We were grateful to the nuhp, but that didn’t make them any easier to live with. They were still insufferable. As my second term as president came to an end, Pleen began to advise me about my future career. “Don’t write a book,” he told me (after I had already written the first two hundred pages of A President Remembers). “If you want to be an elder statesman, fine; but keep a low profile and wait for the people to come to you.”
“What am I supposed to do with my time then?” I asked.
“Choose a new career,” Pleen said. “You’re not all that old. Lots of people do it. Have you considered starting a mail-order business? You can operate it from your home. Or go back to school and take courses in some subject that’s always interested you. Or become active in church or civic projects. Find a new hobby, raising hollyhocks or collecting military decorations.”
“Pleen,” I begged, “just leave me alone.”
He seemed hurt. “Sure, if that’s what you want.” I regretted my harsh words.
All over the country, all over the world, everyone was having the same trouble with the nuhp. It seemed that so many of them had come to Earth, every human had his own personal nup to make endless personal suggestions. There hadn’t been so much tension in the world since the 1992 Miss Universe contest, when the most votes went to No Award.
That’s why it didn’t surprise me very much when the first of our own mother ships returned from its twenty-eight-day voyage among the stars with only two hundred seventy-six of its one thousand passengers still aboard. The other seven hundred twenty-four had remained behind on one lush, exciting, exotic, friendly world or another. These planets had one thing in common: They were all populated by charming, warm, intelligent, humanlike people who had left their own home worlds after being discovered by the nuhp. Many races lived together in peace and harmony on these planets, in spacious cities newly built to house the fed-up expatriates. Perhaps these alien races had experienced the same internal jealousies and hatreds we human beings had known for so long, but no more. Coming together from many planets throughout our galaxy, these various peoples dwelt contentedly beside each other, united by a single common aversion: their dislike for the nuhp.
Within a year of the launching of our first interstellar ship, the population of Earth had declined by one half of one percent. Within two years, the population had fallen by almost fourteen million. The nuhp were too sincere and too eager and too sympathetic to fight with. That didn’t make them any less tedious. Rather than make a scene, most people just up and left. There were plenty of really lovely worlds to visit, and it didn’t cost very much, and the opportunities in space were unlimited. Many people who were frustrated and disappointed on Earth were able to build new and fulfilling lives for themselves on planets that we didn’t even know existed until the nuhp arrived.
The nuhp knew this would happen. It had already happened dozens, hundreds of times in the past, wherever their mother ships touched down. They had made promises to us and they had kept them, although we couldn’t have guessed just how things would turn out.
Our cities were no longer decaying warrens imprisoning the impoverished masses. The few people who remained behind could pick and choose among the best housing. Landlords were forced to reduce rents and keep properties in perfect repair just to attract tenants.
Hunger was ended when the ratio of consumers to food producers dropped drastically. Within ten years, the population of Earth was cut in half, and was still falling.
For the same reason, poverty began to disappear. There were plenty of jobs for everyone. When it became apparent that the nuhp weren’t going to compete for those jobs, there were more opportunities than people to take advantage of them.
Discrimination and prejudice vanished almost overnight. Everyone cooperated to keep things running smoothly despite the large-scale emigration. The good life was available to everyone, and so resentments melted away. Then, too, whatever enmity people still felt could be focused solely on the nuhp; the nuhp didn’t mind, either. They were oblivious to it all.
I am now mayor and postmaster of the small human community of New Dallas, here on Thir, the fourth planet of a star known in our old catalog as Struve 2398. The various alien races we encountered here call the star by another name, which translates into “God’s Pineal.” All the aliens here are extremely helpful and charitable, and there are few nuhp.
All through the galaxy, the nuhp are considered the messengers of peace. Their mission is to travel from planet to planet, bringing reconciliation, prosperity, and true civilization. There isn’t an intelligent race in the galaxy that doesn’t love the nuhp. We all recognize what they’ve done and what they’ve given us.
But if the nuhp started moving in down the block, we’d be packed and on our way somewhere else by morning.
see the metal claw lying in the gutter among the broken bottles and litter, and I recognize it immediately: a piece of an alien spaceship. Before I pick it up, I glance in both directions to make sure no one is watching. The only person nearby is a hooker waiting for a john, and she is watching the cars drive past. A young couple is walking by, but they are looking away, determined to ignore both the hooker and me. They, like so many other people, don’t really want to see what’s around them.
I scoop up the alien artifact. The claw has three digits, joined together at a thick stalk. The end of the stalk is rough, as if it had broken off a larger piece. Though the day is foggy, the metal is warm to the touch. When I touch the claw, I feel its digits flex in response to my touch, but when I examine it more closely, it lies still.
I add the claw to the treasures in my pink plastic shopping bag, and I hurry to the hotel where I live. Harold is at the front desk when I come in. He’s wearing the same dingy white shirt, burgundy tie, and frayed blue suit jacket he always wears. I think he believes that the suit jacket gives him an air of respectability. Harold calls himself the hotel manager, but he’s really just the desk clerk. He’s a middle-aged man with delusions of grandeur.
