Chapter Eight:
"Now
what?!" Napoleon, at
There was no spark
or discharge, but to Mulder's surprise, Dr. Spengler suddenly shouted
incoherently and was thrown to the side as if some sort of explosion had
occurred. He sat where he fell, shaking his head like a man who'd just had a
cannon shot off near his ear. Mulder and Venkman reached down to haul the
fallen nuclear physicist to his feet.
"`Hue-mans-beep-melt'?
Ick," said the ghost-busting psychologist.
"Sounds
messy," agreed the FBI agent, not nearly as flippantly. In fact, Mulder
was understandably worried. "Are you all right, Dr. Spengler? Can you
stand on your own? What just happened?"
"Wow!" it
was the loudest Mulder had yet heard the phlegmatic nuclear physicist speak, he
was practically shouting. Spengler was evidently oblivious to what Mulder had
said, as he ignored his question. "Did you hear that? My ears are still
ringing. What a rush!" He held his shaking hands in front of him and
stared at them as if they were alien devices themselves.
"We didn't hear
anything, but they can hear you in mid-town
Spengler brought his
voice down by sheer force of will, but seemed to quiver with suppressed energy.
"When Ray touched my forehead, it was as if a thousand people were
screaming at me. Or, better analogy, as if a thousand bits of paper, each with
a sentence of information, were suddenly dumped on my head, but I could read
them all, all at once! Suddenly, I knew exactly what's been going on around
here for the past few weeks!...and you didn't hear anything?"
"Vulcan Mind
Meld" everyone said in unison, even Scully.
"T-tell them,
Egon," a faltering voice spoke from the floor. Mulder whirled and saw
Stanz, damp with sweat and weak as a kitten, but apparently otherwise all
right, holding out an imploring hand to his colleague.
"Ray! You're you!"
cried Zeddemore in joyous tones. His attitude seemed to reflect those of his
partners, and certainly that of Scully, who immediately took the occultist's
pulse again.
"How do you
feel, Dr. Stanz?" asked Mulder.
Stanz swallowed
hard. "Forget about me...tell them, Egon, before it's too late! Tell 'em
about `hue-mans-beep-melt'!"
The artificially-charged
up scientist seemed to visibly deflate until he was again almost the dour Egon
Spengler that Mulder had already become used to. "The good news first...my
prognostication that we face The End Of The World was, I believe, somewhat overstated."
"Now you're
talkin', m'man!"
"Yeah, how bad
can `bad' be?"
Spengler stilled
their chatter with a wave of his hand. "The bad news is that some time in
the next few hours, we face a detonation that will take out a good-sized
section of the
"A detonation?
My ship...I mean, this ship's going to explode?!" Mulder gasped, stricken.
"So Lloyd
Lindsay Young has a hell of a weather-forecast tonight. `Hell-oooooo,
Seeeeeecaucus! Good-byeeeeee, swampland!'" Venkman mimicked the infamous
Channel 9 weatherman, "...so big deal. You guys grab Ray and let's get
outa here, stat." He hefted the nozzle of his particle-thrower in a brief
salute and made to leave.
"...and most of
the
"The
"Yes, I am
serious, Ms. Scully-deadly serious.
Venkman stopped
short, shoulders up around his ears. He spun around to face the group, "
"Please. Help
me up...," Stanz implored Zeddemore, who pulled the occultist to his feet,
supporting him when he almost fell to the floor again. The occultist took a few
steps, then fell heavily into the command chair. "Egon, didja get the part
about how to start up the self-destruct sequence? I...I couldn't get m-m-my
mind around it, it was just too weird."
"Uh, oh...too
weird for Ray? Trouble," commented Venkman to Scully, who did not
seem to find him at all amusing. The psychologist fished around in his pockets
and pulled out a Snickers bar, handing it to Stanz, who quickly unwrapped it
with shaking hands and took a bite.
"`Self-destruct
sequence'?!" Things were moving too damned fast, Mulder felt as if he were
running last in a race and he had no hope of ever catching up.
"Waitaminute! Stop! Just stop! You guys are not self-destructing
this ship. Can you imagine what we can learn from this great opportunity we've
been presented with? " He made his stand from the very center of the
bridge, determination personified. "How can we lose her when we just found
her? I have only your word that there's anything wrong with her! I have to put
the brakes on this operation now!" It was more of a plea than an order
that finally burst from his lips. Scully, who seemed shaken by his outburst,
put a hand to his arm as if to calm him, but he walked away from her, eyeing
the Ghostbusters defiantly. It was going to take a lot more to mollify him than
just her concern-he wanted answers, fast.
