There was a sharper, fiercer drone like a hornet’s song as she darted sideways into the insect’s path. Mel didn’t see her catch it. Its buzzing simply stopped, and then she was dropping gently back to the towel, with the ugly black thing between her hands. It looked nearly as big as her head.
There was an exchange of cheerful piping cries between the two. Miss Green laughed up at Mel’s stupefied face, lifted the motionless fly to her mouth and neatly bit off its head.
Mel turned hurriedly and went into the living room. It wasn’t, he told himself, really so very different from human, beings eating a chicken. But he didn’t feel up to watching what he knew was going to be a dismemberment and a feast.
At any rate, the horsefly had settled the feeding problem. His guests could take care of themselves.
THAT night, Miss Green hunted down a few moths. Mel woke up twice with the sudden sharp drone in his ears that told him she had just made her catch. Both times, it was a surge of unthinking physical fright that actually roused him. Awake, and remembering the disproportion in size between himself and the huntress, his reaction seemed ridiculous; but the second time he found he was reluctant to go back to sleep until it would appear that Miss Green was done with her foraging.
So he lay awake, listening to the occasional faint indications of her continuing activity within his apartment, and to more familiar sounds without. A train rattled over a crossing; a police siren gave a sudden view halloo and faded into silence again. For a long time, there was only the whispering passage of distant cars over wet pavements, and the slow roll and thump of the surf. A haze of fog beyond the window turned the apartment into a shut-off little world of its own.
Miss Green moved about with no more than a whisper of air and the muted pipe of voices from the top of the kitchenette cupboard to show where she was. Mel had put a small carton up there, upholstered with the towel and handkerchiefs and roofed over with his best woolen sweater, to make a temporary home for his guests. The princess hadn’t stirred from it since, but Miss Green remained busy.
He started suddenly to find her hovering directly over his bed, vaguely silhouetted against the pale blur of the window. As he stared, she settled down and came to rest on the blanket over his chest, effortlessly as a spider gliding down along its thread. Her wings closed with a faint snap.
Mel raised his head carefully to squint down along the blanket at her. It was the first time either of them had made anything resembling a friendly advance in his direction; he didn’t want to commit any blunders.
“Hello,” he said quietly.
Miss Green didn’t reply. She seemed to be looking up at the window, disregarding him, and he was content to watch her. These strange creatures seemed to have some of the aloofness of cats in their manner, and they might be as easily offended.
She turned presently, walked up over the blanket and perched herself on Mel’s pillow, above his head and somewhat to his right. And there she stayed silently. Which seemed catlike, too: the granting of a reserved and temporary companionship. He would not have been too surprised to hear a tiny purring from above his ear. Instead, drowsily and lulled in an odd way by Miss Green’s presence, he found himself sinking back into sleep.
IT WASN’T surprising either that his mind should be filled for a time with vague pictures of her, but when the room about him seemed to have expanded into something like a faintly luminous fishbowl, he knew he was dreaming. There were others present. They were going somewhere, and he had a sense of concern, which had to do either with their destination or with difficulties in getting there. Then a realization of swift, irrevocable disaster—
There were violent lurchings as the luminosity about him faded swiftly into blackness. He felt a terrible, energy-draining cold, the wet clutch of death itself, then something like a soundless explosion about him and anguished cryings. The motion stopped.
Blackness faded back to gray, but the cold remained. Icy water was pounding down on him now, as if he were fighting his way through a vertical current carrying somebody else. A desperate hunt for refuge—and finding it suddenly, and slipping inside and relaxing into unconsciousness, to wait for the return of warmth and life . . .
Mel’s eyes opened. The room was beginning to lighten with morning. He turned his head slowly to look for Miss Green. She was still there, on the pillow beside his head, watching him; and there was something in her position, in the unwinking golden eyes, even in her curious fluff of blue-white hair, that reminded him now less of a cat than a small lizard.
