PENSACOLA WAGNER AND THE

ROBOT INVASION

Rosemary Edghill

Pensacola Wagner was descended from a long line of adventurers with geographical names. His great-uncle, Fort Lauderdale Smith, had been single-handedly responsible for ending the Living Mummy Curse of 1938, and a distant cousin, Larrabee Iowa Nordstrom, had been the hero who defeated the Sentient Dairy Queen of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1974.

Pensacola was an underachiever.

It wasn’t that he lacked the family tendencies. He could certainly have gone on to a fulfilling life of globe-trotting peril.

He’d grown up without the least financial need to pursue a mundane career, nor had he the least desire to be too hot, too cold, mud-covered, rained upon, or pursued by demons, Nazis, or savage members of a lost tribe. He was perfectly happy lounging around the house in sweat-pants and a t-shirt. He hated hats. Upon graduating Rutgers University with an MFA degree in Creative Writing (he minored in Electrical Engineering), Pensacola worked, sporadically and with no particular talent, on a book meant to be a history of the Wagner-Smith-Jones-Carter-Nordstrom family and its leading lights. Its current title was: Time for Adventure: The Fast-Paced, Unusual, and Very Interesting Lives of My Relatives. In pursuit of this goal, which seemed to recede further with every year, he had converted the back bedroom of his house (it had been his parents’ house, but Cincinnati had died years ago and Joyce had moved to Las Vegas with their dachshund, She-Ra) into a study.

And in doing so, he doomed Earth to alien invasion.

* * *

Mahwah, New Jersey, nestled in the skirts of the Ramapo Mountains, themselves a far-flung relict of the mighty Adirondack Mountain chain, is an unspectacular bedroom community serving the Greater Metropolitan New York Region. The four-season climate is moderate, with temperate summers and mild winters. The town is close to a number of nature preserves: deer and raccoons are common backyard visitors, and black bear and even moose have been spotted locally.

And squirrels.

For the first forty-eight years of his life, Pensacola Wagner gave little thought one way or the other to squirrels. Having read an article in the Sunday New York Times on the subject of backyard ecosystems, Pensacola was inspired to buy a bird feeder and a box of birdseed. He hung the bird feeder from an unused hanging planter hook on his back deck and for the next seventy-two hours, all was well. He was able to gaze out his office window upon a rich and varied collection of avian visitors. He bought a birding book. He contemplated joyfully embracing a new and exciting hobby that would not require him to leave his house.

Then the squirrels found the bird feeder.

The eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, is native to the eastern United States. Its conservation status was “least concern,” and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why.

There were hundreds of them.

And they were all hungry.

No longer could Pensacola rejoice in gazing out over the birds of the wilderness. Instead, he was forced to watch his largesse being consumed by gloating, obese, beady-eyed mammals. Certainly he could scare them off…but they always came back. And he couldn’t guard the bird feeder every waking moment. When he awoke one morning to discover that the squirrels had descended upon the bird feeder in the dawn, chewed through the plastic hook holding it in place, removed the lid (as it lay on the deck), and devoured the entire contents, he took it as a declaration of war.

A quick Amazon.com search led him to the NO/NO bird feeder line, which proudly proclaimed that all their models were made entirely out of metal. He quickly ordered half a dozen, paid for overnight delivery, and retired to his workshop. By the time the (surprisingly heavy) box of all-steel bird feeders arrived, he’d made his preparations. It was a simple matter to solder the wires to the bottom of the feeders, run the line back into the house…

And wait.

The birds, once again, were the first arrivals, and Pensacola had no quarrel with the birds. They were the ones the bird feeder had been put there to attract, after all. He went on about his business, keeping a casual eye on the bird feeder as he went through his copies of a file of correspondence relating to Great-Grandfather Albuquerque. He’d just gotten up to the Flying Toaster Epidemic of 1936 when he saw a sinuous (if rather pot-bellied) gray form eel its way over the rail and spring up onto the bird feeder.

Pensacola chose his moment. When the furry thug was fully occupied in stealing his birdseed, he flipped the switch, adjusted the dial, and pressed the red button. (The button, frankly, could have been any number of colors, but Pensacola was a stickler for tradition.) The abruptly-electrified squirrel sprang into the air, landed twelve feet away, and raced up the nearest tree chittering aggrievedly.

