HELP

“Here we go again,” said Harry’s voice in my ear.

I discovered my wife had waked up first and was holding the office phone over my face. It was still dark.

“—down by the Lunar Alps. Visuals just coming in.”

“Not those Capellan jocks again?” I groaned.

“Smaller. Different emission features. Get down here, Max.”

Tillie was already dressing. When we’d gone to bed two hours back, the ears of Earth were following a moving source which kept disappearing behind Luna, and our moonstation near Mersenius was scrambling to set up a far-side relay. Now the alien had landed, a third of a great circle from our station.

The photo courier passed us at the office door. Mersenius had sent a camera-eye over the alien ship.

“Looks as if they’re interested in those ore-piles the Capellans left,” said George. “What’s that, a derrick?”

“Derrick my azimuth,” I grunted, rapidly opening and closing alternate eyes to catch small differences in consecutive negatives. That’s called flashing. Big photo-shops do it with a trunk-sized geewhizzus that’s almost as efficient as the trained human eye.

“That’s them. It He. He is moving an arm… he is shifting his stance… bipedal? Maybe, if that’s a tail. Yes! He is moving his tail. What did we have for the height of that ore-pile?”

“Forty-one meters.” Little Mrs. Peabody had joined us, Living Bra alert and dedicated.

“Tentative estimate, six meters tall,” I concluded. “We’ll see what Langley says in the morning; they’ve got better comparators. And not human. Let me project this shadow—if it straightened up, it would look something like a small tyrannosaurus, wouldn’t you say?”

The spy-eye gave us a close-up on its second pass, just before the alien knocked it down. We saw a lizard-like creature, helmeted and harnessed with weird hardware, wearing an unpleasant expression on its lipless face. And blue.

“Eighteen-foot blue space-going dinosaurs, that’s what’s up there,” said Harry. “At least two of them.”

“Or praying mantises,” said George.

“Maybe he’s a she,” said Tillie.

“Quit dreaming, kid,” I told her. “The lulu is played only once in a lifetime.”

By this time, the main photo-shop had confirmed my height guess and added that the two aliens had pulled the spy-eye in with some sort of beam and then apparently cut it open for a brief look before blowing the remains.

Meanwhile the hotlines of the world were steaming, and the United Nations halls were boiling with delegates trying to get a decision on what to tell Mersenius to do. So many electric razors were used in the U.N. lounge that they blew a fuse and killed our landline for fifteen minutes. At 0800 EST the question became academic. The aliens took off on a fast-precessing orbit around Terra itself.

So far they had been silent. Now they began to transmit, and George ascended to his idea of heaven with an endless supply of alien gabble to chew on.

What exactly is our shop? Basically, an unimportant bit of C.I.A. that got left out in the big move to Langley. (I warned you this would be the inside story from the pick-and-shovel level; I couldn’t know less about what the President said to the Premier.) We’re officially listed as a communications and special support facility. Just a small crew of oddball linguists and blown operators put out to pasture. It was a nice restful life until we accidentally got into the first great alien contact flap three years back. The Capellans, you’ll recall.

George came out of that as our official Extraterrestrial Language Specialist, which hasn’t done his small-man’s ego any good. I am optimistically regarded as having a flare for alien psychology—shows you what can happen to a fair photo—interpreter. And Tillie is a crack polyglot. Did you know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist? Anyway, she’s George’s aide. And my wife. Harry is our captive physicist-of-all-work since they decided we rated an R&D. Little Mrs. Peabody got upgraded to Chief of Archives, but she still helps me with my income-tax forms.

After the Girls from Capella left hurriedly we all expected to coast into distinguished retirement with no further calls on our peculiar talents, if any. Now suddenly here was Another Alien merrily orbiting Terra, and our little shop was being pelted with data and demands for answers.

“They appear to be sending some sort of standard contact broadcast,” George reported. “Three or four phrases repeated, and switch to a different language. At least twenty-eight so far. One of them resembles Capellan, but not enough to read.”

“I think it’s like a high Capellan,” said Tillie. “You know, like Mandarin to Cantonese. The Capellans who came here must have spoken a dialect. I’m sure I heard a formal I and you and something about speak.”

“Could it be Do you speak our language? Or Will you speak?”

The nations were now in hot debate as to whether and what to reply to the alien. George could scarcely be prevented from trying to pull something through his friends at N.S.A.; he was sweating for fear the Swedes or Japs would beat us to it. But we couldn’t get an O.K. That was the time our Joint Chiefs were so cozy with the President—remember?—and I think there was a struggle to keep them from testing their new anti-orbital-missile missile on the aliens. It may have been the same elsewhere; the big nations had all been working up some space defense since the Capellan visit.

The upshot was that nobody did anything before the alien abruptly stopped transmitting speech and went into repeated da-dits. That lasted an hour. Then two things happened right together.