Stanz slumped in his
chair, but Zeddemore and Venkman looked affronted and stepped up to argue with
Mulder. Spengler held up a hand, and the two fell silent. "Agent Mulder. I
fully understand your position. But use your own powers of cognition, and
you'll confirm for yourself that we are in a dire dilemma. Here are the facts.
This ship crashed two weeks ago-you can see the damage. I have a vague notion
that they were investigating the effects of the Pleides meteor showers on our
planet's atmosphere, and something happened-something unexpected, something
bad...."
Stanz raised his
weary head and added his voice to Spengler's side of the debate.
"Horrible! It was horrible...they tried to self-destruct, really they did,
Agent Mulder! They have a promise, an oath, built into their very DNA to
destroy themselves rather than allow hyper-technology to fall into the hands of
the primitives-that's us&. I could still taste the desperation in that
memory-alien desperation! I'm not surprised they couldn't rest in peace,
poor little guys." His head fell back again and he relaxed into the alien
seat. He looked exhausted.
Dr. Spengler picked
up their tale. "The crash weakened the supports to their version of an
"engine room"-frankly, I find it very odd that they think of this
ship as a living being, the actual translation was the `abdomen', if I got that
right." Stanz nodded, but didn't speak, so Spengler continued. "If
the energy that fuels this ship exerts enough internal pressure to crack its
`stomach' open, there will be an explosion on a sub-atomic level. I'm not even
sure what kind of energy it is, but its power is immense."
"We have to
kill this ship. It's in terrible pain! We have to-we have to euthanize
it," Stanz almost wept in sympathy. A much calmer Spengler nodded in
agreement.
"So, who we
gonna call?-" Mulder snapped at them sarcastically, "-Dr.
Kevorkian?"
"We haven't
time," answered Spengler, apparently taking the question at face value.
"The aliens were actually wondering why the ship hadn't detonated before
now. And when it goes...best-case scenario, I'd say a simple mass conversion of
all matter in a ten-to-twenty mile diameter into energy, spherical scorch
pattern. And when I say `spherical scorch pattern', I mean that precisely-the
crater will be a hemisphere, five-to-ten miles deep, the walls of which will be
fused-glass, similar to volcanic glass. Hence, `humans-beep-melt'. Worst-case
scenario, as I've delineated plus a nuclear winter for, approximately, a
decade."
"I'm sorry,
could we go over the part where the world isn't destroyed again,
Egon?" asked Venkman, but they all ignored him and stared at the angry
F.B.I. agent, clearly waiting for his reaction.
Mulder looked at the
floor, unable to meet the nuclear physicist's eyes. The destruction of this
beautiful artifact seemed inconceivable, sacrilegious. How many rugs have to be
pulled out from under one before one simply gives in? he thought to himself. So
many near-misses! He felt a hand on his shoulder and knew without looking that
it was his partner again.
"We don't know
what to do...therefore, we explore possibilities," her soft voice sounded
in his ear.
He looked up to meet
her remarkable eyes. "First we figure out how to do the dirty deed, then
we decide whether to do it...or not." She nodded. He turned to meet the eyes
of the watchful Ghostbusters.
"Dr. Spengler,
Dr. Stanz-I suppose you guys know where this `engine room' is?" he sighed.
Chapter Nine:
"What rough
beast slouches towards
Even if they'd been
able to locate and decode the alien ship's version of a "turbolift",
they could not have taken it, as power seemed to be out over most of the ship.
The mysterious energy force that ran the bridge fueled only a dim, greenish
phosphorescence running the length of the deck and "stairwells",
making progress difficult. The ship corridors were not only dark, they were
creepy in their lack of clean, machine-made lines; the corridors seemed spun by
insects; it was as if the intrepid group had been injected, as in `Fantastic
Voyage', into some enormous creature's body and were now wandering through one
of its veins. Mulder had been amused when Venkman muttered, "Hey, ma,
lookit me, I'm a blood corpuscle" under his breath as they descended a
tendriled ladder growing on the inside of one of the vertical tubes leading to
other decks. Despite Spengler's admonitions that their weapons were ineffectual
against the alien ghosts, he alone of the Ghostbusters had decided against
leaving his proton pack behind with Captain Meller, and it looked as if he was
finding the climb a difficult one.
lub!
Away from the
machine-hum of the bridge, Mulder could hear, quite clearly, that infrequent,
`sub-sonic' sound that had so surprised him in his first moments on the ship.
"It's a heartbeat," gasped Scully in recognition the third or forth
time she'd heard it. The rush of forced fluid, the snap open and shut of the
valves; she'd determined the regularity of the beats by counting seconds under
her breath. Incredibly, there were approximately 2 minutes between beats.
dub!
The deep, improbably
slow heart-beat of the ship grew louder as they drew nearer to the engine room,
no doubt about it.
