Betelgeuse Bridge Read online

  Betelgeuse Bridge

  William Tenn

  Betelgeuse Bridge

  by William Tenn

  You tell them, Alvarez, old boy; you know how to talk to them. This isn’t my kind of public relations. All I care about is that they get the pitch exactly right, with all the implications and complications and everything just the way they really were.

  If it hurts, well, let them yell. Just use your words and get it right. Get it all.

  You can start with the day the alien spaceship landed outside Baltimore. Makes you sick to think how we never tumbled, doesn’t it, Alvarez? No more than a hop, skip, and a jet from the Capitol dome, and we thought it was just a lucky accident.

  Explain why we thought it was so lucky. Explain about the secrecy it made possible, the farmer who telephoned the news was placed in special and luxurious custody, how a hand-picked cordon of M.P.s paced five square miles off into an emergency military reservation a few hours later, how Congress was called into secret session and the way it was all kept out of the newspapers.

  How and why Trowson, my old sociology prof, was consulted once the problem became clear. How he blinked at the brass hats and striped pants and came up with the answer.

  Me. I was the answer.

  How my entire staff and I were plucked out of our New York offices, where we were quietly earning a million bucks, by a flying squad of the F.B.I. and air-mailed to Baltimore, Honestly, Alvarez, even after Trowson explained the situation to me, I was still irritated. Government hush-hush always makes me uncomfortable. Though I don’t have to tell you how grateful I was for it later.

  The spaceship itself was such a big surprise that I didn’t even wet my lips when the first of the aliens slooshed out. After all those years of streamlined cigar shapes the Sunday supplement artists had dreamed up, that colorful and rococo spheroid rearing out of a barley field in Maryland looked less like an interplanetary vessel than an oversized ornament for a what-not table. Nothing that seemed like a rocket jet anywhere.

  “And there’s your job.” The prof pointed. “Those two visitors.”

  They were standing on a flat metal plate surrounded by the highest the republic had elected or appointed. Nine feet of slimy green trunk tapering up from a rather wide base to a pointed top, and dressed in a tiny pink-and-white shell. Two stalks with eyes on them that swung this way and that, and seemed muscular enough to throttle a man. And a huge wet slash of a mouth that showed whenever an edge of the squirming base lifted from the metal plate.

  “Snails,” I said. “Snails!”

  “Or slugs,” Trowson amended. “Gastropodal mollusks in any case.” He gestured at the roiling white bush of hair that sprouted from his head. “But, Dick, that vestigial bit of coiled shell is even less an evolutionary memento than this. They’re an older—and smarter—race.”

  “Smarter?”

  He nodded. “When our engineers got curious, they were very courteously invited inside to inspect the ship. They came out with their mouths hanging.”

  I began to get uncomfortable. I ripped a small piece off my manicure. “Well, naturally, prof; if they’re so alien, so different—”

  “Not only that. Superior. Get that, Dick, because it’ll be very important in what you have to do. The best engineering minds that this country can assemble in a hurry are like a crowd of South Sea Islanders trying to analyze the rifle and compass from what they know of spears and wind storms. These creatures belong to a galaxy-wide civilization composed of races at least as advanced as they; we’re a bunch of backward hicks in an unfrequented hinterland of space that’s about to be opened to exploration. Exploitation, perhaps, if we can’t measure up. We have to give a very good impression and we have to learn fast.”

  A dignified official with a brief case detached himself from the nodding, smiling group around the aliens and started for us.

  “Whew!” I commented brilliantly. “Fourteen ninety-two, repeat performance.” I thought for a moment, not too clearly. “But why send the Army and Navy after me? I’m not going to be able to read blueprints from—from—”

  “Betelgeuse. Ninth planet of the star Betelgeuse. No, Dick, we’ve already had Dr. Warbury out here. They learned English from him in two hours, although he hasn’t identified a word of theirs in three days! And people like Lopez, like Mainzer, are going quietly psychotic trying to locate their power source. We have the best minds we can get to do the learning. Your job is different. We want you as a top-notch advertising man, a public-relations executive. You’re the good impression part of the program.”

  The official plucked at my sleeve and I shrugged him away. “Isn’t that the function of government glad-handers?” I asked Trowson.

  “No. Don’t you remember what you said when you first saw them? Snails! How do you think this country is going to take to the idea of snails—giant snails—who sneer condescendingly at our skyscraper cities, our atomic bombs, our most advanced mathematics? We’re a conceited kind of monkey. Also, we’re afraid of the dark.”