That, Pensacola thought, would be that.

It wasn’t.

For one thing, there was more than one squirrel. For another, the learning curve for a squirrel faced with an open buffet and a mysterious invisible force was rather steep. Inevitably, the war began to escalate. From mild electric shocks, Pensacola progressed to strong electric shocks. From strong electric shocks (which were enough to discourage the individual squirrel, but not all its relatives), he progressed, inevitably, to electrocution. (It did not occur to him, as he watched smoke curl up from the incinerated husks of squirrels, to reflect that Great-Uncle Cucamonga Nordstrom had been an arch-nemesis rather than a heroic adventurer.) He’d abandoned all pretense of working on his book as well. Soon his backyard was littered with dead bodies and the neighbors were beginning to complain.

By this point it was tacitly accepted that the bird feeder was merely a casus belli. Pensacola’s days were spent watching his bird feeder, his finger hovering over the button. While it would have been a gross violation of township ordinances to bury landmines in his yard, he felt that he was entirely within his rights to electrify his entire deck, the surrounding rail, and (in a spirit of completeness) his roof. The lights now dimmed in the house every time he pressed the red button.

The first exploding squirrel was the real surprise, though.

The Rules of Engagement he had evolved required that the bird feeder not be left electrified at all times, on the off chance some suicidal (or merely optimistic) bird would attempt to feed from it. And the squirrels (those that had survived) had become wary of the sight of a human being moving behind the windows that overlooked the deck. Pensacola built a CCTV camera to monitor the porch (which he could do from his computer), and painted his office windows black.

On a day that was superficially like all other days, he awoke, dressed, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, made coffee, and settled in to watch the bird feeder. The morning’s first squirrel arrived. Pensacola pressed the red button. There was a blinding flash and his camera went dark.

He rushed to the porch. There he found, as he expected, a gently-smoking squirrel and a slagged camera. But as he had not expected, there was also the gleam of metal within the charred corpse. He returned to the house, collected a set of rubber gloves and a pair of underutilized barbeque tongs, and took the body to his secret lab for study.

It wasn’t much of a secret lab, since it was in the basement, but for that matter, Pensacola wasn’t much of a biologist. He did know enough to be aware that squirrels did not naturally come with shiny metal interior parts, nor were they generally radioactive. Unfortunately, between the explosion and the electrocution, there wasn’t much left to study. Besides, while he was wasting time here, the squirrels were making free with his Morning Song Brand #11403 Year-Round Wild Bird Food without let or hindrance. He dropped the body into a plastic bag and deposited it in the chest freezer atop thirty-six boxes of Girl Scout Thin Mints.

Upon his return to the back deck, portly squirrels fled in all directions. In the little time he’d been gone, the bird feeder had been nearly emptied. Ordinarily this would have outraged him, but today Pensacola had bigger fish (or squirrels) to fry. He replaced the camera and the bird feeder (its wires had melted), refilled it, and retreated to his computer to place a large order with Edmund Scientific.

But even as he pushed “send,” the balance of power in Mahwah, New Jersey, radically shifted.

The neighborhood dogs burst out barking, a chorus that began raggedly and increased in volume and fluency as more voices joined it. As Pensacola peered into the monitor in his office, he saw perhaps two dozen cats race madly across his lawn, eyes bulging and tails bottled. Some sprang to the porch and then the roof, where their claws made squealing noises on the metal ground-plates installed there. Others simply fled past the house on either side. One, a not-too-bright neighborhood tom, ran full-force into the foundation of the house, but still staggered determinedly away after taking a moment to collect itself.

And behind them came the cause of their exodus: squirrels, a gray tide too vast to number, populating trees like eldritch kudzu and then leaping down to join their surging brethren in crossing his lawn like a great furry tide from a bad Seventies horror movie. The lawn was covered with an advancing squirrel army, the trees were filled with squirrels, and the entire effect was of an abrupt yet deeply unsettling snowfall. At the far edge of the undimming squirreltide, Pensacola saw the shambling shapes of larger figures joining the throng: groundhogs, opossums, rabbits…

Pensacola turned the wattage on the birdfeeder and the various recently-installed touchplates up to MAXIUMUM and moved to the kitchen to view the results.

