“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Why, don’t you read the papers?”
“Occasionally. What’s this sad business with little Cashel?”
“Why, the fortune he made with his publishing empire and his television programs and all. But that’s the way of it—the bigger they are the harder they fall, and what with the taxes and the overheads it’s a case of rob Peter to pay Paul. And there’s many’s the big shot that, if he was called on to lay down all his cards this very minute, it would be seen that all was paper and credit. It’s always a little playing for time here and a bank renewal there. Poor Mr. Cashel, I served him at this very bar more than once. And to jump out of a thirtieth-story window! A man must be desperate indeed to do such a terrible thing!”
“When was this?” I asked.
“This very morning. He was down by twenty million, and an inquiry pending. But if they had not pushed him to the wall, the Madison Avenue and the Wall Street men, why, given another three months he’d have doubled the money and nobody would have been the wiser or the worse.”
“Thirty dollars would have got the cheapskate six months more,” I said. “But I never heard anything of Cashel’s publishing empire and television programs and whatnot.”
Lonergan said, “I don’t get the gag.”
“Never mind. Since when was Cashel a magnate, for heaven’s sake?”
Lonergan stared at me. “Why,” he said, “everybody in this whole world knew about Mourne Cashel. Where on God’s earth have you been these past two years, Mr. Noxon?”
Throughout these notes, I have placed much emphasis on matters of definition. Time, as a coordinate of space, has been defined with some degree of precision, mathematically, but time, as we ordinarily use the word, a subjective measurement of awareness, is even more difficult to pin down than, for instance, subjective or awareness.
In the Playboy symposium, William Tenn mentioned “intelligence of some sort” as a prerequisite for civilization, and added that the factor we were most likely to share with an alien civilization would be “imagination, the essential ingredient of our culture.”
All right. But what is imagination? What is the relationship between intelligence and imagination? What is intelligence?
And these are all “easy” words; we can usually understand each other when we use them in ordinary conversation, even without clear definitions. But what about intuition, neurotic, creative, secure, art?
Or how about curiosity, wonder, humor, communication? Writers and philosophers have repeatedly pointed to one or another of these qualities as setting mankind apart from other Earth animals. But what— exactly—do we mean when we say them?
The search for practical, working definitions is going on in many fields of sociological and psychological study today. A new kind of science is being born in the process.
When we understand, in the way that we now understand the word atmosphere (composition, behavior, etc.), what we mean by subjectivity, we will be able to make the same allowance for it, in our study of “humanics,” that the spectrographer now can make for the content of Earth’s atmosphere.
We may then come to a further, understanding of the true and complete potential of the (subjective) human mind.
DRUNKBOAT
Cordwainer Smith
Perhaps it is the saddest, maddest, wildest story in the whole long history of space. It is true that no one else had ever done anything like it before, to travel at such a distance, and at such speeds, and by such means. The hero looked like such an ordinary man - when people looked at him for the first time. The second time, ah! that was different.
And the heroine. Small she was, and ash-blonde, intelligent, perky, and hurt. Hurt - yes, that’s the right word. She looked as though she needed comforting or helping, even when she was perfectly all right. Men felt more like men when she was near. Her name was Elizabeth.
Who would have thought that her name would ring loud and clear in the wild vomiting nothing which made up space,?
He took an old, old rocket, of an ancient design. With it he outflew, outfled, outjumped all the machines which had ever existed before. You might almost think that he went so fast that he shocked the great vaults of the sky, so that the ancient poem might have been written for him alone. “All the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears.”
Go he did, so fast, so far that people simply did not believe it at first. They thought it was a joke told by men, a farce spun forth by rumor, a wild story to while away the summer afternoon.
We know his name now.
And our children and their children will know it for always.
Rambo. Artyr Rambo of Earth Four.
But he followed his Elizabeth where no space was. He went where men could not go, had not been, did not dare, would not think.
He did all this of his own free will.
Of course people thought it was a joke at first, and got to making up silly-songs about the reported trip.
“Dig me a hole for that reeling feeling… !” sang one.
“Push me the call for the umber number… !” sang another.
“Where is the ship of the ochre joker… ?” sang a third.
Then people everywhere found it was true. Some stood stock still and got gooseflesh. Others turned quickly to everyday things. Space3 had been found, and it had been pierced. Their world would never be the same again. The solid rock had become an open door.
Space itself, so clean, so empty, so tidy, now looked like a million million light-years of tapioca pudding - gummy, mushy, sticky, not fit to breathe, not fit to swim in.
How did it happen?
Everybody took the credit, each in his own different way.
“He came for me,” said Elizabeth. “I died and he came for me because the machines were making a mess of my life when they tried to heal my terrible, useless death.”
“I went myself,” said Rambo. “They tricked me and lied to me and fooled me, but I took the boat and I became the boat and I got there. Nobody made me do it. I was angry, but I went. And I came back, didn’t I?”
He too was right, even when he twisted and whined on the green grass of earth, his ship lost in a space so terribly far and strange that it might have been beneath his living hand, or might have been half a galaxy away.
How can anybody tell, with space3?
It was Rambo who got back, looking for his Elizabeth. He loved her. So the trip was his, and the credit his.
But the Lord Crudelta said, many years later, when he spoke in a soft voice and talked confidentially among friends, “The experiment was mine. I designed it, I picked Rambo. I drove the selectors mad, trying to find a man who would meet those specifications. And I had that rocket built to the old, old plans. It was the sort of thing which human beings first used when they jumped out of the air a little bit, leaping like flying fish from one wave to the next and already thinking that they were eagles. If I had used one of the regular planoform ships, it would have disappeared with a sort of reverse gurgle, leaving space milky for a little bit while it faded into nastiness and obliteration. But I did not risk that. I put the rocket on a launching pad. And the launching pad itself was an interstellar ship! Since we were using an ancient rocket, we did it up right, with the old, old writing, mysterious letters printed all over the machine. We even had the name of our Organization - I and O and M - for ‘the Instrumentality of Mankind’ written on it good and sharp.