Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (10 page)

"Murderers," one of the women in front of me quavered. "That's all you are—murderers trying to kill inoffensive people who've never done you any harm. Killing would be just too good for you."

The colonel was standing on his toes and oscillating a portentous forefinger at the roof. "We were doing all right," he began apoplectically, then stopped to allow himself to unpurple. "We were doing
well
enough, I can tell you, without—without—"

Forkbeard waited until we began to run down.

"Look at it this way," he urged in a wheedling voice, "you're going to wipe yourselves out—you know it, we know it and so does everybody else in the galaxy. What difference can it possibly make to you whether you do it one way or another? At least by our method you confine the injury to yourselves. You don't damage the highly valuable real estate—to wit, Earth—which will be ours after you've ceased to use it. And you go out with a weapon which is much more worthy of your destructive propensities than any you have used hitherto, including atomic bombs."

He paused and spread knobbed hands down at our impotent hatred. "Think of it—
just think of it:
a million deaths at one plunge of a lever! What other weapon can make that claim?"

—|—

Skimming back northwards with Redbeard and Irngl, I pointed to the flying saucers radiating away from us through the delicate summer sky. "These people are all fairly responsible citizens. Isn't it silly to expect them to advertise a more effective way of having their throats cut?"

There was a shrug of the green-wrapped shoulders. "With any other species, yes. But not you. The Galactic Federation insists that the actual revelation of the weapon, either to your public or your government, must be made by a fairly intelligent representative of your own species, in full possession of the facts, and after he or she has had an adequate period to reflect on the consequences of disclosure."

"And you think we will? In spite of everything?"

"Oh, yes," the little man told me with tranquil assurance. "
Because
of everything. For example, you have each been selected with a view to the personal advantage you would derive from the revelation. Sooner or later, one of you will find the advantage so necessary and tempting that the inhibiting scruple will disappear; eventually, all of you would come to it. As Shulmr pointed out, each member of a suicidal race contributes to the destruction of the whole even while attentively safeguarding his own existence. Disagreeable creatures, but fortunately short-lived!"

"One million," I mused. "So arbitrary. I bet we make—"

"Quite correct. You are an ingenious race. Now if you wouldn't mind stepping back onto your roof? We're in a bit of a hurry, Irngl and I, and we have to disinfect after—Thank you."

I watched them disappear upwards into a cloud bank. Then, noticing a television dipole tied in a hangman's noose which Irngl's father had overlooked, I trudged downstairs.

For a while, I was very angry. Then I was glum. Then I was angry again. I've thought about it a lot since August.

I've read some recent stuff on flying saucers, but not a word about the super-weapon we'll get if we dismantle our hydrogen bombs. But, if someone had blabbed, how would I know about it?

That's just the point. Here I am a writer, a science-fiction writer no less, with a highly salable story that I'm not supposed to use. Well, it happens that I need money badly right now; and it further happens that I am plumb out of plots. How long am I supposed to go on being a sucker?

Somebody's probably told by now. If not in this country, in one of the others. And I am a writer, and I have a living to make. And this is fiction, and who asked you to believe it anyhow?

Only—Only I did intend to leave out the signal. The signal, that is, by which a government can get in touch with the kobolds, can let them know it's interested in making the trade, in getting that weapon. I did intend to leave out the signal.

But I don't have a satisfactory ending to this story. It needs some sort of tag-line. And the signal makes a perfect one. Well—it seems to me that if I've told
this
much—and probably anyhow—

The signal's the immemorial one between man and kobold: Leave a bowl of milk outside the White House door.

I was living next door to Lester del Rey, when I wrote this, in a fifteen-dollar-a-month unheated apartment on West End Avenue in New York City. It had a bathtub in the kitchen and the absolutely boozingest lady superintendent this side of Alcoholics Anonymous. The building was later torn down to become part of the site of today's Lincoln Center. And the apartment was a tiny three-room affair at the end of one of the very longest entrance halls I have ever seen. There was perhaps twice or three times as much square footage in the entrance hall as in the apartment proper.

