They Walked Like Men

  “Now wait,” I said, “just a goddamn minute. You mean you knew about me. Not just me alone, of course?”

  “Certainly not just you alone. But something of every one of you who might at some time be placed in such a position as to become aware of us. Like newsmen and officers of the law and certain public officials and key industrialists and—”

  “You studied all of these?”

  He almost smirked at us. “Every one of them,” he said. “And there were others than myself?” “Oh, of course, there were. Quite a number of them.” “And there were traps and bombs—” “A wide variety of things,” he told me. “You murdered them,” I said.

  “If you insist. But I must remind you not to be self-righteous. When you came in here tonight you had full intention to pour some acid down the sink.”

  “Of course,” I said, “but now I realize it would have done no good.”

  “Just possibly,” said Atwood, “it would have gotten rid of me—or, at least, the major part of me. I was down that drain, you know.”

  “Rid of you,” I said. “But not of all the others.” “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Get rid of you and there could be another Atwood. Any time you want, there could be another Atwood. Frankly, there’s no point to interminably getting rid of Atwoods when there’s always, if necessary, another one on tap.”

  “I do not know,” said Atwood thoughtfully. “I can’t figure you folks out. There is an undeflnable something about you that makes no sense at all. You set up your rules of conduct and you fabricate your neat little social patterns, but you have no patterns of yourselves. You can be incredibly stupid one moment and incredibly brilliant the next. And the most vicious thing about you—the most awful thing about you—is your unspoken, ingrained faith in destiny. Your destiny, not someone else’s. It’s an appalling quality to even think about.”

  “And you,” I said. “You’d have borne me no ill will if I had poured the acid.”

  “Not particularly,” said Atwood.

  “There,” I told him, “is a point of difference between us that you should possibly consider. I bear you—or your kind— considerable ill will for your attempts to kill me. And I bear you as much or more, ill will for the murder of my friend.” “Prove it,” said Atwood defiantly. “What’s that?”

  “Prove I killed your friend. I believe,” he said, “that is the proper human attitude. You get away with anything if no one proves you did it. And, likewise, Mr. Graves, you may be confusing viewpoints. Conditions modify them.”

  “Meaning that in certain other places murder is no crime.” *That,” said Atwood, “is the point exactly.” The flame of the alcohol lamp flickered fitfully and set up fleeing shadows that raced around the room. And it was so ordinary, so commonplace, I thought, that we should be here, two products of different planets and of different cultures, talking as if we might have been two men. Perhaps this were so because this other thing, whatever it might be, had assumed the shape of man and had schooled itself in human speech and action and, perhaps, to some extent as well in the human viewpoint. I wondered if the same condition would exist if it were one of the bowling balls, unshaped to human or to any other form, which rested on the stool and talked to us, perhaps as the Dog talked, without the human movement of a mouth. Or if the thing which had become at least a momentary Atwood could talk so easily and well if it had not absorbed so great a knowledge, despite the fact that knowledge might be no more than superficial, of the ways of Earth and Man.

  How long, I wondered, had these aliens been upon the Earth and how many of them? For years, perhaps, patiently working themselves into not only the knowledge but the feel of Earth and Man, studying the social patterns and the economic systems and the financial setup. It would take a long time, I realized, because they would not only be starting cold on the bare knowledge in itself but probably would be facing not only an unfamiliar but probably an unknown factor in our maze of property laws and our legal and our business systems.

  Joy put her hand on my arm. “Let’s leave,” she said. “I don’t like this character.”

  “Miss Kane,” said Atwood, “we are quite prepared to accept your dislike of us. To tell you the truth, we simply do not care.”

  “I talked to a family this morning that was worried sick,” said Joy* “because they had no place to go. And this evening I saw another family that had been evicted from its home because the father had lost his job.”

  “Things like that,” said Atwood, “have been going on through all your history. Don’t challenge me on that. I have read your history. This is no new condition we’ve created. It is a very old one in your human terms. And we have done it honestly and, believe me, with all due attention to legality.

  It was almost, I thought, as if we, the three of us, were acting out an old morality play, with the basic sins of mankind enlarged a millionfold to prove a point by exaggeration.

  I felt Joy’s grip tighten on my arm and knew that this was perhaps the first time she had realized the true amorality of the creature that we faced. And perhaps, as well, a realization that this creature, this Atwood, was no more than a visual projection of a great, vast horde of others, of an alien force which intended to take the Earth from us. Behind the thing that sat upon the stool one could almost see the ravening blackness which had come from some far star to put an end to Man. And, worse than that, not to Man alone, but to all his works and all his precious dreams, imperfect as all those dreams might be.

  The great tragedy, I realized, was not the end of Man himself but the end of all that Man had stood for, all that Man had built and all that he had planned.

