Cooley moistened his lips. “I’m thinking. We get the gadgets, we use them up-”
“Or sell them,” Baker interrupted.
“Or sell them, but then either way, they’re gone. Suppose we walked off with these.” He hefted his stick. “If we could find out what makes it do what it does-”
“Are you kidding?” said Baker. His dark face was flushed; beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He waved his stick. “You know what this is? A shovel. An idiot stick.”
“How’s that?” said Cooley.
“A shovel,” Baker told him patiently, “is a stick with some dirt on one end and an idiot on the other. Old joke. Didn’t you ever do any common labor?”
“No,” said Cooley.
“Well, you’re doing some now. This thing that looks so wonderful to us—that’s just a shovel, to them. An idiot stick. And we’re the idiots.”
“I don’t like that,” said Cooley.
“Who likes it?” Baker demanded. “But there isn’t a thing you can do about it. Do your work, take your pay, and that’s all. Don’t kid yourself we can ever get the bulge on them. We haven’t got what it takes.”
Cooley thought hard about it, and was one of the fifty-odd people who walked off the site with Galactic tools that day. The Galactics made no complaint. When daylight failed, they called the first crew in and sent another out, under lights that floated overhead.
The work went on around the clock. The tools were stolen at a steady rate; the Galactics handed out more indifferently.
* * * *
The site became level and smooth. The surface was glassy-hard, almost too slick to walk on. The next thing the aliens did was to set up a tall pole on a tripod in the middle of the site. Most of the floating lights went out and drifted away. In the dusk, a network of fluorescent lines appeared on the glassy surface. It looked like the ground plan for a huge building. Some of the pale lines went a little askew because of minor irregularities in the surface, but the Galactics did not seem to mind.
They called in part of the crew and made some adjustment in each man’s stick. A narrow tab, something like the clip in an automatic, came out of the butt. A different one went in.
So equipped, the reduced crew was sent back onto the site, and scattered along the diagram, one man every few hundred yards or so. They were instructed to walk backwards along the lines, drawing their sticks after them.
There was some confusion. The tools now worked only on contact, and instead of flattening the surface down, they made it bulge up, like suddenly rising dough, to form a foot-high ridge. The ridge was pale in color, and felt porous and hard to the touch, like styrene foam.
A few men were called in and had still another set of control tabs put into their sticks. Wherever somebody had jumped, or twitched, and made a ridge where it didn’t belong, these men wiped it out like wiping chalk with a wet sponge: the expanded material shrank again and became part of the dark surface.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew, finishing the first set of lines, was walking along beside them, making the ridges twice as wide. They repeated this process until each ridge was nearly a yard across. Then they stepped up on top of the ridges and began again, making a second foot-high bulge on top of the first.
The building was going up.
It was irregularly shaped, a little like an arrowhead, with an outer shell composed of many small compartments. The interior was left unpartitioned, a single area more than half a mile across.
When the shell was up ten feet, the aliens had connecting doorways cut between all the small chambers. A stick, looking no different from the others, was tossed into each chamber from the wall above. Where it landed, clear liquid immediately began to gush. The liquid rose, covered the stick, and kept on rising. It rose until it reached the level of the walls, and then stopped. A few minutes later, it was cold to the touch. In half an hour, it was frozen solid.
The control tabs were changed again, and a crew began walking across the frozen surface, forming another layer of the hard, dark, glassy substance. Afterward, more doorways were cut in the outer shell, and the liquid drained off toward the river. The sticks that had been dropped into each chamber were recovered. Each had left a slight irregularity in the floor, which was smoothed out.
The second story went up in the same way. Walking backward along the high walls, a good many people fell off. Others quit.
The aliens hired more and the construction went on.
* * * *
Hardly anybody except a few high government officials got to see the inside of the alien spaceship; but the Galactics themselves became familiar sights in the towns and cities of the eastern seaboard.
They walked the streets in inquisitive, faintly supercilious pairs, looking at everything, occasionally stopping to aim little fist-sized machines which might or might not have been cameras.
Some of them fraternized with the populace, asking many earnest questions about local laws and customs. Some bought vast quantities of potatoes, playing cards, Cadillacs, junk jewelry, carpets, confetti, nylons and other goods, paying as usual with the happiness capsules. They ate local foods with interest, and drank heroically—without getting drunk, or even tipsy.
Skin-tight clothes cut in imitation of the Galactics’ bottle-green uniform began to appear on the market. There were Galactic dolls, and Galactic spaceship toys.
Legislatures everywhere were relaxed and amiable. Wherever the Galactics had trouble, or sensed it coming, they smoothed the way with more of the happiness capsules. Prices were beginning to be marked not only in “$” and “¢ but in “Hc,” for “Hapcap.”
Business was booming.
