Rod hesitated. He had paid no attention to the news himself, but he did not want to discredit his home planet by making it seem more ignorant than it really was. “Something about language, wasn’t it? And length of life, too? I never paid much attention to off-planet news, unless it was technical inventions or big battles. I think some people in Old North Australia have a keen interest in Old Earth itself. What was it, anyhow?”
“The Instrumentality finally took on a big plan. Earth had no dangers, no hopes, no rewards, no future except endlessness. Everybody stood a thousand-to-one chance of living the four hundred years which was allotted for persons who earned the full period by keeping busy—”
“Why didn’t everybody do it?” interrupted Rod.
“The Instrumentality took care of the shorties in a very fair way. If offered them wonderfully delicious and exciting vices when they got to be about seventy. Things that combined electronics, drugs and sex in the subjective mind. Anybody who didn’t have a lot of work to do ended up getting ‘the blissfuls’ and eventually died of sheer fun. Who wants to take time for mere hundred-years renewals when they can have five or six thousand years of orgies and adventures every single night?”
“Sounds horrible to me,” said Rod. “We have our Giggle Rooms, but people die in them right away. They don’t mess around, dying among their neighbors. Think of the awful interaction you must get with the normals.”
Doctor Vomact’s face clouded over with anger and grief. He turned away and looked over the endless Martian plains. Dear blue Earth hung friendlily in the sky. He looked up at the star of Earth as though he hated it and he said to Rod, his face still turned away,
“You may have a point there, Mister McBan. My mother was a shortie and after she gave up, my father went too. And I’m a normal. I don’t suppose I’ll get over what it did to me. They weren’t my real parents, of course — there was nothing that dirty in my family — but they were my final adopters. I’ve always thought that you Old North Australians were crazy, rich barbarians for killing off your teen-agers if they didn’t jump enough or something crude like that, but I’ll admit that you’re clean barbarians. You don’t make yourselves live with the sweet sick stink of death inside your own apartments…”
“What’s an apartment?”
“What we live in.”
“You mean a house,” said Rod.
“No, an apartment is part of a house. Two hundred thousand of them sometimes make up one big house.”
“You mean,” said Rod, “there are two hundred thousand families all in one enormous living room? The room must be kilometers long.”
“No, no, no!” said the doctor, laughing a little. “Each apartment has a separate living room with sleep sections that come out of the walls, an eating section, a washroom for yourself and your visitors that might come to have a bath with you, a garden room, a study room, and a personality room.”
“What’s a personality room?”
“That,” said the doctor, “is a little room where we do things that we don’t want our own families to watch.”
“We call that a bathroom,” said Rod.
The doctor stopped in their walk. “That’s what makes it so hard to explain to you what Earth is doing. You’re fossils, that’s what you are. You’ve had the old language of Inglish, you keep your family system and your names, you’ve had unlimited life—”
“Not unlimited,” said Rod, “just long. We have to work for it and pay for it with tests.”
The doctor looked sorry. “I didn’t mean to criticize you. You’re different. Very different from what Earth has been. You would have found Earth inhuman. Those apartments we were talking about, for example. Two-thirds of them empty. Underpeople moving into the basements. Records lost; jobs forgotten. If we didn’t make such good robots, everything would have fallen to pieces at the same time.” He looked at Rod’s face. “I can see you don’t understand me. Let’s take a practical case. Can you imagine killing me?”
“No,” said Rod, “I like you.”
“I don’t mean that. Not the real us. Suppose you didn’t know who I was and you found me intruding on your sheep or stealing your stroon.”
“You couldn’t steal my stroon. My government processes it for me and you couldn’t get near it.”
“All right, all right, not stroon. Just suppose I came from off your planet without a permit. How would you kill me?”
“I wouldn’t kill you. I’d report it to the police.”
“Suppose I drew a weapon on you?”
“Then,” said Rod, “you’d get your neck broken. Or a knife in your heart. Or a minibomb somewhere near you.”
“There!” said the doctor, with a broad grin.
“There what?” said Rod.
“You know how to kill people, should the need arise.”
“All citizens know how,” said Rod, “but that doesn’t mean they do it. We’re not bushwhacking each other all the time, the way I heard some Earth people thought we did.”
“Precisely,” said Vomact. “And that’s what the Instrumentality is trying to do for all mankind today. To make life dangerous enough and interesting enough to be real again. We have diseases, dangers, fights, chances. It’s been wonderful.”
Rod looked back at the group of sheds they had left. “I don’t see any signs of it here on Mars.”
“This is a military establishment. It’s been left out of the Rediscovery of Man until the effects have been studied better. We’re still living perfect lives of four hundred years here on Mars. No danger, no change, no risk.”
“How do you have a name, then?”
“My father gave it to me. He was an official Hero of the Frontier Worlds who came home and died a shortie. The Instrumentality let people like that have names before they gave the privilege to everybody.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Working.” The doctor started to resume their walk. Rod did not feel much awe of him. He was such a shamelessly talkative person, the way most Earth men seemed to be, that it was hard not to be at ease with him.
Rod took Vomact’s arm, gently. “There’s more to it—”
“You know it,” said Vomact. “You have good perceptions. Should I tell you?’
“Why not?” said Rod.
“You’re my patient. It might not be fair to you.”
“Go ahead,” said Rod, “you ought to know I’m tough.”
“I’m a criminal,” said the doctor.
“But you’re alive,” said Rod. “In my world we kill criminals or we send them off planet.”
“I’m off planet,” said Vomact. “This isn’t my world. For most of us here on Mars, this is a prison, not a home.”
“What did you do?”
“It’s too awful…” said the doctor. “I’m ashamed of it myself. They have sentenced me to conditional conditional.”
Rod looked at him quickly. Momentarily he wondered whether he might be the victim of some outrageous bewilderment and grief.
“I revolted,” said the doctor, “without knowing it. People can say anything they want on Earth, and they can print up to twenty copies of anything they need to print, but beyond that it’s mass communications. Against the law. When the Rediscovery of Man came, they gave me the Spanish language to work on. I used a lot of research to get out La Prensa. Jokes, dialogues, imaginary advertisements, reports of what had happened in the ancient world. But then I got a bright idea. I went down to Earthport and got the news from incoming ships. What was happening here. What was happening there. You have no idea, Rod, how interesting mankind is! And the things we do… so strange, so comical, so pitiable. The news even comes in on machines, all marked ‘official use only.’ I disregarded that and I printed up one issue with nothing but truth in it — a real issue, all facts.”