by Fritz Leiber
As the slideway whisked him gently along the corridor toward his apartment, Jorj was thinking of his spaceship. For a moment the silver-winged vision crowded everything else out of his mind.
Just think, a spaceship with sails! He smiled a bit, marveling at the paradox.
Direct atomic power. Direct utilization of the force of the flying neutrons. No more ridiculous business of using a reactor to drive a steam engine, or boil off something for a jet exhaust—processes that were as primitive and wasteful as burning gunpowder to keep yourself warm.
Chemical jets would carry his spaceship above the atmosphere. Then would come the thrilling order, “Set sail for Mars!” The vast umbrella would unfold and open out around the stern, its rear or Earthward side a gleaming expanse of radioactive ribbon perhaps only an atom thick and backed with a material that would reflect neutrons. Atoms in the ribbon would split, blasting neutrons astern at fantastic velocities. Reaction would send the spaceship hurtling forward.
In airless space, the expanse of sails would naturally not retard the ship. More radioactive ribbon, manufactured as needed in the ship itself, would feed out onto the sail as that already there became exhausted.
A spaceship with direct nuclear drive—and he, a Thinker, had conceived it completely except for the technical details! Having strengthened his mind by hard years of somno-learning, mind-casting, memory-straightening, and sensory training, he had assured himself of the executive power to control the technicians and direct their specialized abilities. Together they would build the true Mars rocket.
But that would only be a beginning. They would build the true Mind Bomb. They would build the true Selective Microbe Slayer. They would discover the true laws of ESP and the inner life. They would even—his imagination hesitated a moment, then strode boldly forward—build the true Maizie!
And then…then the Thinkers would be on even terms with the scientists. Rather, they’d be far ahead. No more deception.
He was so exalted by this thought that he almost let the slideway carry him past his door. He stepped inside and called, “Caddy!” He waited a moment, then walked through the apartment, but she wasn’t there.
* * * *
Confound the girl, he couldn’t help thinking. This morning, when she should have made herself scarce, she’d sprawled about sleeping. Now, when he felt like seeing her, when her presence would have added a pleasant final touch to his glowing mood, she chose to be absent. He really should use his hypnotic control on her, he decided, and again there sprang into his mind the word—a pet form of her name—that would send her into obedient trance.
No, he told himself again, that was to be reserved for some moment of crisis or desperate danger, when he would need someone to strike suddenly and unquestioningly for himself and mankind. Caddy was merely a wilful and rather silly girl, incapable at present of understanding the tremendous tensions under which he operated. When he had time for it, he would train her up to be a fitting companion without hypnosis.
Yet the fact of her absence had a subtly disquieting effect. It shook his perfect self-confidence just a fraction. He asked himself if he’d been wise in summoning the rocket physicists without consulting Tregarron.
But this mood, too, he conquered quickly. Tregarron wasn’t his boss, but just the Thinker’s most clever salesman, an expert in the mumbo-jumbo so necessary for social control in this chaotic era. He himself, Jorj Helmuth, was the real leader in theoretics and all-over strategy, the mind behind the mind behind Maizie.
He stretched himself on the bed, almost instantly achieved maximum relaxation, turned on the somno-learner, and began the two hour rest he knew would be desirable before the big conference.
* * * *
Jan Tregarron had supplemented his shorts with pink coveralls, but he was still drinking beer. He emptied his glass and lifted it a lazy inch. The beautiful girl beside him refilled it without a word and went on stroking his forehead.
“Caddy,” he said reflectively, without looking at her, “there’s a little job I want you to do. You’re the only one with the proper background. The point is: it will take you away from Jorj for some time.”
“I’d welcome it,” she said with decision. “I’m getting pretty sick of watching his push-ups and all his other mind and muscle stunts. And that damn somno-learner of his keeps me awake.”
Tregarron smiled. “I’m afraid Thinkers make pretty sad sweethearts.”
“Not all of them,” she told him, returning his smile tenderly.
