Part 7

"Ah, but you've already joined. We had planned to come to you, but you saved us that trouble. You came to us voluntarily and have already taken part in one of our minor missions--that of working for the repeal of antiquated traffic laws."

"I did not. That wasn't me."

"Who would believe you? You previously espoused our cause on a nationwide radio-and-television program."

"That wasn't me either, and you know it. I don't know how you did it, but that double you rigged up isn't going to be able to get away with it much longer."

"I think he can. You see, Sam, for all practical purposes that double, as you call him, is you. There's nothing about you that he doesn't know and everything he does or says is perfectly in character with what you would do or say--presupposing one slight shift in motivation. And you may be sure that adjustment has been made."

"You mean you've been picking my brains all the time you had me cooped up in that cell?"

"You could put it that way. Not _all_ the time, of course. Only while you slept. We know as much about you as you do about yourself. More, probably, because we've probed your subconscious as well as your surface self-awareness."

"Oh yeah? What was my mother's maiden name?"

"Clemens," Mox said instantly. "Hence your full name, with its literary if not strictly genealogical connection--Samuel Langhorne Clemens Kent. You know you are not directly related to Mark Twain, of course?"

"I was told I was," I said defensively. "Way back."

"Way, _way_ back, perhaps," Mox said. "Not in any modern sense."

"That's no proof that you read my mind. There must be genealogical tables...."

"Certainly. But there are no written records of the time you stole money from the newsstand outside the candy store in Ozone Park."

"I never ..." I started to say before I remembered. I'd been about ten. The way to do it was to scoop up the coins boldly on your way into the store and hand them to the owner while buying a candy bar or a roll of caps. Of course you palmed a dime or so on the way. I'd never told anybody about it and I felt suffocated in shame.

"Or the seventy-five wingless flies in the mayonnaise jar," Mox said relentlessly. "You were trying for a hundred, weren't you? But you got sick to your stomach. Or the time you sold your brother's bicycle and claimed it had been stolen. Or the college exams with the dates written in your palm. Or...."

"Stop it! That's enough!"

"I don't condemn you, Sam. No one is wholly free of blame. I have not mentioned these things to bring you pain but to prove to you that the Monolithian Sam Kent is as aware of your potentialities as you are yourself. He has done nothing you would not do, given the proper conviction or opportunity."

I couldn't look at him. "Swiping a dime off a newsstand isn't the same thing as betraying your country," I said miserably.

"It would depend, wouldn't it, on which was the greater good? If the dime you stole bought a quart of milk for your family during the depression when your father was out of work--if the candy store man was obviously better off--if your country were Nazi Germany----"

"The United States isn't Nazi Germany," I said. I could reject that one, at least.

"True," Mox said. "But I said 'if.' You're a man of perception. You don't need an overt act, such as six million deaths, to persuade you that something is wrong. You see it every day in the news reports that are your business--in the United Nations debates on nuclear testing, in the reports on the strontium-90 in food, in the disfigured Hiroshima women getting plastic surgery, in the perennial radiation scares."

"Is that what you're up to?" I asked him. "You think we're going to wipe ourselves out and you're altruistically going to preserve us? You're going to step in and run our world for us because you think we're not capable of handling our own affairs?"

"If necessary," he said.

"The end justifies the means, you think. You have no faith in our ability not to commit suicide."

"Not as much as you seem to have. Look, Sam, we've got a job for you to do and we'd like you to take it because you want to. It would be better for all of us that way. But if you are reconsidering your decision to volunteer, we have ways of conscripting you."

"Torture?" I tried to speak calmly. "Brainwashing?"

"Neither you nor anyone else will ever be tortured. As for the other, we'd prefer that you washed your own brain of its misconceptions about us. Try to realize that what we are trying to do--and what we will do--is for your own good and for the good of all of us."

He was the soul of sincerity, this Mox. I was relieved about the torture. I was even half tempted to believe the other things. But I wasn't going to brainwash myself or anybody else.

On the other hand, I could let him think I'd been won over and bore from within whenever I got the chance. The standard injunctions to the prisoner of war were no longer name-rank-and-serial-number. That had gone out after the lessons of the Korean war. The new instructions were to lie. Tell them whatever they wanted to hear. Confess to anything, no matter how outrageous. Embrace the enemy with lies until he had no idea where the truth lay. I decided to try it, but not so fast as to arouse suspicion.

