This is Nightline, your open door to people and places, and this is Walter O'Keefe. Nightline invites you to listen in on NBC's award-winning science fiction series, X-1. Now escape to a world of the future. Countdown for blast-off. X minus five, four, three, two, X minus one, fire. From the far horizons of the unknown come tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future, adventures in which you'll live in a million could-be years on a thousand maybe worlds. The National Broadcasting Company, in cooperation with Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, presents X minus one. Tonight, The Merchant of Venus by A.H. Phelps, Jr. But first, hear this. When they play it hot and you dig the beat, oh, life is swinging, life's complete. You make it Pabst, cause Pabst makes it perfect. Yes, Pabst makes it perfect, just as we always have ever since 1844. So next time, you make it Pabst, because Pabst makes it perfect. America's blue-ribbon beer from the Pabst Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Yes, Pabst makes it perfect. Now on X minus one, The Merchant of Venus. If you've ever tried to make a six-inch marionette play the piano using spider webs a hundred feet long for the strings, you'll have some idea of the job of administering personnel problems of the Venus colony from an office on East 41st Street in New York. But that's the way it's done. All recruitment and contract work for out-space employment is handled by the UN Off-World Commission. My particular mess is the Venus Project. Mostly, the trouble comes to my phone extension. Workum here. Workum. How long do you think we're going to stand for this? Ah, General Carlson, how are you? At the rate you're going, there won't be a man left on Venus or a dollar left in the budget. What kind of a personnel director are you? Well, if you- Don't you know this project is vital to every person on Earth? General Carlson, just what is wrong? Thirty more resignations came in from the colony on the last mail flight. Thirty-three spineless quitters getting fat at the taxpayers' expense. Excuse me, General- Listen to me, Workum. I'm getting awfully tired of the kind of recruitment you're doing. Miss Cain, get me Dave Newson on the other line. No, don't cut the General off. He's enjoying himself. He won't miss me. Yes, there's a kind of inefficiency that's at the bottom of the whole thing. Well, I'm not too sure about that, General. Believe me, with one platoon of Rangers, I could get a colony in a zip. Hello, Rod. Dave, General Carlson's on the other phone yelling at my desk blotter. He says thirty more resignations came in. Is that right? Actually, twenty-three. Seven for sick leave. What's the breakdown? Mostly farmers or technicians? Well, there were only nine technicians left. This batch cleans them out. The rest are farmers. What's left? A couple of farmers, trappers, and the scientists. They seem to stick it out all right. Different contracts. They only have a two-year hitch and then come back to Earth if they want to. Listen, meet me down at the coffee shop. No, no, Carlson goes down there sometimes. The saloon over on forty-third, about ten minutes. The saloon was decorated in old-fashioned foam and plastic furniture. It looked straight out of the antebellum 1950s. I found Dave waiting for me in a booth and we got right down to it. Listen, why don't we leave this last bunch of quitters right where they are? Refuse to bring them home. Then they'd have to make a go of the colony to save their scrawny necks. I'd like to, but even General Carlson wouldn't dare. We'd never get another colonist off Earth. And our main job is to relieve population crowding on Earth. We'd get tough with the colony, a man would be a fool to go. Every one of these quitters talks like he was just sprung from Devil's Island. This isn't getting us anywhere. I want you to shoot me up the files on this last batch of quitters. Maybe we'd better have a staff meeting on it. Get the psychology section, the preliminary interviewers who passed these men, and I have Jameson too. What do you want a historian for? Maybe he can find us something interesting in the project record. He's used to deducing the philosophical and religious behavior of the ancient Hittites from a loose translation of a cuneiform laundry bill. Shall I get them all down here? No, we'd better make it formal. Book a conference room. When you get Jameson into a saloon, he spends all his time thinking up guessing games to avoid paying for his drinks. Now, make sure about General Carlson. I'll tell his secretary. No, no, no. The secretary doesn't hear about it. I don't have anything against General Carlson personally. It's just that there's always been a fight over Venus Project, the military versus the rest of us soft, decadent civilians. Carlson felt the right way to settle any virgin territory was to set up a military outpost on the ground that soldiers had always been the best operators under similar circumstances. I had lunch with Dave before the conference. You want to call the greasy spoon and order? What's on the menu? Well, Proto's burger, sliced barbecued