Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg
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something of a pioneer, as writers go, in the use of a computer for word-processing, and the computer I had been using all those years was now obsolete—incompatible, in fact, with any existing brand. The company that had made it was out of business, and no one then alive knew how to connect a modern printer to it. I did, of course, have a backup of my forty pages on a floppy disk; but my computer was a pre-MS-DOS model and its operating system could not communicate with then-modern machines. The texts on my computer were trapped in it forever, all my business records and the first half of “Spook City” among them. They could be brought up onscreen but they were inaccessible for purposes of printing.
I needed to buy one of the newfangled MS-DOS computers and learn how to use it. And I contemplated the gloomy prospect of having to type “Spook City” and hundreds of other documents onto the new computer, one word at a time. It would take forever. What about my mid-October deadline?
It was possible, at least, to rescue the unfinished story. The technician who had been servicing my old computer discovered that he still had one machine of that model in working order (more or less) in his San Francisco office. I gave him my backup disk; he printed out the forty pages of “Spook City” and faxed them to me. Later in the day I began keying the story into the only working computer in the house, which belonged to my wife Karen and was a perfectly standard DOS-based job. I also went out and bought a new computer myself, also, of course, a DOS machine compatible with hers.
For the next ten days or so, while waiting for the new computer to arrive, I continued writing “Spook City” using my prehistoric manual typewriter, and entering each day’s typewritten work on Karen’s computer after her work-day was over. By October 4th I had 59 pages on disk. I decided to print them out and halt further work until my own new machine arrived.
Karen’s computer wouldn’t print it.
I didn’t know why.
The text looked fine on screen, but when I gave the familiar print command I was told that the document was “corrupted” and couldn’t be sent on to the printer.
Again? Was there a curse on this story?
The backup disk was corrupted too. It began to look as though I had lost the nineteen pages I had written since the first computer glitch plus all the rewriting I had done on the original forty pages that the computer pro had rescued.
“I’m pretty much in shellshock now,” I wrote Alice Turner of Playboy, “but what I suppose I’ll do is wait for the new computer to arrive, maybe by Wednesday, and then start putting the whole damn thing in once more, trying to reconstruct (though you never really can) the stuff I had been doing all this past week. I can see that I’m going to wind up earning about five cents an hour on this project even if everything goes perfectly the third time, which is by no means assured.”
Enter a second savior that grim evening: our friend and neighbor Carol Carr, who showed up equipped with some program that allowed us to bring up on screen, page by page, the whole corrupted document, and print it. What came out, alas, was mostly babble: a Martian mix, miscellaneous random consonants (not vowels!) and numbers and keyboard symbols with an occasional intelligible phrase glaring out of the welter of nonsense. But that was better than nothing. The next day I told Alice Turner what Carol had achieved: “She spent hours waving magic wands in front of Karen’s computer and was able to coax out pages and pages of gibberish printout, which I am now reassembling, jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by locating recognizable passages, putting them into the proper order, and transcribing them by hand onto the old first draft that the last bunch of computer wizards coaxed out of my old computer last week. So far I’ve reached page 28 of the original 40-page draft and have pretty much reconstructed all the revisions. Unfortunately, a lot of the really good stuff in the climactic scenes didn’t emerge yesterday, but at least I have typed rough drafts of that and I ought to be able to put them back together in something approximating the level of yesterday’s destroyed version.”
The new computer finally arrived. I learned how to use it by entering poor garbled “Spook City” in something like proper form. I rewrote as I went, and cautiously produced a new printout every afternoon. On Friday, October 18th, I finally finished what looked like a complete draft of the story, though it still needed some trimming and polishing. But the evil extraterrestrials who were determined to keep this story from coming into being weren’t finished with me. Two days later—a furiously hot summer day—my part of California caught fire and three thousand houses nearby were destroyed. It looked as though our house might go up in flame as well. Karen and I were forced to flee, taking with us our cats, a handful of household treasures, and a backup disk of the accursed “Spook City.” Whatever else happened, I didn’t want to have to write that thing a third time.
We were able to return home after eighteen hours. The fire had stopped a mile north of us. After a couple of shaky days I got back to work and on October 25th, only two weeks beyond deadline, I sent the story to Playboy, telling Alice: “Here, thank God, is the goddamn story, and what a weird experience it has been. Written on four different machines—my old computer, Karen’s computer, my ancient manual typewriter, and my jazzy new computer—and lost twice by computers and both times recovered with the aid of technical wizardry, and typed over and over from one machine to the other, and interrupted by a natural disaster that makes our earthquake of a few years ago seem trivial—I feel as though I’ve been writing it forever. I wake up mumbling it to myself. I never dreamed I was embarking on such an epic struggle when I proposed the story; I thought it would simply be a few weeks of the usual tough work, a nice payday, and on to the next job . . . Anyway, here’s the story. I hope you like it.” She did, and published it in the August 1992 issue of Playboy, just as planned.
Thus, with some trepidation, I will herewith instruct my computer to copy its text from my 1991 story file into this present collection. If you don’t find it here, you’ll know why.
THE AIR WAS SHINING UP ahead, a cold white pulsing glow bursting imperiously out of the hard blue desert sky. That sudden chilly dazzle told Demeris that he was at the border, that he was finally getting his first glimpse of the place where human territory ended and the alienheld lands began.
He halted and stood staring for a moment, half expecting to see monsters flying around overhead on the far side of the line; and right on cue something weird went flapping by, a blotch of darkness against the brilliant icy sheen that was lighting everything up over there in the Occupied Zone. It was a heavy thing the size of a hawk and a half, with a lumpy greenish body and narrow wings like saw-blades and a long snaky back that had a little globular purple head at the end of it. The creature was so awkward that Demeris had to laugh. He couldn’t see how it stayed airborne. The bird, if that was what it was, flew on past, heading north, dropping a line of bright turquoise turds behind it. A little burst of flame sprang up in the dry grass where each one fell.
“Thank you kindly for that pretty welcome,” Demeris called out after it, sounding jauntier than he felt.
He went a little closer to the barrier. It sprang straight up out of the ground like an actual wall, but one that was intangible and more or less transparent: he could make out vague outlines of what lay beyond that dizzying shield of light, a blurry landscape that should have been basically the same on the Spook side of the line as it was over here, low sandy hills, gray splotches of sagebrush, sprawling clumps of prickly pear, but which was in fact mysteriously touched by strangeness—unfamiliar serrated buttes, angular chasms with metallic blue-green walls, black-trunked leafless trees with rigid branches jutting out like horizontal crossbars. Everything was veiled, though, by the glow of the barrier that separated the Occupied Zone from the fragment of the former United States that lay to the west of it, and he couldn’t be sure how much he was actually seeing and how much was simply the product of his expectant imagination.
A shiver of distaste ran through him. Demeris’s father, dead now, had always regarded the Spooks as his personal enemy, and that had carried over to him. “They’re just biding their time, Nick,” his father would say. “One of these days they’ll come across the line and grab our land the way they grabbed