules, Walter invited “Mary”—a middle-aged and very well-furnished woman, who gave the impression that she had certainly never suffered from an eating disorder of the sort that had once afflicted poor Milly—to tell the story of an encounter she had had some twenty-five years before, in 1981. The prospect did not seem overly exciting, at first—but Steve found out soon enough that appearances could be quite deceptive.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CATALYST AND THE CHRYSALIS
This is something I’ve always remembered but always kept quiet about. I didn’t need psychoanalysis or hypnotherapy to dredge the memory up, but it wasn’t something I wanted to tell anyone at the time, or at any time since. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being laughed at, or being called a liar or a fantasist. It was just something I needed to keep to myself for a while. Now, though, it seems that the time is right. I’ve been coming here for a couple of years now, listening to everyone else’s stories, and I feel that I’m ready to let it go.
Some of the younger members won’t have any memory of 1981, and it’s not a year that has gone down in history for any particular reason. It’s probably enough to say that it was two years into Mrs. Thatcher’s reign of terror, with the economic recession getting ever deeper and unemployment rising fast. I was married then, and my husband, Mike, was one of the people who lost his job.
We had been doing reasonably well until then, and weren’t exactly plunged into instant destitution. I was working at the local hospital as a nurse, but my pay wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage and sustain any kind of decent standard of living. Unfortunately, Mike didn’t react well to unemployment, or to my becoming the breadwinner. The vague plans we’d made to start a family went right out of the window, and although the prospect of having children had never seemed a particularly big deal before, the fact that we were no longer able to consider the possibility suddenly seemed to become one. At any rate, it became another thing for Mike to get bitter about—another thing to fuel his disappointment and his drinking.
We were soon struggling, getting gradually deeper in misery and debt. Being in debt doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays, when everybody under thirty seems to live on credit, but in those days we didn’t think about owing money as something normal and natural. It was bad, and it preyed on our minds—which only served to increase Mike’s disappointment, and drinking, even further. You can imagine how the spiral worked.
I did my best to increase our income, working extra shifts and studying hard for the exams I needed to pass in order to get promotion, but that only made the fact that I was supporting him increasingly conspicuous, burdensome and annoying. The state of the marriage went downhill rapidly once the slide began, and I think we both knew that it was only a matter of time before something broke under the strain.
The abduction itself was like a dozen others I’ve heard described here. I’d worked sixteen hours on the trot, from six o’clock in the morning to ten at night, and I came home exhausted. Mike was already asleep when I came into the bedroom, so dead drunk that an earthquake wouldn’t have woken him up. I should have been equally oblivious once I’d dropped off, but I woke up suddenly in the early hours of the morning. I glanced at the clock on the bedside table, which said that it was twenty past three. I got out of bed and went to the bedroom window.
The window was open—it was August, and we were three days into what passed for a heat wave in those days. There was a huge disk floating over the house, silent and unilluminated. I was paralyzed, and then grabbed by some kind of tractor beam. Its manipulators maneuvered me out of the window easily enough. I was a lot thinner in those days. I lost consciousness when the thing swallowed me up.
When I woke up, I was in the kind of laboratory space that we’ve heard described so often. I was lying on my back on an operating table, with a white sheet draped over me. My limbs were immobilized, although I couldn’t see any solid restraints.
There was a bright light directly above me, bright enough to hurt my eyes. There were various items of equipment massed on the left-hand side of the bed, all seemingly idle. I had lines in each arm, and one in each leg. The one in my left arm seemed to be an intravenous drip, and the one in my left leg also seemed to be carrying a clear fluid—probably bodily wastes. The ones that caught my attention, though, were those in my right arm and leg, which were full of colored fluid. The tube connected to the leg appeared to be carrying red fluid out, while the tube connected to the arm seemed to be carrying a blue fluid back again.
It didn’t take a genius to guess that the leg-tube was carrying oxygenated arterial blood while the arm-tube was returning deoxygenated venous blood. The flow was slow but steady. I didn’t appear to be breathing any more deeply or rapidly than usual, but the air I was sucking in had a slightly strange taste, which suggested that it was richer in oxygen than Earthly air.
