Alien Abduction

by Irving Belateche

  I took my eyes off of the owl and looked at the Kalera tablet in my hand. I was leaning toward taking it—this batch of Kalera was certainly worth taking—but I still wasn’t totally convinced this was the best decision.

  I rarely took the drug. I’d taken it only three times since I’d arrived on Earth, and those three times had been during my first ten cycles on the planet. I’d felt lonely and miserable, homesick in the worst of ways—because I knew I could never return home. I had convinced myself that it was okay to take the drug because my biological and mental makeup made it unlikely that I’d become addicted. And it did help a little with my loneliness. But then I stopped taking it, because the truth was, anyone could get addicted to Kalera, regardless of what their biological and mental makeup predicted. As confirmation of this, all I had to do was look at how many members of my species, and of other species, were addicted.

  But this tablet of Kalera was worth taking in spite of that. And wasn’t that why I’d sent Eddie to San Diego? It wasn’t just that I wanted to harvest what I suspected might be a valuable batch of Kalera. I had to admit to myself that once I’d discovered this target, I’d instantly had the urge to try the Kalera that would result from the harvest—if it turned out to be as potent as I suspected.

  Which it had.

  I’d been feeling terribly homesick over the last cycle. Far more homesick than I’d ever felt. I physically ached for companionship, and for the familiarity of Tracea.

  Kalera would ease my longing. I knew the sense of peace it would provide was a false one, but I didn’t care. I welcomed it. And I could hardly wait for it.

  I welcomed the other effects of the drug, too. Especially one particular effect, which might prove to be an even greater benefit than the sense of peace. Kalera would propel my mind into hyper-drive. And given the potency of this batch, it would be a hyper-drive more powerful than any I’d ever experienced—one so powerful that I’d be capable of generating a plan to end my stay on Earth.

  For the last few cycles, I’d been desperately trying to come up with such a plan. I thought that by planning, perhaps I could fight the misery that had taken root deep within me. The misery I couldn’t shake. And it had worked, partially anyway. Thinking about how I could get back to Tracea gave me hope. The hope that my time as a fugitive would soon be coming to an end.

  But I hadn’t been able to come up with a plan. And that was because I couldn’t come up with a solution to the most vexing part of the problem: finding a way to secretly reintegrate myself back into life on Tracea—the only place I loved.

  To do that, I would need to create a new identity. An identity that would completely shield me from the Council, the governing body on Tracea—and from all my fellow Traceans. An identity with no link to my former self. An identity that was impenetrable.

  No Tracean could ever suspect who I really was.

  I turned the Kalera tablet over in my hand. I was expecting a lot from this tablet. But I knew it could deliver—or had the potential to deliver. Sure, Kalera always delivered on the false sense of peace—that was why it was the most popular drug in the universe. But it didn’t always deliver on the hyper-drive in a way that made any difference. For that you needed potency.

  I thought I held that potency in my hand.

  I lifted the tablet to my eye, ready to absorb it. But just before I let it touch the surface of my eye—just before it would instantly dissolve and there’d be no turning back—doubt came over me.

  This wasn’t the time for taking the drug.

  It was better to wait until the situation with the human was settled. The current situation, anyway. With a man like Eddie, there was bound to be another, eventually. Eddie was a desperate man, and desperate men did desperate things. Things that had dangerous repercussions. Other species were no different; I was an example of that. It was my own desperation that had led to me being a fugitive.

  I had always screened my human employees before offering them the job. And even though Eddie had volunteered, I had screened him, too. But the man had turned out to be far more of a wild card than I’d thought. He concealed details about his abductions to a degree that I hadn’t seen with my prior employees.

  I chalked this up to the fact that even though I had screened him, all my other employees had started at much younger ages and hadn’t been desperate. For them, the job had quickly turned into careers—lucrative careers. Careers they didn’t want to jeopardize. I had hoped Eddie would also see the job as a career. But instead, he saw it as a quick fix for his troubles.

  I blamed myself for that. If I hadn’t disposed of Ben in front of him, then he might not have started the job thinking that his days were already numbered. But I’d made that decision on the spot. My misery had led to poor judgment. My homesickness had gotten the better of my reason.

  I should have disposed of Ben the way I always did when it was time to replace an employee: send him on an assignment that was designed to kill him. Of course, there was no guarantee that if I’d followed my usual protocol—and then had also disposed of Eddie—that a fresh screening process would’ve led to an employee any better than Eddie.

  As proof, all I had to do was look back to Richard Deaks, the man who’d worked for me in the nineteen fifties. By all measures, he’d been an ideal candidate. The man was resourceful and reliable and innovative. He’d taken to the job like a duck to water. That was another of my favorite idioms. I often wished that this idiom applied to me, as in: I had taken to the life of a fugitive like a duck to water. But that wasn’t the case. The appropriate human idiom for my situation here on Earth was: I was a square peg in a round hole. Which was why I wanted to take the Kalera. I was desperate to go home. But though I was still holding the tablet within a few inches of my eye, I wasn’t making the next move. Instead, my thoughts were on Deaks.

