Alien From the Stars

by Jeff Sutton

  Listen closely, the alien commanded again. His words flowed like a stream through Toby's mind.

  Toby's initial amazement gave way to wonder, elation, and finally humility. Abruptly the voice in his brain fell silent, and again there was only the night, the shadowy figures of his companions.

  The Russians? he asked. When Barlo didn't answer, Toby's eyes swept the darkness. He saw only the blobs of bushes and the white of shale, heard only the occasional sound of insect wings. It was all but inconceivable that soldiers were all around them -- that near them were two Russians intent on killing Barlo. He thought it must be a wild dream.

  He looked ahead. The Under Secretary's group had turned to await their arrival. He recognized the general's tall figure standing slightly apart from the others. As they drew closer, the Under Secretary detached himself from the group and came toward them.

  "Ah, you are here." He paused as if not knowing quite what to say, then added nervously, "You know the others, of course."

  The alien nodded. He'd talked with the entire group earlier in the day.

  Toby looked at the general, who stood ramrod-stiff, his gaze on Barlo. In comparison, the alien's figure resembled that of a very small child.

  Toby glanced at Linda. Although her face was but a faint blur in the darkness, he sensed her encouraging smile. Someone ought to know about the

  Russians, he thought desperately. He craned his neck to look down the slope.

  The sheriff moved to his side.

  "Gettin' jittery?" asked Gramp.

  "Always hate to lose a good pinochle player," the sheriff murmured. He moved his lips close to Toby's ear. "What's bothering you, son?"

  "There are people down there," Toby whispered.

  "Soldiers."

  "Russians," he countered. "Barlo told me."

  "Well, now..." The sheriff's hand dropped to his side before he remembered that he carried no Page 78

  gun. Almost as quickly he moved to interpose his stocky body between Barlo and the view from below.

  The Under Secretary asked, "When do you believe the ship might arrive?"

  "Very shortly." Barlo's voice was a squeak in the night.

  "How do you know?" The Under Secretary peered more closely at him. So did the general.

  "I'm in communication with it."

  "Communication?" The Under Secretary was startled. The general stiffened, but that was all.

  Barlo didn't answer.

  What about the Russians? Toby let the question flare in his mind as he fought his apprehension, at the same time marveling at Barlo's back of perturbation. But then Barlo had never exhibited distress, not even when the vigilantes were pursuing him across the fields.

  Don't worry, the alien counseled. Despite the assurance, Toby's uneasiness persisted. Several times he thought he detected movement below the brow of the hill. So did the sheriff, for Toby saw him turn his head sharply, squinting into the darkness.

  "I see something!" The exclamation from one of the Under Secretary's group brought back Toby's attention. The man's eyes were turned toward the sky. Toby looked up, conscious that everyone was doing the same. At first he saw nothing except the glimmer of stars, the gleaming swath of the Milky Way.

  All at once he realized that the stars directly overhead were being eclipsed.

  A cylindrical splotch appeared in the sky, grew steadily bigger and bigger. Someone uttered a low exclamation. His eyes riveted to the monstrous form obliterating the star field, Toby felt his suspense grow until it was almost a physical pain. Conscious that he was holding his breath, he exhaled slowly, cast a swift glance around. Gramp, Linda, the sheriff -- everyone on the hill was standing as if transfixed, their eyes riveted on the enormous, still expanding object above them.

  He couldn't begin to guess how high it might be or how large. He only knew that it was more gigantic than anything he'd conceived of in his wildest dreams.

  Abruptly, the object stopped growing in his visual field. A stir ran through the group. He looked up again at the blackness, at the starless sky, and thought how puny were the works of man.

  "Mighty big," observed Gramp. No one answered. The Under Secretary swung nervously toward the alien. So did the general. The latter looked from the slight figure on the knoll to the huge object in the sky and back again. Toby could sense his incredulity.

  "It can't land here," the Under Secretary protested. He gestured helplessly at the looming form overhead. The alien remained silent, his small face tilted upward. Toby had the impression that he hadn't heard. "It can't land here," the Under Secretary repeated desperately.

  A sense of impending danger flooded Toby's mind. He jerked his gaze to the slope, subconsciously knowing the danger came from there. The Russians?

  Worriedly he peered into the darkness, the awful sense of threat swirling through him.

  "What is it, son?" The sheriff's voice came as a whisper.

  "I don't know." No sooner had he spoken than he had the swift impression of movement.

  Something thudded against the ground a few yards away and instantly burst into a brilliant flare that illumined two figures with rifles just below him.

  As he blinked, blinded by the harsh glare, the sheriff sprang to shield the alien. A rifle cracked.

  The sheriff winced, one hand thrusting the alien behind him. A helmeted figure rose from the brush, swung a snub-barreled weapon toward the two figures.

  "Down," rasped the sheriff. Another shot sounded, and he staggered, without loosing his grip on the alien.

  With shocking suddenness, a cone of eerie green light burst from the huge vessel overhead, bathing the entire hill and the brush-covered fields around it. So intense was the glare that the Page 79

  flare on the brow of the hill appeared but slightly brighter than a candle. A sharp exclamation escaped the general's lips.

