_No birds were these, and surely not of
a feather, and there was no need to tell
Mel by the company he kept--it told him!_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1959.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
All through that Saturday night, rain drummed down mercilessly and
unseasonably on Sweetwater Beach. Thunder pealed and lightning flared.
In between, Mel Armstrong heard the steady boom of the Pacific surf not
a block from his snug little duplex apartment. Mel didn't mind any of
it. He was in bed, slightly swacked and wholly comfortable. He dozed,
and now and then woke up far enough to listen admiringly to the racket.
At nine A. M., when he opened his eyes once more, he discovered
the room was full of summer sunshine. Beyond his window gleamed a
cloudless sky, and only the occasional gusts of wind indicated there
had been anything like a storm during the night.
An exceptionally beautiful Sunday morning--made more beautiful,
perhaps, by the fact that it marked the beginning of Mel Armstrong's
annual two-week paid vacation. Mel was a salesman for Marty's Fine
Liquors, a wholesale house. He was twenty-eight and in fairly good
shape, but his job bored him. This morning, for the first time in
months, he was fully aware of that. Perhaps it was the weather. At any
rate, he had a sense, almost a premonition, of new and exciting events
approaching him rapidly. Events that would break down the boundaries of
his present humdrum existence and pitch him into the life of romantic
adventure that, somehow, he seemed to have missed so far....
Recognizing this as a day-dream, but unwilling to give it up
completely, Mel breakfasted unhurriedly in his pajamas. Then, struck by
a sudden, down-to-earth suspicion, he stuck his head out of his living
room window.
As he'd guessed, there were other reminders of the storm in the narrow
courtyard before the window. Branches and assorted litter had blown
in, including at least one soggily dismembered Sunday paper. The low
rent he paid for his ground-floor apartment in the Oceanview Courts
was based on an understanding with the proprietor that he and the
upstairs occupant of the duplex would keep the court clean. The other
five duplexes that fronted on the court were bulging with vacationing
visitors from the city, which made it a real chore in summer.
Unfortunately, he couldn't count on his upstairs neighbor, a weird
though rather amiable young character who called herself Maria de
Guesgne. Maria went in for painting abstractions, constructing mobiles,
and discussing the works of Madame Blavatsky. She avoided the indignity
of manual toil.
Mel made himself decent by exchanging his pajamas for swimming trunks.
Then he got a couple of brooms and a hose out of a garage back of the
court and went to work.
* * * * *
He'd cleared the courtyard by the time the first of the seasonal guests
began to show up in their doorways, and went on to inspect another,
narrower court behind his duplex, which was also his responsibility.
There he discovered Maria de Guesgne propped on her elbows on her
bedroom window sill, talking reproachfully to a large gray tomcat that
was sitting in the court. Both turned to look at Mel.
"Good morning, Mel!" Maria said, with unusual animation. She had long
black bangs which emphasized her sallow and undernourished appearance.
"Morning," Mel replied. "Scat!" he added to the cat, which belonged to
somebody else in the neighborhood but was usually to be found stalking
about the Oceanview Courts.
"You shouldn't frighten poor Cat," said Maria. "Mel, would you look
into the bird box?"
"Bird box?"
"The one in the climbing rose," said Maria, leaning precariously from
the window to point. "To your left. Cat was trying to get at it."
The bird box was a white-painted, weather-beaten little house set into
a straggly rose bush that grew out of a square patch of earth beside
Mel's bedroom window. The box was about ten feet above the ground.
Mel looked up at it.
"I'm sure I heard little birds peeping in it this morning!" Maria
explained sentimentally.
"No bird in its senses would go into a thing like that," Mel assured
her. "I don't hear anything. And besides--"
"Please, Mel! We don't want Cat to get them!"
Mel groaned, got a wobbly step-ladder out of the garage and climbed
up. The gray cat walked over and sat down next to the ladder to watch
him.
He poked at the box and listened. No sound.
"Can't you open the top and look in?" Maria inquired.
Holding the box in one hand, Mel tentatively inserted his thumbnail
into a crack under its top and pushed. The weathered wood splintered
away easily.
"Don't break it!" Maria cried.
Mel put his eye to the crack he'd made. Then he gasped, jerked back,
letting go of the box, teetered wildly a moment and fell over with the
step-ladder. The cat fled, spitting.
"Oh, my!" said Maria, apparently with some enjoyment. "Poor Mel! Are
you hurt?"
Mel stood up slowly. The bright morning world seemed to be spinning
gently around him, but it wasn't because of his fall. "Of course not,"
he said. His voice quavered somewhat.
