he ran out of gas. He stole a second car that he drove until it stopped working. Then he got a third and pushed until he fell asleep and went off the road, and a state trooper found him and brought him here.”
The physicist paused, breathing hard.
He said, “The device.” He said, “That object that you witnessed. It might be part of the same invasion, unless it is something else. Nobody knows. But a number of small objects have fallen on what was the day side of the Earth. The military watched their arrival before the radars failed. So I feel certain about that detail. These little ships came from every portion of the sky. Most crashed into the Pacific. But the Pender event is very important, you see, because it happened on the land, in an urban setting. This makes us important. We have a real opportunity here. Only we don’t have time to pick apart this conundrum. The quakes are more intense now, more frequent. Ground temperatures are rising, particularly deep below us. One hypothesis—this is my best guess—is that the entity you helped carry to the water has merged with the water table. Fusion or some other power source is allowing it to grow. But I have no idea if it has a different agenda from what the giant alien is doing. I know nothing. And even if I had every answer, I don’t think I could do anything. To me, it feels as if huge forces are playing out however they wish, and we have no say in the matter.”
The man stopped talking so that he could breathe, but no amount of oxygen made him relax. Bloch sat quietly, thinking about what he just heard and how interesting it was. Then a nurse entered, a woman about his mother’s age, and she said, “Sir. She really wants to see her son now.”
“Not quite yet.”
The nurse retreated.
“Anyway,” the physicist said. “I came here to thank you. You saved our lives. And I wanted to apologize too. I saw what you did with that animal, how you grabbed and shook it. You seemed so careless, so brave. And that’s one of the reasons why I ordered the doctors to examine you.”
“What did you do?” Bloch asked.
“This little hospital is surprisingly well-stocked,” the physicist said. “And I was guessing that you were under of some kind of alien influence.”
Bloch grinned. “You thought I was infected.”
The little man nodded and grimaced. “The doctors have kept you under all day, measuring and probing. And your teacher brought your mother, and someone finally thought to interview the woman. She explained you. She says that you were born this way, and you don’t experience the world like the rest of us.”
Bloch nodded and said nothing.
“For what it is worth, your amygdala seems abnormal.”
“I like being me,” Bloch said happily.
The physicist gave the floor another long study. Then the ground began to shake once again, and he stood as still as he could, trying to gather himself for the rest of this long awful day.
“But what happened to the leopard?” Bloch asked.
The man blinked. “The soldiers shot it, of course.”
“Why?”
“Because it was running loose,” the physicist said. “People were at risk, and it had to be killed.”
“That’s sad,” the boy said.
“Do you think so?”
“It’s the last of its kind,” Bloch said.
The physicist’s back stiffened as he stared at this very odd child, and with a haughty voice, he explained, “But of course the entire world seems to be coming to an end. And I shouldn’t have to point out to you, but this makes each of us the very last of his kind.”
THE PENDER MONSTER
Bloch was supposed to be sleeping. Two women sat in the adjoining room, using voices that tried to be private but failed. Fast friends, his mother and his nurse talked about careers and worrisome children and lost men. The nurse’s husband had abandoned her for a bottle and she wanted him to get well but not in her presence, thank you. Bloch’s father died twelve years ago, killed by melanoma, and the widow still missed him but not nearly as much as during those awful first days when she had two young sons and headaches and heartaches, and God, didn’t she sound like every country song?
It was the middle of a very dark night, and the warm ground was shaking more than it stood still. The women used weak, sorry laughs, and the nurse said, “That’s funny,” and then both fell into worried silence.
Bloch didn’t feel like moving. Comfortable and alert, he sat with hard pillows piled high behind him, hands on his lap and eyes half-closed. The fabric hospital walls let in every sound. He listened to his mother sigh, and then the nurse took a breath and let it out, and then the nurse asked his mother about her thoughts.
“My boys,” Mom said. Glad for the topic, she told about when her oldest was ten and happy only when he was causing trouble. But nobody stays ten forever. The Army taught Matt to control his impulses, which was one good thing. “Every situation has its good,” she said, almost believing it. The nurse made agreeable sounds and asked if Matt always wanted to be a soldier, and Mom admitted that he had. Then the nurse admitted that most military men were once that way. They liked playing army as boys, so much so they couldn’t stop when they grew up.
“Does that ever happen?” Mom asked. “Do they actually grow up?”
The women laughed again, this time with heart. Mom kept it up longest and then confessed that she was worried about Bloch but it was Matt that she was thinking of, imagining that big alien ship crashing down on top of him. She gave out one sorry breath after another, and then with a flat, careful voice, she wondered what life was like on the Night Side.
That’s what the other half of the world had been named. The Night Side was mysterious, wrong and lost. For the last few hours, refugees had been coming through town, trading stories for gasoline and working cars. And the stories didn’t change. Bloch knew this because a group of soldiers were standing outside the hospital, gossiping. Every sound came through the fabric walls. Half a dozen men and one woman were talking about impossible things: the land squirming as if it was alive; alien trees black as coal sprouting until they were a mile high, and then the trees would spit out thick clouds that glowed purple and rode the hot winds into the Day Side, raining something that wasn’t water, turning more swathes of the countryside into gelatin and black trees.
What was happening here was different. Everybody agreed about that. The ground shivered, but it was only ground. And people functioned well enough to talk with strained but otherwise normal voices. Concentrating, Bloch could make out every voice inside the hospital and every spoken word for a hundred yards in any direction, and that talent didn’t feel even a little bit peculiar to him.
He heard boots walking. An officer approached the gossiping soldiers, and after the ritual greetings, one man dared ask, “Do we even stand a chance here, lieutenant?”
“A damned good chance,” the lieutenant said loudly. “Our scientists are sitting in a classroom, building us weapons. Yeah, we’re going to tear those aliens some new assholes, just as soon as they find enough glue guns and batteries to make us our death rays.”
Everybody laughed.
One soldier said, “I’m waiting for earth viruses to hit.”
“A computer bug,” somebody said.
“Or AIDs,” said a third.
The laughter ran a time and then faded.
Then the first soldier asked, “So this critter under us, sir… what is it, sir?”
There was a pause. Then the lieutenant said, “You want my opinion?”
“Please, sir.”
“Like that zoo teacher says. The monster came from a different part of the sky, and it doesn’t act the same. When you don’t have enough firepower to kick the shit out of its enemy, you dig in. And that’s what I think it is doing.”
“This is some big galactic war, you mean?”
