The War of the Worlds
by James P. Blaylock 

 
From their second-story bedroom window in the Berkeley hills, Ed watched strange lights flicker through the treetops a mile or so above the house, a two-story rental that backed up to the wooded area around Tilden Park. The October night was unseasonably warm, the window open to catch the land breeze that drifted through the screen, ruffling Ed's hair. It hadn't been the lights that awakened him, although they cast an eerie, moving glow on the bedroom wall opposite the window; he had been up and around anyway, disturbed by odd nighttime noises, unable to sleep, his troubles going around in his head. He and Lisa had argued late last night, and had left the argument unresolved. 

Somewhere around four o'clock every small noise had conspired to awaken him: the slowly dripping faucet in the bathroom, Lisa's rolling over in bed, the early-morning chatter of Lisa's parakeets in their cage downstairs. And then he had heard a low, unidentifiable humming noise, like bees in an immense hive. He had gotten up and gone downstairs, draping the parakeet cage before searching for the source of the noise, going out onto the front porch, where it was quieter, the sound evidently blocked by the house itself. By the time he had gotten back upstairs he was fully awake, and it was only then that he had noticed the oddly moving lights shining in through the window. 

His eyes searched the vast shadow of the eucalyptus grove now, where it merged with the darkness of the pine forest farther up, mostly piñon pines, all in all a couple of hundred densely-wooded square miles cut with trails and cleared patches of grass and wildflowers. The fall sky was clear of clouds and fog. There was no telltale sign of smoke, just thousands of stars and the moon throwing out its cold light—no fire or terrestrial tragedy to account for this display of light and sound, which made him increasingly uneasy. He watched the lights playing across the hillside, now and then shooting up into the air like beacons; mostly white light, but with red flashes spaced evenly in a circular pattern, as if they traced the perimeter of a landing pad or of a vast spherical ship. 

He and Lisa had taken this house at the top of the world partly because of its proximity to mother nature, which was actually something Lisa appreciated more than he did. He had liked the two-bedroom flat off Telegraph Avenue just fine, where they had lived happily during the first two years of their marriage. But Lisa had wanted something farther from the scene downtown, especially because they planned to have a child. His stubborn objection to moving had been met with a resistance that still surprised him when he thought about it. That had been their first real argument as a married couple, the first time he had seen Lisa lose her temper. To use the word lose was to understate it, though. There had come a point when her temper had flooded over the top of the dam and he'd had to swim to safety. 

He was big enough now to admit that he had contributed his small part to that one, especially since she'd been right about moving. The Berkeley flat was too small, the plumbing leaked, the heating was lousy. There hadn't really been room for Ed's stuff, let alone for theirs, although Lisa wasn't a stuff kind of person, not the way he was, which was their philosophical gulf. His HO trains filled eight big cardboard boxes—not the trains alone, but the papier-mâché tunnels and mountains and the depot and houses and all—but during the years of their marriage the trains had been packed away, as had certain other of his collections. Out here at the edge of the wilderness they had an extra room, a piece of a basement, and forced-air heating. The monthly payment was more than they could afford, and that didn't generate harmony, but then everything these days cost more than you could afford, so to hell with it, or at least to hell with it as regards the house and other domestic concerns.… 

As for his stuff, it was still in boxes—a hell of a lot of boxes, admittedly—and the futile idea that the basement would become a train yard rather than a guest bedroom still haunted the new house like a dwindling ghost. But that was thin ice. There was nothing to be gained by skating around on it this morning. 

There seemed to be some sort of increase in whatever was going on out in the woods, a series of blips and blaps that synchronized with the rising glow of a strangely purple light, like an old hippie nightclub. He could see movement now, too, large shadows shifting and growing and then shrinking away again. The bed creaked, and he turned around, thinking that Lisa had awakened, but she slept the sleep of the just, probably whacked out from the enormity of yesterday's work. 

