by William Tenn
Somebody got in front of him. Somebody else took his arm. “I’m Hebster,” he repeated automatically, but out loud. “Algernon Hebster.”
“Exactly the Hebster we want,” Funatti said, holding tightly on to his arm. “You don’t mind coming along with us?”
“Is this an arrest?” Hebster asked Yost, who now moved aside to let him pass. Yost was touching his holstered weapon with dancing fingertips.
The SIC man shrugged. “Why ask such questions?” he countered. “Just come along and be sociable, kind of. People want to talk to you.”
He allowed himself to be dragged through the lobby ornate with murals by radical painters and nodded appreciation at the doorman who, staring right through his captors, said enthusiastically, “Good afternoon, Mr. Hebster.” He made himself fairly comfortable on the back seat of the dark-green SIC car, a late-model Hebster Mono-wheel.
“Surprised to see you minus your bodyguard,” Yost, who was driving, remarked over his shoulder.
“Oh, I gave them the day off.”
“As soon as you were through with the Primeys? No,” Funatti admitted, “we never did find out where you cached them. That’s one big building you own, mister. And the UM Special Investigating Commission is notoriously understaffed.”
“Not forgetting it’s also notoriously underpaid,” Yost broke in.
“I couldn’t forget that if I tried,” Funatti assured him. “You know, Mr. Hebster, I wouldn’t have sent my bodyguard off if I’d been in your shoes. Right now there’s something about five times as dangerous as Primeys after you. I mean Humanity Firsters.”
“Vandermeer Dempsey’s crackpots? Thanks, but I think I’ll survive.”
“That’s all right. Just don’t give any long odds on the proposition. Those people have been expanding fast and furious. The Evening Humanitarian alone has a tremendous circulation. And when you figure their weekly newspapers, their penny booklets and throwaway handbills, it adds up to an impressive amount of propaganda. Day after day they bang away editorially at the people who’re making money off the Aliens and Primeys. Of course, they’re really hitting at the UM, like always, but if an ordinary Firster met you on the street, he’d be as likely to cut your heart out as not. Not interested? Sorry. Well, maybe you’ll like this. The Evening Humanitarian has a cute name for you.”
Yost guffawed. “Tell him, Funatti.”
The corporation president looked at the little man inquiringly.
“They call you,” Funatti said with great savoring deliberation, “they call you an interplanetary pimp!”
Emerging at last from the crosstown underpass, they sped up the very latest addition to the strangling city’s facilities—the East Side Air-Floating Super-Duper Highway, known familiarly as Dive-Bomber Drive. At the Forty-Second Street offway, the busiest road exit in Manhattan, Yost failed to make a traffic signal. He cursed absent-mindedly, and Hebster found himself nodding the involuntary passenger’s agreement. They watched the elevator section dwindling downward as the cars that were to mount the highway spiraled up from the right. Between the two, there rose and fell the steady platforms of harbor traffic while, stacked like so many decks of cards, the pedestrian stages awaited their turn below.
“Look! Up there, straight ahead! See it?”
Hebster and Funatti followed Yost’s long, waggling forefinger with their eyes. Two hundred feet north of the offway and almost a quarter of a mile straight up, a brown object hung in obvious fascination. Every once in a while a brilliant blue dot would enliven the heavy murk imprisoned in its bell-jar shape only to twirl around the side and be replaced by another.
“Eyes? You think they’re eyes?” Funatti asked, rubbing his small dark fists against each other futilely. “I know what the scientists say—that every dot is equivalent to one person and the whole bottle is like a family or a city, maybe. But how do they know? It’s a theory, a guess. I say they’re eyes.”
Yost hunched his great body half out of the open window and shaded his vision with his uniform cap against the sun. “Look at it,” they heard him say, over his shoulder. A nasal twang, long-buried, came back into his voice as heaving emotion shook out its cultivated accents. “A-setting up there, a-staring and a-staring. So all-fired interested in how we get on and off a busy highway! Won’t pay us no never mind when we try to talk to it, when we try to find out what it wants, where it comes from, who it is. Oh, no! It’s too superior to talk to the likes of us! But it can watch us, hours on end, days without end, light and dark, winter and summer; it can watch us going about our business; and every time we dumb two-legged animals try to do something we find complicated, along comes a blasted ‘dots-in-bottle’ to watch and sneer and—”
“Hey there, man,” Funatti leaned forward and tugged at his partner’s green jerkin. “Easy! We’re SIC, on business.”
“All the same,” Yost grunted wistfully, as he plopped back into his seat and pressed the power button, “I wish I had Daddy’s little old M-1 Garand right now.” They bowled forward, smoothed into the next long elevator section and started to descend. “It would be worth the risk of getting pinged.“
And this was a UM man, Hebster reflected with acute discomfort. Not only UM, at that, but a member of a special group carefully screened for their lack of anti-Primey prejudice, sworn to enforce the reservation laws without discrimination and dedicated to the proposition that Man could somehow achieve equality with Alien.
Well, how much dirt-eating could people do? People without a business sense, that is. His father had hauled himself out of the pick-and-shovel brigade hand over hand and raised his only son to maneuver always for greater control, to search always for that extra percentage of profit.
But others seemed to have no such abiding interest, Algernon Hebster knew regretfully.
They found it impossible to live with achievements so abruptly made inconsequential by the Aliens. To know with certainty that the most brilliant strokes of which they were capable, the most intricate designs and clever careful workmanship, could be duplicated—and surpassed—in an instant’s creation by the outsiders and was of interest to them only as a collector’s item. The feeling of inferiority is horrible enough when imagined; but when it isn’t feeling but knowledge, when it is inescapable and thoroughly demonstrable, covering every aspect of constructive activity, it becomes unbearable and maddening.
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—a
s 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 outermost 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 haircut 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.”