by Tom Boardman
“You’re doing fine.”
“To date we have established foot-hold on forty-two planets without ever having to combat other than primitive life. We may find foes worthy of our strength on the forty-third world whenever that is discovered. Who knows? Let us assume for the sake of argument that intelligent life exists on one in every forty-three inhabitable planets.”
“Where does that get us?” Hillder prompted.
“I would imagine,” said Mordafa thoughtfully, “that the experience of making contact with at least six intelligent life-forms would be necessary to enable you to evolve techniques for dealing with their like elsewhere. Therefore your kind must have discovered and explored not less than two-hundred-fifty worlds. That is an estimate in minimum terms. The correct figure may well be that stated by you.”
“And I am not a consistent liar?” asked Hillder, grinning.
“That is beside the point if only our leaders would hold on to sanity long enough to see it. You may have distorted or exaggerated for purposes of your own. If so, there is nothing we can do about it. The prime fact holds fast, namely, that your spaee-venturings must be far more extensive than ours. Hence you must be older, more advanced, and numerically stronger.”
“That’s logical enough,” conceded Hillder, broadening his grin.
“Now don’t start on me,” pleaded Mordafa. “If you fool me with an intriguing fallacy I won’t rest until I get it straight. And that will do either of us no good.”
“Ah, so your intention is to do me good?”
“Somebody has to make a decision seeing that the top brass is no longer capable of it. I am going to suggest that they set you free with our best wishes and assurances of friendship.”
“Think they’ll take any notice?”
“You know quite well they will. You’ve been counting on it all along.” Mordafa eyed him shrewdly. “They’ll grab at the advice to restore their self-esteem. If it works, they’ll take the credit. If it doesn’t, I’ll get the blame.” He brooded a few seconds, asked with open curiosity, “Do you find it the same elsewhere, among other peoples?”
“Exactly the same,” Hillder assured. “And there is always a Mordafa to settle the issue in the same way. Power and scapegoats go together like husband and wife.”
“I’d like to meet my alien counterparts some day,” Getting up, he moved to the door. “If I had not come along how long would you have waited for your psychological mixture to congeal?”
“Until another of your type chipped in. If one doesn’t arrive of his own accord the powers-that-be lose patience and drag one in. The catalyst mined from its own kind. Authority lives by eating its vitals.”
“That is putting it paradoxically,” Mordafa observed, making it sound a mild reproof. He went away.
Hillder stood behind the door and gazed through the bars in its top half. The pair of guards leaned against the opposite wall and stared back.
With amiable pleasantness, he said to them, “No cat has eight tails. Every cat has one tail more than no cat. Therefore every cat has nine tails.”
They screwed up their eyes and scowled.
Quite an impressive deputation took him back to the ship. All the four hundred were there, about a quarter of them resplendent in uniforms, the rest in their Sunday best. An armed guard juggled guns at barked command, Kadina made an unctuous speech full of brotherly love and the glorious shape of things to come. Somebody presented a bouquet of evil-smelling weeds and Hillder made mental note of the difference in olfactory senses.
Climbing eighty yards to the lock, Hillder looked down. Kadina waved an officious farewell. The crowd chanted, “Hurrah!” in conducted rhythm. He blew his nose on a handkerchief, that being deflatory gesture number nine, closed the lock, sat at the control-board.
Tubes fired into a low roar. A cloud of vapour climbed around and sprinkled ground-dirt over the mob. That touch was involuntary and not recorded in the book. A pity, he thought. Everything ought to be listed. We should be systematic about such things. The showering of dirt should he duly noted under the heading of the spaceman’s farewell.
The ship snored into the sky, left the Vard-world far behind. He remained at the controls until free of the entire system’s gravitational field. Then he headed for the beacon-area and locked the auto-pilot on that course.
For a while he sat gazing meditatively into star-spangled darkness. After a while he sighed, made notes in his log-book.
“Cube K49, Sector 10, solar-grade D7, third planet. Name Vard. Life-form named Vards, cosmic intelligence rating BB, space-going, forty-two colonies. Comment: softened up.”
He glanced over his tiny library fastened to a steel bulkhead. Two tomes were missing. They had swiped the two that were replete with diagrams and illustrations. They had left the rest, having no Rosetta Stone with which to translate cold print. They hadn’t touched the nearest volume titled: Diabologic, the Science of Driving People Nuts.
Sighing again, he took paper from a drawer, commenced his hundredth, two-hundredth, or maybe three-hundredth try at concocting an Aleph number higher than A, but lower than C. He mauled his hair until it stuck out in spikes and although he didn’t know it he did not look especially well-balanced himself.
J. T. McIntosh
Made in U.S.A.
1
Not a soul watched as Roderick Liffcom carried his bride across the threshold. They were just a couple of nice, good-looking kids—Roderick a psychologist and Alison an ex-copywriter. They weren’t news yet. There was nothing to hint that in a few days the name of Liffcom would be known to almost everyone in the world, the tag on a case which interested everybody. Not everyone would follow a murder case, a graft case, or an espionage case. But everyone would follow the Liffcom case.
