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

Voices interrupted the perfection. People were approaching, and the woman gave a start, and the leopard lifted his head as she backed against a boy nearly ten years younger than her. Halfway turning her head, she asked the electric air, “Who is it?”

Soldiers, professors, and the Homeland people—everybody was walking up behind them. If they were heading for the penguin pond, they were a little lost. Or maybe they had some other errand. Either way, a dozen important people came around the bend to find the graduate student and boy standing motionless. Then a soldier spotted the cat, and with a loud voice asked, “How do you think they keep that tiger there? I don’t see bars.”

Some people stopped, others kept coming.

The head physicist was in the lead. “Dear God, it’s loose,” he called out.

Suddenly everybody understood the situation. Every person had a unique reaction, terror and flight and shock and startled amusement percolating out of them in various configurations. The colonel and his soldiers mostly tried to hold their ground, and the government people were great sprinters, while the man who had ordered the woman out on the errand laughed loudest and came closer, if not close.

Then the physicist turned and tried to run, his feet catching each other. He fell hard, and something in that clumsiness intrigued the leopard, causing it to slide forwards, making ready to leap.

Bloch had no plan. He would have been happy to stand there all morning with this terrified woman. But then a couple other people stumbled and dropped to their knees, and somebody wanted people to goddamn move so he could shoot. The mayhem triggered instincts in an animal that had killed nothing during its long comfortable life. Aiming for the far bank of the pond, the leopard leapt, and Bloch watched the trajectory while his own reflexes engaged. He jumped to his right, blocking the cat’s path. Smooth and graceful, it landed on the concrete bank, pulling into a tuck, and with both hands Bloch grabbed its neck. The leopard spun and slashed. Claws sliced into one of the big triceps, shredding the sweatshirt. Then Bloch angrily lifted the animal, surprised by how small it felt, but despite little exercise and its advanced years, the animal nearly pulled free.

Bloch shouted, “No!”

The claws slashed again.

Bloch dove into the pond—three hundred pounds of primate pressing the cat into the carp and cold water. The leopard got pushed to the bottom with the boy on top, a steady loud angry-happy voice telling it, “Stop stopstopstopstop.”

The water exploded. Wet fur and panicked muscle leaped over the little fake hill, vanishing. Then Bloch climbed out the water, relieved and thrilled, and he peeled off his sweatshirt, studying the long cuts raking his left arm.

Eyes closed in terror, the young woman hadn’t seen the leopard escape. Now she stared at the panicked fish, imagining the monster dead on the bottom. And she looked at Bloch, ready to say something, wanting very much to thank the boy who had swept into her nightmare to save her life. But then she felt the wet jeans, and touching herself, she said, “I can’t believe this.” She looked at the piss on her hand, and she sniffed it once, and then she was crying, saying, “Don’t look at me. Oh, Jesus, don’t look.”

He slept.

The medicine made him groggy, or maybe Bloch was so short of sleep that he could drift off at the first opportunity. Whatever the reason, he was warm and comfortable in the army bed, having a fine long dream where he wrestled leopards and a dragon and then a huge man with tusks for teeth and filthy, shit-stained hands that shook him again and again. Then a small throat was cleared and he was awake again.

A familiar brown face was watching him. “Hello.”

“Hi.”

The physicist looked at the floor and said, “Thank you,” and then he looked at the boy’s eyes. “Who knows what would have happened. If you hadn’t been there, I mean.”

Bloch was the only patient in a field hospital inflated on the zoo’s parking lot. One arm was dressed with fancy military coagulants, and a bottle was dripping antibiotics into Bloch’s good arm. His voice was a little slow and rough. “What happened to it?”

Bloch was asking about the leopard, but the physicist didn’t seem to hear him. He stared at the floor, something disgusting about the soft vinyl. “Your mother and teacher are waiting in the next room,” he said.

The floor started to roll and pitch. The giant from Bloch’s dream rattled the world, and then it grew bored and the motion quit.

Then the physicist answered a question Bloch hadn’t asked. “I think that a machine has fallen across half the world. This could be an invasion, an investigation, an experiment. I don’t know. The entire planet is blacked out. Most of our satellites are disabled, and we can barely communicate with people down the road, much less on the other side of the world. The alien or aliens are here to torture us, unless they are incapable of noticing us. I keep listening for that god-voice. But there isn’t any voice. No threats or demands, or even any trace of an apology.”

Rage had bled away, leaving incredulity. The little man looked like a boy when he said, “People are coming to us, people from this side of the demarcation line. Witnesses. Just an hour ago, I interviewed a refugee from Ohio. He claims that he was standing on a hilltop, watching the solar sail’s descent. What he saw looked like smoke, a thin quick slippery smoke that fell out of the evening sky, settling on the opposite hillside. Then the world before him changed. The ground shook like pudding and trees were moving—not waving, mind you, but picking up and running—and there were voices, huge horrible voices coming out of the darkness. Then a warm wind hit him in the face and the trees and ground began flowing across the valley before him and he got into his car and fled west until he ran out of gas. He stole a second car that he drove until it stopped working. Then he got a third and pushed until he fell asleep and went off the road, and a state trooper found him and brought him here.”

The physicist paused, breathing hard.

He said, “The device.” He said, “That object that you witnessed. It might be part of the same invasion, unless it is something else. Nobody knows. But a number of small objects have fallen on what was the day side of the Earth. The military watched their arrival before the radars failed. So I feel certain about that detail. These little ships came from every portion of the sky. Most crashed into the Pacific. But the Pender event is very important, you see, because it happened on the land, in an urban setting. This makes us important. We have a real opportunity here. Only we don’t have time to pick apart this conundrum. The quakes are more intense now, more frequent. Ground temperatures are rising, particularly deep below us. One hypothesis—this is my best guess—is that the entity you helped carry to the water has merged with the water table. Fusion or some other power source is allowing it to grow. But I have no idea if it has a different agenda from what the giant alien is doing. I know nothing. And even if I had every answer, I don’t think I could do anything. To me, it feels as if huge forces are playing out however they wish, and we have no say in the matter.”

The man stopped talking so that he could breathe, but no amount of oxygen made him relax. Bloch sat quietly, thinking about what he just heard and how interesting it was. Then a nurse entered, a woman about his mother’s age, and she said, “Sir. She really wants to see her son now.”

“Not quite yet.”

The nurse retreated.

“Anyway,” the physicist said. “I came here to thank you. You saved our lives. And I wanted to apologize too. I saw what you did with that animal, how you grabbed and shook it. You seemed so careless, so brave. And that’s one of the reasons why I ordered the doctors to examine you.”