Alien Contact (36 page)

Seventy years ago, after being picked up by the barge:

Nobody spoke to me again for forty-five minutes, which only fueled my suspicions of mass insanity.

The barge itself made slow but steady progress, following a generally uphill course of the only kind possible in that era, in that place, on the moon: which was to say, serpentine. The landscape here was rough, pocked with craters and jagged outcroppings, in no place willing to respect how convenient it might have been to allow us to proceed in something approaching a straight line. There were places where we had to turn almost a hundred and eighty degrees, double back awhile, then turn again, to head in an entirely different direction; it was the kind of route that looks random from one minute to the next but gradually reveals progress in one direction or another. It was clearly a route that my colleagues had traveled many times before; nobody seemed impatient. But for the one guy who had absolutely no idea where we were going, and who wasn’t in fact certain that we were headed anywhere at all, it was torture.

We would have managed the trip in maybe one-tenth the time in one of our fliers, but I later learned that the very laboriousness of the journey was, for first-timers at least, a traditional part of the show. It gave us time to speculate, to anticipate. This was useful for unlimbering the mind, ironing the kinks out of the imagination, getting us used to the idea that we were headed someplace important enough to be worth the trip. The buildup couldn’t possibly be enough—the view over that last ridge was still going to hit us with the force of a sledgehammer to the brain—but I remember how hard it hit and I’m still thankful the shock was cushioned even as inadequately as it was.

We followed a long boring ridge for the better part of fifteen minutes…then began to climb a slope that bore the rutty look of lunar ground that had known tractor-treads hundreds of times before. Some of my fellow journeyers hummed ominous, horror-movie soundtrack music in my ear, but George’s voice overrode them all: “Max? Did Phil tell you he envied you this moment?”

I was really nervous now. “Yes.”

“He’s full of crap. You’re not going to enjoy this next bit instead in retrospect. Later on you’ll think of it as the best moment of your life—and it might even be—but it won’t feel like that when it happens. It’ll feel big and frightening and insane when it happens. Trust me now when I tell you that it will get better, and quickly…and that everything will be explained, if not completely, then at least as much as it needs to be.”

It was an odd turn of phrase. “As much as it needs to be? What’s that supposed to—”

That’s when the barge reached the top of the rise, providing us a nice panoramic view of what awaited us in the shallow depression on the other side.

My ability to form coherent sentences became a distant rumor.

It was the kind of moment when the entire universe seems to become a wobbly thing, propped up by scaffolding and held together with the cheapest brand of hardware-store nails. The kind of moment when gravity just turns sideways beneath you, and the whole world turns on its edge, and the only thing that prevents you from just jetting off into space to spontaneously combust is the compensatory total stoppage of time. I don’t know the first thing I said. I’m glad nobody ever played me the recordings that got filed away in the permanent mission archives…and I’m equally sure that the reason they didn’t is that anybody actually on the moon to listen to them must have also had their own equally aghast reactions also saved for posterity. I got to hear such sounds many times, from others I would later escort over that ridge myself—and I can absolutely assure you that they’re the sounds made by intelligent, educated people who first think they’ve gone insane, and who then realize it doesn’t help to know that they haven’t.

It was the only possible immediate reaction to the first sight of Minnie and Earl’s.

What I saw, as we crested the top of that ridge, was this:

In the center of a typically barren lunar landscape, surrounded on all sides by impact craters, rocks, more rocks, and the suffocating emptiness of vacuum—

—a dark landscape, mind you, one imprisoned by lunar night, and illuminated only by the gibbous Earth hanging high above us—

—a rectangle of color and light, in the form of four square acres of freshly watered, freshly mowed lawn.

With a house on it.

Not a prefab box of the kind we dropped all over the lunar landscape for storage and emergency air stops.

A house.

