by Isaac Asimov
Again, the water, air, and food must be carefully recycled, and much of our technology is devoted to the distillation of used water, and to the treatment of solid bodily wastes and their conversion to clean fertilizer. We cannot afford to have anything go wrong with our recycling technology, for there is little room for slack. And, of course, even when all goes well, the feeling that we eat and drink recycled materials is a bit unpalatable. All is recycled on Earth, too, but Earth is so large and the natural cycling system so unnoticeable, that Earthpeople tend to be unaware of the matter.
Then, too, there is always the fear that a sizable meteor may strike and damage the outer shell of a Settlement. A bit of matter no larger than a piece of gravel might do damage, and one a foot across would surely destroy any Settlement. Fortunately, the chances for such a misadventure are small and we will eventually learn to detect and divert such objects before they reach us. Still, these dangers weigh upon us, and help mitigate the feeling of over-security that some of us complain about.
With an effort, however, with close attention and unremitting care, we can maintain our ecology, were it not for the matter of trade and travel.
Each Settlement produces something that other Settlements would like to have, in the matter of food, of art, of ingenious devices. What’s more, we must trade with Earth as well, and many Settlers want to visit Earth and see some of the things we don’t have in the Settlements. Earthpeople can’t realize how exciting it is for us to see a vast blue horizon, or to look out upon a true ocean, or to see an ice-capped mountain.
Therefore, there is a constant coming and going among the Settlements and Earth. But each Settlement has its own ecological balance; and, of course, Earth has, even these days, an ecology that is enormously and impossibly rich by Settlement standards.
We have our insects that are acclimated and under control, but what if strange insects are casually and unintentionally introduced from another Settlement or from Earth?
A strange insect, a strange worm, even a strange rodent might totally upset our ecology, inflict damage on our native plants and animals. On numerous occasions, in fact, a Settlement has had to take extraordinary measures to eliminate an unwanted life-form. For months every effort had to be taken to track down every last insect of some species that, in its own Settlement, is harmless, or that, on Earth, can keep its depredations local.
Even worse, what if pathogenic parasites—bacteria, viruses, protozoa—are introduced? What if they produce diseases against which another Settlement and, of course, Earth itself, have developed a certain immunity, but one against which the Settlement that suffers the invasion is helpless. For a while, the entire effort of the Settlement must go into the preparation or importation of sera designed to confer immunity, or to fight the disease once it is established. Deaths, of course, occur invariably.
Naturally, there is always an outcry when this happens and a demand for more controls. As a result, no one from another Settlement, and no one returning to his own Settlement from a trip elsewhere, can be allowed to enter without a complete search of his baggage, a complete analysis of his bodily fluids, and a certain period of quarantine to see if some undetected disease is developing.
What’s more, rightly or wrongly, the inhabitants of the Settlements persist in viewing Earthpeople themselves as particularly dangerous. It is on Earth where the most undesirable life-forms and parasites are to be found; it is Earthpeople who are most likely to be infested, and there are parties on all the Settlements who support the notion—sometimes quite vehemently—of breaking all contacts between the Settlements and Earth.
That is the danger of which I want to warn Earthpeople. Distrust—and even hatred—of Earthpeople is constantly growing among the Settlers.
As long as Earth is only a few tens or hundreds of thousands of miles away, it is useless to talk of breaking off all contact. The lure and attraction of Earth is too great. Therefore, there is now talk—it is only a whisper, so far, but it will grow louder, I assure you—of leaving the Solar system altogether.
Each Settlement can be outfitted with a propulsive mechanism, making use of microfusion motors. Solar energy will suffice us while we are still among the planets and we will pick up small comets as a source of hydrogen fuel, in the process of leaving all the planets behind, when the Sun becomes too distant to be of use to us.
Each Settlement will say good-bye to Earth, then, and launch itself as an independent world into the unimaginable wastes between the stars. And who knows, someday a million years hence a Settlement may find an Earth-like world, empty and waiting, that it can populate.
But that is what I must warn Earth of. The Settlements will someday leave, and if you build others, they will eventually leave, too, and you will be left alone. And yet, in a way, your descendants will be expanding into, and populating, the entire Galaxy. You may find that a consoling thought as you watch them disappear.
Battle-Hymn
There didn’t seem much room for hope. Sibelius Hopkins put it into the simplest words.
“We’ve got to have Martian consent, and we won’t get it, that’s all.”
The gloom among the others was thick enough to impede breathing. “We should never have granted the colonists autonomy,” said Ralph Colodny.
“Agreed,” said Hopkins. “Now who wants to volunteer to go back in time twenty-eight years and change history. Mars has the sovereign right to decide how its territory is to be used, and there’s nothing to be done about it.”
“We might choose another site,” said Ben Devers, who was the youngest of the group and hadn’t yet worked himself to the proper pitch of cynicism.
