By the same author
Rocket Ship Galileo
Copyright…1948
by Robert A. Heinlein
No part of this book may
be reprinted without written
permission of the publishers.
FIRST EDITION
Copyright 1942 by Street & Smith
Publications, Inc., For Astounding
Science Fiction
Printed in U.S.A.
For
Cal
Mickey
and
both
J’s
CONTENTS
Chapter
I.
“All of them should have been very happy—”
II.
“Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief—”
III.
“This we covenant in the Name of Life Immortal”
IV.
Boy Meets Girl
V.
“I myself am but indifferent honest”
VI.
“We don’t speak the same lingo”
VII.
“Burn him down at once—”
VIII.
“Thou, beside me, in the wilderness”
IX.
“When we die, do we die all over?”
X.
“—the only game in town”
XI.
“—then a man is something more than his genes!”
XII.
“Whither thou goest—”
XIII.
“No more privacy than a guppy in an aquarium”
XIV.
“—and beat him when he sneezes”
XV.
“Probably a blind alley—”
XVI.
The quick and the dead
XVII.
Da Capo
XVIII.
“Beyond this Horizon—”
ILLUSTRATIONS
The swimmer climbed out on the bank with effortless graceful strength.
He turned, saw a flash of white, and fired instantly.
The second man came up fast. Hamilton slugged him.
Carvala stood up and took. her departure as suddenly as she came.
CHAPTER ONE
“All of them should have been very happy—”
THEIR problems were solved: the poor they no longer had with them; the sick, the lame, the halt, and the blind were historic memories; the ancient causes of war no longer obtained; they had more freedom than Man has ever enjoyed. All of them should have been happy—
Hamilton Felix let himself off at the thirteenth level of the Department of Finance, mounted a slideway to the left, and stepped off the strip at a door marked:
BUREAU OF ECONOMIC STATISTICS
Office of Analysis and Prediction
Director
PRIVATE
He punched the door with a code combination, and awaited face check. It came promptly; the door dilated, and a voice inside said, “Come in, Felix.”
He stepped inside, glanced at his host and remarked, “You make ninety-eight.”
“Ninety-eight what?”
“Ninety-eight sourpusses in the last twenty minutes. It’s a game. I just made it up.”
Monroe-Alpha Clifford looked baffled, an expression not uncommon in his dealings with his friend Felix. “But what is the point? Surely you counted the opposites, too?”
“Of course. Ninety-eight mugs who’d lost their last friends, seven who looked happy. But,” he added, “to make it seven I had to count one dog.”
Monroe-Alpha gave Hamilton a quick look in an effort to determine whether or not he was joking. But he could not be sure—he rarely could be sure. Hamilton’s remarks often did not appear serious, frequently even seemed technically sense-free. Nor did they appear to follow the six principles of humor—Monroe-Alpha prided himself on his sense of humor, had been known to pontificate to his subordinates on the necessity of maintaining a sense of humor. But Hamilton’s mind seemed to follow some weird illogic of its own, self consistent perhaps, but apparently unrelated to the existent world.
“But what is the purpose of your survey?” he asked.
“Does it need a purpose? I tell you, I just made it up.”
“But your numbers are too few to be significant. You can’t fair a curve with so little data. Besides, your conditions are uncontrolled. Your results don’t mean anything.”
Hamilton rolled his eyes up. “Elder Brother, hear me,” he said softly. “Living Spirit of Reason attend Thy servant. In Your greatest and most prosperous city I find vinegar phizzes to grins in a ratio of fourteen to one—and he says it’s not significant!”
Monroe-Alpha looked annoyed. “Don’t be irreverent,” he advised. “And the proper ratio is sixteen and a third to one; you should not have counted the dog.”
“Oh, forget it!” his friend answered. “How goes the tail chasing?” He wandered around the room, picking things up and putting them down under Monroe-Alpha’s watchful eye, and finally stopped in front of the huge integrating accumulator. “It’s about time for your quarterly prediction, isn’t it?”
“Not ‘about time’—it is time. I had just completed the first inclusive run when you arrived. Want to see it?” He stepped to the machine, pressed a stud. A photostat popped out. Monroe-Alpha unclipped it and handed it to Hamilton without looking at it. He had no need to—the proper data had been fed into the computer; he knew with quiet certainty that the correct answer would come out. Tomorrow he would work the problem again, using a different procedure. If the two answers did not then agree within the limits of error of the machine, he would become interested in the figures themselves, very much interested. But, of course, that would not happen.
The figures would interest his superiors; the procedure alone was of interest to him.
Hamilton eyed the answer from a non-professional viewpoint.
