Invaders!

Edited by

Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-1-62579-119-1

Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

First printing: December 1993

Cover art by: Ron Miller

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Electronic version by Baen Books

Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following stories:

“Bloodchild” by Octavia E. Butler, copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc., was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1984; reprinted by permission of the author.

“Idiot Stick” by Damon Knight, copyright © 1958 by Ballantine Books, Inc., was first published in Star Science Fiction #4 (Ballantine); reprinted by permission of the author.

“Guesting Time” by R. A. Lafferty, copyright © 1965 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, was first published in If, May 1965; reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

“Trading Post” by Neal Barrett, Jr., copyright © 1986 by Davis Publications, Inc., was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1986; reprinted by permission of the author.

“And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” by James Tiptree, Jr., copyright © 1971 by Mercury Press, Inc., was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1971; reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the agent for the estate, Virginia Kidd.

“Night of the Cooters” by Howard Waldrop, copyright © 1987 by Omni Publications International, Ltd., was first published in Omni, April 1987; reprinted by permission of the author.

“Roadside Rescue” by Pat Cadigan, copyright © 1985 by Omni Publications International, Ltd., was first published in Omni, July 1985; reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Liberation of Earth” by William Tenn, copyright 1953 by Columbia Publications, Inc., was first published in Future, May 1953; reprinted by permission of the author.

“Roog” by Philip K. Dick, copyright 1952 by Mercury Press, Inc., was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1953; reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the estate’s agent, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

“Speed Trap” by Frederik Pohl, copyright © 1967 by Frederik Pohl, was first published in Playboy, November 1967; reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Perfect Host” by Robert Silverberg, copyright © 1992 by Omni Publications International, Ltd., was first published in Omni Best Science Fiction One (OMNI Books); reprinted by permission of the author.

“Heresies of the Huge God” by Brian W. Aldiss, copyright © 1966 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation, was first published in Galaxy, August 1966; reprinted by permission of the author.

“Sepoy” by Tom Purdom, copyright © 1992 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines, was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1992; reprinted by permission of the author.

“Dress Rehearsal” by Harvey Jacobs, copyright © 1974 by Mercury Press, Inc., was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Screwfly Solution” by Raccoona Sheldon, copyright © 1977 by Alice B. Sheldon, was first published in Analog, June 1977; reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the estate’s agent, Virginia Kidd.

For

TIM SULLIVAN and GREG FROST

—keep watching the skies!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, who helped with much of the wordprocessing here; Jeanne Van Buren Dann; Janet Kagan; Ricky Kagan; Sheila Williams; Ian Randall Strock; the Wednesday night conference gang on Delphi; Ellen Datlow; Rob Killheiffer; Michael Swanwick; and special thanks to our own editors, Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan.

BLOODCHILD

Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler sold her first novel in 1976, and has subsequently emerged as one of the foremost novelists of her generation with such critically well-received books as Pattermaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay’s Ark, Dawn, and Imago. Her short stories appear infrequently, but are well worth the wait. In 1984 she won a Hugo Award for her story “Speech Sounds.” And in 1985 she won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for the story that follows, “Bloodchild,” one of the most powerful and disturbing stories of human/alien relations you ‘re ever likely to read, a story in which we are not only subjugated, but damn proud to be so, too. . . .

My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T’Gatoi’s sisters had given us two sterile eggs. T’Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn’t matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone. My mother wouldn’t take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time she watched me.

I lay against T’Gatoi’s long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.

But my mother seemed content to age before she had to. I saw her turn away as several of T’Gatoi’s limbs secured me closer. T’Gatoi liked our body heat, and took advantage of it whenever she could. When I was little and at home more, my mother used to try to tell me how to behave with T’Gatoi—how to be respectful and always obedient because T’Gatoi was the Tlic government official in charge of the Preserve, and thus the most important of her kind to deal directly with Terrans. It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying.

I had no idea why she was lying, or even what she was lying about. It was an honor to have T’Gatoi in the family, but it was hardly a novelty. T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses.

“He’s still too thin,” my mother said sharply.

T’Gatoi lifted her head and perhaps a meter of her body off the couch as though she were sitting up. She looked at my mother and my mother, her face lined and old-looking, turned away.

“Lien, I would like you to have what’s left of Gan’s egg.”

“The eggs are for the children,” my mother said.

“They are for the family. Please take it.”

Unwillingly obedient, my mother took it from me and put it to her mouth. There were only a few drops left in the now-shrunken, elastic shell, but she squeezed them out, swallowed them, and after a few moments some of the lines of tension began to smooth from her face.

“It’s good,” she whispered. “Sometimes I forget how good it is.”

“You should take more,” T’Gatoi said. “Why are you in ituch a hurry to be old?”

My mother said nothing.

“I like being able to come here,” T’Gatoi said. “This place is a refuge because of you, yet you won’t take care of yourself.”

T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve—why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me, “Take care of her.” And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.

Now T’Gatoi used four of her limbs to push me away from her onto the floor. “Go on, Gan,” she said. “Sit down there with your sisters and enjoy not being sober. You had most of the egg. Lien, come warm me.”

My mother hesitated for no reason that I could see. One of my earliest memories is of my mother stretched alongside T’Gatoi, talking about things I could not understand, picking me up from the floor and laughing as she sat me on one of T’Gatoi’s segments. She ate her share of eggs then. I wondered when she had stopped, and why.

She lay down now against T’Gatoi, and the whole left row of T’Gatoi’s limbs closed around her, holding her loosely, but securely. I had always found it comfortable to lie that way but, except for my older sister, no one else in the family liked it. They said it made them feel caged.

T’Gatoi meant to cage my mother. Once she had, she moved her tail slightly, then spoke. “Not enough egg, Lien. You should have taken it when it was passed to you. You need it badly now.”

T’Gatoi’s tail moved once more, its whip motion so swift I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been watching for it. Her sting drew only a single drop of blood from my mother’s bare leg.

My mother cried out—probably in surprise. Being stung doesn’t hurt. Then she sighed and I could see her body relax. She moved languidly into a more comfortable position within the cage of T’Gatoi’s limbs. “Why did you do that?” she asked, sounding half asleep.

“I could not watch you sitting and suffering any longer.”

My mother managed to move her shoulders in a small shrug. “Tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes. Tomorrow you will resume your suffering—if you must. But for now, just for now, lie here and warm me and let me ease your way a little.”

“He’s still mine, you know,” my mother said suddenly. “Nothing can buy him from me.” Sober, she wouldn’t have permitted herself to refer to such things.

“Nothing,” T’Gatoi agreed, humoring her.

“Did you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life? My son?”

“Not for anything,” T’Gatoi said stroking my mother’s shoulders, toying with her long, graying hair.

I would like to have touched my mother, shared that moment with her. She would take my hand if I touched her now. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile and perhaps say things long held in. But tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation. I did not want to be part of a remembered humiliation. Best just to be still and know she loved me under all the duty and pride and pain.

“Xuan Hoa, take off her shoes,” T’Gatoi said. “In a little while I’ll sting her again and she can sleep.”

My older sister obeyed, swaying drunkenly as she stood up. When she had finished, she sat down beside me and took my hand. We had always been a unit, she and I.

My mother put the back of her head against T’Gatoi’s underside and tried from that impossible angle to look up into the broad, round face. “You’re going to sting me again?”

“Yes, Lien.”

“I’ll sleep until tomorrow noon.”

“Good. You need it. When did you sleep last?”

My mother made a wordless sound of annoyance. “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” she muttered.

It was an old joke between them. They had grown up together, sort of, though T’Gatoi had not, in my mother’s lifetime, been small enough for any Terran to step on. She was nearly three times my mother’s present age, yet would still be young when my mother died of age. But T’Gatoi and my mother had met as T’Gatoi was coming into a period of rapid development—a kind of Tlic adolescence. My mother was only a child, but for a while they developed at the same rate and had no better friends than each other.

T’Gatoi had even introduced my mother to the man who became my father. My parents, pleased with each other in spite of their very different ages, married as T’Gatoi was going into her family’s business—politics. She and my mother saw each other less. But sometime before my older sister was born, my mother promised T’Gatoi one of her children. She would have to give one of us to someone, and she preferred T’Gatoi to some stranger.

Years passed. T’Gatoi traveled and increased her influence. The Preserve was hers by the time she came back to my mother to collect what she probably saw as her just reward for her hard work. My older sister took an instant liking to her and wanted to be chosen, but my mother was just coming to term with me and T’Gatoi liked the idea of choosing an infant and watching and taking part in all the phases of development. I’m told I was first caged within T’Gatoi’s many limbs only three minutes after my birth. A few days later, I was given my first taste of egg. I tell Terrans that when they ask whether I was ever afraid of her. And I tell it to Tlic when T’Gatoi suggests a young Terran child for them and they, anxious and ignorant, demand an adolescent. Even my brother who had somehow grown up to fear and distrust the Tlic could probably have gone smoothly into one of their families if he had been adopted early enough. Sometimes, I think for his sake he should have been. I looked at him, stretched out on the floor across the room, his eyes open, but glazed as he dreamed his egg dream. No matter what he felt toward the Tlic, he always demanded his share of egg.

“Lien, can you stand up?” T’Gatoi asked suddenly.

“Stand?” my mother said. “I thought I was going to sleep.”

“Later. Something sounds wrong outside.” The cage was abruptly gone.

“What?”

“Up, Lien!”

My mother recognized her tone and got up just in time to avoid being dumped on the floor. T’Gatoi whipped her three meters of body off her couch, toward the door, and out at full speed. She had bones—ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets of limbbones per segment. But when she moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled falls, landing running, she seemed not only boneless, but aquatic—something swimming through the air as though it were water. I loved watching her move.

I left my sister and started to follow her out the door, though I wasn’t very steady on my own feet. It would have been better to sit and dream, better yet to find a girl and share a waking dream with her. Back when the Tlic saw us as not much more than convenient big warm-blooded animals, they would pen several of us together, male and female, and feed us only eggs. That way they could be sure of getting another generation of us no matter how we tried to hold out. We were lucky that didn’t go on long. A few generations of it and we would have been little more than convenient big animals.

“Hold the door open, Gan,” T’Gatoi said. “And tell the family to stay back.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“N’Tlic.”

I shrank back against the door. “Here? Alone?”

“He was trying to reach a call box, I suppose.” She carried the man past me, unconscious, folded like a coat over some of her limbs. He looked young—my brother’s age perhaps—and he was thinner than he should have been. What T’Gatoi would have called dangerously thin.

“Gan, go to the call box,” she said. She put the man on the floor and began stripping off his clothing.

I did not move.

After a moment, she looked up at me, her sudden stillness a sign of deep impatience.

“Send Qui,” I told her. “I’ll stay here. Maybe I can help.”

She let her limbs begin to move again, lifting the man and pulling his shirt over his head. “You don’t want to see this,” she said. “It will be hard. I can’t help this man the way his Tlic could.”

“I know. But send Qui. He won’t want to be of any help here. I’m at least willing to try.”

She looked at my brother—older, bigger, stronger, certainly more able to help her here. He was sitting up now, braced against the wall, staring at the man on the floor with undisguised fear and revulsion. Even she could see that he would be useless.

“Qui, go!” she said.

He didn’t argue. He stood up, swayed briefly, then steadied, frightened sober.

“This man’s name is Bram Lomas,” she told him, reading from the man’s arm band. I fingered my own arm band in sympathy. “He needs T’Khotgif Teh. Do you hear?”

“Bram Lomas, T’Khotgif Teh,” my brother said. “I’m going.” He edged around Lomas and ran out the door.

Lomas began to regain consciousness. He only moaned at first and clutched spasmodically at a pair of T’Gatoi’s limbs. My younger sister, finally awake from her egg dream, came close to look at him, until my mother pulled her back.

T’Gatoi removed the man’s shoes, then his pants, all the while leaving him two of her limbs to grip. Except for the final few, all her limbs were equally dexterous. “I want no argument from you this time, Gan,” she said.

I straightened. “What shall I do?”

“Go out and slaughter an animal that is at least half your size.”

“Slaughter? But I’ve never—”

She knocked me across the room. Her tail was an efficient weapon whether she exposed the sting or not.

I got up, feeling stupid for having ignored her warning, and went into the kitchen. Maybe I could kill something with a knife or an ax. My mother raised a few Terran animals for the table and several thousand local ones for their fur. T’Gatoi would probably prefer something local. An achti, perhaps. Some of those were the right size, though they had about three times as many teeth as I did and a real love of using them. My mother, Hoa, and Qui could kill them with knives. I had never killed one at all, had never slaughtered any animal. I had spent most of my time with T’Gatoi while my brother and sisters were learning the family business. T’Gatoi had been right. I should have been the one to go to the call box. At least I could do that.

I went to the corner cabinet where my mother kept her larger house and garden tools. At the back of the cabinet there was a pipe that carried off waste water from the kitchen—except that it didn’t any more. My father had rerouted the waste water before I was born. Now the pipe could be turned so that one half slid around the other and a rifle could be stored inside. This wasn’t our only gun, but it was our most easily accessible one. I would have to use it to shoot one of the biggest of the achti. Then T’Gatoi would probably confiscate it. Firearms were illegal in the Preserve. There had been incidents right after the Preserve was established—Terrans shooting Tlic, shooting N’Tlic. This was before the joining of families began, before everyone had a personal stake in keeping the peace. No one had shot a Tlic in my lifetime or my mother’s, but the law still stood—for our protection, we were told. There were stories of whole Terran families wiped out in reprisal back during the assassinations.

I went out to the cages and shot the biggest achti I could find. It was a handsome breeding male and my mother would not be pleased to see me bring it in. But it was the right size, and I was in a hurry.

I put the achti’s long, warm body over my shoulder—glad that some of the weight I’d gained was muscle—and took it to the kitchen. There, I put the gun back in its hiding place. If T’Gatoi noticed the achti’s wounds and demanded the gun, I would give it to her. Otherwise, let it stay where my father wanted it.

I turned to take the achti to her, then hesitated. For several seconds, I stood in front of the closed door wondering why I was suddenly afraid. I knew what was going to happen. I hadn’t seen it before but T’Gatoi had shown me diagrams, and drawings. She had made sure I knew the truth as soon as I was old enough to understand it.

Yet I did not want to go into that room. I wasted a little time choosing a knife from the carved, wooden box in which my mother kept them. T’Gatoi might want one, I told myself, for the tough, heavily furred hide of the achti.

“Gan!” T’Gatoi called, her voice harsh with urgency.

I swallowed. I had not imagined a simple moving of the feet could be so difficult. I realized I was trembling and that shamed me. Shame impelled me through the door.

I put the achti down near T’Gatoi and saw that Lomas was unconscious again. She, Lomas, and I were alone in the room, my mother and sisters probably sent out so they would not have to watch. I envied them.

But my mother came back into the room as T’Gatoi seized the achti. Ignoring the knife I offered her, she extended claws from several of her limbs and slit the achti from throat to anus. She looked at me, her yellow eyes intent. “Hold this man’s shoulders, Gan.”

I stared at Lomas in panic, realizing that I did not want to touch him, let alone hold him. This would not be like shooting an animal. Not as quick, not as merciful, and, I hoped, not as final, but there was nothing I wanted less than to be part of it.

My mother came forward. “Gan, you hold his right side,” she said. “I’ll hold his left.” And if he came to, he would throw her off without realizing he had done it. She was a tiny woman. She often wondered aloud how she had produced, as she said, such “huge” children.

“Never mind,” I told her, taking the man’s shoulders. “I’ll do it.”

She hovered nearby.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t shame you. You don’t have to stay and watch.”

She looked at me uncertainly, then touched my face in a rare caress. Finally, she went back to her bedroom.

T’Gatoi lowered her head in relief. “Thank you, Gan,” she said with courtesy more Terran than Tlic. “That one . . . she is always finding new ways for me to make her suffer.”

Lomas began to groan and make choked sounds. I had hoped he would stay unconscious. T’Gatoi put her face near his so that he focused on her.

“I’ve stung you as much as I dare for now,” she told him. “When this is over, I’ll sting you to sleep and you won’t hurt any more.”

“Please,” the man begged. “Wait . . .”

“There’s no more time, Bram. I’ll sting you as soon as it’s over. When T’Khotgif arrives she’ll give you eggs to help you heal. It will be over soon.”

‘T’Khotgif!” the man shouted, straining against my hands.

“Soon, Bram.” T’Gatoi glanced at me, then placed a claw against his abdomen slightly to the right of the middle, just below the last rib. There was movement on the right side—tiny, seemingly random pulsations moving his brown flesh, creating a concavity here, a convexity there, over and over until I could see the rhythm of it and knew where the next pulse would be.

Lomas’s entire body stiffened under T’Gatoi’s claw, though she merely rested it against him as she wound the rear section of her body around her legs. He might break my grip, but he would not break hers. He wept helplessly as she used his pants to tie his hands, then pushed his hands above his head so that I could kneel on the cloth between them and pin them in place. She rolled up his shirt and gave it to him to bite down on.

And she opened him.

His body convulsed with the first cut. He almost tore himself away from me. The sounds he made . . . I had never heard such sounds come from anything human. T’Gatoi seemed to pay no attention as she lengthened and deepened the cut, now and then pausing to lick away blood. His blood vessels contracted, reacting to the chemistry of her saliva, and the bleeding slowed.

I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping her consume him. I knew I would vomit soon, didn’t know why I hadn’t already. I couldn’t possibly last until she was finished.

She found the first grub. It was fat and deep red with his blood—both inside and out. It had already eaten its own egg case, but apparently had not yet begun to eat its host. At this stage, it would eat any flesh except its mother’s. Let alone, it would have gone on excreting the poisons that had both sickened and alerted Lomas. Eventually it would have begun to eat. By the time it ate its way out of Lomas’s flesh, Lomas would be dead or dying—and unable to take revenge on the thing that was killing him. There was always a grace period between the time the host sickened and the time the grubs began to eat him.

T’Gatoi picked up the writhing grub carefully, and looked at it, somehow ignoring the terrible groans of the man.

Abruptly, the man lost consciousness.

“Good,” T’Gatoi looked down at him. “I wish you Terrans could do that at will.” She felt nothing. And the thing she held . . .

It was limbless and boneless at this stage, perhaps fifteen centimeters long and two thick, blind and slimy with blood. It was like a large worm. T’Gatoi put it into the belly of the achti, and it began at once to burrow. It would stay there and eat as long as there was anything to eat.

Probing through Lomas’ flesh, she found two more, one of them smaller and more vigorous. “A male!” she said happily. He would be dead before I would. He would be through his metamorphosis and screwing everything that would hold still before his sisters even had limbs. He was the only one to make a serious effort to bite T’Gatoi as she placed him in the achti.

Paler worms oozed to visibility in Lomas’s flesh. I closed my eyes. It was worse than finding something dead, rotting, and filled with tiny animal grubs. And it was far worse than any drawing or diagram.

“Ah, there are more,” T’Gatoi said, plucking out two long, thick grubs. “You may have to kill another animal, Gan. Everything lives inside you Terrans.”

I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together—a kind of birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn’t ready to see it. Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn’t not see it. Closing my eyes didn’t help.

T’Gatoi found a grub still eating its egg case. The remains of the case were still wired into a blood vessel by their own little tube or hook or whatever. That was the way the grubs were anchored and the way they fed. They took only blood until they were ready to emerge. Then they ate their stretched, elastic egg cases. Then they ate their hosts.

T’Gatoi bit away the egg case, licked away the blood. Did she like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard—or not die at all?

The whole procedure was wrong, alien. I wouldn’t have thought anything about her could seem alien to me.

“One more, I think,” she said. “Perhaps two. A good family. In a host animal these days, we would be happy to find one or two alive.” She glanced at me. “Go outside, Gan, and empty your stomach. Go now while the man is unconscious.”

I staggered out, barely made it. Beneath the tree just beyond the front door, I vomited until there was nothing left to bring up. Finally, I stood shaking, tears streaming down my face. I did not know why I was crying, but I could not stop. I went farther from the house to avoid being seen. Every time I closed my eyes I saw red worms crawling over redder human flesh.

There was a car coming toward the house. Since Terrans were forbidden motorized vehicles except for certain farm equipment, I knew this must be Lomas’s Tlic with Qui and perhaps a Terran doctor. I wiped my face on my shirt, struggled for control.

“Gan,” Qui called as the car stopped. “What happened?” He crawled out of the low, round, Tlic-convenient car door. Another Terran crawled out the other side and went into the house without speaking to me. The doctor. With his help and a few eggs, Lomas might make it.

“T’Khotgif Teh?” I said.

The Tlic driver surged out of her car, reared up half her length before me. She was paler and smaller than T’Gatoi—probably born from the body of an animal. Tlic from Terran bodies were always larger as well as more numerous.

“Six young,” I told her. “Maybe seven alive. At least one male.”

“Lomas?” she said harshly. I liked her for the question and the concern in her voice when she asked it. The last coherent thing he had said was her name.

“He’s alive,” I said.

She surged away to the house without another word.

“She’s been sick,” my brother said, watching her go. “When I called, I could hear people telling her she wasn’t well enough to go out even for this.”

I said nothing. I had extended courtesy to the Tlic. Now I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I hoped he would go in—out of curiosity if nothing else.

“Finally found out more than you wanted to know, eh?”

I looked at him.

“Don’t give me one of her looks,” he said. “You’re not her. You’re just her property.”

One of her looks. Had I picked up even an ability to imitate her expressions?

“What’d you do, puke?” He sniffed the air. “So now you know what you’re in for.”

I walked away from him. He and I had been close when we were kids. He would let me follow him around when I was home and sometimes T’Gatoi would let me bring him along when she took me into the city. But something had happened when he reached adolescence. I never knew what. He began keeping out of T’Gatoi’s way. Then he began running away—until he realized there was no “away.” Not in the Preserve. Certainly not outside. After that he concentrated on getting his share of every egg that came into the house, and on looking out for me in a way that made me all but hate him—a way that clearly said, as long as I was all right, he was safe from the Tlic.

“How was it, really?” he demanded, following me.

“I killed an achti. The young ate it.”

“You didn’t run out of the house and puke because they ate an achti.”

“I had . . . never seen a person cut open before.” That was true, and enough for him to know. I couldn’t talk about the other. Not with him.

“Oh,” he said. He glanced at me as though he wanted to say more, but he kept quiet.

We walked, not really headed anywhere. Toward the back, toward the cages, toward the fields.

“Did he say anything?” Qui asked. “Lomas, I mean.”

Who else would he mean? “He said, ‘T’Khotgif.’ ”

Qui shuddered. “If she had done that to me, she’d be the last person I’d call for.”

“You’d call for her. Her sting would ease your pain without killing the grubs in you.”

“You think I’d care if they died?”

No. Of course he wouldn’t. Would I?

“Shit!” He drew a deep breath. “I’ve seen what they do. You think this thing with Lomas was bad? It was nothing.”

I didn’t argue. He didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I saw them eat a man,” he said.

I turned to face him. “You’re lying!”

“I saw them eat a man.” He paused. “It was when I was little. I had been to the Hartmund house and I was on my way home. Halfway here, I saw a man and a Tlic and the man was N’Tlic. The ground was hilly. I was able to hide from them and watch. The Tlic wouldn’t open the man because she had nothing to feed the grubs. The man couldn’t go any farther and there were no houses around. He was in so much pain he told her to kill him. He begged her to kill him. Finally, she did. She cut his throat. One swipe of one claw. I saw the grubs eat their way out, then burrow in again, still eating.”

His words made me see Lomas’s flesh again, parasitized, crawling. “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I whispered.

He looked startled, as though he’d forgotten I was listening. “I don’t know.”

“You started to run away not long after that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Stupid. Running inside the Preserve. Running in a cage.”

I shook my head, said what I should have said to him long ago. “She wouldn’t take you, Qui. You don’t have to worry.”

“She would . . . if anything happened to you.”

“No. She’d take Xuan Hoa. Hoa . . . wants it.” She wouldn’t if she had stayed to watch Lomas.

“They don’t take women,” he said with contempt.

“They do sometimes.” I glanced at him. “Actually, they prefer women. You should be around them when they talk among themselves. They say women have more body fat to protect the grubs. But they usually take men to leave the women free to bear their own young.”

‘To provide the next generation of host animals,” he said, switching from contempt to bitterness.

“It’s more than that!” I countered. Was it?

“If it were going to happen to me, I’d want to believe it was more, too.”

“It is more!” I felt like a kid. Stupid argument.

“Did you think so while T’Gatoi was picking worms out of that guy’s guts?”

“It’s not supposed to happen that way.”

“Sure it is. You weren’t supposed to see it, that’s all. And his Tlic was supposed to do it. She could sting him unconscious and the operation wouldn’t have been as painful. But she’d still open him, pick out the grubs, and if she missed even one, it would poison him and eat him from the inside out.”

There was actually a time when my mother told me to show respect for Qui because he was my older brother. I walked away, hating him. In his way, he was gloating. He was safe and I wasn’t. I could have hit him, but I didn’t think I would be able to stand it when he refused to hit back, when he looked at me with contempt and pity.

He wouldn’t let me get away. Longer-legged, he swung ahead of me and made me feel as though I were following him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I strode on, sick and furious.

“Look, it probably won’t be that bad with you. T’Gatoi likes you. She’ll be careful.”

I turned back toward the house, almost running from him.

“Has she done it to you yet?” he asked, keeping up easily. “I mean, you’re about the right age for implantation. Has she—”

I hit him. I didn’t know I was going to do it, but I think I meant to kill him. If he hadn’t been bigger and stronger, I think I would have.

He tried to hold me off, but in the end, had to defend himself. He only hit me a couple of times. That was plenty. I don’t remember going down, but when I came to, he was gone. It was worth the pain to be rid of him.

I got up and walked slowly toward the house. The back was dark. No one was in the kitchen. My mother and sisters were sleeping in their bedrooms—or pretending to.

Once I was in the kitchen, I could hear voices—Tlic and Terran from the next room. I couldn’t make out what they were saying—didn’t want to make it out.

I sat down at my mother’s table, waiting for quiet. The table was smooth and worn, heavy and well-crafted. My father had made it for her just before he died. I remembered hanging around underfoot when he built it. He didn’t mind. Now I sat leaning on it, missing him. I could have talked to him. He had done it three times in his long life. Three clutches of eggs, three times being opened and sewed up. How had he done it? How did anyone do it?

I got up, took the rifle from its hiding place, and sat down again with it. It needed cleaning, oiling.

All I did was load it.

“Gan?”

She made a lot of little clicking sounds when she walked on bare floor, each limb clicking in succession as it touched down. Waves of little clicks.

She came to the table, raised the front half of her body above it, and surged onto it. Sometimes she moved so smoothly she seemed to flow like water itself. She coiled herself into a small hill in the middle of the table and looked at me.

“That was bad,” she said softly. “You should not have seen it. It need not be that way.”

“I know.”

“T’Khotgif—Ch’Khotgif now—she will die of her disease. She will not live to raise her children. But her sister will provide for them, and for Bram Lomas.” Sterile sister. One fertile female in every lot. One to keep the family going. That sister owed Lomas more than she could ever repay.

“He’ll live then?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if he would do it again.”

“No one would ask him to do that again.”

I looked into the yellow eyes, wondering how much I saw and understood there, and how much I only imagined. “No one ever asks us,” I said. “You never asked me.”

She moved her head slightly. “What’s the matter with your face?”

“Nothing. Nothing important.” Human eyes probably wouldn’t have noticed the swelling in the darkness. The only light was from one of the moons, shining through a window across the room.

“Did you use the rifle to shoot the achti?”

“Yes.”

“And do you mean to use it to shoot me?”

I stared at her, outlined in moonlight—coiled, graceful body. “What does Terran blood taste like to you?”

She said nothing.

“What are you?” I whispered. “What are we to you?”

She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. “You know me as no other does,” she said softly. “You must decide.”

“That’s what happened to my face,” I told her.

“What?” “Qui goaded me into deciding to do something. It didn’t turn out very well.” I moved the gun slightly, brought the barrel up diagonally under my own chin. “At least it was a decision I made.”

“As this will be.”

“Ask me, Gatoi.”

“For my children’s lives?”

She would say something like that. She knew how to manipulate people, Terran and Tlic. But not this time.

“I don’t want to be a host animal,” I said. “Not even yours.”

It took her a long time to answer. “We use almost no host animals these days,” she said. “You know that.”

“You use us.”

“We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and join our families to yours.” She moved restlessly. “You know you aren’t animals to us.”

I stared at her, saying nothing.

“The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,” she said softly. “You know these things, Gan. Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them—they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.”

At the word “Worms ” I jumped. I couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help noticing it.

“I see,” she said quietly. “Would you really rather die than bear my young, Gan?”

I didn’t answer.

“Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?”

“Yes!” Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn’t had to watch Lomas. She’d be proud . . . Not terrified.

T’Gatoi flowed off the table onto the floor, startling me almost too much.

“I’ll sleep in Hoa’s room tonight,” she said. “And sometime tonight or in the morning, I’ll tell her.”

This was going too fast. My sister. Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still close to her—not like Qui. She could want T’Gatoi and still love me.

“Wait! Gatoi!”

She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned it to face me. “These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!”

“But she’s . . . my sister.”

“I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!”

“But—”

“It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her.”

Human lives. Human young who would someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins.

I shook my head. “Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.” I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?

“Don’t do it to Hoa,” I repeated.

She stared at me, utterly still.

I looked away, then back at her. “Do it to me.”

I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned forward to take it.

“No,” I told her.

“It’s the law,” she said.

“Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to save my life someday.”

She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn’t let go. I was pulled into a standing position over her.

“Leave it here!” I repeated. “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”

It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people. Now her young and this gun would be together in the same house. She did not know about our other guns. In this dispute, they did not matter.

“I will implant the first egg tonight,” she said as I put the gun away. “Do you hear, Gan?”

Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow? Did T’Gatoi imagine I hadn’t known?

“I hear.”

“Now!” I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real. “You would have done it to Hoa tonight!” I accused.

“I must do it to someone tonight.”

I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. “Don’t you care who?”

She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry.

Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.

“Do you care?” I asked. “Do you care that it’s me?”

She did not answer for some time. Finally, “You were the one making choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago.”

“Would you have gone to Hoa?”

“Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?”

“It wasn’t . . . hate.”

“I know what it was.”

“I was afraid.”

Silence.

“I still am.” I could admit it to her here, now.

“But you came to me . . . to save Hoa.”

“Yes.” I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. “And to keep you for myself,” I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so.

She made a soft hum of contentment. “I couldn’t believe I had made such a mistake with you,” she said. “I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me.”

“I had, but . . .”

“Lomas.”

“Yes.”

“I have never known a Terran to see a birth and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Terrans should be protected from seeing.”

I didn’t like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. “Not protected,” I said. “Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death.”

She looked down at me. “It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing.”

Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment.

“You won’t see it again,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking any more about shooting me.”

The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.

“I wouldn’t have shot you,” I said. “Not you.” She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age.

“You could have,” she insisted.

“Not you.” She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.

“Would you have destroyed yourself?”

I moved carefully, uncomfortably. “I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he knows.”

“What?”

I did not answer.

“You will live now.”

“Yes.” Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes.

“I’m healthy and young,” she said. “I won’t leave you Lomas was left—alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of you.”

IDIOT STICK

Damon Knight

Here’s a wry and mordant reminder that it’s always dangerous to be complacent and over-confident, no matter how overwhelmingly superior your technology may be. . . .

A multi-talented professional whose career as writer, editor, critic, and anthologist spans almost fifty years, Damon Knight has long been a major shaping force in the development of modern science fiction. He wrote the first important book of SF criticism, In Search of Wonder, and won a Hugo Award for it. He was the founder of the Science Fiction Writers of America, cofounder of the prestigious Milford Writer’s Conference, and, with his wife, writer Kate Wilhelm, is still deeply involved in the operation of the Clarion workshop for new young writers, which was modeled after the Milford Conference. He was the editor of Orbit, the longest running original anthology series in the history of American science fiction, and has also produced important works of genre history such as The Futurians and Turning Points, as well as dozens of significant reprint anthologies. Knight has also been highly influential as a writer, and may well be one of the finest short story writers ever to work in the genre. His books include the novels A for Anything, The Other Foot, Hell’s Pavement, The Man in the Tree, CV, and A Reasonable World, and the collections Rule Golden and Other Stories, Turning on, Far Out, The Best of Damon Knight, and the recent One Side Laughing. His most recent book is the novel Why Do Birds. Knight lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon.

The ship came down out of a blue sky to land in a New Jersey meadow. It sank squashily into the turf. It was about a mile long, colored an iridescent blue-green, like the shell of a beetle.

A door opened, and a thin, stick-bodied man came out to sniff the cool air. The sky overhead was full of fluffy cumulus clouds and criss-crossing contrails. Across the river, the tall buildings of Greater New York were picturesquely gilded by the early sun.

A dun-colored Army copter came into view, circling the ship at a cautious distance. The thin man saw it, blinked at it without interest, and looked away.

The river was smooth and silvery in the sunlight. After a long time, the sound of bullhorns came blaring distantly across the marshes. Then there was a clanking and a roaring, and two Army tanks pulled into sight, followed by two more. They deployed to either side, and slewed around with their 90-mm. guns pointing at the ship.

The alien watched them calmly. More helicopters appeared, circling and hovering. After a while a gray-painted destroyer steamed slowly into view up the river.

More tanks arrived. There was a ring of them around the spaceship, rumbling and smelling of Diesel oil. Finally a staff car pulled up, and three perspiring general officers got out of it.

From his low platform the alien looked down with a patient expression. His voice carried clearly. “Good morning,” he said. “This is a ship of the Galactic Federation. We come in peace. Your guns will not fire; please take them away. Now, then. I shall tell you what I am going to do. The Federation wishes to establish a cultural and educational organization upon your continent; and for your land and your co-operation, we will pay you generously. Here, catch these.” He raised his arm, and a cloud of glittery objects came toward them.

One of the officers, white-faced, tugged at the pistol in his belt holster; but the objects dropped harmlessly in and around the car. The senior officer picked one up. It was insubstantial to the touch, more like a soap bubble than anything else.

Then it tingled suddenly in his palm. He sat down, glassy-eyed.

The other two shook him. “Frank! Frank!”

His eyes slowly cleared; he looked from one to the other. “Are you still here?” he said faintly, and then: “My God!”

“Frank, what was it? Did it knock you out?”

The senior officer looked down at the glittery thing in his hand. It felt now like nothing in particular—just a piece of plastic, perhaps. There was no more tingle. The zip was gone out of it.

“It was . . . happiness,” he said.

The rest of the objects glittered and gleamed in the rank grass around the car. “Go on,” called the alien encouragingly, “take all you want. Tell your superiors, tell your friends. Come one, come all! We bring happiness!”

Within half a day, the word was out. Work stopped in New York offices; by ferry and tube, people poured across the river. The governor flew in from Trenton and was closeted with the aliens for half an hour, after which he emerged with a dazed and disbelieving look on his face, wearing a shoulder bag full of the glittering little capsules.

The crowd, muddy to the knees, milled around the ship. Every hour the thin alien appeared and tossed out another handful of capsules. There were shouts and screams; the crowd clotted briefly where the capsules fell, then spread apart again like filings released from a magnet.

Dull, used-up capsules littered the grass. Everywhere you saw the dazed expression, the transported look of a man who had had one.

Some few of the capsules got carried home to wives and children. The word continued to spread. No one could describe the effect of the capsules satisfactorily. It lasted only a few seconds, yet seemed to take a long time. It left them satiated and shaken. It was not pleasure of any specific kind, they said; it was happiness, and they wanted more.

Expropriation measures passed the state and national legislatures with blinding speed. There was furious debate elsewhere, but nobody who had had one of the capsules was in any doubt that he was getting a bargain. And the kicker was “What else can we do?”

The aliens, it appeared, wanted five hundred acres of level ground to put up certain buildings and other structures. Their explanations to the press and public were infrequent and offhand in tone; some people found them unsatisfactory. When asked why the aliens had chosen a site so near heavily populated centers, rather than wasteland which would have been plentiful elsewhere, the spokesman replied (he was either the same stick-thin man who had appeared first, or one just like him), “But then who would build us our buildings?”

New York, it seemed, represented a source of native labor to the aliens.

The pay would be generous: three capsules a day a man.

When the aliens announced they were hiring, half the population of Greater New York tried to get over onto the Jersey flats. Three quarters of the population of Hoboken, Jersey City, Hackensack and Paterson was already there.

In the queues that eventually formed out of the confusion, the mayor of New York City was seen alongside an upstate senator and two visiting film stars.

Each person, as he reached the head of the line, was handed a light metal or plastic rod, five feet long, with a curved handle and a splayed tip. The lucky workers were then herded out onto the designated acreage. Some of it was marshland, some was a scraggly part of the New Jersey Parks System, some was improved land. The buildings on the site—a few homes, some factories and warehouses—had all been evacuated but not torn down. The workers with their rods were lined up at one edge of this territory, facing the opposite side.

“When the command ‘Go’ is heard,” said the alien’s voice clearly, “you will all proceed directly forward at a slow walking pace, swinging your sticks from side to side.”

The voice stopped. Apparently that was going to be all.

In the middle of the line, young Ted Cooley looked at his neighbor, Eli Baker. They both worked in the same pharmaceuticals house and had come out together to try their luck. Cooley was twenty-five, blond and brawny; Baker, about the same age, was slight and dark. Their eyes met, and Baker shrugged, as if to say, Don’t ask me.

It was a clear, cool day. The long line of men and women stood waiting in the sunlight.

“Go!” said the alien’s voice.

The line began to move. Cooley stepped forward and waggled his stick hesitantly. There was no feeling of movement in the stick, but he saw a line of darkness spring out on the ground ahead of him. He paused instinctively, thinking that the stick must be squirting oil or some other liquid.

Up and down the line, other people were stopping, too. He looked more closely and saw that the ground was not wet at all. It was simply pressed down flat—dirt, stones, weeds, everything all at once—to form one hard, dark surface.

“Keep going,” said the alien’s voice.

Several people threw down their sticks and walked away. Others moved forward cautiously. Seeing that nothing happened to them when they stepped on the dark strip, Cooley moved forward also. The dark ground was solid and firm underfoot. As he moved forward, swinging the stick, the dark area spread; and, looking closely now, he could see the uneven ground leap downward and darken as the stick swept over it.

“Get in rhythm,” called the voice. “Leave no space between one man’s work and the next.”

The line moved forward, a little raggedly at first, then faster as they got the hang of it. The dark, hard strip, running the whole length of the area, widened as they moved. It was as if everything under the business end of the stick were instantly compressed and smoothed down. Looking closely, you could see the traces of anything that had been there before, like the patterns in marbled linoleum: stones, sticks, grass and weeds.

“How the heck does it work?” said Baker, awed.

“Search me,” said Cooley. In his hands, the tube felt light and empty, like the aluminum shaft of a tank vacuum cleaner. He didn’t see how it could possibly have any mechanism inside. There were no controls; he hadn’t turned anything on to make it operate.

A few yards ahead, there was a stone wall, overgrown with weeds. “What’s going to happen when we come to that?” Baker asked, pointing.

“Search me.” Cooley felt bewildered; he walked mechanically forward, swinging the stick.

The wall grew nearer. When they were within a few paces of it, a rabbit burst suddenly out of cover. It darted one way, then the other, hind legs pumping hard. Confused by the advancing line, it leaped for the space between Baker and Cooley.

“Look out!” shouted Cooley instinctively. Baker’s swinging stick went directly over the rabbit.

Nothing happened. The rabbit kept on going. Cooley and a few others turned to watch it: it bounded away across the level strip and disappeared into the tall grass on the other side.

Baker and Cooley looked at each other. “Selective,” said Cooley through dry lips. “Listen, if I—” He shortened his grip on the stick, moving the splayed end toward himself.

“Better not,” said Baker nervously.

“Just to see—” Cooley slowly brought the stick nearer, slowly thrust the tip of one shoe under it.

Nothing happened. He moved the stick nearer. Bolder, he ran it over his leg, his other foot. Nothing. “Selective!” he repeated. “But how?”

The weeds were dried vegetable fiber. The stick compressed them without hesitation, stamped them down flat like everything else. His trousers were dried vegetable fiber, part of them, anyhow—cotton. His socks, his shoelaces—how did the stick know the difference?

They kept on going. When they came to the stone wall, Cooley waved his stick at it. A section of the wall slumped, as if a giant had taken a bite out of it. He waved it again. The rest of the wall fell.

Somebody laughed hysterically. The line was advancing. The wall was just a lighter stripe in the smooth floor over which they walked.

The sun crept higher. Behind the line of men and women stretched a level, gleaming floor. “Listen,” said Cooley nervously to Baker, “how bad do you want those happiness gadgets?”

Baker looked at him curiously. “I don’t know. What do you mean?”

Cooley moistened his lips. “I’m thinking. We get the gadgets, we use them up—”

“Or sell them,” Baker interrupted.

“Or sell them, but then, either way, they’re gone. Suppose we walked off with these.” He hefted his stick. “If we could find out what makes it do what it does—”

“Are you kidding?” said Baker. His dark face was flushed; beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He waved his stick. “You know what this is? A shovel. An idiot stick.”

“How’s that?” said Cooley.

“A shovel,” Baker told him patiently, “is a stick with some dirt on one end and an idiot on the other. Old joke. Didn’t you ever do any common labor?”

“No,” said Cooley.

“Well, you’re doing some now. This thing that looks so wonderful to us—that’s just a shovel, to them. An idiot stick. And we’re the idiots.”

“I don’t like that,” said Cooley.

“Who likes it?” Baker demanded. “But there isn’t a thing you can do about it. Do your work, take your pay, and that’s all. Don’t kid yourself we can ever get the bulge on them; we haven’t got what it takes.”

Cooley thought hard about it, and he was one of the fifty-odd people who walked off the site with Galactic tools that day. The Galactics made no complaint. When daylight failed, they called in the first crew and sent another out under floating lights. The work went on, around the clock. The tools were stolen at a steady rate; the Galactics handed out more indifferently.

The site became level and smooth; the surface was glassy-hard, almost too slick to walk on. The next thing the aliens did was to set up a tall pole on a tripod in the middle of the site. Most of the floating lights went out and drifted away. In the dusk, a network of fluorescent lines appeared on the glassy surface. It looked like the ground plan for a huge building. Some of the pale lines went a little askew because of minor irregularities in the surface, but the Galactics did not seem to mind. They called in part of the crew and made some adjustment in each man’s stick. A narrow tab, something like the clip in an automatic, came out of the butt; a different one went in.

So equipped, the reduced crew was sent back onto the site and scattered along the diagram, one man every two hundred yards or so. They were instructed to walk backward along the lines, drawing their sticks after them.

There was some confusion. The tools now worked only on contact, and instead of flattening the surface down, they made it bulge up, like suddenly rising dough, to form a foot-high ridge. The ridge was pale in color and felt porous and hard to the touch, like styrene foam.

A few men were called in and had still another set of control tabs put into their sticks. Wherever somebody had jumped, or twitched, and made a ridge where it didn’t belong, these men wiped it out like wiping chalk with a wet sponge: the expanded material shrank again and became part of the dark surface.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew, finishing the first set of lines, was walking along beside them, making the ridges twice as wide. They repeated this process until each ridge was nearly a yard across. Then they stepped up on top of the ridges and began again, making a second foot-high bulge on top of the first.

The building was going up. It was irregularly shaped, a little like an arrowhead, with an outer shell composed of many small compartments. The interior was left unpartitioned, a single area more than half a mile across.

When the shell was up ten feet, the aliens had connecting doorways cut between all the small chambers. A stick, looking no different from the others, was tossed into each chamber from the wall above. Where it landed, clear liquid immediately began to gush. The liquid rose, covered the stick, and kept on rising. It rose until it reached the level of the walls, and then stopped. A few minutes later, it was cold to the touch. In half an hour, it was frozen solid.

The control tabs were changed again, and a crew began walking across the frozen surface, forming another layer of the hard, dark, glassy substance. Afterward, more doorways were cut in the outer shell, and the liquid drained off toward the river. The sticks that had been dropped into the chambers were recovered. Each had left a slight irregularity in the floor, which was smoothed out.

The second story went up in the same way. Walking backward along the high walls, a good many people fell off. Others quit. The aliens hired more, and the construction went on.

Hardly anybody except a few high government officials got to see the inside of the alien spaceship; but the Galactics themselves became familiar sights in the towns and cities of the eastern seaboard. They walked the streets in inquisitive, faintly supercilious pairs, looking at everything, occasionally stopping to aim little fist-size machines which might or might not have been cameras.

Some of them fraternized with the populace, asking many earnest questions about local laws and customs. Some bought vast quantities of potatoes, playing cards, Cadillacs, junk jewelry, carpets, confetti, nylons and other goods, paying, as usual, with the happiness capsules. They ate local foods with interest and drank heroically without getting drunk, or even tipsy. Skin-tight clothes cut in imitation of the Galactics’ bottle-green uniform began to appear on the market. There were Galactic dolls and Galactic spaceship toys.

Legislatures everywhere were relaxed and amiable. Wherever the Galactics had trouble, or sensed it coming, they smoothed the way with more of the happiness capsules. Prices were beginning to be marked not only in “$” and “¢,” but in “Hc,” for “Hapcap.” Business was booming.

In the laboratories of the Bureau of Standards in Washington there was a concerted program—one of many—to discover the secrets of the Galactic all-purpose tool. Specimens had been measured, X-rayed and cut apart. The material, whatever it was, seemed to have been formed in one piece. It was light, chemically inert and fairly strong. The hollow inside was irregularly curved, according to no discernible principle.

There were only two parts—the tool proper and the control tab which fitted into a slot in the handle. With the tab in, the tool functioned. It did work, while the dials of every test instrument calmly reported that no energy was being released. With the tab out, nothing happened at all.

The tabs for various functions could be distinguished by color; otherwise, in shape and dimensions, they seemed identical.

The first—and last—breakthrough came when the tabs were examined by X-ray microscopy. The substance, which had seemed amorphous, was found to have a crystalline structure, permanently stressed in patterns which differed consistently between tabs that produced different functions.

By an elaborate series of test heatings, compressions and deformations, Dr. Crawford Reed succeeded in altering the stress pattern of a type “A” tab to approximately that of a type “C” tab.

When the tab was inserted in a tool, the laboratory went up in an explosion that demolished buildings within a radius of three city blocks.

The explosion was recorded by instruments in the giant spaceship. When he saw the record, the bored officer on duty smiled.

One of the aliens, who said his name was Pendrath go Pendrath, showed up frequently in the pleasant little town of Riverdale, New Jersey. He poked his nose into church bazaars, Little League baseball games, soda fountains, summer camps, chamber of commerce meetings. At first he gathered crowds wherever he went; then the natives, and even the tourists, got used to him.

Three nights after the rough shell of the building was finished, a young Star-Ledger reporter named Al Jenkins found him in the back of a bar, maudlin drunk.