They had just gotten the last of the boxes from the move unpacked, putting in God knew how many hours, with the bulk of his crated-up stuff relegated indefinitely to the garage, which is what struck this off-key nostalgic chord in him. Lisa's vast collection of films occupied an entire bedroom downstairs. She taught film classes at San Francisco State, so the films were her work, whereas his own stuff was useless trash. Being married meant making concessions, and of course now that she was pregnant, there would be more concessions. His simple observation that the concessions were largely his had spoiled their late-night dinner, that and his unfortunate mention of his bowling ball, which was one of the treasures living in the garage, and which was actually more of a sore point than any of the rest of it, his trains included. 

He cocked his head, hearing a high-pitched, dog-whistle-type shriek, just barely audible, as if it were projected at an inhuman decibel. A dog immediately started howling some distance away, and the sound of the howling struck him as unnatural, as if the dog sensed the presence of something fearful out in the woods. The sound diminished, but the howling continued now that the dog was spooked. 

Back when he was single, Ed had bowled in a Tuesday night league. He had enjoyed the bowling alley: the sound of pins falling, the smell of spilled beer from longneck Budweiser bottles, the predictable wit that followed a picked-up spare or a lucky strike. He still had his bowling shirt with their sponsor's name embroidered on it: Nick and Fergy's Appliances. But Lisa wasn't a fan of bowling. That was the long and the short of it. She just didn't appreciate the art form. She had tried to for a little while, but it didn't wash, and, as with so many things, his bowling had gone by the boards as their marriage defined itself over time. He still wore the shirt now and then, although it made him feel like a fraud to invoke the names of Nick and Fergy now that he had become an outsider at the lanes. 

The dog's howling stopped abruptly, as if someone had shut the creature up. A long shaft of ruby red light shot straight up into the sky from the darkness of the woods, then blinked out, followed by a half dozen such shafts, perhaps beacons, projected skyward now from the red perimeter lights. He wondered if this was some kind of Air Force or Army maneuver—nighttime war games using infrared lights. 

Suddenly cool, he walked across the room to find a sweater in his open closet. Inside hung his retired bowling shirt, a delicate robin's egg blue that looked silver in the white light cast from the thing on the hillside. It was made of a high-quality rayon that could pass for silk, with royal blue embroidery—sixty dollars' worth of peerless, hometown American shirt. It occurred to him that it wouldn't be out of place framed, hanging on a wall, but then the very idea that it had become a mere keepsake depressed him, and he shut the closet door quietly and returned to the window, pulling on the sweater. 

The bowling ball trouble had reared its ugly head several months ago, right after the move, when he had gone down to the lanes on San Pablo Avenue with his friend Jerry to bowl a couple of frames. He found that he hadn't lost his touch, even after two years of abstinence, which had probably made him feel slightly self-satisfied and off-guard, affecting his judgment when, afterward, they had gone into the pro shop. Ed had never owned a ball that was worth a damn, even in his playing days, and he coveted Jerry's ball, which was a rainbow swirl of colors that would have been right at home in an art museum. It had put Jerry back three hundred dollars, which was a hell of a lot of money, but to Ed it was like the house: these days nothing was affordable, so you bought it anyway. 

In the pro shop, Ed had impulsively bought a ball of his own—a jet-black, oversized eight ball, which reminded him nostalgically of the fortune-telling eight balls of his youth. The transparently glossy finish was like water in a well, the sort of thing you sat and stared into, like a tidepool or a fire in a fireplace, and the figure eight itself, pearl white and with its suggestion of the infinite, hovered immensely deep within the black sphere. It had cost him nearly four hundred and sixty irretrievable dollars. The experience had been a little like getting a tattoo—once they drilled it, it was yours—and he had walked out of the pro shop in a rising tide of buyer's remorse that was in utter conflict with the virgin object that he carried in its fleece-lined bag. Afterward he and Jerry had spent a couple of hours in the Triple Rock Brewery, and Ed's doubts had dissolved. 

