We Don't Come From Here

"Bye," said Tansy. "Thank you for having me."
 
"Bye," said Susan, waving her off. Behind her she heard her mother grumble "It'd be nice if Tansy's people invited Susan back to their home occasionally."

But that they would never do. Tansy dreaded being away from the house for long. She knew that every minute out-of-doors she was in mortal danger. Danger of disintegration. She let herself in with her own key and switched on the re-integrator. Tubes buzzed with coloured fire and she closed her eyes, feeling the play of lights on her face.

That was better. Now she could run the bath. She dropped careful measures of different coloured liquids into the hot water streaming from the tap. There was a proper sequence for doing this, with the right pauses in between each measure, which she gauged by keeping her eye on the second-hand of the clock above the cabinet. She didn't want to blow up the bathroom.
 
The clock was like no other she had seen. It went round the opposite way and had twenty-five hours--slightly shorter hours than other people's. But still it managed to lose about half an hour a day. Daddy said it was exactly right where they came from. It was everybody else's clocks that were wrong.
But sunset, she noticed, ran to its own schedule, different from everybody's. So what did "being exactly right" really mean?
 
There came the sound of Daddy unlocking his secret way into the house. Before she'd had time to get in the bath he came to the bathroom door and said hello in their private language. Millions of people spoke it, but Daddy and Barbie were the only people she knew of, beside herself. Neither sister dared utter a word of it outside the house, not even to each other in private.
 
"Give me a kiss."
 
She held out a wet hand and they touched three fingertips. Daddy got down a plastic board and a chinagraph pencil dangling on a string.
 
"You said I could take it off when I got in the bath."
 
"Please yourself." He peered at the numbers on the small pearly box she held out to him and wrote them down on the board. "But don't forget to strap it on again as soon as you're dry."
 
"I won't," she said in a sing-song voice.
 
Daddy paused in the doorway. "Where's Seventh Barbie?"
 
"Not back from school yet. And it's her turn to make meal-ten. I'm hungry."
 
Daddy made a noise like a band-aid being ripped off. "I do wish you'd walk home together."
 
"But she's let out of class at a different time to me."
 
She could see Daddy pondering that. He would worry about it for days.
 
***
 
They kept strictly to the five mealtimes spaced equally round the bathroom clock, named after their proper hour, which was marked in yellow. Meal-five, meal-ten, and so on. This meant in practice three meals a day, leaving out the two mealtimes when you were asleep or at school. The meals arrived roughly half an hour later each day. When a mealtime ran into bedtime it was dropped and they ate instead at the earlier hour, which had in the interval crept backwards out of school-time. Meal-ten was shortly due to give way to meal-five. What with the weather turning colder, Tansy was looking forward to that.
 
Whenever they took place, meals always followed the same pattern. Unlike her schoolmates, she and Barbie were allowed to play with their food. They vied with each other to smear the carbohydrate paste into elaborate shapes, castles and helter-skelters, down which they'd trickle purple sauce from a silvery bottle. Then they'd race to eat it, washing it down with nameless juices from squeezy transparent balls. After that they'd break open the shells of the egg-like capsules called mgaftel and compare the contents. They once tried keeping a running count from meal to meal of the different flavours they encountered, but they gave up at around fifty. 
 
Daddy sat in with them, but he'd say very little except to break up the occasional squabble and stop them throwing mgaftel at each other. He'd never eat anything. He'd go to his room and recharge with pure energy, which they couldn't do because they'd been re-integrated in human form. They begged and begged to be allowed to watch, but he never let them.
 
"Why can't we be like you at home?" Tansy asked him once.
 
"Because it would take too long to get you back into the shape of little girls. Just imagine turning up at school the next day looking like me!"
 
"Well--at weekends then, or during the holidays?"
 
"Whatever would your friends say? It's hard enough as it is, keeping it quiet that we don't come from here."
 
