The Golden Age Of Science Fiction Vol Iv Part 33

"I was delighted to hear Prime Minister Nehru say," General O'Reilly went on calmly, "how much he approved this method of settling old disputes. And I should be very glad to help--with this." Smiling, he tossed the Golden Judge in the air and caught it again.

Nehru could keep silent no longer. Like a skilled Oriental debater, he struck back indirectly. "We thank General O'Reilly," he said acidly, "for his kind offer, but perhaps it should be first used by his own people, the Irish, of whose gambling prowess he is so proud. Surely no bitterness has lasted longer than that between the Republic of Ireland and the 'Six Lost Counties' of Northern Ireland. Let the Irish use the Golden Judge themselves before they counsel it for others!"

But General O'Reilly was unruffled. "I'm an American, myself," he said, smiling, "although proud indeed of my Irish blood. And the Irish Irish will have to speak for themselves, although I venture to say you'll find them a sporting people indeed. But that's not quite the point, is it? 'Twas you yourself, sir, who praised the Golden Judge so highly. And you've seen today what fine sportsmen the Chinese are. The point is, are the Indians a sporting people?"

"Of course we're a sporting people!" Nehru glared.

"Then I take it you'd be willing, a.s.suming Pakistan agrees, of course, but I'm told they're a very sporting people, to--" The general tossed the coin again, absent-mindedly.

"All right!" Nehru grated. "If they agree, so do we!"

It took a month before Pakistan could agree, and all the arrangements be made for the Toss on Kashmir. But in that month, the world had other things to think about. Chiang Kai Shek accepted his gambling loss without a murmur and removed his troops from Quemoy and Matsu, the American Seventh Fleet helping, the Communists not interfering. All civilians on the islands who wished to go to Formosa were taken there.

Was.h.i.+ngton said little officially, but in the corridors of the Pentagon, Congress and the White House, the sighs of relief reached gale force. General O'Reilly received a confidential and personal message from the Army Chief of Staff that made him pink with pleasure.

"May get that third star after all," he told his wife that night. "And not too long to wait, maybe."

But, above all, the month was filled with clamor from Ireland. Her Majesty's Government in Whitehall had immediately issued a communique which took a glacial view of the "puerile" proposal to toss for Northern Ireland. It was the timing of this communique, rather than its contents, that proved a tactical error. It had come too quickly, and Irishmen, both north and south, resented it.

As a Belfast newspaper wrote tartly: "Irishmen on both sides of the line are quite able to decide such matters for themselves, without the motherly interference of London."

Dublin agreed in principle to toss, but the wrangling over conditions and exceptions boiled up into the greatest inter-Irish quarreling of twenty years. It was still raging when General O'Reilly flew into the Vale of Kashmir with a broad smile and the Golden Judge.

Again the great coin glittered high in the air while none other than Nehru himself called out, tensely: "Heads!"

It fell "Tails."

"So be it!" Nehru said calmly, shaking hands with the Governor-General of Pakistan.

"Well, general," Nehru said, turning to O'Reilly with a smile, "are you satisfied now? I think we've proved we're a sporting people. So have the Chinese, and the Jews and the Arabs. But what about your own folk, the Irish? From what I read, their sporting qualities seem to be highly overrated. I'd say they'd never gamble but on a sure thing."

The general's face went red at the insult, and so, a day later, did the collective face of all Irishmen, North and South. For a while there was aghast silence from the Emerald Isle, a silence sullen and embarra.s.sed. And then a great rumbling roar of indignation.

"Mr. Speaker!" cried a member of the Dail in Dublin. "Are the Irish people, who honor great gamblers only a little less than great poets, to be outdone by dark-skinned heathen? Mr. Speaker, I say no!"

The following morning, the government of Eire formally offered to toss for the Six Lost Counties and, if the coin fell contrary, to say no more about them forever. Belfast agreed that same afternoon, and the whole island went wild with excitement. Hardly any Irishman failed to place some kind of side bet on the outcome, and stakes were laid that day that would be spoken of with prideful awe for generations to come.

The remark of a Limerick drayman was widely quoted. "There's not a man of us here," he commented in the course of a game of darts at the Sword and Shamrock, "but would toss a coin for his grandmother's head, and well ye know it. So after all the blatherin' and yowrin', why not have a go for the Six Counties, and let the coin decide it now and foriver, once and for all, win or lose?"

The British Government surrendered with grace, and offered to play host to the toss in London, as a neutral place. They soon learned, with burning ears, that the last place on earth any Irishman considered neutral was London.

