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  “There’s a charge of two dollars for the material.”

  Kathryn was startled at that. Proselyters didn’t usually dive for the profits so early in the conversion process. She pursed her lips and handed over the two bills, all the same.

  “There’s also a fifteen-minute information film. We show it in our auditorium on the second floor every half hour. The next show takes place in about five minutes.” A quick grin. “There’s no admission fee.”

  “I’ll watch it,” Kathryn promised.

  “Fine. Afterwards, if you feel you’d like to participate more deeply in the experience Frederic Storm offers the world, come back here and we’ll talk, and I’ll register you on a preliminary basis. That’ll entitle you to attend tonight’s service.”

  “Fine,” Kathryn said. “And now could I ask you just one thing — something about saucers, not exactly about the Society here?”

  “Of course.”

  “The fireball on Monday night. That wasn’t really a meteor, was it? Don’t you think it was a flying saucer, maybe an exploding one?”

  “Frederic Storm believes that it was indeed a vehicle of the galactic people,” said the woman primly. She was like some sort of robot, mouthing the words of the leader, always taking care to call him by his full name. “He released a brief statement about it yesterday. He plans a fuller exposition of his thinking at a service early next week.”

  “And he says it was a saucer? What about its crew?”

  “He has not issued any statement about the crew.”

  “Suppose,” Kathryn said uneasily, “suppose the crew bailed out. Suppose they landed alive. Is that possible? That they could land, and look like human beings, and maybe be discovered by us and come into our houses? Has anything like that ever happened, could you say?”

  She was afraid she was being too transparent. Surely this woman would pounce on her and demand to be taken instantly to the injured galactic visitor in her home. But no, there was no appearance of personal involvement, only the shifting of the gears and the declaiming of the appropriate segment of the party line.

  “Certainly the galactics have landed on Earth many times, and have come among us in human form. For they are human, merely more advanced, more closely approaching the godlike that is the ultimate in our destiny. Frederic Storm would say that it is quite probable that the beings aboard the ship made a safe landing. But we have nothing to fear from them. You must understand that: they are benevolent. Come, now. You’ll miss our film. When you return to my office, you’ll be much more deeply aware of the meaning of this unique and wonderful moment in human and transhuman history.”

  Kathryn was ushered smoothly out of the office. She found herself alone in the sterile anteroom. A sign pointed to the upstairs auditorium, and she followed it. A ramp took her into a large abstract-looking room. The rear wall was a viewing screen; there were about two dozen rows of seats, and the customary emblems, portraits of Frederic Storm, star maps, and other Contact Cult paraphernalia along the walls. Four other people, all of them elderly women, were in the room. Kathryn took a seat in the back row, and almost at once the lights dimmed and the screen came to life.

  A narrator’s voice said in portentous tones, “Out of the immeasurable void of the cosmos, across the inconceivably vast depths of intergalactic space, toward our humble, struggling planet, come friendly visitors.”

  On screen: the stars. The Milky Way. Camera closing in on a group of stars. Suddenly a view of our solar system, the planets strung like beads across the sky. Saturn, Mars, Venus. Earth with the continents unnaturally prominent, an obviously phony shot, nothing at all like a real view from space. And there came a flying saucer soaring out, infinitely small, growing and growing as it neared Earth. Kathryn had to repress the temptation to burst out laughing. The saucer was a comical thing, all portholes and periscopes and flashing lights. So far the film looked like nothing more than a standard sci-fi thriller, handled with the usual degree of subtlety.

  “Beings of godlike grace — transhuman in their abilities — benevolent, all-seeing, all-wise — grieving for our trouble-ridden civilization—”

  Now the screen showed the interior of the flying saucer. Gadgetry everywhere, computers and clicking things and gauges. There were the saucer people: superb specimens of transhuman life, muscular, magnificent, with expressions of ineffable wisdom. Now the ship was landing on Earth, popping down as easily as a feather. The action became violent: farmers firing shotguns at the visitors, grim-faced men in uniforms attacking them, hysterical women cowering behind trees. And the galactic visitors remaining calm throughout, warding off bullets and bombs, smiling sadly, beckoning to the frightened Earthmen to take heart.

