ALL THE KINDS OF YES

The first alien to land on Earth stayed seventy-two seconds; he was a televolpt. He did three back-volpts and collected himself from the region of Lyra. "Good grief." iie said later. "What a mess. Everybody sending, nobody receiving. I shall insist that a warning be placed in the Ephemeris."

Earth was next seen by a flock of xenologists from Highfeather, who can stand anything. "Intelligence simply hasn't evolved there," they reported. "Social structure is at the level of crude incubation ritual with some migratory clanning. Frankly, it looks unnestworthy. A pesky lot of mammals have clobbered up the place with broken shells. Of interest only to students of pseudo-evolution."

Some time later an obscure mimestrel happened by and stayed long enough to compose a toccata for hydration known as "The Sportsday Mass Flushing Rites." For a while thereafter Earth enjoyed a minor vogue as a source of trendy audio seizures.

At the time of our story the only aliens in permanent residence were a small evangelical mission near Strangled Otter, Wis., and four crazy firemice from the planet Dirty who were speculating in New York real estate on the premise that the air would soon be ox-

2 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

ygen-free. There was also a rumor of something or somebody holed out in the central Australian plateau.

No regular transmission lines ran near the system. Thus our hero, in a manner of speaking—our hero when he arrived did so by chartered slambang, incidentally indicating that he was very rich or very desperate. As a matter of fact he was both.

His name would be rendered as an energy configuration followed by several gestures and is of no importance here.

He had ordered his tailor to culture him a soma of the dominant mammalian type, using the specs from the old Highfeather report. In consequence he materialized in the New State Department parking lot on a May morning rush hour in the form of a bare baboon-bottomed youth eighteen feet tall with- very peculiar arms.

Luckily his biotech had included some optional adjustments. After a short stroll down E Street which greatly enriched the Washington psychiatric industry, he ducked into the lobby of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union for a quick retouch. He came out looking like a young, idealized David Dubinsky and when he had extinguished the halo he blended right into the fleeing crowd.

The first thing he discovered was that the females of Earth had a mysterious appeal.

"So that's what that thing is for," he said to himself. "Imagine!"

A supple young female was clinging to his neck and sending tremors through Dubinsky's 1935 single-breasted.

"Will you nest, madame?" he inquired as the crowd carried them through a police line. Fortunately he inquired it in Urdu, in which it sounds remarkably like "Help, help!"

She left off biting his shirt button and looked up. His enthusiasm mounted.

"Hey> you're just as shook as I am," she gasped. "I can hear your heart."

All the Kinds of Yes 3

Her gentle wild song thrilled him, her lower lip was a perfect tractrix. "Let us hasten to the shade of the ro-ble tree!" he exulted in Quechuan. What an environment! He beamed, waving his free arm at the riot wagons and fire trucks howling by. "How flashing the lights, how mellow the siren song!"

"Oh, my," said the girl, her visual organs radiant around 430 millimicrons. She made a delicious blowing sound with her lower lip, dislodging soft strands of hair. "Look, you absolutely cannot trip out on the street. Not here." She pushed back and examined him. "Do you have a car?"

He was achieving contact telepathy. "No," he smiled.

A loudhailer began barking behind them. "Holy Toledo," she muttered.

Flight! FeartHe reached in tenderly.

"Sweet spring is your time," he pleaded. "Is my time is our time, for springtime is lovetime and viva sweet love. E-e-cummings. I am Filomena."

"Oh-h-h . . . ?" she breathed. Was it recognition? she had stopped going away. ^fYm Filomena. You're going to get busted." To his joy she took his arm and began pulling him toward Twenty-first Street.

"I'm still confused in this form," he told her, stroking a fire jeep. "My luggage lacks."

Filomena steered him away from the jeep. "Who isn't? What's your name?"

"Such a sky and such a sun I never knew!" he agreed.

"Your name. I can't remember you."

"Name." He turned slowly around, admiring the wilderness of Pennsylvania Avenue. "Rex?" he said. "Rexall-Liggett? Humble Oil!" It was all so perfect. The female was tugging him across a torrent of free vehicles saying, "Move, hurry," whenever he stopped to savor it all. Presently they reached an open clearing with an artifact in the middle. She seemed to be looking for something. He teetered on the curb gaping at the Washington Circle traffic grinding around them. "Fantastic! Oh, how primal. How unspoiled. Such

4 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

peace!" He inhaled deeply as a D.C. Transit bus belched by.

"Oh mother." She pulled him away from the curb; a gentle girl.