“No other site,” said Hopkins flatly. “If you don’t know that experiments with hyperspace are dangerous, go back to school. You can’t do them on Earth, and even the Moon is far too built up. The space settlements are too small by three orders of magnitude and it’s not possible to reach anything beyond Mars for at least twenty years. But Mars is perfect. It’s still practically empty. It has a low surface gravity and a thin atmosphere. It’s cold. Everything’s perfect for hyperspatial flight—except the colonists.”
“You can never tell,” said young Devers. “People are funny. They might vote in favor of hyperspatial experiments on Mars, if we play it right.”
“How do we play it right?” said Hopkins. “The opposition has blanketed Mars with an old hillbilly tune that has the words:
“No, no, a thousand times, no!
You cannot buy my caress!
“No, no, a thousand times, no!
I’d rather die than say, yes.”
He grinned mirthlessly. “Mars is blanketed with the tune. It’s being drilled into the minds of the Martian colonists. They’ll vote ‘no’ automatically, and we won’t have hyperspatial experiments and that means we won’t have flights to the stars for decades, maybe generations—certainly not in our lifetimes.”
Devers said, frowning in thought, “Can’t we use a tune for our side of the argument?”
“What tune?”
“A large percentage of the Martian colonists are of French extraction. We might play on their ethnic consciousness.”
“What ethnic consciousness? Everyone speaks English now.”
“That doesn’t stop ethnic consciousness,” said Devers. “If you play the old national anthem of France, they’ll all drip nostalgia. It’s a battle-hymn, you know, and battle-hymns always stir the blood, especially now that there aren’t any wars.”
Hopkins said, “But the words don’t mean anything any more. Do you remember them?”
“Yes,” said Devers. “Some—
“Allons, enfants de la patrie,
La jour de gloire est arrive.
Contre nous de la tyrannie,
L’Etendard sanglant est leve.”
He sang them in a clear tenor voice.
Hopkins said, “Not one Martian in a thousand will know what that means.”
Devers said, “Who cares? Play it anyw
ay. Even if they don’t understand the words they will know it’s the old battle-hymn of France and that will stir them up. Besides, the tune is a winner. Infinitely better than that silly music-hall thing about ‘No, no.’ I’m telling you, the battle-hymn will settle into every mind and wipe out the no-no.”
“Maybe you have something there,” said Hopkins. “And if we accompany it with some strong slogan in different changes, ‘Humanity to the stars!’, ‘Reach out for a star,’ ‘Faster than light is the slowest we can go.’ And always with that tune.”
Colodny said, “You know, ‘la jour de gloire’ means ‘the day of glory,’ I think. We can use that phrase, ‘the glory day when we reach the stars.’ If we say ‘glory day’ often enough, maybe the Martians will vote ‘Yes.’ ”
“It sounds too good to be true,” said Hopkins, gloomily, “but I really don’t see that there’s any other choice we have right now. We can try it and see if it does any good.”
That was the beginning of the great voting battle of the tunes. In every one of the domed settlements on Mars, from Olympus all along the Valles Marineris and far into the cratered areas, there rang out on one side, “No, no, a thousand times, no—” and on the other side, “Allons, enfants de la patrie—”
There was no question that the stirring rhythm of the battle-hymn was having its effect. It roared back at the simple negation sing-song and Hopkins had to admit that from zero chance, the “yes” vote was becoming a possibility; from sure defeat, it was beginning to have just a chance.
Hopkins said, “The trouble is, though, we have nothing direct. Their song, silly though it is, has the advantage of saying, ‘No—No!—No!’ Ours is just a tune which is catchy and is filling the minds of many, but with what? La jour de gloire?”
Devers smiled and said, “Why not wait for the election?” After all, it was his idea.
They did.
Challenge to the Reader
What happened on election day? Did the negative vote win or the positive? And, in either case, why?
The best reason counts. You can win if you have the vote come out negative or positive.
On the evening of election day, Hopkins found himself almost unable to talk. The vote had been running a steady 90 percent in favor of “Yes” and there was simply no question about it.
The colonists of Mars were voting to allow their planet to be used for the work that would eventually send human beings to the stars.
Hopkins said, finally, “What happened? What did we do right?”
“It was the tune,” said Devers, smiling his satisfaction. “I had it figured right, but I didn’t want to explain my notion because I didn’t want it to get out to the other side somehow. Not that I don’t trust everyone here, but I didn’t want the tune neutralized in some clever way.”
“What was there about the tune that made so much difference?” demanded Hopkins.
“Well, it did have a subliminal message. Maybe the colonists no longer knew enough French to get the meaning of the words, but they had to know the name of the battle-hymn. That name rang through their minds each time they heard the tune; each time they hummed it.”
“So what?”
“So this,” said Devers, grinning, “The name is ‘Mars say yes!’ ”
Feghoot and the Courts
The planet of Lockmania, inhabited though it was by intelligent beings that looked like large wombats, had adopted the American legal system, and Ferdinand Feghoot had been sent there by the Earth Confederation to study the results.
