The score stands today: Strontium 90;
Humanity 13.
--James Thurber
Tuesday went by like a montage, or a series of fades and dissolves in a
documentary movie.
_Scene_: The Fifth Avenue penthouse. _Mox's_ (formerly Frij's)
office. _Mox_, benevolent, wanting to be understood; _Sam Kent_,
groping, wanting to be convinced.
MOX: There were several ways it might have been done. One requisite
was a common denominator--something everybody uses, such as water.
But water was not quick enough. Air is better.
SAM: You mean you contaminated the air?
MOX: Not contaminated, no. Diluted it, you might say. It started in
El Spaniola, with Domingo Sanchez.
SAM: But you said--Frij said, up on Ultra--that it wasn't
communicable.
MOX: Ah, but Frij lied to you. I don't know why; perhaps he had
absorbed too many of Earth's ways. He was becoming dangerous.
That's why I sent him home. Our conscience gas, as your press calls
it, is transferable from person to person, and rapidly. Like your
own oral polio vaccine, it is contagious on contact.
SAM (wordless): !!!
MOX: You need not look so horrified. Remember the greater good.
Recall the game you've been playing with yourselves--a game where
there is no winner. You had to be stopped because of the way the
odds against survival were mounting. One of your more perceptive
observers put it very well when he said the score stood Strontium
90, Humanity 13."
Gouverneur Allison, President of the United States, a good man
basically and one who had long worried in his private soul, needed no
more indoctrination than the whiff of conscience gas he'd been given by
Mox to be convinced that the World's salvation lay not in the haphazard
politics of Earthmen, but in the clear-seeing, galactic-minded altruism
of Monolithian logic. He went back to Washington by Pennsylvania
Railroad day coach, contaminating a few hundred people along the way,
and when he got to the White House he signed an executive order as
Commander-in-Chief directing that all American nuclear weapons be
deactivated, transported expeditiously to the Challenger Deep, and sunk.
Immediately the four other atomic powers--Britain, the Soviet Union,
France and El Spaniola--followed suit.
You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief that went up around
the world.
_Scene_: Joy Linx's hotel room in Manhattan. _Joy Linx_, beautiful,
hostile, in housecoat. _Sam Kent_, anxious, somewhat wild-eyed,
truth-seeking.
JOY: All right, I guess. Come on in.
SAM: Listen, Joy, it's important.
JOY: It better be.
SAM: It's about Spookie Masters. How well do you know him? I mean
really?
JOY: What kind of question is that?
SAM: I know it sounds crazy, Joy, but it's the key to the whole
thing. Has he--did he ever--oh, God damn it, what I mean is, did he
ever make love to you?
JOY (scornfully): I won't answer that stupid question. Did you
think I would?
SAM: It isn't just me asking it, Joy. Honestly, you've got to
realize how vital it is.
JOY: Look, Sam, my dear, sweet someone else's Sam: In a kind of
crazy, hopeless way I once loved you. It was no good. You know why.
Mae, that's why. That lucky girl. So go away before you kill me any
further, will you?
SAM (emotionally torn): Joy, Joy--how can I say I wish it were
otherwise, when I both do and don't? Damn Mae (I don't mean that)
and damn you--but particularly--damn me.
JOY (touched, quietly): Tell me what you want me to do.
SAM (with a sigh, then getting it over with): All right. When
Spookie comes to see you, lead him on. Let him think you're crazy
about him--as maybe you are.
JOY (looking at the floor, hands on Sam's chest): Maybe I am, in a
second-best sort of way.
SAM (on brink of tears): Listen, my second-best darling ... (a
quick, antiseptic, apologetic kiss) what I have to know is--whether
Spookie Masters is a Monolithian.
JOY (withdrawing): What!
SAM: That's the key to the whole thing. He could have come to Earth
years ago as an advance agent for them--his early life has always
been a mystery. His career took him all over the world. He knows
everybody. Then he got himself to Ultra. Of course! _He_ was the
"Mr. M." who represented Monolithia at the super-summit.
JOY (coldly): Isn't that pretty far-fetched, Sam?
SAM: No. It fits perfectly. Then he arranged to get himself
"captured" and thrown in with us so he could learn what we were
up to. And I'll bet he engineered our "escape," too, and saw to
it somehow that I stole that conscience gas. They knew I would
lead them to the only holdout in their scheme--the real Gov--and
that the gas would be the bait that put him in their trap at the
Garden--where, you must admit, Spookie was very much the big wheel.
JOY (thoughtfully): Well, maybe. Tell me what you want me to do.
I'd told her, unable to look her in the eye, that I had to know whether
Spookie Masters was a whole man, and therefore terrestrial, or a
sexless creature like the android, and thus a Monolithian. Joy had
heard me out, saying nothing except with her contemptuous eyes, then
showed me out.
* * * * *
Something puzzled me. I was feeling no pain. And yet I should have
been, I reasoned, since I had been subjected to the C-gas at the same
time Gov inhaled it and I was probing around in what must be considered
an anti-Monolithian way.
I was also running around loose and doing a certain amount of
independent thinking, which didn't seem to fit into the concept
of a true Monolithian state whose subjects had been C-gassed into
cooperating for the greater good.
True, I was on a loose rein. Mox had given me the day off, in effect,
telling me to report to the White House in the morning. I supposed
I'd find myself fired when I got there, since Gov's ex-guerrillas,
including Josh Holcomb, his original press secretary, had all been
C-gassed into conformity and my services would therefore be superfluous.
I decided to go back to the penthouse and have a heart-to-heart talk
with Mox or one of his lieutenants.
Mox saw me himself. He must have had a million things to do, but he
took the time to talk to me for more than an hour, answering every
question I asked.
When I left his office I found Joy sitting at her desk, typing. She
glanced at me and said, "Sit down, Sam. This is for you. I'll be
through in a minute."
She rattled through another paragraph, then, after a look at me, typed
one final line. With a pen she wrote two words. Joy sighed and said,
"There--I've got that out of my system." She folded the single sheet of
paper, sealed it in an envelope and handed it to me.
"Please go before you read it," she said.
Then she smiled, as if she were now at peace with me and the rest of
the world.
"Joy----" I started to say.
"Just go--please," she said, and I went.
* * * * *
I read Joy's letter over a martini at a solitary table at the Brass
Rail, then decided to have several more martinis and skip dinner
altogether.
Joy's letter started: "Sam (not at all dear):" and went on to tell me
quite explicitly that Spookie Masters--whom she called Robert, his real
name--was male as male could be.
What she had said, actually, was: "He's as human as you are--if you
are."
This was empirical knowledge, she said, not theory or hearsay. She had
known this before today, she said, and hoped I was hurt by this fact
as she had been hurt by me. She did not know whether Robert was an
Earthman or a Monolithian, but this didn't matter to her. Her happiness
was what mattered and it was obvious that I could only cause her pain.
"I've made my choice, Sam," she had written. "I had to choose between
what I wanted and what I could get. There are times when the ideal is
just too unattainable and when the second best becomes, in the long
run, the best. Maybe this also has a universal application. I hope so."