"If I do volunteer," I said, after a period of what I hoped appeared to be profound thought, "will I be able to see my wife?"

"Of course," Mox said, beaming at me.

"I'm more worried about her than I am about strontium-90," I said ingenuously. "She's going to have a baby."

"How marvelous."

"Her name is Mae," I said. "We haven't been married long and this will be our first child."

"Congratulations."

"A man's got to think of his family first," I said, pouring it on, "doesn't he?"

"Absolutely."

"I mean it's all very well to expect every man to do his duty, but where does that duty lie? We've signed a treaty of peace and friendship with you, haven't we? Through the UN, I mean. And if that's good enough for the President, I guess it's good enough for me. Poor Mae. She must be worried to death. I've got to see her."

"And so you shall, Sam."

"That's all I ask. I volunteer. We've got to stop this ridiculous experimentation with the very seeds of our own destruction." I was washing the old brain with everything I had. "What's the job you have for me?"

I hoped I hadn't overdone it. But Mox was beaming.

"I am happy to inform you," he said, "that the position is that of press secretary to President Gouverneur Allison."

* * * * *

"My, you're home early," Mae said, giving me a kiss.

It wasn't a big, fat, oh-I'm-so-glad-to-see-you're-safe kiss. Not at all. I looked at my watch: it was a little after 3 P.M. Early? Here it was Sunday. Mae hadn't seen me since Thursday night and she said I was home early. Had the Monolithians played a trick with time? Was it only Friday afternoon?

"Listen, Mae," I said. "Did you watch your story today? What happened after this girl with the amnesia walked into Dr. Kindfellow's office, not realizing he was the very one she had fled a thousand miles to avoid?" Mae watches this television serial come hell or high water. It's one of her few vices.

"Silly," Mae said. "You know it's not on on Sunday. I thought you wouldn't be home till six. We were just going to take our nap."

"You thought I wasn't going to be home till six? Is that what I told you?" I was feeling my way, full of inklings and forebodings.

"Well, you usually get home at six when you're on the day shift--or is it five-thirty on week ends when you drive right in? Anyway, you're early. I'm glad. I guess we can skip our nap. Do you want to eat early?"

All I wanted to do was get to the bottom of this. It was beginning to be obvious that this double of me that the Monolithians whipped up actually had been living in my house as well as doing my job. I wanted to ask a dozen questions--but I couldn't without either giving Mae a terrific shock or making her think I was out of my mind.

"No, I'll eat whenever it's ready. Listen, Mae--have I been acting strange lately? I mean in the last couple days?"

"I've got some nice lamb chops for supper. Strange? Well, no stranger than usual, Sam. I mean, you've been a little bit nutty ever since the spacemen came. Naturally I've made allowances. I guess it's a pretty big story and a person has to take sides the way you did on that TV show."

"Oh, you saw that, did you?"

"Well, of course I did! You said only last night how the check will pay for the play pen and the bathinette. Surely you remember that?"

"Sure I do," I lied. "It wasn't awfully much, I guess."

"Fifty dollars is what you said it was. It helps."

"Sure. What else did I say?"

"When?"

"Last night."

"You said--honestly, Sam, are you sure you're all right?--you said we'd take an early vacation next year and go to Bermuda, all three of us."

"Sure, Bermuda," I said. "Sure I'm all right. I'm sorry, Mae; I've been a little confused ever since I got my new job."

"What new job? You didn't tell me that."

"No, I guess I didn't. It wasn't set until today. I'm leaving World Wide. I'm going to be press secretary to the President."

Mae did a double take--or at least a double blink--and said without more than a second's hesitation: "Isn't that wonderful!"

"I guess so," I said.

"What do you mean you guess so? It's marvelous! Of course you did say once you didn't think much of Gov. I think you said he doesn't have a brain in his head. Isn't that the way you put it?"

"I may have made some such remark," I said. "Such a thought has crossed my mind. But now I'm in a position to help him. I may even be able to put a thought or two _into_ his head. I'll be the chief factotum of the White House mimeograph machines--the disseminator, if not molder, of executive policy. Then there's the big old unsneezable fact that it pays a fast eighteen thousand a year."

