John Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar

Stand On Zanzibar

John Brunner

1968

context (0) - THE INNIS MODE

"There is nothing wilful or arbitrary about the Innis mode of expression. Were it to be

translated into perspective prose, it would not only require huge space, but the insight

into the modes of interplay among forms of organisation would also be lost. Innis

sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point

of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As

Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of

knowlege. When he interrelates the development of the steam press with 'the

consolidation of the vernaculars' and the rise of nationalism and revolution he is not

reporting anybody's point of view, least of all his own. He is setting up a mosaic

configuration or galaxy for insight . . . Innis makes no effort to 'spell out' the

interrelations between the components in his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in

his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits..."

- Marshall McLuhan: The Gutenberg Galaxy

context (1) - SCANALYZE MY NAME

Stock cue SOUND: "Presenting SCANALYZER, Engrelay Satelserv's unique

thrice-per-day study of the big big Scene, the INdepth INdependent INmediate INterface

between you and your world!"

Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage, splitscreen, cut in bridge-melder, Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere

depthunder (today MAMP, Mid-Atlantic Mining Project), spaceover (today freefly-suiting),

transiting (today Simplon Acceleratube), digging (today as every day homimage with

autoshout).

Autoshout cue: "It's happening it's happening! SCANALYZER SCANALYZER

SCANALYZER SCANALYZER SCANALYZER SCANALYZER - "

Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage, wholescreen, planet Earth turning jerk-jerk-jerk and

holding meridians for GMT, EST, PCT, Pacific Conflict Zone Time.

Live cue SOUND: "And it's six poppa-momma for the happening people keeping it

straight and steady on that old Greenwich Mean Time - how mean can time get, you tell

me, hm? Zee for zero, bee for base, counting down to one after ess ee eks - sorree - ess

EYE eks! We know what's happening happening HAPPENING but that piece of the big big

scene is strictly up to you, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere - or Mr. and Miss, or Miss and Miss,

or Mister and Mister, take your pick, hah-hah! Counting down to one after one poppa -

momma for that good old Eastern Standard tie-yum, one after ten anti-matter for the

Pacific Coast, and for all of you fighting the good fight in lonely midocean one after

seven anti-matter - PIPS!"

Clock cue: 5Xl-sec. countdown pips on G in alt, minute signal on C in alt.

Plug cue: "No time like the present for things to happen in, no better way to keep

time straight and steady than by the signal from General Technics' critonium clock, so

accuright it serves to judge the stars."

Script cue VISUAL: cliptage, splitscreen, excerpts from day's news.

Live cue SOUND: "And no better way to keep abreast - pardon - than with

SCANALYZER!"

Cut autoshout cue. (If they haven't made it by this time they've switched off.)

Plug cue: "SCANALYZER is the one single, the ONLY study of the news in depth that's

processed by General Technics' famed computer Shalmaneser., who sees all, hears all,

knows all save only that which YOU, Mr, and Mrs. Everywhere, wish to keep to

yourselves."

Script cue: the happening world.

the happening world (1) - READ THE DIRECTIONS

For toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN ManhatTEN reports mild spring-type weather

under the Fuller Dome. Ditto on the General Technics Plaza.

But Shalmaneser is a Micryogenic (R) computer bathed in liquid helium and it's cold in

his vault.

(DITTO Use it! The mental process involved is exactly analogous to the

bandwidth-saving technique employed for your phone. If you've seen the scene you've

seen the scene and there's too much new information for you to waste time looking it

over more than once. Use "ditto". Use it!

- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

Less of a machine, more of a human being, but partaking of the nature of both,

Georgette Tallon Buckfast is largely supported by prosthetics in her ninety-first year.

When the strain becomes TOO MUCH it's because Hitrip of California bred it to have

less stalk per ounce, more clean-queen leaf. Ask "The Man who's Married to Mary Jane"!

Eric Ellerman is a plant geneticist with three daughters who's scared because his wife

has developed a permanent pot-belly.

". . . and Puerto Rico today became the latest state to ratify the controversial

dichromatism provision of United States eugenic legislation. This leaves only two havens

for those who wish to bear disadvantaged children: Nevada and Louisiana. The defeat of

the baby-farming lobby removes a long-time stigma from the fair brow of the

Junior-but-One State - a congenital stigma, one may say, since the J-but-O State's

accession to hoodness coincided almost to the day with the first eugenic legislation

concerned with haemophilia, phenylketonuria and congenital imbecility ..."

