Stories of alien invasions of Earth have been a standard form of science fiction since at least the time of H. G. Wells—in fact, this subgenre was so thoroughly explored and exploited in sf’s early years that writers soon had to turn to variations on the theme. (Perhaps the classic novel of this latter type was Fredric Brown’s Martians, Go Home, published more than a quarter century ago.) Still, sf writers are known for their ingenuity, so they’re still able to come up with new approaches… Carol Emshwiller has long been one of our most original writers, and her version of the alien invasion is characteristically offbeat, intriguing … and satirical.

Carol Emshwiller’s stories have been appearing in the genre sf publications since 1955; many have also turned up in nongenre magazines such as Cavalier, New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Transatlantic Review, and TriQuarterly. A collection of her short stories, Joy in Our Cause, was published in 1974.

THE START OF THE END OF THE WORLD

Carol Emshwiller

First the distant sound of laughter. I thought it was laughter. Kind of chuckling… choking maybe … or spasms of some sort. Can’t explain it. Scary laughter coming closer. Then they came in in a scary way, pale, with shiny raincoats and fogged glasses, sat down, and waited out the storm here. Asked only for warm water to sip. Crossed their legs with refined grace and watched late-night TV. They spoke of not wanting to end up in a museum … neither them nor their talismans nor their flags, their dripping flags. They looked so vulnerable and sad … chuckling, choking sad that I lost all fear of them. They left in the morning, most of them. All but three left. Klimp, their regional director, and two others stayed.

“It is important and salutary to speak of incomprehensible things,” they said, and so we did till dawn. They also said that their love for this planet, “this splendid planet,” knows no bounds, and that they could take over with just a tiny smidgen of violence, especially since we had been softening up the people ourselves as though in preparation for them. I believed them. I saw their love for this place in their eyes.

“But am I”—and I asked them this directly—”am I, a woman, and a woman of, should I say, a certain age, am I really to be included in the master plan?” They implied, yes, chuckling (choking), but then everyone has always tried to give me that impression (former husband especially) and it never was true before. It’s nice, though, that they said they couldn’t do it without me and others like me.

What they also say is, “As sun to earth, so kitchen is to house and so house is to the rest of the world. Politics,” they say, “begins at home, and most especially in the kitchen, place of warmth, chemistry, and changes, means toward ends. Grandiose plans cooked up here. A house,” they say, “hardly need be more than kitchen and a few good chairs.” Where they come from that’s the way it is. And I agree that if somebody wanted to take over the Earth, it’s true: they could do worse than to do it from the kitchen.

They also say that it will be necessary to let the world lie fallow and recoup for fifteen years. That’s about step number three of their plan.

“But first,” they say (step number one), “it will be necessary to get rid of the cats.”

Klimp! His kind did not, absolutely not descend from apelike creatures, but from higher beings. Sky folk. We can’t understand that, he said. Their sex organs are, he told me, pure and unconnected to excretory organs in any way. Body hair in different patterns. None, and this is significant, under the arms, and, actually, what’s on their head really isn’t hair either. Just looks like it. They’re a manifestation in living form of a kind of purity not to be achieved by any of us except by artificial means. They also say that, because of what they are, they will do a lot better with this world than we do. Klimp promises me that and I believe him. They’re simply crazy about this world. “It’s a treasure,” Klimp keeps saying.

I ask, “How much time is there, actually, till doomsday, or whatever you call it?”

No special name, though Restoration Day or (even better) Resurrection Day might serve. No special time either. (“Might take a lifetime. Might not.”) They live like that but without confusion.

But first, as they say, it is necessary to get rid of the cats, though I am trying to see both sides: (a) Klimp’s and his friends’ and (b) trying to come to terms with three hyperactive cats that I’ve had since the divorce. The white one is throwing up on the rug. Turns out to be a rubber band and a long piece of string.

Of the three, Klimp is clearly mine. He likes to pass his cool hands … his always-cold hands through my hair, but if I try to sit on his lap to confirm our relationship, he can’t bear that. We’ve known each other almost two weeks now, shuffled along in the park (I name the trees), the shady side of streets, examined the different kinds of grasses. (I never noticed how many kinds there were.) He looks all right from every angle but one, and he always wears his raincoat so we don’t have any trouble.

