Twelve O'Clock Tales Read online

  When the shocked del Cuerco had lifted his wrist away, it came away without the left hand. It was an absolutely clean cut, raw, red, a patchwork of blood vessels, nerve endings, severed muscles, and as-though-lasered-through bones. As he looked on, it seemed to instantly cauterize itself, with a sort of film that slowly opaqued as he watched.

  It’s only then that the video camera shows him falling off the stool backward onto the floor.

  That noise was what Ventano heard.

  He is seen rushing in, looking at El Tigre, looking at del Cuerco, who is on his back on the floor and holds up his handless wrist in astonishment.

  July 8th, 2___

  10 a.m.

  Fifteen minutes ago, Prof Rigoberto y Alain asked us into his office where Dr. Nuccio had set up a teleconference call from Caracas on the monitor of the Mac.

  He began by telling us that El Tigre would be removed from our lab within the hour by the army, which was already on its way. The meteorite would be taken away to an undisclosed location.

  He requested us to give up all notes, tapes, CD-ROMs, videos, photos, handwritten and computer keyed-in data and information on El Tigre and on the entire past six days.

  Hearing that, del Cuerco sobbed loud enough for Dr. Nuccio to pick it up on his end.

  “I’m terribly sorry for all of you. Especially for you, Santiago, my old friend,” Nuccio said.

  “But…But…something did happen here!” del Cuerco said. “It did! You can’t deny it.”

  “Santiago, please! I know you’re upset. And you are right to be. But listen to reason. If any thing at all is revealed about El Tigre, it must all be revealed. The object is dangerous. Surely you must see that as well as anyone. It cannot be allowed to become a public spectacle. Who knows what else might happen?”

  Del Cuerco grabbed me with his good hand. “You, Georgie-boy! Tell him. You were on some other planet. You saw one of them. Face-to-face.”

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” Dr. Nuccio said. Then, “In compensation, you will all be rewarded, in various appropriate manners, but believe me, you will be richly rewarded by the National Academy. It will be done as discreetly as possible, so no one suspects anything. And I must ask you to not ever speak of this again. I must have you promise not to ever speak to an outsider about it.”

  After the visual link had closed down, we heard him speaking a bit, and then the audio too was shut off.

  So it is all over. As though it never happened. As though El Tigre never arrived here.

  This concludes the journal of Jorge Rivas Y Clark.

  That’s the last entry in my audio-taped journal.

  It was the day after that that Prof Rigoberto requested that we promise to never speak about El Tigre to anyone outside of the lab. Del Cuerco handed in his resignation later on that day, muttering, and he left exactly after the required thirty days. Ventano found something else to interest him and he too left, a month later. I took over their projects at the lab.

  Two months later, Dr. Nuccio called me to his office in Caracas and offered me two excellent fellowships, each of them leading to a Ph.D. and to a tenured university position. I took one of them, and I married that young woman I’d been dating, and we moved to Caracas, our large, wealthy and vibrant capital. I never looked back.

  I heard that Prof Rigoberto received a cushy position in the Houston Lab, office of the extraplanetary group that NASA and JPL set up in tandem. He remained in the U.S. until his recent death at the age of seventy-nine. Nuccio died before that.

  I’m not sure if I would have ever written about all this if not for a very minor incident that happened a few weeks ago. It occurred during one of my long vacations—one of the perks that come with my new job. My family and I were in Maracaibo, and somehow or other, Diego, my youngest, had gotten hold of a catalogue at our hotel for the local natural history museum and begged me to take him and his sister.

  I looked at the catalogue, and among its various attractions, it claimed to be exhibiting the El Tigre meteorite.

  Curiosity got the best of me, and so I took the children, while their mother went shopping.

  They were very excited to see the huge meteorite that had fallen in their country before they were even born. I don’t know what their mother had told them, but they vaguely knew that it was connected to their parents first meeting and getting married.

