The Project Gutenberg EBook of Appointment In Tomorrow, by Fritz Leiber
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Title: Appointment In Tomorrow
Author: Fritz Leiber
Release Date: February 8, 2016 [EBook #51152]
Language: English
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Appointment in Tomorrow
BY FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Is it possible to have a world without moral values?
Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?
The first angry rays of the sun--which, startlingly enough, still rose
in the east at 24 hour intervals--pierced the lacy tops of Atlantic
combers and touched thousands of sleeping Americans with unconscious
fear, because of their unpleasant similarity to the rays from World War
III's atomic bombs.
They turned to blood the witch-circle of rusty steel skeletons around
Inferno in Manhattan. Without comment, they pointed a cosmic finger at
the tarnished brass plaque commemorating the martyrdom of the Three
Physicists after the dropping of the Hell Bomb. They tenderly touched
the rosy skin and strawberry bruises on the naked shoulders of a
girl sleeping off a drunk on the furry and radiantly heated floor of
a nearby roof garden. They struck green magic from the glassy blot
that was Old Washington. Twelve hours before, they had revealed things
as eerily beautiful, and as ravaged, in Asia and Russia. They pinked
the white walls of the Colonial dwelling of Morton Opperly near the
Institute for Advanced Studies; upstairs they slanted impartially
across the Pharoahlike and open-eyed face of the elderly physicist and
the ugly, sleep-surly one of young Willard Farquar in the next room.
And in nearby New Washington they made of the spire of the Thinkers'
Foundation a blue and optimistic glory that outshone White House, Jr.
It was America approaching the end of the Twentieth Century. America
of juke-box burlesque and your local radiation hospital. America
of the mask-fad for women and Mystic Christianity. America of the
off-the-bosom dress and the New Blue Laws. America of the Endless War
and the loyalty detector. America of marvelous Maizie and the monthly
rocket to Mars. America of the Thinkers and (a few remembered) the
Institute. "Knock on titanium," "Whadya do for black-outs," "Please,
lover, don't think when I'm around," America, as combat-shocked and
crippled as the rest of the bomb-shattered planet.
Not one impudent photon of the sunlight penetrated the triple-paned,
polarizing windows of Jorj Helmuth's bedroom in the Thinker's
Foundation, yet the clock in his brain awakened him to the minute,
or almost. Switching off the Educational Sandman in the midst of the
phrase, "... applying tensor calculus to the nucleus," he took a
deep, even breath and cast his mind to the limits of the world and
his knowledge. It was a somewhat shadowy vision, but, he noted with
impartial approval, definitely less shadowy than yesterday morning.
Employing a rapid mental scanning technique, he next cleared his memory
chains of false associations, including those acquired while asleep.
These chores completed, he held his finger on a bedside button, which
rotated the polarizing window panes until the room slowly filled with a
muted daylight. Then, still flat on his back, he turned his head until
he could look at the remarkably beautiful blonde girl asleep beside him.
* * * * *
Remembering last night, he felt a pang of exasperation, which he
instantly quelled by taking his mind to a higher and dispassionate
level from which he could look down on the girl and even himself as
quaint, clumsy animals. Still, he grumbled silently, Caddy might have
had enough consideration to clear out before he awoke. He wondered
if he shouldn't have used his hypnotic control of the girl to smooth
their relationship last night, and for a moment the word that would
send her into deep trance trembled on the tip of his tongue. But no,
that special power of his over her was reserved for far more important
purposes.
Pumping dynamic tension into his 20-year-old muscles and confidence
into his 60-year-old mind, the 40-year-old Thinker rose from bed.
No covers had to be thrown off; the nuclear heating unit made them
unnecessary. He stepped into his clothing--the severe tunic, tights and
sockassins of the modern business man. Next he glanced at the message
tape beside his phone, washed down with ginger ale a vita-amino-enzyme
tablet, and walked to the window. There, gazing along the rows of newly
planted mutant oaks lining Decontamination Avenue, his smooth face
broke into a smile.
It had come to him, the next big move in the intricate game making
up his life--and mankind's. Come to him during sleep, as so many of
his best decisions did, because he regularly employed the time-saving
technique of somno-thought, which could function at the same time as
somno-learning.
