“How do I know?” Tracy said impatiently. “That just came from the top of my head. But suppose.”
Betty said, “You ask the strangest questions.” She too had finished her meal.
Stein said, “Why, of course. Why not?”
“Well, suppose you got hooked on it yourself and also spread the stuff around so that Betty, here, and Edmonds also got hooked?”
“You mean addicted?”
“Yes, I mean addicted.”
“Then I imagine as soon as we had finished our investigations into opium addiction, we would consult the Medical Guild for a cure.”
“Cure, eh?” Tracy said. “But suppose it was one of the really hard drugs, like heroin?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Truly dangerous drugs. There are no drugs anymore, Tracy, that do not submit to cure. If one becomes addicted to a narcotic—and some have been developed artificially, much worse than the heroin of your day—he can be cured overnight. One aspect of the matters which the Medical Guild insists upon is a future, ah, allergy to the narcotic involved. That is, from the period when you became addicted and were then cured you can no longer take the drug again. That is, you could not become addicted again. Both your psyche and your physical body would reject it.” He added, frowning, “There has been considerable debate upon this infringement upon your personal prerogative.”
“Jesus Christ, I don’t know how we get off on these sidetracks every time I start asking questions. We’ve gone from cooking to drug addiction by way of how to run an underground in the year 45 New Calendar. Getting back to this working on your own if the computers don’t select you. Suppose you make a big breakthrough in some field. Some really offbeat thing like how to cure cancer.”
“Oh, cancer was eliminated almost seventy-five years ago,” the academician said.
“All right, all right. I was just using it as an example. What happens if you hit on something really worthwhile?”
“Then it’s put into the data banks and from then on the race utilizes it.”
“And how do the damn computers feel about that, after turning you down as someone who should have had a job?”
The other shrugged. “I would imagine that in the future they might well consider using my abilities in that particular field.”
Tracy said, half-disgustedly, “I don’t seem to be getting anywhere in understanding this century and I don’t think I will be getting anywhere until I fill in more background. I think I’ll go on back to my Interlingua. Sometimes I get the feeling you people aren’t getting through to me because you’re using a language that is awkward to you. A hell of a lot of what you say doesn’t make any sense at all. At least it doesn’t to me.”
Stein looked distressed. “I am sorry, Tracy. But you must realize almost a century spans our eras. How would you like to be in the position of discussing the science of your period, for instance, with an averagely well educated man of the 1850s, back even before the Civil War? As I recall, the telegraph was just coming in and the fastest and most efficient means of transportation was the wood-burning steam locomotive. In your day, man was already beginning to reach into space was he not?”
“The Russians had launched the Sputnik,” Tracy said. “Which reminds me of something. One of you said the other day that you had observatories and so forth on the moon. That Sputnik just went around and around in orbit going beep-beep. What’s happened in the past century?”
Stein said, “Well, very briefly, the United States launched a program to get a man onto the moon in a decade. Supposedly, it was a race with the Russians. Evidently, the Russians didn’t know about the race, or didn’t care. They continued their own space program at a slower, less expensive pace. Initially, they made the greatest progress. They put the first earth-born animal into space, a dog. They put the first man up, and later the first woman. They were the first to put more than one person at a time into orbit and made the first space walk. But then American technology, backed with billions upon billions of dollars, forged ahead and before 1970 they had landed the first crewed spaceship on Luna.”
Tracy was fascinated. “And then what happened?”
The other tried to remember details. “Why, they brought back some rocks and things after making various observations. And afterward there were several other moon trips. And they sent up a, uh, sky lab, I think they called it, manned by three men at a time and did some more serious observations; and there was even some cooperation with the Russians after a time but people were already losing interest.”
“Losing interest!” Tracy blurted in surprise. “In a thing like that?”
Stein answered. “Once again, I must remind you that my thinking in terms of your times is as though you were thinking in terms of the nineteenth century, before the American Civil War. But the thing is that the United States was spending too much, so far as finances and resources were concerned. They had become imbroiled in a ridiculous war in Indochina and remained in it for too long, supposedly in an effort to contain communism. Tens of billions of dollars were expended shoring up a corrupt, reactionary government.”
“That mess was already beginning in my time,” Tracy said.
“Yes, well, at the same time the arms race with the Soviet Union was taking place, and America was plowing the better part of a hundred billion a year into that. With the space program also consuming its billions, the economy began to falter. At any rate, to get back to the point, the people began to lose interest in space in view of more immediate problems.”
“But how do things stand now?”
“For all practical purposes, they’ve dragged to a halt,” Betty said in disgust. “To put it in the idiom of your time, nobody gives a damn.”
Tracy protested, “But you said there were some observatories on the moon.”
“Ummm. Automated. Radio Interferometers. In other words, radio telescopes,” she said. “We also have various communications satellites, all automated. But nobody has gone up into space since I was a child.”
Stein said, “Twenty years ago they built a spaceship to send a man out to Jupiter and orbit it. They had sent unmanned probes out to the various other planets long before, but this was to be manned.”
“And what happened?” Tracy said.
“They couldn’t find anyone who would go. The risks were rather high and even with nuclear propulsion the trip would have been a long one.”
“Nobody to go?” Tracy said blankly.
“That is correct,” the academician nodded. “We keep telling you, Tracy, that the human race is turning to mush. Gone are the days when a Hillary would climb Mount Everest. Gone are the days when a Thor Heyerdahl and his crew of adventurers would cross the Pacific on a balsa raft, or the Atlantic in a papyrus boat, just to see if it could be done. These days people get their second-hand thrills watching make-believe on the tri-di television or dreaming of exciting things. So, for twenty years the spaceship has sat.”
Tracy took a deep breath. “Some Utopia,” he said.
“Yes,” Stein said, nodding again. “You are beginning to comprehend why we brought you to this era, Tracy.”
“Like hell I am,” Tracy said, coming to his feet. “These are your problems. Solve them. For me, thus far I largely like what I see, even though I don’t understand much of it. And now I’m going back to take another crack at Interlingua.”
Chapter Five
Tracy Cogswell was a plugger. He always had been. Since his teens he had driven himself. The nearest thing he could remember to a vacation was the three years he had spent in the Stalag, near Krems, on the Danube river in Austria: three years in a Nazi concentration camp. But even there he had read assiduously and attended the classes that the other prisoners had taught. He had even studied art, drawing away with more elan than talent.
Now he was plugging at learning Interlingua. He stuck to it until summoned for dinner.
Jo Edmonds had returned from Gibraltar but said nothing about the results of his trip.
