A World of Difference, page 1
04-04-2023
In the free world of the future, many people are uneasy about the government’s psychological power to control, even benevolently, its citizens’ upbringing.
Four friends, an artist, a scientist, an administrator, and an amorist, each find their own novel and surprising solutions to the problem of how to retain independence of mind and action in a world where conformity has reached way out beyond just one planet…
First U.K. publication
A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE
A World
of Difference
ROBERT CONQUEST
SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED
30/32 Grays Inn Road, London W.C.l
Contents:-
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
First published in Great Britain in 1970 by Sphere Books
© Robert Conquest, 1962
trade
mark
Conditions of Sale - This book shall not without the written consent of the Publishers first given be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
The book is published at a net price and is supplied subject to the Publishers Association Standard
Conditions of Sale registered under the Restrictive
Trade Practices Act 1956.
Any similarity or apparent connection between the characters in this story and actual persons, whether alive or dead, is purely coincidental.
Set in Linotype Times
Printed in Great Britain by
Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd.
Aylesbury, Bucks
CHAPTER ONE
Plunge, lured by a softening eye
Or by a touch or a sigh
Into the labyrinth of another's being.
As often before the words of the poet went through Martin Stahlberg’s head. This time he smiled to think that the plunge, toward the waiting Mireille, was quite literal.
His altitude was about eight hundred kilometres; the little stratoyacht fell freely through the parabola which would put him into the atmosphere somewhere over the Aegean.
Space has its magnificences. Seen from a fair-sized porthole, like the Nereid's, better still from the great windows of an astroliner, and best of all right outside in a spacesuit, the vision of hard diamond stars, the general feeling of being struck dumb in a brilliant cold vista of infinity has an almost shocking emotional effect. It is an entirely special beauty, a revelation all of its own. In fact, the Mystic Experience Investigation sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics back in the eighties had used it as one of its key stimuli.
Everyone should experience it once. But after a while you miss the richness and variety of the Earth. It is like trying to live in Vicenza, among perfect proportions. Or (more apt) in a museum of abstract art
Space was also, Martin thought a good lesson on a different plane altogether—that of physical intuition. People used to variable gravity fields, or indeed to their total absence, gained a direct feeling of one aspect of the nature of the universe unobtainable by those who unconsciously took the equations of movement on earth as immutable. Playing billiards on the concave tables of the space-station, made dynamically equivalent to Earth ones by the station’s spin, or performing one’s necessary actions floating in free fall, eliminated a certain parochialism from the nervous system.
Martin himself had seen enough of space. True, he had only been to the main space-station—a fine entertainment centre with its restaurants, dance floors and viewrooms—and to the Moon. And he had once spent a pleasant weekend with a girl in the Nereid, circling the Earth on a trans-polar orbit But that time the main external interest had still been the Earth, spread in its seasons below them. And most of the interest had been inside at that
No, his main interests were under that thin film of air. This reminded him that he had forgotten to get a present for Mireille. What could be done?
Loosening his straps he leant forward and opened the drawer where he had stowed the portrait Custis had done of him; though he had a fairly definite feeling that it was not the sort of present Mireille liked—her line was probably jewels—the rarest of all, no doubt, black pearls, Mercurian ice-opals, Martian greenstones (really a sort of vegetable excretion of ingested sand) and so on. Still, Custis was a fair painter, and, what was more to the point, one she would have heard admired.
Stahlberg pulled out the little canvas and looked at it. At least they had managed to prevent Hayakawa painting whiskers on it at a rather late stage in the dinner. And actually it was rather a good painting, even under the mixture of artificial light and rotating filtered sun-glare that now illuminated the cabin.
Then he had another look at the portrait. What he really didn't like about it was the air of vapid dissipation which Custis had somehow got into it. No doubt the serious and single-minded painter saw Stahlberg’s varied sex-life, and his attempt to be knowledgeable about everything, as a trifle superficial— but not to this extent, surely.
On the other hand the dissipation, and perhaps even the conceit, raised its value as a present for Mireille, perhaps?
He looked at the representation—the long head with its grey eyes and coarse tawny hair, with the puckering round the lips and eyes, was reasonably portrayed. Perhaps he had been idealizing his own view of himself too much and could only see faults in a perfectly fair delineation.
