Unassigned Territory (23 page)

Obadiah finished what was left in the pitcher and then he began to get scared. He had just enough of a buzz on and he was just pissed enough to do something he was certain would make everything worse. He wasn’t sure exactly what this was but he was just sober enough not to trust himself anywhere near the pool table. The trouble was, he couldn’t just sit there and watch it anymore either, so at last he got up and walked out. He made a fair amount of noise doing it He banged his chair against the floor and then against the table. He even bumped into a few things on his way to the door. Delandra never even looked at him. Neither did the two men. They all just stood there, looking at a shot. The only person who seemed to notice him leaving was the fat guy in the polo shirt and he had such a simpering grin on his face, it was all Obadiah could do to keep from swinging on him.

Once outside, he realized he had left the keys to the car with Delandra’s purse but he couldn’t quite bring himself to go back inside. And anyway, he was within walking distance of the motel. It was hot and quiet and maybe, he thought, the walk would do him good.

He walked along the edge of what appeared to be the town’s main drag, a ragged stretch of asphalt which paralleled the interstate. The theater and the bar were more or less alone at the east end of the street. But then the road curved a bit and soon he was walking past other stores and businesses. He passed a junk shop and a trading post, a used-book store. The bookstore caught his attention. It appeared to specialize in old comic books. Obadiah left the street and walked inside. The comic books were along one wall, arranged in racks and laid out flat on the floor so you could see the covers. On the other side of the store were used paperbacks—the kind with scantily clad women on the covers. Often the women were screaming, chased by men with knives. Toward the rear of the store there were a few dusty-looking hardbacks stacked against a wall.

The store consisted of one long rectangular room. The room was bright at the end which faced the street but ran quickly to shadow as the sunlight failed, replaced by the light of a single neon tube. An extremely large woman accompanied by a small brown dog sat near the door behind a metal desk. There were books stacked on the floor behind the desk and a lot of paperwork strewn across the top. There was also a small black-and-white television on the desk with rabbit-ear antennas. The woman was watching a game show. She looked up as Obadiah came through the door.

He browsed for a few minutes on his own, up one side past the comics, and then down the other, past the naked women and the men with knives. He imagined that several of the men on the book jackets bore a striking resemblance to the men he had left Delandra with in the Corner Pocket and was set upon by a hot wave of guilt. No stranger, however, to such moments of dread, he fought the impulse to rush out of the store and back to the bar. What he did, instead, was approach the woman behind the desk and inquire after Ceton Verity. It had occurred to him that it might be interesting to collect another opinion. So far the only people he and Delandra had spoken to were the people from the thrift store, aside, of course, from Jack and Lyle.

At the mention of Verity’s name the woman turned off the television. “Dr. Verity passed away,” she said, and then smiled.

“Yes,” Obadiah went on. “I heard that. I was just curious about what he built here.”

“The Electro-Magnetron. The landing strip. The Martian Museum.”

Obadiah, encouraged, nodded his head.

“Dr. Verity did many wonderful things,” the woman told him. She folded her plump hands, which were heavily decorated with turquoise jewelry, on the ink blotter before her. “The museum was filled with interesting things—gifts from alien visitors, things he’d picked up on his travels to other worlds.” The woman said all of this in a very matter-of-fact voice, as if the news was nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps she took Obadiah for a believer. “I’ve heard there were conventions here, too,” he said.

“Yes,” the woman nodded. “Once a year. The most wonderful conventions. People would come from all over the country.”

“What did they do?”

“At the convention, you mean?”

Obadiah nodded.

The woman smiled once more. “They would talk,” she said. “People could enter the Electro-Magnetron. Dr. Verity would tell about his most recent travels.”

“What do you know about the Electro-Magnetron?” Obadiah asked her. He was greatly encouraged by her willingness to talk and was beginning to wish they could have stopped here instead of the thrift shop on their first visit.

“I know it is capable of reversing the aging process,” the woman said. “Or at least it would have been. There was a part missing. Dr. Verity died before it could be found. It was a great tragedy.” Obadiah said that he was sorry to hear it. “You wouldn’t happen to know how Dr. Verity died, would you?”

