Multiples

by Robert Silverberg

  “Hey, old man,” he said, grinning at me in a doomed and gallant way. “Came to see the circus, did you?”

  We weren’t really best friends any more. I don’t know what we were to each other. We rarely lunched any more. (How could we? I was busy three days a week with Maranta.) We didn’t meet at the gym. It wasn’t to Tim I turned to advice on personal problems or second opinions on investments. There was some sort of bond but I think it was mostly nostalgia. But officially I guess I did still think of him as my best friend, in a kind of automatic unquestioning way.

  I said, “Are you free to go over to the Plaza for a drink?”

  “I wish. I don’t get relieved until 2100 hours.”

  “Nine o’clock, is that it?”

  “Nine, yes. You fucking civilian.”

  It was only half past one. The poor bastard.

  “What’ll happen to you if you leave your post?”

  “I could get shot for desertion,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Especially if the monsters pick that moment to bust out of the park. This is war, old buddy.”

  “Is it, do you think? Maranta doesn’t think so.” I wondered if I should be talking about what Maranta thought. “She says they’re just out exploring the galaxy.”

  Tim shrugged. “She always likes to see the sunny side. That’s an alien military force over there inside the park. One of these days they’re going to blow a bugle and come out with blazing rayguns. You’d better believe it.”

  “Through the sealfield?”

  “They could walk right over it,” Tim said. “Or float, for all I know. There’s going to be a war. The first intergalactic war in human history.” Again the dazzling Cary Grant grin. Her Majesty’s Bengal lancers, ready for action. “Something to tell my grandchildren,” said Tim. “Do you know what the game plan is? First we attempt to make contact. That’s going on right now, but they don’t seem to be paying attention to us. If we ever establish communication, we invite them to sign a peace treaty. Then we offer them some chunk of Nevada or Kansas as a diplomatic enclave and get them the hell out of New York. But I don’t think any of that’s going to happen. I think they’re busy scoping things out in there, and as soon as they finish that they’re going to launch some kind of attack, using weapons we don’t even begin to understand.”

  “And if they do?”

  “We nuke them,” Tim said. “Tactical devices, just the right size for Central Park Mall.”

  “No,” I said, staring. “That isn’t so. You’re kidding me.”

  He looked pleased, a gotcha look. “Matter of fact, I am. The truth is that nobody has the goddamndest idea of what to do about any of this. But don’t think the nuke strategy hasn’t been suggested. And some even crazier things.”

  “Don’t tell me about them,” I said. “Look, Tim, is there any way I can get a peek over those barricades?”

  “Not a chance. Not even you. I’m not even supposed to be talking with civilians.”

  “Since when am I civilian?”

  “Since the invasion began,” Tim said.

  He was dead serious. Maybe this was all just a goofy movie to me, but it wasn’t to him.

  More junior officers came to him with more papers to sign. He excused himself and took care of them. Then he was on the field telephone for five minutes or so. His expression grew progressively more bleak. Finally he looked up at me and said, “You see? It’s starting.”

  “What is?”

  “They’ve crossed 72nd Street for the first time. There must have been a gap in the sealfield. Or maybe they jumped it, as I was saying just now. Three of the big ones are up by 74th, noodling around the eastern end of the lake. The Metropolitan Museum people are scared shitless and have asked for gun emplacements on the roof, and they’re thinking of evacuating the most important works of art.” The field phone lit up again. “Excuse me,” he said. Always the soul of courtesy, Tim. After a time he said, “Oh, Jesus. It sounds pretty bad. I’ve got to go up there right now. Do you mind?” His jaw was set, his gaze was frosty with determination. This is it, Major. There’s ten thousand Comanches coming through the pass with blood in their eyes, but we’re ready for them, right? Right. He went striding away up Fifth Avenue.

  When I got back to the office there was a message from Maranta, suggesting that I stop off at her place for drinks that evening on my way home. Tim would be busy playing soldier, she said, until nine. Until 2100 hours, I silently corrected.

