The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories (10 page)

“Two things. ‘Soon your cities will fall.’ And ‘Sabotage is love.’ ” 

“Can you see the fire from here?” Timmothy asked quietly. 

His father didn’t answer, and his mother said quickly, “I’m sure it’s been put out by now, Timmothy.” 

Outside, Timmothy looked toward the factory again. No, there wasn’t any fire to be seen. Not even any smoke. No sirens of fire engines either. 

He started to look away, and a tiny something flashed before his eye—out in the night sky. 

He looked back, harder, and found it again. High above the factory, barely visible in the night-yellowed smog, was a red star blinking very red. 

Jonathan wanted to be a member of the club. He had said so a dozen times, before Timmothy finally let him in. 

“How many guys are in the club, do you think?” Timmothy asked, beginning Jonathan’s initiation. 

“There’s you, and Jimmy, and Charlie.” 

“And
Billy.” 

“And Billy . . .” Jonathan was shaking a little, as Timmothy could see under the streetlamp’s light. Jonathan stopped shaking only when they started walking toward Jimmy’s house. 

“There has to be another guy around when I make you a member, Jonathan.” 

Jonathan nodded and didn’t stop nodding until Jimmy left his house and joined them for the walk back to Timmothy’s yard. 

“If there aren’t two guys with you,” Timmothy added, “you won’t be able to see it. It’s a secret, and no one knows about it.” 

On the dying summer grass in the backyard, Timmothy stood by the new member and pointed up at the sky. 

“There! Can you see it
now?
Over my dad’s factory.” 

Jonathan couldn’t see it. Timmothy pointed again. “It’s not very bright, but you
should
be able to see it.” 

Jonathan shook his head slowly. 

He was younger, and in a moment was almost crying. Then he saw it. 

To let the other two boys know that he
really
did see it, Jonathan said, “There it is! It kind of blinks and is very, very red.” 

“Okay, now you’re a member,” Timmothy said, then added, “You can’t see them from here, but there are Martians on it—weird-looking
aliens.”
 

Jimmy nodded now. He was the oldest, and he had the books, and he wanted to remind the other two of those facts. He said, “Yes, I’ve read a lot about those Martians.” 

Timmothy knew he had chosen a bad night to show his father Mars. He had been out staring at the red star, and he realized now that he had missed most of the discussion his parents were having at the table, long after dinner was over. 

“. . . underground newspapers said so,” his father was saying when Timmothy entered the dining room. 

“Did you read them yourself, Sam?” his mother asked, sighing. She sighed again. 

“I didn’t have to. The supervisor keeps track of them, and gets the word to the rest of us. Those kind of newspapers have been talking about today as
the
day—” 

“Dad?” Timmothy asked it as quietly as he could. 

“Well,” his mother ignored him, “maybe you should call the police and see what they think, Sam.” 

“Don’t have to! Carlyle says the police are already ready for it. They think it’ll be tonight, too.” 

“Dad?” 

“What!” His father turned as if the boy had bitten him. 

“I can see Mars, Dad.” 

“Oh for God’s sake!” Turning back to Timmothy’s mother, his father said, “I’ll keep in phone contact with the plant tonight. Remember, we did get hit with arson last month. If anything happens there tonight, we’ll know for sure they weren’t kidding.” 

“I
really
can see Mars.” 

His father stared at the table, his lips in a rubberlike frown. 

“Go ahead, Sam,” his mother said, sighing again. “Find out what it is he’s seeing.” 

Like a big dog his father struggled up from the chair—sighing like his mother, but longer and deeper—and followed the boy toward the back door. 

As they opened the screen and started out, his father stopped and looked down at him. 

“I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but keep it in mind. If there’s ever any trouble—guns or fires started around here—go hide in a closet, please.” 

Timmothy was already pointing happily up at the sky, above the factory. 

His father squinted. “Where? What . . .” 

The boy pointed harder, wanting and trying to make his finger so thin and sharp that his father couldn’t possibly miss the red star, the only star in the sky. 

His father kept squinting, then started and grunted. “Oh for God’s sake!” He began, “That’s just the light on the tower for—” 

He was interrupted by the lights going out in the house. The streetlights around in front of the house went out. The light reflected off the smog cloud over Puente went out. In the sudden darkness his father cried, “Oh God.” 

Timmothy couldn’t see him, but could hear his father’s heavy footsteps pounding back to the house, now stumbling around the screen door. 

“Tim! Get the hell in the house!” 

His father’s voice was different now. It had the pitch of a woman’s voice. Timmothy started trembling. 

As he ran to the house, he looked back once at the red star, and stopped. 

Mars had gone out. 

And then the factory blew up, and for a long minute there was too much light everywhere. 

He was hiding in the living-room closet, in darkness that embraced the whole house. He could hear his parents running from room to room, stumbling. 

“The blacks! Of course it’s them!” his father was shouting. “And they’ll have guns!” 

“Please don’t shout, please don’t.” His mother was crying. 

So the “blacks”—those “aliens” his father had always talked about, afraid that they would live nearby—were powerful enough to destroy the red star, the planet. It was unbelievable, the boy knew, but it was true. He was afraid of wetting his pants, it was so true. 

Something crashed at the front door. In a minute he realized it was the sound of a bullet hitting wood. His mother screamed then, as if she had just realized it, too. 

His father was bellowing now. His mother kept crying. Neither one said a single word Timmothy could understand. 

