“I think you dropped this, Mr.—Mr.—”

  “Dellamon,” the alien replied, in a cold, testy, snappish voice. “Thogral Dellamon, of Procyon V. And I didn’t drop the magazine. I threw it down violently, as you very well saw.”

  She smiled apologetically. “Of course, Mr. Dellamon. Did you see something you disagreed with in the magazine?”

  “Disagreed with? I saw something that was a positive insult!” He snatched the magazine from her, riffled through it, found a page, and handed it back.

  The magazine was open to page 113. The title of the story was “Slaves of the Pink Beings,” bylined J. Eckman Forester. She skimmed the first few lines; it was typical science fiction, full of monsters and bloodshed, and just as dull as every other science fiction story she had tried to read.

  “I hope I won’t make you angry when I say I don’t see anything worth getting angry over in this, Mr. Dellamon.”

  “That story,” he said, “tells of the conquests and sadistic pleasures of a race of evil pink beings—and of their destruction by Earthmen. Look at that cover painting! It’s an exact image of—well, you see? This is vicious propaganda aimed at my people! And none of it’s true! None!”

  The cover indeed bore a resemblance to the indignant little alien. But the date under the heading caught Milissa’s eye. June 2114. Three hundred years old. “Where did you get this magazine?” she asked.

  “Bought it. Wanted to read an Earth magazine, as long as I have to go there, so I had a man on my planet get one for me.”

  “Oh. That explains it, then. Look at the date, Mr. Dellamon! That story’s a complete fantasy! It was written more than a hundred years before Earth and Procyon came into contact!”

  “But—fantasy—I don’t understand—”

  The sputtering little alien threatened to become apoplectic. Milissa wished prodigiously that she had never transferred out of local service. These aliens could be so touchy, at times!

  “Excuse me, please,” said a furry purple creature seated across the aisle. “That magazine you have there—mind if I look at it?”

  “Here,” the angry alien said. He tossed it over.

  The purple being examined it, smiled delightedly, said, “Why, it’s an issue I need! Will you take five hundred credits for it?”

  “Five hundred—” The eyestalks stopped quivering, and drooped in an expression of probable delight. “Make it five-fifty and the book is yours!”

  ***

  CRISIS AFTER CRISIS, MILISSA THOUGHT gloomily. They were two days out from Vega, with better than a day yet to go before Earth hove into sight. And if the voyage lasted much longer, she’d go out of her mind.

  The three Grigori brothers had finally erupted into violence late the first day; they sprang from their seat and went rolling up the aisle, cursing fluently at each other in a dozen languages. Josef had the upper hand for a while, rearing back and pounding his brothers’ heads together, but he was outnumbered and was in dire straits by the time Milissa found two crewmen to put a stop to the brawl.

  Then there was the worm-like being from Albireo III who suddenly discovered she was going to sporulate, and did—casting a swarm of her encapsulated progeny all over the lounge. She was very apologetic, and assisted Milissa in finding the spores, but it caused quite a mess.

  The Greklan brothers from Deneb Kaitos I caused the next crisis. Greklans, Milissa discovered, had peculiar sexual practices: they spent most of their existence as neuters, but at regular periods about a decade apart suddenly developed sex, at which time the procedure was to mate, and fast. One of the brothers abruptly became a male, the other female, to their great surprise, consternation, and delight. The squeals of a puritanical being from Fomalhaut V attracted Milissa’s attention; she managed to hustle the Greklans off to a washroom just in time. They returned, an hour later, to announce they had reverted to neuter status and would name their offspring Milissa, but that scarcely helped her nerves.

  Never again, Milissa told herself, surveying the array of life-forms in the lounge. Back to local service for me. As soon as the return trip is over—

  Eleven hours to Earth. She hoped she could stay sane that long.

  Frozen asparagus turned up on the menu the final night. It was a grave tactical mistake; three vegetable-creatures of Mirach IX accused the Vegan Line of fomenting cannibalism, and stalked out of the dining room. Milissa followed them and found them seriously ill of nausea and threatening to sue. She hadn’t noticed until then how very much like asparagus stalks the Mirachians looked; no one in the galley had either, apparently.

