“He could have been the Garoonish Minister of War for all you knew!” the briefcase blasted. “Not that it made any difference. By the time he’d questioned his various sources and mentioned the matter to his various friends, acquaintances and business associates, every spy organization in the galaxy had been alerted. They knew what we were worrying about, what we were looking for, and where and when we hoped to find it. You accomplished one of the best jobs of interstellar communication ever. Sixty-five years of patient espionage planning gone down the drain. Now what have you to say for yourself?”

  Alfred stood up straight and manfully pulled back his shoulders. “Just this. I’m sorry.” He considered for a moment, then added: “Deeply and truly sorry.”

  Some kind of electrical storm seemed to go off in the briefcase. It almost rolled off Kelly’s knees.

  “I just can’t stand this any more,” Jane Doe said suddenly. “I’ll wait outside.” She walked past Alfred to the door, her eyes swimming in reproachfulness. “Darling, darling, how could you?” she whispered bitterly as she passed him.

  The briefcase crackled down to some semblance of control. “I’ll give you one last chance, Smith. Not that I think any conceivable defense you might have would be valid, but I hate to demote a Special Emissary, to push him forever out of the Service, without giving him every chance to be heard. So. Is there any defense you wish to have registered before sentence of demotion is passed upon you?”

  Alfred considered. This was evidently a serious business in their eyes, but it was beginning to be slightly meaningless to him. There was too much of it, and it was too complicated. He was tired. And he was Alfred Smith, not John Smith.

  He could tell them about the events of the night, about the Lidsgallians and the information he’d received from the captive Smith. It might be valuable and it might throw a weight in the scales in his favor. The trouble was that then the question of John Smith’s real identity would arise—and that might become very embarrassing.

  Besides, he was over the fear he’d felt earlier about these creatures; they could do little more to him than a dose of sodium bicarbonate, he’d found out. Their super-weapons were to be discounted, at least on Earth. And when it came to that point, he was not at all sure that he wanted to give them helpful information. Who knew just where Earth’s best interests lay?

  He shook his head, feeling the fatigue in his neck muscles. “No defense. I said I’m sorry.”

  From the briefcase, Robinson sighed. “Smith, this hurts me more than it hurts you. It’s the principle of the thing, you see. Punishment fit the crime. More in sorrow than in anger. You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. All right, Kelly. The sentence.”

  Kelly put the briefcase on the bed and got to his feet. Cohen and Jones came to attention. There was evidently to be a ceremony.

  “By virtue of the authority vested in me as acting chief of this field group,” Kelly intoned, “and pursuant to Operating Procedure Regulations XCVII, XCVIII and XCIX, I hereby demote and degrade you, Gar-Pitha of Vaklitt, from the rank of Special Emissary, Second Class, to the rank of General Emissary or such other lower rank as Command Central may find fitting and necessary in the best interests of the Service. And I further direct that your disgrace be published throughout every arm and echelon of the Service and that your name be stricken from the roster of graduates of the Academy which you have shamed. And, finally, in the name of this field group and every individual within it, I disown you now and forevermore as a colleague and an equal and a friend.”

  It was, Alfred decided, a kind of strong-medicine ceremony. Must be pretty affecting to someone who was really involved in it personally.

  Then, from either side, Cohen and Jones moved in swiftly to complete the last, dramatic part of the ceremony.

  They were very formal, but very thorough.

  They stripped the culprit of his uniform.

  Afterword

  THIS IS HOW I WROTE this story:

  In 1956, I broke up with a woman with whom I had been involved for the better part of a year. But I knew she’d be back (she always came back), and I knew we’d start all over again, as we so many times had. I therefore called all my friends and told them that they had to arrange seven consecutive dates for me; I wanted to see a new woman every day of the coming week—hoping that I’d get deeply committed to at least one of them.

  Fruma, as she still likes to remind me, Fruma was Wednesday. Katherine MacLean and the guy she was then living with, Dave Mason, told me they knew somebody I would really like. They came up with Fruma.

  After my first date with her on Wednesday night, I told Bob Sheckley—who was recently divorced and who was my closest friend at the time—that I thought I had found the woman of all women who should be my wife. Bob asked when I planned to see her again.

  “Saturday night,” I told him.

  “See if she has a friend,” he said.

  Well, Fruma did, and her friend’s name was Ziva, and Bob and Ziva were married a month after Fruma and me. We all lived in Greenwich Village, not forever after, but most happily, about two or three blocks from each other.

  And Bob and I went through a slump. Not a bad long one, but a very annoying one nonetheless, and one more surprising to Bob than to me, because I wrote spasmodically, when some strong idea turned me around, but Bob was a heavy production man.

  Bob and I talked to each other very intensively and very worriedly about how to get out of the slump. One of the cures we thought about was to rent a furnished room as a mutual office and add two items of furniture to it—a typewriter table and a heavy wooden chair with shackles permanently attached to the chair. We would both arrive at the office at nine each morning, and one of us would be shackled to the chair by the other. He would not be released, no matter how he pleaded or what the excuse, until one p.m.—or until he typed four pages of good, publishable copy. Then the shackles would be opened and the other would take his place, under the same conditions, until either five p.m. or four typed pages of good copy would bring release. Of course, if the four pages were typed early enough and the writer were still going strong, he could go on and write as much as he wanted to, until his release time.

