When They Come from Space (16 page)

I watched, hardly breathing.

A curved gangway materialized out of the side of the ship and dropped into position—gracefully, noiselessly.

The crowd, too, seemed to hold its breath. A long stillness of frozen motion. Only the cameramen seemed to make small movements as they huddled, crouched, aimed their lenses, and waited.

The exit hatch rolled back, and now we could see a blue light glowing softly from the interior of the spaceship.

A soft rustle as the crowd seemed to lean forward.

Then the first Spaceman appeared.

He was human, tall, almost six-four, and built like a brick—and perfectly proportioned, beautifully muscled in all the right places. He was handsome with rugged masculinity. He was resplendent in platinum white uniform. Four circles of ebony braid decorated his tunic sleeves. On his left breast were row upon row of gleaming decorations. His shoulder insignia sparkled like diamonds in the morning sunlight. His white military cap, deep-visored, was set slightly to one side of his head. On the visor was a radiant star in white gold, set in coruscating fire of a circle of diamonds.

The crowd remained hushed.

Over all the vast assembly there was no sound. Then the faint rustle of stretching brassières as the ladies began to lift their mammary appendages into more prominent view.

Far back, from a vantage point where they could get a preview look at their customers, the call girls grimaced cynically and gave up anticipation. There'd be no customers for them, not when there was such obviously free and palpitating competition getting ready to start operations.

As the first Spaceman stepped down the gangplank, his stride a free and easy thing of strength, his eyes swept the crowd.

Was it imagination that they hesitated a moment on mine?

His eyes swept on around, and then his aquiline, perfectly chiseled features broke into a broad, toothy grin.

Signal for pandemonium. Caught breath, en masse, was let forth in a gusty roar. Voices broke loose in a cackle of relief. Women began to weep, and scream with fandom adulation. Men hammered their hats into shapeless balls of felt. One small boy, obviously coached, threw a grubby handful of sticky, damp confetti; and in wild hysteria the people began to throw everything loose they had toward the landing field; watches, purses, tie clips, hats. Most of it landed on the heads of others, slipped down, and was trampled underfoot—but never mind.

I stood immobile, expressionless. I think I was the only one not shouting and screaming. Even the President was waving his top hat in the air and shouting what he remembered from a college sports yell.

The eyes of the grinning Spaceman came back to me, caught me standing immobile. His expression did not change, but his eyes seemed to question.

"Aren't I doing it right?” he seemed to ask.

But it was too fleeting for me to know. It had all happened during his first two steps down the gangplank.

His two steps ahead, and then, behind him, from the hatch, stepped two more Spacemen, and then two more. They were all dressed the same, except the four had only three ebony circles on their sleeves, some fewer decorations across their breasts, and only the star of white gold, without the circle of diamonds, upon their visors.

All were handsome, strong, virile, proud, beautiful.

There would be no need for feeding in the scullery. No need for Junior League and Junior Chamber to go catching flies.

They came all the way down the gangplank in formation. The first Spaceman paused at the bottom, a little shyly, proudly but a little embarrassed.

But then, instead of stepping forward to the President, he made a sharp left turn, and all five of them marched over and came to a halt directly in front of me!

"Take me to your leader!” he said.

I looked at him. And to this day I don't know whether or not my lip lifted in a sneer. I looked at him, and then I realized that about two billion people were watching this—this charade, this farce. Certainly the eyes of everybody there were staring at us.

I took a deep breath.

"Come with me,” I said, “I will take you to our leader."

I stepped up beside him. The four Star-ship crewmen fell in behind us. As one man, the General Staff from the Pentagon fell in behind them. We marched, with nobody out of step, to where the President was still standing. I halted in front of the President.

"This is our leader,” I said to the Starman. “Mr. President,” I said, “may I present the men who have come from the stars."

At a prod from the House and Senate leaders, the President took a step forward, doffed his top hat, and smiled his fatuous vote-getting smile.

"Men from the Stars,” he rolled sonorously, “Earth welcomes you. Earth thanks you for defeating our enemy."

