Another sick feeling began to creep over her as she watched this hopeless awful tape, and she began, with slow horror, to realise that it must be the answer.
She must be…
She shook her head and tried to get a grip.
An overnight flight going East… The sleeping pills she had taken to get her through it. The vodka she’d had to set the sleeping pills going.
What else? Well. There was seventeen years of obsession that a glamorous man with two heads, one of which was disguised as a parrot in a cage, had tried to pick her up at a party but had then impatiently flown off to another planet in a flying saucer. There suddenly seemed to be all sorts of bothersome aspects to that idea that had never really occurred to her. Never occurred to her. In seventeen years.
She stuffed her fist into her mouth.
She must get help.
Then there had been Eric Bartlett banging on about alien spacecraft landing on her lawn. And before that… New York had been, well, very hot and stressful. The high hopes and the bitter disappointment. The astrology stuff.
She must have had a nervous breakdown.
That was it. She was exhausted and she had had a nervous breakdown and had started hallucinating some time after she got home. She had dreamt the whole story. An alien race of people dispossessed of their own lives and histories, stuck on a remote outpost of our solar system and filling their cultural vacuum with our cultural junk. Ha! It was nature’s way of telling her to check into an expensive medical establishment very quickly.
She was very, very sick. She looked at how many large coffees she’d got through as well, and realised how heavily she was breathing and how fast.
Part of solving any problem, she told herself, was realising that you had it. She started to bring her breathing under control. She had caught herself in time. She had seen where she was. She was on the way back from whatever psychological precipice she had been on the brink of. She started to calm down, to calm down, to calm down. She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes.
After a while, now that she was breathing normally again, she opened them again.
So where had she got this tape from then?
It was still running.
All right. It was a fake.
She had faked it herself, that was it.
It must have been her who had faked it because her voice was all over the soundtrack, asking questions. Every now and then the camera would swing down at the end of a shot and she would see her own feet in her own shoes. She had faked it and she had no recollection of faking it or any idea of why she had done it.
Her breathing was getting hectic again as she watched the snowy, flickering screen.
She must still be hallucinating.
She shook her head, trying to make it go away. She had no memory of faking any of this very obviously fake stuff. On the other hand she did seem to have memories that were very like the faked stuff. She continued to watch in a bewildered trance.
The person she imagined to be called the Leader was ques- tioning her about astrology and she was answering smoothly and calmly. Only she could detect the well-disguised rising panic in her own voice.
The Leader pushed a button, and a maroon velvet wall slid aside, revealing a large bank of flat TV monitors.
Each of the monitors was showing a kaleidoscope of different images: a few seconds from a game show, a few seconds from a cop show, a few seconds from a supermarket warehouse security system, a few seconds from somebody’s holiday movies, a few seconds of sex, a few seconds of news, a few seconds of comedy. It was clear that the Leader was very proud of all this stuff and he was waving his hands like a conductor while continuing at the same time to talk complete gibberish.
Another wave of his hands, and all the screens cleared to form one giant computer screen showing in diagrammatic form all the planets of the solar system and mapped out against a background of the stars in their constellations. The display was completely static.