I stepped into the path of one of the southbound runners and said, “Hey, what the hell’s going on?” He was a suit-and-tie man, pop-eyed and puffy-faced. He slowed but he didn’t stop. I thought he would run me down. “It’s an invasion!” he yelled. “Space creatures! In the park!” Another passing business type loping breathlessly by with a briefcase in each hand was shouting, “The police are there! They’re sealing everything off!”
“No shit,” I murmured.
But all I could think was Maranta, picnic, sunshine, Chardonnay, disappointment. What a goddamned nuisance, is what I thought. Why the fuck couldn’t they come on a Tuesday? is what I thought.
When I got to the top of Seventh Avenue, the police had a sealfield across the park entrance and buzz-blinkers were set up along Central Park South from the Plaza to Columbus Circle, with horrendous consequences for traffic. “But I have to find my girlfriend,” I blurted. “She was waiting for me in the park.” The cop stared at me. His cold gray eyes said, I am a decent Catholic and I am not going to facilitate your extramarital activities, you decadent overpaid bastard. What he said out loud was, “No way can you cross that sealfield, and anyhow you absolutely don’t want to go in the park right now, mister. Believe me.” And he also said, “You don’t have to worry about your girlfriend. The park’s been cleared of all human beings.” That’s what he said, cleared of all human beings. For a while I wandered around in some sort of daze.
Finally I went back to my office and found a message from Maranta, who had left the park the moment the trouble began. Good quick Maranta. She hadn’t had any idea of what was occurring, though she had found out by the time she reached her office. She had simply sensed trouble and scrammed. We agreed to meet for drinks at the Ras Tafari at half past five. The Ras was one of our regular places, Twelfth and Fifty-third.
There were seventeen witnesses to the onset of the invasion. It had started, so they said, with a strange pale-blue shimmering about thirty feet off the ground. The shimmering rapidly became a churning, like water going down a drain. Then a light breeze began to blow and very quickly turned into a brisk gale. It lifted people’s hats and whirled them in a startling corkscrew spiral around the churning, shimmering blue place. At the same time you had a sense of rising tension, a something’s-got-to-give feeling. All this lasted perhaps forty-five seconds.
Then came a pop and a whoosh and a ping and a thunk—everybody agreed on the sequence of the sound effects—and the instantly famous not-quite-egg-shaped spaceship of the invaders was there, hovering, as it would do for the next twenty-odd days, about half an inch above the spring-green grass of Central Park. An absolutely unforgettable sight: the sleek, silvery skin of it, the disturbing angle of the slope from its wide top to its narrow bottom, the odd and troublesome hieroglyphics on its flanks that tended to slide out of your field of vision if you stared at them for more than a moment.
A hatch opened and a dozen of the invaders stepped out. Floated out, rather. Like their ship, they never came in contact with the ground.
They looked strange. They looked exceedingly strange. Where we have feet they had a single oval pedestal, maybe five inches thick and a yard in diameter, that drifted an inch or so above ground level. From this fleshy base their wraithlike bodies sprouted like tethered balloons. They had no arms, no legs, not even discernible heads—just a broad, dome-shaped summit, dwindling away to a ropelike termination that was attached to the pedestal. Their lavender skins were glossy, with a metallic sheen. Dark eyelike spots sometimes formed on them but didn’t last for long. We saw no mouths. As they moved about they seemed to exercise great care never to touch one another.
The first thing they did was to seize half a dozen squirrels, three stray dogs, a softball, and a baby carriage, unoccupied. We will never know what the second thing was that they did, because no one stayed around to watch. The park emptied with impressive rapidity, the police moved swiftly in with their sealfield, and for the next three hours the aliens had the meadow to themselves. Later in the day the networks sent up spy-eyes that recorded the scene for the evening news until the aliens figured out what they were and shot them down. Briefly we saw ghostly, gleaming aliens wandering around within a radius of perhaps five hundred yards of their ship, collecting newspapers, soft-drink dispensers, discarded items of clothing, and something that was generally agreed to be a set of dentures. Whatever they picked up they wrapped in a sort of pillow made of a glowing fabric with the same shining texture as their own bodies, which immediately began floating off with its contents toward the hatch of the ship.
People were lined up six deep at the bar when I arrived at the Ras, and everyone was drinking like mad and staring at the screen. They were showing the clips of the aliens over and over. Maranta was already there. Her eyes were glowing. She pressed herself up against me like a wild woman. “My God,” she said, “isn’t it wonderful? The men from Mars are here! Or wherever they’re from. Let’s hoist a few to the men from Mars.”
We hoisted more than a few. Somehow I got home at a respectable seven o’clock anyway. The apartment was still in its one-room configuration, though our contract with Bobby Christie clearly specified wall-shift at half past six. Elaine refused to have anything to do with activating the shift. She was afraid, I think, of timing the sequence wrong and being crushed by the walls or something.
“You heard?” Elaine said. “The aliens?”
“I wasn’t far from the park at lunchtime,” I told her. “That was when it happened, at lunchtime, while I was up by the park.”
Her eyes went wide. “Then you actually saw them land?”
“I wish. By the time I got to the park the cops had everything sealed off.”
