As his mother merged onto the freeway Tim realized that he had forgotten his spare batteries back home. He unzipped his backpack and saw his Game Boy, two games, t-shirts, boxers, socks and library hardback of Tales of Other Planets but no batteries. Tim wondered how recently he had changed his Game Boy’s batteries and whether they would die in the middle of a game.
He thought about asking his mother to drive back home and get the batteries he knew he had left on the nightstand but decided not to. He knew she was busy.
She turned on the radio and weaved around a column of four large trucks. A sand-yellow object slid partially into view from under the driver’s seat. He recognized it immediately as spiked tail of a plastic stegosaurus and picked it up. He held it in his hand and thought of the frantic effort he had made to find it a while ago. He had looked everywhere, under the bed, in every drawer, behind the sofa, under the sofa’s cushions. Finding it had seemed so urgent then.
By now that urgency had faded away like a drained battery. A new Game Boy game and a new cartoon on tv had been enough to distract him and then he had started the fifth grade, where none of the other kids, especially the popular ones, played with dinosaurs.
How long had it been here in his mother’s car? He counted. That was summer, he remembered, and now it was November. Maybe five or six months but it seemed almost a lifetime.
Tim’s mom turned off the radio and told him that grandpa had been feeling lonely since grandma died and that he appreciated Tim coming to visit him for the weekend and that he was a good boy to do so. Things get tough when you get older, she said.
Tim didn’t mind. For his part, he genuinely enjoyed visiting his grandparent’s house. He had since he was younger, when it felt like exploring an unfamiliar environment, when the backyard seemed like a jungle.
For a second he wondered whether he could get grandpa to take him to a RadioShack to buy batteries. Was there a RadioShack near his house?
His mother took the familiar exit and then passed by the landmarks of the trip, the places that had entered and exited his field of vision more times than he could count.
Grandfather sat down in his recliner in the wood-paneled living room. Tim looked at the two dusty framed posters on either side of his head, one of the Greek isles and one of a French castle with a name that he had no idea how to pronounce. Those pictures had hunger there for a long time, as long as Tim could remember. Once, when he was very young, his mother read a story whose title he could not remember to him, a story about a brother and sister who walked through a magic painting to another world. On his first visit to his grandparents’ after hearing the story he sat on the floor and gazed at those pictures, imagining what it would be like to explore the worlds within.
Grandfather had his hand on the remote and was flipping through the channels. He paused for a moment on a football game. His team was down by twenty at the beginning of the 4th.
“They just can’t get anything done today,” he said. He turned off the tv.
In the silence that followed Tim could near a neighbor park and slam the car door shut.
“I have something to tell you, son,” said grandfather. “Something important.”
Tim looked at him.
“A week ago, I went to the funeral of my friend Billy Baker, an old army buddy. I had known him for a very long time. Now he’s dead and Mark Anderson’s dead and I’m the only one left to tell our story. It’s a story I’ve never told before and I want to tell you.”
Tim looked at his grandfather with wide eyes.
“We came back in ‘46. My god, that’ll be fifty years ago next June. The three of us, me, Mark Anderson and Billy Baker. We had been through a lot together, first in the war and then in the occupation. We had had some good times and had seen absolute hell and after it all we were close as brothers. I never had a brother growing up, but I had two true brothers when I came back from Japan.
I went back home, back to my own house in my own hometown. But I had changed so much, and the world had changed so much, and I knew that things could never be the way they used to be, before. So the three of us moved out to California in ‘47.
In those days we would go hunting one weekend every month, camping out on Friday night and getting home by suppertime Saturday. We did take guns and occasionally shot a quail or a partridge but hunting was really an excuse to get together and sit around the campfire and drink whiskey and talk about old times. Talk about things that nobody else would understand. Something about being out in the woods away from our wives and children and jobs made it seem like we were almost back in Guam or the Philippines.
