Alice: The Girl From Earth

1

Alice was born on November 17th. It’s a successful day for such an event. It could have been far worse. I, for example, know someone who was born on January First, with the result that no one ever gave im a special birthday celebration because everyone was busy with New Years. It has to be bad for anyone born in the summer. All your friends are either away on vacation or trips; Alice has never had that trouble.

Just a week before Alice’s birthday I, coming home from the Zoo, started to think: What shall I get her? It is always a problem. I have packed away at home seven identical neckties, six holographic dancing ballerinas and ballerinas carved from wood carved out of roots and knots, three inflatable submarines, fourteen atomic powered lighters, a set of tin Eifel towers all of six inches high, and a multitude of other unnecessary things which you receive on your birthday and which you quite carefully hide away: five blue porcelain cups marked Mars Exposition 2070, an ash tray in the form of a ship of the star wraiths — as well as more such ash trays than one could possibly use.

I was sitting and remembering what Alice asked me back in September. She had asked for something. Something she needed. Back then I wanted to think about it more. And I forgot.

Then the videophone rang.

I pressed the ACCEPT button. On the screen appeared a set of seven eyes arranged in a fan shape above a rounded snout, below the nose the shark-tooth filled muzzle of my oldest and dearest friend, the off-world archaeologist Gromozeka, from the planet Chumaroz. Gromozeka was twice as large as an average human being, he had ten tentacles, seven eyes, a plate of bone armor on his chest and three wonderful, rather confused hearts.

“Professor,” He said. “It is quite unnecessary to burst into tears on seeing my visage. In but ten minutes I shall be at your home and will clutch you to my very own chest.”

“Gromozeka!” I just managed to say the one word when the screen at the other end turned off and my friend vanished. “Alice!” I shouted. “Gromozeka’s coming!”

Alice was doing her homework in the next room; she was delighted to tear herself away from it and come running into my office. A wanderbush came rolling in after her. We had brought it back from our last expedition. The bush was spoilt and demanded it be watered only with fruit juice, with the result that the floors of our house remained slippery puddles and our house robot spent his days grumbling, wiping up after the capricious plant.

“I remember him.” Alice said. “We saw Gromozeka on the Moon last year. What’s he digging up now?”

“Some dead planet or other.” I said. “They found ruins of cities. I saw it on NewsNet.”

Gromozeka leads an adventurous and peripatetic existence. In general, the inhabitants of the planet Chumaroz love nothing better than to sit at home. But you can’t have a rule without exceptions to it. Over the course of his life Gromozeka had gone to more planets than thousands of his conspecifics.

“Alice,” I said. “What should I get you for your birthday?”

Alice patted the bush on its leaves and answered thoughtfully.

“That’s a really serious question, Dad. I have to think on it. Just don’t go off and chose something without asking me. You might get me something I don’t need.”

And at that moment the house’s entry door flew open and the floor shuddered beneath the weight of my guest. Gromozeka rolled into the office, gawked with his enormous maw that was filled from end to end with shark’s teeth, and shouted from the threshold:

“I am here at last, my priceless friends! Straight from the space port to you. I am exhausted and about to go to sleep. Find me a wide enough space on your floor for a bed and cover me with a rug, and wake me in twelve hours.”

Then he caught sight of Alice and started to howl even louder:

“Female child! Daughter of my friend! How you have grown! Just how old are you now?”

“I’ll be ten next week.” Alice said. “I shall be embarking upon the second decade of my life.”

“Just right now we were trying to decide on her birth day present.” I said.

“And what have you chosen?

“Nothing, yet.”

“Shameful!” Gromozeka said. He lowered himself down on the floor on his bottom tentacles like an upside down flower, to take his load off them. “If I was the one who had such a fine female progeny I would celebrate her birthday for a full week and give her a whole planet.”

“All well and good.” I said. “Especially when one takes into consideration that a year on Chumaroz is longer than seventeen Earth years, and a week stretches for four terrestrial months.”

“As always, Professor, you succeed in quashing the mood.” Gromozeka was annoyed. “And have you found any Ex-Lax? Only the undiluted stuff. My thirst is terrible.”

Ex-Lax was something missing from our medicine cabinet and the house robot was dispatched to the nearest drugstore for it.

“Now tell us.” I said. “What have you been doing, where have you been digging, and what have you found?”

“I cannot say.” Gromozeka answered. “I swear by the Galaxy itself that it is a terrible secret. A terrible secret, but a sensational one too.”

“You want to tell us, but you can’t.” I said. “I never knew before now that archaeologists kept secrets.”

“Ho,” Gromozeka expelled a puff of yellow smoke from his nostrils. “I have embarrassed my best of friends! You are angry with me! That is everything. I must depart and, perhaps, do away with myself. I am sworn to secrecy.”

Seven heavy, smoking tears rolled out from my sensitive friend’s seven eyes.

“Don’t take it so hard.” Alice said then. “Papa didn’t want to embarrass. I know him.”

“I have embarrassed myself.” Gromozeka said. “Where is the Ex-Lax? Why do these robots always take so long to run their errands? All they do is stand about and gossip with other house robots. About the weather or about the football scores. And it’s completely forgotten that I am dying of thirst.”

“Perhaps I can bring you some tea?” Alice asked.

“No.” Gromozeka waved his tentacles in fright. “That stuff’s pure poison for me!”

At that moment, fortunately, the robot appeared with a large bottle of Ex-Lax. Gromozeka poured the liquid into a glass, sniffed it to appreciate the bouquet, and drank it down in one gulp; white smoke issued like steam from his nostrils.

