"Not that I know of," I answered honestly. "It might have practiced while I wasn't looking, of course."
"And it never flew before?"
I shook my head.
"And when it did both of these things, there was this skunk of yours aboard?"
"That's right."
"And you say this skunk glided down on a fender after the crash?"
"The fender tipped over and the critter ran into the woods."
"Don't you think it's a little strange that the fender should glide down when all the other wreckage fell kerplunk?"
I admitted that it did seem slightly strange.
"Now about this skunk. You say it purred?"
"It purred real pretty."
"And waved its tail?"
"Just like a dog," I said.
The colonel pushed the pad away and leaned back in his chair. He crossed his arms and sort of hugged himself. "As a matter of personal knowledge," he told me, "gained from years of boyhood trapping, I can tell you that no skunk purrs or ever wags its tail."
"I know what you're thinking," I said, indignant, "but I wasn't that drunk. I'd had a drink or two to while away the time while I was waiting for the jet. But I saw the skunk real plain and I knew he was a skunk and I can remember that he purred. He was a friendly cuss. He acted as if he liked me and he…"
"Okay," the colonel said. "Okay."
We sat there looking at one another. All at once, he grinned. "You know," he said, "I find quite suddenly that I need an aide."
"I ain't joining up," I replied stubbornly. "You couldn't get me within a quarter mile of one of them jets. Not if you roped and tied me."
"A civilian aide. Three hundred a month and keep."
"Colonel, I don't hanker none for the military life."
"And all the liquor you can drink."
"Where do I sign?" I asked.
And that is how I got to be the colonel's aide.
I thought he was crazy and I still think so. He'd been a whole lot better off if he'd quit right there. But he had an idea by the tail and he was the kind of gambling fool who'd ride a hunch to death.
We got along just fine, although at times we had our differences. The first one was over that foolish business about confining me to base. I raised quite a ruckus, but he made it stick.
"You'd go out and get slobbered up and gab your head off," he told me. "I want you to button up your lip and keep it buttoned up. Why else do you think I hired you?"
It wasn't so bad. There wasn't a blessed thing to do. I never had to lift my hand to do a lick of work. The chow was fit to eat and I had a place to sleep and the colonel kept his word about all the liquor I could drink.
For several days, I saw nothing of him. Then one afternoon, I dropped around to pass the time of day. I hadn't more than got there when a sergeant came in with a bunch of papers in in hand. He seemed to be upset.
"Here's the report on that car, sir," he said.
The colonel took the papers and leafed through a few of them. "Sergeant, I can't make head nor tail of this."
"Some of it I can't, either, sir."
"Now this?" said the colonel, pointing.
"That's a computer, sir."
"Cars don't have computers."
"Well, sir, that's what I said, too. But we found the place where it was attached to the engine block."
"Attached? Welded?"
"Well, not exactly welded. Like it was a part of the block. Like it had been cast as a part of it. There was no sign of welding."
"You're sure it's a computer?"
"Connally said it was, sir. He knows about computers. But it's not like any he's ever seen before. It works on a different principle than any he has seen, he says. But he says it makes a lot of sense, sir. The principle, that is. He says…"
"Well, go on!" the colonel yelled.
"He says its capacity is at least a thousand times that of the best computer that we have. He says it might not be stretching your imagination too far to say that it's intelligent."
"How do you meanintelligent?"
"Well, Connally says a rig like that might be capable of thinking for itself, sir."
"My God!" the colonel said.
He sat there for a minute, as if he might be thinking. Then he turned a page and pointed at something else.
"That's another part, sir," the sergeant said. "A drawing of the part. We don't know what it is."
"Don't know!"
"We never saw anything like it, sir. We don't have any idea what it might be for. It was attached to the transmission, sir."
"And this?"
"That's an analysis of the gasoline. Funny thing about that, sir. We found the tank, all twisted out of shape, but there was some gas still left in it. It hadn't…"
"But why an analysis?"
"Because it's not gasoline, sir. It is something else. It was gasoline, but it's been changed, sir."
"Is that all, Sergeant?"
The sergeant, I could see, was beginning to sweat a little. "No, sir, there's more to it. It's all in that report. We got most all the wreckage, sir. Just bits here and there are missing. We are working now on reassembling it."
"Reassembling…"
"Maybe, sir, pasting it back together is a better way to put it."
"It will never run again?"
"I don't think so, sir. It's pretty well smashed up. But if it could be put back together whole, it would be the best car that was ever made. The speedometer says 80,000 miles, but it's in new-car condition. And there are alloys in it that we can't even guess at."
The sergeant paused. "If you'll permit me, sir, it's a very funny business."
"Yes, indeed," the colonel said. "Thank you, Sergeant. A very funny business." The sergeant turned to leave. "Just a minute," said the colonel.
"Yes, sir."
"I'm sorry about this, Sergeant, but you and the entire detail that was assigned to the car are restricted to the base. I don't want this leaking out. Tell your men, will you? I'll make it tough on anyone who talks."
