With Other Eyes Page 5

  “Standard station bathroom. I’ll be out in a few minutes.

  After eating some rehydrated low-residue rations and stretching out for a nap—Lazz won the toss for the minimally padded cot and I used the air mattress Liza had slipped into the container for Lazz—we were ready to go again. Since we were no longer in our suits, I warned our hosts we might have to stop the display from time to time, but then we settled down for another session in front of the screen.

  For the next day, our time was split between naps, meals, and bathroom breaks, each pause bringing us closer to that final tragic frame we had seen.

  Finally we found ourselves looking at a vivid frozen frame that was a virtual duplicate of the exodus picture. The roiling sun dominating the picture actually did look every bit as daunting as the sculpture. I realized that the Travelers were probably living their lives in shielded suits and homes towards the end. It made the forest outside that much more understandable: a defiant return to better times; probably using carefully nurtured plants grown in a shielded environment.

  We got up to stretch, curious over what was next, but then we froze, because the screen had come to life again and a different squeal took over the narrating duties as new, speeded-up images were displayed. From to time, I caught a glimpse of a single ship along with various passing star fields and planetary bodies.

  I was afraid to move until this shorter display ended, but after about ten minutes, the screen went dark and I turned to Lazz, excited.

  “That last bit was the trip this ship made! We can back-track to their home system and see where else they’ve been.”

  “The witnessing of history is over,” our hosts’ voices interrupted. “Put on your suits and prepare to leave this chamber.”

  “That’s it?” Lazz burst out. “Come look at my etchings and then out the door?”

  I reached out to take his arm. “I think we’ll find that we’ve gotten a little more than that once we take a look at the recording in real-time. Let’s not push it.” But one thing bothered me and I looked up.

  “What about our history? Information about us. You have already received some from our exchanges, but—”

  “The witnessing of history is over,” the disembodied chorus repeated, the mechanical tones of the computer lending an air of finality to the words.

  After Lazz reset my computer, I retrieved my flushed-out suit, changed into my undersuit, reconnected all my plumbing, and then closed up. I grabbed my helmet with a sigh and forced myself back into it, wrinkling my nose as the stale canned air hissed in once again. It reminded me that we would not only be in deep shit once we got back, but also in quarantine because we had breathed air here, even if in a “sterile” room with pure gases.

  Lazz seemed to read my mind as he sealed his own helmet. “Time to face the music, huh?”

  “Not yet. It’s only been about twenty-eight hours and I was told it would be several days. I guess there’s more to this show and tell. But look at it this way: we’re going to be employed for some time. Just think about how long it’s going to take to sort through and analyze the recording we just got.”

  “So true, so true.” Lazz seemed to take great delight in that.

  The inner airlock door opened as we approached it, and we were quickly cycled through and back out in the corridor to face the two leading Travelers. I wanted to know more about why I had been brought onboard, but my every attempt to ask anything was ignored and we were efficiently herded down a new corridor to return to the doorway that opened out to the jungle. However, when we passed though it, we were greeted by a surprise.

  A huge crowd of Travelers had gathered outside. They seemed to fill the open field in front of the sculpture wall, only leaving a narrow corridor towards the elevator platform. As we followed our guides past the other aliens, their massed attention was overwhelming and I felt my focus slipping.

  “They must have been revived while we had our screening,” Lazz whispered. “I guess we were wrong?”

  I didn’t answer right away but looked back in amazement as we eventually stepped onto the elevator again. I had lost count of the number of Travelers who were gathered to see us off, but as I forced myself to examine them more closely, I started to realize that there was something wrong. The ten Travelers we had seen first had been virtually identical in size and appearance, as were some of the newcomers, but there was a variance in shape among many in the watching rows, and the signals reaching me were not all as focused or strong as the first ones.

  “Obviously we were wrong about them dying out.” I finally said. “But take a good look at them. You’re better with your eyes.”

  He did, and after a while turned back to me somberly. “I see what you mean. This is a tired bunch! I hope they have better luck at the next stop.”

  “But they all woke up to see us. There must be hundreds of them!” I looked back at them. “That makes sense. After all the effort they went to try to find… alien life, I just knew they couldn’t just sleep it all away!” I thought about the last piece of recording we had been shown and grinned. “And if they’re kicking us out before they go on—they might have made other alien contacts which—”

  “Will be on the last recording!” Lazz finished, just as excited as I was.

  The elevator had started to rise while we had been scanning the crowd, but instead of continuing up to the top, we stopped, about ten meters up in the air. Looking down from where we were was an odd experience. Because of all the foliage, we could only see a few dozen Travelers scattered around the base of the elevator, but somehow we knew that we were the center of attention of the whole ship.

  Our new escorts moved to the edge of the platform, blithely perched millimeters from a fall, and faced in opposite directions to speak in ringing squeals that echoed all around.

  “This is the Witness. Our Journey has purpose.”

  Then the elevator began to drop again and Lazz and I both looked up helplessly. Now what?

  We returned to ground in moments and reversed our parade-like trek to return to the sculpture wall, and then it was back through the claustrophobic corridor to the airlock leading into the screening chamber, and we were issued a peremptory command: “Enter. The Journey continues.” The outer airlock door opened.

