by William Tenn
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.”
Braganza lowered his powerful head and began a slow, reluctant pacing in front of the desk.
“Now, I’m a little different. Not that I mind being a glorified cop. I appreciate the regularity with which the finance office pays my salary, of course; and there are very few women in this town who can say that I have received an offer of affection from them with outright scorn. But the one thing for which I would lay down my life is United Mankind. Would lay down my life? In terms of blood pressure and heart strain, you might say I’ve already done it. Braganza, I tell myself, you’re a lucky dope. You’re working for the first world government in human history. Make it count.”
He stopped and spread his arms in front of Hebster. His unbuttoned green jerkin came apart awkwardly and exposed the black slab of hair on his chest. “That’s me. That’s basically all there is to Braganza. Now if we’re to talk sensibly I have to know as much about you. I ask—what are your goals?”
The President of Hebster Securities, Inc., wet his lips. “I am afraid I’m even less complicated.”
“That’s all right,” the other man encouraged. “Put it any way you like.”
“You might say that before everything else, I am a businessman. I am interested chiefly in becoming a better businessman, which is to say a bigger one. In other words, I want to be richer than I am.”
Braganza peered at him intently. “And that’s all?”
“All? Haven’t you ever heard it said that money isn’t everything, but that what it isn’t, it can buy?”
“It can’t buy me.”
Hebster examined him coolly. “I don’t know if you’re a sufficiently desirable commodity. I buy what I need, only occasionally making an exception to please myself.”
“I don’t like you.” Braganza’s voice had become thick and ugly. “I never liked your kind and there’s no sense being polite. I might as well stop trying. I tell you straight out—I think your guts stink.”
Hebster rose. “In that case, I believe I should thank you for—”
“Sit down! You were asked here for a reason. I don’t see any point to it, but we’ll go through the motions. Sit down.”
Hebster sat. He wondered idly if Braganza received half the salary he paid Greta Seidenheim. Of course, Greta was talented in many different ways and performed several distinct and separately useful services. No, after tax and pension deductions, Braganza was probably fortunate to receive one-third of Greta’s salary.
He noticed that a newspaper was being proffered him. He took it. Braganza grunted, clumped back behind his desk and swung his swivel chair around to face the window.
It was a week-old copy of The Evening Humanitarian. The paper had lost the voice-of-a-small-but-highly-articulate-minority look, Hebster remembered from his last reading of it, and acquired the feel of publishing big business. Even if you cut in half the circulation claimed by the box in the upper left-hand corner, that still gave them three million paying readers.
In the upper right-hand corner, a red-bordered box exhorted the faithful to “Read Humanitarian!” A green streamer across the top of the first page announced that “To make sense is human—to gibber, Prime!”
But the important item was in the middle of the page. A cartoon.
Half-a-dozen Primeys wearing long, curved beards and insane, tongue-lolling grins sat in a rickety wagon. They held reins attached to a group of straining and portly gentlemen dressed—somewhat simply—in high silk hats. The fattest and ugliest of these, the one in the lead, had a bit between his teeth. The bit was labeled “crazy-money” and the man, “Algernon Hebster.”
Crushed and splintering under the wheels of the wagon were such varied items as a “Home Sweet Home” framed motto with a piece of wall attached, a clean-cut youngster in a Boy Scout uniform, a streamlined locomotive and a gorgeous young woman with a squalling infant under each arm.
The caption inquired starkly: “Lords of Creation—Or Serfs?”
“This paper seems to have developed into a fairly filthy scandal sheet,” Hebster mused out loud. “I shouldn’t be surprised if it makes money.”
“I take it then,” Braganza asked without turning around from his contemplation of the street, “that you haven’t read it very regularly in recent months?”
“I am happy to say I have not.”
“That was a mistake.”
Hebster stared at the clumped locks of black hair. “Why?” he asked carefully.
“Because it has developed into a thoroughly filthy and extremely successful scandal sheet. You’re its chief scandal.” Braganza laughed. “You see, these people look upon Primey dealing as more of a sin than a crime. And, according to that morality, you’re close to Old Nick himself!”
Shutting his eyes for a moment, Hebster tried to understand people who imagined such a soul-satisfying and beautiful concept as profit to be a thing of dirt and crawling maggots. He sighed. “I’ve thought of Firstism as a religion myself.”
That seemed to get the SIC man. He swung around excitedly and pointed with both forefingers. “I tell you that you are right! It crosses all boundaries—incompatible and warring creeds are absorbed into it. It is willful, witless denial of a highly painful fact—that there are intellects abroad in the universe which are superior to our own. And the denial grows in strength every day that we are unable to contact the Aliens. If, as seems obvious, there is no respectable place for humanity in this galactic civilization, why, say men like Vandermeer Dempsey, then let us preserve our self-conceit at the least. Let’s stay close to and revel in the things that are undeniably human. In a few decades, the entire human race will have been sucked into this blinkered vacuum.”
