Diplomatic Act

Chapter Five

When he regained consciousness, Richard kept his eyes closed for a long time. He did not think of himself as cowardly or as unwilling to face reality, necessarily, but his mind had endured several rather severe shocks in rapid succession and he was worried about adding another to the list, especially when he wasn't sure yet just what effect that first run of surprises might have had on his mental constitution. If he should open his eyes, say, and see some of those blue-skinned translucent things bending over him, he could easily picture his mind simply packing it in at that point, declaring loudly that sanity was highly overrated as a survival mechanism, and heading south for the winter.

It wasn't just the possibility of opening his eyes to find he was a specimen on an alien examination table, either. He'd read about things like that, of course, in tabloid newspaper headlines and in the sorts of books you found under the UFOs and Weird Happenings section of the bookstore, but at this point he still wasn't entirely sure that anything out of the ordinary had happened at all.

After all, he could have been mistaken about what he'd seen. Couldn't he?

He fervently wished he could think of some logical explanation for all of this.

There were other reasons to be cautious about opening his eyes, now that he thought about it. For one thing, he distinctly remembered being out on the side of the hill above his home. It had been dark, the moon had been shining overhead--not to mention the flying saucer with the advertising slogan on its belly--it had been a bit on the chilly side, and Jimbo had licked his face. He might, possibly, have imagined the flying saucer, the burrowing saucer, the translucent aliens, and the guy who looked exactly like Harmon, but he couldn't have imagined all the rest because it was entirely too ordinary, the sorts of things he saw and experienced on all of his evening sojourns up that hill. When people wigged out completely, they were supposed to imagine out-of-the-ordinary things, right? Like flying saucers, maybe, or translucent blue aliens.

If he had imagined seeing those spaceships and aliens, what did that say about the state of his mind?

actor goes around bend

sees ufos and aliens

doctors puzzled

He wasn't sure he liked the sound of that.

The more he thought about it, the worse it got. He was obviously not lying on a California hillside beneath a shining, smog-hazed half moon, just now. Even with his eyes shut, he could tell he was in a room of some kind, with gentle, even illumination . . . not a white light, but something warmer. Yellow, maybe, or orange. He wasn't lying on the hard-packed dirt of the road, either. It felt like a bed, though it was firmer than beds he was used to and crinkled a bit, unnervingly, when he moved.

The only state of affairs he could think of that would have him in that kind of a room, lying on that kind of a bed, and with the last thing he remembered being spaceships and aliens, was something involving professional psychiatric care and extended bed rest . . . possibly with a new line of leisure wear with extra-long sleeves and the straps in the back as a complimentary extra. He was afraid that if he opened his eyes too suddenly, he would see a sign welcoming him to the psych wing at L.A. General, with a couple of strapping attendants to see to it that he ate his vegetables and took his medication.

Still, he couldn't keep his eyes closed forever. There came a time in every man's life when it was necessary to face your fears squarely, with clear and wide-open eyes.

But . . . well, maybe this wasn't quite the time, just yet. . . .

There was something else peculiar, too . . . something that wasn't so much strange about the room as it was strange about him. It was difficult to put his finger on, exactly, but he knew he felt different. Sort of like . . . like being in an express elevator headed for the hotel lobby, a kind of sinking, hollow, giddy feeling. Of course, that could be stress. He'd been under a lot of stress, lately. A tight shooting schedule. Lots of bickering on the set. Last-minute rewrites. Counting the lines and finding that Jeremy Winston was getting lots more. Seeing aliens . . .

Yeah, he'd been stressed, lately. Otherwise, why would they have put him here?

Circular reasoning. He could keep doing this all day. That was what decided him, finally, the thought that lying here with his eyes closed in a strange room with a falling feeling inside was going to lead nowhere very useful. If he opened his eyes, he might at least have something else to worry about, something serious enough to require immediate action . . . such as a good, loud scream. The sooner he examined himself and his surroundings, the sooner he could get to the screaming, or whatever other therapeutic action might be necessary.

He opened his left eye.

