Among the abductees, it would have been hard to say who was more convinced that he or she was dreaming.
Consider Margaret Burch.
The sight of the most disruptive crackpot ever to show his face in one of her classes now in command of a . . . rocket ship, like on one of those silly TV programs, made the question, “Is this real?” not worth her consideration. True, she was experiencing what seemed to be genuine pain in her lower back and upper left buttock, ostensibly from having been slammed twice into the rocket ship’s window. But could not her sciatica have returned in the night? That was, to say the least, more plausible. Nevertheless, she resolved to stop pinching and slapping herself. Instead she would allow the hallucination to run its course, while noting its every detail. That way, a psychologist could later explain why she had had a dream of this type, and how she could avoid ever having one again.
Melody, by contrast, had no doubt why her dream had taken the form it had. Indeed, she had thought of Marshall Shmishkiss so much since the day he turned up at her workplace, she would have been surprised if she hadn’t started dreaming about him.
Marshall Shmishkiss was the sole reason she had still not committed herself fully to the most amazing guy she had ever met: a guy who did not hesitate, a mere two weeks after they started dating, to introduce her to his family in their penthouse overlooking Central Park; a guy who chose to do his art and work in the prescreening office rather than take his father’s money and go to business school. A guy, in short, with integrity. So why, no matter how she framed it, did Grant McAllister not seem to understand that they had brought humiliation on someone who had done nothing to deserve it? Why, on the contrary, did he keep on crowing about it at the parties they went to, as if it were something to be proud of?
“When that clown showed up in our office,” he would tell everyone, “the way he was staring at Melody? Oh man, it was priceless.”
Marshall Shmishkiss had even caused Melody to wonder about herself. Why had she agreed to string along a deluded person? Why had she imagined that no harm would come of it?
So didn’t it make sense that, in a dream, Marshall Shmishkiss would be as wonderful to her as she had been cruel to him? That he would save her from an assailant twice his size? That he would turn out not to be deluded but a person who actually got taken and now commanded a spaceship?
Well, it made a kind of dream sense.
Maybe?
Possibly?
As for Ethan, he too could readily explain the phantasm in which he found himself. For after all, Marshall Shmishkiss might have remained alive had he, Ethan, been the friend Marshall Shmishkiss required. So if dreams were wish fulfillments, as some believed, then didn’t it make sense that now, in his dream, Marshall would be a success whose crazy ambition had led him not down but up?
And indeed, the Marshall who Ethan now observed was an ascended version of the crumpled, cornered soul who had reached out to him a few months ago. For one thing, this Marshall was thinner. For another, he didn’t wear glasses. But mainly, he was in charge. Moving confidently among the instrument panels, he was activating each with deft assurance, then assigning one of the people here to operate it and showing them how to do it.
The tall, severe-looking woman in the nightgown, for example, got communications; the much younger woman in the sexy underwear got sensors; while the huge Russian got, of course, weapons.
Then it was his turn. “Over here, my friend,” said Marshall, guiding him to a console centered on the main viewscreen. “We’d be lost without someone as bright as you to handle this one.
“Navigation,” he explained, bringing the apparatus to life with a skillful application of his fingers. Ethan looked on closely, for he knew what this console would show him: namely, final, irrefutable proof that this was an illusion.
He knew this from his work as a science writer. For he too, like Marshall, had researched lucid dreaming and had thereby learned of a technique a sleeper could use to determine that he was, in fact, asleep. The trick was to focus on a book or a magazine or a computer monitor like this console. A dream would then reveal itself, since the sleeping brain could not generate long strings of numbers or words that stayed the same when read a second time.
And true to what he suspected—what he all but definitely knew—the navigation console showed nothing that a sleeping brain would have trouble with.
On the contrary, it displayed only the following big, bold and easy-to-reread words:
LEFT. RIGHT. UP. DOWN. FORWARD. BACK. A LITTLE. A LOT.
“You press the last two immediately after any of the others to increase or decrease its effect,” said Marshall. “Any questions?”
Ethan gazed sadly into the familiar, trusting face. “Look, I know it isn’t you,” he said. “But as I mentioned before, there may be an opportunity for healing in all this. And if there is, it’s that I get to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Marshall. I am so, so sorry.”
* * *
Marshall hissed inwardly. “I am trying to remain positive and inspirational," he thought. "But you are making it none too easy.”
“We’ll get to that in a moment,” came the reply. “First we need to make another adjustment. Don't struggle. Just let us through.”
And once again he felt his body being commandeered by a will not his own, as it had been every time he led a crew member to the console they were to oversee. This time he went to a wall panel, which sprang to life, displaying images and symbols as he approached.
