The Baen Big Book of Monsters, page 4
Now the meaning was all too obvious. “My God!” I said to myself. “They feel they can’t handle me. They’ve gone to fetch Big Brother.”
And of Big Brother’s capabilities, I already had better evidence than Joe Watkins, for all his research and newspaper clippings.
That was the point—you won’t be surprised to hear—when I decided not to linger. But before I went, I thought I would try some talking myself.
After hanging here in darkness for so long, I had forgotten the power of my lights. They hurt my eyes, and must have been agonizing to the unfortunate squid. Transfixed by that intolerable glare, its own illumination utterly quenched, it lost all its beauty, becoming no more than a pallid bag of jelly with two black buttons for eyes. For a moment it seemed paralyzed by the shock; then it darted after its companion, while I soared upward to a world that could never be the same again.
“I’ve found your saboteur,” I told Karpukhin, when they opened the hatch of the lobster. “If you want to know all about him, ask Joe Watkins.”
I let Dimitri sweat over that for a few seconds, while I enjoyed his expression. Then I gave my slightly edited report. I implied—without actually saying so—that the squids I’d met were powerful enough to have done all the damage: and I said nothing about the conversation I’d overseen. That would only cause incredulity. Besides, I wanted time to think matters over, and to tidy up the loose ends—if I could.
Joe has been a great help, though he still knows no more than the Russians. He’s told me what wonderfully developed nervous systems squids possess, and has explained how some of them can change their appearance in a flash through instantaneous three-color printing, thanks to the extraordinary network of “chromophores” covering their bodies. Presumably this evolved for camouflage; but it seems natural—even inevitable—that it should develop into a communication system.
But there’s one thing that worries Joe.
“What were they doing around the grid?” he keeps asking me plaintively. “They’re cold-blooded invertebrates. You’d expect them to dislike heat as much as they object to light.”
That puzzles Joe; but it doesn’t puzzle me. Indeed, I think it’s the key to the whole mystery.
Those squids, I’m now certain, are in Trinco Deep for the same reason that there are men at the South Pole—or on the Moon. Pure scientific curiosity has drawn them from their icy home, to investigate this geyser of hot water welling from the sides of the canyon. Here is a strange and inexplicable phenomenon—possibly one that menaces their way of life. So they have summoned their giant cousin (servant? slave!) to bring them a sample for study. I cannot believe that they have a hope of understanding it; after all, no scientist on earth could have done so as little as a century ago. But they are trying; and that is what matters.
Tomorrow, we begin our countermeasures. I go back into Trinco Deep to fix the great lights that Shapiro hopes will keep the squids at bay. But how long will that ruse work, if intelligence is dawning in the deep?
As I dictate this, I’m sitting here below the ancient battlements of Fort Frederick, watching the Moon come up over the Indian Ocean. If everything goes well, this will serve as the opening of the book that Joe has been badgering me to write. If it doesn’t—then hello, Joe, I’m talking to you now. Please edit this for publication, in any way you think fit, and my apologies to you and Lev for not giving you all the facts before. Now you’ll understand why.
Whatever happens, please remember this: they are beautiful, wonderful creatures; try to come to terms with them if you can.
To: Ministry of Power, Moscow
From: Lev Shapiro, Chief Engineer, Trincomalee Thermoelectric Power Project
Herewith the complete transcript of the tape recording found among Herr Klaus Muller’s effects after his last dive. We are much indebted to Mr. Joe Watkins, of Time, for assistance on several points.
You will recall that Herr Muller’s last intelligible message was directed to Mr. Watkins and ran as follows: “Joe! You were right about Melville! The thing is absolutely gigan—”
All About Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past
INTRODUCTION
Speaking of giant monster movies . . . suppose they all came true and happened at once. Would mankind stand a chance? Would human bravery and ingenuity save the day? Are you kidding?
