by William Tenn
“Heads you win, tails I lose.”
The liquid gold of Dempsey’s laughter poured. “I see what you mean, Hebster. Either way, UM or HF, you wind up a smear-mark on the sands of time. You had your chance when we asked for contributions from public-spirited businessmen four years ago. Quite a few of your competitors were able to see the valid relationship between economics and politics. Woodran of the Underwood Investment Trust is a first-echelon official today. Not a single one of your top executives wears a razor. But, even so, whatever happens to you will be mild compared to the Primeys.”
“The Aliens may object to their body-servants being mauled.”
“There are no Aliens!” Dempsey replied in a completely altered voice. He sounded as if he had stiffened too much to be able to move his lips.
“No Aliens? Is that your latest line? You don’t mean that!”
“There are only Primeys—creatures who have resigned from human responsibility and are therefore able to do many seemingly miraculous things, which real humanity refuses to do because of the lack of dignity involved. But there are no Aliens. Aliens are a Primey myth.”
Hebster grunted. “That is the ideal way of facing an unpleasant fact. Stare right through it.”
“If you insist on talking about such illusions as Aliens,” the rustling and angry voice cut in, “I’m afraid we can’t continue the conversation. You’re evidently going Prime, Hebster.”
The line went dead.
Hebster scraped a finger inside the mouthpiece rim. “He believes his own stuff.” he said in an awed voice. “For all of the decadent urbanity, he has to have the same reassurance he gives his followers—the horrible, superior thing just isn’t there!”
Greta Seidenheim was waiting at the door with his briefcase and both their coats. As he came away from the desk, he said, “I won’t tell you not to come along, Greta, but—”
“Good,” she said, swinging along behind him. “Think we’ll make it to—wherever we’re going?”
“Arizona. The first and largest Alien settlement. The place our friends with the funny names come from.”
“What can you do there that you can’t do here?”
“Frankly, Greta, I don’t know. But it’s a good idea to lose myself for a while. Then again, I want to get in the area where all this agony originates and take a close look; I’m an off-the-cuff businessman; I’ve done all of my important figuring on the spot.”
There was bad news waiting for them outside the helicopter. “Mr. Hebster,” the pilot told him tonelessly while cracking a dry stick of gum, “the stratojet’s been seized by the SIC. Are we still going? If we do it in this thing, it won’t be very far or very fast.”
“We’re still going,” Hebster said after a moment’s hesitation.
They climbed in. The two Primeys sat on the floor in the rear, sneezing conversationally at each other. Williams waved respectfully at his boss. “Gentle as lambs,” he said. “In fact, they made one. I had to throw it out.”
The large pot-bellied craft climbed up its rope of air and started forward from the Hebster Building.
“There must have been a leak,” Greta muttered angrily. “They heard about the dead Primey. Somewhere in the organization there’s a leak that I haven’t been able to find. The SIC heard about the dead Primey and now they’re hunting us down. Real efficient, I am!”
Hebster smiled at her grimly. She was very efficient. So was Personnel and a dozen other subdivisions of the organization. So was Hebster himself. But these were functioning members of a normal business designed for stable times. Political spies! If Dempsey could have spies and saboteurs all over Hebster Securities, why couldn’t Braganza? They’d catch him before he had even started running; they’d bring him back before he could find a loophole.
They’d bring him back for trial, perhaps, for what in all probability would be known to history as the Bloody Hebster Incident. The incident that had precipitated a world revolution.
“Mr. Hebster, they’re getting restless,” Williams called out. “Should I relax ‘em out, kind of?”
Hebster sat up sharply, hopefully. “No,” he said. “Leave them alone!” He watched the suddenly agitated Primeys very closely. This was the odd chance for which he’d brought them along! Years of haggling with Primeys had taught him a lot about them. They were good for other things than sheer gimmick-craft.
Two specks appeared on the windows. They enlarged sleekly into jets with SIC insignia.
