“Yes. In fact, that’s what we always come back to. Warbury points to the tremendous development in our language since the advent of technical vocabularies. He says that this process, just beginning with us, already affects our conceptual approach as well as our words. And, naturally, in a race so much further along—But if we could only find a science of theirs which bears a faint resemblance to one of ours!”
I felt sorry for him, standing there blinking futilely out of gentle, academic eyes.
“Cheer up, Prof. Maybe by the time old Suckfoot and his pal come back from the Grand Tour, you’ll have unsnarled a sophistry and we’ll be off this ‘Me, friend; you come from across sea in great bird with many wings’ basis that we seem to have wandered into.’ ”
And there you are, Alvarez: a cheap advertising small-brain like me, and I was that close. I should have said something then. Bet you wouldn’t have nodded at me heavily and said, “I hope so, Dick. I desperately hope so.” But, come to think of it, not only Trowson was trotting up that path. So was Warbury. So were Lopez, Vinthe, and Mainzer. So was I, among others.
I had a chance to relax when Andy and Dandy went abroad. My job wasn’t exactly over, but the public relations end was meshing right along, with me needed only once in a while to give a supervisory spin. Chiefly, I maintained close contact with my opposite number in various other sovereign states, giving out with experienced advice on how to sell the Boys from Betelgeuse. They had to adjust it to their own mass phobias and popular myths; but they were a little happier about it than I had been without any clear idea of what public behavior to expect of our visitors.
Remember, when I’d started, I hadn’t even been sure those snails were housebroken.
I followed them in the newspapers. I pasted the pictures of the Mikado receiving them next to their nice comments on the Taj Mahal. They weren’t nearly so nice to the Akhund of Swat, but then when you think of what the Akhund said about them …
They tended to do that everywhere, giving just a little better than they got. For example, when they were presented with those newly created decorations in Red Square (Dandy got the Order of Extraterrestrial Friends of Soviet Labor, while, for some abstruse reason, the Order of Heroic Interstellar Champion of the Soviet People was conferred upon Andy), they came out with a long, ringing speech about the scientific validity of communist government. It made for cheering, flower-tossing crowds in the Ukraine and Poland but a certain amount of restiveness in these United States.
But before I had to run my staff into overtime hours, whipping up press releases which recapitulated the aliens’ statement before the joint houses of Congress and their lovely, sentimental comments at Valley Forge, the aliens were in Berne, telling the Swiss that only free enterprise could have produced the yodel, the Incabloc escapement in watches, and such a superb example of liberty; hadn’t they had democracy long enough to have had it first, and wasn’t it wonderful?
By the time they reached Paris I had the national affection pretty much under control again, although here and there a tabloid still muttered peevishly in its late city final. But, as always, Andy and Dandy put the clincher on. Even then I wondered whether they really liked DeRoges’s latest abstraction for itself alone.