Tim nudged me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I smell it too.”
“To your left,” he said. “Look to your left.”
I looked to my left and saw three huge yellow eyes looking back at me from twenty feet overhead, like searchlights mounted in a tree. They weren’t mounted in a tree, though. They were mounted in something shaggy and massive, somewhat larger than your basic two-family Queens residential dwelling, that was standing maybe fifty feet away, completely blocking both lanes of the park’s East Drive from shoulder to shoulder.
It was then that I realized that three bottles of wine hadn’t been nearly enough.
“What’s the matter?” Tim said. “This is what we came for, isn’t it, old pal?”
“What do we do now? Climb on its back and go for a ride?”
“You know that no human being in all of history has ever been as close to that thing as we are now?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do know that, Tim.”
It began making a sound. It was the kind of sound that a piece of chalk twelve feet thick would make if it was dragged across a blackboard the wrong way. When I heard that sound I felt as if I was being dragged across whole galaxies by my hair. A weird vertigo attacked me. Then the creature folded up all its legs and came down to ground level; and then it unfolded the two front pairs of legs, and then the other two; and then it started to amble slowly and ominously toward us.
I saw another one, looking even bigger, just beyond it. And perhaps a third one a little farther back. They were heading our way too.
“Shit,” I said. “This was a very dumb idea, wasn’t it?”
“Come on. We’re never going to forget this night.”
“I’d like to live to remember it.”
“Let’s get up real close. They don’t move very fast.”
“No,” I said. “Let’s just get out of the park right now, okay?”
“We just got here.”
“Fine,” I said. “We did it. Now let’s go.”
“Hey, look,” Tim said. “Over there to the west.”
I followed his pointing arm and saw two gleaming wraiths hovering just above the ground, maybe 300 yards away. The other aliens, the little floating ones. Drifting toward us, graceful as balloons. I imagined myself being wrapped in a shining pillow and being floated off into their ship.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Come on, Tim.”
Staggering, stumbling, I ran for the park gate, not even thinking about how I was going to get through the sealfield without Tim’s gizmo. But then there was Tim, right behind me. We reached the sealfield together and he tapped out the numbers on the little keyboard and the field opened for us, and out we went, and the field closed behind us. And we collapsed just outside the park, panting, gasping, laughing like lunatics, slapping the sidewalk hysterically. “Dr. Pritchett,” he chortled. “Bureau of External Affairs. God damn, what a smell that critter had! God damn!”
I laughed all the way home. I was still laughing when I got into bed. Elaine squinted at me. She wasn’t amused. “That Tim,” I said. “That wild man Tim.” She could tell I’d been drinking some and she nodded somberly—boys will be boys, etc.—and went back to sleep.
The next morning I learned what had happened in the park after we had cleared out.
It seemed a few of the big aliens had gone looking for us. They had followed our spoor all the way to the park gate, and when they lost it they somehow turned to the right and went blundering into the zoo. The Central Park Zoo is a small cramped place and as they rambled around in it they managed to knock down most of the fences. In no time whatever there were tigers, elephants, chimps, rhinos, and hyenas all over the park.
The animals, of course, were befuddled and bemused at finding themselves free. They took off in a hundred different directions, looking for places to hide.
The lions and coyotes simply curled up under bushes and went to sleep. The monkeys and some of the apes went into the trees. The aquatic things headed for the lake. One of the rhinos ambled out into the mall and pushed over a fragile-looking alien machine with his nose. The machine shattered and the rhino went up in a flash of yellow light and a puff of green smoke. As for the elephants, they stood poignantly in a huddled circle, glaring in utter amazement and dismay at the gigantic aliens. How humiliating it must have been for them to feel tiny.
Then there was the bison event. There was this little herd, a dozen or so mangy-looking guys with ragged, threadbare fur. They started moving single file toward Columbus Circle, probably figuring that if they just kept their heads down and didn’t attract attention they could keep going all the way back to Wyoming. For some reason one of the behemoths decided to see what bison taste like. It came hulking over and sat down on the last one in the line, which vanished underneath it like a mouse beneath a hippopotamus. Chomp, gulp, gone. In the next few minutes five more behemoths came over and disappeared five more of the bison. The survivors made it safely to the edge of the park and huddled up against the sealfield, mooing forlornly. One of the little tragedies of interstellar war.
I found Tim on duty at the 59th Street command post. He looked at me as though I were an emissary of Satan. “I can’t talk to you while I’m on duty,” he said.
“You heard about the zoo?” I asked.
“Of course I heard.” He was speaking through clenched teeth. His eyes had the scarlet look of zero sleep. “What a filthy irresponsible thing we did!”
“Look, we had no way of knowing—”
“Inexcusable. An incredible lapse. The aliens feel threatened now that humans have trespassed on their territory, and the whole situation has changed in there. We upset them and now they’re getting out of control. I’m thinking of reporting myself for court-martial.”
“Don’t be silly, Tim. We trespassed for three minutes. The aliens didn’t give a crap about it. They might have blundered into the zoo even if we hadn’t—”
“Go away,” he muttered. “I can’t talk to you while I’m on duty.”
Jesus! As if I was the one who had lured him into doing it.
Well, he was back in his movie part again, the distinguished military figure who now had unaccountably committed an unpardonable lapse and was going to have to live in the cold glare of his own disapproval for the rest of his life. The poor bastard. I tried to tell him not to take things so much to heart, but he turned away from me, so I shrugged and went back to my office.
That afternoon some tender-hearted citizens demanded that the sealfields be switched off until the zoo animals could escape from the park. The sealfields, of course, kept them trapped in there with the aliens.
Another tough one for the mayor. He’d lose points tremendously if the evening news kept showing our beloved polar bears and raccoons and kangaroos and whatnot getting gobbled like gumdrops by the aliens. But switching off the sealfields would send a horde of leopards and gorillas and wolverines scampering out into the streets of Manhattan, to say nothing of the aliens who might follow them. The mayor appointed a study group, naturally.
The small aliens stayed close to their spaceship and remained uncommunicative. They went on tinkering with their machines, which emitted odd plinking noises and curious colored lights. But the huge ones roamed freely about the park, and now they were doing considerable damage in their amiable mindless way. They smashed up the backstops of the baseball fields, tossed the Bethesda Fountain into the lake, rearranged Tavern-on-the-Green’s seating plan, and trashed the place in various other ways, but nobody seemed to object except the usual Friends of the Park civic types. I think we were all so bemused by the presence of genuine galactic beings that we didn’t mind. We were flattered that they had chosen New York as the site of first contact. (But where else?)