  There was a gentle official tap on my shoulder. I said “Please!” impatiently. I watched the warm little breeze ruffle Professor Trowson’s slept-in clothes and noticed the tiny red streaks in his weary eyes.

  “ ‘Mighty Monsters from Outer Space.’ Headlines like that, Prof?”

  “Slugs with superiority complexes. Dirty slugs, more likely. We’re lucky they landed in this country, and so close to the Capitol too. In a few days we’ll have to call in the heads of other nations. Then, sometime soon after, the news will be out. We don’t want our visitors attacked by mobs drunk on superstition, planetary isolation, or any other form of tabloid hysteria. We don’t want them carrying stories back to their civilization of being shot at by a suspendered fanatic who screamed, ‘Go back where you come from, you furrin’ seafood!’ We want to give them the impression that we are a fairly amiable, fairly intelligent race, that we can be dealt with reasonably well.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. So they’ll set up trading posts on this planet instead of garrisons. But what do I do in all this?”

  He punched my chest gently. “You, Dick—you do a job of public relations. You sell these aliens to the American people!”

  The official had maneuvered around in front of me. I recognized him. He was the Undersecretary of State.

  “Would you step this way, please?” he said. “I’d like to introduce you to our distinguished guests.”

  So he stepped, and I stepped, and we scrunched across the field and clanked across the steel plate and stood next to our gastropodic guests.

  “Ahem,” said the Undersecretary politely.

  The nearer snail bent an eye toward us. The other eye drew a bead on the companion snail, and then the great slimy head arched and came down to our level. The creature raised, as it were, one cheek of its foot and said, with all the mellowness of air being pumped through a torn inner tube, “Can it be that you wish to communicate with my unworthy self, respected sir?”

  I was introduced. The thing brought two eyes to bear on me. The place where its chin should have been dropped to my feet and snaked around there for a second. Then it said, “You, honored sir, are our touchstone, the link with all that is great in your noble race. Your condescension is truly a tribute.”

  All this tumbled out while I was muttering “How,” and extending a diffident hand. The snail put one eyeball in my palm and the other on the back of my wrist. It didn’t shake; it just put the things there and took them away again. I had the wit not to wipe my hands on my pants, which was my immediate impulse. The eyeball wasn’t exactly dry, either.

  I said, “I’ll do my best. Tell me, are you—uh—ambassadors, sort of? Or maybe just explorers?”

  “Our small worth justifies
no titles,” said the creature, “yet we are both; for all communication is ambassadorship of a kind, and any seeker after knowledge is an explorer.”

  I was suddenly reminded of an old story with the punchline, “Ask a foolish question and you get a foolish answer.” I also wondered suddenly what snails eat.

  The second alien glided over and eyed me. “You may depend upon our utmost obedience,” it said humbly. “We understand your awesome function and we wish to be liked to whatever extent it is possible for your admirable race to like such miserable creatures as ourselves.”

  “Stick to that attitude and we’ll get along,” I said.

  By and large, they were a pleasure to work with. I mean there was no temperament, no upstaging, no insistence on this camera angle or that mention of a previously published book or the other wishful biographical apocrypha about being raised in a convent, like with most of my other clients.

  On the other hand, they weren’t easy to talk to. They’d take orders, sure. But ask them a question. Any question:

  “How long did the trip take you?”

  “ ‘How long’ in your eloquent tongue indicates a frame of reference dealing with duration. I hesitate to discuss so complex a problem with one as learned as yourself. The velocities involved make it necessary to answer in relative terms. Our lowly and undesirable planet recedes from this beauteous system during part of its orbital period, advances toward it during part. Also, we must take into consideration the direction and velocity of our star in reference to the cosmic expansion of this portion of the continuum. Had we come from Cygnus, say, or Bootes, the question could be answered somewhat more directly; for those bodies travel in a contiguous arc skewed from the ecliptic plane in such a way that—”

  Or a question like, “Is your government a democracy?”

  “A democracy is a rule of the people, according to your rich etymology. We could not, in our lowly tongue, have expressed it so succinctly and movingly. One must govern oneself, of course. The degree of governmental control on the individual must vary from individual to individual and in the individual from time to time. This is so evident to as comprehensive a mind as yours that I trust you forgive me my inanities. The same control applies, naturally, to individuals considered in the mass. When faced with a universal necessity, the tendency exists among civilized species to unite to fill the need. Therefore, when no such necessity exists, there is less reason for concerted effort. Since this applies to all species, it applies even to such as us. On the other hand—”

  See what I mean? A little of that got old quickly with me. I was happy to keep my nose to my own grindstone.

