by Mark Clifton
As soon as I grew certain, openly and honestly to myself, that it was all a gigantic hoax, I grew equally certain that it wasn't. Admittedly there was no Earth power, no mentality, no equipment, no facilities, and no foolhardiness so great as to produce this hoax. That they had come from the stars I could not doubt. That they had deliberately hoaxed us I could not doubt. That they must have some alien motive for doing this I could not doubt.
And the more normal these slap-happy fly-boys appeared to be, the wilder the acclaim and adulation of Official and Social Washington, and the world, the more I doubted them.
They were not, surely they could not be what they seemed. Then what were they? Why and how had they so completely adopted Hollywood's entirely spurious idea of what a hero should be? To conceal what?
To look through the eyes of what might logically be assumed the surveillance of an alien life intelligence, I might not be proud of Man (he gave me little cause), but Man was, nonetheless, my own. For better or for worse, I was on his side.
I longed to talk to someone about it, but as the day progressed I found no kinship doubt in any other eyes. I was one attending an executive-suburban social who must tailor his tastes and opinions to public relations lest he give offense by seeming a minority.
Not even Sara was with me, not this time. There had been no doubt in her eyes, the last time I'd seen her before the crowd separated us at the Mall. Her eyes had also been star sapphires.
Unpracticed as I was in Washington's diplomatic courtesies, I found myself quickly shuffled, shouldered, and edged away from the favored position the Starmen had given me at the Mall. Yet, to my astonishment, I found myself in the third car behind them in the parade on its way to Blair House across from the White House. I learned only later that it was Shirley, who did know Washington, working behind the scenes, who not only saw to it that I got a seat in that car but who laid down the law to every host and hostess in Washington that one Dr. Ralph Kennedy must be hurriedly added to their exclusive lists. Only later did I learn that the servants and office staff members are the real social and political arbiters of Washington—everybody else is too green and inexperienced to know.
Both Official and Social Washington, after some cautious inquiry of their own servants, accepted Shirley's judgment. Word was passed around (and my status grew in the telling) that I was the world's foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology (if I had been a mere second-foremost authority I couldn't have got into the service entrance) ... Adviser to the Pentagon, they say the top generals and admirals don't make a move, a single move, without consulting him first ... an admiral, himself, and therefore socially acceptable ... you noticed, didn't you, that the Spacemen picked him out to introduce them to the President, and they're certainly All Right ... therefore he must be too....
It seemed not to occur to anyone (else) to wonder how the Spacemen had known all this about me immediately upon landing—me standing there among all that resplendent brass and braid without so much as a good-conduct medal.
It was while driving from one welcoming function to another in the late afternoon of the first day that I made first mental contact with them. Unhappily, it was my last for quite some time. This time, through Shirley's influence, I had been given the seat beside the secret-service man who was driving their open car through the crowded streets. We were driving through a wild demonstration of celebrity worship. Bex, Dex, Jex, Kex, and Lex, seated in the rear of the car, were busy grinning handsomely, smirking, and occasionally saluting the crowd.
"You're setting us back a hundred years,” I grumbled sourly, while I tried to look both brilliant and happy for the cameras myself. “Here we've been telling our young people that the real hero of tomorrow is a Thinking Man; that to meet the challenge of the future they've got to develop their Intellect beyond studying out how to heat before they eat, how to obey road signs, how to distinguish between rest rooms. How far do you think we're going to get now, after the example you've set?” It was subvocal grumbling; no point in revealing myself to the secret service as a subversive.
We were still bowing and smiling to the crowds lining the street, but I forgot myself long enough to swallow hard on a double take at their answer. They did not speak it, but it was clear and sharp.
"The prevailing art forms of a culture invariably give the common denominator of its direction. In yours we find no such cultural ideal as you express."
It was the first thought they'd uttered which couldn't have been lifted bodily from the script of Git Along Doggie, or Biff Swift, Space Detective.
And it was impersonal, emotionless—as remote from approval or rebuke as a spiral galaxy.
There went my consistency again. Oddly, somehow, it made me feel better. At least they weren't really what they seemed—cowboys taken from some distant world's Western Plains, dressed up in fancy uniforms and taught to press some buttons. There was intellect behind those false fronts.
I felt a twinge of fear. So far they had taken utmost care not to harm any human life—but only so far.
They gave me no more contact. They were much too busy playing up to the crowds lining the streets. And why? Why were they working so hard to be popular? Why were they giving us such a liberal helping of what we obviously had hoped to find in them? Or were they sampling each mind as we passed? With the same ease in sampling mine? And finding? For what were they searching?
Too bad our scientists would all be back at the Mall, attempting to measure, guess the weight and composition of an entranceless, seamless globe. And I still wonder if their instruments told them there wasn't anything there—or if the instruments, too, were subject to illusion.
And I wonder, too, if the police department wasn't secretly relieved when the ship, in midafternoon, suddenly disappeared; releasing the cordons of police so they could go back to their normal occupation of attempting to entice ordinary people into committing crimes so they could entrap them more conveniently.
