William Tenn: Firewater

The SIC man looked at the doctor, who had been following the conversation with interest. “Mind stepping out for a minute?” he suggested.

He walked behind the man and dropped the tent flap into place. Then he came around to the foot of the army cot and pulled on his mustache vigorously. “Now, see here, Hebster, if you keep up this clowning, so help me I will slit your belly open and snap your intestines back in your face! What happened?”

“What happened?” Hebster laughed and stretched slowly, carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking the bones of his arm. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer that question completely. And there’s a section of my mind that’s very glad that I won’t. This much I remember clearly: I had an idea. I communicated it to the proper and interested party. We concluded—this party and I—a tentative agreement as agents, the exact terms of the agreement to be decided by our principals and its complete ratification to be contingent upon their acceptance. Furthermore, we—All right, Braganza, all right! I’ll tell it straight. Put down that folding chair. Remember, I’ve just been through a pretty unsettling experience!”

“Not any worse than the world is about to go through,” the official growled. “While you’ve been out on your three-day vacation, Dempsey’s been organizing a full-dress revolution every place at once. He’s been very careful to limit it to parades and verbal fireworks so that we haven’t been able to make with the riot squads, but it’s pretty evident that he’s ready to start using muscle. Tomorrow might be it; he’s spouting on a world-wide video hookup and it’s the opinion of the best experts we have available that his tag line will be the signal for action. Know what their slogan is? It concerns Verus, who’s been indicted for murder; they claim he’ll be a martyr.”

“And you were caught with your suspicions down. How many SIC men turned out to be Firsters?”

Braganza nodded. “Not too many, but more than we expected. More than we could afford. He’ll do it, Dempsey will, unless you’ve hit the real thing. Look, Hebster,” his heavy voice took on a pleading quality, “don’t play with me any more. Don’t hold my threats against me; there was no personal animosity in them, just a terrible, fearful worry over the world and its people and the government I was supposed to protect. If you still have a gripe against me, I, Braganza, give you leave to take it out of my hide as soon as we clear this mess up. But let me know where we stand first. A lot of lives and a lot of history depend on what you did out there in that patch of desert.”

Hebster told him. He began with the extraterrestrial Walpurgisnacht. “ Watching the Aliens slipping in and out of each other in that cockeyed and complicated rhythm, it struck me how different they were from the thoughtful dots-in-bottles hovering over our busy places, how different all creatures are in their home environments—and how hard it is to get to know them on the basis of their company manners. And then I realized that this place wasn’t their home.”

“Of course. Did you find out which part of the galaxy they come from?”

“That’s not what I mean. Simply because we have marked this area off—and others like it in the Gobi, in the Sahara, in Central Australia—as a reservation for those of our kind whose minds have crumbled under the clear, conscious and certain knowledge of inferiority, we cannot assume that the Aliens around whose settlements they have congregated have necessarily settled themselves.”

“Huh?” Braganza shook his head rapidly and batted his eyes.

“In other words we had made an assumption on the basis of the Aliens’ very evident superiority to ourselves. But that assumption—and therefore that superiority—was in our own terms of what is superior and inferior, and not the Aliens’. And it especially might not apply to those Aliens on… the reservation.”

The SIC man took a rapid walk around the tent. He beat a great fist into an open sweaty palm. “I’m beginning to, just beginning to—”

“That’s what I was doing at that point, just beginning to. Assumptions that don’t stand up under the structure they’re supposed to support have caused the ruin of more close-thinking businessmen than I would like to face across any conference table. The four brokers, for example, who, after the market crash of 1929—”

“All right,” Braganza broke in hurriedly, taking a chair near the cot. “Where did you go from there?”

“I still couldn’t be certain of anything; all I had to go on were a few random thoughts inspired by extrasubstantial adrenalin secretions and, of course, the strong feeling that these particular Aliens weren’t acting the way I had become accustomed to expect Aliens to act. They reminded me of something, of somebody. I was positive that once I got that memory tagged, I’d have most of the problem solved. And I was right.”

“How were you right? What was the memory?”

“Well, I hit it backwards, kind of. I went back to Professor Kleimbocher’s analogy about the paleface inflicting firewater on the Indian. I’ve always felt that somewhere in that analogy was the solution. And suddenly, thinking of Professor Kleimbocher and watching those powerful creatures writhing their way in and around each other, suddenly I knew what was wrong. Not the analogy, but our way of using it. We’d picked it up by the hammer head instead of the handle. The paleface gave firewater to the Indian all right—but he got something in return.”

“What?”

“Tobacco. Now there’s nothing very much wrong with tobacco if it isn’t misused, but the first white men to smoke probably went as far overboard as the first Indians to drink. And both booze and tobacco have this in common—they make you awfully sick if you use too much for your initial experiment. See, Braganza? These Aliens out here in the desert reservation are sick. They have hit something in our culture that is as psychologically indigestible to them as… well, whatever they have that sticks in our mental gullet and causes ulcers among us. They’ve been put into a kind of isolation in our desert areas until the problem can be licked.”

“Something that’s as indigestible psychologically—What could it be, Hebster?”

The businessman shrugged irritably. “I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. Perhaps it’s just that they can’t let go of a problem until they’ve solved it—and they can’t solve the problems of mankind’s activity because of mankind’s inherent and basic differences. Simply because we can’t understand them, we had no right to assume that they could and did understand us.”

“That wasn’t all, Hebster. As the comedians put it—everything we can do, they can do better.”

“Then why did they keep sending Primeys in to ask for those weird gadgets and impossible gimcracks?”

“They could duplicate anything we made.”

“Well, maybe that is it,” Hebster suggested. “They could duplicate it, but could they design it? They show every sign of being a race of creatures who never had to make very much for themselves; perhaps they evolved fairly early into animals with direct control over matter, thus never having had to go through the various stages of artifact design. This, in our terms, is a tremendous advantage; but it inevitably would have concurrent disadvantages. Among other things, it would mean a minimum of art forms and a lack of basic engineering knowledge of the artifact itself if not of the directly activated and altered material. The fact is I was right, as I found out later.

“For example. Music is not a function of theoretical harmonics, of complete scores in the head of a conductor or composer—these come later, much later. Music is first and foremost a function of the particular instrument, the reed pipe, the skin drum, the human throat—it is a function of tangibles which a race operating upon electrons, positrons and mesons would never encounter in the course of its construction. As soon as I had that, I had the other flaw in the analogy—the assumption itself.”