“Cold feet?” I asked.
“No, we haven’t got cold feet. We are prepared to be as ruthless as may be necessary. But it would take time. We don’t want to take the time.”
“OK. So I write the stuff for you. What good would it do to write it? Who would publish it? How would you get it to the people?”
“Write it,” said this blond iceberg. “We’ll take it on from there. We’ll get it to the people. We’ll distribute it. That is not your worry.”
I was afraid. Perhaps a little angry. But mostly afraid. For not until this moment had I really realized the sheer implacability of these aliens. They were not vindictive and they were not hateful. They were scarcely an enemy in the sense we used the word. They were a malignant force and there was no pleading that would move them. They simply did not care. To them the Earth was no more than a piece of property and the humans less than nothing.
“You’re asking me,” I said, “to be a traitor to my race.”
Even as I said it, I was well aware that the term of traitor was meaningless to them. Recognized in its proper context, more than likely, but without a shred of meaning. For these things would not have the same kind of ethics as the human race; they would have another set of ethics, probably, but a set that would be as far beyond our comprehension as ours had been to them.
“Let’s think of it,” she said, “in practical terms. We’re giving you a choice. You either go along with the rest of humanity and share their common fate or you go along with us and fare a good deal better. If you decline, you will not hurt us greatly. If you accept, you’ll help yourself, to a great extent, and your fellow humans, perhaps to a somewhat less extent. You stand to gain and, believe me, the human race can’t lose.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your bargain?”
“A bargain is a bargain,” she said stiffly.
“You’ll pay well, I suppose.”
“Very well,” she said.
One of the bowling balls, coming out of nowhere I could see, rolled across the floor. It stopped about three feet from where I was sitting in the chair.
The girl got up from behind the desk and came around it. She stood at one corner of it, looking at the bowling ball.
The ball became striated—finely striated, like a diffraction grating. Then it began to split along all those tiny lines. It turned from black to green and split, and instead of a bowling ball, there was a little heap of money piled upon the floor.
I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t say a word.
She stooped and picked up a bill and handed it to me.
I looked at it. She waited. I looked at it some more.
“Well, Mr. Graves?” she said.
“It looks like money,” I told her.
“It is money. How else do you think we got all the money that we needed?”
“And you did it by the rules,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You broke one rule. The most important rule of all. Money is a measure of what one has done of the road he had built or the picture he had painted or the hours he has worked.”
“It’s money,” she said. “That is all that’s needed.”
She bent again and scooped up the entire pile of it. She put it on the desk and began to stack it.
There was no point, I knew, in trying to make her understand. She wasn’t being cynical. Or dishonest. It was a lack of understanding—an alien blind spot. Money was a product, not a symbol. It could be nothing else.
She made neat piles of it. She Stooped and picked up the few stray bills that had fluttered off the pile when she had picked it up. She put the stray bills on the pile.
The bill I had in my hand was a twenty, and a lot of the others seemed to be twenties, too, although there were some tens and a stray fifty here and there.
She stacked all the piles together and held it out to me.
“It’s yours,” she said.
“But I haven’t said—”
“Whether you work for us or not, it’s yours. And you’ll think about what I’ve been telling you.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
I stood up and took the money from her. I stuffed it in my pockets. The pockets bulged with it.
“There will come a day,” I said, patting the pockets, “when this stuff is no longer any good. There’ll be a time when there’ll be nothing one can buy with it.”
“When that day comes,” she said, “there will be something else. There’ll be whatever you may need.”
I stood there thinking, and the onlything that I could think about was that flow I had the money to pay the taxi driver. Except for that, my mind was a total blank. The enormity of this meeting had wiped me clean of everything except a total sense of loss—that and the fact that now I could pay the driver.
I had to get out of there, I knew. Had to leave this place before the flood of revulsion and emotion should come crashing down upon me. I had to leave while I still could leave with a numbed human dignity. I had to get away and find a place and the time to think. And until I did this thinking, I must appear to go along with them.
“I thank you, miss,” I said. “I don’t seem to know your name.”
“I haven’t got a name,” she told me. .. “There was never any reason I should have a name. Only ones like Atwood had to : have a name.”
“I thank you, then,” I said. “I will think it over.”
She turned and walked out of the room into the entry hall. There was no sign of the maid. Beyond the hall I saw that the living room was clean and shining and filled with furniture. And how much of it, I wondered, was really furniture, and how much of it was bowling balls changed into furniture?
I picked my coat and hat off the hall tree. She opened the front door.
“It was nice of you to come,” she said.
“It was very thoughtful. I trust you’ll come again.”
I walked out of the door and did not see my cab. In its place stood a long, white Cadillac.
“I had a cab,” I said. “It must be down the road.”
“We paid off the driver,” said the girl, “and sent him on his way. You will not need a cab.”
She saw my befuddlement.
“The car is yours,” she said. “If you’re to work with us—”
“With a built-in bomb?” I asked.
She sighed. “How do I make you understand? Let me put it brutally. So long as you can be useful to us, no harm will come to you. Perform this service for us and harm will never come to you. You’ll be taken care of as long as you may live.”
“And Joy Kane?” I asked.
“If you wish. Joy Kane as well.”
She looked at me with her icy eyes. “But try to stop us now, try to cross us now. . .”
She made a sound like a knife going through a throat.
I went down to the car.
At the edge of the city I stopped at a neighborhood shopping center and walked to a drugstore to buy a paper. I wanted to see if Gavin had been able to get his story about the missing bank funds.
I could tell him now, I knew, exactly what had happened. But, just like the others, he wouldn’t listen to me. I could walk into the office and sit down at my desk and write the greatest story the world had ever known. But it would be a waste of time to do it. It would not be published. It would be too ridiculous to publish. And even if it were published, no one would believe it. Or almost no one. A crackpot here and there. Not enough to count.
Before I got out of the car I riffled through the money in my jacket pocket to find a ten. dollar bill. I looked for a five and there weren’t any. And there weren’t any ones.