H. L. Gold (ed), page 40
I felt as though I had been put upon the end of a huge oscillating spring. I said, “The leader? She?”
“You’ll meet her,” he said. “After blastoff you’ll meet her. Right now our problem is to slip in among those prisoners without being seen.”
“Among the prisoners?”
“Haven’t time to explain more. You’ll have to trust us. Unless you want to stay here and have the Deacons hunt you till they find you.”
He was right: wherever I was going, I had to go. I couldn’t go back now. Ever. I said, “I trust you. Let’s go.”
Slipping in wasn’t really difficult. There were only one or two guards for each group of prisoners, and they were looking for someone to escape, not join their flock. Some of the prisoners were dressed, some naked. Some looked bruised and beaten; some did not. It all depended on whether they had been questioned. They all looked dull-eyed, resigned. They paid remarkably little attention as we moved in among them, and stood there.
The guards began to call out orders presently and the groups shuffled forward, and then single lines moved up the ramp and into the spaceship. The thin man and his woman were still with me. “They don‘t bother to count,” he whispered, “so we won’t be noticed.”
I wanted to ask him other questions, but we were divided into groups and they weren’t in mine.
Minutes later I found myself in the vast hull, sitting on one of the tiers that hold the seats vertical when the ship is tail-based for blastoff. It was very dim here and I couldn’t readily make out the faces of the people on the same tier with me.
A loudspeaker came to life; a deep, impersonal voice. “Fasten your webbings carefully!”
I did that and heard the rustling sounds about me as the others did it, too.
“Stand by for blastoff!”
There was a dead pause, then a sudden low throbbing roar and the feeling of life in the floor plates and the bulkheads. I felt the slightest weight of pressure against the seat. The seat began to tilt slightly.
Suddenly a soft voice on my left spoke: “We’re on our way. They can’t stop us now, can they?”
It was the same low, provocative woman’s voice th’at I had heard in my dreams!
I whirled my head. I could see only the shape of flowing hair, no features. “Who are you ?”
She laughed. “No wonder you don’t recognize me. The natural voice is different than approved standard, isn’t it? Listen. Do you remember this?” The head cocked to one side and a crisp, formal voice came out. “Information you desire is in Bank 29.”
“Lara!” I said. I pushed toward her, but the webbing held me back.
Yes. It’s I. And we’re together now and we’ll have a long, long time to find out about each other. It’s ten weeks to Mars.”
I ran my hand over my forehead. “I don’t get it. I don’t get any of it. Your voice—I mean your real voice, not the standard one—I dreamed about it, and—”
“I know.” I could see her nod. “It wasn’t a dream, though. I was talking to you. Each time. That was the way we planned it from the beginning.”
“Talking to me? But—but how? Through the sleep-learner?”
“No, we’d never have been able to arrange that. It was through your identity tag, which would almost always be in contact with your skin when you slept. It has a microscopic electrical circuit, both between its metal halves and painted on its surface. The same principle as the sleep-learner, tactile induction, and, of course, a highly selective one-channel receiver. All I needed to do was put my transmitter on that same frequency.”
I shook my head. “I follow, I guess, but I’m still baffled. Why all this? When did—”
“Wait for me to finish,” she said. “We’ve been organized and underground, just as the Deacons suspect, for some time. One of our members worked on the identity tags and, when renumbering came about, it was a perfect opportunity to plant the receivers. We picked our people carefully. We picked doctors and hydroponic experts and chemists and rocket pilots—and we picked you because of your knowledge of space-drive theory. Someday we’ll go on to the stars; someday you’ll help us do that. Anyway, all these people we have picked—or most of them—are joining us on Mars. There’s where mankind will begin again while Northern and Southern sit upon earth and glare at each other across the equator and wait for war.”
“But Mars—there’s an equator there, too.”
She laughed. “Northern and Southern prisoners there mingle all the time. There aren’t enough guards to notice it, or stop it if they did notice it. There have even been hundreds of intermarriages.”
“Marriages? You mean like the pre-atomics?”
“Exactly. But we’ll get to that later. We needed you for our colony, only it wasn’t likely that you’d infract all by yourself. You were too standard, too adjusted. We had to give you something to shake you out of it, to make you realize that the security of the State was not security, but slavery. And so one of our members in the renumbering bureau arranged for you to have that four letter word of yours for a name. One thing led to another, then, not always exactly as we’d planned it, but always in the same general direction. Our whole plan nearly failed when the Deacons nabbed you in the park. Fortunately, I’d come along to stow away on this trip, and I sent those others back after you.”
“But what if I’d actually managed to get my name changed ?”
The ship was swaying now, balanced on its rocket trail. The acceleration was increasing. The seat was swinging back. The roar was becoming louder.
“It was unlikely enough to take a chance on it. We felt at the very least you’d be kept on N/P status and then we could work on you some more until you infracted, and got send to Marscol as a nonconform. Funny, that seems a terrible fate to most people. Actually, it’s the only escape. From what I hear of Mars we’ll like it there.”
