PEOPLE WERE LINED UP SIX deep at the bar when I arrived at the Ras, and everyone was drinking like mad and staring at the screen. They were showing the clips of the aliens over and over. Maranta was already there. Her eyes were glowing. She pressed herself up against me like a wild woman. “My God,” she said, “isn’t it wonderful! The men from Mars are here! Or wherever they’re from. Let’s hoist a few to the men from Mars.”
We hoisted more than a few. Somehow I got home at a respectable seven o’clock anyway. The apartment was still in its one-room configuration, though our contract with Bobby Christie specified wall-shift at half past six. Elaine refused to have anything to do with activating the shift. She was afraid, I think, of timing the sequence wrong and being crushed by the walls, or something.
“You heard?” Elaine said. “The aliens?”
“I wasn’t far from the park at lunchtime,” I told her. “That was when it happened, at lunchtime, while I was up by the park.”
Her eyes went wide. “Then you actually saw them land?”
“I wish. By the time I got to the park entrance the cops had everything sealed off.”
I pressed the button and the walls began to move. Our living room and kitchen returned from Bobby Christie’s domain. In the moment of shift I caught sight of Bobby on the far side, getting dressed to go out. He waved and grinned. “Space monsters in the park,” he said. “My my my. It’s a real jungle out there, don’t you know?” And then the walls closed away on him.
Elaine switched on the news and once again I watched the aliens drifting around the mall picking up people’s jackets and candy-bar wrappers.
“Hey,” I said, “the mayor ought to put them on the city payroll.”
“What were you doing up by the park at lunchtime?” Elaine asked, after a bit.
The next day was when the second ship landed and the real space monsters appeared. To me the first aliens didn’t qualify as monsters at all. Monsters ought to be monstrous, bottom line. Those first aliens were no bigger than you or me.
The second batch, they were something else, though. The behemoths. The space elephants. Of course they weren’t anything like elephants, except that they were big. Big? Immense. It put me in mind of Hannibal’s invasion of Rome, seeing those gargantuan things disembarking from the new spaceship. It seemed like the Second Punic War all over again, Hannibal and the elephants.
You remember how that was. When Hannibal set out from Carthage to conquer Rome, he took with him a phalanx of elephants, thirty-seven huge gray attack-trained monsters. Elephants were useful in battle in those days—a kind of early-model tank—but they were handy also for terrifying the civilian populace: bizarre colossal smelly critters trampling invincibly through the suburbs, flapping their vast ears and trumpeting awesome cries of doom and burying your rose bushes under mountainous turds. And now we had the same deal. With one difference, though: the Roman archers picked off Hannibal’s elephants long before they got within honking distance of the walls of Rome. But these aliens had materialized without warning right in the middle of Central Park, in that big grassy meadow between the Seventy-second Street transverse and Central Park South, which is another deal altogether. I wonder how well things would have gone for the Romans if they had awakened one morning to find Hannibal and his army camping out in the Forum, and his thirty-seven hairy shambling flap-eared elephants snuffling and snorting and farting about on the marble steps of the Temple of Jupiter.
The new spaceship arrived the way the first one had, pop whoosh ping thunk, and the behemoths came tumbling out of it like rabbits out of a hat. We saw it on the evening news: the networks had a new bunch of spy-eyes up, half a mile or so overhead. The ship made a kind of belching sound and this thing suddenly was standing on the mall gawking and gaping. Then another belch, another thing. And on and on until there were two or three dozen of them. Nobody has ever been able to figure out how that little ship could have held as many as one of them. It was no bigger than a schoolbus standing on end.
The monsters looked like double-humped blue medium-size mountains with legs. The legs were their most elephantine feature—thick and rough-skinned, like tree-trunks—but they worked on some sort of telescoping principle and could be collapsed swiftly back up into the bodies of their owners. Eight was the normal number of legs, but you never saw eight at once on any of them: as they moved about they always kept at least one pair withdrawn, though from time to time they’d let that pair descend and pull up another one, in what seemed like a completely random way. Now and then they might withdraw two pairs at once, which would cause them to sink down to ground level at one end like a camel kneeling.
They were enormous. Enormous. Getting exact measurements of one presented certain technical problems, as I think you can appreciate. The most reliable estimate was that they were twenty-five-to thirty-feet high and forty-to fifty-feet long. That is not only substantially larger than any elephant past or present, it is rather larger than most of the two-family houses still to be found in the outer boroughs of the city. Furthermore a two-family house of the kind found in Queens or Brooklyn, though it may offend your esthetic sense, will not move around at all, it will not emit bad smells and frightening sounds, it will never sit down on a bison and swallow it, nor, for that matter, will it swallow you. African elephants, they tell me, run ten-or eleven-feet high at the shoulder, and the biggest extinct mammoths were three or four feet taller than that. There once was a mammal called the baluchitherium that stood about sixteen-feet high. That was the largest land mammal that ever lived. The space creatures were nearly twice as high. We are talking large here. We are talking dinosaur-plus dimensions.
Central Park is several miles long but quite modest in width. It runs just from Fifth Avenue to Eighth. Its designers did not expect that anyone would allow two or three dozen animals bigger than two-family houses to wander around freely in an urban park three city blocks wide. No doubt the small size of their pasture was very awkward for them. Certainly it was for us.
