Bug-Eyed Monsters

by Bill Pronzini

  She had had her smashup, lost her job tape-punching now that her father was dead and her really scandalous behavior could no longer be ignored. She had got an unconventional job in the Open Quarter. She had left it. She appeared, hanging around the shops at Standard Transport, where the watchmen had orders to drive her away. She always came back, and one day, evidently, got what she wanted.

  For on the Portsmouth-Jamestown run, which Smith was making to see a man who had a bar with a small theater in what was ostensibly a storeroom, his ship had parted at the seams.

  “Dumped me where you found me—mid-desert.”

  “T-urr-ss-t-ee,” sawed the native.

  There seemed to be some reproach in the word, and Smith chided himself for imagining that a creature which spoke by stridulation could charge its language with the same emotional overtones as those who used lungs and vocal cords.

  But there the note was again: “Ei-m-m-ee—t-urr-ss-t—too.”

  Amy thirst too. A stridulating moralist. But still . . . one had to admit . . . in his frosty way, Smith was reasoning, but a wash of emotion blurred the diagrams, the cold diagrams by which he had always lived.

  It’s getting me, he thought—it’s getting me at last. He’d seen it happen before, and always admitted that it might happen to him—but it was a shock.

  Hesitantly, which was strange for him, he asked if he could somehow find his way across the desert to Portsmouth. The creature ticked approvingly, brought in sand and with one delicate appendage began to trace what might be a map.

  He was going to do it. He was going to be clean again, he who had always had a horror of filth and never until now had seen that his life was viler than maggots, more loathsome than carrion. A warm glow of self-approval filled him while he bent over the map. Yes, he was going to perform the incredible hike and somehow make restitution to her. Who would have thought an inhuman creature like his benefactor could have done this to him? With all the enthusiasm of any convert, he felt young again, with life before him, a life where he could choose between fair and foul. He chuckled with the newness of it.

  But to work! Good intentions were not enough. There was the map to memorize, his bearings to establish, some portable food supply to be gathered—

  He followed the map with his finger. The tracing appendage of the creature guided him, another quietly lay around him, its tip at the small of his back. He accepted it, though it itched somewhat. Not for an itch would he risk offending the bearer of his new life.

  He was going to get Amy to a cure, give her money, bear her abuse—she could not understand all at once that he was another man—turn his undoubted talent to an honest—

  Farewell! Farewell!

  Farewell, little ones. Farewell.

  The map blurred a bit before Smith’s eyes. Then the map toppled and slid and became the red-lit ceiling of the burrow. Then Smith tried to move and could not. The itching in his back was a torment.

  The screy mother did not look at the prostrate host as she turned and crawled up from the incubator to the surface. Something like fond humor wrinkled the surface of her thoughts as she remembered the little ones and their impatience. Heigh-ho! She had given them the best she could, letting many a smaller host go by until this fine, big host came her way. It had taken feeding and humoring, but it would last many and many a month while the little wrigglers grew and ate and grew within it. Heigh-ho! Life went on, she thought; one did the best one could . . .

  There are people who claim to have seen and communicated with alien beings, either here on Earth or inside alien spacecraft; there are even people who are convinced that creatures from the stars—BEMs with multicolored tentacles, perhaps—are bent on invasion and ultimate takeover of the planet. It is generally felt that these individuals are suffering from delusions of one kind or another and might be cured by extensive psychotherapy. But what if such a person went to his psychiatrist to discuss what he believed was an alien invasion, and discovered that the shrink had been replaced by a BEM? This is what happens to Cavender, the protagonist of “The Last One Left,” and with rather startling results.

  Despite the fact that they live 3,000 miles apart, Bill Pronzini (b. 1943) and Barry N. Malzberg (b. 1939) have been collaborating since the early 1970s. Working together, they have produced three suspense novels, three previous anthologies of science fiction, and some thirty mystery and s-f short stories. Individually, Pronzini has published fifteen novels and more than 200 short stories and articles, and is the editor of one fantasy (Werewolf!,) and three mystery anthologies; and Malzberg has authored seventy novels, 250 short works of fiction and nonfiction, and six collections, and has co-edited four additional science-fiction anthologies with Edward L. Ferman and Martin Harry Greenberg.

  The Last

  One Left

  Bill Pronzini and

  Barry N. Malzberg

  The alien leans toward Cavender and folds two of its six tentacles on the desk blotter. Bright green eyes on slender stalks regard him gravely. “Now then,” it says, “what did you say is disturbing you? It would be best to get right to the point. Of course,” it adds in gentle tones, “if you’d prefer not to discuss it at the present moment that would be all right too. Ultimately you must be the judge, the controller, the captain, as it were, of your life.”

  Cavender smiles. He winks at the alien; it pretends not to notice. He is used to this kind of thing by now and is not even surprised that Doctor Fount has been replaced. His own wife, his secretary, half of his office staff in the last week; surely his psychiatrist was inevitable. He sees Fount twice a week, was somewhat surprised the replacement had not been accomplished on Tuesday.