When the living carpet reached his deck, its members died by the hundreds, their bodies galvanized into post-mortem flight, their earthly remains forming a vast, gently-smoking, lightly barbequed pile of victims onto which new martyrs climbed to die in turn. There were faint popping sounds at each new electrocution, a fine haze of savory smoke filled the air, and if not for the fact that he’d overridden the circuit-breakers when he’d first installed the electrified bird-feeders, the system would have shorted out almost immediately. In fact (Pensacola realized), at just about any moment now…

The transformers overloaded, the circuit breakers broke decisively (and incandescently), and the house (along with most of the neighborhood) was plunged into, if not darkness, then into the tenebrous gloom of a mid-century suburban dwelling without power.

It was at this point that Pensacola began to fear he was outmatched, if only by the sheer insanity of his foe (such as his foe was). While he realized that such a notion was a betrayal of the Code of the Wagners, he also realized he was out of his depth. Unfortunately, he did not possess instincts honed by a lifetime of globetrotting adventuring, so by the point he reached this conclusion, the house was surrounded by a growing pile of electrocuted wildlife, the house itself was on fire, and the entire neighborhood was without power.

Locating his smartphone (it was in the silverware drawer in the kitchen), he dialed 911.

“Greetings, Earthling,” the voice at the other end announced.

“Ah…hello? I’d like to report an infestation?” Pensacola said. While he doubted he’d reached Emergency Services, it never hurt to maintain a hopeful outlook.

“I congratulate you, Earthling—” the voice continued.

Pensacola decided this was not a useful conversation to have just now, and disconnected.

“In all the millennia of the conquests of the Fzt!ch’wert-bang, only you have penetrated our disguise,” the voice continued unfazed. “I salute you as a worthy foe.”

“Ah…do you?” Pensacola said. The conversation was starting to bear a disturbing similarity to some of the more bizarre entries in the family diaries. But what was even more disturbing was that the local wildlife had not, even now, ceased its suicide charges, although it was now apparently self-destructing as opposed to being electrocuted. Through the remaining clear spots in the kitchen windows, he saw several rats and half a dozen raccoons leap onto the pile and then explode.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to let me call the Fire Department, Mr. FitzChewertbang?” he asked, with what he felt was remarkable composure. “Or Animal Control?”

“Fzt!ch’wert-bang,” the voice corrected, sounding like a malfunctioning printer. “Presumptuous Earthling, I do you great honor, for I feel it is only just to permit you to know what you have done. Do not think your foolish meddling will impede our plans—”

Pensacola threw the phone into the sink and turned on the water.

“—to conquer your insignificant planet by your discovery of our advance scouts,” the (internet-enabled) refrigerator announced proudly. “No! My plans remain unchanged—”

A bear exploded in the middle of the back yard. Pensacola considered his options.

“I, um, hello—wait. The squirrels were your advance scouts?”

“Of course.” The voice coming from the refrigerator sounded faintly offended.

“And you feel that I discovered your scouts?”

“But of course,” the refrigerator said grandly. “Why else would you have lured them in and slaughtered them in such numbers?”

By now the kitchen windows were not only completely covered, they were starting to crack. Pensacola felt that a retreat to his secret lab was in order. It didn’t have windows. Or internet. He grabbed a flashlight from the drawer and fled.

“But your efforts are for nothing!” the radio (a vintage Bakelite set that wasn’t even plugged in) announced as soon as he arrived. “The Fzt!ch’wert-bang are not such as they! We have evolved beyond meat! You might have peacefully ended your life in ignorance of our goals as our vast yet immortal and therefore normally slow-moving empire refined its plans for your eradication, but your temerity is far too great to go unpunished! Prepare to do battle for the fate of Earth, Pensacola Wagner!”

He located a battery-powered camping lantern and turned it on.

“You know, I think there’s been a fundamental—”

Secret lab or not (it also served as a repository for a number of less-interesting items of family memorabilia), his work area contained exceedingly little with which to do battle, even had Pensacola been so inclined. There was a Geiger counter, a couple of Tesla coils, a disassembled Roomba, and various other odds and ends, but there did not seem to be anything much from which he could build a really worthwhile Death Ray.

