Southern Airways Flight 243
Michael
Monday. October 15, 1973. Archie's mood, in the aftermath of his quasi-Oedipal morning at Black Rock, is near-giddy, mixed with an undertone of solemnity and regret. But it can't be denied; he pulled it off. Frank's tells, his body language, the words Frank used (despite the occasional sniping and that pathetic parting jab at Archie's time in Korea … trying to sow doubt in Archie's mind about his own internal loyalties; golly, kind of pathetic really, Archie thinks) were all unmistakable; he's actually going to connect Archie and URIEL directly with Control. It's almost too good to be believed.
While allowing himself the indulgence of a ginger ale on the very short DC-9 flight ferrying him back to Huntsville, one of the pretty Southern Airways stewardesses checks her manifest and comes directly to Archie's seat. "Excuse me, Mr. Ransom?" she leans over and whispers across an empty seat. "The pilots have patched through a terrestrial phone call for you, radioed in from Redstone Arsenal. You can take it on the headset in the cockpit, if you'll follow me."
Rob
Archie is friendly to the stewardess: "A phone call on an airplane? Well, I'll be!" But he knows you don't generally patch a phone call to a flight with good news. He follows the stewardess up to the cockpit.
Michael
The DC-9 cockpit is pretty poky, and the pilot and the co-pilot each give a perfunctory tip of the cap and a quick greeting to this apparent civilian who rates a radio call from the ground — and from Redstone no less. The stewardess gets Archie set up with the headset right on the edge of the cockpit on the jump seat and says, "Just announce yourself on the line and the operator will connect you."
Archie does so, does not hear the operator acknowledge him, but does hear a change in the quality of the connection that indicates a connection has been made. "Hello, Mr. Ransom. We've met before." The voice on the line is hard to hear under the static, its tone and vocal mannerisms unfamiliar to Archie at first, but then the voice continues, a foreign-sounding accent emerging from underneath the aural spray of underlying white noise. "You've finally done it. Really quite amazing. Congratulations. How does it feel to be the steersman of your own destiny at long last?" A chuckle.
Rob
Archie tries to place the voice, of course. His first mad thought is, "is that any of the puppets' voices"? His second is to look out the window for fighter jets or UFOs about to take the plane down.
"Well, I don't know about all that, but thanks, I guess?" He has to shout a little over the airplane noise and static. "Sorry, I didn't catch your name!"
Michael
His first mad thought is, "is that any of the puppets' voices"?
Nope, but you can give me an IQ-16 roll to place it.
His second is to look out the window for fighter jets or UFOs about to take the plane down.
Vision-14; it's tough to peer out the windows of the cockpit from where you're sitting. "You know who I am, Mr. Ransom. I'm the one you all have to thank for … all your recent successes."
Rob
IQ-16
>> CRITICAL SUCCESS
Michael
It's the Comte.
Rob
Vision.
>> SUCCESS by 6
Michael
As Archie realizes who has he on the line, the co-pilot says, "Hey, Barry … you see that traffic at 320?" A silvery aircraft is indeed heading towards the airplane from a northwesterly direction, a few miles off.
Pilot Barry does indeed see it. "I'll check with ground." He presses his radio button. "Uh, Huntsville Ground this is Southern two-four-three, we are visually tracking unidentified aircraft at roughly 6000 feet, moving at high velocity in our direction from heading three-two-zero. Can we get an ID and can you get them and find out their flight plan, over."
"Well." The Comte says on Archie's headset. "Aren't you going to say, 'Thank you'?"
Rob
"The last time we spoke, you caught on fire and fell off a mountain," Archie says, not quite under his breath. Then, louder, "What can I do for you, Mr. Green? We should be landing at Huntsville in just a few minutes!"
Michael
"That was your original flight plan, yes. How many civilians are onboard your little craft, Mr. Ransom? I'll tell you: it's eighty-seven by my count, including the crew and you. I don't want to have to interfere with their timelines any more than I absolutely have to. I can make this easy, and only take you so we can speak face-to-face, or we can take the entire aircraft and everyone onboard. Hijackings are very popular among you people these days; I'm sure even your successors at SANDMAN could come up with a cover story for a plane vanishing over the continental US. And your fellow commuters will be given a better life over here than they could ever hope for with you."
