Alien Harvest (aliens)

by Robert Sheckley

  Blood streaming from his nose and mouth, Khalil stumbled backward, losing his grip on the knife that was still clamped under Julie's left arm.

  “I'll just keep this for you,” Julie said, slipping the knife into her belt. “It might reduce its value if we got blood all over it.”

  A feint to the midsection drew down Khalil's guard. Fingers folded in protectively, Julie snapped a blow. The heel of her hand caught Khalil where the upper lip meets the nose. Four of his front teeth cracked off clean at the gum line.

  “You ought to thank me,” Julie said. “I've corrected your overbite and haven't even charged you for it.”

  Khalil fell down screaming. He rolled on the floor clutching his head and whimpering. Bloody foam splattered from his mouth. Julie watched him critically for a moment, then muttered, “That ought to keep you occupied for a while.”

  She turned to Sfat. He had regained his feet, and although his balance was just the slightest bit off-kilter, he was still formidable. If rage could kill, then Julie would be dead ten times over. He came toward her on the attack. He was about twice the weight of the slender girl and he was containing his fury now as he backed her into an angle of the wall, just to one side of an indifferent copy of Gainsborough's Blue Boy. There seemed no way she could get out of this one. Shouting an oath in street Arabic, Sfat launched his attack.

  Julie had had long preparation for moments like this. Shen Hui's instructions in self-defense had covered all the basics of unarmed combat. He had not been satisfied with that, however, since he accounted himself no expert in the finer points of self-defense. So he had apprenticed her to Olla Khan, a fat-faced master fighter from Isfahan in central Asia. Khan, beguiled by her beauty, had said, “My arrangement with your master is that you will stay with me and serve me in all particulars until you can beat me at unarmed combat. That might take more than a lifetime, my pet.” In fact it took just five months, and Olla Khan ended up in a hospital for his presumption.

  And so, now, with Sfat launching his impetuous and ill-considered attack, Julie's problem was not how to cope with it, but which of several different methods to choose. She also had to decide to what extent she wished to incapacitate him, and this in turn depended on her estimation of his value to her alive. In the split of a second she decided that this gross hairy-faced man with the bad breath was of no value to her, and indeed could serve her better dead as a message to his master, Khalil, to stop resisting and start cooperating.

  She didn't think all that through consciously. Instead, she opposed his charge with a sword hand, fingers stiffened. Sfat crashed into her hand and was stopped abruptly as the fingers took him high between the eyes, shutting down his pineal gland and. Then going on to break his neck. His eyes rolled up, showing the white, and he crashed to the floor like two hundred pounds of dead mutton.

  She turned from him to Khalil. “Ready to go another round?” she asked.

  Khalil, his teeth scattered over the floor, had had enough. He mumbled through a bloodstained hand. “Don't hurt me anymore. I'm a dilettante, not a fighter. I'll give you whatever you want.”

  “That's what I like to hear,” Julie said. She took a pillow from a nearby bed and stripped off the pillowcase.

  “Fill it with good stuff for me,” she said. “Don't put in any worthless crap or I'll have something to say about it.”

  Khalil, totally unnerved, couldn't even dream of resistance.

  His collapse was absolute. He opened a compartment concealed in the wall behind the bed and picked several precious bracelets, two handfuls of magnificent unmounted gems in a white chamois bag, and a string of glorious baroque pearls, each the size of a pigeon's egg and no two alike. Soon the pillowcase was bulging. Khalil had other objects he wanted to give her, but she stopped him.

  “One bagful is enough. I'm not greedy. Besides, I'd need an extra pair of hands to carry it all.”

  Khalil recovered sufficiently to say, “If you're finished, then get out!”

  “Okay,” Julie said. “This is good-bye, then.” She moved close to him.

  He stared at her. The whites of his eyes went a dirty yellow as she advanced on him. He stumbled away, found himself with his back to a bureau. “What are you going to do?” he asked in a shaking voice.

