Maybe if the nurse had picked me up first when we were born I would have been the one who got the bigger piece of cake. Or maybe she did—I don't know how it started.
But don't think that being a twin is all bad even if you are on the short end; it is mostly good. You go into a crowd of strangers and you are scared and shy—and there is your twin a couple o{ feet away and you aren't alone any more. Or somebody punches you in the mouth and while you are groggy your twin has punched him and the fight goes your way. You flunk a quiz and your twin has flunked just as badly and you aren't alone.
But do not think that being twins is like having a very close and loyal friend. It isn't like that at all and it is a great deal closer.
Pat and I had our first contact with the Long Range Foundation when this Mr. Geeking showed up at our home. I did not warm to him. Dad didn't like him either and wanted to hustle him out, but he was already seated with coffee at his elbow for Mother's notions of hospitality were firm.
So this Geeking item was allowed to state his business. He was, he said, a field representative of "Genetics Investigations."
"What's that?" Dad said sharply.
'Genetics Investigations' is a scientific agency, Mr. Bartlett. This present project is one of gathering data concerning twins. It is in the public interest and we hope that you will cooperate."
Dad took a deep breath and hauled out the imaginary soapbox he always had ready. "More government meddling!
I'm a decent citizen; I pay my bills and support my family. My boys are just like other boys and I'm sick and tired of the government's attitude about them. I'm not going to have them poked and prodded and investigated to satisfy some bureaucrat. All we ask is to be left alone—and that the government admit the obvious fact that my boys have as much right to breathe air and occupy space as anyone else!"
Dad wasn't stupid; it was just that he had a reaction pattern where Pat and I were concerned as automatic as the snarl of a dog who has been kicked too often. Mr. Geeking tried to soothe him but Dad can't be interrupted when he has started that tape. "You tell the Department of Population Control that I'm not having their 'genetics investigations.' What do they want to find out? How to keep people from having twins, probably. What's wrong with twins? Where would Rome have been without Romulus and Remus?
—answer me that! Mister, do you know how many—"
"Please, Mr. Bartlett, I'm not from the government."
"Eh? Well, why didn't you say so? Who are you from?"
"Genetics Investigations is an agency of the Long Range Foundation." I felt Pat's sudden interest. Everybody has heard of the Long Range Foundation, but it happened that Pat and I had just done a term paper on non-profit corporations and had used the Long Range Foundation as a type example.
We got interested in the purposes of the Long Range Foundation. Its coat of arms reads: "Bread Cast Upon the Waters," and its charter is headed: "Dedicated to the Welfare of Our Descendants." The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers' fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn't enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn't show results for ten generations, if ever ,...omething like how to control the weather (they're working on that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.
The funny thing is that bread cast upon waters does come back seven hundred fold; the most preposterous projects made the LRF embarrassing amounts of money—"embarrassing" to a non-profit corporation that is. Take space traveclass="underline" it seemed tailor-made, back a couple of hundred years ago, for LRF, since it was fantastically expensive and offered no probable results comparable with the investment: There was a time when governments did some work on it for military reasons, but the Concord of Bayreuth in 1980 put a stop even to that.
So the Long Range Foundation stepped in and happily began wasting money. It came at a time when the corporation unfortunately had made a few billions on the Thompson mass-converter when they had expected to spend at least a century on pure research; since they could not declare a dividend (no stockholders), they had to get rid of the money somehow and space travel looked like a rat hole to pour it down.
Even the kids know what happened to that: Ortega's torch made space travel inside the solar system cheap, fast, and easy, and the one-way energy screen made colonization practical and profitable; the LRF could not unload fast enough to keep from making lots more money.
I did not think all this that evening; LRF was just something that Pat and I happened to know more about than most high school seniors... more than Dad knew, apparently, for he snorted and answered, "The Long Range Foundation, eh? I'd almost rather you were from the government. If boondoggles like that were properly taxed, the government wouldn't be squeezing head taxes out of its citizens."
This was not a fair statement, not a "flat-curve relationship," as they call it in Beginning Mathematical Empiricism. Mr. McKeefe had told us to estimate the influence, if any, of LRF on the technology "yeast-form" growth curve; either I should have flunked the course or LRF had kept the curve from leveling off early in the 21st century—I mean to say, the "cultural inheritance," the accumulation of knowledge and wealth that keeps us from being savages, had increased greatly as a result of the tax-free status of such non-profit research corporations. I didn't dream up that opinion; there are figures to prove it. What would have happened if the tribal elders bad forced Ugh to hunt with the rest of the tribe instead of staying home and whittling out the first wheel while the idea was bright in his mind?
Mr. Geeking answered, "I can't debate the merits of such matters, Mr. Bartlett. I'm merely an employee.
"And I'm paying your salary, Indirectly and unwillingly, but paying it nevertheless."
I wanted to get into the argument but I could feel Pat holding back. It did not matter; Mr. Geeking shrugged and said, "If so, I thank you. But all I came here for was to ask your twin boys to take a few tests and answer some questions. The tests are harmless and the results will be kept confidential."
"What are you trying to find out?"
I think Mr. Geeking was telling the truth when he answered, "I don't know. I'm merely a field agent; I'm not in charge of the project."
Pat cut in. "I don't see why not, Dad. Do you have the tests in your briefcase, Mr. Geeking?" "Now, Patrick—"
"It's all right, Dad. Let's see the tests, Mr. Geeking."
"Uh, that's not what we had in mind. The Project has set up local offices in the TransLunar Building. The tests take about half a day."
"All the way downtown,, huh, and a half day's 'time... what do you pay?"
"Eh? The subjects are asked to contribute their time in the interests of science."
Pat shook his head. "Sorry, Mr. Geeking. This is exam week... and my brother and I have part-time school jobs, too."
I kept quiet. Our exams were over, except Analysis of History, which is a snap course involving no math but statistics and pseudospatial calculus, and the school chem lab we worked in was closed for examinations. I was sure Dad did not know these things, or he would have butted in; Dad can shift from prejudice to being a Roman judge at the drop of a hint.