alien worlds, colonized moons, extraterrestrials, mutants, intelligent
plants, robots, androids, clones, computers alive with artificial
intelligence, telepathy, starship war fleets engaged in battles in far
reaches of the galaxy, the collapse of the universe, time running
backward, the end of all things! He lost himself in a fog of the
fantastic, in a tomorrow that would never be, to avoid thinking about
the unthinkable.
The traveler from the doorway became quiescent, holed up in the woods,
and days passed without new developments. Eduardo didn't understand
why it would have come across billions of miles of space or thousands
of years of time, only to proceed with the conquest of the earth at a
turtle's pace.
Of course, the very essence of something truly and deeply alien was
that its motivations and actions would be mysterious and perhaps even
incomprehensible to a human being. The conquest of earth might be of
no interest whatsoever to the thing that had come through the doorway,
and its concept of time might be so radically different from Eduardo's
that days were like minutes to it.
In science fiction novels, there were essentially three kinds of
aliens. The good ones generally wanted to help humanity reach its full
potential as an intelligent species and thereafter coexist in
fellowship and share adventures for eternity. The bad ones wanted to
enslave human beings, feed on them, plant eggs in them, hunt them for
sport, or eradicate them because of a tragic misunderstanding or out of
sheer viciousness. The third--and least encountered--type of
extraterrestrial was neither good nor bad but so utterly alien that its
purpose and destiny were as enigmatic to human beings as was the mind
of God, this third type usually did the human race a great good service
or a terrible evil merely by passing through on its way to the galactic
rim, like a bus running across a column of busy ants on a highway, and
was never even aware of the encounter, let alone that it had impacted
the lives of intelligent beings.
Eduardo hadn't a clue as to the larger intentions of the watcher in the
woods, but he knew instinctively that, on a personal level, it didn't
wish him well.
It wasn't seeking eternal fellowship and shared adventures. It wasn't
blissfully unaware of him, either, so it was not one of the third
type.
It was strange and malevolent, and sooner or later it would kill him.
In the novels, good aliens outnumbered bad. Science fiction was
basically a literature of hope.
As the warm June days passed, hope was in far shorter supply on
Quartermass Ranch than in the pages of those books.
On the afternoon of June seventeenth, while Eduardo was sitting in a
living-room armchair, drinking beer and reading Walter M. Miller, the
telephone rang. He put down the book but not the beer, and went into
the kitchen to take the call.
Travis Potter said, 'Mr. Fernandez, you don't have to worry.'
'Don't I?'
'I got a fax from the state lab, results of the tests on the tissue