  “In this time of crisis and doubt, Frederic Storm came forward to offer himself as a bridge between humankind and transhumankind—”

  The great man fearlessly advancing toward the parked saucer. Smiling. Holding out his hands in salute. Drawing geometrical figures in the soil. Resonantly offering welcome. There was Storm aboard the saucer, now. The galactics appeared to be at least eight feet tall. They were clasping his hand solemnly.

  “To a hostile, fear-engulfed mankind, Frederic Storm brought the message of peace. At first he met only the jeers and mockery that other great leaders of mankind had known—”

  A crowd smashing the windshield of Storm’s car. Setting it afire. The police saving the prophet just in time. Angry fists shaking. Faces contorted with hatred.

  “—but there were those who recognized the truth of this persecuted man’s mission—”

  A shot of women queueing up in a supermarket to buy copies of one of Storm’s books. Disciples. Storm smiling, addressing a crowd in the Los Angeles Coliseum. A sense of quickening tempo, of a latter-day religious movement getting under way.

  Kathryn fidgeted in her seat.

  With a kind of empty-headed adroitness the film was shifting madly now, offering a shot of Storm among the saucer people again, Storm leading his followers in prayer and meditation, Storm speaking directly out of the screen urging all mankind to put aside mistrust and suspicion and welcome the benevolent space people with all their hearts. Shots of other saucer-sighters came across the screen: tense women declaring they had seen the galactics, “Yes I surely did,” and lean, trembling men announcing they had ridden in the ships of the saucer folk, “actually and literally’. And a final sequence of shots showing an authentic service of the Society for the Brotherhood of Worlds. It was nothing else but a revival session, full of shouted benedictions and affirmations, of waving arms and glistening foreheads and staring eyes, of rapturous statements of contact with the galactics. The film ended with a rhapsody of organ chords that shook the building. When the lights came on, the other four women of the audience sat motionless, stunned, as if they had experienced a shattering epiphany.

  Kathryn left quickly, slipping through the anteroom downstairs before anyone could see her. It had been a waste of time to come here, she realized now. Everything she had heard about the Contact Cult was true: it was nothing but a moneymaking dodge, an attempt to exploit the easily deluded. Kathryn felt tempted to burst into that elegant office and shout, ‘Frederic Storm’s never seen a galactic in his life! If you want to see one, come home with me!’ Were the galactics eight feet tall and supernally benevolent of mien? No; at least one of them wasn’t. Kathryn saw no connection between the guest in her home and the glossy beings of the film. Frederic Storm was a fraud, and his followers were cranks, just as most intelligent people had always insisted. To Kathryn, it seemed bitterly amusing that Vorneen had chosen to drop into a skeptic’s garden. What if he had fallen beside the home of a true believer?

  She laughed over that. Surely it would demolish Storm overnight if one of his followers showed up at the evening service with an authentic galactic in tow! It would be like bringing Jesus along to High Mass … an embarrassment for the authorities.

  Too bad, though, that the trip had been useless. In what she now sa
w had been hopeless naivete, she had gone to Albuquerque expecting to find genuine comfort and counsel at the Contact Cult — someone who would be able to guide her and interpret for her the presence in her home of this mysterious being. Instead she had received a machine-turned promotional razzle-dazzle and had been milked of a couple of dollars. So much for the Society for the Brotherhood of Worlds, she thought, as she sped homeward along a freeway just beginning to thicken with early rush-hour traffic. The Contact Cult had nothing to offer. She was strictly on her own in her dealings with Vorneen.

  Collecting Jill from the neighbor, Kathryn entered the house and began thinking about dinner. She went into Vorneen’s room. He was awake.

  “Have a good trip?” he asked.

  “Not really. I didn’t accomplish anything.”

  “What’s that in your hand?”

  She realized she was holding the brochures and booklets she had bought at the Contact Club. Her cheeks flared. “Nothing much. Just some junk.”

  “I could use something to read.”

