Alien Pregnant by Elvis, page 23
Asked for specifics, the six-gun-toting, veteran peace officer confided, “He eats all kindsa metal stuff, been doin’ it since he was a just little sprat. Ferris was only six when his Daddy brung him ’round the station, showin’ him Perdition’s very own Matt Dillon, yours truly, yessiree. Anyways, I was a’holdin’ that little shaver up to see them wanted posters on the wall, when he grabs my badge, pops it in his mouth, and gulps the sucker down! He nearly choked to death on it, too. Had to rush him down t’ ol’ Doc Bullfinch’s. By the time we got him there, though, that sucker’d slid right down his gullet, slick as spit on a doorknob. Had one heckuva sore throat, though, by gum!”
Incredulous at this astounding insider revelation, we verified this with both Sheriff O’Dell and Mr. Boyler’s childhood physician, the now-retired Dr. Otis Bullfinch. “Yes, yes, well, I don’t want to betray any confidences, privileged information, patient’s files and all, but, sure enough, that boy was always swallowing something he wasn’t supposed to, then they’d bring him in, his parents, you know, with a godawful stomach ache, why that boy sure did love eating metal . . . at first I thought it was an iron deficiency, but, no . . .
Dr. Doyle M. Culpepper, attending physician at Perdition’s Mercy Hospital, confirmed Mr. Boyler’s ferocious appetite for metal objects. “Mr. Boyler was admitted to Mercy Hospital, following a valiant rescue by our highly skilled trauma team, promptly reacting to a 911 call. Mr. Boyler was treated for shock and exposure symptoms, massive bruises, numerous cuts and abrasions, and was then X-rayed under my supervision. Subsequent examination and evaluation of the X-rays revealed, in addition to several cracked or separated ribs, a 68-pound mass of accumulated, extraneous metal objects.” Overwhelmed by what he had witnessed, the doctor continued, “This was definitely the weirdest case of my career!”
When asked for a complete list of Mr. Boyler’s stomach contents, our exclusive medical contact revealed this comprehensive inventory: 43 keys of assorted sizes; literally hundreds of pins, safety pins, needles, nails, paperclips, screws, drapery hooks, and washers; 19 rings (including his dear, departed mother’s engagement and wedding rings); 97 ball bearings; $87.23 in spare change; a Bates stapler; a 2-pound ball of tinsel; 7 metal toy soldiers; 33 metal jacks; 4 watches (including a Timex that, amazingly, took the licking and was, as advertised, still ticking); 4 small magnets; a six-place table setting of silver-plated, five-and-dime style flatware; 3 crescent wrenches; a single pair of wirecutters; 4 pairs of pliers; a complete set of metric sockets; one tin star; and the crumpled hubcap from a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air.
An exclusive bedside chat with Mr. Boyler revealed a full, first-person account of his astounding true story.
“It all started when I was takin’ a shortcut home from the store, you know, through Sutter’s Salvage. There’s this big rip in the chainlink fence over on the side by the Canyon Road arroyo. It’s kinda hard to spot if you don’t know it’s there, but I found it awhiles back, and I use it all the time. Anyway, I was makin’ a beeline through those stacks of wrecked cars, and I passed right by that big old crane with the ’lectromagnet on it. Well, I heard some kinda motor a’hummin’ away, and it shoulda been off, but I wasn’t really thinkin’ ’bout nothin’ ’cept gettin’ home and havin’ me some supper.
“WHAM! Next thing I knew I was sailin’ right up offa the ground, and I went THUNK! Smack dab up against that dam magnet. I was trapped there all night long, hangin’ in midair, starvin’ and freezin’ my keister off, if you’ll pardon my French!
“I was sure I was a’gonna die right there. I felt myself floatin’ up outta my body, and I was lookin’ down on myself. I felt like I was tied to some kinda metal thread, you know, like it was holdin’ me to my body down there. Then I felt it stretchin’ like, and I just knew it was gonna pop, and I’d never get back inside myself. Then I seen this here bright, blindin’ light and this here unearthly music, and I knew I was goin’ over t’the other side . . . and I seen my dear ol’ Mother, bless her heart, and J. Edgar Hoover and Tom Mix and Gene Autrey and Hank Williams, and Elvis in his white suit, all a’glowin’ with this here white, blindin’ light. Next thing I ’member, the sky was all turned to pink and gold fire, and I thunk to myself, By Gawd, Ferrous, you done made it t’Heaven!
