Michael McCollum - Gift.pdf

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GIFT
McCollum, Michael
If you think nuclear power is a dangerous way to generate electricity, then you obviously have not
considered the drawbacks of solar energy!
It was a cold, blustery Wednesday that first time he came into the El Dorado. It was going on midnight
and the place was deserted. Even Lucy and Suellen, our two "working girls" had given up for the night
and gone home. I recognized him immediately, of course. Even without my photographic memory, I
would have known R. J. Cowen.
"Hi," I said, "what'll it be?" I tried to be a study in friendly aloofness. I have always heard that Cowen
does not like people fawning all over him. That and the fact that he has been known to leave a
thousand-dollar bill for a tip made me keep my distance.
"You know who I am?" he asked. His voice was a low croak and his eyes were bloodshot. I
recognized the symptoms. He had the air of a man in the middle of a weeklong bender. His breath
confirmed my suspicions.
"You're R. J. Cowen, the sunscreen tycoon," I said. "Care for a drink, Mr. Cowen?"
"Yah," he said. "Uh, a scotch-and-water."
The beverage dispenser served up the scotch with its usual assortment of noises. I retired to the other
end of the bar and went back to polishing glasses. He did not taste the scotch at all. He just sat there
and stared into its dark translucence as though hypnotized. I watched him in the mirror for ten minutes,
then put the glass down and sidled back to where he was sitting. He did not take notice of me until I was
standing across from him.
"Pardon me, Mr. Cowen," I said. "It's none of my business, of course, but you look like you need a
friend. Anything I can do to help?"
He looked up with those red-rimmed eyes and sighed. "You say you know who I am."
"Yes, sir."
"Who am I?"
"Some people around this burg say you're the richest man in the world."
He nodded. "Yeah, I've heard that nasty rumor myself. The funny part of it is that it is true. I am the
richest man in the world. Not only that, I am richer than the next ten candidates combined. What do you
think of that?"
I whistled long and low. Not because it was news to me, you understand. Rather because he seemed to
expect it.
"Do you know how I got that way?" he asked, before finally taking a sip from his drink.
 
"Talent?" I asked.
"Like hell! It was luck. That's right. Pure, unadorned, undeserved, and unexpected dumb luck. You
want to hear the story?"
"If you want to tell it," I said. Of course, I did not know then what I was letting myself in for.
Cowen drained the glass dry and asked for another. Fizz, whirrr, plop and I had it in front of him.
Remember the Vietnam War? No, me neither. Well, it was one of those brush fire things that went on
about forty years ago. Cowen was in college at the time and dropped out to protest US involvement.
To hear him tell it, those were the best days of his life. He and a bunch of others traveled around the
country in a battered Volkswagen van. They organized demonstrations, burned draft cards, and just
generally raised hell.
Then a terrible thing happened. The war ended and Cowen was adrift. He had been one of the
hard-core protesters, a real agitator. Suddenly the cause to which he had given six years of his life was
gone. His side had won. There was nothing left to fight for. He felt like a knight who trips over the Holy
Grail on his way to saddle up his horse. (I hope you realize I am condensing this. By the time Cowen
finally got to war's end, it was almost 2:00 a.m.)
After peace broke out, Cowen just drifted. Bringing down a government had been a heady narcotic.
Nothing afterwards had been the same. He tried consumerism, environmentalism, and even Eastern
religions. Nothing gave him that same feeling of excitement he'd found in the peace movement.
"Have you ever belonged to something?" he asked me while nursing his third drink. "I don't mean the
Boy Scouts or the PTA. I mean really belonged, like everyone around you was part of your family.
That was the feeling that I had lost. It was what I was searching for. "
"Must be a great feeling," I said.
"The best," he agreed.
Eventually his search took him to Los Angeles where he met an old girl friend from the peace movement.
She had found a new cause of her own and invited him to attend a lecture on the dangers of nuclear
power.
"You have heard of nuclear power, haven't you?" Cowen asked me. He slurred the name, of course, but
it came out understandable enough.
"Sure," I said. "Used to be what they propelled submarines with, didn't it?"
He nodded. "They still use it on some of the real old boats, the ones they can't retrofit with cryogenic
storage modules. Other than that, nuclear energy has no use. Know why?'
"Sunscreens are cheaper and safer," I said.
He slammed his fist down on the bar. "Damned right they are. Now, stop interrupting, I've a story to
tell..."
That night at the lecture, Cowen had found another crusade he could give himself over to. For the next
several years that is what he had done, heart and soul. He had crisscrossed the country in that same
beat-up old Volkswagen, again organizing demonstrations and sit-ins. By 1980, they had the nukes (As
God is my witness, that's what he called them) on the run. In the fall of 1982, Cowen was on the way to
 
