The Devil's Mirror (16 page)

He slammed down his glass. Scotch spilled all over his desk. ‘And when I ask you to make a few trivial changes in the picture, put in a few short scenes, change a camera angle so as not to conceal nudity—you refuse. Let the lap dog do it, you tell me. To
me
you say that. All right. The lap dog
will
do it. And you are
through
, lady. T-H-R-U, through!’

I didn’t take the same route back to my apartment. I had already had the tour of nostalgia; now I explored the hard realities of the present.

I deliberately drove past L’Exhibition, the club where in-the-flesh sex acts are publicly performed; past Gay Blade, the homo haberdashery built in the shape of a giant erection; past all the other In spots—Cock ’N’ Ball and Pussy In Boots and Suck-You-Lent Snacks and Fladge-Elation and Club ’69 and the Orgasm-West Hotel; past a news-stand selling the updated
Tarzan and Jane
comic books; past the venerable Chinese Theatre, where the cement, they say, used to display merely the
foot
prints of the stars, but which has moved with the times; past the stately Pantages, where the Oscar-winning historical satire,
Victoria Vagina,
is playing (the car radio was treating me to a medley of the current hits:
Finger in the Dyke
and
Whipped Scream
and
It Was Hard When I Kissed Him Goodbye
, and so on, sung by that new group The Groin Gobblers... I switched it off)...

And as I drove, I thought about my future. It would have to be Europe, I supposed. There, in Paris, or maybe Rome, I might escape. Others had done it, artist-expatriates in self-imposed exile from conformity. Bob Morgan, for instance, who quit his publisher when they tried to force him to include a homoincestuous child-molesting scene in his latest novel (a French paperback house finally published it his way); Sue Pevner, the songwriter who refused to write a four-letter lyric for a Broadway musical; Joe Janssen, who started a fist fight with the producer who inserted a defecation scene in his play. They’re all there, quietly working, hoping, biding their time, waiting for the day when they can return, victorious, honoured for their courage. Yes, there I’ll find kindred spirits, brother-and-sisters-in-arms, fearless allies in the war against the censors.

If they haven’t revoked my passport, that is.

How long is an age? How many years in an eon?

Only after the ship had orbited the planet a full three times did Commander Stone, a man of great thoroughness and scant imagination, arrive at a decision. He and his partner had observed optically around the clock. They had checked and re-checked their instrument readings. They had beamed down radio messages, then listened in eager expectation for response. There had been none. And all their instruments confirmed what their eyes had led them to suspect. The planet was totally without life.

There was no question about that. And yet—His partner, the civilian scientist, Dr Amber, had given voice to the Commander’s thoughts as well as his own when he had said, a few moments earlier, ‘But that’s impossible. There
must
be life here. And it must be intelligent, highly advanced, at least as advanced as our own, perhaps more so.’ The Commander had nodded and replied, ‘I know, Doc. But you checked the readings, you watched, you listened, just as I did. Everything tells us this is a dead world.’

‘Everything except the Lights.’

The Lights: pulses of brightness, thrusts of energy, vast, planet-wide, in such precisely coordinated sequence they could not possibly be random, could only be the work of high intelligence. These enormous flashings had been minutely observed and recorded far across the deeps of space by their own scientists back home. Colossal signals, everyone agreed, a giant attempt at communication by a race of superbeings. But the most masterly cryptologists had failed to crack the code. And so a two-man expedition was authorised to journey to the World of Lights (as the journalists had come to call it) and make first-hand contact with its inhabitants.

‘Doc,’ said the Commander, ‘do
you
see any Lights?’

‘Not now. There seems to be nothing down there, I agree. But there
were
Lights. You saw them. The whale world saw them. Do you want me to play the tapes for you again?’

‘I know them by heart.’

‘Then what are we going to do, Commander? It’s your decision.’

It was. There was no way out of it. They would have to land.

After they were securely suited and strapped, and the ship, straight as a plumb line, was making its majestic descent to the surface of the alien planet, Dr Amber voiced a suspicion. ‘It could be a trap,’ he said.

The words were cold in the Commander’s helmet phones. He said, ‘I don’t follow you.’