As I said, we went on those camping trips every month, at first. But then, as you’ll see one day, life gets more and more complicated. Children growing up, job responsibilities, relatives with health problems. So those trips went from once a month to once every two months to once a year by ‘51.
It was August, 1951. We’d driven up to the hills in our car loaded with supplies. We set up our tents for the night and sat around the campfire, talking about whether our sons would walk on the moon one day.
Then we heard it. Son, I’ve been in combat. I’ve heard bombs exploding and planes crashing. But I never heard anything like that sound. It was as if you could press down every single key on a dozen church organs at the same time. Then the sky flashed four times. Then the sound stopped and our ears started ringing. It was a few moments before we could really hear again.
‘The Russians have gone and done it,’ Billy Baker said. Even all these years later I can still remember just how he said it.
I said something like why the hell would they drop a bomb out here instead of Washington or New York.
‘Stop talking,’ Mark said. ‘Listen.’
We heard a constant humming sound and I saw a moving light through the trees. We picked up our guns, all three of us, and walked towards it. It was not like any animal, much less like a human being. It was truly alien.
I’ll tell you what we saw. It was a living creature, and that humming must have been its breathing. It was shaped almost like a capital L. The flat part was like a snake’s body and tail, slithering along the ground, crushing pinecones under it. It must have been six or seven feet long, dark blue or green, thick as a barrel. But it didn’t have scales like a snake. Its skin was smooth and reflective as if it was wet.
The vertical part of the L was like a tree trunk, taller than a man, with three moving branches, all covered in that same skin. Hanging from the end of each branch was a glowing eye the size of a grapefruit. They must have been its eyes because it pointed all three of them at us.
I’m telling you this in detail because I’ve played it over and over again in my mind, the way you can rewind a movie scene again and again on a videotape.
But at the time we just saw those three big eyes staring at us and we opened fire. The thing, the creature, it didn’t bleed. It disintegrated. Its body disintegrated into ash, into a fine powder. Only the three glowing eyes were left and they stopped glowing.
We just looked at each other for a few moments. We were lost for words. Then we heard that overwhelming sound again. We saw a bright flashing light in the sky and I knew, probably from experience, that it was some kind of plane taking off. I just knew. We stood there, looking up through the trees, watching it leave our world. As far as I know, it or they have never come back.
We took the eyes, one for each man. We picked them up and cleaned off the gray ash powder. We kept them hidden away for a long time. We didn’t tell anyone. Just the three of us, the little alien society.
Mark Anderson died of a heart attack in 1983 and we buried his with him. The rarest, greatest hunting trophy. And then Billy Baker died just this August and I buried the second with him. And I have the last eye here with me in this house and I’ve never shown it to anyone.”
Grandfather paused for a second.
“That is the story I’ve never told anyone.”
“Why haven’t you?” asked Tim. “If it’s true it has to be just, just, just amazing. The most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot since Billy got sick. There are really three reasons. You mentioned the first yourself. ‘It’s the most amazing thing I’ve heard, if it’s true.’ I can see a skepticism in your eyes, I think, where I saw surprise and a little fear before. And that’s as it should be. If somebody else told me that story I would’ve said that he was either lying or crazy or both. Who would believe me?
So that’s the first reason. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being seen as some crank, some crackpot telling the same story over and over again, telling them that I’ll be proven right one day when the aliens do come back. Do you understand?”
Tim thought for a second. “But you had the eyes. You have one now. That must be proof, right?”
“Perhaps. But you have to remember that that creature walked into the middle of my life, not the beginning. I already had a normal life, a wife, children, friends, a house, a job, a place in the community. Did I really want to leave all that to become some kind of alien researcher? To become a news story? To be hounded by reports and called up to testify before Congress and interviewed on radio and tv? If they accepted that eye as genuine it would’ve been my ticket to never being left alone again. Or maybe they’d say that eye was a fake and I’d be just another flying saucer nutcase. There were many of them then, still are.”
