Issue September 2013 Flash Fiction Online September 2013

Jake here.

I found the piece of the alien ship out back, right on the marsh edge. I was out fishing, or least I was supposed to be, but mostly I was “lollygagging and woolgathering,” Pa would say. Pa don’t approve of gathering wool, nor gagging no lollies, either. He says a girl my age ought to be practical. No one wants a girl who can’t clean a fresh-caught catfish and keep a boat in working order. No one round here, anyway.

The piece of ship was a hard lump of crystal, all glints and angles in the orange sunlight that leaked through the overhang like marmalade. I’d seen it under a couple feet of water, when it flashed in the light, the sun catching one of the sharp edges. I’d fished it out of the water and the gritty mud: a pretty little rock maybe the size of my fist. News-man said the ship had been diamond, but not like actual diamond. Something different about it, something built, synthetic or what-all. Not worth more’n a cubic zirconium in itself, other than being alien. I could maybe have hocked it on the Internet, but there were so many fakers out there already that I didn’t expect I could get much for it, and I kind of liked the look of the thing. Bits like that one came down all over – across near all the top half of the planet, they say. Most of it landed in the ocean, sank right down, but the ship’d been awful big.

Pa was watching that Fox News when I came in, so I didn’t say nothing and neither did he. We’d pretty much said all that was needful already. There was a man on the show talking about the aliens like they were going to come right down and start abducting all the womenfolk and molesting the cows, which was just silly. The aliens blew up; everyone knows that. Sent a code-signal that knocked out the radios and the teevees, then boom. Might’ve been the other way round, setting themselves to blow and then crying out to the planet in front of them. Or it might’ve been nothing at all, no message but the sound an alien makes when it dies.

I went to my room and put the alien rock on my dresser and turned on the radio. The aliens were there, too; they were a nine-day wonder on about their eighth-and-a-half day. “The reconstruction makes no sense,” the lady on the radio was saying. “It shouldn’t work; everything we know about physics says that something like that ship should have done, well, exactly what it did, which was fall to pieces. But somehow it didn’t do that for all the years and years it was traveling toward us. What kept it together? Or what made it dissolve?” She paused, like we was going to answer her somehow. “Our theory, and we admit it’s pretty radical, is that maybe – just maybe – what we call the ‘constants’ actually aren’t. That if you go far enough, or deep enough, maybe you get to a place where the speed of light isn’t what it is, where gravity and electromagnetism work a little differently. That ship, those beings, whatever they were, whatever they tried to tell us – if it was a message – they came from one of those deep places and just… ran aground. On us, on the shallows where we live.”

I liked the way the lady scientist talked. I wish I had the words and the knowledge to talk like she did, making big complicated stuff that I couldn’t understand sound easy and simple and just like common sense. And it was sensible, the way she explained it. It’s happened before around here; something strange from out in the salt comes up the wrong way, then the tide goes out and it’s trapped in a pool, puffing away in the brackish water. Sometimes they get out when the tide turns and the cold fresh water shows them the way to go. Other times they stay stuck there till they die. I never know quite what to do with them, and Pa says they’re probably poison and won’t eat them.

The lady on the radio was still talking and the sun was still setting, and just then I suddenly couldn’t stand it no more, sitting on my bed with the stupid ruffles that’ve been there since I was four, looking at a rock that wasn’t even diamond and listening to my radio like it was eighty years ago and there was no such thing as TV and the Internet. I hauled up and left. I took my rock with me. Pa didn’t say nothing when I blew past him like an exploding spaceship and huffed out the door.

It’s a long walk to the ocean. I ran the whole way.

It was full dark and more by the time I got there. The sky overhead was empty. Prob’ly a storm coming through in a little while, though.

I cocked my hand back and threw that little piece of alien ship as hard as I could, watched it sparkle one last time in the lights from the pier before it hit the water. It fell. I don’t know what I expected. For it to fly? To explode? It was just a rock, wherever it come from. People like to make a lot out of things, want excitement, want everything to make sense. They want too much. It was a lump of carbon crystal that used to be alien. The waves would take it out to the deeps, with its kin, and they could roll around in the dark where nobody’d look at them. It could maybe belong there, if it couldn’t be what it was meant to. Might be that was what it would want, if rocks could do any wanting to speak of.

Least that’s what I like to think.

