by Jerry
“Nobody lives here but me and my husband,” she insisted. “He’s retired.”
I didn’t care if he hung by his toes from trees. I wanted a young fellow.
“But I saw the young fellow come in here,” I argued. “I was just coming around the corner, trying to catch him. I saw him.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “I don’t know what your racket is,” she said through thin lips, “but I’m not buying anything. I’m not signing anything. I don’t even want to talk to you.” She was stubborn about it.
I apologized and mumbled something about maybe making a mistake.
“I should say you have,” she rapped out tartly and shut the door in righteous indignation. Sincere, too. I could tell.
An employment agent who gets the reputation of being a right guy makes all kinds of friends. That poor old lady must have thought a plague of locusts had swept in on her for the next few day’s.
First the telephone repair man had to investigate an alleged complaint. Then a gas service man had to check the plumbing. An electrician complained there was a power short in the block and he had to trace their house wiring. We kept our fingers crossed hoping the old geezer had never been a construction man. There was a mistake in the last census, and a guy asked her a million questions.
That house was gone over rafter by rafter and sill by sill, attic and basement. It was precisely as she said. She and her husband lived there; nobody else.
In frustration, I waited three months. I wore out the sidewalks haunting the neighborhood. Nothing.
Then one day my office door opened and Margie ushered a young man in. Behind his back she was radiating heart throbs and fluttering her eyes.
He was the traditionally tall, dark and handsome young fellow, with a ready grin and sparkling dark eyes. His personality hit me like a sledge hammer. A guy like that never needs to go to an employment agency. Any employer will hire him at the drop of a hat, and wonder later why he did it.
His name was Einar Johnson. Extraction, Norwegian. The dark Norse strain, I judged. I took a chance on him thinking he had walked into a booby hatch.
“The last time I talked with you,” I said, “your name was Joseph Hoffman. You were Teutonic then. Not Norse.”
The sparkle went out of his eyes. His face showed exasperation and there was plenty of it. It looked real, too, not painted on.
“All right. Where did I flunk this time?” he asked impatiently.
“It would take me too long to tell you,” I answered. “Suppose you start talking.” Strangely, I was at ease. I knew that underneath he w-as the same incomprehensible entity, but his surface was so good that I was lulled.
He looked at me levelly for a long moment. Then he said, “I didn’t think there was a chance in a million of being recognized. I’ll admit that other character we created was crude. We’ve learned considerable since then, and we’ve concentrated everything on this personality I’m wearing.”
He paused and flashed his teeth at me. I felt like hiring him myself. “I’ve been all over Southern California in this one,” he said. “I’ve had a short job as a salesman. I’ve been to dances and parties. I’ve got drunk and sober again. Nobody, I say nobody, has shown even the slightest suspicion.”
“Not very observing, were they?” I taunted.
“But you are,” he answered. “That’s why I came back here for the final test. I’d like to know where I failed.” He was firm.
“We get quite a few phonies,” I answered. “The guy drawing unemployment and stalling until it is run out. The geezik whose wife drives him out and threatens to quit her job if he doesn’t go to work. The plainclothes detail smelling around to see if maybe we aren’t a cover for a bookie joint or something. Dozens of phonies.”
He looked curious. I said in disgust, “We know in the first two minutes they’re phony. You were phony also, but not of any class I’ve seen before. And,” I finished dryly, “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Why was I phony?” he persisted.
“Too much personality force,” I answered. “Human beings just don’t have that much force. I felt like I’d been knocked flat on my . . . well . . . back.”
He sighed. “I’ve been afraid you would recognize me one way or another. I communicated with home. I was advised that if you spotted me, I was to instruct you to assist us.”
I lifted a brow. I wasn’t sure just how much authority they had to instruct me to do anything.
“I was to instruct you to take over the supervision of our final training, so that no one could ever spot us. If we are going to carry out our original plan that is necessary-. If not, then we will have to use the alternate.” He was almost didactic in his manner, but his charm of personality still radiated like an infrared lamp.
“You’re going to have to tell me a great deal more than that,” I said.
He glanced at my closed door.
“We won’t be interrupted,” I said. “A personnel history is private.”
“I come from one of the planets of Arcturus,” he said.
I must have allowed a smile of amusement to show on my face, for he asked, “You find that amusing?”
“No,” I answered soberly, and my pulses leaped because the question confirmed my conclusion that he could not read my thoughts. Apparently we were as alien to him as he to us. “I was amused,” I explained, “because the first time I saw you I said to myself that as far as recognizing you, you might have come from Arcturus. Now it turns out that accidentally I was correct. I’m better than I thought.”
He gave a fleeting polite smile in acknowledgment. “My home planet,” he went on, “is similar to yours. Except that we have grown overpopulated.”
I felt a twinge of fear.
“We have made a study of this planet and have decided to colonize it.” It was a flat statement, without any doubt behind it.
