The Best of L Sprague De Camp Part 19

Lengyel put the letter away and looked at himself in the mirror. He now understood why he had felt so light, daring, and selfconfident the last few hours. Not like his old self at all. He grinned, brushed back his hair, and started for the house phone to call Alice.

"So, chentlemen," said Hithafea, "now you unterstant why I have decidet to sign your agreement as it stants. I shall perhaps be criticized for giffink in to you too easily. But you see, I am soft-heartet apout your planet. I have been on many planets, and nowhere have I peen taken in and mate to feel at home as I was py the Iota Gamma Omicron fraternity many years ago."

The amba.s.sador began to gather up his papers. "Have you a memorantum of this meetink for me to initial? Coot." Hithafea signed, using his claw for a pen. "Then we can have a formal signink next week, eh? With cameras and speeches? Some thy if you feel like erecting a monument to the founders of the Interplanetary Council, you might erect it to Mr. Herbert Lengyel."

Evans said: "Sir, I'm told you Osirians like our Earthly alcoholic drinks. Would you care to step down to the Federation bar. . . ."

"I am so sorry, not this time. Next time, yes. Now I must catch an airplane to Baltimore, U.S.A."

"What are you doing there?" said Chagas.

"Why, Atlantic University is giving me an honorary degree. How I shall balance one of those funny hats with the ta.s.sel on my crest I do not yet know. But that was another reason I agreet to your terms.

You see, we are a sentimental race. What is the matter with Mr. Wu? He looks sick."

Chagas said: "He has been watching his lifelong philosophy crumble to bits, that is all. Come, we will see you to your aircraft."

As Wu pulled himself together and rose with the rest, Evans grinned wryly at him, saying: "After we've dropped the amba.s.sador, I think I'll make it a champagne c.o.c.ktail!"

THE GUIDED MAN.

"ALL YOU DO," said the salesman for the Telagog Company, "is flip this switch at the beginning of the crisis. That sends out a radio impulse, which is picked up here and routed by the monitor to the proper controller."

Ovid Ross peered past the salesman at the man seated in the booth. Gilbert Falck, he understood the man's name to be, but n.o.body would know him under that helmet, from which a thick cable pa.s.sed in a sagging curve to the control board before him.

"So he takes over?" said Ross.

"Exactly. Suppose you've let yourself in for a date where there'll be dancing, and you don't know how?"

"I do, kind of," said Ovid Ross.

"Tell, let's suppose you don't. We have in the booth, by prearrangement, our Mr. Jerome Bundy, who's been a ballet dancer and a ballroom dancing teacher-"

"Did somebody call me?" said a man, putting his head out of another control booth into the corridor behind the row of booths.

"No, Jerry," said the salesman, whose name was Nye. "Just using you as an example. Aren't you still on?"

"No, he gave me the over-and-out."

"See?" said the salesman. "Mr. Bundy is controlling a man-needless to say we don't mention our clients' names-who's trying to become a professional ballet dancer. He's only so-so, but with Jerry running him by remote control he puts on the finest tour-jete you ever saw. Or suppose you can't swim-"

"Shucks," said Ovid Ross, staring at his knuckles. He was a long, big-boned young man with hands and feet large even in proportion to the rest of him, and knuckles oversized for even such hands. "I can swim and dance, kind of, and most of those things. Even play a little golf. My trouble is-well, you know."

"WTell?"

"Here I am, just a big hick from Rattlesnake, Montana, trying to get on among all these slick operators in New York, where everybody's born with his hand in somebody else's pocket. When I go up against them it scares the behooligers out of me. I get embarra.s.sed and trip over my big feet."

"In such a case," said Nye, "we choose controllers specializing in the roles of sophisticate, man-of-the-world, and so forth. Our Mr. Faick here is experienced in such parts. So are Mr. Abrams and Mr. Van Etten. Mr. Bundy is what you might call a second-string sophisticate. When he's not controlling a man engaged in dancing or athletic sports, he relieves one of the others I mentioned."

"So, if I sign up with you, and tomorrow I go see this publisher guy who eats horseshoes and spits out the nails, to ask for a job, you can take over?"

"Easiest thing in the world. Our theory is: no man is a superman! So, when faced with a crisis you can't cope with, call us in. Let a specialist take control of your body! You don't fill your own teeth or make your own shoes, do you? Then why not let our experts carry you through such crises as getting a job, proposing to a girl, or making a speech? Why not?" Nye's eyes shone.

"I dunno why not," said Ross. "But that reminds me. I got-I've got girl trouble too. Can you really take care of that?"

"Certainly. One of the controllers is the former actor Barry Wentworth. During his youth, he was the idol of frustrated women throughout the nation, and he succeeded in acquiring nine real-life wives as well as innumerable less formal romances. We'll do the courtship, the proposal, and everything for you."

Ross looked suspiciously at the salesman. "Dunno as I like that 'everything.'"

