Bug-Eyed Monsters

by Bill Pronzini

  “Nothing else. They’re perfectly harmless. Goodness, they’re even vegetarians.”

  “And what does that mean? Do we feed him a bale of hay for dinner?”

  Rose’s lower lip trembled. “Drake, you’re being deliberately hateful. There are many vegetarians on Earth; they don’t eat hay.”

  “And what about us? Do we eat meat ourselves or will that make us look like cannibals to him? I won’t live on salads to suit him; I warn you.”

  “You’re being quite ridiculous.”

  Rose felt helpless. She had married late in life, comparatively. Her career had been chosen; she herself had seemed well settled in it. She was a fellow in biology at the Jenkins Institute for the Natural Sciences, with over twenty publications to her credit. In a word, the line was hewed, the path cleared; she had been set for a career and spinster-hood. And now, at thirty-five, she was still a little amazed to find herself a bride of less than a year.

  Occasionally, it embarrassed her, too, since she sometimes found that she had not the slightest idea of how to handle her husband. What did one do when the man of the family became mulish? That was not included in any of her courses. As a woman of independent mind and career, she couldn’t bring herself to cajolery.

  So she looked at him steadily and said simply, “It means very much to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Drake, if he stays here for any length of time, I can study him really closely. Very little work has been done on the biology and psychology of the individual Hawkinsites or of any of the extraterrestrial intelligences. We have some on their sociology and history, of course, but that’s all. Surely, you must see the opportunity. He stays here; we watch him, speak to him, observe his habits—”

  “Not interested.”

  “Oh, Drake, I don’t understand you.”

  “You’re going to say I’m not usually like this, I suppose.”

  “Well, you’re not.”

  Drake was silent for a while. He seemed withdrawn and his high cheekbones and large chin were twisted and frozen into a brooding position.

  He said, finally, “Look, I’ve heard a bit about the Hawkinsites in the way of my own business. You say there have been investigations of their sociology, but not of their biology. Sure. It’s because the Hawkinsites don’t like to be studied as specimens any more than we would. I’ve spoken to men who were in charge of security groups watching various Hawkinsite missions on Earth. The missions stay in the rooms assigned to them and don’t leave for anything but the most important official business. They have nothing to do with Earthmen. It’s quite obvious that they are as revolted by us as I personally am by them.

  “In fact, I just don’t understand why this Hawkinsite at the Institute should be any different. It seems to me to be against all the rules to have him come here by himself, anyway—and to have him want to stay in an Earthman’s home just puts the maraschino cherry on top.”

  Rose said, wearily, “This is different. I’m surprised you can’t understand it, Drake. He’s a doctor. He’s coming here in the way of medical research, and I’ll grant you that he probably doesn’t enjoy staying with human beings and will find us perfectly horrible. But he must stay just the same! Do you suppose human doctors enjoy going into the tropics, or that they are particularly fond of letting themselves be bitten by infected mosquitoes?”

  Drake said sharply, “What’s this about mosquitoes? What have they to do with it?”

  “Why, nothing,” Rose answered, surprised. “It just came to my mind, that’s all. I was thinking of Reed and his yellow fever experiments.”

  Drake shrugged. “Well, have it your own way.”

  For a moment, Rose hesitated. “You’re not angry about this, are you?” To her own ears she sounded unpleasantly girlish.

  “No.”

  And that, Rose knew, meant that he was.

  Rose surveyed herself doubtfully in the full-length mirror. She had never been beautiful and was quite reconciled to the fact; so much so that it no longer mattered. Certainly, it would not matter to a being from Hawkin’s Planet. What did bother her was this matter of being a hostess under the very queer circumstances of having to be tactful to an extraterrestrial creature and, at the same time, to her husband as well. She wondered which would prove the more difficult.

  Drake was coming home late that day; he was not due for half an hour. Rose found herself inclined to believe that he had arranged that purposely in a sullen desire to leave her alone with her problem. She found herself in a state of mild resentment.

  He had called her just before noon at the Institute and had asked abruptly, “When are you taking him home?”

