And Now the News (21 page)

His car was parked on a grassy shoulder in a cut between two bluffs. Thick woods surrounded a small clearing to his right, a sloping glade sparsely studded with almost round moraine boulders, of all sizes. He quickly located three, a foot or so in diameter, equally spaced, and buried to approximately the same depth—
i.e.
, not much, Phillipso being merely an ingenious man, not an industrious one. These three he lifted out, being careful to keep his crepe-soled shoes flat on the resilient grass and to leave as few scuff-marks and indentations as possible. One by one he took the stones into the woods and dropped them into an evacuated foxhole and shoved some dead branches in on top of them. He then ran to his car and from the trunk got a blowtorch which he had borrowed to fix a leak in the sweated joint of a very old-fashioned bathtub in his mother's house, and with it thoroughly charred the three depressions in the ground where the boulders had lain.

Destiny had unquestionably been at work from the time he had beered himself into mendacity forty-eight hours before. But it became manifest at this point, for after Phillipso had licked his forearm lightly with the tongue of flame from the torch, extinguished the same and put it away, a car ground up the hill toward him. And it was not just any car. It belonged to a Sunday supplement feature writer named Penfield who was not only featureless at the moment, but who had also seen the light in the sky a half hour earlier. It may have been Phillipso's intention to drive into town with his story, and back with a reporter and cameraman, all to the end that he could show a late edition to his boss and explain this second absence. Destiny, however, made a much larger thing of it.

Phillipso stood in the graying light in the middle of the road and flapped his arms until the approaching car stopped. “They,” he said hoarsely, “almost killed me.”

From then on, as they say in the Sunday supplement business, it wrote itself. Phillipso offered not one blessed thing. All he did was answer questions, and the whole thing was born in the brain of this
Penfield, who realized nothing except that here was the ideal interview subject. “Came down on a jet of fire, did it? Oh—
three
jets of fire.” Phillipso took him into the glade and showed him the three scorched pits, still warm. “Threaten you, did they? Oh—all Earth. Threatened all Earth.” Scribble scribble. He took his own pictures too. “What'd you do, speak right up to them? Em?” Phillipso said he had, and so it went.

The story didn't make the Sunday supplements, but the late editions—just as Phillipso had planned, but much bigger. So big, as a matter of fact, that he didn't go back to his job at all; he didn't need it. He got a wire from a publisher who wanted to know if he, as a promotion writer, might be able to undertake a book.

He might and he did. He wrote with a crackling facility (
The first word in thrift, the last word in value
was his, and was posted all over the Hincty Pincty chain just as if it meant something) in a style homely as a cowlick and sincere as a banker's nameplate.
The Man Who Saved the Earth
sold two hundred and eighty thousand copies in the first seven months.

So the money started to come in. Not only the book money—the other money. The other money came from the end-of-the-world people, the humanity-is-just-too-wicked people, the save-us-from-the-spacemen folk. Clear across the spectrum, from people who believed that if God wanted us to fly through space we'd have been born with tailfins to people who didn't believe in anything but Russians but would believe anything of them, people said “Save us!” and every crack on the pot dripped gold. Hence the Temple of Space, just to regularize the thing, you know, and then the lectures, and could Phillipso help it if half the congre—uh, club members called them services?

The sequel happened the same way, just appendixes to the first book, to handle certain statements he had made which some critics said made him fall apart by his own internal evidence.
We Need not Surrender
contradicted itself even more, was a third longer, sold three hundred and ten thousand in the first nine weeks, and brought in so much of that other money that Phillipso registered himself as an Institute and put all the royalties with it. The Temple itself began
to show signs of elaboration, the most spectacular piece of which was the war surplus radar basket of a battleship that went round and round all the time. It wasn't connected to a damn thing yet people felt that Phillipso had his eyes open. You could see it, on a clear day, from Catalina, especially at night after the orange searchlight was installed to rotate with it. It looked like a cosmic windshield wiper.