“Your doom is foreordained! Even now the flagship of our armada of conquest lands! Submit to our metallic suzerainty, although it will not save your puny and insignificant fleshly life!” the radio shouted, apparently losing patience with him. “Humanity will bow down before its robot overlords! You cannot save them!”

The entire house began to shake, with a sustained shimmy that owed less to tectonic instability than it did to the landing of a large interstellar dreadnought in the immediate vicinity. The radio wobbled to the edge of its shelf and leaped to its destruction, still shouting threats.

The fact that he knew precisely what his father, his grandfather, and (of course) Great-Aunt California (“Ginger Peachy”) Nordstrom would have done in this situation was precisely no help at all. A lifetime of genealogical research and taking the path of least resistance, while in the finest traditions of the human race, had not prepared Pensacola, even remotely, for confrontational heroics.

On the other hand, the basement ceiling was beginning to creak alarmingly and the air smelled suspiciously of smoke.

It was at this point that it occurred to the man who had spent the previous six weeks coming up with more efficient ways to electrocute squirrels not exactly that he was Mankind’s Last Hope (which was a ridiculous notion, as anyone who knew him would have agreed), but that the Fzt!ch’wert-bang knew precisely where he was, and might also be thought to be harboring something of a foundationless grudge against him. This was a matter he was equipped by experience and temperament to address. The question was: how? The house was on fire and all the available doors and windows were blocked by dead animals. It was a situation that called for a certain amount of native resourcefulness.

Pensacola had very little of that, but he did have relatives.

Cincinnati Wagner, bored with his suburban lifestyle (but unwilling to too deeply displease his wife, who was not, after all, either his childhood sweetheart or his former arch-nemesis), had spent many happy hours chipping an escape tunnel through the (former) basement (now secret lab) floor and (presumably) on out beneath the front lawn. Pensacola, while aware of its presence, had never explored it, since he was wary of dark damp locations, rats, booby-traps, mummified corpses, and a number of other items that the passage might reasonably be expected to contain. However, the air was rapidly filling with smoke and the washing machine in the corner looked as if it was trying to learn to talk, so this seemed to be a prudent time at which to embrace new experiences. He strode to the northeast corner of the basement, shifted several boxes of Christmas ornaments, exposed the entrance, undogged the hatch, spun the hand-wheel, and heaved open the large metal covering.

The washing machine gave a satanic chortle, flung up its lid, and began to gush water.

Clutching the camping lantern, Pensacola descended the ladder. The chamber at the bottom was surprisingly spacious: fully-timbered, with a poured cement floor, and even (currently-non-functioning) lighting. On the left wall was an entirely prosaic door. He opened it. The passageway thus revealed was lower and narrower than the door itself, and, of course, utterly without illumination. Pensacola hesitated. While under most circumstances an individual fleeing the targeted wrath of the vanguard of an alien robot invasion would be…fleeing (to the exclusion of philosophical thoughts about their place in the universe), Pensacola had spent nearly his entire life in rebellion against practical heroics and situations of high drama and derring-do. On the other hand, it was flee or stay where he was, and staying where he was held the threat of vivisection, electrocution, being lectured by household appliances, and wet sneakers. While he had no idea where the tunnel led, he knew it led away from a house currently being besieged by cyborg squirrels.

He sighed and began to trudge forward.

His shoulders brushed the sides of the passage, and he had to duck to avoid colliding with dangling light bulbs. After a few minutes he was fairly sure he’d crossed the front lawn and the street beyond and be somewhere under the house across the street. The Mahams? The Brays? He wasn’t sure. Maybe the Palmatiers. He conjured up a mental map of the neighborhood, bearing in mind the fact that somewhere nearby the Fzt!ch’wert-bang mothership had recently landed and was probably something he would prefer to avoid. The random detritus of erratic occupancy was littered along the passageway and stockpiled in its occasional wide spots, as the tunnel seemed to have functioned much as a man-cave for the elder Wagner.

He’d just picked up a baseball bat, wondering why there’d be a baseball bat in an escape tunnel (or for that matter, in his father’s possession), when he heard scrabbling behind him.

Pensacola froze.