  The Government gave me a month for the preparatory propaganda. Originally, the story was to break in two weeks, but I got down on my hands and knees and bawled that a publicity deadline required at least five times that. So they gave me a month.

  Explain that carefully, Alvarez. I want them to understand exactly what a job I faced. All those years of lurid magazine covers showing extremely nubile females being menaced in three distinct colors by assorted monstrosities; those horror movies, those invasion-from-outer-space novels, those Sunday supplement fright splashes—all those sturdy psychological ruts I had to retrack. Not to mention the shudders elicited by mention of “worms,” the regulation distrust of even human “furriners,” the superstitious dread of creatures who had no visible place to park a soul.

  Trowson helped me round up the men to write the scientific articles, and I dug up the boys who could pseudo them satisfactorily. Magazine mats were ripped apart to make way for yarns speculating gently on how far extraterrestrial races might have evolved beyond us, how much more ethical they might have become, how imaginary seven-headed creatures could still apply the Sermon on the Mount. Syndicated features popped up describing “Humble Creatures Who Create Our Gardens,” “Snail Racing, the Spectacular New Spectator Sport,” and so much stuff on “The Basic Unity of All Living Things” that I began to get uncomfortable at even a vegetarian dinner. I remember hearing there was a perceptible boom in mineral waters and vitamin pills…

  And all this, mind you, without a word of the real story breaking. A columnist did run a cute and cryptic item about someone having finally found meat on the flying saucers, but half an hour of earnest discussion in an abandoned fingerprint file room prejudiced him against further comment along this line.

  The video show was the biggest problem. I don’t think I could have done it on time with anything less than the resources and influence of the United States Government behind me. But a week before the official announcement, I had both the video show and the comic strip in production.

  I think fourteen—though maybe it was more—of the country’s best comedy writers collaborated on the project, not to mention the horde of illustrators and university psychologists who combined to sweat out the delightful little drawings. We used the drawings as the basis for the puppets on the TV show and I don’t think anything was ever so gimmicked up with Popular Appeal—and I do mean Popular—as “Andy and Dandy.”

  Those two fictional snails crept into the heart of America like a virus infection: overnight, everybody was talking about their anthropomorphic antics, repeating their quotable running gags and adjuring each other not to miss the next show. (“You can’t miss it, Steve; it’s on every channel anyway. Right after supper.”) I had the tie-ins, too: Andy and Dandy dolls for the girls, snail scooters for the boys, everything from pictures on cocktail glasses to kitchen d4calcomanias. Of course, a lot of the tie-ins didn’t come off the production line till after the Big Announcement.

  When we gave the handouts to the newspapers, we “suggested” what headlines to use. They had a choice of ten. Even the New York Times was forced to shriek “REAL ANDY AND DANDY BLOW IN FROM BETELGEUSE,” and under that a four-column cut of blond Baby Ann Joyce with the snails.

  Baby Ann had been flown out from Hollywood for the photograph. The cut showed her standing between the two aliens and clutching an eye stalk of each in her trusting, chubby hands.

  The nicknames stuck. Those two slimy intellectuals from another star became even more important than the youthful evangelist who was currently being sued for bigamy.

  Andy and Dandy had a ticker-tape reception in New York. They obligingly laid a cornerstone for the University of Chicago’s new library. They posed for the newsreels everywhere, surrounded by Florida oranges, Idaho potatoes, Milwaukee beer. They were magnificently cooperative.

  From time to time I wondered what they thought of us. They had no facial expressions, which was scarcely odd, since they had no faces. Their long eye stalks swung this way and that as they rode down shrieking Broadway in the back seat of the mayor’s car; their gelatinous body-foot would heave periodically and the mouth under it make a smacking noise, but when the photographers suggested that they curl around the barely clad beauties, the time video rigged up a Malibu Beach show, Andy and Dandy wriggled over and complied without a word. Which is more than I can say for the barely clad beauties.

  And when the winning pitcher presented them with an autographed baseball at that year’s World Series, they bowed gravely, their pink shell tops glistening in the sunlight, and said throatily into the battery of microphones: “We’re the happiest fans in the universe!”

  The country went wild over them.

  “But we can’t keep them here,” Trowson predicted. “Did you read about the debate in the U.N. General Assembly yesterday? We are accused of making secret alliances with nonhuman aggressors against the best interests of our own species.”

  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 u
sing 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—”