When They Come from Space Read Online Free Page B

exaltation. Here, surrounded by the months of work that had gone into this display, each piece of which made valiant effort to equal the time chart in workmanship and usefulness, the man came into his own. Now I began to realize why a congressional committee had paid out two billion dollars. They are not the only ones to assume that charts and graphs must mean something.
    Even more, I appreciated Dr. Kibbie's motive in keeping four hundred people busy accomplishing absolutely nothing. The status of a government official depends entirely upon his title and the number of people he supervises. It has nothing whatever to do with what he accomplishes, or whether anything at all is ever accomplished—the academic transferred to the government.
    And Dr. Kibbie was determined to become a most important man.
    I found myself wanting to believe in all this impressive work—a work of which I now, somehow, had become a part. Kibbie had that quality about him. There was no doubt now that he was a first-class con-man, active where the pickings are richest. He had already conned Congress out of two billion for nothing, and even granting the traditional congressional habit of shoveling out tax millions for wild-haired schemes while withholding pennies from sound and sorely needed projects, it was still quite a con feat. I suspected it was only a beginning.
    I wanted to believe, to become a True Believer like the rest of his department. But obviously, I must still be thinking as an Outsider; for, boiled down to essentials, all the charts and graphs and analyses added up to little more than some of the vaguer flying saucer reports.
    In the central Ural Mountains of Russia, some goat-herders had seen a fleet of black flying saucers hovering overhead. A red ray had licked down and melted away one of the peaks to make it run like a river. That was the sum and substance.
    Some of their kids had brought the hallucination of their ignorant parents to the district school, where it could be exposed by the analysis of dialectic materialism. Ever alert to the evil machinations of the Wall Street Overlords, even while the teachers felt it best to soothe and explain away the superstition for their students, they, nonetheless, forwarded the information through the proper channels to the Propaganda Ministry. Possibly there was hope of reminding the peace-loving people of Russia of their danger by this latest invasion of the Capitalist Royalists and their Boot Licking Lackeys.
    The Propaganda Ministry sent out some of its best propagandists to the Urals, and among them, of course, was one of our own C.I.A. operatives.
    But when they got there, the parents had been convinced by their more enlightened children that either they hadn't seen what they knew they had seen, or had better keep their mouths shut about it. The reports and evidence were too evasive, tenuous, and vague, even for Kremlin purposes, and nothing more would have been heard of it—except that the C.I.A. operative felt it necessary to include a summary in his report to substantiate his expense account. He did see fit to add a footnote, a rather extensive footnote, to provide our own propagandists with whatever color background they might find useful.
    As for example, although this was now fourth generation under communism's dialectic materialism, the backward peasants—er, enlightened comrade-workers—had been unable to separate natural from supernatural. With the excellent police training he had received here in the United States, he had succeeded in inciting them into committing the crime they had not intended to commit. Because he succeeded in convincing them he was one of them at heart, they confessed to him, in secret, how they had felt toward the phenomenon. They had dwelt heavily upon the semantics of Evil, as a palpable force, which emanated from the Black Fleet. Fear and hatred of the Fleet had swept over them, appalled and frozen them in their tracks, even before the emission of