The woman shook her head. “They just found him,” she said. “One morning in back of the museum. He had asked that he not be buried, you know. He was donating his body to the Interplanetary Federation and he asked that it be left on top of that ridge.” She waved toward one wall of the shop.

“And what happened? Do you know?”

“Oh, he was taken,” the woman said. “They came for him during the night.”

“Do people still come here? Are there still conventions?”

The woman, who had been looking him in the eye, now turned her face toward the desk. The sunlight coming in through the glass lit her hair, which was dark and streaked with gray. Obadiah guessed she was perhaps fifty years old, though her hair was worn more like a younger woman’s, simply, pulled back against her skull and braided loosely in the back. Obadiah waited. He stood looking down on her hair, the round hump of her shoulders. He found that he wanted suddenly to touch her, to place a hand on her arm. He had talked to people like this so many times, stood on so many porches, listened to so many crackbrained ideas, watched their owners cry—for any number of reasons. He was suddenly afraid this woman might cry now, for Ceton Verity, for the ElectroMagnetron with its missing part, for something that had passed from her life and for what had taken its place. “No one comes here anymore,” the woman said at last, looking up. “Most of what the Doctor built is gone now too. The Electro-Magnetron is still there. But they have it now.”

“They?”

The woman shook her head and made a face. “They,” she repeated. “I don’t know. No one goes out there anymore. They won’t let anyone in. They wouldn’t even let Mrs. Verity in.”

“He had a wife?”

“Yes, and a daughter. They’re both still alive, though his wife now spends most of her time in the East. That was where they were from, you know, the East.”

“What about his daughter?”

“I wouldn’t know. If you wanted to reach her, or his wife, for that matter, you might try through his publisher.”

“He was a writer too?”

The woman smiled again, for the first time since the mention of They. “Oh, my, yes,” she said. “He published many books on all kinds of topics.”

Obadiah looked around the store. “You wouldn’t happen to have any, would you?”

“Why, yes, I do,” the woman said. She hauled herself out of her chair and reached behind herself for a cane. “Broke my hip last summer,” she said by way of explanation. She wobbled out from behind the desk and started for the farthest wall. She was followed by the dog. Obadiah followed the two of them, trailing the dog’s pink ribbon into the gloom at the rear of the shop. The air was mustier there. It smelled of dust and old paper. The woman pulled a slim blue book off the shelf and placed it in Obadiah’s hands. The book was entitled
The God Within
and was the first in a series called The Books of Bueltar. “It was what he was working on when he died,” the woman said. The books were apparently transcriptions of a series of conversations Ceton Verity had had with an alien he’d met in New York. It was in fact the alien, according to the woman, who had sent Ceton Verity west, to build the Electro-Magnetron.

When Obadiah inquired after the rest of the series, however, the woman told him this was all she had.

The first volume of the Books of Bueltar was two dollars and fifty cents—used. When Obadiah had finished collecting change from a five, he asked once more about the They who now guarded the Electro-Magnetron.

The woman made the same face she had made earlier. “You don’t want to know anything about Them,” she said. When Obadiah persisted, the woman asked him if he remembered the wildlife mutilations of a few years back. Obadiah said he thought he had read something about it. In truth he thought he had, but the memory was vague at best.

“It was a terrible thing,” the woman said. She paused. “Someone was mutilating animals,” she said. “All kinds of animals, cutting out different organs, you know.” She looked toward the floor for a moment. “Mostly I guess they were sexual organs.” She said this as if the idea embarrassed her. “It was a big thing,” she went on. “The government even got in on the investigations because a lot of these mutilated carcasses were being left inside some of these top-secret weaponry sites around here. I mean left right on the doorsteps with no trace of how they got there, no tire tracks, not even any signs that the carcasses had been dragged.”

Obadiah looked through the glass window, into the street. The asphalt looked hot and dark; the colors of the buildings were sharply defined in the clear desert air.

“It went on for about six months,” the woman said. “They never really found out all there was to know—at least if you ask most people around here. But at one point some government men came out and arrested those people out at the Electro-Magnetron.”

“How many people were there?”

