The Lost Worlds of 2001

18. Midnight, Washington
The reception at the Little White House, as the vice-president's mansion was invariably called, was one of the events of the season. There was much heart-burning because invitations were restricted to those associated with the project; but if this had not been done, most of official Washington would have been there. Moreover, everyone wanted to keep this as small and intimate as possible; it would be the last time all six astronauts would be gathered together on Earth, and the last opportunity for many of their friends to say farewell to them.

No one mentioned this, but everybody was aware of it. So this was no ordinary reception; there was a curious emotional atmosphere-not one of sadness or foreboding, but rather of excitement and exaltation.

"Look at them!" said Anita Andersen as she and Floyd orbited together across the dance floor. "What do you suppose they're really thinking?" She nodded her head toward the little group around the Vice-President and Mrs. Kelly; their hosts were talking to Bowman, Kaminski, Whitehead, and Poole.

"I can probably tell you," Floyd said. "By this time, I know as much about them as any of the psychologists. But why are you interested?"

His curiosity was genuine, quite unaffected by any taint of jealousy or sexual rivalry. (Besides, who could be jealous of six men about to leave Earth for years, perhaps forever?)

"It's hard for a woman to understand," Anita murmured above the background of the music, as they swirled round the little island of trees in the center of the dance floor. "Leaving all this behind, going off into space, not knowing what they're going to find, or even if they'll come

"I thought there was Viking blood in your veins," Floyd chided gently.

"I was always sorry for their women; they must have spent half their lives wondering if they were widows."

"At least we've avoided that problem here. There will be some unhappy girl friends, but that's all." He lowered his voice. "Here comes one of them."

Jack Kimball swirled by, his arms around a rather plump, vivacious blonde. As they were swept away by the other dancers, the girl suddenly began to laugh at something her consort had said.

"She certainly doesn't sound unhappy," commented Anita.

"Excellent. I shouldn't tell tales, but Jack has quite a reputation. Perhaps she realized that she couldn't hold on to him, and is making the best of a bad job."

"Bowman's the one who fascinates me, I've heard such conflicting stories about him. Is he really unpopular?"

"It depends on the point of view. He's a perfectionist. He can't stand people who aren't fit, or machines that won't work-and that makes life tough for his associates. Incidentally, he also seems to be lucky-he's never been involved in an accident. Maybe he's earned his luck; either way, we want to share it."

"But his crewmates?" persisted Anita. "Do they like him?"

"They like him, otherwise, he wouldn't be there. He has that indefinable quality we call leadership-people will trust his decisions, and feel confident that he's made the correct ones. And ninety-nine percent of the time, he has. We can only hope he'll keep up that batting average, when he gets out to Jupiter."

"The one I really like," confided Anita, "is Dr. Poole. There's something warm and friendly about him-not that the others are unfriendly, of course."

"Everyone feels the same way about Kelvin. He cares for people-but sometimes I wonder if he cares enough for himself."

"What do you mean by that?"

"It's hard to express, and I may be seeing things that aren't there. Probably I can't understand the medical viewpoint-to an astronomer, physiology is so damn messy. But sometimes I think that Kelvin takes too many risks with himself. He's had several narrow escapes; he was nearly drowned-twice-testing artificial lungs. He's always breathing peculiar atmospheres, riding centrifuges, trying out medical gadgets. And I've lost count of the number of times he's hibernated."

"You make him sound just a little peculiar. I'm surprised he passed the psychological tests."

Floyd laughed.

"He helped to set most of them, and you know what a tight labor union the doctors have. But I don't mean that Kelvin is psychotic. I suspect he's just an unusually dedicated medical researcher, who finds that he's his own best guinea pig. Hello, Paul."

As Hunter and his companion swept past, Anita commented, "She's stunning. "Who is she?"

"Australian friend of Paul's-he has some business in Queensland."

"So it seems."

"Darling-are we going to dance or talk? I'm running out of gas."

"Mrs. Kelly seems to be signaling to us-let's break off when we reach her."

A few seconds later, a little breathless, they came to a halt at the Vice-President's group. Bowman and Poole had now disappeared, but Kaminsky and Whitehead were talking animatedly with the Kellys.

"Hello, Miss Andersen," said the Vice-President. "I hope you don't mind us interrupting for a moment."

There was the very faintest of underlining to the "Miss", the Kellys were very old-fashioned, and like the rest of Washington knew perfectly well that Floyd and his lady were not particularly interested in matrimony. But they liked Anita, even if they did not altogether approve of her.

"Mr. Whitehead was telling us about your Council's report on extraterrestrial life forms, Heywood. He says you've worked out the design of a perfectly efficient creature. Is that really true?"

"I was referring," Whitehead said hastily, "to that last Rand Corporation study. But I don't think the Vice President altogether believed me."

Everyone laughed at this, for Whitehead's hobby had been well publicized. Though he was one of the world's experts on life-support systems, and had once, by miracles of improvisation, kept a team of six men alive on Mars for a week when they had lost their oxygen reserve, he was also extraordinarily imaginative and could have earned a good living as a professional writer. That he had published some excellent science fiction under the pseudonym "Paul Black" was an open secret, and he had been responsible for negotiating the serialization, book, film, and TV rights for the mission. It often seemed that he spent most of his time in the old Life building; there were rumors that he had been observed in the picket lines protesting the demolition of that venerable antique.

It took Floyd several seconds to recall the details of the study; he must have read-or at any rate skimmed-at least a thousand reports in the last couple of years, and they tended to blur together. The Space Agency was always issuing contracts to universities, research organizations, and industrial firms for astronautical studies. Sometimes the result was a thick volume of graphs or equations, and sometimes it was what one acute congressional critic had called "high-priced science fiction."

