Chapter II: Part 2

Once again O'Ryan seemed to be in command--just as the computer had foretold. Games went to five-two in his favor. Then, as the players changed courts once more, the tall Irishman paused to towel off--and paid special attention to rubbing his eyes.

At that his string ran out. Four straight times his swiftest drives hit the top of the net and bounced back into his own court. He blew his service thanks to a pair of double-faults and three minutes later Yamato-Rau had taken the set while the crowd sat in stunned silence.

The fourth set was pitiful. O'Ryan played like a blind man and the Indonesian ran it out with the loss of exactly one point per game. The red line on the computer-board yawed wildly toward the bottom instead of following the white line as it should have.

"Keep your credits," Lindsay told Senator Anderson. "You were right. As it turned out I did know something after all."

"It's impossible!" cried the senator. "But it's cheap at the price--here!" He withdrew his wallet and began pulling out crisp hundred-credit notes.

"Look out!" cried Lindsay. Around them the stands had erupted into violence. While the players were shaking hands at the net, angry--and, Lindsay suspected, frightened--bettors and spectators leaped the low barriers and swarmed out onto the dark court. They hemmed the players in, driving them toward the wall directly under the UW box in which Lindsay and Anderson were sitting.

Someone threw something and Yamato-Rau stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. Swinging his racquet like one of his ancestors' shillalehs, O'Ryan charged to his rescue, pulled him to his feet, covered his retreat to the wall. There Lindsay was able to pull first the Indonesian, then the Irishman, up into the box.

"Damned fool!" said Anderson. "Getting us into a riot." But a moment later Lindsay saw the senator swinging hard at an angry customer with a fist in which his wallet was still clenched. The man made a grab for it as someone else hit Anderson over the head with a plastic bottle. He dropped across a contour-chair, letting his wallet fall from unconscious fingers.

UW police formed a protective wall around them and Pat O'Ryan, recognizing Lindsay, said, "Thanks, Ambassador. I guess I owe you a couple. If my eyes hadn't gone bad on me...."

Lindsay was tempted to admit his guilt in that matter but decided against it. He had no desire to be caught in another riot. He picked up Anderson's wallet, put it back in the still unconscious senator's breast pocket. A white-clad interne was brought through the police cordon, knelt beside Anderson and began to make repairs.

"You'd better leave now, Ambassador," said one of the boss policeman respectfully to Lindsay when the senator had been carted away on a stretcher. Lindsay nodded. Then he noticed a slip of paper lying beneath the chair across which Anderson had fallen. It read: _rec. 10,000 cdt. 1 em. & di. neck_. It was from Zoffany, the jeweler.

"What the hell!" Lindsay discovered he was speaking aloud. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and followed the officer through a maze of underground passages out of the Colosseum. He still thought, _What the hell!_ What could Nina have reported about him that was worth that sort of money to the senator?

* * * * *

Spy, slattern or not, Nina was efficient, as he realised when a bowing motley-clad waiter captain smilingly ushered him to a secluded table for two in a banquet niche of the Pelican. It was Lindsay's first visit to an Earthly after-dark cafe and he instinctively compared it with certain of its imitations in the comparatively small cities of his native planet.

It was sleeker, better run, far more beautiful. Its general color scheme was darkly opalescent, subtly glowing, flattering to its clients. And, of course, most of them needed flattering, at least to Lindsay's alien eyes. He noted here a pair of scimitar-shaped spectacles whose turquoise-studded rims caught the light like a pair of small lemon pies, there a harmopan-covered female face that glowed pale green in the darkness.

But even more numerous and decorative than at the stadium, the gladiators and courtesans were present, reinforced by a larding of vidar stars visiting or entertaining in the capital. And these, Lindsay admitted to himself with awed reluctance, outshone in sheer beauty and handsomeness any group of Martian humans.

They ought to, he thought. Direct descendants, figuratively if not actually, of the advertising-Hollywood beauty fetish of the previous century, they were selected almost from birth for their callings and trained rigorously from childhood on, the males to become athletes or actors, the females courtesans or actresses.

There was no race among them, for their only standards were beauty and physical fitness, no creed but achievement in their lines of individual entertainment. He caught sight of a lissome Euro-African, the classic exoticism of her flower-petal face illumined by joyous laughter beneath a glossy neo-Watusi hairdo, as she glided gracefully over the dance-floor in the arms of a hunch-harnessed and bespectacled partner.

The gladiators and courtesans alone seemed to find joy in living. Lindsay, who had seldom been unhappy in his active existence, felt his sympathies and heart go out to them. He followed the progress of a tiny Oriental model whose face was alive with good-humor as she swept past his table, her exquisite figure stressed by a glittering jeweled sheathe.

"You really should wear glasses--or else learn not to stare," said Maria, appearing from nowhere and sitting down at the table. She made amends by extending a warm soft hand to grip one of his. Though she wore her glasses and her hair was severely pulled back, he had no difficulty in recalling the fact that, unclothed, she was lovely.

"Why don't you get in on the act?" he suggested, nodding toward a pair of models emerging from the harmopan room. "All you'd have to do would be to remove your specs and harness and let your hair down."

"You're sweet, Zale," she said, pleased. Then, with a sigh, "But there's a lot more to it than that."

"You do all right that way too," he told her boldly.

She slapped the back of his hand and then, growing quickly serious, said, "Zale, I didn't ask you to meet me for that. I've got so much to ask you--so much to tell. Did you really find an assassin waiting for you when you got home last night? And did you kill him?"

"Yes and no," said Lindsay. "I did find one and I didn't kill him. In fact we parted good friends."

