Silent Obsession

By Noel Carroll




I don't think Earth is going to make it. Dad doesn't agree; he says it will survive but not as we know it. It's just humanity that won't make it.

I don't think it's fair to put all the blame on me. I'm only one little girl, and I was just a little over ten at the time; I needed guidance and didn't get it; certainly I didn't get it from my dad, whose business it is to know such things--he's a scientist, an astronomer; my mom died while I was being born.

Most of the year since it happened I've spent on the moon--not my choice, I can tell you; talk about boring! My dad says there's no other place to go. There are people living on the space stations, but Dad says they're just in denial. It's final, he says, at least it's final for us. He says even if there were a future for humanity, he would not want to be part of the trying--he's no pioneer, my dad. He says sooner or later the people on the space stations will come to the moon colony like we did. I hope so; I'm lonely here.

I know how to free my mind from my body. I used to think this was all in my head, mostly because that's what Dad kept telling me, but now I know better. Maybe he does too. What I do is, I lie in bed and think of a place I'd like to be: the moon, a planet, even the stars. Then, if I concentrate really hard, I can free my mind to go there. Yeah, I know, a lot of people do that, but in my case I really go there. My body is still in bed, but my mind or my spirit or whatever you want to call it is zipping around the universe at the speed of thought, which is a gazillion times the speed of light. I visit fiery suns that don't burn even when I fly right into them; I watch exploding nebula throw rocks all over the place; I've even found planets, some with squirmy things on them.

One other thing, I can influence the direction of things--I found this out by accident. Specifically, I can move objects toward me. Once, while mentally reaching out for a passing comet, thinking this might get me there faster, I moved the comet ever so slightly--I could see this by the little bend that appeared in its tail. Not sure at first, I tried the same thing again. Sure enough, another bend appeared. I had a lot of fun with that one, bouncing that poor little comet around like a basket ball.

I never get lost. At first I feared I might, but then I realized all I had to do was wake up. I tried this once, staying out on a fat gassy planet until my body called me back. Took all night, but it worked. It all started as a way of getting to sleep when sleep would not easily come--a little girl without a mom has problems like that, at least I do. My dad had been to the moon, and he told me all about it, and wanting to go there myself, I tried to imagine what it would look like up close. When one night I dreamed I was there, I described to Dad the next morning exactly what I'd seen. He looked at me a little funny like then tried to get me to admit I was stealing peeks at his confidential files. This happened enough times that I learned to be careful in what I said. At least until I figured it out for myself. As part of the figuring out; I got Dad to tell me about other places he knew about, places he'd photographed through telescopes. I visited one in a dream then--for real this time--sneaked a peek at his confidential files to compare the picture to the dream. Not only was it identical, but I could explain things that were only blurs in the photo.

Feeling something close to proof, I went to Dad and told him what I thought was happening. I pleaded that a ten-year-old mind could not come up with such detail. I invited him to give me a test, to send me someplace I could not know about then listen while I described it. I got what you might expect of a father talking to a ten-year-old with a fanciful imagination. He conceded only that I had a quick mind and was good at making up stories. As I protested further, fatherly love began to give way to parental impatience.

That made me unhappy. By then I knew I had a skill that even Dad didn't have, and I wanted him to know it, to appreciate me, to respect me as I respected him. It wasn't fair; I was really at those places, at least part of me was, and I didn't like him thinking it was all make-believe.

So I resolved to prove it to him.

Putting up with his smiles of condescension, I wrestled information from him on all the planets that had thus far been discovered by Earth's telescopes. Then each night I visited one of them, my hope being to find life on it, something I could get Dad to take seriously, something he could eventually check out, maybe by measuring the oxygen content of that planet or by sending a probe--my dad has a lot of pull with NASA.

I didn't find an inhabited planet, but I did find life. It was in a spaceship traveling many times the speed of light, almost as fast as I move my consciousness. I wasn't sure at first since you can't see something traveling faster than light--unless you have the kind of instruments that even Dad doesn't have--but like I know when there's a mosquito buzzing around my ear, I knew that something had passed me by. The clincher was the trail; there was enough disturbance in the dark matter that fills the voids of space that I could see the direction it had taken. Before this disturbance had time to calm down, I took off in the same direction, making sure as I did so that I was not going so fast that I'd pass the object by.