"I reluct—no, I am reluctant to find mine Handkof-fer. It will recall me. I sigh." He sighed expansively, peering into her point four three micron eyes. "Are you typical? Is my nose right?" He changed Dubinksy's nose a little to make the most of the monoxide.

Filomena's lovely lips now opened as wide as her eyes but she did not let go his hand.

"Hey!" somebody heyed at them.

RT bustled up, too excited to remember to look like Ralph Nader. He was called RT short for Rikki-Tikki, although some people in White Plains thought of him as Schuyler Rotrot, Jr. "Did you hear it? There's a nekkid thirty-foot monster marching on the White House. The whole city's freaking out!"

Filomena didn't say anything. RT went over and prodded a large yellow-haired person whose large sandaled feet were propped up on a bench nearby. "Wake up, Barlow."

When Barlow remained unstirring the alien came over too with Filomena. He put his free hand on Barlow's toes.

"How dear to me is sleep," he said. "For while evil and shame endure, not to see, not to feel is my good fortune, Michelangelo."

Barlow's eyes snapped open.

"Did I do that right? Your song?" The alien felt wonderful; confused but wonderful. He turned and rested his hand on RT's head. "Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself, Marx, 1818-1883. Great grooblie grock in the morning!"

"Great grooblie grock in the morning," said RT faintly, backing. Barlow got up. The alien let his hand go with RT a ways and then recollected himself. He stretched both arms over his head, stood on tiptoe, inhaled, exhaled, farted, spun around and snapped his

All the Kinds of Yes

fingers. Sparks came out of his fingers and shot into his hair, which turned red.

"Oh, oh, oh."

"no fiahworks inna pahk!" A squad car was in the curb lane. They hustled the alien over behind the drinking fountain.

"Was it wrong?" he asked them anxiously. "The birdwatcher is unseen, unheard. Let me hear you," he pleaded, reaching for hands.

"You're It!" RT howled softly. "Aren't you? Aren't you? What, who, Project Ozma? You picked up the atomics, you've come to save us, right? Omigod. Look, let me fill you in—"

"I think we should go elsewhere," Barlow said. He was very tall and plump; the alien stretched up to look in his face and then stretched down again.

"Don't do that," yelped RT. "Quick, a forcefield, an invisibility screen. Listen, the military-industrial feed-forward in this country alone—"

"Woman, find a place," said Barlow.

All this time Filomena hadn't said anything but just watched the alien carefully, holding his hand.

"You said, about your luggage," she reminded him now.

The alien's smile faded. He waved largely toward Arlington. "No hurry." He patted Barlow, RT, smiled again. "Why do we not nest? Everybody never breathed quite so many kinds of yes."

"Oh great, oh groovy," said RT. "Listen, if your approach is basically sociotechnological, you still have to factor in the psychological-ecological scene."

"Woman," said Barlow.

Filomena nodded and started leading the alien down New Hampshire Avenue with the others on both sides. There was a lot of noise over toward the Ellipse.

"It's hard to realize I'm really here," said the alien, squinting around luxuriously. "Utterly untouched. Nature."

"Runaway forward oscillation," RT was saying. "Locked into entropic slide."

WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

"I feel like that after a trip," said Filomena. She led them around a drop pole into the George Washington University parking lot. "I know where Greg keeps her car keys." They followed her into an unpaved alley and found Greg's Toyota four-door, which came a little above Barlow's knees. Filomena scrooched down and started groping under the back floor mat. Just as she found the keys a hand came in from the other side and took them.

"Oh, hi, Greg," they all said.

"Last time I had to get it out of Carter Barron amphitheater," Greg said. "I am brilliantly shitted." She put her books in the Toyota; a small, clean, thrumming girl in a majority suit.

"We have to help him get his gear," RT told her. He pushed the alien around to Greg. "Go on show her. Do the psi thing."

The alien took hold of Greg's hand.

"The crystalline'Style^s-a-gelatinous-rodlike-affair-a head-that-goes-around-clockwise-at-a-rate- of-sixty -to-seventy-rpm-in-a-certain-area-of- the - bivalve - stomach," he exclaimed delightedly. "It is perhaps the only rotating part of any animal, the nearest approach to the wheel found in nature. Huxley calls it one of the most remarkable structures in the animal kingdom. I don't believe it."

"It's happened," RT whooped. "They're really, truly here!"

There was some more of that until Greg said, "All right, but I'll drive," and they all got in the Toyota with the alien in the front seat between Greg and Barlow. "Make yourself thin," said RT, so he did until they told him not so thin. They started down Twenty-first Street to Memorial Bridge. RT was into pollution.