"You Martians...." She sighed, then said, "And I understand you have already broken two computers--this afternoon at the psychiatrist's and this evening at the Colosseum. It's the most marvelous news, darling. I've got to know how you did it."

"I'm damned if I know how I fouled up Dr. Craven's computer," he told her, "I'm still trying to figure it out."

Her face fell. She said, "I was hoping you had something.... But never mind." Then, brightening, "But you're driving them crazy. They ran Dr. Craven's results through Elsac late this afternoon and got the same answer. The records checked that you didn't kill your mother and _I_ know you're not an invert." She laughed softly.

Spurred by the erotic atmosphere, plus the dizzying speed of recent events and Maria's nearness, he said, "Let's get out of here and go to my place."

Her hand covered his again atop the table. "I wish we could," she said wistfully. "I like you _very_ much, Zale darling. But this is too important. We haven't time. But what about the tennis tonight? There's going to be an investigation, of course. Won't you tell me how you did it?"

"Not until I've figured out both," he said. "I may be on the track of something or it may be sheer chance. Until I understand what happened at Dr. Craven's I'm simply not sure of my facts."

"But there simply isn't time, darling," Maria told him. "This is really what I must talk to you about. We got word today that President Giovannini is going to unveil Giac any day now."

"Decided against your sabotage plan?" he asked her.

She wrinkled her pert little nose. "What's the use? They'd simply repair it. Besides, it's much too well guarded. Zale, you're our only hope now."

He said "If I'm right, and I'm beginning to hope I am, it won't matter whether Giac is unveiled or not. In fact, it might be more effective if it were."

Maria drummed on the table with nervous knuckles. "But you _don't_ understand, Zale. You don't think for a minute that the Ministry of Computation is taking this lying down. I got word less than half an hour ago that they are preparing to force your recall as an unsuitable plenipotentiary."

"They can try." Lindsay spoke grimly. This was a move he had failed to foresee, though he supposed he should have. Inadvertently he was becoming a major threat to the crockery in the china shop that was Earth.

"They can do it," Maria said simply. "Zale, these people have become absolutely dependent upon their computers. They aren't going to let their entire creed be wrecked by one Martian."

"What do you want me to do?" he asked simply.

"Come with me--now," she said, once more gripping his hand. "A group of us want to talk to you, to find out _how_ you have done it."

He looked at her, found her adorable in her earnestness. He said, "And if I play guinea pig with your friends, then you and I...?"

"Of course--as soon as there's time," she told him.

"You _are_ a little bundle of fanaticism, as well as of sex," he told her. "I should think at least, since you seem to have such an inside track, you could manage to get my recall deferred."

"That's just _it_!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I see everything, I hear everything--yet I can _do_ nothing. Papa thinks I'm merely a foolish female creature and his attitude blocks me at every turn." Lindsay realized again how fundamentally frustrated she was, wondered if she would ever find a completely satisfactory release.

Lindsay decided to play along. "All right," he said. "Shall we go?"

"Thanks, darling," she promised. "We'd better go separately. There will be a blue copter-cab waiting outside when you leave." She leaned across the table to brush his lips briefly with hers, squeezed his hand and glided off.

* * * * *

He wondered, while he waited for the check, just how foolhardly he was being, allowing himself to be summoned to a meeting of palace conspirators. It could very easily be a trap, whether Maria knew it or not. It could be a ruse to add fuel to the fire being lit under him for his recall as a _legate persona non grata_ on Earth.

"You _haven't_ forgotten our date, have you darling?" The voice was throatily reproachful above him and he looked up in surprise at a glittering female figure, who seemed to be clad entirely in blazing brilliants.

She was tall and blonde, her hair an ocean helmet of gold, sprinkled with gems. Her face was beautifully boned, with broad cheeks and forehead pierced by a decided widow's peak. Light green eyes slanted upward beneath brows like the wings of some tiny graceful bird. Nose, lips and chin gained fascination from the perfection they skirted but just escaped. Face, arms, upper bosom and shoulders wore the even tawny golden tan that only some blondes can achieve.

Her figure, ashimmer with gems, was lithe of waist, firmly full of breast and pelvis, moved with the enticing grace of an Indonesian temple dancer as she slipped into the seat Maria had so recently vacated.

"Sorry, your highness," he said with a look of honest admiration. "I didn't know we _had_ a date."

"We have now," she stated. She laid a handbag solidly encrusted with diamonds, emeralds and rubies on the table, said to the dwarf waiter, "Bring me the usual, Joe--and give Ambassador Lindsay another of whatever he's drinking."

_At any other time_, Lindsay thought. He said, "I regret this more than you'll ever know, my dear, but I've got a copter-cab waiting for me outside."

"It will keep." The girl pouted prettily, then leaned toward him and said huskily, "We'll have just one here. Then we can go to my place. It's just outside of Biloxi, almost on the Gulf. We can watch the dawn come up over the water. We can--"

"Stop twisting my arm," said Lindsay, trying to keep his thoughts in focus. Who had sent _this_ girl and why? And what, he wondered, awaited him in Biloxi.

He got up, tossed a twenty-credit note on the table. "This will pay the check," he informed her.

"Not so fast," said the houri, rising with him. Trying to ignore her, he headed toward the door as fast as he could.

She kept after him and his ears burned as he plunged out into the night, saw the blue copter-cab waiting with its door open at the curb. But when he tried to plunge toward it he was halted by an arm whose sharp-faceted jeweled adornments cut his adam's apple. He gasped but the girl got in front of him, waving her bag.

