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Man’s Reach 269
Morrison nodded as he traveled back with the drinks. You never went to the
part of the room where Steele Morrison was; it hurt his feelings not to be able to
zoom back at you. “Don’t know why—had a hunch and did a little reading on Mme.
Storm. Rumors of something nice and tender back in her great days between her
and Kleinbach. Use it for what it’s worth.”
“She was a great singer. I’ve heard her tapes.”
Morrison shrugged. “Something else too, I guess. Can a man fall in love with
a voice, baby?”
Jon Arthur gave a little silent and serious consideration to his drink and (surprising
himself) to the question.
“Matter? Did I say something?”
“No, just thinking. Making plans. The audition winner,” Arthur carefully sounded
as indifferent as though it had been the baritone, “leaves next Monday. I can set up
the deal by then. Think it’s worth one last crack at Weddergren in the meantime?”
Steele Morrison zoomed for a corner and traveled back with an election pamphlet
in the familiar aseptic blue and white of the Academy. “Here’s his latest, baby. It’s
out in the open now: no more elections, that’s for sure. Antiquated and unscientific,
seems as how. The system is Man’s laboratory,” he read, “in which he conducts the
greatest of all his experiments: the shaping of his own destiny. To run this laboratory by
democratic politics is as absurd as to base its experiments upon the ‘laws’ of alchemy and
astrology. That’s what the man says.”
“The worst of which is that it so damned near makes sense.”
“Baby,” said Morrison, “I’ve got kind of a vested interest in this system. With one
leg buried on Mars and the other on Venus you might say I sort of straddle it. All
our kind of people a hundred years ago, they thought once we forgot nationalism
and got world government everything was going to be as easy as a high jump on
Mars. Well, we’ve got world government, no phony league but an honest Federation
based on the individual as a unit—and that Federation is smack up against the most
important election in its history without any possibility of electing the right party.
If the Academy wins, we’re a laboratory—which I give maybe one generation before
it becomes a technological autocracy. If the Populists win—and may their jets clog
forever for stealing that fine old word—we’ll have book burnings and lab smashings
and a fine fast dive into the New Dark Ages. And in between are the guys who don’t
care, the guys who can’t be bothered, the guys who’d like to but …”
“And us,” Arthur concluded, “keeping underground so we won’t wind up in the
Belsens of either side … I’m seeing Weddergren tonight,” he suddenly announced
his decision. “We’ve got to make one more try.”
The system’s greatest scientist but one, the Academy’s candidate for President of
the World Federation, was surprisingly accessible to Jon Arthur. A technician (the
Academy was firmly opposed to a servant class, but a man needs technical assistants)
ushered Arthur into the study the moment he heard his name.
Dr. Weddergren advanced, white mane and all, to greet him warmly. “Delighted, my
boy! I was hoping you’d come around in person to congratulate me on my pupil.”
This seemed a peculiar gambit even for an Academy politician. “Your pupil?”
“The Parva. Faustina Parva. The contralto who—”