First, Harry got a signal from Defense R&D that one of their boys had identified a digital equation having to do with fissionable elements in the da-dits. Right after that came the word from a Soviet tracker that the alien had ejected an object which was now trailing their ship.

We all ducked and held our breaths.

The blip stayed in orbit.

Just as we started breathing again, the alien poked out a laser finger and the trailing blip went up in the prettiest fusion flare you ever saw—a complex burst, like three shorts and a long.

This is probably where you came in. With that flare overhead, the world media roared out of control. “ALIENS BLAST EARTH!” “BLUE LIZARDS HURL BOMB FROM SKY!” The military was already loose, of course, and an assortment of mega-squibs were blasting up towards the alien ship.

They never connected. The alien deftly distributed three more blips in a pattern around earth, about 150,000 miles out, and took off in the direction of the Coal Sack. They had been in our system exactly thirteen hours, during which the united brains of Earth had demonstrated all the initiative of a shocked opossum.

“Call me anthropocentric, but they struck me as ugly customers,” I brooded later.

“And very alien,” said Tillie.

“You’re supposed to be able to identify, remember?”

She gave me the old sulky leer, with the new magic ingredient.

“Marriage has ruined you, stud…. Hey, George! Did you hear that those bombs they left are covered with writing? About a zillion different scripts, in a nice fluorescent blue. It’s your life work, old brother.”

“A galactic Rosetta stone,” breathed George as he sat down. “Max, you must prevent the military from destroying them. The photos are not adequate.”

“Three tune-bombs going past our ears on the hour, and you want to preserve them as a reference library? What if they’re loaded with disease? Or mutation inducers? Stupid-making generators, so we won’t get into space? Have you heard the newscasts? George, sober up.”

“They can’t,” he groaned. “It’s priceless! The key to the galaxy!”

As it turned out, they didn’t, at least not then. Somebody was either too scared or too avid for alien technology. A US-Soviet astroteam managed to make a remote-control dock with one of the ten-foot missiles and spent two weeks gingerly coaxing it around to a crater on the far side of Luna.

From that minute, George lived to get to the moon. To my amazement, he screamed the medicos into an acceleration and low-G clearance, and next thing we knew he was actually booked for the Mersenius shuttle trip. In spite of looking like a dissipated gerbil, George was fundamentally pretty healthy.

At the good-bye party he told me he felt sure he had detected Capellan script on the missile’s fin.

“Same as the verbal transmission—something about I you speak.”

“How about: If you can read this you’re too damn close? Good luck.”

So that was how we came to be short of our extraterrestrial language expert when Alien No. 2 came along. (Or No. 3, if you count from the Capellans.) You know most of the story here. The new boys followed the same routine as the lizards: a couple of passes over Luna, pause to inspect the ore-piles, and then into orbit and start to transmit There was a diversion when they spotted the two flying bombs. They quit transmitting and, while the world watched, they sneaked up behind one of the blips. There was no laser probe. Instead, we saw some sort of fog drift out of the newcomer’s ship and envelope the blip.

“They’ve melted it!” Harry yelled on the intercom. When the fog moved on, we could all see the blip was gone. The aliens were heading for the other.

“NEW ALIENS CLEAR BOMBS FROM SKY! MENACE FROM SPACE DESTROYED!” Remember?

With the second bomb gone, our new pals resumed transmission. Tillie was our acting chief linguist.

“What’ll I do, Max? George won’t acknowledge his orders to return!”

“You can do it, girl. What’s so hard about little stick figures? Read it like a comic strip.”

“Did you ever try saying Who are you? or Where do you come from? in little stick figures?” she asked bitterly.

But they did look humanoid and peaceful enough. One sketch they kept repeating showed a mixture of big and little figures dancing around a maypole affair.

“The little figures seem to be them, and the big ones are us,” said Tillie.

“You hope. And this one means they want to land, right?”

You’ll recall we let them come down in a burnt-over wilderness area in northern Quebec. No aloha-parties like we gave the Girls from Capella. No official grandstand. Just an empty plain, a sky full of contrails, and five different brands of overkill zeroed in on that big golden ship as it settled.

The airlock opened.

Everyone remembers what marched out into that empty plain—a band of little figures about four feet high and the color of the More Expensive Spread. They seemed to be wearing jointed yellow armor with funny little half-opened helmets on their heads. They were carrying what looked like cereal-box death-ray guns. Each one held his up and then gravely trooped over and dropped his weapon on a pile. Then they joined hands and began to sing.

This was the world’s first taste of what came to be known as the Sound from Cygnus. It wasn’t really too different from a musical saw to me, but you know how it caught on. Oh my earmuffs, did it catch on! That’s right, you had teen-aged kids. The thing hadn’t been zingling through our office a minute before I saw La Peabody starting to twitch.

While we absorbed the Sound, a second band of little butter-boys marched out of the ship carrying a globe on a pole. The distant trigger-fingers tightened. But all they did was to set it up in the center like the maypole in their sketches, and sing harder. Then they shut up, bowed deeply and just stood there. Waiting for someone to say hello.

