The Green Gyre (3 page)

He didn’t know what it was. Hydraulic lubricant, maybe. He felt it touch his head, his cheeks, his shoulders. It came faster, denser, the nearly weightless blobs so numerous that they threatened to suffocate him. The thick, green rain drifted leisurely down about his feet, piled up; soon it was up past his ankles, then halfway to his knees. It was in his face and his hair. He ran through it, swiping, repulsed by the rubbery coolness of it on his skin, expecting it to burn and yet finding it didn’t really feel like much of anything at all. He kept expecting the squishy sacs to burst and release—

What?

Acid? Maggots?

He thought he could see something slightly darker twitching inside them.

Now he was wading knee-deep through it— swimming through it where the drifts were higher. The blobs were light, almost buoyant, and yielded easily before him, giving way as he desperately leaned forward and pushed it away with his hands. They went as effortlessly as if they were little more than bubbles. But they returned just as fluidly in his wake.

He sensed that many of the people around him had stopped running now. They crouched, cowering insensibly on the pavement as the green flood fell upon them. They huddled beneath trees and awnings, babbling nonsensically, unable to move because of their terror.

He kept going, weaving through those who were still milling about. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand, afraid to breathe in that fog-mist-sleet, yet also realizing how unlikely it was that any of it would get into his lungs. Each “droplet” was roughly the size of a plum.

When they landed on him, they didn’t break, as a bubble might. Rather, they seemed to yield, to absorb into his hair and clothes, run through them, then reform and settle to the ground. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know if it was meant to kill him or ensnare him or inseminate him. He just wanted to get away from it.

Eggs
, he thought madly. They reminded him of eggs and the things inside them were the developing fetuses, and he shuddered and nearly collapsed at the thought. If so, the ship had released millions upon millions of them into the center of Manhattan.

He ran straight up 79
^th
Street, heedless of the wrecked and smoking cars, ignoring the flames and screams, yet aware, somehow, that none of the objects seemed to be affected at all by the heat. They simply sat in the flames and didn’t burn.

People were cramming into the doorways of buildings, trying to get in them.
Idiots
, he wanted to scream.
Don’t go inside!
But he instantly realized that if he did and they heeded him, there’d be more people on the streets. More people to fight his way through. More blocking his way.

More for the aliens to choose from!

Underground. He had to get underground, as far away from that ship as possible, remove himself from the equation. Underground, he’d be able to escape. Surely the aliens wouldn’t be able to reach him there. He’d regroup then, figure out what to do next.

Remembering that there was a station on Lexington Avenue, he skidded into the corner of the street, then hurled himself to the right.

The subway entrance!
he thought, straining his neck and looking for the telltale railing. He swiped furiously at the sweat dripping into his eyes, and another of the green blobs squished beneath his fingers but didn’t pop. He shuddered and let out a sharp utterance which was lost in the noise.
Where the hell are the stairs?

The alien rain had slowed. Or thinned. Now he was plowing through drifts of the stuff as high as his waist; they soaked into his clothes, yet left them dry. The objects bobbed gently into the air as he passed before drifting back down again.

He chanced a look up and shuddered at what he saw: the yawning diaphragm of the ship squeezing closed. A spiral sphincter. An insectile ovipositor. The last remnants of the green slime slipped out and floated down toward him.

Water balloons. They’re like water balloons, except lighter, different.

They were nothing at all like water balloons.

By now he’d found the subway entrance, but it was all wrong. The stairwell was flooded. More of the green blobs were pouring into it from the sidewalks like runoff into a drain after a heavy storm. They whirled into the depths, roiling as the people who had been caught belowground emerged, wide-eyed and gasping for breath. A couple burst through, laughing giddily and pulling on each other hand-in-hand, as if what was happening was some kind of grand, elaborate fraternity prank. They stopped when they saw the ship, and the smiles slid off their faces as readily as the green blobs slid from their hair and clothes.

Mark turned, unsure of what to do.
Inside
, his mind finally conceded.
Get inside a building.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t! His feet refused to move. He was frozen with indecision.

Something hit him hard on the back, throwing him to the ground, submerging him beneath the green tide. Scrambling back to his feet, breaching through it into the air above, he saw that the mob had stilled, and he followed their hypnotized gazes skyward one final time. The hole in the underbelly of the alien vessel was nearly fully closed now. The ship was beginning to move away, the world it had painted green now rippling over its mirrored skin.

A woman somewhere down the street started screaming. Mark couldn’t make out the words at first. But then she was right there in his face, gripping his shirt, pulling herself up his body, climbing him as if he were a ladder. Her knees and knuckles were bloody and snot was bubbling from her left nostril. He tried to pull his face away from her, revolted by her touch, by her appearance. By all of her.

“Come back!” she screamed, reaching a hand out toward the receding ship. “Take me with you!
Don’t gooooooo!
”

He flung her away from him then, and the woman plunged into the green ocean at his feet and disappeared.

A minute later, the alien craft was gone, returned to the darkness of outer space, beyond the ken of our strongest telescopes. Back, presumably, into the black abyss which had spawned it. It didn’t even leave behind a vapor trail.

The unmarred sky shimmered as it had before the intrusion and the golden sun continued its trek over the face of the void as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

But the familiar deep blue of the Manhattan sky was now gone. Instead, it had turned the palest shade of aquamarine.

*   *   *

In the immediate aftermath of that terrifying event, the inhabitants of planet Earth responded much as one would expect when an uninvited alien ship arrives and inexplicably lays a billion egg-like objects on the planet. Many people prepared as if they expected something even worse to happen any day now, hastily erecting and stocking apocalypse shelters to survive the inevitable invasion, selling off all their worldly possessions, heading north to become Canadian citizens. Others cowered in fear, figuring nothing could possibly thwart such a powerful and determined enemy.

