You tell them, Alvarez, old boy; you know how to talk to them. This isn’t my kind of public relations. All I care about is that they get the pitch exactly right, with all the implications and complications and everything just the way they really were.
If it hurts, well, let them yell. Just use your words and get it right. Get it all.
You can start with the day the alien spaceship landed outside Baltimore. Makes you sick to think how we never tumbled, doesn’t it, Alvarez? No more than a hop, skip, and a jet from the Capitol dome, and we thought it was just a lucky accident.
Explain why we thought it was so lucky. Explain about the secrecy it made possible, the farmer who telephoned the news was placed in special and luxurious custody, how a hand-picked cordon of M.P.s paced five square miles off into an emergency military reservation a few hours later, how Congress was called into secret session and the way it was all kept out of the newspapers.
How and why Trowson, my old sociology prof, was consulted once the problem became clear. How he blinked at the brass hats and striped pants and came up with the answer.
Me. I was the answer.
How my entire staff and I were plucked out of our New York offices, where we were quietly earning a million bucks, by a flying squad of the F.B.I. and air-mailed to Baltimore, Honestly, Alvarez, even after Trowson explained the situation to me, I was still irritated. Government hush-hush always makes me uncomfortable. Though I don’t have to tell you how grateful I was for it later.
The spaceship itself was such a big surprise that I didn’t even wet my lips when the first of the aliens slooshed out. After all those years of streamlined cigar shapes the Sunday supplement artists had dreamed up, that colorful and rococo spheroid rearing out of a barley field in Maryland looked less like an interplanetary vessel than an oversized ornament for a what-not table. Nothing that seemed like a rocket jet anywhere.
“And there’s your job.” The prof pointed. “Those two visitors.”
They were standing on a flat metal plate surrounded by the highest the republic had elected or appointed. Nine feet of slimy green trunk tapering up from a rather wide base to a pointed top, and dressed in a tiny pink-and-white shell. Two stalks with eyes on them that swung this way and that, and seemed muscular enough to throttle a man. And a huge wet slash of a mouth that showed whenever an edge of the squirming base lifted from the metal plate.
“Snails,” I said. “Snails!”
“Or slugs,” Trowson amended. “Gastropodal mollusks in any case.” He gestured at the roiling white bush of hair that sprouted from his head. “But, Dick, that vestigial bit of coiled shell is even less an evolutionary memento than this. They’re an older—and smarter—race.”
“Smarter?”
He nodded. “When our engineers got curious, they were very courteously invited inside to inspect the ship. They came out with their mouths hanging.”
I began to get uncomfortable. I ripped a small piece off my manicure. “Well, naturally, prof; if they’re so alien, so different—”
“Not only that. Superior. Get that, Dick, because it’ll be very important in what you have to do. The best engineering minds that this country can assemble in a hurry are like a crowd of South Sea Islanders trying to analyze the rifle and compass from what they know of spears and wind storms. These creatures belong to a galaxy-wide civilization composed of races at least as advanced as they; we’re a bunch of backward hicks in an unfrequented hinterland of space that’s about to be opened to exploration. Exploitation, perhaps, if we can’t measure up. We have to give a very good impression and we have to learn fast.”
A dignified official with a brief case detached himself from the nodding, smiling group around the aliens and started for us.
“Whew!” I commented brilliantly. “Fourteen ninety-two, repeat performance.” I thought for a moment, not too clearly. “But why send the Army and Navy after me? I’m not going to be able to read blueprints from—from—”
“Betelgeuse. Ninth planet of the star Betelgeuse. No, Dick, we’ve already had Dr. Warbury out here. They learned English from him in two hours, although he hasn’t identified a word of theirs in three days! And people like Lopez, like Mainzer, are going quietly psychotic trying to locate their power source. We have the best minds we can get to do the learning. Your job is different. We want you as a top-notch advertising man, a public-relations executive. You’re the good impression part of the program.”
The official plucked at my sleeve and I shrugged him away. “Isn’t that the function of government glad-handers?” I asked Trowson.
“No. Don’t you remember what you said when you first saw them? Snails! How do you think this country is going to take to the idea of snails—giant snails—who sneer condescendingly at our skyscraper cities, our atomic bombs, our most advanced mathematics? We’re a conceited kind of monkey. Also, we’re afraid of the dark.”
There was a gentle official tap on my shoulder. I said “Please!” impatiently. I watched the warm little breeze ruffle Professor Trowson’s slept-in clothes and noticed the tiny red streaks in his weary eyes.
“ ‘Mighty Monsters from Outer Space.’ Headlines like that, Prof?”
“Slugs with superiority complexes. Dirty slugs, more likely. We’re lucky they landed in this country, and so close to the Capitol too. In a few days we’ll have to call in the heads of other nations. Then, sometime soon after, the news will be out. We don’t want our visitors attacked by mobs drunk on superstition, planetary isolation, or any other form of tabloid hysteria. We don’t want them carrying stories back to their civilization of being shot at by a suspendered fanatic who screamed, ‘Go back where you come from, you furrin’ seafood!’ We want to give them the impression that we are a fairly amiable, fairly intelligent race, that we can be dealt with reasonably well.”
