Quozl (30 page)

He'd gone to the market to pick up his weekly allotment of groceries. When he finished he'd return home to the microbiology project which had occupied him for most of a month now. Or maybe he'd just take the rest of the day off, hit a museum or take in a film or visit his mom. His dad would be in the cockpit of a 747 somewhere between L.A. and Bangkok. Seniority with the airline brought prestige, better pay, and choice of assignment.

The only trouble was if he dropped in for a visit she'd expect him to stay overnight, and he much preferred his west L.A. apartment to the old Santa Ana homestead. Santa Ana was also a long run for his battered Ford.

It was a new market, which meant less than half the floor space was devoted to food. The rest was given over to hardware, electrical supplies, automotive parts, drugs, toys, greeting cards, and expensive inedible items. Easter was coming up. His aunt had two little girls and he wondered if he could find room in his meager budget for a plastic bunny or candy duck. The Easter display was hard to miss, a double-wide aisle groaning beneath the weight of barnyard chocolate.

The stuffed animals occupied the end of the aisle, an eight-foot-tall hillock of polyester rabbits and rayon chickens. Too many of them wore clothes or carried miniature pails and shovels. There was one large, appallingly anthropomorhized fuzzy duck that looked tough enough to withstand Amy's and Annie's ravening fingers for at least a couple of days.

His eyes strayed from the possible gift and his fingers clenched unconsciously on the handle of the shopping cart. He stared.

On the shelves to the right were licensed characters draped in holiday garb. Mickey was there, and Donald, and Bugs and Daffy and Tweety and a herd of Easterized Garfields, marching in ranks through fields of polyethelene grass, waiting to graze on unsuspecting pocketbooks. Some he didn't recognize.

Crammed in between a perpetually put-upon coyote and a double-suited Hobbes was a figure with big feet, long flexible ears, a flat face, oversized eyes, short tail, and straightforward expression. It wore a tight bodysuit of familiar design, though the color pattern was new to him. This he recognized instantly.

It was Runs-red-Talking.

The longer he stared the more surreal the stuffed toy became. After a while he was sure the plastic eyes had begun to follow his movements accusingly.

Two rug rats were coming toward him, dragging their mother and gesturing excitedly at the pile of toys. Before they reached him he grabbed the toy which had caught his attention.

It was about a foot high. The strangely shaped ears flopped down over the face. Ignoring the arrival of the screaming kids he turned it around to examine the back. A tag protruded from a sewn seam.

Made in South Korea

20% Rayon 80% Polyester

Contents non-toxic, non-flammable

Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. 2556439906

Of more interest was a plastic card secured to the left foot, which enthusiastically proclaimed:

This is an Authentic

QUOZL!

He's come all the way from far-off Quozlene

to be your very own!

His name is

SEES-INTO-YOUR-HEART

That was wrong, Chad thought absently. A Quozl name was formed of three parts, never four, never two. The error did not keep him from reading on.

QUOZLS make great companions.

They'll never let you down.

They'll never hurt you

because they don't know how to fight.

That was wrong too, Chad thought, his brain running on automatic pilot. They just choose not to. He scanned the rest of the card.

This QUOZL has lavender-gray eyes and wears

the green-gray suit of Botanical Exploration

Collect ALL the QUOZLS

for a complete colony of your very own!

LOVES-YOU-COMPLETELY

SNUGGLES-CLOSE-FOREVER

WATCHES-OVER-YOU-ALWAYS

LAUGHS-HIMSELF-SILLY

And all the rest!

Just when he was sure he had passed beyond shock into numbness he turned the card over and read:

Watch all your QUOZL friends on

QUOZLTIME

every Saturday morning

for the most fun intergalactic

adventure thirty minutes

you can have on Earth!

Check local listings for time and station

(or have Mommy and Daddy do it for you!)

Very slowly Chad placed the stuffed, expressionless Runs-red-Talking back on its shelf. His mind was operating at maximum which went partway toward explaining why his eyes were temporarily unfocused.

The instant he put the toy back the eleven-year-old boy who'd been wrestling with a corpulent Sylvester the Cat dumped it to point wildly.

