Troublemakers: Stories by Harlan Ellison

by Harlan Ellison

  He crawled to his feet and unsteadily walked over to the machines. All the while glancing up to keep an eye on Eggzaborg. The machines hurt his eyes.

  A tube-like apparatus mounted on an octagonal casing was spitting–through an orifice–buttons. The shape of the machine hurt his eyes. The buttons were of varying sizes, colors, shapes. Shirt buttons, coat buttons, industrial sealing buttons, watch-cap buttons, canvas tent buttons, exotic-purpose buttons. Many buttons, all kinds of buttons. Many of them were cracked, or the sides of the thread holes were sharpened enough to split the thread. They all fell into a trough with holes, graded themselves, and plunged through attached tubes into cartons on the floor. Henry blinked once.

  The shape of the second machine hurt Henry’s eyes; the device seemed to be grinding a thin line between the head and shank of twopenny nails. The small buzz-wheel ground away while the nail spun, held between pincers. As soon as an almost invisible line had been worn on the metal, the nail dropped into a bucket. Henry blinked twice.

  The other machines, whose shapes really hurt Henry’s eyes, were performing equally petty, yet subversive, procedures. One was all angles and glass sheets, leading to the hole in the wall Henry had seen from below. It was glugging frantically. The puffs of glowing green fog were still erupting sporadically.

  “That one wilts lettuce,” Eggzaborg said, with pride.

  “It what?”

  The unie looked shocked. “You don’t think lettuce wilts of its own accord, do you?”

  “Well, I never thought about it–that is–food rots, it goes bad of its own…uh, nature…entropy…doesn’t it? It doesn’t? Sure it does, yeah?”

  “Poor thing,” the unie repeated, looking even more wistful than before. Pity shone in his eyes. “It’s almost like taking advantage of a very slow pony.”

  Henry felt this was the moment; but since the unie was obviously not human, he would have to handle things carefully. He was dealing with an alien intellect. Oh, yes, that was the long and short of it. An alien from another place in the universe. An e.t. sort of creature. Yes, indeed. He must never forget that. Probably a highly dangerous alien intellect. He didn’t look very dangerous. But then, one couldn’t tell with these alien intellects. One always has to be on one’s toes with these devious, cunning alien intellects, Orson Welles knew that.

  “All right, then,” said Henry, nay, challenged Henry, “so you wilt lettuce. So what? How does that aid you in conquering the Earth?”

  “Disorganization,” the unie answered in a deeply significant tone of voice, pointing one ominous stick finger at Henry. “Disorganization and demoralization! Undercuts you! Unsettles, and unhinges, you! Makes you teeter, throws you off balance, makes you uncertain about the basic structure of things: gravity, entropy, cooking times. Strikes at the very fibers of your security! Heh!” He chuckled several times more, and folded his hands. There was a lot of that: folding and unfolding.

  Henry began to realize just how alien this alien’s thought-processes really were. Though he didn’t recognize the psychological significance of wilted lettuce, it obviously meant something big to the unie. Big. He marked it down in his mind.

  Still, he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere meaningful. He decided to try another method to get the unie to talk, to reveal all. “I don’t get this,” Henry said. “I just don’t believe it. You’re just a demented magician or–or something. You aren’t what you say at all. By the way,” he added snidely, “just what the hell are you?”

  The unie leaped to his feet in the air, bumping his pointed head on the ceiling. More plaster sifted down. “Plummis!” cursed the little being, massaging his skull. Like the lettuce, his antenna had begun to wilt noticeably.

  He was furious. “You dare question the motives, machinations, methodology and…and…” he groped for an alliterative word, “power of Eggzaborg?” His face, normally an off-blue, not unpleasant sky tone, had slowly turned a fierce aquamarine. “Fool, dolt, imbecile, gleckbund, clod, bumpkin, jerk!” The words rolled off his tongue, spattered in Henry’s face. Henry cringed.

  He was beginning to think this might not be the most salutary approach.

