The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy
Page 13
Some real estate agents evidently had been drawn into the whirlpool early, along with their ideas. The slum improvement plans began to blossom and take on a tinge of real estate planning later in the month.
The first day of the sixth month, a big two-page spread appeared in the local paper of a mass meeting which had approved a full-fledged scheme for slum clearance of Watashaw’s shack-town section, plus plans for rehousing, civic building, and rezoning. And good prospects for attracting some new industries to the town, industries which had already been contacted and seemed interested by the privileges offered.
And with all this, an arrangement for securing and distributing to the club members alone most of the profit that would come to the town in the form of a rise in the price of building sites and a boom in the building industry. The profit distributing arrangement was the same one that had been built into the organization plan for the distribution of the small profits of membership fees and honorary promotions. It was becoming an openly profitable business. Membership was rising more rapidly now.
By the second week of the sixth month, news appeared in the local paper that the club had filed application to incorporate itself as the Watashaw Mutual Trade and Civic Development Corporation, and all the local real estate promoters had finished joining en masse. The Mutual Trade part sounded to me as if the Chamber of Commerce was on the point of being pulled in with them, ideas, ambitions and all.
I chuckled while reading the next page of the paper, on which a local politician was reported as having addressed the club with a long flowery oration on their enterprise, charity, and civic spirit. He had been made an honorary member. If he allowed himself to be made a full member with its contractual obligations and its lures, if the politicians went into this too…
I laughed, filing the newspaper with the other documents on the Watashaw test. These proofs would fascinate any businessman with the sense to see where his bread was buttered. A businessman is constantly dealing with organizations, including his own, and finding them either inert, cantankerous, or both. Caswell’s formula could be a handle to grasp them with. Gratitude alone would bring money into the university in carload lots.
The end of the sixth month came. The test was over and the end reports were spectacular. Caswell’s formulas were proven to the hilt.
After reading the last newspaper reports, I called him up.
“Perfect, Wilt, perfect! I can use this Watashaw thing to get you so many fellowships and scholarships and grants for your department that you’ll think it’s snowing money!”
He answered somewhat disinterestedly, “I’ve been busy working with students on their research papers and marking tests—not following the Watashaw business at all, I’m afraid. You say the demonstration went well and you’re satisfied?”
He was definitely putting on a chill. We were friends now, but obviously he was still peeved whenever he was reminded that I had doubted that his theory could work. And he was using its success to rub my nose in the realization that I had been wrong. A man with a string of degrees after his name is just as human as anyone else. I had needled him pretty hard that first time.
“I’m satisfied,” I acknowledged. “I was wrong. The formulas work beautifully. Come over and see my file of documents on it if you want a boost for your ego. Now let’s see the formula for stopping it.”
He sounded cheerful again. “I didn’t complicate that organization with negatives. I wanted it to grow. It falls apart naturally when it stops growing for more than two months. It’s like the great stock boom before an economic crash. Everyone in it is prosperous as long as the prices just keep going up and new buyers come into the market, but they all knew what would happen if it stopped growing. You remember, we built in as one of the incentives that the members know they are going to lose if membership stops growing. Why, if I tried to stop it now, they’d cut my throat.”
I remembered the drive and frenzy of the crowd in the one early meeting I had seen. They probably would.
“No,” he continued. “We’ll just let it play out to the end of its tether and die of old age.”
“When will that be?”
“It can’t grow past the female population of the town. There are only so many women in Watashaw, and some of them don’t like sewing.”
The graph on the desk before me began to look sinister. Surely Caswell must have made some provision for—
“You underestimate their ingenuity,” I said into the phone. “Since they wanted to expand, they didn’t stick to sewing. They went from general charity to social welfare schemes to something that’s pretty close to an incorporated government. The name is now the Watashaw Mutual Trade and Civic Development Corporation, and they’re filing an application to change it to Civic Property Pool and Social Dividend, membership contractual, open to all. That social dividend sounds like a Technocrat climbed on the band wagon, eh?”
While I spoke, I carefully added another red star to the curve above the thousand members level, checking with the newspaper that still lay open on my desk. The curve was definitely some sort of log curve now, growing more rapidly with each increase.
“Leaving out practical limitations for a moment, where does the formula say it will stop?” I asked.
“When you run out of people to join it. But after all, there are only so many people in Watashaw. It’s a pretty small town.”
“They’ve opened a branch office in New York,” I said carefully into the phone, a few weeks later.
With my pencil, very carefully, I extended the membership curve from where it was then.
After the next doubling, the curve went almost straight up and off the page.
Allowing for a lag of contagion from one nation to another, depending on how much their citizens intermingled, I’d give the rest of the world about twelve years.
There was a long silence while Caswell probably drew the same graph in his own mind. Then he laughed weakly. “Well, you asked me for a demonstration.”
That was as good an answer as any. We got together and had lunch in a bar, if you can call it lunch. The movement we started will expand by hook or by crook, by seduction or by bribery or by propaganda or by conquest, but it will expand. And maybe a total world government will be a fine thing—until it hits the end of its rope in twelve years or so.
