Jill said, “It’ll be berserk here now for two or three days. You ought to be very careful if you go outdoors.”

  “Yes. I will.”

  “Listen,” she said, putting an edge on her voice to make it cut through the roaring coming from overhead, “I’ve got a proposition for you, now that you know the truth.” She leaned close to him. “Let’s stay together, you and me. Despite our differences. I like you a lot, Nick.”

  He peered at her, utterly astounded.

  “I really think we can work something out,” she went on. Another horde of winged things shot by just above them, making raspy tearing sounds as they flailed the air, and a new gush of color stained the sky. “Seriously, Nick. We can stay in Spook City if you want to, but I don’t suppose you do. If you don’t I’ll go back across the border with you and live with you in Free Country. In my mind I’ve already crossed over. I don’t want just to study you people from the outside. I want to be one of you.”

  “Are you crazy?” Demeris asked.

  “No. Not in the least, I swear. Can you believe me? Can you?”

  “I’ve got to go inside,” he said. He was trembling. “It isn’t smart to be standing out here while the hunt is going on.”

  “What do you say, Nick? Give me an answer.”

  “It isn’t possible for us to be together. You know it isn’t.”

  “You want to. Some part of you does.”

  “Maybe so,” he said, amazed at what he was saying, but unable to deny it despite himself. “Just maybe. One little fraction of me. But it isn’t possible, all the same. I don’t want to live here among the Spooks, and if I take you back with me, some bastard with a sharp nose will sniff you out sooner or later and expose you for what you are, and stand up before the whole community and denounce me for what I am. I’m not going to take that risk. I’m just not, Jill.”

  “That’s your absolute decision.”

  “My absolute decision, yes.”

  Something was coming down the street now, some vast hopping thing with a head the size of a cow and teeth like spears. A dozen or so humans ran along beside it, practically within reach of the creature’s clashing jaws, and a covey of Spooks hovered over it, bombarding it with flashes of light. Demeris took a step or two toward the door of the hotel. Jill did nothing to hold him back.

  He turned when he was in the doorway. She was still standing there. The hunters and their prey sped right past her, but she took no notice. She waved to him.

  Sure, he thought. He waved back. Goodbye, Jill.

  He went inside. There was a clatter on the stairs, people running down, a woman and some men. He recognized them as the ones who had mocked him in the bar when he had first arrived. Two of the men ran past him and out the door, but the woman halted and caught him by the crook of the arm.

  “Hey, Abblecricky!”

  Demeris stared at her.

  She leaned into his face and grinned. She was flushed and wild-looking, like the ones who had been running through the streets. “Come on, man! It’s the hunt! The hunt, man! You’re heading the wrong way. Don’t you want to be there?”

  He had no answer for that.

  She was tugging at him. “Come on! Live it up! Kill yourself a dragon or two!”

  “Ella!” one of the men called after her.

  She gave Demeris a wink and ran out the door.

  He swayed uncertainly, torn between curiosity about what was going on out there and a profound wish to go upstairs and shut the door behind him. But the street had the stronger pull. He took a step or two after the woman, and then another, and then he was outside again. Jill wasn’t there. The scene in the street was wilder than ever: people running back and forth yelling incoherently, colliding with each other in their frenzy, and overhead streams of winged creatures still swarming, and Spooks like beams of pure light moving among them, and in the distance the sounds of bellowing animals and thunderous explosions and high keening cries of what he took to be Spook pleasure. Far off to the south he saw a winged something the size of a small hill circling desperately in the sky, surrounded by implacable flaring pinpoints of Spook-light, and suddenly halting and plummeting like a falling moon toward the ground. He could smell the smell of charred flesh in the air, with a salty underflavor of what he suspected was the blood of alien beasts.

  At a sleepwalker’s dreamy pace Demeris went to the corner and turned left. Abruptly he found himself confronted with a thing so huge and hideous that it was almost funny—a massive long-snouted frog-shaped thing, sloping upward from a squat base, with a moist-looking greenish-black hide pocked with little red craters and a broad, gaping, yellow-rimmed mouth. It had planted itself in the middle of the street with its shoulders practically touching the buildings at either side and was advancing slowly and clumsily toward the intersection.

  Demeris drew his knife. What the hell, he thought. He was here at hunt time, he might as well join the fun. The creature was immense but it didn’t have any visible fangs or talons and he figured he could move in at an angle and slash upward through the great baggy throat, and then step back fast before the thing fell on him.

  And if it turned out to be more dangerous than it looked, he didn’t give a damn. Not now.

  He moved forward, knife already arcing upward.

  “Hey!” someone cried behind him. “You out of your mind, fellow?”

  Demeris glanced around. The bartender had come out of the hotel and was staring at him.

  “That critter’s just a big sack of acid,” he said. “You cut it open, it’ll pour all over you.”

  The frog-thing made a sound like a burp, or perhaps a sardonic chuckle. Demeris backed away.

  “You want to cut something with that,” the bartender said, “you better know what you’re cutting.”

