I Speak for Earth

by John Brunner

  “When the selection project was instituted, I was invited to manage it. I have personally supervised the breakdown of the records concerning all of you here, and of many, many rejected candidates. Lastly, I am regarded by most authorities as being the greatest living expert in my field. I should now like you, Joe, to describe yourself to us.”

  The transition from autobiography to the last sentence took Joe by surprise. He blinked and laughed shortly.

  “Ah—well, all right. My name is Joseph Hardy Morea—Joe to my friends and practically everyone else. I’m thirty-two years old. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and went through school there; then I took a degree in engineering and physics at MIT, and after that I decided to try and get into space engineering, so I volunteered for the physical course at the North Australian Institute. I got through, and then I spent a year working on the hull-structure of Old Stormalong. I made out pretty well up there, and I turned up a few new ideas which people had contrived to overlook, and when I was sent for by Dr. Schneider I was almost through my third tour up there.”

  “Joe,” said Schneider, “I said without modesty. Please add to that.”

  Joe hesitated and shrugged. “All right,” he said after the pause. “I got the best degree of my year at MIT, and I was head of my course at North Australian. I designed the dust-piercing nose for Old Stormalong—that’s the thing that shoves interstellar dust aside while she’s still below light-speed—and pilot tests show it stands up pretty well. Just lately I figured out a way of welding metal using polarization of molecular binding forces. And for some reason till I came along no one had thought of photo-polymerizing plastics in free space—that wrinkle meant that anything shipped up from Earth could be lighter by the amount of hydrogen which would have been in it, and comes as the raw material instead of as fragile parts that have to be packed in cotton-wool. So now we’re collecting our hydrogen on the spot and manufacturing things like instrument boards and furniture for the crew’s quarters right there. I don’t think there’s any more to add.”

  “Fair enough,” said Schneider with a smile. “Would you like to go on?” He nodded at the Indian woman, who leaned back in her chair, reflexively adjusting her sari at her waist.

  “My name is Rohini Das,” she said, and Joe felt an expression of amazement cross his face. Before he could help it, he had leaned forward eagerly.

  “The Rohini Das?” he said. “The mathematician?”

  Rohini Das gave him a half smile. She had clearly been extraordinarily lovely in her teens, Joe reflected, but like rather many Indian women she was now settling towards a comfortable plumpness. She glanced at Schneider, who indicated with a nod that she should go on.

  “Well, I am twenty-eight years old, and I was born in India, not far from Agra. Now I work at the Higher Education Institute of Travancore, where I teach mathematics and classical literature. This strikes some people as strange, but not myself. I was not well educated, but I had a good friend, an old man who had known the famous mathematician Ramajuna when he was alive, and I was taught something of algebra and so on when I was fifteen. I liked it, and then I read some scientific journals my good friend owned, and I saw a mistake in a calculation, so when I was eighteen people subscribed for me to go and study mathematics because I had discovered what is now called the generator function of the hyperspatial series. To me it was just—how shall I put it?—it was like something aesthetically satisfying; it had to be like that because it was right. But then Dr. Crown in New York showed that it led to a means of transferring energy from one place to another instantaneously or at any rate of providing a signal much faster than light, so it turned out to be important, and I think our friend Mr. Morea from the starship knows more about what happened to it after that than I do. Everyone became very angry when, instead of studying mathematics, I started to write a long poem about Akbar, the famous Indian conqueror, but when they read it they said it was wonderful, so I got my post which I have been at for six years.”

  She chuckled. “I am afraid that whoever selected me was careless—I would probably treat Gyul Kodran like one of my obnoxious students”

  Schneider gave an answering smile, and turned to her partner in the chess game. The stolid man spoke rapidly in a voice like a machine.

  “Name is Stepan Prodshenko. Age thirty years and two months. Born in Sverdlovsk where my father was a factory manager and my mother a teacher. My father is a hero of soviet labor. I studied physics at the Marx-Lenin High School in Sverdlovsk and then at Moscow University, obtaining a Khrushchev prize for my doctorate thesis. I am now engaged in theoretical research into the nature of the matter-energy exchange in meson transformation. I am also an athlete, and have an Olympic silver medal for the five-thousand meter race; I am also a licensed teacher of gymnastics. I am single. Thank you.”

  “I think you might have added,” said Schneider gentry, “that you sing first tenor parts with the Moscow University Choir.”

  Prodshenko’s stolid mask lasted a fraction of a second. Then he suddenly gave a boyish grin and threw his hands up in the air. He said, “But that is only a hobby for me! I love to sing!” And everyone chuckled.

  “Mrs. King?” said Schneider, turning to the spectacled woman.

  “Yes,” she said in a soft, rather high voice—higher than her round face and rather thick set body would have suggested. “Well, my name is King Ti-Pao, or vice-versa in the Western style, and I am thirty-six years old. I am a widow; my husband and child were killed by lightning ten years ago. I am a biologist; I have been fortunate to work with Professor Ji-Lao in Hankow for many years and have studied all aspects of the subject, particularly the genetical aspect. I was with the professor during his celebrated experiments with the spawn of frogs in which he contrived to produce an entirely new animal which had never been seen before by chemical and radiative manipulation of the gene material. You will know about this, perhaps.”

  The others nodded; it had been a sensation a few years ago. The new animal had even turned out to be capable of reproducing its kind, and Ji-Lao’s techniques, people said, would eventually lead to the creation of a whole new species tailored to serve mankind.

  “Also,” Mrs. King continued, “my husband encouraged me to paint pictures, and I have become very successful with my water colors. I do not sing”—this with a shy, amused look at Prodshenko—“but I play very badly the Chinese guitar.”

  “We are all modest,” said Schneider after a pause. “You were actually responsible for designing the genes which Professor Ji-Lao then developed from his frog spawn, weren’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to the last member of the group. “Right, Lawrence,” he said. “You are obviously bursting to tell us about yourself.”

  The African bounced forward on his chair. “Of course!” he said, grinning. “I am most proud of myself! I am Lawrence Tshekele, which is a sort of South African name which you find in what used to be the Nguni land, but actually I’m from Lagos because my father was a council member of the very first council of the United States of Africa and I was on the way when he was appointed, so I was born there the day the council opened; that makes me age twenty-nine. Nobody has to tell me to be modest, believe me: my father dinned it into me fifty times a day that we in my country had to stand up and blow our own trumpets. So here I blow!” He grinned again in appreciation of his own joke.

  “First off, I speak all the African languages pretty well. Then I speak English like you hear, and French and German and Russian and Hindi and Urdu and some Chinese and some Japanese; now I’m learning Spanish. I pick ’em up like a flytrap collects flies. Professionally I’m an adviser to the government of my country, handling public education campaigns, endeavoring to bring the advantages of civilization to depressed areas, attempting to integrate backward people into a city society. In my spare time I write, the results of this effort are The Harbor Bar and African Checkerboard and a couple of others.”

  He sat back, and suddenly he was again the same rat
her ugly nervous-seeming person Joe had seen him to be when he came in. The transformation was almost startling.

  There was a short pause. During it, Joe found himself looking at Schneider. Everyone else, suddenly, was also looking at him. It came to Joe that somehow, without it being clear how, Schneider was dominating this group. It showed, for instance, in the way he had broken the Russian Prodshenko’s defiant mask with a well-chosen remark.

  And yet Schneider had said he was worried.

  Well, the only logical conclusion was that he worried over very small problems. All the major ones—Joe was certain-were safe in his capable hands.

  “Right!” said Schneider thoughtfully. “I’d like you to get a bit better acquainted with one another, to start with. I’m not making that an order—just telling you. We won’t make any demands on your time for a few days yet; it’s up to you what you want to do. You’re at liberty to poke your noses anywhere on the island—except the cybernetics building, though. There’s stuff in there which could be wrecked by a single grain of dust or a single smear of the natural grease from a fingertip. So to save us from having to fit you out with silicone suits, when we could be getting on with the work, please avoid that one building. Anything else you want to know?”

  No one spoke. Joe found his eyes moving slowly around the group now. And he was sure that the same thought had come into the others’ minds as had come into his:

  So this is the pride of Earth! Well, I dont know why they selected me, in spite of all they’ve said. I only hope someone out of this group has the right talents—

  X

  IT WAS quiet in his room except for the very faint hum of the tape recorder he had borrowed to record his letter to Maggie.

  Joe began, “Well, two weeks have gone by here, and I’m getting the weirdest sensation of unreality about the whole affair. When we catch the news broadcasts and hear about the arguments and the rows that go on everywhere about the urgency of the matter, we feel as though it all has to do with other people.

  “I’ll try and give you an idea of what it’s like here. We six candidates, except for Schneider who’s also more or less in charge of the whole business, have as much time as we want to rove around the island—what there is of it. The weather is beautiful; you can swim in the little bay, or lounge on the beach, or watch the UN troops exercising, or sit in the recreation room, or in your own room. Maybe I should explain that the UN troops are here for a very good reason; there was that bomb in the plane I arrived in, which Major Gupta’s boys got rid of barely in time, and since then we’ve heard about other sabotage attempts at the project building in New York—obviously, someone is damnably eager to get chosen by eliminating the competition. Anyway, time hangs on our hands.

  “They’ve made their choice of us six; presumably it only remains to eliminate five of us. No doubt they’re watching us continually, because there are people like ghosts on this island. They’re in the main canteen, or walking around during the day, but they come and go again and never seem to establish a foothold in the present, if you get me. I think they’re experts—psychologists, presumably—who are just weighing up everything we do, probably eavesdropping by microphone on the entire twenty-four hours of the day.