  “Despite the fact,” said Atwood, “that the human race may resent us and, perhaps, even hate us, there is nothing that’s illegal, even in your own concept of right and wrong, in anything we’ve done. There is nothing in the law which restricts anyone, even aliens, from acquiring or from holding property. You, yourself, my friend, or the lady with you, have a perfect right to buy all the property you wish. To purchase and to hold, if that should be your aim, all the property that exists in the entire world.”

  “Two things would,” I said. “One of them is the lack of money.”

  “And the other?”

  “It would be damn poor taste,” I told him. “It simply isn’t done. And, also, a possible third thing. Something that is called an antitrust law.”

  “Oh, those,” said Atwood. “We are well aware of them; we have taken certain measures.”

  “I am sure you have.”

  “When you get right down,” said Atwood, “to the nub of it, the only qualification one needs to do what we have done is to have the money.”

  “You talk as if money is a new idea to you,” I said, for the way he’d said it, that was the way it sounded. “Could it be that money is unheard of elsewhere than Earth?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Atwood. “There is commerce of a sort, and there are mediums of exchange. Mediums of exchange, but not money possibly as you know it here. Money here on Earth is more than the paper or the metal that you use for money, more than the rows of figures that account for money. Here on Earth you have given money a symbolism such as no medium of exchange has anywhere else that I have ever known or heard of. You have made it a power and a virtue and you have made the lack of it despicable and somehow even criminal. You measure men by money and you calibrate success with money and you almost worship money.”

  He would have gone on if I’d let him. He was all ready to preach a full-scale sermon. But I didn’t let him.

  “Look at this business practically,” I said. “You’re going to lay out, before you’re through with it, more cash than the Earth has cost you, much more than it’s worth. You’ll throw people out of jobs and drive them from their homes and someone will have to try at least to take care of them. Every government on Earth will establish great relief programs and set up doles to help their people, and taxes will go up to pay for all of this. Taxes, min
d you, levied on the very property you’ve bought. You throw the people out of work, you take their homes from them—OK, so you’ll take care of them, you’ll have to pay the taxes to take care of them.”

  “I see,” said Atwood, mocking, “that your heart bleeds for us, and it’s very human of you and I thank you for it. But you need not bother. We’ll pay the taxes. We’ll very gladly pay them.”

  “You could overthrow the governments,” I said, “and then there’d be no taxes. Perhaps you’ve thought of that.”

  “Of course not,” said Atwood firmly. “That is something we would not think of doing. That would be illegal. We do not, my friend, overstep the law.”

  And it was no good, I knew. There was nothing any good.

  For the aliens would control the land and the natural resources and all the things that were built upon the land, and they would not use the land in its proper usage—or anything else in the proper way. They would plow no furrow and they would grow no crop. No factory wheel would turn. No metal would be mined. No timber would be cut.

  The people would be dispossessed, not alone of their property, but of their heritage. Gone with the land and houses, with the factory and the job, with the retail store and the merchandise, would be the hope and and the aspiration and the opportunity—and perhaps the faith—that shaped humanity. It did not matter greatly how much of the property of Earth the aliens actually bought. They need not buy it all. All that would be necessary would be to stop the wheels of industry, to halt the flow of commerce, to destroy the effectiveness of the financial structure. When that had been done, there’d be an end to jobs and an end to credit and an end to business. And the human dream was dead.

  It did not really matter that the aliens buy the homes or the apartment houses, for if all the rest were done, then the four walls that a man called home would be just a place in which to die. Either the purchasing of the homes was a pure campaign of terror or, equally as likely, an indication that the aliens even now did not understand how little they would really have to do to strike the fatal blow.

  There would be doles, of course, or some sort of relief program, to keep food in the people’s mouths and, where possible, a roof above their heads. And there’d be no lack of money for the doles, for the taxes would be paid most cheerfully by this alien tribe. But in a situation such as this, money would be the cheapest thing there was, and the least effective. What the price of a potato or a loaf of bread when we had reached the last potato and there was no flour for bread? There would be fighting back, once the situation should be known. Fighting back, not only by the people, but by the governments as well. But by that time the aliens undoubtedly would have set up some sort of defense, perhaps of a kind and nature no one now could guess. Perhaps it would be a scorched-earth defense, with the factories and the homes and all the rest of it going up in flames or otherwise destroyed so that Man could not regain the things with which he’d forged a livelihood. There would then be only the land to fight for, and the bare land in itself would not be enough.

  If something could be done immediately, I knew, there was every chance that, even now, the aliens could be beaten. But to do anything soon enough required a willingness to believe in what was going on. And there was no one who’d believe. Bitterly, I realized that acceptance of the situation in its full and brutal force would have to wait until the world had been plunged in chaos, and by that time it well could be too late.

  And, standing there, I knew that I was licked and that the world was licked.

  Wells had written, long ago, of aliens who had invaded Earth. And many, after him, had written other imaginary versions of alien invasions. But not a one of them, I thought, not a single one, had come even close to what had really happened. Not one had foreseen how it could be done, how the very system which we had constructed so painfully through the ages should now be turned against us—how freedom and the right of property had turned out to be a trap we’d set to catch ourselves.

  Joy pulled at my arm. “Leave us go,” she said.

  I turned with her and headed for the door.

  Behind me I heard Atwood chuckling.

  “Come see me tomorrow,” he said. “You and I maybe can do business.”

  XXVI

  Outside it was raining more heavily than ever. Not a downpour, but a steady drip that was discouraging. There was a definite edge of chill in the air. It was the kind of night, I thought, for the world we knew to come crashing down. No, not crashing down, for that was too dramatic. Sagging, rather. The kind of a night for the world to come sagging down, weakened without knowing it was being weakened or what had weakened it, and falling so smoothly and so steadily it did not know that it was falling until it had collapsed.

  I opened the door of the car for Joy, then slammed it shut again before she could get in.

  “I forgot,” I said. “There could be a bomb in there.” She looked at me and raised a hand to push away a lock of hair that had .blown across her eyes.

  “No,” she said. “He wants to talk with you. Tomorrow.” “That was just talk,” I said. “His way of being funny.” “And even if there is a bomb in there, I’m not walking back to town. Not at this hour and in this rain. And there wasn’t one before.”

  “Let me get in and start it. You stand off—” “No,” she said emphatically. She reached out and jerked the door open.

  I walked around the car and got in. I turned the key and the engine started. “See,” she said.

  “There could have been,” I told her.

  “Even if there were, we can’t live in continual fear of it,” she said. “There are a million ways that they can kill us if that is what they want.”

  “They killed Stirling. There probably are others they have killed. They made two tries at me.”

  “And failed each time,” she said. “I have a feeling they’ll not try again.” “Intuition?”

  “Parker, they may have intuition, too.” “What has that to do with it?”

  “Maybe nothing,” she said. “It’s not really what I meant to say. What I meant was that no matter how much they learn about us, how much they try to be like us to carry out their project, they can never learn to think like us.”

  “So you believe they’ll give up if they don’t kill someone in two tries.”

  “Well, not that exactly, although maybe so. But they won’t try the same thing twice.”

  “So I am safe from traps and bombs and something in the closet.”

  “It may be a superstition with them,” she said. “It may be a way of thinking. It may be a logic we don’t even know.”

  She had been thinking about it all the time, I knew. Trying to get it figured out. That pretty little head had been filled with, speculation, and the few facts, or quasi facts, that we had in our possession had gone round and round. But there was no way, I thought, to get it figured out. Because you didn’t know enough. You were thinking as a human thought and trying to think as an alien thought without knowing how he thought. And even if you did know, there was no guarantee that you could twist the human thought processes into an alien channel.

  Joy had put it the other way around. The aliens, she had said, no matter how much they wanted, could never think like us. But they had a better chance to think like us than we to think like them. They had studied us, how long no one could know. And there had been many of them; no one knew how many. Or was that the correct way to say it? Might there not be no more than a single one of them, with that one fractionated into units the size of bowling balls, so that a single one of them could be in many places and be many things at once?

  Even if they were individuals, if each bowling ball were a complete and single thing, they still were closer to one another than it was possible for human beings to be close to one another. For it took many of them to make a thing like Atwood or like the girl who’d sat beside me at the bar: it took a lot of them to shape themselves into the simulation of a human being. And in doing that, in taking human form, or an
y other form, they then must work as one; then must, in very fact, the many become as one.

  We rolled down the last of the campus streets and came out on a deserted University Avenue and I headed back for town.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “I can’t go home,” said Joy. “Not back to the house. They might still be there.”

  I nodded, knowing how it was. And I wondered what the things that had prowled the yard might be. Perhaps some ferocious beast, or, rather, the simulation of some ferocious beast from some other planet. Perhaps many kinds of ferocious beasts from many other planets. Perhaps a great menagerie of terrible lifeforms, meant, perhaps, to terrify rather than to harm. No more than bait, perhaps, to pull the three of us together—Joy, the Dog, and I—to get us in one spot. But if they had meant to kill the three of us, then it had been another plan that had failed.

  The Dog had said something about the bowling balls’ never going far enough, never pushing hard enough, dealing in half measures. I tried to remember what he actually had said, but my memory was hazy. Too much had happened.

  And I wondered, too, where the Dog had gone.

  “Parker,” Joy said, “we have to get some rest. We have to get in out of the rain and get a few hours’ sleep.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. My place—”

  “I didn’t mean your place. It’s as bad as mine. We could find a motel, maybe.”

  “Joy, I have only a dollar or two in my pocket. I forgot to pick up my check.”

  “I cashed mine,” she said. “I have some money, Parker.”

  “Joy…”