Conflicting emotions
warred within Mulder as he followed close on the heels of Doctors Spengler and
Stanz. They were steadfast in their mission and knew where they were going,
walking with a moral certainty of which Mulder was desperately jealous. The
irony that his immediate mission was the same as theirs, to learn how to
destroy the wonderful ship, was not lost on him. He wondered how the ship had
looked when powered up-would these corridors be brighter, or did the aliens
need less light than a human?-and his mind lead him down the increasingly
morbid path it usually took when contemplating 'close encounters', to...his
sister's abduction. This could be the very ship. Had her small, bare feet paced
this same corridor some twenty years earlier? Had the little girl screamed and
struggled in their grasp, or had she been tranquilized, carried on some sort of
anti-gravity pallet? Had she lived much longer after her abduction or had she
been sacrificed by the alien scientists in the name of higher learning, to gain
information about "the primitives", as Stanz had said they'd thought
of us. Or was she still alive, walking on the soil of a planet no other human
had even seen through a telescope? He shivered, chilled to the marrow, yet the
atmosphere wasn't cold at all; quite the reverse, it was unventilated,
oppressive and unpleasantly humid. He was about to reflect on the unhappy state
of lab monkeys in our own, terrestrial laboratories when a thin whistle of awe
broke his concentration and he looked up into the cheerful, open face of the
much-recovered Dr. Stanz.
lub!
"End of the
line!" Stanz almost chirped as he spoke, and tapped the unhappy FBI agent
on the back in a friendly manner. The occultist gestured to an small alcove
which seemed to lead to another room, much larger. "You can go first if
you'd like," he continued with a smile. Mulder somehow knew Stanz was
according him a great honor rather than attempting to get out of doing
something dangerous. He returned the occultist's smile and nodded, and the
group moved out of his way.
The antechamber was
pitch black, which was just as well, as it made his pupils dilate so that the
room he stepped into seemed somehow brighter. The ceiling arched overhead
reminded him of a cathedral, it dwarfed even the impressive ceiling that hung
over the bridge; flying buttresses and odd, vine-like catwalks could be
perceived dimly all around. Mulder wondered if the ship had dug itself deep
into the earth before its power had been spent or if it were,
T.A.R.D.I.S.-like, simply bigger on the inside than on the outside. They'd had
no clue that the ship was this big. He stepped over some debris on the
floor, then saw that a lot of it wasn't debris at all-the floor wasn't flat,
but instead had tunnels running through it. It reminded him of what a lawn
looks like when infested by moles-in fact, he realized there were no smooth
surfaces in the roughly sphere-shaped room at all. The sound that filled the
room was equally confounding-a `squelching', squeezing noise that repeated over
and over with a machine-like staccato, yet un-machine-like-it was too organic.
It put Mulder to mind of the noise his stomach made when it grumbled, but
through a loudspeaker and on a taped loop.
dub!
"Come on in and
be awed," he spoke up clearly over his shoulder, and his fellow
investigators filed in, eyes and mouths wide-open.
"There,"
one short word from Spengler focused everyone's attention on a greenish-gray,
25-foot high, globular structure suspended by stretched and glistening
ligaments and viscera-like tubes from a framework in the approximate center of
the room. It reminded Mulder of `The Garden Of Earthly Delights', painted by
Heironymous Bosch in the 16th century, and he said so.
"I don't know
about `delights'; yecch, it looks more like someone's insides turned outside,"
Venkman's lip curled in disgust.
"It sort of is,
Peter," explained Stanz. "This is the source of their power, as well
as of all our troubles. It's the ship's `stomach' and it's gonna crack, and
soon."
"And, as a
rough comparison, just as our own stomach protects us from the hydrochloric
acid that it contains, that stomach wall protects the ship from whatever
inside of it. When what is inside breaches the stomach wall, there will
be an explosion of biblical proportions," confirmed Dr. Spengler. They
could all see that the bony structure the huge, pouch-like organ hung from was
damaged, many of the struts were cracked in more than one place.
"...we could
prop it up...," began a hopeful Mulder, but Spengler interrupted him.
"No. This room
was designed to exist without gravity-look above you-there are actually several
doorways over our heads without steps leading to them. The walls of the
receptacle are as unsound as the framework, it's just not as easy to see the
subtle damage caused by several weeks of earth's gravitational pull, and it's
getting worse."
lub!
Mulder was tired,
and he was beginning to resent the ready answers the nuclear physicist seemed
able to call up at a moment's notice. The agent teetered on the edge of a
decision, but he needed more information. "OK. So, let's assume that we
have to destroy the ship...what do we do? Perhaps you could cut down the
`stomach' with your, uh, proton pack?"
"We haven't
been listening, have we?" said Venkman condescendingly. "If we cut
down the tummy, we break it open and it go `boom', remember?"
