Alien Contact (14 page)

“We’re glad to have you, of course,” said my wife, “and it seems that our people have gotten over their initial fears.”

“The hollyhocks did the trick,” said Doim.

“I guess so. How many nuhp are there on Earth now?”

“About five or six million, I’d say.”

The First Lady was startled. “I didn’t think it would be that many.”

Doim laughed. “We’re not just here in America, you know. We’re all over. We really like Earth. Although, of course, Earth isn’t absolutely the best planet. Our own home, Nupworld, is still Number One; but Earth would certainly be on any Top Ten list.”

“Uh huh.” (My wife has learned many important oratorical tricks from me.)

“The hollyhocks were nice,” said the First Lady. “But when are you going to tackle the really vital questions?”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Doim, turning her attention to her cottage cheese salad.

“When are you going to take care of world hunger?”

“Pretty soon. Don’t worry.”

“Urban blight.”

“Pretty soon.”

“Man’s inhumanity to man?”

Doim gave my wife an impatient look. “We haven’t even been here for six months yet. What do you want, miracles? We’ve already done more than your husband accomplished in his entire first term.”

“Hollyhocks,” muttered the First Lady.

“I heard that,” said Doim. “The rest of the universe absolutely
adores
hollyhocks. We can’t help it if humans have no taste.”

They finished their lunch in silence, and my wife came back to the White House fuming.

That same week, one of my advisors showed me a letter that had been sent by a young man in New Mexico. Several nuhp had moved into a condo next door to him and had begun advising him about the best investment possibilities (urban respiratory spas), the best fabrics and colors to wear to show off his coloring, the best holo system on the market (the Esmeraldas F-64 with hexphased Libertad screens and a Ruy Challenger argon solipsizer), the best place to watch sunsets (the revolving restaurant on top of the Weyerhaeuser Building in Yellowstone City), the best wines to go with everything (too numerous to mention—send SASE for list), and which of the two women he was dating to marry (Candi Marie Esterhazy). “Mr. President,” said the bewildered young man, “I realize that we must be gracious hosts to our benefactors from space, but I am having some difficulty keeping my temper. The nuhp are certainly knowledgeable and willing to share the benefits of their wisdom, but they don’t even wait to be asked. If they were people, regular human beings who lived next door, I would have punched their lights out by now. Please advise. And hurry: they are taking me downtown next Friday to pick out an engagement ring and new living room furniture. I don’t even
want
new living room furniture!”

Luis, my secretary of defense, talked to Hurv about the ultimate goals of the nuhp. “We don’t have any goals,” he said. “We’re just taking it easy.”

“Then why did you come to Earth?” asked Luis.

“Why do you go bowling?”

“I don’t go bowling.”

“You should,” said Hurv. “Bowling is the most enjoyable thing a person can do.”

“What about sex?”

“Bowling
is
sex. Bowling is a symbolic form of intercourse, except you don’t have to bother about the feelings of some other person. Bowling is sex without guilt. Bowling is what people have wanted down through all the millennia: sex without the slightest responsibility. It’s the very distillation of the essence of sex. Bowling is sex without fear and shame.”

“Bowling is sex without pleasure,” said Luis.

There was a brief silence. “You mean,” said Hurv, “that when you put that ball right into the pocket and see those pins explode off the alley, you don’t have an orgasm?”

“Nope,” said Luis.

“That’s
your problem, then. I can’t help you there, you’ll have to see some kind of therapist. It’s obvious this subject embarrasses you. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Fine with me,” said Luis moodily. “When are we going to receive the real benefits of your technological superiority? When are you going to unlock the final secrets of the atom? When are you going to free mankind from drudgery?”

“What do you mean, ‘technological superiority’?” asked Hurv.

“There must be scientific wonders beyond our imagining aboard your mother ships.”

“Not so’s you’d notice. We’re not even so advanced as you people here on Earth. We’ve learned all sorts of wonderful things since we’ve been here.”

“What?” Luis couldn’t imagine what Hurv was trying to say.

“We don’t have anything like your astonishing bubble memories or silicon chips. We never invented anything comparable to the transistor, even. You know why the mother ships are so big?”

“My God.”

“That’s right,” said Hurv, “vacuum tubes. All our spacecraft operate on vacuum tubes. They take up a hell of a lot of space. And they burn out. Do you know how long it takes to find the goddamn tube when it burns out? Remember how people used to take bags of vacuum tubes from their television sets down to the drugstore to use the tube tester? Think of doing that with something the size of our mother ships. And we can’t just zip off into space when we feel like it. We have to let a mother ship warm up first. You have to turn the key and let the thing warm up for a couple of minutes,
then
you can zip off into space. It’s a goddamn pain in the neck.”

“I don’t understand,” said Luis, stunned. “If your technology is so primitive, how did you come here? If we’re so far ahead of you, we should have discovered your planet, not the other way around.”

Hurv gave a gentle laugh. “Don’t pat yourself on the back, Luis. Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren’t necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in Los Angeles with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nup in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing a hundred and twenty on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at fifty-five; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nup cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It’s all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have.”

“But we
do
want to go.”

“Then we’ll help you. We’ll give you the secrets. And you can explain your electronics to our engineers, and together we’ll build wonderful new mother ships that will open the universe to both humans and nuhp.”

