The rehearsal ended. There was another long wait. This was to introduce the children—from a totally unknown and superior civilization—to a world which considered them strangers from space, when they were actually from a much more improbable homeland. The world was waiting to see this. Time dragged.
All over the world people were waiting to get a first glimpse of creatures whose coming might mean the end of the world.
Presently it began.
The show, naturally, opened with a tremendous fanfare of trumpets, played from tape.
Then Linda Beach appeared. She introduced Gail and Soames and Captain Moggs.
This broadcast was supposed to be strictly informative. It was, however, produced with the attitude and the technique and the fine professionalism of specialists in the area of subconscious selling. So it put its audience—the vast majority of it—into the exact mood of people who surrender themselves to mildly lulling make-believe. When Captain Moggs told of the finding of the ship, her authoritative manner and self-importance made people feel, without regard to their thoughts, that she was an un-funny comedian. The audience remembered with decreasing concern that some interesting monsters were supposed to be in the show later and that they were waiting to see them.
The introduction of the children was a disappointment, but a mild one. When they were produced and identified, the television-watching syndrome was fully developed. There was a feeling, of course, that the show fell down in interest and that it did not live up to its advance publicity. But the television audience is used to that. Its members continued to watch with slightly dulled eyes, listening with partly attentive ears, automatically waiting for a commercial when it could get some beer or an equivalent without missing anything.
Even when tumult and confusion began; when Linda Beach tried to hold the show together in the teeth of uproar behind her, the tranquillized state of the audience continued. When Linda Beach's necklace was snatched from her neck it seemed intended to be funny.
It wasn't until the very end that anything occurred really to break the mood professionally produced shows are designed to achieve. That occurrence startled the viewers out of their semi-comatose state, just as blatant obscenity or intolerable profanity would have done. Linda Beach, in fine sincerity and in tribute to the children, made a statement which was utterly explosive. When the show ended, people all over the world were roused and horrified and enraged.
Only small children, waiting in space-helmets and with ray-guns ready, complained aggrievedly that there hadn't been any monsters. The adults felt that there had been. That there were.
They hated the children with a strictly personal hatred based on panic combined with shame.
CHAPTER 7
Soames' rehearsed part in the broadcast was finished after he and Gail and Captain Moggs had told the story of the finding of the ship. Their narratives were deftly guided by Linda Beach's questions.
Soames wanted to get out of sight. He was sunk in gloom. It was a show instead of what he would have considered a presentation of the facts, though nearly everything said had been factual. He left the studio.
In an uninhabited room he found himself staring out a window, down at the crowd before the Communications Building.
It was a restless crowd, now. The ground-floor plate-glass windows had been filled with television screens, and those near them could see the broadcast and hear it through out-door loud-speakers. But this crowd was a special one, in that it hadn't gathered to see the broadcast but extraterrestrial monsters, in the flesh or fur or scales or however they might appear. It now knew that the monsters had arrived and there was no chance of seeing them direct. It had been harangued by orators and people who already began to call themselves humanity-firsters. It felt cheated.
There were a large number of teen-agers in the crowd.
At the window, Soames recognized the oddity of the crowd below him. An ordinary, curiosity-seeking crowd would contain a considerable percentage of women. This did not. There were shouting voices which Soames heard faintly. They were orators declaiming assorted emotional opinions about monsters from space, obviously in the belief that they were beyond dispute and needed to be acted on at once. There was competition among these orators. Some had bands of supporters around them to aid their effectiveness by applause and loud agreement. Soames saw, too, at least one hilarious group of college-age boys who might have been organized by a college humor magazine. They waved cardboard signs. "Space-Monsters Go Home!"
The unattended monitor set, placed around some corner in a corridor, gave out an excellently modulated reproduction of the program going on the air. An Italian physicist asked questions about the qualifications of such young children as space navigators. Soames listened abstractedly. He knew unhappily that if the children weren't convincing as visitors from space, they'd be much less plausible in their true roles as fugitives out of time.
The collegians surged here and there, making a demonstration in favor of mirth. There were also youthful members of less innocuous groups, swaggering, consciously ominous members of organizations known as the Maharajas and the Comets and the Toppers. Members of these groups eyed members of other such groups with challenging, level gazes.
Voices harangued. Collegians attempted to sing what must have seemed to them a deliciously satirical song. But it did not please the non-collegian Maharajas or Comets or the Toppers.
A Russian scientist took over on the broadcast. He had been flown to the United States especially for the occasion. He asked elaborate and carefully loaded questions. They had been prepared as propaganda stumpers by people who in their way were as skilled in public relations as the producers of this show. Linda Beach applied the charm which had sold soap, vitamins, automobiles and dessicated soup. Soames heard the exchanges from the monitor set.
Outside, in the street, a brick suddenly fell among the collegians. More bricks fell among those engaged in an impromptu meeting of Humanity Firsters. Police whistles blew. A plate-glass window crashed. A collegian suddenly had a bloody face and a flying wedge of Maharajas scornfully cut through the formerly singing group, wielding belts and bludgeons for the honor of having started a riot on 57th Street. They fought past the college crowd and into a band of the Comets. There they found a rumble ready-made. Haranguing orators found themselves jostled. Fights broke out among members of groups which had come to stage demonstrations against extraterrestrials. The fighting spread to individuals.
Police-car sirens wailed. Squad-cars came careening out of uptown-traffic streets and converged on the tumult. The sirens produced violent surgings of the crowd. There was a wild rush in this direction as a siren sounded from that, and then an equally wild rush in another direction still as blazing headlights and a moving howl came from elsewhere. Rushing figures surged against the doors to the lobby of the Communications Building.
Members of the Toppers and the Comets and the Maharajas and other fanatics rushed up the stairs. There was a sign "On the Air" lighted from behind outside the studio in which the world-wide broadcast was in progress. There was a door. They opened it.
The watching world heard the racket as a former Nobel prize-winner's stilted questions about the children were drowned out. This was not a planned invasion. It was a totally chaotic rushing-about of people who'd been half hysterical to start with, who had been crushed in a senselessly swaying mob, had been pushed bodily into a building-lobby jammed past endurance, and escaped into a maze from which they'd blundered into a studio with a broadcast going on. Stagehands and necktie-less persons rushed to throw them out. But the noise grew greater while Linda Beach tried gamely to cover it up.