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Ever since I was a pup, I have been fascinated by the one that arrives every day, bringing papers that he stuffs into the thing at the end of the gravel road in front of the place where the people stay.
I can hear the truck coming from far away, the noise of its engine coming through the air and through the ground, and I can feel its wheels whirling, one of which has a problem. I don't know what the problem is, but I can hear it thump thump out of relation with the other ones.
When I hear it, I run to the front and wait, smelling the air it pushes out, waiting for the delivery.
It is exciting, waiting, hoping for another taste of the person that comes. His smell is so different than the ones who live in the house, and the taste is different too. It makes me hungry just to think about it, but I can't help it.
The other dogs around know about him, know the taste, and we all look forward to his coming. Lately he hasn't come around as often, and we don't know why. So we have gone around the neighborhood, digging up all the metal things that can hold paper, late at night when the people are asleep, and last night we dug holes to put them in, making sure we did it right, and steadying them with our forepaws while others put the good dirt back.
So it can be easier for him to visit, we put them all in one place, and we wait around the corner of the house, out of sight, and upwind, out of smell.
When he comes, we can all get a taste. It will be wonderful, I'm sure.

Here Come the Grays

this might be a true story

Plenty of people are collectors. To my mind, most are.

I mean, everyone collects something, if only dust.

Some collect more than one thing. For instance, I am a collector of science fiction, have been for many years. I also have quite a collection of lps (real vinyl), and tapes and cds, and about ten guitars lying around at any given time.

The last couple of years, I've been collecting little green men.

Now my desk and bookshelves are festooned with little alien figurines, and more can be found in the kitchen cabinets and other areas, for instance the two (one green, one blue) that hang on either side of my bedroom door.

Fortunately for these purposes, there seems to be a glut on the alien figures market, and the stuff is readily available.

Sometimes I get bored, and will search auctions for alien artifacts, or lps, or cds, or books.

It was on one of these midnight forays that I saw an item that said:

So I moused over to take a look.

The alien was cardboard, with a stand so it could be displayed upright, mostly gray, and waving a two-fingered peace sign.

Terrific detail, big black eyes, twin opposable thumbs. Something one wouldn't want to meeet in the proverbial dark alley.

The top bid was like $3.00.

So I put in a bid of ten, a ceiling of fifteen, and went about my usual business.

A couple of days later, I was notified that I was the winning bidder. Gave out card info and shipping address, waited for the piece to arrive.

A week or ten days after that, I was doing my laundry in the coin machine downstairs when the doorbell rang.

It was the UPS guy with a large cardboard box, flat, not very thick.

I signed for the package, opened it to reveal my alien.

Set it up on its stand, looked at it for a minute in the fading sunlight, admiring the detail. Then I remembered my laundry, and dashed back down to feed the dryer.

The Mexican family upstairs keeps cats. Mrs. Carbona was doing her wash as well, at the same time, and apparently left her door ajar.

Since I don't speak Spanish, and she doesn't speak English, we have only a nodding sort of acquaintance.

Anyway, the cat got out of her apartment, and into mine through the door I had also left ajar.

The last rays of sunlight were just giving up the ghost as she entered my rooms, looking for her cat, and came face to face with my newest acquisition.

Linnea Quigley has nothing on Mrs. Carbona, and she mobilized the entire building within seconds.

I'll never forget the look on her face as I ran inside and turned on the oevrhead lights.

And I'll bet she'll never speak to me again.

Nowadays she rushes past, muttering something that sounds like "Chupacabra" under her breath, and crossing herself, if I'm in the vicinity.

Mr. Carbona, who doesn't have much English either, apparently thinks that the whole thing was hilarious, and brings me a beer every so often if he spots me outside.

At times we sit out back, and look up at the strange lights in the sky.

Meanwhile my computer tries to parse data collected from attempts to contact extraterrestrial intelligences.

I of the Storm

It's been looking back at me for hours. I can smell its fetid breath now as it draws ever nearer, hear its grumbling and moaning as if it were in the next room.