Mae's eyes went sort of glazy and I could see her trying to divide that mentally by 52. "That's a lot, isn't it?" she said finally. "Now we can afford to replace that storm window that fell out last winter and maybe repaper the nursery."

"We can take care of the storm window, anyway. It's the least we can do for whoever rents the place when we move to Washington."

"Oh--of course. I forgot we'd have to move to Washington."

"I don't see any way out of it. It's a little too far for commuting."

14 (AUG. 4, MON.)

They are waiting on the shingle--will you come and join the dance?

--The Mock Turtle

My appointment with Frij was for one P.M. Mox had telephoned on Sunday night and told me about it. He didn't say who Frij was. He merely gave me the address and the room number and hung up.

Frij had an office on the thirty-ninth floor of a building on Fifth Avenue in the forties. He had, in fact, the entire penthouse. A small plaque on the front door said simply: PEERLESS PROMOTIONS.

I rang the bell.

The door opened and a tall gray-haired man grabbed my hand.

"I'd know you anywhere, Sam. Come in, old man. Frij is the name. Frij by name but warm by nature. Like a drink?"

I suppose he was punning on the British nickname for a refrigerator. "Not right now, thanks," I said.

Frij wore a dark, pin-stripe suit, a plaid waistcoat and bow tie. He looked about forty-five. He was solidly built, like a football player gone only slightly to pot. He nodded and half closed one eye.

"Very smart," he said. "I admire your restraint. Sit down, old man." He indicated a deep leather chair on the visitor's side of the huge wooden desk. He dropped himself into a swivel chair on his side, leaned back and propped his feet on a corner of the desk, which was clear of everything except two telephones and three animal figurines made of heavy-looking black plastic. I recognized two of them. One was an elephant and the other was a donkey. I couldn't figure out the third, which was bigger than either of the others. It must have been some kind of Monolithian animal.

It seemed to be up to me to say something, so I said, "Nice place you have here. Quite a view." And so it was. The Empire State Building loomed up to the south and Rockefeller Center to the north. The third set of windows gave a good view of the Hudson River.

"Without a peer," Frij said. "Peerless, in a word. Peerless Promotions. That's us. My name, I've decided after considerable thought, will be Addison Madison. What do you think of it, old man?"

I thought very little of it but I pretended to turn it over in my mind. "It's got class," I said finally. To myself I thought, _With a capital K_.

"Exactly," Addison Madison-Frij said. "That's what they want--class. Frij is too alien-sounding for their ears. They must have something that inspires confidence."

"Confidence in what, if I may ask?"

"Ask by all means. That's what I want you to do. Ask and criticize and suggest. This thing must roll, on all sixteen. It must purr, like the contented kitten. Or is it cow? I need you, old man, I tell you frankly. The closest kind of collaboration is necessary if we are to achieve our objective." He took his feet off the desk and sat up purposefully in his chair. "If you follow me."

"Not entirely," I said. "What exactly are you promoting? Public acceptance of Monolithia?"

"Secondarily," he said, giving me a sincere, old-school-tie look. "President Allison primarily. Through him, us. Didn't Mox brief you?"

"Only briefly. I thought you were going to fill in the gaps."

"That I will," Frij said. "But in good time. First lunch. Then there's the cocktail party. Both excellent gap-fillers. There's no urgency at all." He rang and a girl came in. A pretty girl, about five-feet-four and black-haired, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a notebook.

"Joy," he said, "put down in your book that you're to take Mr. Kent to lunch and keep him occupied until it's time for the party. Joy, Sam. Sam, Joy Linx. That's all for now, Sam. See you at the party."

I followed Joy out, not unwillingly.

At her desk she took a manila envelope from a drawer and counted out two hundred dollars. "I'm an old-fashioned girl, Mr. Kent," she said. "You take _me_ out to lunch." And she pushed the bills over to me.

"What's this?"

"Expense money. There's more when that runs out."

"Want me to sign for it?"

"No. That's petty cash; it's off the books already."

We took a cab to the Algonquin and sat next to each other on the leather couch along one wall and had Scotches and made small talk about the waiter with the two-foot-high pepper grinder and the old Thanatopsis and Inside-Straight Society that used to meet there.

