29 (AUG. 19, TUES.)
The score stands today: Strontium 90; Humanity 13.
—James Thurber
Tuesday went by like a montage, or a series of fades and dissolves in a documentary movie.
Scene: The Fifth Avenue penthouse.Mox's(formerly Frij's) office.Mox, benevolent, wanting to be understood;Sam Kent, groping, wanting to be convinced.Mox: There were several ways it might have been done. One requisite was a common denominator—something everybody uses, such as water. But water was not quick enough. Air is better.Sam: You mean you contaminated the air?Mox: Not contaminated, no. Diluted it, you might say. It started in El Spaniola, with Domingo Sanchez.Sam: But you said—Frij said, up on Ultra—that it wasn't communicable.Mox: Ah, but Frij lied to you. I don't know why; perhaps he had absorbed too many of Earth's ways. He was becoming dangerous. That's why I sent him home. Our conscience gas, as your press calls it, is transferable from person to person, and rapidly. Like your own oral polio vaccine, it is contagious on contact.Sam(wordless): !!!Mox: You need not look so horrified. Remember the greater good. Recall the game you've been playing with yourselves—a game where there is no winner. You had to be stopped because of the way the odds against survival were mounting. One of your more perceptive observers put it very well when he said the score stood Strontium 90, Humanity 13."
Scene: The Fifth Avenue penthouse.Mox's(formerly Frij's) office.
Mox, benevolent, wanting to be understood;Sam Kent, groping, wanting to be convinced.
Mox: There were several ways it might have been done. One requisite was a common denominator—something everybody uses, such as water. But water was not quick enough. Air is better.
Sam: You mean you contaminated the air?
Mox: Not contaminated, no. Diluted it, you might say. It started in El Spaniola, with Domingo Sanchez.
Sam: But you said—Frij said, up on Ultra—that it wasn't communicable.
Mox: Ah, but Frij lied to you. I don't know why; perhaps he had absorbed too many of Earth's ways. He was becoming dangerous. That's why I sent him home. Our conscience gas, as your press calls it, is transferable from person to person, and rapidly. Like your own oral polio vaccine, it is contagious on contact.
Sam(wordless): !!!
Mox: You need not look so horrified. Remember the greater good. Recall the game you've been playing with yourselves—a game where there is no winner. You had to be stopped because of the way the odds against survival were mounting. One of your more perceptive observers put it very well when he said the score stood Strontium 90, Humanity 13."
Gouverneur Allison, President of the United States, a good man basically and one who had long worried in his private soul, needed no more indoctrination than the whiff of conscience gas he'd been given by Mox to be convinced that the World's salvation lay not in the haphazard politics of Earthmen, but in the clear-seeing, galactic-minded altruism of Monolithian logic. He went back to Washington by Pennsylvania Railroad day coach, contaminating a few hundred people along the way, and when he got to the White House he signed an executive order as Commander-in-Chief directing that all American nuclear weapons be deactivated, transported expeditiously to the Challenger Deep, and sunk.
Immediately the four other atomic powers—Britain, the Soviet Union, France and El Spaniola—followed suit.
You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief that went up around the world.
Scene: Joy Linx's hotel room in Manhattan.Joy Linx, beautiful, hostile, in housecoat.Sam Kent, anxious, somewhat wild-eyed, truth-seeking.Joy: All right, I guess. Come on in.Sam: Listen, Joy, it's important.Joy: It better be.Sam: It's about Spookie Masters. How well do you know him? I mean really?Joy: What kind of question is that?Sam: I know it sounds crazy, Joy, but it's the key to the whole thing. Has he—did he ever—oh, God damn it, what I mean is, did he ever make love to you?Joy(scornfully): I won't answer that stupid question. Did you think I would?Sam: It isn't just me asking it, Joy. Honestly, you've got to realize how vital it is.Joy: Look, Sam, my dear, sweet someone else's Sam: In a kind of crazy, hopeless way I once loved you. It was no good. You know why. Mae, that's why. That lucky girl. So go away before you kill me any further, will you?Sam(emotionally torn): Joy, Joy—how can I say I wish it were otherwise, when I both do and don't? Damn Mae (I don't mean that) and damn you—but particularly—damn me.Joy(touched, quietly): Tell me what you want me to do.Sam(with a sigh, then getting it over with): All right. When Spookie comes to see you, lead him on. Let him think you're crazy about him—as maybe you are.Joy(looking at the floor, hands on Sam's chest): Maybe I am, in a second-best sort of way.Sam(on brink of tears): Listen, my second-best darling ... (a quick, antiseptic, apologetic kiss) what I have to know is—whether Spookie Masters is a Monolithian.Joy(withdrawing): What!Sam: That's the key to the whole thing. He could have come to Earth years ago as an advance agent for them—his early life has always been a mystery. His career took him all over the world. He knows everybody. Then he got himself to Ultra. Of course!Hewas the "Mr. M." who represented Monolithia at the super-summit.Joy(coldly): Isn't that pretty far-fetched, Sam?Sam: No. It fits perfectly. Then he arranged to get himself "captured" and thrown in with us so he could learn what we were up to. And I'll bet he engineered our "escape," too, and saw to it somehow that I stole that conscience gas. They knew I would lead them to the only holdout in their scheme—the real Gov—and that the gas would be the bait that put him in their trap at the Garden—where, you must admit, Spookie was very much the big wheel.Joy(thoughtfully): Well, maybe. Tell me what you want me to do.
Scene: Joy Linx's hotel room in Manhattan.Joy Linx, beautiful, hostile, in housecoat.Sam Kent, anxious, somewhat wild-eyed, truth-seeking.
Joy: All right, I guess. Come on in.
Sam: Listen, Joy, it's important.
Joy: It better be.
Sam: It's about Spookie Masters. How well do you know him? I mean really?
Joy: What kind of question is that?
Sam: I know it sounds crazy, Joy, but it's the key to the whole thing. Has he—did he ever—oh, God damn it, what I mean is, did he ever make love to you?
Joy(scornfully): I won't answer that stupid question. Did you think I would?
Sam: It isn't just me asking it, Joy. Honestly, you've got to realize how vital it is.
Joy: Look, Sam, my dear, sweet someone else's Sam: In a kind of crazy, hopeless way I once loved you. It was no good. You know why. Mae, that's why. That lucky girl. So go away before you kill me any further, will you?
Sam(emotionally torn): Joy, Joy—how can I say I wish it were otherwise, when I both do and don't? Damn Mae (I don't mean that) and damn you—but particularly—damn me.
Joy(touched, quietly): Tell me what you want me to do.
Sam(with a sigh, then getting it over with): All right. When Spookie comes to see you, lead him on. Let him think you're crazy about him—as maybe you are.
Joy(looking at the floor, hands on Sam's chest): Maybe I am, in a second-best sort of way.
Sam(on brink of tears): Listen, my second-best darling ... (a quick, antiseptic, apologetic kiss) what I have to know is—whether Spookie Masters is a Monolithian.
Joy(withdrawing): What!
Sam: That's the key to the whole thing. He could have come to Earth years ago as an advance agent for them—his early life has always been a mystery. His career took him all over the world. He knows everybody. Then he got himself to Ultra. Of course!Hewas the "Mr. M." who represented Monolithia at the super-summit.
Joy(coldly): Isn't that pretty far-fetched, Sam?
Sam: No. It fits perfectly. Then he arranged to get himself "captured" and thrown in with us so he could learn what we were up to. And I'll bet he engineered our "escape," too, and saw to it somehow that I stole that conscience gas. They knew I would lead them to the only holdout in their scheme—the real Gov—and that the gas would be the bait that put him in their trap at the Garden—where, you must admit, Spookie was very much the big wheel.
Joy(thoughtfully): Well, maybe. Tell me what you want me to do.
I'd told her, unable to look her in the eye, that I had to know whether Spookie Masters was a whole man, and therefore terrestrial, or a sexless creature like the android, and thus a Monolithian. Joy had heard me out, saying nothing except with her contemptuous eyes, then showed me out.
Something puzzled me. I was feeling no pain. And yet I should have been, I reasoned, since I had been subjected to the C-gas at the same time Gov inhaled it and I was probing around in what must be considered an anti-Monolithian way.
I was also running around loose and doing a certain amount of independent thinking, which didn't seem to fit into the concept of a true Monolithian state whose subjects had been C-gassed into cooperating for the greater good.
True, I was on a loose rein. Mox had given me the day off, in effect, telling me to report to the White House in the morning. I supposed I'd find myself fired when I got there, since Gov's ex-guerrillas, including Josh Holcomb, his original press secretary, had all been C-gassed into conformity and my services would therefore be superfluous.
I decided to go back to the penthouse and have a heart-to-heart talk with Mox or one of his lieutenants.
Mox saw me himself. He must have had a million things to do, but he took the time to talk to me for more than an hour, answering every question I asked.
When I left his office I found Joy sitting at her desk, typing. She glanced at me and said, "Sit down, Sam. This is for you. I'll be through in a minute."
She rattled through another paragraph, then, after a look at me, typed one final line. With a pen she wrote two words. Joy sighed and said, "There—I've got that out of my system." She folded the single sheet of paper, sealed it in an envelope and handed it to me.
"Please go before you read it," she said.
Then she smiled, as if she were now at peace with me and the rest of the world.
"Joy——" I started to say.
"Just go—please," she said, and I went.
I read Joy's letter over a martini at a solitary table at the Brass Rail, then decided to have several more martinis and skip dinner altogether.
Joy's letter started: "Sam (not at all dear):" and went on to tell me quite explicitly that Spookie Masters—whom she called Robert, his real name—was male as male could be.
What she had said, actually, was: "He's as human as you are—if you are."
This was empirical knowledge, she said, not theory or hearsay. She had known this before today, she said, and hoped I was hurt by this fact as she had been hurt by me. She did not know whether Robert was an Earthman or a Monolithian, but this didn't matter to her. Her happiness was what mattered and it was obvious that I could only cause her pain.
"I've made my choice, Sam," she had written. "I had to choose between what I wanted and what I could get. There are times when the ideal is just too unattainable and when the second best becomes, in the long run, the best. Maybe this also has a universal application. I hope so."
The last line of her letter was: "One last thing, Sam—I hate you."
But she had edited this. One of her two handwritten words was her signature. The other, inserted in the last sentence above a caret, was "can't."
That had made her farewell read: "I can't hate you."
Over my third martini I thought I understood Joy's parting smile. Remembering it again, I could see the signs in her eyes. It wouldn't be long, I suspected, before I saw one of those headlines peculiar to the society pages ofThe New York Times, reading: TROTH PLIGHTED OF MRS. JOY LINX; MONOLITHIAN AIDE FIANCEE OF ENTERTAINMENT STAR.
I wished her joy and ordered a fourth martini.
Then I got up and telephoned Mae in Bethesda and told her I'd be home that night. Mox had told me, among other things, that my double wouldn't be there.