Free Welcome to the Greenhouse by Gordon Van Gelder Page A

told these slugs we were all out of
fafashertzz?”
    “They did.”
    “And?”
    “Dial tone. No answer. Nada. Mukwoy.”
    “Buncha jerks!” Bunky said. “Still, whatta ya expect from slugs?”
    “But there’s good news,” said Number-One. “
    Tell me.”
    “The communicator works on other frequencies. Our brainiacs say it looks like we can start calling around, see if we can find someone not so single-minded.”
    Bunky had built his business partly on an aggressive telemarketing campaign. “Put another billion into it,” he said, “build a few million of those things and hire India to make the calls.”
    To himself, he said,
This works out, I could rule the world.
And when Bunky Sansom talked to himself, he never indulged in hyperbole.
    “It’s looking good, boss.”
    “It better,” Bunky said. For the umpteenth time, the worst-case global warming scenarios had proved to be too optimistic: now the U.N. climatologists were predicting that everything from the Gulf of Mexico to the Black Hills was going to end up as a warm, shallow sea. “So whatta we got?”
    “We’re talking to about twenty civilizations, maybe half of them within
bluberiskint
distance.”
    “What’s this
bluberiskint?”
    “Seems to be the main purpose of
fafashertzz—some
kind of interstellar faster-than-light drive.”
    “So, we’re talking to ten or a dozen kindsa space aliens,” Bunky said. A thought occurred to him. “How many of them are bugs?”
    “Big bugs?”
    “Size don’t matter.”
    “Three.”
    “And the rest? Can they help us?”
    Number-One made an
it-ain’t-good-news
face. “Most of them first want to know if we’ve got any
fafashertzz.”
    Bunky looked at the ceiling, which was painted with scenes of triumph from his long, contrarian career. “Give me somethin’ here,” he said, “’fore I drown.”
    Number-One said, “There’s one good prospect.” He caught his boss’s sideways look and added, “And they’re not bugs or slugs. They look like big birds, although they’ve got teeth.”
    Bunky tried it out in his head. “Birds aren’t so bad. How big?”
    “Pretty big. Hard to tell. Maybe twenty feet high.”
    “That’s some bird,” Bunky said. “And with teeth yet.”
    “The thing is,” Number-One said, “they said they were glad we got in touch. They’re familiar with our world. When we told them it was heating up, the answer came back: ‘Not a problem.’”
    “Not a problem?” Bunky said the words again, slowly. “I like their attitude. And they’re within whatsit distance?”
    “They can be here in a month.”
    Bunky didn’t get where he was by procrastinating. He slapped one plump hand down onto the marble top of his decision desk. “Sign ‘em to an exclusive contract. Give ‘em whatever they want.”
    “Already done,” said Number-One. “Everything we proposed, they said, ‘Not a problem.’”
    “I like these birds,” Bunky said. “Get the PR and media people in here. We gotta plan the announcement.”
    The world took Bunky Sansom to its bosom like never before. He had more honorary citizenships, keys to cities, and propositions from hot celebrity babes than he knew what to do with. Not only did “Not a problem” become his signature phrase, but three countries and seven states adopted it as their official mottoes. Privately, he was already negotiating the protocols that would see him become
de facto
ruler of the world.
    Three weeks after he made the big announcement, the first of the expected spaceships were detected decelerating out beyond the orbits of the gas giants. Two days later, the lead ship eased itself into orbit and then, after circling Earth a few times, descended gently into the atmosphere and came to hover over the coordinates Bunky’s people had sent. For his convenience, the contact site was the roof of the Sansom Enterprises head office, a vast, truncated pyramid overlooking the sea-girt island that was all that now remained of