Invaders of Earth

by Groff Conklin

  The following memorandum was originally attached to the extract from the Bannerman Journal. It carries the McCarran initialing.

  ~ * ~

  Aug. 11, 1951

  The original letter of complaint written by Stephen Clyde, M.D., and mentioned in the accompanying letter of Captain Blaine, has unfortunately been lost, owing perhaps to an error in filing. Personnel presumed responsible have been instructed not to allow such error to be repeated except if, as and/or when necessary.

  C.McC.

  ~ * ~

  On the margin of this memorandum there was a penciled notation, later erased. Iodine vapor has been used to bring out the unmistakable McCarran script. The notation read in part as follows: Far be it from a McC. to lose his job except if, as and or—the rest is undecipherable, except for a terminal word which is regrettably unparliamentary.

  ~ * ~

  STATEMENT BY

  LESTER MORSE, M.D.

  DATED AUGUST 9, 1951

  On the afternoon of July 30, 1951, acting on what I am obliged to describe as an unexpected impulse, I drove out to the country for the purpose of calling on my friend Dr. David Bannerman. I had not seen him nor had word from him since the evening of June 12 of this year, 1951.

  ~ * ~

  AFTER knocking, calling to him and hearing no response, I went upstairs to his bedroom and found him dead. From superficial indications I judged that death must have taken place during the previous night. He was lying on his bed on his left side, comfortably disposed as if for sleep, but fully dressed, with a fresh shirt and clean summer slacks. His eyes and mouth were closed, and there was no trace of the disorder to be expected at even the easiest death.

  ~ * ~

  BECAUSE of these signs I assumed, soon as I had determined the absence of breath and heartbeat and noted the chill of the body, that some neighbor must have already found him, performed these simple rites of respect for him, and probably notified a local physician or other responsible person. I therefore waited, Dr. Bannerman had no telephone, expecting that someone would soon call.

  Dr. Bannerman’s journal was on a table near his bed, open to that page on which he had written a codicil to his will. I read that part. Later, while I was waiting for others to come, I read the remainder of the journal, as he apparently wished me to do. The ring he mentions was on the fifth finger of his left hand, and it is now in my possession.

  When writing that codicil, Dr. Bannerman must have overlooked or forgotten the fact that in his formal will, written some months earlier, he had appointed me executor. If there are legal technicalities involved, I shall be pleased to cooperate fully with the proper authorities.

  The ring, however, will remain in my keeping, since that was Dr. Bannerman’s expressed wish, and I am not prepared to offer it for examination or discussion under any circumstances.

  The notes for a revision of one of his textbooks were in his desk, as indicated in the journal. They are by no means “messy,” nor are they particularly revolutionary except in so far as he wished to rephrase, as theory or hypothesis, certain statements which I would have regarded as axiomatic. This is not my field, and I am not competent to judge. I shall take up the matter with his publishers at the earliest opportunity.* (* LIBRARIAN’S NOTE: But it seems he never did. No new edition of “Introductory Biology” was ever brought out, and the textbook has been out of print since 1952.)

  So far as I can determine, and bearing in mind the results of the autopsy performed by Stephen Clyde, M.D., the death of Dr. David Bannerman was not inconsistent with the presence of an embolism of some type not distinguishable on post mortem. I have so stated on the certificate of death. I am compelled to add one other item of medical opinion for what it may be worth:

  I am not a psychiatrist, but, owing to the demands of general practise, I have found it advisable to keep as up to date as possible with current findings and opinion in this branch of medicine. Dr. Bannerman possessed, in my opinion, emotional and intellectual stability to a higher degree than anyone else of comparable intelligence in the entire field of my acquaintance, personal and professional.

  ~ * ~

  IF IT is suggested that he was suffering from a hallucinatory psychosis, I can only say that it must have been of a type quite outside my experience and not described, so far as I know, anywhere in the literature of psychopathology.

  Dr. Bannerman’s house, on the afternoon of July 30, was in good order. Near the open, unscreened window of his bedroom there was a coverless shoebox with a folded silk scarf in the bottom. I found no pillow such as Dr. Bannerman describes in the journal, but observed that a small section had been cut from the scarf. In this box, and near it, there was a peculiar fragrance, faint, aromatic, very sweet, such as I have never encountered before and therefore cannot describe.

  It may or may not have any bearing on the case that, while I remained in his house that afternoon, I felt no sense of grief or personal loss, although Dr. Bannerman had been a loved and honored friend for a number of years. I merely had, and have, a conviction that after the completion of some very great undertaking, he had found peace.

  The ring he bequeathed to me has confirmed that.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  William Tenn

  “WILL YOU WALK A LITTLE FASTER?”

  . . . And then there is the alien civilization that wants what we’ve got and is calmly preparing to take it. This usually involves such technological advances as flying saucers, hydrogen bombs, and other items which are by now such common topics of contemporary chitchat that as science-fiction devices they have become somewhat stale.

  But this flying-saucer tale, in which you are asked to “walk a little faster” (said Lewis Carroll’s whiting to the snail), is much too unusual a dish, with definitely too peculiar a type of alien inhabitant, not to be included in this collection.

  A careful reading of this story will tend to convince you that its author is not above harboring some suspicions as to the level of the social I.Q. of the human race. In this belief you are probably right, for he has placed us in as nasty a situation as you could possibly imagine.

  ~ * ~

  THIS is a good story, all right. This is almost too good a story. But, dammit, I should be ashamed of myself for telling it.

  Or should I? If Forkbeard was right about us, my misplaced idealism has been getting in the way of the biggest chunk of fame and fortune that a poor slob of a scrivener can expect in this world. If he was right, the others haven’t been keeping their mouths shut. While I’ve been practically starving—

  Why, for all I know, there is a cow on the White House lawn this very moment! . . .

  Last August, to be exact, I was perspiring over an ice-cold yarn that I never should have started in the first place, when the doorbell rang.

  I looked up and yelled, “Come in! Door’s open!”

  The hinges squeaked a little, the way they do in my place. I heard feet slap-slapping up the long entrance corridor that makes the rent on my apartment a little lower than most of the others in the building. I couldn’t recognize the walk as belonging to anyone I knew, so I waited with my fingers on the typewriter keys and my face turned to the study entrance.

  After a while, the feet came around the corner. A little man, not much more than two feet high, dressed in a green knee-length tunic, walked in. He had a very large head, a short, pointed red beard, a long, pointed green cap, and he was talking to himself. In his right hand he carried a golden pencil-like object; in his left, a curling strip of what seemed to be parchment.

  We considered each other for a bit, in the course of which my lower jaw began to drop faster and faster, giving every sign of an earnest intention to part company forever with the rest of my head.

  “Now, you,” he said with a guttural accent, pointing both the beard and the pencil-like object at me, “now, you must be a writer.”

  I closed my mouth carefully around a lump of air. Somehow, I noted with interest, I seemed to b
e nodding.

  “Good.” He flourished the pencil and made a mark at the end of a line halfway down the scroll. “That completes the enrollment for this session. Come with me, please.”

  He seized the arm with which I had begun an elaborate gesture. Holding me in a grip that had all the resilience of a steel manacle, he smiled benevolently and walked back down my entrance hall. Every few steps he walked straight up in the air, and then—as if he’d noticed his error—calmly strode down to the floor again.

  “What—who—” I said, stumbling and tripping and occasionally getting walloped painfully by the wall. “You wait, you—who—who—”

  “Please do not make such repetitious noises,” he admonished me. “You are supposed to be a creature of civilization. Ask intelligent questions if you wish, but only when you have them properly organized.”

  I brooded on that while he closed the door of my apartment and began dragging me up the stairs. His heart may or may not have been pure, but I estimated his strength as being roughly equivalent to that of ten. I felt like a flag being flapped from the end of my own arm.

  “We’re going up?” I commented tentatively as I was swung around a landing.

  “Naturally. To the roof. Where we’re parked.”

  “Parked, you said?” I thought of a helicopter, then of a broomstick. These things just don’t happen to a guy, I told myself. Not a guy like me—not in a run-down neighborhood like mine. Maybe in places like Hollywood, or Washington, D.C., or Paris—

  Mrs. Flugelman, who lives on the floor above, came out of her apartment with a canful of garbage. She opened the door of the dumb-waiter and started to nod good morning at me. She stopped when she saw my friend.

  “That’s right: parked. What you call our flying saucer.” He noticed Mrs. Flugelman staring at him and jutted his beard at her as we went by. “Yes, I said flying saucer!” he spat.

  Mrs. Flugelman walked back into her apartment with the canful of garbage and closed the door behind her very quietly.

  Maybe the stuff I write for a living prepared me for such experiences, but—somehow—as soon as he told me that, I felt better. Little men and flying saucers—they seemed to go together. Just so halos and pitchforks didn’t wander into the continuity.

  When we reached the roof, I wished I’d had time to grab a jacket. It was evidently going to be a breezy ride.

  The saucer was about thirty feet in diameter and, colorful magazine articles to the contrary, had been used for more than mere sightseeing. In the center, where it was deepest, there was a huge pile of boxes and crates lashed down with crisscrossing masses of gleaming thread. Here and there in the pile was the unpackaged metal of completely unfamiliar machinery.

  Still using my arm as a kind of convenient handle to the rest of me, the little man whirled me about experimentally once or twice, then scaled me accurately end over end some twenty feet through the air to the top of the pile. A moment before I hit, golden threads boiled about me, cushioning like an elastic net and tying me up more thoroughly than any three shipping clerks. My shot-putting pal grunted and prepared to climb aboard.