“I THINK THEY HAVE TO be an exploration party,” Maranta said. “Don’t you?” We had shifted the scene of our Monday and Friday lunches from Central Park to Rockefeller Center, but otherwise we were trying to behave as though nothing unusual was going on. “They can’t have come as invaders. One little spaceship-load of aliens couldn’t possibly conquer an entire planet.”
Maranta is unfailingly jaunty and optimistic. She is a small, energetic woman with close-cropped red hair and green eyes, one of those boyish-looking women who never seem to age. I love her for her optimism. I wish I could catch it from her, like measles.
I said, “There are two spaceship-loads of aliens, Maranta.”
She made a face. “Oh. The jumbos. They’re just dumb shaggy monsters. I don’t see them as much of a menace, really.”
“Probably not. But the little ones—they have to be a superior species. We know that because they’re the ones who came to us. We didn’t go to them.”
She laughed. “It all sounds so absurd. That Central Park should be full of creatures—”
“But what if they do want to conquer Earth?” I asked.
“Oh,” Maranta said. “I don’t think that would necessarily be so awful.”
THE SMALLER ALIENS SPENT THE first few days installing a good deal of mysterious equipment on the mall in the vicinity of their ship: odd intricate shimmering constructions that looked as though they belonged in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. They made no attempt to enter into communication with us. They showed no interest in us at all. The only time they took notice of us was when we sent spy-eyes overhead. They would tolerate them for an hour or two and then would shoot them down, casually, like swatting flies, with spurts of pink light. The networks—and then the government surveillance agencies, when they moved in—put the eyes higher and higher each day, but the aliens never failed to find them. After a week or so we were forced to rely for our information on government spy satellites monitoring the park from
space, and on whatever observers equipped with binoculars could glimpse from the taller apartment houses and hotels bordering the park. Neither of these arrangements was entirely satisfactory.
The behemoths, during those days, were content to roam aimlessly through the park southward from Seventy-second Street, knocking over trees, squatting down to eat them. Each one gobbled two or three trees a day, leaves, branches, trunk, and all. There weren’t all that many trees to begin with down there, so it seemed likely that before long they’d have to start ranging farther afield.
The usual civic groups spoke up about the trees. They wanted the mayor to do something to protect the park. The monsters, they said, would have to be made to go elsewhere—to Canada, perhaps, where there were plenty of expendable trees. The mayor said that he was studying the problem but that it was too early to know what the best plan of action would be.
His chief goal, in the beginning, was simply to keep a lid on the situation. We still didn’t even know, after all, whether we were being invaded or just visited. To play it safe the police were ordered to set up and maintain round-the-clock seal-fields completely encircling the park in the impacted zone south of Seventy-second Street. The power costs of this were staggering and Con Edison found it necessary to impose a ten-percent voltage cutback in the rest of the city, which caused a lot of grumbling, especially now that it was getting to be air conditioner weather.
The police didn’t like any of this: out there day and night standing guard in front of an intangible electronic barrier with ungodly monsters just a sneeze away. Now and then one of the blue goliaths would wander near the sealfield and peer over the edge. A sealfield maybe a dozen feet high doesn’t give you much of a sense of security when there’s an animal two or three times that height looming over its top.
So the cops asked for time and a half. Combat pay, essentially. There wasn’t room in the city budget for that, especially since no one knew how long the aliens were going to continue to occupy the park. There was talk of a strike. The mayor appealed to Washington, which had studiously been staying remote from the whole event as if the arrival of an extraterrestrial task force in the middle of Manhattan was purely a municipal problem.
The president rummaged around in the Constitution and decided to activate the National Guard. That surprised a lot of basically sedentary men who enjoy dressing up occasionally in uniforms. The Guard hadn’t been called out since the Bulgarian business in ’94 and its current members weren’t very sharp on procedures, so some hasty on-the-job training became necessary. As it happened, Maranta’s husband Tim was an officer in the 107th Infantry, which was the regiment that was handed the chief responsibility for protecting New York City against the creatures from space. So his life suddenly was changed a great deal, and so was Maranta’s; and so was mine.
LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, I FOUND myself going over to the park again and again to try and get a glimpse of the aliens. But the barricades kept you fifty feet away from the park perimeter on all sides, and the taller buildings flanking the park had put themselves on a residents-only admission basis, with armed guards enforcing it, so they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by hordes of curiosity-seekers.
I did see Tim, though. He was in charge of an improvised-looking command post at Fifth and Fifty-ninth, near the horse-and-buggy stand. Youngish stockbrokery-looking men kept running up to him with reports to sign, and he signed each one with terrific dash and vigor, without reading any of them. In his crisp tan uniform and shiny boots, he must have seen himself as some doomed and gallant officer in an ancient movie, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, John Wayne, bracing himself for the climactic cavalry charge or the onslaught of the maddened Sepoys. The poor bastard.
“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 anymore. I don’t know what we were to each other. We rarely lunched anymore. (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 Seventy-second 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 Seventy-fourth, 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 mindset. Then one night he called me and said, “Hey, fellow, how would you like to go into the park and play with the critters?”
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