Party Line

'As you may know,' said the senator, 'the budget for your project is coming up before committee in the next few weeks. I can get nothing out of these jackasses who are your superiors in Washington. They talk about knowledge being the most precious commodity. They say no market value can be placed upon it. I wonder if you would concur.'

'I think I would,' said Thomas, 'although, if that is all they say, it's a fairly general statement. There is so much spinoff. I suppose they told you that.'

They did,' said the senator. 'They dwelt most lovingly upon it.'

'Then what is it you want of me?'

'Realism. Some old-fashioned realism. A hard-headed assessment.'

'I'm fairly close to the operation. It's hard for me to step back those few necessary paces to take a good objective look at it.'

'Well, do the best you can. This is off-the-record. Just between the two of us. If necessary, we'll have you in to testify. To start with, maybe, how good are the chances for FTL?'

'We are working on it, senator. I have a feeling we still have a long way to go. We're beginning to have a feeling that it may not be a simple matter of physical laws.'

'What could it be, then?'

'Emphasizing the fact that we do not really know, I'd be willing to hazard a guess that it might be something we have never heard of. A procedure, or a technique, maybe even a state of mind, that is outside all human experience.'

'Now you're going mystic on me. I don't like this mystic stuff.'

'In no way mystic, senator. Just a willingness to admit mankind's limitations. It stands to reason that one race on one planet is not going to come up with everything there is.'

'Have you anything to back that up?'

'Senator, I think I have. For the last several months, one of our operators has been trying to explain to his opposite number some of the fundamentals of our economic system. It has been and still is a trying task. Even the simplest fundamentals — things like buying and selling, supply and demand — have been hard to put across. Those folks out there, whoever they are, have never even thought of our brand of economics, if, in fact, any kind of economics. What makes it even harder is that they appear to stand in absolute horror of some of the things we tell them. As if the very ideas were obscene.'

'Why bother with them, then?'

'Because they still maintain an interest. Perhaps the ideas are so horrible that they have a morbid fascination for them. As long as they maintain that interest, we'll keep on working with them.'

'Our idea in starting this project was to help ourselves, not a lot of other folks.'

'It's a two-way street,' said Thomas. They help us, we help them. They teach us, we teach them. It's a free interchange of information. And we're not being as altruistic as you think. It is our hope that as we go along with this economic business, we'll pick up some hints.'

'What do you mean, some hints?'

'Perhaps some indications of how we may be able to revise or modify our economic system.'

'Thomas, we have spent five or six thousand years or more in working out that economic system.'

'Which doesn't mean, senator, that it is letter perfect. We made mistakes along the way.'

The senator grunted. This, I take it, will be another long-term project?'

'All of our work, or the most of it, is long-term. Most of what we get is not readily or easily adapted to our use.'

'I don't like the sound of it,' growled the senator. 'I don't much like anything I hear. I asked you for specifics.'

'I've given you specifics. I could spend the rest of the day giving you specifics.'

'You've been at this business for twenty-five years?'

'On a job like this, twenty-five years is a short time.'

'You tell me you're getting nowhere on FTL. You're piddling away your time teaching an economics course to some stupid jerks who are having a hard time knowing what you are talking about.'

'We do what we can,' said Thomas.

'It's not enough,' said the senator. The people are getting tired of seeing their taxes go into the project. They were never very much for it to start with. They were afraid of it. You could slip, you know, and give away our location.'

'No one has ever asked for our location.'

They might have ways of getting it, anyhow.'

'Senator, that's an old bugaboo that should long ago have been laid to rest. No one is going to attack us. No one is going to invade us. By and large, these are intelligent, and I would suspect, honorable gentlemen with whom we're dealing. Even if they're not, what we have here would not be worth their time and effort. What we are dealing in is information. They want it from us, we want it from them. It's worth more than any other commodity that any of us may have.'

'Now we're back to that again.'

'But, dammit, senator, that's what it's all about.'

'I hope you're not letting us be taken in by some sort of slicker out there.'

That's a chance we have to take, but I doubt it very much. As director of this branch of the project, I've had the opportunity…'