  Another few days and we got used to it all. We began to accept the presence of aliens in the park as a normal part of New York life, like snow in February or laser duels in the subway.

  But they remained at the center of everybody’s consciousness. In a subtle pervasive way they were working great changes in our souls as they moved about mysteriously behind the sealfield barriers in the park. The strangeness of their being here made us buoyant. Their arrival had broken, in some way, the depressing rhythm that life in our brave new century had seemed to be settling into. I know that for some time I had been thinking, as I suppose people have thought since Cro-Magnon days, that lately the flavor of modern life had been changing for the worse, that it was becoming sour and nasty, that the era I happened to live in was a dim, shabby, dismal sort of time, small-souled, mean-minded. You know the feeling. Somehow the aliens had caused that feeling to lift. By invading us in this weird hands-off way, they had given us something to be interestingly mystified by: a sort of redemption, a sort of rebirth. Yes, truly.

  Some of us changed quite a lot. Consider Tim, the latter-day Bengal lancer, the staunchly disciplined officer. He lasted about a week in that particular mind-set. Then one night he called me and said, “Hey, fellow, how would you like to go into the park and play with the critters?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know a way to get in. I’ve got the code for the 64th Street sealfield. I can turn it off and we can slip through. It’s risky, but how can you resist?”

  So much for Gary Cooper. So much for John Wayne.

  “Have you gone nuts?” I said. “The other day you wouldn’t even let me go up to the barricades.”

  “That was the other day.”

  “You wouldn’t walk across the street with me for a drink. You said you’d get shot for desertion.”

  “That was the other day.”

  “You called me a civilian.”

  “You still are a civilian. But you’re my old buddy, and I want to go in there and look those aliens in the eye, and I’m not quite up to doing it all by myself. You want to go with me, or don’t you?”

  “Like the time we stole the beer keg from Sigma Frap. Like the time we put the scorpions in the girls’ shower room.”

  “You got it, old pal.”

  “Tim, we aren’t college kids any more. There’s a fucking intergalactic war going on. That was your very phrase. Central Park is under surveillance by NASA spy-eyes that can see a cat’s whiskers from fifty miles up. You are part of the military force that is supposed to be protecting us against these alien invaders. And now you propose to violate your trust and go sneaking into the midst of the invading force, as a mere prank?”

  “I guess I do,” he said.

  “This is an extremely cockeyed idea, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Absolutely. Are you with me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You know I am.”

  I told Elaine that Tim and I were going to meet for a late dinner to discuss a business deal and I didn’t expect to be home until two or three in the morning. No problem there. Tim was waiting at our old table at Perugino’s with a bottle of Amarone already working. The wine was so good that we ordered another midway through the veal pizzaiola, and then a third. I won’t say we drank ourselves blind, but we certainly got seriously myopic. And about midnight we walked over to the park.

  Everything was quiet. I saw sleepy-looking guardsman patrolling here and there along Fifth. We went right up to the command
post at 59th and Tim saluted very crisply, which I don’t think was quite kosher, he being not then in uniform. He introduced me to someone as Dr. Pritchett, Bureau of External Affairs. That sounded really cool and glib, Bureau of External Affairs.

  Then off we went up Fifth, Tim and I, and he gave me a guided tour. “You see, Dr. Pritchett, the first line of the isolation zone is the barricade that runs down the middle of the avenue.” Virile, forceful voice, loud enough to be heard for half a block. “That keeps the gawkers away. Behind that, Doctor, we maintain a further level of security through a series of augmented-beam sealfield emplacements, the new General Dynamics 1100 series model, and let me show you right here how we’ve integrated that with advanced personnel-interface intercept scan by means of a triple line of Hewlett-Packard optical doppler-couplers—”

  And so on, a steady stream of booming confident-sounding gibberish as we headed north. He pulled out a flashlight and led me hither and thither to show me amplifiers and sensors and whatnot, and it was Dr. Pritchett this and Dr. Pritchett that and I realized that we were now somehow on the inner side of the barricade. His glibness, his poise, were awesome. Notice this, Dr. Pritchett, and Let me call your attention to this, Dr. Pritchett, and suddenly there was a tiny digital keyboard in his hand, like a little calculator, and he was tapping out numbers. “Okay,” he said, “the field’s down between here and the 65th Street entrance to the park, but I’ve put a kill on the beam-interruption signal. So far as anyone can tell there’s still an unbroken field. Let’s go in.”

