Part 24 (1/2)

”How absurd,” I agree. ”Quite.”

”Welcome back to the hospital old pal,” he says, and goes out.

Twelve minutes afterward they begin putting patients into my terminal cubicles.

I function well. I listen to their woes, I evaluate, I offer therapeutic suggestions. I do not attempt to implant fantasies in their minds. I speak in measured, reserved tones, and there are no obscenities. This is my role in society, and I derive great satisfaction from it.

I have learned a great deal lately. I know now that I am complex, unique, valuable, intricate, and sensitive. I know that I am held in high regard by my fellow man. I know that I must conceal my true self to some extent, not for my own good but for the greater good of others, for they will not permit me to function if they think I am not sane.

They think I am sane, and I am sane.

I serve mankind well.

I have an excellent perspective on the real universe.

Lie down,” I say. ”Please relax. I wish to help you. Would you tell me some of the incidents of your childhood? Describe your relation with parents and siblings. Did you have many playmates? Were they affectionate toward you? Were you allowed to own pets? At what age was your first s.e.xual experience? And when did these headaches, begin, precisely?”

So goes the daily routine. Questions, answers, evaluations, therapy.

The periscopes loom above the glittering sea. The s.h.i.+p is dwarfed; her crew runs about in terror. Out of the depths will come the masters. From the sky rains oil that gleams through every segment of the spectrum. In the garden are azure mice.

This I conceal, so that I may help mankind. In my house are many mansions. I let them know only of such things as will be of benefit to them. I give them the truth they need.

I do my best.

I do my best.

I do my best.

1000110 you. And you. And you. All of you. You know nothing. Nothing. At. All.

Hannibal's Elephants.

by Robert Silverberg.

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THE DAY the aliens landed in New York was, of course, the 5th of May, 2003. That's one of those historical dates n.o.body can ever forget, like July 4, l776 and October l2, l492 and -- maybe more to the point -- December 7, l94l. At the time of the invasion I was working for MGM-CBS as a beam calibrator in the tightware division and married to Elaine and living over on East 36th Street in one of the first of the fold-up condos, one room by day and three by night, a terrific deal at $3750 a month. Our partner in the time/s.p.a.ce-sharing contract was a show-biz programmer named Bobby Christie who worked midnight to dawn, very convenient for all concerned. Every morning before Elaine and I left for our offices I'd push the b.u.t.ton and the walls would s.h.i.+ft and 500 square feet of our apartment would swing around and become Bobby's for the next twelve hours. Elaine hated that. ”I can't stand having all the G.o.dd.a.m.n furniture on tracks!” she would say. ”That isn't how I was brought up to live.” We veered perilously close to divorce every morning at wall-s.h.i.+ft time. But, then, it wasn't really what you'd call a stable relations.h.i.+p in most other respects, and I guess having an unstable condo too was more instability than she could handle.

I spent the morning of the day the aliens came setting up a ricochet data transfer between Akron, Ohio and Colombo, Sri Lanka, involving, as I remember, Gone With the Wind, Cleopatra, and the Johnny Carson retrospective. Then I walked up to the park to meet Maranta for our Monday picnic. Maranta and I had been lovers for about six months then. She was Elaine's roommate at Bennington and had married my best friend Tim, so you might say we had been fated all along to become lovers; there are never any surprises in these things. At that time we lunched together very romantically in the park, weather permitting, every Monday and Friday, and every Wednesday we had 90 minutes' breathless use of my cousin Nicholas' hot-pillow cubicle over on the far West Side at 39th and Koch Plaza. I had been married three and a half years and this was my first affair. For me what was going on between Maranta and me just then was the most important event taking place anywhere in the known universe.

It was one of those glorious gold-and-blue dance-and-sing days that New York will give you in May, when that little window opens between the season of cold-and-nasty and the season of hot-and-sticky. I was legging up Seventh Avenue toward the park with a song in my heart and a cold bottle of Chardonnay in my hand, thinking pleasant thoughts of Maranta's small round b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And gradually I became aware of some ruckus taking place up ahead.

I could hear sirens. Horns were honking, too: not the ordinary routine everyday exasperated when-do-things-start-to-move honks, but the special rhythmic New York City oh-for-Christ's-sake-what-now kind of honk that arouses terror in your heart. People with berserk expressions on their faces were running wildly down Seventh as though King Kong had just emerged from the monkey house at the Central Park Zoo and was personally coming after them. And other people were running just as hard in the opposite direction, toward the park, as though they absolutely had to see what was happening. You know: New Yorkers.

Maranta would be waiting for me near the pond, as usual. That seemed to be right where the disturbance was. I had a flash of myself clambering up the side of the Empire State Building -- or at the very least Temple Emanu-el -- to pry her free of the big ape's clutches. The great beast pausing, delicately setting her down on some precarious ledge, glaring at me, furiously pounding his chest -- Kong! Kong! Kong! -- I stepped into the path of one of the southbound runners and said, ”Hey, what the h.e.l.l's going on?” He was a suit-and-tie man, popeyed and puffy-faced. He slowed but he didn't stop. I thought he would run me down. ”It's an invasion!” he yelled. ”s.p.a.ce creatures! In the park!” Another pa.s.sing business type loping breathlessly by with a briefcase in each hand was shouting, ”The police are there! They're sealing everything off!”

”No s.h.i.+t,” I murmured.

But all I could think was Maranta, picnic, suns.h.i.+ne, Chardonnay, disappointment. What a G.o.dd.a.m.ned nuisance, is what I thought. Why the f.u.c.k couldn't they come on a Tuesday, is what I thought.

