Beside the Golden Door

Beside the Golden Door

An alien explorer named Deez returns from a long and presumed-lost expedition to find his friends Ky-Tann and Devia, a married couple on the planet Illyri. Bearing visible signs of hardship — weight loss, burn scars, whitened hair — he recounts his discovery of a dead world in a distant galaxy. His crew located the remains of a once-thriving civilization on a barren, airless planet they came to call Earth. Among the ruins stood a colossal statue of a robed woman holding a torch aloft, half-buried in the arid soil of what had once been a vast ocean floor. Excavation revealed buried cities, libraries, artifacts, written histories, and physical remains — the remnants of a race called Earthmen, who had numbered in the billions and achieved significant scientific progress, including early space travel. The story then shifts deep into that excavated history. In 1973, a retired naval surgeon named Dr. Carl Woodward encounters a blue-skinned alien who crashes near his Pennsylvania home. The alien's companion dies in the crash. Woodward, a compassionate and practical man, takes the alien — named Borsu — into his home and becomes his teacher and advocate. Borsu learns language rapidly and reveals the plight of his people: fewer than ten thousand survivors of a destroyed world, living on an airless asteroid, seeking sanctuary on Earth. Their physical form is broadly similar to humans — bipedal, humanoid — though taller, more angular, and distinctively blue-skinned. They cannot interbreed with humans. They carry no weapons and ask for nothing but a place to live. Woodward travels to Washington to plead on Borsu's behalf before the Secretary of Science, Ridgemont. The meeting proceeds with surface civility but veiled hostility. Ridgemont raises the question of race relations, wondering aloud whether the world can absorb yet another group of people perceived as different. Woodward leaves shaken and dies that night of a heart attack. When a government delegation visits his home, a nervous policeman shoots and kills Borsu, mistaking his frightened flight for an attack. The alien migration begins anyway, driven by desperation. Thousands of blue-skinned people arrive in small spacecraft, only to be met with violence from ordinary citizens. Well over three thousand are killed before military intervention slows the slaughter. The United Nations Secretary-General delivers a speech of shame and welcome. Nations offer land and sanctuary. The alien Elder Trecor declines segregation or absorption into any single state, choosing instead to disperse his people in small communities across the world, hoping integration will foster understanding. The results are tragic across every setting. In Kansas, alien farmers produce superior crops and survive a devastating storm season unharmed — achievements that breed resentment rather than admiration. A terrorist organization calling itself the Dom-Dom wages a violent campaign against the aliens over many years, killing over a thousand. In New Zealand, a plague wipes out an entire alien community after human doctors abandon them out of fear. In Russia, a community of alien artists and scientists is first coddled into helplessness, then stripped of support under the guise of granting freedom, leading to internal collapse and the first recorded instance of one alien killing another — an event said to have caused the death of Elder Trecor from shame. Over thirty-six years, ten thousand aliens die while only four thousand births are recorded. Following a massacre in Kansas City in which eight hundred aliens are killed by flamethrowers, the surviving alien Elder Dasru delivers a formal statement to the United Nations. The statement acknowledges that they arrived unwanted, offered love and received hatred, came in peace and died in violence. They express their love for the planet itself while condemning the civilization on it. They announce their departure and invoke their people's ancient custom of deliberate Forgetting — future generations will carry no memory of Earth or what happened there. The exodus is complete before the following spring. Back in the frame narrative, Deez finishes his account and tells Ky-Tann that all of this occurred roughly three to four thousand years ago. Earth's sun eventually convulsed in nuclear fire, sterilizing the planet entirely. Yet the statue remains standing in the ruins, her torch still raised. When his crew excavated the base, they found an inscription — the words of Emma Lazarus welcoming the tired, the poor, the homeless, the tempest-tossed through the golden door. The story closes with silence, and with Devia wiping away tears. Ky-Tann takes her hand and kisses her cheek. Both Ky-Tann and Devia, and their infant daughter Su-Tann, are blue.

By Henry Slesar · First published 1963 · Genre: Science Fiction, Dystopian, Political Fiction · 7,650 words

First lines

_Earth was dead, but Liberty still held her torch aloft. Yet only Deez, the alien, could know whether it was raised in welcome or in mockery._

Devia's voice, like a sweetly tinkling bell in his ear, sounded in Ky-Tann's headpiece, and he chuckled at the urgency of her tone. Wedded less than two years, he still delighted in every nuance of her nature, and this was one of them. She could sound equally urgent about an impending hurricane or an imminent dinner party.

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Beside the Golden Door is listed on Textopian as a short story by Henry Slesar, dated 1963 CE.

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fiction · historical fiction · immigration · Ellis Island · New York City · American dream · family saga · Jewish American life · urban life · identity · assimilation · generational conflict

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