“But why?”

“Why? Why? How obstinately ignorant can you be? Haven’t I told you: I’m a unie! What does that make you think of?”

“Fried shrimp,” replied Henry.

“Oooooh!” The unie hurtled about the room, barely missing collisions with walls and machines. “The impertinence! That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed so well hidden! I can’t stand the stupidity of you people! Rudel You’re unconscionably rude! Probably the most insulting, rude, boorish species in this galaxy, possibly the entire expanding universe! When you think of unie you just naturally think of conquest!”

“I do?” asked Henry, still not quite convinced.

The unie subsided into muted sulfurous cursing.

Henry decided to try flattery. “You speak English very well.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” snapped the unie. “I invented it!”

That quieted Henry again. He wasn’t quite sure for a moment whether he was lying on floor or ceiling. “And French? Did you invent French, too? What about Tagalog and Aramaic? Basque is nice. I’ve always wondered about Basque. So: Basque, too?”

The unie looked genuinely bewildered for a moment, then tried again, looking at Henry with piercing eyes, daring him to interrupt. “I was graduated in a large class. There was much talk that year (though we don’t judge by your years, of course) (we don’t even call them years) (in fact, ‘years’ is an ugly word, and sounds like pure gibberish if you say it over and over) (years years years years years years, years years years, see what I’m pointing out here) as I was saying, there was much talk of the coming Flib. Though I thought it was superfluous exhalations, I was worried by the rapidity with which my classmates were being sent out.” He shivered fearfully, and mumbled, “The Flib...oh.” He trembled again, then resumed. “When my placket was oiled, and I knew I was to go out, all other thoughts fled from my head.

“Now, I’ve been here three hundred and fifty years longer than my shift, six hundred years total, six hundred years, and I can’t contact the Lephamaster. The Flib has likely already vastened longitudinally. It’s not that I’m exactly frightened,” he hastened to add, “it’s just that I’m a little, well, worried, and I’d like a drink of yerbl. Oh yes,” and he looked wistful, “just a melkh of pale, thick, moist yerbl.”

“If you’ve been here six hundred years,” asked Henry, beginning to rise to a sitting position, “why haven’t you conquered us already?”

The unie looked at him strangely. “Who ever heard of conquering in less than four thousand years? It wouldn’t be ethical. We’re talking ethics here, you barbarian.” He pouted and shined his button with a forearm.

Henry decided to risk another edgy question: “But how can writing cookie fortunes and wilting lettuce conquer us?”

“That isn’t all I do,” responded the unie. “Why, I make people smile (that’s very important), and I rust water pipes, and I make pig’s tails curl, and I cure colds, and I make shingles falloff roofs, and I stop wars, and I dirty white shoes, and I-” He seemed intending to continue for some time, but Henry, confused, stopped him.

“Excuse my interruption,” he said, “but I don’t understand. There’s probably a point I’ve missed. What’s the overall plan?”

The unie threw up his hands in exasperation, and Henry noticed for the first time that the alien had only four fingers on each.

“That ‘plan’ as you so casually dismiss it, you meat-plug, has been deployed for millennia, by the unies,” the little being said, “and no one has understood it but the top Lephamasters. How the blazes do you expect me to explain anything as complicated as that to a buffoon like you? That plan was formulated to handle four thousand years of exigencies, and you want a rundown in four sentences! Utter imbecile!”

“You’ve been here six hundred years,” murmured Henry in awe.

“Yes. Rather clever the way I’ve kept out of sight, don’t you think?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Henry felt a spark of belligerence bumming. All the slamming and jouncing and bouncing had finally overcome even his insatiable curiosity, and he was now more than slightly cheesed off. “I’ll bet you’re the basis for all those dumb legends about gnomes and gremlins and poltergeists; and flying saucers, too. Not such a terrific job if you ask me. Not to mention that your, what’s his name, your Lephamaster seems to have forgotten you even exist!”

Eggzaborg spread his hands in unhappiness. “There are bound to be tiny slip-ups in six hundred years. Particularly with the defective screens on those,” he cursed in an alien tongue, “raw-material trucks I use. They’re very old now, pretty worn, and every once in a while some snoopy human will see one coming or going. “

Henry realized he was, in fact, referring to UFOs, to flying saucers. Then, what the unie had said a minute before suddenly sank through to Henry’s conscious: “You say you stop wars?” Amazement rang in his voice.

“Certainly. How else can I conquer you? If you keep killing each other off, what’ll be left for me to conquer?” He looked at Henry appealingly. “I do wish you’d cease all that shooting and stabbing and blowing-up nonsense.”

Any would-be tyrants Henry had ever read about had always encouraged inner strife. The unie seemed to have his wires crossed. “Are you sure you’re supposed to stop wars?”

“Certainly!”

Henry finally decided it was the reverse-thinking of the strange alien intellect. He couldn’t fathom the rationale, but it certainly seemed like a good deal for humanity.

“What are those button and nail machines over there doing?”

“Those are implement-cripplers,” the unie said, with ill-concealed pride. “Have you ever stopped to wonder why you still use buttons, rather than-for instance-clasps, clamps, zippers, Velcro, seams and other much better contrivances? The button is easily lost, loses its center when sent through the laundry, breaks threads, isn’t very attractive, and is difficult to open and close. Ever wonder why you still use them?” He didn’t wait for Henry to answer. “Because I keep sifting supplies of them into stores, and they have to sell them, and that creates more of a demand.

“And there is, of course, the constant mindwashing of my 24-hour-a-day Coercive Brain Ray. That helps a lot.”

Henry said, “Buttons. Insidious, no doubt about it. And the ‘nail crippler’ machine over there?,

“The nails are treated so they go in at angles. You ever see anyone who could hit ten consecutive nails straight into a piece of wood? They slant, they bend, they break! That’s what my sweet little machine over there does! Don’t you just love it? The other machine, the trapezoidal one, helps keep the birthrate up, to offset the death-rate in your wars.” He looked at Henry sternly. “It puts pin-sized holes in pro-”

Henry blanched, cut him off quickly. “Er-that’s all right; I understand. But what about those fortune cookies? Why the weird messages?”

“Demoralization. See how they bothered you? Just think of a million people opening fortune cookies and finding the message, No way, inside! They find a message, Forget about it, or It’s lost, you’ll never find it. What do you think happens to their frame of mind, their self-confidence, their joie de vivre? They don’t know it, but it unnerves them for the rest of the week, throws them off-balance, to find a fortune cookie fortune, and all it says, enigmatically, maddeningly, is ‘Tuesday!’ “

“Do they all say ‘Tuesday’?”

“The dated ones do. That’s the only day I’m sure there will be no ominous omens of a Flib.” He shuddered. Henry didn’t know what Flib was, but the unie certainly seemed to be bothered, even terrified, of it. “Oh, I’m so pleased they’re getting results! I think I’ll step up production.”