Harlan Ellison: Troublemakers

But this crisis with the saucers was something else. It had been dumped in the General’s lap, both from above, and from below, and he was sweating. He had to solve this problem, and for the first time in his life his rough-hewn good looks and military bearing and good name could not bluff him through.

He actually had to make a meaningful decision, and he was almost incapable of doing it. That made him edgy, and snappish, and dissatisfied, and it made the Adjutant’s job not quite so cushy.

“Confound it, Alberts! This isn’t some base maneuver you can stammer through! This is a nationwide emergency, and everyone is on my neck! God knows I’m doing all I can, but I need a little help I I’ve tried to impress upon you the-the -seriousness of the matter; this thing has got to be ended. It’s got the world in an uproar. You’re getting up my nose with this attitude, boy! It’s starting to stink like subordination, Alberts...”

The Adjutant watched, his mouth a fine line. This was the first time the General had spoken to him in such demeaning manner. He didn’t like it; a lot. But it was just another sign of the cracking facade of the old man.

The General had come from wealthy Army parents, been sent through West Point and graduated with top honors. He had joined the Air Force when the Army and Air Corps were one and the same, and stayed on after the separation. He had served in the air, and risen in the ranks almost faster than the eye could see. Mostly through his father’s connections. The honors, the service duty, the medals...all through pull.

The man was a wealthy, sheltered, and vacillating individual, and the Adjutant had been making his decisions for three years. Alberts wondered what would happen when the rotation plan moved him to another job, next year. Would the new Adjutant catch on as fast as he had from the last one? Or would the General pull strings so he could stay on?

But that was all in the future, and this saucer decision was one the General had to make for himself. It wasn’t minor.

And the General was cracking. Badly.

“Now get up there and do something!” the General cried, slamming the empty desktop with a flattened hand.

His face was blotched with frustration and annoyance, and-naturally-Alberts saluted, swiveled, and left.

Thinking, I hope the Pentagon lowers the boom right down his wattled throat, right down his gullet to his large colon!

One saucer was a dirty affair. Not with the dust and filth of an atmosphere, for the saucer had obviously not been very long in air, but with the pocks and blazes of space. Here a small cluster of pits, where the saucer had encountered a meteor swarm; there a bright smear of oxidized metal. Its markings were slovenly, and there were obvious patchings on its metal hull.

Somehow, it seemed out of place among all the bright, shining, marvelously-intricate, painted saucers. It seemed to be a rather poor relation, and never, never flickered out of existence. All the others might be subject to that strange disappearing act, but not the poor relation. It stayed where it was, somewhere above the Fairchild Desert of Nevada.

Once a civilian pilot from Las Vegas, disregarding the orders of the C.A.P., flew very close to the dirty saucer. The pilot buzzed the ship several times, swooping in and over and back around in huge, swinging arcs. By the time he had made his fourteenth Immelmann and decided to land atop the saucer, just for yuks, the hurry-up bleep was out to interceptors based near Reno and Winnemucca, and they caught him high, blasting him from the sky in a matter of minutes.

With the fate of a world hanging in the balance, there could be no time for: subtlety or reasoning with crackpots. He had been irrational, had defied the stay-grounded, keep-back orders, and so had fallen under the martial law which had ruled the country since the day after the five thousand had appeared.

Radio communication with the ships was impossibly fruitless.

Television transmission was equally worthless.

Bounced signals failed to come back; the metal of the ships sopped them up.

Telemetering devices brought back readings of the density-or seeming density-of the ships, and when they were reported, the situation looked bleaker than before.

The metal was, indeed, super-strong.

The only time things looked promising was when a philologist and a linguist were recruited to broadcast a complete course in English for thirty-six hours straight. The beam was directed at first one ship, then another, and finally when it was directed at the dirty saucer, was gulped in.

They continued broadcasting, till at the end of thirty-six hours, the dumpy, red-faced, runny-nosed, and sniffling Linguist, who had picked up his cold in the broadcasting shack, pushed back his chair, gathered his cashmere sweater from where it had fallen in the corner, and said there was no use.

No reply had come in. If the beings who had flown these saucers were intelligent enough to have gotten here, they would surely have been intelligent enough to have learned English by then. But there had been no reply, and spirits sank again.

Inter-channel memos slipped frantically down from President to Aide, to Secretary of Defense, to Undersecretary, to Chief of Staff, to the General, who passed the memos-bundled-to his Adjutant. Who worried.

It had been the only one where there was any slightest sign of contact. “Look, pilot, I want you to fly across that dirty one,” the Adjutant said.

“Begging the Captain’s permission...” the wide-eyed young pilot demanded, over his shoulder; he continued at the nod from Alberts “...but the last man who buzzed that big-O, sir, got himself scissored good and proper. What I mean, sir, is that we’re way off bounds, and if our clearances didn’t, uh, clear, we might have a flock of my buddies down our necks.” He spoke in a faint Texas drawl that seemed to ease from between his thin lips.

The Adjutant felt the adrenaline flowing erratically. He had been taking slop from the General for three weeks, and now to be forced into flying up himself, into the very jaws of death (as he phrased it to himself), to look over the situation...he would brook no backtalk from a whey-faced flight boy fresh out of Floyd Bennett.

Alberts shooed him off, directed him back to the stick. “Don’t worry yourself, pilot. “ He licked his lips, added, “They cleared, and all we have to worry about is that saucer line up ahead.”

The discs were rising out of the late evening Nevada haze. The clouds seemed to have lowered, and the fog seemed to have risen, and the two intermingled, giving a wavering, indistinct appearance to the metallic line of saucers, stretching off beyond the horizon.

The Adjutant looked out through the curving bubble of the helicopter’s control country, and felt the same twinges of fear rippling the hair along his neck that he had felt when the General had started putting the screws to him.

The Sikorsky rescue copter windmilled in toward the saucer, its rotors flap-flap-flap-flapping overhead.

The pilot sticked-in on the dirty saucer. It rose out of the mist abruptly, and they were close enough to see that there really was dust streaked with dirt along the dull metal surface of the ship. Probably from one of these Nevada windstorms, the Adjutant thought.

They scaled down, and came to a hovering stop two feet above the empty metal face of the disc.

“See anything?” the Adjutant asked.

The pilot craned off to one side, swept his gaze around, then turned on the searchbeam. The pole of light watered across the sleek saucer bulk, and picked up nothing. Not even a line of rivets, not even a break in the construction. Nothing but dirt and pockmarks, and what might be considered patches, were this a tire or an ordinary ship.