“Now that’s better. Now I can transmit to you, Professor an enormously important secret. Let the consequences be on my head.”

“You really don’t have to.” I said. “I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Gromozeka said. “No one other than me knows it’s a secret anyway.”

“You are a very strange archaeologist.” Alice said. “Doesn’t that mean there is no secret.”

“But there is a secret.” Gromozeka said. “One of the most important of all, but not in way you understood the word.”

“Gromozeka.” I said. “We don’t understand anything.”

“Nothing at all.” Alice added.

Gromozeka, in order not to waste time uselessly, finished drinking the Ex-Lax directly from the bottle, gave a sigh that made the windows shudder, and told us all about it.

The archaeological expedition with which Gromozeka was working had landed on the dead planet Coleida. Human beings had lived on Coleida once, but they had died out for some reason about a hundred years ago. Along with them had died all the planet’s animals. And the insects. And the birds. And the fish. There was not a single living thing on the planet. Nothing. Not a single cell. Just ruins. The wind howled, the rain beat down. In some places there were cars on the streets, and monuments to great people.

“Did they have a war?” Alice asked. “Did they kill each other off?”

“No where did you come across that idea?” Gromozeka was amazed.

“We re doing the history of the Middle Ages.” Alice answered.

“No, there wasn’t any war there.” Gromozeka said. “If there had been such a terrible and destructive war, even a hundred years later we would have found traces.”

“Well, maybe they used poison gas.” I asked. “Or atomic bombs? What if they started a chain reaction?”

“You are an educated person.” Gromozeka said. “But you are spouting nonsense. Why do you presume the team of experienced archaeologists, specialists in our fields, which I have the honor of heading, capable of penetrating the ground and seeing each earth worm, would have failed to detect such traces?”

Gromozeka shook his head and rolled his eyes so terribly that I sneaked a glance at Alice: had my best friend managed to frighten her yet?

But Alice wasn’t afraid of Gromozeka. She was thinking.

“We are left with but one suspicion.” Gromozeka said. “But it is a secret.”

“They were attacked.” Alice said.

“By whom?”

“By space pirates, of course. I’ve seen them.”

“Non-sense!” Gromozeka answered and burst out laughing, all his tentacles shook and he knocked one of the flower vases down of the window sill.

I pretended not to notice, and Alice did the same. We both knew that Gromozeka would have been very upset at what he had done.

“Space Pirates could not destroy an entire planet. And anyway, there are no such things as Space Pirates.”

“Then what destroyed the planet Coleida?”

“That is a question I came to Earth to answer.” Gromozeka said.

Alice and I were silent and put forward no more questions. Gromozeka was also silent. He was waiting for us to ask him, and I wanted to hold out asking him for as long as possible.

The result was that the three of us were silent or about two minutes. Finally, Gromozeka became quite angry with us.

“I see you are uninterested.” He said.

“No, certainly not.” I answered. “I’m dying to learn, but since you don’t want to talk about it I’m not asking you…”

“Why do you say I don’t want to talk about it?” Gromozeka shouted. “Who told you any such thing?”

“You did.”

“I did? Impossible!”

Then I decided to tease my friend, who was clearly dying from his desire to tell us everything.

“And anyway, Gromozeka, you’re getting ready for a good twelve hours sleep. We’ll move the dining room table to one side and you can have the rug. Alice, go do your homework.”

“Alas for me!” Gromozeka said. “That I should have such ‘friends.’ I hurry to them across the entire Galaxy to bring them the most interesting news, and them right away pack me off to bed they are so bored with me! I bore them. There is nothing to be done… Just lead me to your bath tub so I can wash off my tentacles.”

Alice looked at me pleadingly. She was desperate to ask Gromozeka.

But Gromozeka had already taken himself to the bath tub, dragging his tentacles all over the furniture and walls.

“Why aren’t you asking him, Papa?” Alice whispered when Gromozeka left. “He really does want to tell us.”

“Then he shouldn’t mince words.” I said. “If we were to ask him or show interest, then he’d drag this out for two hours or more before we found out anything at all. But now he’ll tell us on his own. You can bet on it.”

“It’s a bet then.” Alice agreed. “But what do we wager? I say that Gromozeka is very angry and won’t tell us a single thing.”

“And I say that he is very angry, and precisely because he is angry he is going to tell us everything!”

“For an ice cream cone?”

“For an ice cream cone.”

So we set our wager. Before we even had a chance to shake hands on it the hallway’s walls shook. Gromozeka was coming back.

He was wet; water dripped down his shell, and the tentacles left long wet ribbons behind on the floor. The house robot walked behind our guest, wiping the floor with a mop.

“Pardon me, Professor.” Gromozeka said. “But where is your soap?”

“The soap?” I was surprised. “The soap is on the shelf. Isn’t it there?”

“It is.” Gromozeka started to laugh. “I came here especially to have a little joke on you. No doubt you thought I had rushed here for no other reason than to tell you the secret. And, no doubt, you told your daughter: there goes that idiot Gromozeka, who wants to share his secret with us so much he forgot to wipe his tentacles. Didn’t you?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

But Alice gave it all away immediately.

“We even placed a bet on it.” She said. “I said that you would keep the secret.”

“Oh well.” Gromozeka sat down again on our floor and spread out like a flower with his wet tentacles the leaves. “Now I am satisfied. You were having a joke at my expense, as I was having one on you. We’re even. So listen up, my friends. Do you remember the epidemic of Space Plague?”