“You’re not going to put the blame for our society on my back!” Chad said very audibly, and Rex flushed.
“Well—hr’m!—without going into detail I must say that his specialist assistance in the realisation of the Beninia project has been invaluable, which is another reason apart from his great personal cachet why we’ve invited him to address us today—ah—Dr. Chad C. Mulligan.”
He sat down, barely in time to save himself from being shoved out of the way. Chad, as Norman had noticed, had spent most of his time drinking and not eating his meal, and he was a trifle unsteady on his feet as he reached the podium. Liquor had done nothing to affect his voice, however; the moment he started to speak, technicians recording the speeches for SCANALYZER and the company’s own archives winced and made haste to cut back the gain on their microphones.
“Shalmaneser, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ambassador, you lot out there and anybody else who may have snuck in on the astral plane! It is not for nothing that I begin by naming Shalmaneser rather than—there is a line taking all this through to Shal, I suppose? Yes? Good. I made his acquaintance a few hours ago and I completely revised my opinion of him, which was that like other computers I’ve had dealings with he was a moron, magnified, but nonetheless a moron who had to be told everything to be done in little itsy-bitsy steps. I was mistaken.
“My compliments to the design team who said they were going to develop a machine that could exercise conscious volition. My felicitations to Dr. Ibusa, who’s going to enjoy the benefits of that—and who probably doesn’t realise it yet. As far as I know this is the first public announcement of the achievement and that’s because I seem to be the first person who’s realised.”
There was a definite stir among the staffers, mostly people in Rex’s department. Norman, a little relieved that Chad was actually delivering a coherent address and not shouting insults or farting into the mikes, sat up straighter on his chair.
“It’s just as well you have Shal running the Beninia project, by the way,” Chad continued. “Unless there was somebody looking after it who knew what he was getting mixed up in, it would be a grand recipe for sending the country to hell in a handbasket. Even my friend Norman House, who hasn’t had the praise he deserves for thinking more about the people living over there than about what the project can do to line the shareholders’ bank accounts, overlooked the little thing I just referred to—Shal’s acquisition of the faculty possessed only by intelligent creatures which is known as orneriness, or over the water in England as ‘bloody-mindedness’, which seems to me to be the ideal term.”
By now the members of the board were looking rather nervous. Norman saw Waterford lean towards Rankin and whisper. For himself, he thought he might be going to enjoy Chad’s tirade after all. He took another drag on his Bay Gold.
“What do you do with somebody who tells you you’re out of your skull? It’s an annoying and deflating experience, isn’t it? It’s like trying to get a machine to do what it was designed for and finding it won’t.
“But a machine you can send off for repair, or trade in for a more reliable model. You can’t trade in people who bug you; you can only dodge out of their way, and sometimes this isn’t possible either. Sitting over there in Asia are a holovalot of people who disagree with us violently enough to make us boil our brains, so for as much of the time as we can we pretend they don’t exist. Until they kill our sons, or sink our ships, or do something else we can’t ignore.
“Right. Shal was told about Beninia, and what he replied amounted to this—‘I don’t believe you!’ And he was sheeting well justified. I’ll tell you why!
“This is a fine fat wealthy country and we’re scared. We think any moment we may walk around a corner and meet a mucker. We think we may dial California and find a slit-eye answering the phone out there. Without anybody warning us we may find ourselves mixed up in a riot and tossed in jail for no legal reason except we were there. This happened to Norman House just a short time ago, by the way.
“Beninia is a poky, poverty-stricken, broken-down little country which oughtn’t on the face of it to exist. But if they don’t have any wars there, and they haven’t had a murder in fifteen years, and there isn’t a word in the language to say ‘angry’—only a way to say ‘insane’—well, who’d believe that if someone came along and said it in conversation?
“I wouldn’t. I’d say the same thing I say to a little red brother when he tells me how lovely the garden is in China.
“This, in case you haven’t heard, is why I came to make Shalmaneser’s acquaintance. I’m not handing out compliments now—I’ve moved on to the brickbat stage, and believe me there are some people out there who deserve to be snowed under with barrels of dreck for abdicating their responsibilities as thinking individuals. Did you think, the same as Shal did, that the people who fed data about Beninia back to GT were all liars, out to deceive and con you?
“Communism doesn’t make a country a paradise on earth, but it has made an overcrowded underendowed country like China into a problem the world’s really rich countries can’t ignore. Something’s working there, and it’s probably not what its own citizens think it is—never mind. The evidence exists.
“If the evidence says you’re wrong, you don’t have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence. Codders and shiggies, didn’t anyone tell you that while you were in school?
“Even now—Norman, are you listening or have you gone to sleep?” Chad turned around and peered past the edge of the podium. “Ah yes, there you are. Easy to spot you—you have built-in advantages. Even now, like I was saying, a person as nominally intelligent as Norman hasn’t drawn the inevitable conclusion from what it took to persuade Shalmaneser the reports about Beninia were true. There’s something going on there, something working among the people, which you and I don’t know about. Norman! You asked to hire me and I said the hole with that, and then you changed your mind—well, so did I. Hired or not hired, I want to know what it is!”
He thumped the podium with his clenched fist and the microphones jumped.
“Sheeting hole, when’s the next express for Beninia? Dr. Ibusa, do I have to have a visa or can I just go? I like the idea of a country where there aren’t any riots and there aren’t any muckers and there aren’t any wars and there aren’t any lots of other things which make me despair for the human race! Until I was told about Beninia I thought they were all wiped out like Samoa and the Bushmen by Christianity and firewater and downright greed.
“I hate long speeches. Also I’ve drunk too much. I’d better sit down.”
* * *
There was a long silence. Eventually a spattering of applause went around the hall and died. The woman from State sitting next to Norman turned to him and said, “Well, he said a few nice things about you, Mr. House, and I’m sure you deserve them.”
“I deserve to have my head shrunk,” Norman answered curtly, getting to his feet.
“What?”
“I’m a fool!” Norman snapped, and walked away.
the happening world (15)
EQUAL AND OPPOSITE
Dear Friend—I write to you as one who has already supported some of my ventures dedicated to Justice, Right and the Natural Law of White Supremacy. You have no doubt heard how those pro-communist Devils in Washington have sold out more of our irreplaceable natural resources to a gang of lousy black beggars in Beninia. I propose to …