Pendrath looked up as Jenkins slid into the booth next to him. “Ah, my friend,” he said blurrily, “how I regret your poor planet.”

“You don’t like our planet?” said Jenkins.

“No, it is a nice little planet. Extremely picturesque. Pardon me.” Pendrath sipped from the glass he was holding. He blinked, and straightened up slightly.

“You must understand, that is Galactic progress,” he said. “It cannot be helped. We all must go someday.”

Jenkins looked at him critically. “You’ve been having quite a few of those, haven’t you?” he said. “I thought you people were immune to alcohol, or something.”

“No, it is the aps—as—aspirin,” said the alien. He produced a small bottle, and solemnly shook a tablet out into his palm. “Your liquors gave me a headache, and so I took an apsirin—aspirin—and your aspirin is wonderful.” He looked lugubrious. “To think, no more aspirin. No more church bazaar. No more baseball.”

“Why, what’s going to happen to them?”

Pendrath spread his fingers and made an expressive fizzing noise with his mouth. “Blooie,” he said.

Jenkins said incredulously, “You’re going to blow up the world?”

The alien nodded sadly. “Soon our building will be finished. Then we will put in the big machines, and drill, drill.” He made twisting motions downward with one hand. “We will drill to the core. Then we will drop the transformer and close up the shaft. Then we will go away. Then the poor little planet will go—” he made the fizzing noise again—“Blooie.”

Jenkins’ fists were clenched. “But why? Why would you do a thing like that?”

“For dust,” Pendrath explained. “Your little planet will all be dust. No big pieces left—nothing bigger than this.” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together, squinting, to show how tiny. “We are making defenses for the Galaxy. This sector is too open. We will make a little screen of dust here. If there is dust, a ship cannot go very fast. The dust slows it down. Some places, there is already dust. Other places, we will make it. It is the only way to protect ourselves from invasion.”

“Invasion by whom?”

Pendrath shrugged. “Who can tell? We have to look ahead.”

Jenkins’ hands began to shake. He took a dog-eared notebook out of his pocket, thumbing it open automatically; he looked at it and put it back. His hands didn’t want to do anything but make fists. He said thickly, “You lousy—” and swung a left to Pendrath’s beaky face.

The blow never landed. His fist slowed down and stopped; strain as hard as he would, he couldn’t push it any farther.

“No, no,” said Pendrath, smiling sadly. “No use. I regret very much.”

Jenkins’ heart was thumping. “Why us?” he burst out angrily. “If you had to have dust, why couldn’t you take one of the other planets? Jupiter, Venus—any of them—why pick the one we live on?”

Pendrath blinked at him. “But on your other planets no one lives,” he said. “Who, then, would do the work for us?” He popped another tablet into his mouth. “And besides,” he said, “remember that this dust will make a blanket around your sun. It will make the planets very cold. You see, I have thought of all these things. And then suppose we went to some other sun, and did not come here at all. It would be just the same. You would make big spaceships, and we would have to come and finish you anyway. This way, it will be very quick—you will not feel a thing.”

Jenkins had lost his hat. He fumbled on the floor for it. “We’ll stop you,” he said, red-faced over the tabletop. “You’ll be sorry you ever opened your mouth to me, mister. I’ll spread this from here to Belfast.”

“You are going to tell?” the alien asked, in dull surprise.

“You bet your sweet life I’m going to tell!”

Pendrath nodded owlishly. “It does not matter now. The work is nearly done. You cannot stop us, my poor friend.”

The story broke the following day, when the installation of the complex system of girders and braces in the interior of the building had already been finished. A hatch in the side of the ship was open, and under the aliens’ direction, crews were carrying out a steady stream of machine parts to be assembled inside the building.

There were a thousand and one pieces of different sizes and shapes: gigantic torus sections, tubes, cylinders, globes; twisted pipes, jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The material was not metal, but the same light substance the tools were made of.

Some of the tools were serving as grip-sticks: they clung like magnets to the machine parts, and to nothing else. Some, applied to massive pieces of equipment, made them extraordinarily slippery, so that it was easy to slide them across the site and into the building. Others were used in assembling: drawn along the join between two pieces, they made the two flow together into one.

The story did not reach the day shift at all. The second and third shifts turned up a little under strength; the aliens hired enough people from the crowd of curiosity-seekers to make up the difference.

At his regular press conference, the alien spokesman, Mr. Revash go Ren, said, “Mr. Jenkins’ story is a malicious fabrication. The machines you mention will provide pleasant heating, air conditioning, Galactic standard gravitation, and other necessary services for the clerical workers in our offices. We are accustomed to have many conveniences of this kind, and that is why we cannot live or work in buildings suitable for you.”

Hersch of the Times demanded, “Why does that take a half-mile area, when your office space is only a thin ring around the outside of the building?”

Revash smiled. “Why do you take a whole cellar to heat your buildings?” he asked. “One of your savages would say that a fire of sticks and a hole in the ceiling are sufficient.”

Hersch had no answer to that; nevertheless, belief in the story spread. By the end of the week, half a dozen newspapers were thumping the drum for a crusade. A Congressional investigating committee was appointed. More workers quit. When the labor supply slackened, the aliens doubled the pay, and got more applicants than there were jobs. Riots broke out on the Jersey side of the tubes. There were picket lines, fulminations from the pulpit, attempts at sabotage. The work went on just the same.

“The whole problem is psychological,” said Baker. “We know what kind of people they are—it sticks out all over them—they’re decadent. That’s their weak point; that’s where we’ve got to hit them. They’ve got the perfect machines, but they don’t know how to use them. Not only that, they don’t want to; it would soil their lily-white hands. So they come here, and they get us to do their dirty work, even though it means an extra risk.”

“That doesn’t sound so decadent to me,” said Cooley argumentatively. It was past midnight, and they were still sitting in Baker’s living room over a case of beer, hashing it all out. Cooley’s face was flushed, and his voice a little loud. “Take an archaeological expedition, say—I don’t know, maybe to Mesopotamia or somewhere. Do they drag along a lot of pick and shovel men? They do not; they take the shovels, maybe, but they hire native labor on the spot. That isn’t decadence, that’s efficiency.”

“All right, but if we had to, we could get out there and pick up a shovel. They can’t. It just wouldn’t occur to them. They’re overrefined, Ted; they’ve got to the point where the machines have to be perfect, or they couldn’t stay alive. That’s dangerous; that’s where we’ve got to hit them.”

“I don’t see it. Wars are won with weapons.”

“So what are we supposed to do, hit them with atom bombs that don’t go off, or guns that don’t shoot?”

Cooley put down his stein and reached for the tool that lay on the floor. It had rolled the last time he put it down. He said, “Damn,” and reached farther. He picked it up, the same “idiot stick” he had stolen from the Galactic site the first day.

“I’m betting on this,” he said. “You know and I know they’re working on it, day and night. I’m betting they’ll crack it. This is a weapon, boy—a Galactic weapon. If we just get that—”

“Go ahead, wish for the moon,” said Baker bitterly. “What you’re talking about happens to be impossible. We can change the stress patterns in the control tabs, yes. We can even duplicate the formative conditions, probably, and get as many tabs as you want with the same pattern. But it’s all empirical, Ted, just blind chance. We don’t know why such and such a stress pattern makes the tool do a certain thing, and until we know that, all we can do is vary it at random.”

“So?”

“So there are millions of wrong patterns for every right one. There’s the patterns that make things explode, like in Washington; there’re the ones that boil the experimenter alive or freeze him solid, or bury him in a big lump of solid lead. There’re the radioactive ones, the corrosive ones—and for every wrong guess, we lose at least one man.”

“Remote control?” said Cooley.

“First figure out what makes the tools operate when somebody’s holding them, and stop when they let go.”

Cooley drank, frowning.

“And remember,” said Baker, “there’s just about one choice that would do us any good against the Galactics. One pattern, out of millions. No. It won’t be technology that licks them; it’ll be guts.”

He was right; but he was wrong.

Al Jenkins was in the Star-Ledger city room, gloomily reading a wire story about denunciations of the aliens issued by governors of eight states. “What good is that?” he said, tossing it back onto the city editor’s desk. “Look at it.”

Through the window, they could see the top of the alien building shining in the distance. Tiny figures were crawling over the domed roof. The aliens had inflated a hemispherical membrane, and now the workers were going over it with the tools, forming a solid layer.

The dome was almost finished. Work on the interior of the building had stopped two days before.

“He knew what he was talking about,” said Jenkins. “We couldn’t stop them. We had three weeks to do it in, but we just couldn’t get together that fast.”

Cigarette ash was spilling down the front of his shirt. He scrubbed at it absently, turned, and walked out of the office. The editor watched him go without saying anything.

One morning in July, two months after the aliens’ landing, a ragged mob armed with Galactic tools appeared near the spaceship. Similar mobs had formed several times during the last few nights. When a native grew desperate, he lost what little intelligence he had.

The officer in charge, standing in the open doorway, looked them over disdainfully as they approached. There was no need for any defensive measures; they would try to club him with the tools, fail, and go away.

The native in the lead, a big, burly male, raised his tool like a pitchfork. The Galactic watched him with amusement. The next instant, he was dead, turned into bloody mush on the floor of the airlock.

The mob poured into the ship. Inside, the green-lit hallways were as dim and vast as a cathedral. Bored Galactics looked out of doorways. Their bland expressions changed to gapes of horror. Some ran; some hid. The tools cut them down.

The long corridors echoed to the rattle of running feet, to shouts of excitement and triumph, screams of dismay. The mob swept into every room; it was over in fifteen minutes.

The victors stopped, panting and sweaty, looking around them with the beginnings of wonder. The high-ceilinged rooms were hung with gleaming gold-and-green tapestries; the desks were carved crystal. Music breathed from somewhere, soothing and quiet.

A tray of food was steaming on a table. A transparent chart had been pulled out of a wall. Under each was a pulpy red smear, a puddle of disorganized tissue.

Baker and Cooley looked up and recognized each other. “Guts,” said Baker wryly,

“Technology,” said Cooley. “They underrated us; so did you.” He raised the tool he held, careful not to touch the butt. “Ten thousand tries, I hear—and ten thousand dead men. All right, have it your way. I call that guts, too.” He lifted his head, staring off into the distance, trying to imagine the hundreds of research stations, hidden in remote areas, with their daily, ghastly toll of human life. “Ten thousand,” he said.

Baker was shaking with reaction. “We were lucky; it might have been a million. . . .” He tried to laugh. “Have to find a new name for this now—no more idiot stick.”

Cooley glanced at the floor. “It depends,” he said grimly, “which end of the stick the idiot’s on.”

GUESTING TIME

R. A. Lafferty

Hordes of aliens descending upon the Earth, the armed forces helpless against them, governments crumbling under the impact of the invasion, the invaders quartered in our homes, walking all over us, grinding us under their heels . . . Can anyone find anything good to say about these things?

Well, if anyone can, it’s R. A. Lafferty, and sure enough, he does, in “Guesting Time,” one of the most charming and funny stories of alien invasion ever written.

R. A. Lafferty started writing in 1960, and in the years before his retirement in 1987, he published some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever written in the genre, as well as a string of vivid and unforgettable books such as the novels Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, Arrive at Easterwine, and The Flame Is Green, and landmark collections such as Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Golden Gate and Other Stories, and Ringing the Changes. Lafferty won the Hugo Award in 1973 for his story “Eurema’s Dam,” and in 1990 received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. His most recent books are the collections Lafferty in Orbit and Iron Star.

Things were a bit crowded where they came from—and were getting that way here!

Winston, the Civil Servant in Immigration and Arrivals, was puzzled when he came that morning. There were several hundred new people behind the cyclone fences, and no arrivals had been scheduled.

“What ships landed?” he called out. “Why were they unscheduled?”

“No ships landed, sir,” said Potholder, the senior guard.

“Then how did these people get here? Walk down from the sky?” Winston asked snappishly.

“Yes, sir, I guess so. We don’t know who they are or how they keep coming here. They say they are from Skandia.”

“We have few Scandinavian arrivals, and none of such appearance as this,” said Winston. “How many are there?”

“Well, sir, when we first noticed them there were seven, and they hadn’t been there a moment before.”

“Seven? You’re crazy. There are hundreds.”

“Yes, sir. I’m crazy. A minute after there were seven, there were seventeen. But no more had come from anywhere. Then there were sixty. We separated them into groups of ten and watched them very closely. None crossed from one group to another, none came from anywhere else. But soon there were fifteen, then twenty-five, then thirty in each group. And there’s a lot more of them there now than when you started to talk to me a moment ago, Mr. Winston.”

“Corcoran is my superior and will be here in a minute,” Winston said. “He’ll know what to do.”

“Mr. Corcoran left just before you arrived, sir,” said Potholder. “He watched it a while, and then went away babbling.”

“I always admired his quick grasp of a situation,” said Winston. He also went away babbling.

There were about a thousand of those Skandia people, and a little later there were nine times that many. They weren’t dowdy people, but the area wouldn’t hold any more. The fences all went down, and the Skandias spread out into the city and towns and country. This was only the beginning of it. About a million of them materialized there that morning, then the same thing happened at ten thousand other Ports of Entry of Earth.

“Mama,” said Trixie, “there are some people here who want to use our bathroom.” This was Beatrice (Trixie) Trux, a little girl in the small town of Winterfield.

“What an odd request!” said Mrs. Trux. “But I suppose it is in the nature of an emergency. Let them in, Trixie. How many people are there?”

“About a thousand,” said Trixie.

“Trixie, there can’t be that many.”

“All right, you count them.”

All the people came in to use the Trux’s bathroom. There were somewhat more than a thousand of them, and it took them quite a while to use the bathroom even though they put a fifteen-second limit on each one and had a timekeeper with a bell to enforce it. They did it all with a lot of laughter and carrying on, but it took that first bunch about five hours to go through, and by that time there were a lot more new ones waiting.

“This is a little unusual,” Mrs. Trux said to some of the Skandia women. “I was never short on hospitality. It is our physical resources, not our willingness, that becomes strained. There are so many of you!”

“Don’t give it a thought,” the Skandia women said. “It is the intent that counts, and it was so kind of you people to invite us. We seldom get a chance to go anywhere. We came a little early, but the main bunch will be along very soon. Don’t you just love to go visiting.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” said Mrs. Trux. “I never realized till now just how much I wanted to go visiting.”

But when she saw the whole outdoors black with the new people, Mrs. Trux decided that she had better stay where she was.

Truman Trux was figuring with a pencil.

“Our lot is fifty feet by a hundred and fifty feet, Jessica,” he said. “That is either 7,500 or 75,000 square feet depending on how many zeroes you carry it out to.”

“You were always good at math,” said Mrs. Trux. “How do you do it anyhow?”

“And do you know how many people are living with us here on this lot, Jessica?” Truman asked.

“Quite a few.”

“I am guessing between six and seven thousand,” said Truman. “I found several more blocks of them this morning that I didn’t know about. They have a complete city built in our back yard. The streets are two and a half feet wide; the houses are eight feet by eight feet with six foot ceilings, and most of them are nine stories high. Whole families live in each room and cook there besides. They have shops and bazaars set up. They even have factories built. I know there is an entire wholesale textile district in our back yard. There are thirteen taverns and five music halls in our yard to my own knowledge, and there may be more.”

“Well, some of those places are pretty small, Truman. The Little Hideout is the broom closet of the Big Hideout, and I don’t know if we should count it as a separate tavern. You have to go into the Sideways Club sideways; the Thinman Club is only nine inches wide from wall to wall and it’s quite a trick to bending an elbow there; and the Mouse Room is small. But the better clubs are up in our attic, Truman. Did you ever count them? The Crazy Man Cabaret is up there, and the After Hours Club. Most of the other attic clubs are key clubs and I’m not a member. They’ve set up the Skandia Art Theater in our basement now, you know. They have continuous performances.”

“I know it, Jessica, I know it.”

“Their comedies are so funny that I nearly die. The trouble is that it’s so crowded there that you have to laugh in when the one next to you laughs out. And I cry just like they do at their tragedies. They’re all about women who can’t have any more children. Why don’t we have a bunch more, Truman? There’s more than twenty shops in our yard where they sell nothing but fertility charms. I wonder why there aren’t any children with the Skandia?”

“Ah, they say that this is just a short first visit by a few of them and they didn’t presume to bring their children with them. What is that new racket superimposed on the old?”

“Oh, that’s the big drums and the cymbals. They’re having a political campaign to elect temporary officials for the time of their visit here. Imperial City, that’s the town in our yard, and our house, will elect delegates to go to Congress to represent this whole block. The elections will be tonight. Then we’ll really hear some noise, they say. The big drums don’t really waste space, Truman. There are people inside them and they play them from the inside. Some of our neighbors are getting a little fussy about the newcomers, but I always did like a house full of people.”

“We have it now, Jessica. I never got used to sleeping in a bed with nine other people, even if they are quiet sleepers. I like people, and I am fond of new experiences. But it is getting crowded.”

“We have more of the Skandia than anyone else in the block except the Skirveys. They say it’s because they like us more than some of the others. Mamie Skirvey is taking four kinds of fertility pills now. She is almost sure she will be able to have triplets. I want to too.”

“All the stores are stripped, Jessica, and all the lumber yards and lumber camps; and the grain elevators will be empty in two more days. The Skandia pay for everything in money, but nobody knows what it says on it. I haven’t got used to walking on men and women when I go out, but there’s no avoiding it since the ground is covered with them.”

“They don’t mind. They’re used to it. They say it’s crowded where they come from.”

The Winterfield Times-Tribune Telegraph had a piece about the Skandia:

The plain fact is that for two days the Earth has had ten billion visitors from Skandia, wherever that is. The plain fact is that the Earth will die of them within a week. They appear by invisible transportation, but they have shown no inclination to disappear in the same manner. Food will be gone, the very air we breathe will be gone. They speak all our languages, they are polite, friendly and agreeable. And we will perish from them.

A big smiling man broke in on Bar-John, who was once again president of Big State Amalgamated, formerly U.S.A.

“I’m the president of the Skandia Visitation,” he boomed. “We have come partly to instruct you people and we find that you do need it. Your fertility rate is pathetic. You barely double in fifty years. Your medicine, adequate in other fields, is worse than childish in this. We find that some of the nostrums peddled to your people actually impede fertility. Well, get in the Surgeon General and a few of the boys and we’ll begin to correct the situation.”

“Gedoudahere,” said President Bar-John.

“I know you will not want your people to miss out on the population blessing,” said the Skandia Visitation President. “We can aid you. We want you to be as happy as we are.”

“Jarvis! Cudgelman! Sapsucker!” President Bar-John called out. “Shoot down this man. I’ll implement the paper work on it later.”

“You always say that but you never do,” Sapsucker complained. “It’s been getting us in a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, well, don’t shoot him down then if you’re going to make an issue of it. I long for the old days when the simple things were done simply. Dammit, you Skandia skinner, do you know that there are nine thousand of you in the White House itself?”

“We intend to improve that this very hour,” the Skandia president said. “We can erect one, two, or even three decks in these high-ceilinged rooms. I am happy to say that we will have thirty thousand of our people quartered in the White House this night.”

“Do you think I like to take a bath with eight other persons—not even registered voters—in the same tub?” President Bar-John complained. “Do you think I like to eat off a plate shared by three or four other people? Or to shave, by mistake, faces other than my own in the morning?”

“I don’t see why not,” said the Skandia Visitation president. “People are our most precious commodity. Presidents are always chosen as being those who most love the people.”

“Oh, come on, fellows,” said President Bar-John. “Shoot down the ever-loving son. We’re entitled to a free one now and then.”

Jarvis and Cudgelman and Sapsucker blazed away at the Skandia, but they harmed him not at all.

“You should have known that we are immune to that,” the Skandia said. “We voted against its effect years ago. Well, since you will not cooperate, I will go direct to your people. Happy increase to you, gentlemen.”

Truman Trux, having gone out from his own place for a little change, was sitting on a park bench.

He wasn’t actually sitting on it, but several feet above it. In that particular place, a talkative Skandia lady sat on the bench itself. On her lap sat a sturdy Skandia man reading the Sporting News and smoking a pipe. On him sat a younger Skandia woman. On this younger woman sat Truman Trux, and on him sat a dark Skandia girl who was filing her fingernails and humming a tune. On her in turn sat an elderly Skandia man. As crowded as things had become, one could not expect a seat of one’s own.

A fellow and his girl came along, walking on the people on the grass.

“Mind if we get on?” asked the girl.

“Quite all right,” said the elderly gentleman on top. ” ‘Sall right,” said the girl working on her nails. “Certainly,” said Truman and the others, and the Sporting News man puffed into his pipe that it was perfectly agreeable.

There was no longer any motor traffic. People walked closely packed on streets and sidewalks. The slow stratum was the lowest, then the medium, then the fast (walking on the shoulders of the mediums and combining the three speeds). At crossings it became rather intricate, and people were sometimes piled nine high. But the Earth people, those who still went out, quickly got into the Skandia techniques.

An Earthman, known for his extreme views, had mounted onto a monument in the park and began to harangue the people, Earth and Skandia. Truman Trux, who wanted to see and hear, managed to get a nice fifth-level seat, sitting on the shoulders of a nice Skandia girl, who sat on the shoulders of another who likewise to the bottom.

“Ye are the plague of locusts!” howled the Earth-side crank. “Ye have stripped us bare!”

“The poor man!” said the Skandia girl who was Truman’s understeady. “He likely has only a few children and is embittered.”

“Ye have devoured our substance and stolen the very air of our life. Ye are the Apocalyptical grasshoppers, the eleventh plague.”

“Here is a fertility charm for your wife,” said the Skandia girl, and reached it up to Truman. “You might not need it yet, but keep it for the future. It is for those who have more than twelve. The words in Skandia say ‘Why stop now?’ It is very efficacious.”

“Thank you,” said Truman. “My wife has many charms from you good people, but not one like this. We have only one child, a young girl.”

“What a shame! Here is a charm for your daughter. She cannot begin to use them too early.”

“Destruction, destruction, destruction on ye all!” screamed the Earth-side crank from atop the monument.

“Quite an adept,” said the Skandia girl. “To what school of eloquence does he belong?”

The crowd began to break up and move off. Truman felt himself taken down one level and then another.

“Any particular direction?” asked the Skandia girl.

“This is fine,” said Truman. “We’re going toward my home.”

“Why, here’s a place almost clear,” said the girl. “You’d never find anything like this at home.” They were now down to the last level, the girl walking only on the horizontal bodies of those lounging on the grass. “You can get off and walk if you wish,” said the girl. “Here’s a gap in the walkers you can slip down into. Well, toodle.”

“You mean toodle-oo?” Truman asked as he slid off her shoulders.

“That’s right. I can never remember the last part of it.”

The Skandia were such friendly people!

President Bar-John and a dozen other regents of the world had decided that brusqueness was called for. Due to the intermingling of Earth and Skandia populations, this would be a task for small and medium arms. The problem would be to gather the Skandia together in open spots, but on the designated day they began to gather of themselves in a million parks and plazas of the Earth. It worked perfectly. Army units were posted everywhere and went into action.

Rifles began to whistle and machine guns to chatter. But the effect on the Skandia was not that expected.

Instead of falling wounded, they cheered everywhere.

“Pyrotechnics yet!” exclaimed a Skandia leader, mounting onto the monument in one park. “Oh, we are honored!”

But, though the Skandia did not fall from the gunshot, they had began to diminish in their numbers. They were disappearing as mysteriously as they had appeared a week before.

“We go now,” said the Skandia leader from the top of the monument. “We have enjoyed every minute of our short visit. Do not despair! We will not abandon you to your emptiness. Our token force will return home and report. In another week we will visit you in substantial numbers. We will teach you the full happiness of human proximity, the glory of fruitfulness, the blessing of adequate population. We will teach you to fill up the horrible empty places of your planet.”

The Skandia were thinning out. The last of them were taking cheering farewells of disconsolate Earth friends.

“We will be back,” they said as they passed their last fertility charms into avid hands. “We’ll be back and teach you everything so you can be as happy as we are. Good increase to you!”

“Good increase to you!” cried the Earth people to the disappearing Skandia. Oh, it would be a lonesome world without all those nice people! With them you had the feeling that they were really close to you.

“We’ll be back!” said the Skandia leader, and disappeared from the monument. “We’ll be back next week and a lot more of us,” and then they were gone.

“—And next time we’ll bring the kids!” came the last fading Skandia voice from the sky.

TRADING POST

Neal Barrett, Jr.

Here’s a chilling examination of what an alien-dominated Earth would feel like to the people who would have to live in it, told with a hard-edged, hard-eyed, unsentimental intelligence rare to the genre.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Neal Barrett, Jr. grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, spent several years in Austin, hobnobbing with the likes of Lewis Shiner and Howard Waldrop, and now makes his home with his family in Fort Worth, Texas. He made his first sale in 1959, and has been a full-time freelancer for the past twelve years. Barrett became one of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine‘s most popular writers in the last half of the ’80s, and gained wide critical acclaim with a string of pungent, funny, and unclassifiably weird stories like “Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus,” “Stairs,” “Highbrow,” and “Class of ‘61,” as well as publishing great stories such as “Diner,” “Sallie C,” and “Winter on the Belle Fourche” in markets as diverse as Omni, The Best of the West, and The New Frontier. His books include Stress Pattern, Karma Corps, the four-volume Aldair series, the critically acclaimed novel Through Darkest America and its sequel Dawn’s Uncertain Light, and the very strange novel, The Hereafter Gang, which the Washington Post referred to as “the Great American Novel.” His most recent books are the comic Mafia novel Pink Vodka Blues, which has just been optioned for a big-budget Hollywood movie, and a collection of some of his shorter work, Slightly Off Center.

With the glasses, lying on the flat gravel roof across the street, he could follow ant dramatics on the worn brick facing of the center. The place looked thoroughly abandoned. Dry summer grass followed cracks along the broad parking lot, sprouting in small explosions. Wild azalea had taken hold in rusted cars. He slipped the binoculars into his pack and out of the heat. The South Texas sun bleached the sky of any color and there was no shade at all on the roof. He thought about beer in sweaty bottles. He’d tried making beer but it was flat, both in chemistry and emotion. Fruit jars lacked the ambiance of TV taverns.

What the Snakes had done was set up their operation in an old shopping mall on the far edge of Beaumont, close to the Port Arthur road. There was a K-mart and a Safeway and a discount appliance store, and a dozen smaller shops all connected by an inside mall. Josh was sure they weren’t using the whole place. The real operation would be hidden in some inaccessible corner, past a wall that had crumbled on its own or gotten help. You could walk through rubble all day and satisfy yourself there was nothing to see. Proper measures would be taken.

A noise from the street brought him about and he bellied across the roof and parted a tangle of dead vines. A one-wheeler took the corner fast, raising white dust and heading south. The motor was strangely flat in humid air. The Snake sat high on his perch, awkward as Orville Wright. The sun glanced off copper scales. His whip-tail snapped in the breeze. A moment later, the convoy followed. Nine boxy shapes painted the familiar vomit yellow. They made no sound and rode meters above the road.

There was nothing else to see. He backed off and dropped through a hole in the roof. The store was dark and cool. He laid on his pack and slept amid the ghosts of plumbing supplies. He dreamed that a dog came in and saw him. When it was dark he slipped out and walked back to the Neches River. The black gelding was hobbled in a thick grove of willows near the water. The mount jerked away when he approached; he held its nose and spoke to it quietly. A few miles north he turned west and followed Black Creek into the Thicket. A big magnolia grew near the creek, as broad as three men. He stepped down and allowed himself a smoke.

That was how they worked it, then; the convoy turning right past the mall had shown him the answer. The Snakes had a small repair base out past the Eastex Freeway. He had no idea what they repaired. The fact that it was there had gotten him thinking about how his buddy Howard Johnson ran his scam. Traffic came off the base and past the mall. All Howard had to do was bring his goods out the mall’s back door, circle around and edge in a convoy going south. The Snakes had a setup over east of Sabine Pass, a fair-sized town and a landing pad for the big space freighters that took everything in and out of the Gulf Coast. Howard would grease some palms and his stuff would go out clean with everything else. Someone would pick up the goods at the other end. Fucking larceny among the lizards. So much for advanced civilizations.

He mounted up again and took a long pull from the bottle he kept in his pack. The moon was nearly full. He could see flat water, a dense stand of thick-boled cypress. The mosquitoes found him out and he kicked the gelding into a trot.

He was up and out back splashing his face with cold water out of the bucket before the sun came over the trees, regretting the fact that he’d ridden in late and finished off the whiskey on the way. One of the men was chopping wood and the sound rang sharply over the clearing. The smell of breakfast led him into the cabin.

“Dry off before you sit,” Ellie told him. She didn’t turn from the stove. He wiped his dark beard on a cloth and filled his plate with fried fish and biscuits and sorghum. The hands had already eaten. He’d seen their plates stacked on a stump.

“You had to go and see,” Ellie said. “That’s what this is all about.”

“Don’t start on me now.”

Ellie faced him, a big wooden spoon in her hand. She was a long-limbed girl with a country-strong jaw and yellow hair. “What good did it do. Will you just tell me that?”

“I know old Howard’s a crook.”

“Big surprise.”

“Ellie. I wanted to see how he does it.”

Ellie turned back to the stove.

“He’s got a slick operation which is how he better do it. They ever catch him at it, they’ll make him into eighty dollar shoes and a belt.”

“And what’ll they do to you?”

“Commerce is a risk.”

“The way you do it it is.”

He got up and pushed back his chair and walked up behind her and touched her waist. She stiffened slightly under his hands.

“You didn’t bathe this morning. You smell like whiskey and horses.”

“You smell pretty good. Like flour and a woman in heat.”

“That last part’s wishing.” She squirmed out of his grasp. Josh saw her flush and knew evening would find her content. He drank down his coffee and walked out into the yard. The land below the cabin sloped down to a narrow inlet, the water there still and dark as slate. The wind had picked up right at dawn and the fog had burned off early. Moss bearded tall oak trees at the edge of the water. The world came to an end twenty yards into the swamp, choked off in dense vegetation. When the sun broke through, the feeble light was pale as butter.

Sol and Jim and the two new hands were waiting in the shade of the live oak that spread its branches over the cabin and the barn, the smokehouse and the hands’ quarters back past the corral. The red flag was down; Ellie had taken breakfast out to the men and disarmed the traps. Still, they waited past the last white line. They seldom came closer unless they were asked.

Josh didn’t much care for the new hands but Sol said they were all right. They came from up past Votaw and Sol was vaguely related to them both. Which said nothing at all, as everyone in the Thicket was somebody’s cousin. The two would bear watching. They both had the tallow-colored skin and spare frames of back country men who were never more than a day this side of hungry. They knew who Josh was and what he had, and they wouldn’t stop thinking about that.

Sol and Jim stood as Josh appeared. The new men followed their lead, one deliberately slower than the other.

“We got a lot to do,” Josh said without greeting. “I want those horses fit and clean. Jim, you see the trading stock gets some extra feed.” He turned to the new hands. “You all get started on those stumps past the barn. I want that patch flat as a table.”

One of the men looked down at his feet. The other faced Josh for an instant and scratched at his chin. He didn’t want to chop out stumps. It was backbreaking work in the heat of summer.

Sol stayed on when the others left. “Anything special you want me to do today, Josh?”

It was part of their morning rite. Josh would give him paper and a pinch of tobacco in acknowledgment of his status as top hand. Sol would roll a smoke and carefully put it away. Josh had never seen him light up. Sol took his pleasure in private, or did a little trading of his own.

“That storm last week took some cedar shakes off the barn,” Josh said. “You can see it from right here. In the unlikely event it ever rains again we’ll have a ton of sour feed to fork out.”

Sol looked down at his hands. It was something he should have noticed and he knew it. “I’ll get right to that, Josh. I sure will.”

“I found a bee tree yesterday evening coming back. Two miles down past that stand of palmetto. You might take a look at that.”

“Right after I get to that roof,” said Sol. “You have any luck out in the bush? See anything at all?” He pretended the question had suddenly struck him, but it wasn’t a thing he did well at all.

“A little sign, maybe,” Josh told him. “There’s wild porkers out there. One day I’ll get ‘em.”

“You take me out I’ll find them. I got a good nose for game.”

“I might do that,” said Josh. Sol knew it was a lie. He hadn’t gone out three days looking for pigs that didn’t exist.

Josh stood and Sol sprang up like his shadow. He showed Josh an open cheerful grin. A dog eager to fetch. “All right, get to it,” Josh told him. Sol trotted off and Josh rolled a smoke. You couldn’t help but like Sol and it was better to have a snoop on the property who was easy than one who wasn’t. It had to be Sol that told everything he knew to Martin Bregger. Jim was too dumb. Nobody could act that ignorant unless he was.

Josh sighed and walked back to the house. The sun was up strong, the air already too thick to breathe. On one side he had Martin Bregger, who ran everything clear up to the Red River and over east to Louisiana. Martin was too smart to try and kill the golden goose, but he wouldn’t mind at all if the goose was his own man instead of Josh. And on the other end he had the Snakes, Howard Johnson and whoever else was in it. He wasn’t sure which he trusted the least. If either one got foolish he was standing in the middle. He tossed down the smoke and stubbed it out. Maybe he was getting too old for this business. Except the only other business was going hungry, and he was sure as hell too old for that.

It seemed like a night for a treat; no good reason except Beaumont had left him feeling edgy. That, and Ellie’s disapproval. When he finished up his rounds and locked up he ran the patch of red cloth above the roof. The flag told the hands and whoever might decide to wander in that he’d armed the traps again and it wouldn’t be smart to poke around. No one had since the boys from Liberty County had decided to come in and try for the horses. Martin Bregger said it wouldn’t happen again and had come down himself to look at the bodies. Josh knew Bregger had likely sent them himself to see what the traps could do.

He went to the cellar and got the Herradura Añejo tequila, ninety-two proof and still in the bottle, that and two good joints, and then climbed to the bedroom upstairs. Ellie was moving about fluffing pillows. She slept in the raw year round, as he did himself, there being little need for bedclothes in the Thicket. The lamp was out but there was a candle. He liked the way the light kissed her skin. She turned and saw the bottle and the joints and gave him a curious smile.

“What’s the occasion, something special?”

“Make one up if you want.”

She got a single glass from beside the bed and watched him pour, then waited while he lit up the joints, closing her eyes and drawing smoke into her lungs.

“God, it isn’t going to take much of that.”

“It’s all right, is it?”

“Better than all right.”

Josh tasted the tequila on his tongue. Quick picture of a fountain, red-tiled roof and bright color.

“I’m sorry my leaving upset you.”

“I don’t ever like you going. Specially if it’s got to do with a town. That wasn’t something you really had to do.”

“Maybe not.”

“I don’t like staying here, Josh. Making a little circle around the house.”

“Isn’t any other way I know to do it.”

“I still don’t have to like it.” She flipped ash on the floor, using her whole arm in the motion. He gave her the glass again and she held it in both hands, bringing it to her mouth like a child. Her eyes came up and she caught him checking her out.

“You didn’t need to get out the goodies. I can be had.”

“Isn’t what it was for.”

“Well, then. Let’s pretend it was.” She touched his chest and smiled. “I’ll fight you off a little.”

“Not if you finish that toke.”

“Then I guess I finish the toke. I can get you whenever I want.”

“That’s true.”

“While you were gone Sol acted real funny.”

“Funny how?”

“Walking around the yard all the time, stopping to get a rock out of his shoe. That kind of thing.”

Josh grinned. “He’s trying to map out the traps. I’ve caught him at it before.”

“You think it’s funny?”

“Ellie, you know how to find the traps? Step on ‘em. That’s not a practical solution.” There were two trap perimeters around the cabin. When he was gone, Ellie armed the outside perimeter day and night, and shut off the inside perimeter during the day. It left her a little room to walk around, and was better than being shut up in the house.

“You’re not going again soon, are you?” she asked.

“No, you know I’m not.”

“Good. Just don’t.” She pinched out the candle and came in close against his shoulder. The loving was good and they surprised each other with their needs. When Ellie was asleep he looked up at the ceiling and thought about Sol. He was getting a little cocky. He never did anything he wasn’t told to do so Martin was egging him on. Pushing him into something or maybe nothing at all. The whole idea was to keep Josh from getting any sleep and sometimes it worked better than others.

He spent his days mostly in the cellar, getting his goods in order for Howard Johnson’s next visit, the squares on his homemade calendar diminishing much faster than he liked. The cellar was as large as the cabin space above, lined with concrete blocks Josh had hauled in from Batson by team and wagon three summers before. It was caulked, painted and generally proof against the wet ground pressing on every side, and had the virtue of being twenty degrees cooler in the summer. Ellie was from northern Minnesota and had no tolerance for hot and humid weather. More than once he’d been tempted to bring her down, when her skin flushed red and she could hardly get a breath. He hated to see her suffer but it was a rule he couldn’t break. He’d made it clear to Martin that no one but himself had ever been in the cellar or knew how to get in or what was there. It was the only way he had of protecting Ellie. After the boys from Liberty County had taken the short course in fragmentation mines and other surprises, Josh had broken his rule about no one in the cabin. He had brought Martin in and shown him the heavy steel door to the cellar, which was really the front half of a safe, and let him read the sign he’d painted just above the combination:

WARNING!

NO ONE CAN OPEN THIS BUT ME. EVEN IF YOU HAD THE COMBINATION THE DOOR IS RIGGED TO BLOW THE WHOLE FUCKING CABIN UNLESS THE DOOR IS FIRST DISARMED IN SEVERAL PLACES.

SINCERELY YOURS,

JOSHUA T. RAINES

Martin had seemed impressed. He had stopped looking crazed for several moments. Of course the flaw in all this was if Martin somehow got past the traps outside and got to Ellie he could make Josh open up the door. If things ever went that far it was over anyway and wouldn’t matter. The best guarantee against trouble was that Martin was a businessman first and a looney-tune second. That, and the fact that he was scared to death of the Snakes. Josh knew this for certain. It was easier just to let him keep dealing with Howard Johnson than try to cut him out and learn what he traded to the Snakes. Sol’s little capers simply reflected Martin’s feeling that Josh ought to worry a little more. It was a sound corporate tactic. One that told him Martin was probably only marginally unhinged.

The flyer dipped low over the swamp, scaring up bright-colored birds from the trees. The craft was a dull mustard yellow, shaped like half a melon, its power source vaguely asthmatic, a man sucking air through his teeth. It settled on runners in the clearing where Josh had whitewashed a circle. A blister set asymmetrically forward was tinted against the sun. It slid back to reveal the four Snakes. Pilot. Two armed guards. Howard Johnson stepped out and came quickly toward Josh, walking in the springy deliberate manner that make Snakes appear to move in slow-motion—even when they ran as fast as deer, which Josh had watched them do from a distance.

Josh differed from Martin in that he feared them for what they were, and not for the way they looked. Reasonably they were no more alien than upright chameleons. Seven-foot lizards that talked. Rust-sienna skin, salmon under-belly. Whip tail and apparently no use for any clothing. Howard Johnson wore a weapon, slung from a decorative webbing about his throat. To Josh, it looked like a lubricating tool, but would likely prove effective.

The Snake came to a stop. Forty-weight eyes found Josh. “Have a nice day,” said Howard.

“Right, Coke is it,” said Josh. “Hang on, I’ll get the stuff.” He left the Snake standing in the yard and went in and got his goods, packed on a dolly and covered with a tarp. Ellie didn’t come out of the kitchen. Howard Johnson made her nervous. Josh wheeled the dolly across the yard and into the barn, waited until Howard was inside and shut the door. Sol and Jim and the new hands were off in the woods. They had left before sunup with no urging. In the hot, heavy air of the barn, Howard smelled musty and slightly sweet. Dead leaves and pollen. Josh pulled back the tarp and set his wares on a weathered plank table. Light from the slanted window was slightly muted.

“Some real good items this time,” he told Howard. “You’re lucky. First-rate stuff isn’t all that easy to find. Rats get to the canvas. They take to that pigment like candy.” As he talked he fooled with the paintings, turning one a little to the light, brushing at the frame of another.

“I like the people dancing,” said Howard.

“Well sure,” said Josh, “that’s a Degas.”

“Degas is good, I think.”

“Degas is good.” He knew Howard really didn’t care about names. While he talked about dancers his eyes were flicking over the other paintings. It irritated the hell out of Josh that the Snake had a fine critical eye. Bluebonnets and moon-eyed children wouldn’t cut it. Howard knew better. Josh had only tried it on him once.

“Just five, Josh?” Howard shook his head sadly in human imitation. “This is all?”

Not unexpected, but a direction Josh had hoped they might avoid. “We’re talking masterpieces, Howard. These are first-rate goods.”

“I know that, Josh.”

“Then what are we saying here?”

“Last time there were nine.”

“It can’t be the same every time,” Josh said patiently. “You know that. It depends on what I find.”

“Five is not enough, Josh.” His voice was slightly nasal, the words faintly musical and extended, as if he might have learned English from a Chinese waiter.

Josh studied the paintings while he thought about what to do next. He couldn’t tell Howard he had only found two the last trip, that the others were from his hold-back stash. Besides the Degas he had the Miro and the Klee and the Andrew Wyeth, and a Lennart Anderson that looked as good as Gauguin. Back in the cellar he had the Freilicher landscape and the Cezanne and what he thought was maybe a Titian. And that was it. He wanted to tell Howard Johnson that it hadn’t been his idea to flatten Houston. That devastation hindered the earnest collector. He was fast running out of museums, concentrating now on well-to-do residential rubble. This last avenue hit or miss, wealth not always reflecting taste.

He showed Howard the other stuff he had, the Kazak carpet and the three good Téotihuacán heads and a Minoan beaker jug, a salesman winding up his pitch and saving a little kicker for the last. Howard had a weakness for good glass, and he brought out the Baccarat crystal and held it up to the light, flipping the rim so Howard could hear it ring. A tulip-shaped glass, clear as air and whisper-thin.

“Oh yes very nice,” said Howard. He took the piece carefully from Josh. Their hands didn’t touch. He held the crystal by its base, fingers long and spatulate at the tips. Needles of light flecked his skin, for a moment a disco lizard.

“I would like more of these. In other shapes as well.”

“So would I,” Josh said carefully. Howard had an ear for human inflection. “I found this item in a shop that handled fine crystal and china. Spode and Waterford, Steuben, everything the best. Two floors of it. I never saw so much broken glass in my life. This was the only piece intact.”

“You should find other shops such as that.”

“That’s a real good idea. As a matter of fact I’m working on another site now. There might be something, I can’t promise.”

The other site was pure fiction and maybe Howard knew it. If there was a Mason jar left in Houston Josh couldn’t find it. In the cellar he had a single, exquisite Lalique, a crystal piece with a frosted satin finish that would knock the Snake on his tail. Howard would expect something big next time and he’d have to bring it out.

The Snakes came in from the flyer and loaded everything up, packing the items carefully under Howard’s watchful eye. Josh handed Howard the envelope with his samples for next time, then loaded up the goods Howard had brought him and wheeled the dolly into the house.

Howard was waiting in the yard.

“Bring Ellie outside,” he told Josh.

“Ellie? What for?”

It shook Josh badly and Howard caught his concern. “I’m not going to hurt her, Josh. I am going to take her up in the flyer. I will bring her back safely. She can look at the countryside and see the Gulf from great heights.”

“Howard, I don’t think Ellie’d like to do that.”

“Bring her out, Josh.”

He was overcome by a terrible fear, a helpless rage. There was nothing he could do and there was no use asking the Snake what he wanted. He turned and went inside. Ellie looked up from the kitchen table and read his face. She stood quickly and Josh held her shoulders and sat her down and told her.

“Oh Jesus . . .” She looked like a bird caught in a trap.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “If he was going to do something he’d just do it. That’s his way. I can’t stop him, Ellie.”

She pulled away and stood and walked out of the cabin, past Howard without looking. Howard nodded to Josh and followed Ellie. Josh watched the flyer lift from the clearing and bank out of sight above the trees. He went inside and found the Remington 12-gauge which he wasn’t supposed to have and leaned it by the door. Howard was trying to tell him something. He didn’t much care what it was. If he didn’t bring Ellie back safe he’d try to kill him. Pointless. But the only gesture he could imagine.

It was a full two hours before he heard the flyer again. It settled in afternoon shadow and Howard got out and then Ellie. Josh ran out to meet her. Her face looked pale and unfinished. She’d thrown up and stained the front of her dress.

“Ellie . . .”

“Just leave me the fuck alone, all right?” She pushed him off and walked shakily to the cabin.

“She became ill,” said Howard.

“Yeah, I can see that. You want to tell me what this is all about?”

“Let’s walk,” said Howard. He left the front of the house and started past the barn to the corral. The horses shied and trotted away at his approach, bunching up at the far side of the pen, afraid of the unfamiliar smell. There were six pack animals and nine riding horses. Howard drew his weapon and began firing methodically into the pens. Josh stared in dismay, certain this was something he only imagined. A big sorrel mare went down heavily and thrashed in the dust. The other animals went crazy with fear. They shrieked and kicked out at each other and ran blindly into the fence. Howard killed five of the riding horses. He left the pack animals alone, a point not wasted on Josh. Finally, he put the weapon away. Josh couldn’t take his eyes from the corral.

“It was not a good idea to approach my place of business,” said Howard. “I am greatly concerned about this, Josh.”

Josh made no attempt to deny it, or ask Howard how he’d found him out. That’s what it was all about, then. Ellie and the horses. Things could be taken from him. Returned or not returned.

“All right, you made your point,” said Josh. “Here’s one you maybe didn’t consider. People see you and me having trouble, that isn’t good for business. It gives them ideas.”

“You’d better take care of that.”

“You got any suggestions?”

Howard nodded toward the corral. “Fresh meat is scarce. Give some to Martin Bregger.” He had never mentioned Bregger before. He was letting Josh know something else.

“I will be back in one month,” Howard announced. “One instead of four. Have more goods ready.”

“Now Christ, that doesn’t make sense!” Josh was tired of holding back his anger. “I can’t make a run that fast and you know it. What are you trying to do?”

“If the canvases are difficult to find you may substitute crystal for some of the paintings. One good piece will equal three paintings.”

“It doesn’t work like that. The glass is just as scarce.”

“Try harder, Josh.”

“All right, I don’t know. I’ll do what I can.”

“I know you will. Goodbye, Josh.”

He waited until the flyer disappeared and then turned and stomped back into the cabin and armed the traps, not even bothering to raise the flag. Maybe Sol would come back and blow off his ass. Ellie was upstairs. She had changed clothes and washed herself off. The bedroom smelled sour.

“You all right?” He knew it was a useless thing to say.

“I got sick and threw up and passed out. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I’m fine, Josh.”

“I’m sorry, Ellie.”

“He shoot all the horses?”

“Just the ones I don’t need for business.”

“Beaumont. Your goddamn adventure.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

“If you want I can get you something to eat. Some soup or I’ll fry up those potatoes.”

“No thanks. You want you can bring me the rest of the Herradura.”

“I wish this hadn’t of happened.”

