by William Tenn
The two of them added up to all the brains and sharpness a guy could ask for. That's why I was paying out an arm and a leg for this lunch, on top of all my losses with Eksar.
"Morris, tell the truth. You understand him?"
"What's there to understand, Bernie? A quote about the sweet gold? It might be the answer, right there."
Now I looked at Ricardo. He was eating away at a creamy Italian pudding. Two bucks even, those puddings cost in that place.
"Let's say he was an alien," Morris Burlap said. "Let's say he came from somewhere in outer space. Okay. Now what would an alien want with U.S. dollars? What's the rate of exchange out there? How much is a dollar worth forty, fifty light years away?"
"You mean he needed it to buy some merchandise here on Earth?"
"That's exactly what I mean. But what kind of merchandise, that's the question. What could Earth have that he'd want?"
Ricardo finished the pudding and wiped his lips with a napkin. "I think you're on the right track, Morris," he said, and I swung my attention back to him. "We can postulate a civilization far in advance of our own. One that would feel we're not quite ready to know about them. One that has placed primitive little Earth strictly off limits—a restriction only desperate criminals dare ignore."
"From where come criminals, Ricardo, if they're so advanced?"
"Laws produce lawbreakers, Bernie, like hens produce eggs. Civilization has nothing to do with it. I'm beginning to see Eksar now. An unprincipled adventurer, a star-man version of those cutthroats who sailed the South Pacific a hundred years or more ago. Once in a while, a ship would smash up against the coral reefs, and a bloody opportunist out of Boston would be stranded for life among primitive, backward tribesmen. I'm sure you can fill in the rest."
"No, I can't. And if you don't mind, Ricardo—"
Morris Burlap said he'd like another brandy. I ordered it. He came as close to smiling as Morris Burlap ever does and leaned toward me confidentially. "Ricardo's got it, Bernie. Put yourself in this guy Eksar's position. He wraps up his spaceship on a dirty little planet which it's against the law to be near in the first place. He can make some half-assed repairs with merchandise that's available here—but he has to buy the stuff. Any noise, any uproar, and he'll be grabbed for a Federal rap in outer space. Say you're Eksar, what do you do?"
I could see it now. "I'd peddle and I'd parlay. Copper bracelets, strings of beads, dollars—whatever I had to lay my hands on to buy the native merchandise, I'd peddle and I'd parlay in deal after deal. Until I'd run it up to the amount I needed. Maybe I'd get my start with a piece of equipment from the ship, then I'd find some novelty item that the natives would go for. But all this is Earth business know-how, human business know-how."
"Bernie," Ricardo told me, "Indians once traded pretty little shells for beaver pelts at the exact spot where the Stock Exchange now stands. Some kind of business goes on in Eksar's world, I assure you, but its simplest form would make one of our corporate mergers look like a game of potsy on the sidewalk."
Well, I'd wanted to figure it out. "So I was marked as his fish all the way. I was screwed and blued and tattooed," I mumbled, "by a hustler superman."
Ricardo nodded. "By a businessman's Mephistopheles fleeing the thunderbolts of heaven. He needed to double his money one more time and he'd have enough to repair his ship. He had at his disposal a fantastic sophistication in all the ways of commerce."
"What Ricardo's saying," came an almost-soft voice from Morris Burlap, "is the guy who beat you up was a whole lot bigger than you."
My shoulders felt loose, like they were sliding down off my arms. "What the hell," I said. "You get stepped on by a horse or you get stepped on by an elephant. You're still stepped on."
I paid the check, got myself together and went away.
Then I began to wonder if maybe this was really the story after all. They both enjoyed seeing me up there as an interplanetary jerk. Ricardo's a brilliant guy, Morris Burlap's sharp as hell, but so what? Ideas, yes. Facts, no.
So here's a fact.
My bank statement came at the end of the month with that canceled check I'd given Eksar. It had been endorsed by a big store in the Cortlandt Street area. I know that store. I've dealt with them. I went down and asked them about it.