  The man took to the job better than any other employee I’d ever hired; he delivered each target without complications. And he always gave me a full report on each assignment. Also, he didn’t ask many questions, which I appreciated.

  But around the five-year mark, even though he’d never asked questions, he started searching for answers on his own. He began to spy on me and the house. He thought my operation was part of a much larger conspiracy. He had come to believe that I was part of an advanced scout team, and that I’d been sent here to examine humans before my alien brethren launched a full-fledged invasion.

  Deaks had been influenced by the media of the time. Films, books, and news stories had latched on to the idea that aliens were just itching to invade Earth—and that the invasion was imminent. The idea was ridiculous. Earth didn’t have the kind of resources that other species wanted or needed. This planet’s only valuable resource was Kalera, and that resource could be had on many other planets. We, the Traceans, had seeded it all across the universe.

  The ridiculous idea that Earth was worth invading was purely an American invention. The US had an inflated view of itself back then. It had become the dominant global power as a result of that dreadful war, and that power had led to hubris. The same hubris that had sparked Deaks’s delusion. He wanted to be an American hero. And the considerable money that he was earning as my employee wasn’t enough to overcome his delusion.

  The media convinced him that the invasion was just around the corner, and he believed that if he could stop it, he’d save mankind and be hailed as a hero for all eternity. He’d be the superman who’d stopped a deadly alien enemy from wiping out the human race.

  His delusion of grandeur inspired him to cart a telescope into the woods so he could watch the house. It also inspired him to take pictures with a telephoto lens. Within a year, he was taking his mission even more seriously. Every time he delivered a target, he’d bring a small recording device into the house, hidden under his shirt. He kept hoping I’d say something to prove I was part of the alien scout team. And while I was harvesting the Kalera from the target, he’d search the house looking for evidence that would prove th
e invasion was imminent.

  I put up with Deaks’s shenanigans—that was how great an employee the man was—until he did the unthinkable. Up to that point, I had thought there was still a chance I could keep him on. He wasn’t outing me because he wanted to first find solid evidence of the invasion. So I took advantage of that extra time he’d bought himself by volunteering information about what I was actually doing—hinting that I was a lone farmer, harvesting crops—hoping he would conclude for himself that there was no planned invasion and drop his investigation.

  It didn’t work.

  Deaks’s final insubordination came in February 1956. The idea of the alien invasion had been growing on him for a year, the same year during which he’d spied on the house and searched it up and down. Then, that month, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a film about an alien invasion, was released.

  Deaks went to see it on opening weekend.

  And then he did something with the next target that none of my employees had ever done.

  The night started out normally. Deaks brought the target to the house—this was a couple of days after he’d seen the movie—and waited for me to harvest the Kalera.

  After I harvested it and put Deaks’s pay in his car, I walked into the living room and said, “You can return the target.”

  Instead of getting right to it, which he almost always did, Deaks extended the conversation. “Hollywood has some crazy ideas about you guys,” he said.

  “For instance?” I said, pleased that I didn’t have to be the one extending the conversation, which I’d tried to do a few times when dropping hints that I was a lone farmer.

  “I just saw a movie,” he said, “where aliens invade Earth by comin’ in as plant spores.” He stared at me as if he was looking for confirmation.

  “Seems farfetched,” I said.

  “They got it backwards, don’t they?” He let out a derisive laugh, as if he couldn’t believe how foolish Hollywood was. “We’re the plants.”

  “It’s possible that there are species that travel as spores,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t possible. But I was pleased to discover that he’d picked up on the tidbits of information I’d been dispensing over the last year. This was the first indication that he understood what I was doing on the planet.

  “Aliens as plants is dumb,” he said. “Aliens ain’t that primitive. Just look at you.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.

  “I’m just not buyin’ this spore thing.” He shook his head.

  I decided to use Invasion of the Body Snatchers to make a point. “Why did the aliens in that movie invade Earth?”

  Deaks didn’t respond. I could tell his brain was working overtime to come up with an answer. Finally, he realized why he couldn’t come up with one.

  “It didn’t say,” he said.

  I hoped to steer him in the right direction, so I continued. “It seems like an awful lot of trouble to mount an invasion of a planet, if there’s no point.”

  “Resources,” he blurted out.

  “So the spores came for resources?”

  “Nah—that was just a stupid movie. In a real invasion, aliens would be comin’ for our resources.”

  “What makes you think aliens would need Earth’s resources?”

  “You’re here, ain’t ya? You must need somethin’.” This was delivered with a smile, an I got ya smile.

  And he had gotten me. My only comeback was to lay it out a little more explicitly.

  “There’s a difference between need and want,” I said, and I let that sink in for a couple of seconds.

  His eyes narrowed as if he was thinking this through.

  I continued. “My species doesn’t need what I harvest here. But some of them want it.”

  Again, I let him think about that for a few seconds before I went on.

  “Humans need water,” I said. “But they don’t need tomatoes. They might invade another planet if they ever ran out of water, but they wouldn’t invade another planet if they ran out of tomatoes.”

  “Okay… so?”