‘Suppose a race of advanced beings—so
far
advanced we couldn’t even begin to imagine the range and scope of their knowledge—wanted to study some specimens of life from our world? They arouse our curiosity with awesome, cryptic signals, to lure us to their planet...’

‘You’re forgetting. There’s no one down there.’

‘No one our instruments can detect.’

‘Doc, you’re the scientist on this mission. Do I have to tell
you
how sensitive our instruments are? How they can hear a heartbeat a thousand miles away, feel body heat, sniff out the presence of protoplasm, detect impulses from living brains?’

‘Thanks for the popular science course. But what about a life form that can control its own brain impulses, heartbeats, and all other vital signs, temporarily stop them by a kind of ultra-bio-feedback—and do it as easily as you can hold your breath?’

‘How about holding
your
breath, Doc?’ the Commander said, not unkindly.

Dr Amber chuckled. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I guess I
was
wasting air.’

They both remained silent while the ship completed its descent. The landing took place by the book, without incident, and Commander Stone was the first to set foot on the World of Lights. Dr Amber followed immediately.

They stood near their ship for long moments, looking about. On all sides, flat, sterile wasteland stretched to the horizon. There was not a tree, not a blade of grass in sight. The Commander put it in a single word: ‘Barren.’

Dr Amber grunted in agreement. ‘But we’d best have a look around,’ he added.

They began to walk away from their ship, with floating steps, for the gravity of this small world was somewhat less than that of their own.

‘What’s that?’ said the Commander, pointing to a shining something on the ground in the middle distance.

‘Looks like it could be a piece of—’ Dr Amber’s reply was sliced off as their eyes were filled with a flash of soundless light that blinded them for many minutes. A shock wave threw them to the ground.

When they recovered the use of their eyes, they turned quickly in all directions, looking desperately at the empty landscape.

‘The ship,’ said Commander Stone. ‘Where’s the ship?’

The Commander died first. Dr Amber survived him by a few minutes. He spent almost the entirety of that short, lonely time, talking. He was a scientist, and he could not break himself of the habit of making notes, even in his last moments of life. He knew the chances were billions to one that anyone would ever hear his tape, but still he kept talking, until the final atom of air was consumed and he joined the Commander in eternity.

Their bodies lie there still, on that harsh planet, the positions unchanged since the moment of their deaths. Inside Dr Amber’s suit is still a reel of tape, magnetically inscribed with his voice, waiting for some one to bring it to audible life. If that someone were ever to appear, he would hear Dr Amber say, in laboured, increasingly more feeble tones... ‘... original findings were correct, after all. The planet
is
without life. Except for me. And I’ll be dead soon. Even that hypothetical life form I suggested to the Commander—able to control its own vital signs and deceive our instruments—even that doesn’t exist. No life at all...

‘But once, a very clever race lived here. Built the machines. Authored the words on the metal tablet we found. Explained a lot of things. The rest, pieced together myself. Only machines left now. Underground. Self-sustaining, self-repairing, self-perpetuating. Could last... forever. Probably will. Every nation had them. Programmed for defence. Eliminate all foreign air traffic. The nation’s own aircraft electronically coded to allow safe landings. Annihilate all other craft, missiles... everything airborne over a certain weight... with flashes of amplified light. Those were the “signals” we saw... blasting stray meteorites, most likely. Machines still on the job... no one to shut them off. Maybe they
can’t
be shut off... doomsday device. Destroyed our ship. But why only after landing. Why not in the air? Don’t know... unless it was our vertical landing from far outside the planet’s gravitational field... unlike horizontal or parabolic flight patterns of craft from other nations... machines not programmed for landing like ours, from outer space... no early warning...

‘Languages... on that tablet... not too difficult to translate. Wondered about that... until I realised... primitive forms... of our language... this planet... World of Lights... our ancestral home... distant forefathers came from
here
... how long ago? How can it be measured? How long is an age? How many years in an eon? But they were of our race... their blood flows in my... dying veins. It’s not much of a planet... small, mostly water, only one moon... but they must have loved it in their... perverse way. Because... just like us... they named their world after the soil. Their ancient words for soil... the stuff the worlds are made of... stamped on this tablet in many of their languages... TERRE, TERRA, TIERRA, ERDE, EARTH...’