“So do I.” She looked at him for the first time and he saw less anger there than despair. “I’ll be okay. Just leave me alone for awhile.”

Sol and Jim and the new hands came in before dark. The new man took one look at the corral and ran off into the woods. Josh got Sol and Jim butchering before the flies could do more damage. Sol knew better than to ask any questions. Martin would know something had happened here before morning.

Josh took his goods off the dolly and into the cellar, lit a lamp and locked himself in. The way the operation worked, Josh would give Howard a few grams of what he wanted and Howard would work it up. The goods came back in square plastic containers. Some standard Snake measure that came out to roughly four and a half gallons. The Snakes were clearly hotshot chemists; anything Josh had in mind they could make it. Howard never seemed concerned with the sample packets. All he told Josh was the process was risky and expensive; Josh had to take his word for that.

The Snakes leveled the cities with sonic disaster, some weapon that shattered buildings and fine crystal. The best casualty figures Josh had heard were eighty percent. Maybe more, and the same for other countries. The Snakes went away and let pestilence take its course. Disease and famine took another hefty percent. Survivors looted shopping centers and homes and grocery stores. Cattle and pigs quickly vanished. Cats and dogs. Nine years later, the Snakes came again, quashing feeble resistance and settling in to stay. They left people alone and went about doing whatever they did. Howard Johnson caught Josh looting a 7-11 ruin and made him a deal. Supply determined trade. Most items were spoiled or lost forever. Canned goods, Hershey bars and Sprite. Josh concentrated his efforts on items that had lasted. Salt. Sugar. Tea. Coffee. Tobacco. Isolated pockets of whiskey and wine. Seeds that would still come up. Occasional caches of gasoline. Marijuana, and selected recreational and medicinal drugs. Some of the food items had gone stale but nobody cared. Josh gave samples to Howard Johnson and Howard brought the goods back in bulk. There was never very much. Maybe seven hundred pounds each trip.

So Josh traded art to Howard Johnson, which Howard smuggled out to distant worlds. Howard made formerly staple items which Josh traded off to Martin Bregger. Martin stayed in power through control of rare goods. He gave Josh vegetables and fruit, flour and clothing and nails, axe handles and protection from Martin Bregger. Howard Johnson got paid in some measure; Josh had never even thought about that. All he needed to know was that Howard would never let him out of the business. If he couldn’t get out, he had to make certain he stayed in. An indispensable link in the chain of commerce and trade. Why was Howard suddenly making that difficult to do? It could be the Beaumont thing or something else. Maybe lizards thought like Martin Bregger. Keep Josh from getting any sleep. It had a perverse sense of logic, the ring of truth.

Martin appeared in the yard with the morning fog. Four men, a wagon and a team were in the clearing. One man held Martin’s reins while he stood under the trees and waited for Josh. Josh had the goods ready and waiting, stacked on wooden pallets a few yards past his inside perimeter of traps. The goods had been transferred from the Snakes’ plastic containers to canvas sacks, Josh having skimmed off portions for personal use.

Josh appeared in the door and Martin nodded. “Morning, friend. It’s going to be a scorcher.”

“Martin . . .”

Bregger was tall and stringy, a man with possum eyes. His height seemed wrong, as if something might have stretched him out of shape. One leg was shorter than the other, causing him to stand like a tree grown up in the wind. This didn’t bother Martin; other men found themselves leaning off balance to catch his eye.

“Josh, my boys blow up if they get those goods?”

“Not now they won’t, Martin.”

Martin smiled in appreciation. He nodded and his crew brought over the wagon and loaded up. As soon as the pallets were empty, they filled them with the goods they’d brought along. Sweet corn and tomatoes, sacks of onions, strips of metal strapping and bolts of cloth. The men worked quickly. They didn’t like walking in Josh’s yard. Once they were clear, Josh ducked inside and armed the perimeter again, making a big show of raising the flag. Martin was still standing in his spot.

“Understand you had some trouble,” he said to Josh.

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“That’s good to know.”

“I got you some fresh meat. Be a good idea to start it smoking or eat it fast.”

“Sure kind of you. Hate to see you shoot prime horses just for me.” Josh waited for Bregger to get to it. “Your trouble with the Snakes goin’ to interfere with business?”

“I can handle the Snakes just fine.”

A wide possum grin. “I know you can, Josh.”

He decided there was no use putting it off. “I’ll need a couple of escorts, Martin. Sunup four days from now. I’m going back to Houston.”

Martin smiled. “Did put the screws to you, didn’t he?”

“The business that doesn’t grow stands still.”

“Uh-huh.” Martin picked at a tooth. “I’ll have the boys here. Pleasant trip to you.” He turned back to the wagon, listing to the right. A man handed over the reins and he mounted up. Sol and Jim brought meat out of the barn and slung it off their shoulders into the wagon. Blood had soaked the sacking and left stains along their arms. Sol pretended he didn’t know Martin or the others.

Ellie seemed better. There was still a distance between them. Maybe that would change with time. She walked through her days like a woman coming back from a sickness, brushing against life out of habit. Josh would find her standing in the kitchen in a pool of morning light, clutching a spoon or teacup to her breast. He sensed she was drawing some strength from the familiar.

She was reconciled to the trip; that, or too much within herself to show concern. “I’ll be all right,” she told him. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I do worry, Ellie.”

“Worry about yourself. And come back safe.” She rested her hands on his shoulders. The action seemed an effort. When she kissed him, her lips were dry as paper.

Sol and Jim had the packhorses ready. Josh had decided on three. He’d likely find goods to warrant one, but no use advertising that. Martin Bregger’s two men were waiting under the big stand of cypress by the road. The older of the two reached up and flicked at moss with his knife. Josh had worked with the pair before. Sol brought over the black gelding and told Josh he’d hold down the fort. Sol’s open, boyish grin irritated Josh more than usual.

By early mid-morning they had passed the marshy lake with its forest of skeletal trees. Yellow iris dotted the shore. The way south snaked through willows and sharp-leaved holly. Farther, the willows gave way to a steep hammock of pine and welcome shade. A sound like applause startled Josh and he turned to see hundreds of white herons overhead. Birds reassured him. Wildlife was apparently holding its own, the hunger less intense across the land. Creatures mating and reproducing, faster than people could eat them. He kept a running tally of survivors. Grey squirrels. Swamp rabbits. No more deer or wild turkey, but now and then a possum or a coon. Coons were as sly as people. He told himself the Thicket was no place to take a poll. Wildlife had always gathered here and what he saw didn’t reflect true conditions.

He didn’t talk to Martin’s riders. There was nothing he had to say. They were there to protect him, make sure he and the horses got to Houston and back safe. Raiders were always about; protecting Josh was essential to Martin’s business. The men carried pistols but never showed them. It wasn’t smart to let another see you owned something of such great value.

Josh picked up the pace and led them through a tricky piece of swamp. Gnats followed the men and the horses. The trip was settling down in his head. Going back this soon wouldn’t hurt. He was running out of goods; Howard had simply nudged him into action, a little sooner than he liked. The Beaumont business or something else entirely—it didn’t matter. Motives here were futile. A lizard mind was razorblade jelly.

Just after noon he called a halt and stepped out of the saddle. He ate biscuits and honey and sat down under a tree and listened to the lazy sound of cicadas. The riders ate and kept to themselves. Branches crowded in overhead; the air itself was lemony yellow. Cinnamon fern grew thickly under the trees. Josh saw a canebrake rattler slip through the grass. There were still plenty of snakes—the other kind. Snapping turtles and frogs, and ‘gators back in the worst parts of the swamp. He wondered how Snakes viewed the reptile population. Probably the same way people thought of apes.

A hundred years before, black bear had roamed the Thicket. Bears couldn’t run as fast as hogs. They tracked the razorbacks and caught them when they bedded down for the night. Bit the back of the neck and started eating. Wild hogs feared nothing in the world except bears. Josh remembered the taste of bacon. Pleasures now extinct seemed all the sweeter.

He was coming to his feet when the unmistakable sound reached his ears. He looked at Martin’s riders. They led the animals quickly back in the trees, held the reins and squatted on their heels. Josh crawled up through the brush. He’d come due south through the Thicket, intending to skirt 90 and cross over past the Liberty County line. The Snakes kept 90 open for their convenience. Now there was traffic on the road. Four landcars and three flyers overhead. The striped cursive symbol was one everyone knew. Lizard law and order. They’d have to hole up or go back. Travel was out of the question.

The direction of the traffic worried Josh. East, into Beaumont or past it, and past it wasn’t likely. He could tell himself it had nothing to do with Howard Johnson but making himself believe it was something else. Avoidance seemed a temperate solution. Reptile fuzz was the worst kind of trouble you could find.

He walked back and squatted by the riders. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he told them. “Don’t expect me till noon maybe tomorrow. Take the horses back up Jackson Creek and wait for me there.”

The older of the two looked at Josh. “We’re supposed to stay with you.”

“You’re supposed to stay with me if I go to Houston. We can’t go to Houston right now.”

The man wore a straw hat frayed at the edges. “Where is it you’re going?”

“That’s not your business. You don’t want to go.”

The man thought about that, putting together the Snakes’ appearance and Josh’s sudden change of plans. Coming up with indeterminate answers. Each possibility worse than the last.

“We’ll be at the creek,” he said finally.

“Don’t get attached to those horses,” Josh told him. “They don’t belong to you.”

The shopping center was no longer deserted. A flyer sat untended near the rows of rusted cars. The three squat sedans reminded Josh of boll weevils. Three at the Safeway, one farther down at the K-Mart entrance. Winking yellow lights illumined Snakes on official errands. There was no more room for question. Howard Johnson was busted. Which meant, essentially, that Josh was busted too. They’d want to know connections and Howard would tell them. There was no way to guess whether they had him—Josh had to assume they didn’t, that he still had time to get Ellie out of the cabin and into the Thicket. He backed away from the broken fence. The gelding was in an alley, two blocks away and to his right. He stood and started back across the street. Light stabbed out of the dark, nearly catching him in the open. He leaped for the cover of tall weeds. The one-wheelers drew tight circles on the road, came to a stop in a line. Josh guessed four, maybe five. They made Snake-talk and purred their engines. They weren’t looking for him but they clearly didn’t intend to go away. Someone had told them to keep everyone clear of the center.

Josh considered. There was no way to get across the street. Ahead, a warehouse wall blocked the way. He would have to follow the ditch to the back of the mall. Go all the way around and hope for no Snakes on the other side. It would take a good hour. He needed to be heading for the Thicket.

A building had collapsed leaving a mountain of broken brick. Debris lapped the rear of the center. Box-like carriers nosed the concrete dock where K-Mart shoppers had loaded their goods. The carriers floated just above the ground. Bright cones of light illumined the dock, the reef-like strands of rubble. Josh viewed the scene without pleasure. He could easily break his neck if he climbed the rubble. The area near the docks was bright as day. Josh watched the procedure.

Workers wheeled dollies out of the mall, loaded them into carriers, turned and went back for more. More what? Josh wondered. The Snake cops were hauling off a hell of a lot of goods. What else was Howard into besides art?

One way out. If he kept to the shadow below the dock, worked his way under the carriers past the rubble to the other end of the center. He watched the routine once more. There were maybe four minutes when all the Snakes were gone. Loading up inside or going back with empty dollies. Check it out again. He saw he was losing his nerve, waiting for intercession. He took a deep breath and bolted from cover.

The Snakes loaded a dolly directly above. The carrier dipped slightly under the weight. When they left, he made for the next carrier in line. A barrier of rubble intervened. For a moment he was level with the floor of the dock itself. He hesitated, checked quickly for Snakes. Poked his head inside the carrier for a look. The space was packed with long rectangular containers. Pressure-sealed in plastic, accordion ridges along the sides. They reminded Josh of crackers. Individual packs for locked-in flavor. The packs were different sizes. Two feet square on up. It was a bad idea but he knew he was going to do it. Pulling himself up, he slipped inside and moved to the far back wall. With his knife, he cut through the translucent plastic. Stretching the ridges apart, he got a glimpse of a very nice Utrillo. He’d traded it to Howard in March. Behind the Utrillo was another. Not really another, the same one. And after that another, the same painting. Josh tried another, slightly larger container. Grant Wood. All identical down to a wavy scratch on the frame.

He didn’t picture for a moment a roomful of busy Snake forgers. The little bastards had a duplicating device. Something that could stamp out paintings like cookies. Josh ran a gallery operation; Howard had dime-store distribution. The egg-shaped containers to his left would be Pre-Columbian jars. Aztec culture by the gross. So much for hard-working chemists, miserly portions of pot. Howard could turn it out by the ton.

He heard them coming and knew he couldn’t make it to the front. Crouching behind Utrillo, he waited until they wheeled the new load inside. They had to jockey things around to make room. For a moment, the containers hid him from view. He moved up as the load moved back. The dolly was flush against the carrier, stacked high with containers. No way to drop back to the ground. He went to his knees and crawled through the stacks, waited, then darted into the mall.

The mall was a mess. Storefronts gutted and crowded with rubble. Dark except for lights set up farther down. He ducked inside a store. Hickory Farms, the shelves stripped for more than twenty years. He guessed the big lights were where Howard had stored his goods. The lizard cops were looking it over. Part of the roof had collapsed. A cavern hung with rusted steel vines. It allowed Josh to move through stores without going back to the mall. Discount shoes, Doubleday. A shop for skiers and divers. Loaded dollies passed in the mall. The stench hit him at Penney’s. Something was recently dead; it would be deader tomorrow in the heat.

He could hear Snake voices and see the lights in the mall. He was right next door or close to it, much too bright and he moved to the back of the store. Clothing, he decided, from the jungle of empty racks. Light cast a narrow dusty beam on the floor. It came from a fist-sized puncture in the wall. The hole sprouted old electric wiring. The smell here was bad. He held his breath and went to his knees, turning his head to see in the hole. He backed off fast, throwing up in one violent constriction after another. His body was helpless to stop. Cries of alarm reached his ears and he knew the Snakes had heard him. He tried to crawl away. The Snake poked him with something hard. Josh turned and saw a muzzle that resembled a garden hose. Two more Snakes arrived quickly. Josh wiped his face with his shirt. The Snakes gave way to another; he wore ornamental webbing around his throat. He turned a flash on Josh, then bent to study him closer. Standing, he gave quick instructions to the others and walked away.

The Snakes pulled him roughly to his feet, took his knife and his belongings and hustled him out of the store into the mall. Outside, they opened the rear door of a landcar, tossed him in and shut him up in the dark.

Josh tried not to think, a process that only served to sharpen mental pictures. The store was full of Ellies. Hundreds of dead Ellies under a white hot light. The Snakes were dragging them by the legs and tossing them in mustard-colored dumpsters. The Ellies wore blue cotton dresses and jogging shoes . . .

“Jesus!” The image was too sharp, too bright. His stomach lurched again. There was nothing left to give. He took off his shirt and tossed it away. His hands were shaking and wouldn’t stop. The landcar started up smoothly. He felt it turn left, leave the lot and go north. The Ellies wouldn’t go away. Dead Ellies in the store. One back at the cabin, but which one? He saw her in light. Sunlight finding her in the kitchen. A candle by the bed. If he looked at her now, touched her again, would she be the same? Ellie, Ellie . . . His throat tightened just short of closing. He shut his eyes and tried to push the image aside. He wasn’t sure he wanted the answer. Maybe that wasn’t a problem. The way things were going it probably wasn’t a question he’d ever get to ask.

The ride seemed to last half an hour. When the landcar stopped, the Snakes came back and let him out. Dark pines shadowed the rutted dirt road. Josh smelled stagnant water. A flash shined in his eyes and the Snakes motioned him forward. One brought up the rear. He watched the other spring along in an awkward, peculiarly graceful manner. Finally, he stopped and motioned Josh to a halt. A square boxy light sat on the ground. It illuminated two more Snakes. They were digging a shallow grave.

Josh felt a quick little motion under his heart. Breaking glass. He’d guessed where they were going, but a guess is a speculation. A hole is to the point.

When the grave was complete, the guards and the digger left. Josh heard steps, turned and saw the official-looking Snake from the mall.

“You are the one named Josh,” he said abruptly. “You worked with Howard Johnson. You gathered artifacts and traded them for goods. Howard Johnson produced the goods.”

“Yes. I did.” Josh saw no reason to deny it.

“The female. She came from your place? She left at some time with Howard Johnson?”

“Yes.”

“And Howard Johnson brought her back.”

“Yes.”

“You’d like to know if she is real, or if Howard left a copy.”

“The thought occurred.”

” ‘Real’ is a personal observation.”

“Is that supposed to be an answer?”

“An answer is not a solution. That was a very foolish decision on Howard’s part. Smuggling is one thing. Duplicating a being is something else. This is why I put him out of business.”

“A humanitarian gesture.”

“A contradiction in terms.”

“Look. What was Howard going to do with them?”

“Do with what?”

“With the Ellies.”

“Trust me. You don’t want to know.” The Snake drew his weapon. “This is your burial spot. No one will see you again.”

Josh felt himself unravel. The Snake pointed the weapon in the hole and fired twice.

Josh looked at him.

“Take a shovel and fill it up.”

Josh did. The Snake held the light. Josh was wet all over when he finished. The Snake tossed him his knife and his belongings.

“Baskin Robbins. Is that a name?”

“I guess it is.”

“Then you will call me Baskin Robbins. Don’t go back and get your horse. Walk home. Tomorrow afternoon, I will officially discover your cabin and destroy it from a flyer. Don’t take anything with you. Sol will guide you and the female to a place where someone will meet you and pick you up.”

“Sol will?”

“Sol worked for the Bregger person. But mostly he worked for Howard Johnson. Now he works for me. Basically, we start all over from scratch. I have to burn those goods we took from the mall. I still have Howard’s originals. I think. Doesn’t matter. You can’t work in Houston anymore. I want you out of the district. We’ll set you up somewhere else. Maybe San Francisco. Denver.”

“You’re going to keep the operation like it is?”

“Yes, of course. Why not?”

Josh sat down on his grave and made a smoke. “All right,” he said, “let’s talk business. There are some things you got to know about art . . .”

AND I AWOKE AIMD FOUND ME HERE ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE

James Tiptree, Jr.

As most of you probably know by now, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author James Tiptree, Jr. was actually the pseudonym of the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, a semiretired experimental psychologist and former member of the American intelligence community who also wrote occasionally under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon’s tragic death in 1987 put an end to “both” careers, but not before she had won two Nebula and two Hugo Awards as Tiptree, won another Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon, and established herself, under whatever name, as one of the very best science fiction writers of our times. As Tiptree, Dr. Sheldon published two novels, Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air, and nine short-story collections: Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Starsongs of an Old Primate, Out of the Everywhere, Tales of the Quintana Roo, Byte Beautiful, The Starry Rift, the posthumously published Crown of Stars, and the recent posthumous retrospective collection, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

Dr. Sheldon probably wrote more about aliens and their interactions with humans than any other writer of the ’70s, and the thread connecting most, if not all, of Tiptree/Sheldon’s alien stories is cultural contamination, the meddling of one culture with another, often with disastrous results. The unsettlingly plausible story that follows is perhaps her most ingenious and effective handling of the theme, and a fever dream-vivid experience that you may have a hard time forgetting. . . .

He was standing absolutely still by a service port, staring out at the belly of the Orion docking above us. He had on a gray uniform and his rusty hair was cut short. I took him for a station engineer.

That was bad for me. Newsmen strictly don’t belong in the bowels of Big Junction. But in my first twenty hours I hadn’t found anyplace to get a shot of an alien ship.

I turned my holocam to show its big World Media insigne and started my bit about What It Meant to the People Back Home who were paying for it all.

“—it may be routine work to you, sir, but we owe it to them to share—”

His face came around slow and tight, and his gaze passed over me from a peculiar distance.

“The wonders, the drama,” he repeated dispassionately. His eyes focused on me. “You consummated fool.”

“Could you tell me what races are coming in, sir? If I could even get a view—”

He waved me to the port. Greedily I angled my lenses up at the long blue hull blocking out the starfield. Beyond her I could see the bulge of a black and gold ship.

“That’s a Foramen,” he said. “There’s a freighter from Belye on the other side, you’d call it Arcturus. Not much traffic right now.”

“You’re the first person who’s said two sentences to me since I’ve been here, sir. What are those colorful little craft?”

“Procya,” he shrugged. “They’re always around. Like us.”

I squashed my face on the vitrite, peering. The walls clanked. Somewhere overhead aliens were off-loading into their private sector of Big Junction. The man glanced at his wrist.

“Are you waiting to go out, sir?”

His grunt could have meant anything.

“Where are you from on Earth?” he asked me in his hard tone.

I started to tell him and suddenly saw that he had forgotten my existence. His eyes were on nowhere, and his head was slowly bowing forward onto the port frame.

“Go home,” he said thickly. I caught a strong smell of tallow.

“Hey, sir!” I grabbed his arm; he was in rigid tremor. “Steady, man.”

“I’m waiting . . . waiting for my wife. My loving wife.” He gave a short ugly laugh. “Where are you from?”

I told him again.

“Go home,” he mumbled. “Go home and make babies. While you still can.”

One of the early GR casualties, I thought.

“Is that all you know?” His voice rose stridently. “Fools. Dressing in their styles. Gnivo suits, Aoleelee music. Oh, I see your newscasts,” he sneered. “Nixi parties. A year’s salary for a floater. Gamma radiation? Go home, read history. Ballpoint pens and bicycles—”

He started a slow slide downward in the half gee. My only informant. We struggled confusedly; he wouldn’t take one of my sobertabs but I finally got him along the service corridor to a bench in an empty loading bay. He fumbled out a little vacuum cartridge. As I was helping him unscrew it, a figure in starched whites put his head in the bay.

“I can be of assistance, yes?” His eyes popped, his face was covered with brindled fur. An alien, a Procya! I started to thank him but the red-haired man cut me off.

“Get lost. Out.”

The creature withdrew, its big eyes moist. The man stuck his pinky in the cartridge and then put it up his nose, gasping deep in his diaphragm. He looked toward his wrist.

“What time is it?”

I told him.

“News,” he said. “A message for the eager, hopeful human race. A word about those lovely, lovable aliens we all love so much.” He looked at me. “Shocked, aren’t you, newsboy?”

I had him figured now. A xenophobe. Aliens plot to take over Earth.

“Ah Christ, they couldn’t care less.” He took another deep gasp, shuddered and straightened. “The hell with generalities. What time d’you say it was? All right, I’ll tell you how I learned it. The hard way. While we wait for my loving wife. You can bring that little recorder out of your sleeve, too. Play it over to yourself some time . . . when it’s too late.” He chuckled. His tone had become chatty—an educated voice. “You ever hear of supernormal stimuli?”

“No,” I said. “Wait a minute. White sugar?”

“Near enough. Y’know Little Junction bar in D.C.? No, you’re an Aussie, you said. Well, I’m from Burned Barn, Nebraska.”

He took a breath, consulting some vast disarray of the soul.

“I accidentally drifted into Little Junction Bar when I was eighteen. No. Correct that. You don’t go into Little Junction by accident, any more than you first shoot skag by accident.

“You go into Little Junction because you’ve been craving it, dreaming about it, feeding on every hint and clue about it, back there in Burned Barn, since before you had hair in your pants. Whether you know it or not. Once you’re out of Burned Barn, you can no more help going into Little Junction than a sea-worm can help rising to the moon.

“I had a brand-new liquor I.D. in my pocket. It was early; there was an empty spot beside some humans at the bar. Little Junction isn’t an embassy bar, y’know. I found out later where the high-caste aliens go—when they go out. The New Rive, the Curtain by the Georgetown Marina.

“And they go by themselves. Oh, once in a while they do the cultural exchange bit with a few frosty couples of other aliens and some stuffed humans. Galactic Amity with a ten-foot pole.

“Little Junction was the place where the lower orders went, the clerks and drivers out for kicks. Including, my friend, the perverts. The ones who can take humans. Into their beds, that is.”

He chuckled and sniffed his finger again, not looking at me.

“Ah, yes. Little Junction is Galactic Amity night, every night. I ordered . . . what? A margharita. I didn’t have the nerve to ask the snotty spade bartender for one of the alien liquors behind the bar. It was dim. I was trying to stare everywhere at once without showing it. I remember those white boneheads—Lyrans, that is. And a mess of green veiling I decided was a multiple being from someplace. I caught a couple of human glances in the bar mirror. Hostile flicks. I didn’t get the message, then.

“Suddenly an alien pushed right in beside me. Before I could get over my paralysis, I heard this blurry voice:

” ‘You air a futeball enthushiash?’

“An alien had spoken to me. An alien, a being from the stars. Had spoken. To me.

“Oh, god, I had no time for football, but I would have claimed a passion for paper-folding, for dumb crambo—anything to keep him talking. I asked him about his home-planet sports, I insisted on buying his drinks. I listened raptly while he spluttered out a play-by-lay account of a game I wouldn’t have turned a dial for. The ‘Grain Bay Pashkers’. Yeah. And I was dimly aware of trouble among the humans on my other side.

“Suddenly this woman—I’d call her a girl now—this girl said something in a high nasty voice and swung her stool into the arm I was holding my drink with. We both turned around together.

“Christ, I can see her now. The first thing that hit me was discrepancy. She was a nothing—but terrific. Transfigured. Oozing it, radiating it.

“The next thing was I had a horrifying hard-on just looking at her.

“I scrooched over so my tunic hid it, and my spilled drink trickled down, making everything worse. She pawed vaguely at the spill, muttering.

“I just stared at her trying to figure out what had hit me. An ordinary figure, a soft avidness in the face. Eyes heavy, satiated-looking. She was totally sexualized. I remembered her throat pulsed. She had one hand up touching her scarf, which had slipped off her shoulder. I saw angry bruises there. That really tore it, I understood at once those bruises had some sexual meaning.

“She was looking past my head with her face like a radar dish. Then she made an ‘ahhhh’ sound that had nothing to do with me and grabbed my forearm as if it were a railing. One of the men behind her laughed. The woman said, ‘Excuse me,’ in a ridiculous voice and slipped out behind me. I wheeled around after her, nearly upsetting my futeball friend, and saw that some Sirians had come in.

“That was my first look at Sirians in the flesh, if that’s the word. God knows I’d memorized every news shot, but I wasn’t prepared. That tallness, that cruel thinness. That appalling alien arrogance. Ivory-blue, these were. Two males in immaculate metallic gear. Then I saw there was a female with them. An ivory-indigo exquisite with a permanent faint smile on those bone-hard lips.

“The girl who’d left me was ushering them to a table. She reminded me of a goddamn dog that wants you to follow it. Just as the crowd hid them, I saw a man join them too. A big man, expensively dressed, with something wrecked about his face.

“Then the music started and I had to apologize to my furry friend. And the Sellice dancer came out and my personal introduction to hell began.”

The red-haired man fell silent for a minute enduring self-pity. Something wrecked about the face, I thought; it fit.

He pulled his face together.

“First I’ll give you the only coherent observation of my entire evening. You can see it here at Big Junction, always the same. Outside of the Procya, it’s humans with aliens, right? Very seldom aliens with other aliens. Never aliens with humans. It’s the humans who want in.”

I nodded, but he wasn’t talking to me. His voice had a druggy fluency.

“Ah, yes, my Sellice. My first Sellice.

“They aren’t really well-built, y’know, under those cloaks. No waist to speak of and short-legged. But they flow when they walk.

“This one flowed out into the spotlight, cloaked to the ground in violet silk. You could only see a fall of black hair and tassels over a narrow face like a vole. She was a mole-gray. They come in all colors, their fur is like a flexible velvet all over; only the color changes startlingly around their eyes and lips and other places. Erogenous zones? Ah, man, with them it’s not zones.

“She began to do what we’d call a dance, but it’s no dance, it’s their natural movement. Like smiling, say, with us. The music built up, and her arms undulated toward me, letting the cloak fall apart little by little. She was naked under it. The spotlight started to pick up her body markings moving in the slit of the cloak. Her arms floated apart and I saw more and more.

“She was fantastically marked and the markings were writhing. Not like body paint—alive. Smiling, that’s a good word for it. As if her whole body was smiling sexually, beckoning, winking, urging, pouting, speaking to me. You’ve seen a classic Egyptian belly dance? Forget it—a sorry stiff thing compared to what any Sellice can do. This one was ripe, near term.

“Her arms went up and those blazing lemon-colored curves pulsed, waved, everted, contracted, throbbed, evolved unbelievably welcoming, inciting permutations. Come do it to me, do it, do it here and here and here and now. You couldn’t see the rest of her, only a wicked flash of mouth. Every human male in the room was aching to ram himself into that incredible body. I mean it was pain. Even the other aliens were quiet, except one of the Sirians who was chewing out a waiter.

“I was a basket case before she was halfway through. . . . I won’t bore you with what happened next; before it was over there were several fights and I got out. My money ran out on the third night. She was gone next day.

“I didn’t have time to find out about the Sellice cycle then, mercifully. That came after I went back to campus and discovered you had to have a degree in solid-state electronics to apply for off-planet work. I was a pre-med but I got that degree. It only took me as far as First Junction then.

“Oh, god, First Junction. I thought I was in heaven—the alien ships coming in and our freighters going out. I saw them all, all but the real exotics, the tankies. You only see a few of those a cycle, even here. And the Yyeire. You’ve never seen that.

“Go home, boy. Go home to your version of Burned Barn. . . .

“The first Yyeir I saw I dropped everything and started walking after it like a starving hound, just breathing. You’ve seen the pix of course. Like lost dreams. Man is in love and loves what vanishes. . . . It’s the scent, you can’t guess that. I followed until I ran into a slammed port. I spent half a cycle’s credits sending the creature the wine they call stars’ tears. . . . Later I found out it was a male. That made no difference at all.

“You can’t have sex with them, y’know. No way. They breed by light or something, no one knows exactly. There’s a story about a man who got hold of a Yyeir woman and tried. They had him skinned. Stories—”

He was starting to wander.

“What about that girl in the bar, did you see her again?”

He came back from somewhere.

“Oh, yes. I saw her. She’d been making it with the two Sirians, y’know. The males do it in pairs. Said to be the total sexual thing for a woman, if she can stand the damage from those beaks. I wouldn’t know. She talked to me a couple of times after they finished with her. No use for men whatever. She drove off the P Street bridge. . . . The man, poor bastard, he was trying to keep that Sirian bitch happy single-handed. Money helps, for a while. I don’t know where he ended.”

He glanced at his wrist again. I saw the pale bare place where a watch had been and told him the time.

“Is that the message you want to give Earth? Never love an alien?”

“Never love an alien—” He shrugged. “Yeah. No. Ah, Jesus don’t you see? Everything going out, nothing coming back. Like the poor damned Polynesians. We’re gutting Earth, to begin with. Swapping raw resources for junk. Alien status symbols. Tape decks, Coca Cola and Mickey Mouse watches.”

“Well, there is concern over the balance of trade. Is that your message?”

“The balance of trade.” He rolled it sardonically. “Did the Polynesians have a word for it, I wonder? You don’t see, do you? All right, why are you here? I mean you, personally. How many guys did you climb over—”

He went rigid, hearing footsteps outside. The Procya’s hopeful face appeared around the corner. The red-haired man snarled at him and he backed out. I started to protest.

“Ah, the silly reamer loves it. It’s the only pleasure we have left. . . . Can’t you see, man? That’s us. That’s the way we look to them, to the real ones.”

“But—”

“And now we’re getting the cheap C-drive, we’ll be all over just like the Procya. For the pleasure of serving as freight monkeys and junction crews. Oh, they appreciate our ingenious little service stations, the beautiful star folk. They don’t need them, y’know. Just an amusing convenience. D’you know what I do here with my two degrees? What I did at First Junction. Tube cleaning. A swab. Sometimes I get to replace a fitting.”

I muttered something; the self-pity was getting heavy.

“Bitter? Man, it’s a good job. Sometimes I get to talk to one of them.” His face twisted. “My wife works as a—oh, hell, you wouldn’t know. I’d trade—correction, I have traded—everything Earth offered me for just that chance. To see them. To speak to them. Once in a while to touch one. Once in a great while to find one low enough, perverted enough to want to touch me—”

His voice trailed off and suddenly came back strong.

“And so will you!” He glared at me. “Go home! Go home and tell them to quit it. Close the ports. Burn every god-lost alien thing before it’s too late! That’s what the Polynesians didn’t do.”

“But surely—”

“But surely be damned! Balance of trade—balance of life, man. I don’t know if our birth rate is going, that’s not the point. Our soul is leaking out. We’re bleeding to death!”

He took a breath and lowered his tone.

“What I’m trying to tell you, this is a trap. We’ve hit the supernormal stimulus. Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying. . . . Do you think I can touch my wife?”

“But—”

“Look. Y’know, if you give a bird a fake egg like its own but bigger and brighter-marked, it’ll roll its own egg out of the nest and sit on the fake? That’s what we’re doing.”

“You’ve only been talking about sex.” I was trying to conceal my impatience. “Which is great, but the kind of story I’d hoped—”

“Sex? No, it’s deeper.” He rubbed his head, trying to clear the drug. “Sex is only part of it, there’s more. I’ve seen Earth missionaries, teachers, sexless people. Teachers—they end cycling waste or pushing floaters, but they’re hooked. They stay. I saw one fine-looking old woman, she was servant to a Cu’ushbar kid. A defective—his own people would have let him die. That wretch was swabbing up its vomit as if it was holy water. Man, it’s deep . . . some cargo-cult of the soul. We’re built to dream outwards. They laugh at us. They don’t have it.”

There were sounds of movement in the next corridor. The dinner crowd was starting. I had to get rid of him and get there; maybe I could find the Procya. A side door opened and a figure started towards us. At first I thought it was an alien and then I saw it was a woman wearing an awkward body-shell. She seemed to be limping slightly. Behind her I could glimpse the dinner-bound throng passing the open door.

The man got up as she turned into the bay. They didn’t greet each other.

“The station employs only happily wedded couples,” he told me with that ugly laugh. “We give each other . . . comfort.”

He took one of her hands. She flinched as he drew it over his arm and let him turn her passively, not looking at me. “Forgive me if I don’t introduce you. My wife appears fatigued.”

I saw that one of her shoulders was grotesquely scarred.

“Tell them,” he said, turning to go. “Go home and tell them.” Then his head snapped back toward me and he added quietly, “And stay away from the Syrtis desk or I’ll kill you.”

They went away up the corridor.

I changed tapes hurriedly with one eye on the figures passing that open door. Suddenly among the humans I caught a glimpse of two sleek scarlet shapes. My first real aliens! I snapped the recorder shut and ran to squeeze in behind them.

NIGHT OF THE COOTERS

Howard Waldrop

Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and World Fantasy awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in three collections: Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, with more collections in the works. Waldrop is also, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled The Moon World. Waldrop lives in Austin, Texas.

In the wild and wooly tale that follows, he examines some of the events that might have occurred on the periphery of and simultaneously with the central action of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, but from a perspective very different from any that Wells would ever have come up with. . . .

This story is in memory of Slim Pickens (1919-1983)

Sheriff Lindley was asleep on the toilet in the Pachuco County courthouse when someone started pounding on the door. “Bert!” the voice yelled as the sheriff jerked awake.

“Goldang!” said the lawman. The Waco newspaper slid off his lap onto the floor.

He pulled his pants up with one hand and the toilet chain on the water box overhead with the other. He opened the door. Chief Deputy Sweets stood before him, a complaint slip in his hand.

“Dang it, Sweets!” said the sheriff. “I told you never to bother me in there. It’s the hottest Thursday in the history of Texas! You woke me up out of a hell of a dream!”

The deputy waited, wiping sweat from his forehead. There were two big circles, like half-moons, under the arms of his blue chambray shirt.

“I was fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, and I was a Aztec or a Mixtec or somethin’,” said the sheriff. “Anyways, I was buck naked, and I was standin’ on one of them ball courts with the little bitty stone rings twenty foot up one wall, and they was presentin’ me to Moctezuma. I was real proud, and the sun was shinin’, but it was real still and cool down there in the Valley of the Mexico. I look up at the grandstand, and there’s Moctezuma and all his high muckety-mucks with feathers and stuff hangin’ off ‘em, and more gold than a circus wagon. And there was these other guys, conquistadors and stuff, with beards and rusty helmets, and I-talian priests with crosses you coulda barred a livery-stable door with. One of Moctezuma’s men was explainin’ how we was fixin’ to play ball for the gods and things. I knew in my dream I was captain of my team. I had a name that sounded like a bird fart in Aztec talk, and they mentioned it and the name of the captain of the other team, too. Well, everything was goin’ all right, and I was prouder and prouder, until the guy doing the talkin’ let slip that whichever team won was gonna be paraded around Tenochtitlán and given women and food and stuff like that and then tomorrow A.M. they was gonna be cut up and simmered real slow and served up with chilis and onions and tomatoes.

“Well, you never seed such a fight as broke out then! They was all yellin’, and a priest was swingin’ a cross, and spears and axes were flyin’ around like it was an Irish funeral. Next thing I know, you’re a-bangin’ on the door and wakin’ me up and bringin’ me back to Pachuco County! What the hell do you want?”

“Mr. De Spain wants you to come over to his place right away.”

“He does, huh?”

“That’s right. Sheriff. He says he’s got some miscreants he wants you to arrest.”

“Everybody else around here has desperadoes. De Spain has miscreants. I’ll be so danged glad when the town council gets around to movin’ the city limits fifty foot the other side of his place, I won’t know what to do! Every time anybody farts too loud, he calls me.”

Lindley and Sweets walked back to the office at the other end of the courthouse. Four deputies sat around with their feet propped up on desks. They rocked forward respectfully and watched as the sheriff went to the hat pegs. On one of the dowels was a sweat-stained hat with turned-down points at front and back. The side brims were twisted in curves. The hat angled up to end in a crown that looked like the business end of a Phillips screwdriver. Under the hat was a holster with a Navy Colt.41 that looked like someone had used it to drive railroad spikes all the way to the Continental Divide. Leaning under them was a ten-gauge pump shotgun with the barrel sawed off just in front of the foregrip. On the other peg was an immaculate new round-top Stetson of brown felt with a snakeskin band half as wide as a fingernail running around it.

The deputies stared.

Lindley picked up the Stetson.

The deputies rocked back in their chairs and resumed yakking.

“Hey, Sweets!” said the sheriff at the door. “Change that damn calendar on your desk. It ain’t Wednesday, August seventeenth; it’s Thursday, August eighteenth.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

“And you boys try not to play checkers so loud you wake the judge up, okay?”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

Lindley went down the courthouse steps onto the rock walk. He passed the two courthouse cannons he and the deputies fired off three times a year—March second, July fourth, and Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Each cannon had a pyramid of ornamental cannonballs in front of it.

Waves of heat came off the cannons, the ammunition, the telegraph wires overhead, and, in the distance, the rails of the twice-a-day spur line from Waxahachie.

The town was still as a rusty shovel. The forty-five-star United States flag hung like an old, dried dishrag from its stanchion. From looking at the town you couldn’t tell the nation was about to go to war with Spain over Cuba, that China was full of unrest, and that five thousand miles away a crazy German count was making airships.

Lindley had seen enough changes in his sixty-eight years. He had been born in the bottom of an Ohio keelboat in 1830; was in Bloody Kansas when John Brown came through; fought for the Confederacy, first as a corporal, then a sergeant major, from Chickamauga to the Wilderness; and had seen more skirmishes with hostile tribes than most people would ever read about in a dozen Wide-Awake Library novels.

It was as hot as under an upside-down washpot on a tin shed roof. The sheriff’s wagon horse seemed asleep as it trotted, head down, puffs hanging in the still air like brown shrubs made of dust around its hooves. There were ten, maybe a dozen people in sight in the whole town. Those few on the street moved like molasses, only as far as they had to, from shade to shade. Anybody with sense was asleep at home with wet towels hung over the windows, or sitting as still as possible with a funeral-parlor fan in their hands.

The sheriff licked his big droopy mustache and hoped nobody nodded to him. He was already too hot and tired to tip his hat. He leaned back in the wagon seat and straightened his bad leg (a Yankee souvenir) against the boot board. His gray suit was like a boiling shroud. He was too hot to reach up and flick the dust off his new hat. He had become sheriff in the special election three years ago to fill out Sanderson’s term when the governor had appointed the former sheriff attorney general. Nothing much had happened in the county since then.

“Gee-hup,” he said.

The horse trotted three steps before going back into its walking trance.

Sheriff Lindley didn’t bother her again until he pulled up at De Spain’s big place and said, “Whoa, there.”

The black man who did everything for De Spain opened the gate.

“Sheriff,” he said.

“Luther,” said Lindley, nodding his head.

“Around back, Mr. Lindley.”

There were two boys—raggedy town kids, the Strother boy and one of the poor Chisums—sitting on the edge of the well. The Chisum kid had been crying.

De Spain was hot and bothered. He was only half dressed, with suit pants, white shirt, vest, and stockings on but no shoes or coat. He hadn’t macassared his hair yet. He was pointing a rifle with a barrel big as a drainpipe at the two boys.

“Here they are, Sheriff. Luther saw them down in the orchard, I’m sure he saw them stealing my peaches, but he wouldn’t tell me. I knew something was up when he didn’t put my clothes in the usual place next to the window where I like to dress. So I looked out and saw them. They had half a potato sack full by the time I crept around the house and caught them. I want to charge them with trespass and thievery.”

“Well, well,” said the sheriff, looking down at the sackful of evidence. He turned and pointed toward the black man. “You want me to charge Luther here with collusion and abetting a crime?” Neither Lindley’s nor Luther’s face betrayed any emotion.

“Of course not,” said De Spain. “I’ve told him time and time again he’s too soft on filchers. If this keeps happening, I’ll hire another boy who’ll enforce my orchard with buckshot, if need be.”

De Spain was a young man with eyes like a weimaraner’s. As Deputy Sweets said, he had the kind of face you couldn’t hit just once. He owned half the town of Pachuco City. The other half paid him rent.

“Get in the wagon, boys,” said Lindley.

“Aren’t you going to cover them with your weapon?” asked De Spain.

“You should know by now, Mr. De Spain, that when I wear this suit I ain’t got nothin’ but a three-shot pocket pistol on me. Besides”—he looked at the two boys in the wagon bed—“they know if they give me any guff, I’ll jerk a bowknot in one of ‘em and bit the other’n’s ass off.”

“I don’t think there’s a need for profanity,” said De Spain.

“It’s too damn hot for anything else,” said Lindley. “I’ll clamp ‘em in the juzgado and have Sweets run the papers over to your office tomorrow mornin’.”

“I wish you’d take them out one of the rural roads somewhere and flail the tar out of them to teach them about property rights,” said De Spain.

The sheriff tipped his hat back and looked up at De Spain’s three story house with the parlor so big you could hold a rodeo in it. Then he looked back at the businessman, who’d finally lowered the rifle.

“Well, I know you’d like that,” said Lindley. “I seem to remember that most of the fellers who wrote the Constitution were pretty well off, but some of the other rich people thought they had funny ideas. But they were really pretty smart. One of the things they were smart about was the Bill of Rights. You know, Mr. De Spain, the reason they put in the Bill of Rights wasn’t to give all the little people without jobs or money a lot of breaks with the law. Why they put that in there was for if the people without jobs or money ever got upset and turned on them, they could ask for the same justice everybody else got.”

De Spain looked at him with disgust. “I’ve never liked your homespun parables, and I don’t like the way you sheriff this county.”

“I don’t doubt that,” said Lindley. “You’ve got sixteen months, three weeks, and two days to find somebody to run against me. Good evening, Mr. De Spain.”

He climbed onto the wagon seat.

“Luther.”

“Sheriff.”

He turned the horse around as De Spain and the black man took the sack of peaches through the kitchen door into the house.

The sheriff stopped the wagon near the railroad tracks where the houses began to deviate from the vertical.

“Jody. Billy Roy.” He looked at them with eyes like chips of flint. “You’re the dumbest pair of squirts that ever lived in Pachuco City! First off, half those peaches were still green. You’d have got bellyaches, and your mothers would have beaten you within an inch of your lives and given you so many doses of Black Draught you’d shit over ten-rail fences all week. Now listen to what I’m sayin’, ‘cause I’m only gonna say it once. If I ever hear of either of you stealing anything, anywhere in this county, I’m going to put you both in school.”

“No, Sheriff, please, no!”

“I’ll put you in there every morning and come and get you out seven long hours later, and I’ll have the judge issue a writ keeping you there till you’re twelve years old. And if you try to run away, I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth with Joe Sweeper’s bloodhounds, and I’ll bring you back.”

They were crying now.

“You git home.” They were running before they left the wagon.

Somewhere between the second piece of corn bread and the third helping of snap beans, a loud rumble shook the ground.

“Goodness’ sakes!” said Elsie, his wife of twenty-three years. “What can that be?”

“I expect that’s Elmer, out by the creek. He came in last week and asked if he could blast on the place. I told him it didn’t matter to me as long as he did it between sunup and sundown and didn’t blow his whole family of rug rats and yard apes up.

“Jake, down at the mercantile, said Elmer bought enough dynamite to blow up Fort Worth if he’d a mind to—all but the last three sticks in the store. Jake had to reorder for stump-blowin’ time.”

“Whatever could he want with all that much?”

“Oh, that damn fool has the idea the vein in that old mine that played out in ‘83 might start up again on his property. He got to talking with the Smith boy, oh, hell, what’s his name—?”

“Leo?”

“Yeah, Leo, the one that studies down in Austin, learns about stars and rocks and all that shit. . . .”

“Watch your language, Bertram!”

“Oh, hell, anyway, that boy must have put a bug up Elmer’s butt about that—”

“Bertram!” said Elsie, putting down her knife and fork.

“Oh, hell, anyway. I guess Elmer’ll blow the side off his hill and bury his house before he’s through.”

The sheriff was reading a week-old copy of the Waco Herald while Elsie washed up the dishes. He sure missed Brann’s Iconoclast, the paper he used to read, which had ceased publication when the editor was gunned down on a Waco street by an irate Baptist four months before. The Waco paper had a little squib from London, England, about there having been explosions on Mars ten nights in a row last month, and whether it was a sign of life on that planet or some unusual volcanic activity.

Sheriff Lindley had never given volcanoes (except those in the Valley of the Mexico) or the planet Mars much thought.

Hooves came pounding down the road. He put down his paper. “Sheriff, sheriff!” he said in a high, mocking voice.

“What?” asked Elsie. Then she heard the hooves and began to dry her hands on the towel on the nail above the sink.

The horse stopped out front; bare feet slapped up to the porch; small fists pounded on the door.

“Sheriff! Sheriff!” yelled a voice Lindley recognized as belonging to either Tommy or Jimmy Atkinson.

He strode to the door and opened it.

“Tommy, what’s all the hooraw?”

“Jimmy. Sheriff, something fell on our pasture, tore it all to hell, knocked down the tree, killed some of our cattle, Tommy can’t find his dog, Mother sent—”

“Hold on! Something fell on your place? Like what?”