What happens then, I don’t know.
But I don’t want anyone to pin that on me. From now on, if anyone asks me, I’ve never heard of Watashaw.
Incommunicado
“Kinetics expert” is what they called Cliff Baker.
At the sixth hour of the fourth week of Pluto Station project he had nothing more to worry about than a fragment of tune which would not finish itself. Cliff floated out of the master control room whistling softly and looking for something to do.
A snatch of Smitty’s discordant voice raised in song came from a hatch as he passed. Cliff changed direction and dove through into the darkness of a glassite dome. A rubbery crossbar stopped him at the glowing control panel.
“Take a break, Smitty. Let me take over for a while.”
“Hi, chief,” said Smitty, his hands moving deftly at the panel. “Thanks. How come you can spare the time? Is the rest of the circus so smooth? No emergencies, everything on schedule?”
“Like clockwork,” said Cliff. “Knock wood.” He crossed fingers for luck and solemnly rapped his skull. “Take a half hour, but keep your earphones tuned in case something breaks.”
“Sure.” Smitty gave Cliff a slap on the shoulder and shoved off. “Watch yourself now. Look out for the psychologist.” His laugh echoed back from the corridor.
Cliff laughed in answer. Obviously Smitty had seen the new movie, too. Ten minutes later when the psychologist came in, Cliff was still grinning. The movie had been laid in a deep-space construction project that was apparently intended to represent Pluto Station project, and it had been commanded by a movie version of Cliff and Mike; Cliff acted by a burly silent character carrying
a heavy, unidentified tool, and Mike Cohen of the silver tongue by a handsome young actor in a wavy pale wig. In this version they were both bachelors and wasted much time in happy pursuit of a gorgeous blonde.
The blonde was supposed to be the visiting psychologist sent up by Spaceways. She was a master personality who could hypnotize with a glance, a sorceress who could produce mass hallucinations with a gesture. She wound up saving the Earth from Cliff. He was supposed to have been subtly and insanely arranging the Pluto Station orbit, so that when it was finished it would leave Pluto and fall on Earth like a bomb.
Cliff had been watching the movie through an eyepiece-earphone rig during a rest period, but he laughed so much he fell out of his hammock and tangled himself in guide lines, and the others on the rest shift had given up trying to sleep and decided to play the movie on the big projector. They would be calling in on the earphones about it soon, kidding him.
He grinned, listening to the psychologist without subtracting from the speed and concentration of handling the control panel. Out in space before the ship, working as deftly as a distant pair of hands, the bulldog construction units unwrapped floating bundles of parts, spun, pulled, magnetized, fitted, welded, assembling another complex perfect segment of the huge Pluto Station.
“I’d like to get back to Earth,” said the psychologist in a soft tenor voice that was faintly Irish, like a younger brother of Mike. “Look, Cliff, you’re top man in this line. You can plot me a short cut, can’t you?” The psychologist, Roy Pierce, was a slender dark Polynesian who seemed less than twenty years old. During his stay he had floated around watching with all the innocent awe of a tourist, and proved his profession only in an ingratiating skill with jokes. Yet he was extremely likeable, and seemed familiar in some undefinable way, as if one had known him all his life.
“Why not use the astrogator?” Cliff asked him mildly.
“Blast the astrogator! All it gives is courses that swing around the whole rim of the System and won’t get me home for weeks!”
“It doesn’t have to do that,” Cliff said thoughtfully. The segment was finished. He set the controls of the bulldogs to guide it to the next working sector and turned around, lining up factors in his mind. “Why not stick around? Maybe someone will develop a split personality for you.”
“My wife is having a baby,” Pierce explained. “I promised I’d be there. Besides, I want to help educate it through the first year. There are certain things a baby can learn that make a difference later.”
“Are you willing to spend four days in the acceleration tank just to go down and pester your poor kid?” Cliff floated over to a celestial sphere and idly spun it back and forth through the planetary positions of the month.
“Of course.”
“O.K. I think I see a short cut. It’s a little risky, and the astrogator is inhibited against risk. I’ll tell you later.”
“You’re stalling,” complained Pierce, yanking peevishly at a bending crossbar. “You’re the expert who keeps the orbits of three thousand flying skew bodies tied in fancy knots, and here I want just a simple orbit for one little flitter. You could tell me now.”
Cliff laughed. “You exaggerate, kid. I’m only half the expert. Mike is the other half. Like two halves of a stage horse. I can see a course that I could take myself, but it has to go on automatic tapes for you. Mike can tell me if he can make a computer see it, too. If he can, you’ll leave in an hour.”
Pierce brightened. “I’ll go pack. Excuse me, Cliff.”
As Pierce shoved off towards the hatch, Mike Cohen came in, wearing a spacesuit unzipped and flapping at the cuffs, talking as easily as if he had not stopped since the last conversation. “Did you see the new movie during rest shift, Cliff? That hulking lout who played yourself—” Mike smiled maliciously at Pierce as they passed in the semi-dark. “Hi, Kid. Speaking of acts, who were you this time?”
