by Mark Clifton
One other little development of a minor nature had also been making progress. With incredible speed, work, and skill, which can only come through complete dedication and psychotic drive, N-462 had now completed his proof that I was not the real Dr. Ralph Kennedy (who was still teaching a vague class at a vaguer college somewhere in the Mid-West, and never knowing how much he was missing just because some clerk in Space Navy got the files mixed up), but only a Mr. Ralph Kennedy, an imposter.
Following the accustomed police pattern, he calculated the various avenues of advantage to himself, brought the proof of my imposture to me first—and held out his hand.
"Hell!” I exclaimed after I'd looked it over. “I'm not going to pay hush on a half-cooked job like this. If you'd used more sense and less venom you'd have checked Space Navy, Personnel Department, Section of Files beginning with the letter K. There you'd have found a recording of my telephone call, which I made when I first got their letter telling me they'd court-martial me if I didn't show up in forty-eight hours. You'd have found I told them and told them that I was the wrong man.
"If you'd interviewed the people I saw, in person, after I got here, and used the proper thumbscrews and rubber hoses in the approved police manner, they'd have finally admitted that I told them again and again I was the wrong man.
"They're the ones who made the mistake. They're the ones who insisted. They're the ones who threatened me into taking the job. I know how we're supposed to tremble when you look in our direction, I know how easy and how often you cook the evidence to suit your whims, but I'm not going to pay off on a lousy job like this."
"I know who will pay off,” he said. He tried to bully me with his eyes. “The Strickland reps have already approached me, and about half the rest of the people in your department, trying to get something on you. They'll pay plenty for this."
"Sell it,” I answered instantly. “Don't pass up your big chance, man. Sell it for enough so you can retire and write your memoirs about what a good boy you were when you were an undercover agent for, whatever you are an undercover agent for. Sell it to finance you while you tell us how you boys are our big brothers, how you should be let lead us by the hand, how nothing should be put in your way, least of all such a silly little thing like human rights.
"Sell it. Meantime, I'll ask the Starmen if it makes any difference to them whether I'm a Doctor or a Mister. If they don't want me as their go-between you've got yourself a big deal. But if they do want me—well, I don't know if you'd noticed, but I saw what they could do to their enemies."
His eyes were no longer cold and bargaining. He fled.
That left, of the central corps, only Sara to bully me about not making any appointments with the Starmen—a job any secretary ought to be able to do. Certainly the world's foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology ought to be able...
"Awright, Sara!” I finally snapped back. “Stop nagging. We're not married yet, you know!"
Her eyes grew big.
Come to think of it, I guess that's something else I hadn't thought to take care of when I should.
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CHAPTER NINETEEN
I might stand on the smear slide and shake my fist in resentment at the eye looking down through the microscope at us, but it had no apparent effect on the biologists who were stirring up our environment to test the potentials of our reaction.
The next exasperating move of the Starmen was reported on the television set in my office. I'd left the thing turned on because even my brief visit with them had given me another perspective. Now I was looking at the antics of the human race as they might appear to a detached, alien mind in curious observation.
Out of nowhere the star-sapphire globe suddenly appeared again, this time over the street in front of Blair House. There was panic pressure in the crowds of people directly beneath it, but the perimeter crowds were pressing inward to get closer this time. They could not move out of its path of descent.
I watched in apprehension mixed with some sardonic satisfaction. This time the Starmen, those lovable boys, Bex, Dex, Jex, Kex, and Lex, must reveal that the globe was an unsubstantial illusion, or they must crush the people beneath and violate their own precepts of not harming another life form.
They solved their dilemma, but not mine, by performing another miracle. I might have known they'd not hesitate to impress the yokels with their magic.
They came through the doorway of Blair House, again dressed in their resplendent uniforms, again with those irrepressible boyish grins on their handsome faces. They grouped together there at the entrance. The crowd fell silent. The leader, I suppose it was Bex, spoke familiarly with the crowd.
"Folks,” he said, and without seeming to strain his voice reached the outermost limits of the crowd, “I reckon we oughta clear up a little mistake we made. The other day that recording we played said we was here as ambassadors. Well, shucks, we're not. I guess, back on our world, ambassador means something different from here. We didn't know we'd be insultin’ anybody by not meetin’ with all the ambassadors from all your countries.
"And we're not in any position to make any deals with anybody about anything. So that's why we asked Mr. Kennedy not to put us down for talks with all you people of importance."
(They came in lies and deceit. They hadn't asked me any such thing. The matter hadn't even come up. Still, I breathed a sigh of relief.)
"You might say"—Bex continued to sell his winsome personality—"instead of being ambassadors, we're more like—well, tourists. We don't want to disappoint nobody, but that's kinda what we'd like to do a little more of.
"We're gonna tour around now, to see a little more of this beautiful world of yours; that is, if you don't mind. We figger we oughta see the country a little before we go back home. Maybe we can figger out how to give you a helping hand here and there. You might say we're a kind of Youth Peace Corps—in a small way, that is.
