"WILL YOU WALK A LITTLE FASTER"

All right. So maybe I should be ashamed of myself.

But I'm a writer and this is too good a story to let go. My imagination is tired, and I'm completely out of usable plots; I'm down to the gristle of truth. I'll use it.

Besides, someone's bound to blab sooner or later--as Forkbeard pointed out, we're that kind of animal--and I might as well get some private good out of the deal.

Why, for all I know, there is a cow on the White House lawn this very moment...

Last August, to be exact, I was perspiring over an ice-cold yarn that I never should have started in the first place, when the doorbell rang.

I looked up and yelled, "Come in! Door's open!"

The hinges squeaked a little the way they do in my place. I heard feet slap-slapping up the long corridor which makes the rent on my apartment a little lower than most of the others in the building. I couldn't recognize the walk as belonging to anyone I knew, so I waited with my fingers on the typewriter keys and my face turned to the study entrance.

After a while, the steps came around the corner. A little man, not much more than two feet high, dressed in a green knee-length tunic, walked in. He had a very large head, a short pointed red beard, a long pointed green cap, and he was talking to himself. In his right hand, he carried a golden pencil-like object; in his left, a curling strip of what seemed to be parchment.

"Now, you," he said with a guttural accent, pointing both the beard and the pencil-like object at me, "now you must be a writer."

I closed my mouth carefully around a lump of air. Somehow, I noted with interest, I seemed to be nodding.

"Good." He flourished the pencil and made a mark at the end of a line halfway down the scroll. "That completes the enrollment for this session. Come with me, please."

He seized the arm with which I had begun an elaborate gesture. Holding me in a grip that had all the resiliency of a steel manacle, he smiled benevolently and walked back down my entrance hall. Every few steps he walked straight up in the air, and then--as if he'd noticed his error--calmly strode down to the floor again.

"What--who--" I said, stumbling and tripping and occasionally getting walloped by the wall, "you wait, you--who--who--"

"Please do not make such repetitious noises," he admonished me. "You are supposed to be a creature of civilization. Ask intelligent questions if you wish, but only when you have them properly organized."

I brooded on that while he closed the door of my apartment behind him and began dragging me up the stairs. His heart may or may not have been pure, but I estimated his strength as being roughly equivalent to that of ten. I felt like a flag being flapped from the end of my own arm.

"We're going up?" I commented tentatively as I swung around a landing.

"Naturally. To the roof. Where we're parked."

"Parked, you said?" I thought of a helicopter, then of a broomstick. Who was it that rode around on the back of an eagle?

Mrs. Flugelman, who lived on the floor above, had come out of her apartment with a bagful of garbage. She opened the door of the dumbwaiter and started to nod good-morning at me. She stopped when she saw my friend.

"Yes, parked. What you call our flying saucer." He noticed Mrs. Flugelman staring at him and jutted his beard at her as we went by. "Yes, I said flying saucer!" he spat.

Mrs. Flugelman walked back into her apartment with the bagful of garbage and closed the door behind her very quietly.

Maybe the stuff I write for a living prepared me for such experiences, but--somehow--as soon as he told me that, I felt better. Little men and flying saucers, they seemed to go together. Just so halos and pitchforks didn't wander into the continuity.

When we reached the roof, I wished I'd had time to grab a jacket. It was evidently going to be a breezy ride.

The saucer was about thirty feet in diameter and, colorful magazine articles to the contrary, had been used for more than mere sightseeing. In the center, where it was deepest, there was a huge pile of boxes and packages lashed down with criss-crossing masses of gleaming thread. Here and there, in the pile, was the unpackaged metal of completely unfamiliar machinery.

Still using my arm as a kind of convenient handle to the rest of me, the little man whirled me about experimentally once or twice, then scaled me accurately end over end some twenty feet through the air to the top of the pile. A moment before I hit, golden threads boiled about me, cushioning like an elastic net, and tying me up more thoroughly than any three shipping clerks. My shot-putting pal grunted enthusiastically and prepared to climb aboard.