He rose and walked around the desk again. His voice had assumed a terribly earnest, tragically pleading quality. His eyes roved Hebster’s face as if searching for a pin-point of weakness, an especially thin spot in the frozen calm.
“Think of it,” he asked Hebster. “Periodic slaughters of scientists and artists who, in the judgment of Dempsey, have pushed out too far from the conventional center of so-called humanness. An occasional auto-da-fe in honor of a merchant caught selling Primey goods—”
“I shouldn’t like that,” Hebster admitted, smiling. He thought a moment. “I see the connection you’re trying to establish with the cartoon in The Evening Humanitarian.”
“Mister, I shouldn’t have to. They want your head on the top of a long stick. They want it because you’ve become a symbol of dealing successfully, for your own ends, with these stellar foreigners, or at least their human errand-boys and chambermaids. They figure that maybe they can put a stop to Primey-dealing generally if they put a bloody stop to you. And I tell you this—maybe they are right.”
“What exactly do you propose?” Hebster asked in a low voice.
“That you come in with us. We’ll make an honest man of you—officially. We want you directing our investigation; except that the goal will not be an extra
buck but all-important interracial communication and eventual interstellar negotiation.”
The president of Hebster Securities, Inc., gave himself a few minutes on that one. He wanted to work out a careful reply. And he wanted time—above all, he wanted time!
He was so close to a well-integrated and worldwide commercial empire! For ten years, he had been carefully fitting the component industrial kingdoms into place, establishing suzerainty in this production network and squeezing a little more control out of that economic satrapy. He had found delectable tidbits of power in the dissolution of his civilization, endless opportunities for wealth in the shards of his race’s self-esteem. He required a bare twelve months now to consolidate and coordinate. And suddenly—with the open-mouthed shock of a Jim Fiske who had cornered gold on the Exchange only to have the United States Treasury defeat him by releasing enormous quantities from the Government’s own hoard—suddenly, Hebster realized he wasn’t going to have the time. He was too experienced a player not to sense that a new factor was coming into the game, something outside his tables of actuarial figures, his market graphs and cargo loading indices.
His mouth was clogged with the heavy nausea of unexpected defeat. He forced himself to answer:
“I’m flattered. Braganza, I really am flattered. I see that Dempsey has linked us—we stand or fall together. But—I’ve always been a loner. With whatever help I can buy, I take care of myself. I’m not interested in any goal but the extra buck. First and last, I’m a businessman.”
“Oh, stop it!” The dark man took a turn up and down the office angrily. “This is a planet-wide emergency. There are times when you can’t be a businessman.”
“I deny that. I can’t conceive of such a time.”
Braganza snorted. “You can’t be a businessman if you’re strapped to a huge pile of blazing faggots. You can’t be a businessman if people’s minds are so thoroughly controlled that they’ll stop eating at their leader’s command. You can’t be a businessman, my slavering, acquisitive friend, if demand is so well in hand that it ceases to exist.”
“That’s impossible!” Hebster had leaped to his feet. To his amazement, he heard his voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. “There’s always demand. Always! The trick is to find what new form it’s taken and then fill it!”
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to make fun of your religion.”
Hebster drew a deep breath and sat down with infinite care. He could almost feel his red corpuscles simmering.
Take it easy, he warned himself, take it easy! This is a man who must be won, not antagonized. They’re changing the rules of the market, Hebster, and you’ll need every friend you can buy.
Money won’t work with this fellow. But there are other values—
“Listen to me, Braganza. We’re up against the psycho-social consequences of an extremely advanced civilization smacking into a comparatively barbarous one. Are you familiar with Professor Kleimbocher’s Firewater Theory?”
“That the Aliens’ logic hits us mentally in the same way as whisky hit the North American Indian? And the Primeys, representing our finest minds, are the equivalent of those Indians who had the most sympathy with the white man’s civilization? Yes. It’s a strong analogy. Even carried to the Indians who, lying sodden with liquor in the streets of frontier towns, helped create the illusion of the treacherous, lazy, kill-you-for-a-drink aborigines while being so thoroughly despised by their tribesmen that they didn’t dare go home for fear of having their throats cut. I’ve always felt—”
“The only part of that I want to talk about,” Hebster interrupted, “is the firewater concept. Back in the Indian villages, an ever-increasing majority became convinced that firewater and gluttonous paleface civilization were synonymous, that they must rise and retake their land forcibly, killing in the process as many drunken renegades as they came across. This group can be equated with the Humanity Firsters. Then there was a minority who recognized the white men’s superiority in numbers and weapons, and desperately tried to find a way of coming to terms with his civilization—terms that would not include his booze. For them read the UM. Finally, there was my kind of Indian.”
Braganza knitted voluminous eyebrows and hitched himself up to a corner of the desk. “Hah?” he inquired. “What kind of Indian were you, Hebster?”
