The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself here . . .

  So maybe that’s the best place to start the story, that night.

  It was a Monday, the last one in November, at about 9 o’clock. The year was 1964.

  Ma Chetton was sweeping the few remaining cheese surprises from her last visit to the kitchen down onto a plate of freshly-made cookies, their steam rising up into the smoky atmosphere of her husband Bill’s Pool Emporium over on Sycamore, when the place shook like jello and the strains of The Trashmen’s Surfin’ Bird, which had been playing on Bill’s pride-and-joy Wurlitzer, faded into a wave of what sounded like static. Only thing was we’d never heard of a jukebox suffering from static before. Then the lights went out and the machine just ground itself to a stop.

  Jerry Bucher was about to take a shot – six-ball off of two cushions into the far corner as I recall . . . all the other pockets being covered by Ed Brewster’s stripes: funny how you remember details like that – and he stood up ramrod tall like someone had just dropped a firecracker or something crawly down the back of his shorts.

  “What the hell was that?” Jerry asked nobody in particular, switching the half-chewed matchstalk from one side of his mouth to the other while he glanced around to put the blame on somebody for almost fouling up his shot. Ed was never what you might call a calm player and he was an even worse loser.

  Ed Brewster was crouched over, his shoulders hunched up, watching the dust drifting down from the rafters and settling on the pool table, his girlfriend Estelle’s arms clamped around his waist.

  Ma was standing frozen behind the counter, empty plate in her hand, staring at the lights shining through the windows. “Felt like some kind of earthquake,” she ventured.

  Bill Chetton’s head was visible through the hatch into the kitchen, his mouth hanging open and eyes as wide as dinner plates. “Everyone okay?”

  I leaned my pool cue against the table and walked across to the windows. By rights, it should have been dark outside but it was bright as a night-time ballgame, like someone was shining car headlights straight at the windows, and when I took a look along the street I saw sand and stuff blowing across towards us from the vacant lot opposite.

  “Some kind of power failure is what it is,” Estelle announced, her voice sounding even higher and squeakier than usual and not at all reassuring.

  Leaning against the table in front of the window, my face pressed up against the glass, I saw that the cause of that power failure was not something simple and straightforward like power lines being down between Forest Plains and Bellingham, some thirty-five miles away. It was something far more complicated.

  Settling down onto the empty lot across the street was something that resembled a cross between a gigantic metal canister and an equally gigantic vegetable, its sides billowing in and out.

  “Is it a helicoptor?” Old Fred Wishingham asked from alongside me, his voice soft and nervous. Fred had ambled over from the booth he occupied every night of the year and was standing on the other side of the table staring out into the night. “Can’t be a plane,” he said, “so it must be some kind of helicoptor.” There sounded like a good deal of wishful thinking in that last statement.

  But wishful thinking or not, the thing descending on the spare ground across the street didn’t look like any helicoptor I’d ever seen – not that I’d seen many, mind you – and I told Fred as much.

  “It’s some kind of goddam hot air balloon,” Ed Brewster said, crouching down so’s he could get a better look at the top of the thing – it was tall, there was no denying that.

  “Looks more like some kind of furry cloud,” Abel Bodeen muttered to himself. I figured he was speaking so softly because he didn’t feel like making that observation widely known because it sounded a mite foolish. And it did, right enough. The truth of the matter was that the thing did look like a furry cloud . . . or maybe a giant lettuce or the head of a cauliflower, with lights flashing on and off deep inside it.

  Pretty soon we were all gathered around the window watching, nobody saying anything else as the thing settled down on the ground.

  Within a minute or two, the poolroom lights came back on and the shaking stopped. “You going out to see what it is?” Fred asked. Nobody responded. “I guess somebody should go out there to see what it is,” he said.

  Right on cue, the screen door squeaked behind us and we saw the familiar figure of Jimmy-James Bannister step out onto the sidewalk. He glanced back at the window at us all and gave a shrug. Then he started across the street.