Poppy Shelton has believed in miracles for years, but now there's one happening right

inside her body and the real world is leaning on her dreams.

THE DIFFICULT WE DO AT ONCE. THE IMPOSSIBLE TAKES A LITTLE LONGER.

- Base version of General Technics motto.

Norman Niblock House is junior VP in charge of personnel and recruitment at General

Technics.

"One fraction of a second, please - participant breakin coming up. Remember that

only SCANALYZER's participant breakin service is processed by General Technics'

Shalmaneser, the more correct response in the shorter quantum of time ..."

Guinevere Steel's real name is Dwiggins, but do you blame her?

Do your slax sufficiently convey your natural power - at a glance?

If you're wearing MasQ-Lines, the answer's yes. Tired of half measures, we at

MasQ-Line Corp. have put the codpiece back where it belongs, to say to the shiggies not

kidder but codder.

Sheena and Frank Potter are all packed ready to leave for Puerto Rico because a green

and a red light are just lights to him.

"Two participant breakins! Number one: sorree, friend, but no - we are not wrong to

say Puerto Rico's decision leaves a mere two havens for the dissident. Isola does enjoy

statehood, but the whole area of the Pacific its islands occupy is under martial law and

you don't get a pass for other than martial reasons. Thanks for asking us, though, it's the

way of tile world, you're my environment and I am yours, which is why we operate

SCANALYZER as a two-way process ..."

Arthur Golightly doesn't mind not being able to remember where he put things.

Looking for them, he always finds other tilings he'd forgotten he had.

THE DIFFICULT WE DID YESTERDAY. THE IMPOSSIBLE WE'RE DOING RIGHT NOW.

- Current version of General Technics motto.

Donald Hogan is a spy.

"Number the other: dichromatism is what's commonly called colourblindness, and it is

sure as sidereal time a congenital disability. Thank you, participant, thank you."

Stal (short for Stallion) Lucas is a yonderboy, weighed, measured, and freeflying all

the way.

(IMPOSSIBLE Means: 1 I wouldn't like it and when it happens I won't approve; 2 I

can't be bothered; 3 God can't be bothered. Meaning 3 may perhaps be valid but the

others are 101% whaledreck.

- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

Philip Peterson is twenty years old.

Are you undermined by an old-style autoshout unit, one that needs constant

reprogramming by hand if it's not to call you for items that were descheduled last week?

GTs revolutionary new autoshout reprograms itself!

Sasha Peterson is Philip's mother.

"Turning to a related subject, rioting crowds today stormed a Right Catholic church in

Malmö, Sweden, while early mass was in progress. Casualty lists suggest a death toll of

over forty including the priest and many children. From his palace in Madrid Pope

Eglantine accused rival Pope Thomas of deliberately fomenting this and other recent

uprisings, a charge vigorously denied by Vatican authorities."

Victor and Mary Whatmough were born in the same country and have been married

twenty years - she for the second time, he for the third.

What you want to do when you see her in her Forlon&-Morler Maxess costumelet is

what she wants you to do when you see her in her Forlon&Morler Maxess costumelet

If she didn't, she wouldn't have put it on

Maximal access is no exaggeration when you spell it MAXESS

Style illustrated is "Courtesan"

But you should see "Tart"

What there is of it

Elihu Masters is currently United States Ambassador to the one-time British colony of

Beninia.

"Speaking of accusations, Dixierep Senator Lowell Kyte this anti-matter charged that

dicties were now responsible for nine-tenths of the felonies committed per anum -

sorree! - per annum in his home state of Texas and that Fed efforts to quell the problem

were a failure. Privately, officials of the Nark Force have been heard to express concern

at the way GT's new product Triptine is catching the dicties' fancy."

Gerry Lindt is a draftee.

When we say "general" at GT we mean GENERAL. We offer the career of a lifetime to

anyone interested in astronautics, biology, chemistry, dynamics, eugenics,

ferromagnetism, geology, hydraulics, industrial administration, jet propulsion, kinetics,

law, metallurgy, nucleonics, optics, patent rights, quarkology, robotics, synthesis,

telecommunications, ultrasonics, vacuum technology, work, X-rays, ylem, zoology ...

No, we didn't miss out your speciality. We just didn't have room for it in this ad.

Professor Doctor Sugaiguntung is head of the Tectogenetics Department at Dedication

University in the Guided Socialist Democracy of Yatakang.

The incidence of muckers continues to maintain its high: one in Outer Brooklyn

yesterday accounted for 21 victims before the fuzzy-wuzzies fused him, and another is

still at large in Evanston, Ill., with a total of eleven and three injured. Across the sea in

London a woman mucker took out four as well as her own three-month baby before a

mind-present standerby clobbered her. Reports also from Rangoon, Lima and Auckland

notch up the day's toll to 69."

Grace Rowley is seventy-seven and going a bit weak in the head.

Here today and gone tomorrow isn't good enough for us in this modern age. Here

today and gone today is the pidgin we pluck.

The Right Honourable Zadkiel F. Obomi is the president of Beninia.

"Westaway a piece or two, a stiff note was received in Washington this anti-matter

from the Yatakangi government, claiming naval units working out of Isola had

trespassed into Yatakang's territorial waters. Officials will be polite, but it's an open

secret Yatakang's hundred-island territory gives refuge all the time to Chinese

aquabandits who sneak out from so-called neutral ports and ambush U.S. patrols in

mid-ocean ..."

Olive Almerio is the most successful baby-farmer in Puerto Rico.

You know the codders who keep one, two, three shiggies on the string. You know the

shiggies who every weekend blast off with a different codder. Envy them?

Needn't.

Like any other human activity this one can be learned. We teach it, in courses tailored

to your preferences.

Mrs. Grundy Memorial Foundation (may she spin in her grave).

Chad C. Mulligan was a sociologist. He gave it up.

"Last week's State Forest fires on the West Coast that laid low hundreds of square

miles of valuable timber destined for plastics, paper and organic chemicals were today

officially attributed to sabotage by Forestry Commissioner Wayne C. Charles. As yet it is

uncertain to whom the guilt belongs: treacherous so-called partisans among our own, or

infiltrating reds."

Jogajong is a revolutionary.

The word is EPTIFY.

Don't look in the dictionary.

It's too new for the dictionary.

But you'd better learn what it implies.

EPTIFY.

We do it to you.

Pierre and Jeannine Clodard are both the children of pieds-noirs, unsurprisingly as

they are brother and sister.

"Tornado warnings are out in the following states ..."

Jeff Young is "the man to go to" anywhere west of the Rockies for the rather

specialised goods he handles: time-fuzes, explosives, thermite, strong acids and

sabotage bacteria.

"Turning to the gossipy side: once again the rumour goes the rounds that the small

independent African territory of Beninia is in economic chaos. President Kouté of

Dahomalia in a speech at Bamako warned the RUNGs that if they attempted to exploit

the situation all necessary steps to counter ..."

Henry Butcher is an enthusiastic proselytiser for the panacea he believes in.

(RUMOUR Believe all you hear. Your world may not be a better one than the one the

blocks live in but it'll be a sight more vivid.

- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

It is definite that the man known as Begi is not alive. On the other hand, in at least

one sense he isn't dead either.

"Also it's noised that Burton Dent is bivving it again, in that he was seen scorting

former fuel supply Edgar Jewel into the paniculate stages of this anti-matter. Meantime,

Pacific time, it looks like Fenella Koch his spouse of three years may be turning

spousiness into spiciness with 'cream-dream Zoë Laigh. Like the slogan says - why not

equals why ker-not!"

Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere are construct identities, the new century's equivalent of the

Joneses, except that with them you don't have to keep up. You buy a personalised TV

with homimage attachment which ensures that Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere look, and talk,

and move like you.

(HIPCRIME You committed one when you Opened this book. Keep it up. It's our only

hope.

- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

Bennie Noakes sits in front of a set tuned to SCANALYZER orbiting on Triptine and

saying over and over, "Christ what an imagination I've got!"

"And to close on, the Dept of Small Consolations. Some troubledome just figured out

that if you allow for every codder and shiggy and appleofmyeye a space one foot by two

you could stand us all on the six hundred forty square mile surface of the island of

Zanzibar. ToDAY third MAY twen-ty-TEN come aGAIN!"

tracking with closeups (1) - MR. PRESIDENT

The Right Honourable Zadkiel F. Obomi could feel the weight of the night pressing on

his grey-wire scalp like the oppressive bulky silence of a sensory deprivation tank. He sat

in his large official chair, hand-carved into a design that recreated without copying the

sixteenth-century style of the master craftsmen some of whom had been his ancestors ...

presumably. There had been a long interval when no one had time to care about such

things.