But Daddy never told them where they did come from. He always sidestepped the question, or said it was better for them not to know because they couldn't trust a single person to keep it secret. It was something Tansy found out all by herself.
 
Once in class, the teacher had asked them which planet had a "day"--a period of rotation--which was the closest to the earth's. Tansy had gone to the library and found an astronomy book for young people which gave her the answer straightaway. Only one planet, Mars, had a period of rotation anything like that of the earth. But it was pretty close: 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds.
 
Just the time it took for the bathroom clock to go full-circle.
 
***

Seventh Barbie was downstairs mixing the carbopaste by the time she'd got dressed. She always liked it when it was her sister's turn to make the meal, because then she got the job of hosing down the eating chamber afterwards.
 
"Yuk! Do you have to make it that colour?"
 
"What's wrong with it? It's the colour of your spots. You make it whatever colour you like when it's your turn."
 
Daddy looked in. "Greetings, 7B. You're back. Have you got any homework?"
 
"Yes. We've all got to write a page about what we do when we come home from school."
 
"Well, use your imagination. Make it sound like everyone else."
 
***
 
It was the middle of the night. But it was getting-up time where they came from and Daddy softly woke Tansy and her sister. Outside, in the darkness of the overgrown back garden, he had assembled their telescope.
 
Tansy said "I was dreaming about Mummy."
 
"But you've never seen Mummy."
 
"I know. But I saw her in my dream. She was just like you, only female. She had a pair of blue eyes--and a pair of green."
 
"That's... amazing."
 
"You never told us what happened to Mummy."
 
"It's no secret--she disintegrated. It was awful. We left it too late and Beta-3 couldn't do a thing for her."
 
"Oh!" Tansy was sorry she'd asked.
 
"Now forget about Mummy. Just tell me what you see."
 
Tansy peered into the telescope. "It's... Spica, in Virgo."
 
"Let Barbie have a go. What do you think, 7B?"
 
"Yes, it's Spica." She wasn't really sure, but she thought it wise to agree with her sister for once. Tansy pushed her out of the way and put her eye to the eyepiece once more.
 
Daddy said "Now, slowly increase the right-ascension."
Tansy gasped.
 
"Oh, golly! What is it? I'm sure it wasn't there a week ago."
 
"It wasn't. It's Mars. It moves right round the zodiac, but not evenly of course. Why not, 7B?"
 
"Because the earth is moving round the sun too, in the same direction. So it's like watching someone running round you when you're sitting on a roundabout." This time she did know the answer.
 
"Full marks", said Daddy. "Mars is called the Red Planet. You can see its colour clearly."
 
"You know..." said Tansy out of the side of her mouth, peering with one eye screwed up, "...if you hadn't told me it was red, I'd have said it was Pantone 129."
 
In the dim violet glow of the star-globe, she could see her father gazing at her searchingly.
 
"Yes, Fifth Tansy, you're right. It is Pantone 129. What your friends would call a sort of orangey-beige. Don't let people tell you any different."
 
***
 

It was the very next day that she found the key.
 
Clutching it to her chest, she resolved to try it in every keyhole in the house until she found one that it opened. Barbie was staying at school for choir practice. Daddy had warned her he'd be late back, reassuring her it wouldn't be past twenty-five o'clock. So there was no risk of him disintegrating. Martian Midnight, for now that's what Tansy knew it to be, was going to occur shortly after 10pm, British Summer Time, so she was going to be alone in the house for a couple of hours at least.
 
Theirs was a big rambling Georgian house, with tremendously high ceilings on the first floor and ones that got progressively lower as you went upstairs, or down. It was just right for all the equipment that Daddy had to fix up to enable them to live on earth without disintegrating. If her friends could only see it, their eyes would pop.
But no one must ever be invited back. Daddy was most insistent about that.
 