  She answered, curtly, “In about three hours.”

  “All right. What’s his name? His Hawkinsite name?”

  “Why do you want to know?” She could not keep the chill from her words.

  “Let’s call it a small investigation of my own. After all, the thing will be in my house.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Drake, don’t bring your job home with you!”

  Drake’s voice sounded tinny and nasty in her ears. “Why not, Rose? Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing?”

  It was, of course, so she gave him the information he wanted.

  This was the first time in their married life that they had had even the semblance of a quarrel, and, as she sat there before the full-length mirror, she began to wonder if perhaps she ought not make an attempt to see his side of it. In essence, she had married a policeman. Of course he was more than simply a policeman; he was a member of the World Security Board.

  It had been a surprise to her friends. The fact of the marriage itself had been the biggest surprise, but if she had decided on marriage, the attitude was, why not with another biologist? Or, if she had wanted to go afield, an anthropologist, perhaps; even a chemist; but why, of all people, a policeman? Nobody had exactly said those things, naturally, but it had been in the very atmosphere at the time of her marriage.

  She had resented it then, and ever since. A man could marry whom he chose, but if a doctor of philosophy, female variety, chose to marry a man who never went past the bachelor’s degree, there was shock. Why should there be? What business was it of theirs? He was handsome, in a way, intelligent, in another way, and she was perfectly satisfied with her choice.

  Yet how much of this same snobbishness did she bring home with her? Didn’t she always have the attitude that her own work, her biological investigations, were important, while his job was merely something to be kept within the four walls of his little office in the old U.N. buildings on the East River?

  She jumped up from her seat in agitation and, with a deep breath, decided to leave such thoughts behind her. She desperately did not want to quarrel with him. And she just wasn’t going to interfere with him. She was committed to accepting the Hawkinsite as guest, but otherwise she would let Drake have his own way. He was making enough of a concession as it was.

  Harg Tholan was standing quietly in the middle of the living room when she came down the stairs. He was not sitting, since he was not anatomically constructed to sit. He stood on two sets of limbs placed close together, while a third pair entirely different in construction were suspended from a region that would have been the upper chest in a human being. The skin of his body was hard, glistening and ridged, while his face bore a distant resemblance to something alienly bovine. Yet he was not completely repulsive, and he wore clothes of a sort over the lower portion of his body in order to avoid offending the sensibilities of his human hosts.

  He said, “Mrs. Smollett, I appreciate your hospitality beyond my ability to express it in your language,” and he drooped so that his forelimbs touched the ground for a moment.

  Rose knew this to be a gesture signifying gratitude among the beings of Hawkin’s Planet. She was grateful that he spoke English as well as he did. The construction of his mouth, combined with an absence of incisors, gave a whistling sound to the sibilants. Aside from tha
t, he might have been born on Earth for all the accent his speech showed.

  She said, “My husband will be home soon, and then we will eat.”

  “Your husband?” For a moment, he said nothing more, and then added, “Yes, of course.”

  She let it go. If there was one source of infinite confusion among the five intelligent races of the known Galaxy, it lay in the differences among them with regard to their sex life and the social institutions that grew around it. The concept of husband and wife, for instance, existed only on Earth. The other races could achieve a sort of intellectual understanding of what it meant, but never an emotional one.

  She said, “I have consulted the Institute in preparing your menu. I trust you will find nothing in it that will upset you.”

  The Hawkinsite blinked its eyes rapidly. Rose recalled this to be a gesture of amusement.

  He said, “Proteins are proteins, my dear Mrs. Smollett. For those trace factors which I need but are not supplied in your food, I have brought concentrates that will be most adequate.”

  And proteins were proteins. Rose knew this to be true. Her concern for the creature’s diet had been largely one of formal politeness. In the discovery of life on the planets of the outer stars, one of the most interesting generalizations that had developed was the fact that, although life could be formed on the basis of substances other than proteins—even on elements other than carbon—it remained true that the only known intelligences were proteinaceous in nature. This meant that each of the five forms of intelligent life could maintain themselves over prolonged periods on the food of any of the other four.