As a matter of course, General O'Reilly was invited to preside, using the Golden Judge. Like most Irishmen in America, he had long sung of and sighed for the Auld Sod, while carefully avoiding going there, even for a visit.

He now realized his error. He was received as one of Ireland's most glorious sons. He was set upon by thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of proud O'Reillys--there were O'Reillys from the bogs and O'Reillys from the great houses, O'Reillys in tophats and O'Reillys in tam o' shanter. He was a.s.sured, and came near believing it, that in both looks and wisdom, he was the spitting image of the Great O'Reilly, one of the many last rightful Kings of Ireland. A minstrel composed a lay about him, "The Golden Judge of Ireland"; he was smothered in shamrock, and could have swum in the gifts of potheen. Secretly he much preferred Scotch whisky to Irish, but the swarming O'Reillys made the disposal of the potheen no very great problem.

The actual toss took place in a small railroad station, hastily cleaned up, on the railway line between Dublin and Belfast. Impartial surveyors had certified it as being exactly astraddle the frontier.

Amid a deathlike hush, with a high sense of history in his heart, General O'Reilly flipped the Golden Judge high in the air.

Eire won. The Six Counties were no longer lost, and there was little enough work done in Ireland for a fortnight. Eire instantly and magnanimously granted to her new north all the points that had been fought over so bitterly for so many years. For the northerners, to their surprise, life went on exactly as before, except for different postage stamps, and a changed heading on their income-tax returns, which were considerably lower. For the first time in many years, there were no brickbats thrown if a man felt the need, on a summer night, to sing "G.o.d Save the Queen."

General O'Reilly flew away from Ireland with a mist in his eyes and a great glow in his heart. In a shaven second, he had achieved the thing for which long and gallant generations of earlier O'Reillys had fought bloodily and in vain. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if his nervous right hand that day had shown any subconscious partisans.h.i.+p, but rejected the thing as impossible. If the toss for the Six Counties was, in a way, the crowning peak of General O'Reilly's career, it was by no means the end of it. Both he and his coin were fast becoming settled tradition. He continued his normal military career, but with the tacit understanding he would have a few days' leave of absence whenever the Golden Judge was needed.

He took it to Stockholm for the toss that settled the old and bitter fis.h.i.+ng controversy between Britain and Iceland. Britain won.

He took it to Cairo, where Britain and Greece tossed for Cyprus. Greece won, and at once offered Britain all the bases she wanted there, and granted special extraterritorial status to all British colonels, knights' widows and former governors of the Punjab living in retirement on the island.

He got his third star just before he flew down to Rio de Janiero for the toss that finally settled the nagging quarrel between Britain and Argentina as to who owned the Falkland Islands. Britain won.

He took it to The Hague in Holland for the toss about the Saar. The Saar had remained a European sore point despite a series of Franco-German "settlements" which never seemed to settle anything. Germany won the toss, and immediately, of her own free will, granted the French equal commercial rights.

The Saar toss had two odd results. The first was purely personal for General O'Reilly, but he never forgot it. One day, driving through The Hague, his official car pa.s.sed a huge dignified building, which his chauffeur explained was the World Court. With a strange feeling, the general noticed a solemn old man in black, staring bleakly out the window. He realized suddenly it was probably a judge, and that the golden coin in his pocket had turned this costly mechanism into an anachronism. n.o.body used the World Court any more now.

The other result of the Saar toss was, from the viewpoint of world jurisprudence, far more important. It transformed the Golden Judge from a mere tradition into an established legal inst.i.tution, in this manner: France and Germany had been unable to agree whether the Saar was really tossable--a term that soon entered dictionaries--and had appealed to the United Nations to decide. A temporary or ad hoc United Nations commission had been named to settle this point and, after due deliberation, had p.r.o.nounced the Saar tossable.

Technically, this "Saar Commission" should have then dissolved itself. Instead, in the way of parliamentary inst.i.tutions, it lingered on and soon became the accepted body to decide on tossability. And, illogically, it was forever afterwards still called the "Saar Commission."

Whenever, anywhere in the world, some international dispute reached stalemate, it became commonplace for some delegate to rise and say: "Mr. Chairman, I move the question be referred to the Saar Commission."

In due course, the Saar Commission would then give its solemn judgment as to whether or not the dispute should be put to the arbitrament of the Golden Judge. If so, General O'Reilly would board a plane, and be off.

Once the Saar Commission had its say, no nation ever dared refuse to put a dispute to the hazard of the coin. Whereas nations yawned at being called "warmongers" or "imperialists" or "aggressors" or "international bandits," none could stand being called "bad sportsmen" or "poor losers." So many nations had accepted the verdict of the Golden Judge, that it became increasingly more difficult, not to say impossible, for a given nation to admit it was less sporting than the others.

