Gentle Invaders Read online

  “You et supper?”

  “No, Uncle Reb. I ain’t hungry.”

  She looked at me, an’ her eyes caught in th’ candlelight, like they had a way o’ doin’.

  “Uncle Reb, whut would you say if’n I told you I wasn’t one o’ your folks?”

  “Honey, I know that. You ain’t any more kin to me than . . .”

  “No, I mean, I ain’t like nobody around here. Nobody a-tall.”

  “Virgie, are you startin’ that again? I declare, chile, you got the funniest notions in your head o’ anybody . . .”

  “Uncle Reb, I mean it. Set down here.” She took th’ candle an’ lighted the gasoline lantern I don’t hardly never use. She went over to th’ chest an’ got m’ readin’ glasses for me. “Here, put these on. I want you to see me good.”

  I put ’em on, an’ she set down in front o’ me. “Look close at m’ eyes, Uncle Reb.”

  I looked at ’em, an’ it was a minute afore it sunk in whut I was seem’. They wasn’t like ordinary eyes, they wasn’t. I still couldn’t see ’em too plain, even with m’ glasses, but I could see ’em well enough to see they was like that ol’ red mamma-cat’s eyes.

  “Whut are you, Virgie?” I says.

  “I’m a . . . visitor, Unde Reb,” she says. “Me an’ some more like me. We come from somewheres a far off. Th’ others, they wanted to come a lot more’n me, an’ they talked me into it. I was feelin’ awful fearful when you found me an’ took me in.”

  “Where are th’ others like you?”

  “I dunno. We went all over. Most o’ us is scattered through the hill countries, though, ’cause it’s more dangerous for us in th’ cities. Th’ people there are more likely t’ notice that we’re difE’rent.”

  “I reckon you’re right. But how come th’ folks ’round here ain’t seen how you’re so diff’rent? Seems like they c’d look at them eyes an’ see right off.”

  “I got some little bitty pieces o’ special-made glass I wear on m’ eyes, whenever I got to go among people. They don’t hurt none, when you get used to ’em, an’ they make my eyes look like ever’body else’s. I ain’t wore ’em too much with you, ’cause your eyesight is awful poor anyhow. M’ skin is diff’rent colored, too. I keep some dye rubbed in t’ give it color. That Is, I did. I don’t need to very much anymore.”

  “Why not, Virgie?”

  “Uncle Reb, th’ longer I stay, th’ more I get like th’ folks here. I guess I ain’t strong ’nough t’ keep m’self like I was. If’n I stay out in th’ sun long anymore, I get brown. I never did before. My skin don’t look silvery no more, even without the dye. O’ course, there’s some things I can’t change, like m’ eyes, an’m’ feet.” She stuck her feet out, with no shoes. I couldn’t see anythin’ diff’rent, ’til she wiggled her toes, an’ there wasn’t but four of ’em.

  “But, Uncle Reb, I catch m’self thinkin’ strange thoughts, like you folks. An’ in th’ springtime . . .” She started cryin’ an’ hid her head in her skirt. She looked up again. “I ain’t used to th’ feelin’. With us, it’s a quiet thing, but with you-all, it’s like a rollin’ wave that don’t never quite go down but climbs higher all th’ time.”

  I didn’t say nothin’. I jest set quiet for a while, thinkin’. After a little, Virgie got up an.’ went to her room in th’ loft. Pretty soon she came down, dressed in th’ old ragged dress she had on when I found her.

  “I reckon you’ll want me t’ go,” she says real quiet “No such thing,” I says. “I been thinkin’ long an’ hard. You’re a stranger, for sure, but you’ve lived under my roof an’ you’ve eat my bread. I’ve come t’ love you like one o’ my own, an’ you’re welcome t’ stay as long as you want.”

  She looked at me, an’ those strange eyes o’ hers lit up like candles. “Oh, Uncle Reb! Thank you so muchl” She swooped over t’ me an’ give me a kiss on th’ cheek, th’ fust one I’ve had in years.

  So Virgie stayed. As th’ seasons o’ the year passed, I c’d tell, little by little, she was losin’ her strange ways.

