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 dest.i.tute 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 wrist.w.a.tch. 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 mind-clouding 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, andthat 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 cananyone 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 phosph.o.r.escent 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 atsunami, 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, l.u.s.terless, without qualificationdark 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 therehad 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 d.a.m.n or h.e.l.l!" 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 a.s.say 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 prolongedgluuuuuuging.

"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, k.n.o.bbly arms and legs, a pointed head and huge, blue, owl-like eyes with nict.i.tating 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 tripart.i.te 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 b.u.t.ton, half the size of his chest, which quite plainly read: CONQUEROR.

The unie caught Henry's gaze. "The b.u.t.ton. 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 gla.s.ses slide down his nose just a bit, to unfocus the unie. "I am notwell, " he said, matter-of-factly. "Not well at all."

The shivering falsetto broke into chirping laughter.

"Well enoughnow !" 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 b.u.mped 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. "Iknew , I say, I justknew 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 twentymillion times!Plummis! "He let his shoulders slump, and folded his k.n.o.bbly hands in his k.n.o.bbly 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 - b.u.t.tons. The shape of the machine hurt his eyes. The b.u.t.tons were of varying sizes, colors, shapes. Shirt b.u.t.tons, coat b.u.t.tons, industrial sealing b.u.t.tons, watch-cap b.u.t.tons, canvas tent b.u.t.tons, exotic-purpose b.u.t.tons. Many b.u.t.tons, all kinds of b.u.t.tons. 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 shapesreally hurt Henry's eyes, were performing equally petty, yet subversive, procedures. One was all angles and gla.s.s 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.

"Itwhat ?"

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? Itdoesn'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'tlook 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-processesreally 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'tbelieve 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 h.e.l.lare you?"

The unie leaped to his feet in the air, b.u.mping his pointed head on the ceiling. More plaster sifted down.

"Plummis!" cursed the little being, ma.s.saging his skull. Like the lettuce, his antenna had begun to wilt noticeably.

He was furious. "Youdare question the motives, machinations, methodology and . . . and . . ." he groped for an alliterative word, "powerof Eggzaborg?" His face, normally an off-blue, not unpleasant sky tone, had slowly turned a fierce aquamarine. "Fool, dolt, imbecile, gleckbund, clod, b.u.mpkin, 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 bis.m.u.th tablets cascading from his pockets, plonking him on the head as gravity had its way with them. His noticeably thick-lensed eyegla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses 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 antic.i.p.ate, 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 . . . Iam a unie. I was thus a.s.signed 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. "s.p.a.ce, moron. s.p.a.ce. Out there." He pointed. Generally in the direction of some s.p.a.ce. Notall s.p.a.ce, but at leastsome s.p.a.ce. "I came from s.p.a.ce. Now don't interrupt - I come from out there where you have no idea a place exists. Both in s.p.a.ce, and inbetween layers of s.p.a.ce. Interst.i.tial expanses. Voluminous voids. I am here because - I am here because - well, plummis , fellow, I'm here toconquer !" 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! Rude! You're unconscionably rude! Probably the most insulting, rude, boorish species in this galaxy, possibly the entire expanding universe! When you think ofunie you just naturally think ofconquest !".

"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. "Iinvented 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 cla.s.s. 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 cla.s.smates were being sent out." He shivered fearfully, and mumbled, "The Flib . . . oh." He trembled again, then resumed. "Whenmy placket was oiled, and I knewI 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 b.u.t.ton with a forearm.

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

"That isn'tall I do," responded the unie. "Why, I make people smile (that'svery important), and I rust water pipes, and I make pig's tails curl, and I cure colds, and I make shingles fall off 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 overallplan ?"

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 expectme to explain anything as complicated as that to a buffoon likeyou ? That plan was formulated to handle four thousand years of exigencies, and you want a rundown in foursentences ! Utter imbecile!"