“I get out here,” Tennant said. “You didn’t stop.”
“Okay, if that’s the way you want it.” Cass’ heavy right hand, the little black hairs on its back clearly visible in the dashboard light, moved toward his inside pocket.
Tennant teleported to the side of the road, became a half-visible shade against the darkness of the trees. He felt Opal’s excitement surge through his brain, knew that from then on his timing would have to be split-second perfect.
It seemed to him as if all the inchoate thoughts, all the vague theories, all the half-formed plans of more than a year had crystalized. For the first time since his capture, he not only knew what he wanted to do—but saw the faint glimmer of a chance of doing it successfully.
He was going to try to lead Cass to the gateway, maneuver him inside—and then escape. They wouldn’t get Tennant; the power of teleportation they themselves had given him would keep him from being captured again. It would work. He was sure of it. They’d have their male specimen and he’d be free…not to go back to Agatha, because he wouldn’t, but to help the three women to get back, too.
* * * *
Cass was plunging after him now, pistol in hand, shouting. Tennant could have him killed now, have him flayed and decapitated as other male victims had been. Opal might even give him the hide as a reward after it was treated. Some Oriental potentate, Tennant reflected, might relish having his wife’s lover as a rug on his living room floor. Tennant preferred the less operatic revenge of leaving Cass and Agatha alive to suffer.
He teleported farther into the trees, closer to the gateway, plotting carefully his next moves. Cass was crashing along, cursing in frustration.
“Stand still, damn you! You shift around like a ghost!”
Tennant realized with sudden terror that Cass might give up, unable to solve his prey’s abrupt appearances and disappearances. He needed encouragement to keep him going.
Jeeringly, Tennant paused, simultaneously thumbed his nose and stuck out his tongue at Cass. The scornful childishness of the gesture enraged Cass more than the worst verbal insult could have. He yelled his anger and fired at Tennant. There was no way to miss, but Tennant was five yards farther on before the explosion ended.
“Calm down,” he advised quietly. “Getting mad always spoils your aim.”
That, naturally, made Cass even angrier. He fired viciously twice more before Tennant reached the gateway, both times without a chance of hitting his elusive target.
Opal, Tennant discovered, was almost as frantic as Cass. He was deep inside the passage, jittering visibly in his excitement, in his anticipation of the most important bag his species had yet made on Earth. And there was something else in his thoughts.…
Anxiety. Fear. The gateway was vulnerable to third-dimensional weapons. Where the concertina-like passage came into contact with Earth, there was a belt, perhaps a foot in width, which was spanned by some sort of force-webbing. Opal was afraid that a bullet might strike the webbing and destroy the gateway.
Cass was getting closer. It would be so easy…keep teleporting, bewilder him, let him make a grab…and then skip a hundred yards away just as the gateway shut. He would be outside, Cass inside.
And the three women? Leave them with Cass? Leave the gateway open for more live or mounted specimens?
Tennant concentrated on the zone of strain at the point of dimensional contact, was there directly in front of it. Cass, cursing, lunged clear of the underbrush outside, saw Tennant there. Tennant was crouching low, not moving, staring mockingly at him. He lifted the automatic and fired.
* * * *
Tennant teleported by inches instead of yards, and so blood oozed from a graze on his left ear when he rejoined a shaken Opal in the world that knew no night. For a long time—how long, of course, he could not know—they stood and watched the gateway burn to globular ash in a dark brown fire that radiated searing cold.
Opal was in trouble. An aura of anger, of grief, of accusation, surrounded him. Others of them came and for a while Tennant was forgotten. Then, abruptly, he was back in his own compound, walking toward the house.
In place of his country Napoleonic roll-bed, which he had visualized for manufacture with special care, Dana had substituted an immense modern sleeping device that looked like a low hassock with a ten-foot diameter. She was on her knees, her back toward the door, fiddling with a radio.
She heard him enter, said without turning, “It won’t work. Just a little while ago it stopped.”
