Joseph Delaney - Partners

“Why would anybody do a thing like that?”

“What?”

“Why,” Mel repeated, “would an alien visitor bring animals like these along even if he did come here? One was big and mean, one was poisonous, one ate everything in sight—they were all pests, Eddie.”

“Who knows? Crazier things have happened. Here on Earth man has screwed up lots of ecologies by moving animals around, rabbits to Australia, for instance, African bees to South America, sparrows and starlings to North America, walking catfish into Florida, the list is endless.

“As far as the basic pattern of life is concerned, panspermia is one of the oldest ideas in science—that life originated in space, not on planets. It’s just as logical to assume it happened once, and spread everywhere matter did, so that primitive organisms rain down on planets as they form, as it is to assume it evolved over and over again on individual worlds.”

“So all life has to be related?” Alice had arrived.

“And locked into the same blueprint, Alice,” Whitman answered. “Anything that later utilized that blueprint would be very close chemically, but there would be many differences in structural organization. And that,” he added, “is precisely what we actually do see here.”

“Whoever brought these—” Mel abruptly stopped talking and gawked skyward, eyes searching for the source of the slapping sound of rotor blades which had just become audible.

“That’ll be our expert,” the sheriff announced as he strode by, heading for the pasture just east of the Simmons farmhouse. “I called the governor, too, and now we’ll have some help searching the farm. He promised me enough men to do a thorough job. If there are any more strange critters around we’ll find them now. Excuse me, I have to go meet Dr. Aberg.”

Once again, there had been a short period of furious activity, government people underfoot everywhere, including, this time, military people. The neighbors got into the act. So did not only the sensational press but the orthodox media. After all, they had one live specimen and two dead ones as proof that something out of the ordinary was going on.

The trouble was that nothing was reproducible. No new specimens turned up. Aberg couldn’t match any of the tracks to anything that had ever lived on Earth, and the tracks stopped in the middle of nowhere. The military had had no unexplained radar contacts. The several national space agencies all professed their ignorance of any unusual occurrences. The space station, which as a matter self-preservation scanned constantly for vagrant objects in orbit, reported near space was absolutely clear of anything big enough to have transported even a tiny animal to Earth.

Because the creatures couldn’t be explained through natural means, even bizarre ones, a new theory evolved, that somebody here on man’s home planet was making monsters.

It caught on. After all, the people had been psychologically prepared with a steady stream of monster movies, and everybody knew that there were many who had the skill to do such things.

Geneticists had tamed the killer bees that way. They routinely created food plants that poisoned the insects that preyed on them, and were on the brink of producing animals that could do the same to insect pests. In Africa, two species of tsetse fly were extinct, victims of a virus man had made.

So, the theory had some scientific support. Had there been any obvious wide-spread infestation it might have generated a panic—but being confined, as it was, to the Simmons farm, only they suffered.

The farm had become a shrine to a number of offbeat cults, pseudo-scientists, assorted loonies, publicity hungry eccentrics and other strange beings.

Mel and Alice got used to dealing with crank telephone calls and weird proposals, and to ejecting trespassers from the farm. The sheriff mounted a special patrol on the county road that lead to the Simmons place, which helped a little, and gradually all but the most persistent of the nuts gave up.

Because they felt the need of more security and couldn’t afford one of those expensive electronic systems, Alice found Big George a consort. Pretty soon she had a fair-sized flock of geese patrolling the homestead. It meant a lot of nocturnal alarms to investigate, but they both felt this was preferable to more surprises like their last one. Getting past old Brutus would have been easy. Getting past these geese was impossible.

When the really scary aliens came, the trouble was more than worth it.

Alice was home alone when it happened. On this early April morning Mel had driven off on the tractor pulling a planter, to re-sow a forty acre field with late soybeans to replace the crop that had been washed out by rains earlier in the month. But Mel carried a cell phone as well as his twelve-gauge, just in case.

When it rang he throttled down so he could hear better, and the machine barely crawled along. What he heard made his blood run cold.

“They’re not animals this time, Mel! They’re not men, either, and they’re carrying spears.”

“Stay in the house, Alice, I’m coming. I’m gonna’ cut the planter loose and come right in. I’m doing it now, Alice. Don’t hang up, you hear?”

“Mel, we’ll need help. I should call the sheriff—I would have, but I wanted to warn you first.”

Mel was out of his cab, phone clamped to his ear with his left hand while with his right he struggled with the coupler. The pin came loose all at once and he dropped it on the ground. He left it there, and turned the valves that shut off the flow of hydraulic fluid to the planter’s control system.

“Wait on that, Alice. Wait until I have the house in sight.” He paused, and twisted loose the last coupling. Then he continued, “Tell me how many there are and what they’re doing.”

“I’ve started counting but lost track when some of them went around behind the house. It looks to me like there are at least ten of them. They’re not all the same size, but every one of them has a spear, and some of them have other things that could be weapons…”

“The planter’s loose, I’m on my way, Alice. What are they doing?”

“Mostly gawking around. A couple of them went into the barn. I saw a couple more chasing geese. There’s a couple trying to get into the chicken house but they don’t seem to know what to make of the wire.”

“I’m out of the field, Alice, making good time now. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. What do these things look like?”

“Two arms, two legs and a head, Mel. No tentacles, no fangs, no claws. They’re all wearing ragged-looking clothes. These could be skins, and they look dirty. None of them have gotten close enough for me to tell much about their faces, if they have faces. All I can really be sure of is that they aren’t human.”

“I’ve got the house in sight, Alice. Hang up and call the sheriff, then call me right back, OK?”

“OK. Be careful, Mel. I think the tractor’ll scare them off when they see it but you never can tell about aliens.”

“I’ll be careful. Now do what I told you.” Mel waited for the click, then he hung up too. Alice’s last quip, as though she was experienced in dealing with extraterrestrials, was typical of her. Alice was soft and cuddly most of the time, but hard as nails when circumstances demanded. No alien was likely to get in the door without getting his hide riddled. Besides, Mel knew from watching Star Trek that aliens weren’t dangerous unless they had cranial deformities.

It seemed like an eternity before his phone buzzed. Mel answered immediately.

“I didn’t tell him much, just that there were about a dozen armed strangers here,” she said. “He’s calling Eddie, and they’ll bring enough muscle to control things without any outside help. At least, that’s what he hopes. I don’t think the sheriff much cares for the feds.”