Mulder shot him a
resentful look. Here, he'd taken that critical step towards agreement with the
necessity of the ship's destruction, and sarcasm was the thanks he got for his
trouble. "O.K., smart-ass, how do we destroy the ship without destroying
the `stomach'? It seems we're in a Catch-22 situation," the agent sniped.
No one answered
Mulder's question. Venkman shifted his shoulders under the heavy proton pack
strapped to his back, plainly at a loss for words; Spengler fiddled uselessly
with his P.K.E. meter; Zeddemore shrugged helplessly-in fact, the entire group
of investigators seemed confounded as to what might be the next step.
During their
discussion, Stanz had wandered a short distance from the gently groaning
`stomach' and was looking up at a drooping distention in the wall some ten feet
above their heads; the wrinkled mass of it rose another 16 feet higher than
that and followed the curve of the wall as it became ceiling. Scully leaned
over to Mulder and muttered, "...I think I'd better stick close to him,
I'm still a little worried about his color." Mulder nodded in assent. She
walked over to the occultist and began, "Excuse me, Doctor Stanz?"
when, suddenly, the distention over his head bulged out like a balloon abruptly
filled, wrinkles stretched to the bursting point. They jumped back in alarm for
fear that it would pop. Just as suddenly, the balloon contracted sharply,
leaving the wall with the appearance of a wrinkled, empty sac, as before. If
Mulder hadn't seen it, he wouldn't have believed it.
dub!
"It's the
`heart'!" gasped Scully. "We found the `heart' of the ship!"
"Thought
so!" laughed Stanz.
"Whoopee,"
muttered Venkman. He sounded distinctly unimpressed. Plainly tired of staring
at a `stomach' that did nothing but grumble to itself, he wandered over to look
at the `heart' just the same, and Zeddemore followed.
"Hmmm...the
`heart' is, in fact, the crux of the matter," said Stanz to Mulder.
"The aliens communicated to me and Ray how to stop the heart to trigger
the ship's self-destruct, but it was a very complicated procedure. Frankly, I
don't think I ever really understood how to do it. And now I'm losing what
little knowledge I got from my exhilarating experience on the bridge. I somehow
doubt Ray's going to be much help in this regard, either."
"So. One way or
another, this is going to be a heart-stopping experience after all,"
muttered Mulder.
Spengler shot him a
look of betrayal. "Special Agent Mulder," he admonished. "I
think the situation is bad enough without having to resort to puns."
"Well, here's
another one for you, Dr. Spengler," Mulder shook his head sadly. "I
don't think I can give you a rational reason for my change of-sorry-heart, but
I agree with you and Dr. Stanz now. You're right. We can't gamble with the
lives of half of the people in
Chapter Ten:
"The heart has
its reasons which reason knows nothing of." Pascal's dangling preposition
6:32 PM-Dana Scully
"Stop a heart?
Did you say something about stopping the heart?" said Scully, turning from
the organ in question to speak to her partner and Spengler. She fingered her
chin, lost in thought, then turned back to stare hard at the empty balloon that
hung above her head. She could see, just beneath the surface of the wall, a network
of thick `pipes' leading to and from the leathery bag-arteries and veins, if
the bio-engineering comparison held true. "There are, in fact, several
ways to do just that; stop a heart, I mean." She saw that many of the
pipes had access ports, most of them capped, but others had been knocked open.
No ship's `blood' leaked out, she noted with great interest. There were valves
in the access ports, allowing entry, but preventing the fluid in the pipes from
spurting out. "I suppose they could be applied in this case, as in any
earth animal equipped with a heart," she continued her thought.
Venkman snapped his
fingers. "That's right! You're a medical-type doctor, aren't you!
Hippocratic Oath be damned, you can help us Kevorkianize this puppy!"
lub!
"Can't we just
blast it with your proton pack, Pete?" Mr. Zeddemore said, then corrected
himself. "No, not smart. We blast the `heart', we get caught in the
self-destruct sequence. We're gonna want something a little more subtle that'll
let us walk away from this one, I hope."
"Yeah, I don't
enjoy the idea of winding up like those Klingons in Star Trek III; crash, bang,
boom...," Venkman said, pulling the heavy nuclear device from his back and
laying it on the deck. "I could set it to self-destruct, giving us time to
beat it...?"
"No-o-o-o,"
mused Scully, more to herself than to the rest of the group. She looked at her
feet and confirmed that not all of the bumps and ridges were embedded beneath
the floor-plenty of piping, jarred loose from its moorings, littered the deck.