He looks up when I walk in. “Your social worker was looking for you today,” he grumbled. “She said you had missed your last two appointments.” Harold doesn’t look at me when he speaks. He looks past me, at a point somewhere over my head.
“I must have forgotten,” I tell him. A month ago, I was assigned to a new social worker, a bright young woman just out of graduate school. I suspect that she is an agent of the CIA. The one time that I mentioned the aliens to her, I caught a look in her eyes, a flicker of joyous discovery. She hid her elation, but not before I noticed.
“She left this.” He holds out a slip of industrial green paper. It is an official notification that I have an appointment with the city Department of Social Services tomorrow.
I take the paper, drop it in my shopping bag, and head for my room. On my way through the lobby, I pass Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Danneman, and Mrs. Goldman. They sit in the grimy armchairs in the lobby, watching people walk by the hotel’s front windows. I nod to them and smile, but they do not respond. They stare past me, like zombies who are trying to remember what life was like. I may be old, but I hope I will never be that close to dead. I punch the button for the elevator.
On the top floor of the hotel, the hallway stinks of other people’s food: tomato soup heated on illegal hot plates, greasy burgers from the take-out place on the corner, Chinese food in soggy cardboard containers. Down the center of the hall, there’s a long strip of bright red carpet that covers the path where the gray wall-to-wall carpet has worn through. The runner is wearing too: a trail of footprints and dirt marks the center and the edges are starting to fray.
I carry my shopping bag down the hall to my room—a cozy cubicle furnished with a single bed, a battered chest of drawers, and a chair upholstered in turquoise blue vinyl. The room is small, but I’ve made it my own. Along the walls, I’ve stacked cardboard boxes filled with the things that I’ve collected. The paper bags that hold my other treasures fill most of the floor space. A narrow p
ath leads from the door to the chair.
I make my way to the chair and set my shopping bag on the worn gray carpet. This is the best part of the day. Now I sort the treasures I have found, putting each one where it belongs: the buttons go into the bag of buttons, the bottle caps into the box of bottle caps, the broken umbrella into the stack of broken umbrellas. The green slip from the Department of Social Services goes in the trash.
There is no proper place for the metal claw. I set it on the arm of the chair. I will put it with the other spaceship parts, when I find more.
The government does not want people to know about the alien spaceships. They deny all reports of UFOs and flying saucers. The government is good at hiding the things people would rather not see: the old men and women in the lobby, the hookers on the corners, the aliens who visit our world.
But I know about the aliens. Late at night, I sit on the narrow metal balcony of the fire escape outside my window and I watch the sky. The city lights wash out the stars, but there are other lights in the sky: planes landing at the San Francisco airport, police helicopters on patrol, and, of course, the alien spaceships, small sparks that dance just above the buildings of downtown. Sometimes, I can barely see them. I have to squint my eyes and concentrate, staring into the darkness until at last they become clear.
It was drizzling, night before last, when I tried to communicate with the aliens. I had been watching one particular alien spaceship through the rain-streaked window. Its faint wavering light reminded me of fireflies that I had seen as a child. The light blinked on and off, on and off: a dash, a series of dots. I knew it had to be a message, but I could not translate the signal.
The light came lower, hovering just above the buildings a few blocks away. I left the window and stood by my door, flicking the light switch so that the bare bulb in the ceiling went on and off, on and off, repeating the pattern I had seen. I didn’t know how the aliens responded; from my post by the light switch I could not see out the window. As I was repeating the pattern for the third time, I heard the wailing of a siren and the muffled thunder of a police helicopter. I abandoned the light switch and hurried to the window.
The helicopter was circling nearby. The roving beams of its spotlights reflected from the raindrops, forming bright shafts of light that seemed to connect the copter to the ground. The spotlights moved in a frantic, erratic pattern, rippling over the cars, the alleys, the walls of buildings.
Sirens in the street, bright lights flashing blue and red and blue and red, the rattle of gunfire, a distant explosion—I backed away from the window, suddenly frightened. I turned off my light and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up under my chin. I hadn’t meant to lure the spaceship in too close. I hadn’t meant to cause trouble. For a long time, I lay awake, listening to the sirens.
The next day, Harold said that there had been a drug bust down the street. “Thank God they’re doing something to clean up the neighborhood,” he said to Mrs. Goldman, who wasn’t listening.
Harold believes what he reads in the newspapers. He doesn’t know about the aliens. He doesn’t see the world as it really is.
With the alien claw on the arm of my chair, I lie in my bed, trying to sleep. My room is not a quiet place. The bathroom faucet drips, a delicate tap, tap, tapping in the darkness. The wheezing of buses and the rattling of Muni trains drift up to my window from the street below. My next-door-neighbor’s TV rumbles through the walls—he’s a little deaf, and he keeps the sound turned up loud.
On this particular night I notice a new noise: a furtive scrabbling that stops each time I move. I sit up in the bed and look around, thinking it might be a rat. I’ve seen rats on the stairs, nasty gray shadows that flee at the sound of footsteps.
The metal claw is no longer on the arm of the chair. I wait, remaining very still. Finally, by the pale moonlight that filters through my window, I see the claw crouching among the bags and boxes. As I watch, it begins to move again, pulling itself along with its three digits and dragging its broken stalk across the carpet. I shift my weight, the bed creaks, and the claw stops, freezing in position.
