The Children of Night

I

“WE MET before,” I told Haber. “In 1988, when you were running the Des Moines office.”

He beamed and held out his hand. “Why, darn it, so we did! I remember now, Odin.”

“I don’t like to be called Odin.”

“No? All right. Mr. Gunnarsen-“

“Not ‘Mr. Gunnarsen,’ either. Just ‘Gunner.’”

“That’s right, Gunner; I’d almost forgotten.”

I said, “No, you hadn’t forgotten. You never knew my name in Des Moines. You didn’t even know I was alive, because you were too busy losing the state for our client. I pulled you out of that one, just like I’m going to pull you out now.”

The smile was a little cracked, but Haber had been with the company a long time, and he wasn’t going to let me throw him. “What do you want me to say, Gunner? I’m grateful. Believe me, boy, I know I need help-“

“And I’m not your boy. Haber, you were a fat cat then, and you’re a fat cat now. All I want from you is, first, a quick look around the shop here and, second, a conference of all department heads, including you, in thirty minutes. So tell your secretary to round them up, and let’s get started on the sight-seeing.”

Coming in to Belport on the scatjet, I had made a list of things to do. The top item was:

1. Fire Haber.

Still, in my experience that isn’t always the best way to put out a fire. Some warts you remove; some you just let wither away in obscurity. I am not paid by M & B to perform cosmetic surgery on their Habers, only to see that the work the Habers should have done gets accomplished.

As a public relations branch manager he was a wart, but as a tourist guide he was fine, although he was perspiring. He led me all around the shop. He had taken a storefront on one of the main shopping malls-air-curtain door, windows draped tastefully in gray silk. It looked like the best of four funeral parlors in a run-down neighborhood. In gilt letters on the window was the name of the game:

MOULTRIE & BIGELOW

Public Relations

Northern Lake State Division

T. Wilson Haber

Division Manager

“Public relations,” he informed me, “starts at home. They know we’re here, eh, Gunner?”

“Reminds me of the Iowa office,” I said, and he stumbled where there wasn’t even a sill. That was the Presidential campaign of ‘88, where Haber had been trying to carry the state for the candidate who had retained us, and those twelve electoral votes came over at the last minute only because we sent Haber to Nassau to rest and I took over from him. I believe Haber’s wife had owned stock in the company.

His Belport layout was pretty good, at that, though. Four pry booths, each with a Simplex 9090 and an operator-receptionist in the donor’s waiting room. You can’t tell from appearances, but the donors who were waiting for their interrogation looked like a good representative sample-a good mixture of sexes, ages, conditions of affluence-and with proper attention to weighing he should at least be getting a fair survey of opinions. Integration of the pry scores was in a readout station in back-I recognized one of the programmers and nodded to him: good man-along with telefax equipment to the major research sources, the Britannica, Library of Congress, news-wire services, and so on. From the integration room the readout operator could construct a speech, a 3-V commercial, a space ad, or anything else, with the research lines to feed him any data he needed and test its appeal on his subjects. In the front of the building was a taping booth and studio. Everything was small and semi-portable, but good stuff. You could put together a 3-V interview or edit one as well here as you could on the lot in the home office.

“An A-number-one setup, right, Gunner?” said Haber. “Set it up myself to do the job.”

I said, “Then why aren’t you doing it?” He tightened up. The eyes looked smaller and more intelligent, but he didn’t say anything directly. He took my elbow and turned me to the data-processing room.

“Want you to meet someone,” he said, opened the door, led me inside, and left me.

A tall, slim girl looked up from a typer. “Why, hello, Gunner,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

I said, “Hello, Candace.”

Apparently Haber was not quite such a fat cat as he had seemed, for he had clearly found out a little something about my personal life before I showed up in his office. The rest of the list I had scribbled down in the scatjet was:

2. Need “big lie.”

3. Investigate Children.

4. Investigate opponents’ proposition.

5. Marry Candace Harmon?

This was a relatively small job for Moultrie & Bigelow, but it was for a very, very big account. It was important to win it. The client was the Arcturan Confederacy.

In the shop the word was that they had been turned down by three or four other PR agencies before we took them on. Nobody said why, exactly, but the reason was perfectly clear. It was just because they were the Arcturan Confederacy. There is nothing in any way illegal or immoral about a public relations firm representing a foreign account. That is a matter of statute-as most people don’t take the trouble to know: the Smith-Macchioni Act of ‘71. And the courts held that it applied to extra-planetary “foreigners” as well as to terrestrials in 1985, back when the only “intelligent aliens” were the mummies on Mars. Not that the mummies had ever hired anybody on Earth to do anything for them. But it was Moultrie & Bigelow’s law department that sued for the declaratory judgment, as a matter of fact. Just on the off chance. That’s how M & B operates.

Any public relations man takes on the color of his clients in the eyes of some people. That’s the nature of the beast. The same people wouldn’t think of blaming a surgeon because he dissolved a malignancy out of Public Enemy No. 1, or even a lawyer for defending him. But when you are in charge of a client’s emotional image and that image isn’t liked, some of the dislike rubs off on you.

At M & B there is enough in the pay check at the end of every

month so that we don’t mind that. M & B has a reputation for taking on the tough ones-the only surviving American cigarette manufacturer is ours. So is the exiled Castroite government of Cuba, that still thinks it might one day get the State Department to back up its claim for paying off on the bonds it printed for itself. However, for two reasons-as a simple matter of making things easy for ourselves and because it’s better doctrine-we don’t flaunt our connection with the unpopular clients. Especially when the job is going badly. One of the surest ways to get a bad public response to PR is to let the public know that some hotshot PR outfit is working on it.

So every last thing Haber had done was wrong.

In this town it was too late for pry booths and M/R.

I had just five minutes left before the conference, and I spent it in the pry-booth section, anyhow. I noticed a tri-D display of our client’s home planet in the reception room, where donors were sitting and waiting their turn. It was very attractive: the wide, calm seas with the vertical air-mount islets jutting out at intervals.

I turned around and walked out fast, boiling mad.

A layman might not have seen just how many ways Haber had found to go wrong. The whole pry-booth project was probably a mistake, anyway. To begin with, to get any good out of pry booths you need depth interviews, way deep-down M/R stuff. And for that you need paid donors, lots of them. And to get them you have to have a panel to pick from.

That means advertising in the papers and on the nets and interviewing twenty people for every one you hire. To get a satisfactory sample in a town the size of Belport you need to hire maybe fifty donors. And that means talking to a thousand people, every one of whom will go home and talk to his wife or her mother or their neighbors.

In a city like Chicago or Saskatoon you can get away with it. With good technique the donor never really knows what he’s being interviewed for, although, of course, a good newspaperman or private eye can interview a couple of donors and work backward from the sense impulse stimuli with pretty fair accuracy. But not in Belport, not when we never had a branch here before, not when every living soul in town knew what we were doing because the rezoning ordinance was Topic One over every coffee table. In short, we had tipped our hand completely.

As I say, an amateur might not have spotted that. But Haber was not supposed to be an amateur.

I had just seen the trend charts, too. The referendum on granting rezoning privileges to our client was going to a vote in less than two weeks. When Haber had opened the branch, sampling showed that it would fail by a four-to-three vote. Now, a month and a half later, he had worsened the percentage to three to two and going downhill all the way.

Our client would be extremely unhappy-probably was unhappy already, if they had managed to puzzle out the queer terrestrial progress reports we had been sending them. And this was the kind of client that a flackery didn’t want to have unhappy. I mean, all the others were little-league stuff in comparison. The Arcturan Confederacy was a culture as wealthy and as powerful as all Earth governments combined, and as Arcturans don’t bother with nonsense like national governments or private enterprise, at least not in any way that makes sense to us, this one client was-as big as every other possible client combined.

They were the ones who decided they needed this base in Belport, and it was up to M & B-and specifically to me, Odin Gunnarsen-to see that they got it.

It was too bad that they had been fighting Earth six months earlier. In fact, in a technical sense we were still at war. It was only armistice, not a peace, that had called off the H-bomb raids and the fleet engagements.

Like I say. M & B takes on the tough ones!

Besides Haber, four of the staff looked as though they knew which end was up. Candace Harmon, the pry-integration programmer, and two very junior T.A.s. I took the head chair at the conference table without waiting to see where Haber would want to sit and said, “We’ll make this fast, because we’re in trouble here and we don’t have time to be polite. You’re Percy?” That was the programmer; he nodded. “And I didn’t catch your name?” I said, turning to the next along the table. It was the copy chief, a lanky shave-headed oldster named Tracy Spockman. His assistant, one of the T.A.s I had had my eye on, turned out to be named Manny Brock.

I had picked easy jobs for all the deadheads, reserving the smart ones for whatever might turn up, so I started with the copy chief. “Spockman, we’re opening an Arcturan purchasing agency, and you’re it. You should be able to handle this one; if I remember correctly, you ran the Duluth shop for a year.”

He sucked on a cal pipe without expression. “Well, thanks, Mr. Gun-“

“Just Gunner.”

“Well, thanks, but as copy chief-“

“Manny here should be able to take care of that. If I remember the way you ran the Duluth operation, you’ve probably got things set up so he can step right in.” And so he probably did. At least, it surely would do no real harm to give somebody else a chance at lousing things up. I handed Spockman the “positions wanted” page from the paper I’d picked up at the scatport, and a scrawled list of notes I’d made up on the way in. “Hire these girls I’ve marked for your staff, rent an office, and get some letters out. You’ll see what I want from the list. Letters to every real estate dealer in town, asking them if they can put together a five-thousand-acre parcel in the area covered by the zoning referendum. Letter to every general contractor, asking for bids on buildings. Make it separate bids on each-I think there’ll be five buildings altogether. One exoclimatized-so get the airconditioning, heating, and plumbing contractors to bid, too. Letter to every food wholesaler and major grocery outlet asking if they are interested in bidding on supplying Arcturans with food. Fax Chicago for what the Arcturans fancy; I don’t remember-no meat, I think, but a lot of green vegetables-anyway, find out and include the data in the letters. Electronics manufacturers, office equipment dealers, car and truck agencies-well, the whole list is on that piece of paper. I want every businessman in Belport starting to figure out by tomorrow morning how much profit he might make on an Arcturan base. Got it?”

“I think so, Mr.-Gunner. I was thinking. How about stationery suppliers, attorneys, C.P.A.’s?”

“Don’t ask-do it. Now, you down at the end there-“

“Henry Dane, Gunner.”

“Henry, what about club outlets in Belport? I mean specialized groups. The Arcturans are hot for navigation, sailing, like that; see what you can do with the motorboat clubs and so on. I noticed in the paper that there’s a flower show at the armory next Saturday. It’s pretty late, but squeeze in a speaker on Arcturan fungi. We’ll fly in a display. They tell me Arcturans are hot gardeners when they’re home-love all the biological sciences-nice folks, like to dabble.” I hesitated and looked at my notes. “I have something down here about veterans’ groups, but I haven’t got the handle for it. Still, if you can think of an angle, let me know-what’s the matter?”

He was looking doubtful. “It’s only that I don’t want to conflict with Candy, Gunner.”

And so, of course, I had to face up to things and turn to Candace Harmon. “What’s that, honey?” I asked.

“I think Henry means my ArcturanAmerican Friendship League.” It turned out that that had been one of Haber’s proudest ideas. I wasn’t surprised. After several weeks and about three thousand dollars it had worked up to a total of forty-one members. How many of those were employees of the M & B branch? “Well, all but eight,” Candace admitted at once. She wasn’t smiling, but she was amused.

“Don’t worry about it,” I advised Henry Dane. “We’re folding the ArcturanAmerican Friendship League, anyway. Candace won’t have time for it. She’ll be working with me.”

“Why, fine, Gunner,” she said. “Doing what?”

I almost did marry Candace one time, and every once in a while since I have wished I hadn’t backed away. A very good thing was Candace Harmon.

“Doing,” I said, “what Gunner says for you to do. Let’s see. First thing, I’ve got five hundred Arcturan domestic animals coming in tomorrow. I haven’t seen them, but they tell me they’re cute, look like kittens, are pretty durable. Figure out some way of getting them distributed fast-maybe a pet shop will sell them for fifty cents each.”

Haber protested, “My dear Gunner! The freight alone-“

“Sure, Haber, they cost about forty dollars apiece just to get them here. Any other questions like that? No? That’s good. I want one in each of five hundred homes by the end of the week, and if I had to pay a hundred dollars to each customer to take them, I’d pay. Next: I want somebody to find me a veteran, preferably disabled, preferably who was actually involved in the bombing of the home planet-“

I laid out a dozen more working lines-an art show of the Arcturan bas-relief stuff that was partly to look at but mostly to feel, a 3-V panel show on Arcturus that we could plant… the whole routine. None of it would do the job, but all of it would help until I got my bearings. Then I got down to business. “What’s the name of this fellow who’s running for councilman-Connick?”

“That’s right,” said Haber.

“What’ve you got on him?” I asked.

I turned to Candace, who said promptly, “Forty-one years old, Methodist, married, three kids of his own plus one of the casualties, ran for State Senate last year and lost, but he carried Belport, running opposed to the referendum this year, very big in Junior Chamber of Commerce and V.F.W.-“

“No. What’ve you got on him?” I persisted.

Candace said slowly, “Gunner, look. This is a nice guy.”

“Why, I know that, honey. I read his piece in the paper today. So now tell me the dirt that he can’t afford to have come out.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to destroy him for nothing!”

I brushed aside the “fair” business. “What do you mean, ‘for nothing’?”

“We’re not going to win this referendum, you know.”

“Honey, I’ve got news for you. This is the biggest account anybody ever had, and I want it. We will win. What’ve you got on Connick?”

“Nothing. Really nothing,” she said quietly.

“But you can get it.”

Candace said, visibly upset, “Of course, there’s probably some-“

“Of course. Get it. Today.”

II

But I wasn’t relying totally on anyone, not even Candace. Since Connick was the central figure of the opposition I caught a cab and went to see him.

It was already dark, a cold, clear night, and over the mushroom towers of the business district a quarter-moon was beginning to rise. I looked at it almost with affection; I had hated it so when I was there.

As I paid the cab, two kids in snowsuits came sidling out to inspect me. I said, “Hello. Is your Daddy home?”

One was about five, with freckles and bright blue eyes; the other was darker, brown-eyed, and he had a limp. The blue-eyed one said, “Daddy’s down in the cellar. Mommy will let you in if you ring the doorbell. Just push that button.”

“Oh, that’s how those things work. Thanks.” Connick’s wife turned out to be a good-looking, skinny blonde in her thirties, and the kids must have raced around the back way and alerted the old man, because as she was taking my coat, he was already coming through the hall.

I shook his hand and said, “I can tell by the smells from your kitchen that it’s dinnertime. I won’t keep you. My name is Gunnarsen and-“

“And you’re from Moultrie & Bigelow-here, sit down, Mr. Gunnarsen-and you want to know if I won’t think it over and back the Arcturan base. No, Mr. Gunnarsen, I won’t. But why don’t you have a drink with me before dinner? And then why don’t you have dinner?”

He was a genuine article, this Connick. I had to admit he had caught me off balance.

“Why, I don’t mind if I do,” I said after a moment. “I see you know why I’m here.”

He was pouring drinks. “Well, not altogether, Mr. Gunnarsen. You don’t really think you’ll change my mind, do you?”

“I can’t say that until I know why you oppose the base in the first place, Connick. That’s what I want to find out.”

He handed me a drink, sat down across from me, and took a thoughtful pull at his own. It was good Scotch. Then he looked to see if the kids were within earshot, and said: “The thing is this, Mr. Gunnarsen. If I could, I would kill every Arcturan alive, and if it meant I had to accept the death of a few million Earthmen to do it, that wouldn’t be too high a price. I don’t want the base here because I don’t want anything to do with those murdering animals.”

“Well, you’re candid,” I said, finished my drink, and added, “If you meant that invitation to dinner, I believe I will take you up on it.”

I must say they were a nice family. I’ve worked elections before: Connick was a good candidate because he was a good man. The way his kids behaved around him proved it, and the way he behaved around me was the clincher. I didn’t scare him a bit.

Of course, that was not altogether bad, from my point of view.

Connick kept the conversation off Topic A during dinner, which was all right with me, but as soon as it was over and we were alone, he said, “All right. You can make your pitch now, Mr. Gunnarsen. Although I don’t know why you’re here instead of with Tom Schlitz.”

