When They Come from Space

by Mark Clifton

  Let the State Department rant and rave that the Starmen had called themselves ambassadors, and it was their function to handle ambassadors—did they have trained authorities in extraterrestrial psychology to do the job? They did not! All right, we would concede a point. We admitted it was their job to handle Earth ambassadors. So the foreign ambassadors from Earth countries who wanted to call upon the Starmen and pay their respects (and wheedle concessions for their own countries) could go cool their heels in the anterooms of the State Department while their protocol was sorted out, but the State Department would have to deal with us in who actually got in to see the Starmen.

  All right! We would concede that the Commerce Department handled deputations of businessmen, so let the businessmen cool their heels in the Commerce Department while waiting for permission, from us, to wheel and deal trade concessions out of the Starmen.

  All right! Let the Civil Space Authority answer the question of the scientists, “How did you do it?” if they could!

  Shirley solved all this by the simple, and thoroughly familiar to Washington, means of “transmitting orders from above"—without revealing who gave those orders up above. She simply told the guards around Blair House to admit no one but me. She even took on the President's secretary and came out on top, by hinting darkly about the political repercussions which could result from the President making a premature step through interceding for his court favorites.

  Not even Harvey Strickland would be permitted to see the Starmen without my approval!

  Trouble was, since I'd had no further contact with the Starmen myself, I was hardly in position to start filling their calendar with dates from all these pressing deputations, committees, and individuals.

  I found myself curiously reluctant to step out into the spotlight, for now the entire world sat staring at its television set, which showed the entrance of Blair House and the milling crowds outside the cordon of guards.

  So, the Space Cadets could escort me and make a path through the crowds. So, the guards, upon proper identification, would allow me through the lines. So there I would be, walking up the steps, alone. Watched by two billion people. So I would knock on the door. So I would say, “Please, Mr. Starmen, may I come in?"

  What if they said, “No!"?

  Goddam you, Shirley, you and your empire-building.

  I delayed putting it to a test as long as I could. My excuse was that I must sample the reactions of the press and television to the Miracle at Blair House.

  The Strickland organization had gone all out. “Down on your knees, you stupid slaves,” was the gist. “Grovel your silly faces in the dust. Lo! We have been given the sign."

  The more I read the angrier I grew. Not only at Strickland, his motives were becoming pretty clear to me. Not just at the fanatics who were all too willing to jump on the band wagon to increase their importance and their compulsion to destroy all who didn't acknowledge their ascendancy. But at the Starmen, themselves. What were they trying to do to us?

  My anger supplied the necessary adrenalin to get me on my feet and going.

  It went as I had envisioned. There was, indeed, the escort of Space Cadets. I was admitted through the lines upon verification of the Captain of the Guards that I was one and the same person who had introduced the Starmen to the President, the one exception who was to be admitted to Blair House, and therefore the authentic Dr. Ralph Kennedy.

  I did not knock on the door, shuffle my feet, pull my forelock, make a steeple out of my hands, and pray for admittance. I simply pushed open the door and walked inside. I had considered that they might throw me out bodily, feet flying over head down the steps, with two billion people watching my disgrace, but by now I didn't care.

  Instead, I was received with that exasperating, “Shucks, Dr. Kennedy, we're just plain folks. You shouldn't ought to go to all this trouble, a busy man like you, just to see if we're makin’ out all right."

  They were scattered around the breakfast room, in dressing gowns with cloth strained at the shoulders and gathered in folds around the hips—dressing gowns obtained from the wardrobe of Blair House and designed for the more normally proportioned VIP's who might be expected to visit the Capital—with thin shoulders and fat asses. They were having morning coffee—black; served by the regular servants assigned to Blair House. Their faces were designed to reflect the morning after the night before.

  My disgust with them increased, but I was stopped in my impulse to say what I thought by the knowledge of the spy-rays, microphones, and cameras, and knowing how two billion people would interpret my discourtesy to visitors who were heroes at the very least, and possibly divine.

  "Funny thing about them gadgets,” one of the Spacemen drawled, as a dark man in a white coat, who possessed far more dignity than I, seated me and gave me coffee. “Sometime during the night them gadgets all went out of commission. Them noises you hear behind the walls, I reckon they're not rats—just electronic engineers tryin’ to figger out what went wrong."

  That much was a relief. But the joker's stupid country-boy accent and attitude weren't. I'd caught that highly revealing flash about “art forms of a culture” the day before, and they must have known I'd caught it. So they must also know that I wasn't taken in by their false faces. So now why the masquerade? With me?

  I didn't know what their game was. I knew only that so long as they maintained this farce I wouldn't find out. I'm afraid I boiled over, as soon as the servants had left the room.

  "You come in lies and deceit,” I said, and was surprised to find I was speaking in cold, measured words instead of hot stammering. “I shouldn't be surprised to learn that you are also self-righteous, knowing what is good for us. And knowing that, capable of any atrocity upon us."

