Alien Contact (38 page)

It was tempting to believe that my kids were right: that it had been a fairy tale: a little harmless personal fantasy I’d been carrying around with me for most of my life.

But I knew it wasn’t.

Because Claire had believed me.

Because whenever I did drag out the old stories one more time, she always said, “I wish I’d known them.” Not like an indulgent wife allowing the old man his delusions, but like a woman well acquainted with miracles. And because even if I was getting too old to always trust my own judgment, nothing would ever make me doubt hers.

I searched with phone calls, with letters, with hytex research, with the calling-in of old favors, with every tool available to me. I found nothing.

And then one day I was told that I didn’t have much more time to look. It wasn’t a tragedy; I’d lived a long and happy life. And it wasn’t as bad as it could have been; I’d been assured that there wouldn’t be much pain. But I did have that one little unresolved question still hanging over my head

That was the day I overcame decades of resistance and booked return passage to the world I had once helped to build.

The day after I spoke to Janine Seuss, I followed her advice and took a commuter tram to the Michael Collins Museum of Early Lunar Settlement. It was a popular tourist spot with all the tableaus and reenactments and, you should only excuse the expression, cheesy souvenirs you’d expect from such an establishment. I’d avoided it up until now mostly because I’d seen and heard most of it before, and much of what was left was the kind of crowd-pleasing foofaraw that tames and diminishes the actual experience I lived through for the consumption of folks who are primarily interested in tiring out their hyperactive kids. The dumbest of those was a pile of real Earth rocks, replacing the weight various early astronauts had taken from the moon; ha ha ha, stop, I’m dying here. The most offensive was a kids’ exhibit narrated by a cartoon-character early development engineer; he spoke with a cornball rural accent, had comic-opera patches on the knees of his moonsuit, and seemed to have an IQ of about five.

Another annoying thing about frontiers: when they’re not frontiers anymore, the civilizations that move in like to think that the people who came first were stupid.

But when I found pictures of myself, in an exhibit on the development programs, and pointed them out to an attendant, it was fairly easy to talk the curators into letting me into their archives for a look at certain other materials that hadn’t seen the light of day for almost twenty years. They were taped interviews, thirty years old now, with a number of the old guys and gals, talking about their experiences in the days of early development: the majority of those had been conducted here on the moon, but others had taken place on Earth or Mars or wherever else any of those old farts ended up. I felt vaguely insulted that they hadn’t tried to contact me; maybe they had, and my wife, anticipating my reluctance, had turned them away. I wondered if I should have felt annoyed by that. I wondered too if my annoyance at the taming of the moon had something to do with the disquieting sensation of becoming ancient history while you’re still alive to remember it.

There were about ten thousand hours of interviews; even if my health remained stable long enough for me to listen to them all, my savings would run out far sooner. But they were indexed, and audio-search is a wonderful thing. I typed in “Minnie” and got several dozen references to small things, almost as many references to Mickey’s rodent girlfriend, and a bunch of stories about a project engineer, from after my time, who had also been blessed with that particular first name. (To believe the transcripts, she spent all her waking hours saying impossibly cute things that her friends and colleagues would remember and be compelled to repeat decades later; what a bloody pixie.) I typed in “Earl” and, though it felt silly, “Miles,” and got a similar collection of irrelevancies—many many references to miles, thus proving conclusively that as recently as thirty years ago the adoption of the metric system hadn’t yet succeeded in wiping out any less-elegant but still fondly remembered forms of measurement. After that, temporarily stuck, I typed in my own name, first and last, and was rewarded with a fine selection of embarrassing anecdotes from folks who recalled what a humorless little pissant I had been way back then. All of this took hours; I had to listen to each of these references, if only for a second or two, just to know for sure what was being talked about, and I confess that, in between a number of bathroom breaks I would have considered unlikely as a younger man, I more than once forgot what I was supposedly looking for long enough to enjoy a few moments with old voices I hadn’t heard for longer than most lunar residents had been alive.

I then cross-referenced by the names of the various people who were along on that first Sunday night trip to Minnie and Earl’s. “George Peterson” got me nothing of obvious value. “Carrie Aldrin” and “Peter Rawlik,” ditto. Nor did the other names. There were references, but nothing I particularly needed.

Feeling tired, I sat there drumming my fingertips on the tabletop. The museum was closing soon. The research had exhausted my limited stores of strength; I didn’t think I could do this many days in a row. But I knew there was something here. There had to be. Even if there was a conspiracy of silence—organized or accidental—the mere existence of that unassuming little house had left too great a footprint on our lives.

I thought about details that Claire had found particularly affecting.

And then I typed “Yams.”

Seventy years ago, suffering from a truly epic sense of dislocation that made everything happening to me seem like bits of stage business performed by actors in a play whose author had taken care to omit all the important exposition, I descended a creaky flight of wooden stairs, to join my colleagues in Minnie and Earl’s living room. I was the last to come down, of course; everybody else was already gathered around the three flowery-print sofas, munching on finger foods as they chatted up a storm. The women were in soft cottony dresses, the men in starched trousers and button-downs. They all clapped and cheered as I made my appearance, a reaction that brought an unwelcome blush to my cheeks. It was no wonder; I was a little withdrawn to begin with, back then, and the impossible context had me so off-center that all my defenses had turned to powder.

It was a homey place, though: brightly lit, with a burning fireplace, an array of glass shelving covered with a selection of home-made pottery, plants and flowers in every available nook, an upright piano, a bar that did not dominate the room, and an array of framed photographs on the wall behind the couch. There was no TV or hytex. I glanced at the photographs and moved toward them, hungry for data.