Both his hands lay on the edge of the desk before him, as lax as vegetables. The left

one showed its pinkish palm to the ceiling, with the creased lines that once, when he was

a very small boy, had led a woman of half-French and half-Shango breeding to predict

he would be a great hero. The other was turned to show its mahogany back, its

tree-knot knuckles, as though poised to rap out a nervous fingertip rhythm.

It did not stir.

The deep intellectual forehead and the arch of his nose were probably Berber. But

below the bridge on either side the nostrils flared out and the broad flat lips matched the

plump cheeks and round chin and heavy pigmentation. That was all Shinka. He had

often said jokingly in the days when his life had room for jokes that his face was a map

of his country: invader down to the eyes, native from there on south.

But the eyes themselves, that made the dividing line, were simply human.

The left one was amost hidden under its drooping lid; it had been useless since the

assassination bid of 1986, and a long scar still puckered the skin of his cheek and

temple. The right one was bright, sharp, darting - at present unfocused, for he was not

looking at the other occupant of the room.

The dead night suffocated him: Zadkiel F. Obomi, seventy-four years old, first and

thus far only president of the former British colony of Beninia.

Not seeing, he was feeling. At his back, the huge empty nothing of the Sahara - the

best part of a thousand miles away, yet so monstrous and so dominant it loomed in his

brain like a thunderhead. Before him, beyond the walls, beyond the busy city, beyond

the port, the early-night breeze of the Bight, smelling of ocean salt and spices from the

ships standing to at the harbour bar. And to either side, forming the shackles that

anchored his wrists on the desk against his half-formed desire to move them and turn

the next page of the sheaf of documents awaiting his attention, the deadweight of the

prosperous lands on whom fortune had smiled.

The population of the planet Earth was numbered in many billions.

Beninia, thanks to the slashed-on-a-map boundaries of the colonial government, had

only nine hundred thousand of them.

The wealth of the planet Earth was inconceivable.

Beninia, for the same reason, had a little less than enough to save its people from

starving.

The size of the planet Earth was ... large enough, so far.

Beninia was pitted and pendulumed, and the walls were closing in.

He heard in memory the soft wheedling arguments.

With a French accent: Geography is on our side; the lie of the land indicates that

Beninia should logically join the Dahomalians; the river valleys, the hill passes, the ...

With an English accent: History is on our side; we share the same common language;

in Beninia Shinka speaks to Holaini, Inoko to Kpala, in the same tongue as Yoruba

speaks to Ashanti; join the Republican Union of Nigeria with Ghana and be another

RUNG .. .

Abruptly rage claimed him. He slapped the pile of papers with his open palm and

leapt to his feet. The other man in the room jumped up also, face betraying alarm. But

he had no time to speak before Mr. President strode out of the door.

In one of the palace's four high towers, on the inland side where one could look

towards the lush green of the Mondo Hills and feel the bleak desolation of the Sahara far

beyond, there was a room to which only Mr. President had the key. A guard at the

intersection of two corridors saluted him with a quick wave of his ceremonial spear; he

nodded and. went on by.

As always, he closed and locked the door behind him before he turned on the light.

He stood a few seconds in total darkness; then his hand fell to the switch and he blinked

his one good eye at the sudden glare.

To his left, resting on a low table adjacent to a flat padded hassock, a copy of the

Koran bound in green leather and tooled by hand with golden Arabic script listing the

nine-and-ninety honourable names of the Almighty.

To his right, a prie-dieu in traditional Beninian carved ebony, facing a wall on which

hung a crucifix. The victim, nailed to the wood was as dark as the wood itself.

And facing the door, black masks, crossed spears, two drums, and a brazier of a type

only the initiates of the Leopard Claw Brand might see without its disguise of leopard's

fur.

Mr. President took a deep breath. He walked to the low table, picked up the Koran,

and methodically shredded each of its pages into confetti. Last, he ripped the leather

binding down the spine.

He turned on his heel, removed the crucifix from its peg, and snapped it across. The

crucified one fell to the floor and he ground the doll-shape underfoot.

He dragged from the wall each in turn of the masks. He tore away the coloured straw

hair from them, poked out the jewelled eyes, broke loose the ivory teeth. He

stabbed through the sounding heads of both the drums with one of the spears.