I pressed the button and the walls began to move. Our living room and kitchen returned from Bobby Christie’s domain. In the moment of shift I caught sight of Bobby on the far side, getting dressed to go out. He waved and grinned.
“Space monsters in the park,” he said. “My, my, my. It’s a real jungle out there, don’t you know?” And then the walls closed away on him.
Elaine switched on the news, and once again I watched the aliens drifting around the Mall picking up people’s jackets and candy-bar wrappers.
“Hey,” I said, “the mayor ought to put them on the city payroll.”
“What were you doing up by the park at lunchtime?” Elaine asked, after a bit.
The next day was when the second ship landed and the real space monsters appeared. To me the first aliens didn’t qualify as monsters at all. Monsters ought to be monstrous, bottom line. Those first aliens were no bigger than you or me.
The second batch, they were something else, though. The behemoths. The space elephants. Of course, they weren’t anything like elephants, except that they were big. Big? They were immense. It put me in mind of Hannibal’s invasion of Rome, seeing those gargantuan things disembarking from the new spaceship. It seemed like the Second Punic War all over again, Hannibal and the elephants.
You remember how that was. When Hannibal set out from Carthage to conquer Rome, he took with him a phalanx of elephants, thirty-eight huge gray attack-trained monsters. Elephants were useful in battle in those days—a kind of early-model tank—but they were handy also for terrifying the civilian populace: bizarre colossal smelly critters trampling invincibly through the suburbs, flapping their vast ears and trumpeting awesome cries of doom and burying your rose-bushes under mountainous turds. And now we had the same deal. With one difference, though: the Roman archers picked off Hannibal’s elephants long before they got within honking distance of the walls of Rome. But these aliens had materialized without warning right in the middle of Central Park, in that big grassy meadow between the Seventy-second Street transverse and Central Park South, which is another deal altogether. I wonder how well things would have gone for the Romans if they had awakened one morning to find Hannibal and his army camping out in the Forum, and his thirty-eight hairy shambling flap-eared elephants snuffling and snorti
ng and farting about on the marble steps of the Temple of Jupiter.
The new spaceship arrived the way the first one had—pop whoosh ping thunk—and the behemoths came tumbling out of it like rabbits out of a hat. We saw it on the evening news: The networks had a new bunch of spy-eyes up, half a mile or so overhead. The ship made a kind of belching sound and this thing suddenly was standing on the Mall gawking and gaping. Then another belch, another thing. And on and on until there were two or three dozen of them. Nobody has ever been able to figure out how that little ship could have held as many as one of them. It was no bigger than a school bus standing on end.
The monsters looked like double-humped blue medium-size mountains with legs. The legs were their most elephantine feature—thick and rough-skinned, like tree trunks—but they worked on some sort of telescoping principle and could be collapsed swiftly back up into the bodies of their owners.
Eight was the normal number of legs, but you never saw eight at once on any of them: As they moved about they always kept at least one pair withdrawn, though from time to time they’d let that pair descend and pull up another one, in what seemed like a completely random way. Now and then they might withdraw two pairs at once, which would cause them to sink down to ground level at one end like a camel kneeling.
Their prodigious bodies were rounded, with a sort of valley a couple of feet deep running crosswise along their back, and they were covered all over with a dense, stiff growth midway in texture between fur and feathers. There were three yellow eyes the size of platters at one end and three rigid purple rodlike projections that stuck out seven or eight feet at the other. Their mouths were located in their bellies; when they wanted to eat something, they would simply collapse all eight of their legs at the same time and sit down on it. It was a mouth big enough to swallow a very large animal at a single gulp—an animal as big as a bison, say. As we would shortly discover.
They were enormous. Enormous. The most reliable estimate was that they were twenty-five to thirty feet high and forty to fifty feet long. That is not only substantially larger than any elephant past or present, it is rather larger than most of the two-family houses still to be found in the outer boroughs of the city. Furthermore a two-family house, though it may offend your aesthetic sense, will not move around at all; it will not emit bad smells and frightening sounds; it will never sit down on a bison and swallow it; nor, for that matter, will it swallow you. African elephants, they tell me, run ten or eleven feet high at the shoulder, and the biggest extinct mammoths were three or four feet taller than that. There once was a mammal called the baluchitherium that stood about sixteen feet high. That was the largest land mammal that ever lived. The space creatures were nearly twice as high. We are talking large here. We are talking dinosaur-plus dimensions.
Central Park is several miles long but quite modest in width. It runs just from Fifth Avenue to Eighth. Its designers did not expect that anyone would allow two or three dozen animals bigger than two-family houses to wander around freely in an urban park a mere three city blocks wide. No doubt the small size of their pasture was proving very awkward for them. Certainly it was for us.
“I think they have to be an exploration party,” Maranta said. “Don’t you?” We had shifted the scene of our Monday and Friday lunches from Central Park to Rockefeller Center, but otherwise we were trying to behave as though nothing unusual was going on. “They can’t have come as invaders. One little spaceshipload of aliens couldn’t possibly conquer an entire planet.”