I was recovering a little now and I dared to say, “If you’re there, too, I’ll like it. I know that.”
“Oh, you’ll like other things. You’ll like everything. And on Mars they’ll call you by your present name if you wish, and no one will be at all shocked by it.” There was a slight pause and then she said, “In fact, it’s a very nice name. I—I wouldn’t mind having it myself.”
“Is that what the pre-atomics called a proposal?”
She laughed. “I’m not sure. But at least we have ten weeks to talk it over—”
And then the acceleration pressed hard and the gray curtain began to come, and I knew that when it was lifted we would be on our way through
space. I thought in that moment of the name that had brought all this about—the unspeakable four letter word that no conformist would ever dare voice, or even think of; the word, the dangerous word inimical to all that the warring, efficient State meant and stood for.
The word, I realized, that eventually would destroy all that.
I dared to say it now. I spelled it out first, and then I pronounced it. Just loud enough for Lara to hear above the growing roar. “L-O-V-E,” I said. “Love.”
I heard Lara repeat it before the momentary blackout came.
PART IV
Aren’t You an Extraterrestrial?
If there are intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe—and that seems inevitable, for there must be billions of planets in our galaxy alone— earth should almost certainly be visited by them. Charles Fort, the so-called stormy petrel of science, in collecting unexplained data of all sorts, found what he claimed was definite proof that earth has been visited again and again by citizens of other worlds.
Whether or not that’s so, an interstellar tourist may find his reception odd, judging by the results of a test Galaxy Science Fiction magazine ran a while ago:
We chose a peculiar-looking man, dressed him in clothes specially designed to resemble nothing ever worn on earth, dyed his skin a brilliant green … and set him loose in the streets of New York. He caused heads to turn, but fewer than you might imagine, even though he stopped people and asked them questions in a weird voice and language.
For all they knew, he could have been a legitimate visitor from space, yet they regarded him as part of a publicity stunt. This, you can see, will probably be the attitude toward a real extraterrestrial. I’m not even sure a totally non-human appearance will matter; most of us know what can be done with make-up and rubber rigs.
As I mentioned in the introduction to Part I, “Hostess” was a peculiar—eerie, almost—problem of a story. Listen to this: It was written at precisely the same time as Theodore Sturgeon’s “Rule of Three.” It used the identical device indicated by its title. Even the names differed by only a few letters/ Yet Sturgeon was in New York and Asimov in Boston, and they were not in touch with each other at all! If they had been, as a matter of fact, one story or the other would not have been written, for they were so astonishingly similar. “Rule of Three” was bought first, so Asimov rewrote the ending. However, I’ve used his original ending here for you to compare. Now what was that about telepathy not existing?
SYLVIA JACOBS
The Pilot and the Bushman
The ambassador from Outer Space sprang to his feet, taking Jerry’s extended hand in a firm, warm grasp. Jerry had been prepared for almost anything—a scholarly brontosaurus, perhaps, of an educated squid or giant caterpillar with telepathic powers. But the Ambassador didn’t even have antennae, gills, or green hair. He was a completely normal and even handsome human being.
“Scotch? Cigar?” the Ambassador offered cordially. “How can I help you, Mr. Jergins?”
Studying him, Jerry decided there was something peculiar about this extraterrestial, after all. He was too perfect. His shave was too close, his skin so unblemished as to suggest waxworks. Every strand of his distinguished iron-gray hair was impeccably placed. The negligent and just-right drape of his clothes covered a body shaped like a Sixth Century B.C. piece of Greek sculpture. No mere human could have look so unruffled, so utterly groomed, at three o’clock in the afternoon, in a busy office. A race, Jerry wondered, capable of taking any shape at will, in mimicry of the indigenous race of any planet?
“You can help me, but I’m not sure you will,” Jerry said. “The rumor is that you won’t do anything to ease this buyers’ strike you started on Earth.”
The Ambassador smiled. “You’re a man who’s not used to taking no for an answer, I gather. What’s your proposition?”
“I’d like to contact some of the firms on the Federated Planets, show them how I could promote their merchandise on Earth. Earth is already clamoring for their goods. To establish a medium of exchange, we’d have to run simultaneous campaigns, promoting Earth merchandise on other planets.”
“That would be difficult, even for a man of your promotional ability,” the Ambassador said winningly. “You see, Earth is the only planet we’ve yet discovered where advertising—or promotion, to use the broader term— exists as a social and economic force.”
“How in hell can anybody do business without it?” Jerry demanded.
“We don’t do business in the sense you mean. Don’t mistake me,” the
Ambassador added hastily, “we don’t have precisely a communal economy, either. Our very well defined sense of ethics in regard to material goods is something I find impossible to describe in any Earth language. It’s quite simple, so simple that you have to grow up with it to understand it. Our whole attitude toward material goods is conditioned by the Matter Repositor.”
“That gadget!” Jerry said bitterly. “It was when you first mentioned it before the U.N. Assembly that all this trouble on Earth started. Everybody and his brother hopes that tomorrow he can buy a Matter Repositor, and never have to buy anything again. I came here mostly to ask you whether it’s really true, that if you have one of those dinguses, you can bring anything you want into your living room.”
