Stepping Stone

I

ARTHUR CHESLEY WAS A CHEMIST, but you mustn't think of him as a scientist. He was nothing of the kind.

He didn't inquire into the secrets of nature—maybe once he had, but then the foundation grants ran out; and since his specialty couldn't be twisted to sound as though it had anything to do with either nuclear energy or cancer cure it was a matter of get a job or starve. So he got a job. He spent eight hours a night, six nights a week, watching a stainless steel kettle with his fingers crossed. "She's getting hot, Mr. Chesley!" one of the lab assistants would yell, and he'd have to run over and tell them what to do. "Pressure's up, Mr. Chesley!" another would cry, and he'd have to do something about that—or anyway, tell the assistants what to do, because the union rules were pretty strong about who did the actual work. It was all a matter of polymerization, which is cooking little short molecules into big long molecules, and what came out of it all was rubber, or maybe plastic wrappers, or the stuff that goes into children's toys, depending on what was needed right then—and also on whether or not the kettle exploded. Well, it was an easy job, except when the pressure suddenly climbed. And it was night work, so Chesley had his days free. He kind of liked it, partly because he got to boss the crew of assistants around. And they didn't mind. They thought the whole thing was pretty funny, partly because they got two-forty an hour against Chesley's dollar-seventy-five.

Chesley's wife didn't think that was funny at all. What she said was:

"Stepping stone! Arthur, you've been in a rut for seven years and I want to tell you that I'm getting tired of stepping stones that don't step anywhere and— Another thing, why can't you work days like anybody else instead of sleeping all the time I'm trying to clean the house? Did you ever stop to think how much trouble that makes for me? Can't you have any consideration for anybody else and— And why can't you make your own lunch to take to the plant? Other men make their own lunches. If you wouldn't sit around the house watching television you'd have time to make your lunch, not to mention doing a few other little— That reminds me, what's keeping you from putting up the screens? The house will be crawling, and I mean crawling, with every bug in the Bronx if you don't get around to it. You hear me? Or is that too menial a job for a real chemist—a real chemist that's got a job that's a stepping stone to a fine career of— Arthur! Arthur, I'm talking to you! You come back here!"

But the job did leave his days free. Chesley escaped from the house and headed down toward the corner bar, where the barkeep drew him a beer with a half-inch collar without waiting to be asked. "You're early," said the bartender, handing Chesley his change. "I thought you'd be watching television."

"That's what I wanted," Chesley said bitterly. "I wanted to see that new program they're talking about."

The barkeep said, "That Viceroy thing?"

"Yeah. The one they cancelled all the other shows for. Harry, what's the matter with you that you don't have a TV like every other bar in the Bronx?"

"It's my wife," the bartender explained; and maybe that wouldn't have been enough for any other man, but it was enough for Arthur Chesley. The bartender said, "Say, whyn't you go see it in person?"

"You mean at the studio?"

"Nah. No studio. Here." And the bartender picked a card off the top of a stack at the end of the counter. "Fellow left these here this morning."

Chesley read it, sipping his beer. FREE ONE DOLLAR FREE it said at the top, and that was pretty interesting. These nuts, he thought, I wonder how they're going to wiggle out of it in the fine print? Chesley had a wide experience of things marked "free," and they had always, always turned out to be not so very free at all. The small print—not very small, either—said only:

The Viceroy will make an announcement of unparalleled importance to every person in the world TODAY At the Yankee Stadium

^* ONE DOLLAR FREE to every person attending

^* FIVE ADDITIONAL DOLLARS FREE to every person who stays to the end of the program.

"Whoever he is," Chesley said, offering to return the card.

"Keep it. It's probably some kind of advertising deal, you know?"

"If it is, it costs plenty of money," said Chesley. "Why, the Stadium must hold more than seventy-five thousand people. If everybody gets six bucks, why—hey, that's nearly half a million dollars!"

"Nah. Nobody's going to spend half a million," said Harry positively.

"Um," said Chesley. He finished his beer and put the card in his pocket. "I don't know," he said, "maybe I'll take a look." And why not? Because after all it was nearly twelve hours until it was time to polymerize some more molecules, and the only other place he could think of was home.

They really did give away a dollar. Somebody had hooked up gadgets to the turnstiles, and when you pushed your way through there was a click and a rattle and a dollar bill popped up through a slot like a paper towel in a restaurant washroom. It looked real, too.

There were seats down in the field, just like at a prize fight, and about where the pitcher's box usually was, there was a platform with microphones and TV cameras. There must have been plenty of people in the Bronx who enjoyed getting a dollar FREE, because the seats filled up rapidly.

Arthur was early—that was his habit; and he got a good seat. He had nothing to do but chat with his neighbors and eat. He bought himself two hot dogs and an ice cream cone. Ordinarily he was careful about his money—that is, his wife was careful about money and he was careful about his wife —but he regarded the dollar as found money, and he had every intention of staying on to the bitter end, regardless, in order to collect the other five.

At about the time all the seats were filled he discovered that he really was going to stay on, regardless. Because as soon as the Stadium was full the gates were closed; and Chesley could see that they were being locked, and that guards were standing firmly in front of them, turning people away.

