“As for the arts that we rightly cherish, they were all practiced by prehistoric man.”
“This argument is familiar to me from my under-graduate days.” Sir Mihaly said, as he served the salmon. “Yet still we cook our food and eat according to rules with carefully wrought utensils.” He poured some wine. “Still we choose our vintages and exercise our judgments and our prejudices over that choice.” He offered her a basket full of warm crisp rolls. “Still we sit together, male and female, and merely converse.”
“Tin not denying. Mihaly, that you keep a good table, or that you have failed as yet to throw me on the floor. But this meal — and I cast no aspersions — is now an anachronism, and strongly disapproved of by a government pushing the new poison-free man-made foods and drinks. Besides, this lovely meal is the end product of a number of factors that have only a nodding acquaintance with true civility. I mean the fishers crouching in their boats, the farmers sweating through their gracing land, the barb in the mouth, the shot in the head, the chains of middlemen less tolerable than farmers or fishers, the organizations that prepare or can or pack, the transport firms, the financiers — Mihaly, you’re laughing at me!”
“Ah, you’re talking of all this organization with such disapproval. I approve. Vive l’organisation! And let me remind you that the new synthetic food plants are triumphs of organization. Last century, as you say, they didn’t approve of prisons, but they had them, nevertheless; this century we have become organized, and we don’t have prisons. Last century, indeed, they didn’t approve of war. yet they had three bouncing big ones, in 1914, in 1939, and in 1969; this century we have become organized, and we hold our wars on .Charon, the farthest planet, out of harm’s way. If that’s not civilization, I accept it readily as a substitute.”
“So we all do. But it may only be a substitute, man’s substitute. Notice that whatever we do, it is at someone else’s or something else’s expense.”
“I gratefully accept their sacrifice. How will you have your steak, Hilary?”
“Oh, overdone, please. I can’t quite bear the thought of it being real blood and animal tissue. All I’m trying to say is that our civilization may be built not on our best, but on our worst: on fear — other people’s if not our own — or on greed. Can I pour you some more wine? And per-haps another species may have another idea of civilization, built on a sympathy for, an empathy with, all other living things. Perhaps these aliens—”
He pressed the spin stud in the oven pedestal. The porcelain and glass hemisphere slid into the bronze hemisphere. He retrieved the steaks. The aliens again! Ah, but Mrs. Warhoon was off form tonight! The platemaker coughed out two warm plates, and he served her moodily, without taking in what she was saying. Enlightened self-interest, he thought; that was the most you could or should expect from anyone; once you met an altruist, you had to beware a sick man or a scoundrel. Perhaps people like Mrs.
Warhoon, who wouldn’t face the fact, were sick too, and ought to be encouraged to enter mental therapy homes, like criminals and hot gospellers. Once you started questioning fundamentals, like a man’s right to eat good red meat if he could afford it, then you were in trouble, even if you cared to think of that trouble as enlightenment.
“By the standards of another species,” Mrs. Warhoon was saying, “our culture might merely seem like a sickness. It may be that sickness which prevents us from seeing how we ought to communicate with the aliens, rather than any shortcoming of theirs.”
“It’s an interesting theory, Hilary. You may have a chance to turn it into practice on a large scale shortly.”
“Oh, indeed? You don’t mean that some other ship has found more aliens at large in the universe, do you?”
“Nothing quite so fortunate as that. I received a long letter from Lattimore yesterday morning, which was partly why I invited you here this evening. The Americans, as you know, are very interested in our ETA’s. We have had a constant stream of them to the Exozoo over the last month. They are convinced, and I am sure Lattimore has convinced them, that things are not being run as efficiently as they might be.
Lattimore wrote to say that their new stellar exploration ship, Gansas, has been re-routed, though the re-routing is not official yet. Its investigation of the Crab Nebula is postponed. Instead, it will be heading for Clementina, to search for the home planet of the ETA’s.”
Mrs. Warhoon put her knife and fork together, raised her eyebrows, and said, “ What?”
“Lattimore will be on the flight in an advisory capacity. His meeting with you much impressed him and he earnestly hopes that you will come along on the flight as chief cosmoclectic. He asked me to put in a good word for him before he gets in touch with you direct.”
Mrs. Warhoon let her shoulders sag and leaned forward between the Scandinavian candelabras. “
Goodness,” she said. Her cheeks became red; in the candlelight she looked thirty again.
“He says you will not be the only woman on the flight. He also gives a rough indication of the salary, which will be fabulous. You ought to go. Hilary. It’s a splendid opportunity.”
She put an elbow on the table and rested her forehead on her hand. He thought it a theatrical gesture, even while seeing that she was genuinely moved and excited. His earlier fantasies returned to him.
“Space! You know I’ve been no farther abroad than Venus. You know it would wreck my marriage, Mihaly. Alfred would never forgive me.”
“I’m sorry. I understood your marriage was a marriage in name only.”
Her eyes rested blankly on a framed infra red photo-graph of Conquest Canyon. Pluto. She drained her wine-glass.
“It doesn’t matter. I can’t — or possibly will not — save it. To leave in the Gansas would make a clean break with the past. Thank goodness that in that sphere at least we are more civilized than our grandparents, and have no involved divorce laws. Should I go on the Gansas, Mihaly? I should, shouldn’t I? You know there are few men I would as readily take advice from as you.”
The curve of her wrist, the uncertain glimmer of candle-light in her hair, had helped him to make up his mind. He rose, went round the table, and placed his hands on her bare shoulders.
“You owe it to yourself, Hilary. You know it is not only a golden professional opportunity; these days, we are not adult humans until we have faced ourselves in deep space.”
“Nuh ah, Mihaly, I know your reputation, and on the techni you promised you would take me to the new play.
Oughtn’t we to be on our way?” She turned in her chair, away from him, so that he was forced to retreat. With as good a grace as he could muster, he suggested that they might walk, as the theatre was only just round the corner and it was impossible, in this war year, to catch taxis after dark.
“I’ll go and put a new face on and prepare myself for the street,” she said, retreating into the little toileteer that most expensive flats boasted these days. Secure behind the locked door, she surveyed her face in a mirror. She saw, not without satisfaction, that a slight flush spread over her cheeks. It was not the first time that Mihaly had tried something of this sort; she was not going to yield while it was well known that he had an Oriental mistress; because she was away on holiday at present was no reason to accept the post of substitute.
Men led enviable lives. They could pursue whims more easily than women. But here she had a chance to pursue something stronger than a whim: the desire to see distant planets. That that fascinating man Lattimore, Bryant Lattimore, would be on the Gansas too was an incidental, but one that made the prospect more exciting.