  “Hope that damn fool knows what he’s doing.” Ed Brewster was a past master at putting everyone’s thoughts into words.

  The truth of the matter was Jimmy-James knew a whole lot of things that none of the rest of us had any idea at all about. And anything he didn’t know about he just kept on at until he did. Jimmy-James – born James Ronald Garrison Bannister (he’d made his first name into a double to go partways to satisfying his father and partways to keep the mickey-taking down to an acceptable minimum) – was the resident big brain of Forest Plains. Still only twenty-two years old – same age as me, at the time – he was finishing up his Master’s course over at Princeton, studying languages and applied math.

  Jimmy-James could do long division problems in his head and cuss in fourteen languages which, along with the fact that he could drink anyone else in town – including Ed – under the table, made him a pretty popular member of any group gathering . . . particularly one where any amount of liquor or even just beer was to be consumed. He was home for Thanksgiving, taking the week off, and there’s a lot of folks owe him a debt of gratitude for that fact.

  Anyway, there went Jimmy-James, large as life and twice as bold – though some might say ‘stupid’ – walking across the street, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets and his head held high, proud and fearless. There were a couple of muted gasps from somewhere behind me and then the sound of shuffling as folks tried to get closer to the window to get a good look. After all, we’d all seen from the War Of The Worlds movie what happened to people who got a little too close to these objects . . . and we’d all pretty much decided that the thing across the street was about as likely to have come from anyplace on Earth as it was to have flown up to us from Vince and Molly Waldon’s general store down the street. Nobody actually came right out and said it was from another planet but we all knew that it was. But why it was here was another matter, though we weren’t in any great rush to find out the answer to that question. None of us except Jimmy-James Bannister, that is.

  “Go call the Sheriff,” Ma Chetton whispered.

  I could hear Bill Chetton pressing the receiver and saying Hello? Hello? like his life depended on it. It didn’t come as any surprise when Bill announced to the hushed room that the line seemed like it was dead. Then the jukebox kicked in again with a loud and raucous A papapapapapa . . ., the needle somehow having returned to the start of The Trashmen’s hit record.

  The street outside seemed like it was holding its breath in much the same way as the folks looking out of the window were holding their breath . . . both it and us waiting to see what was going to happen.

  What happened was both awesome and kind of an anticlimax.

  Just as Jimmy-James reached the sidewalk across the street, the sides of the giant vegetable balloon canister from another world dropped down and became a kind of shiny skirt reaching all the way to the ground. No sooner had that happened than a whole group of smaller vegetable things – smaller but still twice the size of Jimmy-James . . . and, at almost six-four, JJ is not a small man – came sliding down the platform onto terra firma . . . and into the heart of Forest Plains.

  We could hear their caterwauling from where we were, even over the drone of The Trashmen telling anyone who would listen that the Bird was the Word . . . and, as we watched, we saw the vegetable-shapes come to a halt on the sidewalk right in front of Jimmy-James where they kind of spun around and then gathered around him in a tight
circle. Then all but one of them moved back a few feet and then the last one moved back, too.

  At this point, Jimmy-James turned around and waved to us. “Come on out,” he yelled.

  “You think it’s safe?” Ed Brewster asked.

  I shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be they mean any harm,” Ma Chetton said softly, the wonder in her voice as plain as the streaks of grey colouring the hair around her ears and temples.

  “They come all the way from wherever it is they come from, seems to me that if they’d had a mind to do us any harm they’d have done it by now,” said Old Fred Wishingham. “That said, mind you,” he added, “I’m not about to go charging out there until we see what it is they have come for.”

  “Maybe they haven’t come for nothing at all,” Estelle suggested.

  Somebody murmured that such an unlikely scenario could be the case but they weren’t having none of it. That was the way folks were in Forest Plains in those days – the way folks were all over this country, in fact. Nobody (with the possible exception of Ed Brewster, and even he only did it for fun) wanted to make anyone look or feel a damned fool and hurt their feelings if they could get away without doing so. With Estelle it could be difficult. Estelle had turned making herself look a damned fool into something approaching an art form.

