I pointed.
“Those aren’t cattle. Those are llamas.”
“But,” I said, “I haven’t seen any cattle in the last couple of hundred miles, have you?”
“Well, no. Hell, it works for me if it works for you.” He turned off the car. “You go ahead. I’ll wait here.”
“What?”
“Go ahead. You know, mutilate them.” He made stabbing motions.
I stared at him. “How?”
“I don’t know. You’re the alien.”
“But I’ve never mutilated anything in my whole life.”
He shrugged.
“Fine.” I got out of the car, slamming the door behind me. I went around to his side and looked in the window. “What do you have in the way of mutilating devices?”
He rummaged around in the glove compartment, finally pulling out a pen, a plastic spork, and an ice scraper. “Take your pick.”
“What am I supposed to do with this stuff?” I asked. “And what are you doing with an ice scraper?” I grabbed the pen without waiting for his explanation and started for the field. There were six llamas munching grass and watching me with placid disinterest. They were mostly a shaggy, dirty white, but a couple of them had brown bits as well. As I climbed the faux-rustic wooden fence at the edge of the field, Doc yelled out, “Hey!”
“What?”
“I think some of them might be alpacas, or vicunas or something.”
I looked at him. “Does it matter?”
“No, I guess not.”
I shook my head and continued on my way. I held out my hands and called, “Here, llama, llama, llama.”
They didn’t come prancing up to me, but they didn’t run away either.
Eventually, I was able to work my way up to about a foot away from the largest of them. It stared at me with soft brown eyes and kept chewing. It looked gentle and trusting. I stared at the pen in my hand, then back at the llama. What was I supposed to do, write antihuman slogans on the side of the llama? I supposed I could stab it in the eye. Would that count as a mutilation? It would certainly count as disgusting. I imagined the pen meeting the firm but spongy eyeball, finally piercing it and sending some kind of eyeball fluid squirting out all over the place. I let the pen drop into the grass. I couldn’t do it.
“Okay, llama, you’re off the hook. Live long and prosper.”
It spit at me, filling my mouth with llama saliva. “AAAAHH!” I yelled. I spit and spit again. I ran across the field to the car, leaping over the fence. “Give me a drink! Anything!”
Doc got a fresh bottle of bourbon from under the seat, opened it and handed it to me. “I take it cattle and or llama mutilations are out, huh?”
I would have answered him, but I was busy rinsing my mouth and spitting out the window.
“Well, if mutilations are out, maybe you ought to consider a couple of abductions, with some anal probes thrown in for the sake of verisimilitude.”
I looked at him. “Are you crazy?”
He shrugged. “You got a better idea?”
I thought frantically. “Not immediately, but it seems like there would have to be at least a billion ideas that are better than kidnapping people and shoving things up their rectums.”
“Okay. I’ll drive us back to town, you come up with alternatives. I don’t think we need a full billion, just whatever sounds good to you.”
“How about Tiffany?” Doc indicated our waitress with his chin. “I could see myself probing her a few times.”
“Jeez, Doc, she could be your granddaughter.”
“I don’t know, I think she’s interested in me.” He smirked in my direction. “More interested in me than you, anyway.”
“Oh, that’s hilarious, isn’t it?” I had to admit it rankled that no one had made a fuss over me when we’d entered the small-town diner to get some breakfast. It was the kind of place where the regulars sat in their regular seats every morning and ate their regular breakfasts and drank their regular coffees on their way to work at the local bank or feed store or whatever. A guy in a John Deere cap and red suspenders over his flannel shirt looked up from his fried eggs and wrinkled his forehead as he tried to recollect where he might have seen me before, then went back to sopping up his yolk with a piece of toast. We sat at the counter and the blonde waitress, Tiffany, according to the name stitched on her powder-blue nylon uniform, handed us menus and said, “Morning, boys, what’U it be?” She waited a second or two, then added, “Hey, aren’t you that alien fellow?”
Well, I suppose I could have been a horribly misshapen, mutant human, but I wondered what kind of person needed to ask that question. “Why, yes, I am,” I said, ready to sign an autograph.
“Thought so.” She nodded. “So, you want coffee?”
As I ate my English muffin and Doc plowed through his scrambled eggs and hash browns, we discussed alien abductions.
“We can’t just hold a spork or an ice scraper to someone’s head and force them into your car and drive away, you know. There’s nothing mysterious about that,” I said. “Don’t we need bright lights, and cars stalling, and watches stopping and things like that?”
Doc chewed for a bit. “Yeah, I suppose we do. How do we go about it?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Well, damn it, E, what do you know? You can’t mutilate livestock, you can’t handle a simple abduction. Sometimes I wonder if you really are an alien.”
I held my grotesquely gigantic head in my long, skinny, insubstantial hands. “You’re right, Doc. Mor-ty’s right. Everybody’s right. I’m useless. I don’t belong here and I never will. I wish I had been killed with everybody else when our spaceship crashed.”
Doc’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, man, E, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” He sounded like he was worried I was going to commit suicide all over his breakfast. “You’re… You’re the stuff which dreams are made of. You’re a thousand books that once made my existence almost bearable, brought to life. Your very presence on this planet fills me with awe and wonder. And for myself, and for everyone else who has failed to let you know just how special you are, I apologize.”
I raised my head and blinked at him. “Gee, Doc, you sure can talk pretty when you want to. You ever think of writing that stuff down?”
He looked at me for an instant, then we both burst out laughing.
“You’re an asshole, you know that?” he said.
“Yeah, you, too,” I told him. It’s what Earth guys say when they care about each other. “But, you know what, I think you may have your uses.”
“Morty,” I told the telephone, “I want a book deal.”
“E, we’ve been there, done that. You can buy remaindered copies of your autobiography for a nickel.”
“I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about fiction. Science fiction.”
Loud cheers did not burst from the phone. “Eyul,” Morty said eventually, then more silence, then a sigh. “E. I love you like a son. You know that, right?”
“Sure, Morty.”
“So when I say this, you know I only have your best interests at heart, right?”
“Sure, Morty.”
“E, you can’t write. You don’t know the first thing about writing.
“There are people who write hundreds of thousand of words, who take classes, who study, who never get anything in print. And you want me to go to some publisher, someone who may have at least tried to read your autobiography until he couldn’t take anymore, and ask him to pay money for your fiction?
“Science fiction, no less?”
“Morty, listen. This isn’t some wild scheme, I’ve given it some thought. You ever hear of a guy named Brian Aldiss?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, apparently he writes science fiction, and he’s supposed to be pretty good. Anyway, you know why he said he became a writer? He said, ‘Because I wasn’t fit for society; I didn’t fit into the system.’ Who does that remind you of, huh? Me, that’s who. Who do you know that is less fit for society?”