[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _All Earth needed was a good stiff dose of common sense, but
its rulers preferred to depend on the highly fallible computers instead.
As a consequence, interplanetary diplomatic relations were somewhat
strained--until a nimble-witted young man from Mars came up with the
answer to the "sixty-four dollar" question._]
Zalen Lindsay stood on the rostrum in the huge new United Worlds
auditorium on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain and looked out at an ocean
of eye-glasses. Individually they ranged in hue from the rose-tinted
spectacles of the Americans to the dark brown of the Soviet bloc. Their
shapes and adornments were legion: round, harlequin, diamond, rhomboid,
octagonal, square, oval; rimless, gem-studded, horn-rimmed,
floral-rimmed, rimmed in the cases of some of the lady representatives
with immense artificial eyelashes.
The total effect, to Lindsay, was of looking at an immense page of
printed matter composed entirely of punctuation marks. Unspectacled, he
felt like a man from Mars. He _was_ a man from Mars--first Martian
Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Second United Worlds Congress.
He wished he could see some of the eyes behind the protective goggles,
for he knew he was making them blink.
He glanced down at the teleprompter in front of him--purely to add
effect to a pause, for he had memorized his speech and was delivering it
without notes. On it was printed: HEY, BOSS--DON'T FORGET YOU GOT A
DINNER DATE WITH THE SEC-GEN TONIGHT.
[Illustration]
Lindsay suppressed a smile and said, "In conclusion, I am qualified by
the governors of Mars to promise that if we receive another shipment of
British hunting boots we shall destroy them immediately upon
unloading--and refuse categorically to ship further beryllium to Earth.
"On Mars we raise animals for food, not for sport--we consider human
beings as the only fit athletic competition for other humans--and we see
small purpose in expending our resources mining beryllium or other
metals for payment that is worse than worthless. In short, we will not
be a dumping ground for Earth's surplus goods. I thank you."
The faint echo of his words came back to him as he stepped down from the
rostrum and walked slowly to his solitary seat in the otherwise empty
section allotted to representatives of alien planets. Otherwise there
was no sound in the huge assemblage.
He felt a tremendous lift of tension, the joyousness of a man who has
satisfied a lifelong yearning to toss a brick through a plate-glass
window and knows he will be arrested for it and doesn't care.
There was going to be hell to pay--and Lindsay was honestly looking
forward to it. While Secretary General Carlo Bergozza, his dark-green
spectacles resembling parenthesis marks on either side of his thin eagle
beak, went through the motions of adjourning the Congress for
forty-eight hours, Lindsay considered his mission and its purpose.
Earth--a planet whose age-old feuds had been largely vitiated by the
increasing rule of computer-judgment--and Mars, the one settled alien
planet on which no computer had ever been built, were drifting
dangerously apart.
It was, Lindsay thought with a trace of grimness, the same ancient story
of the mother country and her overseas colonies, the same basic and
seemingly inevitable trend, social and economic, that had led to the
revolt of North America against England, three hundred years earlier.
On a far vaster and costlier scale, of course.
Lindsay had been sent to Earth, as his planet's first representative at
the new United Worlds Congress, to see that this trend was halted before
it led to irrevocable division. And not by allowing Mars to become a
mere feeder and dumping ground for the parent planet.
Well, he had tossed a monkey wrench into the machinery of interplanetary
sweetness and light, he thought. Making his way slowly out with the rest
of the Congress, he felt like the proverbial bull in the china shop. The
others, eyeing him inscrutably through their eye-glasses and over their
harness humps, drew aside to let him walk through.
But all around him, in countless national tongues, he heard the
whispers, the mutterings--"sending a gladiator" ... "looks like a vidar
star" ... "too young for such grave responsibility" ... "no
understanding of the basic sensitivities"....
Obviously, he had _not_ won a crushing vote of confidence.
* * * * *
To hell with them, all of them, he thought as someone tapped him on a
shoulder. He turned to find du Fresne, the North American Minister of
Computation, peering up at him through spectacles that resembled twin
scoops of strawberry ice-cream mounted in heavy white-metal rims.
"I'd like a word with you," he said, speaking English rather than
Esperanto. Lindsay nodded politely, thinking that du Fresne looked
rather like a Daumier judge with his fashionable humped back and long
official robe of office.
Over a table in the twilight bar du Fresne leaned toward him, nearly
upsetting his colafizz with a sleeve of his robe.
"M-mind you," he said, "this is strictly unofficial, Lindsay, but I have
your interests at heart. You're following trend X."
"Got me all nicely plotted out on your machine?" said Lindsay.
Du Fresne's sallow face went white at this pleasantry. As Minister of
Computation his entire being was wrapped up in the immensely intricate
calculators that forecast all decisions for the huge North American
republic. Obviously battling anger, he said, "Don't laugh at Elsac,
Lindsay. It has never been wrong--it can't be wrong."
"I'm not laughing," said Lindsay quietly. "But no one has ever fed me to
a computer. So how can you know...?"
"We have fed it every possible combination of circumstances based upon
all the facts of Terro-Martian interhistory," the Minister of
Computation stated firmly. His nose wrinkled and seemed to turn visibly
pink at the nostril-edges. He said, "Damn! I'm allergic to
computer-ridicule." He reached for an evapochief, blew his nose.
"Sorry," said Lindsay, feeling the mild amazement that seemed to
accompany all his dealings with Earthfolk. "I wasn't--"
"I doe you weren'd," du Fresne said thickly. "Bud de vurry zuggedgeshun
of ridicule dudz id." He removed his strawberry spectacles, produced an
eye-cup, removed and dried the contact lenses beneath. After he had
replaced them his condition seemed improved.
Lindsay offered him a cigarette, which was refused, and selected one for
himself. He said, "What happens if I pursue trend X?"
"You'll be assassinated," du Fresne told him nervously. "And the results
of such assassination will be disastrous for both planets. Earth will
have to go to war."
"Then why not ship us goods we can use?" Lindsay asked quietly.
Du Fresne looked at him as despairingly as his glasses would permit. He
said, "You just don't understand. Why didn't your people send someone
better attuned to our problems?"
"Perhaps because they felt Mars would be better represented by someone
attuned to its own problems," Lindsay told him. "Don't tell me your
precious computers recommend murder and war."
"They don't recommend anything," said du Fresne. "They merely advise
what will happen under given sets of conditions."
"Perhaps if you used sensible judgment instead of machines to make your
decisions you could prevent my assassination," said Lindsay, finishing
his scotch on the rocks. "Who knows?" he added. "You might even be able
to prevent an interplanetary war!"
When he left, du Fresne's nose was again growing red and the Minister of
Computation was fumbling for another evapochief.
* * * * *
Riding the escaramp to his office on the one-twentieth floor of the UW
building, Lindsay pondered the strange people of the mother planet among
whom his assignment was causing him to live. One inch over six feet, he
was not outstandingly tall--but he felt tall among them, with their
slump harnesses and disfiguring spectacles and the women so hidden
beneath their shapeless coveralls and harmopan makeup.
He was not unprepared for the appearance of Earthfolk, of course, but he
had not yet adjusted to seeing them constantly around him in such large
numbers. To him their deliberate distortion was as shocking as, he
supposed wryly, his own unaltered naturalness was to them.
There was still something illogical about the cult of everyday ugliness
that had overtaken the mother planet in the last two generations, under
the guise of social harmony. It dated back, of course, to the great Dr.
Ludmilla Hartwig, psychiatric synthesizer of the final decades of the
twentieth century.
It was she who had correctly interpreted the growing distrust of the
handsome and the beautiful among the great bulk of the less favored, the
intense feelings of inferiority such comely persons aroused. It was from
her computer-psychiatry that the answer employed had come: since
everyone cannot be beautiful, let all be ugly.
This slogan had sparked the mass use of unneeded spectacles, the
distortion harnesses, the harmopan makeup. Now, outside of emergencies,
it was as socially unacceptable for a man or woman to reveal a face
uncovered in public as it had been, centuries earlier, for a Moslem
odalisque to appear unveiled in the bazaar.
