Martians, Go Home

1.

In August of the year 1964 a man with the mildly improbable name of Hiram Pedro Oberdorffer, of Chicago, Illinois, invented a contraption which he called an anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator.

Mr. Oberdorffer had been educated in Heidelberg, Wisconsin. His formal education had ended at the eighth grade, but in the fifty-odd years that followed he had become an inveterate reader of popular science magazines and of science articles in Sunday supplements and elsewhere. He was an ardent theorist and, in his own words (and who are we to gainsay them), he “knew more science than most of them laboratory guys.”

He was employed, and had been for many years, as janitor of an apartment building on Dearborn Street near Grand Avenue, and lived in a basement apartment of two rooms in the same building. In one of the two rooms he cooked, ate and slept. In the other room he lived the part of his life that mattered; it was his workroom.

Besides a work bench and some power tools the workroom contained several cabinets, and in and on the cabinets and piled on the floor or in boxes were old automobile parts, old radio parts, old sewing machine parts and old vacuum cleaner parts. Not to mention parts from washing machines, typewriters, bicycles, lawn mowers, outboard motors, television sets, clocks, telephones, tinkertoys, electric motors, cameras, phonographs, electric fans, shotguns and Geiger counters. Infinite treasures in a little room.

His janitorial duties, especially in summer, were not too onerous; they left him ample time for inventing and for his only other pleasure which was, in good weather, to sit and relax and think in Bughouse Square, which was only a ten minute walk from where he lived and worked.

Bughouse Square is a city park one block square and it has another name but no one ever uses the other name. It is inhabited largely by bums, winos and crackpots. Let us leave it clearly understood, however, that Mr. Oberdorffer vas none of these. He worked for a living and he drank only beer and that in moderate quantity. Against accusations of being a crackpot, he could have proved that he was sane. He had papers to show it, given him upon his release from a mental institution where once, some years before, he had been briefly incarcerated.

Martians bothered Mr. Oberdorffer much less than they bothered most people; he had the very excellent good fortune to be completely deaf.

Oh, they bothered him some. Although he couldn’t listen, he loved to talk. You might even say that he thought out loud, since he habitually talked to himself all the while he was inventing. In which case, of course, Martian interference was no nuisance; although he couldn’t hear his own voice he knew perfectly well what he was saying to himself whether or not he was being drowned out. But he had one friend besides himself to whom he liked to talk, a man named Pete, and he found that Martians did interfere occasionally in his one-sided conversations with Pete.

Every summer Pete lived in Bughouse Square, whenever possible on the fourth bench to the left along the walk that diagonalled from the inner square toward the southeast corner. In the fall Pete always disappeared; Mr. Oberdorffer assumed, not too incorrectly, that he flew south with the birds. But the following spring Pete would be there again and Mr. Oberdorffer would take up the conversation again.

It was a very one-sided conversation indeed, for Pete was a mute. But he loved to listen to Mr. Oberdorffer, believing him to be a great thinker and a great scientist, a view with which Mr. Oberdorffer himself was in complete accord, and a few simple signals sufficed for his end of the conversation—a nod or shake of the head to indicate yes or no, a raising of the eyebrows to request further explanation or elucidation. But even these signals were rarely necessary; a look of admiration and rapt attention usually sufficed. Even more rarely was recourse to the pencil and pad of paper which Mr. Oberdorffer always carried with him necessary.

Increasingly, though, this particular summer Pete had been using a new signal—cupping a hand behind his ear. It had puzzled Mr. Oberdorffer the first time Pete had used this signal, for he knew that he was talking as loudly as ever, so he had passed the pad and pencil to Pete with a request for explanation, and Pete had written: “Cant here. Marsheys too noysy.”

So Mr. Oberdorffer had obliged by talking more loudly, but it annoyed him somewhat to have to do so. (Not as much, however, as his talking so loudly—even after the interference had ceased, since he had no way of knowing when the Martians stopped heckling—annoyed the occupants of adjacent benches.)

Even when, this particular summer, Pete did not signal for an increase in volume, the conversations were no longer quite as satisfactory as they had once been. All too frequently the expression on Pete’s face showed all too clearly that he was listening to something else instead of or in addition to what Mr. Oberdorffer was telling him. And whenever at such times Mr. Oberdorffer looked about he’d see a Martian or Martians and know that he was being heckled, to Pete’s distraction and therefore indirectly to his own.

Mr. Oberdorffer began to toy with the idea of doing something about the Martians.