“Pilot!” Hebster called, his eyes on Larry, who was pulling painfully at his beard. “Get away from the controls! Fast! Did you hear me? That was an order! Get away from those controls!”
The man moved off reluctantly. He was barely in time. The control board dissolved into rattling purple shards behind him. The vanes of the gyro seemed to flower into indigo saxophones. Their ears rang with supersonic frequencies as they rose above the jets on a spout of unimaginable force.
Five seconds later they were in Arizona.
They piled out of their weird craft into a sage-cluttered desert.
“I don’t ever want to know what my windmill was turned into,” the pilot commented, “or what was used to push it along—but how did the Primey come to understand the cops were after us?”
“I don’t think he knew that,” Hebster explained, “but he was sensitive enough to know he was going home, and that somehow those jets were there to prevent it. And so he functioned, in terms of his interests, in what was almost a human fashion. He protected himself.”
“Going home “ Larry said. He’d been listening very closely to Hebster, dribbling from the right-hand corner of his mouth as he listened. “Haemostat, hammersdarts, hump. Home is where the hate is. Hit is where the hump is. Home and locks the door.”
S.S. Lusitania had started on one leg and favored them with her peculiar fleshy smile. “Hindsight,” she suggested archly, “is no more than home site. Gabble, honk?”
Larry started after her, some three feet off the ground. He walked the air slowly and painfully as if the road he traveled were covered with numerous small boulders, all of them pitilessly sharp.
“Goodbye, people,” Hebster said. “I’m off to see the wizard with my friends in greasy gray here. Remember, when the SIC catches up to your unusual vessel—stay close to it for that purpose, by the way—it might be wise to refer to me as someone who forced you into this. You can tell them I’ve gone into the wilderness looking for a solution, figuring that if I went Prime I’d still be better off than as a punching bag whose ownership is being hotly disputed by such characters as P. Braganza and Vandermeer Dempsey. I’ll be back with my mind or on it.”
He patted Greta’s cheek on the wet spot; then he walked deftly away in pursuit of S.S. Lusitania and Larry. He glanced back once and smiled as he saw them looking curiously forlorn, especially Williams, the chunky young man who earned his living by guarding other people’s bodies. The Primeys followed a route of sorts, but it seemed to have been designed by someone bemused by the motions of an accordion. Again and again it doubled back upon itself, folded across itself, went back a hundred yards and started all over again.
This was Primey country—Arizona, where the first and largest Alien settlement had been made. There were mighty few humans in this corner of the southwest any more—just the Aliens and their coolies.
“Larry,” Hebster called as an uncomfortable thought struck him. “Larry! Do...do your masters know I’m coming?”
Missing his step as he looked up at Hebster’s peremptory question, the Primey tripped and plunged to the ground. He rose, grimaced at Hebster and shook his head. “You are not a businessman,” he said. “Here there can be no business. Here there can be only humorous what-you-might-call-worship. The movement to the universal, the inner nature—The realization, complete and eternal, of the partial and evanescent that alone enables...that alone enables—” His clawed fingers writhed into each other, as if he were desperately trying to pull a communicable meaning out of
the palms. He shook his head with a slow rolling motion from side to side.
Hebster saw with a shock that the old man was crying. Then going Prime had yet another similarity to madness! It gave the human an understanding of something thoroughly beyond himself, a mental summit he was constitutionally incapable of mounting. It gave him a glimpse of some psychological promised land, then buried him, still yearning, in his own inadequacies. And it left him at last bereft of pride in his realizable accomplishments with a kind of myopic half-knowledge of where he wanted to go but with no means of getting there.
“When I first came,” Larry was saying haltingly, his eyes squinting into Hebster’s face, as if he knew what the businessman was thinking, “when first I tried to know...I mean the charts and textbooks I carried here, my statistics, my plotted curves were so useless. All playthings I found, disorganized, based on shadow-thought. And then, Hebster, to watch real-thought, real-control! You’ll see the joy—You’ll serve beside us, you will! Oh, the enormous lifting—”
His voice died into angry incoherencies as he bit into his fist. S.S. Lusitania came up, still hopping on one foot. “Larry,” she suggested in a very soft voice, “gabble-honk Hebster away?”