Suddenly he stopped and looked back along the roof. "Irngl!" he yelled in a voice like two ocean liners arguing. "Irngl! Bordge modgunk!"

There was a tattoo of feet on the roof so rapid as to be almost one sound, and a ten-inch replica of my strong-arm guide--minus the beard, however--leaped over the railing and into the craft. Young Irngl, I decided, bordge modgunking.

His father (?) stared at him very suspiciously, then walked back slowly in the direction from which he had run. He halted and shook a ferocious finger at the youngster. Beside me, Irngl cowered.

Just behind the chimney was a cluster of television antennae. But the dipoles of these antennae were no longer parallel. Some had been carefully braided together; others had been tied into delicate and perfect bows. Growling ferociously, shaking his head so that the pointed red beard made like a metronome, the old man untied the knots and smoothed the dipoles out to careful straightness with his fingers. Then he bent his legs slightly at their knobby knees and performed one of the more spectacular standing broad jumps of all time.

And, as he hit the floor of the giant saucer, we took off. Straight up.

When I'd recovered sufficiently to regurgitate my larynx, I noticed that old redbeard was controlling the movement of the disc beneath us by means of an egg-shaped piece of metal in his right hand. After we'd gone up a goodly distance, he pointed the egg south and we headed that way.

Radiant power, I wondered? No information--not much that was useful--had been volunteered. Of course, I realized suddenly: I hadn't asked any questions! Grabbed from my typewriter in the middle of the morning by a midget of great brain and greater muscle--I couldn't be blamed, though: few men in my position would have been able to put their finger on the nub of the problem and make appropriate inquiries. Now, however--

"While there's a lull in the action," I began breezily enough, "and as long as you speak English, I'd like to clear up a few troublesome matters. For example--"

"Your questions will be answered later. Meanwhile, you will shut up." Golden threads filled my mouth with the taste of antiseptics, and I found myself unable to part my jaws. Redbeard stared at me as I grunted impotently. "How hateful are humans!" he said, beaming. "And how fortunate that they are hateful!"

The rest of the trip was uneventful, except for a few moments when the Miami-bound plane came abreast of us. People inside pointed excitedly, seemed to yell, and one extremely fat man held up an expensive camera and took six pictures very rapidly. Unfortunately, I noticed, he had neglected to remove the lens cap.

The saucer skipper shook his metal egg, there was a momentary feeling of acceleration--and the airplane was a disappearing dot behind us. Irngl climbed to the top of what looked like a giant malted milk machine and stuck his tongue out at me. I glared back.

It struck me then that the little one's mischievous quality was mighty reminiscent of an elf. And his pop--the parentage seemed unmistakable by then--was like nothing else than a gnome of Germanic folklore. Therefore, didn't these facts mean that--that--that--I let my brain have ten full minutes, before giving up. Oh, well, sometimes that method works. Reasoning by self-hypnotic momentum, I call it.

I was cold, but otherwise quite content with my situation and looking forward to the next development with interest and even pride. I had been selected, alone of my species, by this race of aliens for some significant purpose. I couldn't help hoping, of course, that the purpose was not vivisection.

It wasn't.

We arrived, after a while, at something so huge that it could only be called a flying dinner plate. I suspected that a good distance down, under all those belly-soft clouds, was the State of South Carolina. I also suspected that the clouds were artificial. Our entire outfit entered through a hole in the bottom. The flying dinner plate was covered with another immense plate, upside-down, the whole making a hollow disc close to a quarter of a mile in diameter. Flying saucers stacked with goods and people--both long and short folk--were scattered up and down its expanse between great masses of glittering machinery.

Evidently I was wrong about having been selected as a representative sample. There were lots of us, men and women, all over the place--one to a flying saucer. It was to be a formal meeting between the representatives of two great races, I decided. Only why didn't our friends do it right--down at the U.N.? Possibly not so formal after all. Then I remembered Redbeard's comment on humanity and I began worrying.

