by Hogan, James
official duties, with detrimental consequences to the job he was being sent to
do. In view of these observations, therefore, would NASO like to reconsider its
choice?
Conlon dashed off a terse reply stating that Massey's function was to assess and
report objectively the behavior, attitudes, emotional stresses, and other
psychological effects observed among the experimental community. If Zambendorf
was going, then Zambendorf would constitute a valid part of the test
environment, thus warranting objective reporting as much as anything else.
Objective reporting demanded qualified observers, and Massey's unique background
fitted him ideally to the total situation. No, NASO would not like to reconsider
its choice.
A few days after that, Warren Taylor, the director of the North American
Division of NASO, told Conlon that he wanted the decision reversed, making
little effort to hide the fact that words had been exchanged among the higher
levels of NASO and GSEC management. Conlon could hardly defy a direct
instruction from his superior, and accepted the directive with a disinclination
to further argument that his colleagues inside NASO found surprising.
That same afternoon, Conlon gave Allan Brady a draft of a press bulletin for
immediate release, stating that Massey was to be dropped from the Mars mission
and spelling out the reasons why: The proposed inclusion of a competent stage
magician was considered threatening to a psychic superman being sponsored by a
multibillion dollar corporation. Brady balked; Conlon demanded to sign the
release note himself, and Brady retreated to seek higher counsel. Eventually the
decision came back down the line that clearance was denied. At that point Conlon
went back to Taylor to protest the unconstitutional and illegal suppression of
information not relating to national security, and threatened to resign with
full public disclosure.
And, suddenly, the heat was off. The order to drop Massey was rescinded, Conlon
tore up his press bulletin, and everybody stopped talking about the law, the
Constitution, and threats of resignation.
Not long afterward, Massey received an invitation to give a private
performance". . . for the further entertainment of our guests . . ."at a banquet
to be held in the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Burton Ramelson in Delaware. All
expenses would be paid, naturally, and the fee was left open, effectively giving
Massey a blank check. It just so happened that the Ramelson family were
controlling stockholders in a diversity of mutually enriching industrial
enterprises, which, among other things, included General Space Enterprises
Corporation and the majority of its bondholding banks.
7
"AMAZING!" ONE OF THE LADIES IN THE ENTHUSIASTIC THRONG crowding around Massey
at the end of the dining hall in the Ramelsons' mansion exclaimed. "Truly
amazing! Are you sure you're not deceiving us just a little when you insist that
you don't possess genuine psychic powers, Mr. Massey?"
Massey, resplendent, his full beard flowing above tuxedo and black tie, shook
his head firmly. "I did all the deceiving earlier. I'm here purely to entertain.
I don't pretend to be anything I'm not."
"Could I have an autograph, possibly?" a buxom woman, festooned with jewels and
wearing a lilac evening dress, asked. "Here on this menu card would be fine."
"Certainly." Massey took the card and seemed about to open it when another voice
caused him to turn away.
"I'm not sure I believe it," a tall, distinguished-looking man with thinning
hair and a clipped mustache declared. "You're genuine all right, Massey, but you
haven't realized it yourself yet. It's happened before, you know—plenty of
reliable, authenticated stories."
In an apparently absentminded way, Massey handed what looked like the same menu
card back to the woman in the lilac dress. It was always a safe bet that someone
would want a menu card autographed at an occasion like that, and Massey made a
point of beginning such evenings with a few prepared cards concealed about his
person. "I would be most surprised," he told the distinguished-looking man
sincerely.
"I simply must know how you did that thing with the envelope," an attractive
girl somewhere in her twenties said. "Can't you give us just a hint, even? I
mean ... it was so impossible."
"Oh, you should know better than to ask things like that," Massey said
reproachfully.
"But you never touched it."
"Didn't I?"
"Well, no. We all know what we saw."
"No—you just know what you think you saw."
"Is Karl Zambendorf genuine?" a tubby man with a ruddy face asked. He was
swaying slightly and looked a little the worse for drink.
"How could I know?" Massey replied. "But I do know that I can duplicate
everything he's done so far."
"But that doesn't prove anything, does it," the tubby man said. "You're all the
same, you fellows ... If Zambendorf walked across the Chesapeake Bay from here
to Washington, you'd just say, 'Oh yes— that's the old walking-on-the-water
trick.' Just because you can imitate something, it doesn't mean it had to be
done the same way first time, does it?"
"When he walks across the bay, I'll give you my comment," Massey promised.
"Er, Mr. Massey, you did say you'd autograph my menu card," the woman in the
lilac evening dress reminded him hesitantly.
"That's right. I did."
"I still have it here, and—"
"No, you misunderstood me. I have."
"I don't think I quite—"
"Look inside it."
