"What I think is beautiful and what you think is beautiful," I said, "might disgust a Rigelian, and vice-versa. Therefore, beauty is a relative thing. So you can't condemn it as an abstract principle if--"
"Crap!" he said. "So they hurt, rape, steal and screw themselves up over different things. It's still because beauty sits there demanding violation."
"Then how can you blame an individual object--"
"We do business with Rigelians, don't we?"
"Yes."
"Then it can be translated. Enough said."
Then the good-looking guy at the bar who'd been trying to pick up the broad in the green dress passed by on his way to the Men's Room and called Nick Shorty when he asked him to move his chair out of the way. That ended our evening in that bar.
Nick swore he'd die with his boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kiimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they'd cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he'd picked up in the hospital.
That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I'd been a pallbearer.
I mashed out my cigarette and made my way back to the slip-sled. Whatever was rotten in Midi, I'd find it out later. It was time to go.
The dead are too much with us.
For two weeks, I puzzled over what I'd found and I kept myself fit. When I entered the Homefree system, my life was further complicated by the fact that Homefree had picked up an additional satellite. Not a natural one, either.
WHAT THE HELL, EXCLAMATION, I sent ahead in code.
VISITOR, came the reply. LANDING PERMISSION REQUESTED STOP DENIED STOP STILL CIRCLING STOP SAYS HES AN EARTH INTELLIGENCE MAN STOP
LET HIM LAND, I said, HALF A HOUR AFTER IM DOWN STOP
There came the acknowledgment, and I swung into a tight orbit and pushed the _Model T_ down and around and down.
After a frolic with the beasts, I repaired to my home for a shower, shucked my Conner face, then dressed for dinner.
It would appear that something finally meant enough to the wealthiest government in existence for someone to at last authorize a trip on the part of some underpaid civil servant in one of the cheapest interstellar vehicles available.
I vowed to at least feed him well.
III
Lewis Briggs and I regarded one another across the remains of dinner and the wide table they occupied. His identification papers informed me that he was an agent of Earth's Central Intelligence Department. He looked like a shaved monkey. He was a wizened little guy with a perpetually inquisitive stare, and it seemed as if he must be pushing retirement age. He'd stuttered just a bit when he'd introduced himself, but the dinner appeared to have relaxed him and the falter had halted.
"It was a very pleasant meal, Mister Sandow," he acknowledged. "Now, if I may, I'd like to discuss the business that brought me here."
"Then let's adjourn to the upstairs, where we can get some fresh air while we talk."
We arose, taking our drinks with us, and I led him to the elevator.
Five seconds later, it admitted us to the roof garden, and I gestured toward a couple lounging chairs set beneath a chestnut free. "How about there?" I asked. He nodded and seated himself. A cool breeze came out of the twilight and we breathed it in and gave it back.
"It's quite impressive," he said, looking around the garden shadows, "the way you satisfy your every whim."
"This particular whim in which we're relaxing," I said, "is landscaped to make this place virtually undetectable by means of aerial reconnaissance."
"Oh, the thought hadn't occurred to me."
I offered him a cigar, which he declined. So I lit it for myself and asked him, "So what is it you want of me?"
"Will you consent to accompany me back to Earth and talk to my chief?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I've answered that question a dozen times, in as many letters. Earth grates on my nerves, it gives me a big pain these days. That's why I live out here. Earth is overcrowded, bureaucratic, unhealthy, and suffering from too many mass-psychoses to bother classifying. Whatever your chief wants to say, you can say for him; and I'll answer you, and you can take it back to him."
"Normally," he said, "these matters are handled at the Division level."
"Sorry about that," I replied, "but I'll foot the bill for a coded courier-gram from here, if it comes to that."
"The reply would cost the Department too much," he said. "Our budget, you know."
"For Chrissake, I'll pay it both ways then! Anything to stop cluttering my incoming basket with what is still strangely referred to as surface-carrier mail."
"God! No!" A tone of panic clung to his words. "It's never been done before, and the man-hours involved in determining how to bill you would be prohibitive!"
Inwardly, I wept for thee, Mother Earth, and the prodigies that had been wrought upon thee. A government is born, it flourishes, strong is its nationalism and great its frontiers, then comes a time of solidification, division of labor unto specialization, and the layers of management and chains of command, yes, and Max Weber spoke of this. He saw bureaucracy in the necessary evolution of all institutions, and he saw that it was good. He saw that it was necessary and good. While it may be necessary, put a comma after that word and after the last one add "God" and an exclamation point. For there comes a time in the history of all bureaucracies when they must inevitably parody their own functions. Look what the breakup of the big Austro-Hungarian machine did to poor Kafka, or the Russian one to Gogol. It drove them out of their cotton-picking minds, poor bastards, and now I was looking at a man who had survived an infinitely more inscrutable one until the end of his days was in sight. This indicated to me that he was slightly below average intelligence, emotionally handicapped, insecure, or morally suspect; or else he was an iron-willed masochist. For these neuter machines, combining as they do the worst of both father-image and mother-image--i.e., the security of the womb and the authority of an omniscient leader--always manage to attract the nebbish. And this is why, Mother Earth, I wept inwardly for thee at that moment of the immense parade called Time: the clowns were passing, and everybody knows that inside, somewhere, their hearts are broken.
"Then tell me what you would like of me and I'll answer you now," I said.
He reached into his inside pocket and withdrew a sealed envelope bearing various security stamps, which I didn't bother examining too closely, even when he handed it to me.
"Should you not consent to accompany me back to Earth, I was instructed to deliver this to you."
"If I had agreed to go along, what would you have done with it?"
"Returned it to my chief," he said.
"So that he could hand it to me?"
"Probably," he said.
I tore it open and withdrew a single sheet of paper.