Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods

by Paul Melko

  Then he looked around and saw me.

  “What happened, Priscilla? Did Mr. Joyce drive his car into the river?”

  “Dunno, Hairy.” He knew I was mispronouncing his name, though I didn’t say it any differently. When he’d started those rumors, I’d made sure everyone knew what I thought of him. Egan snorted.

  “Cars don’t just fall outta the sky, Cilly,” he said. He took a step toward me.

  I reeled in my line and didn’t reply.

  “Where’s the driver?” He took another step.

  “Dunno, Hairy,” I said and cast my line toward him. He jerked as the red-and-white bobber fluttered in the river a few yards from him. After our truth-or-dare adventures, he’d tried to press his advantage down by the river. My hook had caught his cheek just under the eye. He still had a puckered, pink scar where I’d yanked it out.

  “Screw you, Cilly,” he said.

  “Don’t you wish, Hairy,” I said. He slinked back to the shore then disappeared into the woods with his slouching pal.

  *

  The alien was sitting up. He had smoothed the skin back into place, and there was no mark where the cut had been. He smiled brightly and I would have been convinced that he was some ugly guy who’d driven his Volkswagen into the Olentangy if I hadn’t seen his gnarly red flesh.

  There were other things that marked him as an alien. His face was lumpy below the cheeks and his neck seemed to be thicker at the top than the bottom. He looked human enough, and you’d just think he was ugly if you passed him on the street.

  “Thank you, little boy,”

  “Save it for the Galactic Council,” I said. “I know what you are.”

  “What do you mean, young man?” he said.

  “I’m a girl, you dork. Any human male would know that.”

  His shoulders fell. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. So, you might as well ’fess up. You here for First Contact?”

  “No. I’m on Earth illegally.”

  I refrained from the pun. If I’d said it at the dinner table, Mama would have snorted milk out her nose and then Ernie would have choked on his pork chop and then Nick would have started laughing because everyone else was.

  “So, there’s no take-me-to-your-leader thing that you have to do?”

  “No, I need to talk with your scientists. I need to redirect . . .” He was staring over my shoulder. For a second I was worried that Harry had snuck back to spy on me, but it was just Nick. He was piling his rocks next to the limp elm that had rooted itself on the peninsula.

  “Hey. Redirect what?”

  “Is . . . is . . . he broken?”

  I stared at him, unsure what he meant, until I realized. “Yeah, Nick is slow. So what?”

  “I knew about . . . I just never . . .”

  “Don’t you have retarded aliens?” I was getting annoyed with this guy. I figured that a representative from an advanced civilization would know how to behave around someone like Nick. I expect Harry and his friends to make fun of the little yellow school bus, but from aliens I guess I expected a little more.

  “No, of course not. I’m sorry. I . . .”

  Nick wasn’t paying too much attention to the alien. But the alien was all eyes for Nick. I snapped my fingers.

  “So what are you doing here? You need to talk with Earth’s scientists. You need to warn us about a supernova? Help us stop war? What?”

  “No, nothing like that. I’ve got to change the direction of Earth’s research.”

  “Are you bringing high-tech gadgets that will give us cold fusion, nanotechnology, quantum computers?” My real dad had given me one gift in the past ten years, but it was the best gift ever: a subscription to Discover. I’d been paying for the subscription myself for the past three years, but I still thought of it as Dad’s gift. If it weren’t for him, the deadbeat bastard, I’d never have gotten in the magnet school.

  “That’s exactly the sort of technology I need to steer you away from!”

  “What sort of alien are you, anyway?”

  “I’m a . . . teacher.”

  I glanced over at the Beetle. “You get shot down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Air Force? NATO?”

  “The . . . Farmers tried to stop me.”

  “Farmers.” I sat back on my heels. I had the image of Hubert Erskine taking a pot shot at Herbie as it sailed over his soybean fields. “You mean something else than what I think ’farmer’ means.”

