…that he had seen before in the movies…
The darkening land and ocean were a long way away and receding. Dropping away. Dropping down. As if he were taking off, vertically.
The horizon was not one he was used to seeing while standing on the same planet to which it belonged. He was seeing it from above. He was seeing a world not from within its point of view but observing it from the outside.
His ears popped suddenly.
A motion drew his eye and his head swiveled to where the other man was standing — just in time to see something that made his eyes water even more. In the moment that he finally registered the strangeness of his companion — something that he might have been forgiven for skimming over as he approached, since the convention was known for extreme costuming — he tallied up the things that had triggered his weirdness sensor. That stillness, of course, and the speed of the fingerwork, and the odd silvery sheen on the person’s very smooth skin… and now, as Dave watched, the way that the creature standing there calmly lifted what had looked like a tablet computer and pressed it against its abdomen, where it was instantly absorbed without a trace, leaving no bulge in the form — fitting garment. Dave let out his breath in a little hiss, and the man… the creature… turned to look at him — out of eyes that seemed backlit, with a dark circle which looked like an artificially designed pupil within sclera that glowed silver — white.
The man held Dave’s gaze, inclining that impossibly perfect head just a fraction, hands now empty and hanging by his side.
Dave looked past him again, and realized that in the world outside the portico things had changed radically. There was no longer any doubt that although he himself had not moved the ground underneath him definitely had done so, and he could see the difference as — improbably — a little island of planet Earth parted company with its world and lifted into the starlit sky.
“You,” Dave said, snapping his gaze back to his silent companion. “You’re doing something… you’re doing this. What are you doing? What’s going on…?”
“It is necessary,” said the silver man, and the voice sounded theatrically trained, as though he had practiced elocution. As though every syllable was carefully enunciated, precisely selected. “I will explain.”
“Put us back!” Dave blurted, not knowing how he knew that he wanted to be put back or where this ‘back’, exactly, was — knowing only that he was somewhere he was not supposed to be, that something utterly insane was going on. Knowing with the certainty of the true science fiction geek that he prided himself as being that gravity and atmosphere should not feel as normal as they did if what he thought was taking place was actually taking place. Knowing only that the ground underneath his feet, however solid it might look or feel, was no longer terra firma as he knew it, and feeling himself reel with that knowledge. “Put us back this instant!”
The silver man regarded him with that curiously cocked head, then straightened it back to a more natural angle and said, softly and with something that sounded like regret although there didn’t seem to be anything about him that indicated he could feel such an emotion,
“I can’t do that, Dave.”
“…this episode was BADLY WRITTEN!”
Never was a line from a movie more apt to a state of mind; Dave actually froze for a moment while still at full stretch, racing across the hotel lobby toward the stairs leading up to the tower housing the Con Ops Room. It was all he could do not to tangle his own feet into a speed bump and collapse in an undignified heap right there and then — as it was, he managed to cast one look sideways at the flat screen TV in a niche off the lobby, where “Galaxy Quest” was currently running for a small audience of some dozen viewers. It was, however, an epic look, composed of equal parts of outrage, urgency, confusion, panic and outright fury. If anyone had encountered it, they would have been reduced to stone by a gaze more potent than Medusa’s. But those watching the movie had their backs to him, and nobody else happened to be in firing range, and Dave gathered himself and raced on. He didn’t know quite what he expected Andie Mae to do about the situation, but somehow it was imperative that she know about it, and know about it now, and hear about it from him rather than from some incoherently babbling con — goer who had tried to go for a walk to clear their head from the last round of drinks in the bar and ended up walking off the edge of the world.
It mattered so much. It mattered so much to her. It was her first con as Chair. There were things that con Chairs were expected to handle, and she was fully capable of handling most all of those things — but it was blisteringly unfair that on her maiden voyage, as it were, she would be expected to handle this.
Whatever, Dave allowed himself to pause and append to his chaotic thoughts, “this” actually turned out to be.
He had left the silver man at the front door of the hotel and raced inside with a fully formed idea of what he wanted and needed to tell Andie Mae. He seemed, however, to be shedding the words as he ran. The closer he got to the con nerve center where he expected to find her, the more incoherent his thoughts became and the less certain he was that he had actually seen what he had seen. It was all he could do not to turn and run back to the door and peer outside. Just to confirm. Just to make sure. Just to ensure that he did not sound like a raving lunatic when he burst into the room where the rest of the (currently oblivious) ConCom members waited to hear his news.
He made it to the control room, still in such a tearing rush that he tangled his feet into some extension cord wire running across the threshold and practically fell through the doorway. Several people looked up with varying degrees of consternation.
“Hey,” Libby said, “welcome back to con land. I gather that your airport meet and greet mission…”
“Silver man,” Dave gasped.
“Yes, we know. You missed him at the airport. Didn’t anyone tell you he got here under his own steam?”
“What?”
“Silverman. Vince Silverman. Writer GoH. You were supposed to pick him at the…”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“With what?”
“There’s a silver man…”
“Yes…?”
Dave and the rest stared at one another for a long moment, and then at least three people said at once, “What are you talking about?”
Xander pushed his chair back with deliberation, went over to the bar fridge near the sink area, opened it, took out a bottle of water, and crossed over to Dave, thrusting the water into his hand.
“All right,” he said. “Take a deep breath, take a drink, calm down. Everything is under control. Vince Silverman is safely…”
Dave took a vicious swig of the water and then wrenched it away from his mouth, wiping his lips with the back of his free hand. “I am not talking about Vince Silverman!”
“Then start again,” Xander suggested.
“I just — I was just out by the… I saw…” Dave’s eyes wandered over to where the curtains had been drawn across the sliding door to the room’s balcony. “Has anybody,” he asked, very carefully, “looked out of that window recently?”
Xander met Libby’s eyes across the room. “No,” he said, just as carefully. “Why…?”
“Just do it,” Dave said. “Do it now.”
“Okay,” Xander said, taking a few slow careful steps backward toward the sliding door, not taking his eyes off Dave.