Out of This World Read online

  “Yeah, well, what evidence do we have?” Nancy retorted. “We didn’t take any pictures or anything; all we’ve got is some memories and a can of beer. Is that any better than some of the saucer nuts?”

  “No,” Pel admitted.

  “So maybe it didn’t really happen at all,” Nancy said; Pel noticed a hopeful tone to her voice. “Maybe we imagined it, got ourselves hypnotized somehow into believing it.”

  Pel took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.

  That explanation was actually just about as believable as any other, he had to admit. He didn’t like the idea that his mind could play such tricks on him, and he couldn’t explain it, but really, a man from another universe wasn’t a much better explanation.

  He remembered Raven so clearly, though—the embroidery on his tunic, the greasy smudge on one temple, the cat hairs on his cloak, his odd accent. It didn’t seem like something he and Nancy would have imagined, not with the weirdly confusing story about evil wizards and galactic empires.

  That reminded him of something, and he sat up in the recliner.

  “Hey,” he said. “There was something he told me before you got home—he said the Galactic Empire sent a spaceship to Earth. Through a whatchamacallit, a gate or a space-warp or whatever, somewhere near here.”

  Nancy looked puzzled.

  “So?” she said.

  “So,” Pel said, “if it was all real, then don’t you think a spaceship might make the evening news?”

  Nancy blinked.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Maybe.”

  Pel was annoyed at her lack of enthusiasm, but tried not to show it. “Well, if it’s on the news, that would settle it, right? It would all be real, if it’s on the news.”

  “And if it’s not?” Nancy asked.

  Pel shrugged. “Well, then we still don’t know for sure,” he said. “But we wouldn’t be any worse off than we are.”

  “That’s true,” she admitted.

  “And if it is on the news,” Pel said with sudden enthusiasm, “this would really be big-time stuff! The first contact with another universe, my God!”

  Nancy refused to share his excitement as he lifted the remote control and turned on CNN.

  * * * *

  Amy spoke quietly into the phone as she peered out her kitchen window. A man with what looked like a metal detector was walking across the back yard, swinging it slowly from side to side a few inches above the dewy grass. A team of men was taking photographs from every possible angle, with one of them holding a yellow measuring stick in various positions to provide a scale; about half of them wore Air Force uniforms, while the rest were in mufti.

  They had started arriving right around dawn, and had apparently reached equilibrium now, with a few leaving whenever more arrived. And Amy’s call had finally gotten an answer.

  “This is Amy Jewell,” she said. “I need to speak to Bob Hough right away.”

  “I’m sorry,” replied the receptionist at Dutton, Powell, and Hough, “but Mr. Hough is on vacation in Cancun. I have the number of his hotel if this is an emergency, but Ms. Nguyen is handling everything for him while he’s away.”

  Amy paused to think who Ms. Nguyen was. There was Susan, the Vietnamese woman who had helped out with the divorce—that must be her.

  Susan had probably done most of the work anyway. The women with no titles or authority generally did everything except get the credit. “All right, then I’ll talk to Ms... to her,” Amy said.

  “She’s only just gotten in, but I’ll see. Just a moment,” There was a click, and insipid music began playing softly. Amy watched as the man with the metal detector thing wandered out of sight around the corner, and the photography crew paused to reload.

  “Susan Nguyen,” said a voice on the phone.

  “Susan,” Amy said, relieved; the voice was familiar. This was definitely the Susan she remembered. “This is Amy Jewell; I think you helped Bob Hough handle my divorce last year?”

  “Oh, yes, Ms. Jewell; how are you?”

  “I’m fine, but listen, something really weird happened yesterday. This... this thing landed in my back yard yesterday. It’s like a... well, it’s like a spaceship out of a comic book or something.”

  “A spaceship?” Susan replied dubiously.

  “Not a real one,” Amy said hastily, “I think it’s some kind of gag—maybe a publicity stunt of some kind.”