“Look, Mom, look! A Quozl! I want it.”

“You already have that one. That's the technie,” his sister sneered.

“No, I don't!” He flailed at the toy until he got his fingers around it. “This is Sees-Into-Your-Heart. He's a botantist.” He gazed up at his mother. “I gotta have him, Mom. I'll have the whole surface studies team if I get him.”

“No, you won't,” his sister insisted airily, “because the surface studies team is always changing.”

“How would you know? You're always watching that stupid
Dance Fever
.”

“Don't fight.” Easter shopping had taken its toll on Mother. “How much is it?” Price tags, Chad thought dazedly, had long since replaced McGuffey's Readers as the starting point for literacy in American society.

“Ten ninety-nine,” the boy reported promptly.

“All right,” said the woman tiredly. It would buy her a cheap couple of days, until the novelty wore off, Chad mused. “But no more Quozls, understand? You've got enough.”

“Aw, Mom,” the boy began, “you can't have enough Quozls!” Suddenly realizing that the one he clutched had yet to be paid for, he hastily added, “But this'll be enough, I know it will.”

“It better be. Come on.” She shoved her burden up the aisle. “We still have to get the turkey.”

Runs-red-Talking get jammed ears first between two half-gallon containers of two percent real chocolate milk and a giant box of Tide. Chad watched him go. Mother, menagerie, and groceries vanished around a display of Sugar Frosted Flakes.

As soon as they were out of sight he began pawing through the mountain of toys. Sure enough, there were two more. Kisses-You-Every-Night and Likes-to-Be-Close. Neither name had appeared on the botanist's name tag. Maybe these two were recent additions to the kiddie Quozl pantheon. Obviously the line was successful. He picked up Likes-to-Be-Close, at once fascinated and repulsed.

It was grossly fat. Every Quozl he'd met was lean and trim, nor had Runs-red-Talking ever alluded to obesity among his race. Furthermore, the toy wore an idiatic grin wide, enough for most Quozl to construe as a death threat.

Returning it to the display, he hunted some more until he encountered a perfect Runs-red-Talking clone. After making certain all its identifying and descriptive tags were intact, he put it in his own cart, atop the frozen lasagna and bag of bagels. It gazed forlornly back up at him, an unnatural smile permanently affixed to its glistening face. It was a miracle he didn't run into anyone as he headed for the nearest checkout.

What the hell is going on here? For years he'd guarded the secret of the Quozl and their colony. Had someone else seen a Quozl elsewhere? Had the subtle Runs-red-Talking neglected in all their conversations to mention that there was another colony somewhere else on Earth?

With a shock he recalled the story of the Quozl musician High-red-Chanter and his equally deranged mate who'd fled the colony soon after its establishment. Since they'd never been seen or heard from subsequently it had been assumed by the others that they'd long since perished in the high, cold mountains. What if the Quozl were wrong and the two renegades had survived? If they'd survived maybe they'd been observed. Maybe they'd talked to someone else.

Maybe he and his sister weren't the only humans to have made contact.

That seemed the only possible explanation. At least, it was the only one he could think of at the moment. He didn't want to think about it, didn't want to believe it. The great secret was a secret no longer. The colony's existence was common knowledge, if the toy tags were to be believed.

He slowed, physically as well as mentally. Maybe the secret wasn't out. Could a secret be half revealed?

After all, it wasn't as though he'd encountered a newspaper headlining the colony's location, or seen this week's copy of
Newsweek
with a picture, of Runs-red-Talking being interviewed by Barbara Walters. His gaze fell to his cart. Stuffed animals. Anything more significant than that would have been on the evening news, or on the front page of the
Times
. It wasn't.

Could some psychic be seeing the Quozl in dreams?

Screw that. He was a scientist—or a scientist in training, anyway. Someone somewhere had seen and talked to a Quozl. There was no other explanation. The problem now was to find out the details: who, how, where.

The television show would be the logical place to begin. He never watched kidvid. For him and his fellow graduate students, Saturday mornings were a time for sleeping in or fleeing the megalopolis for hiking trips in the south Sierras or beer runs to Mexico. But tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow he would not sleep in. Tomorrow he would use the alarm clock that heretofore had been a Saturday morning virgin.

