I wasn’t as bad off as old Faust and his deal with the devil. My soul was still my own. But my body was community property—and I couldn’t, by God, so much as bite my own tongue without feeling like a bloody murderer—and being made to suffer for it, too.
Perhaps you don’t think biting your tongue is any great privilege to have to give up. Maybe not. But, no matter how you figure, you’ve got to admit the situation was—well—confining.
And it lasted for over nine years.
Nine miserable years of semi-slavery? Well, no. I couldn’t honestly say that it was that bad. There were all the restrictions and limitations, but also there was my perfect health; and what you might call a sort of a sense of inner well-being. Added to that, there was my sensationally successful career. And the money.
All at once, almost anything I undertook to do was sensationally successful. I wrote, in several different styles and fields and under a number of different names; I was terrific. My painting was the talk of the art world. “Superb,” said the critics. “An astonishing other-worldly quality.” How right they were—even if they didn’t know why. I patented a few little inventions, just for fun; and I invested. The money poured in so fast I couldn’t count it. I hired people to count it, and to help guide it through the tax loopholes—although there I was able to give them a few sneaky little ideas that even our sharpest tax lawyers hadn’t worked out.
Of course the catch in all that was that, actually, I was not so much a rich, brilliant, successful man. I was a booming, prosperous nation.
The satisfaction I could take in all my success was limited by my knowledge that it was a group effort. How could I help being successful? I had a very fair part of the resources of a society substantially ahead of our own working for me. As for knowledge of our world, they didn’t just know everything I did. They knew everything I ever had known—or seen, heard, read, dreamed or thought of. They could dig up anything, explore it, expand it and use it in ways I couldn’t have worked out in a thousand years. Sure, I was successful. I did stay out of sports—too dangerous; entertainment—didn’t lend itself too well to the group approach; and music—they had never developed or used sound, and we agreed not to go into it. As I figured it, music in the soul may be very beautiful; but a full- size symphony in a sinus I could do without.
So I had success. And there was another thing I had too. Company.
Privacy? No, I had less privacy than any man who ever lived, although I admit that my people, as long as I obeyed the rules, were never pushy or intrusive. They didn’t come barging into my thoughts unless I invited them. But they were always ready. And if those nine years were less than perfect, at least I was never lonesome. Success, with me, was not a lonely thing.
And there were women.
Yes, there were women. And finally, at the end of it, there was a woman—and that was it.
As they had explained it, they were prepared to be tolerant about my—ah—relations with women as long as I was “reasonable” in my selection. Come to find out, they were prepared to be not just tolerant but insistent—and very selective.
First there was Helga.
Helga was Uncle John’s secretary, a great big, healthy, rosy-cheeked, blonde Swedish girl, terrific if you liked the type. Me, I hadn’t ever made a move in her direction, partly because she was so close to Uncle John, but mostly because my tastes always ran to the smaller types. But tastes can be changed.
Ten days after that first conversation with my people I’d already cleared something like $50,000 in a few speculations in the commodity market. I was feeling a little moody in spite of it, and I decided to quit my job. So I went up that afternoon to Uncle John’s office to tell him.
Uncle John was out. Helga was in. There she was, five foot eleven of big, bouncy, blonde smorgasbord. Wow! Before, I’d seen Helga a hundred times, looked with mild admiration but not one real ripple inside. And now, all at once, wow! That was my people, of course, manipulating glands, thoughts, feelings. “Wow!” it was.
First things first. “Helga, Doll! Ah! Where’s Uncle John?”
“Johnny! That’s the first time you ever called me—hm-m—Mr. Barth has gone for the day… Johnny.”
She hadn’t even looked at me before. My—uh—government was growing more powerful. It was establishing outside spheres of influence. Of course, at the time, I didn’t take the trouble to analyze the situation; I just went to work on it.
As they say, it is nice work if you can get it.
I could get it.
It was a good thing Uncle John didn’t come bustling back after something he’d forgotten that afternoon.
I didn’t get around to quitting my job that afternoon. Later on that evening, I took her home. She wanted me to come in and meet her parents, yet! But I begged off that—and then she came up with a snapper. “But we will be married, Johnny darling. Won’t we? Real soon!”
“Uh,” I said, making a quick mental plane reservation for Rio, “sure, Doll. Sure we will.” I broke away right quick after that. There was a problem I wanted to get a little advice on.
What I did get, actually, was a nasty shock.
Back in my apartment—my big, new, plush apartment—I sat down to go over the thing with the Department of the Interior. The enthusiastic response I got surprised me. “Magnificent,” was the word. “Superb. Great!”
Well, I thought myself that I had turned in a pretty outstanding performance, but I hadn’t expected such applause. “It is a first step, a splendid beginning! A fully equipped, well-armed expedition will have the place settled, under cultivation and reasonably civilized inside of a day or two, your time. It will be simple for them. So much more so than in your case—since we now know precisely what to expect.”
I was truly shocked. I felt guilty. “No!” I said. “Oh, no! What a thing to do. You can’t!”
“Now, now. Gently,” they said. “What, after all, oh Fatherland, might be the perfectly natural consequences of your own act?”
“What? You mean under other—that is—”
“Exactly. You could very well have implanted a new life in her, which is all that we have done. Why should our doing so disturb you?”
Well, it did disturb me. But then, as they pointed out, they could have developed less pleasant methods of spreading colonies. They had merely decided that this approach would be the surest and simplest.
“Well, maybe,” I told them, “but it still seems kind of sneaky to me. Besides, if you’d left it to me, I’d certainly never have picked a great big ox like Helga. And now she says she’s going to marry me, too!”
“You do not wish this? We understand. Do not be concerned. We will—ah—send instructions to our people the next time. She will change her feelings about this.”
She dropped the marriage bit completely.
We had what you might call an idyllic association, in spite of her being such a big, husky model—a fact which never bothered me when I was with her. “She is happy,” I was assured, “very happy.” She seemed pleased and contented enough, even if she developed, I thought, a sort of an inward look about her. She and I never discussed our—uh—people. We had a fast whirl for a couple of weeks. And then I’d quit my job with Uncle John, and we sort of drifted apart.
Next thing I heard of her, she married Uncle John.
Well. I have my doubts about how faithful a wife she was to him, but certainly she seemed to make him happy. And my government assured me Uncle John was not colonized. “Too late,” they said. “He is too old to be worth the risk of settling.” But they respected my scruples about my uncle’s wife and direct communication with Helgaland was broken off.
But there were others.
IV
For the next nine years—things came easy for me. I suppose the restrictions, the lack of freedom should have made me a lot more dissatisfied than I was. I know, though they didn’t say so, that my people did a little manipulating of my moods by jiggering the glands and hormones or something. It must have been that with the women.
