“You’re asking me,” I said, “to be a traitor to my race.” Even as I said it, I was well aware that the term of traitor was meaningless to them. Recognized in its proper context, more than likely, but without a shred of meaning. For these things would not have the same kind of ethics as the human race; they would have another set of ethics, probably, but a set that would be as far beyond our comprehension as ours had been to them.
“Let’s think of it,” she said, “in practical terms. We’re giving you a choice. You either go along with the rest of humanity and share their common fate or you go along with us and fare a good deal better. If you decline, you will not hurt us greatly. If you accept, you’ll help yourself, to a great extent, and your fellow humans, perhaps to a somewhat less extent. You stand to gain and, believe me, the human race can’t lose.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your bargain?” “A bargain is a bargain,” she said stiffly. “You’ll pay well, I suppose.” “Very well,” she said.
One of the bowling balls, coming out of nowhere I could see, rolled across the floor. It stopped about three feet from where I was sitting in the chair.
The girl got up from behind the desk and came around it She stood at one corner of it, looking at the bowling ball.
The ball became striated—finely striated, like a diffraction grating. Then it began to split along all those tiny lines. It turned from black to green and split, and instead of a bowling ball, there was a little heap of money piled upon the floor. I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t say a word. She stooped and picked up a bill and handed it to me. I looked at it. She waited. I looked at it some more. “Well, Mr. Graves?” she said. “It looks like money,” I told her.
“It is money. How else do you think we money that we needed?”
“And you did it by the rules,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.” “You broke one rule. The most important rule of all. Money is a measure of what one has done—of the road he had built or the picture he had painted or the hours he has worked.”
“It’s money,” she said. “That is all that’s needed.” She bent again and scooped up the entire pile of it. She put it on the desk and began to stack it.
There was no point, I knew, in trying to make her understand. She wasn’t being cynical. Or dishonest. It was a lack of understanding—an alien blind spot. Money was a product, not a symbol. It could be nothing else.
She made neat piles of it. She stooped and picked up the few stray bills that had fluttered off the pile when she had picked it up. She put the stray bills on the pile.
The bill I had in my hand was a twenty, and a lot of the others seemed to be twenties, too, although there were some tens and a stray fifty here and there.
She stacked all the piles together and held it out to me. “It’s yours,” she said. “But I haven’t said—”
“Whether you work for us or not, it’s yours. And you’ll think about what I’ve been telling you.” “I’ll think about it,” I said.
I stood up and took the money from her. I stuffed it in my pockets. The pockets bulged with it.
“There will come a day,” I said, patting the pockets, “when this stuff is no longer any good. There’ll be a time when there’ll be nothing one can buy with it.”
“When that day comes,” she said, “there will be something else. There’ll be whatever you may need.”
I stood there thinking, and the only thing that I could think about was that now I had the money to pay the taxi driver. Except for that, my mind was a total blank. The enormity of this meeting had wiped me clean of everything except a total sense of loss—that and the fact that now I could pay the driver.
I had to get out of there, I knew. Had to leave this place before the flood of revulsion and emotion should come crashing down upon me. I had to leave while I still could leave with a numbed human dignity. I had to get away and find a place and the time to think. And until I did this thinking, I must appear to go along with them.
“I thank you, miss,” I said. “I don’t seem to know your name.”
“I haven’t got a name,” she told me. “There was never any reason I should have a name. Only ones like Atwood had to have a name.”
“I thank you, then,” I said. “I will think it over.”
She turned and walked out of the room into the entry hall. There was no sign of the maid. Beyond the hall I saw that the living room was clean and shining and filled with furniture. And how much of it, I wondered, was really furniture, and how much of it was bowling balls changed into furniture?
I picked my coat and hat off the hall tree.
She opened the front door.
“It was nice of you to come,” she said. “It was very thoughtful. I trust you’ll come again.”
I walked out of the door and did not see my cab. In its place stood a long, white Cadillac.
“I had a cab,” I said. “It must be down the road.”
“We paid off the driver,” said the girl, “and sent him on his way. You will not need a cab.”
She saw my befuddlement.
“The car is yours,” she said. “If you’re to work with us—”
“With a built-in bomb?” I asked.
She sighed. “How do I make you understand? Let me put it brutally. So long as you can be useful to us, no harm will come to you. Perform this service for us and harm will never come to you. You’ll be taken care of as long as you may live.”
“And Joy Kane?” I asked.
“If you wish. Joy Kane as well.”
She looked at me with her icy eyes. “But try to stop us now, try to cross us now …”
She made a sound like a knife going through a throat.
I went down to the car.
XXXI
At the edge of the city I stopped at a neighborhood shopping center and walked to a drugstore to buy a paper. I wanted to see if Gavin had been able to get his story about the missing bank funds.