“I accept,” I say, when he asks me a few days later, anthropomorphising as usual, and tired of falling in love with TV stars and newsmen or the equivalent. I put on my old wedding ring and start, then, to keep a record of the takeover, kitchen by kitchen by kitchen… .

Klimp says, “Let’s get in bed and see what happens.”

Something does, but I won’t say what.

I haven’t seen any of them, even Klimp, totally naked, though a couple of times I saw him wearing nothing but a teacup.

(They read our sex manuals before beginning their takeover.)

But willing servants (women are) of almost anything that looks or feels like male or has a raspy voice, regardless of the real sex whatever that may be, or if sex at all. And sometimes one had to make do (we older women do, anyway) with the peculiar, the alien or the partly alien, the egocentric, the disgruntled, the dissipated… . But also, and especially, willing servants of things that can fly, or things, rather, that may have descended from things that could fly once or things that could almost fly (though lots of things can almost fly). But I heard some woman say that someone told her that one had been seen actually vibrating himself into the sky, arched back, hands in pockets … had also, this person said, been seen throwing money off the Ambassador Bridge. The ultimate subversion.

Also I heard they may have already infiltrated the mayonnaise company. A great deal of harm can be done simply by loosening all the jar lids. Is this without violence! And when one of them comes up behind you on the street, grabs your arm with long, strong thumb and forefinger, quietly asking for money and your watch and promising not to hurt you

. . especially not to hurt you, then you give them. Afterward I hear they sometimes crumple the bills into their big, white pipes and smoke them on the spot. They flush the watches down toilets. This last I’ve seen myself.

But is all this without violence! Klimp takes the time to explain it to me. We’re using the same word with two somewhat different meanings, as happens with people from different places. But then there’s never any need to justify the already righteous. Sure of his own kindnesses, as look at him right now, Klimp, kiss to earlobe and one finger drawing tickly circles in the palm of my hand. He sees, he says, the Eastern Seaboard as it could be where it the kind of perfection that it should be. He says it will be splendid and these are means toward that end.

Random pats, now, in the region of the belly button. (His pats. My belly button.) Asks me if I ever saw a cat fly. It’s important. “Not exactly,” I say, “but I saw one fall six stories once and not get hurt, if that counts.”

As we sit here, the white cat eats a twenty-dollar bill.

I was divorced, as I mentioned. We were, all of us women who are in this thing with them, all divorced. DIVORCE. A tearing word. I was divorced in the abdomen and in the chest. In those days I sometimes telephoned just to hear “Hello.” I was divorced at and against sunsets, hills, fall leaves, and, later on in the spring, I was divorced from spring. But now, suddenly, I have not failed everything. None of us has failed. And we want nothing for ourselves. Never have. We want to do what’s best for the planet.

Sometimes lately, when the afternoon is perfect . . a pale, humid day, the kind they like the most … cool … white sky … and Klimp or one of the others (it’s hard to tell them apart sometimes, though Klimp usually wears the largest cap … yellow plastic cap) … when the one I think is Klimp is on the lawn chair figuring how to get rid of all the bees by too much spraying of fruit trees or how best to distribute guns to the quick tempered or some such problems, then I think that life has turned perfect already, though they keep telling me that comes later… but perfect right now, at least as far as I’m concerned. I like it with the takeover only half begun. Doing the job, it’s been said, is half the fun. To me it’s all the fun. And I especially like the importance of the kitchen for things other than mere food. Yesterday, for instance, I destroyed (at the self-cleaning setting) a bushel of important medical records plus several reference works and dictionaries, also textbooks and a bin of brand-new maps. When I see Klimp, then, on the lawn, or all three sometimes, and all three gauzy, pale blue flags unfurled, and they’re chuckling and whispering and choking together, I feel as though the kitchen itself, by its several motors, will take off into the air … hum itself into the sunset riding smoothly on a warm updraft, all its engines turned to low. I want to tell them how I feel. “Perfect,” I say. “Everything’s perfect except for these three things: wet sand tracked into the vestibule, stepping on the tails of cats, and please don’t look at me with such a steady, fishlike gaze, because when you do, I can’t read the recipes you gave me for things that make people feel good, rot the brain, and cost a lot.”

