“What tune?”
“A large percentage of the Martian colonists are of French extraction. We might play on their ethnic consciousness.”
“What ethnic consciousness? Everyone speaks English now.”
“That doesn’t stop ethnic consciousness,” said Devers. “If you play the old national anthem of France, they’ll all drip nostalgia. It’s a battle-hymn, you know, and battle-hymns always stir the blood, especially now that there aren’t any wars.”
Hopkins said, “But the words don’t mean anything any more. Do you remember them?”
“Yes,” said Devers. “Some-
He sang them in a clear tenor voice.
Hopkins said, “Not one Martian in a thousand will know what that means.”
Devers said, “Who cares? Play it anyway. Even if they don’t understand the words they will know it’s the old battle hymn of France and that will stir them up. Besides, the tune is a winner. Infinitely better than that silly music-hall thing about ‘No, no.’ I’m telling you, the battle hymn will settle into every mind and wipe out the no-no.”
“Maybe you have something there,” said Hopkins. “ And if we accompany it with some strong slogan in different changes, ‘Humanity to the stars!,’ ‘Reach out for a star,’ ‘Faster than light is the slowest we can go.’ And always with that tune.”
Colodny said, “You know, ‘la jour de gloire’ means ‘the day of glory,’ I think. We can use that phrase, ‘the glory day when we reach the stars.’ If we say ‘glory day’ often enough, maybe the Martians will vote, ‘Yes.”‘
“It sounds too good to be true,” said Hopkins, gloomily, “but I really don’t see that there’s any other choice we have right now. We can try it and see if it does any good.”
That was the beginning of the great voting battle of the tunes. In everyone of the domed settlements on Mars, from Olympus all along the Valles Marineris and far into the cratered areas, there rang out on one side, “No, no, a thousand times, no-” and on the other side, “ Allons, enfants de la patrie-”
There was no question that the stirring rhythm of the battle-hymn was having its effect. It roared back at the simple negation sing-song and Hopkins had to admit that from zero chance, the “yes” vote was becoming a possibility; from sure defeat, it was beginning to have just a chance.
Hopkins said, “The trouble is, though, we have nothing direct. Their song, silly though it is, has the advantage of saying, “No-No!-No! Ours is just a tune which is catchy and is filling the minds of many, but with what? La jour de gloire?”
Devers smiled and said, “Why not wait for the election? “ After all, it was his idea.
They did.
What happened on election day? Did the negative vote win or the positive? And, in either case, why?
The best reason counts. You can win if you have the vote come out negative or positive.
On the evening of election day, Hopkins found himself almost unable to talk. The vote had been running a steady 90 percent in favor of “Yes” and there was simply no question about it.
The colonists of Mars were voting to allow their planet to be used for the work that would eventually send human beings to the stars.
Hopkins said, finally, “What happened? What did we do right? “
“It was the tune,” said Devers, smiling his satisfaction. “I had it figured right, but I didn’t want to explain my notion because I didn’t want it to get out to the other side somehow. Not that I don’t trust everyone here, but I didn’t want the tune neutralized in some clever way.”
“What was there about the tune that made so much difference?” demanded Hopkins.
“Well, it did have a subliminal message. Maybe the colonists no longer knew enough French to get the meaning of the words, but they had to know the name of the battle-hymn. That name rang through their minds each time they heard the tune; each time they hummed it.”
“So what?”
“So this,” said Devers, grinning, “The name is ‘Mars say yes!”‘
Feghoot And The Courts
The planet of Lockmania, inhabitated though it was by intelligent beings that looked like large wombats, had adopted the American legal system, and Ferdinand Feghoot had been sent there by the Earth Confederation to study the results.
Feghoot watched with interest as a husband and wife were brought in, charged with disturbing the peace. During a religious observation, when for twenty minutes the congregation was supposed to maintain silence, while concentrating on their sins and visualizing them as melting away, the woman had suddenly risen from her squatting position and screamed loudly. When someone rose to object, the man had pushed him forcefully.
The judges listened solemnly, fined the woman a silver dollar, and the man a twenty-dollar gold piece.
Almost immediately afterward, seventeen men and women were brought in. They had been ringleaders of a crowd that had demonstrated for better quality meat at a supermarket. They had torn the supermarket apart and inflicted various bruises and lacerations on eight of the employees of the establishment.
Again the judges listened solemnly, and fined the seventeen a silver dollar apiece.
Afterward, Feghoot said to the chief judge. “I approved of your handling of the man and woman who disturbed the peace.”
“It was a simple case,” said the judge. “We have a legal maxim that goes, ‘Screech is silver, but violence is golden.’”
“In that case,” said Feghoot, “why did you fine the group of seventeen a silver dollar apiece when they had committed far worse violence?”
“Oh, that’s another legal maxim,” said the judge. “Every crowd has a silver fining.”
Fault-Intolerant
9 January
I, Abram Ivanov, finally have a home computer; a word processor, to be exact. I fought it as long as I could. I argued it out with myself. I am America’s most prolific writer and I do fine on a typewriter. Last year I published over thirty books. Some of them were small books for kids. Some were anthologies. But there were also novels, short story collections, essay collections, nonfiction books. Nothing to be ashamed of.
So why do I need a word processor? I can’t go any faster. But, you know, there’s such a thing as neatness. Typing my stuff means I have to introduce pen-and-ink items to correct typos, and nobody does that anymore. I don’t want my manuscripts to stick out like a sore thumb. I don’t want editors to think my stuff is second rate, just because it is corrected.
The difficulty was finding a machine that wouldn’t take two years to learn to use. Deft, I’m not-as
I’ve frequently mentioned in this diary. And I want one that doesn’t break down every other day. Mechanical failures just throw me. So I got one that’s “fault-tolerant. “ That means if some component goes wrong, the machine keeps right on working, tests the malfunctioning component, corrects it if it can, reports it if it can’t, and replacements can be carried through by anybody. It doesn’t take an expert hacker.
Sounds like my kind of thing.
5 February
I haven’t been mentioning my word processor lately, because I’ve been struggling to learn how it works.
I’ve managed. For a while, I had a lot of trouble, because although I have a high IQ, it’s a very specialized high IQ. I can write, but coping with mechanical objects throws me.
But I learned quickly, once I gained sufficient confidence. What did it was this. The manufacturer’s representative assured me that the machine would develop flaws only rarely, and would be unable to correct its own flaws only exceedingly rarely. He said I wouldn’t be likely to need a new component oftener than once in five years.