‘How do you mean?’
‘Right now,’ I said, ‘the world is scared. There has to be some
explanation of what is happening. There is nothing worse than a senseless
happening, nothing worse than reasonless fear, and the aliens, so long as
they know something’s being done, may leave this barrier as it is. For the
moment, I suspect, they’ll do no more than they’ve already done. I hope it
may work out that the situation gets no worse and that in the meantime some
progress can be made.’
Other hands were waving and I pointed to another man.
‘Frank Roberts, Washington Post,’ he said. ‘I have a question about the
negotiations. As I understand it, the aliens want to be admitted to our
world and in return are willing to provide us with a great store of
knowledge they have accumulated.’
‘That is right,’ I said.
‘Why do they want admission?’
‘It’s not entirely clear to me,’ I told him. ‘They need to be here so
they can proceed to other worlds. It would seem the alternate worlds lie in
some sort of progression, and they must be arrived at in a certain order. I
confess quite willingly I understand none of this. All that can be done now
is to reach proposals that we and the aliens can negotiate.’
‘You know of no terms beyond the broad proposal you have stated?’
‘None at all,’ I said. ‘There may be others. I am not aware of them.’
‘But now you have – perhaps you would call him an advisor. Would it be
proper to direct a question at this Mr Smith of yours?’ ‘
‘A question,’ said Mr Smith. ‘I accept your question.’
He was pleased that someone had noticed him. Not without some qualms, I
handed him the mike.
‘You talk into it,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I watch.’
‘You talk our language very well,’ said the Washington Post.
‘Just barely. Mechanism teach me.’
‘Can you add anything about specific conditions?’
‘I do not catch,’ said Smith.
‘Are there any conditions that your different people will insist upon
before they reach an agreement with us?’
‘Just one alone,’ said Smith.
‘And what would that one be?’
‘I elucidate,’ said Smith. ‘You have a thing called war. Very bad, of
course, but not impossible. Soon or late peoples get over playing war.’
He paused and looked around and all those reporters waited silently.
‘Yes,’ said one of the reporters finally, not the Post, ‘yes, war is
bad, but what…?’
‘I tell you now,’ said Smith. ‘You have a great amount of fission… I
am at loss for word.’
‘Fissionable material,’ said a helpful newsman.
‘That correct. Fissionable material. You have much of it. Once in
another world there was same situation. When we arrive, there was nothing
left. No life. No nothing. It was very sad. All life had been wiped out. We
set him up again, but sad to think upon. Must not happen here. So we must
insist such fissionable material be widely dispersed.’
‘Now, wait,’ a newsman shouted. ‘You are saying that we must disperse
fissionable material. I suppose you mean break up all the stockpiles and the
bombs and have no more than a very small amount at any one place. Not
enough, perhaps, to assemble a bomb of any sort.’
‘You comprehend it fast,’ said Smith.
‘But how can you tell that it is dispersed? A country might say it
complied when it really hadn’t. How can you really know? How can you police
it?’
‘We monitor,’ said Smith.
‘You have a way of detecting fissionable material?’
‘Yes, most certainly,’ said Smith.
‘All right, then, even if you knew – well, let’s say it this way – you
find there are concentrations still remaining; what do you do about them?’
‘We blow them up,’ said Smith. ‘We detonate them loudly.’
‘But…’
‘We muster up a deadline. We edict all concentrations be gone by such a
time. Time come and some still here, they auto… auto…’
‘Automatically.’
‘Thank you, kindly person. That is the word I grope for. They
automatically blow up.’
An uneasy silence fell. The newsmen were wondering, I knew, if they
were being taken in; if they were being, somehow, tricked by a phony actor
decked out in a funny vest.
‘Already,’ Smith said, rather casually, ‘we have a mechanism
pinpointing all the concentrations.’
Someone shouted in a loud, hoarse voice: ‘I’ll be damned! The flying
time machine!’
Then they were off and running, racing pell-mell for their cars parked
along the road. With no further word to us, with no leave-taking whatsoever,
they were off to tell the world.
And this’ was it, I thought, somewhat bitterly and more than a little
limp.
Now the aliens could walk in any time they wanted, any way they wanted,
with full human blessing. There was nothing else that could have turned the
trick no argument, no logic, no inducement short of this inducement. In the
face of the worldwide clamour which this announcement would stir up, with
the public demand that the world accept this one condition of an alien
compact, all sane and sober counsel would have no weight at all.
Any workable agreement between the aliens and ourselves would
necessarily have been a realistic one, with checks and balances. Each side
would have been pledged to some contribution and each would have had to face
some automatic, built-in penalty if the agreement should be broken. But now
the checks and balances were gone and the way was open for the aliens to
come in. They had offered the one thing that the people – not the
governments, but the people – wanted, or that they thought they wanted,
above every other thing and there’d be no stopping them in their demand for
it.
And it had all been trickery, I thought bitterly. I had been tricked
into bringing back the time machine and I had been forced into a situation
where I had asked for help and Smith had been the help, or at least a part
of it. And his announcement of the one demand had been little short of
trickery in itself. It was the same old story. Human or alien, it made no
difference. You wanted something bad enough and you went out to get it any
way you could.
They’d beat us all the way, I knew. All the time they’d been that one
long jump ahead of us and now the situation was entirely out of hand and the
Earth was licked.
Smith stared after the running reporters.
‘What proceeds?’ he asked.
Pretending that he didn’t know. I could have broken his neck.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’ll escort you back to the village hall. Your pal
is down there, doctoring up the folks.’
‘But all the galloping,’ he said, ‘all the shouting? What occasions
it?’
‘You should know,’ I said. ‘You just hit the jackpot.’
23
When I got back home, Nancy was waiting for me. She was sitting on the
steps that led up to the porch, huddled there, crouched against the world. I
saw her from a block away and hurried, gladder at the sight of her than I
had ever been before. Glad and humble, and with a tenderness I never knew I
had welling up so hard inside of me that I nearly choked.
Poor kid, I thought. It had been rough on her. Just one day home and
the world of Millville, the world that she remembered and thought of as her
home, had suddenly come unstuck.
Someone was shouting in the garden where tiny fifty-dollar bills
presumably were still growing on the little bushes.
Coming in the gate, I stopped short at the sound of bellowing.
Nancy looked up and saw me.
‘It’s nothing, Brad,’ she said. ‘It’s just Hiram down there.
Higgy has him guarding all that money. The kids keep sneaking in, the
little eight and ten-year-olds. They only want to count the money on each
bush. They aren’t doing any harm.
But Hiram chases them. There are times,’ she said, ‘when I feel sorry
for Hiram.’
‘Sorry for him?’ I asked, astonished. He was the last person in the
world I’d suspected anyone might feel sorry for. ‘He’s just a stupid slob.’
‘A stupid slob,’ she said, ‘who’s trying to prove something and is not
entirely sure what he wants to prove.’
‘That he has more muscle…’
‘No,’ she told me, ‘that’s not it at all.’
Two kids came tearing out of the garden and vanished down the street.
There was no sign of Hiram. And no more hollering. He had done his job; he
had chased them off.
I sat down on the step beside her.
‘Brad,’ she said, ‘it’s not going well. I can feel it isn’t going
well.’
I shook my head, agreeing with her.
‘I was down at the village hall,’ she said. ‘Where that terrible,
shrivelled creature is conducting a clinic. Daddy’s down there, too. He’s