Arizona to join a demonstration outside the gate of the big nuclear power planet there; only he did not
make it. He was sidetracked by an accident, the accident that made him the richest man in the world.
He had gotten off the interstate to buy gas for the Volkswagen. (Yeah, cars ran on gasoline in those
days. Cryogen was just a gleam in a few people's eyes.) It was dinnertime and he stopped in a small
roadside cafe. The sun was just going down as he finished eating. Apparently, it was one of those
sunsets that you can only see in Arizona, so Cowen decided impulsively to go up into the hills to
photograph it. He did not get the picture. What he got was lost. He wandered around in the desert until
he topped a rise and stopped to check the small pocket compass he carried with him. He had sent hours
wandering around and the car was again running on empty. He turned the dome light on and glanced
down at the compass. It was a good thing he did.
Otherwise, the flash would have blinded him for hours.
"Funny things run through your mind when something explodes just over the next rise." he said to me
while popping a peanut into his mouth and dropping a handful of shells on the floor. "I'd been
demonstrating against nuclear power for four years and had learned a lot about how it worked. Know
your enemy, I always say. Well one of the first things I had learned was that a reactor could not explode
like a bomb. I was not so sure during those long seconds after the explosion, I can tell you that! Mostly
I spent the time curled in a ball on the floor of my van with the gearshift lever jamming me in the ribs.
Every story I had ever heard about nuclear weapons flashed through my mind. All I could think about
was the face of a little Japanese girl who had been looking up when the Hiroshima bomb went off ...
never mind, Joe. No sense ruining your evening by being too graphic."
"Whatever you say, sir," I said. My name is Marvin Agronski, but if the richest man in the world wanted
to call me Joe, that was fine by me.
"Eventually I concluded that it wasn't the power plant," he continued, "and that I wasn't dead. The next
thought was plane crash! Weren't planes always going down at night in the mountains? Somehow the
idea of a few hundred dead strangers lying mangled just over the next ridge didn't bother me as much as
that little girl's picture.
"I extricated myself from the gear shift, got back into the driver's seat, and then eased the car up the hill at
dead slow to see what was burning. When I got to the top, I found myself looking down into a little
hollow filled with scrubby desert trees. Many of the trees were ablaze. I stopped the car, got out, and
walked as far as I could before the heat from the fire became too intense. It was bright as day down
there."
I leaned one elbow on the bar and began to pick my teeth, nodding occasionally so that it looked like I
was intent on what he was saying. He didn't even notice me. He was once more in a hollow in the
mountains of Arizona some thirty years ago. Truth was that I could have left the room and he would not
have noticed.
"Suddenly a figure walked out of a clump of trees that hadn't caught fire," Cowen said. "He took three
steps towards me and collapsed to the ground. I did not have time to think. I just ran over to where he
lay face down and rolled him over. That was when I got my second shock of the night.
"I'd whimpered in fright when I thought the power planet had exploded. This time I screamed. Even
after all these years, I can still hear that sound in my head. It was a girlish scream. The figure on the
ground was not a man. It was a thing! In fact, it was nothing less than a bug-eyed monster!"
"Are you all right, Mr. Cowen?" I asked, touching him on the wrist. His eyes lost their unfocused look.
 