It dawned on him now that the red lights in the woods must be lasers. He had read an article about them recently, about what they could do—drill teeth, slice neat little doughnut rings into your eyeballs, blast things to smithereens. Lisa had one that she used as a pointer in her film classes. The idea was unsettling, almost otherworldly. He had been unable to grasp the fine points of the article, why one laser would eliminate an incoming ICBM and another was just a jolly red dot, like the bouncing ball in old sing-along cartoons.… 

Sober, he would have known enough not to bring the bowling ball into the house when he got home from the brewery. They had a little detached garage built into the hillside, and it would have been easy enough for him to hide it out there and visit it from time to time, sneaking it out if he went down to the lanes with Jerry. In a year or two, when it was scuffed up, he could have brought it in and made up a perfectly reasonable lie about buying it at a garage sale. But he had blown all of that in his porter-fueled enthusiasm and in the interests of honesty. Don't lie to your wife; that's what the good angel had told him, although why God had let the good angel drink beer was more than he could say. 

Lisa had been puzzled by the ball at first, full of disbelief. If she hadn't seen the receipt, he might have convinced her that he'd picked it up for $29.99 at Kmart, but his planning had been faulty. Following her puzzlement had come a measure of angry unhappiness. It was no problem now to see that a hugely expensive bowling ball might have had this effect on her, but at the time Ed's rationale for the purchase had sounded as brilliant as Newton to him. Lisa had shown him their skyrocketing Visa bill and accused him of domestic crimes. She was pregnant, for God's sake. The baby would need a cradle, a high chair, an advanced degree from a good university. Of course he hadn't been able to use the ball, ever, and yet it had remained a sore spot in their marriage, the straw that could break the camel's back if it ever landed there again. Buying the eight ball had quite simply wrecked bowling forever, like the stolen diamond that the heiress could never wear in public. Calling up its ghost last night had been an error. 

No more errors, he told himself as he heard Lisa roll over in bed. You don't need to be right to be happy: that would be his thought for the day. You could reach for the brake as easily as the accelerator. She put out her arm now and patted the place where he should have been. He wondered if his absence would wake her up, and he heard the rising shriek of the whistle noise out in the woods again. She raised herself blearily onto her elbows and looked around the room, as if trying dreamily to make out the source of the noise. The dog resumed its howling. 

"What's wrong?" 

"I don't know," he said, turning toward the bed. She sat up, pushing her hair out of her face. 

"Some kind of thing up in the hills," he told her. "Dwarves playing nine pins, maybe." With my bowling ball, he thought, surprised to find the anger rekindle itself so easily. He would have to watch it. Cover the brake—that was what the good angel would whisper to him. 

"What are those noises?" 

"There's something going on up there in the woods, maneuvers or something." 

"Maneuvers?" 

"Yeah, lights, too. Take a look." 

She sat up and slipped on her bedroom slippers, joining him at the window. "That's weird," she said. "It looks like something from a UFO movie." 

The idea spooked him, and he realized that he had been thinking the same thing. Whatever was happening was unearthly. 

"God," Lisa muttered, "look at that." 

Ed stared out the window in disbelief, his mouth open: a vast moving shadow slowly ascended from the forest floor. At first he thought it was an optical illusion, but the thing continued to rise from the trees, a black, circular patch of darkness that hung now in the air, hovering just above the tree line. White lights revolved within it. It seemed to Ed that he could see the stars shining straight through the sphere, a translucent black sun encircled by a white aura. 

"It's a flying fucking saucer," Lisa whispered. 

He couldn't argue with her. It looked like the Death Star, blotting out the sky. 

The rest of the neighborhood was waking up. There were voices from down the block; a door slammed. Lisa pulled on her clothes and turned toward the stairs. "Let's get moving!" she said, her voice full of sudden anxiety. 

Her frightened tone was infectious, and Ed realized that he was holding his breath. He felt vulnerable and exposed standing there in his boxer shorts, and as he stepped across the bedroom to grab his jeans from where he had tossed them last night, a siren started up somewhere down the block, shutting off within seconds, followed by the sound of someone talking through a loudspeaker or bullhorn. Ed caught the gist of it. "Shit!" he said out loud. "They're evacuating us!" 

He heard Mr. Bord, his neighbor, shouting across the street, and an answering shout from Bord's wife. Lights were coming on all over the neighborhood, and he heard a car engine starting up. He went after a fresh pair of socks, then headed for the bathroom, the word "evacuation" going around in his head. Brush your teeth, he thought, who knows when you'll get another chance.… He pulled out his little travel kit from under the sink and sorted through it: razor, toothbrush, mini deodorant. Where would everyone go? Some kind of shelter probably, a school or church somewhere. To hell with that; he and Lisa would find a hotel. He wasn't spending the night on a cot in a school auditorium. 