"We want to thank you for the nice reception and the nice parties you gave us yesterday, but we hope it won't hurt nobody's feelin's if we hafta turn down any more invitations. We're not used to all this celebratin', we're just plain fightin’ men.
"You keep in touch with Mr. Ralph Kennedy at the Pentagon about us, he's a mighty fine fella, and we certainly appreciate all the valuable time he's given us. We'll keep in touch with him too, long as we're visitin’ here on your fine world.
"We'll be back before we hafta go home. So long, now."
A rainbow suddenly sprang out of the side of the hovering globe and placed its end at their feet. They marched up the rainbow and entered a hatch which opened at their approach. The blue glow from within the ship was cut off as the hatch closed again.
And there was no ship there.
Some claimed stoutly that they were able to follow its incredible speed up into the heavens; some confused specks before their eyes with the dot of the globe disappearing into the blue.
I had an idea it was something else; some movement perfectly normal to the experimenting biologist, inconceivable to the germs on the smear slide. But why bother to explain themselves to the germs? To keep the environment as “natural” as possible, within controlled conditions, changing only those things they wished to alter?
Personally, I wished they'd make up their minds. What were they? Ambassadors, tourists, fightin’ men, Youth Peace Corpsmen? Each role required a different response from us, each label carried its own set of expected behaviors.
This was a question I felt Dr. Gerald Gaffee and his phalanx of semanticists might wish to ponder. He and I had grown friendlier since that first meeting, and when I walked into his office this time, I was a little surprised that the original icy hauteur was back. The two scientists with him, both of international renown, looked at me with open hostility. Then I realized.
Twice the Starmen had referred to me in this latest speech of theirs, and both times as Mister. I was a Mister who had been posing as a Doctor. I was beneath contempt. Nothing wa
s said, of course. Nothing needed be.
I had made up my mind to tell them, before they went out on the limb too far in the speculations of these Good and Evil Galaxial Civilizations, that they'd better also take into consideration that the whole thing had been a staged illusion. I changed my mind now. I knew from experience that anything a layman might say could not possibly be credited.
And, anyway, what difference would it make to the biologist what one germ on the smear slide thought of another?
"Never mind,” I told him, and walked out without mentioning why I had interrupted their important conference in the first place.
* * * *
We heard nothing from the Starmen, or no reports of their whereabouts, for two days. This didn't mean we heard nothing about them. There was page after page, hour after hour of hash and rehash.
The newest miracle of Walking on a Rainbow stirred and disturbed us even more than the balcony scene that first night at Blair House.
Now, for the first time, we took public note that in the battle between the globes and discs there had been no debris to fall upon us. It was another miracle.
That the discs had almost won, then suddenly turned coward and fled was a miracle.
That our tracking equipment and scientific instruments generally had failed to work, failed to confirm what our eyes and noses, our ears and tactile senses had told us was real—this was a miracle.
Even Horace Thistlewaite, Night Manager of the Sheridan House, New York, came in for his hour. The entire front page of one edition of the newspapers was given to his story; of the bellhop who saw five guys only it was one guy, then a purple whirlwind, the footprints in the carpet that wouldn't brush out, the broken bed, the scorched stain on the wall. It had happened before the Starmen had arrived on Earth; therefore, it couldn't have happened. And didn't that make it a miracle?
"First thing you know,” I said sourly to Sara, “we'll be like the mountain Indians of Latin America. A tourist drives through a village at the breakneck speed of fifteen miles an hour and doesn't kill anybody. It is a miracle. The sun shines through a rift in the clouds and lights up a Mariposa lily on the hillside. It is a miracle. A man wakes up in the morning, after he had dreamed he was dead. He is alive. It is a miracle."
She looked at me without committing herself. “Accept as basic premise that by individual whim we can suspend the natural law of the entire universe, and anything you want to name becomes a miracle,” I said.
"What natural law would you use to walk on a rainbow?” she asked me.
"Now, Sara,” I chided. “That's like saying, ‘If you're so smart why ain't you rich?’ Hell, I don't know all the natural laws there are. Nobody on Earth does. Maybe the Starmen know some natural laws we don't know, and maybe they don't know all there are, either. But that doesn't mean because we don't know the natural law, there isn't one."
"So you believe in natural laws you don't understand, and others believe in miracles they don't understand—and what's the difference?"
"We can never understand the miracle. Someday we can understand the natural law. That's the difference."
"The miracle is easier,” she said lightly. “Think of all the scientific study you have to do to understand natural law."
"Oh, Sara,” I groaned. “You too?"
"So what kick do you get out of being such a cynic?” she asked. “If we want miracles, what's wrong with miracles?"
I started to answer with the old bromide, “Only the broken-hearted idealist can become a cynic,” but it sounded too corny and too complicated.
"What have you got there? Papers for me to sign?” I asked, instead. “Anyway the heat's off on all the clamoring deputations,” I added.
"There's that,” she agreed fervently, and began pointing out the line where I must write my name.
* * * *
In two days, a new series of miracles began.