  Diego especially loved the meteorite on display, and he took many photos of it with his new camera. He loved most the so-called tiger-striping across its side and the various theories given for why the meteorite possessed them. As for El Tigre’s origin, the flyers we picked up supplied a wide range of not terribly off-the-right-track possibilities presented. Evidently the information about the color of the atmosphere that I’d first noted had already gone out to dozens of scientists before the total information shutdown occurred. Iapetus, a small moon circling the planet Saturn, has become the most popular choice of where El Tigre came from. Based on various criteria that seemed to be not entirely arbitrary, the time of El Tigre’s origin was given as between seventy-five and a hundred thousand years ago, when that little moon apparently underwent its last volcanic-tectonic activity.

  I, of course, understood. It was another meteorite, one less publicly known, from some other place, some other country, perhaps from another continent.

  What was the difference to the public? No one had seen the real El Tigre after it had landed, except a few army personnel—and us.

  That night I was awakened from a dream in which everything was crumbling around me with the greatest noise and shaking I’d ever experienced, and in the midst of this cataclysm, an absolutely fear-stricken face like no face I’d ever seen before suddenly arrived a few centimeters away and shoved me off its preordained spot. It and its companion then pointed a small iridescent torus upward and vanished through the hole it made in the ceiling above.

  Food for Thought

  Because he was a telepath and a little sensitive following their most recent landing, Andy was awakened last.

  In fact, it was hotly discussed whether he ought to be awakened at all.

  Bim thought not. She’d still not gotten over the hysterical panic-state Andy had been in when he’d returned to the Dallas after that Deneb 3 affair. She’d had to shoot him up with every conceivable fungal-soma-to derivative in the dispensary. And when those hadn’t done much, she’d fallen back to more primitive phenobarbs before Andy had finally calmed down.

  Roy thought Andy should be awakened. He pointed out that Deneb 3 was unique: Its nonsense-thinking and speaking inhabitants probably would have made Lewis Carroll pop a gasket. He reminded the others that before the Dallas had arrived, all relations since the disastrous first landing on the planet had been negotiated through mobile computers who couldn’t understand the difference between simple non-rationals like a human crew and real wackos like those on Deneb 3. Andy was the first human, Roy pointed out, certainly the first T-p, to visit the Denebians. And he’d eventually come down from that experience, hadn’t he?

  Patsu also voted no. She was second officer and an improbability addict, which had carried weight before in their group decisions. This time, however, it had become common knowledge among the crew that Patsu was operating with less than her usual objectivity. Andy—admittedly the best-looking genital male on the Dallas—had only made it in Playby with Patsu one time, claiming that she gave off heavy hostile-death thoughts during the sex act. Since everyone else on board had Andy in Playby at least a dozen times, they were convinced that anything Patsu might have to say would be colored by this apparent rejection, and who knew, possibly jealousy.

  Hill, the oldest-seeming of the crew (with all the time/space screw-ups, who could tell real age anymore—after a few years “out” the crew looked younger than their great-great grand nephews and nieces) and by his seniority as much as by default more or less the captain of the Dallas, reminded them that Andy had, after all, saved them and the ship, and probably the Company’s en
tire operation in sector 657 of NGC-345 when he’d telepathically defused and then resolved the !Koh-Mantra Crisis, two trips back.

  Willow, Andy’s friend and most constant Playby mate, also voted yes. So did Ho Wang and Native—whose name was just one part of his claim to be distantly descended from some Old Earth aboriginal group. Native explained his vote: “We’ve already sent ten fly-overs across this new planet’s surface, and they don’t show a single living creature down there. Andy will be as calm as a disconnected ’droid.”

  “What about the Swamp Moths on Epsilon Vega?” Patsu asked. “They were conscious and communicative and never showed up on our fly-over reports.”

  “But they were a positive experience for Andy,” Hill argued. “Remember how he taught them how to play infrared chess? All we can see downstairs is plants. Flowers, vegetables, trees, grass, and more of the same.”

  “Sounds great,” Ho Wang said, “after some of the hellholes we’ve been to lately.”

  “Temperate climate,” Willow chimed in. “Breathable atmosphere. Water. The works. We could picnic for a month.”

  Hill agreed. It was the first stop so far on the trip that looked even vaguely habitable. “The Company will like it.”

