A year passed in the Village. quite pleasantly and uneventfully. Then came what we called the incident. of the "white thing." It took place in the apartment and began with the most down-to-earth member of our family. Anne. One night she woke up screaming and reported that something had poked her in the stomach. She had seen it. too: It was translucent white and about three feet tall. She was greatly agitated. Naturally, we took this to be a nightmare. Nothing more was said about it. Certainly, nothing was said to our son.
The next night at about ten I was sitting up and reading. Anne had just turned over to go to sleep. Suddenly I was struck on the arm. As I turned I saw a small, pale shape withdrawing into the hall. I jumped up and followed it, only to find the hall empty. It hadn't been our son: He was peacefully asleep in bed. Again, Anne and I hardly discussed the incident. When she asked me why I'd gotten up, I muttered something about her nightmare being contagious. The next morning I noticed a distinct bruise on my arm, but assumed that I must have banged into a table or something.
A few nights later our son suddenly began screaming the house down. I leaped up out of bed and went to him. He was terribly frightened. He said that "a little white thing" had come up to his bed "and poked me and poked me."
Neither Anne nor our son showed any physical evidence of injury.
The next Sunday Anne and I were at a wedding reception. I called home and our babysitter's mother answered the phone. She said that there had been some trouble, but everything was all right. Needless to say, we went home, leaving the reception almost before it had begun and incurring the permanent anger of the bride and groom. Something had happened to the sitter. She said that she'd been cooking her dinner when a child in a white sheet had startled her by peering into the kitchen from the fire escape. Only my wife heard this story. I did not. We have tried to find this sitter, but it's been years and we know that she did not remain in the area past that semester. We cannot remember her name. There is thus no way to tell whether my wife remembers the story correctly. We finally realized that there was something weird about the white thing. I have to admit that my thoughts went to Casper the Friendly Ghost. Strangely enough, there are other instances of a similar white figure appearing in the context of the visitors, and even acting very much as this one had acted.
However amused I might outwardly have been about the incidents, within a few weeks I was on the run again. The co-op went on the market, although we once again didn't relate our desire to move to any disturbances. We had decided to move back to the Upper West Side.
But this time thins weren't so easy. We couldn't get enough for our pace to enable us to have as much space in a more expensive neighborhood. We finally quit trying.
In late March 1983 something happened. I walked out to get a breath of air for a few minutes and found myself returning three hours later. Anne hadn't been home and our son was in school, but the experience was so inexplicable to me that I invented an elaborate fantasy of having imagined myself back in old New York for the missing hours. I have told many friends this lovely story. I realized as I thought back that it didn't happen. It was a pleasant cover story, obscuring some other events. The truth is I don't know what happened to me during those three hours. I don't even know if I left the apartment. I was just gone.
We finally gave up trying to sell the co-op and instead bought the cabin, which brings me back to the present.
Emotionally, I have a great deal of trouble with the notions of spaceships and visitors. I simply cannot help it, even though I have a feeling that I might seem to future generations to be obtuse. In view of the evidence, the reason for my reticence is obscure, but it is not so different from the reluctance of most of my friends with scientific or academic backgrounds to entertain the visitor hypothesis comfortably.
This is because the idea of intellectually and technologically advanced visitors who hide their knowledge from us is threatening and infuriating. It suggests that there is something ignoble about mankind, or even that we are prisoners on our planet. Those are ugly notions, and I for one would prefer an empty universe to one that reacts to us with contempt or Olympian indifference.
We human beings have a very natural stake in the value and validity of our species and our minds. And this is doubly true of those whose sense of personal worth stems from intellectual work. If the human mind is second-rate, then so are those who live by it.
On a deeper level, though. I find that I am beginning to become a little more at ease with the idea that the visitors might actually exist. This is for an unexpected reason. I think of those rushing little figures, those haunting eyes, the smells, the little rooms, the uniforms, the sense of hard work being done. I remember how stiff and insectlike the movements of the visitors seemed, and how very careful they were to keep me under control at all times, and I think that I may know the reason for their peculiar manner of dealing with us. If I am right, then the source of their reticence is not contempt but fear, and well-founded fear, too. They are not afraid of man's savagery or his greed, but of his capacity for independent action.
I have seen them from close range, and if I was seeing real beings, then what was most striking about them was that they appeared to be moving to a sort of choreography . . . as if every action on the part of each independent being were decided elsewhere and then transmitted to the individual.
I return to the thought that they may be a sort of hive. If this were true, then they may be, in effect, a single mind with millions of bodies-a brilliant creature, but lacking the speed of independent. quick-witted mankind. If they think slowly enough, it may be that :t human being, fast thinking and autonomous, could be a remarkable threat. It may be that an old, essentially primitive intelligence has encountered a new, advanced form, and is frightened of the potential that our completeness as individuals gives us.
I can picture myself on some night of the future, watching them approach my bed. It will be so dark that I will barely be able to see. But I will see their short selves dressed in their familiar jumpsuits. I will see those big, bobbing heads and those grave, sharp eyes. I will feel their cool, tiny fingers upon me and hear their breathing as they carry me away, perhaps even catch an occasional high whisper, words said and thought like equal sails upon the same ocean. I will know then the reason for both their interest and their shyness: We awe them and frighten them. And I will understand why.
If I am right about them, it is unlikely that there will ever be the kind of open contact between our two species that seems so logical and useful to us. Even a well-intentioned human being would pose a threat, in that his accidentally taking an action they had not anticipated might cause them literally to lose track of him right in the middle of one of their own craft. Might he not then be able to explore it at will, learn its secrets, and potentially, at least, release all of us into the cosmos?
Can it be that any one of us has the potential to be at once inferior and superior to their entire species?
To contemplate such a notion makes my soul ache with longing to know for certain, and yet also to leap up, as if by some obscure hand it has suddenly been set free.