Betelgeuse Bridge
by William Tenn
You tell them, Alvarez, old boy; you know how to talk to them. This isn’t my kind of public relations. All I care about is that they get the pitch exactly right, with all the implications and complications and everything just the way they really were.
If it hurts, well, let them yell. Just use your words and get it right. Get it all.
You can start with the day the alien spaceship landed outside Baltimore. Makes you sick to think how we never tumbled, doesn’t it, Alvarez? No more than a hop, skip, and a jet from the Capitol dome, and we thought it was just a lucky accident.
Explain why we thought it was so lucky. Explain about the secrecy it made possible, the farmer who telephoned the news was placed in special and luxurious custody, how a hand-picked cordon of M.P.s paced five square miles off into an emergency military reservation a few hours later, how Congress was called into secret session and the way it was all kept out of the newspapers.
How and why Trowson, my old sociology prof, was consulted once the problem became clear. How he blinked at the brass hats and striped pants and came up with the answer.
Me. I was the answer.
How my entire staff and I were plucked out of our New York offices, where we were quietly earning a million bucks, by a flying squad of the F.B.I. and air-mailed to Baltimore, Honestly, Alvarez, even after Trowson explained the situation to me, I was still irritated. Government hush-hush always makes me uncomfortable. Though I don’t have to tell you how grateful I was for it later.
The spaceship itself was such a big surprise that I didn’t even wet my lips when the first of the aliens slooshed out. After all those years of streamlined cigar shapes the Sunday supplement artists had dreamed up, that colorful and rococo spheroid rearing out of a barley field in Maryland looked less like an interplanetary vessel than an oversized ornament for a what-not table. Nothing that seemed like a rocket jet anywhere.
“And there’s your job.” The prof pointed. “Those two visitors.”
They were standing on a flat metal plate surrounded by the highest the republic had elected or appointed. Nine feet of slimy green trunk tapering up from a rather wide base to a pointed top, and dressed in a tiny pink-and-white shell. Two stalks with eyes on them that swung this way and that, and seemed muscular enough to throttle a man. And a huge wet slash of a mouth that showed whenever an edge of the squirming base lifted from the metal plate.
“Snails,” I said. “Snails!”
“Or slugs,” Trowson amended. “Gastropodal mollusks in any case.” He gestured at the roiling white bush of hair that sprouted from his head. “But, Dick, that vestigial bit of coiled shell is even less an evolutionary memento than this. They’re an older—and smarter—race.”
“Smarter?”
He nodded. “When our engineers got curious, they were very courteously invited inside to inspect the ship. They came out with their mouths hanging.”
I began to get uncomfortable. I ripped a small piece off my manicure. “Well, naturally, prof; if they’re so alien, so different—”
“Not only that. Superior. Get that, Dick, because it’ll be very important in what you have to do. The best engineering minds that this country can assemble in a hurry are like a crowd of South Sea Islanders trying to analyze the rifle and compass from what they know of spears and wind storms. These creatures belong to a galaxy-wide civilization composed of races at least as advanced as they; we’re a bunch of backward hicks in an unfrequented hinterland of space that’s about to be opened to exploration. Exploitation, perhaps, if we can’t measure up. We have to give a very good impression and we have to learn fast.”
A dignified official with a brief case detached himself from the nodding, smiling group around the aliens and started for us.
“Whew!” I commented brilliantly. “Fourteen ninety-two, repeat performance.” I thought for a moment, not too clearly. “But why send the Army and Navy after me? I’m not going to be able to read blueprints from—from—”
“Betelgeuse. Ninth planet of the star Betelgeuse. No, Dick, we’ve already had Dr. Warbury out here. They learned English from him in two hours, although he hasn’t identified a word of theirs in three days! And people like Lopez, like Mainzer, are going quietly psychotic trying to locate their power source. We have the best minds we can get to do the learning. Your job is different. We want you as a top-notch advertising man, a public-relations executive. You’re the good impression part of the program.”
The official plucked at my sleeve and I shrugged him away. “Isn’t that the function of government glad-handers?” I asked Trowson.
“No. Don’t you remember what you said when you first saw them? Snails! How do you think this country is going to take to the idea of snails—giant snails—who sneer condescendingly at our skyscraper cities, our atomic bombs, our most advanced mathematics? We’re a conceited kind of monkey. Also, we’re afraid of the dark.”
There was a gentle official tap on my shoulder. I said “Please!” impatiently. I watched the warm little breeze ruffle Professor Trowson’s slept-in clothes and noticed the tiny red streaks in his weary eyes.
“ ‘Mighty Monsters from Outer Space.’ Headlines like that, Prof?”
“Slugs with superiority complexes. Dirty slugs, more likely. We’re lucky they landed in this country, and so close to the Capitol too. In a few days we’ll have to call in the heads of other nations. Then, sometime soon after, the news will be out. We don’t want our visitors attacked by mobs drunk on superstition, planetary isolation, or any other form of tabloid hysteria. We don’t want them carrying stories back to their civilization of being shot at by a suspendered fanatic who screamed, ‘Go back where you come from, you furrin’ seafood!’ We want to give them the impression that we are a fairly amiable, fairly intelligent race, that we can be dealt with reasonably well.”
I nodded. “Yeah. So they’ll set up trading posts on this planet instead of garrisons. But what do I do in all this?”
He punched my chest gently. “You, Dick—you do a job of public relations. You sell these aliens to the American people!”
The official had maneuvered around in front of me. I recognized him. He was the Undersecretary of State.
“Would you step this way, please?” he said. “I’d like to introduce you to our distinguished guests.”
So he stepped, and I stepped, and we scrunched across the field and clanked across the steel plate and stood next to our gastropodic guests.
“Ahem,” said the Undersecretary politely.
The nearer snail bent an eye toward us. The other eye drew a bead on the companion snail, and then the great slimy head arched and came down to our level. The creature raised, as it were, one cheek of its foot and said, with all the mellowness of air being pumped through a torn inner tube, “Can it be that you wish to communicate with my unworthy self, respected sir?”
I was introduced. The thing brought two eyes to bear on me. The place where its chin should have been dropped to my feet and snaked around there for a second. Then it said, “You, honored sir, are our touchstone, the link with all that is great in your noble race. Your condescension is truly a tribute.”
All this tumbled out while I was muttering “How,” and extending a diffident hand. The snail put one eyeball in my palm and the other on the back of my wrist. It didn’t shake; it just put the things there and took them away again. I had the wit not to wipe my hands on my pants, which was my immediate impulse. The eyeball wasn’t exactly dry, either.