Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg

the smell of charred flesh in the air, with a salty underflavor of what he suspected was the blood of alien beasts.

      At a sleepwalker’s dreamy pace Demeris went to the corner and turned left. Abruptly he found himself confronted with a thing so huge and hideous that it was almost funny—a massive long-snouted frog-shaped thing, sloping upward from a squat base, with a moist-looking greenish-black hide pocked with little red craters and a broad, gaping, yellow-rimmed mouth. It had planted itself in the middle of the street with its shoulders practically touching the buildings at either side and was advancing slowly and clumsily toward the intersection.

      Demeris drew his knife. What the hell, he thought. He was here at hunt time, he might as well join the fun. The creature was immense but it didn’t have any visible fangs or talons and he figured he could move in at an angle and slash upward through the great baggy throat, and then step back fast before the thing fell on him.

      And if it turned out to be more dangerous than it looked, he didn’t give a damn. Not now.

      He moved forward, knife already arcing upward.

      “Hey!” someone cried behind him. “You out of your mind, fellow?”

      Demeris glanced around. The bartender had come out of the hotel and was staring at him.

      “That critter’s just a big sack of acid,” he said. “You cut it open, it’ll pour all over you.”

      The frog-thing made a sound like a burp, or perhaps a sardonic chuckle. Demeris backed away.

      “You want to cut something with that,” the bartender said, “you better know what you’re cutting.”

      “Yeah.” Demeris said. “I suppose so.” He put the knife back in its sheath, and headed back across the street, feeling all the craziness of the moment go from him like air ebbing from a balloon. This hunt was no business of his. Let the people who live here get mixed up in it if they liked. But there was no reason why he should. He’d just be buying trouble, and he had never seen any sense in that.

      As he reached the hotel entrance he saw Spook-light shimmering in the air at the corner—hunters, hovering above—and then there was a soft sighing sound and a torrent of bluish fluid came rolling out of the side street. It was foaming and hissing as it edged along the gutter.

      Demeris shuddered. He went into the building.

      ***

      QUICKLY HE MOUNTED THE STAIRS and entered his room, and sat for a long while on the edge of the cot, gradually growing calm, letting it all finish sinking in while the din of the hunt went on and on.

      Tom was gone, that was the basic thing he had to deal with. Neither dead nor really alive, but certainly gone. Okay. He faced that and grappled with it. It was bitter news, but at least it was a resolution of sorts. He’d mourn for a while and then he’d be all right.

      And Jill—

      Doing masks. Taking humans as lovers. The whole thing went round and round in his mind, all that he and she had done together, had said, everything that had passed between them. And how he had always felt about Spooks and how—somehow, he had no idea how—his time with Jill had changed that a little.

      He remembered what she had said. I don’t just want to study you. I want to be one of you.

      What did that mean? A tourist in the human race? A sightseer across species lines?

      They are softening, then. They are starting to whore after strange amusements. And if that’s so, he thought, then we are beginning to win. The aliens had infiltrated Earth; but now Earth was infiltrating them. This yearning to do masks, to look and act like humans, to experience human feelings and human practices and human follies: it meant the end for them. There were too many humans on Earth and not enough Spooks, and the Spooks would eventually be swallowed up. One by one, they would succumb to the temptation of giving up their chilly godliness and trying to imitate the messy, contradictory, troublesome creatures that humans are. And, Demeris thought, over the course of time—five hundred years, a thousand, who could say?—Earth would complete the job of absorbing the invaders and something new would emerge from the mixture of the species. That was an interesting thing to consider.

      But then something clicked in his mind and he felt himself flooded by a strange interior light, a light as weird and intense as the Spooklight in the skies over the city now or the glow of the border barrier, and he realized there was another way of looking at these things altogether. Jill dropped suddenly into a new perspective and instead of thinking of her as a mere sightseer looking for forbidden thrills, he saw her for what she really was—a pioneer, an explorer, a borderjumper, a defiant enemy of boundaries and limitations and rules. The same for Tom. They were two of a kind, those two; and he had been slow to recognize it because he simply wasn’t of their sort. Demeris recognized now how little he had understood his youngest brother. To him, Tom was a disturbed kid. To Ben Gorton, he was a contemptible sellout. But the real Tom, Tom’s own Tom, might be something entirely different: someone looking not just to make a little thirty-day Entrada but to carry out a real penetration into the alien, to jump deep and far into otherness to find out what it was like. The same with this Jill, this alien, this Spook—she was of that kind too, but coming from the other direction.

      And she had wanted his help. She had needed it all along, right from the start. She had missed her chance with Tom, but maybe she thought that Tom’s brother might be the same sort of person, someone who lived on the edge, who pushed against walls.

      Well, well, well. How wrong she was. That was too bad.

      For an instant Demeris felt another surge of the strange excitement that had come over him back at the checkpoint, when he had considered the possibility that Jill might be a Spook and had, for a moment, felt exhilarated by the thought. Could he take her back with him? Could he sneak her into the human community and live happily ever after with her, hiding the astonishing truth like the man in the old story who had married a mermaid? He saw himself, for a moment, lying beside her at night while she told him Spook stories and whispered weird Spook words and showed him sly little Spook shapeshifting tricks as they embraced. It was an astonishing thought. And he began to quiver and sweat as he thought about it.

      Then, as it had before, the moment passed.

      He couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t who he was, not really. Tom might have done it, but Tom was gone, and he wasn’t Tom or anything like him. Not one of the leapers, one of the soarers, one of the questers. Not one of the adventurous kind at all: just a careful man, a builder, a planner, a preserver, a protector. Nothing wrong with that. But not of any real use to Jill in her quest.

      Too bad, he thought. Too damned bad, Jill.

      He walked to the window and peered out, past the oilcloth cover. The hunt was reaching some sort of peak. The street was more crowded than ever with frantic monsters. The sky was full of Spooks. Scattered bands of Spook City humans, looking half crazed or more than half, were running back and forth. There was noise everywhere, sharp, percussive, discordant. Jill was nowhere to be seen out there. He let the oilcloth flap drop back in place and lay down on his cot and closed his eyes.

      ***

      THREE DAYS LATER, WHEN THE hunt was over and it was safe to go out again, Demeris set out for home. For the first ten blocks or so a glow that might have been a Spook hovered above him, keeping pace as he walked. He wondered if it was Jill.

      She had given him a second chance once, he remembered. Maybe she was doing it again.

      “Jill?” he called up to it. “That you?”

      No answer came.

      “Listen,” he called to the hovering glow. “Forget it. It isn’t going to work out, you and me. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. You hear me?”

      A little change in the intensity of the flicker overhead, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

      He looked upward and said, “And listen, Jill—if that’s you, Jill, I want to tell you: thanks for everything, okay?” It was strange, talking