Multiples

by Robert Silverberg

  No one could explain how the behemoths had penetrated the 72nd Street sealfield line, but a new barrier was set up at 79th, and that seemed to keep them contained. Poor Tim spent twelve hours a day patrolling the perimeter of the occupied zone. Inevitably I began spending more time with Maranta than just lunchtimes. Elaine noticed. But I didn’t notice her noticing.

  One Sunday at dawn a behemoth turned up by the Metropolitan, peering in the window of the Egyptian courtyard. The authorities thought at first that there must be a gap in the 79th Street sealfield, as there had at 72nd. Then came a report of another alien out near Riverside Drive and a third one at Lincoln Center and it became clear that the sealfields just didn’t hold them back at all. They had simply never bothered to go beyond them before.

  Making contact with a sealfield is said to be extremely unpleasant for any organism with a nervous system more complex than a squid’s. Every neuron screams in anguish. You jump back, involuntarily, a reflex impossible to overcome. On the morning we came to call Crazy Sunday the behemoths began walking through the fields as if they weren’t there. The main thing about aliens is that they are alien. They feel no responsibility for fulfilling any of your expectations.

  That weekend it was Bobby Christie’s turn to have the full apartment. On those Sundays when Elaine and I had the one-room configuration we liked to get up very early and spend the day out, since it was a little depressing to stay home with three rooms of furniture jammed all around us. As we were walking up Park Avenue South toward 42nd, Elaine said suddenly, “Do you hear anything strange?”

  “Strange?”

  “Like a riot.”

  “It’s nine o’clock Sunday morning. Nobody goes out rioting at nine o’clock Sunday morning.”

  “Just listen,” she said.

  There is no mistaking the characteristic sounds of a large excited crowd of human beings, for those of us who spent our formative years living in the late twentieth century. Our ears were tuned at an early age to the music of riots, mobs, demonstrations, and their kin. We know what it means, when individual exclamations of anger, indignation, or anxiety blend to create a symphonic hubbub in which all extremes of pitch and timbre are submerged into a single surging roar, as deep as the booming of the surf. That was what I heard now. There was no mistaking it.

  “It isn’t a riot,” I said. “It’s a mob. There’s a subtle difference.”

  “What?”

  “Come on,” I said, breaking into a jog. “I’ll bet you that the aliens have come out of the park.”

  A mob, yes. In a moment we saw thousands upon thousands of people, filling 42nd Street from curb to curb and more coming from all directions. What they were looking at—pointing, gaping, screaming—was a shaggy blue creature the size of a small mountain that was moving about uncertainly on the automobile viaduct that runs around the side of Grand Central Terminal. It looked unhappy. It was obviously trying to get down from the viaduct, which was sagging noticeably under its weight. People were jammed right up against it and a dozen or so were clinging to its sides and back like rock climbers. There were people underneath it, too, milling around between its colossal legs. “Oh, look,” Elaine said, shuddering, digging her fingers into my biceps. “Isn’t it eating some of them? Like they did the bison?” Once she had pointed it out I saw, yes, the behemoth now and then was dipping quickly and rising again, a familiar one-two, the old squat-and-gobble. “What an awful thing!” Elaine murmured. “Why don’t they get out of its way?”

  “I don’t think they can,” I said. “I think they’re being pushed forward by the people behind them.”

  “Right into the jaws of that hideous monster. Or whatever it has, if they aren’t jaws.”

  “I don’t think it means to hurt anyone,” I said. How did I know that? “I think it’s just eating them because they’re dithering around down there in its mouth area. A kind of automatic response. It looks awfully dumb, Elaine.”

  “Why are you defending it?”

  “Hey, look, Elaine—”

  “It’s eating people. You sound almost sorry for it!”

  “Well, why not? It’s far from home and surrounded by ten thousand screaming morons. You think it wants to be out there?”

  “It’s a disgusting obnoxious animal.” She was getting furious. Her eyes were bright and wild, her jaw was thrust forward. “I hope the army gets here fast,” she said fiercely. “I hope they blow it to smithereens!”