It wasn’t easy to see where the blood was going, because it was below the level of the operating table, but I could crane my neck just far enough to see that there was something in a kind of cradle resting on the floor. The cradle must have been about four feet long and two wide, and the thing fitted into it fairly snugly. It was dark brown in color, with a shiny surface. It put me in mind of a big balloon, or a giant rugby ball, or some sort of monstrous egg. My blood was being slowly pumped into the ovoid at one end, and pumped out again at the other, then returned to the vein in my arm.
My first thought was that I had fallen victim to alien vampires, but that didn’t make sense, because the blood—or something very like it—was being returned. Then I wondered whether the ovoid might be some kind of dialysis machine, but that didn’t seem very plausible either.
I must have been lying there for an hour or so before anyone—or anything—came in. I felt quite calm, perhaps because I was being fed tranquilizers through the incoming drip as well as nutrients. I didn’t scream when the door finally opened, or experience any dreadful sensation of shock. I’d already prepared myself mentally to see something that wasn’t human, and was, in the event, slightly relieved to see something that wasn’t quite as horrid as it might have been.
It was a bug of sorts—a six-limbed thing that used its four hind feet for walking while its two front feet were modified into something more like arms. Its wing-cases curved around its upper body like some sort of fancy jacket, colored dark red with black spots like a ladybird. The body would have suited a head like a praying mantis, but that’s not the sort of head it had. Its skull was big and rounded, and its face was like some kind of Halloween mask, with big round eyes positioned in front and a big smiling mouth with nice white teeth. It didn’t have a nose or ears, but the eyes and the mouth were just enough to provide a hint of apparent humanity even before it spoke.
“Hello Mary,” it said, in a strange fluty accent. “I’m Imhotep. I’ll be looking after you while you’re here. I hope you’re quite comfortable.”
“Wasn’t Imhotep the guy who built the Great Pyramid?” I said. “You’re not going to tell me, I hope, that the pyramids really were constructed as landing-pads for alien spaceships?”
“The legend connecting Imhotep to the Great Pyramid was something of an afterthought,” the bug informed me. “You’re absolutely right to identify it as a pseudonym—you wouldn’t be able to pronounce my real name—but it was selected because of a different legend, which makes Imhotep the father of medicine.”
“You mean you’re a doctor?”
“Absolutely.”
“And what, exactly, are you treating me for?”
“You’re not the patient, I’m afraid,” it said, in what might have been a crude attempt to fake an apologetic tone. “You’re the treatment.”
I looked at the thing in the cradle. “That’s your patient?” I said.
“Yes it is. Perhaps I should have said that your blood is the treatment—but I assure you that our using it won’t do you any harm at all. Blood is essentially a carrier, you see. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, you might say that we’re using your hemoglobin and its associated cofactors as a kind of catalyst, which facilitates certain chemical reactions but is then regenerated, so that it can be used over and over again in an endless cycle.”
The bug said all this rather blandly, as if it didn’t expect me to understand, and didn’t really care whether I did or not, but wanted for some reason to put on a show of honesty. It obviously didn’t know that I was a nurse, or that I’d been desperately revising my anatomy and physiology of late.
“Isn’t there an easier way to pump oxygen into the damn thing?” I asked it. “Taking an interstellar trip, then using a tractor beam to kidnap human beings from their bedrooms, merely in order to use the hemoglobin in their blood as a means of infusing an egg with oxygen, strikes me as the most ludicrously uneconomic project imaginable.”
“It probably would be,” the pseudonymous Imhotep agreed. “As it happens, though, we’ve disguised our apparatus as a spaceship for reasons of convenience. We haven’t had to take an interstellar trip, or even an interplanetary one. And yes, if it were only a matter of oxygenation, we could find simpler ways to do the job. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s a much subtler process of catalysis—which, I have to admit, we don’t fully understand ourselves. Also, it’s not an egg; it’s a chrysalis.”
It took me a minute or two to work my way through the complexities of the triple denial, but I got there in the end. I figured that I ought to take things a little more slowly.
“You’re not from another planet, then?” I said.
“No,” it said. “The little silver-skinned guys with the big eyes apparently claim to be extraterrestrial, and they’re probably not alone, but we don’t socialize with them any more than we socialize with others of our own kind. We often disguise our vessels as theirs, though, in order not to attract overmuch attention from other travelers. Everyone’s used to seeing the little guys hanging around this era.”
