The Glory of Ippling, Helen M. Urban [readict books txt] 📗

stood back from Boswellister to listen, smilingly superior, tolerantly waiting to be entertained. A woman dragging a toddler stopped, then several other people stopped to see until Boswellister had about ten people standing around him.

"People of Earth!" he started in again, but he was interrupted by a cackling voice from the rear.

"Where else?"

The small crowd laughed and started to move away, but Boswellister stood straight and commanded them. "Listen! Wait for a moment and learn your glorious destiny.

"Now," he said quietly into the lapel pickup, and the great doughnut circle of the Ipplinger starship sailed in close over the hills. A line of brush fire followed the starship.

Boswellister held up his hands and pointed. "Behold the glory of Ippling that can be yours!" He held onto the halo, trying to get them to follow the symbolism. "Look upwards!" He screamed at them, but they watched the brush fire that swept the hill top. It was a goodie. It would wipe out a number of homes.

He grabbed a boy by the arm and demanded, "Look at the Ipplinger starship. Behold the glory of Ippling!"

The ten-year-old sneered. "Yah! That's the new 1993 Lockheed X69-P37 experimental ship. I got a model last week."

"No, no, lad! The Ipplinger starship, come to Earth to bring the blessings of Ippling's culture to this backwards planet. Ippling will save you from wars and ills, from poverty and hatred. Ippling will be your destiny. Follow me, Boswellister! Ippling will lead you to the stars! Glory for all!" Boswellister patted the boy on the head.

"Keep your hands off me, you big stiff!"

Boswellister gulped and pointed upwards. "See the Ipplinger starship!"

"Aah! Shuddup!"

His mother jerked his arm in reproof. "How many times I've gotta tell you not to say, shuddup. Say, SHUT UP! S-H-U-T U-P!"

"Aah!" the boy said in disgust. "Everybody knows starships are big rockets!" He'd said the final word; he had no more interest in Boswellister, for the fire engines were coming.

They sirened down Ventura and turned up Laurel Canyon, their heavy motors, air horns and sirens drowning out Boswellister's speech. Cars had piled up at the intersection to wait for the fire engines to make their swing, and Boswellister leaped to the middle of the intersection as soon as the trucks had turned.

He held up his arms and went into his People of Earth spiel again. But angry, blasting horns cut his voice to nothing. The drivers pressed close in on him, pinpointing him in the middle of the intersection. Shouts and jeers and horns; the roaring scream of fire engines; people running and shouting; Ventura at Laurel Canyon was a cacophonous maelstrom.

A traffic officer screeched his copcycle to a halt and made his way to the center of the mass of tangled traffic. He blew his whistle and waved his arms, ordering Boswellister to the sidewalk, but Boswellister refused to move. He had his mission on Earth.

Boswellister shouted over the piled-up noise, waving his hand to the sky, calling to them to follow his lead to the glory of Ippling.

The officer grabbed his coat collar and hustled him to the sidewalk. "You're under arrest!"

"You can't arrest me!" Boswellister squirmed and jerked away. He shouted, "Follow me!" and ran north, a good part of the crowd after him. He shrieked an order into the pickup while he ran over the bridge towards Moorpark.

A woman spotted the Ipplinger starship that followed overhead. "Free samples!" she screamed, and those who had lagged behind fell into a run with the crowd following Boswellister.

The northwest corner of Laurel Canyon and Moorpark had been cleared of houses for the erection of a new billion-dollar shopping center, and the ground was smooth and bare. Here, in the center of the five-acre construction site, the Ipplinger starship settled to Earth.

The Ipplinger Supreme Starship Commander was panic-stricken. He had to rescue Boswellister from that sample-seeking mob. If Boswellister should be trampled and injured! Each screamed demand, picked up by Boswellister's lapel microphone, sent the Supreme Commander's blood pressure up another notch, and the moment the ramp was unshipped he hit the ground.

Officers and crewmen quickly lined up to pipe Boswellister aboard. But the crowd pushed in close, forcing Boswellister to the rear as they screamed for their free samples. Two bulky crewmen stood embattled by the entrance port, strong-arming the kids who tried to storm through the port and inside.

"Space Angel's inside!" That was their battle cry as they tried to wriggle under the legs of the crewmen.

"Ya sellin' Oatbombs?" one screamed in the commander's ear, then reached up to snatch off a shoulder patch.

Boswellister stood in the rear of the crowd and wrung his hands while the crowd clamored for their samples.

"Give us the pitch, then pass out the stuff!"

"Lookit that ship! Ain't it a dilly! Whatcha sellin', Wheatsnaps?"

"Bring on the dames!"

They pressed in close to the starship, running their hands over the slick metal surface.

"Boy, what a prop! Bet it cost a million bucks. What ya sellin', mister?"

"Sanity!" Boswellister shouted from the rear.

His men tried to hold their ranks, but the crowd broke the lines, jerking the medals off their chests for souvenirs.

Boswellister was almost babbling by the time the commander and his men battled their way to him.

"You saw it all! You know!" Boswellister protested. "That Blond Terror and his harem darlings, and those violence-avid ruffians in the audience! Dodie, the stripper, with her lip-licking ogglers! That Calsobisidine pitchman, oozing allure and implied invitation! My equation! My precious equation, buried under a mass of pills, lotions, toys, food, clothes and everything sold with a bump and grind!"

They fought to the ship with him, while the crowd opposed each step, yelling for entertainment, for TV cameras, for samples of anything.

