atop the administration building. He rubbed his hands together and smiled almost tenderly at me, and I would not have been surprised if the round, soft brownness of his eyes had begun to melt and run down his cheeks, leaving chocolate stains.
'You had a pleasant trip?' he asked. 'Captain Anderson made you comfortable?'
I nodded. 'As comfortable as possible. I am grateful, of course. I did not have the money to buy passage on a Pilgrim ship.'
'You must not think of gratitude,' he insisted gently. 'It is we who should be glad. There are few persons of the arts who evince an interest in this Mother Earth of ours.'
In his nice, slick way he was laying it on just a trifle thick, for over the years there had been many, as he called them, persons of the arts who had paid attention to the Earth, and in every case under the very polished and maternal auspices of Mother Earth itself. Even if one had not known of the patronage, it could have been suspected. Most of their work read, looked, or sounded like something a highly paid press relations outfit would have fabricated to advertise the Cemetery.
'It is pleasant here,' I said, more to be making conversation than for any other reason.
I didn't know that I was asking for it, but I was. He settled down comfortably in his chair, like a brooding hen ruffling out her feathers over a clutch of eggs.
'You heard the pines, of course,' he said. 'There's a song to them. Even from up here, when a window happens to be open, you can hear them singing. Even after thirty years of hearing them, I listen by the hour. It is the song of an eternal peace that can be achieved in its totality nowhere else but Earth. At times it seems to me that it is not the song of pines and wind alone, nor yet alone the sound of Earth. Rather, it is the song of scattered Man gathered home at last.'
'I hadn't heard all that,' I said. 'Perhaps in time I may. After I have listened a little longer. That is what I'm here for.'
I might just as well have kept quiet. He wasn't even listening. He didn't want to listen. He had his piece to speak, his snow-job to be done, and he was intent on that and nothing else.
'For more than thirty years,' he said, 'I have bent every thinking moment to the great ideals of the Last Homecoming. It is not a job that can be accepted lightly. There have been many men before me, many other managers sitting in this chair, very many of them, and every one of them a man of honor and of sensitivity. It has been my job to carry on their work, but not their work alone. I must, as well, uphold the great traditions that have been fostered through the entire history of this Mother Earth.'
He slumped back in his chair and his brown eyes became softer, if possible, and slightly watery.
'At times,' he told me, 'it is no easy matter. There are so many circumstances against which a man must need contend. There are the insinuations and the whispered rumors and the charges that are hinted, but never brought out in the open so that one might cope with them. I suppose that you have heard them.'
'Some of them,' I said.
'And believed them?'
'Some of them,' I said.
'Let's not beat about the bush,' he said a little gruffly. ''Leave us lay it out. Let us say immediately that Mother Earth, Incorporated, is a cemetery association and Earth a cemetery. But it is not a money-making fraud nor a pious imposition nor a high-pressure sales promotion scheme to retail at tremendous profit large pieces of worthless real estate. Naturally, we operate along accepted business lines. It is the only way to do. It is the only way we can offer our services to the human galaxy. All this calls for an organization that is vaster than one can easily imagine. Because it is so vast, it is necessarily loose. There is no such thing as maintaining tight control over the entire operation. There always exists the chance that we, here in administration, are unaware of a lot of actions we would not willingly condone.
'We employ a large corps of public relations specialists to promote our enterprise. We necessarily must advertise to the far corners of the areas peopled by humanity. We cheerfully concede that we have sales representatives on all planets occupied by humans. But all of this can be considered as no more than normal business practice. And you must consider this-that in pushing our business so forcefully we are conferring a great benefit upon the human race on at least two levels.'
'Two levels,' I said, astonished-astonished by the man rather than by his flow of words. 'I had thought..'
'The personal level,' he said. 'That was the one you thought of. And it, of course, is the prime consideration. Believe me, there is a world of comfort in knowing that one's loved ones have been committed, once life is done, to the sacred keeping of the soil of Mother Earth. There is a deep satisfaction in knowing that one's self, when the time shall finally come, also will be laid to rest amid the hills of this lovely planet where mankind first arose.'
I stirred uneasily in my chair. I was ashamed for him. He made me uncomfortable and I resented him as well. He must, I thought, consider me an utter fool if he thought that this flow of flowery, syrupy words would lay at rest any doubts I might have of Mother Earth, Inc., and convert me to Cemetery.
'Aside from this,' he said, 'there is a second level, perhaps of even greater service. We in Mother Earth, I earnestly believe, serve as a sort of glue that holds the concept of the race intact. Without the concept of Mother Earth, Man would have become a footless wanderer. He'd have lost his racial roots. There would have been nothing to tie him to this comparatively tiny speck of matter revolving about a very common star. No matter how slim the cord may be, it seems to me essential that there be something to bind Man together, some consideration that gives all men a certain thing in common. To serve in this wise, what could be better than a sense of personal association with the planet of their racial origin.'
He hesitated for a moment and sat there staring at me. He may have expected some response after his fluent exposition of such noble thoughts. If so, I disappointed him.
'So Earth is a vast galactic cemetery,' he went on after it became apparent I was not going to respond. 'One must understand, however, it is something more than a common burial ground. It is, as well, a memorial and a memory and a tie that makes all mankind one, no matter where the individual man may be. Without our work, Earth long ago would have died from the memory of Man. It is not inconceivable that under other circumstances the star where Man arose might have become by now a matter of great academic concern and pointless argument, with expeditions blindly groping for some shadowy evidence that would help pin down that solar system where mankind got its start.'
He tipped forward in his chair and put his elbows on his desk.
'I bore you, Mr. Carson?'
'Not at all,' I told him. And it was the truth. He was not boring me. He fascinated me. It seemed impossible that he could, in conscience, believe this flowery rubbish.
'Mr. Carson,' he said. 'But the first name? The first name now escapes me.'
'Fletcher,' I said.
'Oh, yes, Fletcher Carson. And you, of course, have heard the stories. About how we overcharge, how we fool the people and high-pressure them, and how…'
'Some of the stories,' I admitted, 'have come to my attention.'
'And you thought they might be true.'
'Mr. Bell,' I said, 'I do not see the point-'
He cut me off. 'There have been certain excesses on the part of some of our representatives,' he said. 'It may be that at times the enthusiasm of our copywriters may have given rise to advertisements that were somewhat more flamboyant than would be dictated by good taste. But by and large we have made an honest effort to maintain an essential dignity in keeping with the responsibility that has been placed upon our shoulders.
'Every Pilgrim who has visited Mother Earth will testify that there is nothing more beautiful than the developed portions of our project. The grounds are landscaped, in the most tasteful manner, with evergreen and yew, the grass is tended with a loving care and the floral beds are the most exquisite… but, Mr. Carson, you have seen all this.'
'A glimpse of it,' I said.
'To illustrate the.kind of trouble we must face,' he told me in what seemed a sudden rush of confidence, as if somehow I had betrayed some sympathy, 'a salesman of ours in a far sector of the galaxy caused to circulate, several years ago, a rumor that Mother Earth was running out of room and would soon be full and that those families who wished to have their dead interred here would be well advised to immediately reserve those few remaining lots that were still available.'
