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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) card-carrying 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. Knajti'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. Goon."

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 Arcturan-American 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 non-family 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 commuter-copter. 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 teen-age 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 Arcturan-American 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 Whirling 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 ail 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 dispos-all.

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 cafard, 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 mana—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.

 

 

 

 

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