"Bring down my purse! The big one!" Lisa shouted up at him. He found it on the floor at the top of the stairs. What the hell else? He checked his wallet, which lay on the nightstand. Eighty bucks and two credit cards. That would do the trick. They could easily find food and shelter, even if they had to drive down south, maybe over to the coast toward Halfmoon Bay or Davenport. He pictured the freeways heading out of the Bay area, clogged with people fleeing the saucers, and it dawned on him that they might possibly never be back. 

"You coming down?" Lisa had turned on all the lights in the house. 

"Yeah!" he shouted. "I'm just grabbing a couple of things!" He hauled his tweed coat out of the closet. Extra socks and underwear wouldn't be a bad idea, either. And his bowling shirt! There was no way he was leaving that behind. 

"They're saying something!" Lisa shouted up at him, and he went to the window over the street and opened the casement. 

"Do not panic!" a voice ordered, horribly magnified by whatever device the man was speaking through. It was coming from a fire truck, apparently, creeping up the street, its light revolving. Ed was distracted by the sight of Mr. Bord coming out through his front door carrying a cardboard box, a heavy box, from the way he was stooped over. 

"… the neighborhood cleared in twenty minutes," the truck was saying. Twenty minutes—they had some time yet! He walked to the opposite window again and looked into the hills. The inverted saucer still hovered there, a jet-black orb emitting a white corona, and he was reminded at once of his bowling ball, out in the garage along with the rest of his stuff, with the rest of his life, it seemed to him now. 

He caught sight of the several books on the nightstand shelf—his bedside books, the marked-up copies he read and reread over the years, all of them keepers. He dumped the books and clothes onto his spread-out tweed coat along with his travel kit, then pulled the plug on his bedside lamp and laid that in among the rest, making a bundle of it. The lamp was an antique, with a mica shade shaped like a wizard's cap and a solid copper post on a globular base that looked like an enormous pearl. Like the books, it was irreplaceable. He thought suddenly about his train set, his comics and record albums and God-knew-what-all out in the garage. His little bundle of stuff looked pitiful to him, and he saw that in some indefinable sense this small parcel was a living history: the life of Edward Kelly illustrated by a lamp, some books, an old tweed coat and a bowling shirt. 

He headed downstairs, holding the bundle inconspicuously behind Lisa's king-size purse. She met him in the living room, where she had already been rifling through the big drawer full of photos, loading them into a box. The parakeet cage sat by the front door, cleaned and replenished with food and water. Ed handed Lisa the purse and headed straight for the door. 

"What's that stuff?" she asked. "Your lamp?…" 

"Yeah," he said. "Travel kit." But he was already out the door, fumbling in his pocket for the car keys. He opened the back door of their Ford Escort, put his stuff on the seat, and then sprinted up the side of the house. The gate was nearly blocked by yesterday's empty boxes, and he picked a few up, pitching them back down the path, then kicked the rest aside in order to swing the gate open. He strode to the garage door, pulled it open, and flipped on the light, but instead of going in after more of his things now, he turned and sprinted back down toward the car, picking up two of the empty boxes in mid-stride. Virtually all of his neighbors were carting crap out of their houses. The air was full of the yap and howl of dogs barking and people hollering to each other. He could still make out the shrieking and humming from the woods, a counterpoint to the noises of earthly terror up and down the block. 

He dumped the books into the bottom of one of the empty boxes, then packed the lamp in carefully, shoving the clothing in around it to protect the shade. 

Lisa came up behind him, carrying a box of her own. "What are you doing?" she asked skeptically. 

"What everyone else is doing," he said. "Loading the car. One box for me and one for you, share and share alike." He smile genially, taking the box from her and putting it on the seat, next to his own, realizing that he hadn't chosen his words very well. This was no time to start implying things. 

She lingered for a moment, as if there was something she wanted to discuss, but instead she grabbed the other empty box from him and headed toward the house. After three steps she stopped again and turned around. "We've got a lot of stuff to take," she said raising her eyebrows at him. 