“Michael E. Cohen,” said the youth, as he floated out. He looked back to see Mike’s expression and before shoving from sight added maliciously, “I always pick the character for whom my subject has developed the greatest shock tolerance.”
“Ouch!” Mike murmured. “But I hope I have no such edged tongue as that.” He gripped a crossbar and swung to a stop before Cliff. “The boy is a chameleon,” he said, half admiringly. “But I wonder has he any personality of his own.”
Cliff said flatly, “I like him.”
Mike raised his villainous black eyebrows and spread his hands, a plaintive note coming into his voice. “Don’t we all? It is his business to be liked. But who is it that we like? These mirror trained sensitives—”
“He’s a nice honest kid,” Cliff said. Outside, the constructor units flew up to the dome and buzzed around in circles waiting for control. Another bundle of parts from the asteroid belt foundry began to float by. Hastily Cliff seized a pencil and scrawled a diagram on a sheet of paper, then returned to the controls. “He wants to go back to Earth. Could you tape that course? It cuts air for a sling turn at Venus.”
An hour later Mike and Cliff escorted the psychologist to his ship and inserted the control tapes with words of fatherly advice.
Mike said cheerfully: “You will be running across uncharted space with no blinker buoys with the rocks, so you had better stay in the shock tank and pray.”
And Cliff said cheerfully, “If you get off course below Mars, don’t bother signalling for help. You’re sunk.”
“You know, Cliff,” Mike said, “too many people get cooked that way. Maybe we should do something.”
“How about Mercury?”
“Just the thing, Cliff. Listen, Kid, don’t worry. If you fall into the Sun, we’ll build a rescue station on Mercury and name it after you.”
A warning bell rang from the automatics, and the two pushed out through the air lock into space with Cliff protesting. “That’s not it. About Mercury I meant—”
“Hear the man complaining,” Mike interrupted. “And what would you do without me around to finish your sentences for you?”
Eight hours later Mike was dead. Some pilot accidentally ran his ship out of the assigned lanes and left the ionized gas of his jets to drift across a sector of space where Mike and three assistants were setting up the nucleus of the station power plant.
They were binding in high velocities with fields that put a heavy drain on the power plants of distant ships. They were working behind schedule, working fast, and using space gaps for insulation.
When the ionized gas drifted in everything arced.
The busy engineers in all the ring of asteroids and metalwork that circled Pluto saw a distant flash that filled their earphones with a howl of static, and at the central power plants certain dials registered a sudden intolerable drain, and safety relays quietly cut off power from that sector. Binding fields vanished and circular velocities straightened out. As the intolerable blue flash faded, dull red pieces of metal bulleted out from the damaged sector and were lost in space. The remainder of the equipment began to drift in aimless collisions.
Quietly the emergency calls came into the earphones of all sleeping men, dragging them yawning from their hammocks to begin the long delicate job of charting and rebalancing the great assembly spiral.
One of the stray pieces charted was an eighty-foot asteroid nugget that Mike was known to have been working on. It was falling irrevocably towards Pluto. For a time a searchlight glinted over fused and twisted metal which had been equipment, but it came no closer and presently was switched out, leaving the asteroid to darkness.
The damage, when fully counted, was bad enough to require the rebalancing of the entire work schedule for the remaining months of the project: subtracting the work hours of four men and all work on the power plant that had been counted done; a rewriting of an intricate mathematical jigsaw puzzle of hours; skills; limited fuel and power factors; tools; and heavy parts coming up with inexorable inertia from the distant sunward orbits where they had been launched over a year ago.
He gave only a few general directions after that, working rapidly while he talked over the phone as though trying to straighten everything singlehanded. He gave brief instructions on diverting the next swarm of parts and rocks coming up from the asteroid belt foundries, and then he swung his small tug in a pretzel loop around Pluto that tangented away from the planet in the opposite direction from Pluto’s orbital swing. The ship was no longer in a solar orbit at balance, solar gravity gripped it smoothly and it began to fall in steady acceleration.
“Going to Station A,” Cliff explained over the general phone before he fell out of beam range. “I’m in a hurry.”
The scattered busy engineers nodded, remembering that as a good kinetics man Cliff could jockey a ship through the solar system at maximum speed. They did not wonder why he dared leave them without coordination, for every man of them was sure that in a pinch, maybe with the help of a few anti-sleep and think-quick tablets, he could fill Cliff’s boots. They only wondered why he did not pick one of them to be his partner, or why he did not tape a fast course and send someone else for the man.
When he was out of beam range a solution was offered. “Survival of the fittest,” said Smitty over the general phone. “Either you can keep track of everything at once or you can’t. There is no halfway in this coordination game, and no one can help. My bet is that Cliff has just gone down to see his family, and when he gets back he’ll pick the man he finds in charge.”