Invaders of Earth

by Groff Conklin

  That roused me. I looked at him, dazed and resentful. Why wouldn’t he let me listen so I could help the poor things in the egg? “Be quiet, Quack-quack,” I mumbled to him.

  “You gotta listen, Eddie! Don’t let them get you! ‘Member what happened to Uncle Albert? ‘Member how we felt when we first came to the farm?”

  The words penetrated. My normal caution was waking up. “But they say they don’t mean us any harm,” I argued weakly. I was talking to Donnie just like he was grown up.

  “Aw, they’re big liars. They can’t help hurting us. It’s something they put into the air, like, by just being alive. They can stop it for a while, if they try hard. But that’s the way they really are. Like poison oak or a rattlesnake. ‘Sides, I think they like it. They like being the way they are.”

  Poison oak and rattlers, I translated to myself, aren’t consciously evil. They don’t will their nature. But it’s their nature to be poisonous. If Donnie was right in thinking that the things in the egg gave out, as a part of their metabolism, a vibration which was hostile to human life . . . Uncle Albert had committed suicide by blowing himself up with dynamite.

  “We’d better get rid of the egg, Quack-quack,” I said.

  “Yes, Eddie.”

  I helped him up the shaft to the mouth of the cave. He’d sprained his ankle. On the way I asked, “What are the things in the egg like, Donnie?” I had an idea, but I wanted to check it with him. I felt his young mind and senses were keener and more reliable in this than mine.

  “Like radio. Or ‘lectricity.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Another—not like where we live. Everything’s different. It’s not like here. It’s right here beside us. An’ it’s a long way off.”

  I nodded. I helped him up the ladder and left him sitting on the hillside. Then I went back to the house for my .22 and a can of kerosene.

  Donnie watched me anxiously as I went down with them. I don’t mind admitting I was pretty nervous myself.

  A .22 isn’t an elephant gun. Still, at a two-foot range it ought to have some penetrating power. It didn’t. The bullets just bounced off from the side of the egg. I could hear them spatting against the walls of the cave. I used three clips before I gave up.

  That left the kerosene. There hadn’t been any more attempts to show me pictures or bring me around. In a silence that seemed bitterly hostile I poured kerosene all over the egg. I used plenty. Then I stood back and tossed a match at it.

  Heat boiled up. It got so hot I retreated nearly to where Donnie had fallen in. But when it cooled off enough so that I could go back, I found the egg sitting there as good as new. There wasn’t even any soot on it.

  I was beaten. I couldn’t think of anything more to do. I went up the ladder with the empty kerosene can and my gun. Donnie seemed to know I’d failed. He was crying when I came up to him. “Don’t tell Mom,” I said, and he nodded dutifully.

  Would the egg let it go at that? I didn’t think so. After supper I said to Mom, “You know, sometimes I think it would be nice to go back to the city for a while.”

  She looked at me as if she couldn’t believe her ears. “Are you crazy, Eddie? We never had it so good before.” Her eyes narrowed and she began to get worried. “What’s the matter, honey? Aren’t you feeling well?”

  I couldn’t tell her. I knew she’d believe me; that was just the trouble. If she knew there was a chance I could be cured, be made healthy and strong the way she wanted me to be, she’d make a dicker with the things in the egg, come hell or high water. It wouldn’t make any difference to her whether they were good or bad, if she thought they could help me. Mom’s like that.

  “Oh, I feel fine,” I said as heartily as I could. “It was just an idea. How’s for seconds on the strawberry shortcake? It’s even better than usual, Mom.”

  Her face relaxed. But I didn’t sleep much that night.

  The breakfast Mom cooked next morning was punk. I wasn’t hungry, but I couldn’t help noticing. The toast was burned, the eggs were leathery and cold, the coffee was the color of tea. There was even a fly in the pitcher of orange juice. I thought she must be worried about Donnie. I had bandaged his foot according to the picture in the first-aid book, but the ankle had swelled up like a balloon, and it looked sore and bad.

  After breakfast Mom said, “Eddie, you seem worn out. I think carrying Donnie so far was bad for you. I don’t want you to do any work today. You just sit around and rest.”

  “I don’t feel like resting,” I objected.

  “Well—” Her face brightened. “I know,” she said, sounding pleased. “Why don’t you see what you can get on your radio set? The cord’s long enough you could take it out on the side porch and be out in the fresh air. It’s been a long time since you worked with it. Maybe you could get some of the stations you used to get.”

  She sounded so pleased with herself for having thought of the radio that I didn’t have the heart to argue with her. She helped me move the table and the equipment outside, and I sat down and began to fiddle with it. It was nice and cool out on the porch.

  I didn’t get any signals, of course. Pretty soon Donnie came limping out. He was supposed to stay on the couch in the living room, but it’s hard for a kid to keep still.

  “What’s the matter, Donnie?” I asked, looking at him. He was frowning, and his face was puckered up and serious. “Foot hurt?”