But it wasn’t until in mid-August that he definitely decided to do something about them. In mid-August Pete suddenly disappeared from Bughouse Square. For several days running, Mr. Oberdorffer failed to find him there and he started to ask the occupants of other benches—those whom he had seen often enough to recognize as regulars—what had happened to Pete. For a while he got nothing but head shakes or other obvious disclaimers such as shrugs; then a man with a gray beard started to explain something to him so Mr. Oberdorffer said that he was deaf and handed over the pad and pencil. A temporary difficulty arose when the bearded one turned out to be unable to read or write, but between them they found an intermediary who was barely sober enough to listen to gray beard’s story and put it in writing for Mr. Oberdorffer to read. Pete was in jail.

Mr. Oberdorffer hastened to the precinct station and after some difficulty due to the fact that there are many Petes and he didn’t know his best friend’s last name finally learned where Pete was being held and hurried to see him to help if he could.

It turned out that Pete had already been tried and convicted and was past help for thirty days, although he gladly accepted a loan of ten dollars to enable him to buy cigarettes for that period.

However he managed to talk to Pete briefly and to learn, via the pad and pencil route, what had happened.

Shorn of misspellings, Pete’s story was that he had done nothing at all, the police had framed him; besides, he’d been a little drunk or he’d never have tried to shoplift razor blades from a dime store in broad daylight with Martians around. The Martians had enticed him into the store and had promised to act as lookout for him and then had ratted on him and called copper the moment he had his pockets full. It was all the fault of the Martians.

This pathetic story so irked Mrs Oberdorffer that, as of that very moment, he decided definitely to do something about the Martians. That very evening. He was a patient man but he had reached the limit of his patience.

Enroute home, he decided to break along standing habit and eat at a restaurant. If he didn’t have to interrupt his thinking to cook a meal for himself, he’d be off to a quicker start.

In the restaurant he ordered pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut and, while waiting for it to be brought to him, he started his thinking. But very quietly so as not to disturb other people along the counter.

He marshaled before him everything he’d read about Martians in the popular science magazines, and everything he’d read about electricity, about electronics and about relativity.

The logical answer came to him at the same time as the pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut. “lt’s got,” he told the waitress, “to be an anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator! That’s the only thing that will get them.” Her answer, if any, went unheard and is unrecorded.

He had to stop thinking while he ate, of course, but he thought loudly the rest of the way home. Once in his own place, he disconnected the signal (which was a flashing red light is lieu of a bell) so no tenant of the building could interrupt him to report a leaking faucet or a recalcitrant refrigerator, and then he started to build an anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator.

“We use this outboard motor for power,” he thought, suiting action to word. “Only the propeller it comes off and gives a generator to make the D.C. at—how many volts?” And when he figured that out, he stepped up the voltage with a transformer and then stepped it sidewise into a spark coil, and went on from there.

Only once did he encounter a serious difficulty. That was when he realized that he would need a vibrating membrane about eight inches in diameter. There was nothing in his workroom that would serve the purpose and since it was by then eight o’clock and all stores were closed he almost gave up for the evening.

But the Salvation Army saved him, when he remembered it. He went out and over to Clark Street, walked up and down until a Salvation Army lassie came along to make the rounds of the taverns. He had to get as high as an offer of thirty dollars to the cause before she would agree to part with her tambourine; it is well she succumbed at that figure for it was all the money he had with him. Besides, if she had not agreed he would have been strongly tempted to grab the tambourine and run with it, and that would in all probability have landed him in jail with Pete. He was a portly man, a slow runner, and short of wind.

But the tambourine, with the jangles removed, turned out to be exactly right for his purpose. Covered with a light sprinkling of magnetized iron filings and placed between the cathode tube and the aluminum saucepan which served as a grid, it would not only filter out the unwanted delta rays but the vibration of the filings (once the outboard motor was started) would provide the required fluctuation in the inductance.

Finally, a full hour after his usual bedtime, Mr. Oberdorffer soldered the last connection and stepped back to look at his masterpiece. He sighed with satisfaction. It was good. It should work.

He made sure that the airshaft window was open as high as it would raise. The subatomic vibrations had to have a way out or they would work only inside the room. But once free they would bounce back from the heaviside layer and, like radio waves, travel all around the world in seconds.

He made sure there was gasoline in the tank of the outboard motor, wound the cord around the spinner, prepared to pull the cord—and then hesitated. There’d been Martians in the room, off and on all evening but there was none present now. And he’d rather wait till one was present again before starting the machine, so he could tell right away whether or not it worked.

