Invasion! Earth vs. The Aliens

by Robert Reginald

  Already the city was busy with people; in places even a few stores were open again, and I saw a drinking fountain spurting fresh running water. The remnants of the red weed were being systematically rooted out and cleared away.

  I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed before I began my melancholy pilgrimage to my long-lost house in Novato, how busy the streets were, how vivid life seemed in New-Francisco. So many people, so many things to do: it seemed incredible now that any great number of them could have been killed. But then I noticed how yellow the people were, how gaunt, how shaggy their hair, how large and bright their eyes, how every other man still sported a set of dusty, dirty rags. Their faces seemed to hold one of two expressions: an exultation at the work to be done, or a grim resolution to persevere in the face of adversity.

  Otherwise, San Francisco seemed almost like a city of tramps. Charities were distributing free sacks of food arriving from other parts of the country. Haggard police (they wore white stars on their breasts to distinguish them from everyone else) stood at the corners of every street to maintain order (the power was still out). I saw little evidence of the Martian occupation until I reached the North Beach area, where I noticed fronds of the red weed still scaling the walls of a garden.

  That was where I saw the single sheet of paper tacked to a power pole, the first issue of the Chronicle to be published since the fall of the city. It was the most primitive thing I’ve ever seen, obviously run off a laser printer that someone had managed to get working again. There were even a couple of ads at the bottom of the page, one for “clean water” and “good food,” and the other from Madame Stavroula, who had miraculously risen from the dead and was back telling fortunes again—this time for a can of beans or some lentil soup!

  That told me as much as anything about the spirit of the returnees: they now had a future to look forward to! But I learned nothing new about the Martian invasion from the paper, except that already, just a short time after the last of the aliens had perished, an examination of the alien machines was already yielding results in our laboratories. No details were forthcoming, however, and few have actually been published since.

  Regular service on BART and flights to and from the San Francisco International Airport gradually resumed, albeit on a limited basis. Service to Oakland was promised within the week, once a makeshift bridge had been constructed by the Navy. A few buses were up and running free of charge. I took one north, wanting to see my home again and to find some trace of my wife. I wasn’t in any mood for casual conversation, so I just got a seat to myself, and sat there with folded arms, looking out at the sunlit devastation flowing past the windows. The vehicle jolted over potholes that had been temporarily filled in; on either side of the road the houses were frequently just blackened ruins.

  One lane of the Golden Gate Bridge had been cleared, with police directing traffic back and forth. No tolls were being collected. Part of Highway 101 was blocked just the other side of Fort Baker, however, so we had to detour over several rough side routes. Gangs of volunteer laborers were trying to remove the worst of the wreckage and restore basic travel. Many of the highways would obviously require repaving.

  Everywhere the countryside seemed unfamiliar to me. San Rafael in particular had suffered grievously. The old mission there was completely demolished, and would have to be rebuilt from scratch. The little streams that we crossed were heaped with masses of red weed that had mottled leaves like pickled cabbage. The woods around here were too dry, however (those that still survived), to support the red climber.

  Beyond the city, but within sight of the highway, I saw a mound of earth that signaled where one of the great spaceships had initially landed. A number of people were standing around the open pit, and some National Guard troops were busy doing something (I couldn’t see what) in the very center. Over the workings flew the Star Spangled Banner, flapping cheerfully in the morning breeze. The adjoining gardens were everywhere crimson with the weed, a wide expanse of livid color cut with purple shadows, very painful to the eye in the bright sunshine. My gaze shrank with relief from the scorched grays and sullen reds of the foreground to the ochre-brown softness of the northern hills.

  The portion of the Redwood Highway that led north to Novato was still under repair, but I wanted to go to Sonoma anyway to check on Becky. I hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck. The town of Sonoma was pretty much gone, as if a tornado had swept through its center, wiping out the businesses and most of the housing, including Anita’s place. All that remained there was a concrete slab, a chimney, a driveway, and a bright green lawn.

  One of the surviving neighbors pointed me north, so I walked a ways up Highway 12 before another kind soul gave me a lift to Glen Ellen. After much searching I located Berke Fernández at his Star Rover Lodge (named for a Jack London novel), and he told me that Becky and her relatives had been evacuated weeks earlier to Rohnert Park. He knew nothing of them after that. Somehow he and his family and motel had come through the war unscathed.

  I went to Rohnert Park, but no one there could tell me anything except that refugees had been sent off every which way during the war, depending on the deployment of the fighting-machines, and that they had no records of who’d passed through the area or where they’d gone.

  So eventually, after a week’s searching with nothing to show for my efforts, I finally went back home.

  I stopped by the pit where the first Martian machine had landed, and remembered Private Mayer, the National Guardsman. The wrecks of the military vehicles still littered the landscape. I stood there for the longest time. I don’t really know why. I just did.

  Then I walked through the burned skeletons of the trees, neck-high at times in the red weed, only to find that Novato Boulevard was already being restored. I wandered around town for awhile, delaying the inevitable. I wanted to go home—but I didn’t. I was afraid of what I might find—or what I wouldn’t find! Finally I quit debating with myself, and turned up Olivet. A man was standing out in front of my house. He called me by name as I approached. I’d almost forgotten who I was in the past month; it seemed strange hearing my name spoken again by a former acquaintance.

  “Alex,” he yelled. “Alex Smith!”

  Then I recognized Mindon, my dear old friend Min! Mindon lived! One of my friends had survived the war!

  I rushed forward and embraced him.

  “Man,” he said, “man, I thought you were dead for sure. No one knew what’d happened to you.”

  “Where’d you go?” I managed to gasp out.

  “They took us to Ukiah,” he said. “The Martians never got that far. I worked as a civilian volunteer, trying to get supplies to the border areas. Hot damn, it’s good to see you again.”

  “You too. Have you heard anything about Becky?”

  He looked down. “Sorry, man. So many people are missing now, and there’s just no news about any of them. She could be anywhere.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I looked over at my house. It seemed empty and forlorn. There wasn’t any life left to it. I’d already known that, of course. The door was open, swinging in the light breeze.

  “I was trying to clean the place up for you,” he said, “just in case, you know. I kept hoping, even as the weeks went by. I guess it worked!”

  The door slammed shut once again, jolting me out of my lethargy. Time to take stock, I thought. The curtains of my office fluttered in and out of the window from which the Guardsman and I had watched the coming of the dawn more than a month earlier. No one had closed it since. The bushes were just as I’d left them so many weeks earlier, and part of the garden was still trampled into the ground. Many of the plants had suffered from lack of water.

  I stumbled into the downstairs hall, but the house felt completely bereft of spirit. The stairway carpet was discolored where I’d crouched on the night of the invasion. I could still see our muddy footsteps going up the stairs.

  I followed the traces to my study. On my desk, with t
he meteorite paperweight still holding it down, was the sheet of paper that I’d left half-finished on the afternoon that the skies had opened wide. I reread my priceless prose with some amusement. This was intended to be a book on the probable evolution of Man’s Moral Ideas with the development of civilization, ad nauseam, ad nauseam, all of which seemed perfect nonsense to me now; the last sentence was supposed to be the opening of a prophecy:

  “In about two hundred years,” I’d written, “we might expect—”

  You betcha! I still remembered my inability to finish that sentence, a little more than a lifetime ago, and how I’d taken a break to read my newspaper and to get a cup of coffee to recast my stale thoughts. I’d gone into the garden, and there I’d heard the story of “The Men from Mars.”

  I went downstairs into the dining room. The spoiled food had been tossed, thanks to Mindon’s efforts, as had the empty beer bottles. I was desolate. I’d been stupid to think that I’d find anything here worthwhile other than broken dreams and wishful thinking.

  I went back outside to Mindon, and he suggested that we walk over to Zee’s, which was open for business again.

  “I don’t have any money,” I said.

  “It’s on me.”

  He pulled a pad of bright green paper out of his pocket, and wrote an “I.O.U” to Zee.

  “Real money seems to be scarce these days,” he said, “so the businessmen are accepting tokens.”

  Zee’s was run by a veteran of Iraq, whose brain had been partially fried by the atrocities he’d witnessed there; he only seemed halfway normal when he was cooking. You never knew what was on the menu until you sat down, because he just fixed whatever sounded good to him that day; but he was an extraordinarily natural chef, and anything that he made was really, really good to eat.

  “You, uh, you back?” he said, when he saw me sit down.

  “I’m back,” I said. “How’ve you been, Zee?”

  “I, uh, I, uh, I….”

  “Never mind, you look good.”

  “Thank, uh, you.”

  Then he turned back to the grill, where something truly scrumptious was in process.

  “You know,” I said, “this is really strange.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Mindon said. “You turn towards Zee and everything seems, like, normal again. Then you look out the window and you realize you’ll never, ever be normal again in your entire life.”

  “That’s it!”

  So we watched Zee. That seemed a more normal thing to do.

  I paid no attention to the patrons, some of whom I knew, but who were wholly absorbed in the small communities of their tables or their food, or both. People came and people went, and we just talked idly between us. Mostly I told him what’d happened to me.

  The door opened again behind us, and then a very strange thing happened, one that to this day seems nothing short of a miracle.

  “Well, it’s just no use, Auntie,” a woman’s voice whispered. “The house looks deserted. No one’s been there for weeks. No one seems to have any news. Let’s get a bite to eat before heading back.”

  The voice was familiar.

  I turned around and gasped out loud. Standing there before me was my dear, dead wife, whose face had now gone completely white. She uttered a faint cry.

  “You,” she said. “I…I knew—”

  She put her hands up and swayed. I rushed and caught her as she fell forward into my arms. In a moment my life had been restored to me. I felt so damned grateful that I cried. I just couldn’t help myself. I just cried and cried and so did she. For once I couldn’t say anything at all. The academic man was finally buried beneath the raw emotion of the moment.

  I just knew that finally, finally, I had come home again, and that fact somehow made the whole trip worthwhile.