  She heard Drake’s key in the door and went stiff with apprehension.

  She had to admit he did well. He strode in, and, without hesitation, thrust his hand out at the Hawkinsite, saying firmly, “Good evening, Dr. Tholan.”

  The Hawkinsite put out his large and rather clumsy forelimb and the two, so to speak, shook hands. Rose had already gone through that procedure and knew the queer feeling of a Hawkinsite hand in her own. It had felt rough and hot and dry. She imagined that, to the Hawkinsite, her own and Drake’s felt cold and slimy.

  At the time of the formal greeting, she had taken the opportunity to observe the alien hand. It was an excellent case of converging evolution. Its morphological development was entirely different from that of the human hand, yet it had brought itself into a fairly approximate similarity. There were four fingers but no thumb. Each finger had five independent ball-and-socket joints. In this way, the flexibility lost with the absence of the thumb was made up for by the almost tentacular properties of the fingers. What was even more interesting to her biologist’s eyes was the fact that each Hawkinsite finger ended in a vestigial hoof, very small and, to the layman, unidentifiable as such, but clearly adapted at one time to running, just as man’s had been to climbing.

  Drake said, in friendly enough fashion, “Are you quite comfortable, sir?”

  The Hawkinsite answered, “Quite. Your wife has been most thoughtful in all her arrangements.”

  “Would you care for a drink?”

  The Hawkinsite did not answer but looked at Rose with a slight facial contortion that indicated some emotion which, unfortunately, Rose could not interpret. She said, nervously, “On Earth there is the custom of drinking liquids which have been fortified with ethyl alcohol. We find it stimulating.”

  “Oh, yes. I am afraid, then, that I must decline. Ethyl alcohol would interfere most unpleasantly with my metabolism.”

  “Why, so it does to Earthmen, too, but I understand, Dr. Tholan,” Drake replied. “Would you object to my drinking?”

  “Of course not.”

  Drake passed close to Rose on his way to the sideboard and she caught only one word. He said, “God!” in a tightly controlled whisper, yet he managed to put seventeen exclamation points after it.

  The Hawkinsite stood at the table. His fingers were models of dexterity as they wove their way around the cutlery. Rose tried not to look at him as he ate. His wide lipless mouth split his face alarmingly as he ingested food, and, in chewing, his large jaws moved disconcertingly from side to side. It was another evidence of his ungulate ancestry. Rose found herself wondering if, in the quiet of his own room, he would later chew his cud, and was then panic-stricken lest Drake get the same idea and leave the table in disgust. But Drake was taking everything quite calmly.

  He said, “I imagine, Dr. Tholan, that the cylinder at your side holds cyanide?”

  Rose started. She had actually not noticed it. It was a curved metal object, something like a water canteen, that fitted flatly against the creature’s skin, half-hidden behind its clothing. But, then, Drake had a policeman’s eyes.

  The Hawkinsite was not in the least disconcerted. “Quite so,” he said, and his hoofed fingers held out a thin, flexible hose that ran up his body, its tint blending into that of his yellowish skin, and entered the corner of his wide mouth. Rose felt slightly embarrassed, as though at the display of intimate articles of clothing.

  Drake said, “And does it contain pure cyanide?”

  The Hawkinsite humorously blinked his eyes. “I hope you are not considering possible danger to Earthites. I know the gas is highly poisonous to you and I do not need a great deal. The gas contained in the cylinder is five percent hydrogen cyanide, the remainder oxygen. None of it emerges except when I actually suck at the tube, and that need not be done frequently.”

  “I see. And you really must have the gas to live?”

  Rose was slightly appalled. One simply did not ask such questions without careful preparation. It was impossible to foresee where the sensitive points of an alien psychology might be. And Drake must be doing this deliberately, since he could not help realizing that he could get answers to such questions as easily from herself. Or was it that he preferred not to ask her?

  The Hawkinsite remained apparently unperturbed. “Are you not a biologist, Mr. Smollett?”