He went into the other room and got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and opened it. Took it back with him into the workroom and sat sipping it and waiting.

Somewhere outside a clock struck, but Mr. Oberdorffer being deaf, did not hear it.

There was a Martian, sitting right atop the anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator itself.

Mr. Oberdorffer put down his beer, reached over and pulled the cord. The motor spun and caught, the machine ran.

Nothing happened to the Martian.

“Take it a few minutes to build up potential,” Mr. Oberdorffer explained, to himself rather than to the Martian.

He sat down again, picked up his beer. Sipped it and watched and waited for the few minutes to pass.

It vas approximately five minutes after eleven o’clock, Chicago time, on the evening of August 19 ^th, a Wednesday.

2.

On the afternoon of August 19, 1964, in Long Beach, California, at four o’clock in the afternoon (which would have been six o’clock in the afternoon in Chicago, just about the time Mr. Oberdorffer reached home full of pigs’ knuckles and sauerkraut, ready to start work on his anti-extraterrestrial et cetera), Margie Devereaux looked around the corner of the doorway into Dr. Snyder’s office and asked, “Busy, Doctor?”

“Not at all, Margie. Come in,” said Dr. Snyder, who was swamped with work. “Sit down.”

She sat down. “Doctor,” she said, a bit breathlessly. “I’ve an idea finally as to how we can find Luke.”

“I certainly hope it’s a good one, Margie. It’s been two weeks now.”

It had been a day longer than that. It had been fifteen days and four hours since Margie had gone up to their room to waken Luke from his nap and had found a note waiting for her instead of a husband.

She’d run with the note to Dr. Snyder and their first thought since Luke had had no cash except a few dollars that had been in Margie’s purse, had been the bank. But a call to the bank had brought them the information that he had drawn five hundred dollars from the joint account.

Only one further fact had come to light subsequently. Police, the following day, had learned that less than an hour after Luke’s call at the bank a man answering his description but giving a different name had bought a used car from a lot and paid one hundred dollars cash for it.

Dr. Snyder was not without influence at the police department and the entire Southwest had been circularized with descriptions of Luke and of the car, which was an old 1957 Mercury, painted yellow. Dr. Snyder himself had similarly circularized all mental institutions in the area.

“We agreed,” Margie was saying, “that the place he’d most likely go to would be that shack on the desert where he was the night the Martians came. You still think so?”

“Of course. He thinks he invented the Martians—says so in that note he left for you. So what’s more natural than that he’d go back to the same place, try to reconstruct the same circumstances, to undo what he thinks he did. But I thought you said you didn’t have the faintest idea where the shack is.”

“I still haven’t except that it’s within driving distance of L.A. But I just remembered something, Doctor. I remember Luke telling me, several years ago; that Carter Benson had bought a shack somewhere—near Indio, I think. That could be the one. I’ll bet it is.”

“But you called this Benson, didn’t you?”

“I called him, yes. But all I asked him was whether he’d seen or heard from Luke since Luke left here. And he said he hadn’t but promised to let me knew if he did hear anything. But I didn’t ask him if Luke had used his shack last March! And he wouldn’t have thought to volunteer the information, because I didn’t tell him the whole story or that we thought Luke might be going back to wherever he was last March. Because—well, it just never occurred to me.”

“Hmmm,” said Dr. Snyder, “Well, it’s a possibility. But would Luke use the shack without Benson’s permission?”

“He probably had permission last March. This time he’s hiding out, don’t forget. He wouldn’t want even Carter to know where he went. And he’d know Carter wouldn’t be using it himself—not in August.”

“Quite true. You want to phone Benson again, then? There’s the phone.”

“I’ll use the one in the outer office, Doctor. It might take a while to reach him, and you are busy, even if you say you aren’t.”

But it didn’t take long to reach Cater Benson after all. Margie was back within minutes, and her face vans shining.

“Doctor, it was Carter’s place Luke used last March. And I’ve got instructions how to get there!” She waved a slip of paper.

“Good girl! What do you think we should do? Phone the Indio police or—?”

“Police nothing. I’m going to him. As soon as I’m through with my shift.”

“Yon needn’t wait for that, my dear. But are you sure you should go alone? We don’t know how much his illness has changed and progressed, and you might find him—disturbed.”

“If he isn’t I’ll disturb him. Seriously, Doctor, don’t worry. I can handle him, no matter what.” She glanced at her wrist watch. “A quarter after four. If you really don’t mind my leaving now, I can be there by nine or ten o’clock.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to take one of the attendants with you?”