  “Yeah.” Demeris said. “I suppose so.” He put the knife back in its sheath, and headed back across the street, feeling all the craziness of the moment go from him like air ebbing from a balloon. This hunt was no business of his. Let the people who live here get mixed up in it if they liked. But there was no reason why he should. He’d just be buying trouble, and he had never seen any sense in that.

  As he reached the hotel entrance he saw Spook-light shimmering in the air at the corner—hunters, hovering above—and then there was a soft sighing sound and a torrent of bluish fluid came rolling out of the side street. It was foaming and hissing as it edged along the gutter.

  Demeris shuddered. He went into the building.

  ***

  QUICKLY HE MOUNTED THE STAIRS and entered his room, and sat for a long while on the edge of the cot, gradually growing calm, letting it all finish sinking in while the din of the hunt went on and on.

  Tom was gone, that was the basic thing he had to deal with. Neither dead nor really alive, but certainly gone. Okay. He faced that and grappled with it. It was bitter news, but at least it was a resolution of sorts. He’d mourn for a while and then he’d be all right.

  And Jill—

  Doing masks. Taking humans as lovers. The whole thing went round and round in his mind, all that he and she had done together, had said, everything that had passed between them. And how he had always felt about Spooks and how—somehow, he had no idea how—his time with Jill had changed that a little.

  He remembered what she had said. I don’t just want to study you. I want to be one of you.

  What did that mean? A tourist in the human race? A sightseer across species lines?

  They are softening, then. They are starting to whore after strange amusements. And if that’s so, he thought, then we are beginning to win. The aliens had infiltrated Earth; but now Earth was infiltrating them. This yearning to do masks, to look and act like humans, to experience human feelings and human practices and human follies: it meant the end for them. There were too many humans on Earth and not enough Spooks, and the Spooks would eventually be swallowed up. One by one, they would succumb to the temptation of giving up their chilly godliness and trying to imitate the messy, contradictory, troublesome creatures that humans are. And, Demeris thought, over the course of time—five hundred years, a thousand, who could say?—Earth would complete the job of absorbing the invaders and something new would emerge from the mixture of the species. That was an interesting thing to consider.

  But then something clicked in his mind and he felt himself flooded by a strange interior light, a light as weird and intense as the Spooklight in the skies over the city now or the glow of the border barrier, and he realized there was another way of looking at these things altogether. Jill dropped suddenly into a new perspective and instead of thinking of her as a mere sightseer looking for forbidden thrills, he saw her for what she really was—a pioneer, an explorer, a borderjumper, a defiant enemy of boundaries and limitations and rules. The same for Tom. They were two of a kind, those two; and he had been slow to recognize it because he simply wasn’t of their sort. Demeris recognized now how little he had understood his youngest brother. To him, Tom was a disturbed kid. To Ben Gorton, he was a contemptible sellout. But the real Tom, Tom’s own Tom, might be something entirely different: someone looking not just to make a little thirty-day Entrada but to carry out a real penetration into the alien, to jump deep and far into otherness to find out what it was like. The same with this Jill, this alien, this Spook—she was of that kind too, but coming from the other direction.

  And she had wanted his help. She had needed it all along, right from the start. She had missed her chance with Tom, but maybe she thought that Tom’s brother might be the same sort of person, someone who lived on the edge, who pushed against walls.

  Well, well, well. How wrong she was. That was too bad.

  For an instant Demeris felt another surge of the strange excitement that had come over him back at the checkpoint, when he had considered the possibility that Jill might be a Spook and had, for a moment, felt exhilarated by the thought. Could he take her back with him? Could he sneak her into the human community and live happily ever after with her, hiding the astonishing truth like the man in the old story who had married a mermaid? He saw himself, for a moment, lying beside her at night while she told him Spook stories and whispered weird Spook words and showed him sly little Spook shapeshifting tricks as they embraced. It was an astonishing thought. And he began to quiver and sweat as he thought about it.

  Then, as it had before, the moment passed.

  He couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t who he was, not really. Tom might have done it, but Tom was gone, and he wasn’t Tom or anything like him. Not one of the leapers, one of the soarers, one of the questers. Not one of the adventurous kind at all: just a careful man, a builder, a planner, a preserver, a protector. Nothing wrong with that. But not of any real use to Jill in her quest.

  Too bad, he thought. Too damned bad, Jill.

  He walked to the window and peered out, past the oilcloth cover. The hunt was reaching some sort of peak. The street was more crowded than ever with frantic monsters. The sky was full of Spooks. Scattered bands of Spook City humans, looking half crazed or more than half, were running back and forth. There was noise everywhere, sharp, percussive, discordant. Jill was nowhere to be seen out there. He let the oilcloth flap drop back in place and lay down on his cot and closed his eyes.

  ***

  THREE DAYS LATER, WHEN THE hunt was over and it was safe to go out again, Demeris set out for home. For the first ten blocks or so a glow that might have been a Spook hovered above him, keeping pace as he walked. He wondered if it was Jill.

  She had given him a second chance once, he remembered. Maybe she was doing it again.