It wasn’t long before a reception committee crawled out of the bunkers and the second alien contact got underway.

Quite a relief after the previous hoopla. This one went more like grown up. No sex, no fireworks. Just a mob of decorous little yellow squirts earnestly interested in learning our languages and customs. Their chief concern seemed to be to avoid getting poisoned by our food. Did you know they were vegetarians? They answered everything we asked as well as they could. Their home system was quickly identified as Cygnus 61. The death-ray pistols were lasers; they passed out samples. They made no more objection to electronic surveillance than a herd of Guernseys, and they let us into the ship with anything we wanted to bring. Harry was in on that.

“Same general thing as the Capellans,” he reported. “And fairly old. They seem to have bought it second-hand from somewhere. Two auxiliary flyers on board. No major weapons we can find aside from some small standard missiles and that particle-fog thing. That looks to be a catalyst effect.”

“What makes you think they didn’t build it?”

“Every time we ask a technical question they drag out a manual to look up the answer. They ended by giving us the whole set to copy. I brought back the lot. Where’s George?”

“He won’t answer. What’s one language when he has hundreds? He’s up there with his Rosetta stone, and I doubt he’ll budge till his oxygen runs out.”

“Funny thing,” Harry mused. “They have this maypole thing all over the ship, in different sizes. One big room looks exactly like a chapel. I believe they’re deeply religious.”

Just in time, I recalled that Harry himself was deeply religious.

And that of course was the big news about our visitors. Until the religious angle came out, the Siggies threatened to be about as newsworthy as a trivet-makers’ convention. When the official tours got started it was quickly realized that the Sound was hymns. You remember the pictures—circles of little yellow fellows setting up their maypoles at dawn, noon and sunset, wherever they happened to be, joining hands and singing and beckoning the bystanders to join in. With that Sound and their appealing appearance, they got a lot of takers, especially with young people.

This seemed to delight them. “You comp? You comp?” they would call. “Good! You glike? Good?” they asked, peering up into the human faces around them when the song was over. When people smiled back, the Siggies would grab their hands and squeeze. Their hands were cool and felt fragile. “Like a child’s hands in paper gloves,” one woman said.

“I do think they’re sweet,” Mrs. Peabody confessed. “Those little brown button eyes peering out.”

“Reminds me of Hobbits,” said Tillie. “Meriadoc in armor.”

“It’s not armor, it’s an exoskeleton,” I told her. “It doesn’t come off.”

“I know—but listen, they’re going to sing.”

By now we knew that the object on top of the poles was not a globe. It was roughly egg-shaped, with interior creases.

“Like a bagel,” said Mrs. Peabody.

“They call it something like the Pupa, or the Great Pupa,” said Tillie. “It represents a Cygnian wrapped up in a cocoon. See the face?”

“Looks sad,” said Harry.

There was a note of sadness in the songs, too—sadness and exaltation, which added immensely to the appeal. The recording companies knew a good thing when it fell on their heads and the Sound rapidly became a menace on the radio bands. Rapa had three kids and told me he had wrecked his set to stay sane. Well, you know all about it, those first weeks with the Siggies touring around and singing in front of churches and mosques and temples, and the Unitarian minister coming out to hold joint services in the open air, and the kids wearing maypole buttons and Great Pupa buttons and all the rest. Hands Across the Galaxy. Oekoumene!

What you don’t know about is S’serrrop. (We spelled it that way to indicate a hard buzzing r-r-r. The Cygnians were strong on stops and clicks, but had trouble with our nasals and semivowels—I quote from Tillie.)

S’serrrop came to us when the West Hemisphere Cygnian party first went through D.C. We met him at the official mass reception—an indefinably tatty-looking Cygnian, somewhat pale in color. He was one of their many language students, and he and Tillie went into a fast huddle. We had our chief ask for him to stay behind when the tour moved on, and for a wonder we got him, after State had been practically in bed with the party for a week. The Siggies jumped at any chance to learn our languages. I guess they were surprised at the number.

The thing about S’serrrop was that he was different. A marginal Cygnian, if you like. We never found out why. How can you evaluate aberrant factors in an arthropod’s childhood? Anyway, he gave us some new insights. The first was about Siggie emotion.

Remember how they always looked so sort of neat and merry? Well, S’serrrop disabused us of that the day he tried to join us eating meat. He was yellower than usual when George was ordering the salad for him at Rapa’s.

“Gno!” clicked S’serrrop. “I eat samp as hew!”

His yellow color grew richer while he rejected our protests. When the meatballs arrived, we saw the crisis. You know that crest of tiddly bits sticking out above the Cygnian visor was actually their chemoreceptors and part of their ears? At sight of the meat, S’serrrop’s receptors began to retreat until his “helmet” was a smooth round sphere. He took a mouthful, chomped once, and looked wildly about. The gesture was so human I was on my feet ready to help our visitor from space to Rapa’s can. But he had swallowed and sat there breathing hard. Stern stuff, S’serrop. Tillie snatched up his plate and substituted greens, and after a while his crest came back out.