"How could I have missed it?" Boswellister moaned. "I should have sold them with sex, right from the beginning."

"What do you do, handsome? Sing?" A bundle-clutching housewife breathed into his face, stepping on the commander's foot as she shoved in close to Boswellister.

"Take me home!" Boswellister beseeched the commander.

The officers and crew, tattered, demedaled, bruised and completely defeated in morale, formed a flying wedge and drove for the safety of the ship.

The ramp retracted. The port closed, then opened briefly to eject a nosey boy, closing finally on the demands and the mocking laughter and the clangor of arriving police cars.

"Raise ship!" the commander ordered. He sopped at the blood from his gashed arm and said to his first officer, "Somebody in that mob used a knife to go after those service stripes."

The first shuddered. "Ugly brutes."

Boswellister leaned against the corridor bulkhead and sighed as the Ipplinger starship rose from the ground. How could he explain to his poppa? All his brothers had won their worlds. He would do it. He squared his shoulders. After all, he was a Boswellister. Boswellister XIV, no less. A son of Gaphroldshan IX himself, the Prince of Ippling World LXIV, a Royal Prince of the Central Ippling.

He walked resolutely to the control room, riding the crest of his refurbished dignity.

"Put me down on that planet we spotted last year," he ordered. "What was that star map number?"

"G.S.R. 285139-F. R. A. 592-105-R.U. 13," his alert assistant astronomical officer answered, reading the number from a prepared memorandum.

Boswellister hesitated. Should he reprimand the officer for anticipating his failure or compliment him for his efficiency? Boswellister backed water and went to his room to learn the language he'd need, while the officers pulled their own demoralized spirits together so they could go to work on the crew when the news broke that they weren't going home.

They made a quick passage to their destination, and Boswellister—well rested, well fed, hypnotically tutored, supplied with communicators, a synthesizer for his food and a portable equation writer strapped to his back, and his irrepressible, dauntless belief in himself in triumphant operation—stepped from the ramp onto this newest world of his Princely destiny.

"Circle in orbit," he ordered. "I'll call you when I need you."

Boswellister walked confidently down the road to town. He congratulated himself on having learned, also on his wise humility in admitting the fact of his having learned. He smiled now at the naiveté with which he had approached his first try at establishing a realm for his Ipplinger Princedom rights.

He had been so full of illusions that he had landed openly, had stepped right up and announced that he had come to establish his household and rear his own Princes, who would, in their maturity, leave to win their own worlds. In addition to their being small-minded on that first world about his needing five wives for his household, they had nearly managed to commit him to a lunatic asylum, for he had overlooked, in his equation, the fact that his first planet, with its two suns and perpetual daylight, had never known about the stars. There had been no way to break through their wall of stupidity, and he had left, the planet's sanity-police close on his heels. Had he used money it would have been a cinch, he had realized as soon as he was safely in the ship.

That hard-earned lesson he had applied to his second planet, but there superstition meant more than money, though money had seemed on the surface to be the answer to everything. On that second planet he had made the error of buying his way into the half-political, half-religious temple setup, and had tried to bring the local superstitions into line with Ipplinger Reality Philosophy. They had lost an officer and three men when they rescued him from the temple's torture chamber; and none too soon, for he had been taking quite a stretching when his rescue had arrived.

Applied on Earth, the superstition equation had not paid off. He had failed to notice that they didn't really believe in their religions and superstitions, though they showed every indication of being extremely devout and credulous. He should have sold Earth, and sold it with sex.

Well, he had learned, all right, and here, on this new world, in this fresh start, he would show how well he had learned. In the idiom of Ventura Boulevard, he'd hit 'em with the whole deck, deuces wild. He'd give 'em sex and money and superstition and to hell with fact and logic.

These primitive worlds had to be brought slowly into a respect for logic; for Ipplinger logic, the only valid system of logic in the whole universe.

In the hovering ship, the commander turned to the astrogator and said, with the bitterness of yesterday's conflict with the mutinous crew evident in his voice, "Well, our little vaporized circuit is off again." He motioned to the image of Boswellister in the forward viewscreen.

It was a sight that tended to increase the tremor in the astrogator's hands. He replied, "I only hope we can pull the crew through another pickup. Home and family! Do they think I want mine any less?"

Boswellister marched confidently down the road. He would succeed, for didn't he have the well oiled machinery of the whole Ipplinger starship crew of cultural contact specialists to back him up?

While he walked, he practiced the strident-voiced delivery of extravagant lies he had learned so well and had so magnificently imitated from the Ventura Boulevard pitch artists. He practiced the leering insinuendo of the barker outside the gambling hall; he gave it the Calsobisidine con come-on; he sold it solid, dripping with sex, twitching with lure.

He knew that here, finally, he would succeed.

Boswellister XIV, Noble Prince of Ippling, smiled his confidence in his sex-money-superstition equation as he walked briskly down the road to begin his contact with a world that had substituted vat-culture procreation for sex; that had abolished money in favor of a complicated system of verbal, personal-honor swapping credits; that had no religions or superstitions. A world of people who considered the most sweetly distilled essence of living to be the minute investigation of the fine points of logical discourse, engaged in on the basis of an incredibly multiplied logic structure composed of thirty-seven separate systems of discursive regulations, the very first of which was based on a planetary absolute, the rejection and ridicule of all persuasive techniques and those who used them.

—HELEN M. URBAN