Astounding! (6 page)

“You don’t seem happy about it. I don’t understand,” said John.

“The world didn’t change. Or maybe it did, but not because of us.”

John squeezed a healthy dollop of batter on the griddle. His pancakes were almost perfectly round, whereas Carter’s tended to have craters and volcanoes marring the surface. John waited patiently for his food to brown, then carefully flipped it over. Carter sucked at pancake flipping.

Only after John had slid the pancake onto his plate did he look at Carter again. “I don’t know if you’ve changed the world. But you’ve changed people. Some of them, I mean. People have read the stories you’ve printed and told themselves
Yes! This is a better way to see.
They’ve found pieces of themselves printed on your pages and learned they weren’t as strange and alone as they’d thought. Isn’t that important too?”

Carter’s heart thudded more strongly than it had in years. “I don’t know,” he rasped.

They both used up all their batter, and Carter drank a third beer. They didn’t talk about the magazine or why John was so desperate to get into it. Instead they ended up in a lengthy discussion of music. Not surprisingly, John liked stuff from the fifties. Not the doo-wop crap, but rhythm and blues like Little Richard and Chuck Berry, and rockabilly, and good old rock ’n’ roll. “Elvis,” John intoned with a grin.

“Jerry Lee Lewis.”

“Carl Perkins.”

“Roy Orbison.”

“Johnny Cash.”

“Bo Diddley.”

“Fats Domino.”

“Buddy Holly.”

They threw the names back and forth like a ball in a lively game of catch until they were both laughing. “Don’t you like anything more recent?” Carter finally asked. “You’re awfully young for this stuff.”

John’s smile faded. “I’m older than I look.”

That sort of killed the conversation, leaving them in awkward silence until the waiter came by with the bill. John paid him in cash, then toyed with his napkin. “Do you want to go have coffee? I can tell you… my story.”

What Carter wanted was more booze. But it was getting late, and he had a long drive ahead of him. He really couldn’t afford a motel—not even a cheap one. “Coffee would be great.”

They didn’t get back in the car. Instead, John led him a few blocks down the sidewalk, past darkened shop windows filled with overpriced crap nobody really needed. But warm light spilled from the windows of a coffeehouse called P-Town, and guitar music filled the night air.

John paused outside the door. “I forgot. It’s Tuesday. We can go somewhere else. Or we can just wait. They’ll stop playing in about half an hour.”

The music was very good. “I don’t mind waiting,” Carter said.

This place was brighter than Perk Up, with mismatched wooden chairs painted a rainbow of colors and cheery art on the walls. One of the paintings appeared to be a green-and-purple stylized penis with a multihued swirl exuding from the tip and a pair of mallard ducks standing near the corner of the canvas, looking on disapprovingly. The painting made Carter smile. So did the aroma of coffee, tea, and baked goods. Best of all, though, was the song being strummed by a pair of guitar players on the tiny stage. The song had bluesy bottom notes embroidered by fanciful yet plaintive tones.

“They’re good,” Carter whispered into John’s ear as they waited at the counter for their coffees.

“I know.”

Almost all the tables were occupied, but Carter and John snagged an empty one in the corner farthest from the stage. They sipped at their drinks and watched the performers, who played several more songs. Neither of the musicians sang, but words weren’t necessary. Their guitar notes were enough.

Carter was disappointed when the set ended.

The musicians stood and leaned their guitars against the wall. One of them, a beautiful young man with flowing white-blond hair, drank a tall glass of water very quickly, then smiled at a cute guy with technicolor hair who sat in the front. At the same time, the other musician sat down and bumped his head gently against that of a man wearing an eye patch. From the looks of adoration exchanged by each of these pairs, it was pretty clear they were couples—each deeply in love.

At Carter’s table, John watched them and sighed softly. Carter remembered that he wasn’t the only person who suffered from loneliness.

“You liked their music and it wasn’t even from the fifties,” Carter teased gently.

“Sometimes they play old tunes,” John replied with a smile. “Besides, their music is timeless, don’t you think?”

Carter nodded his agreement. He wondered if John came often to hear them play, and whether he usually sat alone. Carter didn’t mind being solo in coffeehouses—he spent plenty of time that way—but it was kind of nice to have another person sitting across from him.

After a few minutes, the musicians put their instruments into cases and, with their partners, said good-bye to the café employees before heading for the door. The guy with the long blond hair gave John a sunny smile as he passed by.

“I’m fairly sure he’s not human,” John murmured as he watched him leave.

“Pardon me?”

John gave Carter a long, almost anguished look before turning away. “Nothing.”

Pursuing that line of conversation intrigued him, but despite the large amount of caffeine he was ingesting, Carter was tired. “Why do you need to be in my magazine?” he asked quietly.

John looked at him again. This time John was expressionless. “I’m not human either.”

“Oh?”

Maybe John had expected Carter to scoff right away. But Carter had pretty much been gearing himself up for a trip through Loonyville, and now he just waited for further details.

“You’d be surprised, Carter, how many strange creatures walk these streets. And nobody realizes. We look human and everyone assumes we are. A few weeks ago, a werewolf came here to see these musicians play. I think he’s friends with them. He’s very handsome.” He looked slightly wistful when he said the last bit.

“But you can see the truth,” Carter said levelly. “What does that make you? Let’s see…. Mimir was supposed to be very wise, but he was just a severed head and you have a body. Hmm. Do you have a third eye hidden somewhere, maybe?” Those long-ago courses on world mythology were coming in handy after all.

“I am an alien.”

Well, that response was less shocking than it might have been. “I take it you don’t mean you’re an undocumented Canadian immigrant.”

“I’m from… far away.” John let out a long breath. “Another planet.”

“Of course.”

“You don’t believe me,” John said, frowning.

“Of course not. But it’s a good story, and like I said, I’ll publish you no matter what. So go ahead.” Carter made a move-on gesture with his hand.

John sighed. “If I were any good at making stories up, I wouldn’t have to beg you to print my work. But I
am
an alien. This isn’t my natural form.” He waved his hand to indicate his face and body. “It’s a disguise. Camouflage.”

“It’s a really good disguise. Fooled me.”

“It’s fooled everyone, Carter. It had to.
I
had to. I came here a long time ago and nobody was supposed to know. Nobody has, until now. And you don’t believe me anyway.”

The guy’s tale might be crazy, but it clearly felt real to him, which meant his distress was no less painful than if he’d been suffering from a sane malady. Carter wanted to comfort him, but all he could do was shrug. “I’m sorry.”

“I appreciate that at least you’re listening to me. Thank you.” John’s smile was weak but genuine.

Someone abruptly turned on the café sound system, making Carter jump. The song that played loud enough to be heard over the espresso machine wasn’t in English, and he didn’t recognize the tune. But he liked it and tapped his fingers on the tabletop. He could feel John’s scrutiny but wasn’t especially bothered by it. Really, few people noticed him under ordinary circumstances. Catching a handsome man’s attention wasn’t a bad thing—even if the man thought he was ET.

Which reminded him. “Do you want to go home, John? Like the aliens in your stories?”

“Yes,” John whispered.

“But you can’t?”

John shook his head.

“Why not? You can’t just… phone?”

“You—humans—you launched your first vehicle into orbit, which caught our attention. We’d known you were here long before that, but until you ventured into space, we didn’t consider you very important. You understand?”

Carter did. It was a premise he’d seen in more than one story. As long as the hairless apes stuck to crawling around on their own planet’s surface, alien civilizations paid about as much attention as a human might pay to ants hurrying along the sidewalk. But if those ants got into the kitchen—if humans launched Sputnik—suddenly they became a hell of a lot more relevant. “So we sent up a rocket…,” he prompted.

“And I was sent here to investigate you.”

Carter rubbed the back of his neck. “Investigate like an anthropologist, or investigate like the FBI?”

“More… more the latter, I guess. I was supposed to live among you. Learn what kind of creatures you are and what your potential is. And I was supposed to send a message when I was ready to leave. This was long before the Internet, of course. And anyway, we’re not good at that sort of technology. We don’t use machinery.”

“So how were you supposed to contact them? Crop circles?”

