Fredric Brown: Martians, Go Home

“Want me to pose for you?” asked the Martian. He put his thumbs in his ears and waggled his ten other fingers, crossed his eyes and stuck out a long greenish yellow tongue.

Luke took the shot.

He put another bulb in the gun, wound the film, aimed the camera again. But the Martian wasn’t there. His voice, from another corner of the room, said, “One’s enough, Mack. Don’t crowd your luck by boring me any worse.”

Luke whirled and aimed the camera that way, but by the time he’d raised the flash gun, the Martian was gone. And a voice behind him told him not to make more of an ass of himself than he already was.

Luke gave up and put down the camera. Anyway, he had one shot on the film. When it was developed, it would either show a Martian or it wouldn’t. Too bad it hadn’t been color film, but you can’t have everything.

He picked up his glass again. Sat down with it, because suddenly the floor was becoming just a bit unsteady. He took another drink to steady it.

“Shay,” he said. “I mean, say. You catch our radio programs. What’s the matter with television? You people behind the times?”

“What’s television, Mack?”

Luke told him.

“Waves like that don’t carry that far,” the Martian said. “Thank Argeth. It’s bad enough to listen to you people. Now that I’ve seen one of you and know what you look like—”

“Nuts,” said Luke. “You never invented television.”

“Of course not. Don’t need it. If anything’s going on anywhere on our world that we want to see, we just kwim there. Listen, did I just happen to find a freak, or are all people here as hideous as you are?”

Luke almost choked over a sip he was taking from his drink. “Mean to shay—say, you think you’re worth looking at?”

“To any other Martian, I am.”

“I’ll bet you drive the little girls wild,” said Luke, “That is, if you’re bisexual like us and there are Martian girls.”

“We’re bisexual but not, thank Argeth, like you. Do you people really carry on in the utterly disgusting way your radio characters do? Are you in what you people call love with one of your females?”

“None of your damn business,” Luke told him.

“Thats what you think,” said the Martian.

And he vanished.

Luke stood up—not too steadily—and looked around to see if he had kwimmed to another part of the room. He hadn’t.

Luke sat down, shook his head to clear it, and took another drink, to fuddle it.

Thank God or Argeth, he thought, that he’d got that picture. Tomorrow morning he’d drive back to Los Angeles and get it developed. If it showed an empty chair, he’d put himself in the hands of a psychiatrist, but fast.

If it showed a Martian—Well, if it did, he’d decide then what he was going to do about it, if anything. Meanwhile, getting drunk as fast as he could was the only sensible thing he could do. He was already too drunk to risk driving back tonight and the faster he drank himself to sleep the sooner he’d wake up in the morning.

He blinked his eyes and when he opened them again, there was the Martian back in the chair, grinning at him. “I was just in that pigsty of a bedroom, reading your correspondence. Foo, what trash.”

Correspondence? He didn’t have any correspondence here with him, Luke thought. And then he remembered that he did have. A little packet of three letters from Rosalind, the ones she’d written him while he was in New York tree months ago, seeing his publisher and talking him out of more money on the book he was now trying to start. He’d stayed a week, mostly to renew his acquaintances among magazine editors while he was there; he’d written Rosalind every day and she’d written him three times. They were the only letters he’d ever had from her and he’d saved them carefully, had put them in the suitcase thinking to reread them here if he got too lonely.

“Argeth, what mush,” said the Martian. “And what a damned silly way you people have of writing your language. Took me a full minute to break down your alphabet and correlate the sounds and letters. Imagine a language that has the same sound spelled three different ways—as in true, too and through.”

“God damn it,” said Luke, “you had no business reading my mail.”

“Chip, chip,” said the Martian. “Anything’s my business that I make my business and you wouldn’t tell me about your love life, Sweetie-pie, Darling, Honeybun.”

“You really did read it then, you little green wart. For a dime, I’d—”

“You’d what?” asked the Martian contemptuously.

“Toss you all the way back to Mars, that’s what,” Luke said.

The Martian laughed raucously. “Save your breath, Mack, for making love to your Rosalind. Bet you think she meant all that hogwash she fed you in those letters. Bet you think she’s as dopey about you as you are about her.”

“She is as dopey—I mean, God damn it—”

“Don’t get an ulcer, Mack. Her address was on the envelope. I’ll kwim there right now and find out for you. Hold your hat.”

“ You stay right —”

Luke was alone again.

And his glass was empty so he made his way across to the sink and refilled it. He was already drunker than he’d been in years, but the quicker he knocked himself out the better. If possible, before the Martian came back, or kwimmed back, if he really was coming or kwimming back.

Because he just couldn’t take any more. Hallucination or reality, he couldn’t help himself, he would throw the Martian right through the window. And maybe start an interplanetary war.

Back in the chair he started on the drink. This one should do it.

“Hey, Mack. Still sober enough to talk?”

He opened his eyes, wondering when he had closed them. The Martian was back.

“Go ’way,” he said. “Get lost. Tomorrow I’ll—”

“Straighten up, Mack. I got news for you, straight from Hollywood. That chick of yours is home and she’s lonesome for you all right.”

“Yeah? Tole you she loved me, didden I? You li’l green—”

“So lonesome for you she had someone in to console her. Tall blond guy. She called him Harry.”

It partly sobered Luke for a second. Rosalind did have a friend named Harry, but it was platonic; they were friends because they worked in the same department at Paramount. He’d make sure and then tell off the Martian for tattling.

“Harry Sunderman?” he asked. “Slender, snappy dresser, always wears loud sport coats—?”

“Nope, this Harry wasn’t that Harry, Mack. Not if he always wears loud sport coats. This Harry wasn’t wearing anything but a wrist watch.”

Luke Devereaux roared and got to his feet, lunged at the Martian. With both hands extended he grabbed at a green neck.

And both hands went right through it and closed on one another.

The little green man grinned up at him and stuck out his tongue. Then pulled it in again. “Want to know what they were doing, Mack? Your Rosalind and her Harry?”

Luke didn’t answer. He staggered back for his drink and gulped the rest of it down.

And gulping it down was the last thing he remembered when he woke up in the morning. He was lying on the bed; he’d got that far somehow. But he was atop the covers, not under them, and fully dressed even to his shoes.

He had a God-awful headache and a hellish taste in his mouth.

He sat up and looked around fearfully. No little green man.

Made his way to the living room door and looked around in there. Came back and looked at the stove, wondering if coffee would be worth the effort of making it.

Decided that it wouldn’t since he could get some already made on his way back to town, less than a mile after he got on the main highway. And the sooner he got there and the sooner thereafter he got back to town the better. He wouldn’t even clean up or pack. He could come back later and get his stuff. Or ask someone to come and get it for him if he was going to be in the loony bin for a while.