"As I remember," he said, collecting his thoughts rapidly, "the biologists asked themselves the question, 'If we had no preconceived ideas, and were starting with a blank sheet of paper-how would we design an intelligent organism?"'

"I'm not much of an artist," Floyd apologized, after he had managed to borrow paper and pencil, "but the general conclusion was something like this."

He sketched quickly, and when he had finished Mr. Kelly said, "Ugh!"

"Well," chuckled Floyd, "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. And talking of eyes, there would be four of them, to provide all-round vision. They have to be at the highest part of the body, for good visibility-so."

He had drawn an egg-shaped torso surmounted by a small, conical head that was fused into it with no trace of a neck. Roughly sketched arms and legs were affixed at the usual places.

"Getting rid of the neck removes a fundamental weakness, we only need it because our eyes have a limited field of view, and we have to turn our heads to compensate."

"Why not a fifth eye on top, for upward vision?" asked Kaminski, in a tone of voice which showed what he, thought of the whole concept.

"Too vulnerable to falling objects. As it is, the four eyes would be recessed, and the head would probably be covered with a hard protective layer. For the brain would be somewhere in this general region-you want the shortest possible nerve connections to the eyes, because they are the most important sense organs."

"Can you be sure of that?"

"No-but it seems probable. Light is the fastest, longest-ranging carrier of information. Any sentient creature would surely take advantage of it. On our planet, eyes have evolved quite independently, over and over again, in completely separate species, and the end results have been almost identical."

"I agree," said Whitehead. "Look at the eye of an octopus-it's uncannily human. Yet we aren't even remote cousins."

"But where's the thing's nose and mouth?" asked Mrs. Kelly.

"Ah," said Floyd mischievously, "that was one of the most interesting conclusions of the study. It pointed out the utter absurdity of our present arrangements. Fancy combining gullet and windpipe in one tube and then running that through the narrow flexible column of the neck! It's a marvel we don't all choke to death every time we eat or drink, since food and air go down the same way."

Mrs. Kelly, who had been sipping at a highball, rather hastily put it down on the buffet table behind her.

"The oxygen and food intakes should be quite independent, and in the logical places. Here."

Floyd sketched in what appeared to be, from their position, two oversized nipples.

"The nostrils," he explained. "Where you want them- beside the lungs. There would be at least two, well apart for safety."

"And the mouth?"

"Obviously-at the front door of the stomach. Here."

The ellipse that Floyd sketched was too big to be a navel, though it was in the right place, and he quickly destroyed any lingering resemblance by insetting it with teeth.

"As a matter of fact," he added, "I doubt if a really advanced creature would have teeth. We're rapidly losing ours, and it's much too primitive to waste energy grinding and tearing tissues when we have machines that will do the job more efficiently."

At this point, the Vice-President unobtrusively abandoned the canape he had been nibbling with relish.

"No," continued Floyd remorselessly. "Their food intake would probably be entirely liquid, and their whole digestive apparatus far more efficient and compact than our primitive plumbing."

"I'm much too terrified to ask," said Vice-President Kelly, "how they would reproduce. But I'm relieved to see that you've given them two arms and legs, just like us."

"Well, from an engineering viewpoint it is quite hard to make a major improvement here. Too many limbs get in each other's way; tentacles aren't much good for precision work, though they might be a useful extra. Even five fingers seems about the optimum number; I suspect that hands will look very much the same throughout the universe even if nothing else does."

"And I suspect," said Kaminski, "that the people who designed our friend here failed to think far enough ahead. What's the purpose of food and oxygen? Why, merely combustion, to produce energy-at a miserable few percent efficiency. This is what our really advanced extraterrestrial will look like. May I?"

He took the pen and pad from Floyd, and rapidly shaded the egg-shaped body until the air and food intakes were no longer visible. Then, at waist level, he sketched in an electric power point-and ran a long cable to a socket a few feet away.

There was general laughter, in which Kaminski did not join, though his eyes twinkled.

"The cyborg-the electromechanical organism. And even he-it is only a stepping stone to the next stage-the purely electronic intelligence, with no flesh and-blood body at all. The robot, if you like-though I prefer to call it the autonomous computer."

"And what would that look like?" asked the vice-president.

Before Kaminski could answer, Whitehead annexed his sketchpad and started to draw swiftly.

"It could look just like one of our present computers," he said. "On the other hand-it could be this."

He handed the pad to Mr. Kelly. It showed a simple, unadorned tetrahedron.

"I see-TMA-l itself."

"Exactly, sir. There may be no pyramid-builders-there may only be pyramids. They may be our super-intelligences."

"That would be disappointing," said the Vice-President. "I don't know what I expect you to find out on Jupiter, but I hope it's more exciting than that."

"l don't," interjected Mrs. Kelly. Then she began to laugh.

After a while she pulled herself together, obviously with an effort.

"I've just had the most hilarious idea," she said. "Suppose you're right, and they send back an ambassador. Can you imagine that welcoming parade down Fifth Avenue- and the President sharing his Cadillac with a large, black pyramid?"

The Vice-President began to grin, and very quickly the grin spread right across his face. He made no comment, but everyone remembered the stories of his occasional disagreements with the Chief Executive.

It was quite obvious that he could imagine that parade; and that, on the whole, he rather liked the idea.

It was a glorious night; there had been rain earlier in the day, and the freshly washed sky was unusually dark. Bowman had never seen so many stars above Washington; and now, soon after midnight, the brightest of them all was rising in the east.

"Look, Mr. Vice-President," he said, as they took their final leave. "Our target-eight months from now."

They all stood in thoughtful silence, wholly forgetting the other guests, not even hearing the soft background of music from the band inside the house. Around them was the sleeping city, dominated by the floodlit bubble of the Capitol dome. And over that ghostly white hemisphere, Jupiter was rising.