  “Yes. Earth’s protectors.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. My alien had run a blockade to get here. Interesting, but still a little lame. I was half-tempted to put him back in his car and let Harry find him. “So, what exactly is it you want to do here on Earth?”

  “I need to write anonymous letters to leading scientists, asking certain questions that will direct their thoughts toward key areas.”

  I looked him up and down. It was a slow summer, and this seemed like a pretty good diversion.

  “So you’ll need a place to hole up.”

  “Yes. And stamps.”

  *

  The Mingo Concrete company had a factory about a mile from the trailer park. It was a small factory where they cast sewer segments, six feet long and interconnecting.

  Some time ago, lost in local kid history, someone stole a steel wire reinforcement cylinder from the factory. They’d rolled it away from the factory site and into the woods, in what must have been a daring feat. Then they’d put it on its end and used plywood and plastic to build a two-level fort. These kids had grown up, left for college, and the fort had become overrun with thorn bushes, until you couldn’t tell it was there.

  Now it was Nick’s and my fort. Maybe other kids knew about it, but I never saw anyone else there. We’d found it when I’d first got the Boy Scout handaxe I’d sent away for; it had cost twelve bucks, which was half a summer’s worth of lemonade stands, lawn-mowing for Nick (under my guidance), and dog-walking. I’d used Nick’s name on the order form since I wasn’t sure about the correctness of a girl buying a Boy Scout gadget. When it came, we were eager to chop something down, anything, and had set out for the woods.

  We’d found a maple with a trunk three inches in diameter and set to chopping. It was harder work than we’d thought and we got only a quarter way through before we gave up. We decided to look for something easier, and, seeing the thorn patch, we started blazing a trail. Unfortunately, the bushes were as hearty as the maple, not coming off in instant bails, but leaning against each other with clasped thorns.

  After we cut a few bushes and pulled their carcasses out, I spotted the shape of the fort. We suddenly had a destination for our trail. The work became a little easier.

  The fort was rusted, moldy, but instantly desirable. We cleared the orange shag carpet, limp, moldy Playboys, and Rolling Rock bottles out, and made it over into our own place, with a nine-volt radio, a homemade telescope, and sporks from KFC.

  It seemed to suit the alien too. We gave him paper, pen, envelopes, and a roll of stamps I stole from Ernie’s night stand. We borrowed our sleeping bag for him to sleep in. He used the lower, darker level for sleeping, and the upper, cramped level for his correspondence.

  Each day, he wrote out long letters on a legal pad, with tight print. We collected them and left them in our mailbox for pickup.

  He wrote a lot of letters. To MIT, Caltech, Harvard, and Princeton. We had to get airmail envelopes for his letters to Cambridge and the University of Tokyo.

  When he wasn’t writing, he’d talk with me. He never spoke to Nick. We learned his name was Bert. He liked classic TV, especially Gilligan’s Island, because he used the show to teach the futility of organized action among classist herds. He was one of a long, well-known line of aliens. He liked warmer weather. He didn’t agree with the Farmers.

  “So why did the Farmers shoot you down?”

  “The Earth is our restricted planet.”

  “Your restricted planet? No one told us.”

  “It�
�s one of the fallow planets for this portion of the galaxy.”

  “Which means you ignore us.”

  “Oh no,” Bert said. “We do not ignore you. How do you think I know English? It’s our common language.”

  “English is the galaxy’s common language?” Wouldn’t Mrs. Moore, my composition teacher, be surprised.

  “Just a small part of it. You’re our source for a lot of things.”

  “Beer? Cows? Women?” What could we humans provide that these aliens didn’t already have? “Comedy. It must be comedy.”

  Bert looked at me flatly. No, it wasn’t comedy. He licked the envelope with his too thin tongue and handed it to me. “Tomorrow’s post, please.”

  I handed the letter to Nick, and Bert recoiled as if it hurt him that something he’d touched had then been touched by something broken. He never looked at Nick, never talked to him, not even out of politeness.

  “Don’t you have slow people where you’re from?”

  He shook his head.

