Captain Wark sat up slowly and a light began to gleam in his eyes.
But the Chief said, “Odds?”
“Galton,” Fers went on, “is the guy who started it all on a serious criminalistic level. Sir Francis Galton, English anthropologist. It’s all in your office; I looked it up again while you were disposing of our print-twins. Quite a character, this Galton; practically founded meteorology and eugenics too. And he figured that the odds on any two fingerprints coinciding on all the points we used in classification was one in sixty-four billion. For his time this was fine; it was just about the same, for practical police work, as saying one in infinity. But what’s the population of the system now?”
“The whole system?” The Chief’s eyes were boggling. “Damned near—seventy billion!”
“So by now,” the Captain exclaimed, “it just about had to happen sooner or later!”
“Exactly,” said Fers. “From now on a single print is not identification. It’s strong presumptive evidence, but that’s all. And it’ll usually be enough. Just remember never to feed the defense ammunition by trying to claim that an odds-on chance is an unshakable fact. And you’ve still got the best possible personal identification in two or more prints. You noticed that all the other fingers on those two men were completely different. Chances on two prints coinciding are about one in forty quadrillion, which is good enough for us. For a while. And we don’t have words for the chances on all ten matching up. That works out to the sixtieth power of two times the eightieth power of ten—if you want to see what it looks like, put down a one and write ninety-eight zeroes after it.”
Captain Wark looked like himself again. Happily he raised his beer mug in a toast. “I propose we drink to the identification man of the future Inter-Galactic Empire,” he proclaimed, “who first discovers two sets of ten matching prints!”
Secret of the House
Of course no one realized in advance what would be, ounce for ounce, the most valuable return cargo of the Earth-Venus spaceships, even though the answer should have been obvious to anyone with the faintest knowledge of historical patterns.
Rare metals? With the cost of fuel to lift them out of Venus’ almost-Earth gravity making them even costlier than on Earth itself? No, the answer was the obvious but overlooked one: What did Marco Polo bring back from China and Vasco da Gama from India? Why was Columbus seeking a new route to the Indies?
In one word: spices.
Man’s palate needs occasional rejuvenation. One of the main purposes of exploration, intercontinental or interplanetary, is the restimulation of jaded taste buds. And in addition to the new spices there were new methods of cooking, such as that wonderful native Venusian quick passing through live steam, which gave the startling effect of sizzling hot crisp rawness; or balj, that strange native dish which was a little like a curry and a little like a bouillabaisse, but richer and more subtle than either. There was sokalj, or Venusian swamphog, the most delicately delicious meat on three planets—not that anything Martian would ever be considered by the true gourmet . . .
This was the speech that Kathy listened to regularly once a week for the first year of her marriage. For she had married not only a prominent and successful man, she soon realized, but one who had been bitten at a susceptible age by the word gourmet.
It was fun while they were courting. It was fun, anyway, for a video network receptionist to be taken to good restaurants by the top interplanetary commentator. It was especially fun to watch him go through the masculine production number of conferring with the headwaiter, sending his compliments (and instructions) to the chef, and exchanging views with the sommelier, as Kathy quickly learned to call the-man-with-the-wine. Wine did not ship well interplanetarily; acceleration over one g, in the term of the cognoscenti, “bruised” it. In this domain, the French still reigned supreme, and stressed their superiority to mask their natural jealousy of the upstart Venusian colonists.
In every American city—with a few exceptions in New Orleans and San Francisco—former “French” restaurants had become “Venusian” and even in Paris cuisine venerienne marked some of the most highly esteemed establishments.
But the entertainment value of a gourmet exhibitionist decreased as courtship progressed logically into marriage, and being wined and dined gave place to the daily problem of feeding the man. Quick freezing had, of course, made the bride’s problems simple compared to those of earlier centuries. But George, completely in character, insisted on a high percentage of personally prepared meals—and was shrewd enough to spot any substitute makeshifts via the deep freeze and the electronic oven.
Not even the apartment on the very top level of Manhattan, where you could still see the Hudson, not even the charge accounts at shops she’d never dared enter, not even the wondrous fact that she loved George with an intensity which she had always considered just an unlikely convention of the women’s minimags—none of these could quite reconcile Kathy to life with a man who could down three bowls of your best hand-made oyster stew without interrupting his speech on the glories of authentic balj a la Venusberg, who could devour enough of a prime rib roast to throw the whole week’s budget out of joint while expatiating on the absurdity of the legend that Earth cooks in general, and the Anglo-Saxons in particular, did at least understand beef.
Kathy toyed with the idea of hiring a cook, not so much to satisfy George as to divert his inevitable reproaches to someone else. But aside from the fact
