Fredric Brown: Martians, Go Home

Right now all he wanted was out of here and to hell with everything else. He wouldn’t even bathe or shave until he was home; he had an extra razor in his apartment and all of his good clothes were still there anyway.

And after that, what?

Well, after that he’d worry about what after that. He’d be nearly enough over his hang-over to think things out calmly.

Walking through the other room he saw the camera, hesitated briefly and then picked it up to take along. Might as well, before he did his heavy thinking, get that picture developed. There was still a chance in a thousand that, despite the fact that his hands had passed through it, an actual Martian and not an hallucination had been in that chair. Maybe Martians had stranger powers than being, able to kwim.

Yes, if there was a Martian on that photograph it would change all his thinking, so he might as well eliminate the possibility before making any decisions.

If there wasn’t—well, the sensible thing to do if he could bring himself to do it would be to phone Margie and ask her the name of the psychiatrist she’d tried to get him to go to several times during their marriage. She’d been a nurse in several mental institutions before they were married and she’d gone to work in another one when she’d walked out on him. And she’d told him that she’d majored in psychology at college and, if she could have afforded the extra years of schooling, would have tried to become a psychiatrist herself.

He went out and locked the door, walked around the house to his car.

The little green man was sitting on the car’s radiator.

“Hi, Mack,” he said. “You look like hell, but I guess you earned the right to. Drinking is sure a disgusting habit.”

Luke turned and went back to the door, let himself in again. He got the bottle and poured himself a pickup drink and drank it. Before, he’d fought off the idea of taking one. If he was still hallucinating, though, he needed one. And, once his throat had quit burning, it did make him feel better physically. Not much, but a little.

He locked the house again and went back to his car. The Martian was still there. Luke got in and started the engine.

Then be leaned his head out of the window. “Hey,” he said, “how can I see the road with you sitting there?”

The Martian looked back and sneered. “What do I care whether you can see the road or not? If you have an accident it won’t hurt me .”

Luke sighed and started the car. He drove the stretch of primitive road to the highway with his head stuck out of the window. Hallucination or no, he couldn’t see through the little green man so he had to see past him.

He hesitated whether or not to stop at the diner for coffee, decided that he might as well. Maybe the Martian would stay where he was. If he didn’t, if he entered the diner too, well, nobody else would be able to see him anyway so what did it matter? Except that he’d have to remember not to talk to him.

The Martian jumped down when he parked the car and followed him into the diner. There weren’t, as happened, any other customers. Just a sallow-faced counterman in a dirty white apron.

Luke sat en a stool. The Martian jumped up and stood on the adjacent stool, leaned his elbows on the counter.

The counterman turned and looked, not at Luke. He groaned, “Oh, God, another one of ’em.”

“Huh?” said Luke. “Another what?” He found himself gripping the edge of the counter so tightly that it hurt his fingers.

“Another Goddam Martian,” said the clerk. “Can’t you see it?”

Luke took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You mean there are more of them?”

The counterman stared at Luke in utter amazement. “Mister, where were you last night? Out on the desert alone and without a radio or TV? Jesus, there are a million of them.”

The counterman was wrong. It was estimated later that there were approximately a billion of them.

And let’s leave Luke Devereaux for a while—we’ll get back to him later—and take a look at things that were happening elsewhere while Luke was entertaining his visitor at the Benson shack near Indio.

As near as matters, a billion Martians. Approximately one to every three human beings—men, women and children—on Earth.

There were close to sixty million in the United States alone and an equivalent number relative to population in every other country in the world. They’d all appeared at, as near as could be determined, exactly the same moment everywhere. In the Pacific time zone, it had been at 8:14 P.M. Other time zones, other times. In New York it was three hours later, 11:14 P.M., with the theaters just letting out and the night clubs just starting to get noisy. (They got noisier after the Martians came.) In London it was 4:14 in the morning—but people woke up all right; the Martians wakened them gleefully. In Moscow it was 7:14 A.M. with people just getting ready to go to work—and the fact that many of them actually went to work speaks well for their courage. Or maybe they were more afraid of the Kremlin than of the Martians. In Tokyo it was 1:14 P.M. and in Honolulu 6:14 P.M.

A great many people died that evening. Or morning or afternoon, depending on where they were.

Casualties in the United States alone are estimated to leave run as high as thirty thousand people, most of them within minutes of the moment of arrival of the Martians.

Some died of heart failure from sheer fright. Others of apoplexy. A great many died of gunshot wounds because a great many people got out guns and tried to shoot Martians. The bullets went right through the Martians without hurting them and all too frequently came to rest embedded in human flesh. A great many people died in automobile accidents. Some Martians had kwimmed themselves into moving vehicles, usually on the front seat alongside the driver. “Faster, Mack, faster,” coming from what a driver thinks is an empty seat beside him is not conducive to his retaining control of the car, even if he doesn’t turn to look.

Casualties among the Martians were zero, although people attacked them—sometimes on sight but more frequently after, as in the case of Luke Devereaux, they had been goaded into an attack—with guns, knives, axes, chairs, pitchforks, dishes, cleavers, saxophones, books, tables, wrenches, hammers, scythes, lamps and lawn mowers, with anything that came to hand. The Martians jeered and made insulting remarks.

Other people, of course, tried to welcome them and to make friends with them. To these people the Martians were much more insulting.

But wherever they arrived and however they were received, to say that they caused trouble and confusion is to make the understatement of the century.

Take, for example, the sad sequence of events at television station KVAK, Chicago. Not that what happened there was basically different from what happened at all other television stations operating with live broadcasts at the time, but we can’t take all of them.

It was a prestige program and a spectacular, rolled into one. Richard Bretaine, the greatest Shakespearean actor in the world, was enacting a condensed-for-television version of Romeo and Juliet , with Helen Ferguson playing opposite him.

The production had started at ten o’clock and by fourteen minutes after the hour had reached the balcony scene of Act 11. Juliet had just appeared on the balcony and Romeo below was sonorously declaiming that most famous of romantic speeches: