"They must be in one of the nearby stellar systems. Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti-"
"Or they left signal devices in all the likely systems-"
"Wouldn't it depend on how intelligent they want us? Maybe we're supposed to be repairmen for a starship motor. Then they-"
"They'd damn well wait for us to come to them, wouldn't they? To prove we can build a starship!"
Jack Keenan tapped me on the shoulder. He was still wearing his clerical collar. He spoke low, near my ear. "There's a place at the poker table. They sent me to tell you."
My cake was gone, and the conversation here was turning chaotic. I got up. Behind me Tom Findlay was saying, "But they'd have to find our starships some way. Maybe a large metallic mass moving faster than light would put out heavy Cherenkov radiation...
I played for an hour and lost a dollar twenty. Presently Carol put her head around the corner, caught my eye, showed her teeth and snapped them at me several times in rapid succession. I nodded and cashed in.
It means, "I'm starving. Let's collect some people and go eat." There was still a group around Tom Findlay. I caught bits and pieces of sentences. They were talking about the things you could do with neutronium, if you could get it in four-foot globs and had the technology to move it around. I broke in to ask if anyone was hungry, and got Hal Grant that way.
We looked up our host (our hostess had gone home with her date), thanked him for a great party, told him we might be back in an hour or so, and asked if he'd like to come along. The guests could take care of themselves, and he knew it, but he declined anyway.
Joy Benjamin was outside sitting on the wall, breathing. There was precious little oxygen left inside. She joined us too. We drove off to find a place we knew of, an all-night pizza place.
Sometimes they get forgotten instantly. Sometimes they go on and on. This latest of Findlay's brainstorms was one of Those. I came back from the counter carrying a tremendous deluxe pizza, and Hal Grant was saying, "See, that way you wouldn't need a Project Ozma, or an FTL spacecraft detector either." And both women were nodding, rapt.
Joy Benjamin was young and pretty and a bit pudgy, and her front teeth showed when she smiled. It all gave her a cuddly, innocent look that I had never found occasion to mention to my wife; but if she had been in the group around Findlay I would have noticed her. She must have gotten her details at second hand. She looked up as I set the pizza down, and said, "He's got a point. You know about Tom Findlay's Multiple Eden Hypothesis?"
"Yes."
"This planet puts out as much radio flux as a small star," she said seriously. "The overlords could put a detector on the Moon and then just wait for us to invent radios."
"That means they must be on their way here now," my wife put in.
Hal smiled sardonically, an effect he couldn't have managed without the beard. "Maybe they're already here. There were flying saucers all over the place when radio was really popular, before everybody had two television sets.''
"It's been done, that bit about a detector on the Moon. In 2001. Put it on Mars."
"Okay, it's on Mars. The point is, with the radio detector they can get here after we develop as much intelligence as we're going to, but before we can pollute ourselves to death or bomb ourselves to death. After all, they probably weren't trying to develop anything supremely intelligent. Just bright enough to take orders."
"How young you are, to be so cynical."
It took him a moment to decide I was kidding. He said, "Someday, Howards," and shook his head sorrowfully, contemplating awful carnage. He went to work on the pizza.
It was delicious. I wish I'd paid more attention, because it was the last time I ever tasted pizza. We ate on a wooden bench, and used up an inch-high stack of paper napkins. Off in one corner, a man with garters on his sleeves played a player piano.
"So we can expect them any minute." Joy made whirring noises and moved her hands expressively. "Big ships in the sky, coming down to ssscoop us up."
"Or little ships to take samples."
"If they were the flying saucers, they must have rejected us already," Hal put in. "They've been here too long. They'd have started major scooping operations long ago."
And if we'd dropped it there, we'd be home now.
There are tunes that go round and round in your head, driving you nuts, driving others nuts because you're humming under your breath. There are ideas you can't leave alone. You toy with them, or they toy with you...I got my fair share of the pizza and a bit more. While we were waiting for Carol to finish, I said, "Suppose they did reject us. Suppose we didn't meet their presumably exacting standards. What then?"
"They'd destroy the Earth," Joy said instantly.
"Typical bloodthirsty female."
Hal said, "Maybe they'd start us over. Give us IQ tests. Pick a thousand off the top. Settle us on a new planet."
"Then destroy the Earth."
"Maybe. Maybe even settle us back on Earth, after clearing it for us." Grant's "us" had not escaped me. He would be one of the thousand, and so would his friends. I let it pass. Truth to tell, I was flattered.
The pizza was gone, and much of the cardboard disc beneath it. We piled in the car and started back to George's place.
Carol ended a reflective silence. "Does it seem to anyone that there are more written tests around than there used to be? Army IQ tests, motivational research, testing for jobs, even the forms for computer dating. Now-"
We started laughing. Hal said, "Are you still on that?"
"Well, they have to test us some way."
"It's a lovely idea, but I can't bring myself to trust those IQ tests. I know too much psychology. There's not a printed test that's good for anything, especially at the top of the scale."
"What, then?"
"There Are Aliens Among Us," Hal Grant intoned. "Or their agents. And they choose by intuition and superior judgment. You, and you-"
"Hey," I said, hit by a lovely idea. "Hey. You know who would make a great intelligence tester?"
"Who?"
"Tom Findlay! He's a walking, talking intelligence test. Remember what he was talking about just before we left? Blobs of neutron star matter-"
"That's lovely stuff, neutronium. It's unreasonably heavy. If you just let it sit, it's got to be a shiny sphere. The surface gravity would flatten any surface roughness, see? If you toss a glob of the stuff at an enemy spaceship, it'll just drift through the hull and leave a gaping hole and come out a fraction of an inch thicker. Spin it and you don't get an ellipsoid, you get like a flying saucer, a ball with a rim around it. It's all theoretical, of course."
"See what I mean?"
Behind me in the darkened car, Hal Grant said, "I guess so. Findlay makes you think. If you can't think, you go away. After awhile there's nobody left talking to Findlay except people who like playing with ideas. He's a filter. Then I suppose he tags the best of us and off we go, right?"
"Right. Well, nobody's disappeared yet."
"Nobody that was noticed. How many of us do you know, away from these parties? Sometimes I run across Jack Keenan in the supermarket, but that's it. All we know for sure is, we haven't been picked yet." Grant laughed uneasily. "Maybe we'd better not go back to George's."