Robert Sheckley - The Day The Aliens Came

Various neighbors came around to see the baby. The Bayersons came in from their new room which they had plastered on the side of apartment house after molting. Mrs. Bayerson had spun all the construction material out of her own mouth, and she was some kind of proud I want to tell you. They looked Manny up and down and said, “Looks like a good one.” They offered to baby-sit, but we didn't like to leave Manny alone with them. We still didn't have a reliable report on their feeding habits. Fact is, it was taking a long time getting any hard facts about aliens, even though the federal government had decided to make all information available on the species that came to Earth.

The presence of aliens among us was responsible for the next step in human development, the new interest in composite living. You got tired of the same old individualism after a while. Rimb and I thought it could be interesting to be part of something else. We wanted to join a creature like a medusa or Portuguese man of war. But we weren't sure how to go about it. And so we didn't know whether to be pleased or alarmed when we received our notification by mail of our election to an alien composite

life-form. Becoming part of a composite was still unusual in those days.

Rimb and I had quite a discussion about it. We finally decided to go to the first meeting, which was free, and see what it was like.

This meeting was held at our local Unitarian Church, and there were almost two hundred people and aliens present. There was a lot of good-natured bewilderment for a while as to just what we were supposed to do. We were all novices at this and just couldn't believe that we were expected to form up a two hundred person composite without prior training.

At last someone in a scarlet blazer and carrying a loose-leaf binder showed up and told us that we were supposed to be forming five unit composites first, and that as soon as we had a few dozen of these and had gotten the hang of morphing and melding, we could proceed to the second level of composite beinghood.

It was only then that we realized that there could be many levels to composite beings,

each level being a discrete composite in its own right.

Luckily the Unitarian Church had a big open space in the basement, and here is where we and our chimaeric partners fit ourselves together.

There was good-natured bewilderment at first as we tried to perform this process.

Most of us had had №experience at fitting ourselves to other creatures, so we were unfamiliar with for example, the Englen, that organ of the Pseudontoics which fits securely into the human left ear.

Still, with help from our expert (the guy in the scarlet blazer) who had volunteered to assist us, we soon formed up our first composite. And even though not everything was entirely right, since some organs can fit into very different types of human holes, it was still a thrill to see ourselves turning into a new creature with an individuality and self-awareness all of its own.

The high point of my new association with the composite was the annual picnic.

We went to the Hanford ruins where the old atomic energy place used to be. It was overgrown with weeds, with some of them of very strange shapes and colors indeed. There were about two hundred of us in this group, and we deferred joining up until after

lunch was served.

The Ladies' Auxiliary gave out the food, and they had a collection point just beyond, where everyone put in what they could. I dropped in a Synestrian bill that I had just been paid for the novelette. A lot of people came around to look at the bill and there was ooing and aahing, because Synestrian bills are really pretty, though they're so thick you can't fold them and they tend to make an unsightly bulge in your pocket. One of the men from the Big Red composite cruised over and looked at my Synestrian bill. He held it up to the light and watched the shapes and colors chase each other.

“That's mighty pretty.” he said. “You ever think of framing it and hanging it on the wall?”

“I was just about to think about that,” I said.

He decided he wanted the bill and asked me how much I wanted for it. I quoted him a price about three times its value in USA currency. He was delighted with the price. Holding the bill carefully by one corner, he sniffed it delicately.

“That's pretty good,” he said.

Now that I thought about it, I realized the Synestrian money did have a good smell.

“These are prime bills,” I assured him.

He sniffed again. “You ever eat one of these?” he asked me.

I shook my head. The notion had never occurred to me.

He nibbled at a corner. “Delicious!” Seeing him enjoying himself like that got me thinking. I wanted a taste myself.

But it was his bill now. I had sold it to him. All I had was bland old American currency.

I searched through my pockets. I was clean out of Synestrian bills. I didn't even have one left to hang on my wall back home, and I certainly didn't have one to eat.

And then I noticed Rimb, melding all by herself in a corner, and she looked so cute doing it that I went over to join her.