Troublemakers

NEVER SEND TO KNOW FOR WHOM THE LETTUCE WILTS

Tuesday.

Henry Leclair did a double-take. His eyes racked and reracked between the Chinese fortune cookie in his right hand and the Chinese fortune cookie fortune in his left. He read it again: Tuesday.

Then again, querulously, “Tuesday?”

That was all. Nothing more; no aphorism about meeting one’s true love on Tuesday; no saccharine cliché denoting Tuesday as the advent of good fortune; no Tuesday-themed accompanying notation warning of investing in hi-tech stocks on Tuesday. Nothing. Just the narrow, slightly-gray slip of rectangular paper with the printed word Tuesday and a period immediately after it.

Henry muttered to himself. “Why Tuesday? What Tuesday?” He absently let the fortune cookie slip from his fingers.

“Damn!” he murmured, watching the cookie sink quickly to the bottom of his water glass.

He returned his attention to the fortune. Tuesday. That was today. Biting his lower lip, Harry reached for the second of the three cookies. He pulled at the edge of the fortune paper protruding from the convoluted pastry. Placing the cookie back on its plate carefully, he turned the slip over and read it:

You’re the one.

Henry Leclair had been a premature baby. His mother, Martha Annette Leclair, had not carried him full term. Seven months, two days. Boom. Enter baby Henry. There was no explanation save the vagaries of female physiology. However, there was another explanation: Henry-even prenatal-had been curious. Pathologically, even pre-natally, curious. He had wanted free from the womb, had wanted to discover what was out there.

When he was two years old, Henry had been discovered, in trapdoor-bottom pajamas, in mid-winter, crouching in the snow outside his home, waiting to see whether the white stuff fell from above or came up through the ground.

At the age of seven they had to cut Henry down. He had been swinging from a clothesline strung in the basement, drying the family wash. Henry had been curious: what does it feel like to strangle?

By the time he was thirteen, Henry had read every volume of the ENCYLOPAEDIA BRITTANICA, copious texts on every phase of the sciences, all matter disseminated by the government for the past twenty-eight years, and biographies by the score. Also, somewhere between seven thousand, eight hundred, and seven thousand, nine hundred books on history, religion, and sociology. He avoided books of cartoons-and novels.

By the time he was twenty, Henry wore noticeably thick-lensed glasses; and he had migraine headaches. But his all-consuming curiosity had not been satiated.

On his thirty-first birthday, Henry was unmarried and digging for bits of a stone tablet in the remains of a lost city somewhere near the Dead Sea. Curiosity.

Henry Leclair was curious about almost everything. He wondered why a woman wore egret feathers in her hat, rather than those of the peacock. He wondered why lobsters turned red when they were cooked. He wondered why office buildings did not have thirteenth floors. He wondered why men left home. He wondered what the soot-accumulation rate in his city was. He wondered why he had a strawberry mark on his right knee. He wondered all sorts of things.

Curiosity. He was helpless, driven, doomed in its itching, overwhelming, adhesive grip.

You’re the one.

“I’m the one?” Henry blurted incredulously. “Me? I’m the what? What am I? What the blazes are you talking about?” He spoke to the insensate, unresponsive fortune paper.

This was, suddenly, overpoweringly, a conundrum for Henry. He knew, deep in his soul-matter, that curiosity demanded he must solve this intrusive enigma. Two such fortunes-two such incomprehensible mind-troublers-were more than mere coyness on someone’s part. There was something not quite right here. Something, as Henry put it to himself, with stunning originality, more than meets the eye!

Henry called for the waiter. The short, almost bald, and overly-contemptuous Oriental passed twice more-once in either direction-finally coming to a halt beside Henry’s booth. Henry extended the two fortunes and said, “Who writes these?”

“########[1],” answered the waiter, with a touch of insouciant, yet distingue, impudence.

“I beg your pardon,” Henry said, removing his noticeably thick-lensed glasses, dangling them in his other hand, “but would you mind speaking English?”

The waiter wrinkled his nose in distaste, stroked the cloth napkin draped over his forearm, and pointed to the manager, lounging half-asleep behind the cash register.

