Fredric Brown - Martians, Go Home

We never learned what they ate or drank or even whether they did eat or drunk. They couldn’t have eaten Earth food, of course; they couldn’t even pick it up or handle it, for the same reason that we couldn’t handle them. Most people thought that, since their kwimming seemed to be an instantaneous process, a Martian would simply kwim to Mars and back again any time he felt the need for food or drink. Or for sleep, if Martians slept, since no one had ever seen a Martian sleeping on Earth.

We knew amazingly little about them.

We didn’t know for sure that they were really here in person. Many people, and especially scientists, insisted that a life form that is noncorporeal, without solidity, cannot possibly mist. And that therefore what we saw weren’t the Martians themselves but projections of them, that the Martians had bodies as solid as ours and left their bodies back on Mars, possibly in a trance state, that kwimming was simply the ability to project an astral body that was visible but not corporeal.

If true, that theory explained a lot, but that there was one thing it didn’t explain even its most ardent proponent had to admit. How could a noncorporeal projection talk? Sound is the physical movement or vibration of air or other molecules so how could a mere projection that wasn’t really there create a sound?

And they certainly created sounds. Actual sounds, not just in the mind of the listener; the fact that the sounds they made could be recorded on wax or tape was proof of that. They could really talk and they could also (but seldom did) knock on doors. The Martian who knocked on Luke Devereaux’s door on what came to be called Coming Night had been an exception in that particular respect. Most of them had kwimmed their way, without knocking, right into living rooms, bedrooms, television stations, night clubs, theaters, taverns (there must have been some wonderful scenes in taverns that night), barracks, igloos, jails, everywhere.

They also showed clearly on photographs, as Luke Devereaux would have found out had he ever bothered to have that roll of film developed. Whether they were there or not, they were opaque to light. But not to radar, and scientists tore their hair over that.

They all insisted that they had no names, or even numbers, and that names were ridiculous and unnecessary. None of them ever addressed a human being by name. In the United States they called every man Mack and every woman Toots ; elsewhere they used local equivalents.

In one field at least they showed tremendous aptitude—linguistics. Luke’s Martian hadn’t been bragging when he said he could learn a new language in an hour or so. The Martians who appeared among various primitive peoples whose tongues had never been broadcast by radio arrived without knowing a word of the language, but they were speaking it adequately within an hour, fluently within a few hours. And whatever language they spoke, they spoke it idiomatically, even slangily, with none of the stiffness and awkwardness with which human beings speak a new language which they have recently acquired.

Many words in their vocabulary were obviously not learned from radio broadcasts. But that isn’t difficult to account for; within seconds of their arrival they, or many of them, had plenty of opportunity to pick up a liberal education in profanity. The Martian, for example, who had broken up Romeo and Juliet on television with his vulgar comment on Romeo’s balcony scene speech was no doubt one who heel first kwimmed into, say, a tavern but had sought greener pastures within a matter of seconds when he had found too many others of his kind had kwimmed into the same place.

Mentally, the Martians were even more alike than they were physically, although again there was minor variation—some of them were even worse than others.

But one and all they were abusive, aggravating, annoying, brash, brutal, cantankerous, caustic, churlish, detestable, discourteous, execrable, fiendish, flippant, fresh, galling, hateful, hostile, ilI-tempered, insolent, impudent, jabbering, jeering, knavish killjoys. They were leering, loathsome, malevolent, malignant, nasty, nauseating, objectionable, peevish, perverse, quarrelsome, rude, sarcastic, splenetic, treacherous, truculent, uncivil, ungracious, waspish, xenophobic, yapping, and zealous in making themselves obnoxious to and in making trouble for everyone with whom they came in contact.

Alone again and feeling blue—there wasn’t even a Martian present or he’d have felt bluer—Luke Devereaux took his time unpacking two suitcases in the little room in a cheap rooming house he’d just taken in Long Beach.

It was just two weeks after Coming Night. Luke had fifty-six dollars left between himself and starvation and he’d come to Long Beach to look for a job, any kind of job that would keep him eating after that fifty-six dollars was gone. He’d given up even trying to write, for a while.

He’d been lucky in one way, very lucky. He’d been able to sublet his hundred-dollars-a-month Hollywood bachelor apartment, which he’d furnished himself, for the same figure by renting it furnished. That left him free to cut his living expenses and still hang onto the bulk of his possessions without having to pay storage on them. He couldn’t have sold them for enough to bother about anyway because the most expense items were his television set and his radio, and both of those were utterly worthless at the present moment. If the Martians ever left, they’d be valuable again.

So here he was in the cheapest district of Long Beach and all he’d brought with him were two suitcases of clothes and his portable typewriter, the latter for writing letters of application.

He’d probably have to write plenty of them, he thought gloomily. Even here in Long Beach the situation was going to be tough. In Hollywood it would have been impossible.

Hollywood was the hardest hit spot in the country. Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City and the whole movie colony area. Everybody connected in whatever capacity with the movie and television and radio businesses was out of work. Actors, producers, announcers, everyone. All in the same boat, and the boat had sunk suddenly.

And by secondary reaction everything else in Hollywood was being hit hard. Bankrupt or failing were the thousands of shops, beauty parlors, hotels, taverns, restaurants and call houses whose clientele had been mostly among movie people.

Hollywood was becoming a deserted village. The only people staying there were those who, for one reason or another, couldn’t get out. As he, Luke, wouldn’t have been able to get out, except by walking, if he’d waited much longer.

Probably, he thought, he should have gone farther from Hollywood than Long Beach but he hated to cut deeply into his dwindling hoard for long-distance transportation. And anyway, things were tough all over.

Throughout the country—except Hollywood, which simply gave up—BUSINESS AS USUAL had been the slogan for a week now.

And in some businesses it worked, more or less. You can get used to driving a truck with a Martian sneering at the way you drive or jumping up and down on the hood—or if you can’t get used to it, at least you can do it. Or you can sell groceries across a counter with a Martian sitting—weightlessly but irremovably—on top of your head and dangling his feet in front of your face while he heckles you and the customer impartially. Things like that are wearing on the nerves but they can be done.

Other businesses did not fare so well. As we have seen, the entertainment business was the first and hardest hit.

Live television was particularly impossible. Although filmed television shows were not interrupted that first night, except at some stations where technicians panicked at the sight of Martians, every live television broadcast was off the air within minutes. The Martians loved to disrupt live broadcasts, either television or radio ones.