He set his who?-where? robot for "Rocket Physicist" and "Genius Class."
While it worked, he dictated to his steno-robot the following brief
message:
Dear Fellow Scientist:
A project is contemplated that will have a crucial bearing on man's
future in deep space. Ample non-military Government funds are
available. There was a time when professional men scoffed at the
Thinkers. Then there was a time when the Thinkers perforce neglected
the professional men. Now both times are past. May they never
return! I would like to consult you this afternoon, three o'clock
sharp, Thinkers' Foundation I.
Jorj Helmuth
Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced
through them, hesitated at the name "Willard Farquar," looked at the
sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and
plugged in the steno-robot.
The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.
"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir," a clear feminine voice
announced. "He has the general staff with him."
"Martian peace to him," Jorj Helmuth said. "Tell him I'll be down in a
few minutes."
* * * * *
Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed
above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in
the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls,
indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair
on a boom.
Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information
and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not
resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great
cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its
own controls--the permissible ones--and could doubtless improvise a
hearing apparatus if it wanted to.
For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and
Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons.
This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human
brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the
rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney
Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had
given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This
was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased
human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.
_This was the machine that really thought--a million-plus!_
This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy
professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the
machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, _had_
built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and
girl-fondness, "Maizie."
Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord
plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and
shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense,
although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with
the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet
infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape
the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.
* * * * *
The grizzled general--there was also one who was gray--was thinking
that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and
usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his
ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent
than himself. And always orders of the "Tell me how to kill that man"
rather than the "Kill that man" sort. The distinction bothered him
obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls
which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's
right-minded leaders--even the Thinkers weren't certain which.
The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a
more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and
the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble.
He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation
be in metal rather than flesh?
The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such
pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success
with Buddhism. Sitting before his _guru_, his teacher, feeling the
Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had
felt a little like this.
The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets,
was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists
weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd
always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things,
rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill
of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty
sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better--more
disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie,
which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.
* * * * *
The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was
also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though
he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration.
Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even
the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!
Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal
features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the
tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had
handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for
next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet
minds--profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising
simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were
alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical
shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.
The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice
nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly
put it away. No one spoke.
Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. "Section Five, Question
Four--whom would that come from?"
The burly man frowned. "That would be the physics boys, Opperly's
group. Is anything wrong?"
Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust
controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually
he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.
From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the
six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to
get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.
* * * * *
Jorj turned, smiling. "And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie
to celebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the
takeoff of the Mars rocket." He switched on a giant television screen.
The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich
ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a
silvery mighty spindle.
Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here
was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official
territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That
rocket there--just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered
from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed
nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first
spaceship--and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!
Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when
he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him
from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole
Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And
that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional
mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.
"Lord," the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's
feeling, "I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little
devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country."
Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. "It's quite unthinkable," he said.
"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely
sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them
psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to
contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and
errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone
to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course,
some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds
of the Martians--"
"Sure, I know," the President said hastily. "Shouldn't have mentioned
it, Jorj."
Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great
violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out
a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning
rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that
of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand
relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes,
impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and,
reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room
where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.
He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as
a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first
question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the
staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the
answer.
For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon
and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to
close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone,
asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer,
then went back to the grind.
Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his
thinking with his eyes open.
The question was: "Does Maizie stand for Maelzel?"
He sat for a while slowly scratching his thigh. His loose, persuasive
lips tightened, without closing, into the shape of a snarl.
Suddenly he began to tape again.
"Maizie does not stand for Maelzel. Maizie stands for amazing,
humorously given the form of a girl's name. Section Six, Answer One:
The mid-term election viewcasts should be spaced as follows...."
But his lips didn't lose the shape of a snarl.
* * * * *
Five hundred miles above the ionosphere, the Mars rocket cut off
its fuel and slumped gratefully into an orbit that would carry it
effortlessly around the world at that altitude. The pilot unstrapped
himself and stretched, but he didn't look out the viewport at the
dried-mud disc that was Earth, cloaked in its haze of blue sky. He knew
he had two maddening months ahead of him in which to do little more
than that. Instead, he unstrapped Sappho.