A young man with a face smooth as an olive, an older man with seamed and stubbled features; Croydon the name of the one, Stark the name of the other; together they charted the foreign worlds that floated like random pebbles in black and loveless space.

The younger man, Croydon, spoke after a long silence: ‘What’s the score?’

‘Let’s see...’ Stark sighed and studied the clipboard. ‘Eight moons explored. Of these, five support sentient life. Of the five, three are benevolent, two malignant.’ He hung the clipboard above the control panel. ‘That leaves three moons to go.’

Croydon asked, ‘Want to knock off for the day?’

Stark thoughtfully massaged the grey sandpaper of his face. ‘No, they’re small moons. Let’s get ’em out of the way.’

‘I’m game.’ Croydon guided the ship towards Moon Nine. ‘Eleven moons—that’s a lot to cover in two days.’

Stark nodded, then yawned widely. ‘A lot. But we’ll never be too fast for the Colonial Bureau. They have a list of prospective settlers a mile long. We barely get a chance to clear a planet before the first colony starts to spring up. Moons are always a pain in the neck. Gravel, I call ’em. They really slow up the report.’

Croydon frowned and studied the shifting lights of his navigation chart. ‘I’ll say they do do,’ he replied. ‘It drives me crazy trying to keep track of them in their orbits.’

‘Reminds me of the old Saturn run.’

‘The Saturn run!’ said Croydon. ‘That’s to hell and gone back in the home galaxy, isn’t it? God, that must have been twenty, twenty-five years ago!’

Stark grunted. ‘Thirty years. Before you were born. I was eighteen when I started. But nothing’s changed except the names of the planets. The pay was as rotten then as it is now.’

‘Maybe so,’ grinned Croydon, adding with a touch of smugness, ‘but the old-timers only had those little one-horse worlds to deal with. Ever explore a planet like
this
before? A planet with eleven moons?’

‘Hell, I was assigned to the planet Orestes in System K when I was a kid. It’s got
twenty
moons! And back then we didn’t have this gadget to help us.’ His pressure suit hung within reach and he tapped the insect-iike antennae on the helmet.

‘The Probe certainly saves a lot of time,’ Croydon agreed. ‘As well as lives.’

He brought the ship to a smooth landing on Moon Nine. The two men pulled on their pressure suits and stepped out. Moon Nine was small, with little gravity. Automatically, their suits adjusted to the situation and supplied enough artificial gravity to make up for the lack.

Their heavy-booted feet sank into spongy soil. Croydon dug up a piece of it and put it in his sample case. ‘Couldn’t grow anything here. I’m afraid,’ he mumbled.

Stark heard him over his helmet-phones and growled, ‘Not a chance. But the fools will come here and live in pressure cabins and irrigate the whole damn moon with chemicals and try to raise a few weeds just the same. They’re crazy. Just because they can buy a moon for a few hundred bucks they think they’re lords of creation. Of course,’ he added, ‘if a man were lucky enough to buy himself a moon loaded with precious rock...’

‘
Look
!’ said Croydon.

Stark looked. Perched on a mound of the sponge-like soil was a woman. She was smiling and flexing a richly curved naked body. Her eyes flashed, if not with love precisely then at least with unmistakable invitation.

Stark heard his young companion chuckle, ‘I’d pay a couple of hundred for
this
moon any day: it has a built-in harem!’ Croydon started to walk towards her.

‘Don’t be a fool, lad,’ Stark said sharply. ‘Turn on your Probe.’ Both men touched buttons on their helmets and felt their minds go out to the delicious siren and burrow into her thoughts. What they found there made them stop suddenly.

HATE! Overwhelming hostility. And hunger: a strong, raging hunger for flesh.

Stark pulled out his blaster and burned a hole through the smiling charmer’s chest. The thing that thrashed in agony on the ground was a slimy obscenity with no eyes and monstrous jaws that gaped but did not smile. Another blast and it was dead.

‘Chalk up another moon with malignant inhabitants,’ said Stark.

Croydon’s voice was unsteady: ‘Let’s get back to the ship.’

Inside the ship, they climbed out of their suits. Croydon’s face was pale. ‘What’s wrong kid?’ Stark laughed. ‘You’ve had close shaves before.’