Softening up was a technical problem of some magnitude, but it had been solved long ago. The abducted humans had died messily but not in vain. At least, from the point of view of the Arrogating Ones their deaths had not been in vain, for in their dying agonies they had supplied information about themselves which had enabled the Arrogating Ones to devise appropriate softening-up mechanisms. The watchers had been equipped with these on a standby basis ever since.
Of course, from the point of view of the abducted humans the question of whether their deaths had been in vain might have had a different answer. No one had troubled to ask them.
At any rate, the watchers now energized the generators which would soften up mankind for its destruction.
While they were waiting for a charge to build up they looked up the coordinates and call signal for the nearest cruising superdreadnaught of the Arrogating Ones and transmitted a request for it to come in and finish up the job with a core-bomb. They then discussed among themselves the prospects of what their next assignment would be. It was not a fruitful discussion. Core-bombs are messy and there was not much chance that Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis’s orbit would get them far enough away to be out of its range when it went off. Even if they survived, none of them had any idea what the Arrogating Ones’ future plans for the watchers were. All they were sure of was that they were certain not to enjoy them.
We now turn to Albert Novak. He was in another four-engined jet, climbing to cruising altitude out of Kennedy en route to Los Angeles International. He was a crew-cut young man, with something on his mind. His neighbor was a short, white-haired, dark-tanned Westerner with the face of a snapping turtle, who offered his hand and said aggressively, jerking his head toward the window, “That confounded thing! Do you know the space agency wants to spend thirty million dollars of your tax money just to go sniff around it? Thirty million dollars! Just to sniff some marsh gas! Not as long as I’m on the Aeronautics and Space Committee. Let me introduce myself. I’m Congressman—” But he was talking to gas himself. Albert Novak had not accepted his hand, had not even met his eyes. Although the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign was still lighted in three languages, he unstrapped himself and walked down the aisle. Hostesses hissed at him and tardily began to unsnap themselves to make him return to his seat. He ignored them. He had no intention of ever arriving at L.A. International and when he wanted to talk to a hostess he would do so on his own terms. He carried a cassette recorder into a toilet and locked the door against everyone.
The cassette recorder could no longer be used to record or play. He had removed its insides the day before, replacing them with more batteries and a coil of fine wire, which
he now carefully connected to thirty Baggies full of dynamite and firing caps he had sewn into the lining of his trenchcoat while his mother nearsightedly smiled on him from across the room.
Although Novak thought of himself as a hijacker, it was not his intention to cause the jet to head for Cuba, Caracas, or even Algiers. He did not want the airplane. He didn’t even want the one hundred million dollars’ ransom he planned to ask for.
What Novak wanted, mostly, was to matter to somebody. As far as he had thought out his plan of action, it was to walk up to a stewardess with his hand on the detonating switch, show her the ingenious arrangement he had gotten past the metal detectors, be escorted to the flight deck in the traditional manner and then, after the airline had begun trying to get together the five million unmarked twenty-dollar bills he intended to demand and the maximum of annoyance and confusion had been caused, to close the switch and explode the dynamite.
He knew that in destroying the airplane he would die. That was not very important to him. The one important failure that he regretted very much was that he would not be able to see his mother’s face when the reporters and TV crew began to swarm around her and she learned he had been pushing around all kinds of people and thirty million dollars’ worth of airplane.
The generators at the core of Comet Ujifusa-McGinnis were now up to full charge.
Disgruntledly, the watchers of the Arrogating Ones sighted the beam in on the planet Earth. They were quite careful to get it aligned properly, for they remembered very well what the consequences were for slipshod work. When it was locked in, they released the safety switch that allowed the contact to close that discharged the beam.
More than three million watts of beamed power surged out toward the near hemisphere of the planet. Certain chemical changes at once took place in the atmosphere and were borne by jet stream, trade winds, and the aimless migration of air masses all around the Earth.
The equipment used was highly directional, but the watchers who operated it were very close and large magnitudes of energy were involved. Some of the radiation sprayed them. There was some loss from corona points, some reflection even from the tenuous gases of the comet’s halo.
As the radiation had been designed specifically for use against mankind, on the basis of the experiments conducted on the kidnappees of two thousand years before, it was only of limited effect on the watchers. But they happened to be warm-blooded oxygen-breathers with two sexes and many of humanity’s hangups, so that the weapon did do to them much what it was intended to do to mankind.
First they felt a sudden, sharp pang of an emotion which they identified (but only by logical deduction) as joy. The diagnosis was not simple, for they had little in their lives that would enable them to recognize such a state. But they looked at each other with fatuous fondness and, in their not really very human ways, shared pleasure.
The next thing they shared was serious physical pain, accompanied by vomiting, dizziness, and a feeling of weakness, for they were receiving a great deal more of the radiation than was necessary for the mere task of turning them into pussycats to receive the knockout blow of the Arrogating Ones. They recognized that, too. They deduced that they were dying, and doing it pretty fast.
They did not mind that any more than Albert Novak minded blowing himself up
with the airliner. It was worthwhile. They were happy. It was what the ray was intended to do to people and it did its work very well.
And all over the near side of the Earth, as the radiation searched out and saturated humanity, joy replaced fear, peace replaced tension, love replaced anger.
In Central Park three slum youths released the girl they had lured behind the Seventy-second Street boathouse and decided to apply for Harvard, while a member of the Tactical Patrol Force lay down on Umpire Rock and gazed jubilantly at the comet. At the park’s southern margin the white-haired gentleman came leaping out at Myron Landau and his girl. “My dear children!” he cried, tugging the women’s stocking off his face. “How sweet and tender you are. You remind me so much of my own beloved son and daughters that you must let me stand you to the best hotel room in New York, with unlimited room service.”