It wasn't too bad. Some White House speech writer had had enough sense to keep it simple.

The Spacemen listened, their heads bowed modestly, their shoulders square and erect. The first Spaceman took one pace forward, cleared his throat—and blushed!

The crowd was completely silent again.

"Shucks, Mr. President,” he said in a West Texas drawl, “it wasn't nothin', really. Wasn't nothin’ any red-blooded boy in the Right Thinkin’ Universe wouldn't have done for his friends!"

He broke into his exuberant grin again; that charming, careless, boyish, handsome, irrepressible, spontaneous grin which can be achieved only after hours upon hours of practice before a mirror. “We was just lucky, I guess!"

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There was something wrong with my consistency.

As soon as I grew certain, openly and honestly to myself, that it was all a gigantic hoax, I grew equally certain that it wasn't. Admittedly there was no Earth power, no mentality, no equipment, no facilities, and no foolhardiness so great as to produce this hoax. That they had come from the stars I could not doubt. That they had deliberately hoaxed us I could not doubt. That they must have some alien motive for doing this I could not doubt.

And the more normal these slap-happy fly-boys appeared to be, the wilder the acclaim and adulation of Official and Social Washington, and the world, the more I doubted them.

They were not, surely they could not be what they seemed. Then what were they? Why and how had they so completely adopted Hollywood's entirely spurious idea of what a hero should be? To conceal what?

To look through the eyes of what might logically be assumed the surveillance of an alien life intelligence, I might not be proud of Man (he gave me little cause), but Man was, nonetheless, my own. For better or for worse, I was on his side.

I longed to talk to someone about it, but as the day progressed I found no kinship doubt in any other eyes. I was one attending an executive-suburban social who must tailor his tastes and opinions to public relations lest he give offense by seeming a minority.

Not even Sara was with me, not this time. There had been no doubt in her eyes, the last time I'd seen her before the crowd separated us at the Mall. Her eyes had also been star sapphires.

Unpracticed as I was in Washington's diplomatic courtesies, I found myself quickly shuffled, shouldered, and edged away from the favored position the Starmen had given me at the Mall. Yet, to my astonishment, I found myself in the third car behind them in the parade on its way to Blair House across from the White House. I learned only later that it was Shirley, who did know Washington, working behind the scenes, who not only saw to it that I got a seat in that car but who laid down the law to every host and hostess in Washington that one Dr. Ralph Kennedy must be hurriedly added to their exclusive lists. Only later did I learn that the servants and office staff members are the real social and political arbiters of Washington—everybody else is too green and inexperienced to know.

Both Official and Social Washington, after some cautious inquiry of their own servants, accepted Shirley's judgment. Word was passed around (and my status grew in the telling) that I was the world's foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology (if I had been a mere second-foremost authority I couldn't have got into the service entrance) ... Adviser to the Pentagon, they say the top generals and admirals don't make a move, a single move, without consulting him first ... an admiral, himself, and therefore socially acceptable ... you noticed, didn't you, that the Spacemen picked him out to introduce them to the President, and they're certainly All Right ... therefore he must be too....

It seemed not to occur to anyone (else) to wonder how the Spacemen had known all this about me immediately upon landing—me standing there among all that resplendent brass and braid without so much as a good-conduct medal.

It was while driving from one welcoming function to another in the late afternoon of the first day that I made first mental contact with them. Unhappily, it was my last for quite some time. This time, through Shirley's influence, I had been given the seat beside the secret-service man who was driving their open car through the crowded streets. We were driving through a wild demonstration of celebrity worship. Bex, Dex, Jex, Kex, and Lex, seated in the rear of the car, were busy grinning handsomely, smirking, and occasionally saluting the crowd.

"You're setting us back a hundred years,” I grumbled sourly, while I tried to look both brilliant and happy for the cameras myself. “Here we've been telling our young people that the real hero of tomorrow is a Thinking Man; that to meet the challenge of the future they've got to develop their Intellect beyond studying out how to heat before they eat, how to obey road signs, how to distinguish between rest rooms. How far do you think we're going to get now, after the example you've set?” It was subvocal grumbling; no point in revealing myself to the secret service as a subversive.

