“Tell me about…?”
“About Luna II. Peter, it was Luna II. It wasn’t anything the people at Lakeport have done or the space medicine buffs from the Lake, it was just Luna II. There’s something in Luna II that changes things. That’s its nature: to change things. Sometimes the changes may be radicaclass="underline" it takes a sane man and makes him mad, or turns a peaceful race into a mindless gang of mass murderers, or changes a small planet into a chunk of shiny black slag that we’ve named Luna II. And sometimes it’s sleeping or inert, and then there’s no effect whatever.”
I tried to take all of this in but it was coming too thick and fast. “Eh? Something in Luna II? But don’t we already know about that? That it’s a source of peculiar emanations or whatever?”
“Something like that.” He shrugged helplessly, impatiently. “Maybe. I don’t know. But when I was up there I felt it, and now it’s starting to look like it felt me.”
“It felt you?” Now he really wasn’t making sense, had started to ramble.
“I don’t know”—he shrugged again—”but it could be the answer to Everything—it could be Everything! Maybe there are lots of Luna IIs scattered through the universe, and they all have the power to change things. Like they’re catalysts. They cause mutations—in space, in time. A couple of billion years ago the Earth felt it up there, felt its nearness, its effect. And it took this formless blob of mud hurtling through space and changed it, gave it life, brought microorganisms awake in the soup of its oceans. It’s been changing things ever since—and we’ve called that evolution! Do you see what I mean? It was The Beginning—and it might yet be The End.”
“Smiler, I—”
He caught my arm, gave me what I suspect was the most serious look he’d ever given anyone in his entire life, and said: “Don’t look at me like that, Peter.” And there was just a hint of accusation.
“Was I?”
“Yes, you were!” And then he relaxed and laughed, and just as suddenly became excited. “Man, when something like this happens, you’re bound to ask questions. So I’ve asked myself questions, and the things I’ve told you are the answers. Some of them, anyway. Hell, they may not even be right, but they’re my answers!”
“These are your thoughts, then? Not the boffins’?” This was one of his Brit words I used, from the old days. It meant “experts.”
“Mine,” he said, seeming proud of it, “but grown at least in part from what the boffins have told me.”
“So what has happened?” I asked him, feeling a little exasperated now. “What’s going down, Smiler?”
“Not so much going down,” he shook his head, “as coming out.”
“Coming out?” I waited, not sure whether to smile or frown, not knowing what to do or say.
“Of me.”
And still I waited. It was like a guessing game where I was supposed to come up with some sort of conclusion based on what he’d told me. But I didn’t have any conclusions.
Finally he shrugged yet again, snorted, shook his head, and said: “But you do know about cancer, right? About the Big ‘C’? Well, when I went up to Luna II, it changed my cancer. Oh, I still have it, but it’s not the same any more. It’s a separate thing existing in me, but no longer truly a part of me. It’s in various cavities and tracts, all connected up by threads, living in me like a rat in a system of burrows. Or better, like a hermit crab in a pirated shell. But you know what happens when a hermit crab outgrows its shell? It moves out, finds itself a bigger home. So…this thing in me has tried to vacate—has experimented with the idea, anyway….”
He shuddered, his whole body trembling like jelly.
“Experimented?” It was all I could find to say.
He gulped, nodded, controlled himself. And he sank what was left of his drink before going on. “In the night, a couple of nights ago, it started to eject—from both ends at once—from just about everywhere. Anus, throat, nostrils, you name it. I almost choked to death before they got to me. But by then it had already given up, retreated, retracted itself. And I could breathe again. It was like it…like it hadn’t wanted to kill me.”
I was numb, dumb, couldn’t say anything. The way Smiler told it, it was almost as if he’d credited his cancer with intelligence! But then a white movement caught my eye, and I saw with some relief that it was the boys from the ambulance coming for him. He saw them, too, and clutched my arm. And suddenly fear had made his eyes round in his round face. “Peter….” he said. “Peter….”
“It’s OK,” I grabbed his fist grabbing me. “It’s all right. They have to know what they’re doing. You said it yourself, remember? You’re not going to die.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “But will it be worth living?”
And then they came and took him to the ambulance. And for a long time I wondered about that last thing he’d said. But of course in the end it turned out he was right….
The car door slammed and the telephone rang at one and the same time, causing me to start. I looked out through the control shack’s dusty window and saw Big “C” receding from the car. Apparently everything was OK. And when the telephone rang again I picked it up.
“OK, Peter,” Smiler’s voice seemed likewise relieved, “you can come on in now.”
But as well as relieved I was also afraid. Now of all times—when it was inevitable—I was afraid. Afraid for the future the world might never have if I didn’t go in, and for the future I certainly wouldn’t have if I did. Until at last common sense prevailed: what the heck, I had no future anyway!
“Something wrong, old friend?” Smiler’s voice was soft. “Hey, don’t let it get to you. It will be just like the last time you visited me, remember?” His words were careful, innocent yet contrived. And they held a code.
I said “Sure,” put the phone down, left the shack and went to the car. If he was ready for it then so was I. It was ominous out there, in Big “C”’s gloom; getting into the car was like entering the vacant lair of some weird, alien animal. The thing was no longer there, but I knew it had been there. It didn’t smell, but I could smell and taste it anyway. You would think so, the way I avoided breathing.
And so my throat was dry and my chest was tight as I turned the lights on to drive. To drive through Big “C,” to the core which was Ben ‘Smiler’ Williams. And driving I thought:
I’m traveling down a hollow tentacle, proceeding along a pseudopod, venturing in an alien vein. And it can put a stop to me, kill me any time it wants to. By suffocation, strangulation, or simply by laying itself down on me and crushing me. But it won’t because it needs Smiler, needs to appease him, and he has asked to see me.
As he’d said on the telephone, “Just like the last time.” Except we both knew it wouldn’t be like the last time. Not at all….
The last time:
That had been fifteen months ago when we’d agreed on the boundaries. But to continue at that point would be to leave out what happened in between. And I needed to fill it in, if only to fix my mind on something and so occupy my time for the rest of the journey. It isn’t good for your nerves, to drive down a midmorning road in near darkness, through a tunnel of living, frothing, cancerous flesh.
A month after I’d seen Smiler on the beach, Big “C” broke out. Except that’s not exactly how it was. I mean, it wasn’t how you’d expect. What happened was this:
Back in 2002 when we went through a sticky patch with the USSR and there were several (as yet still unsolved) sabotage attempts on some of our missile and space research sites, a number of mobile ICBM and MIRV networks were quickly commissioned and established across the entire USA. Most of these had been quietly decommissioned or mothballed only a year or two later, but not the one covering the Okeechobee region of Florida. That one still existed, with its principal base or railhead at La Belle and arms reaching out as far as Fort Myers in the west, Fort Drum north of the Lake, and Canal Point right on the Lake’s eastern shore. Though still maintained in operational order as a deterrent, the rail network now carried ninety per cent of hardware for the Space Center while its military functions were kept strictly low profile. Or they had been, until that night in late August 2024.