"We come—you could have guessed this from our size—from an asteroid near Jupiter. Don't ask me why my people are so much like yours except for size; after all, why shouldn't they be? Spores of life, you know.
"Our space-ship's somewhere in your New Jersey; we landed there two years ago and sized the situation up. We'd been driven from our own planet by nasty creatures from Ceres who had the damnedest war-machines you ever saw. Flame-guns, disintegrator rays—and they're going to mop up the universe when they get around to it. By your standards they were three inches tall; to us they were twenty-foot horrors.
"We sent out a few agents who learned the language in two or three days; we could live on the space-ship and keep out of sight. The agents came back to us all steamed up. They'd been riding in coat pockets and things, listening in on private wires. They found out that most of the wealth in the world is concentrated in the Billionaire's Club, right here where we are. So we moved en masse, all three hundred of us, into this sofa and built our city.
"It isn't as easy as it sounds, of course. To listen in on a conversation means that you have to weigh yourself down with almost an ounce of equipment for raising the octaves of the voice and scaling it down to fit our ears. But now we have our listening posts and we eavesdrop in relays to every word that's spoken. If you knew what I know about Atlantis Plastic and Explosive—
"Anyway, Battle; we have our fingers on the economic pulse of the planet. We could release information through dreams and hunches that would wreck the market, as you call it, and create the most staggering panic of all times. Once that happens, Battle…"
"Go on," snapped the Lieutenant.
"Once that happens, Battle," she said in a small, tense voice, "we turn on a little machine we have and every human being that walks the Earth turns into pocket-fuzz."
She faced his horrified stare with a pitying smile. "It's true," she said.
"We can do it. When we're ready, when we're convinced that science and research is so disorganized that they can't possibly do anything about it, we turn on the machine, technically known as a protoplasmo-high carbon proteidic - discellular converter and it happens."
"Not," grated Battle, "if I can stop it."
"That's the rub, my dear," she said with a frown. "You can't. You're my prisoner." And she smiled exquisitely, baring apple-green teeth, so that Battle was constrained to agree with the little lady.
"It seems fitting," he brooded absently. "A super-race indeed is come to humble man."
"DARLING," SAID BATTLE, "it's the strange mixture of ruthlessness and sentimentality that makes your people perpetually amazing to me. It's a pitched battle in the dark on our part; my people have no notion of what's going on behind their backs, and you see nothing evil or dark in the situation."
Busily Miss Aktying click! Byam kissed him and returned to her desk.
"My sweet," she said, "if you trouble your head over our alien morality you'll never get to the end of it. Enough that you are accepted into our midst as a non-combatant worker and the very special charge of the Expediter-in-Chief―that's me. Now go away, please. I'll see you tonight."
Battle pocketed the seal he had lifted from the desk and blew a kiss at her back as he closed the door behind him.
The week he had been imprisoned had been no great hardship; he had been privileged to roam within the limits of the city and examine the marvelously complicated life these tiny invaders had made for themselves. There had been other privileges as well…
The lieutenant, professional and romanticized killer, could not get over the appalling technique of the invaders. It was not inefficient, it was not cold-blooded; somehow to him it was worse. Like all right-minded military men of the old school, he deplored the occasional necessity of spying. What then could he think of a campaign that was spying and nothing else but?
He had been allowed to see—under guard—the wonderful listening posts of the tiny people. From little speakers boomed the voices of "Old Jay" and the other Titans of finance who worked off steam in the smoking room of the Billionaire's Club. And nobody ever sat on the sofa or moved it; it simply would never occur to a member to do so, and in the minds of the servants there had been built up a myth that it was the very first sofa that the celebrated and deceased founder of the club, Nicholas VanBhoomenbergen, had installed and that it would be a breach of the club's rules to move it. The fact was that it had been brought in by two men from Airways Express who had had their minds taken over for the nonce by the invaders. A Mrs. Pinsky, for whom it had been originally consigned, never did find out what happened to it.
Battle ascertained by judicious inquiry that the pocket-fuzz machine actually did exist. It had been a swipe from the war-science of the invaders from Ceres.
The thing was broken down at the moment, but when they got it into shape again—!
He had uneasy pictures of a vast number of speculators all waking up with the same hunch on which way the market would jump. All bidding simultaneously for the same securities would make a ticklish situation that could be touched off by judicious inspiration of an investment banker—any investment banker—who could be dreamed into thinking his bank was without assets. Bank closes and banker commits suicide.
Panic on the market; the vast number of speculators find themselves with securities at fantastically high prices and worth fantastically near nothing at all. Vast number of speculators sell out and are ruined, for then three more banks close and three more bankers commit suicide.
President declares bank-holiday; the great public withdraws savings as soon as the banks open again, therefore the banks close again. The great public holes up for a long, hard winter. With loose cash lying around crime is on the upswing and martial law is declared, at which Leftist organizations explode and start minor insurrections in industrial cities.
Mexico attacks across the Rio Grande; the invaders from the asteroid had a contingent of expert hypnotists ready to leave for Chihuahua where the southern republic's army as stationed.
And then the protoplasmo-high carbon proteidic-discellular converter would get turned on. The population of Manhattan would turn into pocket fuzz—or at least separate large-molecule units resembling very closely the stuff you find in pockets or handbags after two or three weeks of use.
Manhattan is fortified by the wee folk from the asteroid who build several more of the flug-machines, aiming them at the other boroughs and moving their twenty-mile field of effectiveness at the rate of a state each day. The North American continent would be clear of any and all protoplasmic life at the end of a week, they estimated.
And the hell of it was that they were right. But Battle was whistling cheerily as he forged a pass with the aid of the seal from his lady's desk.
HE HAD CREPT out into the open, been perceived by the eagle-eye of old Cromleigh, lifted on a pair of tweezers and whistled into a waiting Rolls.
Once again his natural size in the New Jersey lab he stretched comfortably.
"Thanks for being so prompt," he yawned. "Thanks a lot. They were coming after me, by the sound of footsteps in the distance."
"Now you see why I had to be quiet and do this thing on the sly?"
demanded the financier. "If I'd told all I know they'd have called me mad and locked me up the way his family treated poor old John Dee.
(But don't let that get out, Lieutenant.) Now tell me what you found there—begin at the beginning. How much do they know about finance and manipulation? Have they got their records in a safe place?"
Battle lit a cigarette; he hadn't taken any with him for fear of firing the sofa. Luxuriously he drew in a draft of the smoke clear down to his toenails and let it trickle from the corners of his mouth. "One question at a time," he said.