They handle mostly marked-down, surplus electronic equipment. That's what they said Eksar had bought. A walloping big order of transistors and transformers, resistors and printed circuits, electronic tubes, wiring, tools, gimmicks like that. All mixed up, they said, a lot of components that just didn't go together. He'd given the clerk the impression that he had an emergency job to do—and he'd take as close as he could get to the things he actually needed. He'd paid a lot of money for freight charges: delivery was to some backwoods town in northern Canada.
That's a fact, now, I have to admit it. But here's another one.
I've dealt with that store, like I said. Their prices are the lowest in the neighborhood. And why is it, do you think, they can sell so cheap? There's only one answer: because they buy so cheap. They buy at the lowest prices; they don't give a damn about quality: all they want to know is, how much mark-up? I've personally sold them job-lots of electronic junk that I couldn't unload anywhere else, condemned stuff, badly wired stuff, stuff that was almost dangerous—it's a place to sell when you've given up on making a profit because you yourself have been stuck with inferior merchandise in the first place.
You get the picture? It makes me feel rosy all over.
There is Eksar out in space, the way I see it. He's fixed up his ship, good enough to travel, and he's on his way to his next big deal. The motors are humming, the ship is running, and he's sitting there with a big smile on his dirty face: he's thinking how he took me, how easy it was.
He's laughing his head off.
All of a sudden, there's a screech and a smell of burning. That circuit that's running the front motor, a wire just got touched through the thin insulation, the circuit's tearing the hell out of itself. He gets scared. He turns on the auxiliaries. The auxiliaries don't go on—you know why? The vacuum tubes he's using have come to the end of their rope, they didn't have much juice to start with. Blooie! That's the rear motor developing a short-circuit. Ka-pow! That's a defective transformer melting away in the middle of the ship.
And there he is, millions of miles from nowhere, empty space all around him, no more spare parts, tools that practically break in his hands—and not a single, living soul he can hustle.
And here am I, walking up and down in my nine-by-six office, thinking about it, and I'm laughing my head off. Because it's just possible, it just could happen, that what goes wrong with his ship is one of the half-dozen or so job-lots of really bad electronic equipment that I personally, me, Bernie the Faust, that I sold to that surplus store at one time or another.
That's all I'd ask. Just to have it happen that way.
Faust. He'd have Faust from me then. Right in the face, Faust. On the head, splitting it open, Faust.
Faust he wants? Faust I'd give him!
AFTERWORD
I have written stories like "Child's Play" and "The Flat-Eyed Monster" by, in effect, reading them for the first time as I wrote them—finding out with some fascination what happens on a given page only when I have completed the page. But for "Bernie the Faust," I used the technique of what I call mining for a story.
Lester del Rey had told me of the newspaper reporter back in the Depression who had offered people a twenty-dollar bill for a dollar—and found no takers. We both felt there was a story there somewhere, and he told me that if I could do it, I was welcome to it.
I made a number of tries at it, off and on, over several years, and, finally, in 1960, it began to take off. I wrote and wrote, page after page after page, trying to find out what the story wanted to say to me. I called the piece "The Giveaway Show," and when I finished the first draft, it was thirty-three thousand words long and it plunged in several different directions, like a madd
ened horse.
But I had found the direction I liked, and I began again with the title, "Bernie the Faust."
This version worked out to be twenty-five thousand words in length, which was too short for a novel and too long for a novelette, in other words, unsaleable according to the publishing conventions of science-fiction magazines of the day. After two months of rewriting, I had it down twelve thousand, five hundred words—a novelette. I sent it to my then agent, one of the most important general fiction agents of that time; she had told me she was going to sell me to Harper's and The New Yorker and points north; she sent it back to me by return post. "Don't just tear this up, Phil," she said, "but keep it near you and look at it from time to time, and ask yourself, 'How could I, a gifted professional writer, come to write such a piece of shit?'"
