Children of Infinity Page 8

  After a number of trips from his table, the alien said, “Say, you don’t mind if we sit at the food table, do you? It’ll conserve an awful lot of my energy.”

  “It’s all right with me,” said the cop.

  A half hour later, the policeman was on the phone calling headquarters, asking for a replacement at the restaurant when he went off duty.

  At the same time, the food table having been emptied, the alien wandered into the kitchen in search of further snacks and was raiding the walk-in refrigerator.

  —If you don’t mind eating those sides of beef, we can cook them here.

  —But first I’ll drink up this milk. It looks like at least seven or eight gallons.

  Shortly after, along with a change-of-shift replacement for law and order, came a reporter who had been covering the police station on routine nighttime assignment. He brought a photographer with him after hearing the restaurant owner’s story, hoping for an interesting shot to go with a small page filler.

  Sitting opposite the alien now were the reporter and the new policeman.

  “So what’s the scoop?” the newsman asked, as his subject of interest munched on various pale, almost transparent, odds and ends of new food he had located.

  “Well,” the alien said, between chomps, “I’m from a distant planet.”

  The reporter and his photographer, who was standing nearby, exchanged knowing glances.

  The alien went on. “What we’ve done is used up our planet’s resources. We were so busy advancing technologically that we did not too wisely decide what areas we should pursue.” He sucked hungrily on a bone. “As a result, our planet is not just polluted like yours—it’s devastated. Some cities are actually so blanketed in smoke that our citizens can hardly see. Our population is dying off at a vast rate, new births are prohibited, and industry is in a state of regulation—but in that area, it’s panic, and we don’t know what to do at this late date.” He paused and looked down at his bone-filled plate, then licked his fingers. “Would you excuse me for a moment? I noticed a crate in the back of the kitchen and it might have food in it.” He stood and rushed off.

  The reporter turned to the photographer. “Well, what do you think?”

  “Sounds like a nut!”

  “You have to face one fact, fellows,” the policeman said, looking at his watch. “This guy—or whatever he is—has been here for almost twelve hours and he’s been eating steadily. So, who knows? Maybe there’s something to what he says.”

  The alien returned wearing a wide grin and carrying an armful of the birds that had finally thawed.

  He set them down on the table, sat back in the booth, and rubbed his hands together. “Ahhhhh,” he said. T hen he leaned forward and began cracking the fowl apart.

  The reporter ran a finger across his lips. “Say, are you going to eat them like that? Raw?”

  “Of course. Don’t worry, though. They’ll be processed back there.”

  “What do you mean by that?” the photographer asked.

  The alien tore big slabs of meat from a huge drumstick and wolfed them down. “You see, I send this back by means of my kinergetic powers. In other words, the food is turned into energy, transmitted, and returned to matter on arrival. It’s sort of related to your mental telepathy.”

  “Do you mean you’re feeding a whole planet?” the reporter asked.

  “Oh, my gosh, no,” the alien corrected. “There are thousands of us all over the universe doing this, sending food back for the survival of our population.”

  The reporter’s face suddenly became serious, and he began to write swiftly on his pad. “How much food would you estimate you’ve eaten?”

  The alien stopped his gustatory efforts momentarily and poised proudly. “Based on your gravity and weight system, I’d say it’s close to a ton.”

  “That does it!” the reporter exclaimed, and began scratching his notes down even faster.

  The photographer began setting up his equipment and was soon posing his subject against piles of used dishes, the empty food table, in the kitchen, and against the background of an empty restaurant still open in the wee hours of the morning. Through all of the picturetaking, the alien continued eating.

  The newspaperman and his sidekick left hurriedly and excitedly with their story and photos to make a deadline.

  The alien continued his orgy, and the policeman looked on stoically as raw chunks of uncooked birds slid one after another down his throat.

  The next morning, the restaurant owner opened his place to discover the policeman and the alien sitting quietly, both almost immobile.

  “You’re still here!” the heavy man exclaimed.

  “Yes,” said the alien. “When does your cook come in? I’m hungry!”

  “All right!” the tense restauranteur said. He seemed to have lost weight. “My lawyer informed me that the statement on the menu is a contract and that throwing you out is a breach of that contract. However,” he added with a self-satisfied grin, “you’ll be served something special this afternoon—an order to cease and desist—eating!”

  The owner, however, was shortly given good reason to change his plans. By that afternoon, the news of the alien had circled the globe and the restaurant’s phone rang constantly with offers of considerably large amounts of money from the mass media for permission to cover the eating event. A quick tally of potential payments showed that the compensation would not only cover his culinary losses to the alien but would provide for more food. Not to mention the publicity for his business. As a result, the restaurant owner permitted his establishment to be filled with television cameras, lights, photographers, and reporters.

  He ordered two moving vans full of food, and hired a dozen chefs—still ending up with a profit. Other restaurants, wanting to get in on the advertising resulting from the notoriety, contributed food for just a mention of their names. Trucks arrived all evening.