  “So some people still may want tomatoes, and if it’s worth it economically, a few people might go to another planet to get tomatoes. But the human race isn’t going to mount an invasion to make sure they have a steady supply of tomatoes.”

  He studied me, then said, “Okay… I can see that.”

  But as it turned out, he couldn’t.

  When he left with the target, I believed I’d gotten through to him—not completely, but partially. Enough to begin to counter the ridiculous idea that one extraterrestrial, stuck in the hills of Beverly, with minimal assets, was the lead scout for an alien invasion.

  But I hadn’t gotten through to him at all, and I found that out by listening to police transmissions. Through those transmissions, which gave a good recap of the story Deaks had told, I learned that my best employee had become my worst.

  Deaks didn’t return the target to Culver City, where she lived. Instead, he took her to Cedars Sinai Hospital and revived her there. He told the doctors that an alien had abducted her, and he convinced them to examine her. He was able to pull that off because the target did corroborate part of Deaks’s story. She confirmed that she’d fainted unexpectedly, though that was all she could confirm, because the revival capsule had done its job.

  So it was Deaks who insisted the police come to the hospital. And when they arrived, he told them his tall tale. He didn’t want to incriminate himself, so he didn’t mention his five-year stint as a kidnapper, and the income he’d earned from it. Instead, he told the police that he’d witnessed this strange-looking creature shoot a tranquilizer dart at this woman—the woman he’d brought to the hospital.

  He was driving down Venice Boulevard in Culver City, minding his own business, when he turned a corner and saw a woman step out of her car, then suddenly pass out. Out of nowhere, an alien creature grabbed the woman, loaded her back into her car, and got in himself. Deaks said he followed the car up Motor Avenue, through Beverly Hills, and up Dixie Canyon Road, all the way to a fancy house. He gave the police the address of that fancy house—my address.

  Though the police transmissions were detailed, they left out one element. Whether it was on purpose or not, I didn’t know. But I did know that this element—the only real evidence that Deaks had—was probably the reason the police were willing to consider Deaks’s outlandish claim at all.

  I had no doubt that Deaks had shown the police the copper straw, the tranquilizer pellets, and the revival capsules. And I thought it likely that the doctors at Cedars had confirmed that the pellets and capsules were unfamiliar. But the doctors were professionals. They would withhold judgment until a proper chemical analysis of the pellets and capsules was complete.

  Too bad for Deaks. Because that forensic evidence would disintegrate, if it hadn’t already. For as soon as someone other than Deaks reached into either of those tin boxes, whether with gloved hands or tweezers, the pellets and capsules would disintegrate, and the elements from which they were made would disperse into the atmosphere, never to be recovered. Same with the copper straw. As soon as someone other than Deaks touched it, it would disintegrate.

  And that was that.

  Back then, I didn’t have to worry about the gold card because I didn’t use it to contact employees. There was no need to. Using a landline had been fine. Back then, I could hide my landline communications quite well, which brought to mind another idiom: it had been child’s play. Everything was easier in those days.

  In the fifties, those freewheeling police transmissions were all I’d needed to fix the damage Deaks had wrought. They provided a step-by-step guide to what I needed to do to throw the police off my trail. I used phony dispatches and phone calls, and a few other tricks—facilitated by using the limited equipment I’d managed to smuggle off of Tracea during my escape. Changing the facts that made up Deaks’s tall tale was easy.

  One of those new facts gave me a sense of satisfaction—and
a good laugh. By the time the address Deaks had given to the police made it to the detective assigned to the case, I had changed it. It was no longer my address, it was Pete Wilson’s address. Pete was a gaffer on a film in production on the Paramount lot.

  The film was about an alien invasion. And lo and behold, when the detective paid a visit to Pete’s house, a little bungalow on Gower, Pete identified Deaks as someone who dropped by the film set often. “Deaks was obsessed with the film” was the way Pete put it.

  Pete was more than happy to lie to the detective because I’d sent him a special delivery: one hundred thousand dollars, which was close to a decade’s worth of his salary. And to earn it, all he had to do was stick to the story I’d sent him, which was that Deaks believed an alien invasion was imminent, and that the poor schmuck was a nutcase.

  Damage control hadn’t been too tough back then. Now it was much harder, which was another reason I wanted off this planet. I could still manipulate human technology just well enough to cover my tracks, but as human technology had improved, my limited equipment was less able to do the job.

  Still, being discovered by humans wasn’t my biggest fear. My biggest fear was that the Traceans would find me. If my own species found me, I’d have to go on the run again—if I was lucky enough to escape again. Otherwise, they’d dispose of me faster than I had disposed of Ben Kingsley.

  With every passing cycle, it was getting harder to monitor and manipulate all the information that might give the Traceans a clue that I was here on Earth—which was another reason I had to come up with a plan to get back home now. I knew my cover here would eventually be blown.

  That thought forced my hand.

  I moved the capsule toward my eye, and this time I didn’t stop. When it made contact with my eye, it dissolved.

  As I waited for the drug to take effect, I stared out the window at the sprawling birch tree. I hoped the Kalera would deliver on the hyper-drive, and that the hyper-drive would be powerful enough to generate a plan.