On my right, an army colonel, with a face like a keg of butter, was chewing on the pencil with which he had been taking notes. On my left, a tall man in a gray sharkskin suit flipped back his sleeve, looked at his watch and expelled his breath noisily, impatiently. Up ahead, two women were leaning toward each other at the touching edges of their respective saucers, both talking at the same time and both nodding vehemently as they talked.

Each of the flying saucers also had at least one equivalent of my redbearded pilot. I observed that while the females of this people had beards too, they were exactly one-half as motherly as our women. But they balanced, they balanced...

Abruptly, the image of a little man appeared on the ceiling. His beard was pink and it forked. He pulled on each fork and smiled down at us.

"To correct the impression in the minds of many of you," he said, chuckling benignly, "I will paraphrase your great poet, Shakespeare. I am here to bury humanity, not to praise it."

A startled murmur broke out all around me. "Mars," I heard the colonel say, "bet they're from Mars. H.G. Wells predicted it. Dirty little, red little Martians. Well, just let them try!"

"Red," the man in the gray sharkskin suit repeated, "red?"

"Did you ever--" one of the women started to ask. "Is that a way to begin? No manners! A real foreigner."

"However," Forkbeard continued imperturbably from the ceiling, "in order to bury humanity properly, I need your help. Not only yours, but the help of others like you, who, at this moment, are listening to this talk in ships similar to this one and in dozens of languages all over the world. We need your help--and, knowing your peculiar talents so well, we are fairly certain of getting it!"

He waited until the next flurry of fist-waving and assorted imprecations had died down; he waited until the anti-Negroes and the anti-Jews, the anti-Catholics and the anti-Protestants, the Anglophobes and the Russophobes, the vegetarians and the fundamentalists in the audience had all identified him colorfully with their peculiar concepts of the Opposition and had excoriated him soundly.

Then, once relative quiet had been achieved, we got the following blunt tale, rather contemptuously told, with mighty few explanatory flourishes:

There was an enormous and complex galactic civilization surrounding our meager nine-planet system. This civilization, composed of the various intelligent species throughout the galaxy, was organized into a peaceful federation for trade and mutual advancement.

A special bureau in the federation discharged the biological duty of more advanced races to new arrivals on the cerebral scene. Thus, quite a few millennia ago, the bureau had visited Earth to investigate tourist accounts of a remarkably ingenious animal that had lately been noticed wandering about. The animal having been certified as intelligent with a high cultural potential, Earth was closed to tourist traffic and sociological specialists began the customary close examination.

"And, as a result of this examination," the forked pink beard smiled gently down from above, "the specialists discovered that what you call the human race was nonviable. That is, while the individuals composing it had strongly developed instincts of self-preservation, the species as a whole was suicidal."

"Suicidal!" I found myself breathing up with the rest.

"Quite. This is a matter on which there can be little argument from the more honest among you. High civilization is a product of communal living and Man, in groups, has always tended to wipe himself out. In fact, a large factor in the development of what little civilization you do experience has been the rewards contingent upon the development of mass-destruction weapons."

"We have had peaceful, brotherly periods," a hoarse voice said on the opposite side of the ship.

The large head shook slowly from side to side. The eyes, I saw suddenly and irrelevantly, were all black iris. "You have not. You have occasionally developed an island of culture here, an oasis of cooperation there; but these have inevitably disintegrated upon contact with the true standard-bearers of your species--the warrior-races. And when, as happened occasionally, the warrior-races were defeated, the conquerors in their turn became warriors, so that the suicidal strain was ever rewarded and became more dominant. Your past is your complete indictment, and your present--your present is about to become your executed sentence. But enough of this peculiar bloody nonsense--let me return to living history."

He went on to explain that the Federation felt a suicidal species should be allowed to fulfill its destiny unhampered. In fact, so long as overt acts were avoided, it was quite permissible to help such a creature along to the doom it desired--"Nature abhors self-destruction even more than a vacuum. The logic is simple: both cease almost as soon as they come into existence."

