The Long Result (11 page)

‘I believe I do,’ she said in a small determined voice, and put her arms around me.

Well…

Her mouth was cool and firm, astonishingly different from Patricia’s; the sliding movement of the muscles on her satiny bare shoulders came as a mute reminder that she was probably as strong as I was – again, not like Patricia. And there, I thought wryly, was proof how heavily I’d fallen for Patricia: thinking about her while embracing another girl.

None the less it was with a sensation of great satisfaction that I went to collect my baggage and proceed to the rocketport. After last night, naturally, I was extremely tired; long before the steady pull of the rocket’s acceleration sank me into my couch, I was dozing.

I think I smiled in my sleep.

Before I had time to activate the annunciator, the voice rang out from beyond the door.

‘Come in, Roald. Dump your bag in the usual place. I’ll be with you in a moment.’

I had to chuckle. Micky had a phenomenal ear for footsteps; he could identify all his friends before he saw them. The door slid aside to reveal him seated at a typer, moving his hands almost faster than the eye could follow.

I’d been here often enough to know my way around. I went into the little annexe kept for visitors and rinsed travel-dust from face and hands. Then I came back as quietly as I could. Micky was copying from a rough draft, and he’d reached the last page.

These rooms were part of the ‘new’ university buildings – already a century old, but upstarts compared with some of Cambridge’s really ancient architecture. I sank into a chair and enjoyed the aura of peace which the place exuded.

The walls were crowded floor to ceiling with books and
microfilm spools; the range stretched from recently imported Viridian poetry, rather ostentatiously printed with hand-set type on hand-made paper, to a group of three identical red-bound volumes thickly covered with dust. They were copies of Mick’s own novel,
Stars Beckoned,
historical romance about the early days of Venus colonization.

The number of interests this room reflected was fantastic. A theremin stood under the main window, its flex coiled over an antique and fabulously valuable guitar. Rows of loose-leaf binders containing semantic and sociological notes were half-hidden behind, reproductions of classical sculpture: a Rodin, a Henry Moore, the Venus de Milo, and Kasneky’s
Virtue.

On the table beside me was a splendidly bound folio volume whose yellowed page-ends indicated that it was made of woodpulp paper instead of everlasting plastic. Curious, I opened it. It was a collection of engravings by a twenty-first century artist called Laslo Curtin, whom I’d never heard of. They were amazingly good. When I’d leafed to the end, I turned back to the inside front cover to see where Micky had got hold of it. Tacked there with pseudo-magnetic gum so as not to mark the book and spoil its curio value, was a bookplate inscribed with the resounding name of Miguel Fernando José Maria de Madrigal de las Altas Torres.

‘Found my Curtin, have you?’ Micky said, slapping the cover over the typer. ‘Mother picked it up in Buenos Aires last month and sent it to me.’

I indicated the imposing name. ‘Is all this you?’

He laughed. ‘Yes, it’s all me. Mother, bless her, is much prouder of my Spanish antecedents than she ought to be, seeing she’s mostly Norwegian herself. Still, I suppose anyone who’s inherited a long tradition of middle-class Socialism can be excused a hankering after the glamour of autocracy. Madrigal de las Altas Torres – sounds like a
line from a song, doesn’t it? – is where Queen Isabella was born. They had some colourful royalty in Scandinavia too, of course, which makes me wonder sometimes about the lure of the exotic.’ He folded his ungainly-looking body into a chair facing mine. ‘However, how are you?’

‘Rather bedraggled. I’ve had a tough couple of days.’

Micky clicked his tongue sympathetically. He was tall and bony. His father’s night-black hair and jet eyes contrasted with a skin almost milky in its clearness. Somehow the mixture of genes which produced that had also created the nearest thing to a
uomo universale –
I was ready to swear it – that we’d had in a hundred years. He was doing postgraduate research on the staff of the sociology foundation here and writing his doctorate thesis. Though, as Tinescu had rudely reminded me, he was twenty years my junior, he already had a reputation which would allow him to pick his own post when he was ready. On top of that, he was practically unchallenged as an authority on the social evolution of Starhome.

