The Martian Child

by David Gerrold

  A minute later, I said, "Can you wish this light to turn green too?"

  "No," he said, abruptly angry. "You're going to use up all my wishes."

  "Huh?" I looked over at him.

  "I only have so many wishes and you're going to use them all up on stoplights." There was a hurt quality in his voice.

  I pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. I turned to him and put my hand gently on his shoulder. "Oh, sweetheart. I don't know who told you that, but that's not so. The wish bag is bottomless. You can have as many wishes as you want."

  "No, you can't," he insisted. "I have to save my wishes for things that are important."

  "What's the most important thing you ever wished for? " I asked, already knowing the answer.

  He didn't answer.

  "What's the most important wish?" I repeated.

  Very softly, he admitted, "I wished for a dad. Someone who would be nice to me."

  "Uh-huh. And did you get your wish?"

  He nodded.

  "So, you see, sweetheart. There's no shortage of miracles."

  I didn't know if he believed me. It was still too early in the process. We were still learning who each other was. I noted the conversation in my journal and let the matter slide. But it left me with an uncomfortable feeling. What has to happen to a child to make him believe there's a limit to wishes?

  A year later, I looked at the words I'd written glowing on the computer screen, and wondered about Dennis's ability to wish. It was probably a coincidence. But maybe it wasn't. That time we'd matched four out of six numbers in the lottery and won eighty-eight dollars — was that the week I'd asked him to wish real hard for us to win?

  Maybe Martians have precognitive or telekinetic powers…?

  Dennis likes cleaning things. Without asking, he'll go out and wash the car, or the patio. He'll give the dogs baths. He'll vacuum the rugs and take the Dustbuster to the couch. He'll mop the floors. His favorite toys are a sponge and a squirt-bottle of Simple Green. I've seen him take a rusty old wrench he found in a vacant field and scrub the rust off of it until it shone like new. One night after dinner, after he finished methodically loading the dishwasher, I sat him down at the kitchen table and told him I had a surprise for him.

  "What?"

  "It's a book of puzzles."

  "Oh." He sounded disappointed.

  "No, listen. Here's the game. You have twenty minutes to do these puzzles, and then when you finish. I add them up and we'll find out how smart you are. Do you want to do this?"

  "It'll really tell you how smart I am?"

  «Uh-huh."

  He grabbed for the book and a pencil.

  "Wait a minute — let me set the timer. Okay? Now once you start, you can't stop. You have to go all the way through to the end. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  «Ready?"

  «Ready."

  "One, two, three… go."

  He attacked the first three puzzles with a vengeance. They were simple. Pick the next shape in a series: triangle, square, pentagon…? Which object doesn't belong: horse, cow, sheep, scissors? Feather is to Bird as Fur is to: dog, automobile, ice cream…?

  Then the puzzles started getting harder and he started to frown. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and once he stopped to clean his glasses; but he stayed interested and involved and when the timer went off, he didn't want to stop. He insisted that he be allowed to finish the puzzle he was working on. What the hell. I let him.

  "What does it say?" Dennis asked as I computed the percentile. He wanted to grab the test book out of my hand.

  "Well… let me finish here. " I held it out of his reach as I checked the table of percentiles.

  The test showed that he had above-average intelligence — not unexpected; hyperactive kids tend to be brighter than average — but well within the normal range for a nine-year-old. "It says that you are fifty-two inches high, that you weigh sixty-six pounds, and that your daddy loves you very much. It also says that you are very smart."

  "How smart?"

  "Well, if this test were given to one hundred children, you would be smarter than ninety-two of them."

  "How good is that?"

  "That's very good. You can't get much better. And it means we should go out for ice cream after dinner. What do you think?"

  «Yeah!"

  Oh, that was another thing. He didn't like chocolate. He preferred rainbow sherbet. I'd never seen that in a kid before.

  A couple of weeks later, we played another game. I made sure to pick a quiet evening, one with no distractions. "This game is even harder," I explained. "It's a kind of card game," I explained. "See these cards? There are six different shapes here. A circle, a square, a star, three squiggly lines, a cross, and a figure-eight. All you have to do is guess which one I'm looking at. See if you can read my mind, okay?"

  He frowned at me, and I had to explain it two or three more times. This was not a game he wanted to play. I said okay and started to put the deck away. If he didn't want to cooperate, the results would be inconclusive. "Can we go for ice cream after we do this?" he asked abruptly.

  "Sure," I said.

  "Okay, let's do it then."

  "All night. We have to do it five times. Do you think you can do it that many times?"

  He shrugged. I laid out a paper in front of him, showing him the shapes so he would be able remember them all. I told him he could close his eyes if it would help him concentrate. The test conditions were less than perfect, but if there were any precognitive or telepathic powers present, five trials should be enough to demonstrate them.

  Half an hour later, I knew.

  Martians aren't telepathic.

  But they do like rainbow sherbet. A lot.

  There were other tests. Not many. Not anything too weird. Just little ones that might indicate if there was something worth further investigation. There wasn't. As near as I could determine, there was nothing so unusual about Dennis that it would register as a statistical anomaly in a repeatable testable circumstance. He couldn't levitate. He couldn't move objects. He couldn't make things disappear. He didn't know how to grok. He could only hold his breath for thirty-three seconds. He couldn't think muscles. He couldn't see around comers.