I guess I'm too young to appreciate the ease at which I did this. I mean, I just expected that what I wanted to happen would happen. And it did too; I caught up to that sucker in no time. After slowing to its speed, I then paused to savor what had to be the first encounter of a little girl with an alien spaceship.

The outside of the ship reminded me of a giant domino; it even had big circles in the middle that could have been dots. I guessed they were windows or doors, not that it mattered to me; I didn't need either to get inside. I slipped through the skin of that ship like it wasn't there. The inside was a huge open space, the walls of which were dotted with smaller versions of the circles I'd seen from the outside--the larger ones were indeed windows. In these circles and throughout the cavity itself were all kinds of neat-looking instruments, some with Nintendo-like levers jutting out of this or that side of them. It all looked to be floating; I could see nothing holding one set of instruments to any other. And there were no partitions, nothing to separate instruments or provide privacy. I could sense rather than hear what was a lot of noisemakers: buzzing instruments, lights clicking on and off, an occasional hissing from those circles in the walls (it looked like steam, but I wouldn't have wanted to test that by taking a sniff). And there was noise coming from the people.

I guess you would call them "people." I called them slugs because that's what they looked like. They were big like me, but their smooth, conical bodies--green and slimy--gave no hint of where eyes, nose or mouth might be. Or arms and legs, except they had a slug's ability to push out parts of themselves--I watched one push out a limb, pull a switch on a floating instrument, then melt that limb back into its body like a drop of rain water on a pond. Since I could not tell which end was which, I did not know whether this limb was an arm or a leg.

There were only five of them, which did not seem much for as big a ship as this was. I wondered where they had come from and how many months (or years) they'd been racing around in space. I also wondered where they were going--they were not heading for Earth, not directly at least. What I did not wonder about was whether they knew about me. It was obvious that they did.

They could not see me, that much I figured out, but there was something about them--or about me--that allowed them to detect my presence. I could see it in the attitude of those closest to me. They stiffened, then curved their slug-like bodies into semi-circles as if circling the wagons against an attack. They retreated from that position as I moved on. When I approached another, he (or she; I couldn't tell the difference) did the same. There was a noticeable shaking about them when this happened, which at my age is easy to pick up--I do the same when I'm scared.

I watched them the entire night then, after my mind pulled me back home, told Dad about it. I knew that was a mistake, that I was nowhere near ready to confront him with any kind of proof of my talent, but I couldn't help myself; this was too big for a little kid. As you might expect, it went badly. With more emotion than the situation deserved, he told me to cut it out, that I was taking this too far and bugging the heck (he didn't say "heck") out of everybody, especially him. Oh, he apologized later on, but that just meant the "cut it out" was presented in a nicer way. He praised me again for being a bright little kid then gave me a lecture on imaginary playmates and "the negative effects of a destabilized imagination."

It really pissed me off.

I became as determined as I'd ever been in my life, determined to prove myself to my dad. That night I went to bed early and didn't even say goodnight, and even before the pillow stopped moaning, I had my eyes closed and was berating my mind to go traveling. It took a while, I guess because I was upset, but eventually I was flying around space like before and looking for the slug ship. My hope was to find something inside it that I could use as proof, something Dad would have to admit could not have come from the imagination of a ten-year-old. I did not know what or where that something was, but I knew that sooner or later I would find it. I caught up with it as I knew I would, then for that night and the three nights that followed, I learned everything I could about the ship and its funny-looking people.

I found myself liking these slug-like creatures, so much so that I took pains to avoid upsetting them, staying far enough away so they couldn't detect me. This was less than a perfect answer for them--they still knew I was there--but it made me feel better. At that point I had no idea what weapons they possessed, but it didn't take a lot of smarts to know they had to be thinking about using them. I wished I could tell them that this wasn't necessary, that I was only one little girl not an army, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. Anyway, I got to where I could tell how they were feeling: when they were happy, when they were sad, even when they were angry. And finally I got to tell the boys from the girls.

