Long Ago, Far Away

CHAPTER 6

Soames, remembering Rex, got two puppies for the children next morning. He was inside the cottage when Captain Moggs turned up. He watched Mal and Hod, outside on the lawn, playing with the two small dogs. Zani sat at a table indoors, drawing. Gail had shown her pictures of cities and provided her with paper and soft pencils. Zani grasped the idea immediately. She drew, without remarkable skill but with a certain pleasing directness. Now she drew a city while Gail hovered near.

"I reported to Washington of your willingness to work on the report, Mr. Soames," said Captain Moggs with gratification. "Your status has been clarified. The papers are on the way here now."

Soames started a little. From where he stood, he could watch Mal and Hod out of a window, and by turning his eyes he could see Zani. She could see nothing that went on where Mal cuddled one puppy, girl-fashion, while Hod played in quite another fashion with the other. The window was behind Zani.

Soames had not been too attentive. He realized it.

"What's that, Captain?"

"Your status is clarified," said Captain Moggs, authoritatively. "You have been appointed a civilian consultant. You had no official status before. The bookkeeping problem was serious. Now you have a civil service status, a rating, an assimilated rank and a security classification."

Soames turned again to watch the children out-of-doors. Fran came around from the back of the cottage. He carried something in his hands. It was a white rabbit. He'd brought it to show Mal and Hod. They put down the puppies and gazed at it in amazement, stroking its fur and talking inaudibly.

Soames looked swiftly at Zani. Her pencil had ceased to make strokes upon the paper. She had the expression of someone watching absorbedly, though her eyes were on the paper before her.

Gail stirred, and Soames made a gesture to her. Puzzled, she came to his side. He said quietly:

"Watch the kids outside and Zani at the same time."

Fran retrieved the rabbit and went away with it, to give it back to its owners. Zani returned to her drawing. The two children outside went back to the puppies. One small dog sprawled triumphantly over the other with an expression of bland amiability on his face. For no reason at all, he began to chew meditatively on the other puppy's ear. His victim protested with no indignation at all.

Zani, with her back to the scene, giggled to herself. The two children outdoors separated the puppies to play with them again, individually.

"Zani knew," said Soames under his breath. "She knew what the others saw."

"It happens all the time," said Gail in a similar low tone. "I've noticed, since you pointed it out. But they aren't telepaths! They talk to each other constantly. If they were telepaths they wouldn't need to."

Captain Moggs exclaimed. She'd gone to look at Zani's drawing:

"Really, Gail, the child draws very nicely! But do you think she should waste time on pictures like this, when it's so important that she and the others learn English?"

Gail said quietly:

"She's drawing pictures of her own world. That's a city like her people build. I thought it would be a good idea to get such pictures from her."

Gail went to look at the drawing, at which Zani labored with a young girl's complacent absorption in something she knows will be approved by a grown-up when it's done. With a gesture, Gail invited Soames to look. He did.

Zani had drawn the sky-line of a city, but it was an odd one. There were tall buildings, but their walls were draping, catenary curves. There were splendid towers and soaring highways, which leaped across emptiness to magnificent landings. There were groups of structures with no straight line visible anywhere.

"Interesting," said Soames. "That kind of building has been suggested as ultra-modern architecture. They don't have an external steel frame. There's a central mast from which all the floors are hung. They have to be braced by cables, which make catenary curves like suspension-bridges on end."

Zani went on with her drawing. Gail said:

"It isn't fantasy, then. Look at this. It's a—maybe you'll call it a car. Only it looks like a sled. Or maybe a motorcycle."

She showed him a finished sketch. With a childish directness, yet a singular effect of direct observation, Zani had drawn a vehicle. It did not have wheels. It rested on what looked like two short, thick runners like skids.

"This isn't fantasy, either," said Soames. "There've been wheelless vehicles built lately. They're held an inch or so above the ground by columns of air pouring out. They ride on cushions of air. But they have to have perfect highways. It isn't likely that a child would draw them if she hadn't seen them."