  But —

  He could predict elevators. Take him into any building, anywhere. Take him to the elevator bank. Let him push the up button. Don't say a word. Without fail, the door he stands in front of will be the one where the first elevator arrives. Was he wishing them or predicting them? I don't know. It's useful only at science fiction conventions, which are legendary for recalcitrant elevators. It has little value anywhere else in the world.

  He could make stop lights turn green — sometimes. Mostly, he waited until he saw the lights for the cross street turn yellow before he announced his wish. Maybe he could still make the Dodgers score four runs in two innings — but it wasn't consistent. We went back to Dodger Stadium in May, and either Dennis wasn't wishing or he really had used up all his wishes.

  He could sing with perfect pitch, especially if the lyrics were about Popeye's gastrointestinal distress. He could play a video game for four hours straight without food or water. He could invent an amazing number of excuses for not staying in bed. He could also hug my neck so hard that once I felt a warning crack in my trachea. My throat hurt for a week afterward.

  I began to think that maybe I had imagined the whole thing.

  On school nights, I tucked him in at 9:30. We had a whole ritual. If there was time, we read a storybook together; whatever was appropriate. Afterward, prayers —

  "I'm sorry God for… I didn't do anything to be sorry for."

  "How about sassing your dad? Remember you had to take a timeout?"

  "Oh, yeah. I'm sorry God for sassing my dad. Thank you God for… um, I can't think of anything."

  "Going swimming."

  "No. Thank you God for Calvin, my cat."

  "Good. Anything else you want to say to God?"


  "Does God hear the prayers of Martians?"

  "Uh… of course he does. God hears everybody's prayers."

  "Not Martians."

  "Yes, even Martians."

  "Uh-uh."

  "Why do you say no?"

  "Because God didn't make any Martians."

  "If God didn't make the Martians, then who did?"

  "The devil."

  "Did the devil make you?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because… I'm a Martian."

  "Mm," I said, remembering a little speech I'd made just about a year ago. Let it be all right for him to be a Martian for as long as he needs to be. "All right," I said. "But let me tell you a secret," I whispered. "The devil didn't make any Martians. That's just a lie the devil wants you to believe. God made the Martians."

  «Really?"

  "Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a noodle in my eye."

  "How do you know?" He was very insistent.

  "Because I talk to God every night," I said. "Just like you, I say my prayers. And God made everything in the world."

  "But Martians aren't from this world —"

  "That's night. But God made Mars too. And everything on it. Just like she made this world, she made a whole bunch of others, and Mars was one of them. Honest."

  "How come you say 'she' when you talk about God?"

  "Because sometimes God is female and sometimes God is male. God is everything. And now it's time for you to stop asking questions and go to sleep. Hugs and kisses —?"

  "Hugs and kisses."

  "G'night. No more talking."

  "I love you."

  "I love you too. Now no more talking."

  "Dad?

  "What?"

  "I have to tell you something."

  «What?"

  "I love you."

  "I love you too. Now, shhh. No more talking, Dennis."

  "G'night."

  "Sleep tight —"

  Finally, I got smart. I stopped answering. Control freaks. We each wanted to have the last word.

  I padded barefoot down the hall. I stopped in the living room long enough to turn off the television set, the VCR, and the surround-sound system. I continued on through the dining room and finally to my office. Two computers sat on my desk, both showing me that it was 9:47. The monster-child had manipulated an extra seventeen minutes tonight.

  I sat down in my chair, leaned back, put my feet up on my desk, and stared out at the dark waters of the swimming pool in the back yard. The pool glowed with soft blue light. The night was… silent. Somewhere, a dog, barked.

  Somewhere — that was his name, yes; he was a writer's dog — lived under my desk. Whenever I said," Let's go to work," wherever he was in the house, Somewhere would pick himself up and laboriously pad-pad-pad into my office where he'd squelch himself flat and scrooch his way under the desk, with a great impassioned Jewish sigh of, "I hope you appreciate what I do for you. '

  He'd stay there all day — as long as the computer was on. Somewhere would only come out for two things: cookies and the doorbell…and the doorbell was broken. It had been broken for as long as I'd lived in this house. I'd never had the need to get it fixed. If someone came to the door, the dog barked.

  Somewhere, the dog, barked.

  That was why I loved him so much. He was a living clich‚. He was the only possible justification for one of the most infamous sentences in bad writing. It was just a matter of placing the commas correctly.

  Somewhere had just enough intelligence to keep out of the way and more than enough intelligence to find his dinner dish — as long as no one moved it. He spent his mornings resting under my desk, his afternoons snoozing behind the couch, his evenings snoring next to Dennis; he spent the hours before dawn in the dark space underneath the headboard of my bed, dreaming about the refrigerator.

  Almost every night, just as Dennis began saying his prayers, Somewhere would come sighing down the hall, a shaggy, absent-minded canine-American. He'd step over everything that was in his way, uncaring if he knocked over a day's worth of Lego construction. He'd climb onto the bed, over my lap, over Dennis, grumbling softly as he found his position next to Dennis. With his prehensile tongue, he could slurp the inside of Dennis's right ear from the left side of his head, taking either the internal or external route.