  “Oh,” Susan said. “It still seems strange. How big is... no, never mind that. What is it you want us to do?”

  “I want it out of my yard, that’s what I want!” Amy’s temper, carefully held in check until now, finally gave out. “I don’t want anything to do with it! I want it out of here, and I want all these people who are out here looking at it off my land and away from here! And I want damages—it smashed my hedge and scared the hell out of me!”

  “Have you called the police?”

  Amy said, almost screaming, “They’re the ones who started it!” Then she stopped herself, took a deep breath, and forced herself to calm down.

  She could sense Susan waiting calmly on the other end of the line.

  “I called 9-1-1,” Amy said at last, “when the thing first fell here, because I thought it was a crashing airplane or something. So the police and the firemen came out and looked at it, and they took away the people who had been in it, and then the FAA came out and looked at it, and they said it wasn’t a private plane, it was some kind of military thing. So now...”

  “Wait a minute, Ms. Jewell,” Susan said, interrupting. “There were people in it?”

  “Yes! About a dozen of them, in silly purple uniforms. One woman and a bunch of men. All white, most of them blond, like a bunch of Nazis, with things like rayguns that didn’t work. The police took them all away and charged them with trespassing. And I want you to find them and find out who’s responsible and make them get this thing out of here!”

  “I see,” Susan said. “Was it the county police that took them?”

  “I think so,” Amy said. “Someone said something about taking them to Rockville, I think.”

  “Well, that would be the county, then,” Susan agreed. “So you want to know who they are, and get the... the thing off your property. Anything else?”

  “I want these people out of here. The FAA man called the Air Force, and one of them was here all night, sitting in his car, and a lot more got here this morning before I even woke up, and now there are a bunch of people out there taking pictures and measuring everything, and I want them off my land.”

  “Air Force?” There was a long pause before Susan said, “I’m not sure how much I can do about them, Ms. Jewell, but I’ll try.”

  “I don’t care who they are, I want them off my land!” Amy shouted. “Isn’t there something in the Constitution about soldiers in people’s houses?”

  “Third Amendment,” Susan replied automatically. “I doubt it applies in this case, but I’ll see what I can do. I need to make a few calls, and then I’ll probably want to come out there and see just what the situation is. I have your address and phone number in the files; are they still current?”

  “I haven’t moved,” Amy said.

  “Good. Just hold on, Ms. Jewell, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you,” Amy said.

  “Goodbye.”

  “’Bye.” She hung up the phone and looked out the window at the photo team. Now they were pacing off the dimensions of her patio.

  What business of theirs was that? She clamped her lips tight and turned away.

  Maybe, she thought, if she didn’t watch, it wouldn’t be so annoying.

  * * * *

  “What I can’t figure out,” the detective lieutenant said, “is that not one of them wanted to use the phone. You’re sure of that?”

  The booking sergeant nodded. “Absolutely,” he said. “We read them their rights individually, just to be on the safe side, and we explained it all, and we told each of them he was entitled to
one phone call, and all we got was blank looks. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that none of them had ever heard any of it before.”

  “What, they never saw cop shows on TV?”

  “That’s what it seemed like. I mean, when I read the line about if you can’t afford an attorney one will be appointed for you, I got these looks you wouldn’t believe—they were all of them astonished, like they’d never heard of such a thing. One of them, I mean, man, his jaw dropped open. And one said, ‘Really? It’s not a trick?’ and Jesus, he sounded sincere.”

  The detective shook his head in wonder.

  The sergeant slapped a hand on the desk. “It’s weird,” he said. “I mean, I know there are nuts out there, I’ve seen plenty of them. I’ve seen guys dragged in here trying to pick invisible bugs off their skin, and guys hopped up on PCP who needed a dozen men to hold them, and guys that looked like they’d been dead for a week and I was afraid they’d drop dead on the floor for real before we could get a doctor in, and I’ve had guys swear at me and curse me up one side and down the other, I’ve had rich guys screaming at me and street punks being Momma’s little angel, but I have never seen anything like this bunch!”