He didn’t doubt that she had somehow enabled him to share the experience that in part explained their presence here. Without thinking he asked aloud, “What happened to the others?”
She didn’t move, but he was aware of a surge of horrified revulsion. Then before his open eyes for a moment swam a picture of a bleak, rain-beaten beach . . . and, just above the waterline, in a cluster of harsh voices, jabbing beaks and beating wings, great gulls were tearing apart a strange jetsam of tiny bodies too weakened to escape—
A small, plaintive crying came from the kitchenette. The picture faded as Miss Green soared into the air to attend to her princess.
MEL breakfasted in the living room, thoughtfully. He couldn’t quite understand that luminous vehicle of theirs, or why it should have succumbed to the rain storm of Saturday night, which appeared to be what had happened. But his guests obviously were confronted with the problem of getting back to wherever they’d come from—and he didn’t think Miss Green would have confided in him if he wasn’t somehow expected to be helpful in solving the problem.
There was a thump on the sill outside his bedroom window, followed by an annoyed meowing. The gray cat that had been spying on the bird box seemed to suspect he was harboring the refugees. Mel went out into the little courtyard through the back door of the duplex and chased the animal away. The fog, he saw, was thinning out quickly; in an hour or so it would be another clear day.
When he came in, Miss Green fluted a few soft notes, which Mel chose to interpret as gratitude, from the top of the cupboard and withdrew from sight again.
One couldn’t think of them, he decided, as being exactly like any creatures of Earth. The cold rain had been very nearly deadly to them, if the memory Miss Green had transmitted to him was accurate—as destructive as it had been to their curious craft. Almost as if it could wash right through them, to drain vital energies from their bodies, while in the merely foggy air of last night she had seemed comfortable enough. It indicated different tolerance spans with more sharply defined limits.
The thought came into his mind:
Venus?
It seemed possible, even if it left a lot to explain. Mel got up in sudden excitement and began to walk about the room. He knew not much was known about the second planet, but he had a conviction of being right. It struck him he might be involved in an event of enormous historical significance.
Then, stopping for a moment before the window, he saw it—
Apparently high in the gray sky overhead, a pale yellow circle moved, much smaller than the sun, but like the disk of the sun seen ghostlike through clouds. Instantly, another part of his dream became clear to him.
HE LOST his head. “Miss Green! Come here, quick!”
A buzz, the swift drone of wings, and she was beside him, perching on his shoulder. Mel pointed.
She gave a lamenting little cry of recognition. As if it had been a signal, the yellow circle darted sideways in a long streaking slant, and vanished. Miss Green fled to report to the princess, while Mel stayed at the window, and quickly returned to him again. Evidently she was both excited and distressed, and he wondered what was wrong. If that apparition of pale light had been one of their vessels, as her behavior indicated, it seemed probable that its mission was to hunt for survivors of the lost globe.
Miss Green seemed either less sure of that, or less confident that the rescue would be easily effected. Some minutes later, she pointed to a different section of the sky
, where the yellow circle—or another very like it—was now moving slowly about. Presently it vanished again, and when it reappeared for the second time, it was accompanied by two others.
Meanwhile, Miss Green might have been transmitting some understanding of the nature of her doubts to Mel, because the ghostly vagrants now gave him an immediate impression of insubstantiality: not space-spanning luminous globes but pictured shapes projected on the air. His theory of interplanetary travelers became suddenly much less probable.
In the next few moments, the concept he was struggling with abruptly completed itself in his mind, so abruptly, in fact, that there was no longer any question that it had originated with Miss Green. The rescue craft Mel thought he was seeing actually were just that.
But the pictures in the sky were only signals to possible survivors that help was approaching. The globes themselves were elsewhere, groping their way blindly and dangerously through strange dimensions that had nothing to do with the ones Mel knew.
And they were still, in some manner his imagination did not even attempt to clarify, very, very “far away.”