"And not much time," he answered. The loudspeaker started up helpfully, droning out its evacuation message somewhere up the adjacent street. 

She set out again without another word, which perhaps wasn't a good omen. But the truth was she had never understood the lamp any more than she had understood the bowling ball or the train set. Still, he was perfectly ready to be rational, to share the space in the car, what there was of it. They were a married couple; they could both make concessions, just like she had explained to him last night. He opened the trunk, which was empty aside from a couple of stadium blankets, the spare tire, and a map book. All of it could stay. He headed up the driveway again, through the open gate. If this was some kind of marital test that involved their capacity to meet each other halfway, then he was entirely up to the challenge. 

He looked around the garage with an inquisitive eye. He couldn't be excessive; the Escort wasn't roomy enough for excess. The boxes containing the train set lay against the back wall, but there wasn't a single one of them that would even fit in the Escort, even if he bungeed the trunk lid down. They'd need to be sorted and repacked, and there wasn't time for that. My kingdom for a U-Haul truck, he thought, turning his back on the trains. Lying on the bench was the matched set of deer antlers his Uncle Oscar had given him twenty-odd years ago. They were mounted on a mahogany plaque with a tooled leather patch that had his name on it. Oscar, his favorite uncle, was dead now, which was reason enough not to abandon the antlers to the aliens. It dawned on him that the horns formed a cage the size of a large basket, into which he could load all manner of things, so they wouldn't really consume excess space anyway. 

The bowling bag sat on the bench, too, but he ignored it for the moment and went out into the night carrying the antlers, hurrying down to the car, where he put them in the trunk. Then he fetched the box full of clothing from the back seat and repacked the travel kit and odds and ends of clothing within the arched confines of the horns. He hesitated over the bowling shirt. Why not wear it? he asked himself, and he pulled it on over his sweater without another thought. It was a little bit wrinkled now, but it gave him an instant sense of security, a suit of armor against the alien threat. He fitted the lamp in among the clothes in the antler basket and checked his watch: a bare ten minutes to go. 

Picking up another empty box, he returned to the garage. He would take another two minutes, and then, as his dutiful concession, he would give Lisa what time was left over. He heard the car door slam while he was in the garage—Lisa hard at work. Good for her. He grabbed his bowling ball, case and all, and a shadow box full of fishing lures that had belonged to his father. There was the box half full of old Mad magazines that he had saved from his childhood, and another of vinyl records. He didn't have a turntable any longer, but he could always buy one.… 

He studied a couple of the faded old record jackets, overcome by a wave of nostalgia. They were too much a part of his past, and without his past he was nothing, only a cardboard cutout living in the tiresome moment. He was struck again with the epiphany he had glimpsed upstairs, in the light from the alien saucer—that these objects, cast away into the dark limbo of closets and garages, were him, in some essential way. One was defined by the stuff of one's life. Even the shambling beggar had something in his stolen shopping cart, something he would struggle to keep, pitiful as it might be. Poets knew the truth in this. Wives, apparently, did not. 

He dumped the records and magazines together and went back down the path carrying the lot of it. There was a new noise from the hills, what sounded like the roar and whoosh of vast engines coming to life, perhaps death rays warming up, blood boilers, vacuum devices, anatomical probes. He picked up his pace, loping up the driveway where he nearly stumbled over the deer antlers sitting on the lawn, his stuff still packed neatly inside them. Lisa had pulled them out of the trunk. 

Three cardboard boxes full of photos sat where the antlers had been. Calmly and fairly, he eenie-meenied Lisa's three boxes and removed the loser, pulling it out and setting it on the lawn before replacing the antlers. Then he loaded in the bowling bag and the carton of magazines and records, which killed the rest of his share of the space. Adjusting his thinking, he ran back toward the garage instead of into the house like he had vowed. Lisa's hogging up the trunk had obviated one of his concessions. If it had come down to a street fight, then either she played by the rules or the rules took a hike. He glanced again at his watch, conscious that the seconds were ticking away at an alarming rate of speed, but when he reentered the garage, he was staggered by the sheer quantity of stuff that still littered the floor and benchtop. He shifted boxes around, pulling flaps back, searching for treasures, fueled now by nostalgia. 