"Yes, sir," the sergeant said, saluting very polite, but looking like he could have slit the colonel's throat.
When the sergeant was gone, the colonel said to me: "Asa, if there's something that you should say now and you fail to say it and it comes out later and makes a fool of me, I'll wring your scrawny little neck."
"Cross my heart," I said.
He looked at me funny. "Do you know what that skunk was?"
I shook my head.
"It wasn't any skunk," he said. "I guess it's up to us to find out what it is."
"But it isn't here. It ran into the woods."
"It could be hunted down."
"Just you and me?"
"Why just you and me when there are two thousand men right on this base?"
"But…"
"You mean they wouldn't take too kindly to hunting down a skunk?"
"Something like that, Colonel. They might go out, but they wouldn't hunt. They'd try not to find it."
"They'd hunt if there was five thousand dollars waiting for the man who brought the right one in."
I looked at him as if he'd gone off his rocker.
"Believe me," said the colonel, "it would be worth it. Every penny of it."
I told you he was crazy.
I didn't go out with the skunk hunters. I knew just how little chance there was of ever finding it. It could have gotten clear out of the county by that time or found a place to hole up where one would never find it.
And, anyhow, I didn't need five thousand. I was drawing down good pay and drinking regular.
The next day, I dropped in to see the colonel. The medical officer was having words with him.
"You got to call it off!" the sawbones shouted.
"I can't call it off," the colonel yelled. "I have to have that animal."
"You ever see a man who tried to catch a skunk barehanded?"
"No, I never have."
"I got eleven of them now,"
the sawbones said. "I won't have any more of it."
"Captain," said the colonel, "you may have a lot more than eleven before this is all over."
"You mean you won't call it off, sir?"
"No, I won't."
"Then I'll have it stopped."
"Captain!" said the colonel and his voice was deadly.
"You're insane," the sawbones said. "No court martial in the land…"
"Captain."
But the captain did not answer. He turned straight around and left.
The colonel looked at me. "It's sometimes tough," he said.
I knew that someone had better find that skunk or the colonel's name was mud.
"What I don't understand", I said, "is why you want that skunk. He's just a skunk that purrs."
The colonel sat down at his desk and put his head between his hands. "My God," he moaned, "how stupid can men get?"
"Pretty stupid," I told him, "but I still don't understand…"
"Look," the colonel said, "someone jiggered up that car of yours. You say you didn't do it. You say no one else could have done it. The boys who are working on it say there's stuff in it that's not been even thought of."
"If you think that skunk…"
The colonel raised his fist and smacked it on the desk. "Not a skunk! Something that looks like a skunk! Something that knows more about machines than you or I or any human being will ever get to know!"
"But it hasn't got no hands. How could it do what you think?"
He never got to answer. The door burst in and two of the saddest sacks outside the guardhouse stumbled in. They didn't bother to salute.
"Colonel, sir," one of them said, heaving hard. "Colonel, sir, we got one. We didn't even have to catch it. We whistled at it and it followed us."
The skunk walked in behind them, waving its tail and purring. It walked right over to me and rubbed against my legs. When I reached down and picked it up, it purred so loud I was afraid it would go ahead and explode.
"That the one?" the colonel asked me.
"He's the one," I said.
The colonel grabbed the phone. "Get me Washington. General Sanders. At the Pentagon."
He waved his hand at us. "Get out of here!"
"But, Colonel, sir, the money…"
"You'll get it. Now get out of here." He looked exactly like you might imagine a man might look right after he's been told he's not going to be shot at dawn.
We turned around and got out of there.
At the door, four of the toughest-looking hombres this side of Texas were waiting, with rifles in their hands. "Don't pay no attention to us, Mac," one of them said to me. "We're just your bodyguards."
They were my bodyguards, all right. They went every place I went. And the skunk went with me, too. That, of course, was why they stuck around. They didn't care a rap about me. It was the skunk that was getting the bodyguarding.
And that skunk stuck closer to me than paper to the wall. He followed at my heels and walked between my feet, but mostly he wanted me to carry him or to let him perch on my shoulder. And he purred all the blessed time. Either he figured I was the only true friend he had or he thought I was a soft touch.
Life got a little complicated. The skunk slept with me and the four guards stayed in the room. The skunk and one of the guards went to the latrine with me while the others kept close. I had no privacy at all. I said it wasn't decent. I said it was unconstitutional. It didn't make no difference. There was nothing I could do. There were, it turned out, twelve of them guards and they worked in eight-hour shifts.
For a couple of days, I didn't see the colonel and I thought it was funny how he couldn't rest until he'd found the skunk and then paid no attention to it.
I did a lot of thinking about what the colonel had said about the skunk not being a skunk at all, but something that only looked like a skunk and how it might know more, some ways, than we did. And the more I lived with it, the more I began to believe that he might be right. Although it still seemed impossible that any critter without hands could know much about machinery in the first place, let alone do anything about it.
Then I got to remembering how me and Betsy had understood each other and I carried that a little further, imagining how a man and machine might get to know one another so well, they could even talk together and how the man, even if he didn't have hands, might help the machine to improve itself.