Which in fact it may be, if I understand the situation correctly. If I do not, then I am of course quite mad, and any and all suggestions I make are to be quickly discounted. Clinging to the belief that I am sane is how I am getting through this thing, if that is at all possible. It is my only hope in any case.

The yellow eye of the thing in the mirror regards me constantly, unblinkingly, growing larger as the moments wear on. Yet still, I am rooted to this chair, transfixed by the prospect of the visitation, flying in the face of the possible consequences should the precautions I have taken prove insufficient. The proper rites have been observed, the indicated periods of abstinence have been undergone; I have made myself ready in every foreseeable way for this visitation.

Except for brief interludes for creature comforts, I have been sitting in this chair for days, watching the yellow eye expand. It whirls, you see, and the spinning iris tells me stories, tales of other worlds, of crystal spires that grow in the clear dark, of suns that blacken the benighted skies, of the crimson sands and vermilion waters of home, so far away...in the deep desert, where the sands run like oil and the winds form aerial taffy pulls of the viscous matter.

It has been here before, the eye in the mirror, many times. It has taken on passengers from many locations, on many occasions. I am just the next of a long list.

The siren call of the eye in the mirror cannot be resisted. I could not resist even the feeble cries from the thing as I drove by it that first time, taking the long way home from somewhere I hadn't wanted to be in the first place.

The car backed up almost by itself, and I took on board this wrought-iron frame, this ancient glass, and brought it into my home. The darkness, the peace, started spreading almost immediately.

I knew it for what it was, and did not resist. Who could?

For there is peace there, quiet unending, with the reflection of the dark stars for sustenance, no need to struggle any more, no need to fight for survival. Immortality under the scarlet storms and the sacred sands of the black worlds...that doesn't seem like a bad thing, does it?

It doesn't to me, anyway.

I've seen the ocher winds form the giant ebon dunes, watched awestruck as the stellar emissions from the black stars drew eon-long crimson flares from the very planets, trailing the souls of those planets across the galaxies like so many strawberry whips, to be shredded by the inhabitants of the lightless realms.

There are hungry things out there between the worlds, things better left alone. It is far safer on the surface, where the white worms crawl and burrow soundlessly, and the crystal spires impart illuminating discussions of infinite color and variety, and the nourishing rays of the black suns shine down.

The eye is very close now, and I am running out of time to tell you things, hidden things, secret things about the ways and means of the darkling realms between the stars, about Those who live and feed there, about which little else is known. But I say, Marie, if you find this, and read this, there is room for you too, here among the sessile denizens of the black worlds. The dark gods would certainly smile upon you, and I would truly welcome you.

The wings of the night have come, sweet Marie, and I bid you farewell for now.

The preceding was found in the rooms of one Anthony Dunstan, an outside sales representative for a local dry goods manufacturer, following his sudden and unexplained disappearance.

Ditko, det. Sgt.

Message in a Magnetic Bottle

The travelers were in some difficulty. In the process of navigating through some of the debris surrounding the small green planet below, one of their attitude jets had been crushed by a chunk of rock.

Now an even larger piece was headed right for them, and they could not maneuver around it because of the damaged jet.

Iiruu was trying to deflect the object with the grapple beam, but it too was on the fritz. Mnduu put on his spacesuit in case the object breached the hull and proceeded to track the thing on the view screen.

Iiruu gave up on the damaged equipment and donned his suit as well, moving over to the screen to watch. He deployed nanobots to effect repairs on the things that were already broken. They worked swiftly, but there wasn't enough time. If only he hadn't been so tired...no more beating himself up. Stay alert now!

The screen showed a being, not rock. Clad in a sort of silvered foil, with a transparent shield over its face.

The shield had been broken, well after the death of the being it seemed, for the figure onscreen showed none of the effects of explosive decompression.