“I don’t know! Like a big rock, only sparks was flyin’ off it, and it roared and blew up! It’s at the north end of the place, and—”

“Elsie, run over and get Sweets and the boys. Have them go get Leo Smith if he ain’t gone back to college yet. Sounds to me like Pachuco County’s got its first shootin’ star. Hold on, Jimmy, I’m comin’ right along. We’ll take my wagon; you can leave your pony here.”

“Oh, hurry, Sheriff! It’s big! It killed our cattle and tore up the fences—”

“Well, I can’t arrest it for that,” said Lindley. He put on his Stetson. “And I thought Elmer’d blowed hisself up. My, my, ain’t never seen a shooting star before. . . .”

“Damn if it don’t look like somebody threw a locomotive through here,” said the sheriff. The Atkinson place used to have a sizable hill and the tallest tree in the county on it. Now it had half a hill and a big stump and beyond, a huge crater. Dirt had been thrown up in a ten-foot-high pile around it. There was a large, rounded, gray object buried in the dirt and torn caliche at the bottom. Waves of heat rose from it, and gray ash, like old charcoal, fell off it into the shimmering pit.

Half the town was riding out in wagons and on horseback as the news spread. The closest neighbors were walking over in the twilight, wearing their go-visiting clothes.

“Well, well,” said the sheriff, looking down. “So that’s what a meteor looks like.”

Leo Smith was in the pit, walking around.

“I figured you’d be here sooner or later,” said Lindley.

“Hello, Sheriff,” said Leo. “It’s still too hot to touch. Part of a cow’s buried under the back end.”

The sheriff looked over at the Atkinson family. “You folks is danged lucky. That thing coulda come down smack on your house or, worse, your barn. What time did it fall?”

“Straight up and down six o’clock,” said Mrs. Atkinson. “We was settin’ down to supper. I saw it out of the corner of my eye; then all tarnation came down. Rocks must have been falling for ten minutes!”

“It’s pretty spectacular, Sheriff,” said Leo. “I’m going into town to telegraph off to the professors at the university. They’ll sure want to look at this.”

“Any reason other than general curiosity?” asked Lindley.

“I’ve only seen pictures and handled little bitty parts of one,” said Leo, “but it doesn’t look usual. They’re generally like big rocks, all stone or iron. The outside of this one’s soft and crumbly. Ashy, too.”

There was a slight pop and a stove-cooling noise from the thing.

“Well, you can come back into town with me if you want to. Hey, Sweets!”

The chief deputy came over.

“A couple of you boys better stay here tonight, keep people from falling in the hole. I guess if Leo’s gonna wire the university, you better keep anybody from knockin’ chunks off it. It’ll probably get pretty crowded. If I was the Atkinsons, I’d start chargin’ a nickel a look.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

“I’ll be out here tomorrow mornin’ to take another gander. I gotta serve a process paper on old Theobald before he lights out for his chores. If I sent one ‘a’ you boys, he’d as soon shoot you as say howdy.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

He and Leo and Jimmy Atkinson got in the wagon and rode off toward the quiet lights of town far away.

There was a new smell in the air.

The sheriff noticed it as he rode toward the Atkinson ranch by the south road early the next morning. There was an odor like when something goes wrong at the telegraph office. Smoke was curling up from the pasture. Maybe there was a scrub fire started from the heat of the falling star.

He topped the last rise. Before him lay devastation the likes of which he hadn’t seen since the retreat from Atlanta.

“Great gawd ahmighty!” he said.

There were dead horses and charred wagons all around. The ranch house was untouched, but the barn was burned to the ground. There were crisscrossed lines of burnt grass that looked like they’d been painted with a tarbrush.

He saw no bodies anywhere. Where was Sweets? Where was Luke, the other deputy? Where had the people from the wagons gone? What had happened?

Lindley looked at the crater. There was a shiny rod sticking out of it, with something round on the end. From here it looked like one of those carnival acts where a guy spins a plate on the end of a dowel rod, only this glinted like metal in the early sun. As he watched, a small cloud of green steam rose above it from the pit.

He saw a motion behind an old tree uprooted by a storm twelve years ago. It was Sweets. He was yelling and waving the sheriff back. Lindley rode his horse into a small draw, then came up into the open.

There was movement over at the crater. He thought he saw something. Reflected sunlight flashed by his eyes, and he thought he saw a rounded silhouette. He heard a noise like sometimes gets in bob wire on a windy day. He heard a humming sound then, smelled the electric smell real strong. Fire started a few feet from him, out of nowhere, and moved toward him.

Then his horse exploded. The air was an inferno, he was thrown spinning—

He must have blacked out. He had no memory of what went next. When he came to, he was running as fast as he ever had toward the uprooted tree.

Fire jumped all around. Luke was shooting over the tree roots with his pistol. He ducked. A long section of the trunk was washed with flames and sparks.

Lindley dove behind the root tangle.

“What the dingdong is goin’ on?” he asked as he tried to catch his breath. He still had his new hat on, but his britches and coat were singed and smoking.

“God damn, Bert! I don’t know,” said Sweets, leaning around Luke. “We was out here all night; it was a regular party; most of the time we was up on the lip up there. Maybe thirty or forty people comin’ and goin’ all the time. We was all talking and hoorawing, and then we heard something about an hour ago. We looked down, and I’ll be damned if the whole top of that thing didn’t come off like a mason jar!

“We was watching, and these damn things started coming out—they looked like big old leather balls, big as horses, with snakes all out the front—”

“What?”

“Snakes. Yeah, tentacles Leo called them, like an octy-puss. Leo’d come back from town and was here when them boogers came out. Martians he said they was, things from Mars. They had big old eyes, big as your head! Everybody was pushing and shoving; then one of them pulled out one of them gun things, real slow like, and just started burning up everything in sight.

“We all ran back for whatever cover we could find—it took ‘em a while to get up the dirt pile. They killed horses, dogs, anything they could see. Fire was everywhere. They use that thing just like the volunteer firemen use them water hoses in Waco!”

“Where’s Leo?”

Sweets pointed to the draw that ran diagonally to the west. “We watched awhile, finally figured they couldn’t line up on the ditch all the way to the rise. Leo and the others got away up the draw—he was gonna telegraph the university about it. The bunch that got away was supposed to send people out to the town road to warn people. You probably would have run into them if you hadn’t been coming from Theobald’s place. Anyway, soon as them things saw people were gettin’ away, they got mad as hornets. That’s when they lit up the Atkinsons’ barn.”

A flash of fire leapt in the roots of the tree, jumped back thirty feet into the burnt grass behind them, then moved back and forth in a curtain of sparks.

“Man, that’s what I call a real smoke pole,” said Luke.

“Well,” Lindley said. “This won’t do. These things done attacked citizens in my jurisdiction, and they killed my horse.”

He turned to Luke.

“Be real careful, and get back to town, and get the posse up. Telegraph the Rangers and tell ‘em to burn leather gettin’ here. Then get aholt of Skip Whitworth and have him bring out The Gun.”

Skip Whitworth sat behind the tree trunk and pulled the cover from the six-foot rifle at his side. Skip was in his late fifties. He had been a sniper in the War for Southern Independence when he had been in his twenties. He had once shot at a Yankee general just as the officer was bringing a forkful of beans up to his mouth. When the fork got there, there were only some shoulders and a gullet for the beans to drop into.

That had been from a mile and a half away, from sixty feet up a pine tree.

The rifle was an .80-caliber octagonal-barrel breechloader that used two and a half ounces of powder and a percussion cap the size of a jawbreaker for each shot. It had a telescopic sight running the entire length of the barrel.

“They’re using that thing on the end of that stick to watch us,” said Lindley. “I had Sweets jump around, and every time he did, one of those cooters would come up with that fire gun and give us what-for.”

Skip said nothing. He loaded his rifle, which had a breechblock lever the size of a crowbar on it, then placed another round—cap, paper cartridge, ball—next to him. He drew a bead and pulled the trigger. It sounded like dynamite had gone off in their ears. The wobbling pole snapped in two halfway up. The top end flopped around back into the pit.

There was a scrabbling noise above the whirring from the earthen lip. Something round came up.

Skip had smoothly opened the breech, put in the ball, torn the cartridge with his teeth, put in the cap, closed the action, pulled back the hammer, and sighted before the shape reached the top of the dirt.

Metal glinted in the middle of the dark thing. Skip fired. There was a squeech; the whole top of the round thing opened up; it spun around and backward, things in its front working like a daddy longlegs thrown on a roaring stove.

Skip loaded again. There were flashes of light from the crater. Something came up shooting, fire leaping like hot sparks from a blacksmith’s anvil, the air full of flames and smoke. Skip fired again.

The fire gun flew up in the air. Snakes twisted, writhed, disappeared.

It was very quiet for a few seconds.

Then there was the renewed whining of machinery and noises like a pile driver, the sounds of filing and banging. Steam came up over the crater lip.

“Sounds like a steel foundry in there,” said Sweets.

“I don’t like it one bit,” said Lindley. “Be danged if I’m gonna let ‘em get the drop on us. Can you keep them down?”

“How many are there?” asked Skip.

“Luke and Sweets saw four or five before all hell broke loose this morning. Probably more of ‘em than that was inside.”

“I’ve got three more shots. If they poke up, I’ll get ‘em.”

“I’m goin’ to town, then out to Elmer’s. Sweets’ll stay with you awhile. If you run outta bullets, light up out the draw. I don’t want nobody killed. Sweets, keep an eye out for the posse. I’m telegraphing the Rangers again, then goin’ to get Elmer and his dynamite. We’re gonna fix their little red wagon for certain.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

The sun had just passed noon.

Leo looked haggard. He had been up all night, then at the telegraph office sending off messages to the university. Inquiries had begun to come in from as far east as Baton Rouge. Leo had another, from Percival Lowell out in Flagstaff, Arizona Territory. “Everybody at the university thinks it’s wonderful,” said Leo.

“People in Austin would,” said Lindley.

“They’re sure these things are connected with Mars and those bright flashes of gas last month. Seems something’s happened in England, starting about a week ago. No one’s been able to get through to London for two or three days.”

“You telling me Mars is attacking London, England, and Pachuco City, Texas?” asked the sheriff.

“It seems so,” said Leo. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

” ‘Scuse me, Leo,” said Lindley. “I got to get another telegram off to the Texas Rangers.”

“That’s funny,” said Argyle, the telegraph operator. “The line was working just a second ago.” He began tapping his key and fiddling with his coil box.

Leo peered out the window. “Hey!” he said. “Where’s the 3:14?” He looked at the railroad clock. It was 3:25. In sixteen years of rail service, the train had been four minutes late, and that was after a mud slide in the storm twelve years ago.

“Uh-oh,” said the sheriff.

They were turning out of Elmer’s yard with a wagonload of dynamite. The wife and eleven of the kids were watching.

“Easy, Sheriff,” said Elmer, who, with two of his boys and most of their guns, was riding in back with the explosives. “Jake sold me everything he had. I just didn’t notice till we got back here with that stuff that some of it was already sweating.”

“Holy shit!” said Lindley. “You mean we gotta go a mile an hour out there? Let’s get out and throw the bad stuff off.”

“Well, it’s all mixed in,” said Elmer. “I was sorta gonna set it all up on the hill and put one blasting cap in the whole load.”

“Jesus. You woulda blowed up your house and Pachuco City too.”

“I was in a hurry,” said Elmer, hanging his head.

“Well, can’t be helped. We’ll take it slow.”

Lindley looked at his watch. It was six o’clock. He heard a high-up, fluttering sound. They looked at the sky. Coming down was a large, round, glowing object throwing off sparks in all directions. It was curved with points, like the thing in the crater at the Atkinson place. A long, thin trail of smoke from the back end hung in the air behind it. They watched in awe as it sailed down. It went into the horizon to the north of Pachuco City.

“One,” said one of the kids in the wagon, “two, three—”

Silently they took up the count. At twenty-seven there was a roaring boom, just like the night before.

“Five and a half miles,” said the sheriff. “That puts it eight miles from the other one. Leo said the ones in London came down twenty-four hours apart, regular as clockwork.” They started off as fast as they could under the circumstances.

There were flashes of light beyond the Atkinson place in the near dusk. The lights moved off toward the north where the other thing had plowed in.

It was the time of evening when your eyes can fool you. Sheriff Lindley thought he saw something that shouldn’t have been there sticking above the horizon. It glinted like metal in the dim light. He thought it moved, but it might have been the motion of the wagon as they lurched down a gulley. When they came up, it was gone.

Skip was gone. His rifle was still there. It wasn’t melted but had been crushed, as had the three-foot-thick tree trunk in front of it. All the caps and cartridges were gone.

There was a monstrous series of footprints leading from the crater down to the tree, then off into the distance to the north where Lindley thought he had seen something. There were three footprints in each series. Sweets’ hat had been mashed along with Skip’s gun. Clanging and banging still came from the crater.

The four of them made their plans. Lindley had his shotgun and pistol, which Luke had brought out with him that morning, though he was still wearing his burned suit and his untouched Stetson.

He tied together the fifteen sweatiest sticks of dynamite he could find.

They crept up, then rushed the crater.

“Hurry up!” yelled the sheriff to the men at the courthouse. “Get that cannon up those stairs!”

“He’s still coming this way!” yelled Luke from up above.

They had been watching the giant machine from the courthouse since it had come up out of the Atkinson place, before the sheriff and Elmer and his boys made it into town after their sortie.

It had come across to the north, gone to the site of the second crash, and stood motionless there for quite a while. When it got dark, the deputies brought out the night binoculars. Everybody in town saw the flash of dynamite from the Atkinson place.

A few moments after that, the machine had moved back toward there. It looked like a giant water tower with three legs. It had a thing like a teacher’s desk bell on top of it, and something that looked like a Kodak roll-film camera in front of that. As the moon rose, they saw the thing had tentacles like thick wires hanging from between the three giant legs.

The sheriff, Elmer, and his boys made it to town just as the machine found the destruction they had caused at the first landing site. It had turned toward town and was coming at a pace of twenty miles an hour.

“Hurry the hell up!” yelled Luke. “Oh, shit—!” He ducked. There was a flash of light overhead. The building shook. “That heat gun comes out of the box on the front!” he said. “Look out!” The building glared and shook again. Something down the street caught fire.

“Load that son of a bitch,” said Lindley. “Bob! Some of you men make sure everybody’s in the cyclone cellars or where they won’t burn. Cut out all the damn lights!”

“Hell, Sheriff. They know we’re here!” yelled a deputy. Lindley hit him with his hat, then followed the cannon up to the top of the clock-tower steps.

Luke was cramming powder into the cannon muzzle. Sweets ran back down the stairs. Other people carried cannonballs up the steps to the tower one at a time.

Leo came up. “What did you find, Sheriff, when you went back?”

There was a cool breeze for a few seconds in the courthouse tower. Lindley breathed a few deep breaths, remembering. “Pretty rough. There was some of them still working after that thing had gone. They were building another one just like it.” He pointed toward the machine, which was firing up houses to the northeast side of town, swinging the ray back and forth. They could hear its hum. Homes and chicken coops burst into flames. A mooing cow was stilled.

“We threw in the dynamite and blew most of them up. One was in a machine like a steam tractor. We shot up what was left while they was hootin’ and a-hollerin’. There was some other things in there, live things maybe, but they was too blowed up to put back together to be sure what they was, all bleached out and pale. We fed everything there a diet of buckshot till there wasn’t nothin’ left. Then we high-tailed it back here on horses, left the wagon sitting.”

The machine came on toward the main street of town. Luke finished with the powder. There were so many men with guns on the building across the street it looked like a brick porcupine. It must have looked this way for the James gang when they were shot up in Northfield, Minnesota.

The courthouse was made of stone. Most of the wooden buildings in town were scorched or already afire. When the heat gun came this way, it blew bricks to dust, played flame over everything. The air above the whole town heated up.

They had put out the lamps behind the clockfaces. There was nothing but moonlight glinting off the three-legged machine, flames of burning buildings, the faraway glows of prairie fires. It looked like Pachuco City was on the outskirts of hell.

“Get ready, Luke,” said the sheriff. The machine stepped between two burning stores, its tentacles pulling out smoldering horse tack, chains, kegs of nails, then heaving them this way and that. Someone at the end of the street fired off a round. There was a high, thin ricochet off the machine. Sweets ran upstairs, something in his arms. It was a curtain from one of the judge’s windows. He’d ripped it down and tied it to the end of one of the janitor’s long window brushes.

On it he had lettered in tempera paint COME AND TAKE IT. There was a ragged, nervous cheer from the men on the building as they read it by the light of the flames.

“Cute, Sweets,” said Lindley, “too cute.”

The machine turned down Main Street. A line of fire sprang up at the back side of town from the empty corrals.

“Oh, shit!” said Luke. “I forgot the wadding!” Lindley took off his hat to hit him with. He looked at its beautiful felt in the mixed moonlight and firelight.

The thing turned toward them. The sheriff thought he saw eyes way up in the bellthing atop the machine, eyes like a big cat’s eyes seen through a dirty windowpane on a dark night.

“Goldang, Luke, it’s my best hat, but I’ll be damned if I let them cooters burn down my town!”

He stuffed the Stetson, crown first, into the cannon barrel. Luke shoved it in with the ramrod, threw in two 35-pound cannonballs behind it, pushed them home, and swung the barrel out over Main Street.

The machine bent to tear up something.

“Okay, boys,” yelled Lindley. “Attract its attention.” Rifle and shotgun fire winked on the rooftop. It glowed like a hot coal from the muzzle flashes. A great slather of ricochets flew off the giant machine.

It turned, pointing its heat gun at the building. It was fifty feet from the courthouse steps.

“Now,” said the sheriff.

Luke touched off the powder with his cigarillo. The whole north side of the courthouse bell tower flew off, and the roof collapsed. Two holes you could see the moon through appeared in the machine: one in the middle, one smashing through the dome atop it. Sheriff Lindley saw the lower cannonball come out and drop lazily toward the end of burning Main Street.

All six of the tentacles of the machine shot straight up into the air, and it took off like a man running with his arms above his head. It staggered, as fast as a freight train could go, through one side of a house and out the other, and ran partway up Park Street. One of its three legs went higher than its top. It hopped around like a crazy man on crutches before its feet got tangled in a horse-pasture fence, and it went over backward with a shudder. A great cloud of steam came out of it and hung in the air. No one in the courthouse tower heard the sound of the steam. They were all deaf as posts from the explosion. The barrel of the cannon was burst all along the end. The men on the other roof were jumping up and down and clapping each other on the back. The come and take it sign on the courthouse had two holes in it, neater than you could have made with a biscuit cutter. First a high whine, then a dull roar, then something like normal hearing came back to the sheriff’s left ear. The right one still felt like a kid had his fist in there.

“Dang it, Sweets!” he yelled. “How much powder did Luke use?”

“Huh?” Luke was banging on his head with both his hands.

“How much powder did he use?”

“Two, two and a half cans,” said Sweets.

“It only takes half a can a ball!” yelled the sheriff. He reached for his hat to hit Luke with, touched his bare head. “I feel naked. Come on, we’re not through yet. We got fires to put out and some hash to settle.”

Luke was still standing, shaking his head. The whole town was cheering.

It looked like a pot lid slowly boiling open, moving just a little. Every time the end unscrewed a little more, ashes and cinders fell off into the second pit. There was a piled ridge of them. The back turned again, moved a few inches, quit. Then it wobbled, there was a sound like a stove being jerked up a chimney, and the whole back end rolled open like a mad bank vault and fell off. There were one hundred eighty-four men and eleven women all standing behind the open end of the thing, their guns pointing toward the interior. At the exact center were Sweets and Luke with the other courthouse cannon. This time there was one can of powder, but the barrel was filled to the end with everything from the blacksmith-shop floor—busted window glass, nails, horseshoes, bolts, stirrup buckles, and broken files and saws.

Eyes appeared in the dark interior.

“Remember the Alamo,” said the sheriff.

Everybody, and the cannon, fired.

When the third meteor came in that evening, south of town at thirteen minutes past six, they knew something was wrong. It wobbled in flight, lost speed, and dropped like a long, heavy leaf.

They didn’t have to wait for this one to cool and open. When the posse arrived, the thing was split in two and torn. Heat and steam came up from the inside.

One of the pale things was creeping forlornly across the ground with great difficulty. It looked like a thin gingerbread man made of glass with only a knob for a head.

“It’s probably hurting from the gravity,” said Leo.

“Fix it, Sweets,” said Lindley.

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

There was a gunshot.

No fourth meteor fell, though they had scouts out for twenty miles in all directions, and the railroad tracks and telegraph wires were fixed again.

“I been doing some figuring,” said Leo. “If there were ten explosions on Mars last month, and these things started landing in England last Thursday week, then we should have got the last three. There won’t be any more.”

“You been figurin’, huh?”

“Sure have.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

Sheriff Lindley stood on his porch. It was sundown on Sunday, three hours after another meteor should have fallen, had there been one.

Leo rode up. “I saw Sweets and Luke heading toward the Atkinson place with more dynamite. What are they doing?”

“They’re blowing up every last remnant of them things—lock, stock, and ass hole.”

“But,” said Leo, “the professors from the university will be here tomorrow, to look at their ships and machines! You can’t destroy them!”

“Shit on the University of Texas and the horse it rode in on,” said Lindley. “My jurisdiction runs from Deer Piss Creek to Buenos Frijoles, back to Olatunji, up the Little Clear Fork of the North Branch of Mud River, back to the creek, and everything in between. If I say something gets blowed up, it’s on its way to kingdom come.”

He put his arms on Leo’s shoulders. “Besides, what little grass grows in this county’s supposed to be green, and what’s growing around them things is red. I really don’t like that.”

“But Sheriff! I’ve got to meet Professor Lowell in Waxahachie tomorrow. . . .”

“Listen, Leo. I appreciate what you done. But I’m an old man. I been kept up by Martians for three nights, I lost my horse and my new hat, and they busted my favorite gargoyle off the courthouse. I’m going in and get some sleep, and I only want to be woke up for the Second Coming, by Jesus Christ himself.”

Leo jumped on his horse and rode for the Atkinson place.

Sheriff Lindley crawled into bed and went to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

He had a dream. He was a king in Babylon, and he lay on a couch at the top of a ziggurat, just like the Tower of Babel in the Bible. He surveyed the city and the river. There were women all around him, and men with curly beards and big headdresses. Occasionally someone would feed him a large fig from a golden bowl. His dreams were not interrupted by the sounds of dynamiting, first from one side of town, then another, and then another.

ROADSIDE RESCUE

Pat Cadigan

Money can subjugate and conquer as well as or better than armies or fleets of warships, a lesson learned and relearned by every empire and every colonial people—and relearned in the incisive and hard-edged story that follows by a stranded traveler who gets a little more help than he bargained for from a passing alien, for a price he isn ‘t willing to pay. . . .

Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in Overland Park, Kansas. She made her first professional sale in 1980, and has subsequently come to be regarded as one of the best new writers in SF. She was the coeditor, along with husband Amie Fenner, of Shayol, perhaps the best of the semiprozines of the late ’70s; it was honored with a World Fantasy Award in the “Special Achievement, Non-Professional” category in 1981. She has also served as Chairman of the Nebula Award Jury and as a World Fantasy Award Judge. Her first novel, Mindplayers, was released in 1987 to excellent critical response, and her second novel, Synners, appeared in 1991 to even better response—it was recognized as one of the year’s top novels and won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her story “Pretty Boy Crossover” has recently appeared on several critics’ lists as among the best science fiction stories of the ’80s. Another one of her stories, “Angel, ” was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award (one of the few stories ever to earn that rather unusual distinction), and her collection Patterns has been hailed as one of the landmark collections of the decade. Her most recent book is a new novel, Fools.

Barely fifteen minutes after he’d called Area Traffic Surveillance, Etan Carrera saw the big limousine transport coming toward him. He watched it with mild interest from his smaller and temporarily disabled vehicle. Some media celebrity or alien—more likely an alien. All aliens seemed enamored with things like limos and private SSTs, even after all these years. In any case, Etan fully expected to see the transport pass without even slowing, the navigator (not driver—limos drove themselves) hardly glancing his way, leaving him alone again in the rolling, green, empty countryside.

But the transport did slow and then stopped, cramming itself into the breakdown lane across the road. The door slid up, and the navigator jumped out, smiling as he came over to Etan. Etan blinked at the dark, full-dress uniform. People who worked for aliens had to do some odd things, he thought, and for some reason put his hand on the window control as though he were going to roll it up.

“Afternoon, sir,” said the navigator, bending a little from the waist.

“Hi,” Etan said.

“Trouble with your vehicle?”

“Nothing too serious, I hope. I’ve called Surveillance, and they say they’ll be out to pick me up in two hours at most.”

“That’s a long time to wait.” The navigator’s smile widened. He was very attractive, holo-star kind of handsome. People who work for aliens, Etan thought. “Perhaps you’d care to wait in my employer’s transport. For that matter, I can probably repair your vehicle, which will save you time and money. Roadside rescue fees are exorbitant.”

“That’s very kind,” Etan said, “but I have called, and I don’t want to impose—”

“It was my employer’s idea to stop, sir. I agreed, of course. My employer is quite fond of people. In fact, my employer loves people. And I’m sure you would be rewarded in some way.”

“Hey, now, I’m not asking for anything—”

“My employer is a most generous entity,” said the navigator, looking down briefly. “I’ll get my tool kit.” He was on his way back across the road before Etan could object.

Ten minutes later, the navigator closed the power plant housing of Etan’s vehicle and came around to the window again, still looking formal and unruffled. “Try it now, sir.”

Etan inserted his key card into the dash console and shifted the control near the steering module. The vehicle hummed to life. “Well, now,” he said. “You fixed it.”

That smile again. “Occasionally the connections to the motherboard are improperly fitted. Contaminants get in, throw off the fuel mixing, and the whole plant shuts down.”

“Oh,” Etan said, feeling stupid, incompetent, and worst of all, obligated.

“You won’t be needing rescue now, sir.”

“Well. I should call and tell them.” Etan reached reluctantly for the console phone.

“You could call from the limo, sir. And if you’d care for a little refreshment—” The navigator opened his door for him.

Etan gave up. “Oh, sure, sure. This is all very nice of you and your, uh, employer.” What the hell, he thought, getting out and following the navigator across the road. If it meant that much to the alien, he’d give the alien a thrill.

“We both appreciate this. My employer and I.”

Etan smiled, bracing himself as the door to the passenger compartment of the limo slid back. Whatever awkward greeting he might have made died in his throat. There was no one inside, no one and nothing.

“Just go ahead and get in, sir.”

“But, uh—”

“My employer is in there. Somewhere.” Smile. “You’ll find the phone by the refrigerator. Or shall I call Surveillance for you?”

“No, I’ll do it. Uh, thanks.” Etan climbed in and sat down on the silvery grey cushion. The door slid partially shut, and a moment later Etan heard the navigator moving around up front. Somewhere a blower went on, puffing cool, humid air at his face. He sat back tentatively. Luxury surroundings—refrigerator, bar, video, sound system. God knew what use the alien found for any of it. Hospitality. It probably wouldn’t help. He and the alien would no doubt end up staring at each other with nothing to say, feeling freakish.

He was on the verge of getting up and leaving when the navigator slipped through the door. It shut silently as he sat down across from Etan and unbuttoned his uniform tunic.

“Cold drink, sir?”

Etan shook his head.

“Hope you don’t mind if I do.” There was a different quality to the smile now. He took an amber bottle from the refrigerator and flipped the cap off, aiming it at a disposal in the door. Etan could smell alcohol and heavy spicing. “Possibly the best spiced ale in the world, if not the known universe,” the navigator said. “Sure you won’t have any?”

“Yes, I—” Etan sat forward a little. “I really think I ought to say thank you and get on. I don’t want to hold you up—”

“My employer chooses where he wants to be when he wants to be there.” The navigator took another drink from the bottle. “At least, I’m calling it a he. Hard to tell with a lot of these species.” He ran his fingers through his dark hair; one long strand fell and brushed his temple. Etan caught a glimpse of a shaved spot. Implant; so the navigator would be mentally attuned to his employer, making speech or translation unnecessary. “With some, gender’s irrelevant. Some have more than one gender. Some have more than two. Imagine taking that trip, if you can.” He tilted the bottle up again. “But my present employer, here, asking him what gender he is, it’s like asking you what flavor you are.”

Etan took a breath. One more minute; then he’d ask this goof to let him out. “Not much you can do, I guess, except to arbitrarily assign them sex and—”

“Didn’t say that.”

“Pardon?”

The navigator killed the bottle. “Didn’t say anything about sex.”

“Oh.” Etan paused, wondering exactly how crazy the navigator might be and how he’d managed to hide it well enough to be hired for an alien. “Sorry. I thought you said that some of them lacked sex—”

“Never said anything about sex. Gender, I said. Nothing about sex.”

“But the terms can be interchangeable.”

“Certainly not.” The navigator tossed the bottle into the disposal and took another from the refrigerator. “Maybe on this planet but not out there.”

Etan shrugged. “I assumed you’d need gender for sex, so if a species lacked gender, they’d uh . . .” He trailed off, making a firm resolution to shut up until he could escape. Suddenly he was very glad he hadn’t canceled his rescue after all.

“Our nature isn’t universal law,” said the navigator. “Out there—” He broke off, staring at something to Etan’s left. “Ah. My employer has decided to come out at last.”

The small creature at the end of the seat might have coalesced out of the humid semidark, an off-white mound of what seemed to be fur as close and dense as a seal’s. It would have repelled or disconcerted him except that it smelled so good, like a cross between fresh-baked bread and wildflowers. The aroma filled Etan with a sudden, intense feeling of well-being. Without thinking, he reached out to touch it, realized, and pulled his hand back.

“Going to pet it, were you? Stroke it?”

“Sorry,” Etan said, half to the navigator and half to the creature.

“I forgive you,” said the navigator, amused. “He’d forgive you, too, except he doesn’t feel you’ve done anything wrong. It’s the smell. Very compelling.” He sniffed. “Go ahead. You won’t hurt him.”

Etan leaned over and gingerly touched the top of the creature. The contact made him jump. It didn’t feel solid. It was like touching gelatin with a fur covering.

“Likes to stuff itself into the cushions and feel the vibrations from the ride,” said the navigator. “But what it really loves is talk. Conversation. Sound waves created by the human voice are especially pleasing to it. And in person, not by holo or phone.” The navigator gave a short, mirthless laugh and killed the second bottle. “So. Come on. Talk it up. That’s what you’re here for.”

“Sorry,” Etan said defensively. “I don’t know exactly what to say.”

“Express your goddamn gratitude for it having me fix your vehicle.”

Etan opened his mouth to make an angry response and decided not to. For all he knew, both alien and human were insane and dangerous besides. “Yes. Of course I do appreciate your help. It was so kind of you, and I’m saving a lot of money since I don’t need a roadside rescue now—”

“Never called it off, did you?”

“What?”

“The rescue. You never called to tell Surveillance you didn’t need help.”

Etan swallowed. “Yes. I did.”

“Liar.”

All right, Etan thought. Enough is too much. “I don’t know what transport services you work for, but I’ll find out. They ought to know about you.”

“Yeah? What should they know—that I make free repairs at the bidding of an alien hairball?” The navigator grinned bitterly.

“No.” Etan’s voice was quiet. “They should know that maybe you’ve been working too long and too hard for aliens.” His eyes swiveled apologetically to the creature. “Not that I mean to offend—”

“Forget it. It doesn’t understand a goddamn word.”

“Then why did you want me to talk to it?”

“Because I understand. We’re attuned. On several frequencies, mind you, one for every glorious mood it might have. Not that it’s any of your business.”

Etan shook his head. “You need help.”

“Fuck if I do. Now finish your thanks and start thinking up some more things to say.”

The bread-and-flowers aroma intensified until Etan’s nerves were standing on end. His heart pounded ferociously, and he wondered if a smell could induce cardiac arrest.

“I think I’ve finished thanking your employer.” He looked directly at the creature. “And that’s all I have to say. Under more pleasant circumstances, I might have talked my head off. Sorry.” He started to get up.

The navigator moved quickly for someone who was supposed to be drunk. Etan found himself pinned against the back of the seat before he realized that the man wasn’t jumping up to open the door. For a moment, he stared into the navigator’s flushed face, not quite believing.

‘Talk,” the navigator said softly, almost gently. “Just talk. That’s all you’ve got to do.”

Etan tried heaving himself upward to throw them both off the seat and onto the floor, but the navigator had him too securely. “Help!” he bellowed. “Somebody help me!”

“Okay, yell for help. That’s good, too,” said the navigator, smiling. They began to slide down on the seat together with Etan on the bottom. “Go ahead. Yell all you want.”

“Let me up and I won’t report you.”

“I’m sure I can believe that.” The navigator laughed. “Tell us a whole fairy story now.”

“Let me go or I swear to Christ I’ll kill you and that furry shit you work for.”

“What?” the navigator asked, leaning on him a little harder. “What was that, sir?”

“Let me go or I’ll fucking kill you!”

Something in the air seemed to break, as though a circuit had been completed or some sort of energy discharged. Etan sniffed. The bread-and-flowers aroma had changed, more flowers, less bread, and much weaker, dissipating in the ventilation before he could get more than a whiff.

The navigator pushed himself off Etan and plumped down heavily on the seat across from him again. Etan held still, looking first at the man rubbing his face with both hands and then turning his head so he could see the creature sliding down behind the cushion. We scared it, he thought, horrified. Bad enough to make it hide under the seat.

“Sir.”

Etan jumped. The navigator was holding a fistful of currency out to him. The denominations made him blink.

“It’s yours, sir. Take it. You can go now.”

Etan pulled himself up. “What the hell do you mean, it’s mine?”

“Please, sir.” The navigator pressed one hand over his left eye. “If you’re going to talk anymore, please step outside.”

“Step outs—” Etan slapped the man’s hand away and lunged for the door.

“Wait!” called the navigator, and in spite of everything, Etan obeyed. The navigator climbed out of the transport clumsily, still covering his eye, the other hand offering the currency. “Please, sir. You haven’t been hurt. You have a repaired vehicle, more than a little pocket money here—you’ve come out ahead if you think about it.”

Etan laughed weakly. “I can’t believe this.”

“Just take the money, sir. My employer wants you to have it.” The navigator winced and massaged his eye some more. “Purely psychosomatic,” he said, as though Etan had asked. “The implant is painless and causes no damage, no matter how intense the exchange between species. But please lower your voice, sir. My employer can still feel your sound, and he’s quite done with you.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“The money is yours from my employer,” the navigator said patiently. “My employer loves people. We discussed that earlier. Loves them. Especially their voices.”

“So?” Etan crossed his arms. The navigator leaned over and stuffed the money between Etan’s forearms.

“Perhaps you remember what else we were discussing. I really have no wish to remind you, sir.”

“So? What’s all that stuff about gender—what’s that got to do with . . .” Etan’s voice died away.

“Human voices,” the navigator said. “No speech where they come from. And we’re so new and different to them. This one’s been here only a few weeks. Its preference happens to be that of a man speaking from fear and anger, something you can’t fake.”

Etan took a step back from the man, unfolding his arms and letting the money fall to the ground, thinking of the implant, the man feeling whatever the creature felt.

“I don’t know if you could call it perversion or not,” said the navigator. “Maybe there’s no such thing.” He looked down at the bills. “Might as well keep it. You earned it. You even did well.” He pulled himself erect and made a small, formal bow. “Good day, sir,” he said, with no mockery at all, and climbed into the transport’s front seat. Etan watched the limo roll out of the breakdown lane and lumber away from him.

After a while, he looked down. The money was still there at his feet, so he picked it up.

Just as he was getting back into his own vehicle, the console phone chimed. “We’ve got an early opening in our patrol pattern,” Surveillance told him, “so we can swing by and get you in ten minutes.”

“Don’t bother,” Etan said.

“Repeat?”

“I said, you’re too late.”

“Repeat again, please.”

Etan sighed. “There isn’t anything to rescue me from anymore.”

There was a brief silence on the other end. “Did you get your vehicle overhauled?”

“Yeah,” Etan said. “That, too.”

THE LIBERATION OF EARTH

William Tenn

William Tenn is the pseudonym of Philip J. Klass, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. Although Klass has produced little fiction since the early ’60s, he was, as William Tenn, one of the top science fiction writers of the ’50s, appearing almost everywhere with imaginative, vivid, bitingly satiric stories like the well-known “Bernie the Faust” or “Down Among the Dead Men”—stories that have earned him a secure place in genre history. “William Tenn” was primarily known as a master of the short story—although he did publish two novels, A Lamp for Medusa and the better-known Of Men and Monsters—and his short work has been gathered in six collections, Of All Possible Worlds, Time in Advance, The Human Angle, The Seven Sexes, The Square Root of Man, and The Wooden Star.

In the masterful black comedy that follows, he gives us a look at several groups of high-minded aliens who come to Earth with only the very best of intentions . . . but of course, we all know what the Road to Hell is paved with, don’t we?

This then, is the story of our liberation. Suck air and grab clusters. Heigh-ho, here is the tale.

August was the month, a Tuesday in August. These words are meaningless now, so far have we progressed; but many things known and discussed by our primitive ancestors, our unliberated, unreconstructed forefathers, are devoid of sense to our free minds. Still the tale must be told, with all of its incredible place-names and vanished points of reference.

Why must it be told? Have any of you a better thing to do? We have had water and weeds and lie in a valley of gusts. So rest, relax and listen. And suck air, suck air.

On a Tuesday in August, the ship appeared in the sky over France in a part of the world then known as Europe. Five miles long the ship was, and word has come down to us that it looked like an enormous silver cigar.

The tale goes on to tell of the panic and consternation among our forefathers when the ship abruptly materialized in the summer-blue sky. How they ran, how they shouted, how they pointed!

How they excitedly notified the United Nations, one of their chiefest institutions, that a strange metal craft of incredible size had materialized over their land. How they sent an order here to cause military aircraft to surround it with loaded weapons, gave instructions there for hastily grouped scientists, with signaling apparatus, to approach it with friendly gestures. How, under the great ship, men with cameras took pictures of it; men with typewriters wrote stories about it; and men with concessions sold models of it.

All these things did our ancestors, enslaved and unknowing, do.

Then a tremendous slab snapped up in the middle of the ship and the first of the aliens stepped out in the complex tripodal gait that all humans were shortly to know and love so well. He wore a metallic garment to protect him from the effects of our atmospheric peculiarities, a garment of the opaque, loosely folded type that these, the first of our liberators, wore throughout their stay on Earth.

Speaking in a language none could understand, but booming deafeningly through a huge mouth about halfway up his twenty-five feet of height, the alien discoursed for exactly one hour, waited politely for a response when he had finished, and receiving none, retired into the ship.

That night, the first of our liberation! Or the first of our first liberation, should I say? That night, anyhow! Visualize our ancestors scurrying about their primitive intricacies: playing ice-hockey, televising, smashing atoms, red-baiting, conducting giveaway shows and signing affidavits—all the incredible minutiae that made the olden times such a frightful mass of cumulative detail in which to live—as compared with the breathless and majestic simplicity of the present.

The big question, of course, was—what had the alien said? Had he called on the human race to surrender? Had he announced that he was on a mission of peaceful trade and, having made what he considered a reasonable offer—for, let us say, the north polar ice-cap—politely withdrawn so that we could discuss his terms among ourselves in relative privacy? Or, possibly, had he merely announced that he was the newly appointed ambassador to Earth from a friendly and intelligent race—and would we please direct him to the proper authority so that he might submit his credentials?

Not to know was quite maddening.

Since decision rested with the diplomats, it was the last possibility which was held, very late that night, to be most likely; and early the next morning, accordingly, a delegation from the United Nations waited under the belly of the motionless star-ship. The delegation had been instructed to welcome the aliens to the outermost limits of its collective linguistic ability. As an additional earnest of mankind’s friendly intentions, all military craft patrolling the air about the great ship were ordered to carry no more than one atom-bomb in their racks, and to fly a small white flag—along with the U.N. banner and their own national emblem. Thus did our ancestors face this, the ultimate challenge of history.

When the alien came forth a few hours later, the delegation stepped up to him, bowed, and, in the three official languages of the United Nations—English, French and Russian—asked him to consider this planet his home. He listened to them gravely, and then launched into his talk of the day before—which was evidently as highly charged with emotion and significance to him as it was completely incomprehensible to the representatives of world government.

Fortunately, a cultivated young Indian member of the secretariat detected a suspicious similarity between the speech of the alien and an obscure Bengali dialect whose anomalies he had once puzzled over. The reason, as we all know now, was that the last time Earth had been visited by aliens of this particular type, humanity’s most advanced civilization lay in a moist valley in Bengal; extensive dictionaries of that language had been written, so that speech with the natives of Earth would present no problem to any subsequent exploring party.

However, I move ahead of my tale, as one who would munch on the succulent roots before the drier stem. Let me rest and suck air for a moment. Heigh-ho, truly those were tremendous experiences for our kind.

You, sir, now you sit back and listen. You are not yet of an age to Tell the Tale. I remember, well enough do I remember how my father told it, and his father before him. You will wait your turn as I did; you listen until too much high land between water holes blocks me off from life.

Then you may take your place in the juiciest weed patch and, reclining gracefully between sprints, recite the great epic of our liberation to the carelessly exercising young.

Pursuant to the young Hindu’s suggestions, the one professor of comparative linguistics in the world capable of understanding and conversing in this peculiar version of the dead dialect was summoned from an academic convention in New York where he was reading a paper he had been working on for eighteen years: An Initial Study of Apparent Relationships Between Several Past Participles in Ancient Sanskrit and an Equal Number of Noun Substantives in Modern Szechuanese.

Yea, verily, all these things—and more, many more—did our ancestors in their besotted ignorance contrive to do. May we not count our freedoms indeed?

The disgruntled scholar, minus—as he kept insisting bitterly—some of his most essential word lists, was flown by fastest jet to the area south of Nancy which, in those long-ago days, lay in the enormous black shadow of the alien spaceship.

Here he was acquainted with his task by the United Nations delegation, whose nervousness had not been allayed by a new and disconcerting development. Several more aliens had emerged from the ship carrying great quantities of immense, shimmering metal which they proceeded to assemble into something that was obviously a machine—though it was taller than any skyscraper man had ever built, and seemed to make noises to itself like a talkative and sentient creature. The first alien still stood courteously in the neighborhood of the profusely perspiring diplomats; ever and anon he would go through his little speech again, in a language that had been almost forgotten when the cornerstone of the library of Alexandria was laid. The men from the U.N. would reply, each one hoping desperately to make up for the alien’s lack of familiarity with his own tongue by such devices as hand gestures and facial expressions. Much later, a commission of anthropologists and psychologists brilliantly pointed out the difficulties of such physical, gestural communication with creatures possessing—as these aliens did—five manual appendages and a single, unwinking compound eye of the type the insects rejoice in.

The problems and agonies of the professor as he was trundled about the world in the wake of the aliens, trying to amass a usable vocabulary in a language whose peculiarities he could only extrapolate from the limited samples supplied him by one who must inevitably speak it with the most outlandish of foreign accents—these vexations were minor indeed compared to the disquiet felt by the representatives of world government. They beheld the extra-terrestrial visitors move every day to a new site on their planet and proceed to assemble there a titanic structure of flickering metal which muttered nostalgically to itself, as if to keep alive the memory of those faraway factories which had given it birth.

True, there was always the alien who would pause in his evidently supervisory labors to release the set little speech; but not even the excellent manners he displayed, in listening to upward of fifty-six replies in as many languages, helped dispel the panic caused whenever a human scientist, investigating the shimmering machines, touched a projecting edge and promptly shrank into a disappearing pinpoint. This, while not a frequent occurrence, happened often enough to cause chronic indigestion and insomnia among human administrators.

Finally, having used up most of his nervous system as fuel, the professor collated enough of the language to make conversation possible. He—and, through him, the world—was thereupon told the following:

The aliens were members of a highly advanced civilization which had spread its culture throughout the entire galaxy. Cognizant of the limitations of the as-yet-underdeveloped animals who had latterly become dominant upon Earth, they had placed us in a sort of benevolent ostracism. Until either we or our institutions had evolved to a level permitting, say, at least associate membership in the galactic federation (under the sponsoring tutelage, for the first few millennia, of one of the older, more widespread and more important species in that federation)—until that time, all invasions of our privacy and ignorance—except for a few scientific expeditions conducted under conditions of great secrecy—had been strictly forbidden by universal agreement.

Several individuals who had violated this ruling—at great cost to our racial sanity, and enormous profit to our reigning religions—had been so promptly and severely punished that no known infringements had occurred for some time. Our recent growth-curve had been satisfactory enough to cause hopes that a bare thirty or forty centuries more would suffice to place us on applicant status with the federation.

Unfortunately, the peoples of this stellar community were many, and varied as greatly in their ethical outlook as their biological composition. Quite a few species lagged a considerable social distance behind the Dendi, as our visitors called themselves. One of these, a race of horrible, wormlike organisms known as the Troxxt—almost as advanced technologically as they were retarded in moral development—had suddenly volunteered for the position of sole and absolute ruler of the galaxy. They had seized control of several key suns, with their attendant planetary systems, and, after a calculated decimation of the races thus captured, had announced their intention of punishing with a merciless extinction all species unable to appreciate from these object-lessons the value of unconditional surrender.

In despair, the galactic federation had turned to the Dendi, one of the oldest, most selfless, and yet most powerful of races in civilized space, and commissioned them—as the military arm of the federation—to hunt down the Troxxt, defeat them wherever they had gained illegal suzerainty, and destroy forever their power to wage war. This order had come almost too late. Everywhere the Troxxt had gained so much the advantage of attack, that the Dendi were able to contain them only by enormous sacrifice. For centuries now, the conflict had careened across our vast island universe. In the course of it, densely populated planets had been disintegrated; suns had been blasted into novae; and whole groups of stars ground into swirling cosmic dust.

A temporary stalemate had been reached a short while ago, and—reeling and breathless—both sides were using the lull to strengthen weak spots in their perimeter.

Thus, the Troxxt had finally moved into the till-then peaceful section of space that contained our solar system—among others. They were thoroughly uninterested in our tiny planet with its meager resources; nor did they care much for such celestial neighbors as Mars or Jupiter. They established their headquarters on a planet of Proxima Centaurus—the star nearest our own sun—and proceeded to consolidate their offensive-defensive network between Rigel and Aldebaran. At this point in their explanation, the Dendi pointed out, the exigencies of interstellar strategy tended to become too complicated for anything but three-dimensional maps; let us here accept the simple statement, they suggested, that it became immediately vital for them to strike rapidly, and make the Troxxt position on Proxima Centaurus untenable—to establish a base inside their lines of communication.

The most likely spot for such a base was Earth.

The Dendi apologized profusely for intruding on our development, an intrusion which might cost us dear in our delicate developmental state. But, as they explained—in impeccable pre-Bengali—before their arrival we had, in effect, become (all unknowingly) a satrapy of the awful Troxxt. We could now consider ourselves liberated.

We thanked them much for that.

