Science Fiction - Daily Short Stories

The Good Neighbors - Edgar Pangborn 2

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Duration:: 17m
Broadcast on:: 12 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Well, it sounds like the tenants at your rental property sure know how to throw a great party. You just wish they wouldn't throw so many parties, on Tuesdays, until 4am. And if they could pay the rent on time, that would be nice too. Being a landlord can be stressful, but it doesn't have to be. Let renters warehouse handle the hard part of property management for you, like finding quality tenants you can trust. Renters warehouse manages thousands of single-family homes, and specializes in locating reliable tenants at the right price for your property, usually in a matter of days. And if your tenant defaults for any reason, they'll replace them for free up to 18 months under their tenant warranty program. From rent collection to maintenance coordination, their best-in-class property management professionals do it all. All for one flat monthly fee. Get a free rental price analysis at renterswarehouse.com to find out how much your home can rent for. At renterswarehouse.com, call 303-974-9444 to speak to a rent estate advisor today. What if you could have a career where the opportunities are as vast as our nation, where it's not about mission statements, but a shared mission? At U.S. Customs and Border Protection, we go beyond to protect more than borders, from ship to shore, air to ground, cities to local communities, CBP agents and officers are keeping people safe. Join U.S. Customs and Border Protection and go beyond for something far greater than yourself. Learn more at cbp.gov/careers. The Good Neighbors by Edgar Pangborn. You can't blame an alien for a little inconvenience, as long as he makes up for it. The ship was sighted a few times, briefly, and without a good fix. It was spherical, the estimated diameter, about 27 miles, and was in an orbit approximately 3,400 miles from the surface of the Earth. No one observed the escape from it. The ship itself occasioned some excitement, but back there, at the tattered end of the 20th century, what was one visiting spaceship more or less? Others had appeared before, and gone away, discouraged, or just not bothering. Three-dimensional TV was coming out of the experimental stage. Soon, anyone could have Dora the Doll, or the grandson of Tarzan smack in his own living room. Besides, it was a hot summer. The first knowledge of the escape came when the region of Seattle suffered an eclipse of the sun, which was not an eclipse, but a near shadow, which was not a shadow, but a thing. The darkness drifted out of the northern Pacific. It generated thunder, without lightning, and without rain. When it had moved eastward and the hot sun reappeared, when followed, a moderate gale. The coast was battered by sudden, high waves, then hushed in a bewilderment of fog. Before that appearance, radar had gone crazy for an hour. The atmosphere buzzed with aircraft. They went up in readiness to shoot, but after the first sighting, reports only a few miles offshore. That order was vehemently canceled. Someone in charge must have had a grain of sense. The thing was not a plane, rocket, or missile. It was an animal. If you shoot an animal that resembles an inflated gas bag with wings, and the wings spread happens to be something over four miles, tip to tip, and the carcass drops on a city, it's not nice for the city. The Office of Continental Defense deplored the lack of precedent. But actually none was needed. You just don't drop four miles of dead or dying alien flesh on Seattle, or any other part of a swarming homeland. You wait till it flies out over the ocean, if it will, the most commodious ocean in reach. It, or rather she, didn't go back over the Pacific, perhaps because of the prevailing Westerlies. After the Seattle incident, she climbed to a great altitude above the Rockies, apparently using an updraft with very little wing motion. There was no means of calculating her weight, or mass, or buoyancy. Dead or injured, Drift might have carried her anywhere within one or two hundred miles. Then she seemed to be following the line of the Platte and the Missouri. By the end of the day, she was circling interminably over the huge complex of St. Louis, hopelessly crying. She had a head, drawn back most of the time, into the bloated mass of the body, but thrusting forward now and then, on a short neck, not more than three hundred feet in length. When she did that, the blunt, turtle-like head could be observed. The gaping, toothless, suffering mouth from which the thunder came, and the soft-shining purple eyes that searched the ground, but found nothing answering her need. The skin color was mud-brown, with some dull iridescence