CHAPTER 3

 

 

‘Hey!’ Carmody cried.

‘And so, once again,’ the dark individual said, ‘the criminal has escaped into his doom. Behold me, Carmody! I am your executioner! You pay now for your crimes against humanity as well as for your sins against yourself. But let me add that this execution is provisional, and implies no value judgement.’

The executioner slipped a knife from his sleeve. Carmody gulped and found his voice.

‘Hold it!’ he cried. ‘I’m not here to be executed!’

‘I know, I know,’ the executioner said soothingly, sighting along his knife blade on Carmody’s jugular vein. ‘What else could you say?’

‘But it’s true!’ Carmody shrieked. ‘I’m supposed to collect a Prize!’

‘A what?’ the executioner asked.

‘A Prize, damn you, a Prize! I was told I’d won a Prize! Ask the Messenger, he brought me here to collect a Prize!’

The executioner studied him, then looked away sheepishly. He pushed a switch on a nearby switchboard. The steel bands around Carmody turned into paper streamers. The executioner’s black garments changed to white. His knife turned into a fountain pen. The scar on his cheek was replaced by a wen.

‘All right,’ he said, with no hint of repentance. ‘I warned them not to combine the Department of Petty Crime with the Office of the Sweepstakes, but no, they wouldn’t listen to me. It would serve them right if I had killed you. Wouldn’t that have been a pretty mess, eh?’

‘It would have been messy for me,’ Carmody said shakily.

‘Well, no sense crying over unspilt blood,’ the Prize Clerk said. ‘If we took full account of our eventualities, we’d soon run out of eventualities to take full account of … What did I say? Never mind, the construction is right even if the words are wrong. I’ve got your prize here somewhere.’

He pressed a button on his switchboard. Immediately a large, messy desk materialized in the room two feet above the floor, hung for a moment, then dropped with a resounding thud. The Clerk pulled open the drawers and began to throw out papers, sandwiches, carbon ribbons, file cards and pencil stubs.

‘Well, it has to be here somewhere,’ he said, with a tone of faint desperation. He pushed another button on the switchboard. The desk and the switchboard vanished.

‘Damn it, I’m all nerves,’ the Clerk said. He reached into the air, found something and squeezed it. Apparently, it was the wrong button, for, with an agonizing scream, the Clerk himself vanished. Carmody was left alone in the room.

He stood, humming tunelessly under his breath. Then the Clerk reappeared, looking none the worse for his experience except for a bruise on his forehead and an expression of mortification on his face. He carried a small, brightly wrapped parcel under his arm.

‘Please excuse the interruption,’ he said. ‘Nothing seems to be going right just at present.’

Carmody essayed a feeble joke. ‘Is this any way to run a galaxy?’ he asked.

‘Well, how did you, expect us to run it? We’re only sentient, you know.’

‘I know,’ Carmody said. ‘But I had expected that here, at Galactic Centre –’

‘You provincials are all alike,’ the Clerk said wearily. ‘Filled with impossible dreams of order and perfection, which are mere idealized projections of your own incompletion. You should know by now that life is a sloppy affair, that power tends to break things up rather than put things together, and that the greater the intelligence, the higher the degree of complication which it detects. You may have heard Holgee’s Theorem; that Order is merely a primitive and arbitrary relational grouping of objects in the chaos of the Universe, and that, if a being’s intelligence and power approached maximum, his coefficient of control (considered as the product of intelligence and power, and expressed by the symbol ing) would approach minimum – due to the disastrous geometric progression of objects to be comprehended and controlled outstripping the arithmetic progression of Grasp.’

‘I never thought of it that way,’ Carmody said politely enough. But he was beginning to grow annoyed at the glib civil servants of Galactic Centre. They had an answer for everything; but the fact was, they simply didn’t do their jobs very well, and they blamed their failures on cosmic conditions.

‘Well, yes, that’s also true,’ the Clerk said. ‘Your point (I took the liberty of reading your mind) is well made. Like all other organisms, we use intelligence to explain away disparity. But the fact is, things are forever just a little beyond our grasp. It is also true that we do not extend our grasp to the utmost; sometimes we do our work mechanically, carelessly, even erroneously. Important data sheets are misplaced, machines malfunction, whole planetary systems are forgotten. But this merely points out that we are subject to emotionality, like all other creatures with any measure of self-determination. What would you have? Somebody has to control the galaxy; otherwise everything would fly apart. Galaxies are reflections of their inhabitants; until everyone and everything can rule himself and itself, some outer control is necessary. Who would do the job if we didn’t?’

‘Couldn’t we build machines to do the work?’ Carmody asked.