From this cheerfully apocalyptic yarn, it’s obvious that Howard Waldrop has seen nearly every movie monster that stalked, stomped, slithered, or oozed across the silver screen in the 1950s. Having also at the time seen nearly every movie monster that etc., etc., I can state this with confidence. True, I didn’t notice a walk-on by the Killer Shrews, but I might have blinked. And there were a few sly references which I couldn’t nail down. Identifying all the movies referenced (not all of them with giant monsters) would be an interesting exercise for the reader, or for an academic type, though in the latter case the number of footnotes would probably triple the length of the text. The tale begins with the title character from one of the worst monster flicks from the 1950s, and ends with the overgrown things from one of the first and best of the breed.
Howard Waldrop was born in Mississippi, but has spent much of his life in Texas, where he currently resides. His novelet, “The Ugly Chickens,” won both the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award. Most of his output consists of short stories, written in a very individual style around striking ideas. His collections of short stories include Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, Going Home Again, and the recent Horse of a Different Color. That last one’s still in print, so order it quick before you have to pay collector’s prices —not that it wouldn’t still be worth it.
All About Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past
by Howard Waldrop
It’s all over for humanity, and I’m heading east.
On the seat beside me are an M1 carbine and a Thompson submachine gun. There’s a special reason for the Thompson. I traded an M16 and 200 rounds of ammo for it to a guy in Barstow. He got the worst of the deal. When things get rough, carbine and .45 ammo are easier to find than the 5.56mm rounds the M16 uses. I’ve got more ammo for the carbine than I need, though I’ve had plenty of chances to use it.
There are fifty gallons of gasoline in the car, in cans. I have food for six days. (I don’t know if that many are left.)
When things really fell apart, I deserted. Like anyone else with sense. When there were more of them than we could stop. I don’t know what they’ll do when they run out of people. Start killing each other, maybe.
Meanwhile, I’m driving 160 kph out Route 66. I have an appointment in the desert of New Mexico.
God. Japan must have gone first. They deluged the world with them; now, it’s Japan’s turn. You sow what you reap.
We were all a little in love with death and the atom bomb back in the 1950s. It won’t do us much good now.
The road is flat ahead. I’ve promised myself I’ll see Meteor Crater before I die. So many of them opened at Meteor Crater, largest of the astroblemes. How fitting I should go there now.
In the back seat with the ammo is a twenty-kilo bag of sugar.
It started just like the movies did. Small strangenesses in small towns, disappearances in the back woods and lonely places, tremors in the Arctic, stirrings in the jungles.
We never thought when we saw them as kids what they would someday mean. The movies. The ones with the giant lizards, grasshoppers, molluscs. We yelled when the monsters started to get theirs. We cheered when the Army arrived to fight them. We yelled for all those movies. Now they’ve come to eat us up.
And nobody’s cheered the Army since 1965. In 1978, the Army couldn’t stop the monsters.
I was in that Army. I still am, if one’s left. I was one of the last draftees, with the last bunch inducted. At the Entrance Station, I copped and took three years for a guaranteed job.
I would be getting out in three months if it weren’t for this.
I left my uniform under a bush as soon as I decided to get away. I’d worn it for two and a half years. Most of the Army got torn away in the first days of the fight with the monsters. I decided to go.
So I went. East.
I saw one of the giant Gila monsters this morning. There had been a car ahead of me, keeping about three kilometers between us, not letting me catch up. Maybe a family, figuring I was going to rob them or rape the women. Maybe not. It was the first car I’d seen in eighteen hours of dodging along the back roads. The car went around a turn. It looked like it slowed. I eased down, too, thinking maybe it wasn’t a family but a bunch of dudes finally deciding to ambush me. Good thing I slowed.
I came around the turn and all I could see was the side of an orange and black mountain. I slammed on the brakes and skidded sideways. The Gila monster had knocked the other car off the road and was coming for me. I was shaken, but I hadn’t come this far to be eaten by a lizard. Oh, no. I threw the snout of the M1 carbine out the window and blasted away at the thing’s eyes. Scales flew like rain. It twitched away then started back for me. I shot it in the tongue. It went into convulsions and crawled over a small sandhill hissing and honking like a freight train. It would come back later to eat whatever was in the other car. I trundled back on the road and drove past the wreck. Nothing moved. A pool of oil was forming on the concrete. I drove down the road with the smell of cordite in my nose and the wind whipping past. There was gila monster blood on the hood of the car.
I had been a clerk in an airborne unit deployed to get the giant locusts eating up the Midwest. It is the strangest time in the history of the United States. The nights are full of meteors and lights.
At first, we thought it was a practice alert. We suited up, climbed into the C-130s with full combat gear, T-10 parachutes, lurp bags and all. At least the others had chutes. I wasn’t on jump status so I went in with the heavy equipment to the nearest airbase. A lot of my buddies jumped into Illinois. I never saw them again. By the times the planes landed, the whole brigade was gone.
We landed at Chanute. By then, the plague of monsters was so bad I ended up on the airbase perimeter with the Air Policemen. We fired at the things until the barrels of the machine guns moaned with heat. The locusts kept coming, squirting brown juice when they were hit or while killing someone.
Their mandibles work all the time.
We broke and ran after a while. I caught a C-130 revving up. The field was a moving carpet of locusts as I looked behind me. They could be killed easily, as easily as could any insect with a soft abdomen. But there were so many of them. You killed and killed and they kept coming. And dying. So you had to run. We roared off the runway while they scuttled across the airfield below. Some took to the air on their rotor-sized wings. One smashed against the Hercules, tearing off part of an elevator. We flew on through a night full of meteors. A light paced us for a while but broke off and flew after a fighter plane.
We couldn’t land back at Pope AFB. It was a shambles. A survivor said the saucers hit about midnight. A meteor had landed near Charlotte, and now the Martian fighting machines were drifting toward Washington, killing everything in their paths.
We roared back across country, looking for some place to land where we wouldn’t be gobbled up. Fuel got lower. We came in on a wing, a prayer and fumes to Fitzee Field at Fort Ord. I had taken basic training at Ord.
A few hours later, I duffed.
I heard about New York on the radio before the stations went off. A giant lizard had come up from the Hudson submarine canyon and destroyed Manhattan. A giant octopus was ravaging San Francisco, a hundred miles north of Ord. It had already destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. Saucers were landing everywhere. One had crashed into a sandpit behind a house nearby. A basic training unit had been sent in. They wouldn’t be back, I knew. A glass-globed intelligence would see to that.
Navy ships were pulled under by the monsters that pillaged New York, by the giant octopus, by giant crabs in the South Pacific; by caterpillar-like molluscs in the Salton Sea.
The kinds of invaders seemed endless: Martian fighting machines, four or five types of aliens. The sandpit Martians, much different from the fighting machine kind. Bigheaded invaders with eyes on the backs of their hands.
A few scattered reports worldwide. No broadcasts from Japan after the first few minutes. Total annihilation, no doubt. Italy: a craft, which only existed on celluloid, brings back from Venus an egg of death. Mexico: a tyrannosaurus rex comes from the swamps for cattle and children. A giant scorpion invades from the volcanoes. South America: giant wasps, fungus disease, terrors from the earth. Britain: a monster slithers wild in Westminster Abbey, another fungus from space, radioactive mud, giant lizards again. Tibet: the yeti are on the move.
It is all over for humanity.
Meteor Crater at sunset. A hole punched in the earth while ice sheets still covered Wyoming and Pennsylvania.
I can see for miles, and I have the carbine ready. I stare into the crater, thinking. This crater saw the last mammoth and the first of the Indians.
The shadow deepens and the floor goes dark. Memories of man, crater. Your friend the Grand Canyon regards you as an upstart in time. It’s jealous because you came from space.