“Very sure.”

“All right, my dear. Drive carefully.”

3.

On the evening of the third day of the third moon of the season of kudus (at, as near as matters, the same moment Mr. Oberdorffer, in Chicago, was making inquiries in Bughouse Square about his missing friend) a witch doctor named Bugassi, of the Moparobi tribe in equatorial Africa, was called before the chief of his tribe. The chief’s name was M’Carthi, but he was no relative of a former United States senator of the same name.

“Make juju against Martians,” M’Carthi ordered Bugassi.

Of course he did not really call them Martians. He used the word gnajamkata, the derivation of which is: gna, meaning “Pygmy,” plus jam, meaning “green,” plus kat, meaning “sky.” The final vowel indicates a plural, and the whole translates as “green Pygmies from the sky.”

Bugassi bowed. “Make big juju,” he said.

It had damned well better be a big juju, Bugassi knew.

The position of a witch doctor among the Moparobi is a precarious one. Unless he is a very good witch doctor indeed, his life expectancy is short. It would be even shorter were it not quite rare for the chief to make an official demand upon one of his witch doctors, for tribal law decreed that one of them who failed must make a contribution of meat to the tribal larder. And the Moparobi are cannibals.

There had been six witch doctors among the Moparobi when the Martians came; now Bugassi was the last survivor. One moon apart (for taboo forbids the chief to order the making of a juju less than a full moon of twenty-eight days after the making of the last previous juju) the other five witch doctors had tried and failed and made their contributions.

Now it was the turn of Bugassi and from the hungry way M’Carthi and the rest of the tribe stared at him it appeared they would be almost as satisfied if he failed as if he succeeded. The Moparobi had not tasted meat for twenty-eight days and they were meat hungry.

All of Africa was meat hungry.

Some of the tribes, those who had lived exclusively or almost exclusively from hunting were actually starving. Other tribes had been forced to migrate vast distances to areas where vegetable foods, such as flits anal berries were available.

Hunting was simply no longer possible.

Almost all of the creatures man hunts for foods are fleeter of foot or of wing than he. They must be approached upwind and by stealth until he is within killing distance.

With Martians around there was no longer any possibility of stealth. They loved to help the natives hunt. Their method of helping was to run—or to kwim—well ahead of the hunter, awakening and alerting his quarry with gladsome cries.

Which made the quarry scamper like hell.

And which made the hunter return empty-handed from the hunt, ninety-nine times out of a hundred without having had the opportunity to shoot an arrow or throw a spear, let alone having hit something with either one.

It was a Depression. Different in type but at least as punishing in effect as the more civilized types of Depression that were rampant in the more civilized countries.

The cattle-herding tribes were affected too. The Martians loved to jump onto the backs of cattle and stampede them. Of course, since a Martian had no substance or weight, a cow couldn’t feel a Martian on its back, when the Martian leaned forward and screamed “Iwrigo ’m N’gari” (“Hi-yo, Silver”) in Masai at the top of his voice in the cow’s ear while a dozen or more other Martians were screaming “Iwrigo ’m N’gari” into the ears of a dozen or more other cows and bulls, the stampede was on.

Africa just didn’t seem to like the Martians.

But, back to Bugassi.

“Make big juju, he had told M’Carthi. And a big juju it was going to be, literally and figuratively. When, shortly after the green Pygmies had come from the sky, M’Carthi had called in his six witch doctors and had conferred long and seriously with them. He had tried his best to persuade or to order them to pool their knowledge so that one of them, using the knowledge of all six, could make the greatest juju that had ever been made.

They had refused and even threats of torture and death could not move them. Their secrets were sacred and more important to them than their lives.

But a compromise had been reached. They were to draw lots for their turns, a moon apart. And each agreed that if, and only if, he failed, he would confide all of his secrets, including and in particular the ingredients and incantations that went into his juju, before he made his contribution to the tribal stomach.

Bugassi had drawn the longest twig and now, five moons later, he had the combined knowledge of all of the others as well as his own—and the witch doctors of the Moparobi are famed as the greatest of all Africa. Furthermore, he had exact knowledge of every thing and every word that had gone into the making of the five jujus that had failed.

With this storehouse of knowledge at his fingertips, he had been planning his own juju for a full moon now, ever since Nariboto, the fifth of the witch doctors, had gone the way of all edible flesh. (Of which Bugassi’s share, by request, had been the liver, of which he had saved a small piece; well putrefied by now, it was in prime condition to be included in his own juju.)