"Besides," the Comte says with glee, "it's been 25 years since you were last on a flying saucer, don't you want to jog those memories a little bit by coming back onboard?"
A pause. "I promise we'll return you safe and sound and your fellow passengers will be none the wiser about your absence. Better decide quick, though."
A quiet beeping begins to emanate from the cockpit, and the co-pilot shuts the door, but Archie can hear urgent voices behind the door say, "That's an intercept course!"
"Huntsville Ground, who the hell is that, get them on the horn now and tell them to change course!"
Rob
Archie frowns. "That's not much of a choice. Take me, then. Leave these folks alone."
Michael
"Splendid. I had a feeling that'd be your choice. Look towards the window of the plane, please, Mr. Ransom."
As Archie, sitting on the jumpseat outside of the cockpit, can no longer look through the cockpit windows, he goes to the right (north) side of the plane, where a no-fooling flying saucer is streaking towards the commuter flight. It's silvery and shaped not like a saucer per se but more like one of the skipping stones Archie's grandpa used to be able to find unerringly by the water when the two of them would go camping: smooth and thin and flat. The silvery disc rotates in the air ninety degrees along its y-axis, a positive pitching motion, a pilot might call it. The shading on the underside of the saucer is made up of a darker blue-green-tinged concentric circle; it looks to Archie's eye like a peacock's tailfeather, or maybe a bullseye.
For a moment, the memories of skipping stones with his Grandpa overwhelm Archie; for some reason, this whole thing is making him think about Grandpa REDACTED intensely. Archie feels something small and delicate break inside him; an image of Marshall and Jocasta and Mitch out on the peaceful waters of Lake Champlain on a crisp autumn day comes to his mind. He wishes he were there with them. The UFO's underside begins to glow like a coil inside a toaster; but instead of deep red-orange heat, the outline of the darker circle is limned with icy blue light. A bright flash hits Archie square between the eyes.
Will-21, please (with a sizeable unspoken penalty).
Rob
>>> 3d6 … 8
Jeff
(Stick it to 'em, Arch!)
Michael
The flash is physically blinding, but also psychically, as Archie feels disembodied for a gut-sinking moment or two. Grandpa's voice speaks in his head: Hang on, pard'ner, it's gonna be a lot to take in, but you can do it. Ye've done it before. Don't take any wooden nickels from these jokers. It's the same vertiginous feeling Archie had on the mushrooms at Terence and Ev's and on acid at Point 7 with Marshall, Morris, and Jocasta, but somehow more … directed. Like he was locked into someone else's programmed hallucination. Archie's experience as an amateur psychonaut holds him in good stead as he finally opens his eyes against the now-fading blue glow behind his eyelids, ready to not take any wooden nickels.
𒁀𒊏𒀸 𒄑𒁹𒃲, 𒁇 𒊑𒁀𒈾 𒅆𒁳𒀉
Archie is, yes, apparently, onboard a flying saucer. The walls are white and glow with the same blue glow as the saucer's eye; the walls' surfaces, seemingly curved white, shift uneasily and queasily in Archie's peripheral vision in such a way as to suggest strongly that this whole space is like a Western town on an old movie set: a Potemkin Village of flat facades, except they're not flat in two dimensions, but three. Behind these walls, Archie realizes with a sick feeling, is the flow of ordinary mortal time. Here, a setting has been created to allow Archie's mind to acclimate and interact, but Archie knows if he tries dashing down a hallway or leaving this weird chamber, he's going to face down things he's never had to face before, not even on mushrooms or acid.
There is a short, roughly 4½-foot-tall alien being here. It wears a navy blue coverall with a triangular insignia in bronze over the heart. The being has a big head with huge, unblinking malachite-colored eyes. It stands before a control console with lots of flashing multi-colored lights, buttons, and dials, a high-tech view screen above showing the vessel zooming above the Cumberland plateau in northern Alabama.
"Greetings, Earthman," the grey alien says in the Comte's voice. Two other greys, noticeably shorter than the Grey Comte, man a pair of control panels to either side of him. The Comte holds up his floppy grey fingers in a Vulcan salute. "We come to help you save your planet from certain doom … but oh, you have done this now apparently already." The Comte laughs, long and lustily.