However, not all disputes were held tossable, to the disappointment of some people who had too quickly believed the Golden Judge would bring immediate Utopia, the end of all quarreling forever. Gradually the Saar Commission evolved certain criteria: 1. A dispute was not tossable if it might give great populations and great nations over into systems of government they abhorred; it was tossable only if the population involved had no very great bias one way or the other.

2. A tossable dispute was one in which justice lay on both sides, evenly balanced.

3. Tossing was clearly indicated where both sides ardently wished a settlement, but where neither side was willing to cede an inch, for fear of losing "face."

Thus the Saar Commission p.r.o.nounced untossable the proposal by the Soviet Union to have the Golden Judge decide whether or not America should abandon all her overseas bases. It also turned down the suggestion of an American senator that Russia and the United States should toss for Soviet withdrawal from all Eastern Europe. It denied the appeal of an idealistic Dane who wanted a toss to decide whether Germany should be all Communist or all-Western. It likewise rejected a Swiss proposal that Chiang Kai Shek and Chou En-Lai should toss again, this time for Formosa itself.

In pa.s.sing, it is of interest to note that only once did Soviet Russia agree to toss. It was in the matter of her old dispute with Persia over caviar fis.h.i.+ng rights in the Caspian Sea. Persia won but, to the consternation of the world, Russia refused to abide by the outcome. It was the first and only time that the decision of the Golden Judge was not obeyed, and it had startling repercussions.

All over the world, fellow-travelers abandoned the Soviet cause. They had been able to find some excuses, however tortuous, for Russian purges, forced confessions, concentration camps and aggressions, but they turned away, shocked and saddened, from a nation that openly welshed on a bet.

There were strong reactions within Russia itself, although the convulsions were largely screened from Western eyes. However, an unprecedented number of Russians fled across the Iron Curtain, seeking asylum in the West. They said gloomily they could no longer support a regime that reneged on its fair gambling losses, and protested fiercely this was not the true soul of Russia.

In a gallant effort to recoup face for Russian sportsmans.h.i.+p, many of these refugees grimly began playing almost non-stop games of "Russian roulette," which gives the player a five-to-one chance of living. Some extreme chauvinists proudly reduced the odds to three-to-one by inserting two bullets, and a former Red Army major named Tolbunin even used three. His tour de force was widely admired, although not repeated, and Tolbunin himself was given a magnificent funeral.

Yet, except for the Caspian caviar toss, the Golden Judge was obeyed as unquestioningly as the Voice from Sinai, and perhaps more so. And if it could be used only in what some called "minor" disputes, it was surprising to see, once these were settled, how really few "major" ones remained. It is impossible here, of course, to list more than a few of General O'Reilly's tosses, but he flew to nearly every spot on earth, a beloved world figure.

He flew to Ethiopia--and caught malaria there--to settle an old quarrel between that country and the Sudan over a one-square-mile Sudanese enclave named Gambela, well inside Ethiopia. A relic of the times when Britain controlled the Sudan, Gambela had long been a thorn in the side of the Conquering Lion of Judah. Although the Negus lost, he accepted the verdict as uncomplainingly as earlier disputants, some three thousand years before, had once accepted the awards of his putative ancestor, King Solomon.

General O'Reilly ended a tiny but poisonous quarrel of many years' standing as to whether British Honduras should become a part of the Republic of Honduras. Britain won.

In an epic tour in 1973 that left the world gasping with admiration, General O'Reilly spread lasting balm on many sores in the Middle East. The Golden Judge settled--in favor of Pakistan--her friction with Afghanistan over the long-disputed Pathan territory. Saudi Arabia won from Britain two small and completely worthless oases on the undefined border between Saudi Arabia and Trucial Oman. These oases had, over the years, produced many hot and vain notes, and desultory shooting, but the Lord of Saudi Arabia was subsequently much disappointed that they never produced oil. He was further dismayed when the Golden Judge awarded to Iraq a "neutral zone" between the two countries, on which they had never been able to agree, and this zone did, in fact, produce tremendous amounts of oil. However, he complained only to Allah.

Syria and Turkey resorted to the toss to decide about the Sanjak of Alexandretta (Iskanderun) which Turkey had been given by France back in the Thirties, when France ran Syria. Turkey won. Damascus sighed but smiled, and reopened diplomatic relations with Ankara that had been severed for more than twenty years.

