Читать книгу Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CATALYST AND THE CHRYSALIS

This is something I’ve always remembered but always kept quiet about. I didn’t need psychoanalysis or hypnotherapy to dredge the memory up, but it wasn’t something I wanted to tell anyone at the time, or at any time since. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being laughed at, or being called a liar or a fantasist. It was just something I needed to keep to myself for a while. Now, though, it seems that the time is right. I’ve been coming here for a couple of years now, listening to everyone else’s stories, and I feel that I’m ready to let it go.

Some of the younger members won’t have any memory of 1981, and it’s not a year that has gone down in history for any particular reason. It’s probably enough to say that it was two years into Mrs. Thatcher’s reign of terror, with the economic recession getting ever deeper and unemployment rising fast. I was married then, and my husband, Mike, was one of the people who lost his job.

We had been doing reasonably well until then, and weren’t exactly plunged into instant destitution. I was working at the local hospital as a nurse, but my pay wasn’t enough to pay the mortgage and sustain any kind of decent standard of living. Unfortunately, Mike didn’t react well to unemployment, or to my becoming the breadwinner. The vague plans we’d made to start a family went right out of the window, and although the prospect of having children had never seemed a particularly big deal before, the fact that we were no longer able to consider the possibility suddenly seemed to become one. At any rate, it became another thing for Mike to get bitter about—another thing to fuel his disappointment and his drinking.

We were soon struggling, getting gradually deeper in misery and debt. Being in debt doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays, when everybody under thirty seems to live on credit, but in those days we didn’t think about owing money as something normal and natural. It was bad, and it preyed on our minds—which only served to increase Mike’s disappointment, and drinking, even further. You can imagine how the spiral worked.

I did my best to increase our income, working extra shifts and studying hard for the exams I needed to pass in order to get promotion, but that only made the fact that I was supporting him increasingly conspicuous, burdensome and annoying. The state of the marriage went downhill rapidly once the slide began, and I think we both knew that it was only a matter of time before something broke under the strain.

The abduction itself was like a dozen others I’ve heard described here. I’d worked sixteen hours on the trot, from six o’clock in the morning to ten at night, and I came home exhausted. Mike was already asleep when I came into the bedroom, so dead drunk that an earthquake wouldn’t have woken him up. I should have been equally oblivious once I’d dropped off, but I woke up suddenly in the early hours of the morning. I glanced at the clock on the bedside table, which said that it was twenty past three. I got out of bed and went to the bedroom window.

The window was open—it was August, and we were three days into what passed for a heat wave in those days. There was a huge disk floating over the house, silent and unilluminated. I was paralyzed, and then grabbed by some kind of tractor beam. Its manipulators maneuvered me out of the window easily enough. I was a lot thinner in those days. I lost consciousness when the thing swallowed me up.

When I woke up, I was in the kind of laboratory space that we’ve heard described so often. I was lying on my back on an operating table, with a white sheet draped over me. My limbs were immobilized, although I couldn’t see any solid restraints.

There was a bright light directly above me, bright enough to hurt my eyes. There were various items of equipment massed on the left-hand side of the bed, all seemingly idle. I had lines in each arm, and one in each leg. The one in my left arm seemed to be an intravenous drip, and the one in my left leg also seemed to be carrying a clear fluid—probably bodily wastes. The ones that caught my attention, though, were those in my right arm and leg, which were full of colored fluid. The tube connected to the leg appeared to be carrying red fluid out, while the tube connected to the arm seemed to be carrying a blue fluid back again.

It didn’t take a genius to guess that the leg-tube was carrying oxygenated arterial blood while the arm-tube was returning deoxygenated venous blood. The flow was slow but steady. I didn’t appear to be breathing any more deeply or rapidly than usual, but the air I was sucking in had a slightly strange taste, which suggested that it was richer in oxygen than Earthly air.

