“I’m still working on that,” Lyman said. “It isn’t easy to understand. They run the world, of course, but why?” He wrinkled his brow and stared appealingly at the brown man. “Why?”
“If they do run it, they’ve got a lot to explain.”
“That’s what I mean. From our viewpoint, there’s no sense to it. We do things illogically, but only because they tell us to. Everything we do, almost, is pure illogic. Poe’s Imp of the Perverse—you could give it another name beginning with M. Martian, I mean. It’s all very well for psychologists to explain why a murderer wants to confess, but it’s still an illogical reaction. Unless a Martian commands him to.”
“You can’t be hypnotized into doing anything that violates your moral sense,” the brown man said triumphantly.
Lyman frowned. “Not by another human, but you can by a Martian. I expect they got the upper hand when we didn’t have more than ape-brains, and they’ve kept it ever since. They evolved as we did, and kept a step ahead. Like the sparrow on the eagle’s back who hitch-hiked till the eagle reached his ceiling, and then took off and broke the altitude record. They conquered the world, but nobody ever knew it. And they’ve been ruling ever since.”
“But—”
“Take houses, for example. Uncomfortable things. Ugly, inconvenient, dirty, everything wrong with them. But when men like Frank Lloyd Wright slip out from under the Martians’ thumb long enough to suggest something better, look how the people react. They hate the thought. That’s their Martians, giving them orders.”
“Look. Why should the Martians care what kind of houses we live in? Tell me that.”
Lyman frowned. “I don’t like the note of skepticism I detect creeping into this conversation,” he announced. “They care, all right. No doubt about it. They live in our houses. We don’t build for our convenience, we build, under order, for the Martians, the way they want it. They’re very much concerned with everything we do. And the more senseless, the more concern.