Now it was three o'clock in the morning. At the dinners and receptions the human males had worn their symbolic tails, the females had shown off the old dead scraps skinned from slaughtered rodents to display the hunting prowess of their males in the widows-and-orphans fleecing marts or under the graft table. The social events symbolizing the progress of a flowering civilization were over for the night. Even the stench of perfumes, so fragrant in the bottle and jar, so fetid as they oxidize and mix with sweat and decaying scales of skin, was being carried away on the cool night breeze.
The Star Heroes lounged around in one of the more intimate reception rooms of Blair House, theirs for their stay, while they relaxed before going to bed—single beds, of course, installed under the strict supervision of F.B.I. who were doing their best to make sure these handsome, single men from the stars indulged in no nonconformist sex behavior while guests of this Earth and subject to association with government officials.
The long legs of the heroes were thrown up over the arms of chairs, their cigarette ashes dropped carelessly upon priceless rugs, their corrosive nightcaps etched rings upon rare table tops.
They seemed not to know about spyray units, microphones, and cameras concealed behind moldings, under chairs, in electrical outlets, through minute openings punched through eye pupils of masterpiece paintings on the wall, through false mirrors placed strategically to cover every square foot of Blair House.
They seemed unaware that a couple billion people would be treated to their every private move and word—well, nearly every move and word. Certain scratching, certain tugging at cloth cutting into certain body areas, certain remarks; these would have to be expurgated, of course. All right for the censors to observe them, for the censors could be confident that their minds were pure, but no such trust could be placed in those with inferior morals.
They seemed unaware of the vast satisfaction their behavior would bring to a hundred million moms who would watch them mash down the upholstered arms of chairs, mess up the rugs, ruin the furniture, make grunts and
belches just like their own fine sons. Which proved, again, that they were All Right, for here was behavior that even moms could understand. Oh, they would cluck with shocked disapproval at the terrible, terrible upbringing these boys must have had; but they would sigh happily that these heroes didn't have a thing, not a single thing, which their own fine sons didn't also have. Anybody could be a hero, it didn't take anything special. Just luck. The moms could draw vast comfort from seeing that with their own eyes, and compliment themselves that they had done just as good a job as those mothers on—well, wherever these heroes came from.
The secret services, the supersecret services, the spies who spy upon the spies, wherever a human body could be squeezed into false wall passages, locked closets, basements, attics, and houses next door, all these watched, recorded, and photographed for later analysis. They had begun with narrowed, suspicious eyes; they had savored each remark for hidden, subversive meanings, and gradually they, too, became convinced that these astronauts were, indeed, what they claimed to be—pure and simple representatives from the Right Thinking Universe.
The conversation of the five was in the tradition of an army barracks. Perhaps an occasional Navy man actually does make a furtive try or so at obtaining some illicit pleasure while ashore, but it takes an Army man to talk about it. This portion of their conversation would have to be considerably expurgated, for the social beauties might not like the general public to hear the argued estimates of their milk-gallonage production capacity, and whether or not the daily gallons they advertised were really believable. Probably their conversation did help to reassure the F.B.I. that their sex patterns had been properly oriented and their association with government officials might not contaminate with any positions or movements not on the approved list.
I did my own share of listening, viewing, analyzing, and wondering, and found I really didn't have the Peeping Tom temperament required for this work. My status as the world's foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology gave me access to the various observing units, but after sampling the behavior of the Starmen, the cloud of avidity radiating from the observers drove me outside, onto the lawn, to clear my lungs with the night's cool breeze.
But not an empty lawn or street. Even at this hour of predawn, and after nights of sleeplessness, still there were crowds of people standing outside of Blair House stolidly watching, staring at lighted rectangles of windows blanked by closed blinds or even blanker walls.
I walked among the silent, staring people, and was on the point of deciding to find some transportation to my hotel when the dark figures of the crowd began to stir, and a low murmur arose from them. I turned and looked at the spot which seemed to have drawn all their eyes.
It was one of the upper balconies which let through French doors into a bedroom. It began with a glow, a vague nimbus of pearly light.
The throaty murmur around me was one of awe.
A form began to take shape within the brightening nimbus of light. At first it was ghostly, symbolizing immateriality. It began to clear, take shape. Now it was a human form. The arms came up and out. The white robe draped the figure and flowed from the extended arms. A face emerged from the nimbus of the head, a Flemish face, with hair long, and blond, and draped in ringlets about the shoulders. The robe glistened now as finest nylon. A halo began to glow about the head.
Then it was gone.
The balcony was dark and black.
The crowd had buckled at the knees. Some were lying prone upon the ground. I looked back up at the balcony angrily.
"Now what are you practical jokers up to?” I asked bitterly.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Miracle at Blair House, as it came to be called, gave Harvey Strickland the assurance he needed.