Nyc spread his hands. "Only at your request. We have no thought of controlling a client beyond his desires. What we do is to compel you to do what you really wish to do, but lack the skill or the nerve to do."

"Say, here's another thing."

"Yes?"

"Is there any carry-over effect? In other words, uh, if a controller puts me through some act like swimming, will I learn to do that better from having the controller do an expert job with my carca.s.s?"

"We believe so, though the psychologists are still divided. We think that eventually telegog control will be accepted as a necessary part of all training for forms of physical dexterity or skill, including such things as singing and speech-making. But that's in the future."

"Another thing," said Ross. "This gadget would give a controller a wonderful chance for-uh-practical jokes. Say the controllee was a preacher who hired you to carry him through a tough sermon, and the controller had it in for him, or maybe just had a low sense of humor. What would stop the controller from making the preacher tell stag-party stories from the pulpit?"

The salesman's face took on a look of pious horror. "n.o.body in this organization would think of such a thing! If he did, he'd be fired before he could say 'hypospatial transmission.' This is a serious enterprise, with profound future possibilities."

Ross gave the sigh of a man making a fateful decision. "Okay, then. Guess I'll have to go without lunch for a while to pay for it, but if your service does what you say, it'll be worth it. Give me the forms."

When Ross had signed the contract with the Telagog Company, the salesman said: "Now, we'll have to decide which cla.s.s of telagog receiver to fit you with. For full two-way communication you use this headset with this hypospatial transmitter in your pocket. It's fairly Conspicuous. .

"Too much so for me," said Ross.

"Then we have this set, which looks like a hearing aid and has a smaller pocket control unit. This doesn't let you communicate by hypospatial broadcast with the controller, but it does incorporate an off-switch so you can cut off the controller. And, if you have to communicate with him, you can write a note and hold it up for him to see with your eyes."

"Still kind of prominent. Got 'ny others?"

"Yes, this last kind is invisible for practical purposes." The salesman held up a lenticular object about the size of an eyegla.s.s lens but thicker, slightly concave on one face and thin around the edge. "This is mounted on top of your head, between your scalp and your skull."

"How about controls?"

"You can't cut off the controller, but you can communicate by clicks with this pocket wireless key. One click means 'take over,' two is 'lay off but stand by,' and three is 'over and out,' or 'that's all until the next schedule.' If you want to arrange a niore elaborate code with your controller, that's up to you."

"That looks like me," said Ross. "But have you got to bore holes in my skull for the wires?"

"No. That's the beauty of this Nissen metal. Although the wires are only a few molecules thick, they're so strong that when the receiver is actuated and their coils are released they shoot right through your skull into your brain without making holes you can see except under the strongest microscope."

"Okay," said Ovid Ross.

"First we'll have to fit you and install the receiver. You'll take a local anesthetic, won't you?"

"I guess so. Whatever you say."

"Then you'd better have a practice session with your controllers. They have to get used to your body, you know."

"Rather," said Gilbert Faick, taking off his helmet. He was a smallish blond young man about Ovid Ross's age. "You wouldn't want to knock your coffee cup over because your arm is longer than mine, would you?"

The gold lettering on the frosted-gla.s.s part of the door said:

1026.

HOOLIHAN PUBLICATIONS.

THE GARMENT GAZETTE.

Ovid Ross had stood in front of this door for fifteen awful seconds with his hand outstretched but not quite touching the k.n.o.b, as if he feared an electric shock. G.o.d almighty, why did one have to be young and green and embarra.s.sable? And from Rattlesnake, Montana? Then he remembered, reached into his pocket, and pushed the switch-b.u.t.ton, once.

He remembered what he had been taught: as the controller took over, relax gradually. Not too suddenly, or you might fall in a heap on the floor. That would not make a good impression on a prospective employer.

The feeling of outside control stole over him with an effect like that of a heavy slug of hard liquor. He relaxed. A power outside his body was seeing with his eyes and sensing with his other senses. This power reached his arm Out and briskly opened the door. Without volition on his part, he realized that he had stridden in and said to the girl at the switchboard behind the hole in the gla.s.s window, in friendly but firm and confident tones: "Will you please tell Mr. Sharpe that Mr. Ross is here to see him? I'm expected."

Ross thought that alone he would have stumbled in, goggled wordlessly at the girl, stuttered, and probably ended by slinking out without seeing Sharpe at all. The control was not really complete- semiautomatic acts like breathing and walking were still partly under Ross's control-but Falck had taken over all the higher functions.

Presently he was shaking hands with Addison Sharpe, the managing editor, a small man with steel-rimmed gla.s.ses. Ross amazed himself by the glibness with which his tongue threw off the correct pleasantries: "A very nice plant you have, sir . . . I'm sure I shall enjoy it.

Yes, the salary mentioned by the agency will be satisfactory, though I hope eventually to convince you I'm really worth more. . . References? Mr. Maurice Vachek of The Clothing Retailer; Mr. Joseph McCue of A. S. Glickman Fabrics. .

Not a word to indicate that this same McCue had pounded his desk and shouted, when firing Ovid Ross: "And here you are, a college man, who couldn't sell bed warmers to Eskimos!~ What the h.e.l.l good's your fancy education if it don't teach you nothing useful?"

Luckily, McCue had promised to give him a good reference- provided the job were anything but selling. Ross was pleased to observe that his body's deportment under Falck's control, while much improved, was not altered out of all recognition. He still spoke his normal General American instead of with Falck's more easterly accents.

Addison Sharpe was saying: "You'll find working conditions here a little unusual."

"So?" said Falck-Ross.

"For one thing, Mr. Hoolihan likes neathess. That means everybody cleans his desk completely before he goes home at night. Every. thing but the telephone, the calendar, the ashtray, and the blotter pad has to be out of sight."

Ross felt his controller start a little. No wonder! This would be Ovid Ross's third trade journal, and never before kad he come across such a ruling. Normally, staff writers and editors were allowed to build mares' nests of paper on their desks to suit themselves, so long as they delivered the goods.

"For another," continued Sharpe, "Mr. Hoolihan disapproves of his employees' fraternizing with each other outside of working hours. He considers it bad for discipline."

At this outrageous ukase, Ross felt Falck jerk again.

"Finally," said Sharpe, "Mr. Hoolihan has a very acute sense of time. He takes it much amiss if his employees show up so much as one minute late, so the rest of us make a habit of arriving fifteen minutes early in the morning to allow for delays. Also, I advise you not to get in the habit of taking your newspaper down to the men's room to read, or ducking out for a midmorning cup of coffee. The staff writer you're replacing thought he couldn't live without his teno'clock coffee. That's why you're here and he isn't."

Ross had an urge to ask 110w you got to be a trusty. However, he had no control over his vocal organs, and Falck was too well-trained for any such breaks.

"Now," said Sharpe, "we'll go in to see Mr. Hoolihan."

The tyrant overflowed his swivel chair: a big stout red-faced man with a fringe of graying hair around his pink dome of a scalp and great bushy eyebrows. Timothy Hoolihan extended a paw and wrung Ross's hand. He made Ross's bones creak, despite the fact that Ross had gotten his start in life by pitching hay and throwing calves around.

"Glad to have you!" barked Hoolihan in a staccato voice like a burst of machine-gun fire. "You do as we tell you, no reason we can't get along. Here! Read this! Part of every new employee's indoctrination. Ever hear of Frederick Winslow Taylor? Should have! Hundred years old and still makes sense."

Falck-Ross glanced down at the brochure: a reprint of an ancient homily by Taylor on the duties of an employee.

"Now, you hang around a couple of days, reading the files, getting oriented, and we'll put you on a definite a.s.signment. Good luck! Take him away, Addison!"

Overawed by this human dynamo, Ross was conscious of Falck's making some glib but respectful rejoinder and directing his body out of the office.

For the first time since he had entered the office suite occupied by The Garment Gazette, Ross began to try to regain control. He urged his right hand toward the pocket in which reposed the little clicker key by which he communicated with Falck. Evidently Faick realized what he was up to, for he relaxed control long enough for Ross to get his hand into that pocket and press the k.n.o.b, twice.

At once Falck's control ceased. Ross, not catching himself quite in time, stumbled and recovered. Sharpe turned his head to give him an owlish stare. The managing editor took him around and introduced him to a half-dozen other people: staff writers (called "editors" on this paper), an advertising manager, and so forth. Then Sharpe showed Ross a cubicle with a desk.

"Yours," he said. "Say, are you feeling all right?"

"Sure. Why?"

"I don't know. When we came out of Mr. Hoolihan's office your manner seemed to change. You're not sick, are you?"

"Never felt better."

"Heart all right? We wouldn't like you to conk out on us before you've worked long enough to pull your weight."

"No, sir. My heart was good enough for me to be a practicing cowboy, so I guess this won't hurt it."

Ross settled down at his new desk to read the Taylor article, the burden of which seemed to be that to get ahead one should practice abject submission to one's employer's slightest whim. While he was absorbing the eminent engineer's advice, one of the girls came in and placed on his desk a big ring binder containing last year's acc.u.mulation of file copies of The Garment Gazette, which he read.

What Mr. Hoolihan really needed, he thought, was a multiple telagog set by which he could control all his employees all at once and all the time.

During the lunch hour, Ovid Ross telephoned the Telagog Company and asked for Gilbert Faick. After some delay a voice said: "Falck speaking."

"This is Ross, Ovid Ross. Say, it worked! I got the job!"

"Oh, I know that. I monitored you for a half-hour after you shut me off, and cut in on you at odd minutes later."