But I shouldn’t have reminded them of the cats. They are saying again that I have to choose between the cats or them. They say their talismans are getting lost under the furniture, that some of their wafers have been found chewed on and spat out. They say I don’t realize the politics of the situation and I suppose I don’t. I never did pay much attention to politics. “You have to realize everything is political,” they say, “even cats.”

I’m thinking perhaps I’ll take them to the state park outside of town. They’ll do all right. Cats do. Get rid of them in some nice place I’d like to be in myself, by a river, near some hills. … Leave them with full stomachs. Be up there and back by evening. Klimp will be pleased.

But look what’s coming true now! Dead cats…drowned cats washed up on the beaches. I saw the pictures on the news. Great flocks of cats, as though they had been caught at sea in a storm, or as though they had flown too far from shore and fallen into the ocean from exhaustion. Perhaps I understand even less about politics than I thought.

I decide to please my cats with a big dish of fresh fish. (Klimp is out tonight turning up amplifiers in order to impair hearing, while the others are out pulling the hands off clocks.)

The house has a sort of air space above the attic. There’s a little vent which, if removed, a cat could live up there quite comfortably, climbing up and down by way of the roof of the garage and a tree near it. A cat could be fed secretly outside and might not be recognized as one who lived here. It isn’t that I don’t dedicate myself to Klimp and the others. I do, but, as for the cats, I also dedicate myself to them.

Klimp and the others come back at dawn, flags furled, tired but happy. “Job’s well done,” they say. I fill the bathtub, boil water for them to dip their wafers in. They chuckle, pat me. (They’re so demonstrative. Not at all like my husband used to be.) They move their hands in cryptic signals, or perhaps it’s just nervousness. They blink at each other. They even blink at me. I’m thinking this is pure joy. Must never end. And now I have the cats and them also. I love. I love. Luff… loove … loofe . . they can’t pronounce it, but they use the word all the time. Sometimes I wonder exactly what they mean by it, it comes so easily to their lips.

At least I know what I mean by “love,” and I know I’ve gone from having nothing and nobody (I had the cats, of course, but I have people now) to having all the best things in life: love and a kind of family and meaningful work to do…world-shaking work… . All of us useless old women, now part of a vast international kitchen network and I’m wondering if we can go even further. Get to be sort of a world-watching crew while the earth lies fallow. “Listen, what about us in all this?” I ask, my arm across Klimp’s barrel chest. “We’re no harm. We’re all over childbearing age. What about if we watch over things for you during the time the Earth rests up?”

He answers, “Is as does. Does as is.” (If he really loves me, he’ll do it.)

“Listen,’ we could see to it that no smart ape would start leveling out hills.”

“What we need,” he says, “are a lot of little, warm, wet places.’’ He tells me he’s glad the cats are no longer here. He says, “I know you love (‘luff) me now,” and wants me to eat a big pink wafer. I try to get out of it politely. Who knows what’s in it? And the ones they always eat are white. But what has made me worthy of this honor, just that the cats are no longer in view?

“All right,” I say, “but just one tiny bite.” Tastes dry and chalky and sweet … too sweet. Klimp … but I see it’s not Klimp this time … one of the others … urges another bite. “Where’s Klimp?” “I also love (‘luff) you,” he says and “Time to find lots of little dark, wet places. We told you already.”

I’m wondering what sort of misunderstanding is happening right now.

I have a vision of a skyful of minnows … silver schools of minnows … the buzz of air … the tinkling … the glitter … my minnows flashing by. Why not? And then more and more until the sky is bursting with them. I can’t tell anymore which are mine. Somewhere a group of thirty-six…no, lots more than that … eighty-four …I’m not sure. One hundred and eight? Yes, my group among the others. They, my own, swim back to me, then swirl up and away. Forever. And forever mine. Why not?

