He hadn't taken it well. There were other physicists who went on zestfully through the most abstruse areas of Grek theory. They'd produced nothing new as yet, of course. They couldn't hope for independent achievement before they were thoroughly grounded in the new way of looking at things. But they were admired, while Hackett had lost his reputation with his dismissal. He no longer had a career. His training and his work up to now had become useless.
At this time we who were madly absorbed in the gifts the Greks had brought us couldn't see Jim's value. There were a lot of things we didn't see. We don't feel proud of ourselves. We were idiots. Some of us were worse than idiots. Very luckily, Hackett wasn't.
But he had enough reason to feel bitter as he drove along a curving secondary road on the day before the Greks' departure. Beside him, Lucy Thale frowned a little. She wasn't too happy, either. She'd just finished her year's interning at Hoyt Memorial Hospital, and she'd been debating what it would mean if she married Hackett. There'd been a time when it had seemed a complete and beautifully satisfying career. But Hackett wasn't thinking romantically now.
The traffic grew more dense even on this road. From fifty miles an hour, the practical road speed dropped to forty, then to thirty. Others beside Hackett had abandoned the toll highways for lesser thoroughfares. Hackett drove automatically, scowling to himself.
The traffic stopped. Hackett braked, and wound up with his front bumper only inches from the car ahead. Presently movement began again, inch by inch and foot by foot. A long time later they came to a place where a car had swerved out of the right-hand lane to try to leapfrog on ahead. There'd been a truck coming in the opposite direction and the leap-frogging car couldn't get back into its proper lane. It should have darted across the road into a ditch. It hadn't. A wrecked truck and four more or less wrecked cars had blocked traffic for a time. The cars had now been pushed off the highway. Traffic speeded up again.
"That's six wrecks we've seen so far today," observed Lucy. "If anybody was hurt, though—"
If so, they'd been taken away. The national highway safety board had estimated that there would be between nine hundred and a thousand highway fatalities today, due to the traffic toward the lift-off tribute to the Greks. That compared with estimates of six to seven hundred for a long Fourth of July weekend. The farewell to the Greks would be costly in human lives, but there was no way to prevent it. And Hackett had spent a good deal of his financial reserves getting tickets for himself and Lucy to watch the departure.
There were gigantic grandstands built all around the monstrous space ship. There were many square miles of parking space set aside. There were acres of cubbyholes containing bunks, to be rented for the night before the take-off. There was an enormous bunting-draped auditorium in which an incredible departure party would be held in honor of the Greks. Humanity would do itself proud. There were already organizations collecting funds with which to build a towering permanent monument where the Greks had first landed. It seemed proper. Hadn't the Greks come to turn Earth into a terrestrial paradise in which nobody would work more than a day a week, all men would retire at forty, and everybody would have every possession he'd ever envied anybody else?
It is too bad those plans for a monument weren't carried through. It might be useful to remind later generations what fools we humans can be.
The traffic spread out to where individual vehicles were one car length apart and the speed was up to fifty miles an hour once more. Small towns and villages appeared near the roadside from time to time. Little service highways led to them. Hackett noticed a car lumbering off to the right at one such turnoff. Two miles later he saw two more cars turn off. Not long after, another car went careening out of the traffic-loaded secondary road, though there was then no settlement of any sort in sight. Each of these cars seemed to turn off in consequence of something ahead of Hackett. The first one he'd noticed was perhaps the eighth car ahead. The seventh had swerved off on a lesser road. The sixth was followed off by the fifth. The road passed a small town with twin steeples on its church, and the fourth car ahead left at the next possible exit. The third and second went off together. It was peculiar.
Then the car just ahead of Hackett turned off. It would not be easy to get back into such traffic as this, but it left. And then Hackett saw what eight other cars had refused to follow. But Lucy saw it first.
"Jim!" she said quickly. "Look! It's an Aldarian!"
Hackett nodded with some, grimness. The car just ahead was a convertible with its top down. It slowed violently, as if a foot had been taken off its accelerator. Hackett had to brake to avoid crashing into it. But then it shot ahead with such acceleration as almost to crash into the car ahead. It braked again and swerved wildly, came back on the highway, and proceeded normally for a minute or more. Then it darted to the right, overcorrected so it headed into the left-hand lane, and got back just before a monstrous truck roared by from the opposite direction.
The convertible stopped short and Hackett burned rubber to keep from smashing into it. Instinctively he cringed in anticipation of being crashed into from behind. But the white convertible shot ahead again and Jim sent his own car leaping after it.
"Yes," he said between his teeth, "it's an Aldarian. And he's a lousy driver. Somebody'll get killed if he keeps on!"
The furry poll and ears of an Aldarian showed above the back of the driver's seat. The world loved Aldarians—one of the few excusable reactions we managed in connection with the stay of the Grek ship. The Aldarians were likable. We owed gratitude to the Greks, but it had to be admitted that they made human beings feel creepy. Aldarians were something else again. They were, we understood, the students and trainees of the Greks. They knew vastly more than men, but one didn't feel uncomfortably inferior to them. They didn't make anybody feel creepy. And they took delight in doing primitive things—like driving human-design cars—which their Grek officers and instructors in the training ship never bothered with.
This Aldarian doubtless enjoyed driving a human car in the middle of human traffic. He'd probably been presented with it. Greks and Aldarians alike were overwhelmed with gifts everywhere they went. But he shouldn't have tried to drive in traffic like this, not until he'd had a lot of practice. His car required the constant attention of its driver, which was not true of Grek-designed cars. He couldn't remember that requirement. He was charmed with the adventure he was having. . . .
Lucy watched, fascinated by the sight of an Aldarian in the flesh. Hackett swore at his erratic driving. He not only swerved unpredictably, but from time to time he had to slow down and put his whole mind on aiming his car again. Which is not a good practice in nearly bumper-to-bumper traffic at fifty miles an hour.
Lucy said suddenly, "Jim, Aldarians are deaf, aren't they?"
"Yes, all of them." Hackett added sourly, "They're also crazy as drivers."
"But—they've got ears! Why?"
Hackett did not answer immediately. The Aldarian driver found himself about to run off the highway to the right and agitatedly swung to the left, just as a truckload of lumber raced past in the opposite direction. The truck tapped the alien's car, at exactly the right angle and with just the right force to flip it sharply into its proper lane and line of travel. The furry-headed driver was flung to one side. He straightened up frantically, and found everything perfectly normal. He was bemused. He was astonished!