by William Tenn
The SIC man’s face slowly deepened into purple. “Well, are you coming in, or aren’t you? Remember, Hebster, in these times, a man who insists on business as usual is a traitor to history.”
“I think Kleimbocher is the end.” Hebster nodded to himself. “Not much point in chasing Alien mentality if you’re going to lose your best men on the way. I say let’s forget all this nonsense of trying to live as equals in the same universe with Aliens. Let’s concentrate on human problems and be grateful that they don’t come into our major population centers and tell us to shove over.”
The telephone rang. Braganza had dropped back into his swivel chair. He let the instrument squeeze out several piercing sonic bubbles while he clicked his strong square teeth and maintained a carefully focused glare at his visitor. Finally, he picked it up, and gave it the verbal minima:
“Speaking. He is here. I’ll tell him. ’Bye.”
He brought his lips together, kept them pursed for a moment and then, abruptly, swung around to face the window.
“Your office, Hebster. Seems your wife and son are in town and have to see you on business. She the one you divorced ten years ago?”
Hebster nodded at his back and rose once more. “Probably wants her semiannual alimony dividend bonus. I’ll have to go. Sonia never does office morale any good.”
This meant trouble, he knew. “Wife-and-son” was executive code for something seriously wrong with Hebster Securities, Inc. He had not seen his wife since she had been satisfactorily maneuvered into giving him control of his son’s education. As far as he was concerned, she had earned a substantial income for life by providing him with a well-mothered heir.
“Listen!” Braganza said sharply as Hebster reached the door. He still kept his eyes studiously on the street. “I tell you this: You don’t want to come in with us. All right! You’re a businessman first and a world citizen second. All right! But keep your nose clean, Hebster. If we catch you the slightest bit off base from now on, you’ll get hit with everything. We’ll not only pull the most spectacular trial this corrupt old planet has ever seen, but somewhere along the line, we’ll throw you and your entire organization to the wolves. We’ll see to it that Humanity First pulls the Hebster Tower down around your ears.”
Hebster shook his head, licked his lips. “Why? What would that accomplish?”
“Hah! It would give a lot of us here the craziest kind of pleasure. But it would also relieve us temporarily of some of the mass pressure we’ve been feeling. There’s always the chance that Dempsey would lose control of his hotter heads, that they’d go on a real gory rampage, make with the sound and the fury sufficiently to justify full deployment of troops. We could knock off Dempsey and all of the big-shot Firsters then, because John Q. United Mankind would have seen to his own vivid satisfaction and injury what a dangerous mob they are.”
“This,” Hebster commented bitterly, “is the idealistic, legalistic world government!”
Braganza’s chair spun around to face Hebster and his fist came down on the desk top with all the crushing finality of a magisterial gavel. “No, it is not! It is the SIC, a plenipotentiary and highly practical bureau of the UM, especially created to organize a relationship between Alien and human. Furthermore, it’s the SIC in a state of the greatest emergency when the reign of law and world government may topple at a demagogue’s belch. Do you think”—his head snaked forward belligerently, his eyes slitted to thin lines of purest contempt—“that the career and fortune, even the life, let us say, of as openly selfish a slug as you, Hebster, would be placed above that of the representative body of two billion socially operating human beings?”
The SIC official thumped his sloppily buttoned chest. “Braganza, I tell myself now, you’re lucky he’s too hungry for his blasted profit to take you up on that offer. Think how much fun it’s going to be to sink a hook into him when he makes a mistake at last! To drop him onto the back of Humanity First so that they’ll run amuck and destroy themselves! Oh, get out, Hebster. I’m through with you.”
He had made a mistake, Hebster reflected as he walked out of the armory and snapped his fingers at a gyrocab. The SIC was the most powerful single government agency in a Primey-infested world; offending them for a man in his position was equivalent to a cab driver delving into the more uncertain aspects of a traffic cop’s ancestry in the policeman’s popeyed presence.
But what could he do? Working with the SIC would mean working under Braganza—and since maturity, Algernon Hebster had been quietly careful to take orders from no man. It would mean giving up a business which, with a little more work and a little more time, might somehow still become the dominant combine on the planet. And worst of all, it would mean acquiring a social orientation to replace the calculating businessman’s viewpoint which was the closest thing to a soul he had ever known.
The doorman of his building preceded him at a rapid pace down the side corridor that led to his private elevator and flourished aside for him to enter. The car stopped on the twenty-third floor. With a heart that had sunk so deep as to have practically foundered, Hebster picked his way along the wide-eyed clerical stares that lined the corridor. At the entrance to General Laboratory 23B, two tall men in the gray livery of his personal bodyguard moved apart to let him enter. If they had been recalled after having been told to take the day off, it meant that a full-dress emergency was being observed. He hoped that it had been declared in time to prevent any publicity leakage.