  A family of reptiloids from Algenib became embroiled with a lizardlike inhabitant of Altair II. It took what was left of Milissa’s tattered diplomacy to separate the squabblers and persuade them all to retake their seats.

  She counted hours. She counted minutes. And, finally, she counted seconds.

  “Earth ahead!” came the announcement from Control Cabin.

  She went before the passengers to make the traditional final speech. Calmly, almost numbly, she thanked them for their cooperation, hoped they had enjoyed the flight, wished them the best of everything on Earth.

  Mike-Jim-Josef Grigori paused to say good-bye on their way out. They looked slightly bruised and battered. For the seventh time, Milissa explained to Mike how regulations prohibited her from dating, and finally they said good-bye. They walked down the ramp snarling and cursing at each other.

  She watched them all go—the Greklans, the angry little man from Procyon, the asparaguslike Mirachians. She felt a perverse fondness for them all.

  “That’s the last,” she said, turning to Captain Brilon. “And thank goodness.”

  “Tired, huh?”

  “All you had to do was watch the instruments,” she said. “I was playing nursemaid to umpteen different life-forms. But the return trip will be a rest. Just Earthmen and Vegans, I hope. No strange nonhumanoid forms. I can’t wait!”

  ***

  SHE RETURNED TO THE SHIP after the brief leave allotted her, and found herself almost cheerful at the prospect of the return trip. The passengers filed aboard—pleasant, normal Vegans and Earthmen, who whistled at her predictably but who showed no strange and unforeseeable mating habits or other manifestations.

  It was going to be a quiet trip, she told herself. A snap.

  But then three dark furry shapes entered the lounge and huddled self-consciously in the back. Milissa bit her lip and glanced down at the passenger list.

  Three spider-men from Arcturus VII. These creatures do not have names.

  They are extremely sensitive and will require close personal attention.

  Milissa shuddered. Even without a mirror handy, she knew her face was paling to a weak ultramarine. She could get used to Greklans and sporulating worms from Albireo, she thought. She could calm petulant Procyonites and fend off wolfish three-headed Earthmen. But there was nothing in her contract about travelers from Arcturus.

  She stared at the hairy, eight-legged creatures. Twenty-four arachnid eyes glinted beadily back at her.

  It was asking too much. No woman should be expected to take solicitous care of spiders.

  Sighing, she realized it was going to be a long, long voyage home.

  THE WAY TO SPOOK CITY

  Here’s a case where the author experienced more thrills and chills than his own protagonist in the course of writing one simple 18,000-word story. It is altogether possible that aliens were at work trying to prevent this one from ever seeing print.

  The saga began during the hot, dry summer of 1991, when I proposed to the editors of Playboy that I write a story of double the usual length of the stories I had done for them in the past. I was having increasing difficulty confining my Playboy stories to their top limit of 7,500 words or so. Long ago, I pointed out, the magazine had regularly run novellas, such stories as George Langelaan’s “The Fly,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” and Ray Bradbury’s “The Lost City of Mars.” What about reviving that custom and letting me write a long one now?

  The powers that be mulled over the idea and gave me a qualified go-ahead. I submitted an outline, and on September 10, 1991, we came to an agreement on the deal. Two days later the printer of my loyal computer, which I had been using for nearly a decade, declined to print a document. Somehow I jollied it into going back to work, and blithely got started on the story that was to become “The Way to Spook City” a day or two later, imagining I’d have the piece behind me before settling down to work on the upcoming winter novel. I promised to deliver it by mid-October so that it could be used in the August 1992 issue. But the printer trouble returned, and worsened, and on September 27—when I was forty pages into the story—the printer died completely. I was trying to print out my forty pages at the time, but what came out was this:

  “Everyone had been astonished when Nick announced he was going LIa kciN disiruprus oo, that he should be setting himself up for such a crazy LKthguoht eh nruter ot brawny young man Tom had become but of the soft-eyed LJs’kciN fo lla nehgt dna ,n” and then blank space, not another garbled word.