  “Must be nice to be from an alien society.”

  He seemed to recognize my sarcasm. “It’s not like that. We have problems. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What problems could you possibly have?” I considered a world where Nick was whole.

  Bert was more animated than I’d ever seen him. “We are all the same! We have everything we need and no cares for our own survival. There is no drive for growth, no need to create. We are as dead as he is.” He pointed at Nick.

  “Fuck you!” I yelled. “Nick is alive. You may wish he was dead, but he’s alive!”

  He blinked at me, then looked down. “I am sorry.”

  “Yeah, see ya tomorrow.” I’d seen a lot of reactions to Nick, but the alien’s was something new.

  When Ernie came to live in the trailer with Mama, he never called Nick any names. He didn’t ignore him; he sorta looked at him as a toy. He’d hold out his hand and say, “Slap me five.” When Nick would try, Ernie’d pull his hand away. Nick would laugh every time, until Ernie said, “Now you hold out your hand.” Nick didn’t have the sense to move his hand from the snake-like strike. He’d smile a little, then look at me as he rubbed his hand. “Hold out your hand, Nick,” Ernie would say again, and I’d have to distract them, somehow.

  “Hey, Ernie, I think NASCAR is on,” or “Nick, is that the school bus?” or “You guys want another Coke?” I hated thinking about what happened when I wasn’t there.

  *

  I’d mailed about a dozen letters over a week’s time when the Farmers showed up. You’d think they were insurance men or Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I knew what to look for. Their cheeks were bumpy in the wrong place like Bert’s, and their necks were too wide at the top.

  I was coming out of our trailer, down the black metal stair specked with rust, when I heard Harry say, “That’s her, there.” The two Farmers fastened their gaze on me, and I stood like a statue. I hated Harry more, which I’d thought was impossible.

  “We understand you saw the car land in the river,” one of them said.

  “Nope.” The gravel of the driveway seemed to poke through my shoes.

  “Yes, she did,” Harry said.

  “Nope.”

  “We’re looking for the driver,” said the first alien.

  “To ask him some questions,” added the second.

  “Or her,” I said. “Could’a been a woman driver. Them being the worst type of drivers.” They faced me with blank stares. No senses of humor, just like Bert.

  “We’re very interested in what you saw.”

  “Nothing,” I said, but they were crowding close.

  “Could you talk with us in our car, please?” The second took my arm. “We can offer a cash reward.”

  Just then, Nick clomped down the stairs of the trailer, and I slipped free. “This is my brother, Nick. Have you met him, yet?” I shoved Nick into them, and his arms came up around his head. They didn’t like it either, once they realized they were dealing with a broken human. They couldn’t tell a boy from a girl, but they spotted a broken human right away.

  “We’re sorry,” they said as they backed off.

  Nick and I watched them get into their car and drive down the stone gravel road. I gave Harry the finger.

  “I know you know something, Cilly.”

  “That’d be the only thing you do know, pudd’n head.”

  He sauntered off.

  That day, the Farmers hired Bubba to tow the car. We watched from the woods. Bubba’d brought the smaller truck, the one with the tilting flatbed. The Farmers must not have explained it to him, since he started cursing when he saw the VW in the middle of the river. He cursed the whole time he waded across the river.

  Harry and Egan watched from across the river. Harry had his eyes on the Farmers. I wondered if he could see the oddly shaped necks, the too-high cheekbones? Probably not. Harry was keen on the weaknesses of others but nothing else.

  Well, that wasn’t true. Once we’d worked on a project together, Harry and I and a group of people. We’d been in the sixth grade, and we’d gone over to the USDA facility and used their electron microscope to look at spores. We’d made a couple of trips into the woods to find samples, and Harry, off by himself, had found the best ferns, long, arcing, feathery plants, like green fire. He was brushing the back of them gently with a collection tray, intent, when I walked up. He turned, saw me watching, smirked, capped the sample, and tossed it to me. He’d thrown it so hard, I’d juggled it, and almost dropped it. He pretended he didn’t care about it, but I’d seen how he’d carefully gathered the spores.

