Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg

That story’s a complete fantasy! It was written more than a hundred years before Earth and Procyon came into contact!”

      “But—fantasy—I don’t understand—”

      The sputtering little alien threatened to become apoplectic. Milissa wished prodigiously that she had never transferred out of local service. These aliens could be so touchy, at times!

      “Excuse me, please,” said a furry purple creature seated across the aisle. “That magazine you have there—mind if I look at it?”

      “Here,” the angry alien said. He tossed it over.

      The purple being examined it, smiled delightedly, said, “Why, it’s an issue I need! Will you take five hundred credits for it?”

      “Five hundred—” The eyestalks stopped quivering, and drooped in an expression of probable delight. “Make it five-fifty and the book is yours!”

      ***

      CRISIS AFTER CRISIS, MILISSA THOUGHT gloomily. They were two days out from Vega, with better than a day yet to go before Earth hove into sight. And if the voyage lasted much longer, she’d go out of her mind.

      The three Grigori brothers had finally erupted into violence late the first day; they sprang from their seat and went rolling up the aisle, cursing fluently at each other in a dozen languages. Josef had the upper hand for a while, rearing back and pounding his brothers’ heads together, but he was outnumbered and was in dire straits by the time Milissa found two crewmen to put a stop to the brawl.

      Then there was the worm-like being from Albireo III who suddenly discovered she was going to sporulate, and did—casting a swarm of her encapsulated progeny all over the lounge. She was very apologetic, and assisted Milissa in finding the spores, but it caused quite a mess.

      The Greklan brothers from Deneb Kaitos I caused the next crisis. Greklans, Milissa discovered, had peculiar sexual practices: they spent most of their existence as neuters, but at regular periods about a decade apart suddenly developed sex, at which time the procedure was to mate, and fast. One of the brothers abruptly became a male, the other female, to their great surprise, consternation, and delight. The squeals of a puritanical being from Fomalhaut V attracted Milissa’s attention; she managed to hustle the Greklans off to a washroom just in time. They returned, an hour later, to announce they had reverted to neuter status and would name their offspring Milissa, but that scarcely helped her nerves.

      Never again, Milissa told herself, surveying the array of life-forms in the lounge. Back to local service for me. As soon as the return trip is over—

      Eleven hours to Earth. She hoped she could stay sane that long.

      Frozen asparagus turned up on the menu the final night. It was a grave tactical mistake; three vegetable-creatures of Mirach IX accused the Vegan Line of fomenting cannibalism, and stalked out of the dining room. Milissa followed them and found them seriously ill of nausea and threatening to sue. She hadn’t noticed until then how very much like asparagus stalks the Mirachians looked; no one in the galley had either, apparently.

      A family of reptiloids from Algenib became embroiled with a lizardlike inhabitant of Altair II. It took what was left of Milissa’s tattered diplomacy to separate the squabblers and persuade them all to retake their seats.

      She counted hours. She counted minutes. And, finally, she counted seconds.

      “Earth ahead!” came the announcement from Control Cabin.

      She went before the passengers to make the traditional final speech. Calmly, almost numbly, she thanked them for their cooperation, hoped they had enjoyed the flight, wished them the best of everything on Earth.

      Mike-Jim-Josef Grigori paused to say good-bye on their way out. They looked slightly bruised and battered. For the seventh time, Milissa explained to Mike how regulations prohibited her from dating, and finally they said good-bye. They walked down the ramp snarling and cursing at each other.

      She watched them all go—the Greklans, the angry little man from Procyon, the asparaguslike Mirachians. She felt a perverse fondness for them all.

      “That’s the last,” she said, turning to Captain Brilon. “And thank goodness.”

      “Tired, huh?”

      “All you had to do was watch the instruments,” she said. “I was playing nursemaid to umpteen different life-forms. But the return trip will be a rest. Just Earthmen and Vegans, I hope. No strange nonhumanoid forms. I can’t wait!”

      ***

      SHE RETURNED TO THE SHIP after the brief leave allotted her, and found herself almost cheerful at the prospect of the return trip. The passengers filed aboard—pleasant, normal Vegans and Earthmen, who whistled at her predictably but who showed no strange and unforeseeable mating habits or other manifestations.

      It was going to be a quiet trip, she told herself. A snap.

      But then three dark furry shapes entered the lounge and huddled self-consciously in the back. Milissa bit her lip and glanced down at the passenger list.

       Three spider-men from Arcturus VII. These creatures do not have names.

       They are extremely sensitive and will require close personal attention.

      Milissa shuddered. Even without a mirror handy, she knew her face was paling to a weak ultramarine. She could get used to Greklans and sporulating worms from Albireo, she thought. She could calm petulant Procyonites and fend off wolfish three-headed Earthmen. But there was nothing in her contract about travelers from Arcturus.

      She stared at the hairy, eight-legged creatures. Twenty-four arachnid eyes glinted beadily back at her.

      It was asking too much. No woman should be expected to take solicitous care of spiders.

      Sighing, she realized it was going to be a long, long voyage home.

       THE WAY TO SPOOK CITY

      Here’s a case where the author experienced more thrills and chills than his own protagonist in the course of writing one simple 18,000-word story. It is altogether possible that aliens were at work trying to prevent this one from ever seeing print.

      The saga began during the hot, dry summer of 1991, when I proposed to the editors of Playboy that I write a story of double the usual length of the stories I had done for them in the past. I was having increasing difficulty confining my Playboy stories to their top limit of 7,500 words or so. Long ago, I pointed out, the magazine had regularly run novellas, such stories as George Langelaan’s “The Fly,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Lost City of Mars.” What about reviving that custom and letting me write a long one now?

      The powers that be mulled over the idea and gave me a qualified go-ahead. I submitted an outline, and on September 10, 1991, we came to an agreement on the deal. Two days later the printer of my loyal computer, which I had been using for nearly a decade, declined to print a document. Somehow I jollied it into going back to work, and blithely got started on the story that was to become “The Way to Spook City” a day or two later, imagining I’d have the piece behind me before settling down to work on the upcoming winter novel. I promised to deliver it by mid-October so that it could be used in the August 1992 issue. But the printer trouble returned, and worsened, and on September 27—when I was forty pages into the story—the printer died completely. I was trying to print out my forty pages at the time, but what came out was this:

      “Everyone had been astonished when Nick announced he was going LIa kciN disiruprus oo, that he should be setting himself up for such a crazy LKthguoht eh nruter ot brawny young man Tom had become but of the soft-eyed LJs’kciN fo lla nehgt dna ,n” and then blank space, not another garbled word.

      No