Possibly useful...though God only knew from what life-supporting mechanisms
they'd been ripped when the ship had crash-landed. Now, were there the
equivalent of `lungs', to air-condition the ship...? She could barely make out
something that looked like a cross between a huge calliope and a giant-sized
bellows across the darkened room. That looked promising. "Unless you can
pin-point the blast exactly," she continued, "you might take out the
stomach wall along with the heart, before the self-destruct programming could
come on-line, and that...would be bad...hmmm, I really think I have an
idea."
"We could
certainly use one of those about now," said Mulder, in regretful tones.
She turned to him,
to tell him about her idea, but stopped. Somewhere along the line, when she
wasn't looking, he'd apparently come to the conclusion that the Ghostbusters
were right. Now he looked like a small boy on the verge of losing his puppy..
No, that wasn't right. It would be more apt to say he looked like a small boy
on the verge of losing...his sister. "God, I'm so sorry, Mulder."
"S'OK." He
shrugged. "I'm getting used to this unfinished-business thing. It's not
like we haven't had this sort of thing happen to us before."
dub!
Chapter Eleven:
"It's showtime!"
Beetlejuice, Humanbuster
7:40 PM-Fox Mulder
It was a helluva
contraption, even Rube Goldberg would have been proud of it, if Mulder did say
so himself. And he'd helped. They all had. God, he was depressed.
Through the gloom,
he could see the glittering expanse of pipes that stretched from one side of
the engine room to the other, connecting the calliope/bellows air-compression
mechanism-or the ship's `lungs', as Scully liked to refer to it-to the ship's
pipes, or `veins', leading to the deflated-looking goiter that acted as the
ship's `heart'. He was getting a bit woozy with all the bio-comparisons.
lub!
The `lungs' were
pumping but, like the `heart', only just barely; hence, the oppressive, humid
atmosphere in the ship's corridors. Either it was damaged or it simply did not
have enough power to operate efficiently; they were betting on the latter.
They'd almost given up on Scully's mad scheme when they realized they'd need a
lot more power, until Spengler and Stanz had come up with a brilliant plan that
utilized the nuclear particle accelerator in Venkman's proton pack as an
alternate power source. "Knew it'd come in handy; nyahh,
nyahh," was the ghost-busting psychologist's smug assertion. The two mad scientists
had clucked and muttered over the power connections on one slide of the `lungs'
as, on the other side, Venkman and Zeddemore had done the `plumbing' under
Scully's direction. Her solution was devilishly complicated-yet also
frighteningly simple. Bubbles of air, injected into the blood-stream leading to
the heart, will stop that heart cold, in mid-pump. She proposed to inject some
bubbles of air into this `heart'.
dub!
"All right, it
looks good," said Stanz. "We've slaved the circuitry in Peter's
particle accelerator to the board with help from the last bit of alien
knowledge we could dredge up from our memories. It's all pretty much faded now,
like what happened to McCoy after he used the `teacher' in that really bad
episode, `Spock's Brain'. God help us!"
"God helps
those who help themselves," sighed Mulder. He'd dragged long, undamaged
piping out from under damaged paneling, he'd searched for and found a box of
alien engineering tools that helped them attach the pipes to the access ports,
he'd even acted as a gofer for Stanz and Spengler without saying "Yes,
mahster" in a bad Transylvanian accent even once-but he was damned if he
was going to be cheerful about it.
"We're finished
here, too," said Zeddemore. "It's a good job, it'll hold-you're a
genius, Agent Scully!"
His partner smiled
at the complement, but didn't seem convinced. "If it works, Mr. Zeddemore,
I'm a genius. But if it doesn't...." She left the rest of the thought
unspoken.
The same small group
of humans that had stood on the alien bridge at odds with one another now stood
united in a common cause, in the middle of what they'd done...in the middle of
what they'd soon destroy. In theory, when Spengler pushed the button on
Venkman's nuclear particle accelerator, the energy unleashed would jump-start
the calliope/bellows mechanism, which would, theoretically, start pushing air
through the pipes they'd attached to the access ports in the veins.
Theoretically, the bubbles of air would push their way through the one-way
valves in the access ports, then through the heavy liquid in the veins, and
then, theoretically, to the heart. The theoretical bubbles of air would
theoretically stop the heart. When the heart stopped, the ship's self-destruct
mechanism would kick in, `safely' destroying the ship before the energy in the
`stomach' could explode, taking part of Secaucus and most of Manhattan with it.
Theoretically. Mulder felt a pang in his chest, feeling the loss as keenly as
if she were already self-destructed. It almost equaled the pain he felt when he
thought of his sister.
He leaned over to
his partner and said, in a stage whisper, "This won't hurt a bit?",
and she gave him a sympathetic look. Even Venkman seemed to recognize the small
bit of gallow's humor for what it was; he reached across and patted the
depressed Special Agent on the shoulder encouragingly.
lub!
