And Now the News (22 page)

“I am
not
getting fat,” said Phillipso.

“Am I saying anything?” breathed the sandy-haired man. “Am I here at all?”

In all innocence Phillipso pointed out, “You said you weren't.”

Hurensohn closed his eyes and said in tones of sweet infinite patience, “Listen to me, Phillipso, because I now fear I shall never speak to you again. Whether or not you like it—and you do, and we don't—you have become the central clearinghouse for the Unidentified Aerial Object. You have accomplished this by lies and by fear, but that's now beside the point—you accomplished it. Of all countries on earth, this is the only one we can effectively deal with; the other so-called Great Powers are constitutionally vindictive, or impotent, or hidebound, or all three. Of all the people in this country we could deal with—in government, or the great foundations, or the churches—we can find no one who could overcome the frenzy and foolishness of your following. You have forced us to deal with you.”

“My,” said Phillipso.

“Your people listen to you. More people than you know listen to your people—frequently without knowing it themselves. You have something for everyone on earth who feels small, and afraid, and guilty. You tell them they are right to be afraid, and that makes them proud. You tell them that the forces ranged against them are beyond their understanding, and they find comfort in each other's ignorance. You say the enemy is irresistible, and they huddle together in terror and are unanimous. And at the same time you except yourself, implying that you and you alone can protect them.”

“Well,” said Phillipso, “if you have to deal with me … isn't it so?”

“It is not,” said Hurensohn flatly. “
‘Protect'
presupposes
‘attack.'
There is no attack. We came here to help.”

“Liberate us,” said Phillipso.

“Yes.
No!
” For the first time Hurensohn showed a sign of irritation. “Don't go leading me into your snide little rat-shrewd pitfalls, Phillipso! By liberate I meant make free; what you meant is what the Russians did to the Czechs.”

“All right,” said Phillipso guardedly. “You want to free us. Of what?”

“War. Disease. Poverty. Insecurity.”

“Yes,” said Phillipso. “It's corny.”

“You don't believe it.”

“I haven't thought about it one way or the other yet,” said Phillipso candidly. “Maybe you can do all you say. What is it you want from me?”

Hurensohn held up his hands. Phillipso blinked as
The Man Who Saved the Earth
appeared in one of them and
We Need not Surrender
in the other. He then realized that the actual volumes must be in the ship. Some of his incipient anger faded; some of his insipid pleasure returned. Hurensohn said, “These. You'll have to retract.”

“What do you mean retract?”

“Not all at once. You're going to write another book, aren't you? Of course; you'd have to.” There was the slightest emphasis on
“you'd”
and Phillipso did not like it. However, he said nothing. Hurensohn went on: “You could make new discoveries. Revelations, if you like. Interpretations.”

“I couldn't do that.”

“You'd have all the help in the world. Or out of it.”

“Well, but what for?”

“To draw the poison of those lies of yours. To give us a chance to show ourselves without getting shot on sight.”

“Can't you protect yourselves against that?”

“Against the bullets, certainly. Not against what pulls the triggers.”

“Suppose I go along with you?”

“I told you! No poverty, no insecurity, no crime, no—”

“No Phillipso.”

“Oh. You mean, what's in it for you? Can't you see? You'd make possible a new Eden, the flowering of your entire specie—a world where men laughed and worked and loved and achieved, where a child could grow up unafraid and where, for the first time in your history, human beings would understand one another when they spoke. You could do this—just you.”

“I can see it,” said Phillipso scathingly. “All the world on the village green and me with them, leading a morris dance. I couldn't live that way.”

“You're suddenly very cocky, Mister Phillipso,” said Hurensohn with a quiet and frightening courtesy.

Phillipso drew a deep breath. “I can afford to be,” he said harshly. “I'll level with you, bogeyman.” He laughed unpleasantly. “Good, huh. Bogey. That's what they call you when they—”

“—get us on a radar screen. I know. I know. Get to the point.”