Schlitz was the man he was running against. I said, “You don’t know this business, I guess. What do we need him for? He’s already committed on our side.”

“And I’m already committed against you, but I guess that’s what you’re hoping to change. Well, what’s your offer?”

He was moving too fast for me. I pretended to misunderstand. “Really, Mr. Connick, I wouldn’t insult you by offering a bribe-“

“No, I know you wouldn’t. Because you’re smart enough to know I wouldn’t take money. So it isn’t money. What is it, then? Moultrie & Bigelow working for me instead of Schlitz in the election? That’s a pretty good offer, but the price is too high. I won’t pay it.”

“Well,” I said, “as a matter of fact, we would be willing-“

“Yes, I thought so. No deal. Anyway, do you really think I need help to get elected?”

That was a good point, I was forced to admit. I conceded, “No, not if everything else were equal. You’re way ahead right now, as your surveys and ours both show. But everything else isn’t equal.”

“By which you mean that you’re going to help old Slits-and-fits. All right, that makes it a horse race.”

I held up my glass, and he refilled it. I said, “Mr. Connick, I told you once you didn’t know this business. You don’t. It isn’t a horse race because you can’t win against us.”

“I can sure give it a hell of a try, though. Anyway”-he finished his own drink thoughtfully-“you brainwashers are a little bit fat, I think. Everybody knows how powerful you are, and you haven’t really had to show it much lately. I wonder if the emperor’s really running around naked.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Connick. Best-dressed emperor you ever saw, take my word for it.”

He said, frowning a little bit, “I think I’ll have to find out for myself. Anyway, frankly, I think people’s minds are made up, and you can’t change them.”

“We don’t have to,” I said. “Don’t you know why people vote the way they do, Connick? They don’t vote their ‘minds.’ They vote attitudes and they vote impulses. Frankly, I’d rather work on your side than against you. Schlitz would be easy to beat. He’s Jewish.”

Connick said angrily, “There’s none of that in Belport, man.”

“Of anti-Semitism, you mean. Of course not. But if one candidate is Jewish and if it turns up that fifteen years ago he tried to square a parking ticket-and there’s always something that turns up, Connick, believe me-then they’ll vote against him for fixing parking tickets. That’s what I mean by ‘attitudes.’ Your voter-oh, not all of them, but enough to swing any election-goes into the booth pulled this way and that. We don’t have to change his mind. We just have to help him decide which part of it to operate on.” I let him refill my glass and took a pull at it. I was aware that I was beginning to feel the effects. “Take you, Connick,” I said. “Suppose you’re a Democrat and you go in to cast your vote. We know how you’re going to vote for President, right? You’re going to vote for the Democratic candidate.”

Connick said, not unbending much, “Not necessarily. But probably.”

“Not necessarily, right. And why not necessarily? Because maybe you know this fellow who’s running on the Democratic ticket-or maybe somebody you know has a grudge against him, couldn’t get the postmaster’s job he wanted, or ran against his delegates for the convention. Point is, you have something against him just because your first instinct is for him. So how do you vote? Whichever way happens to get dominance at the moment of voting. Not at any other moment. Not as a matter of principle. But right then. No, we don’t have to change any minds … because most people don’t have enough mind to change!”

He stood up and absentmindedly filled his own glass-I wasn’t the only one who was beginning to feel the liquor. “I’d hate to be you,” he said, half to himself.

“Oh, it’s not bad.”

He shook his head, then recollected himself and said, “Well, thanks for the lesson. I didn’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing you’ll never do. You’ll never get me to vote on the Arcturan side on any question.”

I sneered, “There’s an open mind for you! Leader of the people! Takes an objective look at every question!”

“All right, I’m not objective. They stink.”

“Race prejudice, Connick?”

“Oh, don’t be a fool.”

“There is,” I said, “an Arcturan aroma. They can’t help it.”

“I didn’t say ‘smell.’ I said ‘stink.’ I don’t want them in this town, and neither does anybody else. Not even Schlitz.”

“You don’t ever have to see them. They don’t like Earth climate, you know. Too hot for them. Too much air. Why, Connick,” I said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you won’t set eyes on an Arcturan for at least a year, not until the base is built and staffed. And then I doubt they’ll bother to-What’s the matter?”

He was looking at me as though I were an idiot, and I almost began to think I was.

“Why,” he said, again in that tone that was more to himself than to me, “I guess I’ve been overrating you. You think you’re God, so I’ve been accepting your own valuation.”

“What do you mean?”

“Inexcusably bad staff work, Mr. Gunnarsen,” he said, nodding judgmatically. “It ought to make me feel good. But you know, it doesn’t. It scares me. With the kind of power you throw around, you should always be right.”

“Spit it out!”

“It’s just that you lose your bet. Didn’t you know there’s an Arcturan in town right now?”

III

When I got back to the car, the phone was buzzing and the “Message Recorded” light blinked at me. The message was from Candace:

“Gunner, a Truce Team has checked into the Statler-Bills to supervise the election, and get this. One of them’s an Arcturan!”

The staff work wasn’t so bad, after all, just unpardonably slow. But there wasn’t much comfort in that.

I called the hotel and was connected with one of the Truce Team staff-the best the hotel would do for me. The staff man was a colonel who said, “Yes, Mr. Knafti is aware of your work here and specifically does not wish to see you. This is a Truce Team, Mr. Gunnarsen. Do you know what that means, exactly?”

And he hung up on me. Well, I did know what it meant-strictly hands-off, all the way-I simply hadn’t known that they would interpret it that rigidly.

It was a kick in the eye, any way I looked at it. Because it made me look like a fool in front of Connick, when I kind of wanted him scared of me. Because Arcturans do, after all, stink-not good public relations at all when your product smells like well-rotted garlic buds a few hundred feet away. I didn’t want the voters smelling them.

And most of all because of the inference that I was sure any red-blooded, stubborn-minded, confused voter would draw: Jeez, Sam, you hear about that Arcturan coming to spy on us? Yeah, Charlie, the damn bugs are practically accusing us of rigging the election. Damn right, Sam, and you know what else? They stink, Sam.

Half an hour later I got a direct call from Haber. “Gunner boy! Good God! Oh, this is the reeking end!”

I said, “It sounds to me like you’ve found out about the Arcturan on the Truce Team.”

“You know? And you didn’t tell me?”

Well, I had been about to ream him for not telling me, but obviously that wasn’t going to do any good. I tried, anyway, but he fell back on his fat ignorance. “They didn’t clue me in from Chicago. Can I help that? Be fair now, Gunner boy!”

Gunner boy very fairly hung up.

I was beginning to feel very sleepy. For a moment I debated taking a brisk-up pill, but the mild buzz Connick’s liquor had left with me was pleasant enough, and besides, it was getting late. I went to the hotel suite Candace had reserved for me and crawled into bed.

It only took me a few minutes to fall asleep, but I was faintly aware of an odor. It was the same hotel the Truce Team was staying at.

I couldn’t really be smelling this Arcturan, Knafti. It was just my imagination. That’s what I told myself as I dialed for sleep and drifted off.

The pillow-phone hummed, and Candace’s voice said out of it, “Wake up and get decent, Gunner. I’m coming up.”

I managed to sit up, shook my head, and took a few whiffs of amphetamine. As always, it woke me right up, but at the usual price of feeling that I hadn’t had quite enough sleep. Still, I got into a robe and was in the bathroom fixing breakfast when she knocked on the door. “It’s open,” I called. “Want some coffee?”

“Sure, Gunner.” She came and stood in the doorway, watching me turn the Hilsch squirt to full boil and fill two cups. I spooned dry coffee into them and turned the squirt to cold. “Orange juice?” She took the coffee and shook her head, so I just mixed one glassful, swallowed it, tossed the glass in the disposal hamper, and took the coffee into the other room. The bed had stripped itself already; it was now a couch, and I leaned back on it, drinking my coffee. “All right, honey,” I said, “what’s the dirt on Connick?”

She hesitated, then opened her bag and took out a photofax and handed it to me. It was a reproduction of an old steel engraving headed, in antique script, The Army of the United States, and it said:

Be it known to all men that

DANIEL T. CONNICK

ASIN AJ-32880515

has this date been separated from the service of the United

States for the convenience of the government; and

Be it further known to all men that the conditions of his discharge are

DISHONORABLE

“Well, what do you know!” I said. “You see, honey? There’s always something.”