Speaking of mammoths, perhaps it’s our time to join old woolly in the great land of fossil dreams. Whatever plows farms in a million years can turn up our teeth and wonder at them.
Nobody knows why the mammoth disappeared, or the dinosaur, or our salamander friend the Diplovertebron, for that matter. Racial old age. No plausible reason. So now it’s our turn. Done in by our own dreams from the silver screen. Maybe we’ve created our own Id monsters, come to snuffle us out in nightmares.
The reason I deserted: the Air Force was going to drop an A-bomb on the Martian fighting machines. They were heading for Ord after they finished L.A. I was at the command post when one of the last B-52s went over, heading for the faraway carnage on the horizon.
“If the A-bomb doesn’t stop it, Colonel,” said a major to the commander, “nothing will.”
How soon they forget, I thought, and headed for the perimeter.
The Great Southwest saw more scenes of monster destruction than anywhere in the world except Japan. Film producers loved it for the sterility of the desert, the hot sun, the contrasts with no gradations for their black and white cameras. In them, saucers landed, meteors hurtled down, townspeople disappeared, tracks and bones were found.
Here is where it started, was the reasoning. In the desert thirty-three years ago when the first atomic bomb was detonated, when sand was turned to glass.
So the monsters shambled, plodded, pillaged and shook the Southwest. This desert where once there was only a shallow sea. You can find clamshells atop the Sierras, if you look.
I have an appointment here, near Alamogordo. Where it started. The racial old age is on us now. Unexplained, and we’ll die not knowing why, or why we lived the least time of all the dominant species on this planet.
One question keeps coming to me. Why only films of the 1950s?
Am I the only one who remembers? Have I been left alone because I’m the only one who remembers and knows what I’m doing? Am I the only one with a purpose, not just running around like a chicken with its head cut off?
The radio stations are going off one by one as I drive from the crater to Alamogordo. Emergency broadcast stations, something out of Arkansas, an Ohio station. Tonight, I’m not going to be stopped. I’ve got the 30-round magazine in the carbine and the 45-round drum in the Thompson. I wish I had some grenades, or even tear gas, but I have no mask (I lost it in the battle against the grasshoppers). Besides, I’m not sure tear gas will be effective for what I have in mind.
On the dying radio stations and in my mind’s eye, this is what I see and hear.
The locusts reach Chicago and feast till dawn, while metal robots roam the streets looking for men to kill.
The giant lizard goes past Coney Island with no resistance.
The huge mantis, after pillaging the Arctic, reduces Washington to shambles. It has to dodge flying saucers while it pulls apart monuments, looking for goodies. The statue of Abraham Lincoln looks toward Betelgeuse and realizes that the War Between the States was fought in vain.
The sky is filled with meteors, saucers, a giant flying bird. Two new points of light hang in the sky: a dead star and a planet which will crash into earth in a few days. The night is beginning to be bathed in a dim bloody light.
An amorphous thing sludges its way through a movie theater, alternately flattening, thickening, devouring anything left.
The Martian fighting machines have gone up and down both coasts, moving in a crescent pivotal motion.
The octopus has been driven underwater by heat from the burning San Francisco.
So much for the rest of the country.
Here in the Southwest, a million-eyed monster has taken over the cattle and dogs for hundreds of miles.
A giant spider eats cattle and people and grows. The last Air Force fighters have given up and are looking for a place to land. Maybe one or two pilots, like me, will get away. Maybe saucers will get them. It won’t be long now.
The Gila monsters roam, tongues moving, seeking the heat of people, cars, dogs.
Beings with a broken spaceship are repairing it, taking over the bodies of those not eaten by other monsters. Soon they will be back up in the sky. Benevolent monsters.
Giant columns of stone grow, break, fall, crushing all in their paths. Miles wide now, and moving toward the Colorado River, the Gulf and infinite growing bliss. No doubt they have crushed giant Gila monsters and spiders along with people, towns, and mountains.