He sat, the next morning, in his purple robe at his desk in the suite of offices reserved for him at the Washington Evening Bulletin, and weighed the discrepancies in the vision against their purpose.
Nylon robe, indeed! His first response to this item in the reporters’ stories had been fury at the sloppy thinking, and some of his reporters came closer than they ever knew to excommunication from the fourth estate. But then he grew curious at the unanimous opinion that the robe was nylon. Odd.
Odd, also, that a halo was universally reported. Painters didn't invent the halo for several centuries after the time of Christ. And it was some centuries still more before the anti-Semitic Nordic painters changed the physical appearance to one they liked better. Just as the approved image which came to be accepted had nothing whatever in common with the probably dark and swarthy little Asiatic Jew, so did Christianity evolve into something which had nothing whatever in common with that servile little Jew's teachings.
So what motive in presenting this wholly inaccurate vision?
The goddam communists had said religion was the opiate of the people. As usual, they were so twisted in their thinking they had even misinterpreted this. Christianity was the most powerful weapon rulers had ever found for keeping the people meek, docile, humble, subservient, asking nothing, expecting nothing, fearing even that if they asked for their rights here on Earth, they might be denied them in Heaven. This was the reason the ancient rulers had shrewdly adopted it as a state policy; this was the reason the modern industrialist enforced it upon his employees, and saw to it that the ministers in his factory towns kept the workers humble, docile, and afraid.
Suddenly he felt flooded with revelation. The Miracle at Blair House had been their sign to him. “We approve the method of scaring the sheep into submission,” they were saying to him. “We see that there is altogether too goddam much independent thinking going on, and it's time the people were brought back into line."
He pushed his huge bulk to his feet and began to pace the space between the desk and the doorway while he thought out the implications behind the act. From their behavior these five had seemed no more than stupid fly-boys, the kind of happy-go-lucky show-offs we might send out after we had taught them to press the right buttons. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Maybe there was more to them than met the eye, or maybe this was just another button they had been ordered to push, part of a long range pattern.
It didn't really matter which. Whether they'd thought it up, or it had been thought up for them, the intended result was clear.
Here lately there'd been a rash of independent little literary magazines, operating on a shoestring, with appeal to only a few goddam intellectuals. He'd paid them no attention. Those things usually died out after two or three issues, and the backers saw that they hadn't changed the destiny of mankind with a couple of editorials. But the rash of them was symptom of increase in independent thinking. Worse, there were mutterings among the scientists that came close to mutiny. Goddam scientists were getting too big for their britches. They were forgetting they were just hired mechanics, and were trying to tell the bosses how the shop ought to be run.
He whirled around and slapped his hand down hard on his desk.
That was the deal!
Lest this give anybody ideas about science being more important than sheeplike docility, this arrival of men from the stars, the people were to be reminded of the pasture fences and who drives them with the dogs and whip.
Well, they didn't have to hit Harvey Strickland over the head. Now that they had shown him that either they, or the power behind them, knew the score; he'd play their game. Sooner or later, there'd be a showdown of hands across the table—or under it.
He wheezed his high, gasping laughter, went around the desk, sat back down in the triple-strength chair, and began punching buttons to summon his editorial staff. He grabbed up his phone, called his New York suite, and ordered Miller to come on the next plane.
He hadn't wanted Miller with him while he was uncertain of his course. It wouldn't do for Miller to know he could be uncertain. But now that he knew, Miller must be here to see. He would have considered it complete nonsense if any psychologist had told
him Miller, to him, was symbolic of humanity; and that the same jealousy and hatred which had driven him to destroy Miller pressured his drive to humble the contemptible human race.
That its determined, eternal, beautiful effort to lift its head in pride, in spite of all his efforts and those down through the ages like him to keep it servile and cowardly, was embodied in Miller. Even if he had contemplated the idea, he would have rejected it, for obviously Miller had been completely broken, by him, long ago.
He would not have admitted, or known, either of the human race or of Miller, that the spark of man's desire to lift himself up out of the muck, to throw back his head and gaze in ecstasy up to the stars, is never quenched.
More immediately, it did not occur to him that his secretary, so self-effacing as to be often forgotten, as a good organization man should, had, ignored, stood by his shoulder once too often and watched him work the secret combination to his file room of dossiers.
That Miller had used his absence from New York, and the excitement of the rest of the New York personnel in its absorption with the doings of the Starmen, to spend long hours in that secret room.
That Miller had finally found his own dossier, and had read its every word with increasingly comprehending eyes.
That the dormant spark of pride in Miller had been given the fuel to flame into a raging fire.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was Shirley again, with her manipulations behind the scenes, who filled my following days with woe.
Long experienced in the empire-building involvements and intrigues of bureaucratic Washington, and well knowing this was done through grabbing the ball of expediency and running with it before anybody else had a chance to get their hands on it, she grabbed the ball and passed it into my hands before I knew what it was.
Who had a better right to act as intermediary between the Starmen and the deputations and committees of Earthmen than Dr. Ralph Kennedy, the world's foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology?