II
Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn’t been a chance in a hundred that he’d have the bad luck to have his name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.
When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty takeoff on what should have been a routine Moon run.
Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree, a bust, a bat, a wingding, a night on the town. A commemoration of dangers met and passed.
Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented him from ever being called up for contributing to the country’s labor needs again. And he most certainly wasn’t going to volunteer.
He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn’t any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn’t want to get the reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn’t you? What else did you need?
It had come as a surprise when he’d been drafted for the labor force.
In the early days of the Ultrawelfare State, they had made a mistake in adapting to the automation of the second industrial revolution. They had attempted to give everyone work by reducing the number of working hours in the day, and the number of working days in the week. It finally became ludicrous when employees of industry were working but two days a week, two hours a day. In fact, it got chaotic. It became obvious that it was more practical to have one worker putting in thirty-five hours a week and getting to know his job well, than it was to have a score of employees, each working a few hours a week and none of them ever really becoming efficient.
The only fair thing was to let the technologically unemployed remain unemployed, with their Inalienable Basic stock as the equivalent of unemployment insurance, while the few workers still needed put in a reasonable number of hours a day, a reasonable number of weeks a year and a reasonable number of years in a life time. When new employees were needed, a draft lottery was held.
All persons registered in the labor force participated. If you were drawn, you must need serve. The dissatisfaction those chosen might feel at their poor luck was offset by the fact that they were granted additional Variable Basic shares, according to the tasks they fulfilled. Such shares could be added to their portfolios, the dividends becoming part of their current credit balance, or could be sold for a lump sum on the market.
Yes, but now it was all over. He had his own little place, his own vacuum-tube vehicle and twice the amount of shares of Basic that most of his fellow citizens could boast. Si Pond had it made. A spree was obviously called for.
He was going to do this one right. This was the big one. He’d accumulated a lot of dollars these past few months and he intended to blow them, or at least a sizeable number of them. His credit card was burning a hole in his pocket, as the expression went. However, he wasn’t going to rush into things. This had to be done correctly.
Too many a spree was played by ear. You started off with a few drinks, fell in with some second rate mopsy and usually wound up in a third rate groggery where you spent just as much as though you’d been in the classiest joint in town. Came morning and you had nothing to show for all the dollars that had been spent but a rum-head.
Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his yearlong trip to the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage’s profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long denied him.
Si was going to do it differently this time.
Nothing but the best. Wine, women, song, food, entertainment. The works. But nothing but the best.
To start off, he dressed with great care in the honorable retirement-rank suit he had so recently purchased. His space pin he attached carefully to the lapel. That was a good beginning, he decided. A bit of prestige didn’t hurt you when you went out on the town. In the Ultrawelfare State hardly one person in a hundred actually ever performed anything of value to society. The efforts of most weren’t needed. Those few who did contribute were awarded honors, decorations, titles.
Attired satisfactorily, Si double-checked to see that his credit card was in his pocket. As an afterthought, he went over to the auto-apartment’s teevee-phone, flicked it on, held the card to the screen and said, “Balance check, please.”
In a moment, the teevee-phone’s robot voice reported, “Ten shares of Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.” The screen went dead.
One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he wouldn’t have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.
He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one place really made sense. The big city.
He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He might as well do it up brown.
He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his car’s dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his destination, he dialed the vehicle’s teevee-phone for information on the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry he’d read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car’s destination dial.
“Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,” he said aloud.
The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the direction of the pressure was reversed.
Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the canopy and stepped into his hotel room.
A voice said gently, “If the quarters are satisfactory, please present your credit card within ten minutes.”
Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.
He didn’t take the time to flick on the menu, next to the auto-dining table, nor to check the endless potables on the auto-bar list. All that, he well knew, would be superlative. Besides, he didn’t plan to dine or do much drinking in his suite. He made a mock leer. Not unless he managed to acquire some feminine companionship, that was.
He looked briefly into the swimming pool and bath, then flopped himself happily onto the bed. It wasn’t up to the degree of softness he presently desired, and he dialed the thing to the ultimate in that direction so that with a laugh he sank almost out of sight into the mattress.