and many peculiar marks resembling wheels or blisters. Along the belly, some observers saw half a mile of paired protuberances that looked like teats. She was unquestionably the equivalent of a vertebrate. Two web-footed legs were drawn up close against the cigar-shaped body. The vast, rather narrow, inflated wings could not have been held or moved in flight without a strong internal skeleton and musculature. Theorists later argued that she must have come from a planet with a high proportion of water-surface, a planet possibly larger than Earth, though of about the same mass and with a similar atmosphere. She could rise in Earth's air. And before each thunderous lament, she was seen to breathe. It was assumed that the immense air sacs within her body were inflated or partly inflated when she left the ship, possibly with some gas lighter than nitrogen. Since it was inconceivable that a vertebrate organism could have survived entry into atmosphere from an orbit 3400 miles up, it was necessary to believe that the ship had briefly descended, unobserved, and by unknown means, probably on Earth's night-side. Later on, the ship did descend as far as atmosphere for a moment. St. Louis was partly evacuated. There is no reliable estimate of the loss of life and property from panic and accident on the jammed roads and rail lines. 1500 dead, 7,400 injured, is the conservative figure. After a night and day, she abandoned that area, flying heavily eastward. The droning and swooping knots of aircraft plainly distressed her. At first she had only tried to avoid them, but now and then during her eastward flight from St. Louis, she made short, desperate rushes against them, without skill or much sign of intelligence, screaming from a wide open mouth that could have swallowed a four-engine bomber. Two aircraft were lost over Cincinnati, by collision with each other, and trying to get out of her way. Pilots were then ordered to keep a distance of not less than ten miles until such a time as she reached the Atlantic, if she did, when she could safely be shot down. She studied Chicago for a day. By that time, civil defense was better prepared. About a million residents had already fled to open country before she came, and the loss of life was proportionately smaller. She moved on. We have no clue to the reason why great cities should have attracted her, though apparently they did. She was hungry, perhaps, or seeking help, or merely drawn in animal curiosity by the endless motion of the cities and the strangeness. It has even been suggested that the lifeforms of her homeland, her masters, resembled humanity. She moved eastward, and religious organizations united to pray that she would come down on one of the lakes where she could safely be destroyed. She didn't. She approached Pittsburgh, choked and screamed and flew high, and soared in weary circles over Buffalo for a day and a night. Some pilots who had followed the flight from the west coast claimed that the vast lamentation of her voice was growing fainter and horseer, while she was drifting along the line of the Mohawk Valley. She turned south, following the Hudson at no great height. Sometimes she appeared to be choking, the labored inhalations harsh and prolonged, like a cloud and agony. When she was over Westchester, headquarters tripled the swarm of interceptors and observation plans. Squadrons from Connecticut and Southern New Jersey deployed to form a monstrous funnel, the small inn before her, the large inn pointing out to open sea. Heavy bombers closed and above, laying a smokescreen at ten thousand feet, to discourage her from rising. The ground shook with a drone of jets, and with her crying. Multitudes had abandoned the metropolitan area, other multitudes trusted to the subways, to the narrow street canyons, and to the strength of concrete and steel. Others climbed to a thousand high places and watched, trusting the laws of chance. She passed over Manhattan in the evening, between 814 and 827, July 16th, 1976, at an altitude of about two thousand feet. She swerved away from the aircraft that blanketed Long Island and the sound, swerved again as the southern group buzzed her instead of giving way, she made no attempt to rise into the sun-crims and terror of drifting smoke. The plan was intelligent. It should have worked, but for one fighter pilot who jumped the gun. He said later that he himself couldn't understand what happened. It was court-martial testimony, but his reputation had been good. He was Bill Green, William Hammond Green, of New London, Connecticut, flying a one-man jet fighter, well aware of the strictest orders not to attack until the turret had moved at least ten miles east of Sandy Hook. He said he certainly had no previous intention to violate orders. It was something that just happened in his mind, a