The Visible Man and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

  “The aliens!” Tommy breathed.

  “The aliens,” it agreed. “The Other Ones who are now here. That is why we did not come, ‘yesterday.’ That is why we will not be able to talk to you—” a pause, to adjust itself to human scale—“ ‘long’ today. We are talking, discussing”—flick, a radio news announcer—“negotiating with them, the Other Ones, the aliens. They have been here before, but so ‘long’ ago that we cannot even start to make you understand, Man. It is ‘long’ even to us. We are negotiating with them, and, through them, with your Dogs. No, Man”—and it flicked aside an image of a German shepherd that had begun to form in Tommy’s mind—“not those dogs. Your Dogs. Your mechanical Dogs. Those dead Things that serve you, although they are dead. We are all negotiating. There were many agreements”—flick, Pastor Turner again—“many Covenants that were made ‘long’ ago. With Men, although they do not remember. And with Others. Those Covenants have run out now, they are no longer in force, they are not”—flick, a lawyer talking to Tommy’s father—“binding on us anymore. They do not hold. We negotiate new Covenants”—flick, a labor leader on television—“suitable agreements mutually profitable to all parties concerned. Many things will be different now, many things will change. Do you understand what we are saying, Man?”

  “No,” Tommy said.

  “We did not think you would,” it said. It sounded sad.

  “Can you guys help me?” Tommy said. “I’m in awful bad trouble. Miss Fredricks is after me. And she sent me down to the doctor. He don’t like me, neither.”

  There was a pause while the Thant examined Tommy’s most recent memories. “Yes,” it said, “we see. There is nothing we can do. It is your . . . pattern? Shape? We would not interfere, even if we could.”

  “Scup,” Tommy said, filling with bitter disappointment. “I was hoping that you guys could—scup, never mind. I . . . can you tell me what’s gonna happen next?”

  “Probably they will kill you,” it said.

  “Oh,” Tommy said hollowly. And bit his lip. And could think of nothing else to say, in response to that.

  “We do not really understand ‘kill,’ ” it continued, “or ‘dead.’ We have no direct experience of them, in the way that you do. But from our observation of Men, that is what they will do. They will ‘kill’ you.”

  “Oh,” Tommy said again.

  “Yes,” it said. “We will miss you, Man. You have been . . . a pet? A hobby? You are a hobby we have been much concerned with. You, and the others like you who can see. One of you comes into existence”—flick—“every once in a while. We have been interested”—flick, an announcer—“in the face of stiff opposition. We wonder if you understand that. . . . No, you do not, we can see. Our hobby is not approved of. It has made us”—flick, Tommy’s father telling his wife what would happen to her son if he didn’t snap out of his dreamy ways—“an outcast, a laughingstock. We are shunned. There is much disapproval now of Men. We do not use this”—flick—“world in the same way that you do, but slowly you”—flick, “have begun to make a nuisance of yourselves, regardless. There is”—flick—“much sentiment to do something about you, to solve the problem. We are afraid that they will.” There was a long, vibrant silence. “We will miss you,” it repeated. Then it was gone, all at once, like a candle flame that had been abruptly blown out.

  “Oh, scup,” Tommy said after a while, tiredly. He climbed down from the knoll.

  When he got back home, still numb and exhausted, his mother and father were fighting. They were sitting in the living room, with the television turned down, but not off. Giant, eternally smiling faces bobbed on the screen, their lips seeming to synch eerily with the violent argument taking place. The argument cut off as Tommy entered the house; both of his parents turned, startled, to look at him. His mother looked frightened and defenseless. She had been crying, and her makeup was washing away in dirty rivulets. His father was holding his thin lips in a pinched white line.

