All The Myriad Ways

"Or little ships to take samples."

"If they were the flying saucers, they must have rejected us already," Hal put in. "They've been here too long. They'd have started major scooping operations long ago."

And if we'd dropped it there, we'd be home now.

There are tunes that go round and round in your head, driving you nuts, driving others nuts because you're humming under your breath. There are ideas you can't leave alone. You toy with them, or they toy with you...I got my fair share of the pizza and a bit more. While we were waiting for Carol to finish, I said, "Suppose they did reject us. Suppose we didn't meet their presumably exacting standards. What then?"

"They'd destroy the Earth," Joy said instantly.

"Typical bloodthirsty female."

Hal said, "Maybe they'd start us over. Give us IQ tests. Pick a thousand off the top. Settle us on a new planet."

"Then destroy the Earth."

"Maybe. Maybe even settle us back on Earth, after clearing it for us." Grant's "us" had not escaped me. He would be one of the thousand, and so would his friends. I let it pass. Truth to tell, I was flattered.

The pizza was gone, and much of the cardboard disc beneath it. We piled in the car and started back to George's place.

Carol ended a reflective silence. "Does it seem to anyone that there are more written tests around than there used to be? Army IQ tests, motivational research, testing for jobs, even the forms for computer dating. Now-"

We started laughing. Hal said, "Are you still on that?"

"Well, they have to test us some way."

"It's a lovely idea, but I can't bring myself to trust those IQ tests. I know too much psychology. There's not a printed test that's good for anything, especially at the top of the scale."

"What, then?"

"There Are Aliens Among Us," Hal Grant intoned. "Or their agents. And they choose by intuition and superior judgment. You, and you-"

"Hey," I said, hit by a lovely idea. "Hey. You know who would make a great intelligence tester?"

"Who?"

"Tom Findlay! He's a walking, talking intelligence test. Remember what he was talking about just before we left? Blobs of neutron star matter-"

"That's lovely stuff, neutronium. It's unreasonably heavy. If you just let it sit, it's got to be a shiny sphere. The surface gravity would flatten any surface roughness, see? If you toss a glob of the stuff at an enemy spaceship, it'll just drift through the hull and leave a gaping hole and come out a fraction of an inch thicker. Spin it and you don't get an ellipsoid, you get like a flying saucer, a ball with a rim around it. It's all theoretical, of course."

"See what I mean?"

Behind me in the darkened car, Hal Grant said, "I guess so. Findlay makes you think. If you can't think, you go away. After awhile there's nobody left talking to Findlay except people who like playing with ideas. He's a filter. Then I suppose he tags the best of us and off we go, right?"

"Right. Well, nobody's disappeared yet."

"Nobody that was noticed. How many of us do you know, away from these parties? Sometimes I run across Jack Keenan in the supermarket, but that's it. All we know for sure is, we haven't been picked yet." Grant laughed uneasily. "Maybe we'd better not go back to George's."

The feel of the car changed drastically. I hit the brake fast, but it was hardly necessary; we were only starting to move from a dead stop. A moment ago we'd been doing seventy.

I heard the sea before I saw it: breakers crunching ahead of us, flashing white in the headlights. If I'd kept the throttle down we'd have driven right into them. The freeway lighting had become a pale pink glow far across the sea; dawn or dusk, I couldn't tell. We were in soft dry sand. It might have been a California beach, and our car sitting mired in sand might have been a television commercial or a practical joke, except that it wasn't.

"S-s-sonofabitch took me at my word," said Hal Grant. Then, "This can't be real. Can it?"

Joy was furious. "He was listening to us! That-eavesdropper!"

I got out.

It felt like sand. It crunched beneath my feet, like sand. How could it be part of another world? But the sinking feeling in my belly felt like an elevator starting down. Terror? Or low gravity?

I threw back my head and screamed, "Findlay!"

And he was there, gri

"Christ no, Findlay! What's going on here? We're terribly confused! One minute we were driving along the freeway, and the next we're here at Hermosa Beach!"

First he was flabbergasted. Then he burst out laughing. Well, it had been worth a try.

So was my next move. His head was thrown back and his beard was raised, and I stepped forward fast and hit him in the throat, putting all my weight behind it.

Not murder. Justice. And we needed that cage affair to get home.

It was like hitting a padded pillar. My head snapped forward, my teeth came together with a sharp click, and something gave agonizingly in my shoulder. Tom Findlay must have weighed over a ton.

He stopped laughing, gradually. "Very good. Nobody's ever adjusted quite that fast. Let's say you pass with honors," he said. "And here's your diploma."

It appeared beside him in the cage: a black disc on edge, two feet high. He caught it before it could topple, and he sent it rolling out. I let it go past me.

Grant had come up behind me. In resignation he said, "Where are we?"

"A lot of use you'll get out of that! I'll tell you anyway. It's the second planet out from Alpha Centauri A. If you were hoping for double suns and wild new constellations, you can forget it. We used the closest available water world."

"Go

So had I. I inhaled; the air smelled incredibly clean. A door slammed behind me. The women. God, don't let them beg. I said, "So they came and sampled us and found us wanting. So they're doing it over with another five hundred Edens. So where do you come in, Findlay? They aren't human, are they?"

"Not by a long way," said Findlay, with reverence. "Neither am I. I'm a robot. I'm also the ideal they're aiming for, in case you were wondering."

"I wasn't."

"Now, now."

"If you're just what they want, why do they need us?"

"I'm expensive. Robots don't breed. You can forget about genetic engineering, too. It's immoral. I don't know why. It's enough that they think so. Anything else?"

"We were doing seventy on the freeway," said Hal. "What happened to the momentum?"

"You were also doing about twenty miles per second with respect to this beach. We just took it all in one vector sum. What else? Oh, you won't be separated. This Eden will hold all four of you. We did it that way last time, too. The Eden story is only a myth."

"Are there any others?" Carol cried. "What direction are they."

But he was gone, and the metal frame around him. We were alone on a beach, four of us and a car, in the growing light of dawn.

"This thing is sticky," Hal said suddenly. He was holding the black disc that Findlay had rolled past me. He looked at his hand, then licked a finger. "Right. It's a memento, his signature, as it were. What can you say about chocolate covered manhole covers?"

"Don't get it sandy," my wife said briskly. "We can eat the chocolate. It's the only thing on this world that we know we can eat."