A stranded spaceman makes it to Palomar and spends his last seconds turning the telescope toward his home star. He has already killed nineteen people in his effort to communicate.
And of Big Brother’s capabilities, I already had better evidence than Joe Watkins, for all his research and newspaper clippings.
That was the point—you won’t be surprised to hear—when I decided not to linger. But before I went, I thought I would try some talking myself.
After hanging here in darkness for so long, I had forgotten the power of my lights. They hurt my eyes, and must have been agonizing to the unfortunate squid. Transfixed by that intolerable glare, its own illumination utterly quenched, it lost all its beauty, becoming no more than a pallid bag of jelly with two black buttons for eyes. For a moment it seemed paralyzed by the shock; then it darted after its companion, while I soared upward to a world that could never be the same again.
“I’ve found your saboteur,” I told Karpukhin, when they opened the hatch of the lobster. “If you want to know all about him, ask Joe Watkins.”
I let Dimitri sweat over that for a few seconds, while I enjoyed his expression. Then I gave my slightly edited report. I implied—without actually saying so—that the squids I’d met were powerful enough to have done all the damage: and I said nothing about the conversation I’d overseen. That would only cause incredulity. Besides, I wanted time to think matters over, and to tidy up the loose ends—if I could.
Joe has been a great help, though he still knows no more than the Russians. He’s told me what wonderfully developed nervous systems squids possess, and has explained how some of them can change their appearance in a flash through instantaneous three-color printing, thanks to the extraordinary network of “chromophores” covering their bodies. Presumably this evolved for camouflage; but it seems natural—even inevitable—that it should develop into a communication system.
But there’s one thing that worries Joe.
“What were they doing around the grid?” he keeps asking me plaintively. “They’re cold-blooded invertebrates. You’d expect them to dislike heat as much as they object to light.”
That puzzles Joe; but it doesn’t puzzle me. Indeed, I think it’s the key to the whole mystery.
Those squids, I’m now certain, are in Trinco Deep for the same reason that there are men at the South Pole—or on the Moon. Pure scientific curiosity has drawn them from their icy home, to investigate this geyser of hot water welling from the sides of the canyon. Here is a strange and inexplicable phenomenon—possibly one that menaces their way of life. So they have summoned their giant cousin (servant? slave!) to bring them a sample for study. I cannot believe that they have a hope of understanding it; after all, no scientist on earth could have done so as little as a century ago. But they are trying; and that is what matters.
Tomorrow, we begin our countermeasures. I go back into Trinco Deep to fix the great lights that Shapiro hopes will keep the squids at bay. But how long will that ruse work, if intelligence is dawning in the deep?
As I dictate this, I’m sitting here below the ancient battlements of Fort Frederick, watching the Moon come up over the Indian Ocean. If everything goes well, this will serve as the opening of the book that Joe has been badgering me to write. If it doesn’t—then hello, Joe, I’m talking to you now. Please edit this for publication, in any way you think fit, and my apologies to you and Lev for not giving you all the facts before. Now you’ll understand why.
Whatever happens, please remember this: they are beautiful, wonderful creatures; try to come to terms with them if you can.
To: Ministry of Power, Moscow
From: Lev Shapiro, Chief Engineer, Trincomalee Thermoelectric Power Project
Herewith the complete transcript of the tape recording found among Herr Klaus Muller’s effects after his last dive. We are much indebted to Mr. Joe Watkins, of Time, for assistance on several points.
You will recall that Herr Muller’s last intelligible message was directed to Mr. Watkins and ran as follows: “Joe! You were right about Melville! The thing is absolutely gigan—”
All About Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past
INTRODUCTION
Speaking of giant monster movies . . . suppose they all came true and happened at once. Would mankind stand a chance? Would human bravery and ingenuity save the day? Are you kidding?