“Well. All right then. You asked for it.” He got to his feet. “You're a phony. You can maybe do tricks with mirrors, maybe even hide the mirrors, but that's it. If you could do a tenth of what you say, you wouldn't have to come begging. You'd just … do it. You'd just walk in and take over. By God, I would.”

“You probably would,” said Hurensohn, with something like astonishment. No, it was more like an incredulous distaste. He narrowed his eyes. For a brief moment Phillipso thought it was part of his facial expression, or the beginning of a new one, and then he realized it was something else, a concentration, a—

He shrieked. He found himself doing something proverbial, unprintable, and not quite possible. He didn't want to do it—with all his mind and soul he did not want to, but he did it nonetheless.

“If and when I want you to,” said Hurensohn calmly, “you'll do that in the window of Bullock's Wilshire at high noon.”

“Please …”

“I'm not doing anything,” said Hurensohn. He laughed explosively, put his hands in his jacket pockets, and—worst of all, he watched. “Go to it, boy.”

“Please!”
Phillipso whimpered.

Hurensohn made not the slightest detectable move, but Phillipso was suddenly free. He fell back into his chair, sobbing with rage, fear, and humiliation. When he could find a word at all, it came out between the fingers laced over his scarlet face, and was, “Inhuman. That was … inhuman.”

“Uh-huh,” agreed Hurensohn pleasantly. He waited until the walls of outrage expanded enough to include him, recoil from him, and return to the quivering Phillipso, who could then hear when he was spoken to. “What you've got to understand,” said Hurensohn, “is that we don't do what we can do. We can, I suppose, smash a planet, explode it, drop it into the sun. You can, in that sense, catch worms. You don't, though, and wouldn't. In your idiom you
couldn't
. Well then, neither can we force humanity into anything without its reasoned consent. You can't understand that, can you? Listen: I'll tell you just how far it goes. We couldn't even force
one
human to do what we want done. You, for example.”

“You-you just did, though.”

Hurensohn shuddered—a very odd effect, rather like that on a screen when one thumps a slide-projector with the heel of one's hand. “A demonstration, that's all. Costly, I may add. I won't get over it as soon as you will. To make a point, you might say, I had to eat a bedbug.” Again the flickering shudder. “But then, people have gone farther than that to put an idea over.”

“I could refuse?” Phillipso said, timidly.

“Easily.”

“What would you do to me?”

“Nothing.”

“But you'd go ahead and—”

Hurensohn was shaking his head as soon as Phillipso began to speak. “We'd just go. You've done too much damage. If you won't repair it, there's no way for us to do it unless we use force, and we can't do that. It seems an awful waste, though. Four hundred years of observation … I wish I could tell you the trouble we've gone to, trying to watch you,
learn
you, without interfering. Of course, it's been easier since Kenneth Arnold and the noise he made about us.”

“Easier?”

“Lord, yes. You people have a talent—really, a genius for making rational your unwillingness to believe your own eyes. We got along famously after the weather-balloon hypothesis was made public. It's so easy to imitate a weather balloon. Pokey, though. The greatest boon of all was that nonsense about temperature inversions. It's quite a trick to make a ship behave like automobile headlights on a distant mountain or the planet Venus, but temperature inversions?” He snapped his fingers. “Nothing to it. Nobody understands 'em so they explain everything. We thought we had a pretty complete tactical manual on concealment, but did you see the one the U.S. Air Force got out? Bless 'em! It even explains the mistakes we make. Well, most of them, anyway. That idiot in Loch Ness—”

“Wait, wait!” Phillipso wailed. “I'm trying to find out what I'm supposed to do, what will happen, and you sit there and go
on
so!”

“Yes, yes of course. You're quite right. I was just blowing words over my tongue to try to get the taste of you out of my mouth. Not that I really have a mouth, and that would make a tongue sort of frustrated, wouldn't it? Figure of speech, you know.”

