The Ambassador — Reading Companion

There was going to be hell to pay--and Lindsay was honestly looking forward to it. While Secretary General Carlo Bergozza, his dark-green spectacles resembling parenthesis marks on either side of his thin eagle beak, went through the motions of adjourning the Congress for forty-eight hours, Lindsay considered his mission and its purpose.

Earth--a planet whose age-old feuds had been largely vitiated by the increasing rule of computer-judgment--and Mars, the one settled alien planet on which no computer had ever been built, were drifting dangerously apart.

It was, Lindsay thought with a trace of grimness, the same ancient story of the mother country and her overseas colonies, the same basic and seemingly inevitable trend, social and economic, that had led to the revolt of North America against England, three hundred years earlier.

On a far vaster and costlier scale, of course.

Lindsay had been sent to Earth, as his planet's first representative at the new United Worlds Congress, to see that this trend was halted before it led to irrevocable division. And not by allowing Mars to become a mere feeder and dumping ground for the parent planet.

Well, he had tossed a monkey wrench into the machinery of interplanetary sweetness and light, he thought. Making his way slowly out with the rest of the Congress, he felt like the proverbial bull in the china shop. The others, eyeing him inscrutably through their eye-glasses and over their harness humps, drew aside to let him walk through.

But all around him, in countless national tongues, he heard the whispers, the mutterings--"sending a gladiator" ... "looks like a vidar star" ... "too young for such grave responsibility" ... "no understanding of the basic sensitivities"....

Obviously, he had _not_ won a crushing vote of confidence.

To hell with them, all of them, he thought as someone tapped him on a shoulder. He turned to find du Fresne, the North American Minister of Computation, peering up at him through spectacles that resembled twin scoops of strawberry ice-cream mounted in heavy white-metal rims.

"I'd like a word with you," he said, speaking English rather than Esperanto. Lindsay nodded politely, thinking that du Fresne looked rather like a Daumier judge with his fashionable humped back and long official robe of office.

Over a table in the twilight bar du Fresne leaned toward him, nearly upsetting his colafizz with a sleeve of his robe.

"M-mind you," he said, "this is strictly unofficial, Lindsay, but I have your interests at heart. You're following trend X."

"Got me all nicely plotted out on your machine?" said Lindsay.

Du Fresne's sallow face went white at this pleasantry. As Minister of Computation his entire being was wrapped up in the immensely intricate calculators that forecast all decisions for the huge North American republic. Obviously battling anger, he said, "Don't laugh at Elsac, Lindsay. It has never been wrong--it can't be wrong."

"I'm not laughing," said Lindsay quietly. "But no one has ever fed me to a computer. So how can you know...?"

"We have fed it every possible combination of circumstances based upon all the facts of Terro-Martian interhistory," the Minister of Computation stated firmly. His nose wrinkled and seemed to turn visibly pink at the nostril-edges. He said, "Damn! I'm allergic to computer-ridicule." He reached for an evapochief, blew his nose.

"Sorry," said Lindsay, feeling the mild amazement that seemed to accompany all his dealings with Earthfolk. "I wasn't--"

"I doe you weren'd," du Fresne said thickly. "Bud de vurry zuggedgeshun of ridicule dudz id." He removed his strawberry spectacles, produced an eye-cup, removed and dried the contact lenses beneath. After he had replaced them his condition seemed improved.

Lindsay offered him a cigarette, which was refused, and selected one for himself. He said, "What happens if I pursue trend X?"

"You'll be assassinated," du Fresne told him nervously. "And the results of such assassination will be disastrous for both planets. Earth will have to go to war."

"Then why not ship us goods we can use?" Lindsay asked quietly.

Du Fresne looked at him as despairingly as his glasses would permit. He said, "You just don't understand. Why didn't your people send someone better attuned to our problems?"

"Perhaps because they felt Mars would be better represented by someone attuned to its own problems," Lindsay told him. "Don't tell me your precious computers recommend murder and war."

"They don't recommend anything," said du Fresne. "They merely advise what will happen under given sets of conditions."

"Perhaps if you used sensible judgment instead of machines to make your decisions you could prevent my assassination," said Lindsay, finishing his scotch on the rocks. "Who knows?" he added. "You might even be able to prevent an interplanetary war!"