  He became convinced of his miscalculation as his feet left the floor and he found himself hanging upside-down in the air, vibrating madly, all the pocket-change and keys and bismuth tablets cascading from his pockets, plonking him on the head as gravity had its way with them. His noticeably thick-lensed eyeglasses finally fell off. Everything became a blur. “S-s-s-stop! P-p-please s-s-s-stop!” Henry begged, twisting about in the air like a defective mixmaster. “U-u-u-uggedy-ug-ug!” he ugged as the unie bounced him, then pile-drove Henry’s head against the floor, numerous times, with numerous painful clunks. His pipe lighter fell out of his vest pocket and cracked him under the chin.

  Suddenly, it stopped. Henry felt his legs unstiffen, and he somersaulted over onto the floor, lying face up, quite a bit the worse for having been uniehandled. He was puffing with agony when the unie’s face floated into what little was left of his blurred range of vision.

  “Terribly sorry,” the unie said, looking down. He appeared to be sincerely concerned about his actions. He picked up Henry’s glasses and smoothly hooked them back in place on Henry’s head. “It’s just a result of waiting all these years. Six hundred years waiting. That’s a long time to anticipate, to yearn for relief on a conquest-shift that, at best, would make anyone edgy. This planet isn’t all that entertaining, meaning no offense; but you do only have the one moon, the one sun, no flemnall, and a mere four seasons. I’m three hundred and fifty years past due for the usual, standard rotation relief, and I really need some. I’m six hundred years total time on this unimportant tour of duty and, well, I’m feelin’ mighty low.” He sighed, bit what little there was of his lips, and sank into silent glumness.

  Henry felt a bit of his strength coming back. At least enough to ask a few more questions.

  “T-tell me the story, E-Eggzaborg.”

  The unie came to a floating halt above the prostrate Henry Lecalir. “Well…” he began, with reluctance to talk to this cretinous human, “the story is simple. I graduated with honors from Dorvis Lepham. One of the top phages, of course. First in quatt wunkery, first in padgett, sixteenth in crumbpf, but the professor had it in for me…well, anyway…I am a unie. I was thus assigned to–”

  Henry cut him off, “What is a unie?”

  “Shut up, stop interrupting!”

  “But where did you come from?”

  The unie purpled again, and Henry felt (with growing terror) his body twitch, as though it were about to ascend yet again. But it didn’t, and he knew the unie had brought his temper under control. “Plummis, man! Let me finish! Stop your blasphemous interrupting!” Snappish. Very snappish. Probably not a congenial species, in the main. Likely did not play well with other species.

  Henry quickly motioned him to continue, calming him with the same movement.

  Eggzaborg huffed, then resumed. “Space, moron. Space. Out there.” He pointed. Generally in the direction of some space. Not all space, but at least some space. “I came from space. Now don’t interrupt–I come from out there where you have no idea a place exists. Both in space, and in between layers of space. Interstitial expanses. Voluminous voids. I am here because–I am here because–well, plummis, fellow, I’m here to conquer!” He vacillated his antenna helplessly, at a loss to embellish the explanation.

  “But why?”

  “Why? Why? How obstinately ignorant can you be? Haven’t I told you: I’m a unie! What does that make you think of?”

  “Fried shrimp,” replied Henry.

  “Oooooh!” The unie hurtled about the room, barely missing collisions with walls and machines. “The impertinence! That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed so well hidden! I can’t stand the stupidity of you people! Rude! You’re unconscionably rude! Probably the most insulting, rude, boorish species in this galaxy, possibly the entire expanding universe! When you think of unie you just natur
ally think of conquest!”

  “I do?” asked Henry, still not quite convinced.

  The unie subsided into muted sulfurous cursing.

  Henry decided to try flattery. “You speak English very well.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” snapped the unie. “I invented it!”

  That quieted Henry again. He wasn’t quite sure for a moment whether he was lying on floor or ceiling. “And French? Did you invent French, too? What about Tagalog and Aramaic? Basque is nice. I’ve always wondered about Basque. So: Basque, too?”

  The unie looked genuinely bewildered for a moment, then tried again, looking at Henry with piercing eyes, daring him to interrupt. “I was graduated in a large class. There was much talk that year (though we don’t judge by your years, of course) (we don’t even call them years) (in fact, ‘years’ is an ugly word, and sounds like pure gibberish if you say it over and over) (years years years years years years, years years years, see what I’m pointing out here) as I was saying, there was much talk of the coming Flib. Though I thought it was superfluous exhalations, I was worried by the rapidity with which my classmates were being sent out.” He shivered fearfully, and mumbled, “The Flib…oh.” He trembled again, then resumed. “When my placket was oiled, and I knew I was to go out, all other thoughts fled from my head.