From this cheerfully apocalyptic yarn, it’s obvious that Howard Waldrop has seen nearly every movie monster that stalked, stomped, slithered, or oozed across the silver screen in the 1950s. Having also at the time seen nearly every movie monster that etc., etc., I can state this with confidence. True, I didn’t notice a walk-on by the Killer Shrews, but I might have blinked. And there were a few sly references which I couldn’t nail down. Identifying all the movies referenced (not all of them with giant monsters) would be an interesting exercise for the reader, or for an academic type, though in the latter case the number of footnotes would probably triple the length of the text. The tale begins with the title character from one of the worst monster flicks from the 1950s, and ends with the overgrown things from one of the first and best of the breed.
Howard Waldrop was born in Mississippi, but has spent much of his life in Texas, where he currently resides. His novelet, “The Ugly Chickens,” won both the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award. Most of his output consists of short stories, written in a very individual style around striking ideas. His collections of short stories include Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, Going Home Again, and the recent Horse of a Different Color. That last one’s still in print, so order it quick before you have to pay collector’s prices —not that it wouldn’t still be worth it.
All About Strange
Monsters of the Recent Past
by Howard Waldrop
It’s all over for humanity, and I’m heading east.
On the seat beside me are an M1 carbine and a Thompson submachine gun. There’s a special reason for the Thompson. I traded an M16 and 200 rounds of ammo for it to a guy in Barstow. He got the worst of the deal. When things get rough, carbine and .45 ammo are easier to find than the 5.56mm rounds the M16 uses. I’ve got more ammo for the carbine than I need, though I’ve had plenty of chances to use it.
There are fifty gallons of gasoline in the car, in cans. I have food for six days. (I don’t know if that many are left.)
When things really fell apart, I deserted. Like anyone else with sense. When there were more of them than we could stop. I don’t know what they’ll do when they run out of people. Start killing each other, maybe.
Meanwhile, I’m driving 160 kph out Route 66. I have an appointment in the desert of New Mexico.
God. Japan must have gone first. They deluged the world with them; now, it’s Japan’s turn. You sow what you reap.
We were all a little in love with death and the atom bomb back in the 1950s. It won’t do us much good now.
The road is flat ahead. I’ve promised myself I’ll see Meteor Crater before I die. So many of them opened at Meteor Crater, largest of the astroblemes. How fitting I should go there now.
In the back seat with the ammo is a twenty-kilo bag of sugar.
It started just like the movies did. Small strangenesses in small towns, disappearances in the back woods and lonely places, tremors in the Arctic, stirrings in the jungles.
We never thought when we saw them as kids what they would someday mean. The movies. The ones with the giant lizards, grasshoppers, molluscs. We yelled when the monsters started to get theirs. We cheered when the Army arrived to fight them. We yelled for all those movies. Now they’ve come to eat us up.
And nobody’s cheered the Army since 1965. In 1978, the Army couldn’t stop the monsters.
I was in that Army. I still am, if one’s left. I was one of the last draftees, with the last bunch inducted. At the Entrance Station, I copped and took three years for a guaranteed job.
I would be getting out in three months if it weren’t for this.
I left my uniform under a bush as soon as I decided to get away. I’d worn it for two and a half years. Most of the Army got torn away in the first days of the fight with the monsters. I decided to go.
So I went. East.
I saw one of the giant Gila monsters this morning. There had been a car ahead of me, keeping about three kilometers between us, not letting me catch up. Maybe a family, figuring I was going to rob them or rape the women. Maybe not. It was the first car I’d seen in eighteen hours of dodging along the back roads. The car went around a turn. It looked like it slowed. I eased down, too, thinking maybe it wasn’t a family but a bunch of dudes finally deciding to ambush me. Good thing I slowed.
I came around the turn and all I could see was the side of an orange and black mountain. I slammed on the brakes and skidded sideways. The Gila monster had knocked the other car off the road and was coming for me. I was shaken, but I hadn’t come this far to be eaten by a lizard. Oh, no. I threw the snout of the M1 carbine out the window and blasted away at the thing’s eyes. Scales flew like rain. It twitched away then started back for me. I shot it in the tongue. It went into convulsions and crawled over a small sandhill hissing and honking like a freight train. It would come back later to eat whatever was in the other car. I trundled back on the road and drove past the wreck. Nothing moved. A pool of oil was forming on the concrete. I drove down the road with the smell of cordite in my nose and the wind whipping past. There was gila monster blood on the hood of the car.