Candace finished her coffee, set the cup down neatly on a windowsill, and took out a cigarette. That was like her: She always did one thing at a time, an orderly sort of mind that I couldn’t match-and couldn’t stand, either. Undoubtedly she knew what I was thinking because undoubtedly she was thinking it, too, but there wasn’t any nostalgia in her voice when she said: “You went and saw him last night, didn’t you? … And you’re still going to knife him?”

I said, “I’m going to see that he is defeated in the election, yes. That’s what they pay me for. Me and some others.”

“No, Gunner,” she said, “that’s not what M & B pay me for, if that’s what you mean, because there isn’t that much money.”

I got up and went over beside her. “More coffee? No? Well, I guess I don’t want any, either. Honey-“

Candace stood up, crossed the room, and sat down in a straight—

backed chair. “You wake up all of a sudden, don’t you? Don’t change the subject. We were talking about-“

“We were talking,” I told her, “about a job that we’re paid to do. All right, you’ve done one part of it for me-you got me what I wanted on Connick.”

I stopped, because she was shaking her head. “I’m not so sure I did.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, it’s not on the fax, but I know why he got his DD. ‘Desertion of hazardous duty.’ On the Moon, in the U.N. Space Force. The year was 1998.”

I nodded, because I understood what she was talking about. Connick wasn’t the only one. Half the Space Force had cracked up that year. November. A heavy Leonid strike of meteorites and a solar flare at the same time. The Space Force top brass had decided they had to crack down and asked the U.S. Army to court-martial every soldier who cut and ran for an underground shelter, and the Army had felt obliged to comply. “But most of them got Presidential clemency,” I said. “He didn’t?”

Candace shook her head. “He didn’t apply.”

“Um. Well, it’s still on record.” I dismissed the subject. “Something else. What about these Children?”

Candace put out her cigarette and stood up. “Why I’m here, Gunner. It was on your list. So-get dressed.”

“For what?”

She grinned. “For my peace of mind, for one thing. Also for investigating the Children, like you say. I’ve made you an appointment at the hospital in fifty-five minutes.”

You have to remember that I didn’t know anything about the Children except rumors. Bless Haber, he hadn’t thought it necessary to explain. And Candace only said, “Wait till we get to the hospital. You’ll see for yourself.”

Donnegan General was seven stories of cream-colored ceramic brick, air-controlled, wall-lighted throughout, tiny asepsis lamps sparkling blue where the ventilation ducts opened. Candace parked the car in an underground garage and led me to an elevator, then to a waiting room. She seemed to know her way around very well. She glanced at her watch, told me we were a couple of minutes early, and pointed to a routing map that was a mural with colored lights showing visitors the way to whatever might be their destination. It also showed, quite impressively, the size and scope of Donnegan General. The hospital had twenty-two fully equipped operating rooms, a specimen and transplant bank, X-ray and radiochemical departments, a cryogenics room, the most complete prosthesis installation on Earth, a geriatrics section, O.T. rooms beyond number.

And, of all things, a fully equipped and crowded pediatric wing.

I said, “I thought this was a V.A. facility.”

“Exactly. Here comes our boy.”

A Navy officer was coming in, hand and smile outstretched to Candace. “Hi, good to see you. And you must be Mr. Gunnarsen.”

Candace introduced us as we shook hands. The fellow’s name was Commander Whitling; she called him Tom. He said, “We’ll have to move. Since I talked to you, there’s been an all-hands evolution scheduled for eleven-some high brass inspection. I don’t want to hurry you, but I’d like it if we were out of the way… this is a little irregular.”

“Nice of you to arrange it,” I said. “Lead on.”

We went up a high-rise elevator and came out on the top floor of the building, into a corridor covered with murals of Disney and Mother Goose. From a sun deck came the tinkle of a music box. Three children, chasing each other down the hail, dodged past us, yelling. They made pretty good time, considering that two of them were on crutches. “What the hell are you doing here?” asked Commander Whitling sharply.

I looked twice, but he wasn’t talking to me or the kids. He was talking to a man with a young face but a heavy black beard, who was standing behind a Donald Duck mobile, looking inconspicuous and guilty.

“Oh, hi, Mr. Whitling,” the man said. “Jeez, I must’ve got lost again looking for the PX.”

“Carhart,” said the commander dangerously, “if I catch you in this wing again, you won’t have to worry about the PX for a year. Hear me?”

“Well, jeez! All right, Mr. Whitling.” As the man saluted and turned, his face wearing an expression of injury, I noticed that the left sleeve of his bathrobe was tucked, empty, into a pocket.

“You can’t keep them out,” said Whitling and spread his hands. “Well, all right, Mr. Gunnarsen, here it is. You’re seeing the whole thing.”

I looked carefully around. It was all children-limping children, stumbling children, pale children, weary children. “But what am I seeing, exactly?” I asked.

“Why, the Children, Mr. Gunnarsen. The ones we liberated. The ones the Arcturans captured on Mars.”

And then I connected. I remembered about the capture of the colony on Mars.

Interstellar war is waged at the pace of a snail’s crawl, because it takes so long to go from star to star. The main battles of our war with Arcturus had been fought no farther from Earth than the surface of Mars, and the fleet engagement around Orbit Saturn. Still, it had taken eleven years, first to last, from the surprise attack on the Martian colony to the armistice signed in Washington.

I remembered seeing a reconstructed tape of that Martian surprise attack. It was a summer’s day-hot-at full noon, ice melted into water. The place was the colony around the Southern Springs. Out of the small descending sun a ship appeared.

It was a rocket. It was brilliant gold metal, and it came down with a halo of gold radiation around its splayed front, like the fleshy protuberance of a star-nosed mole. It landed with an electrical crackle on the fine-grained orange sand, and out of it came the Arcturans.

Of course, no one had known they were Arcturans then. They had swung around the sun in a long anecliptic orbit, watching and studying, and they had selected the small Martian outpost as the place to strike. In Mars gravity they were bipeds-two of their ropy limbs were enough to lift them off the ground-man tall, in golden pressure suits. The colonists came running out to meet them-and were killed. All of them. All of the adults.

The children, however, had not been killed, not that quickly or that easily, at least. Some had not been killed at all, and some of those were here in Donnegan General Hospital.

But not all.

Comprehension beginning to emerge in my small mind, I said, “Then these are the survivors.”

Candace, standing very close to me, said “Most of them, Gunner. The ones that aren’t well enough to be sent back into normal life.”

“And the others?”

“Well, they mostly don’t have families-having been killed, you see. So they’ve been adopted out into foster homes here in Belport. A hundred and eight of them-isn’t that right, Tom? And now maybe you get some idea of what you’re up against.”

There were something like a hundred of the Children in that wing, and I didn’t see all of them. Some of them were not to be seen.

Whitling just told me about but couldn’t show me the blood temperature room, where the very young and very bad cases lived. They had a gnotobiotic atmosphere, a little rich in oxygen, a little more humid than the ambient air, plus pressure to help their weak metabolism keep oxygen spread in their parts. On their right, a little farther along, were the small individual rooms belonging to the worst cases of all. The contagious. The incurables. The unfortunates whose very appearance was bad for the others. Whitling was good enough to open polarizing shutters and let me look in on some of those where they lay (or writhed or stood like sticks) in permanent solitary. One of the Arcturan efforts had been transplantation, and the project seemed to have been directed by a whimsical person. The youngest was about three; the oldest in the late teens.

They were a disturbing lot, and if I have glossed lightly over what I felt, it is because what I felt is all too obvious.

Kids in trouble! Of course, those who had been put back into population weren’t put back shocking as these. But they would pull at the heartstrings-they even pulled at mine-and every time a foster parent or a foster parent’s neighbor or a casual passer-by on the street felt that heartstring tug, he would feel, too, a single thought: The Arcturans did this.

For after killing the potentially dangerous adults, they had caged the tractable small ones as valuable research specimens.

And I had hoped to counteract this with five hundred Arcturan pets!

Whitling had been all this time taking me around the wing, and I could hear in his voice the sound of what I was up against, because he loved and pitied those kids. “Hi, Terry,” he said on the sun deck, bending over a bed and patting its occupant on his snow-white hair. Terry smiled up at him. “Can’t hear us, of course,” said Whitling. “We grafted in new auditory nerves four weeks ago-I did it myself-but they’re not surviving. Third try, too. And, of course, each attempt is a worse risk than the one before: antibodies.”

