The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything ; Target- Berlin! Read online

  Luis, my secretary of defense, talked to Hurv about the ultimate goals of the nuhp. "We don't have any goals," he said. "We're just taking it easy."

  "Then why did you come to Earth?" asked Luis.

  "Why do you go bowling?"

  "I don't go bowling."

  "You should," said Hurv. "Bowling is the most enjoyable thing a person can do."

  "What about sex?"

  "Bowling is sex. Bowling is a symbolic form of intercourse, except you don't have to bother about the feelings of some other person. Bowling is sex without guilt. Bowling is what people have wanted down through all the millennia: sex without the slightest responsibility. It's the very distillation of the essence of sex. Bowling is sex without fear and shame."

  "Bowling is sex without pleasure," said Luis.

  There was a brief silence. "You mean," said Hurv, "that when you put that ball right into the pocket and see those pins explode off the alley, you don't have an orgasm?"

  "Nope," said Luis.

  "That's your problem, then. I can't help you there, you'll have to see some kind of therapist. It's obvious this subject embarrasses you. Let's talk about something else."

  "Fine with me," said Luis moodily. "When are we going to receive the real benefits of your technological superiority? When are you going to unlock the final secrets of the atom? When are you going to free mankind from drudgery?"

  "What do you mean, 'technological superiority'?" asked Hurv.

  "There must be scientific wonders beyond our imagining aboard your mother ships."

  "Not so's you'd notice. We're not even so advanced as you people here on Earth. We've learned all sorts of wonderful things since we've been here."

  "What?" Luis couldn't imagine what Hurv was trying to say.

  "We don't have anything like your astonishing bubble memories or silicon chips. We never invented anything comparable to the transistor, even. You know why the mother ships are so big?"

  "My God."

  "That's right," said Hurv, "vacuum tubes. All our spacecraft operate on vacuum tubes. They take up a hell of a lot of space. And they burn out. Do you know how long it takes to find the goddamn tube when it burns out? Remember how people used to take bags of vacuum tubes from their television sets down to the drugstore to use the tube tester? Think of doing that with something the size of our mother ships. And we can't just zip off into space when we feel like it. We have to let a mother ship warm up first. You have to turn the key and let the thing warm up for a couple of minutes, then you can zip off into space. It's a goddamn pain in the neck."

  "I don't understand," said Luis, stunned. "If your technology is so primitive, how did you come here? If we're so far ahead of you, we should have discovered your planet, not the other way around."

  Hurv gave a gentle laugh. "Don't pat yourself on the back, Luis. Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in Los Angeles with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nup in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing a hundred and twenty on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at fifty-five; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nup cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have."

  "But we do want to go."

  "Then we'll help you. We'll give you the secrets. And you can explain your electronics to our engineers, and together we'll build wonderful new mother ships that will open the universe to both humans and nuhp."

  Luis let out his breath. "Sounds good to me," he said.

  Everyone agreed that this looked better than hollyhocks. We all hoped that we could keep from kicking their collective asses long enough to collect on that promise.

  When I was in college, my roommate in my sophomore year was a tall, skinny guy named Barry Rintz. Barry had wild, wavy black hair and a sharp face that looked like a handsome normal face that had been sat on and folded in the middle. He squinted a lot, not because he had any defect in his eyesight, but because he wanted to give the impression that he was constantly evaluating the world. This was true. Barry could tell you the actual and market values of any object you happened to come across.

  We had a double date one football weekend with two girls from another college in the same city. Before the game, we met the girls and took them to the university's art museum, which was pretty large and owned an impressive collection. My date, a pretty Elementary Ed major named Brigid, and I wandered from gallery to gallery, remarking that our tastes in art were very similar. We both liked the Impressionists, and we both liked Surrealism. There were a couple of little Renoirs that we admired for almost half an hour, and then we made a lot of silly sophomore jokes about what was happening in the Magritte and Dali and de Chirico paintings.

  Barry and his date, Dixie, ran across us by accident as all four of us passed through the sculpture gallery. "There's a terrific Seurat down there," Brigid told her girlfriend.

  "Seurat," Barry said. There was a lot of amused disbelief in his voice.

  "I like Seurat," said Dixie.

  "Well, of course," said Barry, "there's nothing really wrong with Seurat."

  "What do you mean by that?" asked Brigid.

  "Do you know F. E. Church?" he asked.

  "Who?" I said.

  "Come here." He practically dragged us to a gallery of American paintings. F. E. Church was a remarkable American landscape painter (1826-1900) who achieved an astonishing and lovely luminance in his works. "Look at that light!" cried Barry. "Look at that space! Look at that air!"

  Brigid glanced at Dixie. "Look at that air?" she whispered.

  It was a fine painting and we all said so, but Barry was insistent. F. E. Church was the greatest artist in American history, and one of the best the world has ever known. "I'd put him right up there with Van Dyck and Canaletto."