He came back to his feet, gave his suit a quick patting so that it fell into press and, taking his credit card from his pocket, put it against the teevee-phone screen and pressed the hotel button so that registration could be completed.
For a moment he stood in the center of the floor, in thought. Take it easy, Si Pond, take it all easy, this time. No throwing his dollars around in second-class groggeries, no eating in automated luncheterias. This time, be it the only time in his life, he was going to frolic in the grand manner. No cloddy was Si Pond.
He decided a drink was in order to help him plan his strategy. A drink at the hotel’s famous Kudos Room where celebrities were reputed to be a dime a dozen.
He left the suite and stepped into one of the elevators. He said, “Kudos Room.”
The auto-elevator murmured politely, “Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.”
At the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a moment and looked about. He’d never been in a place like this, either. However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made his way to the bar.
There was actually a bartender.
Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an air of easy sophistication, “Slivovitz Sour.”
“Yes, sir.”
The drinks in the Kudos Room might be concocted by hand, but Si noticed they had the routine teevee screens built into the bar for payment. He put his credit card on the screen immediately before him when the drink came, and had to quell his desire to dial for a balance check, so as to be able to figure out what the Sour had cost him.
Well, this was something like it. This was the sort of thing he’d dreamed about, out there in the great alone, seated in the confining conning tower of his space craft. He sipped at the drink, finding it up to his highest expectations, and then swiveled slightly on his stool to take a look at the others present.
To his disappointment, there were no recognizable celebrities. None that he placed, at least—top teevee stars, top politicians of the Ultrawelfare State or Sports personalities.
He turned back to his drink and noticed, for the first time, the girl who occupied the stool two down from him. Si Pond blinked. He blinked and then swallowed.
“Zo-ro-as-ter,” he breathed.
She was done in the latest style from Shanghai, even to the point of having cosmetically duplicated the Mongolian fold at the corners of her eyes. Every pore, but every pore, was in place. She sat with the easy grace of the Orient, so seldom found in the West.
His stare couldn’t be ignored.
She looked at him coldly, turned to the bartender and murmured, “A Far Out Cooler, please, Fredric.” Then deliberately added, “I thought the Kudos Room was supposed to be exclusive.”
There was nothing the bartender could say to that, and he went about building the drink.
Si cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said, “how about letting this one be on me?”
Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her Oriental motif, rose. “Really!” she said, drawing it out.
The bartender said hurriedly, “I beg your pardon, sir. …”
The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, “Why, isn’t that a space pin?”
Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, “Yeah … sure.”
“Good Heavens, you’re a spaceman?”
“Sure.” He pointed at the lapel pin. “You can’t wear one unless you been on at least a Moon run.”
She was obviously both taken back and impressed. “Why,” she said, “you’re Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave you.”
Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. “Call me Si,” he said. “Everybody calls me Si.”
She said, “I’m Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.”
“Si,” Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he’d never seen anything like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the current sex symbols, but never in person. “Call me Si,” he said again. “I’ve been called Si so long, I don’t even know who somebody’s talking to if they say Seymour.”
“I cried when they gave you that antique watch,” she said, her tone such that it was obvious she hadn’t quite adjusted as yet to having met him.
Si Pond was surprised. “Cried?” he said. “Well, why? I was kind of bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.”
“Academician Gubelin?” she said. “You just call him Doc?”
Si was expansive. “Why, sure. In the Space Department we don’t have much time for formality. Everybody’s just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like that. But how come you cried?”
She looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her, as though avoiding his face. “I … I suppose it was that speech Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the planets. …”
“Well,” Si said modestly, “two of my runs were only to the Moon.”
“… and he said all those things about man’s conquest of space. And the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.”
Si grunted. “Yeah. That’s all part of the Doc’s scheme to get me to take on another three runs. They’re afraid the whole department’ll be dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job, it’d take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop. So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they’re both trying to pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their ships. It’s kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those spaceships costs?”
“Funny?” she said. “Why, I don’t think it’s funny at all.”
Si said, “Look, how about another drink?”
