Alien Contact (67 page)

“I’ve got your alien,” she said. “Sitting in my living room, stoned out of its head on oregano. Yes, I’m absolutely certain. It was disguised as a Chicana girl first, Concepcion Flores, but then it attacked my boyfriend, Charley Taylor, and—yes, yes, I’m safe. I’m locked in the john. Just get somebody over here fast—okay. I’ll stay on the line—what happened was, I spotted it downtown outside the video center, and it insisted on coming home with me—”

The actual capture took only a few minutes. But there was no peace for hours after the police tactical squad hauled the alien away, because the media was in on the act right away, first a team from Channel 2 in Oakland, and then some of the network guys, and then the
Chronicle,
and finally a whole army of reporters from as far away as Sacramento, and phone calls from Los Angeles and San Diego and—about three that morning—New York.

Amanda told the story again and again until she was sick of it, and just as dawn was breaking, she threw the last of them out and barred the door.

She wasn’t sleepy at all. She felt wired up, speedy, and depressed all at once. The alien was gone, Charley was gone, and she was all alone. She was going to be famous for the next couple of days, but that wouldn’t help. She’d still be alone. For a time she wandered around the house, looking at it the way an alien might, as if she had never seen a stereo cassette before, or a television set, or a rack of spices. The smell of oregano was everywhere. There were little trails of it on the floor.

Amanda switched on the radio and there she was on the six
A.M.
news. “—the emergency is over, thanks to the courageous Walnut Creek High School girl who trapped and outsmarted the most dangerous life form in the known universe—”

She shook her head. “You think that’s true?” she asked the cat. “Most dangerous life form in the universe? I don’t think so, Macavity, I think I know of at least one that’s a lot deadlier. Eh, kid?” She winked. “If they only knew, eh? If they only knew.” She scooped the cat up and hugged it, and it began to purr. Maybe trying to get a little sleep would be a good idea. Then she had to figure out what she was going to do about the rest of the weekend.

n hour ago I came out of Spid’s Smoke House and saw Clark Gable scoring a couple balls of dung off an Aphid twice his size. It was broad moonlight, and Gable should have known better, but I could see by the state of his getup and the deflation of his hair wave that he was strung out on loneliness. I might have warned him, but what the hell, he’d end up taking me down with him. Instead I stepped back into the shadows of the alleyway and waited for the Beetle Squad to show up. I watched Gable flash his rakish smile, but frankly Scarlett, that Aphid didn’t give a damn. When he gave up on the ancient film charm and flashed the cash instead, the bug handed over two nice little globes, sweating the freasence in droplets of bright silver. Love was in the air.

Then they descended, iridescent in the dim light of the streetlamps, circling in like a flock of Earth geese landing on a pond. The Beetles were always hot for action and they had a directive that allowed them to kill first and ask questions later. The Aphid they just kicked the crap out of until it looked like a yellow pancake with green syrup, but Gable was another story. Because he was human, they shot him once with a stinger gun, and when the needle pierced his exo-flesh, the real
him
blew out the hole with an indelicate
frrrappp
and turned to juice on the street. The dung balls were retrieved, Gable’s outer skin was swiped, the bluebottles swooped in for a feeding, and twenty minutes later there was nothing left but half a mustache and a crystal coin good for three tokes at Spid’s. I crossed the street, picked up the crystal, and went back into my home away from home away from home.

This is Exo-Skeleton Town, the dung-rolling capitol of the universe, where the sun never shines and bug folk barter their excremental wealth for Earth movies almost two centuries old. There’s a slogan in Exo-town concerning its commerce—“Sell it or smell it,” the locals say. The air pressure is intense, and everything moves in slow motion.

When the first earthlings landed here two decades earlier, they wore big, bulky exo-suits to withstand the force. It was a revelation when they met the bugs and by using the universal translator discovered that these well-dressed insects had smarts. I call them Beetles and Aphids, etc., but they aren’t really. These terms are just to give you an idea of what they look like. They come in a span of sizes, some of them much larger than men. They’re kind of a crude, no-frills race, but they know what they want, and what they want is more and more movies from Earth’s twentieth century.

In trying to teach them about our culture, one of the members of the original Earth crew, who was an ancient movie buff, showed them
Casablanca.
What appealed to bugs about that pointless tale of piano playing, fez wearing, woman crying, I can’t begin to tell you. But the minute the flick was over and the lights went on the mayor of Exo-Skeleton Town, a big crippled flealike specimen who goes by the name of Stootladdle, offered to trade something of immeasurable worth for it and the machine it played on.

