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 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 entrance 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? 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, 37 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 72nd 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 37 hairy shambling flap-eared elephants snuffling and snorting 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 schoolbus 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.
They were enormous. Enormous. Getting exact measurements of one presented certain technical problems, as I think you can appreciate. The most reliable estimate was that they were 25 to 30 feet high and 40 to 50 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 of the kind found in Queens or Brooklyn, though it may offend your esthetic 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 10 or 11 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 16 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 three city blocks wide. No doubt the small size of their pasture was 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 spaceship-load 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 spaceship-loads of aliens, Maranta.”
She made a face. “Oh. The jumbos. They’re just dumb shaggy monsters. I don’t see them as much of a menace, really.”