“When I spoke to you earlier in the day, Margritt, you indicated disapproval of Verus. Don’t you think it was your duty to let me know I had a Firster official about to mix it up with Primeys?”
The little man beat a violent negative back and forth with his chin. “I’m paid to supervise research, Mr. Hebster, not to coordinate your labor relations nor vote your political ticket!”
Contempt—the contempt of the creative researcher for the businessman-entre-preneur who paid his salary and was now in serious trouble—flickered behind every word he spoke. Why, Hebster wondered irritably, did people so despise a man who made money? Even the Primeys back in his office, Yost and Funatti, Braganza, Margritt—who had worked in his laboratories for years. It was his only talent. Surely, as such, it was as valid as a pianist’s?
“I’ve never liked Charlie Verus,” the lab chief went on, “but we never had reason to suspect him of Firstism! He must have hit the third-echelon rank about a week ago, eh, Bert?”
“Yeah,” Bert agreed from across the room. “The day he came in an hour late, broke every Florence flask in the place and told us all dreamily that one day we might be very proud to tell our grandchildren that we’d worked in the same lab with Charles Bolop Verus.”
“Personally,” Margritt commented, “I thought he might have just finished writing a book which proved that the Great Pyramid was nothing more than a prophecy in stone of our modern textile designs. Verus was that kind. But it probably was his little safety razor that tossed him up so high. I’d say he got the promotion as a sort of payment in advance for the job he finally did today.”
Hebster ground his teeth at the carefully hairless captive who tried, unsuccessfully, to spit in his face; he hurried back to the door, where his private secretary was talking to the bodyguard who had been on duty in the lab.
Beyond them, against the wall, stood Larry and S.S. Lusitania conversing in a low-voiced and anxious gabble-honk. They were evidently profoundly disturbed. S.S. Lusitania kept plucking tiny little elephants out of her rags which, kicking and trumpeting tinnily, burst like malformed bubbles as she dropped them on the floor. Larry scratched his tangled beard nervously as he talked, periodically waving a hand at the ceiling, which was already studded with fifty or sixty replicas of the dagger buried in Theseus. Hebster couldn’t help thinking anxiously of what could have happened to his building if the Primeys had been able to act human enough to defend themselves.
“Listen, Mr. Hebster,” the bodyguard began, “I was told not to—”
“Save it,” Hebster rapped out. “This wasn’t your fault. Even Personnel isn’t to blame. Me and my experts deserve to have our necks chopped for falling so far behind the times. We can analyze any trend but the one which will make us superfluous. Greta! I want my roof helicopter ready to fly and my personal stratojet at LaGuardia alerted. Move, girl! And you… Williams, is it?” he queried, leaning forward to read the bodyguard’s name on his badge, “Williams, pack these two Primeys into my helicopter upstairs and stand by for a fast take-off.”
He turned. “Everyone else!” he called. “You will be allowed to go home at six. You will be paid one hour’s overtime. Thank you.”
Charlie Verus started to sing as Hebster left the lab. By the time he reached the elevator, several of the clerks in the hallway had defiantly picked up the hymn. Hebster paused outside the elevator as he realized that fully one-fourth of the clerical personnel, male and female, were following Verus’ cracked and mournful but terribly earnest tenor.
If it was like this in Hebster Securities, he thought wryly as he came into his private office, how fast was Humanity First growing among the broad masses of people? Of course, many of those singing could be put down as sympathizers rather than converts, people who were suckers for choral groups and vigilante posses—but how much more momentum did an organization have to generate to acquire the name of political juggernaut?
The only encouraging aspect was the SIC’s evident awareness of the danger and the unprecedented steps they were prepared to take as countermeasure.
Unfortunately, the unprecedented steps would take place upon Hebster.
He now had a little less than two hours, he reflected, to squirm out of the most serious single crime on the books of present World Law.
He lifted one of his telephones. “Ruth,” he said. “I want to speak to Vandermeer Dempsey. Get me through to him personally.”
She did. A few moments later he heard the famous voice, as rich and slow and thick as molten gold. “Hello Hebster, Vandermeer Dempsey speaking.” He paused as if to draw breath, then went on sonorously: “Humanity —may it always be ahead, but, ahead or behind, Humanity!” He chuckled. “Our newest. What we call our telephone toast. Like it?”
“Very much,” Hebster told him respectfully, remembering that this former video quizmaster might shortly be church and state combined. “Er… Mr. Dempsey, I notice you have a new book out, and I was wondering—”
“Which one? Anthropolitics?
“That’s it. A fine study! You have some very quotable lines in the chapter headed, ‘Neither More Nor Less Human.’ ”
A raucous laugh that still managed to bubble heavily. “Young man, I have quotable lines in every chapter of every book! I maintain a writer’s assembly line here at headquarters that is capable of producing up to fifty-five memorable epigrams on any subject upon ten minutes’ notice. Not to mention their capacity for political metaphors and two-line jokes with sexy implications! But you wouldn’t be calling me to discuss literature, however good a job of emotional engineering I have done in my little text. What is it about, Hebster? Go into your pitch.”