In the laboratories of the Bureau of Standards in Washington there was a concerted program, one of many, to discover the secrets of the Galactic all-purpose tool. Specimens had been measured, X-rayed and cut apart. The material, whatever it was, seemed to have been formed in one piece. It was light, chemically inert and fairly strong. The hollow inside was irregularly curved, according to no discernible principle.
There were only two parts—the tool proper, and the control tab which fitted into a slot in the handle. With the tab in, the tool functioned. It did work, while the dials of every test instrument indicated that no energy was being released.
With the tab out, nothing happened at all.
The tabs for various functions could be distinguished by color. Otherwise, in shape and dimensions, they seemed identical.
The first—and last—breakthrough came when the tabs were examined by X-ray microscopy. The substance, which had seemed amorphous, was found to have a crystalline structure, permanently stressed in patterns which differed consistently between tabs that produced different functions.
By an elaborate series of test heatings, compressions and deformations, Dr. Crawford Reed succeeded in altering the stress pattern of a tab, type “A,” to approximately that of a tab, type “C.”
When the tab was inserted in a tool, the laboratory went up in an explosion that demolished buildings within a radius of three city blocks.
The explosion was recorded by instruments in the giant spaceship. When he saw the record, the bored officer on duty smiled.
* * * *
One of the aliens, who said his name was Pendrath go Pendrath, showed up frequently in the pleasant little town of Riverdale, N.J. He poked his nose into church bazaars, Little League baseball games, soda fountains, summer camps, chamber of commerce meetings. At first he gathered crowds wherever he went; then the natives, and even the tourists, got used to him.
Three nights after the rough shell of the building was finished, a young Star-Ledger reporter named Al Jenkins found him in the back of a bar, maudlin drunk.
Pendrath looked up as Jenkins slid into the booth next to him. “Ah, my friend,” he said blurrily, “how I regret your poor planet.”
“You don’t like our planet?” said Jenkins.
“No, it is a nice little planet. Extremely picturesque. Pardon m
e.” Pendrath sipped from the glass he was holding. He blinked, and straightened up slightly.
“You must understand, that is Galactic progress,” he said. “It cannot be helped. We all must go some day.”
Jenkins looked at him critically. “You’ve been having quite a few of those, haven’t you?” he said. “I thought you people were immune to alcohol, or something.”
“No, it is the aps—as—aspirin,” said the alien. He produced a small bottle, and solemnly shook a tablet out into his palm. “Your liquors gave me a headache, and so I took an apsirin—aspirin. And your aspirin is wonderful.” He looked lugubrious. “To think, no more aspirin. No more church bazaar. No more baseball.”
“Why, what’s going to happen to them?”
Pendrath spread his fingers and made an expressive fizzing noise with his mouth.
“Blooie,” he said.
* * * *
Jenkins said incredulously, “You’re going to blow up the world?”
The alien nodded sadly. “Soon our building will be finished. Then we will put in the big machines, and drill, drill.” He made twisting motions downward with one hand. “We will drill to the core. Then we will drop the transformer and close up the shaft. Then we will, go away. Then your poor little planet will go-” He made the fizzing noise again. “Blooie.”
Jenkins’ fists were clenched. “But why? Why would you do a thing like that?”
“For dust,” Pendrath explained. “Your little planet will all be dust. No big pieces left—nothing bigger than this.” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together, squinting, to show how tiny. “We are making defenses for the Galaxy. This sector is too open. We will make a little screen of dust here. If there is dust, a ship cannot go very fast. The dust slows it down. Some places, there is already dust. Other places, we will make it. It is the only way to protect ourselves from invasion.”
“Invasion by who?”
Pendrath shrugged. “Who can tell? We have to look ahead.”
Jenkins’ hands began to shake. He took a dog-eared notebook out of his pocket, thumbing it open automatically; looked at it and put it back. His hands didn’t want to do anything but make fists. He said thickly, “You lousy——” and swung a left to Pendrath’s beaky face.
The blow never landed.
His fist slowed down and stopped. Strain as hard as he would, he couldn’t push it any farther.
“No, no,” said Pendrath, smiling sadly. “No use. I regret very much.”
Jenkins’ heart was thumping. “Why us?” he burst out angrily. “If you had to have dust, why couldn’t you take one of the other planets? Jupiter—Venus—any of them—why pick the one we live on?”
Pendrath blinked at him. “But on your other planets no one lives,” he said. “Who, then, would do the work for us?” He popped another tablet into his mouth. “And besides,” he said, “remember that this dust will make a blanket around your sun. It will make the planets very cold. You see, I have thought of all these things. And then suppose we went to some other sun, and did not come here at all. It would be just the same. You would make big spaceships, and we would have to come and finish you anyway. This way, it will be very quick—you will not feel a thing.”