  “Just give you a couple hours' sleep. So I can walk out of here like a lady.” She touched a nerve in his neck. He slumped to the floor unconscious.

  “Be sure to have a dentist look at those stumps,” she said. He couldn't hear her, of course, but she was sure he'd remember anyway.

  Julie went to the dressing-room mirror and checked her clothing and makeup. She repaired her lipstick, which had been smeared in the combat, and found an ugly red stain on the shoulder of her red dress.

  Luckily, Khalil had a really smart ermine jacket in his closet. It covered the stain nicely. She left by the penthouse elevator. No one stopped her as she walked out, passed through the lobby, and exited the revolving front door onto Central Park South, where she called a taxi.

  11

  “How did it go tonight?” Stan asked when she got back to the brownstone.

  “Not bad,” she said, dumping her loot into the bed. “A dream night for a thief. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near enough to buy a spaceship with.”

  “We don't need to buy one,” Stan said. “I've got a plan that ought to work now that we have some money to play around with. The first thing we're going to need is a spaceship driver.”

  “I'd love to talk about it,” Julie said. “But first I need a bath. And I'm famished! Sometimes stealing can be hard work. Oh, by the way, here's a present.” She tossed the dagger onto the bed.

  Stan picked it up and admired the gleaming narrow blade and the rhino handle. “Where'd you get this?”

  “Just a little trinket I picked up during the evening.”

  12

  Over the next two weeks, Julie converted the loot from Khalil's apartment to cash, and Stan lost no time putting it to work. There was information to buy, people to bribe, and round-the-clock work by hired technicians to put Norbert into full working condition.

  Two weeks to the day after Julie's theft at the Plaza, she met Stan for lunch at the Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Since it wasn't a workday for her, she permitted herself a cocktail.

  Stan was looking pretty well. A shade paler than usual, but still not bad for a man dying of cancer and sustaining himself on heavy doses of the most addicting narcotic substance known to man. His eyes were a little dreamy, but his voice was firm enough as he said, “Julie, we're ready to make our move.”

  “Today?”

  “That's right. Are you ready?”

  She gave him an exasperated look. “Of course. You really don't have to ask me that.”

  “Sorry, I didn't mean anything by it.”

  Her voice softened. “No, I'm sorry, Stan. I don't mean to snap at you. It's the waiting. It's hard on my nerves.”

  “Well,” Stan said, “it'll soon be over. If this plan works, we'll have ourselves a pilot.”

  “And if it doesn't work?”

  “We could be dead.”

  “Fair enough. Where are we going?”

  “To look up an old friend of mine and make him an offer he can't refuse.”

  13

  Jersey City, even in its best days, had been a city many people found objectionable.

  It hadn't improved much since the days before the Human-Alien Wars and the human reoccupation. On the day Stan and Julie went there, half of the streets downtown were awash due to a burst water main from a week before, and the city's repair crews still hadn't gotten around to capping it.

  Ragged, mean-looking men and women hung around every street corner. They looked like down-and-outers, but there was something sly and dangerous about them, too. There were soup kitchens set up here and there, and the buildings looked old and dilapidated. Even the newly built sections of the city were starting to show wear, their poor construction materials already crumbling.
Packs of wild dogs slinked in and out of back alleys; nobody had gotten around to getting rid of them yet.

  “It's pretty bad,” Stan said, like he was apologizing for it.

  “Hey, I've seen worse,” Julie said. “Not that I want to hang around this place …”

  At Central Station, Stan found them a motorized pedicab. The driver was a gnarled old brute, dressed nearly in rags, with a shapeless felt hat on which, incongruously, was the glittering bright medallion that let him legally operate a for-hire vehicle.

  Stan peered inside the three-wheel pedicab. Some of these drivers had been known to hide accomplices inside, the better to rob the customers, or so it was said. Stan didn't really know what to expect. He hadn't been outside New York City in years.

  He gave the driver the address, and the man grunted. “You sure you want to go there, mister?”