  “Outside the other candidates, only two people really impinge on me: one is Lagenfeld, the Australian cyberneticist who spends most of his time in a sealed hut full of electronic gadgetry, but who emerges in the evenings and sometimes comes and chats with us in the recreation room. I don’t know what he keeps in that hut; presumably, computers to process the data which these ghostly watchers bring in.

  “And the other is this Major Gupta, whom I suspect of actually holding a very much higher rank. In fact, I don’t believe Gupta is his real name. He mentioned casually that he used to serve with the UN disarmament inspection teams, which implies that by now he ought to have reached a generalship if only because his superiors had been retired out of his way. He’s in command of the military—specifically, of anti-sabotage work and I imagine also of the Tiger’s Claws missiles, which have disappeared into superbly camouflaged emplacements at each end of the island. Those things worry me, you know; I hope to God they don’t turn out to be necessary. He has a staff, but they keep to themselves even more than the psychological watchdogs.

  “Something else that worries me, you know—that’s the nature of the candidates. If you had to choose someone to represent Earth this way, you’d pick the most versatile people you could imagine. Instead, all of us candidates are specialists. At most, Stepan Prodshenko shines in three different fields, and two of them don’t seem particularly applicable to the problem in hand.

  I mentioned that we all get on with one another pretty well. That’s understating it, I guess. I’ve never before met such a really interesting group of people. Of them all, I find now that I like Lawrence Tshekele best. He’s a wonderful talker, and he’s got a gift for making other people take an interest in what interests him—he can make people realize that things are really worth while being interested in.

  “Frankly, I’m putting my money on him to be selected. I know it’ll cause a tremendous squawk in the Americas and Australasia, but I honestly believe he’s by far the best bet.

  “After him—well, I don’t know. I like Mrs. King a lot—a quiet person, rather placid, who has another kind of gift: she can be emotional and enthusiastic about beautiful things or about people without appearing sentimental. I’m the sort of guy who deprecates such things; usually, the most I say about them is that they’re great or terrific. Only the other evening Mrs. King had found a huge flowering shrub up on top of the island and sat down outside the quarters to paint a water color picture of it, and I got started talking with her about it. In the end, you know, she practically had me crying because it was just so painfully beautiful.

  “Stepan Prodshenko is a worker. He never lets up. His only relaxation is chess, which he plays fiendishly well—mostly with Rohini Das, who can beat him about once in twenty games. None of the rest of us can stand up to him at all. Stepan sleeps only about five hours a night. Around dawn you see him running down to the beach for a swim; then he exercises on the sand for half an hour, doing handsprings and standing jumps and maybe finishing off with a run around the island. Then you hear him singing in front of the open window of his room. Usually he sings Russian folksongs; there’s one terrific number he does, which he says is about a birch tree standing in a field, in which he hits notes that practically make the island shiver. But he sings opera, too. Only—and this is what gets me—you can’t feel he does it just because he enjoys it. He seems incapable of enjoying it unless he does it absolutely magnificently, and it’s an affront to his dignity if he doesn’t make a top note properly. He has to go back and start over until he comes close to perfection.

  “I’ve had some really good bull sessions with him, though. Rohini Das sits in on some of them when we get to arguing about social evolution and materialism and things like that. He maintains that the real reason for accepting Gyul Kodran’s challenge is to short-cut an otherwise long process of getting out into galactic society; he says that if we fail, we’ll nonetheless get there provided we don’t fall into despair at having failed. I feel that if we don’t make it now, we never will, and when Rohini expresses any opinion at all, she’s inclined to the view that success will only be valuable if it enhances our understanding of fundamental reality. There’s an overtone of mysticism there somewhere which I don’t get at all. In fact, Rohini is the oddball of our collection, I think. When she was eighteen she did this fantastic work in pure math which rivals what Einstein did with his special theory; immediately she lost interest and turned to writing her epic poem. She’s working on another, by the way. If she has a gift of the same kind that Lawrence and Mrs. King have, then it’s a gift for getting inside history. I recall the other night she was telling me what her famous poem was about; well, I didn’t get much out of it as poetry, because it’s florid and highly stylized in the oriental tr
adition, and I suppose it’s vaguely like Homer’s poems in its way—which doesn’t do anything for me in general. But what I did get was a sense of what it’s like to be rooted in another passage of history. Do you follow me? I mean, I got to feel how it is to have Arjuna and Akbar and Gandhi as the major figures of the history one grows up with and learns about in school, instead of Washington and Patrick Henry and Lincoln.

  “I see the tape is running down. One last thing I must say—tomorrow there’s some big kind of test coming up at last, and maybe that will put an end to our hanging around. I gather that it means I won’t be able to send any more news for a while, so this tape will have to do for several letters. I can see you smiling at me out of the photo Doc Schneider got for me. I tell the photo all the things I wouldn’t like to put on tape because someone else has to hear what I say before it gets mailed. Just remember I love you and I think about you all the time.”