“You know,” he continued, “not six months later I was called up again. I won’t get into it, but I felt like an older man after that night, and after Korea. I’d had enough of being part of history, and if I went public with what happened that night I could have become an even bigger part of it.
I just wanted to live a little life, a quiet life, taking care of my children and being a good husband and citizen. I’d seen a lot of buddies die in the war, in both wars, and I just wanted to focus on the people near me, during the time I had left. And I knew that that night could build a wall between me and them. Because there was no way they could understand.
I knew it because it happened to Mark. After I got back, he would call me every week and tell me about some newspaper article he’d read about someone in Idaho or Michigan seeing a flying saucer. Then he’d start calling my secretary, telling her it was urgent and when I got on the phone he’d say that he read a magazine article on what Martian life might be like. ‘This might be the last piece of the puzzle,’ he’d say. He always said that. He always though that he was just one piece away from understanding who they were and why they came to earth. And when he had that, he’d be the Copernicus of a new universe.
In ‘54 his wife called me and told me that he’d been growing more and more distant from her and the boys and that now he’d been gone for an entire week without a clear explanation.
Well, Billy Baker and I did what you’d call staging an intervention nowadays. Turns out he’d spent that whole week investigating flying saucer sightings in Texas and Oklahoma. He’d heard a lot of stories but hadn’t seen any evidence. No smoking gun proof.
We told him what it was doing to his family, that regardless of what happened that night he had responsibilities that came first. It wasn’t easy but we taught him what we’d learned, which was that while we’d always carry that experience with us, we couldn’t let it be our whole story. ‘That way madness lies.’ We made him burn his scrapbooks of flying saucer clippings.”
He paused again and looked around the room, as if to find the right words in some corner.
“The third reason,” his grandfather said, “is shame.”
He sat in thought for a second. Tim thought he could almost hear his thoughts turning and whirring.
“Have they taught you about the moon landing in school?” grandfather asked him.
“Yes. We went on a field trip to the science museum and the day before we watched a video on it. ‘One small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.’”
“I’m old enough to have seen it live, back in 1969. Now I have a question for you, son. What would we think, I’m talking about all of us watching the Apollo 11 broadcast, if some moon creature came out from behind a rock and killed Armstrong and Aldrin?”
“That we’re hostile,” Tim said without hesitation.
“That’s right. If you ask me, that’s why they haven’t come back. Think about it this way. Hiroshima was about 25 years before Apollo 11. That creature almost certainly came from another solar system. If they have that kind of technology, then they must have weapons we couldn’t even imagine. If they took what we did to be an act of war, then they would have already destroyed us.
No, I think that we’re like a rattlesnake to them. You don’t hate it, you don’t go out and kill it, but when you hear it rattling you keep your distance.
But sometimes I think about what could have happened. We shot it because we feared it, because it looked like a monster to us. But it must have felt the same way. I wonder what could have happened if gave them a better impression of the human race. We could have worked together.”
Inside the safe was a black strongbox, inside of which, wrapped in a quilt, was a translucent orb about the size of a grapefruit. It seemed to be filled with a liquid and the tendrils inside swayed like kelp in a current when grandfather picked it up and held it. Tim thought he could almost see the ghost of a glow.
“When I die, I don’t want you to bury it with me, as we did with the other two,” said his grandfather. “I want you to have it. I’ll let you decide what to do with it. Maybe you’ll take it to a lab and be part of one of history’s greatest discoveries. Maybe you’ll just keep it in memory of an old man who lived a long time and saw so much. Pass it down as a family heirloom.”
That evening Tim walked outside and watched the color fade from the sky. One star appeared, then another, and then the veil of day lifted to reveal an archipelago of stars in a sea of black.
He knew, intellectually, even at that age, that the stars were very far away, that the distance separating him from them was larger than what the human mind could comprehend. But they seemed very close now, as if they were looking down at him.