“Thanks,” said Henry absently, his attention to the chase now directed elsewhere. He started to rise as the waiter turned. “Oh-check, please.” The waiter stopped dead in his tracks, drew his shoulders up as though he had been struck an especially foul blow, and returned to the table. He hurriedly scribbled the check, all in Chinese glyphs except the total, and plunked it on the table. Muttering Eastern epithets, he stalked away.

Henry absently dropped the remaining fortune cookie in his jacket pocket as he picked up the check-so anxious was he now to speak to the manager. Quickly slapping his hat on his head, he gathered his topcoat off the chair, dropped a dollar and some change, and headed for the manager. The old man was slumped across the glass case, one arm securely pressed against the cash register’s drawer. He awakened at almost the instant Henry stopped in front of him. His hand extended automatically for check and cash.

While the fellow was placing his check on a spindle, Henry leaned across and asked, quietly, “Can you tell me where you get these little fortunes?” He showed one. Henry expected more misdirection and confusion, as he had experienced with the waiter, but the Chinese manager did not take his eyes off the change he was delivering as he said, “We buy in lots. From trading company that sell us cookies. You want buy dozen, take home with you?”

Henry fended him off, and asked the name and address of the company. After a few seconds of deliberation, the manager reached out of sight under the counter, dragged forth a large notebook. He opened it, ran a finger down a column of addresses, said, “Saigon-San Francisco Trading Company, 431 Bessemer Street.”

Henry thanked him and strode out onto the sidewalk. “Taxi!” he called into the river of passing cars, and a few minutes later was riding toward 431 Bessemer Street. The crimson clutching claw of cold curiosity. Oh, my.

The Saigon-San Francisco Trading Company was located in a condemned warehouse on the desolate lower end of Bessemer Street. In the manufacturing and warehouse section of the city, Bessemer Street was regarded as the dropoff dead end of the known universe. On Bessemer Street, the lower end was regarded much the same. Henry had an idea this building was the last rung on the ladder of aversion. Beyond lay the dark, restless river.

The windows of the pathetic warehouse were, for the most part, broken and sightless; many were boarded up. The building itself leaned far out of plumb, dolorous, as though seeking impecunious support from some destitute relative on its west side. Its west side faced an empty, rat-infested lot.

So, for that matter, did the east, north, and south sides. Dolorous, pathetic, rat-infested.

“A pretty sorry place for an active trading company,” murmured Henry, pulling his coat collar up about his ears. The wind ricocheting through the darkened warehouse canyons was rock-chilling, this late at night. Henry glanced at his wristwatch. Nearly eleven o’clock. It was the hour when the terminally curious talked to themselves:

“Um. Probably no one working at this time, no late shift, but at least I can get an idea of what the place is like, as long as I’m here.” He mentally kicked himself for taking off in such a flurry of desire to solve the riddle of the fortune papers. “I should have waited till reasonable working hours, tomorrow morning. Ah, well...”

He walked across the street, stepping quickly in and out of the smudge of light thrown by a lone, remarkably, unshattered street lamp. Henry glanced nervously behind him.

Far off, back the way they had come, he could see the rapidly disappearing taillights of the taxi.

“Why the devil didn’t I ask him to wait?” Henry had no answer for himself, though one did, in fact, exist: the mindclouding power of curiosity. Now he would have to walk far in the wind, the cold, the dark, to the nearest hack stand or at least an inhabited thoroughfare.

The building loomed over him. He went up to the front door. Locked solid; steel bolts welded to the frame.

“Hmm. Locked up for good.” He glanced at the dirty CONDEMNED sign beside the door. Then he muttered, “Odd,” with uncertainty, because there were fresh truck tire treadmarks in the mud of the street. The tracks led around to the rear of the warehouse. Henry found his interest in this problem mounting. Piqued, piqued, piqued. Deserted, condemned: but still getting deliveries, or pickups? Curiouser and Curiouser.

He walked around to the rear of the warehouse, following the truck tracks. They stopped beside a number of square indentations in the mud. “Somebody left a bunch of crates here.”

He looked around. The rear of the building bulked uglier than the front-if that was possible. All but one of the windows was boarded, and that one...

Henry realized he was looking at light streaming through the window, there on the top floor. It was blanked out for a moment, then came back. As though someone had walked in front of it. But that light’s in the ceiling, Henry thought wildly. I can see the edge of the fixture from here. How can anyone walk in front of it?

