I wasn’t too happy when the knocking started on my door that morning. Nobody’s welcome out here except UPS and customers, and I wasn’t expecting any deliveries, and customers have to call first. New buyers have to be referred by people I know. That’s a rule. I check references, too. I don’t let anybody in who isn’t vouched for, and even so, it’s amazing I’ve never had cops out here. Some of my buyers ask why I didn’t go legit when the medical-marijuana bill passed four years ago, but that’s a no-brainer: I do not need the government crawling up my backside to regulate me, and I have a lot more customers this way, and I make a lot more money. Being legal would be nothing but a pain in the ass, even if I didn’t have to worry about keeping people from finding out about the space cucumbers.
As it happened, my latest bunch of cucumbers was due to start singing any minute, which meant the last thing I needed was somebody in the house. That’s another reason buyers have to call first: depending on what the cucumbers are up to, I tell people they have to wait, I can’t see them today.
So when the knocking started, I thought, shit, government, and my stomach tied up in a knot. I’d have pretended I wasn’t home, but you can get stranded motorists out here too, and the sooner you let them use your phone or whatever, the sooner they go away. So when I heard that knock and looked out and didn’t recognize who was there—some bearded guy pushing forty, about my age, in jeans and a plaid shirt and hiking boots, had tree-hugging liberal written all over him—I grabbed my gun and yelled through the door, “Who is it?” Since it was only one guy, that made cops less likely, but on the other hand his car was in front of the house, a nice little Toyota, which made mechanical failure less likely, too. Maybe he had to use the bathroom, in which case I’d tell him to use the desert. If he needed water I’d give him some, though. You always give people water, out here. You’d think people would know not to drive anywhere in this state without extra water in the car, but between the dumb college kids from Reno and the morons moving here from California, the average survival IQ in Nevada isn’t what it should be. This guy was too old to be in college, so I pegged him as Californian. Local folks only drive in the desert with four-wheel drive.
“Mr. Whitwell Smith?” he yelled through the door. “Welly?”
“Yeah?” Only buyers call me Welly: It’s a kind of code. I’m Whit to everybody else, not that I’ve talked to much of anybody else since Nancy Ann left. “Who wants to know?”
“My name’s Jim Humphreys.” The name didn’t mean anything to me. “I’m a friend of Sam Mortimer’s.”
That name did. Sam used to be one of my best customers, out here once a month spending big money, until he suddenly stopped coming altogether about six months ago. No call, nothing. I’d been wondering what happened to him, not that it’s any of my business. I’d almost started to think of Sam as a friend, I’d known him so long; we’d even gone skeet-shooting on my property a few times. “Yeah? You know Sam, you know you have to call before you come out here. Sam knows that.”
“I’ve been trying to call for three days, Mr. Smith. Your phone’s out of order.”
Shit. That was the first I knew of it. I hadn’t gotten any calls for three days, but that’s not unusual: You never know when business is going to be slow, and nobody else calls me. But it could still be a trick. “You wait just a minute,” I hollered through the door, and ran and picked up the phone. Dead. No dial tone. Nothing. Which meant I’d have to get telephone repair people out here, but that would have to wait until the latest batch of cucumbers was gone. In the meantime, I turned on my cell phone in case anybody was trying to reach me. I don’t like the cell phone; I don’t like having my conversations broadcast all over hell and gone for the government to spy on. But you have to have a cell phone for emergencies, just like you have to have water. If you miss a customer call, you could lose business.
“Okay,” I hollered, back at the door. “Thank you for telling me about the telephone, but I can’t see you today. We can make an appointment—”
“Mr. Smith, I drove seventy miles to get here, and this is an emergency. Please open the door.”
Emergency? Nobody’d ever used that line on me before. My crop isn’t addictive, which is one of the things I like about it. You don’t get strung-out dopeheads at your door who’d murder their own mothers for their next fix. Who needs that kind of trouble?