There was a faint popping noise as the door closed and the copter-cab swiftly and silently darted away. Stunned by the swiftness of events, Lindsay was utterly incapable of resistance when his decorative tormentor thrust him into another vehicle. As they took off he said, "I suppose this is the prelude to another assassination try."

"Night soil!" said a familiar voice. "What the hell do you think I just saved you from, boss?"

* * * * *

Lindsay uttered one word--a word which, he thought later, was singularly revealing as to his native flair for diplomacy. He said, briefly and succinctly, "_Huh?_"

"Listen, my fine unfeathered Martian friend." She sounded like a primary school teacher addressing an overgrown and somewhat backward pupil. "Somebody fired a glass bullet at you from that cab."

"How do you...?" he began helplessly.

For answer she turned on the copter-cab light, revealing the back of a uniformed chauffeur, and showed him her handbag. There was a slight tear in one side of its begemmed surface and, when she shook it, bits of glass fell to the floor. "Careful," she warned when he reached for the bag. "It was probably packed with poison." Then, "Can you think of a better shield than diamonds?"

He said, "_Ulp!_" Unquestionably, now that she had revealed herself, this glittering creature was his slovenly office Nina. Seeking desperately to recover what had at best been a shaky boss-secretary relationship, he said, "Where are you taking me?"

"Out of the city, boss," she informed him. "We really are going to my place in Biloxi. You're much too hot a property to be allowed to wander around loose. Two tries in less than twenty-four hours."

"Then Maria..." he said, wonderingly.

Nina picked his thought up crisply. "We don't know whether your little playmate put the finger on you consciously or not. But she did it. Some of that sweet little crew she pals around with are desperate. They don't believe they can lick the computers and their only hope is to foment incidents that will lead to an interplanetary war. Nice kids!"

"But why pick on me?" he asked. "From what Maria said tonight I'm their one hope of beating the machines."

Nina shook her head at him sadly. "And you're the best brain our Martian cousins could send us. Here it is in words of one syllable. Maria's mob wants war. They believe they can light the powder train by arranging the assassination of a Martian Plenipotentiary.

"Meanwhile your speech yesterday and your fouling up Doc Craven's computer this afternoon, and whatever you did at the tennis tonight, have the Computer crowd screaming for your recall before you upset their little red wagon." She paused, added, "Naturally Maria's crowd wants to have you killed before you become a mere private citizen of Mars. Once you're removed from office you aren't important enough to cause a war."

"Good God!" said Lindsay as the double pattern became apparent. Then, curiously, "And just whom do you represent, Nina?"

She eyed him steadily, mockingly for a moment. Then she said, "Let's just say for now that I represent the Model's Union. We don't want any wartime austerity wrecking our pitch. Will that do?"

"I guess it will have to," he said. Then, plucking a diamond-and-emerald necklace from among the half-dozen about her throat, "You certainly didn't give poor Anderson much for his money."

"Stop it!" she snapped. "Do you want my eyes to swell up again? In a way what happened tonight was all your fault. Fernando and I were going to keep close tabs on you but you fouled me up with your beastly remark about my business at Doc Craven's and then put poor Fernando out of commission by getting mixed up in that riot at the Colosseum. I barely made the Pelican in time."

He thought of giving Nina the receipt from Zoffany's in his pocket, decided not to take the chance. So he said, "Is Fernando working for the Model's Union too?"

"Stop trying to be funny," she told him. "Night soil! You make me so damned mad. Letting that little tramp Maria nail you."

"At the time there wasn't much alternative," he said. Then, eyeing her closely, "How come you're mixed up in UW politics? I thought models were strictly for fun and games."

Nina said matter-of-factly, "I won top model rating when I was seventeen. I still hold it and I'm twenty-six now. A girl can get tired of being and doing the same thing--even in my profession. Besides, I've got brains. So I try to use them."

"How come you decided to be my secretary?"

"We drew lots and I lost," she informed him.

* * * * *

The copter dropped by searchlight to a flagged terrace in front of a dark cottage just off the beach. "Thanks, Bob," said Nina. "Tell the boys to stand by with their guard beams up." Then, to Lindsay, "Come on, boss, let's get out of this heap."

She walked swiftly toward the cottage, pressed something. Soft lights came on, revealing a charming simulated wood dwelling in the fine antique Frank Lloyd Wright tradition. She ushered him into a delightfully gay bathroom looking out on the water, said, "Wait here while I get this armor off."

Lindsay felt a slight qualm as he considered what being a top model at seventeen must mean. And then he thought, Why not? Certainly he had no claim on Nina's morals. He doubted if anyone had a claim of any kind on her.

She emerged, looking unexpectedly like a young girl in simple clout and cup-bra, which exposed most of her gorgeously tanned body. Her hair, innocent of jewels like the rest of her, was clubbed back simply with some sort of clip. She lit a cigarette and said, "Now--how the hell are you fouling up the computers?"

"I'm not," he told her promptly. "At least not in the case of the tennis match. I just happened to know something about Pat O'Ryan the people who fed facts to the computer didn't."

"That goon Pat!" she said. "He's so damned dumb."

"You know him well?" he asked with a trace of jealousy.

"I know him." She dismissed it with a flick of her cigarette. "It's a good thing you knew _judo_ too, boss. But what did you do to him that fouled up the match?"

"While he was out cold I gave him a shot of whiskey to bring him 'round," Lindsay told her. "He didn't know about it and I didn't tell him when he informed me about his grain-alcohol allergy. So for once the computer didn't get full facts. And I had them."

For the first time Lindsay basked in a smile of approval from Nina. She said, "And then you had to mess me up at Doc Craven's so I couldn't sit in on the match."