He chuckled. “It’s about one of those rocket physicists in the list you brought me. A fellow named Willard Farquar.”
Caddy didn’t say anything, but she stopped stroking his forehead.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You knew him once, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she replied and then added, with surprising feeling, “The big, ugly ape!”
“Well, he’s an ape whose services we happen to need. I want you to be our contact girl with him.”
She took her hands away from his forehead. “Look, Jan,” she said, “I wouldn’t like this job.”
“I thought he was very sweet on you once.”
“Yes, as he never grew tired of trying to demonstrate to me. The clumsy, overgrown, bumbling baby! The man’s disgusting, Jan. His approach to a woman is a child wanting candy and enraged because Mama won’t produce it on the instant. I don’t mind Jorj—he’s just a pipsqueak and it amuses me to see how he frustrates himself. But Willard is.…”
“…a bit frightening?” Tregarron finished for her.
“No!”
“Of course you’re not afraid,” Tregarron purred. “You’re our beautiful, clever Caddy, who can do anything she wants with any man, and without whose.…”
“Look, Jan, this is different—” she began agitatedly.
“…and without whose services we’d have got exactly nowhere. Clever, subtle Caddy, whose most charming attainment in the ever-appreciative eyes of Papa Jan is her ability to handle every man in the neatest way imaginable and without a trace of real feeling. Kitty Kaddy, who.…”
“Very well,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll do it.”
“Of course you will,” Jan said, drawing her hands back to his forehead. “And you’ll begin right away by getting into your nicest sugar-and-cream war clothes. You and I are going to be the welcoming committee when that ape arrives this afternoon.”
“But what about Jorj? He’ll want to see Willard.”
“That’ll be taken care of,” Jan assured her.
“And what about the other dozen rocket physicists Jorj asked to come?”
“Don’t worry about them.”
* * * *
The President looked inquiringly at his secretary across his littered desk in his homey study at White House, Jr. “So Opperly didn’t have any idea how that odd question about Maizie turned up in Section Five?”
His secretary settled his paunch and shook his head. “Or claimed not to. Perhaps he’s just the absent-minded prof, perhaps something else. The old feud of the physicists against the Thinkers may be getting hot again. There’ll be further investigation.”
The President nodded. He obviously had something uncomfortable on his mind. He said uneasily, “Do you think there’s any possibility of it being true?”
“What?” asked the secretary guardedly.
“That peculiar hint about Maizie.”
The secretary said nothing.
“Mind you, I don’t think there is,” the President went on hurriedly, his face assuming a sorrowful scowl. “I owe a lot to the Thinkers, both as a private person and as a public figure. Lord, a man has to lean on something these days. But just supposing it were true—” he hesitated, as before uttering blasphemy—“that there was a man inside Maizie, what could we do?”
The secretary said stolidly, “The Thinkers won our last election. They chased the Commies out of Iran. We brought them into the Inner Cabinet. We’ve showered them with public funds.” He paused. �
�We couldn’t do a damn thing.”
The President nodded with equal conviction, and, not very happily, summed up: “So if anyone should go up against the Thinkers—and I’m afraid I wouldn’t want to see that happen, whatever’s true—it would have to be a scientist.”
* * * *
Willard Farquar felt his weight change the steps under his feet into an escalator. He cursed under his breath, but let them carry him, a defiant hulk, up to the tall and mystic blue portals, which silently parted when he was five meters away. The escalator changed to a slideway and carried him into a softly gleaming, high-domed room rather like the antechamber of a temple.
“Martian peace to you, Willard Farquar,” an invisible voice intoned. “You have entered the Thinkers’ Foundation. Please remain on the slideway.”
“I want to see Jorj Helmuth,” Willard growled loudly.
The slideway carried him into the mouth of a corridor and paused. A dark opening dilated on the wall. “May we take your hat and coat?” a voice asked politely. After a moment the request was repeated, with the addition of, “Just pass them through.”
