Alien Invasion

by Flame Tree Studio

  Everybody was alive once more! Had it all been a delusion? Was it conceivable that this whole poison belt incident had been an elaborate dream? For an instant my startled brain was really ready to believe it. Then I looked down, and there was the rising blister on my hand where it was frayed by the rope of the city bell. It had really been so, then. And yet here was the world resuscitated – here was life come back in an instant full tide to the planet. Now, as my eyes wandered all over the great landscape, I saw it in every direction – and moving, to my amazement, in the very same groove in which it had halted. There were the golfers. Was it possible that they were going on with their game? Yes, there was a fellow driving off from a tee, and that other group upon the green were surely putting for the hole. The reapers were slowly trooping back to their work. The nurse-girl slapped one of her charges and then began to push the perambulator up the hill. Everyone had unconcernedly taken up the thread at the very point where they had dropped it.

  I rushed downstairs, but the hall door was open, and I heard the voices of my companions, loud in astonishment and congratulation, in the yard. How we all shook hands and laughed as we came together, and how Mrs. Challenger kissed us all in her emotion, before she finally threw herself into the bear-hug of her husband.

  “But they could not have been asleep!” cried Lord John. “Dash it all, Challenger, you don’t mean to believe that those folk were asleep with their staring eyes and stiff limbs and that awful death grin on their faces!”

  “It can only have been the condition that is called catalepsy,” said Challenger. “It has been a rare phenomenon in the past and has constantly been mistaken for death. While it endures, the temperature falls, the respiration disappears, the heartbeat is indistinguishable – in fact, it is death, save that it is evanescent. Even the most comprehensive mind” – here he closed his eyes and simpered – “could hardly conceive a universal outbreak of it in this fashion.”

  “You may label it catalepsy,” remarked Summerlee, “but, after all, that is only a name, and we know as little of the result as we do of the poison which has caused it. The most we can say is that the vitiated ether has produced a temporary death.”

  Austin was seated all in a heap on the step of the car. It was his coughing which I had heard from above. He had been holding his head in silence, but now he was muttering to himself and running his eyes over the car.

  “Young fat-head!” he grumbled. “Can’t leave things alone!”

  “What’s the matter, Austin?”

  “Lubricators left running, sir. Someone has been fooling with the car. I expect it’s that young garden boy, sir.”

  Lord John looked guilty.

  “I don’t know what’s amiss with me,” continued Austin, staggering to his feet. “I expect I came over queer when I was hosing her down. I seem to remember flopping over by the step. But I’ll swear I never left those lubricator taps on.”

  In a condensed narrative the astonished Austin was told what had happened to himself and the world. The mystery of the dripping lubricators was also explained to him. He listened with an air of deep distrust when told how an amateur had driven his car and with absorbed interest to the few sentences in which our experiences of the sleeping city were recorded. I can remember his comment when the story was concluded.

  “Was you outside the Bank of England, sir?”

  “Yes, Austin.”

  “With all them millions inside and everybody asleep?”

  “That was so.”

  “And I not there!” he groaned, and turned dismally once more to the hosing of his car.

  There was a sudden grinding of wheels upon gravel. The old cab had actually pulled up at Challenger’s door. I saw the young occupant step out from it. An instant later the maid, who looked as tousled and bewildered as if she had that instant been aroused from the deepest sleep, appeared with a card upon a tray. Challenger snorted ferociously as he looked at it, and his thick black hair seemed to bristle up in his wrath.

  “A pressman!” he growled. Then with a deprecating smile: “After all, it is natural that the whole world should hasten to know what I think of such an episode.”

  “That can hardly be his errand,” said Summerlee, “for he was on the road in his cab before ever the crisis came.”

  I looked at the card: “James Baxter, London Correspondent, New York Monitor.”

  “You’ll see him?” said I.

  “Not I.”

  “Oh, George! You should be kinder and more considerate to others. Surely you have learned something from what we have undergone.”

  He tut-tutted and shook his big, obstinate head.

  “A poisonous breed! Eh, Malone? The worst weed in modern civilization, the ready tool of the quack and the hindrance of the self-respecting man! When did they ever say a good word for me?”

  “When did you ever say a good word to them?” I answered. “Come, sir, this is a stranger who has made a journey to see you. I am sure that you won’t be rude to him.”

  “Well, well,” he grumbled, “you come with me and do the talking. I protest in advance against any such outrageous invasion of my private life.” Muttering and mumbling, he came rolling after me like an angry and rather ill-conditioned mastiff.

  The dapper young American pulled out his notebook and plunged instantly into his subject.

  “I came down, sir,” said he, “because our people in America would very much like to hear more about this danger which is, in your opinion, pressing upon the world.”

  “I know of no danger which is now pressing upon the world,” Challenger answered gruffly.

  The pressman looked at him in mild surprise.

  “I meant, sir, the chances that the world might run into a belt of poisonous ether.”

  “I do not now apprehend any such danger,” said Challenger.

  The pressman looked even more perplexed.