  “You mean, like they’re exploring . . . something like that?” Abel Bodeen said to help her out a mite.

  “Yeah,” Estelle agreed dreamily, “exploring.”

  “Well, I’m going out,” Ma said. And without so much as a second glance or a pause to allow someone to talk her out of it, she rested the empty plate on the counter-top and strode over to the door. A minute or so later she was walking across the street. It seemed like the things had sensed she was going to come out because they’d moved across the street like to greet her, swivelling around at the last minute – just as Ma came to a stop – and ringing her just the way they had done with Jimmy-James.

  They seemed harmless enough but I felt like we should have the law in on the situation. “Phone still out, Bill?” I shouted. Bill Chetton lifted the receiver and tried again. He nodded and returned it to the cradle.

  “Okay Ed,” I said, “let’s me and you scoot out the back and run over to the Sheriff’s office.”

  Ed said okay, after thinking about that for a second or two, and then the two of us slipped behind the counter and into Bill’s and Ma’s kitchen, then out of the back door and into the yard, past the trashcans towards the fence . . . and then I heard someone calling.

  “What was that?” I whispered across to Ed.

  Ed had stopped dead in his tracks on the other side of the fence. He was staring ahead of him. When I got to the fence I looked in the direction Ed was looking and there they were. Three of them. Right in front of us, wailing. I’ll never forget that sound . . . like the wind in the desert, lost and aimless.

  The door we’d just come out of opened up again behind us and Fred Wishingham’s voice shouted, “Hold it right where you . . .” and then trailed off when Fred saw the things. “I was just going to tell you that some of those things had just turned around and headed over to where you’d be appearing . . . and, well, you already saw that.” Fred had lowered his voice like he’d just been caught shooting craps in Church.

  Ed nodded and I told Fred to get back inside.

  As I heard the lock click on the door, I whispered to Ed. “You think maybe they can read our minds?”

  Ed shrugged.

  The things were about ten, maybe twelve feet high and seemed to float above the ground on a circular frilled platform. I say “floated” because they didn’t leave any marks as they moved along, not even in the soft dirt of the alleyway that ran behind Bill’s and Ma’s store.

  The platform was about a foot deep and, above that, the thing’s body kind of tapered up like a glass stem until it reached another frilly overhang – like a mushroom’s head – at the top. Halfway between the two platforms a collar of tendrils or thin wings – like the gossamer veils of a jellyfish – stuck out from the stem a foot or so and then drooped down limply about three feet. These seemed to twitch and twirl of their own accord, no matter whether a wind was blowing or not, and it didn’t take me too long to figure out these were what passed for arms and hands on the things’ own world.

  I looked up at the first creature’s top section, trying to see if there were any kind of air-holes or eyes but there was nothing, although the texture of the skin-covering was kind of translucent . . . see-through, for want of a better phrase, and I could see things moving around in there, shifting and re-forming. Where the noise they made came out, I couldn’t tell. And we never did find out.

  We watched as the creatures moved closer. Suddenly, the one at the front turned around real fast and the hand-arm things fluttered outwards, like a sheet settling on a bed, and, just for a moment, they touched my shoulder. There was something akin to affection there. At the time, I thought I was maybe imagining it . . . maybe reading the creature’s thought-waves or something, but I was later to discover that there was, if not an outright affection, then at least a feeling of familiarity on the creature’s part.

  This confrontation lasted only a few seconds, a minute at the most, and then the creatures moved back away from us in the direction of the Sheriff’s office, the wing things outstretched towards us as they went.

  “What did you make of that?” Ed Brewster said, his voice a little croaky and hoarse.

  “I have absolutely no idea at all,” I said.

