ROBERT A. HEINLEIN. BEYOND THIS HORIZON
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN. BEYOND THIS HORIZON
For
Cal
Mickey and
Both
J’s
CHAPTER ONE
“All of them should have been very happy — ”
THEIR problems were solved: the poor they no longer had with them; the sick, the lame, the halt, and the blind were historic memories; the ancient causes of war no longer obtained; they had more freedom than Man has ever enjoyed. All of them should have been happy —
Hamilton Felix let himself off at the thirteenth level of the Department of Finance, mounted a slideway to the left, and stepped off the strip at a door marked:
BUREAU OF ECONOMIC STATISTICS
Office of Analysis and Prediction
Director
PRIVATE
He punched the door with a code combination, and awaited face check. It came promptly; the door dilated, and a voice inside said, “Come in, Felix.”
He stepped inside, glanced at his host and remarked, “You make ninety-eight.”
“Ninety-eight what?”
“Ninety-eight sourpusses in the last twenty minutes. It’s a game. I just made it up.”
Monroe-Alpha Clifford looked baffled, an expression not uncommon in his dealings with his friend Felix. “But what is the point? Surely you counted the opposites, too?”
“Of course. Ninety-eight mugs who’d lost their last friends, seven who looked happy. But,” he added, “to make it seven I had to count one dog.”
Monroe-Alpha gave Hamilton a quick look in an effort to determine whether or not he was joking. But he could not be sure-he rarely could be sure. Hamilton’s remarks often did not appear serious, frequently even seemed technically sense-free. Nor did they appear to follow the six principles of humor-Monroe-Alpha prided himself on his sense of humor, had been known to pontificate to his subordinates on the necessity of maintaining a sense of humor. But Hamilton’s mind seemed to follow some weird illogic of its own, self consistent perhaps, but apparently unrelated to the existent world.
“But what is the purpose of your survey?” he asked.
“Does it need a purpose? I tell you, I just made it up.”
“But your numbers are too few to be significant. You can’t fair a curve with so little data. Besides, your conditions are uncontrolled. Your results don’t mean anything.”
Hamilton rolled his eyes up. “Elder Brother, hear me,” he said softly. “Living Spirit of Reason attend Thy servant. In Your greatest and most prosperous city I find vinegar phizzes to grins in a ratio of fourteen to one-and he says it’s not significant!”
Monroe-Alpha looked annoyed. “Don’t be irreverent, ” he advised. “And the proper ratio is sixteen and a third to one; you should not have counted the dog.”
“Oh, forget it!” his friend answered. “How goes the tail chasing?” He wandered around the room, picking things up and putting them down under Monroe-Alpha’s watchful eye, and finally stopped in front of the huge integrating accumulator. “It’s about time for your quarterly prediction, isn’t it?”
“Not ‘about time’ — it is time. I had just completed the first inclusive run when you arrived. Want to see it?” He stepped to the machine, pressed a stud. A photostat popped out. Monroe Alpha undipped it and handed it to Hamilton without looking at it. He had no need to-the proper data had been fed into the computer; he knew with quiet certainty that the correct answer would come out. Tomorrow he would work the problem again, using a different procedure. If the two answers did not then agree within the limits of error of the machine, he would become interested in the figures themselves. But, of course, that would not happen. The figures would interest his superiors; the procedure alone was of interest to him.
Hamilton eyed the answer from a nonprofessional viewpoint. He appreciated, in part at least, the huge mass of detail which had gone into this simple answer. Up and down two continents human beings had gone about their lawful occasions-buying, selling, making, consuming, saving, spending, giving receiving. A group of men in Altoona, Pennsylvania, had issued unsecured aspirant stock to subsidize further research into a new method of recovering iron from low grade ores. The issue had been well received down in New Bolivar where there was a superabundance of credit because of the extreme success of the tropical garden cities along the Orinoco (“Buy a Slice of Paradise”). Perhaps that was the canny Dutch influence in the mixed culture of that region. It might have been the Latin influence which caused an unprecedented tourist travel away from the Orinoco during the same period-to Lake Louise, and Patagonia, and Sitka.