“You can. In practice, of course, repositing just anything that took your fancy would produce economic anarchy.”
“Let’s put it this way,” Jerry persisted. “Home appliances were my biggest accounts. Now, when we try to sell a refrigerator, the prospect says she’s saving her cash till Matter Repositors get on the Earth market. She plans to reposit a refrigerator—not from her neighbor’s kitchen, because that would be stealing—but from the factory. If the factory goes bust, people figure the government will have to subsidize building appliances. Now, could she really reposit a refrigerator?”
“She could. But she wouldn’t want to.”
“Why not ?” Jerry asked, puzzled.
“If she conceived an illogical and useless desire for food refrigeration, she would simply reposit a block of cold air from, say, the North Pole.”
“Oh, fine!” Jerry said sarcastically. “That would cause more unemployment in the refrigerator industry than repositing them without paying for them! But what do you mean about food refrigeration being illogical and useless?”
“Well, in a storage warehouse, there might be some reason for food preservation. But you don’t need cold or canning. Why not just reposit the bacteria that cause the food to deteriorate? There’s no need to store food in a home equipped with a Matter Repositor. You simply reposit one meal at a time. Fruits and vegetables direct from tree or field. Meat from a slaughterhouse, since it isn’t humane to remove a pound of steak from a live steer. But even this is needless.”
“Why?” Jerry baffledly wanted to know.
“To free the maximum amount of the effort of thinking beings for non-material activities, each consumer can reposit the chemical elements of the food, synthesize his meal on the table. He can even reposit these elements directly into his stomach, or, to by-pass the effort of digestion, into his bloodstream as glycogen and amino acids.”
“So refrigerators would be as dead an item as kerosene lamps in a city wired for electricity.” Jerry agreed unhappily. “Suppose Mrs. Housewife, not needing a refrigerator, reposits a washing machine. The point I’m driving at—is there any practical way to compensate the factory, give it an incentive to produce more washing machines, without dragging in government control?”
“Why should the factory produce more washing machines? Who would want one? The housewife would simply reposit the dirt from her clothes into her flowerbed, without using water and soap. Or, more likely, reposit new clothes with different colors, fabrics, and styles. The Matter Repositor would eliminate textile mills and clothing factories. Earth’s oceans have vast enough quantities of seaweed to eliminate the growing of cotton, wool, or flax. Or, again, you could reposit the chemical elements, either from the soil or from seawater.”
Jerry pondered the extensive implications of these revelations. Finally he said, “What it boils down to is this. All Earth’s bustling material activity, all the logging and construction, the mining and manufacturing, the planting and fishing, the printing and postal service, the great transportation and shipping effort, the cleaning and painting, the sewage disposal, even the bathing and self-adornment, consist, when you analyze them, of one process only—putting something from where you don’t want it to where you do. There’s not one single, solitary Earth invention or service left to advertise!”
“Nothing,” the Ambassador agreed. “Which is exactly why advertising has not developed on the Federated Planets. You’re fortunate that Earth doesn’t have Matter Repositors. You’d be out of a job if it did.”
“Oh, no!” Jerry said. “I could still advertise the gadget to end all gadgets—the Matter Repositor itself. I know other people have asked you this before, but could an Earth company get a franchise to import those machines here, or the license rights to manufacture them?”
“No,” the Ambassador said, briefly and definitely.
“Mr. Ambassador,” Jerry protested, “you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to explain things you must already be tired of explaining to Earthmen, just so I personally could be sure they weren’t merely rumors or misinterpretations. Now that I get down to the real point, you suddenly become blunt and unqualified. Why?”
“Because there’s a very serious question of ethics involved, wherever a more advanced civilization comes in contact with a relatively primitive one. For instance, when the white men came to America, the aborigines were introduced to gunpowder and firewater.”
“So you people are keeping Matter Repositors away from us, like a mama keeping candy away from a baby who’s hollering for it, because it’s not good for him! You’d pass up a chance to name your own price—”
“The very way you phrase that remark indicates the danger. You regard personal gain as the strongest of motives, which means that Matter Repositors would be used for that, even by such unusually intelligent members of your race as yourself.”
“Don’t softsoap me,” Jerry said angrily. “Not after you just got through saying that we Earthlings are nothing but naked savages, compared to the high and mighty super-beings on other planets!”
“I apologize for my phraseology,” the Ambassador said. “With my limited command of your language—”
“Your limited command, nuts! I suppose you supermen enjoy seeing us naked savages squirm. Why talk sanctimoniously about the damage you might do, when you know damn well the damage has already been done? Just the news that something as advanced as the Matter Repositor exists has sent unemployment to a new high, and the stock market to a new low. And you theorize about ethics, while denying us the only cure!” Jerry found himself fighting a nearly irresistible impulse to smash his fist into that too-perfect profile—which, he realized glumly, would only prove the Ambassador’s point about savages.