I had been a clerk in an airborne unit deployed to get the giant locusts eating up the Midwest. It is the strangest time in the history of the United States. The nights are full of meteors and lights.
At first, we thought it was a practice alert. We suited up, climbed into the C-130s with full combat gear, T-10 parachutes, lurp bags and all. At least the others had chutes. I wasn’t on jump status so I went in with the heavy equipment to the nearest airbase. A lot of my buddies jumped into Illinois. I never saw them again. By the times the planes landed, the whole brigade was gone.
We landed at Chanute. By then, the plague of monsters was so bad I ended up on the airbase perimeter with the Air Policemen. We fired at the things until the barrels of the machine guns moaned with heat. The locusts kept coming, squirting brown juice when they were hit or while killing someone.
Their mandibles work all the time.
We broke and ran after a while. I caught a C-130 revving up. The field was a moving carpet of locusts as I looked behind me. They could be killed easily, as easily as could any insect with a soft abdomen. But there were so many of them. You killed and killed and they kept coming. And dying. So you had to run. We roared off the runway while they scuttled across the airfield below. Some took to the air on their rotor-sized wings. One smashed against the Hercules, tearing off part of an elevator. We flew on through a night full of meteors. A light paced us for a while but broke off and flew after a fighter plane.
We couldn’t land back at Pope AFB. It was a shambles. A survivor said the saucers hit about midnight. A meteor had landed near Charlotte, and now the Martian fighting machines were drifting toward Washington, killing everything in their paths.
We roared back across country, looking for some place to land where we wouldn’t be gobbled up. Fuel got lower. We came in on a wing, a prayer and fumes to Fitzee Field at Fort Ord. I had taken basic training at Ord.
A few hours later, I duffed.
I heard about New York on the radio before the stations went off. A giant lizard had come up from the Hudson submarine canyon and destroyed Manhattan. A giant octopus was ravaging San Francisco, a hundred miles north of Ord. It had already destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge. Saucers were landing everywhere. One had crashed into a sandpit behind a house nearby. A basic training unit had been sent in. They wouldn’t be back, I knew. A glass-globed intelligence would see to that.
Navy ships were pulled under by the monsters that pillaged New York, by the giant octopus, by giant crabs in the South Pacific; by caterpillar-like molluscs in the Salton Sea.
The kinds of invaders seemed endless: Martian fighting machines, four or five types of aliens. The sandpit Martians, much different from the fighting machine kind. Bigheaded invaders with eyes on the backs of their hands.
A few scattered reports worldwide. No broadcasts from Japan after the first few minutes. Total annihilation, no doubt. Italy: a craft, which only existed on celluloid, brings back from Venus an egg of death. Mexico: a tyrannosaurus rex comes from the swamps for cattle and children. A giant scorpion invades from the volcanoes. South America: giant wasps, fungus disease, terrors from the earth. Britain: a monster slithers wild in Westminster Abbey, another fungus from space, radioactive mud, giant lizards again. Tibet: the yeti are on the move.
It is all over for humanity.
Meteor Crater at sunset. A hole punched in the earth while ice sheets still covered Wyoming and Pennsylvania.
I can see for miles, and I have the carbine ready. I stare into the crater, thinking. This crater saw the last mammoth and the first of the Indians.
The shadow deepens and the floor goes dark. Memories of man, crater. Your friend the Grand Canyon regards you as an upstart in time. It’s jealous because you came from space.
Speaking of mammoths, perhaps it’s our time to join old woolly in the great land of fossil dreams. Whatever plows farms in a million years can turn up our teeth and wonder at them.