I used both the apartment and the entrance hallway as the opening scene of "Will You Walk a Little Faster." The title, of course, comes from Lewis Carroll, per the whiting's impatient question to the snail. And the theme...

The theme was
the
theme of science fiction, five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a time when every newly built house in the suburbs proudly featured a concrete-lined bomb cellar:

Atomic doom.

I had just come back to my apartment after a visit to Lester next door. We had begun a discussion of atomic doom as a mild, rather urbane disagreement and had ended in a screaming, yelling, almost-throwing-things argument.

Lester was a maddening person to argue with. If driven into a corner he would start to Jurgenize; that is, he would start quoting authorities, most of whom he had made up on the spot (I created this verb in honor of Lester, naming it after the most colorful character of the late James Branch Cabell). Randy Garrett, during a similar battle with Lester, made a point of writing down the title of the book Lester was quoting, the name of the author and the publishing house, and even the year, goddammit, of publication—all of which Lester supplied with a
noblesse oblige
wave of his hand. These Randy then checked, not only with the New York Public Library, but also eventually with the Library of Congress itself.

He confronted Lester with the result in the presence of four other science-fiction writers. "No such book," he said triumphantly. "No record of its ever being published. No record at all, at all, at all."

Lester looked amused. He shrugged. "It's a shame about the Library of Congress," he said. "Such a shabby excuse for what it's supposed to be. So ridiculously incomplete in every important way. No, you really have to learn to use the Bodleian in Oxford for any important research. The last time I checked, they had two copies, one of them in pretty good condition."

Randy positively danced with fury and frustration. He put his left fist in his mouth and bit hard on it.

He swore he would make it a goal of his life to go to Oxford before he died, and to visit the Bodleian. Unfortunately, he later had a stroke and never did.

My argument with Lester on the subject of atomic doom had begun with Lester asking me if I was one of those people who ran around shivering and shaking about the mere existence of nuclear weapons. When I told him I was—that I
both
shivered
and
shook—he smiled and, in his best Campbellian manner, pointed out to me how unlikely it would be for anyone with the merest
soupcon
of a sense of self-preservation to use such a weapon no matter what the provocation. Who would take the chance of doing something that might well end up destroying the planet? After all, people who governed countries had gotten to where they were because of outstanding intelligence.

"Really?" I said. "Then how about Hitler in that last bunker in Berlin, with the Russians smashing their way to where he lay hidden? If a subordinate had come to him and told him of the development of a weapon that could vaporize the oncoming Russian armies but might also just possibly destroy the entire world, what do you think he would have said?"

Lester rebutted immediately with a previously unheard-of biography of Hitler that practically said in so many words
Der Führer
would have done no such thing. He added concurring opinions by two French lieutenant generals my extensive reading had failed to mention, and wound up by quoting a former associate head of the atomic energy program whose name and title I knew he had just made up out of the thinnest of air.

At this point I'm afraid I began yelling. Lester yelled back. We continued at a very high pitch until the frequently drunken woman who was the building's resident landlady was attracted by the uproar and walked in through the open doorway to ask us if we possibly had any part of a quart of Scotch that she could borrow.

I left, still yelling over my shoulder. And the moment I opened the door of my apartment and began walking up that long entrance hall, what the French call
l'esprit d'escalier
(
l'esprit du vestibule?
) came upon me and I thought of what I might have said. And, as I did, I looked about me and realized just how I might dramatize all that I could have and should have said.

Then I went into the apartment proper and sat down at my Remington typewriter and wrote out the dramatization. Because after all, an argument is an argument, but I needed the money to pay the landlady my overdue rent.

Written 1950——Published 1951

To—to be... an unformable, lonely thought groped blindly for a potential fact... need, a need... it was—something... it was—needed... it was needed? Consciousness!