Maranta is unfailingly jaunty and optimistic. She is a small, energetic woman with close-cropped red hair and green eyes, one of those boyish-looking women who never seem to age. I love her for her optimism. I wish I could catch it from her, like measles.
I said, “There are two spaceshiploads of aliens, Maranta.”
She made a face. “Oh. The jumbos. They’re just a bunch of dumb shaggy monsters. I don’t see them as much of a menace, really.”
“Probably not. But the little ones—they have to be a superior species. We know that because they’re the ones who came to us. We didn’t go to them.”
She laughed. “It all sounds so absurd to me. That Central Park should be full of creatures—”
“But what if they do want to conquer Earth?” I asked.
“Oh,” Maranta said. “I don’t think that would necessarily be so awful.”
The smaller aliens spent the first few days installing a good deal of mysterious equipment on the Mall in the vicinity of their ship: odd, intricate, shimmering constructions that looked as though they belonged in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.
They made no attempt to enter into communication with us. They showed no interest in us at all. The only time they took notice of us was when we sent spy-eyes overhead. They would tolerate them for an hour or two and then would shoot them down, casually, like swatting flies, with spurts of pink light. The networks—and then the government surveillance agencies, when they moved in—put the eyes higher each day, but the aliens never failed to find them. After a week or so we were forced to rely for our information on government spy satellites monitoring the park from space, and on whatever observers equipped with binoculars could glimpse from the taller apartment houses and hotels bordering the park. Neither of these arrangements was entirely satisfactory.
The behemoths, during those days, were content to roam aimlessly through the park southward from Seventy-second Street, knocking over trees, squatting down to eat them. Each one gobbled two or three trees a day: leaves, branches, trunk, and all. There weren’t all that many trees to begin with down there, so it seemed likely that before long they’d have to start ranging farther afield.
The usual civic groups spoke up about the trees. They wanted the mayor to do something to protect the park. The monsters, they said, would have to be made to go elsewhere—to Canada, perhaps, where there were plenty of expendable trees. The mayor said that he was studying the problem but that it was too early to know what the best plan of action would be.
His chief goal, in the beginning, was simply to keep a lid on the situation. We still didn’t even know, after all, whether we were being invaded or just visited. To play it safe, the police were ordered to set up and maintain round-the-clock sealfields completely encircling the park in the impacted zone south of Seventy-second Street. The power costs of this were staggering and Con Edison found it necessary to impose a ten percent voltage cutback throughout the rest of the city, which caused a lot of grumbling, especially now that it was getting to be air-conditioner weather.
The police didn’t like any of this: out there day and night standing guard in front of an intangible electronic barrier with ungodly monsters just a sneeze away. Now and then one of the blue goliaths would wander near the sealfield and peer over the edge. A sealfield maybe a dozen feet high doesn’t give you much of a sense of security when there’s an animal two or three times that height looming over its top.
So the cops asked for time and a half. Combat pay, essentially. There wasn’t room in the city budget for that, especially since no one knew how long the aliens were going to continue to occupy the park. There was talk of a strike. The mayor appealed to Washington, which had studiously been staying remote from the event, as if the arrival of an extraterrestrial task force in the middle of Manhattan was purely a municipal problem.
The president rummaged around in the Constitution and decided to activate the National Guard. That surprised a lot of basically sedentary men who enjoy dressing up occasionally in uniforms. The Guard hadn’t been called out since the Bulgarian business in ’94, and its current members weren’t very sharp on procedures, so some hasty on-the-job training became necessary. As it happened, Maranta’s husband, Tim, was an officer in the 107th Infantry, the regiment that was handed the chief responsibility for protecting New York City against the creatures from space. So his life suddenly was changed a great deal, and so was Maranta’s; and so was mine.
Like everybody else, I
found myself going over to the park again and again to try and get a glimpse of the aliens. But the barricades kept you fifty feet away from the park perimeter on all sides, and the taller buildings flanking the park had put themselves on a residents-only admission basis, with armed guards enforcing it, so they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by hordes of curiosity seekers.
I did see Tim, though. He was in charge of a command post at Fifth and Fifty-ninth, near the horse-and-buggy stand. Youngish, stockbrokery-looking men kept running up to him with reports to sign, and he signed each one with terrific dash and vigor, without reading any of them. In his crisp tan uniform and shiny boots, he must have seen himself as some doomed and gallant officer in an ancient movie—Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, John Wayne—bracing himself for the climactic cavalry charge. The poor bastard.
“Hey, old man,” he said, grinning at me in a doomed and gallant way. “Came to see the circus, did you?”
We weren’t really best friends anymore. I don’t know what we were to each other. We rarely lunched anymore. (How could we? I was busy three days a week with Maranta.) We didn’t meet at the gym. It wasn’t to Tim I turned to advice on personal problems or second opinions on investments. There was some sort of bond, but I think it was mostly nostalgia. But officially I guess I did still think of him as my best friend, in a kind of automatic, unquestioning way.
I said, “Are you free to go over to the Plaza for a drink?”
“I wish. I don’t get relieved until twenty-one hundred hours.”
“Nine o’clock, is that it?”
“Nine, yes. You fucking civilian.”
It was only half past one. The poor bastard. “What’ll happen to you if you leave your post?”