It had, Greta Seidenheim assured him. “I was down here applying the clamps five minutes after the fuss began. Floors twenty-one through twenty-five are closed off and all outside lines are being monitored. You can keep your employees an hour at most past five o’clock—which gives you a maximum of two hours and fourteen minutes.”
He followed her green-tipped fingernail to the far corner of the lab where a body lay wrapped in murky rags. Theseus. Protruding from his back was the yellowed ivory handle of quite an old German S.S. dagger, 1942 edition. The silver swastika on the hilt had been replaced by an ornate symbol—an HF. Blood had soaked Theseus’ long matted hair into an ugly red rug.
A dead Primey, Hebster thought, staring down hopelessly. In his building, in the laboratory to which the Primey had been spirited two or three jumps ahead of Yost and Funatti. This was capital offense material—if the courts ever got a chance to weigh it.
“Look at the dirty Primey-lover!” a slightly familiar voice jeered on his right. “He’s scared! Make money out of that, Hebster!”
The corporation president strolled over to the thin man with the knobby, completely shaven head who was tied to an unused steampipe. The man’s tie, which hung outside his laboratory smock, sported an unusual ornament about halfway down. It took Hebster several seconds to identify it. A miniature gold safety razor upon a black “3.”
“He’s a third-echelon official of Humanity First!”
“He’s also Charlie Verus of Hebster Laboratories,” an extremely short man with a corrugated forehead told him. “My name is Margritt, Mr. Hebster, Dr. J.H. Margritt. I spoke to you on the communicator when the Primeys arrived.”
Hebster shook his head determinedly. He waved back the other scientists who were milling around him self-consciously. “How long have third-echelon officials, let alone ordinary members of Humanity First, been receiving salary checks in my laboratories?”
“I don’t know.” Margritt shrugged up at him. “Theoretically no Firsters can be Hebster employees. Personnel is supposed to be twice as efficient as the SIC when it comes to sifting background. They probably are. But what can they do when an employee joins Humanity First after he passed his probationary period? These proselytizing times you’d need a complete force of secret police to keep tabs on all the new converts!”
“When I spoke to you earlier in the day, Margritt, you indicated disapproval of Verus. Don’t you think it was your duty to let me know I had a Firster official about to mix it up with Primeys?”
The little ma
n beat a violent negative back and forth with his chin. “I’m paid to supervise research, Mr. Hebster, not to coordinate your labor relations nor vote your political ticket!”
Contempt—the contempt of the creative researcher for the businessman-entre-preneur who paid his salary and was now in serious trouble—flickered behind every word he spoke. Why, Hebster wondered irritably, did people so despise a man who made money? Even the Primeys back in his office, Yost and Funatti, Braganza, Margritt—who had worked in his laboratories for years. It was his only talent. Surely, as such, it was as valid as a pianist’s?
“I’ve never liked Charlie Verus,” the lab chief went on, “but we never had reason to suspect him of Firstism! He must have hit the third-echelon rank about a week ago, eh, Bert?”
“Yeah,” Bert agreed from across the room. “The day he came in an hour late, broke every Florence flask in the place and told us all dreamily that one day we might be very proud to tell our grandchildren that we’d worked in the same lab with Charles Bolop Verus.”
“Personally,” Margritt commented, “I thought he might have just finished writing a book which proved that the Great Pyramid was nothing more than a prophecy in stone of our modern textile designs. Verus was that kind. But it probably was his little safety razor that tossed him up so high. I’d say he got the promotion as a sort of payment in advance for the job he finally did today.”
Hebster ground his teeth at the carefully hairless captive who tried, unsuccessfully, to spit in his face; he hurried back to the door, where his private secretary was talking to the bodyguard who had been on duty in the lab.
Beyond them, against the wall, stood Larry and S.S. Lusitania conversing in a low-voiced and anxious gabble-honk. They were evidently profoundly disturbed. S.S. Lusitania kept plucking tiny little elephants out of her rags which, kicking and trumpeting tinnily, burst like malformed bubbles as she dropped them on the floor. Larry scratched his tangled beard nervously as he talked, periodically waving a hand at the ceiling, which was already studded with fifty or sixty replicas of the dagger buried in Theseus. Hebster couldn’t help thinking anxiously of what could have happened to his building if the Primeys had been able to act human enough to defend themselves.
“Listen, Mr. Hebster,” the bodyguard began, “I was told not to—”
“Save it,” Hebster rapped out. “This wasn’t your fault. Even Personnel isn’t to blame. Me and my experts deserve to have our necks chopped for falling so far behind the times. We can analyze any trend but the one which will make us superfluous. Greta! I want my roof helicopter ready to fly and my personal stratojet at LaGuardia alerted. Move, girl! And you… Williams, is it?” he queried, leaning forward to read the bodyguard’s name on his badge, “Williams, pack these two Primeys into my helicopter upstairs and stand by for a fast take-off.”
He turned. “Everyone else!” he called. “You will be allowed to go home at six. You will be paid one hour’s overtime. Thank you.”