  “Oh, some. . . . But Eddie . . . you know that old egg?”

  I picked up my headphones and turned them a bit. “Urn,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t think you should’a built that fire around it. It was a bad thing to do.”

  I put the headphones down. I wanted to tell Donnie to shut up and not bother me; I know that was because I didn’t like what he was saying. “Why was it bad?” I asked.

  “Because it stirred the things in the egg up. I kin feel it. It’s like you have a station with more juice, you can get farther. The fire gave them more juice.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I figured he was right, and I felt scared. After a minute I made myself laugh. “Nothing to worry about, Quack-quack,” I said. “We can lick any old egg.”

  His face relaxed a little. “I guess so,” he said. He sat down in the porch swing.

  Mom stuck her head around the edge of the door. “Did you get anything on your radio, Eddie?” she asked.

  “No,” I said a little shortly.

  “That’s too bad.” She went back in the kitchen and hung her apron up, and then she came out on the porch. She was rubbing her forehead with the back of her hand as if her head ached.

  To please her, I put on my headphones and twiddled the dials. No dice, of course. Mom frowned. She went around to the other side of the table and stood looking at the wiring, something I’d never seen her do before. “How would it be if you moved this from here to here?” she said. Her voice was a little high.

  I leaned over to see what she was pointing at. “That would just burn out the tubes.”

  “Oh.” She stood there for a moment. Then her hand darted out, and before I could stop her, before I even had any idea what she was up to, she moved the wire she’d been talking about.

  “Hey!” I squawked, “stop that!” I said it too late. There was a crackle and a flash and all the tubes burned out. My station was completely dead.

  Mom rubbed her forehead and looked at me. “I don’t know what made me do that, Eddie,” she said apologetically. “It was just like something moved my hand! I’m awfully sorry, son.”

  “Oh, that’s o.k.,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. The station wasn’t good for anything.”

  “I know, but . . . My head’s been feeling queer all morning. I think it must be the weather. Doesn’t the air feel heavy and oppressive to you?”

  The air did have a thick, discouraging feel, but I hadn’t noticed it before she burned out the radio tubes. I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could say it, Donnie yelled, “Look at Fluffie!
She’s walking on the air!”

  We both jerked around. There Fluffie was, about ten feet up, making motions with her paws as if she were trying to walk. She was mewing a blue streak. Now and then she’d slip down three or four feet and then go up to the former level, just as if a hand had caught at her. Her fur was standing up all over, and her tail was three times its usual size. Finally she went up about twenty feet and then came sailing down in a long curve. She landed on the ground with a thump. And that was the beginning of all the phenomena.

  It wasn’t so much that we felt depressed at first, though we certainly did. But we could stand it; the depression wasn’t as bad as it had been when we first came to Hidden Valley. I guess that was because the things in the egg were more spread out now. Whether that was the reason or not, most of the phenomena were physical.

  You could hardly get into the living room. It was like pushing your way through big wet bladders to go into it. If you sat on the sofa you had a sense of being crowded and pushed, and pretty soon you’d find yourself down at the far end of it, squeezed into a corner. When Mom struck matches to make a fire for lunch, the matches were twitched out of her hand and went sailing around the room. We had to eat cold things; she was afraid of burning down the place.

  At first Mom tried to pretend there was nothing wrong; after all, you couldn’t see anything. But I went out in the kitchen at suppertime and found her crying quietly. She said it was because she’d been trying to cut bread for sandwiches and the knife in her hand kept rising up toward her throat. I knew that if Mom was crying it had been pretty bad. So I told her about the egg in the cave and all that.

  “They’re out of the egg now,” she said unhappily when I had finished. “My burning out the tubes this morning let them out. We’ve got to go back to the city, Eddie. It’s the only thing to do.”

  “And leave them loose?” I said sharply. “We can’t do that. If it was just a case of deserting the valley and having them stay here, it would be all right. But they won’t stay here. They came to Earth to colonize. That means they’ll increase and spread out.

  “Remember how it was when we came here? Remember how we felt? Suppose it was like that over most of the Earth!”

  Mom shook her head till her gray curls bobbed. “This can’t be real, Eddie,” she said in a sort of wail. “We must be having hallucinations or something. I keep telling myself, this can’t be real.”

  Donnie, outside, gave a sudden horrible shriek. Mom turned as white as a ghost. Then she darted out, with me after her.

  Donnie was standing over Fluffie’s body, crying with rage. He was so mad and so miserable he could hardly talk. “They killed her! They killed her!” he said at last. “She was way up in the air, and they pushed her down hard and she squashed when she hit the ground. She’s all mashed flat!”

  There wasn’t anything to say. I left Mom to try to comfort Donnie, and went off by myself to try to think.

