THAT EVENING, in the lounge of an old hotel on a small island artificially infested with feral cats, I read episode sixteen of Dead Air, “Anxiety Pays.”
IT WAS A TIME when a great many people were anxious about the possibility that otherworldly beings would invade us in fleets of flying saucers. We were already anxious about the possibility that intercontinental ballistic missiles would deliver nuclear warheads to our back yards, so you would have thought we had enough to worry about.
One night, my parents and I watched a television program about flying saucers. We saw blurry snapshots of hubcaps in the sky, scratchy films of fuzzy lights, and we listened to the sketchy, contradictory accounts of the people who had seen the hubcaps and fuzzy lights. The back yards of Babbington were never mentioned, but, even so, the program left my mother wringing her hands. “Peter,” she said, “could you make me a flying-saucer detector like that one you’ve got?”
“Sure,” I said, trying not to sound pleased.
My father looked at her over the top of his glasses and asked, “What is all this, Ella?”
“I built a detector from plans in Cellar Scientist magazine — ” I began.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, Peter,” said my father. “I was speaking to your mother. Ella, what is all this nonsense?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said my mother. She hugged herself as if she were cold, though it was a warm night. “Maybe it’s silly to be afraid of something you’ve never seen — ”
“ — and never will,” said my father. He lifted the can of beer on the table beside him to see if there was anything left in it.
“Maybe not, but you could say that about missiles too, couldn’t you?”
“That’s different,” claimed my father.
“It’s just that I’d rather know if they’re coming,” said my mother, softly, with her eyes down. “I’d like some warning. I don’t want to be taken by surprise.”
That seemed reasonable enough to me. “You can borrow mine for now,” I said. I went upstairs, got my detector, and brought it downstairs. My parents were sitting in silence. My father had a fresh beer.
“Where should I put it?” I asked.
“In the bedroom,” said my mother.
“I don’t want that thing waking me up in the middle of the night,” said my father.
“You expect it to go off?” asked my mother.
“No,” said my father. “I don’t.”
“Then you don’t have to worry about having it wake you up in the middle of the night. Besides, it only has a little light. I’ll put it on my bedside table and sleep with my back to you so that it will wake me but won’t wake you.”
My father said nothing. He turned his attention to the television set. I went to my parents’ bedroom and put the saucer detector on my mother’s bedside table. I aligned it properly and made certain that it was stable, and then I switched the bedroom light off and triggered the detector. Its little light filled the room; it would wake my mother.
I left my parents’ bedroom, said good night to them, and went upstairs to my own room. I stretched out in bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there wondering whether any flying saucers were passing overhead. I got up and went to the window to see. The night was clear, with a fine scattering of stars and a sliver of moon. I stood there, searching the night sky for anomalies, and soon I began to detect movement in the star at the center of my field of vision. I wished that it would move again, so that I could be convinced that I was actually seeing what I thought I was. I got my wish. The star, or whatever it was, moved, or seemed to move, seemed to grow larger, as it would if it were coming toward me. Had it actually moved? Was it really a larger presence in my field of vision than it had been? I turned from the window to find some objective measure and grabbed the first thing I found, a comb. I held it at arm’s length, turned sideways, so that the teeth would provide a gauge against which I could measure the increase in apparent size as the star approached, but I couldn’t find the star. (Let’s be honest about this: I mean that I couldn’t find a flying saucer, since that’s what I now expected to see.) Where had it gone? I looked this way and that in the night sky, but I couldn’t see it. The devious saucerians must be hiding somewhere. Were they hovering above the roof, where I couldn’t see them? I leaned out the window, but I still couldn’t find the ship.
I tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs, where I could see the door of my parents’ bedroom at the far end of the living room. The door was closed, but there was a gap between the floor and the bottom of the door, and I could see that there was no light showing in the gap, and after a while I felt certain that my parents were asleep. If the star that I had seen had been a saucer, it was far away, beyond the range of my detector, and so, in a sense, my detector was useless as a saucer detector in these immediate circumstances, but the presence of the detector and the absence of a warning from it had allowed my mother to sleep, had made her feel secure. I was proud of myself for having given her that security.
“Sleep tight, boys and girls,” I whispered in the direction of my parents’ room, and crept back up the stairs to my own bed. On the way, I realized that other people would be willing to pay for the security I had given my mother, a night’s freedom from anxiety, a good night’s sleep, and that I could probably make big money selling saucer detectors.
THERE IS no more effective method of generating apparent anomalies than the hunt for them. I saw movement in the stars because I was looking for movement in the stars. If you doubt the truth of this assertion, try the following experiment tonight when you get into bed: pay close attention to your heartbeat to determine whether anything is going wrong with the old ticker. In a short time, you will begin to detect arrhythmic fluctuations, hesitations, thumps, bumps, and lapses — enough to have you calling your neighborhood cardiologist first thing in the morning.
[to be continued]
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