"I'm sorry about that," he said sincerely. "You might brief me so I don't do it again."

"Well...." She hesitated. "I don't want to set myself off. It's not uncommon among us--models. You see, we're proud of our careers, not like the two-credit whores who wear glasses and harnesses. And it hurts us when someone refers to our work as business. You see, there's nothing really commercial about it. So when you--"

"But how the devil was I to know you were a model?" he asked her.

"I know," she said illogically. "But it still made me mad." Then, frowning, "But if the computer was wrong because of incomplete knowledge at the Colosseum, what was wrong at Doc Craven's?"

Lindsay said, "I'm damned if I know."

"We've _got_ to know, with the president ready to put Giac to work."

"I meant to tell you about that," said Lindsay.

"Don't worry," Nina informed him. "Your table at the Pelican was wired."

"Why are you against computers?" Lindsay asked her.

She dropped her smoke in a disposal-tray, said, "Never mind why--let's just accept the fact that I am. And not for Fernando Anderson's reason either. He just wants power."

"And what do you want?"

"Me?" Her eyebrows rose in surprise. "Why, I just want to have _fun_!" She extended her arms and flapped her hands like birds. Then, again reverting to seriousness, "I wish you'd tell me everything that went on at Doc Craven's yesterday. Dammit, _his_ office wasn't wired."

Lindsay went through it, as nearly word for word as he could, then did it again when no answer was quickly forthcoming. Nina listened, her perfect forehead marred by a frown. Finally she said, "Let's take a dip. It's almost dawn."

She removed what clothing she wore and Lindsay did likewise. They felt the refreshing caress of the cool Gulf water on their skins--but that was all the caressing there was. Nina, unlike Maria, was all business despite the near-blatant perfection of her charms. Back in the bathroom she said, "The only thing I can think of is that stigmata business. Why should you imagine a mark on your mother's forehead?"

"Because she had one," he told her bluntly. "It was not unattractive--my father used to call it her beauty mark."

Nina ran long slim fingers through her water-dark hair and said incredulously, "You mean blemishes are not removed automatically at birth on Mars?"

"Why, no," said Lindsay, surprised. "It's entirely up to the individual--or the parents."

"And Doc Craven asked no questions that would lead to the truth?" the girl asked, blinking. When Lindsay shook his head she suddenly grabbed him and kissed him and did a little dance of sheer joy. "It's simply too good to be true! Two computers fouled in one day through missing information!"

"You're right, of course," he admitted. "But I'm damned if I see how it does us any good."

"You idiot!" she shook him. "It clears the whole situation. It means that the computers cannot give accurate answers according to the symbolic logic tables unless they get full information. And you have proved two breakdowns in the inescapable human element--the information feeding--just like _that_!" She snapped her fingers. "It means we've got the whole computer-cult on the hip. I could kiss you again, you big goon." She did so.

"Cut it out," he said. "I'm not made of brass."

She said, "Night soil," amiably. What he might have done he was never to know, for a buzzer sounded and Nina moved quickly to a wall-talkie. She said, "All right, Bob, you say he's clean?" Then, a moment later, "Better let him in and say his piece." And, to Lindsay, "We've got company. Dmitri Alenkov--met him?"

Lindsay frowned. "You mean the Soviet _charge d'affaires_? I met him at the reception last week. Dreadful little lizard."

"Dmitri might surprise you," she said enigmatically.

Lindsay almost said _night soil_ himself in exasperation. Instead and peevishly he asked, "Is there anybody you don't know--intimately?"

She laughed. "Of course," she said, "I don't know many women."

* * * * *

The Soviet diplomat entered the bathroom. He was a languid mincing creature whose decadence glowed around him like phosphorescence around a piece of rotted swampwood. He said, "I hope I am not intruding."

"That depends," Nina told him. "_I'd_ like to know how you traced us here so quickly."

"My sweet," said the Russian in intensely Oxford Esperanto, "you and your friend's"--with another bow toward Lindsay--"little affair at the Pelican was witnessed this evening. When the two of you departed together, heading eastward, and Ambassador Lindsay could not be reached in his apartment...." He paused delicately.

So this, thought Lindsay, was a descendant of one of the Red Commissars whose fanatic and chill austerity had terrorized the free world of a century ago. Lindsay knew something of modern Soviet history, of course. There had been no real counter-revolution. Instead the gradual emergence of the scientists over their Marxist political rulers had been a slow process of erosion.

Once computer rule was inaugurated in the North American Republic and swept the Western World, the scientists had simply taken over real power. The once-powerful Politburo and its sub-committees became obsolete.

Alenkov was stressing this very point. He said, "So you see, we, the best blood of Russia, are forced by these machines to live the lives of outcast children. Naturally we resent it. And when, after so many long years of waiting, we learn that one man has succeeded in foiling the computers where no man has succeeded before, we want to know his secret. We must have it."

Nina spoke first. She said, "Dmitri, the secret, as you call it, has been right there all along for any of us to see. It just happens that Ambassador Lindsay fell into it head first."

"Thanks for the 'Ambassador' anyway," Lindsay said drily.

Nina quelled him with a frown. "The computer weakness," she said, "lies in the human element. Now figure that out for yourself."

Alenkov's brows all but met in the middle of his forehead and his mouth became a little round O under the twin commas of his mustache. He said, "I see."

He left shortly afterward on a note of sadness, rousing himself only to say to Lindsay, "Ambassador, you are a very lucky man." His eyes caressed Nina's near-nude figure.

"That," Lindsay told him, "is what you think."

