“Good,” I said. “Now we can all relax.” And I called Sally Tate, telling her it was safe to come out now.
All this time since I was where I could see her Vadi had stood with one hand over her mouth, looking up into the mist.
Sally Tate came out of the other tent. She was carrying the boy, and both their faces were pale and puffy-eyed and streaked with tears.
“It’s all right now,” I said. “You can go—” I was going to say “home,” and then there was a sound in the sky that was not wind or thunder, that was hardly a sound at all, but more of a great sigh. The air pressed down on me and the grass was flattened as by a down-driven wind and all the branches of the trees bowed. The mist rolled, boiled, was rent, torn apart, scattered.
Something had come to rest against the top of the mast.
Amek turned and ran to Vadi and I did not stop him. I moved closer to Sally Tate, standing with her mouth open and her eyes big and staring.
The mast began to contract downward, bringing the thing with it.
I suppose I knew then what the thing was. I just didn’t want to admit it. It was cylindrical and slender, about fifty feet long, with neither wings nor jets. I watched it come slowly and gracefully down, attached by its needle-sharp nose to the magnetic grapple on top of the mast. The mast acted as automatic guide and stabilizer, dropping the ship into a slot between the trees as neatly as you would drop a slice of bread into the slot of a toaster.
And all the time the bitter breath of fear was blowing on me and little things were falling into place in my mind and I realized that I had known the answer for some time and had simply refused to see it.
A port opened in the side of the ship. And as though that was the final symbolic trigger I needed, I got the full impact of what I was seeing. Suddenly the friendly protecting sky seemed to have been torn open above me as the veiling cloud was tom, and through the rent the whole Outside poured in upon me, the black freezing spaces of the galaxy, the blaze and strangeness of a billion billion suns. I shrank beneath that vastness. I was nothing, nobody, an infinitesimal fleck in a cosmos too huge to be borne. The stars had come too close. I wanted to get down and howl and grovel like a dog.
No wonder Amek and Vadi and the boy were queer. They were not mutants—they were not even that Earthly. They came from another world A little ladder had extended itself downward from the port. A man came briskly to the ground and spoke to Amek. He resembled Amek except that he was dressed in a single close-fitting garment of some dark stuff. Amek pointed to me, speaking rapidly. The man turned and looked at me, his body expressing alarm. I felt childish and silly standing there with my little gun. Lone man of Earth at an incredible Thermopylae, saying, “You shall not land.”
All the time Amek and the stranger had been talking there had been other activities around the ship. A hatch in the stem had opened and now from both hatches people began to come out helter-skelter as though haste was the chief necessity. There were men and women both. They all looked human. Slightly odd, a little queer perhaps, but human. They were different types, different colors, sizes, and builds, but they all looked a little excited, a little scared, considerably bewildered by the place in which they found themselves. Some of the women were crying. There were maybe twenty people in all.
I understood then exactly what Amek and Marlin had been up to and it seemed so grotesquely familiar and prosaic that I began to laugh.
“Wetbacks,” I said aloud. “That’s what you’re doing, smuggling aliens.”
Aliens. Yes indeed.
It did not seem so funny when I thought about it.
The stranger turned around and shouted an order. The men and’ women stopped, some of them still on the ladders were shoved aside and eight men in uniform jumped out, with weapons in their hands.
Sally Tate let go one wild wavering shriek. The child fell out of her arms. He sat on the wet ground with the wind knocked out of him so he couldn’t cry, blinking in shocked dismay. Sally tottered. Her big strong healthy body was sunken and collapsed, every muscle slack. She turned and made a staggering lunge for the tent and fell partly in through the doorway, crawled the rest of the way like a hurt dog going under a porch, and lay there with the flap pulled over her head.
I didn’t blame her. I don’t’ even know what obscure force kept me from joining her.
Of the eight men, five were not human. Two of them not even remotely.
I can’t describe them. I can’t remember what they looked like, not clearly.