We were still bowing and smiling to the crowds lining the street, but I forgot myself long enough to swallow hard on a double take at their answer. They did not speak it, but it was clear and sharp.

"The prevailing art forms of a culture invariably give the common denominator of its direction. In yours we find no such cultural ideal as you express."

It was the first thought they'd uttered which couldn't have been lifted bodily from the script of Git Along Doggie, or Biff Swift, Space Detective.

And it was impersonal, emotionless—as remote from approval or rebuke as a spiral galaxy.

There went my consistency again. Oddly, somehow, it made me feel better. At least they weren't really what they seemed—cowboys taken from some distant world's Western Plains, dressed up in fancy uniforms and taught to press some buttons. There was intellect behind those false fronts.

I felt a twinge of fear. So far they had taken utmost care not to harm any human life—but only so far.

They gave me no more contact. They were much too busy playing up to the crowds lining the streets. And why? Why were they working so hard to be popular? Why were they giving us such a liberal helping of what we obviously had hoped to find in them? Or were they sampling each mind as we passed? With the same ease in sampling mine? And finding? For what were they searching?

Too bad our scientists would all be back at the Mall, attempting to measure, guess the weight and composition of an entranceless, seamless globe. And I still wonder if their instruments told them there wasn't anything there—or if the instruments, too, were subject to illusion.

And I wonder, too, if the police department wasn't secretly relieved when the ship, in midafternoon, suddenly disappeared; releasing the cordons of police so they could go back to their normal occupation of attempting to entice ordinary people into committing crimes so they could entrap them more conveniently.

Now it was three o'clock in the morning. At the dinners and receptions the human males had worn their symbolic tails, the females had shown off the old dead scraps skinned from slaughtered rodents to display the hunting prowess of their males in the widows-and-orphans fleecing marts or under the graft table. The social events symbolizing the progress of a flowering civilization were over for the night. Even the stench of perfumes, so fragrant in the bottle and jar, so fetid as they oxidize and mix with sweat and decaying scales of skin, was being carried away on the cool night breeze.

The Star Heroes lounged around in one of the more intimate reception rooms of Blair House, theirs for their stay, while they relaxed before going to bed—single beds, of course, installed under the strict supervision of F.B.I. who were doing their best to make sure these handsome, single men from the stars indulged in no nonconformist sex behavior while guests of this Earth and subject to association with government officials.

The long legs of the heroes were thrown up over the arms of chairs, their cigarette ashes dropped carelessly upon priceless rugs, their corrosive nightcaps etched rings upon rare table tops.

They seemed not to know about spyray units, microphones, and cameras concealed behind moldings, under chairs, in electrical outlets, through minute openings punched through eye pupils of masterpiece paintings on the wall, through false mirrors placed strategically to cover every square foot of Blair House.

They seemed unaware that a couple billion people would be treated to their every private move and word—well, nearly every move and word. Certain scratching, certain tugging at cloth cutting into certain body areas, certain remarks; these would have to be expurgated, of course. All right for the censors to observe them, for the censors could be confident that their minds were pure, but no such trust could be placed in those with inferior morals.

They seemed unaware of the vast satisfaction their behavior would bring to a hundred million moms who would watch them mash down the upholstered arms of chairs, mess up the rugs, ruin the furniture, make grunts and belches just like their own fine sons. Which proved, again, that they were All Right, for here was behavior that even moms could understand. Oh, they would cluck with shocked disapproval at the terrible, terrible upbringing these boys must have had; but they would sigh happily that these heroes didn't have a thing, not a single thing, which their own fine sons didn't also have. Anybody could be a hero, it didn't take anything special. Just luck. The moms could draw vast comfort from seeing that with their own eyes, and compliment themselves that they had done just as good a job as those mothers on—well, wherever these heroes came from.