The sociologists having extrapolated the probable date on which humanity might be expected to extinguish itself, the planet was assigned--as soon as it should be vacated--to the inhabitants of an Earth-like world for the use of such surplus population as they might then have. These were the redbeards.

"We sent representatives here to serve as caretakers, so to speak, of our future property. But about nine hundred years ago, when your world still had six thousand years to run, we decided to hurry the process a bit as we experienced a rising index of population on our own planet. We therefore received full permission from the Galactic Federation to stimulate your technological development into an earlier suicide. The Federation stipulated, however, that each advance be made the moral responsibility of an adequate representative of your race, that he be told the complete truth of the situation. This we did: we would select an individual to be the discoverer of a revolutionary technique or scientific principle; then we would explain both the value of the technique and the consequences to his species in terms of accelerated mass destruction."

I found it hard to continue looking into his enormous eyes. "In every case"--the booming rattle of the voice had softened perceptibly--"in every case, sooner or later, the individual announced the discovery as his own, giving it to his fellows and profiting substantially. In a few cases, he later endowed great foundations which awarded prizes to those who advanced the cause of peace or the brotherhood of man. This resulted in little beyond an increase in the amount of currency being circulated. Individuals, we found, always chose to profit at the expense of their race's life-expectancy."

Gnomes, elves, kobolds! Not mischievous sprites--I glanced at Irngl sitting quietly under his father's heavy hand--nor the hoarders of gold, but helping man for their own reasons: teaching him to smelt metals and build machinery, showing him how to derive the binomial theorem in one part of the world and how to plow a field more efficiently in another.

To the end that people might perish from the Earth... sooner.

"Unfortunately--ah, something has developed."

We looked up at that, all of us--housewives and handymen, preachers and professional entertainers--looked up from the tangle of our reflections and prejudices, and hoped.

As D-day drew nigh, those among the kobolds who intended to emigrate filled their flying saucers with possessions and families. They scooted across space in larger craft such as the one we were now in and took up positions in the stratosphere, waiting to assume title to the planet as soon as its present occupants used their latest discovery--nuclear fission--as they had previously used ballistics and aeronautics.

The more impatient wandered down to survey home-sites. They found to their annoyance that an unpleasant maggot of error had crawled into the pure mathematics of extrapolated sociology. Humanity should have wiped itself out shortly after acquiring atomic power. But--possibly as a result of the scientific stimulation we had been receiving recently--our technological momentum had carried us past uranium-plutonium fission up to the so-called hydrogen bomb.

Whereas a uranium-bomb Armageddon would have disposed of us in a most satisfactory and sanitary fashion, the explosion of several hydrogen bombs, it would seem, will result in the complete sterilization of our planet as the result of a subsidiary reaction at present unknown to us. If we go to war with this atomic refinement, Earth will not only be cleansed of all present life-forms, but it will also become uninhabitable for several millions of years in the future.

Naturally, the kobolds view this situation with a certain amount of understandable unhappiness. According to Galactic Law, they may not actively intervene to safeguard their legacy. Therefore, they would like to offer a proposition--

Any nation which guarantees to stop making hydrogen bombs and to dispose of those it has already made--and the little redbeards have, they claim, satisfactory methods of enforcing these guarantees--such a nation will be furnished by them with a magnificently murderous weapon. This weapon is extremely simple to operate and is so calibrated that it can be set to kill instantaneously and painlessly any number of people at one time, up to a full million.

"The advantage to any terrestrial military establishment of such a weapon over the unstable hydrogen bomb, which is not only hard to handle but must be transported physically to its target," the genial face on the ceiling commented, "should be obvious to all of you! And, as far as we are concerned, anything which will dispose of human beings on a wholesale basis while not injuring--"

At this point, there was so much noise that I couldn't hear a word he was saying. For that matter, I was yelling quite loudly myself.