I nodded. “Yeah. So they’ll set up trading posts on this planet instead of garrisons. But what do I do in all this?”
He punched my chest gently. “You, Dick—you do a job of public relations. You sell these aliens to the American people!”
The official had maneuvered around in front of me. I recognized him. He was the Undersecretary of State.
“Would you step this way, please?” he said. “I’d like to introduce you to our distinguished guests.”
So he stepped, and I stepped, and we scrunched across the field and clanked across the steel plate and stood next to our gastropodic guests.
“Ahem,” said the Undersecretary politely.
The nearer snail bent an eye toward us. The other eye drew a bead on the companion snail, and then the great slimy head arched and came down to our level. The creature raised, as it were, one cheek of its foot and said, with all the mellowness of air being pumped through a torn inner tube, “Can it be that you wish to communicate with my unworthy self, respected sir?”
I was introduced. The thing brought two eyes to bear on me. The place where its chin should have been dropped to my feet and snaked around there for a second. Then it said, “You, honored sir, are our touchstone, the link with all that is great in your noble race. Your condescension is truly a tribute.”
All this tumbled out while I was muttering “How,” and extending a diffident hand. The snail put one eyeball in my palm and the other on the back of my wrist. It didn’t shake; it just put the things there and took them away again. I had the wit not to wipe my hands on my pants, which was my immediate impulse. The eyeball wasn’t exactly dry, either.
I said, “I’ll do my best. Tell me, are you—uh—ambassadors, sort of? Or maybe just explorers?”
“Our small worth justifies no titles,” said the creature, “yet we are both; for all communication is ambassadorship of a kind, and any seeker after knowledge is an explorer.”
I was suddenly reminded of an old story with the punchline, “Ask a foolish question and you get a foolish answer.” I also wondered suddenly what snails eat.
The second alien glided over and eyed me. “You may depend upon our utmost obedience,” it said humbly. “We understand your awesome function and we wish to be liked to whatever extent it is possible for your admirable race to like such miserable creatures as ourselves.”
“Stick to that attitude and we’ll get along,” I said.
By and large, they were a pleasure to work with. I mean there was no temperament, no upstaging, no insistence on this camera angle or that mention of a previously published book or the other wishful biographical apocrypha about being raised in a convent, like with most of my other clients.
On the other hand, they weren’t easy to talk to. They’d take orders, sure. But ask them a question. Any question:
“How long did the trip take you?”
“ ‘How long’ in your eloquent tongue indicates a frame of reference dealing with duration. I hesitate to discuss so complex a problem with one as learned as yourself. The velocities involved make it necessary to answer in relative terms. Our lowly and undesirable planet recedes from this beauteous system during part of its orbital period, advances toward it during part. Also, we must take into consideration the direction and velocity of our star in reference to the cosmic expansion of this portion of the continuum. Had we come from Cygnus, say, or Bootes, the question could be answered somewhat more directly; for those bodies travel in a contiguous arc skewed from the ecliptic plane in such a way that—”
Or a question like, “Is your government a democracy?”
“A democracy is a rule of the people, according to your rich etymology. We could not, in our lowly tongue, have expressed it so succinctly and movingly. One must govern oneself, of course. The degree of governmental control on the individual must vary from individual to individual and in the individual from time to time. This is so evident to as comprehensive a mind as yours that I trust you forgive me my inanities. The same control applies, naturally, to individuals considered in the mass. When faced with a universal necessity, the tendency exists among civilized species to unite to fill the need. Therefore, when no such necessity exists, there is less reason for concerted effort. Since this applies to all species, it applies even to such as us. On the other hand—”
See what I mean? A little of that got old quickly with me. I was happy to keep my nose to my own grindstone.
The Government gave me a month for the preparatory propaganda. Originally, the story was to break in two weeks, but I got down on my hands and knees and bawled that a publicity deadline required at least five times that. So they gave me a month.
Explain that carefully, Alvarez. I want them to understand exactly what a job I faced. All those years of lurid magazine covers showing extremely nubile females being menaced in three distinct colors by assorted monstrosities; those horror movies, those invasion-from-outer-space novels, those Sunday supplement fright splashes—all those sturdy psychological ruts I had to retrack. Not to mention the shudders elicited by mention of “worms,” the regulation distrust of even human “furriners,” the superstitious dread of creatures who had no visible place to park a soul.
Trowson helped me round up the men to write the scientific articles, and I dug up the boys who could pseudo them satisfactorily. Magazine mats were ripped apart to make way for yarns speculating gently on how far extraterrestrial races might have evolved beyond us, how much more ethical they might have become, how imaginary seven-headed creatures could still apply the Sermon on the Mount. Syndicated features popped up describing “Humble Creatures Who Create Our Gardens,” “Snail Racing, the Spectacular New Spectator Sport,” and so much stuff on “The Basic Unity of All Living Things” that I began to get uncomfortable at even a vegetarian dinner. I remember hearing there was a perceptible boom in mineral waters and vitamin pills…
And all this, mind you, without a word of the real story breaking. A columnist did run a cute and cryptic item about someone having finally found meat on the flying saucers, but half an hour of earnest discussion in an abandoned fingerprint file room prejudiced him against further comment along this line.