  “You are Professor Challenger, are you not?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir; that is my name.”

  “I cannot understand, then, how you can say that there is no such danger. I am alluding to your own letter, published above your name in the London Times of this morning.”

  It was Challenger’s turn to look surprised.

  “This morning?” said he. “No London Times was published this morning.”

  “Surely, sir,” said the American in mild remonstrance, “you must admit that the London Times is a daily paper.” He drew out a copy from his inside pocket. “Here is the letter to which I refer.”

  Challenger chuckled and rubbed his hands.

  “I begin to understand,” said he. “So you read this letter this morning?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And came at once to interview me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you observe anything unusual upon the journey down?”

  “Well, to tell the truth, your people seemed more lively and generally human than I have ever seen them. The baggage man set out to tell me a funny story, and that’s a new experience for me in this country.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Why, no, sir, not that I can recall.”

  “Well, now, what hour did you leave Victoria?”

  The American smiled.

  “I came here to interview you, Professor, but it seems to be a case of ‘Is this nigger fishing, or is this fish niggering?’ You’re doing most of the work.”

  “It happens to interest me. Do you recall the hour?”

  “Sure. It was half-past twelve.”

  “And you arrived?”

  “At a quarter-past two.”

  “And you hired a cab?”

  “That was so.”

  “How far do you suppose it is to the station?”

  “Well, I should reckon the best part of two miles.”

  �
�So how long do you think it took you?”

  “Well, half an hour, maybe, with that asthmatic in front.”

  “So it should be three o’clock?”

  “Yes, or a trifle after it.”

  “Look at your watch.”

  The American did so and then stared at us in astonishment.

  “Say!” he cried. “It’s run down. That horse has broken every record, sure. The sun is pretty low, now that I come to look at it. Well, there’s something here I don’t understand.”

  “Have you no remembrance of anything remarkable as you came up the hill?”

  “Well, I seem to recollect that I was mighty sleepy once. It comes back to me that I wanted to say something to the driver and that I couldn’t make him heed me. I guess it was the heat, but I felt swimmy for a moment. That’s all.”

  “So it is with the whole human race,” said Challenger to me. “They have all felt swimmy for a moment. None of them have as yet any comprehension of what has occurred. Each will go on with his interrupted job as Austin has snatched up his hose-pipe or the golfer continued his game. Your editor, Malone, will continue the issue of his papers, and very much amazed he will be at finding that an issue is missing. Yes, my young friend,” he added to the American reporter, with a sudden mood of amused geniality, “it may interest you to know that the world has swum through the poisonous current which swirls like the Gulf Stream through the ocean of ether. You will also kindly note for your own future convenience that today is not Friday, August the twenty-seventh, but Saturday, August the twenty-eighth, and that you sat senseless in your cab for twenty-eight hours upon the Rotherfield hill.”

  And “right here,” as my American colleague would say, I may bring this narrative to an end. It is, as you are probably aware, only a fuller and more detailed version of the account which appeared in the Monday edition of the Daily Gazette – an account which has been universally admitted to be the greatest journalistic scoop of all time, which sold no fewer than three-and-a-half million copies of the paper. Framed upon the wall of my sanctum I retain those magnificent headlines:

  TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS’ WORLD COMA UNPRECEDENTED EXPERIENCE CHALLENGER JUSTIFIED OUR CORRESPONDENT ESCAPES ENTHRALLING NARRATIVE THE OXYGEN ROOM WEIRD MOTOR DRIVE DEAD LONDON REPLACING THE MISSING PAGE GREAT FIRES AND LOSS OF LIFE WILL IT RECUR?

  Underneath this glorious scroll came nine and a half columns of narrative, in which appeared the first, last, and only account of the history of the planet, so far as one observer could draw it, during one long day of its existence. Challenger and Summerlee have treated the matter in a joint scientific paper, but to me alone was left the popular account. Surely I can sing ‘Nunc dimittis.’ What is left but anti-climax in the life of a journalist after that!

  But let me not end on sensational headlines and a merely personal triumph. Rather let me quote the sonorous passages in which the greatest of daily papers ended its admirable leader upon the subject – a leader which might well be filed for reference by every thoughtful man.

  “It has been a well-worn truism,” said the Times, “that our human race are a feeble folk before the infinite latent forces which surround us. From the prophets of old and from the philosophers of our own time the same message and warning have reached us. But, like all oft-repeated truths, it has in time lost something of its actuality and cogency. A lesson, an actual experience, was needed to bring it home. It is from that salutory but terrible ordeal that we have just emerged, with minds which are still stunned by the suddenness of the blow and with spirits which are chastened by the realization of our own limitations and impotence. The world has paid a fearful price for its schooling. Hardly yet have we learned the full tale of disaster, but the destruction by fire of New York, of Orleans, and of Brighton constitutes in itself one of the greatest tragedies in the history of our race. When the account of the railway and shipping accidents has been completed, it will furnish grim reading, although there is evidence to show that in the vast majority of cases the drivers of trains and engineers of steamers succeeded in shutting off their motive power before succumbing to the poison. But the material damage, enormous as it is both in life and in property, is not the consideration which will be uppermost in our minds today. All this may in time be forgotten. But what will not be forgotten, and what will and should continue to obsess our imaginations, is this revelation of the possibilities of the universe, this destruction of our ignorant self-complacency, and this demonstration of how narrow is the path of our material existence and what abysses may lie upon either side of it. Solemnity and humility are at the base of all our emotions today. May they be the foundations upon which a more earnest and reverent race may build a more worthy temple.”

