Now she kneeled, nude and covered with some kind of oil that Sput had read about in the Nero book, and carefully licked his wingwang up and down while he, imitating supercool, went over the interview list.
"Don't want President Hubbard," he said. "She's too controversial."
"But dammit, Sput, our interviews are supposed to be controversial!" Stuart seemed to recall saying that at each of these conferences.
"Not that controversial," Sput said. "The intellectuals all hate her because she's a scientist.* Now, here, Jane
*Terran Archives 2803: At the time of this comedy those primates who specialized in verbal manipulations of the third neurological circuit formed a gene-pool separate from those who specialized in mathematical manipulations. The former, controlling the verbal environment, had dubbed themselves "the intellectuals."
Fonda and Timothy Leary, they're good. But, Jesus H. Christ, Robert Anson Wilson, for Chrissake-he's a fucking science-fiction writer!"
"We interviewed Vonnegut," Stuart said, watching the lady's head bobbing up and down at Sput's crotch.
"Yeah, but his books are serious. That's different," Sput said, breathing a bit heavily by now. "Besides, everybody says The Universe Next Door drives people wiggy and makes them become nudists or Buddhists or something. That kind of trouble we don't need. And one science-fiction writer in five years is enough, already. (Gently, doll, gently!) I see you don't have the Attorney General on the list yet."
"It's the same as ever," Stuart explained, noting that the girl's hand was sneaking down her belly into her crotch. "She just won't give us an interview. She still says we're a dirty magazine."
"Dammit, we never go beyond contemporary community standards," Sput protested, hurt. "That old bitch is a bigot."
"Well, bigot or not, she won't give us an interview."
"Fascist reactionary old bat," Sput fumed. "Someday I'll-" Then he brightened. "Listen, doll," he said to the girl at his feet. "You're the Attorney General-now really go to it, like a fucking vacuum cleanerl" The girl's head began bobbing faster, and Sput slouched back a bit, smiling contentedly.
"Reactionary WASP bitch," he muttered. "That's right, take it, take it all, you foe of the First Amendment!"
"Er-Dr. Francis Dashwood," Stuart prompted.
"Very good, very good." Sput was whispering, as if toking a marijuana cigarette. "You Gestapo pig, " he added to the girl at his feet.
"How about Jackie Kennedy Onassis?"
"Yeah, yeah, class," Sput said vaguely. He was beginning to tremble a bit. "Who else you got?" he whispered, trembling more.
"Dr. Spock."
"Spock?" Sput asked. Then he repeated, shrilly, "Spock? Spock! SPOCK!???!" He was coming, Stuart realized with an embarrassed twinge. "Swallow it," Sput was roaring. "Swallow it, you wire tapper!"
It was a distracting conference all around, Stuart thought, remembering.
His secretary was at his door. "I finally located Dr. j Dashwood," she said, "at this home. He's on the phone." j
Stuart picked up his phone, saying, "Ah, good afternoon, Dr. Dashwood. It's a great pleasure to speak to you."
"Is this on the level?" came a tense voice. "You're not involved with that Poop or Foof place, are you?"
Stuart was dumbfounded. Could the head of the best-known sex research organization in America be a paranoid nut? "I am speaking to Dr. Francis Dashwood?" he asked carefully.
"Yes, yes-but how can I be sure who I'm speaking to?"
"Well," Stuart said, "if you have your doubts, call me back. Go through information, to check the number, and | then have the Pussycat switchboard put you on my line. That should convince you."
"I'll do just that," the doctor said. "A lot of damned peculiar things are happening today. I want to be sure you're not some cohort of that Ezra Pound character." He hung up abruptly.
Ezra Pound, Stuart thought, bemused. The doctor thinks a dead poet and folk singer is plotting against him.
An absolute nut of the first water. A real signifyin' mad scientist.
Obviously, this would require great care. Dashwood couldn't just be discarded as an interview subject for being batty; he was too big a name. The interview would go ahead, but Dashwood would be handled with kid gloves.
The phone buzzed, and he picked it up.
"Dr. Dashwood is back on the line," his secretary said.
"Put him through." He waited, then said, "Dr. Dashwood?"
"Well, I guess it really is you," the voice said. "Please excuse me. A man in my sensitive field-cranks and schizophrenics wondering around loose…"
"Yes, yes, I quite understand," Stuart said, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. "Poets always have harbored nasty grudges." He had no doubt that the doctor was as goofy as a waltzing mouse.
HOW THE TERRAN PRIMATES WERE DOMESTICATED
GALACTIC ARCHIVES:
President Hubbard had abolished poverty through a plan which she called the RICH economy.
RICH meaning Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis.
This was a diabolically clever scheme to abolish all forms of human labor except the most creative-i.e., those frontal-lobe metaprogramming circuits which have evolved last in evolution and surpass the mechanical old four-circuit primate brain functions.
Of course it had been theoretically possible to abolish most mechanical labor since about 1948, when a very cunning primate mathematician, Norbert Weiner, noted that self-correcting (cybernetic) machines would soon be able to monitor whole factories.
Even earlier a metaprogramming-circuit Greek primate, Aristotle, had observed that it would be possible to abolish slavery "when the loom and other machines become self-managing."
Terran primates had continued slavery over the generations, despite the increasing distress this caused their hominid third and fourth (semantic and moral) circuits, simply because machines could not yet manage themselves. As many a primate Utopian had rediscovered in chagrin, under primitive planetary conditions, "somebody has to do the shit-work." The most appealing solution to electing that somebody was to invade a weaker neighboring tribe and bring back a group of biots who could be domesticated.
This had been done so often that there was no hominid pack on Terra that did not show the effects of domestication and slave mentality, a fact first noted by a dour German primate named Nietzsche.
In Unistat, due to the strong encouragement of individualistic third- and fourth-circuit (semantic-moral) functions, slavery had grown so repugnant that it was formally "abolished" within a century after the formation of the pack constitution; it lingered on through inertia in the form of "wage slavery," which required that all primates not born into the sixty families that "owned" almost everything would have to "work" for those families or their corporations in order to get the tickets (called "money") which were necessary for survival.
This slave mentality was so entrenched in the domesticated primates that cybernation advanced very slowly in the first thirty years after Weiner discovered it would be possible to abolish primate toil. All the important primate bands-the alpha male corporations, the primate trade unions, the primate council or "government," the primate totem cults or "churches"-believed that the traditional domesticated caste system was the only possible system under which primates could live. Even the Red primates shared this delusion, differing only in their ideas about distribution of resources.