1956
According to their biographies, Destiny's favored children usually had their lives planned out from scratch. Napoleon was figuring on how to rule France when he was a barefoot boy in Corsica, Alexander the Great much the same, and Einstein was muttering equations in his cradle.
Maybe so. Me, I just muddled along.
In an old book that belonged to my great grandfather Lucas I once saw a cartoon of a man in evening clothes, going over a ski jump. With an expression of shocked unbelief he is saying: "How did I get up here?"
I know how he felt. How did I get way up here?
I was not even planned on. The untaxed quota for our family was three children, then my brother Pat and I came along in one giant economy package. We were a surprise to everyone, especially to my parents, my three sisters, and the tax adjusters. I don't recall being surprised myself but my earliest recollection is a vague feeling of not being quite welcome, even though Dad and Mum, and Faith, Hope, and Charity treated us okay.
Maybe Dad did not handle the emergency right. Many families get an extra child quota on an exchange basis with another family, or something, especially when the tax-free limit has already been filled with all boys or all girls. But Dad was stubborn, maintaining that the law was unconstitutional, unjust, discriminatory, against public morals, and contrary to the will of God. He could reel off a list of important people who were youngest children of large families, from Benjamin Franklin to the first governor Of Pluto, then he would demand to know where the human race would have been without them?—after which Mother would speak soothingly.
Dad was probably accurate as he was a student of almost everything, even his trade, which was micromechanics—but especially of history. He wanted to name us for his two heroes in American history, whereas Mother wanted to name us for her favorite artists: This is how I ended up as Thomas Paine Leonardo da Vinci Bartlett and my twin became Patrick Henry Michelangelo Bartlett. Dad called us Tom and Pat and Mother called us Leo and Michel and our sisters called us Useless and Double-Useless. Dad won by being stubborn.
Dad was stubborn. He could have paid the annual head tax on us supernumeraries, applied for a seven-person flat, and relaxed to the inevitable. Then he could have asked for reclassification. Instead be claimed exemption for us twins each year, always ended by paying our head tax with his check stamped "Paid under Protest!" and we seven lived in a five-person flat. When Pat and I were little we slept in homemade cribs in the bathroom which could not have been convenient for anybody, then when we were bigger we slept on the living-room couch, which was inconvenient for everybody, especially our sisters, who found it cramping to their social life.
Dad could have solved all this by putting in for family emigration to Mars or Venus, or the Jovian moons, and he used to bring up the subject. But this was the one thing that would make Mum more stubborn than he was. I don't know which part of making the High Jump scared her, because she would just settle her mouth and not answer. Dad would point out that big families got preferred treatment for emigration and that the head tax was earmarked to subsidize colonies off Earth and why shouldn't we benefit by the money we were being robbed of? To say nothing of letting our children grow up with freedom and elbow room, out where there wasn't a bureaucrat standing behind every productive worker dreaming up more rules and restrictions? Answer me that?
Mother never answered and we never emigrated,
We were always short of money. Two extra mouths, extra taxes, and no family assistance for the two extras make the stabilized family income law as poor a fit as the clothes Mum cut down for us from Dad's old ones. It was darn' seldom that we could afford to dial for dinner like other people and Dad even used to bring home any of his lunch that he didn't eat. Mum went back to work as soon as we twins were in kindergarten, but the only household robot we had was an obsolete model "Morris Garage" Mother's Helper which was always burning out valves and took al most as long to program as the job would have taken. Pat and I got acquainted with dish water and detergents—at least I did; Pat usually insisted on doing the sterilizing or had a sore thumb or something.
Dad used to talk about the intangible benefits of being poor—learning to stand on your own feet, building character, and all that. By the time I was old enough to understand I was old enough to wish they weren't so intangible, but, thinking back, maybe he had a point. We did have fun. Pat and I raised hamsters in the service unit and Mum never objected. When we turned the bath into a chem lab the girls did make unfriendly comments but when Dad put his foot down, they sweet-talked him into picking it up again and after that they hung their laundry somewhere else, and later Mum stood between us and the house manager when we poured acid down the drain and did the plumbing no good.
The only time I can remember when Mum put her foot down was when her brother, Uncle Steve, came back from Mars and gave us some canal worms which we planned to raise and sell at a profit. But when Dad stepped on one in the shower (we had not discussed our plans with him) she made us give them to the zoo, except the one Dad had stepped on, which was useless. Shortly after that we ran away from home to join the High Marines—Uncle Steve was a ballistics sergeant—and when lying about our age did not work and they fetched us back, Mum not only did not scold us but had fed our snakes and our silkworms while we were gone.
Oh, I guess we were happy. It is hard to tell at the time. Pat and I were very close and did everything together but I want to get one thing straight: being a twin is not the Damon-and-Pythias dream that throb writers would have you think. It makes you close to another person to be born with him, share a room with him, eat with him, play with him, work with him, and hardly ever do anything without him as far back as you can remember, and farther according to witnesses. It makes you close; it makes you almost indispensable to each other-but it does not necessarily make you love him.
I want to get this straight because there has been a lot of nonsense talked about it since twins got to be suddenly important. I'm me; I'm not my brother Pat. I could always tell us apart, even if other people couldn't. He is the right-handed one; I'm the left-handed one. And from my point of view I'm the one who almost always got the small piece of cake.
I can remember times when he got both pieces through a fast shuffle. I'm not speaking in general; I'm thinking of a certain white cake with chocolate icing and how he confused things so that he got my piece, too, Mum and Dad thinking he was both of us, despite my protests. Dessert can be the high point of the day when you are eight, which was what we were then.
I am not complaining about these things . . . even though I feel a dull lump of anger even now, after all the years and miles, at the recollection of being punished because Dad and Mum thought I was the one who was trying to wangle two desserts. But I'm just trying to tell the truth. Doctor Devereaux said to write it all down and where I have to start is how it feels to be a twin. You aren't a twin, are you? Maybe you are but the chances are forty-four to one that you aren't—not even a fraternal, whereas Pat and I are identicals which is four times as unlikely.
They say that one twin is always retarded—I don't think so. Pat and I were always as near alike as two shoes of a pair. The few times we showed any difference I was a quarter inch taller or a pound heavier, then we would even out. We got equally good marks in school; we cut our teeth together. What he did have was more grab than I had, something the psychologists call "pecking order." But it was so subtle you could not .define it and other people could not see it. So far as I know, it started from nothing and grew into .a pattern that neither of us could break even if we wanted to.
Maybe if the nurse had picked me up first when we were born I would have been the one who got the bigger piece of cake. Or maybe she did—I don't know how it started.
But don't think that being a twin is all bad even if you are on the short end; it is mostly good. You go into a crowd of strangers and you are scared and shy—and there is your twin a couple o{ feet away and you aren't alone any more. Or somebody punches you in the mouth and while you are groggy your twin has punched him and the fight goes your way. You flunk a quiz and your twin has flunked just as badly and you aren't alone.
But do not think that being twins is like having a very close and loyal friend. It isn't like that at all and it is a great deal closer.
Pat and I had our first contact with the Long Range Foundation when this Mr. Geeking showed up at our home. I did not warm to him. Dad didn't like him either and wanted to hustle him out, but he was already seated with coffee at his elbow for Mother's notions of hospitality were firm.
So this Geeking item was allowed to state his business. He was, he said, a field representative of "Genetics Investigations."
"What's that?" Dad said sharply.
'Genetics Investigations' is a scientific agency, Mr. Bartlett. This present project is one of gathering data concerning twins. It is in the public interest and we hope that you will cooperate."
Dad took a deep breath and hauled out the imaginary soapbox he always had ready. "More government meddling!
I'm a decent citizen; I pay my bills and support my family. My boys are just like other boys and I'm sick and tired of the government's attitude about them. I'm not going to have them poked and prodded and investigated to satisfy some bureaucrat. All we ask is to be left alone—and that the government admit the obvious fact that my boys have as much right to breathe air and occupy space as anyone else!"
Dad wasn't stupid; it was just that he had a reaction pattern where Pat and I were concerned as automatic as the snarl of a dog who has been kicked too often. Mr. Geeking tried to soothe him but Dad can't be interrupted when he has started that tape. "You tell the Department of Population Control that I'm not having their 'genetics investigations.' What do they want to find out? How to keep people from having twins, probably. What's wrong with twins? Where would Rome have been without Romulus and Remus?
—answer me that! Mister, do you know how many—"
"Please, Mr. Bartlett, I'm not from the government."
"Eh? Well, why didn't you say so? Who are you from?"
"Genetics Investigations is an agency of the Long Range Foundation." I felt Pat's sudden interest. Everybody has heard of the Long Range Foundation, but it happened that Pat and I had just done a term paper on non-profit corporations and had used the Long Range Foundation as a type example.
We got interested in the purposes of the Long Range Foundation. Its coat of arms reads: "Bread Cast Upon the Waters," and its charter is headed: "Dedicated to the Welfare of Our Descendants." The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers' fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn't enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn't show results for ten generations, if ever , . . something like how to control the weather (they're working on that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.
The funny thing is that bread cast upon waters does come back seven hundred fold; the most preposterous projects made the LRF embarrassing amounts of money—"embarrassing" to a non-profit corporation that is. Take space travel: it seemed tailor-made, back a couple of hundred years ago, for LRF, since it was fantastically expensive and offered no probable results comparable with the investment: There was a time when governments did some work on it for military reasons, but the Concord of Bayreuth in 1980 put a stop even to that.
So the Long Range Foundation stepped in and happily began wasting money. It came at a time when the corporation unfortunately had made a few billions on the Thompson mass-converter when they had expected to spend at least a century on pure research; since they could not declare a dividend (no stockholders), they had to get rid of the money somehow and space travel looked like a rat hole to pour it down.
Even the kids know what happened to that: Ortega's torch made space travel inside the solar system cheap, fast, and easy, and the one-way energy screen made colonization practical and profitable; the LRF could not unload fast enough to keep from making lots more money.
I did not think all this that evening; LRF was just something that Pat and I happened to know more about than most high school seniors . . . more than Dad knew, apparently, for he snorted and answered, "The Long Range Foundation, eh? I'd almost rather you were from the government. If boondoggles like that were properly taxed, the government wouldn't be squeezing head taxes out of its citizens."
This was not a fair statement, not a "flat-curve relationship," as they call it in Beginning Mathematical Empiricism. Mr. McKeefe had told us to estimate the influence, if any, of LRF on the technology "yeast-form" growth curve; either I should have flunked the course or LRF had kept the curve from leveling off early in the 21st century—I mean to say, the "cultural inheritance," the accumulation of knowledge and wealth that keeps us from being savages, had increased greatly as a result of the tax-free status of such non-profit research corporations. I didn't dream up that opinion; there are figures to prove it. What would have happened if the tribal elders bad forced Ugh to hunt with the rest of the tribe instead of staying home and whittling out the first wheel while the idea was bright in his mind?
Mr. Geeking answered, "I can't debate the merits of such matters, Mr. Bartlett. I'm merely an employee.
"And I'm paying your salary, Indirectly and unwillingly, but paying it nevertheless."
I wanted to get into the argument but I could feel Pat holding back. It did not matter; Mr. Geeking shrugged and said, "If so, I thank you. But all I came here for was to ask your twin boys to take a few tests and answer some questions. The tests are harmless and the results will be kept confidential."
"What are you trying to find out?"
I think Mr. Geeking was telling the truth when he answered, "I don't know. I'm merely a field agent; I'm not in charge of the project."
Pat cut in. "I don't see why not, Dad. Do you have the tests in your briefcase, Mr. Geeking?" "Now, Patrick—"
"It's all right, Dad. Let's see the tests, Mr. Geeking."
"Uh, that's not what we had in mind. The Project has set up local offices in the TransLunar Building. The tests take about half a day."
"All the way downtown,, huh, and a half day's 'time . . . what do you pay?"
"Eh? The subjects are asked to contribute their time in the interests of science."
Pat shook his head. "Sorry, Mr. Geeking. This is exam week . . . and my brother and I have part-time school jobs, too."
I kept quiet. Our exams were over, except Analysis of History, which is a snap course involving no math but statistics and pseudospatial calculus, and the school chem lab we worked in was closed for examinations. I was sure Dad did not know these things, or he would have butted in; Dad can shift from prejudice to being a Roman judge at the drop of a hint.
Pat stood up, so I stood up. Mr. Geeking sat tight. "Arrangements can be made," he said evenly.
Pat stuck him as much as we made for a month of washing bottles in the lab, just for one afternoon's work—then upped the ante when it was made clear that we would be obliged to take the tests together (as if we would have done it any other way!). Mr. Geeking paid without a quiver, in cash, in advance.
I never in my life saw so many twins as were waiting on the fortieth floor of the TransLunar Building the following Wednesday afternoon. I don't like to be around twins, they make me think I'm seeing double. Don't tell me I'm inconsistent; SISTENT; I never saw the twins I am part of—I just saw Pat.
Pat felt the same way; we had never been chummy with other twins. He looked around and whistled. "Tom, did you over see such a mess of spare parts?"
"Never."
"If I were in charge, I'd shoot half of them." He hadn't spoken loud enough to offend anyone; Pat and I used a prison-yard whisper that no one else could hear although we never had trouble understanding it. "Depressing, isn't Then he whistled softly and I looked where he was look ing. Twins of course, but this was a case of when once is good, twice is better. They were red-headed sisters, younger than we were but not too young-sixteen, maybe-and cute as Persian kittens.
Those sisters had the effect on us that a light has on a moth. Pat whispered, "Tom, we owe it to them to grant them a little of our time," and headed toward them, with me in step. They were dressed in fake Scottish outfits, green plaid which made their hair flame like bonfires and to us they looked as pretty as a new fall of snow.
And just as chilly. Pat got halfway through his opening speech when he trailed off and shut up; they were staring through him. I was blushing and the only thing that kept it from being a major embarrassing incident was a loudspeaker that commenced to bray:
"Attention, please! You: are requested to report to the door marked with your surname initial." So we went to door A- to-D and the red-beaded sisters headed toward the other end of the alphabet without ever having seen us at all. As we queued up Pat muttered, "Is there egg on my chin? Or have they taken a vow to be old maids?"
"Probably both," I answered. "Anyhow, I prefer blondes." This was true, since Maudie was a blonde. Pat and I had been dating Maudie Kauric for about a year-going steady you could call it, though in my case it usually meant that I was stuck with Maudie's chum Hedda Staley, whose notion of dazzling conversation was to ask me if I didn't think Maudie was the cutest thing ever? Since this was true and unanswerable, our talk did not sparkle.
"Well, so do I," Pat agreed, without saying which blonde—Maudie was the only subject on which we were reticent with each other. "But I have never had a closed mind." He shrugged and added cheerfully, "Anyhow, there are other possibilities."
There certainly were, for of the hundreds of twins present maybe a third were near enough our age not to be out of the question and half of them, as near as I could tell without counting, were of the sex that turns a mere crowd into a social event. However, none came up to the high standards of the redheads, so I began looking over the crowd as a whole.
The oldest pair I saw, two grown men, seemed to be not older than the early thirties and I saw one set of little girls about twelve—they had their mother in tow. But most of them were within a loud shout of twenty. I had concluded that "Genetics Investigations" was picking its samples by age groups when I found that we were at the head of the line and a clerk was saying, "Names, please?"
For the next two hours we were passed from one data collector to another, being fingerprinted, giving blood samples, checking "yes" or "no" to hundreds of silly questions that can't be answered "yes" or "no." The physical examination was thorough and involved the usual carefully planned nonsense of keeping a person standing in bare feet on a cold floor in a room five degrees too chilly for naked human skin while prodding the victim and asking him rude personal questions.
I was thoroughly bored and was not even amused when Pat whispered that we should strip the clothes off the doctor now and prod him in the belly and get the nurse to record how he liked it? My only pleasant thought was that Pat had stuck them plenty for their fun. Then they let us get dressed and ushered us into a room where a rather pretty woman sat behind a desk. She had a transparency viewer on her desk and was looking at two personality profiles superimposed on it. They almost matched and I tried to sneak a look to see where they did not. But I could not tell Pat's from my own and anyhow I'm not a mathematical psychologist.
She smiled and said, "Sit down, boys. I'm Doctor Arnault." She held up the profiles and a bunch of punched cards and added, "Perfect mirror twins, even to dextrocardia. This should be interesting."
Pat tried to look at the papers. "What's our I.Q. this time, Doctor?"
"Never mind." She put the papers down and covered them, then picked up a deck of cards. "Have you ever used these?"
Of course we had, for they were the classic Rhine test cards, wiggles and stars and so forth. Every high school psychology class has a set and a high score almost always means that some bright boy has figure out a way to cold-deck the teacher. In fact Pat had worked out a simple way to cheat when our teacher, with a tired lack of anger, split us up and made us run tests only with other people—whereupon our scores dropped to the limits of standard error. So I was already certain that Pat and I weren't ESP freaks and the Rhine cards were just another boring test.
But I could feel Pat become attentive. "Keep your ears open, kid," I heard him whisper, "and we'll make this interesting." Dr. Arnault did not hear him, of course.
I wasn't sure we ought to but I knew if he could manage to signal to me I would not be able to refrain from fudging the results. But I need not have worried; Dr. Arnault took Pat out and returned without him. She was hooked by microphone to the other test room but there was no chance to whisper through it; it was hot only when she switched it on.
She started right in. "First test run in twenty seconds, Mabel," she said into the mike and switched it off, then turned to me. "Look at the cards as I turn them," she said.
"Don't try, don't strain. Just look at them."
So I looked at the cards. This went on with variations for • maybe an hour. Sometimes I was supposed to be receiving, sometimes sending. As far as I was concerned nothing happened, for they never told us our scores.
Finally Dr. Arnault looked at a score sheet and said, "Tom, I want to give you a mild injection. It won't hurt you and it'll wear off before you go home. Okay?"
"What sort?" I said suspiciously.
"Don't fret; it is harmless. I don't want to tell you or you might unconsciously show the reaction you expected."
"Uh, what does my brother say? Does he get one, too?"
"Never mind, please. I'm asking you."
I still hesitated. Dad did not favor injections and such unless necessary; he had made a fuss over our taking part in the encephalitis program. "Are you an M.D.?" I asked.
"No, my degree is in science. Why?"
"Then how do you know it's harmless?"
She bit her lip, then answered, "I'11 send for a doctor of medicine, if you prefer."
"Uh, no, I guess that won't be necessary." I was remembering something that Dad had said about the sleeping sickness shots and I added, "Does the Long Range Foundation carry liability insurance for this?"
"What? Why, I think so. Yes, I'm sure they do." She looked at me and added, "Tom, how does a boy your age get to be so suspicions?"
"Huh? Why ask me? You're the psychologist, ma'am. Anyhow," I added, "if you had sat on as many tacks as I have, you'd be suspicions too."
"Mmm . . . never mind. I've been studying for years and I still don't know what the younger generation is coming to. Well, are you going to take the injection?"
"Uh, I'll take it—since the LRF carries insurance. Just write out what it is you are giving me and sign it."
She got two bright pink spots in her cheeks. But she took out stationery, wrote on it, folded it into an envelope and sealed it. "Put it in your pocket," she said briskly. "Don't look at it until the experiments are over. Now bare your left forearm."
As she gave me the shot she said sweetly, "This is going to sting a little... I hope." It did.
She turned out all the lights except the light in the transparency viewer. "Are you comfortable?"
"Sure."
"I'm sorry if I seemed vexed. I want you to relax and be comfortable." She came over and did something to the chair " I was in; it opened out gently until I was practically lying in a hammock. "Relax and don't fight it. If you find yourself getting sleepy, that is to be expected." She sat down and all I could see was her face, illuminated by the viewer. She was awfully pretty, I decided, even though she was too old for it to matter . . . at least thirty, maybe older. And she was nice, too. She spoke for a few minutes in her gentle voice but I don't remember exactly what she said.
I must have gone to sleep, for next it was pitch dark and Pat was right there by me, although I hadn't noticed the light go out nor the door being opened. I started to speak when I heard him whisper:
"Tom, did you ever see such nonsensical rigamarole?"
I whispered back, "Reminds me of the time we were initiated into the Congo Cannibals."
"Keep your voice down; they'll catch on."
"You're the one who is talking too loud: Anyhow, who cares? Let's give 'em the Cannibal war whoop and scare 'em out of their shoes."
"Later, later. Right now my girl friend Mabel wants me to give you a string of numbers. So we'll let them have their fun first. After all, they're paying for it."
"Okay."
"Point six nine three one."
"That's the natural logarithm of two."
"What did you think it was? Mabel's telephone number? Shut up and listen. Just repeat the numbers back. Three point one four one five nine..."
It went on quite a while. Some were familiar numbers like the first two; the rest may have been random or even Mabel's phone number, for all of me. I got bored and was beginning to think about sticking in a war whoop on my own when Dr. Arnault said quietly, "End of test run. Both of you please keep quiet and relax for a few minutes. Mabel, I'll meet you in the data comparison room." I heard her go out, so I dropped the war whoop notion and relaxed. Repeating all those numbers in the dark had made me dopey anyhow—and as Uncle Steve says, when you get a chance to rest, do so; you may not get another chance soon.
Presently I heard the door open again, then I was blinking at bright lights. Dr. Arnault said, "That's all today, Tom . . . and thank you very much. We want to see you and your brother at the same time tomorrow."
I blinked again and looked around. "Where's Pat? What does he say?"
"You'll find him in the outer lobby. He told me that you could come tomorrow. You can, can't you?"
"Uh, I suppose so, if it's all right with him." I was feeling sheepish about the trick we had pulled, so I added, "Dr. Arnault? I'm sorry I annoyed you."
She patted my hand and smiled. "That's all right, You were right to be cautious and you were a good subject. You should see the wild ones we sometimes draw. See you tomorrow."
Pat was waiting in the big room where we had seen the redheads. He fell into step and we headed for the drop.
"I raised the fee for tomorrow," he whispered smugly.
"You did? Pat, do you think we should do this? I mean, fun is fun, but if they ever twig that we are faking, they'll be sore. They might even make us pay back what they've already paid us."
"How can they? We've been paid to show up and take tests. We've done that. It's up to them to rig tests that can't be beaten. I could, if I were doing it."
"Pat, you're dishonest and crooked, both." I thought about Dr. Arnault... she was a nice lady. "I think I'll stay home tomorrow."
I said this just as Pat stepped off the drop. He was ten feet below me all the way down and had forty stories in which to consider his answer. As I landed beside him he answered by changing the subject. "They gave you a hypodermic?"
"Yes."
"Did you think to make them sign an admission of liability, or did you goof?"
"Well, sort of." I felt in my pocket for the envelope; I'd forgotten about it. "I made Dr. Arnault write down what she was giving us."
Pat reached for the envelope. "My apologies, maestro. With my brains and your luck we've got them where we want them." He started to open the envelope. "I bet it was neopentothal-or one of the barbiturates."
I snatched it back. "That's mine."
"Well, open it," he answered, "and don't obstruct traffic. I want to see what dream drug they gave us."
We had come out into the pedestrian level and his advice did have merit. Before opening it I led us across the change strips onto the fast-west strip and stepped behind a wind break. As I unfolded the paper Pat read over my shoulder:
"'Long Range Fumbling, and so forth-injections given to subjects 7L435 & -6 T. P. Bartlett & P. H. Bartlett (iden-twins)—each one-tenth c.c. distilled water raised to normal salinity,' signed 'Doris Arnault, Sc.D., for the Foundation.' Tom, we've been hoaxed!"
I stared at it, trying to fit what I had experienced with what the paper said. Pat added hopefully, "Or is this the hoax? Were we injected with something else and they didn't want to admit it?"
"No," I said slowly. I was sure Dr. Arnault wouldn't write down "water" and actually give us one of the sleeping drugs—she wasn't that sort of person. "Pat, we weren't drugged... we were hypnotized."
He shook his head. "Impossible. Granting that I could be hypnotized, you couldn't be. Nothing there to hypnotize. And I wasn't hypnotized, comrade. No spinning lights, no passes with the hands—why, my girl Mabel didn't even stare in my eyes. She just gave me the shot and told me to take it easy and let it take effect."
"Don't be juvenile, Pat. Spinning lights and such is for suckers. I don't care whether you call it hypnotism or salesmanship. They gave us hypos and suggested that we would be sleepy—so we fell asleep."
"So I was sleepy! Anyhow that wasn't quite what Mabel did. She told me not to go to sleep, or if I did, to wake up when she called me. Then when they brought you in, she—"
"Wait a minute. You mean when they moved you back into the room I was in—"
"No, I don't mean anything of the sort. After they brought you in, Mabel gave me this list of numbers and I read them to you and—"
"Wait a minute," I said. "Pat, you're mixed up. How could you read them in pitch darkness? She must have read them to you. I mean—" I stopped, for I was getting mixed up myself. Well, she could have read to him from another room. "Were you wearing headphones?"
"What's that got to do with it? Anyhow, it wasn't pitch dark, not after they brought you in. She held up the numbers on a board that was rigged with a light of its own, enough to let me see the numbers and her hands."
"Pat, I wish you wouldn't keep repeating nonsense. Hypnotized or not, I was never so dopey that I couldn't notice anything that happened. I was never moved anywhere; they probably wheeled you in without disturbing you. And the room we were in was pitch dark, not a glimmer."
Pat did not answer right away, which wasn't like him. At last he said, "Tom, are you sure?"
"Sure I'm sure!"
He sighed. "I hate to say this, because I know what you will say. But what are you supposed to do when none of your theories fits?"
"Huh? Is this a quiz? You throw 'em away and try a new one. Basic methodology, freshman year."
"Okay, just slip this on for size, don't mind the pattern: Tom, my boy, brace yourself-we're mind readers."
I tried it and did not like it. "Pat, just because you can't explain everything is no reason to talk like the fat old women who go to fortune tellers. We're muddled, I admit, whether it was drugs or hypnosis. But we couldn't have been reading each other's minds or we would have been doing it years ago. We would have noticed."
"Not necessarily. There's never anything much going on in your mind, so why should I notice?"
"But it stands to reason—"
"What's the natural log of two?"
"'Point six nine three one' is what you said, though I've got very little use for four-place tables. What's that got to do with it?"
"I used four-place because she gave it to me that way. Do you remember what she said just before I gave you that number?"
"Huh? Who?"
"Mabel. Dr. Mabel Lichtenstein. What did she say?"
"Nobody said anything."
"Tom, my senile symbiote, she told me what to do, to wit, read the numbers to you. She told me this in a clear, penetrating soprano. You didn't hear her?"
"No."
"Then you weren't in the same room. You weren't within earshot, even though I was prepared to swear that they had shoved you in right by me. I knew you were there. But you weren't. So it was telepathy."
I was confused. I didn't feel telepathic; I merely felt hungry.