  EPILOGUE

  DEAD RECKONING

  Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.

  —John Keats

  Alex Smith, 18 Bi-November, Mars Year i

  Novato, California, Planet Earth

  Now that I’ve reached the end of my story, I realize that I can actually add very little to the questions that remain about the invaders. My particular interest is speculative philosophy: what if, what might have been, what could be. My knowledge of comparative physiology is confined to having read a few popular books and essays. Even so, it seems to me that Martina Kosnick’s conclusions regarding the sudden disappearance of the Martians are likely to remain unchallenged for the foreseeable future. I’ve assumed here that her rationale is absolutely correct.

  No bacteria except terrestrial bugs were found in the bodies of the aliens—or in the Martian plant life. The fact that the aliens failed to bury any of their dead may point to their ignorance of bodily decay, which on Earth is caused by microbes; or it may just represent some peculiarity in their cultural heritage. So many questions like this have answers that are wholly based on supposition; the sad fact is, no one was ever able during those days to communicate with the Martians, either directly or indirectly, and much remains uncertain about their methods, motivations, and even the operation of their machines.

  The composition of the Black Death, which the Martians employed with such deadly effect, also remains unknown, despite numerous attempts at synthesis; and the mechanism used to generate the sting-ray remains a puzzle, although the weapon appears to be based on some sort of laser technology. The terrible disasters at Alabaster Sands, Rancho Cucaracha, and Castle Rock have made experimenters somewhat wary of dissecting advanced Martian technology. The brown scum and dark dust that were a residue of the neutralized Black Death mostly vanished before it could be recovered, leaving just minute samples that have proven equally difficult to analyze.

  The results of Professor Jarmann’s multitudinous dissections of the Martian bodies, his cutting and sawing and probing, have already been discussed earlier in this narrative. Almost everyone is familiar with the magnificent, almost complete alien specimen on display in the Natural History Museum of the California Academy of Sciences, and the detailed videos and photographs of the Martians that have been posted on the Internet.

  A question of more immediate concern is the possibility, even the probability, of another invasion by the Martians. In my estimation, not nearly enough attention is being given to this threat. With every orbit of Mars, with every opposition of the two planets, we can anticipate another attack. If Singletown is right, and the Martians were unable to communicate with their lost expeditionary force, then it may take years, even decades, for them to analyze exactly what went wrong. But the reasons why they attacked Earth in the first place, whatever those are, are still valid, and the likelihood of their return is without question. Sooner or later “they’ll be back,” to paraphrase a famous California governor who spent the entire invasion period raising funds in Europe.

  But maybe the Martian home world did communicate with its outriders on Earth. Maybe they’re already preparing a second strike force. If so, we must be ready. We have to keep watching the skies, and especially the Red Planet. We have to have defenses in place to fight the invaders wherever and whenever they land, immediately, before they can establish their bases and their war machines—and, if possible, even before they reach the Earth.

  It does seem to me, though, that they’ve now lost one great advantage: the element of surprise. We now know they exist, and we now understand the threat that they pose to our species. Possibly they understand this and will be more cautious in any future attack. Possibly not.

  No human being will ever be able to think about man’s place in the universe in quite the same way again. We’re not alone any longer. And our nearest neighbors, while they may be intelligent, are surely not our friends. Perhaps the only way that we’ll ever be able to rest at night is to take the fight to Mars itself. Analyzing the cold equations in this light, I really think that we have no choice: it’s us or them. Another war is surely inevitable.

  We’ve learned a hard lesson here. We can nev
er again regard our planet as a safe, secure hiding place for mankind. We can never again dismiss the unseen good or evil that may suddenly fall upon us from the depths of outer space. Maybe in the greater design of things the invasion from Mars was not without benefit: it’s robbed us of that serene confidence in the future that is the most fruitful source of decadence; it’s leveled our innocence. Human science has already benefited by the study of the Martian machines. The war has also done much to promote the community of man. We can only hope that the Martians have watched the ugly death of their pioneer settlers and have learned their lesson.

  Before the alien ships landed, most of our scientists questioned the notion of intelligent life on other worlds. We simply had found no evidence to support the theory, despite the work of SETI and other such projects. Now we see things quite differently. If the Martians can travel through space, so can we. If the Martians exist, then others do as well, possible friends or possible foes, and we would be fools to ignore the opportunity they present.

  It’s time for man to spread his wings and cast his seed beyond the confines of just one planet or one solar system. But right now that’s only a remote dream. The destruction of the Martian threat has to come first. To them, perhaps, and not to us, the future is ordained—unless we take the initiative, unless we carry the fight to the Red Planet.

  For myself, I confess that the stress of my experience during the War of Two Worlds has left me with an abiding sense of insecurity. I sit in my office writing these words, and then suddenly I see again the red weed and the writhing flames, and I feel my house abandoned and desolate. I walk out to Novato Boulevard, and watch the vehicles passing by—an SUV filled with vacationers, a delivery van, a police car, a school bus—and suddenly I find myself escaping again with Mayer the Guardsman through the hot, brooding silence of a dark and dangerous night.