"What? Oh, but ... Oh, my God, look at this! How did that get in here?"
At that moment Burton Ramelson appeared behind Massey, smiling and holding a
brandy glass. He was small in stature, almost bald, and even his exquisitely cut
dinner jacket failed to hide completely the sparseness of his frame; but his
sharp eyes and tight, determined jaw instilled enough instant respect to open a
small circle in the guests before him. "A splendid exhibition!" he declared. "My
compliments, Mr. Massey, and I'm sure I speak for everyone when I add—my thanks
for turning our evening into a sparkling occasion." Murmurs and applause
endorsed his words. He turned his head to address the guests. "I know you would
all like to talk to Mr. Massey forever, but after his exertions I think we owe
him the courtesy of a few minutes' rest in relative peace and quiet. I promise
I'll do my best to persuade him to rejoin you later." Turning once more toward
Massey, he said, "Perhaps you'd care to join a few friends and myself for a
brandy in the library."
As they proceeded out of the dining room and across a hall of paneled walls,
gilt-framed portraits, and heavy drapes, Ramelson chatted about the house and
its grounds, which had been built for a railroad magnate in the 1920s and
acquired by Ramelson's father toward the end of the twentieth century. The
Ramelson family, Massey had learned from Conlon, commanded hundreds of millions
spread among its many members, heirs, foundations, and trusts in such a way as
to avoid excessively conspicuous concentrati
ons of assets. Most of their wealth
had come from the energy hoax and coal boom following the antinuclear propaganda
campaign and political sabotage of high-technology innovation in the seventies
and eighties, which while achieving its immediate objective of maximizing the
returns on existing capital investments, had contributed to the formulation of
U.S. policies appropriate to the nineteenth century while the developing nations
were thrusting vigorously forward into the twenty-first. The subsequent decline
in competitiveness of American industries and their increasing dependence on
selling to their own domestic market to maintain solvency was partly the result
of it.
The group waiting in the library comprised a half dozen or so people, and
Ramelson introduced the ones whom Massey had not met already. They included
Robert Fairley, a nephew of Ramelson, who sat on the board of a New York
merchant bank affiliated to GSEC; Sylvia Fenton, in charge of corporate media
relations; Gregory Buhl, GSEC's chief executive, and Caspar Lang, Buhl's
second-in-command.
Ramelson filled a glass at an open cabinet near the fireplace, added a dash of
soda, and passed the glass to Massey. He proffered a cigar box; Massey declined.
"I'm so glad you were able to come," Ramelson said. "You possess some
extraordinary skills. I particularly admire the insight into human thinking that
your profession must cultivate. That's a rare, and very valuable, talent." After
the briefest of hesitations he added, "I do hope you find it adequately rewarded
in this world of ours."
"It was a good act," Buhl said, clapping Massey on the shoulder. "I've always
been about as cynical as a man can get, but I don't mind saying it straight—you
came close to converting me."
Massey grinned faintly and sipped his drink. "I don't believe that, but it's
nice to hear you say it all the same." Somebody laughed; everyone smiled.
"But it's only your hobby, isn't that right?" Robert Fairley said. "Most of the
time you're a professor of human behavior or something..."
"Cognitive psychology," Massey supplied. "I study what kinds of things people
believe, and why they believe them. Deception and delusion play a big part in
it. So, you see, the hobby is really an extension of my job, but in disguise."
"It sounds a fascinating field to be associated with," Sylvia Fenton commented.
"Button's right—it's valuable," Buhl said. "Not enough people know how to begin
telling sense from nonsense. Most of our managers don't know where to start . .
. nobody to show 'em how. Financial mechanics are all you get from the business
schools these days."
"An interesting point," Ramelson said. He went through the motions of thinking
to himself for a few seconds. "Have you, er . . . have you ever wondered what
your knowledge might be worth to you outside of the academic community, Mr.
Massey?" Massey made no immediate response, and after a pause Ramelson went on,
"I'm sure I don't have to spell out at great length what it might mean to have
the resources of an organization like GSEC at your disposal. And as we all know,
such an organization is able, if it so chooses, to reward the services that it
considers particularly valuable with . . . well, shall we say, extreme
generosity."
The rest of the company had fallen quiet. Massey walked slowly away toward the
center of the room, stopped to sip some more of his drink, and then turned back
to face them. "Let's come right to the point," he suggested. "You want to buy me
off of the Mars mission."
Ramelson seemed to have been half expecting the sudden directness, and remained
affable. "If you wish to put it that way," he agreed. "We all have our
price—it's a worn and tired phrase, but I believe it nevertheless. So what's
yours, Massey? Name it—research facilities and equipment? Staff? Effectively
unlimited funding? Publicity? . . . Someone like you doesn't need the details
elaborated. But everything is negotiable."