“The kind who had enough sense to know that the paleface had not the slightest interest in saving him from slow and painful cultural anemia. The kind of Indian, also, whose instincts were sufficiently sound so that he was scared to death of innovations like firewater and wouldn’t touch the stuff to save himself from snake bite. But the kind of Indian—”
“Yes? Go on!”
“The kind who was fascinated by the strange transparent container in which the firewater came! Think how covetous an Indian potter might be of the whisky bottle, something which was completely outside the capacity of his painfully acquired technology. Can’t you see him hating, despising and terribly afraid of the smelly amber fluid, which toppled the most stalwart warriors, yet wistful to possess a bottle minus contents? That’s about where I see myself, Braganza—the Indian whose greedy curiosity shines through the murk of hysterical clan politics and outsiders’ contempt like a lambent flame. I want the new kind of container somehow separated from the firewater.”
Unblinkingly, the great dark eyes stared at his face. A hand came up and smoothed each side of the arched mustachio with long, unknowing twirls. Minutes passed.
“Well. Hebster as our civilization’s noble savage,” the SIC man chuckled at last. “It almost feels right. But what does it mean in terms of the overall problem?”
“I’ve told you,” Hebster said wearily, hitting the arm of the bench with his open hand, “that I haven’t the slightest interest in the overall problem.”
“And you only want the bottle. I heard you. But you’re not a potter, Hebster—you haven’t an elementary particle of craftsman’s curiosity. All of that historical romance you spout—you don’t care if your world drowns in its own agonized juice. You just want a profit.”
“I never claimed an altruistic reason. I leave the general solution to men whose minds are good enough to juggle its complexities—like Kleimbocher.”
“Think somebody like Kleimbocher could do it?”
“I’m almost certain he will. That was our mistake from the beginning—trying to break through with historians and psychologists. Either they’ve become limited by the study of human societies or—well, this is personal, but I’ve always felt that the science of the mind attracts chiefly those who’ve already experienced grave psychological difficulty. While they might achieve such an understanding of themselves in the course of their work as to become better adjusted eventually than individuals who had less problems to begin with, I’d still consider them too essentially unstable for such an intrinsically shocking experience as establishing rapport with an Alien. Their internal dynamics inevitably make Primeys of them.”
Braganza sucked at a tooth and considered the wall behind Hebster. “And all this, you feel, wouldn’t apply to Kleimbocher?”
“No, not a philology professor. He has no interest, no intellectual roots in personal and group instability. Kleimbocher’s a comparative linguist—a technician, really—a specialist in basic communication. I’ve been out to the University and watched him work. His approach to the problem is entirely in terms of his subject—communicating with the Aliens instead of trying to understand them. There’s been entirely too much intricate speculation about Alien consciousness, sexual attitudes and social organization, about stuff from which we will derive no tangible and immediate good. Kleimbocher’s completely pragmatic.”
“All right. I follow you. Only he went Prime this morning.”
Hebster paused, a sentence dangling from his dropped jaw. “Professor Kleimbocher? Rudolf Kleimbocher?” he asked idiotically. “But he was so close...he almost had it...an elementary signal dictionary...he was about to—”
“He did.
About nine forty-five. He’d been up all night with a Primey one of the psych professors had managed to hypnotize and gone home unusually optimistic. In the middle of his first class this morning, he interrupted himself in a lecture on medieval Cyrillic to...to gabble-honk. He sneezed and wheezed at the students for about ten minutes in the usual Primey pattern of initial irritation, then, abruptly giving them up as hopeless, worthless idiots, he levitated himself in that eerie way they almost always do at first. Banged his head against the ceiling and knocked himself out. I don’t know what it was, fright, excitement, respect for the old boy perhaps, but the students neglected to tie him up before going for help. By the time they’d come back with the campus SIC man, Kleimbocher had revived and dissolved one wall of the Graduate School to get out. Here’s a snapshot of him about five hundred feet in the air, lying on his back with his arms crossed behind his head, skimming west at twenty miles an hour.”
Hebster studied the little paper rectangle with blinking eyes. “You radioed the air force to chase him, of course.”
“What’s the use? We’ve been through that enough times. He’d either increase his speed and generate a tornado, drop like a stone and get himself smeared all over the countryside, or materialize stuff like wet coffee grounds and gold ingots inside the jets of the pursuing plane. Nobody’s caught a Primey yet in the first flush of...whatever they do feel at first. And we might stand to lose anything from a fairly expensive hunk of aircraft, including pilot, to a couple of hundred acres of New Jersey topsoil.”
Hebster groaned. “But the eighteen years of research that he represented!”
“Yeah. That’s where we stand. Blind Alley umpteen hundred thousand or thereabouts. Whatever the figure is, it’s awfully close to the end. If you can’t crack the Alien on a straight linguistic basis, you can’t crack the Alien at all, period, end of paragraph. Our most powerful weapons affect them like bubble pipes, and our finest minds are good for nothing better than to serve them in low, fawning idiocy. But the Primeys are all that’s left. We might be able to talk sense to the Man if not the Master.”