And a light settled onto the street beside me.
Oh God, I prayed, trying to crawl out from under the pickup — help me, God — but aliens swarmed on both sides and I was trapped there, aliens reaching hands in toward my chest and chittering and saying things in English.
“Got rocks, Dr. Massey?”
“Bug rocks.”
“Rocks.”
I blinked tears out of my eyes, determined at least not to cry out of fear in front of them. They chittered on about bug rocks. “You want fossils?” I asked them. “Rocks with insects in them?”
“Bug rocks, Dr. Massey.”
“Bug rocks.”
“Will you leave Salt Lake if I give you bug rocks?” I asked.
I don’t know why I said that, but I was scared; I was desperate; and I wanted them away from me. It wasn’t the first time I’d bargained with thieves, either. I’d once been fool enough to barter through an interpreter with brigands on the Mongolian steppes, us broken down and stuck in the mud, them driving an ancient jeep and riding horses. Now I found myself bargaining with these thieves. They chittered amongst themselves, and one spat at me, eyes big and bright in the light, glaring and angry.
“I know where to find bug rocks,” I said. “I’ve found lots of them and I’ll give them to you, but if I do, you have to leave this place and never come back. Otherwise, find them on your own and good luck.”
Suddenly they all left, but the light didn’t. I watched their spindly legs scurry away out of sight. After a time, I peeked out from under the pickup. One of their ships was hovering maybe eight feet above the street. The aliens were heaped on top of each other under it, not moving, chittering softly and squirming around. One looked up at me. “Warm,” he said, patting the pavement next to him.
And so it was. I could feel the warmth from the ship. I didn’t think they’d sleep in that warmth if it were radioactive.
They all sat up. “Rocks, rocks, bug rocks, rocks, rocks,” they chittered at me.
“You’ll leave this city? All of you?”
“Yesssss,” they said in unison.
“Do you want them now, or in the morning?”
“Morning,” one said.
“Morning, morning,” they chittered.
Then they settled back down, but a lot of them kept looking at me.
“Warm,” one said.
“Warm here,” another said. “Warm, Dr. Massey.”
“Is the warmth radioactive?” I asked.
“No!”
“No, no, no,” they said.
I cursed all the papers I’d published. I cursed the species of fossilized insects I’d classified. I cursed myself for a fool and thought how crazy I must look to anybody who might be watching, but even so I took my blanket and walked over to them and lay down on the pavement in the light of their ship and the warmth from it and the warmth from all their little alien bodies and I slept and they slept.
No. 3: If you become homeless, watch your back.
We walked to my lab. They didn’t offer me a ride in their ship, and I didn’t ask for one. People stared at us as we walked along, me in the lead and seventeen gray-green little aliens fanned out behind me, streetlights blinking off as we went ahead in the brightening dawn. We made quite a parade.
Along the way, we passed a discount electronics store. It had one TV still running in the busted-out window display. The CBS Morning News was on, broadcasting from Boise, and I didn’t care what the aliens thought, I stopped to listen. The news showed the horrors the aliens were committing in Chicago, Delhi, Arusha, São Paulo, North Platte; then the announcer read a list of seventy cities where the same things were happening. A red dot blinked on a world map with every name, Salt Lake one of those dots. The broadcast moved to a panel speculating about why the aliens had left our satellites alone, then they started showing pictures of the Serengeti Plain littered with the corpses of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of wildebeests — all dead. No one knew why.
“You did this, too, didn’t you?” I said to the aliens.
“Did what, Dr. Massey?”
“What?”
“Did what?”
They hadn’t been paying attention to the news broadcast — they’d been tossing around shards of broken glass — so I pointed to the TV and made them look at the dead animals. “As if you haven’t done enough to us, you’ve killed the animals in Africa. Why? Why did you have to do that?”
“Not us, Dr. Massey.”
“Not us, not us, not us,” they chittered.
