Garrison was silent for a moment, considering, trying to put his thoughts together.

"It's not the administration so much," he finally said, "as it is the nation. The White House is being stiff-necked about it; they're determined to ride the crisis out. Maybe they can do it. Maybe they had a chance of doing it before the houses came up. But the houses will wreck them. The cars are bad enough, the houses "Yes, I can see that," said Lathrop. "The implication is there. Houses as well as cars. First the automotive business, now the housing industry. The dollar will be worthless. Our credit will be gone. But still we have to run the story. Even if we wanted to, and we don't, it's something that can't be covered up."

"There's no question about publishing," said Garrison. "We have to do that. The question is: Do we give our own government a chance to react to it before we let them have it straight between the eyes? Maybe, if they knew, they would have the time to shift their stance, stand on more solid ground to deal with it when it broke."

"The whole idea," said Lathrop, "is that we should go international on it. I'm not sure that's the right thing to do. After all, we have taken the brunt of this alien invasion. If there are to be any benefits or advantages because of it, they should go to us. The visitors chose us; we didn't invite them in, we didn't lure them in. Why they chose us, I don't know. I don't know why they didn't land in Europe or in Africa. But the U.N. has been yelling ever since it happened - .

"I don't know about that, either," said Garrison. "It would gall me to see it go international, but international or not, however we may go, I think the administration should be given a few hours to reconsider on the basis of new developments. They'll handle it better if they have some advance warning. They may elect to stand pat, tough it out. I don't know. You and I don't have to decide that. Our problem is a different one. We talk about our responsibility in dealing with the news. We think of ourselves as a public service institution. We do nothing willingly to harm or debase our cultural system. We talk a lot about digging out the truth and reporting the truth and that's an easy one in those cases where we can determine truth. But there is something else that goes beyond mere truth. And that's the power we hold. We have to use that power as wisely as we can. If we keep this bottled up for the sake of another scoop .

"Dammit, Johnny, I want another scoop," said Lathrop. "I love them. You can't get too many for me. I roll in them with great delight. How can we be sure the White House wouldn't leak it? There's no such thing as a secret in Washington unless someone has slapped a confidential stamp on it."

"They would be unlikely to leak it," said Garrison. "They'd want to keep it quiet until they could figure out what to do, what action they should take. As soon as it is known, there'll be hell let loose. They'll need all the time we can give them. They'll be no more anxious to leak it than we are."

"Well, I don't know," said Lathrop. "About letting Washington in on it, I don't really know. Let me think about it, talk with the publisher."

55. ABOARD PLANE APPROACHING MINNEAPOLIS.

"Everyone is determined to make them ogres," Kathy said to Jerry. "Nasty little ogres that came down out of the sky to do mischief to us. But I know they aren't. I touched 101-I don't mean touched just her hide, but the inside of her, the living spirit of her. It wasn't just a touch; it was a contact. And when I told the President about this, he was interested-most interesting, he said. But he wasn't interested, nor were any of the others. All they can think of is their precious economy. Sure, they want to know if there is some way they can talk with the visitors. But the only reason they want to talk to them is to tell them to stop what they are doing."

"You have to understand the President's position," Jerry told her. "You have to realize what the administration is facing . .

"Has it ever occurred to you, or to anyone," she asked, "that the President could be wrong, that all of us are wrong. That the way we live is wrong and has been wrong for a long, long time."

"Well, certainly," said Jerry. "All of us, everyone. We all make mistakes."

"I don't mean that," said Kathy. "It's not being wrong right now, but wrong from a long way back. Maybe if we could go back far enough in time, we might be able to pinpoint where we started going wrong. I don't know enough history to even guess where that particular time of going wrong might be, but somewhere along the time track, we took the wrong turning, started going down the wrong road and there was no way of going back.

"Just a few weeks ago, I interviewed a bunch of crazy kids at the university, real far-out freaks who called themselves Lovers. They told me love was everything, the be-all and the end-all, that there was nothing else that counted. They looked at me out of wide, round, innocent eyes with their naked souls shining through their eyes and I felt sick inside. I felt as naked as their souls were naked. I felt pity for them and was enraged at them, both at the same time. I went back and wrote the story and I felt sicker and sicker all the time I was writing it, for they were wrong, disturbingly wrong. They were far off the beaten track, so far out there was a sense that they were forever lost. But, maybe, they are no more wrong than we are. The thing is that we've gotten so accustomed to our wrongness that we think it's right. All-love may be wrong, but so is all-money, all-greed wrong. I tell you, Jerry.

"You think the visitors may be trying to kick us back on the right track?"