"Oh?" said Maria. "Well, then--_are_ there any little birds in the
nest?"
Mel swallowed hard. "No," he said. He bent over and carefully picked
up the ladder and placed it against the wall. The action made it
unnecessary to look at her.
"Eggs?" she asked in a hopeful tone.
"No eggs either! No nothing!" His voice was steady again, but he had
to get rid of Maria. "Well, I'll clean up this court now, I guess.
Uh--maybe you'd like to come down and lend a hand?"
Maria replied promptly that she certainly would like to, but she hadn't
had breakfast yet; and with that she vanished from the window.
Mel looked round stealthily. The cat was watching from the door of the
garage, but no one else was in sight.
Hurriedly, he replaced the step-ladder under the bird nest and climbed
up again.
* * * * *
Setting the box carefully down on the table in his living room, he
locked the apartment door and closed the Venetian blinds. All this had
been done in a sort of quiet rush, as if every second counted, which it
did in a way. Mel wasn't going to believe, even for a moment, that what
he thought he'd seen in that box could be really there; and he couldn't
disprove it fast enough to suit him. But something warned him that he
wouldn't want to have any witnesses around when he did take his second
look.
Then, as he turned from the window, he heard a thin piping cry, a voice
as tiny as the peeping of a mouse, coming from the table, from the box.
An instant fright reaction froze him where he stood. The sounds
stopped again. There was a brief, faint rustle, like the stirring of
dry parchment, and then quiet.
The rustling, he thought, must have been the wings--he'd been _sure_
they had wings. Otherwise--
It could all have been an illusion, he told himself. An illusion that
transformed a pair of featherless nestlings into something he still
didn't want to give a name to. Color patterns of jade and pink flashed
into his memory next, however, which made the bird theory shaky. Say a
rather small green-and-pink snake then, or a lizard--
Except, of course, for the glassy glitter of the wings. So make
it instead, Mel thought desperately, a pair of big insects, like
dragonflies, only bigger....
He shook his head and moistened his lips. That wouldn't explain that
tiny voice--and the more he tried to rationalize it all, the more
scared he was getting. Assume, he took the mental jump, he really
had seen the figures of two tiny, naked, green-and-pink people in
there--with wings! One didn't have to drag in the supernatural to
explain it. There were things like flying saucers, presumably, and
probably such beings might exist on other worlds.
The thought was oddly reassuring. He still felt as if he'd locked
himself in the room with things potentially in the class of
tarantulas, but there was excitement and wonder coming up now. With a
surge of jealous proprietorship, he realized that he didn't want to
share this discovery with anybody else. Later, perhaps. Right now, it
was _his_ big adventure.
The room was too dim to let him distinguish anything inside the box as
he had outdoors, and he was still reluctant to get his face too close
to it. He gave it a gingerly rap with his knuckle and waited. No sound.
He cleared his throat. "Hello?" he said. Immediately, that seemed like
an idiotic approach. Worse than that, it also brought no reaction.
For the first time, Mel had a sense of worry for the occupants of the
box. There was no way of guessing how they'd got in there, but they
might be sick or dying. Hurriedly he brought a lamp over to the table
and tried to direct light inside, both through the round hole in its
side and through the opening he'd made in the top. It wasn't very
effective and produced no stir within.
With sudden decision, he shoved one hand into the opening, held the box
with the other and broke off the entire top. And there they were.
Mel stared at them a long time, his fears fading slowly. They were
certainly alive! One was green, a tiny body of luminous jade, and the
other was silkily human-colored, which was why he had been confused on
that point. The wings could hardly be anything else, though they were
very odd-looking, almost like thin, flexible glass.
He couldn't force himself to touch them. Instead, he laid a folded
clean towel on the table and tilted the box very slowly over it. A
series of careful tappings and shakings brought the two beings sliding
gently out onto the towel.
Two delicately formed female figurines, they lay there a moment,
unmoving. Then the green one passed a tiny hand over her forehead in
a slow, completely human gesture, opened slanted golden eyes with
startled suddenness and looked up at Mel.
He might still have thought he was dreaming, if his attention hadn't
been caught just then by a detail of undream-like realism. The other,
the human-colored one, seemed to be definitely in a family way.
* * * * *
They were sitting on the folded bath towel in a square of afternoon
sunlight which came in through the kitchenette window. The window was
high enough up so nobody could look in from outside, and they seemed to
want the warmth of the sun more than anything else. They did not appear
to be sick, but they were still rather languid. It wasn't starvation,
apparently. Mel had put bits of a variety of foods on a napkin before
them, and he changed the samples as soon as his guests indicated they
weren't interested. So far, canned sardine was the only item that had
attracted them at all, and they hadn't done much more than test that.