“What then?” I asked. “Those animals were doing just fine till you came.” I didn’t mention poachers or madcap dictators willing to turn national parks into private hunting reserves.
I turned and started walking again. “Not us. Not us,” they kept saying, and I ignored them.
We reached the University of Utah campus, and most of it was still standing — but what a mess it was: papers and books and chairs scattered everywhere on the lawns and all the windows busted out. My office was what you’d expect — if a cyclone had hit it, it would have dealt a kinder blow. The lab was in worse shape. “What did you need me for?” I asked. “You mean to tell me you couldn’t find your precious bug rocks after you made all this mess so you had to come find me to sort it out for you?”
They actually looked abashed. I didn’t know how far I could push them, but I was angry at what they’d done and at what they were doing — to me and to everyone, to the animals in Africa.
We were standing in what had once been a decent, even decently funded, paleontology lab, a huge, cavernous warehouse of a building where my preparators and I and all the other professors and their preparators and the curators had stored and studied and labeled and taken notes for articles on all the specimens we’d found in Mongolia and Patagonia and Utah. My colleagues and I had stored our specimens in trays and boxes on metal shelving fifteen feet high, and the aliens had knocked those over like dominoes. All the specimens lay heaped on the floor amidst the twisted shelving, looking like nothing more than dusty rocks. The electricity was on, but the lights flickered and I didn’t trust them. I did not want to walk back into the black cave the building would become if the lights went out, alone as I was with aliens. They’d scattered amongst the piles of rubble, picking up rocks and looking at them and tossing away anything that didn’t interest them longer than two seconds.
“Be careful with those specimens!” I said, but none of them would look at me or stop throwing fossils.
One of them touched my hand. I jerked it away, surprised. “Bug rocks,” he hissed.
“You’ll get them,” I said. “But in this mess you’ve made, it might take me a while.”
Someone screamed. Six aliens started jumping up and down on rocks not far away, hissing. I rushed over. “Don’t hurt them!” I shouted. “If you hurt these people, I will not help you get bug rocks.”
The aliens quit jumping, but they kept hissing and pointing and curling their sharp, long fingers. It was Ann Sanders, one of my preparators, and a young man, both of them wrapped in blankets. I walked through the ring of aliens after them. “Stand up,” I told them, and when they did I put my arms around them. “Now walk out with me.”
We stumbled over the fossils and shelving to the front of the room, the aliens following, hissing. “These people work for me,” I told the aliens, which was partly true, at least in Ann’s case. “You must not hurt them.”
If anything, the aliens hissed even more.
I turned around to face them. “Are we agreed?” I asked. “Or do I leave you now?”
“Agreed,” one of the aliens finally hissed.
“Agreeeed,” they all said.
“Then stop hissing,” I said. “We humans have work to do. Stay out of our way.”
I don’t know who looked more surprised at my orders, the aliens or Ann and her boyfriend. I needed things from my office. “Come with me,” I told the two humans. I couldn’t just send them after a flashlight and t
he recording gear — I wanted to keep them in sight to make sure they were safe. “We’ll be right back,” I told the aliens.
Of course they followed us.
“You must be Tom,” I said to the boy as we walked along.
He nodded. “But Dr. Massey, how —”
I told them what had happened and about the bargain I’d struck. Eventually we found my flashlight under books thrown on the floor, and the mike I clip to my collar, and the little recorder I use to record my comments and ideas while I work. Then I walked Ann and Tom to the front door where I could watch them walk away across the lawn and watch the aliens to make sure they didn’t run after them. It was the best I could do for their safety. When I couldn’t see Ann and Tom anymore, I went back to the lab and started stepping over the piles of stones — all of them fossils, some of them priceless — heading for my section. The aliens began sorting through the fossils again on their own. “Dinosaur rock,” they’d say in disgust, then throw the fossil against the wall.
“Reptile rock,” they’d chitter before throwing a specimen onto the floor.
“Dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs,” they’d chant, and then spit.