  Her ferocity frightened me. I saw an Elaine I scarcely knew at all. When I tried one more time to make excuses for that miserable hounded beast on the viaduct she glared at me with unmistakable loathing. Then she turned away and went rushing forward, shaking her fist, shouting curses and threats at the alien.

  Suddenly I realized how it would have been if Hannibal actually had been able to keep his elephants alive long enough to enter Rome with them. The respectable Roman matrons, screaming and raging from the housetops with the fury of banshees. And the baffled elephants sooner or later rounded up and thrust into the Coliseum to be tormented by little men with spears, while the crowd howled its delight. Well, I can howl too. “Come on, Behemoth!” I yelled into the roar of the mob. “You can do it, Goliath!” A traitor to the human race is what I was, I guess.

  Eventually a detachment of Guardsmen came shouldering through the streets. They had mortars and rifles, and for all I know they had tactical nukes too. But of course there was no way they could attack the animal in the midst of such a mob. Instead they used electronic blooglehorns to disperse the crowd by the power of sheer ugly noise, and whipped up a bunch of buzz-blinkers and a little sealfield to cut 42nd Street in half. The last I saw of the monster it was slouching off in the direction of the old United Nations Buildings with the Guardsmen warily creeping along behind it. The crowd scattered, and I was left standing in front of Grand Central with a trembling, sobbing Elaine.

  That was how it was all over the city on Crazy Sunday, and on Monday and Tuesday too. The behemoths were outside the park, roaming at large from Harlem to Wall Street. Wherever they went they drew tremendous crazy crowds that swarmed all over them without any regard for the danger. Some famous news photos came out of those days: the three grinning black boys at Seventh and 125th hanging from the three purple rod-like things, the acrobats forming a human pyramid atop the Times Square beast, the little old Italian man standing in front of his house in Greenwich Village trying to hold a space monster at bay with his garden hose.

  There was never any accurate casualty count. Maybe 5000 people died, mainly trampled underfoot by the aliens or crushed in the crowd. Somewhere between 350 and 400 human beings were gobbled by the aliens. Apparently that stoop-and-swallow thing is something they do when they’re nervous. If there’s anything edible within reach, they’ll gulp it in. This soothes them. We made them very nervous; they did a lot of gulping.

  Among the casualties was Tim, the second day of the violence. He went down valiantly in the defense of the Guggenheim Museum, which came under attack by five of the biggies. Its spiral shape held some ineffable appeal for them. We couldn’t tell whether they wanted to worship it or mate with it or just knock it to pieces, but they kept on charging and charging, rushing up to it and slamming against it. Tim was trying to hold them off with nothing more than tear-gas and blooglehorns when he was swallowed. Never flinched, just stood there and let it happen. The president had ordered the guardsmen not to use lethal weapons. Maranta was bitter about that. “If only they had let them use grenades,” she said. I tried to imagine what it was like, gulped down and digested, nifty tan uniform and all. A credit to his regiment. It was his atonement, I guess. He was back there in the Gary Cooper movie again, gladly paying the price for dereliction of duty.

  Tuesday afternoon the rampage came to an unexpected end. The behemoths suddenly started keeling over, and within a few hours they were all dead. Some said it was the heat—it was up in the 90s all day Monday and Tuesday—and some said it was the excitement. A Rockefelle
r University biologist thought it was both those factors plus severe indigestion: the aliens had eaten an average of ten humans apiece, which might have overloaded their systems.

  There was no chance for autopsies. Some enzyme in the huge bodies set to work immediately on death, dissolving flesh and bone and skin and all into a sticky yellow mess. By nightfall nothing was left of them but some stains on the pavement, uptown and down. A sad business, I thought. Not even a skeleton for the museum, memento of this momentous time. The poor monsters. Was I the only one who felt sorry for them? Quite possibly I was. I make no apologies for that. I feel what I feel.

  All this time the other aliens, the little shimmery spooky ones, had stayed holed up in Central Park, preoccupied with their incomprehensible research. They didn’t even seem to notice that their behemoths had strayed.

