Free I Speak for Earth by John Brunner Page B

being a uniform. She was reading a thick gaudy-covered novel. On the right, a dark brown man—also wearing glasses—reading a set of proofs and pausing to mark a printing error with a fountain pen. He was slim, nervous-looking, and had a face which was almost positively ugly. But he was the first to glance up to see who had entered, and when he did, his face was transformed by a white-toothed smile.
    “Good morning,” said Schneider, walking forward. There was a chorus of replies which sounded to Joe oddly like the chorused greeting of school children when the teacher entered for the first lesson of the day. He repressed a desire to smile and followed Schneider forward.
    “I’m sorry to interrupt your game,” he said to the chess-players, and the stolid man sat back, spreading his hands.
    “It matters not at all,” he said, in good but poorly inflected English. “I believe I must resign—it is
shakhmat
in five moves”
    He glanced at the Indian woman, who nodded and smiled, and dropped the pieces back in their box before setting the board aside.
    Schneider tugged one of the vacant easy chairs around with his foot until it faced the rest of the room, and then dropped into it. He rested his elbows on its arms, clasped his hands, and smiled.
    “Well, we are now all here,” he said. “Shall we make a last concession to superstition and say we hope for good luck? From now on, it is logic that we must obey, without risking reliance on instinctive feelings. We must get to know one another first, of course—Joe, please sit!—and therefore I would like to propose that we make ourselves acquainted. I would like you to describe yourselves without modesty please, as fully and completely as you possibly can. I will if you like begin by presenting myself. My name is Fridrich Schneider, and all my friends call me Fritz. I am fifty-three years old. The reason I do not sometimes speak perfect English is that I was born in Salzburg, in Austria, and I did not learn English until I studied psychology in England when I was twenty-one. I am a psychologist, not a psychiatrist; I have only for a short time been in curative work, many years ago. Aside from that, I have been studying always the physical aspect of theprocess of thought. I have a degree in cybernetics as well as in psychology. I am well known in my field. I have done work on the electrical implantation of nervous impulses, on human adaptation, on the early diagnosis of nervous disease and on other subjects.
    “When the selection project was instituted, I was invited to manage it. I have personally supervised the breakdown of the records concerning all of you here, and of many, many rejected candidates. Lastly, I am regarded by most authorities as being the greatest living expert in my field. I should now like you, Joe, to describe yourself to us.”
    The transition from autobiography to the last sentence took Joe by surprise. He blinked and laughed shortly.
    “Ah—well, all right. My name is Joseph Hardy Morea—Joe to my friends and practically everyone else. I’m thirty-two years old. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and went through school there; then I took a degree in engineering and physics at MIT, and after that I decided to try and get into space engineering, so I volunteered for the physical course at the North Australian Institute. I got through, and then I spent a year working on the hull-structure of
Old Stormalong
. I made out pretty well up there, and I turned up a few new ideas which people had contrived to overlook, and when I was sent for by Dr. Schneider I was almost through my third tour up there.”
    “Joe,” said Schneider, “I said without modesty. Please add to that.”
    Joe hesitated and shrugged. “All right,” he said after the pause. “I got the best degree of my year at MIT, and I was head of my course at North Australian. I designed the dust-piercing nose for
Old Stormalong
—that’s the thing that shoves interstellar dust aside