"No, I guess not. No, I never really thought that. They wouldn't know what is wrong with us. Maybe if they did know, they wouldn't care; maybe they'd think it was our business to be wrong. They themselves may be wrong in what they are doing. Most likely they are. But what they are doing, wrong or right, may be showing up our wrongness.

"I think," said Jerry, "that, in any ease, under any circumstance, it might be impossible to say what is wrong and what is right. We and the visitors are far separated. They came from God knows where. Their standard of behavior-and surely they must have such a standard-would be different from ours. When two cultures with differing standards collide head-on, one of them, or perhaps the both of them, will get roughed up. With the best intentions on both their parts, there will be some roughing up."

"Poor things," said Kathy. "They came so far. They faced so much. They dared so greatly. We should be friends of theirs but we'll end up hating them."

"I don't know about that," said Jerry. "Maybe some people. The men in power, in any sort of power, will hate them, for they'll take away the power. But with the new cars, and perhaps other things, the people, the great faceless mass of people, will be dancing in the streets for them."

"But not for long," said Kathy. "They'll finally hate them, too.~~

56. WASHINGTON, D.C.

"'With this new information," said Marcus White, Secretary of State, "I think it might be time to realign our thinking."

John Hammond, White House chief of staff, asked Porter, "Just how solid is this information? Should we check further on it?"

"I would think we might be checking on it," said Porter.

The President stirred uneasily in his chair. "Dave is right," he said. "We are checking on it. We have men in Lone Pine. Norton will guide them in. The National Guard is flying in a helicopter to take the party in. Everything is being kept under cover. The guard doesn't even know why the copter's going in. We'll soon know if the information's right."

"I think you can count on it being right," said Porter. "I've had some previous contact with Garrison at Minneapolis. He's a solid citizen. Remember, the man didn't have to tip us off. He had an exclusive story; he could have stayed sitting on it."

"Then why didn't he stay sitting on it?" demanded General Whiteside.

"He was giving us a break. Said he felt it was only right that we should have some warning, thought we'd probably need some time to get our feet planted under us before he went to press."

"He pledged you to secrecy?" asked Whiteside.

"Not in so many words. He said he assumed we would protect him. I told him that we would. And I assume we will. It's in our interest as well as his. Once this thing breaks, we had better have some idea of what we should be saying and doing. We need the time he gave us."

"I don't like it," said Whiteside. "I don't like it one damn bit."

"You don't have to like it, Henry," said the President. "None of the rest of us likes it, either."

"That's not what I meant," said Whiteside.

"I know it isn't what you meant," said the President. "I was putting a charitable interpretation on what you said."

Allen, the science advisor, spoke up. "It is my opinion that we have to accept the Lone Pine report as true. It may seem, on the surface, somewhat far-fetched, but when you consider it, it's not. If the visitors can make cars, it seems entirely reasonable they also can make houses. A more difficult job, of course, but only in degree. I, personally, would say they are equal to it."

"But houses!" said Whiteside. "Cars are one thing; houses are another. They can distribute the cars, but how will they go about distributing houses? By setting up new housing tracts, perhaps, taking over valuable farm lands or industrial sites for the tracts? Or knocking down rows of substandard housing and placing the new houses in their stead?"

"It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference how they go about it," Hammond said. "No matter what they do, whether they do anything or not, the threat is there. So far as this country is concerned, the housing industry is wiped out."

"I had said," the President told them, "that we could weather the elimination of the automotive industry. I don't know about this other. The thing about it is that it plants an over-riding fear, a cancer in the economic picture. If the auto industry and the housing industry are gone, is there anything that's safe?"

"How is the car situation going out on the Mississippi?" Hammond asked.

"It's ugly," Porter told him. "We have Goose Island cordoned off, but the crowds are building. Sooner or later, there is going to be an incident of some sort. There are a dozen or more people dead that we know of. A boat swamped and went down when ear-seekers overloaded it. There'll be more of it, I'm sure. You can't keep people from getting their hands on free cars. The greedy bastards are going to make a lot of trouble."

"That is a single situation," White pointed out. "We can't waste time on it. What we have to do is work out a policy. When the news breaks, we have to have at least the beginning of a policy. We have to give the nation and the world some indication of what we intend to do about it."

"It's going to go down hard," said the President. "Whatever we do, it will be hard to take. From our first beginnings, we have been a proud people. Standing on our own feet. It's not in us to cave ~ "Some damn fool," said Whiteside, "started a rumor on the Hill that there had been a weapons test and we're onto something. It won't take long for Ivan to pick that up. Get him upset enough and one touch of a button . .

"That rumor," said the President, "wherever it might have come from, has served to keep the Congress solidly behind us. If it hadn't been for the rumor, no one knows what they might have done."

