30 (AUG. 20, WED.)
And now we all have a new King. I wish him and you, his people, happiness and prosperity with all my heart.
—Duke of Windsor
It's done now. It's all over but the shouting, or maybe the weeping, depending on how you look at it.
Earth has been absorbed into the greater scheme of things.
There'd been a telephone call from the White House at 7 A.M., from Gov personally. There was no need for me to come in, he said. My job was intact but different. I wasn't the Presidential Press Secretary any more, but my new assignment was just as important—maybe more so. Mox, who came on the line on an extension, said the same, so I knew it was official.
I tried to explain it to Mae over breakfast.
"I'm the historian," I said. "That's what it's all about."
"Eat your eggs," she said. "They'll get cold." She had sprinkled them with Pep.
"My job is to write it just as it happened. The way I see it. No propaganda, no censorship."
"That's nice. You want your coffee now or later?"
"I can work at home if I want to. And they'll send out a secretary if I want somebody to type up notes or take dictation. Now, please."
"That's sweet of them," Mae said. She poured the coffee. "Maybe they'll send that nice Joy Linx."
I carefully broke a yolk and stirred Pep into it with my fork, giving it all my attention. I think Mae was serious. "I don't believe I'll need anybody," I said carefully.
"You need me." Mae was standing at the stove with her back to me, frying an egg for herself. She was wearing a sort of maternity middy blouse and skirt and looked very good. "Don't you?"
I got up and put my arms around her gently and kissed the back of her neck.
"You can hug us gently," she said.
I did. I thought I felt my son or daughter give a kick, not of protest, but just to let me know someone was there.
"Say it," Mae whispered.
"I love you and I need you," I said.
"Good." She gave her egg a poke and sighed as if in relief. "And I love you and need you. What I don't need is that crazy robot that's been hanging around pretending to be you."
"What!"
"He didn't fool me any—except at first."
"He didn't?"
"Oh, he's a very good imitation—as far as he goes. But he worked too hard at keeping me from finding out that he lacked a few male—or even human—necessities."
"You mean he didn't—uh, sleep with you?" I had to get it said, any old way.
"He certainly didnot. Actually it was his own idea to sleep in the guest room. I'd have seen that he did anyway. But that wasn't the only thing. He never went to the bathroom."
"Well," I said.
"Oh, he'd go in and take a bath, but he never—how do they say it in hospitals?—he nevervoided."
"Oh? How do you know?"
"I listened at the door. There was never a sound till he flushed."
"Oh, Mae!" I said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. "And I thought you were completely fooled, and that I had to stay away because if you saw two of us the shock would be too much for you. Why didn't you say something?"
"I figured it was important to you and your job, and maybe even the world. You usually have a good reason when you do something peculiar. Want some toast?"
"Yes, please—wait a minute. The toaster's broken."
"Hefixed it. That's how I really knew he wasn't you. He went right ahead without a murmur and repaired half a dozen things you've been putting off ever since we were married, practically. He fixed the stuck zippers and my sewing machine and that lamp with the short in it and the switch on the vacuum cleaner. That wasn't my fumble-fingered old Sam."
All that was a long time ago. It's been only a little more than two years, but it seems like ancient history now.
A lot has happened since. It's all been fully recounted and interpreted in the press and magazines, so I'll just hit the highlights.
A year ago all the nuclear weapons in the world were deactivated and sunk in a remote corner of the Pacific. The scientists who were working on bigger and worse ones were transferred to peaceful research.
Six months ago the Moon was colonized by a six-man international expedition, whose names are Underwood, Chih-ho, Cohen, Raswaplindi, Buragin and Thorwald, and their wives.
Five months ago the cure for cancer was announced. They'd solved the riddle of muscular dystrophy, Parkinson's disease and arthritis before that.
Last week the people of Mississippi elected a Negro governor.
For more than a year a few million people who had been on the brink of starvation have had enough to eat—and the U.S. government is saving a few billion dollars a year by not paying storage charges on surplus grain. (Our farmers have never had it so good, either, and the take-home pay of factory workers has doubled in the past year.)
Income taxes are now so low that there's a bill in Congress to abolish them altogether.
