“And another thing,” I said. “You haven’t got your model.”
I fished around in my topcoat pocket and found the tiny doll I’d picked up off the floor of the basement room in the Belmont house.
“Far be it from me,” I said, “to make it tough on you.”
I tossed the doll toward him and he lifted the shortened arm and, despite the feeble light, caught it unerringly. And as he caught it, during that second when it touched his fingers, it melted into him—as if his body, or his hand, had been a mouth that had sucked it in.
His face became symmetrical and his arms became the same length and the lopsided quality went entirely out of him. But his clothing was a bad fit now and the short sleeve of his jacket was halfway up his arm. He still was smaller, much smaller than I had remembered him.
“Thanks,” he said. “It helps. One doesn’t have to concentrate so hard to hold his shape.”
The sleeve was growing down his arm; you could see it grow. And the rest of his clothes were changing, too, so that they would fit him.
“The clothes are a bother, though,” he said conversationally.
“That’s why you had racks of them in the downtown office.”
He looked a little startled; then he said:
“Yes, you were there, of course. It had Slipped my mind. I must say, Mr. Graves, that you surely get around.”
“It’s my business,” I told him.
“And the other with you?”
“I am sorry,” I said. “I should have introduced you. Miss Kane, Mr. Atwood.”
Atwood stared at her. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” he said, “it occurs to me that you people have the damnedest reproductive setup I have ever seen.”
“We like it,” Joy said.
“But so cumbersome,” he said. “Or, rather, made so cumbersome and so intricate by the social customs and the concepts of morality you have woven round it. I suppose that otherwise it is perfectly all right.”
I said: “You wouldn’t know, of course.”
“Mr. Graves,” he said, “you must understand that while we ape your bodies, we need not necessarily subscribe to all the activity connected with those bodies.”
“Our bodies,” I said, “and perhaps some other things. Like bombs placed in a car.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Such simple things as that.”
“And traps set before a door?”
“Another simple thing. Not intricate, you know. Complex things are very much beyond us.”
“But why the trap?” I asked him. “You tipped your hand on that one. I didn’t know about you. I didn’t even dream there were such things as you. If there had been no trap—“You’d still have known,” he said. “You were the one who could have put two and two together. You see, we knew about you. We knew you, perhaps, a good deal better than you knew yourself. We knew what you could do, what you most probably would do. And we know, as well, a little of the happenings immediately ahead. Sometimes we do not always. There are certain factors—”
“Now wait,” I said, “just a goddamn minute. You mean you knew about me. Not just me alone, of course?”
“Certainly not just you alone. But something of every one of you who might at some time be placed in such a position as to become aware of us. Like newsmen and officers of the law and certain public officials and key industrialists and—”
“You studied all of these?”
He almost smirked at us. “Every one of them,” he said.
“And there were others than myself?”
“Oh, of course, there were. Quite a number of them.”
“And there were traps and bombs—”
“A wide variety of things,” he told me.
“You murdered them,” I said.
“If you insist. But I must remind you not to be self-righteous. When you came in here tonight you had full intention to Pour some acid down the sink.”
“Of course,” I said, “but now I realize it would have done no good.”
“Just possibly,” said Atwood, “it would have gotten rid of me—or, at least, the major part of me. I was down that drain, you know.”
“Rid of you,” I said. “But not of all the others.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Get rid of you and there could be another Atwood. Any time you want, there could be another Atwood. Frankly, there’s no point to interminably getting rid of Atwoods when there’s always, if necessary, another one on tap.”
“I do not know,” said Atwood thoughtfully. “I can’t figure you folks out. There is an undefinable something about you that makes no sense at all. You set up your rules of conduct and you fabricate your neat little social patterns, but you have no patterns of yourselves. You can be incredibly stupid one moment and incredibly brilliant the next. And the most vicious thing about you the most awful thing about you—is your unspoken, ingrained faith in destiny. Your destiny, not someone else’s. It’s an appalling quality to even think about.
“And you,” I said. “You’d have borne me ill will if I had poured the acid.”
“Not particularly,” said Atwood.
“There,” I told him, “is a point of difference between us that you should possibly consider. I bear you—or your kind—considerable ill will for your attempts to kill me. And I bear you as much or more, ill will for the murder of my friend.”
“Prove it,” said Atwood defiantly.
“What’s that?”
“Prove I killed your friend. I believe,” he said, “that is the proper human attitude. You get away with anything if no one proves you did it. And, likewise, Mr. Graves, you may be confusing viewpoints. Conditions modify them.”
“Meaning that in certain other places murder is no crime.”
“That,” said Atwood, “is the point exactly.”
The flame of the alcohol lamp flickered fitfully and set up fleeing shadows that raced around the room. And it was so ordinary, so commonplace, I thought, that we Should be here, two products of different Planets and of different cultures, talking as if we might have been two men. Perhaps this were so because this other thing, what... ever it might be, had assumed the shape of man and had schooled itself in human speech and action and, perhaps, to some extent as well in the human viewpoint. I wondered if the same condition would exist if it were one of the bowling balls, unshaped to human or to any other form, which rested on the stool and talked to us, perhaps as the Dog talked, without the human movement of a mouth. Or if the thing which had become at least a momentary Atwood could talk so easily and well if it had not absorbed so great a knowledge, despite the fact that knowledge might be no more than superficial, of the ways of Earth and Man.
How long, I wondered, had these aliens been upon the Earth and how many of them? For years, perhaps, patiently working themselves into not only the knowledge but the feel of Earth and Man, studying the social patterns and the economic systems and the financial setup. It would take a long time, I realized, because they would not only be starting cold on the bare knowledge in itself but probably would be facing not only an unfamiliar but probably an unknown factor in our maze of property laws and our legal and our business systems.
Joy put her hand on my arm. “Let’s leave,:: she said. “I don’t like this character.
“Miss Kane,” said Atwood, “we are quiteprepared to accept your dislike of us. To tell you the truth, we simply do not care.”
“I talked to a family this morning that was worried sick,” said Joy, “because they had no place to go. And this evening I saw another family that had been evicted from its home because the father had lost his job.”
“Things like that,” said Atwood, “have been going on through all your history. Don’t challenge me on that. I have read your history. This is no new condition we’ve created. It is a very old one in your human terms. And we have done it honestly and, believe me, with all due attention to legality.”