“I said to him and I say to you and I say to everybody, ‘Space can absorb the productivity of a trillion planets the size of earth. We could build and fire rockets forever, and never fill up space and never learn all there is to know about it.
“Now, these same people who like to weep and wail so much say, ‘Oh, but Mr. President, what about the chrono-synclastic infundibula and what about this and what about that?’ And I say to them, ‘If people listened to people like you, there wouldn’t ever be any progerse. There wouldn’t be the telephone or anything. And besides,’ I tell them and I tell you and I tell everybody, ‘we don’t have to put people in the rocket ships. We will use the lower animals only.'”
There was more to the speech.
Malachi Constant of Hollywood, California, came out of the rhinestone phone booth cold sober. His eyes felt like cinders. His mouth tasted like horseblanket purée.
He was positive that he had never seen the beautiful blond woman before.
He asked her one of the standard questions for times of violent change. “Where is everybody?” he said.
“You threw ’em all out,” said the woman.
“I did?” said Constant
“Yah,” said the woman. “You mean you drew a blank?”
Constant nodded weakly. During the fifty-six-day party he had reached a point where he could draw almost nothing else. His aim had been to make himself unworthy of any destiny — incapable of any mission — far too ill to travel. He had succeeded to a shocking degree.
“Oh, it was quite a show,” said the woman. “You were having as good a time as anybody, helping shove the piano in the pool. Then, when it finally went in, you got this big crying jag.”
“Crying jag,” echoed Constant. That was something new.
“Yah,” said the woman. “You said you had a very unhappy childhood, and made everybody listen to how unhappy it was. How your father never even threw a ball to you once — any kind of ball. Half the time nobody could understand you, but every time somebody could understand you, it was about how there never was any kind of ball.
“Then you talked about your mother,” said the woman, “and you said if she was a whore, then you were proud to be a son of a whore, if that’s what a whore was. Then you said you’d give an oil well to any woman who’d come up to you and shake your hand and say real loud, so everybody could hear, ‘I’m a whore, just like your mother was.'”
“What happened then?” said Constant.
“You gave an oil well to every woman at the party,” said the woman. “And then you started crying worse than ever, and you picked me out, and you told everybody I was the only person in the whole Solar System you could trust. You said everybody else was just waiting for you to fall asleep, so they could put you on a rocket ship and shoot you at Mars. Then you made everybody go home but me. Servants and everybody.
“Then we flew down to Mexico and got married, and then we came back here,” she said. “Now I find out you haven’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. You better go down to the office and find out what the hell is going on, on account of my boyfriend is a gangster, and he’ll kill you if I tell him you aren’t providing for me right.
“Hell,” she said, “I had an unhappier childhood than you did. My mother was a whore and my father never came home, either — but we were poor besides. At least you had billions of dollars.”
In Newport, Beatrice Rumfoord turned her back to her husband. She stood on the threshold of Skip’s Museum, facing the corridor. Down the corridor came the sound of the butler’s voice. The butler was standing in the front doorway, calling to Kazak, the hound of space.
“I know a little something about roller coasters, too,” Beatrice said.
“That’s good,” said Rumfoord emptily.