  No problem, you say. Get a new printer, hook it up, do the printout. But there was a problem. I had been something of a pioneer, as writers go, in the use of a computer for word-processing, and the computer I had been using all those years was now obsolete—incompatible, in fact, with any existing brand. The company that had made it was out of business, and no one then alive knew how to connect a modern printer to it. I did, of course, have a backup of my forty pages on a floppy disk; but my computer was a pre-MS-DOS model and its operating system could not communicate with then-modern machines. The texts on my computer were trapped in it forever, all my business records and the first half of “Spook City” among them. They could be brought up onscreen but they were inaccessible for purposes of printing.

  I needed to buy one of the newfangled MS-DOS computers and learn how to use it. And I contemplated the gloomy prospect of having to type “Spook City” and hundreds of other documents onto the new computer, one word at a time. It would take forever. What about my mid-October deadline?

  It was possible, at least, to rescue the unfinished story. The technician who had been servicing my old computer discovered that he still had one machine of that model in working order (more or less) in his San Francisco office. I gave him my backup disk; he printed out the forty pages of “Spook City” and faxed them to me. Later in the day I began keying the story into the only working computer in the house, which belonged to my wife Karen and was a perfectly standard DOS-based job. I also went out and bought a new computer myself, also, of course, a DOS machine compatible with hers.

  For the next ten days or so, while waiting for the new computer to arrive, I continued writing “Spook City” using my prehistoric manual typewriter, and entering each day’s typewritten work on Karen’s computer after her work-day was over. By October 4th I had 59 pages on disk. I decided to print them out and halt further work until my own new machine arrived.

  Karen’s computer wouldn’t print it.

  I didn’t know why.

  The text looked fine on screen, but when I gave the familiar print command I was told that the document was “corrupted” and couldn’t be sent on to the printer.

  Again? Was there a curse on this story?

  The backup disk was corrupted too. It began to look as though I had lost the nineteen pages I had written since the first computer glitch plus all the rewriting I had done on the original forty pages that the computer pro had rescued.

  “I’m pretty much in shellshock now,” I wrote Alice Turner of Playboy, “but what I suppose I’ll do is wait for the new computer to arrive, maybe by Wednesday, and then start putting the whole damn thing in once more, trying to reconstruct (though you never really can) the stuff I had been doing all this past week. I can see that I’m going to wind up earning about five cents an hour on this project even if everything goes perfectly the third time, which is by no means assured.”

  Enter a second savior that grim evening: our friend and neighbor Carol Carr, who showed up equipped with some program that allowed us to bring up on screen, page by page, the whole corrupted document, and print it. What came out, alas, was mostly babble: a Martian mix, miscellaneous random consonants (not vowels!) and numbers and keyboard symbols with an occasional intelligible phrase glaring out of the welter of nonsense. But that was better than nothing. The next day I told Alice Turner what Carol had achieved: “She spent hours waving magic wands in front of Karen’s computer and was able to coax out pages and pages of gibberish printout, which I am now reassembling, jigsaw-puzzle fashion, by locating recognizable passages, putting them into the proper order, and transcribing them by hand onto the old first draft that the last bunch of computer wizards coaxed out of my old computer last week. So far I’ve reached page 28 of the original 40-page draft and have pretty much reconstructed all the revisions. Unfortunately, a lot of the really good stuff in the climactic scenes didn’t emerge yesterday, but at least I have typed rough drafts of that and I ought to be able to put them back together in something approximating the level of yesterday’s destroyed version.”

  The new computer finally arrived. I learned how to use it by entering poor garbled “Spook City” in something like proper form. I rewrote as I went, and cautiously produced a new printout every afternoon. On Friday, October 18th, I finally finished what looked like a complete draft of the story, though it still needed some trimming and polishing. But the evil extraterrestrials who were determined to keep this story from coming into being weren’t finished with me. Two days later—a furiously hot summer day—my part of California caught fire and three thousand houses nearby were destroyed. It looked as though our house might go up in flame as well. Karen and I were forced to flee, taking with us our cats, a handful of household treasures, and a backup disk of the accursed “Spook City.” Whatever else happened, I didn’t want to have to write that thing a third time.