“I think we’re cut off now, perhaps for good,” he told her. He sat down on the edge of the absurd bed and began to take off the clothes they had given him for the hunt. He was too tired to protest against the massacre of his bedroom decor. He was not even sure he wanted to protest. For all its anachronism, the big round bed was comfortable.
She watched him, her hands on her thighs, and there was worry written on her broad forehead. “You know something, Rog.”
“I don’t know anything,” he replied. “I only think and have theories.” Unexpectedly he found himself telling her all about it, about himself, where he had been, what he had done.
She listened quietly, saying nothing, letting him go on. His head was in her lap and he talked up to her while she ran gentle fingers through his hair. When he had finished, she smiled down at him thoughtfully, affectionately, then said, “You know, you’re a funny kind of man, Roger.”
“Funny?”
She cuffed him gently. “You know what I mean. So now we’re really cut off in this place—you and me and little Tom and Olga and Eudalia and the twins. What are we going to do, Roger?”
He shrugged. He was very tired. “Whatever they’ll let us do,” he said through a yawn. “Maybe we can make this a two-way study. They are almost human, you know. Almost.” He pulled her down and kissed her and felt unexpected contentment decant through his veins. He knew now that things had worked out the right way, the only way. He added aloud, “I think we’ll find ways to keep ourselves amused.”
“You really enjoy playing the heel, don’t you, Rog?” Her lips moved against his as she spoke. “You had a chance to get out of here. You could have changed places with Cass. Maybe you could have destroyed the gateway and stayed on the other side and still saved other victims. But no, you had to come back to—us. I think I’m going to be in love with you for that.”
He sat up on one elbow and looked down at her half angrily. “Are you trying to make a goddam hero out of me?” he asked.
THE AMBASSADOR
Originally published in IF Worlds of Science Fiction, March 1954.
Zalen Lindsay stood on the rostrum in the huge new United Worlds auditorium on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain and looked out at an ocean of eye-glasses. Individually they ranged in hue from the rose-tinted spectacles of the Americans to the dark brown of the Soviet bloc. Their shapes and adornments were legion: round, harlequin, diamond, rhomboid, octagonal, square, oval; rimless, gem-studded, horn-rimmed, floral-rimmed, rimmed in the cases of some of the lady representatives with immense artificial eyelashes.
The total effect, to Lindsay, was of looking at an immense page of printed matter composed entirely of punctuation marks. Unspectacled, he felt like a man from Mars. He was a man from Mars—first Martian Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Second United Worlds Congress.
He wished he could see some of the eyes behind the protective goggles, for he knew he was making them blink.
He glanced down at the teleprompter in front of him—purely to add effect to a pause, for he had memorized his speech and was delivering it without notes. On it was printed: HEY, BOSS—DON’T FORGET YOU GOT A DINNER DATE WITH THE SEC-GEN TONIGHT.
Lindsay suppressed a smile and said, “In conclusion, I am qualified by the governors of Mars to promise that if we receive another shipment of British hunting boots we shall destroy them immediately upon unloading—an
d refuse categorically to ship further beryllium to Earth.
“On Mars we raise animals for food, not for sport—we consider human beings as the only fit athletic competition for other humans—and we see small purpose in expending our resources mining beryllium or other metals for payment that is worse than worthless. In short, we will not be a dumping ground for Earth’s surplus goods. I thank you.”
The faint echo of his words came back to him as he stepped down from the rostrum and walked slowly to his solitary seat in the otherwise empty section allotted to representatives of alien planets. Otherwise there was no sound in the huge assemblage.
He felt a tremendous lift of tension, the joyousness of a man who has satisfied a lifelong yearning to toss a brick through a plate-glass window and knows he will be arrested for it and doesn’t care.
There was going to be hell to pay—and Lindsay was honestly looking forward to it. While Secretary General Carlo Bergozza, his dark-green spectacles resembling parenthesis marks on either side of his thin eagle beak, went through the motions of adjourning the Congress for forty-eight hours, Lindsay considered his mission and its purpose.