I wake to the sounds of sheep. I have a backyard full of them. Ewes, it turns out. They are contented. As am I. I watch the setting moon, eat the oranges and onions Klimp brings me, sip mint tea, feel slightly nauseous, get a call from a friend. Seems she’s had sheep for a couple of weeks now. Took her cats up to the state park just as I’d thought of doing and had sheep the next day, though she wishes now she had put those cats in the attic as I’ve done, but she’s wondering will I get away with it? She wants me to come over, secretly if I can. She says it’s important. But there’s a lot of work to be done here. Klimp is talking, even now, about important projects such as opening the wild animal cages at the zoo and the best way to drop water into mailboxes and how about digging potholes in the roads? How about handing out free cartons of cigarettes especially those high in tars? He hangs up the phone for me and brings me another onion. I don’t need any other friends.

She calls me again a few days later. She says she thinks she’s pregnant, but we both know that can’t be true. I say to see a doctor. It’s probably a tumor. She says they don’t want her to, that they drove her car away somewhere. She thinks they pushed it off the pier along with a lot of others. I say I thought they were doing just the opposite. Switching road signs and such to get people to drive around wasting gas. Anyway, she says, they won’t let her out of the house. Well, I can’t be bothered with the illusions of every old lady around. I have enough troubles of my own and I haven’t been feeling so well lately either, tired all the time and a little sick. Irritable. Too irritable to talk with her.

The ewes in the backyard are all obviously pregnant. They swell up fast. The bitch dog next door seems pregnant, too, which is funny because I thought she was a spay. It makes you stop and think. I wonder, what if I wanted to go out? And is my old car still in the garage? They’ve been watching me all the time lately. I can’t even go to the bathroom without one of them listening outside-the door. I haven’t been able to feed the cats lately. I used to hate it when they killed birds, but now I hope there are some winter birds around. I think I will put up a bird feeder. I think spring is coming. I’ve lost track, but I’m sure we’re well into March now. Klimp says, “I luff, I luff,” and wants to rub my back, but I won’t let him … not anymore … or not right now. Why won’t they all three go out at the same time as they used to?

What’s wrong with me lately? Can’t sleep … itch all over … angry at nothing… . They’re not so bad, Klimp and the others. Actually better than most. Always squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom, leave the toilet seat down…they don’t cut their toenails and leave them in little piles on the night table, use their own towels usually, listen to me when I talk. Why be so angry?

I must try harder. I will tell Klimp that he can rub my back later. I’ll apologize for being angry and I’ll try to do it in a nice way. Then I’ll go into the bedroom, shut the door, brace it with a chair and be really alone for a while. Lie down and relax. I know I’ll miss cooking up some important concoctions, but I’ve missed a lot of things lately.

Next thing I know I wake up and it’s dark outside. I have a terrible stomachache like a lot of gas rolling around inside. I feel very strange. I have to get out of here.

I can hear one of them moving outside the door. I hear him brush against it…a chitinous scraping. “Let me in. I loofe you.” Then there’s that kind of giggle. He can’t help it, I know, but it’s getting on my nerves. “Is as does,” he says. “Now you see that.” I put on my sneakers and grab my old sweatshirt. “Just a minute, dear”—I try to say it sweetly—”I just woke up. I’ll let you in in a minute. I need a cup of tea. I’d love if you’d get one for me.” (I really do need one, but I’m not going to wait around for it.) I open the window and step out on the garage roof, cross to the tree, and climb down. Not hard. I’m a chubby old woman, but I’m in pretty good shape. The cats follow me. All three.

As I trot by, I see all the ewes in the backyard lying down and panting. God! I have to get out of here. I run, holding my stomach. I know of an empty lot with an old Norway spruce tree that comes down to the ground all around. I think I can make that. I see cats all around me, more than just my own. Maybe six or eight. Maybe more. Hard to see but, thank God, Klimp has broken all the streetlights. I cross vacant lots, tear through brambles, finally crawl under the spruce branches and lie down panting … panting. It feels right to pant. I saw my cat do that under similar circumstances.

I have them. I give birth to them, the little silvery ones squeaking … sparkling. I’ll surprise Klimp with eighty-four … ninety-six … one hundred and eight? Look what we did together! But it wasn’t Klimp and I. Suddenly I realize it. It was Klimp and that other. Through me. And all those ewes … fourteen ewes and one bitch dog times eighty-four or one hundred and eight. That’s well over a thousand of them that I know about already.