Fright check, succeed on a 13 or less.
Rob
>> SUCCESS by 3
Archie grins widely, partly out of fear and overwhelm but also sort of delighted as he looks around. "Well, I'll be cow-kicked! I always wanted to take a ride on a rocket ship." He turns to face the Alien Comte. "Save the planet, yes, yes," like he's pleased that they're hitting the tropes. He has an idea how this goes, or thinks he does. "Are you fellows from Mars, then, or what?"
Michael
The Grey Comte chuckles, and says, "Come now, Mr. Ransom. Don't play the country rube headed to the big city with me. I know you're more canny than that, non? You're a born con man. Like your grandfather before you. And like me, for that matter, when I lived as a man." The Comte takes his rubber Grey mask off and reveals his fleshy, thick-lipped face. He looks like a material being, but if Archie catches him from the right angle, he goes all squiggly like a TV with its reception on the fritz
"We of course have little time to speak, the way these temporary alignments go. So let me cut to the chase. You have supplanted your enemies, the ones who sought to wait for Our Masters' inevitable return. Not just that, but through your actions things have changed so radically that you now will engineer an entirely new timeline from this cruxpoint. And all without our aid. Splendid. We must entreat with the circumstances as the game brings us, and we are nothing if not adaptable. We have no quarrel with your becoming the new 'Secret Masters of the World.'" A conspiratorial smile.
"But when you find about the Machine in Mount Shasta, of us uncreating Krane and Abeille to destroy your 'Working Group' … you were intrigued, I could tell. Add that to what you saw with our friend Mitchell and Emperor Norton, and it opened your eyes to what else could be done to your timeline, in the past. But alas, you, like all humans, can only move in one direction in four dimensions. Whereas my Masters are not bound by such trivialities."
"So you will plow onwards into the future, blind, as all mortals are, as to what kind of world you're creating with only the esmology to guide you. The esmology that, remember, failed your Working Group friends. Donc, okay, this is fair. We will manage. But you still yearn for one basic injustice to be remedied. No matter how many of your, ha, grey men you will kill in revenge, you will never be able to get back what they took from you. Watch the viewscreen if you please, Mr. Ransom."
The viewscreen flashes to life: it looks like the best-quality television set Archie has seen in his quarter-century of gazing into TVs after one fashion or another. The "camera" slowly zooms in, like a Hitchcock film, on an eave of a gorgeous split-level Mediterranean house in southern California. Tucked into one of the crevasses of this house, unseen for months in the California winter, a hive of bees have been building their nest. Their duties assigned from the queen, the workers collected plant resin to build the walls and cells, and have just begun their first season's harvest of pollen and nectar. And the "camera" alights on one bee in particular, departing the nest and going to the backyards in this affluent Glendale neighborhood to find the products of good flowers to bring home. But there's something undeniably sweet coming from the yard right below the nest. Big, sweating animals, and the odors of pure sugar and the esters coming off of roasting foods. This worker, she senses the feast of sugar in the backyard of the home of Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Enoch Ransom and the picnic table laid with such a bounty that could, of course, benefit the hive.
The Comte watches Archie very closely.
Rob
Archie goes pale. He shakes his head 'no, no' as he watches the bees. "I'm ... not ... out for revenge," he says, without much conviction. Am I? he wonders.
He faces the Comte again, grin gone from his face. "Okay, so we're both con men. Let me hear your pitch. If you could—" (he can't bring himself to say it, he just gestures toward the viewscreen) "If you could do this, what would you want from me? What's your price?"
Michael
"Price? My dear Mr. Ransom, I am not Mephistopheles and you are not Faust. I'm not asking for anything. As with my offer to take care of, ah, OZYMANDIAS, this comes with no strings attached, at least anything as picayune as 'payment.'" The Comte scoffs. "This is more of a... reward for the work you have done for us, and a recognition that you and your cercle are... well, you are the next stage of human evolution, non? You are Becoming what our Masters intended humanity to be all along. Not servants, but partners. Secret Masters. You deserve this. It is what none of you seemed to ever understand, always so quick to shoot me or kick me off a mountain. I entreat with you all as peers."