  “No, Dr. Tholan.”

  “But you are in close association with Mrs. Dr. Smollett.”

  Drake smiled a bit. “Yes, I am married to a Mrs. doctor, but just the same I am not a biologist; merely a minor government official. My wife’s friends,” he added, “call me a policeman.”

  Rose bit the inside of her cheek. In this case it was the Hawkinsite who had impinged upon the sensitive point of an alien psychology. On Hawkin’s Planet, there was a tight caste system and intercaste associations were limited. But Drake wouldn’t realize that.

  The Hawkinsite turned to her. “May I have your permission, Mrs. Smollett, to explain a little of our biochemistry to your husband? It will be dull for you, since I am sure you must understand it quite well already.”

  She said, “By all means do, Dr. Tholan.”

  He said, “You see, Mr. Smollett, the respiratory system in your body and in the bodies of all air-breathing creatures on Earth is controlled by certain metal-containing enzymes, I am taught. The metal is usually iron, though sometimes it is copper. In either case, small traces of cyanide would combine with these metals and immobilize the respiratory system of the terrestrial living cell. They would be prevented from using oxygen and killed in a few minutes.

  “The life on my own planet is not quite so constituted. The key respiratory compounds contain neither iron nor copper; no metal at all, in fact. It is for this reason that my blood is colorless. Our compounds contain certain organic groupings which are essential to life, and these groupings can only be maintained intact in the presence of a small concentration of cyanide. Undoubtedly, this type of protein has developed through millions of years of evolution on a world which has a few tenths of a percent of hydrogen cyanide occurring naturally in the atmosphere. Its presence is maintained by a biological cycle. Various of our native micro-organisms liberate the free gas.”

  “You make it extremely clear, Dr. Tholan, and very interesting,” Drake said. “What happens if you don’t breathe it? Do you just go, like that?” He snapped his fingers.
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  “Not quite. It isn’t equivalent to the presence of cyanide for you. In my case, the absence of cyanide would be equivalent to slow strangulation. It happens sometimes, in ill-ventilated rooms on my world, that the cyanide is gradually consumed and falls below the minimum necessary concentration. The results are very painful and difficult to treat.”

  Rose had to give Drake credit; he really sounded interested. And the alien, thank heaven, did not mind the catechism.

  The rest of the dinner passed without incident. It was almost pleasant.

  Throughout the evening, Drake remained that way; interested. Even more than that—absorbed. He drowned her out, and she was glad of it. He was the one who was really colorful and it was only her job, her specialized training, that stole the color from him. She looked at him gloomily and thought, Why did he marry me?

  Drake sat, one leg crossed over the other, hands clasped and tapping his chin gently, watching the Hawkinsite intently. The Hawkinsite faced him, standing in his quadruped fashion.

  Drake said, “I find it difficult to keep thinking of you as a doctor.”

  The Hawkinsite laughingly blinked his eyes. “I understand what you mean,” he said. “I find it difficult to think of you as a policeman. On my world, policemen are very specialized and distinctive people.”

  “Are they?” said Drake, somewhat drily, and then changed the subject. “I gather that you are not here on a pleasure trip.”

  “No, I am here very much on business. I intend to study this queer planet you call Earth, as it has never been studied before by any of my people.”

  “Queer?” asked Drake. “In what way?”

  The Hawkinsite looked at Rose. “Does he know of the Inhibition Death?”

  Rose felt embarrassed. “His work is important,” she said. “I am afraid that my husband has little time to listen to the details of my work.” She knew that this was not really adequate and she felt herself to be the recipient, yet again, of one of the Hawkinsite’s unreadable emotions.

  The extraterrestrial creature turned back to Drake. “It is always amazing to me to find how little you Earthmen understand your own unusual characteristics. Look, there are five intelligent races in the Galaxy. These have all developed independently, yet have managed to converge in remarkable fashion. It is as though, in the long run, intelligence requires a certain physical makeup to flourish. I leave that question for philosophers. But I need not belabor the point, since it must be a familiar one to you.