I told them once, I told them twice;
They would not listen to advice....
--Through the Looking-Glass
The overnight file consisted of about 10 percent fact and 90 percent
speculation. Sources close to the White House thought that President
Allison had been favorably impressed with the Monolithians and that
they would issue a joint communiqué today announcing their intention of
signing a treaty of friendship in the very near future. Congressional
sources said it was likely that the Senate would want to take a long,
hard look at such a treaty before it ratified it. There was some talk
of a full-scale investigation of the aliens by the Senate Internal
Security Committee.
The factual part of the file included a description of the spaceship,
which remained under guard at the Burning Tree Club, and interviews
with the manager and salesmen of the Young Men's Shop. The size of the
ship indicated that it had not made an interstellar voyage by itself;
that it was a sort of scout ship or lifeboat from a much bigger craft
which presumably was moored somewhere out in space.
The ship at Burning Tree was about as big as our biggest nuclear
submarine. It was wingless and cylindrical and its means of propulsion
was a mystery.
The people at the Young Men's Shop, honored at having been chosen to
outfit the visitors, described them as pleasant, athletically built men
whose height ranged from five-feet ten to six-feet three. The aliens
spoke excellent, almost unaccented English, but had discussed nothing
except the clothing they purchased. They had not paid cash but said the
bill should go to the Monolithian Embassy, Burning Tree Club, Maryland.
The cloaks they changed from were made of wool much softer in texture
than it looked. They had taken the cloaks with them after being fitted
from the skin out in Earth-style clothing. It was delicately indicated
in one of the stories that the aliens had worn nothing under the cloaks
and that they seemed to be human in every respect.
The dozen young Monolithians had barely arrived at the White House for
the scheduled morning meeting when it was simultaneously announced
by Josh Holcomb and at the United Nations that the aliens were flying
to New York immediately. President Allison was going with them in his
personal plane.
My second cup of coffee got cold while I handled a series of
fast-breaking developments. Gov asked for a meeting of the Security
Council at which he would propose that Monolithia be admitted to UN
membership. If the Council made such a recommendation, Nils Nilsen
would convene an extraordinary meeting of the General Assembly for the
purpose of voting on Monolithia's application.
A think-piece by Ian McEachern speculated that this was a tidy way of
bypassing possible Senate objections to a U.S.-Monolithian treaty.
By going directly to the world organization the Monolithians would
in effect be signing a treaty of friendship with Earth, avoiding the
time-consuming process of negotiating unilaterally with each of the
eighty-odd nations in the UN.
Collishaw Jones contributed a few takes of interpretation from his
end. While no one was so undiplomatic as to say it aloud, the thought
persisted in many a mind at UN Headquarters that the Monolithians
might not be as friendly as they seemed. Thus it would be well to vote
them into the UN as quickly as possible, legally and morally binding
them to the preservation of the peace. If they failed then to uphold
the principles of the Charter, no one nation would be in the perhaps
hopeless position of trying to repel their aggression. The combined
might of the world's armies would be pledged to deter them: to take,
in the words of the Charter, "effective collective measures for the
prevention and removal of threats to the peace."
Ian departed Gov and the aliens from the White House and Reb arrived
them at Washington National Airport. Gov had a brief statement for the
newsreel and television cameras; it was a marathon sentence to the
effect that he would personally sponsor the Monolithians' application,
which he hoped would be acted on with alacrity, reflecting in a
concrete way the friendly feeling he was sure the world already had for
the interplanetary visitors, who had shown themselves to be genuinely
desirous of establishing bonds of comity and of exchanging cultural and
scientific information which undoubtedly would be mutually beneficial.
The President declined to answer questions and the aliens courteously
but firmly followed suit. The plane then took off for New York.
WW's airport stringer arrived it at LaGuardia, where Gov made much the
same statement and the Monolithians maintained their silence. The party
then roared off in a siren-screaming motorcade to the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel by way of lower Broadway and City Hall so that the aliens could
have a ticker-tape parade and be officially welcomed by the Mayor.
Stew Macon finished taking the stringer's dictation, then wandered
around the desk to watch Nancy Corelli send it off to London. He shook
his head.
"What's the matter?" I asked him.
"I don't know, exactly," Stew said, "but this sure isn't the way I
thought the interplanetary age would dawn."
"From the other direction, you mean?"
"No, I don't mean that, though of course it would have been more
soothing to the ego to see Earth people pioneer space travel."
"Well, we did get to the Moon," I pointed out.
"Moon-shmoon," Stew said. "Big deal. What I mean is that it's all too
pat. Here we have the biggest story since creation and it has about as
much kick to it as a punch bowl at the Temperance Society's convention.
It's all surrounded with protocol and rigmarole."
"Would you have been happier if they came down shooting?"
"Maybe I would."
"Maybe we'd all be dead."
"Yeah, there's that. But this way there's no drama, no color. First
chance they got they even swapped their native costumes for Brooks
Brothers suits. Now they look like everybody else. They might as well
have come over from France on the Liberté."
"The French have wider lapels," I said.
"Ha ha," he said. "Look, ma, I'm laughing. No, really, I have a hunch
there's more to these characters than interplanetary amity or comity,
or whatever that old fool Gov called it. I have a feeling they're
up to something we're not going to like at all. They're too smooth.
Everything's just too smooth."
"Shall I mark your words?"