I checked my watch. The cucumbers were due to start singing in about thirty minutes, but sometimes they go off early. I’m never sure exactly when they’ve gotten here, which makes the timing tricky, and that means I wasn’t about to open the door. “If it’s an emergency, call 911, Mr. Humphreys. I’m not in that line of work.”
“Welly, please. Sam’s very sick. He has cancer. He had surgery four months ago and now he’s having chemo and it’s making him sicker than a dog, and the prescription stuff isn’t working for him. He says it isn’t strong enough. He says yours is the best. He sent me out here with two hundred and fifty dollars to buy some. Please don’t send me back to that poor man empty-handed.”
“Huh,” I said. I wasn’t surprised the government couldn’t grow good plants. They were probably growing oregano and charging pot prices for it; you can’t trust those people as far as you can throw them. I started with the best stock when I got into business fifteen years ago, and I’ve been refining it since then. Genetics was my favorite part of biology in high school.
I looked at my watch again. I could run and get a quarter bag and shove it through the door and pull this Humphreys’ cash in, and it would all be over in ten seconds. And if the cucumbers started up and he heard them, I’d tell him it was the TV. “You wait there,” I called out. “I’ll be right back.”
I ran and got a quarter bag and a paper lunch sack, and put the gun on a shelf near the door, where I could grab it fast if I had to, but Humphreys couldn’t reach inside and get it, and then I opened the door a crack, as far as the chain would allow. “Here,” I said. I held up the quarter bag so he could see it, and dropped it in the lunch sack. “You pass the money through, you get this.”
He held up a sheaf of bills and slipped them through. All singles and fives, Jesus, what had Sam been thinking? Come to think of it, a quarter bag wouldn’t get him very far, not given Sam’s smoking habits, but I was guessing he didn’t have much money left over, after the cancer. He’d probably been saving up since the chemo started, the poor bastard, and insurance wouldn’t pay for mine. I wondered if I should give him some extra for free—he’d been a very good customer for a long time—but in the meantime, I started counting the bills. Old habits.
While I was counting, Humphreys said drily, “Sam said you let him come into the house.” I could hear him more clearly now, with the door open, and something about his voice nagged at me. He had a little bit of an accent, English or Aussie maybe. Where had I heard a voice like that lately?
“I know Sam,” I said. “No offense.” I finished counting—it was all there—and then I handed the bag through. As I did, I got a good look at Humphreys’ face for the first time, and two things happened at once.
The first thing was that I recognized him from TV. You just don’t see many preachers with Aussie accents feeding bag ladies on the news, especially when the preacher has one deformed ear, the right one, all ugly and lumpy and crumpled up like a cauliflower. I hadn’t picked up on the ear before because I’d only gotten a side view of him when I looked out the window.
The second thing was that the cucumbers starting singing, all three of them at once: Wails and whistles and grunts, like a cross between a porno soundtrack and an orchestra of teakettles.
Humphreys’ eyes widened. “What—”
“It’s the TV,” I said, and tried to slam the door, but I couldn’t because he’d wedged his foot in there, and he was staring behind me, goggle-eyed. When I turned to look over my shoulder, I saw that one of the cucumbers had staggered out of the den, away from its friends and the nice warm heaters, and was hopping in pathetic circles around my livin
g room, which makes it the first time in almost ten years that a cucumber’s moved from where I put it once it got into the house.
I was about to have a very bad day.
The space cucumbers started coming here a few months after Nancy Ann ran off. I don’t know why they picked this place—it’s just a ranch house out in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Reno and Gerlach, with nothing to look at but sagebrush and lizards and alkali dust, so flat that the mountains on the horizon seem like a mirage—and I never have figured out how they keep from attracting the attention of the air base in Stead. Those bastards are government, and I figure they have to have instruments that can tell if you throw a penny in the air, and the cucumbers have to come in some kind of ship, or come down through the atmosphere, anyway. And you see those air base planes and ’copters doing maneuvers out here all the time, so I don’t know why they’ve never picked up on what’s going on. I guess the cucumbers are smarter than they are. It’s not hard to be smarter than the government.