  Tonight, though, he knew I wasn't finished working. I had some serious thinking to do. He remained under the desk, sighing about the overtime. "You're in super-golden hours," I said to him; he shut up.

  Whenever I'm in doubt about something, I sit down and start writing. I write down everything I'm feeling or thinking or worrying about. I say everything there is to say until there's nothing left to say. The first time I did this was the day after my dad died. I sat and wrote for two days. When I was finished, I had a Nebula nominated story, In the Deadlands. To this day I still don't fully understand what the story was about, but the emotional impact of it is undeniable. It still gives me the shudders.

  But the lesson I learned from that experience was the most important thing I've ever learned about storytelling. Effective writing isn't in the mechanics. Anyone can master the mechanical act of stringing together words and sentences and paragraphs to make a character move from A to B. The bookstores are full of evidence. But that's not writing. Writing isn't about the words, it's about the experience. It's about the feeling that the story creates inside of you. If there's no feeling, there's no story.

  But sometimes, there's only the feeling without any meaning or understanding. And that's not a story either. What I was feeling about Dennis was so confusing and troubling and uncertain that I couldn't even begin to sort it out. I needed to write down all the separate pieces — as if in the act of telling, it would sort itself out. Sometimes the process worked.

  When I looked up again, three hours had passed. My back and shoulders ached. The dog had gone to bed, and I felt I had accomplished nothing at all except to delineate the scale of my frustration.

  Why would an alien species come to this planet? The last time I spent that much time on this question, I came up with giant pink man-eating slugs in search of new flavors. Why would Martians send their children to Earth?

  The most logical idea that I came up with was that they were here as observers. Spies.

  Haven't you ever been pulling on your underwear and realized that your dog or your cat is watching you? Haven't you ever considered the possibility that the creature is sharing your secrets with some secret network of dogs and cats? "Oh, you think that's weird? My human wears underwear with pictures of Rocky and Bullwinkle on them."

  But dogs and cats are limited in what they can observe. If you really want to know a culture, you have to be a member of it. But an alien couldn't step in and pretend to be a member of this culture, could he? He'd have to learn. He'd have to be taught….

  Where could a Martian go to get lessons in being a human? Who gives lessons in human beingness?

  Mommies and Daddies. That's right.

  "You're too paranoid," my sane friend said. He asked me to leave his name out of this narrative, so I'll just call him my sane friend.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You think that aliens are all motivated by evil intentions. You've written four novels about evil aliens eating our children, and you're working on a fifth. Isn't it possible that you're wrong?"

  "Moi? Wrong?"

  "Do you ever think about the cuckoo?" my sane friend asked.

  "No," I said.

  "Well, think about the cuckoo for a moment."

  "Okay."

  "How do you feel about the cuckoo?" he asked.

  "It's an evil bird," I said. "It lays its egg in the sparrow's nest. The cuckoo chick pushes the other babies out of the nest. The sparrow ends up raising it — even at the expense of her own young. It's a parasite."

  "See, that's your judgment talking —"

  "That's the truth — " I started to object.

  "I
s it? Is that what you tell Dennis about his birth-mother?"

  "Uh — I tell him that his birth-mom couldn't take care of him. And that she loves him and misses him. And that's the truth. Sort of… whitewashed."

  My sane friend grinned at me.

  "Okay," I admitted. "I'm protective of my son. So what?"

  My sane friend shrugged. "How do you think the cuckoo feels?"

  "Birds don't feel."

  "If it could feel, how do you think it would feel?"

  I thought about it. The first image that came to mind was the silly little bird from the Dr. Seuss story; the one who flew off, leaving Horton the elephant to hatch her egg. I shook my head. "I'm not getting anything useful — ~}

  "How do you think Dennis's mother feels?"

  I shook my head again. "Everything I've heard about her… I can't empathize."

  "All right, try it this way. Under what circumstances would you give Dennis up?"

  "I'd die before I'd give him up," I said. "He makes me happier than anybody I've ever known before. Just looking at him, I get an endorphin rush. If anybody started proceedings to take him out of my home, I'd have him on a plane to New Zealand so fast — " I stopped. "Oh, I see what you mean." I thought about it. "If I wasn't able to take care of him, or if I thought I was hurting him, or if I thought I wasn't doing a good enough job — " There was that old familiar twinge again. "If I thought he'd really be better off with someone else, I'd want him to have the best chance possible. But I just can't see that happening."

  "Uh-huh…." My sane friend grinned. "Now, how do you think the Martians feel?"

  "Huh?"

  He repeated the question.

  I thought about it for a while. "I'd have to assume that if they have the capability to implant their children in human wombs that they would have a highly developed science and technology and that implies — to me anyway — a highly developed emotional structure and probably a correspondingly well-developed moral structure as well. At least, that's what I'd like to believe."

  "And if what you believe is true… " he started to say.

  I finished the thought for him."… then the Martians are trusting us with their children."

  "Aren't they?" he asked.