  “Gave you a lot of trouble?”

  “Hell, no—that’s what’s so strange! They all of them looked around like this place was something out of a fairy tale, and did just exactly what they were told, and they gave us names and ranks and serial numbers, like they were prisoners of war instead of just busted for trespassing and littering, but they wouldn’t tell us anything else. They didn’t ask for lawyers, didn’t make phone calls, nothing. It’s like they really believe they’re soldiers from another planet!”

  “Maybe they do,” the detective suggested.

  The sergeant spread his hands wide. “Ten of them? Ten nuts with the same delusion?”

  The detective shrugged. “So they were all ten like that?”

  “Well, eight of ‘em, anyway. The woman was a little different, I guess. She seemed real upset, where the others were calm as anything. And the captain, as he’s supposed to be—he wanted to talk to someone official, and no, I wouldn’t do, he wanted somebody from the military or the State Department. I told him I couldn’t do that, especially on a weekend.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Well, yeah. He’s an envoy, he says, from the Galactic Empire, and he wants to talk to someone about arranging a mutual defense treaty with Earth, or at least the United States. He can’t make a treaty with local cops.”

  The detective considered that silently for a moment, then asked, “Think it’s a movie stunt?”

  “At first I did,” the sergeant said, “but now... I dunno. Wouldn’t they have called in the reporters by now? Wouldn’t they have made some phone calls? And why would they pick this lady’s back yard way the hell out in Goshen? Her lawyer just called, y’know—the lady’s really pissed about it.”

  The detective nodded again. “So they all claim to come from the Galactic Empire?”

  “As much as they claim anything, yeah.”

  “They’re consistent?”

  “Oh, yeah, absolutely. Not one of them has slipped out of character for as much as an instant, I swear.”

  The detective sighed. “All right,” he said. “Where should I start?”

  “Wherever you like,” the sergeant said, pushing a clipboard over.

  The detective picked it up and scanned the list of names. “Prosser-pine Thorpe?” he said. “Is that the woman?”

  “Proserpin-AH,” the sergeant corrected him. “Yeah, that’s her.”

  “Gave her rank as ‘registered master telepath’?”

  “That’s what she said, yeah.”

  “She try to read your mind?”

  The sergeant just shrugged.

  “Not so you could tell, huh?”

  “So how am I supposed to know? But she sure didn’t talk about it, if she read anybody’s mind.”

  “You said she was nervous?”

  “Well, upset about something, anyway. Had a sort of trapped look—like a junkie who suddenly realizes she doesn’t know where to get her next fix. You know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” the detective said. “She a looker?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “She’s okay,” he said. “Nothing I’d leave home for, but okay.”

  “What the hell,” the detective said, dropping the clipboard back on the desk. “I’ll start with her.”

  * * * *

  Proserpine Thorpe stared at the walls of her cell, baffled and frustrated.

  Nothing. She had been straining her every nerve, focusing all her being on her telepathic sense, and there was simply nothing there.

  This universe had some characteristics that nobody had mentioned or thought about in any of the briefings—presumably because nobody knew about them. The ship’s main drive didn’t work here. The crew’s blasters didn’t seem to work, either, though she wasn’t sure they’d really been tested.

  And, it seemed, telepathy didn’t work here.

  They should have expected this, or at least considered the possibility. After all, they had known that at least some of Shadow’s magic didn’t work in Imperial space. That demonstrated that there were differences. Why hadn’t they considered what other differences there might be?

  She felt as if her head were packed with wool, shutting out the constant background hum of other people’s thoughts, and it was not a comfortable feeling at all. She had never experienced anything like it before.

  What was even worse, though, was that no one had yet contacted her.