Dad told me all about sex. He says you shouldn't hide things from kids, that if you do all you get is an uninformed adult. Dad says a lot of stuff like that, most of it using big words--I had to learn all those words just to keep up with him.

Anyway, there were four boys and one girl, and this girl liked all four boys. Often.

I got to know other things about them as well, like what they ate, how long they slept and how hard they worked. Everything except where they were going--I still had no idea about that. Every night they moved closer to Earth, but if they stuck to their current heading (I confirmed this with Dad without his knowing why I was asking) they would miss Earth by trillions of miles. I figured they didn't even know we were there.

I also tried to figure out where they had come from; there was a planet out there filled with slugs, and I wanted to visit it. Whenever I could without upsetting them, I looked over their shoulders, hoping in this to see a star map that logic suggests should look like the star maps Dad has--I mean, a star is a star, to a human or to a slug. But they were apparently confident enough in where they were that they didn't need to check a map. I never saw anything that even remotely resembled one.

After the fourth night of this, while confronting a moment of despair of ever finding something to take home to Dad, it finally came to me. I might be able to take the whole spaceship home. What a show-and-tell that would be!

Matching exactly the speed of the slug ship, I moved a mile out into space in the direction of Earth then mentally reached out to pull it toward me. We got closer, but I couldn't tell whether this was because I moved toward it or it moved toward me. So I moved further away and tried again. Same thing; I couldn't tell for sure; there was no comet's tail to examine. It wasn't until I popped my head back into the ship that I knew for sure. My slugs were going ape.

They knew only that they were being jerked off course by an unknown entity, and they were reacting by racing around like their pants were on fire: pulling dials, spinning wheels and humming at each other and at the ship. And even though what they did put them back on course, still they huddled together to begin an even louder chorus of humming. Aware that it was I who had gotten them so upset, I felt a pang of guilt.

But only for a while.

I had a genuine cause going here, a good one in my mind, and what I was trying to do would help the slugs as much as it would me, even if they did not realize that at the moment. They would discover a new planet, a new life form, a new civilization, all of which was not even on their list of things to do. And none of it would have been possible without my help. I was a parent helping a reluctant child do what was best for it, and like that deserving parent, when they fought me on this, they only made me mad.

I positioned myself a good thousand miles away, again toward Earth, and gave that spaceship a tug and a half, pleased when this resulted in its appearing in front of me within seconds--I was less pleased a moment later as I felt its engines tug back. In response, I locked on to that thing with all my mental might, then sped away in the direction of Earth, not as fast as I would like but enough to get my way.

I almost came to an abrupt stop, having only then realized that their bodies might not be able to withstand the sudden change in direction and speed. But then I realized that, if they could go faster than the speed of light, they must have a way of accommodating their delicate bodies. Besides, somebody inside that ship was running the engine, I could feel it increasing in strength.

I really couldn't blame them. I was a tractor beam, one they had no choice but to resist. I even understood when they shot some kind of energy beam at me. I mean, it didn't hurt or anything. In vain, I tried to think of a way to tell them I was not going to harm them. Only take them home for a while.

In time, maybe because they realized how much fuel they were using, they gave it up and shut down their engine. Anyway, it wasn't doing them any good; I was steadily increasing speed, even with them going full blast against me. Now I could go faster, which was good; I had to get home in time for school.

We had a long way to go and, as I soon found out, pulling a spaceship wasn't the same as moving my consciousness, which mostly goes at the speed of thought. But I had no doubt that we would get there before my body woke up, before it took back my mind and, in so doing, let my slugs go.

I did not have a formal plan for when we reached Earth. I just figured that would take care of itself, that all I had to do was pull the ship down to the surface and wait for somebody to take notice. I figured the slugs would back me up enough to satisfy Dad. I mean, after somebody figured out how to communicate with them. If he refused to buy it, I'd pull his hair from across the room!

Actually that isn't part of my talent. If it were, I would have long-ago demonstrated it on him. I can only pull things mentally during my nocturnal trips. I didn't even know if I could slow the slugship down once we got in the vicinity of Earth. (I wondered what would happen if it entered Earth's atmosphere at the speed of light. Would they pass through like a quark or would they turn into a pile of mush?)