Willard scowled, then fought his way out of his shapeless coat and passed it and his hat through in a lump. Instantly the opening contracted, imprisoning his wrists, and he felt his hands being washed on the other side of the wall.
He gave a great jerk which failed to free his hands from the snugly padded gyves. “Do not be alarmed,” the voice advised him. “It is only an esthetic measure. As your hands are laved, invisible radiations are slaughtering all the germs in your body, while more delicate emanations are producing a benign rearrangement of your emotions.”
The rather amateurish curses Willard was gritting between his teeth became more sulfurous. His sensations told him that a towel of some sort was being applied to his hands. He wondered if he would be subjected to a face-washing and even greater indignities. Then, just before his wrists were released, he felt—for a moment only, but unmistakably—the soft touch of a girl’s hand.
That touch, like the mysterious sweet chink of a bell in darkness, brought him a sudden feeling of excitement, wonder.
Yet the feeling was as fleeting as that caused by a lurid advertisement, for as the slideway began to move again, carrying him past a series of depth-pictures and inscriptions celebrating the Thinkers’ achievements, his mood of bitter exasperation returned doubled. This place, he told himself, was a plague spot of the disease of magic in an enfeebled and easily infected world. He reminded himself that he was not without resources—the Thinkers must fear or need him, whether because of the Maelzel question or the necessity of producing a nuclear power spaceship. He felt his determination to smash them reaffirmed.
* * * *
The slideway, having twice turned into an escalator, veered toward an opalescent door, which opened as silently as the one below. The slideway stopped at the threshold. Momentum carried him a couple of steps into the room. He stopped and looked around.
The place was a sybarite’s modernistic dream. Sponge-carpeting thick as a mattress and topped with down. Hassocks and couches that looked butter-soft. A domed ceiling of deep glossy blue mimicking the night sky, with the constellations tooled in silver. A wall of niches crammed with statuettes of languorous men, women, beasts. A self-service bar with a score of golden spigots. A depth-TV-screen simulating a great crystal ball. Here and there barbaric studs of hammered gold that might have been push-buttons. A low table set for three with exquisite ware of crystal and gold. An ever-changing scent of resins and flowers.
A smiling fat man clad in pearl gray sports clothes came through one of the curtained archways. Willard recognized Jan Tregarron from his pictures, but did not at once offer to speak to him. Instead he let his gaze wander with an ostentatious contempt around the crammed walls, take in the bar and the set table with its many wine glasses, and finally return to his host.
“And where,” he asked with harsh irony, “are the dancing girls?”
The fat man’s eyebrows rose. “In there,” he said innocently, indicating the second archway. The curtains parted.
“Oh, I am sorry,” the fat man apologized. “There seems to be only one on duty. I hope that isn’t too much at variance with your tastes.”
She stood in the archway, demure and lovely in an off-the-bosom frock of pale blue skylon edged in mutated mink. She was smiling the first smile that Willard had ever had from her lips.
“Mr. Willard Farquar,” the fat man murmured, “Miss Arkady Simms.”
* * * *
Jorj Helmuth turned from the conference table with its dozen empty chairs to the two mousily pretty secretaries.
“No word from the door yet, Master,” one of them ventured to say.
Jorj twisted in his chair, though hardly uncomfortably, since it was a beautiful pneumatic job. His nervousness at having to face the twelve rocket physicists—a feeling which, he had to admit, had been unexpectedly great—was giving way to impatience.
“What’s Willard Farquar’s phone?” he asked sharply.
One of the secretaries ran through a clutch of desk tapes, then spent some seconds whispering into her throat-mike and listening to answers from the soft-speaker.
“He lives with Morton Opperly, who doesn’t have one,” she finally told Jorj in scandalized tones.
“Let me see the list,” Jorj said. Then, after a bit, “Try Dr. Welcome’s place.”
This time there were results. Within a quarter of a minute he was handed a phone which he hung expertly on his shoulder.
“This is Dr. Asa Welcome,” a reedy voice told him.
