55. ABOARD PLANE APPROACHING MINNEAPOLIS

"Everyone is determined to make them ogres," Kathy said to Jerry. "Nasty little ogres that came down out of the sky to do mischief to us. But I know they aren't. I touched 101—I don't mean touched just her hide, but the inside of her, the living spirit of her. It wasn't just a touch; it was a contact. And when I told the President about this, he was interested—most interesting, he said. But he wasn't interested, nor were any of the others. All they can think of is their precious economy. Sure, they want to know if there is some way they can talk with the visitors. But the only reason they want to talk to them is to tell them to stop what they are doing."

"You have to understand the President's position," Jerry told her. "You have to realize what the administration is facing.

"Has it ever occurred to you, or to anyone," she asked, "that the President could be wrong, that all of us are wrong. That the way we live is wrong and has been wrong for a long, long time."

"Well, certainly," said Jerry. "All of us, everyone. We all make mistakes."

"I don't mean that," said Kathy. "It's not being wrong right now, but wrong from a long way back. Maybe if we could go back far enough in time, we might be able to pinpoint where we started going wrong. I don't know enough history to even guess where that particular time of going wrong might be, but somewhere along the time track, we took the wrong turning, started going down the wrong road and there was no way of going back.

"Just a few weeks ago, I interviewed a bunch of crazy kids at the university, real far-out freaks who called themselves Lovers. They told me love was everything, the be-all and the end-all, that there was nothing else that counted. They looked at me out of wide, round, innocent eyes with their naked souls shining through their eyes and I felt sick inside. I felt as naked as their souls were naked. I felt pity for them and was enraged at them, both at the same time. I went back and wrote the story and I felt sicker and sicker all the time I was writing it, for they were wrong, disturbingly wrong. They were far off the beaten track, so far out there was a sense that they were forever lost. But, maybe, they are no more wrong than we are. The thing is that we've gotten so accustomed to our wrongness that we think it's right. All-love may be wrong, but so is all-money, all-greed wrong. I tell you, Jerry.

"You think the visitors may be trying to kick us back on the right track?"

"No, I guess not. No, I never really thought that. They wouldn't know what is wrong with us. Maybe if they did know, they wouldn't care; maybe they'd think it was our business to be wrong. They themselves may be wrong in what they are doing. Most likely they are. But what they are doing, wrong or right, may be showing up our wrongness.

"I think," said Jerry, "that, in any ease, under any circumstance, it might be impossible to say what is wrong and what is right. We and the visitors are far separated. They came from God knows where. Their standard of behavior—and surely they must have such a standard—would be different from ours. When two cultures with differing standards collide head-on, one of them, or perhaps the both of them, will get roughed up. With the best intentions on both their parts, there will be some roughing up."

"Poor things," said Kathy. "They came so far. They faced so much. They dared so greatly. We should be friends of theirs but we'll end up hating them."

"I don't know about that," said Jerry. "Maybe some people. The men in power, in any sort of power, will hate them, for they'll take away the power. But with the new cars, and perhaps other things, the people, the great faceless mass of people, will be dancing in the streets for them."

"But not for long," said Kathy. "They'll finally hate them, too.~~

56. WASHINGTON, D.C

"‘With this new information," said Marcus White, Secretary of State, "I think it might be time to realign our thinking."

John Hammond, White House chief of staff, asked Porter, "Just how solid is this information? Should we check further on it?"

"I would think we might be checking on it," said Porter.

The President stirred uneasily in his chair. "Dave is right," he said. "We are checking on it. We have men in Lone Pine. Norton will guide them in. The National Guard is flying in a helicopter to take the party in. Everything is being kept under cover. The guard doesn't even know why the copter's going in. We'll soon know if the information's right."

"I think you can count on it being right," said Porter. "I've had some previous contact with Garrison at Minneapolis. He's a solid citizen. Remember, the man didn't have to tip us off. He had an exclusive story; he could have stayed sitting on it."

"Then why didn't he stay sitting on it?" demanded General Whiteside.

"He was giving us a break. Said he felt it was only right that we should have some warning, thought we'd probably need some time to get our feet planted under us before he went to press."

"He pledged you to secrecy?" asked Whiteside.

"Not in so many words. He said he assumed we would protect him. I told him that we would. And I assume we will. It's in our interest as well as his. Once this thing breaks, we had better have some idea of what we should be saying and doing. We need the time he gave us."

"I don't like it," said Whiteside. "I don't like it one damn bit."

"You don't have to like it, Henry," said the President. "None of the rest of us likes it, either."

"That's not what I meant," said Whiteside.

"I know it isn't what you meant," said the President. "I was putting a charitable interpretation on what you said."

Allen, the science advisor, spoke up. "It is my opinion that we have to accept the Lone Pine report as true. It may seem, on the surface, somewhat far-fetched, but when you consider it, it's not. If the visitors can make cars, it seems entirely reasonable they also can make houses. A more difficult job, of course, but only in degree. I, personally, would say they are equal to it."

"But houses!" said Whiteside. "Cars are one thing; houses are another. They can distribute the cars, but how will they go about distributing houses? By setting up new housing tracts, perhaps, taking over valuable farm lands or industrial sites for the tracts? Or knocking down rows of substandard housing and placing the new houses in their stead?"

"It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference how they go about it," Hammond said. "No matter what they do, whether they do anything or not, the threat is there. So far as this country is concerned, the housing industry is wiped out."

"I had said," the President told them, "that we could weather the elimination of the automotive industry. I don't know about this other. The thing about it is that it plants an over-riding fear, a cancer in the economic picture. If the auto industry and the housing industry are gone, is there anything that's safe?"

"How is the car situation going out on the Mississippi?" Hammond asked.

"It's ugly," Porter told him. "We have Goose Island cordoned off, but the crowds are building. Sooner or later, there is going to be an incident of some sort. There are a dozen or more people dead that we know of. A boat swamped and went down when ear-seekers overloaded it. There'll be more of it, I'm sure. You can't keep people from getting their hands on free cars. The greedy bastards are going to make a lot of trouble."

"That is a single situation," White pointed out. "We can't waste time on it. What we have to do is work out a policy. When the news breaks, we have to have at least the beginning of a policy. We have to give the nation and the world some indication of what we intend to do about it."