Age Of The Pussyfoot Part 8

"What are they talking about?" Forrester asked the boy.

"The war, of course. Shut up, won't you?"

". . . Well, there's a good news tonight from 22H Camelopardis! A late bulletin just received from sortie-control headquarters states that the difficult task of replacing the damaged probe has been completed! The first of the replacements rushed out from BO 7899 has achieved stellar orbit in a near-perfect, almost circular orbit, and all systems are go. Seven backup replacements-"

"Sweat," said the girl. "What a tedious war! Charles, you used to do things better, didn't you?"

"In what way?"

The girl looked puzzled. "More killing, of course."

"If you call that better, maybe we did. World War Two killed twenty million people, I think."

"Weep. Twenty million," breathed the girl. "And so far we've killed, what is it, Tunt? Twenty-two?"

"Twenty-two million?" asked Forrester.

The boy shook his head disgustedly. "Twenty-two individual Sirians. Isn't that rotten?"

But before Forrester could answer, his joymaker spoke up.

"Man Forrester! Your tests have been integrated and a.s.sayed. May I display the transcript on Bensen children equipment?"

"Go ahead," the boy said sullenly. "Can't be any worse than that."

The star map disappeared from the wall and was replaced by shimmering sine waves, punctuated with numbers that were quite meaningless to Forrester. "You may apply for reevaluation on any element of the profile, if you wish. Do you wish to do this, Man Forrester?"

"h.e.l.l, no." The numbers and graphs were not only meaningless but disturbing. Forrester had a flash of memory, which he identified as dating from the last time a government agency had concerned itself with finding him a job-after his discharge from his post-Korean peacetime army service, when he joined the long lines of unemployables telling their lies to a bored State Employment Service clerk. He could almost see the squares of linoleum on the floor, the queues of those who, like himself, wanted only to collect unemployment insurance for a while, in the hope that during that time the world would clarify itself for them.

But the joymaker was talking.

"Your profile, Man Forrester, indicates relatively high employability in personal-service and advocative categories. I have selected ninety-three possible openings. Shall I give you the list?"

"My G.o.d, no. Just give me the one you like best."

"Your optimum choice, Man Forrester, is as follows: Salary, seventeen thousand five hundred. This is rather less than your stated requirements, but an expense-"

"Hold on a minute! I'll say it's less! I was asking for ten million!"

"Yes, Man Forrester. You stated ten million per year. This is seventeen thousand five hundred per day. At four-day-week norm, allowing for projected overtime as against health losses, three million eight hundred thousand dollars per year. Expenses are also included, however, optimized at five million plus in addition to salary."

"Wait a minute." The numbers were so large as to be dizzying. He turned to the children. "That's almost nine million a year. Can I live on that?"

"Sweat, Charles, sure, if you want to."

Forrester took a deep breath.

"I'll take it," he said.

The joymaker did not seem particularly concerned. "Very well, Man Forrester. Your duties are as follows: Conversation. Briefing. Discussion. The orientation is timeless, so your status as a recent disfreezee will not be a handicap. You will be expected to answer questions and be available for discussions, usually remote due to habitat considerations. Some travel is indicated."

"Sweat." The Bensen children were showing signs of interest; the boy sat up, and his sister stared wide-eyed at Forrester.

"Supplementary information, Man Forrester: This employer has rejected automated services for heuristic reasons. His desideratum is subjectivity rather than accuracy of data. The employer is relatively unfamiliar with human history, culture, and customs-"

"It is!" cried the girl.

"-And will supplement your services with TIC data as needed."

Forrester cut in, "Never mind that. Where do I go for my interview?"

"Man Forrester, you have had it."

"You mean I've got the job? but-but what do I do next?"

"Man Forrester, I was outlining the procedure. Please note the following signal." There was a mellow, booming chime. "This will indicate a message from your employer. Under the terms of your employment contract, you may not decline to accept these messages during the hours of ten hundred to fourteen hundred on working days. You are further required to receive such messages with no more than twelve hours' delay even on nonworking days. Thank you, Man Forrester."

And that, thought Forrester, was that.

Except for trying to find out what was bugging the kids. He said, "All right. What's eating you?"

They were whispering together, their eyes on him. The boy stopped long enough to ask, "Eating us, Charles?"

"Why are you acting like that?" Forrester amended.

"Oh, nothing."

"Nothing important," corrected the girl.

"Come on!"

The little girl said, "It's just that we never knew anybody who'd work for them before."

"Work for who?"

"The joymaker told you, Charles! Don't you listen?" said the boy, and the girl chimed in, "Sweat, Charles! Don't you know who you're working for?"

