Tomy and the Planet of Lies (5 page)

We laughed. We laughed like happy kids! But happiness is often just a step away from suffering. It was clear to us both that even drinking it sparingly, the water from the bottle and the melted water from the cool box were only going to keep us going for a few hours.

* * *

I had written fourteen books in the previous twenty years. My specialist subjects, so to speak, were aliens, archeology, myths, and ancient religions. I didn't have the slightest doubt that sometime in the distant past our ancestors had been visited by aliens. They hadn't understood, these ancients of thousands of years ago, and had taken the aliens to be gods. A fatal mistake, which led to the foundation of many religions. Holy, and not-so-holy books, had become the legitimation for countless wars throughout human history, right up until the present day. A sad joke indeed. Of course, I was attacked from all sides, because apart from circumstantial evidence there was little proof, and circumstantial evidence is contestable. Thank God, I had already understood at the time when I wrote my first book, that those who seek the public eye are not only the objects of praise but also the targets for censure and spiteful criticism. I had never expected that the scientific community would heap praise upon me and welcome me into their bosom.

Many years ago, Hermann Oberth, known to many as the father of the German space program, said: “The unjustified criticism must run off you like liquid manure from a marble column!” That made an impression on me! Now, where our will to live was again running riot, I told Marc the story of what had happened to me during the recording of an American TV show. I was sat, back then, on a leather sofa between the professors J. Allan Hynek and Carl Sagan, both of them respected astronomers. The discussion was about aliens and Sagan pooh-poohed the whole subject. He admitted that the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial life could not be categorically ruled out, but said that such beings would never have any similarity to human beings and the distances involved made the possibility of any contact unimaginable.

Of course, I saw it all somewhat differently—for good reasons—and Professor Hynek took my side, albeit a little hesitantly. He spoke of technologies beyond the realm of Einsteinian physics and refused to deny any possibility, not even the existence of UFOs. Then Sagan patronizingly said to his academic colleague:

“If extraterrestrial intelligence exists anywhere out there, they would have long since opened up diplomatic relations with us!”

Hynek glanced at me and then at Sagan and answered:

“But we haven't opened up diplomatic relations with the chickens!”

My situation was just as absurd. Now I had my alien—and couldn't do anything about it. Who would ever believe that Tomy was an alien?

* * *

The temperature rose and rose: the content of our water bottle sank. Around 10 o'clock, something occurred to me that I should have thought of much, much earlier. We needed to make a shelter. The sun shouldn't be allowed to shine directly onto the car's roof. Using a tripod from our camera equipment, some rope and adhesive tape we managed to improvise a second roof around ten centimeters above the roof of the car. We did the same thing over the hood. I bent the windscreen wipers up so that they were standing upright in front of the windscreen, jammed the second woolen blanket underneath, opened the hood a fraction, and tied it so that the spring didn't cause it to fly up.

By rummaging around in our stinking clothes, I even found an umbrella on the floor under the rear seat. I jammed that into the window on Marc's side like an awning. Then we took the last few slugs out of the water bottle, as if it were mother's milk. Where the hell was Tomy? And why were there no other cars driving around out here? Admittedly, it was a fairly remote piece of road, but even so, it was marked on the map. Really, we had done everything right. We had started with plenty of water, with three car batteries, with dried fruit and even some raw ham. The Range Rover even had a winch, which was no use at all to us now because it needed electricity to work. And the motor to be running. Marc and I sat around in our underwear. Our improvised roof had an unexpected effect: even though the sun rose inexorably, it remained pleasantly cool in the car.

In my daily decision-making back home, I am a pretty impulsive man. I always know what I want and get worked up about those indecisive people at the deli counter who can't make up their minds. Another bit of that, how about a bit of that one, maybe a slice of liverwurst or headcheese. Heavens above! They make me mad, these complainers, hesitators, these indecisive people who get to the checkout and spend half an hour digging around in their purses, or can't find any change for the parking lot, or go to the shoe store and get the assistant to show them twenty pairs of shoes and in the end don't buy any. I need about twenty minutes to buy a car, and I haven't been to a shoe store for years. And now? It was getting close to midday. All that was left was the melt water from the cooler. Somewhere in the car, I found a roll of aluminum foil. We unwrapped it and laid it on the ground in a big cross as a signal to passing airplanes.