  “Now, I’ve been here three hundred and fifty years longer than my shift, six hundred years total, six hundred years, and I can’t contact the Lephamaster. The Flib has likely already vastened longitudinally. It’s not that I’m exactly frightened,” he hastened to add, “it’s just that I’m a little, well, worried, and I’d like a drink of yerbl. Oh yes,” and he looked wistful, “just a melkh of pale, thick, moist yerbl.”

  “If you’ve been here six hundred years,” asked Henry, beginning to rise to a sitting position, “why haven’t you conquered us already?”

  The unie looked at him strangely. “Who ever heard of conquering in less than four thousand years? It wouldn’t be ethical. We’re talking ethics here, you barbarian.” He pouted and shined his button with a forearm.

  Henry decided to risk another edgy question: “But how can writing cookie fortunes and wilting lettuce conquer us?”

  “That isn’t all I do,” responded the unie. “Why, I make people smile (that’s very important), and I rust water pipes, and I make pig’s tails curl, and I cure colds, and I make shingles fall off roofs, and I stop wars, and I dirty white shoes, and I–” He seemed intending to continue for some time, but Henry, confused, stopped him.

  “Excuse my interruption,” he said, “but I don’t understand. There’s probably a point I’ve missed. What’s the overall plan?”

  The unie threw up his hands in exasperation, and Henry noticed for the first time that the alien had only four fingers on each.

  “That ‘plan’ as you so casually dismiss it, you meat-plug, has been deployed for millennia, by the unies,” the little being said, “and no one has understood it but the top Lephamasters. How the blazes do you expect me to explain anything as complicated as that to a buffoon like you? That plan was formulated to handle four thousand years of exigencies, and you want a rundown in four sentences! Utter imbecile!”

  “You’ve been here six hundred years,” murmured Henry in awe.

  “Yes. Rather clever the way I’ve kept out of sight, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Henry felt a spark of belligerence burning. All the slamming and jouncing and bouncing had finally overcome even his insatiable curiosity, and he was now more than slightly cheesed off. “I’ll bet you’re the basis for all those dumb legends about gnomes and gremlins and poltergeists; and flying saucers, too. Not such a terrific job if you ask me. Not to mention that your, what’s his name, your Lephamaster seems to have forgotten you even exist!”

  Eggzaborg spread his hands in unhappiness. “There are bound to be tiny slip-ups in six hundred years. Particularly with the defective screens on those,” he cursed in an alien tongue, “raw-material trucks I use. They’re very old now, pretty worn, and every once in a while some snoopy human will see one coming or going.”

  Henry realized he was, in fact, referring to UFOs, to flying saucers. Then, what the unie had said a minute before suddenly sank through to Henry’s conscious: “You say you stop wars?” Amazement rang in his voice.

  “Certainly. How else can I conquer you? If you keep killing each other off, what’ll be left for me to conquer?” He looked at Henry appealingly. “I do wish you’d cease all that shooting and stabbing and blowing-up nonsense.”

  Any would-be tyrants Henry had ever read about had always encouraged inner strife. The unie seemed to have his wires crossed. “Are you sure you’re supposed to stop wars?”

  “Certainly!”

  Henry finally decided it was the reverse-thinking of the strange alien intellect. He couldn’t fathom the rationale, but it certainly seemed like a good deal for humanity.

  “What are those button and nail machines over there doing?”

  “Those are implement-cripplers,” the unie said, with ill-concealed pride. “Have you ever stopped to wonder why you still use buttons, rather than–for instance–clasps, clamps, zippers, Velcro, seams and other much better contrivances? The button is easily lost, loses its center when sent through the laundry, breaks threads, isn’t very attractive, and is difficult to open and close. Ever wonder why you still use them?” He didn’t wait for Henry to answer. “Because I keep sifting supplies of them into stores, and they have to sell them, and that creates more of a demand.

  “And there is, of course, the constant mindwashing of my 24-hour-a-day Coercive Brain Ray. That helps a lot.”

  Henry said, “Buttons. Insidious, no doubt about it. And the ‘nail crippler’ machine over there?