It wasn’t easy to see where the blood was going, because it was below the level of the operating table, but I could crane my neck just far enough to see that there was something in a kind of cradle resting on the floor. The cradle must have been about four feet long and two wide, and the thing fitted into it fairly snugly. It was dark brown in color, with a shiny surface. It put me in mind of a big balloon, or a giant rugby ball, or some sort of monstrous egg. My blood was being slowly pumped into the ovoid at one end, and pumped out again at the other, then returned to the vein in my arm.

My first thought was that I had fallen victim to alien vampires, but that didn’t make sense, because the blood—or something very like it—was being returned. Then I wondered whether the ovoid might be some kind of dialysis machine, but that didn’t seem very plausible either.

I must have been lying there for an hour or so before anyone—or anything—came in. I felt quite calm, perhaps because I was being fed tranquilizers through the incoming drip as well as nutrients. I didn’t scream when the door finally opened, or experience any dreadful sensation of shock. I’d already prepared myself mentally to see something that wasn’t human, and was, in the event, slightly relieved to see something that wasn’t quite as horrid as it might have been.

It was a bug of sorts—a six-limbed thing that used its four hind feet for walking while its two front feet were modified into something more like arms. Its wing-cases curved around its upper body like some sort of fancy jacket, colored dark red with black spots like a ladybird. The body would have suited a head like a praying mantis, but that’s not the sort of head it had. Its skull was big and rounded, and its face was like some kind of Halloween mask, with big round eyes positioned in front and a big smiling mouth with nice white teeth. It didn’t have a nose or ears, but the eyes and the mouth were just enough to provide a hint of apparent humanity even before it spoke.

“Hello Mary,” it said, in a strange fluty accent. “I’m Imhotep. I’ll be looking after you while you’re here. I hope you’re quite comfortable.”

“Wasn’t Imhotep the guy who built the Great Pyramid?” I said. “You’re not going to tell me, I hope, that the pyramids really were constructed as landing-pads for alien spaceships?”

“The legend connecting Imhotep to the Great Pyramid was something of an afterthought,” the bug informed me. “You’re absolutely right to identify it as a pseudonym—you wouldn’t be able to pronounce my real name—but it was selected because of a different legend, which makes Imhotep the father of medicine.”

“You mean you’re a doctor?”

“Absolutely.”

“And what, exactly, are you treating me for?”

“You’re not the patient, I’m afraid,” it said, in what might have been a crude attempt to fake an apologetic tone. “You’re the treatment.”

I looked at the thing in the cradle. “That’s your patient?” I said.

“Yes it is. Perhaps I should have said that your blood is the treatment—but I assure you that our using it won’t do you any harm at all. Blood is essentially a carrier, you see. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, you might say that we’re using your hemoglobin and its associated cofactors as a kind of catalyst, which facilitates certain chemical reactions but is then regenerated, so that it can be used over and over again in an endless cycle.”

The bug said all this rather blandly, as if it didn’t expect me to understand, and didn’t really care whether I did or not, but wanted for some reason to put on a show of honesty. It obviously didn’t know that I was a nurse, or that I’d been desperately revising my anatomy and physiology of late.

“Isn’t there an easier way to pump oxygen into the damn thing?” I asked it. “Taking an interstellar trip, then using a tractor beam to kidnap human beings from their bedrooms, merely in order to use the hemoglobin in their blood as a means of infusing an egg with oxygen, strikes me as the most ludicrously uneconomic project imaginable.”

“It probably would be,” the pseudonymous Imhotep agreed. “As it happens, though, we’ve disguised our apparatus as a spaceship for reasons of convenience. We haven’t had to take an interstellar trip, or even an interplanetary one. And yes, if it were only a matter of oxygenation, we could find simpler ways to do the job. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s a much subtler process of catalysis—which, I have to admit, we don’t fully understand ourselves. Also, it’s not an egg; it’s a chrysalis.”

It took me a minute or two to work my way through the complexities of the triple denial, but I got there in the end. I figured that I ought to take things a little more slowly.

“You’re not from another planet, then?” I said.