Besides, their leader pointed out proudly, the Dendi were engaged in a war for the sake of civilization itself, against an enemy so horrible, so obscene in its nature, and so utterly filthy in its practices, that it was unworthy of the label of intelligent life. They were fighting, not only for themselves, but for every loyal member of the galactic federation; for every small and helpless species; for every obscure race too weak to defend itself against a ravaging conqueror. Would humanity stand aloof from such a conflict?

There was just a slight bit of hesitation as the information was digested. Then—“No!” humanity roared back through such mass-communication media as television, newspapers, reverberating jungle drums, and mule-mounted backwoods messenger. “We will not stand aloof! We will help you destroy this menace to the very fabric of civilization! Just tell us what you want us to do!”

Well, nothing in particular, the aliens replied with some embarrassment. Possibly in a little while there might be something—several little things, in fact—which could be quite useful; but, for the moment, if we would concentrate on not getting in their way when they serviced their gun mounts, they would be very grateful, really. . . .

This reply tended to create a large amount of uncertainty among the two billion of Earth’s human population. For several days afterward, there was a planet-wide tendency—the legend has come down to us—of people failing to meet each other’s eyes.

But then Man rallied from this substantial blow to his pride. He would be useful, be it ever so humbly, to the race which had liberated him from potential subjugation by the ineffably ugly Troxxt. For this, let us remember well our ancestors! Let us hymn their sincere efforts amid their ignorance!

All standing armies, all air and sea fleets, were reorganized into guard-patrols around the Dendi weapons: no human might approach within two miles of the murmuring machinery, without a pass countersigned by the Dendi. Since they were never known to sign such a pass during the entire period of their stay on this planet, however, this loophole-provision was never exercised as far as is known; and the immediate neighborhood of the extra-terrestrial weapons became and remained henceforth wholesomely free of two-legged creatures.

Cooperation with our liberators took precedence over all other human activities. The order of the day was a slogan first given voice by a Harvard professor of government in a querulous radio round table on “Man’s Place in a Somewhat Over-Civilized Universe.”

“Let us forget our individual egos and collective conceits,” the professor cried at one point. “Let us subordinate everything—to the end that the freedom of the solar system in general, and Earth in particular, must and shall be preserved!”

Despite its mouth-filling qualities, this slogan was repeated everywhere. Still, it was difficult sometimes to know exactly what the Dendi wanted—partly because of the limited number of interpreters available to the heads of the various sovereign states, and partly because of their leader’s tendency to vanish into his ship after ambiguous and equivocal statements—such as the curt admonition to “Evacuate Washington!”

On that occasion, both the Secretary of State and the American President perspired fearfully through five hours of a July day in all the silk-hatted, stiff-collared, dark-suited diplomatic regalia that the barbaric past demanded of political leaders who would deal with the representatives of another people. They waited and wilted beneath the enormous ship—which no human had ever been invited to enter, despite the wistful hints constantly thrown out by university professors and aeronautical designers—they waited patiently and wetly for the Dendi leader to emerge and let them know whether he had meant the State of Washington or Washington, D.C.

The tale comes down to us at this point as a tale of glory. The capitol building taken apart in a few days, and set up almost intact in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains; the missing Archives, that were later to turn up in the Children’s Room of a Public Library in Duluth, Iowa; the bottles of Potomac River water carefully borne westward and ceremoniously poured into the circular concrete ditch built around the President’s mansion (from which unfortunately it was to evaporate within a week because of the relatively low humidity of the region)—all these are proud moments in the galactic history of our species, from which not even the later knowledge that the Dendi wished to build no gun site on the spot, nor even an ammunition dump, but merely a recreation hall for their troops, could remove any of the grandeur of our determined cooperation and most willing sacrifice.

There is no denying, however, that the ego of our race was greatly damaged by the discovery, in the course of a routine journalistic interview, that the aliens totaled no more powerful a group than a squad; and that their leader, instead of the great scientist and key military strategist that we might justifiably have expected the Galactic Federation to furnish for the protection of Terra, ranked as the interstellar equivalent of a buck sergeant.

That the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Navy, had waited in such obeisant fashion upon a mere noncommissioned officer was hard for us to swallow; but that the impending Battle of Earth was to have a historical dignity only slightly higher than that of a patrol action was impossibly humiliating.

And then there was the matter of “lendi.”

The aliens, while installing or servicing their planet-wide weapon system, would occasionally fling aside an evidently unusable fragment of the talking metal. Separated from the machine of which it had been a component, the substance seemed to lose all those qualities which were deleterious to mankind and retain several which were quite useful indeed. For example, if a portion of the strange material was attached to any terrestrial metal—and insulated carefully from contact with other substances—it would, in a few hours, itself become exactly the metal that it touched, whether that happened to be zinc, gold, or pure uranium.

This stuff—“lendi,” men have heard the aliens call it—was shortly in frantic demand in an economy ruptured by constant and unexpected emptyings of its most important industrial centers.

Everywhere the aliens went, to and from their weapon sites, hordes of ragged humans stood chanting—well outside the two-mile limit—“Any lendi, Dendi?” All attempts by law-enforcement agencies of the planet to put a stop to this shameless, wholesale begging were useless—especially since the Dendi themselves seemed to get some unexplainable pleasure out of scattering tiny pieces of lendi to the scrabbling multitude. When policemen and soldiery began to join the trampling, murderous dash to the corner of the meadows wherein had fallen the highly versatile and garrulous metal, governments gave up.

Mankind almost began to hope for the attack to come, so that it would be relieved of the festering consideration of its own patent inferiorities. A few of the more fanatically conservative among our ancestors probably even began to regret liberation.

They did, children; they did! Let us hope that these would-be troglodytes were among the very first to be dissolved and melted down by the red flame-balls. One cannot, after all, turn one’s back on progress!

Two days before the month of September was over, the aliens announced that they had detected activity upon one of the moons of Saturn. The Troxxt were evidently threading their treacherous way inward through the solar system. Considering their vicious and deceitful propensities, the Dendi warned, an attack from these worm-like monstrosities might be expected at any moment.

Few humans went to sleep as the night rolled up to and past the meridian on which they dwelt. Almost all eyes were lifted to a sky carefully denuded of clouds by watchful Dendi. There was a brisk trade in cheap telescopes and bits of smoked glass in some sections of the planet; while other portions experienced a substantial boom in spells and charms of the all-inclusive, or omnibus, variety.

The Troxxt attacked in three cylindrical black ships simultaneously; one in the Southern Hemisphere, and two in the Northern. Great gouts of green flame roared out of their tiny craft; and everything touched by this imploded into a translucent, glass-like sand. No Dendi was hurt by these, however, and from each of the now-writhing gun mounts there bubbled forth a series of scarlet clouds which pursued the Troxxt hungrily, until forced by a dwindling velocity to fall back upon Earth.

Here they had an unhappy after-effect. Any populated area into which these pale pink cloudlets chanced to fall was rapidly transformed into a cemetery—a cemetery, if the truth be told as it has been handed down to us, that had more the odor of the kitchen than the grave. The inhabitants of these unfortunate localities were subjected to enormous increases of temperature. Their skin reddened, then blackened; their hair and nails shriveled; their very flesh turned into liquid and boiled off their bones. Altogether a disagreeable way for one-tenth of the human race to die.

The only consolation was the capture of a black cylinder by one of the red clouds. When, as a result of this, it had turned white-hot and poured its substance down in the form of a metallic rainstorm, the two ships assaulting the Northern Hemisphere abruptly retreated to the asteroids into which the Dendi—because of severely limited numbers—steadfastly refused to pursue them.

In the next twenty-four hours the aliens—resident aliens, let us say—held conferences, made repairs to their weapons and commiserated with us. Humanity buried its dead. This last was a custom of our forefathers that was most worthy of note; and one that has not, of course, survived into modern times.

By the time the Troxxt returned, Man was ready for them. He could not, unfortunately, stand to arms as he most ardently desired to do; but he could and did stand to optical instrument and conjurer’s oration.

Once more the little red clouds burst joyfully into the upper reaches of the stratosphere; once more the green flames wailed and tore at the chattering spires of lendi; once more men died by the thousands in the boiling backwash of war. But this time, there was a slight difference: the green flames of the Troxxt abruptly changed color after the engagement had lasted three hours; they became darker, more bluish. And, as they did so, Dendi after Dendi collapsed at his station and died in convulsions.

The call for retreat was evidently sounded. The survivors fought their way to the tremendous ship in which they had come. With an explosion from her stern jets that blasted a red-hot furrow southward through France, and kicked Marseilles into the Mediterranean, the ship roared into space and fled home ignominiously.

Humanity steeled itself for the coming ordeal of horror under the Troxxt.

They were truly worm-like in form. As soon as the two night-black cylinders had landed, they strode from their ships, their tiny segmented bodies held off the ground by a complex harness supported by long and slender metal crutches. They erected a dome-like fort around each ship—one in Australia and one in the Ukraine—captured the few courageous individuals who had ventured close to their landing sites, and disappeared back into the dark craft with their squirming prizes.

While some men drilled about nervously in the ancient military patterns, others pored anxiously over scientific texts and records pertaining to the visit of the Dendi—in the desperate hope of finding a way of preserving terrestrial independence against this ravening conqueror of the star-spattered galaxy.

And yet all this time, the human captives inside the artificially darkened space-ships (the Troxxt, having no eyes, not only had little use for light but the more sedentary individuals among them actually found such radiation disagreeable to their sensitive, unpigmented skins) were not being tortured for information—nor vivisected in the earnest quest of knowledge on a slightly higher level—but educated.

Educated in the Troxxtian language, that is.

True it was that a large number found themselves utterly inadequate for the task which the Troxxt had set them, and temporarily became servants to the more successful students. And another, albeit smaller, group developed various forms of frustration hysteria—ranging from mild unhappiness to complete catatonic depression—over the difficulties presented by a language whose every verb was irregular, and whose myriads of prepositions were formed by noun-adjective combinations derived from the subject of the previous sentence. But, eventually, eleven human beings were released, to blink madly in the sunlight as certified interpreters of Troxxt.

These liberators, it seemed, had never visited Bengal in the heyday of its millennia-past civilization.

Yes, these liberators. For the Troxxt had landed on the sixth day of the ancient, almost mythical month of October. And October the Sixth is, of course, the Holy Day of the second Liberation. Let us remember, let us revere. (If only we could figure out which day it is on our calendar!)

The tale the interpreters told caused men to hang their heads in shame and gnash their teeth at the deception they had allowed the Dendi to practice upon them.

True, the Dendi had been commissioned by the Galactic Federation to hunt the Troxxt down and destroy them. This was largely because the Dendi were the Galactic Federation. One of the first intelligent arrivals on the interstellar scene, the huge creatures had organized a vast police force to protect them and their power against any contingency of revolt that might arise in the future. This police force was ostensibly a congress of all thinking life forms throughout the galaxy; actually, it was an efficient means of keeping them under rigid control.

Most species thus-far discovered were docile and tractable, however; the Dendi had been ruling from time immemorial, said they—very well, then, let the Dendi continue to rule. Did it make that much difference?

But, throughout the centuries, opposition to the Dendi grew—and the nuclei of the opposition were the protoplasm-based creatures. What, in fact, had come to be known as the Protoplasmic League.

Though small in number, the creatures whose life cycles were derived from the chemical and physical properties of protoplasm varied greatly in size, structure, and specialization. A galactic community deriving the main wells of its power from them would be a dynamic instead of a static place, where extra-galactic travel would be encouraged, instead of being inhibited, as it was at present because of Dendi fears of meeting a superior civilization. It would be a true democracy of species—a real biological republic—where all creatures of adequate intelligence and cultural development would enjoy a control of their destinies at present experienced by the silicon-based Dendi alone.

To this end, the Troxxt—the only important race which had steadfastly refused the complete surrender of armaments demanded of all members of the Federation—had been implored by a minor member of the Protoplasmic League to rescue it from the devastation which the Dendi intended to visit upon it, as punishment for an unlawful exploratory excursion outside the boundaries of the galaxy.

Faced with the determination of the Troxxt to defend their cousins in organic chemistry, and the suddenly aroused hostility of at least two-thirds of the interstellar peoples, the Dendi had summoned a rump meeting of the Galactic Council; declared a state of revolt in being; and proceeded to cement their disintegrating rule with the blasted life-forces of a hundred worlds. The Troxxt, hopelessly outnumbered and out-equipped, had been able to continue the struggle only because of the great ingenuity and selflessness of other members of the Protoplasmic League, who had risked extinction to supply them with newly developed secret weapons.

Hadn’t we guessed the nature of the beast from the enormous precautions it had taken to prevent the exposure of any part of its body to the intensely corrosive atmosphere of Earth? Surely the seamless, barely translucent suits which our recent visitors had worn for every moment of their stay on our world should have made us suspect a body chemistry developed from complex silicon compounds rather than those of carbon?

Humanity hung its collective head and admitted that the suspicion had never occurred to it.

Well, the Troxxt admitted generously, we were extremely inexperienced and possibly a little too trusting. Put it down to that. Our naiveté, however costly to them—our liberators—would not be allowed to deprive us of that complete citizenship which the Troxxt were claiming as the birthright of all.

But as for our leaders, our probably corrupted, certainly irresponsible leaders. . . .

The first executions of U.N. officials, heads of states, and pre-Bengali interpreters as “Traitors to Protoplasm”—after some of the lengthiest and most nearly-perfectly-fair trials in the history of Earth—were held a week after G-J Day, the inspiring occasion on which—amidst gorgeous ceremonies—Humanity was invited to join, first the Protoplasmic League and thence the New and Democratic Galactic Federation of All Species, All Races.

Nor was that all. Whereas the Dendi had contemptuously shoved us to one side as they went about their business of making our planet safe for tyranny, and had—in all probability—built special devices which made the very touch of their weapons fatal for us, the Troxxt—with the sincere friendliness which had made their name a byword for democracy and decency wherever living creatures came together among the stars—our Second Liberators, as we lovingly called them, actually preferred to have us help them with the intensive, accelerating labor of planetary defense.

So men’s intestines dissolved under the invisible glare of the forces used to assemble the new, incredibly complex weapons; men sickened and died, in scrabbling hordes, inside the mines which the Troxxt had made deeper than any we had dug hitherto; men’s bodies broke open and exploded in the undersea oil-drilling sites which the Troxxt had declared were essential.

Children’s schooldays were requested, too, in such collecting drives as “Platinum Scrap for Procyon” and “Radioactive Debris for Deneb.” Housewives also were implored to save on salt whenever possible—this substance being useful to the Troxxt in literally dozens of incomprehensible ways—and colorful posters reminded: “Don’t salinate—sugarfy!”

And over all—courteously caring for us like an intelligent parent—were our mentors, taking their giant supervisory strides on metallic crutches, while their pale little bodies lay curled in the hammocks that swung from each paired length of shining leg.

Truly, even in the midst of a complete economic paralysis caused by the concentration of all major productive facilities on other-worldly armaments, and despite the anguished cries of those suffering from peculiar industrial injuries which our medical men were totally unequipped to handle, in the midst of all this mind-wracking disorganization, it was yet very exhilarating to realize that we had taken our lawful place in the future government of the galaxy and were even now helping to make the Universe Safe for Democracy.

But the Dendi returned to smash this idyll. They came in their huge, silvery space-ships and the Troxxt, barely warned in time, just managed to rally under the blow and fight back in kind. Even so, the Troxxt ship in the Ukraine was almost immediately forced to flee to its base in the depths of space. After three days, the only Troxxt on Earth were the devoted members of a little band guarding the ship in Australia. They proved, in three or more months, to be as difficult to remove from the face of our planet as the continent itself; and since there was now a state of close and hostile siege, with the Dendi on one side of the globe, and the Troxxt on the other, the battle assumed frightful proportions.

Seas boiled; whole steppes burned away; the climate itself shifted and changed under the gruelling pressure of the cataclysm. By the time the Dendi solved the problem, the planet Venus had been blasted from the skies in the course of a complicated battle maneuver, and Earth had wobbled over as orbital substitute.

The solution was simple: since the Troxxt were too firmly based on the small continent to be driven away, the numerically superior Dendi brought up enough firepower to disintegrate all Australia into an ash that muddied the Pacific. This occurred on the twenty-fourth of June, the Holy Day of First Reliberation. A day of reckoning for what remained of the human race, however.

How could we have been so naive, the Dendi wanted to know, as to be taken in by the chauvinistic pro-protoplasm propaganda? Surely, if physical characteristics were to be the criteria of our racial empathy, we would not orient ourselves on a narrow chemical basis! The Dendi life-plasma was based On silicon instead of carbon, true, but did not vertebrates—appendaged vertebrates, at that, such as we and the Dendi—have infinitely more in common, in spite of a minor biochemical difference or two, than vertebrates and legless, armless, slime-crawling creatures who happened, quite accidentally, to possess an identical organic substance?

As for this fantastic picture of life in the galaxy. . . . Well! The Dendi shrugged their quintuple shoulders as they went about the intricate business of erecting their noisy weapons all over the rubble of our planet. Had we ever seen a representative of these protoplasmic races the Troxxt were supposedly protecting? No, nor would we. For as soon as a race—animal, vegetable or mineral—developed enough to constitute even a potential danger to the sinuous aggressors, its civilization was systematically dismantled by the watchful Troxxt. We were in so primitive a state that they had not considered it at all risky to allow us the outward seeming of full participation.

Could we say we had learned a single useful piece of information about Troxxt technology—for all of the work we had done on their machines, for all of the lives we had lost in the process? No, of course not! We had merely contributed our mite to the enslavement of far-off races who had done us no harm.

There was much that we had cause to feel guilty about, the Dendi told us gravely—once the few surviving interpreters of the pre-Bengali dialect had crawled out of hiding. But our collective onus was as nothing compared to that borne by “vermicular collaborationists”—those traitors who had supplanted our martyred former leaders. And then there were the unspeakable human interpreters who had had linguistic traffic with creatures destroying a two-million-year-old galactic peace! Why, killing was almost too good for them, the Dendi murmured as they killed them.

When the Troxxt ripped their way back into possession of Earth some eighteen months later, bringing us the sweet fruits of the Second Reliberation—as well as a complete and most convincing rebuttal of the Dendi—there were few humans found who were willing to accept with any real enthusiasm the responsibilities of newly opened and highly paid positions in language, science, and government.

Of course, since the Troxxt, in order to reliberate Earth, had found it necessary to blast a tremendous chunk out of the northern hemisphere, there were very few humans to be found in the first place. . . .

Even so, many of these committed suicide rather than assume the title of Secretary General of the United Nations when the Dendi came back for the glorious Re-Reliberation, a short time after that. This was the liberation, by the way, which swept the deep collar of matter off our planet, and gave it what our forefathers came to call a pear-shaped look.

Possibly it was at this time—possibly a liberation or so later—that the Troxxt and the Dendi discovered the Earth had become far too eccentric in its orbit to possess the minimum safety conditions demanded of a Combat Zone. The battle, therefore, zig-zagged coruscatingly and murderously away in the direction of Aldebaran.

That was nine generations ago, but the tale that has been handed down from parent to child, to child’s child, has lost little in the telling. You hear it now from me almost exactly as I heard it. From my father I heard it as I ran with him from water puddle to distant water puddle, across the searing heat of yellow sand. From my mother I heard it as we sucked air and frantically grabbed at clusters of thick green weed, whenever the planet beneath us quivered in omen of a geographical spasm that might bury us in its burned-out body, or a cosmic gyration threatened to fling us into empty space.

Yes, even as we do now did we do then, telling the same tale, running the same frantic race across miles of unendurable heat for food and water; fighting the same savage battles with the giant rabbits for each other’s carrion—and always, ever and always, sucking desperately at the precious air, which leaves our world in greater quantities with every mad twist of its orbit.

Naked, hungry, and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry, and thirsty do we scamper our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.

The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father before him. Suck air, grab clusters, and hear the last holy observation of our history:

“Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!”

ROOG

Philip K. Dick

A dedicated investigator of the elusive nature of reality, an intrepid explorer of alternate states of consciousness, a wickedly effective and acidulous satirist, the late Philip K. Dick wrote some of the most brilliant novels and short stories in the history of the SF genre, and is now widely recognized as one of the major authors of the late twentieth century, in any genre. He won a Hugo Award for his novel The Man in the High Castle, and his many other novels include Ubik, Martian Time Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Time Out of Joint, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was somewhat disappointingly filmed as Bladerunner. His most recent books, published posthumously, include The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Radio Free Albemuth, Puttering About in a Small Land, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, and the massive three-volume set, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.

In the sly little classic that follows, he shows us that sometimes the most insidious alien threat of all can exist unnoticed right under our very noses. . . .

“Roog!” the dog said. He rested his paws on the top of the fence and looked around him.

The Roog came running into the yard.

It was early morning, and the sun had not really come up yet. The air was cold and gray, and the walls of the house were damp with moisture. The dog opened his jaws a little as he watched, his big black paws clutching the wood of the fence.

The Roog stood by the open gate, looking into the yard. He was a small Roog, thin and white, on wobbly legs. The Roog blinked at the dog, and the dog showed his teeth.

“Roog!” he said again. The sound echoed into the silent half-darkness. Nothing moved nor stirred. The dog dropped down and walked back across the yard to the porch steps. He sat down on the bottom step and watched the Roog. The Roog glanced at him. Then he stretched his neck up to the window of the house, just above him. He sniffed at the window.

The dog came flashing across the yard. He hit the fence, and the gate shuddered and groaned. The Roog was walking quickly up the path, hurrying with funny little steps, mincing along. The dog lay down against the slats of the gate, breathing heavily, his red tongue hanging. He watched the Roog disappear.

The dog lay silently, his eyes bright and black. The day was beginning to come. The sky turned a little whiter, and from all around the sounds of people getting up echoed through the morning air. Lights popped on behind shades. In the chilly dawn a window was opened.

The dog did not move. He watched the path.

In the kitchen Mrs. Cardossi poured water into the coffeepot. Steam rose from the water, blinding her. She set the pot down on the edge of the stove and went into the pantry. When she came back Alf was standing at the door of the kitchen. He put his glasses on.

“You bring in the paper?” he said.

“It’s outside.”

Alf Cardossi walked across the kitchen. He threw the bolt on the back door and stepped out onto the porch. He looked into the gray, damp morning. At the fence Boris lay, black and furry, his tongue out.

“Put the tongue in,” Alf said. The dog looked quickly up. His tail beat against the ground. “The tongue,” Alf said. “Put the tongue in.”

The dog and the man looked at one another. The dog whined. His eyes were bright and feverish.

“Roog!” he said softly.

“What?” Alf looked around. “Someone coming? The paperboy come?”

The dog stared at him, his mouth open.

“You certainly upset these days,” Alf said. “You better take it easy. We both getting too old for excitement.”

He went inside the house.

The sun came up. The street became bright and alive with color. The postman went along the sidewalk with his letters and magazines. Some children hurried by, laughing and talking.

About 11:00, Mrs. Cardossi swept the front porch. She sniffed the air, pausing for a moment.

“It smells good today,” she said. “That means it’s going to be warm.”

In the heat of the noonday sun the black dog lay stretched out full length, under the porch. His chest rose and fell. In the cherry tree the birds were playing, squawking and chattering to each other. Once in a while Boris raised his head and looked at them. Presently he got to his feet and trotted down under the tree.

He was standing under the tree when he saw the two Roogs sitting on the fence, watching him.

“He’s big,” the first Roog said. “Most Guardians aren’t as big as this.”

The other Roog nodded, his head wobbling on his neck. Boris watched them without moving, his body stiff and hard. The Roogs were silent, now, looking at the big dog with his shaggy ruff of white around his neck.

“How is the offering urn?” the first Roog said. “Is it almost full?”

“Yes.” The other nodded. “Almost ready.”

“You, there!” the first Roog said, raising his voice. “Do you hear me? We’ve decided to accept the offering, this time. So you remember to let us in. No nonsense, now.”

“Don’t forget,” the other added. “It won’t be long.”

Boris said nothing.

The two Roogs leaped off the fence and went over together just beyond the walk. One of them brought out a map and they studied it.

“This area really is none too good for a first trial,” the first Roog said. “Too many Guardians. . . . Now, the northside area—”

“They decided,” the other Roog said. “There are so many factors—”

“Of course.” They glanced at Boris and moved back farther from the fence. He could not hear the rest of what they were saying.

Presently the Roogs put their map away and went off down the path.

Boris walked over to the fence and sniffed at the boards. He smelled the sickly, rotten odor of Roogs and the hair stood up on his back.

That night when Alf Cardossi came home the dog was standing at the gate, looking up the walk. Alf opened the gate and went into the yard.

“How are you?” he said, thumping the dog’s side. “You stopped worrying? Seems like you been nervous of late. You didn’t used to be that way.”

Boris whined, looking intently up into the man’s face.

“You a good dog, Boris,” Alf said. “You pretty big, too, for a dog. You don’t remember long ago how you used to be only a little bit of a puppy.”

Boris leaned against the man’s leg.

“You a good dog,” Alf murmured. “I sure wish I knew what is on your mind.”

He went inside the house. Mrs. Cardossi was setting the table for dinner. Alf went into the living room and took his coat and hat off. He set his lunch pail down on the sideboard and came back into the kitchen.

“What’s the matter?” Mrs. Cardossi said.

“That dog got to stop making all that noise, barking. The neighbors going to complain to the police again.”

“I hope we don’t have to give him to your brother,” Mrs. Cardossi said, folding her arms. “But he sure goes crazy, especially on Friday morning, when the garbage men come.”

“Maybe he’ll calm down,” Alf said. He lit his pipe and smoked solemnly. “He didn’t used to be that way. Maybe he’ll get better, like he was.”

“We’ll see,” Mrs. Cardossi said.

The sun came up, cold and ominous. Mist hung over all the trees and in the low places.

It was Friday Morning.

The black dog lay under the porch, listening, his eyes wide and staring. His coat was stiff with hoarfrost and the breath from his nostrils made clouds of steam in the thin air. Suddenly he turned his head and leaped up.

From far off, a long way away, a faint sound came, a kind of crashing sound.

“Roog!” Boris cried, looking around. He hurried to the gate and stood up, his paws on the top of the fence.

In the distance the sound came again, louder now, not as far away as before. It was a crashing, clanging sound, as if something were being rolled back, as if a great door were being opened.

“Roog!” Boris cried. He stared up anxiously at the darkened windows above him. Nothing stirred, nothing.

And along the street the Roogs came. The Roogs and their truck moved along, bouncing against the rough stones, crashing and whirring.

“Roog!” Boris cried, and he leaped, his eyes blazing. Then he became more calm. He settled himself down on the ground and waited, listening.

Out in front the Roogs stopped their truck. He could hear them opening the doors, stepping down onto the sidewalk. Boris ran around in a little circle. He whined, and his muzzle turned once again toward the house.

Inside the warm, dark bedroom, Mr. Cardossi sat up a little in bed and squinted at the clock.

“That damn dog,” he muttered. “That damn dog.” He turned his face toward the pillow and closed his eyes.

The Roogs were coming down the path, now. The first Roog pushed against the gate and the gate opened. The Roogs came into the yard. The dog backed away from them.

“Roog! Roog!” he cried. The horrid, bitter smell of Roogs came to his nose, and he turned away.

“The offering urn,” the first Roog said. “It is full, I think.” He smiled at the rigid, angry dog. “How very good of you,” he said.

The Roogs came toward the metal can, and one of them took the lid from it.

“Roog! Roog!” Boris cried, huddled against the bottom of the porch steps. His body shook with horror. The Roogs were lifting up the big metal can, turning it on its side. The contents poured out onto the ground, and the Roogs scooped the sacks of bulging, splitting paper together, catching at the orange peels and fragments, the bits of toast and eggshells.

One of the Roogs popped an eggshell into his mouth. His teeth crunched the eggshell.

“Roog!” Boris cried hopelessly, almost to himself. The Roogs were almost finished with their work of gathering up the offering. They stopped for a moment, looking at Boris.

Then, slowly, silently, the Roogs looked up, up the side of the house, along the stucco, to the window, with its brown shade pulled tightly down.

“ROOG!” Boris screamed, and he came toward them, dancing with fury and dismay. Reluctantly, the Roogs turned away from the window. They went out through the gate, closing it behind them.

“Look at him,” the last Roog said with contempt, pulling his corner of the blanket up on his shoulder. Boris strained against the fence, his mouth open, snapping wildly. The biggest Roog began to wave his arms furiously and Boris retreated. He settled down at the bottom of the porch steps, his mouth still open, and from the depths of him an unhappy, terrible moan issued forth, a wail of misery and despair.

“Come on,” the other Roog said to the lingering Roog at the fence.

They walked up the path.

“Well, except for these little places around the Guardians, this area is well cleared,” the biggest Roog said. “I’ll be glad when this particular Guardian is done. He certainly causes us a lot of trouble.”

“Don’t be impatient,” one of the Roogs said. He grinned. “Our truck is full enough as it is. Let’s leave something for next week.”

All the Roogs laughed.

They went on up the path, carrying the offering in the dirty, sagging blanket.

SPEED TRAP

Frederik Pohl

A seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of modern SF, Frederik Pohl has been one of the genre’s major shaping forces—as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist—for more than fifty years. He was the founder of the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time Galaxy‘s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos. As a writer, he has several times won Nebula and Hugo awards, as well as the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include several written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth—including The Space Merchants, Wolfbane, and Gladiator-at-Law—and many solo novels, including Gateway, Man Plus, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, and The Coming of the Quantum Cats. Among his many collections are The Gold at the Starbow’s End, In the Problem Pit, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. His most recent books are a nonfiction book in collaboration with the late Isaac Asimov, Our Angry Earth, and a new novel, Mining the Oort.

In the deceptively quiet story that follows, he demonstrates that there are many ways to conquer a world, and that many of the best of them don’t require you to come anywhere near a battlefield. . . .

My reservation was for a window seat, up front, because on this particular flight they serve from the front back; but on the seat next to mine, I saw a reservation tag for Gordie MacKenzie. I kept right on going until the hostess hailed me.

“Why, Dr. Grew, nice to have you with us again “

I stood blocking the aisle. “Can I switch to a seat back here somewhere, Clara?”

“Why, I think—let me see “

“How about that one?” I didn’t see a tag on it.

“Well, it’s not a window seat “

“But it’s free?”

“Well, let’s look.” She flipped the seating chart out of her clipboard. “Certainly. May I take your bag?”

“Uh-uh. Work to do.” And I did have work to do, too; that was why I didn’t want to sit next to MacKenzie. I slouched down in the seat, scowling at the man next to me to indicate that I didn’t want to strike up a conversation; he scowled back to show that that suited him fine. I saw MacKenzie come aboard, but he didn’t see me.

Just before we took off, I saw Clara bend over him to check his seat belt; and in the same motion, she palmed the reservation card with my name on it. Smart girl. I decided to buy her a drink the next time I found myself in the motel where her crew stayed between flights.

I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m a jet-set type who’s on first-name terms with every airline stewardess around. The only ones I see enough of at all are a couple on the New York-L. A. run, and a few operating out of O’Hare, and maybe a couple that I see now and then between Huntsville and the Cape—oh, and one Air France girl I’ve flown with once or twice out of Orly, but only because she gave me a lift in her Citroen one time when there was a métro strike and no cabs to be found. Still, come to think of it, well—all right—yes, I guess I do get around a lot. Those are the hazards of the trade. Although my degree’s in atmospheric physics, my specialty is signatures—you know, the instrument readings or optical observations that we interpret to mean such-and-such pressure, temperature, chemical composition and so on—and that’s a pretty sexy field right now, and I get invited to a lot of conferences. I said “invited.” I don’t mean in the sense that I can say no. Not if I want to keep enough status in the department to have freedom to do my work. And it’s all plushy and kind of fun, at least when I have time to have fun; and really, I’ve got pretty good at locating a decent restaurant in Cleveland or Albuquerque (try the Mexican food at the airport) and vetoing an inferior wine.

That’s funny, too, because I didn’t expect it to be this way—not when I was a kid reading Willy Ley’s articles and going out to hunt ginseng in the woods around Potsdam (I mean the New York one) so I could earn money and go to MIT and build spaceships. I thought I would be a lean, hungry-eyed scientist in shabby clothes. I thought probably I would never get out of the laboratory (I guess I thought spaceships were designed in laboratories) and I’d waste my health on long night hours over the slide rule. And, as it turns out, what I’m wasting my health on is truite amandine and time-zone disorientation.

But I think I know what to do about that.

That’s why I didn’t want to spend the four and a half hours yakking with Gordie MacKenzie, because, by God, I maybe do know what to do about that.

It’s not really my field, but I’ve talked it over with some systems people and they didn’t get that polite look people get when you’re trying to tell them about their own subject. I’ll see if I can explain it. See, there are like 20 conferences and symposia and colloquia a month in any decent-sized field, and you’re out of it unless you make a few of them. Not counting workshops and planning sessions and get-the-hell-down-here-Charley-or-we-lose-the-grant meetings. And they do have a way of being all over the place. I haven’t slept in my own home all seven nights of any week since Christmas before last, when I had the flu.

Now, question is, what do all the meetings accomplish? I had a theory once that the whole Gestalt was planned—I mean, global scatter, jet travel and all. A sort of psychic energizer, designed to keep us all pumped up all the time—after all, if you’re going somewhere in a jet at 600 miles an hour, you know you’ve got to be doing something important, or else you wouldn’t be doing it so fast. But who would plan something like that?

So I gave up that idea and concentrated on ways of doing it better. You know, there really is no more stupid way of communicating information than flying 3000 miles to sit on a gilt chair in a hotel ballroom and listen to 25 people read papers at you. Twenty-three of the papers you don’t care about anyway, and the 24th you can’t understand because the speaker has a bad accent and, anyway, he’s rushing it because he’s under time pressure to catch his plane to the next conference, and that one single 25th paper has cost you four days, including travel time, when you could have read it in your office in 15 minutes. And got more out of it, too. Of course, there’s the interplay when you find yourself sitting in the coffeeshop next to somebody who can explain the latest instrumentation to you because his company’s doing the telemetry; you can’t get that from reading. But I’ve noticed there’s less and less time for that. And less and less interest, too, maybe, because you get pretty tired of making new friends after about the 300th; and you begin to think about what’s waiting for you on your desk when you get back, and you remember the time when you got stuck with that damn loudmouthed Egyptian at the I.A.U. in Brussels and had to fight the Suez war for an hour and a half.

All right, you can see what I mean. Waste of time and valuable kerosene jet fuel, right?

Because the pity of it is that electronic information handling is so cheap and easy. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Bell Labs’ demo of their picture phone—they had it at a couple of meetings—but it’s nearly like face to face. Better than the telephone. You get all the signatures, except maybe the smell of whiskey on the breath or something like that. And that’s only one gadget: There’s facsimile, telemetry, remote-access computation, teletype . . . well, there it is, we’ve got them, why don’t we use them? And go farther, too. You know about how they can strip down a taped voice message—leave out the unnecessary parts of speech, edit out the pauses, even drop some of the useless syllables? And you can still understand it perfectly, only at about 400 words a minute instead of maybe 60 or 70. (And about half of them repetitions or “What I mean to say.”)

Well, that’s the systems part; and, as I say, it’s not my field. But it’s there for the taking—expert opinion, not mine. A couple of the fellows were real hot, and we’re going to get together on it as soon as we can find the time.

Maybe you wonder what I have to contribute. I do have something, I think. For example, how about problem-solving approaches to discussions? I’ve seen some papers that suggest a way of simplifying and pointing up a conference so you could really confer. I’ve even got a pet idea of my own. I call it the Quantum of Debate, the irreducible minimum of argument which each participant in a discussion can use to make one single point and get that understood (or argued or refuted) before he goes on to the next.

Why, if half of what I think is so, then people like me can get things done in—oh, be conservative—a quarter of the time we spend now.

Leaving three quarters of our time for—what? Why, for work! For doing the things that we know we ought to do but can’t find the time for. I mean this literally and really and seriously. I honestly think that we can do four times as much work as we do. And I honestly think that this means we can land on Mars in 5 years instead of 20, cure leukemia in 12 years instead of 50, and so on.

Well, that’s the picture, and that’s why I didn’t want to waste the time talking with Gordie MacKenzie. I’d brought all my notes in my briefcase, and four and a half hours was just about enough time to try to pull them all together and make some sort of presentation to show my systems friends and a few others who were interested.

So as soon as we were airborne, I had the little table down and I was sorting out little stacks of paper.

Only it didn’t work out.

It’s funny how often it doesn’t work out—I mean, when you’ve got something you want to do and you look ahead and see where the time’s going to be to do it, and then, all of a sudden, the time’s gone and you didn’t do it. What it was was that Clara worked her way back with the cocktails—she knew mine, an extra-dry martini with a twist of lemon—and I moved the papers out of her way out of politeness, and then she showed up with the hors d’oeuvres and I put them back in my bag out of hunger, and then I had to decide how I wanted my tournedos, and it took almost two hours for dinner, including the wine and the B & B; and although I didn’t really want to watch the movie, there’s something about seeing all those screens ahead of you, with the hero just making his bombing run on your own screen but shot up and falling in flames on the ones you can see out of the corner of your eye in the forward seats—and back in the briefing room, or even in the pub the night before on the screens in the other row that the film gets to after it gets to yours—all sort of like a cross section of instants of time, a plural “now.” Disconcerting. It polarized my attention; of course, the liquor helped; and, anyway, by the time the movie was over, it was time for the second round of coffee and mints, and then the seat-belt sign was on and we were over the big aluminum dome on Mount Wilson, coming in, and I never had found the time to do my sorting. Well, I was used to that. I’d never found any ginseng back in Potsdam, either. I had to get through school on a scholarship.

I checked in, washed my face and went down to the meeting room just in time for a very dull tutorial on clear-air turbulence in planetary atmospheres. There was quite a good turnout, maybe 70 or 80 people in the room; but what they thought they were getting out of it, I cannot imagine, so I picked up a program and ducked out.

Somebody by the coffee machine called to me. “Hi, Chip.”

I went over and shook his hand, a young fellow named Resnik from the little college where I’d got my bachelor’s, looking bored and angry. He was with someone I didn’t know, tall and gray-haired and bankerish. “Dr. Ramos, this is Chesley Grew. Chip, Dr. Ramos. He’s with NASA—I think it’s NASA?”

“No, I’m with a foundation,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Grew. I’ve followed your work.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” I would have liked a cup of coffee, but I didn’t particularly want to stand there talking to them while I drank it, so I said, “Well, I’d better get checked in, so if you’ll excuse me——”

“Come off it, Chip,” said Larry Resnik. “I saw you check in half an hour ago. You just want to go up to your room and work.”

That was embarrassing, a little. I didn’t mind it with Resnik, but I didn’t know the other fellow. He grinned and said, “Larry tells me you’re like that. Matter of fact, when you went by, he said you’d be back out in thirty seconds, and you were.”

“Well. Clear-air turbulence isn’t my subject, really “

“Oh, nobody’s blaming you. God knows not. Care for some coffee?”

The only thing to do was to be gracious about it, so I said, “Yes, please. Thanks.” I watched him take a cup and fill it from the big silver urn. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. “Did we meet at the Dallas Double-A S sessions?”

“I’m afraid not. Sugar? No, I’ve actually been to very few of these meetings, but I’ve read some of your papers.”

I stirred my coffee. “Thank you, Dr. Ramos.” One of the things I’ve learned to do is repeat a name as often as I can so I won’t forget it. About half the time I forget it anyway, of course. “I’ll be speaking tomorrow morning, Dr. Ramos. ‘A Photometric Technique for Deriving Slopes from Planetary Fly-bys.’ Nothing much that doesn’t follow from what they’ve clone at Langley, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, I saw the abstract.”

“But you’ll get your brownie points for reading it, eh?” said Larry. He was breathing heavily. “How many does that make this year?”

“Well, a lot.” I tried to drink my coffee both rapidly and inconspicuously. Larry seemed in an unhappy mood.

“That’s what we were talking about when you came in,” he said. “Thirty papers a year and committee reports between times. When was the last time you spent a solid month at your desk? I know, in my own department——”

I could feel myself growing interested and I didn’t want to be, I wanted to get back to my notes. I took another gulp of my coffee.

“You know what Fred Hoyle said?”

“I don’t think so, Larry.”

“He said the minute a man does anything, anything at all, the whole world enters into a conspiracy to keep him from ever doing it again. Program chairmen invite him to read papers. Trustees put him onto committees. Newspaper reporters call him up to interview him. Television shows ask him to appear with a comic, a bandleader and a girl singer, to talk about whether there’s life on Mars.”

“And people who sympathize with him button-hole him on his way out of meetings,” said Dr. Ramos. He chuckled. “Really, Dr. Grew. We’ll understand if you just keep on going.”

“I’m not even sure it’s this world,” said Larry.

He was not only irritable, he was hardly making sense. “For that matter,” he added, “I haven’t even really done anything yet. Not like you, Chip. But I can, someday.”

“Don’t be modest,” said Dr. Ramos. “And look, we’re making a lot of noise here. Why don’t we find some place to sit down and talk—unless you really do want to get back to your work, Dr. Grew?”

But you see, I was already more than half convinced that this was my work, to talk to Larry and Dr. Ramos; and what we finally did was go up to my room and then up to Larry’s, where he had a Rand Corporation report in his bag with some notes I’d sent him once, and we never did get back to the meeting room. Along about ten we had dinner sent up, and that was where we stayed, drinking cold coffee off the set-up table and sparingly drinking bourbon out of a bottle Larry had brought along, and I told them everything I’d ever thought about a systems approach to the transmission of technological information. And what it implied. And Dr. Ramos was with it at every step, the best listener either of us had ever had, though most of what he said was, “Yes, of course” and “I see.” There really was a lot in it. I’d believed it, sitting by myself and computing, like a child anticipating Christmas, how much work I could get done for a couple K a year in amortization of systems and overhead. And with the two of them, I was sure of it. It was a giddy kind of evening. Toward the end, we even began to figure out how quickly we could colonize Mars and launch a fleet of interstellar space liners, with all the working time of the existing people spent working; and then there was a pause and Larry got up and threw back the glass French window and we looked out on his balcony. Twenty stories up, and Los Angeles out in front of us and a thunderstorm brewing over the southern hills. The fresh air cleared my head for a moment and then made me realize, first, that I was sleepy and, second, that I had to read that damned paper in about seven hours.

“We’d better call it a day,” said Dr. Ramos.

Larry started to object, then grinned. “All right for you old fellows,” he said. “Anyway, I want to look at those notes of yours by myself, Chip, if you don’t mind.”

“Just so you don’t lose them,” I said, and turned to go back to my room and get into my bed and lie with my eyes wide open, smiling to myself, before I fell asleep to dream about 50 weeks a year working at my trade.

Even so, I woke easily the moment the hotel clock buzzed by my head. We’d fixed it to have breakfast in Larry’s room so I could reclaim my notes and maybe chat for a moment before the morning session began; and when I got to his floor, I saw Dr. Ramos padding toward me. “Morning,” he said. “I just woke up two honeymooners who didn’t appreciate it. Wasn’t Larry’s room 2051?”

“It’s 2052. The other way.” He grinned and fell into step and told me a fast and quite funny honeymooner joke, timing the punch line just as we reached Larry’s door.

He didn’t answer my knock. Still laughing, I said, “You try.” But there was no answer to Dr. Ramos’ knock, either.

I stopped laughing. “He couldn’t have forgotten we were coming, could he?”

“Try the door, why don’t you?”

And I did and it opened easily.

But Larry wasn’t in the room. The door to the bath was standing open and so was the balcony window, and no Larry. His bed was rumpled but empty.

“I don’t think he’s gone out,” said Dr. Ramos. “Look, his shoes are still there.”

The balcony wasn’t big enough to hide on, but I walked over and looked at it. Rain-slick and narrow, all that was on it was a couple of soaked deck chairs and some cigarette butts.

“Looks like he was out here,” I said; and then, feeling melodramatic, I leaned over the rail and looked down; and it wasn’t actually melodramatic after all, because there in the curve of the hotel’s sweeping front, on the rim of a fountain, something was sprawled, and a man was standing by it, shouting at the doorman. It was too early for much noise, and I could hear his voice faintly coming up the 200 vertical feet between us and what was left of Larry.

They canceled the morning session but decided to go ahead in the afternoon, and I got into a long, bruising fight with Gordie MacKenzie because he wanted to give his paper when it was scheduled, at three in the afternoon, and I’d been reshuffled into that time and I just wasn’t feeling cheerful enough to let him get away with anything. Not after spending two hours with the coroner’s men and the hotel staff, trying to help them figure out why Larry would have jumped or slipped off the balcony, and especially not after finding out that he had had all my notes in his hand when he jumped and they were now in sticky, sloppy clusters all over Los Angeles County.

So I was about fed up. I once heard Krafft Ehricke give what I would figure to be a 12-minute paper in three minutes and 45 seconds, and I tried to beat his record and pretty nearly made it. Then I threw everything I owned into my suitcase and checked out, figuring to head right out to the airport and get on the first plane going home.

But the clerk said, “I have a message for you, Mr. Grew. Dr. Ramos asked you not to leave without seeing him.”

“Thanks,” I said, after a moment of debating whether to do anything about it or not; but as it turned out, I didn’t have to make the decision. Ramos came hurrying toward me across the lobby, his friendly face concerned.

“I thought you’d be leaving,” he said. “Give me twenty minutes of your time first.”

I hesitated and he snapped a finger at a bellboy. “Here. Let him take care of your bag and let’s go down and have a cup of coffee.” So I let him lead me to the outdoor patio by the coffeeshop, warm and clean now after the rain. I wondered if he recognized the place where Larry had hit, but I’m not sensitive about that sort of thing and apparently neither was he. He really had a commanding presence when he wanted to. He had a waitress beside us before we had quite slid our chairs closer to the table, sent her after coffee and sandwiches without consulting me and started in on me without a pause. “Chip,” he said, “don’t blow it. I’m sorry about your notes. But I don’t want to see you give up.”

I leaned back in my chair, feeling very weary. “Oh, that I won’t do, Dr. Ramos——”

“Call me Laszlo.”

“That I won’t do, Laszlo. As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking about it already.”

“I knew you would be.”

“I figure that by cutting out a couple of meetings next week—I can use Larry’s death as an excuse, some way; I’ll use anything, actually—I can reconstruct most of them from memory. Well, maybe not in a week, come to think of it. I’ll have to send for copies of some of the reports. But sooner or later——”

“Right. That’s what I want to talk to you about.” The girl brought the coffee and sandwiches and he waved her away briskly as soon as she’d set them down. “You see, you’re the man I came here to see.”

I looked at him. “You’re interested in photometry?”

“No. Not your paper—your idea. What we were talking about all night, for God’s sake. I didn’t know it was you I wanted until Resnik mentioned you yesterday. But after last night, I was sure.”

“I already have a job, Dr.—Laszlo.”

“And I’m not offering you a job.”