  I didn’t get anywhere with my thinking. How do you fight anything you can’t see or understand? The things from the egg were immaterial but could produce material phenomena; Donnie had said they were like electricity or radio. Even if that were true, how did it help? I thought up a dozen fragmentary schemes, each with some major flaw, for getting rid of them, and in the end I had to give up.

  None of us went to bed that night. We stayed up in the kitchen huddled together for comfort and protection, while the house went crazy around us. The things that happened were ridiculous and horrible. They made you feel mentally outraged. It was like being lowered down into a well filled with craziness.

  About three o’clock the light in the kitchen went slowly out. The house calmed down and everything got quiet. I guess the things from the egg had revenged themselves on us enough for having tried to get rid of them, and now they were going about their own business, perhaps beginning to increase. Because from then on the feeling of depression got worse. It was worse than it had ever been before.

  It seemed like years and years until four o’clock. I sat there in the dark, holding Mom’s and Donnie’s hands and wondering how much longer I could stand it. I had a vision of life, then, that people in asylums must have, an expanse filled with unbearable horror and pain and misery.

  By the time it was getting light I couldn’t stand it any longer. There was a way out; I didn’t have to go on seeing Hell opening in front of me. I pulled my hands from Mom’s and Donnie’s and stood up. I knew where Uncle Albert had kept the dynamite. I was going to kill myself.

  Donnie’s eyes opened and he looked at me. I’d known he wasn’t asleep. “Don’t do it, Eddie,” he said in a thread of a voice. “It’ll only give them more juice.”

  Part of my mind knew dimly what he meant. The things from the egg weren’t driving me to suicide deliberately; they didn’t care enough about me for that. But my death—or any human’s death—would be a nice little event, a tidbit, for them. Life is electrical. My death would release a little juice.

  It didn’t matter, it wasn’t important. I knew what I was going to do.

  Mom hadn’t moved or looked at me. Her face was drawn and gray and blotched. I knew, somehow, that what she was enduring was worse than what I had endured. Her vision was darker than mine had been. She was too deep in it to be able to think or speak or move.

  The dynamite was in a box in the shed. I hunted around until I found the detonator and the fuse. I stuffed the waxy, candlelike sticks inside the waistband of my trousers and picked up the other things. I was going to kill myself, but part of me felt a certain compunction at the thought of blowing up Mom and Donnie. I went outside and began to walk uphill.

  The sun was coming up in a blaze of red and gold and there was a soft little breeze. I could smell wood smoke a long way off. It was going to be a fine day. I looked around me critically for a good place to blow myself up.

  They say suicides are often very particular; I know I was. This spot was too open and that one too enclosed; there was too much grass here and not quite enough at the other place. It wasn’t that I had cold feet. I hadn’t. But I wanted everything to go off smoothly and well, without any hitches or fuss. I kept wandering around and looking, and pretty soon, without realizing it, I was near the hillside with the cave.

  For a moment I thought of going down in the cave to do what I had to do. I decided against it. The explosion, in that confined space, might blow up the whole valley. I moved on. And suddenly I felt a tug at my mind.

  It wasn’t all around, like the feeling of depression was, something that seemed to be broadcast generally into the air. And it wasn’t like the voice inside my head I’d heard in the cave. The best way I can express the feeling is by saying that it was like walking past a furnace with your eyes shut.

  I hesitated. I was still feeling suicidal; I never wavered in that. But I felt a faint curiosity and something a lot fainter that you might call, if you exaggerated, the first beginnings of hope.

  I went to the mouth of the cave and let myself down through the opening.

  The egg, when I reached it, was different from the way I remembered it. It was bigger and the edges were misty. But the chief difference was that it was rotating around its long axis at a really fancy rate of speed. It reminded me of the rotation of a generator. The sensation I felt was coming out from it.

  Watching the thing’s luminous, mazy whirling, I got the idea that it and the things which had come out of it represented opposite poles. It was as alive as they were, though in an opposite way, and its motion provided the energy for them to operate.

  I pulled the sticks of dynamite out of my belt and began setting them up. There really wasn’t much danger of blowing up the valley, and as long as I was going to do away with myself, I might as well take the egg with me, or try to. That was the way I looked at it.

  No attempt was made to stop me. This may have been because the things from the egg weren’t interested in human beings, except spasmodically, but I think it more likely was because they, being polar opposi
tes from the egg, had to keep their distance from it. Anyhow, I got my connections made without interference. I stood back a foot or two.

  I closed the switch.

  The next thing I knew, my head was on Mom’s lap. She was shaking me desperately by the shoulders and crying something about fire.

  Now, I don’t see how I could have been responsible for the fire. The earthquake, possibly. Apparently when the dynamite exploded, the egg tried to absorb the energy. (That’s why I wasn’t hurt more.) It got an overload. And the overload, somehow, blew it clean out of our space. I got a glimpse of the space it was blown into, I think, just before my head hit the rock. But anyhow, a thing like that might possibly have caused an earthquake. All the country around Hidden Valley is over a fault.