Forrester took a deep breath and glared at them. He told himself that they were only children and that in fact he was rather fond of them; but they seemed on this particular morning to be determined to drive him mad. He sat down and picked up his joymaker. Carefully he scanned the cl.u.s.ter of b.u.t.tons until he found the crystal-clear, rounded one he was looking for, turned the joymaker until its spray nozzle was pointing at the exposed flesh of his arm, and pressed the b.u.t.ton.

Happily it was the right b.u.t.ton. What the fine mist that danced into his wrist might be he did not know, but it achieved the expected effect. It was like a supertranquilizer; it cleared his mind, quieted his pulse, and enabled him to say, quite calmly, "Machine! Just who the h.e.l.l have you got me working for?"

"Do you wish me to display a picture of your employer, Man Forrester?"

"You d.a.m.n bet I wish!"

"Please observe the view-wall, Man Forrester."

And observe it Forrester did; and he swallowed hard, stunned.

In all justice to the joymaker, Forrester was forced to admit that he had placed no restrictions on its choice of an employer for him. He had been willing to accept almost anything, but all the same he was surprised.

He hadn't expected his employer to have bright green fur, or a diadem of tiny eyes peering out of a ruff around a pointed head, or tentacles. He had not, in fact, expected it to be one of the enemy, the race whose presence in s.p.a.ce had scared mankind into a vast series of raid drills, weapons programs, and s.p.a.ce probes . . . in short, a Sirian.

Nine.

Forrester could have carried on his new duties anywhere. But he didn't want to, he wanted to return to the nest; and there in his room he wrestled with the joymaker and the view-wall and emerged with some sort of picture of what the Sirians were and what they were doing on Earth.

There were eleven of them, as it turned out. They were neither tourists nor diplomats. They were prisoners.

Some thirty years earlier, the first human vessels had made contact with the outposts of the Sirian civilization-a civilization much like the human in the quality of its technology, quite inhuman in terms of the appearance of its members and in their social organization. The human exploring party, investigating an extrasolarian planet, had encountered a Sirian ship nosing about a ringlike structure orbiting that planet.

Forrester, having learned that much, had already discovered some enormous gaps in his knowledge. Why hadn't somebody said something to him about men exploring extrasolar s.p.a.ce? Where was this system? And what was the orbital ring? It puzzled and confused Forrester; evidently it was not a Sirian structure and it certainly was not man's. But he avoided the proliferation of questions in his mind and stuck to the straight line of the first encounter with the Sirians.

The Earth ship was loaded for bear. Having found bear, it pushed all the b.u.t.tons. The commander may or may not have been given discretion about the chances of alien contact and what to do when and if it happened. But he wasted no time in contemplating choices. Everything the Earth ship owned lashed out at the squat, uneven Sirian vessel-lasers and sh.e.l.ls, rockets and energy-emitting decoys to confuse and disrupt its instruments. The Sirians didn't have a chance. Except for a few who were found still alive in s.p.a.ce tanks-their equivalent of suits-they all died with their ship.

The Earthmen brought them warily aboard, then turned tail and fled for home. (Years later, remote-operated probes cautiously returned to look at the scene. They discovered that even the wreckage of the Sirian ship was gone, apparently retrieved by . . . someone. Whereupon the probes fled, too.) Fourteen Sirians had survived the attack. Eleven of them were still alive and on Earth.

Forrester, watching the picture-story of the Sirians spread across his view-wall while the joymaker stolidly recited the facts of their exile, could not help feeling a twinge of sympathy. Thirty years of imprisonment! They must be getting old now. Did they hope? Did they despair? Were their wives and kiddies waiting back in the nest, or hatching pond, or burrow?

The joymaker did not say; it said only that the Sirians had been thoroughly studied, endlessly debated-and released. Released to house arrest.

The Parliament of Ridings had pa.s.sed laws about the Sirians. First, it was, from that moment, cardinal policy to avoid contact with their home planet. It was possible that the Sirians would not attack even if they discovered Earth-but it was certain that they wouldn't if they didn't. Second, the Sirians now in captivity could never go home. Third-mankind prepared for the attack it hoped would not come.

So the Sirians were spread across the face of the earth, one to a city. They were provided with large subsidies, good living quarters, everything they could want except the freedom to leave and the company of their kind. Every one of them was monitored-not with a mere joymaker. Transponders linked to the central computing nets were surgically built into their very nervous systems. The whereabouts of each was on record at every moment. They were informed as to the areas forbidden to them-rocket landing grounds, nuclear power stations, a dozen other cla.s.ses of installations. If they ignored the warning, they were reminded. If they failed to heed the reminder, they got a searing jolt of pain in the central nervous system to emphasize it. If that did not stop them, or if for any reason their transponders lost contact with the central computer, they would be destroyed at once. Three of them already had been.

At that moment the mellow chime sounded, the view-wall flickered and changed its picture, and Forrester was face to face with his employer.

