Ugly Earthling

My alien was different.

  He wasn’t a supercivilized saint who came to warn our world to mend its ways, or a giant spider or slug, or an invader with a ray gun. Drax wasn’t like any of those. I kept trying to tell people . . . And when they went out gunning for him, so many angry, frightened men in the darkness of the hills, I even showed Major Brett what Drax had given me. When the Major asked me why Drax had given them to me, I couldn’t answer—not till the very end. But I guess you’d say that was another story.

  I know all the patterns of Alien Visitor stories: why shouldn’t I? Reading is the only thing they taught me, and science fiction is the closest I can get to the kind of work my father and brothers are doing. Being the only girl in a family of four brilliant men isn’t what the women’s magazine writers would have you think. My menfolk don’t twinkle at each other over their pipes when I mistake a cyclotron for a condenser. My father never discusses his work with me. Once when I came into the lab to see what kept them all so busy, Father shouted to my brothers, “Get that freak out of here before she blows us all up!”

  I’m not complaining. They have every reason to dislike me. They all worshipped my mother, who was beautiful and laughing and tiny. It killed her to have me. I was too big then and I’m too big now. Really too big. I’m over six feet and still growing. And then, of course, there’s my feet . . . talipes, they call it. Clubfoot. Both of them. It can’t be corrected. The specialist told my father it was a most unusual bone malformation.

  But it isn’t only my looks. I don’t know how to pronounce a lot of the words I read, so I get nervous and talk very slow and stammer. My family are so busy with really important things—scientific discoveries and all—that you can’t blame them for getting impatient with my stupidity. It used to embarrass my brothers.

  There was a nurse once—but she annoyed my father, nagging him for things for me. He told her every time he looked at me he remembered my dead mother. Then there’s the caretaker, Lute. He’s old and crabby and deaf and doesn’t like to be bothered. I wear my brothers’ old clothes. It doesn’t matter—no one sees me anyway. After I learned to read I quit going to school. The teacher was sorry. She said I learned very fast. She was the only one who ever thought so.

  I grew up in the Palos Verdes hills in a sprawling old barn of a place that my father built out there years before the area got fashionable. My brothers went away to college and later to teach, but they always came back to experiment in the lab. One or another of them was usually home, so they kept the cupboard and pantry stocked, and ate when they thought about it. I did too.

  As the district developed and the first houses were built, women and children began to appear along the roads and in the meadows. I kept out of sight, going deeper into the hills. I knew I didn’t look like they did. I watched the women, and tried to fix my clothes like theirs, but it wasn’t easy. One day I said to Lute, “I’m going to visit neighbors.”

  He scowled. “Mr. Cardel won’t like it.”

  I got ready. First I washed my hair and combed most of the burrs out of it. Then I took the colored tablecloth my youngest brother Ted brought home. I cut a hole in the middle of it and put it on like a skirt. Then I cut the sleeves off Ralph’s lab coat. I tied one of Roger’s ties around my head to hold my hair down. When I was finished I looked in the mirror. It didn’t look very pretty but it was better than the too-tight jeans and T-shirts.

  It was a long walk to the nearest house. I stood by the fence, looking in. Near the house a mother and two little boys, a baby, and a dog were playing, laughing over something the baby was doing. The mother glanced up and saw me watching them. The smile went off her face as she stared at me.

  I had planned what to say: Good afternoon. I am Vigo Cardel’s daughter. I am so glad you have come to live here . . . Something like that. But the alarm and displeasure in her mind came to me like a pushing away and I began to stammer as I always do when I try to talk to people.

  “Goo-goo-daternoon. Viggggg . . . Cardel—”

  The little boy laughed. His mother turned nervously to silence him before she said, “What do you want? Are you hungry?”

  The older boy crowed, “She’s a gypsy. A real horrible gypsy. She’ll steal you out of your bed because you laughed at her, Timmie. You’ll have to wash all the pots and pans in the gypsy camp—”

  “Be quiet, Donald! You’re frightening your brother.”

  The little Timmie was crying and clinging to his mother. I came closer, anxious to tell him that I wasn’t going to hurt him. The mother saw me and cried out sharply. The dog growled and began to bark. I tried to speak louder, to make them hear me above his barking. Donald threw a stone at me. Then he set the dog on me.

