When They Come From Space

by Mark Clifton

First rule of government of the people, by the people, for the people: Never tell the people!"

"The work I foresee may well require two or three hundred. Maybe more." He jumped up from behind his desk and clapped his hands delightedly. "That's the ticket!" he exclaimed. "Think big! Oh, I can see we have the right man.

You have a responsibility to the taxpayers not to use anything you have learned outside of government service. Where to get the proper computer would be that kind of misuse of special knowledge."

Apparently my real mission was to be concealed. Ostensibly my job was to train extraterrestrials vocationally and put them to work in self-respecting employment –if we ever did discover any. My real mission, of course, was to drive them away before anybody found out they'd been here;

"Miss Shirley Chase. I am Executive Clerical Administrator of the Department of Extraterrestrial Vocational Research, Division of Extraterrestrial Psychology, Bureau of Extraterrestrial Life Research!"

"This is Dr. Gerald Gaffee, A.B., B.S., M.A., M.S., Ph.D., Abstract Vocational Research Director of the Department of Extraterrestrial, etc., etc., etc.

"That's only an N-462." N-462 stared at me with startled eyes and didn't nod.

There are those who milk, and those born to be milked; those who slaughter, and those who line up for the slaughtering.

I am Dr. Ralph Kennedy, Director of the Department of Extraterrestrial Vocational Research, Division of Extraterrestrial Psychology, Bureau of Extraterrestrial Life Research –with the secret mission of keeping them from doing it. Right

"First rule: We cannot harm intelligent life." "First question: How do we know we've found some?"

outré

My gorge rose in revulsion, I fought for detachment; to still my atavistic fears; to remind myself that man had created the dread forces of Evil out of his own sick imaginings, even as he had created the forces of Good out of his noble aspirations. It did no good. This was materialization of something basically, inherently Evil, no sickness of the imagination.

There had been the little poltergeist girl who threw things without touching them, set things on fire without matches.

There had been the fake swami who had been the most frightened of all when he learned he really wasn't faking

Ge...

Perhaps, without realizing it, I actually had developed –well, if not an open mind, one which was at least cracked.

Of course science fiction was now old enough, traditional enough, and therefore respectable enough that it was no longer scorned by the literary elite. And, seventy-eighty years later, Dr. Gaffee had learned, in his early research, what the pioneer writers and fans of that literature had known all along; that not only did it provide the power thrust to enable the mind to take off and soar into the unknown geographies of undiscovered mental continents, but that it was virtually the only way this could be done.

I knew how little it took to turn an overwrought, tense collection of individuals into a ravening mob, all acting in one accord of insane fury, possessed by a superentity created through interaction and feedback of emotions, given brief life of uncalculated power, taking possession of the individuals, turning them into body cells of the entity, playing out the tragic role before the individual mind could recoil in horror from its acts, shatter the group accord and destroy the entity –after the deed had been done.

If your heart is pure, your cause is just, your strength is great, and your purpose firm; you can overcome the obstacles in your path to reach your heart's desire.

This was the meaning. This was the essence of all religion, all philosophy, all education, all science, all Man's striving. If Man did not believe this, then there was no meaning to anything. Without this belief, nothing mattered, Man was nothing.

The Starmen weren't men, well, not human men, anyhow. Wow! Suppose that goddam Supreme Court had to distinguish between a man's rights, and a –well, whatever they were. What a precedent that one would set. Because then that precedent could be used to settle other questions, such as, well, such as –is a Negro really a man? Wow!

Precedent for one person's being different from another person, and therefore not having the same rights. Wow! Nineteen sixty here we come, right back where we started from! Make that eighteen sixty. Or seventeen, or sixteen, or any goddam century you want to name.

ukase

Comintern

"When I was a kid," I said, and looked back in memory to a long time ago, "I used to dream about the time when we would meet some other life intelligence face to face. I was pretty innocent, I guess. Because, in that imagining, I always saw Man standing straight and proud –and I was so proud of him."

mufti

pandemonium.

"Take me to your leader!" he said.

"The prevailing art forms of a culture invariably give the common denominator of its direction. In yours we find no such cultural ideal as you express."

And I wonder, too, if the police department wasn't secretly relieved when the ship, in midafternoon, suddenly disappeared;

releasing the cordons of police so they could go back to their normal occupation of attempting to entice ordinary people into committing crimes so they could entrap them more conveniently.

At the dinners and receptions the human males had worn their symbolic tails, the females had shown off the old dead scraps skinned from slaughtered rodents to display the hunting prowess of their males in the widows-and-orphans fleecing marts or under the graft table. The social events symbolizing the progress of a flowering civilization were over for the night.

they relaxed before going to bed –single beds, of course, installed under the strict supervision of F.B.I. who were doing their best to make sure these handsome, single men from the stars indulged in no nonconformist sex behavior while guests of this Earth and subject to association with government officials.

All right for the censors to observe them, for the censors could be confident that their minds were pure, but no such trust could be placed in those with inferior morals.

nimbus

Flemish

Their faces were designed to reflect the morning after the night before.

"You come in lies and deceit," I said,

"The most despicable of all human traits," I said, "the most cruel and mean, is self-righteousness, the belief that there is some special virtue in ourselves which enables us to decide what is best for others.

It provides excuse for anything we may want to do in the destruction of others. We know it well. We should. We've had plenty of experience with it. We know it in all its stages of progression. We know it is a contagion and an addiction. We know it to be worse than any narcotic habit, for it can only feed upon forbidding and condemning others in ever increasing doses, to increase its own self-approval.

Their values were formed by a universe almost totally devoid of life –where every scrap of it was so precious that its right to survive must transcend all else, the right to be must transcend the difference in being.

"Oh darn, oh gracious, oh fudge," I said. "To heck with those people!" [This isn't really what I said, but our United States Post Office Department, itself far gone in the syndrome of self-righteousness, has determined that the American public is much too young to be told how people really talk and behave, not if we expect to use their post offices for distributing our horrid books.]

might stand on the smear slide and shake my fist in resentment at the eye looking down through the microscope at us, but it had no apparent effect on the biologists who were stirring up our environment to test the potentials of our reaction.

You can be against sin, but there's no real fun in it until you've gone out and located yourself some sinners.

(no rainbow bridge this time)

"Good-by, now. When you all have figgered out how to sail across space to our shores, you'll find yourselves just as welcome as the people who come to your shores."

The Space Cadet chauffeurs saw us turn and start walking briskly toward them. Even at that distance they began to catch the sudden enthusiasm our strides and faces revealed. They straightened up, pulled their space helmets into ready, climbed jauntily into the cockpits of the automobiles, and when we had slammed the ports behind us, they blasted off down Pennsylvania Avenue.