Bugassi knew that his own juju could not fail, not only because the results to his own person were unthinkable if it did fail, but because—well, the combined knowledge of all of the witch doctors of the Moparobi simply could not fail.

It was to be a juju to end all jujus, as well as all Martians.

It was to be a monster juju; it was to include every ingredient and every spell that had been used in the other five and in addition was to include eleven ingredients and nineteen spells (seven of which were dance steps) which had been his own very special secrets, completely unknown to the other five.

All the ingredients were at hand and when assembled, tiny as most of them were individually, they would fill the bladder of a bull elephant, which was to be their container. (The elephant of course, had been killed six months before; no big game had been killed since the Martians came.)

But the assembling of the juju would take all night, since each ingredient must be added with its own spell or dance and other spells and dances interspersed with the adding of ingredients.

Throughout the night no Moparobi slept. Seated in a respectful circle around the big fire, which the women replenished from time to time, they watched while Bugassi labored, danced and cast spells. It was a strenuous performance; he lost weight, they noticed sadly.

Just before dawn, Bugassi fell supine before M’Carthi, the chief.

“Juju done,” he said from the ground.

“Gnajamkata still here,” said M’Carthi grimly. They were very much still there; they had been very active all night, watching the preparations and joyfully pretending to help them; several times they had made Bugassi stumble in his dancing and once fall flat on his face by darting unexpectedly between his legs while he had danced. But each time he had patiently repeated the sequence so no step would be lost.

Bugassi raised himself on one elbow in the dirt. With the other arm he pointed to the nearest large tree.

“Juju must hang clear of ground,” he said.

M’Carthi gave an order, and three black bucks leaped to obey it. They tied a rope of woven vines around the juju and one of them shinned up the tree and passed the rope over a limb; the other two hoisted the juju and when it was ten feet off the ground Bugassi, who had meanwhile climbed painfully to his feet, called to them that it was high enough. They secured it there. The one in the tree came down and they rejoined the others.

Bugassi went over to the tree, walking as though his feet hurt (which they did) and stood under the juju, he faced the east, where the sky was gray now and the sun just under the horizon, and folded his arms.

“When sun strike juju,” he said solemnly if a bit hoarsely, “gnajamkata go.”

The red rim of the sun came into sight over the horizon; its first rays struck the top of the tree in which the juju hung, moved downward.

In a very few minutes now, the first rays of the sun would reach the juju.

By coincidence or otherwise it was the exact moment when, in Chicago, Illinois, United States or America, one Hiram Pedro Oberdorffer, janitor and inventor, sat sipping beer and waiting for his anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator to build up potential.

4.

And as near as matters to three quarters of an hour before that exact moment, at about 9:15 P.M. Pacific Time in a shack on the desert near Indio, California, Luke Devereaux was making his third drink of the evening.

It was his fourteenth thwarting evening at the shack.

It was the fifteenth evening since his escape, if one can call so simple a walk-away an escape, from the sanitarium. The first evening had been thwarting too, but for a different reason. His car, the old ’57 Mercury he had bought for a hundred dollars, had broken down in Riverside, about half-way between Long Beach and Indio. He’d had it towed to a garage, where they’d told him it couldn’t possibly be fixed until the next afternoon. He’d spent a dull evening and a bad night (it seemed so strange and so lonesome to be sleeping alone again) at a Riverside hotel.

He’d spent the following morning shopping and carrying his purchases to the garage to load them in the car while a mechanic was working on it. He’d bought a used portable typewriter, of course, and some stationery. (He’d been in the process of choosing the typewriter when, at 10 A.M. Pacific Time, Yato Ishurti’s speech had come on the air, and business had been suspended while the proprietor turned on a radio and everyone in the store had gathered around it. Knowing Ishurti’s fundamental premise—that there really were Martians—to be completely wrong, Luke had been mildly annoyed at the interruption to his shopping, but had found himself quite amused at Ishurti’s ridiculous reasoning.)

He bought a suitcase and some extra clothing, razor, soap and comb, and enough food and liquor so he wouldn’t have to make a shopping trip into Indio for at least a few days after he got to the shack. He hoped what he had to accomplish there wouldn’t take any longer than that.

He got his car back—with a repair bill almost half as much as the original cost of it—in midafternoon and reached his destination just before dark. He found himself too tired to try very hard that evening, and, anyway, he realized that he had forgotten something: Alone, he had no way of telling whether or not he had succeeded. The next morning he drove back to Indio and bought himself the best and most expensive table model radio he could find, a set that would bring in programs from all over the country, a set on which he could find newscasts emaciating from somewhere or other almost any tune of day or evening.

