“Sit down, Owen. Drink your coffee on your ass like a normal person and let me do this, I need to.”
Owen thought maybe he did. He sat down and drank the coffee. Five minutes passed in this fashion, then Kurtz got painfully back to his feet. Holding the bandanna fastidiously by one comer, he carried it to the kitchen, dropped it into the trash, and returned to his rocker. He took a sip of his coffee, grimaced, and put it aside. “Cold.”
Owen rose. “I’d get you a fresh-”
“No. Sit down. We need to talk.” Owen sat.
“We had a little confrontation out there at the ship, you and I, didn’t we?”
“I wouldn’t say-”
“No, I know you wouldn’t, but I know what went on and so do you. When the situation’s hot, tempers also get hot. But we’re past that now. We have to be past it because I’m the OIC and you’re my second and we’ve still got this job to finish. Can we work together to do that?”
“Yes, sir.” Fuck, there it was again. “Boss, I mean.”
Kurtz favored him with a wintry smile.
“I lost control just now.” Charming, frank, open-eyed and honest. This had fooled Owen for a lot of years. It did not fool him now. “I was going along, drawing the usual caricature-two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve-and I just… whew! I just lost it. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
Careful, careful. There was telepathy in this room, honest-to-God telepathy, and Owen had no idea how deeply Kurtz might be able to see into him. “Yes, sir. A little, sir.”
Kurtz nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes. A little. That pretty well describes it. I’ve been doing this for a long time-men like me are necessary but hard to find, and you have to be a little crazy to do the job and not just high-side it completely. It’s a thin line, that famous thin line the armchair psychologists love to talk about, and never in the history of the world has there been a cleanup job like this one… assuming, that is, the story of Hercules neatening up the Augean Stables is just a myth. I am not asking for your sympathy but for your understanding. If we understand each other, we’ll get through this, the hardest job we’ve ever had, all right. If we don’t…” Kurtz shrugged. “If we don’t, I’ll have to get through it without you. Are you following me?”
Owen doubted if he was, but he saw where Kurtz wanted him to go and nodded. He had read that there was a certain kind of bird that lived in the crocodile’s mouth, at the croc’s sufferance. He supposed that now he must be that kind of bird. Kurtz wanted him to believe he was forgiven for putting the alien broadcast on the common channel-heat of the moment, just as Kurtz had blown off Melrose’s foot in the heat of the moment. And what had happened six years ago in Bosnia? Not a factor now. Maybe it was true. And maybe the crocodile had tired of the bird’s tiresome pecking and was preparing to close its jaws. Owen got no sense of the truth from Kurtz’s mind, and either way it behooved him to be very careful. Careful and ready to fly.
Kurtz reached into his coverall again and brought out a tarnished pocket watch. “This was my grandfather’s and it works just fine,” he said. “Because it winds up, I think-no electricity. My wristwatch, on the other hand, is still FUBAR.”
“Mine too.”
Kurtz’s lips twitched in a smile. “See Perlmutter when you have a chance, and feel you have the stomach for him. Among his many other chores and activities, he found time to take delivery of three hundred wind-up Timexes this afternoon. just before the snow shut down our air-ops, this was. Pearly’s damned efficient. I just wish to Christ he’d get over the idea that he’s living in a movie.”
“He may have made strides in that direction tonight, boss.”
“Perhaps he has at that.”
Kurtz meditated. Underhill waited.
“Laddie-buck, we should be drinking the whiskey. It’s a bit of an Irish deathwatch we’re having tonight.”
“Is it?”
“Aye. Me beloved phooka is about to keel over dead.”
Owen raised his eyebrows.
“Yes. At which point its magical cloak of invisibility Will be whisked away. Then it will become just another dead horse for folks to beat. Primarily politicians, who are best at that sort of thing.”
“I don’t follow you.”
Kurtz took another look at the tarnished pocket watch, which he’d probably picked up in a pawnshop… or looted off a corpse. Underhill wouldn’t have doubted either.
“It’s seven o'clock. In just about forty hours, the President is going to speak before the UN General Assembly. More people are going to see and hear that speech than any previous speech in the history of the human race. It’s going to be part of the biggest story in the history of the human race… and the biggest spin-job since God the Father Almighty created the cosmos and set the planets going round and round with the tip of his finger.”
“What’s the spin?”
“It’s a beautiful tale, Owen. Like the best ties, it incorporates large swatches of the truth. The President will tell a fascinated world, a world hanging on every word with its breath caught in its throat, praise Jesus, that a ship crewed by beings from another world crashed in northern Maine on either November sixth or November seventh of this year. That’s true. He Will say that we were not completely surprised, as we and the heads of the other countries which constitute the UN Security Council have known for at least ten years that ET has been scoping us out. Also true, only some of us here in America have known about our pals from the void since the late nineteen-forties. We also know that Russian fighters destroyed a grayboy ship over Siberia in 1974… although to this day the Russkies don’t know we know. That one was probably a drone, a test-shot. There have been a lot of those. The grays have handled their early contacts with a care which strongly suggests that we scare them quite a lot.”
Owen listened with a sick fascination he hoped didn’t show on his face or at the top level of his thoughts, where Kurtz might still have access.
From his inner pocket, Kurtz now brought out a dented box of Marlboro cigarettes. He offered the pack to Owen, who first shook his head, then took one of the remaining four fags. Kurtz took another, then lit them up.
“I’m getting the truth and the spin mixed in together,” Kurtz said after he’d taken a deep drag and exhaled. “That may not be the most profitable way to get on. Let’s stick to the spin, shall we?'Owen said nothing. He smoked rarely these days and the first drag made him feel light-headed, but the taste was wonderful.
“The President will say that the United States government quarantined the crash site and the area around it for three reasons. The first was purely logistical: because of the Jefferson Tract’s remote location and low population, we could quarantine it. If the grayboys had come down in Brooklyn, or even on Long Island, that would not have been the case. The second reason is that we are not clear on the aliens” intentions. The third reason, and ultimately the most persuasive, is that the aliens carry with them an infectious substance which the on-scene personnel calls “Ripley fungus". While the alien visitors have assured us passionately that they are not infectious, they have brought a highly infectious substance with them. The President will also tell a horrified world that the fungus may in fact be the controlling intelligence, the grayboys just a growth medium. He will show videotape of a grayboy literally exploding into the Ripley fungus. The footage has been slightly doctored to improve visibility, but is basically true.”
You’re lying, Owen thought. The footage is entirely fake from be inning to end, as fake as that Alien Autopsy shit. And why are you lying? Because you can. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it? Because to you, a lie comes more naturally than the truth.