Chapter Twelve:
"Hicks, hurry!
I mean it!!!" Ellen Ripley, "Aliens"
7:45 PM-Egon
Spengler
"Let us all be
very clear on this," intoned Egon in his best, you'd-better-take-this-seriously-Peter-or-else
manner. "When I throw this switch, we move out of here in as swift a
fashion as possible. We have no idea how quickly the air-compressor will push
the bubbles through the piping, nor do we have any idea just how much air it's going
to take to stop the `heart'. So we get out."
"Egon's right.
Think `fire drill'-move calmly, but quickly," agreed Ray. "Egon, I'll
be leader, I still remember the way out pretty well. After you push the button,
you can bring up the rear. Try not to trip."
Egon moved carefully
over the uneven deck to the proton pack. The rest of the group stood near the
exit, waiting. He hated to admit to the weakness, but he was glad they'd
decided, without a need for discussion, that it was one for all and all for one-they'd
entered as a group, and leave the same way. He didn't relish the idea of being
alone in the engine room, not to mention having to make his way out of the ship
on his own.
The blond scientist
adjusted his red-rimmed glasses on his nose, contemplating the task before him.
The act of pushing a button was simplicity itself but, as the alien urgency
implanted in his mind diminished, he was beginning to find it a difficult act
to commit. His eyes roved over the multiple connections from human-created nuclear
accelerator to alien air-compression device; it shouldn't work, it couldn't
work-but he knew it would. He also knew he was just stalling-possibly an
unhealthy move, as they really had no idea when the `stomach' walls would
finally give way, to the city's great misfortune as well as their own. As a
nuclear physicist, he knew there was no place in science for sentimentality,
but he did regret the destruction of the fantastic ship. Dismissing the
emotion, he pushed the button.
The nuclear particle
accelerator sprang to life, the familiar hum starting on the low end of human
hearing, building to a higher pitch as it warmed up. When it reached its
highest pitch, it began to transferring power to the alien mechanism, which
began to hum and warble on its own wave-length. Egon watched, utterly
entranced. Lights raced each other across the face of the alien machine, the
bellows on the other side groaned and heaved. He suddenly realized he could
feel a breeze of clean, cooled air on his face and was looking around for the
source, when he became vaguely aware of someone yelling his name.
Chapter Thirteen:
"Wake up and
smell the coffee!" Juan Valdez
7:48 PM-Fox Mulder
"Egon! Egon!
For the love of...," Zeddemore waved his arms at the mesmerized nuclear
physicist, desperately trying to get his attention. "What a time for a
trip to la-la land!"
"What is with
the man?" Mulder muttered, baffled. "This is the guy who warned us to
get the hell out of here A.S.A.P., right? Dr. Spengler! Yo!"
"I think our
Egon's in love," said Venkman. "Rather predictable, really."
Spengler turned and
saw them, then came to life with an almost comical look of surprise on his face
when he realized what was happening. Mulder was relieved to see the scientist
start to pick his way across the engine room, his progress made easier by the
fact that the ship's lights were coming on line, illuminating his way. But as
Spengler got near the exit, the deck began to pitch and yaw beneath his feet
and the terrifying scream of straining metal filled the air. "C'mon!
Jump!" screamed Mulder, gesturing with his arms in case the message wasn't
getting through. A look of panic etched on his features, Spengler launched
himself over a pile of debris instead of going around it, to be grabbed in
mid-air by the agitated FBI agent. "That's it," yelled Venkman over
the noise. "Next time, I get to push the self-destruct
button!"
They were all tossed
about the ship's corridors and stairwells like dried peas in a jar as the ship
shook with the assimilated power of the nuclear particle accelerator. Mulder
made his way as best he could, aiding the fallen and being helped in turn when
he lost his footing. Fortunately the walls seemed to be made of a
shock-absorbing substance, and he and his companions managed to half-crawl,
half-run their way to bridge without much more than a few bruises. The
vari-colored stations that surrounded the captain's chair flashed on and off
and a piercing whoop instantly recognizable as `Red Alert' filled the bridge,
urging all of them on like a herd of panicked cattle. Mulder gave Scully a
sharp shove in the small of her back to go first through the crack in the hull.
Apparently she wasn't about to waste time arguing with that bit of rough
gallantry, because she ducked her head and exited. Bits of the ceiling came
crashing down as each member of the group squeezed through and out after her,
into the blessed twilight of a summer night; Stanz, then Zeddemore, Venkman,
Spengler...and last came Mulder. He felt he owed that much to himself, to be
the final passenger on the incredible alien ship-even if they'd never left the
ground. He exited backwards, giving a last, longing look at what he'd helped
destroy, then was outside and found himself on his knees on the grass. Someone
grabbed his arm and hustled him away as the ship keened in its death-throws,
but he couldn't see where he was going because of the tears in his eyes.
