Free Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II by William Tenn Page A

abounded on Earth. We had data and we had such tools as the cyclotron, the betatron. And, if our present company will pardon the expression, Alvarez, we are a young and vigorous race.
    All we had to do was the necessary research.
    The research was done. With a truly effective world government, with a population not only interested in the problem, but recently experienced in working together—and with the grim incentive we had, Alvarez—the problem, as you know, was solved.
    We developed artificial radioactives and refueled the revitalizers. We developed atomic fuels out of the artificial radioactives and we got space travel. We did it comparatively fast, and we weren't interested in a ship that just went to the Moon or Mars. We wanted a starship. And we wanted it so bad, so fast, that we have it now, too.
    Here we are. Explain the situation to them, Alvarez, just the way I told it to you, but with all the knee-bending and doubletalk that a transplanted Brazilian with twelve years' Oriental trading experience can put into it. You're the man to do it—I can't talk like that. It's the only language those decadent slugs understand, so it's the only way we can talk to them. So talk to them, these slimy snails, these oysters on the quarter shell, these smart-alecky slugs. Don't forget to mention to them that the supply of radioactives they got from us won't last forever. Get that down in fine detail.
    Then stress the fact that we've got artificial radioactives, and that they've got some things we know we want and lots of other things we mean to find out about.
    Tell them, Alvarez, that we've come to collect tolls on that Brooklyn Bridge they sold us.

AFTERWORD
    This was the first—at least the first I was conscious of writing—of my "Here Comes Civilization!" stories. About the time I wrote "The Liberation of Earth," I had been thinking of a cycle that would celebrate, in future, galactic terms, what happened in our history when technologically advanced cultures moved in on technologically backward cultures, from the Aztecs to the Tahitians, from Lake Chad to Lake Titicaca.
    We of Earth were to be the Indians of Manhattan Island and the creatures from Betelgeuse were to be the Dutch of Mynheers Peter Minuit and Peter Stuyvesant. And how, my fellow humans, I intended to ask, does that feel?
    I had mentioned the idea to John Campbell at Astounding , but he was in the midst of his dianetics period and asked me if I couldn't work at least one good-guy clear into the story. Horace Gold had been begging me for stories for his new magazine, Galaxy , so I called him up and told him what I'd like to do. He was very enthusiastic about it; he said he particularly wanted to publish as many satires as he could get.
    In fact, he wanted the story so badly that he managed to control himself and didn't do what maddened me in my later relationship with him—try to rewrite my story before I had even written it. He just said, "Please get it to me as soon as possible. I'll definitely buy it."
    I wrote it, and he bought it. But he was Horace, after all. He couldn't keep his fingers out of his writers' stories. With all their quarrels and intense rivalry, he and John Campbell had something very basic in common. They both saw the writers for their magazines as so many pencils, scribbling the stories they, as editors, felt themselves no longer able to write. And although they were great editors, they were lousy, unasked-for and insistent collaborators.
    Since he wanted me to continue writing for him, Horace at this early time in our relationship made very few changes in the published "Betelgeuse Bridge." He just threw an extra adverb or adjective into three or four sentences. I was furious.
    But, alas...
    Of course, I had a carbon copy (carbon print on yellow backup sheets in the typewriter—for all you young, computer-using readers) in my files. But, as with several other stories, I never took very close care of that carbon. It was on brittle