When he had departed Lindsay suddenly realized he was exhausted. He sank back in a contour chair and let fatigue sweep over him. But Nina paced the bathroom floor like a caged cat. Finally she went to the wall-talkie, gave a number in a low voice.

She pushed some sort of signal button several times, then swore and said, "Better not sleep now, boss. We're cut off."

It brought him to with a start. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Somebody or something is jamming our communicator."

She opened a concealed cabinet, apparently part of the bathroom wall, drew from it a couple of light but deadly looking blasters, and tossed one onto the contour chair in front of him. "You know how to work one of these things?" she asked.

"Better drop the weapons," a quiet voice said from the doorway behind them. "You haven't got a chance."

The speaker wore the light blue tunicall that was the summer uniform of the Army of the Republic of North America. His cap and shoulder-boards were bright with silver lace and he held a singularly ugly little automatic weapon cradled across one forearm.

Nina and Lindsay dropped their weapons. But the girl's back was up. Her slanting eyes crackled green fire as she said, "What right have you bastards got to come busting in here without a warrant?"

"Sorry," said the officer with chilling courtesy. "As it happens we do have a warrant. Remember, Miss Beckwith, this cottage is not United World's soil." He tossed an official looking document which Nina caught, motioned a couple of his men to pick up her weapons.

"All right," she said after scanning the warrant. "What do you want?"

"Ambassador Lindsay," was the reply. "We have been ordered to ensure that no harm comes to him while he is on American soil."

"I can read!" snapped the girl. "There's going to be hell to pay over this." Then, to Lindsay, "We can't stop them now but they can't hold you. _I_ can see to that. Just try to keep your big dumb blundering self out of any extra trouble till we can take steps--will you promise me that, boss?"

"I'll try," said Lindsay.

* * * * *

They took him to Washington--or rather to Sherwood Forest, in Annapolis, where the summer White House sprawled over and beneath its landscaped acres. To a man from Mars it was very green, very lush, very beautiful.

Lindsay's first impression of famed President Giovannini was that the famous elected leader of the North American Republic was composed mostly of secretaries. But at last one of them--the seventh or eighth--said gravely, "If you'll just step this way, please," to Lindsay and motioned for the Army officer to remain where he was. He was admitted to the bathroom of the man who had sent for him so summarily.

The president proved to be unexpectedly like some of the governors of Lindsay's home planet--incisive, unaffected, easily articulate. Physically he was stocky, of middle height, with a round, firmly fleshed sensitive face. He wore huaraches and bright blue shorts, no glasses or distortion harness.

He waved Lindsay to a contour chair beside his own, said, "Sorry I had to have you hauled here this way. I was afraid you'd get killed if I didn't. Do you have any idea of the uproar you've caused in the past two days, young man?"

Lindsay, somewhat taken aback by the president's abruptness, said, "Well, I knew some small groups were upset but...."

"Take a look," the president told him, waving toward a quartet of vidar screens on the wall. Over one of them was the legend, New Orleans, over another, New York, over a third, Los Angeles, over the fourth, Chicago. "Those are live shots," Giovannini added.

Lindsay was appalled. Each of them showed rioting crowds and defensive police action; the commentaries cried their confusion. However, the Martian got the drift quickly enough. Apparently his recent activities had driven the neurotic Earthlings to violence.

There appeared to be two chief factions. One of them, smashing and swarming and screaming its outrage, was demanding the abolishment of computer government. The other, equally violent and even more numerous, was after a villain named Zalen Lindsay.

Seeing that Lindsay was beginning to understand what was happening, the president pressed a button that turned off all the vidar screens and voices. He said, "I could switch to any of our other cities--to cities in South America, India, Western Europe, England. They're especially bitter toward you in England."

"I'm beginning to accept the fact--if not to understand," said Lindsay.

The president said, "Lindsay, from the point of view of your planet you have done nothing improper. But from the point of view of this planet...." He let silence and a shrug of thick shoulders finish the sentence.

"I had no idea," Lindsay began, "that conditions on Earth...." He let his own voice trail off.

Giovannini finished it for him. "You had no idea people on Earth were so damned neurotic," he said, and sighed. Then, "Lindsay--call me Johnny, will you? All my friends do--Lindsay, for generations now people by and large have been forfeiting confidence in themselves to confidence in computers.

"They have had good reason. Computer judgment has been responsible for the first true age of world peace in history. It may not be healthy but it's a damn sight healthier than war. And it has transformed this republic from an unwieldy group of states into a controlled anarchy that can be run by pushbuttons under ordinary conditions."

He paused while the Martian lit a cigarette, then went on with, "Thanks first to Sylac, then to Elsac, we learned that Vermont was happiest under its Town Meeting method, North Carolina needed its oligarchy, while my native state, California, is much better off divided in two. Texas became happy with its triple legislature--they never are happy unless they have a little more of everything down there. It was the same in other countries--Canada, South America, Spain...."

"And England?" Lindsay said softly.

The president sighed again. "England," he admitted, "is a bit of a problem--out of all proportion to its size and current importance. But the British are stubborn about their institutions. They've hung onto a Royal Family a hundred years longer than anyone else. We can hardly expect them to give up their beloved socialism so soon."

"Just as long as Mars is not expected to pay for this indulgence, it's quite all right with my people," Lindsay told him.

"What's _your_ first name--Zalen?" the president asked. "Well, Zalen, I know it's a problem but we all have to give a little or crowd somebody out. Zalen, people are getting killed on account of you right now."

"I've nearly been killed a couple of times myself."

"I know. Regrettable," said Giovannini. "The UW crowd never has understood security. That's why I had to kidnap you, Zalen. Couldn't have you killed, you know. Not now anyway."