Used to free fall from two previous experiences, and loving it, the
fluffy little cat was soon bounding about the cabin in curves and
gyrations that would have made her the envy of all back-alley and
parlor felines on the planet below. A miracle cat in the dream world of
free fall. For a long time she played with a string that the man would
toss out lazily. Sometimes she caught the string on the fly, sometimes
she swam for it frantically.
After a while the man grew bored with the game. He unlocked a drawer
and began to study the details of the wisdom he would discover on
Mars this trip--priceless spiritual insights that would be balm to
war-battered mankind.
The cat carefully selected a spot three feet off the floor, curled up
on the air, and went to sleep.
* * * * *
Jorj Helmuth snipped the emerging answer tape into sections and handed
each to the appropriate man. Most of them carefully tucked theirs away
with little more than a glance, but the Secretary of Space puzzled over
his.
"Who the devil would Maelzel be?" he asked.
A remote look came into the eyes of the Secretary of State. "Edgar
Allen Poe," he said frowningly, with eyes half-closed.
The grizzled general snapped his fingers. "Sure! Maelzel's Chess
player. Read it when I was a kid. About an automaton that was supposed
to play chess. Poe proved it hid a man inside it."
The Secretary of Space frowned. "Now what's the point in a fool
question like that?"
"You said it came from Opperly's group?" Jorj asked sharply.
The Secretary of Space nodded. The others looked at the two men
puzzledly.
"Who would that be?" Jorj pressed. "The group, I mean."
The Secretary of Space shrugged. "Oh, the usual little bunch over at
the Institute. Hindeman, Gregory, Opperly himself. Oh, yes, and young
Farquar."
"Sounds like Opperly's getting senile," Jorj commented coldly. "I'd
investigate."
The Secretary of Space nodded. He suddenly looked tough. "I will. Right
away."
* * * * *
Sunlight striking through French windows spotlighted a ballet of dust
motes untroubled by air-conditioning. Morton Opperly's living room was
well-kept but worn and quite behind the times. Instead of reading tapes
there were books; instead of steno-robots, pen and ink; while in place
of a four by six TV screen, a Picasso hung on the wall. Only Opperly
knew that the painting was still faintly radioactive, that it had been
riskily so when he'd smuggled it out of his bomb-singed apartment in
New York City.
The two physicists fronted each other across a coffee table. The face
of the elder was cadaverous, large-eyed, and tender--fined down by
a long life of abstract thought. That of the younger was forceful,
sensuous, bulky as his body, and exceptionally ugly. He looked rather
like a bear.
Opperly was saying, "So when he asked who was responsible for the
Maelzel question, I said I didn't remember." He smiled. "They still
allow me my absent-mindedness, since it nourishes their contempt.
Almost my sole remaining privilege." The smile faded. "Why do you keep
on teasing the zoo animals, Willard?" he asked without rancor. "I've
maintained many times that we shouldn't truckle to them by yielding
to their demand that we ask Maizie questions. You and the rest have
overruled me. But then to use those questions to convey veiled insults
isn't reasonable. Apparently the Secretary of Space was bothered enough
about this last one to pay me a 'copter call within twenty minutes of
this morning's meeting at the Foundation. Why do you do it, Willard?"
The features of the other convulsed unpleasantly. "Because the
Thinkers are charlatans who must be exposed," he rapped out. "We know
their Maizie is no more than a tealeaf-reading fake. We've traced their
Mars rockets and found they go nowhere. We know their Martian mental
science is bunk."
"But we've already exposed the Thinkers very thoroughly," Opperly
interposed quietly. "You know the good it did."
Farquar hunched his Japanese-wrestler shoulders. "Then it's got to be
done until it takes."
Opperly studied the bowl of mutated flowers by the coffee pot. "I think
you just want to tease the animals, for some personal reason of which
you probably aren't aware."
Farquar scowled. "We're the ones in the cages."
* * * * *
Opperly continued his inspection of the flowers' bells. "All the more
reason not to poke sticks through the bars at the lions and tigers
strolling outside. No, Willard, I'm not counseling appeasement. But
consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians." His voice grew
especially tranquil. "A scientist tells people the truth. When times
are good--that is, when the truth offers no threat--people don't mind.
