Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg

which was still pulsing unpleasantly but didn’t look as bad as it had at first. The water seemed reasonably safe. He took a long drink and filled his canteens. Then he sat quietly in the open doorway of the shack for a time, not thinking of anything at all, simply unwinding from his long day’s march and the border crossing.

      As darkness fell the boy reappeared and led him to the communal eating hall. Fifty or sixty people were sitting at long benches in family groups. A few had an Anglo look, most seemed mixed Mexican and Indian. There was little conversation, and what there was was in the local language, all clicks and snorts and whistles. Almost nobody paid any attention to him. It was as if he was invisible; but a few did stare at him now and then and he could feel the force of their hostility, an almost intangible thing.

      He ate quickly and went back to his shack. But sleep was a tough proposition. He lay awake for hours, listening to the wind blowing in out of Texas and wishing he was home, on his own ten acres, in his familiar adobe house, with the houses of his brothers and sisters around him. For a while there was singing—chanting, really—coming up from the village. It was harsh and guttural and choppy, a barrage of stiff angular sounds that didn’t follow any musical scale he knew. Listening to it, he felt a powerful sense of the strangeness of these people who had lived under Spook rule for so long, tainted by Spook ways, governed by Spook ideas. How had they survived? How had they been able to stand it, the changes, the sense of being owned? But somehow they had adapted, by turning themselves into something beyond his understanding.

      Later, other sounds drifted to him, the night sounds of the desert, hoots and whines and screeches that might have been coming from owls and coyotes, but probably weren’t. He thought he heard noise just outside his shack, people moving around doing something, but he was too groggy to get up and see what was going on. At last he fell into a sort of stupor and lay floating in it until dawn. Just before morning he dreamed he was a boy again, with his mother and father still alive and Dave and Bud and the girls just babies and Tom not yet even born. He and his dad were out on the plains hunting Spooks, vast swarms of gleaming vaporous Spooks that were drifting overhead as thick as mosquitoes, two brave men walking side by side, the big one and the smaller one, killing the thronging aliens with dart guns that popped them like balloons. When they died they gave off a screeching sound like metal on metal and released a smell like rotting eggs and plummeted to the ground, covering it with a glassy scum that quickly melted away and left a scorched and flaking surface behind. It was a very satisfying dream. Then a flood of morning light broke through the slats and woke him.

      Emerging from the shack, he discovered a small tent pitched about twenty yards away that hadn’t been there the night before. A huge mottled yellow animal was tethered nearby, grazing on weeds; something that might have been a camel except there weren’t any camels the size of elephants, camels with three shallow humps and great goggling green eyes the size of saucers, or knees on the backs of their legs as well as in front. As he gaped at it a woman wearing tight khaki slacks and a shirt buttoned up to the collar came out of the tent and said, “Never seen one of those before?”

      “You bet I haven’t. This is my first time across.”

      “Is it, now?” she said. She had an accent too. It wasn’t as strange to Demeris as the village boy’s but there was some other kind of spin to it, a sound like that of a tolling bell beneath the patterns of the words themselves.

      She was youngish, slender, not bad-looking: long straight brown hair, high cheekbones, tanned Anglo face. It was hard to guess her age. Somewhere between 25 and 35 was the best he could figure. She had very dark eyes, bright, almost glossy, oddly defiant. It seemed to him that there was a kind of aura around her, a puzzling crackle of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.

      She told him what the camel-thing was called. The word was an intricate slurred sound midway between a whistle and a drone, rising sharply at the end. “You do it now,” she said. Demeris looked at her blankly. The sound was impossible to imitate. “Go on. Do it.”

      “I don’t speak Spook.”

      “It’s not all that hard.” She made the sound again. Her eyes flashed with amusement.

      “Never mind. I can’t do it.”

      “You just need some practice.”

      Her gaze was focused right on his, strong, direct, almost aggressive. At home he didn’t know many women who looked at you like that. He was accustomed to having women depend on him, to draw strength or whatever else they needed from him until they were ready to go on their way and let him go on his.

      “My name’s Jill,” she said. “I live in Spook City. I’ve been in Texas a few weeks and now I’m on my way back.”

      “Nick Demeris. From Albuquerque. Traveling up that way too.”

      “What a coincidence.”

      “I suppose,” he said.

      A sudden hot fantasy sprang up just then out of nowhere within him: that instant sexual chemistry had stricken her like a thunderbolt and she was going to invite him to travel with her, that they’d ride right off into the desert together, that when they made camp that evening she would turn to him with parted lips and shining eyes and open her arms and beckon him toward her—

      The urgency and intensity of the idea surprised him as much as its adolescent foolishness. Had he really let himself get as horny as that? She didn’t even seem that interesting to him.

      In any case he knew it wasn’t going to happen. She looked cool, self-sufficient, self-contained. She wouldn’t have any need for his companionship on her trip home and probably not for anything else he might have to offer.

      “What brings you over here?” she asked him.

      He told her about his missing brother. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he spoke. She was taking a good long look, studying his face with great care, staring at him as though peering right through his skull into his brain. Turning her head this way and that, checking him out.

      “I think I may know him, your brother,” she said calmly, after a time.

      He blinked. “You do? Seriously?”

      “Not as tall as you and stockier, right? But otherwise he looks pretty much like you, only younger. Face a lot like yours, broader, but the same cheekbones, the same high forehead, the same color eyes, the same blond hair, but his is longer. The same very serious expression all the time, tight as a drum.”

      “Yes,” Demeris said, with growing wonder. “That’s him. It has to be.”

      “Don, that was his name. No, Tom. Don, Tom, one of those short little names.”

      “Tom.”

      “Tom, right.”

      He was amazed. “How do you know him?” he asked.

      “Turned up in Spook City a couple of months back. June, July, somewhere back then. It isn’t such a big place that you don’t notice new people when they come in. Had that Free Country look about him, you know. Kind of big-eyed, raw-boned, can’t stop gawking at things. But he seemed a little different from most the other Entrada kids, like there was something coiled up inside him that was likely to pop out any minute, that this trip wasn’t just a thing he was doing for the hell of it but that it had some other meaning for him, something deeper that only he could understand. Peculiar sort of guy, actually.”

      “That was Tom, yes.” The side of Demeris’s face was starting to twitch. “You think he might still be there?”

      “Could be. More likely than not. He was talking about staying quite a while, at least until fall, until hunt time.”

      “And when is that?”

      “It starts late next week.”

      “Maybe I can still find him, then. If I can get there in time.”

      “I’m leaving here this afternoon. You can ride with me to Spook City if you want.”

      “With you?” Demeris