Alien Contact (41 page)

Eventually, I came to the same conclusion George had; the only conclusion that was possible under the circumstances. It was a genuine phenomenon, that conclusion: a community of skeptics and rationalists and followers of the scientific method deciding that there were some things Man was having too good a time to know. Coming to think of Minnie and Earl as family didn’t take much longer than that. For the next three years, until I left for my new job in the outer system, I went out to their place at least once, sometimes twice a week; I shot pool with Earl and chatted about relatives back home with Minnie; I’d tussled with Miles and helped with the dishes and joined them for long all-nighters talking about nothing in particular. I learned how to bake with the limited facilities we had at Base, so I could bring my own cookies to her feasts. I came to revel in standing on a creaky front porch beneath a bug lamp, sipping grape juice as I joined Minnie in yet another awful rendition of “Anatevka.” Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune. I came to think of Minnie and Earl as the real reason we were on the moon, and I came to understand one of the major reasons we were all so bloody careful to keep it a secret—because the needy masses of Earth, who were at that point still agitating about all the time and money spent on the space program, would not have been mollified by the knowledge that all those billions were being spent, in part, so that a few of the best and the brightest could indulge themselves in sing-alongs and wiener dog cookouts.

I know it doesn’t sound much like a frontier. It wasn’t, not inside the picket fence. Outside, it remained dangerous and backbreaking work. We lost five separate people while I was there; two to blowouts, one to a collapsing crane, one to a careless tumble off a crater rim, and one to suicide (she, alas, had not been to Minnie and Earl’s yet). We had injuries every week, shortages every day, and crises just about every hour. Most of the time, we seemed to lose ground—and even when we didn’t, we lived with the knowledge that all of our work and all of our dedication could be thrown in the toilet the first time there was a political shift back home. There was no reason for any of us to believe that we were actually accomplishing what we were there to do—but somehow, with Minnie and Earl there, hosting a different group every night, it was impossible to come to any other conclusion. They liked us. They believed in us. They were sure that we were worth their time and effort. And they expected us to be around for a long, long time…just like they had been.

I suppose that’s another reason why I was so determined to find them now. Because I didn’t know what it said about the people we’d become that they weren’t around keeping us company anymore.

I was in a jail cell for forty-eight hours once. Never mind why; it’s a stupid story. The cell itself wasn’t the sort of thing I expected from movies and television; it was brightly lit, free of vermin, and devoid of any steel bars to grip obsessively while cursing the guards and bemoaning the injustice that had brought me there. It was just a locked room with a steel door, a working toilet, a clean sink, a soft bed, and absolutely nothing else. If I had been able to come and go at will it might have been an acceptable cheap hotel room. Since I was stuck there, without anything to do or anybody to talk to, I spent those forty-eight hours going very quietly insane.

The habitat module of Walter Stearns was a lot like that cell, expanded to accommodate a storage closet, a food locker, and a kitchenette; it was that stark, that empty. There were no decorations on the walls, no personal items, no hytex or music system I could see, nothing to read and nothing to do. It lost its charm for me within thirty seconds. Stearns had been living there for sixteen years: a self-imposed prison sentence that might have been expiation for the sin of living past his era.

The man himself moved with what seemed glacial slowness, like a wind-up toy about to stop and fall over. He dragged one leg, but if that was a legacy of a stroke—and an explanation for why he chose to live as he did—there was no telltale slur to his speech to corroborate it. Whatever the reason might have been, I couldn’t help regarding him with the embarrassed pity one old man feels toward another the same age who hasn’t weathered his own years nearly as well.

He accepted my proffered can of yams with a sour grin and gave me a mug of some foul-smelling brown stuff in return. Then he poured some for himself and shuffled to the edge of his bed and sat down with a grunt. “I’m not a hermit,” he said, defensively.

“I didn’t use the word,” I told him.

“I didn’t set out to be a hermit,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Nobody sets out to be a hermit. Nobody turns his back on the damned race unless he has some reason to be fed up. I’m not fed up. I just don’t know any alternative. It’s the only way I know to let the moon be the moon.”

He sipped some of the foul-smelling brown stuff and gestured for me to do the same. Out of politeness, I sipped from my own cup. It tasted worse than it smelled, and had a consistency like sand floating in vinegar. Somehow I didn’t choke. “Let the moon be the moon?”

“They opened a casino in Shepardsville. I went to see it. It’s a big luxury hotel with a floor show; trained white tigers jumping through flaming hoops for the pleasure of a pretty young trainer in a spangled bra and panties. The casino room is oval-shaped, and the walls are alive with animated holography of wild horses running around and around and around and around, without stop, twenty-four hours a day. There are night clubs with singers and dancers, and an amusement park with rides for the kids. I sat there and I watched the gamblers bent over their tables and the barflies bent over their drinks and I had to remind myself that I was on the moon—that just being here at all was a miracle that would have had most past civilizations consider us gods. But all these people, all around me, couldn’t feel it. They’d built a palace in a place where no palace had ever been and they’d sucked all the magic and all the wonder all the way out of it.” He took a deep breath, and sipped some more of his contemptible drink. “It scared me. It made me want to live somewhere where I could still feel the moon, being the moon. So I wouldn’t be some useless…relic who didn’t know where he was half the time.”