His wonderment was cut short by still further signs of activity in the building. A circular opening in the wall next to the window-quite dark and obviously a pipe-shaft of some sort-was emitting large puffs of faintly phosphorescent green fog.

“There’s someone up there,” Henry concluded, ever the rocket scientist.

The Urge rose in Henry Leclair once more. The problem thumped and bobbed in his mind. Curiosity, now a tsunami, had utterly overwhelmed even the tiniest atoll of caution and self-preservation. You’re the one, you say? You’d better believe it because here I come!

He carefully examined the rear of the building. No doors. But a first floor window was broken, and the boards were loose. As quietly as possible, he disengaged the nails’ grip on the sill, and prized the boards off. Dragging two old crates from the dumpster across the alley, Henry stacked them, and climbed into the building. Curious is, as curious does. (Did anyone hear a cat being killed?)

It was pitch, night, ebony, lusterless, without qualification dark inside. Henry held his pipe lighter aloft and rasped it, letting the flame illuminate the place for a few seconds.

Broken crates, old newspapers, cobwebs, dust. The place looked deserted. But there had been the light from above.

He sought out the elevator. Useless. He sought out the stairs. Bricked off. He sat down on a packing crate. Annoyed.

Then the sound of glugging came to him.

Glug. Glug. And again, glug. Then a sort of washed-out, whimpery glug that even Henry could tell was a defective: Gluuuuuug!

“Plummis!” swore a voice in shivering falsetto.

Henry listened for a minute more, but no other sound came to him. “Oh, that was cursing, all right,” murmured Henry to himself. “I don’t know who’s doing it, or where it’s coming from, but that’s unquestionably someone’s equivalent of a damn or hell!” He began searching for the source of the voice.

As he neared one wall, the voice came again. “Plummis, valts er webbel er webbel er webbel...” the voice trailed off into muttered webbels.

Henry looked up. There was light shining through a ragged hole in the ceiling, very faintly shining. He stepped directly under it to assay a clearer view...

...and was yanked bodily and immediately up through many such holes in many such ceilings, till his head came into violent contact with a burnished metal plate in the ceiling of the top floor.

“Aaargh!” moaned Henry, crashing to the floor, clutching his banged head, clutching his crushed hat.

“Serves you qquasper!” the shivering falsetto voice remonstrated. Henry looked around. The room was filled with strangely-shaped machines resting on metal workbenches. They were all humming, clicking, gasping, winking and glugging efficiently. All, that is, but one, that emitted a normal glug then collapsed into a fit of prolonged gluuuuuuging.

“Plummis!” Falsetto cursing: vehemently.

Henry looked around once more. The room was empty. He glanced toward the ceiling. The unie was sitting cross-legged in the air, about six inches below the ceiling.

“You’re...” The rest of it got caught somewhere in Henry’s throat.

“I’m Eggzaborg. You’d call me a unie, if you had the intelligence to call me.”

“You’re...” Henry tried again.

“I’m invading the Earth,” he said snappishly. The unie completed the thought for Henry, even though that was not even remotely what Henry had been thinking.

Henry took a closer look at the unie.

He was a little thing, no more than two feet tall, almost a gnome, with long, knobbly arms and legs, a pointed head and huge, blue, owl-like eyes with nictitating eyelids. He had a fragile antenna swaying gently from the center of his forehead. It ended in a feather. A light blue feather. Almost robin’s egg blue, Henry thought inanely.

The unie’s nose was thin and straight, with tripartite nostrils, overhanging a tight line of mouth, and bracketed by cherubic, puffy cheeks. He had no eyebrows. His ears were pointed and set very high on his skull. He was hairless.

The unie wore a form-fitting suit of bright yellow, and pinned to the breast was a monstrous button, half the size of his chest, which quite plainly read:

CONQUEROR.

The unie caught Henry’s gaze. “The button. Souvenir. Made it up for myself. Can’t help being pompous, giving in to hubris once in a while.” He said it somewhat sheepishly. “Attractive, though, don’t you think?”

Henry closed his eyes very tightly, pressing with the heels of both hands. He wrinkled his forehead, letting his noticeably thick-lensed glasses slide down his nose just a bit, to unfocus the unie. “I am not well, “ he said, matter-of-factly. “Not well at all.”

The shivering falsetto broke into chirping laughter.

“Well enough now!” Eggzaborg chortled. “But just wait three thousand years-just wait!” Henry opened his left eye a slit. Eggzaborg was rolling helplessly around in the air, clutching a place on his body roughly where his abdomen should have been. The unie bumped lightly against the ceiling, besotted with his revelry.

A thin shower of plaster fell across Henry’s face. He felt the cool tickle of it on his eyelids and nose. That plaster, thought Henry, was real. Ergo, this unie must be real.

This is a lot like being in trouble.

“You wrote those fortunes?” Henry inquired, holding them up for the unie to see.

“Fortunes?” The unie spoke to himself. “For...ohhh! You must mean the mentality-crushers I’ve been putting in the cookies!” He rubbed long, thin fingers together. “I knew, I say, I just knew they would produce results!” He looked pensive for a moment, then sighed. “Things have been so slow. I’ve actually wondered once or twice if I’m really succeeding. Well, more than once or twice, actually. Actually, about ten or twenty million times! Plummis!”

He let his shoulders slump, and folded his knobbly hands in his knobbly lap, looking wistfully at Henry Leclair. “Poor thing,” he said. (Henry wasn’t sure if the unie meant his visitor...or himself.)

Henry ignored him for a moment, deciding to unravel this as he had always unraveled every conundrum in his search for information: “calmly, sequentially, first things first. Since the unie’s comments were baffling in the light of any historical conquests Henry had ever read about, he decided to turn his immediate attention elsewhere before trying to make sense of the nonsensical. First things first.

He crawled to his feet and unsteadily walked over to the machines. All the while glancing up to keep an eye on Eggzaborg. The machines hurt his eyes.

A tube-like apparatus mounted on an octagonal casing was spitting-through an orifice-buttons. The shape of the machine hurt his eyes. The buttons were of varying sizes, colors, shapes. Shirt buttons, coat buttons, industrial sealing buttons, watch-cap buttons, canvas tent buttons, exotic-purpose buttons. Many buttons, all kinds of buttons. Many of them were cracked, or the sides of the thread holes were sharpened enough to split the thread. They all fell into a trough with holes, graded themselves, and plunged through attached tubes into cartons on the floor. Henry blinked once.

The shape of the second machine hurt Henry’s eyes; the device seemed to be grinding a thin line between the head and shank of twopenny nails. The small buzz-wheel ground away while the nail spun, held between pincers. As soon as an almost invisible line had been worn on the metal, the nail dropped into a bucket. Henry blinked twice.

The other machines, whose shapes really hurt Henry’s eyes, were performing equally petty, yet subversive, procedures. One was all angles and glass sheets, leading to the hole in the wall Henry had seen from below. It was glugging frantically. The puffs of glowing green fog were still erupting sporadically.

“That one wilts lettuce, “ Eggzaborg said, with pride.

“It what?”

The unie looked shocked. “You don’t think lettuce wilts of its own accord, do you?”

“Well, I never thought about it-that is-food rots, it goes bad of its own...uh, nature...entropy...doesn’t it? It doesn’t? Sure it does, yeah?”

“Poor thing,” the unie repeated, looking even more wistful than before. Pity shone in his eyes. “It’s almost like taking advantage of a very slow pony.”

Henry felt this was the moment; but since the unie was obviously not human, he would have to handle things carefully. He was dealing with an alien intellect. Oh, yes, that was the long and short of it. An alien from another place in the universe. An e.t. sort of creature. Yes, indeed. He must never forget that. Probably a highly dangerous alien intellect. He didn’t look very dangerous. But then, one couldn’t tell with these alien intellects. One always has to be on one’s toes with these devious, cunning alien intellects, Orson Welles knew that.

“All right, then,” said Henry, nay, challenged Henry, “so you wilt lettuce. So what? How does that aid you in conquering the Earth?”

“Disorganization,” the unie answered in a deeply significant tone of voice, pointing one ominous stick finger at Henry. “Disorganization and demoralization! Undercuts you! Unsettles, and unhinges, you! Makes you teeter, throws you off balance, makes you uncertain about the basic structure of things: gravity, entropy, cooking times. Strikes at the very fibers of your security! Heh!” He chuckled several times more, and folded his hands. There was a lot of that: folding and unfolding.