  Aware that his arm was outflung, Toby started to lower it and found to his horror that he couldn't. Neither could he move his feet or head. His entire body was frozen into rigid immobility. Out of the corner of an eye he saw that the Under Secretary, his aides, and the general were caught in the same catatonic posture. The sheriff held one foot lifted as if in the process of taking a step, and now was oddly off balance. The silence from behind, from all sides, indicated that everyone and everything within the cone of green light were transfixed in exactly the same way. He tried to call to Barlo, but no answer came.

  Down through the emerald light came a small craft, oval-shaped at each end. Toby first glimpsed it in the periphery of his frozen stare. The craft touched down noiselessly about a dozen feet away, and simultaneously a door slid open in the side facing him.

  Barlo walked to the open doorway and turned, his large violet eyes resting for a long moment on Toby's face. Farewell. The word, touching Toby's mind, held infinite sadness.

  Good-bye, good-bye. Toby tried to shout the words but couldn't, so let them flame in his mind.

  The alien shifted his gaze to Gramp, to Linda, to the sheriff. Although Toby sensed no communication, he was certain that Barlo was bidding farewell to each in turn. Finally the large violet eyes turned to the

  Under Secretary.

  "Good-bye." This time he spoke aloud. "Thank your government and your people for the shelter they have given me." He looked at Toby again before turning to enter the ship. The door slid shut behind him, and the small vessel rose swiftly into the cone of emerald light.

  Farewell, Toby. The words in his mind echoed as from afar, then the cone of emerald light blinked out.

  Instantly the tableau was broken. In the dying light from the flare on the slope he saw the sheriff's lifted foot stab toward the ground. A crash of gunfire came from the snub-barreled weapon held by the helmeted figure below him, and the bodies of the two men with rifles jerked convulsively.

  A babble of voices broke out as other helmeted figures rose from the thick brush all around.

  "Sheriff!" Suddenly remembering, Toby leaped to the big man's side.
/>   "Nicked," the sheriff drawled.

  "Better'n television," cackled Gramp. Toby swung his gaze toward the sky, saw a shadow against the stars that grew smaller and smaller. But he wasn't thinking of the ship.

  He was thinking of what Barlo had told him.

  Ten years later to the day, to the hour, a man and a woman climbed the hill. The evening was warm, the sky cloud-spattered. The stars that showed in the gulfs between gleamed mistily.

  Occasional lightning flashes stabbed jaggedly from thunderheads above the mountains to the east. Long seconds after

  each flash the thunder rumbled down the granite flanks to echo in the valley, smash against the hill.

  They reached the top and halted silently to survey the world below. Cars crawled down the grade from the west and zoomed across the valley floor, their headlights agleam like fireflies in the night. Other headlights twisted down from the east. Small rectangles of light off to one side of the highway marked the rambling two-story frame house where Linda had lived until her parents had moved farther from the growing city.

  But the valley was different now. Dozens of houses had been built for each one that had stood there before. The loneliness was gone. George

  Murdock's general store remained, little changed. In another building next to it his son now sold souvenirs to mark the alien's visit. There were also a new gas station, a roadside café, lines of tract housing snaking up the nearby hills.

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  Carl Cleator had never gone to Congress, but he had acquired considerable local fame for his part in the capture of the three Russian agents. And the VACI still rode the hills, much as they had before the starship came.

  The man's eyes settled on a small house set several hundred yards behind the general store.

  Although he could see little but the light that spilled from its windows, he could reconstruct every part of it in detail. Following his mother's marriage to the sheriff, it had remained his home until he'd left to attend the university. Later the sheriff had retired and had moved with Toby's mother to Alpine, a nearby mountain community, where he now was busy raising saddle horses.

  He let his mind wander. Across a distant ridge, where the green grass flowed down among the eucalyptus and sycamore, Grandpa Jed had lain for three years. He'd been with Gramp on that final night. A withered, fragile body, palsied hands, but eyes that burned as brightly as ever --

  that had been

  Gramp, when he had come to say goodbye.

  Gramp's eyes watching him in the lamplight -- how vividly he remembered.

  Gramp finally saying, "I was thinking of that Barlo fellow," his eyes expectant. And that night Toby had told him the story -- the things the alien had said in those last moments before he'd stepped into the small pod that had come down in the glare of the green cone.

  When he finished, the old man nodded with an inner satisfaction. "I thought it was something like that," he said. Two hours later he was gone.

  Now, gazing at the sky directly above him, Toby fancied he detected movement, then quickly realized the stars were being blotted out. "They're coming," he murmured.

  Linda clasped his hand. "It seems so natural to be waiting here."

  He knew how she felt. He felt the same, as if this was a part of him that could never be otherwise, that had always been destined. But they weren't going as strangers; they were taking their memories with them. And there would be Barlo.

  But they would be coming back; Barlo had promised. In fifty or a hundred or perhaps a thousand years, whenever Earth was ready, they would return to lead their people to the stars.

  That's what he'd told Gramp on that final night. Several minutes later a small ship landed, a door slid open, and they stepped confidently inside.

  The ship moved swiftly upward toward the gigantic shape that obscured the stars.

  The Authors

  JEAN and JEFF SUTTON are a man-wife writing team whose collaboration has brought them three Junior Literary Guild Selections for their Putnam books: The Beyond, The Programmed Man, and Lord of the Stars. An ex-newspaperman and the author of many novels Mr. Sutton is an editorial consultant in the aerospace field. Mrs. Sutton teaches high school social studies in San Diego, California, where they live.

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