Robert Silverberg - Amanda and the Alien

Amanda spotted the alien late Friday afternoon outside the Video Center on South Main. It was trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien was disguised as a seventeen-year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olive-toned skin and hair so black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one. She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely certain. Then she walked across.

Youre doing it wrong, Amanda said. Anybody with half a brain could tell what you really are.

Bug off, the alien said.

No. Listen to me. You want to stay out of the detention center or dont you?

The alien stared coldly at Amanda and said, I dont know what the crap youre talking about.

Sure you do. No sense trying to bluff me. Look, I want to help you, Amanda said. I think youre getting a raw deal. You know what that means, a raw deal? Hey, look, come home with me and Ill teach you a few things about passing for human. Ive got the whole friggin weekend now with nothing else to do anyway.

A flicker of interest came into the other girls dark chilly eyes. But it went quickly away and she said, You some kind of lunatic?

Suit yourself, O thing from beyond the stars. Let them lock you up again. Let them stick electrodes up your ass. I tried to help. Thats all I can do, is try, Amanda said, shrugging. She began to saunter away. She didnt look back. Three steps, four, five, hands in pockets, slowly heading for her car. Had she been wrong, she wondered? No. No. She could be wrong about some things, like Charley Taylors interest in spending the weekend with her, maybe. But not this. That crinkly-haired chick was the missing alien for sure. The whole county was buzzing about itdeadly nonhuman life-form has escaped from the detention center out by Tracy, might be anywhere, Walnut Creek, Livermore, even San Francisco, dangerous monster, capable of mimicking human forms, will engulf and digest you and disguise itself in your shape, and there it was, Amanda knew, standing outside the Video Center. Amanda kept walking.

Wait, the alien said finally.

Amanda took another easy step or two. Then she looked back over her shoulder.

Yeah?

How can you tell?

Amanda grinned. Easy. Youve got a rain slicker on and its only September. Rainy season doesnt start around here for another month or two. Your pants are the old spandex kind. People like you dont wear that stuff any more. Your face paint is San Jose colors, but youve got the cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern. Thats just the first three things I noticed. I could find plenty more. Nothing about you fits together with anything else. Its like you did a survey to see how you ought to appear, and tried a little of everything. The closer I study you, the more I see. Look, youre wearing your headphones and the battery light is on, but theres no cassette in the slot. What are you listening to, the music of the spheres? That model doesnt have any FM tuner, you know. You see? You may think youre perfectly camouflaged, but you arent.

I could destroy yon, the alien said.

What? Oh, sure. Sure you could. Engulf me right here on the street, all over in thirty seconds, little trail of slime by the door and a new Amanda walks away. But what then? What goods that going to do you? You still wont know which end is up. So theres no logic in destroying me, unless youre a total dummy. Im on your side. Im not going to turn you in.

Why should I trust you?

Because Ive been talking to you for five minutes and I havent yelled for the cops yet. Dont you know that half of California is out searching for you? Hey, can you read? Come over here a minute. Here. Amanda tugged the alien toward the newspaper vending box at the curb. The headline on the afternoon Examiner was:

BAY AREA ALIEN TERROR

MARINES TO JOIN NINE-COUNTY HUNT

MAYOR, GOVERNOR CAUTION AGAINST PANIC

You understand that? Amanda asked. Thats you theyre talking about. Theyre out there with flame guns, tranquilizer darts, web snares, and God knows what else. Theres been real hysteria for a day and a half. And you standing around here with the wrong chevrons on! Christ. Christ! Whats your plan, anyway? Where are you trying to go?

Home, the alien said. But first I have to rendezvous at the pickup point.

Wheres that?

You think Im stupid?

Shit, Amanda said. If I meant to turn you in, Id have done it five minutes ago. But okay. I dont give a damn where your rendezvous point is. I tell you, though, you wouldnt make it as far as San Francisco rigged up the way you are. Its a miracle youve avoided getting caught until now.

And youll help me?