I flashed him a look of incredulity. “And you expect me to help you with that?”
He gave me a worldly wise look—almost an ancient look. “Why not?” he asked.
“There is the matter of loyalty to my own kind, for one thing,” I said. “Not too many generations away and we’ll be overpopulated also. There would hardly be room for both your people and ours on Earth.”
“Oh that’s all right,” he answered easily. “There’ll be plenty of room for us for quite some time. We multiply slowly.”
“We don’t,” I said shortly. I felt this conversation should be taking place between him and some great statesman—not me.
“You don’t seem to understand,” he said patiently. “Your race won’t be here. We have found no reason why your race should be preserved. You will die away as we absorb.”
“Now just a moment,” I interrupted. “I don’t want our race to die off.” The way he looked at me I felt like a spoiled brat who didn’t want to go beddie time.
“Why not?” he asked.
I was stumped. That’s a good question when it is put logically. Just try to think of a logical reason why the human race should survive. I gave him at least something.
“Mankind,” I said, “has had a hard struggle. We’ve paid a tremendous price in pain and death for our growh. Not to have a future to look forward to, would be like paying for something and never getting the use of it.”
It was the best I could think of, honest. To base argument on humanity and right and justice and mercy would leave me wide open. Because it is obvious that man doesn’t practice any of these. There is no assurance he ever will.
But he was ready for me, even with that one. “But if we are never suspected, and if we absorb and replace gradually, who is to know there is no future for humans?”
And as abruptly as the last time, he stood up suddenly. “Of course,” he said coldly, “we could use our alternative plan: Destroy the human race without further negotiation. It is not our way to cause needless pain to any life form. But we can.
“If you do not assist us, then it is obvious that we wi
ll eventually be discovered. You are aware of the difficulty of even blending from one country on Earth to another. How much more difficult it is where there is no point of contact at all. And if we are discovered, destruction would be the only step left.”
He smiled and all the force of his charm hit me again. “I know you will want to think it over for a time. I’ll return.”
He walked to the door, then smiled back at me. “And don’t bother to trouble that poor little woman in that house again. Her doorway is only one of many entrances we have opened. She doesn’t see us at all, and merely winders why her latch doesn’t work sometimes. And we can open another, anywhere, anytime. Like this—”
He was gone.
I walked over and opened the door. Margie was all prettied up and looking expectant and radiant. When she didn’t see him come out she got up and peeked into my office. “But where did he go?” she asked with wide eyes.
“Get hold of yourself, girl,” I answered. “You’re so dazed you didn’t even see him walk right by you.”
“There’s something fishy going on here,” she said.
“Well, I had a problem. A first rate, genuine, dyed in the wool dilemma.
What was I to do? I could have gone to the local authorities and got locked up for being a psycho. I could have gone to the college professors and got locked up for being a psycho. I could have gone to maybe the FBI and got locked up for being a psycho. That line of thinking began to get monotonous.
I did the one thing which I thought might bring help. I wrote up the happenings and sent it to my favorite science-fiction magazine. I asked for help and sage counsel from the one place I felt awareness and comprehension might be reached.
The manuscript bounced back so fast it might have had rubber bands attached to it, stretched from California to New York. I looked the little rejection slip all over, front and back, and I did not find upon it those sage words of counsel I needed. There wasn’t even a printed invitation to try again some time.
And for the first time in my life I knew what it was to be alone—genuinely and irrevocably alone.
Still, I could not blame the editor. I could see him cast the manuscript from him in disgust, saying, “Bah! So another evil race comes to conquer Earth. If I gave the fans one more of those, I’d be run out of my office.” And like the deacon who saw the naughty words written on the fence, saying, “And misspelled, too.”
The fable of the boy who cried “Wolf! Wolf!” once too often came home to me now. I was alone with my problem. The dilemma was my own. On one hand was immediate extermination. I did not doubt it. A race which can open doors from one star system to another, without even visible means of mechanism, would also know how to—disinfect.
On the other hand w-as extinction, gradual, but equally certain, and none the less effective in that it would not be perceived. If I refused to assist, then acting as one lone judge of all the race, I condemned it. If I did assist, I would be arch traitor, with an equal final result.
For days I sweltered in my miasma of indecision. Like many a man before me, uncertain of what to do, I temporized. I decided to play for time. To play the role of traitor in the hopes I might learn a way of defeating them.
Once I had made up my mind, my thoughts raced wildly through the possibilities. If I were to be their instructor on how to walk unsuspected among men, then I would have them wholly in my grasp. If I could build traits into them, common ordinary traits which they could see in men all about them, yet which would make men turn and destroy them, then I would have my solution.
And I knew human beings. Perhaps it was right, after all, that it became my problem. Mine alone.
I shuddered now to think what might have happened had this being fallen into less skilled hands and told his story. Perhaps by now there would be no man left upon Earth.