That gave us the clue. There was a Siggie song-fest near the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City on the screen that night.

“Max!” Tillie gasped, “look at their heads!”

Every one of them was as bare and round as a billiard ball. And they were glowing like hot butter.

“Intense fear, disgust, revulsion… funny emotions for a quiet party of space-going sociologists.”

“I’ll ask S’serrrop.”

“Very carefully. Very, very carefully.”

Oddly enough, Harry had already done the job. We discovered he had been mixing quite a lot of religious discussion in with the particle physics. (Strange thing, I never can figure out where physicists keep their Almighty, but they seem to be among His chief defenders these days.) Anyway, Harry gave us the complete story of the Great Pupa.

“Well, you know the Cygnians are hatched from eggs, and they go through a metamorphosis later into the adult form we’ve met. Their religion is based on the belief that there is a further metamorphosis into a form with wings. Yes, wings. Beautiful, really. It has only happened once, when the Great Pupa achieved it. He was’ persecuted and tortured. They have—or had—a rather dreadful method of execution in which the victim is wrapped in acid-soaked cloth and his flesh eaten away alive. That’s the figure on the pole—you do see the primitive parallel?” Harry interrupted himself.

We nodded silently, staring at a new and different Harry.

“Yes. Well, in his agony, the Great Pupa achieved the ultimate metamorphosis and appeared to his followers afterwards as a winged shape… profoundly amazing, isn’t it? Over eleven light-years away—”

He told us that he had invited S’serrrop to attend church services with him that Sunday. Did we realize no Cygnian had actually entered a Terran house of worship? We also soon realized how S’serrrop felt about it. Frightened and revolted, but resolute. When we met them after the service his crest was still half retracted.

Harry had been expounding Christian doctrine to him. The Cygnian was so excited that we could barely understand the barrage of clicks. “Abast! Abast!” he exclaimed. We took this as amazed—or perhaps abased?

He desired more information, and Tillie volunteered to find him a religious dictionary in which he could explore Moslem and Hindu, Greek, Roman and Hebrew doctrines as well as Harry’s Massachusetts Avenue rites. We saw Harry’s face cloud; Tillie told me that he became deeply exercised over questions like the propriety of using candles.

Next morning, I went into Harry’s office, feeling a fairly strong shade of yellow myself. He was doodling on his blackboard.

“First of all, Harry, congratulations. The array of talent around here never ceases to amaze me. But—bear with me—there’s one thing I’d like to get straight. Are you absolutely one hundred percent satisfied with the official estimate of the aggressive capabilities of that ship?”

He looked at me disdainfully from his galactic evangelical dream.

“You mean weapons?”

“Weapons. Blowpipes, atomic disintegrators, germ cultures—call me a paranoid bastard, Harry. What could they do to us if they tried?”

“Really, Max.” He sighed. “Well… they have that short-range laser, and they have about fifty tactical atomic missiles that probably came with the ship. The fusing is less advanced than ours. They’re slow. Their auxiliary craft can’t go much over Mach I all out. Very vulnerable.

They have no laboratories or culture stores. A bare minimum of machining facilities. Their main drive certainly couldn’t be used as a mobile torch in atmosphere. They haven’t got the right guidance systems for space attack. I think the estimate is quite correct; the most they could possibly do would be a few lucky hits on big targets before our defenses overtook them.”

He XXd out a couple of equations, angrily.

“Harry, is there anything about that ship you don’t understand?”

“No. If you mean, in general. Oh, maybe—”

“Maybe?”

“There are one or two large generators which seem to be beyond their power needs, that’s all. Just generators. They may have been in the ship when the Siggies got it, perhaps for powering a ground installation. What’s eating you, Max? Here we have one of the biggest—I’m not afraid to say it, one of the sweetest things possible to conceive of…. Probably you don’t get it, Max. I feel sorry for you. I pity all atheists. But others do get it.”

“I guess I don’t get it, Harry, but I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I’ve read history. Earth history. A big strange ship full of religious symbols—an alien race, fervently pious and revolted by the practices of the natives—doesn’t that remind you of anything, Harry? No bell?”

“Sorry, it doesn’t,” he said. He erased the blackboard. Our comfy little shop had been invaded in more ways than one.

It got invaded some more next day when S’serrrop turned up after his session with Tillie’s dictionary. We learned about another Cygnian emotion, but we weren’t sure at the time what it was. At first we thought he was sick. He kept making a rustling, flittering noise which we saw were his exoskeletal joints snicking together. He said he wasn’t sick, it was something else.

“Is bad,” he kept repeating. “Bad! Sad! Hew—I caddot say—hew so simple! So be-hewtifut! Kch, too bad! KCHKCHCH!”