Let’s be honest. I don’t want to remember.
I suppose if you were used to things like that all your life it would be different. You wouldn’t think anything about it.
I was not used to things like that. I knew that I never would be, not if we ourselves achieved spaceflight tomorrow. I’m too old, too set in the familiar pattern of existence that has never been broken for man since the beginning. Perhaps others are more resilient. They’re welcome to it.
I picked up the boy and ran.
It came on again to rain. I ran down Buckhorn Mountain, carrying the boy in my arms. And the green lightning came after us, hunting us along the precipitous slope.
The boy got his breath back. He asked me why we had to die. I said never mind, and kept on running.
I fell with him and Tolled to the bottom of a deep gully. We were shaken. We lay in the dripping brush looking up at the lightning lancing across the night above us. After a while it stopped. I picked him up again and crept silently along the gully and onto the slope below.
And nearly got shot by Ed Betts and a scratch posse, picking their cautious way up the mountainside.
One of the men took the child out of my arms. I hung onto Ed and said inanely, “They’re landing a load of wetbacks.”
“Up there?”
“They’ve got a ship,” I told him. “They’re aliens, Ed. Real aliens.”
I began to laugh again. I didn’t want to. It just seemed such a hellishly clever play on words that I couldn’t help it.
Fire bloomed suddenly in the night above us. A second later the noise of the explosion reached us.
I stopped laughing. “They must be destroying their installations. Pulling out. Marlin said they’d have to. Christ. And Sally is still up there.”
I ran back up the mountain, clambering bearlike through the trees. The others followed.
There was one more explosion. Then I came back to the edge of the clearing. Ed was close behind me. I don’t think any of the others were really close enough to see. There was a lot of smoke. The tents were gone. Smoking trees were slowly toppling in around the edges of a big raw crater in the ground. There was no trace of the instruments that had been in the tents.
The ship was still there. The crew, human and unhuman, were shoving the last of the passengers back into the ship. There was an altercation going on beside the forward port.
Vadi had her arm around Sally Tate. She was obviously trying to get her aboard. I thought I understood then why Sally and the boy were still alive. Probably Vadi had been insisting that her brother send them along where they wouldn’t be any danger to him, and he hadn’t quite had the nerve to cross her. He was looking uncertain now, and it was the officer who was making the refusal. Sally herself seemed to be in a stupor.
Vadi thrust past the officer and led Sally toward the ladder. And Sally went, willingly. I like to remember that, now, when she’s gone.
I think—I hope—that Sally’s all right out there. She was younger and simpler than I, she could adapt. I think she loved Bill Jones—Amek—enough to leave her child, leave her family, leave her world, and still be happy near him.
Ed and I started to run across the clearing. Ed had not said a word. But his face was something to look at.
They saw us coming but they didn’t bother to shoot at us. They seemed in a tremendous hurry. Vadi screamed something, and I was sure it was in English and a warning to me, but I couldn’t understand it. Then she was gone inside the ship and so were Arnek a
nd Sally and the officer and crewmen, and the ladders went up and the ports shut.
The mooring mast began to rise and so did the ship, and the trees were bent with the force of its rising.
I knew then what the warning was.
I grabbed Ed and bodily hauled him back. The ship didn’t have to be very high. Only above the trees. I hauled him as far as blind instinct told me I could go and then I yelled, “Get down! Get downl” to everybody within earshot and made frantic motions. It all took possibly thirty seconds. Ed understood and we flopped and hugged the ground.
The mast blew.
Dirt, rocks, pieces of tree rained down around us. The shock wave pounded our ears. A few moments later, derisive and powerful, a long thin whistling scream tore upward across the sky, and faded, and was gone.
We got up after a while and collected the muddy and startled posse and went to look at what was left of the clearing. There was nothing. Sally Tate was gone as though she had never existed. There was no shred of anything left to prove that what Ed and I had seen was real.