In silence, Gail showed other sketches. A man and woman in costumes somehow related to those the children had worn at the beginning. There was a picture of a group of people.

"Odd," said Soames. "Everybody wears a belt like the children have on now. Everybody. As if it were official."

He glanced at Zani. She wore a belt over American-style young-girl's clothing today. The belt was neither leather nor plastic nor anything that could have a name put to it. It had two round and two square medallions placed two on each side of the fastening, which was not a buckle. The others wore the same. Soames puzzled over it for a moment.

Gail offered him another sheet of paper.

"I'm going to tear this up when you've seen it."

It was a landscape, sketched in with surprisingly bold strokes of the soft pencil. The time was night. Near the bottom of the picture there was a city of the strange, catenary-curve architecture. It was drawn so small, though, that most of the picture was black sky. But there was a blazing light upon the city, and it came from something monstrous and jagged and incandescent and vast, plunging upon the city from the sky, trailing flames behind it.

"And this," said Gail, very quietly.

It was a picture of a crater, a ring-mountain, the scene of the impact of something terrible and huge. It was a chasm with circular, broken rocky walls. There was a fallen tree in the foreground, near the spot from which the sketch seemed to have been made.

"You're right not to show anyone else those drawings," said Soames. "The kids are in a bad enough fix as visitors of a superior race. If it should be realized that they're not here by accident, but somehow to open a way for invasion by the population of a whole planet, well, you can just imagine ..."

Zani giggled suddenly, and he jumped. But her eyes were on the paper before her. Soames glanced out the window. Mal had toppled over, and one of the puppies had climbed valiantly on her back and was pulling with all his tiny might at a puppy-mouthful of her hair. His tail wagged vigorously the while. Hod laughed, and Mal giggled, and inside the cottage Zani—who could not see what had happened—giggled with them.

"She couldn't see it, but she knew what happened," said Soames. "I suspect this place is so top-secret that it's a breach of security to remember it outside. If anybody notices that little trick the kids can do, they'll be suspected of casually inspecting high-secrecy stuff while drawing pictures or playing with little dogs."

Soames returned to his quarters. He set to work upon the highly necessary task of pretending that he was a castaway from the children's civilization in order to improvise conveniences that as a castaway he'd consider crude, but as an aborigine amazing.

From time to time, though, he wondered sardonically about the public-relations program on the children. He'd prepared a complete report about the ship, telling in detail about its arrival and adding everything he could infer about the civilization that had made it, except its location on the Earth of aeons ago and its imminent doom. Gail had written what she considered the best human-interest story of her life about the children. Neither report was asked for. Nobody knew where either was to be sent. Soames guessed sardonically at a change of policy somewhere.

But the problem justified worry, the simple, relatively insignificant problem of the children here and now, with all thought of flaming skies and upheaved earth put firmly aside.

The children had to be revealed. But the world would automatically assume that the crew of an alien spaceship must be in some fashion monsters. But four nicely raised children? Space-travellers? Spaceships navigated by boys and girls who liked to play with puppies? Such innocuous persons to represent the most deadly danger the modern world had faced?

But they did represent it. There was no way out of the fact. And somehow the facts had to be put across. The public-relations counsellors who had interviewed the children pointed out the means. They got the job.

The advance publicity was thoroughly professional. The spaceship's company was to be revealed in the most stupendous broadcast of all time. For the second time in history, a trans-Atlantic relay patrol would form two relay-channels from North America to Europe. It would reach Japan via the Aleutians and a relay-ship, by wire from Japan to all Asia and—again relayed—to Australia. South Africa would get the coverage by land-wire down the continent from the Pillars of Hercules. The Mediterranean basin, the Near East, Scandinavia, and even Iceland would see the spectacle. Detailed instructions were given to Gail to give to the children.

The very top feminine TV personality of America would serve as hostess, substituting for Gail, who must try to make the children understand. Miss Linda Beach could establish a personal contact with any audience. One had only to watch her to respond to her charm, her wholesomeness, her adroit sincerity. She had sold soap, automobiles, vitamin tablets and dessicated soup. Obviously, she was the perfect saleswoman for the children out of space.