Joy Linx spelled her last name for me, emphasizing that it had no "y," and took off her glasses. She said to call her Joy. You can say all you want about glasses not hiding a girl's beauty, but Joy was much more of a looker without them. "I'm near-sighted," she said, "and they're heavy."

"I approve," I said. "How long have you been with Peerless Promotions, Joy?"

"With the aliens, you mean? You can speak frankly. They hired me last Friday and I started today. How about you, Mr. Kent?"

I told her to call me Sam, but decided not to say, as I was tempted to, that I wasn't sure I was _with_ the aliens, exactly, even though I was on their payroll. "I started today, too, officially," I said. "It's been very pleasant work so far. Another Scotch?"

"Just one more," she said, and we smiled at each other a bit stiffly and tentatively.

I ordered the second round and the lunch, trying not to look at the prices. They were academic, of course, considering the expense money in my pocket, but I couldn't help contrasting this with my hectic lunches at World Wide--often a sandwich brought down from the cafeteria and eaten on the desk with a cup of office-brewed coffee--total cost under half a dollar.

I risked telling Joy about this. You never know what kind of reception such a sad little anecdote may have and I was relieved when she laughed with genuine understanding.

"I used to do the same thing," she said. "Only I brought my own sandwich. I liked egg salad on whole wheat."

"I'm a liverwurst and swiss cheese on rye man myself. With lettuce and mustard. Who were you with before Peerless?"

"A theatrical agency. I had some far-fetched dream of becoming an actress by association one day."

"You've certainly got the looks for it."

"Thanks, Sam, but I'm afraid my only talent lies in being a secretary."

I made some gallant reply, then asked what she did, exactly, for Frij--alias Addison Madison.

"Isn't that a scream of a name?" Joy said. "So far all he's told me is that I'm to be his Girl Friday--I guess he picked that up when he was studying his role. And to take you out to lunch. It's a fine job." Joy looked straight at her plate of _beef au jus_ and said, "I suppose you're married."

"Yes," I said, looking at my scallops.

"Just like to get the facts. I'm divorced, myself. Incompatibility. Linx is his name. I kept it because it's more euphonious, professionally, than Kaplan."

"I see."

"I wish you much better luck, Sam."

"Thanks," I said, and almost told her Mae was pregnant. For some reason I didn't. I don't think it was entirely because I was reluctant to compare her unhappy state with my excellent one. Joy was a very pretty girl indeed. "Thanks," I said again, and left it at that. "How about another drink?"

"Okay." She looked up and smiled. "Forgive the personal history."

"Not at all." I got the waiter's eye and ordered, and a bus boy took away the plates. "Tell me about this cocktail party. Who all's coming?"

"Some of everybody, I gather. Everybody who is anybody, that is."

"Oh? Big names?" I didn't know anything about the social life of the aliens, come to think of it. So far all I was familiar with was their public appearances, in a news sense, and their cloak-and-dagger intrigues, such as locking me up in that air-conditioned dungeon.

"The biggest," Joy said. "You'll see. They've been mingling like mad."

"What for, I wonder."

"Your guess is as good as mine. Ten times better, probably."

"Will you be going to the party?"

"Yes. In my Girl Friday capacity. Wearing my glasses, so I can recognize people across the room, and seeing that Addison Madison shakes hands with everybody."

"How about shaking hands with me now, just in case you're too busy later?"

"I won't be," Joy smiled. But she put her hand in mine. I neglected to give it back right away.

Then the drinks came and after a while Joy put her glasses on and we took a cab back to the office. She sat on her side and I sat on mine and we talked about the weather. It was hot.

* * * * *

The party had got to the point where everybody seemed to be talking at once. Enough liquor had been consumed for the initial tentativeness to have worn off and the Monolithians were no longer standing apart as they had been at the beginning. It was impossible to tell who was from where, except that the women were all from Earth, presumably, and I heard several variations on the question "Are you one of Them or one of Us?"

The din of the talk, the overworked air conditioners and the mechanics of barkeeping made every conversation a private one within its own area, even though it was carried on at the top of the voice.

"I'm one of us," I shouted to a short, stout martini fellow who cornered me in an alcove where I'd gone to put out a cigarette. "Sam Kent, World Wide." I'd forgotten for the moment that I'd resigned.

