The Astral Mirror (20 page)

Elmer, hey, why isn’t the spectrometer ready to go?

—You said I could go to the stockholders’ meeting.—

Yes, but we’ve still got work to do. When does the meeting start?

—Ten sharp.—

Well, we’ve still got lots of time...

—It’s ten of ten.—

What? Can’t be... Is that clock right?

—Yep.—

He wouldn’t have tampered with the clock; stop being so suspicious. O.K., go on to the meeting. I’ll set it up myself.

—O.K., thanks.—

But I’m not by myself, of course. Good old grinnin’ gruntin’ Gunga Din. You lazarushin leather Gunga Din. He’s not much help, naturally. What does an actor know about biochemistry? But he talks, and I talk, and the work gets done.

—Satisfactory, sahib?—

Very regimental, Din. Very regimental.

He glows with pride. White teeth against black skin. He’ll die for us. They’ll kill him, up there atop the temple of gold. The Thugees, the wild ones. The cult of death, worshippers of heathen idols. Kali, the goddess of blood.

Up to the roof for lunch. The stockholders are using the cafeteria. Let them. It’s better up here, alone. Get the sun into your skin. Let the heat sink in and the glare dazzle your eyes.

My god, there they are! The heathens, the Thugees. Swarms of them grumbling outside the gate. Dirty, unkempt. Stranglers and murderers. Already our graves are dug. Their leader, he’s too young to be Cianelli. And he’s bearded; the guru should be clean-shaven. The guards look scared.

He’s got a bullhorn. He’s black enough to be the guru, all right. What’s he telling the crowd? I know what he’s saying, even though he tries to disguise the words. Cianelli didn’t hide it, he said it straight out: Kill lest you be killed yourselves. Kill for the love of killing. Kill for the love of Kali. Kill! Kill! Kill!

They howl and rush the gate. The guards are bowled over. Not a chance for them. The swarming heathen boil across the parking lot and right into the lab building itself. They’re all over the place. Savages. I can smell smoke. Glass is shattering somewhere down there. People screaming.

One of the guards comes puffing up here. Uniform torn and sweaty, face red.

—Hey, Doc, better get down the emergency stairs right away. It ain’t safe up here. They’re burning your lab.—

I’m a soldier of Her Majesty the Queen. I don’t bow before no heathen!

His eyes go wide. He’s scared. Scared of rabble, of heathen rabble.

—I’ll... I’ll get somebody to help you, Doc. The fire engines oughtta be here any minute.—

Let him run. We can handle it. The Scotties will be here soon. I can hear their bagpipes now, or is it just the heat singing in my ears?

They’ll be here. Get up on top of the temple dome, Din. Warn them. Sound your trumpet. The colonel’s got to know! These dark incoherent forces of evil can’t be allowed to win. You know that. Snake worshippers, formless, nameless shadows of death. The Forces of Light and Order have to win out in the end. Western organization and military precision always triumph. It will kill you, Din, I know. But that’s the price of admission. We’ll make you an honorary corporal in the regiment, Din. Your name will be written on the rolls of our honored dead.

They’re coming; I know they’re coming. The whole bloomin’ regiment! Climb the golden dome and warn them. Warn them. Warn them!

“Not just research,” Gorman said, rocking smugly in his swivel chair,
“Organized
research.”

Hopler, the cost-time analyst, nodded agreement. “Organized,” Gorman continued, “and carefully controlled—from above. The System—that’s what gets results. Give the scientists their way and they’ll spend you deaf, dumb, and blind on butterfly sex-ways or sub-subatomic particles. Damned nonsense.”

Sitting on the front inch of the visitor’s chair, Hopler asked meekly, “I’m afraid I don’t see what this has to do...”

“With the analysis you turned in?” Gorman glanced at the ponderous file that was resting on a corner of his desk. “No, I suppose you don’t know. You just chew through the numbers, don’t you? Names, people, ideas... they don’t enter into your work.”

With an uncomfortable shrug, Hopler replied, “My job is economic analysis. The System shouldn’t be biased by personalities...”

“Of course not.”

“But now that it’s over, I would like to know... I mean, there’ve been rumors going through the Bureau.”

“About the cure? They’re true. The cure works. I don’t know the details of it,” Gorman said, waving a chubby hand. “Something to do with repressor molecules. Cancerous cells lack ‘em. So the biochemists we’ve been supporting have found out how to attach repressors to the cancer cells. Stops ‘em from growing. Controls the cancer. Cures the patient. Simple... now that we can do it.”

“It... it’s almost miraculous.”

Gorman frowned. “What’s miraculous about it? Why do people always connect good things with miracles? Why don’t you think of cancer as a miracle, a black miracle?”

Hopler fluttered his hands as he fumbled for a reply. “Never mind,” Gorman snapped. “This analysis of yours. Shows the cure can be implemented on a nationwide basis. Not too expensive. Not too demanding of trained personnel that we don’t have.”

“I believe the cure could even be put into worldwide effect,” Hopler said.

“The hell it can be!”

“What? I don’t understand. My analysis...”

“Your analysis was one of many. The System has to look at all sides of the picture. That’s how we beat heart disease, and stroke, and even highway deaths.”

“And now cancer.”

“No. Not cancer. Cancer stays. Demographic analysis knocked out all thoughts of using the cure. There aren’t any other major killers around anymore. Stop cancer and we swamp ourselves with people. So the cure gets shelved.”

For a stunned instant, Hopler was silent. Then, “But... I
need
the cure!”

Gorman nodded grimly. “So will I. The System predicts it.”

Professor Uriah K. Pencilbeam, an obscure anthropologist from a virtually unknown small college in (where else?) southern California, has announced a theory that has sent shock waves throughout the myriad worlds of science, government, and industry.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” says Tony (“Slug”) Solazzo, one of Los Angeles’ leading building contractors. “This professor don’t know what he’s talking about.”

But the head of the anthropology department of a prestigious Ivy League university has said of Pencilbeam’s theory, “He’s explained it all. There’s nothing left for the rest of us to do except fill in a few of the details.” The Ivy League anthropologist refused to allow his name to be used.

Briefly stated, Pencilbeam’s theory is this: Governments exist for the benefit of building contractors. Indeed, Pencilbeam insists that governments were originally created, back in the Old Stone Age, so that building contractors could flourish.

As the professor himself puts it, “If it means pouring cement, a government will do it. If it doesn’t mean pouring cement, a government
might
do it, but the chances are much slimmer.”

In his startling research paper, which is already rumored to be in line for a Pulitzer Prize, Pencilbeam gives a long list of examples to bolster his thesis.

Ancient Egypt, he claims, was little more than a few scattered towns strung out along the Nile until the first Pharaoh united the Upper and Lower Kingdoms into a single political entity. Historians and paleontologists have always been puzzled as to the reasons for this sudden unification. Pencilbeam has the answer: the building contractors lobbied for unification so that they could get to build the colossal monuments that we still revere today: the pyramids, the sphinx, Cleopatra’s Needle, etc.

Pencilbeam points out that the ancient civilization of Sumer, on the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq, was just as old and perhaps even older than Egypt. But they built their cities out of bricks made from dried mud. “No cement, no endurance,” Pencilbeam says. The Sumerian civilization decayed while Egypt flourished for thousands of years.

Every conqueror and emperor, from Caesar through Napoleon, was secretly a front man for the construction contractors. Look at the money and effort they lavished on building their capital cities. Caesar was assassinated when he threatened to stop construction of the Circus Maximus, which was suffering from serious cost overruns and labor disputes. Napoleon practically rebuilt all of Paris, except for Montmartre, where the nightclub interests were already firmly entrenched. While his
Grand Armee
was freezing its collective butt in Russia, Napoleon’s building contractors were amassing huge fortunes back home.

It is interesting to note that barbarian conquerors such as Attilla, Genghis Khan, and Tambarlane had no lasting impact on history despite their extensive conquests. This is true precisely because they poured no cement, according to Pencilbeam’s theory. They came, they saw, they conquered, but they did not build any public monuments, bridges, highways or condominium complexes. In Pencilbeam’s view, one way to delineate a barbarian from a true empire-builder is to look at the state of the construction industry during a man’s reign. Contrast Genghis Khan, who conquered everything from the coast of China to the Danube River, with Cecil Rhodes, the Victorian Englishman who dreamed of a railroad from Cape Town to Cairo. How many Khan Scholarships are there in the world today?

Pencilbeam’s theory even explains much of recent and current history. Adolph Hitler would have been the greatest ruler of all time, considering the amount of cement he expended on bunkers, pillboxes, tank traps, bomb shelters, etc. Fortunately for the Allies, brilliant military thinkers hit upon the idea of demolishing those constructions by aerial bombardment and, also by bombing night and day,
preventing the Nazis from erecting new constructions.
Unable to pour cement effectively, Nazi Germany eventually collapsed.

In the United States it has long been known that if a state or local government can start a construction project, it will. Traditionally, the federal government’s role has been limited to constructing Post Offices and interstate highways, except for Washington, D.C., where the amount of cement used is obvious even to the most casual visitor.
(Vide
the Washington Monument, the new Metro,
et al.)

Even the US space program is no exception to Pencilbeam’s penetrating theory. NASA was at its prime, with virtually unlimited funding, in the 1960s when the space agency was pouring megatonnages of cement for its facilities at Cape Canaveral, Houston, and elsewhere. Once those facilities were built, once the cement hardened, NASA’s funding woes began. Not even the Space Shuttle (which uses practically no cement at all) has significantly brightened NASA’s funding picture.

Every valid scientific theory must be able to predict new phenomena, as well as explaining old ones. Pencilbeam points out that the MX missile program, which will require the expenditure of huge amounts of cement wherever and however the missiles are ultimately based, will certainly pass Congressional muster and go on to full-scale construction. Of course, the Russians—who are probably slightly ahead of the US in the cement race—might revert to the World War II tactic of demolishing the cement sites and establishing their own construction industry as supreme in the world.

If they do, Pencilbeam insists, the survivors of the nuclear exchange will undoubtedly start right in where civilization began: pouring cement and pressuring the government for bigger construction contracts.

In addition to being a writer, lecturer, and retired editor, I am also a space activist. I believe firmly that humankind’s expansion into space is not only exciting and beneficial, it is necessary for the survival of the species. I wrote a book on the subject, called The High Road. I have also joined several space-activism organizations, and in 1983 was elected the president of the oldest of them, the National Space Institute. Back in 1980, when I was asked to be Guest of Honor at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society’s annual conference, Philcon 80, it occurred to me that although science fiction fans love to read about space travel, relatively few of them were actively working in the real world to strengthen the space program. I wrote this speech, which was later adapted into magazine form and published in Analog.

Frankly, I’m afraid that there are still too many science fiction fans sitting on their duffs reading about the future instead of working to help make it come true.

My text today is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Chapter 5, Verse 13: “Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost his savor, wherewith shall it be salted?”

We all love this thing we call science fiction. No two of us agree as to just what, exactly, science fiction is—but whatever it is, we agree that we love it.

Perhaps too much. After all, there is a big, brawling world out there that desperately needs men and women of vision, and vigor, and courage. Yet it is awfully tempting to remain here in our snug little world of science fiction and hope that the outside world leaves us alone.

When I first came into science fiction, writers and fans alike bemoaned the fact that we were in a literary ghetto. Science fiction was ignored by the general reading public, despised by the critics, and treated by the publishers as something between a narcotics addiction and a social disease.

Through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, many writers struggled to break down the old ghetto walls. So did a few fans. Gradually, brick by stubborn brick, the walls did come down.

An enormous part of that success was due to two men whom we seldom think of as science fiction writers: Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas.
Star Trek
created a huge audience for science fiction among people who had never read a science fiction story in their lives.
Star Wars
cashed in on that audience—and made it even bigger.

Shallow as
Star Wars
was, as science fiction, it was a profound message to the men who make the money decisions in New York and Hollywood. The old ghetto walls were finally leveled by outsiders who came to us searching for gold.