‘I have some bad news for you,’ he went on. ‘Remember I said there were anomalies in your recent reports from Starhome? Well, they weren’t accidents. They look like deliberate fakes.’

‘I know,’ I said, and explained what had happened.

‘The Stars Are For Man League? Now what would
that
gang want to mess up Starhomer data for?’ he wondered aloud.

‘You sound as though you know about them.’

‘Smattering … They’re eight or ten years old, started in Transvaal among a group of patriarchal back-to-the-Boers. There’s a chapter here, of course – universities tend to attract lunatic-fringe organizations – and I think they have members in most big European cities. But then, so do the Good Earthers, who believe starflight is a direct invitation to the wrath of God and spend their time praying to be spared the
vengeance incurred by the impious spacemen – you’d think they’d get discouraged, but no-o … Then there are the Brothers and Sisters of the Fruitful Vine, who hold that marriage, clothing and fidelity are sinful, chastity is a crime and even sobriety is – well – socially undesirable. Like body odour. I’m convinced that bunch started as a joke, but it’s been one of the most gorgeous jokes in history. I love ’em.’

‘How come you know so much about these odd cults?’

‘Did a survey of them for my bachelor’s thesis. You wouldn’t credit, in this supposedly sane day and age, how much balderdash is going the rounds. But most of the cults are dull as ditchwater, and so are their tracts, though the Brothers and Sisters have a version of the Song of Solomon for private circulation only, which – Hell, I started to talk about the League, didn’t I? I was going to say I thought they were pure hot-air addicts.’

‘Tinescu had the police investigate them three years ago. They said the same – then. Lately, I gather, someone’s been feeding them with funds.’

‘Then they’ll have to be banned, and quickly,’ Micky said with decision. ‘See to it, will you?’ And with a swiftness that left me gasping, he was on to another subject: a new project to form a folk-music society and rebuild some of the old instruments like saxophones and spinets.

But you could never accuse Micky Torres of having a butterfly mind. He more resembled a bee; he would flit from item to item as his interest waxed or waned, but he examined each one exhaustively before discarding it. I liked him as much as I admired him, and that was a great deal. In the long-lived modern world, the difference in our ages amounted to little – after the rapids of the teens and early twenties, people entered a sort of great lake of shared experience fourscore years in length, and we were friends as much as people living on different continents could be.

Tinescu had been wrong, I thought, watching the white
nervous face. Micky wouldn’t want my job if I transferred to alien contact. He had more sense than to concentrate on a single facet of so huge a task. In fifty years he would have left a mark on history – perhaps altered the social structure of Earth, perhaps created a new art-form, perhaps done for the inchoate field of sociology what unified-field theory did for physics – conceivably, all three. I felt an unworthy but inescapable pang of envy.

‘Oh, I don’t think I’ve shown you this,’ he said, switching subjects once more with the same disconcerting rapidity. He reached behind him and drew out a small, rather tattered volume. He held his hand over the top of it so that all I could see was the picture on the front: a painting of Mars with a spaceship in the foreground.

‘What about it?’ I said.

‘Well – what do you think it is?’

‘It’s a spaceship, obviously. One of the early pure-rocket models, I presume, though I’m no expert on that.’

‘Take a look at the date on it. Handle with care!’

I took it gingerly. It was old, and made of woodpulp paper which had been coated with plastic to preserve it; even so it was brittle to the touch. I looked for the date Micky had mentioned, and found it on the spine. It was – 1959.

I said, ‘But—’

And stopped. It was one of the most violent double-takes I’d ever made.

‘Correct,’ Micky said. ‘There weren’t any spaceships flying to Mars in 1959. Someone who’d read
Stars Beckoned
found a whole pile of those in the attic of his grandfather’s house: books and magazines describing what was then the future. It must have been a popular form of entertainment, though frankly I’d never realized there was so much of it published.’

I turned the pages in wonderment. ‘Well! What did they
think the future held in store for them? Were any of their prophecies accurate? And were they – what d’you call ’em? – astrologers?’

‘Heavens, no. They weren’t seriously predicting the future – sociology and mob psychology were just getting started then, and I guess that had proved how vain prophecy was without computers and proper manipulative techniques. No, they were just letting their fancy roam a bit. It’s a fascinating sidelight on the period, though – I think I’ll include the material in my thesis, if I can figure out an excuse. By the way!’ He jolted upright. ‘Ought I to offer you breakfast? I keep forgetting the time differential when you come over from the Bureau.’

‘No thanks. I ate at the airport before I came here.’

‘That reminds me.’ He leaned dangerously far backward on his chair and caught at the dangling mike of a recorder, continuing half to me, half to the machine. ‘I must make a reservation on tomorrow night’s express. I’m coming back to the Bureau with you. There’s something rather important I have to discuss with Tinescu. Do you want to hear about it now, or later? It is in your department, though for the moment it oughtn’t to be noised around.’

Since Micky’s notion of ‘rather important’ equated to most people’s concept of ‘epoch-making’, I tensed. ‘Now!’ I said anxiously.

‘Okay, you asked for it. Earth is now second-best.’

‘What?’

‘Earth is no longer the leading human-occupied planet. Starhome is.’

I knew it was coming. We’d all known for years. But this was the last place and the last kind of occasion when I’d expected to hear the news. I shook my head feebly.

‘I’ll spell it out,’ Micky said, jumping up and pacing the room. ‘I think so far even the Starhomers don’t know the balance has tipped – I wouldn’t have cottoned on, but that
these faked data I mentioned caused me to go back and take a second look at some earlier results.

‘Starhome – as you damned well know – is a force-grown society. It’s not exactly regimented, but it’s sure as hell disciplined. It was planted by the spiritual descendants of the twentieth-century totalitarians. I know that’s a dirty word, but it’s an accurate description. Their supreme goal is efficiency. It’s the most workable compromise ever achieved between the laxity of individual freedom and the rigidity of a corporate state. Most important, it’s a far more efficient
basic
design than we have.

‘True, we have a very stable society, and for the past two centuries it’s been damned nearly perfect. No one starves; no one lacks work if he wants it, no one’s forced to work if he doesn’t want to; we have negligible crime, so our police go unarmed – and so on. But any society that’s stable and not
utterly
perfect is capable of being surpassed. From the beginning Starhome has been dedicated to maximum utilization of its human resources. We shy away from that – we say ‘totalitarianism!’ and run a mile.

‘So long as Starhome was in the pioneering stage, having its teething troubles, as it were, our superiority remained. But we’ve completed our social evolution – for this cycle, at any rate. Starhome is just starting out. Sooner or later our lead was bound to disappear, and I’m now convinced that it’s gone.’

I thought irrationally that I could have known this last night. It was implicit in the difference between Patricia and Kay.

Suddenly, I was wondering how it felt to be a citizen of a backwater planet.

I knew better than to question Micky’s assurances. If he said the balance had tipped, the balance had tipped. But I still needed to ram the news home in my mind.

I said, ‘What brought you to that conclusion, anyway?’

‘Well …!’ He resumed his chair with a wry smile. ‘Actually I used a matrix I invented myself, which seems to exhibit remarkable stability over a very big range of factors. I can show it to you if you like, but I imagine the Bureau will be putting it through their computers to confirm my results.’

‘Let it slide, then.’ I’d seen Micky’s matrices; he was happy dealing with two hundred free variables, and I wasn’t. ‘What’s it going to mean in – let’s say in public terms?’

‘That depends absolutely on how soon the Starhomers catch on. They have no techniques for analysing even their own society, of course … but there are indications that suggest they suspect the truth. The landing of the
Algenib,
for instance. They may be flying a kite to test the wind there.’

‘If they don’t know?’

‘Why, we get a chance to adjust gracefully and make our bows before leaving the centre of the stage. If they do know they’ll barnstorm us out of our place in the sun, and there’ll be trouble. Of course, there are a hell of a lot of people who do know already, even if only subconsciously.’

‘Who?’

‘The entire population of Earth.’

‘I see your point,’ I agreed. It was logical that once a culture stabilized its members would realize they ran the risk of being outstripped. ‘Could this be one of the reasons why the League is breaking loose?’

‘Oh, surely. They may well be after the last chance to
establish an evolving culture on Earth, by breaking the present one apart forcibly. It won’t work. They’re bucking history.’