Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (47 page)

Dodson left. The Ambassador sat back and stared at the ceiling—calmly. Then he got up and paced back and forth across the office—calmly. Then he went back to his desk, opened a heavy, gray-bound book, skimmed through a few pages in it and finally leaned forward, drumming his fingers on the polished desktop—calmly, very calmly.

His wrist communicator buzzed. He flipped it on.

"Your Excellency, this is the Secretary of State," said a formal, moistureless voice.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary," said the Ambassador, with equal formality. "What can I do for you?"

"Your Excellency, according to information just received by my office, a certain Henry Hancock Groppus has escaped from the jail cell in which he was awaiting execution and taken shelter in your Embassy. I must ask you if this is true."

"That is true, Mr. Secretary, except for one small detail. At the time he entered the Embassy, he was not being pursued by lawfully constituted authority, but by an unlawful and ungoverned mob."

The voice in the communicator coughed an extremely dry cough. "I cannot regard this detail as being relevant, Your Excellency. In the name of the government of the United States of America of 2119 AD—to which government you are accredited and whose laws you are bound to respect—I must ask you to surrender the person of Henry Hancock Groppus, convicted felon, to the justice of his country and his time."

"And I, Mr. Secretary," the Ambassador replied with equal dry urbanity, "as a representative and servant of United Earth of 2219 AD, must respectfully decline until I have had time to study the situation."

"In that case, Your Excellency, I regret to have to inform you of the extreme displeasure of my government and our determination to take whatever steps are necessary to secure the person of Henry Hancock Groppus."

"Noted, Mr. Secretary," said the Ambassador.

There was a silence. "May I speak to you on the private channel, Your Excellency?"

"You may, Mr. Secretary. One moment, please."

The Ambassador from 2219 AD pressed a button on his desk which locked his door and lit a
Do Not Disturb
indicator. Then he swung around and switched on the big screen behind his desk.

A heavy-set balding man appeared on it. "Hi, Don," he said. "This is one big stink we're in."

"I know, Cleve," the Ambassador sighed. "A bigamy case. Capital offense."

"Bigamy, hell! Polygamy, Don boy! That's what this joker's been convicted of,
polygamy
. Advocating, abetting and encompassing polygamy. You just don't go any lower."

"In your time, you mean. In 2119."

"In our time, yes. That's the time we're living in right now. The time that has to face the problem of one woman to every ten men because of the genetic imbalance created by the last world war. All right, so we haven't licked the Uterine Plague yet. We won't lick it for another fifty years, according to you, though you won't tell our medics how we finally will solve it."

The Ambassador gestured wearily at the screen. "You know as well as I, Cleve, there are things that Temporal Embassies can do and there are things they can't do."

"Okay. Good. No argument. You boys take your orders and have your problems. But we've got problems, too. Gigantic ones. We've got a social code that was designed in the days when there were equal numbers of men and women, and it's splitting at the seams everywhere. We've got to persuade hundreds of millions of normal men that it's right and proper for them to lead lives of the most maddening frustration if we want to keep civilization from dissolving into hand-to-hand battles. We've got them persuaded—about as well persuaded as a herd of rutting elephants. And along comes this Henry Groppus and his handful of crackpot Mendelists, making strange, sudden noises in the rear of the herd and—"

"Slow down, Cleve. Take a deep breath. I know the kind of problems your time is facing, perhaps better than you. I know it from the history I studied in school, and, since I've arrived here in 2119 as Ambassador from the Next Century, I've seen it sharp and bloodily clear, at first hand. I know what an explosive danger the Mendelist philosophy is. I couldn't be more sympathetic, I assure you.

"Nonetheless, Cleve, you're an important government official; you're not the man in the street. 2119 is grappling with the social effects of the Uterine Plague, and to 2119 it looks like the biggest thing that ever was. But 2119 is just a drop in the historical bucket. And so, for that matter," he added in all fairness, "is 2219, my own period. Be just to your position and your intellect; look at the thing in perspective."