The self-pity had wormed its way into his voice so late that I almost didn’t catch it. “It must get lonely,” I ventured.

“Annnh. Sometimes I put on my moonsuit and go outside, just to stand there. It’s so silent there that I can almost hear the breath of God. And I remember that it’s the moon—the moon, dammit. Not some five-star hotel. The moon. A little bit of that and I don’t mind being a little lonely the rest of the time. Is that crazy? Is that being a hermit?”

I gave the only answer I could. “I don’t know.”

He made a hmmmph noise, got up, and carried his mug over to the sink. A few moments cleaning and refilling it and he returned, his lips curled into a half-smile, his eyes focused on some far-off time and place. “The breath of God,” he murmured.

“Yams,” I prompted.

“You caught that, huh? Been a while since somebody caught that. It’s not the sort of thing people catch unless they were there. Unless they remember her.”

“Was that by design?”

“You mean, was it some kind of fiendish secret code? Naah. More like a shared joke. We knew by then that nobody would believe us if we actually talked about Minnie and Earl. They were that forgotten. So we dropped yams into our early-settlement stories. A little way of saying, hey, we remember the old lady. She sure did love to cook those yams.”

“With her special seasoning.” I said. “And those rolls she baked.”

“Uh-huh.” He licked his lips, and I almost fell into the trap of considering that unutterably sad…until I realized that I was doing the same thing. “Used to try to mix one of Earl’s special cocktails, but I never could get them right. Got all the ingredients. Mixed ’em the way he showed me. Never got ’em to taste right. Figure he had some kind of technological edge he wasn’t showing us. Real alien superscience, applied to bartending. Or maybe I just can’t replace the personality of the bartender. But they were good drinks. I’ve got to give him that.”

We sat together in silence for a while, each lost in the sights and sounds of a day long gone. After a long time, I almost whispered it: “Where did they go, Walter?”

His eyes didn’t focus: “I don’t know where they are. I don’t know what happened to them.”

“Start with when you last visited them.”

“Oh, that was years and years and years ago.” He lowered his head and addressed the floor. “But you know how it is. You have relatives, friends, old folks very important to you. Folks you see every week or so, folks who become a major part of who you are. Then you get busy with other things and you lose touch. I lost touch when the settlement boom hit, and there was always some other place to be, some other job that needed to be done; I couldn’t spare one night a week gabbing with old folks just because I happened to love them. After all, they’d always be there, right? By the time I thought of looking them up again, it turned out that everybody else had neglected them too. There was no sign of the house and no way of knowing how long they’d been gone.”

I was appalled. “So you’re saying that Minnie and Earl moved away because of…neglect?”

“Naaah. That’s only why they didn’t say goodbye. I don’t think it has a damn thing to do with why they moved away; just why we didn’t notice. I guess that’s another reason why nobody likes to talk about them. We’re all just too damn ashamed.”

“Why do you think they moved, Walter?”

He swallowed another mouthful of his vile brew, and addressed the floor some more, not seeing me, not seeing the exile he’d chosen for himself, not seeing anything but a tiny little window of his past. “I keep thinking of that casino,” he murmured. “There was a rotating restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. Showed you the landscape, with all the billboards and amusement parks—and above it all, in the place where all the advertisers hope you’re going to forget to look, Mother Earth herself. It was a burlesque and it was boring. And I also keep thinking of that little house, out in the middle of nowhere, with the picket fence and the golden retriever dog…and the two sweet old people…and the more I compare one thought to the other the more I realize that I don’t blame them for going away. They saw that, on the moon we were building, they wouldn’t be miraculous anymore.”

“They had a perfectly maintained little environment—”

“We have a perfectly maintained little environment. We have parks with grass. We have roller coasters and golf courses. We have people with dogs. We even got rotating restaurants and magic acts with tigers. Give us a few more years up here and we’ll probably work out some kind of magic trick to do away with the domes and the bulkheads and keep in an atmosphere with nothing but a picket fence. We’ll have houses like theirs springing up all over the place. The one thing we don’t have is the moon being the moon. Why would they want to stay here?” His voice, which had been rising throughout his little tirade, rose to a shriek with that last question; he hurled his mug against the wall, but it was made of some indestructible ceramic that refused to shatter. It just tumbled to the floor, and skittered under the bunk, spinning in place just long enough to mock him for his empty display of anger. He looked at me, focused, and let me know with a look that our audience was over. “What would be left for them?”

I searched some more, tracking down another five or six oldsters still capable of talking about the old days, as well as half a dozen children or grandchildren of same willing to speak to me about the memories the old folks had left behind, but my interview with Walter Stearns was really the end of it; by the time I left his habitat, I knew that my efforts were futile. I saw that even those willing to talk to me weren’t going to be able to tell me more than he had…and I turned out to be correct about that. Minnie and Earl had moved out, all right, and there was no forwarding address to be had.