“Er, thanks.”
The president glanced at his aides for inspiration. Finding none, he reached out and took the baby awkwardly. He’d had two children, William knew, but that didn’t mean he had any clue about the best way to cuddle aliens.
The baby didn’t seem to mind. It cooed—more like a dove than a child—then, just like uncounted scenes in a hundred years of bad movies—unleashed a stream of urine directed with admirable precision at the president’s face.
The aliens bounced up and down on the balls of their feet.
The SatNet newscasters suggested they were angry at the president’s inept handling of the baby, but William knew laughter when he saw it. Soon enough, the aliens would be giving everyone their equivalent of spludge.
Meanwhile, they continued talking, the TriVee operators picking up every word. “We seek to see how good you be at caring,” the one who’d presented the infant said as the president pretended not to notice the magenta fluid dripping from his chin. “Please bring Kemrit back to us each day for checking-up.”
“Kemrit?” The president glanced at the baby. “You wouldn’t actually mean…?”
The lead alien huddled with two of its coterie. A moment later, it turned back to the president. “Your language it be strangely linear. Ours does not so adapt. Mekrit? Remkit? Kermit? Pick your choose.”
The president made an odd noise that dropped his ratings another couple of points. “Kemrit,” he eventually managed. “I like Kemrit. The other’s too gree—” Then political correctness stopped him. The aliens were again bouncing.
Moments later, William was online, booking a flight to D.C. When it came, the spludge was going to be impressive.
Writing serious stories hadn’t been a waste of William’s time. He knew someone who knew someone who knew the president’s assistant press secretary, and that was good enough that the next day he was among the reporters on the White House lawn.
“Barry expanding gratitude to female sheep,” the lead alien said as the president arrived with the baby. William laughed. Their English was getting worse with each meeting, a sure sign they knew exactly what they were doing. But the president had spent too many years dealing with humorless government agencies. Again he sought refuge in his favorite word. “Er?”
He handed the baby to the lead alien, who took it into the spaceship. “Our wharf must examine to make sure you know how to care good,” another said.
A few minutes later, the alien doctor reemerged. “Much good,” she said. “Kemrit well do.”
Every day for nearly two weeks, the ritual was repeated. Each time, the president brought out the baby, and the aliens, after finding ever-new ways to slaughter the language, retreated with it for a check-up. “Our goodly relations are increasing in prospecutuity.”
Kemrit was clearly thriving. He was visibly larger, and the president, his ratings expanding as well, hadn’t said “er” in days.
That was when William knew what the aliens were up to. “Oh, crap,” he told his editor’s editor. “The baby’s a turtle.”
The editor-in-chief was one of the best in the business. That meant he saw no reason to join the president in trying to look more intelligent than he felt. “I thought it was a frog.”
“Trust me,” William said. “It’s a turtle.” He then explained the most famous practical joke in history, in which the joker gave his landlady a baby turtle, then swapped it, each day, for a slightly bigger one. “One of these days, they’ll reverse the process and the baby will get smaller. We can’t let that happen.”
For a week, William wracked his brain trying to figure out what to do. How do you beat a practical joker? Ideally at his own game. He ordered a new copy of World’s Best Practical Jokes (his own thumb-worn edition was back home, in his apartment), but found no inspiration. Squirty fountain pens and clown handkerchiefs weren’t going to do it, and nobody was going to let him close enough to the aliens to try something like that anyway.
By this time, the baby had expanded enough that even the most obtuse had noticed. Right-wingers, left-wingers, new-wingers: All were preening about what great care “we” had taken of the infant and how the aliens would soon, surely, open to us the secrets of the Universe, whether they be of godlike enlightenment, warp drive, antigravity, or a cell phone that never dropped calls.
William winced every time he heard it. If he were the aliens, he’d already be starting to shrink the baby. Maybe they were and the president’s advisers were already fretting.
William tried talking to the press secretary’s assistant but got nowhere. Why would the aliens play a gag on us? There was no way the assistant was going to suggest such a thing to her boss, and even if she did, her boss would never suggest it to the president. Briefly, he thought of asking why she thought they’d showed up looking like caricatures of the most grotesque sex toys. But there was no point. Politicians, like bureaucrats, have no sense of humor.
What would the aliens do when they found us easy marks? Have a good laugh and go find someone else to play with? Or conclude we deserved anything else they might do, like steal our planet? Maybe they’d just give us what we wanted—with a twist. A hyperdrive that blew up in our faces? Sorry about that. An antigrav unit that lofted its user into outer space? Oops. Hope she had life insurance.
If he could write his own script, William would turn the tables and make the baby expand when it should be contracting. But the only way to do that was to raid the aliens’ store of… whatever. Babies. Turtles. It didn’t really matter. Somewhere there was a whole bin of them.
Except… the obvious. It couldn’t be done. Not without breaking into the alien ship, which might not be the worst idea unless they were too heavily armed, but which nobody was going to do. What was needed was the type of technology everyone was hoping to get from the aliens. A turtle transporter would do nicely. Beam one in and another out, day by day. Nano-nano, live long and perspire, and all that. Defy them to complain.
Except, of course, the transporter didn’t exist either.
Meanwhile, William worked his sources. Everything was off the record, maximum deniability, you’ll-never-work-this-town-again-if-you-breathe-a-word, but the upshot was that yes, the baby’s weight had plateaued, and yes, the president was worried. William again tried to pass the turtle story back up the line—but that merely lent new meaning to the word hopeless. This was a test, everyone believed, and we were flunking.
Belatedly, he remembered that there were two groups of aliens. He was patriotic enough to be primarily concerned with one, but that was no excuse not to keep track of what the ones at the Taj Mahal were up to.
Nothing relevant, it turned out. Mostly they just seemed to prance around. Though they too did a lot of bouncing on the balls of their feet. They seemed particularly fond of the Cult of the Ultimate Phallus, which sprang from nothing to celebrate their welcome. But they also graced (if that was the word) online pharmacy ads, environmental pacifist gatherings (“Grow greens, not bombs!”), and assorted nudist camps and “bare buns” jogging clubs.
One evening, he had dinner with his editor. The editor was getting tired of William talking about turtles instead of filing stories, but his name was Mastrione and even though he’d never been to the old country, he was inordinately fond of all things Italian.
William hated paying for meals a course at a time, but as long as the Times was footing the bill he was amenable. Somewhere between the antipasto and dessert, he found himself staring vaguely across the table, thinking about spaghetti.