It seems so frightened and helpless, crouching on the floor in the darkness. “It’s all right,” I say to it softly. “Don’t worry. I won’t hurt you. I’m your friend.” I remain very still.
Eventually, the claw moves again. I hear a soft rustling as it pushes between the paper bags. I hear it rattling among the broken umbrellas. I fall asleep to the gentle clicking as its digits flex and straighten, flex and straighten again.
In the morning, I see the claw sunning itself in the pale morning light that comes in the window. When I was a girl on my grandfather’s farm, the morning light was yellow—like the corn that grew in the fields, like the sunflowers on the edge of the garden. But the city light is gray. I remember reading somewhere that different stars cast light of different colors. I wonder what color light the claw is used to.
During the night, the claw has improved itself. It has six legs now—the original three and three more that look like they were constructed from the ribs of a broken umbrella. When I sit up in bed, the claw scurries away, seeking refuge among the boxes and bags. I watch it go.
It’s comforting to have something alive here in my room. I had a kitten once, a scrawny black alley cat that I found hiding under a dumpster in an alley. But Harold found out about it and told me cats weren’t allowed. When I was out, he got into my room and took the kitten away. I don’t think he could catch the claw and take it away. I’ll bet that the claw would hide so well that he wouldn’t even see it.
I get up and wash my face. In a cracked cup, I make myself a cup of instant coffee, using hot water from the bathroom tap. I eat a sweet roll from a bag of day-old donuts that I bought from the shop on the corner. As I eat my breakfast and get dressed, I talk softly to the claw that I know is hidden somewhere among my things. “No one will find you here,” I tell the claw. “I’ll make sure of that. You’ll be okay with me.”
The claw does not respond, but I know it’s there, hidden and silent. I finish dressing, take my shopping bag, and go out to see what I can find.
The day is cold and a bitter wind has swept the gutters almost clean. Though I search for hours, I can’t find any other spaceship parts. I find other things: a few aluminum cans, a rhinestone brooch with a broken pin, a stray button from someone’s coat. Near a construction site, I find a one-foot length of cable made up of many strands of copper wire. But nothing else from the spaceship. Finally, late in the afternoon, I return to my room.
The claw has been busy while I was out. In the narrow space between the bed and the bags of things, it has built a metal framework from the narrow ribs of broken umbrellas. In my absence, it seems to have gained confidence. As I make my way to the chair, it continues working.
The framework forms a cylinder that is maybe six feet long and two feet across. As I watch, the claw neatly snips another rib from a broken umbrella. Carrying the strip of metal in its two front feet, it makes its way to the end of the cylinder, then begins to weave the strip in with the others, pushing it over and under the crisscrossing strips of the framework. It’s a clever little machine, busy about its own business. I wonder if it even notices that I’m home.
I set the shopping bag on the floor at my feet and begin to sort through my acquisitions. Boldly, the claw comes over to investigate these additions to my collection. It examines the cable closely, gently separating the individual copper strands. I watch for a moment and then put my hand down by the floor, wiggling my fingers as if coaxing a cat to come nearer. The claw abandons the cable and turns toward my hand, approaching cautiously. It touches me delicately with two of its digits, hesitates, then clambers onto my outstretched hand.
My hands are still cold from being outside. The claw radiates a comforting warmth, like the glow of a wood fire. Moving slowly, I bring it to my lap. It folds its legs beneath it, snuggling down. I stroke it gently and the claw responds by vibrating pleasantly, like a cat
purring.
“Were you lonely before I found you?” I ask the claw. “Were you lost and all alone?”
The claw just keeps on purring. I can feel its heat through the fabric of my dress. The warmth soothes my aching legs. It feels so right to hold the claw and just sit.
“You must have been frightened,” I say. “It’s much better when someone’s with you.”
I stroke the claw, knowing that I should get up and heat up some soup on the hotplate. But I’m not hungry now, though I haven’t eaten since the sweet roll I had for breakfast. Through my window, I watch the sky grow darker. I relax, reluctant to move, and I consider the framework that the claw has constructed.
It could be something dangerous, I suppose, but I rather doubt that. The claw seems like a friendly creature. I study the structure and think about what it might be. Back in school, I remember experimenting with a worm called the planaria. If you cut off a piece of a planaria, the piece will grow into a whole planaria again. All you need is a piece, and the piece re-creates the rest.
Suppose that the alien spaceship was like a planaria. Each part of it contained all the information about the whole thing. Break off one piece, and that piece would go about reconstructing the rest. I consider the framework that the claw has built.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” I say to the claw. “I think you are rebuilding the spaceship that blew up.”
The claw shows no interest in my theories. After a time, it scrambles off my lap and gets back to work, busily weaving the copper wire in and out through the framework it has built. Every now and then, it selects a metal button from the box of buttons, threads the wire through the holes in the button, and then continues its weaving. I can see no pattern to its selection or placement of buttons. That night, I lie awake, listening to the rustlings of the claw as it searches among my things and assembles them into an alien pattern.
Alien Contact Page 10