II.
You can well imagine the dread and despair this caused me. Flying saucers, I have read, were psychic phenomena, products of a troubled mind, particularly a mind broken by peering too long at the Abyss, but here before me in a field of brown slush, beneath a cindery sky, was a vessel the likes of which I’d never seen.(A complex ship powered by the synthesis of plutonium and 4Yb, an ytterbium isotope. No time to relate this now. You’ll find details elsewhere in this dossier.) That meant I was crazy. My mind had snapped — the result, I reasoned, of long hours at the hospital, too little sleep, talking cheerfully to patients only I knew would be dead before daybreak. What puzzled me was why lunacy had taken so long in coming. But crazy or not, I heard something squeal from inside. I was, as I say, still a physician. I picked up my bag, took two Pervitin, for I was still dazed, and forded weeds to the ship’s entrance — a sort of orifice that opened with a quick, vegetable contraction as I came near. It looked real. It felt real. Quite possibly, it was real. Cautiously, I climbed inside. Behind me the hole closed with a hiss, a sphincteral snap so suggestive of the lower regions, of entombment, caskets and crypts that for a moment I could not move. The wail grew louder. A shiver passed through my back. If my intuition was right, this ship was older than the world. The entrance blended into a maze of propellant tanks, hatches, cables, crawl spaces: a bathysphere, or so I thought at first. So far all right.
But slowly the familiar blended into foreign shapes as I patched on, pushing through walkways smaller than those in a Civil War submarine. The machinery I saw now (on the ceiling) favored glasswork sculpture, fantasmata that might please the aesthetic taste of tarantulas. And it didn’t sound like machinery — it might have been the echo of cell division I heard, the ring of enucleation, or embryo fission, the clack of hadrons collapsing into their constituent quarks. Little as I knew of space flight, I knew all technology was an extension of the body, but here interior design did not distinguish left (evil) or right (good), front or back, as if the pilot had no center, physical or metaphysical. What I felt was awe. What I felt, plainly, was terror. Almost I wanted to flee. Nothing even vaguely human would build a vessel like this. Now the wailing became a whimper. Then, abruptly, all was light. There came a cool splash of air, and I stood weaving in the lancet arch to a new chamber. I drew my neck in. My palms began to sweat, the way they perspired in the days when I first dated Mildred, for as a young man in medical school, the only Negro in my class — the one chosen to prove the Race’s worth — I so doubted myself it seemed miraculous that a woman as beautiful as Mildred, with her light voice and brilliant eyes, would have me. Success in middle age, even the citations on my office wall, had not shaken this feeling that I’d not fully comprehended my own (foster) culture, that George Twenhafel, who counted it as his heritage, understood something I did not. Why these thoughts arose as I groped deeper into the saucer, I cannot say. Its strangeness seemed to trigger in me the same primordial feeling of thrownness that every Negro experiences when hurled into a society that simultaneously supports and, I am saying, annihilates him, because he can find reflections of himself nowhere in it — like a falcon exiled, say, to the Lifeworld of fish, always off-balance, but finally embracing the alien in all its otherness, yet never sure if he’s got it right. (My ancestors — or so I’ve read — had a hundred concepts for the African community, but none for the “individual,” who, as we define him today — the lonely Leibnizean monad — is an invention of the Industrial Age, as romantic love is the product of medieval poets. My ancestors, I’ve also heard, were pre-Industrial and, therefore, are no test of reality. But enough.) Panting a little now, I stepped inside, pouring sweat….
Well, no point in B-movie melodrama.
The Creature was hideous beyond belief, but there’s no reason to bang the harpsichord about it. To any man who saw him, it would seem he was a huge boiled crayfish about the size of a fence post, sprinkled with a little squid, lobster, and jumbo shrimp — what you might expect to find on a seafood platter in a decent restaurant, or on the pages of Planet Stories. Whenever he moved, he left a trail of paste or organic matter. I stayed a respectful distance from this vision, who (I learned later) had six claws, eighty-four teeth, three antennae, two stomachs like a cow, and four enormous tentacles — his, he told me, later, was a family for large tentacles, which I believed. What else could I say? I knew nothing of his standards for beauty and truth, or even if he had such standards. And what did his control room contain? Spectrometers, I guess. Particle detectors. The only furnishings were four-feet-high platforms on the floor. In their bases lights were recessed. A wall-to-wall Tele-cipher — a sort of electronic speculum, with a screen thin as hair and integrated circuitry — processed data from Carbondale, Benton, Herrin, and Elk-ville. It could multiply, divide, add, do square and cubic roots, Boolean equations, calculate in metalanguage, or the Hilbert-Ackermann system, or deploy Rs1 logical strategies, and I couldn’t for the life of me guess its full capabilities. Even so, a physician knows an unhealthy being when he sees one. Entering the room, putting away my knife, I could tell the pilot wasn’t exactly running on all twelve cylinders. He gave a Dostoyevskian sigh. He looked sick as mud. What convinced me of his sensitivity, however, was that he had a Cambridge manner, and the pallor any creature has when he is trying to ask directions in German.
“No — speak English.” I placed my bag on a platform by the Telecipher. “Speak English. You have landed in America. Are you injured?” I felt, rather than heard, the Creature say, “Quite.” Telegnosis. What English he knew, as it turned out, came from eavesdropping on radio broadcasts around Cambridge and Amherst College — he pronounced car as “cah” and water came out as “waddah,” which diminished his strangeness by a little. When introductions were over and he had taken my coat and politely offered me a part of the floor to eat (the whole saucer was edible, a fifty-four-thousand-ton Hershey bar), he touched the outside of my elbows as he talked, taking both my hands in his tentacles, and confessed in a very apologetic voice, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m not a Big Noise on my world, Henry. I am what you call a carrier. I have been quarantined.”
“Quarantined, you say?” I withdrew my pipe and charged it. “You’re not an ambassador or a diplomat?”
“No, I’m afraid not. On my world I’m the equivalent of your street people — I’m not even sure how this ship works. I’m sorry.”