I could tell him now, I knew, exactly what had happened. But, just like the others, he wouldn’t listen to me. I could walk into the office and sit down at my desk and write the greatest story the world had ever known. But it would be a waste of time to do it. It would not be published. It would be too ridiculous to publish. And even if it were published, no one would believe it. Or almost no one. A crackpot here and there. Not enough to count.
Before I got out of the car I riffled through the money in my jacket pocket to find a ten-dollar bill. I looked for a five and there weren’t any. And there weren’t any ones.
I wondered, as I riffled through it, how much money I might have. Not that it mattered greatly. Just curiosity.
For money in a few more weeks, perhaps in a few more days, would begin to lose its value. And a short time after that the value would be lost. It would be no more than so much worthless paper. You couldn’t eat it and you couldn’t wear it and it would not shelter you from the wind or weather. For it was no more—had never been more—than a tool devised by Man to carry out his peculiar system of culture and of life. It had no more significance, actually, than the notches on the gun butt or the crude marks chalked upon the wall. It had been no more, at any time, than sophisticated counters. I walked into the drugstore and picked a paper off the pile on top of the cigar counter and there, staring out at me, all grins and full of happiness, was a picture of the Dog.
There could be no doubt about it. I’d have known him anywhere. He sat there, bubbling with good-fellowship, and behind him was the White House.
The headline beneath the picture was the clincher. It said: TALKING DOG ARRIVES TO VISIT PRESIDENT
“Mister,” said the clerk, “do you want that paper?” I gave him the bill and he groused about it. “That the smallest that you got?” I told him that it was.
He gave me the change and I stuffed it and the paper in my pocket and went back to the car. I wanted to read the story, but for some reason I did not understand, or even try to understand, I wanted to get back to the car to do it, t
o where I could sit and read it without the possibility of someone disturbing me.
The story was cute, just a shade too cute.
It told about this dog that had come to see the President. He’d trotted through the gate before anyone could stop him and he’d tried to get into the White House, but the guards had sho*ved him out. He went reluctantly, trying to explain, in his doggish manner, that he wanted to make no trouble but would be very much obliged if he could see the President. He tried to get in a couple of more times, and finally the guards put in a call to the dogcatcher.
The catcher came and got the dog, who went along with him willingly enough, without apparent malice. And in a little while the catcher came back and the dog was with him. The catcher explained to the guards that maybe it would be a good idea if they did let the dog see the President. The dog, he said, had talked to him, explaining that it was most important he see the chief executive.
So the guards went to the phone again and in a little while someone came and got the dogcatcher and took him to a hospital, where he still was under observation. The dog was allowed to stay, however, and one of the guards explained to him most emphatically that it was ridiculous of him to expect to see the President.
He was, the story said, polite and well behaved. He sat outside the White House and didn’t bother anything. He didn’t even chase the squirrels on the White House lawn.
“This reporter,” said the story, “tried to talk with him. We asked him several questions, but he never said a word. He just grinned at us.”
And there he was, in the picture on page one, just as big as life—a shaggy, friendly bum that no one for a moment would think of taking seriously.
But, perhaps, I thought, you couldn’t blame the newsman who had written that story or any of the rest of them, for there was nothing quite so outrageous as a shaggy dog that talked. And, perhaps, when you came to think of it, it was no whit more ridiculous than a bunch of bowling balls about to grab the Earth.
If the threat had been bloody or spectacular, then it could be comprehended. But, as it stood, it was neither, and all the more deadly because of that very fact.
Stirling had talked about a nonenvironmental being, and that was what these aliens were. They could adapt to anything; they could assume any sort of shape; they could assimilate and use to their own advantage any kind of thinking;-they could twist to their own purposes any economic, political, or social system. They were things that were completely flexible; they could adapt to any condition which might be brought about to fight them.
And it could be, I told myself, that we were not facing here many bowling balls but one giant organism that could divide and split itself into many forms for many purposes, while still remaining its single self, aware of all the things its many parts were doing.
How do you thwart a thing like that? I asked myself. How do you stand against it?
Although, even if it should be one great organism, there were certain facets to it which were hard of explanation. Why had the girl without a name, instead of Atwood, been waiting for me at the Belmont house?
We knew nothing of them and there was no time to know anything of them, or it, whichever it might be. And such a knowledge was something one must have, for surely the life and culture of this enemy must be as complex and as peculiar in its many ways as the human culture.
They could become anything at all. They could see, apparently, in some restricted sense, into future happenings. And they were iu ambush and would stay in ambush as long as they were able. Was it possible, I wondered, that mankind could go crashing to its death without ever knowing what had caused its death?
And I, myself, I wondered—what was I to do? It would have been no more than human to have thrown the money in their faces, to have hurled defiance at them. It would, perhaps, have been an easy thing to do. Although, I remembered, at the time I had been so numb with fear that I’d been able to do nothing of the sort.