  And we entered the park just north of the zoo.

  For five generations the first thing New York kids have been taught, ahead of tying shoelaces and flushing after you go, is that you don’t set foot in Central Park at night. Now here we were, defying the most primordial of no-nos. But what was to fear? What they taught us to worry about in the park was muggers. Not creatures from the Ninth Glorch Galaxy.

  The park was eerily quiet. Maybe a snore or two from the direction of the zoo, otherwise not a sound. We walked west and north into the silence, into the darkness. After a while a strange smell reached my nostrils. It was dank and musky and harsh and sour, but those are only approximations: it wasn’t like anything I had ever smelled before. One whiff of it and I saw purple skies and a great green sun blazing in the heavens. A second whiff and all the stars were in the wrong places. A third whiff and I was staring into a gnarled twisted landscape where the trees were like giant spears and the mountains were like crooked teeth.

  Tim nudged me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I smell it too.”

  “To your left,” he said. “Look to your left.”

  I looked to my left and saw three huge yellow eyes looking back at me from twenty feet overhead, like searchlights mounted in a tree. They weren’t mounted in a tree, though. They were mounted in something shaggy and massive, somewhat larger than your basic two-family Queens residential dwelling, that was standing maybe fifty feet away, completely blocking both lanes of the park’s East Drive from shoulder to shoulder.

  It was then that I realized that three bottles of wine hadn’t been nearly enough.

  “What’s the matter?” Tim said. “This is what we came for, isn’t it, old pal?”

  “What do we do now? Climb on its back and go for a ride?”

  “You know that no human being in all of history has ever been as close to that thing as we are now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do know that, Tim.”

  It began making a sound. It was the kind of sound that a piece of chalk twelve feet thick would make if it was dragged across a blackboard the wrong way. When I heard that sound I felt as if I was being dragged across whole galaxies by my hair. A weird vertigo attacked me. Then the creature folded up all its legs and came down to ground level; and then it unfolded the two front pairs of legs, and then the other two; and then it started to amble slowly and ominously toward us.

  I saw another one, looking even bigger, just beyond it. And perhaps a third one a little farther back. They were heading our way too.

  “Shit,” I said. “This was a very dumb idea, wasn’t it?”

  “Come on. We’re never going to forget this night.”

  “I’d like to live to remember it.”

  “Let’s get up real close. They don’t move very fast.”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s just get out of the park right now, okay?”

  “We just got here.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We did it. Now let’s go.”

  “Hey, look,” Tim said. “Over there to the west.”

  I followed his pointing arm and saw two gleaming wraiths hovering just above the ground, maybe 300 yards away. The other aliens, the little floating ones. Drifting toward us, graceful as balloons. I imagined myself being wrapped in a shining pillow and being floated off into their ship.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Come on, Tim.”

  Staggering, stumbling, I ran for the park gate, not even thinking about how I was going to get through the sealfield without Tim’s gizmo. But then there was Tim, right behind me. We reached the sealfield together and he tapped out the numbers on the little keyboard and the field opened for us, and out we went, and the field closed behind us. And we collapsed just outside the park, panting, gasping, laughing like lunatics, slapping the sidewalk hysterically. “Dr. Pritchett,” he chortled. “Bureau of External Affairs. God damn, what a smell that critter had! God damn!”

  I laughed all the way home. I was still laughing when I got into bed. Elaine squinted at me. She wasn’t amused. “That Tim,” I said. “That wild man Tim.” She could tell I’d been drinking some and she nodded somberly—boys will be boys, etc.—and went back to sleep.

