The ball of flame on the horizon, however, was not without its importance.
Arnold Novak had released the armlock he had got around the little brown-eyed stewardess's neck and had begun to try to explain to her that his intention to blow up the jet meant nothing personal, but was only a way of inducing his mother to pay as much attention to him as she had, all through their lives, to his brother, Dick. Although he stammered so that he was almost incoherent, the stew understood him at once. She, too, had had both a mother and an older brother. Her pretty brown eyes filled with tears of sympathy and with a rush of love she flung her arms around him. "You poor boy," she cried, covering his stubbly face with kisses. "Here, honey! Let me help you." And she caught the cassette from his hand, careful not to pull the wires loose, and closed the switch that touched off the caps in all the 30 Baggies.
One hundred and thirty-one men, women, and children simultaneously were converted into maltreated chunks of barbecued meat falling through the sky. Their roster included the pilot, the co-pilot, the third pilot, and 8 other members of the flight crew; plus, among the passengers, mothers, infants, honeymooning couples, nonhoneymooning but equally amorous couples who did not happen to be married to each other, a middle-aged grape picker returning home after a 5-days-4-nights all-expense tour of Sin City (which he had found disappointing), a defrocked priest, a disbarred lawyer, and a Congressman from Oregon who would never now achieve his dream of dismantling NASA and preventing the further waste of the taxpayer's funds on space, which he held to be empty and uninteresting.
Whoever they had been when whole, the pieces of barbecue all looked pretty much alike now. It did not matter. Not one of the passengers or crew had died unhappy, since they had all been touched by the comet.
And deep inside the core of the comet Ujifusa-McGinnis, the device which was meant to display the wave forms signifying receipt of the destruction order for Earth remained blank. No signal was received. No one would have observed it if it had been, certainly not the watchers, but it was unprecedented that a response should not be received.
The reason was quite simple. It was that that particular superdreadnaught of the Arrogating Ones, like most of the others in their galactic fleet, had long since been hurled against the fortresses of the insectoids of the core. There, like the others, it had been quickly destroyed, so that the message sent by the watchers had never reached its destination.
It was, in a way, too bad, to think of all that strength and sagacity spent with no more tangible visible result than to give pleasure to a few billion advanced primates. Although this was regrettable, it did not much bother the Arrogating Ones. They had plenty of other regrets to work on. What remained of their collective intelligence was fully taken up with the problem of bare survival against the insectoid fleets —plus, to be sure, a good deal of attention given to mutual recrimination.
The watchers did not mind; they had long since perished of acute terminal pleasure.
And, as it turned out, they had not died entirely in vain.
Because the Oregon congressman did not live to complete his plan to dismantle NASA, all his seniority and horse-trading power having perished with him, the projected comet-study mission was not canceled. To be sure, the bird did not fly on schedule. The effects of the joy beams from the comet did not begin to wear off for several days and the NASA technicians simply could not be bothered while their joy was in its manic phase.
But gradually the world returned to—normal? No. It was definitely not normal for everyone to be feeling rather cheerful most of the time. But the world settled down, sweetly and fondly, to something not unlike its previous condition of work and play. So the astronauts found another launch window and made rendezvous with the comet; and what they found there made quite a difference in the history of both the human race and the galaxy. The watchers were gone, but they had left their weaponry behind.
When the astronauts returned with the least and weakest of the weapons, all they could cram into their ship, the President of the United States gave up his shuffleboard game to fly to the deck of the Independence and stare at it. "Oh, boy!" he chortled, awed and thrilled. "If that'd turned up two months ago Brazil would've had a seaport on the Caribbean!" But Venezuela went about its business untouched. The President was tempted. Even cheerful and at peace with himself and the world, he was tempted—old habits die hard. But he had several thoughts and the longest and most persuasive of them was that weaponry like this meant that somewhere there was an enemy who had constructed and deployed it and someday might return to use it. So with some misgivings, but without any real freedom of choice, he flew back to Washington, summoned the ambassadors of Venezuela, Cuba, Canada, the U.S.S.R., the People's Republic of China, and the United Irish Republics of Great Britain and laid everything before them.
Although politicians, too, were residually cheerful still from the effect of the comet, they had not lost their intelligence. They quickly saw that there was an external foe—somewhere —which made each of them look like a very good friend. Nobody was in a mood to fool with little international wars. So treaties were signed, funds were appropriated, construction was begun.
And the human race, newly armed and provided with excellent spaceships, went looking for the Arrogating Ones.
They did not, of course, find them. By the time they were ready to make their move, the last of the Arrogating Ones had gone resentfully to his death. But a good many generations later, humans found the insectoids of the core instead and what then happened to the insectoids would have satisfied even the Arrogating Ones.
The Man Who Ate the World
During the presidential election of 1948 I was spending a lot of time with an enchantingly beautiful girl, all of five years old, named Merril Zissman. She knew what an election was, and she knew that Harry Truman was battling for survival against the favorite contender, Tom Dewey; but she had a little trouble remembering which was which. So she called them both "Trumie." It wasn't until I had actually written "The Man Who Ate the World," and sold it, and seen it in print that I realized where the name of the lead character had come from, tucked away for years in my subconscious and emerging through my fingertips onto the typewriter paper with no intervention at all of the conscious mind.
I
He had a name but at home he was called "Sonny," and he was almost always at home. He hated it. Other boys his age went to school. Sonny would have done anything to go to school, but his family was, to put it mildly, not well off. It was not Sonny's fault that his father was so unsuccessful. But it meant no school for Sonny, no boys of his own age for Sonny to play with. All childhoods are tragic (as all adults forget), but Sonny's was misery all the way through.