My little ones cough and flutter, try to swim into the air, but only raise themselves an inch or so … hardly that. They smell of fish. They slither over each other as though looking for a stream. They are covered with a shiny, clear kind of slime. Do I love them or hate them?

So that’s the way it is. As with us humans, it takes two, only I wasn’t one of them. I might just as well have been a bitch or a ewe … better, in fact, to have been some dumb animal. “Lots of little warm, wet places!” It must have been a big night, that night. Some sacred sort of higher beings they turned out to be. That’s not love … nor luff nor loove. Whatever they mean by those words, this can’t be it.

But look what all those hungry cats are doing. Eating up my minnows. I try to gather the little things up, but they’re too slippery. I can’t even get one. I try to push the cats away, but there are too many of them and they all seem very hungry. And then, suddenly, Klimp is there helping me, kicking out at the cats in a fury and gathering up minnows at the same time. For him it’s easy. They stick to him wherever he touches them. He’s up to his elbows in them. They cluster on his ankles like barnacles, but I’m afraid lots are eaten up already. And now he’s kicking out at me. Hits me hard on the cheek and shoulder. Stamps on my hand.

“I’m confused,” I say, getting up, thinking he can explain all this in a fatherly way, but now he stamps on my foot and knocks me down with his elbow. Then I see him give a kind of hop step, the standard dance way of getting from one foot to the other. He was going to lift. I don’t know how I know, but I do. He has that look on his face, too, eyes half closed … ecstasy. I see it now—flying, or almost flying, is their ultimate orgasm … their true love (or loofe) … if this is flying. Yes, he’s up, but only inches, and struggling … pulling at my fingers. This is not flying.

“You call this flying!” I yell. “And you call this whole thing being a pure aerial being! I say, cloaca … cloaca, I say, is your only orifice.” I have, by now, one knee hooked around his neck and both hands grabbing his elbow, and he’s not really more than one foot off the ground at the very highest, if that, and struggling for every inch. “Cloaca! You and your ‘luff !” The slime and minnows are all over him. He seems dressed in them … sparkling like sequins. He’s too slippery with them. I can’t hang on. I slip off and drop lightly into the brambles. Klimp slides away at a diagonal, right shoulder leading, and glides, luminous with slime, just off the ground. Disappears in a few seconds behind the trees. “Cloaca!” I shout after him. It’s the worst I’ve ever said to anyone. “Filthy fish thing! Call that flying!”

Everything is going wrong. It always does, I should know that by now. I’m thinking that my former husband slipped away in almost exactly the same way. He was slippery too, sneaked out first with younger women and then left for one of them later on. I tried to grab at him the same way I grabbed at Klimp. Tried to hold him back. I even tried to change my ways to suit him. I know I’ve got faults. I talk too much. I worry about things that never happen (though they did finally happen, almost all of them, and now look).

I hobble back (with cats), too angry to feel the pain of my bruises. No sign of the ewes or the dog, but the backyard looks all silvery. No minnows left there, though, just slime. I have to admit it’s lovely. Makes me feel romantic feelings for Klimp in spite of myself. I wonder if he saw it. They’re so sensitive to beautiful things and they love glitter. I can see why.

The house is dark. I open the door cautiously. I let in all eight … no, nine, maybe ten cats. I call. No answer. I lock all the windows and the doors. I check under the beds and in the closets. Nobody. I go into the bathroom and lock that door too. Fill tub. Take off my clothes. Find two minnows stuck inside my sweatshirt. One is dead. The other very weak. I put him in the tub and he seems to revive a little. He has big eyes, four fins where legs and arms would be, a tail … a minnow’s tail … actually big blue eyes … pale blue, like Klimp’s. He looks at me with such pleading. He comes to the surface to breathe and squeaks now and then. I keep making reassuring sounds as if I were talking to the cats. Then I decide to get in the tub with him myself. Carefully, though. With me in the tub, the creature seems happier. Swims around making a kind of humming sound and blowing bubbles. Follows my hand. Lets me pick it up. I’m thinking it’s a clear case of bonding, perhaps for both of us.