But on a golden January day in 1975, in Malaga, Spain, General O'Reilly's aide-de-camp noticed that his chief seemed strangely preoccupied. The occasion was a toss between Sweden and Finland as to the possession of four large rocks lying in the sea at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, just off the Finno-Swedish frontier. These rocks, just south of the Arctic circle, contained no population other than sea gulls, but had been warmly claimed by both nations for years. And since the weather in Scandinavia in January is miserable, the Finns and Swedes had sagely decided to hold the toss in Malaga, which was as far south as they could go and still be in Europe.

In public, General O'Reilly was himself--charming, dependable, cheerful. He carried out the toss as gracefully as he had all the others, and he made a winning speech at the banquet given by the Finns that night to celebrate their acquisition of the four sub-Arctic rocks.

But the A.D.C. was not deluded and later, on the flight back to Was.h.i.+ngton, he observed that General O'Reilly was unusually abstracted and pensive, lost in thought. But since a major does not ask a lieutenant general about such matters, he kept silent.

The fact was that the general had now reached sixty-five, and in the American Army, sixty-five is retirement age. As the ocean fled away under the racing plane, he was remembering a scene the week before in the office of the Army Chief of Staff.

"It's up to you, Terry," the Chief of Staff had said. "You know perfectly well that the President is willing, even eager, to keep you on past the retirement age. You're a big man in the world now. You can stay on the active list as long as you want. If necessary, he'll ask a special law, and there won't be one vote against it."

Then the general remembered his wife: "You've done enough, darling. It's time we had a real permanent home for once in our lives. That garden for me, those Aberdeen Angus for you--remember? You've traveled too much; you've never really gotten over that malaria. Darling, you need a rest. You've earned it."

The general gazed out the plane window, trying to make up his mind. Then suddenly he chuckled. The A.D.C. saw him pull a leather case out of his pocket and watched, puzzled, as a golden coin spun briefly in the air.

The general caught it on the back of his left hand, covering it with his right. Then he removed the right, looked at it.

He chuckled again.

When General O'Reilly retired the following week, the President asked Congress for a fourth star for him and, in a special message, listed in glowing terms the services he had rendered to America and the world. The bill pa.s.sed without a murmur, and Terence Patrick O'Reilly became at last a full general.

Messages poured in from nearly every country in the world, from dozens of presidents and premiers, and the handful of remaining kings. Along with them came hundreds of gifts. They included a carved elephant tusk from Nepal, a Royal Copenhagen dinner service for twenty-four from the Kingdom of Denmark, a one-rupee note from a ten-year-old girl in Bombay and--a gesture that excited much speculation--a case of caviar from the Kremlin.

The Department of Defense announced that General O'Reilly had become the most decorated soldier ever to wear American uniform. In every toss, each of the rival sides had awarded him some kind of decoration. When he wore full-dress uniform, the ribbons solidly covered both sides of his tunic, and he was nearly strangled with various stars and orders that dangled from ribbons around his neck.

"He retired just in time," his wife told her daughter-in-law one day at tea. "There's not another square inch left for another ribbon."

General O'Reilly presented the Golden Judge to the United Nations, and the King of Saudi Arabia proved his sportsmans.h.i.+p by having a theft-proof case made for it of solid crystal, so that it could be on public display. It was soon as visited and cherished as the Magna Carta and the Liberty Bell. A night and day guard stood watch over it.

Yet it was far from a useless relic. Often the crystal case was empty, and this meant it was seeing service somewhere in the world, in the hands of a Swedish general who had finally been chosen by the United Nations to succeed Terence O'Reilly.

In his final press interview, General O'Reilly unburdened himself of some thoughts which--refined--have pa.s.sed into international jurisprudence under the name of O'Reilly's Law.

"For thousands of years," the general said thoughtfully, "mankind has been making all kinds of commandments and laws and prohibitions and contracts and treaties--and broken them all when the mood suited them. Perhaps it's a sad thing to say, but so far nothing's ever been invented that men will really live up to more than the terms of a bet. With very, very few exceptions, a man--or a nation--will respect a bet when he won't respect any other d.a.m.ned thing on earth!"

THE END.

Contents

THE WORLD OF THE CRYSTAL CITIES.

by George Griffith

INTRODUCTION.

For their honeymoon Rollo Lenox Smeaton Aubrey, Earl of Redgrave, and his bride, Lilla Zaidie, leave the earth on a visit to the moon and the princ.i.p.al planets, their sole companion being Andrew Murgatroyd, an old engineer who had superintended the building of the Asfronef, in which the journey is made. By means of the " R. Force," or Anti-Gravitational Force, of the secret of which Lord Redgrave is the sole possessor, they are able to navigate with precision and safety the limitless ocean of s.p.a.ce. Their adventures on the Moon, Mars, and Venus have been described in the first three stories of the series.