He appreciated, in part at least, the huge mass of detail which had gone into this simple answer. Up and down two continents human beings had gone about their lawful occasions—buying, selling, making, consuming, saving, spending, giving, receiving. A group of men in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had issued unsecured aspirant-stock to subsidize further research into a new method of recovering iron from low grade ores. The issue had been well received down in New Bolivar where there was a super-abundance of credit because of the extreme success of the tropical garden cities along the Orinoco (“Buy a Slice of Paradise”). Perhaps that was the canny Dutch influence in the mixed culture of that region. It might have been the Latin influence which caused an unprecedented tourist travel away from the Orinoco during the same period—to Lake Louise, and Patagonia, and Sitka.
No matter. All of the complex of transactions appeared in the answer in Hamilton’s hand. A child in Walla Walla broke its piggy bank (secretly, with one eye on the door), gathered up the slowly accumulated slugs and bought a perfectly delightful gadget, which not only did things, but made the appropriate noises as well. Some place down in the innards of the auto-clerk which handled the sale for the Gadget Shoppe four holes were punched in a continuous roll of paper; the item appeared in the cost accounting of the owner, and was reflected in the accounting of the endless chain of middle distributors, transporters, processors, original producers, service companies, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs—world without end.
The child (a bad-tempered little blond brat, bound to prove a disappointment to his planners and developers) had a few slugs left over which he exchanged for a diet-negative confection (“Father Christmas’ Pseudo-Sweets—Not a tummyache in a tankful”); the sale was lumped with many others like it in the accounts of the Seattle Vending Machine Corporation.
The broken piggy bank and its concatenation
s appeared in the figures in Hamilton’s hand, as a sliver of a fragment of a super-microscopic datum, invisible even in the fifth decimal place. Monroe-Alpha had not heard of this particular piggy bank when he set up the problem—nor would he, ever—but there are tens of thousands of piggy banks, a large but countable number of entrepreneurs, lucky and unlucky, shrewd and stupid, millions of producers, millions of consumers, each with his draft book, each with printed symbols in his pouch, potent symbols—the stuff, the ready, the you-know-what, jack, kale, rocket juice, wampum, the shekels, the sugar, the dough.
All of these symbols, the kind that jingle and the kind that fold and, most certainly, the kind that are only abstractions from the signed promise of an honest man, all of these symbols, or more correctly, their reflected shadows, passed through the bottle neck formed by Monroe-Alpha’s computer, and appeared there in terms of angular speeds, settings of three-dimensional cams, electronic flow, voltage biases, et complex cetera. The manifold constituted a dynamic abstracted structural picture of the economic flow of a hemisphere.
Hamilton examined the photostat. The re-investment of accumulated capital called for an increase in the subsidy on retail transfers of consumption goods of three point one percent and an increase in monthly citizens’ allowance of twelve credits—unless the Council of Policy decided on another means of distributing the social increment.
“‘Day by day, in every way, I’m getting richer and richer,’” Hamilton said. “Say, Cliff, this money machine of yours is a wonderful little gadget. It’s the goose that lays the golden egg.”
“I understand your classical allusion,” Monroe-Alpha conceded, “but the accumulator is in no sense a production machine. It is merely an accounting machine, combined with an integrating predictor.”
“I know that,” Hamilton answered absently. “Look, Cliff—what would happen if I took an ax and just beat the bejasus out of your little toy?”
“You would be examined for motive.”
“Don’t be obtuse. What about the economic system?”
“I suppose,” Monroe-Alpha told him, “that you want me to assume that no other machine was available for replacement. Any of the regional accumulators could—”
“Sure. Bust the hell out of all of them.”
“Then we would have to use tedious methods of actuarial computation. A few weeks delay would result, with accumulated errors which would have to be smoothed out in the next prediction. No important result.”
“Not that. What I want to know is this. If nobody computed the amount of new credit necessary to make the production-consumption cycle come out even—what would happen?”
“Your hypothetical question is too far-fetched to be very meaningful,” Monroe-Alpha stated, “but it would result in a series of panics and booms of the post-nineteenth century type. Carried to extreme, it could even result in warfare. But of course it would not be—the structural nature of finance is too deeply imbedded in our culture for pseudo-capitalism to return. Any child understands the fundamentals of production accounting before he leaves his primary development center.”
“I didn’t.”
Monroe-Alpha smiled tolerantly. “I find that difficult to believe. You know the Law of Stable Money.”
“‘In a stable economy, debt-free new currency must be equated to the net re-investment,’” Hamilton quoted.
“Correct enough. But that is Reiser’s formulation. Reiser was sound enough, but he had a positive talent for stating simple things obscurely. There is a much simpler way to look at it. The processes of economic system are so multitudinous in detail and involve so many promises to be performed at later dates that it is a psychological impossibility for human beings to deal with the processes without the use of a symbol system. We call the system ‘finance’ and the symbols ‘money.’ The symbolic structure should bear a one-to-one relationship to the physical structure of production and consumption. It’s my business to keep track of the actual growth of the physical processes and recommend to the policy board changes in the symbol structure to match those in the physical structure.”
“I’m damned if you’ve made it any simpler,” Hamilton complained. “Never mind—I didn’t say I didn’t understand it; I said I didn’t understand it as a kid. But honestly—wouldn’t it be simpler to set up a collective system and be done with it?”
Monroe-Alpha shook his head. “Finance structure is a general theory and applies equally to any type of state. A complete socialism would have as much need for structural appropriateness in its cost accounting as do free entrepreneurs. The degree of public ownership as compared with the degree of free enterprise is a cultural matter. For example, food is, of course, free, but—”
“Freeze it, pal. You’ve just reminded me of one of the two reasons I had for looking in on you. Busy for dinner tonight?”
“Not precisely. I’ve a tentative date with my ortho-wife for twenty-one hundred, but I’m free until then.”
“Good. I’ve located a new pay-restaurant in Meridian Tower that will be a surprise to your gastro tract. Guaranteed to give you indigestion, or you have to fight the chef.”
Monroe-Alpha looked dubious. He had had previous experience with Hamilton’s gastronomic adventures. “Let’s go to the refectory here. Why pay out hard cash for bad food when good food is included in your basic dividend?”
“Because one more balanced ration would unbalance me. Come on.”
Monroe-Alpha shook his head. “I don’t want to contend with the crowds. Honestly, I don’t.”
“You don’t really like people, do you?”
“I don’t dislike them—not individually.”
“But you don’t like ’em. Me, I like ’em. People are funnier than anybody. Bless their silly little hearts. They do the craziest things.”
Monroe-Alpha looked morose. “I suppose you are the only sane one in the lot.”
“Me? Shucks, no. I’m one long joke on myself. Remind me to tell you about it sometime. But look—the other thing I came to see you about. Notice my new sidearm?”
Monroe-Alpha glanced at Hamilton’s holster. In fact, he had not noticed that his friend was bearing anything new in the way of weapons—had he arrived unarmed Monroe-Alpha would have noticed it, naturally, but he was not particularly observant about such matters, and could easily have spent two hours with a man and never noticed whether he was wearing a Stokes coagulator or a common needlebeam.
But, now that his attention was directed to the matter, he saw at once that Hamilton was armed with something novel…and deucedly odd and uncouth. “What is it?” he asked.
“Ah!” Hamilton drew the sidearm clear and handed it to his host. “Woops! Wait a moment. You don’t know how to handle it—you’ll blow your head off.” He pressed a stud on the side of the grip, and let a long flat container slide out into his palm. “There—I’ve pulled its teeth. Ever see anything like it?”
Monroe-Alpha examined the machine. “Why, yes, I believe so. It’s a museum piece, isn’t it? An explosive-type hand weapon?”
“Right and wrong. It’s mill new, but it’s a facsimile of one in the Smithsonian Institution collection. It’s called a point forty-five Colt automatic pistol.”
“Point forty-five what?”
“Inches.”
“Inches…let me see, what is that in centimeters?”
“Huh? Let’s see—three inches make a yard and a yard is about one meter. No, that can’t be right. Never mind, it means the size of the slug it throws. Here…look at one.” He slid one free of the clip. “Damn near as big as my thumb, isn’t it?”
“Explodes on impact, I suppose.”
“No. It just drills its way in.”
“That doesn’t sound very efficient.”
“Brother, you’d be amazed. It’ll blast a hole in a man big enough to throw a dog through.”
Monroe-Alpha handed it back. “And in the meantime your opponent has ended your troubles with a beam that acts a thousand times as fast. Chemic
al processes are slow, Felix.”
“Not that slow. The real loss of time is in the operator. Half the gunfighters running around loose chop into their target with the beam already hot. They haven’t the skill to make a fast sight. You can stop ’em with this thing, if you’ve a fast wrist. I’ll show you. Got something around here we can shoot at?”
“Mmm…this is hardly the place for target practice.”
“Relax. I want something I can knock out of the way with the slug, while you try to burn it. How about this?” Hamilton picked up a large ornamental plastic paperweight from Monroe-Alpha’s desk.
“Well… I guess so.”
“Fine.” Hamilton took it, removed a vase of flowers from a stand on the far side of the room, and set the target in its place. “We’ll face it, standing about the same distance away. I’ll watch for you to start to draw, as if we really meant action. Then I’ll try to knock it off the stand before you can burn it.”
Monroe-Alpha took his place with lively interest. He fancied himself as a gunman, although he realized that his friend was faster. This might be, he thought, the split second advantage he needed. “I’m ready.”
“Okay.”
Monroe-Alpha started his draw.
There followed a single CRACK! so violent that it could be felt through the skin and in the nostrils, as well as heard. Piled on top of it came the burbling Sring-ow-ow! as the bullet ricocheted around the room, and then a ringing silence.
“Hell and breakfast,” remarked Hamilton. “Sorry, Cliff—I never fired it indoors before.” He stepped forward to where the target had been. “Let’s see how we made out.”
The plastic was all over the room. It was difficult to find a shard large enough to show the outer polish. “It’s going to be hard to tell whether you burned it, or not.”
“I didn’t.”
“Huh?”