Luis let out his breath. “Sounds good to me,” he said.

Everyone agreed that this looked better than hollyhocks. We all hoped that we could keep from kicking their collective asses long enough to collect on that promise.

When I was in college, my roommate in my sophomore year was a tall, skinny guy named Barry Rintz. Barry had wild, wavy black hair and a sharp face that looked like a handsome normal face that had been sat on and folded in the middle. He squinted a lot, not because he had any defect in his eyesight, but because he wanted to give the impression that he was constantly evaluating the world. This was true. Barry could tell you the
actual and market values of any object you happened to come across.

We had a double date one football weekend with two girls from another college in the same city. Before the game, we met the girls and took them to the university’s art museum, which was pretty large and owned an impressive collection. My date, a pretty Elementary Ed major named Brigid, and I wandered from gallery to gallery, remarking that our tastes in art were very similar. We both liked the Impressionists, and we both liked Surrealism. There were a couple of little Renoirs that we admired for almost half an hour, and then we made a lot of silly sophomore jokes about what was happening in the Magritte and Dali and de Chirico paintings.

Barry and his date, Dixie, ran across us by accident as all four of us passed through the sculpture gallery. “There’s a terrific Seurat down there,” Brigid told her girlfriend.

“Seurat,” Barry said. There was a lot of amused disbelief in his voice.

“I like Seurat,” said Dixie.

“Well, of course,” said Barry, “there’s nothing really
wrong
with Seurat.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Brigid.

“Do you know F. E. Church?” he asked.

“Who?” I said.

“Come here.” He practically dragged us to a gallery of American paintings. F. E. Church was a remarkable American landscape painter (1826–1900) who achieved an astonishing and lovely luminance in his works. “Look at that light!” cried Barry. “Look at that space! Look at that air!”

Brigid glanced at Dixie. “Look at that air?” she whispered.

It was a fine painting and we all said so, but Barry was insistent. F. E. Church was the greatest artist in American history, and one of the best the world has ever known. “I’d put him right up there with Van Dyck and Canaletto.”

“Canaletto?” said Dixie. “The one who did all those pictures of Venice?”

“Those skies!” murmured Barry ecstatically. He wore the expression of a satisfied voluptuary.

“Some people like paintings of puppies or naked women,” I offered. “Barry likes light and air.”

We left the museum and had lunch. Barry told us which things on the menu were worth ordering, and which things were an abomination. He made us all drink an obscure imported beer from Ecuador. To Barry, the world was divided up into masterpieces and abominations. It made life so much simpler for him, except that he never understood why his friends could never tell one from the other.

At the football game, Barry compared our school’s quarterback to Y. A. Tittle. He compared the other team’s punter to Ngoc Van Vinh. He compared the halftime show to the Ohio State band’s Script Ohio formation. Before the end of the third quarter it was very obvious to me that Barry was going to have absolutely no luck at all with Dixie. Before the clock ran out in the fourth quarter, Brigid and I had made whispered plans to dump the other two as soon as possible and sneak away by ourselves. Dixie would probably find an excuse to ride the bus back to her dorm before suppertime. Barry, as usual, would spend the evening in our room, reading
The Making of the President 1996.

On other occasions, and with little or no provocation, Barry would lecture me about subjects as diverse as American literature (the best poet was Edwin Arlington Robinson, the best novelist James T. Farrell), animals (the only correct pet was the golden retriever), clothing (in anything other than a navy blue jacket and gray slacks, a man was just asking for trouble), and even hobbies (Barry collected military decorations of czarist Imperial Russia; he wouldn’t talk to me for days after I told him my father collected barbed wire).

Barry was a wealth of information. He was the campus arbiter of good taste. Everyone knew Barry was the man to ask.

But no one ever did. We all hated his guts. I moved out of our dorm room before the end of the fall semester. Shunned, lonely, and bitter, Barry Rintz wound up as a guidance counselor in a high school in Ames, Iowa. The job was absolutely perfect for him; few people are so lucky in finding a career.

If I didn’t know better, I might have believed that Barry was the original advance spy for the nuhp.

When the nuhp had been on Earth for a full year, they gave us the gift of interstellar travel. It was surprisingly inexpensive. The nuhp explained their propulsion system, which was cheap and safe and adaptable to all sorts of other earthbound applications. The revelations opened up an entirely new area of scientific speculation. Then the nuhp taught us their navigational methods, and about the “shortcuts” they had discovered in space. People called them spacewarps, although technically speaking the shortcuts had nothing to do with Einsteinian theory or curved space or anything like that. Not many humans understood what the nuhp were talking about, but that didn’t make very much difference. The nuhp didn’t understand the shortcuts either; they just used them. The matter was presented to us like a Thanksgiving turkey on a platter. We bypassed the whole business of cautious scientific experimentation and leaped right into commercial exploitation. Mitsubishi of La Paz and Martin Marietta used nuhp schematics to begin construction of three luxury passenger ships, each capable of transporting a thousand tourists anywhere in our galaxy. Although man had yet to set foot on the moons of Jupiter, certain selected travel agencies began booking passage for a grand tour of the dozen nearest inhabited worlds.