  “The nails are treated so they go in at angles. You ever see anyone who could hit ten consecutive nails straight into a piece of wood? They slant, they bend, they break! That’s what my sweet little machine over there does! Don’t you just love it? The other machine, the trapezoidal one, helps keep the birthrate up, to offset the death-rate in your wars.” He looked at Henry sternly. “It puts pin-sized holes in pro–”

  Henry blanched, cut him off quickly. “Er–that’s all right; I understand. But what about those fortune cookies? Why the weird messages?”

  “Demoralization. See how they bothered you? Just think of a million people opening fortune cookies and finding the message, No way, inside! They find a message, Forget about it, or It’s lost, you’ll never find it. What do you think happens to their frame of mind, their self-confidence, their joie de vivre? They don’t know it, but it unnerves them for the rest of the week, throws them off-balance, to find a fortune cookie fortune, and all it says, enigmatically, maddeningly, is ‘Tuesday!’”

  “Do they all say ‘Tuesday’?”

  “The dated ones do. That’s the only day I’m sure there will be no ominous omens of a Flib.” He shuddered. Henry didn’t know what Flib was, but the unie certainly seemed to be bothered, even terrified, of it. “Oh, I’m so pleased they’re getting results! I think I’ll step up production.”

  He walked down the air to a flat, multi-snake-armed machine, and punched a tip at one end. The machine began to wonkle.

  Wonkle, wonkle, wonkle. “Plummis!” Eggzaborg swore, dealing the machine a vicious kick. The machine wonkled once more in agony, then began winkling. Winkle, winkle, winkle.

  Eggzaborg looked relieved. “You’d think even this refurbished equipment would hold up better. It’s only about a thousand years old. We don’t judge in years, of course,” he reminded Henry again. “No years. We’re not from here, remember?”

  “Why are you bothering to tell me all this?” asked Henry. “I should think you’d have to keep all this secret…or get rid of me.” Suddenly Henry was very much more frightened. “Are you going to kill me…and…recycle my mortal flesh?”

  The unie settled back in its cross-legged crouch. “Are you nuts? Kill you?!? I won’t
be here in another ten minutes, and you’ll never find me again. Besides, who’d believe you if you told them what you’d seen? You people are such moles.” He began to laugh. High, thin, squeaky. It rasped on Henry’s nerves. “Kill you. Recycle you. Oh, that’s rich! What ultra stupegoids you humans be!”

  Henry lost his temper with flashing poor judgment. “You, sir,” he began, from a lifetime of practicing the amenities, “are a charlatan and an egotistical…”

  He never finished the epithet. Suddenly every coin in his pockets–every coin that was left from his previous jouncing–became screeching hot; every hair in every pore developed a life of its own, writhing and twisting, wrenching his skin over every inch of his agonized body; the soles of his shoes became peanut butter; his nose began to run; his pen leaked through his shirt. All at once.

  Then he was turned upside-down, downside-up in the air yet again, and began to experience alternate hot and cold waves of stomach-convulsing nausea.

  “You know something,” the unie said, quietly, “if I didn’t want to conquer you wretched gobbets so much, I’d–I’d kill the lot of you. You’re an arrogant…human being!” He said the last, much as Henry would have said “leper,” or “dog catcher,” or “televangelist.”

  “Now scram, you nosey, rude simian! And just wait three thousand years! Just you wait–you’ll see!”

  An instant later, Henry found himself in an apartment at 6991 Perry Avenue, 5th Floor, sharing a bathtub with a very small naked child and her three plastic ducks. He sputtered several times, quacked once in hopes it might distract someone enough so they would not notice he wasn’t a duck, clambered dripping from the tub, and was shortly thereafter taken into police custody, read his rights, casually but thoroughly bludgeoned, dragged down five flights of tenement stairs, and eventually transported to Incarceration Island. Not curiously, Henry was no longer curious.

  The cell was drafty, and Henry was certain he was coming down with a beastly case of intestinal flu. His cellmate was ignoring him, while picking between his naked toes and eating what he discovered there. Henry was ill, he was nauseated, and he was still confused by the entire escapade. Nonetheless, he was desperately trying to cling to the impression that things were better than most people thought. (Some jobs are simply not worth the effort.)