I said, “He doesn’t look more than five years old.” Whitling nodded. “But the attack on the colony was-“

“Oh, I see what you mean,” said Whitling. “The Arcturans were, of course, interested in reproduction too. Ellen-she left us a couple of weeks ago-was only thirteen, but she’d had six children. Now this is Nancy.”

Nancy was perhaps twelve, but her gait and arm coordination were those of a toddler. She came stumbling in after a ball, stopped, and regarded me with dislike and suspicion. “Nancy’s one of our cures,” Whitling said proudly. He followed my eyes. “Oh, nothing wrong there,” he said. “Mars-bred. She hasn’t adjusted to Earth gravity, is all; she isn’t slow-the ball’s bouncing too fast. Here’s Sam.”

Sam was a near-teenager, giggling from his bed as he tried what was obviously the extremely wearing exercise of lifting his head off the mattress. A candy-striped practical nurse was counting time for him as he touched chin to chest, one and two, one and two. He did it five times, then slumped back, grinning. “Sam’s central nervous system was almost gone,” Whitling said fondly. “But we’re making progress. Nervous tissue regeneration, though, is awfully-” I wasn’t listening; I was looking at Sam’s grin, which showed black and broken teeth. “Diet deficiency,” said Whitling, following my look again.

“All right,” I said, “I’ve seen enough; now I want to get out of here before they have me changing diapers. I thank you, Commander Whiting. I think I thank you. Which way is out?”

IV

I didn’t want to go back to Haber’s office. I was afraid of what the conversation might be like. But I had to get a fill-in on what had been happening with our work, and I had to eat.

So I took Candace back to my room and ordered lunch from room service.

I stood at the thermal window looking out at the city while Candace checked with the office. I didn’t even listen, because Candace knew what I would want to know; I just watched Belport cycle through an average dull Monday at my feet. Belport was a radial town, with an urban center-cluster of the mushroom-shaped buildings that were popular twenty years ago. The hotel we were in was one, in fact, and from my window I could see three others looming above and below me, to right and left, and beyond them the cathedral spires of the apartment condominia of the residential districts. I could see a creeping serpent of gaily colored cars moving along one of the trafficways, pinpointed with sparks of our pro-referendum campaign parades. Or one of the opposition’s. From four hundred feet it didn’t seem to matter.

“You know, honey,” I said as she clicked off the 3-V, “there isn’t any sense to this. I admit the kids are sad cases, and who can resist kids in trouble? But they don’t have one solitary damned thing to do with whether or not the Arcturans should have a telemetry and tracking station out on the lake.”

Candace said, “Weren’t you the man who told me that logic didn’t have anything to do with public relations?” She came to the window beside me, turned, and half-sat on the ledge and read from her notes: “Survey index off another half-point… . Haber says be sure to tell you that’s a victory-would have been off two points at least without the Arcats. Supplier letters out. Chicago approves budget overdraft. And that’s all that matters.”

“Thanks.” The door chimed, and she left me to let the waiter in with our lunch. I watched her without much appetite, except maybe for the one thing that I knew wasn’t on the menu: Candace herself. But I tried to eat.

Candace did not seem to be trying to help me eat. In fact, she did something that was quite out of character for her. All the way through lunch she kept talking, and the one subject she kept talking about was the kids. I heard about Nina, who was fifteen when she came to Donnegan General and had been through the occupation all the way-who wouldn’t talk to anybody and weighed fifty-one pounds and screamed unless she was allowed to hide under the bed. “And after six months,” said Candace, “they gave her a hand-puppet, and she finally talked through that.”

“How’d you find all this out?” I asked.

“From Tom. And then there were the germ-free kids…”

She told me about them, and about the series of injections and marrow transplants that they had needed to restore the body’s immune reaction without killing the patient. And the ones with auditory and vocal nerves destroyed, apparently because the Arcturans were investigating the question of whether humans could think rationally in the absence of articulate words. The ones raised on chemically pure glucose for dietary studies. The induced bleeders. The kids with no sense of touch, and the kids with no developed musculature.

“Tom told you all this?”

“And lots more, Gunner. And remember, these are the survivors. Some of the kids who were deliberately-“

“How long have you known Tom?”

She put down her fork, sugared her coffee, and took a sip, looking at me over the cup. “Oh, since I’ve been here. Two years. Since before the kids came, of course.”

“Pretty well, I judge.”

“Oh, yes.”

“He really likes those kids-I could see that. And so do you.” I swallowed some more of my own coffee, which tasted like diluted pig swill, and reached for a cigarette and said, “I think maybe I waited too long about the situation here, wouldn’t you say?”

“Why, yes, Gunner,” she said carefully, “I think you maybe missed the boat.”

“I tell you what else I think, honey. I think you’re trying to tell me something, and it isn’t all about Proposition Four on the ballot next week.”

And she said, not irrelevantly, “As a matter of fact, Gunner, I’m going to marry Tom Whitling on Christmas Day.”

I sent her back to the office and stretched out on my bed, smoking and watching the smoke being sucked into the wall vents. It was rather peaceful and quiet because I’d told the desk to hold all calls until further notice, and I wasn’t feeling a thing.

Perfection is so rare that it is interesting to find a case in which one has been perfectly wrong all the way.

If I had taken out my little list, then I could have checked off all the points. One way or another. I hadn’t fired Haber, and in fact, I really didn’t want to anymore, because he wasn’t much worse than I was at this particular job; the record showed it. I had investigated the Children, all right. A little late. I had investigated Connick, the number one opponent to the proposition, and what I had found would hurt Connick, all right, but I couldn’t really see how it would help do our job. And I certainly wasn’t going to marry Candace Harmon.

Come to think of it, I thought, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the old one, there had been a fifth item, and I had blown that one, too.

The classics of public relations clearly show how little reason has to do with M/R, and yet I had allowed myself to fall into that oldest and most imbecilic of traps set for flacks. Think of history’s master strokes of flackery: “The Jews stabbed Germany in the back!” “Seventy-eight (or fifty-nine, or one hundred and three) cardcarrying Communists in the State Department!” “I will go to Korea!” It is not enough for a theme to be rational; indeed it is wrong for a theme to be rational if you want to move men’s glands, because, above all else, it must seem new and fresh and of such revolutionary simplicity that it illuminates an enormous, confused, and disagreeable problem in a fresh and hopeful light. Or so it must seem to the Average Man. And since he has spent any number of surly, worried hours groping for some personal salvation in the face of a bankrupt Germany or a threat of subversion or a war that is going nowhere, no rational solution can ever meet those strictures … since he has already considered all the rational solutions and found either that they are useless or that the cost is more than he wants to pay.

So what I should have concentrated on in Belport was the bright, irrational, distractive issue. The Big Lie, if you will. And I had hardly found even a Sly Insinuation.

It was interesting to consider in just how many ways I had done the wrong thing. Including maybe the wrongest of all: I had let Candace Harmon get away. And then in these thoughts, myself almost despising, haply the door chimed, and I opened it, and there was this fellow in Space Force olive-greens saying, “Come along, Mr. Gunnarsen, the Truce Team wants to talk to you.”

For one frozen moment there, I was nineteen years old again. I was a Rocketman 3/C on the Moon, guarding the Aristarchus base against invaders from outer space. (We thought that to be a big joke at the time. Shows how unfunny a joke can turn.) This fellow was a colonel, and his name was Peyroles, and he took me down the corridor, to a private elevator I had never known was there, up to the flat dome of the mushroom and into a suite that made my suite look like the cellar under a dog run in Old Levittown. The reek was overpowering. By then I had gotten over my quick response to the brass, and I took out a ker-pak and held it to my nose. The colonel did not even look at me.

“Sit down!” barked the colonel, and left me in front of an unlighted fireplace. Something was going on; I could hear voices from another room, a lot of them:

“-burned one in effigy, and by God we’ll burn a real one-“

“-smells like a skunk-“

“-turns my stomach!” And that last fellow, whoever he was, was pretty near right at that-although actually in the few seconds since I’d entered the suite I had almost forgotten the smell. It was funny how you got used to it. Like a ripe cheese: The first whiff knocked you sick, but pretty soon the olfactory nerves got the hang of the thing and built up a defense.

