Gridlock and Other Stories Part 10

"I'd whimpered in fright when I thought the power planet had exploded. This time I screamed.

Even after all these years, I can still hear that sound in my head. It was a girlish scream. The figure on the ground was not a man. It was athing! In fact, it was nothing less than a bug-eyed monster!"

"Are you all right, Mr. Cowen?" I asked, touching him on the wrist. His eyes lost their unfocused look.

"Huh?"

"I said, are you all right?"

"Sure. Why shouldn't I be?"

"You were just talking about bug-eyed monsters."

"That's right," he said, nodding. "I was just telling you about the night I found Thing in the desert. "

"Thing?'

"The bug-eyed monster. Weren't you listening?"

"I must have missed something," I said.

"Well, be quiet and I'll tell you about it."I shut my mouth. I had probably blown my thousand-dollar tip. Still, when a man has as much money as R. J. Cowen, you do not call him crazy to his face. Trillionaires are eccentric, not crazy, He continued his story.

It seems this BEM was purple with slick oily black hair and a mouth that opened sideways rather than up and down. That is, it was on a vertical line rather than a horizontal one like yours and mine.

(Hope you don't mind my paraphrasing some of this. I do have a photographic memory like I said, but Cowen was rambling pretty badly and I think I can make the story a h.e.l.l of a lot more coherent than he did.) Anyway, the thing was slightly smaller than a man and resembled a person in gross detail -- that is, it had two arms, two legs, and a head. The only thing was that all its features were not arranged the same as ours. Its knees folded the wrong way and it had too many fingers on each hand. Worst of all, it had eyes that glowed red in the dark.

Cowen was no fool. He did the sensible thing. He turned and ran. Only problem was, he took only two steps before tripping over his feet and cras.h.i.+ng down on the hard rocks. It was then that he knew what real terror was. His system got a jolt of adrenaline that dwarfed the previous two surges.

Deep down in his brain, down where the subconscious hangs out, he could feel a sensation he'd never felt before.

The thing had gotten hold of his mind!

"How'd you know that?" I whispered. I don't know why but we had taken to talking in hushed tones. Reminded me of one of those overnight camping trips where you sit around the campfire and tell scary stories.

"How can I describe the sensation?" he asked. "Might as well describe the color blue. I felt like a piano and the BEM was running its mental fingers over my keyboard. First, there was a flash of heat, then clammy cold, and then other sensations in quick succession. I had difficulty breathing, dizziness, extreme joy, and an attack of naked l.u.s.t, followed instantly by numbing depression. I began to s.h.i.+ver violently while sweat poured from my body and a blazing rainbow of color flashed before my eyes.

Those are the words, but they don't describe what I felt any better than a six year old can describe s.e.x."

I was getting interested in this insane story. It was like a fantasy novel. You know it is not real, but you pretend it is for as long as the story lasts. Except this was better. "Care for a beer, Mr. Cowen?" I asked, hoping to get him off the hard stuff.

He nodded and waited for me to draw the brew.

"What happened next?"

"There was this clicking sound," he said.

"Clicking sound?'

"Yeah, like you hear when someone energizes the phone screen on the other end of the line. Except it was not a sound at all. It was inside my head.

"--Ah, there it is," a quiet voice speaking accentless English said deep in Cowen's brain. "I apologize for any discomfort I may have caused, sir. When I noted your predilection for using one of your grasping appendages in preference to the other, I naturally a.s.sumed your brain would be mostdeveloped on that side. However, I now see that you are cross-connected and that I've been searching the wrong hemisphere of your cortex for the speech center..."

"--Who are you? --" Cowen asked.

"--Not so much volume, please!" the thing said. "You are an extremely powerful telepath for one who is untrained. You may call me ...Thing . As you can see, I am an alien. My s.h.i.+p is destroyed and although uninjured, I require your a.s.sistance. If you would be so kind --"

"Look, I'm a little busy right now," Cowen muttered sarcastically, falling into the lifelong habit of speaking his thoughts. "Perhaps I could drop you off at a police station. The authorities will know what to do with you."

"--I am sorry, sir. But that is impossible. This planet is under quarantine. That you know of my presence is bad enough. None other must learn of it. You must hide me until my comrades are able to effect, a rescue. --"

"What about your s.h.i.+p?" Cowen asked, pointing a thumb at the blazing fire that was still warming his back uncomfortably.

"--The generators are aflame. In another twentieth of one p1anetary revolution there will be nothing there but a charred spot of ground. --"

"How long until you are rescued?"

"--No more than a year --"

"A year!" Cowen screamed. "How do you expect me to keep a bug-eyed monster secret for a year?"