  We thought it was an excellent idea and were eager to try it. Unfortunately, both Fruma and Ziva claimed to be horrified and begged us not to. Bob and I muttered to each other about the unfortunate weakness of women, and tried to think of something else.

  What we settled on was this: The two of us would meet five mornings a week at a neighborhood diner, each with our four pages of new copy in hand. Whoever was late for the appointment or who didn’t have his requisite four pages had to pay five dollars into a fund handled by our wives. Whenever the fund grew large enough, it would be used to buy theater tickets for all four of us.

  It worked, it really worked well, at least for a time. I put more fives in than Bob, because, after all, I was born a month late and have never caught up: I am frequently tardy for any and all appointments. But both of us were writing again, and selling, and that was the whole point.

  Then there was the morning I didn’t have a good story in my head. I desperately wrote four pages of something, anything, and hurried off to meet Bob. He had his four pages, too, and they were very professional and very good. But they also looked slightly familiar.

  Of course, I realized! They were four pages from one of his first published stories, a story I liked very much and remembered well. I accused him of cheating. He broke down and admitted it, and paid the five dollars. I went home with my four pages of nonsense, righteously angry.

  I put the four pages in front of me, one thousand words of pure narrative hook, and wondered if anything at all could be made of it. Yes, it turned out: “Lisbon Cubed” could be made of it. (If you want to see just what the original was pretty much like, count one thousand words from the beginning of the story.)

  My title, when it went to Horace Gold’s Galaxy, was “The Fourth Power of Lisbon.” He, finding nothing else to change in the story—although he did try hard—removed my title and substituted his. I’ve kept it for this edition: the man is dead and deserves some sort of minor prose monument.

  If you tell all this to Bob Sheckley, he will swear that it’s not quite true; it all happened the other way around, with me being the guilty party. Don’t listen to him.

  But this is why I wrote this story:

  I’m not sure why I write science fiction any more, except that, well, it’s a living, and, hell, it’s where I made what reputation I have. But there are a couple of responsibilities that I felt I had fifty years ago and at least one of which I still feel very strongly today.

  It’s my duty—it really is my duty, being the kind of person I am and knowing and believing what I do—to prepare my fellow humans for what they will shortly be facing, at the most in one or two lifetimes. Whatever I write these days, satire, high or low drama, whatever, I ought to get them ready for the unsettling discovery that they and their species will soon no longer be Nature’s only child.

  The universe is awfully big, and not only are we going out into it physically, we are splashing signals out in every direction that we think, we think, therefore we are, we are. Somebody (or somebodies) somewhere is abruptly going to be seen—or heard from. We will find that we have very smart siblings.

  I pray most of all and first of all that we will not be mice alerting cats. Then I pray that they will not be too far ahead of us technologically; I do not want the U.N. Secretary General to play Montezuma to some galactic Cortez. And then I pray that we will be up to the challenge of living with intelligent creatures who come from a totally different evolution, that we will be able to enjoy and use totally different technologies, totally different art forms, totally different philosophical and religious systems. That we will appreciate the fact there are many, many other forms of intelligence—and that their highest forms must inevitably deal with what they too must call the tragedy of life.

  And mostly to that end I write these comedies of space.

  Written 1956 / Published 1958

  The Ghost Standard

  REMEMBER THE ADAGE OF the old English legal system: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall”? Well, was justice done in this case?

  You have three entities here. An intelligent primate from Sol III—to put it technically, a human. An equally intelligent crustacean from Procyon VII—in other words, a sapient lobstermorph. And a computer of the Malcolm Movis omicron beta design, intelligent enough to plot a course from one stellar system to another and capable of matching most biological minds in games of every sort, from bridge to chess to double zonyak.

  Now—add a shipwreck. A leaky old Cascassian freighter comes apart in deep space. I mean quite literally comes apart. Half the engine segment explodes off, the hull develops leaks and begins to collapse, all those who are still alive and manage to make it to lifeboats get away just before the end.

  In one such lifeboat you have the human, Juan Kydd, and the lobstermorph, Tuezuzim. And, of course, the Malcolm Movis computer—the resident pilot, navigator and general factotum of the craft.

  Kydd and Tuezuzim had known each other for more than two years. Computer programmers of roughly the same level of skill, they had met on the job and had been laid off together. Together they had decided to save money by traveling on the scabrous Cascassian freighter to Sector N-42B5, where there were rumored to be many job opportunities available.

  They were in the dining salon, competing in a tough hand of double zonyak, when the disaster occurred. They helped each other scramble into the lifeboat. Activating the computer pilot, they put it into Far Communication Mode to search for rescuers. It informed them that rescue was possible no sooner than twenty days hence, and was quite likely before thirty.

  Any problems? The lifeboat had air, fuel, more than enough water. But food…

  It was a Cascassian freighter, remember. The Cascassians, of course, are a silicon-based life-form. For their passengers, the Cascassians had laid in a supply of organic, or carbon-based, food in the galley. But they had not even thought of restocking the lifeboats. So the two non-Cascassians were now imprisoned for some three to four weeks with nothing to eat but the equivalent of sand and gravel.