"Glad you feel that way, Johnny." Lindsay told him drily. "But hasn't it occurred to you that if people here are so easily set off it might be a good idea to knock out this computer business once and for all?"

The president puffed on his cigarette. Then he said, "Zale, twenty years ago, maybe even ten, it could have been done. Now it's too late. Which is why the ninety-billion-dollar investment in Giac. We've got to give them an absolute computer, one that will remove forever the basic distrust of computer judgment that underlies the neuroses you just mentioned."

"Quite possibly," said Lindsay. "But I haven't actually done a damned thing myself to undermine computer judgment. The mistakes have been made by the so-called experts who have fed their machines inadequate information. Those mistakes were infantile. They suggest some sort of neurosis on the part of the feeders. They could be mistake-prone, you know."

President Giovannini chuckled again. "Of course they're mistake-prone, Zalen," he said. "Some of them, anyway. And it's getting worse. That's the real reason for Giac. Wait'll you see it!"

"You think I'm going to be around that long, Johnny?" Lindsay asked. "I understand I'm to be sent back to Mars--if I live that long."

"No, Lindsay, we need you--I'll explain in a moment. And we aren't going to let you die and become a martyr for generations of anti-computerites. We can't have that now, can we?"

"I'll go along with you on it," said Lindsay, wondering what the president was leading up to.

"Good!" The president beamed at him. "Zalen--I want _you_ to be the first person to put Giac through a public test. That's how much I trust that machine. I want you, the man who has fouled up two computers, including Elsac, to try her out."

* * * * *

And Lindsay could only nod. The governors of Mars might not approve but after the uproar he had caused on this mission they could hardly object. President Giovannini's scheme was fully up to that renowned statesman's reputation for political astuteness. The more Lindsay thought it over the more beautiful was its simplicity.

Mere word that he was to conduct the first public test would quell the rioting. And unless Lindsay could show this mightiest of all symbolic logic computers to be fallible, computer rule would be entrenched on Earth as never before.

But what if, in some way, he succeeded in confounding the computer? Lindsay shuddered as he thought of the rioting he had so recently witnessed on the vidar-screens.

His face must have revealed his distress for the president said, "You're worn out, Zalen. Can't have that, you know. Not with the big test coming tomorrow."

Lindsay barely remembered leaving the president and being led to a sleeping chamber somewhere in the vast mansion. When he woke up it was dark and Nina was perched on the edge of his contour couch, looking unexpectedly demure in a grey bolo with white collar and cuffs.

He said, as articulate as usual when she surprised him, "Hi."

"About time you woke up," she said. "Do you know you snore?"

"I can't help it," he told her. Then, coming fully awake, "How the devil did you get _here_?"

"I walked," she informed him succinctly. She stood up, her magnificent figure silhouetted against the light. "Better get dressed--your duds are over there." She nodded toward a walldrobe. "I'll wait in the bathroom." She breezed out.

When he looked at the clothing he was to wear he sensed that Nina had selected it for him. It was a little brighter in color, a little more daring in cut, than what he would have picked for himself.

Nina was placing jewels carefully in her hair, which she had released to form a sleek halo around her magnificent head, when he entered the bathroom. A small palisade of glittering jeweled hairpins protruded from her mouth. She had shed her demure bolo and stood revealed in glittering black bodice-bra and evening skirt-clout.

After placing the last jewel in her hair she swung about and said, "There--how do I look?"

"Gorgeous," he told her.

"You look a bit dull," she said. She dug a box out of a travel-bag placed in a corner of the room. "Here," she said. "Put this on--left side."

"This" proved to be a magnificent sunburst decoration, a glittering diamond-encrusted star. He said, "What is it?"

"Grand Order of the United Worlds--a fine diplomat you are! I picked it up for you this afternoon before flying here. Just stick it on...." She came over, took it from him, pressed it firmly against his bolo till the suction grips caught hold.

He put his arms around her. She let him hold her a moment, then pushed clear in the immemorial gesture of women dressed for a party who do not want to have their grooming mussed. "Not now," she said. "We'll have plenty of time."

"Not for what's worrying _me_," he said. "Nina, I've got to put Giac through its paces in front of the whole world tomorrow. And I don't know what to ask it. I've got a blind spot where symbolic logic is concerned."

"Don't fret yourself," said the girl calmly. "I'm not worried about _you_. Not after what you've managed to do to all the other computers you've faced. Come on--we're having dinner with the president."

"Who the hell _are_ you anyway?" he asked her bluntly. "You don't even look the same."

She laughed. "I should _hope_ not," she told him. "After all, I could hardly grace the president's table as a mere UW secretary--_or_ as a New Orleans top model. Come on!"

He went--and got his second shock when President Giovannini greeted Nina with a manner as close to obsequiousness as that professionally free-and-easy politician could muster. He said, "My dear Miss Norstadt-Ramirez. I do hope you'll forgive me for ordering such summary action this morning. If I'd had the slightest idea...."

"I was boiling," Nina told him. "I was just about ready to order Aetnapolitan to pull the props out from under you when the riots started. Then I blessed your shiny little head and came up here."

"I am honored," said the president.

* * * * *

Lindsay, walking through the proceedings in a fog, was even more laconic than a clipped British envoy who, along with a recovered Senator Anderson, was a member of the party.

"Don't take it so hard," Anderson whispered. "Nina is just about the best-kept secret in this hemisphere. If I weren't one of the few who's been in on it all along...." He shrugged eloquently.

