Damon Knight - Orbit 19

Perhaps they are aliens, come to take over the world. They are biding their time, waiting for their forces to gather, to generate enough energy to make it a decisive victory when they act. The ones who don’t believe the above tend to believe this.

A few think they would be passive, engaging in yet another spectator sport when the end comes.

I don’t think they are aliens.

Howard thought they were monkeys, escaped from a zoo or a laboratory many years ago, that managed to survive in the wild. The wild of Fairdale, Kentucky, twenty minutes from the airport where Howard mechanics.

He didn’t get as good a look as I did. It is my fault he glimpsed them at all, of course, so possibly I am not the tried and true friend to them that I would like to be.

Howard bought a camera for several hundred dollars. Airplane mechanics make very good money, more than many lawyers, especially those who work for the government. He took seven rolls of film, with thirty-six exposures on each roll. He had two hundred fifty-two pictures of oak leaves.

He took the ladder out to the tree and climbed it, but didn’t stay long. All he saw was more leaves. I tried that, too, in the beginning. They are very clever at hiding. They have had thousands of years of practice. I am the first living person to have seen them clearly, and Howard, who glimpsed something that he prefers to call monkey, is the second, who almost did. We could have our names in the _Guinness Book of World Records_.

Howard called in exterminators. He didn’t want them to kill anything, only identify the varmints in his tree.

The exterminators found the cardinal nest, and the squirrels, and they told us we have an infestation of southern oak moths. They produced three leaves with very small holes in them, which I am certain they made with their Bic pens. For fifty dollars they would spray the tree.

We were hardly speaking to each other. When he came home, the first thing he did was inspect the special shelf in the refrigerator where I kept things like bing cherries, emperor grapes, Persian melons. Then he gulped down his dinner, holding his plate on his lap in order to turn around and keep the tree under observation. After dinner he sat on the patio and watched the tree until dark. Then he studied the pictures he had taken, using a magnifying glass, poring over each one for half an hour at least. By twelve he would stagger off to bed. He was looking haggard. He gave up bowling, and haircuts.

He thought they might migrate in the fall. He was getting desperate for fear they would leave one stormy night and his chance to make hundreds, even thousands of dollars would leave with them. One Saturday he went out and returned hours later with a tall, sunburned man who was the director of the zoo.

Howard took him to the tree and the man didn’t even glance at the foliage, but began a minute examination of the ground, taking almost an hour. He was looking for droppings, and there are none. I visualized the tiny toilets, the complicated plumbing, or else the nightly chamber pot ritual, the menial who must empty and clean it in the gray dusk of dawn ...

Howard was furious with the director. He shook him and pointed upward. The man looked past him to where I was standing on the patio and I tried to achieve a tortured smile, like Joan Fontaine’s. I shrugged just a little bit, sadly. Howard whirled about and saw this, but of course the monster dog was at my side, watching him very closely.

The zoo director left by the side gate while Howard stared at me, his lips moving silently.

The next morning before I got up, Howard climbed the tree again. I saw the ladder and waited, sipping coffee. He was up a long time and when he came down he said nothing, didn’t even comment on the scratches on his hands, his cheeks, even his ankles. I never knew an oak tree had stickers. I imagined a tiny brown hand streaking out, a sharp dart raking, fast as thought, withdrawing ...

He tried to smoke them out in the afternoon, and the fire marshal paid a call and explained the no-burn ordinance and how much the fine would be if it happened again.

He bought Sominex and emptied it into the birdbath, and the next morning there were two dopey squirrels draped over the lowest branch of the tree, their tails inches away from the jaws of the dog when it leaped, as it did over and over. The dog was exhausted.

He bought sparkling burgundy. When I became giggly, he begged me to tell him what was in the tree.

“A-corns and squirrels, and a nest of car-din-als,” I chanted and giggled and hiccupped and, I think, fell asleep. It is possible I said it more than once, because something made him angry enough to sleep on the couch, and the next morning the phrase was like a refrain in my head.

For over a week we didn’t speak at all, not even a grunt, and the next week he muttered something about being sorry and it was the heat, and worry about his job, and maybe I should put in an application someplace or other. He heard that International Harvester was hiring secretarial help again. He wanted me to go to bed and I said I’d rather sleep with a crocodile. He slammed the door on his way out.

He came back with a string of perfectly awful beads, all iridescent and shiny and it is impossible to tell what they are even supposed to be. One of us forgave the other and I made him promise to leave them alone and triumphantly he disclosed that he had had a tape recorder going all the time and now he had proof that I knew something was in our oak tree and there was no point in my pretending he was crazy. I am certain he is a secret Nixon Republican.

I said soothingly that of course something lived in the oak tree and its children lived under the lilac bush and its relatives lived in the honeysuckle and everyone knew all about them. He tried to hit me, and the monster dog was outside guarding the tree, so I had to fend him off myself, and eventually we did go to bed, just as we both had planned from the start. After he was sleeping I got up and erased the tape.

It became open warfare. Neither of us was willing to sleep while the other was awake. He began to eat the bing cherries. We both looked haggard.

Someone at work told him about infrared film and he planned to spend the night taking pictures, after the air cooled so _they_ would show up better. At dusk I climbed the tree and moved about here and there, but eventually I had to climb back down, for fear I might fall asleep and fall out. He was snoring. I finished the roll of film, taking a dozen pictures of the monster dog, who was dreaming of the Great Chase in the Sky. He was smiling, his legs twitching, his impossible tongue now and then snaking out to wipe his chops.

It would take several weeks to have the film developed. No one does it locally. Several weeks was too long. Already, in September, the evenings were cool, and if there was an early frost, it could drive them to their southern homes. He was positive they would migrate.

He bought a cat. It refused to climb the tree even though he put it on the trunk where it clung and looked at him hissing. It turned and sprang to the ground and he caught it and put it back, higher. The monster dog was tied to the water spigot, straining to get free, making weird tortured-dog noises. The cat twisted and jumped and jumped again, nearly halfway across the yard; the dog broke loose, and they both leaped over the fence and vanished, the dog baying like the Baskerville hound. Howard had to go after them before someone shot the dog. When they got back, the dog’s feet were sore and it came to me, grinning, its tongue dripping like a hose, expecting high praise for its heroism. Howard didn’t speak. The cat never came back.