sort of mental sneeze. His squadron was approaching Rockaway. The flying creature about three miles ahead of him, and half a mile down. He was aware of saying out loud to nobody. "Well, she's too big." Then he was darting out of formation, diving on her, giving her one rocket burst and reeling off to the south at 840 miles per hour. He never did locate or rejoin his squadron, but he made it somehow back to his home field. He climbed out of the cockpit, they say, and fell flat on his face. It seems likely that his shot missed the animal's head and tore through some part of her left wing. She spun to the left, rose perhaps a thousand feet, facing the city, side-slipped, recovered herself, and fought for altitude. She could not gain it, and the effort she collided with two of the following planes. One of them smashed into her right side, behind the wing. The other flipped end over end across her back, like a swatted dragonfly. It dropped clear and made a mess on Betlow's Island. She too was falling, in a long slant, silent now, but still living. After the impact, her body thrashed decilently on the wreckage between Lexington and South Mount Avenue's, her right wing churning, then only trailing in the East River. Her left wing, a crumpled, slowly deflating mass, concealing Times Square, Harold Square, and the Garment District. At the close of the struggle, her neck extended, her turtle beak grasping the top of Radio City. She was still trying to pull herself up, as the buoyant gases hissed and bubbled away through the gushing holes in her side, Radio City collapsed with her. For a long while, after the roar of descending rubble and her own roaring had ceased, there was no human noise except a melancholy thunder of the planes. The apology came early next morning. The spaceship was observed to descend to the outer limits of atmosphere very briefly. A capsule was released, with a parachute time to open at 40,000 feet and come down quite neatly in Scarsdale. Parachute, capsule, and timing device were of good workmanship. The communication engraved on a plaque of metal, which still defies analysis, was a hasty job. The English, slightly odd, was some evidence of an incomplete understanding of the situation. That the visitors were themselves aware of these deficiencies is indicated by the text of the message itself. Those sadly regret inexcusable escape of livestock, while pitting the same, one of our children monkeyed, spelling, with airlock, will not happen again. Regret also imperfect grasp of language, learned through what you term "television," etc. Animal not dangerous, but observe some accidental damage caused, therefore hasten to enclose reimbursement, having taken liberty of studying your highly ingenious methods of exchange. Hope same will be adequate, having estimated deplorable inconvenience to best of ability. Regret exceedingly impossibility of communicating further as pressure of time and prior obligations for bids. These accept heartfelt apologies and assurances of continuing esteem. The reimbursement was, in fact, properly enclosed with the plaque, and may be seen by the public and the rotunda of the restoration of Radio City. Though technically counterfeit, it looks like perfectly good money, except that Mr. Lincoln is missing one of his wrinkles, and the words "5 dollars" are upside down. End of The Good Neighbors by Edgar Pangborn Well, it sounds like the tenants at your rental property sure know how to throw a great party. You just wish they wouldn't throw so many parties, on Tuesdays, until 4am. And if they could pay the rent on time, that would be nice too. Being a landlord can be stressful, but it doesn't have to be. Renters' warehouse handle the hard part of property management for you, like finding quality tenants you can trust. Renters' warehouse manages thousands of single-family homes and specializes in locating reliable tenants at the right price for your property, usually in a matter of days. And if your tenant defaults for any reason, they'll replace them for free up to 18 months under their tenant warranty program. From rent collection to maintenance coordination, their best-in-class property management professionals do it all, all for one flat monthly fee. Get a free rental price analysis at renterswearhouse.com to find out how much your home can rent for. That's renterswearhouse.com or call 303-974-9444 to speak to a rent estate advisor today. It's time for today's Lucky Land horoscope with Victoria Cash. Life's gotten mundane, so shake up the daily routine and be adventurous, with a trip to Lucky Land. You know what they say. Your chance to win starts with a spin, so go to luckylandslots.com to play over a hundred social casino-style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. 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