“Don’t tell me about them,” I said. “Look, Tim, is there any way I can get a peek over those barricades?”
“Not a chance. Not even you. I’m not even supposed to be talking with civilians.”
“Since when am I civilian?”
“Since the invasion began,” Tim said.
He was dead serious. Maybe this was all just a goofy movie to me, but it wasn’t to him.
More junior officers came to him with more papers to sign. He excused himself and took care of them. Then he was on the field telephone for five minutes or so. His expression grew progressively more bleak. Finally he looked up at me and said, “You see? It’s starting.”
“What is?”
“They’ve crossed 72nd Street for the first time. There must have been a gap in the sealfield. Or maybe they jumped it, as I was saying just now. Three of the big ones are up by 74th, noodling around the eastern end of the lake. The Metropolitan Museum people are scared shitless and have asked for gun emplacements on the roof, and they’re thinking of evacuating the most important works of art.” The field phone lit up again. “Excuse me,” he said. Always the soul of courtesy, Tim. After a time he said, “Oh, Jesus. It sounds pretty bad. I’ve got to go up there right now. Do you mind?” His jaw was set, his gaze was frosty with determination. This is it, Major. There’s ten thousand Comanches coming through the pass with blood in their eyes, but we’re ready for them, right? Right. He went striding away up Fifth Avenue.
When I got back to the office there was a message from Maranta, suggesting that I stop off at her place for drinks that evening on my way home. Tim would be busy playing soldier, she said, until nine. Until 2100 hours, I silently corrected.
Another few days and we got used to it all. We began to accept the presence of aliens in the park as a normal part of New York life, like snow in February or laser duels in the subway.
But they remained at the center of everybody’s consciousness. In a subtle pervasive way they were working great changes in our souls as they moved about mysteriously behind the sealfield barriers in the park. The strangeness of their being here made us buoyant. Their arrival had broken, in some way, the depressing rhythm that life in our brave new century had seemed to be settling into. I know that for some time I had been thinking, as I suppose people have thought since Cro-Magnon days, that lately the flavor of modern life had been changing for the worse, that it was becoming sour and nasty, that the era I happened to live in was a dim, shabby, dismal sort of time, small-souled, mean-minded. You know the feeling. Somehow the aliens had caused that feeling to lift. By invading us in this weird hands-off way, they had given us something to be interestingly mystified by: a sort of redemption, a sort of rebirth. Yes, truly.
Some of us changed quite a lot. Consider Tim, the latter-day Bengal lancer, the staunchly disciplined officer. He lasted about a week in that particular mind-set. Then one night he called me and said, “Hey, fellow, how would you like to go into the park and play with the critters?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know a way to get in. I’ve got the code for the 64th Street sealfield. I can turn it off and we can slip through. It’s risky, but how can you resist?”
So much for Gary Cooper. So much for John Wayne.
“Have you gone nuts?” I said. “The other day you wouldn’t even let me go up to the barricades.”
“That was the other day.”
“You wouldn’t walk across the street with me for a drink. You said you’d get shot for desertion.”
“That was the other day.”
“You called me a civilian.”
“You still are a civilian. But you’re my old buddy, and I want to go in there and look those aliens in the eye, and I’m not quite up to doing it all by myself. You want to go with me, or don’t you?”
“Like the time we stole the beer keg from Sigma Frap. Like the time we put the scorpions in the girls’ shower room.”
“You got it, old pal.”
“Tim, we aren’t college kids any more. There’s a fucking intergalactic war going on. That was your very phrase. Central Park is under surveillance by NASA spy-eyes that can see a cat’s whiskers from fifty miles up. You are part of the military force that is supposed to be protecting us against these alien invaders. And now you propose to violate your trust and go sneaking into the midst of the invading force, as a mere prank?”
“I guess I do,” he said.
“This is an extremely cockeyed idea, isn’t it?” I said.
“Absolutely. Are you with me?”
“Sure,” I said. “You know I am.”
I told Elaine that Tim and I were going to meet for a late dinner to discuss a business deal and I didn’t expect to be home until two or three in the morning. No problem there. Tim was waiting at our old table at Perugino’s with a bottle of Amarone already working. The wine was so good that we ordered another midway through the veal pizzaiola, and then a third. I won’t say we drank ourselves blind, but we certainly got seriously myopic. And about midnight we walked over to the park.
Everything was quiet. I saw sleepy-looking guardsman patrolling here and there along Fifth. We went right up to the command post at 59th and Tim saluted very crisply, which I don’t think was quite kosher, he being not then in uniform. He introduced me to someone as Dr. Pritchett, Bureau of External Affairs. That sounded really cool and glib, Bureau of External Affairs.
Then off we went up Fifth, Tim and I, and he gave me a guided tour. “You see, Dr. Pritchett, the first line of the isolation zone is the barricade that runs down the middle of the avenue.” Virile, forceful voice, loud enough to be heard for half a block. “That keeps the gawkers away. Behind that, Doctor, we maintain a further level of security through a series of augmented-beam sealfield emplacements, the new General Dynamics 1100 series model, and let me show you right here how we’ve integrated that with advanced personnel-interface intercept scan by means of a triple line of Hewlett-Packard optical doppler-couplers—”
And so on, a steady stream of booming confident-sounding gibberish as we headed north. He pulled out a flashlight and led me hither and thither to show me amplifiers and sensors and whatnot, and it was Dr. Pritchett this and Dr. Pritchett that and I realized that we were now somehow on the inner side of the barricade. His glibness, his poise, were awesome. Notice this, Dr. Pritchett, and Let me call your attention to this, Dr. Pritchett, and suddenly there was a tiny digital keyboard in his hand, like a little calculator, and he was tapping out numbers. “Okay,” he said, “the field’s down between here and the 65th Street entrance to the park, but I’ve put a kill on the beam-interruption signal. So far as anyone can tell there’s still an unbroken field. Let’s go in.”
And we entered the park just north of the zoo.
For five generations the first thing New York kids have been taught, ahead of tying shoelaces and flushing after you go, is that you don’t set foot in Central Park at night. Now here we were, defying the most primordial of no-nos. But what was to fear? What they taught us to worry about in the park was muggers. Not creatures from the Ninth Glorch Galaxy.
The park was eerily quiet. Maybe a snore or two from the direction of the zoo, otherwise not a sound. We walked west and north into the silence, into the darkness. After a while a strange smell reached my nostrils. It was dank and musky and harsh and sour, but those are only approximations: it wasn’t like anything I had ever smelled before. One whiff of it and I saw purple skies and a great green sun blazing in the heavens. A second whiff and all the stars were in the wrong places. A third whiff and I was staring into a gnarled twisted landscape where the trees were like giant spears and the mountains were like crooked teeth.