His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"This Cromleigh," said Battle, "was—and is—no fool. He went to a psychologist friend and had his mind probed. The result was a complete outline of your civilization and plans—including that ingenious device of yours, the minimifyer. He had one built in his lab and paid me very highly to go into it. Then I was dropped by him personally into this sofa with a pair of tweezers."

"How much does he know?" snapped the woman.

"Not much. Only what one of your more feeble-minded citizens let him know. He doesn't know the final invasion plans and he doesn't know the time-schedule—if there is any as yet."

"There isn't," she said with furrowed brow. "And if there were, you imbecile monsters would never learn it from us." Suddenly she blazed at him: "Why must you die the hard way? Why don't you make room for the super-race while you have the chance? But no! We'd never be able to live in peace with you—you—cretins!"

Then her lip trembled. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't mean to be harsh—

but there are so few of us and so many of you—" The dam broke, and the little lady dissolved in a flood of tears.

Battle leaped into the breech like a veteran He scored 99.9807 on the firing range consistently and that was pretty good, but when it came to comforting weeping female soldiers-of-fortune Battle really shone.

SOME MINUTES LATER they were chummily propped up against the wall of the wooden room. Her weeps over, the little lady—who had identified herself as Miss Aktying click! Byam—began:

"We come—you could have guessed this from our size—from an asteroid near Jupiter. Don't ask me why my people are so much like yours except for size; after all, why shouldn't they be? Spores of life, you know.

"Our space-ship's somewhere in your New Jersey; we landed there two years ago and sized the situation up. We'd been driven from our own planet by nasty creatures from Ceres who had the damnedest war-machines you ever saw. Flame-guns, disintegrator rays—and they're going to mop up the universe when they get around to it. By your standards they were three inches tall; to us they were twenty-foot horrors.

"We sent out a few agents who learned the language in two or three days; we could live on the space-ship and keep out of sight. The agents came back to us all steamed up. They'd been riding in coat pockets and things, listening in on private wires. They found out that most of the wealth in the world is concentrated in the Billionaire's Club, right here where we are. So we moved en masse, all three hundred of us, into this sofa and built our city.

"It isn't as easy as it sounds, of course. To listen in on a conversation means that you have to weigh yourself down with almost an ounce of equipment for raising the octaves of the voice and scaling it down to fit our ears. But now we have our listening posts and we eavesdrop in relays to every word that's spoken. If you knew what I know about Atlantis Plastic and Explosive—

"Anyway, Battle; we have our fingers on the economic pulse of the planet. We could release information through dreams and hunches that would wreck the market, as you call it, and create the most staggering panic of all times. Once that happens, Battle…"

"Go on," snapped the Lieutenant.

"Once that happens, Battle," she said in a small, tense voice, "we turn on a little machine we have and every human being that walks the Earth turns into pocket-fuzz."

She faced his horrified stare with a pitying smile. "It's true," she said.

"We can do it. When we're ready, when we're convinced that science and research is so disorganized that they can't possibly do anything about it, we turn on the machine, technically known as a protoplasmo-high carbon proteidic - discellular converter and it happens."

"Not," grated Battle, "if I can stop it."

"That's the rub, my dear," she said with a frown. "You can't. You're my prisoner." And she smiled exquisitely, baring apple-green teeth, so that Battle was constrained to agree with the little lady.

"It seems fitting," he brooded absently. "A super-race indeed is come to humble man."

"DARLING," SAID BATTLE, "it's the strange mixture of ruthlessness and sentimentality that makes your people perpetually amazing to me. It's a pitched battle in the dark on our part; my people have no notion of what's going on behind their backs, and you see nothing evil or dark in the situation."

Busily Miss Aktying click! Byam kissed him and returned to her desk.

"My sweet," she said, "if you trouble your head over our alien morality you'll never get to the end of it. Enough that you are accepted into our midst as a non-combatant worker and the very special charge of the Expediter-in-Chief―that's me. Now go away, please. I'll see you tonight."

Battle pocketed the seal he had lifted from the desk and blew a kiss at her back as he closed the door behind him.