Almost exactly at nine o'clock the car turned into the very small village of Traylor, which contained perhaps five hundred people. There was a state-maintained highway which ran down its principal street. Lucy looked absorbedly out a car window as they went along it.
"I remember that," she said when they passed a red-brick school. "And that's the town hall. Those stores are new, but that's the drugstore. I had sodas there when I was twelve. My cousin's house is around the corner. Turn right here."
The car stopped before a small and completely nondescript cottage with a yard full of shrubbery and flowers.
Her cousin was much older than Lucy. She greeted Lucy with dignity. "The President of the United States telephoned me last night," she observed with something of stateliness. "We had a very pleasant chat. I have a room ready for you, Lucy, but Mr. Hackett is a problem. So many people have come to visit relatives —things are dreadful in the cities, they say—that I couldn't find anybody with a spare room. So I've put up a cot for him in the woodshed. It wouldn't do for him to stay in the house, with both of us unmarried!"
"I'll try not to be a nuisance," said Hackett. "And it may not be for long."
"When the President of the United States asks an old friend a favor," said Lucy's cousin firmly, "it cannot be a nuisance. But oh, my dear Lucy! He asked me not to let anybody know there was anything unusual about your coming. I can't tell anybody he called me up. I can't even tell them he remembered the time when a naughty boy opened my school lunch as I stood up to recite, and I sat down on two slices of bread spread with strawberry jam!"
Miss Constance Thale, spinster, was one of the people who acted with sanity and integrity throughout the whole affair of the Greks. It is true that she was not employed by anyone, so she wasn't emotionally involved in the question of unemployment. She made no pretense of intellectuality, so she didn't feel it necessary to go out on a limb in ardent adulation of the Greks. She minded her own business. But when she received a request from the President of the United States, she wholeheartedly cooperated with the government of her country.
People like Lucy's cousin are very valuable. Those of us who made fools of ourselves remove our hats. We don't feel embarrassed about it, because they will never notice our tribute or know what it is for. They simply behaved as usual.
But we behaved like idiots!
8
The news reports, next day, carried long and involved accounts of the farewell to the Greks. They included post-recorded extracts from the tributes of eminent persons, and there was nothing to imply less than complete graciousness on the part of the Greks. Whether contemptuous or indifferent, the abandonment of the gifts just made them was not mentioned. There was some reference to the Greks' disappointment that two special human persons could not be found, to receive the reward the Greks wanted to give them. But there was no mention of the bomb destruction of a car on the parking area. And there was no reference to the digging up of a garbage pit left behind by the Greks. There was total silence respecting all ambassadors— iron curtain or other—who might have tried to do a small favor to the now-departed Greks by murdering a couple of people they wanted disposed of.
Especially there was no mention of the garbage pit. It could be that no newsman knew about it. But it wouldn't have been published anyhow.
Publishable news dealt with the ship itself, which had been watched for by telescopes beyond the sunrise and sunset lines of Earth. It was seen clearly in Hawaii as a curiously shaped sliver of sun-surface brightness, moving out from Earth. At a hundred thousand miles it vanished. The Greks, so the news accounts said, were now traveling toward their homes at multiples of the speed of light. Their ship had vanished when that spectacular interstellar drive began to operate.
Most of the rest of the current events information dealt with riots and rumors of riots in one place or another. Congress and the Administration were under bitter attack for their delay in the extension of broadcast power, for callous demands that persons on relief actually attempt work for which they had not been specially trained, and for seemingly systematic delays in the application of new discoveries for the benefit of the average man.
The average man was a favored subject for speeches these days. Oratory had returned to the status of a century before. Merely suspenseful television dramas had lost their public. Something more exciting had turned up. Instead of watching while imaginary persons suffered imaginary sorrows for its edification, the watching and listening public had identified itself with an "average man" who had been supplied with a high and splendid destiny by the Greks, and was being cheated out of it. The regrettable thing about this picture was that people could believe it.
There was a further drawback, in that anybody who listened could take part in the worldwide drama in progress. And they did. Most confined their participation to words and grumblings, but many found it zestful to riot, to smash things, and, on occasion, to loot.
But these outbreaks of violence were restricted to cities, where people were much too sophisticated and enlightened to listen to anything that did not supply them with kicks.
In the village of Traylor, none of this applied. It was a small and tranquil community inhabited by people who liked it that way. There were no factories or industries. Everybody knew everybody else—had until recently. Nowadays Traylor was crowded with relatives who wanted their children out of the cities. Which was a sane reaction. It should be remembered that there were some sane people all through mankind's adventure with the Greks. Only they were not in the limelight.
Hackett found Traylor a highly suitable place for Lucy to stay in. Presently he discovered that her cousin had explained that Lucy had come to visit. Hackett was described as her fiance, who had brought her here and had to wait until things settled down before he could hope to be employed again. She explained to Lucy that that story made everything look reasonable. If she couldn't confide to her friends that the President of the United States had called her up to chat and to ask a favor of her, she could confide something else. She had.
Lucy was unreasonably annoyed. Hackett hadn't mentioned marriage except when he said he might marry her for her brains. Lucy did not find the idea appealing. She wasn't pleased with her cousin. She was even less than cordial to Hackett when he came back from exploring the village.
"The Grek ship took off at noon yesterday," he observed, "and since then there've been two attempts to kill us, and we've been dumped here where everybody knows everybody else. That looks like quick action! But things move even faster than I thought. There's already an FBI man watching over us, and he's fully accepted in the village and not suspected of any special reason for being here."
Lucy did not answer. She was helping her cousin set the table for lunch.
"The answer," Hackett told her, "is that he was born here. He was pulled off some other assignment to come here and dry-nurse us. So he's officially on vacation and nobody thinks of him as doing FBI work here, because he isFBI!"
Lucy still did not answer. She went out to the kitchen and came back.
"I thought," said Hackett, "you might like to know that we're officially protected. But it may turn out that we're like a staked-out goat it's hoped a tiger will try to devour. If anybody can trail us to here, and does, it will be informative. But disturbing."
Lucy's cousin came in. They lunched, Lucy very quiet and Miss Constance Thale very dignified, as befitted a person doing a favor to her former schoolmate, the President of the United States. She asked Hackett about his profession. She'd no idea of what it might be.