Earth—a planet whose age-old feuds had been largely vitiated by the increasing rule of computer-judgment—and Mars, the one settled alien planet on which no computer had ever been built, were drifting dangerously apart.
It was, Lindsay thought with a trace of grimness, the same ancient story of the mother country and her overseas colonies, the same basic and seemingly inevitable trend, social and economic, that had led to the revolt of North America against England, three hundred years earlier.
On a far vaster and costlier scale, of course.
Lindsay had been sent to Earth, as his planet’s first representative at the new United Worlds Congress, to see that this trend was halted before it led to irrevocable division. And not by allowing Mars to become a mere feeder and dumping ground for the parent planet.
Well, he had tossed a monkey wrench into the machinery of interplanetary sweetness and light, he thought. Making his way slowly out with the rest of the Congress, he felt like the proverbial bull in the china shop. The others, eyeing him inscrutably through their eye-glasses and over their harness humps, drew aside to let him walk through.
But all around him, in countless national tongues, he heard the whispers, the mutterings—“sending a gladiator”…“looks like a vidar star”…“too young for such grave responsibility”…“no understanding of the basic sensitivities”.…
Obviously, he had not won a crushing vote of confidence.
* * * *
To hell with them, all of them, he thought as someone tapped him on a shoulder. He turned to find du Fresne, the North American Minister of Computation, peering up at him through spectacles that resembled twin scoops of strawberry ice-cream mounted in heavy white-metal rims.
“I’d like a word with you,” he said, speaking English rather than Esperanto. Lindsay nodded politely, thinking that du Fresne looked rather like a Daumier judge with his fashionable humped back and long official robe of office.
Over a table in the twilight bar du Fresne leaned toward him, nearly upsetting his colafizz with a sleeve of his robe.
“M-mind you,” he said, “this is strictly unofficial, Lindsay, but I have your interests at heart. You’re following trend X.”
“Got me all nicely plotted out on your machine?” said Lindsay.
Du Fresne’s sallow face went white at this pleasantry. As Minister of Computation his entire being was wrapped up in the immensely intricate calculators that forecast all decisions for the huge North American republic. Obviously battling anger, he said, “Don’t laugh at Elsac, Lindsay. It has never been wrong—it can’t be wrong.”
“I’m not laughing,” said Lindsay quietly. “But no one has ever fed me to a computer. So how can you know…?”
“We have fed it every possible combination of circumstances based upon all the facts of Terro-Martian interhistory,” the Minister of Computation stated firmly. His nose wrinkled and seemed to turn visibly pink at the nostril-edges. He said, “Damn! I’m allergic to computer-ridicule.” He reached for an evapochief, blew his nose.
“Sorry,” said Lindsay, feeling the mild amazement that seemed to accompany all his dealings with Earthfolk. “I wasn’t—”
“I doe you weren’d,” du Fresne said thickly. “Bud de vurry zuggedgeshun of ridicule dudz id.” He removed his strawberry spectacles, produced an eye-cup, removed and dried the contact lenses beneath. After he had replaced them his condition seemed improved.
Lindsay offered him a cigarette, which was refused, and selected one for himself. He said, “What happens if I pursue trend X?”
“You’ll be assassinated,” du Fresne told him nervously. “And the results of such assassination will be disastrous for both planets. Earth will have to go to war.”
“Then why not ship us goods we can use?” Lindsay asked quietly.
Du Fresne looked at him as despairingly as his glasses would permit. He said, “You just don’t understand. Why didn’t your people send someone better attuned to our problems?”
“Perhaps because they felt Mars would be better represented by someone attuned to its own problems,” Lindsay told him. “Don’t tell me your precious computers recommend murder and war.”
“They don’t recommend anything,” said du Fresne. “They merely advise what will happen under given sets of conditions.”