  As soon as Tommy had closed the door, his father began to shout at him, and Tommy realized, with a thrill of horror, that the school had telephoned his parents and told them that he had been sent down to the psychiatrist, and why. Tommy stood, paralyzed, while his father advanced on him. He could see his father’s lips move and could hear the volume of sound that was being thrown at him, but he could not make out the words somehow, as if his father were speaking in some harsh, foreign language. All that came across was the rage. His father’s hand shot out, like a striking snake. Tommy felt strong fingers grab him, roughly bunching together the front of his jacket, his collar pulling tight and choking him, and then he was being lifted into the air and shaken, like a doll. Tommy remained perfectly still, frozen by fear, dangling from his father’s fist, suspended off the ground. The fingers holding him felt like steel clamps—there was no hope of escape or resistance. He was yanked higher, and his father slowly bent his elbow to bring Tommy in closer to his face. Tommy was enveloped in the tobacco smell of his father’s breath, and in the acrid reek of his strong, adult sweat; he could see the tiny hairs that bristled in his father’s nostrils, the white tension lines around his nose and mouth, the red, bloodshot stain of rage in his yellowing eyes—a quivering, terrifying landscape that loomed as big as the world. His father raised his other hand, brought it back behind his ear. Tommy could see the big, knobby knuckles of his father’s hand as it started to swing. His mother screamed.

  He found himself lying on the floor. He could remember a moment of pain and shock, and was briefly confused as to where he was. Then he heard his parents’ voices again. The side of his face ached, and his ear buzzed; he didn’t seem to be hearing well out of it. Gingerly, he touched his face. It felt raw under his fingers, and it prickled painfully, as if it were being stabbed with thousands of little needles. He got to his feet, shakily, feeling his head swim. His father had backed his mother up against the kitchen divider, and they were yelling at each other. Something hot and metallic was surging in the back of Tommy’s throat, but he couldn’t get his voice to work. His father rounded on him. “Get out,” he shouted. “Go to your room, go to bed. Don’t let me see you again.” Woodenly, Tommy went. The inside of his lip had begun to bleed. He swallowed the blood.

  Tommy lay silently in the darkness, listening, not moving. His parents’ voices went on for a long time, and then they stopped. Tommy heard the door of his father’s bedroom slam. A moment later, the television came on in the living room, mumbling quietly and unendingly to itself, whispering constantly about the aliens, the aliens. Tommy listened to its whispering until he fell asleep.

  He dreamed about the aliens that night. They were tall, shadowy shapes with red eyes, and they moved noiselessly, deliberately, across the dry plain. Their feet did not disturb the flowers that had turned to skeletons of dust. There was a great crowd of people assembled on the dry plain, millions of people, rank upon rank stretching off to infinity on all sides, but the aliens did not notice them. They walked around the people as if they could not see them at all. Their red eyes flicked from one side to the other, endlessly searching and searching. They continued to thread a way through the crowd without seeing them, their motions smooth and languid and graceful. They were very beautiful and dangerous. They were all smiling, faintly, gently, and Tommy knew that they were friendly, affable killers, creatures who would kill you casually and amicably, almost as a gesture of affection. They came to the place where he stood, and they paused. They looked at him. They can see me, Tommy realized. They can see me. And one of the aliens smiled at him, benignly, and stretched out a hand to touch him.

  His eyes snapped open.

  Tommy turned on the bed lamp, and spent the rest of the night reading a book about Irish setters. When morning showed through his window, he turned off the lamp and pretended to be asleep. Blue veins showed through the skin of his mother’s hands, he noticed, when she came in to wake him up for school.