Charlie Verus started to sing as Hebster left the lab. By the time he reached the elevator, several of the clerks in the hallway had defiantly picked up the hymn. Hebster paused outside the elevator as he realized that fully one-fourth of the clerical personnel, male and female, were following Verus’ cracked and mournful but terribly earnest tenor.
Mine eyes have seen the coming
of the glory of the shorn:
We will overturn the cesspool
where the Primey slime is born,
We’ll be wearing cleanly garments
as we face a human morn—
The First are on the march!
Glory, glory, hallelujah,
Glory, glory, hallelujah…
If it was like this in Hebster Securities, he thought wryly as he came into his private office, how fast was Humanity First growing among the broad masses of people? Of course, many of those singing could be put down as sympathizers rather than converts, people who were suckers for choral groups and vigilante posses—but how much more momentum did an organization have to generate to acquire the name of political juggernaut?
The only encouraging aspect was the SIC’s evident awareness of the danger and the unprecedented steps they were prepared to take as countermeasure.
Unfortunately, the unprecedented steps would take place upon Hebster.
He now had a little less than two hours, he reflected, to squirm out of the most serious single crime on the books of present World Law.
He lifted one of his telephones. “Ruth,” he said. “I want to speak to Vandermeer Dempsey. Get me through to him personally.”
She did. A few moments later he heard the famous voice, as rich and slow and thick as molten gold. “Hello Hebster, Vandermeer Dempsey speaking.” He paused as if to draw breath, then went on sonorously: “Humanity —may it always be ahead, but, ahead or behind, Humanity!” He chuckled. “Our newest. What we call our telephone toast. Like it?”
“Very much,” Hebster told him respectfully, remembering that this former video quizmaster might shortly be church and state combined. “Er… Mr. Dempsey, I notice you have a new book out, and I was wondering—”
“Which one? Anthropolitics?
“That’s it. A fine study! You have some very quotable lines in the chapter headed, ‘Neither More Nor Less Human.’ ”
A raucous laugh that still managed to bubble heavily. “Young man, I have quotable lines in every chapter of every book! I maintain a writer’s assembly line here at headquarters that is capable of producing up to fifty-five memorable epigrams on any subject upon ten minutes’ notice. Not to mention their capacity for political metaphors and two-line jokes with sexy implications! But you wouldn’t be calling me to discuss literature, however good a job of emotional engineering I have done in my little text. What is it about, Hebster? Go into your pitch.”
“Well,” the executive began, vaguely comforted by the Firster chieftain’s cynical approach and slightly annoyed at the openness of his contempt, “I had a chat today with your friend and my friend, P. Braganza.”
“I know.”
“You do? How?”
Vandermeer Dempsey laughed again, the slow, good-natured chortle of a fat man squeezing the curves out of a rocking chair. “Spies, Hebster, spies. I have them everywhere practically. This kind of politics is twenty percent espionage, twenty percent organization and sixty percent waiting for the right moment. My spies tell me everything you do.”
“They didn’t by any chance tell you what Braganza and I discussed?”
“Oh, they did, young man, they did!” Dempsey chuckled a carefree scale exercise. Hebster remembered his pictures: the head like a soft and enormous orange, gouged by a brilliant smile. There was no hair anywhere on the head—all of it, down to the last eyelash and follicled wart, was removed regularly through electrolysis. “According to my agents, Braganza made several strong representations on behalf of the Special Investigating Commission which you rightly spurned. Then, somewhat out of sorts, he announced that if you were henceforth detected in the nefarious enterprises which everyone knows have made you one of the wealthiest men on the face of the Earth, he would use you as bait for our anger. I must say I admire the whole ingenious scheme immensely.”
“And you’re not going to bite,” Hebster suggested. Greta Seidenheim entered the office and made a circular gesture at the ceiling. He nodded.
“On the contrary, Hebster, we are going to bite. We’re going to bite with just a shade more vehemence than we’re expected to. We’re going to swallow this provocation that the SIC is devising for us and go on to make a worldwide revolution out of it. We will, my boy.”
Hebster rubbed his left hand back and forth across his lips.” Over my dead body!” He tried to chuckle himself and managed only to clear his throat. “You’re right about the conversation with Braganza, and you may be right about how you’ll do when it gets down to paving stones and baseball bats. But if you’d like to have the whole thing a lot easier, there is a little deal I have in mi
nd—”
“Sorry, Hebster my boy. No deals. Not on this. Don’t you see we really don’t want to have it easier? For the same reason, we pay our spies nothing despite the risks they run and the great growing wealth of Humanity First. We found that the spies we acquired through conviction worked harder and took many more chances than those forced into our arms by economic pressure. No, we desperately need L’affaire Hebster to inflame the populace. We need enough excitement running loose so that it transmits to the gendarmerie and the soldiery, so that conservative citizens who normally shake their heads at a parade will drop their bundles and join the rape and robbery. Enough such citizens and Terra goes Humanity First.”
“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-ech-elon 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 bodyservants 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.”