Feghoot watched with interest as a husband and wife were brought in, charged with disturbing the peace. During a religious observation, when for twenty minutes the congregation was supposed to maintain silence, while concentrating on their sins and visualizing them as melting away, the woman had suddenly risen from her squatting position and screamed loudly. When someone rose to object, the man had pushed him forcefully.
The judges listened solemnly, fined the woman a silver dollar, and the man a twenty-dollar gold-piece.
Almost immediately afterward, seventeen men and women were brought in. They had been ringleaders of a crowd that had demonstrated for better quality meat at a supermarket. They had torn the supermarket apart and inflicted various bruises and lacerations on eight of the employees of the establishment.
Again the judges listened solemnly, and fined the seventeen a silver dollar apiece.
Afterward, Feghoot said to the chief judge, “I approved of your handling of the man and woman who disturbed the peace.”
“It was a simple case,” said the judge. “We have a legal maxim that goes, ‘Screech is silver, but violence is golden.’ ”
“In that case,” said Feghoot, “why did you fine the group of seventeen a silver dollar apiece when they had committed far worse violence?”
“Oh, that’s another legal maxim,” said the judge. “Every crowd has a silver fining.”
Fault-Intolerant
9 January
I, Abram Ivanov, finally have a home computer; a word processor, to be exact. I fought it as long as I could. I argued it out with myself. I am America’s most prolific writer and I do fine on a typewriter. Last year I published over thirty books. Some of them were small books for kids. Some were anthologies. But there were also novels, short story collections, essay collections, nonfiction books. Nothing to be ashamed of.
So why do I need a word processor? I can’t go any faster. But, you know, there’s such a thing as neatness. Typing my stuff means I have to introduce pen-and-ink items to correct typos, and nobody does that anymore. I don’t want my manuscripts to stick out like a sore thumb. I don’t want editors to think my stuff is second rate, just because it is corrected.
The difficulty was finding a machine that wouldn’t take two years to learn to use. Deft, I’m not—as I’ve frequently mentioned in this diary. And I want one that doesn’t break down every other day. Mechanical failures just throw me. So I got one that’s “fault-tolerant.” That means if some component goes wrong, the machine keeps right on working, tests the malfunctioning component, corrects it if it can, reports it if it can’t, and replacements can be carried through by anybody. It doesn’t take an expert hacker. Sounds like my kind of thing.
5 February
I haven’t been mentioning my word processor lately, because I’ve been struggling to learn how it works. I’ve managed. For a while, I had a lot of trouble, because although I have a high IQ, it’s a very specialized high IQ. I can write, but coping with mechanical objects throws me.
But I learned quickly, once I gained sufficient confidence. What did it was this. The manufacturer’s representative assured me that the machine would develop flaws only rarely, and would be unable to correct its own flaws only exceedingly rarely. He said I wouldn’t be likely to need a new component oftener than once in five years.
And if I did need one, they would hear exactly what was needed from the machine. The computer would then replace the part itself, do all the wiring and oiling that was necessary and reject the old part, which I could then throw away.
That’s sort of exciting. I almost wish something would go wrong so that I could get a new part and insert it. I could tell everyone, “Oh, sure, the discombobulator blew a fuse, and I fixed it like a shot. Nothing to it.” But they wouldn’t believe me.
I’m going to try writing a short story on it. Nothing too long. Just about two thousand words, maybe. If I get confused, I can always go back to the typewriter until I’ve regained my confidence. Then I can try again.
14 February
I didn’t get confused. Now that the proof is in, I can talk about it. The short story went as smoothly as cream. I brought it in and they’ve taken it. No problem.
So I’ve finally started my new novel. I should have started it a month ago, but I had to make sure I could work my word processor first. Let’s hope it works. It’ll seem funny not having a pile of yellow sheets I can rifle through when I want to check something I said a hundre
d pages earlier, but I suppose I can learn how to check back on the discs.
19 February
The computer has a spelling correction component. That caught me by surprise because the representative hadn’t told me about it. At first, it let misspellings go and I just proofread each page as I turned it out. But then it began to mark off any word it was unfamiliar with, which was a little bothersome because my vocabulary is a large one and I have no objection to making up words. And, of course, any proper name I use is something it was unfamiliar with.
I called the representative because it was annoying to have to be notified of all sorts of corrections that didn’t really have to be made.
The representative said, “Don’t let that bother you, Mr. Ivanov. If it questions a word that you want to remain as it is, just retype it exactly as it is and the computer will get the idea and not correct it the next time.”
That puzzled me. “Don’t I have to set up a dictionary for the machine? How will it know what’s right and what’s wrong?”
“That’s part of the fault-tolerance, Mr. Ivanov,” he said. “The machine already has a basic dictionary and it picks up new words as you use them. You will find that it will pick up false misspellings to a smaller and smaller degree. To tell you truthfully, Mr. Ivanov, you have a late model there and we’re not sure we know all its potentialities. Some of our researchers consider it fault-tolerant in that it can continue to work despite its own flaws, but fault-intolerant in that it won’t stand for flaws in those who use it. Please report to us if there’s anything puzzling. We would really like to know.”