  "Canaletto?" said Dixie. "The one who did all those pictures of Venice?"

  "Those skies!" murmured Barry ecstatically. He wore the expression of a satisfied voluptuary.

  "Some people like paintings of puppies or naked women," I offered. "Barry likes light and air."

  We left the museum and had lunch. Barry told us which things on the menu were worth ordering, and which things were an abomination. He made us all drink an obscure imported beer from Ecuador. To Barry, the world was divided up into masterpieces and abominations. It made life so much simpler for him, except that he never understood why his friends could never tell one from the other.

  At the football game, Barry compared our school's quarterback to Y. A. Tittle. He compared the other team's punter to Ngoc Van Vinh. He compared the halftime show to the Ohio State band's Script Ohio formation. Before the end of the third quarter it was very obvious to me that Barry was going to have absolutely no luck at all with Dixie. Before the clock ran out in the fourth quarter, Brigid and I had made whispered plans to dump the other two as soon as possible and sneak away by ourselves. Dixie would probably find an excuse to ride the bus back to her dorm before suppertime. Barry, as usual, would spend the evening in our room, reading The Making of the President 1996.

  On other occasions, and with little or no provocation, Barry would lecture me about subjects as diverse as American literature (the best poet was Edwin Arlington Robinson, the best novelist James T. Farrell), animals (the only correct pet was the golden retriever), clothing (in anything other than a navy blue jacket and gray slacks, a man was just asking for trouble), and even hobbies (Barry collected military decorations of czarist Imperial Russia; he wouldn't talk to me for day
s after I told him my father collected barbed wire).

  Barry was a wealth of information. He was the campus arbiter of good taste. Everyone knew Barry was the man to ask.

  But no one ever did. We all hated his guts. I moved out of our dorm room before the end of the fall semester. Shunned, lonely, and bitter, Barry Rintz wound up as a guidance counselor in a high school in Ames, Iowa. The job was absolutely perfect for him; few people are so lucky in finding a career.

  If I didn't know better, I might have believed that Barry was the original advance spy for the nuhp.

  When the nuhp had been on Earth for a full year, they gave us the gift of interstellar travel. It was surprisingly inexpensive. The nuhp explained their propulsion system, which was cheap and safe and adaptable to all sorts of other earthbound applications. The revelations opened up an entirely new area of scientific speculation. Then the nuhp taught us their navigational methods, and about the "shortcuts" they had discovered in space. People called them space-warps, although technically speaking the shortcuts had nothing to do with Einsteinian theory or curved space or anything like that. Not many humans understood what the nuhp were talking about, but that didn't make very much difference. The nuhp didn't understand the shortcuts either; they just used them. The matter was presented to us like a Thanksgiving turkey on a platter. We bypassed the whole business of cautious scientific experimentation and leaped right into commercial exploitation. Mitsubishi of La Paz and Martin Marietta used nuhp schematics to begin construction of three luxury passenger ships, each capable of transporting a thousand tourists anywhere in our galaxy. Although man had yet to set foot on the moons of Jupiter, certain selected travel agencies began booking passage for a grand tour of the dozen nearest inhabited worlds.

  Yes, it seemed that space was teeming with life, humanoid life on planets circling half the G-type stars in the heavens. "We've been trying to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence for decades," complained one Soviet scientist. "Why haven't they responded?"

  A friendly nup merely shrugged. "Everybody's trying to communicate out there," he said. 'Tour messages are like Publishers Clearinghouse mail to them." At first that was a blow to our racial pride, but we got over it. As soon as we joined the interstellar community, they'd begin to take us more seriously. And the nuhp made that possible.

  We were grateful to the nuhp, but that didn't make them any easier to live with. They were still insufferable. As my second term as president came to an end, Pleen began to advise me about my future career. "Don't write a book," he told me (after I had already written the first two hundred pages of A President Remembers). "If you want to be an elder statesman, fine; but keep a low profile and wait for the people to come to you."

  "What am I supposed to do with my time then?" I asked.

  "Choose a new career," Pleen said. "You're not all that old. Lots of people do it. Have you considered starting a mail-order business? You can operate it from your home. Or go back to school and take courses in some subject that's always interested you. Or become active in church or civic projects. Find a new hobby, raising hollyhocks or collecting military decorations."

  "Pleen," I begged, "just leave me alone."

  He seemed hurt. "Sure, if that's what you want." I regretted my harsh words.

  All over the country, all over the world, everyone was having the same trouble with the nuhp. It seemed that so many of them had come to Earth, every human had his own personal nup to make endless personal suggestions. There hadn't been so much tension in the world since the 1992 Miss Universe contest, when the most votes went to No Award.