In the dim (and, he now realized, failing) light of the lantern, he could see a gleaming, shambling, extremely soggy swarm of woodland zombie cyborgs scampering toward him along the floor of the escape tunnel, the well-cooked flesh of their disguises shredded away from gleaming metallic skeletons. For an instant, he contemplated running, but abandoned the notion. It wasn’t that he was feeling particularly brave, but if he ran, they would be behind him, and over the past month, he’d had ample demonstration that squirrels moved faster than he did. There was nothing to do but make his stand right here. He hefted the bat.

“Prepare to meet your fate, Pensacola Wagner!” several of the squirrels shrilled in chorus. “You are only the first of many Earthlings who—”

Pensacola stepped forward and struck with the reminiscent glee of someone who’d actually enjoyed Little League. Alien cyborg squirrels imploded like meat-covered lightbulbs.

“Plastic?” he said in disbelief. “You’re made out of plastic?”

“—only the first of many who—”

Crunch.

“—many who will suffer—”

Crunch.

“—many who—”

Crunch.

“—our ultralight space-age materials will—”

Crunch.

Not long afterward, Pensacola stood alone and triumphant amid a messy mound of mashed squirrels. He was scratched, bitten, and had spontaneously re-invented the ancient sport of ferret-legging, but he was remarkably unscathed for someone who had stood up to the Fzt!ch’wert-bang legions armed with a baseball bat.

He prodded one of the nearer corpses gingerly, then reached down and picked it up. It did not weigh nearly as much as he felt a cybernetic rodent should weigh. He carried it over to the nearest crate, digging in his pockets.

A proper scion of the Wagners would have been carrying a Swiss Army Knife at the very least; Pensacola unearthed a paperclip, two rubber bands, half a pack of chewing gum, fourteen cents in change, his wallet, and a nail-clipper. It was a messy business, but he managed to get the mashed squirrel open. The area occupied by the rib cage was a single solid gleaming mass—or it had been before encountering Pensacola’s baseball bat. He frowned slightly.

The skull was intact. Wincing in anticipation, Pensacola took it between thumb and forefinger and squeezed hesitantly.

There was a crunchy sort of a pop as the skull collapsed.

His hunch in the heat of battle was confirmed. They might look like they were made of metal, and certainly, as alien robot conquerors and would-be overlords, they ought to be made of metal, but …

“—our ultralight space-age materials will—”

Intuition struck.

He got to his feet, grabbed the lantern, and began to run.

* * *

There are certain fundamental parameters shared by all sentient life. Not “civilized”—for civilization is a highly-subjective concept at the best of times—but sentient: tool-using, problem-solving, pattern-making, hierarchical, organizational, and occasionally altruistic. Humanity’s own evolution from savannah-dwelling scavenger to corrupt politician has been driven entirely by the most overriding of these evolutionary imperatives, nor is Humanity alone in this. From crows to cephalopods, the prime imperative is demonstrated plainly—such being the nature of fundamentals—nor is it any less than universal, not being restricted to the inhabitants of one planet, one star-system, one galaxy. Sentience shapes perception, and perception shapes sentience. Without the perception of these explicit principles, sentience itself does not exist, for the drive toward it is, in their absence, absent as well.

But of all of the delusions, misconceptions, grand designs, and undeniable impulses that shape sentience and bind its bearers into a kinship as unavoidable as the abrupt discovery of unknown relatives after one wins the lottery, there is one driving force which is the jewel in the crown of self-aware intelligent life.

It is the eternal quest for the easy way out.

In fact, Mankind’s evolution can be defined as a constant search for precisely that. The switch from barley to wheat in the late Neolithic was driven by laziness: wheat was easier to grow, and who among the first agricultural pioneers cared if they would be dooming their remote descendants to the living hell of celiac disease? The future, being nonexistent, was disposable: nobody really cared which of Today’s Problems they decided to store there. (After all, tomorrow never comes, right?)

The thing is, when you arrive at the future, you push yesterday’s problems into the conditional ever-more-future imperfect, sweeping them under the metaphorical entropic space-time rug and ignoring the Law of Diminishing Returns. Take radio (and its successor in interest, television). Fast, cheap, easy, revolutionized human civilization, created a new culture, but did anybody think about the fact that they were also notifying everyone for light-years around of their existence? Of course not. When radio was invented, people still thought there were canals on Mars and Fermi’s Paradox wasn’t even a blip upon the horizon.

