The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert Silverberg
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by brownies; some of them have even seen brownies.”
“What about the milk?” I asked.
“Milk? What milk?”
“Why, the milk they should set out for them.”
“How do I know,” he said. “Why don’t you call up some of the milk companies and find out.”
* * * *
That is just what I did—and, so help me Hannah, the milk companies were slowly going crazy. Every driver had come racing back to get extra milk, because the most of their customers were ordering an extra quart or so. They were lined up for blocks outside the stations waiting for new loads and the milk supply was running low.
There weren’t any of us in the newsroom that morning who did anything but write brownie copy. We filled the paper with it—all sorts of stories about how the brownies had been helping people. Except, of course, they hadn’t known it was brownies helping them until they read my story. They’d just thought that it was good luck.
When the first edition was in, we sat back and sort of caught our breath—although the calls still were coming in—and I swear my typewriter still was hot from the copy I’d turned out.
The papers came up, and each of us took our copy and started to go through it, when we heard a roar from J. H.’s office. A second later, J. H. came out himself, waving a paper in his fist, his face three shades redder than a brand-new fire truck.
He practically galloped to the city desk and he flung the paper down in front of the Barnacle and hit it with his fist. “What do you mean?” he shouted. “Explain yourself. Making us ridiculous!”
“But, J. H. I thought it was a good gag and…”
“Brownies!” J. H. snorted.
“We got all those calls,” said Barnacle Bill. “They still are coming in. And…”
“That’s enough,” J. H. thundered. “You’re fired!”
He swung around from the city desk and looked straight at me. “You’re the one who started it,” he said. “You’re fired, too.”
I got up from my chair and moved over to the city desk. “We’ll be back a little later,” I told J. H., “to collect Our severance pay.”
He flinched a little at that, but he didn’t back up any.
The Barnacle picked up an ash tray off his desk and let it fall. It hit the floor and broke. He dusted off his hands. “Come on, Mark,” he said “I’ll buy you a drink.”
IV
We went over to the corner. Joe brought us a bottle and a couple of glasses, and we settled down to business.
Pretty soon some of the other boys started dropping in. They’d have a drink or two with us and then go back to work. It was their way of showing us they were sorry the way things had turned out. They didn’t say anything, but they kept dropping in. There never was a time during the entire afternoon when there wasn’t some one drinking with us. The Barnacle and I took on quite a load.
We talked over this brownie business, and at first we were a little skeptical about it, laying the situation more or less to public gullibility. But the more we thought about it, and the more we drank, the more we began to believe, there might really be brownies. For one thing, good luck just doesn’t come in hunks the way it appeared to have come to this town of ours in the last few weeks. Good luck is apt to scatter itself around a bit—and while it may run in streaks, it’s usually pretty thin. But here it seemed that hundreds—if not thousands—of persons had been visited by good luck.
* * * *
By the middle of the afternoon, we were fairly well agreed there might be something to this brownie business. Then of course, we tried to figure out who the brownies were, and why they were helping people.
“You know what I think,” said the Barnacle. “I think they’re aliens. People from the stars. Maybe they’re the ones who have been flying all these saucers.”
“But why would aliens want to help us?” I objected. “Sure, they’d want to watch us and find out all they could; and after a while, they might try to make contact with us. They might even be willing to help us—but if they were they’d want to help us as a race, not as individuals.”
“Maybe” the Barnacle suggested, “they’re just busybodies. There are humans like that. Psychopathic do-gooders, always sticking in their noses, never letting well enough alone.”
“I don’t think so,” I argued back at him. “If they are trying to help us, I’d guess it’s a religion with them. Like the old friars who wandered all over Europe in the early days. Like the Good Samaritan. Like the Salvation Army.”
But he wouldn’t have it that way. “They’re busybodies,” he insisted. “Maybe they come from a surplus economy, a planet where all the work is done by machines and there is more than enough of everything for everyone. Maybe there isn’t anything left for anyone to do—and you know yourself that a man has to have something to keep him occupied, something to do so he can think that he is important.”
Then along about five o’clock Jo Ann came in. It had been her day off and she hadn’t known what had happened until someone from the office phoned her. So she’d come right over.
She was plenty sore at me, and she wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to explain that at a time like this a man had to have a drink or two. She got me out of there and out back to my car and drove me to her place. She fed me black coffee and finally gave me something to eat and along about eight o’clock or so she figured I’d sobered up enough to try driving home.
* * * *
I took it easy and I made it, but I had an awful head and I remembered that I didn’t have a job. Worst of all, I was probably tagged for life as the man who had dreamed up the brownie hoax. There was no doubt that the wire services had picked up the story, and that it had made front page in most of the papers coast to coast. No doubt, the radio and television commentators were doing a lot of chuckling at it.
My cottage stands up on a sharp little rise above the lake, a sort of hog’s back between the lake and road, and there’s no road up to it. I had to leave my car alongside the road at the foot of the rise, and walk up to the place.
I walked along, my head bent a little so I could see the path in the moonlight and I was almost to the cottage before I heard a sound that made me raise my head.
And there they were.
They had rigged up a scaffold and there were four of them on it, painting the cottage madly. Three of them were up on the roof replacing the bricks that had been knocked out of the chimney. They had storm windows scattered all over the place and were furiously applying putty to them. And you could scarcely see the boat, there were so many of them slapping paint on it.
I stood there staring at them, with my jaw hanging on my breastbone, when I heard a sudden swish and stepped quickly to one side. About a dozen of them rushed by, reeling out the hose, running down the hill with it. Almost in a shorter time than it takes to tell it, they were washing the car.
They didn’t seem to notice me. Maybe it was because they were so busy they didn’t have the time to—or it might have been just that it wasn’t proper etiquette to take notice of someone when they were helping him.
* * * *
They looked a lot like the brownies that you see pictured in the children’s books, but there were differences. They wore pointed caps, all right, but when I got close to one of them who was busy puttying, I could see that it was no cap at all. His head ran up to a point, and that the tassel on the top of it was no tassel of a cap, but a tuft of hair or feathers-I couldn’t make out which. They wore coats with big fancy buttons on them, but I got the impression—I don’t know how—that they weren’t buttons, but something else entirely. And instead of the big sloppy