The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Robert Silverberg
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just had to stand and watch.”
I grinned. “There’s nothing bad about that, Colonel. They were just being good to you.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “When they got it all prettied up, they painted a brownie on the nose.”
That’s just about all there’s to it so far as the brownies are concerned. The job they did on the colonel’s plane was, actually, the sole public appearance that they made. But it was enough to serve their purpose if publicity was what they wanted—a sort of visual clincher, as it were. One of our photographers—a loopy character by the name of Charles, who never was where you wanted him when you wanted him, but nevertheless seemed to be exactly on the spot when the unusual or disaster struck—was out at the airport that morning. He wasn’t supposed to be there; he was supposed to be covering a fire, which turned out luckily to be no more than a minor blaze. How he managed to wind up at the airport even he, himself, never was able to explain. But he was there and he got the pictures of the brownies polishing up the plane—not only one or two pictures, but a couple dozen of them, all the plates he had. Another thing—he got the pictures with a telescopic lens. He’d put it in his bag that morning by mistake; he’d never carried it before. After that one time he never was without it again and, to my knowledge, never had another occasion where he had to use it.
* * * *
Those pictures were a bunch of lulus. We used the best of them on page one—a solid page of them—and ran two more pages of the rest inside. The AP got hold of them, transmitted them, and a number of other member papers used them before someone at the Pentagon heard about it and promptly blew his stack. But no matter what the Pentagon might say, the pictures had been run and whatever harm—or good—they might have done could not be recalled.
I suppose that if the colonel had known about them, he’d have warned us not to use them and might have confiscated them. But no one knew the pictures had been taken until the colonel was out of town, and probably back in Washington. Charlie got waylaid somehow—at a beer joint most likely—and didn’t get back to the office until the middle of the afternoon.
When he heard about it, J. H. paced up and down and tore his hair and threatened to fire Charlie; but some of the rest of us got him calmed down and back into his office. We caught the pictures in our final street edition, picked the pages up for the early runs next day, and the circulation boys were pop-eyed for days at the way those papers sold.
The next day, after the worst of the excitement had subsided, the Barnacle and I went down to the corner to have ourselves a couple. I had never cared too much for the Barnacle before, but the fact that we’d been fired together established a sort of bond between us; and he didn’t seem to be such a bad sort, after all.
* * * *
Joe was as sad as ever. “It’s them brownies,” he told us, and he described them in a manner no one should ever use when talking of a brownie. “They’ve gone and made everyone so happy they don’t need to drink no more.”
“Both you and me, Joe,” said the Barnacle; “they ain’t done nothing for me, either.”
“You got your job back,” I told him.
“Mark,” he said, solemnly, pouring out another, “I’m not so sure if that is good or not.”
It might have developed into a grade-A crying session if Lightning, our most up-and-coming copy boy, had not come shuffling in at that very moment.
“Mr. Lathrop,” he said, “there’s a phone call for you.”
“Well, that’s just fine.”
“But it’s from New York,” said the kid.
That did it. It’s the first time in my life I ever left a place so fast that I forgot my drink.
The call was from one of the papers to which I had applied, and the man at the New York end told me there was a job opening in the London staff and that he’d like to talk with me about it. In itself, it probably wasn’t any better than the job I had, he said, but it would give me a chance to break in on the kind of work I wanted.
When could I come in? he asked, and I said tomorrow morning.
I hung up and sat back and the world all at once looked rosy. I knew right then and there those brownies still were working for me.
* * * *
I had a lot of time to think on the plane trip to New York; and while I spent some of it thinking about the new job and London, I spent a lot of it thinking about the brownies, too.
They’d come to Earth before, that much at least was clear. And the world had not been ready for them. It had muffled them in a fog of folklore and superstition, and had lacked the capacity to use what they had offered it. Now they tried again. This time we must not fail them, for there might not be a third time.
Perhaps one of the reasons they had failed before—although not the only reason—had been the lack of a media of mass communications. The story of them, and of their deeds and doings, had gone by word of mouth and had been distorted in the telling. The fantasy of the age attached itself to the story of the brownies until they became no more than a magic little people who were very droll, and on occasion helpful, but in the same category as the ogre, or the dragon, and others of their ilk.
Today it had been different. Today there was a better chance the brownies would be objectively reported. And while the entire story could not be told immediately, the people still could guess.
And that was important—the publicity they got. People must know they were back again, and must believe in them and trust them.
And why, I wondered, had one medium-sized city in the midwest of America been chosen as the place where they would make known their presence and demonstrate their worth? I puzzled a lot about that one, but I never did get it figured out, not even to this day.
* * * *
Jo Ann was waiting for me at the airport when I came back from New York with the job tucked in my pocket. I was looking for her when I came down the ramp, and I saw that she’d got past the gate and was running toward the plane. I raced out to meet her and I scooped her up and kissed her and some damn fool popped a Hash bulb at us. I wanted to mop up on him, but Jo Ann wouldn’t let me.
It was early evening and you could see some stars shining in the sky, despite the blinding floodlights; from way up, you could hear another plane that had just taken off; and up at the far end of the field, another one was warming up. There were the buildings and the lights and the people and the great machines and it seemed, for a long moment, like a tableau built to represent the strength and swiftness, the competence and assurance of this world of ours.
Jo Ann must have felt it, too, for she said suddenly: “It’s nice, Mark. I wonder if they’ll change it.”
I knew who she meant without even asking.
“I think I know what they are,” I told her; “I think I’ve got it figured out. You know that community chest drive that’s going on right now. Well, that’s what they are doing, too—a sort of galactic chest. Except that they aren’t spending money on the poor and needy; their kind of charity is a different sort. Instead of spending money on us, they’re spending love and kindness, neighborliness and brotherhood. And I guess that it’s all right. I wouldn’t wonder but that, of all the people in the universe, we are the ones who need it most. They didn’t come to solve all our problems for us—just to help clear away some of the little problems that somehow keep us from turning our full power on the important jobs, or keep us from looking at them in the right way.”
* * * *
That was more years ago than I like to think about, but I still can remember just as if it were yesterday.
Something happened yesterday that brought it all to mind again.
I happened to be in Downing street, not too far from No. 10, when I saw a little fellow I first took to be some sort of dwarf. When