“Suppose I can show proof that Tempo was sabotaged by entities from another planet, Mr. Path?”
“Oh, come now, Dr. Inly!”
“Please hold the line. There is someone else here who wishes to speak to you.”
Bard took the phone quickly. “Mr. Path, this is Bard Lane speaking. If you want to gamble on this story, I suggest you fly out here. We haven’t too much time to waste. I know that superlatives are sometimes distasteful. But this, Mr. Path, is the biggest story of this or any other century.”
“What is your address there?”
Walter Howard Path was a lean, enormously tall man with stooped shoulders, seamed cheeks and restless eyes. With his hands jammed in his hip pockets, he slouched over to the windows of the suite and looked down into the street. The four of them watched his motionless back. The conference lasted for five hours. Walter Howard Path had been angry at what he suspected was a ruse for one hour, incredulous for two more hours, grudgingly intrigued for the fourth hour, and obscurely frightened from then on.
Without turning he said, “It’s a hell of a gamble, folks. Even when the fit is so good. Even when it answers so many questions about this crazy, violent planet of ours. Dammit, people won’t want to believe a thing like that. And the ones who will jump into line will be the faddists, the cultists, the chronic end-of-the-world kids.”
The tape recorder had been switched off. Walter Howard Path ambled back to the small table, fiddled with the tape reel.
He gave them all a weary smile. “So I guess I’ve got to hold my nose and go off the high board. Today is Wednesday. I’ll blow it in the Sunday column and on the Sunday night program. We better dig us a hole and crawl in and hold our ears.”
“This is Melvin C. Lynn, reporting the news for Wilkins’ Mead and the Wilkins Laboratories, where the secret of your happiness was developed.
“Tonight, listeners, I am going to give you a different sort of news program. Today a colleague, Walter Howard Path, broke a rather astonishing story. It is considered ethical in this newscasting field never to run down a competitor directly. However, your Wilkins’ Mead reporter feels that it is high time somebody took a lusty kick at Mr. Path’s little red wagon.
“I have attempted to report the news to you honestly and sincerely. Sometimes I have fallen for a hoax. All of us have. But I have never been guilty of perpetrating one. Mr. Path has an enormous audience, far larger than mine. His responsibility to that audience is equally enormous. However, straight news reporting does not seem to satisfy our Mr. Path. You will remember his disinterment of the flying saucer hoax a few years ago. Possibly that sensationalism added a few more readers, a few more listeners.
“This time, however, Walter Howard Path has overreached himself. You all remember the scandal of Project Tempo. A Dr. Bard Lane, physicist, was dismissed for incompetence. He had shielded a technician, a William Kornal, who had committed sabotage on the project. There was a rumored intrigue between Dr. Lane and Dr. Sharan Inly, a sexy young psychiatrist on the project. In the finale debacle, twenty-eight persons died in the premature takeoff of the project ship. For honest reporters, there was no more news to be reported.
“Now let us examine what Walter Howard Path has done. He has gathered around himself a very unwholesome little group. Dr. Bard Lane, discredited physicist. Dr. Sharan Inly, sexy psychiatrist. Mr. William Kornal, unpunished technician guilty of criminal sabotage. Dr. Heintz Lurdorff, hypnotist and alleged psychiatrist. Remember that with the possible exception of Lurdorff, the other three have every reason to find some sort of excuse for their previous actions.
“These five persons have cooked up the most fantastic story that ever hit these tired old ears. Long-range hypnosis from another planet! People like us who can come here on thought waves, or something, and make us do whatever they wish! Remind me to use those Martians or whatever they are as an excuse to my wife the next time I stay out too late. Now see how neatly it all fits. This is a wonderful country, listeners. No matter how crazy your story is, you can find somebody to believe you.
“Let us check and see the possible results, if Walter Howard Path is permitted to use the power of the press, radio and video to spread this new yarn of his. Dr. Bard Lane will, in the minds of fools, be acquitted of mismanagement, negligence and preoccupation with pretty Sharan instead of his job. Sharan Inly will become the high priestess of the new cult, and probably do very well indeed, financially. Dr. Heintz Lurdorff will get some publicity to trade on. William Kornal will be able to say, ‘See? I didn’t do it. Them Martians did it.’
“And how about Walter Howard Path? Priceless publicity on a story none of the rest of us would touch. Here is his master touch, though. He says that two of the alien people who grab us and make us do tricks are coming here in person, on a space ship, for goodness sake! A couple. Brother and sister. Raul and Leesa Kinson. Your Wilkins’ Mead reporter wonders how long it took our Mr. Path to think up those names. Ever play anagrams? Take that name. Leesa Kinson. Use the letters in it. You can make two words. ‘No sense.’ With four letters left over, a-l-k-i, a practically prehistoric slang word for alcohol. How long is Walter Howard Path going to feed us delusions out of the bottom of a bottle? How brazen can his hoaxes become?
“Your Wilkins’ Mead reporter leaves you with this one thought. How can a responsible video network or a responsible publisher give house room to an irresponsible man like Walter Howard Path and still claim to function in the public interest?”
“From the wires of the Associated Press. Yesterday morning one person was killed and three injured in a riot at Benson, Georgia. The clash was between the new cult which spends hours on hilltops watching for Walter Howard Path’s mythical spaceships, and a detachment of the Georgia State Police. The new cult calls itself Kinsonians.”
Excerpt from an address given at the annual dinner of the American Medical Association: “It is not altogether strange that the mass hallucination of the late nineteen forties involving ‘flying saucers’ should now be duplicated by a similar mass hallucination involving ‘space ships.’ Even the most cursory study of the history of mass hysteria shows clearly a cyclical pattern, with the outbreaks averaging twenty to forty years between peaks of intensity. At the latest count the ‘space ship’ which we are to play host to, according to the Kinsonians, has been reported landing at twenty-six different places. It is no accident that the locations of the ‘landings’ correlate most amusingly with the activity of the Kinsonian groups in those places.”
1. As there is no desire to give special attention to unfounded charges regarding Project Tempo through any formal statement in rebuttal, all personnel are directed to refrain from commenting to representatives of the press.
2. All military personnel directly connected with Project Tempo have been given changes of station to take them immediately outside the continental limits of the United States to new posts where the possibility of such interviews is lessened.
3. Official position on this matter, to be announced later, is that in the light of current world tension it is of dubious value to the national effort that mass hysteria should be whipped to such a peak that industrial absenteeism is at an unprecedented rate.
4. All officers and EM who profess publicly any degree of belief in Kinsonianism and, when warned, shall persist in such belief, will be considered unfit for duty.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen of the vidio audience, we bring you that lint-headed wonder of the stratosphere, that little man who didn’t arrive in a space ship, that Yum-Bubble (Chew it, it’s good for you) comic, Willy Wise! Hey, Willy! What’s the matter, Willy? The cameras are over here, not up there on the ceiling.”