“-all right, the war’s over and we have to get along with them, but a man’s home town-“

Whatever it was that was going on in the other room, it was going on loudly. Tempers were always short when Arcturans were around, because the smell, of course, put everybody on edge. People don’t like bad smells. They’re not nice. They remind us of sweat and excrement, which we have buttressed our lives against admitting as real, personal facts. Then there was a loud military yell for order-I recognized the colonel, Peyroles-and then a voice that sounded queerly not-quite-human, although it spoke in English. An Arcturan? What was his name, Knafti? But I had understood they couldn’t make human sounds.

Whoever it was, he put an end to the meeting. The door opened.

Through it I could see a couple of dozen hostile backs, leaving through another door, and coming toward me the Space Force colonel, a very young man with a pale angel’s face and a dragging limp, in civilian clothes… and, yes, the Arcturan. It was the first one I had ever been with at so close range, in so small a group. He wobbled toward me on four or six of his coat-hanger limbs, breathing-thorax encased in a golden shell, his mantis face and bright black eyes staring at me. Peyroles closed the door behind them.

He turned to me and said, “Mr. Gunnarsen … Knafti . Timmy Brown.”

I hadn’t the ghost of a clue whether to offer to shake, and if so, with what. Knafti, however, merely regarded me gravely. The boy nodded. I said: “I’m glad to meet you, gentlemen. As you perhaps know, I tried to set up an appointment before, but your people turned me down. I take it now the shoe is on the other foot.”

Colonel Peyroles frowned toward the door he had just shut-there were still noises behind it-but said to me, “You’re quite right. That was a meeting of a civic leaders’ committee-“

The door interrupted him by opening, and a man leaned through and yelled: “Peyroles! Can that thing understand white man’s talk? I hope so. I hope it hears me when I say that I’m going to make it my personal business to take it apart if it’s still in Belport this time tomorrow. And if any human being, or so-called human being like you, gets in the way, I’ll take him apart, too!” He slammed the door without waiting for an answer.

“You see?” said Peyroles gruffly, angrily. Things like that would never have happened with well-tempered troops. “That’s what we want to talk to you about.”

“I see,” I said, and I did see, very clearly, because that fellow who had leaned through the door had been the Arcturan-property-sale standard bearer we had counted on, old-what had Connick called him?-old Slits-and-fits Schlitz, the man we were attempting to elect to get our proposition through.

Judging by the amount of noise I’d heard from the citizens’ delegation, there was lynching in the atmosphere. I could understand why they would reverse themselves and ask for me, before things got totally out of control and wound up in murder, if you call killing an Arcturan murder-although, it occurred to me, lynching Knafti might not be the worst thing that could happen; public sentiment might bounce back-I shoved that thought out of my mind and got down to business.

“What, exactly?” I asked. “I gather you want me to do something about your image.”

Knafti sat himself down, if that’s what Arcturans do, on a twining-rack. The pale boy whispered something to him, then came to me. “Mr. Gunnarsen,” he said, “I am Knafti.” He spoke with a great precision of vowels and a stress at the end of each sentence, as though he had learned English out of a handbook. I had no trouble in understanding him. At least, not in understanding what it was he said. It did take me a moment to comprehend what he meant, and then Peyroles had to help.

“He means at this moment he’s speaking for Knafti,” said the colonel. “Interpreter. See?”

The boy moved his lips for a moment-shifting gears, it seemed-and said, “That is right, I am Timmy Brown. Knafti’s translator and assistant.”

“Then ask Knafti what he wants from me.” I tried to say it the way he had-a sort of sneeze for the “K” and an indescribable whistle for the “f.”

Timmy Brown moved his lips again and said, “I, Knafti, wish you to stop … to leave … to discontinue your operation in Belport.”

From the twining-tree the Arcturan waved his ropy limbs and chittered like a squirrel. The boy chirped back and said: “I, Knafti, commend you on your effective work, but stop it.”

“By which,” rumbled Colonel Peyroles, “he means knock it off.”

“Go fight a space war, Peyroles. Timmy-I mean, Knafti, this is the job I’m paid to do. The Arcturan Confederacy itself hired us. I take my orders from Arthur S. Bigelow, Jr., and I carry them out whether Knafti likes it or not.”

Chirp and chitter between Knafti and the pale, limping boy. The Arcturan left his twining-tree and moved to the window, looking out into the sky and the copter traffic. Timmy Brown said: “It does not matter what your orders may be. I, Knafti, tell you that your work is harmful.” He hesitated, mumbling to himself. “We do not wish to obtain our base here at the cost of what is true, and-” he turned imploringly to the Arcturan-“it is apparent you are attempting to change the truth.”

He chirped at the Arcturan, who took his blind black eyes from the window and came toward us. Arcturans don’t walk, exactly. They drag themselves on the lower part of the thorax. Their limbs are supple and thin, and what are not used for support are used for gestures. Knafti used a number of his now as he chirped one short series of sounds at the boy.

“Otherwise,” Timmy Brown finished off, “I, Knafti, tell you we will have to fight this war over again.”

As soon as I was back in my room, I messaged Chicago for orders and clarification and got back the answer I expected:

Hold everything. Referring matter to ASB-jr. Await instructions.

So I awaited. The way I awaited was to call Candace at the office and get the latest sitrep. I told her about the near-riot in the Truce Team’s suite and asked her what it was all about.

She shook her head. “We have their appointments schedule, Gunner. It just says, ‘Meeting with civic leaders.’ But one of the leaders has a secretary who goes to lunch with a girl from Records and Accounting here, and-“

“And you’ll find out. All right, do that, and now what’s the current picture?”

She began reading off briefing digests and field reports. They were mixed, but not altogether bad. Opinion sampling showed a small rise in favor of the Arcturans, in fact. It wasn’t much, but it was the first plus change I had seen, and doubly puzzling because of Knafti’s attitude and the brawl with the civic leaders.

I asked, “Why, honey?”

Candace’s face in the screen was as puzzled as mine. “We’re still digging.”

“All right. Go on.”

There were more pluses. The flower show had yielded surprisingly big profits in attitudes-among those who attended. Of course, they were only a tiny fraction of the population of Belport. The Arcats were showing a plus for us, too. Where we were down was in PTA meeting resolutions, in resignations from Candace’s ArcturanAmerican Friendship League, in poor attendance at neighborhood kaffeeklatsches.

Now that I knew what to look for, I could see what the Children had done to us. In every family-situation sampling, the attitudes were measurably worse than when the subjects were interviewed in a nonfamily environment-at work, stopped on the street, in a theater.

The importance of that was just what I had told Connick. No man is a simple entity. He behaves one way when his self-image is as head of a family, another when he is at a cocktail party, another at work, another still when a pretty girl sits down beside him on a commutercopter. Elementary truths. But it had taken the M/R boys half a century to learn how to use them.

In this case the use was clear: Play down family elements, play up play. I ordered more floats, torchlight parades, and a teenage beauty contest. I canceled the 14 picnic rallies we had planned and ordered a hold on the kaffeeklatsches.

I was not exactly obeying Chicago’s orders. But it didn’t matter. All this could be canceled with a single word, and, anyway, it was only nit-picking detail. The One Big Weeny still escaped me.

I lit a cigarette, thought for a minute, and said, “Honey, get me some of the synoptic extracts of opinion sampling from heads of families and particularly families containing some of the Children. I don’t want the integration or analysis. Just the raw interviews, but with the scutwork left out.”

And as soon as she was off the line, the Chicago circuit came in with a message they’d been holding:

Query from ASB-jr. Provided top is taken off budget and your hand is freed, can you guarantee, repeat guarantee, win on referendum question?

It was not the response I had expected from them.

Still, it was a legitimate question. I took a moment to think it over. Junior Bigelow had already given me a pretty free hand-as he always did; how else can a troubleshooter work? If he was now emphasizing that my hand was freed entirely, it would not be because he thought I hadn’t understood him in the first place. Nor would it be because he suspected I might be cheese-paring secretarial salaries. He meant one thing: Win, no matter what.

Under those conditions, could I do it?

Well, of course I could win. Yes. Provided I found the One Big Weeny. You can always win an election, any election anywhere, provided you are willing to pay the right price.

It was finding the price to pay that was hard. Not just money. Sometimes the price you pay is a human being, in the role for which I had been lining up Connick. Throw a human sacrifice to the gods, and your prayer is granted…

But was Connick the sacrifice the gods wanted? Would it help to defeat him, bearing in mind that his opponent was one of the men who had been screaming at Knafti in the Truce Team suite? And if so-had my knife enough edge to drain his blood?

