They stayed inside their ship for almost six days while the world almost went insane with impatience. When I think of all the fingernails bitten that week by two billion people …
“Imagine!” Trowson whispered to me. He was pacing the floor as if he full intended to walk all the way to Betelgeuse. “We’d just be children on a quintupled life scale, Dick. All my achievement and education, all yours, would be just the beginning! A man could learn five professions in such a life—and think what he could accomplish in one!”
I nodded, a little numb. I was thinking of the books I could read, the books I might write, if the bulk of my life stretched ahead of me and the advertising profession as just a passing phase at the beginning of it. Then again, somehow I’d never married, never had had a family. Not enough free time, I had felt. And now, at forty, I was too set in my ways. But a man can unset a lot in a century …
In six days the aliens came out. With a statement of price.
They believed they could persuade their people to manufacture a supply of revitalizers for us if—An IF writ very large indeed.
Their planet was woefully short of radioactive minerals, they explained apologetically. Barren worlds containing radium, uranium, and thorium had been discovered and claimed by other races, but the folk of Betelgeuse IX were forbidden by their ethics to wage aggressive war for territorial purposes. We had plenty of radioactive ore, which we used chiefly for war and biological research. The former was patently undesirable and the latter would be rendered largely unnecessary by the revitalizers.
So, in exchange, they wanted our radioactive elements. All of them, they stated humbly.
All right, we were a little surprised, even stunned. But the protests never started to materialize. There was an overwhelming chorus of “sold!” from every quadrant of the globe. A couple of generals here, a few militaristic statesmen there managed to raise direly pointing forefingers before they were whisked out of position. A nuclear physicist or two howled about the future of subatomic research, but the peoples of the earth howled louder.
“Research? How much research can you do in a lifetime of three hundred years?”
Overnight, the United Nations became the central office of a planet-wide mining concession. National boundaries were superseded by pitchblende deposits and swords were beaten into pickaxes. Practically anyone with a good, unable arm enlisted in the shovel brigades for two or more months out of the year. Comaraderie flew on the winds of the world.
Andy and Dandy politely offered to help. They marked out on detail contour maps the spots to be mined, and that included areas never suspected of radioactivity. They supplied us with fantastic but clear line drawings of devices for extracting the stuff from the ores in which it assayed poorly, and taught us the exact use of these devices, if not their basic principle.
They hadn’t been joking. They wanted it all.
Then, when everything was running smoothly, they buzzed off for Betelgeuse to handle their part of the bargain.
Those two years were the most exhilarating of my life. And I’d say everyone feels the same, don’t they, Alvarez? The knowledge that the world was working together, cheerfully, happily, for life itself. I put my year in at the Great Slave Lake, and I don’t think anyone of my age and weight lifted more pitchblende.
Andy and Dandy came back in two huge ships, manned by weird snail-like robots. The robots did everything, while Andy and Dandy went on being lionized. From the two ships, almost covering the sky, the robots ferried back and forth in strange, spiral aircraft, bringing revitalizers down, carrying refined radioactive elements aloft. No one paid the slightest attention to their methods of instantaneous extraction from large quantities of ore: we were interested in just one throbbing thought—the revitalizers.
They worked. And that, so far as most of us were concerned, was that.
The revitalizers worked. Cancer disappeared; heart disease and kidney disease became immediately arrested. Insects which were introduced into the square one-story lab structures lived for a year instead of a few months. And humans—doctors shook their heads in wonder over people who had gone through.
All over the planet, near every major city, the long, patient, slowly moving lines stood outside the revitalizers, which were rapidly becoming something else.
“Temples!” shouted Mainzer. “They look on them as temples. A scientist investigating their operation is treated by the attendants like a dangerous lunatic in a nursery. Not that a man can find a clue in those ridiculously small motors. I no longer ask what their power source can be. Instead, I ask if they have a power source at all!”
“The revitalizers are very precious now, in the beginning,” Trowson soothed him. “After a while the novelty will wear off and you’ll be able to investigate at your leisure. Could it be solar power?”
“No!” Mainzer shook his huge head positively. “Not solar power. Solar power I am sure I could recognize. As I am sure that the power supply of their ships and whatever runs these—these revitalizers are two entirely separate things. On the ships I have given up. But the revitalizers I believe I could solve. If only they would let me examine them. Fools! So terribly afraid I might damage one, and they would have to travel to another city for their elixir!”
We patted his shoulder, but we weren’t really interested. Andy and Dandy left that week, after wishing us well in their own courteous and complex fashion. Whole population groups blew kisses at their mineralladen ships.
Six months after they left, the revitalizers stopped.