I didn't want that to happen, so I tested my ability to slow them down well before entering the solar system. I'm glad I did, because it didn't work, not at first anyway. After a fruitless try at pushing, I let the ship pass me by then pulled at it from the opposite direction. That was better, much better. We entered my favorite solar system still above the speed of light, but now I had a way of controlling our speed.

I felt my body begin to call back my mind just as we passed Mars, the only planet left between us and Earth. Time was running out; chances were good that I would not be able to complete the trip. I had to take a chance. I had to hope the slugs would see Earth in the distance and realize the good I was trying to do. I gave control back to them then vowed to stand by as a safety net for as long as my waking body would permit.

That was when I lost them.

They must have been waiting for this to happen, because as soon as I let them go, they set their engines to max and took off like a flash in a different direction. Had I more time, I could easily have followed, but even while wanting them so much I could cry, I could not fight the call of my body. With or without my permission, it would have its way.

The next day I was as grouchy as any kid could be. And I could not even tell anybody what was bothering me. Most of my anger was directed at myself; for letting them go, I mean. Next time I would not be so generous. Oh, I wouldn't let them burn up in our atmosphere, but I would pull them all the way down to the ground. Right in front of Dad! Once again I couldn't wait to get to bed--Dad must have wondered why, but recognizing my mood, he didn't say a thing. And as soon as the door was closed and the light out, I closed my eyes, waited until my body was ready to let go, then shot my consciousness out into space to the exact spot where I had last seen my slugs. Then, even though the trail was too old to follow, I moved as fast as I could in the direction I had seen them take the previous night. I knew I was in danger of passing them by, but I figured some kind of trail would begin to appear as I closed the distance. I was confident the slugs could not outrun me--a spaceship, even one as fast as that, can not outrun a thought.

But I couldn't find them. Not them or any evidence that they'd been there. I tried for most of that night before finally concluding that they had used deception where power and weapons had failed. They had simply changed direction, probably many times since our last little get-together.

My slugs were gone. I was back to square one, with no way to prove a thing, to Dad or to anyone else. No one on Earth even noticed they were out there.

Then it occurred to me: I had shown them the way to Earth. Now they knew of us. And in knowing, considering how that "knowing" came about, they might choose to react, maybe by using that weapon of theirs, which this time would hit, not something so flimsy as my consciousness, but something solid, like human flesh. I wondered whether they would do that. Or would they just put a dot on a stellar map to show where we are, and label it as a place to avoid, an aggressive society that would have to be dealt with in the future?

The next night I felt so empty that I cried myself to sleep. And when, after a while, I went out-of-body again, I shot off to the edge of the solar system to cry some more. It helped; it helped a lot. It even allowed me to think about such things as how young I was, and how much time I had to get better at what I do, get better at bringing stuff back from outer space, maybe do it as a career--I was mad enough at Dad that I decided to spite him by not following in his footsteps. Then I knew I was only fooling myself. There were too many growing-up years left to me, and I could not bear to wait so long, not unless I could first do something to restore my self respect.

In such a mood, I began looking for an alternative, something that would leave no doubt as to my superkid status. I let my mind wonder around the solar system in search of anything that held promise, a piece of ice from Europa, a chunk of frozen sulfur from one of Jupiter's moons, a rock from Mars. I cried again, this time because I realized that, even if I could use my skill to pick up stuff like that, I could not prove any of it was extraterrestrial. So I sat on a rock in the asteroid belt and contemplated ending my miserable existence.

I hadn't told dad about the slugs. I couldn't; he would have laughed for a day and a night, then poked fun at me like before--God, I'd become even more of a nutcase about this than I already am! For a while, after loosing my slugs, I believed something was doing this to me deliberately, thwarting my every move toward respectability and always at the eleventh hour. It was unfair. It was unfair of fate; it was unfair of the slugs and it was unfair of Dad!