“Perhaps if you used sensible judgment instead of machines to make your decisions you could prevent my assassination,” said Lindsay, finishing his scotch on the rocks. “Who knows?” he added. “You might even be able to prevent an interplanetary war!”
When he left, du Fresne’s nose was again growing red and the Minister of Computation was fumbling for another evapochief.
* * * *
Riding the escaramp to his office on the one-twentieth floor of the UW building, Lindsay pondered the strange people of the mother planet among whom his assignment was causing him to live. One inch over six feet, he was not outstandingly tall—but he felt tall among them, with their slump harnesses and disfiguring spectacles and the women so hidden beneath their shapeless coveralls and harmopan makeup.
He was not unprepared for the appearance of Earthfolk, of course, but he had not yet adjusted to seeing them constantly around him in such large numbers. To him their deliberate distortion was as shocking as, he supposed wryly, his own unaltered naturalness was to them.
There was still something illogical about the cult of everyday ugliness that had overtaken the mother planet in the last two generations, under the guise of social harmony. It dated back, of course, to the great Dr. Ludmilla Hartwig, psychiatric synthesizer of the final decades of the twentieth century.
It was she who had correctly interpreted the growing distrust of the handsome and the beautiful among the great bulk of the less favored, the intense feelings of inferiority such comely persons aroused. It was from her computer-psychiatry that the answer employed had come: since everyone cannot be beautiful, let all be ugly.
This slogan had sparked the mass use of unneeded spectacles, the distortion harnesses, the harmopan makeup. Now, outside of emergencies, it was as socially unacceptable for a man or woman to reveal a face uncovered in public as it had been, centuries earlier, for a Moslem odalisque to appear unveiled in the bazaar.
There were exceptions, of course—aside from those who were naturally ugly to begin with. Vidar-screen actors and actresses were permitted to reveal beauty when their parts demanded it—which was usually only in villains’ roles. And among men, professional athletes were expected to show their faces and bodies au naturel as a mark of their profession. Among women the professional courtesans—the “models”, not the two-credit whores—displayed their charms on all occasions. Beauty was bad business for lower-caste prostitutes—it made such clients they could pr
omote feel too inferior.
These specialists, the models and gladiators, were something of a race apart, computer-picked in infancy and raised for their professions like Japanese sumo wrestlers. They were scarcely expected to enter the more sensitive realms of the arts, business affairs or government.
It was, Lindsay decided, a hell of a state of affairs.
* * * *
Nina Beckwith, Lindsay’s Earth-assigned personal secretary, was leaning far back in her tilt-chair with her feet on the desk. Her eyes were squinted behind chartreuse-tinted flat-oval lenses to avoid fumes from a cigarette stuck in a corner of her wide mouth. She had shut off the air-conditioner, opened the picture window and pulled the pants of her coverall far up above her knees to let the warm New Orleans September air wash over her skin.
Lindsay looked at her legs with surprise—it had not occurred to him that Nina owned such a long and shapely pair. He whistled softly through his teeth.
Nina removed her smoke, sighed and made a move to stand up and let her coverall fall back over the exposed limbs. Lindsay said, “Not on my account—please! Those are the first good looking legs I’ve seen since leaving Mars.”
“Watch yourself, boss,” said Nina and indulged in a slow half-smile. Then, putting her feet back on the floor, “You certainly lost a lot of friends and disinfluenced a lot of people down there today. If you’d prepared your speech on the machine I’d have fixed it up for you.”
“Which is exactly why I prepared it in my hot little head,” Lindsay told her. “I wanted to knock some sense into them.”
Nina got out of her chair and snuffed out her cigarette in the disposal tray, then sat on the edge of the desk and poked at the untidy dark-blonde hair she wore in a knot on top of her head. She said, “Night soil! You’ll never knock any sense into that mob.”
Lindsay, who had been thinking wistfully that if Nina would only do something about that hair, the thickness of her middle, and her bilious complexion, she might be fairly good looking, blinked. He said, “Why in hell do you work for them then?”
The 31st Golden Age of Science Fiction Page 4