  I’m a-gettia’ old, an.’ a little feeble, an’ I worry T)Out Virgie sometimes, an’ whut’Il happen t’ her when I’m gone. After she told me whut she did, I can’t see that it would be good, crossin’ her strain an’ ours.

  I jest hope she c’n maybe find one o’ her own kind afore she gets so much like us he wouldn’t be able t’ tell who she was.

  He’d better hurry. Last week I caught her kissin’ ’Kiah Piersall, out in th’ autumn moon. And this time, she wam’t scairt.

  Over the centuries, over the millennia in fact, Man has seldom been kind to the Alien and to the Strange. It seems to be in our blood, whatever our race, to fear and to distrust those who are “different,” even in these conformist times. We wonder at times how those among whom we live will react to the “strange ones” who must be born the day after Tomorrow. No. Maybe we know . . .

  THE QUEER ONES

  by

  LEIGH BRACKETT

  I ran down Buckhorn Mountain in the cloud and rain, carrying the boy in my arms. The green lightning flashed among the trees. Buckhorn is no stranger to lightning, but this was different. It did not come from the clouds, and there was no thunder with it. It ran low, searching the thickets, the brush-choked gullies, the wet hollows full of brambles and poison ivy. Thick green hungry snakes looking for something. Looking for me.

  Looking for the boy who had started it all.

  He peered up at me, clinging like a lemur to my coat as I went headlong down the slope. His eyes were copper-colored. They had seen a lot for all the two-and-a-half years they had been open on this world. They were frightened now, not just vaguely as you might expect from a child his age, but intelligently. And in his curiously sweet shrill voice he asked:

  “Why mus’ they kill us?”

  “Never mind,” I said, and ran and ran, and the green lightning hunted us down the mountainside.

  It was Doc Callendar, the County Health Officer, who got me in on the whole thing. I am Hank Temple, owner, editor, feature writer, legman, and general roustabout of the Newhale News, serving Newhale and the rural and mountain areas around it. Doc Callendar, Sheriff Ed Betts and I are old friends, and we work together, helping out where we can. So one hot morning in July my phone rang and it was Doc, sounding kind of dazed.

  “Hank?” he said. “I’m at the hospital. Would you want to take a run up here for a minute?”

  “Who’s hurt?”

  “Nobody. Just thought something might interest you.”

  Doc was being cagey because anything you say over the phone in Newhale is public property. But even so the tone of his voice put prickles between my shoulder-blades. It didn’t sound like Doc at all.

  “Sure,” I said. “Right away.”

  Newhale is the county seat, a small town, and a high town. It lies in an upland hollow of the Appalachians, a little clutter of old red brick buildings with porches on thin wooden pillars, and frame houses ranging from new white to weathered silver-gray, centered around the dumpy courthouse. A very noisy stream bisects the town. The tannery and the feed-mill are its chief industries, with some mining nearby. The high-line comes down a neat cut on Tunkharmock Ridge to the east and goes away up a neat cut on Goat Hill to the west. Over all towers the rough impressive hump of Buckhorn Mountain, green on the ridges, shadowed blue in the folds, wrapped more often than not in a mist of cloud.

  There is not much money nor any great fame to be made in Newhale, but there are other reasons for living here. The girl I wanted to marry couldn’t quite see them, and it’s hard to explain to a woman why you would rather have six pages of small-town newspaper that belong to you than the whole of the New York Times if you only work for it. I gave up trying, and she went off to marry a gray flannel suit, and every time I unlimber my fishing-rod or my deer rifle I’m happy for her.

  The hospital is larger than you might expect, since it serves a big part of the county. Sitting on a spur of Goat Hill well a
way from the tannery, it’s an old building with a couple of new wings tacked on. I found Doc Callendar in his office, with Bossert. Bossert is the resident doctor, a young guy who knows more, in the old phrase, than a jackass could haul downhill. This morning he looked as though he wasn’t sure of his own name.

  “Yesterday,” Doc said, “one of the Tate girls brought her kid in, a little boy. I wasn’t here, I was out testing those wells up by Pinecrest. But I’ve seen him before; He’s a stand-out, a real handsome youngster.”