We made up a story, about a big helicopter and an alien racket It wasn’t too good a story, but it was better than the truth. Afterward, when we were calmer, Ed and I tried to figure it out for ourselves. How was it done, I mean, and why.
The “how” was easy enough, given the necessary technology. Pick a remote but not too inconveniently isolated spot, like the top of Buckhorn Mountain. Set up your secret installation—a simple one, so compact and carefully hidden that hunters could walk right over it and never guess it was there when it was not in use. On nights when conditions are right—that is to say, when the possibility of being observed is nearest to zero—run your cargo in and land it. We figured that the ship we saw wasn’t big enough to transport that many people very far. We figured it was a landing-craft, ferrying the passengers down from a much bigger mother-ship way beyond the sky.
A star-ship. It sounded ridiculous when you said it. But we had seen the members of the crew. It is generally acknowledged by neatly everybody now that there is no intelligent life of any terrestrial sort on the other planets of our own system. So they had to come from farther out.
Why? That was a tougher one to solve. We could only guess at it.
“There must be a hell of a big civilization out there,” said Ed, “to build the ships and travel in them. They obviously know we’re here.”
Uneasy thought.
“Why haven’t they spoken to us?” he wondered. “Let us in on it too.”
“I suppose,” I said, “they’re waiting for us to develop spaceflight on our own. Maybe it’s a kind of test you have to pass to get in on their civilization. Or maybe they figure we’re so backward they don’t want to have anything to do with us, all our wars and all. Or both. Pick your own reason.”
“Okay,” said Ed. “But why dump their people on us like that? And how come Marlin, one of our own people, was in on it?”
“There are Earthmen who’ll do anything for money,” I said. “Like Marlin. It’d not be too hard to contact men like him, use them as local agents.”
“As for why they dump their people on us,” I went on, “it probably isn’t legal, where they came from. Remember what Marlin said about Vadi? How long will she keep her mouth shut at your end? My guess is her brother was a failure at home and got into a dirty racket, and she was trying to get him out of it. There must be other worlds like Earth, too, or the racket wouldn’t be financially sound. Not enough volume.”
“But the wetbacks,” Ed said. “Were they failures, too? People who couldn’t compete in the kind of society they must have? And how the hell many do you suppose they’ve run in on us already?”
I’ve wondered about that myself. How many aliens has Marlin, and probably others like him, taken off the star-boats and dressed and instructed and furnished with false papers, in return doubtless for all the valuables the poor devils had? How many of the people you see around you every day, the anonymous people that just look a little odd somehow, the people about whom you think briefly that they don’t even look human—the queer ones you notice and then forget—how many of them aren’t human at all in the sense that we understand that word?
Like the boy.
Sally Tate’s family obviously didn’t want him back. So I had myself appointed his legal guardian, and we get on fine together. He’s a bright kid. His father may have been a failure in his own world, but on ours the half-breed child has an I.Q, that would frighten you. He’s also a good youngster. I think he takes after his aunt.
I’ve thought of getting married since then, just to make a better home for the boy, and to fill up a void in my own life I’m beginning to feel. But I haven’t quite done it yet. I keep thinking maybe Vadi will come back some day, walking with swift grace down the side of Buckhorn Mountain. I do not think it is likely, but I can’t quite put it out of my mind. I remember the cold revulsion that there was between us, and then I wonder if that feeling would go on, or whether you couldn’t get used to that idea of differentness in time.
The trouble is, I guess, that Vadi kind of spoiled me for the general run of women.
I wonder what her life is like in Hrylliannu, and where it is. Sometimes on the bitter frosty nights when the sky is diamond-clear and the Milky Way glitters like the mouth of hell across it, I look up at the stars and wonder which one is hers. And old Buckhorn sits black and silent in the north, and the deep wounds on his shoulder are healing into grassy scars. He says nothing. Even the thunder now has a hollow sound. It is merely thunder.
But, as Amek said, there are plenty of mountains.