“No,” it said. “The little silver-skinned guys with the big eyes apparently claim to be extraterrestrial, and they’re probably not alone, but we don’t socialize with them any more than we socialize with others of our own kind. We often disguise our vessels as theirs, though, in order not to attract overmuch attention from other travelers. Everyone’s used to seeing the little guys hanging around this era.”

“So where do you come from?” I wanted to know.

“Earth, about three hundred million years downstream.”

“Downstream?”

“Down the time-stream—about three hundred million years in the future. The Third Arthropod Era. The insects of your world are our remote ancestors. Some of our scientists think that might have something to do with the fact that we still have a vestigial dependence on—or, at least, a vestigial affinity with—human blood. Personally, I don’t believe it. The hypothesis that we’re descended from human parasitic lice is at best unproven and at worst silly. The chain of evidence is broken in half a dozen places—global catastrophes and their consequential extinction events tend to mess up the fossil record somewhat. On the other hand, our adults do seem to need the catalytic infusion of mammalian blood if they’re to pupate successfully, and human blood does seem to work far better than any other kind. Whatever the explanation is for that, it’s bound to be at least a little crazy.”

By the time Imhotep had finished that speech I had several things on my mind, and it wasn’t easy to figure out which to tackle first. “So you got to be the way you are by having human blood pumped into you when you were a chrysalis?” I said, figuring that I really ought to demonstrate that I was capable of keeping up with his arguments.

“That’s a neat inference,” the bug conceded, “but I’m afraid it’s mistaken. I know that I look something like an adult, with the wing-cases and the legs and all, but actually I’m the result of what we call pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. I never pupated—which might be regarded as a blessing, or as a lost opportunity, according to your point of view.”

I was now way out of my depth. Rather than ask it what the hell pedogenetic meant, though, I thought it might be more productive to change tack.

“You don’t have any humans in your world,” I inferred, “so you have to travel back in time to acquire human blood.”

“That’s right,” it said. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your species becomes extinct in the not-too-distant future, when global warming causes a catastrophic release of methane from sea-bed clathrates. Most vertebrate species go with you, although a handful of rodents get through. The insects do better—though not as well as the worms, of course. The worms always pull through. Arthropodan Eras are relatively rare events, although they might be more common downstream of our time. As I said, we don’t socialize with time-travelers from our past or our future. It’s too dangerous. Nobody wants to create an unhealable rift in the fabric of history.”

“But snatching twentieth-century humans from their beds doesn’t count as changing history?”

“No. It happens all the time, thanks to the little silver-grey guys, and it never changes anything, even though their memory-wipes are always liable to go awry. Not that ours are perfect, mind—but our timing’s much better. The silvers are always returning people hours, or even months, later. With us, you can be sure that you won’t lose a single minute. You’ll be back in your bed within a few seconds of getting out of it, no matter how long you’re here. You won’t have aged measurably either—that cocktail we’re pumping into you to keep you healthy and happy is good stuff.”

“That’s good to know,” I told it. “Even so, you’re not exactly observing the principle of informed consent, are you? I know you’re calling yourself Imhotep rather than Hippocrates, but that doesn’t free you from the demands of medical ethics. Or do you think that just because you’re a giant bug, who isn’t even a true adult, while I’m only a long-extinct mammal, you don’t owe me any ethical consideration at all?”

“That’s fair comment,” the bug conceded. “To tell you the truth, we have occasionally tried to observe the principle of informed consent, but we’ve found that it leads to a drastic shortage of volunteers. Time travel isn’t as impractical as space travel, by any means, but it’s not so convenient as to allow us to waste a great deal of energy and effort. It’s an ethical compromise, I know, but we tend to skip the consent part—and I have to confess that even the information component is a bit of a swizz, considering that the memory-wipe will surgically remove all the information I’m currently giving you. The odds are a thousand to one against your actually remembering any of this when we put you back—and even if you do, the fact that you’ll only have been gone for five or six seconds will make it very difficult for you to believe that it was anything but a wacky dream. In that event, your brain will probably do its own memory-wipe, just as it does when you wake up every morning, to protect you from the possibility of mistaking your dreams for real experiences.”