So far, so good. No alien monsters. Nothing much at all, really, save an indistinct orange glow. He chanced opening his right eye then, but this added little new information. He was lying on his back, and the ceiling was singularly devoid of such homey and reassuring touches as water spots or cobwebs. In fact, unless his eyes were deceiving him--something which Richard was quite willing to believe of them at this point, in fact, though he fully intended to give them the benefit of the doubt--the ceiling appeared to be the source of that even lighting he'd noted earlier when his eyes were closed. It was orange, too, about the same hue as a ripe, California navel or a little lighter. It was almost as if the ceiling itself was illuminated, glowing with a warm, orange radiance that bathed the room.

Okay. No aliens leaning over him to poke at his brain, or whatever, and no spaceships, either. That delightful absence gave him the fortitude to take the next step in his action program. Slowly, still half afraid that he was about to come face to face with a committee of alien medical students here to invite him to attend their next dissection, he turned his head.

The room was, in fact, something of an anticlimax. Aside from the glowing ceiling and the circular, crinkling-surfaced bed, there were no other furnishings in the room at all. This was at once reassuring and alarming, reassuring because he was reasonably certain that hospital rooms had more in the way of furniture than this . . . alarming because it was at least possible that a mental ward might have a minimum of furniture to keep the inmates from hurting themselves.

In fact, this particular room was so empty of furnishings, it didn't even have a door, and that really worried him. If there was no door, the owners of this place must not be keen on his ever getting out.

Of course, if there was no door, how had he gotten in in the first place? These were serious questions, requiring serious study . . . but he decided to defer answering them until he had a better handle on just where he might be. He had a terrible, growing, gnawing dread that this was in fact a room in some kind of psychiatric intensive care facility. As much as he wanted to think of some other, less extreme explanation, that was the only one he could think of at the moment that made any sense.

He sat up on the side of the bed, then caught himself, feeling giddily light-headed. He tried putting his head between his knees and then noticed something else of exceptional interest.

He still had his shoelaces.

And his Topsiders, too, for that matter. Likewise trousers, complete with tan Nieman Marcus belt. His ballpoint pen, a Parker, was still clipped inside his shirt pocket, and his wallet was still in his hip pocket. If he was in a mental hospital, they wouldn't have let him keep those things, right? Mental patients might do anything, after all, like hang themselves with their shoelaces or attack the attendants with their credit cards. They should have taken all of that stuff away, leaving him in pajamas and, just maybe, that long-sleeved coat with the straps in back.

Now he was really alarmed. When faced with the possibility that he'd been committed to a mental institution, he'd at least had the comfort of knowing he was being tended by professionals who were there to safeguard his well-being . . . a well-being, incidentally, that he was becoming increasingly worried about.

Just where the hell was he, anyway? And, just as urgent, a second question followed close behind. Did he really want to know the answer to the first question?

"Is . . . anybody there?" he called out. He mustered all of his courage, took a deep breath, and tried again . . . this time loudly enough to actually be heard clear on the other side of the room.

No reply. That didn't exactly surprise him since he couldn't see anyone at all on the other side of the room. Standing, a little unsteadily, on feet that felt very far away, he took a step . . .

. . . and very nearly fell flat on his face. He caught himself and plopped back on the bed, but slowly, as if in a dream.

Damn . . . he felt very strange . . . not just light-headed, but light everything. His foot had slipped out from under him as though he'd tried stepping onto ice.

An idea--a rather alarming and unpleasant idea--was forming, gurgling up from a churning pool of many unpleasant ideas. Carefully, making no sudden moves for fear of frightening himself, he reached up and removed the pen from his pocket. Holding it straight out in front of him at arm's length between trembling thumb and forefinger, he hesitated, drew a deep breath, and let it go.

Surprisingly, it fell. Surprisingly because, for one moment there, he'd been terribly afraid that he was weightless, that he was, in fact, in a spacecraft somewhere very far indeed from Earth; he'd more than half expected to see the pen hang there in midair, like a prop out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

No, the pen fell . . . or rather, it was falling . . . still falling, that is, and taking its own sweet time about it. On Earth, of course, the pen would have struck the floor some fraction of a second after he released it. Here, the pen was definitely falling . . . but it took almost all of two long seconds to complete the trip, before striking the smooth, white floor with a bright clink, bouncing high and falling again with equal laziness.

