The Age of the Pussyfoot

by Pohl Frederik

  At that moment the mellow chime sounded, the view-wall flickered and changed its picture, and Forrester was face to face with his employer.

  It was just like the picture he had seen before.

  Maybe it was the same Sirian. But it was looking at him now, or seemed to be, although it was hard to tell from the dozens of tiny eyes that rimmed its upper parts, and it spoke to him.

  “Your name,” it said in hollow, unaccented English, “is Charles Dalgleish Forrester, and you work for me and you call me S Four.”

  It sounded like a robot talking. More like a robot than the joymaker itself.

  “Right, S Four,” said Forrester.

  “You tell me about yourself.”

  It sounded like a reasonable request. “All right, S Four. Where do you want me to begin?”

  “You tell me about yourself.” The tentacles were rippling slowly, the circlet of tiny eyes winking at random like the lights on a computer. He had been wrong about its sound, Forrester decided. It was more like a dubbed-in voice in a foreign film on the Late Show—back when there were foreign films and Late Shows.

  “Well,” said Forrester ruminatively, “I guess I can start with when I was born. It was the nineteenth of March, nineteen thirty-two. My father was an architect, but at that time he was unemployed. Later he worked as a project supervisor for the WPA. My mother—”

  “You will tell me about WPA,” interrupted the Sirian.

  “It was a government agency designed to relieve unemployment during the Depression. You see, at that time there were periodic cyclic imbalances in the economy—”

  “You will not lecture me,” interrupted the Sirian, “and will explain terms for which letters WPA are function of entity.”

  Dashed, Forrester tried to put in concrete terms the business of the New Deal’s work relief program. Only concrete terms would do. The Sirian was distinctly not interested in Forrester’s digressions into economic theory. Probably he liked his own theories better. But he seemed interested in, or at least did not interrupt, a couple of jokes about leaf-raking and about a WPA worker falling down when someone kicked the broom he was leaning on. The Sirian listened impassively, the girdle of eyes twinkling, for half an hour by the clock; then it said, cutting through Forrester’s description of his high school graduation, “You will tell me more at another time,” and was gone.

  And Forrester was well enough pleased. He had never talked to a Sirian before.

  Although the children were romantically thrilled, Adne did not approve when she heard about it. Not in the least. “Dear Charles,” she said patiently, “they’re the enemy. People will say you are doing an evil thing.”

  “If they’re so dangerous, why aren’t they in concentration camps?”

  “Charles! You’re acting kamikaze again!”

  “Or why isn’t there a law against working for them?”

  She sighed and nibbled what looked like a candied orchid, regarding him with fond concern. “Oh, Charles. Human society is not merely a matter of law. You have to remember principle. There are certain standards of what is good and what is bad, and civilized people comply with them.”

  Forrester grumbled, “Yes, I understand that. It’s good when anybody jumps on me. It’s bad when I try to do anything about it.”

  “Kamikaze, Charles! I’m simply trying to point out to you that Taiko—for instance—would pay you at least as much as this filthy Sirian for a socially useful job—”

  “Sweat Taiko!” shouted Forrester, making her laugh with his malaprop anger. “I’m going to do this by myself!”

  So Adne left him there on friendly terms, but she left him nonetheless; an engagement in connection with her employment, she said, and Forrester did not know enough about her job to question it. He hadn’t found an opportunity to ask what her “crawling” date had been, nor did he see a chance to bring up her suggestion about picking a name. She volunteered nothing, and he was just as well pleased.

  Besides, he wanted to talk more with the children.

  With their help he was learning more about the Sirian than the Sirian would be able to learn about him. The kids frothed with information. It wasn’t difficult to master all the facts they had on tap, for there were not many real facts about Sirians to learn. All the hostages on Earth were of the same sex, for example, but there was a good deal of argument about what that sex was. Nor was their family structure at all clear. Whatever their relationships may have been on the planet from which they came, none of them had ever given any signs of being particularly depressed over being separated from their near and dear. Forrester took in the information grudgingly; he could not help thinking there should have been more of it. He said, “Do you mean to tell me that the only time we’ve ever seen them is this one time when we wiped out their exploring party?”

  “Oh, no, Charles!” The boy was indulgent with him. “We long-range spied their home planet once, too. But that’s dangerous. Anyway, that’s what they say; so they stopped it. If it was up to me I would have kept it up.”

  “And like in the chromosphere of Mira Ceti,” added the girl brightly.

  “The what?”

  The boy chortled. “Oh, yeah. That was a fun one! We had it on our class evaluation trip.”

  “Sweat!” cried the girl excitedly. “Say! Maybe Forrester would like to go with us if we do it again. I’d like to!”

  Forrester felt a sensation of committing himself to more than he liked. He said uncertainly, “Well, sure. But I don’t have much time right now. I mean, these are my working hours—”

  “Oh, sweat, Charles,” said the boy impatiently, “it doesn’t take time. I mean, you don’t go anywhere in space. It’s a construct.”

  “Only it was kind of real, too,” added the girl.

  “But it’s all just tapes now,” explained the boy helpfully.