Convulsively his elbows began rubbing against his thorax in a blur of motion. A thin shriek rent the air.

Tillie grabbed one of his vibrating hands, and he grabbed back. Hand-holding seemed to be the same on Cygnus as it was on Terra. He stopped the cicada wail and looked gravely in our faces. Then he said something that rocked even Harry.

“So far-r-r! So bady he-yars of glight!” He spread his arms in what we had come to know as the Great Pupa wing symbol. “He is hee-yar too!” he exclaimed. The next minute he was striding down the hall in the general direction of Rock Creek Park, with his U.N. guard scrambling after.

Two hours later we discovered he had stampeded State into flying him back to his group, who were touring Mexico. He said he had something urgent to tell them.

In the turmoil, there arrived a covert signal from our man on the moon, namely, George. As predicted, Tillie’s boss was shacked up with his explosive lexical treasure around the far side from Mersenius and playing doggo. He had found an old pal at Mersenius to pass down a message demanding data on the Cygnians. The signal ended, “Don’t trust those polyunsaturated pygmies.”

“Small men loathe each other,” Tillie commented.

Of course you realize that the Cygnians had a written language in addition to the cartoon figures they used for first contact, but George hadn’t seen it before he left. While Tillie assembled some Cygnese, I rooted out the negatives of the script-covered missile George was working on. They looked pretty bad. Can you imagine a Chinese trying to decipher Ne pas se pencher en dehors in five European languages? Well, there were about five hundred choice graffiti on each negative, some you wouldn’t believe.”

“Tillie girl, can you locate Cygnian script among any of these?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about those tech manuals they gave us, can’t you compare scripts?”

“They were in the script of whoever built the ship. Diagrams and math.”

“Well, don’t we have any Cygnian samples?”

“Mostly their cursive.”

Something was all wrong, she was as touchy as a lady porcupine. I pulled her around.

“So you think I’m a stinker. Give me a break. Remember it’s just that old heathen Max who scares easy.”

“I think you’re being unforgivable to Harry,” she started. Then she squinted at me around her glossy hair. “Max, are you really scared?”

“You bet I am. Honey, I’m so scared I even think about it in bed.”

“But what of, Max?”

“Oh, history, micro-macro parallelism—I don’t know. That’s the worst of it. See what you can get out of these, would you?”

She tried, but it was no go all Tuesday. And Wednesday you remember what happened.

The West Hemisphere group of Siggies were holding their evening sing-in on the plaza outside the Catadrale de la Dama de something-or-other in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Inside, a minor mass was about to be celebrated. Instead of their usual circle the Siggies formed a line across the front steps and the human worshippers found themselves barred out

A couple of clerics came out to protest. The Siggies stood firm, singing. The crowd milled. A padre laid hands on a Siggie, who yielded, but another took his place. The Sound mounted. The cathedral bells started tolling. Somebody called the police, who added sirens to the uproar. At the height of the confusion two Siggies—bright orange with emotion—marched into the nave and up to the altar, where they deposited a small object. Then they marched out again and rejoined the singing.

Half a minute liter the altar area of the cathedral lit up, gave off an amazing sound, and exploded into a flour-like dust-which towered up over the plaza and came down all over everybody.

In the melee the Siggies withdrew to the far side of the plaza and formed a circle. It was shortly discovered that they were now protected by some kind of force-shield, presumably generated by a large box which they always carried with them. Defense R&D had identified it as a musical amplifier.

While we were digesting this, news came that the East Hemisphere Siggie group had pulled an almost identical stunt, resulting in the obliteration of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto.

The fact that the Cignian ship’s auxiliary flyers were both out on what was described as routine maintenance tests had up to now escaped notice. After a pause, it became apparent where they were flying to. Harry’s evaluation sources had been quite right; they were slow. It took the one on our side over six hours to make the seven thousand air miles from Quebec to the little group in the plaza at Sao Paulo. En route, one of our more enterprising neighbors discovered that it too was now protected by an unknown form of shielding. As it made its weary Mach I way home with the West Hemisphere Siggies inside, our Air Force confirmed this the expensive way.

Somewhere along the line the main ship had englobed itself too, with eight Terran technical people aboard.

“Well, I guess we know what the generators are for now,” I remarked next morning, roaming restlessly around Harry’s office.

“An interesting tactical problem,” I mused. “What can you do with a measly few old badly guided fusion bombs—provided you can carry them anywhere you want in perfect safety?”

Harry slammed his papers down hard and inhaled and, exhaled explosively. Just as he inhaled again his phone rang.

“Huh? Who? Get him down here. We’ve got to get him down here! What? All right, I’ll go through your damn channels—” He banged the phone down.

“Max. They opened the ship long enough to turn loose our techs. S’serrrop came out with them. He’s been hurt. Get the chief to get him.”

It was Tillie who got him, but how she did it I don’t know because our chief, like everybody else, was caught up in the runaway oscillation over the Siggie atrocities.

