Winter Moon

intelligence, telepathy, starship war fleets engaged in battles in far

reaches of the galaxy, the collapse of the universe, time running

backward, the end of all things! He lost himself in a fog of the

fantastic, in a tomorrow that would never be, to avoid thinking about

the unthinkable.

The traveler from the doorway became quiescent, holed up in the woods,

and days passed without new developments. Eduardo didn't understand

why it would have come across billions of miles of space or thousands

of years of time, only to proceed with the conquest of the earth at a

turtle's pace.

Of course, the very essence of something truly and deeply alien was

that its motivations and actions would be mysterious and perhaps even

incomprehensible to a human being. The conquest of earth might be of

no interest whatsoever to the thing that had come through the doorway,

and its concept of time might be so radically different from Eduardo's

that days were like minutes to it.

In science fiction novels, there were essentially three kinds of

aliens. The good ones generally wanted to help humanity reach its full

potential as an intelligent species and thereafter coexist in

fellowship and share adventures for eternity. The bad ones wanted to

enslave human beings, feed on them, plant eggs in them, hunt them for

sport, or eradicate them because of a tragic misunderstanding or out of

sheer viciousness. The third--and least encountered--type of

extraterrestrial was neither good nor bad but so utterly alien that its

purpose and destiny were as enigmatic to human beings as was the mind

of God, this third type usually did the human race a great good service

or a terrible evil merely by passing through on its way to the galactic

rim, like a bus running across a column of busy ants on a highway, and

was never even aware of the encounter, let alone that it had impacted

the lives of intelligent beings.

Eduardo hadn't a clue as to the larger intentions of the watcher in the

woods, but he knew instinctively that, on a personal level, it didn't

wish him well.

It wasn't seeking eternal fellowship and shared adventures. It wasn't

blissfully unaware of him, either, so it was not one of the third

type.

It was strange and malevolent, and sooner or later it would kill him.

In the novels, good aliens outnumbered bad. Science fiction was

basically a literature of hope.

As the warm June days passed, hope was in far shorter supply on

Quartermass Ranch than in the pages of those books.

On the afternoon of June seventeenth, while Eduardo was sitting in a

living-room armchair, drinking beer and reading Walter M. Miller, the

telephone rang. He put down the book but not the beer, and went into

the kitchen to take the call.

Travis Potter said, "Mr. Fernandez, you don't have to worry."

"Don't I?"

"I got a fax from the state lab, results of the tests on the tissue

samples from those raccoons, and they aren't infected."

"They sure are dead," Eduardo said.

"But not from rabies. Not from plague, either. Nothing that appears

to be infectious, or communicable by bite or fleas."

"You do an autopsy?"

"Yes, sir, I did."

"So was it boredom that killed them, or what?"

Potter hesitated. "The only thing I could find was severe brain

inflammation and swelling."

"Thought you said there was no infection?"

"There isn't. No lesions, no abscesses or pus, just inflammation and

extreme swelling. Extreme."

"Maybe the state lab ought to test that brain tissue."

"Brain tissue was part of what I sent them in the first place."

"I see."

"I've never encountered anything like it," Potter told him.

Eduardo said nothing.

"Very odd," Potter said. "Have there been more of them?"

"More dead raccoons? No. Just the three."

"I'm going to run some toxicological studies, see if maybe we're

dealing with a poison here."

"I haven't put out any poisons."

"Could be an industrial toxin."

"It could? There's no damned industry around here."

"Well ... a natural toxin, then."

Eduardo said, "When you dissected them ..."

"Yes?"

"... opened the skull, saw the brain inflamed and swollen . . ."

"So much pressure, even after death, blood and spinal fluid squirted

out the instant the bone saw cut through the cranium."

"Vivid image."

"Sorry. But that's why their eyes were bulging."

"Did you just take samples of the brain tissue or . . ."

"Yes?"

". .. did you actually dissect the brain?"

"I performed complete cerebrotomies on two of them."

"Opened their brains all the way up?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't find anything?"

"Just what I told you."

"Nothing ... unusual?"

The puzzlement in Potter's silence was almost audible. Then: "What

would you have expected me to find, Mr. Fernandez?"

Eduardo did not respond.

"Mr. Fernandez?"

"What about their spines?" Eduardo asked. "Did you examine their

spines, the whole length of their spines?"

"Yes, I did."

"You find anything ... attached?"

"Attached?" Potter said.

"Yes."

"What do you mean, attached'?"

"Might have . .. might have looked like a tumor."

"Looked like a tumor?"

"Say a tumor ... something like that?"

"No. Nothing like that. Nothing at all."