In the evening I felt stimulated but tired; I was still so used to the solitude of my running that constant contact with people was wearing, and I hadn’t yet recovered from New York. Freya left me alone in the lounge for a while and I deliberately relaxed as much as I could, allowing my mind to drift.
After a few minutes I became conscious of an odd new sensation. It was as if someone was nudging my mind. I tried to analyse the sensation but failed. I scanned around, looking for the source for whatever had disturbed me, but could find none. It seemed to be coming from within my own mind.
Without being very conscious of what I was doing I picked up the remote and switched on the television. The programme which came up didn’t satisfy me, so I flipped channels, and again, and again, blindly searching for something I didn’t understand. Suddenly I ran out of channels, was receiving nothing but the usual grey flickerings of static. Still I kept pressing the button, working down through the blank channel numbers in what seemed to be a pointless obsession. And then I stopped.
A face was looking back at me from the screen.
At first I thought it was some kind of joke, that someone had put my face up on a spare channel. Almost immediately, I realise that this wasn’t true. The face in the screen wasn’t my face.
It wasn’t even human.
I looked past the purplish-green scales and saw a different structure; a more beak-like nose with narrow slits of nostrils, a more pronounced cranial crest – and something wrong with the gold eyes. After a second I realised what it was; the pupils were vertical slits, like a cat’s.
Then the picture slipped, became fuzzy, reverted to static.
Freya came back into the room, looked at me and stopped in her tracks. ‘What’s the matter?’ She asked quickly, her concern reaching out to me.
I looked down and saw that I had gone silver all over, in what I later came to realise was an instinctive protective fall-back to reflect radiation. I was too stunned to answer her. I slowly got up and walked out onto the verandah, then leaned forward and held desperately onto the railing. I felt the wood splintering under my grip and deliberately eased off. My thoughts were cycling in an uncontrollable loop, trying to comprehend what I had seen.
The face that looked back at me had shown no human expression yet I had felt that I could read the alien mood, had sensed an urgency, the importance of the need to communicate. I realised that this face was connected with the strange nudging in my mind – I had been prompted to turn on the television and hunt for the channel.
I realised something else, too; the face on the screen looked too much like mine for it to be a coincidence; there had to be some connection with what had happened to me.
I became aware that Freya was hovering by the open door, her concern for what was happening to me in a tug of war with anxiety not to disturb me. She didn’t yet know me well enough to tell if this was normal behaviour for her bizarre new charge or if she needed to worry.
With an effort, I refocused my mind on the present and turned slowly to face her. ‘I’m all right, but I need some time to think’, I managed.
‘Of course’ she said instantly, and disappeared into the house.
I stayed looking out over the sea for a long time, conscious of the almost imperceptible whirl of the stars, the occasional lights of a plane, the slower movement of a satellite. All the while, my mind was in turmoil, trying to understand what I had seen, what it meant.
As the sky slowly lightened with the approach of dawn, I gave up the hopeless search for answers, more tired than I had been for a long time. I went back into the house, to sleep.
6
I awoke late the next day and lay in bed for a while, feeling an unaccustomed lethargy. After a while I realised that I was reluctant to get up and face the day, to deal with the shocking revelation of the previous evening. I located Freya, the bodyguard and the housekeeper, sensed them moving about the house, and noticed Freya’s continued anxiety about me. I forced myself to get up and walk downstairs, greeted Freya cheerfully, and announced that I felt like a long swim.
The coolness of the water slid soothingly over me and I settled into a long, steady rhythm which I knew I could keep up for hours – or even days, if necessary. The monotonous repetition of swimming helped me to slip into a light trance, not thinking consciously but retaining a rather detached awareness of my surroundings. Some tracks by Wynton Marsalis drifted through my mind. There were few boats around, and I easily avoided them. After a few hours I turned on my back, raised my head and saw nothing but water in all directions. I lay back and just floated for a while, feeling relaxed enough to turn my mind to the incident which had troubled me so much.
I ran it through my mind again from start to finish, my sharpened memory allowing me to examine the image in detail. I suddenly recalled where I had seen similar faces; in speculative paintings showing what dinosaurs might have looked like had they survived to evolve human-type intelligence. After a while I reluctantly acknowledged what my subconscious had been telling me for some time; that there was no point in putting off the moment any longer, I had to go back and look at that television again.
I returned in time for dinner, feeling physically tired but mentally refreshed. After some attempts at conversation, Freya realised that I was in no mood to chat, and retired to her room. The housekeeper had already cleared up and withdrawn to the annex she shared with the guard, so I immediately switched on the television, muted the sound and trawled through the vacant channels until, with a shock of recognition and fear, I saw that face again.
It was the same face as the previous evening, and this time I sensed a different emotion – relief rather than anxiety. The face looked me intently for a few moments, then faded out to be replaced by a string of numbers. I started blankly at them for a few moments, until I realised that they formed a telephone number. I felt a sudden desire to laugh hysterically; “phone home”, I thought. Then I walked over to the cordless telephone, picked up the handset and sat down again facing the television. Handling the phone as gingerly as if it were a live grenade, I dialled the number on the screen and waited. The face reappeared as the call was answered. Then the lips moved.
‘Good evening Cade.’
I felt a flood of terror and excitement wash over me at the sound in my headset. There was no accent, but the voice could have come from no human throat. The sound had an overlay which was simultaneously fricative and sibilant, and beneath that a strange echo, formed in a different voicebox. I forced myself to speak: ‘Good evening’, I managed.
‘Thank you for calling’, the alien continued, ‘I have waited for this moment for a long time’.
A detached part of my mind noted that he – she? No, definitely he, I knew somehow – had even mastered clichés.
‘There is much that we need to discuss.’
‘Yes.’ I responded dryly.
‘This is a very cumbersome and limited method of communication for us. I would like to suggest something better.’
‘Go on.’
‘I will put a diagram on the screen, of something we might call a “headnet”; it will permit mind-to-mind communications.’
His face disappeared, to be followed by a three-dimensional image of what looked like a hairnet, only with fewer strands all leading to a small box. Words appeared on the screen, labelling the different parts. I focused on memorising them. The black box slowly exploded into its component parts, each also labelled. As it expanded, details of the specification of each part appeared. The “net” was made of wire: the lengths required and the specification followed. I gradually realised that what I was looking at was a kind of battery-powered radio, linked to a network of wires which would fit around my head. It seemed to be an absurdly simple device.