William Tenn: Firewater

“Hebster, tell me something. What are your goals?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What do you want out of life? What do you spend your days planning for, your nights dreaming about? Yost likes the girls and wants more of them. Funatti’s a family man, five kids. He’s happy in his work because his job’s fairly secure, and there are all kinds of pensions and insurance policies to back up his life.”

Braganza lowered his powerful head and began a slow, reluctant pacing in front of the desk.

“Now, I’m a little different. Not that I mind being a glorified cop. I appreciate the regularity with which the finance office pays my salary, of course; and there are very few women in this town who can say that I have received an offer of affection from them with outright scorn. But the one thing for which I would lay down my life is United Mankind. Would lay down my life? In terms of blood pressure and heart strain, you might say I’ve already done it. Braganza, I tell myself, you’re a lucky dope. You’re working for the first world government in human history. Make it count.”

He stopped and spread his arms in front of Hebster. His unbuttoned green jerkin came apart awkwardly and exposed the black slab of hair on his chest. “That’s me. That’s basically all there is to Braganza. Now if we’re to talk sensibly I have to know as much about you. I ask—what are your goals?”

The President of Hebster Securities, Inc., wet his lips. “I am afraid I’m even less complicated.”

“That’s all right,” the other man encouraged. “Put it any way you like.”

“You might say that before everything else, I am a businessman. I am interested chiefly in becoming a better businessman, which is to say a bigger one. In other words, I want to be richer than I am.”

Braganza peered at him intently. “And that’s all?”

“All? Haven’t you ever heard it said that money isn’t everything, but that what it isn’t, it can buy?”

“It can’t buy me.”

Hebster examined him coolly. “I don’t know if you’re a sufficiently desirable commodity. I buy what I need, only occasionally making an exception to please myself.”

“I don’t like you.” Braganza’s voice had become thick and ugly. “I never liked your kind and there’s no sense being polite. I might as well stop trying. I tell you straight out—I think your guts stink.”

Hebster rose. “In that case, I believe I should thank you for—”

“Sit down! You were asked here for a reason. I don’t see any point to it, but we’ll go through the motions. Sit down.”

Hebster sat. He wondered idly if Braganza received half the salary he paid Greta Seidenheim. Of course, Greta was talented in many different ways and performed several distinct and separately useful services. No, after tax and pension deductions, Braganza was probably fortunate to receive one-third of Greta’s salary.

He noticed that a newspaper was being proffered him. He took it. Braganza grunted, clumped back behind his desk and swung his swivel chair around to face the window.

It was a week-old copy of The Evening Humanitarian. The paper had lost the voice-of-a-small-but-highly-articulate-minority look, Hebster remembered from his last reading of it, and acquired the feel of publishing big business. Even if you cut in half the circulation claimed by the box in the upper left-hand corner, that still gave them three million paying readers.

In the upper right-hand corner, a red-bordered box exhorted the faithful to “ Read Humanitarian!” A green streamer across the top of the first page announced that “ To make sense is human — to gibber, Prime!”

But the important item was in the middle of the page. A cartoon.

Half-a-dozen Primeys wearing long, curved beards and insane, tongue-lolling grins sat in a rickety wagon. They held reins attached to a group of straining and portly gentlemen dressed—somewhat simply—in high silk hats. The fattest and ugliest of these, the one in the lead, had a bit between his teeth. The bit was labeled “ crazy-money” and the man, “Algernon Hebster.”

Crushed and splintering under the wheels of the wagon were such varied items as a “Home Sweet Home” framed motto with a piece of wall attached, a clean-cut youngster in a Boy Scout uniform, a streamlined locomotive and a gorgeous young woman with a squalling infant under each arm.

The caption inquired starkly: “Lords of Creation—Or Serfs?”

“This paper seems to have developed into a fairly filthy scandal sheet,” Hebster mused out loud. “I shouldn’t be surprised if it makes money.”

“I take it then,” Braganza asked without turning around from his contemplation of the street, “that you haven’t read it very regularly in recent months?”

“I am happy to say I have not.”

“That was a mistake.”

Hebster stared at the clumped locks of black hair. “Why?” he asked carefully.

“Because it has developed into a thoroughly filthy and extremely successful scandal sheet. You’re its chief scandal.” Braganza laughed. “You see, these people look upon Primey dealing as more of a sin than a crime. And, according to that morality, you’re close to Old Nick himself!”

Shutting his eyes for a moment, Hebster tried to understand people who imagined such a soul-satisfying and beautiful concept as profit to be a thing of dirt and crawling maggots. He sighed. “I’ve thought of Firstism as a religion myself.”

That seemed to get the SIC man. He swung around excitedly and pointed with both forefingers. “I tell you that you are right! It crosses all boundaries—incompatible and warring creeds are absorbed into it. It is willful, witless denial of a highly painful fact—that there are intellects abroad in the universe which are superior to our own. And the denial grows in strength every day that we are unable to contact the Aliens. If, as seems obvious, there is no respectable place for humanity in this galactic civilization, why, say men like Vandermeer Dempsey, then let us preserve our self-con-ceit at the least. Let’s stay close to and revel in the things that are undeniably human. In a few decades, the entire human race will have been sucked into this blinkered vacuum.”

He rose and walked around the desk again. His voice had assumed a terribly earnest, tragically pleading quality. His eyes roved Hebster’s face as if searching for a pin-point of weakness, an especially thin spot in the frozen calm.

“Think of it,” he asked Hebster. “Periodic slaughters of scientists and artists who, in the judgment of Dempsey, have pushed out too far from the conventional center of so-called humanness. An occasional auto-da-fe in honor of a merchant caught selling Primey goods—”

“I shouldn’t like that,” Hebster admitted, smiling. He thought a moment. “I see the connection you’re trying to establish with the cartoon in The Evening Humanitarian.”

“Mister, I shouldn’t have to. They want your head on the top of a long stick. They want it because you’ve become a symbol of dealing successfully, for your own ends, with these stellar foreigners, or at least their human errand-boys and chambermaids. They figure that maybe they can put a stop to Primey-dealing generally if they put a bloody stop to you. And I tell you this—maybe they are right.”

“What exactly do you propose?” Hebster asked in a low voice.

“That you come in with us. We’ll make an honest man of you—officially. We want you directing our investigation; except that the goal will not be an extra buck but all-important interracial communication and eventual interstellar negotiation.”

The president of Hebster Securities, Inc., gave himself a few minutes on that one. He wanted to work out a careful reply. And he wanted time—above all, he wanted time!