Lars said, "I do not object to a monopoly of knowledge by one small class. It doesn't upset me, that there are a few cogs and a lot of pursaps. Every society is really run by an elite."
"So what's the trouble, darling dear?"
"What bothers me," Lars said as the up-elevator came and he and Maren entered it, "is that the elite, in this case, doesn't even bother to guard that knowledge which makes it the elite." There is, he thought, probably a free pamphlet, distributed by UN-West for the asking, filled something like, HOW WE RULE YOU FELLAS AND WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
"You're in authority," Maren reminded him.
Glancing at her he said, "You do keep that telepathic brain-add turned on. Despite Behren's Ordinance."
Maren said, "It cost me fifty mil to get it installed. You think I'm going to set it to the off position, really? Look how it earns its keep. It tells me if you're faithful or off in some conapt with—"
"Read my subconscious, then."
"I have been. Anyhow, why? Who wants to know where you keep the nasty things you don't want to know—"
"Read it anyhow! Read the prognosticating aspects. What I'm going to do, the potential actions still in germinal form."
Maren shook her head. "Such big words and such little ideas."
She giggled at his response. The ship, now on auto-auto, had reached a height above the commute-layer, was on its way out of town. He had reflexively instructed it to vacate Paris... God knew why.
"I'll analyze you, dear duck," she said. "It's really touching, what you're thinking over and over again deep down there in that substandard mind of yours—substandard if you don't count that knob on the frontal lobe that makes you a medium."
He waited to hear only the truth.
Maren said, "Over and over again that little inner voice is squeaking, Why must the pursaps believe what isn't so? Why can't they be told, and being told, accept?" Her tone was compassionate, now. For her, quite unusually so. "You just can't grasp the incredible truth. They can't."
7
After dinner they made for Maren's Paris apartment. He prowled about in the living room, waiting while Maren changed, as Jean Harlow once remarked in an ancient but still potent flick, "into something more comfortable."
Then he happened onto a device resting on a low imitation tarslewood table. It was vaguely familiar and he picked it up, handled it with curiosity. Familiar and yet utterly strange.
The bedroom door was partly open. "What's this?" he called. He could see her dim, underwear-clad form as she traveled back and forth between the bed and closet. "This thing that looks like a human head with no features. The size of a baseball."
Maren called back cheerfully. "That's from 202."
"My sketch?" He stared at the object. Plowshared. This was the product for the retail market derived from the decision of one concomody on the Board. "What's it do?" he asked, finding no switches.
"It amuses."
"How?"
Maren appeared in the doorway briefly, wearing nothing. "Say something to it."
Glancing at her, Lars said, "I'm more amused just looking at you. There's about three pounds you've put on.
"Ask," Maren said, "the Orville a question. Ol' Orville is the rage. People cloister themselves for days with it, doing nothing but asking and getting answers. It replaces religion."
"There is no religion," he said, feeling serious. His experiences with the hyper-dimensional realm had disabused him of any dogmatic or devotional faith. If anyone living was qualified to claim knowledge of the "next world" it was he, and as yet he had discovered no transcendent aspect to it.
Maren said, "Then tell it a joke."
"Can't I just put it back where I found it?"
"You really don't care how they plowshare your items."
"No, that's their business." However, he tried to think of a joke. "What has six eyes," he said, "is headed for entropy, wears a derby hat—"
"Can't you ask it a serious joke?" Maren said. She returned to the bedroom, resumed dressing. "Lars, you're polymorphic perverse."
"Um," he said.
"In the bad sense. The instinct for self-destruction."
"Better that," he answered, "than the instinct to murder." Maybe he could ask Ol' Orville that question. He said to the hard, small sphere in his hand. "Am I making a mistake by feeling sorry for myself? By fighting city hall? By talking with a Soviet official during my coffee break?" He waited; nothing occurred. "By believing," he said, "that it is time that those who claim to be making machines to kill and maim and lay waste ought to have the ethical integrity to really make machines that kill and maim and lay waste instead of machines that constitute an elaborate pretext to finally bring forth a nonentity, a decadent novelty, such as yourself?" Again he waited, but Ol' Orville remained silent.
"It's broken," he called to Maren.
"Give it a second. It's got fourteen thousand minned parts in it; they have to function in sequence."
"You mean the entire guidance system from 202?"
He stared at Ol' Orville with horror. Yes, of course; this sphere was precisely the size and shape of the guidance system of 202. He began thinking of the possibilities. It could solve problems, fed to it orally, rather than on punched or iron oxide tape, to a magnitude of sixty constituents. No wonder it was taking its time to answer him. He had activated a prize assembly.
Probably in no sketch would he exceed this. And now here it was, Ol' Orville, a novelty to fill the vacant time and brains of men and women whose jobs had degenerated into repetitious psychomotor activity on a level that a trained pigeon could better perform. God! His worst expectations were fulfilled!
Lars P., he thought, remembering Kafka's stories and novels, woke up one morning to discover that somehow overnight he had been transformed into a gigantic—what? Cockroach?
"What am I?" he asked Ol' Orville. "Forget my previous queries; just answer that! What have I become?" He squeezed the sphere angrily.
Now dressed in blue-cotton Chinese pajama bottoms, Maren stood at the door of her bedroom observing him as he fought it out with Ol' Orville. "Lars P. woke up one morning to discover that somehow overnight he had been transformed into a—" She broke off, because in the corner of the living room the TV set had said pingggggg. It was turning itself on. A news bulletin was about to be read.
Forgetting Ol' Orville, Lars and she turned to face the TV set. He felt his pulse speed up. News bulletins were almost always bad news.
The TV screen showed a fixed still reading NEWS BULLETIN. The announcer's voice sounded professionally calm: "NASBA, the Wes-bloc space agency at Cheyenne, Wyoming, announced today that a new satellite, presumably launched by Peoples' China or Freedom For Mankind Cuba, is in orbit at an—"
Maren turned the set off. "Some news bulletin."
"The day I'm waiting for," Lars said, "is when a satellite already up launches its own satellite by itself."
"They do that now. Don't you read the 'papes? Don't you read Scientific American? Don't you know anything?" Her scorn was semi-serious, semi-not. "You're an idiot savant, like those cretins who memorize license plates or all the vidphone numbers in the Los Angeles area or the zip-codes for every population center in North America." She returned to the bedroom for the top to her pajamas.
In Lars' hand, forgotten, Ol' Orville stirred and spoke.
It was uncanny; he blinked as its telepathic verbal response croaked at him, its answer to a question he had already forgotten asking. "Mr. Lars."
"Yes," he said, hypnotized.
Ol' Orville creakily unwound its long-labored-for results. Toy though it was, Ol' Orville was not facile. Too many components had gone into its make-up for it to be merely glib. "Mr. Lars, you have posed an ontological query. The Indo-European linguistic structure involved defeats a fair analysis; would you rephrase your question?"