  When the special news telecast went on the air, preempting all programs around the world, the alien appeared on the screen against a lush background of flowers and expensive original paintings on loan from 57th Street and Madison Avenue art galleries. He stood at a huge table filled with tiers of edibles of every kind of American and exotic foods to be found in New York, as well as those flown in, within the limited time, from other countries.

  Between huge gulps, the alien explained the plight of his planet, how the inhabitants had destroyed their environment with wastes over the last hundred years. That they had realized too late that their food resources were running out and that pollution, as a result, was actually beginning to cause death by numerous means. As a last-minute stopgap beginning in the Earth year of 1972, they had begun building enclosures for the planet’s people in which individuals could be sent kinergized food as well as information and entertainment. Most enclosure dwellers would hardly have to leave their “homes,” since the Administration Complex could see to it that its citizens were well cared for. He also explained that they were capable of assuming the morphology of any living creature in the universe and that they could instantly create similar sartorial styles—thus his appearance as an Earthman wearing the latest clothes.

  He and the other food-searchers, he told the viewers, had to visit all life-bearing planets in order to kinergize food—a system they hadn’t yet been able to duplicate by machine, as Earth hadn’t yet been able to reproduce photosynthesis synthetically.

  As he spoke and answered questions from the off-camera voice of a news commentator, the alien walked around the table, devouring great quantities of food. Toward the end of the hour, all of it was gone, and the camera cut to trucks outside, where teams of men were unloading huge crates, then to the kitchen where the cooks were frantically preparing more dishes. Then the camera returned to the restaurant where more food was being brought in.

  Just before the program was to end, a special red phone was brought onto the set, and the alien took it as it had been explained to him to do. The television equipment m
oved in for a close-up.

  “Hello,” said the visiting gourmand into the phone. The voice on the other end was heard by the audience, and the picture split to reveal the speaker on the other half. It was the President of the United States.

  “Hello, there!” said the officious political voice. “America is proud to be the first country of Earth to welcome you to this planet.”

  The alien swallowed his mouthful. “Thanks,” he said, then continued eating.

  “It gives me great pleasure to communicate with others in the universe, to say that our planet has constantly striven for peace among men—uhhh, beings. We hope that when you return home—”

  At this, the restauranteur, off camera, muttered to himself, “And I hope that’s soon!”

  “—you will relay to your . . . beings . . . .” the President continued, “the best wishes of all Americans—and other peoples of this globe, too.” Then he cleared his throat. “You have been extended, however, an invitation by our scientists here to remain and help us with our space program. We’d like to be able to travel to other parts of the universe, as you do, so that we can bring peace and prosperity to all of God’s creatures through our combined technologies.”

  The alien actually stopped eating for a moment. He looked directly into the television camera. “Thank you. However, I must finish my quota of food-kinergizing by tonight and leave.”

  “Thank God!” mumbled the restaurant owner from the crowd of onlookers.

  “However,” continued the outer-space being, “I must tell you that we could never reveal our accomplishments to any other world. You see, life everywhere has been designed so that survival is the most important instinct. Therefore, if I would explain to your . . . people . . . about how kinergesis and our other advanced accomplishments work, when you finally destroy your own planet by not using your resources properly—as it has been our mistake to do—your later generations will give our later generations competition. Therefore, we must, obviously, think of ours. But,” he went on, scraping up the last remnants of food that he could find on the part of the table near him, “the people of our planet feel indebted to those worlds from which we replenish our own destroyed ecology. And we repay them with what we consider equivalent value. You see, we are unable to pay you in your own currency—since we cannot reproduce your money. That would create an imbalance of nature, anyway. I mean, looking at such a situation from your viewpoint, it would adversely affect your country’s monetary system—being, in effect, counterfeit currency—and would eventually result in disruption of your planet’s finances.”

  With that, the restauranteur vigorously pushed his way through the crowd of media men and technical crews and, despite their efforts to hold him back, appeared on camera. He grasped the alien by the throat. “Do you mean,” he shrieked before millions of viewers, “that after all your gluttony in my place, you couldn’t pay the four ninety-five in the first place?”

  “That’s correct,” replied the alien, attempting to free his neck from the proprietor’s viselike grip. “But,” he gagged, “if you check your government’s supply of uranium in the storage area of the Atomic Energy Commission, you’ll see that it’s been increased.”

  “But what about me!” the restauranteur screamed, forcing the alien back onto the empty food table. Dishes, bowls, and utensils clattered to the floor. “You’re under arrest!” he shouted insanely. “You’re under arrest!”

  “Thank you, and good-bye,” gasped the alien, and before the eyes of millions of television viewers around the Earth, he began to fade from the screens. His assailant seemed to topple into the space that the alien was yielding, bringing the table and remaining servers, dishes, and other tabletop equipment down over himself. The news commentator spoke nervously, and the President could be heard in the background saying, “Hello? Hello?”

  Somewhere in the vast timelessness of space, the young alien hurtled molecularly to his next assignment.

  philip josé farmer

  Opening the Door

  The voyage from sixteen to seventeen was dark and silent.