This spectacle would normally have disconcerted Myron Landau, especially as he had just succeeded in solving the puzzle of Ellen’s bra snap. But he was so filled with the sudden rapture himself that he could only say, “You bet you can, friend. But only if you come with us. Ellen and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
And Ellen chimed in sweetly: “What do we need a motel room for, mister? Why don’t we just get out of these clothes?”
Forty thousand feet directly overhead, as the presidential jet sped back from the Summer White House near Boothbay Harbor, Maine, the secretary of state lifted eyes streaming with joy and said, “Dear Mr. President, let’s give the spics another chance. It’s too nice a night to be H-bombing Caracas.” And the president, flinging an arm around him, sobbed, “Danny, as a diplomat you’re not worth a bucket of warm snot, but I’ve always said you’ve got the biggest damn heart in the cabinet.”
A great bubble of orange-yellow flame off on the western horizon disconcerted them for a moment, but it did not seem relevant to their transcendental joy. They began singing all the good old favorites like “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Sweet Adeline,” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and had so much fun doing it that the president quite forgot to radio the message that would cancel his strike order against Caracas. It did not matter very much. The B-52 ordnance crews had dumped the bombs from the fork lifts and were now giving each other rides on them, while the commanding general of the strike, Curtis T. “Vinegar Ass” Pinowitz, had decided he preferred going fishing to parachuting into Venezuela in support of the bombing. He was looking for his spinning reel, oblivious to the noise on the hardstand where the 101st Airborne was voting whether to fly to Disneyland or the Riviera. (In any event, the Venezuelans, or those members of the Venezuelan government who were bothering to answer their telephones, had just voted to give the Yankees all the oil they wanted and were seriously considering scenting it with jasmine.)
The ball of flame on the horizon, however, was not without its importance.
Albert Novak had released the armlock he had got around the little brown-eyed stewardess’s neck and had begun to try to explain to her that his intention to blow up the jet meant nothing personal, but was only a way of inducing his mother to pay as much attention to him as she had, all through their lives, to his brother, Dick. Although he stammered so that he was almost incoherent, the stew understood him at once. She, too, had had both a mother and an older brother. Her pretty brown eyes filled with tears of sympathy and with a rush of love she flung her arms around him. “You poor boy,” she
cried, covering his stubbly face with kisses. “Here, honey! Let me help you.” And she caught the cassette from his hand, careful not to pull the wires loose, and closed the switch that touched off the caps in all the thirty Baggies.
One hundred and thirty-one men, women, and children simultaneously were converted into maltreated chunks of barbecued meat falling through the sky. Their roster included the pilot, the copilot, the third pilot, and eight other members of the flight crew; plus, among the passengers, mothers, infants, honeymooning couples, nonhoney-mooning but equally amorous couples who did not happen to be married to each other, a middle-aged grape picker returning home after a five-days-four-nights all-expense tour of Sin City (which he had found disappointing), a defrocked priest, a disbarred lawyer, and a congressman from Oregon who would never now achieve his dream of dismantling NASA and preventing the further waste of the taxpayer’s funds on space, which he held to be empty and uninteresting.
Whoever they had been when whole, the pieces of barbecue all looked pretty much alike now. It did not matter. Not one of the passengers or crew had died unhappy, since they had all been touched by the comet.
And deep inside the core of the comet Ujifusa-McGinnis, the device which was meant to display the wave forms signifying receipt of the destruction order for Earth remained blank. No signal was received. No one would have observed it if it had been, certainly not the watchers, but it was unprecedented that a response should not be received.
The reason was quite simple. It was that that particular superdreadnaught of the Arrogating Ones, like most of the others in their galactic fleet, had long since been hurled against the fortresses of the insectoids of the core. There, like the others, it had been quickly destroyed, so that the message sent by the watchers had never reached its destination.
It was, in a way, too bad, to think of all that strength and sagacity spent with no more tangible visible result than to give pleasure to a few billion advanced primates. Although this was regrettable, it did not much bother the Arrogating Ones. They had plenty of other regrets to work on. What remained of their collective intelligence was fully taken up with the problem of bare survival against the insectoid fleets—plus, to be sure, a good deal of attention given to mutual recrimination.
The watchers did not mind; they had long since perished of acute terminal pleasure.
And, as it turned out, they had not died entirely in vain.
Because the Oregon congressman did not live to complete his plan to dismantle NASA, all his seniority and horse-trading power having perished with him, the projected comet-study mission was not canceled. To be sure, the bird did not fly on schedule. The effects of the joy beams from the comet did not begin to wear off for several days and the NASA technicians simply could not be bothered while their joy was in its manic phase.
But gradually the world returned to—normal? No. It was definitely not normal for everyone to be feeling rather cheerful most of the time. But the world settled down, sweetly and fondly, to something not unlike its previous condition of work and play. So the astronauts found another launch window and made rendezvous with the comet; and what they found there made quite a difference in the history of both the human race and the galaxy. The watchers were gone, but they had left their weaponry behind.
When the astronauts returned with the least and weakest of the weapons, all they
could cram into their ship, the president of the United States gave up his shuffleboard game to fly to the deck of the
Independence
and stare at it. “Oh, boy!” he chortled, awed and thrilled. “If that’d turned up two months ago Brazil would’ve had a seaport on the Caribbean!” But Venezuela went about its business untouched. The president was tempted. Even cheerful and at peace with himself and the world, he was tempted—old habits die hard. But he had several thoughts and the longest and most persuasive of them was that weaponry like this meant that somewhere there was an enemy who had constructed and deployed it and someday might return to use it. So with some misgivings, but without any real freedom of choice, he flew back to Washington, summoned the ambassadors of Venezuela, Cuba, Canada, the U.S.S.R., the People’s Republic of China, and the United Irish Republics of Great Britain and laid everything before them.