  We were able to return home after eighteen hours. The fire had stopped a mile north of us. After a couple of shaky days I got back to work and on October 25th, only two weeks beyond deadline, I sent the story to Playboy, telling Alice: “Here, thank God, is the goddamn story, and what a weird experience it has been. Written on four different machines—my old computer, Karen’s computer, my ancient manual typewriter, and my jazzy new computer—and lost twice by computers and both times recovered with the aid of technical wizardry, and typed over and over from one machine to the other, and interrupted by a natural disaster that makes our earthquake of a few years ago seem trivial—I feel as though I’ve been writing it forever. I wake up mumbling it to myself. I never dreamed I was embarking on such an epic struggle when I proposed the story; I thought it would simply be a few weeks of the usual tough work, a nice payday, and on to the next job . . . Anyway, here’s the story. I hope you like it.” She did, and published it in the August 1992 issue of Playboy, just as planned.

  Thus, with some trepidation, I will herewith instruct my computer to copy its text from my 1991 story file into this present collection. If you don’t find it here, you’ll know why.

  THE AIR WAS SHINING UP ahead, a cold white pulsing glow bursting imperiously out of the hard blue desert sky. That sudden chilly dazzle told Demeris that he was at the border, that he was finally getting his first glimpse of the place where human territory ended and the alienheld lands began.

  He halted and stood staring for a moment, half expecting to see monsters flying around overhead on the far side of the line; and right on cue something weird went flapping by, a blotch of darkness against the brilliant icy sheen that was lighting everything up over there in the Occupied Zone. It was a heavy thing the size of a hawk and a half, with a lumpy greenish body and narrow wings like saw-blades and a long snaky back that had a little globular purple head at the end of it. The creature was so awkward that Demeris had to laugh. He couldn’t see how it stayed airborne. The bird, if that was what it was, flew on past, heading north, dropping a line of bright turquoise turds behind it. A little burst of flame sprang up in the dry grass where each one fell.

  “Thank you kindly for that pretty welcome,” Demeris called out after it, sounding jauntier than he felt.

  He went a little closer to the barrier. It sprang straight up out of the ground like an actual wall, but one that was intangible and more or less transparent: he could make out vague outlines of what lay beyond that dizzying shield of light, a blurry landscape that should have been basically the same on the Spook side of the line as it was over here, low sandy hills, gray splotches of sagebrush, sprawling clumps of prickly pear, but which was in fact mysteriously touched by strangeness—unfamiliar serrated buttes, angular chasms with metallic blue-green walls, black-trunked leafless trees with rigid branches jutting out like horizontal crossbars. Everything was veiled, though, by the glow of the barrier that separated the Occupied Zone from the fragment of the former United States that lay to the west of it, and he couldn’t be sure how much he was actually seeing and how much was simply the product of his expectant imagination.

  A shiver of distaste ran through him. Demeris’s father, dead now, had always regarded the Spooks as his personal enemy, and that had carried over to him. “They’re just biding their time, Nick,” his father would say. “One of these days they’ll come across the line and grab our land the way they grabbed what they’ve got already. And there won’t be a goddamned thing we can do about it.” Demeris had dedicated himself ever since to maintaining the order and prosperity of the little ranch near the eastern border of Free Country that was his family heritage, and he loathed the Spooks, not just for what they had done but simply because they were hateful—unknown, strange, unimaginable, alien. Not us. Others were able to take the aliens and the regime they had imposed on the old U.S.A. for granted: all that had happened long ago, ancient history. In any case there had never been a hint that the elder Demeris’s fears were likely to be realized. The Spooks kept to themselves inside the Occupied Zone. In a hundred fifty years they had shown no sign of interest in expanding beyond the territory they had seized right at the beginning.