“Am I certain?” Trowson snorted at my dismayed face. “One set of statistics proves it: look at your death rate. It’s back to pre-Betelgeuse normal. Or ask any doctor. Any doctor who can forget his U.N. security oath, that is. There’ll be really wild riots when the news breaks, Dick.”
“But why?” I asked him. “Did we do something wrong?”
He started a laugh that ended with his teeth clicking frightenedly together. He rose and walked to the window, staring out into the star-diseased sky. “We did something wrong, all right. We trusted. We made the same mistake all natives have made when they met a superior civilization. Mainzer and Lopez have taken one of the revitalizer engine units apart. There was just a trace of it left, but this time they found the power source. Dick, my boy, the revitalizers were run on the fuel of completely pure radioactive elements!”
I needed a few moments to file that properly. Then I sat down in the easy chair very, very carefully. I made some hoarse, improbable sounds before croaking: “Prof, do you mean they wanted that stuff for themselves, for their own revitalizers? That everything they did on this planet was carefully planned so that they could con us with a maximum of friendliness all around? It doesn’t seem—it just can’t—Why, with their superior science, they could have conquered us if they’d cared to. They could have—”
“No, they couldn’t have,” Trowson whipped out. He turned to face me and flung his arms across each other. “They’re a decadent, dying race; they wouldn’t have attempted to conquer us. Not because of their ethics—this huge, horrible swindle serves to illustrate that aspect of them—but because they haven’t the energy, the concentration, the interest. Andy and Dandy are probably representative of the few remaining who have barely enough git-up-and-go to trick backward peoples out of the all-important, life-sustaining revitalizer fuel.”
The implications were just beginning to soak into my cortex. Me, the guy who did the most complete and colossal public-relations job of all time—I could just see what my relations with the public would be like if I was ever connected with this shambles.
“And without atomic power, Prof, we won’t have space travel!”
He gestured bitterly. “Oh, we’ve been taken, Dick; the whole human race has been had. I know what you’re going through, but think of me! I’m the failure, the man responsible. I’m supposed to be a sociologist! How could I have missed? How? It was all there: the lack of interest in their own culture, the overintellectualization of esthetics, the involved methods of thought and expression, the exaggerated etiquette, even the very first thing of theirs we saw—their ship—was too heavily stylized and intricately designed for a young, trusting civilization.
“They had to be decadent; every sign pointed to that conclusion. And of course the fact that they resort to the methods of fueling their revitalizers that we’ve experienced—when if we had their science, what might we not do, what substitutes might we not develop! No wonder they couldn’t explain their science to us; I doubt if they understand it fully themselves. They are the profligate, inadequate and sneak-thief heirs of what was once a soaring race!”
I was following my own unhappy images. “And we’re still hicks. Hicks who’ve been sold the equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge by some dressed-up sharpies from Betelgeuse.”
Trowson nodded. “Or a bunch of poor natives who have sold their island home to a group of European explorers for a handful of brightly colored glass beads.”
But of course we were both wrong, Alvarez. Neither Trowson nor I had figured on Mainzer or Lopez or the others. Like Mainzer said, a few years earlier and we would have been licked. But man had entered the atomic age some time before 1945 and people like Mainzer and Vinthe had done nuclear research back in the days when radioactive elements abounded on Earth. We had that and we had such tools as the cyclotron, the betatron. And, if our present company will pardon the expression, Alvarez, we are a young and vigorous race.
All we had to do was the necessary research.
The research was done. With a truly effective world government, with a population not only interested in the problem but recently experienced in working together—and with the grim incentive we had, Alvarez, the problem, as you know, was solved.
We developed artificial radioactives and refueled the revitalizers. We developed atomic fuels out of the artificial radioactives and we got space travel. We did it comparatively fast, and we weren’t interested in a ship that just went to the Moon or Mars. We wanted a star ship. And we wanted it so bad, so fast, that we have it now too.
Here we are. Explain the situation to them, Alvarez, just the way I told it to you, but with all the knee-bending and gobbledegook that a transplanted Brazilian with twelve years oriental trading experience can put into it. You’re the man to do it—I can’t talk like that. It’s the only language those decadent slugs understand, so it’s the only way we can talk to them. So talk to them, these slimy snails, these oysters on the quarter shell, those smart-alecky slugs. Don’t forget to mention to them that the supply of radioactives they got from us won’t last forever. Get that down in fine detail.
Then stress the fact that we’ve got artificial radioactives, and that they’ve got some things we know we want and lots of other things we mean to find out about.
Tell them, Alvarez, that we’ve come to collect tolls on that Brooklyn Bridge they sold us.