Anyhow, that Custis respected his intellect, to some extent at least, he happened to know. It had not been Custis but Hayakawa and Vlakhov who had coined for Stahlberg, rather unkindly, the jeering epithet ‘Pammath,’ meaning know-all. It was formed on the analogy of polymath, which was certainly a favourite Stahlberg word in his ceaseless agitation to stop people of great intelligence in special fields being complacent about their ignorance in others. ‘All-rounder’ was another: and it had to be admitted that the various books Stahlberg had written to this theme had had a good reception, and even some sort of effect
Custis hadn’t got his looks quite right. He had probably known him too long. They were both in their early forties now. In an earlier age of physiological ignorance they would already have been starting to age. As it was they were physically still in their young prime. Just the same, the years had some effect: girls always seemed able to guess one’s age, more or less. It was probably psychological—habits of talk, facial expressions, the look in one’s eyes. Stahlberg liked to think of himself as good-looking, of course, but also as ‘grizzled.’ (In fact he had once managed to get the word included in his description on an identity card back in the eighties, at a time when, just after the war, they were still in use.)
He must now be almost over the Atlantic coast of North Africa. At this rate he would be about an hour and a half late for Mireille whatever he did.
It was curious to think that the three men be had been with, his old comrades of the war, were all distinguished figures in their own fields. In fact, of them all, he himself was the only one not to rate that adjective. It was true that he too was well known in his way, through his multifarious books and articles. But Custis’ rather gloomy seriousness went better with a solid reputation. Not that the articles weren’t good —he should start calling them ’essays.’ He began to recite a bit to himself from the one which had appeared the previous week in the magazine Selene,
“If we wish to feel ourselves back in the mental climate of Britain in the fifties, we cannot do better than read these reviews. Remembering that they were intended for people who prided themselves on their capacity to reason and to judge, we are astonished to find to what extent their arguments ” are a mixture of bare assertion, thinly disguised emotionalism and straight logical fallacies. For instance…From here on, of course, it had written itself.
He looked at himself in the polished enamel of the roof dome, but it did not give a clear image. Thinking that he had anyhow better tidy himself up while still in free fall, as he would be unable to when strapped in for the landing, he decided to go to the cramped cubicle which was his dressing-room, and where there was a mirror. But, unstrapping the belt too early, he drifted across the cabin to the main port, where the scene held him.
The view of the Earth from this height, especially when it is late afternoon or mid-morning at the point below, is held by some connoisseurs to be the most magnificent there is, better even than the great sweeping fullness from five thousand kilometres. It is low enough to see the distinct colours and contours in all their astonishing wealth, yet not so far down as to lose much of the periphery of vision in the blur of a too oblique view through atmosphere and cloud.
Below him and to the north lay the Straits of Gibraltar, ruffled by a visible current passing into the Mediterranean. To the east stretched North Africa, green round the great Sahara Lakes but still glittering red and yellow where the influence of the new waters had not yet reached. Beyond lay the whole Mediterranean as far as Crete.
Little cloud flecked the old world's aft ernoon and what there was did not fall into the regular lanes and whorls—the pattern of the weather—which distract attention when seen from a greater altitude. To the north-east successive cones of Alps and Pyrenees flickered like ice-opals, as the reflection changed continually with the angle of ship's movement.
Stahlberg thought he could see a golden tint in the green round Elche: it must be the time of the orange harvest now.
There is no space-station as low as this, and so the view is always one which changes not merely from the observer’s course across it, but also in his movement toward or away from it. As the Nereid dropped rapidly in, the landscape slipped away under Stahlberg and at the same time grew visibly. A small storm south of the Balearics, at first just a whirl of whiteness, revealed round its edges a white of different texture—from miles of broken waves foaming on the bluish darkness of the sea.
It was breathtakingly beautiful. Stahlberg felt the usual pangs of admiration, of love. And if his breath was taken rather less than was normal for him it was for obvious reasons; his concentration of thought in these matters was elsewhere. on the girl Mireille, the anticipation of whose not entirely comparable beauty caught at his throat more strongly still. This was in accordance, in any case, with the theory he had finally proved, to his own satisfaction at least, in his recent book Heart and Senses. He had concluded, with a wealth of evidence, that all the senses of wonder and of beauty (and even of colour) are derived from the excitement of sexual attraction, and would be non-existent in a sexless species.
It was too late to bother with his toilet, which seemed less important in any case. He went back to his control chair. The Nereid was a fine little craft for the short distances. Stahlberg had two interests in her. One was speed. The other comfort, and suitability as a place to entertain women, as could be seen from a glance at the main cabin. With two tiny dressing and toilet cubicles (with showers) opening off it, it was a miracle of amenity in compression. Retractable into the wall were a broad bed, a bar, a galley, a fair-sized stereo-tank for all programmes. The floor was thickly carpeted in a cream Persian. It was a complete apartment, at the minimum cost of weight and bulk.