Between moments of just marveling at them, assuring himself they were
there and not an illusion, and wondering _what_ they were then and
where they'd come from, Mel was beginning to get worried again. For all
he knew, they might suddenly die on the bath towel.
"Miss Green," he said in a very low voice--he didn't want to give Maria
de Guesgne any indication he was in the house--"I wish you could tell
me what you like to eat!"
Miss Green looked up at him and smiled. She was much more alert and
vivacious than the other one who, perhaps because of her condition,
merely sat or lay there gracefully and let Miss Green wait on her.
The relationship seemed to be about that of an elf princess and her
personal attendant, but they were much too real-seeming creatures to
have popped out of a fairy tale, though their appearance did arouse
recurrent bursts of a feeling of fairy tale unreality, which Mel hadn't
known since he was ten. But, tiny as they were, Miss Green and the
princess primarily gave him the impression of being quite as functional
as human beings or, perhaps, as field mice.
He would have liked to inspect the brittle-seeming wings more closely.
They seemed to be made up of numerous laminated, very thin sections,
and he wondered whether they could fly with them or whether their race
had given up or lost that ability.
But touching them might have affected their present matter-of-fact
acceptance of him, and he didn't want to risk that....
A door banged suddenly in the apartment overhead. A moment later, he
heard Maria coming down the hall stairs.
Mel stood up in sudden alarm. He'd known for some time that his
neighbor had supplied herself with a key to his apartment, not to pry
but with the practical purpose of borrowing from the little bar in
Mel's living room when she was out of both money and liquor. She rarely
took much, and until now he'd been more amused than annoyed.
* * * * *
He went hurriedly into the living room, closing the door to the
kitchenette behind him. If Maria knocked, he wouldn't answer. If she
decided he was out and came in to steal his liquor, he would pretend to
have been asleep in the chair and scare the hell out of her!
She paused before the apartment door a moment, but then went out into
the court.
Mel waited until her footsteps died away, going toward the street. As
he opened the door to the kitchenette, something buzzed noisily out of
the living room past his shoulder--a big, unlovely looking horsefly.
The apartment screens didn't fit too well, and the fly probably had
been attracted by the smell of food.
Startled, he stopped to consider the new problem. There was a
flyswatter hanging beside the door, but he didn't want to alarm his
guests--and then, for the first time, he saw Miss Green's wings unfold!
She was up on her feet beside the princess, who remained sitting on the
towel. Both of them were following the swift, erratic course of the big
fly with more animation than they'd shown about anything so far.
Miss Green gave a sudden piping cry, and the glassy appendages on her
back opened out suddenly like twin transparently gleaming fans, and
blurred into motion too swift for Mel to follow.
Miss Green rose into the air like a tiny human helicopter, hands up
before her as if she were praying.
It wasn't till the horsefly swerved from the kitchenette window and
came buzzing back that Mel guessed her purpose.
There was a sharper, fiercer drone like a hornet's song as she darted
sideways into the insect's path. Mel didn't see her catch it. Its
buzzing simply stopped, and then she was dropping gently back to the
towel, with the ugly black thing between her hands. It looked nearly as
big as her head.
There was an exchange of cheerful piping cries between the two. Miss
Green laughed up at Mel's stupefied face, lifted the motionless fly to
her mouth and neatly bit off its head.
Mel turned hurriedly and went into the living room. It wasn't, he told
himself, really so _very_ different from human beings eating a chicken.
But he didn't feel up to watching what he knew was going to be a
dismemberment and a feast.
At any rate, the horsefly had settled the feeding problem. His guests
could take care of themselves.
* * * * *
That night, Miss Green hunted down a few moths. Mel woke up twice with
the sudden sharp drone in his ears that told him she had just made her
catch. Both times, it was a surge of unthinking physical fright that
actually roused him. Awake, and remembering the disproportion in size
between himself and the huntress, his reaction seemed ridiculous; but
the second time he found he was reluctant to go back to sleep until it
would appear that Miss Green was done with her foraging.
So he lay awake, listening to the occasional faint indications of her
continuing activity within his apartment, and to more familiar sounds
without. A train rattled over a crossing; a police siren gave a sudden
view halloo and faded into silence again. For a long time, there was
only the whispering passage of distant cars over wet pavements, and the
slow roll and thump of the surf. A haze of fog beyond the window turned
the apartment into a shut-off little world of its own.
