The Aliens [сборник]

"Turn out the light."

Burt turned out the light. There was silence. Above the cart-track there was a narrow band of stars. Frogs croaked somewhere a little way off. Burt felt a slight movement beside him. He reached out and Norma's band closed frightenedly over his. There was not much reassurance he could give her. "I should repeat to you," said Burt steadily to the darkness behind him, "that you need human help. You are colorblind!"

"You will explain," said the voice in the back. "Your eyes do not see as ours do. There is color. The word does not mean anything to you. Maybe you see by what to us is in infra-red. But you do not see as we do. You cannot make up your face, by your eyesight, to look right by ours."

"My face and hands are like yours now," said the alien. "I compared. I know."

"You can't tell!" insisted Burt doggedly. "You do not look like a human. You look like a zombie! If you speak to a woman, she will scream. Speak to a man, and he will be frightened! You look like hell to us!"

The alien said coldly: -"Turn-on the light."

Burt turned on the light. The alien said:

"Norma. Turn and look at me"

Slowly, the girl turned. The creature in the back should have looked like a man. But it had used powder and its skin was a sickly dead white. It had shadowed under its eyes, because there were shadows under Burt's eyes now. Its own unwinking orbs were enormously emphasized, so that they looked terrifyingly remote from humankind-as they. were. Its mouth was vividly red, and wrongly shaped. Norma gasped.

She looked as in another instant she would cry out shrilly.

"Turn out the light," said the alien.

Burt turned out the light He could not tell if the alien were offended in its vanity-or if it had vanity. He could not tell whether its intelligence was so great that it would recognize facts which its intellect must discern, but which its senses could not verify, or whether it had a pride-of-race equal to the impassioned pride of men, so that it could not admit itself to be dependent on inferior creatures.

"I shall test this," said the alien tonelessly. "I shall see how other humans act when they see me. if you have lied I shall kill you both."

Burt licked his lips. He said steadily:

"There is nothing on earth I want to do more than to kill you. But I tell the truth. You cannot live on Earth without men. You cannot force men to serve you. I can arrange for my government to bargain with you-even forgive the murder of that poor devil in the tank-truck because you didn't know what you were doing. I offer to get you a hiding-place and protection from your enemies and secrecy so your existence won't be known to them. But you'll have to trade the technical information you have and that we haven't got yet. Unless you make that bargain you're finished! And you can take it or leave it!"

It was an ultimatum which was absolutely based on fact.

But it was not one that a man could take from a lower animal. It was not one that the alien could take from men.

Burt's muscles -abruptly seemed to turn to water. He slumped in his seat. Norma, simultaneously, went absolutely limp. The two of them sagged helplessly where they sat. They were conscious, but unable to move. They were two utterly inert heaps on the front-seat cushion. They could not even try to stir. Burt, at first, could only hate helplessly.

Nothing happened. Nothing. The alien had reduced the two to helplessness -as a man might tether a horse. It did not want to pay -attention to them. It numbed them to wait for it to use them again. The helplessness lasted for a very long time indeed. The night-insects chirruped and stridulated outside the car. The breeze blew softly among the pine branches. The thing from space remained perfectly still. It waited for an appropriate time to leave this place and go back to the town through which it had recently passed. Perhaps it meditated upon materials to be bought, machines to be contrived, devices to be duplicated, and ultimately a headlong rush through space away from this world. For such purposes, money would be required, humans would have to be bribed, workshops established. The alien prepared to secure money as the practical means of getting things done on the planet Earth. It was the most practical way. So the creature from the stars would use the technology of a race that -bad conquered interstellar space, and the powers developed in a thousand thousand years of progress-to rob a bank in a small country town.

It seemed - centuries, but it was really no more than two hours before feeling and strength returned together in a rush to Burt's arms and legs and body. In those two hours, Burt had had perforce to think. He had thought with some clarity, if not to any encouraging purpose. But because he no longet had any ifiusions about the entity in the back seat of his car, he could never feel any more fear of it. Even his fears - for Norma were changed in kind. He no longer hated the alien to any great degree. But he knew, now, a deep and implacable enmity for the creature that did not need hatred for energy. The alien was an enemy of mankind because of its very constitution. Because it existed. Because it was what it was.