  I was starting to get more than a little nervous for some unknown reason, and I could tell by Lazz’s tensed posture that he felt the same way.

  “No,” I countered. “We must return to our home.”

  “You are here to witness. Then you will be returned.” One and Two were taking turns. “The Witness is honored and must not be harmed.” A pause and then again: “Enter so we may continue.”

  Lazz and I locked eyes. I nodded towards the waiting airlock.

  “What do you think?”

  After a moment he sighed. “Well, this is the price I pay for black-mailing my way along. It’s your call. I’ll do it if you will… besides, I have to admit, my curiosity cat is looking to loose a few lives.”

  “I have to know,” I admitted. “Besides, I really don’t feel worried.” Lazz mumbled something and I asked: “What?”

  “Umm… never mind.” Lazz shook his head. “I was just thinking about some land sales in a geographically disadvantaged area… Go ahead. After you.”

  Once again we entered the viewing room and stripped off our suits before settling in expectantly in front of the screen.

  Lazz leaned over. “Well, at least we’re ‘honored’ and ‘not to be harmed’. I just wish I could let Liza know I’m okay.”

  I heard the edge in his voice, but I could understand it. He knew what Liza had to be going through, and I knew it also.

  I remembered well how I had felt one night when Ellen had been late coming home. We had had plans to go out to dinner, and when over an hour had passed without a call, I had begun to seriously worry. Ellen had had a thing about being punctual, or calling if detained. If she was due someplace where she had never been, she would prefer to sit for ten
minutes outside the building and wait rather than risk being late. I had tried calling her personal phone several times but had only reached a recording that kept repeating that the carrier was “unable to connect due to network difficulties”.

  When she had finally called, from a land-line at a service station, her first thought had been to reassure me, because she had known how much I had been worrying. Then she had explained that her car had broken down in the middle of a record thunderstorm and on a back road. And by a supreme act of cosmic malice, the road had been washed out both ahead of her and behind her. On top of that, the storm had knocked out power to the cellular towers in the area, and she had been forced to walk several miles in the pouring rain to get to a service station.

  When she had finally come home, drenched and miserable, I had immediately scrapped our restaurant dinner plans and sent her packing to a shower, while I had cooked a good hot meal for us to eat by the fireplace. It had always amazed me that she had been worried about me! But that night had turned into one of the most wonderfully intimate evenings we had ever shared.

  As I sat next to Lazz waiting for the aliens’ next move, I envied him again and wondered if I’d ever have any evenings like that again.

  The screen suddenly flashed back to life and we found ourselves looking out into space from a vantage point I presumed was the front of the ship, since the space station was off to the side as expected. But as we watched, the station moved, or rather we did.

  “This is what was,” came a simple explanation from above.

  The scene speeded up and we moved away from the station. The massive globe of the Earth brushed the upper portion of the screen momentarily, but disappeared behind us. Our vantage point changed and we were looking back from the same place and I saw that the pyramids were back down in travel position as we accelerated away from the space station.

  “Son of a bitch!” Lazz blasted and got to his feet. “They space-napped us!”

  I realized immediately what had happened. While we had been starting down that elevator, they had been folding down the pyramids and launching us gradually to simulate the increasing gravity as we descended on the elevator. We had never noticed it because once underway, we had been under the same level of gravity as we would have been from the rotation of the ship.

  Lazz’s jaw was clenched and he was glaring up at the low ceiling, but before he could say anything I grabbed him and tried to pull him back down into his seat.

  “Sit down!” I wasn’t alarmed. Even if we were a long way from understanding each other, I had a gut feeling we had nothing to fear from the Travelers. And in a strange way, the maneuvers we had been going through were very reassuring, because they reminded me that the Travelers were not some sort of super-beings able to control gravity and all sorts of unimaginable forces. They were more advanced than we were, but not so much that we couldn’t catch up.

  Lazz was resisting me and I pulled harder. “Will you relax? They said we would be safe and that we would be returned, and I believe them. Obviously they’ve got something else to show us.” My eyes were locked on the screen. I looked up as Lazz finally calmed down and dropped back to his seat.

  “What is now?” I asked.

  The scene shifted and I found myself staring into what had to be the sun.

  “How close are we?” I asked, feeling like an idiot as I did for not being more specific.

  But our hosts knew what I meant, and the screen changed to show a diagrammatic representation of the solar system that looked like it could have come out of any elementary school book on Earth. A small pyramid was almost halfway between the orbits of Earth and Mercury and heading towards the sun. If I strained, I could almost imagine that I saw it move.

  “Slingshot effect?” Lazz murmured next to me, yielding to curiosity. “Even if our sun is a wimp compared to theirs, it’s got a pretty good gravity well to use.”

  “Yeah, but how good is their insulation?” I wondered. “And how come we’re along?” But something else bothered me. “And if they have such a good drive, whatever the hell is powering this thing, why do they need a gravity well for acceleration?”