There were exceptions, of course--aside from those who were naturally
ugly to begin with. Vidar-screen actors and actresses were permitted to
reveal beauty when their parts demanded it--which was usually only in
villains' roles. And among men, professional athletes were expected to
show their faces and bodies _au naturel_ as a mark of their profession.
Among women the professional courtesans--the "models", not the
two-credit whores--displayed their charms on all occasions. Beauty was
bad business for lower-caste prostitutes--it made such clients they
could promote feel too inferior.
These specialists, the models and gladiators, were something of a race
apart, computer-picked in infancy and raised for their professions like
Japanese _sumo_ wrestlers. They were scarcely expected to enter the more
sensitive realms of the arts, business affairs or government.
It was, Lindsay decided, a hell of a state of affairs.
* * * * *
Nina Beckwith, Lindsay's Earth-assigned personal secretary, was leaning
far back in her tilt-chair with her feet on the desk. Her eyes were
squinted behind chartreuse-tinted flat-oval lenses to avoid fumes from a
cigarette stuck in a corner of her wide mouth. She had shut off the
air-conditioner, opened the picture window and pulled the pants of her
coverall far up above her knees to let the warm New Orleans September
air wash over her skin.
Lindsay looked at her legs with surprise--it had not occurred to him
that Nina owned such a long and shapely pair. He whistled softly through
his teeth.
Nina removed her smoke, sighed and made a move to stand up and let her
coverall fall back over the exposed limbs. Lindsay said, "Not on my
account--_please_! Those are the first good looking legs I've seen since
leaving Mars."
"Watch yourself, boss," said Nina and indulged in a slow half-smile.
Then, putting her feet back on the floor, "You certainly lost a lot of
friends and disinfluenced a lot of people down there today. If you'd
prepared your speech on the machine I'd have fixed it up for you."
"Which is exactly why I prepared it in my hot little head," Lindsay told
her. "I wanted to knock some sense into them."
Nina got out of her chair and snuffed out her cigarette in the disposal
tray, then sat on the edge of the desk and poked at the untidy
dark-blonde hair she wore in a knot on top of her head. She said, "Night
soil! You'll never knock any sense into that mob."
Lindsay, who had been thinking wistfully that if Nina would only do
something about that hair, the thickness of her middle, and her bilious
complexion, she might be fairly good looking, blinked. He said, "Why in
hell do you work for them then?"
She shrugged disinterested shoulders, told him, "It's a job." She
yawned, unabashed, added irrelevantly, "You know, boss, the trouble with
you is you look like a gladiator. They won't take you seriously unless
you wear specs and a harness."
"Over my dead body," he told her. "What's wrong with athletes anyway? I
play damned good tennis when I get time to practice."
"Athletes are lousy lovers," she said. "Your correspondence is on your
desk." She nodded toward it. "Get it signed, will you? I've got a dinner
date."
Lindsay restrained an impulse to ask her with what and signed the
letters dutifully.
Nina was a spy, of course, or she wouldn't have the job. In view of his
own assignment and the delicacy of Terro-Martian relations at the
moment, she must be a good one.
He handed her the letters, noted the slight sway of her thick body as
she walked toward the dispatch-chute. A pity, he thought, that the rest
of her failed to match the long perfect legs she had so unexpectedly put
on display.
"Oh, Miss Beckwith'" he called after her. "You don't have to list my
appointments on the teleprompter when I'm making a speech after this."
She stopped, cast him an oblique glance over one shoulder and said
without much interest, "I didn't know whether you'd get back here or
not--and it wouldn't do to forget the Secretary General."
"All right," he said in resignation. When she had gone he wondered if he
should have told her what du Fresne had said about his possible
assassination, decided it was just as well he had kept mum. He went up
on the roof for a copter.
