I, Alien

CREATURE FOR HIRE by Paul L. Martens

I WAS ALONE. And if you’ve never been the only one of your kind on a world of billions, then you don’t know what being alone is. I was a monster, shunned and unwanted, with no place in the universe.

Morty was on the phone, confirming that assessment. “I’m sorry, E, I just can’t get you another movie.” Morty was my agent. “I mean, face it, you can’t act.”

“But, Morty, I’m an alien. Christ, I’m The Alien, the only one on the whole damned planet. There’s got to be something.” It occurred to me that my apartment was too big. It seemed to be getting bigger every day. And when I considered the rent vis-a-vis my bank account balance, the place was huge.

“The novelty’s worn off, kiddo. I’m surprised it lasted for four movies. And that last one didn’t really count, just a walk-on in a dream sequence. The point is, people aren’t going to keep paying to see something they’ve already seen, even if he is an alien. I mean, it’s not like you do anything. You’re just there, you know?”

I looked around at the plush carpets, the antique furniture, the paintings that hadn’t been painted by starving artists, things my next place would be lacking.

I caught sight of myself in the gilded mirror across from the couch. My Celtics T-shirt hung loosely from my spindly frame. My head, which I used to think was a perfectly normal head, seemed too big. I blinked silvery lids over my enormous black eyes.

“What about TV?” I asked, knowing that my voice was too high and thin for any hope to live in it.

There was a sigh. “Maybe. The producers of Inter-galactic Battlecruiser have dropped some hints about a guest-villain spot. But they want to pay bupkes. And besides, people know you too well, they won’t buy you as a bad guy.”

“Couldn’t we work on my image a little? You know, play up the Menace-from-Outer-Space angle?”

He didn’t bother to say anything. It was my turn to sigh. What kind of world was this if you couldn’t even depend on xenophobia to make a living?

“How about the lecture tour?”

“Ah, jeez, E, I just can’t sell it. You’ve got nothing to say that people haven’t heard already. You don’t know how your spaceship worked. You don’t know how anything worked. You were a cook’s assistant. You don’t even know where Tethys is.”

Sure, I did. It was somewhere out there, far, far, far away. And I would probably never see it again.

“And anything you did have to say, you gave away for free when you spilled your guts to the Feds and let them record your interrogation. You remember what that did to the sales of your autobiography, don’t you?”

“Morty, I told you, I didn’t know…”

“Okay, okay. Water under the bridge. I’m just trying to tell you why I can’t get you a gig.”

“All right, Morty. Thanks, anyway. Let me know if anything comes up.” I hung up and wondered if this was one of those times when a human would cry. I can’t do it myself, but I was willing to bet that if I could have, I would have,

I didn’t really mind moving. The apartment had been Morty’s idea. The other tenants were writers, accountants, lawyers, and so on. I’d never belonged there, and soon I wouldn’t have enough money to make up for not belonging.

I sat and scratched the place where my nose would have been if I was human as I considered my options. What I needed was a secret hideaway, an inaccessible lair buried deep inside a mountain from which I could hold the governments of the world hostage with the threat of annihilation by my alien death-ray. That would make people notice me. Unfortunately, not only did I not have a secret hideaway, I was completely death-rayless, and there was no way I could persuade anyone otherwise. The only reason the government had let me go was because they were convinced I had nothing useful to tell them. If they had even suspected that I knew how to build an alien death-ray, or even an alien give-you-a-slight-headache-ray, I would have still been locked up tight in an NSA laboratory somewhere.

All right, then, how about this? I have a hidden receiver implanted in my head, and I just got a message from home that they were prepared to wipe out the Earth if I wasn’t given a billion dollars and my own sitcom. No. The first thing they would do is grab me and start digging around for the receiver. My head might seem freakishly large on this planet, but I was still pretty attached to it.

I wasn’t getting anywhere alone in my apartment thinking soberly and rationally about my problems. I decided I needed a drink.

I took the elevator down to the lobby and went out into the LA afternoon. I stopped to take a breath when I reached the sidewalk. As always, the air seemed to be missing something to me, even with all of the extras provided by the smog. It’s breathable, but not exactly what my lungs are looking for. Like everything else, though, whatever is missing is a mystery to me. And there’s something wrong with the sun. Some scientist told me it had to do with the color of the light and rods and cones or something, but I really couldn’t follow what she was saying. I was still learning English back then, but I doubt I would understand it any better now either.

I did, and do, understand alcohol, though, and I knew where to get it. I walked a couple of blocks to Prof’s, a dark little place owned by Doc Siegel, who described himself as a defrocked teacher of Fantastic Literature. I kept hoping someone would notice me, maybe ask for an autograph, but all I got was a few brief glances, a halfhearted gawk. Someone in a passing car did throw an empty coffee cup at me, but that was probably just a coincidence. Morty was right, nobody cared about me anymore. He’d told me about something called a nine-days’ wonder. I guess, after five years, it was finally the tenth day for me.

Doc was sitting behind the bar, soaking up his profits in the form of a glass of bourbon, probably not his first. The sun refused to follow me into the place, the only light came from a couple of three-watt bulbs and some fizzling, red-and-blue neon beer signs over the bar. There were a few customers scattered around at tables in the murk. Prof’s was a good place to drink alone.

“Eyu!, my alien friend and the word made flesh, welcome.” He bowed his bald head to me.

“Hi, Doc. A beer, please. A cheap one.” I climbed onto a stool.

He poured me a draft and asked, “How’s the alien biz?”

I swallowed some beer and said, “It stinks. A few more weeks and a dollar draft will be out of my price range.”

“That’s too bad, brother. What are you going to do about it?”

“What can I do? I’m unique; a genuine, one-of-a-kind, out-of-this-world alien, but no one cares. You’d think all I’d have to do is sit in a room someplace and charge people five bucks a pop just to look at me and I’d be rich. But, no, I’m old news. I’m last year’s Christmas present, just another guy from out of town who couldn’t make it in the big city. It’s not fair!”

Doc squinted at me, aiming his blue eyes along his hawk-sharp nose. “Fair? It’s not fair? What are you telling me, that life is fair where you come from? If that’s the case, you don’t just come from another world, you’re from a whole different universe that operates under its own set of rules. Was it fair that I had to become a school teacher because no one would buy my books? Was it fair that I had to give that up because I had a slight drinking problem?” He took a guzzle of bourbon.

I blinked at him. “I didn’t know you wrote.”

“Yeah, well, it was a long time ago,” he kind of mumbled it, as if he were embarrassed by his outburst. “But let me ask you this, would you be special if you were home?”

I hesitated, then finally admitted, “Okay, no. But I’m not home.”

“Are you sure? What are the chances that you’ll ever see Tethys again? Maybe you ought to get used to the fact that Earth is home, at least for now, and ask yourself what you can do to fit in.”

“But that’s the problem, I don’t fit in. My agent’s right, I don’t do anything, I don’t know anything, I don’t have anything that anyone would want. What can I do to myself that would change that?”

Doc took a long gulp of bourbon, smacked his lips with every evidence of relish, and said, “Well, why not do what I do when I come up against an insurmountable problem? If you can’t rise to the occasion, drink yourself under the table.” He poured a glass of Kentucky’s finest and slid it across the bar to me. “On the house.”

Sometime and some bourbon later, it hit me. Actually, first, the bar hit me, or, rather, I hit the bar. I had been thinking that it would be really nice if the bar would elevate itself a few inches to help me hold my head up. After a little while, I figured that wasn’t going to happen, and decided that if the mountain wouldn’t come to Mohammed… and I let my head fall.

“Ow,” I said. “I mean, eureka.”

Doc peered at me and waited.

“It’s a matter of pershpec… prospect… perspective. If I don’t have anything they want, then I have^ to make them want what I have.”

“Right!”

“Damned right I’m right. What I have to do is make people think there are aliens, other aliens, sneaking around, secretly doing alien things. Then people will want to know, who are they? What do they want? What should we do? And who will they ask?”

Doc thought about it.

“Me!” I told him.

“Okay.”

“And I’ll tell ‘em, but it’ll cost ‘em.”

“You bet.”

“So, how do I make ‘em think there are aliens?”

“Cows.”

“What?”

“You know. Cows.” He held fingers up next to his head. “Moo. Cows. Cattle mutilations. That’s what aliens do.”

“We do?”

He shrugged. “Some people think so.”

And so, at three-thirty in the morning, after the bar closed, we found ourselves in Doc’s ancient and mammoth purple Cadillac, on our way out of town, looking for cows. We knew they would be “in the country,” but beyond that we were going on guesswork and bourbon. Eventually, though, the bourbon wore off, and our guesswork wasn’t looking too good.

“Hey, over there!” I shouted.

Doc slammed on the brakes, fishtailing and almost missing a tree with his fender.

“Jesus, E! You want to give me a heart attack? What are you yelling about?”

I pointed.

“Those aren’t cattle. Those are llamas.”

“But,” I said, “I haven’t seen any cattle in the last couple of hundred miles, have you?”

“Well, no. Hell, it works for me if it works for you.” He turned off the car. “You go ahead. I’ll wait here.”

“What?”

“Go ahead. You know, mutilate them.” He made stabbing motions.

I stared at him. “How?”

“I don’t know. You’re the alien.”

“But I’ve never mutilated anything in my whole life.”

He shrugged.

“Fine.” I got out of the car, slamming the door behind me. I went around to his side and looked in the window. “What do you have in the way of mutilating devices?”

He rummaged around in the glove compartment, finally pulling out a pen, a plastic spork, and an ice scraper. “Take your pick.”

“What am I supposed to do with this stuff?” I asked. “And what are you doing with an ice scraper?” I grabbed the pen without waiting for his explanation and started for the field. There were six llamas munching grass and watching me with placid disinterest. They were mostly a shaggy, dirty white, but a couple of them had brown bits as well. As I climbed the faux-rustic wooden fence at the edge of the field, Doc yelled out, “Hey!”

“What?”

“I think some of them might be alpacas, or vicunas or something.”

I looked at him. “Does it matter?”

“No, I guess not.”

I shook my head and continued on my way. I held out my hands and called, “Here, llama, llama, llama.”

They didn’t come prancing up to me, but they didn’t run away either.

Eventually, I was able to work my way up to about a foot away from the largest of them. It stared at me with soft brown eyes and kept chewing. It looked gentle and trusting. I stared at the pen in my hand, then back at the llama. What was I supposed to do, write antihuman slogans on the side of the llama? I supposed I could stab it in the eye. Would that count as a mutilation? It would certainly count as disgusting. I imagined the pen meeting the firm but spongy eyeball, finally piercing it and sending some kind of eyeball fluid squirting out all over the place. I let the pen drop into the grass. I couldn’t do it.

“Okay, llama, you’re off the hook. Live long and prosper.”

It spit at me, filling my mouth with llama saliva. “AAAAHH!” I yelled. I spit and spit again. I ran across the field to the car, leaping over the fence. “Give me a drink! Anything!”

Doc got a fresh bottle of bourbon from under the seat, opened it and handed it to me. “I take it cattle and or llama mutilations are out, huh?”

I would have answered him, but I was busy rinsing my mouth and spitting out the window.

“Well, if mutilations are out, maybe you ought to consider a couple of abductions, with some anal probes thrown in for the sake of verisimilitude.”

I looked at him. “Are you crazy?”

He shrugged. “You got a better idea?”

I thought frantically. “Not immediately, but it seems like there would have to be at least a billion ideas that are better than kidnapping people and shoving things up their rectums.”

“Okay. I’ll drive us back to town, you come up with alternatives. I don’t think we need a full billion, just whatever sounds good to you.”

“How about Tiffany?” Doc indicated our waitress with his chin. “I could see myself probing her a few times.”

“Jeez, Doc, she could be your granddaughter.”

“I don’t know, I think she’s interested in me.” He smirked in my direction. “More interested in me than you, anyway.”

“Oh, that’s hilarious, isn’t it?” I had to admit it rankled that no one had made a fuss over me when we’d entered the small-town diner to get some breakfast. It was the kind of place where the regulars sat in their regular seats every morning and ate their regular breakfasts and drank their regular coffees on their way to work at the local bank or feed store or whatever. A guy in a John Deere cap and red suspenders over his flannel shirt looked up from his fried eggs and wrinkled his forehead as he tried to recollect where he might have seen me before, then went back to sopping up his yolk with a piece of toast. We sat at the counter and the blonde waitress, Tiffany, according to the name stitched on her powder-blue nylon uniform, handed us menus and said, “Morning, boys, what’U it be?” She waited a second or two, then added, “Hey, aren’t you that alien fellow?”

Well, I suppose I could have been a horribly misshapen, mutant human, but I wondered what kind of person needed to ask that question. “Why, yes, I am,” I said, ready to sign an autograph.

