I shrugged. “Well, let them go overseas. I don’t think anyone else will be more successful extracting information from them than we were.”
Professor Trowson wriggled his short body up on a corner of his desk. He lifted a folder full of typewritten notes and grimaced as if his tongue were wrapped in wool.
“Four months of careful questioning,” he grumbled. “Four months of painstaking interrogation by trained sociologists using every free moment the aliens had, which admittedly wasn’t much. Four months of organized investigation, of careful data sifting.” He dropped the folder disgustedly to the desk and some of the pages splashed out. “And we know more about the social structure of Atlantis than Betelgeuse IX.”
We were in the wing of the Pentagon assigned to what the brass hats, in their own cute way, had christened Project Encyclopedia. I strolled across the large, sunny office and glanced at the very latest organizational wall chart. I pointed to a small rectangle labeled “Power Source Sub-Section” depending via a straight line from a larger rectangle marked “Alien Physical Science Inquiry Section.” In the small rectangle, very finely printed, were the names of an army major, a WAC corporal, and Drs. Lopez, Vinthe, and Mainzer.
“How’re they doing?” I asked.
“Not much better, I’m afraid.” Trowson turned away with a sigh from peering over my shoulder. “At least I deduce that from the unhappy way Mainzer bubbles into his soup spoon at lunch. Conversation between sub-sections originating in different offices on the departmental level is officially discouraged, you know. But I remember Mainzer from the university cafeteria. He bubbled into his soup the very same way when he was stuck on his solar refraction engine.”
“Think Andy and Dandy are afraid we’re too young to play with matches? Or maybe apelike creatures are too unpleasant-looking to be allowed to circulate in their refined and esthetic civilization?”
“I don’t know, Dick.” The prof ambled back to his desk and leafed irritably through his sociological notes. “If anything like that is true, why would they give us free run of their ship? Why would they reply so gravely and courteously to every question? If only their answers weren’t so vague in our terms! But they are such complex and artistically minded creatures, so chockful of poetic sentiment and good manners that it’s impossible to make mathematical or even verbal sense out of their vast and circumlocutory explanations. Sometimes, when I think of their highly polished manners and their seeming lack of interest in the structure of their society, when I put that together with their spaceship, which looks like one of those tiny jade carvings that took a lifetime to accomplish—”
He trailed off and began riffling the pages like a Mississippi steamboat gambler going over somebody else’s deck of cards.
“Isn’t it possible we just don’t have enough stuff as yet to understand them?”
“Yes. In fact, that’s what we always come back to. Warbury points to the tremendous development in our language since the advent of technical vocabularies. He says that this process, just beginning with us, already affects our conceptual approach as well as our words. And, naturally, in a race so much further along—But if we could only find a science of theirs which bears a faint resemblance to one of ours!”
I felt sorry for him, standing there blinking futilely out of gentle, academic eyes.
“Cheer up, Prof. Maybe by the time old Suckfoot and his pal come back from the Grand Tour, you’ll have unsnarled a sophistry and we’ll be off this ‘Me, friend; you come from across sea in great bird with many wings’ basis that we seem to have wandered into.’ ”
And there you are, Alvarez: a cheap advertising small-brain like me, and I was that close. I should have said something then. Bet you wouldn’t have nodded at me heavily and said, “I hope so, Dick. I desperately hope so.” But, come to think of it, not only Trowson was trotting up that path. So was Warbury. So were Lopez, Vinthe, and Mainzer. So was I, among others.
I had a chance to relax when Andy and Dandy went abroad. My job wasn’t exactly over, but the public relations end was meshing right along, with me needed only once in a while to give a supervisory spin. Chiefly, I maintained close contact with my opposite number in various other sovereign states, giving out with experienced advice on how to sell the Boys from Betelgeuse. They had to adjust it to their own mass phobias and popular myths; but they were a little happier about it than I had been without any clear idea of what public behavior to expect of our visitors.
Remember, when I’d started, I hadn’t even been sure those snails were housebroken.
I followed them in the newspapers. I pasted the pictures of the Mikado receiving them next to their nice comments on the Taj Mahal. They weren’t nearly so nice to the Akhund of Swat, but then when you think of what the Akhund said about them …
They tended to do that everywhere, giving just a little better than they got. For example, when they were presented with those newly created decorations in Red Square (Dandy got the Order of Extraterrestrial Friends of Soviet Labor, while, for some abstruse reason, the Order of Heroic Interstellar Champion of the Soviet People was conferred upon Andy), they came out with a long, ringing speech about the scientific validity of communist government. It made for cheering, flower-tossing crowds in the Ukraine and Poland but a certain amount of restiveness in these United States.
But before I had to run my staff into overtime hours, whipping up press releases which recapitulated the aliens’ statement before the joint houses of Congress and their lovely, sentimental comments at Valley Forge, the aliens were in Berne, telling the Swiss that only free enterprise could have produced the yodel, the Incabloc escapement in watches, and such a superb example of liberty; hadn’t they had democracy long enough to have had it first, and wasn’t it wonderful?
By the time they reached Paris I had the national affection pretty much under control again, although here and there a tabloid still muttered peevishly in its late city final. But, as always, Andy and Dandy put the clincher on. Even then I wondered whether they really liked DeRoges’s latest abstraction for itself alone.
But they bought the twisted sculpture, paying for it, since they had no cash of their own, with a thumb-sized gadget which actually melted marble to any degree of pattern delicacy the artist desired, merely by being touched to the appropriate surface. DeRoges threw away his chisels blissfully, but six of the finest minds in France retired to intensive nervous breakdowns after a week of trying to solve the tool’s working principles.
It went over big here:
ANDY AND DANDY PASS AS THEY GO
Betelgeuse Businessmen Show Appreciation for Value Received.
This newspaper notes with pleasure the sound shopper’s ethics behind the latest transaction of our distinguished guests from the elemental void. Understanding the inexorable law of supply and demand, these representatives of an advanced economic system refuse to succumb to the “gimmies.” If certain other members of the human race were to examine carefully the true implications of …
So when they returned to the United States after being presented at the British court, they got juicy spreads in all the newspapers, a tug-whistle reception in New York harbor and the mayor’s very chiefest deputy there on City Hall steps to receive them.
And even though people were more or less accustomed to them now, they were somehow never shoved off page one. There was the time a certain furniture polish got a testimonial out of them in which the aliens announced that they’d had particularly happy and glossy results on their tiny shell toppers with the goo; and they used the large financial rewards of the testimonial to buy ten extremely rare orchids and have them sunk in plastic. And there was the time …