“Then, what——”

“I’m offering you a chance to make your idea work. I’ve got money, Chip, foundation money looking for something to be spent on. Not space research or cancer research or higher mathematics—they’re funded well enough now. My foundation is looking for projects that don’t fit into the usual patterns. Big ones. Like yours.”

Well, of course I was excited. It was so good to be taken that seriously.

“I called the board secretary in Washington first thing—I mean, as soon as they were open there. Of course, I couldn’t give him enough over the phone for a formal commitment. But he’s on the hook, Chip. And the board will go along. There’s a meeting next week and I want you there.”

“In Washington? I suppose “

“Well, no. The foundation’s international, Chip, and this meeting’s at Lake Como. But we’ll pick up the tab, of course, and you can get a lot more done there, where your office isn’t going to call you——”

“But, I mean, I’m not sure——”

“We’ll back you. Everything you need. A staff. A headquarters. We’ve got the beginnings of a facility in Ames, Iowa; you’ll have to go out there, of course. But it shouldn’t be more than, oh, say, a couple days a month. And”—he grinned, a little apologetically—“I know it won’t mean anything to you. After you’ve got one medal on your chest, the rest aren’t too exciting. But it’ll look nice in your Who’s Who entry; and, anyway, the secretary has already authorized me to tell you that you’re invited to accept appointment to a trusteeship.”

I began to need the coffee and I took a long swallow. “You’re moving too fast for me, Laszlo,” I said.

“The trustees meet in Flagstaff; they’ve got a country-club deal there. You’ll like it. Of course, it’s only six times a year. But it’s worth it, Chip. I mean, we have our politics like everything else; and if you’re a trustee, you swing a lot of weight.”

And he prattled on, and I sat there listening, and it was all coming true, everything I’d hoped for; and the next week in Italy, in a great shiny room with an enormous window looking out over Lake Como, I found myself a full-fledged project director, with status as a trustee, honorary membership on the priorities committee and a staff of 41.

Next week we dedicate the Lawrence Resnik Memorial Building in Ames—the name was my idea, but everybody agreed—and although it’s been a hell of a year, I can see where we’ll really make progress now. It still seems a little incongruous that I should be putting in so much time on managerial work and conferences. But when I mentioned it to Laszlo the other day in Montreal, he gave me the grin and an approving look. “I wondered how long it would take you to think of that,” he chuckled. “But it’s best to make haste slowly, and you can see for yourself it’s paying off. Have I told you what a good impression your lecture tour made?”

“Thanks. Yes, as a matter of fact, you did. Anyway, once we get the Resnik installation going, there’ll be a little more time.”

“Damn right! And don’t say I told you”—he winked—“but remember what I told you about a possible appointment to the President’s Commission on Interdisciplinary Affairs? Well, it’s not official. But it’s definite. We’ve already taken a suite at the Shoreham for you. You’ll be using it a lot. We’ve even fitted up a room as an office; you can keep your notes and things there between trips.”

Well, I told him, of course, that if he meant the notes I had been trying to reconstruct, they didn’t require all that much room. Not by quite a lot, since I haven’t in all truth got very far.

I think I would have, somehow or other, with a little luck. But I haven’t actually been very lucky. Poor Honeyman, for instance—I’d already written him for another copy of the report he’d made up for me when I heard that his yawl had capsized in a storm. They didn’t even find his body for a week. And nobody seems to know where he kept his copy of the report, if he ever made one. And——

Well, there was that funny thing Resnik said the day he died, about how the world conspired against anybody who’d ever done anything. And then he said, “I’m not even sure it’s this world.”

I figured out what the joke was—that is, if it was a joke. I mean, just for a hypothesis, suppose Somebody didn’t want us to get ahead as fast as we could, Somebody from another world. . . .

That’s silly. That is, I think it’s silly.

But if that line of thinking isn’t silly, then it must be something quite the opposite of silly; by which I mean it must be dangerous. Just recently, I’ve almost been run over twice by crazy drivers in front of my own house. And then there’s the air taxi I missed and saw crash on take-off before my eyes.

Just for the fun of it, there are two things I’d like to know. One is where the foundation gets its money and why. The other—and I just might see if I can get an answer to this one, next time I’m in L. A.—is whether there really were a pair of honeymooners in room 2051 that morning, to be accidentally awakened by Laszlo Ramos just about the time that Larry was on his way down 20 flights.

THE PERFECT HOST

Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. His novels include Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrack in the Furnace, Tom O’ Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, and At Winter’s End. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, and Beyond the Safe Zone. His most recent books are Nightfall and Child of Time, two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, the novel The Face of the Waters, and a massive retrospective collection, The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. For many years he edited the prestigious anthology series New Dimensions, and has recently, along with his wife, writer Karen Haber, taken over the editing of the Universe anthology series. He lives in Oakland, California.

Aliens have always fascinated Silverberg, and he has written a great deal about them, including several ingenious and powerful stories of alien invasion. Here he depicts an alien invasion and conquest of Earth which takes place on such a small and personal scale, down in the world of the ultra-small, among the cells and molecules, that it is almost unnoticeable—but no less effective for all that.

After the third chemotherapy session a voice said, coming from somewhere within him, apparently just back of his ribs on the right side, “I wish you’d quit letting them give you these treatments. It’s pretty damned disagreeable for us both, and a complete waste of time besides. You don’t have cancer.”

McDermott glanced quickly around the room. No one was there.

“Who said that?”

“I did.”

“Who are you? Where are you?”

“I’m right in here. Inside you, not very far from your gallbladder. I think this thing is your gallbladder. You’ve got one hell of an incredible mess of complicated stuff inside you, are you aware of that?”

McDermott closed his eyes and took five or six deep breaths. They had warned him that the chemotherapy would nauseate him and make what was left of his hair fall out, but they hadn’t said a word about hallucinations. He could handle the nausea, most likely, and the hair was supposed to grow back eventually if he survived at all, but he didn’t like the idea of hearing voices.

“I want you to cancel these chemo sessions,” the voice said firmly.

“Look, leave me alone, will you?”

“I’m serious. You’re letting them pour all this deadly crap into your system, and it’s very unpleasant for me. It can’t be a lot of fun for you either.”

“I refuse to listen to this,” McDermott said. “It’s bad enough to turn up with cancer at my age. To lose my mind on top of everything else is simply adding insult to injury.”

“I told you. You don’t have cancer.”

“Then what’s this lump in my abdomen?”

“Me,” said the voice. “I’ve been living inside you for nine weeks. Establishing contact with your neural system, getting everything in shape to notify you of my presence. But you had to decide I was a malignancy, didn’t you? You and that pansy doctor of yours. And now the chemotherapy. Talk about adding insult to injury, fellow. How would you like it if I called you a malignancy? And then started polluting your environment with vile and nasty life-threatening substances?”

“Shit,” McDermott muttered. “Oh, shit, shit, shit. This is too goddamned much.”

“You don’t believe I’m really here?”

“Of course you’re really here. You’re a hideous fucking mass of inoperable carcinoma that’s trying to kill me and doing a pretty good job of it, and obviously you’ve metastasized to my brain as well, and now I’m sliding into terminal insanity. I’m going to spend my few remaining weeks having long intimate conversations with my own cancer. That’s just great. You can’t imagine how happy it all makes me.”

“I keep telling you and telling you, McDermott. You don’t have cancer.”

“What do I have, then?”

“You really want to know?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“All right. Your body is host to an intelligent alien lifeform. I’m a visitor from Cherponex VII, and I’ve taken up residence in your abdomen. That may sound a little unsettling to you, but I assure you, fellow, I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Trust me.”

“Shit,” McDermott said again. So he had gone out of his mind, on top of all the rest of it. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”

He began to cry. He had grown very emotional here in these days of terminal affliction.

There was no arguing with the voice’s timetable, at any rate. His troubles had started exactly nine weeks before, nine weeks to the day. He had it all charted out on the calendar on his bedroom wall. Tuesday, the Fourth of July: Bill and Jan Kaiser’s annual holiday cookout at the picnic grove in Taft Park, the whole gang there, beer by the keg, the usual Softball name, hamburgers grilling on the charcoal fire. He played left field and didn’t do such a bad job of it, considering that he hadn’t been sixteen years old for the past twenty-three years, although his throwing arm wasn’t what it once had been. He did proper justice to all that fine cold beer, too. And, since it was the Fourth of July, he allowed himself three nice sizzling burgers with plenty of onion, and to hell with the cholesterol count. Half an hour later he felt a stabbing pain in his gut, a little more than halfway down his right side, an icepick sensation so powerful that it knocked him to his knees. He crouched there, sweating, astonished.

“What is it, man?” Dave Brewster asked. They had gone to high school together. Brewster was an internist now. He was McDermott’s doctor whenever McDermott needed a doctor, which hadn’t been often.

“Pain—right—here—”

Brewster helped him up. “A little gastrointestinal discomfort, hey? That fourth hamburger sending you a message?”

“I only had three.”

“But you forgot the Alka-Seltzer chaser, didn’t you? You aren’t a kid any more, Joey-boy.”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Just what I said. You aren’t a kid.”

Brewster always brought a first-aid kit to the Kaisers’ picnic. He fixed up some fizzy-water for McDermott, and he felt better, or thought he did, though he begged off on the volleyball game that traditionally wrapped up the day’s frolics. There was still a dull ache in his side when he drove home, even so, and in the morning it was worse, and he had some fever besides. He tried Maalox.

He tried more Alka-Seltzer. He lived on a bland diet for a couple of days. Things went on hurting. The pain would diminish at times, would almost disappear, and then would return worse than ever. Had there been a chunk of ground glass in that last hamburger? The following Tuesday—exactly a week after the picnic—he took a morning off—and went to see Dave Brewster.

“Still hurts?” Brewster asked, sounding surprised. “Well, let’s check a few things out, now—”

He peered at McDermott’s tongue. He looked down McDermott’s throat. He prodded McDermott’s tender abdomen. He took McDermott’s temperature. He had McDermott give him blood and urine samples, just to play it safe. But he said he didn’t see anything amiss.

“Could it be appendicitis?” McDermott asked, in case Brewster hadn’t considered that possibility. “The appendix is on the right side, isn’t it?”

“Generally. Not always. It might be appendicitis, yeah. Except that I happen to recall that you had your appendix out when you were seventeen years old, which is why I didn’t explore that idea right away at the picnic. The things don’t grow back, Joe. On the other hand, pain like this could be caused by a perforating ulcer of the stomach or duodenum. Or inflammation of the gallbladder. Or diverticulitis of the sigmoid colon. It could be an intestinal blockage, for that matter. Kidney stones. Shingles. Or maybe—”

“Enough,” McDermott said. “Stop already. What do you think it is?”

“Let’s wait for the tests, okay, Joe? The fact that the pain, while acute, doesn’t seem to be getting any worse argues against most of the things I just listed. Most likely it’s just some virus you picked up. Some of these viruses can be awfully stubborn.”

The pain stayed. The fever came and went. There were more tests: gastric analyses, stool samples, liver-function studies. Some of the procedures were less than enjoyable. Brewster began to sound puzzled and then evasive, which McDermott didn’t like at all.

“We’ve known each other twenty-five years,” McDermott said. “Don’t fuck around with me. What do you think I’ve got?”

“I’m not sure. I’d like to run a GI series on you with barium sulfate, just to rule a few things out.”

“That means you suspect cancer, right?”

Brewster nodded. “That’s one possibility, I’m afraid.”

“Is there a growth in there?”

“There’s a zone of irritation. I’m not sure I would call it a growth. I need a better look.”

The barium sulfate was horrible, and the GI series produced no useful answers. The next step was a fiber-optic endoscopic exploration of McDermott’s abdomen. Brewster reported some abnormalities in the vicinity of his liver or gallbladder.

New words entered McDermott’s vocabulary as the weeks went by. The transhepatic cholangiography, which involved a long skinny needle passed through the wall of his chest, provided data about his liver ducts. The cholecystography was an unamusing X-ray study of his gallbladder. The intravenous cholangiography that followed the cholecystography sent dye into his veins to bring back information about bile production.

“I don’t know, Joe,” Brewster said. “I just don’t know.”

“That’s a wonderful diagnosis, all right.”

“You want to hear what I know? You’ve got a gallbladder inflammation that tests out malignant using one kind of methodology and as something else entirely using another kind. What the something else is, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know and nobody else seems to either. There’s a possibility of metastasis into the liver. It may already have happened.”

“If you’re using words like malignant and metastasis, you’re telling me that I have cancer.”

“It’s more like cancer than not like cancer, if you take my meaning.”

“What are you saying, Dave?”

“That we regard this as cancer and treat it accordingly, despite the little anomalies we’ve seen. We may be able to knock this thing out chemotherapeutically, if we get moving now. Otherwise we’re talking about surgical removal of the gallbladder, possible liver transplants, a whole raft of really problematical procedures. I’m sorry, Joe.”

“That makes two of us,” McDermott said.

The voice said, “It’s a slow business, infiltrating an intelligent being’s nervous system. First I had to get myself established, you realize, and that takes time. Negotiate some sort of truce with your white blood corpuscles, get the antibodies on my side, build my nest, settle in really snugly. That inevitably causes the host some pain, because I don’t know where the neural centers are yet, so I obviously can’t neutralize them. I regret that very much. It’s not my intention to cause you discomfort of any sort.”

“I really appreciate that,” McDermott said.

“You don’t have to speak out loud to me, you know. I’m plugged right into your main switchboard now.”

In that case, McDermott said silently, you can hear me when I tell you that I want you to get the fuck out of my body this very minute, if you’re real. And to stop bothering me anyway if you aren’t.

“I assure you I’m quite real,” said the voice.

“Your assuring me doesn’t prove anything. If you’re just a figment of my chemically disordered mind, then you can react to my thoughts just as easily as you can to what I say out loud. But none of that makes you real.”

“How would you like your hair back, Joe?”

“I haven’t started losing it yet. I’ve only had three chemotherapy sessions.”

“I mean the hair you’ve lost normally in the course of living your life up to this point. You want me to fill in that little bald spot in back? You want nice black hair hanging down over your forehead the way it did when you were in college? I can do that for you.”

“Can you, now? Well, go right ahead.”

“I can do more than that. I can metabolize those extra fifteen pounds of yours and get rid of them.”

“Dying of cancer will do that too, and more.”

“You aren’t dying of cancer. You aren’t going to die at all, as a matter of fact. Not if you don’t want to. I can see to it that you live forever or as much of forever as you’re interested in living into.”

“You’re one hell of a fine hallucination, you know?”

“What about virility? Unquenchable sexual power? Five, six, ten times a night? It would be no effort at all to arrange that. If you want me to, of course.”

“You’d do that little thing for me, would you?”

“I’ll make you physically perfect, Joe. It’s to my advantage as well as yours, of course. I’m completely plugged into you now. I’m wired into your ganglia, your ductless glands, your autonomic nervous system, your everything. I told you, it’s a slow business infiltrating a being of your complexity, but I’ve had nine weeks, and I’ve done it very thoroughly. So from now on I feel what you feel. You stub your toe, I yell ‘ouch.’ You get laid, I share the tingle. You do chemotherapy, I get nauseated. We’re partners, Joe. Fifty-fifty in the well-being of your body. So naturally I’ll do everything in my power to protect you from harm. And my powers are considerable. A little glandular adjustment here, a little retuning of the hormonal balance there—”

“Just where did you come from, anyway?”

“I told you. Cherponex VII. That’s a dense and very lovely planet in the Framboin system.”

“An invader from space living in my gallbladder.”

“Exactly. And glad to be there, Joe. What a miserable, solitary journey I had to make! Seventeen light-years all by myself—a real pisser of an ordeal. But then at last I saw Earth ahead of me in my screen, blue and beautiful. Signs of intelligent life. Down through the atmosphere I went. Very turbulent: a terrific feat of navigation, if I have to say so myself. But I managed just fine. I landed my ship right in the middle of your hamburger no more than a tenth of a second before you put the top of the bun down on it. You swallowed me on the fourth bite, and the rest is history, Joe. The rest is history.”

“I swallowed you, ship and all?”

“There was no other way. I was inside the ship; the ship was on your burger.”

“So I’ve got a little alien spaceship attached to my gallbladder?”

“A very small vessel by your standards, let me assure you. Very very small. And I, naturally, am even smaller.”

“Naturally.”

“But quite capable, believe me. My species is not large, as Earth-species go, but we are an extremely advanced race. As I will demonstrate over the weeks ahead, if you give me permission to begin rebuilding your body according to your ideal mode.”

“You want my permission,” McDermott said bleakly.

“It seems only courteous.”

“Did you ask my permission when you invaded my gallbladder?”

“I needed to find a secure place of lodging,” said the alien. “That was necessary for my survival. But now that I’m safely established, I have no desire to act contrary to your wishes.”

“Then get yourself out of me and find some other host.”

“Unfortunately that won’t be possible. Once union has been achieved there’s no way to sever it.”

“Then I’m stuck with you?”

“That’s a harsh way of phrasing it, but, yes, you are.”

“Listen to me talk,” McDermott said wonderingly. “I’m actually falling into the trap of believing that you really are there.”

“But I really am.”

“I refuse to believe any of this. A microscopic alien in a microscopic spaceship, crossing seventeen light-years and landing on my hamburger at a Fourth of July picnic, taking up residence in my gallbladder—”

“You’d rather have cancer?” the alien asked.

The strange thing was that his hair really did start to grow back. First there was a little fuzz along the top of his forehead, and then the fuzz deepened and thickened, and by the end of the week there was no getting away from the fact that the slow erosion of his hairline that had been going on for the past seven or eight years had begun to reverse itself. He worked out a complicated arrangement of mirrors in the bathroom to see the back of his head and damn if the bothersome bald spot that he had noticed in last year’s picnic photos wasn’t closing over too.

He also lost a couple of pounds of the soft roll around his middle. That was easily enough explained: the cancer, the chemotherapy. But he hadn’t ever heard of chemotherapy making someone grow hair.

If anybody at the Oncology Center noticed the odd things that were happening on his scalp, they didn’t mention it. Probably they had other matters on their minds. McDermott, who was still on outpatient status, drove faithfully down to the Center every Tuesday and Friday for his regular sessions: the long hours in the chemoroom cubicle, the rigmarole with the IV, the increasingly familiar onset of the nausea, the wobbly time of waiting for the risks of vomiting to recede and his head to clear enough for him to go home.

Two weeks went by that way. There were no further announcements from the visitor from Cherponex VII. It must simply have been a little delusionary spell, McDermott decided. Some kind of weird one-shot drug reaction. His hair continued to grow in, dark and copious. He went on losing weight, too, but seemingly only in his gut and hips, where he had thickened a little too much in recent years. And his mental outlook seemed to have changed, also: he felt strangely exhilarated a lot of time, bouncy and vigorous in a way that seemed totally incongruous, considering the realities of his situation.

On the down side, there still were occasional little stabs of pain from the general region of his gallbladder, and when he put his hand to his side, McDermott imagined he could feel the presence of something hard and round and intrusive encapsulated within him. And the side effects of the continuing chemotherapy were very nasty indeed, just as he had been told they would be.

On the Tuesday of the third week, as he was getting ready to drive down to the Oncology Center, he heard the voice again.

“We can’t go on this way any longer, Joe. You want me to keep making significant bodily improvements for you, you’ve absolutely got to knock off this chemotherapy crap right here and now. I tell you, it’s murdering me.”

“I don’t want to hear anything out of you,” McDermott said. “You’re nothing but a drug reaction.”

“The hell I am.”

“And the chemotherapy is essential to my recovery.”

“You’ve got that exactly upside down, fellow. The chemo really sucks. Maybe if you had cancer it could do you some good, I don’t know, but cancer is not what you have, and you’re putting up with all those foul side effects for no purpose whatsoever. All the chemo does is upset your digestion. I’m what’s making you better and better in every way. Call Dr. Brewster and tell him that you’re in remission and you want to check out of the program.”

“I need proper medical help,” said McDermott. “I have a mortal illness.”

“In a pig’s eye you do. What you have is me. Call Brewster.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You won’t call?”

“No.”

McDermott felt a sensation very much like a punch on the back of his skull. But it came from inside.

“Quit that!”

“You’ll stop the chemotherapy?”

“Christ,” McDermott muttered. “Go away!”

“All right for you, buddy. As of this minute, no more hair regrowth. As of this minute, you gain two pounds a day, and let your cancer doctors explain that. Tomorrow I start blurring your vision. Beginning Thursday I fuck around with your hearing. As for any hope of ever getting it up again, forget all about that. Permanently.”

“They said there’d be some side effects. But they didn’t say I’d be having hallucinations. Nasty, vindictive ones at that.”

“We don’t need to be at war, Joe. I want to be your ally. Listen, just cancel the chemo, and nothing bad will ever happen to you again. Trust me.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I told you what I’d do. Plus this.”

McDermott felt another punch against the inside of his skull.

“Every hour on the hour, one of those. Right on through the whole night.”

“I don’t dare stop the chemo. It would amount to committing suicide. You’re putting me under duress and asking me to jeopardize my life.”

“There’s no suicide involved. Giving up the chemo is something that’ll be good for you as well as me. And I have no choice about the duress. You’re making my life hell in here, pal.”

“Who invited you in the first place?”

“That’s not the point. I’m here. No more chemo?”

“Jesus Christ,” McDermott said. “No.”

“What a stubborn son of a bitch you are. You’re really compelling me to mess around with you, aren’t you?”

McDermott felt the soles of his feet beginning to itch infuriatingly. His head seemed to be puffing up like a balloon. His left hand started to wriggle violently as though it wanted to jump away from his wrist. Then it slapped him hard across the face.

“I control your entire nervous system,” the voice said. “You can’t even imagine what I’m capable of doing to you if you won’t cooperate. But you’ll be sorry. Will you call Dr. Brewster?”

“No.”

“I can do this.”

“Hey!”

“And this. Or this. And if I really want to be mean—”

“Stop it!”

“Call Brewster?”

McDermott nodded. He reached for the phone.

Brewster wasn’t happy about the cancellation.

“I won’t mince words. It’s your funeral, Joey.”

“I tell you, I don’t feel tender there any more. The thing is gone. Or at least it’s in remission.”

“You’re not in any position to determine that.”

“Nevertheless,” McDermott said. “I’m quitting the chemo.”

“Hey, nobody likes it. I know it’s a miserable thing. But you’ve got to go through with it. At least come down here and let me check out this so-called remission of yours. You weren’t looking good last time I saw you, Joe. The Oncology Center people are starting to think it’s time for you to move on to radiation treatments.”

McDermott felt a savage internal thump. A little warning, to keep him in line.

“I don’t think radiation treatments will be necessary either, Dave.”

“I want to look you over, at least. I can’t just authorize cessation of therapy over the phone like this. It’s completely improper.”

Another thump, an even more agonizing one. McDermott grunted and doubled up.

“What was that?” Brewster asked.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“I want to see you at nine tomorrow, all right?”

“No,” said McDermott. “Sorry. I just can’t make it, Dave.”

He put down the phone.

Brewster called back, of course. And went on calling over the next few days. McDermott had never realized before what a mistake it could be to let an old friend be your doctor. Or how persistent Dave Brewster could be when a question of medical ethics was involved. But there was no way McDermott could possibly explain the situation to him.

To escape Brewster’s irritated phone messages, finally, he cashed in some unused vacation time and flew off to Hawaii for a week, telling no one where he was going.

He had the time of his life.

It was autumn now at home, a chilly, rainy autumn at that, but Hawaii’s golden summer goes on and on and on. The sea was warm, the beach was sparkling, the hotel was full of hopeful single women, many of them quite attractive. McDermott, whose sex life had been on hold since the Fourth of July, quickly began making up for lost time.

That inexplicable sense of vigor and general well-being that had come over him soon after his first hallucinatory spell was still exerting its magic. He hadn’t had such physical vitality since his late teens: never, perhaps. He did a couple of miles on the beach every morning at dawn, swam out to the reef and back before breakfast, ate double helpings of everything, dominated the volleyball court, spiking like a madman, and wiped out the whole tennis-court crowd with an invincible and faultless serve. He danced all evening and frolicked all night and when the sun came up he was ready to start all over again. It was unbelievable.

“Aren’t you glad you listened to me?” the Cherponexian asked.

“There’s got to be a catch,” McDermott replied. “And I think I’ve figured out what it is. This is like having made a deal with the devil. The Faust thing all over again. What’s really happening is that I’m having one final fling, one last speedy go-round on the racetrack of life. In another few days it’ll be over and then I’ll collapse all at once, home in a wheelchair and six weeks of being a palsied burned-out husk in the hospital, and then The End.”

“Pal, you couldn’t be wronger,” said the voice within him.

Indeed McDermott went from strength to strength as the week moved along. Muscles he had almost forgotten he had began to throb and swell. He tanned almost instantly. His hair was growing so fast that he needed to have it trimmed twice within five days, to the mystification of the hotel barber. The little lines at the corners of his eyes were going away, too. He looked years younger. It all seemed wondrous. He felt blessed.

On the last night of the trip, dressing up in a suit for the first time since his arrival for an evening of formal dancing with a noteworthy young lady from Seattle, he was startled to find his jacket tight across the shoulders and open space showing between his cuffs and the top of his shoes. What the hell was this: was he growing? A shiver ran down his back. The pants legs had been the right length the last time he had worn the suit. Could clothing shrink so fast in the warm, humid climate here?

In the morning he hurried down to the hotel health club to check himself out on the medical scales there as soon as he and Ms. Seattle had finished breakfast. Since the age of sixteen he had been five feet eleven exactly, which had been a cause of great frustration for him then, though he had long since ceased giving a damn about having fallen just short of six feet. But when he set the scale’s metal rod at the usual place it wouldn’t balance. He moved it up, and up a little more. He stared. It was in balance now. Six feet one? Could it be?

“Either you aren’t a hallucination after all,” he told the Cherponexian, “or you’ve got the damndest fine sense of detail any hallucination could offer.”

“Trust me,” the silent voice within him said.

But he couldn’t. It all seemed too good to be true. A diagnosis of cancer, followed by sudden rejuvenation, incredibly enhanced physical prowess, and two inches of new height at the age of thirty-nine, and all of it the work of a microscopic alien intelligence that had built a nice little home for itself in his gallbladder and is giving him these goodies by way of rent? Come off it, he thought. It’s a pipe dream. You’re actually on your deathbed in Veterans Memorial Hospital at this very moment, and everything you think you’ve experienced over the past few weeks is simply a medication-induced delusion that has passed through your failing mind in the last thirty seconds. Right?

“Wrong,” said the Cherponexian. “What a peculiar kind of life-form you humans seem to be. Why can’t you just accept your good luck and shut up about it?”

He flew home into a dreary, windy autumn day and called Dave Brewster right away.

“I bugged out and went to Hawaii,” he said. “I know you were annoyed with me, but it was something I had to do. Now I’m back, and I want you to check me out, okay?”

“You still think you’re in remission, Joe?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on with me,” McDermott said. “I want you to tell me.”

There was a look of astonishment on Brewster’s face for a moment when McDermott entered his office: his eyes widened, his jaw sagged, he gaped in a highly unprofessional way. Then the amazement vanished, and anger took its place.

“Very funny, Joe,” Brewster said sourly. “The wig, the elevator heels, the makeup, and all the rest. I’ve seen all kinds of denial mechanisms at work in my time, but this really takes the prize.”

“You notice a difference, do you?”

“Are you kidding?”

McDermott pulled off his shoes. “But I’m not doing any kind of faking. Here, measure me. Stocking feet. I’ve grown two inches. I’ve dropped ten pounds around the middle and added it to my shoulders. And if you think this is a wig, take a close look.”

He realized that he was trembling. “It’s real, isn’t it, Dave? Isn’t it? What do you say? Do you know any kind of cancer that can do this to a man? Do you? Do you?”

“Get on the scale,” Brewster said.

He was silent throughout the examination, which was as thorough as any McDermott could remember ever having had. When Brewster was done, he walked across the room to his desk and sat down behind it, looking up over his shoulder at the medical-school diplomas behind it. After a while he said, still looking away, “You’ve grown two inches, and your hair is thicker than it’s been for ten years, and you check out like an Olympic athlete in everything on the chart.” His voice sounded strained and hollow. “Your hemorrhoids are gone, and your blood pressure is like a kid’s, and I can’t find your appendectomy scar.”

“So all the changes are real? I didn’t just dream them?”

“They look pretty goddamned real to me, I have to say.”

“That must be some cancer I have. What kind of cancer does all that to you, I wonder?”

“I wonder that too,” said Brewster. He swiveled around to face him. “But the original diagnosis has to stand until we come up with a better one. So far as I can tell from manual probing, you’ve still got some sort of tumor in your abdomen.”

“Malignant?”

“Malignant, benign, who the hell knows?” There was a stunned look in Brewster’s eyes. “This situation is beyond my comprehension, and I don’t mind admitting it. I’m totally bewildered by what I’ve seen here just now.”

McDermott considered the idea of telling Brewster about the Cherponexian. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Brewster said, “The only thing I can suggest is a complete workup at the Oncology Center. Another GI series, a biopsy, maybe a spinal tap. And more: the whole works. As you can imagine, it won’t be a lot of fun for you, Joe. But we’ve got to find out the precise nature of that growth by your gallbladder. We’re talking medical history here.”

“I understand.”

“Can I set up an appointment for you for tomorrow?”

McDermott felt a thump within his skull that almost sent him to the floor. Invisible hands stroked his heart and squeezed ever so gently. An invisible finger tapped him warningly on the shoulder.

“Joe?” Brewster said. He sounded worried.

“Not tomorrow, all right? I’m just back from a vacation. Give me a day or two to get back into the swing of things, first.”

“Day after tomorrow, then? This is too important to be allowed to slide.”

Another thump. Another squeeze.

McDermott moistened his lips.

“I’ll call you and set up a date,” he said. “Is that okay, Dave? Is that okay?”

He went home, deep in humiliation and chagrin. What good was radiant health and a regenerated head of hair, if he was only the puppet of some creature from another planet no bigger than a flea? What good were two inches of extra height at his age, for Christ’s sake, if he couldn’t even make a doctor’s appointment without getting a knock on the head from inside?

He resolved to fight back. Somehow. He had to free himself of this thing.

It wouldn’t be easy, he knew. The Cherponexian—he had no doubt now that the Cherponexian was real and was really inside him—could read his every thought. It was listening in even now, McDermott suspected.

“That’s right, Joe. I am.”

“Fuck you.”

“You won’t admit that I’m the best thing that ever happened to you, will you?”

Chinga tu madre, McDermott said silently. If you have one.

There was no response. McDermott’s eyebrows rose. Maybe the alien wasn’t able to read his mind when he thought in Spanish. Could that be? He was pretty fluent in Spanish. Two years in Puerto Rico on the Webster-Santos account had done that for him.

It was worth a try, anyway.

He grabbed the phone and punched in Brewster’s number.

“It’s me, Joe. We have to talk fast. You’ve got to get hold of someone who understands Spanish and have him call me back. A nurse, a doctor, anybody. And tell that person to take whatever I tell him at face value, no matter how crazy it seems. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“What? What?”

“Just do it. Please.”

Brewster hung up. McDermott sat by the phone, waiting. He had it all worked out in his mind, in Spanish. Going over the phrases again and again, finding the words he needed. An alien creature from space has invaded me, he would say. Un extranjero. De espacio. The doctors think it’s a cancer in my abdomen, but it isn’t. It’s an honest-to-God alien, and no, I’m not making this up. Verdad. Absolutamente verdad. It has control of my mind, only it doesn’t know Spanish, which is why I’m able to tell you this. It’s modifying my body. I can hardly recognize myself any more. The thing’s got to he killed. Chemotherapy makes it sick. Send an ambulance for me. You’ll probably have to put me under restraint. A straitjacket, yeah. Take me to the Center and get me on double chemo, the strongest dose I can stand. Triple, even. Whatever it takes. Just get rid of—

The phone rang. McDermott reached for it.

The Cherponexian did something inside his arm and it jerked back around his neck and grabbed his throat as if the alien were trying to make him strangle himself one-handed.

“Hey!” McDermott cried.

“Y chinga tu madre tambien,” the Cherponexian said, cackling in his brain. “Verga estupida! Cabron!”

As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered much even if the alien had let McDermott pick up the phone, because that evening marked the start of the second phase of the invasion of Earth. McDermott’s Cherponexian, who had served as the advance scout, had finished learning all that it needed to know about the world it had landed on and had sent the go-ahead signal to its comrades hovering just beyond the ionosphere.

That night billions of Cherponexian invaders fell like snow everywhere human life was to be found. By the time morning came, there was scarcely anyone on the planet who had not been infiltrated one way or another—by inhaling an invader, or ingesting one along with the morning toast, or simply by drinking one down in water from the tap—and the process of spreading minute Cherponexian tendrils through billions of human brains and nervous systems was under way everywhere.

With the help of the guidance the scout had been able to provide, the second-wave invaders were able to establish complete somatic control in a much shorter time than the nine weeks McDermott’s Cherponexian had needed. Within minutes they could locate essential neural centers and send messages to their new hosts. Within hours they had set up beachheads in ductless glands and medulla oblongatas. The whole conquest took about a day and a half.

When McDermott realized what was going on, he felt worse than ever. He had been the gateway, after all, through which the first of the invaders had entered Earth. He felt personally responsible. If only he had been able to strike back, somehow. If only—if only—

“Look,” the Cherponexian said, “why beat up on yourself like this? You’re completely blameless, you know. Our arrival was an inevitable event. We’re utterly invincible. Nothing you could have done would have stopped the invasion. Nothing.”

“I don’t get it,” said McDermott. “You come seventeen light years just to occupy the gallbladders of an alien species? What’s the point? What use can we possibly be to you?”

“Ah,” said the Cherponexian. “You will be of great use indeed. And we will be of great use to you. What has happened is for everyone’s mutual benefit. Trust me, my friend.”

And, in fact, after the initial period of transition everything went on pretty much as before, except that most sickness and hunger and other forms of distress disappeared, along with bald spots, cellulite, unwanted weight, scars and birthmarks, and overly troublesome neuroses. Doctors, lawyers, and politicians suddenly had very little to do, since the Cherponexians saw to it that everyone’s health was perfect and refused to allow any kind of dispute, whether between people or between nations. That created a certain amount of disruption until the members of the displaced professions could be retrained.

At the Kaisers’ Fourth of July picnic the following year, McDermott hit four home runs and handled the ball magnificently in the field. So, however, did almost everyone else. They were all in terrific shape, big and strong and bursting with vitality. After the game, when the whole crowd gathered at the charcoal grill for the hamburger ritual, Dave Brewster came over to him and said, “You’re looking good, kid.”

“You too, man. We’re all looking good, aren’t we? But tell me: How’s the doctor-biz?”

“What doctor-biz? Nobody gets sick these days, not even the sniffles. You know that. I’m studying classical ballet, matter of fact. A little late in life to start, but my Cherponexian has done a terrific job building up my tendons.”

“That’s just great, Dave,” McDermott said. There wasn’t much enthusiasm in his tone.

Brewster looked at him closely. “Hey, guy, what’s the matter? Don’t tell me you still feel guilty for—”

“Don’t you?” McDermott snapped. His neck growing warm with sudden annoyance. “You who couldn’t tell an alien space invader from cancer of the gallbladder? You’re at least as responsible for what happened as I am.”

“Hey, hey, hold on a second—” Brewster said, just as hotly.

But already McDermott felt his anger cooling. The Cherponexians took care of such things quickly.

“Yeah,” he said in a milder voice. “What the hell, getting conquered by space invaders isn’t so bad, really, is it?” He grinned. “And at least I don’t have to worry about losing my hair anymore. Do I, Dave?”

“Right,” Brewster said.

“Right,” said the Cherponexian.

HERESIES OF THE HUGE GOD

Brian W. Aldiss

From the ultra-small, we turn now to the ultra-large, and to an alien invasion and conquest so overwhelmingly obvious that it can’t possibly be overlooked by anyone on Earth—even though the conqueror itself remains completely oblivious to the fact that there has even been a conquest. . . .

One of the true giants of the field, Brian W. Aldiss has been publishing science fiction for more than a quarter of a century, and has more than two dozen books to his credit. His classic novel The Long Afternoon of Earth won a Hugo Award in l962. “The Saliva Tree” won a Nebula Award in 1965, and his novel Starship won the Prix Jules Verne in 1977. He took another Hugo Award in 1987 for his critical study of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, written with David Wingrove. His other books include The Malacia Tapestry, An Island Called Moreau, Frankenstein Unbound, Cryptozoic, and the acclaimed Helliconia trilogy—Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter. His latest books include the collection Seasons in Flight and the novel Dracula Unbound. Upcoming is a new novel, Remembrance Day, and a collection of poems, Home Life with Cats. He lives in Oxford, England.

I, Harad IV, Chief Scribe, declare that this my writing may be shown only to priests of rank within the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church and to the Elders Elect of the Council of the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, because here are contained matters concerning the four Vile Heresies that may not be seen or spoken among the people.

For a Proper Consideration of the newest and vilest heresy, we must look in perspective over the events of history. Accordingly, let us go back to the First Year of our epoch when the World Darkness was banished by the Huge God, our truest, biggest Lord, whom all honor and greatly fear.

From this present year, 910 H.G., it is impossible to recall what the world was like then. But from the few records still surviving we can gather something of those times and even perform the Mental Contortions necessary to see how the events must have looked to the sinners then involved in them.

The world on which the Huge God found himself was full of people and their machines, all of them unprepared for his visit. There may have been a hundred thousand times more people than there are now.

The Huge God landed in what is now the Sacred Sea, upon which in these days sail some of our most beautiful churches dedicated to his name. At that time, the region was much less pleasing, being broken up into many states possessed by different nations. This was a system of land tenure practiced before our present policies of constant migration and evacuation were formed.

The rear legs of the Huge God stretched far down into Africa—which was then not the island it now is—almost touching the Congo River, at the sacred spot marked now by the Sacrificial Church of Basoko-Aketi-Ele, and at the sacred spot marked now by the Temple Church of Aden, obliterating the old port of Aden.

Some of the Huge God’s legs stretched above the Sudan and across what was then the Libyan Kingdom, now part of the Sea of Elder Sorrow, while a foot rested in a city called Tunis on what was then the Tunisian shore. These were some of the legs of the Huge God on his left side.

On his right side, his legs blessed and pressed the sands of Saudi Arabia, now called Life Valley, and the foothills of the Caucasus, obliterating the Mount called Ararat in Asia Minor, while the Foremost Leg stretched forward to Russian lands, stamping out immediately the great capital city of Moscow.

The body of the Huge God, resting in repose between his mighty legs, settled mainly over three ancient seas, if the Old Records are to be trusted, called the Sea of Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Nile Sea, all of which now form part of the Sacred Sea. He eradicated also with his Great Bulk part of the Black Sea, now called the White Sea, Egypt, Athens, Cyprus and the Balkan Peninsula as far north as Belgrade, now Holy Belgrade, for above this town towered the neck of the Huge God on his First Visit to us mortals, just clearing the roofs of the houses.

As for his head, it lifted above the region of mountains that we call Ittaland, which was then named Europe, a populous part of the globe, raised so high that it might easily be seen on a clear day from London, then as now the chief town of the land of the Anglo-French.

It was estimated in those first days that the length of the Huge God was some four and a half thousand miles, from rear to nose, with the eight legs each about nine hundred miles long. Now we profess in our Creed that our Huge God changes shape and length and number of legs according to whether he is Pleased or Angry with man.

In those days, the nature of God was unknown. No preparation had been made for his coming, though some whispers of the millennium were circulating. Accordingly, the speculation on his nature was far from the truth, and often extremely blasphemous.

Here is an extract from the notorious Gersheimer Paper, which contributed much to the events leading up to the First Crusade in 271 H.G. We do not know who the Black Gersheimer was, apart from the meaningless fact that he was a Scientific Prophet at somewhere called Cornell or Carnell, evidently a Church on the American Continent (then a differently shaped territory).

“Aerial surveys suggest that this creature—if one can call it that—which straddles a line along the Red Sea and across southeast Europe, is non-living, at least as we understand life. It may be merely coincidence that it somewhat resembles an eight-footed lizard, so that we do not necessarily have to worry about the thing being malignant, as some tabloids have suggested.”

Not all the vile jargon of that distant day is now understandable, but we believe “aerial surveys” to refer to the mechanical flying machines which this last generation of the Godless possessed. Black Gersheimer continues:

“If this thing is not life, it may be a piece of galactic debris clinging momentarily to the globe, perhaps like a leaf clinging to a football in the fall. To believe this is not necessarily to alter our scientific concepts of the universe. Whether the thing represents life or not, we don’t have to go all superstitious. We must merely remind ourselves that there are many phenomena in the universe as we conceive it in the light of twentieth-century science which remain unknown to us. However painful this unwanted visitation may be, it is some consolation to think that it will bring us new knowledge—of ourselves, as well as of the world outside our solar system.”

Although terms like “galactic debris” have lost their meaning, if they ever had one, the general trend of this passage is offensively obvious. An embargo is being set up against the worship of the Huge God, with a heretical God of Science set up in his stead. Only one other passage from this offensive mishmash need be considered, but it is a vital one for showing the attitude of mind of Gersheimer and presumably most of his contemporaries.

“Naturally enough, the peoples of the world, particularly those who are still lingering on the threshold of civilization, are full of fear these days. They see something supernatural in the arrival of this thing, and I believe that every man, if he is honest, will admit to carrying an echo of that fear in his heart. We can only banish it, and can only meet the chaos into which the world is now plunged, if we retain a galactic picture of our situation in our minds. The very hugeness of this thing that now lies plastered loathsomely across our world is cause for terror. But imagine it in proportion. A centipede is sitting on an orange. Or, to pick an analogy that sounds less repulsive, a little gecko, six inches long, is resting momentarily on a plastic globe of the Earth which is two feet in diameter. It is up to us, the human race, with all the technological forces at our disposal, to unite as never before, and blow this thing, this large and stupid object, into the depths of space from whence it came. Good night.”

My reasons for repeating this initial blasphemy are these: that we can see here in this message from a member of the World Darkness traces of that original sin which—with all our sacrifices, all our hardships, all our crusades—we have not yet stamped out. That is why we are now at the greatest Crisis in the history of the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, and why the time has come for a Fourth Crusade.

The Huge God remained where he was, in what we now refer to as the Sacred Sea Position, for a number of years, absolutely unmoving.

For mankind, this was the great formative period of Belief, marking the establishment of the Universal Church, and characterized by many upheavals. The early priests and prophets suffered much that the Word might go round the World, and the blasphemous sects be destroyed, though the Underground Book of Church Lore suggests that many of them were, in fact, members of earlier churches who, seeing the light, transferred their allegiances.

The mighty figure of the Huge God was subjected to many puny insults. The Greatest Weapons of that distant age, forces of technical charlatanry, were called Nuclears. These were dropped on the Huge God—without having any effect, as might be expected. Walls of fire burnt against him in vain. Our Huge God, whom all honor and fear, is immune from earthly weakness. His body was clothed as it were with Metal—here lay the seed of the Second Crusade—but it had not the weakness of metal.

His coming to earth met with immediate response from nature. The old winds that prevailed were turned aside about his mighty flanks and blew elsewhere. The effect was to cool the center of Africa, so that the tropical rain forests died and all the creatures in them. In the lands bordering Caspana (then called Persia and Kharkov, say some old accounts), hurricanes of snow fell in a dozen severe winters, blowing far east into India. Elsewhere, all over the world, the coming of the Huge God was felt in the skies, and in freak rainfalls and errant winds, and month-long storms. The oceans also were disturbed, while the great volume of waters displaced by his body poured over the nearby land, killing many thousands of beings and washing away ten thousand dead whales.

The land too joined in the upheaval. While the territory under the Huge God’s bulk sank, preparing to receive what would later be the Sacred Sea, the land roundabout rose up, forming small hills, such as the broken and savage Dolomines that now guard the southern lands of Ittaland. There were earthquakes and new volcanoes and geysers where water never spurted before and plagues of snakes and blazing forests and many wonderful signs that helped the Early Fathers of our faith to convert the ignorant. Everywhere they went, preaching that only in surrender to him lay salvation.

Many Whole Peoples perished at this time of upheaval, such as the Bulgarians, the Egyptians, the Israelites, Moravians, Kurds, Turks, Syrians, Mountain Turks, as well as most of the South Slavs, Georgians, Croats, the sturdy Vlaks, and the Greeks and Cypriotic and Cretan races, together with others whose sins were great and names unrecorded in the annals of the church.

The Huge God departed from the world in the year 89, or some say 90. (This was the First Departure, and is celebrated as such in our Church calendar—though the Catholic Universal Church calls it First Disappearance Day.)

He returned in 91, great and aweing be his name.

Little is known of the period when he was absent from our Earth. We get a glimpse into the mind of the people then when we learn that in the main the nations of Earth greatly rejoiced. The natural upheavals continued, since the oceans poured into the great hollow he had made, forming our beloved and holy Sacred Sea. Great Wars broke out across the face of the globe.

His return in 91 halted the wars—a sign of the great peace his presence has brought to his chosen people.

But the inhabitants of the world at That Time were not all of our religion, though prophets moved among them, and many were their blasphemies. In the Black Museum attached to the great basilica of Omar and Yemen is documentary evidence that they tried at this period to communicate with the Huge God by means of their machines. Of course they got no reply—but many men reasoned at this time, in the darkness of their minds, that this was because the God was a Thing, as Black Gersheimer had prophesied.

The Huge God, on this his Second Coming, blessed our Earth by settling mainly within the Arctic Circle, or what was then the Arctic Circle, with his body straddling from northern Canada, as it was, over a large peninsula called Alaska, across the Bering Sea and into the northern regions of the Russian lands as far as the River Lena, now the Bay of Lenn. Some of his rear feet broke far into the Arctic Ice, while others of his forefeet entered the North Pacific Ocean—but truly to him we are but sand under his feet, and he is indifferent to our mountains or our Climatic Variations.

As for his terrible head, it could be seen reaching far into the stratosphere, gleaming with metal sheen, by all the cities along the northern part of America’s seaboard, from such vanished towns as Vancouver, Seattle, Edmonton, Portland, Blanco, Reno, and even San Francisco. It was the energetic and sinful nation that possessed these cities that was now most active against the Huge God. The weight of their ungodly scientific civilization was turned against him, but all they managed to do was blow apart their own coastline.

Meanwhile, other natural changes were taking place. The mass of the Huge God deflected the earth in its daily roll, so that seasons changed, and in the prophetic books we read how the great trees brought forth their leaves to cover them in the winter, and lost them in the summer. Bats flew in the daytime and women bore forth hairy children. The melting of the ice caps caused great floods, tidal waves and poisonous dews, while in one night we hear that the waters of the Deep were moved, so that the tide went out so far from the Malayan Uplands (as they now are) that the continental peninsula of Blestland was formed in a few hours of what had previously been separate Continents or Islands called Singapore, Sumatra, Indonesia, Java, and Australia or Austria.

