But they bought the twisted sculpture, paying for it, since they had no cash of their own, with a thumb-sized gadget which actually melted marble to any degree of pattern delicacy the artist desired, merely by being touched to the appropriate surface. DeRoges threw away his chisels blissfully, but six of the finest minds in France retired to intensive nervous breakdowns after a week of trying to solve the tool’s working principles.
It went over big here:
ANDY AND DANDY PASS AS THEY GO Betelgeuse Businessmen Show Appreciation for Value Received.
This newspaper notes with pleasure the sound shopper’s ethics behind the latest transaction of our distinguished guests from the elemental void. Understanding the inexorable law of supply and demand, these representatives of an advanced economic system refuse to succumb to the “gimmies.” If certain other members of the human race were to examine carefully the true implications of …
So when they returned to the United States after being presented at the British court, they got juicy spreads in all the newspapers, a tug-whistle reception in New York harbor and the mayor’s very chiefest deputy there on City Hall steps to receive them.
And even though people were more or less accustomed to them now, they were somehow never shoved off page one. There was the time a certain furniture polish got a testimonial out of them in which the aliens announced that they’d had particularly happy and glossy results on their tiny shell toppers with the goo; and they used the large financial rewards of the testimonial to buy ten extremely rare orchids and have them sunk in plastic. And there was the time …
I missed the television show on which it broke. I had gone to a side-street movie theater that night to see a revival of one of my favorite Chaplin pictures; and I’d never enjoyed the ostentatious greet-the-great hysterics of Celebrity Salon anyway. I hadn’t any idea of how long the M.C., Bill Bancroft, had waited to get Andy and Dandy on his program, and how much he was determined to make it count when the big night arrived.
Reconstructed and stripped of meaningless effusion, it went something like this:
Bancroft asked them if they weren’t anxious to get home to the wife and kiddies. Andy explained patiently, for perhaps the thirty-fourth time, that, since they were hermaphrodites, they had no family in any humanly acceptable sense. Bancroft cut into the explanation to ask them what ties they did have. Chiefly the revitalizer, says Andy politely.
Revitalizer? What’s a revitalizer? Oh, a machine they have to expose themselves to every decade or so, says Dandy. There’s at least one revitalizer in every large city on their home planet.