Then Earl rose from his easy chair and came around the coffee table, with a gruff, “Plenty of time to look around, son. Let me take care of you.”

“That’s—” I said. I was still not managing complete sentences, most of the time.

He took me by the arm, brought me over to the bar, and sat me down on a stool. “Like I said, plenty of time. You’re like most first-timers, you’re probably in dire need of a drink. We can take care of that first and then get acquainted.” He moved around the bar, slung a towel over his shoulder, and said: “What’ll it be, Pilgrim?”

Thank God I recognized the reference. If I hadn’t—if it had just been another inexplicable element of a day already crammed with them—my head would have exploded from the effort of figuring out why I was being called a Pilgrim. “A…Sea of Tranquility?”

“Man after my own heart,” Earl said, flashing a grin as he compiled an impressive array of ingredients in a blender. “Always drink the local drink, son. As my daddy put it, there’s no point in going anywhere if you just get drunk the same way you can at home.—Which is where, by the way?”

I said, “What?”

“You missed the segue. I was asking you where you were from.”

It seemed a perfect opportunity. “You first.”

He chuckled. “Oh, the wife and I been here long enough, you might as well say we’re from here. Great place to retire, isn’t it? The old big blue marble hanging up there all day and all night?”

“I suppose,” I said.

“You suppose,” he said, raising an eyebrow at the concoction taking shape in his blender. “That’s awful noncommittal of you. Can’t you even admit to liking the view?”

“I admit to it,” I said.

“But you’re not enthused. You know, there’s an old joke about a fella from New York and a fella from New Jersey. And the fella from New York is always bragging on his town, talking about Broadway, and the Empire State Building, and Central Park, and so on, and just as often saying terrible things about how ugly things are on the Jersey side of the river. And the fella from Jersey finally gets fed up, and says, ‘All right, I’ve had enough of this, I want you to say one thing, just one thing, about New Jersey that’s better than anything you can say about Manhattan.’ And the fella from New York says, ‘No problem. The view.’”

I didn’t laugh, but I did smile.

“That’s what’s so great about this place,” he concluded. “The view. Moon’s pretty nice to look at for folks on Earth—and a godsend for bad poets, too, what with June-moon-spoon and all—but as views go, it can’t hold a candle to the one we have, looking back. So don’t give me any supposes. Own up to what you think.”

“It’s a great view,” I said, this time with conviction, as he handed me my drink. Then I asked the big question another way: “How did you arrange it?”

“You ought to know better than that, son. We didn’t arrange it. We just took advantage of it. Nothing like a scenic overlook to give zip to your real estate.—So answer me. Where are you from?”

Acutely aware that more than a minute had passed since I’d asked him the same question, and that no answer seemed to be forthcoming, I was also too trapped by simple courtesy to press the issue. “San Francisco.”

He whistled. “I’ve seen pictures of San Francisco. Looks like a beautiful town.”

“It is,” I said.

“You actually climb those hills in Earth gravity?”

“I used to run up Hyde every morning at dawn.”

“Hyde’s the big steep one that heads down to the bay?”

“One of them,” I said.

“And you ran up that hill? At dawn? Every day?”

“Yup.”

“You have a really obsessive personality, don’t you, son?”

I shrugged. “About some things, I suppose.”

“Only about some things?”

“That’s what being obsessive means, right?”

“Ah, well. Nothing wrong about being obsessive, as long as you’re not a fanatic about it. Want me to freshen up that drink?”

I felt absolutely no alcoholic effect at all. “Maybe you better.”

I tried to turn the conversation back to where he was from, but somehow I didn’t get a chance, because that’s when Minnie took me by the hand and dragged me over to the wall of family photos. There were pictures of them smiling on the couch, pictures of them lounging together in the backyard, pictures of them standing proudly before their home. There were a large number of photos that used Earth as a backdrop. Only four photos showed them with other people, all from the last century: in one, they sat at their dining table with a surprised-looking Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin; in another, they sat on their porch swing chatting with Carl Sagan; in a third, Minnie was being enthusiastically hugged by Isaac Asimov; the fourth showed Earl playing the upright piano while Minnie sat beside him and a tall, thin blonde man with androgynous features and two differently colored eyes serenaded them both. The last figure was the only one I didn’t recognize immediately; by the time somebody finally clued me in, several visits later, I would be far too jaded to engage in the spit-take it would have merited any other time.

I wanted to ask Minnie about the photos with the people I recognized, but then Peter and Earl dragged me downstairs to take a look at Earl’s model train set, a rural landscape incorporating four lines and six separate small towns. It was a remarkably detailed piece of work, but I was most impressed with the small miracle of engineering that induced four heavy chains to pull it out of the way whenever Earl pulled a small cord. This handily revealed the pool table. Earl whipped Peter two games out of three, then challenged me; I’m fairly good at pool, but I was understandably off my game that afternoon, and missed every single shot. When Carrie Aldrin No Relation came down to challenge Earl, he mimed terror. It was a genial hour, totally devoted to content-free conversation—and any attempt I made to bring up the questions that burned in my breast was terminated without apparent malice.

Back upstairs. The dog nosing at my hand. Minnie noting that he liked me. Minnie saying anything about the son whose room we’d changed in, the one who’d died “in the war.” A very real heartbreak about the way her eyes grew distant at that moment. I asked which war, and she smiled sadly: “There’s only been one war, dear—and it doesn’t really matter what you call it.” Nikki patting her hand. Oscar telling a mildly funny anecdote from his childhood, Minnie asking him to tell her the one about the next-door neighbors again. I brought up the photo of Minnie and Earl with Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and Minnie clucked that they had been such nice boys.