And while it sounds somewhat far-fetched just telling it, thinking of it in the secrecy of one's mind made it sound all right and it gave a sort of warm feeling to imagine that one could get to be downright personal friendly with machines.
When you come to think of it, it's not so far-fetched, either.
Perhaps, I told myself, when I had gone into the tavern and had left the skunk bedded down in Betsy, the skunk might have looked her over and felt sorry for such a heap of junk, like you or I would feel sorry for a homeless cat or an injured dog. And maybe the skunk had set out, right then and there, to fix her up as best he could, probably cannibalizing some metal here and there, from places where it would not be missed, to grow the computer and the other extra pieces on her.
Probably he couldn't understand, for the life of him, why they'd been left off to start with. Maybe, to him, a machine was no machine at all without those pieces on it. More than likely, he thought Betsy was just a botched-up job.
The guards began calling the skunk Stinky and that was a libel because he never stunk a bit, but was one of the best-mannered, most even-tempered animals that I have ever been acquainted with. I told them it wasn't right, but they just laughed at me, and before long the whole base knew about the name and everywhere we went they'd yell "Hi, Stinky" at us.
He didn't seem to mind, so I began to think of him as Stinky, too.
I got it figured out to my own satisfaction that maybe Stinky could have fixed up Betsy and even why he fixed up Betsy. But the one thing I couldn't figure out was where he'd come from to start with. I thought on it a lot and came up with no answers except some foolish ones that were too much for even me to swallow.
I went over to see the colonel a couple of times, but the sergeants and the lieutenants threw me out before I could get to see him. So I got sore about it and decided not to go there any more until he sent for me.
One day he did send for me, and when I got there the place was crowded with a lot of brass. The colonel was talking to an old grey-haired, eagle-beaked gent who had a fierce look about him and a rat-trap jaw and was wearing stars.
"General," said the colonel, "may I introduce Stinky's special friend?"
The general shook hands with me. Stinky, who was riding on my shoulder, purred at him.
The general took a good look at Stinky.
"Colonel," he said, "I hope to God you're right. Because if you aren't and this business ever leaks, the Air Force goose is cooked. The Army and the Navy would never let us live it down and what Congress would do to us would be a crimson shame."
The colonel gulped a little. "Sir, I'm sure I'm right."
"I don't know why I let myself get talked into this," the general said. "It's the most hare-brained scheme I have ever heard of."
He had another squint at Stinky. "He looks like a common skunk to me," the general said.
The colonel introduced me to a bunch of other colonels and a batch of majors, but he didn't bother with the captains if there were any there and I shook hands with them and Stinky purred at them and everything was cozy.
One of the colonels picked up Stinky, but he kicked up quite a fuss trying to get back to me.
[missing text] just had to sit in a certain place to earn it, why, it was all right.
Stinky didn't pay any attention to any of the stuff. He settled down in my lap and went to sleep, or at least he seemed to go to sleep. He took it easy, for a fact. Once in a while, he opened an eye or twitched an ear, but that was all he did.
I hadn't thought much about it at first, but after I'd sat there for an hour or so,
I began to get an idea of why they wanted me and Stinky in the plane. They figured, I told myself, that if they put Stinky in the ship, he might feel sorry for it, too, and do the same kind of job on it as he had done on Betsy. But if that was what they thought, they sure were getting fooled, for Stinky didn't do a thing except curl up and go to sleep.
We sat there for several hours and finally they told us that we could get out.
And that is how Operation Stinky got off to a start. That is what they called all that foolishness. It does beat hell, the kind of names the Air Force can think up.
It went on like that for several days. Me and Stinky would go out in the morning and sit in a plane for several hours, then take a break for noon, then go back for a few hours more.
Stinky didn't seem to mind. He'd just as soon be there as anywhere. All he'd do would be curl up in my lap and in five minutes he'd be dozing.
As the days went on, the general and the colonel and all the technicians who cluttered up the hangar got more and more excited. They didn't say a word, but you could see they were aching to bust out, only they held it back. And I couldn't understand that, for as far as I could see, there was nothing whatsoever happening.
Apparently their work didn't end when Stinky and I left.
Evening after evening, lights burned in the hangar and a gang was working there and they had guards around three deep.
One day they pulled out the jet we had been sitting in and hauled in another and we sat in that and it was just the same as it had been before. Nothing really happened. And yet the air inside that hangar was so filled with tension and excitement, you could fairly light a fire with it.
It sure beat me what was going on.
Gradually the same sort of tension spread throughout the entire base and there were some funny goings-on. You never saw an outfit that was faster on its toes. A construction gang moved in and started to put up buildings and as soon as one of them was completed, machinery was installed. More and more people kept arriving until the base began to look like an anthill with a hotfoot.
On one of the walks I took, with the guards trailing along beside me, I found out something else that made my eyes bug.
They were installing a twelve-foot woven fence, topped with barbed wire, all around the area.
Aliens for Neighbors Page 13