He found his old basketball, which a friend had inscribed with the legend "Sir Duke" in Germanic script, his nickname on the courts back in the day. He stuffed the ball into a fresh box along with a genuine Hawaiian tiki carved out of palm, then threw in his collection of baseball caps, many of which were collectible, or would have been if they weren't worn out. He grabbed his old Red Sox jersey, which had fit him back when he'd played Pony League ball, but was too small for him now. Satisfied, he flipped off the light and shut the garage door, out of room and out of time. This was it, this pitiful little collection of trinkets. Trifles, he remembered reading somewhere, made the sum of life, and not always an elegant sum, either. 

He wondered if he were being excessive with all this, and on impulse he tossed the Red Sox jersey into the bushes. What did he want with a jersey that didn't even fit? As for the rest—hell, it was the principle of the thing, wasn't it? That's what it had come down to, the old cliché. 

He was staggered to see that once again Lisa had emptied out every damned single thing he had put into the trunk. The box of records and magazines sat on the lawn alongside the antlers. She had been cool about it, very controlled, making a simple statement. And he could understand the statement. She didn't want to argue about it. Setting his stuff on the lawn had made her simple point. He looked up at the open front door and saw her inside the house, pulling things hurriedly out of their china hutch—probably the silver and crystal, the "valuables," if that was the quality of your thinking. Her wooden jewelry box sat on the porch, ready to go. 

Across the street the Bords' car fired up and backed out of the driveway, the family huddled inside, the windows rolled up against the terrible alien noise. In his haste, Bord knocked down the trash cans waiting at the curb, which rolled away downhill in the wake of the car, clattering and banging, bags of trash and lawn clippings spilling out onto the street. Other cars followed, running over the Bords' trash, knocking through the metal cans. One of the cans picked up speed, revolving as it rolled, bang up against the curb a good sixty yards downhill where it scraped to a stop, its rear end pointed downhill like the exhausted first stage of a galvanized rocket. 

Once again he took a rational look at the nearly full trunk, removing exactly half of what Lisa had installed there, and filling the remainder with his things, which he picked up from the lawn again. He crammed the basketball and the rest of the garage items behind the front seat, leaving room on the back seat itself for whatever else Lisa brought out. Abruptly he was aware that his bowling bag was missing. He looked around the lawn, but it wasn't there. In a fit of anger he strode toward the house, but then he caught himself, forcing himself to take a deep breath. He started counting to level out his patience, but then stopped when he caught sight of his own trash cans there at the curb. Suspicious, he hurried down to them, and, sure enough, there lay the bowling bag in among the dead leaves and grass clippings, right where she'd dropped it, making the clearest sort of statement. Smiling grimly, he pulled it out, returned to the car, pushed aside the boxes in the trunk, and wedged the bowling bag in behind them, out of sight. 

Lisa appeared just then, piled high with her jewelry box and the things from the hutch, coming up behind him silently. He steeled himself for the inevitable. 

"Backseat!" he said helpfully, gesturing toward the open door. "Plenty of room left." 

"Get the parakeets?" she asked, phrasing it as a question rather than an order. He turned to obey. It was a reasonable request, but it would eat up the rest of the available space inside the car, the only real space for the china closet stuff and the jewelry box. But what the hell, he thought, life was nothing but one hard choice after another. He grabbed the cage, careful not to dump the water and food, and turned straight back toward the car. 

Lisa had disappeared behind the raised trunk lid, and he saw only her hand and arm jerking and throwing. Magazines and records flew out onto the lawn in a hurricane of flapping paper and sailing cardboard. The whole damned box followed, end over end. He stood clutching the bird cage, suddenly humbled by this display of wrath. The antlers followed, cartwheeling into the neighbor's hedge, littering the lawn with his clothes. The lamp rolled free of the bundle, and he set the cage down and ran to it, picking it up. It was apparently unhurt, and he hid it in the shrubbery in case her rage compelled her to track it down and destroy it. With an exaggerated lack of concern he walked back to the parakeets, watching as she heaved the basketball off into the night and then zingoed the shadow box onto the roof. 