"I hope the professionals know what they're doing," Soames had said to Gail. "I'm a simple soul who'd be inclined to tell the truth without trimmings. It might not be easy, and it might not be comfortable, but it would be fact."

A small fast transport came to get the children and Gail and Soames. It took off.

Soames took a seat beside Fran. He took out a pencil and a pad of paper. He drew a sketch of a boy flying a kite, and added a close-up drawing of the kite. He drew a boy walking on stilts, and a drawing of how stilts were made. Soames hadn't actually seen a boy walking on stilts for years, and it might now be a lost art, but Fran showed interest. Soames drew a bicycle with a boy on it, and then modified the bike into a motorcycle. He hoped his sketches would strike Fran as interesting, if primitive, things a boy might do for his own satisfaction.

Fran was intrigued. Presently he took the pencil and made sketches of his own. A boy with a belt like his rode something which vaguely resembled a sledge or a motorcycle. He made a detailed drawing of a runner. This was an air-sled, such as Zani had pictured in more elaborate form. Fran sketched the air-column generator, and it was utterly simple and a boy of fourteen could make it. After painful scrutiny Soames realized that it was a ram-jet engine which would start itself and operate in still air. In the modern world, it would make gas-turbine engines practical for locomotives and motorcars.

The transport landed. A motorcycle escort surrounded the car with drawn curtains which carried the children from Idlewild into New York. In time the car dived down into the freight entrance of the new Communications Building on 59th Street. Secret Service men had cleared all corridors so the children reached their dressing-rooms unseen.

Linda Beach appeared an hour later and began the rehearsal.

The children gathered the purpose of the thing by watching the monitors. They chattered together, and the girls went pleasantly through what was expected of them. Hod seemed quite numb, and Fran scowled. But he was more gracious when he saw Soames going through similar antics.

The rehearsal ended. There was another long wait. This was to introduce the children—from a totally unknown and superior civilization—to a world which considered them strangers from space, when they were actually from a much more improbable homeland. The world was waiting to see this. Time dragged.

All over the world people were waiting to get a first glimpse of creatures whose coming might mean the end of the world.

Presently it began.

The show, naturally, opened with a tremendous fanfare of trumpets, played from tape.

Then Linda Beach appeared. She introduced Gail and Soames and Captain Moggs.

This broadcast was supposed to be strictly informative. It was, however, produced with the attitude and the technique and the fine professionalism of specialists in the area of subconscious selling. So it put its audience—the vast majority of it—into the exact mood of people who surrender themselves to mildly lulling make-believe. When Captain Moggs told of the finding of the ship, her authoritative manner and self-importance made people feel, without regard to their thoughts, that she was an un-funny comedian. The audience remembered with decreasing concern that some interesting monsters were supposed to be in the show later and that they were waiting to see them.

The introduction of the children was a disappointment, but a mild one. When they were produced and identified, the television-watching syndrome was fully developed. There was a feeling, of course, that the show fell down in interest and that it did not live up to its advance publicity. But the television audience is used to that. Its members continued to watch with slightly dulled eyes, listening with partly attentive ears, automatically waiting for a commercial when it could get some beer or an equivalent without missing anything.

Even when tumult and confusion began; when Linda Beach tried to hold the show together in the teeth of uproar behind her, the tranquillized state of the audience continued. When Linda Beach's necklace was snatched from her neck it seemed intended to be funny.

It wasn't until the very end that anything occurred really to break the mood professionally produced shows are designed to achieve. That occurrence startled the viewers out of their semi-comatose state, just as blatant obscenity or intolerable profanity would have done. Linda Beach, in fine sincerity and in tribute to the children, made a statement which was utterly explosive. When the show ended, people all over the world were roused and horrified and enraged.

Only small children, waiting in space-helmets and with ray-guns ready, complained aggrievedly that there hadn't been any monsters. The adults felt that there had been. That there were.

They hated the children with a strictly personal hatred based on panic combined with shame.