Fredric Brown: Martians, Go Home

Well, he’d happened to think once during the day, if she’d left it as a joke, the joke had backfired because he’d discovered it at a time when he was alone and could actually wear it. And if by any chance she’d left it deliberately so he’d come across it, think of her and be sorry, she was fooled on that too. Shirt or no shirt, he thought of her occasionally, of course, but he wasn’t sorry in the slightest degree. He was in love again, and with a girl who was the opposite of Margie in almost every way. Her name was Rosalind Hall, and she was a stenographer at the Paramount Studios. He was nuts about her. Mad about her. Crazy about her.

Which no doubt was a contributory factor to his being alone here in the shack at this moment, miles from a paved highway. The shack belonged to a friend of his, Carter Benson, who was also a writer and who occasionally, in the relatively cooler months of the year, as now, used it for the same purpose for which Luke was using it now—the pursuit of solitude in the pursuit of a story idea in the pursuit of a living.

This was the evening of Luke’s third day here and he was still pursuing and still hadn’t caught up with anything except the solitude. There’d beers no lack of that. No telephone, no mailman, and he hadn’t seen another human being, even at a distance.

But he thought that he had begun this very afternoon to sneak up on an idea. Something as yet too vague, too diaphanous, to put on paper, even as a notation; something as impalpable, perhaps, as a direction of thinking, but still something . That was a start, he hoped, and a big improvement over the way things had been going for him in Los Angeles.

There he’d been in the worst slump of his writing career, and had been going almost literally insane over the fact that he hadn’t written a word for months. With, to make it worse, his publisher breathing down his neck via frequent airmails from New York astking for at least a title they could list as his next book. And how soon would he finish the book and when could they schedule it? Since they’d given him five five hundred dollar advances against it, they had the right to ask.

Finally sheer despair—and there are few despairs sheerer than that of a writer who must create and can’t—had driven him to borrow the keys to Carter Benson’s shack and the use of it for as long as he needed it. Luckily Benson lead trust signed a six months’ contract with a Hollywood studio and wouldn’t be using the shack for at least that long.

So here Luke Devereaux was and here he’d stay until he had plotted and started a book. He wouldn’t have to finish it here; once he’d got going on one he knew he could carry on with it back in his native habitat where he’d no longer have to deny himself evenings with Rosalind Hall.

And for three days now, from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon he’d paced the floor, trying to concentrate. Sober and almost going crazy at times. Evenings, because he knew that driving his brain for even longer hours would do more harm than good, he allowed himself to relax, to read and to have a few drinks. Specifically, five drinks—a quantity which he knew would relax him but would neither get him drunk nor give him a hangover the next morning. He spaced those five drinks carefully to last the evening until eleven. Eleven, on the dot, was his bedtime while here at the shack. Nothing like regularity—except that thus far it hadn’t helped him much.

At 8:14 he had made his third drink—the one which would last him until nine o’clock—and had just finished taking his second short sip of it. He was trying to read but not succeeding very well because his mind, now that he was trying to concentrate on reading, wanted to think about writing instead. Minds are frequently that way.

And probably because he wasn’t trying to he was getting closer to a story idea than he’d been in a long time. He was idly wondering, what if the Martians…

There was a knock at the door.

He stared at it for a moment in blank surprise before he put down his drink and got up out of the chair. The evening was so quiet that a car couldn’t possibly have approached without his having heard it, and surely no one would have walked here.

The knock was repeated, louder.

Luke went to the door and opened it, looked out into the bright moonlight. At first he saw no one; then he looked downward.

“Oh, no,” he said.

It was a little green man, about two and a half feet tall.

“Hi, Mack,” he said. “Is this Earth?”

“Oh, no,” Luke Devereaux said. “It can’t be.”

“Why can’t it? It must be. Look.” He pointed upward. “One moon, and just about the right size and distance. Earth’s the only planet in the system with one moon. My planet’s got two.”

“Oh, God,” said Luke. There is only one planet in the solar system that has two moons.

“Look, Mack, straighten up and fly right. Is this Earth or isn’t it?”

Luke nodded dumbly.

“Okay,” said the little man. “We got that settled. Now, what’s wrong with you ?”

“G-g-g,” said Luke.

“You crazy? And is this the way you welcome strangers? Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

Luke said, “C-come in,” and stepped back.

Inside the Martian looked around and frowned. “What a lousy joint,” he said. “You people all live like this or are you what they call white trash? Argeth, what stinking furniture.”

“I didn’t pick it out,” Luke said defensively. “It belongs to a friend of mine.”

“Then you’ve got lousy taste in picking friends. You alone here?”

“That,” Luke said, “is what I’m wondering. I’m not sure I believe in you. How do I know you’re not an hallucination?”

The Martian hopped lightly up on a chair and sat there with his feet dangling. “You don’t know. But if you think so you got rocks in your head.”

Luke opened his mouth and closed it again. Suddenly he remembered his drink and groped behind himself for it, knocked the glass over with the back of his hand instead of getting hold of it. The glass didn’t break but it emptied itself across the table and onto the floor before he could right it. He swore, and then remembered that the drink hadn’t been a very strong one anyway. And under the circumstances he wanted a drink that was a drink. He went over to the sink where the whiskey stood and poured himself half a tumbler of it straight.

He drank a slug of it that almost choked him. When he was sure that it was going to stay down he came back and sat, glass in hand, staring at his visitor.

“Getting an eyeful?” the Martian asked.

Luke didn’t answer. He was getting a double eyeful and taking his time about it. His guest, he saw now, was humanoid but definitely not human. A slight suspicion that one of his friends had hired a circus midget to play a joke on him vanished.

Martian or not, his visitor wasn’t human. He couldn’t be a dwarf because his torso was very short proportionate to the length of his spindly arms and legs; dwarfs have long torsos and short legs. His head was relatively large and much more nearly spherical than a human head, the skull was completely bald. Nor was there any sign of a beard and Luke had a strong hunch that the creature would also be completely devoid of body hair.

The face—well, it had everything that a face should have but again things were out of proportion. The mouth was twice the size, proportionately, of a human mouth and so was the nose; the eyes were as tiny as they were bright, set quite close together. The ears were very small too, and had no lobes. In the moonlight the skin had looked olive green; here under artificial light, it looked more nearly emerald green.

The hands had six fingers apiece. That rneant he probably had twelve toes too, but since be wore shoes there was no way of verifying that.