I call them space cucumbers because they look like a sea cucumber I saw once—or at least, they look more like that than like anything else. My parents took me on a trip to San Diego when I was a kid, and we went to the aquarium there. They had all kinds of animals, scary ones like sharks and smart ones like dolphins and whales who did tricks, but for some reason, the one I always remembered best was the sea cucumber. It was lying in a tank of water, in this kind of petting zoo they had, and you could reach in and touch it. It was brown and very, very soft, and if somebody had grabbed it and started cutting it into pieces, it couldn’t have fought back. It didn’t swim or do tricks. It didn’t do anything. It just sat there. The aquarium lady said it ate by filtering tiny bits of food out of the water. It was a really boring animal, and I never have known why it made such an impression on me. Probably because I couldn’t figure out how a creature like that could survive in the ocean with sharks and lobsters and stingrays. “I guess sharks don’t think they taste good,” the aquarium lady said, but you could tell she didn’t know either. That cucumber was a mystery.
Which is what mine are, too. They show up two or three at a time, every five or six weeks. I just open the door in the morning and there they are, waiting on my welcome mat. They’re much bigger than the sea cucumber in San Diego, about three feet tall and as thick around as a flagpole, and I can’t touch them because they’re wrapped in something like plastic. Like really thick shrink wrap. Or maybe that’s their skin, but I don’t think so: I think it’s some kind of spacesuit, and the animal’s the thing inside, the brown blobby cylindrical thing that hops along on nine stubby little legs, all clustered at the bottom of the cylinder, like tentacles. Hopping isn’t easy for them, you can tell—I don’t think it’s how they usually move around, wherever they come from—so I usually pick them up to carry them inside. Wherever they’re from, they’ve come a long way to get here, and I figure if there’s anything I can do to make it easier for them, why not? They’re always exactly air temperature, or the shrink wrap is, and they’re not as heavy as you’d expect from their size. I can just stick them under my arm, like pieces of firewood.
When the first ones came I was terrified, of course. The cucumbers would have been weird whenever they showed up, but Nancy Ann had just left, and I was out of my mind with grief and anger, smoking entirely too much of my own crop just to get to sleep at night. I felt like I was going crazy, and having space cucumbers on my welcome mat didn’t help. I didn’t know what they were or what they wanted. I didn’t know if they were going to kill me or take over the planet or poison the water supply, and I couldn’t ask anybody because that would have gotten the government involved, and even if I trusted the government I couldn’t have people tramping around my house and finding the plants and grow lights and sprinklers in the basement. I have one hell of a professional setup down there: no way I could argue personal use, even if possession weren’t still a felony for anybody without an approved medical condition.
The first time they showed up and hopped into the house, I just went weak in the knees and started babbling at them, trying to figure out what they wanted, trying to find some way to communicate. Didn’t work, of course. If they can talk or understand me when I talk, I haven’t found any way to tell, not in all these years. Maybe the singing’s some kind of language, like what whales have, but if so I haven’t figured it out yet, and they never respond in any way I can tell when I say things to them. That first visit, they all hopped over to my wood stove and stood around it, shaking, and the entire forty-eight hours until they started singing, I don’t think I slept a wink. I didn’t know what they were going to do. I didn’t dare shoot them because I didn’t want to give them an excuse to destroy the planet, and anyway I could tell even then they had some kind of suit on, and if I broke through it and whatever they were made of came out, who knew what kind of plague I’d start? I never have breached one of those suits.
They didn’t do anything that first time, of course, not until they started singing. When the noise started, I got into a duck-and-cover position under my coffee table because I thought they were going to attack me. And then when nothing happened and the singing stopped, I just crouched there, waiting, until about half an hour later the first one liquefied on me, and then within half an hour after that, the other two had gone gravy, too.