That they knew about dinosaurs at all made me wonder. “How do you know so much about past life on this world?” I asked them.
They just looked at me. They wouldn’t answer. Answering my questions, after all, was not part of our bargain. I started looking again for my fossils, and they went back to throwing around dinosaur bones. When I needed help, they helped me pull aside the twisted and bent shelving, and I found my specimens. I’d know them anywhere, of course, even in a mess. “God damn you — you broke this one,” I said, and I held up the two pieces of what had once been a perfect Meganeura monyi, a giant dragonfly, with its three-foot wingspan. I handed the pieces to one of the aliens. “You broke off the right wing,” I said.
All the aliens sucked in their breath and held it. The hands of the one I’d handed the giant dragonfly to were shaking. “Don’t drop it,” I said. “Put it down if you can’t hold on to it.”
He did set it down, and he stood watch over it while the others cleared a space on the floor where they set out all the specimens I handed to them. It was a small, precious collection — precious to me, anyway. Insects are such poor candidates for fossilization that there never have been many to study, not in the ambers, not in the rocks. It was how I’d made a name for myself. I’d discovered the earliest fossilized termites — in Permian rock, something people had had theories about but hadn’t proved. The oldest rock they’d found termites in before my work was Early Cretaceous. My termites had been a new species, too, and huge. I was giving up these specimens and others to buy Salt Lake and me a little time, but I hated to do it. I didn’t hand them everything.
They stared at the bits of ancient life I did give them in awe, and they chittered softly, almost reverently, around them. Their fascination with insect fossils made their disdain for every dinosaur fossil seem odd. Why the difference? Why hate one kind of ancient life and love another? Wondering that made me wonder how much they knew about dinosaurs, anyway. I figured they knew a lot.
“You know what killed the dinosaurs, don’t you?” I said.
They deflected my question. “Bugs not dead,” one said.
“Got ants, got dragonflies, got beetles —”
“Yes, but we don’t have the great reptiles, do we? Or the great amphibians — what about them? You know what happened, don’t you?”
They stopped chittering.
“Tell me,” I said.
They said nothing.
“Did an asteroid or a comet kill them?” I asked.
They were quiet for a time. “All die off,” one said.
“I know that,” I said.
“Mammals now.”
“Mammals!”
“Mammals die, die, die,” they chanted.
“Why?” I asked.
They just looked at me. Then they started picking up the fossils and heading for the doors. Eventually I followed them, turning out the lights as I went. When I walked out onto the sidewalk, they were gone. Not a thank-you. Not a good-bye. Not a good luck to you, mammal, because you’ll need it.
I looked up at the sky and wondered what they knew that we didn’t. What was maybe sneaking up on us that drove them here to take what they could while they could? Or what had they loosed upon the Earth that was killing all mammals? Thinking those thoughts — wondering those things — my mammal body shivered and grew cold.
No. 4: If you become homeless, guard personal space.
They didn’t leave. Their ships hovered over downtown through evening and into night. I grew more and more angry at the sight of them, and I started thinking: what do I have to lose? I headed downtown.
Downtown was deserted, busted-out windows and wrecked cars and bloated bodies everywhere. I wondered if the aliens hated cars so much because bugs splatter across their windshields — because cars are bug killers. I walked under seven of their ships and shouted up at them, but nothing happened. I started hearing what I thought was chittering in the dark, but it wasn’t them, it was the TV in the discount electronics store playing news bulletins: aliens in Paris, aliens in San Antonio, aliens in half the world, all the adult sheepdogs in Tierra del Fuego and Australia dead overnight, and the adult sheepdogs in New Zealand and Idaho and Wyoming sick and listless and dying, too — but no infection, no canine pandemic, no poisoning that anybody could detect. Something had just turned off in the sheepdogs of a certain age and they died. Everybody blamed the aliens, but I wondered. For as long as I remembered, whales had beached themselves around the world for no clear reason. Last Christmas, my father had told me the American Cattlemen’s Association had reported the fourteenth year of drops in live births in cattle. Human sperm counts had been dropping for decades. What was going on with class Mammalia?