Experimentally, he stood up, flexed his knees a bit, then straightened them, hard, sailing straight up in the air, so high he had to raise his hands to fend off the ceiling. Despite the orange glow, it was cool to the touch.

It took an unusually long time for him to fall back to the floor . . . a couple of seconds or so.

Richard closed his eyes again. He much preferred the dark, he found. It was more comfortable, spoke more of security and sanity, than this eerie, orange-lit room where objects fell at a fraction of their usual speed.

He could think of just two explanations. One, which he knew was girded carefully around with lots of wishful thinking, was that his mind was racing so fast that the pen had only seemed to fall slowly, in short, that his perception of time was somehow flawed, or at least different. He'd experienced something of the sort a time or two before, notably during his college years . . . but that had always been under the influence of various mind-altering chemicals. He'd not experimented with any of those, save for the odd drinking bout at some Hollywood party or other, for a good many years. He certainly didn't feel drunk or high, however much he wished he were.

In any event, the sense of euphoria and somewhat muddled ramblings masquerading as razor-keen thought were absent here. He was feeling muddled, to be sure, but it was ordinary, run-of-the-mill muddled, as might be expected after too many sharp shocks, and not the thorough scrambling brought on by drink or drugs.

Okay. So look at option two, which took him back to his original dread. Things fell slowly because he was someplace where gravity wasn't doing its thing, or at least was not doing it with its accustomed vigor.

He was no longer on the Earth.

Richard Faraday was not a scientist. In fact, he'd never had much interest in science at all, but he'd picked up a smattering of facts from the Star Peace scripts, and he'd picked up even more when he'd started reading a variety of science fiction stories and books. Spaulding had recommended that he try some, and given him a list of books, with the idea that if he read some good science fiction it would help him round out his understanding of his character, Harmon. He'd been surprised to find that he liked some of it, and more surprised still to find that some of the authors, rather than just making up wild-sounding stuff, seemed to pay some attention to their facts and figures.

He knew from several stories, for instance, that Venus had about the same gravity as Earth--a tad less, maybe--and that the gravity on Mars was something like a third of that. The moon . . . well, he'd seen recordings of American astronauts bouncing around on the lunar surface often enough, despite the encumbrance of their heavy space suits. He remembered hearing that the moon's gravity was one sixth of Earth's. He weighed a fairly trim and compact one-eighty in Los Angeles; that meant that on the moon he'd weigh . . . what? Thirty pounds.

Was that what he weighed now? It was hard to judge. For one thing, if he weighed less, his--a term out of a high school physics course popped unbidden into his mind, waving its hand to be called on--his inertia was just the same as it had been back home. He had to work just as hard to lift his body from the bed as he would back home.

Did less gravity mean things fell more slowly? He wasn't sure. It seemed like a strange and somehow counterintuitive notion, like learning, one bright morning, that contrary to all experience, things fell up. He could imagine things weighing less, certainly, but the idea that they would fall slowly violated every rule his until-now Earth-bound body had ever experienced. He could remember, though, one of those film clips he'd seen of astronauts on the moon. When they jumped, they did seem to fall slower than he would expect . . . and there was one memorable scene, with a space-suited astronaut, bright-lit and blurry and fuzzily indistinct as only Apollo astronauts could be, giving a demonstration of the old Galileo experiment, demonstrating that, in a vacuum--such as the one that existed on the moon's surface--a feather and a hammer dropped from the astronaut's gloved hands fell at exactly the same rate and struck the dust together. Eyes closed, Richard played that scene back in his mind. Yeah . . . feather and hammer had fallen together, and they'd fallen slowly.

As near as he could tell, they'd fallen about as fast as his Parker had.

Richard felt a flash of something like pride at the realization. He might not be a scientist, but he'd just used a single experiment and his actor's eclectic memory to work out where he was.

He was on the moon.

Of course, his use of experiment, logic, and deduction hadn't helped his circumstances, much. If he was on the moon, and if he was in an obviously artificial structure of some kind, complete with air, light--at least, of a sort--and a bed, then it stood to reason that he'd not been hallucinating the aliens or the spaceships.

He'd been kidnapped.

By aliens.

And brought to the moon.

And locked inside a room with no door.

He decided, after giving the matter some careful thought, that yes, it was definitely now the time to start doing some serious screaming.