Henry began to realize just how alien this alien’s thought-processes really were. Though he didn’t recognize the psychological significance of wilted lettuce, it obviously meant something big to the unie. Big. He marked it down in his mind.

Still, he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere meaningful. He decided to try another method to get the unie to talk, to reveal all. “I don’t get this,” Henry said. “I just don’t believe it. You’re just a demented magician or-or something. You aren’t what you say at all. By the way,” he added snidely, “just what the hell are you?”

The unie leaped to his feet in the air, bumping his pointed head on the ceiling. More plaster sifted down. “Plummis!” cursed the little being, massaging his skull. Like the lettuce, his antenna had begun to wilt noticeably.

He was furious. “You dare question the motives, machinations, methodology and...and...” he groped for an alliterative word, “power of Eggzaborg?” His face, normally an off-blue, not unpleasant sky tone, had slowly turned a fierce aquamarine. “Fool, dolt, imbecile, gleckbund, clod, bumpkin, jerk!” The words rolled off his tongue, spattered in Henry’s face. Henry cringed.

He was beginning to think this might not be the most salutary approach.

He became convinced of his miscalculation as his feet left the floor and he found himself hanging upside-down in the air, vibrating madly, all the pocket-change and keys and bismuth tablets cascading from his pockets, plonking him on the head as gravity had its way with them. His noticeably thick-lensed eyeglasses finally fell off. Everything became a blur. “S-s-s-stop! P-p-please s-s-s-stop!” Henry begged, twisting about in the air like a defective mixmaster. “U-u-u-uggedy-ug-ug!” he ugged as the unie bounced him, then pile-drove Henry’s head against the floor, numerous times, with numerous painful clunks. His pipe lighter fell out of his vest pocket and cracked him under the chin.

Suddenly, it stopped. Henry felt his legs unstiffen, and he somersaulted over onto the floor, lying face up, quite a bit the worse for having been uniehandled. He was puffing with agony when the unie’s face floated into what little was left of his blurred range of vision.

“Terribly sorry,” the unie said, looking down. He appeared to be sincerely concerned about his actions. He picked up Henry’s glasses and smoothly hooked them back in place on Henry’s head. “It’s just a result of waiting all these years. Six hundred years waiting. That’s a long time to anticipate, to yearn for relief on a conquest-shift that, at best, would make anyone edgy. This planet isn’t all that entertaining, meaning no offense; but you do only have the one moon, the one sun, no flemnall, and a mere four seasons. I’m three hundred and fifty years past due for the usual, standard rotation relief, and I really need some. I’m six hundred years total time on this unimportant tour of duty and, well, I’m feelin’ mighty low.” He sighed, bit what little there was of his lips, and sank into silent glumness.

Henry felt a bit of his strength coming back. At least enough to ask a few more questions.

“T-tell me the story, E-Eggzaborg.”

The unie came to a floating halt above the prostrate Henry Lecalir. “Well...” he began, with reluctance to talk to this cretinous human, “the story is simple. I graduated with honors from Dorvis Lepham. One of the top phages, of course. First in quatt wunkery, first in padgett, sixteenth in crumbpf, but the professor had it in for me...well, anyway...I am a unie. I was thus assigned to-”

Henry cut him off, “What is a unie?”

“Shut up, stop interrupting!”

“But where did you come from?”

The unie purpled again, and Henry felt (with growing terror) his body twitch, as though it were about to ascend yet again. But it didn’t, and he knew the unie had brought his temper under control. “Plummis, man! Let me finish! Stop your blasphemous interrupting!” Snappish. Very snappish. Probably not a congenial species, in the main. Likely did not play well with other species.

Henry quickly motioned him to continue, calming him with the same movement.

Eggzaborg huffed, then resumed. “Space, moron. Space. Out there.” He pointed. Generally in the direction of some space. Not all space, but at least some space. “I came from space. Now don’t interrupt-I come from out there where you have no idea a place exists. Both in space, and in between layers of space. Interstitial expanses. Voluminous voids. I am here because-I am here because-well, plummis, fellow, I’m here to conquer!” He vacillated his antenna helplessly, at a loss to embellish the explanation.

“But why?”

“Why? Why? How obstinately ignorant can you be? Haven’t I told you: I’m a unie! What does that make you think of?”