Any newscast would tell him.

The only trouble was that for two weeks, until tonight, the newscasts had consistently told him wrong. They’d told him that the Martians were still around. Not that the newscasts opened with the statement, “The Martians are still with us,” but almost every story concerned them at least indirectly or concerned the Depression and the other troubles they were causing.

And Luke was trying everything he could think of, and almost going crazy trying.

He knew the Martians were imaginary, the product (like everything else) of his own imagination, that he had invented them that evening five months ago, in March, when he’d been trying to plot a science fiction novel. He’d invented them.

But he’d invented hundreds of other plots and none of there had really happened (or seemed really to happen) so there had been something different that evening, and he was trying everything to reconstruct the exact circumstances, the exact frame of mind, the exact everything.

Including, of course, the exact amount of drinking, the exact tinge of inebriety, since that might have been a factor. As he had done while he was here the period preceding that evening, he stayed strictly sober by day, no matter how badly hung over he might awaken—pacing the floor and getting desperate (then, for a plot; now, for an answer). Now, as then, he would let himself start drinking only after he’d made and fed himself a dinner and then he’d space his drinks and pace his drinking very carefully—at least until he’d given up in disgust for the evening.

What was wrong?

He’d invented Martians by imagining them, hadn’t he? Why couldn’t he un-invent them now that he’d ceased to imagine them, now that he’d learned the truth? He had, of course, as far as he himself was concerned. Why wouldn’t other people stop seeing and hearing them?

It must be a psychic block, he told himself. But naming it didn’t help.

He took a sip of his drink and stared at it. Trying, for the thousandth time since he’d been here, to remember exactly how many drinks he’d had that night in March. It wasn’t many, he knew; he hadn’t been feeling them, any more than he was feeling the two he’d already had tonight before this one.

Or didn’t the drinking have anything to do with it after all?

He took a second sip of his drink, put it down and started pacing. There aren’t any Martians, he thought. There never were any; they existed—like everything and everybody else—only while I imagined them. And I no longer imagine them.

Therefore—

Maybe that had done it. He went over to the radio and turned it on, waited for it to warm up. Listened to several discouraging items, realizing that even if he had just succeeded it would be at least minutes, since Martians weren’t seen everywhere all the time, before anyone began to realize that they were gone. Until the newscaster happened to say, “At this very moment, right here in the studio, a Martian is trying to…”

Luke flicked off the radio and swore.

Took another sip of his drink and paced some more.

Sat down and finished his drink and made another one.

Had a sudden idea.

Maybe he could outwit that psychic block by going around it instead of through it. The block could only be because, even though he knew he was right, he lacked sufficient faith in himself. Maybe he should imagine something else, something completely different, and when his imagination brought it into being, even his damned subconscious couldn’t deny it, and then in that moment of undeniability—

It was worth trying. There was nothing to lose.

But he’d imagine something that he really wanted, and what did be want—outside of getting rid of Martians—most right at this moment?

Margie, of course.

He was lonesome as hell after these two weeks of solitude. And if he could imagine Margie here, and by imagining bring her here, he knew he could break that psychic block. With one arm tied behind his back, or with both arms around Margie.

Let’s see, he thought. I’ll imagine that she’s driving here in her car, already through Indio and only half a mile away. Pretty soon I’ll hear the car.

Prey soon he heard the car.

He made himself walk, not run, to a door and open it. He could see headlights coming. Should he—now—?

No, he’d wait till lie was sure. Not even when the car came close enough that he thought he could recognize it as Margie’s; a lot of cars look alike. He’d wait until the car had stopped and Margie got out of it and he knew. And then, an that golden moment, he’d think There Aren’t Any Martians.

And there wouldn’t be.

In a few minutes, the car would be here.

It was approximately five minutes after nine o’clock (P.M.), Pacific Time. In Chicago it was five minutes after eleven and Mr. Oberdorffer sipped beer and waited for his subervibrator to build up potential; in equatorial Africa it was dawn and a witch doctor named Bugassi stood with crossed arms under the greatest juju ever made, waiting for the sun’s first rays to strike it.

Four minutes later, one hundred and forty-six days and fifty minutes after they appeared, the Martians disappeared. Simultaneously, from everywhere. Everywhere on Earth, that is.

Wherever they went, there is no authenticated instance of one having been seen since that moment. Seeing Martians in nightmares and in delirium tremens is still common, but such sightings can hardly be called authenticated.

To this day…