Well, it always had had before. And if Connick wasn’t the right man, I would find the man who was. I messaged back, short and sweet: Yes.

And in less than a minute, as though Junior had been standing by at the faxtape receiver, waiting for the word from me-and perhaps he had!-his reply came back:

Gunner, we’ve lost the Arcturan Confederacy account. Arc Con liaison man says all bets off. They’re giving notice of cancellation our contract, suggestion they will cancel entire armistice treaty, too. I don’t have to tell you we need them. Some possibility that showing strong results in Belport will get them back. That’s what we have to play for. No holds barred, Gunner, win that election.

The office circuit chimed then. Probably it was Candace, but I didn’t want to talk to her just then. I turned all the communication circuits to “hold,” stripped down, climbed into the shower, set it for full needle spray, and let the water beat on me. It was not an aid to thought, it was a replacement for thought.

I didn’t want to think anymore. I wanted time out.

I did not want to think about (a) whether the war would break out again, and, if so, in what degree I would have helped to bring that about; (b) what I was doing to Nice Guy Connick; (c) whether It Was All Worth It, or (d) how much I was going to dislike myself that coming Christmas Day. I only wanted to let the hot splash of scented foaming water anesthetize me. When my skin began to look pale and wrinkly, although I had not come to any conclusions or found any solutions, I came out, dressed, opened the communications circuits, and let them all begin blinking, ringing, and winking at once.

I took Candace first. She said, “Gunner! Dear Lord, have you heard about the Armistice Commission? They’ve just released a statement-“

“I heard. What else, honey?”

Good girl, she shifted gears without missing a beat. “Then there was that meeting of civic leaders in the Truce Team suite-“

“I saw. Feedback from the Armistice Commission’s statement. What else?”

She glanced at the papers in her hand, hesitated, then said: “Nothing important. Uh-Gunner, that 3-V preempt for tonight-“

“Yeah, honey?”

“Do you want me to cancel it?”

I said, “No. You’re right, we won’t use the time for the ArcturanAmerican Friendship League or whatever we had scheduled, but you’re wrong, we’ll use the time some way. I don’t know how right now.”

“But Junior said-“

“Honey,” I told her, “Junior says all sorts of things. Anybody looking to scalp me?”

“Well,” she said, “there’s Mr. Connick. I didn’t think you’d want to see him.”

“No, I’ll see him. I’ll see anybody.”

“Anybody?” I had surprised her. She dove into her list again. “There’s somebody from the Truce Team-“

“Make it everybody from the Truce Team.”

“-and Commander Whitling from-“

“From the hospital. Sure, and tell him to bring some kids.”

“-and …” She trailed off and looked at me. “Gunner, are you putting me on? You don’t really want to see all these people.”

I smiled and reached out and patted the viewphone. From her point of view it would look like an enormous cloudy hand closing in on her screen, but she would know what I meant. I said, “You could not be more wrong. I do. I want to see them all, the more the better, and the way I’d like to see them best is in my office all at once. So set it up, honey, because I’ll be busy between now and then.”

“Busy doing what, Gunner?”

“Busy trying to think of what I want to see them for.” And I turned off the viewphone, got up, and walked out, leaving the others gobbling into emptiness behind me. What I needed was a long, long walk, and I took it.

When I was tired of walking, I went to the office and evicted Haber from his private quarters. I kept him standing by what had once been his own desk while I checked with Candace and found that she had made all my appointments for that evening; then I told him to get lost. “And thanks,” I said.

He paused on his way to the door. “For what, Gunner?”

“For a very nice office to kill time in.” I waved at the furnishings. “I wondered what you’d spent fifty grand on when I saw the invoices in the Chicago office, Haber, and I admit I thought there might have been a little padding. But I was wrong.”

He said woundedly: “Gunner-boy! I wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“I believe you. Wait a minute.” I thought for a second, then told him to send in some of the technical people and not to let anybody, repeat anybody, disturb me for any purpose whatever. I scared him good, too. He left, a shaken man, a little angry, a little admiring, a little excited inside, I think, at the prospect of seeing how the great man would get himself out of this one.

Meanwhile the great man talked briefly to the technicians, took a ten-minute nap, drank the martinis out of his dinner tray, and pitched the rest of it in the disposal.

Then, as I had nearly an hour before the appointments Candace had set up for me, I scrounged around fat-cat Haber’s office to see what entertainment it offered.

There were his files. I glanced at them and forgot them; there was nothing about the hoarded memoranda that interested me, not even for gossip. There were the books on his shelf. But I did not care to disturb the patina of dust that even the cleaning machines had not been able to touch. There was his private bar, and the collection of photographs in the end compartment of his desk drawer.

It looked like very dull times, waiting, until the studio men reported in that they had completed their arrangements at my request, and the 3-V tape-effects monitor could now be controlled by remote from my desk, and then I knew I had a pleasant way of killing any amount of time.

Have you ever played with the console of a 3-V monitor, backed by a library of tape-effects strips? It is very much like being God.

All that the machine does is take the stored videotapes that are in its files and play them back. But it also manipulates size and perspective or superimposes one over another … so that you can, as I, in fact, have done, put the living person of someone you don’t like in a position embarrassing to him, and project it on a montage screen so that only a studio tech can find the dots on the pattern where the override betrays its presence.

Obviously, this is a way out of almost any propaganda difficulty, since it is child’s play to make up any event you like and give it the seeming of reality.

Of course, everybody knows it can be done. So the evidence of one’s own eyes is no longer quite enough, even for a voter. And the laws can cut you down. I had thought of whomping up some frightful frame around Connick, for example. But it wouldn’t work; no matter when I did it, there would still be time for the other side to spread the word of an electoral fraud, and a hoax of this magnitude would make its own way onto the front pages. So I used the machine for something much more interesting to me. I used it as a toy.

I started by dialing the lunar base at Aristarchus for background, found a corps of Rocketmen marching off in the long lunar step, patched my own face onto one of the helmeted figures, and zoomed in and out with the imaginary camera, watching R3/C Odin Gunnarsen as a boy of nineteen, scared witless but doing his job. He was a pretty nice boy, I thought objectively, and wondered what had gone wrong with him later. I abandoned that and sought for other amusements. I found Candace’s images on tape in the files and pleasured myself with her for a time. Her open, friendly face gave some dignity to the fantastic bodies of half a dozen 3-V strippers in the files, but I stopped that child’s game.

I looked for a larger scope. I spread the whole panoply of the heavens across the screen of the tape machine. I sought out the crook of the Big Dipper’s handle, traced its arc across half the heavens until I located orange Arcturus. Then I zoomed in on the star, as littler stars grew larger and hurtled out of range around it, sought its seven gray-green planets and located Number Five among them, the watery world that Knafti had spawned upon. I bade the computing mind inside the tape machine reconstruct the events of the orbit bombing for me and watched hell-bombs splash enormous mushrooms of poisonous foam into the Arcturan sky, whipping the island cities with tidal waves and drowning them in death.

Then I destroyed the whole planet. I turned Arcturus into a nova and watched the hot driven gases sphere out to embrace the planet, boil its seas, slag its cities … and found myself sweating. I ordered another drink from the dispenser and switched the machine off. And then I became aware that the pale blue light over the door to Haber’s office was glowing insistently. It was time; my visitors had arrived.

Connick had brought his kids along, three of them; the lover from Donnegan General had brought two more; Knafti and Colonel Peyroles had Timmy Brown. “Welcome to Romper Room,” I said. “They’re making lynch mobs young this year.”

They all yelled at me at once-or all but Knafti, whose tweeting chitter just didn’t have the volume to compete. I listened, and when they showed signs of calming down, I reached into fat cat Haber’s booze drawer and poured myself a stiff one and said, “All right, which of you creeps want first crack?” And they boiled up again while I drank my drink. All of them, except Candace Harmon, who only stood by the door and looked at me.

So I said, “All right, Connick, you first. Are you going to make me spread it all over the newscasts that you had a dishonorable discharge?… And by the way, maybe you’d like to meet my assistant blackmailer; Miss Harmon over there dug up the dirt on you.”