The media caught on a bit slow and generated more confusion than anything else at first. By next day, when the Siggies had leisurely vaporized Milan Cathedral and the BaHai Temple in Chicago, the newscasters hit stride. From there on—you’ll remember—it was just one bewildered yell of outrage. The Moslem world held aloof until Friday, when the Blue Mosque of Ahmed at Istanbul went up in flour. For all that first week no one was killed or even badly hurt.

Except S’serrrop.

We met his stretcher at Andrews Air Base. He seemed glad to see Harry.

“I trite,” he shrilled feebly. “I trite explait—” He thrashed a bit, under the blankets. What we could see of his hide was deep yellow, but we couldn’t see much. They had treated him to an acid massage. Our medicos couldn’t do much for the alien biology beyond the obvious topical applications. Like a burned human, he was in toxemia.

That was the morning the Cygnians started their broadcasts. It was now clear why they had been so eager to learn our languages, but even so, you’ll recall that the first messages were more stimulating than enlightening. Our shop had the advantage of an early copy of the eight technicians’ reports. The Cygnians had given them an intensive briefing before they let them go.

“Delusions of nonpersecution… Harry, I’m sorry.”

He was head-in-hands, down.

“When you look at the history of the early Christian missionaries, say in Polynesia, or Africa—”

“Damnation, Max, do you think you’re the only one who’s read history? It was just that—my fault—I saw the gestalt the wrong way. From their point of view, we’re the heathen. You don’t need to rub it in. They never even bothered to try to understand—”

“How many missionaries ever tried to understand the native religions? They just threw down the idols, burned the ju-jus, destroyed the temples… unspeakable savage rites, I believe was the standard phrase.”

“Only S’serrrop. He tried.”

“Yes, he tried. He’s a believer too, of course, but liberal. What it adds up to, Harry, is a bunch of dedicated, primitive fundamentalists who bought themselves a boat and set out to bring the word to the heathen. With atomics.”

“Missionaries with fissionaries,” squeaked Mrs. Peabody, and shut up abruptly.

“I blame myself—”

“Don’t, Harry. What could a Bushman make of a gun until he’d seen it fired? He’d have put it down as a clumsy kind of club. We’d never seen a generator used to throw a standing energic whatsis.”

“But how can they hope to succeed?” Tillie asked. “It’s so crazy! To make the whole population of Earth worship the Great Pupa? We aren’t even the same kind of animal. It’s insane.”

“What do you think the Holy Family looked like to a polygamous culture where a man’s father was his mother’s brother? No. Insane or not, conversion by the sword can work. What’s our price for saving St. Peter’s, or Westminster, or Santa Sophia, for starters? Or the Kremlin? Friends, don’t be too sure. You’ll be attending Great Pupa services in Carter Barron Amphitheatre in the near future, I promise you.”

“What about you?” snapped Tillie.

“Purification,” Harry was muttering. “Fire.”

His eyes were pale and clear, like a Weimeraner’s.

“The early Christians survived, Max: Underground, in the catacombs. In the days of the martyrs. From persecution will come rebirth.”

I refrained from asking him to name a few aboriginal religions which had survived the Society of Jesus. I had something else to worry about.

“Can S’serrrop talk at all, Tillie? It’s urgent.”

Well, you recall what went on then, the public convulsions, the predictable and pathetic brave responses we made to the Cygnian’s simple ultimatum. I guess what riled people the most was the level of their pitch. They had apparently tagged us as Stone Age Stanley.

“You can see the Great Pupa is the true god, because our weapons are stronger than yours. Your false gods cannot protect themselves, or you.” Right off page one of a nineteenth-century missionary handbook.

The part about them ending our local strife in universal brotherhood as children of the Great Pupa wasn’t so bad, although I don’t think people went for the idea of themselves as larvae. But when they got into the higher doctrinal mysteries—and what they proposed to do about our sex and mating customs, they being biologically rather different…

It was while they were explaining that aspect that the British CinC up in Quebec laid our biggest nuclear egg neatly on the Cygnian ship. The broadcast stopped. Two days later when things settled down, the ship was still sitting there englobed with debris. After awhile, a new type of transmission came out of the force-shell, and every piece of metal several kilometers beyond the blast-hole went to vapor. Then the religious broadcasts resumed. The Great Pupa was indeed a strong god.

Over everybody’s protests, I tried to get S’serrrop to locate and decipher any Cygnian text he could find on my photos of George’s missile.

“What in hell do you expect to prove, Max? Even if there’s a Cygnian text, so what? We know the story now.”

“Do we? I thought you said you’d read history.”

But S’serrrop was nearly blind, and terribly weak. He did appear to recognize the photos.

“Too bad!” he whispered again. “Kchch! Too bad—”

“Leave him alone, Max.”

“Wait! S’serrrop—Tillie, ask him this: are there others? More like him? Coming here?”

We couldn’t get his answer, but as you know, we were not left long in doubt.