  There was a blur of faces and forms. For an instant, there was no one in the room with me. Only a vortex of faint, violet light. Then the room was populated again. The boys were still lounging around with coffee cups in their hands. But their faces were not the stupid duh faces of Earth heroes. There was the faint glow of a nimbus around them.

  It shook me. What kind of fool was I? To stir up what? All right! The worst they could do was blast me out of existence for blasphemy. And that might be preferable to living in the kind of world their behavior was going to create. Their faces were symbols of curiosity now, a wordless invitation for me to go on.

  "The most despicable of all human traits,” I said, “the most cruel and mean, is self-righteousness, the belief that there is some special virtue in ourselves which enables us to decide what is best for others. It provides excuse for anything we may want to do in the destruction of others. We know it well. We should. We've had plenty of experience with it. We know it in all its stages of progression. We know it is a contagion and an addiction. We know it to be worse than any narcotic habit, for it can only feed upon forbidding and condemning others in ever increasing doses, to increase its own self-approval.

  "You come to us in lies and deceit. You probably have even rationalized already that such lies and deceit are for our own good—the first stage of addiction to self-righteousness. You are, even now, probably trying to decide what is best for us. Your behavior seems to indicate you already think you know what is good for us. When will you go into the next stage of self-righteousness and start punishing us for not behaving the way you think we should?"

  Again the blur, again the violet glow of whirlpool, again the curious faces around me. There was no country-boy drawl when one of them spoke.

  "When one of your biologists wishes to study a life form,” he said in emotionless tones, “he first tries to measure all the elements in its environment. But this study does not reveal to him the tolerances of variation in that life form, nor does it reveal the potentials he suspects may be hidden within it. He enters the medium in which the culture exists, by, let us say, increasing the temperature, changing the chemical compound slightly, altering the environment to determine the potentials of reaction in the life form. He probably
hasn't the slightest concern, at this point, for what is ‘good’ for the life form, or ‘bad’ for it. He simply wants to know what it is, how it behaves, how it might behave."

  "And,” I interrupted, this time a little hotly, “if he finds out we don't like it, we set about finding a way to destroy it.” They hit me then.

  Oh, not with a brawny hero's sadistic fists. They did not gun me down with impunity and praise because they were on the right side.

  They hit me with a vision.

  I saw the universe as I had never before conceived it. For an instant I knew the vastness of infinity, the trillions and quadrillions of whirling dead worlds, a vastness of emptiness so overwhelming that the mind cannot grasp the whole of it—and lifeless.

  Only here and there, in such pitifully small quantities as to be only a trace element was there life in any form—and, of that, an even tinier amount evolved to self-awareness.

  And then I saw Earth; with its surface teeming, crawling, squirming with multitudes and myriads of life forms; each in life/death struggle with all the rest for survival and room to grow. No wonder, to us, life was cheap. No wonder, to us, the way to win was destruction of our opposition. Our values were formed on a world where there was too much life for the space it could occupy.

  Their values were formed by a universe almost totally devoid of life—where every scrap of it was so precious that its right to survive must transcend all else, the right to be must transcend the difference in being.

  They did not know which was the Right form of life, and which the Wrong form. Such concepts had no meaning. They did not know which should become ascendant and which should be suppressed; for they did not know what the future destiny of life, any kind of life, was to be. They did not know it of us, they did not know it of themselves. They did not know of any right to harm us; or we, coming out to the stars, to harm them.

  They did not know.

  I did not know how or when I left them there in the breakfast room—again appearing to be duh loafers sprawled around sipping morning coffee. They tell me that while I was there, for something like an hour, the crowds had massed in increasing numbers, to press tighter and tighter against the cordon of guards. They tell me that when I came out of the door the crowd, which had been growing noisier, hushed. They tell me I walked as one in a trance. They tell me that even Strickland, purple-faced near apoplexy in his argument with the guards, demanding admittance, fell silent, and clamped his lips in a thin line.

  They tell me that, as I walked through the line, my eyes were fixed on something out of this world, and that the crowd, somehow, pushed back to open a path for me—wide enough that none touched me.

  They tell me that, on the outskirts of the crowd, I stepped into the first limousine I reached—which wasn't mine—and that the chauffeur, without a word, closed the door and drove me straight to the Pentagon.

  I came to, sitting at my desk, with Sara telling me that the deputations of politicians, businessmen, and even some scientists were still waiting for me to tell them when they were scheduled to interview the Starmen.

  I shook my head, as if coming out of a sleep.

  "I don't know,” I said vaguely. “I didn't think to arrange anything."

  "But, boss,” she wailed. “You have no idea what we've been going through trying to stall off those people!"

  "Oh darn, oh gracious, oh fudge,” I said. “To heck with those people!” [This isn't really what I said, but our United States Post Office Department, itself far gone in the syndrome of self-righteousness, has determined that the American public is much too young to be told how people really talk and behave, not if we expect to use their post offices for distributing our horrid books.]

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Meanwhile, back at the office, things had not stood still.