  It bit me. I didn’t mean to hurt it. I just wanted to get it off. Then they were all running and screaming. I went away.

  My father was home that week. He was very angry with me.

  “Why can’t you keep out of sight? Surely you know by now how you affect people?”

  I took a big breath. This was important. I said very carefully, so the words would come out right, “How-do-I-affect-people?”

  He stared at me for a minute and then said something that sounded like “Tschah!” He went back to the lab and slammed the door.

  From then on, I kept out of sight. I spent most of my time in the high meadows, curled up in a deep, cup-shaped depression. I didn’t even want to read any more. I would lie in the long hot golden grass and insects would hum and buzz and the sun would make the tight blue sky ring like a soundless gong above me. Or maybe that was only my heart, beating. I would whisper sometimes, all the things I wanted to say to people, and after a while it got so I thought I could hear them answering.

  One day the sound of voices got so real I lifted my head above the rim of the depression. Two young men were coming up the hill, talking and laughing. One of them noticed me and threw out a hand to stop his companion. They both stared at me for a long time. They were beautiful. Their black hair shone in the sunlight like a blackbird’s feathers. They were wearing bright colored shirts open at the throat and their skins gleamed with sweat. They came slowly toward me, till their heads were level with mine across the rim of the depression.

  “Get a load of big Red,” said the smaller of the two. “And I do mean load!”

  The glittering black eyes of the other went to my shoulders and chest. “She ain’t so bad, Louie. The giant economy size might have its advantages . . .”

  Louie grinned admiringly. “You figure all the angles, Dooch. What’s the word?”

  Dooch said softly, “Why don’t you round up the gang, Louie? Big Red an’ me will be waitin’ for you here—all nice an’ cozy. Eh, Red?”

  I came to my feet slowly, towering above them. I started to climb out of the depression. Their smiles faded. Then Louie squealed like the children had done. I looked at him. His bulging eyes were on my feet. His face swiveled up to mine and he made a queer gesture with his fingers like two little horns. From his lips spilled a stream of Italian.

  “Can it,” snapped Dooch, glaring at him. But Louie turned and leaped down the slope, stumbling, falling, scrabbling up and on again. Dooch backed cautiously away from me. “I’m not chicken,” he muttered, “but what gives with you?” His voice held a sort of raspy warmth, like sandpapering your skin. My hands went out to him.

  “Please,” I whispered, “please don’t go.”

  He shook his head warily. I took a step toward him, then my bare feet slipped on the matted golden grass and I fell. When I got my head up, he was gone.

  I stayed in the little hollow until after dark, just lying there, staring up at the blazing blue, till it softened into night and I saw the beautiful bright stars. One of them seemed to come closer, trailing a white-hot plume of fire. I crawled out of the pit then and began to make my way to the house.

  The lab was a blaze of light. The door was open. I went in. Father and the boys were clustered around the telescreen. A man was talking. “—p
ositively been confirmed that the object is a non-terrestrial craft, a space ship. It has not responded to our signals, but has set up an orbit roughly three miles above the surface of the earth. Military authorities are continuing to attempt communication . . .”

  I caught my father’s arm as he turned away from the screen.

  “I must talk,” I began. “To you.”

  “Why?”

  It surprised me. I wasn’t ready for that question. I tried to straighten out my thoughts into words. The youngest of my brothers, called Ted, said, “Why not?”

  It was my father who was surprised now.

  “You think it worthwhile to examine the thought processes? None of us is a psychiatrist, and I fail to see how science could be served—”

  My brother interrupted. “I didn’t mean science—that is—she is one of us.”

  My father said coldly, “I cannot accept that. A freak, a travesty—”

  “She is a woman,” said my brother awkwardly.

  “No more woman than the cows in the field or the cat that keeps the lab free of mice. To try to make more of her would lead to pain for all involved.” He walked away and slammed the door. My brother Ted said something under his breath. Roger snapped at him.

  “Are you nuts? Can’t you see Dad is still breaking his heart over Mother?”