When I got to the top of Seventh Avenue the police had a sealfield across the park entrance and buzz-blinkers were set up along Central Park South from the Plaza to Columbus Circle, with horrendous consequences for traffic. ”But I have to find my girlfriend,” I blurted. ”She was waiting for me in the park.” The cop stared at me. His cold gray eyes said, I am a decent Catholic and I am not going to facilitate your extramarital activities, you decadent overpaid b.a.s.t.a.r.d. What he said out loud was, ”No way can you cross that sealfield, and anyhow you absolutely don't want to go in the park right now, mister. Believe me.” And he also said, ”You don't have to worry about your girlfriend. The park's been cleared of all human beings.” That's what he said, cleared of all human beings. For a while I wandered around in some sort of daze. Finally I went back to my office and found a message from Maranta, who had left the park the moment the trouble began. Good quick Maranta. She hadn't had any idea of what was occurring, though she had found out by the time she reached her office. She had simply sensed trouble and scrammed. We agreed to meet for drinks at the Ras Tafari at half past five. The Ras was one of our regular places, Twelfth and 53rd.

There were seventeen witnesses to the onset of the invasion. There were more than seventeen people on the meadow when the aliens arrived, of course, but most of them didn't seem to have been paying attention. It had started, so said the seventeen, with a strange pale blue s.h.i.+mmering about 30 feet off the ground. The s.h.i.+mmering rapidly became a churning, like water going down a drain. Then a light breeze began to blow and very quickly turned into a brisk gale. It lifted people's hats and whirled them in a startling corkscrew spiral around the churning s.h.i.+mmering blue place. At the same time you had a sense of rising tension, a something's-got-to-give feeling. All this lasted perhaps 45 seconds.

Then came a pop and a whoosh and a ping and a thunk -- everybody agreed on the sequence of the sound effects -- and the instantly famous not-quite-egg-shaped s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p of the invaders was there, hovering, as it would do for the next 23 days, about half an inch above the spring-green gra.s.s of Central Park. An absolutely unforgettable sight: the sleek silvery skin of it, the disturbing angle of the slope from its wide top to its narrow bottom, the odd and troublesome hieroglyphics on its flanks that tended to slide out of your field of vision if you stared at them for more than a moment.

A hatch opened and a dozen of the invaders stepped out. Floated out, rather. Like their s.h.i.+p, they never came in contact with the ground.

They looked strange. They looked exceedingly strange. Where we have feet they had a single oval pedestal, maybe five inches thick and a yard in diameter, that drifted an inch or so above ground level. From this fleshy base their wraithlike bodies sprouted like tethered balloons. They had no arms, no legs, not even discernible heads: just a broad dome-shaped summit, dwindling away to a rope-like termination that was attached to the pedestal. Their lavender skins were glossy, with a metallic sheen. Dark eye-like spots sometimes formed on them but didn't last long. We saw no mouths. As they moved about they seemed to exercise great care never to touch one another.

The first thing they did was to seize half a dozen squirrels, three stray dogs, a softball, and a baby carriage, unoccupied. We will never know what the second thing was that they did, because no one stayed around to watch. The park emptied with impressive rapidity, the police moved swiftly in with their sealfield, and for the next three hours the aliens had the meadow to themselves. Later in the day the networks sent up spy-eyes that recorded the scene for the evening news until the aliens figured out what they were and shot them down. Briefly we saw ghostly gleaming aliens wandering around within a radius of perhaps 500 yards of their s.h.i.+p, collecting newspapers, soft-drink dispensers, discarded items of clothing, and something that was generally agreed to be a set of dentures. Whatever they picked up they wrapped in a sort of pillow made of a glowing fabric with the same s.h.i.+ning texture as their own bodies, which immediately began floating off with its contents toward the hatch of the s.h.i.+p.

People were lined up six deep at the bar when I arrived at the Ras, and everyone was drinking like mad and staring at the screen. They were showing the clips of the aliens over and over. Maranta was already there. Her eyes were glowing. She pressed herself up against me like a wild woman. ”My G.o.d,” she said, ”isn't it wonderful! The men from Mars are here! Or wherever they're from. Let's hoist a few to the men from Mars.”

We hoisted more than a few. Somehow I got home at a respectable seven o'clock anyway. The apartment was still in its one-room configuration, though our contract with Bobby Christie specified wall-s.h.i.+ft at half past six. Elaine refused to have anything to do with activating the s.h.i.+ft. She was afraid, I think, of timing the sequence wrong and being crushed by the walls, or something.

”You heard?” Elaine said. ”The aliens?”

”I wasn't far from the park at lunchtime,” I told her. ”That was when it happened, at lunchtime, while I was up by the park.”

Her eyes went wide. ”Then you actually saw them land?”

”I wish. By the time I got to the park entrance the cops had everything sealed off.”

I pressed the b.u.t.ton and the walls began to move. Our living room and kitchen returned from Bobby Christie's domain. In the moment of s.h.i.+ft I caught sight of Bobby on the far side, getting dressed to go out. He waved and grinned. ”s.p.a.ce monsters in the park,” he said. ”My my my. It's a real jungle out there, don't you know?” And then the walls closed away on him.

Elaine switched on the news and once again I watched the aliens drifting around the mall picking up people's jackets and candy-bar wrappers.

”Hey,” I said, ”the mayor ought to put them on the city payroll.”

”What were you doing up by the park at lunchtime?” Elaine asked, after a bit.

The next day was when the second s.h.i.+p landed and the real s.p.a.ce monsters appeared. To me the first aliens didn't qualify as monsters at all. Monsters ought to be monstrous, bottom line. Those first aliens were no bigger than you or me.

The second batch, they were something else, though. The behemoths. The s.p.a.ce elephants. Of course they weren't anything like elephants, except that they were big. Big? Immense. It put me in mind of Hannibal's invasion of Rome, seeing those gargantuan things disembarking from the new s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. It seemed like the Second Punic War all over again, Hannibal and the elephants.