“Fried shrimp,” replied Henry.

“Oooooh!” The unie hurtled about the room, barely missing collisions with walls and machines. “The impertinence! That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed so well hidden! I can’t stand the stupidity of you people! Rudel You’re unconscionably rude! Probably the most insulting, rude, boorish species in this galaxy, possibly the entire expanding universe! When you think of unie you just naturally think of conquest!”

“I do?” asked Henry, still not quite convinced.

The unie subsided into muted sulfurous cursing.

Henry decided to try flattery. “You speak English very well.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” snapped the unie. “I invented it!”

That quieted Henry again. He wasn’t quite sure for a moment whether he was lying on floor or ceiling. “And French? Did you invent French, too? What about Tagalog and Aramaic? Basque is nice. I’ve always wondered about Basque. So: Basque, too?”

The unie looked genuinely bewildered for a moment, then tried again, looking at Henry with piercing eyes, daring him to interrupt. “I was graduated in a large class. There was much talk that year (though we don’t judge by your years, of course) (we don’t even call them years) (in fact, ‘years’ is an ugly word, and sounds like pure gibberish if you say it over and over) (years years years years years years, years years years, see what I’m pointing out here) as I was saying, there was much talk of the coming Flib. Though I thought it was superfluous exhalations, I was worried by the rapidity with which my classmates were being sent out.” He shivered fearfully, and mumbled, “The Flib...oh.” He trembled again, then resumed. “When my placket was oiled, and I knew I was to go out, all other thoughts fled from my head.

“Now, I’ve been here three hundred and fifty years longer than my shift, six hundred years total, six hundred years, and I can’t contact the Lephamaster. The Flib has likely already vastened longitudinally. It’s not that I’m exactly frightened,” he hastened to add, “it’s just that I’m a little, well, worried, and I’d like a drink of yerbl. Oh yes,” and he looked wistful, “just a melkh of pale, thick, moist yerbl.”

“If you’ve been here six hundred years,” asked Henry, beginning to rise to a sitting position, “why haven’t you conquered us already?”

The unie looked at him strangely. “Who ever heard of conquering in less than four thousand years? It wouldn’t be ethical. We’re talking ethics here, you barbarian.” He pouted and shined his button with a forearm.

Henry decided to risk another edgy question: “But how can writing cookie fortunes and wilting lettuce conquer us?”

“That isn’t all I do,” responded the unie. “Why, I make people smile (that’s very important), and I rust water pipes, and I make pig’s tails curl, and I cure colds, and I make shingles falloff roofs, and I stop wars, and I dirty white shoes, and I-” He seemed intending to continue for some time, but Henry, confused, stopped him.

“Excuse my interruption,” he said, “but I don’t understand. There’s probably a point I’ve missed. What’s the overall plan?”

The unie threw up his hands in exasperation, and Henry noticed for the first time that the alien had only four fingers on each.

“That ‘plan’ as you so casually dismiss it, you meat-plug, has been deployed for millennia, by the unies,” the little being said, “and no one has understood it but the top Lephamasters. How the blazes do you expect me to explain anything as complicated as that to a buffoon like you? That plan was formulated to handle four thousand years of exigencies, and you want a rundown in four sentences! Utter imbecile!”

“You’ve been here six hundred years,” murmured Henry in awe.

“Yes. Rather clever the way I’ve kept out of sight, don’t you think?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Henry felt a spark of belligerence bumming. All the slamming and jouncing and bouncing had finally overcome even his insatiable curiosity, and he was now more than slightly cheesed off. “I’ll bet you’re the basis for all those dumb legends about gnomes and gremlins and poltergeists; and flying saucers, too. Not such a terrific job if you ask me. Not to mention that your, what’s his name, your Lephamaster seems to have forgotten you even exist!”

Eggzaborg spread his hands in unhappiness. “There are bound to be tiny slip-ups in six hundred years. Particularly with the defective screens on those,” he cursed in an alien tongue, “raw-material trucks I use. They’re very old now, pretty worn, and every once in a while some snoopy human will see one coming or going. “

Henry realized he was, in fact, referring to UFOs, to flying saucers. Then, what the unie had said a minute before suddenly sank through to Henry’s conscious: “You say you stop wars?” Amazement rang in his voice.