  When the aliens first appeared, just one week ago, they had started at the fringes: marginal people, beggars, cleaning ladies, token sellers, busboys and the like. The next day it had been the children and white-collar workers. Last night it had been Eunice and three-quarters of the opera company. And now it was his shrink. Ah well. He had never got along with Fount anyway.

  It doesn’t really matter, he thinks. What does matter is finding out why they have moved in and from where they’ve come. And why nobody but him seems to have been aware of the replacements when they started; no pandemonium on the streets, no newspaper articles, routine applause at the City Opera last night. Is he the only one who can see them?

  Once he has the answers to these questions Cavender is sure he will be able to find a way to banish or destroy the aliens. He will have to save the world—that occurred to him during the sextet, just before all six of the singers sprouted tentacles. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the fate of Mankind is in his hands. Which is not unusual. He has been cleaning up weaker people’s messes all of his life, it seems.

  “All of my life,” he says, and realizes that he has spoken most of this aloud. An old trait, this talking to himself, which has increased markedly in the past couple of days, what with the pressures and losing Eunice and all. Who could blame a man for becoming a little less stable under these circumstances?

  The alien, who has been listening to him with polite attention, says, “This is very interesting, Albert. Why do you think this is so? Why does the fate of Mankind, that is to say, rest exclusively upon you?”

  Like Fount, the alien replacement is humoring him. It must have read the files, listened to the tapes. No matter; Cavender loves to be humored. Why pay a hundred dollars for forty-five minutes if not for that? He has always enjoyed psychotherapy, although now of course he can hardly continue.

  “Because,” he says, “I seem to be the only one aware of the invasion. Your invasion, I mean, through which one by one you’ve usurped almost all the population of New York. I wonder if it’s this way in the midwest, to say nothing of the Eastern bloc?”

  The alien regards him sadly. “How long have you felt this way?”

  “Oh come on,” Cavender says, “I’ve been in this shrinking game for four years and I know all the tricks better than you. You don’t have to deal
with me as if this is reactive depression with paranoid focus.”

  “Come again?”

  “Never mind,” Cavender says. He pauses. “What I want to find out,” he says, “is why you’re doing this. I mean, what’s your primary motivation? Simple conquest of an inferior race? Or what? And what happens to all the good folks you’ve replaced? Are they simply being eliminated or are they transferred to your home planet, whatever strange place that must be, and put to work in mines or labor communes?”

  The alien holds a pencil between two of its tentacles and assumes an expression of professional concern. It seems to be waiting with interest for him to continue.

  “Labor communes would be my guess,” Cavender says. “Let’s see. You needed to take over a new world because living conditions on your planet are becoming intolerable. Pollution, overpopulation, that sort of thing.”

  “Mmm,” the alien says noncommittally.

  “But you don’t want to just abandon your home because there are plenty of natural resources left. None of your people want to stay there and work in the communes, so that’s where we come in. Where the ones you’ve replaced come in, rather. How about that? Am I on the right track?”

  One of the alien’s eyestalks flicks aside. Nothing else changes in its expression and it doesn’t speak, but Cavender thinks: Aha! On target, all right.

  “Now the next question is,” he says, “why am I exempt? Why haven’t I been replaced and why is it I can see you for what you are and nobody else suspected a thing?”

  “Perhaps you’d care to venture another guess there, Albert,” the alien says.

  Cavender nods, considers, and has what he takes to be another insight. “Maybe you aliens are only able to replace people who don’t need shrinks,” he says. “The unimaginative masses, the normal ones. Normal ones,” he says again, because he likes the sound of the phrase. “Does that make any sense?”

  “What do you think, Albert? It’s you on whom all of this must focus, after all. Are you pleased with your insights?”

  “Stop patronizing me,” Cavender says. “I’m one of the last ones left and you know it. Maybe I’m even the last one by now, who knows?” He pauses, suddenly at a loss. “I’m quite disturbed by all of this,” he adds after a while.

  “I’m sure you are, Albert,” the alien says in a sympathetic way. “Of course you realize I have no answers. The only answers must come from you, as I have explained in the past.”

  The alien’s color has shifted, Cavender notices. It is the most delicate of orange now, its tentacles a pastoral and bucolic blue, as blue as an inverted bowl of sky against the earth-colored speckles of the upper and lower extremities. His perspective lurches; he feels a moment of confusion. Another moment of confusion?

  “I think I’m going to leave,” he says.

  “That is your decision. You don’t have to talk, though: we can just sit here if you like.”

  There is a beauty to the tentacles; they have the symmetry and the fine detail of the backs of old violins. “No,” Cavender says, “I want to leave. You’ll bill me, I guess. Do aliens send out bills?”

  “Of course I’ll bill you, Albert,” the alien says kindly. “But why don’t you lie down on the couch and rest for a time? You still have twenty minutes left and you want to get full value for your money, don’t you?”

  “You have no mercy,” Cavender says. “I’m not bitter about that but it’s the truth. No mercy at all.”

  “Why do you say that? Why do you think I have no mercy?”

  “Because you don’t. You could make it easier for me by admitting the truth, but you just won’t do it.”

  “What truth, Albert?”