  “Show him!” crowed the girl excitedly. “Mira Ceti! Please, Tunt, you promised!”

  The boy shrugged, cocked an eye thoughtfully at Forrester, then leaned forward. He spoke into his junior joymaker and touched a button on his teaching desk.

  At once the cluttered children’s room disappeared, and they were surrounded by a wall of hot swirling gray and incandescent orange. It cleared. . . .

  And at once Forrester and the two children were seated in the bridge of a spaceship. The toys were gone, the furnishings replaced by bright metal instruments and flickering, whistling gauges. And outside crystal panels surged the devastating chromosphere of a sun.

  Forrester shrank back instinctively from the heat before he realized that there was none. It was illusion. But it was perfect.

  “By God!” he cried admiringly. “How does that work?”

  “Sweat, I don’t know,” scoffed the boy. “That’s ninth-phase stuff. Ask your joymaker.”

  “Well, machine? How about it?”

  The calm voice of the joymaker replied at once. “The phenomenon you are currently inspecting, Man Forrester, is a photic projection on a vibratory curtain. An interference effect produces a virtual image on the surface of an optical sphere with the nexus of yourself and your companions as its geometric center. This particular construct is an edited and simplified reproduction of scansion of a Sirian exploration vessel in a stellar atmosphere, to wit—”

  “That’s enough,” interrupted Forrester. “I liked the kid’s answer better.”

  But the boy said tautly, “Knock it off, Charles. We’re starting! See, there’s this Sirian high-thermal scout vessel, and we’re about to run into it.”

  A harsh male voice rasped, “Tractor ship Gimmel! Your wingmate has an engine dysfunction! Prepare to lock, grapple, and evacuate crew!”

  “Are!” cried the boy. “Start search procedures, Tunt! Keep a watch, Charles!” His hands flashed over the keyboard—it had not been there a moment before, but it was operative; when he energized a circuit, their make-believe ship responded. He put it through a turn; the “virtual” sunship heeled sharply and sped through fountai
ns of flaming gas.

  Forrester could not repress his admiration at the perfection of the illusion. Everything was there, everything but the heat and the feeling of motion—and, gazing at the images around him, Forrester could almost feel the surge and shudder of their ship as it responded to the boy’s touch at the controls. Clearly, they were part of a squadron on some adventurous, unspecified mission. Forrester saw nothing that resembled a Sirian; he saw nothing at all, in fact, but the serpents and coils of gas through which they hurtled. But he was conscious of illusory vessels around them. A spatter of command signals came through the speaker as other “ships” talked back and forth. A panel showed their position in plan and elevation as they swam through the stripped-atom gases of Mira Ceti’s ocean of fire. Forrester ventured to say, “Uh, Tunt. What am I supposed to be doing again?”

  “Just use your eyes!” the boy hissed, his attention riveted to the controls. “Don’t mix me up, man!” But his sister was shrieking, “I see it! I see it, Tunt! Look over there!”

  “Oh, sweat,” he groaned in despair. “Will you ever learn to make a report?”

  She gulped. “I mean, wingmate sighted, vector oh, seven, oh, I guess. Depression—um—not much.”

  “Prepare to grapple!” roared the boy.

  Through the incandescent swirl a fat slug of a ship appeared, vanished, and appeared again. It was black against the blinding brilliance of its surroundings. Black on its metal skin, black in its ports, black even at the tail where a rocket exhaust discharged dark gases into the brightness around them. The rocket cut off as a labored voice gasped through the speaker, “Hurry it up, Gimmel! We can’t hold out much longer!”

  They jockeyed close to the stranded “ship,” buffeted this way and that by the force of the flaming gas. Forrester stared open-mouthed. There was the ship, derelict and helpless. And beyond it, swimming faintly toward them through the chromosphere, something that was bright even in this explosion of radiation, something that loomed enormous and fearsome. . . .

  “Holy God,” he cried, “it’s a Sirian!”

  And the whole picture shivered and winked away.

  They were back in the children’s room. For a moment Forrester was almost blind; then his strained optic centers began to register again. He saw the view-walls, the furnishings, the children’s familiar faces. The expedition was over.

  “Fun?” demanded the girl, jumping up and down. “Wasn’t it, Charles? Wasn’t it fun?”

  But her brother was staring disgustedly at a readout on his desk. “Tunt,” he grumbled, “you should know better. Don’t you see the tally? We were late locking up. There was a crew of three there, and two of them are scored dead . . . and we never even got to see the Sirian at all. Just him.”

  “I’m sorry, Tunt. I’ll look better next time,” the little girl said repentantly.

  “Oh, it’s not you.” He glared past her at Forrester and said bitterly, “They set the norms for a three-person mission. As if he was any help.”

  Thoughtfully Forrester picked up the mace of his joymaker, selected a button, pointed it at the base of his skull just behind the ear, and squirted. He was not sure he had picked the right joy-juice for the occasion; what he wanted was something that would make him tranquil, happy, and smart. What he got was more like a euphoric, but it would serve.

  He said humbly, “I’m sorry I messed it up for you.”

  “Not your fault. Should have known better than to take you, anyway.”