  I crept away while they talked. I went into the common room. Above the big black mouth of the fireplace was The Picture. This was Mother—smiling, beautiful, dainty, beloved. Even dead sixteen years, she was more a part of the family than I ever could be. I fumbled blindly for the poker. I lifted it, drew it back—

  There was such a blast of hatred from my father in the doorway behind me that my head ached. “Put that down,” he said, “and get to your room. I’m sending you away in the morning.”

  I dropped the poker and went out the other door. The smell of hate in the room sickened me. I had to get out of it. In the darkened kitchen I rested my head against the cold white top of the refrigerator. It hummed and trembled, busy and comforting. I felt my father grieving in the common room, loving the picture, and I could not be angry with him. I would not go away to the place he had in mind, though, so I opened the back door very gently and slipped out into the darkness.

  I slept in the high meadows that night. I returned late the next day, when the family had all driven off in their cars. Lute was scrubbing the kitchen floor as I came in the back door.

  “Your pa was lookin’ for you,” he said.

  I made a gesture. “Hungry.” I went to the cupboard. My bare feet made small muddy circles on the wet linoleum. Lute grunted angrily and snapped his fingers to get my attention. Then he pointed to my feet.

  “Where’s them shoes I made you?”

  I shrugged. I kept losing the prickly felt pouches he had made to cover my misshapen feet. He glared at me, grabbed up his pail, and slopped out. “Your pa’ll be back,” he growled over his shoulder.

  I tried to eat but I wasn’t hungry after all. The bad feeling inside kept growing and hurting. From the common room came a high, excited voice. I went to look in the door. Lute was watching the news. The announcer was shouting something about mysterious disappearances. “—the girls all reappeared shortly in a dazed condition, completely unharmed—I repeat, they were not harmed in any way. None of them has been able to tell what happened . . . The army announces all leaves cancelled. Return at once to your stations—”

  I went outside and up to the high meadows. I thought I would stay there until I was dead, like the dog I read about who wouldn’t leave his master’s grave. My thinking was very twisted. I admit it. For the first time, self-pity was warping my mentation, so I could even find it possible to envy a dead dog its human connection. As I lay in the sunset, I thought about relationships and loyalties until I began to feel very queer. The grass within the hollow was warm but I began to shake with chill. There was a whining like a giant top above me. I opened my eyes.

  Hovering above me was a whirling, shining wheel. The sound was coming from it. It slid off sideways as I stared, and came to earth beyond the rim of the depression. In a moment there was a clang, like a big bell. Then I heard footsteps approaching. I closed my eyes. The sounds stopped above me, at the edge of my resting place. An enormous shadow cut off the sunlight.

  I did not open my eyes. Whoever it was would go away soon, running and slipping and stumbling like all the others. I extended my hideous feet into view, the sooner to be alone again.

  Someone uttered a soundless question—a gentle tentative probing. I turned on my face and wept, but as the tears flowed, with my mind I was remembering the quality of that thought—not revulsion, not rejection . . .

  And now steps, very soft but heavy. And a presence kneeling beside me—and a gentle pressure on my hair, stroking. I whirled over—

  The alien was kneeling beside me, looming above me, cutting off the light of the sinking sun with his enormous shoulders. His presence was a closeness—a comfort. That was the first wonderful thing. And then he was big—bigger even than I. Lying there at his knees, for the first time I felt acceptable, small, compressed awarely into a form, held together inside my skin like a person. I searched for the word. Integrated. He was accepting me as a whole person—there was a tinge of pleased admiration in his thought, as though I were small and delicate and—to him—appealing!

  I raised my eyes to his face. He was smiling at me, his teeth very white in a reddish-brown face. His eyes were like the metal retorts in the lab, coppery, and they were on me—warm and friendly and eager. I stared at him, thoughts in a chaos. The closefitting suit he wore was of fine metallic mesh and covered all his body except his face. His hands were in delicately articulated metal gloves, and his feet . . . I stared at them, shock and disbelief struggling with a new feeling of hope.