Someone said this should be called the Half-Century of the Common-Sense Man.
Earth's population explosion has been controlled to the satisfaction of both the Catholic Church and the economists and Antarctica is becoming a populated continent. It's actually warm under the ice where the mining and living is going on.
You've read about it. There's something new and wonderful almost every day.
Mae says I have to put in some personal stuff, like the name of our son (Kevin) and the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Robert (Spookie) Masters came to the christening as godparents and how we have dinner with Spookie and Joy, or vice versa, every Friday night when he's not making a movie or being on TV.
I'd better make it clear that Spookie's not a Monolithian, though he was among the first to dig them, as he puts it with no shame. And he's recently become the father of a beautiful little girl. So much for my doubts about his sex life.
World Wide has been de-nationalized and Ian McEachern went back and Stew Macon and all the rest are still with it. There's a good job there for me, too, when I finish my book.
Eurydice Playfair got awfully bored with the Monolithians when the initial glamor wore off for her. For a while there was talk about her marrying one of them (they're all quite male, except for their robot-androids, which have been deactivated), but she broke that off and went to the Caribbean and, I heard, opened up a fashion house, or some kind of house.
President Gouverneur Allison backed his Vice-President for the top spot on the ticket and he was duly nominated at the convention. The other party nominated its man but there was little to choose between. Both espoused the good and peaceful life our country has come to know and, though there was nothing explicit, there were pro-Monolithian overtones to each candidate's campaign.
It didn't matter which won, as had been proven in the elections of other countries. All on Earth, I thought sometimes, were contented cows—happy, unambitious and no longer obsessed by the fear of an annihilating war.
Crime vanished as the effects of the conscience gas spread inexorably around the world. This gave a boost to the common welfare—the billions of dollars, pounds, francs, marks, rubles and drachmas which had been illegally drained off almost as a matter of course showed up where they belonged: in the pockets of honest people.
Despite my vow to retain my objectivity I've had to fight to avoid succumbing to the pervading conviction that all's well with the world. But maybe I should stop fighting. "Monolithian" has practically become a lower-case word—like humanitarian or altruistic or philanthropic. It almost never connotes anything alien.
It's as if the Monolithian philosophy has been thoroughly absorbed into our culture, while the aliens themselves have retreated into the background, content to keep a paternalistic eye on us.
Oh, they're still with us, physically, but I think they're getting ready to go. They're a bit wistful about it, not wanting to be forgotten. They've apparently absorbed that Earthly trait of vanity, which may be one reason—a minor one, I'm sure—for my project under what has become the Monolithian Foundation.
I'm compiling the history of their visit under a grant probably more generous than any writer ever received. I'm writing it exactly as I see it, as I told Mae, without guidance, restraint or censorship. I think they'd like it finished before they go back, so they can take a copy with them, but there's no deadline. It shouldn't take me more than another six months, now that I've finished the day-by-day account of the first month of their visit.
There's some talk of publishing these working notes immediately in a popular version, perhaps under the title30-Day Wonder, orThe Peaceful Invasion. A doctor friend of mine has suggestedThe Febrifuge, which my Little Oxford tells me is a medicine to reduce fever, and, though I like the thought it expresses, it doesn't have much zing.
As I wind it up I really don't see how I can come to any valid conclusion. I've been too close to everything.
It's all down on paper now, except for the footnotes and the documents and the index.
I've said all I can and I still don't know what's right, except for me and my family, who have never been so happy or secure.
But is this enough? Frankly, it's enough for me. For now. Twenty years from now I hope to ask my son the same question. And I hope he'll know what I'm talking about.
THE MONOLITHIANS...
they were such gentle, friendly, affable creatures—they even looked okay—handsome, human males, all of them.
They were law-abiding too. If a local speed limit was 25 m.p.h., that's how fast they'd go, no matter if traffic snarled up for miles in back of them. If a Blue Law town said nobody should work on Sunday, they'd do their duty as citizens and let the town burn before they'd permit a fireman to put out the blaze. No one could do anything about it because the Monolithians were impregnable.
So when they got into the United Nations and the politicians found themselves having to live by what they said, the world was in real trouble.
Or was it?
This is an original publication—not a reprint.Printed in U.S.A.