  It was a little planet, only size 4 in the Company’s catalogue, the eighth world out from a double star system of a medium-sized redSun and small white-blueSun. It had a solid, metallic core, extremely slow-shifting continents, was composed of 81 percent land, the rest non-saline water; but with a mantle of real rock and real dirt. The fly-overs had already shown the crew wonderful vistas below, and—as Native said—they had found no animal life on land or water large enough to be detected. But to be classified for colonization and/or exploitation, the planet needed to be landed on, actually tried out by humans. And for an official landing with a designation-status imposed, the human crew had to include one T-p. Company rules. Tried and true after centuries. No ifs, ands, or buts.

  “It’s your funeral,” Patsu warned and voted no.

  She and Bim were outvoted by the six others. Andy was awakened.

  He surprised Patsu by asking if she’d Playby with him and Willow after chow-down. She’d been enjoying Ho and Willow for the last few days with Andy asleep and had pretty much decided she’d have to give up being in a trio.

  “We’ll be in Playlounge five,” Andy said, smiling. “Bring a few Super-Qs, will you?” Patsu always kept a large supply of the recreational hypno-stimulators on hand as all the crew liked them in Playby.

  “And, Patsu,” Andy added, “don’t feel guilty about voting to not awaken me. It’s too typical as behavior to be out of character.”

  *

  “Well, Andy,” Willow asked when they first stepped out of their lander and onto what seemed to be a ten-kilometer ellipse of short-leaved, perfectly manicured green lawn, “do you T-p anything?”

  Andy didn’t. Not a thing. Of course, he heard the various thoughts of the eight others, all thinking furiously, as they always did upon first planet-fall. Howard wondering if he’d forgotten a needed instrument gauge, Hill still thinking furiously about his recent Playby with Roy, Native nurturing fantasies that he’d soon leave this spot and encounter landscapes similar to that of Wyoming, wherever that might be—some area from his tribal collective history, Andy supposed. By now, Andy was able to channel the entire crew’s fairly predictable thoughts into a single murmuring noise—something like radio static. He’d been a T-p long enough to be able to deal with the Big Brown Buzz, which was how all T-ps among themselves and at their silent, active, infrequent, bi-decade conventions referred to the general, barely acceptable background tele-noise of their surroundings.

  “You are scanning, aren’t you?” Willow asked.

  “Of course I’m scanning. My range is only about a hundred kilometers in surface atmosphere at this density and composition. I still don’t T-p a thing.”

  Which was odd, Andy thought. Almost unprecedented, in his experience. There was generally some kind of T-p noise, at one frequency or another, comprehensible or not.

  “Well,” Hill said, frowning a bit, “you might T-p better once we’re out of your way. Let me know.” He knew the Company would like a perfectly empty world for once. No pay-offs, no negotiations with greedy inhabitants. “The rest of us are going to explore,” Hill added.

  Exploration was pretty much what the crew did all the rest of that day. It was fairly primitive exploring compared to what the Dallas’s computer/sensor backups had already achieved though scores of particularized fly-overs previously sent out. But in a way more essential. The planet might look like a paradise, but if the Company was going to stake a claim here, it had to be proven to be completely inhabitable by normal humans. No more expensive surprises like on Tau Ceti 12, which the Valparaiso crew had found a while back, now famous, or rather infamous, in Company annals.

  There too, the planet had been beautifully, utterly comfortable for humans—an Eden. A month of landing and visits with the charming, hospitable Cetian humanoids had been an experience to be savored by the crew for years after—it was so rare. All the more of a shock when one crew member, stuck on board the observing ship with punishment-duty for the entire planet-fall duration, had decided to play back some of the luckier crew members’ wandering infra-sound and ultraviolet video recordings. The planet proved to be not what it seemed; instead it was nothing more than a thick sheet of some kind of plankton floating upon an unstable lava ocean. And the Cetianids were neither graceful, beautiful, nor humanoid, but instead a sort of omniphagic bacteria with extraordinary control over their appetite and extraordinary telepathic ability, powerful enough to confuse humans and sensors, and with the ability to create perfect tri-dimensional illusions. Their evident aim in so wonderfully greeting the Valparaiso had been to encourage a large colony and thus assure themselves of a good-sized human population they might then feed upon at their leisure. A plan thwarted by one disgruntled crewman with time on his hands who’d saved not only the crew, but possibly thousands to come. The story had been told across the galaxies, and even Patsu referred to “the Valparaiso factor” whenever she wanted to explain exactly how improbable improbability could be whenever living beings were involved.