“Actually,” I told it, “I’m quite good at remembering my dreams—and my nightmares too—although I rarely mistake them for real experiences.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Imhotep said, with all apparent sincerity. “I’d offer to treat you for it if I could, but it’s not my specialty. I’m a metamorphologist.”

“Right,” I said. “The overgrown football is your patient. I’m just the unconsenting blood donor. So what’s the problem you guys have with pupation? Why does your average chrysalis need a three hundred million year time trip if it’s to produce a healthy adult?”

I got the impression that it had been asked the question a dozen times before. Its answer was as casual and as practiced as the rest of his spiel. “It’s a question of pedogenesis,” it said. “There are a few pedogenetic insects around in your era, but they don’t get the same kind of publicity that ants and bees get, so the idea isn’t exactly common knowledge. You might be familiar with the general notion, though, in an amphibian context. Do you know what an axolotl is?”

“No,” I said.

“Pity. Well, briefly, an axolotl is a kind of tadpole, which has the genetic apparatus to metamorphose into a kind of salamander—but if there’s plenty of water around, it doesn’t bother. It grows sexual organs while remaining a tadpole, and breeds without ever producing a true adult. We think it’s a fairly common reproductive pattern in certain evolutionary phases—lots of new species seem to emerge during phases of rapid adaptive radiation by taking neotenic short cuts, so that larval forms begin reproducing themselves rather than completing their supposedly-full life-cycles.

“In your world, some insect larvae that feed on material that’s rare in general terms but tends to crop up in massive quantities when it does occur—the rotting wood from falling trees, say—have the option of developing sex organs as larvae and breeding as juveniles, often going through twenty or thirty generations like that before finally running short of food, pupating, and producing flies that hurtle off in every direction looking for another juicy fallen tree. Do you see the logic of the situation?”

“Yes,” I claimed, bravely.

“Well then,” Imhotep said, settling down on his oddly-jointed legs as if for a long lecture, “imagine what might happen to an insect species that developed intelligence in its larval form—and developed agriculture along with it. Agriculture provides the means to secure a permanent food supply, while the prospect of a reversion to idiocy provides a strong motive for trying very hard to avoid metamorphosis. My ancestors—like the ancestors of most of the species that developed self-conscious intelligence in our era—had the pedogenetic option, and they took it. Adults became very rare, and then almost mythical. Pupation came to be regarded as a fate worse than death, and for centuries those individuals unlucky enough to pupate were ritually destroyed. After a long period of time, though—during which our fledgling civilization flourished, and eventually gave rise to science—attitudes began to change. Pupation became a mystery to be solved, and an opportunity to be explored. We began to produce adults again—but the adults our nearer ancestors produced seemed to be defective, even by comparison with our modest expectations.

“We had to go back to our myths and legends to figure out exactly what we ought to expect of our adults, and why we didn’t seem to be getting it. We gradually began to realize that we’d lost something vital. Like most intelligent species, our early emergence from animal stupidity had corresponded with a massive extinction event, during which we’d wiped out a great many potential competitors. Our larval form was vegetarian, but our adults had been blood-drinkers, and the species we’d killed off included almost all of those from which blood could be drawn in any quantity on a regular basis.

“We realized, too, that blood-drinking hadn’t just been a matter of adult nutrition. Long before our larvae developed self-conscious intelligence our adults had developed a number of parental care strategies, which not only involved the protection of eggs and larvae but also the boosting of pupal metamorphosis by injections of blood. Over the course of time, our pupal form had got so much benefit from those injections that it became heavily dependent on them—a process whose interruption might well have been another key factor encouraging the development of pedogenesis.