These images and symbols, however, were completely unlike the others. No ludicrous labels here, like UP, DOWN and BIG MISSILE. These markings were elaborate, dense, profoundly alien. And with unpracticed dexterity he raced his fingers across them, entering information and initiating commands.
Then he switched the panel back off and regained control of his arms as they dropped to his sides.
“All right. What are you complaining about now?” said Oobla.
“That!” He pointed at the wall. “That’s a real control panel. You—someone—just did something.”
“Course correction, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about? How are we to prevail in this challenge of yours if we have no real idea how to use our equipment?”
“You expect us to teach a band of semis the details of trans-dimensional tunneling? The minutiae of gravity field modulation? The fine points of light-speed marksmanship?”
“At least show us something more than UP, DOWN and BIG MISSILE.”
“But that would take days, and by then we’d be very bored and have to be figuring out methods of feeding you and providing for your sleep and hygiene.”
“But you’re going to have to do that anyway,” he thought, facing the wall panel so as to hide any expressions that might leak from his face. “It’ll take hours to reach Earth, I’m pretty sure, and within that time frame human beings generally require—”
“Now who said anything about going to Earth?”
His face started leaking expressions, none of them pleasant.
“You did!”
“What we did? What happening, Shmeeshkees?”
Realizing he had spoken out loud, Marshall turned to find Aleksei and the others scrutinizing him from their stations. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s OK. I’m attempting to, uh, negotiate with a supply ship.” He turned back to the wall. “You assured me we’d have a real opportunity to succeed.”
“And so you will, by surmounting your challenge. After that you will get everything we promised. But who specified where that challenge is to take place?”
Marshall stopped protesting, since of course she was right. He'd been told nothing about location, had simply assumed that victory would entail bursting into Earth orbit and firing BIG MISSILE, A LOT at the Zetan vessel.
But why couldn’t they triumph some other way? And why couldn’t the Zetans, once they had lost, dismantle their Earth facility on their own?
Oobla waited as he realized this, then continued. “And how would it make any difference if we did give you greater control? Look around. Your crew isn’t even taking advantage of what they have.”
Was she right? Marshall looked around, but could see no evidence of it. At each of the consoles, a person from his past seemed to be following his instructions to the letter.
“They’re not?” he asked.
“The young female, for example.”
He went over to Melody. From a distance she appeared to be staring off into space. Only at closer range could he tell that she was, just not the space she was supposed to be staring off into.
On her console, a cartoon image of their ship and the stars around it was going entirely unsupervised.
Moreover, one of the cartoon stars, if that’s what it was, was behaving quite unlike the others, moving rapidly on a course that would soon intersect their own.
“Uh, Melody?”
She looked at him, her eyes brimming. “That you would actually risk your life to save me, after what I did to you, what is that telling me? What does it say about him? That he uses people? That because of all the money he grew up with, he has no empathy? Maybe his dad’s right about the whole artist shtick being a way to avoid adulthood.”
“I don’t know, Melody. But the thing is, that’s not really what we need to be focusing on right now.”
“You’re right. You’re right! It’s about focus. I’ve lost my focus. I’ve fallen for a lot of superficial shit when I’m supposed to be falling for someone like . . .”
She looked up at him, and all of a sudden the misbehaving dot on her screen had vanished. Oobla also. Everything had receded save for a lightly freckled face and two gorgeous, tearful eyes.
Could it really happen? Could someone like her ever…
If he was motivated to succeed before, he was a thousand times more motivated now.
But what sort of test was it going to be? And when was it going to—?
The answer arrived in the next moment, in the form of a lurch so violent it made everything in the room double, triple, quintuple even. Or maybe everything did double, triple and quintuple, since he didn’t actually move until the return lurch, when everything snapped back into singularity. Then he went tumbling into the empty area in front of the viewscreen, where he landed along with everyone else, all similarly upheaved, both from their stations and the comforting certainty that had buffered them so far.
“What my brain doing!?” cried Aleksei. “Ees dream or no?”
“I must admit I am no longer certain,” grimaced Margaret Burch, nursing a sore hand. “Though we do seem to have landed unusually gently, given the force of the jolt.”
“Unusually gently,” echoed Ethan in an effort to calm himself.
Melody, meanwhile, was crawling resolutely away.
“Nyet, no, not necessary,” called Aleksei after her. “Eef no dream, I never bothering woman.”
“That’s not why I’m over here,” she said, hauling herself back into her chair. “This was my fault. I’m the one on sensors, after all. So I’d better start sensing.”
“What do you see?” asked Marshall.
“Nothing,” she said, checking her console. “It’s gone blank. Maybe it’s . . . ” She rapped on it, then looked up at the main viewer and froze.
The others froze, too.
* * *
For they were seeing nothing but whiteness: the glare of a structure so vast and close that only part of it could be observed at one time.