It was just like the picture he had seen before.

Maybe it was the same Sirian. But it was looking at him now, or seemed to be, although it was hard to tell from the dozens of tiny eyes that rimmed its upper parts, and it spoke to him.

"Your name," it said in hollow, unaccented English, "is Charles Dalgleish Forrester, and you work for me and you call me S Four."

It sounded like a robot talking. More like a robot than the joymaker itself.

"Right, S Four," said Forrester.

"You tell me about yourself."

It sounded like a reasonable request. "All right, S Four. Where do you want me to begin?"

"You tell me about yourself." The tentacles were rippling slowly, the circlet of tiny eyes winking at random like the lights on a computer. He had been wrong about its sound, Forrester decided. It was more like a dubbed-in voice in a foreign film on the Late Show-back when there were foreign films and Late Shows.

"Well," said Forrester ruminatively, "I guess I can start with when I was born. It was the nineteenth of March, nineteen thirty-two. My father was an architect, but at that time he was unemployed. Later he worked as a project supervisor for the WPA. My mother-"

"You will tell me about WPA," interrupted the Sirian.

"It was a government agency designed to relieve unemployment during the Depression. You see, at that time there were periodic cyclic imbalances in the economy-"

"You will not lecture me," interrupted the Sirian, "and will explain terms for which letters WPA are function of ent.i.ty."

Dashed, Forrester tried to put in concrete terms the business of the New Deal's work relief program. Only concrete terms would do. The Sirian was distinctly not interested in Forrester's digressions into economic theory. Probably he liked his own theories better. But he seemed interested in, or at least did not interrupt, a couple of jokes about leaf-raking and about a WPA worker falling down when someone kicked the broom he was leaning on. The Sirian listened impa.s.sively, the girdle of eyes twinkling, for half an hour by the clock; then it said, cutting through Forrester's description of his high school graduation, "You will tell me more at another time," and was gone.

And Forrester was well enough pleased. He had never talked to a Sirian before.

Although the children were romantically thrilled, Adne did not approve when she heard about it. Not in the least. "Dear Charles," she said patiently, "they're the enemy. People will say you are doing an evil thing."

"If they're so dangerous, why aren't they in concentration camps?"

"Charles! You're acting kamikaze again!"

"Or why isn't there a law against working for them?"

She sighed and nibbled what looked like a candied orchid, regarding him with fond concern. "Oh, Charles. Human society is not merely a matter of law. You have to remember principle. There are certain standards of what is good and what is bad, and civilized people comply with them."

Forrester grumbled, "Yes, I understand that. It's good when anybody jumps on me. It's bad when I try to do anything about it."

"Kamikaze, Charles! I'm simply trying to point out to you that Taiko-for instance-would pay you at least as much as this filthy Sirian for a socially useful job-"

"Sweat Taiko!" shouted Forrester, making her laugh with his malaprop anger. "I'm going to do this by myself!"

So Adne left him there on friendly terms, but she left him nonetheless; an engagement in connection with her employment, she said, and Forrester did not know enough about her job to question it. He hadn't found an opportunity to ask what her "crawling" date had been, nor did he see a chance to bring up her suggestion about picking a name. She volunteered nothing, and he was just as well pleased.

Besides, he wanted to talk more with the children.

With their help he was learning more about the Sirian than the Sirian would be able to learn about him. The kids frothed with information. It wasn't difficult to master all the facts they had on tap, for there were not many real facts about Sirians to learn. All the hostages on Earth were of the same s.e.x, for example, but there was a good deal of argument about what that s.e.x was. Nor was their family structure at all clear. Whatever their relationships may have been on the planet from which they came, none of them had ever given any signs of being particularly depressed over being separated from their near and dear. Forrester took in the information grudgingly; he could not help thinking there should have been more of it. He said, "Do you mean to tell me that the only time we've ever seen them is this one time when we wiped out their exploring party?"

"Oh, no, Charles!" The boy was indulgent with him. "We long-range spied their home planet once, too. But that's dangerous. Anyway, that's what they say; so they stopped it. If it was up to me I would have kept it up."

"And like in the chromosphere of Mira Ceti," added the girl brightly.

"The what?"

The boy chortled. "Oh, yeah. That was a fun one! We had it on our cla.s.s evaluation trip."

"Sweat!" cried the girl excitedly. "Say! Maybe Forrester would like to go with us if we do it again. I'd like to!"

Forrester felt a sensation of committing himself to more than he liked. He said uncertainly, "Well, sure. But I don't have much time right now. I mean, these are my working hours-"

"Oh, sweat, Charles," said the boy impatiently, "it doesn't take time. I mean, you don't go anywhere in s.p.a.ce. It's a construct."

"Only it was kind of real, too," added the girl.