“Now, of course—our now, that is, not yours—we don’t actually need to produce adults at all, and some of our people think that we shouldn’t even try. If we don’t, though, that leaves us with an awkward ethical problem in disposing of the chrysalides that occasional result when individuals spontaneously pupate. Another school of thought holds that if we are, in fact, morally or practically compelled to produce adults, then we ought to do everything possible to produce the best adults we can. Some of those individuals hold to a quasi-religious faith that if only we can find the right sanguinary catalyst, we might produce adults far better than those that nature used to produce in the remoter eras of our evolution. The ultimate goal, I suppose, would be an adult that retains, or even improves on, larval self-consciousness and intelligence.

“In the meantime, of course, a combination of natural mutations, selective breeding and—more recently—genetic engineering has allowed us to reproduce various aspects of adult form within essentially larval bodies. That’s what I meant by pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. Some of us, inevitably, think that’s the way to go to produce something resembling an intelligent adult. Others, especially those inclined to various versions of evolutionary mysticism, disagree. Our explorations in time revealed soon enough that antique blood is better for our pupae than contemporary blood, and that blood from the mammals of much earlier eras than ours seems to be better still.

“The present experimental run—that’s your present, of course, although it’s ours too, in a peculiar sense—is only part-way through, but the results so far have proved astonishingly variable. There’s something in human blood, especially late twentieth-century human blood, which encourages mutational metamorphoses. Some of us entertain high hopes as to what the run might ultimately produce. Others, admittedly, see the project as a matter of mad scientists running amok and producing monsters—but you ought to understand that little disagreement well enough, if what I’ve seen in your movies is anything to go by.

“That’s the whole story in a nutshell. That’s why I’m here, and why you’re here, and why you’re hooked up in this admittedly undignified fashion. I’d say I’m sorry if I thought you’d believe me, but the fact is that I’m doing what I’m doing because I think it needs to be done, and you’re just one of the means that I believe the end justifies. Such is life—and now I have to go.”

The bug doctor didn’t wait for any further questions, but turned and made its exit. I got the impression that it was embarrassed by what it had told me, and that it really was a little bit sorry for the way I was being treated—but it didn’t come back again before I went to sleep. I have no idea how long that was, or how long I slept, but I didn’t get bored and I woke up feeling better than I had for some considerable time. It was a holiday of sorts, and—to tell the truth—it was a relief simply to be free of Mike’s increasingly resentful and accusatory presence.

Imhotep came in again on the second “day” of my confinement, and we talked again for what seemed like an hour or more. It filled in a bit more detail about the nature of the Third Arthropodan Era and the politics of time travel, but didn’t add much to the basics of his explanation. I got the impression that it was distracted, and that its heart was no longer in our conversation now that it had done what it considered to be its explanatory duty.

On that second day I put Imhotep’s distraction down to concern for the progress of his experiment. It certainly spent a lot of time hovering over the bloated football and making unobtrusive measurements of its progress. On the third “day”, however, Imhotep wasn’t alone when it came in. The newcomer didn’t introduce itself, and ignored me completely while it inspected the chrysalis with the utmost care, but it was easy enough to see that it and Imhotep were at odds. They clicked and whistled at one another incessantly, in what was obviously their native tongue, but Imhotep didn’t translate any of what was said for my benefit. Indeed, it seemed to be ignoring me, just as its adversary was—but it came back later to explain and apologize.

“As you probably noticed,” it said, “you’ve become the object of a minor controversy. Well, not you exactly, but the effect that your blood is having on the chrysalis.”

“Why?” I asked. “Am I turning it into something horrible? Something from the Outer Limits of the Third Arthropodan Era?”

“In your situation,” Imhotep observed, “I’m not sure I’d be able to see the funny side of that particular joke. But yes, something like that—something, at least, that we haven’t seen before.”

“But you don’t think it’s horrible,” I guessed. “You’re the crazy optimist who thinks it might just be the messiah you’ve all been waiting for: the superadult with brains as well as legs and a fancy carapace.”

“Let’s just say that I’m hopeful,” the bug said. “Hopeful, at least, that the thing won’t rip me to pieces and gobble me up when it hatches. I’m the one who’ll have to be here, you see, when it does emerge. I’m the metamorphologist. On the other hand, if it does rip me to pieces and devour me, I won’t have to listen to anyone saying I told you so.”