"Anyway, I put before you a similar option to the one I gave Mitchell two months ago. All that's required is for that little bee to fly away; it's a trivial expenditure of energy given the current conjunctions, celestially and terrestrially. In a way, you have your Working Group compatriots to thank for this; otherwise, I could not be here in this saucer to make this offer. The bee flies to the neighbors' yard, and Charlie will live. Perhaps we even give past you a little mental nudge, a clue to take care of that beehive in the rain gutter so nothing nasty happens down the line to your firstborn, hein?"
"But you know of course if your son lives instead of tragically passes on that summer evening eight years ago, everything changes for you. As I told Mitchell, the timeline is elastic, resilient; it will bounce back and leave things very close to how they exist in this worldline. Certain elements will fall into place to ensure the narrative adheres to some kind of similar logic. URIEL will be created by the Working Group, they will slog through five years of unwitting servitude, ALLOCHTHON will occur, Marshall will have shot himself, and the Working Group will have been diverted from their plans."
"What happens to you though, with your happy family of five, not four... eh, it is not for me to say." The Comte gives a noncommittal Gallic shrug in his little grey alien uniform. "I can surmise a guess or two, but it is a throw of the dice, yes? Would you have taken Project SANDMAN's offer if Charlie had lived? Would they have even bothered to approach you again were you complacent and happy? Does SANDMAN even recruit complacent and happy agents?" He laughs again.
"Anyway, the choice is yours. If you say no, no harm no foul, we can chat obliquely a little bit about our respective plans and part in peace, like two good Cold Warriors meeting, aheh, at 'Checkpoint Charlie.'"
The Comte approaches Archie, looks up to his light-bathed face, lays a hand on Archie's shoulder. "I know you miss him terribly, Archibald. It is a terrible thing to lose a son, and a firstborn no less. When I was young—in my mortal life, of course—my father the Prince Francis the Second Rákóczi, lost his heir before having me. Even in those days... such a tragedy. He was haunted his whole life. I apply no pressure here; I offer you the choice. But the choice, it must be made relatively quickly. Even if we exist outside time and space here, the saucer itself will only intersect with your dimension briefly. And you do not want to get stuck here, trust me."
Rob
Archie wobbles on his feet. "Ki'uš."
"Naturally, the con man says there are no strings attached. But I've seen how this movie ends, or at least the next bit: He's lost. And I'm damned for it."
"A straight up trade, me for him? Sure, I would've taken that. I prayed for that. But that... that wasn't God's plan. 'The pain means you must go on living.'"
"This?" Archie gestures at the viewscreen, the saucer, scornfully. "This is a bunco trick. 'I apply no pressure, but you must decide now.' We call that 'the Hurrah.' Act now, this offer won't last. Classic bunco."
"And I have a family of five."
"I didn't understand before, why you got up Mitch's nose so bad, but I get it now. Can I go home?"
Michael
"Bien sûr." With a wave of his hand, the Comte's viewscreen goes blank. Archie, for a moment, sees behind the screen and what looks like a single, monstrous, gruesome, bloodshot eye looking back at him, but this 3D afterimage fades slowly, like the phosphors on a good old American TV set. "But before you go, a few words on your group's recent set of decisions."
"As you know, I am not … alive in the proper sense. I am not, how you say in the Project, an 'irruptor.' I am a waveform, an idea … a meme. 'The immortal man,' 'the alchemical grifter,' chacun à son goût. In life I scraped by on the periphery of people doing real magic, a fraud, a charlatan, and when I died, the Kings, as you call them, gave me a new life; for my sins, They made me 'immortal.' For this I do tasks for them, track down lost lambs like our friend Mitchell's double … and try to set worldlines right when they go wrong, to get people to the worldlines they truly belong in. There are many worlds, Archibald. Mitchell, of course, was right about this when you spoke those many months ago over lunch. He is always right, you know. We glimpse these worlds in dreams, in near-death experiences … in drug trips." He smiles, more leers, at Archie.
"The worldline your friend Marshall created with his gambit … you all may be very excited right now to see where it goes, where your nation and world will head now without the Working Group heightening all the contradictions. Your higher selves are already plotting and planning how they want to … ha, listen to me, giving the plot away."