On the bridge approach lane they saw policemen stopping everybody. Filomena took off her tarn and put it on Barlow's blond head and started pulling out his shirt. "Spread it over your knees, she told him. Somebody suggested the alien should make his hair gray. When the park patrolman put his head in the Toyota,

All the Kinds of Yes 7

Greg told him she was taking her folks out to see President Kennedy's grave. Barlow smiled shyly around his hair. "That's where it's at," the gray-haired alien said rather loudly. The policeman's head swiveled, withdrew.

"That's where it's at," the alien repeated as they drove onto the bridge.

"What's at?"

"Mes equipajes. Valise. Portmanteaux," he explained. "It just called me."

"At Kennedy's grave?"

"That figures," Greg snorted.

The alien touched her cheek to see what the joke was. "Breakfast in Betelgeuse, dinner in Denebola, baggage in Arlington," he changed, laughing. Barlow was sticking the anitenna of Greg's radio out the window. WAVA's teletype went Rattle-rattle police cordon rattle White House. They drove into the Arlington Cemetery Public Parking and got out to walk up to President Kennedy's grave.

When they got up to the marble place they found a dozen people standing by the ropes, looking at the gas flame. Flowers, some of them real, were leaning on the big white box.

"Excuse me," said the alien. He reached in his mouth and took out a sort of micronode which he held out toward the catafalque. A bunch of daffodils fell over and something small and shiny whizzed out and snapped into the alien's hand where it began making a yattering noise.

"I saw that," said a woman in a pink slacks suit.

"Quick," hissed RT. "The shield, the hypnotic distorter!"

"I can't," the alien hissed back. "There's an overtime stasis charge."

"Stealing souvenirs," said the woman, louder. "I saw fiimf"

"Pay it, pay it," RT bayed.

The alien stuck his little finger into the yammering

8 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

thing, which quieted. When he pulled his finger out it was shorter; he put it in his mouth.

"I'm going to report you," said the woman, working up. Her face was shaped like the inside of a sneaker. "Vandalism. The President's grave." She started toward them.

Barlow stepped in front of her, taking off the tarn. "You'll have to excuse him, lady. He is the Muscular Dystrophy Father of the Year. We'll put it right back/' He took the thing out of the alien's hand and tossed it back among the flowers.

"Your claim check!" said RT. It was gone too.

Barlow was herding them all away from the Kennedys' place across the grassy hillside filled with ordinary dead people. Greg tried her radio again. Buses bumper-to-bumper, rattled WAVA, moving into position rattle-rattle reserves blah-blah Pentagori.

"What's a pentagon?" the alien asked.

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," said RT. "Thet professional military syndrome inevitably evolves—"

"Incredible," said the alien. They were standing on six ex-corporals, looking across the river at a platter of smog with white bits sticking out into the sunlight.

"The Indians are sending fresh-air signals," said Greg.

The alien sighed deeply. "The wild millions in their primordial might," he exclaimed reverently. "The dust of their passing darkens the sun." A 727 burst up from National over them, trailing kerosene, and two police choppers crossed below it going woodchuck-wood-chuck. "The thunder, the wild majesty," said the alien. He inhaled the kerosene.

Barlow sat down restfully on the corporals with his eyes closed.

"Terrible, terrible," said RT. "Do you think we can possibly qualify for Galactic membership?" He tore a little at his short hair and went back to see if the people had left the Kennedys.

Filomena was standing quietly holding onto the alien. They turned around so that he was holding her,

All the Kinds of Yes

and she put her other arm up around his neck and they slowly kissed. His hair was now a beautiful dark red.

"Hey, everybody's gone," cried RT, running up. "We can go back." He poked the alien. "Hey."

"Guard at ten o'clock," said Barlow, getting up. Greg put her hands questioningly on the alien's other arm and he wrapped it around her too. They walked back to the grave like that.

"How'll you get it?" asked RT. The flowers were a couple of yards beyond the rope where the guard could see them.

The alien tightened his arms around Filomena and Greg. "I don't really desire . .." he mumbled.

"You should," said Filomena. "All your things."

"I packed in a hurry," the alien said apologetically.

"Get it, get it!" urged RT.

The alien reluctantly unhooked one arm. It was a delicate moment. "Don't watch me."

When they looked back the thing was in his hand. A trapezact lattice; it twinkled.

"Open it," panted RT. "Aren't you going to open it?"

"It's so small," Greg said.

