“I’m certain you’re a fine, upstanding gentleman in real life. I’m certain you have nothing but good in mind for me. But I can’t take that chance, and neither can you, really. So, Alex Smith, whoever the hell you are, take the damned food I’m offering you, and get out of here before I shoot you dead in bed. Because I will, sir, in just about two goddamned minutes, sir.”
What choice did I have? At least I got something to eat.
The morning was bright and clear again, and the eastern sky glowed pink, tinged with fine little golden clouds. The vista reminded me of one of those TV programs about “Beautiful California”—you know, the ones where everything is bright and rosy and “we don’t talk about poverty here, oh no.”
Somewhere near Chinatown I saw the ruins of the panic that must have poured through the city when the evacuations began. A minivan had slewed halfway up the curb by the side of the road, inscribed with the young, seductive, come-hither image of “Madame Stavroula, Grand Mystic and Traveling Tarot Card Reader,” who for just a hundred bucks would tell you your future and your fortune, with a money-back guarantee. She looked like a gypsy in her waist-long hair and multi-colored shawl and quasi-medieval outfit, but the effect was partially ruined by the granny glasses and thick pancake make-up. I wondered who’d refunded her deposit.
Nearby I saw some blood-stained bone fragments next to a vaguely spurting fire hydrant, no doubt all that remained of the dear Madame, at least on this sphere. My movements had become slow and even lazy, as if I had all the time in the world. I thought again of going north to Sonoma to find my wife, although I knew that I probably had little chance of surviving such a trip. I realized suddenly that I was very lonely.
I found cover under a bunch of oleanders in a park near the North Beach area. Patches of red illuminated the paths, but I saw relatively little of the weed there, which seemed, well, odd. Then the sun emerged from behind a cloud, flooding everything with newfound light and vitality. I encountered a swarm of miniature yellow frogs frolicking in a swampy pond amidst the eucalyptus trees, and I drew a lesson from their example.
I would live.
I would survive to tell my story.
These creatures had no more inkling of the aliens than ants did of man.
Suddenly I knew I was being watched. Turning around, I saw a dark figure crouching behind a clump of roses. I stepped towards him, and he pulled out a rifle. I held out my hands where he could see them. He just stood there silent and motionless, waiting for me to approach.
I noticed that he was dressed in camouflage clothing such as a soldier might wear, and I wondered if he was one of the “weekend warriors” who’d gone out to meet the Martian onslaught a month ago. He looked as though he’d been dragged through several ditches and weed patches. His clothes were dirty and tattered, his face streaked with mud, his nose dripping, his dark hair completely unkempt. His entire body was gaunt from stress and hunger. There was a red slash across the lower part of his face that gave him an ugly smirk; it looked as though it might be infected.
“Halt!” he said in his hoarse voice. “Halt, I say. Who are you and where are you from?”
“Novato,” I said. “I was at the first pit that the Martians made.”
“What’s your name, soldier?”
I was tempted to say, “Call me Ishmael,” but instead just mumbled something about “Smith.”
He paid no attention to anything I said.
“There’s no food here. This is my place. From this hill down to the Bay and back again and up to the edge of the park, it’s my place, all mine. I’m the commander of the company here, and there’re only enough supplies for us. What do you want?”
I considered my answer carefully. This man was skating right on the edge.
“I was trapped in the ruins of a house for two weeks. I don’t know anything about what’s happened in the interim, except that everyone seems to have disappeared.”
He looked at me uncertainly. His finger twitched on the rifle.
“Could you possibly lower that gun?” I said.
“I’ll be damned!” he said. “It’s you! It’s the man from Novato! I thought you’d been killed.”
Then I recognized him.
“You’re the National Guardsman from my garden.”