  Long as I Can See the Light

  Maria Haskins

  “Do you remember that night when we saw the light?”

  She asks this as they’re sitting on the balcony, and he turns to look at her. When he meets her gaze he can see the thing that lurks within her now – the presence that isn’t really her – look back at him, peering out through those familiar blue eyes. A cold trickle of fear runs down his spine, and he almost gets up, he almost runs away from her again, but he has been running for so long already. He’s too old to run, too tired.

  What year is it? What month? He has to think about it for a while, and when he eventually remembers, he realizes that it’s almost exactly forty years since he ran away from her the first time.

  He inhales deeply from the cigarette, knowing it’s his last smoke: a filthy, hand-rolled, slim and rather bitter stick of something that is supposed to resemble tobacco, but doesn’t really. She asked him about that: where he got the cigarettes, why he started smoking. “No one smokes anymore,” she said. “No one even manufactures cigarettes.” And of course that’s true enough. He could have told her that he picked up the habit in recent years when he lived rough in the alleys downtown. He could have told her that there are times and places and situations when sharing something, anything – even a lousy cigarette – with a stranger is a way to feel a connection, however briefly: a fragile tendril of community and communion. But in the end he said nothing at all, just shrugged.

  “Do you remember?” she asks again, prodding him. As if he could forget. As if that one memory is not his everlasting, never-ending nightmare.

  He remembers it very well. He remembers sitting with her, with Lisa, in the park that night, in that small suburb outside Vancouver. They sat next to each other on the blanket he had brought and spread out in the grass near the baseball field. The blanket was just for sitting on. It wasn’t like he thought they’d be making out or anything like that. It wasn’t like that between them, not then or ever. And that was fine, because Lisa was his friend. His best friend. His only friend, really, when he thinks about it now.

  They were born the same year and grew up in the same cul-de-sac: they went to the same preschool, the same school, eventually the same high school. Through the years, Lisa stuck with him, even when other kids laughed at him, and called him crazy or stupid. The doctors and his parents used words like ‘neurological disorder’ instead, of course. Whatever that meant. All he knew was that he noticed some things that no one else seemed to see, and that he couldn’t understand some things that others found self-evident. But Lisa never seemed to care about any of that. Lisa simply remained his friend.

  The night when they saw the light, he had asked her to come with him to the park after dark, saying he wanted to show her something. Maybe she thought he’d bring his telescope and that they’d look at some planet, or the moon. They used to do that back then because they were both into science and science fiction and astronomy. He didn’t tell her what he had seen in the park on the two previous nights: he just wanted her to come with him, because if she could see it, too, then it had to be real, and not all in his head. She kept asking: “What is it? What is it you want me to see?” And he remembers saying: “Y
ou’ll see. It’ll be worth it.”

  She was always kind to me, he thinks, and feels a piercing sense of guilt and loss and grief as he sucks in another puff of stinking fake tobacco.

  The woman who looks like Lisa, but who has someone else or something else hidden behind her eyes and beneath the bone of her skull, is still regarding him: her face is patient, compassionate, even. It’s a convincing mask, but he knows better than to trust her.

  They sat side by side in the grass. It was warm and summery and early July. She looked up at the sky, and he looked up at the sky, too, when he wasn’t looking at her. “Which star do you want to go to,” she asked, and he laughed. They had played that game from when they were kids, picking out stars to go to, imagining the planets around those stars and the beings and creatures inhabiting those worlds. And right when he was going to answer, when he was going to tell her which star he would pick that night…there it was. It looked exactly like when he had seen it before: surfacing in the night-sky above them without warning like a gigantic metallic whale in deep ocean water, suspended between the stars. It looked close, but somehow you knew that it was far away – a shiny, luminescent metal hull, just hanging there above the Earth: terrifying, menacing, and wondrous all at once.

  He heard her gasp and knew that it was real, that she could see it too, and he felt relieved. The first night he had seen it, he thought he must have imagined it, but then it had come back the second night. This was the third time he beheld it, and still his mind could barely contain the sheer mind-bending enormity of it. Everything about it – its glow, the smoothness of its surface, the magnitude of it – was utterly and undeniably alien.

  Lisa looked at him with a strange expression, halfway between terror and elation, and she opened her mouth, as if to say something. Through the years he has often wondered what she was going to say, but he will never know, because in that moment the light hit her. A blinding, radiant, noiseless beam coming down from the metal hull above, lighting up her face and striking her down. She fell, fell flat on her back on the blanket.