Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“What is happening on the other side?”

Mr. Rightly asked him to lean over, and then he whispered. “The colonel was talking to the Homeland person. I heard him say that the hardened military channels didn’t quit working right away. Twenty minutes after the big impact, from Europe, from Asia, came reports of bright lights and large motions, from the ground and the water. And then the wind started to blow hard, and all those voices fell silent.”

Bloch felt sad for his brother, but he couldn’t help but say, “Wow.”

“There is a working assumption,” Mr. Rightly said. “The Earth’s night side has been lost, but the invasion hasn’t begun here. Homeland and the military are trying not to lose this side too.”

Thinking about the alien and the dead kids, Bloch said, “You were right, sir. We shouldn’t have trusted it.”

Mr. Rightly shrugged and said nothing.

Some kind of meeting had been called in the back of the room. There was a lot of passion and no direction. Then the Homeland man whispered to an assistant who wrote hard on the clipboard, and the colonel found new orders and sent his last soldier off on another errand.

“What’s the alien doing now?” Bloch asked.

“Who knows,” Mr. Rightly said.

“Is the radiation keeping us away?”

“No, it’s not…” The glasses needed another shove. “Our friend vanished. After you and I left, it apparently punched through the bottom of the pond. I haven’t been to the Site myself. But the concrete is shattered and there’s a slick new hole reaching down who-knows-how-far. That’s the problem. And that’s why they’re so worried about these little quakes, or whatever they are. What is our green-eyed mystery doing below us?”

Bloch looked at the other faces and then at the important floor. Then a neat, odd thought struck him: the monster was never just the creature itself. It was also the way that the creature lurked about, refusing to be seen. It was the unknown wrapped heavy and thick around it, and there was the vivid electric fear that made the air glow. Real life was normal and silly. Nothing happening today was normal or silly.

He started to laugh, enjoying the moment, the possibilities.

Half of the room stared at him, everybody wondering what was wrong with that towering child.

“They’re bringing in equipment, trying to dangle a cable down into the hole,” Mr. Rightly said.

“What, with a camera at the end?”

“Cameras don’t seem to be working. Electronics come and go. So no, they’ll send down a volunteer.”

“I’d go,” Bloch said.

“And I know you mean that,” Mr. Rightly said.

“Tell them I would.”

“First of all: I won’t. And second, my word here is useless. With this crew, I have zero credibility.”

The physicist and colonel were having an important conversation, fingers poking imaginary objects in the air.

“I’m hungry,” Bloch said.

“There’s MREs somewhere,” said Mr. Rightly.

“I guess I’ll go look for them,” the boy lied. Then he walked out into a hallway that proved wonderfully empty.

Every zoo exists somewhere between the perfect and the cheap. Every cage wants to be impregnable and eternal, but invisibility counts for something too. The prisoner’s little piece of the sky had always been steel mesh reaching down to a concrete wall sculpted to resemble stone, and people would walk past all day, every day, and people would stand behind armored glass, reading about Amur leopards when they weren’t looking at him.

Sometimes he paced the concrete ground, but not this morning. Everything felt different and wrong this morning. He was lying beside a dead decorative tree, marshaling his energies. Then the monster came along. It was huge and loud and very clumsy, and he kept perfectly still as the monster made a sloppy turn on the path, its long trailing arm tearing through the steel portion of the sky. Then the monster stopped and a man climbed off and looked at the damage, and then he ran to the glass, staring into the gloomy cage. But he never saw any leopards. He breathed with relief and climbed back on the monster and rode it away, and the leopard rose and looked at the hole ripped in the sky. Then with a lovely unconscious motion, he was somewhere he had never been, and the world was transformed.

Cranes and generators were rumbling beside the penguin pond. Temporary lights had been nailed to trees, and inside those brilliant cones were moving bodies and purposeful chaos, grown men shouting for this to be done and not that, and goddamn this and that, and who the hell was in charge? Bloch was going to walk past the pond’s backside. His plan, such as it was, was to act as if he belonged here. If somebody stopped him, he would claim that he was heading for the vending machines at the maintenance shed—a good story since it happened to be true. Or maybe he would invent some errand given to him by the little physicist. There were a lot of lies waiting inside the confusion, and he was looking forward to telling stories to soldiers holding guns. “Don’t you believe me?” he would ask them, smiling all the while. “Well maybe you should shoot me. Go on, I dare you.”

The daydream ended when he saw the graduate student. He recognized her tight jeans and the blond hair worn in a ponytail. She was standing on the path ahead of him, hands at her side, eyes fixed on the little hill behind the koi pond. Bloch decided to chat with her. He was going to ask her about the machine that she was looking for, what was it called? He wanted to tell her about carrying the alien, since that might impress her. There was enough daylight now that he could see her big eyes and the rivets in her jeans, and then he noticed how some of the denim was darker than it should be, soaked through by urine.

The girl heard Bloch and flinched, but she didn’t blink, staring at the same unmoving piece of landscape just above the little waterfall.

Bloch stopped behind her, seeing nothing until the leopard emerged from the last clots of darkness.

Quietly, honestly, he whispered, “Neat.”

She flinched again, sucking down a long breath and holding it. She wanted to look at him and couldn’t. She forced herself not to run, but her arms started to lift, as if ready to sprout wings.

The leopard was at least as interested in the girl as Bloch was. Among the rarest of cats, most of the world’s Amur leopards lived in zoos. Breeding programs and Russian promises meant that they might be reintroduced into the Far East, but this particular male wasn’t part of any grand effort. He was inbred and had some testicular problem, and his keepers considered him ill-tempered and possibly stupid. Bloch knew all this but his heart barely sped up. Standing behind the young woman, he whispered, “How long have you been here?”

“Do you see it?” she muttered.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Quiet,” she insisted.

He said nothing.

But she couldn’t follow her own advice. A tiny step backward put her closer to him. “Two minutes, maybe,” she said. “But it seems like hours.”

Bloch watched the greenish-gold cat eyes. The animal was anxious. Not scared, no, but definitely on edge and ready to be scared, and that struck him as funny.

The woman heard him chuckling. “What?”

“Nothing.”

She took a deep breath. “What do we do?”

“Nothing,” was a useful word. Bloch said it again, with authority. He considered placing his hands on her shoulders, knowing she would let him. She might even like being touched. But first he explained, “If we do nothing, he’ll go away.”

“Or jump us,” she said.

That didn’t seem likely. She wasn’t attacked when she was alone, and there were two of them now. Bloch felt lucky. Being excited wasn’t the same as being scared, and he enjoyed standing with this woman, listening to the running water and her quick breaths. Colored fish were rising slowly in the cool morning, begging out of habit to be fed, and the leopard stared down from his high place, nothing moving but the tip of his long luxurious tail.