“Certainly. How else can I conquer you? If you keep killing each other off, what’ll be left for me to conquer?” He looked at Henry appealingly. “I do wish you’d cease all that shooting and stabbing and blowing-up nonsense.”

Any would-be tyrants Henry had ever read about had always encouraged inner strife. The unie seemed to have his wires crossed. “Are you sure you’re supposed to stop wars?”

“Certainly!”

Henry finally decided it was the reverse-thinking of the strange alien intellect. He couldn’t fathom the rationale, but it certainly seemed like a good deal for humanity.

“What are those button and nail machines over there doing?”

“Those are implement-cripplers,” the unie said, with ill-concealed pride. “Have you ever stopped to wonder why you still use buttons, rather than-for instance-clasps, clamps, zippers, Velcro, seams and other much better contrivances? The button is easily lost, loses its center when sent through the laundry, breaks threads, isn’t very attractive, and is difficult to open and close. Ever wonder why you still use them?” He didn’t wait for Henry to answer. “Because I keep sifting supplies of them into stores, and they have to sell them, and that creates more of a demand.

“And there is, of course, the constant mindwashing of my 24-hour-a-day Coercive Brain Ray. That helps a lot.”

Henry said, “Buttons. Insidious, no doubt about it. And the ‘nail crippler’ machine over there?,

“The nails are treated so they go in at angles. You ever see anyone who could hit ten consecutive nails straight into a piece of wood? They slant, they bend, they break! That’s what my sweet little machine over there does! Don’t you just love it? The other machine, the trapezoidal one, helps keep the birthrate up, to offset the death-rate in your wars.” He looked at Henry sternly. “It puts pin-sized holes in pro-”

Henry blanched, cut him off quickly. “Er-that’s all right; I understand. But what about those fortune cookies? Why the weird messages?”

“Demoralization. See how they bothered you? Just think of a million people opening fortune cookies and finding the message, No way, inside! They find a message, Forget about it, or It’s lost, you’ll never find it. What do you think happens to their frame of mind, their self-confidence, their joie de vivre? They don’t know it, but it unnerves them for the rest of the week, throws them off-balance, to find a fortune cookie fortune, and all it says, enigmatically, maddeningly, is ‘Tuesday!’ “

“Do they all say ‘Tuesday’?”

“The dated ones do. That’s the only day I’m sure there will be no ominous omens of a Flib.” He shuddered. Henry didn’t know what Flib was, but the unie certainly seemed to be bothered, even terrified, of it. “Oh, I’m so pleased they’re getting results! I think I’ll step up production.”

He walked down the air to a flat, multi-snake-armed machine, and punched a tip at one end. The machine began to wonkle.

Wonkle, wonkle, wonkle. “Plummis!” Eggzaborg swore, dealing the machine a vicious kick. The machine wonkled once more in agony, then began winkling. Winkle, winkle, winkle.

Eggzaborg looked relieved. “You’d think even this refurbished equipment would hold up better. It’s only about a thousand years old. We don’t judge in years, of course,” he reminded Henry again. “No years. We’re not from here, remember?”

“Why are you bothering to tell me all this?” asked Henry. “I should think you’d have to keep all this secret... or get rid of me.” Suddenly Henry was very much more frightened. “Are you going to kill me...and...recycle my mortal flesh?”

The unie settled back in its cross-legged crouch. “Are you nuts? Kill you?!? I won’t be here in another ten minutes, and you’ll never find me again. Besides, who’d believe you if you told them what you’d seen? You people are such moles.” He began to laugh. High, thin, squeaky. It rasped on Henry’s nerves. “Kill you. Recycle you. Oh, that’s rich! What ultra stupegoids you humans be!”

Henry lost his temper with flashing poor judgment. “You, sir,” he began, from a lifetime of practicing the amenities, “are a charlatan and an egotistical...”

He never finished the epithet. Suddenly every coin in his pockets-every coin that was left from his previous jouncing-became screeching hot; every hair in every pore developed a life of its own, writhing and twisting, wrenching his skin over every inch of his agonized body; the soles of his shoes became peanut butter; his nose began to run; his pen leaked through his shirt. All at once.

Then he was turned upside-down, downside-up in the air yet again, and began to experience alternate hot and cold waves of stomach-convulsing nausea.