“Yeah, I’m Mayer. We’re the lucky ones! Imagine seeing you again after all this time! I thought you’d been blasted for sure. Bugger-food, you know.” He put down his rifle and held out his hand, and I shook it most gratefully. “I crawled into a drain,” he said. “But they didn’t kill everyone, not after that first bout. And later, well, later they all went away, and I headed off towards San Quentin, taking a shortcut across the fields.” Then he stopped. “You’ve gone part gray! Imagine that! And your beard, you didn’t have a beard before, that’s why I didn’t recognize you. You look like an old fart now.” Suddenly he realized what he’d said. “Sorry,” he said, “sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you.”
I shook my head.
“We’ve all been through a lot,” I said.
There was a squawk in the trees. Mayer jumped up, grabbed his weapon, and stood sentinel until the sound repeated itself.
“Just a damn crow.” He gestured with his gun, visibly relaxing. “Lot of ’em about these days. You know, this park’s a bit too open for me. Let’s get under cover where we can talk some more.”
“Have you seen any of the Martians?”
“Nah, they’ve all gone to the other side of the city somewheres,” he said. “They’ve got a camp over there. At night, the sky lights up with their doin’s. It’s just like a big city itself, and in the glare you can barely see them movin’, shadows outlined among the shadows. In daylight you can’t see much of anything, unless you get too close, and you don’t want to do that! But here, well, here I haven’t seen them for”—he counted on his fingers—“five days, I guess. Then I spotted a couple of the big machines carrying something really large, dunno what it was. And night before last”—he stopped and waved again at the distant horizon—”it was just more lights, you know, but they had something up in the sky, this kind of jet, I guess, but bigger than anything I’ve seen before. Now that our fighters are gone, I think they’re building their own warplanes. Maybe they want to rule the rest of the world, huh?”
At his direction, I dropped to my hands and knees to crawl under the rose bushes, cringing every time one of the thorns grabbed my clothing.
“So they’re flying now?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “they fly! You know, it was so large, the thing was so damn friggin’ big, that it blotted out the whole sky. Geez, I saw the stars covered over one by one as the machine drifted by. It scared the holy shit out of me, tell you the truth, even more than the sting-ray did, and that was bad enough. Had to change my pants, if you know what I mean.”
I allowed as how I did. I settled my bottom into a little dirt hollow and made myself comfortable.
“Then it’s all over,” I said quietly. “If they can do that, they can do anything. We don’t stand a chance.”
He nodded in agreement.
“Yeah, that’s what I think too. But maybe they’ll leave us alone for awhile. ’Sides”—he looked at me furtively—“’Sides, we’re already down, so we have no where to go but up!
“We’re beat, Smith. They crippled the old U.S. of A., the greatest goddam power in the whole friggin’ known universe, and they did it without even breakin’ a sweat. They walked all over us, and we couldn’t do a damn thing about it. And those machines up near San Rafael, hey, that was just an accident! We got lucky! And these’re just the first wave. You know they’ll keep coming. They’ve probably already got another fleet on its way. We’re beat!”
I just stared into space, unable to counter his argument.
“This ain’t a war,” said the Guardsman. “It’s a slaughter. The Martians are so far above us that we never even had a chance.”
Suddenly I recalled that night in Mindon’s observatory.
I mentioned this and added: “I only saw a few ships land.”
“But you don’t know what happened afterwards, you said so yourself. You don’t have any idea how many ships they’ve sent. Look here”—he pointed to a nearby anthill—“These little buggers go right on building their cities, living their lives, waging their wars and revolutions, until man wants them out of his way, and then, pfft! They’re gone! That’s what we are to the Martians—just a bunch of ants. The only thing is—”
He swallowed hard.
“Yes,” I said.
“We’re the edible ants!”
We sat looking at each other in horror.
“What’ll they do with us?” I said.
“Well, that’s what I’ve been thinkin’ about,” he said, shaking his head again, “that’s what I’ve been really thinkin’ about, my friend. After what happened at San Rafael—you were there, you saw it—I headed south, and all the time I was thinkin’. I saw what was happenin’. Most people were squealin’ like rabbits and pissin’ all over themselves. But I’m not a squealer or a pisser. I’ve seen death and I’ve seen pain, and death is just death, you know. It’s the thinkin’ man who always comes through.