Near the end of his fifteenth orbit as Greenland slipped by noiselessly below, he made the routine measurements that tested the operation of his space capsule and checked the automatic instruments which would transmit their stored data to Earth on his next pass over Control. Everything normal; all mechanical devices were operating perfectly.

This information didn’t surprise him, in fact, he really didn’t even think about it. The previous orbits and the long simulated flights on Earth during training had made such checks routine and perfect results expected. The capsules were developed by exhaustive testing both on the ground and as empty satellites before entrusting them to carry animals and then the first human.

He returned to contemplation of the panorama passing below and above, although as he noted idly, above and below had lost some of their usual meaning. Since his capsule, like all heavenly bodies, was stable in position with respect to the entire universe and, thanks to Sir Isaac Newton and his laws, never changed, the Earth and the stars alternated over his head during each orbit. “Up” now meant whatever was in the direction of his head. He remembered that even during his initial orbit when the Earth first appeared overhead he accepted the fact as normal. He wondered if the other two had accepted it as easily.

For there had been two men hurled into orbit before he ventured into space. Two others who had also passed the rigorous three-year training period and were selected on the basis of over-all performance to precede him. He had known them both well and wondered again what had happened on their flights. Of course, they had both returned, depending upon what your definition of return was. The capsules in which they had ventured beyond Earth had returned them living. But this was to be expected, for even the considerable hazards of descent through the atmosphere and the terrible heating which occurred were successfully surmounted by the capsule.

Naturally, it had not been expected that the satellites would have to be brought down by command from the ground. But this, too, was part of the careful planning–radio control of the retro-rockets that move the satellite out of orbit by reducing its velocity. Of course, ground control was to be used only if the astronaut failed to ignite the retro-rockets himself. He remembered everyone’s surprise and relief when the first capsule was recovered and its occupant found to be alive. They had assumed that in spite of all precautions he was dead because he had not fired the rockets on the fiftieth orbit and it was necessary to bring him down on the sixty-fifth.

Recovery alive only partially solved the mystery, for the rescuers and all others were met by a haughty, stony silence from the occupant. Batteries of tests confirmed an early diagnosis: complete and utter withdrawal; absolute refusal to communicate. Therapy was unsuccessful.

#

The second attempt was similar in most respects, except that command return was made on the thirty-first orbit after the astronaut’s failure to de-orbit at the end of the thirtieth. His incoherent babble of moons, stars, and worlds was no more helpful than the first.

Test after test confirmed that no obvious organic damage had been incurred by exposure outside of the Earth’s protective atmosphere. Biopsy of even selected brain tissues seemed to show that microscopic cellular changes due to prolonged weightlessness or primary cosmic-ray bombardment, which had been suggested by some authorities, were unimportant. Somewhat reluctantly, it was decided to repeat the experiment a third time.

The launching was uneventful. He was sent into space with the precision he expected. The experience was exhilarating and, although he had anticipated each event in advance, he could not possibly have foreseen the overpowering feeling that came over him. Weightlessness he had experienced for brief periods during training, but nothing could match the heady impression of continuous freedom from gravity.

Earth passing overhead was also to be expected from the simple laws of celestial mechanics but his feeling as he watched it now was inexpressible. It occurred to him that perhaps this was indeed why he was here, because he could appreciate such experiences best. He had been told the stars would be bright, unblinking, and an infinitude in extent, but could mere descriptions or photographs convey the true seeing?

On his twenty-first orbit he completed his overseeing the entire surface of the planet in daylight. He had seen more of Earth than anyone able to tell about it, but only he had the true feeling of it. The continents were clearly visible, as were the oceans and both polar ice caps. The shapes were familiar but in only a remote way. A vague indistinctness borne of distance served to modify the outlines and he alone was seeing and understanding. On the dark side of the planet large cities were marked by indistinct light areas which paled to insignificance compared to the stars and his sun.

He speculated about the others who had only briefly experienced these sights. Undoubtedly they weren’t as capable of fully grasping or appreciating any of these things as he was. It was quite clear that no one else but he could encompass the towering feeling of power and importance generated by being alone in the Universe.

At the end of the twenty-fifth orbit he disabled the radio control of the retro-rockets and sat back with satisfaction to await the next circuit of his Earth around Him.

This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction, May 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.

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