Melody tapped the commands VIEW and FARTHER AWAY and A LOT until the object fit the screen. Now it looked like an aircraft carrier, in that it had a flat top section which protruded from a backward-sloping bottom section. Though it might have fared poorly in water due to the small holes that ran along its base.
Maybe the challenge, thought Marshall, was to prove that human beings could rise above the urge to panic or lash out in a crisis.
He had, however, only begun to compose a polite, nonconfrontational greeting for the other vessel, when one of its holes gave off a small red spark.
* * *
The worst part of having one’s ship pummeled a second time was not that the wall panel exploded or even that acrid smoke billowed from the ruined equipment.
The worst part was the change this produced in the crew.
They converged on Marshall, backing him first into a console and then onto it, so that he was staring up into a quartet of faces—angry, frightened and utterly confused.
“Thees no dream. You tell us what happening or we keel you right now.”
“Marshall, it's got something to do with that website, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve had just about enough of your antics, Mr. Michelin. Teaching evening classes should not result in this.”
Until that moment, Marshall had let his companions hide behind the notion that they were dreaming—and for good reason. That notion had saved his life. And would save everyone except him a lot of needless upset should they fail to meet the Blurggit challenge.
But what was he to tell them now? That dead fish hoped to get a rejuvenating thrill by co-experiencing their predicament? How could he arrange his words to prevent wild panic from blotting out any chance this little group could work together and succeed?
There was, however, no alternative. He had to try.
So he did. Sort of like a nervous parent revealing the facts of life.
“Well, uh, you see, certain beings on certain worlds, when they get very old, need help entertaining themselves, and sometimes they reach out to . . .”
And he would have gone on in this manner, gently unveiling reality, had Aleksei only let him.
But Aleksei didn’t.
“Never mind, Shmeeshkees. You tell us! Where we are. Why we are.” He brandished a finger at the viewscreen. “Who ees? If situation hopeless, never mind. You tell us.”
“No! The situation definitely isn’t hopeless!” he answered with as much earnest emphasis as possible. “You see, the whole purpose of the situation is not to be hopeless.”
He then tried to explain that the aliens who had put them in this predicament would never have done so if there was no way out of it. On the contrary, these aliens, who were observing them at every moment, were counting on them to do something exciting, creative, surprising. Which was all they had to do to save themselves and, by the way, the Earth as well.
And meanwhile, the four faces stared down at him—faces whose bewilderment only grew as he spoke.
He grasped for evidence. How about the cube? The hovering cube would surely demonstrate that someone—someone advanced—was watching them. But when he looked about, he could no longer find it. So . . . what about the wall panel? “Did you see me operating that?” he cried, indicating with his jaw the smoldering remains on the other side of the bridge. “Did you see how fast my hands were moving? I’m sure, if you did, you wondered, ‘How can he do that?’ Well, actually, I can’t. But there’s this alien, you see. She speaks directly into my brain and—”
“Nyet, I cannot stand any more!” exploded Aleksei, clamping a hand around Marshall’s throat.
“No!” screamed Melody, clamping her own hands atop the Russian’s and pulling futilely.
But Margaret Burch was more effective. Speaking calmly, as she always advised her students to in an emergency, she said, “Count to ten, sir. Count to ten. Now take a deep breath. We all share your sentiment, I am sure. But consider where it will lead us. With him we have idiocy, true. But without him we have nothing.”
“Nothing,” repeated Ethan, who seemed too dazed to say or do anything more.
“Nothing,” croaked Marshall desperately.
“Da,” said Aleksei, releasing his grip. “OK, I no care. Say more stupid thing, Shmeeshkees. Go on, say.”
“All right, thank you,” gasped Marshall, who then took a few moments simply to breathe. “But please understand,” he resumed, “when I communicate with this alien, she may take some convincing before she agrees to—”
“Fine,” snapped Burch. “No need for the preamble. Just do it.”
“All right, then,” said Marshall. “Oobla?” he called out interiorly. “Oobla?
“Oobla!”
“Marshall? Marshall? Is that you calling? Please be patient, Marshall. We were just seeing Igglbligg off to his vat.”
“Off to his . . .? Oh, never mind. Just listen to me. It would be enormously helpful, Oobla, if you want my crew to behave with the, uh, zest and gusto you’re expecting from them, if you would help me convince them that they have, as you have always so firmly maintained, a chance of success.
“Oobla?”
He had expected cooperation. Or exasperated noncooperation. But when, after a few seconds, he heard from her again, it was in a tone she had never taken with him before.
A tone of . . . could it be?
Remorse?
Regret?
“Marshall, we so wish we could accommodate you.”
“But you can, Oobla. Of course you can. You could, uh, send them a message through a console or—”
“It’s those Zetans, Marshall.”