Since this is just the inside story we’ll skip the history-makers, the steady attrition of our religious monuments (don’t think Chartres didn’t rock me)—the efforts of the Vatican, Israel and the International Council of Churches of Christ to negotiate some kind of coexistence for the West at least—the day the Siggies, by an understandable theological error, took out the New York Stock Exchange—the United Arab kamikazi attempt—the successful assault on two isolated Siggies in Chili—the Sino-Soviet proposal—you know all that. The inside story isn’t much, here: sixteen long go-arounds between me and our chief, ending in stalemate. And then the second Cygnian ship arrived.

It put down in the North African desert. Same general type, a bit newer and knobbier and copper rather than gold. The same opening ceremonies, but these Siggies were definitely orange—Red Siggies as they were dubbed. As you can imagine, the welcoming committee was conspicuously absent.

“Reinforcements?” Tillie asked.

“I devoutly hope so,” I said. She gave me the look I was getting used to those days.

“I’ve got to see S’serrrop.”

“You’ll kill him, Max.”

She was right. When S’serrrop saw the photos of the new Cygnians he went—or tried to go—into his shivering and stridulating act. It seemed to be involuntary, like uncontrollable sobs. He couldn’t stop himself from knocking the dressings around. Not that they were doing him any good, but the result was horrible. In his agony he could barely be understood. What came through clearly at the end was: “I trite! I trite!” And then something so obviously a private prayer that I snapped the recorder off. He died that night.

I spent the night with that tape and was waiting on the chiefs doormat with my reconstruction in the morning. At noon he was still not in. His hotline girl told me about the fire-fight between Yellow Siggie and Red Siggie flyers, in which most of Marseilles had come up missing.

At 1500 the chief was still going ’round in the high level whirlwind. I decided to take—it says here on my citation—independent initiative. What the hell, how much Class A office furniture do you get in a catacomb? I had nothing to lose.

The independence took the form of a structure of tastefully forged directives and speciously worded coordinating concurrences, at the end of which chain of duplicity there emerged in about sixty hours’ time one live Astromarine lieutenant. He looked exactly like a video space hero except he had cold-sores. He contributed the action.

By this time the Red Siggies, who seemed to be faster workers and more practical-minded, had decided that it would make for more togetherness if we evacuated our lunar bases. There was to be just one shuttle-run per each, and Mersenius was unluckily scheduled as Number Two. You’d be up all night if I told you what it took to get that boy into a disguised cargo-pod. Harry, who knew I was nuts but was too far gone to argue, helped a lot. After that we could only hope.

By this point the bands were so loaded with Red and Yellow Siggie broadcasts and counter-broadcasts and doctrinal trumpetings and counter-counter-jamming that we were virtually blind and deaf, electronically speaking. To this day, I don’t understand the difference between their versions of the Great Pupa religion. Something about the powers of the clergy and the existence of other lesser Pupas or prophets. Harry is making a study of it.

I was trying to keep score of the accidental damage sustained by Earth when the Yellow and Red missionary flyers tangled. You remember how the media kept saying that they were decimating each other? People outside really hoped that one faction would eliminate the other, at least; or maybe they might even kill each other off. The inside reports gave no such hope. We had no concrete evidence that they could do each other any serious damage and the side-effects on us were brutal. People were getting killed now, as well as churches. Marseilles was the start; next came Altoona, of all places, and poor old Coventry, and Tangiers. And a lot of smaller places.

“This phase won’t last,” I pontificated. “The history of religious wars is like any other. Your main attack is not on the enemy leaders but on their followers. That’ll be us, when they get organized. We’ll have to sign up with one lot or the other, and when we do we get it. What’s the matter, Harry? In particular, I mean?”

“Houston’s picked up a new type of transmission from both ships, beamed off-planet.”

“Calling for reinforcements?”

“Probably.”

“And alles ganz kaput…. Did you ever identify that planet S’serrrop described?”

“Not positively. I personally think that was Cygnus 61. I don’t believe these creatures are Cygnians; they just came from Cygnus 61 in the sense that that was the last place they stopped. Perhaps they were there quite some time—”

“Before they and their competition managed to fracture the planetary crust.”

“I wonder what the real Cygnians were like,” sighed Tillie.

“What I wonder is where Lieutenant Sternhagen is. At least he wasn’t brought down in the Mersenius evacuation.”

As it turned out, of course, Leiutenant Sternhagen was right where he was supposed to be. He had cleverly managed to unpack himself undetected after his ghastly trip in the pod and had slipped away on his trek around to the far side. All we had been able to give him was a dinky personnel jato unit. After 120 hours of hoping, sliding, gliding and tumbling he reached George, who was blissfully holed up with his life work and a nice little hydroponics set-up he had wangled out of his Mersenius pals. The young Marine, as directed, asked George one or two pointed questions.