Miss Green moved about with no more than a whisper of air and the muted
pipe of voices from the top of the kitchenette cupboard to show where
she was. Mel had put a small carton up there, upholstered with the
towel and handkerchiefs and roofed over with his best woolen sweater,
to make a temporary home for his guests. The princess hadn't stirred
from it since, but Miss Green remained busy.
He started suddenly to find her hovering directly over his bed,
vaguely silhouetted against the pale blur of the window. As he stared,
she settled down and came to rest on the blanket over his chest,
effortlessly as a spider gliding down along its thread. Her wings
closed with a faint snap.
Mel raised his head carefully to squint down along the blanket at her.
It was the first time either of them had made anything resembling
a friendly advance in his direction; he didn't want to commit any
blunders.
"Hello," he said quietly.
Miss Green didn't reply. She seemed to be looking up at the window,
disregarding him, and he was content to watch her. These strange
creatures seemed to have some of the aloofness of cats in their manner,
and they might be as easily offended.
She turned presently, walked up over the blanket and perched herself on
Mel's pillow, above his head and somewhat to his right. And there she
stayed silently. Which seemed catlike, too: the granting of a reserved
and temporary companionship. He would not have been too surprised to
hear a tiny purring from above his ear. Instead, drowsily and lulled in
an odd way by Miss Green's presence, he found himself sinking back into
sleep.
* * * * *
It wasn't surprising either that his mind should be filled for a time
with vague pictures of her, but when the room about him seemed to have
expanded into something like a faintly luminous fish-bowl, he knew he
was dreaming. There were others present. They were going somewhere,
and he had a sense of concern, which had to do either with their
destination or with difficulties in getting there. Then a realization
of swift, irrevocable disaster--
There were violent lurchings as the luminosity about him faded swiftly
into blackness. He felt a terrible, energy-draining cold, the wet
clutch of death itself, then something like a soundless explosion about
him and anguished cryings. The motion stopped.
Blackness faded back to gray, but the cold remained. Icy water was
pounding down on him now, as if he were fighting his way through
a vertical current carrying somebody else. A desperate hunt for
refuge--and finding it suddenly, and slipping inside and relaxing into
unconsciousness, to wait for the return of warmth and life....
Mel's eyes opened. The room was beginning to lighten with morning. He
turned his head slowly to look for Miss Green. She was still there, on
the pillow beside his head, watching him; and there was something in
her position, in the unwinking golden eyes, even in her curious fluff
of blue-white hair, that reminded him now less of a cat than a small
lizard.
He didn't doubt that she had somehow enabled him to share the
experience that in part explained their presence here. Without thinking
he asked aloud "What happened to the others?"
She didn't move, but he was aware of a surge of horrified revulsion.
Then before his open eyes for a moment swam a picture of a bleak,
rain-beaten beach ... and, just above the waterline, in a cluster of
harsh voices, jabbing beaks and beating wings, great gulls were tearing
apart a strange jetsam of tiny bodies too weakened to escape--
A small, plaintive crying came from the kitchenette. The picture faded
as Miss Green soared into the air to attend to her princess.
* * * * *
Mel breakfasted in the living room, thoughtfully. He couldn't quite
understand that luminous vehicle of theirs, or why it should have
succumbed to the rain storm of Saturday night, which appeared to be
what had happened. But his guests obviously were confronted with the
problem of getting back to wherever they'd come from--and he didn't
think Miss Green would have confided in him if he wasn't somehow
expected to be helpful in solving the problem.
There was a thump on the sill outside his bedroom window, followed by
an annoyed meowing. The gray cat that had been spying on the bird box
seemed to suspect he was harboring the refugees. Mel went out into the
little courtyard through the back door of the duplex and chased the
animal away. The fog, he saw, was thinning out quickly; in an hour or
so it would be another clear day.
When he came in, Miss Green fluted a few soft notes, which Mel chose to
interpret as gratitude, from the top of the cupboard and withdrew from
sight again.
One couldn't think of them, he decided, as being exactly like any
creatures of Earth. The cold rain had been very nearly deadly to them,
if the memory Miss Green had transmitted to him was accurate--as
destructive as it had been to their curious craft. Almost as if it
could wash right through them, to drain vital energies from their
bodies, while in the merely foggy air of last night she had seemed
comfortable enough. It indicated different tolerance spans with more
sharply defined limits.
The thought came into his mind:
Venus?
It seemed possible, even if it left a lot to explain. Mel got up in
sudden excitement and began to walk about the room. He knew not much
was known about the second planet, but he had a conviction of being
right. It struck him he might be involved in an event of enormous
historical significance.