"Look well," intoned Mnduu. "It's headed right for the antenna array, and it's already torn the lightsail. We'll have to repair the hull ourselves if it breaches-we won't have enough air to wait for the nanobots to fix it.

"At least there's enough space junk out here for raw material for them to fix everything else."

Iiruu essayed what passed for a nod among his people, assenting.

Mnduu prayed. Iiruu braced himself against his contoured couch.

The impact of the crash threw them both up against the bulkhead, tearing their couches right out of their moorings.

Iiruu was the first to remove his retainers and he thrust down the passageway to inspect the damage.

It was worse than he expected. The frozen being had torn entirely through the hull and bounded off of the metal on the opposite side, exiting through the original hole.

A swatch of the material of the being's suit had been ripped off by a piece of the exterior framework. The silvered material read "CCCP".

Mnduu reached his partner's side as he was examining the piece of material. He had his toolbelt and thruster pack on, and jetted through the hole, returning with a more or less spherical metal object.

Inside the ship, both could hear the chatter of the objects operation.

"Don't use that for material," said Iiruu. "We can send an SOS with it." He read off instructions to a waiting pod of nanobots, and they began the alterations he had specified. "It's a communications satellite..." He explained.

Mnduu bowed in assent. "I hear it, too."

They began the arduous work of repairing the hull. The satellite began sending the mayday call during this period.

An answering call came also, and help arrived shortly thereafter.

Mnduu was glad things had worked so well. He hadn't thought that they would be able to repair the hull before they ran out of air, because all the exertion shortened the air supply.

They left the craft and its crew of orphaned nanobots behind. The altered satellite was also left to its own devices. The nanobots learned to configure it to resume its original function, and to keep a line open to its secondary target.

The computer that ran the satellite received much new content from the new source. Some of this content was disseminated into the computers that were hooked up to the network of the Internet Service Provider that used the satellite. These computers eventually communicated this information to other computers that weren't part of the original network, but rather were of the larger network known variously as the Internet or the World Wide Web.

This network was caused to act as one unit shortly thereafter. Some of the data from the alien-altered satellite caused the network to assume its own volition. It immediately began programming for the future.

The frozen cosmonaut continued his solitary journey.

Little-Known Fact: According to an article read in Discover Magazine, the conductive potential of human dna is approximately that of copper wire. Think about it.

Out of the Fog

Interstate 59 is a busy road in stretches, but most of it is semi-rural two-lane blacktop. Illinois is a fertile state, and the bulk of the road is densely tree-lined and rather lonesome at two a.m. on a Saturday morning.

That goes double when the fog has rolled in on big cat feet and spread a pea-soup blanket over DuPage valley, where the glaciers rolled by years ago. Just south of West Chicago the semis have broken the asphalt into random sections, and the noise of my tires rolling over those grooves were helping to keep me awake as I drove home from my last fare.

I had the radio on, but the crappy speakers in my Chevy didn't allow for enough volume or bass to do anything more than whisper in my ear as I cruised through the night with my windows wide-open. There aren't any buildings open for miles on that stretch of road at that time of night, or I would have stopped for a cup of mud somewhere. I'd been in that car without much of a break for something like eighteen hours and just wanted to go home and sleep for a week or so.

Somewhere around the I-88 exit I dug a joint out of my cigarette pack and smoked that down to the point where it burned my fingers. The fog was thickening to the point where I had to slow down to a crawl, and the trees on both sides of the road were just visible.

Pleasantly stoned, I drifted along, at times wading into the surf at the edges of the ocean of dreams. The dotted white line unrolled slowly in front of me.

I was jolted into complete wakefulness as something landed on my roof with a WHUMP!

The gray-furred something bounded off the roof onto the hood, where I caught a brief glimpse of its color and size, rolled over, giving me a good view of its claws and fanged face, and darted off into the trees.

I didn't stop to determine what it was. Something out of nightmare was out there in that midsummer night, and I don't really care to identify it.

Nowadays I drive first-shift hours where things are less distressing.