Alternating Currents Read Online Free PDF Page B

found would hurt Connick, all right, but I couldn’t really see how it would help do our job. And I certainly wasn’t going to marry Candace Harmon.
     
    Come to think of it, I thought, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the old one, there had been a fifth item, and I had blown that one too.
     
    The classics of public relations clearly show how little reason has to do with M/R, and yet I had allowed myself to fall into that oldest and most imbecilic of traps set for flacks. Think of history’s master-strokes of flackery: ‘The Jews stabbed Germany in the back!’ ‘Seventy-eight (or fifty-nine, or one hundred and three) card-carrying communists in the State Department!’ ‘I will go to Korea!’ It is not enough for a theme to be rational; indeed it is wrong for a theme to be rational, if you want to move men’s glands, because, above all else, it must seem new, and fresh, and of such revolutionary simplicity that it illuminates an enormous, confused, and disagreeable problem in a fresh and hopeful light. Or so it must seem to the Average Man. And since he has spent any number of surly, worried hours groping for some personal salvation in the face of a bankrupt Germany, or a threat of subversion, or a war that is going nowhere, no rational solution can ever meet those strictures ... since he has already considered all the rational solutions and found either that they are useless or that the cost is more than he wants to pay.
     
    So what I should have concentrated on in Belport was the bright, irrational, distractive issue. The Big Lie, if you will. And I had hardly found even a Sly Insinuation.
     
    It was interesting to consider in just how many ways I had done the wrong thing. Including maybe the wrongest of all: I had let Candace Harmon get away. And then in these thoughts, myself almost despising, haply the door chimed and I opened it, and there was this fellow in Space Force olive-greens saying, ‘Come along, Mr Gunnarsen, the Truce Team want to talk to you.’
     
    ~ * ~
     
    For one frozen moment there, I was nineteen years old again. I was a Rocketman 3/c on the Moon, guarding the Aristarchus base against invaders from outer space. (We thought that to be a big joke at the time. Shows how unfunny a joke can turn.) This fellow was a colonel, and his name was Peyroles, and he took me down the corridor, to a private elevator I had never known was there, up to the flat dome of the mushroom and into a suite which made my suite look like the cellar under a dog-run Old Levittown. The reek was overpowering. By then I had gotten over my quick response to the brass and I took out a ker-pak and held it to my nose. The colonel did not even look at me.
     
    ‘Sit down!’ barked the colonel, and left me in front of an unlighted fireplace. Something was going on; I could hear voices from another room, a lot of them:
     
    ‘- burned one in effigy, and by God we’ll burn a real one—’
     
    ‘- smells like a skunk—’
     
    ‘- turns my stomach!’ And that last fellow, whoever he was, was pretty near right, at that - although actually in the few seconds since I entered the suite I had almost forgotten the smell. It was funny how you got used to it. Like a ripe cheese: the first whiff knocked you sick, but pretty soon the olfactory nerves got the hang of the thing and built up a defence.
     
    ‘- all right, the war’s over and we have got to get along with them, but a man’s home town—’
     
    Whatever it was that was going on in the other room, it was going on loudly. Tempers were always short when Arcturans were around, because the smell, of course, put everybody on edge. People don’t like bad smells. They’re not nice. They remind us of sweat and excrement, which we have buttressed our lives against admitting as real, personal facts. Then there was a loud military yell for order - I recognized the colonel, Peyroles - and then a voice that sounded queerly not-quite-human, although it spoke in