Nobody knows why the mammoth disappeared, or the dinosaur, or our salamander friend the Diplovertebron, for that matter. Racial old age. No plausible reason. So now it’s our turn. Done in by our own dreams from the silver screen. Maybe we’ve created our own Id monsters, come to snuffle us out in nightmares.
The reason I deserted: the Air Force was going to drop an A-bomb on the Martian fighting machines. They were heading for Ord after they finished L.A. I was at the command post when one of the last B-52s went over, heading for the faraway carnage on the horizon.
“If the A-bomb doesn’t stop it, Colonel,” said a major to the commander, “nothing will.”
How soon they forget, I thought, and headed for the perimeter.
The Great Southwest saw more scenes of monster destruction than anywhere in the world except Japan. Film producers loved it for the sterility of the desert, the hot sun, the contrasts with no gradations for their black and white cameras. In them, saucers landed, meteors hurtled down, townspeople disappeared, tracks and bones were found.
Here is where it started, was the reasoning. In the desert thirty-three years ago when the first atomic bomb was detonated, when sand was turned to glass.
So the monsters shambled, plodded, pillaged and shook the Southwest. This desert where once there was only a shallow sea. You can find clamshells atop the Sierras, if you look.
I have an appointment here, near Alamogordo. Where it started. The racial old age is on us now. Unexplained, and we’ll die not knowing why, or why we lived the least time of all the dominant species on this planet.
One question keeps coming to me. Why only films of the 1950s?
Am I the only one who remembers? Have I been left alone because I’m the only one who remembers and knows what I’m doing? Am I the only one with a purpose, not just running around like a chicken with its head cut off?
The radio stations are going off one by one as I drive from the crater to Alamogordo. Emergency broadcast stations, something out of Arkansas, an Ohio station. Tonight, I’m not going to be stopped. I’ve got the 30-round magazine in the carbine and the 45-round drum in the Thompson. I wish I had some grenades, or even tear gas, but I have no mask (I lost it in the battle against the grasshoppers). Besides, I’m not sure tear gas will be effective for what I have in mind.
On the dying radio stations and in my mind’s eye, this is what I see and hear.
The locusts reach Chicago and feast till dawn, while metal robots roam the streets looking for men to kill.
The giant lizard goes past Coney Island with no resistance.
The huge mantis, after pillaging the Arctic, reduces Washington to shambles. It has to dodge flying saucers while it pulls apart monuments, looking for goodies. The statue of Abraham Lincoln looks toward Betelgeuse and realizes that the War Between the States was fought in vain.
The sky is filled with meteors, saucers, a giant flying bird. Two new points of light hang in the sky: a dead star and a planet which will crash into earth in a few days. The night is beginning to be bathed in a dim bloody light.
An amorphous thing sludges its way through a movie theater, alternately flattening, thickening, devouring anything left.
The Martian fighting machines have gone up and down both coasts, moving in a crescent pivotal motion.
The octopus has been driven underwater by heat from the burning San Francisco.
So much for the rest of the country.
Here in the Southwest, a million-eyed monster has taken over the cattle and dogs for hundreds of miles.
A giant spider eats cattle and people and grows. The last Air Force fighters have given up and are looking for a place to land. Maybe one or two pilots, like me, will get away. Maybe saucers will get them. It won’t be long now.
The Gila monsters roam, tongues moving, seeking the heat of people, cars, dogs.
Beings with a broken spaceship are repairing it, taking over the bodies of those not eaten by other monsters. Soon they will be back up in the sky. Benevolent monsters.
Giant columns of stone grow, break, fall, crushing all in their paths. Miles wide now, and moving toward the Colorado River, the Gulf and infinite growing bliss. No doubt they have crushed giant Gila monsters and spiders along with people, towns, and mountains.
A stranded spaceman makes it to Palomar and spends his last seconds turning the telescope toward his home star. He has already killed nineteen people in his effort to communicate.