From my time as a boy scout, I could remember most of the letters of the Morse code. Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot was the code for SOS (…– – –…). We laid out clothes in the Morse code signal next to our foil cross. (Later, quite a few people asked me why I didn't just use a cell phone to call for help. Man! In the Baluchistan desert cell phones simply don't work. Anyway, this was back in 1987; in those days, not so many people had cell phones. In the desert, they still don't.)

Where was Tomy? Marc voiced his concern, and it began to gnaw on my nerves, maybe something had happened to Tomy that was beyond his power to influence. Had he landed in God-knows-what dimension? I tried to stave off the claws of doubt and began reciting for Marc a poem about friendship written by Schiller that I had learnt back in my schooldays. Why it occurred to me at precisely that moment, I've never quite understood—even years later:

The tyrant Dionys to seek, Stern Moerus with his poniard crept; the watchful guard upon him swept; the grim king marked his changeless cheek: “What wouldst thou with thy poniard? Speak!” “The city from the tyrant free!” “The death-cross shall thy guerdon be.”

And so on to the end where the tyrant becomes his true friend and says: “Tis mine your suppliant now to be, Ah, let the band of love—be three!”

Tomy was to be our third person, I hammered into Marc. At least our improvised air conditioning was working. I fished a clean handkerchief out of the confusion behind us and dunked it into the tepid water in the cool box. As greedy as young camels, we sucked the disgusting brew down and also moistened Tomy's brows. Wasn't it possible to extract water from the air? I had read somewhere that some Indian prime minister had drank his own urine, but neither Marc nor I needed to go—we were pretty dehydrated as it was. What could we do to get water? Dig? We didn't have the tools for that and we were probably in the wrong place anyway. Should we hang our aluminum foil from the cable of the winch to collect dew from the from the early morning air? We would have had to twist the foil into funnels and put some sort of container underneath every one.

We had four plates and cups in our onboard canteen. Before we could test whether it was possible to extract the steel cable without having any power for the winch, we heard the sound of a distant motor. We held our breath. Was it friend or foe? Quickly we pulled our pants on—I stashed the pistol in my pants pocket after checking that the first bullet was in the chamber. The noise came ever closer, but because of the massive dune in front of us we could see nothing. It was clear that it was some heavy vehicle from the tone of the motor. Thus, it was that each of us stood by our doors, quivering with anticipation. We didn't even notice that Tomy had come back to life.

Behind the dune, the sand swirled up into a large dust cloud. The growling of the engine got ever louder and then suddenly a yellow-brown speckled truck appeared with eight massive wheels and its headlights on. Who would be so crazy as to drive around in the desert with their headlights on? The monstrous military truck drove straight at us and we started worrying that the massive vehicle was about to ram us, but twenty meters before it reached the Range Rover, which now looked like a run-down Bedouin tent with its improvised roof, the driver pulled the leviathan to one side. The truck lurched, covering us with sand and dust, and then came to a standstill.

The motor stalled.

Before the driver climbed down from the cab, I registered Tomy's weak voice behind me.

“Have you got anything to drink?” he asked.

“Only brackish water,” I replied automatically and felt so overjoyed that I could have yodeled from happiness. Tomy was back! He squatted upright in the piled up junk on the back seat, looking tired, dried out and asked:

“Has Mahmud arrived yet?”

“
Who?
”

“The driver of the army vehicle!”

“You mean him over there?”