  “Oh all right,” Cavender says irritably and stands. The beauty of the tentacles is beginning to unnerve him. “An invasion is an invasion. You people are obviously superior to us in every way and your mass hypnosis and transferral program is almost a hundred percent effective. You hold all the advantages. For now,” he adds in a cryptic tone. “For now.”

  “We’ll continue this next Tuesday,” the alien says. “Unless you’d care to change your mind and stay on for the rest of your session—”

  Cavender shakes his head, turns, and leaves the office. He notes as he walks through the reception area that in the interim Fount’s secretary has also become an alien—a small, delicate, five tentacled creature in fetching magenta with multicolored eye-stalks. It is all slipping away very quickly; he should have known that they would make a second sweep of all clerical personnel. He sighs and goes through the outer door, waits in the corridor by the elevator.

  Three aliens emerge wobbling from the periodontist’s office adjacent and stand by him, complaining to each other about excessive bleeding and the perils of anesthesia. Aliens, it would seem, have the same dental problems as humans. He must keep that in mind, Cavender thinks; it might be a flaw in their armament. Perhaps it can be worked with, used against them as a means of saving the world. If there is any world left to save, that is. If he is not already the last human left.

  The elevator comes and takes them all silently to the lobby, where they part. Cavender walks toward the entrance at a brisk pace, and then he—

  —rolls through the flickering doors. Comes into a burning and omnipresent sunlight. Conditions here are not nearly so good as advertised, he thinks; there is too much sunlight and too much air. At the very least they could have denextified the amorlets for the Crossing, piped through a little inductivity. But then, Headquarters gives grattl about the amenities. All they care about is ranking and rendling, ninking and bocck, and little compassion for the furnerraghts as always.

  Waving his tentacles meditatively, denextifying as best he can unsupported, Szzlvey Trg establishes rolicular modal control and warkles toward Cavender’s hutch.

  The BEM in “Hostess,” like those in most stories in this anthology, is atypical: a doctor from a world called Hawkin’s Planet comes to Earth to study a deadly phenomenon known as the Inhibition Death. The story begins when he is invited to stay in the home of a noted biologist and her “policeman” husband—and develops into a grim, suspenseful (and scientifically exacting) account of one of the strangest of all fictional triangles, with a superior twist at the end.

  Isaac Asimov (b. 1920) last year published his 200th book—twice. That is to say, his 200th and 201st were brought out at the same time, by his two leading publishers, so that both may lay claim to the honor; they are Opus 200 (Houghton Mifflin) and In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, Part One (Doubleday). His 199 previous books include works of science fiction, mystery fiction, popular science, encyclopedic scholasticism—and some that defy categorization. Perhaps the most famous and most prolific writer in the United States (certainly the one with the highest visual recognition), Dr. Asimov lives in New York City with his wife, Janet, and continues to amass a staggeringly impressive body of work.

  Hostess

  Isaac Asimov

  Rose Smollett was happy about it; almost triumphant. She peeled off her gloves, put her hat away, and turned her brightening eyes upon her husband.

  She said, “Drake, we’re going to have him here.”

  Drake looked at her with annoyance. “You’ve missed supper. I thought you were going to be back by seven.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter. I ate something on the way home. But, Drake, we’re going to have him here!”

  “Who here? What are you talking about?”

  “The doctor from Hawkin’s Planet! Didn’t you realize that was what today’s conference was about? We spent all day talking about it. It’s the most exciting thing that could possibly have happened!”

  Drake Smollett removed the pipe from the vicinity of his face. He stared first at it and then at his wife. “Let me get this straight. When you say the doctor from Hawkin’s Planet, do you mean the Hawkinsite you’ve got at the Institute?”

  “Well, of course. Who else could I possibly mean?”

  “And may I
ask what the devil you mean by saying we’ll have him here?”

  “Drake, don’t you understand?”

  “What is there to understand? Your Institute may be interested in the thing, but I’m not. What have we do with it personally? It’s Institute business, isn’t it?”

  “But, darling,” Rose said, patiently, “the Hawkinsite would like to stay at a private house somewhere, where he won’t be bothered with official ceremony, and where he’ll be able to proceed more according to his own likes and dislikes. I find it quite understandable.”

  “Why at our house?”

  “Because our place is convenient for the purpose, I suppose. They asked if I would allow it, and frankly,” she added with some stiffness, “I consider it a privilege.”

  “Look!” Drake put his fingers through his brown hair and succeeded in rumpling it. “We’ve got a convenient little place here—granted! It’s not the most elegant place in the world, but it does well enough for us. However, I don’t see where we’ve got room for extraterrestrial visitors.”

  Rose began to look worried. She removed her glasses and put them away in their case. “He can stay in the spare room. He’ll take care of it himself. I’ve spoken to him and he’s very pleasant. Honestly, all we have to do is show a certain amount of adaptability.”

  Drake said, “Sure, just a little adaptability! The Hawkinsites breathe cyanide. We’ll just adapt ourselves to that, I suppose!”

  “He carries the cyanide in a little cylinder. You won’t even notice it.”

  “And what else about them that I won’t notice?”