John actually chuckled at that. “No, although that’s a pretty good idea. But I was going to send a coded communication in your printed materials. In your magazines. We knew from some preliminary studies that humans printed stories about visitors from other planets, and we decided my message could hide among those stories without alerting you to my presence.”

“Ah.” Carter picked up his cup but discovered it was empty. “Hold that thought,” he said. He stood and walked to the counter, where the barista was happy to give him a refill. When Carter returned to the table, John looked at him gratefully, as if he’d half expected Carter to take a runner out the front door.

“Okay,” Carter said, sitting down. “So your pals were going to subscribe to
Astounding!
and— But my rag didn’t even exist back then. I wasn’t even born.”

“I know. But we agreed on the type of publication. There were many pulp magazines in the 1950s. My people would monitor them all.”

Carter decided not to ask
how
they would monitor. Intergalactic newsstands, maybe. “And they’d see your secret message and swing by to pick you up.”

“Yes. But we didn’t understand humans at all, and we made two mistakes.
I
made two mistakes. It was my plan.”

The coffee burned Carter’s tongue when he sipped at it. A species advanced enough to conquer space should be able to figure out how to serve coffee and pizza that didn’t scald away the taste buds, but apparently not. “What were the mistakes?”

“I didn’t understand how difficult it would be to get published. My people don’t write fiction. I didn’t recognize what an art good writing is—and how difficult that art is to achieve.”

“So the rejection slips piled up.” Carter winced, remembering the nasty one he’d penned.

“Yes. And also, my people, we live a very long time. Much longer than humans. Maybe that’s why we don’t do anything quickly. Change happens very slowly with us. Hundreds of years might pass, and our society remains fundamentally unaltered. But you! You change in a heartbeat! What you wear, what you eat, how you entertain yourselves… I blink and everything is different. I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that by the time I was ready to send my message, there would be few vehicles remaining to send it in.”

Carter’s tongue was already burned anyway, so he took a bigger swallow, then put down his cup. “You didn’t plan on the pulps dying out.”

“No,” John said mournfully.

“Yeah, well, nobody’s crying harder at that funeral than me, buddy.” And because John had just spilled his guts—even though they were delusional guts—Carter felt compelled to spill his as well. “
Astounding!
is going under too.”

John looked as if he’d just been notified that a loved one had passed away. “No!” he cried.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got one more issue in me, and you’ll be in it. Hell, you can lead the thing. I’ll even make sure the cover illustrates your piece.”

“But why?” asked John, less mollified than Carter would have predicted. “Your magazine is so good!”

Carter lifted his chin. “It is. It’s damn good. But nobody reads anything but BuzzFeed anymore. I’m broke.”

“What will you do, then?” John leaned forward across the table as if the answer mattered to him.

“Dunno. I’m sure there are oodles of jobs out there for thirtysomething idiots with master’s degrees in English.”

“My people don’t use currency and we don’t… we don’t have jobs the way humans do.”

“Of course not.” Carter gulped the last of his brew, pushed his chair back with a noisy scrape, and stood. “It’s getting late. Do you mind if we go?”

John leaped to his feet. “I’m sorry to have kept you.”

“You didn’t. I mean, I would have bitched sooner if I wanted to leave. Tonight was fun.” Pancakes and coffee with a madman—the highlight of his social life for the year.

A light rain had begun while they were in P-Town. Carter turned up his coat collar and hunched his shoulders, but John, who wore nothing over his sweater, hardly seemed to notice the droplets falling on him. They got into the car, which started up right away, and John turned on the heat. The windshield wipers squeaked as he drove; water refracted the streetlights into stars and rainbows.

John parked in front of his house instead of around the corner. Carter would have hopped straight into his car and hit the road, but he had a more urgent need. “Can I use your bathroom? It’s a long drive back to Seattle.”

“Of course.”

Apparently the house had only a single bathroom, small and neat. Like the rest of the place, it was well kept but seemed largely unchanged since the 1950s. After pissing and washing his hands, Carter gave in to temptation and peeked in the medicine cabinet, but it contained nothing other than basic dental cleaning supplies and a tube of hair guck. Either John wasn’t on any meds, or he kept them somewhere else.