  The alien’s legs, strong and shapely in their metallic covering, tapered down to gilded hooves! I blushed. The alien laughed softly. And the most wonderful thing of all happened. He answered my thoughts with his own! It was like suddenly finding someone who could speak, in a country of mutes. My own thoughts tumbled over each other in a surge of answering. He laughed again softly and took both my hands in his. He helped me to rise. My head did not quite reach his shoulder. I could not meet the searching of his eyes. Clear and demanding his thought came through the dusk to my mind:

  “You are not like the others—the little dwarfed ones with the flipper feet. Are you native to this planet?”

  I answered, “I am of this world.”

  He thought gently, “Have you promised your body or mind to any of the males?”

  My mind shrank from the question, but I answered, “As for my body, no one wants it. All their minds are closed to me, as mine to them.”

  There was eagerness in his mind.

  He opened a small case linked to his belt and took out two small golden plates with raised rims. He smiled at me, softly, eyes glowing. Then he took my foot in his warm hands and placed a shining plate on it. It was like a living thing—soft, firm clinging.

  As his hands manipulated, it fitted my foot like a glove. He took the other plate and set that upon my other foot.

  “What—what is this?” I stammered.

  “A gift,” he began, taking my hands again. I jerked them away.

  “Listen!” I commanded. A plane was swooping low over the hills. As it passed us it banked sharply, circled, and thrust down a searchlight beam. It picked out the wheelship. The plane shot off toward the distant airport.

  “You must go at once. They have radio—will report your ship.”

  “I have nothing to hide,” he thought proudly.

  “You don’t know how ruthless humans can be when they are afraid,” I told him. Far away from the city, the wail of sirens began. “Go!”

  “I wish you to live and be happy,” I said. His hands held mine.

  “I am called Drax. I must meet with the males of your family. My purpose in coming here—There is somet
hing of importance I must get from your father or from one of your brothers.” His thoughts at this point were veiled from me. It was a familiar feeling, yet how much more painful from this man than from anyone ever before. For I had been in complete communication with another being for the first time in my life, and to be excluded now . . . I put my face in my hands. The alien must need scientific data, help perhaps, from my family. I raised my head but did not meet his eyes.

  “Go, now. Come to my father’s house after midnight.” I gave him the directions.

  “You will have to be there, also, to translate for me. I cannot communicate with any of your race except you.” He ran with great strides to his craft and within a minute had skimmed up out of sight, a brighter star against the night.

  I ran into the army’s dragline before I got to the road. Since I had been in the contaminated area, I was placed under “protective arrest” and taken back to the home I had never planned to see again. All the while they were quizzing me before my father and brothers came. I said little. My mind was filled with the wonder of the presence of such as Drax in the universe.

  When my father came he was very angry. He had been taken from the middle of a lecture and brought at a high speed to his house, only to discover that the great emergency consisted of—myself.

  “What crackbrain dreamed this up?” he stormed at the Major in charge. “I’m snatched from the platform, dragged at illegal speeds through the night, told nothing, and now I find you suspect this—this unfortunate child of some sort of interplanetary espionage. Ridiculous! Surely after five minutes conversation with her you can see what she is!”

  The Major looked at my father as if he did not like him. “She hasn’t said much of anything. She was seen by two reliable witnesses, standing near a large circular craft with a being in a metallic suit. Both craft and being have disappeared.”

  My father snorted. “Hysterical delusions! I’m surprised an officer of our army would be taken in by such childish—”

  The Major held out the golden plates. “We took these from her. She says the alien gave them to her as a gift. Do they look like delusions?”

  My father stared at the plates, wordless.

  The Major snapped, “Damned if I don’t think you’re all in on it!” He called over his shoulder. “Captain, keep this place under maximum guard. Patrols under cover. If the craft attempts to land, let it, but secure any person who leaves the craft.”

  “You believe this nonsense?” frowned my father.

  The Major looked at the plates. The clock ticked loudly in the silence. Eleven thirty. I had told Drax to come after twelve. I clenched my fists and concentrated on sending out warning thought waves.

  “Look at her!” the Major’s voice startled me so I snapped my eyes open and stared at him. “She was signaling,” he explained, scowling. My father walked over to me.

  “Is there any truth in this officer’s accusations?”

  I closed my eyes again and tried to resume the warning thoughts. My father raised his hand and struck my cheek.

