He nodded. “All wrapped up and ready to preview. I have your friends waiting in the projection room.”
There was a pause while he rose and walked slowly around the compartment. I waited for his next words, hardly daring to savor the impact of the moment. Our culture had been started!
“Look, Plookh, I’ve given you guys a stereo that, in my opinion, positively smashes the gong. I’ve locked the budget out of sight, and I’ve worked from deep down in the middle of my mind. Now, do you think you might do a little favor for old Shlestertrap in return?”
“Anything,” I throbbed. “We would do anything for the unselfish genius who—”
“Okey-dandy. A couple of busybodies on Earth are prancing around and making a fuss about my being assigned to this mission, on the grounds that I never even had a course in alien psych. They’re making me into a regular curse of labor, using my appointment and a bunch of others from show business as a means of attacking the present administration on grounds of corruption and incompetence. I never looked at this job as anything more than a stop-gap until Hollywood finds that it just can’t do without the authentic Shlestertrap Odor in its stereos—still, the good old bank account on Earth is growing nicely and right now I don’t have any better place to go. It would be kind of nice and appreciative of you to give me a testimonial in the form of a stereo record that I can beam back to Earth. Sort of show humanity that you’re grateful for what we’re doing.”
“I would be grateful in turn to be given an opportunity to show my gratitude,” I replied. “It will take a little time, however, for me to compose a proper speech. I will start immediately.”
He reached for my long tentacles and pulled me back into the compartment. “Fine! Now, you don’t want to make up a speech of your own and give out with all kinds of errors that would make humans think you aren’t worth the money we’re spending on you? Of course you don’t! I have a honey of a speech all written—just the thing they’ll want to hear you say back home. Greasejob! You and Dentface get that apparatus ready for recording.”
Then, while the robots manipulated the stereo-record, I read aloud the speech Shlestertrap had written from a copy he held up just out of camera range. I stumbled a bit over unfamiliar concepts—for example, passages where I extolled The Great Civilizer for teaching us English and explaining our complicated biological functions to us—but generally, the speech was no more than the hymn of praise that the man deserved. When I finished, he yelled: “Cut! Good!”
Before I had time to ask him the reasons for the seeming inconsistencies in the speech—I knew that, since he was human, they could not be mere errors—he had pushed me into the projection room where the Plookh actors waited. I thought I heard him mumble something about “That should hold the Gogarty crowd till the next election,” but I was so excited over the prospect of the first Plookhian cultural achievement that I did nothing more than scurry to my place as the projectors started. Now, sometimes, I think perhaps—No.
The first stereo with an all-Plookh cast! Already, it is a commonplace, with all Plookh seeing it for the first time before they are more than six days out of the egg. But that preview, as it was called, was a moment when everything seemed to pause and offer us sanctuary. Our civilization seemed assured.