  But now they became agitated. For two or three days they bustled about like worried penguins, dismantling their instruments and packing them aboard their ship; and then they took apart the other ship, the one that had carried the behemoths, and loaded that aboard. Perhaps they felt demoralized. As the Carthaginians who had invaded Rome did, after their elephants died.

  On a sizzling June afternoon the alien ship took off. Not for its home world, not right away. It swooped into the sky and came down on Fire Island: at Cherry Grove, to be precise. The aliens took possession of the beach, set up their instruments around their ship, and even ventured into the water, skimming and bobbing just above the surface of the waves like demented surfers. After five or six days they moved on to one of the Hamptons and did the same thing, and then to Martha’s Vineyard. Maybe they just wanted a vacation, after three weeks in New York. And then they went away altogether.

  “You’ve been having an affair with Maranta, haven’t you?” Elaine asked me, the day the aliens left.

  “I won’t deny it.”

  “That night you came in so late, with wine on your breath. You were with her, weren’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “I was with Tim. He and I sneaked into the park and looked at the aliens.”

  “Sure you did,” Elaine said. She filed for divorce and a year later I married Maranta. Very likely that would have happened sooner or later even if the Earth hadn’t been invaded by beings from space and Tim hadn’t been devoured. But no question that the invasion speeded things up a bit for us all.

  And now, of course, the invaders are back. Four years to the day from the first landing and there they were, pop whoosh ping thunk, Central Park again. Three ships this time, one of spooks, one of behemoths, and the third one carrying the prisoners of war.

  Who could ever forget that scene, when the hatch opened and some 350 to 400 human beings came out, marching like zombies? Along with the bison herd, half a dozen squirrels, and three dogs. They hadn’t been eaten and digested at all, just collected inside the behemoths and instantaneously transmitted somehow to the home world, where they were studied. Now they were being returned. “That’s Tim, isn’t it?” Maranta said, pointing to the screen. I nodded. Unmistakably Tim, yes. With the stunned look of a man who has beheld marvels beyond comprehension.

  It’s a month now and the government is still holding all the returnees for debriefing. No one is allowed to see them. The word is that a special law will be passed dealing with the problem of spouses of returnees who have entered into new marriages. Maranta says she’ll stay with me no matter what; and I’m pretty sure that Tim will do the stiff-upper-lip thing, no hard feelings, if they ever get word to him in the debriefing camp about Maranta and me. As for the aliens, they’re sitting tight in Central Park, occupying the whole place from 96th to 110th and not telling us a thing. Now and then the behemoths wander down to the reservoir for a lively bit of wallowing, but they haven’t gone beyond the park this time.

  I think a lot about Hannibal, and about Carthage versus Rome, and how the Second Punic War might have come out if Hannibal had had a chance to go back home and get a new batch of elephants. Most likely Rome would have won the war anyway, I guess. But we aren’t Romans, and they aren’t Carthaginians, and those aren’t elephants splashing around in the Central Park reservoir. “This is such an interesting time to be alive,” Maranta likes to say. “I’m certain they don’t mean us any harm, aren’t you?”

  “I love you for your optimism,” I tell her then. And then we turn on the tube and watch the evening news.

  Blindsight

  The shrewd, exasperating, unforgettable editor Horace Gold taught me long ago that one good way to generate story ideas is to take a standard, familiar idea and stand it on its head. Here’s an example of my doing just that.

  This story was written in July of 1985. Dr. Joseph Mengele, the diabolical Nazi medical experimenter who had been hiding in South America since the end of the Second World War, had just died, and his evil exploits were much in the news. Nobody needed another story about a mad scientist. But I wondered if I could turn the Mengele story upside down and thereby find something interesting to write about.

  So: a sinister and unscrupulous surgeon has escaped to sanctuary, yes—not to South America but to an L5 satellite world. And one of his victims is stalking him, but not to bring him to justice: oh, no, too predictable, too routine. He’s a wanted man, all right, but because his medical skills are needed somewhere. The formula story of revenge turns into something, well, a little different.

