1.
The Martians stayed, and no one knew or could guess how long they might stay. For all we knew, they might be here permanently. It was none of our business.
And little if anything was learned about them beyond what was obvious within a day or two after their arrival. Physically, they were pretty much alike. Although not identical, they averaged considerably less physical variation from one of them to another than human beings, of the same race and sex, average.
The only important difference among them was a difference in size; the largest among them was as tall as three feet and the smallest as short as two feet, three inches.
There were several schools of thought, among human beings, as to the explanation of this difference in height among them. Some people thought that they were all adult males—which, judging from their faces, they appeared to me—and that variation in height among them was as natural among them as is variation in height among human beings.
Other people thought that the difference in height indicated a difference in age; that probably they were all adult males but that, with them, growth did not cease at adulthood and that the short ones were relatively young and the tall ones relatively old.
Still other people thought that the tall ones were probably males and the shorter ones females, and that seen differences between them, whatever they might be, didn’t show except in height when they had their clothes on. And since no one ever saw a Martian with his clothes off, this possibility, like the others, could be neither proved nor disproved.
And then there was the theory that all Martians were alike sexually, being either bisexual or having no sex at all, as we understand sex, and that possibly they reproduced by parthenogenesis or some means we couldn’t even guess at. For all we knew they grew on trees like coconuts and dropped off when they were ripe, already adult and intelligent, ready to face their world, or to face and sneer at ours. In that case, the smallest among them could have been babies, as it were, just off the tree but fully as hateful as the bigger and older ones. If the smallest among them weren’t infants, then we never saw a Martian infant.
We never learned what they ate or drank or even whether they did eat or drunk. They couldn’t have eaten Earth food, of course; they couldn’t even pick it up or handle it, for the same reason that we couldn’t handle them. Most people thought that, since their kwimming seemed to be an instantaneous process, a Martian would simply kwim to Mars and back again any time he felt the need for food or drink. Or for sleep, if Martians slept, since no one had ever seen a Martian sleeping on Earth.
We knew amazingly little about them.
We didn’t know for sure that they were really here in person. Many people, and especially scientists, insisted that a life form that is noncorporeal, without solidity, cannot possibly mist. And that therefore what we saw weren’t the Martians themselves but projections of them, that the Martians had bodies as solid as ours and left their bodies back on Mars, possibly in a trance state, that kwimming was simply the ability to project an astral body that was visible but not corporeal.
If true, that theory explained a lot, but that there was one thing it didn’t explain even its most ardent proponent had to admit. How could a noncorporeal projection talk? Sound is the physical movement or vibration of air or other molecules so how could a mere projection that wasn’t really there create a sound?
And they certainly created sounds. Actual sounds, not just in the mind of the listener; the fact that the sounds they made could be recorded on wax or tape was proof of that. They could really talk and they could also (but seldom did) knock on doors. The Martian who knocked on Luke Devereaux’s door on what came to be called Coming Night had been an exception in that particular respect. Most of them had kwimmed their way, without knocking, right into living rooms, bedrooms, television stations, night clubs, theaters, taverns (there must have been some wonderful scenes in taverns that night), barracks, igloos, jails, everywhere.
They also showed clearly on photographs, as Luke Devereaux would have found out had he ever bothered to have that roll of film developed. Whether they were there or not, they were opaque to light. But not to radar, and scientists tore their hair over that.
They all insisted that they had no names, or even numbers, and that names were ridiculous and unnecessary. None of them ever addressed a human being by name. In the United States they called every man Mack and every woman Toots; elsewhere they used local equivalents.
In one field at least they showed tremendous aptitude—linguistics. Luke’s Martian hadn’t been bragging when he said he could learn a new language in an hour or so. The Martians who appeared among various primitive peoples whose tongues had never been broadcast by radio arrived without knowing a word of the language, but they were speaking it adequately within an hour, fluently within a few hours. And whatever language they spoke, they spoke it idiomatically, even slangily, with none of the stiffness and awkwardness with which human beings speak a new language which they have recently acquired.
Many words in their vocabulary were obviously not learned from radio broadcasts. But that isn’t difficult to account for; within seconds of their arrival they, or many of them, had plenty of opportunity to pick up a liberal education in profanity. The Martian, for example, who had broken up Romeo and Juliet on television with his vulgar comment on Romeo’s balcony scene speech was no doubt one who heel first kwimmed into, say, a tavern but had sought greener pastures within a matter of seconds when he had found too many others of his kind had kwimmed into the same place.
Mentally, the Martians were even more alike than they were physically, although again there was minor variation—some of them were even worse than others.
But one and all they were abusive, aggravating, annoying, brash, brutal, cantankerous, caustic, churlish, detestable, discourteous, execrable, fiendish, flippant, fresh, galling, hateful, hostile, ilI-tempered, insolent, impudent, jabbering, jeering, knavish killjoys. They were leering, loathsome, malevolent, malignant, nasty, nauseating, objectionable, peevish, perverse, quarrelsome, rude, sarcastic, splenetic, treacherous, truculent, uncivil, ungracious, waspish, xenophobic, yapping, and zealous in making themselves obnoxious to and in making trouble for everyone with whom they came in contact.
2.
Alone again and feeling blue—there wasn’t even a Martian present or he’d have felt bluer—Luke Devereaux took his time unpacking two suitcases in the little room in a cheap rooming house he’d just taken in Long Beach.
It was just two weeks after Coming Night. Luke had fifty-six dollars left between himself and starvation and he’d come to Long Beach to look for a job, any kind of job that would keep him eating after that fifty-six dollars was gone. He’d given up even trying to write, for a while.
He’d been lucky in one way, very lucky. He’d been able to sublet his hundred-dollars-a-month Hollywood bachelor apartment, which he’d furnished himself, for the same figure by renting it furnished. That left him free to cut his living expenses and still hang onto the bulk of his possessions without having to pay storage on them. He couldn’t have sold them for enough to bother about anyway because the most expense items were his television set and his radio, and both of those were utterly worthless at the present moment. If the Martians ever left, they’d be valuable again.
So here he was in the cheapest district of Long Beach and all he’d brought with him were two suitcases of clothes and his portable typewriter, the latter for writing letters of application.