Let’s have a good look at them while we have the chance, before the mobs surround them. Roderick was big and strong enough to treat his wife’s 115 pounds with contempt, but there was no contempt in the way he held her. He carried her as if she were a million dollars in small bills and there was a strong wind blowing. He looked down at her with his heart in his eyes. He had black hair and brown eyes and one could see at a glance that he could have carried any girl he liked over the threshold.
Alison nestled in his arms like a kitten, eyes half-closed with rapture, arms about his neck. She was blonde and had fantastically beautiful eyes, not to mention the considerable claims to notice of her other features. But even at first glance one would know that there was more to Alison than beauty. It might be brains, or courage, or hard, bitter experience that had tempered her keen as steel One could see at a glance that she could have been carried over the threshold by any man she liked.
As they went in, it was the end of a story. But let’s be different and call it the beginning.
In the morning, when they were at breakfast on the terrace, the picture hadn’t changed radically. That is, Roderick was rather different, blue-chinned and sleepy-eyed and in a brown flannel bathrobe, and Alison was more spectacularly different in a pale green negligee that wasn’t so much worn as wafted about. But the way they looked at each other hadn’t changed remotely—then.
“There’s something,” remarked Alison casually, tracing patterns on the damask tablecloth with one slim finger, “that perhaps I ought to tell you.”
Two minutes later they were fighting for the phone.
“I want to call my lawyer,” Roderick bellowed.
“I want to call my lawyer,” Alison retorted.
He paused, the number half dialled. “You can’t,” he told her roughly, “It’s the same lawyer.”
She recovered herself first, as she always had. She smiled sunnily. “Shall we toss a coin for him?” she suggested.
“No,” said Roderick brutally. Where, oh, where was his great blinding love? “He’s mine. I pay him more than you ever could.”
“Right,” agreed Alison. “I’ll fight the case myself.”
“So will I,” Roderick exclaimed and slammed
the receiver down. Instantly he picked it up again. “No, we’ll need him to get things moving.”
“Collusion?” asked Alison sweetly.
“It was a low, mean, stinking, dirty, cattish, obscene, disgusting, filthy-minded thing to wait until…”
“Until what?” Alison asked with more innocence than one would have thought there was in the world.
“Android!” he spat viciously at her.
Despite herself, her eyes flashed with anger.
2
The newspapers not only mentioned it, they said it at the top of their voices: human sues android for divorce. It wasn’t much of a headline, for one naturally wondered why a human suing an android for divorce should rate a front-page story. After all, half the population of the world was android.
Every day humans divorced humans, humans androids, androids humans, and androids androids. The natural reaction to a headline like that was: “So what? Who cares?”
But it didn’t need particular intelligence to realize that there must be something rather special about this case.
The report ran:
Everton, Tuesday. History is made today in the first human vs. android divorce case since the recent grant of full legal equality to androids. It is also the first case of a divorce sought on the grounds that one contracting party did not know the other was an android. This became possible only because the equality law made it no longer obligatory to disclose android origin in any contract.
Recognizing the importance of this test case, certain to affect millions in the future. Twenty-four Hours will cover the case, which opens on Friday, in meticulous detail. Ace reporters Anona Grier and Walter Hallsmith will bring to our readers the whole story of this historic trial. Grier is human and Hallsmith android…
The report went on to give such details as the names of the people in this important test case, and remarked incidentally that although the Liffcom marriage had lasted only ten hours and thirteen minutes before the divorce plea was entered, there had been even briefer marriages recorded.
Twenty-four Hours thus adroitly obviated thousands of letters asking breathlessly: “is this a record?”
3
Alison, back at her bachelor flat, stretched herself on a divan, focused her eyes past the ceiling on infinity, and thought and thought and thought.
She wasn’t particularly unhappy. Not for Alison were misery and resentment and wild, impossible hope. She met the tragedy of her life with placid resignation and even humour.
“Let’s face it,” she told herself firmly. “I’m hurt. I hoped he’d say, ‘it doesn’t matter. What difference could that make? It’s you I love’—the sort of thing men say in love stories. But what did he say? Dirty android.”
Oh, well. Life wasn’t like love stories or they wouldn’t just be stories.
She might as well admit for a start that she still loved him. That would clarify her feelings.
She should have told him earlier that she was an android. Perhaps he had some excuse for believing she merely waited until non-consummation was no longer grounds for divorce, and then triumphantly threw the fact that she was an android in his lap. (But what good was that supposed to do her?)
It wasn’t like that at all, of course. She hadn’t told him because they had to get to know each other before the question arose. One didn’t say the moment one was introduced to a person: “I’m married,” or “I once served five years for theft,” or “I’m an android. Are you?”
If in the first few weeks she had known Roderick, some remark had been made about androids, she’d have remarked that she was one herself. But it never had.