Phillipso's office was in the dome under the radar basket, and was reachable only from the floor below by an automatic elevator. He could commune with himself in there just fine, especially when he switched the elevator off. He had a lot of communing to do, too, sometimes detail stuff, like whether he could sustain a rally at the Coliseum and where to apply the ten thousand dollar grant from the Astrological Union which had annoyingly announced the exact size of the gift to the press before sending him the check. But his main preoccupation was another book, or what do I do for an encore? Having said that we are under attack, and then that we can rally and beat 'em, he needed an angle. Something new, preferably borne by newsbeat out of cultural terror. And soon, too; his kind of wonder could always use another nine days.

As he sat alone and isolated in the amnion of these reflections, his astonishment can hardly be described at the sound of a dry cough just behind him, and the sight of a short sandy-haired man who stood there. Phillipso might have fled, or leapt at the man's throat, but he was stopped cold by a device that historically guaranteed to stem all raging authors: “I have,” said the man, holding up one volume in each hand, “read your stuff.”

“Oh, really?” asked Phillipso.

“I find it,” said the man, “logical and sincere.”

Phillipso looked smilingly at the man's unforgettable bland face and his unnoticeable gray suit. The man said, “Sincerity and logic have this in common: neither need have anything to do with truth.”

“Who are you,” demanded Phillipso immediately, “What do you want and how did you get in here?”

“I am not, as you put it, in here,” said the man. He pointed upward suddenly, and in spite of himself Phillipso found his eyes following
the commanding finger.

The sky was darkening, and Phillipso's orange searchlight slashed at it with increasing authority. Through the transparent dome, just to the north, and exactly where his visitor pointed, Phillipso saw the searchlight pick out a great silver shape which hovered perhaps fifty feet away and a hundred feet above the Temple. He saw it only momentarily, but it left an afterimage in his retinae like a flashbulb. And by the time the light had circled around again and passed the place, the thing was gone. “I'm in that,” said the sandy-haired man. “Here in this room I'm a sort of projection. But then,” he sighed, “aren't we all?”

“You better explain yourself,” said Phillipso loudly enough to keep his voice from shaking, “or I'll throw you out of here on your ear.”

“You couldn't. I'm not here to be thrown.” The man approached Phillipso, who had advanced away from his desk into the room. Rather than suffer a collision, Phillipso retreated a step and a step and another, until he felt the edge of his desk against his glutei. The sandy-haired man, impassive, kept on walking to Phillipso, through Phillipso, Phillipso's desk, Phillipso's chair, and Phillipso's equanimity, the last named being the only thing he touched.

“I didn't want to do that,” said the man some moments later, bending solicitously over Phillipso as he opened his eyes. He put out his hand as if to assist Phillipso to his feet. Phillipso bounced up by himself and cowered away, remembering only then that, on his own terms, the man could not have touched him. He crouched there, gulping and glaring, while the man shook his head regretfully, “I
am
sorry, Phillipso.”

“Why are you, anyway?” gasped Phillipso.

For the first time the man seemed at a loss. He looked in puzzlement at each of Phillipso's eyes, and then scratched his head. “I hadn't thought of that,” he said musingly. “Important, of course, of course. Labeling.” Focusing his gaze more presently at Phillipso, he said, “We have a name for you people that translates roughly to
‘Labelers.'
Don't be insulted. It's a categorization, like
‘biped'
or
‘omnivorous.'
It means the mentality that verbalizes or it can't think.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh, I do beg your pardon. Call me—uh, well, call me Hurensohn. I suggest that because I know you have to call me something, because it doesn't matter what you call me, and because it's the sort of thing you'll be calling me once you find out why I'm here.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Then by all means let's discuss the matter until you do.”

“D-discuss what?”

“I don't have to show you that ship out there again?”

“Please,” said Phillipso, “don't.”

