Mike Resnick - I, Alien

I didn’t answer. I just headed for the door. If the human race really did hold the key to curing chronic ullnik, my troubles were as good as solved. If I could get the proof… get it to Remsee… no bribe in the universe would stop me from saving Earth.

“Well, that’s fine,” the Naag called after me. “The rope is starting to rub my wrists raw, but I don’t mind so much. And anyway, I’m sure you’ve got more important things to think about.”

Breakneck Mountain rose out of suburbia, an undeveloped pile of rock and tree, a lonely shred of evidence that Earthlings were intelligent. By the time I reached it, night had fallen from it like a cow, and it hung caught and broken in the thousand orange streetlights bordering the highway.

I parked in the breakdown lane and climbed the slope, ascending through the musky darkness in between the trees. Near the top, a blue haze filtered through the branches. I crept forward, catching glimpses of machinery. I approached a clearing. In the center of it loomed the Sublukhar. She squelched, cursing, glistening, tinkering with something. For some reason I could not yet fathom, monkeys hung from branches overhead.

I stepped into the light.

“Nice night,” I said.

She spun around fast for a Sublukhar, her knobbed antennae shrinking. “Well, well. The great Xzchsthyl.” She pronounced it wrong. “I thought you’d be slimier.”

“I haven’t been feeling well,” I said. I’d never met her before, but I knew all about her. She was of a race of incredibly possessive sluglike creatures. They had no word for “yours” in their language, but over seven thousand words for “mine.” When the concept of property possessed by others was first explained to some of their linguists, they laughed hysterically for weeks and finally had to be hospitalized.

“I hear you’re xenoforming Earth,” I said.

“That’s the plan,” she admitted, gurgling at me. “We’re going to turn it into a filing planet.”

“Filing?”

She nodded her slick and eyeless head. “In three days’ time, the machinery you see around you will create the cataclysmic, simultaneous appearance of over three trillion billion trillion manila folders, burying every major landmass on the Earth. It’s for the Griggons. You’ve heard of them?”

I hadn’t. “I’ve been busy lately.”

“An interesting civilization. They reduced forty centuries of history and learning down to a simple, beautiful mathematical equation, then misplaced it. They keep hard copies of everything since then.”

“And Earth is going to store those copies.”

“Only G through K. We’ll need other planets to take up the rest. That is,” she added, “if I can get the job done.”

“Something wrong?”

“I’m having problems,” she admitted. “And I don’t mean you.” She swung her head in the direction of the device she’d been repairing. “I was supposed to be in human form three weeks ago, but my ZrrfCo Somatorific here is on the fritz. Keeps turning everything to monkeys.”

That explained a lot. But she was still slithering slowly toward me, so I held my blaster up where she could see it. “That’s far enough,” I said. “I’m here about the cure for chronic ullnik.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Why didn’t you say so? It’s over there, in that compartment.”

I looked where she had gestured, and saw a hatch in one side of a domed machine. I kept one eye on her and walked to it. I had to scare a crested gibbon away, but I popped the hatch, pulled out a manila folder, and looked inside.

I am no scientist, but the papers in the folder seemed to be the real McCoy. There was even a budget analysis of the cost of harvesting the cure for chronic ullnik. Evidently the Naag had thought about selling the cure himself, but had decided he’d make more money from the xenoforming.

This was it. If I could get this evidence to the government, they’d have to protect the human race. I’d stop the Naag. I was so excited by the prospect that I completely failed to notice that the Sublukhar had pressed the button on her defective ZrrfCo Somatorific, and that I was standing in the active area.

Metamorphosing into a monkey stands low on my list of enjoyable sensations. Growing the hair was the worst part—like someone pulling a million needles out of all the pores on my entire body, all at once. I had to bite the Sublukhar in order to escape, and all the other monkeys chased me through the canopy. I did manage to get away with the evidence, but I was in no condition to drive, and don’t even talk to me about the use of public transportation as a monkey. I particularly and personally hated it because, although I had never met an Earthling monkey myself, I had spent three weeks as a binkled ape one time on Ratcheon in punishment for excess parking violations, and my love of primates was, therefore, a sickly thing at best.

“You’re looking well,” the Naag said when I came in through the window.

I screeched at him.

“I see your point,” he said. “We’ve all got problems. Look at me. I’ve been tied to this credenza for hours. Not that you care about my suffering, of course.”

Trying to guilt me again. Typical. I pivoted on my knuckles and loped into the bathroom, leaving him behind. Once there, I dropped another tab of prepaid calling acid, and after staring at the pretty colors that resulted, I found myself face-to-face again with Remsee.

“Good God,” he said, doing an exaggerated double take. “Xzchsthyl! Is that you?”

I screeched. The hallucination compensated, translating. “That’s right,” I said.

“My God. What happened?”

“I’ve been turned into a monkey.”

He nodded. “Parking violations,” he said knowingly.

“Not this time. But never mind that now.” I held up the manila folder.

“What the hell is that?” he said.

“Evidence. The human race produce a cure for chronic ullnik. We’ll have to protect them now, Remsee, intelligent or not.”

He grabbed our mutual hallucination of the manila folder and leafed through its contents. Then he looked relieved. “Thank God,” he said. “I was beginning to think I’d never get a crack at those hands. I was looking through your research this morning. I found—I think it’s called a television show. They called it Howdy Doody… ”

I was feeling dumber already. I cut him off before he could get into it. “I’ve got to go, Remsee. Just send backup, will you? I’ll have to bring in the Naag and his partner and I’m in no condition to do it alone.”

We disconnected. And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust Remsee… Okay, it was. Either way, I made a few more calls, and showed the evidence about the cure to other higher-ups within the government. Things were looking up, in other words. I sat down on my rented Earthling couch and waited for the cavalry. I picked at fleas to pass the time.

I had run out of fleas some hours later and I was starting to get nervous. Especially nerve-racking was the look on the Naag’s face. If he grinned any wider, he’d be in danger of an embolism.

“Anything seem strange to you?” he said.

I thought about it. Apart from my having been turned into a monkey, there was the lack of a patrol troop materializing in the living room.

“They’re not coming,” the Naag positively gushed. “And do you know why?”

I was starting to have my suspicions, to tell the truth.

“It’s because your friends know by now I’m on your side. By now, they’ve got a message from the Subluk-har. They know that I have every reason to protect the human race.”

I hopped up on the armrest, glaring at him.

“Oh, yes,” he said. He cocked his head. “The human race. Don’t they strike you as odd?” He tried to stand up, but the ropes jerked him back down. He went on talking anyway. “Think about it. After a billion years of competitive evolution, with organism after organism fighting for a niche here, a niche there, one species out of countless others wins the game in an evolutionary eyeblink.”