"Huh?"
"I said, are you all right?"
"Sure. Why shouldn't I be?"
"You were just talking about bug-eyed monsters."
"That's right," he said, nodding. "I was just telling you about the night I found Thing in the desert. "
"Thing?'
"The bug-eyed monster. Weren't you listening?"
"I must have missed something," I said.
"Well, be quiet and I'll tell you about it."
I shut my mouth. I had probably blown my thousand-dollar tip. Still, when a man has as much money as
R. J. Cowen, you do not call him crazy to his face. Trillionaires are eccentric, not crazy,
He continued his story.
It seems this BEM was purple with slick oily black hair and a mouth that opened sideways rather than up
and down. That is, it was on a vertical line rather than a horizontal one like yours and mine.
(Hope you don't mind my paraphrasing some of this. I do have a photographic memory like I said, but
Cowen was rambling pretty badly and I think I can make the story a hell of a lot more coherent than he
did.)
Anyway, the thing was slightly smaller than a man and resembled a person in gross detail -- that is, it had
two arms, two legs, and a head. The only thing was that all its features were not arranged the same as
ours. Its knees folded the wrong way and it had too many fingers on each hand. Worst of all, it had
eyes that glowed red in the dark.
Cowen was no fool. He did the sensible thing. He turned and ran. Only problem was, he took only two
steps before tripping over his feet and crashing down on the hard rocks. It was then that he knew what
real terror was. His system got a jolt of adrenaline that dwarfed the previous two surges. Deep down in
his brain, down where the subconscious hangs out, he could feel a sensation he'd never felt before.
The thing had gotten hold of his mind!
"How'd you know that?" I whispered. I don't know why but we had taken to talking in hushed tones.
Reminded me of one of those overnight camping trips where you sit around the campfire and tell scary
stories.
"How can I describe the sensation?" he asked. "Might as well describe the color blue. I felt like a piano
and the BEM was running its mental fingers over my keyboard. First, there was a flash of heat, then
clammy cold, and then other sensations in quick succession. I had difficulty breathing, dizziness, extreme
joy, and an attack of naked lust, followed instantly by numbing depression. I began to shiver violently
while sweat poured from my body and a blazing rainbow of color flashed before my eyes. Those are the
words, but they don't describe what I felt any better than a six year old can describe sex."
I was getting interested in this insane story. It was like a fantasy novel. You know it is not real, but you
pretend it is for as long as the story lasts. Except this was better. "Care for a beer, Mr. Cowen?" I
 
asked, hoping to get him off the hard stuff.
He nodded and waited for me to draw the brew.
"What happened next?"
"There was this clicking sound," he said.
"Clicking sound?'
"Yeah, like you hear when someone energizes the phone screen on the other end of the line. Except it
was not a sound at all. It was inside my head.
"--Ah, there it is," a quiet voice speaking accentless English said deep in Cowen's brain. "I apologize for
any discomfort I may have caused, sir. When I noted your predilection for using one of your grasping
appendages in preference to the other, I naturally assumed your brain would be most developed on that
side. However, I now see that you are cross-connected and that I've been searching the wrong
hemisphere of your cortex for the speech center..."
"--Who are you? --" Cowen asked.
"--Not so much volume, please!" the thing said. "You are an extremely powerful telepath for one who is
untrained. You may call me ... Thing . As you can see, I am an alien. My ship is destroyed and
although uninjured, I require your assistance. If you would be so kind --"
"Look, I'm a little busy right now," Cowen muttered sarcastically, falling into the lifelong habit of speaking
his thoughts. "Perhaps I could drop you off at a police station. The authorities will know what to do with
you."
"--I am sorry, sir. But that is impossible. This planet is under quarantine. That you know of my presence
is bad enough. None other must learn of it. You must hide me until my comrades are able to effect, a
rescue. --"
"What about your ship?" Cowen asked, pointing a thumb at the blazing fire that was still warming his
back uncomfortably.
"--The generators are aflame. In another twentieth of one p1anetary revolution there will be nothing there
but a charred spot of ground. --"
"How long until you are rescued?"
"--No more than a year --"
"A year!" Cowen screamed. "How do you expect me to keep a bug-eyed monster secret for a year?"
"--Perhaps you could hide me in your domicile. --"
"I don't have a domicile. Besides, I have my own life to live. Sorry..."
The burning red points stared at him in silence for a minute. He knew it still had him since he felt no
desire to get up and run for his car.
Finally, it spoke. "--I would be willing to pay whatever you wished. --"
"You mean money?"
 

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