“That’s monster movies for you,” I said. “Don’t expect any sympathy from me—I’m just the nubile underdressed starlet supinely helpless on the mad scientist’s operating table. According to the script, all I have to do is scream. Given what you’ve been feeding that thing these last three days, isn’t it more likely to devour me than you.”

“You blood isn’t feeding it,” Imhotep reminded me. “It’s just a catalyst. It provides oxygen, and that mysterious something extra—something, I presume, that the immunoglobulins do, or maybe the clotting factors.…”

“You need to find out, then pop back in time to tell yourself how to do the job properly,” I said. “What’s the point of time travel is you can’t tip yourself off when you need a helping hand?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” it said. “You can’t socialize with other time-travelers, and that goes double for yourself. This is the finding out part of the story all right—but once we have the information, we’ll only be able to carry it forward. Trying to tie time in knots is worse than making material changes in history. It’s the sort of thing that’s likely to lead to elimination.”

It sounded genuinely anxious—almost as if it were worried about the possibility that it had already shot some kind of hole in the continuity of history—not, of course, by removing me from the cold marital bed to which it would ultimately return me, but by using my blood as a transtemporal catalyst to produce a kind of adult that its species had never known before, and might not like very much.

Personally, of course, I didn’t need to care—except, maybe, about the slim possibility that the damn thing would turn on me and do horrible things to me. Whether Imhotep and its snooty buddy regarded the product of my catalysis as a monster or messiah was all the same to me. To me, it would just be another bug, a louse writ large.

I couldn’t help being interested, though. Even if I wasn’t really the damn thing’s mother, or even its midwife, I was doing my bit. It would owe its form—and perhaps even its thoughts, if it were capable of having any—to me.

Imhotep’s adversary came back repeatedly on the fourth day and the fifth, sometimes on its own—but even when it didn’t have Imhotep around it pointedly refused to look at me or talk to me. It obviously had a very different view of medical ethics, or the degree of ethical consideration owed to a mere extinct mammal. Imhotep apologized for its colleague’s behavior, but I could tell that its heart wasn’t in the apology.

On the sixth day, the chrysalis began to crack. As soon as that happened, Imhotep came in with no less than three others of its own kind, two of them far more obviously larval in aspect than it or its familiar adversary was. The three others soon cleared out, though, leaving Imhotep to supervise the emergence solo. I soon developed a nagging pain in my neck straining for a better view, but I never gave up no matter how irksome it became. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I didn’t want to miss a thing. Nor did I.

Bit by bit, the thing emerged, and I watched every moment of the process. I had been harboring the vague hope that my catalytic blood might produce something more human than bug, but that hope was dashed as soon as the thing began to ease itself out, wing-cases first. The ground color of the wing-cases was yellow rather than red, and its ladybird spots were very faint, but there was nothing particularly unusual about them. The wings themselves, when it had stretched them to their full extremity and dried them, were beautifully diaphanous, but very obviously insectile. The legs, which it poked out one at a time, were darker in hue and somewhat sturdier than Imhotep’s, but they too were exactly the sort of thing one might expect to see on a giant grasshopper, save for the forefeet ingeniously modified as manipulative hands, which looked exactly like Imhotep’s.

“This thing’s related to you, isn’t it?” I guessed, as I watched Imhotep busy itself obsessively with its machines and various items of movable apparatus. “Not just in a species sense, but in a kin sense. Is it a sibling?”

For a moment, it seemed that Imhotep would refuse to answer the question, but then it thought better of it. “My offspring,” it said, shortly.

It was the first time I had cause to wonder whether I was really correct to think of it as “it”. “Are you its mother or its father?” I asked.