You know those gravy packets that come with some kinds of TV dinners? The plastic pouches you throw into boiling water and then pull out of the pot with tongs, so you can cut them open to pour the gravy out? I guess some people use microwaves, but I think boiling water works better. Anyway, that’s what the cucumbers look like when they liquefy: giant gravy pouches. There’s a big sploosh, and then all of a sudden where there used to be something that looked like an animal, there’s just brown mush. If you pick up the suit then, it’s like holding a bag of thick brown water, and frankly it’s pretty disgusting. The first time I saw it, I nearly got sick, and then I got even more scared, wondering what would happen next.
Nothing happened. Nothing’s ever happened, after they go gravy. I think they’re dead, then. As near as I can tell, they come here to die. Why they’d come here, I have no idea. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, but I’ve never come up with any idea that makes sense. The first few times it happened, I thought they’d just crashed here or gotten stranded, like motorists without water, and Earth had killed them somehow, or I had. But it’s been happening every five or six weeks for ten years, so now I think they come here deliberately. Maybe this is some kind of pilgrimage for them; maybe my house was built on some kind of alien shrine, like Area 51. I just don’t know. And I could be wrong, anyway. Maybe they aren’t dead at all. Maybe if I opened one of the suits up, they’d come back to life.
For a while I kept some of the cucumber-gravy bags stacked out where the newest ones could see them when they showed up; I thought maybe they’d show me somehow what to do with them. They never responded at all. It was like the gravy packets weren’t even there. Don’t ask me what kind of animal doesn’t recognize its own dead. Then I kept some of those first packets down in the basement, to see if they’d change over time, but they didn’t. The suits keep whatever’s inside from decomposing more, I guess.
Now I bury them. I’ve got forty acres here. I don’t know what I’ll do when my land gets filled in. Go out into the desert, I guess, and try to find places where people won’t see me, places that aren’t likely to get developed. Who knows what would happen if a backhoe sliced through one of those suits? None of the ones I’ve buried have ever gotten dug up by coyotes. I guess the cucumbers, dead or alive, are as invisible to coyotes as they are to the government. And as far as I know, the government hasn’t seen me digging, either. I don’t dig any time I can see or hear planes or ’copters, not that that’s any guarantee.
For a while at the beginning I thought maybe the cucumbers really were invisible, thought I was having hallucinations, losing it over Nancy Ann. I drove into Reno a bunch of times
to use the Internet at the library—I won’t have a computer here because I don’t trust the government not to spy on what I’m looking up—and did research, trying to find out if anyone else was reporting space aliens who looked like sea cucumbers. Nothing. I keep checking, every six months or so, but if other people are getting visits, I’ve never found any sign of it. I’ve read about crop circles and UFO abductions and all kinds of damnfool things, but never anything about singing cucumbers in plastic suits who turn into mush.
After a few visits, I wasn’t scared of them anymore. They’re nothing if not predictable. Every five or six weeks I wake up and open the door and find a couple or three on my welcome mat. I’ve never seen any bright lights in the middle of the night, or heard anything; I just open the door and there they are. And they hop into the house, and forty-eight hours later, give or take an hour, they start singing. They sing for three to seven minutes, and within an hour after that, they go gravy.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if they’d never started coming. Would I still be living here? Would I have taken all the money I’ve made and moved to Hawaii, the way Nancy Ann and I always planned? Would I have taken that trip around the world I dreamed about when I was a kid? As it is, three or four times a year I take off for a week or two, always right after the latest cucumbers have gone gravy. I go someplace fancy, someplace that might as well be a different planet—New York or New Orleans or Bermuda—and I live it up. Good hotels, good food, high-class hookers. Those women like me. I tip well, and I treat them like human beings. They don’t have to worry that I’ll get ugly on them, and I don’t have to worry that they’ll break my heart. Works out for everybody. I could use Nevada hookers too, of course, the legal ones, and sometimes I do, but it feels less like a vacation that way.
I enjoy those trips. But I always come back home, because I always know another batch of cucumbers will be landing on my welcome mat.
Lightspeed: Year One Page 45