"It's only partly in this dimension," RT explained. "Time-independent spin waves. Magnon phasing." The alien looked at him admiringly.

"Open it!"

But the alien continued to hold it in a tentative way; it seemed to disturb him. "I don't really need anything now," he said. "Later. There is time." He put the thing in his pocket and laughed and hugged the girls. "I feel so, so yes! Let us do more native things."

"We could eat," said Barlow.

So they got back in the Toyota and went to the riverside Howard Johnson. The Howard Johnson Muzak was saying Unexplained electromagnetic blackout blah-blah Fort Myer. The alien ate three subs and a paper napkin and kissed Greg. He wasn't a vegetarian. The Muzak voice said National Guard and warned everybody not to park on emergency snow routes. Greg

10 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

tried to show the alien at least the Beatles on the Music Menu but it came out Man of La Mancha in white noise. RT went into minorities. Filomena explained to the alien that he had to katabolize with Barlow and RT instead of with her and Greg. He went with them happily and after he had adjusted the hydraulic pressure they compared everything. It was empty hour at the Howard Johnson.

"A totally sick society," RT said, back at the table. "It's hard to know where to start. What's the baddest, the very worst? What's your impression?" he asked the alien. "Our area of maximum social entropy?"

"What's your name, really?" asked Filomena.

The alien considered this, making a tch-tch-tch noise. Until he opened his luggage he^ really couldn't know.

"Binary groups," RT interpreted for theim_s"Natu-rally everybody carries index numbers. We couldn't pronounce it." The alien admired him some more, hug-ging Filomena and Greg. RT began telling him about behavioral sinks. Barlow's eyes were closed.

When they decided it was time to go the alien made a wailing sound and sat back down.

"The soma," he told them. "I seem to be inflated."

"Well, deflate," said RT. "You can change things."

They watched his nose shrink and swell and then his ears.

"It doesn't seem to work," he reported. "My tailor said there could be problems."

"Think of square roots," RT directed. "Cube roots. Intragalactic coordinates. Higher prime numbers."

The alien wrinkled his forehead, trying. Then he shook his head. "Isn't there a better way?"

Filomena made a soft noise.

Barlow opened his eyes. "There you are," he said.

And there they were.

"This. Is. A. Cosmic. Moment," announced RT. "Oh. Omigod. You female persons have a stupefying responsibility. Are you truly, existentially aware?"

All the Kinds of Yes 11

Filomena was leaning on the alien with her nose in his ear.

"Out," said Barlow. ^Out."

When they achieved the Toyota, Greg's radio said Georgetown hippie hangouts rattle-rattle strictly enforced. M Street was closed off.

"My aunt is in Costa Rica at a WHO conference," Greg said. "I water her violets. She lives in Bethesda."

The Toyota scuttled north and around and over Chain Bridge and rushed up Seven Locks Road. ^ "Oh, oh," RT groaned. "Hard-core kitsch. African violets. Split-level breezeways. Metal script house numbers. Desecration." He pawed the alien's shoulders. "We're not really like this. Don't look."

When they trooped into Greg's aunt's cellar rumpus room they found the blinds were closed. It was dim and mild.

"There's some incense somewhere," said Greg. She showed them her aunt's violets in the Plant-a-window. Some of them were three feet tall with feathery gray leaves.

"No/⁹ said Barlow. But he let her put Pink Floyd on the stereo deck. Then he took off his shirt and sat down on Greg's aunt's wall-to-wall and took off his sandals. Then he took off his jeans. In the dimness he was huge and plump and gleaming. From the stereo Ummagumma made all right sounds.

"Omigod." RT was getting out of his Trevira double-knit. "Are you aware?" Filomena unlaced her skirt and they were unzipping and peeling and stepping out of their clothes, and the alien dissolved Dubinsky's suit, all except the buttons, which fell on the carpet. He had no underwear and his soma was amazing. They sat down in a circle with Barlow and the alien put his arms around both Filomena and Greg and clasped them to him. There was a complicated interval until he put his face out. "Two at once is not possible, I think?"

"Not really," said Barlow.

The alien looked from Filomena to Greg to Filo-

12 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

mena and then his body flowed along the simple strong imperative of Filomena's welcoming legs.

Over his shoulder they could see one of her eyes looking very surprised and then it rolled up and closed; she was feeling herself entered, enveloped, in total empathy and augmentation. RT drew his breath in hard as the two bodies rocked and plunged in the dim Bethesda afternoon. Then Filomena arched and came twice with finality. The alien feeling her change around him raised his head and backed out bewildered, his soma incandescent, prodding air.