  “Answer me, you—!”

  My younger brother Ted caught his arm. Then he came close to me and touched my shoulder with awkward pity. He faced the Major scornfully. “Why can’t you let her alone? She’s not in league with any alien power—how could she be? She’s like a child, for all she’s so big. I won’t have her tormented—”

  The Major permitted himself a grim smile. “The only person who’s laid a hand on her is her father.”

  “Take her away with you,” said my father. “Examine her to your heart’s content—and small good it’ll do you.”

  “Very tired,” I said. They all looked at me. “I am tired,” I repeated slowly.

  “She can have my room,” volunteered Ted, quickly.

  “What’s wrong with her own?” said the Major sharply. “She does live here?”

  My father glared at Ted. “I had the caretaker pack her things today. I intended to send her to—a sanatorium. Her bed can be made up again—”

  “Are you willing to accept full responsibility for her conduct?” snapped the Major. “She’s our only contact with the monster, and you can bet we’ll guard the house, but we haven’t figured out yet how she signals to the aliens. If she brings some kind of a raid down on us—”

  “I’ll sit with her,” said Ted gently. “I’m sure you’re wrong—”

  I tried very hard to think straight and strong. Drax planned to come here to get my family’s help. The army man was so nervous he would probably fire on sight, with his talk of aliens and “monsters.” I was not getting any response from Drax, mentally. There was just one thing left to do.

  “I will go with Major . . . show him where to meet alien . . . get soldiers quickly . . .”

  They were all staring at me. I looked only at my father, trying to will him to agree to my going. The Major nodded his head. “That makes sense. We know she’s the only one who’s contacted him and remembers anything about it. It’s most probable she’s arranged to meet him again.” He went out into the hall, calling orders to his men. I turned quickly to my father.

  “His name—Drax,” I whispered urgently. “Like you—scientist. He will be here tonight. Needs help from you and my brothers. I will lead soldiers away—”

  “Why bother with all this elaborate hocus-pocus? I can soon find out if this alien is a scientist, as you claim. If he is, I’ll vouch for him to the military—”

  I stamped my foot. “Soldiers are all very frightened. When they see him they will destroy.”

  My father set his lips. “That I should be cursed with stupidity and childish melodramatics at a time like this! The man has only to declare himself—prove himself a rational being with a harmless motive for being here—”

  “He . . . cannot . . . communicate with humans!”

  “Then how do you pretend to be so familiar with his plans?”

  “It is as though I could hear his thinking in my mind,” I groped to explain that glorious sense of sharing.

  “Extra-sensory perception?” suggested Ted, eagerly.

  “Some form of hypnosis, more likely,” my father said. He looked at me speculatively. It was maddening to me that they should be so calmly discussing the matter, when every moment Drax was drawing closer to the trap.

  “I find it difficult to believe that she should be in communication with a nonterresterial being,” Ralph objected. “Granting there are any such.”

  “You suggest that such a one, a scientist, would hardly be likely to choose a mind like hers when there are trained, high intelligences trying to establish contact with him?” My father considered the matter. “Yet the trained intelligences might not be aware of the possibility or the method of such communication.”

  “There’s those chaps at Duke University,” Ted put in.

  “Why this girl?” my father mused.

  “Perhaps because I understand him,” I said desperately.

  “You?”

  “Why not? He is alien in form. He cannot talk to you. Everyone is afraid of him because they do not understand him. They are cruel. It has been so with me, always.”

  “But you are different—” began my father uncomfortably.

  Anger was making the words flow out of my mouth faster than ever in my life. Or maybe part of it was Drax with his mind like a strong gentle hand reaching into mine. Anyway, I burst out:

  “Is wanting to be needed and loved different? Is gentleness and kindness and respect different? Drax has these feelings—I have sensed them in his thoughts. I have lived with these hungers all the days of my life. Could I mistake them? Inside, we have needs like yours and hopes and dreams . . . Only the shell is different. But that is enough for men . . .”

  My father did not meet my eyes. “Call the alien to you. Bring him here. I’ll try to protect him.”