  Up above, he knew, were light and air, blue clouds, white skies. No, it was the other way around. Blue skies. White clouds. And the wind shushed, the waves slapped, the gulls screamed. And somewhere, far off, human beings spoke.

  He cruised along in the dark of the deep. He felt the pressure—its cold, its indifference.

  Sometimes, he could put up a periscope. He could drive it up through the congealing and freezing substance. He could drive it up, up, until it was near the surface. He knew that it was near, where water and air met—or parted—because he would see a glimmer. And the voices became stronger.

  Then he would cry out through the periscope. But nobody answered. And though he tried to keep going up, he would sink. The glimmer would dissolve, and the cold and pressure would return.

  And something huge would move near in the darkness. Menacing, it moved. Breathing in darkness and pressure and cold, and breathing out horror, it would move nearer.

  Then he ceased being a submarine. It was so unexpected. It was like having the world pulled out from under you and another shoved in. Light was born. White was up above and on both sides, except where dark instruments and gray faces of cathode-ray tubes emerged. Faces moved around him as if he were the sun and they the planets.

  No. He was in a hospital room. The faces were those of men and women who must be doctors. After a few seconds, he recognized two faces.

  His mother was weeping. This was not unexpected. But she had gotten older. His father’s face was rigid. Nothing new. But he seemed to have aged also.

  His mother’s tears fell on his face. Salt water. Was it for this that he had struggled up from the briny deep? For more brine? The briny shallow? And the face of his father. Was it for the thermosetting plastic of those features that he had propelled himself so desperately upward?

  His parents’ faces fell away. A man’s face appeared. He was, the face said, Dr. Deet. He was in charge of NPWR. Neural-Parallel World Research. He had personally supervised the care and instrumentation of Clark for over a year. From the day that Clark had been brought in.

  He remembered his name then. He was Clark Norris. He was just sixteen and had been driving his father’s new steamer. There was the Yield sign, and Clark hadn’t yielded, and something vast and dark and screaming had overtaken them.

  It was not all his fault, Dr. Deet explained. The big steam semi had not had its lights on.

  That did not matter, Clark thought. His girl, Diana, and Bob, Mavis, Angela, and Larry were dead. Buried over a year ago.

  And why did you bring me back from the dead?

  He could not hear his own voice. However, he could see it. On the ceiling was a screen, and his words flashed across it.

  His mother wailed.

  Dr. Deet said, “You’ve not been dead, though there were times when we were not sure that you were still living.”

  His parents came and went many times. He groped around on the bottom of the ooze now and then. Other times he dreamed, and he knew that he was dreaming and that this was the first time in a long time that he had dreamed. And the doctors floated up before him and then were snatched away, as if they were balloons.

  At first, he did not want to admit it. But after a long while, after many talks, he told Deet that, yes, he now knew that he had no legs or arms. He did not have a tongue. Yes, as he could easily see and feel, he was hooked up to electronic devices. He watched his own words flashing across the screen. His speech was like lightning, but it struck only himself.

  “Now I know who I am,” he said.

  “Who?” Dr. Deet asked.

  “In the midst of all the chatter a year ago, we were talking about the game—rather, they were. I was asking myself, Who are you? Will you ever know? That’s why I didn’t see the Yield sign. Perhaps because I felt like yielding to no one at that time. It seemed to me that I’d been yielding all my life.”

  “And now you
know who you are?” Deet said.

  His face passed from Clark’s tunnel of view.

  “I know who Diana, Bob, Mavis, Angela, and Larry are,” Clark said. “They’re dead. No problem there. And I know who I am. Clark the almost dead. No problem there. From almost to completely is a short step. Of course, I can’t take that step. I have no legs. That’s a problem there.”

  “We all know that,” the doctor said. “No self-pity, please. Now, for your information, you haven’t been in a genuine coma. Shortly after you were hooked up, you began seeing—no, experiencing—this.”

  His mother must have entered while he and Deet were talking. Or perhaps she’d been there for a long time. No, she would never have kept quiet for a long time. Now, she wailed and she said, “Oh, no!”

  Dr. Deet ignored her and signaled to someone. A gray screen on the ceiling turned to two shades of black. The lighter was an oblong in the center of the screen. After a while, something gleamed flickeringly and palely behind the oblong.

  “This is a recording of what you saw while you were—ah—unconscious,” Deet said.

  “What is it?” Clark said. Then he said, “Of course. I’m in N-PWR. Never mind. I know what you’re doing to me.”

  “You’ve made contact,” Dr. Deet said. His voice was low but fierce. “This is the best contact we’ve ever recorded. I don’t mean just by you. By anyone.”

  “It doesn’t look like much to me,” Clark said. “Black on black.”

  “It’s consistent. That’s the thing, it’s consistent. And it keeps getting stronger. The flickering, I mean. It’s increasing in frequency and brightness.”

  “I have a big imagination,” Clark said. He drifted off, vaguely aware that his mother was crying. Where was his father? Probably glaring at her because she was weeping. When he got her home, he would lose his silence. Then he would start yelling at her to quit crying, to quit making a scene.