“But it was just real early mornin’, sunup, you know, and them medics saved me.
“Some folks think it t’was Elvin McMurty in his ’47 Ford pickup out there, a’parkin’ with some floozy and his lights shinin’ in my eyes and some doggone Rock’ n’ Roll music a’playin’ away, but I KNOW better! I seen the Gates of Heaven, and I KNOW there is a life after death after all!”
They’d Never—
by Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove has a degree in Byzantine Studies which he puts to good (and highly entertaining) use in his Videssos series. Who better than he to make alternate history so riveting? Among his more recent works are The Guns of the South and, in hardback. In the Balance, which is the first book of a thrilling alternate history SF series. He has been a freelance writer for more than three years now, which he says “beats the living kapok out of working for a living.”
Join him now to explore the tabloid newsman’s ultimate experience.
Moit Pfeiffer slung his jacket over the back of his chair, then plomped his ample bottom into said chair and turned on his computer. Another day, he thought gloomily. He looked around the office of the Weekly Intelligencer.
It looked like a newspaper office: other people dressed no better than he was sat around in front of screens and clicked away at keyboards. Those clicks made it sound like a newspaper office, too. It even smelled like a newspaper office: stale coffee and musty air conditioning with two settings, too hot and too cold.
But it wasn’t a newspaper office, or not exactly. If the Intelligencer wasn’t the trashiest supermarket and 7-Eleven rack filler around, the troops hadn’t done their job for the week. “For this I went to journalism school?” Mort muttered.
He wished for a cigarette. The smoke would have made the place smell even more authentic. But the Intelligencer office had gone smokefree a couple of years before—it was either that or lose their health insurance. Besides, he was wearing a transdermal nicotine patch. Smoke while you had one of those things stuck to you and you were a coronary waiting to happen.
Behind glasses that were going to turn into bifocals the next time he got around to seeing his optometrist, his eyes lit up for a moment. Transdermal patches . . . he might be able to do something with that. They were hot these days, and no more than three percent of the lip-movers who bought the Intelligencer were likely to have even a clue about what transdermal meant.
So. . . the beginning of a headline formed in this mind, 72-point type, sans-serif, with an exclamation point at the end. TRANSDERMAL PATCHES CAUSE . . .!
“Cause what?” he mused aloud.
Cause heart attacks if you’re stupid enough to keep lighting up while you’re wearing one? He shook his head. That wasn’t scary enough. You didn’t necessarily die from a heart attack, and if you did, it was over quick.
Cause cancer? That one was stale even for the Intelligencer (which was saying something). Besides, the whole idea behind nicotine patches was to keep you from getting lung cancer. Pfeiffer’s ethical sense was stunted (Would I be here otherwise? he thought), but it hadn’t quite atrophied.
Cause AIDS? He shook his head again. Something there, though. Suddenly, like striking snakes, his hands leaped at the keyboard. Letters flowed rapidly across the screen: TRANSDERMAL PATCHES CAUSE AIDS-LIKE SYNDROME! He knew just how to write that one up. When you took the patch off, you went through some of the same whim whams you did when you gave up smoking (he’d call a trained seal of a doctor for the impressive-sounding quotes he’d need). And some of those whimwhams were enough like early AIDS symptoms to give the piece the germ of truth his editor liked.
Speak of the devil, he thought, because his editor came by just then, paused to see what he was working on, and nodded approvingly before heading off to the next desk. Don’t think of Ed Asner as Lou Grant here. Katie Nelligan looked more like Mary Tyler Moore with red hair.
Mort sighed. If she hadn’t been his boss, and if he hadn’t had a well-founded suspicion that she was smarter than he was (although if she was all that smart, why did she work for the Intelligencer!), he’d have asked her out a year ago. One of these days, he kept telling himself. It hadn’t happened yet.