“Thirty-three sixty, please.”

“Huh, what?” He blinked at the cashier.

“Thirty-three sixty.”

Another part of his brain had taken control, placed him in line, and methodically removed his groceries from the cart. They had subsequently been totaled, which was exactly how he felt. The cashier eyed him uneasily.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“Fine. I'm fine.” He dug for his wallet.

“Paper or plastic?” the bagboy inquired.

“Plastic.”

The stuffed clone of Runs-red-Talking went headfirst into a bag laden with cereal and snack food.

He left in such a hurry he forgot to buy a paper.

He hardly slept at all that night with the result that the alarm had to struggle to wake him. Unlike most mornings, however, he was alert and anxious after the fifth ring. No need to heat coffee, no need to sip juice, no reason for breakfast or reviewing the day's activities. Instead he fumbled into his robe and the bathroom. Throwing cold water onto your face was something drunks did in movies. He discovered that it was not just a literary conceit but that it actually worked. One more shock to add to the others.

Drying himself, he went into his living room and switched on the tv.

There it was in the guide:
Quozltime
, 8
A.M.
every Saturday. No wonder he'd never noticed it before. He didn't begin to function as a human being until after nine-thirty, later on weekends. Flipping to the proper channel, he confronted a multitude of screeching cats pursuing pudgy mice. In the usual reversal of logic, the mice turned the tables on their pursuers. He'd never been able to enjoy cartoons. Too rational a mind, he knew. Sitting in the broken, oozing couch that was his favorite piece of furniture, he waited while the hands on the wall clock crawled toward eight.

The animation in the commercials was a hundred times better than in the show he'd been watching. Each was flashier than the next, all designed to sell two things: toys and sugar. As eight o'clock neared he found himself leaning forward, his clasped hands falling between his legs. He heard nothing but the tv; not the couple upstairs, not the traffic outside.

When it finally took over the screen, it was so matter-of-fact in its blandly colored limited-animation format that he could only untense and lean back in the couch. Silently he watched two-dimensional Quozl parade across the screen: fat ones, short ones, skinny ones, displaying none of the uniformity of size and build that was a Quozl hallmark. The females wore makeup and had absurd long eyelashes. They walked and talked and danced to an irresistible theme song. One wore dark sunglasses. Others whizzed about on cute little air scooters that to the best of Chad's knowledge no more existed in the Quozl colony than they did in downtown Manhattan.

It wasn't all pure invention. Quozl ear gestures and finger movements were rendered with some accuracy. The bodysuits, omnipresent jewelry, and flash scarves had been drawn with regard for the originals. Not every name was overpoweringly saccharine, though none were familiar to Chad. No Runs-red-Talking cavorted inside the tube.

The colony itself was a product of pure imagination. Instead of existing underground the animated Quozl lived in simple surface structures located not in Idaho wilderness but close to an unnamed small American town. They consorted exclusively with adolescent humans. The only adults were either villains who appeared to motivate the plot or clumsy parents whose sole function was to get in the way of the efficient Quozl and kids.

Instead of declaiming eloquent phrases rich with meaning and subtle overtones in their high, breathy whisper, these Quozl spoke sappy, infantile English at a volume sufficient to drive any real Quozl to distraction. Of more interest was the story line itself. It spoke of a particularly introspective Quozl who had meditated and meditated to the point where he'd thought himself into a state of noncorporality. It was an interesting tale with an intriguing moral.

He'd thought exactly the same thing when Runs-red-Talking told it to him by the bank of the snow-fed river high in the mountains.

It was pure fiction, but the show treated it as fact. Quozl and children ran around in a panic trying to aid their newly ethereal friend, and then a monster materialized because the show, as opposed to the plot, demanded one. It was black with yellow eyes and came floating out of inner consciousness or wherever it was the unfortunate Quozl had dematerialized into, so naturally he was able to save his friends before they saved him, and by this time Chad was no longer interested in the feeble story.