  Kathryn sought for a way out, found none, and said, “All right. For what it’s worth, here.” She tossed the material onto the bed. Vorneen fanned the booklets out.

  “What is all this?” he asked.

  She said evenly, “It’s literature about flying saucers. I got it at the Contact Cult in Albuquerque. You know what a Contact Cult is?”

  “The new religion. Based on supposed meetings between Earthmen and beings from space.”

  “That’s right,” Kathryn said.

  “Why should you be interested in such things?” he asked, and there was no mistaking the slyness in his voice.

  Her eyes met his. “I’m interested in many things. But I wasted my time with them. They’re talking through their hats down there. They’ve invented their whole religion. They wouldn’t know a real galactic being if it walked up and saluted them.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “Yes!”

  Eleven

  In the darker moments over the past few years, Tom Falkner had liked to tell himself that he was living in hell. But now, in the few days since he had taken Glair into his house, he came to realize that that had been an exaggeration. He hadn’t really been in hell at all, only living on the outskirts. At last he had arrived in the true downtown section.

  He wasn’t sure how much longer he could take it without cracking altogether.

  He had taken a lot of punishment in his day — the washout of his astronaut career, his relegation to the AOS scrap heap, the breakup of his marriage — without cracking. Bending, yes. But remaining whole. This latest thing was too much, though. It hit him right along the line of irreconcilable conflicts that lay at the core of his being, and he was on the verge of splitting like the San Andreas Fault.

  Glair said, “Go ahead and have a drink.”

  “How do you know I want one?”

  “It isn’t hard to tell. Poor Tom! I feel so sorry for you!”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “I know,” she said, letting a smile cross her face.

  “You little devil! That isn’t fair, picking on my weakness. Can I help it if I’m a born self-pitier?”

  “You could try a little harder. But go have your drink, anyway.”

  “Do you want one?”

  “You know I shouldn’t touch alcohol,” Glair said. She was sitting up in bed, the blankets bunched around her waist. The upper half of her body was engulfed in one of his pajama tops. He had insisted on that; she had no clothes of her own but for the rubber undergarment and the outer suit, both of which were hidden deep in his basement security chamber, and he found her casual outlook on nudity troublesome in his present frame of mind. Her breasts were extraordinarily well developed — implausibly so, in fact — and the sight of them filled him with such a fury of need that he had asked her to cover them. The temptation to climb into bed with her was overpowering enough as it was. And he had plenty of other problems about her presence here, right now, without getting involved in that.

  He took a spray can of Japanese Scotch from his pocket drink-case and activated it. Right into the veins; that was the way. No bother about the vile taste, just mainline the alcohol to the bloodstream where it belonged, and start it on its way to the brain. Glair watched his impassively. Within moments, he imagined that he was more relaxed.

  “Won’t you have to report to your office one of these days?” she asked him.

  “I’m on sick leave. No one will bother me until Monday, now. That gives me a few more days to figure things out.”

  “You’re still planning to turn me in?”

  “I should. I can’t. I won’t.”

  “My legs are getting better fast,” she said. “They’ll be healed in another two weeks, perhaps. Then I’ll get off your hands. I’ll clear out and my people will take me away and you can go back to work.”

  “How are they going to find you, if that communicator in your suit is broken?”

  “Don’t worry about that, Tom. They’ll find me or I’ll find them, and I’ll be off Earth in a hurry.”

  “Heading where? Back to Dirna?”

  “Probably not. Just to our relief base for a medical checkup and a rest.”

  He frowned. “Where’s that?”

  “I don’t want to tell you, Tom. I’ve told you a lot too much already.”

  “Sure,” he said morosely. “And when I’ve pried all your galactic secrets out of you, I’m going to file a full report to the Air Force. You think I’m keeping you here for fun? I’m just pretending to be hiding you. Actually, AOS knows all about it, and this is our subtle way of—”

  “Tom, why do you hate yourself so much?”

  “Hate myself?”

  “It shows in everything you say, in your movements, even. You’re so full of bitterness, of tension. Your sarcasm. The look on your face. What’s the matter?”