“Thought so.” She nodded. “So, you want coffee?”

As I ate my English muffin and Doc plowed through his scrambled eggs and hash browns, we discussed alien abductions.

“We can’t just hold a spork or an ice scraper to someone’s head and force them into your car and drive away, you know. There’s nothing mysterious about that,” I said. “Don’t we need bright lights, and cars stalling, and watches stopping and things like that?”

Doc chewed for a bit. “Yeah, I suppose we do. How do we go about it?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Well, damn it, E, what do you know? You can’t mutilate livestock, you can’t handle a simple abduction. Sometimes I wonder if you really are an alien.”

I held my grotesquely gigantic head in my long, skinny, insubstantial hands. “You’re right, Doc. Mor-ty’s right. Everybody’s right. I’m useless. I don’t belong here and I never will. I wish I had been killed with everybody else when our spaceship crashed.”

Doc’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, man, E, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” He sounded like he was worried I was going to commit suicide all over his breakfast. “You’re… You’re the stuff which dreams are made of. You’re a thousand books that once made my existence almost bearable, brought to life. Your very presence on this planet fills me with awe and wonder. And for myself, and for everyone else who has failed to let you know just how special you are, I apologize.”

I raised my head and blinked at him. “Gee, Doc, you sure can talk pretty when you want to. You ever think of writing that stuff down?”

He looked at me for an instant, then we both burst out laughing.

“You’re an asshole, you know that?” he said.

“Yeah, you, too,” I told him. It’s what Earth guys say when they care about each other. “But, you know what, I think you may have your uses.”

“Morty,” I told the telephone, “I want a book deal.”

“E, we’ve been there, done that. You can buy remaindered copies of your autobiography for a nickel.”

“I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about fiction. Science fiction.”

Loud cheers did not burst from the phone. “Eyul,” Morty said eventually, then more silence, then a sigh. “E. I love you like a son. You know that, right?”

“Sure, Morty.”

“So when I say this, you know I only have your best interests at heart, right?”

“Sure, Morty.”

“E, you can’t write. You don’t know the first thing about writing.

“There are people who write hundreds of thousand of words, who take classes, who study, who never get anything in print. And you want me to go to some publisher, someone who may have at least tried to read your autobiography until he couldn’t take anymore, and ask him to pay money for your fiction?

“Science fiction, no less?”

“Morty, listen. This isn’t some wild scheme, I’ve given it some thought. You ever hear of a guy named Brian Aldiss?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well, apparently he writes science fiction, and he’s supposed to be pretty good. Anyway, you know why he said he became a writer? He said, ‘Because I wasn’t fit for society; I didn’t fit into the system.’ Who does that remind you of, huh? Me, that’s who. Who do you know that is less fit for society?”

“E, it’s not that easy. It takes more than just not fitting into the system. You’ve got to have talent.”

“Morty, do me a favor, okay? Just try to sell the idea. An alien writing science fiction. It’s a great concept. A one-book deal, that’s all I’m asking. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But, Morty, it’s going to work.”

“All right. One book. I’ll see what I can do. But don’t get your hopes up.”

I hung up and looked at Doc. “Okay, now it’s your turn. Can you write something that I could have written?”

“Well, I’m not sure if I can rein in my abilities to that extent, but I’m willing to take a stab at it.”

“You have to let people see the pain, the inner torment, of being a bug-eyed monster, a freak, cut off from everything and everyone he’s ever known.”

“Okay,” he said, in an entirely too off-handed manner for my taste.

“I’m serious, Doc.”

“Relax, E. You’re going to be famous again.”

And so I am. In a few minutes, a limo is picking me up to take me to the television studio to tape another talk show. This afternoon, I’m giving a lecture to some college kids. We’re on our fifth book, all bestsellers.

We’ve got money. Doc is happy because he feels like he’s screwing the publishers that wouldn’t buy his manuscripts when he used his own name. He loves the way the critics and the academics gush over the books. His favorite was, “Eyul gives voice to that inchoate longing, that ineffable desire to belong in each of us. He reminds us that, whatever planet we are from, we are all aliens.” Sooner or later, we’ll “collaborate” on a couple of books to get his name out, then he can have his own writing career, too.

As for me, I finally found my calling. I still don’t do anything, not really. I’m just there. But it turns out, if you do it right, sometimes that’s all you have to be.