  “I will not have him trapped and laughed at and hated as I have been. I cannot trust any of you. I will lead them away from here. Whe
n he comes you must help him to escape—”

  “That’s all I need to hear,” broke in the Major from the doorway. Behind him stood two soldiers with guns drawn and pointed at us. “Confine the whole family in one room. Post guards outside the door and windows. All lights out except in this room. Alert all personnel to keep silent and well hidden till the alien is safely inside. I’ll personally break the neck of any man who warns him away by so much as an audible breath.”

  When they had locked us in Father’s room in the dark, I said softly, “I am going to get away and warn him.”

  Ted was at the window. “There’s only one guard out here.”

  “I advise against your doing anything foolish,” said my father. “Let him come here. Surely we are all rational beings—”

  “Have you a weapon in this room?” interrupted Ted.

  My father said, “Don’t be a fool.”

  I went to the window and opened it quietly. A soldier came head and shoulders into the opening, gun pointing.

  “You won’t shoot me,” I said quietly. “I’m only one who can talk to the alien.”

  “We don’t aim to do much talking,” whispered the soldier. “Now shut up so you don’t warn him away.”

  I reached out and jerked his gun. He fell toward me. I held his head against my chest. Ted helped me pull him into the room. We gagged and tied him. I went out through the window. Ted slid after me.

  I don’t know whether the soldiers heard us leave. They’d been ordered to be quiet, and they were. We ran along the roads to the high meadows, our feet thudding dully in the soft grasses. After a while Ted gasped, “Slow down a bit, will you?”

  I stopped, to listen. At first there was only his heavy breathing and the distant rumble of the city. A dog barked in the valley. Then a man’s voice, calling something. I began to run again. When I got to the hollow where I had met the alien, I sank to my knees and put my head in my hands.

  “Danger!” I thought at him. “Go quickly. Danger!” I swept the night for a response. There was nothing. Far below us there were shouts and the sound of a gunshot. I redoubled my efforts. Ted caught my shoulder, shook it.

  “Look!”

  The wheel of Drax was coming down on us, whining softly. In a moment he stood beside us. Drax did not address his thoughts to me, but to my brother.

  “Say to him,” he commanded me, “Why have you brought this girl to me?”

  My brother said, “Tell him I wanted you to come.”

  I did so, then broke in, “Oh, Drax, the soldiers are after you, as —”

  He sent a thought full of reassurance. “Tell your brother it is well. This is the way of my people. To the males of the woman’s family we come; the one who loves her best must give her to us.”

  In a daze I repeated this message, then added, “No one loves me. I do not understand this—”

  Drax: “Your brother loves you. His heart is tender.”

  Myself: “But why do you want me? I’m not a scientist—”

  Ted: “Don’t be a stupe, Sis. The guy’s making you an honorable offer . . .”

  I stared from one to the other in the dim starlight. Both of them were smiling at me. Ted walked over and grinned up at the huge Drax. “Tell him I think he seems like a worthy young man—he’s so big I don’t dare say anything else! Tell him, as your closest relative, I hereby give away the bride.”

  When with trembling unbelieving mind, I had conveyed this message, Drax thought solemnly, “I will truly protect and care for this woman all the days of my life. I will explore with her the utmost delights of love; I will protect her children. She will be honored in my clan.” He held my hand in his enormous fist as I repeated the words to Ted.

  There was more. “Tell your brother that I can never bring you back to this planet. Long across the black of space I have sought such a one as you to be my mate, for the Overlord’s son must always go in search of a woman of different race, that the blood of the People may be diversified, and therefore enriched, according to The Great Law—”

  Sirens began to wail in the distance, and powerful search beams crossed the sky. Ted pushed me gently toward Drax.

  “The Injuns are on the warpath. Tell Gabby here to get going.” Drax clasped my brother’s hand. Ted winced, said, “ouch,” and patted my shoulder gently. “Best of luck, kid. Have fun. And name one of them after me, huh?”

  Drax caught me to his breast and leaped for the port of the wheelship . . .

  Now we approach my new world—Home. I shall finish this account and, sealing it in a capsule, send it on a trace beam back to the hollow in the high meadow.

  I think that Ted will come there, sometime, to remember me.

  Backyard Universe