Only the two control chairs, in one of which Stahlberg was now seated, showed the speed interest. Set before the master instrument board, and the perfectly balanced controls, and under the ship’s vision screen with its four alternative views forward, backwards and around the ship, the chairs were carefully designed gravity couches, with a system of sponge-plastic springs and hydromatic buffers able to provide the greatest possible comfort under the highest accelerations. Just the same a shot of the gravity-adaptation drug was advisable for the accelerations Stahlberg used.
He was able to combine these two interests over short distances (and the long ones bored him anyhow) because of a single principle. Once it became possible to carry enough fuel to keep the jets going all the time, the decisive factors are the maximum acceleration the pilot can stand, plus the skill that enables him to risk a landing with as little adjustment and hesitation as possible.
The Nereid ran off a matter-converter field which was adjusted to turn a tough plastic, or nitrogen, into monatomic hydrogen—a simple enough substance which gives a jet more power than the clumsy atomic drives of the seventies and eighties: its powers had long been known—the difficulty was simply to produce it. Only the matter-converter fields, products of the science after atomics, had so far been able to do it.
Stahlberg had been second in the Continental Capitals Grand Prix, London to Accomac City in four stages, three years before. And though he did not race much now, he used the same bone-straining (in acceleration) and hair-raising (in landing) techniques.
All this, in what was just an extremely powerful and comfortable version of the ordinary man’s runabout, was regarded by many friends as more of a clue to Stahlberg’s nature than his multifarious writings. The significance of his attitude to women was more controversial among them, and they wished that the fuel problem had been more difficult or his favourite distance greater, so that they could have seen definitely if, and at what stage. Stahlberg would have sacrificed the ship's amenities as a girl-trap to its speed requirements.
He turned on the speaker. It was saying, “…our production is done in servomatic factories; war has ceased, except for the occasional raids from the Bases—so greatly played up by the Government for its own purposes. There is no poverty, no persecution. But what do all these avail if we lack a firm basis of freedom?”
The voice, dignified and firm, was recognizable as that of old Sevillano, the President of the Freedom and Vigilance League, commonly known as the Watchdogs. It was well known to Stahlberg, as to most other people on Earth, and there was a good deal in what it said that he agreed with. He, too, felt uneasy about it all. like many other people. But still, there was just that touch of idiocy in Sevillano’s way of presenting his case.
The voice went on, “…an off-white Utopia! So long as the Government conducts secret research, so long as education is on lines that amount to psychological compulsion, so long as there remains a legal right to force psychological changes even on the worst criminals, we can never be safe. It is not from the few and backward extremists of the Bases, whose attitude has anyhow probably been exaggerated by the Government, that we have anything to fear. It is in the outlook of the Government itself, which by failing to take these necessary steps, shows only too clearly the roots of an outlook terribly dangerous to us all. The thin edge of the wedge…”
The whole business of freedom and induced psychological compulsion was certainly enough to make anyone uneasy, and Stahlberg thought of it as little as possible (except for occasional forays forward in time in his quasi-historical writings), preferring to trust the Government. He certainly would not have trusted them if there had been the slightest serious cause for his uneasiness—but still he felt sometimes that it was the unsatisfactory position for a man who prided himself on the comprehensiveness of his interests. And the four-man veterans reunion of the old 175th Automatic Infantry had reminded him of the war, and the unpleasant results of mistakes in these matters. But this wasn’t the time for thinking about it. He gave the dial an aimless spin which sent it off the station and down into the little used high-modulation belt.
As it stopped he could hear, very far in the background, a quite different voice, tense and exultant, saying, “…liaison established. Large forces…” It was cut off by the characteristic splutter of a polar scrambler, showing Stahlberg that he must for a few seconds have been directly in the line of a tight and guarded radio beam. As this could only be one from a spacecraft above him locked to a ground station, it meant that the Nereid and the other ship must have maintained the same relative direction from the ground source for over a second, an astonishing coincidence in the first place, quite apart from his set having been on the same modulation band. What the somehow rather sinister message signified was another question. Nothing, probably: but in his present state of recovering from military reminiscences, it put him uncomfortably in mind of the war period.
He looked downward. A slow spin had again turned the port till it faced south-west, and its field of vision approached the sun. The great streamers of the corona flickered around its edge and then automatic filters cut out what would have been a blinding glare. He sat back in a calmer mood and gazed at the polished curve of the ceiling.
After a while the altitude-radar’s speaker said, in his own recorded voice, “Your height it three-ninety kilometres, buster.” This had been fixed up for the irritation of Custis when be had borrowed the machine once, and was meant to imply that Stahlberg was too independent-minded to stand servility, even from machines. Still, this bluff familiarity did not suit his present mood. Leaning forward he flicked its speaker out of circuit.
