William Tenn: Firewater

He was so close to a well-integrated and worldwide commercial empire! For ten years, he had been carefully fitting the component industrial kingdoms into place, establishing suzerainty in this production network and squeezing a little more control out of that economic satrapy. He had found delectable tidbits of power in the dissolution of his civilization, endless opportunities for wealth in the shards of his race’s self-esteem. He required a bare twelve months now to consolidate and coordinate. And suddenly—with the open-mouthed shock of a Jim Fiske who had cornered gold on the Exchange only to have the United States Treasury defeat him by releasing enormous quantities from the Government’s own hoard—suddenly, Hebster realized he wasn’t going to have the time. He was too experienced a player not to sense that a new factor was coming into the game, something outside his tables of actuarial figures, his market graphs and cargo loading indices.

His mouth was clogged with the heavy nausea of unexpected defeat. He forced himself to answer:

“I’m flattered. Braganza, I really am flattered. I see that Dempsey has linked us—we stand or fall together. But—I’ve always been a loner. With whatever help I can buy, I take care of myself. I’m not interested in any goal but the extra buck. First and last, I’m a businessman.”

“Oh, stop it!” The dark man took a turn up and down the office angrily. “This is a planet-wide emergency. There are times when you can’t be a businessman.”

“I deny that. I can’t conceive of such a time.”

Braganza snorted. “You can’t be a businessman if you’re strapped to a huge pile of blazing faggots. You can’t be a businessman if people’s minds are so thoroughly controlled that they’ll stop eating at their leader’s command. You can’t be a businessman, my slavering, acquisitive friend, if demand is so well in hand that it ceases to exist.”

“That’s impossible!” Hebster had leaped to his feet. To his amazement, he heard his voice climbing up the scale to hysteria. “There’s always demand. Always! The trick is to find what new form it’s taken and then fill it!”

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to make fun of your religion.”

Hebster drew a deep breath and sat down with infinite care. He could almost feel his red corpuscles simmering.

Take it easy, he warned himself, take it easy! This is a man who must be won, not antagonized. They’re changing the rules of the market, Hebster, and you’ll need every friend you can buy.

Money won’t work with this fellow. But there are other values—

“Listen to me, Braganza. We’re up against the psychosocial consequences of an extremely advanced civilization smacking into a comparatively barbarous one. Are you familiar with Professor Kleimbocher’s Firewater Theory?”

“That the Aliens’ logic hits us mentally in the same way as whisky hit the North American Indian? And the Primeys, representing our finest minds, are the equivalent of those Indians who had the most sympathy with the white man’s civilization? Yes. It’s a strong analogy. Even carried to the Indians who, lying sodden with liquor in the streets of frontier towns, helped create the illusion of the treacherous, lazy, kill-you-for-a-drink aborigines while being so thoroughly despised by their tribesmen that they didn’t dare go home for fear of having their throats cut. I’ve always felt—”

“The only part of that I want to talk about,” Hebster interrupted, “is the firewater concept. Back in the Indian villages, an ever-increasing majority became convinced that firewater and gluttonous paleface civilization were synonymous, that they must rise and retake their land forcibly, killing in the process as many drunken renegades as they came across. This group can be equated with the Humanity Firsters. Then there was a minority who recognized the white men’s superiority in numbers and weapons, and desperately tried to find a way of coming to terms with his civilization—terms that would not include his booze. For them read the UM. Finally, there was my kind of Indian.”

Braganza knitted voluminous eyebrows and hitched himself up to a corner of the desk. “Hah?” he inquired. “What kind of Indian were you, Hebster?”

“The kind who had enough sense to know that the paleface had not the slightest interest in saving him from slow and painful cultural anemia. The kind of Indian, also, whose instincts were sufficiently sound so that he was scared to death of innovations like firewater and wouldn’t touch the stuff to save himself from snake bite. But the kind of Indian—”

“Yes? Go on!”

“The kind who was fascinated by the strange transparent container in which the firewater came! Think how covetous an Indian potter might be of the whisky bottle, something which was completely outside the capacity of his painfully acquired technology. Can’t you see him hating, despising and terribly afraid of the smelly amber fluid, which toppled the most stalwart warriors, yet wistful to possess a bottle minus contents? That’s about where I see myself, Braganza—the Indian whose greedy curiosity shines through the murk of hysterical clan politics and outsiders’ contempt like a lambent flame. I want the new kind of container somehow separated from the firewater.”

Unblinkingly, the great dark eyes stared at his face. A hand came up and smoothed each side of the arched mustachio with long, unknowing twirls. Minutes passed.

“Well. Hebster as our civilization’s noble savage,” the SIC man chuckled at last. “It almost feels right. But what does it mean in terms of the overall problem?”

“I’ve told you,” Hebster said wearily, hitting the arm of the bench with his open hand, “that I haven’t the slightest interest in the overall problem.”

“And you only want the bottle. I heard you. But you’re not a potter, Hebster—you haven’t an elementary particle of craftsman’s curiosity. All of that historical romance you spout—you don’t care if your world drowns in its own agonized juice. You just want a profit.”

“I never claimed an altruistic reason. I leave the general solution to men whose minds are good enough to juggle its complexities—like Kleimbocher.”

“Think somebody like Kleimbocher could do it?”

“I’m almost certain he will. That was our mistake from the beginning—trying to break through with historians and psychologists. Either they’ve become limited by the study of human societies or—well, this is personal, but I’ve always felt that the science of the mind attracts chiefly those who’ve already experienced grave psychological difficulty. While they might achieve such an understanding of themselves in the course of their work as to become better adjusted eventually than individuals who had less problems to begin with, I’d still consider them too essentially unstable for such an intrinsically shocking experience as establishing rapport with an Alien. Their internal dynamics inevitably make Primeys of them.”

Braganza sucked at a tooth and considered the wall behind Hebster. “And all this, you feel, wouldn’t apply to Kleimbocher?”

“No, not a philology professor. He has no interest, no intellectual roots in personal and group instability. Kleimbocher’s a comparative linguist—a technician, really—a specialist in basic communication. I’ve been out to the University and watched him work. His approach to the problem is entirely in terms of his subject—communicating with the Aliens instead of trying to understand them. There’s been entirely too much intricate speculation about Alien consciousness, sexual attitudes and social organization, about stuff from which we will derive no tangible and immediate good. Kleimbocher’s completely pragmatic.”