The large pot-bellied craft climbed up its rope of air and started forward from the Hebster Building.
“There must have been a leak,” Greta muttered angrily. “They heard about the dead Primey. Somewhere in the organization there’s a leak that I haven’t been able to find. The SIC heard about the dead Primey and now they’re hunting us down. Real efficient, I am!”
Hebster smiled at her grimly. She was very efficient. So was Personnel and a dozen other subdivisions of the organization. So was Hebster himself. But these were functioning members of a normal business designed for stable times. Political spies! If Dempsey could have spies and saboteurs all over Hebster Securities, why couldn’t Braganza? They’d catch him before he had even started running; they’d bring him back before he could find a loophole.
They’d bring him back for trial, perhaps, for what in all probability would be known to history as the Bloody Hebster Incident. The incident that had precipitated a world revolution.
“Mr. Hebster, they’re getting restless,” Williams called out. “Should I relax ’em out, kind of?”
Hebster sat up sharply, hopefully. “No,” he said. “Leave them alone!” He watched the suddenly agitated Primeys very closely. This was the odd chance for which he’d brought them along! Years of haggling with Primeys had taught him a lot about them. They were good for other things than sheer gimmick-craft.
Two specks appeared on the windows. They enlarged sleekly into jets with SIC insignia.
“Pilot!” Hebster called, his eyes on Larry, who was pulling painfully at his beard. “Get away from the controls! Fast! Did you hear me? That was an order! Get away from those controls!”
The man moved off reluctantly. He was barely in time. The control board dissolved into rattling purple shards behind him. The vanes of the gyro seemed to flower into indigo saxophones. Their ears rang with supersonic frequencies as they rose above the jets on a spout of unimaginable force.
Five seconds later they were in Arizona.
They piled out of their weird craft into a sage-cluttered desert.
“I don’t ever want to know what my windmill was turned into,” the pilot commented, “or what was used to push it along—but how did the Primey come to understand the cops were after us?”
“I don’t think he knew that,” Hebster explained, “but he was sensitive enough to know he was going home, and that somehow those jets were there to prevent it. And so he functioned, in terms of his interests, in what was almost a human fashion. He protected himself.”
“Going home ” Larry said. He’d been listening very closely to Hebster, dribbling from the right-hand corner of his mouth as he listened. “Haemostat, hammersdarts, hump. Home is where the hate is. Hit is where the hump is. Home and locks the door.”
S.S. Lusitania had started on one leg and favored them with her peculiar fleshy smile. “Hindsight,” she suggested archly, “is no more than home site. Gabble, honk?”
Larry started after her, some three feet off the ground. He walked the air slowly and painfully as if the road he traveled were covered with numerous small boulders, all of them pitilessly sharp.
“Goodbye, people,” Hebster said. “I’m off to see the wizard with my friends in greasy gray here. Remember, when the SIC catches up to your unusual vessel—stay close to it for that purpose, by the way—it might be wise to refer to me as someone who forced you into this. You can tell them I’ve gone into the wilderness looking for a solution, figuring that if I went Prime I’d still be better off than as a punching bag whose ownership is being hotly disputed by such characters as P. Braganza and Vandermeer Dempsey. I’ll be back with my mind or on it.”
He patted Greta’s cheek on the wet spot; then he walked deftly away in pursuit of S.S. Lusitania and Larry. He glanced back once and smiled as he saw them looking curiously forlorn, especially Williams, the chunky young man who earned his living by guarding other people’s bodies. The Primeys followed a route of sorts, but it seemed to have been designed by someone bemused by the motions of an accordion. Again and again it doubled back upon itself, folded across itself, went back a hundred yards and started all over again.
This was Primey country—Arizona, where the first and largest Alien settlement had been made. There were mighty few humans in this corner of the southwest any more—just the Aliens and their coolies.
“Larry,” Hebster called as an uncomfortable thought struck him. “Larry! Do… do your masters know I’m coming?”
Missing his step as he looked up at Hebster’s peremptory question, the Primey tripped and plunged to the ground. He rose, grimaced at Hebster and shook his head. “You are not a businessman,” he said. “Here there can be no business. Here there can be only humorous what-you-might-call-worship. The movement to the universal, the inner nature—The realization, complete and eternal, of the partial and evanescent that alone enables… that alone enables—” His clawed fingers writhed into each other, as if he were desperately trying to pull a communicable meaning out of the palms. He shook his head with a slow rolling motion from side to side.
Hebster saw with a shock that the old man was crying. Then going Prime had yet another similarity to madness! It gave the human an understanding of something thoroughly beyond himself, a mental summit he was constitutionally incapable of mounting. It gave him a glimpse of some psychological promised land, then buried him, still yearning, in his own inadequacies. And it left him at last bereft of pride in his realizable accomplishments with a kind of myopic half-knowledge of where he wanted to go but with no means of getting there.