A clapboard family home, painted a homey yellow, with a wraparound porch three steps off the ground, a canopy to keep off the sun, a screen door leading inside and a bug-zapper over the threshold. There was a porch swing with cushions in a big yellow daisy pattern, and a wall of neatly trimmed hedges around the house, obscuring the latticework that enclosed the crawlspace underneath. It was over-the-top Middle American that even in that first moment I half-crazily expected the scent of lemonade to cross the vacuum and enter my suit. (That didn’t happen, but lemonade was waiting.) The lawn was completely surrounded with a white picket fence with an open gate; there was even an old-fashioned mailbox at the gate, with its flag up. All of it was lit, from nowhere, like a bright summer afternoon. The house itself had two stories, plus a sloping shingled roof high enough to hide a respectable attic; as we drew closer I saw that there were pull-down shades, not Venetian blinds, in the pane-glass windows. Closer still, and I spotted the golden retriever that lay on the porch, its head resting between muddy paws as it followed our approach; it was definitely a lazy dog, since it did not get up to investigate us, but it was also a friendly one, whose big red tail thumped against the porch in anticipation. Closer still, and I made various consonant noises as a venerable old lady in gardening overalls came around the side of the house, spotted us, and broke into the kind of smile native only to contented old ladies seeing good friends or grandchildren after too long away. When my fellow astronauts all waved back, I almost followed their lead, but for some reason my arms wouldn’t move.

Somewhere in there I murmured, “This is impossible.”

“Clearly not,” George said. “If it were impossible it wouldn’t be happening. The more accurate word is inexplicable.”

“What the hell is—”

“Come on, goofball.” This from Carrie Aldrin No Relation. “You’re acting like you never saw a house before.”

Sometimes, knowing when to keep your mouth shut is the most eloquent expression of wisdom. I shut up.

It took about a million and a half years—or five minutes if you go by merely chronological time—for the tractor to descend the shallow slope and bring us to a stop some twenty meters from the front gate. By then an old man had joined the old woman at the fence. He was a lean old codger with bright blue eyes, a nose like a hawk, a smile that suggested he’d just heard a whopper of a joke, and the kind of forehead some very old men have—the kind that by all rights ought to have been glistening with sweat, like most bald heads, but instead seemed perpetually dry, in a way that suggested a sophisticated system for the redistribution of excess moisture. He had the leathery look of old men who had spent much of their lives working in the sun. He wore neatly pressed tan pants, sandals, and a white button-down shirt open at the collar, all of which was slightly loose on him—not enough to make him look comical or pathetic, but enough to suggest that he’d been a somewhat bigger man before age had diminished him, and was still used to buying the larger sizes. (That is, I thought, if there was any possibility of him finding a good place to shop around here.)

His wife, if that’s who she was, was half a head shorter and slightly stouter; she had blue eyes and a bright smile, like him, but a soft and rounded face that provided a pleasant complement to his lean and angular one. She was just overweight enough to provide her with the homey accoutrements of chubby cheeks and double chin; unlike her weathered, bone-dry husband, she was smooth-skinned and shiny-faced and very much a creature the sun had left untouched (though she evidently spent time there; at least, she wore gardener’s gloves, and carried a spade).

They were, in short, vaguely reminiscent of the old folks standing before the farmhouse in that famous old painting
American Gothic
. You know the one I mean—the constipated old guy with the pitchfork next to the wife who seems mortified by his very presence? These two were those two after they cheered up enough to be worth meeting.

Except, of course, that this couldn’t possibly be happening.

My colleagues unstrapped themselves, lowered the stairway, and disembarked. The tractor driver, whoever he was, emerged from its cab and joined them. George stayed with me, watching my every move, as I proved capable of climbing down a set of three steps without demonstrating my total incapacitation from shock. When my boots crunched lunar gravel—a texture I could feel right through the treads of my boots, and which served at that moment to reconnect me to ordinary physical reality—Carrie, Oscar, and Nikki patted me on the back, a gesture that felt like half-congratulation, and half-commiseration. The driver came by, too; I saw from the markings on his suit that he was Pete Rawlik, who was assigned to some kind of classified biochemical research in one of our outlabs; he had always been too busy to mix much, and I’d met him maybe twice by that point, but he still clapped my shoulder like an old friend. As for George, he made a wait gesture and went back up the steps.