When he asked her to marry him, she honestly didn’t think of saying she was an android. There were times when it mattered and times when it didn’t; this seemed to be one of the latter. Roderick was so intelligent, so liberal-minded, and so easy-going (except when he lost his temper) that she didn’t think he would care.
It never did occur to her that he might care. She just mentioned it, as one might say: “I hope you don’t mind my drinking iced coffee every morning.” Well, almost. She just mentioned…
And happiness was over.
Now an idea was growing in the sad ripple of her thoughts. Did Roderick really want this divorce case, after all, or was he only trying to prove something? Because if he was, she was ready to admit cheerfully that it was proved.
She wanted Roderick. She didn’t quite understand what had happened—perhaps he would take her back on condition that he could trample on her face first. If so, that was all right. She was prepared to let him swear at her and rage at androids and work off any prejudice and hate he might have accumulated somehow, somewhere—as long as he took her back.
She reached behind her, picked up the telephone and dialled Roderick’s number.
“Hello, Roderick,” she said cheerfully. “This is Alison. No, don’t hang up. Tell me, why do you hate androids?”
There was such a long silence that she knew he was considering everything, including the advisability of hanging up without a word. It could be said of Roderick that he thought things through very carefully before going off half-cocked.
“I don’t hate androids,” he barked at last.
“You’ve got something against android girls, then?”
“No!” he shouted. “I’m a psychologist, I think comparatively straight. I’m not fouled up with race hatred and prejudice and megalomania and—”
“Then,” said Alison very quietly, “it’s just one particular android girl you hate.”
Roderick’s voice was suddenly quiet, too. “No, Alison. It has nothing to do with that. It’s just… children.”
So that was it. Alison’s eyes filled with tears. That was the one thing she could do nothing about, the thing she had refused even to consider.
“You really mean it?” she asked. “That’s not just the case you’re going to make out?”
“It’s the case I’m going to make out,” he replied, “and I mean it. Trouble is, Alison, you hit something you couldn’t have figured on. Most people want children, but are resigned to the fact that they’re not likely to get them. I was one of a family of eight. The youngest. You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that that line was pretty safe?
“Well, all the others are married. Some have been for a long time. One brother and two sisters have been married twice. That makes a total of seventeen human beings, not counting me. And their net achievement in the way of reproduction is zero.
“It’s a question of family continuity, don’t you see? I don’t think we’d mind if there was one child among the lot of us—one extension into the future. But there isn’t, and there’s only this chance left.”
Alison dropped as close to misery as she ever did. She understood every word Roderick said and what was behind every word. If she ever had a chance of having children, she wouldn’t give it up for one individual or love of one individual, either.
But then, of course, she never had it.
In the silence, Roderick hung up. Alison looked down at her own beautiful body and for once couldn’t draw a shadow of complacency or content from looking at it. Instead, it irritated her, for it would never produce a child. What was the use of all the appearance, all the mechanism of sex, without its one real function?
But it never occurred to her to give up, to let the suit go undefended. There must be something she could do, some line she could take. Winning the case was nothing, except that that might be a tiny, unimportant part of winning back Roderick.
4
The judge was a little pompous, and it was obvious from the start that under the very considerable power he had under the contract-court system, he meant to run this case in his own way and enjoy it.
He clasped his hands on the bench and looked around the packed courtroom happily. He made his introductory remarks with obvious intense satisfaction that at least fifty reporters were writing down every word.
“This has been called an important c
ase,” he said, “and it is. I could tell you why it is important, but that would not be justice. Our starting point must be this,” He wagged his head in solemn glee at the jury. “We know nothing.”
He liked that. He said it again. “We know nothing. We don’t know the factors involved. We have never heard of androids. All this and more, we have to be told. We can call on anyone anywhere for evidence. And we must make up our minds here and now, on what we are told here and now, on the rights and wrongs of this case—and on nothing else.”
He had stated his theme and he developed it. He swooped and soared; he shot away out of sight and returned like a swift raven to cast pearls before swine. For, of course, his audience was composed of swine. He didn’t say so or drop the smallest hint to that effect, but it wasn’t necessary. Only on Roderick and Alison did he cast a fatherly, friendly eye. They had given him his hour of glory. They weren’t swine.
But Judge Collier was no fool. Before he had lost the interest he had created, he was back in the courtroom, getting things moving.
“I understand,” he said, glancing from Alison to Roderick and then back at Alison, which was understandable, “that you are conducting your own cases. That will be a factor tending, towards informality, which is all to the good. First of all, will you look at the jury?”
Everyone in court looked at the jury. The jury looked at each other. In accordance with contract-court procedure, Roderick and Alison faced each other across the room, with the jury behind Alison so that they could see Roderick full-face and Alison in profile, and would know when they were lying.
“Alison Liffcom,” said the judge, “have you any objection to any member of the jury?”
Alison studied them. They were people, no more, no less. Careful police surveys produced juries that were as near genuine random groups as could reasonably be found.