It was obvious what was going to happen. But Greg scrambled onto his lap and he went off into her, into the heart of the sun.

"Yes, oh, yes," he panted. And then before he could cool down, her feelings caught his nerve nets and his body began to build with hers until Greg mwwed and rolled him over completely clutched to him tight--and then she was finished and he was stuck again, kneeling over her homeless.

So RT put his hand on the alien's back and they looked at each other for a moment and then the alien put his hand on RT and RT did the same for him and they took care of everything that way.

Barlow was sitting relaxed against Greg's aunt's modular sofa with Filomena's hair over his ankles.

"Touch him," Filomena told the alien.

The alien reached out his hand a little shyly and Barlow took it and they clasped hands awhile, looking in each other's eyes.

"Two gates of sleep," the alien said.

"The one of horn, the one of ivory," agreed Barlow quietly and that was it for them. Greg went over and put on Brahms's Quintet for clarinet in B minor with Reginald Kell, which was just right.

Presently they all got up and showed the alien Greg's aunt's shower and had some root beer, and RT winced and flinched over Greg's aunt's kitchen mottoes but you could see he was deeply happy too.

"Virgin wilderness," said the alien, drinking root

All the Kinds of Yes 13

beer and listening to the diesels on the Beltway rattling Greg's aunt's windows. "The unspoiled grandeur of the wild."

"You sound like we're bison." Greg laughed. "Passenger pigeons."

"Some people don't listen enough," said Barlow.

"Aren't you going to open your gear?" RT fussed. "Oh, Gandalf. Earth's greatest day. I'm living it. The first alien contact. Me. You too," he added. "Us. The first."

"The purity of the moment." The alien sighed happily.

"Come on," said RT. He pushed them all back downstairs and rooted in the pile of buttons. "All the great things."

"I don't really," said the alien. "I was in a hurry."

RT put the lattice thing in the alien's hand. As soon as it touched him it gave a musical tweep and Greg's aunt's phone jumped in sympathy.

"Does that mean more overtime?" asked Filomena.

"No, somebody is calling me." The alien shook his head and pressed a facet of the trapezact. A circuit chip thing popped out.

"Galactic Central," breathed RT. "Now you report, right? Wait—"

"Actually it's local." The alien peered. "Forty-two north, uh, seventy-five west."

"Isn't that New York City?" asked Greg, who always knew where things were.

"You mean you—you mean you've landed in New York too?" RT protested. "But you're the first, aren't you? Aren't you?—Oh!" He broke off as the chip spun, threw up a flaw in space which bloomed into a round vertical lens like a 1910 Stutz Bearcat windscreen.

"Oooh, aaah," they all said.

"The hardware" sighed RT, hanging over the alien's shoulder. "The real thing."

The alien tiddled things at the base of the screen, Greg's aunt's phone jingling empathically. The screen

14 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

opaqued, flowed into black and white and became Julia Child's punishing some food on WNET.

"Wrong number."

"The New York phone system is in crumbs." RT leaned over further to watch the alien's fingers. This time the screen irised into a close-up of something large and pale and sluglike.

"Oh, my," gasped Filomena.

"Where's its head?" Greg asked.

The thing on the screen effortfully hoisted up one limb and began snapping an instrument at itself. Over one of its mounds they could see a mat lettered "Peanut butter for God."

"That's no alien!" RT yelped. "That's my father in White Plains cutting his toenails. Oh, tune it out, cut, cut!"

"You better lean off him, it's picking up your vibes," said Filomena.

On the next try the screen formed in living coldr a persimmon-red executive scene with a devilishly mod older man clasping his knee in a lucite pedestal chair. He glanced around and his face lit up with sincere da-vid frost-type joy.

"Frempl'vaxt? Asimplaxco?" he beamed.

"Vlngh. Excuse me," their alien said hesitantly. "I don't think so."

"Oh, forgive me, I thought you were my clients coming in. Look, by the by—are you an anaerobe?"

"Well, I haven't unpacked yet."

"Yes, yes, always a problem." The cordial person wreathed his arms around his chair back. "I do hope you turn out to be, I'd love to show you around. Would you believe less than twenty years to a climax ecology in this area?" He laced his fingers and cocked his head on one side merrily. "If I didn't force myself to be conservative I'd say ten, some days we hardly need filters at all. I've picked myself the most marvy site right on the estimated high slime line. Well, hi." He cocked his head the other way, peering at them. "You haven't been peeking about by yourself, I hope?"