  Alice Turner bought it for Playboy, essentially as written, and ran it in the December, 1986 issue. Terry Carr picked it for his annual Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology—alas, the last in this series, for that gifted editor and very dear friend of mine died while the book was in production, and in fact I was the one who handled the mechanical aspects of the anthology, the getting of permissions and the proofreading and the other jobs of seeing it into print, in his place. Since “Against Babylon” had appeared both in the Dozois and Wollheim anthologies that year, I had another three-way sweep of the annual honors, although this time only two different stories were involved.

  And, as with “Against Babylon” and “The Pardoner’s Tale,” which eventually became sections of the novel The Alien Years, I used “Blindsight” and a second short story, 1990’s “Hot Sky,” some years later as the foundations for a book called Hot Sky at Midnight.

  ___________

  That’s my mark, Juanito told himself. That one, there. That one for sure.

  He stared at the new dudes coming off the midday shuttle from Earth. The one he meant to go for was the one with no eyes at all, blank from brow to bridge of nose, just the merest suggestions of shadowy pits below the smooth skin of the forehead. As if the eyes had been erased, Juanito thought. But in fact they had probably never been there in the first place. It didn’t look like a retrofit gene job, more like a prenatal splice.

  He knew he had to move fast. There was plenty of competition. Fifteen, twenty couriers here in the waiting room, gathering like vultures, and they were some of the best: Ricky, Lola, Kluge. Nattathaniel. Delilah. Everybody looked hungry today. Juanito couldn’t afford to get shut out. He hadn’t worked in six weeks, and it was time. His last job had been a fast-talking fancy-dancing Hungarian, wanted on Commonplace and maybe two or three other satellite worlds for dealing in plutonium. Juanito had milked that one for all it was worth, but you can milk only so long. The newcomers learn the system, they melt in and become invisible, and there’s no reason for them to go on paying. So then you have to find a new client.

  “Okay,” Juanito said, looking around challengingly. “There’s mine. The weird one. The one with half a face. Anybody else want him?”

  Kluge laughed and said, “He’s all yours, man.”

  “Yeah,” Delilah said, with a little shudder. “All yours.” That saddened him, her chiming in like that. It had always disappointed Juanito that Delilah didn’t have his kind of imagination. “Christ,” she said. “I bet he’ll be plenty trouble.”

  “Trouble’s what pays best,” Juanito said. “You want to go for the
easy ones, that’s fine with me.” He grinned at her and waved at the others. “If we’re all agreed, I think I’ll head downstairs now. See you later, people.”

  He started to move inward and downward along the shuttle-hub wall. Dazzling sunlight glinted off the docking module’s silvery rim, and off the Earth shuttle’s thick columnar docking shaft, wedged into the center of the module like a spear through a doughnut. On the far side of the wall the new dinkos were making their wobbly way past the glowing ten-meter-high portrait of El Supremo and on into the red fiberglass tent that was the fumigation chamber. As usual, they were having a hard time with the low gravity. Here at the hub it was one-sixteenth G, max.

  Juanito always wondered about the newcomers, why they were here, what they were fleeing. Only two kinds of people ever came to Valparaiso, those who wanted to hide and those who wanted to seek. The place was nothing but an enormous spacegoing safe house. You wanted to be left alone, you came to Valparaiso and bought yourself some privacy. But that implied that you had done something that made other people not want to let you alone. There was always some of both going on here, some hiding, some seeking, El Supremo looking down benignly on it all, raking in his cut. And not just El Supremo.

  Down below, the new dinkos were trying to walk jaunty, to walk mean. But that was hard to do when you were keeping your body all clenched up as if you were afraid of drifting into mid-air if you put your foot down too hard. Juanito loved it, the way they were crunching along, that constipated shuffle of theirs.

  Gravity stuff didn’t ever bother Juanito. He had spent all his life out here in the satellite worlds and he took it for granted that the pull was going to fluctuate according to your distance from the hub. You automatically made compensating adjustments, that was all. Juanito found it hard to understand a place where the gravity would be the same everywhere all the time. He had never set foot on Earth or any of the other natural planets, didn’t care to, didn’t expect to.