Aliens Alien Harvest - By Robert Sheckley Page 0,37

on his small chin. He looked far younger than his twenty eight years; like a schoolboy again, coming back to the big old house where he had lived with his parents before the devastation wrought by the aliens. Again he saw his stern father, the scholar, always with an ironic little Greek or Latin phrase on his lips; and his mother, with her high forehead, flinty gray eyes, and hastily pinned up mass of dark blond hair.

Then he seemed to be walking down a long corridor. On either side, standing in niches like statues, were replicas of his parents at every age and in every mood. Stan could, in his imagination, freeze the frame, stop his parents in midtrack, and walk around them, inspecting them from every angle, and then start the tape of memory running again. All this while the ampoule was in midair.

The ampoule was still falling from his hand, and he could segue instantly from where he was to another memory, himself after class in high school, walking along beside the little brook that ran behind his home, thinking about everything under the sun except his homework assignments. Stan looked down on the work given him by his teachers. He thought it was beneath his intellectual level, unworthy of his efforts. So disdainful was he of school that his parents feared he would not graduate. But he did graduate - there he was at his own graduation, wearing an English schoolboy's suit his parents had bought him while they were attending a seminar in London. He had always hated that suit; he had looked damned silly next to the casual attire of the other boys.

There were many scenes like that, ready for him to step into, but Stan wasn't in the mood for childhood memories. There were other things he wanted to look at. Other times. Other people, places, things.

And so he moved, the ampoule still falling, moved as a spiritual presence, down the spiraling, faintly glowing corridors of the years. And now he was a man, in his twenties, already a well known scientist, and he was in the doctor's office, buttoning his shirt, listening dumbly as Dr. Johnston said, "I might as well give it to you straight, Dr. Myakovsky. You were correct in your surmise about those black marks on your chest and back. They are indeed cancers."

"Is my condition terminal?"

"Yes." The doctor nodded gravely. "In fact, you don't have much time left. The condition, as I'm sure you know, is incurable. But its progress can be slowed, and we can ease some of the symptoms. You already have the medicine we prescribe for such cases. And there is also this."

The doctor held out a small plastic box. Within it, packed in foam rubber, were a dozen ampoules of a bluish liquid.

"This is royal jelly. Have you heard of it?"

Stan nodded. "If memory serves, it is produced by the aliens."

"That is correct," Dr. Johnston said. "I must tell you it's no cure. But it should relieve the symptoms. It could be just what you're looking for."

"Does it have much in the way of side effects?"

The doctor smiled grimly. "It has indeed. That's why it hasn't received government approval yet, though many people use it. Indeed, it has become the most sought after consciousness altering substance in existence. It gives some an intense feeling of well being and competence. Others experience levels of their own being not normally perceived. Still others have an orgasm that seems to go on forever." "At least I'm going to die happy," Stan said.

But of course there were also the bad side effects. Some people had been known to go berserk on the drug, or to undergo personality changes so great that their own families didn't recognize them. Could that be happening in his case?

And then he forgot his concern as the images swept him up again. There was so much to look at! So many memories, all nicely staged and lighted, waiting for him, the sole audience, to put them into motion. It was like owning all of the theaters in the world, and in each of them a different movie was playing, and each movie starred himself, Stan Myakovsky, in all the scenes of his life. He glided past them, a ghostly presence in his own memories.
Chapter 25-26

25

Red Badger was one of the first crewmen revived from hypersleep. He stretched and yawned, then carefully unplugged the leads that connected him to the central sleep inducer. He looked around.