The Taking

brows.
        At the quiet end of the bar, where they could not be overheard, Derek said, "I don't want to alarm anyone. I mean more than they're already alarmed. But I know what's happening, and there's no point in resisting it."
        "Derek, dear," Molly said, "no offense, but is there anything in your life that you ever found much reason to resist?"
        He smiled. "The only thing I can think of was the disgusting popularity of that dreadful cocktail they called a Harvey Wallbanger. In the seventies, at every party, you were offered that concoction, that abomination, which I refused with heroic persistence."
        "Anyway," said Neil, "we all know what's happening-in general if not the specific details."
        Gin seemed to serve Derek as an orally administered eyewash, for his gaze was crystalline clear, not bloodshot, and steady. "Before I explain, I must confess to an embarrassing weakness you know nothing about. Over the years, in the privacy of my home, I have read a great deal of science fiction."
        If he thought this secret required confession and penitence, perhaps he was drunker than Molly had realized.
        She said, "Some of it's quite good."
        Derek smiled brightly. "Yes, it is. Undeniably, it's a guilty pleasure. None of it is Hemingway or Faulkner, certainly, but whole libraries of the stuff are markedly better than Gore Vidal or James Jones."
        "Now science fiction is science fact," Neil acknowledged, "but what does that have to do with living through tomorrow?"
        "In several science-fiction novels," Derek said, "I encountered the concept of terraforming. Do you know what it is?"
        Analyzing the word by its roots, Molly said, "To make earth-or to make a place like the planet Earth."
        "Yes, exactly, yes," said Derek with the enthusiasm of a Star Trek fan recounting a delicious plot twist in his favorite episode. "It means altering the environment of an inhospitable planet to make it capable of supporting terrestrial life forms. Theoretically, for instance, one could build enormous machines, atmosphere processors, to liberate the composite molecules of a breathable atmosphere from the very soil and rock of Mars, turning a nearly airless world into one on which human beings, flora, and fauna would flourish. In such science-fiction stories, terraforming a planet takes decades or even centuries."
        Molly at once understood his theory. "You're saying they aren't using weather as a weapon."
        "Not primarily," Derek said. "This isn't the war of the worlds. Nothing as grand as that. To these creatures, wherever they may be from, we are as insignificant as mosquitoes."
        "You don't go to war with mosquitoes," Neil said.
        "Exactly. You just drain the swamp, deny them the environment in which they can thrive, and build your new home on land that no longer supports such annoying bugs. They're engaged in reverse terraforming, making Earth's environment more like that on their home world. The destruction of our civilization is to them an inconsequential side effect of colonization."
        To Molly, who believed that life was a gift given with meaning and purpose, the perfect cruelty and monumental horror that Derek was describing could not exist in Creation as she understood it. "No. No, it's not possible."
        "Their science and technology are hundreds if not thousands of years more advanced than ours," Derek said. "Literally beyond our comprehension. Instead of decades, perhaps they can remake our world in a year, a month, a week."
        If this was true, humankind was indeed the victim of something worse than war, denied even the dignity of enemy status, viewed as cockroaches, as less than cockroaches, as an inconvenient mold to be rinsed out of existence with a purging solution.
        When Molly's chest tightened and her breath came less easily than before, when her heart began to race with anxiety, she told herself that her reaction to Derek's premise was not an indication that she recognized the ring of truth in his words. She did not believe that the world was being taken from humanity with such arrogance and with no fear of the consequences. She refused to believe such a thing.
        Evidently sensing her innate resistance to his theory, Derek said, "I have proof."
        "Proof?" Neil scoffed. "What proof could you possibly have?"
        "If not proof, at least some damn convincing evidence,"