The president ordered martial law, and the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut sent in their National Guards to quarantine the island and surrounding areas. These efforts were abandoned almost as soon as they were rolled out, for while the Guard managed to keep the people inside the city in and the people outside of it out, the alien green blobs themselves refused to behave like civilized alien objects. Because of their buoyancy, they proved to be completely refractory to even the most aggressive containment procedures. Once the breeze returned following the ship’s departure, they were quite easily picked up and transported outside of the quarantine zone.

Many people simply carried on as they had before, refusing to accept what had happened, as if by denying that there could be such things as giant chrome spaceships and parasitic green rain they could actually bend reality to suit their needs. Within the greater New York metropolitan area, only the most seriously deluded managed to accomplish this with any success; after all, you couldn’t turn around without being reminded. For the rest of the world, however, denial came much more easily.

The stuff soon became known as
Greenies
. Nobody knows for sure where the term originated or when exactly it was coined or by what genius, but it caught on and spread with the same viral efficiency as the objects themselves. In time, Greenies would come to refer equally to the mysterious substance and the unseen alien guest which had left it behind.

When an attack wasn’t immediately forthcoming and martial law was cancelled for lack of interest, New Yorkers, ever ready to show off their world-famous sense of irony, quipped how unfair it was that celestial visitors always seemed to focus their harassment on their fair city. Granted, this was the first time it actually happened for real, but when you counted all the times it happened in science fiction movies, New York was apparently the Israel of the universe. Why couldn’t the ship have gone to Lubbock, Texas, instead? Or Peoria, Illinois?

Nobody mentioned Atlantic City. This time, New Jersey was simply too close to home.

Not everyone took it so nonchalantly. After all, the implications seemed dire enough: The aliens would eventually return. And when they did, what would they do next? What would
we
do?

What could we do?

Although most of the Greenies blew out to sea, enough of the initial flood was picked up and carried inland on countervailing winds so that in a matter of days the strange gelatinous orbs could be found in places as distant as Philadelphia. Within a week, isolated samples of it were identified as far west as Chicago and as far south as Washington, DC.

Professional scientists from dozens of governments and thousands of universities and biotech companies requested some of the material be sent to them for analysis in their laboratories. Thousands more amateur researchers made similar requests, although none of these, of course, and few of the others were ever granted.

Once it became apparent the Greenies didn’t pose an immediate military threat, didn’t kill us or hatch baby alien lizards inside of us or explode or catch fire or take out the Internet or give us superpowers or turn us into zombies, suddenly everyone wanted some of it for themselves. Eager collectors flocked to New York City in such numbers that the George Washington Bridge was jammed solid for nearly two straight weeks.

About a month after being deposited here, the Greenies started to change.

The blobs began to harden and reform, generating loose, amorphous, pseudo-crystalline structures. These retained the same buoyancy in air, but because of a newly-developed stickiness — a strange sort of magnetism or static electricity that the physicists were unable to explain — they tended to adhere lightly to any surface they contacted. By mid-August, lower Manhattan resembled a birthday cake covered in green sugar sprinkles and the Statue of Liberty and odd-shaped Christmas tree.

The Greenies seemed especially attracted to moving objects — automobiles, people, animals — which greatly accelerated their dispersal rate.

The clusters could be easily separated into individual units and, if left alone, readily and spontaneously fell apart. They weren’t brittle, however. They couldn’t be smashed. And whatever fetal shadows Mark Williams thought he’d seen swimming within their pearlescent interiors turned out to be nothing at all, just a trick of the light.

Smaller and smaller particles of it found their way into the basements and attics of hundred-year-old brownstones, reached the deepest ventilation shafts of the highest skyscrapers, and even managed to breach the industrial clean rooms of high tech companies. There was considerable concern expressed by safety engineers and aeronautics mechanics, but as far as anyone could determine, Greenies appeared to be completely unobtrusive (except for the fact that they were infuriatingly intrusive). They didn’t seem to interfere with devices, whether the most delicate timepiece or the most complicated engine. Medical doctors and toxicologists warned folks about exposure to the material, but for all their outcry, Greenies appeared to be completely inert. Early experiments to establish their harmfulness yielded little evidence that they were. They didn’t seem to be infective, mutagenic, teratogenic, or psychotropic, at least when tested on lab mice. They didn’t replicate on their own, nor could they be induced to replicate by any of the means known to terrestrial species.

Nevertheless, prophylactic measures were taken. Surgeon’s masks became a popular fashion accessory, as were rubber boots.

The blobs which had been blown out to sea also crystallized. These attached themselves to the hulls of overseas freighters, prompting foreign governments to demand painstaking inspections and the implementation of prohibitive decontamination procedures prior to docking. Even so, it was inevitable that the material would find its way to distant shores simply by floating there on the surface of the water or by being carried on the wings of migratory birds.

Our military and those of foreign governments did not rest in their efforts to study Greenies and those responsible for delivering them to us. They took every opportunity to prepare for the expected invasion and any other contingency they could think of. Nightmare scenarios were drawn up and presented to Congress, and the public was entreated to support the purchase and stockpiling of ballistic weaponry, global missile shields, and flamethrowers.
Planetary defense
was no longer just a catchphrase.

The citizenry also did their small part to prepare. Individual shotgun sales increased sixty thousand percent and applications for CCW permits increased a hundredfold.

Months passed, but still no attack came. There was no further visit, no attempt at communication. We scanned the entire energy spectrum from the sub-gamma to the ultra-high radio, all without detecting a single out-of-place blip.

Panic and chaos eventually coalesced into anger. Righteous indignation spread almost as quickly as a Nigerian phishing scam. Protests were mounted, cries of retaliation were sounded.