But when times are very, very bad...." A shadow darkened his eyes.
"Well, we all know what happened to--" And he mentioned three names
that had been household words in the middle of the century. They
were the names on the brass plaque dedicated to the martyred three
physicists.
He went on, "A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they
wish were true--that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured
by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that
they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a
luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their
souls for magic cures, and buy perpetual motion machines to power their
war rockets."
Farquar clenched his fist. "All the more reason to keep chipping away
at the Thinkers. Are we supposed to beg off from a job because it's
difficult and dangerous?"
Opperly shook his head. "We're to keep clear of the infection of
violence. In my day, Willard, I was one of the Frightened Men. Later I
was one of the Angry Men and then one of the Minds of Despair. Now I'm
convinced that all my reactions were futile."
"Exactly!" Farquar agreed harshly. "You reacted. You didn't act. If
you men who discovered atomic energy had only formed a secret league,
if you'd only had the foresight and the guts to use your tremendous
bargaining position to demand the power to shape mankind's future...."
"By the time you were born, Willard," Opperly interrupted dreamily,
"Hitler was merely a name in the history books. We scientists weren't
the stuff out of which cloak-and-dagger men are made. Can you imagine
Oppenheimer wearing a mask or Einstein sneaking into the Old White
House with a bomb in his briefcase?" He smiled. "Besides, that's not
the way power is seized. New ideas aren't useful to the man bargaining
for power--only established facts or lies are."
"Just the same, it would have been a good thing if you'd had a little
violence in you."
"No," Opperly said.
"I've got violence in me," Farquar announced, shoving himself to his
feet.
* * * * *
Opperly looked up from the flowers. "I think you have," he agreed.
"But what are we to do?" Farquar demanded. "Surrender the world to
charlatans without a struggle?"
Opperly mused for a while. "I don't know what the world needs now.
Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that
he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the
philosopher's stone. Which Newton did the world need then?"
"Now you are justifying the Thinkers!"
"No, I leave that to history."
"And history consists of the actions of men," Farquar concluded. "I
intend to act. The Thinkers are vulnerable, their power fantastically
precarious. What's it based on? A few lucky guesses. Faith-healing.
Some science hocus-pocus, on the level of those juke-box burlesque acts
between the strips. Dubious mental comfort given to a few nerve-torn
neurotics in the Inner Cabinet--and their wives. The fact that the
Thinkers' clever stage-managing won the President a doubtful election.
The erroneous belief that the Soviets pulled out of Iraq and Iran
because of the Thinkers' Mind Bomb threat. A brain-machine that's just
a cover for Jan Tregarron's guesswork. Oh, yes, and that hogwash of
'Martian wisdom.' All of it mere bluff! A few pushes at the right times
and points are all that are needed--and the Thinkers know it! I'll bet
they're terrified already, and will be more so when they find that
we're gunning for them. Eventually they'll be making overtures to us,
turning to us for help. You wait and see."
"I am thinking again of Hitler," Opperly interposed quietly. "On his
first half dozen big steps, he had nothing but bluff. His generals
were against him. They knew they were in a cardboard fort. Yet he won
every battle, until the last. Moreover," he pressed on, cutting Farquar
short, "the power of the Thinkers isn't based on what they've got, but
on what the world hasn't got--peace, honor, a good conscience...."
The front-door knocker clanked. Farquar answered it. A skinny old man
with a radiation scar twisting across his temple handed him a tiny
cylinder. "Radiogram for you, Willard." He grinned across the hall at
Opperly. "When are you going to get a phone put in, Mr. Opperly?"
The physicist waved to him. "Next year, perhaps, Mr. Berry."
The old man snorted with good-humored incredulity and trudged off.
"What did I tell you about the Thinkers making overtures?" Farquar
chortled suddenly. "It's come sooner than I expected. Look at this."
He held out the radiogram, but the older man didn't take it. Instead he
asked, "Who's it from? Tregarron?"
"No, from Helmuth. There's a lot of sugar corn about man's future in
deep space, but the real reason is clear. They know that they're going
to have to produce an actual nuclear rocket pretty soon, and for that
they'll need our help."
"An invitation?"
