He found that it was possible to view the state of things dispassionately now. It was true that not everybody would want the benefits the Greks had made possible. Knowing oneself to be inferior and primitive and at the mercy of aliens whose presence produced a feeling of creepy dread and horror—that was a high price. To some people it would seem too much to pay for progress.
They smoked, and talked fragmentarily and to no purpose. The slatlike streaks of moonlight moved across the ground under the grandstands. At very, very long last the sky grayed to the east, and in due time the sun rose.
One of the archaeological party went off to buy coffee. The Army officer disappeared among his bulldozers. There were vague stirrings here and there.
The coffee was very bad, with the sole virtue of being hot. It was flavored by the paper containers in which it came. Hackett paced restlessly. He'd found that other people shared some of his doubts about the Greks, but there was nothing definite to blame on them. Displayed weapons or no displayed weapons, humanity was helpless against the Greks. It was necessary to believe in their benevolence, or one would grow mad with fear. But after all, there was no evidence against their kindliness. The Aldarians were lively, friendly, cordial creatures. They got along with the Greks. The Greks had given us so many things. . . .
The people who presently began to fill the stands appeared to have no doubts whatever. Some had come to cheer the departing Greks. Some tended to sniffle sentimentally at the departure of those who had done so much for mankind. There were people who were already maudlin about the benefits that needed just a little more organization to become available to everybody. ...
Those of us who sat in the stands that morning remember the atmosphere. Some of us have trouble believing that we actually shed tears of gratitude while the interminable program went on. Tears of boredom would probably have been more sensible.
It was an appalling performance. There were schoolchildren marching to give bouquets to the Greks—or, rather, to the solitary Grek who sat through what must have been unutterable tedium for him. There was a prominent artist who presented a painted portrait of one of the ship's officers. There were representatives of industry who presented special examples of their manufactures, either made of gold or thriftily gold plated, for the Greks to remember them by. The motion picture industry presented a gold-plated movie projector with twenty gold-plated cans of news film portraying Greks and Aldarians in full color on their rare excursions from their ship. There were scrolls of fulsome praise extending honorary membership in hereditary societies. Fraternal orders presented certificates of special qualification, plus the regalia for the celebration of mysterious rites wherever the Greks came from or went back to.
Such events were at least varied. But the speeches.
Every politician on Earth tried to be allowed to say a few appropriate words. When speech-making was restricted to prime ministers or heads of state of nations in being, the time required was still impossibly long. Sternly ordered to restrict their speeches to four minutes each, they appeared in hordes, and none spoke under six minutes. Several had to be hauled without dignity away from the microphones.
At long last the business was done. It was noon, Eastern Standard Time. The lone Grek who had endured all this mishmash stood up. With complete impassiveness he walked across the wooden walk from the speaker's platform to the ship. He went into it. The entry port closed. Men hastily pulled the walkway aside. For a while nobody noticed that the departure presents still stayed where they'd been set down. Some of the watchers might have expected to see this oversight repaired, but nothing happened. From bouquets to gold-plated cans of film, they stayed where they'd been placed. And then, without fanfare of any sort, the ship lifted, silently and steadily and with no ceremony at all.
The crowds in the stands burst into cheers. The unnumbered thousands who'd been unable to get tickets for the stands, cheered from the spaces beyond them. The Grek ship rose and rose, with a chorus of grateful human voices following it. Presently its hugeness was no longer appressive. Soon it was only a sliver of glittering metal rising ever more swiftly toward the heavens. And after a while it could not be seen at all.
The Greks had gone away, as they said they intended to, leaving a dozen Aldarians to help us become civilized. And we began to face certain unease-producing facts. We'd been left alone to fumble at the situation the Greks had left. They said they'd go, and they visibly had. They said they were heading back to their home star cluster, and we had no reason to doubt them. They said some Grek ship would stop by to pick up the Aldarian volunteers in ten of our years or so. They said we couldn't expect to see them back in less time than that.
We believed them, and we were uneasy because we believed them! Heaven help us, we—were—uneasy— because—we—believed—them!
Maybe, though, we'd have done worse if suspicion of the truth had become widespread. When things began to be found out, nobody in authority dared to make them public. Which, it can be said, some students of the matter consider to be the only intelligent decision made by anybody of importance—except those who came to work secretly with Hackett.
5
"I'd feel better," said Hackett, "if I could decide whether the Greks were displaying indifference or contempt in that lift-off performance of theirs."
He and Lucy and the others of the tarpaper-shack archaeological group were watching the crowds trying to leave the scene of the Greks' departure. It was an astonishing spectacle. There was a large space in which buses had parked after bringing their loads of onlookers to the lift-off site. The buses were now surrounded by confused groups of people who, having waited through one of the most tedious ceremonies ever conceived by the mind of man, were impatient at the least delay in beginning the almost equally tedious journeys back to where they'd come from.
There were private cars trying helplessly to get through the mobs of people, then trying to get to their cars so they could try helplessly to get through other mobs trying to get to their cars. The attempt at leaving, of course, began at the parts of the parking fields nearest the grandstands, because those car owners reached their vehicles first. It was an arrangement designed for the maximum of confusion.
It seemed that hours passed before even the buses were filled, and the people who had become separated from their traveling companions who had their bus tickets either found them or gathered near information booths set up for the purpose. Traffic police borrowed from six neighboring states began to get things moving, through inexplicable and irrational stoppages still frustrated them. Lost children contributed to the uproar, while the parents they'd lost increased the tumult. Inevitably, anybody who got to his car immediately started its motor while waiting for a chance to move, and a fog of mephitic fuel fumes spread for miles. Only the Grek-designed cars did not burn gasoline, and contributed nothing to the unwholesomeness.
It was quite a spectacle. Underneath the grandstand, where Hackett and Lucy watched, there was a sort of echoing stillness. The ground was Uttered with crumpled paper candy wrappers, popcorn containers, chewing-gum packages and cigarette butts to mark where human crowds had been. Outside, swirling dust arose to mingle with gasoline fumes and the confused murmur of the mob.
"They figured," said Clark, "that there'd be a million and a half people here. I think they guessed wrong. That's too low."
The Army officer from the bulldozer sheds said sourly to Hackett, "Indifference or contempt? How do you mean that?"
"What do they think of us?" asked Hackett. "They've given us all sorts of things we need, but they haven't bothered to be pleasant about it, only polite. That could be indifference. On the other hand, the elaborate gifts we got ready for them, they didn't bother to carry away. And that could be contempt."