There wasn't any way out.

And then the field lights flickered and spots came on, beaming down at the platform. And a man appeared.

He appeared. He didn't walk quickly up the stairs, or come out from behind a curtain. He appeared. The only part of that statement that is questionable is that he was "a man." Chesley thought that, taking everything into account, he looked like a man.

But he was ten feet tall; and he had a halo that glowed all around him.

He said good evening, and his voice was heard all over the park. Maybe it was the microphones, but Chesley didn't think the sound came from the microphones; it seemed to come from the speaker himself; and the voice was odd. Not metallic. Not foreign. Not any of the words that people use to describe the voices of people. It sounded non-peoplish; it sounded strange.

Out of the corner of his eye Chesley saw commotion, and realized that some people were fainting. But not him. He did choke a little on the last of his ice cream cone, but he managed to get it down. Still and all, he did have a sick feeling in his stomach. It wasn't from the hot dogs.

The man said: "I am not a man."

A muffled moan from eighty thousand voices. Chesley only nodded.

"I take the form of a man in order to permit you to see me," boomed the voice. "I am your Viceroy."

A couple of hundred people, near the exits, had had all they could take. No mere five dollars was enough to make them stay. But the Viceroy was. The desperate ones jumped up from their seats, ran shouting toward the guards; and maybe the guards couldn't have stopped them, but the Viceroy could; he pointed his finger. They stopped. In fact, they were frozen. Most of them toppled over, rigid.

Arthur Chesley thought that this was very interesting.

Living with his wife had done things to his temperament; he was so unused to strong emotion that he didn't recognize it when it came. He was scared to death. His heart was beating wildly; he had violent cramps in his stomach. But since he had never been terribly afraid before, he didn't realize it.

He even tried to order a bottle of soda pop. But apparently the vendor knew more about his emotions than Chesley did; because he had disappeared.

The Viceroy went on: "I have been sent by my people to prepare this planet for their habitation."

Moans again, and another nod from Chesley. That figured, he thought; it would have to be something like that. He began to shake, and wondered why.

"I have been sent alone," boomed the voice, "because I need no aid. I myself can cope with any force your puny Earth can send against me. Singlehanded I can destroy every Army."

The audience had stopped moaning; it was stunned, or most of it was. Then the first shock began to wear off and Chesley began to hear voices. "Fake!" cried someone, and "Who're you kidding?" screamed someone else. And there were uglier noises than that, too.

"I can do some things that you do not even suspect!" cried the Viceroy in a terrible voice. "Watch, Earthlings! Watch me and see!"

He began to grow.

The eighty thousand throats rasped in unison as every person present caught his breath. The Viceroy lengthened, like a stretched string. Ten feet tall? He became fifteen feet tall—twenty feet—thirty. Not an inch broader, but he towered as high as the top of the stands themselves before he was through. "See!" he bellowed, and the giant organ voice, nowhere near the microphones now, made the concrete walls of the Stadium shudder. "Watch now!" he commanded; and he began to broaden. Now he was a giant, not a string man; still thirty feet tall, but nearly ten feet across the shoulders, too. And then he began to shrink—only downwards, until he was a squashed butter-man, pressed down to a height that was less than his thickness, an oblate spheroid with a gross flat head at the top and gross chunky legs underneath. And then he shrank his width, until he was the same size and shape as at first.

The halo flashed orange sparks. Mirrors? Chesley wondered. Probably it was mirrors. All the same, it was a good thing that he hadn't been able to buy that soda pop, because it would have gone down his windpipe.

The Viceroy thundered in a far-more-than-human voice: "I shall inform certain of you of what their duties will be. The rest of you may continue with your piddling little human lives—for the time being."

The halo flared violet. "Meanwhile," rumbled the enormous voice, "do not think of resistance. It cannot succeed. I shall prove to you that I am invulnerable. Absolutely invulnerable! To weapons—"

A barrage of machine-gun fire from a battery at the side of the speaker's stand. Bright yellowish tracers ricocheted up and out over the cringing audience.

"To poison gas—"

A man in a blue uniform climbed onto the stand and directed a flexible hose at the Viceroy. Chesley shrugged; what difference did it make? The machine-gun bullets had been all the evidence anyone really needed. But there was more:

"To fire—"

A flame-thrower squirted a flaring blob of napalm; it clung to the Viceroy's halo; flickered; went out.

"To atomic energy"— Chesley half rose—"but I shall not demonstrate that at this time, as too many of you would be casualties. Now you may go. My peace be with you."

And the halo flared white, and he was gone.

Chesley slowly joined the fleeing crowd.

Such things, Chesley realized, could be faked. But they impressed him none the less. And they impressed a lot of other people—for example, the man who went through the exit turnstile ahead of Chesley, who was in such a sweat that he raced through without stopping to pick up his five-dollar-bill, leaving it for Chesley—along with Chesley's own.

He came home with ten dollars and change and his wife, for the first time in some years, was immensely pleased.

So were a very few other persons throughout the world—nearly one half of whom had seen the Viceroy in person or on television, or had heard his voice on the radio. But even they didn't stay pleased, not for very long.