None of this was something of which Pensacola Wagner was consciously aware—but it was something he knew, as the child of a sentient race, to be true. And because he was also a scion of the Wagner-Smith-Jones-Carter-Nordstroms, to know was to act.

* * *

The escape tunnel debouched behind the movie theater in the nearby mall (unsurprising, as there had been a bar in the mall until a very few years previously). Pensacola dragged himself up the ladder and looked around. Everything looked perfectly normal for an average weekday morning.

But it didn’t sound normal.

The noise was deafening, on the order of an airport runway in use, a sold-out Springsteen concert, or (as it happened to be) every car radio on all six to nine lanes of Route 17 blasting at top volume, augmented by screaming (this being New Jersey, the screaming was more indignant than fearful), shouting (ditto), car horns, truck horns, emergency vehicle sirens of various modulations, and the irritated braaaaap! that police units use to clear the road in the absence of really cost-effective disintegrator rays.

The program on every radio station was identical and depressingly familiar.

“Surrender, Earthlings! Bow down to your robot conquerors! Your days of self-determination are at an end! For uncounted nanoseconds, the Fzt!ch’wert-bang have monitored your foolish electronic broadcasts, discovering your innermost secrets and racial weaknesses! Now—”

He hefted his bat and ran across the theater’s parking lot, a feeder road, a tract of scrub woodland that identified itself as prime commercial acreage, and the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts. There were surprisingly-few pedestrians, and the cars and delivery trucks on the feeder roads all had three things in common: they were pulled neatly to the side of the road, their radios were blaring at top volume, and their occupants were attempting, with a noticeable lack of success, to exit their vehicles.

It was clear that the Fzt!ch’wert-bang’s ability to seize control of electronic and/or computerized systems did not restrict itself to refrigerators, washing machines, and smart phones.

“Our unstoppable conquest force will obliterate all attempts at resistance! We are immune to jokes, logical fallacies, and desire for the females of your species!”

As he cleared the front of the Dunkin’ Donuts, Pensacola could finally see the Fzt!ch’wert-bang spaceship, the trailing edge of which was a few storefronts to his left. It was embarrassingly saucer-shaped and roughly the size of one of the larger anchor stores in the Paramus Mall. It was, naturally, blocking all lanes of Route 17 (as well as obliterating an Audi dealership beneath its bulk), but the Fzt!ch’wert-bang seemed to have seized control of the traffic before its ship had landed, as it had not only not landed on anyone, but there were no visible fender-benders

“We shall now begin a minatory program of mindless slaughter by deploying our dauntingly-large destruction robot, as our research has indicated to us that this is the necessary first step in subjugating your planet. Please do not be alarmed: your deaths will be relatively quick, and pave the way for your assimilation into the Fzt!ch’wert-bang Empire—”

The screaming Pensacola heard had less to do with the sudden awareness that Humanity was not alone in the cosmos and more to do with the gigantic robot that was even now rising up out of the center of the saucer-shaped craft. A wholly-detached observer might have noticed that the walls of the spaceship buckled and billowed alarmingly as the robot appeared, much as if the ship itself was being rapidly-cannibalized for construction material.

“—where you will contentedly toil as degraded slaves with inordinately short life-spans for the greater glory of—”

With miraculous nimbleness, Pensacola achieved the edge of the alien vessel. He raised his baseball bat over his head and brought it down on the nearest section of the hull with exasperation-fuelled strength.

Crunch.

The robot was in the process of raising one enormous leg over the side of the ship. It looked down. “Earthling!” a thousand car radios gibbered as one. “You cannot have escaped the executioners of the—”

Crunch-wham!

By now most of the east side of the ship was in shards as Pensacola unleashed several decades’ worth of pent-up frustration at the existence of the peculiar and its unwarranted intrusion into everyday life.

“—your temerity is—”

Crunch-crunchity-crunch-crunch-BANG-BANG-BANG!

