Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II Read Online Free Page B

and kept moving, all fast, as if he was in a hell of a hurry.
    There was no more business. Okay. I had thirty-two hundred and thirty dollars in my wallet that I'd made in one morning.
    But how good had I really been? I mean, what was the top figure in the show's budget? How close had I come to it?
    I had a contact who maybe could find out—Morris Burlap.
    Morris Burlap is in business like me, only he's a theatrical agent, sharp, real sharp. Instead of selling a load of used copper wire, say, or an option on a corner lot in Brooklyn, he sells talent. He sells a bunch of dancers to a hotel in the mountains, a piano player to a bar, a disc jockey or a comic to late-night radio. The reason he's called Morris Burlap is because of these heavy Harris tweed suits he wears winter and summer, every day in the year. They reinforce the image, he says.
    I called him from a telephone booth near the entrance and filled him in on the giveaway show. "Now, what I want to find out—"
    "Nothing to find out," he cut in. "There's no such show, Bernie."
    "There sure as hell is, Morris. One you haven't heard of."
    "There's no such show. Not in the works, not being rehearsed, not anywhere. Look: before a show gets to where it's handing out this kind of dough, it's got to have a slot, it's got to have air time all bought. And before it even buys air time, a packager has prepared a pilot. By then I'd have gotten a casting call—I'd have heard about it a dozen different ways. Don't try to tell me my business, Bernie: when I say there's no such show, there's no such show."
    So damn positive he was. I had a crazy idea all of a sudden and turned it off. No. Not that. No.
    "Then it's a newspaper or college research thing, like Ricardo said?"
    He thought it over. I was willing to sit in that stuffy telephone booth and wait: Morris Burlap has a good head. "Those damn documents, those receipts, newspapers and colleges doing research don't operate that way. And nuts don't either. I think you're being taken, Bernie. How you're being taken, I don't know, but you're being taken."
    That was enough for me. Morris Burlap can smell a hustle through sixteen feet of rockwool insulation. He's never wrong. Never.
    I hung up, sat, thought. The crazy idea came back and exploded.
    A bunch of characters from outer space, say they want Earth. They want it for a colony, for a vacation resort, who the hell knows what they want it for? They got their reasons. They're strong enough and advanced enough to come right down and take over. But they don't want to do it cold.
    You know, a big country wants to invade a small country, it doesn't start until there's at least a riot on the border. It gives them a legal leg. Even a big country needs a legal leg.
    All right. These characters from outer space, maybe all they had to have was a piece of paper from just one genuine, accredited human being, signing the Earth over to them. No, that couldn't be right. Any piece of paper? Signed by any Joe Jerk?
    I jammed a dime into the telephone and called Ricardo's college. He wasn't in. I told the switchboard girl it was very important: she said, all right, she'd ring around and try to spot him.
    All that stuff, I kept thinking, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Sea of Azov—they were as much a part of the hook as the twenty-for-a-five routine. There's one sure test of what an operator is really after: when he stops talking, closes up shop and goes away.
    With Eksar, it had been the Earth. All that baloney about extra rights on the Moon! They were put in to cover up the real thing he was after, for extra bargaining power.
    I go out to buy a shipment of small travel alarm clocks that I've heard a jobber is stuck with. Do I start arguing about the price of clocks? I do not. I tell the jobber I want to buy a truckload of folding ladies' umbrellas, maybe a couple of gross of alarm clocks, say travel alarms if he's got a nice buy in them, and can he do me any good in the men's wallet line?
    That's what