"But my Masters, they will find a new way to get people to love them, no matter what 'utopia' you manage to craft out of the bits and bobs you have been left with. They do not need collapse and apocalypse. You have not won. The fight will go on. And every time you craft a meme, use the source code, persuade the masses with neurolinguistic programming … you make Them stronger and become more like unto Them. Your friend Sophie — such a terrible thing, glyph addiction, but then as a 'dealer' I can hardly sit in judgment — fell into such a thing thinking she was doing 'right' in trying to figure out who the Sixth Man was, how to rescue Charley's mother. You, too, as the new Man Behind the Curtain must beware of such things... be careful the nightmares of other worlds do not infect the stories you are so excited to tell, hein? Or you may end up right back where you were headed before Marshall shot himself." A cold, leveling look from the Comte.
Rob
"Yes, of course," Archie says. "Sin, temptation, it's all baked in. We do the most evil when we imagine we can eliminate evil, instead of holding it, suffering it. Carrying the cross."
Something occurs to him. "But why give me this advice? How does it benefit you? What does benefit you? What do you get out of serving the Kings?"
Michael
Archie can tell the Comte is anxious to speak, but the Comte gives a quick anxious side-eye at the two "Greys" in the console seats to either side of him. "My minders," he mutters in the Secret Language of the Hoboes. "Toads." The grey aliens do not react in the slightest to these words in Aulang.
Back to English, the Comte's visage turns to one of delight rather than trepidation. "Why, they make sure my story circulates, of course! As long as occultists, esotericists, students of the fantastical remember the name of the Comte de Saint-German, I live! All those pilgrims to Mount Shasta, all those shabby conmen who sell their marks the Ascended Masters by mail for $49.95, the charismatic be-robèd priestesses who speak to their followers of the power of the Violet Flame, they carry memes created by my Masters and I can appear, eh, you know, here and there. Usually on mountaintops when the alignments are right, or, perhaps, sometimes, in the upper atmosphere where the aeroplanes dwell." Archie then sees, as if on cue, the Comte's face again experience that weird TV-like wavy-lines distortion effect.
"It's time then. The game is afoot, and you and your cercle have much to do. I wager your life is about to get a great deal more interesting. I have a feeling we will meet again, Mr. Ransom. And of course Mitchell must yet find our fugitive princeling Regulus, the Alpha star of the constellation Leo, oui?"
Rob
"My life is going to get more interesting? Boy." And if we're done and looking for a button, Archie says something like: "Well, thanks for the saucer ride. If you ever get off your minders' leash, if that's even possible, come talk with us. It's not too late to join the winning side."
Michael
Despite the moment of shock that crosses the Comte's face after Archie has said something about the Comte's "minders," the other Greys don't seem to pay much attention to Archie's amiable espiocratic coat-dragging. The Comte says, "Very well, let us engineer your return." The walls glow blue again, and Archie feels the craft around him shudder, as an overwhelming cascade of white noise washes over his ears. Behind the static, Archie can hear a faint voice, saying, "Mr. Ransom? Mr. Ransom!" as he opens his eyes against the blue light.
Southern Airways Flight 243
Archie is sitting in the jump seat on Southern Airways Flight 243, the cabin in a mild state of panic and the proximity alarms in the cockpit finally fading away to silence as the plane's altitude and attitude straighten out after their close aerial encounter.
"Mr. Ransom, are you all right?" the stewardess who escorted Archie back to the cockpit asks him as she rushes back to the cockpit area from helping the cabin passengers. Archie wasn't buckled in at the time of the near-intercept and is a little bit askew on the jump seat but otherwise unharmed. The cockpit door opens and the co-pilot peeks out at Archie and the stewardess. He looks a little green around the gills. It seems like only a handful of seconds has elapsed since Archie saw the eye of the saucer opening for him from the window.
Rob
Archie feigns airsickness / dizziness from the turbulence and hustles back to his seat.
Michael
Scuttlebutt from the crew and the passengers is some kind of weird UFO buzzed the plane and then shot off to the east.
Archie smells the possibility of a lot of UFO stories being told when this plane full of Americans gets off in Huntsville-Decatur.