He said solemnly: “And now the proof. People of Earth, are you with me in both of those pledges? If you are, prove it now, wherever you are, with an affirmative in your loudest voice! But so that the translators may have caught up with me, please wait until I give the signal by saying…
“…Now!”
“YES!
“SI!
“OUI!
“DAH!
“JA!
“SIM!
“JES!
“NAM!
“SHI!
“LAH!”
And thousands of other words that all mean the same thing, simultaneously from the throat and from the heart of every human being who had been listening.
Not a no or a nyet among them.
It was the damnedest sound ever made. Compared to it an H-bomb would have been the dropping of a pin, the eruption of Krakatao would have been the faintest of whispers.
There could be no doubt that every Martian on Earth must have heard it. Had there been an atmosphere between the planets to carry sound, the Martians on Mars would have heard it.
Through ear stopples and inside a closed soundproofed broadcasting studio, Yato Ishurti heard it. And felt the building vibrate with it.
He spoke no further word to anticlimax that magnificent sound. He opened his eyes and nodded to the man in the control room to take him off the air. Sighed deeply after he had seen the switch move and reached up and took the stopples from his ears
Stood, spent emotionally, walled slowly and let himself into the little anteroom between the studio and the hallway, paused there a moment to regain his composure.
Turned by chance and saw himself in a mirror on the wall.
Saw the Martian seated cross-legged atop his head, caught its eye in the mirror, and its grin, heard it tell him, “-- you, Mack.”
Knew that he must do what he had come prepared to do in case of failure.
Took from his pocket the ceremonial knife and removed it from its sheath.
Sat himself upon the floor in the manner required by tradition. Spoke briefly to his ancestors, performed the brief preliminary ritual, and then with the knife—
Resigned as secretary-general of the United Nations.
19.
The stock market had closed at noon the day of Ishurti’s speech.
It closed at noon again on August 6th, the following day, but for a different reason; it closed for an indefinite period as a result of an emergency order issued by the President. Stocks that morning had opened at a fraction of their previous day prices (which were a fraction of their pre-Martian prices), were finding no takers and declining rapidly. The emergency order stopped trading while at least some stocks were still worth the paper they were printed on.
In an even more sweeping emergency measure that afternoon, the government decided upon and announced a ninety per cent reduction in the armed forces. In a press conference, the President admitted the desperation behind this decision; it would greatly swell the ranks of the unemployed, nevertheless the measure was necessary as the government was for all practical purposes bankrupt and it was cheaper to maintain men on relief than in uniform. And all other nations were making similar cuts.
And similarly, despite all cuts, tottering upon the verge of bankruptcy. Almost any of the established orders would have been a pushover for a revolution—except for the fact that not even the most fanatical of revolutionaries wanted to take over under such circumstances.
Harassed, beckled, hounded, helpless, hamstrung, harred and harrowed, the average citizen of the average country looked with heartfelt horror to a hideous future and hankered hungrily for a return of the good old days when his only worries were death, taxes and the hydrogen bomb.
PART THREE
The Going of the Martians
1.
In August of the year 1964 a man with the mildly improbable name of Hiram Pedro Oberdorffer, of Chicago, Illinois, invented a contraption which he called an anti-extraterrestrial subatomic supervibrator.
Mr. Oberdorffer had been educated in Heidelberg, Wisconsin. His formal education had ended at the eighth grade, but in the fifty-odd years that followed he had become an inveterate reader of popular science magazines and of science articles in Sunday supplements and elsewhere. He was an ardent theorist and, in his own words (and who are we to gainsay them), he “knew more science than most of them laboratory guys.”
He was employed, and had been for many years, as janitor of an apartment building on Dearborn Street near Grand Avenue, and lived in a basement apartment of two rooms in the same building. In one of the two rooms he cooked, ate and slept. In the other room he lived the part of his life that mattered; it was his workroom.
Besides a work bench and some power tools the workroom contained several cabinets, and in and on the cabinets and piled on the floor or in boxes were old automobile parts, old radio parts, old sewing machine parts and old vacuum cleaner parts. Not to mention parts from washing machines, typewriters, bicycles, lawn mowers, outboard motors, television sets, clocks, telephones, tinkertoys, electric motors, cameras, phonographs, electric fans, shotguns and Geiger counters. Infinite treasures in a little room.
His janitorial duties, especially in summer, were not too onerous; they left him ample time for inventing and for his only other pleasure which was, in good weather, to sit and relax and think in Bughouse Square, which was only a ten minute walk from where he lived and worked.
Bughouse Square is a city park one block square and it has another name but no one ever uses the other name. It is inhabited largely by bums, winos and crackpots. Let us leave it clearly understood, however, that Mr. Oberdorffer vas none of these. He worked for a living and he drank only beer and that in moderate quantity. Against accusations of being a crackpot, he could have proved that he was sane. He had papers to show it, given him upon his release from a mental institution where once, some years before, he had been briefly incarcerated.
Martians bothered Mr. Oberdorffer much less than they bothered most people; he had the very excellent good fortune to be completely deaf.
Oh, they bothered him some. Although he couldn’t listen, he loved to talk. You might even say that he thought out loud, since he habitually talked to himself all the while he was inventing. In which case, of course, Martian interference was no nuisance; although he couldn’t hear his own voice he knew perfectly well what he was saying to himself whether or not he was being drowned out. But he had one friend besides himself to whom he liked to talk, a man named Pete, and he found that Martians did interfere occasionally in his one-sided conversations with Pete.
Every summer Pete lived in Bughouse Square, whenever possible on the fourth bench to the left along the walk that diagonalled from the inner square toward the southeast corner. In the fall Pete always disappeared; Mr. Oberdorffer assumed, not too incorrectly, that he flew south with the birds. But the following spring Pete would be there again and Mr. Oberdorffer would take up the conversation again.
It was a very one-sided conversation indeed, for Pete was a mute. But he loved to listen to Mr. Oberdorffer, believing him to be a great thinker and a great scientist, a view with which Mr. Oberdorffer himself was in complete accord, and a few simple signals sufficed for his end of the conversation—a nod or shake of the head to indicate yes or no, a raising of the eyebrows to request further explanation or elucidation. But even these signals were rarely necessary; a look of admiration and rapt attention usually sufficed. Even more rarely was recourse to the pencil and pad of paper which Mr. Oberdorffer always carried with him necessary.