The task complete, he turned off the light, left and locked the room, and at the first

disposall chute he came to throw away the one and only key.

context (2)

EDITORIAL SLOT

Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage, wholescreen, atmospheric-type, orchestrated, first

favouring copter views and MCU's New Jersey Turnpike Jam 1977 (3/4 million cars o/w

16,-000-odd, had to be crushed in situ) intercut w crush-hour shots Fifth Ave., Oxford

St, Red Sq.; later favouring cretins, morons, phocomeli.

Live cue SOUND: "Today we congratulate Puerto Rico on the defeat it's inflicted on the

baby-farming lobby. People who have celebrated their twenty-first find it hard to believe

that a mere thirty years ago highways and cities were choked to strangulation point with

masses of allegedly moving metal that got in each other's way so much we finally saw

sense. Why worry about two tons of complicated steel gadgetry you wont need when

you get where you're going - that won't even get you there in reasonable time? Worse

yet - which measurably shortens your life through cancer or bronchitis thanks to the

stench it emits!

"Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated

with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to

happen to us. That's why we have eugenic legislation. Praise the J-but-O State for

joining the majority of us who have seen the danger coming and resolved to put up with

the minor inconveniences it entails when we decide to control the human elements of the

big scene we inhabit. "This has been a Greater New York Times editorial slot"

continuity (1)

THE GUILT-EDGED SECURITY

Everything about Norman Niblock House was measured: as measured as a foot-rule,

as measured as time. Item the degree to which he allowed himself to lighten his skin and

straighten the kinks in his hair and beard, so that he could exploit the guilt-reaction of

his colleagues while still managing to get next to the shiggies who did most for his cod.

Item the soupçon of eccentricity he manifested in his behaviour, as much as could

ordinarily be tolerated in a junior VP of a big corporation and that much over the limit

which said he was not a man to trifle with. Item the amount and nature of the work he

arranged to have channelled to his office, selected so the visits of other zecks found him

engaged in vastly important transactions.

He had been recruited to the company under the provisions of the Equal Opportunity

Act which bound corporations like General Technics to employ the same ratio of whites

to Aframs as was found in the country at large, plus or minus five per cent. Unlike some

of his intake, he'd been welcome with a sigh of relief by the then vice-president in charge

of personnel and recruitment, who had almost given up hope of finding enough Aframs

willing to accept the standards of their host society. (A doctorate? What's a doctorate? A

piece of paleass's toilet-paper.)

Norman N. House, D.Sc., was a prize. Knowing that, he'd made the race to win him

long and hard.

Perceptive for the third time in his life (the first time: picking his parents; the second:

sideswiping the only other contender for the post he now held down), the VP noticed

that his new subordinate had a talent for impressing his personality on people he had

never met before and was unlikely to meet- again. They said later that he had House

style. It meant that while he could bear to forget others he hated the idea that they

should forget him.

The VP, envying this talent, took to cultivating Norman House in the hope that some

of it might rub off on him. The hope was unfounded. Either a man is born with the gift

or he learns it by conscious application over twenty years. Norman was then twenty-six

and had been applying himself for the requisite two decades.

But the VP was tossed a few glib, helpful snippets. "What I think of him? Well, his

papers are good" (spoken judiciously, willing to make allowances) "but to my mind the

man who has to wear MasQ-Lines is basically unsure of his own competence. They pad

the frontal area, you know." The VP, who had six pairs, never wore them again. "What

do I think of her? Well, she profiles okay on the testing sheet, but to my mind any girl

who wears a Forlon&-Morler Maxess top over a pair of impervious slax is the type who

won't go through with what she starts."

The VP, who had invited her to dinner and expected to be paid in the current

contemporary coin, excused himself on grounds of imaginary illness and went grumpily

home to his wife for the night.

"What I think of the annual report? Well, the graphing is up on last year's, but the

noise level generated by this operation suggests it could be fifteen to eighteen per cent

higher than it is. I'm wondering if it'll last"

The VP, who had been dithering, decided to retire at fifty with the Grade One bonus

stock issue instead of hanging on to collect the Grade Three entitlement, double the size,

due at sixty. He sold the stock as soon as he acquired it and chewed his nails while he

watched its value creep up month by month. Eventually he shot himself.

It was his suspicion that the rise of GT stock might be due to his own replacement by

Norman which killed him.