After crying to the point where it no longer did anything for me, I decided to pick myself up and try again. I thought about what I did right and what I did wrong then went on another search, this time vowing not to give up until I found what I was looking for. I spent weeks on end probing the heavens, always hoping that around the next bend in space I would find an inhabited planet or a spaceship loaded with people or something else that would make my fellow humans stand up and take notice. At the same time, I kept an eye out for my slugs, thinking that someday they would come back this way, maybe on their way home. I worried about their bringing help along with them, armed help, but not enough that I wouldn't grab one of them if I had the chance. A month went by then a week after that before finally I had what I wanted. For the second time in my short career as a junior astronaut, something passed me by in a flash. And for the second time, I went after it.

This time, when I took it in tow, I would not let it go for a second. I would bring it all the way home. I would park it in orbit, make sure it stayed there, then get back into my body for what would be the greatest day of my life. God, how I looked forward to that, looked forward to the look on Dad's face when finally he realized how right I had been and how wrong he had been. He might even give me a job at his office. I'd tell him about it as soon as he woke up then smile as he gave me that "not again!" look. He wouldn't understand, of course, and I'd add to his confusion by saying something clever like, "Go ahead and laugh; make my day."

I gave a lot of thought to the actual snatch. I had learned something from the slugs, and I did not want what happened then to happen now. Only when I was sure I knew exactly what to do for the entire length of the trip home did I seize it with my mind then begin the long tow to Earth.

My joy increased in direct proportion to how close I got to home. The only bump in my emotional curve was at the point where I'd earlier lost control of the slugs--remembering what happened to them, I tightened my grip even more.

Then I felt my body begin to stir back on Earth, a familiar signal, one that said I would have to hurry. I darted to the other side of my prize but did not start the slowing down process right away. I had to get closer to Earth to pick up extra time. I held off until halfway between Mars and Earth then slowed it to just below the speed of light.

That meant I had about ten minutes, close but doable.

Too late I realized my error. It was ten minutes to Earth at light speed; I had not considered the obvious, that slowing down to avoid crashing into Earth's atmosphere would consume additional time. I needed a lot more than ten minutes.

I argued with my body to hold off calling me back, even as I had no faith that it would listen. I even tried tensing up, like you do when you don’t want to be picked up by a weird aunt. None of that worked and the trying only kept me from concentrating on the task at hand. When the call of my body increased, I cried out to an indifferent universe that it was not fair, that this was another bad joke, that I was too close. At the same time, hoping my protests were buying me time, I delayed slowing down until the earth filled half the sky.

Only when I knew I could wait no longer did I begin shooting for orbit speed--I figured I could pace it with one of our satellites. I got it to maybe fifty or sixty thousand miles per hour--seconds from my goal--but then the space around me began to fade. I started yelling, even louder than before, but this time I heard the echo of my voice bounce off bedroom walls. I had awakened.

Covered with sweat, I lay in bed for a long time, at first angry and upset that I had again failed at the eleventh hour. But that quickly changed to fear, fear of what I knew would come out of this latest aborted run. You see, I had given up on finding an inhabited planet or a spaceship filled with people--it was a case of few and far between. Instead I chose something that, even though it was common, would not fail to impress. I chose an absolute mountain of a rock.

Which brings us to why I live on the moon--my dad was high enough up in NASA that he was able to bully a ride on one of the last shuttles to make it out of the rapidly-deteriorating Earth. A lot of his friends did too--most of what remains of humanity is NASA. God, I hate it here. I have just about zero prospects for a normal life; no kids to play with, no hope for a husband or of children of my own, not even a car, assuming I live long enough to be allowed to drive.

I still don’t know if Dad believes. When I tell others, wanting in this to apologize, I see something like belief in their eyes, but dad says they’re just superstitious fools. I think he knows better, though. At least I hope at long last he does.

The slugs never did come back. But now I wish they would.

THE END

Copyright © 1999 by Noel Carroll

"Noel Carroll is a husband and wife team with six novels and a number of short stories to their credit. All the shorts have been published and the first of the novels (Circle of Distrust) will be published this summer by Hollis Books.

Noel Munson, Prior to taking up writing full time, served as President and CEO of two U.S. corporations. Carol Munson was first a nurse then an executive in a medically-oriented private corporation. They share a love of sailing and this is reflected in one way or another in each of their novels."

E-mail: noelcarroll@worldnet.att.net


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