He looked surprised, then nodded. The two Primeys linked arms and clambered laboriously back up to the invisible road from which Larry had fallen. They stood facing him for a moment, looking like a weird, ragged, surrealistic version of Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Then they disappeared and darkness fell around Hebster as if it had been knocked out of the jar. He felt under himself cautiously and sat down on the sand, which retained all the heat of daytime Arizona.
Now!
Suppose an Alien came. Suppose an Alien asked him point-blank what it was that he wanted. That would be bad. Algernon Hebster, businessman extraordinary—slightly on the run, at the moment, of course—didn’t know what he wanted; not with reference to Aliens.
He didn’t want them to leave, because the Primey technology he had used in over a dozen industries was essentially an interpretation and adaptation of Alien methods. He didn’t want them to stay, because whatever was orderly in his world was dissolving under the acids of their omnipresent superiority.
He also knew that he personally did not want to go Prime.
What was left then? Business? Well, there was Braganza’s question. What does a businessman do when demand is so well controlled that it can be said to have ceased to exist?
Or what does he do in a case like the present, when demand might be said to be nonexistent, since there was nothing the Aliens seemed to want of Man’s puny hoard?
“He finds something they want,” Hebster said out loud.
How? How? Well, the Indian still sold his decorative blankets to the paleface as a way of life, as a source of income. And he insisted on being paid in cash—not firewater. If only, Hebster thought, he could somehow contrive to meet an Alien—he’d find out soon enough what its needs were, what was basically desired.
And then as the retort-shaped, the tube-shaped, the bell-shaped bottles materialized all around him, he understood! They had been forming the insistent questions in his mind. And they weren’t satisfied with the answers he had found thus far. They liked answers. They liked answers very much indeed. If he was interested, there was always a way—
A great dots-in-bottle brushed his cortex and he screamed. “No! I don’t want to!” he explained desperately.
Ping! went the dots-in-bottle and Hebster grabbed at his body. His continuing flesh reassured him. He felt very much like the girl in Greek mythology who had begged Zeus for the privilege of seeing him in the full regalia of his godhood. A few moments after her request had been granted, there had been nothing left of the inquisitive female but a fine feathery ash.
The bottles were swirling in and out of each other in a strange and intricate dance from which there radiated emotions vaguely akin to curiosity, yet partaking of amusement and rapture.
Why rapture? Hebster was positive he had caught that note, even allowing for the lack of similarity between mental patterns. He ran a hurried dragnet through his memory, caught a few corresponding items and dropped them after a brief, intensive examination. What was he trying to remember—what were his supremely efficient businessman’s instincts trying to remind him of?
The dance became more complex, more rapid. A few bottles had passed under his feet and Hebster could see them, undulating and spinning some ten feet below the surface of the ground as if their presence had made the Earth a transparent as well as permeable medium. Completely unfamiliar with all matters Alien as he was, not knowing—not caring!—whether they danced as an expression of the counsel they were taking together, or as a matter of necessary social ritual, Hebster was able nonetheless to sense an approaching climax. Little crooked lines of green lightning began to erupt between the huge bottles. Something exploded near his left ear. He rubbed his face fearfully and moved away. The bottles followed, maintaining him in the imprisoning sphere of their frenzied movements.
Why rapture? Back in the city, the Aliens had had a terribly studious air about them as they hovered, almost motionless, above the works and lives of mankind. They were cold and careful scientists and showed not the slightest capacity for...for—
So he had something. At last he had something. But what do you do with an idea when you can’t communicate it and can’t act upon it yourself?
Ping!
The previous invitation was being repeated, more urgently. Ping! Ping! Ping!
“No!” he yelled and tried to stand. He found he couldn’t. “I’m not...I don’t want to go Prime!”