"John Blobber," the martini said. "I'm with the Yarbutta people." That's what it sounded like. "Good name, Sam. Sam Clemens, Sam Goldwyn, Sam Spade. Lots of people named Sam. Sam Levene, Sam Behrman--good American name."

"I never thought it wasn't, Mr. Yarbutta," I told him, trying to edge away.

"No. John Blasher," he said, approximately. "I'm _with_ the Yollawa people."

"Oh, sure. I guess I've heard about them."

"Make tunsleys," he said, waving his glass dangerously in my vicinity. "Business very good, at the moment, thanks to the Monolithians." He set his glass down on the little wooden table that held the ashtray I'd sought out, knocked on the wood and picked up his glass. "Sam F.B. Morse--great inventor. Sam Lincoln, great preshident."

"I think you've got that last one wrong," I said, backing off. "Fellow named Abe, he was, I believe. Look, Mr. Blasher, you just reminded me--I've got to see Abe Copeless about that story in Hammerslam this morning. You know the one I mean."

I left him nodding in polite confusion. At the bar I got a fresh Scotch and turned around to find myself trapped in a group playing Real Names.

"You with the Scotch," a red-haired woman said. "You can't go till you tell us who Archibald Leach is."

"Cary Grant," I said instantly out of my storehouse of copy-reader's lore. I tried to go, but the woman put a hand on my drinking arm and said, "Oh, this is one we've got to keep. I'll bet you don't know Joe Yule, Junior."

"Why, madam," I said, "everyone knows Mickey Rooney."

"This man is a gem," the woman--she was a gin and tonic--said.

"Arlington Brugh?"

"S. Arlington Brugh," I corrected. "Robert Taylor. Now may I go?" I smiled, so she wouldn't think my rude question was rude.

"Not a chance, my dear boy. You're an absolute fount. Irwin, give him that one that stumped us before." Irwin was a tall, lean Screwdriver.

"Lucille LeSueur," he said defiantly, wrinkling an eyebrow.

"Joan Crawford," I told him instantly.

The gin-and-tonic lady shrieked with glee--"That's right! We all guessed Lucille Ball. How do you do it?"

"It's really very simple," I said modestly. "You see, I'm their lawyer and they have no secrets from me."

"I doubt that very much," the third Real Names player said frostily. He was a Bloody Mary and I figured it served him right. "James Stewart," he said, as if he were playing the ace of spades. "Let's see you get out of that."

"You're doing it backwards," the gin lady said reprovingly.

"No, I'm not," the Bloody Mary man insisted.

"No, he's not," I said, lifting my Scotch and her arm for a sip. "That's Stewart Granger. And Charles Pratt is Boris Karloff and Rita Hayworth is Margarita Cansino, and Roy Rogers is Leonard Slye and--if you will unhand me, my good woman--Frederick Bickel is Fredric March."

"Don't let him get away," she shrieked. "He's priceless!"

But I did get away. I weaved my way among clusters of people who were making sounds of our time touching on Lorca, Kerouac, Glenn Gould, Lenny Bernstein, Brendan Behan, Sinatra, Astaire, Gielgud, Philip, Kennedy, Marlon, Ingrid, and Marilyn, and found myself cheek by jowl with my old friend Eurydice Playfair, who used to be a newspaperwoman herself.

My Real Names ploy, which I had been savoring along with my umpteenth Scotch, turned to ashes as it recalled itself forcibly to me that I was no better than dear Riddie, having sold out to the aliens myself.

"Dear boy!" she said. "Where _have_ you been keeping yourself?"

"Between you and me, Riddie," I said, "between the devil and the deep blue tax collector, up to just about now. Can I get you a drink?"

This is one way of vanishing. You just don't come back from the bar. It's understandable at such a conclave. But Riddie was not to be put off that easily.

"I'm well fixed, Samuel, my old," she said, waving three-quarters of a bourbon on the rocks at me. "What I want to know is who's running the store, now that Kent and double-you double-you have phfft? Not old pinchpurse Hyatt, surely?"

"I have put all those mundane cares behind me," I said in an attempt to be sprightly. "Greater things are afoot."

"How very true," she said. Riddie was dressed to the hilt in a lamé thing that clung to her well-preserved curves. "I'm delighted you've got yourself a handhold. There's room enough for all."