"FIVE HUNDRED MILLION miles from the earth and forty-seven million miles from Jupiter," said his lords.h.i.+p, as he came into breakfast on the morning of the twenty-eighth day after leaving Venus.

During this brief period the Astronef had recrossed the orbits of the Earth and Mars and pa.s.sed through that marvellous region of the Solar System, the Belt of the Asteroides. Nearly a hundred million miles of their journey had lain through this zone, in which hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny planets revolve in vast orbits round the Sun.

Then had come a desert void of over three hundred million miles, through which the Astronef voyaged alone, surrounded by the ever-constant splendours of the Heavens, but visited only now and then by one of those Spectres of s.p.a.ce, which we call comets.

Astern, the disc of the Sun steadily diminished, and ahead, the grey-blue shape of Jupiter, the Giant of the Solar System, had grown larger and larger until now they could see it as it had never been seen before -- a gigantic three-quarter moon filling up the whole Heavens in front of them almost from Zenith to Nadir.

Its four satellites, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto were distinctly visible to the naked eye, and Europa and Ganymede happened to be in such a position with regard to the Astronef that her crew could see not only the bright sides turned towards the sun, but also the black shadow-spots which they cast on the cloud-veiled face of the huge planet.

"Five hundred million miles!" said Zaidie, with a little s.h.i.+ver, "that seems an awful long way from home, doesn't it? Though, of course, we've brought our home with us to a certain extent. Still I often wonder what they are thinking about us on the dear old earth. I don't suppose anyone ever expects to see us again. However, it's no good getting homesick in the middle of a journey when you're outward bound."

They were now falling very rapidly towards the huge planet, and, as the crescent approached the full they were able to examine the mysterious bands as human observers had never examined them before. For hours they sat almost silent at their telescopes, trying to probe the mystery which has baffled human science since the days of Gallileo.

"I believe I was right, or, in other words, the people I got the idea from are," said Redgrave eventually, as they approached the orbit of Calisto, which revolves at a distance of about eleven hundred thousand miles from the surface of the planet.

"Those belts are made of clouds or vapour in some stage or other. The lightest -- the ones along the equator and what we should call the Temperate Zones -- are the highest, and therefore coolest and whitest. The dark ones are the lowest and hottest. I daresay they are more like what we call volcanic clouds. Do you see how they keep changing? That's what's bothered our astronomers. Look at that big one yonder a bit to the north, going from brown to red. I suppose that's something like the famous red spot which they have been puzzling about. What do you make of it?"

"Well," said Zaidie, looking up from her telescope, "it's quite certain that the glare must come from underneath. It can't be sunlight, because the poor old sun doesn't seem to have strength enough to make a decent sunset or sunrise here, and look how it's running along to the westward! What does that mean, do you think?"

"I should say it means that some half-formed Jovian Continent has been flung sky high by a big burst-up underneath, and that's the blaze of the incandescent stuff running along. Just fancy a continent, say ten times the size of Asia, being split up and sent flying in a few moments like that. Look, there's another one to the north. On the whole, dear, I don't think we should find the climate on the other side of those clouds very salubrious. Still, as they say the atmosphere of Jupiter is about ten thousand miles thick, we may be able to get near enough to see something of what's going on.

"Meanwhile, here comes Calisto. Look at his shadow flying across the clouds. And there's Ganymede coming up after him, and Europa behind him. Talk about eclipses, they must be about as common here as thunderstorms are with us."

"We don't have a thunderstorm every day," corrected Zaidie, "but on Jupiter they have two or three eclipses every day. Meanwhile, there goes Jupiter himself. What a difference distance makes! This little thing is only a trifle larger than our moon, and it's hiding everything else."

As she was speaking, the full-orbed disc of Calisto, measuring nearly three thousand miles across, swept between them and the planet. It shone with a clear, somewhat reddish light like that of Mars. The Astronef was feeling its attraction strongly, and Redgrave went to the levers and turned on about a fifth of the R. Force to avoid contact with it.

"Another dead world," said Redgrave, as the surface of Calisto revolved swiftly beneath them, "or, at any rate, a dying one. There must be an atmosphere of some sort, or else that snow and ice wouldn't be there, and the land would be either black or white as it was on the Moon. It's not worth while landing there. Ganymede will be much more interesting."