"--while not injuring useful and compatible life-forms--"

"Ah-h," screamed a deeply tanned stout man in a flowerful red sports shirt and trunks, "whyn't you go back where you came from?"

"Yeah!" someone else added wrathfully. "Can't yuh see yuh not wanted? Shut up, huh? Shut up!"

"Murderers," one of the women in front of me quavered. "That's all you are--murderers trying to kill inoffensive people who've never done you any harm. Killing would be just too good for you."

The colonel was standing on his toes and oscillating a portentous forefinger at the roof. "We were doing all right," he began apoplectically, then stopped to allow himself to unpurple. "We were doing well enough, I can tell you, without--without--"

Forkbeard waited until we began to run down.

"Look at it this way," he urged in a wheedling voice, "you're going to wipe yourselves out--you know it, we know it and so does everybody else in the galaxy. What difference can it possibly make to you whether you do it one way or another? At least by our method you confine the injury to yourselves. You don't damage the highly valuable real estate--to wit, Earth--which will be ours after you've ceased to use it. And you go out with a weapon which is much more worthy of your destructive propensities than any you have used hitherto, including atomic bombs."

He paused and spread knobbed hands down at our impotent hatred. "Think of it--just think of it: a million deaths at one plunge of a lever! What other weapon can make that claim?"

--|--

Skimming back northwards with Redbeard and Irngl, I pointed to the flying saucers radiating away from us through the delicate summer sky. "These people are all fairly responsible citizens. Isn't it silly to expect them to advertise a more effective way of having their throats cut?"

There was a shrug of the green-wrapped shoulders. "With any other species, yes. But not you. The Galactic Federation insists that the actual revelation of the weapon, either to your public or your government, must be made by a fairly intelligent representative of your own species, in full possession of the facts, and after he or she has had an adequate period to reflect on the consequences of disclosure."

"And you think we will? In spite of everything?"

"Oh, yes," the little man told me with tranquil assurance. "Because of everything. For example, you have each been selected with a view to the personal advantage you would derive from the revelation. Sooner or later, one of you will find the advantage so necessary and tempting that the inhibiting scruple will disappear; eventually, all of you would come to it. As Shulmr pointed out, each member of a suicidal race contributes to the destruction of the whole even while attentively safeguarding his own existence. Disagreeable creatures, but fortunately short-lived!"

"One million," I mused. "So arbitrary. I bet we make--"

"Quite correct. You are an ingenious race. Now if you wouldn't mind stepping back onto your roof? We're in a bit of a hurry, Irngl and I, and we have to disinfect after--Thank you."

I watched them disappear upwards into a cloud bank. Then, noticing a television dipole tied in a hangman's noose which Irngl's father had overlooked, I trudged downstairs.

For a while, I was very angry. Then I was glum. Then I was angry again. I've thought about it a lot since August.

I've read some recent stuff on flying saucers, but not a word about the super-weapon we'll get if we dismantle our hydrogen bombs. But, if someone had blabbed, how would I know about it?

That's just the point. Here I am a writer, a science-fiction writer no less, with a highly salable story that I'm not supposed to use. Well, it happens that I need money badly right now; and it further happens that I am plumb out of plots. How long am I supposed to go on being a sucker?

Somebody's probably told by now. If not in this country, in one of the others. And I am a writer, and I have a living to make. And this is fiction, and who asked you to believe it anyhow?

Only--Only I did intend to leave out the signal. The signal, that is, by which a government can get in touch with the kobolds, can let them know it's interested in making the trade, in getting that weapon. I did intend to leave out the signal.

But I don't have a satisfactory ending to this story. It needs some sort of tag-line. And the signal makes a perfect one. Well--it seems to me that if I've told this much--and probably anyhow--

The signal's the immemorial one between man and kobold: Leave a bowl of milk outside the White House door.

