No wonder men went berserk under hours of unwinking Alien scrutiny—watching them as they marched in a colorfully uniformed lodge parade, or fished through a hole in the ice, as they painfully maneuvered a giant transcontinental jet to a noiseless landing or sat in sweating, serried rows chanting to a single, sweating man to “knock it out of the park and sew the whole thing up!” No wonder they seized rusty shotgun or gleaming rifle and sped shot after vindictive shot into a sky poisoned by the contemptuous curiosity of a brown, yellow or vermilion “bottle.”
Not that it made very much difference. It did give a certain release to nerves backed into horrible psychic corners. But the Aliens didn’t notice, and that was most important. The Aliens went right on watching, as if all this shooting and uproar, all these imprecations and weapon-wavings, were all part of the self-same absorbing show they had paid to witness and were determined to see through if for nothing else than the occasional amusing fluff some member of the inexperienced cast might commit.
The Aliens weren’t injured, and the Aliens didn’t feel attacked. Bullets, shells, buckshot, arrows, pebbles from a slingshot—all Man’s miscellany of anger passed through them like the patient and eternal rain coming in the opposite direction. Yet the Aliens had solidity somewhere in their strange bodies. One could judge that by the way they intercepted light and heat. And also—
Also by the occasional ping .
Every once in a while, someone would evidently have hurt an Alien slightly. Or more probably just annoyed it by some unknown concomitant of rifle-firing or javelin-throwing.
There would be the barest suspicion of a sound—as if a guitarist had lunged at a string with his fingertip and decided against it one motor impulse too late. And, after this delicate and hardly heard ping, quite unspectacularly, the rifleman would be weaponless. He would be standing there sighting stupidly up along his empty curled fingers, elbow cocked out and shoulder hunched in, like a large oafish child who had forgotten when to end the game. Neither his rifle nor a fragment of it would ever be found. And—gravely, curiously, intently—the Alien would go on watching.
The ping seemed to be aimed chiefly at weapons. Thus, occasionally, a 155mm howitzer was pinged, and also, occasionally, unexpectedly, it might be a muscular arm, curving back with another stone, that would disappear to the accompaniment of a tiny elfin note. And yet sometimes—could it be that the Alien, losing interest, had become careless in its irritation?—the entire man, murderously violent and shrieking, would ping and be no more.
It was not as if a counterweapon were being used, but a thoroughly higher order of reply, such as a slap to an insect bite. Hebster, shivering, recalled the time he had seen a black tubular Alien swirl its amber dots over a new substreet excavation, seemingly entranced by the spectacle of men scrabbling at the earth beneath them.
A red-headed, blue-shirted giant of construction labor had looked up from Manhattan’s stubborn granite just long enough to shake the sweat from his eyelids. So doing, he had caught sight of the dot-pulsing observer and paused to snarl and lift his pneumatic drill, rattling it in noisy, if functionless, bravado at the sky. He had hardly been noticed by his mates, when the long, dark, speckled representative of a race beyond the stars turned end over end once and pinged.
The heavy drill remained upright for a moment, then dropped as if it had abruptly realized its master was gone. Gone? Almost, he had never been. So thorough had his disappearance been, so rapid, with so little flicker had he been snuffed out—harming and taking with him nothing else—that it had amounted to an act of gigantic and positive noncreation.
No, Hebster decided, making threatening gestures at the Aliens was suicidal. Worse, like everything else that had been tried to date, it was useless. On the other hand, wasn’t the Humanity First approach a complete neurosis? What could you do?
He reached into his soul for an article of fundamental faith, found it. “I can make money,” he quoted to himself. “That’s what I’m good for. That’s what I can always do.”
As they spun to a stop before the dumpy, brown-brick armory that the SIC had appropriated for its own use, he had a shock. Across the street was a small cigar store, the only one on the block. Brand names which had decorated the plate-glass window in all the colors of the copyright had been supplanted recently by great gilt slogans. Familiar slogans they were by now—but this close to a UM office, the Special Investigating Commission itself?
At the top of the window, the proprietor announced his affiliation in two huge words that almost screamed their hatred across the street:
Humanity First!
Underneath these, in the exact center of the window, was the large golden initial of the organization, the wedded letters HF arising out of the huge, symbolic safety razor.
And under that, in straggling script, the theme repeated, reworded and sloganized:
“Humanity first, last and all the time!”
The upper part of the door began to get nasty:
“Deport the Aliens! Send them back to wherever they came from!”
And the bottom of the door made the store-front’s only concession to business:
“Shop here! Shop Humanitarian!”
“Humanitarian!” Funatti nodded bitterly beside Hebster. “Ever see what’s left of a Primey if a bunch of Firsters catch him without SIC protection? Just about enough to pick up with a blotter. I don’t imagine you’re too happy about boycott-shops like that?”
Hebster managed a chuckle as they walked past the saluting, green-uniformed guards. “There aren’t very many Primey-inspired gadgets having to do with tobacco. And if there were, one Shop Humanitarian outfit isn’t going to break me.”
But it is, he told himself disconsolately. It is going to break me—if it means what it seems to. Organization membership is one thing and so is planetary patriotism, but business is something else.
Hebster’s lips moved slowly, in half-remembered catechism: Whatever the proprietor believes in or does not believe in, he has to make a certain amount of money out of that place if he’s going to keep the door free of bailiff stickers. He can’t do it if he offends the greater part of his possible clientele.