  “Jill?” he called up to it. “That you?”

  No answer came.

  “Listen,” he called to the hovering glow. “Forget it. It isn’t going to work out, you and me. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. You hear me?”

  A little change in the intensity of the flicker overhead, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

  He looked upward and said, “And listen, Jill—if that’s you, Jill, I want to tell you: thanks for everything, okay?” It was strange, talking to the sky this way. But he didn’t care. “And good luck. You hear? Good luck, Jill! I hope you get what you want.”

  The glow bobbed for a moment, up, down. Then it was gone.

  Demeris, shading his eyes, looked upward for a time, but there was nothing to see. He felt a sharp little momentary pang, thinking of the possibilities. But what could he have done? She had wanted something from him that he wasn’t able to give. If he had been somebody else, things might have been different. But he was who he was. He could go only so far toward becoming someone else, and then he had to pull back and return to being who he really was, and that was all there was to it.

  He moved onward, toward the edge of the city.

  No one gave him any trouble at all on his way out, and the return trip through the western fringe of the Occupied Zone was just as smooth. Everything was quiet, all was peaceful, clear on to the border.

  The border crossing itself was equally uncomplicated. The fizzing lights and the weird hallucinatory effects of the barrier were visible, but they had no impact from this side. Demeris passed through them as though they were so much smoke, and kept on walking. In hardly any time he was across the border and back in Free Country again.

  AMANDA AND THE ALIEN

  Some stories seem almost to write themselves. This was one of them. I wish they were all that easy, or that the results were always that pleasing.

  “Amanda” was a product of the rainy winter of 1981–1982, when I was having a particularly fertile run of short-story writing. (Here I need to pause for a digression on California weather and my writing habits. California is one of five places in the world that have the so-called “Mediterranean” climate—the others are Chile, Western Australia, the western part of South Africa, and the Mediterranean region itself—in which the winters are mild and rainy and the summers are dry. Where I live, in the San Francisco region, the heaviest rains fall between November and March. Then they taper off, and from mid-April to early November there’s normally no rain at all. Rain in summertime here has been known to happen occasionally, but so rarely that it’s a front-page news item. My working pattern followed the weather: in the days when I was writing novels—it’s been a while since I last wrote one—I tended to write them during the period of maximum rainfall, tapering off to short stories as the season’s rains began to diminish in the spring, and doing as little work as my conscience would allow during the dry season. By fall, just as the rains were getting ready to return, I would warm up the machinery with a short story or two and then embark on the new season’s novel. But 1981 was an unusual year: instead of a novel, my book for the year was Majipoor Chronicles, which is actually a collection of short stories disguised as a novel, and I wrote it in the spring and summer instead of winter. When autumn came, I was out of sequence with my regular writing rhythm, and I decided to keep on doing short stories and get things straightened out later on.)

  And so “Amanda.” It wasn’t the story I had intended to do then. I had promised one to Ellen Datlow, the new fiction editor of Omni, and what I had in mind was a sequel to one from the year before called “Dancers in the Time-Flux”—using the same protagonist, the 17th-century Dutch circumnavigator Olivier van Noort, who has been transported to the far future and this time encounters a Parisian woman from the year 1980 who was, like himself, a creature of antiquity, but nevertheless something out of his own future. My long-range plan was to assemble another story cycle along the lines of Majipoor Chronicles, set in the Son of Man world that I had invented for a 1969 novel. But something went wrong and the story died on me after about eight pages. I don’t know why. Unfinished stories are as rare around here as heavy rainfall in July. So far as I can recall, that’s the only story I’ve left unfinished in the past sixty years.

  “The thing seems terribly slow and ponderous and wrong,” I told Ellen in a letter of February 20, 1982, “and after a few days of work I called a halt to find out what the trouble was. The trouble was, apparently, that I wanted to do a different sort of story for you, something bouncier and zippier and more contemporary. And before I really knew what was happening, the enclosed lighthearted chiller came galloping out of the typewriter.” Ellen bought it by return mail, and Terry Carr chose it for the 1983 volume of his annual Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series.

  Instead of setting my story in the remote future world of “Dancers in the Time-Flux,” I had put it right here, in the San Francisco Bay Area of just a few years hence. And, though I wrote it in cool rainy February, I picked warm sunny September as the time in which it took place. Perhaps that was why I wrote it with such ease. It had been pouring outside for days, but in my mind our long golden summer had already come. And, with it, the utterly unscrupulous Amanda, an all too familiar California life-form who comes face to face with a very scary alien and holds her own with it.

  Ellen Datlow published it in the May, 1983 issue of Omni. Some years later the talented young director Jon Kroll made a very funny television movie out of it, and careful observers will note that in it I made my film debut in a role (non-speaking) that had me on camera for approximately seventeen seconds.

  AMANDA SPOTTED THE ALIEN LATE Friday afternoon outside the Video Center on South Main. It was trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien was disguised as a seventeen-year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olive-toned skin and hair so black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one. She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely certain. Then she walked across.