“Now look,” said Hurensohn gently, “there is nothing to fear, only a great deal to explain. Please straighten up and take the knots out of your thorax. That's better. Now sit down calmly and we'll talk the whole thing over.
There
, that's
fine!
” As Phillipso sank shakily into his desk chair, Hurensohn lowered himself into the easy chair which flanked it. Phillipso was horrified to see the half-inch gap of air which, for five seconds or so, separated the man from the chair. Then Hurensohn glanced down, murmured an apology, and floated down to contact the cushion somewhat more normally. “Careless, sometimes,” he explained. “So many things to keep in mind at once. You get interested, you know, and next thing you're buzzing around without your light-warp of forgetting your hypno-field when you go in swimming, like that fool in Loch Ness.”

“Are you really a—a—an extraulp?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. Extra-terrestrial, extra-solar, extra-galactic—all that.”

“You don't, I mean, I don't see any—”

“I know I don't look like one. I don't look like this”—he gestured down his gray waistcoat with the tips of all his fingers—“either. I could show you what I really do look like, but that's inadvisable. It's been tried.” He shook his head sadly, and said again, “Inadvisable.”

“Wh-what do you want?”

“Ah. Now we get down to it. How would you like to tell the world about me—about us?”

“Well, I already—”

“I mean, the
truth
about us.”

“From the evidence I already have—” Phillipso began with some heat. It cooled swiftly. Hurensohn's face had taken on an expression of unshakable patience; Phillipso was suddenly aware that he could rant and rave and command and explain from now until Michaelmas, and this creature would simply wait him out. He knew, too (though he kept it well below the conscious area) that the more he talked the more he would leave himself open to contradiction—the worst kind of contradiction at that: quotes from Phillipso. So he dried right up and tried the other tack. “All right,” he said humbly. “Tell me.”

“Ah …” It was a long-drawn-out sound, denoting deep satisfaction. “I think I'll begin by informing you that you have, quite without knowing it, set certain forces in motion which can profoundly affect mankind for hundreds, even thousands of years.”

“Hundreds,” breathed Phillipso, his eye beginning to glow. “Even thousands.”

“That is not a guess,” said Hurensohn. “It's a computation. And the effect you have on your cultural matrix is—well, let me draw an analogy from your own recent history. I'll quote something: ‘
Long had part of the idea; McCarthy had the other part. McCarthy got nowhere, failed with his third party, because he attacked and destroyed but didn't give. He appealed to hate, but not to greed, no what's-in-it-for-me, no pork chops.'
That's from the works of a reformed murderer who now writes reviews for the
New York Herald Tribune
.”

“What has this to do with me?”

“You,” said Hurensohn, “are the Joseph McCarthy of saucer-writers.”

Phillipso's glow increased. “My,” he sighed.

“And,” said Hurensohn, “you may profit by his example. If that be—no, I've quoted enough. I see you are not getting my drift, anyway. I shall be more explicit. We came here many years ago to study your interesting little civilization. It shows great promise—so great that we have decided to help you.”

“Who needs help?”

“Who needs help?” Hurensohn paused for a long time, as if he
had sent away somewhere for words and was waiting for them to arrive. Finally, “I take it back. I won't be more explicit. If I explained myself in detail I would only sound corny. Any rephrasing of the Decalogue sounds corny to a human being. Every statement of every way in which you need help has been said and said. You are cursed with a sense of rejection, and your rejection begets anger and your anger begets crime and your crime begets guilt; and all your guilty reject the innocent and destroy their innocence. Riding this wheel you totter and spin, and the only basket in which you can drop your almighty insecurity is an almighty fear, and anything that makes the basket bigger is welcome to you … Do you begin to see what I am talking about, and why I'm talking to you?

“Fear is your business, your stock in trade. You've gotten fat on it. With humanity trembling on the edge of the known, you've found a new unknown to breed fear in. And this one's a honey; it's infinite. Death from space … and every time knowledge lights a brighter light and drives the darkness back, you'll be there to show how much wider the circumference of darkness has become … Were you going to say something?”