Massey frowned at the glass in his hand, and, perplexed, exhaled a long breath,
then answered obliquely. "I don't understand all this. I know that you know
Zambendorf is a fake. Okay, so the stunt on Mars could be good for business—but
I can't see what makes it so essential. The logical thing would be to drop
Zambendorf now since it looks like more trouble than it's worth. But that's not
what's happening. What do people in your positions care whether he keeps his
image clean or not? So what's the real story?"
"You just said it," Buhl replied, shrugging and following Ramelson's candid
lead. "It's good for business. The more the idea of colonies is popularized, the
sooner they'll become financially viable and potentially profitable. Yes, we
like making money. Who doesn't?"
The answer sounded more like a rationalization than a reason and left Massey
feeling dissatisfied. But his instincts told him that any attempt at delving
deeper would be futile. "I've nothing against trying to popularize the
colonies," he said. "But if you're going to do it, why can't you do it through
rational education and reason? Why resort to spreading miseducation and
unreason?"
"Because it works," Sylvia Fenton said simply. "It's the only thing that has
ever worked. We have to be realistic, not idealistic. We didn't make people the
way they are. What benefit has rational education ever had, except on a small
minority of any population, anytime in history? Nobody wants to hear it."
"Some people do," Massey replied. "There are a lot of people on this planet who
used to starve by the millions, and while their children withered away and died
like flies, they prayed to cows that wandered the streets. Now they're building
their own fusion plants and launching moonships. I'd say they got quite a bit
out of it."
"But that kind of thing takes centuries to trickle down," Fairley pointed out.
"We don't have centuries. No popular mass movement was ever started in a
laboratory or a lecture theater. Thinking things through takes too much time for
most people. Sylvia made a valid point —look at anybody from Jesus Christ to
Karl Marx who got results fast, and see how they did it."
"And what were the results worth?" Massey asked. "Generations of people wasting
their lives away buying crutches because they'd been brainwashed into thinking
they were cripples."
Buhl studied his glass for a moment, then looked up. "That's a noble sentiment,
Mr. Massey, but who's to blame for people being conditionable in the first
place?"
"A society that fails to teach them to think for themselves, trust in their own
judgment, and rely on their own abilities," Massey said.
"But that's not what most people want," Sylvia Fenton insisted. "They want to
believe that something smarter and stronger than they are knows all the answers
and will take care of them—a God, the government, a cult leader, or some magic
power . . . anything. If they're going to change, they'll change in their own
time. All you can do until then is take the world as you find it and make the
most of your opportunities."
"Opportunities for w
hat?" Massey said. "To persuade ordinary people that wanting
a better living is really a trivial distraction from the higher things that
really matter, and fob them off with superstitions that tell them they'll get
theirs later, in some hereafter, some other dimension, or whatever—if they'll
only believe, and work harder. Is that what I'm supposed to do?"
"Why do you owe them anything else?" Buhl asked. He shrugged. "The ones who can
make it will make it anyway. Are the rest worth the effort?"
"From the way a lot of them end up, no," Massey agreed frankly. "But the
potential they start out with is something else. The most squandered resource on
this planet is the potential of human minds— especially the minds of young
people. Yes, I believe the effort to realize some of that potential is worth
it."
The conversation continued for a while longer, but the positions remained
essentially unaltered. Each side had heard the other's viewpoint before, and
neither was about to be converted. Eventually Mrs. Ramelson appeared with a
request from the guests for a further, impromptu, performance, and after a few
closing pleasantries Massey left with her to return to the dining room.
Silence descended for a while after their departure. At last Ramelson commented
genially, "Well, at least we know where we stand: If we fly our flag on the good
ship Zambendorf, Massey will be out to torpedo it. I can't say I'm entirely
surprised, but we all agreed it had to be tried. . . ." He looked across at the
saturnine figure of Caspar Lang, the deputy chief executive of GSEC, who had
said little since Massey's arrival and was brooding in one of the leather
armchairs opposite the door. Lang raised his ruggedly chiseled, crew-cut head
and returned a hard-eyed inquiring look as he caught the motion. "So if we're
sending our ship into hostile waters, we'd better make sure it has a strong
escort squadron," Ramelson went on. He closed his eyes and brought a hand to his
brow. "You could find yourself with a tough job on your hands at the end of your
voyage, my powers tell me, Caspar. . . . We'd better make sure you take plenty
of ammunition along."
"Don't give me any of that crap, you little tramp!"
"Who the hell do you think you are to call me a tramp? You—you of all people!"
"Just stop screaming for two seconds and listen to yourself for chrissakes! What