What if it was?
Whose?
“We’d better get back upstairs,” Haber said, getting up. He felt increasingly impatient and irritable; the excitement was getting too extensive. “Who’s the woman with you, anyway?”
“That’s Miss Lelache,” Orr said, looking at him oddly. “The lawyer. She was here Friday.”
“How’d she happen to be with you?”
“She was looking for me, came to the cabin after me.”
“You can explain all that later,” Haber said. There was no time to waste on this trivia. They had to get out, to get out of this burning exploding world.
Just as they entered Haber’s office the glass burst out of the great double window with a shrill, singing sound and a huge sucking-out of air; both men were impelled toward the window as if toward the mouth of a vacuum cleaner. Everything then turned white: everything. They both fell over.
Neither was aware of any noise.
When he could see again, Haber scrambled up, holding on to his desk. Orr was already over by the couch, trying to reassure the bewildered woman. It was cold in the office: the spring air had a moist chill in it, pouring in the empty windows, and it smelled of smoke, burnt insulation, ozone, sulfur, and death. “We ought to get down into the basement, don’t you think?” Miss Lelache said in a reasonable tone, though she was shivering hard.
“Go on,” Haber said. “We’ve got to stay up here a while.”
“Stay here?”
“The Augmentor’s here. It doesn’t plug in and out like a portable TV! Get on down into the basement, we’ll join you when we can.”
“You’re going to put him to sleep now?” the woman said, as the trees down the hill suddenly burst into bright yellow balls of flame. The eruption of Mount Hood was quite hidden by events closer at hand; the earth, however, had been trembling gently for the past few minutes, a sort of fundamental palsy that made one’s hands and mind shake sympathetically.
“You’re fucking right I am. Go on. Get down to the basement, I need the couch. Lie down, George.... Listen, you, in the basement just past the janitor’s room you’ll see a door marked Emergency Generator. Go in there, find the ON handle. Have your hand on it, and if the lights fail, turn it on. It’ll take a heavy pressure upward on the handle. Go on!”
She went. She was still shaking, and smiling; as she went she caught Orr’s hand for a second and said, “Pleasant dreams, George.”
“Don’t worry,” Orr said, “It’s all right.”
“Shut up,” Haber snapped. He had switched on the Hypnotape he had recorded himself, but Orr wasn’t even paying attention, and the noise of explosions and things burning made it hard to hear. “Shut your eyes!” Haber commanded, put his hand on Orr’s throat, and turned up the gain. “RELAXING,” said his own huge voice. “YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE AND RELAXED. YOU WILL ENTER THE—” The building leaped like a spring lamb and settled down askew. Something appeared in the dirty-red, opaque glare outside the glassless window: an ovoid, large object, moving in a sort of hopping fashion through the air. It came directly toward the window. “We’ve got to get out!” Haber shouted over his own voice, and then realized that Orr was already hypnotized. He snapped the tape off and leaned down so he could speak in Orr’s ear. “Stop the invasion!” he shouted. “Peace, peace, dream that we’re at peace with everybody! Now sleep! Antwerp!” and he switched on the Augmentor.
But he had no time to look at Orr’s EEG. The ovoid shape was hovering directly outside the window. Its blunt snout, lit luridly by reflections of the burning city, pointed straight at Haber. He cowered down by the couch, feeling horribly soft and exposed, trying to protect the Augmentor with his inadequate flesh, stretching out his arms across it. He craned over his shoulder to watch the Alien ship. It pressed closer. The snout, looking like oily steel, silver with violet streaks and gleams, filled the entire window. There was a crunching, racking sound as it jammed itself into the frame. Haber sobbed aloud with terror, but stayed spread out there between the Alien and the Augmentor.
The snout, halting, emitted a long thin tentacle which moved about questingly in the air. The end of it, rearing like a cobra, pointed at random, then settled in Haber’s direction. About ten feet from him, it hung in the air and pointed at him for some seconds. Then it withdrew with a hiss and crack like a carpenter’s flexible rule, and a high, humming noise came from the ship. The metal sill of the window screeched and buckled. The ship’s snout whirled around and fell off onto the floor. From the hole that gaped behind it, something emerged.
It was, Haber thought in emotionless horror, a giant turtle. Then he realized that it was encased in a suit of some kind, which gave it a bulky, greenish, armored, inexpressive look like a giant sea turtle standing on its hind legs.
It stood quite still, near Haber’s desk. Very slowly it raised its left arm, pointing at him a metallic, nozzled instrument.
He faced death.
A flat, toneless voice came out of the elbow joint. “Do not do to others what you wish others not to do to you,” it said.
Haber stared, his heart faltering.
The huge, heavy, metallic arm came up again. “We are attempting to make peaceful arrival,” the elbow said all on one note. “Please inform others that this is peaceful arrival. We do not have any weapons. Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear. Please cease destruction of self and others. We do not have any weapons. We are nonaggressive unfighting species.”
“I—I—I can’t control the Air Force,” Haber stammered.
“Persons in flying vehicles are being contacted presently,” the creature’s elbow joint said. “Is this a military installation?”
Word order showed it to be a question. “No,” Haber said, “No, nothing of the kind—”
“Please then excuse unwarranted intrusion.” The huge, armored figure whirred slightly and seemed to hesitate. “What is device?” it said, pointing with its right elbow joint at the machinery connected to the head of the sleeping man.
“An electroencephalograph, a machine which records the electrical activity of the brain—”
“Worthy,” said the Alien, and took a short, checked step toward the couch, as if longing to look. “The individual-person is iahklu’. The recording machine records this perhaps. Is all your species capable of iahklu’?
“Idon’t—don’t know the term, can you describe—”
The figure whirred a little, raised its left elbow over its head (which, turtle-like, hardly protruded above the great sloped shoulders of the carapace), and said, “Please excuse. Incommunicable by communication-machine invented hastily in very-recent-past. Please excuse. It is necessary that all we proceed in very-near-future rapidly toward other responsible individual-persons engaged in panic and capable of destroying selves and others. Thank you very much.” And it crawled back into the nose of the ship.
Haber watched the great, round soles of its feet disappear into the dark cavity.
The nose cone jumped up from the floor and twirled itself smartly into place: Haber had a vivid impression that it was not acting mechanically, but temporally, repeating its previous actions in reverse, precisely like a film run backward. The Alien ship, jarring the office and tearing out the rest of the window frame with a hideous noise, withdrew, and vanished into the lurid murk outside.