Her boyfriend yelped, but Candace just went on looking. I didn’t look back, but kept my eyes on Connick. He squinted his eyes, put his hands in his pockets, and said, with considerable self-restraint, “You know I was only seventeen years old when that happened.”

“Oh, sure. I know more. You had a nervous breakdown the year after your discharge, space *scared, as they call it on the soapies. Yellow fever is what we called it on the Moon.”

He glanced quickly at his kids, the two who were his own and the one who was not, and said rapidly: “You know I could have had that DD reversed-“

“But you didn’t. The significant fact isn’t that you deserted. The significant fact is that you were loopy. And, I’d say, still are.”

Timmy Brown stuttered: “One moment. I, Knafti, have asked that you cease-“

But Connick brushed him aside. “Why, Gunnarsen?”

“Because I intend to win this election. I don’t care what it costs-especially what it costs you.”

“But, I, Knafti, have instructed-” That was Timmy Brown trying again.

“The Armistice Commission issued orders-” That was Peyroles.

“I don’t know which is worse, you or the bugs!” And that was Candace’s little friend from the hospital, and they all were talking at once again. Even Knafti came dragging toward me on his golden slug’s belly, chirruping and hooting, and Timmy Brown was actually weeping as he tried to tell me I was wrong, I had to stop; the whole thing was against orders and why wouldn’t I desist?

I shouted: “Shut up, all of you!”

They didn’t, but the volume level dropped minutely. I rode over it: “What the hell do I care what any of you want? I’m paid to do a job. My job is to make people act in a certain way. I do it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be paid to make them act the opposite way, and I’ll do that, too. Anyway, who the hell are you to order me around? A stink-bug like you, Knafti? A GI quack like yourself, Whitling? Or you, Connick. A-“

“A candidate for public office,” he said clearly. And I give him much manna-he didn’t shout, but he talked right over me. “And as such I have an obligation-“

But I outyelled him, anyway. “Candidate! You’re a candidate right up till the minute I tell the voters you’re a nut, Connick. And then you’re dead! And I will tell them, I promise, if-“

I didn’t get a chance to finish that sentence, because all three of Connick’s kids were diving at me, his own two and the other one. They sent papers flying off Haber’s desk and smashed his sand-crystal decanter, but they didn’t get to my throat, where they clearly were aimed, because Connick and Timmy Brown dragged them back. Not easily.

I allowed myself a sneer. “And what does that prove? Your kids like you, I admit-even the one from Mars. The one that Knafti’s people used for vivisection-that Knafti himself worked over, likely as not. Nice picture, right? Your bug-buddy there, killing babies, destroying kids … or didn’t you know that Knafti himself was one of the boss bugs on the baby-killing project?”

Timmy Brown shrieked wildly, “You don’t know what you are doing. It was not Knafti’s fault at all!” His ashen face was haggard, his rotten teeth bared in a grimace. And he was weeping.

If you apply heat to a single molecule, it will take off like a torn with a spark under his tail, but you cannot say where it will go. If you heat a dozen molecules, they will fling out in all directions, but you still do not know which directions they will be. If, however, you heat a few billion, about as many as are in a thimble of dilute gas, you know where they will go: they will expand. Mass action. You can’t tell what a single molecule may do-call it the molecule’s free will if you like-but masses obey mass laws. Masses of anything, even so small a mass as the growling troop that confronted me in Haber’s office. I let them yell, and all the yelling was at me. Even Candace was showing the frown and the darkening of the eyes and the working of the lips, although she watched me as silently and steadily as ever.

Connick brought it to a head. “All right, everybody,” he yelled, “now listen to me! Let’s get this thing straightened out!”

He stood up, a child gripped by each elbow, and the third, the youngest, trapped between him and the door. He looked at me with such loathing that I could feel it-and didn’t like it, either, although it was no more than I had expected, and he said: “It’s true. Sammy, here, was one of the kids from Mars. Maybe that has made me think things I shouldn’t have thought-he’s my kid now, and when I think of those stink bugs cutting-“

He stopped himself and turned to Knafti. “Well, I see something. A man who would do a thing like that would be a fiend. I’d cut his heart out with my bare hands. But you aren’t a man.”

Grimly he let go of the kids and strode toward Knafti. “I can’t forgive you. God help me, it isn’t possible. But I can’t blame you-exactly-any more than I can blame lightning for striking my house. I think I was wrong. Maybe I’m wrong now. But-I don’t know what you people do-I’d like to shake your hand. Or whatever the hell it is you’ve got there. I’ve been thinking of you as a perverted murderer and a filthy animal, but I’ll tell you right now, I’d rather work together with you-for your base, for peace, for whatever we can get together on-than with some human beings in this room!”

I didn’t stay to watch the tender scene that followed.

I didn’t have to, since the cameras and tape recorders that the studio people had activated for me behind every one-way mirror in the room would be watching for me. I could only hope they had not missed a single word or scream, because I didn’t think I could do that scene over again.

I opened the door quietly and left. And as I was going, I caught the littlest Connick kid sneaking past me, headed for the 3-V set in the waiting room, and snaked out an arm to stop him. “Stinker!” he hissed. “Rat fink!”

“You may be right,” I told him, “but go back and keep your father company. You’re in on living history today.”

“Nuts! I always watch Dr. Zhivago on Monday nights, and it’s on in five minutes, and-“

“Not tonight it isn’t, son. You can hold that against me, too. We preempted the time for a different show entirely.”

I escorted him back into the room, closed the door, picked up my coat, and left.

Candace was waiting for me with the car. She was driving it herself.

“Will I make the nine-thirty flight?” I asked.

“Sure, Gunner.” She steered onto the autotraffic lane, put the car on servo, and dialed the scatport, then sat back and lit a cigarette for each of us. I took one and looked morosely out the window.

Down below us, on the slow-traffic level, we were passing a torchlight parade, with floats and glee clubs and free beer at the major pedestrian intersections. I opened the glove compartment and took out field glasses, looked through them- “Oh, you don’t have to check up, Gunner. I took care of it. They’re all plugging the program.”

“I see they are.” Not only were the marchers carrying streamers that advertised our preempt show that was now already beginning to be on the air, but the floats carried projection screens and amplifiers. You couldn’t look anywhere in the procession without seeing Knafti, huge and hideous in his gold carapace, clutching the children and protecting them against the attack of that monster from another planet, me. The studio people had done a splendid job of splicing in no time at all. The whole scene was there on camera, as real as I had just lived it.

“Want to listen?” Candace fished out and passed me a hyperboloid long-hearer, but I didn’t need it. I remembered what the voices would be saying. There would be Connick denouncing me. Timmy Brown denouncing me. The kids denouncing me, all of them. Colonel Peyroles denouncing me, Commander Whitling denouncing me, even Knafti denouncing me. All that hate and only one target.

Me.

“Of course, Junior’ll fire you. He’ll have to, Gunner.”

I said, “I need a vacation, anyway.” It wouldn’t matter. Sooner or later, when the pressure was off, Junior would find a way to hire me back. Once the lawsuits had been settled. Once the Armistice Commission could finish its work. Once I could be put on the payroll inconspicuously, at an inconspicuous job in an inconspicuous outpost of the firm. With an inconspicuous future.

We slid over the top of a spiraling ramp and down into the parking bays of the scatport. “So long, honey,” I said, “and Merry Christmas to you both.”

“Oh, Gunner! I wish-“

But I knew what she really wished, and I wouldn’t let her finish. I said, “He’s a nice fellow, Whitling. And you know? I’m not.”

I didn’t kiss her good-bye.

The scatjet was ready for boarding. I fed my ticket into the check-in slot, got the green light as the turnstile clicked open, entered the plane, and took a seat on the far side, by the window.

You can win any cause if you care to pay the price. All it takes is one human sacrifice.

By the time the scatjet began to roar, to quiver, and to turn on its axis away from the terminal, I had faced the fact that that price once and for all was paid. I saw Candace standing there on the roof of the loading dock, her skirts whipped by the back-blast. She didn’t wave to me, but she didn’t go away as long as I could see her standing on the platform.

Then, of course, she would go back to her job and ultimately on Christmas morning to that nice guy at the hospital. Haber would stay in charge of his no-longer-important branch office. Connick would win his campaign. Knafti would transact his incomprehensible business with Earth, and if any of them ever thought of me again, it would be with loathing, anger, and contempt. But that is the way to win an election. You have to pay the price. It was just the breaks of the game that the price of this one was me.