“I wouldn’t know. A dozen maybe. The cops wound up letting them go. Couldn’t prove anything, I guess.”

“When was all of this?”

“Last summer.”

“Verity was dead then?”

“Oh, yes,” the woman said. “He would never have allowed the kind of things that have gone on. Those people have just taken the place over.” The woman paused, looking past Obadiah, toward the window. “It’s been different around here ever since,” she said. “You know, the whole atmosphere of the place. Most people don’t want to talk about it. I mean, those people are still out there. And no matter what happened at the trial... Well, let’s just say folks are scared. You’re not planning on going out there yourself, are you?” Suddenly what Obadiah had dreaded transpired. The woman began to cry. A large tear formed on her cheek and rolled to drop upon the ink blotter. She wiped her nose with a ringed finger. Obadiah waited, shifting his weight. There was one more thing he wanted to know. He wanted to know the exact date of Verity’s death. When the woman told him, he jotted it down on a blank page of his book. He did it quickly, scarcely looking at what he was writing. “Also there will be signs in the sun and moon and stars, and on earth anguish of nations, not knowing the way out because of the roaring of the sea and its agitation,” he said softly, the words seeming to come from a long way off. It was a kind of conditioned response: the search for something that might prove comforting. “But as these things start to occur, raise yourselves erect, and lift your heads up, because your deliverance is getting near.”

The woman looked at him “The Bible?” she asked.

Obadiah admitted that it was.

“Dr. Verity could quote the Bible,” she said. “He explains in the Books of Bueltar how much of the Bible was really written by early extraterrestrial visitors. Are you familiar with Ezekiel’s vision of the wheelworks?” she asked.

Obadiah said that he was. On some morning from a distant past he might have gone on. He might have countered her interpretation with one of his own. They might have talked for hours while the sunlight heated the room. She looked hopefully up at him from her cluttered desk while Obadiah felt the palm of his hand go slick with sweat against the spine of the book, felt the too early drunk going sour on him. He groped for the front door with his free hand. The woman looked disappointed. “Promise me now you won’t go out there,” she said. He assured her that he would not, that speaking with her had been most enjoyable. She started up from her desk. Obadiah waved her down. He took his book, slipped once more into the street, and sucked down a few good lungfuls of desert air laced with whatever noxious substance it was which issued from the towers of the Trona Chemical Works.

O
badiah had intended to walk back to the motel, but when he left the bookstore he turned instead toward the Corner Pocket. He believed it had something to do with the covers of the detective magazines.

The sun was straight up and the shadows had fled the street. His shirt stuck to his back and the layers of heated air did funny things with the horizons. Ahead of him, where the road curved, he could see the theater and a piece of the lot but he had to make the curve before seeing the bar itself and when he did he was aware of an acute sinking sensation in his chest. Delandra and the three men, all considerably more intoxicated than when Obadiah had left them, had moved outside, where they now stood shouting obscenities at one another beneath a colorless sun. Mainly it was Delandra and the guy in the white jacket who were doing most of the yelling. At one point, as Obadiah moved up the grade toward the lot, he saw the man lurch forward and grab at Delandra’s arm. Delandra responded by kicking the man in the knee. When he took a step backward she followed with a roundhouse right to the solar plexus. Obadiah paused briefly in his ascent, halted by some combination of disbelief and horror. The other spectators seemed to find the action quite amusing. By the time Obadiah had gained level ground, the others were clinging for support to the side of the white pickup and laughing hysterically. Meanwhile, the man in the jacket, obviously now in some pain, was standing red-faced about five feet in front of Delandra, wagging a finger in her face.

At Obadiah’s approach, Delandra turned to look at him and the man took the opportunity of moving forward to grab at her hair. He succeeded in getting a fistful of it. Delandra shrieked and lowered her head. Her boots fought for traction in the gravel lot, looking, it appeared, for something like ramming speed. Which in fact she managed—at least enough to get her head into the pit of the man’s stomach and knock him over, ass first, into the lot. The man still had hold of her hair and Delandra followed, sprawling on top of him, her legs still kicking. “Hang on to her, Bob,” one of the men yelled. “Don’t let go.”