«That’s James Dean, isn’t it?»
I peered at the photo as if I was trying to remember something that wasn’t terribly important. «Yeah, I think so. The kid wanted more money than I wanted to spend on the project. That’s what killed it.»
«He’s been dead for five or six years.»
«Has it been that long?» James Dean was alive and having the time of life working with the Martians on Venus. He had left his acting career and his life on earth far behind him to do better work than the President’s Peace Corps could even dream about.
«I didn’t know he did a picture for you,» she said, her voice dreamy, ethereal. Like every other woman her age she had a crush on James Dean. That’s what drove the poor kid to Venus.
«He didn’t,» I snapped. «We couldn’t agree on terms. Come on back to bed.»
She did, but in the middle of it my damned private phone rang. Only five people on earth knew that number and one of them wasn’t human.
I groped for the phone. «This better be important,» I said.
«The female you are with,» said Jazzbow’s hissing voice, «is a government agent.»
Oh yeah, the Martians are long-distance telepaths, too.
So I took Jean for a drive out to the desert in my Bentley convertible. She loved the scenery, thought it was romantic. Or so she said. Me, I looked at that miserable dry Mohave scrubland and thought of what it could become: blossoming farms, spacious tracts of housing where people cooped up in the cities could raise their kids, glamorous shopping malls. But about all it was good for now was an Air Force base where guys like Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield flew the X-planes and the Martians landed their saucers every now and then. After dark, of course.
«Just look at that sunset,» Jean said, almost breathless with excitement, maybe real, maybe pretended. She was an actress, after all.
I had to admit the sunset was pretty. Red and purple glowing brighter than Technicolor.
«Where are we going?» she kept on asking, a little more nervous each time.
«It’s a surprise.» I had to keep on going until it was good and dark. We had enough UFO sightings as it was, no sense taking a chance on somebody getting a really good look. Or even worse, a photograph.
The stars came out, big and bright and looking close enough to touch. I kept looking for one in particular to detach itself from the sky and land on the road beside us. All that stuff about saucers shining green rays on cars or planes and sucking them up inside themselves is sheer hooey. The Martians don’t have anything like that. Wish they did.
Pretty soon I see it.
«Look!» says Jean. «A falling star!»
I didn’t say anything, but a couple of minutes later the headlights pick up the saucer sitting there by the side of the road, still glowing a little from the heat of its re-entry from orbit.
«Don’t tell me you’ve driven me all the way out here to see another movie set,» Jean said, sounding disappointed. «This isn’t your big surprise, is it?»
«Not quite,» I said, pulling up beside the saucer’s spindly little ladder.
She was pretty pissed off. Even when two of the Martians came slithering down the ladder she still thought it was some kind of a movie stunt. They had to move pretty slow and awkwardly because of the gravity; made me think of the monster movies we made. Jean was definitely not impressed.
«Honestly, Howard, I don’t see why—»
Then one of the Martians put its snake-fingered hands on her and she gave a yelp and did what any well-trained movie starlet would do. She fainted.
Jazzbow wasn’t in the ship, of course. The Martians wouldn’t risk a landing in Culver City to pick him up, not even at night. Nobody but Prof. Schmidt and me knew he was in my office suit there. And the other Martians, of course.
So I got Jazzbow on the ship’s interociter while his fellow Martians draped the unconscious Jean on one of their couches. Her skirt rucked up nicely, showing off her legs to good advantage.
«They’re not going to hurt her any, are they?» I asked Jazzbow.
«Of course not,» his image answered from the inverted triangular screen. «I thought you knew us better than that.»
«Yeah, I know. You can’t hurt a fly. But still, she’s just a kid …»
«They’re merely probing her mind to see how much she actually knows. It will only take a few minutes.»
I won’t go into all the details. The Martians are extremely sensitive about their dealings with other living creatures. Not hurt a fly? Hell, they’d make the Dalai Lama look like a bloodthirsty maniac.
Very gently, like a mother caressing her sleeping baby, three of them touched her face and forehead with those tentacle-like fingers. Probing her mind. Some writer got wind of the technique second- or third-hand and used it on television a few years later. Called it a Velcro mind-melt or something like that.
«We have for you,» the ship’s science officer told me, «good news and bad news.»
His name sounded kind of like Snitch. Properly speaking, every Martian is an «it,» not a «him» or a «her.» But I always thought of them as males.
«The good news,» Snitch said to me, «is that this female knew nothing of our existence. She hadn’t the faintest suspicion that Martians exist or that you are dealing with them.»
«Well, she does now,» I grumbled.
«The bad news,» he went on, with that silly grin spread across his puss, «is that she is acting as an undercover agent for your Internal Revenue Service—while she’s between acting jobs.»
Aw hell.
I talked it over with Jazzbow. Then he talked in Martian with Snitch. Then all three of us talked together. We had evolved a Standard Operating Procedure for situations like this, when somebody stumbled onto our secret. I didn’t much like the idea of using it on Jean, but there wasn’t much else we could do.
So, reluctantly, I agreed. «Just be damned careful with her,» I insisted. «She’s not some hick cop who’s been startled out of his snooze by one of your cockamamie malfunctioning saucers.»
Their saucers were actually pretty reliable, but every once in a while the atmospheric turbulence at low altitude would get them into trouble. Most of the sightings happened when the damned things wobbled too close to the ground.
Jazzbow and Snitch promised they’d be extra-special careful.
Very gently, the Martians selectively erased Jean’s memory so that all she remembered the next morning, when she woke up a half a mile from a Mohave gas station, was that she had been abducted by aliens from another world and taken aboard a flying saucer.
The authorities wanted to put her in a nut house, of course. But I sent a squad of lawyers to spring her, since she was under contract to my movie studio. The studio assumed responsibility for her, and my lawyers assured the authorities that she was about to star in a major motion picture. The yokels figured it had all been a publicity stunt and turned her loose. I actually did put her into a couple of starring roles, which ended her career with the IRS, although I figured that not even the Feds would have had anything to do with Jean after the tabloids headlined her story about being abducted by flying saucer aliens. I took good care of her, though. I even married her, eventually. That’s what comes from hanging around with Martians.
See, the Martians have a very high ethical standard of conduct. They cannot willingly hurt anybody or anything. Wouldn’t step on an ant. It’s led to some pretty near scrapes for us, though. Every now and then somebody stumbles onto them and the whole secret’s in jeopardy. They could wipe the person’s brain clean, but that would turn the poor sucker into a zombie. So they selectively erase only the smallest possible part of the sucker’s memory.