The Translation Department alone filled three large office buildings and provided employment for thousands of multilingual people. If nothing else.
Membership in the P.F.A.M. and in the similar organizations in other countries was voluntary and unpaid. But almost everyone qualified belonged and the lack of pay didn’t matter since every psychologist and psychiatrist who could remain sane himself was earning plenty.
There were, of course, no conventions; large groups of psychologists were as impractical as large groups for any other purpose. Large groups of people meant large groups of Martians and the sheer volume of interference made speaking impractical. Most P.F.A.M. members worked alone and reported by correspondence, received reams of reports of others and tried out on their patients a whatever ideas seemed worth trying.
Perhaps there was progress of a sort. Fewer people were going insane, at any rate. This may or may not have been, as some claimed, that most people insufficiently stable to stand up to the Martians had already found escape from reality in insanity.
Others credited the increasingly sensible advice that the psychologists were able to give to these still sane. Incidence of insanity had dropped, they claimed, when it was fully realized that it was safe, mentally, to ignore Martians only up to a point. You had to swear back at them and lose your temper at them once in a while. Otherwise the pressure of irritation built up in you as steam builds up pressure in a boiler without a safety valve, and pretty soon you blew your top.
And the equivalently sensible advice not to try to make ends with them. People did try, at first, and the highest percentage of mental casualties is believed to have been among this group. A great many people, men and women of good will, tried that first night; some of them kept on trying for quite a while. A few—saints they must haw been, and wonderfully stable people to boot—never did quit trying.
The thing that made it impossible was that the Martians moved around so. No single Martian ever stayed long in one place or in contact with one person, one family or one group. It just might have been possible, unlikely as it seems, for an extremely patient human being to have achieved friendly footing with a Martian, to have gained a Martian’s confidence, if that humans being had had the opportunity of protracted contact with a given Martian.
But no Martian was given, in that sense. The next moment, the next hour—at most the next day—the man of good will would find himself starting from scratch with a different Martian. In fact, people who tried to be nice to them found themselves changing Martians oftener than those who swore back at them. Nice people bored them. Conflict was their element; they loved it.
But we digressed from the P.F.A.M.
Other members preferred to work in small groups, cells. Especially those who, as members of the Psychological Front, were studying, or attempting to study, the psychology of the Martians. It is an advantage, up to a point, to have Martians around when one is studying or discussing them.
It was to such a cell, a group of six members, that Dr. Ellicott H. Snyder belonged, and it was due to meet that evening. And now he was pulling paper into the roller of his typewriter; the notes for the paper are finished. He wishes he could simply talk from the notes themselves; he likes to talk and detests writing. But there is always the possibility that Martian interference will make coherent talking impossible at a cell meeting and necessitate papers being passed around to be read. Even more important, if the cell members approve the content of a paper it is passed up to a higher echelon and given wider consideration, possibly publication. And this particular paper should definitely merit publication.
15.
Dr. Snyder’s paper began:
It is my belief, that the Martians’ one psychological weakness, their Achilles’ heel, is the fact that they are congenitally unable to lie.
I am aware that this point has been stated and disputed, and I am aware that many—and particularly our Russian colleagues—firmly believe that the Martians can and do lie, that their reason for telling the truth about our own affairs, for never once having been caught in a provable lie about terrestrial matters, is twofold. First, because it makes their tattling more effective and more harassing, since we cannot doubt what they tell us. Second, because by never being provably untrue in small things, they prepare us to believe without doubt whatever Big Lie about their nature and their purpose here they are telling us. The thought that there must be a Big Lie is one that would seem more natural to our Russian friends than to most people. Having lived for so long with their own Big Lie …
Dr. Snyder stopped typing, reread the start of his last sentence and then went back and x’d it out. Since, he hoped, this particular paper would be distributed internationally, why prejudice some of his readers in advance against what he was going to say.
I believe, however, that it can be clearly proved through a single logical argument that the Martians not only do not lie but cannot.
It is obviously their purpose to harass us as much as possible. Yet they have never made the one claim, the one statement, that would increase our misery completely past bearing; they have never once told us that they intend to stay here permanently. Since Coming Night their only answer, where they deign to answer at all, to the question, however worded, of when they intend to go home or how long they intend to stay is that it is “none of our business” or words to that effect.
For most of us the only thing that makes survival desirable is hope, hope that someday, whether tomorrow or ten years from now, the Martians will leave and we’ll never see them again. The very fact that their coming was so sudden and unexpected makes it seem quite possible that they’ll leave the same way.
If the Martians could lie, it is impossible to believe that they would not tell us that they intend to be permanent residents here. Therefore, they cannot lie.
And a very welcome corollary of this simple step in logic is that it become immediately obvious that they know their stay here is not permanent. If it were, they would not have to lie in order to increase our unhap-
A high-pitched chuckle sounded only an inch or two from Dr. Snyder’s right ear. He jumped a few inches, but very carefully didn’t turn, knowing it would put the Martian’s face unbearably close to his own.
“Ver-y clever, Mack, ver-y clever. And screwy as a bedbug, screwy as a bedbug.”
“It’s perfectly logical,” said Dr. Snyder. “It’s absolutely proved. You can’t lie.”
“But I can,” said the Martian. “Work on the logic of that a while, Mack.”
Dr. Snyder worked on the logic of that, and groaned. If a Martian said he could lie, then either he was telling the truth and he could lie, or else he was lying and—
There was a sudden shrieking laugh in his ear.
And then silence in which Dr. Snyder took the paper from his typewriter, manfully resisted the impulse to fold it so he could tear it into paper dolls, and tore it into small pieces instead. He dropped them into the wastebasket and then dropped his head in his hands.