Free When They Come from Space by Mark Clifton Page A

There should be martyred songs of defiance. There should be marching people. There should be line-up and clamor for self-destruction. The formula was guaranteed.
    And what did the goddam rabbits do? They sat in their holes and trembled!
    Trouble was, this time, there wasn't anything they could pick on, nothing weaker than themselves.
    He pushed his massive body, groaning under the weight of fat, out of his throne chair and began to pace the floor in sudden fury. Goddam it, he'd missed his cue. He should have set up a scapegoat, a whole bunch of scapegoats. He should have manufactured some victims for the majority to persecute. Hell, that was the simplest formula in the book. The stupidest mayor of a stinking country town knew that one. Some niggers here, some Jews there, Catholics here, Protestants there, Irishmen, Swedes, Polacks, wops, kooks, commies and homosexuals everywhere. Hell, with just a little twist of words, any and all of these could be made to look responsible for the Black Fleet. It always worked.
    And he'd slipped on it.
    He knew damn well that humans would never go out and tackle anything stronger than they were. They had to feel they were in the majority; they had to feel that the opinion of the majority was behind them—no matter what hypocritical false front they put on for public consumption—before they would dare to stand up and be counted. Oh they were strong on crusading for perfectly safe subjects, these humans; but they had to have something weak and running in fear before they'd change over from rabbits to dogs and run baying after it in furious, frenzied chase.
    But, goddam it, he hadn't had time. Nobody had tipped him off to expect the Black Fleet. What was the matter with that Pentagon? Why hadn't they tipped him off? Wasn't it their business to know, to anticipate? And weren't they completely dependent upon him to shape the mass mind for them? Trouble was, they were so goddam engrossed in strutting around upstaging one another with their silly little brass and braid symbols, they'd forgot what they were there for—and who kept ‘em there.
    And why hadn't his own direct organization men been on their toes, and, even without warning, put the formula into motion without waiting to be told? Hell, he'd trained them well enough. They'd been pampered and spoiled with the high wages he paid them, the silly little status levels he'd granted them, to the point that they would sacrifice anything, anything at all to keep their position. That was his technique. He'd seen to it that all his independent editors, on both sides of every fence, said what he wanted them to say; the pro faction coming out strong, the con faction advancing such weak arguments against that even a child could see the only possible Right way to look at the question. Every damn one of his free and fearless commentators and columnists said exactly what he wanted them to say. They didn't get hired unless their past opinions showed they could be trusted. They didn't work for him if they didn't go on freely and independently coming to the conclusions favorable to Mr. Harvey Strickland. Hell, they couldn't work anywhere if they didn't do that
    So now, in a real emergency, they'd sat on their overstuffed duffs and let the Black Fleet take over without making one move to capitalize on it to strengthen his position.
    Angrily, he waddled over to the television monitors and flipped the switch to turn them off—a symbolic destruction of them all. He turned to do the same thing to the battery of fax machines lined up along the wall, but paused to read the latest messages.
    The same thing was happening everywhere, over all the large cities of America, over every large city in the world.
    Everywhere, the discs hovered, and wheeled in formation, and waited.
    An unbidden doubt tried to force its way into his mind that there might be no opportunity in this to tighten his hold on the mass mind still more; that this might be something beyond his