The Amba.s.sador.
by Samuel Kimball Merwin.
[Sidenote: _All Earth needed was a good stiff dose of common sense, but its rulers preferred to depend on the highly fallible computers instead.
As a consequence, interplanetary diplomatic relations were somewhat strained--until a nimble-witted young man from Mars came up with the answer to the "sixty-four dollar" question._]
Zalen Lindsay stood on the rostrum in the huge new United Worlds auditorium on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Pontchartrain and looked out at an ocean of eye-gla.s.ses. 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 Amba.s.sador 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
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--and 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 compet.i.tion 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 a.s.semblage.
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-gla.s.s window and knows he will be arrested for it and doesn"t care.
There was going to be h.e.l.l 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-gla.s.ses 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 h.e.l.l 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 circ.u.mstances 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, "d.a.m.n! 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 a.s.sa.s.sinated," du Fresne told him nervously. "And the results of such a.s.sa.s.sination 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 gla.s.ses 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 a.s.sa.s.sination," 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 a.s.signment 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 ma.s.s 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 wh.o.r.es--displayed their charms on all occasions. Beauty was bad business for lower-caste prost.i.tutes--it made such clients they could promote 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 j.a.panese _sumo_ wrestlers. They were scarcely expected to enter the more sensitive realms of the arts, business affairs or government.