Alien Contact by Marty Halpern

Author:Marty Halpern
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781597802819
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2011-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

I was in a jail cell for forty-eight hours once. Never mind why; it’s a stupid story. The cell itself wasn’t the sort of thing I expected from movies and television; it was brightly lit, free of vermin, and devoid of any steel bars to grip obsessively while cursing the guards and bemoaning the injustice that had brought me there. It was just a locked room with a steel door, a working toilet, a clean sink, a soft bed, and absolutely nothing else. If I had been able to come and go at will it might have been an acceptable cheap hotel room. Since I was stuck there, without anything to do or anybody to talk to, I spent those forty-eight hours going very quietly insane.

The habitat module of Walter Stearns was a lot like that cell, expanded to accommodate a storage closet, a food locker, and a kitchenette; it was that stark, that empty. There were no decorations on the walls, no personal items, no hytex or music system I could see, nothing to read and nothing to do. It lost its charm for me within thirty seconds. Stearns had been living there for sixteen years: a self-imposed prison sentence that might have been expiation for the sin of living past his era.

The man himself moved with what seemed glacial slowness, like a wind-up toy about to stop and fall over. He dragged one leg, but if that was a legacy of a stroke—and an explanation for why he chose to live as he did—there was no telltale slur to his speech to corroborate it. Whatever the reason might have been, I couldn’t help regarding him with the embarrassed pity one old man feels toward another the same age who hasn’t weathered his own years nearly as well.

He accepted my proffered can of yams with a sour grin and gave me a mug of some foul-smelling brown stuff in return. Then he poured some for himself and shuffled to the edge of his bed and sat down with a grunt. “I’m not a hermit,” he said, defensively.

“I didn’t use the word,” I told him.

“I didn’t set out to be a hermit,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Nobody sets out to be a hermit. Nobody turns his back on the damned race unless he has some reason to be fed up. I’m not fed up. I just don’t know any alternative. It’s the only way I know to let the moon be the moon.”

He sipped some of the foul-smelling brown stuff and gestured for me to do the same. Out of politeness, I sipped from my own cup. It tasted worse than it smelled, and had a consistency like sand floating in vinegar. Somehow I didn’t choke. “Let the moon be the moon?”

“They opened a casino in Shepardsville. I went to see it. It’s a big luxury hotel with a floor show; trained white tigers jumping through flaming hoops for the pleasure of a pretty young trainer in a spangled bra and panties.

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