Well. I had to recover something for all that work, so I sent it around to the magazines with which I regularly dealt, from Galaxy on down, four-cents-a-word markets down to a half cent. They all bounced it, with comments ranging from the regretful to the pitying.
I acquired a new agent, Henry Morrison. I showed him—and apologized for showing it to him—"Bernie the Faust." To my astonishment—he liked it. He liked it so much, he sent it to Playboy. To my further astonishment, A.C. Spectorsky, the editorial director of Playboy, also liked it.
"The only problem," Henry Morrison told me over the phone, "is that Spec feels, as it stands, it's still too long for Playboy. If you can cut it down to, say, eighty-five hundred or nine thousand words, he'll definitely buy it."
"I can't do it, Henry," I said. "There's no fat at all left in the piece. All there is is the humor basic to the story itself. No fat—just bone."
"Good enough. I wouldn't ask you to damage the story. But, as your agent, I have to tell you that they're thinking of using it as what they call a front-of-the-book piece. That would mean five thousand dollars. I do have to tell you that."
Then I must tell you who are reading this that the most money I had ever received up to then for a story was seven hundred dollars—and that was for something twenty-three thousand words long. Five thousand dollars! And remember, please, we are talking about the year 1962... I mean, five thousand dollars?
"I don't care," my wife, Fruma, said to me. "With all the rejections, it's still a good story. You cut it up and tear it to pieces, and I swear I'll leave you."
And she went to bed, I into my study to begin trying to cut. A word here, a sentence there, once in a while a short paragraph. But no block cuts that I could see—none of the necessary big deletions. I came to the end of the story with a hundred and ten words gone, and began again. A couple of words here, maybe a sentence or two there, a longish speech by a not-too-important character. Maybe the character himself? The talkative notarizing druggist shrank to three short appearances.
When Fruma looked in on me next morning, the story was no longer twelve thousand, five hundred words long. Nor was it nine thousand words or eight thousand words long. It was a shade over five thousand, five hundred words.
"Where did it all go to?" Fruma asked after reading. "All the good stuff is still there. It's even better now."
I agreed. I pretty much still agree.
Playboy bought it for five thousand dollars. It was reprinted in several best-of-the-year anthologies in the U.S. and in Britain. I'm still proud of my double-luftmensch story.
The version printed here has had a couple of small cuts added—about five or six hundred words worth.
Written 1960——Published 1963
BETELGEUSE BRIDGE
You tell them, Alvarez, old boy; you know how to talk to them. This isn't my kind of Public Relations. All I care about is that they get the pitch exactly right with all the implications and complications and everything just the way they really are.
If it hurts, well, let them yell. Just use your words and get it right. Get it all.
You can start with the day the alien spaceship landed outside Baltimore. Makes you sick to think how we never tumbled, doesn't it, Alvarez? No more than a hop, skip and a jet from the Capitol dome, and we thought it was just a lucky accident.
Explain why we thought it was so lucky. Explain about the secrecy it made possible, how the farmer who telephoned the news was placed in special and luxurious custody, how a hand-picked cordon of M.P.s paced five square miles off into an emergency military reservation a few hours later, how Congress was called into secret session and the way it was all kept out of the newspapers.
How and why Trowson, my old sociology prof, was consulted once the problem became clear. How he blinked at the brass hats and striped pants and came up with the answer.
Me. I was the answer.
How my entire staff and I were plucked out of our New York offices, where we were quietly earning a million bucks, by a flying squad of the F.B.I. and air-mailed to Baltimore. Honestly, Alvarez, even after Trowson explained the situation to me, I was still irritated. Government hush-hush always makes me uncomfortable. Though I don't have to tell you how grateful I was for it later.
The spaceship itself was such a big surprise that I didn't even wet my lips when the first of the aliens slooshed out. After all those years of streamlined cigar-shapes the Sunday Supplement artists had dreamed up, that colorful and rococo spheroid rearing out of a barley field in Maryland looked less like an interplanetary vessel than an oversized ornament for a what-not table. Nothing that seemed like a rocket jet anywhere.