  Suddenly, he stopped and looked back along the roof. “Irngl!” he yelled in a voice like two ocean liners arguing. “Irngl! Bordge modgunk!”

  There was a tattoo of feet on the roof so rapid as to be almost one sound, and an eight-inch-high replica of my strong-arm guide—minus the beard—leaped into the craft. Young Irngl, I decided, bordge mod-gunning.

  His elder stared at him suspiciously, then walked back slowly in the direction from which he had run. He halted and shook a ferocious finger at the youngster. Beside me, Irngl cowered.

  Just behind the chimney was a cluster of television antennas. But the dipoles of these antennas were no longer parallel: some had been carefully braided together; others had been tied into delicate and perfect bows. Growling ferociously, shaking his head so that the pointed red beard made like a metronome, the old man untied the knots and smoothed the dipoles out to careful straightness with his fingers. Then he bent his legs slightly at their knobby knees and performed one of the most spectacular standing broad jumps of all time.

  And, as he hit the floor of the giant saucer, we took off. Straight up.

  When I’d recovered sufficiently to regurgitate my larynx, I noticed that old Redbeard was controlling the movement of the disk beneath us by means of an egg-shaped piece of metal in his right hand. After we’d gone up a goodly distance, he pointed the egg south and we headed that way.

  Radiant power, I wondered ? Not much information had been volunteered. Of course, I realized suddenly: I hadn’t asked any questions! Grabbed from my typewriter in the middle of the morning by a midget of great brain and muscle—I couldn’t be blamed: few men in my position would have been able to put their finger on the nub of the problem and make appropriate inquiries. Now, however—

  “While there’s a lull in the action,” I began breezily enough, “and as long as you speak English, I’d like to clear up a few troublesome matters. For example . . .”

  “Your questions will be answered later. Meanwhile, you will shut up.” Golden threads filled my mouth, and I found myself unable to open it. Redbeard stared at me as I gurgled impotently. “How hateful are humans!” he said, beaming. “And how fortunate that they are so hateful!”

  The rest of the trip was uneventful, except for a few moments when the Miami-bound plane came abreast of us. People inside pointed excitedly, seemed to yell, and one extremely fat man held up an expensive camera and took six pictures very rapidly. Unfortunately, I noticed, he had neglected to remove the lens cap.

  The saucer skipper shook his metal egg, there was a momentary feeling of acceleration—and the airplane was a disappearing dot behind us. Irngl climbed to the top of what looked like a giant malted-milk machine and stuck his tongue out at me. I glared back.

  It struck me then that the little one’s mischievous quality was mighty reminiscent of an elf. And his pop—the parentage seemed unmistakable by then—was like nothing other than a gnome from Germanic folklore. Therefore, didn’t these facts mean that—that—that—

  I let my brain have ten full minutes, before giving up. Oh, well, sometimes that method works: reasoning by self-hypnotic momentum, I call it.

  I was cold, but otherwise quite content and looking forward to the next development with interest. I had been selected, alone of my species, by this race of aliens for some significant purpose.

  I couldn’t help hoping, of course, that the purpose was not vivisection.

  We arrived, after a while, at something huge: another vehicle, very much like ours but many, many times larger (what you might call a flying platter or soup tureen) poised on an invisible pillar of force several miles high. I suspected that a good distance down, under all those belly-soft clouds beneath it, was the state of South Carolina. I also suspected that the clouds were artificial.

  Our entire outfit entered through an oversized porthole in the bottom. It wasn’t until much later that I understood the big porthole was really an air lock. Somehow, I had never expected an outer air lock to be transparent.

  Since the flying soup tureen had a cover, so to speak, we found ourselves in a hollow disk close to a quarter of a mile in diameter. Flying saucers stacked with goods and people—both long and short folk— were scattered up and down its expanse between great masses of glittering machinery.

  Evidently I was wrong about having been selected as a representative sample. There were lots of us, human men and women, all over the place—one to a flying saucer. It was to be a formal meeting between the representatives of two great races, I decided.

  Only why didn’t our friends do it with the U.N.? Then I remembered Redbeard’s comment on humanity. . . .

  On my right, an Army colonel, with a face like a keg of butter, was chewing on the pencil with which he had been taking short, hastily scrawled notes. On my left, a tall man in a gray sharkskin suit flipped back his sleeve, looked at his watch, and expelled hi
s breath noisily, impatiently. Up ahead, two women were leaning toward each other at the touching edges of their respective saucers, both talking at the same time and both nodding vehemently as they talked.

  Each of the flying saucers also had at least one equivalent of my red-bearded pilot. I observed that while the females of this people had beards too, they were exactly one-half as motherly as our women. But they balanced, they balanced. . . .

  Abruptly, the image of a little man appeared on the ceiling. His beard was pink and it forked. He pulled on each fork and smiled down at us.