When Messenger reappears, it isn’t a pretty scene. Tokyo is mauled, Vladivostok is flattened, Seattle and Valparaiso and Brisbane are forcibly redecorated. Singapore takes a haircut, Brunei is stomped, Taipei and Manila are turned upside down. As each attack unfolds, Messenger broadcasts telepathic messages in the local languages, urging survivors to pressure their leaders, to demand atomic disarmament and international unity, but inasmuch as the huge creature has a heart (it has five circulatory centers), that heart is beginning to ache with something like a traumatized sense of futility. How many cities must it destroy in order to convince these young thinkers to prevent the destruction of their cities? The seed-planters do not program their watchseeds to give up, but neither do they prevent them from learning. From the natives of this planet, Messenger has finally learned how to be depressed. It ceases attacks for a month or two and drifts quietly somewhere in the midnight zone, three thousand meters down. Bioluminescent things flash little blue-green lights at it, and Messenger flashes back. This is relaxing. Alone in the dark, it makes a pocket inside itself containing manipulators and optical stalks. At last, it begins to examine the materials Eugenia Aldrich-Haines threw at it.
Economic turmoil reigns on the surface. In the United States, massive disinvestment in coastal regions and the displacement of millions of people are sharpening intolerance. Shipping and ocean drilling are bottomed out; railways and coal are roaring like the clock has been turned back a century. Production of nuclear weapons is up 250 percent, and Richard Nixon is polling at an all-time high. “DRAGONSLAYER DICK,” say the buttons handed out by the thousands at the Republican National Convention. “Not a penny for tribute!” he proclaims in his stump speech. He’s the guy who told that moralizing space monster where to stick it, the guy who’ll lead the world in showing that thing it can have our planet when it pries it from our cold, dead, irradiated hands!
He hasn’t been able to do a damn thing to stop it, of course, but in the end he’s applied some of that crazy woman’s advice after all. Managing the monster—but in his own way. Sure, things are a bit of a mess, and the riots are getting a little out of hand, but what’s important is that George McGovern is absolutely going to eat a dogshit popsicle on November 7th.
Then one morning he finds Eugenia Aldrich-Haines sitting in his office again.
“You are leaving here in handcuffs, ma’am. Handcuffs! That is the end of this ridiculous matter!”
“You can have the Secret Service do whatever they want to me. I can’t personally resist. But if my liberty is curtailed in any way, my client will take a leisurely swim up the Potomac and you’re going to have to find a new house, Mr. President. It’s lurking not far from here. I know you’re aware that it walked across Panama a few days ago.”
Aldrich-Haines is wearing a gleaming black dress that looks knitted from the stuff they make spy planes out of. With a start, the president realizes it resembles the carapace of the thing he met on Likiep Atoll. That thing made it for her.
“Your collusion with that entity, Ms. Aldrich-Haines, raises more legal questions than I can imagine, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it might go as far as high treason.”
“I am now Messenger’s sole authorized representative for all affairs legal, political, and financial on this planet, Mr. President. So while I intend to maintain my New York domicile and pay my income taxes, all the broader questions of citizenship and allegiance just went weird and you know it. If anything happens to me, my client the skyscraper-sized alien monster will start smashing things again. It’s that simple, Dick. Let’s cut the shit.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Could it have something to do with that time you pretended to consider my proposals and flew me to the middle of the Pacific—”
“I didn’t pretend anything, ma’am! I gave you genuine consideration!”
“You undercut me, Mr. President. I was ignored and silenced. Henry Kissinger kicked me into a lagoon. Then you had me detained for three weeks. Well, so what? Shake off the dust from your feet, and so forth. All I wanted to do at first was make some money and give you a public opinion turnaround. Now I have a client who takes my proposals seriously, which means the whole world is going to take them seriously.”
“Unbelievable. A megalomaniac soap jingle lady.”
“Actually, I never worked on soap jingles, Mr. President. I worked on applied psychology in public relations, just as I’m doing now. Changing minds professionally.”
“No credentials concerning that monster will ever be recognized in this country,” says the president. “No extraordinary status will ever be conferred to you or anyone who takes your place when you depart for federal prison.”