  “Maybe they use the sun for a different kind of boost?” Lazz wondered. “I’ve read several old science fiction books about that.”

  “And maybe we were right before.” Something kept nudging my mind and I reached down to type: “Please show an image of the history wall outside. The last six panels.”

  “Huh?” Lazz stared at me. “What are you up to?”

  As the screen changed obligingly, I bent forward to ask: “Please display only the bottom portions of each panel and expand them in size.” Again the screen cooperated, and I peered closely at the declining numbers of Traveler figures at the base of each panel. At first, I didn’t see anything new; just a tragically shrinking population as resources declined, and the Travelers cut their population. But finally I saw what I had been missing.

  Not only were the number of the Travelers shrinking, but in each of the final panels, there were an increasing number of figures that were misshapen, even if just slightly. Perhaps just with a smaller or missing ‘eye’, or with no arm at all, or with legs missing—small differences that had been impossible to spot on unmagnified images, but there were more and more of these mutant Travelers among the population census figures. The angry sun was doing more than damaging the planet!

  “They’re mutating from the radiation,” Lazz said numbly as he also spotted the changes. “Dying out.”

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it.” I had suspected that radiation had been a problem, but this was worse than I had thought. “If this has been going on for a long time—we won’t know how long until we go through the first recording—and the whole time they have been trying to find other life forms—”

  “—and now they’ve reached that goal, and we’ve been ‘witnesses’…” Lazz continued my thought but left the implication unvoiced.

  “Exactly.” I saw he understood, and asked needlessly: “If you were very tired, dying, had no possible future really to expect, and had finally realized your one life’s ambition, what might you do?”

  “What I tried, twice,” Lazz answered bitterly. “The first time with pills, except I took too many and threw them all up before they could work. And the second time with a gun, but I got caught before I could pull the trigger. And I didn’t even have a ‘life’s ambition’.”

  I swallowed. “I’m sorry.” I felt like shit.

  He squeezed my arm. “Don’t worry about it. Like I told you: I was a poor little rich boy who couldn’t handle reality too well at first. It took me a while to wise up, but I did. But what I want to know is how far this ‘witness’ thing is going to go?”

  “Put the map back on, please,” I asked. As it re-appeared, I could see that we were on a direct course with the sun.

  I saw Lazz’s lips move as he stared at the chart, and I could almost hear him whisper: “Liza”. Like Ellen worrying about my fears when she had been late, he was thinking of her instead of himself; knowing that all she could see was a rapidly accelerating ship heading right for the sun, and carrying her husband with it.

  It made me think again of Ellen, and death, and coping. And I thought about the Travelers. If we were right and they were heading for some grand self-immolation to end their journey: how long had they been in search of their ‘witness’? And if we were right, it also meant that we were the first alien race they had encountered; or at least the first technically advanced one. There was the reason for that three part signal again, since the final component would only have been detectable to a space-faring race. They were tired and wanted to move on, but they wanted witnesses who would appreciate their journey and the scale of their existence.

  The requirement for me to use their language and to ‘see’ in their way was obvious now. I shook my head as I thought about the way I had fought the temporary sacrifice I had been asked to make. For Lazz, it had not been a choice and he had survived a
nd prospered. And I thought about poor Janice: a target for my attempt to deny what was happening, what I was going to face, and what I had lost.

  Grow up and stop feeling sorry for yourself! I chided myself. It was time to accept that Ellen was dead. Soon I would have my eyes back and I would be able to on with a new, exciting life uncovering Traveler secrets, knowing that I had been part of one of the greatest moments in human history.

  I looked up as my fingers typed automatically: “Thank you.” But even though there was no reply and I had a strange feeling we were alone, I wasn’t afraid. I believed their assurance that we would be “returned”.

  My thoughts were suddenly interrupted. “The separation comes,” the chorus proclaimed. “Witness our existence to your world.”

  Somehow I had expected excitement, fear, some kind of emotion, but that was stupid. The artificial voice of my computer had no programming for it and no knowledge of Traveler emotions, whatever ones they had.

  “Now what?” I wondered, but I braced myself because I suspected what was coming. “Hold on Lazz.”

  The map disappeared and found ourselves looking at the Traveler ship from a vantage point several kilometers behind it. Apparently a remote probe with a camera. The giant drive dish had been glowing in some peculiar way with energies displayed on the screen, but suddenly the dish flickered and gradually went dark as we found ourselves weightless.

  “What the hell?” Lazz grabbed for the stool.

  “Turnover,” I answered, sure I was right. “And if the separation is what I think, we’ll soon see it.”

  “Right… Turnover!” Lazz caught on immediately. “Constant acceleration… hmm.” He let go and pulled up his Braille pad, fingering the keys rapidly as he gradually drifted up off the stool. “How long since we left Earth orbit?”

  “Around thirty hours or so.”

  “Bingo. Assuming we burn—or whatever this ship does—at the same rate on an outward vector to slow down, and continue to do a lateral burn since we also have orbital velocity to contend with…” His fingers kept flashing some more as his computer kept rattling off figures too rapidly for me to understand. “We should stop somewhere just inside Mercury’s orbit.”