"--Perhaps you could hide me in your domicile. --"

"I don't have a domicile. Besides, I have my own life to live. Sorry..."

The burning red points stared at him in silence for a minute. He knew it still had him since he felt no desire to get up and run for his car.

Finally, it spoke. "--I would be willing to pay whatever you wished. --"

"You mean money?"

"--If that is what you desire," Thing said. "Anything in my power as payment for harboring me until I am rescued. --"

Now this was an intriguing turn of events, Cowen decided. That is, if the creature really could pay for his keep. He wondered how a s.h.i.+pwrecked sailor would go about bribing a native of a South Sea island into helping him. Would his promises be anything but empty words?

He decided a test was in order.

"Okay," Cowen said. "Make it so the atom bomb was never invented."

"--Changing that which already exists is beyond my power. --"

"Hmmm, I thought so." It was beginning to look like he had gotten the cheap model of Aladdin'sLamp. Not only was the genie offering only one wish, but he was choosy about what that wish could be. "I don't suppose you could get rid of all the nuclear power plants in the world, either."

"-- I could," Thing said, "but such overt action is forbidden by the quarantine regulations. Pure knowledge is more my specialty. --"

"Oh, peachy," Cowen said disgustedly. "If there is anything the world already had too much of, it was pure knowledge. Look at the automobile. If it had never been invented, there wouldn't be any smog, urban sprawl, ugly parking lots, drunk drivers, etc., ad infinitum. If only we had invested all those billions into something clean, safe and inexhaustible -- solar power, for instance."

The sudden insight took him by surprise. It took him a few moments to order his thoughts. Finally, he said, "I've got another wish."

"--Yes? --"

"I want a cheap, efficient means of capturing the sun's rays and turning them into electricity."

"--Is that all?" Thing asked. "We have had such a device since the dawn of our history. --"

"It's got to be as close to one hundred percent efficient as possible. I don't want any of these three percent solar collectors we've been fooling around with."

"-- Of course," Thing said, making it sound like the easiest trick in the world. "Complete efficiency is not possible in the real universe, you understand. However, the energy absorption screen is so close that you will barely notice the difference. --"

"How about cost? If it isn't dirt cheap to produce, the d.a.m.ned oil companies will get control of it like everything else."

"--The cost will be minimal once the factories are tooled up. It should cost less than the material from which your clothes are manufactured. Is that satisfactory? --"

"Right on!" Cowen yelled. Then a dark suspicion crept in to put a damper on his enthusiasm. "How do I know you will keep your part of the bargain?"

"--I must construct a signaling device. I will not begin to manufacture the ... you might call it a radio ... until I have demonstrated my good faith." Thing regarded him seriously once more. "Is it a deal? --"

"It's a deal!" Cowen said.

Suddenly the mental restraint that had kept him from using his legs was gone. He probed deeply into his mind. There was no trace of the strange lethargy of a few seconds before. He was once more in control of his body and his fate.

"Or so I thought at the time," he said, burping noisily in my ear.

"What happened then?" I asked.

"I rented a place in Pueblo, Colorado, and fixed up the bas.e.m.e.nt as a small workshop and living quarters for Thing. I wiped out my savings doing it. Luckily, Thing had salvaged a few hundred feet of gold electrical wire from the wreck before it burned, so we had money to spare.

"We holed up for six months and spent every waking moment on the device. Three months after setting up shop, we had our first working model. I imagine you have seen pictures. Old Mark I is in theSmithsonian now."

I nodded. "I took Hazel and the kids to Was.h.i.+ngton the summer before last. I remember it because it had your name on a bra.s.s plaque on the display case, Mr. Cowen."

"I'd gone out to stock up on groceries. Thing did not eat meat, so he went through a lot of lettuce, carrots, and rutabagas. As soon as I got back to the house, I heard his telepathic call to get down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. There in the center of the table we used as a lab bench was a black void. It was as though I was looking through a square window into the blackness of s.p.a.ce. The contraption had two sets of wires running from it. One was attached to a nine-volt battery -- the kind you use for a transistor radio. The other pair ran to a hundred-watt incandescent light bulb. The light glowed brightly."

"That it?" Cowen asked Thing after he'd found his voice again.

Thing rippled his whole body, which was his way of nodding. "--That is it. It absorbs all visible light and everything into the high ultraviolet with ninety-seven percent efficiency. With proper control of our process, we can tune it down to pick up the infrared region as well. --"

"Thus was born the sunscreen," Cowen said, sighing.