All the Kinds of Yes 15

"Well, no," said their alien.

^uYou have gone native," he giggled, waggling one finger at them. They could see his mouth was down in his neck where his chin should be. "Tut-tut-tut. A friendly word, we have a firm option on everything on this side above twenty. The, ah"—he glanced at his console—"North American. The cream. Unless you're aquatic of course." He tapped his buck teeth, grinning like mad. "And you haven't any silly planet-forming schemes, no, no, no." One of his legs stamped nervously, gerbU-wise. "It's been a joy, a real joy. I have to break now, I hear my clients." He twiddled his finger ta-ta and the screen went blank.

There was a silence in Greg's aunt's rumpus room.

"Anaerobic means not needing oxygen," Greg said slowly. "In twenty years?"

"They're the bad guys, right?" RT demanded. "You're here to help us, to block them—aren't you?" "What did he mean about buying North America?" Filomena asked. "I mean, nobody could sell it to him."

"Nobody here," said Barlow. The alien looked at him and looked down again, not touching anybody.

"You help us buy it back." RT frowned. "Galactic credits. What do we use? Universal unit of wealth. Rare life-prolonging spices. Time! Planetary time-energy—"

The lattice tweeped again. The alien sighed and tip-tapped the base of the screen, which lit up to show a repellent greenish armored head with honeycomb eyes. "Oh god, more," muttered RT.

"Greetings in grexhood," rasped the monster. "We, ah, happened to overhear your communication. I grasp your present condition and trust that we do not offend your life values?"

"Not so far as I know," said their alien.

"I wish merely to observe that we too would deplore any rearrangements here. We being a chartered evangelical mission." His eye grids swiveled. "By the same token, we do feel concern over the rush of prospective development by this anaerobe group. We're thinking of

16 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

filing on behalf of the dominant species. It's been making the most gratifying progress, really an evolutionary threshold—Oh, thank you, Olaf." He interrupted himself to accept a light green glob of something from a jointed black arm. Olaf loomed briefly into view; bulbous black and shiny.

"Well, that's all I wished to impart. That will do, Olaf." He patted Olafs mandible. "We'll be in touch when you get your identity together."

The screen blanked.

"Does that mean he'll help us?" burst out RT. "Where are they? What else is going on here, what else?"

"What was that black thing?" asked Filomena.

"I think that was an ant," Greg replied quietly. "Comonotus herculeanus, maybe. Like one centimeter high. He's converting bugs." .

"No ally is trivial," said RT bravely, but he sounded hollow. The purity of the situation, the beautiful thing, ...

Barlow got up and picked up his jeans.

"It's time," he told the alien. "Let's find out who you really are."

They all stood up. The alien folded up the screen and it snicked back into the lattice. He looked very unhappy.

Filomena touched his arm. "Is that thing going to change you?"

"Just a memory. At first," he sighed.

Filomena reached up and kissed him gravely. Greg stepped up and kissed him too, and RT shook his hand. "We should stand back, there may be an energy vortex," he said. They went and stood with Barlow on the other side of the conversation pit.

The alien stood alone, looking at them. Then he raised the trapezact and stuck out his tongue and held the thing to it. Nothing happened. After they'd been holding their breaths about a minute the alien took the thing away from his mouth, still staring at them.

At first they thought he hadn't changed at all. Then

All the Kinds of Yes

they saw his posture was subtly diiferent. His shoulders sagged. His mouth sagged too, and his eyes puckered up, still staring at them. He groaned.

"What is it? What is it?"

The alien groaned again and stumbled toward them, holding out his hands. "I ... I ochquop—the word, help, let me touch you—"

He grabbed hold of Barlow.

"I'm pregnant," he said and put his face on Barlow's chest.

"Oh, you poor thing." Filomena and Greg began patting his back.

"Of. All. The. Stupid. Bourgeois. Irrelevancies." RT said furiously. "Great flying dog do."

The alien groaned again and they heard Greg's aunt's front door opening upstairs in the hall.

"Hi, kids! I'm back."

"Hi, Aunt Dorothy," Greg yelled. She took a breath. "Your violets are fine, I hope we didn't mess up the bathroom. We're just on our way from the, the park. How was Costa Rica?"

"I'm bushed," her aunt yelled back. "Don't try to go downtown, there's some kind of riot."

After a little more yelling they were all back in the Toyota. Greg had the alien's buttons in a Baggie and he was wearing RT's shorts under Filomena's poncho and shaking his head as if it hurt him.