Katie came back, dropped a wire service report into his IN basket. “See what you can do with this one, Mort,” she said.
He looked at the news item. Kids in Japan, it seemed, raised stag beetles (not Japanese beetles, for some reason) as pets. Then they’d put them up on round cushions two at a time to see which one could grab the other by the projecting mouthparts and throw it off. They’d just chosen a national champion beetle.
“Jesus Christ,” Mort said. “Sumo-wrestling bugs!”
“That’s just the slant we’ll want on it,” Katie said. She nodded again—twice in one morning, which didn’t happen every day. “Can you give me a draft before you go home tonight?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he answered. What was he supposed to tell her?
“Good,” she said crisply, and went on down the aisle be! tween desks. Mort looked back at her for a couple of seconds before he returned to his computer.
He discovered he’d forgotten what he was going to write next about the transdermal patches. No wonder, he thought. Sumo-wrestling bugs—Lord, that was enough to derail anybody’s train of thought. Bullshit about patches and the truth about bugs . . . “Hell of a way to make a living,” he said under his breath.
Nobody glanced over at him to see why he was talking to himself. People at the Intelligencer did it every day. Nobody, but nobody, was ever a bright-eyed, eager eighteen-year-old getting himself ready for a hot career writing for a supermarket tabloid. It wasn’t a job you went looking for, it was a job you fell into—generally from a great height.
“If I weren’t Typhoid Mary, I wouldn’t be here,” Mort said, again to himself. He’d worked for four different papers in three years, each of which went belly-up within months of hiring him. The jobs had disappeared, but his rent and his car payment and his child support hadn’t. He’d been here five years. Whatever else you said about it, the Intelligencer wouldn’t go broke any time soon. What was that line about nobody going broke overestimating the stupidity of the American people?
A guaranteed regular paycheck—yeah, that was one thing that kept him coming to the office every morning. The other was something he hadn’t thought through when he’d taken this job: now that he’d worked for the Intelligencer, no real newspaper would ever take him seriously again.
He saved the patch story, got to work on the sumo-wrestling stag beetles. He took a certain perverse pride in the way he reworked it to fit the Intelligencer’s style: breezy, breathless, no paragraph more than two sentences long, no words more than three syllable if he could help it. Besides, Katie’d given him a deadline for that one, and he always met deadlines.
He was just heading into the wrapup when the lights went off.
“Oh, shit,” he said loudly, an editorial comment echoed and embellished all over the office. When the lights went off, so did the computers. Mort hadn’t saved the stag beetle story as he worked on it, so it was gone for good. He’d have to do it over from scratch, and doing it once had been once too often.
Besides which, with the power gone, the inside of the Intelligencer office was black as an IRS man’s heart: no windows. The publisher, three floors up—he had a window, and one with an ocean view. The peons who did the actual work? They got peed on, as their name implied.
Katie Nelligan’s voice cut through the chatter: “Does anybody have a flashlight at their desk? There’s supposed to be an emergency kit in here somewhere, but we haven’t needed it for so long, I’ve forgotten where.”
No flashlights went on. Mort didn’t even have a luminous watch. He just sat at his desk, figuring the only thing he was likely to do in pitch darkness was stumble over somebody’s chair and break his fool neck.
Wouldn’t that be a great way to go? If a network correspondent cut himself shaving while he was covering a war, he turned into a national hero overnight. But if a tabloid reporter killed himself trying to get out of his office, he might make page seven on the inside section of the newspaper. Having his passing altogether ignored was a hell of a lot more likely.
Somebody else did get up, and promptly tripped. Feeling smugly virtuous, Mort stayed put.
Then, all of a sudden, he could see again. Standing in the doorway were four slim, manlike shapes, each glowing a slightly different shade of bluish green. All together they put out about as much light as a nightlight.
“Give me a break,” Mort said. “Who’s the practical joker?” Slim, glowing aliens were as much an Intelligencer hallmark as no funnies was with the New York Times. He’d written at least half a dozen stories about them himself. They all contradicted one another, but who kept track?