“Neither,” it said. “Sex is the prerogative of adults. Pedogenetic reproduction is a short cut in more ways than one. It’s my clone—or was. It still would be, if it weren’t for its capacity for mutation. Thus far, though, it doesn’t seem.…”

The reason Imhotep stopped was that the head of the adult had finally appeared. Imhotep’s own head, I remembered, was the result of pedogenetic pseudometamorphosis. There was no reason to expect the head of its clone-sibling’s adult incarnation to resemble it closely. It did resemble it very closely, though; it had similar big dark eyes, and a similar mouth with similar teeth and a tongue, shaped for pronouncing the syllables of human languages as well as well as those of its own species.

Except, of course, that it didn’t know any human languages. Imhotep’s clone-sibling had not had the same opportunity, or the same motive, to learn any language that Imhotep had learned while it was a larva. Imhotep’s larval clone-sibling had only known its own language—a language it ought to have forgotten, if the normal course of specific development had been followed.

Once the monster’s head was free, it was able to stand up slowly on its four hind legs, and to use its hand-like forefeet to free itself of the debris of its cocoon. While it did so, it looked down. Not until it had finished did it look up—not at Imhotep, but at me.

It looked at me with intelligence in its eyes, and with compassion. It looked at me with love. It didn’t say a word, because it couldn’t, but I understood. Imhotep understood too. Imhotep understood that I had worked the miracle, that I had catalyzed the production of the first self-consciously intelligent adult that its species had ever produced.

Imhotep spoke to its recently-metamorphosed clone-sibling, but the clone-sibling made no reply. It continued looking at me, and its silent gaze told me everything I needed to know.

I’m not claiming that we exchanged ideas telepathically, or even that there was any kind of quasi-magical empathy between us, but there was a bond, and there was understanding. I knew it, and so did Imhotep.

The monster took a single step towards me, which brought it close enough to be able to reach out with one of its vast and clumsy hands to caress my throat. All the while it was looking directly into my eyes—and now it came close enough to be able to do so without my having to strain my neck.

I was able to lie back, and make myself more comfortable, while the creature from the chrysalis moved its head to a position directly above mine, so that it could look down at me gratefully, fondly and admiringly. It didn’t matter, just then, that I was a long-extinct mammal, while it was a God-knows-what from the Third Arthropod Era. There was a bond between us more intimate than that between any Earthly mother and child, or between any Earthly pedogenetic clone-parent and clone-sibling.

I felt perfectly happy, for the first time in my adult life.

Then the others burst in, all armed with ugly ray guns, and shot the thing to pieces.

Imhotep tried to stop them, and was gunned down too.

That was when I started screaming.

I must have blacked out soon afterwards, presumably because whatever was in charge of my drip feed doctored the input with a powerful narcotic. When I woke up, I was back in my own bed.

The clock on my bedside table said that it was twenty past three, but it wasn’t—not so far as I was concerned.

It wasn’t the end of the world, either, but it certainly wasn’t twenty past three—not for me.

I remembered everything, probably because the confusion aboard the alien timeship had been too great to allow them to do the memory-wipe properly. My brain might have attempted its own kind of memory-wipe, but there was never any possibility of it taking effect. Nor was there any possibility of my confusing the experience with a dream or a nightmare. It was real. It took no time, according to the clock, but it was real. It was more real than Mike, more real than the divorce, more real than the ovarian cysts, more real than the hysterectomy, more real than any of the thousand diseases and hundred deaths I witnessed week by week and year by year at the hospital. It was the realest thing I ever experienced, or ever will.

It’s possible, I suppose, that the time-travelers got the wrong idea. It’s possible that they thought that the adult was attacking me, and that the hand it put to my throat was about to strangle me. It’s just about conceivable that they thought they were doing the right thing, the ethical thing. They were, after all, afraid of what Imhotep and I might have wrought…and, for that matter, of anything and everything else that their project might yet produce.

They didn’t understand. They couldn’t understand.

They were not, after all, adults themselves.

I am an adult. I do understand. I understand better than they did, and better than Imhotep did. Nothing can ever take that away from me, even though it’s no longer my secret, my private torment, my heaven and hell on Earth. Whatever anyone says, it wasn’t twenty past three to me.