“When I first came,” Larry was saying haltingly, his eyes squinting into Hebster’s face, as if he knew what the businessman was thinking, “when first I tried to know… I mean the charts and textbooks I carried here, my statistics, my plotted curves were so useless. All playthings I found, disorganized, based on shadow-thought. And then, Hebster, to watch real-thought, real-control! You’ll see the joy—You’ll serve beside us, you will! Oh, the enormous lifting—”
His voice died into angry incoherencies as he bit into his fist. S.S. Lusitania came up, still hopping on one foot. “Larry,” she suggested in a very soft voice, “gabble-honk Hebster away?”
He looked surprised, then nodded. The two Primeys linked arms and clambered laboriously back up to the invisible road from which Larry had fallen. They stood facing him for a moment, looking like a weird, ragged, surrealistic version of Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Then they disappeared and darkness fell around Hebster as if it had been knocked out of the jar. He felt under himself cautiously and sat down on the sand, which retained all the heat of daytime Arizona.
Now!
Suppose an Alien came. Suppose an Alien asked him point-blank what it was that he wanted. That would be bad. Algernon Hebster, businessman extraordinary—slightly on the run, at the moment, of course—didn’t know what he wanted; not with reference to Aliens.
He didn’t want them to leave, because the Primey technology he had used in over a dozen industries was essentially an interpretation and adaptation of Alien methods. He didn’t want them to stay, because whatever was orderly in his world was dissolving under the acids of their omnipresent superiority.
He also knew that he personally did not want to go Prime.
What was left then? Business? Well, there was Braganza’s question. What does a businessman do when demand is so well controlled that it can be said to have ceased to exist?
Or what does he do in a case like the present, when demand might be said to be nonexistent, since there was nothing the Aliens seemed to want of Man’s puny hoard?
“He finds something they want,” Hebster said out loud.
How? How? Well, the Indian still sold his decorative blankets to the paleface as a way of life, as a source of income. And he insisted on being paid in cash—not firewater. If only, Hebster thought, he could somehow contrive to meet an Alien—he’d find out soon enough what its needs were, what was basically desired.
And then as the retort-shaped, the tube-shaped, the bell-shaped bottles materialized all around him, he understood! They had been forming the insistent questions in his mind. And they weren’t satisfied with the answers he had found thus far. They liked answers. They liked answers very much indeed. If he was interested, there was always a way—
A great dots-in-bottle brushed his cortex and he screamed. “No! I don’t want to!” he explained desperately.
Ping! went the dots-in-bottle and Hebster grabbed at his body. His continuing flesh reassured him. He felt very much like the girl in Greek mythology who had begged Zeus for the privilege of seeing him in the full regalia of his godhood. A few moments after her request had been granted, there had been nothing left of the inquisitive female but a fine feathery ash.
The bottles were swirling in and out of each other in a strange and intricate dance from which there radiated emotions vaguely akin to curiosity, yet partaking of amusement and rapture.
Why rapture? Hebster was positive he had caught that note, even allowing for the lack of similarity between mental patterns. He ran a hurried dragnet through his memory, caught a few corresponding items and dropped them after a brief, intensive examination. What was he trying to remember—what were his supremely efficient businessman’s instincts trying to remind him of?
The dance became more complex, more rapid. A few bottles had passed under his feet and Hebster could see them, undulating and spinning some ten feet below the surface of the ground as if their presence had made the Earth a transparent as well as permeable medium. Completely unfamiliar with all matters Alien as he was, not knowing—not caring!—whether they danced as an expression of the counsel they were taking together, or as a matter of necessary social ritual, Hebster was able nonetheless to sense an approaching climax. Little crooked lines of green lightning began to erupt between the huge bottles. Something exploded near his left ear. He rubbed his face fearfully and moved away. The bottles followed, maintaining him in the imprisoning sphere of their frenzied movements.
Why rapture? Back in the city, the Aliens had had a terribly studious air about them as they hovered, almost motionless, above the works and lives of mankind. They were cold and careful scientists and showed not the slightest capacity for… for—
So he had something. At last he had something. But what do you do with an idea when you can’t communicate it and can’t act upon it yourself?
Ping!
The previous invitation was being repeated, more urgently. Ping! Ping! Ping!
“No!” he yelled and tried to stand. He found he couldn’t. “I’m not… I don’t want to go Prime!”
There was detached, almost divine laughter.
He felt that awful scrabbling inside his brain as if two or three entities were jostling each other within it. He shut his eyes hard and thought. He was close, he was very close. He had an idea, but he needed time to formulate it—a little while to figure out just exactly what the idea was and just exactly what to do with it!
Ping, ping, ping! Ping, ping, ping!
He had a headache. He felt as if his mind were being sucked out of his head. He tried to hold on to it. He couldn’t.