Natalie Paskov said, “Oh, I’d love to have a drink with you, Mr. …”
“Si,” Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. “How come you know so much about it? You don’t meet many people who are interested in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like. Think it’s kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of materials and all and keep the economy going.”
Natalie said earnestly, “Why, I’ve been a space fan all my life. I’ve read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you’d say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.”
Si chuckled. “A real buff, eh? You know, it’s kind of funny. I was never much interested in it. And I got a darn sight less interested after my first run and I found out what space cafard was.”
She frowned. “I don’t believe I know much about that.”
Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. “Old Gubelin keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper articles. Says there’s enough adverse publicity about space exploration already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship’s crammed tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there’s precious little room in the conning tower and you’re the only man aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there’s a whole flock of people aboard, there won’t be any such thing as space cafard, but. …” Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond’s mouth began to tic and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.
He cleared his throat. “Let’s talk about some other angle. Look, how about something to eat, Natalie? I’m celebrating my retirement, like. You know, out on the town. If you’re free. …”
She put the tip of a finger to her lips, looking for the moment like a small girl rather than an ultra-sophisticate. “Supposedly, I have an appointment,” she said hesitantly.
When the mists rolled out in the morning—if it was still morning—it was to the tune of an insistent hotel chime. Si rolled over on his back and growled, “Zo-ro-as-ter, cut that out. What do you want?”
The hotel communicator said softly, “Checking-out time, sir, is at two o’clock.”
Si groaned. He couldn’t place the last of the evening at all. He didn’t remember coming back to the hotel. He couldn’t recall where he had separated from, what was her name … Natalie.
He vaguely recalled having some absinthe in some fancy club she had taken him to. What was the gag she’d made? Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. And then the club where they had the gambling machines. And the mists had rolled in on him. Mountains of the Moon! but that girl could drink. He simply wasn’t that used to the stuff. You don’t drink in Space School and you most certainly don’t drink when in space. His binges had been few and far between.
He said now, “I don’t plan on checking out today. Don’t bother me.” He turned to his pillow.
The hotel communicator said quietly, “Sorry, sir, but your credit balance does not show sufficient to pay your bill for another day.”
Si Pond shot up, upright in bed, suddenly cold sober.
His eyes darted about the room, as though he was seeing it for the first time. His clothes, he noted, were thrown over a chair haphazardly. He made his way to them, his face empty, and fished about for his credit card, finding it in a side pocket. He wavered to the teevee-phone and thrust the card against the screen. He demanded, his voice as empty as his expression, “Balance check, please.”
In less than a minute the robot-voice told him: “Ten shares of Inalienable Basic. Current cash credit, forty-two dollars and thirty cents.” The screen went dead.
He sank back into the chair which held his clothes, paying no attention to them. It couldn’t be right. Only yesterday, he’d had twelve shares of Variable Basic, immediately convertible into more than fifty thousand dollars, had he so wished to convert rather than collect dividends indefinitely. Not only had he the twelve shares of Variable Basic, but more than a thousand dollars to his credit.
He banged his fist against his mouth. Conceivably, he might have gone through his thousand dollars. It was possible, though hardly believable. The places he’d gone to with that girl in the Chinese getup were probably the most expensive in Greater Metropolis. But, however expensive, he couldn’t possibly have spent fifty thousand dollars! Not possibly.
He came to his feet again to head for the teevee screen and demand an audit of the past twenty-four hours from Central Statistics. That’d show it up. Every penny expended. Something was crazy here. Someway that girl had pulled a fast one. She didn’t seem the type. But something had happened to his twelve shares of Variable Basic, and he wasn’t standing for it. It was his security, his defense against slipping back into the ranks of the cloddies, the poor demi-buttocked ranks of the average man, the desperately dull life of those who subsisted on the bounty of the Ultrawelfare State and the proceeds of ten shares of Inalienable Basic.
He dialed Statistics and placed his card against the screen. His voice was strained now. “An audit of all expenditures for the past twenty-four hours.”
Then he sat and watched.