  By dawn of the second day, news of the alien infestation had sprea
d rapidly but irregularly. Most of the East Coast stations were on to the story to one degree or another, some sandwiching it into the news as a silly-season item, and some, especially the Philadelphia stations, treating it as a live, continuous-coverage special, with teams of newsmen manufacturing small talk and pretending that they were not just as uninformed as everyone else. The stations that were taking the story seriously were divided among themselves as to exactly what had happened. By the 6 and 7 A.M. newscasts, only about half of the major stations were reporting it as a landing by alien spaceships. The others were interpreting it as anything from the crash of an orbiting satellite or supersonic transport to an abortive Soviet missile attack or a misfired hydrogen bomb accidentally dropped from a SAC bomber—this station urged that the populations of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore be evacuated to the Appalachians and the Adirondacks before the bomb went off. One station suggested that the presidential incumbent was engineering this incident as a pretext for declaring martial law and canceling an election that he was afraid he would lose, while another insisted that it was an attempt to discredit the minority candidate, who was known as an enthusiastic supporter of space exploration, by crashing a “spaceship” into a population center. It was also suggested that the ship was one of the electromagnetic “flying saucers” which Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel had been independently developing for years—while loudly protesting that they were not—that had crashed on its maiden test flight. This was coupled with a bitter attack on extravagant government spending. There were no more live broadcasts coming out of the Delaware Valley site, but videotapes of the original coverage had been distributed as far north as Portland. The tapes weren’t much help in resolving the controversy anyway, as all they showed was a large object sitting in a stretch of vacant scrub land behind an abandoned garage on an old state highway.

  In Ohio, some newsmen from Akron made a low pass over the alien ship in a war-surplus helicopter loaded with modern camera equipment. All the newsmen were certain that they would be death-rayed to cinders by the aliens, but their cameras were keyed to telemeter directly to the biggest television network in the state, so they committed themselves to God and went in at treetop level. They made it past the aliens safely, but were run down by two Air Force hovercraft a mile away, bundled into another war-surplus helicopter, and shipped directly to the federal prison at Leavenworth. By this time, televised panic had spread all over the Midwest. The Midwesterners seemed to accept the alien landing at face value, with little of the skepticism of the Easterners, and reacted to it with hostility, whipping up deep feelings of aggression in defense of their territoriality. By noon, there were a dozen prominent voices urging an all-out military effort to destroy the alien monsters who had invaded the heartland of America, and public opinion was strongly with them. The invasion made headlines in evening papers from Indiana to Arkansas, although some of the big Chicago papers were more tolerant or more doubtful.

  No news was coming out of Colorado, and the West was generally unalarmed. Only the most confused and contradictory reports reached the West Coast, and they were generally ignored, although once the landings had been confirmed as a fact, the people of the West Coast would become more intensely and cultishly interested in them than the inhabitants of the areas directly involved.

  News of the Venezuelan disaster had not yet reached the general public, and in an effort to keep the lid down on that, at least, the government, at 11 A.M., declared that they were taking emergency control of all media, and ordered an immediate and total moratorium on the alien story. Only about a third of the media complied with the government ban. The rest—television, newspapers, and radio—began to scream even more loudly and hysterically than before, and regions that had not been inclined to take the story seriously up until now began to panic even more than had other areas, perhaps to make up for lost time. The election-canceling martial-law theory was suddenly accepted, almost unanimously. Major rioting broke out in cities all over the East.

  At the height of the confusion, about 1 P.M., the ships opened and the aliens came out.

  Although “came out” is probably the wrong way to put it. There was an anticipatory shimmer across the surface of the hulls, which were in their mirror phase, and then, simultaneously at each of the sites, the ships exploded, or erupted, or dissolved, or did something that was not exactly like any of those, but which was impossible to analyze. Something which was variously described as being like a bunch of paper snakes springing out of a prank-store can, like a soap bubble bursting, like a hot-water geyser, like an egg hatching, like a bomb exploding in a chinaware shop, like a dam breaking, and like a time-study film of a flower growing, if a flower could grow into tesseracts and polyhedrons and ziggurats and onion domes and spires. To those observers physically present at the site, the emergence seemed to be a protracted experience—they agreed that it took about a half hour, and one heavy smoker testified that he had time to go through a pack of cigarettes while it was happening. Those observing the scene over command-line television insisted that it had only taken a little while, five minutes at the most, closer, actually, to three, and they were backed up by the evidence of the film in the recording cameras. Clocks and wristwatches on the site also registered only about five minutes of elapsed time. But on-scene personnel swore, with great indignation, that it had taken a half hour. Curiously, the relatively simple eighth- and tenth-generation computers on the scene reported that the phenomenon had been of five minutes’ duration, while the few twentieth-generation computers, which had sensor extensions at the Colorado site—systems inferior only to AI and possessed of their own degree of sentience—joined with the human personnel in insisting that it had taken a half hour. This particular bit of data made AI very thoughtful.