Now that I’m relaxing in the water, I’m feeling a lot better. And nothing like a helpless little blue-eyed creature of some sort to care for to bring brightness back into life. The thing needs me. And so do fill those cats.

I lie quietly, cats miawing outside the door, but I just lie here and Charles (Charles was my father’s name) … Charles? Howard? Henry? He falls asleep in the shallows between my breasts. I don’t dare move. The phone rings and there’s the thunk of something knocked over by cats. I don’t move. I don’t care.

So what about ecology? What about our favorite planet, Klimp’s and mine? How best save it? And who for? Make it safe for this thing on my chest? (Charles Bird? Henry Fishman?) Quietly breathing. Blue eyes shut. And what about all those thousands of others? Department of fisheries? Department of lakes and streams? Gelatin factory? Or the damp basements of those housing developments built in former swamps?

I blame myself. I really do. Perhaps if I’d been more understanding of their problems … accepted them as they are. Not criticized all that sand tracked in. And so what if they did step on the tails of cats? I’ve been so irritable these last few days. No wonder Klimp kicked out at me. If only I had controlled myself and thought about what they were going through. It was a crucial time for them too. But all I thought about was myself and my blowing-up stomach. Me, me, me! No wonder my former husband walked out. And now the same old pattern. Another breakup, another identity crisis. It shows I haven’t learned a thing.

I almost fall asleep lying here, but when the water begins to get cold we both wake up, Charles and 1.1 rig up a system, then, with the electric frying pan on the lowest setting and two inches of water on top of a piece of flannel. Put Charles … Henry? … inside, sprinkle in crumbs of wafer. Lid on. Vent open. Lock the whole business in my bedroom on top of the knickknack shelves. Then I check out their room, Klimp’s and the others. It’s a mess, wafers scattered around … several pink ones, bed not made. If they were, all three, men, I’d understand it, but that can’t be. I wonder if they used servants where they come from … or slaves? Well, Charles will be brought up differently. Learn to pick up his underwear and help out around the house, cook something besides telephone books and such. I find a talisman under the bed. I shut my eyes, squeeze hard, wondering can I lift with it? Maybe, on the other hand, it’s some sort of anchor to stop with or to be let down by. Something thrown out to keep from flying. I’ll save it for Charles.

I sit down to rest with a cup of tea, two cats on my lap and one across my shoulders. All the cats seem fat and happy, and I really feel pretty happy too … considering.

The telephone rings again and this time I answer it. It’s a love call. I think I recognize Klimp’s voice, but he won’t say if it’s him and they do all sound a lot alike, sort of muffled and slurred. Anyway, he says he wants to do all those things with me, things, actually, he already did. I suppose this call is part of a new campaign. I don’t think much of it and I tell him so. “How about breaking school windows and stealing library books?” I say. But whose side am I on now? “Listen,” I say, “I know of a nice wet place devoid of cats. It’s called The Love Canal and you’ll love it. Lots of empty houses. And there’s another place in New Jersey that I know of. Call me back and I’ll have the exact address for you.” I think he believes me. (Evidently they haven’t read all the books about women.)

Political appointees. I’ll bet that’s what they are. Makes a lot of sense. I could do as well myself. And who was it sent them out with spray-paint cans? Who told them how to cause static on TV? Who had thousands of stickers made up reading: NO DANGER, NONTOXIC, and GENERALLY REGARDED AS SAFE?

We can do all this by ourselves. Let’s see: number 1, day-care-aquarium centers; number 2, separate cat-breeding facilities; number 3, the takeover proper; number 4, the lying-fallow period. And we have time … plenty of time. Our numbers keep increasing, too, though slowly … the rejected, the divorced, the growing older, the left out… . Maybe they’ve already started it. I can’t be the only one thinking this way. Maybe they’re out there just waiting for my call, kitchens all warmed up. I’ll dial my old friend. “Include me in,” I’ll say.

Everything perfect, and I even have Charles. We don’t need them. Bunch of bureaucrats. That wasn’t flying.