“What?”
“Those, pardon me, slime-in-the-muck Zetans! You have to understand: we negotiated every detail. We paid them a sizable fraction of our savings. They know precisely what they agreed to, and let me tell you, there will be a reckoning. Even now, we are contacting our lawyers. When we emerge again, we will meet with them. In two or three centuries, there will be a hearing. And within the next millennium, let me assure you, those smog breathers will find themselves on the wrong side of a substantial judgment.”
“But what does his have to do with us? With our chances of—”
“Marshall, have you not been looking out your viewscreen?”
“Of course I have.”
“Then what do you see?”
“A very large—”
“Very large? My homeworld! It’s a quasar class destroyer, for creek’s sake; you can’t fight that. A lightly armored escort, maybe. A recently decommissioned micro-marauder, perhaps. But that!? It’s completely . . .”
But Marshall was no longer paying attention. He was back with his fellow humans, who seemed alarmed, perhaps due to the expression on his face. Valiantly he tried to remold it into one of hopeful optimism, even while wrestling with Oobla’s words.
“Is what you’re telling me, then, that we have no chance at all?” he asked her.
“None whatsoever, haven’t you been listening?” she said. “Put it this way: You could fire off everything you have. You could aim it at the central point of their hull—the part that covers their antimatter fuel. You could detonate every weapon simultaneously, at the optimum moment. You wouldn’t even ripple their force field.”
“Then get us out of here!” he screamed inwardly, while trying to wrench his lips into an encouraging smile.
A few tense seconds passed, and when she responded, her tone had changed yet again.
“Marshall, I don’t think you understand. We are all very weary. We have squandered more of our remaining enthusiasm on this one emergence than we would have on this one and the next one and probably the next hundred if you hadn’t come along. We cannot endure any more of it, Marshall. So please, I beg you, have some consideration. Enough of these demands.”
“But . . . what are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. Tilt your bridge towards the next missile they fire. Then you won’t suffer in your final moments.”
And with that, silence returned to Marshall’s brain, save for his own whirling thoughts.
“Oobla?
“Oobla?
“OOBLAAAAAAAA!!!”
“Who that? Who Oobla? What Oobla? You say, ‘Oobla.' Tell us about Oobla or we—”
He had never been so happy to be hit by an antimatter torpedo in his life.
* * *
This time, the incoming weapon tore off one of the battered ship’s winglike structures, sending the rest of it into a tumbling spin. The gravity generator, one of whose roles was to shield the crew from shocks, worked bravely to shield it from this one, but as before could not totally compensate for the violence of the attack. With the result that human beings floated and fell. All landed softly, though, except for Marshall, who had started off bent backwards on a console. From that unfortunate position he was catapulted into the viewscreen, then crumpled at its base.
With a cry, Melody rushed over and knelt beside him. While Ethan hovered behind her, agonizing at the sight of his slack-jawed friend.
But Burch, from her station, called them back.
“We will attend to him later,” she said. “For now, something here demands our attention.”
And soon everyone who could had gathered around her console, on which big bright words were flashing.
TOUCH TO RECEIVE NEW MESSAGE!
“My guess,” said Burch, “is that this comes from”—she indicated the viewscreen—“whatever that is we're looking at. If we receive its message, then maybe we can send back one of our own, establishing that we mean no harm and sparing ourselves further harassment.”
“Da. Good,” said Aleksei.
“I will touch it, then?”
Everyone agreed.
Except Marshall, that is, who groaned.
* * *
No one heard him, though, since by then he had crawled back into the duct. Was he hurt? Definitely. His left elbow throbbed where it had struck the viewscreen. But he was fully awake, his elbow having shielded the rest of him.
He had feigned unconsciousness, however, and then made for the duct, as the only way to avoid the excitable Aleksei.
So he lay there and listened and groaned. Groaned because he knew perfectly well what would happen when his crewmates opened the communications link with the other ship. Groaned because he could do nothing to stop them.
What would they see? The teaspoon eyes? The unmoving mouths? Or perhaps the creatures underneath. It would make no difference. He readied himself for the screams, the fainting falls, as person after person succumbed to horror and hopelessness.
And, indeed, in the seconds after Burch activated the link, Aleksei did lose his footing.
Though not because he'd fainted.
Rather, because of something quite different.
Aleksei was laughing so hard he couldn’t stand up.
While the others, they were laughing too, and almost as uncontrollably: sometimes doubling over, sometimes pointing at the viewscreen.
Leading Marshall to shake his head grimly. For of course, this was what he should have anticipated. That so much strangeness combined with so much menace would push them even beyond horror and hopelessness.
Into hysteria.
And he didn’t want to guess what the Blurggit, if they were still observing, would be concluding about his species now.