“I WAS wondering what you’d done with the bird box,” Maria de Guesgne explained. “It’s not there in the bush any more!”
Mel told her annoyedly that the bird box had been damaged by the storm, and so he’d thrown it into the incinerator.
“Well,” Maria said vaguely, “that’s too bad.” Her handsome dark eyes were shifting about his living room meanwhile, not at all vaguely. Mel had left the apartment door partly open, and she had walked right in on her way to the market. When she wasn’t drinking or working herself up to a bout of creative painting, which seemed to put her into a tranced sort of condition, Maria was a highly observant young woman. The question was now how to get her out of the apartment again before she observed more than he wanted her to.
“How does it happen you’re not at work on Monday afternoon?” she inquired, and set her shopping bag down on the armchair.
Keeping one eye on the kitchenette door, Mel explained about his vacation. Miss Green hadn’t been in sight for almost an hour; but he wasn’t at all sure she mightn’t come out to inspect the visitor, and the thought of Maria’s probable reactions was unnerving.
“Two weeks?” Maria repeated chattily. “It’ll be fun having you around for two weeks—unless you’re going off to spend your vacation somewhere else. Are you?”
“No,” Mel said. “I’m staying here—”
And at that moment, Miss Green came in through the kitchenette door.
At least, Mel assumed it was Miss Green. All he actually saw was a faint blur of motion. It went through the living room, accompanied by a high-pitched hum, and vanished behind Maria.
“Good Lord!” she cried, whirling. “What’s that? Oh!” The last was a shrill yelp. “It stung me!”
MEL hadn’t imagined Miss Green could move so fast. Rising and falling with furious menace, the sound seemed to come from all points of the room at once, as Maria darted out of the apartment. Clutching her shopping bag, Mel followed her out hastily and slammed the door behind them. He caught up with Maria in the court.
She was rubbing herself angrily.
“I’m not coming into that apartment again, Mel Armstrong,” she announced, “until you’ve had it fumigated! That thing kept stinging me! What was it, anyway?”
“A wasp, I guess.” Mel felt weak with relief. She hadn’t really seen anything. “Here’s your bag. I’ll chase it out.” Maria stalked off, complaining about screens that didn’t even protect people against giant wasps.
Mel found the apartment quiet again and went into the kitchenette. Miss Green was poised on the top edge of the cupboard, a gold-eyed statuette of Victory, laughing down at him, the laminated wings spread and raised behind her like iridescent glass fans. Mel looked at her with a trace of uneasiness. She had some kind of small white bundle in her arms, and he wondered whether it concealed the weapon with which she’d stung Maria.
“I don’t think you should have done that,” he told her. “But she’s gone now.”
Looking rather pleased with herself, Miss Green glanced back over her shoulder and piped a few questioning notes to the princess. There was a soft reply, and she soared down to the table, folded her wings and knelt to lay the bundle gently down on it. She beckoned to Mel.
Mel’s eyes popped as she unfolded the bundle. Perhaps he really shouldn’t have been surprised.
He was harboring four guests now—the princess had been safely delivered of twins.
AT DUSK, Miss Green widened the biggest slit in the bedroom screen a little more and slipped out to do her own kind of shopping, with a section of one of Mel’s handkerchiefs to serve as a bag.
Mel left the lights out and stayed at the window. He felt depressed, but didn’t quite know why—unless it was that so many odd things had happened since Sunday morning that his mind had given up trying to understand them.
He wasn’t really sure now, for example, whether he was getting occasional flash-glimpses of those circular luminous vessels plowing through another dimension somewhere, or whether he was half asleep and imagining it. Usually it was a momentary glow printed on the dark air at the edge of his vision, vanishing before he could really look at it.
He had a feeling they had managed to come a good deal closer during the day. Then he wondered briefly whether other people had been seeing strange light-shapes, too, and what they might have thought the glimpses were.
Spots before their eyes, probably.
