Dragnie turned out the light as, in his study, Glatt continued to work on his achievement.
“Prepare for landing.”
Regnad Daghammarskjold’s voice echoed throughout the spaceship as, below, the mottled and dusty surface of their destination drew nearer. “Co-ordinate the rockets. Get ready to turn off the engines.”
All around him, the crew flawlessly operated switches and, with cool efficiency, checked important readings preparatory to the craft’s touchdown.
“I hope this baby works properly!” Sanfrancisco De Soto chuckled in roguish humor.
“It will,” Dragnie murmured. She spoke, not out of hope, but conviction. The ship had been designed over the course of three days by John Glatt, its materials supplied by Hunk Rawbone’s mills, and fabricated under her personal supervision in Tagbord Rail’s most experienced factory. Now, under the command of the breathtakingly attractive Swedish pirate, its maiden voyage was on the verge of a successful completion.
“Stabilize the gyroscopes,” Regnad ordered. “Adjust the controls and line up the necessary components properly.”
Finally the craft touched down on the surface. “Confirm that everything is pressurized,” the pirate said. “Turn off the motors and turn on the lights. Assure that the cabin pressure is correct for human habitation.”
“How much time do we have?” Sanfrancisco asked.
Dragnie glanced at her watch, an expensive timepiece she proudly wore in unashamed pride. Beautifully enhanced with precious jewels and waterproof to thirty atmospheres, it was built with the utmost precision and expressed her own personal style. “Fifteen minutes.”
“Ready, John?”
John Glatt unbuckled his seat belt in a single clean, decisive, confident motion. It was a motion that had the cleanliness and the decisiveness and the confidence of a certainty that, unlike the certainty of other men who, however much they had felt a similar certainty about other things, had been proven wrong, was right. “Yes.”
On Earth, in the country of the United States, in a state called Nebraska, a family sat in its living room, preparing to watch an address delivered by the Head Person of the United States government. They had been told to anticipate this event for a week, and had obediently gathered before their television to hear their leader’s words of wisdom. “Be sure to watch Mr. Jenkins!” the television ads had cried. “Mr. Jenkins will have something important to say!” read the billboards on signs and buses. “Listen to Mr. Jenkins because he is smart!” ran the ads on the radio. This family, whose members had been instructed from birth to believe whatever certain authorities told them, whether the authorities were the church, the government, or the education system, consisted of a father, who was a contemptible weakling, his wife, who was hatefully stupid, and their two children, each more repulsively “idealistic” than the other.
“Mr. Jenkins cares about us,” the mother said reassuringly. “He will be able to help us.”
“Mr. Jenkins is not one of those heartless, selfish capitalists,” the father said, believing himself to have expressed an opinion of wisdom. “He is able to empathize with the ordinary man.”
“I love Mr. Jenkins!” cried the daughter in a voice indistinguishable from that with which she squealed her adoration of the latest pop star.
“Mr. Jenkins is my favorite person. When I grow up, I want the government to give me everything,” announced the son, believing himself to be a mature and thoughtful human being.
Suddenly a voice announced Mr. Jenkins, and a face appeared on the television, and the family fell silent and paid attention to it. “Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans, boys and girls, and people all over the world,” said Mr. Jenkins. “I come before you tonight with a grave announcement.” He spoke in the dull monotone of a man who did not love life. There were pouches below his eyes, as if reality had hung there twin bags of ethical compromise, while the lines of his face formed the latitude and longitude demarcations of a map of moral corruption that no cosmetologist’s pancake makeup could conceal. “The People’s States of the People of all the states and nations and people of the world have determined that they can no longer engage in trade with the United States of America. They say our products are too dangerous. They say that when we removed all regulatory oversight from the private sector, ended corporate taxation, outlawed unions, and eliminated the minimum wage, our work force degenerated into a pool of depressed and angry wage-slaves for whom quality no longer mattered. And so…” He paused to lick his thin, terrified lips. “And so they are issuing a blanket embargo on… on…” Suddenly Mr. Jenkins lurched up from his seat and toward the camera, as though desperately seeking the attention and sympathy of a skeptical onlooker. “This isn’t my fault!” he cried, sweating visibly. “You can’t blame this on me! I can’t help it! I just do what I’m told by John Glatt and that wife of his, and that Frisco fellow and that, that pirate! You’ve got to believe me—“
And then the picture went black. The channel seemed to have ceased transmission.
“Attention, the ears of men. This is John Glatt speaking.”
