Fascinated despite herself, she asked, “What’s the message?”
“Firstly: Two days from now, on Sunday night at ten P.M., Eastern Time, we will announce over national television what we are doing here and how we will proceed.
“Secondly: Once they know we are present, the populace of a planet almost always sends us messages. The messages are to be accumulated somewhere to be picked up. Someone will tell you where they are, and we will pick them up. Tell the powers that be that you will not transmit spoken messages. Even if you were constrained to do so, we would ignore them. This is to prevent your being inundated and our being influenced by discourtesies that might be blurted in anger, such as General McVane’s outburst the other evening.”
“Are you going to rewrite our laws or something? That could make it difficult for some people.”
“No, no. Your laws will still be in effect, more or less. They’ll probably be needed less as we go along, but we won’t fool with them, at least not just yet. Tell the president not to worry about it. Any confusion we cause will be temporary and minimal. Tell him, also, that we will make any further announcements to the public on television, just as we will do this first time.”
“At regular intervals?”
“Not necessarily, no. Whenever we have something to say. At this time, we plan only the first announcement, and it won’t be lengthy.”
They rose and moved together out into the hall, pausing there long enough for Chiddy to say, “When the government people fixed your apartment, they put in a great many listening and looking devices. We have made the ones in the bathroom inoperable, as we understand your culture to prefer. The others we left intact. However, they will show only you, fully clothed in whatever you choose to wear on any given day, moving about, reading, fixing food, whatever is appropriate to the hour when you are here. If you change clothes, the viewers will show you selecting the clothes and then going into the bathroom to change. Whatever you are really doing, they will not see. They are not seeing us here tonight. They are seeing you seated on the couch, reading a book.
“Whenever we ask you to transmit a message, you may say it appeared on your table, but it self-destructed once you had read it. We got that idea from an old TV show of yours.”
“Strange,” murmured Vess, “that we had never thought of it ourselves.”
Benita murmured, “I can understand your being enamored of oldMission Impossible technology, but if you expect them to believe you’re using me as an intermediary, you should black out this place every now and then for a few moments. If they can see me whenever I’m here, but never see you, and if all my time is accounted for, they’ll get to the point where they’ll suspect I’m making things up.”
Chiddy paused, staring at his feet in a very humanish way.
“She’s right,” he said. “We have never visited a moderately advanced world before, so we must adjust our methods. Should it be blackouts, or fake visits?”
“I think blackouts,” she said firmly. “I’d have to remember what was supposed to have happened during fake visits, in case they asked.”
“Very well,” said Chiddy. “We will black you out for a time whenever we are with you. As we speak, we are making a blacked-out time.”
“Now, what about if I have visitors? If Simon comes up to my apartment, or if I invite someone in?”
“On those occasions, we will let them see what is actually happening,” Chiddy said, his handsome face twisted into a slightly lecherous leer. “Unless you ask us not to.”
“That facial expression should be avoided,” she told him severely. “It is most insulting.”
“An actor named Price did it,” Chiddy replied.
“He was almost invariably the villain,” cautioned Benita. “What about my phone line? Did they tap my phone?”
“Both this phone and the ones downstairs, yes. But unless it is a call we ask you to make, they will hear only innocuous conversations. You, asking if there are tickets available for the opera. You, wondering if a retailer has an item in another color. You, ordering books. It’s all being done automatically. Believe us, no one will see or hear you doing anything significant or embarrassing. You may scold or bless your children, laugh or cry, or even scratch your intimate parts in private. The only calls they will actually record are the ones you make to them.”