"Are you really a woman, I mean a female?" Filomena asked.

"Cruddy epiphenomenon," RT was muttering. "Mod Squad. Fleeing from social censure. Looking for its father, maybe? You didn't even intend to come here, to Earth."

"Oh, I did." Tears welled into the alien's eyes. He rubbed at them distractedly.

"How can you be so heartless?" Filomena hugged the alien from the back seat and he grabbed her hands gratefully and groaned again.

"Where to?" said Barlow as Greg inserted the Toyota into the afternoon Beltway stampede.

18 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

"I think they're supposed to take the chain off Turkey Run Park last week."

"We should get something to eat, you must be hungry, dear," Filomena said.

The alien nodded miserably. He kept looking at Barlow and then looking out at the General Motors demolition derby on both sides and sighing.

"Refugees from interplanetary war?" RT grumbled. "Unborn heir to a lost empire. Oh, what a ripoff."

The Toyota shot out of the Dolly Madison exit and ran into the McLean McDonald's. "I'll get the Hi-Prot," Greg said. "And milk," Filomena called. The alien took the parcel on his lap with the lattice thing on top and they doubled back onto the parkway and into the Turkey Run cutoff. Sure enough, the chain was down. There was a Volkswagen camper in Parking Area A.

"Let's go down to the view."

"It's getting cold," said Filomena as they straggled down to the scruffy place above the remains of the Potomac. The alien's muscular calves were all goose-pimply.

"As an unwed mother your image is pretty sad," RT said venomously. "Can't you do something to keep warm?"

"If I only remembered to pack it." The alien fiddled with the lattice. "Oh yes, here." A gentle wave of warmth spread over them. The alien fiddled some more and they were knee-deep in invisible foam padding. "Hey!" Even RT cheered up. It felt fine sitting on the unseen foam.

"Now tell us all about it," said Greg, dealing out the food. "Why are you so sad? Is pregnancy a crime where you come from? Are you exiled from your planet?"

"Planets," said the alien a trifle sharply with his mouth full. He was looking less and less like Dubinsky. "Well, no, as a matter of fact it's an honor. I was"—he touched RT's arm—"elected. I w-won." He put his Hi-Prot down and gazed at them distressfully.

All the Kinds of Yes 19

"I can't adjust to your being a female." Filomena gave him a hug.

"I—it's not—oh, it's all so complicated." The alien leaned toward Barlow and his features seemed to melt a little. "I had no idea it was so beautiful—the two kinds and all the—all you—" He choked up, patting blindly at them all.

"Why, dear? Why? Tell us."

The alien pulled himself together. "I was desperate, I mean, after I got elected. There wasn't much time. And I'd made up my mind I was going to give my—my offspring the best possible start. Even where I grew up— and we're very vrangh, you know—even there was all so nothing. So used. I want to give them a good start. Meaningful."

They understood. "Of course."

"Some place fresh and wild, I thought. Free. So I

went all through the directory—Look." He squeezed

the lattice thing and it extruded a fan of helices. "Oh, I

forgot, you can't. I found your place here. Of interest

only to students, it says."

"We're listed in that?" RT poked at it. "Hey, it tingles. Telepathic engrams," he murmured. "A K-ob-ject."

"Actually you're not in a very good volume, you know. Funeral homes, is that your word? They were planning to use the system just beyond as a place for, well, garbage."

"A dump," said RT. "Neat."

"What kind of garbage?" Greg asked.

"Oh, space kipple. Boil-offs. I don't know. But I stopped it. I'm really very high vrangh." He nodded at them, wide-eyed. "Clout, glue. I recall now, I used a snaggler."

"A what?"

"Never mind," said Barlow. "Go on."

The alien gazed back at Barlow and melted some more. They saw he was coming to resemble Barbra Streisand.

"So I came here and it was so great." He choked up

20 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

again. "So beautiful. All the yes." He hiccuped and a kind of shimmer came over him. "I began thinking of you as pnongl. People. We had so much together. Oh, I just hate to do it here." He pawed at his eyes.

"Why not do it here?" said Filomena gently. "We'd love to have your baby."

"Wait," said Barlow.

"It's not just one," the alien told her.

"How many?"

"Thirty," the alien sniffed. "I mean, thirty thousand. Approximately."

"At one go?" RT whistled.

The alien nodded, gripping Filomena's hand, his bosom swelling, turning creamy.