There’s been a lot of talk, from Charles Fort to William Tenn, about how we are a “secretly supervised” planet. Perhaps we are. The possibility has also been raised, and more often, that we are: being studied, coldly and dispassionately, by alien intelligences who feel they could do a better job with this Earth than we’ve, done ’til now. Perhaps they have a point.
FREAK SHOW
by
MIRIAM ALLEN de FORD
“Who runs this outfit?” Rasi asked the first roustabout he saw on the carnival lot. He flicked a thumb toward the poster announcing the Human Oddities.
“Spencer,” grunted the roustabout,
“Is he around?”
“Don’t know why not.”
Rasi lifted the flap of the tent, and found it empty. He walked toward the cluster of trailers drawn up on the new grounds an hour before. He bad followed the carnival all night from its pitch of yesterday.
He knocked at the door of the nearest trailer. It opened a crack and a colorless eye in a pink face crowned by snow-white fluffy hair peered out at him. He had been lucky; this must be one of the Oddities.
“Can you tell me where I can find Mr. Spencer?”
A pink arm, apparently unclothed, pointed to the left.
“That’s his car, over there—the green one with the window curtains,” said a husky feminine voice. “But brother, watch your step. He’s mad as hops. Goofoo the Nuthead didn’t show up today. Blotto again, I wouldn’t wonder. Prob’ly locked in the hoosegow at Cedartown.”
The door closed on Rasi’s thanks.
Goofoo—so that was the name, the stage name at least, of the likely-looking one he’d picked up after the carnival closed last night in that other town. Three drinks from his special flask, and Goofoo had been easy to deposit in a nearby cornfield to sleep it off for 24 hours or so. Everything was working out right.
Spencer came to the door with an irritated frown, but at least he was dressed. It was easier to look at them when they were covered. Rasi had been intensively trained and explicitly briefed, his camouflage was perfect, but nobody can control his psychological reactions completely.
“Mr. Spencer?” he said. “It’s about a job. I was told there might be a vacancy.”
The heavy-set middle-aged man with a shock of greying hair stared at him.
“Who told you?” he growled. “Anyway, I run a freak show.
There’d be nothing for you.”
“If I may come in for a moment—”
The manager opened the door grudgingly and stepped aside. It was a neat little place, shipshape and compact—a lot better, Rasi guessed, than the spot that would be allotted to him if he should be taken on.
Spencer sat down on the bunk and waved him to the chair.
“Make it snappy,” he said. “I’ve bailed out that drunken idiot for the last time. But you couldn’t take his place.”
Rasi did not answer. Instead, he took off his hat, then his wig. Then slowly he removed the mask, with its unobservable transparency in the middle of the forehead. Spencer sat with his mouth open, his face turning slightly green. Rasi pulled off his gloves. He stooped and began to unfasten his shoes. Spencer put up his hand.
“That’s enough.” His voice sounded thick. “I don’t know. I thought I’d seen everything. It might be too much—I don’t want to have to be paying damages to women who have miscarriages after they see you.
“Good God, man, how have you got by up to now?”
“With the mask, and the wig, and shoes and gloves,” said Rasi calmly. What would Spencer think, he reflected, if he knew that his own appearance was as revolting to his visitor as the visitor’s could possibly be to Mm? And there were so many more of Spencer’s kind!
“Then why do you—And why pick this outfit? If you can put it across at all, you could be a headliner with the Biggest Show on Earth.”
“That’s just what I don’t want. I didn’t choose to be like this. The fewer people I make sick the better. But I have to do something; I’ve come to the end of my money. So I have to use my only asset.”
Spencer was recovering; the showman was taking over. He gazed meditatively at Rasi.
“If the costume was right—” he murmured. “And with a good spiel. You can’t talk—that’s it. You’re a—I’ve got it I You’re a Martian captured alive from a flying saucer that crashed. How would that do?”
Rasi repressed his amusement.
“Wouldn’t your—wouldn’t the government be interested in that? That Air Force project that’s investigating?”
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