  “Yes, I'm sure. Why do you ask?”

  “You're going to the heart of the old Gaslight District. Where the space derelicts and the chemheads hang out.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “No place for a lady, either.”

  “Shut your face and get moving,” Julie said.

  “Long as you know what you're getting into.” The pedicab operator started up the hand-cranked washing-machine motor that ran his little vehicle. Stan and Julie settled back.

  Once the driver got up to speed, he gave them a dashing ride. He wove in and out of traffic on Jersey City's wide boulevards, the pedicab dodging in and out of the debris that the striking garbage collectors would get around to picking up once they settled their contract with the city. The street was like an obstacle course, filled with boxes, packing cases, mattresses, wrecked vehicles, even the carcass of a horse. There were also plenty of vehicles, driven by kamikaze drivers who were hell-bent on getting somewhere, anywhere, rushing around and dodging in and out of each other's way like rules of the road were no more than memories. There was a dirty gray sky overhead, the sun concealed behind dark-edged clouds. It wasn't anyone's fault that the day was so rotten, but you felt like blaming someone anyhow. Looking around, Stan thought, “To paraphrase Robert Browning, anything so ugly had to be evil.”

  “How do you like it?” the driver asked, turning back to fix Stan with a hard look.

  “The city? It looks like it's fallen on hard times.”

  “Buddy, you can say that again. This has always been a bad-luck city. Gutted during the Alien Wars. That happened to a lot of cities. Gave them a chance to rebuild. Only crappier.”

  “Well, things are tough all over,” Stan said, wishing the driver would turn around and pay attention to the traffic.

  The driver acted like he had eyes in the back of his head. Cars came shrieking at him from every direction; and somehow they always missed and he kept right on talking.

  “You're from New York, right? I can always tell. You people didn't get the Pulsing Plague like we got it here in Jersey. Turned whole neighborhoods into madhouses filled with raving lunatics before it did them the favor of killing them. But not all of them, worse luck. There are some plague people still alive, you know. They were infected, but it didn't kill them. But it can kill you if they touch you.”

  “I've been inoculated against plague,” Stan said.

  “Sure. But what good will an inoculation do you against the new berserkers you get around here? They're mostly people who recovered from the Pulser, but with something missing. It was like some center of control in their heads just vanished. Berserkers can get into a frenzy over the smallest thing, over nothing at all. And then watch out for them because they start killing and don't stop until somebody stops them.”

  “I'll watch out for them,” Stan said, feeling very uncomfortable.

  What was he getting himself and Julie into?

  “You wanta good restaurant?” the driver said suddenly.

  “Try Toy's Oriental Palace over on Ogden. They got a way with soypro you'd never believe. They use real spices in their sauces, too.”

  “Thanks, I'll remember that,” Stan said. “Are we close now?”

  “You can smell it, can't you?” the driver said, grinning.

  “Yep, we're just about there.”

  The driver slowed down and looked for an opening in the traffic, found one that was too small, and decided to make it larger. He propelled the little pedicab into it, suffering no more than a bruised bumper, ducked into a narrow street off the boulevard, took a couple of turns, and pulled up to the curb.

  Stan and Julie got out. Stan saw they were in an evil-looking neighborhood, which was just about what he'd expected. Above him, rising above the buildings, he saw a landmark: the spire of the Commercial Services Landing Field, a local service facility where non-stellar spaceships took off and landed. There had been a lot of discussion about it in the newly formed city council. Too close to the city, some said. It could be a source of danger. If one of those things goes down … Some people still didn't trust spacecrafts. It was a point, but the other side had the answer. “It'll bring jobs into the city. We'll be the closest full-facility field within a hundred-mile radius of New York. A lot closer than the Montauk Point facility. The business will flock to us.” And in Jersey City, where business is king and corruption is its adviser, there was no answer to that.

  The spaceport's spire was several miles away, Stan figured. He was in a neighborhood of small ramshackle buildings built against the bulwark of several skyscrapers.