"Me, too, on both counts," Pat agreed. "So let's stop at Berkeley Station end get a sandwich."
I followed him off the strips, feeling not quite as hungry and even more confused. Pat had answered a remark I had not made.
Even though I was told to take my time and tell everything, it can't be done. I haven't had time to add to this for days, but even if I didn't have to work I still could not "tell all," because it takes more than a day to write down what happens in one day. The harder you try the farther behind you get. So I'm going to quit trying and just hit the high spots.
Anyhow everybody knows the general outline of Project Lebensraum.
We did not say anything to Mum and Dad about that first day. You can't expose parents to that sort of thing; they get jittery and start issuing edicts. We just told them the tests would run a second day and that nobody had told us what the results were.
Dr. Arnault seemed unsurprised when we told her we knew the score, even when I blurted out that we thought we had been faking but apparently weren't. She just nodded and said that it had been necessary to encourage us to think that everything was commonplace, even if there had to be a little fibbing on both sides. "I had the advantage of having your personality analyses to guide me," she added. "Sometimes in psychology you have to go roundabout to arrive at the truth.
"We'll try a more direct way today," she went on. "We'll put you two back to back but close enough together that you unquestionably can hear each other. But I am going to use a sound screen to cut you off partly or completely from time to time without your knowing it."
It was a lot harder the second time. Naturally we tried and naturally we flubbed. But Dr. Arnault was patient and so was Dr. Lichtenstein—Pat's "Dr. Mabel." She preferred to be called Dr. Mabel; she was short and pudgy and younger than Dr. Arnault and about as cute as a female can be and still look like a sofa pillow. It wasn't until later that we found out she was boss of the research team and world famous. "Giggly little fat girl"—was an act she used to put ordinary people, meaning Pat and myself, at their ease.
I guess this proves you should ignore the package and read the fine print.
So she giggled and Dr. Arnault looked serious and we could not tell whether we were reading minds or not. I could hear Tom's whispers—they told us to go ahead and whisper—and he could hear mine and sometimes they would fade. I was sure we weren't getting anything, not telepathy I mean, for it was just the way Pat and I used to whisper answers back and forth in school without getting caught.
Finally Dr. Mabel giggled sheepishly and said, "I guess that's enough for today. Don't you think so, Doctor?"
Dr. Arnault agreed and Pat and I sat up and faced each other. I said, "I suppose yesterday was a fluke. I guess we disappointed you."
Dr. Mabel looked like a startled kitten. Dr. Arnault answered soberly, "I don't know what you expected, Tom, but for the past hour you and your brother have been cut off from hearing each other during every test run."
"But I did hear him."
"You certainly did. But not with your ears. We've been recording each side of the sound barrier. Perhaps we should play back part of it."
Dr. Mabel giggled. “That's a good idea." So they did. It started out with all four voices while they told us what they wanted, then there were just my whispers and Pat's, reading lines back and forth from The Comedy of Errors. They must have had parabolic mikes focused on us for our whispers sounded like a wind storm.
Pat's whispers gradually faded out. But mine kept fight on going... answering a dead silence.
We signed a research contract with the Foundation and Dad countersigned it, after an argument. He thought mind-reading was folderol and we did not dispute him, since the clincher was that money was scarce as always and it was a better-paying job than any summer job we could get, fat enough to insure that we could start college even if our scholarships didn't come through.
But before the summer was over they let us in on the connection between "Genetics Investigations" and "Project Lebensraum." That was a horse of another color—a very dark black, from our parents' standpoint.
Long before that time Pat and I could telepath as easily as we could talk and just as accurately, without special nursing and at any distance. We must have been doing it for years without knowing it—in fact Dr. Arnault made a surprise recording of our prison-yard whispering (when we weren't trying to telepath, just our ordinary private conversation) and proved that neither one of us could understand our recorded whispers when we were keeping it down low to keep other people from hearing.
She told us that it was theoretically possible that everyone was potentially telepathic, but that it had proved difficult to demonstrate it except with identical twins—and then only with about ten per cent. "We don't know why, but think of an analogy with tuned radio circuits."
"Brain waves?" I asked.
"Don't push the analogy too far. It can't be the brain waves we detect with an encephalograph equipment or we would have been selling commercial telepathic equipment long since. And the human brain is not a radio. But whatever it is, two persons from the same egg stand an enormously better chance of being 'tuned in' than two non-twins do. I can't read your mind and you can't read mine and perhaps we never will. There have been only a few cases in all the history of psychology of people who appeared to be able to "tune in" on just anyone, and most of those aren't well documented."
Pat grinned and winked at Dr. Mabel. "So we are a couple of freaks."
She looked wide-eyed and started to answer but Dr. Arnault beat her to it. "Not at all, Pat. In you it is normal. But we do have teams in the project who are not identical twins. Some husbands and wives, a few fraternal siblings, even some pairs who were brought together by the research itself. They are the 'freaks.' If we could find out how they do it, we. might be able to set up conditions to let anyone do it."
Dr. Mabel shivered. "What a terrible thought! There is too little privacy now."
I repeated this to Maudie (with Pat's interruptions and corrections) because the news services had found out what was going on in "Genetics Investigations" and naturally we "mind readers" came in for a lot of silly publicity and just as naturally, under Hedda Staley's mush-headed prodding, Maudie began to wonder if a girl had any privacy? She had, of course; I could not have read her mind with a search warrant, nor could Pat. She would have believed our simple statement if Hedda had not harped on it. She nearly managed to bust us up with Maudie, but we jettisoned her instead and we had threesome dates with Maudie until Pat was sent away.
But that wasn't until nearly the end of the summer after they explained Project Lebensraum.
About a week before our contract was to run out they gathered us twins together to talk to us. There had been hundreds that first day, dozens the second day, but just enough to crowd a big conference room by the end of summer. The redheads were among the survivors but Pat and I did not sit by them even though there was room; they still maintained their icicle attitude and were self-centered as oysters. The rest of us were all old friends by now.
A Mr. Howard was introduced as representing the Foundation. He ladled out the usual guff about being happy to meet us and appreciating the honor and so forth. Pat said to me. "Hang onto your wallet, Tom. This bloke is selling something." Now that we knew what we were doing Pat and I talked in the presence of other people even more than we used to. We no longer bothered to whisper since we had had proved to us that we weren't hearing the whispers. But we did subvocalize the words silently, as it helped in being understood. Early in the summer we had tried to do without words and read minds directly but it did not work. Oh, I could latch on to Pat, but the silly, incoherent rumbling that went on his mind in place of thought was confusing and annoying, as senseless as finding yourself inside another person's dream. So I learned not to listen unless he "spoke" to me and he did the same. When we did, we used words and sentences like anybody else. There was none of this fantastic, impossible popular nonsense about instantly grasping the contents of another person's mind; we simply "talked."
One thing that had bothered me was why Pat's telepathic "voice" sounded like his real one. It had not worried me when I did not know what we were doing, but once I realized that these "sounds" weren't sounds, it bothered me. I began to wonder if I was all there and for a week I could not "hear" him—psychosomatic telepathic-deafness Dr. Arnault called it.
She got me straightened out by explaining what hearing is. You don't hear with your ears, you hear with your brain; you don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain. When you touch something, the sensation is not in your finger, it is inside your head. The ears and eyes and fingers are just data collectors; it is the brain that abstracts order out of a chaos of data and gives it meaning. "A new baby does not really see," she said. "Watch the eyes of one and you can see that it doesn't. Its eyes work but its brain has not yet learned to see. But once the brain has acquired the habits of abstracting as 'seeing' and 'hearing,' the habit persists. How would you expect to 'hear' what your twin says to you telepathically? As little tinkling bells or dancing lights? Not at all. You expect words, your brain 'hears' words; it is a process it is used to and knows how to handle."
I no longer worried about it, I could hear Pat's voice clearer than I could hear the voice of the speaker addressing us. No doubt there were fifty other conversations around us, but I heard no one but Pat and it was obvious that the speaker could not hear anybody (and that he did not know much about telepathy) for he went on:
"Possibly a lot of you wonderful people—" (This with a sickening smile) "-are reading my mind right now. I hope not, or if you are I hope you will bear with me until I have said my say."
"What did I tell you?" Pat put in. "Don't sign anything until l check it."
("Shut up,'). I told him. ("I want to listen.") His voice used to sound like a whisper; now it tended to drown out real sounds. "
Mr. Howard went on, "Perhaps you have wondered why the Long Range Foundation has sponsored this research. The Foundation is always interested in anything which will add to human knowledge. But there is a much more important reason, a supremely important reason . . . and a grand purpose to which you yourselves can be supremely important."
"See? Be sure to count your change."
("Quiet, Pat.") , "Let me quote," Mr. Howard continued, "from the charter of the Long Range Foundation: 'Dedicated to the welfare of our descendants.' " He paused dramatically—I think that was what he intended; "Ladies and gentlemen, what one thing above all is necessary for our descendants?"
"Ancestors!" Pat answered promptly. For a second I thought that he had used his vocal cords, But nobody else noticed.
"There can be only one answer—living room! Room to grow, room to raise families, broad acres of fertile grain, room for parks and schools and homes. We have over five billion human souls on this planet; it was crowded to the point of marginal starvation more than a century ago with only half that number. Yet this afternoon there are a quarter of a million more of us than there were at this same hour yesterday
—ninety million more people each year. Only by monumental efforts of reclamation and conservation, plus population control measures that grow daily more difficult, have we been able to stave off starvation. We have placed a sea in the Sahara, we have melted the Greenland ice cap, we have watered the windy steppes, yet each year there is more and more pressure for more and more room for endlessly more people."
I don't care for orations and this was all old stuff. Shucks, Pat and I knew it if anyone did; we were the kittens that should have been drowned; our old man paid a yearly fine for our very existence.
"It has been a century since the inception of interplanetary travel; man has spread through the Solar System. One would think that nine planets would be ample for a race too fertile for one. Yet you all know that such has not been the case. Of the daughters of Father Sol only fair Terra is truly suited to Man."
"I'll bet he writes advertising slogans."
("Poor ones,") I agreed.
"Colonize the others we have done, but only at a great cost. The sturdy Dutch in pushing back the sea have not faced such grim and nearly hopeless tasks as the colonists of Mars and Venus and Ganymede. What the human race needs and must have are not these frozen or burning or airless discards of creation. We need more planets like this gentle one we are standing on. And there are more, many more!" He waved his hands at the ceiling and looked up.
"There are dozens, hundreds, thousands, countless hordes of them . . . out there. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the stars!"
"Here comes the pitch," Pat said quietly. "A fast curve, breaking inside."
("Pat, what the deuce is he driving at?")
"He's a real estate agent."
Pat was not far off: but I am not going to quote the rest of Mr. Howard's speech. He was a good sort when we got to know him but he was dazzled by the sound of his own voice, so I'll summarize. He reminded us that the Torchship Avant-Garde had headed out to Proxima Centauri six years back. Pat and I knew about it not only from the news but because mother's brother, Uncle Steve, had put in for it—he was turned down, but for a while we enjoyed prestige just from being related to somebody on the list—I guess we gave the impression around school that Uncle Steve was certain to be chosen.
Nobody had heard from the Avant-Garde and maybe she would be back in fifteen or twenty years and maybe not. The reason we hadn't heard from her, as Mr. Howard pointed out and everybody knows, is that you don't send radio messages back from a ship light-years away and traveling just under the speed of light. Even if you assumed that a ship could carry a power plant big enough to punch radio messages across light-years (which may not be impossible in some cosmic sense but surely is impossible in terms of modem engineering)—even so, what use are messages which travel just barely faster than the ship that sends them? The Avant-Garde would be home almost as quickly as any report she could send, even by radio.
Some fuzzbrain asked about messenger rockets. Mr. Howard looked pained and tried to answer and I didn't listen. If radio isn't fast enough, how can a messenger rocket be faster? I'll bet Dr. Einstein spun in his grave.
Mr. Howard hurried on before there were any more silly interruptions. The Long Range Foundation proposed to send out a dozen more starships in all directions to explore Sol-type solar systems for Earth-type planets, planets for coloniza tion. The ships might be gone a long time, for each one would explore more than one solar system.
"And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where you are indispensable to this great project for living room—for you will be the means whereby the captains of those ships report back what they have found!"
Even Pat kept quiet.
Presently a man stood up in the back of the room. He was one of the oldest twins among us; he and his brother were about thirty-five. "Excuse me, Mr. Howard, but may I ask a question?"
. "Surely."
"I am Gregory Graham; this is my brother Grant Graham. We're physicists. Now we don't claim to be expert in cosmic phenomena but we do know something about communication theory. Granting for the sake of argument that telepathy would work over interstellar distances—I don't think so but I've no proof that it wouldn't—even granting that, I can't see where it helps. Telepathy, light, radio waves, even gravity, are all limited to the speed of light. That is in the very nature of the physical universe, an ultimate limit for all communication. Any other view falls into the ancient philosophical contradiction of action-at-a-distance. It is just possible that you might use telepathy to report findings and let the ship go on to new explorations—but the message would still take light-years to come back. Communication back and forth between a starship and Earth, even by telepathy, is utterly impossible, contrary to the known laws of physics." He looked apologetic and sat down.
I thought Graham had him on the hip. Pat and I got good marks in physics and what Graham had said was the straight word, right out of the book. But Howard did not seem bothered. "I'll let an expert answer. Dr. Lichtenstein? If you please—"
Dr. Mabel stood up and blushed and giggled and looked flustered and said, "I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Graham, I really am, but telepathy isn't like that at all." She giggled again and said, "I shouldn't be saying this, since you are telepathic and I'm not, but telepathy doesn't pay the least bit of attention to the speed of light."
"But it has to. The laws of physics—"
"Oh, dear! Have we given you the impression that telepathy is physical?" She twisted her hands. "It probably isn't."
"Everything is physical. I include 'physiological,' of course."
"It is? You do? Oh, I wish I could be sure . . . but physics has always been much too deep for me. But I don't know how you can be sure that telepathy is physical; we haven't been able to make it register on any instrument. Dear me, we don't even know how consciousness hooks into matter. Is consciousness physical? I'm sure I don't know. But we do know that telepathy is faster than light because we measured it."
Pat sat up with a jerk, "Stick around, kid. I think we'll stay for the second show."
Graham looked stunned. Dr. Mabel said hastily, "I didn't do it; it was Dr; Abernathy."
"Horatio Abernathy?" demanded Graham.
"Yes, that's his first name, though I never dared call him by it. He's rather important."
"Just the Nobel prize," Graham said grimly, "in field theory. Go on. What did he find?"
"Well, we sent this one twin out to Ganymede—such an awfully long way. Then we used simultaneous radio-telephony and telepathy messages, with the twin on Ganymede talking by radio while he was talking directly—telepathically, I mean—to his twin back in Buenos Aires. The telepathic message always beat the radio message by about forty minutes. That would be right, wouldn't it? You can see the exact figures in my office."
Graham managed to close his month. "When did this happen? Why hasn't it been published? Who has been keeping it secret? It's the most important thing since the Michelson-Morley experiment—it's terrible!"
• Dr. Mabel looked upset and Mr. Howard butted in soothingly. "Nobody has been suppressing knowledge, Mr. Graham, and Dr. Abernathy is preparing an article for publication in the Physical Review. However I admit that the Foundation did ask him not to give out an advance release in order to give us time to go ahead with another project—the one you know as 'Genetics Investigations'—on a crash- priority basis. We felt we were entitled to search out and attempt to sign up potential telepathic teams before every psychological laboratory and, for that matter, every ambitious showman, tried to beat us to it. Dr. Abernathy was willing—he doesn't like premature publication."
"If it will make you feel better, Mr. Graham," Dr. Mabel said diffidently, "telepathy doesn't pay attention to the inverse-square law either. The signal strength was as strong at half a billion miles as when the paired telepaths were in adjoining rooms."
Graham sat down heavily. "I don't know whether it does or it doesn't. I'm busy rearranging everything I have ever believed."
The interruption by the Graham brothers had explained some things but had pulled us away from the purpose of the meeting, which was for Mr. Howard to sell us on signing up as spacemen. He did not have to sell me. I guess every boy wants to go out into space; Pat and I had run away from home once to enlist in the High Marines—and this was much more than just getting on the Earth-Mars-Venus run; this meant exploring the stars.
The Stars!
"We've told you about this before your research contracts run out," Mr. Howard explained, "so that you will have time to consider it, time for us to explain the conditions and advantages."
I did not care what the advantages were. If they had invited me to hook a sled on behind, I would have said yes, not worrying about torch blast or space suits or anything.
"Both members of each telepathic team will be equally well taken care of," he assured us. "The starside member will have good pay and good working conditions in the finest of modern torchships in the company of crews selected for psychological compatibility as well as for special training; the earthside member will have his financial future assured, as well as his physical welfare." He smiled. "Most assuredly his physical welfare, for it is necessary that he be kept alive and well as long as science can keep him so. It is not too much to say that signing this contract will add thirty years to your lives."
It burst on me why the twins they had tested had been young people. The twin who went out to the stars would not age very much, not at the speed of light. Even if he stayed away a century it would not seem that long to him—but his twin who stayed behind would grow older. They would have to pamper him like royalty, keep him alive—or their "radio" would break down.
Pat said, "Milky Way, here I come!"
But Mr. Howard was still talking. "We want you to think this over carefully; it is the most important decision you will ever make. On the shoulders of you few and others like you in other cities around the globe, all told just a tiny fraction of one per cent of the human race, on you precious few rest the hopes of all humanity. So think carefully and give us a chance to explain anything which may trouble yore Don't act hastily."
The red-headed twins got up and walked out, noses in the air. They did not have to speak to make it clear that they would have nothing to do with anything so unladylike, so rude and crude, as exploring space. In the silence in which they paraded out Pat said to me, "There go the Pioneer Mothers. That's the spirit that discovered America." As they passed us he cut loose with a loud razzberry—and I suddenly realized that he was not telepathing when the redheads stiffened and hurried faster. There was an embarrassed laugh and Mr. Howard quickly picked up the business at hand as if nothing had happened while I bawled Pat out.
Mr. Howard asked as to come back at the usual time tomorrow, when Foundation representatives' would explain details. He invited us to bring our lawyers, or (those of us who were under age, which was more than half) our parents and their lawyers.
Pat was bubbling over as we left, but I had lost my enthusiasm. In the middle of Mr. Howard's speech I had had a great light dawn: one of us was going to have to stay be hind and I knew as certainly as bread falls butter side down which one it would be. A possible thirty more years on my life was no inducement to me. What use is thirty extra years wrapped in cottonwool? There would be no spacing for the twin left behind, not even inside the Solar System . . . and I had never even been to the Moon.
I tried to butt in on Pat's enthusiasm and put it to him fair and square, for I was darned if I was going to take the small piece of cake this time without argument.
"Look, Pat, I'll draw straws with you for it. Or match coins."
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about!"
He just brushed it aside and grinned. "You worry too much, Tom. They'll pick the teams the way they want to. It won't be up to us."
I know he was determined to go and I knew I would lose.
Our parents made the predictable uproar. A conference in the Bartlett family always sounded like a zoo at feeding time but this one set a new high. In addition to Pat and myself, Faith, Hope, and Charity, and our parents, there was Faith's fairly new husband, Frank Dubois, and Hope's brand- new fiancé, Lothar Sembrich. The last two did not count and both of them seemed to me to be examples of what lengths a girl will go to in order to get married, but they used up space and occasionally contributed remarks to confuse the issue. But Mother's brother, Uncle Steve, was there, too, having popped up on Earthside furlough.
It was Uncle Steve's presence that decided Pat to bring it out in the open instead of waiting to tackle Dad and Mum one at a time. Both of them considered Uncle Steve a disturbing influence but they were proud of him; one of his rare visits was always a holiday.
Mr. Howard had given us a sample contract to take home and look over. After dinner Pat said, "By the way, Dad, the Foundation offered us a new contract today, a long-term one." He took it out of his pocket but did not offer it to Dad.
"I trust you told them that you were about to start school again?"
"Sure, we told them that, but they insisted that we take the contract home to show our parents. Okay, we knew what your answer would be." Pat started to put the contract into his pocket.
I said to Pat privately, ("What's the silly idea? You've made him say 'no' and now he can't back down.")
"Not yet he hasn't," Pat answered on our private circuit.
"Don't joggle my elbow."
Dad was already reaching out a hand. "Let me see it, You should never make up your mind without knowing the facts."
Pat was not quick about passing it over. "Well, there is a scholarship clause," he admitted, "but Tom and I wouldn't be able to go to school together the way we always have."
"That's not necessarily bad. You two are too dependent on each other. Some day you will have to face the cold, cruel world alone . . . and going to different schools might be a good place to start."
Pat stuck out the contract, folded to the second page, "It's paragraph ten."
Dad read paragraph ten first, just as Pat meant him to do, and his eyebrows went up. Paragraph ten agreed that the party of the first part, the LRF, would keep the party of the second part in any school of his choice, all expenses, for the duration of the contract, or a shorter time at his option, and agreed to do the same for the party of the third part after the completion of the active period of the contract, plus tutoring during the active period—all of which was a long-winded way of saying that the Foundation would put the one who stayed home through school now and the one who went starside through school when he got back... all this in addition to our salaries; see paragraph seven.
So Dad turned to paragraph seven and his eyebrows went higher and his pipe went out. He looked at Pat. "Do I understand that they intend to appoint you two 'communications technicians tenth grade' with no experience?"
Uncle Steve sat up and almost knocked his chair over.
"Bruce, did you say 'tenth grade'?"
"So it says."
"Regular LRF pay scales?"
"Yes. I don't know how much that is, but I believe they ordinarily hire skilled ratings beginning at third grade."
Uncle Steve whistled. "I'd hate to tell you how much money it is, Bruce—but the chief electron pusher on Pluto is tenth pay grade . . . and it took him twenty years and a doctor's degree to get there." Uncle Steve looked at us.
"Give out, shipmates. Where did they bury the body? Is it a bribe?" Pat did not answer. Uncle Steve turned to Dad and said, "Never mind the fine print, Bruce; just have the kids sign it. Each one of them will make more than you and me together. Never argue with Santa Claus."
But Dad was already reading the fine print, from sub- paragraph one-A to the penalty clauses. It was written in lawyer language but what it did was to sign us up as crew members for one voyage of an LRF ship, except that one of us was required to perform his duties Earthside. There was lots more to nail it down so that the one who stayed Earth- side could not wiggle out, but that was all it amounted to.
The contact did not say where the ship would go or how long the voyage would last.
Dad finally put the contract down and Charity grabbed it. Dad took it from her and passed it over to Mother. Then he said, "Boys, this contract looks so favorable that I suspect there must be a catch. Tomorrow morning I'm going to get hold of Judge Holland and ask him to go over it with me. But if I read it correctly, you are being offered all these benefits-and an extravagant salary-provided one of you makes one voyage in the Lewis and Clark."
Uncle Steve said suddenly, "The Lewis and Clark, Bruce?"
"The Lewis and Clark, or such sister ship as may be designated. Why? You know the ship, Steve?"
Uncle Steve got poker-faced and answered, "I've never been in her. New ship, I understand. Well equipped."
"I'm glad to hear it." Dad looked at Mum. "Well, Molly?"
Mother did not answer. She was reading the contract and steadily getting whiter. Uncle Steve caught my eye and shook his head very slightly. I said to Pat, ("Uncle Steve has spotted the catch in it.")
"He won't hinder. "
Mother looked up at last and spoke to Dad in a high voice. "I suppose you are going to consent?" She sounded sick. She put down the contract and Charity grabbed it again just as Hope grabbed it from the other side. It ended with our brother-in-law Frank Dubois holding it while everybody else read over his shoulders.
"Now, my dear," Dad said mildly, "remember that boys do grow up. I would like to keep the family together forever—but it can't be that way and you know it."
"Bruce, you promised that they would not go out into space."
Her brother shot her a glance—his chest was covered with ribbons he had won in space. But Dad went on just as mildly. "Not quite, dear. I promised you that I would not consent to minority enlistment in the peace forces; I want them to finish school and I did not want you upset. But this is another matter... and, if we refuse, it won't be long before they can enlist whether we like it or not."
Mother turned to Uncle Steve and said bitterly, "Stephen, you put this idea in their heads."
He looked annoyed then answered as gently as Dad.
"Take it easy, Sis. I've been away; you can't pin this on me. Anyhow, you don't put ideas in boys' heads; they grow them naturally."
Frank Dubois cleared his throat and said loudly, "Since this seems to be a family conference, no doubt you would like my opinion."
I said, to Pat only, ('Nobody asked your opinion, you lard head!")
Pat answered, "Let him talk. He's our secret weapon, maybe."
"If you want the considered judgment of an experienced businessman, this so-called contract is either a practical joke or a proposition so preposterous as to be treated with contempt. I understand that the twins are supposed to have some freak talent—although I've seen no evidence of it—but the idea of paying them more than a man receives in his mature years, well, it's just not the right way to raise boys. If they were sons of mine, I would forbid it. Of course, they're not—"
"No, they're not," Dad agreed.
Frank looked sharply at him. "Was that sarcasm, Father Bartlett? I'm merely trying to help. But as I told you the other day, if the twins will go to some good business school and work hard, I'd find a place for them in the bakery. If they make good, there is no reason why they should not do as well as I have done." Frank was his father's junior partner in an automated bakery; he always managed to let people know how much money he made. "But as for this notion of going out into space, I've always said that if a man expects to make anything of himself, he should stay home and work. Excuse me, Steve."
Uncle Steve said woodenly, "I'd be glad to excuse you."
"Eh?"
"Forget it, forget it. You stay out of space and I'll promise not to bake any bread. By the way, there's flour on your lapel."
Frank glanced down hastily. Faith brushed at his jacket and said, "Why, that's just powder."
"Of course it is," Frank agreed, brushing at it himself. "I'll have you know, Steve, that I'm usually much too busy to go down on the processing floor. I'm hardly ever out of the office."
"So I suspected."
Frank decided that he and Faith were late for another appointment and got up to go, when Dad stopped them.
"Frank? What was that about my boys being freaks?"
"What? I never said anything of the sort."
"I'm glad to hear it."
They left in a sticky silence, except that Pat was humming silently and loudly the March of the Gladiators. "We've got it won, kid!"
It seemed so to me, too-but Pat had to press our luck. He picked up the contract. "Then it's okay, Dad?"
"Mmm . . . I want to consult Judge Holland—and I'm not speaking for your mother." That did not worry us; Mum wouldn't hold out if Dad agreed, especially not with Uncle Steve around. "But you could say that the matter has not been disapproved." He frowned. "By the way, there is no time limit mentioned in there."
Uncle Steve fielded that one for us; "That's customary on a commercial ship, Bruce . . . which is what this is, legally. You sign on for the voyage, home planet to home planet."
"Uh, no doubt. But didn't they give you some idea, boys?"
I heard Pat moan, "There goes the ball game. What'll we tell him, Tom" Dad waited and Uncle Steve eyed us.
Finally Uncle Steve said, "Better speak up, boys. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I'm trying to get a billet on one of those ships myself—special discharge and such. So I know."
Pat muttered something. Dad said sharply, "Speak up, son."
"They told us the voyage would probably last . . . about a century."
Mum fainted and Uncle Steve caught her and everybody rushed around with cold compresses getting in each other's way and we were all upset. Once she pulled out of it Uncle Steve said to Dad, "Bruce? I'm going to take the boys out and buy them a tall, strong sarsaparilla and get them out from under foot. You won't want to talk tonight anyhow."
Dad agreed absently that it was a good. idea. I guess Dad loved all of us; nevertheless, when the chips were down, nobody counted but Mother.
Uncle Steve took us to a place where be could get something more to his taste than sarsaparilla, then vetoed it when Pat tried to order beer. "Don't try to show off, youngster. You are not going to put me in the position of serving liquor to my sister's kids."
"Beer can't hurt you."
"So? I'm still looking for the bloke who told me it was a soft drink. I'm going to beat him to a pulp with a stein. Pipe down." So we picked soft drinks and he drank some horrible mixture he called a Martian shandy and we talked about Project Lebensraum. He knew more about it than we did even though no press release had been made until that day—I suppose the fact that he had been assigned to the Chief of Staff's office had something to do with it, but he did not say.
Presently Pat looked worried and said, "See here, Uncle Steve, is there any chance that they will let us? Or should Tom and I just forget it?"
"Eh? Of course they are going to let you do it."
"Huh? It didn't look like it tonight. If I know Dad, he would skin us for rugs rather than make Mum unhappy."
"No doubt. And a good idea. But believe me, boys, this is in the bag . . . provided you use the right arguments."
"Which is?"
"Mmm... boys, being a staff rating, I've served with a lot of high brass. When you are right and a general is wrong, there is only one way to get him to change his mind. You shut up and don't argue. You let the facts speak for themselves and give him time to figure out a logical reason for reversing himself."
Pat looked unconvinced; Uncle Steve went on, "Believe me. Your pop is a reasonable man and, while your mother is not, she would rather be hurt herself than make anybody she loves unhappy. That contract is all in your favor and they can't refuse—provided you give them time to adjust to the idea. But if you tease and bulldoze and argue the way you usually do, you'll get them united against you."
"Huh? But I never tease, I merely use logical—"
"Stow it, you make me tired. Pat, you were one of the most unlovable brats that ever squawled to get his own way . . . and, Tom, you weren't any better. You haven't mellowed with age; you've simply sharpened your techniques. Now you are being offered something free that I would give my right arm to have. I ought to stand aside and let you flub it. But I won't. Keep your flapping mouths shut, play this easy, and it's yours. Try your usual loathsome tactics and you lose."
We would not take that sort of talk from most people. Anybody else and Pat would have given me the signal and he'd 've hit him high while I hit him low. But you don't argue that way with a man who wears the Ceres ribbon; you listen. Pat didn't even mutter to me about it.
So we talked about Project Lebensraum itself, Twelve ships were to go out, radiating from Sol approximately in axes of a dodecahedron—but only approximately, as each ship's mission would be, not to search a volume of space, but to visit as many Sol-type stars as possible in the shortest time. Uncle Steve explained how they worked out a "mini-max" search curve for each ship but I did not understand it; it involved a type of calculus we had not studied.. Not that it mattered; each ship was to spend as much time exploring and as little time making the jumps as possible.
But Pat could not keep from coming back to the idea of how to sell the deal to our parents. "Uncle Steve? Granting that you are right about playing it easy, here's an argument that maybe they should hear? Maybe you could use it on them?"
"Um?"
"Well, if half a loaf is better than none, maybe they haven't realized that this way one of us stays home." I caught a phrase of what Pat had started to say, which was not "one of us stays home," but "Tom stays home." I started to object, then let it ride. He hadn't said it. Pat went on, "They know we want to space. If they don't let us do this, we'll do it any way we can. If we joined your corps, we might come home on leave-but not often. If we emigrate, we might as well be dead; very few emigrants make enough to afford a trip back to Earth, not while their parents are still alive, at least. So if they keep us home now, as soon as we are of age they probably will never see us again. But if they agree, not only does one stay home, but they are always in touch with the other one—that's the whole purpose in using us telepath pairs." Pat looked anxiously at Uncle Steve.
"Shouldn't we point that out? Or will you slip them the • idea?"
Uncle Steve did not answer right away, although I could not see anything wrong with the logic. Two from two leaves zero, but one from two still leaves one.
Finally he answered slowly, "Pat, can't you get it through your thick head to leave well enough alone?"
"I don't see what's wrong with my logic.”
"Since when was an emotional argument won by logic? You should read about the time King Solomon proposed to divvy up the baby." He took a pull at his glass and wiped his mouth. "What I am about to tell you is strictly confidential. Did you know that the Planetary League considered commissioning these ships as warships?"
"Huh? Why? Mr. Howard didn't say—"
"Keep your voice down. Project Lebensraum is of supreme interest to the Department of Peace. When it comes down to it, the root cause of war is always population pressure no matter what other factors enter in."
"But we've abolished war."
"So we have. So chaps like me get paid to stomp out brush fires before they burn the whole forest. Boys, if I tell you the rest of this, you've got to keep it to yourselves now and forever."
I don't like secrets. I'd rather owe money. You can't pay back a secret. But we promised.
"Okay. I saw the estimates the Department of Peace made on this project at the request of LRF. When the Avant-Garde was sent out, they gave her one chance in nine of returning. We've got better equipment now; they figure one chance in six for each planetary system visited. Each ship visits an average of six stars on the schedule laid out—so each ship has one chance in thirty-six of coming back. For twelve ships that means one chance in three of maybe one ship coming back. That's where you freaks come in."
"Don't call us 'freaks'!" We answered together.
" 'Freaks,' " he repeated. "And everybody is mighty glad you freaks are around, because without you the thing is impossible. Ships and crews are expendable—ships are just money and they can always find people like me with more curiosity than sense to man the ships. But while the ships are expendable, the knowledge they will gather is not expendable. Nobody at the top expects these ships to come back—but we've got to locate those earth-type planets; the human race needs them. That is what you boys are for: to report back. Then it won't matter that the ships won't come back."
"I'm not scared," I said firmly.
Pat glanced at me and looked away. I hadn't telepathed but I had told him plainly that the matter was not settled as to which one of us would go. Uncle Steve looked at me soberly and said, "I didn't expect you to be, at your age. Nor am I; I've been living on borrowed time since I was nineteen. By now I'm so convinced of my own luck that if one ship comes back, I'm sure it will be mine. But do you see why it would be silly to argue with your mother that half a set of twins is better than none? Emotionally your argument is all wrong. Go read the Parable of the Lost Sheep. You point out to your mother that one of you will be safe at home and it will simply fix her mind on the fact that the other one isn't safe and isn't home. If your Pop tries to reassure her, he is likely to stumble onto these facts—for they aren't secret, not the facts on which the statisticians based their predictions; it is just that the publicity about this project will emphasize the positive and play down the negative."
"Uncle Steve," objected Pat, "I don't see how they can be sure that most of the ships will be lost."
"They can't be sure. But these are actually optimistic assumptions based on what experience the race has had with investigating strange places. It's like this, Pat: you can be right over and over again, but when it comes to exploring strange places, the first time you guess wrong is the last guess you make. You're dead. Ever looked at the figures about it in just this one tiny solar system? Exploration is like Russian roulette; you can win and win, but if you keep on, it will kill you, certain. So don't get your parents stirred up on this phase of the matter. 1 don't mind—a man is entitled to die the way he wants to; that's one thing they haven't taxed. But there is no use in drawing attention to the fact that one of you two isn't coming back."
Uncle Steve was right about the folks giving in; Pat left for the training course three weeks later.
I still don't know just how it was that Pat got to be the one. We never matched for it, we never had a knock-down argument, and I never agreed. But Pat went.
I tried to settle it with him several times but he always put me off, telling me not to worry and to wait and see how things worked out. Presently I found it taken for granted that Pat was going and I was staying. Maybe I should have made a stand the day we signed the contract, when Pat hung back and let me sign first, thereby getting me down on paper as the party of the second part who stayed home, instead of party of the third part who went. But it had not seemed worth making a row about, as the two were interchangeable by agreement among the three parties to the contact. Pat pointed this out to me just before we signed; the important thing was to get the contract signed while our parents were holding still—get their signatures.
Was Pat trying to put one over on me right then? If so, I didn't catch him wording his thoughts. Contrariwise, would I have tried the same thing on him if I had thought of it? 1 don't know, I just don't know. In any case, I gradually became aware that the matter was settled; the family took it for' granted and so did the LRF people. So I told Pat it was not settled. He just shrugged and reminded me that it had not been his doing. Maybe I could get them to change their minds... if I didn't care whether or not I upset the applecart.
I didn't want to do that. We did not know that the LRF would have got down on its knees and wept rather than let any young and healthy telepath pair get away from them; we thought they had plenty to choose from. I thought that if I made a fuss they might tear up the contract, which they could do up till D-Day by paying a small penalty.
Instead I got Dad alone and talked to him. This shows how desperate I was; neither Pat nor I ever went alone to our parents about the other one. I didn't feel easy about it, but stammered and stuttered and had trouble making Dad understand why I felt swindled.
Dad looked troubled and said, “Tom, I thought you and your brother had settled this between you?"
"That's what I'm trying to tell you! We didn't."
"What do you expect me to do?"
"Why, I want you to make him be fair about it. We ought to match for it, or something. Or you could do it for us and keep it fair and square. Would you?"
Dad gave attention to his pipe the way he does when he is stalling. At last he said, “Tom, I don't see how you can back out now, after everything is settled. Unless you want me to break the contract? It wouldn't be easy but I can."
"But I don't have to break the contract. I just want an even chance. If I lose, I'll shut up. If I win, it won't change anything—except that I would go and Pat would stay."
"Mmm . . ." Dad puffed on his pipe and looked thoughtful. "Tom, have you looked at your mother lately?"
I had, but I hadn't talked with her much. She was moving around like a zombie, looking grief-stricken and hurt. "Why?"
"I can't do this to her. She's already going through the agony of losing your brother; I can't put her through it on your account, too. She couldn't stand it."
I knew she was feeling bad, but I could not see what difference it would make if we swapped. "You're not suggesting that Mum wants it this way? That she would rather have Pat go than me?"
"I am not. Your mother loves you both, equally,"
"Then it would be just the same to her."
"It would not. She's undergoing the grief of losing one of her sons. If you swapped now, she would have to go through it afresh for her other son. That wouldn't be fair." He knocked his pipe against an ash tray, which was the same as gaveling that the meeting was adjourned. "No, son, I'm afraid that you will just have to stand by your agreement."
It was hopeless so I shut up. With Dad, bringing Mum's welfare into it was the same as trumping an ace.
Pat left for the training center four days later. I didn't see much of him except the hours we spent down at the TransLunar Building for he was dating Maudie every night and I was not included. He pointed out that this was the last he would see of her whereas I would have plenty of time—so get lost, please. I did not argue; it was not only fair, taken by itself, but I did not want to go along on their dates under the circumstances. Pat and I were farther apart those last few days than we had ever been.
It did not affect our telepathic ability, however, whatever this "tuning" was that some minds could do went right on and we could do it as easily as we could talk . . . and turn it off as easily, too. We didn't have to "concentrate" or "clear our minds" or any of that Eastern mysticism nonsense. When we wanted to "talk," we talked.
When Pat left I felt lost. Sure, I was in touch with him four hours a day and any other time I cared to call him, but you can't live your whole life doing things by two's without getting out of joint when you have to do things by one's. I didn't have new habits yet. I'd get ready to go someplace, then I would stop at the door and wonder what I had forgotten. Just Pat. It is mighty lonesome to start off somewhere by yourself when you've always done it with someone.
Besides that, Mum was being brightly cheerful and tender and downright unbearable, and my sleep was all broken up. The training center worked on Switzerland's time zone which meant that I, and all other twins who were staying behind no matter where on. Earth they were, worked our practice messages on Swiss time, too. Pat would whistle in my ears and wake me at two in the morning each night and then I would work until dawn and try to catch up on sleep in the daytime.
It was inconvenient but necessary and I was well paid. For the first time in my life I had plenty of money. So did all of our family, for I started paying a fat board bill despite Dad's objections. I even bought myself a watch (Pat had taken ours with him) without worrying about the price, and we were talking about moving into a bigger place.
But the LRF was crowding more and more into my life and I began to realize that the contract covered more than just recording messages from my twin. The geriatrics program started at once. "Geriatrics" is a funny term to use about a person not old enough to vote but it had the special meaning here of making me live as long as possible by starting on me at once. What I ate was no longer my business; I had to follow the diet they ordered, no more sandwiches picked up casually. There was a long list of "special hazard" things I must not do. They gave me shots for everything from housemaid's knee to parrot fever and I had a physical examination so thorough as to make every other one seem like a mere laying on of hands.
The only consolation was that Pat told me they were doing. the same to him. We might be common as mud most ways but we were irreplaceable communication equipment to LRF, so we got the treatment a prize race horse or a prime minister gets and which common people hardly ever get. It was a nuisance.
I did not call Maudie the first week or ten days after Pat left; I didn't feel easy about her. Finally she called me and asked if I were angry with her or was she in quarantine? So we made a date for that night. It was not festive. She called me "Pat" a couple of times, which she used to do every now and then and it had never mattered, since Pat and I were used to people mixing up our names. But now it was awkward, because Pat's ghost was a skeleton at the feast.
The second time she did it I said angrily, "If you want to talk to Pat, I can get in touch with him in half a second!"
"What? Why, Tom!"
"Oh, I know you would rather I was Pat! If you think I enjoy being second choice, think again."
She got tears in her eyes and I got ashamed and more difficult. So we had a bitter argument and then I was telling her how I had been swindled.
Her reaction wasn't what I expected. Instead of sympathy she said, "Oh, Tom, Tom! Can't you see that :Pat didn't do this to you? You did it to yourself."
"Huh?"
"It's not his fault; it's your own. I used to get so tired of the way you let him push you around. You liked having him push you around. You've got a 'will to fail.'"
I was so angry I had trouble answering. "What are you talking about? That sounds like a lot of cheap, chimney-corner psychiatry to me. Next thing you know you'll be telling me I have a 'death wish.'"
She blinked back tears. "No. Maybe Pat has that. He was always kidding about it but, just the same, I know how dangerous it is. I know we won't see him again."
I chewed that over. "Are you trying to say," I said slowly, "that I let Pat do me out of it because I was afraid to go?"
"What? Why, Tom dear, I never said anything of the sort."
"It sounded like it." Then I knew why it sounded like it. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe I had struggled just hard enough to let Pat win... because I knew what was going to happen to the one who went.
Maybe I was a coward.
We made it up and the date seemed about to end satisfactorily. When I took her home I was thinking of trying to kiss her good night—I never had, what with the way Pat and I were always in each other's hair. I think she expected me to, too.., when Pat suddenly whistled at me.
"Hey! You awake, mate?"
("Certainly,") I answered shortly. ("But I'm busy.")
"How busy? Are you out with my girl?"
("What makes you think that?")
"You are, aren't you? I figured you were. How are you making out?"
("Mind your own business!")
"Sure, sure! Just say hello to her for me. Hi, Maudie!"
Maudie said, "Tom, what are you so preoccupied about?"
I answered, "Oh, it's just Pat. He says to say hello to you."
"Oh... well, hello to him from me."
So I did. Pat chuckled. "Kiss her good night for me."
So I didn't, not for either of us.
But I called her again the next day and we went out together regularly after that. Things began to be awfully pleasant where Maudie was concerned . . . so pleasant that I even thought about the fact that college students sometimes got married and now I would be able to afford it, if it happened to work out that way. Oh, I wasn't dead sure I wanted to tie myself down so young, but it is mighty lonely to be alone when you've always had somebody with you.
Then they brought Pat home on a shutter.
It was actually an ambulance craft, specially chartered. The idiot had sneaked off and tried skiing, which he knew as much about as I know about pearl diving. He did not have much of a tumble; he practically fell over his own feet. But there he was, being carried into our flat on a stretcher, numb from the waist down and his legs useless. He should have been taken to a hospital, but he wanted to come home and Mum wanted him to come home, so Dad insisted on it. He wound up in the room Faith had vacated and I went back to sleeping on the couch.
The household was all upset, worse than it had been when Pat went away. Dad almost threw Frank Dubois out of the house when Frank said that now that this space travel nonsense was disposed of, he was still prepared to give Pat a job if he would study bookkeeping, since a bookkeeper could work from a wheelchair. I don't know; maybe Frank had good intentions, but I sometimes think "good intentions" should be declared a capital crime.
But the thing that made me downright queasy was the way Mother took it. She was full of tears and sympathy and she could not do enough for Pat—she spent hours rubbing his legs, until she was ready to collapse. But I could see, even if Dad couldn't, that she was indecently happy—she had her "baby" back. Oh, the tears weren't fake . . . but females seem able to cry and be happy at the same time.
We all knew that the "space travel nonsense" was washed up, but we did not discuss it, not even Pat and I; while he was flat on his back and helpless and no doubt feeling even worse than I did was no time to blame him for hogging things and then wasting our chance. Maybe I was bitter but it was no time to let him know. I was uneasily aware that the fat LRF cheeks would stop soon and the family would be short of money again when we needed it most and I regretted that expensive watch and the money I had blown in taking Maudie to places we had never been able to afford, but I avoided thinking about even that; it was spilt milk. But I did wonder what kind of a job I could get instead of starting college.
I was taken off guard when Mr. Howard showed up—I had halfway expected that LRF would carry us on the payroll until after Pat was operated on, even though the accident was not their fault and was the result of Pat's not obeying their regulations. But with the heaps of money they had I thought they might be generous.
But Mr. Howard did not even raise the question of the Foundation paying for, or not paying for, Pat's disability; he simply wanted to know how soon I would be ready to report to the training center?
I was confused and Mother was hysterical and Dad was angry and Mr. Howard was bland. To listen to him you would have thought that nothing had happened, certainly nothing which involved the slightest idea of letting us out of our contract. The parties of the second part and of the third part were interchangeable; since Pat could not go, naturally I would. Nothing had happened which interfered with our efficiency as a communication team. To be sure, they had let us have a few days to quiet down in view of the sad accident—but could I report at once? Time was short.
Dad got purple and almost incoherent. Hadn't they done enough to his family? Didn't they have any decency? Any consideration?
In the middle of it, while I was trying to adjust to the new situation and wandering what I should say, Pat called me silently. "Tom! Come here!"
I excused myself and hurried to him. Pat and I had hardly telepathed at all since he had been hurt. A few times he had called me in the night to fetch him a drink of water or something like that, but we had never really talked, either out loud or in our minds. Them was just this black, moody silence that shut me out. I didn't know how to cope with it; it was the first time either of us had ever been ill without the other one.
But when he called I hurried in. "Shut the door."
I did so. He looked at me grimly. "I caught you before you promised anything, didn't I?"
"Yeah."
"Go out there and tell Dad I want to see him right away. Tell Mum I asked her to please quit crying, because she is getting me upset." He smiled sardonically. "Tell Mr. Howard to let me speak to my parents alone. Then you beat it."
"Huh?"
"Get out, don't stop to say good-by and don't say where you are going. When I want you, I'll tell you. If you hang around, Mother will work on you and get you to promise things." He looked at me bleakly. "You never did have any will power."
I let the dig slide off; he was ill. "Look, Pat, you're up against a combination this time. Mother is going to get her own way no matter what and Dad is so stirred up that I'm surprised he hasn't taken a poke at Mr. Howard."
"I'll handle Mother, and Dad, too. Howard should have stayed away. Get going. Split 'em up, then get lost."
"All right," I said uneasily. "Uh... look, Pat, I appreciate He looked at me and his lip curled. "Think I'm doing this for you?"
"Why, I thought—"
"You never think . , . and I've been doing nothing else for days. If I'm going to be a cripple, do you fancy I'm going to spend my life in a public ward? Or here, with Mother drooling over me and Dad pinching pennies and the girls getting sick of the sight of me? Not Patrick! If I have to be like this, I'm going to have the best of everything . . . nurses to jump when I lift a finger and dancing girls to entertain me—and you are going to see that the LRF pays for it. We can keep our contract and we're going to. Oh, I know you don't want to go, but now you've got to."
"Me? You're all mixed up. You crowded me out. You—"
"Okay, forget it. You're rarin' to go." He reached, up and punched me in the ribs, then grinned. "So we'll both go—for you'll take me along every step of the way. Now get out there and break that up."
I left two days later. When Pat handed Mum his reverse-twist whammie. she did not even fight. If getting the money to let her sick baby have proper care and everything else he wanted meant that I had to space, well, it was too bad but that was how it was. She told me how much it hurt to have me go but I knew she was not too upset. But I was, rather . . . I wondered what the score would have been if it had been I who was in Pat's fix? Would she have let Pat go just as easily simply to get me anything I wanted? But I decided to stop thinking about it; parents probably don't know that they are playing favorites even when they are doing it.
Dad got me alone for a man-to-man talk just before I left. He hemmed and hawed and stuck in apologies about how he should have talked things over with me before this and seemed even more embarrassed than I was, which was plenty. When he was floundering I let him know that one of our high school courses had covered most of what he was trying to say. (I didn't let him know that the course had been an anti-climax.) He brightened up and said, "Well, son, your mother and I have tried to teach you right from wrong. Just remember that you are a Bartlett and you won't make too many mistakes. On that other matter, well, if you will always ask yourself whether a girl is the sort you would be proud to bring home to meet your mother, I'll be satisfied."
I promised—it occurred to me that I wasn't going to have much chance to fall into bad company, not with psychologists practically dissecting everybody in Project Lebensraum. The bad apples were never going into the barrel
When I see how naive parents are I wonder how the human race keeps on being born. Just the same it was touching and I appreciate the ordeal he put himself through to get me squared away—Dad was always a decent guy and meant well.
I had a last date with Maudie but it wasn't much; we spent it sitting around Pat's bed, She did kiss me good-by—Pat told her to. Oh, well!
I was in Switzerland only two days. I got a quick look at the lake at Zurich and that was all; the time was jammed with trying to hurry me through all the things Pat had been studying for weeks. It couldn't be done, so they gave me spools of minitape which I was to study after the trip started.
I had one advantage: Planetary League Auxiliary Speech was a required freshman course at our high school—P-L lingo was the working language of Project Lebensraum. I can't say I could speak it when I got there, but it isn't hard. Oh, it seems a little silly to say "goed" when you've always said "gone" but you get used to it, and of course all technical words are Geneva-International and always have been.
Actually, as subproject officer Professor Brunn pointed out, there was not a lot that a telepathic communicator had to know before going aboard ship; the principal purpose of the training center had been to get the crews together, let them eat and live together, so that the psychologists could spot personality frictions which had not been detected through tests.
"There isn't any doubt about you, son. We have your brother's record and we know how close your tests come to matching his. You telepaths have to deviate widely from accepted standards before we would disqualify one of you."
"Sir?'
"Don't you see? We can turn down a ship's captain just for low blood sugar before breakfast and a latent tendency to be short tempered therefrom until he has had his morning porridge. We can fill most billets twenty times over and juggle them until they are matched like a team of acrobats. But not you people. You are so scarce that we must allow you any eccentricity which won't endanger the ship: I wouldn't mind if you believed in astrology—you don't, do you?"
"Goodness, no!" I answered, shocked.
"You see? You're a normal, intelligent boy; you'll do. Why, we would take your twin, on a stretcher, if we had to."
Only telepaths were left when I got to Zurich. The captains and the astrogation and torch crews had joined the ships first, and then the specialists and staff people. All the "idlers" were aboard but us. And I hardly had time to get acquainted even with my fellow mind readers.
They were an odd bunch and I began to see what Professor Brunn meant by saying that we freaks had to be allowed a little leeway. There were a dozen of us—just for the Lewis and Clark, I mean; there were a hundred and fifty for the twelve ships of the fleet, which was every telepathic pair that LRF had been able to sign up. I asked one of them, Bernhard van Houten, why each ship was going to carry so many telepaths?
He looked at me pityingly. "Use your head, Tom. If a radio burns out a valve, what do you do?"
"Why, you replace it."
"There's your answer. We're spare parts. If either end of a telepair dies or anything, that 'radio' is burned out, permanently. So they plug in another one of us. They want to be sure they have at least one telepair still working right up to the end of the trip... they hope."
I hardly had time to learn their names before we were whisked away. There was myself and Bernhard van Houten, a Chinese-Peruvian girl named Mei-Ling Jones (only she pronounced it "Hone-Ace"), Rupert Hauptman, Anna Horoshen, Gloria Maria Antonita Docampo, Sam Rojas, and Prudence Mathews. These were more or less my age. Then there was Dusty Rhodes who looked twelve and claimed to be fourteen. I wondered how LRF had persuaded his parents to permit such a child to go. Maybe they hated him; it would have been easy to do.
Then there were three who were older than the rest of us: Miss Gamma Furtney, Cas Warner, and Alfred McNeil. Miss Gamma was a weirdie, the sort of old maid who never admits to more than thirty; she was our triplet. LRF had scraped up four sets of triplets who were m-r's and could be persuaded to go; they were going to be used to tie the twelve ships together into four groups of three, they the groups could be hooked with four sets of twins.
Since triplets are eighty-six times as scarce as twins it was surprising that they could find enough who were telepathic and would go, without worrying about whether or not they were weirdies. I suspect that the Misses Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Furtney were attracted by the Einstein time effect; they could get even with all the men who had not married them by not getting older while those men died of old age.
We were a "corner" ship and Cas Warner was our side, wise twin, who would hook us through his twin to the Vasco da Gama, thus linking two groups of three. Other sidewise twins tied the other comers. The ones who worked ship-to-ship did not have to be young, since their twins (or triplets) were not left back on Earth, to grow older while their brothers or sisters stayed young through relativity. Cas Warner was forty-five, a nice quiet chap who seemed to enjoy eating with us kids.
The twelfth was Mr. ("Call me 'Uncle Alfred' ") McNeil, and he was an old darling. He was a Negro, his age was anything from sixty-five on up (I couldn't guess), and he had the saintliness that old people get when they don't turn sour and self-centered instead... to look at him you would bet heavy odds that he was a deacon in his church.
I got acquainted with him because I was terribly homesick the first night I was in Zurich and he noticed it and invited me to his room after supper and sort of soothed me. I thought he was one of the Foundation psychologists, like Professor Brunn—but no, he was half of a telepair himself . , . and not even a sidewise twin; his partner was staying on Earth.
I couldn't believe it until be showed me a picture of his pair partner—a little girl with merry eyes and pigtails—and I finally got it through my thick head that here was that rarity, a telepathic pair who were not twins. She was Celestine Regina Johnson, his great-niece—only be called her "Sugar Pie" after he introduced me to the photograph and had told her who I was.
I had to pause and tell Pat about it, not remembering that he had already met them.
Uncle Alfred was retired and had been playmate-in-chief to his baby great-niece, for he had lived with his niece and her husband. He had taught the baby to talk. When her parents were both killed in an accident he had gone back to work rather than let the child be adopted. "I found out that I could keep tabs on Sugar Pie even when I couldn't see her. She was always a good baby and it meant I could watch out for her even when I had to be away. I knew it was a gift; I figured that the Lord in His infinite mercy had granted what I needed to let me take care of my little one."
The only thing that had worried him was that he might not live long enough; or, worse still, not be able to work long enough, to permit him to bring up Sugar Pie and get her started right. Then Project Lebensraum had solved everything. No, he didn't mind being away from her because be was not away from her; he was with her every minute.
I gathered an impression that he could actually see her but I didn't want to ask. In any case, with him stone walls did not a prison make nor light-years a separation. He knew that the Infinite Mercy that had kept them together this long would keep them together long enough for him to finish his appointed task. What happened after that was up to the Lord.
I had never met anybody who was so quietly, serenely happy. I didn't feel homesick again until I left him and went to bed. So I called Pat and told him about getting acquainted with Uncle Alfred. He said sure, Uncle All was a sweet old codger... and now I should shut up and go to sleep, as I had a hard day ahead of me tomorrow.
Then they zoomed us out to the South Pacific and we spent one night on Canton Atoll before we went aboard They wouldn't let us swim in the lagoon even though Sam had arranged a picnic party of me and himself and Mei-Ling and Gloria; swimming was one of the unnecessary hazards. Instead we went to bed early and were awakened two hours before dawn—a ghastly time of day, particularly when your time sense has been badgered by crossing too many time zones too fast. I began to wonder what I was doing there and why?
The Lewis and Clark was a few hundred miles east of there in an unused part of the ocean. I had not realized how much water there was until I took a look at it from the air—and at that you see just the top. If they could figure some way to use all those wet acres as thoroughly as they use the Mississippi Valley they wouldn't need other planets.
From the air the Lewis and Clark looked like a basketball floating in water; you could not see that it was really shaped like a turnip. It floated with the torch down; the hemispherical upper part was all that showed. I got one look at her, with submersible freighters around her looking tiny in comparison, then our bus was hovering over her and we were being told to mind our step on the ladder and not leave anything behind in the bus. It occurred to me that it wouldn't do any good to write to Lost-and-Found if we did. It was a chilly thought . . . I guess I was still homesick, but mostly I was excited.
I got lost a couple of times and finally found my stateroom just as the speaker system was booming: "All hands, prepare for acceleration. Idlers strap down. Boost stations report in order. Minus fourteen minutes." The man talking was so matter of fact that he might as well have been saying, "Local passengers change at Birmingham."
The stateroom was big enough, with a double wardrobe and a desk with a built-in viewer-recorder and a little wash-stand and two pull-down beds. They were down, which limited the floor space. Nobody else was around so I picked one, lay down and fastened the three safety belts. I had just done so when that little runt Dusty Rhodes stuck his head in. "Hey! You got my bed!"
I started to tell him off, then decided that just before boost was no time for an argument. "Suit yourself," I answered, unstrapped, and moved into the other one, strapped down again.
Dusty looked annoyed; I think he wanted an argument. Instead of climbing into the one I had vacated, he stuck his head out the door and looked around. I said, "Better strap down. They already passed the word."
"Tripe," he answered without turning. "There's plenty of time. I'll take a quick look in the control room."
I was going to suggest that he go outside while he was about it when a ship's officer came through, checking the rooms. "In you get, son," he said briskly, using the no-nonsense tone in which you tell a dog to heel. Dusty opened his mouth, closed it, and climbed in. Then the officer "baby-strapped" him, pulling the buckles around so that they could not be reached by the person in the bunk. He even put the chest strap around Dusty's arms.
He then checked my belts. I had my arms outside the straps but all he said was, "Keep your arms on the mattress during boost," and left.
A female voice said, "All special communicators link with your telepartners."
I had been checking with Pat ever since I woke up and had described the Lewis and Clark to him when we first sighted her and then inside as well. Nevertheless I said, ("Are you there, Pat?")
"Naturally. I'm not going anyplace. What's the word?"
("Boost in about ten minutes. They just told us to link with our partners during boost.")
"You had better stay linked, or I'll beat your ears off! I don t want to miss anything.
("Okay, okay, don't race your engine. Pat? This isn't quite the way I thought it would be.")
"Huh? How?"
("I don't know. I guess I expected brass bands and speeches and such. After all, this is a big day. But aside from pictures they took of us last night at Canton Atoll, there was more fuss made when we started for Scout camp.")
Pat chuckled. "Brass bands would get wet where you are—not to mention soaked with neutrons."
("Sure, sure.") I didn't have to be told that a torchship needs elbow room for a boost. Even when they perfected a way to let them make direct boost from Earth-zero instead of from a space station, they still needed a few thousand square miles of ocean—and at that you heard ignorant prattle about how the back wash was changing the climate and the government ought to do something.
"Anyhow, there are plenty of brass bands and speeches. We are watching one by the Honorable J. Dillberry Egghead... shall I read it back?"
("Uh, don't bother. Who's 'we'?")
"All of us. Faith and Frank just came in."
I was about to ask about Maudie when a new voice came over the system: "Welcome aboard, friends. This is the Cap rain. We will break loose at an easy three gravities; nevertheless, I want to warn you to relax and keep your arms inside your couches. The triple boost will last only six minutes, then you will be allowed to get up. We take off in number two position, just after the Henry Hudson."
I repeated to Pat what the Captain was saying practically as fast as he said it; this was one of the things we had practiced while he was at the training center: letting your directed thoughts echo what somebody else was saying so that a telepair acted almost like a microphone and a speaker. I suppose he was doing the same at the other end, echoing the Captain's words to the family a split second behind me-it's not hard with practice.
The Captain said, "The Henry is on her final run-down ... ten seconds... five seconds... now!"
I saw something like heat lightning even though I was in a closed room. For a few seconds there was a sound over the speaker like sleet on a window, soft and sibilant and far away. Pat said, "Boy!"
("What is it, Pat?")
"She got up out of there as if she had sat on a bee. Just a hole in the water and a flash of light. Wait a sec-they're shifting the view pick-up from the space station to Luna."
("You've got a lot better view than I have. All I can see is the ceiling of this room.")
The female voice said, "Mr. Warner! Miss Furtney! Tween-ships telepairs start recording."
The Captain said, "All hands, ready for boost. Stand by for count down," and another voice started in, "Sixty seconds . . . fifty-five . . . fifty . . . forty-five . . . holding on-forty-five . . . holding forty-five... . holding... holding..."
—until I was ready to scream.
"Tom, what's wrong?"
("How should I know?")
"Forty... thirty-five ... thirty..."
"Tom, Mum wants me to tell you to be very careful."
("What does she think I can do? I'm just lying here, strapped down.")
"I know." Pat chuckled. "Hang on tight to the brush, you lucky stiff; they are about to take away the ladder."
"... four!... Three!... Two!... ONE!"
I didn't see a flash, I didn't hear anything. I simply got very heavy—like being on the bottom of a football pile-up.
"There's nothing but steam where you were."
I didn't answer, I was having trouble breathing.
"They've shifted the pick-up. They're following you with a telephoto now. Tom, you ought to see this . . . you look just like a sun. It burns the rest of the picture right out of the tank."
("How can I see it?") I said crossly. ("I'm in it.')
"You sound choked up. Are you all right?"
("You'd sound choked, too, if you had sand bags piled across your chest.")
"Is it bad?"
("It's not good. But it's all right, I guess.")
Pat let up on me and did a right good job of describing what he was seeing by television. The Richard E. Byrd took off just after we did, before we had finished the high boost to get escape velocity from Earth; he told me all about it. I didn't have anything to say anyhow; I couldn't see anything and I didn't feel like chattering. I just wanted to hold still and feel miserable.
I suppose it was only six minutes but it felt more like an hour. After a long, long time, when I had decided the controls were jammed and we were going to keep on at high boost until we passed the speed of light, the pressure suddenly relaxed and I felt light as a snowflake . . . if it hadn't been for the straps I would have floated up to the ceiling.
"We have reduced to one hundred and ten per cent of one gravity," the Captain said cheerfully. "Our cruising boost will be higher, but we will give the newcomers among us a while to get used to it." His tone changed and he said briskly, "All stations, secure from blast-off and set space watches, third section."
I loosened my straps and sat up and then stood up. Maybe we were ten per cent heavy, but it did not feel like it; I felt fine. I started for the door, intending to look around more than I had been able to when I came aboard.
Dusty Rhodes yelled at me. "Hey! Come back here and unstrap me! That moron fastened the buckles out of my reach."
I turned and looked at him. "Say 'please.'"
What Dusty answered was not "please." Nevertheless I let him loose. I should have made him say it; it might have saved trouble later.
The first thing that happened in the L.C. made me think I was dreaming—I ran into Uncle Steve.
I was walking along the circular passageway that joined the staterooms on my deck and looking for the passage inboard, toward the axis of the ship. As I turned the comer I bumped into someone. I said, "Excuse me," and started to go past when the other person grabbed my arm and clapped me on the shoulder. I looked up and it was Uncle Steve, grinning and shouting at me. "Hi, shipmate! Welcome aboard!"
"Uncle Steve! What are you doing here?"
"Special assignment from the General Staff . . . to keep you out of trouble."
"Huh?"
There was no mystery when he explained. Uncle Steve had known for a month that his application for special discharge to take service with the LRF for Project Lebensraum had been approved; he had not told the family but had spent the time working a swap to permit him to be in the same ship as Pat—or, as it turned out, the one I was in.
"I thought your mother might take it easier if she knew I was keeping an eye on her boy. You can tell her about it the next time you are hooked in with your twin."
"I'll tell her now," I answered and gave a yell in my mind for Pat. He did not seem terribly interested; I guess a reaction was setting in and he was sore at me for being where he had expected to be. But Mother was there and he said he would tell her. "Okay, she knows."
Uncle Steve looked at me oddly. "Is it as easy as that?"
I explained that it was just like talking . . . a little faster, maybe, since you can think words faster than you can talk, once you are used to it. But he stopped me. "Never mind. You're trying to explain color to a blind man. I just wanted Sis to know."
"Well, okay." Then I noticed that his uniform was different. The ribbons were the same and it was an LRF company uniform, like my own, which did not surprise me—but his chevrons were gone: "Uncle Steve . . . you're wearing major's leaves!"
He nodded. "Home town boy makes good. Hard work, clean living, and so on."
"Gee, that's swell!"
"They transferred me at my reserve rank, son, plus one bump for exceptionally neat test papers. Fact is, if I had stayed with the Corps, I would have retired as a ship's sergeant at best—there's no promotion in peacetime. But the Project was looking for certain men, not certain ranks, and I happened to have the right number of hands and feet for the job."
"Just what is your job, Uncle?"
"Commander of the ship's guard."
"Huh? What have you got to guard?"
"That's a good question. Ask me in a year or two and I can give you a better answer. Actually, 'Commander Landing Force' would be a better title. When we locate a likely looking planet—'when and if,' I mean—I'm the laddie who gets to go out and check the lay of the land and whether the natives are friendly while you valuable types stay safe and snug in the ship." He glanced at his wrist. "Let's go to chow."
I wasn't hungry and wanted to look around, but Uncle Steve took me firmly by the arm and headed for the mess room. "When you have soldiered as long as I have, lad, you will learn that you sleep when you get a chance and that you are never late for chow line."
It actually was a chow line, cafeteria style. The L.C. did not run to table waiters nor to personal service of any sort, except for the Captain and people on watch. We went through the line and I found that I was hungry after all. That meal only, Uncle Steve took me ever to the heads-of-departments table. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is my nephew with two heads, Tom Bartlett. He left his other head dirtside—he's a telepair twin. If he does anything he shouldn't, don't tell me, just clobber him." He glanced at me; I was turning red. "Say 'howdy,' son . . . or just nod if you can't talk."
I nodded and sat down. A sweet old girl with the sort of lap babies like to sit on was next to me. She smiled and said, "Glad to have you with us, Tom." I learned that she was the Chief Ecologist. Her name was Dr. O'Toole, only nobody called her that, and she was married to one of the relativists.
Uncle Steve went around the table, pointing out who was who and what they did: the Chief Engineer. the Relativist (Uncle Steve called him the "Astrogator" as the job would be called in an ordinary ship), Chief Planetologist Harry Gates and the Staff Xenologist, and so forth—I couldn't remember the names at the time—and Reserve Captain Urqhardt. I didn't catch the word "reserve" and was surprised at how young he was. But Uncle Steve corrected me: "No, no! He's not the Captain. He's the man who will be captain if it turns out we need a spare. Across from you is the Surgeon-don't let that fool you, either; he never does surgery himself. Dr. Devereaux is the boss head-shrinker."
I looked puzzled and Uncle Steve went on, "You don't savvy? Psychiatrist. Doc Dev is watching every move we make, trying to decide how quick he will have to be with the straitjacket and the needle. Correct, Doc?"
Dr. Devereaux buttered a roll. "Essentially, Major. But finish your meal; we're not coming for you until later in the day." He was a fat little toad, ugly as could be, and with a placid, unbreakable calm. He went on, "I just had an up setting thought, Major."
"I thought that thoughts never upset you?"
"Consider. Here I am charged with keeping quaint characters like you sane . . . but they forgot to assign anybody to keep me sane. What should I do?"
"Mmm..." Uncle Steve seemed to study it. "I didn't know that head-shrinkers were supposed to be sane, themselves."
Dr. Devereaux nodded. "You've put your finger on it. As in your profession, Major, being crazy is an asset. Pass the salt, please."
Uncle Steve shut up and pretended to wipe off blood.
A man came in and sat down; Uncle Steve introduced me and said, "Staff Commander Frick, the Communications Officer. Your boss, Tom."
Commander Frick nodded and said, "Aren't you third section, young man?"
"Uh, I don't know, sir."
"I do . . . and you should have known. Report to the communications office."
"Uh, you mean now, sir?"
"Right away. You are a half hour late."
I said, "Excuse me," and got up in a hurry, feeling silly. I glanced at Uncle Steve but he wasn't looking my way; he seemed not to have heard it.
The communications office was two decks up, right under the control room; I had trouble finding it. Van Houten was there and Mei-Ling and a man whose name was Travers, who was communicator-of-the-watch. Mei-Ling was reading a sheaf of papers and did not look up; I knew that she was telepathing. Van said, "Where the deuce have you been? I'm hungry."
"I didn't know," I protested.
"You're supposed to know."
He left and I turned to Mr. Travers. "What do .you want me to do?"
He was threading a roll of tape into an autotransmitter; he finished before he answered me. "Take that stack of traffic as she finishes it, and do whatever it is you do with it. Not that it matters."
"You mean read it to my twin?"
"That's what I said."
"Do you want him to record?"
"Traffic is always recorded. Didn't they teach you anything?"
I thought about explaining that they really hadn't because there had not been time, when I thought, oh what's the use? He probably thought I was Pat and assumed that I had had the full course. I picked up papers Mei-Ling was through with and sat down.
But Travers went on talking. "I don't know what you freaks are up here for now anyhow. You're not needed; we're still in radio range."
I put the papers down and stood up: "Don't call us 'freaks.' "
He glanced at me and said, "my, how tall you've gown. Sit down and get to work."
We were about the same height but he was ten years older and maybe thirty pounds heavier. I might have passed it by if we had been alone, but not with Mei-Ling present.
"I said not to call us 'freaks.' It's not polite."
He looked tired and not amused but he didn't stand up. I decided he didn't want a fight and felt relieved. "All right, all right," he answered. "Don't be so touchy. Get busy on that traffic."
I sat down and looked over the stuff I had to send, then called Pat and told him to start his recorder; this was not a practice message.
He answered, "Call back in half an hour. I'm eating dinner.”
("I was eating lunch but I didn't get to finish. Quit stalling, Pat. Take a look at that contract you were so anxious to sign.")
"You were just as anxious. What's the matter, kid? Cold feet already?"
("Maybe, maybe not. I've got a hunch that this isn't going to be one long happy picnic. But I've learned one thing already; when the Captain sends for a bucket of paint, he wants a full bucket and no excuses. So switch on that recorder and stand by to take down figures.")
Pat muttered and gave in, then announced that he was ready after a delay that was almost certainly caused by Mother insisting that he finish dinner. "Ready."
The traffic was almost entirely figures (concerning the take-off, I suppose) and code. Being such, I had to have Pat repeat back everything. It was not hard, but it was tedious. The only message in clear was one from the Captain, ordering roses sent to a Mrs. Detweiler in Brisbane and charged to his LRF account, with a message: "Thanks for a wonderful farewell dinner."
Nobody else sent personal messages; I guess they had left: no loose ends back on Earth.
I thought about sending some roses to Maudie, but I didn't want to do it through Pat. It occurred to me that I could do it through Mei-Ling, then I remembered that, while I had money in the bank, I had appointed Pat my attorney; if I ordered them, he would have to okay the bill I decided not to cross any bridges I had burned behind me.
Life aboard the L.C., or the Elsie as we called her, settled into a routine. The boost built up another fifteen per cent which made me weigh a hundred and fifty-eight pounds; my legs ached until I got used to it—but I soon did; there are advantages in being kind of skinny. We freaks stood a watch in five, two at a time—Miss Gamma and Cas Warner were not on our list because they hooked sidewise with other ships. At first we had a lot of spare time, but the Captain put a stop to that.
Knowing that the LRF did not really expect us to return, I had not thought much about that clause in the contract which provided for tutoring during the trip but I found out that the Captain did not intend to forget it. There was school for everybody, not just for us telepaths who were still of school age. He appointed Dr. Devereaux, Mrs. O'Toole, and Mr. Krishnamurti a school board and courses were offered in practically everything, from life drawing to ancient history. The Captain himself taught that last one; it turned out he knew Sargon the Second and Socrates like brothers.
Uncle Alfred tried to sign up for everything, which was impossible, even if he didn't eat, sleep, nor stand watch. He had never, he told me, had time for all the schooling he wanted and now at last he was going to get it. Even my real uncle, Steve, signed up for a couple of courses. I guess I showed surprise at this, for he said, "Look, Tom, I found out my first cruise that the only way to make space bearable is to have something to learn and learn it. I used to take correspondence courses. But this bucket has the finest assemblage of really bright minds you are ever likely to see. If you don't take advantage of it, you are an idiot. Mama O'Toole's cooking course, for example: where else can you find a Cordon Bleu graduate willing to teach you her high art free? I ask you!"
I objected that I would never need to know how to cook high cuisine.
"What's that got to do with it? Learning isn't a means to an end; it is an end in itself. Look at Uncle Alf. He's as happy as a boy with a new slingshot. Anyhow, if you don't sign up for a stiff course, old Doc Devereaux will find some way to keep you busy, even if it is counting rivets. Why do you think the Captain made him chairman of the board of education?"
"I hadn't thought about it. "
"Well, think about it. The greatest menace in space is going coffin crazy. You are shut up for a long time in a small space and these is nothing outside but some mighty thin vacuum . . . no street lights, no bowling alleys. Inside are the same old faces and you start hating them. So a smart captain makes sure you have something to keep you interested and tired—and ours is the smartest you'll find or he wouldn't be on this trip."
I began to realize that a lot of arrangements in the Elsie were simply to see that we stayed healthy and reasonably happy. Not just school, but other things. Take the number we bad aboard, for example—almost two hundred. Uncle Steve told me that the Elsie could function as a ship with about ten: a captain, three control officers, three engineer officers, one communicator, one farmer, and a cook. Shucks, you could cut that to five: two control officers (one in command), two torch watchstanders, and a farmer-cook.
Then why two hundred? .
In the first place there was room enough. The Elsie and the other ships had been rebuilt from the enormous freighters the LRF use to haul supplies out to Pluto and core material back to Earth. In the second place they needed a big scientific staff to investigate the planets we hoped to find. In the third place some were spare parts, like Reserve Captain Urqhardt and, well, me myself. Some of us would die or get killed; the ship had to go on.
But the real point, as I found out, is that no small, isolated social group can be stable. They even have a mathematics for it, with empirical formulas and symbols for "lateral pressures" and "exchange valences" and "exogamic relief." (That last simply means that the young men of a small village should find wives outside the village.)
Or look at it this way. Suppose you had a one-man space ship which could cruise alone for several years. Only a man who was already nutty a certain way could run it—otherwise he would soon go squirrelly some other way and start tearing the controls off the panels. Make it a two-man ship: even if you used a couple as fond of each other as Romeo and Juliet, by the end of the trip even Juliet would start showing black-widow blood.
Three is as bad or worse, particularly if they gang up two against one. Big numbers are much safer. Even with only two hundred people there are exactly nineteen thousand nine hundred ways to pair them off, either as friends or enemies, so you see that the social possibilities shoot up rapidly when you increase the numbers. A bigger group means more chances to find friends and more ways to avoid people you don't like. This is terribly important aboard ship.
Besides elective courses we had required ones called "ship's training"—by which the Captain meant that every body had to learn at least one job he had not signed up for. I stood two watches down in the damping room, whereupon Chief Engineer Roch stated in writing that he did not think that I would ever make a torcher as I seemed to have an innate lack of talent for nuclear physics. As a matter of fact it made me nervous to be that close to an atomic power plant and to realize the unleashed hell that was going on a few feet away from me.
I did not make out much better as a farmer, either. I spent two weeks in the air-conditioning plant and the only thing I did right was to feed the chickens. When they caught me cross-pollinating the wrong way some squash plants which were special pets of Mrs. O'Toole, she let me go, more in sorrow than in anger. "Tom," she said, "what do you do well?"
I thought about it. "Uh, I can wash bottles... and I used to raise hamsters."
So she sent me over to the research department and I washed beakers in the chem lab and fed the experimental animals. The beakers were unbreakable. They wouldn't let me touch the electron microscope. It wasn't bad—I could have been assigned to the laundry.
Out of the 19,900 combinations possible in the Elsie, Dusty Rhodes and I were one of the wrong ones.: I hadn't signed up for the life sketching class because he was teaching it; the little wart really was a fine draftsman. I know, I'm pretty good at it myself and I would have liked to have been in that class. What was worse, he had an offensively high I.Q. genius plus, much higher than mine, and he could argue rings around me. Along with that he had the manners of a pig and the social graces of a skunk—a bad go, any way you looked at it.
"Please" and "Thank you" weren't in his vocabulary. He never made his bed unless someone in authority stood over him, and I was likely as not to come in and find him lying on mine, wrinkling it and getting the cover dirty. He never hung up his clothes, he always left our wash basin filthy, and his best mood was complete silence.
Besides that, he didn't bathe often enough. Aboard ship that is a crime.
First I was nice to him, then I bawled him out, then I threatened him. Finally I told him that the next thing of his I found on my bed was going straight into the mass converter. He just sneered and the next day I found his camera on my bed and his dirty socks on my pillow.
I tossed the socks into the wash basin, which he had left filled with dirty water, and locked his camera in my wardrobe, intending to let him stew before I gave it back.
He didn't squawk. Presently I found his camera gone from my wardrobe, in spite of the fact that it was locked with a combination which Messrs. Yale & Towne had light-heartedly described as "Invulnerable." My clean shirts were gone, too . . . that is, they weren't clean; somebody had carefully dirtied every one of them.
I had not complained about him. It had become a point of pride to work it out myself; the idea that I could not cope with somebody half my size and years my junior did not appeal to me.
But I looked at the mess he had made of my clothes and I said to myself, "Thomas Paine, you had better admit that you are licked and holler for help—else your only chance will be to plead justifiable homicide."
But I did not have to complain. The Captain sent for me; Dusty had complained about me instead.
"Bartlett, young Rhodes tells me you are picking on him. What's the situation from your point of view?"
I started to swell up and explode. Then I let out my breath and tried to calm down; the Captain really wanted to know.
"I don't think so, sir, though it is true that we have not been getting along."
"Have you laid hands on him?"
"Uh . . . I haven't smacked him, sir. I've jerked him off my bed more than once—and I wasn't gentle about it."
He sighed. "Maybe you should have smacked him. Out of my sight, of course. Well, tell me about it. Try to tell it straight—and complete."
So I told him. It sounded trivial and I began to be ashamed of myself . . . the Captain had more important things to worry about than whether or not I had to scrub out a hand basin before I could wash my face. But he listened.
Instead of commenting, maybe telling me that I should be able to handle a younger kid better, the Captain changed the subject.
"Bartlett, you saw that illustration Dusty had in the ship's paper this morning?"
"Yes, sir. A real beauty," I admitted. It was a picture of the big earthquake in Santiago, which had happened after we left Earth.
"Mmm... we have to allow you special-talent people a little leeway. Young Dusty is along because he was the only m-r available who could receive and transmit pictures."
"Uh, is that important, sir?"
"It could be. We won't know until we need it. But it could be crucially important. Otherwise I would never have permitted a spoiled brat to come aboard this ship." He frowned. "However, Dr. Devereaux is of the opinion that Dusty is not a pathological ease."
"Uh, I never said he was, sir."
"Listen, please. He says that the boy has an unbalanced personality—a brain that would do credit to a grown man but with greatly retarded social development. His attitudes and evaluations would suit a boy of five, combined with this clever brain. Furthermore Dr. Devereaux says that he will force the childish part of Dusty's personality to grow up, or he'll turn in his sheepskin."
"So? I mean, "Yes, sir?' "
"So you should have smacked him. The only thing wrong with that boy is that his parents should have walloped him, instead of telling him how bright he was." He sighed again.
"Now I've got to do it. Dr. Devereaux tells me I'm the appropriate father image."
"Yes, sir."
" 'Yes, sir,' my aching head. This isn't a ship; it's a confounded nursery. Are you having any other troubles?"
"No, sir."
"I wondered. Dusty also complained that the regular communicators call you people "freaks.' " He eyed me.
I didn't answer. I felt sheepish about it.
"In any case, they won't again. I once saw a crewman try to knife another one, just because the other persisted in calling him 'skin head.' My people are going to behave like ladies and gentlemen or I'll bang some heads together." He frowned. "I'm moving Dusty into the room across from my cabin. If Dusty will leave you alone, you let him alone. If he won't . . . well, use your judgment, bearing in mind that you are responsible for your actions—but remember that I don't expect any man to be a doormat. That's all. Good-by."