  That was a long time ago, long before the truth-or-dare incident. Harry had changed since then. I watched him watching the Farmers, scheming.

  Mr. Joyce was there too, pestering the Farmers about his back pain after the Volkswagen had fallen on him. The spaceship hadn’t caused his problems; cheap bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 had done his back in, as well as the rest of him.

  *

  “Farmers came to look for you. And they towed your spaceship.”

  Bert nodded. “I knew they would. But I’m safe here, I think.”

  “Yeah, they don’t like retards either.”

  “You’re being purposefully cruel. I knew it was possible among outsiders, but not those of your own family.”

  “He’s my brother, and I can do what I want with him.” Nick was below, piling his skipping stones. He’d carried two jeans pockets full of them from the river.

  Bert frowned, then returned to writing his latest letter.

  “What’re you writing?” I’d asked before, but he wouldn’t show me.

  “A letter to Doctor Robert Cutter at Vanderbilt University.”

  “What are you talking about in your letter?”

  He didn’t respond at first. “I’m asking questions that will expand his research into key areas.”

  “What areas?”

  “I can’t explain.”

  “You’re writing a long enough letter to Doctor Cutter. How come you can’t explain it to me?”

  He said nothing.

  “What’s wrong with where we’re going now? Robots, computers, nanotechnology. What’s wrong with that direction?”

  “We already have advances in those areas,” Bert said. “We need advances in other areas.”

  “What other areas?”

  He folded his sheets of paper into an envelope, sealed it, and handed it to me.

  “I come from a tightly woven family. We have a long lineage, well-known for our teaching,” he said. “When I was young, I lost my father. This is not a common thing. We have long lives, made longer and safer by technology. We should have lived long lives together, son, father, father’s father, and several generations, in a chain. This is how our people live.

  “When I was just a student, an accident severed the chain. Certain rites did not occur. Certain things did not happen because of his death. Our culture is more ritualized than yours.”

  “Like gr
aduation?” We’d had a small graduation ceremony at middle school in June. They’d played music and made us walk in line with a double half step instead of a full step.

  “Yes. Every day is like graduation. The grandfathers tried to make do, but I felt my father’s absence strongly. Each father is a bridge to the past. My link was sundered.

  “I came here . . . to find help.”

  I looked at the letter in my hands, confused. “There’s no help here for that.”

  His eyes were fierce and glassy. “Yes, I know there is hope, and my hope is here on this fertile, fallow planet.” He pulled out his legal pad and began addressing a new letter.

  “Come on, Nick,” I said.

  Bert had such faith in human technology. He believed that we could solve his father’s death. But we couldn’t solve death. Mama took us to church sometimes, but I could see that was hogwash. What god would allow a person like Nick to exist? None that I cared to worship.

  We passed the tree that we had once tried to chop down. It was brown, dead. We’d severed the trunk enough to kill it; it stood leafless while the trees around it were emerald green and full. Nick pressed his hand into the gray mouth we had cut.

  I slapped the letter against my palm. How could we help Bert? What did he think we could do for his father now?

  Halfway to the trailer, I opened the letter. I was so engrossed as I read it, that I must not have noticed Harry.

  *

  “What the hell is this?”

  I stood on the ladder leading to the upper level of the fort. Bert looked at me blankly. I’d scrambled through the briars to get there, and there was a huge thorn poking through my jeans into my shin. I ignored it as I waved the letter in his face.

  “Those are my private correspondences with leading scientists of your world.”

  My mouth wouldn’t work, I was so angry. Finally, I held the paper in front of my face and read, “’I respectfully ask how one might gauge the magnitude of spiritual manifestation based on ganglion density in the cortex? Clearly a dog has less ghostly presence than a human. Is it tied to brain size? Is it linear? Is it related to some other parameter, such as sexual audacity or emphatic quotient? Find attached a chart of data that I have compiled.’ What the hell is this? What do you think scientists will do with this crap?”