"That is all behind us," urged White. "We should forget it now. What's done can't be helped. We have to live with it. As I've told you from the start, we can't work it out alone. If we act in a reasonable manner, we will have the rest of the world behind us. We've not gone so far that we've lost good will."

"Even Russia?" asked the President.

"I don't know what they'll do to help. Probably more than we would expect. But if we react reasonably, they'll keep their fingers off the buttons Henry talks about."

"And what else? Just what do you have in mind? What do you see?"

"I am convinced we have to agree, in principle, that the visitors constitute an international problem, that we must consult with other states considering the situation that has been created here. I think that most of the major states realize that no one nation, us or anyone else, could contain such a situation, that eventually, it will spill over national boundaries, any national boundaries, and that it will become a world problem. I think the time has come to invite help and cooperation from the rest of the world, from anyone who might be willing to help and cooperate."

"Marcus, you have talked with some of these people?"

"Informally, yes. Unofficially. Mostly, they have done the talking and I have done the listening. Those I have talked with are convinced that whatever happens to us now will happen to them later unless the problem, or problems, can be solved."

"What sort of cooperation can you detect? We have to know. If we go international, we have to know where we stand, what we can expect."

"France and Britain are ready to come in-in any way they can be of assistance. Do what they can to bolster the dollar, do whatever they can. Japan has the same willingness. The Scandinavians are waiting only for a word from us. The West Germans stand ready, if necessary, with monetary aid."

"You mean foreign aid? For us!"

"That's exactly what I mean," said White. "Why flinch away from it? We've carried half the world on our back for years. We rebuilt Western Europe after World War II. It would be no more than turn and turn about. It's their ass as well as ours and they know it. The rest of the world can't afford to let us collapse. Even the OPEC people would rally around."

The President looked around the table with a stricken face. "Oh, my God!" he said.

"It's not only the matter of keeping us from going under," said the Secretary of State. "It's a matter of working out a new system -a new political pattern, a new financial concept, perhaps a rehauling of the entire economic structure. Not for the United States alone, but for the world. The visitors not only have come close to ruining us, but they have changed the situation for the entire world and we have to find a way to live with it. Nothing will ever be the same again. I think the first job, and perhaps the hardest, will be to honestly analyze what has happened. We have to know that before we can assess its impact."

"You're very eloquent on the subject, Marcus," said Hammond. "Do the other nations, the men you have talked with so informally and so unofficially, recognize all the factors that you have outlined for us?"

"I would say they do," said State. "At least, their thinking runs in that direction."

"But the tests," cried Whiteside. "'We are onto something. Do we have to give up everything? Can't we, somehow, hold back on what we found?"

The President said, quietly, "I don't think we can, Henry. You have heard what the man said-a new kind of world and a new way to live in it. It comes hard for old battle-scarred dogs such as you and I, but I can glimpse some of the logic in it. I suppose that some of us, maybe the most of us, have been thinking something like this all along, but couldn't bring ourselves to say so."

"How the hell we'll ever work it out," said Hammond, "I don't know.~~ "Not us alone," said State. "The world. It's not up to us alone; it's up to all the others. If the world doesn't pull together on this one, all of us are sunk."

57. MINNEAPOLIS.

Gold was reading copy on the Norton story. He lifted his head and looked across the desk at Garrison.

"This last paragraph," he said.

"What about the last paragraph?"

"Where he tells about seeing shadows in the kitchen, as if there were people in the kitchen. And he thinks, 'My God, are they making people, too?'"

"There's nothing wrong with it. It's a honey of a line. It makes cold shivers up your spine."

"Did you tell Lathrop about this? Mention it particularly to him?"

"No, I guess I didn't. I forgot. There were a lot of other . .

"And Porter?"

"No, I didn't tell Porter. It would have scared the pants off him."

"It could have been Norton's imagination. He didn't see any people. All he saw, or thought he saw, were shadows. Maybe he imagined shadows."

"Let me see it," said Garrison, holding cut his hand. Gold handed him the sheet.

Garrison read the paragraph carefully, read it through again. Then he picked up a heavy, black editorial pencil and methodically crossed out the paragraph.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Clifford D. Simak is a newspaperman, only recently retired. Over the years he has written more than 25 books and some 200 short stories. In 1977 he received the Nebula Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America and has won several other awards for his writing.

Perhaps the best known of his works is City, which has become a science-fiction classic.

He was born and raised in southwestern Wisconsin, a land of wooded hills and deep ravines, and often uses this locale for his stories. A number of critics have cited him as the pastoralist of science fiction.

He and his wife Kay have been happily married for almost ~o years. They have two children-a daughter, Shelley Ellen, a magazine editor, and Richard Scott, a chemical engineer.