“You’re not a real astronomer,” he told me.
I shrugged. I couldn’t deny it.
“Still,” he grumbled, “I’d better get some kind of a spot for the late news. All right. Sit over there, and try to sound as if you know what you’re talking about.” Then he began telling the technical crew what to do.
That was a strange thing. I’d already noticed that the technicians wore citizens’ gold. The interviewer didn’t. But he was the one who was giving them orders.
I didn’t approve of that at all. I don’t like big commercial outfits that put slaves in positions of authority over free citizens. It’s a bad practice. Jobs like tutors, college professors, doctors, and so on are fine; slaves can do them as well as a citizen, and usually a lot cheaper. But there’s a moral issue involved here. A slave must have a master. Otherwise, how can you call him a slave? And when you let the slave be the master, even in something as trivial as a broadcasting studio, you strike at the foundations of society.
The other thing is that it isn’t fair competition. There are free citizens who need those jobs. We had some of that in my own line of work a few years ago. There were two or three slave authors turning out adventure novels, but the rest of us got together and put a stop to it — especially after Marcus bought one of them to use as a sub-editor. Not one citizen writer would work with her. Mark finally had to put her into the publicity department, where she couldn’t do any harm.
So I started the interview with a chip on my shoulder, and his first question made it worse. He plunged right in. “When you’re pounding out those sci-roms of yours, do you make any effort to keep in touch with scientific reality? Do you know, for instance, that the Olympians have stopped transmitting?”
I scowled at him, regardless of the cameras. “Science-adventure romances are about scientific reality. And the Olympians haven’t ‘stopped’ as you put it. There’s just been a technical hitch of some kind, probably caused by radio interference from our own sun. As I said in my earlier romance, The Radio Gods, electromagnetic impulses are susceptible to—”
He cut me off. “It’s been—” he glanced at his watch — ”twenty-nine hours since they stopped. That doesn’t sound like just a technical hitch.”
“Of course it is. There’s no reason for them to stop. We’ve already demonstrated to them that we’re truly civilized, first because we’re technological, second because we don’t fight wars any more — that was cleared up in the first year. As I said in my roman, The Radio Gods—”
He gave me a pained look, then turned and winked into the camera. “You can’t keep a hack from plugging his books, can you?” he remarked humorously. “But it looks like he doesn’t want to use that wild imagination unless he gets paid for it. All I’m asking him for is a guess at why the Olympians don’t want to talk to us any more, and all he gives me is commercials.”
As though there were any other reason to do interviews! “Look here,” I said sharply, “if you can’t be courteous when you speak to a citizen, I’m not prepared to go on with this conversation at all.”
“So be it, pal,” he said, icy cold. He turned to the technical crew. “Stop the cameras,” he ordered. “We’re going back to the studio. This is a waste of time.” We parted on terms of mutual dislike, and once again I had done something that my editor would have been glad to kill me for.
That night at dinner, Sam was no comfort. “He’s an unpleasant man, sure,” he told me. “But the trouble is, I’m afraid he’s right.”
“They’ve really stopped?”
Sam shrugged. “We’re not in line with the sun any more, so that’s definitely not the reason. Damn. I was hoping it would be.”
“I’m sorry about that, Uncle Sam,” Rachel said gently. She was wearing a simple white robe, Hannish silk by the look of it, with no decorations at all. It really looked good on her. I didn’t think there was anything under it except for some very well-formed female flesh.
“I’m sorry, too,” he grumbled. His concerns didn’t affect his appetite, though. He was ladling in the first course — a sort of chicken soup, with bits of a kind of pastry floating in it — and, for that matter, so was I. Whatever Rachel’s faults might be, she had a good cook. It was plain home cooking, none of your partridge-in-a-rabbit-inside-a-boar kind of thing, but well prepared and expertly served by her butler, Basilius. “Anyway,” Sam said, mopping up the last of the broth, “I’ve figured it out.”
“Why the Olympians stopped?” I asked, to encourage him to go on with the revelation.
“No, no! I mean about your romance, Julie. My alternate world idea. If you don’t want to write about a different future, how about a different now?”
I didn’t get a chance to ask him about what he was talking about, because Rachel beat me to it. “There’s only one now, Sam, dear,” she pointed out. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Sam groaned. “Not you, too, honey,” he complained. “I’m talking about a new kind of sci-rom.”
“I don’t read many sci-roms,” she apologized, in the tone that isn’t an apology at all.
He ignored that. “You’re a historian, aren’t you?” She didn’t bother to confirm it; obviously, it was the thing she was that shaped her life. “So what if history had gone a different way?”
He beamed at us as happily as though he had said something that made sense. Neither of us beamed back. Rachel pointed out the flaw in his remark. “It didn’t, though,” she told him.
“I said suppose! This isn’t the only possible now, it’s just the one that happened to occur! There could have been a million different ones. Look at all the events in the past that could have gone a different way. Suppose Annius Publius hadn’t discovered the Western Continents in City Year 1820. Suppose Caesar Publius Terminus hadn’t decreed the development of a space program in 2122. Don’t you see what I’m driving at? What kind of a world would we be living in now if those things hadn’t happened?”
Rachel opened her mouth to speak, but she was saved by the butler. He appeared in the doorway with a look of silent appeal. When she excused herself to see what was needed in the kitchen, that left it up to me. “I never wrote anything like that, Sam,” I told him. “I don’t know anybody else who did, either.”
“That’s exactly what I’m driving at! It would be something completely new in sci-roms. Don’t you want to pioneer a whole new kind of story?”
Out of the wisdom of experience, I told him, “Pioneers don’t make any money, Sam.” He scowled at me. “You could write it yourself,” I suggested.
That just changed the annoyance to gloom. “I wish I could. But until this business with the Olympians is cleared up, I’m not going to have much time for sci-roms. No, it’s up to you, Julie.”
Then Rachel came back in, looking pleased with herself, followed by Basilius bearing a huge silver platter containing the main course.
Sam cheered up at once. So did I. The main dish was a whole roasted baby kid, and I realized that the reason Rachel had been called into the kitchen was so that she could weave a garland of flowers around its tiny baby horn buds herself. The maid servant followed with a pitcher of wine, replenishing all our goblets. All in all, we were busy enough eating to stop any conversation but compliments on the food.