  “I thought you knew. I was supposed to be an astronaut, and I flunked out, and they stuck me in a garbage assignment where 1 spent five days a week comforting crackpots and chasing around the country after mysterious blinking lights. Isn’t that a reason to be bitter?”

  “Because you didn’t believe in your work, yes. But now you know that your AOS assignment wasn’t all wasted time. There really was something up there above the Earth. Isn’t that better? Don’t you feel now that there was a purpose to your work?”

  “No,” he said sullenly. “What I was doing wasn’t worth a damn. And still isn’t.” He reached for a second spray can. “Glair, Glair, Glair, I didn’t want it to be real! I didn’t want to find any flying saucer girl in the desert! I—” He stopped, feeling absurd at what he had blurted. Glair said softly, “You preferred to have a worthless, empty job, because that way you could go on torturing yourself about your wasted career. Things became a lot worse for you when you found me, didn’t they? Suddenly you had to face up to the fact that your motive for self-torture was gone.”

  “Quit it, Glair. Change the subject.”

  “Look at me, Tom. Why do you hate yourself like this? Why do you want to go on hurting yourself?”

  “Glair—”

  “You’re still finding new ways to torment yourself, too. You told me that it was your duty to report me. You didn’t do it. The one man in all of AOS that actually found an extraterrestrial being, and instead of doing the naturally military thing you took her home and hid her in your house and opaqued the windows. Why? So you could feel good and guilty about the way you were violating your orders.”

  His hand shook so vehemently that he could barely get the next spray can lined up with his vein.

  “One more thing, Tom. Then I’ll let you alone. Why are you keeping your distance from me, if not for the same idea that you’ve got to keep hurting yourself? You want me, and we both know it. But you punish yourself by covering my body in this thing and telling yourself you’re being virtuous. There’s a word for your kind of personality in your
language. Vorneen told me, once. A mato — mati—”

  “Masochist,” Falkner said. His heart was hammering against the cage of his ribs.

  “Masochist, yes. I don’t mean you whip yourself and wear tight boots. I mean you find ways to hurt your soul.”

  “Who’s Vorneen?” Falkner asked. “One of my mates.”

  “You mean, one of your shipmates?” That too. But I mean, a sexual mate. Vorneen and Mirtin and I, we were a crew together. A three-facet sexual group. Two males and me.”

  “How could an arrangement like that possibly work? Aboard one ship, two males and—”

  “It works. We aren’t human, Tom. And we don’t necessarily have the same emotions as human beings. We were very happy together. They may have been killed when the ship blew up, I don’t know. I was the first to jump. But you’re getting off the subject, Tom. The subject is you.”

  “Forget me. I never realized you might have — have a sexual group. I never thought of it at all. You’re a married woman, then.”

  “You could say that. Unless they’re dead. I have no way of communicating with them.”

  “But you loved them both?”

  Glair’s forehead furrowed. “ I loved them both, yes. And I could find room to love someone else, too. Come over here, Tom, and stop looking for ways to make yourself unhappy.”

  He walked slowly toward her, thinking of two men and a woman aboard a flying saucer, and telling himself that they were not men, she was not a woman. He was surprised at the power of the jealousy that gripped him. He wondered what their alien lovemaking might be like. He felt dizzy.

  Glair looked up, her eyes cool and inviting.

  “Take this silly piece of cloth off me, Tom. Please.”

  He drew the pajama top over her head, leaving her golden hair in disarray. Her breasts were high and firm and very white, and showed a total disregard for the forces of gravity. They were the sort of breasts one saw on calendar girls, but never on a real woman: mysteriously firm, mysteriously close-set, mysteriously out-thrust, a sixteen-year-old boy’s ideal image of what a woman’s breasts were like. She threw back the covers. He looked down at her and reminded himself that her entire body was a sham, a synthetic outer cloak for something terrifyingly strange. She could have the breasts of Aphrodite and the thighs of Diana, she could have every feminine perfection she desired, for she had had this body constructed to suit her own whims. Her flesh felt like flesh, and within it were nerves and bones and conduits for blood, but flesh, nerves, bones, and blood all were the pseudo-living products of a laboratory.