Yes, the old and worn-out plot of the one little unknown guy who saved Earth from outer evil might yet run its course in reality.
I was ready for the Arcturan when he returned. And he did return.
Einar Johnson and I walked out of my office after I had sent a tearful Margie on a long vacation with fancy pay. Einar had plenty of money, and was liberal with it. When a fellow can open some sort of fourth-dimensional door into a bank vault and help himself, money is no problem.
I had visions of the poor bank clerks trying to explain things to the examiners, but that wasn’t my worry right now.
We walked out of the office and I snapped the lock shut behind me. Always conscious of the cares of people looking for work, I hung a sign on the door saying I was ill and didn’t know when I would be back.
We walked down the stairs and into the parking lot. We got into my car, my own car, please note, and I found myself sitting in a sheltered patio in Beverly Hills. Just like that. No awful wrenching and turning my insides out.
No worrisome nausea and emptiness of space. Nothing to dramatize it at all. Car—patio, like that.
I would like to be able to describe the Arcturans as having long snaky appendages and evil slobbering maws, and stuff like that. But I can’t describe the Arcturans, because I didn’t see any.
I saw a gathering of people, roughly about thirty of them, wandering around the patio, swimming in the pool, going in and out of the side doors of the house. It was a perfect spot. No one bothers the big Beverly Hills home without imitation.
The natives wouldn’t be caught dead looking toward a star’s house. The tourists see the winding drive, the trees and grass, and perhaps a glimpse of a gabled roof. If they can get any thrill out of that then bless their little spending money hearts, they’re welcome to it.
Yet if it should become known that a crowd of strange acting people are wandering around in the grounds, no one would think a thing about it. They don’t come any more zany than the Hollywood crowd.
Only these w-ere. These people could have made a fortune as life-size puppets. I could see now why it was judged that the lifeless Teutonic I had first interviewed was thought adequate to mingle with human beings. By comparison with these, he was a snappy song and dance man.
But that is all I saw. Vacant bodies wandering around, going through human motions, without human emotions. The job looked bigger than I had thought. And yet, if this was their idea of how to win friends and influence people, I might be successful after all.
There are dozens of questions the curious might want answered—such as how did they get hold of the house and how did they get their human bodies and where did they learn to speak English, and stuff. I wasn’t too curious. I had important things to think about. I supposed they were able to do it, because here it was.
I’ll cut the following weeks short. I cannot conceive of what life and civilization on their planet might be like. Yardsticks of scientific psychology are used to measure a man, and yet they give no indication at all of the inner spirit of him, likewise, the descriptive measurements of their civilization are empty and meaningless. Knowing about a man, and knowing a man are two entirely different things.
For example, all those thalamic urges and urgencies which we call emotion were completely unknown to them, except as they saw them in antics on TV. The ideals of man w-ere also unknown—truth, honor, justice, perfection—all unknown. They had not even a division of sexes, and the emotion we call love was beyond their understanding. The TV stories they saw must have been like watching a parade of ants.
What purpose can be gained by describing such a civilization to man? Man cannot conceive accomplishment without first having the dream. Yet it was obvious that they accomplished, for they were here.
When I finally realized there was no point of contact between man and these, I knew relief and joy once more. My job was easy. I knew how to destroy them. And I suspected they could not avoid my trap.
They could not avoid my trap because they had human bodies. Perhaps they conceived them out of thin air, but the veins bled, the flesh felt pain and heat and pressure, the glands secreted.
Ah
yes, the glands secreted. They would learn what emotion could be. And I was a master at wielding emotion. The dream of man has been to strive toward the great and immortal ideals. His literature is filled with admonishments to that end. In comparison with the volume of work which tells us what we should be, there is very little which reveals us as we are.
As part of my training course, I chose the world’s great literature, and painting, and sculpture, and music—those mediums which best portray man lifting to the stars. I gave them first of all, the dream.
And with the dream, and with the pressure of the glands as kicker, they began to know emotion. I had respect for the superb acting of Einar when I realized that he, also, had still known no emotion.
They moved from the puppet to the newborn babe—a newborn babe in training, with an adult body, and its matured glandular equation.
I saw emotions, all right. Emotions without restraint, emotions unfettered by taboos, emotions uncontrolled by ideals. Sometimes I became frightened and all my skill in manipulating emotions was needed. At other times they became perhaps a little too Hollywood, even for Hollywood. I trained them into more ideal patterns.
I will say this for the Arcturans. They learned—fast. The crowd of puppets to the newborn babes, to the boisterous boys and girls to the moody and unpredictable youths, to the matured and balanced men and women. I watched the metamorphosis take place over the period of weeks.
I did more.
All that human beings had ever hoped to be, the brilliant, the idealistic, the great in heart, I made of these. My little 145 I.Q. became a moron’s level. The dreams of the greatness of man which I had known became the vaguest wisps of fog before the reality which these achieved.
My plan was working.