Norman walked briskly towards the general elevator. He declined to use the one that

led directly from street-level to the wall behind his desk: "It's ludicrous for someone who

deals with people not to mingle with the people he's dealing with, isn't it?"

At least one of the senior VP's had lately stopped using his private elevator too.

But in any case, he was going up.

Waiting, there was one of the company shiggies. She smiled at him, not because they

were acquainted - he preferred to let it be felt that someone who relied on the firm to

get him shiggies was less of a man than Norman House - but because the time and effort

he invested in trifles like not using a private elevator paid off in the common belief that

of all the twenty VP's in the company the most approachable and sociable was Mr.

House. Stockboys toting crates in GT's . West Virginia electronics plant shared the

opinion, never having set eyes on him.

The smile he automatically returned was forced. He was edgy. An invitation to take

lunch on the presidential floor with the senior zecks might be accounted for in two main

ways: there might be promotion in the offing, although the grapevine he assiduously

cultivated had brought him no hint of it; or, far more likely, they might be planning yet

another review of the staffing system. He had endured two such since inheriting his

present job, but they were a nuisance, and sometimes he could not hang on to people

he had schemed for months to slot into influential posts.

The hole! 1 can cope with these paleasses. I did it before.

The descending light of the elevator showed and a soft chime rang out. Norman

returned his attention to the here and now. A clock over the door, keyed like all those in

the GT tower to the famous critonium master clock, indicated -12 - 44 poppa-momma.

If he let the shiggy take the car down, he'd be a measured minute late for lunch with

the Highly Important Personages. That should be about right.

When the car arrived, he waved the girl past him. "I'm going up," he told her.

Promotion in the offing or not, he meant it.

The predicted few moments behind schedule, he emerged on the presidential floor.

Synthetic grass hushed under his feet as he walked towards the group gathered

alongside the swimming-pool. Four of the shapeliest of the company shiggies were

disporting themselves nude in the water. He thought of the recurrent joke question -

"Why doesn't GT pioneer company codders?" - and had trouble masking his amusement

as he was greeted by Old GT herself.

Merely by looking at Georgette Tallon Buckfast one could not have guessed she was

both an extraordinary person and an extraordinary artifact. One had to be told that she

was ninety. She looked at worst sixty: plump, well-favoured, crowned with enough of

her own brown hair to belie the old charge that she was more male than female. True,

close study of her bosom might reveal the inequality which betrayed her use of a cardiac

pacemaker, but nowadays many people wore such accessories by the time they were

seventy or even younger. Only intensive prying had led Norman to knowledge of the

lung-tissue transplant, the plastic venous valves, the kidney graft, the pinned bones, the

vocal cords replaced because of cancer.

According to reliable estimates she was somewhat richer than the British royal family.

Wealth like that could buy health, even if only by instalments.

With her were Hamilcar Waterford, the company treasurer, much younger than Old

GT but looking older; Rex Foster-Stern, senior VP in charge of projects and planning, a

man of Norman's own height and build who affected Dundreary whiskers and what the

Children of X sneeringly termed a "non-partisan tan"; and an Afram whose features had

a tantalisingly familiar cast, though he was not someone Norman had seen around the

GT tower before - fiftyish, stocky, bald, Kenyatta beard, looking tired.

Norman considered a new explanation for his having been invited to this luncheon.

Last time he had encountered a middle-aged stranger at such a function it had been a

retired admiral GT was thinking of adding to the board for the sake of his service

contacts. He had gone to a hovercraft manufacturer instead, so nothing had come of it.

But if this was another of the same, Norman was going to be as insolent as he could

manage without jeopardising his career. No kinky-knobbed Uncle Tom was going to be

slotted into a high board chair above Norman House.

Then Old GT said, "Elihu, let me introduce Norman House, who's our VP i/c personnel

and recruitment," and the world shifted to a different axis.

Elihu. Elihu Rodan Masters, career diplomat, U. S. Ambassador to Beninia. But

whatinole could GT want with a snake's-tongue scrap of land like that, stuck wedgewise

into Africa with neither skills nor natural resources to be exploited?

There was no time for speculation, though. He put out his hand, cutting short GT's

introduction with the gesture. "No real need to introduce anyone to Mr. Masters, ma'am,"

he said briskly. "Someone with his kind of personal distinction is environment-forming

for all of us, and I feel I know him well though I never had the chance to shake with him

John Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar

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