  That's why it didn't surprise me very much when the first of our own mother ships returned from its twenty-eight-day voyage among the stars with only two hundred seventy-six of its one thousand passengers still aboard. The other seven hundred twenty-four had remained behind on one lush, exciting, exotic, friendly world or another. These planets had one thing in common: They were all populated by charming, warm, intelligent, humanlike people who had left their own home worlds after being discovered by the nuhp. Many races lived together in peace and harmony on these planets, in spacious cities newly built to house the fed-up expatriates. Perhaps these alien races had experienced the same internal jealousies and hatreds we human beings had known for so long, but no more. Coming together from many planets throughout our galaxy, these various peoples dwelt contentedly beside each other, united by a single common aversion: their dislike for the nuhp.

  Within a year of the launching of our first interstellar ship, the population of Earth had declined by one half of one percent. Within two years, the population had fallen by almost fourteen million. The nuhp were too sincere and too eager and too sympathetic to fight with. That didn't make them any less tedious. Rather than make a scene, most people just up and left. There were plenty of really lovely worlds to visit, and it didn't cost very much, and the opportunities in space were unlimited. Many people who were frustrated and disappointed on Earth were able to build new and fulfilling lives for themselves on planets that we didn't even know existed until the nuhp arrived.

  The nuhp knew this would happen. It had already happened dozens, hundreds of times in the past, wherever their mother ships touched down. They had made promises to us and they had kept them, although we couldn't have guessed just how things would turn out.

  Our cities were no longer decaying warrens imprisoning the impoverished masses. The few people who remained behind could pick and choose among the best housing. Landlords were forced to reduce rents and keep properties in perfect repair just to attract tenants.

  Hunger was ended when the ratio of consumers to food producers dropped drastically. Within ten years, the population of Earth was cut in half, and was still falling.

  For the same reason, poverty began to disappear. There were plenty of jobs for everyone. When it became apparent that the nuhp weren't going to compete for those jobs, there were more opportunities than people to take advantage of them.

  Discrimination and prejudice vanished almost overnight. Everyone cooperated to keep things running smoothly despite the large-scale emigration. The good life was available to everyone, and so resentments melted away. Then, too, whatever enmity people still felt could be focused solely on the nuhp; the nuhp didn't mind, either. They were oblivious to it all.

  I am now mayor and postmaster of the small human community of New Dallas, here on Thir, the fourth planet of a star known in our old catalog as Struve 2398. The various alien races we encountered here call the star by another name, which translates into "God's Pineal." All the aliens here are extremely helpful and charitable, and there are few nuhp.

  All through the galaxy, the nuhp are considered the messengers of peace. Their mission is to travel from planet to planet, bringing reconciliation, prosperity, and true civilization. There isn't an intelligent race in the galaxy that doesn't love the nuhp. We all recognize what they've done and what they've given us.

  But if the nuhp started moving in down the block, we'd be packed and on our way somewhere else by morning.

  Target: Berlin!

  The Role of the Air Force Four-Door Hardtop

  PREFACE

  Feeling neglected, my wife left me during those terrible months. I also lost the friendship of several colleagues, but we succeeded in modifying a Lincoln Continental four-door sedan into our first great bomber of the war, the B—17 Flying Fortress. It was a trying time, but I'll tell you about it if you care to listen.

  Effinger WWII Book Gossipy, Rambling

  Reviewed for the Rusty Brook, New Jersey, Sun by Louis J. Arphouse

  The opening words of Effinger's memoir, the very first paragraph of his preface, give the flavor of the remainder of the book. After a chapter or two, it is not a pleasant flavor. This is the first eye-witness document we have gotten from the war, at least from so notorious a participant. One could have hoped for a more disciplined, less discursive book. Effinger was personally involved in many of the tactical decisions and t
echnical inventions that shaped the Second World War. He has seen fit in his history of those years to give us instead his meager snapshots of great figures, mere glimpses of elbows and coats rushing out of the frame while momentous consequences remain hinted at in the background.

  One might even think that Effinger's book was written well before the end of the war, as a kind of hedging of his bets. In places it seems like the author is placating his former enemies, smoothing over their errors in the hopes that, had they emerged victorious, they might have gone easier on Effinger in whatever hypothetical war crimes trials that might have ensued. It's unlikely that the book would have had even that effect. Instead, it is too stilted to be read with any pleasure as a personal memoir, and not strict enough to be of value as a history text. It is fortunate for Effinger, and for the free world, that his talents during the war were used in other directions.

  PREFACE (continued)

  The decision not to hold the Second World War in the 1940s was made by mutual consent of all combatant parties, and a general agreement was signed in Geneva. Simply speaking, most nations felt it would just be better to wait. But there were often more probing reasons, situations which reflected sophisticated and convoluted paths of national policy. The Japanese, for example, at the Maryknoll conference, were rankled at the oil embargo a suspicious United States had placed on that island empire. A Japanese delegate rose from his seat at one point and abandoned his polite but false diplomatic manner. "What's the matter?" he said in a loud voice. "I can't understand it. Your own Admiral Perry opened us up to trade. Now you won't sell us what we want. That's stupid." And the irate delegate walked out of the conference room, blushing at his own brazenness.