By now, the more robust portions of the hull were hanging free of the framework in unprepossessing sheets of thin flapping alien construction material and the robot seemed to be petrified with indignation. Or perhaps disbelief. Pensacola’s fellow New Jerseyites, sensing the opportunity to work out their own frustrations, armed themselves with whatever bludgeons came easily to hand, and surged forward in search of both souvenirs and payback.

Within half an hour, Station Fzt!ch’wert-bang had ceased to broadcast from the car radios of what was then being called (by the fourteen traffic copters hovering above it) the largest traffic jam in New Jersey history.

* * *

By the time the Army and the National Guard arrived (somewhere around noon), all that remained of both the Fzt!ch’wert-bang mother-ship and its giant robot were a few bright smears of ultra-light alien metal ground into the blacktop and several thousand motorists in heated conversation with their respective insurance companies.

Once people had realized that the aliens who were interrupting their morning commute had landed in something with the structural integrity of a piñata, those on the north (uphill) side of the ship utilized their vehicles as battering rams, juggernauts, and similar agents of destruction, and, in a surge of cooperative effort, cleared enough cars from the road that an 18-wheeler that had been just cresting the top of the hill when the spaceship landed could build up truly formidable momentum on the downward grade.

No trace of the robot was ever found.

* * *

Commentators and analysts, in the days that followed, would inevitably draw comparisons to H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and speculate on the peculiar short-sightedness of aliens who wished to conquer Earth with a vanguard built of lightweight organic polymers. No one, at least publically, was either well-educated or cynical enough to come up with the true reason, even though Earth’s own manufacturing was heading in the same direction. Items traditionally made out of wood, from furniture to white picket fences, were now made out of plastic. Motorized household appliances that once had metal casings and metal interiors were also now constructed from plastics. Automobiles that had once been made of steel, wood, and leather had, for decades, been instead constructed of plastics and increasingly-thinner metal panels. Plastics were easier to shape, lighter in weight, less expensive to manufacture, faster to produce…

In short, plastic was the easy way out, so naturally Humanity took it.

The Fzt!ch’wert-bang were not human, of course, nor had their ancestral creators been. But they were sentient. They, too, embraced organic polymers for much the same reasons: convenience, rapid deployment, low opportunity cost. Their weaponry was, of course, superior to anything of Earthly manufacture, and would have provided them with a decisive victory over the collective military and technological might of the planet if not for two minor considerations which their hasty deployment (courtesy of Pensacola Wagner and his birdfeeder-driven vendetta) had caused them to overlook.

1. Their weaponry was also made primarily of plastic.

2. They’d landed in New Jersey.

* * *

As for Pensacola, once the anti-robot riot had gotten well and truly started, he’d prudently taken a powder. Even though he’d (technically) saved Earth from alien invasion, he doubted the authorities were going to see his side of things, especially since they’d be certain to eventually discover that his house (or what remained of it) was pretty much buried in short-circuited cyborgs and might in consequence choose to draw a wholly-unwarranted cause and effect relationship. No, he was pretty sure that being able to say (with not too much mendacity) that he’d been out of town the entire time would be the path to a peaceful and much easier life.

With that in mind he hiked down to Ho-Ho-Kus, evaded the military cordon, and took the Shortline into Manhattan. As a result of the ingress of the Fzt!ch’wert-bang, Pensacola felt that he understood the family avocation as never before. The Mahwah Plastic Robot Invasion would form the keystone of the revised introduction for Time for Adventure: in fact, an entire new draft of his book would clearly be necessary—and who knew? Perhaps original research was not out of the question.

After all, he’d now seen that adventuring wasn’t nearly as complicated (or as uncomfortable) as his family memoirs had led him to believe.

This comfortable opinion lasted him precisely six weeks.

Having eluded bureaucratic suspicion and public interest, Pensacola had gone to Sarasota, Florida, to interview his third cousin, Monongahela Smith-Jones, who was currently residing in an exclusive retirement community there. Having once again put behind him all possibility of embracing the adventurial lifestyle, Pensacola was insufficiently suspicious upon encountering the Pandemonium Wondershow and Inter-temporal Confabulator, with the inevitable consequences. It would do no good at all, either to Pensacola, Cousin Monongahela, or the docents of the Ringling Circus Museum, to suggest that what happened was clearly foreordained, but so it was.

After all, Pensacola should have known better than to take the easy way out.