“I bet you’re looking forward to Puff arriving,” I said at the entrance to my cubicle, yawning a second time.
“You don’t know how much, man,” he said. “You’ve been lucky to have your wife and family here all these years, but I have no one, and I’m getting old enough that the prospect of settling down with a good woman is starting to appeal to me. I heard from her this morning. The initial complement of ships will dock at Phobos Base in ten days.”
“Well, I look forward to seeing her again. But I really have to get some shut-eye now.”
I was asleep almost before I settled into my bunk.
* * * *
I was swimming in the ocean again with Big Guy. He moved like a giant jellyfish, with convulsive squeezes of his mid-section, and seemed completely at home in water. Although we were clearly some distance below the surface, I had no trouble breathing.
“What do you want of us?” I asked, parroting Madame Stavroula’s query. “Why do you want us?”
He didn’t reply, but moved his bulky mass a little to one side. Behind him Buddy was puffing his little body, jetting through the liquid as if he’d been born there—as perhaps he had!
“Buddy has something to do with this?”
I had the sense that this might have been part of the answer, but not all of it, or perhaps not what I was meant to understand. Another movement caught my eye, and I turned my head to see Mellie swimming towards us. Becky was no where in evidence.
Far behind her I spied something else, something I’d never seen before.
It was long and sleek and green, rather like an eel crossed with a killer whale. But I didn’t notice the body at first—not at all—because what drew my attention, and the attention of everything else in our little drama, was the open mouthful of long, curved teeth.
“Daddy!” my daughter screamed, churning her arms as fast as she could.
“Mellie!” I yelled back, trying to propel myself towards her.
But it was Aroostook who interposed itself between the monster and my teenaged girl—and then the thing was gone!
When I regained my breath again (underwater, no less!), I asked Big Guy: “What was that?”
It swiveled its gray lump of a head back in my direction, and raised two of its tentacles toward me. I drifted into them in spite of myself, and the Martian placed the tips of its feelers on both sides of my brain.
I had then the flash of an impression: that was the enemy, and that was what we should be fighting together—and not each other.
But the alien’s thought or communication or whatever it was so overwhelmed my senses that I struggled once again towards the surface, trying to regain my equilibrium.
“Ahhhh!” I screamed, and I know I did so out loud.
And then I awoke.
Someone was sitting right next to the bed. I could feel the touch of the individual’s hand on one arm.
“Who…?”
I abruptly sat up and found myself face to face with Madame Stavroula.
“You!”
I jerked my limb back and tucked it under the cover.
“What were you doing?” I asked.
She said nothing for a very long time. Her face had gone completely white.
“I…I had no idea,” she finally said. “I really had no idea at all.”
Then she grabbed me by both arms and looked straight into my eyes.
“They want to assimilate us, Alex! While he was reading you, I was reading him! They want to make us part of them! That’s what this is all about! My God, they, they….”
I again pulled myself away from her.
“It was just a dream,” I said, “just like all the dreams we’ve had, just like all the communications we’ve had, Nomsah. You can’t interpret them straightforwardly. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. They don’t think like us. You can’t apply human standards to Martian norms.”
She shook her head “no.”
“I could see them, Alex, I could see him! They want us as part of them, so they can use our strength to conquer some other race out there. They want to make us one with their collective. It would mean the end of man. The General has to know: they want to destroy us!”
Then she quickly got up and ran into the corridor, swishing the entrance veil as she went.
“Wait!” I said, but she was gone by the time I could follow her.
My com rang, shocking me with its buzz.
I answered it absentmindedly.
“Daddy!” Mellie said.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m fine, Daddy. I had the dream too. Don’t worry. Big Guy knows what it’s doing.”
“I wish I did,” I said. “Is your mother there?”
When Becky came on the line, I explained to her what had happened.
“Do you think she’s right, Alex?” my wife asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve been wrong so many times in the past about the aliens that I’m hesitant to say yea or nay about anything they do. But…I do trust Big Guy. I’ve felt all along that there’s no meanness in its nature, that it will do us no deliberate harm. It certainly has had its opportunities in the past. The rest of them…well, who knows?”
“You take care,” she said. “I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow.”
“It’s tomorrow already,” I said, glancing at the chronometer, which had just moved past midnight. “I need to get back to sleep, if I can. I love you and I love Mellie and Buddy with all my heart.”
“I love you too, Alex.”
“Sleep well, Daddy!” came Mellie’s voice from a distance.
And so I did.
CHAPTER TWO
SQUIDS “R” US
Our disputants put me in mind of the skuttle fish,
That when he is unable to extricate himself,
Blackens all the water about him,
Till he becomes invisible.
—Joseph Addison
Alex Smith,