  I had no more than introduced the Starmen to the President than Central Personnel suddenly discovered that somehow it had made the mistake of cutting my employee requisitions in half, and that in view of my obvious change in status the credit they might receive for all that money they were saving the taxpayers might measure somewhat less than the blame for not giving me the help I asked. They hurriedly rectified this by sending more than a thousand new employees to us, in one day's time—each carrying a back-order reference to a given requisition.

  Shirley was fit to be tied. But she arose to the occasion by appealing to Dr. Kibbie for assistance in finding still more space to hold them and orienting them to their new jobs. Apparently he was willing and eager to help, and to offer the help of all his other departments as well. We were making use of that two billion very nicely, and he had received word from a congressional committee that even though Congress was not officially in session all members were in town, and if we needed any more spending money they could get some of the boys together within an hour. Dr. Kibbie did not refuse. Shirley's request for him to take on some of the burdens, and actually do some work around here, came as a boon to him.

  Mine was the department where the spotlight was shining. He was only too glad for the opportunity to move back into the spotlight, after he had flubbed earlier chances so miserably. If it seemed that I had started out working for him and now he was working for me—well, that's Washington.

  Shirley had done a couple other things to pull the reins of control tightly into our hands. Telephone switchboards were removed from Blair House and all calls were routed through our office; or rather, stopped at our office. All mail and telegrams were routed to our office. She closed off every approach to the Starmen except through us—through me.

  Dr. Gerald Gaffee, the second member of my original staff of three, was not far behind her. He, too, in his own field, had become the man of the hour; and arose to its challenge. With a singular lack of self-doubt and conflict, which usually keeps the intellectual impotent to accomplish anything, he drafted every available scientist to assist him in calculating the probable civilization of these Starmen to pad out the bales of news releases demanded of us; for page after page and hour after hour of print and discussion must be filled. There was no news of any other kind worth printing or talking about.

  The scientists were delighted. As rapidly as they could, they turned off their Bunsen burners, cooled their retorts, balanced their equations, set aside their drawings, and flocked to his aid. When he matched them credential for credential, hauteur for hauteur, they fell to work with a sigh of deep satisfaction. Accustomed as they were to being low man on the totem pole, bottom of the status barrel, victims of every vagrant breeze that blew in cultural whims, they had grown practiced in seizing every fleeting opportunity to add a little more to mankind's knowledge of the world and universe about him before a change in whim cut them off at the pockets, or a new program of anti-science in the culture quietly eliminated them.

  A skilled archaeologist, himself finding the fragment at the site dig, can deduce an entire culture from a single shard. To do this, they must have known that. To know that could happen only after they had progressed through these and these stages of cultural growth. Buried at this level, in this climatic condition, required this much passage of time. Or, finding this shard at this site, instead of halfway around the world where it should have been found, presupposed an intercontinental trade among these earlier people, which, in turn, measured the level of civilization they had attained. All from a piece of shard—and astonishingly accurate in estimate, when later discoveries come to light. (Or, are later discoveries rearranged to confirm the first?)

  Here they had no isolated shard. They had had days of watching, first the discs, then the globes, the battle with its incredible denials of the laws of inertia, the globe which had come to rest briefly at the Mall before it suddenly disappeared, the shape and clothing of the occupants—the speech of the occupants which they must have learned from a Western movie television-wave trapped by their instruments, the correct (well, in so far as West Texas speech can be considered correct) semanti
c meanings to the words they had uttered. Here was such an abundance of observation and evidence that deduction was mere child's play—at least deduction at the level understandable to the people.

  Their scientific deductions even brought them dangerously close to the forbidden areas of the humanities. For they deduced two massive galaxial civilizations strung out among the stars and galaxies of stars, at war, one Evil, one Good.

  The discs were Evil, because they had threatened us. The globes were Good, because they had saved us. The scientists fell into the humanities routine of morals and ethics without even knowing they had done it.

  They did not go on to spell out that mankind's morals and ethics are based solely in expediency and have no other source of origin; that which favors his survival is Good; that which threatens his survival is Evil. The universe was created around man, for his benefit and no other purpose. It surrounds him, he is at its center, and all things in it relate to him in terms of Good, or Evil. In the humanics, man is still in the Ptolemaic age and has not yet reached, or come close, to that level of rational thinking where a humanic Copernicus can emerge.

  And therefore the scientists bought themselves a few more days of toleration from the humanists, by, once again, not challenging the arbiters of right and wrong.

  These bales of news handouts kept reporters and commentators off our necks for the moment. But the insistence of other deputations, each with its own expedient fish to fry, was growing in volume and number.

  Oddly, there were no church deputations. Perhaps the churchmen prefer their miracles be kept long ago and far away. Perhaps that bogus miracle at Blair House filled them with dread that the Judgment Day was at hand—a Judgment Day few of them really believed would ever come, when they would be called to account for what they had done with that stewardship handed to them so long ago. At least, so went the comment around the department when the absence of such deputations was realized.