“Tell me again. This Paradise on earth—how long is it supposed to take? How would you go about it?”

“Through your next book, I suppose. We'd have to work out a way to counteract your other two without losing your audience. If you jump right into line and say how friendly and wise we aliens are, the way Adamski and Heard did, you'll only disappoint your followers. I know! I'll give you a weapon against these—uh—bogeymen of yours. A simple formula, a simple field generator. We'll lay
it out so anyone can use it, and bait it with some of your previous nonsense—beg pardon, I might have meant some of your previous statements. Something guaranteed to defend Earth against the—uh—World Destroyers.” He smiled. It was rather a pleasant sight. “It would, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if we claimed that the device had an effective range of fifty feet and it actually covered, say, two thousand square miles, and it was easy and cheap to build, and the plans were in every copy of your new book … let's see now, we'd have to pretend to violate a little security, too, so the people who aren't afraid would think they were stealing … hmmm.”

“Device, device—
what
device?”

“Oh, a—” Hurensohn came up out of his reverie. “Labeling again, dammit. I'll have to think a minute. You have no name for such a thing.”

“Well, what is it supposed to do?”

“Communicate. That is, it makes complete communications possible.”

“We get along pretty well.”

“Nonsense! You communicate with labels—words. Your words are like a jumble of packages under a Christmas tree. You know who sent each one and you can see its size and shape, and sometimes it's soft or it rattles or ticks. But that's all. You don't know
exactly
what it means and you won't until you open it. That's what this device will do—open your words to complete comprehension. If every human being, regardless of language, age or background, understood exactly what every other human being wanted, and knew at the same time that he himself understood, it would change the face of the earth. Overnight.”

Phillipso sat and thought that one out. “You couldn't bargain,” he said at length. “You couldn't—uh—explain a mistake, even.”

“You could explain it,” said Hurensohn. “It's just that you couldn't excuse it.”

“You mean every husband who—ah—flirted, every child who played hookey, every manufacturer who—”

“All that.”

“Chaos,” whispered Phillipso. “The very structure of—”

Hurensohn laughed pleasantly. “You know what you're saying, Phillipso. You're saying that the basic structure of your whole civilization is lies and partial truths, and that without them it would fall apart. And you're quite right.” He chuckled again. “Your Temple of Space, just for example. What do you think would happen to it if all your sheep knew what their Shepherd was and what was in the shepherd's mind?”

“What are you trying to do—tempt me with all this?”

Most gravely Hurensohn answered him, and it shocked Phillipso to the marrow when he used his first name to do it. “I am, Joe, with all my heart I am. You're right about the chaos, but such a chaos should happen to mankind or any species like it. I will admit that it would strike civilization like a mighty wind, and that a great many structures would fall. But there would be no looters in the wreckage, Joe. No man would take advantage of the ones who fell.”

“I know something about human beings,” Phillipso said in a flat, hurt voice. “And I don't want 'em on the prowl when I'm down. Especially when they don't have anything. God.”

Hurensohn shook his head sadly. “You don't know enough, then. You have never seen the core of a human being, a part which is not afraid, and which understands and is understood.” Hurensohn searched his face with earnest eyes.

“Have you?”

“I have. I see it now. I see it in you all. But then, I see more than you do. You could see as much; you all could. Let me do it, Joe. Help me. Help me,
please
.”

“And lose everything I've worked so hard to—”

“Lose? Think of the gain! Think of what you'd do for the whole world! Or—if it means any more to you—turn the coin over. Think of what you'll carry with you if you don't help us. Every war casualty, every death from preventable disease, every minute of pain in every cancer patient, every stumbling step of a multiple sclerosis victim, will be on your conscience from the moment you refuse me.

“Ah, think, Joe—
think!
”

Phillipso slowly raised his eyes from his clenched hands to Hurensohn's plain, intense face. Higher, then, to the dome and through it. He raised his hands and pointed. “Pardon me,” he said shakily, “but your ship is showing.”