Chapter Fourteen:
"This, too,
shall pass." Dr. Crusher to a six-year-old Wesley, that time he swallowed
the dilithium crystal.
8:10 PM-Peter
Venkman
Peter dropped from
the crack in the hull, almost landing on Winston, who rolled out of the way
barely in time. He felt the spongy soil beneath his fingers and resisted the
urge to give it a big kiss, rolling out of the way in turn to avoid getting
Egon's big feet planted in his back. Getting his bearings, he looked up and saw
Police Captain Meller hovering over the three proton packs he'd been left
behind to guard, clutching his gun uselessly. The last of their expedition,
that special agent guy, dropped to the ground, but he seemed to have gotten
some smoke in his eyes; fortunately, the delectable Dana Scully kept her head
and grabbed his arm, spinning him away from the ship. "Go! Go!"
yelled Peter at the top of his lungs, unsure if anyone could hear him over the
roar of the self-destructing ship and he stumbled in the captain's direction as
the ground shook beneath him. He knew they had to put as much distance as
possible between themselves and the ship before she blew, but wondered if it
would be enough.
"Grab the
packs, the proton packs! Aaaargh! Ya didn't grab the proton packs!" yelled
Peter, bringing up the rear, but nobody listened to him-typical! He was, as a
rule, not very happy when expensive equipment got left behind to be destroyed
in world-shattering cataclysms. The psychologist managed to snag one of the
heavy particle accelerators by a strap as he ran by, but couldn't carry all
three.
Peter followed
Captain Meller's broad back as the captain lead the group over the top of a
small hill that might prove a shield against a blast. Tripping over a clump of
crabgrass, the psychologist hit the dirt and dug in, covering his head with his
arms as protection-but if the ship was going to take out most of the swamp and
half of Manhattan, there was no way any of them were going to survive it.
He heard, rather
than saw, the implosion that took the ship from them. There was a sound like a
vast sucking-in of breath, a swift, in-rushing wind that blew over him towards
the ship, an audible pop...and it was over. Silence. Slowly he peered out from
behind his arms, to find himself face-to-face with the soft blue eyes of Agent
Scully. She looked cute with a smudge of dirt across her nose and bits of grass
in her hair, and he grinned at her and winked. She gave a lady-like snort of
disdain and pulled herself to her knees, away from him. Women. You survive The
End Of The World with `em, and they still won't give you the time of day.
He picked himself up
off the ground, shaking his arms and legs to check for damage, and saw the rest
of the group doing likewise. Finding nothing more than bruises, he hefted the
proton pack he'd rescued and walked back to the spot the ship had occupied, to
find...nothing. Just a deep, scarred depression in the shape of a hemisphere,
some broken trees, and the smell of burnt metal. His friends clustered around
him and they all peered into the crater in silence. The self-destruct had
kicked in, and had literally deleted the ship from its existence as a crashed
and broken derelict on the planet. No `primitives' would gain knowledge from it
now.
"I still
think it was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside-and now, it's a
hole," said Peter, with some finality. He handed off the proton pack to a
grave-looking Egon, who stood staring at the scorched grass they'd all been
walking on mere moments ago. "This is yours, Egon, I'll be damned if I'm
gonna lug it around for you after I saved it-and you're welcome." Egon
took it from him with a grateful, if dazed, nod.
Winston bent down to
pick up his proton pack, which had somehow escaped destruction. Ray's was not
so lucky as it had been just over the line into the circle of destruction, and
was now the source of the burnt metal smell. The occultist peeked into the
abyss. "Wow! The ship just up and disappeared, the same way they did when
they got zapped on that old TV show, `The Invaders'!"
Agent Scully threw
her hands sky-ward. "Thank you! Thank you, Dr. Stanz! If I heard one more
Star Trek reference out of you gentlemen, I think I might have screamed!"
she took the sting out of her words with a charming smile. "I'll cop to
the occasional Star Trek-everyone's seen it, if only once. I never saw that
show you mentioned, `The Invaders'?...but I bet you did, Mulder."
Her partner laughed
softly, as if at a private joke. "Yeah, I've seen it. However, I like to
think I have a better sense of humor than David Vincent-he was the main
character on the show and he was grim. Though I'll tell you, Scully, I
can certainly understand his paranoia."
"I'm so sorry,
Mulder," Scully shook her head in commiseration. Mulder just shrugged.
Peter had to give the guy credit for guts.