After an hour of closet darkness, the front door crashed open, and Timmothy wet his pants. Had his father left the house? 

In the distance there were popping sounds, sirens, boomings, and maybe shouting. 

He was wet, and had to get out. 

He was afraid that if he opened the closet door slowly someone would reach in and grab him. So he opened it quickly and ran out—over to the living-room window. 

Outside, in the red light of a police car zooming by, he could see his mother. She was leaning over a man on the ground, his father. Another red light went by, and the wetness on his father’s T-shirt shone red. 

Even without the red light, the wetness would have been red. 

There was nothing left in him to wet his pants with, but his body tried, and he whimpered and stepped back from the window. 

He understood it slowly now. He was on Mars. That was what had happened. The
red
lights, the
red
fires burning at the factory and down the street, and the
red
wetness on his father’s shirt. This was the Red Planet. 

The red star was no longer in the sky because he and his parents had been carried to it. He was on Mars. The Martians were angry, and they were attacking, burning everything, causing
redness
everywhere. 

He and his mother and father were trespassers. The Martians, the aliens, hated them. “Don’t go into other people’s yards,” he remembered his mother had always said. 

Back in the closet, he quietly wished he were a Martian. He wished he were black, because this was Mars, the aliens’ home, and they had the right. They would win. 

I want to be a winner, too, the boy thought to himself. 

In the darkness of the closet he looked at his arm, and it was black. For a brief moment he was a crouching Martian, and happy. 

World of the Wars 

Story Notes 

This is the only story I’ve ever written under the influence of a beer, and while that may seem less than momentous a revelation to those of you who can put down a gallon of Red Mountain or Jack Daniel’s or a dozen Mescal worms and rise bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next morning, it was, for someone like me—someone who gets a hangover sitting too close to anyone who’s had a few drinks—a “writer’s life” milestone, worthy of book-jacket mention. It was an afternoon at UC Irvine, in the middle of my MFA program in creative writing (fiction emphasis), in the off-campus student hangout; and I drank the beer; and, lo and behold, the story popped from the hops and needed only two drafts to be publishable, when most of my stories have taken me at least a dozen drafts and left me feeling like the tortoise among science fiction writer-gazelles. Of course I did what all writers do when they discover they can write under the influence of something benign and legal: I tried again (after all, two drafts?), and of course it never worked again. As all writers learn, some stories come more easily than others, and that’s the tradeoff: for every story that’s easy, there will be at least one that’s hard. 

This story was published in 1971 in the anthology of Mars-themed sf entitled
Mars, We Love You,
edited by my first academic mentor and good friend, the late James Joyce scholar and science fiction aficionado Willis McNelly, and his colleague at Cal State Fullerton, Jane Hipolito. I had just received my MFA, was starting to teach science fiction at Fullerton part-time, and was about to enter the science fiction community for real. Harry Harrison—who’d midwifed one of my early stories for Ed Ferman’s
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
while he (Harry) was editing
Fantastic
(there’s a story there, of course)— had just turned editorship of the latter over to a writer he much admired and in whom he had complete faith. That man was Barry Malzberg, and that careful handoff by Harry—calculated as match-making, I have no doubt—was the beginning of Barry’s and my thirty-plus years of friendship as well as the kind of selfless mentoring (and decisive craft help with two dozen stories) that every young writer dreams of but doesn’t, given how unfair the world can be to the young, always obtain. I’d actually made contact with Barry a few years before, when I was sending stories to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, quite happily paying the fees for critique-reports in response. I had received three such reports—one in high school and two in college—and while all had been helpful to the young, clueless, driven-by-inspiration-and-nothing-else writer I was, one of them had stood out even at the time for its dry irony, sense of humor, insight, and somewhat eccentric voice. It was a voice the entire science fiction community would know soon enough—the Malzberg voice—but how could I know that at the time? Besides, the letter was signed “Scott Meredith.” But about two years after starting up correspondence with Barry (where I’d soon watch him win the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel
Beyond Apollo,
and have any number of my own stories influenced by his remarkable sf story about sf, “A Galaxy Called Rome”), I heard a voice whisper, “Where have you heard this
voice
before?” I went back to the SMLA critique-reports and there it was, just as subliminal memory had it. I sent a photocopy of the letter to Barry and he laughed and said, “Yes, that’s me all right.” To have received a critique-report from the SMLA’s most famous and prolific “fee reader”—now
that
was something, carrying the same weight in fact in my eyes (as it still does) as the manuscript of a Philip K. Dick story I’d bid $25 for at WorldCon ’68 and won and kept like the relic of a saint in a dorm drawer. I was a science fiction writer, sure—I had published stories to prove it—but I was a dyed-in-the-wool fan, too, I realized suddenly.
 

That same year at Fullerton, I also got to know—thanks to Willis McNelly, who had given me half of his office (when part-timers usually had to make do with the snack bar or a sidewalk for student conferences)—the Fullerton Three: those three talented young writers whom we now know as Tim Powers, James P. Blaylock, and K. W. Jeter. They were all friends of science fiction great Philip K. Dick, who also lived in the area and regularly gave them his blessing (but not his snuff). I remember Tim’s first story—the promise of it, though he was having no luck getting it published—and K. W.’s very edgy novels, beating cyberpunk to the punch. 

This story, by the way and as you may have gathered, isn’t science fiction—except in the way that the human mind can make the impossible possible. As more than one pundit has pointed out, “When our reality becomes strange enough, then the strange becomes our ‘realism.’ ”