* * * * *
The dinner was informal. Lindsay and Fernando Anderson, the flamboyant
junior senator from New Mexico, were the only guests. They were four
at the charming _ante bellum_ mahogany table of the Secretary
General's Natchez mansion. Carlo Bergozza, the Secretary General
himself--courteous, with natural as well as harness-stooped shoulders, a
trifle vague--and his daughter and official hostess, Maria--vividly
brunette and dynamic despite the twist given her body by her harness and
the mask of huge triangular spectacles--made up the rest of the party.
The meal was simple, automatically served, well prepared. It consisted
of plankton soup with chives in chilled bowls, noisettes of lamb with
yeast-truffles and bamboo-grass and, in deference to Lindsay, a dessert
of Martian lichenberries. Conversation consisted of routine gambits and
responses until the dessert.
Then Senator Anderson removed his diamond-shaped raspberry glasses and
said, "You'll pardon me, but I want to see what our distinguished
visitor really looks like. After all, he can see us as we are."
Secretary General Bergozza looked briefly shocked. Then his overpowering
courtesy came to his rescue and he laid aside his own dark green
spectacles. He said, "You know, Lindsay, you remind me a little of an
American ambassador to the Court of Saint James a hundred and fifty
years ago--I believe his name was Harvey. He refused to wear
knee-britches to his own reception. Other times, other customs."
"I'm sorry if my appearance is bothering people," said Lindsay, noting
that Maria, without her glasses, came close to being a truly pretty
young woman. "I'm not trying to disturb them--I merely want them to see
me as a true representative of my own world."
Maria said impulsively, "It isn't that you bother us--not really. It's
just that you're a little too good looking. Almost like a gladiator.
People aren't used to it in a statesman."
"Too good looking--with this busted beak of mine?" Lindsay pressed a
finger against his nose, which had been broken in youth by a wild pitch.
Senator Anderson said, "The slight irregularity of your nose is just
enough to keep you from being too pretty, Lindsay." He smiled and added,
"You certainly stirred up a cyclotron with your speech this afternoon.
The British are planning a white paper."
"I merely stated facts as I know them," said Lindsay.
"They aren't used to facts--not unless they have been
computer-processed," said the senator. He seemed pleased for some
reason, added, "You may have broken some real ice, Lindsay. I've been
trying for years to work out a way to tell people computers are robbing
them of all powers of decision."
"All they have to do is confine them to mathematical problems and let
people decide human ones," said Lindsay.
The Secretary General cleared his throat. He said, "Without the
computers there would be no United Worlds. There would be no world at
all, probably."
It was a rebuke. Carlo Bergozza redonned his spectacles and rose from
the table. He said, "If you'll excuse me I have some business to attend
to. I'm sure my daughter will see that you are properly entertained." He
left the room with slow, old-man steps.
Maria said fondly, "Poor darling, he gets so upset. He'll take a pill
and go to sleep. Let's go to the bathroom, shall we?"
* * * * *
Though outwardly the Secretary General's mansion was hyper-gingerbread
steamboat Gothic, inwardly it was entirely modern in plan. There was a
living room, of course, for formal receptions, but as in all normal
Earth-dwellings of the period the bathroom was the lived-in chamber.
There and there only did people of the 2070's permit themselves to
relax. This was a logical development of latter-day plumbing and air
conditioning and the crowding of apartment and small-house life. Actual
lavatory plumbing was concealed, in this instance, by an etched glass
screen. Otherwise the room featured comfortable plastic lounge chairs
and sofas around a fifteen-foot sunken tub and a small semicircular bar,
fully equipped.
On entering Maria unfastened her harness and coverall and stood before
them, a sweet-bodied dark-eyed girl in her early twenties, clad in
shorts and halter. "Lord!" she exclaimed, pushing dark hair back from
her broad low forehead, "It feels good to relax. Zalen, I want to talk
to you."
"Delighted," said Lindsay, mildly surprised at the use of his Martian
first name.
"I've got something to tell him first," said Anderson, unhitching his
own harness and emerging as a lean medium-sized man in good condition
for his forty years. "I got word just before I flew up here tonight that
your life may be in danger, Zalen."
* * * * *
Lindsay accepted the arrack-fizz Maria handed him, said "That makes
warning number two, Senator. Du Fresne talked to me about it this
afternoon."