The answers being on the right trajectory, Lieutenant Sternhagen stayed not to argue but injected a little dream-juice into George’s airlines. Then he had a busy time boosting the missile—carefully—out of the cave, carrying George over a couple of rim-walls and stowing him, and laying a remote-control laser line.

The thing went up beautifully as demonstrated, three shorts and a long, but of course we couldn’t see from Earth. After that the young Marine, who had received only minor radiation burns in addition to his previously acquired contusions, had nothing to do except hop, slide and tumble 120 hours back to the empty Mersenius base hauling a hysterical George, who was undamaged except in his aspiration-level.

By a miracle, Mersenius had registered our covert signal and left sufficient supplies to allow the pair to survive until rescue, during which time George had the opportunity to say everything he wanted to, about fifteen thousand times. It doesn’t tell half enough on Lieutenant Sternhagen’s medal.

After this, there was nothing at all to do but wait. And wait. And wait. The rest of the world, who weren’t waiting for anything, just reacted. You know. Fortunately the loss of human life was relatively low as yet, except for Marseilles, Jaipur, and Altoona where the Yellow Siggies had been holding a mass outdoor Great Pupa baptism ceremony.

I’ll say this for the Siggies, they were brave. The Yellow Siggie conducting services didn’t even look up when the Red flyer came over—just sang harder. Glory, glory.

The weapon they chiefly used was a variant of the catalytic vaporizer business. R&D had not guessed that it could be produced as a rather bountiful fuel by-product We counted a total.of only five actual missiles expended to date. If the Red Siggies had brought in another fifty, that left ninety-five to go. Their fallout proved to be rather more copious than the best art, too.

During the next week, two of our tracking stations got melted and we were down to our last ear-flaps when we caught a new ship coming in.

“The reinforcements,” Harry said. He had taken to shadow-boxing the eraser, very softly.

“Why?”

“Both Siggie ships are transmitting nonstop.”

But it wasn’t their reinforcements.

The little blue ship made one orbit and then came in low over North Africa and on to Quebec. When it had passed, both Siggie ships were still there and apparently undamaged, but they had lost some of their shine. On the ground the Siggie groups were scrambling first for cover and then for their ships. We only caught part of the saurian transmission in Cygnese—something about one planetary rotation.

Thirty hours later both Red and Yellow Siggies were on their way out of our system, leaving us with five smashed cities, innumerable wrecked houses of religion, and more maypole effigies of the Great Pupa than could be counted before they were melted down. The blue lizards left too—we still don’t know where they’re from.

“You guessed they were cops… how?” said Harry. We were at Rapa’s back table, celebrating George’s return. After blowing out his outrage on Sternhagen, George had more or less run down about the criminal destruction of his galactic key.

“My glands. Primitive response to the fuzz aura. Once you saw them as two guys in a squad car it all fit. They couldn’t stick around. They set up call-boxes. One demonstration of how to work it, good-bye. Holler if you need help, right, George? Tell me, old brother, how long had you known? Never mind, don’t answer that. I respect a man who values knowledge more than the mere survival of his culture, not to say his race. I won’t ask you if you would ever have got ’round to triggering it—”

“Max!” shouted Tillie.

“All right…. Say there was a report that these so-called Cygnians and such are messing around with backward planets. Somewhere, there’s a minor policy directive. Pressure from a Society to Save Our Seminoles. Low budget. Two guys to cover a sector. Probably left a set of flares around any number of likely planets. The Siggies knew damn well what they were, too.”

“Is that like history?” ventured Mrs. Peabody.

“Not really. Certainly not in the old days. The poor benighted heathen caught in sectarian wars just suffered. Did any of you read about what happened to people who happened to be in the path of a crusade, by the way? We’ve missed that, so far.”

“Their religion was sort of poetic in a way. I mean, changing to wings—”

I saw Harry wince.

“Tell you what isn’t so beautiful, if you want more history. This is all early-stage stuff, informal. Like when Tahiti or the Congo were months away from Europe, and North America was half wild. A few private schooners wild-catting around. What happens now we got saved? Do we go back to our palm trees and peace?”

“Why not?” shrugged Tillie. Then she said, “Oh.”

“Exactly. The next stage was industrial nation-states got organized into coalitions and went to war for global mastery. What happens to the people in the sarongs when something like Admiral Tojo’s fleet sails into the lagoon to set up a fortified base? And something like Admiral Nimitz’s fleet and the Allied ak armada arrives to throw him out?”

“…Viet Nam,” murmured Harry.

“I could see Tillie trying to say something cheerful and not succeeding. Pouring George a drink, she asked, “Did any of you know how old S’serrrop was?”

“Huh?”

“A kid. About like our nineteen. He got involved with the natives and felt sorry for us and begged the heads of the mission to leave us alone because the Great Pupa’s spkit had already touched us, in another form. That made him a heretic.”

“Any parallels there, Max?”

We went to bed on that one and I’ll leave it with you. Along with the original meaning of the word Bikini.

Table of Contents

Start