The biologists began to mess up the culture they were studying in earnest. First news came from Western United States. From Austin, Texas, to the barren shores of the Pacific in Baja California, and upward to the badlands of the Dakotas and on upward into Canada, subterranean streams of water geysered to the surface overnight. The water was as fresh as that from mountain springs. It was seeping into the desert lands, flowing through the arroyos, forming lakes in box canyons, forming its own interwoven network of irrigation ditches. Within weeks the entire desert would be green with growing plants. Within a year, millions of new acres would become rich farmlands.
Let the Agriculture Department groan about its already too expensive surplus crops. It was a miracle.
Only the lag in communications, caused by lines clogged with diplomatic recriminations for our hogging the Starmen all to ourselves and trying to extend Yankee imperialism to the entire universe, prevented us from knowing at once that the desert regions all over the Earth were receiving like treatment.
News came from the Sahara region next, then the Arabian desert, the parched plains of India, then the Gobi. Australia was furious for being treated as if she were down under until suddenly her whole interior became a network of canals, streams, and lakes.
Brazil was in the act of complaining that just because she had no deserts was no reason why she should be deprived of her share of miracles, when word came that the vast Amazon region had been penetrated with networks of clearings and highways to checkerboard her many thousands of square miles of jungle. Almost in the manner of mycelium growth, the clearings spread up into Central America and momentarily stopped those people from shaking angry fists toward the north and south. Interior Africa and the jungles of Southern Asia next reported.
Russia was reaching new heights of bad manners until she noticed that the snows of Siberia were melting to release more millions of square miles where more comrade workers could refuse to grow enough grain to feed the toiling masses who had little personal incentive to toil. Greenland, Canada, and the State of Alaska hardly had time to draft protests before the same phenomena caused them to tear up the drafts.
There was a week of this. Hardly more than enough time for the land speculators to recast their investment programs to cash in on these profitable miracles. Hardly time for people to start packing their goods for the biggest land rush in all history—hardly time for governments to pass laws telling the people they couldn't do it, not until the land investors had got set for profit taking. Hardly time for Russia to wonder where she would send her variant thinkers now that Siberia was a potential paradise. Hardly more than time for us in the Pentagon to do more than keep statistics on authenticated and rumored miracles.
If economists expressed alarm over the disruption of normal trade, if scientists expressed alarm at the potential ocean-level rise because of all these melting snows, nobody heeded. Economists are about as accurate as weather forecasters or horse-race handicappers, and who pays any attention to scientists where there are miracles?
United States did find time to do a little muttering in Uncle Sam's beard. Figured on an area-for-area basis, certain other countries were receiving more miracles per square miles than we, and was that fair? Of course we were still ahead on a per capita basis—and so how you looked at it depended on whether you wanted to complain or brag.
Yes, indeed, the Starmen were varying the chemistry of the culture on the smear slide.
I looked at these changes with dread. They were so vast, with consequences beyond imagining—while man can tolerate only the smallest of change at any one time.
...It took a thousand years, fifteen hundred years, of placing the holy image exactly in the center of the canvas before man could tolerate the blasphemy of placing it slightly to one side.
...For fourteen hundred years Ptolemy's astronomic system of placing the Earth at the center of the universe satisfied the vanity of man, including his astronomers, before the courage of Copernicus to say it might not be so. And four hundred years after Copernicus, in the scientifically enlightened year of 1958, one third of American
high-school students still believed the Earth to be at the center of the universe.
...Change one word on the label of a product, and although they cannot read it, five hundred million Chinese will refuse to buy it. How ignorant can those natives be? But—
...Oh yes, we once tried to put this thick catsup in a wide-mouth bottle so it would pour easily, and the company almost went broke—the American housewife refused to touch it because the shape of the container had been changed. It has taken us fifteen years to enlarge the neck of the bottle by one quarter of an inch. And—
...It takes ten years to change the lapel line of men's suits.
...Oh yes, we like to see fresh, new ideas and treatment in stories, but we can print only those exactly like those we have printed in the past.
...A popular song must be written in exactly thirty-two measures. State the theme in eight. Repeat it in the second eight. Bridge with another eight. Repeat the theme for the final eight. Otherwise a musician cannot play it, the people cannot learn to sing it.
...A man may take one step ahead of his culture and chance being called a genius. But if he takes two steps, he is certain to be called a menace, a madman, a fool.
...The humanist does not make even one step ahead, and thereby maintains his secure control of men's minds. No one knows, or cares, how the scientist thinks, so long as he continues to make things easier without really changing anything. So he may say, “If my theory doesn't work it must be wrong, and I must recast my notions about the true nature of this until I find a theory which will work.” If he gets any kick out of confounding himself with all this self-doubt, he's welcome to it so long as he doesn't disturb the certainties of the rest of us. But the humanist says, “I cannot be wrong. If my theory doesn't work someone else is at fault and must be punished.” In all man's history there has been taken not one single step forward from this attitude among the humanists.
And so I looked at these changes caused by the Starmen, and dreaded.
