The Glory of Ippling | Page 6

having learned, also on his wise humility in
admitting the fact of his having learned. He smiled now at the naiveté
with which he had approached his first try at establishing a realm for
his Ipplinger Princedom rights.
He had been so full of illusions that he had landed openly, had stepped
right up and announced that he had come to establish his household and
rear his own Princes, who would, in their maturity, leave to win their
own worlds. In addition to their being small-minded on that first world
about his needing five wives for his household, they had nearly
managed to commit him to a lunatic asylum, for he had overlooked, in
his equation, the fact that his first planet, with its two suns and

perpetual daylight, had never known about the stars. There had been no
way to break through their wall of stupidity, and he had left, the
planet's sanity-police close on his heels. Had he used money it would
have been a cinch, he had realized as soon as he was safely in the ship.
That hard-earned lesson he had applied to his second planet, but there
superstition meant more than money, though money had seemed on the
surface to be the answer to everything. On that second planet he had
made the error of buying his way into the half-political, half-religious
temple setup, and had tried to bring the local superstitions into line with
Ipplinger Reality Philosophy. They had lost an officer and three men
when they rescued him from the temple's torture chamber; and none too
soon, for he had been taking quite a stretching when his rescue had
arrived.
Applied on Earth, the superstition equation had not paid off. He had
failed to notice that they didn't really believe in their religions and
superstitions, though they showed every indication of being extremely
devout and credulous. He should have sold Earth, and sold it with sex.
Well, he had learned, all right, and here, on this new world, in this fresh
start, he would show how well he had learned. In the idiom of Ventura
Boulevard, he'd hit 'em with the whole deck, deuces wild. He'd give 'em
sex and money and superstition and to hell with fact and logic.
These primitive worlds had to be brought slowly into a respect for logic;
for Ipplinger logic, the only valid system of logic in the whole universe.
In the hovering ship, the commander turned to the astrogator and said,
with the bitterness of yesterday's conflict with the mutinous crew
evident in his voice, "Well, our little vaporized circuit is off again." He
motioned to the image of Boswellister in the forward viewscreen.
It was a sight that tended to increase the tremor in the astrogator's
hands. He replied, "I only hope we can pull the crew through another
pickup. Home and family! Do they think I want mine any less?"
Boswellister marched confidently down the road. He would succeed,

for didn't he have the well oiled machinery of the whole Ipplinger
starship crew of cultural contact specialists to back him up?
* * * * *
While he walked, he practiced the strident-voiced delivery of
extravagant lies he had learned so well and had so magnificently
imitated from the Ventura Boulevard pitch artists. He practiced the
leering insinuendo of the barker outside the gambling hall; he gave it
the Calsobisidine con come-on; he sold it solid, dripping with sex,
twitching with lure.
He knew that here, finally, he would succeed.
Boswellister XIV, Noble Prince of Ippling, smiled his confidence in his
sex-money-superstition equation as he walked briskly down the road to
begin his contact with a world that had substituted vat-culture
procreation for sex; that had abolished money in favor of a complicated
system of verbal, personal-honor swapping credits; that had no
religions or superstitions. A world of people who considered the most
sweetly distilled essence of living to be the minute investigation of the
fine points of logical discourse, engaged in on the basis of an incredibly
multiplied logic structure composed of thirty-seven separate systems of
discursive regulations, the very first of which was based on a planetary
absolute, the rejection and ridicule of all persuasive techniques and
those who used them.
--HELEN M. URBAN

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