Becoming Alien Read Online Free

head moves, didn’t you?”
    I nodded.
    Warren held out his hands as if he was cupping the egg between them, and shook his head no. “No. No.”
    The alien stepped back and threw out his arms, crying out one strange sound, the tones almost like no.
    “No,” Warren said again.
    “Nuyngh,” Alpha replied, crumpling to the floor.
    I started toward him, but he scrambled to his feet, wrapped his arms around himself, and ran stumbling to the room we’d put him in.
    “All since you showed him the egg, Warren,” I said, “he’s been expecting his people.”
    “Fool. I just wanted to know what the egg was.”
     
    The next morning, Alpha lay sprawled in bed, the webs spread out, his body cold. Dead, I thought, until I held my finger on his throat, and felt the vein throb once, then again five seconds later.
    “Warren!” I cried. Half naked, barefooted, he rushed in and laid his hand against Alpha’s throat.
    “Dying,” Warren said. “Just as well.”
    Alpha stayed tranced out the rest of the day, no colder than five degrees above room temperature, heart going twelve times a minute.
    While I sat with the cool, stiff alien, I wondered if his people made movies about beating off hordes of attacking Earthlings.
    Warren and I didn’t say much to each other all weekend, expecting those spaced-out heartbeats to finally stop. But Sunday, the alien’s pulse beat a little faster. At breakfast Monday, before I caught the school bus, Warren said, “You gonna trust me not to barbecue your alien or what?”
    “He’s upset. He could have had hope…”
    “I don’t want some space freak dividing the family. You trust me to take care of it if it wakes up, or not?”
    “Okay, Warren, I trust you won’t hurt him more.”
    “What do you mean, ‘more’?”
    “Warren, I’ll miss the bus,” I said, gathering up the books I needed and stuffing them in my pack.
    “Well, don’t miss the damn bus. The Atlanta guys’re upping my production schedule, by way of threatening to break your legs, but I guess what happens in the basement’s no damn concern of yours.”
     
    At lunch, I called Warren on the school pay phone in the hall. “How are things?” I asked him.
    “Cool,” Warren said.
    “Cool?” I asked.
    “Yeah, cool, just like you left it. Okay. You’ve got school business to tend to, don’t you?”
    “Yeah, physics.”
    “Chemistry’d be better use,” Warren said. “Bye now.”
    I hung up, wondering if Alph was still alive, or if Warren’d said that to keep me from worrying. Then Roose Dexter came by and asked, “Them hens gonna keep you too busy for baseball again come spring?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Them hens.” And I walked off to physics class, wondering how my buddy alien got from wherever to here.
     
    “Can’t go faster than light?” I asked. “Won’t we learn ways around that?”
    The little-guy teacher took off his glasses and wiped them clean on his shirt. “Well, Tom, mass would be infinite at light speed, so you’d need infinite fuel. That’s the universe. Can’t go faster than light. The stars are out of human reach.”
    I knew that wasn’t so. “No way?”
    “I realize what this does to your science fiction fantasies, but right, no way.”
    Bullshit, I thought, and Alpha is from creatures smarter than us, but we’re killing him, Warren and me. I pulled out a bit of knife blade from my wallet and started cutting on my desk.
    “Tom!” the teacher cried out, looking nervous, because I was taller than him, and country-built from heaving chicken shit and feed.
    “Right, sir,” I said, hopping up to hand over the bit of knife blade. Doesn’t do to take a good knife to school, so I grind down something I find broken, whittle with it.
    Then algebra—so beautiful and inhuman, math problems, without taints of human social bull. But today, the numbers just jerked around in my mind.
    When I got home, the alien still lay on the bed, but his arms were sprawled different. “Alpha?” I