“You – you really can see into the future?” said Constant. The skin of his face tightened, felt parched. His palms perspired.
“In a punctual way of speaking – yes,” said Rumfoord. “When I ran my space ship into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, it came to me in a flash that everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been.” He chuckled again. “Knowing that rather takes the glamour out of fortunetelling – makes it the simplest, most obvious thing imaginable.”
“You told your wife everything that was going to happen to her?” said Constant. This was a glancing question. Constant had no interest in what was going to happen to Rumfoord’s wife. He was ravenous for news of himself. In asking about Rumfoord’s wife, he was being coy.
“Well – not everything,” said Rumfoord. “She wouldn’t let me tell her everything. What little I did tell her quite spoiled her appetite for more.”
“I – I see,” said Constant, not seeing at all.
“Yes,” said Rumfoord genially, “I told her that you and she were to be married on Mars.” He shrugged. “Not married exactly – ” he said, “but bred by the Martians – like farm animals.”
Winston Niles Rumfoord was a member of the one true American class. The class was a true one because its limits had been clearly defined for at least two centuries – clearly defined for anyone with an eye for definitions. From Rumfoord’s small class had come a tenth of America’s presidents, a quarter of its explorers, a third of its Eastern Seaboard governors, a half of its full-time ornithologists, three-quarters of its great yachtsmen, and virtually all of its underwriters of the deficits of grand opera. It was a class singularly free of quacks, with the notable exception of political quacks. The political quackery was a means of gaining office – and was never carried into private life. Once in office, members of the class became, almost without exception, magnificently responsible.
If Rumfoord accused the Martians of breeding people as though people were no better than farm animals, he was accusing the Martians of doing no more than his own class had done. The strength of his class depended to some extent on sound money management – but depended to a much larger extent on marriages based cynically on the sorts of children likely to be produced.
Healthy, charming, wise children were the desiderata.
The most competent, if humorless, analysis of Rumfoord’s class is, beyond question, Waltham Kittredge’s The American Philosopher Kings. It was Kittredge who proved that the dass was in fact a family, with its loose ends neatly turned back into a hard core of consanguinity through the agency of cousin marriages. Rumfoord and his wife, for instance, were third cousins, and detested each other.
And when Rumfoord’s class was diagramed by Kittredge, it resembled nothing so much as the hard, ball-like knot known as a monkey’s fist.
Waltham Kittredge often floundered in his The American Philosopher Kings, trying to translate the atmosphere of Rumfoord’s class into words. Like the college professor he was, Kittredge groped only for big words, and, finding no apt ones, he coined a lot of untranslatable new ones.
Of all Kittredge’s jargon, only one term has ever found its way into conversation. The term is un-neurotic courage.
It was that sort of courage, of course, that carried Winston Niles Rumfoord out into space. It was pure courage – not only pure of lusts for fame and money, but pure of any drives that smack of the misfit or screwball.
There are, incidentally, two strong, common words that would have served handsomely, one or the other, in place of all of Kittredge’s jargon. The words are style and gallantry.
When Rumfoord became the first person to own a private space ship, paying fifty-eight million dollars out of his own pocket for it – that was style.
When the governments of the earth suspended all space exploration because of the chrono-synclastic infundibula, and Rumfoord announced that he was going to Mars – that was style.
When Rumfoord announced that he was taking a perfectly tremendous dog along, as though a space ship were nothing more than a sophisticated sports car, as though a trip to Mars were little more than a spin down the Connecticut Turnpike – that was style.
When it was unknown what would happen if a space ship went into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, and Rumfoord steered a course straight for the middle of one – that was gallantry indeed.
To contrast Malachi Constant of Hollywood with Winston Niles Rumfoord of Newport and Eternity:
Everything Rumfoord did he did with style, making all mankind look good.
Everything Constant did he did in style – aggressively, loudly, childishly, wastefully – making himself and mankind look bad.
Constant bristled with courage – but it was anything but un-neurotic. Every courageous thing he had ever done had been motivated by spitefulness and by goads from childhood that made fear seem puny indeed.
Constant, having just heard from Rumfoord that he was to be mated to Rumfoord’s wife on Mars, looked away from Rumfoord to the museum of remains along one wall. Constant’s hands were clasped together, tightening on each other pulsingly.
Constant cleared his throat several times. Then he whistled thinly between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. In all, he was behaving like a man who was waiting for a terrible pain to pass. He closed his eyes and sucked in air between his teeth. “Loo dee doo, Mr. Rumfoord,” he said softly. He opened his eyes. “Mars?” be said.
“Mars,” said Rumfoord. “Of course, that isn’t your ultimate destination – or Mercury either.”
“Mercury?” said Constant. He made an unbecoming quack of that lovely name.
“Your destination is Titan,” said Rumfoord, “but you visit Mars, Mercury, and Earth again before you get there.”
It is crucial to understand at what point in the history of punctual space exploration it was that Malachi Constant received the news of his prospective visits to Mars, Mercury, Earth, and Titan. The state of mind on Earth with regard to space exploration was much like the state of mind in Europe with regard to exploration of the Atlantic before Christopher Columbus set out.
There were these important differences, however: the monsters between space explorers and their goals were not imaginary, but numerous, hideous, various, and uniformly cataclysmic; the cost of even a small expedition was enough to ruin most nations; and it was a virtual certainty that no expedition could increase the wealth of its sponsors.
In short, on the basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing good to be said for the exploration of space.
The time was long past when one nation could seem more glorious than another by hurling some heavy object into nothingness. Galactic Spacecraft, a corporation controlled by Malachi Constant, had, as a matter of fact, received the very last order for such a showpiece, a rocket three hundred feet high and thirty-six feet in diameter. It had actually been built, but the fire order had never come.
The ship was called simply The Whale, and was fitted with living quarters for five passengers.
What had brought everything to such an abrupt halt was the discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibula. They had been discovered mathematically, on the basis of bizarre flight patterns of unmanned ships sent out, supposedly, in advance of men.
The discovery of the chrono-synclastic infundibula said to mankind in effect: “What makes you think you’re going anywhere?”
It was a situation made to order for American fundamentalist preachers. They were quicker than philosophers or historians or anybody to talk sense about the truncated Age of Space. Two hours after the firing of The Whale was called off indefinitely, the Reverend Bobby Denton shouted at his Love Crusade in Wheeling, West Virginia:
“And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of the earth.’”
Bobby Denton spitted his audience on a bright and loving gaze, and proceeded to roast it whole over the coals of its own iniquity. “Are these not Bible times?” he said. “Have we not builded of steel and pride an abomination far taller than the Tower of Babel of old? And did we not mean, like those builders of old, to get right into Heaven with it? And haven’t we heard it said many times that the language of scientists is international? They all use the same Latin and Greek words for things, and they all talk the language of numbers.” This seemed a particularly damning piece of evidence to Denton, and the Love Crusaders agreed bleakly without quite understanding why.