Lindsay said nothing. He couldn't. So Nina--his fresh slatternly secretary, the courtesan of the world capital--was also Coranina Norstadt-Ramirez, the heiress who owned almost half of Earth!

He felt like a quadruply-plated idiot. He knew about Norstadt-Ramirez--who didn't, whether on Earth or Mars or the space-stations circling Venus while that planet's atmosphere was being artificially altered to make it fit for human habitation?

She was a fantastic glamorous lady of mystery, the ultimate heiress, the young woman to whom inexorably, thanks to North America's matriarchal era during the twentieth century, the control of most of its mightiest corporations and trust funds had descended.

And she was Lindsay's secretary. No wonder, he thought miserably, she had never sounded quite sincere about calling him boss. Why, she virtually owned his home planet as well. He watched her covertly across the table, poised, amused, alert, occasionally witty--and so damnably attractive. He wished he were dead.

She caught his regard, scowled and stuck her tongue out at him. He thought. _Why, you little...!_

Somehow she got them out of the chatter after dinner, got him back to his suite. There, regarding him sternly, she said, "Zale, you aren't going to be stuffy about this, are you?"

"I can't help it," he replied. "If you'd only told me...."

He read sympathy in her green eyes. But she merely shrugged and said, "Result of a lifetime of keeping myself under wraps." She sat on a contour chair, patted a place for him alongside.

She said, "I'm the richest single person there has ever been--you know that. It isn't my fault. It just happened. I didn't deserve or want or need it. But it is a hell of a responsibility. Since I'm responsible for so much it seemed important to me to know how people felt. After all we act because we feel. And thanks to a few good friends like Fernando Anderson I've been able to get away with it."

"Why me?" he asked her. "Why pick on me?"

Her expression softened. One of her hands crept into his. "One of the nicest things about you, Zale, is the fact that you don't realise just how special you are."

"I'm not so special on Mars," he told her.

"No?" Her eyebrows rose delightfully. "A quarter of a billion Martians select you as their first Plenipotentiary to the UW and you're not special? Zale, you're an absolute woolly lamb.

"There's more to it than that. I've never been to Mars. I should have, but I simply haven't had the time. So I decided the best way to find out about Mars at second hand was to work with you in some capacity that would let you be yourself."

"A filthy, underhanded, thoroughly feminine trick," he said gently and kissed her. Then, frowning into her green eyes, "But why are you so dead set against computer judgment?"

"Isn't it obvious?" she asked. "I've got a tremendous stake in this world. Kicking around it as I have I've been able to see what is happening. I'm damned if I'm going to have my property managed and run by a bunch of people who make mistakes because they're too neurotic to make decisions. Look at them!" Her voice became edged with disgust.

Lindsay said, "I see. Listen, honey, I'd like to sleep with you tonight."

She looked surprised but not displeased by his bluntness. "Of course, darling," she told him.

"How much will it cost me?" he asked her.

She froze--then her eyes began to fill and she sniffled. He said, "You know I didn't mean that. Dammit, I just wanted to show you you're a neurotic yourself."

She slapped him hard enough to tilt him off the contour chair. She rose haughtily, still sniffing. Lindsay stretched out a hand and caught one of her ankles and tripped her up. She tottered, gave vent to a startled, "_Awk!_", fell backward into the pool-tub.

He dived in after her, caught her when she came up, spluttering, gripped her shoulders hard. Her eyes blazed green fire at him. She said, "How _dare_ you do that to me, you moron!"

He said, "If I hadn't I'd probably never have seen you again."

She collapsed into his arms.

Later--much later--as Nina was about to leave him for her own suite, he asked, "Honeycomb, what did you lose that caused Fernando to give you that necklace?"

"I nearly lost you," she replied from the doorway. "I bet him Maria wouldn't get you that night. And lost. So Fernando sent the necklace as compensation."

"Quite a large compensation," said Lindsay drily.

Nina shrugged. "Not for Fernando," she told him. "After all, I pay him enough. He's my number one political boy. 'Night, darling."

* * * * *

Lindsay was on the verge of a breakdown himself by noon the next day, after Computation Minister du Fresne, looking uglier than ever, had finished conducting President Giovannini's official party through the rooms and passages of Giac. If Nina hadn't been by his side during and after the swift rocket trip to Death Valley, he might have collapsed.

It was she who had removed the glittering star from his breast before breakfast in the Sherwood Forest mansion that morning. "You needed something to wear for show last night," she had told him.

"Then it's not mine?" he had countered absently.

"Of course it is," she had assured him. "But Secretary General Bergozza is going to make the official investiture after the test."

Lindsay had meekly surrendered the bauble, barely noticing. His brain was straining to recall what he could of symbolic logic--a subject that had never particularly interested him. For some reason it kept working back to Lewis Carroll, who, under his real name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, had been the founder of symbolic logic back in the nineteenth century, along with the renowned Dr. Poole.

About all he could remember was the following problem:

(1) Every one who is sane can do Logic;

(2) No lunatics are fit to serve on a jury;

(3) None of _your_ sons can do Logic.

The Universal was "persons". The symbols were: a--able to do Logic; b--fit to serve on a jury; c--sane; d--your sons.

And the answer, of course, was: None of _your_ sons is fit to serve on a jury.

For some reason this, in turn, made him think of the ancient conundrum that employed confusion to trip its victims: What's the difference between an iron dog in the side yard of a man who wants to give his little daughter music lessons but is afraid he can't afford them next year, and a man who has a whale in a tank and wants to send him for a wedding present and is trying to pin a tag on him, saying how long he is, how much he weighs and where he comes from, but can't because the whale keeps sloshing around in the tank and knocking the tag off?

