A few people heard about the picked up signals and were uneasy. For some reason, security slipped up on this item of fact, and a number of people noted that the Greks had said they were going home, to ten fight-years away. But their signals came from the moon, less than two light-seconds away. If, however, anybody drew any particular conclusions from such facts, they did nothing about them.
In the general public, though, there were no misgivings of any kind at any time. Not about the Greks! They'd gone away after enriching humanity beyond belief. True, there was unemployment, there was hardship, there was depression and there was indignation. Human industries, unable to sell anything but Grek-designed units, and unable to make them, closed down. Other factories, wanting to modify themselves to make such units, were unable to get anybody to work at any rational wage. People who saw the extinction of whole classes of business—fuel, for example—tried to get out of those businesses and the stock market hit bottom, bored holes in it, and went down farther. But this was not the fault of the Greks! They'd done great things for us and they intended greater. So we were angry and impatient with the current state of things. We wanted what the Greks had given us and we wanted it fast.
Already murmurings blamed the delay on Wall Street, or capitalists, or graft, or corruption. People said indignantly that "the interests" would keep us from our Grek-given wealth and it wasn't likely we'd ever get what the Greks had meant us to have unless they came back and forced the arrival of an economic millenium.
The point of which, naturally, was that people began to fink the granting of all our wishes to the return of the Greks.
There was more rioting. In South Africa it took on a racial tinge. In ultra-socialistic nations, the riots implied criticism of Marxism-Leninism. In other countries the rioters seemed pro-communist as well as pro-Grek. There was an increasing, seething political chaos in much of the world, and there was financial depression everywhere. Ugly moods characterized the followers of volunteer agitators, but also nearly everybody who'd set their hearts on working only one day a week with retirement at forty and everybody having everything that anybody else had.
The signals from the moon presently yielded pictures. They were of hands—Grek hands—making gestures in that formalized code with which the Greks communicated with the Aldarians. The pictures proved that the Greks hadn't gone away. But it didn't matter because the signals stopped. Hackett was among those who believed the Aldarians had heard the rumors about them, though they'd actually have to read them, and had reported the matter to the Greks. So the Greks stopped the signals.
At about this same time the various underground activities of the United States Government began to bear fruit. For one, Hackett found a way to find a way to discover how the broadcast-power receivers worked. He labored frantically at it. His basic discovery was that—as he'd guessed—the Greks were truly stupendous liars. Their policy could be summed up in a sequence of five statements. (1) If the Greks wanted to take over Earth, they could take it by violence or they could take it by deception. (2) But violence would reduce the value of Earth after they'd conquered it. Also (3) violence would leave the surviving humans filled with hatred which would make them less desirable as slaves. Therefore (4) it would be much more intelligent to let men conquer and enslave themselves so they would serve their new owners and masters with a loyal and grateful docility. And (5) the Greks' policy of action and of instrumentation would follow from the preceding statements.
They said they gave us all their devices and all their learning. But their science was obfuscation and their devices were wholly deceptive. The Greks had designed—say—their broadcast-power receiver as a stage magician plans his card tricks and illusions, to keep his audience from knowing how he does them.
That was Hackett's basic discovery, after the way to make the discovery had been discovered. He examined a power receiver, not for its working principles, but for the equivalent of magic passes and mumblings that would look as if they did something, but didn't. Then he began to take such things away from the complex apparatus, and somehow to make their absence not count. On the second day he had his first success. After the third day he had a receiver that worked with nine-tenths of its original parts removed.
There were some other discoveries not reported in the public newscasts. There'd been suspicions that the Greks had some sort of flying device coated with a sort of radar black so radars wouldn't be able to detect it. In the garbage pit specimens of arctic vegetation had been found: tundra grass; dwarf willows; kidney ferns. The records of Johnson detectors, noting objects at a different temperature from their backgrounds, showed oddities that fitted in with periods of bad weather at the Ohio landing place of the ship. It became practically certain that the Greks had some sort of flying object and that they'd made explorations including arctic landings.
It was information. It fitted into other information but added nothing to the prospects for the defense of Earth against the Greks—particularly since public opinion was feverishly in favor of anything the Greks were for. Nobody would have taken the fact of secret exploration seriously. If the Greks wanted to go somewhere, why not? Shouldn't we let the benign, benevolent, beautifully generous and illimitably altruistic Greks do as they pleased?
Then Hackett ran into something which filled him with bitter doubt. Human devices, on the whole, work both ways. Radio receivers need to be changed very slightly to become transmitters, and the reverse is true of transmitters. Most pumps can be made to work as engines, and most engines as pumps. A dynamo can function as a motor, and a motor as a dynamo. The starting motor generator in human cars was a familiar example of the last. But a Grek broadcast-power receiver couldn't be made to work as a transmitter. It simply couldn't be done.
Hackett racked his brains. Until he worked that out he didn't have anything but an enormously simplified receiver. It wasn't enough. It wasn't anything. And time was working for the Greks.
No day passed without an intensification of the chaotic state of Earth. If it had happened without the Greks' visit beforehand, there would already have been starvation and worse. It was disaster comparable to war, when all a nation's productive capacity is taken away from normal use and applied to destruction. Now production simply stopped. It was not applied to anything. Prices fell because nobody wanted to buy anything, since presently they could get better things. Human production simply ceased.
Stored surplus foodstuffs began to run low. Many people began to hoard food. All other values dropped to zero. There was practically a complete paralysis of all human activities—and we waited blandly for the miracle we expected.
Hackett took his stripped-down power receiver to Washington and demonstrated it. It was enlightening, but it wasn't enough to start human activities up again. Attempts by other men to use Hackett's principles of research into Grek gadgets yielded no results. There were only so many human brains that could work on the premise that liars making machinery would make mechanical lies.
Lucy was along because she'd contributed to what fragments of information had been gathered, but Hackett alone made his demonstration and found out the inflexibility of most human brains. When he rejoined Lucy, his expression was queer.
"You look almost stunned," said Lucy. "Red tape?"
"No," said Hackett. "Everything's fine. I'm a hero.
You're a heroine. But—I've got a job to do. I'll join you later at Traylor."
Lucy stood still looking at him. He said impatiently, "I explained what you've done—how you've thought straight when nobody else seemed able to. You did what the Aldarians wanted. You kept your mouth shut and gave me the key to what I've figured out. If I'm—delayed coming back, somebody will come and talk to you from time to time about—things. What's been accomplished has to be kept secret for now, but you'll definitely be in on everything that's done."