Therefore, since he’s still in business and, from all outward signs, doing quite well, it’s obvious that he doesn’t have to depend on across-the-street UM personnel. Therefore, there must be a fairly substantial trade to offset this among entirely transient customers who not only don’t object to his Firstism but are willing to forgo the interesting new gimmicks and lower prices in standard items that Primey technology is giving us.
Therefore, it is entirely possible—from this one extremely random but highly significant sample—that the newspapers I read have been lying and the socioeconomists I employ are incompetent. It is entirely possible that the buying public, the only aspect of the public in which I have the slightest interest, is beginning a shift in general viewpoint which will profoundly affect its purchasing orientation.
It is possible that the entire UM economy is now at the top of a long slide into Humanity First domination, the secure zone of fanatic blindness demarcated by men like Vandermeer Dempsey. The highly usurious, commercially speculative economy of Imperial Rome made a similar transition in the much slower historical pace of two millennia ago and became, in three brief centuries, a static unbusinesslike world in which banking was a sin and wealth which had not been inherited was gross and dishonorable.
Meanwhile, people may already have begun to judge manufactured items on the basis of morality instead of usability, Hebster realized, as dim mental notes took their stolid place beside forming conclusions. He remembered a folderful of brilliant explanation Market Research had sent up last week dealing with unexpected consumer resistance to the new Ewakleen dishware. He had dismissed the pages of carefully developed thesis—to the effect that women were unconsciously associating the product’s name with a certain Katherine Ewakios who had recently made the front page of every tabloid in the world by dint of some fast work with a breadknife on the throats of her five children and two lovers—with a yawning smile after examining its first brightly colored chart.
“Probably nothing more than normal housewifely suspicion of a radically new idea,” he had muttered, “after washing dishes for years, to be told it’s no longer necessary! She can’t believe her Ewakleen dish is still the same after stripping the outer-most film of molecules after a meal. Have to hit that educational angle a bit harder—maybe tie it in with the expendable molecules lost by the skin during a shower.”
He’d penciled a few notes on the margin and flipped the whole problem onto the restless lap of Advertising and Promotion.
But then there had been the seasonal slump in furniture—about a month ahead of schedule. The surprising lack of interest in the Hebster Chubbichair, an item which should have revolutionized men’s sitting habits.
Abruptly, he could remember almost a dozen unaccountable disturbances in the market recently, and all in consumer goods. That fits, he decided; any change in buying habits wouldn’t be reflected in heavy industry for at least a year. The machine tools plants would feel it before the steel mills; the mills before the smelting and refining combines; and the banks and big investment houses would be the last of the dominoes to topple.
With its capital so thoroughly tied up in research and new production, his business wouldn’t survive even a temporary shift of this type. Hebster Securities, Inc., could go like a speck of lint being blown off a coat collar.
Which is a long way to travel from a simple little cigar store. Funatti’s jitters about growing Firstist sentiment are contagious! he thought.
If only Kleimbocher could crack the communication problem! If we could talk to the Aliens, find some sort of place for ourselves in their universe. The Firsters would be left without a single political leg!
Hebster realized they were in a large, untidy, map-splattered office and that his escort was saluting a huge, even more untidy man who waved their hands down impatiently and nodded them out of the door. He motioned Hebster to a choice of seats. This consisted of several long walnut-stained benches scattered about the room.
P. Braganza, said the desk nameplate with ornate Gothic flow. P. Braganza had a long, twirlable and tremendously thick mustache. Also, P. Braganza needed a hair-cut badly. It was as if he and everything in the room had been carefully designed to give the maximum affront to Humanity Firsters. Which, considering their crew-cut, closely shaven, “Cleanliness is next to Manliness” philosophy, meant that there was a lot of gratuitous unpleasantness in this office when a raid on a street demonstration filled it with jostling fanatics, antiseptically clean and dressed with bare-bones simplicity and neatness.
“So you’re worrying about Firster effect on business?”
Hebster looked up, startled.
“No, I don’t read your mind,” Braganza laughed through tobacco-stained teeth. He gestured at the window behind his desk. “I saw you jump just the littlest bit when you noticed that cigar store. And then you stared at it for two full minutes. I knew what you were thinking about.”
“Extremely perceptive of you,” Hebster remarked dryly.
The SIC official shook his head in a violent negative. “No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit perceptive. I knew what you were thinking about because I sit up here day after day staring at that cigar store and thinking exactly the same thing. Braganza, I tell myself, that’s the end of your job. That’s the end of scientific world government. Right there on that cigar-store window.”
He glowered at his completely littered desk top for a moment. Hebster’s instincts woke up—there was a sales talk in the wind. He realized the man was engaged in the unaccustomed exercise of looking for a conversational gambit. He felt an itch of fear crawl up his intestines. Why should the SIC, whose power was almost above law and certainly above governments, be trying to dicker with him?
Considering his reputation for asking questions with the snarling end of a rubber hose, Braganza was being entirely too gentle, too talkative, too friendly. Hebster felt like a trapped mouse into whose disconcerted ear a cat was beginning to pour complaints about the dog upstairs.
“Hebster, tell me something. What are your goals?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What do you want out of life? What do you spend your days planning for, your nights dreaming about? Yost likes the girls and wants more of them. Funatti’s a family man, five kids. He’s happy in his work because his job’s fairly secure, and there are all kinds of pensions and insurance policies to back up his life.”