"And there's your job," the prof pointed. "Those two visitors."
They were standing on a flat metal plate surrounded by the highest the republic had elected or appointed. Nine feet of slimy green trunk tapering up from a rather wide base to a pointed top, and crested with a tiny pink and white shell. Two stalks with eyes on them that swung this way and that, and seemed muscular enough to throttle a man. And a huge wet slash of a mouth that showed whenever an edge of the squirming base lifted from the metal plate.
"Snails," I said. "Snails!"
"Or slugs," Trowson amended. "Gastropodal mollusks in any case." He gestured at the roiling white bush of hair that sprouted from his head. "But, Dick, that vestigial bit of coiled shell is even less an evolutionary memento than this. They're an older—and smarter—race."
"Smarter?"
He nodded. "When our engineers got curious, they were very courteously invited inside to inspect the ship. They came out with their mouths hanging."
I began to get uncomfortable. I ripped a small piece off my hangnail. "Well, naturally, prof, if they're so alien, so different—"
"Not only that. Superior. Get that, Dick, because it'll be very important in what you have to do. The best engineering minds that this country can assemble in a hurry are like a crowd of Caribbean Indians trying to analyze the rifle and compass from what they know of spears and windstorms. These creatures belong to a galaxy-wide civilization composed of races at least as advanced as they; we're a bunch of backward hicks in an unfrequented hinterland of space that's about to be opened to exploration. Exploitation, perhaps, if we can't measure up. We have to give a very good impression and we have to learn fast."
A dignified official with a briefcase detached himself from the nodding, smiling group around the aliens and started for us.
"Whew!" I commented brilliantly. "Fourteen ninety-two, repeat performance." I thought for a moment, not too clearly. "But why send the army and navy after me? I'm not going to be able to read blueprints from—from—"
"Betelgeuse. Ninth planet of the star Betelgeuse. No, Dick, we've already had Dr. Warbury out here. They learned English from him in two hours, although he hasn't identified a word of theirs in three days! And people like Lopez, like Mainzer, are going quietly psychotic trying to locate their power source. We have the best minds we can get to do the learning. Your job is different. We want you as a top-notch advertising man, a public relations executive. You're the good impression part of the program."
The official plucked at my sleeve and I shrugged him away. "
Isn't that the function of government glad-handers?" I asked Trowson.
"No. Don't you remember what you said when you first saw them? Snails! How do you think this country is going to take to the idea of snails—giant snails—who sneer condescendingly at our skyscraper cities, our atomic bombs, our most advanced mathematics? We're a conceited kind of monkey. Also, we're afraid of the dark."
There was a gentle official tap on my shoulder. I said "Please!" impatiently. I watched the warm little breeze ruffle Professor Trowson's slept-in clothes and noticed the tiny red streaks in his weary eyes.
"Mighty Monsters from Outer Space. Headlines like that, prof?"
"Slugs with Superiority Complexes. Dirty Slugs, more likely. We're lucky they landed in this country, and so close to the Capitol, too. In a few days, we'll have to call in the heads of other nations. Then, sometime soon after, the news will be out. We don't want our visitors attacked by mobs drunk on superstition, planetary isolation or any other form of tabloid hysteria. We don't want them carrying stories back to their civilization of being shot at by a suspendered fanatic who screamed, 'Go back where you came from, you furrin seafood!' We want to give them the impression that we are a fairly amiable, fairly intelligent race, that we can be dealt with reasonably well."
I nodded. "Yeah. So they'll set up trading posts on this planet instead of garrisons. But what do I do in all this?"
He punched my chest gently. "You, Dick—you do a job of public relations. You sell these aliens to the American people!"
The official had maneuvered around in front of me. I recognized him. He was the Undersecretary of State.
"Would you step this way, please?" he said. "I'd like to introduce you to our distinguished guests."
So I stepped this way please, and we went all across the field and clanked across the steel plate and stood next to our gastropodal guests.