The Secretary of State made a sluicing motion at the top of his bald head. "What perspective? How perspective?"

"Simply this, as an example. Take an Englishman of the upper middle class, a rich merchant, let us say. In the time of the Tudors, he'd be all for increasing the powers of the king, all for an absolute monarchy, all for a very strong central government—the things that would damage his superiors, the feudal nobility, the most. A century later, when the nobility had been pretty much reduced to so much court decoration, his great-great-grandson would be fighting the absolutism of the Stuarts tooth and nail, insisting that the people had a right to call their king to account and that any government which was dictatorial deserved to be overthrown.

"And a hundred years or so after that, under the Hanoverian George III,
his
great-great-grandson, looking across the channel to France, observing that the
very
common people there in the course of taking the same drastic action with
their
king had completely bollixed up industry, banking and commerce—he would be exclaiming his pious horror over regicides and calling for laws that would strengthen the government and keep revolutionaries in their place."

"The point being," said the Secretary of State, "that most social values are conditioned by the time, place and prevailing political climate. Is that what you mean by perspective?"

"Exactly," the Ambassador said.

The bald-headed man stared angrily out of the screen. "I wish I weren't so upset. It's my misfortune to forget every dirty word I know when I get really mad. And this calls for—Look, Don, I don't know very much about 2219, what's important, what's sacred, what's not to be touched. The rules of your outfit forbid you to give us a very clear picture of your time—and you're a close-mouthed character to begin with. But I'd give the goddam front lobe of my brain to see how you'd behave if some Henry Groppus of the twenty-third century did the future equivalent of polygamy in
your
neck of the woods.

"You'd perspective
him
, you would. Now I'm not going to beat about the bush any more. Enough history, enough philosophy. Our government wouldn't last a week if we let Mendelists get away with preaching their vicious nonsense, let alone committing overt acts. I hate to have to put it this way, Don, but the man is the vilest of criminals. You're going to hand him over to us."

Smiling calmly, the Ambassador from 2219 AD said, "I repeat: he's a criminal in
your
terms. Beyond that, I repeat: I have to study the situation. He had escaped from prison; he was being pursued by a lynch mob; he took asylum in our Embassy, which is legally an enclave of 2219 in the present-day United States, an extension of our time and government into yours. Don't talk to me as if I were your office boy's assistant, Cleve."

"A criminal is a criminal," the bald-headed man went on doggedly. "
This
criminal has got to be brought to justice. I've asked you for him on the record and off the record. Next step is formal extradition papers. And the step after that—well, I won't like to do it, but I will."

"I wouldn't like you to do it, either," said the Ambassador calmly and softly.

Their eyes locked. The Secretary of State spread his hands. "Well, there it is," he muttered, and he clicked off.

Dodson and Groppus had been waiting patiently outside. When the Ambassador unlocked the door and nodded them in, he looked the bearded man over carefully.

A thoroughly bewhiskered, messily eyebrowed and well-muscled person, perhaps a jot past middle age, he stood clumsily tall and stiffly erect in a manner slightly reminiscent of a military cadet who had arrived at the academy just the evening before.

His eyes were mild and apologetic, not at all fanatic and intense. They had a tendency to blink if you stared at them too hard. His hands were the most vibrant part of him. Even in comparative repose, when he was listening or thinking, they kept going through the repertoire of the fluid, underlining gestures of the practiced sidewalk exhorter.

"I suppose you know, Mr. Groppus, that you are already the subject of a rather acrimonious controversy between your government and my Embassy?" said the Ambassador.

"Not
my
government. I don't recognize it as mine. I don't admit its jurisdiction over me."

"Unfortunately, it feels differently. And it is larger, more powerful and more numerous than you. Please sit down."

Henry Groppus lowered his head and shook it from side to side slowly, a negative gesture that could make its point the entire length of a meeting hall. "I prefer to stand, thank you. I always stand. Size, power, numbers—since the beginning of time, those three have been trying to correlate with right and wrong. So far, they haven't succeeded."

Nodding, the Ambassador murmured, "Very true. But, on the other hand, they do exceedingly well with life and death. Which, of course, brings us back to the present moment and you. As a convicted criminal under sentence of—"

"I am
not
a criminal."

"You aren't? In that case, Mr. Groppus, we have all been misled. I really must beg your pardon. Suppose you tell me then: how, precisely, do
you
visualize your role?"

"As a political refugee! I come here, persecuted and cast out, to my true home and nation. I claim spiritual citizenship in 2219."

"Spiritual citizenship? That's hardly the best kind. But putting that complex question aside for the moment, let me ask you, Mr. Groppus: what has given you the impression that my era shares your beliefs? The first rule of all Temporal Embassies is to transmit no information about the technological status and social attitudes of their own time to the period in which they are accredited. I fail to see what basis you have for—"

"I always suspected that the future would be Mendelist, but I couldn't be really sure. When the mob broke into the jail to lynch me and I got away from them, this was the only place I could think of hiding in. Now that I've been here for a while and seen you people—I
know
! The next century belongs to us!"

The Ambassador looked completely startled and unbelieving, as if he'd stubbed an emotion on a projecting rock. He shot a quick, questioning glance at his First Secretary.

"I'm sorry, sir," Dodson said in a low, rapid voice. "Bruce. It was his fault. He was so busy barricading the second floor against the mob that he neglected to take proper precautions. Some of the clerks came up to the prisoner during the excitement and got into conversation with him. By the time I reached him, the damage had been done."

"Some of the clerks—" His Excellency fought with himself for a moment, then squirted out an immense, protective cloud of calm. He said, after a deep breath, "I was under the impression that my staff was composed of trained employees, regularly briefed as to their responsibilities. Well trained. Down to the very lowest echelons."

"Yes, sir, but these were three youngsters on their first extratemporal assignment. I'm not trying to make excuses for them, but it's been very dull at the Embassy these last few months, especially for romantic kids who came out all hot and bothered at the idea of seeing history come alive and happen. And then, all of a sudden, there's a lynch mob and a siege of the Embassy. They find themselves standing next to an actual twenty-second-century Mendelist Martyr in the flesh. Well, you know how it is, sir. They started out by asking excited, admiring questions—and ended up answering them."

The Ambassador nodded gravely. "Groppus is the man to do just that. But after this affair has been cleared up, Vice-Consul Bruce and those three clerks will be the subject of an investigation and a report through Temporal Embassy channels clear to the end of the line."

Groppus, meanwhile, had wound himself up and was now running strong.

"It had to be! It had to be!" he chanted, pacing up and down the office, his torn clothes whipping in the breeze created by his gesticulating hands. "We carried the word to the people and told them it had to be. If the Uterine Plague means that nine-tenths of all female children are still-born, does it follow that the remaining precious tenth should marry at random? No, we said. Such a thought stinks in the nostrils of evolution!

"It's not enough to require every prospective husband to show a certificate of fecundity. We must go further! We must march under the slogan of a maximum genetic potential in every marriage. After all, we are not living in the darkness of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries! With modern eugenic methods, we can know exactly what we are getting in every fetus conceived. But even
that
is not enough. We must—"

"All right," said the Ambassador from 2219 AD wearily, dropping into his chair and frowning at the desktop. "I am quite familiar with the sentiments. I had them drummed into me all through childhood, and I had to memorize and repeat them all through my adolescence."

"Even that is not enough!"
repeated the bearded man, his voice rising majestically. "We must go further yet, we told them. We must turn a curse into a blessing, the Uterine Plague into a true genetic revival! If only the best should be allowed to reproduce, why not the
best
of the best? And if only the best of the best—if only the smallest, most refined nugget of mankind is to be allowed the privileges of further heredity—" here his voice sank to a dramatic whisper, before suddenly soaring up again—"surely we will not presume to impose the ancient, outworn limitation of one woman, one wife, one mate at a time?