  “Precocious,” said Jim Bossert nervously. “Very precocious for his age. Physically, too. Coordination and musculature well developed. And his coloring—”

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “Odd. I don’t know. I noticed it, and then forgot it. The kid looked as though he’d been through a meat-grinder. His mother said the other kids had ganged up and beaten him, and he hadn’t been right for several days, so she reckoned she’d better bring him in. She’s not much more than nineteen herself. I took some X-rays—”

  Bossert picked up a couple of pictures from the desk and shoved them at me. His hands shook, making the stiff films rattle together.

  “I didn’t want to trust myself on these. I Waited until Callendar could check them, too.”

  I held the pictures up and looked at them. They showed a small, frail bony structure and the usual shadowy outline of internal organs. It wasn’t until I had looked at them for several minutes that I began to realize there was something peculiar about them. There seemed to be too few ribs, the articulation of the joints looked queer even to my layman’s eyes, and the organs themselves were a hopeless jumble.

  “Some of the innards,” said Doc, “we can’t figure out at all. There are organs we’ve never seen nor heard of before.”

  “Yet the child seems normal and perfectly healthy,” said Bossert. “Remarkably so. From the beating he’d taken he should have had serious injuries. He was just sore. His body must be as flexible and tough as spring steel.”

  I put the X-rays back on the desk. “Isn’t there quite a large literature on medical anomalies?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Doc. “Double hearts, upside-down stomachs, extra arms, legs, heads—almost any distortion or variation you can think of. But not like this.” He leaned over and tapped his finger emphatically on the films. “This isn’t a distortion of anything. This is different. And that’s not all.”

  He pushed a microscope slide toward me.

  “That’s the capper, Hank. Blood sample. Jim tried to type it. I tried to type it. We couldn’t. There isn’t any such type.” I stared at them. Their faces were flushed, their eyes were bright, they quivered with excitement, and suddenly it got to me too.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you trying to tell me—”

  “We’ve got something here,” said Doc Callendar. “Something—” He shook his head. I could see the dreams in it. I could see Callendar standing ten feet tall on a pedestal of medical journals. I could see him on podiums addressing audiences of breathless men, and the same dreams were in Bossert’s eyes.

  I had my own. The Newhale News suddenly a famous name on the wire-services, and one Henry Temple bowing with modest dignity as he accepted the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

  “Big,” said Bossert softly. “The boy is more than a freak. He’s something new. A mutation. Almost a new species. The blood-type alone—”

  Something occurred to me and I cut him short. “Listen,” I said. “Listen, are you sure you didn’t make a mistake or something? How could the boy’s blood be so different from his mother’s?” I hunted for the word. “Incompatibility. He’d never have been born.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Doc Callendar, “he was born. And nevertheless, there is no such blood-type. We’ve run tests backward and forward, together and independently. Kindly allow us to know what we’re talking about, Hank. The boy’s blood obviously must have been compatible with his mother’s. Possibly it’s a more advanced Type O, universally compatible. This is only one of the many things we have to study and evaluate.”

  He picked up the X-ray films again and looked at them, with an expression of holy ecstasy in his eyes.

  I lighted another cigarette. My hands were shaking now, like theirs. I leaned forward.

  Okay,” I said. “What’s the first thing we do?”

  Doc’s station wagon, with county health service painted on its side, slewed and snorted around the turns of the steep dirt road. Jim Bossert had had to stay at the hospital, but I was sitting beside Doc, hunched forward in a sweat of impatience. The road ran up around the shoulder of Tunkhannock Ridge. We had thick dark woods on our right going up, and thick dark woods on our left going down. Buckhorn hung in the north like a curtain across the sky.

  “We’ll have to be careful,” Doc was saying. “I know these people pretty well. If they get the idea we’re trying to pull something, we’ll never get another look at the kid.”

  “You handle it,” I said. “And by the way, nobody’s mentioned the boy’s father. Doesn’t he have one?”

  “Do you know the Tate girls?”

  “No. I’ve been through Possum Creek all right, but through it is all.”

  “You must have gone fast,” said Doc, grinning. “The answer is physiologically yes, legally are you kidding?” He shifted into second, taking it easy over a place where the road was washed and gullied. “They’re not a bad bunch of girls at that, though,” he added reflectively. “I kind of like them. Couple of them are downright married.”