Trying to work détente, the crew’s captain readily agreed. Stootladdle called to his underlings to bring the freasence and they did. It came in a beeswax box. The mayor then whipped the lid off the box with three of his four hands and revealed five sweating bug turds the size of healthy meatballs. The captain had to adjust the helmet of his exo-suit to get a closer look, not believing at first what he was seeing. “Sure,” he said in the name of diplomacy, and he forced his navigator, the film buff, to hand over the
Casablanca
cartridge and viewer. The navigator, wanting to do the right thing, also gave the mayor copies of
Ben Hur
and
Citizen Kane.
When the captain asked Stootladdle, through the translator, why he liked the movie, the big flea mentioned Peter Lorre’s eyes. The earthlings laughed but the mayor remained silent. When the captain inquired as to what they were supposed to do with the freasence, the answer came in a clipped buzz, “Eat it.” And so began one of the first intergalactic trading partnerships.

I know it sounds like we humans got the messy end of the stick on this deal, but when the ship returned to Earth and scientists tested the freasence, it proved to be an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac. A couple of grains of one of those spherical loads in a glass of wine and the recipient would be hot to go and totally devoted for half a day. The first test subjects reported incredible abilities in the love act. Those original five globes disappeared faster than cream puffs from a glutton’s pantry, and none of it even made it out of the laboratory. So another spaceship was sent, carrying
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,
Double Indemnity,
and
Gone with the Wind.
Ten balls of dung came back at warp speed, and the screwing started in earnest.

Two decades of this trade went on, and by then we had bartered copies of every movie we could find. Private corporations started making black and white, vintage original films by digitally resurrecting the characters of the old films, feeding them into a quantum computer, and putting them in new situations. The bugs got suspicious with the first couple of batches of these, especially one entitled
We Dream
with Bogart, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Carmen Miranda, and Veronica Lake. It was about a love pentagon during the Nazi occupation of Brooklyn. In the end Welles explodes, Trevor Howard poisons Bogart and then is shot by Carmen Miranda, who runs off with Veronica Lake. The problem with the film was that it was too damn good. It didn’t have what the ancients called that “B” quality.

To offset this problem the specialists came up with a batch of real stinkers, starring the likes of Mickey Rooney, Broderick Crawford, and Jane Withers. One in particular,
Lick the Devil,
was credited with having saved the precious dung trade. I’ve seen it and it’s terrible. Crawford plays an Irish Catholic priest, Withers is the ghost of the Virgin Mary, and Rooney plays a slapstick Chinese waiter in the racist fashion of the old days with a rubber band around his eyes. I’ve always said I’d like to shake the hand of the insidious mother who made that one.

Anyway, as the ships kept coming, trading their bogus movies, technical advances were made on Earth in the exo-gear that humans would have to wear on the bug planet. The geniuses at the Quigley Corporation came up with a two-molecule-thick suit that hugged the body like a second skin. Everything that one needed was shrunk down to nano-size and made part of the suit. It breathed for you, saw for you, heard with a built-in translator for you, ate for you. The only task that was necessary was emptying the exhaust twice a day through a three-inch-long circular spigot in the crotch area. The device you emptied the spigot into was a vacuum, so that when the pipe opened for its instant, the crushing weight of the atmosphere couldn’t splat you. This new alloy the designers used was so flexible and strong it easily withstood the pressure.

The first of these exo-skins, as they were called, gave Earth traders back their human form, so that they now had false faces and eyes and smiles and skin color and hair. The exo-skins were made to resemble the people that they encased like so much sausage. Then some ad exec got the idea that they should make these suits in the guise of the actors of the old movies. Bogart was the prototype of these new star skins. When he showed up on the bug planet, they rolled out the brown carpet. Stootladdle was beside himself, calling for a holiday. The dung rollers came in from the luminous veldt that surrounds the town and there was a three-day party.

As time went on, the exo-skins improved, more authentic with greater detail. They made a Rita Hayworth that was so fine, I’d have humped it if Stootladdle was wearing it. Entrepreneurs started investing capital in an exo-skin and a ticket to the bug planet. They’d bring a couple of movies with them, score a few turds, and head back home to cut the crap up into a fortune. At first, one trip was enough to set up an enterprising businessperson for the rest of his life. Back on Earth, the freasence was so sought after that you could only buy it with bars of gold bullion. For the wealthy it was the death of romantic love, but the poor still had to score with good looks and outlandish promises.