Miss Green was back with a soft hum of wings, on the outer window sill, six feet from where he sat. She pushed the knotted scrap of cloth through the screen. There was something inside it now; it caught for a moment on the wires. Mel started up to help, then checked himself, afraid of feeling some bug squirming desperately inside; and while he hesitated, she had shoved it through. She followed it, picked it up again and flew off to the living room. After a moment she returned with the empty cloth and went out again.
She made eight such trips in the next hour, while night deepened outside and then began to lighten as a half-moon shoved over the horizon. Mel must have dozed off several times; at least, he suddenly found himself coming awake, with the awareness that something had just landed with a soft thump on the window sill outside.
It wasn’t Miss Green. He saw a chunky shadow at one corner of the window, and caught the faintest glint of green eyes peering into the room. It was the cat from the courtyard.
In the same moment, he heard the familiar faint hum, and Miss Green appeared at the opposite end of the sill.
AFTERWARD, Mel realized he’d simply sat there, stiffening in groggy, sleep-dazed horror, as the cat-shadow lengthened and flowed swiftly toward the tiny humanoid figure. Miss Green seemed to raise both arms over her head. A spark of brilliant blue glowed from her cupped hands and extended itself in an almost invisible thread of fire that stabbed against the cat’s forehead. The cat yowled, swung aside and leaped down into the court.
Mel was on his feet, shaking violently, as Miss Green slipped in through the screen. He heard Maria open her window upstairs to peer down into the court, where the cat was making low, angry sounds. Apparently it hadn’t been hurt, but no wonder Maria had suspected that afternoon she’d been stung by a wasp! Or that Miss Green’s insect victims never struggled, once she had caught them!
He pulled down the shade and stood undecided in the dark, until he heard her piping call from the living room. It was followed by an impatient buzzing about the standing lamp in there, and Mel concluded correctly that he was supposed to turn on the light.
He discovered her on the living room table, sorting out the plunder she had brought back.
It wasn’t a pile of electrocuted insects, as he had expected, but a puzzlingly commonplace collection—little heaps of dry sand from the beach, some small white pebbles, and a sizable bundle of thin twigs about two inches in length. Since she was disregarding him, he shifted the lamp over to the ta
ble to see what this human-shaped lightning bug from another dimension was going to do next.
That was the way he felt about Miss Green at the moment . . .
What she did was to transport the twigs in two bundles to the top of the cupboard, where she left them with the princess. Then she came back and began to lay out a thin thread of white sand on the dark, polished surface of the table.
Mel pulled up his armchair, poured himself a glass of brandy, lit a cigarette, and settled down to watch her.
BY THE time Miss Green indicated to him that she wanted the light turned out again, he had finished his second drink and was feeling rather benevolent. She had used up all her sand, and about a square foot of the table’s surface was covered now with a confusingly intricate maze of lines, into which she had placed white pebbles here and there. Some of the lines, Mel noticed, blended into each other, while others stopped abruptly or curved back on themselves. As a decorative scheme, it hardly seemed worthwhile.
“Miss Green,” he told her thoughtfully, “I hope it makes sense to you. It doesn’t to me.”
She piped imperiously, pointing: the light! Mel had a moment of annoyance at the way she was ordering him around in his own apartment.
“Well,” he said, “I’ll humor you this time.”
For a moment after he had pulled the switch, he stood beside the table to let his eyes adjust to the dark. However, they weren’t adjusting properly—a patch of unquiet phosphorescent glimmering floated disturbingly within his field of vision, and as the seconds passed, it seemed to be growing stronger.
Suddenly, Mel swore in amazement and bent down to examine the table.
“Now what have you done—?” he began.
Miss Green fluted soothingly at him from the dark and fluttered up to his shoulder. He felt a cool touch against his ear and cheek, and a burst of oddly pleasant tinglings ran over his scalp.
“Stop that!” he said, startled.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 70