  The next morning I learned what had happened in the park after we had cleared out.

  It seemed a few of the big aliens had gone looking for us. They had followed our spoor all the way to the park gate, and when they lost it they somehow turned to the right and went blundering into the zoo. The Central Park Zoo is a small cramped place and as they rambled around in it they managed to knock down most of the fences. In no time whatever there were tigers, elephants, chimps, rhinos, and hyenas all over the park.

  The animals, of course, were befuddled and bemused at finding themselves free. They took off in a hundred different directions, looking for places to hide.

  The lions and coyotes simply curled up under bushes and went to sleep. The monkeys and some of the apes went into the trees. The aquatic things headed for the lake. One of the rhinos ambled out into the mall and pushed over a fragile-looking alien machine with his nose. The machine shattered and the rhino went up in a flash of yellow light and a puff of green smoke. As for the elephants, they stood poignantly in a huddled circle, glaring in utter amazement and dismay at the gigantic aliens. How humiliating it must have been for them to feel tiny.

  Then there was the bison event. There was this little herd, a dozen or so mangy-looking guys with ragged, threadbare fur. They started moving single file toward Columbus Circle, probably figuring that if they just kept their heads down and didn’t attract attention they could keep going all the way back to Wyoming. For some reason one of the behemoths decided to see what bison taste like. It came hulking over and sat down on the last one in the line, which vanished underneath it like a mouse beneath a hippopotamus. Chomp, gulp, gone. In the next few minutes five more behemoths came over and disappeared five more of the bison. The survivors made it safely to the edge of the park and huddled up against the sealfield, mooing forlornly. One of the little tragedies of interstellar war.

  I found Tim on duty at the 59th Street command post. He looked at me as though I were an emissary of Satan. “I can’t talk to you while I’m on duty,” he said.

  “You heard about the zoo?” I asked.

  “Of course I heard.” He was speaking through clenched teeth. His eyes had the scarlet look of zero sleep. “What a filthy irresponsible thing we did!”

  “Look, we had no way of knowi
ng—”

  “Inexcusable. An incredible lapse. The aliens feel threatened now that humans have trespassed on their territory, and the whole situation has changed in there. We upset them and now they’re getting out of control. I’m thinking of reporting myself for court-martial.”

  “Don’t be silly, Tim. We trespassed for three minutes. The aliens didn’t give a crap about it. They might have blundered into the zoo even if we hadn’t—”

  “Go away,” he muttered. “I can’t talk to you while I’m on duty.”

  Jesus! As if I was the one who had lured him into doing it.

  Well, he was back in his movie part again, the distinguished military figure who now had unaccountably committed an unpardonable lapse and was going to have to live in the cold glare of his own disapproval for the rest of his life. The poor bastard. I tried to tell him not to take things so much to heart, but he turned away from me, so I shrugged and went back to my office.

  That afternoon some tender-hearted citizens demanded that the sealfields be switched off until the zoo animals could escape from the park. The sealfields, of course, kept them trapped in there with the aliens.

  Another tough one for the mayor. He’d lose points tremendously if the evening news kept showing our beloved polar bears and raccoons and kangaroos and whatnot getting gobbled like gumdrops by the aliens. But switching off the sealfields would send a horde of leopards and gorillas and wolverines scampering out into the streets of Manhattan, to say nothing of the aliens who might follow them. The mayor appointed a study group, naturally.

  The small aliens stayed close to their spaceship and remained uncommunicative. They went on tinkering with their machines, which emitted odd plinking noises and curious colored lights. But the huge ones roamed freely about the park, and now they were doing considerable damage in their amiable mindless way. They smashed up the backstops of the baseball fields, tossed the Bethesda Fountain into the lake, rearranged Tavern-on-the-Green’s seating plan, and trashed the place in various other ways, but nobody seemed to object except the usual Friends of the Park civic types. I think we were all so bemused by the presence of genuine galactic beings that we didn’t mind. We were flattered that they had chosen New York as the site of first contact. (But where else?)