The Invasion

It was after his escape from the infamous E People that Balfour's usefulness to the Section came into question. Balfour, meanwhile, was in a bar, where he had ordered Irish on ice. Just on the corner, waiting for a bus, he had seen what he thought was an A Person. He didn't know if it was male or female, but of course it hardly mattered, not even to another A Person, they were so timid.

He intended to go on to rye or bourbon after the first drink, the milder drink. Nothing stronger than tea had been available to him in the Section's small, secluded hospital. The bar was clean and dark and quiet, and after the second sip he asked the dark-haired girl if he could order another whiskey sour for her.

"Yes, you can."

He moved down the three empty stools and sat next to her. The frothy little goblet appeared and she started to thank him, but then a shovel grated on the sidewalk outside and Balfour shuddered, gasped, spilled part of his drink.

"I know just how you feel," she said. "It always goes right through me, too—sets my teeth (concluded on page 78)Invasion(continued from page 75) like on edge, you know."

Tasting acid, Balfour swallowed, drank from his glass. "How the E People make the sound, we don't know. They are only superficially similar to us, after all. It may indicate anger. Or pleasure. Usually they are very careful to do no more than mimic us. Perhaps there is some subconscious, hereditary remembrance of the sound. Which is why perhaps even the noise of a shovel grating can have the effect it does. By which I mean," he saw his face in the mirror behind the bar, grimaced at it, "that at some long-forgotten time in human history there was possibly a prior contact with the E People."

The dark-haired girl held the stem of the cherry and plumped it up and down in the drink and then licked it off, all while he was talking. Then she said, "You sound like a professor or something. I never heard of any E People. What are they? Oh, and I mean, you're very kind to buy me this drink. I usually never have more than one before lunch, because I'm on a budget. What are E People?"

Balfour said that he wasn't supposed to tell her. " 'The world is not yet ready,' to put it mildly. If I weren't still so sick I wouldn't be talking about it at all. It can't be what I really think it is, it can't be. They think I'm cured, but I'm not." His voice was somewhat uneven.

The girl took a tiny bite of the cherry and a tiny sip of the drink. "That's a healthy sign, anyway, that you recognize it. My mother, now, she was away twice, once for almost a year and once for two months, and the doctor there, he said to us, 'She recognizes that she needs help and that's the first step toward recovery.' I'm not embarrassed to talk about it. It's just like any other sickness, that's the way I feel about it."

He shook his head. The glass before him was empty. He looked at the row of bottles for one with an American label and a green revenue stamp, and ordered a double. The girl with the dark hair frowned slightly. "I hope you had a late breakfast, or something," she said.

"No." He looked at her, feeling his way. "I suppose I should get something to eat. But restaurants are crowded and smelly."

Very promptly she said, "There's a Chinese place right near where I live, it's not a restaurant, they put up the food to take out. Do you like Chinese food?"

"All right."

• • •

"What they did to me, what they did to me, what they did——"

His voice was rising and she put her hand over his mouth. It was dark, though still afternoon, with the curtain drawn across the window on the air shaft. They were both naked. It had been a relief to him when she asked for money, but although this meant one less thing to worry about, neither that nor the other relief had lasted long.

"I can't let you stay here if you're not going to be quiet, Bobby," she said.

"I can feel them," he whispered.

"More trouble with the super I don't need ... but you're going to be quiet now, aren't you?"

"Yes ..."

There was a lipstick-smeared cup of coffee on the crowded night table; he shook his head when she offered it before drinking from it herself, but he took the cigarette she offered next.

"You see, now, with my mother," the girl explained, "she had this idea that Our Lady was real mad at her because she broke this promise. She wouldn't eat, she wouldn't wash, she wouldn't go out——Anyway, like I say, she was in the hospital those two times, and they gave her treatments and pills and now she's just like she was before and she even goes to church and everything. So what I'm trying to say is ... the first time you were in the hospital, maybe it didn't cure you completely, but don't be afraid to go back. The second time is lucky."

He rolled his head slowly from side to side.

"What's it all about, then?" She leaned over and kissed him. "Want to tell me?"

A long moment passed while he stared up at her and her questioning smile. Then he began to talk. "This is my own idea about it," he said, finally. He shifted his glance to the burning end of the cigarette. He shrugged, spoke more quickly. "Aeneas fled from burning Troy—yes? With his old father on his back. No—better example. Something like a barbarian invasion is taking place on the outer edges of the galaxy. The Huns are bumping the Tartars and the Tartars are shoving the Gauls and the Gauls are pushing the Goths. And the Goths invade Rome because they have no other place to go. Can you imagine what they must be up against to seek refuge here? We don't know too much about them. At first there were only two types and we called them the A People and the B People. Now the list has gotten as far as F ...

"Do you know what I'm talking about?"

She nodded, half turned to get her cigarette from the tray. After a puff she said, "Like, refugees. But how come you're not supposed to tell?"

A look of pain and hatred and despair passed over his face. "Oh, my God," he said. "You don't know ... the E People ... their metabolisms are so entirely different from ours!" Then he said, "What? How come? Ahh ... it's a verse from Coleridge, I think. About a man, you see, who's walking down a lonely road at night,

'And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.'

"That's how come. And that's how much use it all is. The wave of the future, yeah ... I'm hot. I hurt. I'm sick."

She asked him if he'd like something cold to drink, with ice in it.

He said he would. "With whiskey, too."

There wasn't any, but she agreed, with only a little reluctance, to go and get some if he promised to be quiet and not go out in the hall with nothing on. He promised. "Oh, God, I'm sick," he mumbled. "I'm so sick."

• • •

The liquor store was a small one and had just made its afternoon bank deposit and didn't have change. The man knew her and asked, "Where'd you get a hundred-dollar bill?"

"From the flying-saucer people," she said. He laughed, and so did she. In the supermarket she looked to see what she could buy fancy enough to justify presenting the big bill, and in so doing she forgot to look at the clock. The checker wouldn't cash it when she finally got through the line, and the manager asked for identification and copied her name and address from the electric-light bill, together with the serial number of the money.

"This is a changing neighborhood and I'm new here and I have to be careful," he said.

"Look at the time!" she exclaimed.

• • •

There was a bad smell and a funny sound in the apartment. "Bobby?" she called, her heart going queer. She hurried to open the bedroom door. "Bobby?"

On the bed, flaccid, torn and bleeding from a hundred holes, lay the still-recognizable outlines of what had been Robert Balfour. On the body, on the bed, on the floor, on the walls, window and ceiling were the other things, all like tiny-tiny people. They seemed to grow, even as she looked at them. And, even as she looked, two more holes appeared on the body and two more little creatures wriggled out of them. There must have been over a hundred of them. A sound arose, like the piercing nighttime sound of insects.

"Bobby?

"Bobby?"

Powerless, stricken, she slumped forward into the room. Then, for the first time, they seemed to see her. They turned toward her with one movement, and from them now arose another sound—harsh, shrill, raucous, like the noise of a shovel grating on a sidewalk.