Jenkins had lost his hat. He fumbled on the floor for it “We’ll stop you,” he said, red-faced over the table top. “You’ll be sorry you ever opened your mouth to me, mister. I’ll spread this from here to Belfast”
“You are going to tell?” the alien asked, in dull surprise.
“You bet your sweet life I’m going to tell!”
Pendrath nodded owlishly. “It does not matter now. The work is nearly done. You cannot stop us, my poor friend.”
* * * *
The story broke the following day, when the installation of the complex system of girders and braces in the interior of the building had already been finished.
A hatch in the side of the ship was open. Under the aliens’ direction, crews were carrying out a steady stream of machine parts to be assembled inside the building.
There were a thousand and one pieces of different sizes and shapes: gigantic torus sections, tubes, cylinders, globes; twisted pipes, jigsaw puzzle pieces. The material was not metal, but the same light substance the tools were made of.
Some of the tools were serving as grip-sticks: they clung like magnets to the machine parts, and to nothing else. Some, applied to massive pieces of equipment, made them extraordinarily slippery, so that it was easy to slide them across the site and into the building. Others were used in assembling: drawn along the join between two pieces, they made the two flow together into one.
The story did not reach the day shift at all. The second and third shifts turned up a little under strength: the aliens hired enough people from the crowd of curiosity-seekers to make up the difference.
At his regular press conference, the alien spokesman, Mr. Revash go Ren, said. “Mr. Jenkins’ story is a malicious fabrication. The machines you mention will provide pleasant heating, air conditioning, Galactic standard gravitation, and other necessary services for the clerical workers in our offices. We are accustomed to having many conveniences of this kind, and that is why we cannot live or work in buildings suitable for you.”
Hersch of the Times demanded: “Why does that take a half-mile area, when your office space is only a thin ring around the outside of the building?”
Revash smiled. “Why do you take a whole cellar to heat your buildings?” he asked. “One of your savages would say that a fire of sticks and a hole in the ceiling are sufficient.”
Hersch had no answer to that; nevertheless, belief in the story spread.
By the end of the week, half a dozen newspapers were thumping the drum for a crusade. A congressional investigating committee was appointed. More workers quit. When the labor supply slackened, the aliens doubled the pay, and got more applicants than there were jobs. Riots broke out on the Jersey side of the tubes. There were picket lines, fulminations from the pulpit, attempts at sabotage.
The work went on just the same.
* * * *
Baker said: “The whole problem is psychological. We know what kind of people they are—it sticks out all over them—they’re decadent. That’s their weak point. That’s where we’ve got to hit them. They’ve got the perfect machines, but they don’t know how to use them. Not only that, they don’t want to, it would soil their lily-white hands. So they come here, and they get us to do their dirty work, even though it means an extra risk.”
“That doesn’t sound so decadent to me,” said Cooley argumentatively. It was past midnight, and they were still sitting in Baker’s living room over a case of beer, hashing it all out. Cooley’s face was flushed, and his voice a little loud. “Take an archaeological expedition, say—I don’t know, maybe to Mesopotamia or somewhere. Do they drag along a lot of pick and shovel men?” They do not. They take the shovels, maybe, but they hire native labor on the spot. That isn’t decadence, that’s efficiency.”
“All right, but if we had to, we could get out there and pick up a shovel. They can’t. It just wouldn’t occur to them. They’re overrefined, Ted. They’ve got to the point where the machineshave to be perfect, or they couldn’t stay alive. That’s dangerous. That’s where we’ve got to hit them.”
“I don’t see it. Wars are won with weapons.”
“So what are we supposed to do, hit them with atom bombs that don’t go off, or guns that don’t shoot?”
Cooley put down his stein and reached for the tool that lay on the floor. It had rolled the last time he put it down. He said, “Damn,” and reached farther. He picked it up, the same “idiot stick” he had stolen from the Galactic site the first day.
“I’m betting on this,” he said. “You know and I know they’re working on it, day and night. I’m betting they’ll crack it. This is a weapon, boy. A Galactic weapon. If we just get that-”
“Go ahead, wish for the moon,” said Baker bitterly. “What you’re talking about happens
to be impossible. We can change the stress patterns in the control tabs, yes. We can even duplicate the formative conditions, probably, and get as many tabs as you want with the same pattern. But it’s all empirical, Ted, just blind chance. We don’t knowwhy such and such a stress pattern makes the tool do a certain thing. And until we know that, all we can do is vary it at random.”
“So?”
“So there are millions of wrong patterns for every right one. There’s the patterns that make things explode, like in Washington. There’s the ones that boil the experimenter alive or freeze him solid. Or bury him in a big lump of solid lead. There’s the radioactive ones, the corrosive ones—and for every wrong guess, we lose at least one man.”
“Remote control?” said Cooley.
“First figure out what makes the tools operate when somebody’s holding them, and stop when they let go.”
Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology] Page 11