“Well,” the executive began, vaguely comforted by the Firster chieftain’s cynical approach and slightly annoyed at the openness of his contempt, “I had a chat today with your friend and my friend, P. Braganza.”
“I know.”
“You do? How?”
Vandermeer Dempsey laughed again, the slow, good-natured chortle of a fat man squeezing the curves out of a rocking chair. “Spies, Hebster, spies. I have them everywhere practically. This kind of politics is twenty percent espionage, twenty percent organization and sixty percent waiting for the right moment. My spies tell me everything you do.”
“They didn’t by any chance tell you what Braganza and I discussed?”
“Oh, they did, young man, they did!” Dempsey chuckled a carefree scale exercise. Hebster remembered his pictures: the head like a soft and enormous orange, gouged by a brilliant smile. There was no hair anywhere on the head—all of it, down to the last eyelash and follicled wart, was removed regularly through electrolysis. “According to my agents, Braganza made several strong representations on behalf of the Special Investigating Commission which you rightly spurned. Then, somewhat out of sorts, he announced that if you were henceforth detected in the nefarious enterprises which everyone knows have made you one of the wealthiest men on the face of the Earth, he would use you as bait for our anger. I must say I admire the whole ingenious scheme immensely.”
“And you’re not going to bite,” Hebster suggested. Greta Seidenheim entered the office and made a circular gesture at the ceiling. He nodded.
“On the contrary, Hebster, we are going to bite. We’re going to bite with just a shade more vehemence than we’re expected to. We’re going to swallow this provocation that the SIC is devising for us and go on to make a worldwide revolution out of it. We will, my boy.”
Hebster rubbed his left hand back and forth across his lips.” Over my dead body!” He tried to chuckle himself and managed only to clear his throat. “You’re right about the conversation with Braganza, and you may be right about how you’ll do when it gets down to paving stones and baseball bats. But if you’d like to have the whole thing a lot easier, there is a little deal I have in mind—”
“Sorry, Hebster my boy. No deals. Not on this. Don’t you see we really don’t want to have it easier? For the same reason, we pay our spies nothing despite the risks they run and the great growing wealth of Humanity First. We found that the spies we acquired through conviction worked harder and took many more chances than those forced into our arms by economic pressure. No, we desperately need L’affaire Hebster to inflame the populace. We need enough excitement running loose so that it transmits to the gendarmerie and the soldiery, so that conservative citizens who normally shake their heads at a parade will drop their bundles and join the rape and robbery. Enough such citizens and Terra goes Humanity First.”
“Heads you win, tails I lose.”
The liquid gold of Dempsey’s laughter poured. “I see what you mean, Hebster. Either way, UM or HF, you wind up a smear-mark on the sands of time. You had your chance when we asked for contributions from public-spirited businessmen four years ago. Quite a few of your competitors were able to see the valid relationship between economics and politics. Woodran of the Underwood Investment Trust is a first-ech-elon official today. Not a single one of your top executives wears a razor. But, even so, whatever happens to you will be mild compared to the Primeys.”
“The Aliens may object to their bodyservants being mauled.”
“There are no Aliens!” Dempsey replied in a completely altered voice. He sounded as if he had stiffened too much to be able to move his lips.
“No Aliens? Is that your latest line? You don’t mean that!”
“There are only Primeys—creatures who have resigned from human responsibility and are therefore able to do many seemingly miraculous things, which real humanity refuses to do because of the lack of dignity involved. But there are no Aliens. Aliens are a Primey myth.”
Hebster grunted. “That is the ideal way of facing an unpleasant fact. Stare right through it.”
“If you insist on talking about such illusions as Aliens,” the rustling and angry voice cut in, “I’m afraid we can’t continue the conversation. You’re evidently going Prime, Hebster.”
The line went dead.
Hebster scraped a finger inside the mouthpiece rim. “He believes his own stuff.” he said in an awed voice. “For all of the decadent urbanity, he has to have the same reassurance he gives his followers—the horrible, superior thing just isn’t there!”
Greta Seidenheim was waiting at the door with his briefcase and both their coats. As he came away from the desk, he said, “I won’t tell you not to come along, Greta, but—”
“Good,” she said, swinging along behind him. “Think we’ll make it to—wherever we’re going?”
“Arizona. The first and largest Alien settlement. The place our friends with the funny names come from.”
“What can you do there that you can’t do here?”
“Frankly, Greta, I don’t know. But it’s a good idea to lose myself for a while. Then again, I want to get in the area where all this agony originates and take a close look; I’m an off-the-cuff businessman; I’ve done all of my important figuring on the spot.”
There was bad news waiting for them outside the helicopter. “Mr. Hebster,” the pilot told him tonelessly while cracking a dry stick of gum, “the stratojet’s been seized by the SIC. Are we still going? If we do it in this thing, it won’t be very far or very fast.”
“We’re still going,” Hebster said after a moment’s hesitation.