“He volunteered to give me any assistance on my speech, which was kind of him. When I said I was
still working on it, he reminded me that it was essential to have a final draft by the end of June so that all of the important commentators could study it in advance. Otherwise, it would be drowned in the flood of verbiage on July Fourth. That was a very good point, which I hadn't thought of; but then I said, ‘Won't the other speakers do exactly the same?’ And he answered, ‘Of course, but I've got good friends in all the media, and there's a great interest in Titan. You're still intrepid explorers in the wilderness. There may not be many volunteer carvers around here, but we like to hear about such things.’ By that time I felt we'd got to understand each other, and so I risked teasing him ‘You mean it's true — Earth is getting
decadent?’ And he looked at me with a grin and answered quickly: ‘Oh, no — we aren't decadent.’ Then
he paused, and added: ‘But the next generation will be.’ I wonder how far he was joking...”
“Then we talked for ten minutes about mutual friends like the Helmers and the Wongs and the
Morgans and the Lees — oh, he seems to know everyone important on Titan. And finally he asked about
Grandma Ellen, and I told him that she was just the same as ever, which he understood perfectly. And
then George came back and took me to his farm. It was the first chance I had of seeing the open
countryside, in full daylight. I'm still trying to get over it...”
19
Mount Vernon
"Don't take this program too seriously," said General George Washington. "It's still being changed every day. But your main appointments — I've marked them — aren't going to be altered. Especially on
July Fourth."
Duncan leafed through the small brochure that the other had handed to him when they entered
President Bernstein's limousine. It was a daunting document — stuffed full of Addresses and Receptions and Balls and Processions and Concerts. Nobody in the capital was going to get much sleep during the
first few days in July, and Duncan felt sorry for poor President Claire Hansen.
As a gesture of courtesy, in this Centennial year she was President not only of the United States, but also of Earth. And, of course, she had not asked for either job; if she had done so — or even if she had been suspected of such a faux pas — she would have been automatically eliminated. For the last century, almost all top political appointments on Terra had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteer for them,
especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewd political commentator had remarked:
“We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then
do the best job he possibly can, so that he'll get time off for good behavior.”
Duncan put the program away; there would be plenty of opportunity to study it later. Now he had
eyes only for his first real look at Planet Earth, on a bright sunny day.
And that was the first problem. Never before in his life had he been exposed to such a glare. Though
he had been warned, he was still taken aback by the sheer blazing ferocity of a sun almost one hundred times brighter than the star that shone gently on his own world. As the car whispered automatically
through the outskirts of Washington, he kept readjusting the transmission of his dark glasses to find a comfortable level. It was appalling to think that there were places on Earth where the sun was even more brilliant than this, and he remembered another warning that had now suddenly become very real. Where
the light fell on his exposed skin, he could actually feel the heat. On Titan, the very concept of ‘sunburn’
was ludicrous; now, it was all too easy to imagine, especially for skin as dark as his.
He was like a newborn child, seeing the world for the first time. Almost every single object in his
field of vision was unfamiliar, or recognizable only from the recordings he had studied. Impressions
flowed in upon him at such a rate that he felt utterly confused, until he decided that the only thing to do was to concentrate on a single category of objects and to ignore all the rest — even though they were
clamoring for his attention.
Trees, for example. There were millions of them — but he had expected that. What he had not
anticipated was the enormous variety of their shape, size and color. And he had no words for any of
them. Indeed, as he realized with shame, he could not have identified the few trees in his own Meridian Park. Here was a whole complex universe, part of everyday life for most of mankind since the beginning of history; and he could not utter one meaningful sentence about it, for lack of a vocabulary. When he searched his mind, he could think of only four words that had anything to do with trees — ‘leaf,’