  Or each other, as they realized immediately and simultaneously.

  Humans, on their home planet, consider tinier, less-sapient crustaceans such as lobsters and crawfish great delicacies. And back on Procyon VII, as Tuezuzim put it, “We consider it a sign of warm hospitality to be served a small, succulent primate known as spotted morror.”

  In other words, each of these programmers could eat the other. And survive. There were cooking and refrigerating facilities aboard the lifeboat. With careful management and rationing, meals derived from a full-size computer programmer would last till rescue.

  But who was to eat whom? And how was a decision to be reached?

  By fighting? Hardly. These were two highly intellectual types, neither of them good physical exemplars of their species.

  Kydd was round-shouldered, badly nearsighted and slightly anemic. Tuezuzim was somewhat undersized, half deaf and suffering from one crippled chela. The claw had been twisted at birth and had never matured normally. With these disabilities, both had avoided participation in athletic sports all their lives, especially any sport of a belligerent nature.

  Yet the realization that there was nothing else available to eat had already made both voyagers very hungry. What was their almost-friendship compared with the grisly prospect of starvation?

  For the record, it was the lobstermorph, Tuezuzim, who suggested a trial by game, with the computer acting as referee and also as executioner of the loser. Again, only for the record and of no importance otherwise, it was the human, Juan Kydd, who suggested that the logical game to decide the issue should be Ghost.

  They both liked Ghost and played it whenever they could not play their favorite game—that is, when they lacked zonyak tiles. In the scrambling haste of their emergency exit, they had left both web and tiles in the dining salon. A word game now seemed the sole choice remaining, short of flipping a coin, which—as games-minded programmers—they shrugged off as childishly simplistic. There also was the alternative of trial by physical combat, but that was something that neither found at all attractive.

  Since the computer would function as umpire and dispute-settling dictionary as well as executioner, why not make it a three-cornered contest and include the computer as a participant? This would make the game more interesting by adding an unpredictable factor, like a card shuffle. The computer could not lose, of course—they agreed to ignore any letters of Ghost that it picked up.

  They kept the ground rules simple: a ten-minute time limit for each letter; no three-letter words; the usual prohibition against proper nouns; and each round would go in the opposite direction from that of the previous round. Thus, both players would have equal challenging opportunities, and neither would be permanently behind the other in the contest.

  Also, challenging was to be allowed across the intervening opponent—the computer, not part of the combat.

  Having sent off one last distress signal, they addressed themselves to programming the computer for the game (and the instantaneous execution of the loser). Combing through the immense software resources of the computer, they were pleased to discover that its resident dictionaries included Webster’s First and Second, their own joint favorites. They settled on the ancient databases as the supreme arbiters.

  The verdict-enforcer took a little more time to organize. Eventually, they decided on what amounted to a pair of electric chairs controlled by the computer. The killing force would be a diverted segment of the lifeboat’s Hametz Drive. Each competitor would be fastened to his seat, locked in place by the computer until the game was over. At the crucial moment, when one of them incurred the t in Ghost, a single blast of the diverted drive would rip through the loser’s brain, and the winner would be released.

  “Everything covered?” asked Tuezuzim as they finished their preparations. “A fair contest?”

  “Yes, everything’s covered,” Kydd replied. “All’s fair. Let’s go.”

  They went to their respective places: Kydd to a chair, Tuezuzim to the traditional curved bed of the lobstermorph. The computer activated their electronic bonds. They stared at each other and softly said their goodbyes.

  We have this last information from the computer. The Malcolm Movis omicron beta is bundled at sale with Al-truix 4.0, a fairly complex ethicist program. It was now recording the proceedings, with a view to the expected judicial inquest.

  The lobstermorph drew the first g. He had challenged Juan Kydd, who had just added an e to t-w-i-s. Kydd came up with twisel, the Anglo-Saxon noun and verb for fork. To Tuezuzim’s bitter protests that twisel was archaic, the Malcolm Movis pointed out that there had been no prior agreement to exclude archaisms.

  Kydd himself was caught a few minutes later. Arrogant over his initial victory, he was helping to construct laminectomy (“surgical removal of the posterior arch of a vertebra”) by adding m after l-a-m-i-n-e-c-t-o. True, this would end on the computer’s turn, which could incur no penalty letters, but Kydd was willing to settle for a neutral round. Unfortunately, he had momentarily forgotten the basic escape hatch for any seasoned Ghost player—plurals. The Malcolm Movis indicated i, and Tuezuzim added the e so fast it sounded like an echo. There was absolutely no escape for Kydd from the concluding s in laminectomies.

  And so it went, neck and neck, or, rather, neck and cephalothorax. Tuezuzim pulled ahead for a time and seemed on the verge of victory, as Kydd incurred g-h-o-s and then was challenged in a dangerous situation with a questionable word.

  “Dirigibloid?” Tuezuzim demanded. “You just made that one up. There is no such word. You are simply trying to avoid getting stuck with the e of dirigible.”