  I kept watching because one of the creatures intrigued me more then the others. This one carried what seemed to be some kind of foam box, thick with piled-up layers of what looked like cotton candy. All the time we’d been ‘meeting’ with the leader – we supposed the thing that had touched me was the leader – this other creature was removing small pieces of foam which it seemed to absorb into its tendrils. It was still doing it as the three of them moved down the alleyway. Just as they reached the back of the Sheriff’s office, the leader put down its wings, turned around and, leaving the other two behind, moved up onto the sidewalk and out of sight.

  I turned at the sound of hurried footsteps behind me and saw Jimmy-James running along the alleyway, his face beaming a wide smile. Ma Chetton was following him, her head still turned in the direction of the street to see if any of the creatures were following her.

  “What about that!” JJ said. Then, “What about that!”

  I nodded and when I turned to look at Ed, he was nodding too. There didn’t seem much else to do.

  “Did they say anything?” Jimmy-James asked. “Did they say where they’ve come from?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Not a word. Just that mournful wailing. Gives me the creeps . . . sounds like a coyote.”

  “Or a baby teething,” Ma said breathlessly.

  “Same here,” said JJ. “I tried them with everything I know . . . English, French, German, Spanish, Russian . . . quite a few more. And I tried out a couple of hybrids, too.”

  “Like standing in the United Nations,” Ma Chetton muttered testily, her breath rasping. “Or hanging atop the Tower of Babel come Doomsday.”

  “What the hell are hybrids?” Ed Brewster asked.

  “Mixtures of two or three languages,” JJ explained. “In the old days, that was the way most folks communicated . . . I mean before any one single language or dialect had gained enough of a footing to be commonplace. And I tried them with all kinds of signs and stuff but they didn’t seem to know what I was doing. I thought maybe they would have known all about our language by listening to our radio waves out there in outer space. But it was no-go. I can’t figure out how they communicate with each other at all,” he said. “Unless it’s that wailing noise or maybe through that thing that one of them’s carrying around.”

  “You mean the box-thing? The thing that looks like a pile of cotton candy?”

  JJ nodded. “He’s messing with that thing all the time, changing it even as I’m trying
to talk to them.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “but did you notice he’s taking things out instead of adding to what’s already in there.”

  “I’d noticed that,” JJ said. “I was wondering if that stuff is absorbed into him and enables him to communicate to the others. Like a translator.”

  I shrugged. It was all too much for me.

  Ed glanced around to make sure none of those creatures had sneaked up on him and said, “We figure they can read our minds.”

  “Really?” said JJ. “How’s that?”

  “Well,” Ed said, matter-of-factly, “they knew we were coming out here into the alleyway.”

  JJ frowned and glanced at me before returning his full attention to Ed.

  Ed gave a characteristic shrug. “Why else would they come on down here from the street if they didn’t know we were coming out?”

  While JJ mulled that over, I said, “What do you figure they want, JJ?”

  The back door to the poolroom opened and Abel Bodeen peered out. “Is there any of those things out there?”

  “Nope, they’ve gone down to see the Sheriff,” I said.

  Abel pulled a face and gave a wry smile. “That should please Benjamin no end,” he said with a chuckle.

  The fact was that the creatures did please Sheriff Ben Travers, as it turned out. Or they didn’t displease him anyway. The truth of the matter was that the aliens didn’t do anything to upset or irritate anyone. In fact, they didn’t do anything at all.

  “Why the hell did they come, Derby?” Abel Bodeen asked me a couple of days after they’d . . . after we’d first seen them.

  “Beats me,” I said.

  We were sitting out on the old straight-backed chairs Molly Waldon had left out in front of her and Vince’s General Store, watching the creatures wander around the town, just as they had been doing all the time. But I was watching a little more intently than I had done at first. The folks around town had become used to the aliens after two full days and nobody seemed to care much what they were there for. So it’s probably fair to say that people hadn’t picked up that the attitude of the creatures was changing. It wasn’t changing by much, but it was changing.