“Everyone was runnin’ south towards San José. And there was a Martian camp there! Does that make any sense? Does it? So I says to myself, ‘You know, the food won’t last,’ and I went back to the city. I headed there because I knew I couldn’t outsmart the buggers. Down there”—he waved a hand at the southern horizon—“down there everyone’s starvin’ and runnin’ and killin’ and fightin’ each other, all over scraps of bread. Not me, friend, not me! Mama Mayer didn’t raise any stupid kids.
“The ones who had money, well, they all got away. I’m not goin’ to worry about them. The politicians, the businessmen, the big kahunas, they’re all gone now. They left us in the lurch. Funny thing is there’s plenty of food in the city. Plenty if you know where to look: canned goods in the stores, all kinds of packaged stuff, and lots of wine, beer, even mineral water, if you like that sorta thing. Well, what was I sayin’?”
“You were talking about your plans.”
“Oh, yeah, I was tellin’ you what I was thinkin’. ‘There’s these thingies,’ I says to myself, ‘these aliens, and they need our land and they need us, the people, for food. Well, first thing they did, they smashed us all to smithereens—the ships, the guns, the cities, the government, the police, the army, the stores, everything! All that’s gone now, and it’s not comin’ back neither. If we were ants, well, we might pull through. But we’re not ants. It’s too much for any one person to stop.’ That’s the first thing.”
I nodded my head.
“Well, I’ve thought it all out very carefully, verrry carefully. Right now they can catch us whenever they please. A Martian only has to go a few blocks to get a crowd movin’. The other day I saw one down around the ’Barcadero, rootin’ through the warehouses, pickin’ them to pieces and diggin’ in the wreckage, lookin’ for people and stuff. But they won’t keep doin’ that forever. They can’t. As soon as they’ve finished destroyin’ our shit—and it’s pretty much over already, like I said—they’ll start roundin’ us up more systematic-like, picking out the fattest and the youngest and storing us in cages and stuff like that. That’s what they’ll start doin’, and it won’t take them long, neither. Shit! I’ve seen it already. You understand?”
“They haven’t even begun!” I said.
“Everything that’s happened so far is because we didn’t have enough sense to keep our heads down. Every time we’ve tried to fight them, they’ve beaten us. Every time we’ve tried to run away, we’ve given them another quick source of food. There’re no safe places anymore. They’re still organizin’ all their shit. They’re still makin’ their machine-thingies, puttin’ together all that stuff they couldn’t bring with them, gettin’ things ready for the next batch. That’s probably why the ships have stopped coming now, ’cause they have to make way for the new ones. So, instead of us rushin’ about like fools, without thinkin’, we’ve gotta stop and think for a change. We’ve gotta decide what to do. That’s how I figure it, anyways. See, the cities, civilization, progress—hey, it’s all over now. We’ve been played by someone who’s better at the game.”
“Yes, but what do we do to entertain ourselves?”
I was pulling his leg and he knew it. The Guardsman looked at me suspiciously.
“Hey, there won’t be no more rock concerts for a million, gazilion years, so you can forget all about your game shows and your palm pilots and your IPODs and your computers and your bars. Starbucks ain’t serving no raspberry latté; and every McDonalds in the world is closed. So if that’s what you want, friend, you’re just doomed. Hey, forget all your manners, the Martians ain’t gonna pay any attention to them when they start suckin’ the blood out of your veins. Forget it all, I say.”
“You mean—”
“I mean, guys like me are goin’ to go on livin’, no matter what. I mean, I’m dead set on livin’. I mean, if you want to survive, you’re gonna have to change your ways as well. The human race is not goin’ to let itself be wiped out by a bunch of creepy-crawlies from outer space. And I don’t intend to be caught neither, or tamed like some dumb goat, or fattened up like some whiny sheep, or bred like some stupid cow on the hoof. Christ! Save me from all the wishy-washy namby-pambies!