  We bucketed on through the hot green shadows, the great centers of civilization like Newhale forgotten in the distance behind us, and finally in a remote pocket just under Tunkhannock’s crest we came upon a few lean spry cattle, and then the settlement of Possum Creek.

  There were four ancient houses straggled out along the side of the stream. One of them said general store and had a gas pump in front of it. Two old men sat on the steps.

  Doc kept on going. “The Tates,” he said, straight-faced, “live out a little from the center of town.”

  Two more turns of the road, which was now only a double-rutted track, brought us to a rural mailbox which said TATE. The house behind it was pretty well run down, but there was glass in most of the windows and only half the bricks were gone from the chimney. The clapboards were sort of a rusty brown, patched up with odds and ends of tarpaper. A woman was washing clothes in an old galvanized tub set on a stand in the side yard. There was a television aerial tied on cockeyed to the gable of the house. There was a sow with a litter in a pen right handy to the door, and a little way at the back was a barn with the ridge-pole swayed like an old horse. A tarpaper shack and a battered house-trailer were visible among the trees;—probably the homes of the married daughters. An ancient man sat in an ancient rocking-chair on the porch and peered at us, and an ancient dog beside him rose up heavily and barked.

  I’ve known quite a lot of families like the Tates. They scratch out enough com for their pigs and their still-houses, and enough garden for themselves. The young men make most of their money as guides during hunting season, and the old men make theirs selling moonshine. They have electricity now, and they can afford radios and even television sets. City folks call them lazy and shiftless. Actually, they find the simple life so pleasant that they hate to let hard work spoil their enjoyment of it.

  Doc drove his station wagon into the yard and stopped. Instantly there was an explosion of dogs and children and people.

  “There he is,” Doc said to me, under cover of the whooping and woofing and the banging of screen doors. “The skinny little chap with the red hair. There, just coming down the steps.”

  I looked over and saw the boy.

  He was an odd one, all right. The rest of the Tate tribe all had straight hair ranging from light brown to honey-blond. His was close and curly to his head and I saw what Jim Bossert had meant about his coloring. The red had undertones of something else in it. One would almost, in that glare of s
unlight, have said silver. The Tates had blue eyes. His were copper-colored. The Tates were fair and sunburned, and so was he, but there was a different quality of fairness to his skin, a different shading to the tan.

  He was a little boy. The Tate children were rangy and big boned. He moved among them lightly, a gazelle among young goats, with a totally unchildlike grace and sureness. His head was narrow, with a very high arch to the skull. His eyes were grave, precociously wise. Only in the mouth was there genuine childishness, soft and shy.

  We got out of the car. The kids—a dozen of them, give or take a couple—all stopped as though on a signal and began to study their bare feet. The woman came from the washtub, wiping her hands on her skirt. Several others came out of the house.

  The little boy remained at the foot of the steps. His hand was now in the hand of a buxom girl. Judging by Bossert’s description, this would be his mother. Not much over nineteen, handsome, big-breasted, full-hipped. She was dressed in tight jeans and a boy’s shirt, her bare feet stuck into sandals, and a hank of yellow hair hung down her back.

  Doc spoke to them all, introducing me as a friend from town. They were courteous, but reserved. “I want to talk to Sally,” he said, and we moved closer to the steps. I tried not to look at the boy lest the glitter in my eye give me away. Doc was being so casual and hearty it hurt. I could feel a curious little prickle run over my skin as I got close to the child. It was partly excitement, partly the feeling that here was a being different from myself, another species. There was a dark bruise on the child’s forehead, and I remembered that the others had beaten him. Was this otherness at the bottom of their resentment? Did they sense it without the need for blood samples and X-rays?

  Mutant. A strange word. A stranger thing to come upon here in these friendly familiar hills. The child stared at me, and the July sun turned cold on my back.

  Doc spoke to Sally, and she smiled. She had an honest, friendly smile. Her mouth was wide and full, frankly sensuous but without coquetry. She had big blue eyes, and her sunburned cheeks were flushed with health, and she looked as uncomplicated and warmly attractive as a summer meadow. I wondered What strange freak of genetics had made her the fountainhead of a totally new race.