This time, the answer was: One can't wag his tail, the other can't tag his whale.

"None of _your_ sons is fit to tag a whale--or wag a tail," he said absently.

"What was that?" Nina asked.

"Nothing, nothing at all," he replied. "Merely a man going out of his mind."

"It will never miss you," she replied brightly. But her brightness became a bit strained as the day wore on. The trip, for Lindsay, was sheer nightmare. _No sane man can wag his tail_, he kept thinking.

Even such fugitive grasping at Logical straws vanished when he saw the immense squat mass of Giac, rising like a steel-and-concrete toad from the wastes of the California desert. It seemed absurd even to think that such an imposing and complex structure should have been reared on the mathematics of the immortal author of _Alice in Wonderland_, _Through the Looking Glass_ and _The Hunting of the Snark_.

For Giac _was_ imposing, even to a man biased against computers from birth. Nor did du Fresne's smugness help Lindsay's assurance a bit. He explained how each of the block-large preliminary feeders worked--one for mathematical symbols, one for oral recording, a third for written exposition. Each worked simultaneously and in three different ways--via drum-memory banks, via punched tapes, via the new "ear-tubes" that responded to sound.

Then there were the preliminary synthesizers, each of which unified in vapor-plutonium tubes the findings of its three separate feeders. Next, a towering black-metal giant filling three walls of a cubical room twenty metres in each dimension, came the final synthesizer, which coordinated the findings of the preliminary synthesizers and fed them into Giac itself.

The master machine was the least imposing of all. It stood like an alabaster stele in the center of an immense chamber arranged like a theater-in-the-round. But du Fresne, peering through his strawberry spectacles, said gloatingly, "Don't be deceived by the size, ladies and gentlemen. All but what you see of Giac is underground. It is contained in an all-metal cell one million cubic metres in volume. And it is infallible."

Fortunately Lindsay was given a half hour of final preparation in one of the small offices with which the above-ground building was honeycombed. Nina came with him--by request.

"I can't do it," he told her abruptly.

"Don't worry, darling, you'll think of something," she said. She tried to embrace him but he was too worried to respond. After awhile she said, "Why not put a direct question. Ask it if it's infallible."

"It could hardly tell a lie on itself," he replied.

"What if such a question involved destruction of part of itself in the answer?" she asked.

"It might--though I presume du Fresne and his boys have prepared it for such jokers. And anyway, what sort of question would do that? Got any ideas?"

"That's your department," she said helpfully. "You're the computer smasher of this team."

"But that was pure luck," he said half-angrily. "One can't wag his tail.... The other can't serve on a jury."

She looked alarmed. "Darling," she said, "you aren't--"

"Not yet, Honeycomb," he said, "but give me time.

"It's got to be something about this Mars-Earth problem," he went on after a long silence. "Listen: how can Mars develop if it's in the spot of the Red Queen--has to run like hell just to stay where it is thanks to Earth's dumping policies?"

* * * * *

The door opened and closed and Maria Bergozza was with them. She said, "Apparently this is necessary." She was holding a glass-pellet gun in her hand, pointing it at Lindsay.

He said, "Why, you--!" and moved toward her. Promptly the Secretary General's daughter pointed the gun at Nina's tanned midriff. He stopped.

Maria said evenly, "It's _you_ that have done this to me, Nina. You've had all the fun while I've had to pour tea for papa at his damned functions. You've fouled up our plans with your meddling down in New Orleans. And now you've taken Zale, as you take everything else you take a fancy to."

"But you tried to kill him," said Nina. "Why should you care?"

"He would have been a martyr--and _you_ wouldn't have had him," said Maria, her gun hand steady. "I know it's going to ruin me to kill you--but my whole life is ruined anyway. And this way at least I can sacrifice it for the cause."

"The cause of interplanetary war?" said Lindsay, in his turn incredulous. Hot rage rose within him, "You third-rate tramp!" He stepped squarely into the line of fire, thrust his left breast in front of the muzzle of her gun. Behind him Nina screamed.

But Maria didn't fire. Instead she sneezed--sneezed and sneezed again. Her gun hand gyrated wildly as she doubled in a paroxysm and Nina moved past Lindsay to pluck the weapon from her.

"Don't call me--krrrra_shew_!--third-rate," she managed to gasp before the blonde sent her sprawling with a very efficient right cross to the chin.

Nina turned on Lindsay angrily. "You damned fool!" she almost shouted. "You might have been killed."

He looked down, felt his knees turn to water. He said, "Omigod--I thought I was still wearing the star. I remembered how you saved my life in New Orleans with your diamond evening bag!"

He sat down--hard. From the floor Maria whimpered, "What are you going to do to me?"

Nina said, "I ought to kill you, you know, but it would cause too much of a stink. So beat it and let us think. You'll be hearing from me later. What you hear will depend on how you handle yourself from now on. Understand?"

When she had slunk out Lindsay said, "What broke her up?"

Nina dropped the gun into her bag casually, said, "Now I know you're lucky, you thin slob. You happened to stumble right onto her allergy. She can't stand being thought of as a third-rate lover. That's why she's always been jealous of me--because I have top-model rating and she could never make it. She's too damned concerned with pleasing herself to please anyone else. She flunked out at fourteen."

"Then why didn't _you_ pull it?" Lindsay asked her, astonished.

"Because," Nina said thoughtfully, "I'm not conditioned to think that way. It's horribly rude here on Earth to stir up other people's allergies. As you reminded me last night, you rat, we're all people in glass houses."

"But I didn't even know...." muttered Lindsay.