Haggopian and Other Stories

James, with a start, his sore eyes blinking rapidly: “Why, so did I!” And then, recovering himself and rather more calmly, “What do you suppose it means?”

Jason, having apparently failed to hear, or having ignored James’ question: “I also dreamed of my mother and brother. They didn’t say anything and looked sad, but in any case I knew what they were thinking: that I wouldn’t be joining them.”

James: “That you are not going to die? A good omen, eh?”

Jason, shaking his head: “No, just that I won’t be joining them. I also heard a song or a chant…no, it was more properly a hymn or song of—I don’t know—thanksgiving? Possibly.” And giving himself a shake. “Breakfast is up. We might as well enjoy it.” Then, as they commence eating: “We always assumed it was a meteorite or comet that took out the dinosaurs, right?”

James: “So?”

Jason: “What if it was Them?”

James, nodding: “I know what you mean, but it just doesn’t fit the picture. You’re talking about prehistory. Who was there here to call them down from the stars? Man’s earliest ancestors hadn’t as yet crawled up out of the oceans, let alone come down from the trees!”‘

Jason, bringing the food—eggs and bacon—seating himself close to James and handing him a plate; then absentmindedly, or even fatalistically picking at his own food: “What if They were already here? Or maybe they just happened to be passing by, and saw how rich it was—the planet, I mean. Personally, I believe that one of them was here, alone in a crazily angled city maybe something like (R’xxxx). And he/she/it called through a lens to its friends in the stars. And the closest of them came—”

James: “—To the harvest? Is that what you are saying? But even if I thought you could be right, still it might have taken them millions of years to get here.”

Jason: “But the dinosaurs were here for millions of years—for a whole lot longer than we’ve been here, anyway.”

James: “And that cavern out in the Iraqi desert? You think it’s all that remains of that prehistoric city? Forget it! That cave is recent by comparison. A million, or perhaps two million years old, but no more than that.”

Jason: “I agree. No, I think who or whatever was there in the Iraqi cavern got called away long ago, perhaps to a harvesting somewhere out in the stars. But he had seen the beginnings of Homo sapiens, and he left the lens for us to find. Maybe old (Axxxx) was something of a dreamer—maybe he was gifted, that old Arab—like us, but he got it wrong. Maybe the stars don’t ‘come right’ until some intelligence finds them and takes them away! Because they aren’t stars in the sky after all but starstones buried deep in the earth! Too many maybes, I agree, but maybe, just maybe…”

James, scathingly: “And maybe, just maybe, you want to give in, quit right now—right?”

Jason: “Quit? On the contrary. I think we should go ahead, speak to them through the lens. Why? Because we can’t avoid the unavoidable. And I know you’ll do it anyway, because you’re ignorant, arrogant and pig-headed. And what the hell…Que sera, sera!” He shrugs, again fatalistically.

James, tight-lipped: “Putting insults such as that aside—if only because contact will probably be easier with your help—when do you propose we do it? Tonight?”

Jason, shrugging: “Tonight, tomorrow night, next Friday…what difference does it make down here? Why not right now?”

James, turning to stare at the lens in its glass globe, the lens that Jason has been staring at from the moment he sat down at the table: “Right now? Are you sure?”

Jason, putting his plate aside: “It’s all…all very confusing, isn’t it?”

James: “Do you feel you’re being lured?”

Jason: “Lured? Let me think about that.” And a brief moment later: “Yes, I believe I can feel that thing tugging at me. But mainly I just feel as I think you feel—that come what may we have to know. Or we have to know come what will.”

James, also pushing his plate of untouched food aside, and resting his chin in his cupped hands: “Very well then, let’s do it…”

• • •

NOTE: Following our night shift—myself and our good lady psychiatrist—we could by now have been asleep; but something had kept us at our stations, where we had been joined by our Military companions and my Foundation colleague. Our technician was drowsing in a room close by, but such were my feelings of—of what? Uncertainty, confusion, imminence—of interference with my thinking, that I had known I would be unable to sleep. Which was probably also true of my night’s companion.

I have mentioned my own somewhat shallow extrasensory perceptions; but now through the medium of this ESP I “perceived” a current that was almost electric, a faint tingle in my scalp. And I was aware that on my viewscreen the forms of the two men in the cell had taken on a kind of rigidity. Their eyes—and their sensitive minds, obviously—were now rapt upon the lens in its bowl atop the pedestal.