And how did insects fit in?
I found the aliens in Liberty Park, or rather, I found my fossils set out in a neat row on the sidewalk and I knew the aliens could not be far. They were attracting moths with a light and catching the moths in jars. “Punch holes in the lids, or they’ll die,” I told them. “They have to breathe.”
They hissed greetings at me: “Dr. Massey, Dr. Massssssey, Dr. Massey.”
“We had a deal,” I told them. “Why haven’t you left?”
“Got catch bugs!”
“Take live bugs!”
“Bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs,” they said.
I started helping them, the sooner to get rid of them. We caught ants underneath picnic tables. I took them to garbage cans where they caught flies. Their hands were so fast they could follow the sound of a cricket and snatch it out of the shadows.
And the puzzle started to come together in my mind. I turned on my recorder. “You want live bugs and stone bugs,” I said.
“Yes, yes, yes,” they chittered.
“You want specimens of the one thing that’s never had a truly big die-off on this world — insects.”
They stopped whatever they were doing to stare at me. I was lying, of course: Earth evolved two types of life that haven’t, as far as we know, suffered a mass extinction — we have class Schizomycetes, the bacteria, besides class Insecta. But I did not want to give them ideas. Mammals also haven’t gone through a natural extinction on the scale of the dinosaurs, but the aliens seemed to think such a thing was upon us.
“Smart mammal,” one hissed.
“Smart, sssmart, smart,” they hissed, then they were quiet, staring at me.
“On any world,” one said, finally.
That stunned me. Evidently, at least as far as these aliens knew, insects were the only species anywhere to be so lucky. Nowhere else had anything like them to study. It was clear now why the aliens had come to Earth. “So it won’t be just amphibians, reptiles, now mammals,” I said. “Your day is coming, too?”
They held up their jars with insects in them. “Maybe not,” one said softly.
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br /> “Maybe not, not, not,” they whispered.
Theories flashed through my head. Perhaps DNA combines and evolves and works for, oh, one hundred, two hundred million years in a given class, then it gets too garbled — its combinations produce more errors than viable organisms — and the class dies off. “It’s the DNA, isn’t it?” I said. “It never was an asteroid or a comet.”
“DNA, Dr. Massey.”
“Sssmart mammal. Smart.”
“DNA.”
So they’d come here to study a species that hadn’t suffered a mass extinction — probably to try to find a way to extend the life of their own species, or maybe class. We should have known what they knew, I thought, and maybe we would have realized it on our own, given time. We’d known for decades, after all, that dinosaurs in Australia had survived millions of years after the comet or asteroid or whatever hit the Earth had done its damage. Something else had reduced class Reptilia to the comparatively few examples we presently have. I turned the recorder back on. “How long does a die-off take?” I asked.
But I had almost all the answers from them I was going to get. They ignored that question. I tried one more. “What mammals will likely survive?”
They wouldn’t answer that, either, or so I thought. I gave up and turned off the recorder, something I’ve always regretted. One of them hissed, at that moment, unrecorded: “Ratssss.”
No. 5: If you become homeless, keep secrets.
By morning they had lots of bugs, and by noon they kept their part of the bargain. They never came back to Salt Lake City, but they spent most of the year terrorizing the rest of the planet; then they spent two years collecting on Mindanao, in the Amazon Basin, in the ruins of Shanghai and Isfahan; then they all left. I spent a year in Isfahan with all the teams trying to figure out what was unique about insects there — living or fossilized — and we came up empty-handed. But there was something, we figured. We just hadn’t found it yet. Shanghai ended up having eight aquatic insects, two flies, one cockroach, one beetle, and two moths all endemic to the city — and who would have imagined such a thing? I’m leaving for Shanghai next fall to study the fossilized insects they’re finding in the quarries the aliens left behind.
How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories Page 14