  “But I wish we’d seen the Sirian,” said the little girl wistfully.

  “I think I did. A big bright ship? Coming toward us?”

  The boy revived. “Really? Well, maybe that’s not so bad, then. You hear that, monitor?” He listened to what was, to Forrester, an inaudible voice from his teaching machine, then grinned. “We got a tentative conditional,” he said happily. “Take it again next week, Tunt. For record.”

  “Oh, wonderful!”

  Forrester cleared his throat. “Would you mind telling me exactly what it was we just did?” he asked.

  The boy put on his patient expression. “It was a simulated mission against the Sirian exploring party in the chromosphere of Mira Ceti. I thought you knew that. Basically a real observation, but with the contact between our ships and theirs variably emended.”

  “Oh. Uh-huh.”

  The boy looked quizzically at him. He said, “The thing is, Charles, we get graded on these simulations. But it’s all right; it didn’t hurt us.”

  “Sure.” Forrester could feel the beginnings of an idea asserting themselves. No doubt it was the spray from the joymaker, but . . . “Could you do the same trick with some other things about the Sirians? So I could get a better look at them? Maybe the original encounter, for instance?”

  “Neg.” The boy glared at his sister. “It’s Tunt’s fault, of course. She cried when the Sirians got killed. We have to wait to take the prebriefing over when we’re older.”

  The little girl hung her head. “I was sad,” she said defensively. “But there’s other things we can do, Charles. Would you like to see the coconut on the Moon?”

  “The what?”

  “Oh, sweat. We’ll just show you.” The boy scratched his ear thoughtfully, then spoke to his junior joymaker. The view-walls clouded again.

  “It’s supposed to be another artifact like the one the Sirians were searching for in Mira Ceti’s atmosphere,” he said over his shoulder, manipulating his teaching machine as he spoke. “Don’t know much about it, really. It’s not Sirian. It’s also not ours. Nobody knows whose they are, really, but there are lots of them around—and the Sirians don’t seem to know any more about them than we do. They’re old. And this is the nearest one.”

  The view-walls cleared to show the lunar Farside. They were near the terminator line, with crystalline white peaks and craters before them, the jet black of a lunar night to one side. They were looking down into the shallow cup of a crater, where figures were moving.

  “This is just tape,” the boy said. “No participation. Just look as long’s you want to.”

  There was a clump of pressure huts in the crater. Perhaps they were laboratories, perhaps housing for the scientists or for those who were studying the “artifact” in the center of the screen—or who had been studying it once, perhaps, and had given it up.

  It did indeed look like a coconut. As much as it looked like anything.

  It was shaggy and rather egg-shaped. Its tendrils of—whatever they were—were not organic, Forrester thought. They were almost glassy in their brightness, reflecting and refracting the sunlight in a spray of color. By the scale of the huts, the thing appeared to be about the size of a locomotive.

  “It’s empty, Charles,” volunteered the girl. “They all are.”

  “But what are they?”

  The girl giggled. “If you find out, tell us. They’ll make us twelfth-phase for sure!”

  But the boy said kindly, “Now you know as much as anybody does.”

  “But the Sirians must—”

  “Oh, no, Charles. The Sirians are late arrivals. Like us. And that thing’s been there, just the way it is now, for no less than a couple gigayears.” He switched off the scene. “Well,” he said brightly. “Anything else you want to know?”

  There was indeed. But Forrester had grasped the fact that the more he got to know, the more he was going to realize how little that knowledge was.

  Astonishingly enough, it has not really occurred to him before this that a lot of things had been happening to the human race while he was lying deep in the liquid-helium baths of the West Annex Facility. It was like a story in a magazine. You turn a page. Ten years have passed; but you know perfectly well that they weren’t important; if they were, the author would have told you about them.

  But far more than ten years had passed. And they were important, all right. And there was no Author to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

  Ten

  On the third day of his job, Forrester had be
en six days out of the freezer. He felt as though it had been a million.

  But he was learning. Yes, he told himself—gravely gratulatory—he was doing all his homework, and it was only a question of time until all answers were revealed to him and he took his proper place in this freemasonry of heroes.

  Meanwhile, working for the Sirian was not at all disagreeable. The social pressure against his job came only from Adne, and he had seen very little of her since that first day. He missed her; but he had other things on his mind. The Sirian—it had agreed to allow Forrester to think of it as a male, although it did not concur in the diagnosis and would not explain further—was curious, insatiable but patient. When Forrester could not answer questions, it permitted him to take time to look them up. Its orientation, surprisingly enough, was all to the past. It volunteered an explanation for this—well, a sort of explanation. In its view, it said, the present state of any phenomenon was a mere obvious derivative of some prior state; and it was the prior states of mankind that it wanted to know about.

  It crossed Forrester’s mind that if he were a war captive on a planet of alien enemies, the sort of knowledge that he would try to acquire would have more to do with arms and defense strategies. But he was not a Sirian, and he had decided not to bother trying to think like one. That was obviously beyond his powers. So he answered questions about Madison Avenue ad agencies and the angst that surrounded a World Series, and every day called up his bank to verify that his day’s salary had been deposited.