It was a Friday. After work I stopped by Perry’s Place with Fred Schingle and Burk Walters from the main accounting office. I was hoping it would turn out to be one of my nights to have a couple—but no. I got the message and sat there, more or less sulking, in my half of the booth.
Fred and Burk got to arguing about flying saucers. Fred said yes; Burk, no. I stirred my coffee and sat in a neutral corner.
“Now look here,” said Burk, “you say people have seen things. All right. Maybe some of them have seen things—weather balloons, shadows, meteors maybe. But space ships? Nonsense.”
“No nonsense at all. I’ve seen pictures. And some of the reports are from airline pilots and people like that, who are not fooled by balloons or meteors. They have seen ships, I tell you, ships from outer space. And they are observing us.”
“Drivel!”
“It is not!”
“It’s drivel. Now look, Fred. You too, Johnny, if you’re awake over there. How long have they been reporting these things? For years. Ever since World War II.
“All right. Ever since the war, at least. So. Suppose they were space ships? Whoever was in them must be way ahead of us technically. So why don’t they land? Why don’t they approach us?”
Fred shrugged. “How would I know? They probably have their reasons. Maybe they figure we aren’t worth any closer contact.”
“Hah! Nonsense. The reason we don’t see these space people, Fred my boy, admit it, is because there aren’t any. And you know it!”
“I don’t know anything of the damned sort. For all any of us know, they might even be all around us right now.”
Burk laughed. I smiled, a little sourly, and drained my coffee.
I felt a little warning twinge.
Too much coffee; should have taken milk. I excused myself as the other two ordered up another round.
I left. The conversation was too stupid to listen to. Space creatures all around me, of all things. How wrong can a man get? There weren’t any invaders from space all around me.
I was all around them.
All at once, standing there on the sidewalk outside Perry’s Bar, I knew that it was true. Space invaders. The Earth was invaded—the Earth, hell! I was invaded. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew all right. I should have. I was in possession of all the information.
I took a cab home to my apartment.
I was upset. I had a right to be upset and I wanted to be alone. Alone? That was a joke!
Well, my cab pulled up in front of my very modest place. I paid the driver, overtipped him—I was really upset—and ran up the stairs. In the apartment, I hustled to the two by four kitchen and, with unshakable determination, I poured myself a four-finger snort of scotch.
Then I groaned and poured it down the sink. Unshakable determination is all very well—but when the top of your head seems to rip loose like a piece of stubborn adhesive coming off a hairy chest and bounces, hard, against the ceiling, then all you can do is give up. I stumbled out to the front room and slumped down in my easy chair to think.
I’d left the door open and I was sitting in a draft.
So I had to—that compulsion—go close the door. Then I sat down to think.
Anyway I thought I sat down to think. But, suddenly, my thoughts were not my own.
I wasn’t producing them; I was receiving them.
“Barth! Oh, Land of Barth. Do you read us, oh Barthland? Do you read us?”
I didn’t hear that, you understand. It wasn’t a voice. It was all thoughts inside my head. But to me they came in terms of words.
I took it calmly. Surprisingly, I was no longer upset—which, as I think it over, was probably more an achievement of internal engineering than personal stability.
“Yeah,” I said, “I read you. So who in hell—” a poor choice of expression—“are you? What are you doing here? Answer me that.” I didn’t have to say it, the thought would have been enough. I knew that. But it made me feel better to speak out.
“We are Barthians, of course. We are your people. We live here.”
“Well, you’re trespassing on private property! Get out, you hear me? Get out!”
“Now, now, noble Fatherland. Please, do not become upset and unreasonable. We honor you greatly as our home and country. Surely we who were born and raised here have our rights. True, our forefathers who made the great voyage through space settled first here in a frightful wilderness some four generations back. But we are neither pioneers nor immigrants. We are citizens born.”
“Invaders! Squatters!”
“Citizens of Barthland.”
“Invaded! Good Lord, of all the people in the world, why me? Nothing like this ever happened to anyone. Why did I have to be picked to be a territory—the first man to have queer things living in me?”
“Oh, please, gracious Fatherland! Permit us to correct you. In the day of our fathers, conditions were, we can assure you, chaotic. Many horrible things lived here. Wild beasts and plant growths of the most vicious types were everywhere.”
“There were—?”
“What you would call microbes. Bacteria. Fungi. Viruses. Terrible devouring wild creatures everywhere. You were a howling wilderness. Of course, we have cleaned those things up now. Today you are civilized—a fine, healthy individual of your species—and our revered Fatherland. Surely you have noted the vast improvement in your condition!”
“Yes, but—”
“And we pledge our lives to you, oh Barthland. As patriotic citizens we will defend you to the death. We promise you will never be successfully invaded.”
Yeah. Well, that was nice. But already I felt as crowded as a subway train with the power cut out at rush hour.
But there was no room for doubt either. I’d had it. I still did have it; had no chance at all of getting rid of it.
They went on then and told me their story.
I won’t try to repeat it all verbatim. I couldn’t now, since my memory—but that’s something else. Anyway, I finally got the picture.
But I didn’t get it all the same evening. Oh, no. At ten I had to knock it off to go to bed, get my sleep, keep up my health. They were insistent.
As they put it, even if I didn’t care for myself I had to think about an entire population and generations yet unborn. Or unbudded, which was the way they did it.
Well, as they said, we had the whole weekend to work out an understanding. Which we did. When we were through, I didn’t like it a whole lot better, but at least I could understand it.
It was all a perfectly logical proposition from their point of view—which differed in quite a number of respects from my own. To them it was simply a matter of survival for their race and their culture. To me it was a matter of who or what I was going to be. But then, I had no choice.
According to the Official History I was given, they came from a tiny planet of a small sun. Actually, their sun was itself a planet, still incandescent, distant perhaps like Jupiter from the true sun. Their planet or moon was tiny, wet and warm. And the temperature was constant.
These conditions, naturally, governed their development—and, eventually, mine.
Of course they were very small, about the size of a dysentery amoeba. The individual life span was short as compared to ours but the accelerated pace of their lives balanced it out. In the beginning, something like four of our days was a lifetime. So they lived, grew, developed, evolved. They learned to communicate. They became civilized —far more so than we have, according to them. And I guess that was true. They were even able to extend their life span to something like two months.
“And to what,” I inquired—but without much fire, I’m afraid; I was losing fight—“to what am I indebted for