And, I realized with a start, I thought of them as them, not as him or her, not as Atwood, not as the girl who had no name because she’d never needed one. And did that mean, I wondered, that their human guise was thinner than it seemed? I folded the paper and laid it on the seat beside me and slid beneath the wheel.
This was not the time for grand heroics. It was a time a man did what he could, no matter how it seemed. If, by pretending to go along with them, I could gain some fact, some insight, some hint that would help the humans, then, perhaps, that was the thing to do. And if it ever came to a point where I had to write the alien propaganda, might it not escape them if I wrote into it something that they had not intended and might not recognize but that would be crystal-clear to the human readers?
I started the engine and put the car in gear and the car slid out into the stream of traffic. It was a good car. It was the finest thing I had ever driven. In spite of where it came from, in spite of everything, I felt proud of driving it.
Back at the motel, Quinn’s car still was parked in front of his unit, and now there were two other cars parked in front of other units. Soon, I knew, the motel would be full. People would drive in and say to other people there how do you go about getting lodging here. And the people there would say you use a crowbar or sledgehammer and they might even, then, produce a bar or hammer and help them to break in. For the moment, at least, people would stick together. In adversity, they’d help one another. It only would be later that they would fall apart, each one on his own. And later, after that perhaps, come back together, knowing once again that human strength lay in unity.
When I got out of the car, Quinn came out of his unit and walked over to.meet me.
“That’s quite a car you have,” he said.
“Belongs to a friend of mine,” I told him. “Get a good night’s sleep?”
He grinned. “Best in weeks. And the wife is happy. It isn’t very much, of course, but it’s the best we’ve had in a good long time.”
“See we have some neighbors.”
He nodded. “They came in and asked. I told them. I went out and got a gun, the way you told me. Felt a little foolish, but it won’t hurt to have it. Wanted a rifle, but all I could get was a shotgun. Just as well, I imagine. I’m no dead eye with a rifle.”
“All you could get?” I asked.
“Went to three hardware stores. All of them were out. Went to a fourth and they had this shotgun. So I bought it.”
So the guns, I thought, were being bought. Soon, perhaps, there’d not be any to be had. Other frightened people who felt a little safer if they could reach out their hand and pick up a weapon.
He looked down at the ground and scrubbed a pattern with the toe. of his shoe.
“Funny thing happened,” he said. “I haven’t told the wife about it because it might upset her. Drove out to get some groceries and went out of my way to go past our house—the one we sold, I mean. First time I had driven past it since we left it. Neither had my wife. She told me several times she wanted to but didn’t, because it would make her feel too bad. But, anyhow, I drove past it today. And there it was—empty, like we moved out of it. Even in this short a time beginning to look shabby. They made us get out of it a month ago and they haven’t moved in yet. They said they needed it. They said they had to have it. But they didn’t need it. What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I could have told him. Maybe I should have told him. I know I wanted to. For he might have believed what I had to .. tell him. He had taken weeks of punishment, he was softened up, he was ready to believe. And, God knows, I needed someone to believe me—someone who could huddle with me in a little pit of fear and misery.
But I didn’t tell him, for it would have served no purpose. At the moment, at least, he was far happier not knowing. Now he still had hope, for he could ascribe all that had happened to an economic malady. A malady that he could not understand of course, but a misadjustment that lay within a familiar framework and one that Man could cope with.
/> But this other—the true—explanation of it would have left him without hope and facing the unknowable. And that would spell pure panic.
If I could have made a million people understand, then it would have been all right, for out of that million there would have been a few who would have viewed it calmly and objectively and given leadership. But to tell it to a little puddle of people in a single city had no point at all.
“It makes no sense,” said Quinn. “The whole thing makes no sense. I’ve laid awake at night to get it figured out and there’s no way to figure it. But that’s not the reason I came out. We would like to have you and the wife eat dinner with us. It won’t be too much, but we have a roast and I could fix a drink or two. We could sit and talk.”
“Mr. Quinn,” I said, “Joy is not my wife. We are just two people who got sort of thrown together.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m sorry. I had just presumed she was. It really makes no difference. I hope you’re not embarrassed.” “Not at all,” I said. “And you will eat with us?” “Some other time,” I said. “But thank you very much. I may have a lot to do.”
He stood there and looked at me. “Graves,” he said, “there’s something that you haven’t told me. Something about this business you said the other night. You said it was the same all over, that there was no place to run. How did you know that?”
“I’m a newspaperman,” I told him. “I’m working on a story.”
“And you do know something.”
“Not very much,” I said.
He waited and I didn’t tell him. He flushed and turned around. “Be seeing you,” he said, and went back to his unit.
I didn’t blame him any. I felt like a heel myself.
I went into the unit and there was no one there. Joy was still at the office. Gavin, more than likely, had found things for her to do.