With these powerful signs, our priests could Convert the People, and millions of survivors were speedily enrolled into the Church. This was the First Great Age of the Church, when the word spread across all the ravaged and transformed globe. Our institutions were formed in the next few generations, notably at the various Councils of the New Church (some of which have since proved to be heretical).

We were not established without some difficulty. Many people had to be burned before the rest could feel the faith Burning in Them. But as generations passed, the True Name of the God emerged over a wider and wider area.

Only the Americans still clung largely to their base superstition. Fortified by their science, they refused Grace. So in the Year 271 the First Crusade was launched, chiefly against them but also against the Irish, whose heretical views had no benefit of science. The Irish were quickly Eradicated, almost to a man. The Americans were more formidable, but this difficulty served only to draw the people closer and unite the Church further.

This First Crusade was fought over the First Great Heresy of the Church, the heresy claiming that the Huge God was a Thing not a God, as formulated by Black Gersheimer. It was successfully concluded when the leader of the Americans, Lionel Undermeyer, met the Venerable World Emperor-Bishop, Jon II, and agreed that the messengers of the Church should be free to preach unmolested in America. Possibly a harsher decision could have been forced, as some commentators claim, but by this time both sides were suffering severely from plague and famine, the harvests of the world having failed. It was a happy chance that the population of the world was already cut by more than half, or complete starvation would have followed the reorganization of the seasons.

In the churches of the world, the Huge God was asked to give a sign that he had witnessed the great victory over the American unbelievers. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed. He answered the prayers in 297 by moving swiftly forward only a comparatively Small Amount and lying Mainly in the Pacific Ocean, stretching almost as far south as what is now the Antarter, what was then the Tropic of Capricorn, and what had previously been the Equator. Some of his left legs covered the towns along the west American seaboard as far south as Guadalajara (where the impression of his foot is still marked by the Temple of the Sacred Toe), including some of the towns such as San Francisco already mentioned. We speak of this as the First Shift; it was rightly taken as a striking proof of the Huge God’s contempt for America.

This feeling became rife in America also. Purified by famine, plague, gigantic earth tremors and other natural disorders, the population could now better accept the words of the priests, all becoming converted to a man. Mass pilgrimages were made to see the great body of the Huge God, stretching from one end of their nation to the other. Bolder pilgrims climbed aboard flying airplanes and flew over his shoulder, across which savage rainstorms played for a hundred years Without Cease.

Those that were converted became More Extreme than their brethren older in the faith across the other side of the world. No sooner had the American congregations united with ours than they broke away on a point of doctrine at the Council of Dead Tench (322). This date marks the beginning of the Catholic Universal Sacrificial Church. We of the Orthodox persuasion did not enjoy, in those distant days, the harmony with our American brothers that we do now.

The doctrinal point on which the churches split apart was, as is well known, the question of whether humanity should wear clothes that imitated the metallic sheen of the Huge God. It was claimed that this was setting up man in God’s Image; but it was a calculated slur on the Orthodox Universal priests, who wore plastic or metal garments in honor of their maker.

This developed into the Second Great Heresy. As this long and confused period has been aptly dealt with elsewhere, we may pass over it lightly here, mentioning merely that the quarrel reached its climax in the Second Crusade, which the American Catholic Universals launched against us in 450. Because they still had a large preponderance of machines they were able to force their point, to sack various monasteries along the edge of the Sacred Sea, to defile our women and to retire home in glory.

Since that time, everyone in the world has worn only garments of wool or fur. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed.

It would be wrong to emphasize too much the struggles of the past. All this while, the majority of people went peacefully about their worship, being sacrificed regularly, and praying every sunset and sunrise (whenever they might occur) that the Huge God would leave our world, since we were not worthy of Him.

The Second Crusade left a trail of troubles in its wake. The next fifty years were, on the whole, not happy ones. The American armies returned home to find that the heavy pressure upon their western seaboard had opened up a number of volcanoes along their biggest mountain range, the Rockies. Their country was covered in fire and lava, and their air filled with stinking ash.

Rightly, they accepted this as a sign that their conduct left much to be desired in the eyes of the Huge God (for though it has never been proved that he has eyes, he surely Sees Us). Since the rest of the world had not been Visited with punishment on quite this scale, they correctly divined that their sin was that they still clung to technology and to the weapons of technology which was against the wishes of God.

With their faith strong within them, every last instrument of science, from the Nuclears to the Canopeners, was destroyed, and a hundred thousand virgins of the persuasion were dropped into suitable volcanoes as propitiation. All who opposed these enlightened acts were destroyed, and some were even ceremonially eaten.

We of the Orthodox Universal faith applauded our brothers’ whole-hearted action. Yet we could not be sure they had purged themselves enough. Now that they owned no weapons and we still had some, it was clear we could help them in their purgation. Accordingly, a mighty armada of one hundred and sixty-six wooden ships sailed across to America, to help them suffer for the faith—and incidentally to get back some of our loot. This was the Third Crusade of 482, under Jon the Chubby.

While the two opposed armies were engaged in battle outside New York, the Second Shift took place. It lasted only a matter of five minutes.

In that time, the Huge God turned to his left flank, crawled across the Atlantic as if it were a puddle, moved over Africa, and came to rest in the south Indian Ocean, demolishing Madagascar with one rear foot. Night fell Everywhere on earth.

When dawn came, there could hardly have been a single man who did not believe in the power and wisdom of the Huge God, to whose name belongs all Terror and Might. Unhappily, among those who were unable to believe were the contesting armies who were one and all swept under a Wave of Earth and Rock as the God passed.

In the ensuing chaos, only one note of sanity prevailed—the sanity of the Church. The Church established as the Third Great Heresy the idea that any machines were permissible to man against the wishes of God. There was some doctrinal squabble as to whether books counted as machines. It was decided they did, just to be on the safe side. From then on, all men were free to do nothing but labor in the fields and worship, and pray to the Huge God to remove himself to a world more worthy of his might. At the same time, the rate of sacrifices was stepped up, and the Slow-Burning Method was introduced (499).

Now followed the great Peace, which lasted till 900. In all this time, the Huge God never moved; it has been truly said that the centuries are but seconds in his sight. Perhaps mankind has never known such a long peace, four hundred years of it—a peace that existed in his heart if not outside it, because the world was naturally in Some Disorder. The great force of the Huge God’s progress halfway across the world had altered the progression of day and night to a considerable extent. Some legends claim that before the Second Shift, the sun used to rise in the east and set in the west—the opposite of today’s natural order.

Gradually, this peaceful period saw some re-establishment of order to the seasons, and some cessation of the floods, showers of blood, hailstorms, earthquakes, deluges of icicles, apparitions of comets, volcanic eruptions, miasmic fogs, destructive winds, blights, plagues of wolves and dragons, tidal waves, year-long thunder storms, lashing rains and sundry other scourges of which the scriptures of this period speak so eloquently. The Fathers of the Church, retiring to the comparative safety of the inland seas and sunny meadows of Gobiland in Mongolia, established a new orthodoxy well calculated in its rigor of prayer and human burnt-offering to invite the Huge God to leave our poor wretched world for a better and more substantial one.

So the story comes to the present—to the year 900, only a decade past as your scribe writes. In that year, the Huge God left our earth!

Recall, if you will, that the First Departure in 89 lasted only twenty months. Yet the Huge God has been gone from us already half that number of years! We need him Back. We cannot live without him, as we should have realized Long Ago had we not blasphemed in our hearts!

On his going, he propelled our humble globe on such a course that we are doomed to deepest winter all the year; the sun is far away and shrunken; the seas Freeze half the year; icebergs march across our fields; at midday, it is too dark to read without a rush light; nothing will grow. Woe is us!

Yet we deserve everything we get. This is a just punishment, for throughout all the centuries of our epoch, when our kind was so relatively happy and undisturbed, we prayed like fools that the Huge God would leave us. And now he has.

I ask all the Elders Elect of the Council to brand those prayers as the Fourth and Greatest Heresy, and to declare that henceforth all men’s efforts be completely devoted to calling on the Huge God to return to us at once.

I ask also that the sacrifice rate be stepped up again. It is useless to skimp things just because we are running out of women.

I ask also that a Fourth Crusade be launched—fast, before the air starts to freeze in our nostrils!

SEPOY

Tom Purdom

Tom Purdom made his first sale in 1957 to Fantastic Universe, and has subsequently sold to Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Star, and most of the major SF magazines and anthologies, becoming in recent years a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He is the author of one of the most unfairly forgotten SF novels of the ’60s, the powerful and still timely Reduction in Arms, about the difficulties of disarmament in the face of the mad proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as such novels as I Want the Stars, Tree Lord of Imeten, Five Against Arlane, and The Barons of Behavior. Purdom lives with his family in Philadelphia, where he reviews classical music concerts for a local newspaper, and is at work on several new novels.

In the compelling and grittily realistic story that follows, he takes us to a future Earth that has come to be dominated by aliens as thoroughly as the British Empire once dominated India, dominated culturally as well as by military force, and presents a tale of a man caught literally between two worlds, a man who is forced to make some very hard choices indeed. . . .

There had been a time, near the end of the twentieth century, when very few people would have believed anything like the Tucfra Hegemony would ever be necessary. Then the global temperature had risen almost 50 percent faster than those unpleasant forecaster types had said it might, the tides had washed away beaches from the Riviera to the Great Barrier Reef, Londoners had discovered they couldn’t get through an English May without an air conditioner, and it had seemed a little matter like the exact amount of fumes and radiation each city or province could dump into the atmosphere might be a cause de guerre after all. When the tucfra ship had orbited Earth in 2044, three small wars had already gone nuclear, the United States was lurching toward its second devolution, the Austro-Hungarian Economic Bloc was exchanging threatening faxes with the Russo-Turkish Defense Pact, and humanity had only been saved from a global plague, brought on by an attempt to use biological weapons, by a notably ruthless decision by the last prime minister of the Republic of India.

Intellectually, Jason Jardanel was willing to admit—in the privacy of his own thoughts, anyway—that the Hegemony had probably kept his fellow humans from wiping out every vestige of organized society on their planet. When he was confronted with the kind of suggestion he had just heard, however, he reacted like every upright, thoroughly conventional citizen of the New England Confederation was supposed to react.

“I’m a human,” Jason told the woman lying beside him. “I’m not a tucfra. I’m not a seep. I’m a human.”

The words hadn’t come out that way, of course. She had caught Jason by surprise, while he had been languidly contemplating the ceiling of his bedroom, and he could still become almost unintelligible when a surge of emotion went racing through his psyche and he forgot to shape each syllable with extreme care. In the sentences Marcia Woodbine had actually heard, “human” had sounded more like hammen, “tucfra” like tafre, “not a seep” like naughtahhsip. Earlier Marcia had lifted Jason out of his wheelchair. Later she would cradle his skinny, flabby body in her arms and lift him out of bed.

He had thought she was just another one of those women who improved their opinions of themselves by dispensing sexual charity. They seemed to come along every year or two and he never turned them down if they were reasonably presentable. There had even been one or two he had liked.

“They thought you would feel that way,” Marcia Woodbine said. “They told me I could tell you this was an offer that should stay open for some time. Your records apparently indicate you’ve got just the kind of intelligence they need the most—the ability to think very fast when you’re confronted with practical problems.”

Jason stared at the ceiling. Twenty minutes ago, when he had opened his eyes between gasps, he had seen her, astride, towering above him, her breasts swinging from side to side, her face, with the close cut black hair, looking like it belonged on a Greek vase. There had been a young violinist in a North Pacific chamber orchestra, five years ago, who had looked like that. Jason had played a video of the chamber version of Sallinen’s Shadows eight times just so he could look at her. He had never quite admitted to himself, at the time, that he had played it for that reason, but he had.

“They said I should also make it clear they would have to pick the body type they give you. It’s apparently very important you look a certain way for the kind of jobs they have in mind.”

It was a subtle approach, but Marcia couldn’t quite pull it off. Jason could have picked up the tension in her voice if he had been listening to her through a concrete wall. That’s the offer we’re making you, Marcia was saying. You can have a real body. You can walk around. You can pursue women. You lust have to serve us. You just have to take the oath. To Us.

“I’m also supposed to tell you some of the things they have in mind will be dangerous. They’re not offering you a picnic.”

“I think you had better go,” Jason said.

Plus time every syllable he fabricated would have earned him a happy shout of praise from the speech therapy program he had worked with when he was five. The pace he was speaking at, on the other hand, would have given most people apoplexy. Jason had never walked along an icy street but he had long ago learned that strong feelings affected him the same way slippery walks affected pedestrians. He could only handle them by creeping along syllable by syllable.

“I . . . would . . . ap . . . pre . . . ci . . . ate . . . it . . . if . . . you . . . would . . . take . . . me . . . out . . . of . . . this . . . bed . . . and . . . go.”

Two minutes after the door closed behind her, Jason was tilting in front of his desk with his wheelchair plugged into his information system. He had been working when Marcia had rung his bell and the work still had to be finished before the end of the day.

There were people Jason knew who would be happy to argue that he already had a functioning body. Some of the more radical techies would even have claimed the artificial physique he already possessed was bigger and more powerful than the best merely organic body the tucfra could grow in their medical centers. Every important item in Jason’s apartment—the refrigerator, the cooking units, the doors, everything—was linked to a dual-input interface that would respond to two types of instructions: voice commands and signals from the control panel built into the right arm of his wheelchair. The personal service unit in his bedroom had even been outfitted with attachments that could handle most of his routine dressing and undressing. Jason spent 23 percent of his income on a personal service agency that sent two people around once a day, but he could sit here in his room alone, manipulating the devices that were linked to his computer, and do most of the things he needed to do without any help from anyone.

The speakers on his entertainment system could respond to the subtlest variations in bow pressure a violinist could transmit to the human ear. The entire ten by twelve wall on his left could be converted into a high resolution screen. His communications equipment connected him to a net that could provide him with companions and entertainments that could be located anywhere in the world. He had received so many calls from his friends last week that he had been forced to set up a privacy block just so he could have some time to himself.

What difference could a new body make?

The image on Jason’s primary screen was the score of a string quartet by M.K. Sun, a composer who had written over a hundred and twenty quartets during the thirty years she had been an active producer. The first great Oriental composer to write in traditional Western forms, Sun had been a successor to the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean performers whose violins and cellos had been such a notable presence on the world’s concert stages since the last decades of the twentieth century. Jason’s employers, the Hartford Quartet, played a selection from Sun’s output at almost every concert on their schedule. They relied on Jason to search Sun’s catalog, analyze the available data on the audience they were going to be playing for, and come up with a selection that fitted the audience profile. For over six years now Jason had been planning the quartet’s programs, making their travel arrangements, arranging alternate programs when one of them became sick, and even handling their fund raising.

“Scroll,” Jason said. “Tempo—moderato 105. Execute.”

The score scrolled across the screen at about the tempo Jason’s four employers would probably play it. His brain turned the notes into a musical daydream that was probably a good approximation of the way they would interpret it. Sun was noted for the elegant surface polish of her compositions but that external sheen always covered a structure that was as complex as anything Bach had ever produced. She had, in effect, treated the string quartet as if it was a traditional Oriental art form such as haiku or Chinese brush painting.

A light glowed under a loudspeaker. The voice of his apartment building’s security system superimposed itself on the music dancing in his head. “Jason Jardanel has a visitor. Name—William Patros, Department of Internal Security. Message: I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes, Mr. Jardanel, if it isn’t inconvenient.”

Patros had a round, youthful face and one of those medium-sized bodies that seem to have a lot of shoulder. His companion was named Jeanette O’Keefe and she was taller and older.

“We have some questions about the woman who just left here, Mr. Jardanel. Is there any chance she said something that indicates she may be employed by an organization that may be associated with the tucfra? We already have a number of indications that she is, but we’d naturally like to accumulate all the direct testimony we can put in our files.”

Jason let his head slump to one side. His right hand rose off the arm of his chair and he let it wander around aimlessly for several seconds, as if he had started to make a gesture and lost control. There were times, Jason had long ago learned, when his condition had its uses.

“You think . . . Marcia . . . may be . . . a seep?”

“It would probably be more accurate to say we know she is.”

“I’m afraid this was a . . . purely social . . . visit. I don’t think she said anything at all about . . . poli . . . tics.”

“Is this the first time she’s visited you like this?”

Jason’s mouth shaped itself into a twisted smile. “It’s the first time she’s been here alone.”

“We have reason to think she sometimes makes people offers—that she often functions as a recruiter.”

One of the software packages stored in Jason’s electronic files was a counseling program designed for people with his “difficulties.” He was well aware, thanks to the time he had spent with the program, that people with his condition had a natural tendency to be accommodating. When you were totally dependent on others, an abrasive personality was not a survival characteristic. Now, looking up at Patros’s face, Jason had to fight the reflex that encouraged him to give his visitors whatever they wanted.

His mouth twisted into another smile. “I don’t think she thought I was the right . . . physical type.”

“What did she offer you?” Jeanette O’Keefe said. “A new body?”

O’Keefe had been leaning against the wall on which Jason had hung his little collection of antique instruments, with her head only half a nod from a twentieth century replica of a wooden Baroque flute. She slid into the conversation without making the slightest shift in her position.

“Marcia Woodbine came here . . . like many women . . . because she wanted to be . . . kind. There are . . . women . . . who seem to . . . respond . . . that way.”

“And you’re in the habit of accepting their kindness?”

“She is very . . . attractive.”

“Recruiting for seeps is illegal in our Confederation, Mr. Jardanel. So is failure to report it.”

It was a statement that was so obvious Jason might have smiled if he had heard anyone else throw it into a conversation. There was probably no political unit on Earth in which the word seep could arouse so much hostility.

In the nineteenth century, a few thousand British subjects had ruled millions of Indians by working through soldiers and civil servants recruited from among the Indians themselves. In the twenty-first century, a couple of thousand aliens managed eight billion human beings with the aid of several million human agents. In the Indian section of the British Empire, British officers had commanded regiments of Indian soldiers who had been called sepoys. In the world of the Tucfra Hegemony, the tucfra were the real power behind the UN “peace force,” the UN civil service, and an army of “consultants,” spies, and secret agents who had infiltrated every society on the globe. The New England Confederation had been forced to accept the presence of a tucfra embassy—but its flag was a globe guarded by a rattlesnake, and its laws and attitudes matched the sentiments expressed by the flag.

“We enjoyed a . . . purely social . . . afternoon. I’m afraid I can’t help you with your . . . investigation.”

“If she didn’t offer you a new body yet,” O’Keefe said, “she will. It’s one of the major bribes they use to gain recruits. They’ve probably had their eye on you for years.”

“I’m a human being. Ahm nawht . . . a . . . seep.”

“A new body can be a very hard incentive to resist, Mr. Jardanel,” Patros said.

“I’ve . . . become . . . fonder . . . of this one than you might think. It has its . . . defects . . . but it’s mine.”

It wasn’t the best sally he had ever come up with, but Patros smiled anyway. “There are studies,” Jason said, “of the way . . . people with disabilities . . . react to changes in their situation. It isn’t . . . cut and dried. People have committed . . . suicide . . . after . . . beneficial . . . changes. Big changes involve . . . alterations . . . in your self-image . . . in your relations to others.”

“The tucfra seem to have other ideas,” O’Keefe said. “Whole body replacement technology is the one medical procedure they seem to be absolutely determined to keep out of our hands. Every human researcher who’s ever tried to develop the technology has either been co-opted by them or side-tracked in some other way. It’s the most important reward they have to offer collaborators, and they know it. The British imperialists used to keep the poorest people in their society living in the worst kind of poverty so they could recruit them into their armies. The tucfra spread viruses that turn people like you into cripples and then keep us from developing the only technology that will help you so they can offer a bribe very few people can bring themselves to refuse.”

“I’m not . . . interested . . . in becoming a seep. I might like a new body but that doesn’t mean I will do . . . anything . . . to get it.”

O’Keefe pushed herself away from the wall. She closed the space between them with three long, easy-going strides. Jason raised his head and found himself looking up at a taut, angry face that looked just like all the indignant masks he had seen on a thousand news videos.

“We expect loyal citizens to cooperate with the authorities, Mr. Jardanel,” O’Keefe said. “The people we are opposing have voluntarily terminated their membership in the human race. There is no reason why any true human should be unwilling to help us deal with them.”

Jason had been eleven when his parents had made him stop watching the adventures of Captain Rhena Krishmikari and her side-kick, Lieutenant John White. Most boys that age had watched the other show and identified with Major Khan Singh and his side-kick, curvy Special Agent Dori Chang. Even then Jason had been the kind who would rather watch a woman when it came time for the lead to jump out of a helicopter or shoot it out with a South American dictator who was testing new bacteriological weapons in his underground torture chamber. He had already known that, for him, there was no point in identifying with anyone, male or female, who did things like that.

The first time his father had caught him, his parents had disconnected his TV control for two hours. The next time it had been disconnected for two days.

They had been even firmer, a year later, when he had searched the library for information on the controversy over his disease and discovered that the official position of the New England Confederation could be shattered by any kid with a keyboard who had the guts to ask the right questions. It had taken him less than ninety minutes to decide that the virus that had poisoned his major motor nerves had been developed by a human government, several years before the arrival of the tucfra, and spread by human carelessness. He had even located three different studies—by epidemiologists from three different countries—that proved that the virus had traveled from the Arabian desert to the regions that had the strongest commercial ties with the Saudi regime. He had spent five happy minutes savoring one more proof that adults were just as dumb as his thirteen-year-old ego had known they were—and then his mother had entered the room, and he had seen the terror in her eyes when she had realized he was looking at a map that showed the areas with the highest incidence of the disease were Singapore and the metropolitan concentrations that surrounded Tokyo and Los Angeles.

There was no legal way the government of the New England Confederation could keep him from any information he really wanted. Legally, he could just phone the library and the database software would routinely transmit any video or written document anyone on Earth had filed in an information system. This was New England, after all—a republic which was carrying on the best traditions of the human race, as they had been embodied in the Constitution of the United States of America. And even if the library wouldn’t cooperate with his request—how could you keep a kid from pressing the right buttons on his TV and picking up the stuff that came pouring down from the UN satellites?

The answer could be seen in the way Jason turned away from O’Keefe’s face as she bent over him—and the way O’Keefe reached out, without any hesitation, confident he wouldn’t object, and turned his head back toward her eyes. A republic didn’t need censorship laws when it had private citizens who were willing to write S’s on people’s cheeks with well-directed lasers—or apply plastique and napalm to the homes of parents who didn’t exercise proper supervision of their children. Jason’s father had regularly “donated” 5 percent of his income to the COH—the Children of Humanity. He had even run little errands for the COH when he had to travel out of the Confederation on business. Jason’s mother had understood, without anyone telling her in so many words, that the amateur chamber music groups she organized were only supposed to play music that had been written by composers who were “certifiably human.”

At one point, O’Keefe went up to Jason’s desk and removed the cartridge interface that translated his slurred vocalizations into signals his computer could react to. She stared at it thoughtfully, glanced across the room to make sure Jason had seen her, and then replaced it in its slot.

Jason hadn’t looked at the clock when Patros and O’Keefe had entered his apartment, but he knew Marcia had left him a little after four. By five thirty, they had been harassing him for over an hour. There had been no blows and no overt threats, but what difference did that make? There were a thousand ways in which O’Keefe and her buddies in the COH could turn him into a helpless lump of misery. For the few seconds O’Keefe had been holding the interface cartridge in her hand, he had been totally isolated from most of the systems he would need in any emergency in which he couldn’t use a keyboard.

“All we need is a single statement from you,” Patros said. “If Woodbine didn’t do it this time, then she’ll do it sooner or later. We can’t do anything legally without a statement from someone who’s been approached. It doesn’t matter if she did it just now or if she does it the next time you see her. All you have to do is give us a call.”

“You can even invite her back,” O’Keefe said. “Nobody’s going to object if you have a little fun first. We’re a lot more understanding than people give us credit for.”

Marcia had given him two numbers he could contact, with some mumbo-jumbo he could go through if he wanted to make it look like he was making an ordinary business call that had been encrypted for conventional business reasons. The call could go to Atlanta—to the hotel where the Hartford Quartet was currently staying—and from there it would go to a tucfra installation in the Carolina Federation which would relay it to its true destination. The encryption process was supposed to be some kind of gee-whiz development that the tucfra were “confident” the security agencies in the New England Confederation couldn’t decode, Marcia had claimed. They would know he had made an encrypted call, but that would be it.

“Except, of course,” Jason had said, “that they’ll also know I just happened to call someone who has access to that kind of encryption software.”

“It still won’t give them any usable evidence. The Confederation courts tend to be strict about things like that. You’ve got a lot of fanatics in this area, but your courts tend to be just as fanatic about procedures.”

He called the number that was supposed to put him in touch with Marcia herself, and she popped on the screen seconds after he had initiated the process. It only took her a moment to recover from her initial shock and get herself under control.

She was sitting in her dining room having dinner with a friend, and she had to keep her thoughts to herself until she could step into another room.

“I’m sorry, Jason,” she said when she had settled into her bedroom. “I wouldn’t have said a word to you if I’d known that could happen. This is the first time I’ve ever gotten any indication they’ve been watching me.”

“I wouldn’t assume . . . O’Keefe . . . is going to worry about the . . . legal issues. She probably wants a statement from me so she can convince her . . . superiors . . . in the COH she isn’t just . . . killing people . . . at random. Don’t assume she’ll leave you alone if she doesn’t get it.”

“My superiors will probably pull me out of this territory as soon as they think they can. The main thing we have to worry about is what happens to you. My personal recommendation is that you should go ahead and cooperate with them. Unless you’re willing to take up my offer, of course.”

“I called you to warn you.”

“Then I suggest you cooperate with them. I can guarantee you all the tucfra I’ve ever met would give you the same advice.”

“If I call . . . O’Keefe . . . and tell her you just tried to . . . recruit me . . . it will be just like I gave her permission to . . . kill . . . you. I’ve seen how she looks, Marcia. I’ve . . . looked . . . at . . . her . . . face.”

“You’re under no obligation to protect me, Jason. I made a stupid mistake somewhere, and now it’s up to me to look after myself. The longer you wait before you cooperate with them, the more it’s going to look like you were giving me time to get away. You have to go on living here. You’ve already done more than anybody could expect of you just by making this call.”

“Is that another example of the . . . moral principles . . . our lords and masters are supposed to be teaching us?”

“The tucfra have a civilization that is thousands of years older than ours. They’ve created a society that can live with weapons of mass destruction and all the other technical developments that nearly destroyed our own civilization. Their entire civilization is based on the idea that all the individuals in a technological society have to live by certain principles—and stand by them, even when it means they might be better off as individuals if they didn’t. I put you in danger when I approached you. That means I’m expected to act like someone who has taken on certain obligations. They wouldn’t want me to act any other way.”

“And while you’re getting yourself . . . killed . . . worrying about me, two thousand aliens are . . . gobbling up . . . fifteen percent of all the goods and services produced on earth.”

“We’re alive. We have a functioning world government. The global temperature has dropped almost a full degree. The imbalance in the distribution of wealth has been corrected to the point where half the people in the poorest country on Earth have the same standard of living as the population of Europe. We might have accomplished all that without them, but we’ve got several thousand years of history that indicate we wouldn’t have.”

He couldn’t see her back, but he knew it was about as stiff and proud as a human spine could look. Her face was glowing with the kind of idealism you saw on the faces of the actors they used in the recruiting videos that the United Nations regiments sent down over the satellites.

O’Keefe forced her way onto Jason’s primary screen seconds after he broke the connection with Marcia.

“You made an encrypted call,” O’Keefe said.

“It was a . . . business . . . call. I always . . . encrypt . . . business calls.”

“With a type of encryption even the Department of Internal Security can’t decrypt? You aren’t being frank with us, Jason. You apparently have access to some exceptionally advanced encryption software. A loyal citizen should be eager to give his government the opportunity to put a product like that to good use.”

“It . . . was private . . . business . . . call. There is no reason why any . . . government . . . agency should be . . . monitoring . . . my phone.”

“The government agency can monitor your phone, Jason, on the grounds that you belong to a category that is very attractive to recruiters and have been seen with someone who is believed to be a recruiter—and you know as well as I do that the activities of the government agency in question are not your primary worry.”

He called the second number Marcia had given him, and told the gatekeeper who answered the phone that he wanted to speak to one of the people who was really in charge. The gatekeeper spent a few seconds fussing over a computer screen, but apparently Marcia had filed all the relevant information. The trim figure that replaced the gatekeeper could have been the same tucfra officer that Captain Rhena had always chatted with when she had received the lowdown on the latest mission the video script writers had dreamed up for her. The tucfra generally preferred the bodies of athletic males in their late thirties or early forties when they chose to sample the pleasures available to beings who had been endowed with a human physiology. There were rumors that they sometimes entertained themselves by assuming the bodies of panthers or wolves when they were alone in their private domain in the Sahara, but there was no evidence that that was true. No one had ever seen a tucfra who didn’t look like a debonair, totally relaxed human male in the prime of life.

“I’ve already examined Ms. Woodbine’s reports,” the tucfra said. “Please feel free to assume I’ve been fully informed about your present situation.”

“I want to know—will she be . . . safe . . . if I co . . . operate with them?”

“I can only repeat what Ms. Woodbine has already told you, Mr. Jardanel. The best advice we can give you is to urge you to cooperate with your visitors at once—unless, of course, you’re willing to accept our offer. I can assure you no one involved in this situation will engage in any action that will give our adversaries in your region the impression that you tried to give her time to escape.”

“I’m asking about her. Will . . . she . . . be . . . safe?”

“We are giving her the best possible support someone in her situation can receive. I can’t go into any more detail than that, obviously, but I think you know enough about us to know we don’t abandon anyone who has given us their support.”

“Can you . . . guarantee . . . she’ll be safe? Can you . . . give me . . . your word?”

The tucfra smiled thinly. This was the first time Jason had ever actually talked to a tucfra, but they both knew he had probably read fifty essays and editorials on tucfra ethics and stared at his share of the two-minute ethical pep-talks the tucfra PR experts had scattered along the electronic byways. No species, the tucfra propagandists claimed, could survive the impact of high technology without a scrupulous sense of personal honor. There was no concept in tucfra ethics that was more critical. The army of lawyers that had infested the old United States had been a sure sign, according to this theory, that the old society could not handle the complexities created by technology. No one could write laws that could guide people through that level of complexity.

“There’s no way in the world anyone can promise you that, Mr. Jardanel. That would be about the most dishonorable thing I could do, in fact. All I can tell you is that I know Ms. Woodbine well. I can assure you she’s just as anxious to have you look out for yourself as I am. Your concern for her is exactly the type of reaction we are looking for in the people we would like to recruit. It would be a great loss if anything happened to you.”

It had been three years since Jason had run the video of the North Pacific Chamber Orchestra playing Sallinen’s Shadows. The young violinist sitting at the second desk didn’t look as much like Marcia as his memories had indicated, but he could see how she and Marcia could activate the same areas of his psyche. The violinist was slimmer and younger than Marcia, with a spray of freckles over the bridge of her nose, but she had the same clean features, the same milky complexion, the same air of easy competence.

The speaker over his door emitted a genteel beep. An auxiliary screen lit up, and he found himself looking at Patros’s face. “Would you mind if I come up, Mr. Jardanel? I’m afraid I have to trouble you again.”

Jason glanced at his clock. It had been just about thirty minutes since he had left the appropriate message on the security agent’s information system. His wording had been mildly ambiguous—I’m just calling to tell you I’ve received the offer you were interested in—but it should have given Patros all the support he needed for whatever he and O’Keefe were planning to do next.

“Dedya gamah . . . message?”

“I’m happy to say we did. And we appreciate it very much, too.”

The elevator was equipped with a security camera that came on automatically whenever the elevator door slid open. The camera was mounted just below the ceiling, so Jason got a good view of the way the light played across O’Keefe’s hair as she slipped into the elevator after Patros.

Marcia’s face filled Jason’s primary screen. On the auxiliary screen on the left, Jason could see the wide-angle view that displayed the carefully arranged tableau his own system was transmitting. He was slumped in his chair with his weight resting on his right side. O’Keefe was standing behind the chair with her left hand resting on his shoulder.

“There’s a police office three blocks from here,” Marcia said. “I can turn myself in there in ten minutes.”

Jason closed his eyes and concentrated on the relaxation technique his speech therapy program had taught him. He formed the first carefully shaped syllable of the speech he had worked out in his head and O’Keefe reached around him as soon as she heard the strangled beginnings of a sound and covered his mouth with her left arm. She patted him on the cheek with her right hand, as if she was soothing a child, and Jason cringed when he saw the look on Marcia’s face.

“We think it would be best if you came here,” O’Keefe said. “This is a security matter, not a police matter.”

“As I understand it,” Marcia said, “you are not an official of the Department of Internal Security. I am perfectly willing to give myself up and stand trial. But I believe it would be best if I surrendered to an authorized police officer.”

“Mr. Patros is a fully accredited official of the Confederation government. We are not here to negotiate with you. We want you here now. I’m certain Jason feels the same way.”

O’Keefe’s hand tightened on Jason’s bony, undermuscled shoulder. Marcia stared out of the screen for a moment and then tipped back her head. Her face took on the same recruiting-video glow that Jason had seen before.

“At least we don’t have to worry about whether or not she’ll come,” O’Keefe said. “That’s one of the few advantages we have over these people. She wouldn’t leave you here now if the tucs had an armored helicopter hovering over her apartment, ready to take her straight to whatever hole they’ve got waiting for her.”

“And you use . . . that . . . against her?”

“She’s an enemy of the human race, Jason. She doesn’t have any more in common with you or me than a worm does.”

O’Keefe and Patros had been carrying bulky equipment bags when they had entered the apartment. Now they had both slipped into armored tunics and lowered visored combat helmets over their heads. As every action-adventure enthusiast knew, the helmets were essentially an infantry version of the command and control technology that was routinely crammed into combat planes and armored vehicles. The technology packed into the helmets included components that could guide the wearer’s aim, sensors that could maintain a 360 degree watch on their surroundings, offensive electronic devices that would attempt to disrupt whatever command and control devices Marcia might manage to conceal on her person, and an expert system which could evaluate the situation and coordinate the efforts of a three-person combat team faster than any individual member of the team could think.

Patros saw Jason staring at the hardware and gave him a shrug. “You can’t take too many precautions,” Patros said. “A lot of these people have been enhanced. Our friends in the Sahara have ways they can enhance muscles and nervous systems even when they let their agents keep their original bodies.”

“There’s no such thing as a human seep,” O’Keefe said. “They may look human, but it’s just a façade. That wasn’t a woman in your bed, Jason. It was a thing.”

They had both shoved their hands into gloves and snapped leads to wires that connected the gloves with a junction hidden under their tunics. The tunics looked bulky and awkward compared to the stylish body armor Jason had seen in videos, but the video equipment had normally been worn by characters who represented organizations that could devote unlimited resources to glamorous weaponry.

“Jason Jardanel has a visitor,” the security system said. “Name—Marcia Woodbine.”

“Say the words, Jason,” O’Keefe said. “We can always let her in with the keyboard.”

“Admit . . . the . . . visitor.”

The security cameras picked Marcia up as she entered the elevator and followed her down the hall toward Jason’s door. The dressy black cape she was wearing had a swing and heft that made her look like a fashion model.

Something hard pressed against the side of Jason’s neck. He pulled away from it, and O’Keefe shifted toward the front of his field of vision and let him see the bulky little weapon she was holding in her hands.

“Just sit still,” O’Keefe said. “This is not the time to get fidgety, Jason.”

Patros was standing on the other side of the room, where he would be located on Marcia’s left side when she came through the door. Jason rolled his eyes in that direction and saw the security agent checking the electronics on a gun that had come off the same assembly line as the item O’Keefe had just brought to his attention.

Marcia had come to a stop two steps from the door. She waited without saying anything, and Jason realized O’Keefe and Patros were deliberately making her stand there.

Patros turned his head toward the microphone over the door. “We would appreciate it if you would take off your cape. Please do it in full view of the camera.”

Marcia slipped her cape off her shoulders and let it fall onto the floor behind her. She was wearing the same kind of pants and pullover outfit she had been wearing the last time she had come here, but she looked stiffer and less bouncy.

“I’ll take her,” O’Keefe said. “Forget that. I’ll take her.”

Patros turned his visor toward her and then shrugged. “Just don’t take too long. I wouldn’t give her a second myself.”

“She’s a traitor. She should know that she’s being executed.”

It took Jason a moment to realize that he had been listening to two-thirds of a three-way conversation. The expert system in their helmets could talk to both of them through their earphones. It had apparently told them that Patros should shoot Marcia from the side—as she came through the door—and O’Keefe had overridden it.

The muzzle of O’Keefe’s gun pressed against Jason’s neck again. “Let’s hear you say the words one more time, Jason. I’m certain your security system will be glad to receive some additional evidence you’re a good citizen who cooperates with the people who defend his freedoms.”

Patros had already settled into firing position, with the gun braced against his stomach and his left hand gripping the carrying handle. Now he turned his visor toward O’Keefe and stared at her again.

“I’m going to be making reports when this is over,” O’Keefe said. “They’re going to be asking me about you, Jason. Don’t you think they’ll want to know if you seemed truly cooperative?”

Patros shook his head. He crossed the room in three long strides, brushed his hand against the manual lock switch, and returned to his position.

“The door is unlocked,” Patros said. “You can come in.”

On the screen, Marcia pushed open the door from the other side. Jason turned his head away from the image and watched the real door swing into the room.

Marcia turned toward O’Keefe as soon as she stepped through the doorway. The red dot from the laser sight on Patros’s gun pinpointed the spot on her chest where the bullet would go in.

“Turn it off,” Patros said. “My electronics just beat your electronics.”

O’Keefe still had her arm around Jason’s head. The gun was digging into his neck as if she was trying to kill him by driving it through the side of his throat.

“It’s off,” Marcia said. “I turn it off by subvocalizing.”

The pressure on Jason’s neck let up. O’Keefe took her arm off his head and stepped away from the chair.

The noise didn’t start until Marcia was halfway across the room and then it was nothing more than the phut, phut, phut of Patros’s gun emitting a three-shot burst—a sound that was so subdued it was as unassertive as a polite cough. One moment Marcia had been looking around her with bright, wide eyes dancing between Patros and O’Keefe. The next this intent, tight-faced demon was hurtling toward Jason with a red light glowing in her hand. Something dropped on the floor beside Jason’s chair. O’Keefe choked out the first syllable of an obscenity.

The weapon Marcia had used was about the only effective piece of hardware she could have hidden in her clothing—a six inch cylinder that was sometimes called a laser “sword.” It was usually used as a personal self-defense weapon and it had the great advantage that it could be carried like a pen or a pocket flashlight. It was called a sword because its pulse lasted a little over a second and people who didn’t have time to develop their marksmanship skills frequently trailed it across their targets with a short slashing motion. Its great weakness was the fact that it had to recharge for several seconds after each pulse.

The keyboard on the arm of Jason’s chair included a control panel for the chair itself. Marcia flowed past him with a velocity that was about twice as fast as the best speed any human should be able to force out of human muscles, and he rubbed his forefinger into the On square as if he was trying to scrape the plastic off.

His middle finger traced a path on the steering square. The chair shot forward with a force that made his head swing, but he managed to keep his hand on the control panel and chart a course that sent him charging toward Patros.

There was a long, strange moment when the muzzle of Patros’s gun seemed to be pointed toward Jason’s face. Then Patros moved to the right, to get a clear shot at Marcia, and Jason’s finger drew a curve that kept the chair rolling straight at Patros’s hands and the thing they were holding.

Patros’s visor swung toward Jason. Patros jumped to the left, directed by the expert system in his helmet, and the chair rolled by him with the left wheel almost bruising his heels.

Patros had been standing directly in front of Jason’s collection of instruments. The sensors on the chair activated the emergency speed controls but the bumpers still rammed into the wall with an impact that threw Jason’s chest against the safety harness. A skinny Baroque oboe fell out of its clip and clattered across the floor.

Jason’s hand overshot the control panel the first time he tried to get his fingers back into position. He tried to force it onto the panel by sheer will power and then gave up and brought the chair around with the slowest, most precisely articulated verbal commands he could squeeze out of his system.

O’Keefe was lying on the floor, with Marcia standing over her. A dark stain had spread across the entire left side of Marcia’s pullover and the top third of her pants. On the floor just in front of the wheelchair, Patros was down on his knees, reaching across the tiles for his gun—which he had probably dropped, Jason assumed, when Marcia’s laser had struck at his hand in the same way it had struck at O’Keefe’s.

Jason’s hand settled into position on the control panel. The chair shot forward. Another impact threw him into the safety harness. Patros lurched for the gun in spite of the disruption and Jason pushed forward again, as if he was driving a bulldozer into a pile of dirt.

Marcia strode across the room with O’Keefe’s gun in her hands. She had set the selector on single shot, and there was something peculiarly businesslike about the brief little puff of sound.

Patros was doubled over with his visor pressed against the floor when Jason’s brain finally started registering the things his eyes were picking up. Marcia had fired at point blank range, with the gun poised just above the point where Patros’s neck joined his shoulder, and blood was still welling out of the hole and spreading across the security man’s neck and the collar of his tunic.

“Do you think you’re safe?” Marcia said. “Do you think they’ll blame you for this?”

“Is he . . . dead?”

“They’re both dead. I broke her neck while she was down.”

She had laid the gun on the floor so she could press both her hands against her side. Her enhancements obviously included components that could shut off pain and keep her functioning, but the soggy-looking stain was still oozing relentlessly across her clothes.

“Will O’Keefe’s people believe I did this all by myself, Jason? Will they believe you if you claim you didn’t help me? You’d better come with me if they won’t.”

She closed her eyes and hunched over her wound. There was a moment when Jason thought she was going to fall over. She turned away from him somehow, and he watched her stumble into the bathroom.

He heard her mumble something in a voice that was almost inaudible, the medicine cabinet gave her an answer, and he picked up enough words to know the cabinet was telling her how to treat her wound. The supply modules that were linked to the medicine cabinet covered 80 percent of the free wall space in his bathroom. The cabinet couldn’t tell her how to remove the bullet or repair her mangled internal organs, but it could give her antibiotics, a self-sealing patch for the hole, and pain killers if her enhancements needed some help.

He backed the chair away from Patros’s body and maneuvered himself into the middle of the room. There was a position that put him just forward of an imaginary line that connected O’Keefe’s sprawling legs with Patros’s head. If he placed the angle of the chair just right, he could watch the bathroom door without seeing either of them.

Marcia was walking like a bent-over old woman when she eased herself out of the bathroom. She rested one hand on his desk and talked to him with her chin slumped against her chest.

“There’s a car downstairs. They’re supposed to have a hovercraft meet me at the beach. It may have to violate New England space by a few meters but I think they’re willing to do that.”

His brain was beginning to recover from the first shock. He was not, after all, someone who had a lot of illusions about the durability of the human body. No one had ever had to tell Jason Jardanel that the human body was a complex, highly vulnerable system which depended on the interactions of millions of highly vulnerable components.

“You can drive like . . . that?”

“I think I’m good for half an hour. It’s up to you. Whatever you want.”

Her eyes stayed on the floor. She was still hunched over but he could detect the same stiffness in her spine he had picked up when she had given him her big speech on the phone.

“You’re not . . . going to go . . . until I tell you . . . it’s all right. Is that it?”

“Give me an answer, Jason! Please give me an answer.”

Her body slumped again. She turned her head away from him as if she was ashamed of the outburst.

“They would have killed you if I hadn’t come here,” she said. “They don’t pretend about that. They would have killed you just so we’d know they meant it next time.”

“So I . . . owe you . . . something?”

“You don’t owe anyone anything. I’d just like an answer. So I can go.”

“I don’t . . . know . . . if they’ll . . . believe . . . I didn’t . . . help you.”

“Then come.”

“You went after her first. I . . . understand . . . that. You didn’t move until she took . . . the gun . . . away from my neck. You wouldn’t be . . . hurt . . . if you’d gone after him first.”

“She would have killed you. I didn’t come here to get you killed. That really is the way we operate, Jason. You may have to do the same thing yourself if you join us.”

“You might not . . . reach the . . . rendezvous.”

“I’ll do my best to get you close enough so you can try to go the rest of the way in your chair.”

“She liked . . . violence. They all like . . . violence.”

“We’d spend our lives tearing each other’s throats out if people like her had their way. If she wasn’t fighting the tucfra, she’d be killing people over something else.”

“The tucfra only let us . . . kill . . . when it’s . . . good . . . for us?”

“Would you rather let people like O’Keefe run things? Would you rather have us spend the next five hundred years fighting people like her over whatever little bits of civilization we didn’t destroy with our mistakes?”

“I . . . couldn’t . . . let them . . . kill . . . you. My father . . . my mother . . . they would have . . . killed . . . them, too.”

“Please give me an answer, Jason. Please.”

His fingers crawled across the control pad. The chair rolled forward and he turned it toward the door.

“Lean . . . on . . . the chair. Tell me . . . if I go . . . too fast.”

“You’re coming with me? You’re joining us?”

“Do . . . I . . . have . . . any . . . choice?”

DRESS REHEARSAL

Harvey Jacobs

Here’s a blackly funny reminder that in invasions, as in everything, it’s attention to the little things that really counts. . . .

Harvey Jacobs is the author of two novels, The Juror and Summer on a Mountain of Spices, and a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, The Egg of the Glack. He has written for most of the SF magazines, as well as for major magazines such as Playboy and Esquire, and has also written widely for television and radio. He has received the Playboy Fiction Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent book is a new novel, Beautiful Soup, A Novel for the 21st Century. He lives and works in New York City.

Sam Derby felt old, even up there when time was an ice cube. He tried a knee bend and gave it up when his knees cracked like dice. Xarix appeared on the wall screen just as Sam Derby recovered his posture and let out a grunt.

“Are you stable?” Xarix said.

“I’m fine,” Sam said. “How are you?”

“It’s time for the dress rehearsal,” Xarix said. “Will you transport to the Green Theater?”

“You mean the Blue Theater, don’t you?”

“The Green Theater. The children are performing in the Blue Theater.”

“Ah, the kiddies, yes.”

Some kiddies, Sam Derby thought to himself. He once knew a man named Louie who carried pictures of two apes in his wallet. When somebody asked him about his family, he showed the pictures of the young apes and beamed when the somebody told him what a lovely family he had. Up there the apes would look like gods. What they called kiddies wouldn’t serve for bait back home. Sam Derby often wondered about the kind of sex that produced such results. Yuch. Still, they loved their offspring. Chip off the old block, like that. To each his own.

The capsule came to Sam Derby’s door. He got in and pressed the circular button marked The Green Theater. The capsule hummed and moved. It was a nice feeling to be inside, warm, vibrated, moving, and no meter ticking off a dime every few seconds to remind you of time and your own heartbeat.

Sam Derby, a senior citizen, with a First Indulgence classification, had the right to be gently lifted from the capsule and aimed at the door of the Green Theater. Xarix waited for him. As the doors of the Green Theater slid apart, Xarix appeared like a developing photograph.