One by one Tansy tried the key in every keyhole in turn, starting with the lowermost cellar (the house had two). There were lots of rooms she and Barbie had never been in, doors which had never been unlocked, so far as she recalled. The key didn't fit any of those. But at last, on the fifth floor landing, in a door she'd walked past so often that she no longer noticed it, the key fitted in the keyhole and turned.
In the gloom of the top landing (the bulb had gone), she pushed the creaky door. It swung right back with a clunk. Two glowing eyes rushed at her and something rustling smacked her full in the chest. She fell over backwards.
 
She lay in the doorway, heart pounding, not daring to move. But as nothing happened for a long while, she put her hand up ever-so-slowly and felt her chest. No blood: she wasn't hurt. Whatever had hit her hadn't been all that heavy. Just as slowly she crept back along the landing, towards the glow of light seeping up the stairs.
The world looked safe and ordinary once more. Nothing moved--not a sound was to be heard. She rushed down the stairs as fast as she could.
 
***
 
Well, she couldn't just leave it at that. Whatever horror awaited her in the mystery room, she was more afraid of Daddy finding the door open. So she fetched a big torch from the rear lobby and went back upstairs, her chest feeling both light and tight as if stuffed with feathers.
 
Now she saw what had hit her. A "monster" hung there on strings. It was made of empty boxes, yoghurt pots and other familiar junk. She laughed and felt round the door jamb where a light switch was normally situated, found it and switched it on. The mystery room lit up. She pushed her way past the cardboard dragon.
 
It took her a long time to comprehend what it was she was looking at. Round three walls there was waist-high shelving which served as a workbench. On it were jars and jars of various coloured liquids, with tiny bottles scattered about the bench. Some bore labels saying they were food dyes, others vitamins.
There was all the equipment you'd need for making mgaftel, lots of empty eggshells, a fridge full of eggs and a small electric engraver for grinding holes in the shells to blow them. There was a blender and boxes of cans of perfectly ordinary foods like tuna, spinach, corned beef and macaroni cheese. The price-labels revealed that they hadn't come from Mars but from the supermarket down the road.
 
There were tools and vices and soldering irons, plus "Martian" gadgets and contraptions of all shapes and sizes in various stages of construction, all made of cardboard, tinsel paper and balsa wood, laced with bulbs and light-emitting diodes: the latter she recognised from the Craft & Design room at school.
Last of all there was a damaged head looking like Daddy's. It was hollow and made of rubber.
 
***
 
She must have stood in that room for half an hour or more, when suddenly she heard a noise downstairs. It was Barbie coming home from school. Hastily she locked the door and tiptoed down the stairs. She didn't say a word about it to her sister, because she would have had to show her the key.
 
But over meal-twenty-five, which they had when Daddy came home, she could keep silent no longer. "There's a workshop upstairs for making Martian things," she mumbled.
 
Instantly Daddy leapt to his feet. "Barbie, grab hold of Tansy! She's disintegrating--her mind's nearly gone!"
 
Tansy struggled and kicked, but her father and Barbie clung onto her tightly. "Beta-3 will put her together again but we must be quick. Hurry!"
 
They dragged her upstairs, right to the secret workshop, where Daddy produced his own key to unlock the door. He bundled her inside and locked it again. Ear to the door, she heard him telling Barbie to go downstairs and shut herself in the bathroom while he did what was necessary and wait for him to come and say it was all right. "Don't cry, now. Everything will be fine. I think we've caught her in time..."
 
She heard Barbie's feet running down the stairs. There came the sound of a key being fumbled and dropped on the floor. In her school-blouse pocket Tansy still had the key she'd found. It occurred to her to put it in the lock on her side and give it a half-turn to stop it being pushed out. She could hear her father's voice imploring her to take out the key, but she put her fingers in her ears. Going to the window she lifted the blind and with a brief fierce struggle got the heavy sash to open.
 
Outside, the Georgian facade formed a narrow balcony with the weathered slates of the shallow roof. Her mind numb, she crawled along it to the next house, down a fire-escape and off into the night.