Tracy gave up. He sighed and said, “Now that you mention it, I think they were able to produce small industrial diamonds. They had to subject carbon to extreme heat and pressure, or something. Damn it. They were beautiful! Precious! That’s why people wanted them.”
“No they weren’t,” Betty said decisively. “I’ve seen some of the old jewelry in museums. The former British crown jewels, for instance. Gaudy, garish. And from twenty feet away you couldn’t have told the difference between a diamond and a cleverly cut piece of glass or rhinestone. It would take an expert up close with his equipment to tell a flawed diamond from an unflawed one. Jo is right. They were status symbols, a symbol of wealth. Oh, some gems had a beauty of their own. Opals, star sapphires, jade, turquoise, but, as I recall, none of those were particularly precious. They were sort of semiprecious.”
Cogswell was frustrated. “All right. I shouldn’t have picked jewelry for my example. But this matter of everything being free. Suppose I dialed this super-supermarket of yours and had them deliver a Rembrandt.”
Stein said, still soothingly, as though to calm his patient, “You mean the artist?”
“Yes, I mean the artist. Don’t tell me you no longer look at paintings.”
The Academician said, “Oh, most certainly we do. We’re very art conscious. Certainly you’ve noted the many we have in the house. Rembrandt is not a particular favorite of mine; however, if I wanted a reproduction of any of his… ”
Cogswell had him now. “I wasn’t talking about a reproduction,” he said. “I was talking about an original Rembrandt. The real thing.”
The other shook his head in despair. He said, “You didn’t have duplicators in your day, did you?”
“Duplicator?”
The Academician nodded. “Tracy Cogswell, today we have equipment that… well, we can take the Rembrandt painting you wish and so duplicate it that Rembrandt himself would not know the difference between the original and the copy. It would be exactly the same, down to practically the last molecule in the paint. And then you could make a copy of the copy and a copy of that and they would all be exactly alike… down to the last molecule.”
“So why would you want the original?” Betty said in a reasonable tone.” She thought about it. “Come to think, I doubt if anyone knows where any of the originals of a painter as famous as Rembrandt might be. Everything he ever did has been copied over and over again, probably thousands of times. How could you ever find the original?“ Her expression indicated that the question had never crossed her mind before.
Tracy gave up. “The hell with it,” he said. “At any rate, I’m getting out of here. All I want from you three is a little knowledge of the ropes. How I get a room in a hotel. How I get food in a restaurant. How I order from these distribution centers. I think that you owe me at least that much.”
Jo Edmonds flipped his piece of jade and said softly, “Where would you go?”
“I don’t know,” Tracy said. “Somewhere to get orientated until I can get a job.”
Walter Stein said, his voice still placating, “Tracy Cogswell, there are no jobs.”
Tracy was scornful of that opinion. He said, “I’ll find something. I’m no bum. You mean there’s a lot of unemployment? I thought this was Utopia.”
The academician sighed. He said, “Unemployment isn’t quite the way to put it, Tracy Cogswell. Did you ever hear of a Dr. Richard Bellman of the Rand Corporation? Possibly he came after your time, I don’t quite remember. At any rate, he predicted that by the end of the twentieth century two percent of the labor force would be able to produce all the products the United States could consume. Obviously, the rest of the developed nations were in much the same position.”
“Once again, failure of nerve and imagination,” Edmonds put in. “He failed to realize the extent to which automation and the computer, not to speak of nuclear fussion and other breakthroughs, would take over.”
Tracy was staring again. He said, in utter disbelief, “You mean nobody works?”
Edmonds shrugged. “For all practical purposes, nobody has to work. Even those who do are usually employed at make-work projects. They wouldn’t have to if they didn’t want to.”
Tracy had to reject that one. It was just out of the question. He said, “That’s crazy! There’ll always be some work that has to be done.”
Stein nodded agreement to that and said, “Yes, and always some compulsive workers available to do it. But for all practical purposes labor has been eliminated. Machines do it so very much better.”
Tracy Cogswell slumped back in his chair. So many curves had been thrown at him in the past hour or so that he simply couldn’t assimilate them.
The academician said, “Tracy Cogswell, it’s what we told you. The human race is turning to mush. It no longer has purpose.” He chuckled, but this time bitterly. “They used to think that the Romans went to pot because they gave their people free bread and circuses. Ha! Bread and circuses. In our age, we give our people everything free.”
Tracy squared his shoulders and said, “All right, so be it, but I’m not your patsy. I’m clearing out of here just as soon as I can.”
“Where would you go?” Edmonds repeated.
Tracy again glared at the younger man. He said, “What difference does it make to you?”
“You don’t even speak the language,” Jo said mildly. “And it makes a difference to me since I have been working with the academician on this project for several years now.”
Cogswell laughed at him. “You haven’t studied up on my background as much as you claim you have. I speak—besides my native English—French, Spanish, Italian, German and even have a smattering of Slavic. What language is current in these parts?”
Edmonds said smoothly, “Your languages are understood only by scholars, these days, Cogswell. How are you on Interlingua?”
Chapter Two
Tracy Cogswell looked from one of them to the other. Another curve had been thrown. “Interlingua?” he said.
“The international language,” Betty explained. “Everybody speaks it now.”
That floored him. He said, “You mean nobody speaks English, French, Spanish?”
She shook her head, as though sorry she had to tell him. “Only scholars of linguistics.”
He said, “But… well, what was wrong with English? It was rapidly becoming more or less an international language. Practically all educated people spoke it everywhere. All the airlines… at least in the West… used it. And all ships used it in going through the red tape of leaving or entering a port. It… ”
Betty took over the explaining. “English, like all the other languages before Interlingua, was a bastard tongue, Tracy. Consider its history, for a moment. When Caesar’s Romans arrived, the language spoken in England was Celtic. The Romans, in their several centuries of occupation, grafted Latin on it. When they left, the waves of Saxons and Angelos occupied the country, followed by Danes and Norwegians, all with their own languages. Next came William the Conqueror and his Norman French. So you can see what I mean by a bastard language. Interlingua is a scientific language based on the earlier Esperanto and is more suited for a scientific society than yours was. To take just one or two examples, look at the way you form the plural in English.”
Tracy said, “You simply add an ‘s.’ ”
She shook her head, and said, “Sometimes. Sometimes not. What is the plural of man? Mans? What is the plural of woman? Womans? And how do you form the feminine in English? By simply adding ‘ess’? Sometimes, such as heir-heiress. But you can’t say horse -horseess, or bull-bulless. You have to say mare and cow and you have to say boar-sow. There are no such exceptions in Interlingua. There are only a half-dozen grammatical rules, where in your day you had to study a whole book on grammar, and spelling is completely phonetic. It’s easily learned, internationally understood. The most remote inhabitant of Mongolia speaks Interlingua.”