"Spare the tiki," he muttered, but it did no good. The tiki sailed clear across the street, bouncing across the Bords' driveway and up onto their front porch. She found his bowling ball where he had hidden it, and she hauled it out, swung the bag by the handle, and heaved it into the shrubbery. Then, coldly and steadily, she walked straight up to him and took the parakeet cage, turning around and walking back to the car, where she belted it securely onto the rear seat. She turned and strode past him into the house as if he didn't exist, her jaw set, eyes straight ahead. He knew better than to say anything. He had forgotten about the brake, and instead had accelerated, picking up speed in his haste to save his things 

The fire truck swung around the corner again at the bottom of the hill, unimpeded by what was now a trickle of outward-bound cars. "Evacuate immediately," the magnified voice intoned. "Leave at once." The truck paused in front of their house, repeating the order for Ed's benefit, and he waved and nodded seriously, pointing toward the house to show them that someone was still inside. The truck moved on. He looked at the junk on the lawn. There was no time to repack it. She'd had the last word. 

He caught sight of her now, pulling on a jacket as she approached the door, keys in hand. This was it. They were leaving. So much for concessions. So much for fairness. But then she stopped, turning around, running toward the kitchen for some forgotten thing. 

Just then he was struck with inspiration, one last vital statement. He ducked into the bushes, where he spotted the bowling bag in the dirt. Dusting it with the sleeve of his shirt, he hurried back to the car. He unbelted the parakeets and took them out, replacing them on the seat with the bag and ball, expecting to hear the door slam as he sprinted the six steps to the top of the driveway, where he set the cage carefully down on the concrete. At the car again he positioned the seatbelt across the bag, pulled it tighter, and secured it. 

He climbed into the Escort and fired up the engine just as Lisa came out of the house, her purse over her shoulder, shutting the door behind her and locking the dead bolt. She must have heard the last warning, because she was nearly running when she passed the parakeet cage, not even seeing it in her fear and haste. She opened the door hard enough to test its hinges, and when the dome light blinked on, she glanced into the back seat, where the bowling bag sat securely, snugged down into the upholstery. The sight of it seemed to confuse her, as if it were an utterly alien thing, something from outside her realm of experience. The look of confusion passed away, replaced by something dangerously close to resignation, and immediately he regretted his little gag. 

"Just kidding," he muttered, but already she had depressed the seat belt button, freeing the bag, which she opened in a single, swift motion, carrying it down toward the street. Ed climbed out, not quite knowing how to react, thinking that maybe she had come utterly unhinged and was simply walking away into the night. 

The street was empty of cars. They were apparently the last ones left in the abandoned neighborhood. Lisa walked briskly out into the center, where she stopped, swept her arm back, and bowled the eight ball down the rough asphalt. Ed saw it hit a chuckhole, which deflected it toward the curb. It caromed off, bouncing a few times, then smashed through the closest of the Bords' renegade trash cans, sounding like a train wreck in the silent night. He saw it bounce clear again, centrifugal force pinning it to the curb as it shot away downhill. 

He was suddenly aware of the quiet. There were no more noises from the hillside, no whirring or shrieking, just an eye-of-the-hurricane silence. Horns honked in the distance, traffic moving out along Grizzly Peak or down Marin, heading toward Oakland and Richmond and the freeways. Lisa walked slowly back toward the car, passing him without looking at him. "Gutter ball," he heard her say, but there was no spirit in her voice, no joking around. She simply looked tired. He felt the urge to rush to her, drop to his knees, recant everything. But she wasn't in the mood for it. Not now she wasn't. If the universe cut him any slack, he could think again about it later. 

She picked up the birdcage from where it sat on the driveway and put it carefully back into the car, then climbed wearily into the front seat and belted in, waiting for him. There was a red glow in the air out over the hills, and he thought at once that it was the alien laser light, consuming the sky, but then he realized that it was merely the dawn, that the sun was rising on a warm and cloudless fall morning. He picked his way across the lawn, which was strewn with the litter of their lives—both of their lives, since Lisa had never had the chance to return her own stuff to the car from where he had ditched it. 

