“Morty, I told you, I didn’t know…”
“Okay, okay. Water under the bridge. I’m just trying to tell you why I can’t get you a gig.”
“All right, Morty. Thanks, anyway. Let me know if anything comes up.” I hung up and wondered if this was one of those times when a human would cry. I can’t do it myself, but I was willing to bet that if I could have, I would have,
I didn’t really mind moving. The apartment had been Morty’s idea. The other tenants were writers, accountants, lawyers, and so on. I’d never belonged there, and soon I wouldn’t have enough money to make up for not belonging.
I sat and scratched the place where my nose would have been if I was human as I considered my options. What I needed was a secret hideaway, an inaccessible lair buried deep inside a mountain from which I could hold the governments of the world hostage with the threat of annihilation by my alien death-ray. That would make people notice me. Unfortunately, not only did I not have a secret hideaway, I was completely death-rayless, and there was no way I could persuade anyone otherwise. The only reason the government had let me go was because they were convinced I had nothing useful to tell them. If they had even suspected that I knew how to build an alien death-ray, or even an alien give-you-a-slight-headache-ray, I would have still been locked up tight in an NSA laboratory somewhere.
All right, then, how about this? I have a hidden receiver implanted in my head, and I just got a message from home that they were prepared to wipe out the Earth if I wasn’t given a billion dollars and my own sitcom. No. The first thing they would do is grab me and start digging around for the receiver. My head might seem freakishly large on this planet, but I was still pretty attached to it.
I wasn’t getting anywhere alone in my apartment thinking soberly and rationally about my problems. I decided I needed a drink.
I took the elevator down to the lobby and went out into the LA afternoon. I stopped to take a breath when I reached the sidewalk. As always, the air seemed to be missing something to me, even with all of the extras provided by the smog. It’s breathable, but not exactly what my lungs are looking for. Like everything else, though, whatever is missing is a mystery to me. And there’s something wrong with the sun. Some scientist told me it had to do with the color of the light and rods and cones or something, but I really couldn’t follow what she was saying. I was still learning English back then, but I doubt I would understand it any better now either.
I did, and do, understand alcohol, though, and I knew where to get it. I walked a couple of blocks to Prof’s, a dark little place owned by Doc Siegel, who described himself as a defrocked teacher of Fantastic Literature. I kept hoping someone would notice me, maybe ask for an autograph, but all I got was a few brief glances, a halfhearted gawk. Someone in a passing car did throw an empty coffee cup at me, but that was probably just a coincidence. Morty was right, nobody cared about me anymore. He’d told me about something called a nine-days’ wonder. I guess, after five years, it was finally the tenth day for me.
Doc was sitting behind the bar, soaking up his profits in the form of a glass of bourbon, probably not his first. The sun refused to follow me into the place, the only light came from a couple of three-watt bulbs and some fizzling, red-and-blue neon beer signs over the bar. There were a few customers scattered around at tables in the murk. Prof’s was a good place to drink alone.
“Eyu!, my alien friend and the word made flesh, welcome.” He bowed his bald head to me.
“Hi, Doc. A beer, please. A cheap one.” I climbed onto a stool.
He poured me a draft and asked, “How’s the alien biz?”
I swallowed some beer and said, “It stinks. A few more weeks and a dollar draft will be out of my price range.”
“That’s too bad, brother. What are you going to do about it?”
“What can I do? I’m unique; a genuine, one-of-a-kind, out-of-this-world alien, but no one cares. You’d think all I’d have to do is sit in a room someplace and charge people five bucks a pop just to look at me and I’d be rich. But, no, I’m old news. I’m last year’s Christmas present, just another guy from out of town who couldn’t make it in the big city. It’s not fair!”
Doc squinted at me, aiming his blue eyes along his hawk-sharp nose. “Fair? It’s not fair? What are you telling me, that life is fair where you come from? If that’s the case, you don’t just come from another world, you’re from a whole different universe that operates under its own set of rules. Was it fair that I had to become a school teacher because no one would buy my books? Was it fair that I had to give that up because I had a slight drinking problem?” He took a guzzle of bourbon.
I blinked at him. “I didn’t know you wrote.”
“Yeah, well, it was a long time ago,” he kind of mumbled it, as if he were embarrassed by his outburst. “But let me ask you this, would you be special if you were home?”
I hesitated, then finally admitted, “Okay, no. But I’m not home.”
“Are you sure? What are the chances that you’ll ever see Tethys again? Maybe you ought to get used to the fact that Earth is home, at least for now, and ask yourself what you can do to fit in.”
“But that’s the problem, I don’t fit in. My agent’s right, I don’t do anything, I don’t know anything, I don’t have anything that anyone would want. What can I do to myself that would change that?”
Doc took a long gulp of bourbon, smacked his lips with every evidence of relish, and said, “Well, why not do what I do when I come up against an insurmountable problem? If you can’t rise to the occasion, drink yourself under the table.” He poured a glass of Kentucky’s finest and slid it across the bar to me. “On the house.”
Sometime and some bourbon later, it hit me. Actually, first, the bar hit me, or, rather, I hit the bar. I had been thinking that it would be really nice if the bar would elevate itself a few inches to help me hold my head up. After a little while, I figured that wasn’t going to happen, and decided that if the mountain wouldn’t come to Mohammed… and I let my head fall.
“Ow,” I said. “I mean, eureka.”
Doc peered at me and waited.
“It’s a matter of pershpec… prospect… perspective. If I don’t have anything they want, then I have^ to make them want what I have.”
“Right!”
“Damned right I’m right. What I have to do is make people think there are aliens, other aliens, sneaking around, secretly doing alien things. Then people will want to know, who are they? What do they want? What should we do? And who will they ask?”
Doc thought about it.
“Me!” I told him.
“Okay.”
“And I’ll tell ‘em, but it’ll cost ‘em.”
“You bet.”
“So, how do I make ‘em think there are aliens?”
“Cows.”
“What?”
“You know. Cows.” He held fingers up next to his head. “Moo. Cows. Cattle mutilations. That’s what aliens do.”
“We do?”
He shrugged. “Some people think so.”
And so, at three-thirty in the morning, after the bar closed, we found ourselves in Doc’s ancient and mammoth purple Cadillac, on our way out of town, looking for cows. We knew they would be “in the country,” but beyond that we were going on guesswork and bourbon. Eventually, though, the bourbon wore off, and our guesswork wasn’t looking too good.
“Hey, over there!” I shouted.
Doc slammed on the brakes, fishtailing and almost missing a tree with his fender.
“Jesus, E! You want to give me a heart attack? What are you yelling about?”