  The Dallas’s planet-fall crew broke up into groups of two, except for Andy, naturally, whose efficiency demanded he be alone. Each of the others was to cover a sector previously mapped out by fly-overs. During the previous charting session aboard the ship, they’d already designated areas with fanciful names: the apparently sparkling (bi-carbonated) fresh water area was referred to as Lake Champagne; the extensive north-south chain of deciduous forest was titled the Peppermint Wood; the enormous, apparently self-cultivating oval and elliptical fields of what appeared to be wheat and rice, they called the Pita Basket and the Rice Bowl. The crew members snapped into their little planet skimmers as though they were on holiday.

  All but Andy. His skimmer also glided over enormous pastures, across giant plains filled with huge and healthy specimens of what looked like natural wheat, corn, carrots, string beans, all sorts of fruit orchards, none of it terribly different than the Old Earth varieties grown on the Dallas’s own conservatory—the basic food staples of all Company colonists, no matter where they ended up settling. Few of these human origin foods had ever been found indigenous to any New Home planets, although most of them had been seeded and eventually found to adapt well to new environments without too startling genetic differences. Like Proxima Centauri 16’s bright azure wheat fields and baked breads that all the tinting and bleaching in the universe couldn’t keep from retaining a bluish cast. Or the melon-sized raspberries and blackberries of Spica’s single planet, or the tiny, naturally pickled, pineapples grown on the sulfur fields of Io.

  Here, everything looked right. The coloration more or less correct, the size about right, the various species laid out similarly to the way Native did it on board the Dallas. No obvious anomalies like mangoes growing next to potatoes. Still, something about
all this plant life bothered Andy. What was worse, he couldn’t exactly pin down what it was.

  Perhaps it was merely that he hadn’t picked up a single thought. With the other crew members off on their own skimming missions and way beyond his T-p range, it was the first real tele-silence Andy had enjoyed in months, in fact, since his affair on Company Depot Lounge #2 with another T-p who’d also learned how to turn off transmission. In a sense, this was even quieter. With Branca, Andy was never certain whether or when she’d suddenly turn on or not. And when he and Branca argued, it had quickly descended into an all-out T-p mental war, devastating to both of them for days after. Here, there wasn’t a hint of a thought.

  Having nothing to do but listen, Andy managed to skim his section in a few hours, then decided to set down for a snooze in the warm sunlight. It might be hours more before Willow and the others returned to the planet-fall base. They’d relay any anomalies at that time, and naturally Andy would check them out.

  He selected a grassy knoll beside a glassy-looking rivulet. In the distance he could make out thousands of untouched acres of bright green mature corn stalks. It was so warm here, so quiet, he napped outside the skimmer on an inflatable. For the first time in what seemed to be years, Andy fell asleep instantly without having to slowly tune out the Big Brown Buzz.

  He awakened as the smaller, white-blueSun was setting. According to previous calculations, the redSun would remain above the horizon another twenty minutes or so to color the landscape with warmth. He remembered Ho saying that tomorrow the two suns would exchange positions, and the redSun set first.

  He’d overslept. Everyone but Bim and Howard was at the lander by the time he skimmed the dozen kilometers back to their planet-fall spot. Andy’s own lateness went unremarked, either verbally or T-pically. While waiting for the last two-person skimmer to arrive, the others were busily enthusing over the planet, vying with each other for delighted descriptions of the day’s explorations. They all agreed that the planet was the company find of the decade. Definitely temperate weather: not a hint of polar weather; no sign of seasonal changes either. It appeared rich in geological diversity: Their instruments had confirmed the fly-over’s ores, minerals, and metals galore. It was also filled with naturally growing foodstuff no matter where you turned—from artichokes to kiwi fruit, rhubarb to honeydew—and in the right proportional quantities for human consumption. The forested areas, the lakeshores, the grass meadows, the low-humped hilly ranges that separated the good producing areas, were spacious enough and more than pleasant enough to provide built-up areas for millions of potential colonists without a bit of crowding. The planet was rich, beautiful, accommodating: undoubtedly that rarest of Company catalogue designations—Class A. Even the normally restrained Willow thought so. The Dallas crew was certain to receive the Company’s highest bonuses for finding it.