[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction
January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: They were the perfect servants--they were willing to do
everything for nothing. The obvious question is: How much is nothing?]
I still feel that the ingratiating little runts never _intended_ any
harm. They were eager to please, a cinch to transact business with, and
constantly, everlastingly grateful to us for giving them asylum.
Yes, we gave the genuflecting little devils asylum. And we were glad to
have them around at first--especially when they presented our women with
a gift to surpass all gifts: a custom-built domestic servant.
In a civilization that had made such a fetish of personal liberty and
dignity, you couldn't hire a butler or an upstairs maid for less than
love _and_ money. And since love was pretty much rationed along the
lines of monogamy, domestic service was almost a dead occupation. That
is, until the Ollies came to our planet to stay.
Eventually I learned to despise the spineless little immigrants from
Sirius, but the first time I met one he made me feel foolishly
important. I looked at his frail, olive-skinned little form, and
thought, _If this is what space has to offer in the way of advanced
life-forms ... well, we haven't done so badly on old Mother Earth_.
This one's name was Johnson. All of them, the whole fifty-six, took the
commonest Earth family names they could find, and dropped their own
name-designations whose slobbering sibilance made them difficult for us
to pronounce and write. It seemed strange, their casually wiping out
their nominal heritage just for the sake of our convenience--imagine an
O'Toole or a Rockefeller or an Adams arriving on Sirius IV and no sooner
learning the local lingo than insisting on becoming known as
Sslyslasciff-soszl!
But that was the Ollie. Anything to get along and please us. And of
course, addressing them as Johnson, Smith, Jones, etc., did work
something of a semantic protective coloration and reduce some of the
barriers to quick adjustment to the aliens.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
Johnson--_Ollie_ Johnson--appeared at my third under-level office a few
months after the big news of their shipwreck landing off the Maine
coast. He arrived a full fifteen minutes ahead of his appointment, and I
was too curious to stand on the dignity of office routine and make him
wait.
As he stood in the doorway of my office, my first visual impression was
of an emaciated adolescent, seasick green, prematurely balding.
He bowed, and bowed again, and spent thirty seconds reminding me that it
was _he_ who had sought the interview, and it was _he_ who had the big
favors to ask--and it was wonderful, gracious, generous _I_ who flavored
the room with the essence of mystery, importance, godliness and
overpowering sweetness upon whose fragrance little Ollie Johnson had
come to feast his undeserving senses.
"Sit down, sit down," I told him when I had soaked in all the celestial
flattery I could hold. "I love you to pieces, too, but I'm curious about
this proposition you mentioned in your message."
He eased into the chair as if it were much too good for him. He was
strictly humanoid. His four-and-a-half-foot body was dressed in the most
conservative Earth clothing, quiet colors and cheap quality.
While he swallowed slowly a dozen times, getting ready to outrage my
illustrious being with his sordid business proposition, his coloring
varied from a rather insipid gray-green to a rich olive--which is why
the press instantly had dubbed them _Ollies_. When they got excited and
blushed, they came close to the color of a ripe olive; and this was
often.
* * * * *
Ollie Johnson hissed a few times, his equivalent of throat-clearing, and
then lunged into his subject at a 90 degree tangent:
"Can it be that your gracious agreement to this interview connotes a
willingness to traffic with us of the inferior ones?" His voice was
light, almost reedy.
"If it's legal and there's a buck in it, can't see any reason why not,"
I told him.
"You manufacture and distribute devices, I am told. Wonderful
labor-saving mechanisms that make life on Earth a constant pleasure."