“This is Helmuth of the Thinkers’ Foundation,” Jorj said icily. “Did you get my communication?”
The reedy voice became anxious and placating. “Why, yes, Mr. Helmuth, I did. Very glad to get it too. Sounded most interesting. Very eager to come. But.…”
“Yes?”
“Well, I was just about to hop in my ‘copter—my son’s ‘copter—when the other note came.”
“What other note?”
“Why, the note calling the meeting off.”
“I sent no other note!”
The other voice became acutely embarrassed. “But I considered it to be from you…or just about the same thing. I really think I had the right to assume that.”
“How was it signed?” Jorj rapped.
“Mr. Jan Tregarron.”
Jorj broke the connection. He didn’t move until a low sound shattered his abstraction and he realized that one of the girls was whispering a call to the door. He handed back the phone and dismissed them. They went in a rustle of jackets and skirtlets, hesitating at the doorway but not quite daring to look back.
He sat motionless a minute longer. Then his hand crept fretfully onto the table and pushed a button. The room darkened and a long section of wall became transparent, revealing a dozen silvery models of spaceships, beautifully executed. He quickly touched another; the models faded and the opposite wall bloomed with an animated cartoon that portrayed with charming humor and detail the designing and construction of a neutron-drive spaceship. A third button, and a depth-picture of deep star-speckled space opened behind the cartoon, showing a section of Earth’s surface and in the far distance the tiny ruddy globe of Mars. Slowly a tiny rocket rose from the section of Earth and spread its silvery sails.
* * * *
He switched off the pictures, keeping the room dark. By a faint table light he dejectedly examined his organizational charts for the neutron-drive project, the long list of books he had boned up on by somno-learning, the concealed table of physical constants and all sorts of other crucial details about rocket physics—a cleverly condensed encyclopedic “pony” to help out his memory on technical points that might have arisen in his discussion with the experts.
He switched out all the lights and slumped forward, blinking his eyes and trying to swallow the lump in his throat. In the dark his memory went seeping back, back, to the day when his math teacher had told him
, very superciliously, that the marvelous fantasies he loved to read and hoarded by his bed weren’t real science at all, but just a kind of lurid pretense. He had so wanted to be a scientist, and the teacher’s contempt had cast a damper on his ambition.
And now that the conference was canceled, would he ever know that it wouldn’t have turned out the same way today? That his somno-learning hadn’t taken? That his “pony” wasn’t good enough? That his ability to handle people extended only to credulous farmer Presidents and mousy girls in skirtlets? Only the test of meeting the experts would have answered those questions.
Tregarron was the one to blame! Tregarron with his sly tyrannical ways, Tregarron with his fear of losing the future to men who really understood theoretics and could handle experts. Tregarron, so used to working by deception that he couldn’t see when it became a fault and a crime. Tregarron, who must now be shown the light…or, failing that, against whom certain steps must be taken.
For perhaps half an hour Jorj sat very still, thinking. Then he turned to the phone and, after some delay, got his party.
“What is it now, Jorj?” Caddy asked impatiently. “Please don’t bother me with any of your moods, because I’m tired and my nerves are on edge.”
He took a breath. When steps may have to be taken, he thought, one must hold an agent in readiness. “Caddums,” he intoned hypnotically, vibrantly. “Caddums.…”
The voice at the other end had instantly changed, become submissive, sleepy, suppliant.
“Yes, Master?”
* * * *
Morton Opperly looked up from the sheet of neatly penned equations at Willard Farquar, who had somehow acquired a measure of poise. He neither lumbered restlessly nor grimaced. He removed his coat with a certain dignity and stood solidly before his mentor. He smiled. Granting that he was a bear, one might guess he had just been fed.
“You see?” he said. “They didn’t hurt me.”
“They didn’t hurt you?” Opperly asked softly.
Willard slowly shook his head. His smile broadened.
Opperly put down his pen, folded his hands. “And you’re as determined as ever to expose and smash the Thinkers?”