In the thirty seconds we stood there waiting for him, I looked up at the picket fence, just to confirm that the impossible old couple was still there, and I saw that the golden retriever, which had joined its masters at the gate, was barking silently. That was good. If the sound had carried in vacuum, I might have been worried. That would have been just plain crazy.

Then George came back, carrying an airtight metal cylinder just about big enough to hold a soccer ball. I hadn’t seen any vacuum boxes of that particular shape and size before, but any confusion I might have felt about that was just about the last thing I needed to worry about. He addressed the others: “How’s he doing?”

A babble of noncommittal okays dueled for broadcast supremacy. Then the voices resolved into individuals.

Nikki Hollander said: “Well, at least he’s not babbling anymore.”

Oscar Desalvo snorted: “I attribute that to brain-lock.”

“You weren’t any better,” said Carrie Aldrin No Relation. “Worse. If I recall correctly, you made a mess in your suit.”

“I’m not claiming any position of false superiority, hon. Just giving my considered diagnosis.”

“Whatever,” said Pete Rawlik. “Let’s just cross the fenceline, already. I have an itch.”

“In a second,” George said. His mirrored faceplate turned toward mine, aping eye-contact. “Max? You getting this?”

“Barely,” I managed.

“Outstanding. You’re doing fine. But I need you with me a hundred percent while I cover our most important ground rule. Namely—everything inside that picket fence is a temperate-climate, sea-level, terrestrial environment. You don’t have to worry about air filtration, temperature levels, or anything else. It’s totally safe to suit down, as long as you’re inside the perimeter—and in a few minutes, we will all be doing just that. But once you’re inside that enclosure, the picket fence itself marks the beginning of lunar vacuum, lunar temperatures, and everything that implies. You do not, repeat not, do anything to test the differential. Even sticking a finger out between the slats is enough to get you bounced from the program, with no possibility of reprieve. Is that clear?”

“Yes, but—”

“Rule Two,” he said, handing me the sealed metal box. “You’re the new guy. You carry the pie.”

I regarded the cylinder. Pie?

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did.

The instant we passed through the front gate, the dead world this should have been surrendered to a living one. Sound returned between one step and the next. The welcoming cries of the two old people—and the barking of their friendly golden retriever dog—may have been muffled by my helmet, but they were still identifiable enough to present touches of personality. The old man’s voice was gruff in a manner that implied a past flavored by whiskey and cigars, but there was also a singsong quality to it, that instantly manifested itself as a tendency to end his sentences at higher registers. The old woman’s voice was soft and breathy, with only the vaguest suggestion of an old-age quaver and a compensatory tinge of the purest Georgia Peach. The dog’s barks were like little frenzied explosions that might have been threatening if they hadn’t all trailed off into quizzical whines. It was a symphony of various sounds that could be made for hello: laughs, cries, yips, and delighted shouts of “George! Oscar! Nikki! Carrie! Pete! So glad you could make it! How are you?”

It was enough to return me to statue mode. I didn’t even move when the others disengaged their helmet locks, doffed their headgear, and began oohing and aahing themselves. I just spent the next couple of minutes watching, physically in their midst but mentally somewhere very far away, as the parade of impossibilities passed on by. I noted that Carrie Aldrin No Relation, who usually wore her long red hair beneath the tightest of protective nets, was today styled in pigtails with big pink bows; that Oscar, who was habitually scraggly-haired and two days into a beard, was today perfectly kempt and freshly shaven; that George giggled like a five-year-old when the dog stood up on its hind legs to slobber all over his face; and that Pete engaged with a little mock wrestling match with the old man that almost left him toppling backward onto the grass. I saw the women whisper to each other, then bound up the porch steps into the house, so excitedly that they reminded me of schoolgirls skipping off to the playground—a gait that should have been impossible to simulate in a bulky moonsuit, but which they pulled off with perfect flair. I saw Pete and Oscar follow along behind them, laughing at a shared joke.