Imperial Earth

As the beautiful old car cruised in almost perfect silence under the guidance of its automatic controls, Duncan tried to see something of the terrain through which he was passing. The spaceport was fifty kilometers from the city-no one had yet invented a noiseless rocket-and the four-lane highway bore a surprising amount of traffic. Duncan could count at least twenty vehicles of various types, and even though they were all moving in the same direction, the spectacle was somewhat alarming.

“I hope all those other cars are on automatic,” he said anxiously.

Washington looked a little shocked. “Of course,” he said. “It’s been a criminal offense for-oh-at least a hundred years to drive manually on a public highway. Though we still have occasional psychopaths who kill themselves and other people.”

That was an interesting admission; Earth had not solved all its problems.

One of the greatest dangers to the Technological Society was the unpredictable madman who tried to express his frustrationsconsciously or otherwise-by sabotage. There had been hideous instances of this in the past. The destruction of the Gondwana reactor in the early twenty-first century was perhaps the best-known example. Since Titan was even more vulnerable than Earth in this respect, Duncan would have liked to discuss the matter further; but to do so within an hour of his arrival would hardly be tactful.

He was quite sure that if he did commit such a faux pas, his host would neatly divert the conversation without causing him the slightest embarrassment. During the short time that they had been acquainted, Duncan had decided that George Washington was a very polished diplomat, with the selfassurance that comes only with a family tree whose roots are several hundred years deep. Yet it would have been hard to imagine anyone less like his distinguished namesake, for this George Washington was a short, bald, and rather plump brown man, very elegantly dressed and bejeweled. The baldness and plumpness were both rather surprising, since they could be so easily corrected. On the other hand, they did provide a mark of distinction, and perhaps that was the idea. But this was another sensitive subject that Duncan would be well advised to avoid-at least until he knew his host much better. And perhaps not even then.

The car was now passing over a slender bridge spanning a wide and rather dirty river. The spectacle of so much genuine water was impressive, but it looked very cold and dismal on this dreary night.

“The Potomac,” said Washington. “But wait until you see it on a sunny day, after that silt’s gone downstream. Then it’s blue and sparkling, and you’d never guess it took two hundred years of hard work to get it that way. And that’s Watergate-not the original, of course; that was pulled down around 2000, though the Democrats wanted to make it a national monument. And the

Kennedy Center-that is the original, more or less. Every fifty years some architect tries to salvage it, but now it’s been given up as a bad job.”

So this was Washington, still basking (though not very effectively, on a night like this)) in its former glories. Duncan had read that the physical appearance of the city had changed very little in three hundred years, and he could well believe it. Most of the old government and public buildings had been carefully preserved. The result, said the critics, was the largest inhabited museum in the world.

A little later, the car turned into a driveway which led through beautifully kept lawns. There was a gentle beeping from the control

panel, and a sign flashed beneath the steering handle: SWITCH TO MANUAL George Washington took over, and proceeded at a cautious twenty klicks between flower beds and sculptured bushes, coming to a halt under the portico of an obviously very old building. It seemed much too large for a private house, but rather too small for a hotel, despite the fact that it bore the sign, in lettering so elaborate that it was almost impossible to read: CENTENNIAL HOTEL.

Professor Washington seemed to have an extraordinary knack of anticipating questions before they could be asked.

“It was built by a railroad baron, in the late nineteenth century. He wanted to have somewhere to entertain Congress, and the investment paid him several thousand percent. We’ve taken it over for the occasion, and most of the official guests will be staying here.”

To Duncan’s astonishment-and embarrassment, since personal service was unknown on Titan-his scanty baggage was seized by two black gentlemen wearing gorgeous liveries. One of them addressed him in a soft, musical language of which he could not comprehend a single word.

“You’re overdoing it, Henry,” George Washington remonstrated mildly. “That may be genuine slave patter, but what’s the point if only you linguistic historians can understand it? And where did you get that make-up? I may need some myself.”