He glossed over the next part of his story. It seems that he and Thing worked sixteen hours a day for three months to perfect the screen. In addition, Thing tried to teach him the theory behind it. Cowen had never been much good at science and it was tough sledding. However, they kept at it. Part of Cowen's deal with the alien was that he would learn enough about how the device worked so that he could plausibly claim to have invented it. In the end, Thing settled on merely giving his human student the cookbook rudiments, the backyard mechanic's explanation, the barest smattering of knowledge necessary to put up a good front.

By the end of six months, Cowen's patent was pending and he had begun negotiations with various companies for the right to manufacture sunscreens under license. While he traveled with his demonstration model, Thing began to construct his "radio" in the house in Pueblo. Cowen had laid in a stock of canned vegetables and did not see the alien for two months. The sales trip proved profitable.

By the time he returned home he had made deals with General Electric, RCA, and Matsus.h.i.+ta of j.a.pan.

Others were pending, but those three were already modifying their factories for sunscreen production.

"That homecoming was a surprisingly emotional one for me," Cowen said. "Even though Thing was an alien, I'd gotten used to the rea.s.suring feel of his mind touch, the emotional support he gave me when I was feeling low. Moreover, he was as glad to see me as I was to see him. Possibly, he was merely tired of canned vegetables and wanted to get back to fresh. He was an alien, true, but I could not help liking him. I think he felt the same way about me.

"I was feeling a little down the night of my homecoming. The papers were full of news about a big demonstration the Clamsh.e.l.l Alliance had organized against the Seabrook Nuclear Station. It reminded me that others were still on the front lines, getting smacked with police nightsticks, while I was stuck in Pueblo, Colorado, with a bug-eyed monster. Thing noticed my funk and asked me about it. We started to talk and soon, it had turned into a good old fas.h.i.+oned bull session."

"--A strange puzzle. --" he said.

"What is?" Cowen asked.

" --The human reaction to a problem. Do you attempt to determine your best course of action?

No. Rather your first thought is to climb the nearest hill and bay defiance at the stars. Only later doesreason come over you. Surely, this is not the most efficient means of finding solutions. --"

"I don't get you," Cowen said, puzzled.

" --You wish an end to the dangers of nuclear power. But are you happy working quietly toward that end as we are doing? No. You prefer to plot confrontation with your enemies. What is this need of yours to 'go public' as the expression goes? --"

"But it's only been four years since Three Mile Island. How long before the next nuke goes haywire, killing a few thousand people this time? We have to keep the pressure on while the public remembers. How else are we going to win?"

"-- As you are winning. By introducing sunscreens and making all other forms of power generation unattractive. --"

"Do you really think sunscreens will end nukes?"

"--Yes. --"

"How can you be so sure?"

"--Because the companies that generate electricity in your society have fixed expenses they must meet. As sunscreens are introduced, demand for their product will fall and they will be forced to raise rates. As rates increase, demand will drop further. It is obviously a situation wherein positive feedback controls events, a vicious cycle, a diverging series --"

"Then the utilities will go bust?"

"--The utilities will go bust. --"

"He was right, too," Cowen said, looking at me with tears in his eyes. "Five years after that conversation, the last nuke in America pulled its core and closed down for good. Thing predicted a lot of other things that night -- the end of cities as we knew them, population sprawl, solar farms, the return of cottage industry, the spiraling standard of living. He even predicted the stock market crash of December 1983. Not the date, of course, but the event.

"And with his talk of Depression, I began to have second thoughts about what I had wished into being."

Cowen looked at Thing with tears in his eyes. "Have I done right?" he asked. "A lot of people are going to be out of work because of me."

"--Temporarily," Thing agreed. "But perhaps it will help to think of it this way. Electricity is to your civilization what fire was to your distant ancestors. Only your people have surrendered control of your fires to a few powerful individuals. If you desire to warm yourself on a cold night, you must pay for the privilege. --"

"So?"

"--Sunscreens are going to change that. In effect, you have taken the fires of your civilization and given them back to the common people. As long as energy remains inexpensive and readily available, no man may bar another from his source of heat and light. Isn't such a world preferable to your current system? --"Cowen nodded. Put that way it made a lot of sense.

"We talked far into the night, exploring alien concepts of government, religion, and ethics," Cowen said. "It was the closest we ever came to understanding each other. It turned out to be our last chance to try.

"Thing was rescued at the end of the year. I took him up into the Rockies and a saucer shaped craft floated down from the sky, hovering just off the ground while he boarded, then zoomed off without a sound."

"Interesting story," I said. Only then did I realize I had been holding my breath. I picked up my towel and began polis.h.i.+ng the bar once more. "Interesting, but I can't rightly say that I believe it."

"Don't blame you, Joe," he said. He made a face as he tossed off the last of his beer. "The john?"