‘Machines!’ the Clerk said scornfully. ‘We have many of them, some exquisitely complex. But even the best of them are much like idiot savants. They do adequately on tedious straightforward tasks like building stars or destroying planets. But give them something tough, like solacing a widow, and they simply go to pieces. Would you believe it, the largest computer in our section can landscape an entire planet; but it cannot fry an egg or carry a tune, and it knows less about ethics than a newborn wolf cub. Would you want something like that to run your life?’

‘Of course not,’ Carmody said. ‘But couldn’t someone build a machine with creativity and judgement?’

‘Someone has,’ the Clerk said. ‘It has been designed to learn from experience, which means that it must make errors in order to arrive at truths. It comes in many shapes and sizes, most of them quite portable. Its flaws are readily apparent, but seem to exist as necessary counterweights to its virtues. No one has yet improved on the basic design, though many have tried. This ingenious device is called “intelligent life.”’

The Clerk smiled the self-satisfied smile of the aphorism-maker. Carmody felt like hitting him square on his smug pug nose. But he restrained himself.

‘If you are quite through lecturing,’ Carmody said, ‘I would like my Prize.’

‘Just as you wish,’ the Clerk said. ‘If you are quite sure that you want it.’

‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t want it?’

‘No particular reason,’ the Clerk said. ‘Just a general one; the introduction of any novel object into one’s life pattern is apt to be disrupting.’

‘I’ll take my chances on that,’ Carmody said. ‘Let’s have the Prize.’

‘Very well,’ the Clerk said. He took a large clipboard out of a small rear pocket and produced a pencil. ‘We must fill this in first. Your name is Car-Mo-Dee, you’re of Planet 73C, System BB454C252, Left Quadrant, Local Galactic System referent LK by CD, and you were picked at random from approximately two billion contestants. Correct?’

‘If you say so,’ Carmody said.

‘Let me see now,’ the Clerk said, scanning the page rapidly, ‘I can skip the stuff about you accepting the Prize on your own risk and recognizance, can’t I?’

‘Sure, skip it,’ Carmody said.

‘And then there’s the section on Edibility Rating, and the part on Reciprocal Fallibility Understandings between you and the Sweepstakes Office of the Galactic Centre, and the part about Irresponsible Ethics, and, of course, the Termination Determinant Residue. But all of that is quite standard, and I suppose you adhere to it.’

‘Sure, why not?’ Carmody said, feeling lightheaded. He was very eager to see what a Prize from Galactic Centre would look like, and he wished that the Clerk would stop quibbling.

‘Very well,’ the Clerk said. ‘Now simply signify your acceptance of the terms to this mind-sensitive area at the bottom of the page, and that’ll be it.’

Not quite knowing what to do, Carmody thought, Yes, I accept the Prize and the conditions attached to it. The bottom of the page grew pink.

‘Thank you,’ the Clerk said. ‘The contract itself is witness to the agreement. Congratulations, Carmody, and here is your Prize.’

He handed the gaily wrapped box to Carmody, who muttered his thanks and began eagerly to unwrap it. He didn’t get far, though; there was a sudden, violent interruption. A short, hairless man in glittering clothes burst into the room.

‘Hah!’ he cried. ‘I’ve caught you in the act, by Klootens! Did you really think you could get away with it?’

The man rushed up to him and grabbed at the Prize. Carmody held it out of arm’s reach.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked.

‘Doing? I’m here to claim my rightful Prize, what else? I am Carmody!’

‘No, you aren’t,’ Carmody said. ‘I am Carmody.’

The little man paused and looked at him with curiosity. ‘You claim to be Carmody?’

‘I don’t claim, I am Carmody.’

‘Carmody of Planet 73C?’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ Carmody said. ‘We call the place Earth.’

The shorter Carmody stared at him, his expression of rage changing to one of disbelief.

‘Earth?’ he asked. ‘I don’t believe I’ve heard of it. Is it a member of the Chlzerian League?’

‘Not to the best of my knowledge.’

‘What about the Independent Planetary Operators Association? Or the Scagotine Stellar Co-operative? Or the Amalgamated Planet-Dwellers of the Galaxy? No? Is your planet a member of any extrastellar organization?’

‘I guess it isn’t,’ Carmody said.

‘I suspected as much,’ the short Carmody said. He turned to the Clerk. ‘Look at him, you idiot! Look at the creature to whom you have awarded my Prize! Observe the dull piggish eyes, the brutish jaw, the horny fingernails!’

‘Now just a minute,’ Carmody said. ‘There’s no reason to be insulting.’

‘I see, I see,’ the Clerk replied. ‘I never really looked before. I mean, one hardly expects –’

‘Why, damn it,’ the alien Carmody said, ‘anyone could tell at once that this creature is not a Class 32 Life-Form. As a matter of fact, he’s not even close to Class 32, he hasn’t even attained Galactic status! You utter imbecile, you have awarded my Prize to a nonentity, a creature from beyond the pale!’