He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive
lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.
Suddenly he began to tape again.
"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing,
humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One:
The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows...."
But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.
* * * * *
Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off
its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it
effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped
himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the
dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew
he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more
than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.
Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the
fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and
gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and
parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of
free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would
toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes
she swam for it frantically.
After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer
and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on
Mars this trip--priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to
war-battered mankind.
The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up
on the air, and went to sleep.
* * * * *
Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed
each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away
with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over
his.
"Who the devil would Maelzel be?" he asked.
A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. "Edgar
Allen Poe," he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.
The grizzled general snapped his fingers. "Sure! Maelzel's Chess
player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed
to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it."
The Secretary of Space frowned. "Now what's the point in a fool
question like that?"
"You said it came from Opperly's group?" Jorj asked sharply.
The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men
puzzledly.
"Who would that be?" Jorj pressed. "The group, I mean."
The Secretary of Space shrugged. "Oh, the usual little bunch over at
the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young
Farquar."
"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile," Jorj commented coldly. "I'd
investigate."
The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. "I will. Right
away."
* * * * *
Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust
motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was
well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes
there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place
of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly
knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been
riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in
New York City.
The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face
of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender--fined down by
a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful,
sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather
like a bear.
Opperly was saying, "So when he asked who was responsible for the
Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember." He smiled. "They still
allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt.
Almost my sole remaining privilege." The smile faded. "Why do you keep
on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?" he asked without rancor. "I've
maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding
to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have
overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults
isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough
about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of
this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?"
The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. "Because the
Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed," he rapped out. "We know
their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their
Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental
science is bunk."
"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly," Opperly
interposed quietly. "You know the good it did."
Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. "Then it's got to be
done until it takes."
Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. "I think
you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which
you probably aren't aware."