"Well, that's kind of a lot," Greg admitted, "but couldn't we manage to care for them, maybe the UN—" ■

"Especially if you're rich," said RT. "There's really no problem. H'mmm. Thirty thousand high-status in-fant aliens, wow. Trade treaties? Cultural exchange. Conquest of space."

"No," cried the alien. "I can't, I can't! Not after sharing your—Oh, what have I done?" He hid his face in Filomena's shoulder.

"These kids," said Barlow slowly. "What about them?"

The alien lifted his or her head and met Barlow's stare. The shimmer was quite strong now. He or she drew a deep breath.

"It's not like with you. I mean, the first phase is like almost crude energy. They just f-fight and eat, you can't even see them and they're dreadfully fast. They destroy everything. That's why we use special planets now. And we send in soldiers to collect the survivors. After the third molt, that is. When they start to be pnongl There wouldn't be anything l-left.

The alien's eyes were streaming and the shimmer was brightening fast.

"When?" demanded Barlow.

The alien put her beautiful face in her hands.

All the Kinds of Yes 21

"In a f-few minutes. As soon as the s-soma goes."

They gasped, trying to realize.

"Does the thrashing start right away?" RT stuttered. "What, how—"

^ Barlow had got up. The alien was still looking up at him in a peculiar intense way. Suddenly they all understood that something unreally real was going on between them.

"Don't, don't," the alien whispered, holding the lattice thing. "You can't."

"I can try," said Barlow.

"It's too late anyway," the alien told him. "It's almost time."

Barlow flexed his large hands. "Can't you go someplace else?"

"I looked, I looked. The whole galaxy," the alien cried softly, hot looking very human any more. "Oh, you're so real to me, it's dreadful, you think a place is just wild and then they're people with all their—"

^'Yeah," said Barlow.

"Did you look in the Magellanic Clouds?" demanded Greg.

"Where?" The alien touched Greg to understand. "That's a different directory. Did I? It's so hard to think in this condition." She or it squeezed another helix out of the lattice thing and riffled it with shimmering fingers.

"Nothing. Nothing. Oh! Wait—how does this sound? Under kveeth-type: EMG profile sum unity. Postglacial, scenic, unaffiliated. Et cetera. But scenic, that's nice."

What about the peo—" Filomena began.

"Can you get there in time?" Barlow cut her off.

"Da. Si, si. II s'agit seulement de"—the alien clutched one of Barlow's hands and was able to continue—"pay for clearing the coordinates and frinx the drevath. Oh, my soma is going."

"Good-by," said Barlow.

Still holding on to Barlow, the alien nodded sol-

22 WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE

emnly. Then it clicked something very fast in the lattice thing and tossed it down.

"Matter transmitter, end-point simultaneity," RT muttered automatically.

"I'll never forget your song," the alien said wistfully.

Filomena stroked its beautiful mane. "We'll miss you, dear." The lattice suddenly sparked and disappeared, leaving a microchip. RT handed it to the alien to put in its mouth. Its teeth seemed to be very active.

"Are you going to be all right?" Greg asked. "Don't you need a doctor or anything?"

"No." The alien's form had begun to waver and break up like a watery reflection; they felt the sliding under their hands and pulled back, but still it was there.

"It was so threengl, so plegth" it told them.

"Tell us again the name of your planet," said Greg.

"Come back afterwards," Filomena cried.

"I vred, my official—"

"Hey," exclaimed RT, "about that garbage—"

The alien strobed into discontinuous spectra and the empty air whomped in, rocking them.

"knock off th' fahwuhks," someone yelled faintly from the parking area above.

They sat down in silence in the warmth, looking at where the alien had been. Across the river the mercury lamps were flaring along Canal Road and the sky above D.C. was the color of melted tigers. A jet crawled down it, whirling lights.

"Would you really have tried to kill him, Barlow?" Greg asked.

Barlow lifted his hands a little and let them fall.

"I wonder how long this lasts." RT prodded the invisible softness. "I should show somebody. National Science Council. CIA." He didn't get up.

"I have a B-baggie full of buttons," said Greg.

"How could he, I mean her children be so awful?" Filomena was crying quietly. "What about the people where he's g-going?"

Barlow signed. "Call me Calley," he said.

All the Kinds of Yes 23

"I think he left us some of his t-telepathy," Filomena told them. "Touch me and see if you know what I'm thinking."

Greg touched her and after a minute RT touched them both.

"Will it ever be like that again?"

They blew their noses. Barlow settled back and gazed up at the high glowing contrails. "Evil and shame endure." He closed his eyes. "I think I'll go back to Australia."

,■'■■