A living creature came with the pride of ownership, the triggering wistfulness for it. Unlike its first darling, this creature had notions that were bizarre and primitive, conceptually agonizing. Painful, painful, painful they were to organize into. But it had purpose again—and, more, it had desire—

Thoughtlessly, lovingly, the immense thing began to flow to the fixed-upon place, twitching awkward experimental shapes upward as it went.

—|—

The back-country Canadian road was obscure even for the biting concentration of the deluxe Caterpillar runabout. Metal treads apologized shrilly as they hit a rock that was too large and too snugly embedded in the mud. The bright yellow car canted steeply to the right and came down level again with a murky splash.

"And I was so
happy
in the dairy," Esther Sakarian moaned in histrionic recollection as she dug her unpainted, thoroughly trimmed fingernails into the lavender upholstery of the front seat. "I had my own quiet little lab, my neatly labeled samples of milk and cheese from the day's production; at night I could walk home on cement sidewalks or drop into a dry, air-conditioned restaurant or movie. But Philadelphia wasn't good enough for me! No, I had to—"

"Bad storms last night, smooth riding, usually," Paul Marquis muttered on her left. He grimaced his glasses back into correct nose position and concentrated on the difficult visual task of separating possible road from possible marsh.

"I had to come up to the Great Bear Lake where every prospector sneezes and all the men are vile. Adventure I wanted—hah! Well, here I am, using up the last of my girlhood. I spend my days purifying water for a bunch of whisky-soaked nuclear physicists. Every night I ask God: Is this by you adventure?"

Marquis sloughed the runabout around a dwarfed red spruce that grew belligerently in the middle of the damp highway. "Should be there in a minute or two, Es. Forty of the sweetest acres that anybody ever talked the Canadian government into selling. And a little bumpy hill just off the road that's a natural foundation for the Cape Cod cottage Caroline's always talking about."

The bacteriologist prodded his shoulder tenderly. "Talking about it in Boston and building it in northern Canada—a little different, don't you think? You haven't married the gal yet."

"You don't know Caroline," Marquis told her confidently. "Besides, we'll be only forty miles from Little Fermi—and the town will grow. The lode we're working on seems to be about ten times as rich as the Eldorado mine over at Port Radium. If it holds up, we'll build a uranium pile that will be a power plant for the entire western hemisphere. Business will get interested, real estate values will boom—"

"So it's a good investment, too? Sheer mysticism, like your opinion that a lifetime spent behind Beacon Street walls makes the housemaid-and-mistress combo you want in a wife."

"Now you sound like that mad medico Connor Kuntz when I beat his classic Capablancan chess with an inspirational heresy.
There's
a nineteenth-century mechanist you could be happy with; all he wants is a mate of good disposition and fair heredity who will be absorbed in her work and let him do his bone-setting in peace. I don't want a mate—I want a marriage. No servant any employment agency ever—"

"Dr. Kuntz is a mass of greasy rationalization. And I wasn't proposing to you by indirection."

"—ever sent out," he went on doggedly, "could handle the menial essentials of domestic living with the affection and grace of a wife. Machines are no substitute; you don't get omnipresent, understanding love from a machine. Not that I'm marrying Caroline just to get someone who'll kiss me while she's preparing dinners I like—"

"Of course not! It's comfortable, though, to know you'll get it just the same. Which you wouldn't if you married, say... oh, say a female bacteriologist who had work of her own to do and would be as tired as you at the end of the day. Up with the double standard; but keep it intellectual!"

The excessively thin young man slapped the car to a stop and turned with his mouth open for a blast. Esther Sakarian was one of those tidy, docile-appearing women whose remarks generated a surprising amount of factional heat in men.

"Look here, Es," he began loudly, "social development and the relatively new integrity of the individual to one side, people still consist of men and women. Women—with the exception of maladjusted—"

"Hey, there!" Esther was staring over his shoulder with her nostrils flaring respectfully. "You've done quite a job! It doesn't look a bit prefabricated, Paul. But it must have been expensive getting priorities for those sections on the Diesel snow trains. And you banged it together in one week by yourself? Quite a job!"