Beyond This Horizon

CHAPTER SIX

"We don't speak the same lingo"

HAMILTON FELIX discovered that a conspirator can be a busy person, especially if he is also engaged in counter-conspiracy. He tried to present a convincing picture to McFee Norbert and his other associates in the Survivors Club of an enthusiastic neophyte, anxious in every way to promote the cause. Indoctrination classes, dull in themselves but required before advancement in the organization could be expected, took a good deal of time. He endured these patiently, trying his best to maintain actually the frame of mind of romantic acceptance during instruction, in order that his questions and reactions in general would arouse no suspicion.

In addition to lessons in the principles of the New Order new members were assigned tasks to perform. Since the organization was ruled with an absolute from-the-top-down discipline, the reasons for the tasks were never explained nor were questions permitted. The assigned job might actually have significance to the conspiracy, or it might simply be a test, with every person concerned in the matter actually a brother clubmember. The recruit had no way of knowing.

Hamilton saw what happened to one candidate who neglected to take the instruction seriously.

He was tried in the presence of the chapter. Attendance on the part of junior members was compulsory. McFee Norbert acted as prosecutor and judge. The accused was not represented by spokesman, but was permitted to explain his actions.

He had been directed to deliver in person a specific message to a specific person. This he had done, but recognizing the man to whom he had been sent as one he had seen at the club, he had revealed himself. "You had not been told that this man was one in whom you could confide?" McFee persisted.

"No, but he-"

"Answer me."

"No, I had not been told that."

McFee turned to the company present and smiled thinly. "You will note, " he stated, "that the accused had no means whatsoever of knowing the exact status of the man he was to contact. He might have been a brother we suspected and wished to test; he might have been a government operative we had unmasked; the accused might have been misled by a chance resemblance. The accused had no way of knowing. Fortunately the other man was none of these things, but was a loyal brother of superior rank."

He turned back to the accused. "Brother Hornby Willem, stand up." The accused did so. He was unarmed.

"What is the first principle of our doctrines?"

"The Whole is greater than the parts."

"Correct. You will understand, then, why I find it necessary to dispense with you."

"But I didn't-" He got no further. McFee burned him down where he stood.

Hamilton was part of the task group which took the body and spirited it to a deserted corridor, then disposed it so that it would appear to have become deceased in an ordinary private duel, a matter of only statistical interest to police monitors. McFee commanded the group himself and earned Hamilton's reluctant admiration for the skill with which he handled the ticklish matter. Hamilton won McFee's approval by the intelligent alacrity which he showed in carrying out his orders.

"You are getting ahead fast, Hamilton," he said to him when they had returned to the clubroom. "You'll be up with me soon. By the way, what did you think of the object lesson?"

"I don't see what else you could have done, " Hamilton declared. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

"'You can't make an-' Say, that's a good one!" McFee laughed and dug him in the ribs. "Did you make it up, or hear it somewhere?"

Hamilton shrugged. He promised himself that he would cut off McFee's ears for that dig in the ribs-after all this was over.

He reported the matter in detail, through devious channels, to Mordan, including his own part as an accessory before and after the fact. Getting his reports to Mordan occupied a good portion of his time and thoughts. Neither of his secret lives could be permitted to show above water. His daily conduct had to conform, superficially, with his public persona; it was necessary to continue his social life as usual, see his agent when his affairs required it, be seen in public in his habitual manner. It is not necessary to enumerate the varied means by which he found safe channels of communication to Mordan in the midst of this pattern; the methods of intrigue have varied little through the millennia. One example will suffice; Mordan had provided him with a tube address to which (he maintained) messages might be safely sent. He dare not assume that it was safe to stat a letter over his own telephone, but he could and did assume that a public phone picked at random could be used for dictation recording. The spool containing his report would then be consigned at once to the anonymity of the postal system.

Longcourt Phyllis took up much of his free time. He freely admitted that the woman intrigued him; he did not admit even to himself that she represented anything more than diversion to him. Nevertheless he was quite likely to be found waiting for her at the end of her working day. For she was a working woman-four hours a day, seven days a week, forty weeks a year, as a practical psycho-pediatrician in the Wallingford Infant Development Center.

Her occupation disturbed him a little. Why anyone should voluntarily associate day after day with a mob of yelling sticky little brats was beyond him. She seemed normal otherwise-normal but stimulating.

He was too preoccupied to take much interest in the news of the world these days, which was why he did not follow the career of J. Darlington Smith, the "Man from the Past, " very closely. He was aware that Smith had been a news sensation for a few days, until crowded out by lunar field trials, and a report (erroneous) of intelligent life on Ganymede. The public soon filed him away with the duckbill platypus and the mummy of Rameses II-interesting relics of the past no doubt, but nothing to get excited about. It might have been different if his advent had been by means of the often discussed and theoretically impossible time travel, but it was nothing of the sort-simply an odd case of suspended animation. A sight-sound record from the same period was just as interesting-if one were interested.

Hamilton had seen him once, for a few minutes, in a newscast. He spoke with a barbarous accent and was dressed in his ancient costume, baggy pantaloons described by the interlocutor as "plus fours" and a shapeless knitted garment which covered his chest and arms. None of which prepared Hamilton for the reception of a stat relating to J. Darlington Smith.

"Greetings," it began, etc. etc. The gist of it was that the interlocutor appointed by the Institution as temporary guardian for Smith desired that Hamilton grant the favor of an hour of his no-doubt valuable time to Smith. No explanation.

In his bemused frame of mind his first impulse was to ignore it. Then he recalled that such an act would not have fitted his former, pre-intrigue, conduct. He would have seen the barbarian, from sheer curiosity.

Now was as good a time as any. He called the Institution, got hold of the interlocutor, and arranged for Smith to come to his apartment at once. As an afterthought he called Monroe-Alpha, he having remembered his friend's romantic interest in Smith. He explained what was about to take place. "I thought you might like to meet your primitive hero."

"My hero? What do you mean?"

"I thought you were telling me what a bucolic paradise he came from?"

"Oh, that! Slight mistake in dates. Smith is from 1926. It seems that gadgeting was beginning to spoil the culture, even then."

"Then you wouldn't be interested in seeing him?"

"Oh, I think I would. It was a transition period. He may have seen something of the old culture with his own eyes. I'll be over, but I may be a little late."

"Fine. Long life." He cleared without waiting for a reply. Smith showed up promptly, alone. He was dressed, rather badly, in modern clothes, but was unarmed.

"I'm John Darlington Smith, " he began.

Hamilton hesitated for a moment at the sight of the brassard, then decided to treat him as an equal. Discrimination, he felt, under the circumstances would be sheer unkindness. "I am honored that you visit me, sir."

"Not at all. Awfully good of you, and so forth."

"I had expected that there would be someone with you."

"Oh, you mean my nursemaid." He grinned boyishly. He was, Hamilton decided, perhaps ten years younger than Hamilton himself-discounting the years he had spent in stasis. "I'm beginning to manage the lingo all right, well enough to get around."

"I suppose so, " Hamilton agreed. "Both lingos are basically Anglic."

"It's not so difficult. I wish lingo were the only trouble I had."

Hamilton was a little at a loss as to how to handle him. It was utterly inurbane to display interest in a stranger's personal affairs, dangerous, if the stranger were an armed citizen. But this lad seemed to invite friendly interest. "What is troubling you, sir?"

"Well, lots of things, hard to define. Everything is different."

"Didn't you expect things to be different?"

"I didn't expect anything. I didn't expect to come to ... to now."

"Eh? I understand that-never mind. Do you mean that you did not know that you were entering the 'stasis'?"

"I did and I didn't."

"What do you mean?"

"Well... Listen, do you think you could stand a long story? I've told this story about forty-eleven times, and I know it doesn't do any good to try to shorten it. They just don't understand."

"Go ahead."

"Well, I'd better go back a little. I graduated from Eastern U in the spring of '26 and-"

"You what?"

"Oh, dear! You see in those days the schools-"

"Sorry. Just tell it your own way. Anything I can't pick up I'll ask you about later."

"Maybe that would be better. I had a pretty good job offered to me, selling bonds-one of the best houses on the Street. I was pretty well known-All-American back two seasons." Hamilton restrained himself, and made about four mental notes.

"That's an athletic honor, " Smith explained hastily. "You'll understand. I don't want you to think I was a football bum, though. To be sure the fraternity helped me a little, but I worked for every cent I got. Worked summers, too. And I studied. My major was Efficiency Engineering. I had a pretty thorough education in business, finance, economics, salesmanship. It's true that I got my job because Grantland Rice picked me-I mean football helped a lot to make me well known-but I was prepared to be an asset to any firm that hired me. You see that, don't you?"

"Oh, most certainly!"

"It's important, because it has a bearing on what happened afterwards. I wasn't working on my second million but I was getting along. Things were slick enough. The night it happened I was celebrating a little-with reason. I had unloaded an allotment of South American Republics-"

"Eh?"

"Bonds. It seemed like a good time to throw a party. It was a Saturday night, so everybody started out with the dinner-dance at the country club. It was the usual thing. I looked over the flappers for a while, didn't see one I wanted to dance with, and wandered into the locker room, looking for a drink. The attendant used to sell it to people he could trust."

"Which reminds me, " said Hamilton, and returned a moment later with glasses and refreshment.

"Thanks. His gin was pure bathtub, but usually reliable. Maybe it wasn't, that night. Or maybe I should have eaten dinner. Anyhow, I found myself listening to an argument that was going on in one end of the room. One of these parlor bolsheviks was holding forth-maybe you still have the type? Attack anything, just so long as it was respectable and decent."

Hamilton smiled.

"You do, eh? He was one of 'em. Read nothing but the American Mercury and Jurgen and then knew it all. I'm not narrow-minded. I read those things, too, but I didn't have to believe 'em. I read the Literary Digest, too, and the Times, something they would never do. To get on, he was panning the Administration and predicting that the whole country was about to go to the bow-wows... go to pieces. He didn't like the Gold Standard, he didn't like Wall Street, he thought we ought to write off the War Debts.

"I could see that some of our better members were getting pretty sick of it, so I jumped in. "They hired the money, didn't they, ' I told him.

"He grinned at me-sneered I should say. 'I suppose you voted for him.'

"'I certainly did, ' I answered, which was not strictly true; I hadn't gotten around to registering, such things coming in the middle of the football season. But I wasn't going to let him get away with sneering at Mr. Coolidge. 'I suppose you voted for Davis.'

"'Not likely, ' he says. 'I voted for Norman Thomas. '

"Well, that burned me up. 'See here, ' I said, 'the proper place for people like you is in Red Russia. You're probably an atheist, to boot. You have the advantage of living in the greater period in the history of the greatest country in history. We've got an Administration in Washington that understands business. We're back to normalcy and we're going to stay that way. We don't need you rocking the boat. We are levelled off on a plateau of permanent prosperity. Take it from me-Don't Sell America Short!'" I got quite a burst of applause.

"'You seem pretty sure of that,' he says, weakly.

"'I ought to be,' I told him. 'I'm in the Street. '

"'Then there is no point in me arguing,' he said, and just walked out.

"Somebody poured me another drink, and we got to talking. He was a pleasant, portly chap, looking like a banker or a broker. I didn't recognize him, but I believe in establishing contacts. 'Let me introduce myself, ' he said. 'My name is Thadeus Johnson.'

"I told him mine."

"'Well, Mr. Smith, ' he said, 'you seem to have confidence in the future of our country.'

"I told him I certainly did.

"'Confident enough to bet on it?'

"'At any odds you want to name, money, marbles, or chalk.'

"'Then I have a proposition that might interest you. '

"I pricked up my ears. 'What is it?' I said.

"'Could you take a little joyride with me?' he said. 'Between the saxophones and those Charleston-crazy kids, a man can't hear himself think.' I didn't mind-those things don't break up until 3 A. M.; I knew I could stand a spell of fresh air. He had a long, low wicked-looking Hispano-Suiza. Class.

"I must have dozed off. I woke up when we stopped at his place. He took me in and fixed me a drink and told me about the stasis-only he called it a 'level-entropy field. ' And he showed it to me. He did a lot of stunts with it, put a cat in it, left it in while we killed a drink. It was all right.

"'But that isn't the half of it, ' he said. 'Watch. ' He took the cat and threw it, right through where the field would be if it was turned on. When the cat was right spang in the center of the area, he threw the switch. We waited again, a little longer this time. Then he released the switch. The cat came sailing out, just the way it was heading when we saw it last. It landed, spitting and swearing.

"'That was just to convince you, ' he said, 'that inside that field, time doesn't exist-no increase of entropy. The cat never knew the field was turned on. '

"Then he changed his tack. "Jack, " he says, 'what will the country be like in twenty-five years?'

"I thought about it. 'The same-only more so,' I decided.

"'Think A. T. & T. will still be a good investment?'

"'Certainly!'

"'Jack, ' he says softly, "would you enter that field for ten shares of A. T. & T. ?',

"'For how long?'

"'Twenty-five years, Jack.'

"Naturally, it takes a little time to decide a thing like that. Ten of A.T. & T. didn't tempt me; he added ten of U. S. Steel. And he laid 'em out on the table. I was as sure as I'm standing here that the stock would be worth a lot more in a quarter of a century, and a kid fresh out of college doesn't get blue chips to play with very easily. But a quarter of a century! It was like dying. When he added ten of National City, I said, 'Look Mr. Johnson, let me try it for five minutes. If it didn't kill the cat, I ought to be able to hold my breath that long.'

"He had been filling out the assignments in my name, just to tempt me. He said, 'Surely, Jack.' I stepped to the proper spot on the floor while I still had my courage up. I saw him reach for the switch.

"That's all I know."

Hamilton Felix sat up suddenly. "Huh? How's that?"

"That's all I know," repeated Smith. "I started to tell him to go ahead, when I realized he wasn't there any more. The room was filled with strangers, it was a different room. I was here. I was now."

"That," said Hamilton, "deserves another drink."

They drank it in silence.

"My real trouble is this," said Smith. "I don't understand this world at all. I'm a business man, I'd like to go into business here. (Mind you, I've got nothing against this world, this period. It seems okay, but I don't understand it.) I can't go into business. Damn it, nothing works the same. All they taught me in school, all I learned on the Street, seems utterly foreign to the way they do business now."

"I should think that business would be much the same in any age-fabrication, buying, selling."

"Yes and no. I'm a finance man-and, damn it, finance is cockeyed nowadays!"

"I admit that the details are a little involved," Hamilton answered, "but the basic principles are evident enough. Say-I've a friend coming over who is the chief mathematician for the department of finance. He'll straighten you out."

Smith shook his head decisively. "I've been experted to death. They don't speak my lingo."

"Well," said Hamilton, "I might tackle the problem myself."

"Would you? Please?"

Hamilton thought about it. It was one thing to kid sober-sided Clifford about his "money-machine"; another matter entirely to explain the workings of finance economics to ... to the hypothetical Man from Arcturus. "Suppose we start this way," he said. "It's basically a matter of costs and prices. A business man manufactures something. That costs him money-materials, wages, housing, and so forth. In order to stay in business he has to get his costs back in prices. Understand me?"

"That's obvious."

"Fine. He has put into circulation an amount of money exactly equal to his costs."

"Say that again."

"Eh? It's a simple identity. The money he has had to spend, put into circulation, is his costs."

"Oh ... but how about his profit?"

"His profit is part of his cost. You don't expect him to work for nothing."

"But profits aren't costs. They're ... they're profits."

Hamilton felt a little baffled. "Have it your own way. Costs-what you rail 'costs'-plus profit must equal price. Costs and profits are available as purchasing power to buy the product at a price exactly equal to them. That's how purchasing power comes into existence."

"But ... but he doesn't buy from himself."

"He's a consumer, too. He uses his profits to pay for his own and other producers' products."

"But he owns his own products."

"Now you've got me mixed up. Forget about him buying his own products. Suppose he buys what he needs for himself from other business men. It comes out the same in the long run. Let's get on. Production puts into circulation the amount of money-exactly-needed to buy the product. But some of that money put into circulation is saved and invested in new production. There it is a cost charge against the new production, leaving a net shortage in necessary purchasing power. The government makes up that shortage by issuing new money."

"That's the point that bothers me," said Smith. "It's all right for the government to issue money, but it ought to be backed by something-gold, or government bonds."

"Why, in the Name of the Egg, should a symbol represent anything but the thing it is supposed to accomplish?"

"But you talk as if money was simply an abstract symbol."

"What else is it?"

Smith did not answer at once. They had reached an impasse of different concepts, totally different orientations. When he did speak it was to another point. "But the government simply gives away all this new money. That's rank charity. It's demoralizing. A man should work for what he gets. But forgetting that aspect for a moment, you can't run a government that way. A government is just like a business. It can't be all outgo and no income."

"Why can't it?' There's no parallel between a government and a business. They are for entirely different purposes."

"But it's not sound. It leads to bankruptcy. Read Adam Smith."

"I don't know this Adam Smith. Relative of yours?"

"No, he's a- Oh, Lord!"

"Crave pardon?"

"It's no use," Smith said. "We don't speak the same lingo."

"I am afraid that is the trouble, really. I think perhaps you should go to see a corrective semantician."

"Anyhow," Smith said, one drink later, "I didn't come here to ask you to explain finance to me. I came for another purpose."

"Yes?"

"Well, you see I had already decided that I couldn't go into finance. But I want to get to work, make some money. Everybody here is rich-except me."

"Rich?"

"They look rich to me. Everybody is expensively dressed. Everybody eats well-Hell! They give food away-it's preposterous."

"Why don't you live on the dividend? Why worry about money?"

"I could, of course, but, shucks, I'm a working man. There are business chances all around. It drives me nuts not to do something about them. But I can't-I don't know the ropes. Look-there is just one thing else besides finance that I know well. I thought you might be able to show me how to capitalize on it."

"What is it?"

"Football."

"Football?"

"Football. I'm told that you are the big man in games. Games 'tycoon' they called you." Hamilton conceded it wordlessly. "Now football is a game. There ought to be money in it, handled right."

"What sort of a game? Tell me about it."

Smith went into a long description of the sport. He drew diagrams of plays, describing tackling, blocking, forward passing. He described the crowds and spoke of gate receipts. "It sounds very colorful," Hamilton admitted. "How many men get killed in an engagement?"

"Killed? You don't hurt anybody-barring a broken collar bone, or so."

"We can change that. Wouldn't it be better if the men defending the ball handlers were armored? Otherwise we would have to replace them with every maneuver."

"No, you don't understand. It's-well..."

"I suppose I don't," Hamilton agreed, "I've never seen the game played. It's a little out of my line. My games are usually mechanicals-wagering machines."

"Then you aren't interested?"

Hamilton was not, very. But he looked at the youth's disappointed face and decided to stretch a point. "I'm interested, but it isn't my line. I'll put you in touch with my agent. I think he could work something out of it. I'll talk with him first."

"Say, that's white of you!"

"I take it that means approval. It's no trouble to me, really."

The annunciator warned of a visitor-Monroe-Alpha. Hamilton let him in, and warned him, sotto voce, to treat Smith as an armed equal. Some time was consumed in polite formalities, before Monroe-Alpha got around to his enthusiasm. "I understand that your background is urban industrial, sir."

"I was mostly a city boy, if that's what you, mean."

"Yes, that was the implication. I was hoping that you would be able to tell me something of the brave simple life that was just dying out in your period."

"What do you mean? Country life?"

Monroe-Alpha sketched a short glowing account of his notion of rustic paradise. Smith looked exceedingly puzzled. "Mr. Monroe," he said, "somebody has been feeding you a lot of cock-and-bull, or else I'm very much mistaken. I don't recognize anything familiar in the picture."

Monroe-Alpha's smile was just a little patronizing. "But you were an urban dweller. Naturally the life is unfamiliar to you."

"What you describe may be unfamiliar, but the circumstances aren't. I followed the harvest two summers, I've done a certain amount of camping, and I used to spend my summers and Christmases on a farm when I was a kid. If you think there is anything romantic, or desirable per se, in getting along without civilized comforts, well, you just ought to try tackling a two-holer on a frosty morning. Or try cooking a meal on a wood-burning range."

"Surely those things would simply stimulate a man. It's the primitive, basic struggle with nature."

"Did you ever have a mule step on your foot?"

"No, but-"

"Try it some time. Honest-I don't wish to seem impertinent, but you have your wires crossed. The simple life is all right for a few days vacation, but day in and day out it's just so much dirty back-breaking drudgery. Romantic? Hell, man, there's no time to be romantic about it, and damned little incentive."

Monroe-Alpha's smile was a little bit forced. "Perhaps we aren't talking about the same thing. After all, you came from a period when the natural life had already been sullied by over-emphasis on machines. Your evaluations were already distorted."

Smith himself was beginning to get a little heated. "I hate to tell you, but you don't know what you're talking about. Country life in my day, miserable as it was, was tolerable in direct proportion to the extent to which it was backed by industrialization. They may not have had electric light and running water, but they had Sears Roebuck, and everything that implies."

"Had what?" asked Hamilton.

Smith took time out to explain mail-order shopping. "But what you're talking about means giving up all that-just the noble primitive, simple and self-sufficient. He's going to chop down a tree-who sold him the ax? He wants to shoot a deer-who made his gun? No, mister, I know what I'm talking about-I've studied economics." (That to Monroe-Alpha, thought Hamilton, with a repressed grin.) "There never was and there never could be a noble simple creature such as you described. He'd be an ignorant savage, with dirt on his skin and lice in his hair. He would work sixteen hours a day to stay alive at all. He'd sleep in a filthy hut on a dirt floor. And his point of view and his mental processes would be just two jumps above an animal."

Hamilton was relieved when the discussion was broken into by another chime from the annunciator. It was just as well-Cliff was getting a little white around the lips. He couldn't take it. But, damn it, he had it coming to him. He wondered how a man could be as brilliant as Monroe-Alpha undoubtedly was-about figures-and be such a fool about human affairs.

The plate showed McFee Norbert. Hamilton would have liked not to have admitted him, but it was not politic. The worm had the annoying habit of dropping in on his underlings, which Hamilton resented, but was helpless to do anything about-as yet.

McFee behaved well enough, for McFee. He was visibly impressed by Monroe-Alpha, whose name and position he knew, but tried not to show it. Toward Smith he was patronizingly supercilious. "So you're the man from out of the past? Well, well-how amusing! You did not time it very well."

"What do you mean?"

"Ah, that would be telling! But ten years from now might have been a better time-eh, Hamilton?" He laughed.

"Perhaps," Hamilton answered shortly, and tried to turn attention away from Smith. "You might talk to Monroe-Alpha about it. He thinks we could improve things." He regretted the remark at once, for McFee turned to Monroe-Alpha with immediate interest.

"Interested in social matters, sir?"

"Yes-in a way."

"So am I. Perhaps we can get together and talk."

"It would be a pleasure, I'm sure, Felix, I must leave you now."

"So must I," McFee said promptly. "May I drop you off?"

"Don't trouble."

Hamilton broke in. "Did you wish to see me, McFee?"

"Nothing important. I hope to see you at the Club tonight."

Hamilton understood the circumlocution. It was a direct order to report-at McFee's convenience. McFee turned back to Monroe-Alpha, adding, "No trouble at all. Right on my way."

Hamilton watched them leave together with vague discomfort.