There was detached, almost divine laughter.
He felt that awful scrabbling inside his brain as if two or three entities were jostling each other within it. He shut his eyes hard and thought. He was close, he was very close. He had an idea, but he needed time to formulate it—a little while to figure out just exactly what the idea was and just exactly what to do with it!
Ping, ping, ping! Ping, ping, ping!
He had a headache. He felt as if his mind were being sucked out of his head. He tried to hold on to it. He couldn’t.
All right, then. He relaxed abruptly, stopped trying to protect himself. But with his mind and his mouth, he yelled. For the first time in his life and with only a partially formed conception of whom he was addressing the desperate call to, Algernon Hebster screamed for help.
“I can do it!” he alternately screamed and thought. “Save money, save time, save whatever it is you want to save, whoever you are and whatever you call yourself—I can help you save! Help me, help me—We can do it—but hurry. Your problem can be solved—Economize. The balance-sheet—Help—”
The words and frantic thoughts spun in and out of each other like the contracting rings of Aliens all around him. He kept screaming, kept the focus on his mental images, while, unbearably, somewhere inside him, a gay and jocular force began to close a valve on his sanity.
Suddenly, he had absolutely no sensation. Suddenly, he knew dozens of things he had never dreamed he could know and had forgotten a thousand times as many. Suddenly, he felt that every nerve in his body was under control of his forefinger. Suddenly, he—
Ping, ping, ping! Ping! Ping! PING! PING! PING! PING!
“...like that,” someone said.
“What, for example?” someone else asked.
“Well, they don’t even lie normally. He’s been sleeping like a human being. They twist and moan in their sleep, the Primeys do, for all the world like habitual old drunks. Speaking of moans, here comes our boy.”
Hebster sat up on the army cot, rattling his head. The fears were leaving him, and, with the fears gone, he would no longer be hurt. Braganza, highly concerned and unhappy, was standing next to his bed with a man who was obviously a doctor. Hebster smiled at both of them, manfully resisting the temptation to drool out a string of nonsense syllables.
“Hi, fellas,” he said. “Here I come, ungathering
nuts in May.”
“You don’t mean to tell me you communicated!” Braganza yelled. “You communicated and didn’t go Prime!”
Hebster raised himself on an elbow and glanced out past the tent flap to where Greta Seidenheim stood on the other side of a port-armed guard. He waved his fist at her, and she nodded a wide-open smile back.
“Found me lying in the desert like a waif, did you?”
“Found you!” Braganza spat. “You were brought in by Primeys, man. First time in history they ever did that. We’ve been waiting for you to come to in the serene faith that once you did, everything would be all right.”
The corporation president rubbed his forehead. “It will be, Braganza, it will be. Just Primeys, eh? No Aliens helping them?”
“Aliens?” Braganza swallowed. “What led you to believe—What gave you reason to hope that...that Aliens would help the Primeys bring you in?”
“Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word ‘help.’ But I did think there would be a few Aliens in the group that escorted my unconscious body back to you. Sort of an honor guard, Braganza. It would have been a real nice gesture, don’t you think?”
The SIC man looked at the doctor, who had been following the conversation with interest. “Mind stepping out for a minute?” he suggested.
He walked behind the man and dropped the tent flap into place. Then he came around to the foot of the army cot and pulled on his mustache vigorously. “Now, see here, Hebster, if you keep up this clowning, so help me I will slit your belly open and snap your intestines back in your face! What happened?”
“What happened?” Hebster laughed and stretched slowly, carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking the bones of his arm. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer that question completely. And there’s a section of my mind that’s very glad that I won’t. This much I remember clearly: I had an idea. I communicated it to the proper and interested party. We concluded—this party and I—a tentative agreement as agents, the exact terms of the agreement to be decided by our principals and its complete ratification to be contingent upon their acceptance. Furthermore, we—All right, Braganza, all right! I’ll tell it straight. Put down that folding chair. Remember, I’ve just been through a pretty unsettling experience!”