His vacuum-tube trip to Manhattan was the first item. Two dollars and fifty cents. Next was his hotel suite. Fifty dollars. Well, he had known it was going to be expensive. A Slivovitz Sour at the Kudos Room, he found, went for three dollars a throw, and the Far out Coolers Natalie drank, four dollars. Absinthe was worse still, going for ten dollars a drink.
He was impatient. All this didn’t account for anything like a thousand dollars, not to speak of fifty thousand.
The audit threw an item he didn’t understand. A one dollar credit. And then, immediately afterward, a hundred dollar credit. Si scowled.
And then slowly reached out and flicked the set off. For it had all come back to him.
At first he had won. Won so that the other players had crowded around him, watching. Five thousand, ten thousand. Natalie had been jubilant. The others had cheered him on. He’d bet progressively higher, smaller wagers becoming meaningless and thousands being involved on single bets. A five thousand bet on odd had lost, and then another. The kibitzers had gone silent. When he had attempted to place another five thousand bet, the teevee screen robot voice had informed him dispassionately that his current cash credit balance was insufficient to cover that amount.
Yes. He could remember now. He had needed no time to decide, had simply snapped, “Sell one share of Variable Basic at current market value.”
The other eleven shares had taken the route of the first.
When it was finally all gone and he had looked around, it was to find that Natalie Paskov was gone as well.
Academician Lofting Gubelin, seated in his office, was being pontifical. His old friend Hans Girard-Perregaux had enough other things on his mind to let him get away with it, only half following the monologue.
“I submit,” Gubelin orated, “that there is evolution in society. But it is by fits and starts, and by no means a constant thing. Whole civilizations can go dormant, so far as progress is concerned, for millennia at a time.”
Girard-Perregaux said mildly, “Isn’t that an exaggeration, Lofting?”
“No, by Zoroaster, it is not! Take the Egyptians. Their greatest monuments, such as the pyramids, were constructed in the earlier dynasties. Khufu, or Cheops, built the largest at Giza. He was the founder of the 4th Dynasty, about the year 2900 BC. Twenty-five dynasties later, and nearly three thousand years, there was no greatly discernable change in the Egyptian culture.”
Girard-Perregaux egged him on gently. “The sole example of your theory I can think of, offhand.”
“Not at all!” Gubelin glared. “The Mayans are a more recent proof. Their culture goes back to at least 500 BC. At that time their glyph-writing was already widespread and their cities, eventually to number in the hundreds, being built. By the time of Christ they had reached their peak. And they remained there until the coming of the Spaniards, neither gaining nor losing, in terms of evolution of society.”
His colleague sighed. “And your point, Lofting?”
“Isn’t it blisteringly obvious?” the other demanded. “We’re in danger of reaching a similar static condition here and now. The Ultrawelfare State!” He snorted indignation. “The Conformist State or the Status Quo State, is more like it. I tell you, Hans, all progress is being dried up. There is no will to delve into the unknown, no burning fever to explore the unexplored. And this time it isn’t a matter of a single area, such as Egypt or Yucatan, but our whole world. If man goes into intellectual coma this time, then all the race slows down, not merely a single element of it.”
He rose suddenly from the desk chair he’d been occupying to pace the room. “The race must find a new frontier, a new ocean to cross, a new enemy to fight.”
Girard-Perregaux raised his eyebrows.
“Don’t be a cloddy,” Gubelin snapped. “You know what I mean. Not a human enemy, not even an alien intelligence. But something against which we must pit our every wit, our every strength, our strongest determination. Otherwise, we go dull, we wither on the vine.”
The other at long last chuckled. “My dear Lofting, you wax absolutely lyrical.”
Gubelin suddenly stopped his pacing, returned to his desk and sank back into his chair. He seemed to add a score of years to his age, and his face sagged. “I don’t know why I take it out on you, Hans. You’re as aware of the situation as I. Man’s next frontier is space. First the planets, and then a reaching out to the stars. This is our new frontier, our new ocean to cross.”
His old friend was nodding. He brought his full attention to the discussion at last. “And we’ll succeed, Lofting. The last trip Pond made gives us ample evidence that we can actually colonize and exploit the Jupiter satellites. Two more runs, at most three, and we can release our findings in such manner that they’ll strike the imaginations of every Tom, Dick and Harry like nothing since Columbus made his highly exaggerated reports on his New World.”
“Two or three more runs,” Gubelin grunted bitterly. “You’ve heard the rumors. Appropriations is going to lower the boom on us. Unless we can get Pond back into harness, we’re sunk. The runs will never be made. I tell you, Hans. …”
But Hans Girard-Perregaux was wagging him to silence with a finger. “They’ll be made. I’ve taken steps to see friend Seymour Pond comes dragging back to us.”
“But he hates space! The funker probably won’t consent to come within a mile of the New Albuquerque Spaceport for the rest of his life, the blistering cloddy.”
A desk light flicked green, and Girard-Perregaux raised his eyebrows. “Exactly at the psychological moment. If I’m not mistaken, Lofting, that is probably our fallen woman.”
“Our what?”
But Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux had come to his feet and personally opened the door. “Ah, my dear,” he said affably.
Natalie Paskov, done today in Bulgarian peasant garb, and as faultless in appearance as she had been in the Kudos Room, walked briskly into the office.
“Assignment carried out,” she said crisply.
“Indeed,” Girard-Perregaux said approvingly. “So soon?”
Gubelin looked from one to the other. “What in the blistering name of Zoroaster is going on?”
His friend said. “Academician Gubelin, may I present Operative Natalie of Extraordinary Services Incorporated?”
“Extraordinary Services?” Gubelin blurted.
“In this case,” Natalie said smoothly, even while taking the chair held for her by Doctor Girard-Perregaux, “a particularly apt name. It was a dirty trick.”
“But for a good cause, my dear.”
She shrugged. “So I am often told, when sent on these far-out assignments.”
Girard-Perregaux, in spite of her words, was beaming at her. “Please report in full,” he said, ignoring his colleague’s obvious bewilderment.
Natalie Paskov made it brief. “I picked up the subject in the Kudos Room of the Greater Metropolis Hotel, pretending to be a devotee of the space program as an excuse. It soon developed that he had embarked upon a celebration of his retirement. He was incredibly naive, and allowed me to overindulge him in semi-narcotics as well as alcohol, so that his defensive inhibitions were low. I then took him to a gambling spot where, so dull that he hardly knew what he was doing, he lost his expendable capital.”
Gubelin had been staring at her, but now he blurted, “But suppose he had won?”
She shrugged it off. “Hardly, the way I was encouraging him to wager. Each time he won, I urged him to double up. It was only a matter of time until …” she let the sentence dribble away.
Girard-Perregaux rubbed his hands together briskly. “Then, in turn, it is but a matter of time until friend Pond comes around again.”
“That I wouldn’t know,” Natalie Paskov said disinterestedly. “My job is done. However, the poor man seems so utterly opposed to returning to your service that I wouldn’t be surprised if he remained in his retirement, living on his Inalienable Basic shares. He seems literally terrified of being subjected to space cafard again.”
But Hans Girard-Perregaux wagged a finger negatively at her. “Not after having enjoyed a better way of life for the past decade. A person is able to exist on the Inalienable Basic dividends, but it is almost impossible to bring oneself to it once a fuller life has been enjoyed. No, Seymour Pond will never go back to the dullness of life the way it is lived by nine-tenths of our population.”
Natalie came to her feet. “Well, gentlemen, you’ll get your bill—a whopping one. I hope your need justifies this bit of dirty work. Frankly, I am considering my resignation from Extraordinary Services, although I’m no more anxious to live on my Inalienable Basic than poor Si Pond is. Good day, gentlemen.”
She started toward the door.
The teevee-phone on Gubelin’s desk lit up and even as Doctor Girard-Perregaux was saying unctuously to the girl, “Believe me, my dear, the task you have performed, though odious, will serve the whole race,” the teevee-phone said:
“Sir, you asked me to keep track of Pilot Seymour Pond. There is a report on the news. He suicided this morning.”