Farquar nodded. "For this afternoon." He noticed Opperly's anxious
though distant frown. "What's the matter?" he asked. "Are you bothered
about my going? Are you thinking it might be a trap--that after the
Maelzel question they may figure I'm better rubbed out?"
The older man shook his head. "I'm not afraid for your life, Willard.
That's yours to risk as you choose. No, I'm worried about other things
they might do to you."
"What do you mean?" Farquar asked.
* * * * *
Opperly looked at him with a gentle appraisal. "You're a strong and
vital man, Willard, with a strong man's prides and desires." His voice
trailed off for a bit. Then, "Excuse me, Willard, but wasn't there a
girl once? A Miss Arkady?"
Farquar's ungainly figure froze. He nodded curtly, face averted.
"And didn't she go off with a Thinker?"
"If girls find me ugly, that's their business," Farquar said harshly,
still not looking at Opperly. "What's that got to do with this
invitation?"
Opperly didn't answer the question. His eyes got more distant. Finally
he said, "In my day we had it a lot easier. A scientist was an
academician, cushioned by tradition."
Willard snorted. "Science had already entered the era of the police
inspectors, with laboratory directors and political appointees stifling
enterprise."
"Perhaps," Opperly agreed. "Still, the scientist lived the safe,
restricted, highly respectable life of a university man. He wasn't
exposed to the temptations of the world."
Farquar turned on him. "Are you implying that the Thinkers will somehow
be able to buy me off?"
"Not exactly."
"You think I'll be persuaded to change my aims?" Farquar demanded
angrily.
Opperly shrugged his helplessness. "No, I don't think you'll change
your aims."
Clouds encroaching from the west blotted the parallelogram of sunlight
between the two men.
* * * * *
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?"
"Of course!" The menacing growl came back into the bear's voice, except
that it was touched with a certain pleased luxuriousness. "Only from
now on I won't be teasing the zoo animals, and I won't embarrass you
by asking any more Maelzel questions. I have reached the objective at
which those tactics were aimed. After this I shall bore from within."
"Bore from within," Opperly repeated, frowning. "Now where have I heard
that phrase before?" His brow cleared. "Oh, yes," he said listlessly.
"Do I understand that you are becoming a Thinker, Willard?"
The other gave him a faintly pitying smile and stretched himself on the
couch, gazed at the ceiling. All his movements were deliberate, easy.
"Certainly. That's the only realistic way to smash them. Rise high
in their councils. Out-trick all their trickeries. Organize a fifth
column. Then _strike_!"
"The end justifying the means, of course," Opperly said.
"Of course. As surely as the desire to stand up justifies your
disturbing the air over your head. All action in this world is nothing
but means."
Opperly nodded abstractedly. "I wonder if anyone else ever became a
Thinker for those same reasons. I wonder if being a Thinker doesn't
simply mean that you've decided you have to use lies and tricks as your
chief method."
* * * * *
Willard shrugged. "Could be." There was no longer any doubt about the
pitying quality of his smile.
Opperly stood up, squaring together his papers. "So you'll be working
with Helmuth?"
"Not Helmuth. Tregarron." The bear's smile became cruel. "I'm afraid
that Helmuth's career as a Thinker is going to have quite a setback."
"Helmuth," Opperly mused. "Morgenschein once told me a bit about him.
A man of some idealism, despite his affiliations. Best of a bad lot.
Incidentally, is he the one with whom...."
"... Miss Arkady Simms ran off?" Willard finished without any
embarrassment. "Yes, that was Helmuth. But that's all going to be
changed now."
Opperly nodded. "Good-by, Willard," he said.
Willard quickly heaved himself up on an elbow. Opperly looked at him
for about five seconds, then, without a word, walked out of the room.
* * * * *
The only obvious furnishings in Jan Tregarron's office were a
flat-topped desk and a few chairs. Tregarron sat behind the desk, the
top of which was completely bare. He looked almost bored, except that
his little eyes were smiling. Jorj Helmuth sat across the desk from
him, a few feet back, erect and grim-faced, while shadowy in the muted
light, Caddy stood against the wall behind Tregarron. She still wore
the fur-trimmed skylon frock she'd put on that afternoon. She took no
part in the conversation, seemed almost unaware of it.