Tomy smiled tiredly. A heavily built man in beige-brown army fatigues and black laced up boots climbed down out of the truck. A wild-looking mustache and 5-millimeter stubble covered half of his face. From underneath his raven-black hair and large, dark eyes with bushy eyebrows poked a beak-like nose from the leathery skin. I then noticed the two pale silver stars on his epaulettes: the man must be some kind of low- ranking officer. Tomy freed himself from the chaos of the car's interior and called to him. It sounded like Arabic. At least, Marc and I understood nothing.

Mahmud, as the bearded man was called, dug three plastic bottles out of his cab and handed them round wordlessly. Before I put my bottle to my lips, I looked over to Tomy, who now stood behind our shattered rear window. He tipped almost the entire contents of his bottle over his head and body before taking a few swigs. Then he spoke Arabic again to Mahmud. He fetched a crate containing 24 liters of mineral water from the back of the truck, 20 cans of cola wrapped in plastic film and a ten-liter container of distilled water. Without saying a word he started untying the cloth roof from over the hood of the car, unscrewed the battery's terminals and began expertly filling up the main battery. Then he emptied several bottles into the radiator, throwing the empties to the floor afterwards and then made his way towards the broken rear window. Tomy said something in Arabic and then asked us to give the stranger a hand. He plucked the remaining bits of glass from out of the frame, took a waxed cloth, and cut it to the right shape using his army knife. Marc and I held the cloth in place while Mahmud took a paintbrush and smeared some stinking black substance that looked like tar around the edges.

After a few minutes, the cloth was firmly stuck in place. Then Mahmud conjured up a battery and jumper cables from somewhere within his vehicle and attached everything to our battery. Tomy, who had been chatting intermittently with Mahmud, asked me to try the starter. The car started first time. I left the motor running to charge up the battery. Mahmud gave us a military salute, called something to Tomy that sounded something like “salaam” and “shukran,” climbed back into his monstrous vehicle and roared off, leaving a massive cloud of dust behind.

Tomy's body regenerated very quickly and we silent witnesses, who had stood around like mute boys the whole time, finally managed to get out the questions that we had been burning to ask the whole time.

“Have you got any vitamins and minerals here? We should all take some,” began Tomy, before he told us—after taking the tablets—his incredible story.

Around a hundred kilometers from here was the border and just a bit further was an Iranian Army barrack. He had taken over the camp commandant and explained about our predicament…

“Just like that?” snapped Marc disbelievingly. “He just let you come in and take him over and you gave him orders?”

I noticed quickly that Tomy put a lot of effort into explaining things that we found difficult to understand. He was patient: not exactly one of my best qualities. The human consciousness, he explained, understands everything immediately. It is connected with multiple consciousnesses in a kind of network like a holographic image. The problem lay with the ego of the body concerned. This “I” is a world in its own right, created at birth and stretching to the person's present. This “I” is, by its very nature, egocentric, we are all egomaniacs. Somewhere between the consciousness and the ego is a kind of filter. The consciousness doesn't allow information from other consciousnesses—we would say subconsciousnesses—through. This serves as a kind of protective mechanism for the body; otherwise we would quickly go crazy...

“And so you broke through this filter between the subconscious and the conscious and then the ego and—I repeat—started giving the commandant orders?” Marc was determined to get to the bottom of things. He didn't believe a word Tomy said.

“More or less, yes. When someone has a strong will his ego violently resists the takeover because it senses the suppression of his own identity, his “I,” and this causes a terrible state of panic. The commander in Taftan is very egocentric and I still have very little experience with people. He is, by the way, from a very good Iranian family and visited Switzerland in his youth.”

We said nothing. It was all too much, too quick. We didn't understand and we didn't have the time to sit back and think about it. Therefore, I started picking up the articles of clothing that we had used for our signal and rolled up the aluminum foil. Tomy realized that he was hungry and Marc offered to cut him a few slices of ham. A short while later we were all sitting in the car; we didn't want to take down our Bedouin tent until shortly before we were ready to set off. The battery level indicator was looking a lot healthier, so I turned off the motor. We sat in silence for a while until Marc couldn't hold it in any longer and demanded: