As it happened, some sort of local celebration was in full sway when Carman, a solitary figure with a solitary suitcase of belongings, left the spaceport. Great heavy-set creatures were whirling up and down the streets in each other’s arms, looking like so many dancing bears clad in tinsel and frills. Carman stepped hastily back into the shadow of a squat yellow-painted building while a platoon of the huge shaggy aliens came thundering past, to the gay accompaniment of distant tootling music composed in excruciating quarter-tone intervals.
A hand fell lightly on his shoulder. Carman turned and jumped away all in the same nervous motion. He saw an Earthman behind him, clad in the somber black vestments of the Terran diplomatic corps.
“Pardon me if I startled you,” the stranger said in a soft, cultured voice. He was a neatly turned out, mildly foppish-looking man in his forties, with elegant features, well-groomed dark hair, delicately shaven brow ridges. Only the startling brass ring through his nostrils marred his others se distinguished upper-class appearance.
“I’m the Terran consul on this world,” he went on, in the same gentle tones. “Adrian Blyde’s my name. Am I right in assuming you’re the man who was just dropped oil by that freighter?”
“You are. I’m David Carman of Earth. Want to see my passport?”
Consul Blyde smiled serenely. “In due time, Mr. Carman. I’m sure it’s in good order. But would you mind telling me precisely why you’ve come to Sirius VII?”
“To join the armed forces. I want to take part in the Sirian campaign.”
“To join the armed forces,” Blyde repeated in a faintly wonderstruck voice. “Well, well, well. That’s very interesting, Mr. Carman. Very. Would you come this way, please?”
Blyde seized him firmly by the fleshy part of his arm and propelled him across the wide, poorly paved street, between two pairs of madly careening bearlike beings, and into a narrow doorway in a building constructed of purple brick.
“The autochthones are celebrating their annual fertility dance through the city from morning to night without rest. Those that keep on their feet the whole day without collapsing are entitled to mate. The weak ones have to try again next year. It’s quite a neat genetic system, really.”
Carman glanced back through the doorway at the horde of spinning aliens weaving wildly down the broad street locked each to each in a desperate grip of love.
“The nose rings denote masculinity,” Blyde said. “Terran males who stay here have to wear them too; the natives are very, very fussy about that. When in Rome, you know. I’ll give you yours tonight.”
“Just a minute,” Carman said worriedly, as Blyde unlocked an office door and gestured within to a cluttered little room lined with booktapes and scattered papers. “I don’t plan to stay here, you know. The military action’s on Sirius IV. That’s where I’m going as soon as I’ve seen the authorities and enlisted.”
Blyde dropped heavily into a well-upholstered pneumo-chair, wiped perspiration from his brow with an obviously scented cloth, and sighed unhappily. “My dear Mr. Carman: I don’t know what motives impelled you to come to this system, nor by what chicanery you wangled your passage. But now that you’re here, there are several things you should know.”
“Such as?”
“For one, there are no hostilities currently taking place anywhere in the Sirius system.”
Stunned, Carman gasped, “No—hostilities? Then the war’s over?”
Blyde touched his fingertips lightly together. “You misunderstand. There never was any war between Earth and Sirius IV. Care for a drink?”
“Rye,” Carman said automatically. “Never—was—a—war? But—how—”
“Economic Regulator Harrison Morch of Earth is a great man,” Blyde said with seeming irrelevancy, putting his head back as if studying the reticulated pattern of paint cracks on the office ceiling. An air conditioner hummed ineffectually somewhere. “Economic Regulator Morch has devoted a lifetime of study to examining the motives governing fluctuations in economic trends.”
Carman’s throat felt terribly dry. The moist warmth of Sirius VII’s atmosphere, the additional drag of the heavier gravity, the calm blandness of the consul’s manner, the sheer nonsense he was talking—all these factors were combining to make Carman thoroughly sick. “What does all this have to do with—” Blyde raised one manicured hand. “Economic Regulator Morch, through his studies, has reduced to a formula the general economic principle known to theorists for centuries—that spending increases in direct proportion to adverse military news. Consumers go on buying sprees, remembering the last cycle of shortages and of rapid price increases. Money flows more freely. Of course, when the war situation lasts long enough, a period of inflation sets in—making it necessary that an equally violent peace be waged.”
Dimly Carman sensed what was coming. “No,” he said.
“Yes. There is no war with Sirius. It was a stroke of genius on Economic Regulator Morch’s part to take advantage of the uncertainty of interstellar communication to enforce a news block on the entire Sirius system. It’s a simple matter to distribute fabricated war communiques, invent wholly fictitious spaceships which perish gorily c x the c mane of the moment, arouse public interest and keep it at a high pitch—”
“You mean,” Carman said tonelessly, “that Morch invented this whole war, and arranges Terran victories and losses to fit economic conditions back home?”
“It is a brilliant plan,” said Blyde, smiling complacently. “If a decline in spending occurs, word of severe losses in space reaches the home front, and the bad news serves to unloose the purse strings. When the economy has been reinflated, Earth’s legions forge on to victory, and spending drops off again. We spend heavily in times of stress, when we need consolation—not in peacetime.”
Carman blinked. “I spent six thousand dollars and forged a passport to come here and find out this! The one time in my life I decided to do something, instead of sitting back and letting things happen to me, I discover it’s all a hoax,” He flexed his fingers experimentally as if wondering what he might do with them.
Blyde seemed to be sympathetic. “It is, I realize, terribly awkward for you. But no more so than it is to us, who h the strenuous task of preserving this beneficial hoax exposing it from would-be exposers.”
“Are you going to kill me, then?”
Blyde blanched at the blunt question. “Mr. Carman! We are not barbarians!”
“Well, what are you going to do with me?”
The consul shrugged. “The one completely satisfactory thing. We’ll find you a good job here on Sirius VII. You’ll be much happier here than you ever were on Earth. Naturally, you can’t be permitted to return home.”
But the man who can forge a passport to Sirius can also find a way home. In Carman’s case it took him seven full months—months of living in the sticky endless heat of Sirius VII, dodging the playful ursinoid natives, kowtowing to Blyde (whose secretary he became, at $60 a week) and wearing a brass nose ring through his nostrils.
It was seven months before he had mastered Blyde’s signature to his own satisfaction, and knew enough of local diplomatic protocol to be able to requisition a spaceship from the small military outpost just outside Zuorf. A messenger—there were no phones on the planet, for obscure religious reasons—came to the Consulate to announce that the ship was ready.