Ive been trying to. Come on. Lets get the hell out of here. Ill take you home and fix you up a little. My cars in the lot on the corner.

Okay.

Whew!Amanda shook her head slowly. Christ, some people are awfully hard to help.

As she drove out of the center of town, Amanda glanced occasionally at the alien sitting tensely to her right. Basically the disguise was very convincing, Amanda thought. Maybe all the small details were wrong, the outer stuff, the anthropological stuff, but the alien looked human, it sounded human, it even smelled human. Possibly it could fool ninety-nine people out of a hundred, or maybe more than that. But Amanda had always had a good eye for detail. And the particular moment she had spotted the alien on South Main she had been unusually alert, sensitive, all raw nerves, every antenna up. Of course, it wasnt aliens she was hunting for, but just a diversion, a little excitement, something to fill the great gaping emptiness that Charley Taylor had left in her weekend.

Amanda had been planning the weekend with Charley all month. Her parents were going to go off to Lake Tahoe for three days, her kid sister had wangled permission to accompany them, and Amanda was going to have the house to herself, just her and Macavity the cat. And Charley. He was going to move in on Friday afternoon and theyd cook dinner together and get blasted on her stash of choice powder and watch five or six of her parents X-rated cassettes, and Saturday theyd drive over to the city and cruise some of the kinky districts and go to that bathhouse on Folsom where everybody got naked and climbed into the giant Jacuzzi, and then on SundayWell, none of that was going to happen. Charley had called on Thursday to cancel. Something big came up, he said, and Amanda had a pretty good idea what that was, which his hot little cousin from New Orleans who sometimes came flying out here on no notice at all; but the inconsiderate bastard seemed to be entirely unaware of how much Amanda had been looking forward to this weekend, how much it meant to her, how painful it was to be dumped like this. She had run through the planned events of the weekend in her mind so many times that she almost felt as though she had experienced them: it was that real to her. But overnight it had become unreal. Three whole days on her own, the house to herself, and so early in the semester that there was no homework to think about, and Charley had stood her up! What was she supposed to do now, call desperately around town to scrounge up some old lover as a playmate? Or pick up some stranger downtown? Amanda hated to fool around with strangers. She was half tempted to go over to the city and just let things happen, but they were all weirdos and creeps over there, anyway, and she knew what she could expect. What a waste, not having Charley! She could kill him for robbing her of the weekend.

Now there was the alien, though. A dozen of these star people had come to Earth last year, not in a flying saucer as everybody had expected, but in little capsules that floated like milkweed seeds, and they had landed in a wide arc between San Diego and Salt Lake City. Their natural form, so far as anyone could tell for sure, was something like a huge jellyfish with a row of staring purple eyes down one wavy margin, but their usual tactic was to borrow any local body they found, digesting it and turning themselves into an accurate imitation of it. One of them had made the mistake of turning itself into a brown mountain bear and another into a bobcatmaybe they thought that those were the dominant life-forms on Earthbut the others had taken on human bodies, at the cost of at least ten lives. Then they went looking to make contact with government leaders, and naturally they were rounded up very swiftly and interned, some in mental hospitals and some in county jails, but eventuallyas soon as the truth of what they really were sank inthey were all put in a special detention camp in Northern California. Of course, a tremendous fuss was made over them, endless stuff in the papers and on the tube, speculation by this heavy thinker and that about the significance of their mission, the nature of their biochemistry, a little wild talk about the possibility that more of their kind might be waiting undetected out there and plotting to do God knows what, and all sorts of that stuff, and then came a government clamp on the entire subject, no official announcements except that discussions with the visitors were continuing; and after a while the whole thing degenerated into dumb alien jokes (Why did the alien cross the road?) and Halloween invader masks, and then it moved into the background of everyones attention and was forgotten. And remained forgotten until the announcement that one of the creatures had slipped out of the camp somehow and was loose within a hundred-mile zone around San Francisco. Preoccupied as she was with her anguish over Charleys heartlessness, even Amanda had managed to pick up