  The plan had been that once they were through the warp she would send a quick verification that they had arrived safely, and that she then would devote her attention to the usual duties of a ship’s telepath—accompanying Captain Cahn on his diplomatic mission, reading the minds of those around them, advising him when they were lying, and so on and so forth. All of that had obviously become impossible when the ship had crashed twenty miles from their objective and they had all been taken prisoner by the local constabulary, and when most of their equipment wouldn’t work.

  And she hadn’t sent any verification because her telepathy didn’t work, either.

  Which meant that as far as she could tell, nobody back at Base One had any idea what had happened to them.

  So why hadn’t they gotten another telepath and contacted her? Surely, she could still receive as well as the natives here could, and her team had managed to make limited contact with half a dozen of the native psychics. Didn’t they realize something had gone wrong? She had been here, isolated, all night, and there had been no contact.

  Surely they knew something had gone wrong. Surely they had had plenty of time to try to get through.

  Then, at last, something stirred in her mind, as if a mouse were moving inside that mass of wool. She tried to focus on it, and it became clearer, she could sense a sort of shape to the message.

  And then it was through, it was Carrie back at Base One, calling her, calling desperately.

  “Here!” she thought. “I’m here, Carrie!”

  “Prossie!” Relief flooded through the contact, flowing both ways.

  She didn’t reply with words, but with reassuring thoughts roughly equivalent to, “It’s okay, Carrie, I’m fine.”

  Carrie’s thoughts caressed hers for a moment, and then a question came through, so clear that for a moment Prossie thought she had heard it spoken aloud.

  “Prossie,” it said, “what happened?”

  Chapter Five

  “No telepathy? No anti-gravity?” The Under-Secretary frowned at the papers on his desk.

  “No, sir,” the telepath standing stiffly before him reported. “Neither one. It appears that the laws of physics are totally different there—it’s not just that the telepathic mutation never happened, or AG wasn’t discovered. Not only do they have no telepaths or AG of their own, but ours don’t work there; that’s why the ship crashed, and why Prossie... why Telepath Thor
pe didn’t report in. It’s a miracle that there are human beings so much like us in a place so alien, let alone that they speak the same language.”

  “But they have some sort of technology, don’t they?” the official demanded. “I mean, they aren’t just using sticks and stones?”

  “Thorpe says that they have a different technology from ours, sir,” the telepath explained, “but it’s one that’s very nearly as advanced as ours in some ways, sir, maybe even higher. She reports seeing a recording machine of some kind that’s unlike anything we’ve ever imagined, and they appear to have a sophisticated mechanical communications system.”

  “But if our machines won’t work there,” the Under-Secretary asked, tapping the desk, “will their machines work here? Will their weapons work here? Or in the Shadow realm?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” the telepath said. “Nobody knows.”

  “The reports say these people do have advanced weapons,” he said. “Did Thorpe say anything about them?”

  “Well, sir,” the telepath said cautiously, “you have to remember, she was taken into custody before she’d ever had a chance to leave the landing site, and she can’t read minds there, she has to rely on her eyes and ears, like anybody else. She spent the night in their jail, and there wasn’t much to see there. And I didn’t take time to go over every detail; I came directly to you to report.”

  The Under-Secretary’s manner made his impatience clear as he said, “Yes?”

  “So far as I know, she hasn’t seen any weapons except the handguns the law enforcers carry,” the telepath said. “And she hasn’t heard anything about any others.”

  “Handguns?”

  “Yes, sir. Projectile weapons, apparently, like the pistols of a century ago. She saw bullets on the law officers’ belts.”

  “Bullets,” the Under-Secretary said, frowning.

  “Yes, sir,” the telepath said.

  “We’re looking for help against the alien super-science of another universe,” the Under-Secretary demanded, “science so advanced that they call it magic, and the best we can find is people who still shoot bullets at each other?”

  The telepath shifted uneasily, struggling to stay at attention. “Well, sir, bullets can be very effective, really, and these were civilian law officers, after all, not military personnel. We’ve all read things in other minds there that hint at much better...”