“You know something,” the unie said, quietly, “if I didn’t want to conquer you wretched gobbets so much, I’d-I’d kill the lot of you. You’re an arrogant...human being!” He said the last, much as Henry would have said “leper,” or “dog catcher,” or “televangelist.”

“Now scram, you nosey, rude simian! And just wait three thousand years! Just you wait-you’ll see!”

An instant later, Henry found himself in an apartment at 6991 Perry Avenue, 5th Floor, sharing a bathtub with a very small naked child and her three plastic ducks. He sputtered several times, quacked once in hopes it might distract someone enough so they would not notice he wasn’t a duck, clambered dripping from the tub, and was shortly thereafter taken into police custody, read his rights, casually but thoroughly bludgeoned, dragged down five flights of tenement stairs, and eventually transported to Incarceration Island. Not curiously, Henry was no longer curious.

The cell was drafty, and Henry was certain he was coming down with a beastly case of intestinal flu. His cellmate was ignoring him, while picking between his naked toes and eating what he discovered there. Henry was ill, he was nauseated, and he was still confused by the entire escapade. Nonetheless, he was desperately trying to cling to the impression that things were better than most people thought. (Some jobs are simply not worth the effort.)

Yet somehow, either because the unie had been sent out by the Lephamaster too quickly, or because there had been a glitch in the system and his people had forgotten he was here, or because this poor Earth had been an insignificant operation to begin with, or because he had gone mad having been left here too long, or perhaps, pathetically, the unie had been contaminated by human contact, or maybe, simply, just because of the normal alien viewpoint, humanity was getting Help From Outside. And Henry smiled.

Curiously, Henry was suddenly less troubled by his circumstance than common sense and pragmatism would have decreed. Yes, he had been through a physically unpleasant and unbelievable experience, one he” could not convey to another human being lest he be put in a soft room dressed in clothing with sleeves too long for his arms. Yes, he was in jail waiting arraignment on a plethora of charges that only began with moral turpitude. And, yes, he was probably coming down with intestinal flu, not to mention that the goon across from him had started exploring elsewhere on his person for edibles. But...

His lifelong curiosity, which had gotten him into this wretched situation, had been well and truly cured; and it had been exchanged for something no one else on Earth possessed.

Something more valuable than freedom or sanity or the right to vote, which he would probably lose if convicted.

Every human being on the planet, whether a barrio child in La Paz or a multimillionaire in Lucerne, whether an igloo-dwelling Aleut or an iconoclastic Algerian, no matter old or young, male or female, rich or poor, everyone lived with some measure of terror about the future, some lesser or greater trepidation about war, the Bomb, global warming, meteors from space, crime in the streets, the pollution of the gene pool, the endless inhumanity of the human race toward itself.

Everyone harbored the fear of tomorrow.

But not Henry.

Henry was in on the secret.

Henry’s curiosity had taken him to the source of the revelation that we were all going to do just fine, that there was a demented, all screwed-up, backward-thinking alien creature named Eggzaborg who, under the misconception that he was laying the groundwork for alien invasion, was actually looking out for the human race and this pitiful planet...at least for the next three thousand-plus years.

For the next three thousand-plus years nothing terminally awful could happen. The Flib, whatever horror that was, held fear for the unie, but probably was so alien it would have no effect on the human race.

Henry was in clover. One day he’d be out of jail. One day he’d be back in the world. And he’d be the happiest guy on the planet, because he was the only guy, the only guy... who knew!

His ruminations were cut short by the rumbling of his stomach. An hour earlier the inmates of cell block 4 had marched lockstep to lunch, and even though Henry had smiled at the scrap of wilted lettuce on his plate, he couldn’t eat what had been doled out; he was still hungry.

Pretty miserable meal, he mused. Then the remembrance of the third fortune cookie in his pocket made him smile. Dessert! The guards had left it in his jacket pocket-clearly no “escape potential,” any more than a stick of gum-when they had searched him and taken his belt and glasses and shoelaces and personal possessions.

He fished it out. It was still soggy from the bathwater in Apartment 5-C at 6991 Perry Avenue, but it was edible.

He pulled at the fortune. It came loose and he read it, choking on a slice of air. He remembered what the unie had said about the Flib. The fortune didn’t say Tuesday. Horribly, ominously, it said:

Wednesday.