The sound of the loudspeaker squawked again from up the road, breaking in on his thoughts. If the truck made the same circuit it had before, it wouldn't take thirty seconds for it to get down here.… 

He climbed in beside her and backed out, heading downhill and around the corner onto Grizzly Peak, where right away he saw activity in the street ahead—cars stopped, uniformed men milling around, leaning in open windows to say something to the evacuees. The first of the cars in line made a U-turn and motored back up hill, throttling past them. The driver's face, visible in the glow of the instrument panel, was full of a visible rage, as if he had just been insulted beyond words. 

"What the hell is this now?" Ed asked, but Lisa didn't respond. The parakeets chattered happily in the back seat. He rolled down the window and nodded at an officer, apparently a fireman, who stepped off the curb and approached the Escort. 

"You folks can go home," he said. "Excitement's over. Sorry for the panic." 

"It's over?" Ed asked. "What the hell was it?" All that for nothing, he thought. But then he glanced over at Lisa and realized that it hadn't been for nothing; he wasn't that lucky. It might be the end of the world, one way or another. The aliens had won without firing a shot. "What was all that racket back in the hills?" 

"Some kind of performance artists from Cal." The man shrugged. His face was bland. Clearly he wasn't happy to be up this early either, and he looked at Ed's bowling shirt now, as if he didn't quite understand why Ed would want to wear it over the top of his sweater like that. 

"Artists?" Ed asked. This was astonishing. 

"Yeah. They didn't file a permit. Had a bunch of sound equipment and some kind of high-tech holographic stuff that they trucked back into the hills on an access road. Just a prank." 

Lisa laughed suddenly, shaking her head as if she'd just figured out the punch line to a joke. Apparently mystified, the fireman ducked a little in order to look in at her. 

"It's October thirtieth," she said, and laughed again, shaking her head as if it beat all. 

Ed patted her on the thigh good-naturedly. Clearly she'd snapped. And it was his fault, of course. His response to an apparent alien invasion had been to attack his own wife in an insidious and incomprehensible way. 

"I'm sorry?" the fireman asked. 

"October thirtieth, 1938—that's the night Orson Welles pulled the War of the Worlds prank." 

The man looked as if he'd been pole-axed. "The tripods thing! He did that radio show! Well, I'll be damned.…" 

He laughed now and stepped away from the car, motioning Ed forward. Other cars had stopped behind them, and the Escort was blocking traffic. They made an easy U-turn and headed back uphill, Lisa still chuckling to herself. Through the open window, Ed heard the fireman shouting the news to one of his cohorts, the mystery solved to everyone's satisfaction. He swung the car back up into the neighborhood, and between two houses he got a glimpse of the eastern sky, ablaze with color. The tall houses and curb trees shaded the streets and sidewalks, though, and there was still a lot of darkness in the morning. 

He sensed that Lisa was looking at him, and he glanced in her direction as if he were checking his passenger-side blind spot, even though there was no lane there. In fact she was staring at him, an expectant grin on her face, as if she had seen the joke and wondered if he had, and when their eyes met, she burst into laughter again. "You've got to admit it's funny," she said, shaking her head in amused wonder. "The prank, I mean." The parakeets in the backseat took up their merry chatter again, as if they, at least, were cheerful enough to admit anything. 

Ed tried to laugh, but the sound he made was inhuman, and he was abruptly silent. The drive home, only half a mile, seemed an eternity now, and yet he dreaded arriving. But there was the bottom of their street just ahead, and as he turned the car toward home, he saw in the early morning twilight the Bords' farthest-flung trash can lying in the gutter. Scattered, car-flattened trash littered the street above it. He glanced at Lisa again. She had a beatific half-smile on her face that was impossible to read. He slowed down a little as they passed the fallen trash can, then pointed toward the hills, hunkering down and looking out through the windshield. "What's that?" he asked, knowing exactly what it was—a news helicopter sweeping low over the woods, getting the story. 

Lisa peered up through the window, though, turning her head away, and at once he bent over and squinted into the side mirror, looking back down at the galvanized mouth of the Bords' trash can, facing uphill so that it caught the first rays of the morning sun like a glowing metal halo. Inside the half-filled can lay the discarded bowling ball, a shining black hole against the white aurora of a kitchen trash bag. 


The End