Before the family a new face had appeared, a face only vaguely familiar to the adults and almost entirely unknown to the children, and yet a face which each of them—man, wife, son, daughter—sensed belonged to a man that could be trusted. It was a face not only at perfect peace with itself, but at perfect peace with life and with man and with existence. “You are now receiving me on every channel on every television and on every station on every radio on Earth,” Glatt said in a tone of supreme confidence. “It is useless to try to change the station or the channel. We are controlling transmission. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. How is it that we are able to dominate the airwaves in this fashion, you ask? We are able to do so for one reason: I am speaking to you from the Moon.
“I have come here, in a craft of my own design and constructed at my own expense, to issue a reply to the people of the People’s States of the People. I address them as follows: You have, with the fall of Goa, consolidated your grip on all the nations on earth—except ours. You have elected to embargo all of our private sector products, claiming that it is our governmental responsibility that some of them are dangerous, unwholesome, or lethal. We have sought, in good faith, to avoid that responsibility. We have made the logically irrefutable case that, for every shipment of arsenic-tainted minty-fresh toothpaste or dioxin-laced lo-fat yogurt or spontaneously-combusting strawberry-scented bowling balls or carcinogenic E-Z-Fit sweat pants we sell, there is another shipment of the same product that poses no danger to its users. But, rather than allow the market to sort out the dangerous commodities from the safe ones—rather than allowing some consumers to die or sustain injuries so that others may enjoy the safe versions of those products—you now choose to impose a global ban, denying your citizens access to these products and unfairly victimizing both us and them, but mainly us, in the process.
“We have protested, we have argued, and we have petitioned, but all to no avail. You continue to reject our products—and, in so doing, our very society. You continue to reject our values. You continue to live differently than we do—and, thus, to contradict us. It is for this reason that we hate you. We have arrived at our values, and our society, through the use of mind. We are the men of mind, and the women of mind, and the kids of mind. That is how we know we are right. To your attacks and criticisms we have ample reply. You say that your economies are growing and ours is stagnant. We say: economies are like hair, and too much growth can result in unmanageability and a fly-away society. You say your unemployment rates are at an all-time low while ours are skyrocketing. We say: when everyone is employed, there is an insufficient labor pool for the starting of new businesses; then innovation dies and everything gets old and depressing. You say that your governments are able to assure a modern, efficient infrastructure and a pleasant array of public amenities such as highways, parks and libraries, via the taxation of the individuals and corporations who make use of them. We say: taxes are the people who make so little that they need not pay them anyway, while the others, the successful, should not be taxed, so they will have an incentive to make more money, whereas if they were taxed, and therefore had less money, they would have no incentive to make more. You say that you have created a decent safety net to assure every one of your citizens a minimally civilized existence from infancy through old age, while we have abandoned our poor and infirm and aged to lives of degradation and poverty. We say that safety nets are for amateur tightrope walkers, while the tightrope walkers that men truly admire, and pay good money to watch, are the professionals, who work without a net. You say your defense budgets are sensible and targeted to actual enemies, while ours is larger than the rest of the world’s put together and targeted at enemies that no longer exist. We say, the bigger one’s defense budget, the stronger one feels. You say that your literacy rates are higher than ours. We say: a nation filled with people reading is a nation filled with people not doing other worthwhile activities, such as writing a stirring symphony, painting a breathtaking new masterpiece, or delivering an unforgettable cinematic performance of astounding depth and sensitivity. You say your life expectancy is higher than ours. We say: No one can accurately guess how long they will live, so why try to? You say that your percentage of population per capita in prison is lower than ours. We say, a high rate of imprisonment attests to both a society’s ample temptations to criminal behavior, and to the existence of an efficient and effective criminal justice system. You say your infant mortality rate is lower than ours. We say that our supply of babies is so large and excellent that we can afford to have more of them die. You say your average costs of medical procedures and prescription drugs are lower than ours. We say, men place the highest value on what costs them the most, and that when health comes with a high price tag men cherish their lives all the more. You say your rates of medical bankruptcies are zero while ours are astronomical. We say, if life is not worth going bankrupt to prolong, then one shouldn’t be alive in the first place. You say you have lower rates of venereal disease, teenage pregnancies, and abortions per capita than we do. We say, the more syphilis and gonorrhea and unwanted pregnancies a nation has, the sexier its population has proven itself to be. You say that polls indicate that your populations are consistently happier and less frightened of the future than ours are. We say that happiness without fear is like rice pudding without cinnamon, that fear makes you conscious, and that consciousness is what differentiates man from the non-conscious entities of the universe, such as rice pudding.