It was past time to
go. The ghost-busting psychologist picked up a couple of scattered ghost traps
and clicked them onto his belt, and saw Ray do the same. It looked like Ray had
gotten over his traumatic alien possession, but Peter made a mental note to run
some tests on his resilient buddy, just to be sure. As the sun fell low in the
summer sky and the stars slowly appeared at the edge of the eastern horizon,
Captain Meller set out in the direction of their cars, and Peter, for once
without a ready comment, fell in step behind him. He was tired, tired down to
his bones-and he bet he wasn't the only one. He glanced over his shoulder to
see that, of the entire group, only Mulder looked back as they left.
Chapter Fifteen:
"Twenty,
twenty, twenty-four hours to go; I wanna be sedated! Nothing to do, nowhere to
go, ho! I wanna be sedated!" The Ramone's "I Wanna Be Sedated",
early '80s rock anthem
The Great Falls
Diner Secaucus, New Jersey
August 17, 1994
12:05 PM-Fox Mulder
Coffee, and lots of
it, was definitely in order, and a stop at one of the great American diners of
New Jersey was a must for both agents and all four Ghostbusters. They bid a
relieved Captain Meller good-bye and drove to a local diner often frequented by
the police and recommended to them by the good captain. Once there, they took
over a large corner table and started swapping tall tales, all of which
happened to be true, late into the night. The waitress, amused by her unusual
clients, kept them well-stocked with strong brew, and swiftly trotted out a
dazzling array of very fattening, home-baked desserts. Mulder knew he needed
the caffeine and sugar after what he'd just been through.
"Have I
mentioned I saw `Silence of the Lambs' four times?" said Venkman across
the table to Scully, still in there, pitching. "I have this thing about
good-looking lady FBI agents." The guy was simply irrepressible.
His partner tilted
her head sideways and regarded the confident Ghostbuster suspiciously out of
narrowed eyes. "Uh, huh.... As long as you don't have a `thing' about
liver with fava beans and a nice chianti, Dr. Venkman." Her tone was
decidedly guarded.
But Venkman refused
to be rattled, and just grinned back at her. "Sure, I can take you to
dinner-I know a great little Italian restaurant, it's on the West Side-no fava
beans, but they do a great calf's liver in wine sauce. They don't know it, but
they owe us big-time. But now is a strange time to be thinking about
food; you just snarfed down three big helpings of apple pie." Score one
for the Ghostbuster. Mulder was impressed.
Scully did not deign
to answer, but favored Venkman with one of her patented "oh, yeah?"
looks. Mulder marveled at how she could do more with less expression than
anyone else he knew-and it was nice to see some one other than himself as the
recipient of that silent, blue-crystal stare. He suspected that someone had
once told her if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, and
she'd taken it completely to heart.
"`Primitives'...,"
said Mulder, picking up the thread of their conversation, "...that
suggests they think of us as intelligent beings, albeit uncivilized ones, not
just animals."
Spengler was
apparently not persuaded. "Which means precisely nothing, Agent Mulder.
They may well accord us the status of `beings', but they might still cheerfully
on experiment on us, enslave us, obliterate us."
"History has
shown us that whenever we humans have destroyed our fellow humans, we've
accorded the ones we've destroyed to a lower status, relegating them to
non-humanity," Zeddemore mused. "Which may go to show these aliens
are a lot more human than is gonna be healthy for us, should they ever decide
to come back again." Mulder blinked at that last, but did not say
anything, merely compressing his mouth into a line as if to keep his response
inside.
"But they were
very upset about the city being blown up-`poor humans', they said!"
Stanz protested. "They were inside my head and I could feel how
upset they were about it."
"Ray, anyone
would feel bad if one's lab rats got stepped on. But it wouldn't put a dent in
one's life for very long," Spengler said gently to his partner.
"Besides, they
were looking through the eyes of a great humanist-Ray Stanz!" Zeddemore
lifted his coffee cup in salute to his friend. "That may have merely been
your take on how the aliens should have been feeling. Ray, you are,
simply, a good man-they are not men, and even our ideas of `good' and
`evil' may be, well...alien to them."
"Well, we
missed our chance at the brass ring this time," Mulder sighed. "If
we'd even had a chance to remove one piece of machinery, to study it. We're
helpless, aren't we...they can, and do, do as they please with us.
They've been here before. They'll be here again."
Scully sipped the
last of the dregs in her cup, then pushed it from her. She looked like she'd
had enough for one night. "Perhaps they mean us well in the big picture,
perhaps what they're doing is for the best. Or not. It's...it's difficult,
isn't it, to look at the sky, and not be more than a little frightened. We
don't know what or why or who-we don't even know the right questions to ask.
And it's the waiting, not knowing the truth, that's the hardest part."
"Well, ya know
what they say, pretty lady," Venkman leaned towards Scully, raising his
eyebrows to help make his point. "The truth is out there.
Unfortunately, it just so happens to be
End File
I hope you enjoyed
my story! Please drop me a line!