AFTERWORD

I was living next door to Lester del Rey, when I wrote this, in a fifteen-dollar-a-month unheated apartment on West End Avenue in New York City. It had a bathtub in the kitchen and the absolutely boozingest lady superintendent this side of Alcoholics Anonymous. The building was later torn down to become part of the site of today's Lincoln Center. And the apartment was a tiny three-room affair at the end of one of the very longest entrance halls I have ever seen. There was perhaps twice or three times as much square footage in the entrance hall as in the apartment proper.

I used both the apartment and the entrance hallway as the opening scene of "Will You Walk a Little Faster." The title, of course, comes from Lewis Carroll, per the whiting's impatient question to the snail. And the theme...

The theme was the theme of science fiction, five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a time when every newly built house in the suburbs proudly featured a concrete-lined bomb cellar:

Atomic doom.

I had just come back to my apartment after a visit to Lester next door. We had begun a discussion of atomic doom as a mild, rather urbane disagreement and had ended in a screaming, yelling, almost-throwing-things argument.

Lester was a maddening person to argue with. If driven into a corner he would start to Jurgenize; that is, he would start quoting authorities, most of whom he had made up on the spot (I created this verb in honor of Lester, naming it after the most colorful character of the late James Branch Cabell). Randy Garrett, during a similar battle with Lester, made a point of writing down the title of the book Lester was quoting, the name of the author and the publishing house, and even the year, goddammit, of publication--all of which Lester supplied with a noblesse oblige wave of his hand. These Randy then checked, not only with the New York Public Library, but also eventually with the Library of Congress itself.

He confronted Lester with the result in the presence of four other science-fiction writers. "No such book," he said triumphantly. "No record of its ever being published. No record at all, at all, at all."

Lester looked amused. He shrugged. "It's a shame about the Library of Congress," he said. "Such a shabby excuse for what it's supposed to be. So ridiculously incomplete in every important way. No, you really have to learn to use the Bodleian in Oxford for any important research. The last time I checked, they had two copies, one of them in pretty good condition."

Randy positively danced with fury and frustration. He put his left fist in his mouth and bit hard on it.

He swore he would make it a goal of his life to go to Oxford before he died, and to visit the Bodleian. Unfortunately, he later had a stroke and never did.

My argument with Lester on the subject of atomic doom had begun with Lester asking me if I was one of those people who ran around shivering and shaking about the mere existence of nuclear weapons. When I told him I was--that I both shivered and shook--he smiled and, in his best Campbellian manner, pointed out to me how unlikely it would be for anyone with the merest soupcon of a sense of self-preservation to use such a weapon no matter what the provocation. Who would take the chance of doing something that might well end up destroying the planet? After all, people who governed countries had gotten to where they were because of outstanding intelligence.

"Really?" I said. "Then how about Hitler in that last bunker in Berlin, with the Russians smashing their way to where he lay hidden? If a subordinate had come to him and told him of the development of a weapon that could vaporize the oncoming Russian armies but might also just possibly destroy the entire world, what do you think he would have said?"

Lester rebutted immediately with a previously unheard-of biography of Hitler that practically said in so many words Der Fuhrer would have done no such thing. He added concurring opinions by two French lieutenant generals my extensive reading had failed to mention, and wound up by quoting a former associate head of the atomic energy program whose name and title I knew he had just made up out of the thinnest of air.

At this point I'm afraid I began yelling. Lester yelled back. We continued at a very high pitch until the frequently drunken woman who was the building's resident landlady was attracted by the uproar and walked in through the open doorway to ask us if we possibly had any part of a quart of Scotch that she could borrow.

I left, still yelling over my shoulder. And the moment I opened the door of my apartment and began walking up that long entrance hall, what the French call l'esprit d'escalier (l'esprit du vestibule?) came upon me and I thought of what I might have said. And, as I did, I looked about me and realized just how I might dramatize all that I could have and should have said.

Then I went into the apartment proper and sat down at my Remington typewriter and wrote out the dramatization. Because after all, an argument is an argument, but I needed the money to pay the landlady my overdue rent.