“I’ll bet I know who did it,” Katie Nelligan said: “San Levy at the News of the World” The News of the World specialized in aliens, too, generally warty yellow ones; Levy, who held down Katie’s job over there, was a notorious prankster. Katie turned to the glowing quartet. “Okay, boys, you can knock it off now. We’re wise to you. How about turning the lights back on, too?”
The four guys in the alien suits (Mort thought of them as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, which does a good job of dating him) didn’t answer. One of them—George—started walking up toward the ceiling. There weren’t any steps, but that didn’t bother him. He just went up and up, as if the air were solid beneath his feet.
A couple of people broke into applause. “Hell of a special effect,” someone called.
Mort gaped along with everybody else. It was a hell of a special effect. He would have been impressed seeing it on a movie screen. Seeing it for real, live and in person, was . . . unbelievable. You could put somebody in a suit that made him look like a freeway emergency light, yeah, but Mort knew for a fact that the ceiling didn’t have any wires in it. Which left—what? Antigravity?
“Holy Jesus,” he said hoarsely. “Maybe they are aliens.”
The chorus of derision that brought down on his head couldn’t have been louder or more scornful at an Air Force UFO debunking unit. People who worked for the Intelligencer wrote about aliens, sure, but they weren’t dumb enough to believe in them. That was for the yahoos who bought the paper.
Then the fellow in the suit up by the ceiling pointed an (inhumanly?) long finger at Katie Nelligan. He didn’t keep a flashlight in his fingernail, a la ET, but, with a startled squawk, Katie floated slowly off the floor and up toward him. “Somebody do something!” she yelped.
Mort sprang up, sprinted down the aisle, and grabbed her around the waist (he’d fantasized doing things like that, but not under these circumstances). He tried to pull her back down to Mother Earth. Instead, she rose higher and higher—and so did he.
He let go of Katie as soon as his feet left the ground, but that was too late. Up he went anyhow, toward the—well, if he wasn’t an alien, he’d do until somebody showed up with Mars license plates.
About halfway to the ceiling, Mort remembered that once upon a time he’d been a pretty good reporter, and here he was, floating up to the biggest story in the history of mankind. “Get a camera!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “We’ve got to have pictures!”
“Oh, good for you, Mort,” Katie exclaimed. “God, we’ll sell fifty million copies and we won’t even have to make anything up.” No matter that she’d been captured by aliens and was probably heading for a fate worse than taxes—she worried about the Intelligencer’s circulation ahead of her own.
Down on the ground, first one flash camera and then another started going off, strobing away until the office reminded Mort of nothing so much as a psychedelic 60s dance. Had the aliens smelled like pot smoke, the illusion would have been perfect, but they didn’t smell like anything.
Only after he shouted for a camera did Mort stop to wonder whether the aliens would mind having their images immortalized in the Intelligencer. If they had minded, things might have turned decidedly unpleasant for the person on the wrong end of the Nikon. But they didn’t seem to care one way or the other.
Then he wondered if anybody kept a gun in his desk or her purse. He didn’t think the aliens would be able to ignore bullets like flash photography. If anybody was toting a piece, though, he didn’t open up. That removed one of Mort’s worries.
A bigger, more urgent one remained: now that the aliens had Katie and him, what would they do with them? The beings the Intelligencer featured were always looking out for humanity’s best interests, but how likely was that really? Was a species that could invent pasturized processed cheese food product worth saving anyhow? Mort had his doubts. Which left—what?
The first thing that sprang to mind was experimental animal That was a long walk off a short pier. Number two was zoo specimen. That might have its moments if they tried to establish a breeding population with him and Katie Nelligan, but in the long run it wasn’t much better than number one: medium-to long-term insanity as opposed to instant anguish.
He flapped his arms and kicked his legs in midair, none of which changed his trajectory a bit. Whatever the aliens were going to do to him, he couldn’t stop them.
His feet were still within grabbing distance of the ground, but when somebody—he didn’t see who—made the same sort of run at him as he’d made at Katie, one of the aliens who’d remained by the doorway held up a hand like a traffic cop and his would-be rescuer bounced off an invisible wall. Pictures the aliens didn’t mind; they wouldn’t put up with anything more.
