Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net BACKLASH By WINSTON MARKS Illustrated by SIBLEY [Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] [Sidenote: They were the perfect servants--they were willing to do everything for nothing. The obvious question is: How much is nothing?] I still feel that the ingratiating little runts never _intended_ any harm. They were eager to please, a cinch to transact business with, and constantly, everlastingly grateful to us for giving them asylum. Yes, we gave the genuflecting little devils asylum. And we were glad to have them around at first--especially when they presented our women with a gift to surpass all gifts: a custom-built domestic servant. In a civilization that had made such a fetish of personal liberty and dignity, you couldn't hire a butler or an upstairs maid for less than love _and_ money. And since love was pretty much rationed along the lines of monogamy, domestic service was almost a dead occupation. That is, until the Ollies came to our planet to stay. Eventually I learned to despise the spineless little immigrants from Sirius, but the first time I met one he made me feel foolishly important. I looked at his frail, olive-skinned little form, and thought, _If this is what space has to offer in the way of advanced life-forms ... well, we haven't done so badly on old Mother Earth_. This one's name was Johnson. All of them, the whole fifty-six, took the commonest Earth family names they could find, and dropped their own name-designations whose slobbering sibilance made them difficult for us to pronounce and write. It seemed strange, their casually wiping out their nominal heritage just for the sake of our convenience--imagine an O'Toole or a Rockefeller or an Adams arriving on Sirius IV and no sooner learning the local lingo than insisting on becoming known as Sslyslasciff-soszl! But that was the Ollie. Anything to get along and please us. And of course, addressing them as Johnson, Smith, Jones, etc., did work something of a semantic protective coloration and reduce some of the barriers to quick adjustment to the aliens. * * * * * [Illustration] Johnson--_Ollie_ Johnson--appeared at my third under-level office a few months after the big news of their shipwreck landing off the Maine coast. He arrived a full fifteen minutes ahead of his appointment, and I was too curious to stand on the dignity of office routine and make him wait. As he stood in the doorway of my office, my first visual impression was of an emaciated adolescent, seasick green, prematurely balding.