"So you just went ahead and canceled the conference without consulting
me?" Jorj was saying.
"You called it without consulting me." Tregarron playfully wagged a
finger. "Shouldn't do that sort of thing, Jorj."
"But I tell you I was completely prepared. I was absolutely sure of my
ground."
"I know, I know," Tregarron said lightly. "But it's not the right time
for it. I'm the best judge of that."
"When will be the right time?"
Tregarron shrugged. "Look here, Jorj," he said, "every man should stick
to his trade, to his forte. Technology isn't ours."
Jorj's lips thinned. "But you know as well as I do that we are going to
have to have a nuclear spaceship and actually go to Mars someday."
Tregarron lifted his eyebrows. "Are we?"
"Yes! Just as we're going to have to build a real Maizie. Everything
we've done until now have been emergency measures."
"Really?"
Jorj stared at him. "Look here, Jan," he said, gripping his knees with
his hands, "you and I are going to have to talk things through."
"Are you quite sure of that?" Jan's voice was very cool. "I have a
feeling that it might be best if you said nothing and accepted things
as they are."
"No!"
"Very well." Tregarron settled himself in his chair.
"I helped you organize the Thinkers," Jorj said, and waited. "At least,
I was your first partner."
Tregarron barely nodded.
"Our basic idea was that the time had come to apply science to the life
of man on a large scale, to live rationally and realistically. The
only things holding the world back from this all-important step were
the ignorance, superstition, and inertia of the average man, and the
stuffiness and lack of enterprise of the academic scientists--their
worship of facts, even when facts were clearly dangerous.
"Yet we knew that in their deepest hearts the average man and
the professionals were both on our side. They wanted the new
world visualized by science. They wanted the simplifications and
conveniences, the glorious adventures of the human mind and body. They
wanted the trips to Mars and into the depths of the human psyche, they
wanted the robots and the thinking machines. All they lacked was the
nerve to take the first big step--and that was what we supplied.
"It was no time for half measures, for slow and sober plodding. The
world was racked by wars and neurosis, in danger of falling into the
foulest hands. What was needed was a tremendous and thrilling appeal
to the human imagination, an Earth-shaking affirmation of the power of
science for good.
"But the men who provided that appeal and affirmation couldn't afford
to be cautious. They wouldn't check and double check. They couldn't
wait for the grudging and jealous approval of the professionals. They
had to use stunts, tricks, fakes--_anything to get over the big point_.
Once that had been done, once mankind was headed down the new road, it
would be easy enough to give the average man the necessary degree of
insight to heal the breach with the professionals, to make good in
actuality what had been made good only in pretense.
"Have I stated our position fairly?"
* * * * *
Tregarron's eyes were hooded. "You're the one who's telling it."
"On those general assumptions we established our hold on susceptible
leaders and the mob," Jorj went on. "We built Maizie and the Mars
rocket and the Mind Bomb. We discovered the wisdom of the Martians. We
_sold_ the people on the science that the professionals had been too
high-toned to advertise or bring into the market place.
"But now that we've succeeded, now that we've made the big point, now
that Maizie and Mars and science do rule the average human imagination,
the time has come to take the second big step, to let accomplishment
catch up with imagination, to implement fantasy with fact.
"Do you suppose I'd ever have gone into this with you, if it hadn't
been for the thought of that second big step? Why, I'd have felt dirty
and cheap, a mere charlatan--except for the sure conviction that
someday everything would be set right. I've devoted my whole life to
that conviction, Jan. I've studied and disciplined myself, using every
scientific means at my disposal, so that I wouldn't be found lacking
when the day came to heal the breach between the Thinkers and the
professionals. I've trained myself to be the perfect liaison man for
the job.
"Jan, the day's come and I'm the man. I know you've been concentrating
on other aspects of our work; you haven't had time to keep up with my
side of it. But I'm sure that as soon as you see how carefully I've
prepared myself, how completely practical the neutron-drive rocket
project is, you'll beg me to go ahead!"
Tregarron smiled at the ceiling for a moment. "Your general idea isn't
so bad, Jorj, but your time scale is out of whack and your judgment is
a joke. Oh, yes. Every revolutionary wants to see the big change take
place in his lifetime. Tcha! It's as if he were watching evolutionary
vaudeville and wanted the Ape-to-Man Act over in twenty minutes.
