Freudian block.
'The one I blame,' Pat said, 'is Lurton Sands.'
'Then don't invite him either,' Sal said. But there was hardly much chance of that; Sands was in prison, right now, for his crime against the sleeping bibs and his ridiculous attempt on Jim's life.
As was Cally Vale for having lasered the 'scuttler repairman. That whole business had been excessively melancholy, both intrinsically and as a conspicuous harbinger of the difficulties which it had ushered into their collective lives, difficulties which by no means were over.
'You know,' Pat said fretfully, 'there's one thing that still, right now, I can't quite get out of my mind. I keep having this sneaking, nervous anxiety that. ...' She smiled at him uneasily, her jessamine lips twitching. 'I hope I don't pass it on to you, but...'
'But deep down inside,' Sal finished for her, 'you're afraid a few of those Pekes have stayed on this side.'
'Yes.' She nodded.
Sal said, 'I get the same damn intimation, now and then. Late at night, I keep looking out of the corner of my eye, especially on the street when I see someone furtive looking hurrying away around a corner to get out of sight. And the funny thing is that from what Jim tells me, I know he feels exactly the same way. Maybe we all have a residual sense of guilt connected with the
Pekes ... after all, we did invade their world first. It's our consciences bothering us.'
Shivering, as she was wearing only a weightless Tafek-web negligee, his wife said, 'I hope that's all it is. Because I'd really hate to run into a Peke some dark night; I'd think right away that they'd opened a nexus again into our world at some point and were very carefully, secretly, ferrying a wide stream of their cousins and aunts across.'
As if we're not desperately overcrowded as it is, Sal thought, without having to cope with that any more.
'What I can never comprehend,' he murmured, 'is why they didn't accept our liberal offer of The
Smithsonian. And for that matter the Library of Congress. Gosh, they pulled out without getting anything.'
'Pride,' Pat said.
'No.' Sal shook his head.
'Stupidity, then. Dumb, dawn-man stupidity. There's no frontal lobe inside that sloping forehead.'
'Maybe.' He shrugged. 'But how can you expect one species to follow the logic of another ? They operate at their level; we operate at ours. And never the twain will meet... I hope.' Anyhow not in his lifetime, he said to himself. Maybe a later generation will be open-minded enough to accept such things, but not now; not we who inhabit this world at this particular moment.
'Shall I ask Mr. Turpin to come here to our place ?' Pat asked. 'Are we going to have the party here ?'
'Maybe Turpin won't want to celebrate Jim's victory,' Sal said. 'He and Schwarz were pretty thick through most of the campaign.'
'Let me ask you something,' Pat said suddenly. 'Do you think George Walt really are a Wind
God ? After all, they were born with two bodies and four arms and legs, the artificial part wasn't installed until much later. So originally they were exactly what they pretended to be. Jim didn't tell that Sinanthropus that.'
'You're darn right he didn't,' Sal said vigorously. 'And don't you rock the boat out of any misplaced ethical motives ... you hear ?'
'Okay,' she said, nodding.
Outside on the sidewalk a gang of well-wishers yelled up praise and slogans of congratulations; the racket filtered into the conapt, and Sal went to glance out the living room window.
Some Cols, he saw. And also some Whites. Just what he hoped to see; just what the entire struggle had been about. How long it had been in coming ... almost two centuries more than it should have taken. The mind of man was uncommonly stubborn and slow to change. Reformers, including himself, were always prone to forget that. Victory always seemed just around the corner. But generally it was not, after all.
A vote for Jim Briskin, he thought, recalling the cliches and tirades of the campaign, is a vote for humanity itself. Stale now, and always oversimplified, and yet deep underneath substantially true. The slogan had embodied the motor which had driven them on, which had, finally, enabled them to win. And now what ? Sal asked himself. The big problems, every one of them, still remained. The bibs, in their all too many warehouses throughout the nation, had become the property of Jim Briskin and the Republican-Liberal Party. As had the desolate, roving packs of unemployed Cols, not to mention the unhappy lower fringes of the white in-group . . men such as
Mr. Hadley, who had been the first White to emigrate, as well as nearly the first to come stumbling back, after the nexus had, mercifully, been reopened.
It'll be a hard four years for Jim, he realized soberly. He's inherited a vast, savage burden from
Schwarz. If he thinks he's worn down now, he should see himself next year or the year after that.
But I guess that's what he wants. I hope so, anyhow.
Did we get or learn anything from our unexpected confrontation with the Pekes ? he wondered.
It showed us, he decided, that the difference between say myself and the average Negro is so damn slight, by every truly meaningful criterion, that for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist.
When something like that, a contact with a race that's not Homo sapiens, occurs, at last we can finally see this. And I don't mean just myself; it was given to me to see this from the start. I mean the ordinary (statistically speaking) fat, mean slob who plops down next to you in a jet-hopper, snatches up a homeopape that someone's left, reads a headline, and then begins to spout right and left his miserable opinions. So maybe, in the final analysis, this is what won the election for Jim.
Could it be ? Admittedly, we can never be certain. But we can make an educated guess and say yes, maybe so. Maybe it was.
In that case, the whole wretched fracas was worth while.
'All the time you've been standing there in your dreams of self-glory,' Pat said archly, 'I've been on the vids getting hold of people for our party. Mr. Turpin can't come or doesn't care to come, which is more likely, but he's sending a few of his carefully cultivated big-time employees - an administrative assistant named Donald Stanley, for instance, whom he said we ought to meet. He didn't say why.'
'I know why,' Sal said. 'Tito Cravelli mentioned him, and anyhow I met him personally on our trip to alter-Earth. Stanley was directly in charge of the defective 'scuttler and, in a sense, was responsible for getting the entire project going. Yes, Stanley certainly should be part of this gettogether.
And I hope you called Tito. Our man in the world.'
'I'll call him now,' Pat said, 'and can you think of anyone else ?'
'The more the better,' Sal said, beginning finally to get into the spirit of the thing.
At night Darius Pethel worked alone in his closed-up store. Something tapped on the window, and he glanced up, startled. There, on the dark sidewalk, stood Stuart Hadley.
Going to the front door, Pethel unlocked it. Opening it he said, 'I thought you emigrated.'
'Cut it out. You know we all came back." Shoulders hunched, Hadley entered the store. The familiar place where he had worked so long.
'How was it over there ?'
'Awful.'
'So I heard,' Pethel said. 'I suppose you want your job back. With each and every trimming.'
'Why not ? I'm as good as I ever was.' Restlessly, Hadley roamed about the marginal shadowy spaces of the store. 'You'll be glad to hear I'm back with my wife. Sparky returned to the Golden
Door satellite; they're going to open it again. In spite of Jim Briskin's election. I guess there's going to be a showdown fight.' He added,, 'Frankly I couldn't care less. I've got my own problems. Well ? What do you say ? Can I come back ?' He tried to make it sound casual.