Robert Silverberg - Invaders From Earth

As a dramatic climax to the expose, W. Richardson Bullard, 53, an Executive First-Level of the Corporation, rose from his seat in the Assembly gallery and fired point-blank at Kennedy, wounding him in the shoulder. Bullard was taken into police custody.

Also rounded up were Louis Dinoli, 66, Executive First-Level of the public-relations firm, and the four second-level men of the firm, as well as ranking Corporation officials. Further investigation —”

Kennedy scanned the rest of the paper. There was a marvelous shot of Dinoli, eyes blazing satanically, being led from the S and D offices by Security men. There was a quote from him, too: A vile traitor has struck us a mortal blow. He has violated the sanctity of our organization. We nurtured a viper in our midst for eight years.

There was much more: pages and pages of it. Pictures of Kennedy and an amazingly accurate biography; a transcript of the entire U.N. session that day; photographs of the Corporation leaders. A long article covered the background of the Ganymede affair from the very first public release back in May, quoting significant passages from the pseudo-accounts of the pseudo-colony. An angry editorial called for prompt punishment of the offenders and more effective monitoring of the sources of news in the future to prevent repetitions of this flagrant deception.

“Dinoli never did things in a small way,” Kennedy said, looking up. “His model was the twentieth-century German dictator, Hitler. Hitler always said it’s harder to fool the people on the small things than on the big ones. You could always get them to believe that the continents on the other side of the world had been swallowed up by the ocean a lot easier than you could convince them that the price of meat would drop next week. So Dinoli set out to tell the world all about Ganymede. He nearly made it, too.”

He handed back the newspapers. He felt very tired, too tired to think, too tired to evaluate what he had done. All he knew was that it was over now, and he wanted to rest and plan his next move.

“Take me home,” he said to Marge.

He went home. Flaherty saw to it that there were U.N. people on hand to take care of him. The house hadn’t been lived in for weeks, and Marge couldn’t handle everything herself.

It had been a busy couple of days, he thought. The business of Gunther’s charges had been mostly cleared up, and he had been cleared of Spalding’s death as well.

He sent one of the U.N. people down the road to the Camerons to fetch the cat. He asked Marge to help him across the room to the sound system; he wanted to hear some music.

He wondered briefly about the consequences of what he had done. Certainly he had finished Steward and Dinoli; a lot of men who had been drawing fancy pay would be out scrambling for jobs tomorrow, if the psych-squads didn’t get them. He tried to picture old Dinoli going through Personality Adjustment, and laughed; Dinoli would be a thorn for the adjusters, a regular bramble bush!

But the others—Haugen, Cameron, Presslie. Probably they would get off easily, pleading that they were mere employees and did not set agency policy. They might draw minor sentences. After that, though, their careers in public relations were just as dead as—

As his.

What do I do now?

His name would fade from the front pages in a few days. He knew too much about communications media to believe that his current notoriety would last.

And then?

Few jobs would be open for him. Potential employers would always be aware that he had turned against Dinoli, had broken into his own office late at night to secure damning evidence. No, he would not be a safe man to employ.

One other thing troubled him. He had been through three months of torture since being assigned to the Ganymede contract. So had Marge. It showed on both of them.

He had had his eyes opened. He had learned to think. His brief exposure to the Ganny philosophy had given him an entirely new outlook on existence. He had developed a conscience. But a man with a conscience was useless in his line of work, and he wasn’t trained for any other profession. At thirty-two it was too late to start over. He had unemployed himself.

He looked at Marge and smiled.

“You forgive me, don’t you, darling?” she asked him.

“Of course I do. It wasn’t exactly all your fault, what you did.” Ganny words rolled through his head—words of forgiveness, words of love.

He realized that he longed to finish his conversation up there. He had just been beginning, just finding out that there was truth and wisdom somewhere in the universe . . . and he had been learning it from those strange, methane-breathing beings on snowswept Ganymede. That was what had changed him. That was what had impelled him to break faith with Dinoli and the Corporation—the higher call of Ganymede.

The U.N. man he had sent down the road to the Camerons returned. He shrugged apologetically and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Kennedy. The Camerons weren’t home, and the neighbors said they were away and wouldn’t be back for a long time. I couldn’t find the cat. The man in the next house says he thinks it ran away last week.”

“That’s all right,” Kennedy said. “Thanks.”

“Oh!” Marge said. “Poor old McGillicudy!”

Kennedy nodded, listening to the solemn marcia funebre coming from the audio speaker. Poor old cat, he thought; after a decade, nearly, of civilized life, he had to go back to the jungle. He probably had forgotten how to catch mice after all these years.

But it was just as well. The cat was part of the past, too, and the past was dropping away, sloughing off and vanishing down the river of time.

No cat, no job, no past. And fame was fast fleeting. Today he was “The Man Who Exposed The Corporation”; tomorrow he’d be just another jobless has-been, trying to coast through life on his old press clippings. He’d seen it happen to other heroes all too often.

His mind drifted back two months, to his short stay on Ganymede. Ganymede had served as the catalyst, as it were, for the change in his life. On Ganymede . . .

Yes. He knew what he wanted.

“Marge?”

“What is it, Ted?”

“How fond are you of living on Earth?”

Her bloodshot eyes lifted slightly. “You mean—go back to—”

He nodded. He waited a moment; she smiled.

“Will you be happy there?” she asked.

“Very.”

“I can’t say no, can I?”

“If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to. But—”

She kissed his forehead lightly. “Did I say I didn’t want to go?”

It had been a fine scene, a memorable one, Kennedy thought, as he relived it in his mind once again three weeks after the blast-off. It had been Saturday, December 30, 2044—the final day of the old year, and the final day on Earth for Ted and Marge Kennedy.

Spacefield Seven in New Jersey was bright with snow— the soft, fluffy, sparkling snow of Earth, not the bleak, blue-flecked, forbidding snow of Ganymede. There had been a heavy fall on Christmas Eve, and most of it still remained on the ground in the rural areas. The Bureau of Weather Adjustment had never been too good at averting snow, and Kennedy was glad of it; few things were more beautiful, he thought, than the whiteness of falling snow against the black of a winter night.

The spaceship stood tall and proud in the center of the field. Once it had been a Corporation ship; now it belonged to the United Nations. The crew was a Corporation-trained crew, but they had a new loyalty now. The November trials had finished off the Corporation.

In his mind’s eye, three weeks later, Kennedy recreated the moment. Flaherty was there, and Secretary-General Isaacs, and most of the other United Nations delegates, as well as representatives from every news medium.