"Time for the second big step? Jorj, the average man's exactly what
he was ten years ago, except that he's got a new god. More than
ever he thinks of Mars as a Hollywood paradise, with wise men and
yummy princesses. Maizie is Mama magnified a million times. As for
professional scientists, they're more jealous and stuffy than ever. All
they'd like to do is turn the clock back to a genteel dream world of
quiet quadrangles and caps and gowns, where every commoner bows to the
passing scholar.
"Maybe in ten thousand years we'll be ready for the second big step.
Maybe. Meanwhile, as should be, the clever will rule the stupid for
their own good. The realists will rule the dreamers. Those with free
hands will rule those who have deliberately handcuffed themselves with
taboos.
"Secondly, your judgment. Did you actually think you could have bossed
those professionals, kept your mental footing in the intellectual
melee? You a nuclear physicist? A rocket scientist? Why, it's--Take
it easy now, boy, and listen to me. They'd have torn you to pieces in
twenty minutes and glad of the chance! You baffle me, Jorj. You know
that Maizie and the Mars rocket and all that are fakes, yet you believe
in your somno-learning and consciousness-expansion and optimism-pumping
like the veriest yokel. I wouldn't be surprised to hear you'd taken up
ESP and hypnotism. I think you should take stock of yourself and get a
new slant. It's overdue."
* * * * *
He leaned back. Jorj's face had become a mask. His eyes did not flicker
from Tregarron's, yet there was a subtle change in his expression.
Behind Tregarron, Caddy swayed as if in a sudden gust of intangible
wind and took a silent step forward from the wall.
"That's your honest opinion?" Jorj asked, very quietly.
"It's more than that," Tregarron told him, just as unmelodramatically.
"It's orders."
Jorj stood up purposefully. "Very well," he said. "In that case I have
to tell you that--"
Casually, but with no wasted motion, Tregarron slipped an ultrasonic
pistol from under the desk and laid it on the empty top.
"No," he said, "let me tell you something. I was afraid this would
happen and I made preparations. If you've studied your Nazi, Fascist
and Soviet history, you know what happens to old revolutionaries who
don't move with the times. But I'm not going to be too harsh. I have a
couple of the boys waiting outside. They'll take you by 'copter to the
field, then by jet to New Mex. Bright and early tomorrow morning, Jorj,
you're leaving on a trip to Mars."
Jorj hardly reacted to the words. Caddy was two steps nearer Tregarron.
"I decided Mars would be the best place for you," the fat man
continued. "The robot controls will be arranged so that your 'visit'
to Mars lasts two years. Perhaps in that time you will have learned
wisdom, such as realizing that the big liar must never fall for his own
big lie.
"Meanwhile, there will have to be a replacement for you. I have in mind
a person who may prove peculiarly worthy to occupy your position, with
all its perquisites. A person who seems to understand that force and
desire are the motive powers of life, and that anyone who believes the
big lie proves himself strictly a jerk."
* * * * *
Caddy was standing behind Tregarron now, her half-closed, sleepy eyes
fixed on Jorj's.
"His name is Willard Farquar. You see, I too believe in cooperating
with the scientists, Jorj, but by subversion rather than conference. My
idea is to offer the hand of friendship to a selected few of them--the
hand of friendship with a nice big bribe in it." He smiled. "You were
a good man, Jorj, for the early days, when we needed a publicist
with catchy ideas about Mind Bombs, ray guns, plastic helmets, fancy
sweaters, space brassieres, and all that other corn. Now we can afford
a soldier."
Jorj moistened his lips.
"We'll have a neat explanation of what's happened to you. Callers will
be informed that you've gone on an extended visit to imbibe the wisdom
of the Martians."
Jorj whispered, "Caddums."
Caddy leaned forward. Her arms snaked down Tregarron's, as if to
imprison his wrists. But instead she reached out and took the
ultrasonic pistol and put it in Tregarron's right hand. Then she looked
up at Jorj with eyes that were very bright.
She said very sweetly and sympathetically, "Poor Superman."
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Appointment In Tomorrow, by Fritz Leiber
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