“I’m goin’ to do it right under their stupid Martian noses”—I didn’t bother pointing out that the Martians had no noses—“I got it all worked out. I’ve thought it out real careful like. I’m no lightweight, friend. Sure, we men were beat, fair and square. Sure, we don’t know enough to fight back, at least right now. So, we’ve got to learn a lot more before we can send those buggers back to alien hell. But we will! We’ll survive, we’ll learn, and in the end we’ll kick some Martian butt. Yeah. Yeah! We’ll kill ’em all, every last one!”
I had to admit, this last part sounded pretty good to me.
“I’m right, ain’t I?” he said, his eyes shining. “Right is right, and you know it when you hear it. I’ve thought it all out, haven’t I?”
“Indeed you have,” I said.
“Well, anyone who wants to escape has to start plannin’ things right now. And I’m doing it! Sure, not all of us are going to make it, but some of us will, the smart ones will, see. That’s why I was watchin’ you, see. I had my doubts at first. You were putzin’ around in the open too much. That’s not smart: you can’t do that any more. I didn’t realize it was you, or I’d’ve said somethin’ right away. The kinda people who live in the city, the damn clerks and paper-pushers, they’re just no good at all. They’re all goin’ to die. They haven’t got any spirit left in them—no dreams—and a man who hasn’t got one or the other—shit! What the hell is he, anyway? Nothin’, I tell you. Nothin’!
“These people, they just shuffled off to work everyday by the hundreds and thousands, stuffin’ breakfast burritos in their bellies, runnin’ to catch their bodacious BARTs and cabs and buses, all because they feared for their little jobbies, slavin’ away in businesses they didn’t even understand, skulkin’ back home to their wifeys and hubbies and kiddies, hidin’ indoors at night because ‘it’s dark out there!’ for cryin’ out loud! All because that was what was expected of them. Hell was built for rabbits!
“Well, the Martians’ll be a godsend to them. Nice comfy cages, some food to fatten them up, a little careful breeding, jeez, not a worry in the world! After a week or so of chasin’ ’round the countryside on empty bellies, they’ll come right on home to mama. They’ll be happy to do it, too. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them. And the bar hoppers, the performers, the singers—I can imagine them too. I can really imagine them,” he said, with a sort of somber gratification, “singin’ for their suppers. They’ll be full of sloppy sentiment and religion, not that it’ll do them any good. There’s lots of things I saw with my own eyes that I’ve only begun to
understand these last few days. There’s lots of folks who’ll take things just as they are—fat and stupid people, all of them; and just a few who’ll be bothered by the sort of feelin’ that it’s all gone wrong, that they ought to be doin’ somethin’ about it.
“Now, whenever things are so bad that a lot of people feel that they ought to be doin’ somethin’ about it, those who’re weak and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinkin’, why they always head for religion, becomin’ very pious and superior-like, and submitting ’emselves ‘to persecution and the will of the Lord.’ You’ve noticed it yourself, I know”—I thought of Reverend Lesley—“The Martian cages will be full of pretty psalms and hymns and pleas for mercy on high. And there’ll be those who’ll get down to basics, so to speak, tee hee, just to maintain the species.
“You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Martians didn’t make pets of some of them, train ’em to do tricks and the like, maybe even get sentimental over the ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ who grew up and finally had to be sacrificed for the tribe. And some, maybe, they’ll train to hunt their own kind.”
“No,” I said, “Not that. That’s impossible!”
“Is it? Why lie to ourselves?” the Guardsman said. “There’re plenty of men who’d do it without any problem at all. Plenty, my friend!”
I just shook my head.
“Well, if they to try to come after me,” he said, “I’ll take care of them, yes I will, and I won’t be taken alive, neither!”
I sat thinking on what he’d said. His reasoning was basically sound, so far as I could see. In the days before the war no one would have questioned my intellectual superiority—I am, after all, a published author, a Ph.D., a commentator on philosophy and the modern times, someone talked about in fashionable circles. Who was he, really? Just a common soldier. Just a rube. And yet he’d already formulated a philosophy to cope with the emergency.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
Invasion! Earth vs. The Aliens Page 19
