But the Greks could. They did.
They landed their ship in Ohio in an enormous earthen cradle Army engineers scooped out for them. In preparing the earth cradle, the military men thoughtfully buried four atomic fission bombs where they would be handy if we needed them. They were arranged to be detonated from a distance. There were also ballistic missiles with atomic warheads, prudently placed in concealment a good way from the landing site. They could blast even the Grek ship to incandescent, radioactive gas if the need arose. But apparently we were much ashamed of this afterward. From the moment of their landing until after their departure, it seems that nobody thought a single naughty thought about the Greks. They were wonderful! They were making everybody rich! For six months the Greks were deliriously revered.
It is still hard for us who went through all this to make another generation understand why we acted and felt as we did. But now we know what the Greks are like. Then we didn't. Now we know what they came for. Then we were intoxicated by the gifts they brought us. We hadn't discovered that unearned riches are as bad for a race as for a person. And the Greks had made us rich.
In the six months the Greks were aground we acquired broadcast power. Not yet an adequate supply for all the waste a planet's population could achieve. Not yet. But anybody who had a receiving unit could draw from the air all the power he needed to light or heat his house and run his ground car or his small-sized business, if he had one. We had de-salting plants turning salt water into fresh for the irrigation of the Sahara Basin, and we anticipated having all the fresh water we could use in all the arid regions of the world.
We had fish-herding electronic devices that drove unbelievable quantities of ocean fish into estuaries to be netted. We had a sinter field which made the minerals in topsoil more available to plants, and our crops promised to be unmanageably huge. We had plastics we hadn't dreamed of, materials we could hardly believe, and new manufacturing processes. . . .
After six months the Greks announced that they were going away. They'd leave us to the enjoyment of our new wealth. We owed them nothing. What they had done had been done out of the goodness of their hearts. True, they made most of their benefactions through their furry Aldarian student spacemen. We liked the Aldarians, though it was odd that they had external ears but were totally deaf. We felt uncomfortable in the presence of Greks. The feeling Greks produced in human beings was usually described as "creepy." But we were grateful to them. We idolized them. Being the kind of idiots we were, we practically worshipped the Greks for their benefactions!
If all this seems improbable, it's true just the same. The rest of the tale may make it believable.
The rest may as well begin with Jim Hackett on the day before the leaving of the Greks. The date of their departure had been proclaimed a planetary holiday, the first in human history. All of Earth would take the day off to do honor to those gray-skinned, bald and uninterested creatures who had remade our world much nearer to our hearts' desire.
At the lift-off spot itself, in Ohio, it was estimated that not less than a million and a half human beings would congregate to tell the Greks goodbye. In the rest of America there were to be other gigantic farewell parties. They'd be linked to the actual lift-off spot by closed-circuit television. In Europe, in Asia, in Australia, in South America, in Africa—everywhere—the world prepared to do honor to the Greks on their departure.
In the United States, naturally, the celebration began with the worst traffic foul-up in the history of self-propelled vehicles. And Hackett was caught in it. He was going to the lift-off ceremony for a reason of his own. He'd made a suggestion to an archaeologist he knew, and he wanted to see what it turned up, if anything. He'd picked up Lucy Thale—she'd been Doctor Lucy Thale this past full month—at the hospital where she'd been interning. She wanted to see the Greks go away. After four hours of stop-and-go crawling, Hackett swerved off the official main highway to the liftoff site and turned onto a secondary road.
There was an enormous difference. The two-lane main road had been a solid, packed, crawling mass of vehicles. Now and again they halted by necessity. Sooner or later they started up again, to crawl at five to ten miles an hour until perforce they halted once more. When he got on the narrower road, though, Hackett could make fifty miles an hour or better.
It was a singularly perfect day, with remarkably green grass and an unusually blue sky, and little white clouds sailing overhead. This road wound and twisted, and the main highway gradually moved farther and farther away toward the horizon, until one couldn't even smell the gas fumes from its fuel-driven cars. Seven-eighths of the cars on the road were still that kind. The cars that ran on broadcast power were coming out of the factories, but there weren't anywhere near enough of them to meet the public demand. There were other difficulties about them, too. But everybody knew that everything would be ironed out shortly.
Hackett drove, thinking absorbedly to himself. Lucy Thale took a deep breath of the purer air.
"It'll be a good thing," she said, "when all cars run on broadcast power. It was stifling on the highway!"
Hackett grunted.
"It's the heaviest traffic in history. I can imagine only one way it could be heavier."
Lucy turned her head to look at him inquiringly.
"Everybody on the road," he told her, "is on the way to cheer and praise the Greks. But if they'd turned out not to be as benevolent as they seem, there'd be heavier traffic trying to get away from them."
Lucy smiled a little.
"You're not enthusiastic about the Greks, Jim."
"I'm less enthusiastic about the human race," he said grimly. "We're about in the position of the American Indians when the whites came to America. The Greks are farther ahead of us than our ancestors were ahead of the Indians. But the Indians didn't quarrel among themselves for the privilege of letting the whites destroy them!"
"But the Greks aren't—"
"Aren't they?" asked Hackett sourly.
Lucy said, "They've given us things we didn't hope to have for generations to come!"
"We gave the Indians metal tomahawks and whiskey and guns," growled Hackett. "They killed each other with the tomahawks, drank themselves to death on the whiskey, and fairly often they used the guns on us. But they didn't try to keep each other from having the guns or the tomahawks or the whiskey. We're not so tolerant."
Lucy did not comment. There were some governments which protested that it was unfair for other nations with more developed industry and more trained technical workers to be able to make more use of the Greks' gifts than they could. They argued that they should be given extra aid to lift themselves level. But so far it was only squabbling. It would be smoothed out. Everybody was sure it would work out all right.
"Also," said Hackett, "Indians didn't go hungry because flint arrowheads became obsolete. Have you seen the unemployment figures? The Indians didn't pauperize their hunters because they weren't needed while everybody was busy getting drunk! The thing hasn't hit you, Lucy. You're a doctor, and the Greks haven't made medicine a useless skill. But most of the world isn't so lucky. Me, for example."
Again Lucy did not answer. Hackett had been among the first to feel the impact of the Greks upon his career. He had been the youngest man ever to be nominated for a Nobel Prize and, though he hadn't received it, he'd had some reputation and the prospect of considerable achievements in the years to come. So he'd been included in the group of Earth physicists to whom the Greks offered instruction in their more advanced science. But he hadn't made the grade. The painstakingly translated Grek texts on physics made sense to him so far and no further. At a certain point the statements seemed to him to become meaningless gobbledy-gook. He couldn't follow the reasoning or grasp the ideas. They seemed simply nonsensical, leading nowhere and accounting for nothing. So the Greks, with painstaking sighs of regret, observed that he seemed incapable of the kind of thinking their sciences required, and politely showed him the door.