“So, Professor,” Xarix said, “how do you feel about the approach of Minus Hour?”

“Not Minus Hour,” Sam Derby said. “Zero Hour. You’re the one who should set an example.”

“God, yes,” Xarix said. “If one of my students said that, I would have him boiled in . . . oil?”

“Oil is correct,” Sam Derby said. “Where is everybody?”

“Supply,” Xarix said. “They’ll be here at the drop of a hat.”

“Good. Well said,” Sam Derby said.

“Thank you. I like that expression, at the drop of a hat. I have this vision of hats dropping. It amuses me.”

“You have a nice sense of humor.”

“I think so. Yes. I could have been a schpritzer.”

“Not exactly a hundred percent,” Sam Derby said. “A man who gives a schpritz is a comic. A comic is a schpritzer. Say, ‘I could have been a comic.’ It’s a lot better.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Xarix and Sam Derby went to the podium at the front of the Green Theater.

“What do you want from me today?” Sam Derby said. “I can’t tell them much more.”

“I thought a kind of pep talk was in order. Good luck, go get ‘em, half time in the locker room. Do it for the old Prof. You know what I’m after.”

“I’ll do that. When does the next class start?”

“Not for a week. You have yourself a vacation, a well-deserved holiday, Sam.”

“Sam? What happened to Professor?”

“Under the circumstances I felt justified in using the familiar. We’ve worked together twelve solstices.”

“Use what you want,” Sam Derby said. “I wasn’t complaining. In fact, I’m flattered. I was just surprised. I began to feel disposable.”

“Disposable?”

“Like a tissue. I finished my work. The class is graduating, in a manner of speaking. How do I know there’s another class? How do I know you won’t dispose of me?”

“But that’s ridiculous. You’re one of us.”

“It’s nice of you to say so.”

“Tell me,” Xarix said, “are you sorry you came?”

“No,” Sam Derby said. “I must admit, when you first came to get me, I wasn’t so happy.”

“You had a clear choice.”

“Choice? You said I had a choice. But when one of us sees one of you for the first time coming from noplace, not the most beautiful thing in the universe, no insult intended, choice isn’t choice. I was scared out of my rectum.”

“Surprise is our schtik. The startle effect.”

“You startled. Now that I’m here, now that I’ve had time to think things over, I’m really glad I flew up here. I like it here.”

“Good.”

“Besides, what did I have down there? Did I have respect? Honors? Medals? I had Social Security. I had a pension from the guild. The people who saw my work were dropping like flies. One day before you came I went to three funerals one after the other, bang, bang, bang.”

“Alevai. Rest in peace.”

“Wait. No alevai. Alevai is it should happen.”

“Whoops.”

“Whoops. If one of them said whoops, you would give him such a knock with the ray his kishkas would burn.”

“There’s an advantage to executive status,” Xarix said. “Sam, do you think they’ll be successful?”

“Why not? You send one here, one there, they have papers, they have skills, and they know how to behave. It’s amazing how they look, exactly like people. Who should find out what they’re up to? You got no problem with the spies. Your problem might be that Earth is already taken over by meshuganas. Maybe from another planet. I never met a producer, an agent, a successful man who couldn’t be from Mars.”

“Why Mars?”

“A figure of speech.”

“Ah.”

“I keep asking myself. Xarix, why you want Earth?”

“Because it’s there.”

“So all this trouble, spies, saboteurs, chazzerai, because it’s there?”

“Sufficient reason.”

“Sufficient reason. Be gazoont.”

“Amen.”

“You could say that. In all my years on stage I never would believe such a plot. Never. Too fantastic. So who knew?”

“We knew. Our computers knew. When we asked them the name of the man for the job, Sam, your card came out with two others. Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg. One was dead, and the other is too much with the guttural noises, the schlepping and yutzing. Out of all the actors past or present, your card came out, Sam Derby.”

“It’s nice to know. Nobody on Earth even remembers there was a theater on Second Avenue.”

“Let me say that for an alien you’ve dedicated yourself wonderfully well to our purposes. We had the human forms down pat. We had the technicalities worked out. But nuances of manner, subtleties of speech, are all important. Only you could impart such wisdom.”

“Wisdom. There is a word. Xarix, I’ll tell you, don’t worry yourself. Your people, whatever you call it, will blend like a snowflake on white bread. Down there, anybody will swear they’re just like everybody else. They have the tools.”

“Thanks to you, Sam. Professor.”

“So.”

When the students came, there was much excitement. Take off was only hours away. The combination of youth, travel and purpose produced a familiar tension. Sam Derby stood on the podium delivering his pep talk and feeling some of the excitement himself.

“Remember, you’re going to take over a planet, not to play pinochle. Do what I told you, be discreet, and the magic word is to blend in the soup. Now, let me hear all together in unison, what you say when you meet a person of rank and power.”

“Oy vay, vots new, hello, howdy doo?”

“Good. Now, in sexual encounter, what is the correct approach?”

“Hey, dollink, let’s schtup, don’t futz, hurry up.”

“Wonderful. And for you in the diplomatic corps, very important, when you run into a prince, a king, a president, let’s hear it.”

“Honorable Ganef, it’s a real Watergate to make the acquaintance of so illustrious a nebbish schlemiel nudnik putz as thyself. May you fornicate with a horse before the night falls.”

“Gorgeous,” Sam Derby said. “I’m proud of you. Go, and give my regards to Broadway.”

“You think they’re ready?” Xarix said.

“Ready for Freddy,” Sam Derby said. “If they learned my lessons and wave the arms you gave them, they’ll be accepted anyplace. Like brothers.”

THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION

Raccoona Sheldon

Here’s another brilliant story by the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, wearing her Raccoona Sheldon hat this time instead of her James Tiptree, Jr. hat. It won Dr. Sheldon a well-deserved Nebula Award, and may well be one of the best stories that Sheldon ever wrote—which means, almost by definition, that it is one of the best SF stories of the last twenty years.

The young man sitting at 2° N, 75° W sent a casually venomous glance up at the nonfunctional shoofly ventilador and went on reading his letter. He was sweating heavily, stripped to his shorts in the hot box of what passed for a hotel room in Cuyapán.

How do other wives do it? I stay busy-busy with the Ann Arbor grant review programs and the seminar, saying brightly “Oh yes, Alan is in Columbia setting up a biological pest control program, isn’t it wonderful?” But inside I imagine you surrounded by nineteen-year-old raven-haired cooing beauties, every one panting with social dedication and filthy rich. And forty inches of bosom bursting out of her delicate lingerie. I even figured it in centimeters, that’s 101.6 centimeters of busting. Oh, darling, darling, do what you want only come home safe.

Alan grinned fondly, briefly imagining the only body he longed for. His girl, his magic Anne. Then he got up to open the window another cautious notch. A long pale mournful face looked in—a goat. The room opened on the goatpen, the stench was vile. Air, anyway. He picked up the letter.

Everything is just about as you left it, except that the Peedsville horror seems to be getting worse. They’re calling it the Sons of Adam cult now. Why can’t they do something, even if it is a religion? The Red Cross has set up a refugee camp in Ashton, Georgia. Imagine, refugees in the U.S.A. I heard two little girls were carried out all slashed up. Oh, Alan.

Which reminds me, Barney came over with a wad of clippings he wants me to send you. I’m putting them in a separate envelope; I know what happens to very fat letters in foreign POs. He says, in case you don’t get them, what do the following have in common? Peedsville, Sao Paulo, Phoenix, San Diego, Shanghai, New Delhi, Tripoli, Brisbane, Johannesburg and Lubbock, Texas. He says the hint is, remember where the Intertropical Convergence Zone is now. That makes no sense to me, maybe it will to your superior ecological brain. All I could see about the clippings was that they were fairly horrible accounts of murders or massacres of women. The worst was the New Delhi one, about “rafts of female corpses” in the river. The funniest (!) was the Texas Army officer who shot his wife, three daughters and his aunt, because God told him to clean the place up.

Barney’s such an old dear, he’s coming over Sunday to help me take off the downspout and see what’s blocking it. He’s dancing on air right now, since you left his spruce budworm-moth antipheromone program finally paid off. You know he tested over 2,000 compounds? Well, it seems that good old 2,097 really works. When I asked him what it does he just giggled, you know how shy he is with women. Anyway, it seems that a one-shot spray program will save the forests without harming a single other thing. Birds and people can eat it all day, he says.

Well sweetheart, that’s all the news except Amy goes back to Chicago to school Sunday. The place will be a tomb, I’ll miss her frightfully in spite of her being at the stage where I’m her worst enemy. The sullen sexy subteens, Angie says. Amy sends love to her Daddy. I send you my whole heart, all that words can’t say.

Your Anne

Alan put the letter safely in his notefile and glanced over the rest of the thin packet of mail, refusing to let himself dream of home and Anne. Barney’s “fat envelope” wasn’t there. He threw himself on the rumpled bed, yanking off the lightcord a minute before the town generator went off for the night. In the darkness the list of places Barney had mentioned spread themselves around a misty globe that turned, troublingly, briefly in his mind. Something. . . .

But then the memory of the hideously parasitized children he had worked with at the clinic that day took possession of his thoughts. He set himself to considering the data he must collect. Look for the vulnerable link in the behavioral chain—how often Barney—Dr. Barnhard Braithwaite—had pounded it into his skull. Where was it, where? In the morning he would start work on bigger canefly cages. . . .

At that moment, five thousand miles north, Anne was writing:

Oh, darling, darling, your first three letters are here, they all came together. I knew you were writing. Forget what I said about swarthy heiresses, that was all a joke. My darling I know, I know . . . us. Those dreadful canefly larvae, those poor little kids. If you weren’t my husband I’d think you were a saint or something. (I do anyway.)

I have your letters pinned up all over the house, makes it a lot less lonely. No real news here except things feel kind of quiet and spooky. Barney and I got the downspout out, it was full of a big rotted hoard of squirrel nuts. They must have been dropping them down the top. I’ll put a wire over it. (Don’t worry, I’ll use a ladder this time.)

Barney’s in an odd, grim mood. He’s taking this Sons of Adam thing very seriously, it seems he’s going to be on the investigation committee if that ever gets off the ground. The weird part is that nobody seems to be doing anything, as if it’s just too big. Selina Peters has been printing some acid comments, like When one man kills his wife you call it murder, but when enough do it we call it a lifestyle. I think it’s spreading, but nobody knows because the media have been asked to downplay it. Barney says it’s being viewed as a form of contagious hysteria. He insisted I send you this ghastly interview. It’s not going to be published, of course. The quietness is worse, though, it’s like something terrible was going on just out of sight. After reading Barney’s thing I called up Pauline in San Diego to make sure she was all right. She sounded funny, as if she wasn’t saying everything . . . my own sister. Just after she said things were great she suddenly asked if she could come and stay here a while next month. I said come right away, but she wants to sell her house first. I wish she ‘d hurry.

Oh, the diesel car is okay now, it just needed its filter changed. I had to go out to Springfield to get one but Eddie installed it for only $2.50. He’s going to bankrupt his garage.

In case you didn’t guess, those places of Barney’s are all about latitude 30° N or S—the horse latitudes. When I said not exactly, he said remember the equatorial convergence zone shifts in winter, and to add in Libya, Osaka, and a place I forget—wait, Alice Springs, Australia. What has this to do with anything, I asked. He said, “Nothing—I hope.” I leave it to you, great brains like Barney can be weird.

My dearest, here’s all of me to all of you. Your letters make life possible. But don’t feel you have to, I can tell how tired you must be. Just know we ‘re together, always everywhere.

Your Anne

PS I had to open this to put Barney’s thing in, it wasn’t the secret police. Here it is. All love again. A.

In the goat-infested room where Alan read this, rain was drumming on the roof. He put the letter to his nose to catch the faint perfume once more, and folded it away. Then he pulled out the yellow flimsy Barney had sent and began to read, frowning.

peedsville cult/sons of adam special. Statement by driver Sgt. Willard Mews, Globe Fork, Ark. We hit the roadblock about 80 miles west of Jacksonville. Major John Heinz of Ashton was expecting us, he gave us an escort of two riot vehicles headed by Capt. T. Parr. Major Heinz appeared shocked to see that the NIH medical team included two women doctors. He warned us in the strongest terms of the danger. So Dr. Patsy Putnam (Urbana, Ill.), the psychologist, decided to stay behind at the Army cordon. But Dr. Elaine Fay (Clinton, N.J.) insisted on going with us, saying she was the epi-something (epidemiologist).

We drove behind one of the riot cars at 30 mph for about an hour without seeing anything unusual. There were two big signs saying “sons of adam—liberated zone.” We passed some small pecan packing plants and a citrus processing plant. The men there looked at us but did not do anything unusual. I didn’t see any children or women of course. Just outside Peedsville we stopped at a big barrier made of oil drums in front of a large citrus warehouse. This area is old, sort of a shantytown and trailer park. The new part of town with the shopping center and developments is about a mile further on. A warehouse worker with a shotgun came out and told us to wait for the Mayor. I don’t think he saw Dr. Elaine Fay then, she was sitting sort of bent down in back.

Mayor Blount drove up in a police cruiser and our chief, Dr. Premack, explained our mission from the Surgeon General. Dr. Premack was very careful not to make any remarks insulting to the Mayor’s religion. Mayor Blount agreed to let the party go on into Peedsville to take samples of the soil and water and so on and talk to the doctor who lives there. The Mayor was about 6′ 2″, weight maybe 230 or 240, tanned, with grayish hair. He was smiling and chuckling in a friendly manner.

Then he looked inside the car and saw Dr. Elaine Fay and he blew up. He started yelling we had to all get the hell back. But Dr. Premack talked to him and cooled him down and finally the Mayor said Dr. Fay should go into the warehouse office and stay there with the door closed. I had to stay there too and see she didn’t come out, and one of the Mayor’s men would drive the party.

So the medical people and the Mayor and one of the riot vehicles went on into Peedsville and I took Dr. Fay back into the warehouse office and sat down. It was real hot and stuffy. Dr. Fay opened a window, but when I heard her trying to talk to an old man outside I told her she couldn’t do that and closed the window. The old man went away. Then she wanted to talk to me but I told her I did not feel like conversing. I felt it was real wrong, her being there.

So then she started looking through the office files and reading papers there. I told her that was a bad idea, she shouldn’t do that. She said the government expected her to investigate. She showed me a booklet or magazine they had there, it was called Man Listens to God by Reverend McIllhenny. They had a carton full in the office. I started reading it and Dr. Fay said she wanted to wash her hands. So I took her back along a kind of enclosed hallway beside the conveyor to where the toilet was. There were no doors or windows so I went back. After a while she called out that there was a cot back there, she was going to lie down. I figured that was all right because of the no windows, also I was glad to be rid of her company.

When I got to reading the book it was very intriguing. It was very deep thinking about how man is now on trial with God and if we fulfill our duty God will bless us with a real new life on Earth. The signs and portents show it. It wasn’t like, you know, Sunday school stuff. It was deep.

After a while I heard some music and saw the soldiers from the other riot car were across the street by the gas tanks, sitting in the shade of some trees and kidding with the workers from the plant. One of them was playing a guitar, not electric, just plain. It looked so peaceful.

Then Mayor Blount drove up alone in the cruiser and came in. When he saw I was reading the book he smiled at me sort of fatherly, but he looked tense. He asked me where Dr. Fay was and I told him she was lying down in back. He said that was okay. Then he kind of sighed and went back down the hall, closing the door behind him. I sat and listened to the guitar man, trying to hear what he was singing. I felt really hungry, my lunch was in Dr. Premack’s car.

After a while the door opened and Mayor Blount came back in. He looked terrible, his clothes were messed up and he had bloody scrape marks on his face. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at me hard and fierce, like he might have been disoriented. I saw his zipper was open and there was blood on his clothing and also on his (private parts).

I didn’t feel frightened. I felt something important had happened. I tried to get him to sit down. But he motioned me to follow him back down the hall, to where Dr. Fay was. “You must see,” he said. He went into the toilet and I went into a kind of little room there, where the cot was. The light was fairly good, reflected off the tin roof from where the walls stopped. I saw Dr. Fay lying on the cot in a peaceful appearance. She was lying straight, her clothing was to some extent different but her legs were together. I was glad to see that. Her blouse was pulled up and I saw there was a cut or incision on her abdomen. The blood was coming out there, or it had been coming out there, like a mouth. It wasn’t moving at this time. Also her throat was cut open.

I returned to the office. Mayor Blount was sitting down, looking very tired. He had cleaned himself off. He said, “I did it for you. Do you understand?”

He seemed like my father, I can’t say it better than that. I realized he was under a terrible strain, he had taken a lot on himself for me. He went on to explain how Dr. Fay was very dangerous, she was what they called a cripto-female (crypto?), the most dangerous kind. He had exposed her and purified the situation. He was very straightforward, I didn’t feel confused at all, I knew he had done what was right.

We discussed the book, how man must purify himself and show God a clean world. He said some people raise the question of how can man reproduce without women but such people miss the point. The point is that as long as man depends on the old filthy animal way God won’t help him. When man gets rid of his animal part, which is woman, this is the signal God is waiting. Then God will reveal the new true clean way, maybe angels will come bringing new souls, or maybe we will live forever, but it is not our place to speculate, only to obey. He said some men here had seen an Angel of the Lord. This was very deep, it seemed like it echoed inside me, I felt it was an inspiration.

Then the medical party drove up and I told Dr. Premack that Dr. Fay had been taken care of and sent away, and I got in the car to drive them out of the Liberated Zone. However four of the six soldiers from the roadblock refused to leave. Capt. Parr tried to argue them out of it but finally agreed they could stay to guard the oil-drum barrier.

I would have liked to stay too, the place was so peaceful, but they needed me to drive the car. If I had known there would be all this hassle I never would have done them the favor. I am not crazy and I have not done anything wrong and my lawyer will get me out. That is all I have to say.

In Cuyapán the hot afternoon rain had temporarily ceased. As Alan’s fingers let go of Sgt. Willard Mews’s wretched document he caught sight of pencil-scrawled words in the margin. Barney’s spider hand. He squinted.

Man’s religion and metaphysics are the voices of his glands. Schonweiser, 1878.

Who the devil Schonweiser was Alan didn’t know, but he knew what Barney was conveying. This murderous crackpot religion of McWhosis was a symptom, not a cause. Barney believed something was physically affecting the Peedsville men, generating psychosis, and a local religious demagogue had sprung up to “explain” it.

Well, maybe. But cause or effect, Alan thought only of one thing: eight hundred miles from Peedsville to Ann Arbor. Anne should be safe. She had to be.

He threw himself on the lumpy cot, his mind going back exultantly to his work. At the cost of a million bites and cane-cuts he was pretty sure he’d found the weak link in the canefly cycle. The male mass-mating behavior, the comparative scarcity of ovulant females. It would be the screwfly solution all over again with the sexes reversed. Concentrate the pheromone, release sterilized females. Luckily the breeding populations were comparatively isolated. In a couple of seasons they ought to have it. Have to let them go on spraying poison meanwhile, of course; damn pity, it was slaughtering everything and getting in the water, and the caneflies had evolved to immunity anyway. But in a couple of seasons, maybe three, they could drop the canefly populations below reproductive viability. No more tormented human bodies with those stinking larvae in the nasal passages and brain. . . . He drifted off for a nap, grinning.

Up north, Anne was biting her lip in shame and pain.

Sweetheart, I shouldn’t admit it but your wife is scared a bit jittery. Just female nerves or something, nothing to worry about. Everything is normal up here. It’s so eerily normal, nothing in the papers, nothing anywhere except what I hear through Barney and Lillian. But Pauline’s phone won’t answer out in San Diego; the fifth day some strange man yelled at me and banged the phone down. Maybe she’s sold her house—but why wouldn’t she call?

Lillian’s on some kind of Save-the-Women committee, like we were an endangered species, ha-ha—you know Lillian. It seems the Red Cross has started setting up camps. But she says, after the first rush, only a trickle are coming out of what they call “the affected areas.” Not many children, either, even little boys. And they have some airphotos around Lubbock showing what look like mass graves. Oh, Alan . . . so far it seems to be mostly spreading west, but something’s happening in St. Louis, they’re cut off. So many places seem to have just vanished from the news, I had a nightmare that there isn’t a woman left alive down there. And nobody’s doing anything. They talked about spraying with tranquillizers for a while and then that died out. What could it do? Somebody at the U.N. has proposed a convention on—you won’t believe this—femicide. It sounds like a deodorant spray.

Excuse me, honey, I seem to be a little hysterical. George Searles came back from Georgia talking about God’s Will—Searles the life-long atheist. Alan, something crazy is happening.

But there aren’t any facts. Nothing. The Surgeon General issued a report on the bodies of the Rahway Rip-Breast Team—I guess I didn’t tell you about that. Anyway, they could find no pathology. Milton Baines wrote a letter saying in the present state of the art we can’t distinguish the brain of a saint from a psychopathic killer, so how could they expect to find what they don’t know how to look for?

Well, enough of these jitters. It’ll be all over by the time you get back, just history. Everything’s fine here, I fixed the car’s muffler again. And Amy’s coming home for the vacation, that’ll get my mind off faraway problems.

Oh, something amusing to end with—Angie told me what Barney’s enzyme does to the spruce budworm. It seems it blocks the male from turning around after he connects with the female, so he mates with her head instead. Like clockwork with a cog missing. There’re going to be some pretty puzzled female spruceworms. Now why couldn’t Barney tell me that? He really is such a sweet shy old dear. He’s given me some stuff to put in, as usual. I didn ‘t read it.

Now don’t worry, my darling, everything’s fine.

I love you, I love you so.

Always, all ways your Anne

Two weeks later in Cuyapán when Barney’s enclosures slid out of the envelope, Alan didn’t read them either. He stuffed them into the pocket of his bush jacket with a shaking hand and started bundling his notes together on the rickety table, with a scrawled note to Sister Dominique on top. The hell with the canefly, the hell with everything except that tremor in his Anne’s firm handwriting. The hell with being five thousand miles away from his woman, his child, while some deadly madness raged. He crammed his meager belongings into his duffel. If he hurried he could catch the bus through to Bogotá and maybe make the Miami flight.

He made it, but in Miami he found the planes north jammed. He failed a quick standby; six hours to wait. Time to call Anne.

When the call got through some difficulty he was unprepared for the rush of joy and relief that burst along the wires.

“Thank God—I can’t believe it—Oh, Alan, my darling, are you really—I can’t believe—”

He found he was repeating too, and all mixed up with the canefly data. They were both laughing hysterically when he finally hung up.

Six hours. He settled in a frayed plastic chair opposite Aerolineas Argentinas, his mind half back at the clinic, half on the throngs moving by him. Something was oddly different here, he perceived presently. Where was the decorative fauna he usually enjoyed in Miami, the parade of young girls in crotch-tight pastel jeans? The flounces, boots, wild hats and hairdos, and startling expanses of newly-tanned skin, the brilliant fabrics barely confining the bob of breasts and buttocks? Not here—but wait; looking closely, he glimpsed two young faces hidden under unbecoming parkas, their bodies draped in bulky, non-descript skirts. In fact, all down the long vista he could see the same thing: hooded ponchos, heaped-on clothes, and baggy pants, dull colors. A new style? No, he thought not. It seemed to him their movements suggested furtiveness, timidity. And they moved in groups. He watched a lone girl struggle to catch up with others ahead of her, apparently strangers. They accepted her wordlessly.

They’re frightened, he thought. Afraid of attracting notice. Even that gray-haired matron in a pantsuit, resolutely leading a flock of kids, was glancing around nervously.

And at the Argentine desk opposite he saw another odd thing: two lines had a big sign over them, Mujeres. Women. They were crowded with the shapeless forms and very quiet.

The men seemed to be behaving normally; hurrying, lounging, griping, and joking in the lines as they kicked their luggage along. But Alan felt an undercurrent of tension, like an irritant in the air. Outside the line of storefronts behind him a few isolated men seemed to be handing out tracts. An airport attendant spoke to the nearest man; he merely shrugged and moved a few doors down.

To distract himself Alan picked up a Miami Herald from the next seat. It was surprisingly thin. The international news occupied him for a while; he had seen none for weeks. It too had a strange, empty quality, even the bad news seemed to have dried up. The African war which had been going on seemed to be over, or went unreported. A trade summit meeting was haggling over grain and steel prices. He found himself at the obituary pages, columns of close-set type dominated by the photo of a defunct ex-senator. Then his eye fell on two announcements at the bottom of the page. One was too flowery for quick comprehension, but the other stated in bold plain type:

the forsette funeral home regretfully

announces it will no longer accept

female cadavers

Slowly he folded the paper, staring at it numbly. On the back was an item headed Navigational Hazard Warning, in the shipping news. Without really taking it in, he read:

ap/nassau: The excursion liner Carib Swallow reached port under tow today after striking an obstruction in the Gulf Stream, off Cape Hatteras. The obstruction was identified as part of a commercial trawler’s seine floated by female corpses. This confirms reports from Florida and the Gulf of the use of such seines, some of them over a mile in length. Similar reports coming from the Pacific coast and as far away as Japan indicate a growing hazard to coastwise shipping.

Alan flung the thing into the trash receptacle and sat rubbing his forehead and eyes. Thank God he had followed his impulse to come home. He felt totally disoriented, as though he had landed by error on another planet. Four and a half hours more to wait. . . . At length he recalled the stuff from Barney he had thrust in his pocket, and pulled it out and smoothed it.

The top item was from the Ann Arbor News. Dr. Lillian Dash, together with several hundred other members of her organization, had been arrested for demonstrating without a permit in front of the White House. They had started a fire in a garbage can, which was considered particularly heinous. A number of women’s groups had participated, the total struck Alan as more like thousands than hundreds. Extraordinary security precautions were being taken despite the fact that the President was out of town at the time.

The next item had to be Barney’s acerbic humor.

up/vatican city, 19 june. Pope John IV today intimated that he does not plan to comment officially on the so-called Pauline Purification cults advocating the elimination of women as a means of justifying man to God. A spokesman emphasized that the Church takes no position on these cults but repudiates any doctrine involving a “challenge” to or from God to reveal His further plans for man.

Cardinal Fazzoli, spokesman for the European Pauline movement, reaffirmed his view that the Scriptures define woman as merely a temporary companion and instrument of Man. Women, he states, are nowhere defined as human, but merely as a transitional expedient or state. “The time of transition to full humanity is at hand,” he concluded.

The next item was a thin-paper Xerox from a recent issue of Science:

SUMMARY REPORT OF THE AD HOC

EMERGENCY COMMITTEE ON FEMICIDE

The recent world-wide though localized outbreaks of femicide appear to represent a recurrence of similar outbreaks by groups or sects which are not uncommon in world history in times of psychic stress. In this case the root cause is undoubtedly the speed of social and technological change augmented by population pressure, and the spread and scope are aggravated by instantaneous world communications, thus exposing more susceptible persons. It is not viewed as a medical or epidemiological problem; no physical pathology has been found. Rather it is more akin to the various manias which swept Europe in the seventeenth century, e.g., the Dancing Manias; and like them, should run its course and disappear. The chiliastic cults which have sprung up around the affected areas appear to be unrelated, having in common only the idea that a new means of human reproduction will be revealed as a result of the “purifying” elimination of women.

We recommended that (1) inflammatory and sensational reporting be suspended; (2) refugee centers be set up and maintained for women escapees from the focal areas; (3) containment of affected areas by military cordon be continued and enforced; and (4) after a cooling-down period and the subsidence of the mania, qualified mental health teams and appropriate professional personnel go in to undertake rehabilitation.

SUMMARY OF THE MINORITY

REPORT OF THE AD HOC COMMITTEE

The nine members signing this report agree that there is no evidence for epidemiological contagion of femicide in the strict sense. However, the geographical relation of the focal areas of outbreak strongly suggests that they cannot be dismissed as purely psychosocial phenomena. The initial outbreaks have occurred around the globe near the 30th parallel, the area of principal atmospheric downflow of upper winds coming from the Intertropical Convergence Zone. An agent or condition in the upper equatorial atmosphere would thus be expected to reach ground level along the 30th parallel, with certain seasonal variations. One principal variation is that the downflow moves north over the East Asian continent during the late winter months, and those areas south of it (Arabia, Western India, parts of North Africa) have in fact been free of outbreaks until recently, when the downflow zone moved south. A similar downflow occurs in the Southern Hemisphere, and outbreaks have been reported along the 30th parallel running through Pretoria, and Alice Springs, Australia. (Information from Argentina is currently unavailable.)

This geographical correlation cannot be dismissed, and it is therefore urged that an intensified search for a physical cause be instituted. It is also urgently recommended that the rate of spread from known focal points be correlated with wind conditions. A watch for similar outbreaks along the secondary down-welling zones at 60° north and south should be kept.

(signed for the minority)

Barnhard Braithwaite

Alan grinned reminiscently at his old friend’s name, which seemed to restore normalcy and stability to the world. It looked as if Barney was onto something, too, despite the prevalence of horses’ asses. He frowned, puzzling it out.

Then his face slowly changed as he thought how it would be, going home to Anne. In a few short hours his arms would be around her, the tall, secretly beautiful body that had come to obsess him. Theirs had been a late-blooming love. They’d married, he supposed now, out of friendship, even out of friends’ pressure. Everyone said they were made for each other, he big and chunky and blond, she willowy brunette; both shy, highly controlled, cerebral types. For the first few years the friendship had held, but sex hadn’t been all that much. Conventional necessity. Politely reassuring each other, privately—he could say it now—disappointing.

But then, when Amy was a toddler, something had happened. A miraculous inner portal of sensuality had slowly opened to them, a liberation into their own secret unsuspected heaven of fully physical bliss . . . Jesus, but it had been a wrench when the Colombia thing had come up. Only their absolute sureness of each other had made him take it. And now, to be about to have her again, trebly desirable from the spice of separation—feeling-seeing-hearing-smelling-grasping. He shifted in his seat to conceal his body’s excitement, half mesmerized by fantasy.

And Amy would be there, too; he grinned at the memory of that prepubescent little body plastered against him. She was going to be a handful, all right. His manhood understood Amy a lot better than her mother did; no cerebral phase for Amy. . . . But Anne, his exquisite shy one, with whom he’d found the way into the almost unendurable transports of the flesh. . . . First the conventional greeting, he thought; the news, the unspoken, savored, mounting excitement behind their eyes; the light touches; then the seeking of their own room, the falling clothes, the caresses, gentle at first—the flesh, the nakedness—the delicate teasing, the grasp, the first thrust—

A terrible alarm bell went off in his head. Exploded from his dream, he stared around, then finally down at his hands. What was he doing with his open clasp-knife in his fist?

Stunned, he felt for the last shreds of his fantasy and realized that the tactile images had not been of caresses, but of a frail neck strangling in his fist, the thrust had been the plunge of a blade seeking vitals. In his arms, legs, phantasms of striking and trampling, bones cracking. And Amy—

Oh God, Oh God—

Not sex, bloodlust.

That was what he had been dreaming. The sex was there, but it was driving some engine of death.

Numbly he put the knife away, thinking over and over, it’s got me. It’s got me. Whatever it is, it’s got me. I can’t go home.

After an unknown time he got up and made his way to the United counter to turn in his ticket. The line was long. As he waited, his mind cleared a little. What could he do, here in Miami? Wouldn’t it be better to get back to Ann Arbor and turn himself in to Barney? Barney could help him, if anyone could. Yes, that was best. But first he had to warn Anne.

The connection took even longer this time. When Anne finally answered he found himself blurting unintelligibly, it took a while to make her understand he wasn’t talking about a plane delay.

“I tell you, I’ve caught it. Listen, Anne, for God’s sake. If I should come to the house don’t let me come near you. I mean it. I’m going to the lab, but I might lose control and try to get to you. Is Barney there?”

“Yes, but darling—”

“Listen. Maybe he can fix me, maybe this’ll wear off. But I’m not safe, Anne. Anne, I’d kill you, can you understand? Get a—get a weapon. I’ll try not to come to the house. But if I do, don’t let me get near you. Or Amy. It’s a sickness, it’s real. Treat me—treat me like a fucking wild animal. Anne, say you understand, say you’ll do it.”

They were both crying when he hung up.

He went shaking back to sit and wait. After a time his head seemed to clear a little more. Doctor, try to think. The first thing he thought of was to take the loathsome knife and throw it down a trash slot. As he did so he realized there was one more piece of Barney’s material in his pocket. He uncrumpled it; it seemed to be a clipping from Nature.

At the top was Barney’s scrawl: Only guy making sense. U.K. infected now, Oslo, Copenhagen out of communication. Damfools still won’t listen. Stay put.

COMMUNICATION FROM

PROFESSOR IAN MACINTYRE, GLASGOW UNIV.

A potential difficulty for our species has always been implicit in the close linkage between the behavioural expression of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male. This close linkage involves (a) many neuromuscular pathways which are utilized both in predatory and sexual pursuit: grasping, mounting, etc., and (b) similar states of adrenergic arousal which are activated in both. The same linkage is seen in the males of many other species; in some, the expression of aggression and copulation alternate or even coexist, an all-too-familiar example being the common house cat. Males of many species bite, claw, bruise, tread, or otherwise assault receptive females during the act of intercourse; indeed, in some species the male attack is necessary for female ovulation to occur.

In many if not all species it is the aggressive behaviour which appears first, and then changes to copulatory behaviour when the appropriate signal is presented (e.g., the three-tined stickleback and the European robin). Lacking the inhibiting signal, the male’s fighting response continues and the female is attacked or driven off.

It seems therefore appropriate to speculate that the present crisis might be caused by some substance, perhaps at the viral or enzymatic level, which effects a failure of the switching or triggering function in the higher primates. (Note: Zoo gorillas and chimpanzees have recently been observed to attack or destroy their mates; rhesus not.) Such a dysfunction could be expressed by the failure of mating behaviour to modify or supervene over the aggressive/predatory response; i.e., sexual stimulation would produce attack only, the stimulation discharging itself through the destruction of the stimulating object.

In this connection it might be noted that exactly this condition is a commonplace of male functional pathology in those cases where murder occurs as a response to, and apparent completion of, sexual desire.

It should be emphasized that the aggression/copulation linkage discussed here is specific to the male; the female response (e.g., lordotic reflex) being of a different nature.

Alan sat holding the crumpled sheet a long time; the dry, stilted Scottish phrases seemed to help clear his head, despite the sense of brooding tension all around him. Well, if pollution or whatever had produced some substance, it could presumably be countered, filtered, neutralized. Very, very carefully, he let himself consider his life with Anne, his sexuality. Yes; much of their loveplay could be viewed as genitalized, sexually-gentled savagery. Play-predation. . . . He turned his mind quickly away. Some writer’s phrase occurred to him: “The panic element in all sex.” Who? Fritz Leiber? The violation of social distance, maybe; another threatening element. Whatever, it’s our weak link, he thought. Our vulnerability. . . . The dreadful feeling of tightness he had experienced when he found himself knife in hand, fantasizing violence, came back to him. As though it was the right, the only way. Was that what Barney’s budworms felt when they mated with their females wrong-end-to?

At long length, he became aware of body need and sought a toilet. The place was empty, except for what he took to be a heap of clothes blocking the door of the far stall. Then he saw the red-brown pool in which it lay, and the bluish mounds of bare, thin buttocks. He backed out, not breathing, and fled into the nearest crowd, knowing he was not the first to have done so.

Of course. Any sexual drive. Boys, men, too. At the next washroom he watched to see men enter and leave normally before he ventured in.

Afterward he returned to sit, waiting, repeating over to himself: Go to the lab. Don’t go home. Go straight to the lab. Three more hours; he sat numbly at 26° N, 81° W, breathing, breathing. . . .

Dear diary. Big scene tonite, Daddy came home!!! Only he acted so funny, he had the taxi wait and just held onto the doorway, he wouldn’t touch me or let us come near him. (I mean funny weird, not funny ha-ha.) He said, I have something to tell you, this is getting worse not better. I’m going to sleep in the lab but I want you to get out, Anne, Anne, I can’t trust myself any more. First thing in the morning you both get on the plane for Martha’s and stay there. So I thought he had to be joking, I mean with the dance next week and Aunt Martha lives in Whitehorse where there’s nothing nothing nothing. So I was yelling and Mother was yelling and Daddy was groaning. Go now! And then he started crying. Crying!! So I realized, wow, this is serious, and I started to go over to him but Mother yanked me back and then I saw she had this big KNIFE!! And she shoved me in back of her and started crying too Oh Alan, Oh Alan, like she was insane. So I said, Daddy, I’ll never leave you, it felt like the perfect thing to say. And it was thrilling, he looked at me real sad and deep like I was a grown-up while Mother was treating me like I was a mere infant as usual. But Mother ruined it, raving Alan the child is mad, darling go. So he ran out the door yelling Be gone, Take the car, Get out before I come back.

Oh I forgot to say I was wearing what but my gooby green with my curltites still on, wouldn ‘t you know of all the shitty luck, how could I have known such a beautiful scene was ahead we never know life’s cruel whimsy. And mother is dragging out suitcases yelling Pack your things hurry! So she’s going I guess but I am not repeat not going to spend the fall sitting in Aunt Martha’s grain silo and lose the dance and all my summer credits. And Daddy was trying to communicate with us, right? I think their relationship is obsolete. So when she goes upstairs I am splitting, I am going to go over to the lab and see Daddy.

Oh PS Diane tore my yellow jeans she promised me I could use her pink ones Ha-ha that’ll be the day.

I ripped that page out of Amy’s diary when I heard the squad car coming. I never opened her diary but when I found she’d gone I looked. . . . Oh, my darling girl. She went to him, my little girl, my poor little fool child. Maybe if I’d taken time to explain, maybe—

Excuse me, Barney. The stuff is wearing off, the shots they gave me. I didn’t feel anything. I mean, I knew somebody’s daughter went to see her father and he killed her. And cut his throat. But it didn’t mean anything.

Alan’s note, they gave me that but then they took it away. Why did they have to do that? His last handwriting, the last words he wrote before his hand picked up the, before he—

I remember it. “Sudden and light as that, the bonds gave/And we learned of finalities besides the grave. The bonds of our humanity have broken, we are finished. I love—”

I’m all right, Barney, really. Who wrote that, Robert Frost? The bonds gave. . . . Oh, he said tell Barney: The terrible rightness. What does that mean?

You can’t answer that, Barney dear. I’m just writing this to stay sane, I’ll put it in your hidey-hole. Thank you, thank you, Barney dear. Even as blurry as I was, I knew it was you. All the time you were cutting off my hair and rubbing dirt on my face, I knew it was right because it was you. Barney, I never thought of you as those horrible words you said. You were always Dear Barney.

By the time the stuff wore off I had done everything you said, the gas, the groceries. Now I’m here in your cabin. With those clothes you made me put on I guess I do look like a boy, the gas man called me “Mister.”

I still can’t really realize, I have to stop myself from rushing back. But you saved my life, I know that. The first trip in I got a paper, I saw where they bombed the Apostle Islands refuge. And it had about those three women stealing the Air Force plane and bombing Dallas, too. Of course they shot them down, over the Gulf. Isn’t it strange how we do nothing? Just get killed by ones and twos. Or more, now they’ve started on the refuges. . . . Like hypnotized rabbits. We’re a toothless race.

Do you know I never said “we” meaning women before? “We” was always me and Alan, and Amy of course. Being killed selectively encourages group identification. . . . You see how sane-headed I am.

But I still can’t really realize.

My first trip in was for salt and kerosine. I went to that little Red Deer store and got my stuff from the old man in the back, as you told me—you see, I remembered! He called me “Boy,” but I think maybe he suspects. He knows I’m staying at your cabin.

Anyway, some men and boys came in the front. They were all so normal, laughing and kidding. I just couldn’t believe, Barney. In fact I started to go out past them when I heard one of them say, “Heinz saw an angel.” An angel. So I stopped and listened. They said it was big and sparkly. Coming to see if man is carrying out God’s Will, one of them said. And he said, Moosonee is now a liberated zone, and all up by Hudson Bay. I turned and got out the back, fast. The old man had heard them too. He said to me quietly, “I’ll miss the kids.”

Hudson Bay, Barney, that means it’s coming from the north too, doesn’t it? That must be about 60°.

But I have to go back once again, to get some fishhooks. I can’t live on bread. Last week I found a deer some poacher had killed, just the head and legs. I made a stew. It was a doe. Her eyes; I wonder if mine look like that now.

I went to get the fishhooks today. It was bad, I can’t ever go back. There were some men in front again, but they were different. Mean and tense. No boys. And there was a new sign out in front, I couldn’t see it; maybe it says Liberated Zone too.

The old man gave me the hooks quick and whispered to me, “Boy, them woods’ll be full of hunters next week.” I almost ran out.

About a mile down the road a blue pickup started to chase me. I guess he wasn’t from around there. I ran the VW into a logging draw and he roared on by. After a long while I drove out and came on back, but I left the car about a mile from here and hiked in. It’s surprising how hard it is to pile enough brush to hide a yellow VW.

Barney, I can’t stay here. I’m eating perch raw so nobody will see my smoke, but those hunters will be coming through. I’m going to move my sleeping bag out to the swamp by that big rock, I don’t think many people go there.

Since the last lines I moved out. It feels safer. Oh, Barney, how did this happen?

Fast, that’s how. Six months ago I was Dr. Anne Alstein. Now I’m a widow and bereaved mother, dirty and hungry, squatting in a swamp in mortal fear. Funny if I’m the last woman left alive on Earth. I guess the last one around here, anyway. May be some holed out in the Himalayas, or sneaking through the wreck of New York City. How can we last?

We can’t.

And I can’t survive the winter here, Barney. It gets to 40° below. I’d have to have a fire, they’d see the smoke. Even if I worked my way south, the woods end in a couple hundred miles. I’d be potted like a duck. No. No use. Maybe somebody is trying something somewhere, but it won’t reach here in time . . . and what do I have to live for?

No. I’ll just make a good end, say up on that rock where I can see the stars. After I go back and leave this for you. I’ll wait to see the beautiful color in the trees one last time.

Goodbye, dearest dearest Barney.

I know what I’ll scratch for an epitaph.

here lies the second meanest

primate on earth.

I guess nobody will ever read this, unless I get the nerve to take it back to Barney’s. Probably I won’t. Leave it in a Baggie, I have one here; maybe Barney will come and look. I’m up on the big rock now. The moon is going to rise soon, I’ll do it then. Mosquitoes, be patient. You’ll have all you want.

The thing I have to write down is that I saw an angel too. This morning. It was big and sparkly, like the man said; like a Christmas tree without the tree. But I knew it was real because the frogs stopped croaking and two bluejays gave alarm calls. That’s important; it was really there.

I watched it, sitting under my rock. It didn’t move much. It sort of bent over and picked up something, leaves or twigs, I couldn’t see. Then it did something with them around its middle, like putting them into an invisible sample pocket.

Let me repeat—it was there. Barney, if you’re reading this, there are things here. And I think they’ve done whatever it is to us. Made us kill ourselves off.

Why? Well, it’s a nice place, if it wasn’t for people. How do you get rid of people? Bombs, death-rays—all very primitive. Leave a big mess. Destroy everything, craters, radioactivity, ruin the place.

This way there’s no muss, no fuss. Just like what we did for the screwfly. Pinpoint the weak link, wait a bit while we do it for them. Only a few bones around; make good fertilizer.

Barney dear, goodbye. I saw it. It was there.

But it wasn’t an angel.

I think I saw a real-estate agent.

FURTHER READING

Novels

Greg Bear, Blood Music

__________, The Forge of God

Frederic Brown, Martians, Go Home

Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon

Octavia E. Butler, Dawn

Avram Davidson, Clash of Star-Kings

__________, The Kar-Chee Reign/Rogue Dragon

__________, Masters of the Maze

Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich

__________, Our Friends from Frolix 8

G. C. Edmondson, Blue Face

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit, Will Travel

__________, The Puppet Masters

John Kessel, Good News From Outer Space

R. A. Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth

Fritz Leiber, The Wanderer

Jack McDevitt, A Talent for War

Judith Moffett, The Ragged World

Larry Niven, World of Ptaavs

Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers

Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Wolfbane

Frederik Pohl, A Plague of Pythons

Eric Frank Russell, Sinister Barrier

Fred Saberhagen, Berserker

Robert Silverberg, Nightwings

Clifford D. Simak, Way Station

William Tenn, Of Men and Monsters

Jack Vance, The Dragon Masters

__________, The Last Castle

A. E. Van Vogt, The War against the Rull

John Varley, The Ophiuchi Hotline

__________, Steel Beach

Ian Watson, The Miracle Visitors

__________, The Flies of Memory

H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Jack Williamson, The Trial of Terra

Roger Zelazny, This Immortal

Short Stories

Poul Anderson, “Silent Victory”

Isaac Asimov, “Found!”

Harry Bates, “Farewell to the Master”

Greg Bear, “Blood Music”

Michael Bishop, “Close Encounters with the Deity”

__________, “The Gospel According to Gamiel Cruxus”

Frederic Brown, “Pattern”

Algis Budrys, “All for Love”

__________, “Be Merry”

Pat Cadigan, “Angel”

__________, “My Brother’s Keeper”

John W. Campbell, Jr., “Who Goes There?”

Avram Davidson, “Or All the Seas with Oysters”

Philip K. Dick, “Expendable”

__________, “Oh, To Be a Blobel”

__________, “War Game”

Gardner Dozois, “Chains of the Sea”

George Alec Effinger, “The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything”

Philip Jose Farmer, “Down in the Black Gang”

Nicholas Fisk, “Find the Lady”

Harry Harrison, “Ad Astra”

M. John Harrison, “Settling the World”

Robert A. Heinlein, “Goldfish Bowl”, “They”

James Patrick Kelly, “St. Theresa of the Aliens”

John Kessel, “Invaders”

Damon Knight, “The Big Pat Boom”

__________, “The Earth Quarter”

__________, “Rule Golden”

__________, “To Serve Man”

__________, “Stranger Station”

C. M. Kornbluth, “The Slave”

R. A. Lafferty, “Six Fingers of Time”

Ian McDonald, “Toward Kilimanjaro”

Ray Nelson, “At Eight O’Clock in the Morning”

Frederik Pohl, “We Purchased People”

Robert Reed, “Chaff”

Robert Silverberg, “Flies”

__________, “Passengers”

__________, “The Reality Trip”

Bruce Sterling, “Swarm”

Theodore Sturgeon, “The Other Celia”

__________, “The Sky Was Full of Ships”

__________, “There Is No Defense”

Somtow Sucharitkul, “Fiddling for Waterbuffalos”

Michael Swanwick, “A Midwinter’s Tale”

William Tenn, “Bernie the Faust”

__________, “Down among the Dead Men”

James Tiptree, Jr., “Help”

__________, “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever”

__________, “I’m Too Big but I Love to Play”

__________, “On the Last Afternoon”

__________, “Mamma Come Home”

Ian Watson, “The Flies of Memory”

__________, “Nanoware Time”

Rick Wilber, “Suffer the Children”

Gene Wolfe, “Alien