  He was standing in front of Gabrielli's Meat Market, advertising fresh pork today in addition to the usual soypro steaks and turkeytofu butterballs, and the place stank of blood and chemicals. Next to it was a small newsstand, and what looked like a betting parlor beside that betting was legal in the state of New Jersey, an important source of revenue. Most of the state legislature didn't approve of gambling, but money was hard to find these days, even with the giant Bio-Pharm plant recently opened in nearby Hoboken and with MBSW — the Mercedes-Benz Spaceship Works — sprawled out in Lodi.

  A young woman, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, came up to Stan. She was slender and tall, and she wore a new motorcycle jacket. Ignoring Julie, she said, “Can I help you, mister?”

  Stan shook his head. “I'm not interested today, thank you.”

  She glared at him. “You think I'm selling sex? Forget it, stupid. I can see you got a lady with you. And besides, you don't have enough to buy me.”

  “What are you offering, then?” Stan said.

  “Advice. Guidance.”

  Stan couldn't help laughing. “Thanks, but we can do without it.”

  “Can you really? You people from around here?”

  “No, as a matter of fact.”

  “That's pretty clear. You want to walk out of here alive? You'd better buy a pass.”

  Stan looked around. There seemed to be nothing much happening on the street. It all looked safe enough. Yet something about her tone of voice chilled him, and he said, “Just out of curiosity, what happens if we don't take a pass?”

  She shrugged. “What usually happens to people who stray onto other people's turf?”

  “But I'm standing in a public street!”

  “It's turf all the same. You're in the territory of the Red Kings. I can sell you a pass that'll keep you out of trouble, or you can take your chances.”

  Julie had been standing by, listening, letting Stan handle it, but she was getting impatient. “For heaven's sake, Stan, give her something and let's get on with it!”

  “I guess I'll take two passes,” Stan said. “How much are they?”

  Her price of ten dollars didn't seem too bad. Stan paid with a twenty and waited for change.

  “For the other ten I'll sell you some advice,” the woman said.

  Stan hesitated, then decided not to argue. “Okay. What's your advice?”

  “When you go into the soup kitchen,” she said, “don't forget your pail.” And then she turned and walked away.

  Stan looked at the pass in his hand. It was a
playing card, the five of diamonds. Turning it over, he saw a fine looping scrawl in red Magic Marker. He couldn't read it, but it looked just like graffiti.

  “Hey, kin I help?” a voice asked.

  It was a vagrant in a shapeless graycloth hat who had spoken to them. He looked fat and stupid and evil.

  Julie said to him, “Buzz off, buster.”

  The man looked for an instant as though he was prepared to take umbrage at the remark. Then, warned perhaps by a sixth sense that told him when he was outmatched, he mumbled something and walked on.

  “I should be doing the protecting,” Stan said.

  “Don't get all bent out of shape over it,” Julie said. “I can take care of bums and wise guys, but I don't know how to build robots. It all evens out in the end.”

  “Yeah, I guess it does,” Stan said. “Here we are.”

  They walked up the crumbling steps of a rotting tenement. An odor of roach repellent fought with the smell of crushed roaches. There was not much to choose between them. Dim yellow light bulbs burned overhead as they climbed to the third floor.

  Stan found the right door and knocked. No answer. He knocked again, louder.

  Julie said, “Maybe we should have phoned.”

  “No telephone.” Stan hammered on the door. “I know he's in there. There's a light on under the door. And I can hear the TV.”

  “Maybe he's shy,” Julie said. “I think we can fix that.” With one well-placed kick, she shattered the lock. The door swung inward.

  Within, there was a dismal-looking apartment that might have been pretty nice along around the time Rome was founded. It was a hideous place of ancient wallpaper and mildew, and the sound of a toilet running.

  Smell of frying kelp patties from other apartments overlay the basic odors. There was an overflowing garbage pail, with two cardboard cartons of garbage beside it.