  When the phenomenon—however long it took—ended, the ships were gone.

  In their place was a bewildering variety of geometric shapes and architectural figures—none more than eight feet tall and all apparently made out of the same alternately dull-black and mirror-glossy material as the ship hulls—spread at random across a hundred-foot-wide area, and an indeterminate number of “aliens.” The latter looked pretty much the way everyone had always expected that aliens would look—some of them vaguely humanoid, with fur or chitinous skin, double-elbowed arms, too many fingers, and feathery spines or antennae; others looking like giant insects, like spiders and centipedes; and a few like big, rolling spheres of featureless protoplasm. But the strange thing about them, and the reason why there was an indeterminate number, was that they kept turning into each other, and into the geometric shapes and architectural figures. And the shapes and figures would occasionally turn into one of the more mobile kinds of creatures. Even taking this cycle of metamorphosis into account, though, the total number of objects in the area kept varying from minute to minute, and the closest observation was unable to detect any of them arriving or departing. There was a blurred, indefinite quality to them anyway—they were hard to see, somehow, and even on film it was impossible to get them into a clear, complete focus.

  In toto, shapes, figures and “aliens,” they ignored the humans.

  Special contact teams, composed of scientists, government diplomats, and psychologists, were sent cautiously forward at each of the sites, to initiate communications. Although the contact teams did everything but shoot off signal flares, the aliens totally ignored them, too. In fact, the aliens gave no indication that they were aware of the humans at all. The mobile manifestations walked or crawled or rolled around the area in a leisurely manner, in irregular, but slowly widening, circles.

  Some of their actions could be tentatively identified—the taking of soil samples, for instance—but others remained obscure at best, and completely incomprehensible at worst. Whenever one of the aliens needed a machine—like a digging device to extract soil samples—it would metamorphose into one, much like Tom Terrific or Plastic Man but without the cutesy effects, and direct itself through whateve
r operation was necessary. Once a humanoid, a ziggurat, and a tetrahedron melted together and shaped themselves into what appeared to be a kind of organic computer—at least that was the uneasy opinion of the human-owned twentieth-generation computer on the scene, although the conglomeration formed could have been any of a thousand other things, or none of them, or all of them. The “computer” sat quietly for almost ten minutes and then dissolved into an obelisk and a centipede. The centipede crawled a few dozen yards, changed into a spheroid, and rolled away in the opposite direction. The obelisk turned into an octahedron.

  The sporadic circle traced by the wanderings of the aliens continued to widen, and the baffled contact team was pulled back behind the periphery of the first ring of armor. The aliens kept on haphazardly advancing, ignoring everything, and the situation became tense. When the nearest aliens were about fifty yards away, the military commanders, remembering what had happened at Caracas, reluctantly ordered a retreat, although they called it a “regrouping”—the ring of armor was to be pulled back into a much larger circle, to give the aliens room to move freely. In the resultant confusion, a tank crewman, who was trying to direct his tank through a backing-and-turning maneuver, found himself in the path of one of the humanoid aliens that had wandered ahead of the rest in an unexpected burst of speed. The alien walked directly at the crewman, either not seeing him or trying to run him down. The crewman, panicked, lashed out at the alien with the butt of his rifle, and immediately collapsed, face down. The alien, apparently unharmed and unperturbed, strolled in for another few feet and then turned at a slight angle and walked back more or less in the direction of the main concentration of things. Two of the crewman’s friends pulled his body into the tank, while another two, enraged, fired semiautomatic bursts at the retreating alien. The alien continued to saunter away, still unharmed, although the fire could not have missed at that range; it didn’t even look back. There was no way to tell if it was even aware that an encounter had taken place.