yeast, or seaweed borscht with boiled algae balls. Just coffee, black coffee. They don't have coffee. What do you think this is, the chamboard? You can have neocaf or syntho tea. And that just about sums up the problem the earth faces. Scientific agriculture and hydroponics had gone just about as far as they could. Most foods couldn't take up the slack. If the people of earth kept on emulating the extinct rabbits as they showed every intention of doing, we had about 30 years before we'd all be standing on each other's shoulders chewing our fingernails for nourishment. Or rigid birth control would go into effect with the whole attendant problem of racial tension, nationalistic wars, and bootleg conceptions. The group gathered in the conference room looked sour enough to have been dining on seaweed borscht for a week. All right. Now suppose I sum up what we all know already. It'll give us time to stall before we face problems to which we have no answers. That's a cheerful beginning. All right. Now for six years, we've been trying to establish a self-sustaining colony on Venus. Why? Take the monorail out to Bucks County or up to Vermont at rush hour. There just isn't any more room on earth. They've just opened the dome colony in Antarctica, the housing areas in the Amazon Valley. They're already piled up with a 10-year waiting list. All right. Now, if we send out colonists, what happens? They quit. Thank you, Mr. Jameson. The resignations come in. By terms of the contract, we have to transport them back to Earth inside of a month of resignation. There'll be nothing left on Venus but a few small clearings in the jungle and a few empty beer cans. Now, I'm not accusing anyone here of making mistakes, but I think we have to seriously consider whether we're spending money for nothing. Rod, you said the problem was insoluble. We know what we need up there. It's just that we're still making some mistake in selection, in psychological screening. That's all. You're not going to quit, are you, Rod? Well, we're not. We'll get these studies out and check again. Venus project is too important to fail, right? Right. Right. It's a cheap trick, but it always works. I talk with a heavy, heavy heart. Dave jumps into shield like a boy scout. It always amazes me how a bunch of PhD psychologists can get suckered into enthusiasm every time. We tried to figure out what made the settlers quit. We went into their backgrounds, their personality psych profiles. The coffee grew stale and the smoke heavy. Nothing. Look, Rod, here's what it boils down to. A man has to be unstable to want to leave Earth, but he has to be stable to stay on Venus. You need initiative and resourcefulness to make out on a new planet, but if you had it, you'd make out fine at home. You need young, healthy, vigorous, mature, older, experienced people all rolled into one. We're looking for a collection of walking paradoxes. We're listening to The Merchant of Venus, tonight's attraction on X minus one. For the big things in your life, be ready with United States savings bonds. That's the new savings bond with the higher interest rate, the improved Series E savings bonds that now mature faster to pay you back extra dollars faster. Yes, when you think of saving, think of savings bonds. They offer you the safe, easy way to save regularly. Safe because each bond is backed by the United States government itself. And it's easy because you can buy bonds either where you bank or through the payroll savings plan where you work. And remember, you get back $4 at maturity for every three invested, so you earn extra dollars. But the big news is that the maturity period is shortened to only eight years and 11 months. So join the bond wagon, start a family savings program, invest in improved Series E bonds first thing tomorrow and hold the bonds you already own. Now back to X minus one and The Merchant of Venus. We tried brainstorming on Project Venus. You know, just sit around and let the ideas seep out of your unconscious. Take kids up and bring them up on Venus under guard. Grow colonists in test tubes and ship them out wrapped in glass. Start trial colonies in the Congo. Nothing. I was mulling the conference over by myself in the saloon when Jameson dropped into a chair beside me. Hi, Rod. Oh, hello. Hey, I got a new game. I take three matches in my right hand and you guess... Don't bother. I'll pay for the drinks. Rod, you're taking the sport out of sponging. I see nothing amusing in being a petty con man. How about that snow job you work on the psych team every couple of weeks? You could get rich selling bogus mining stock to investigators for the SEC. There is a difference between legitimate personnel psychology. Sure, sure. How about when you threatened to quit? Well, I'm not sure I was kidding. What would happen if you quit? Carlson would probably send a military outpost up there. Make a clearing, build a fort, maybe a town, and then he'd try to get people to come and live in it. It won't work though. They'll want to know why the planet had to be colonized that way. Why wouldn't the civilian colonists stay? Rod, this may surprise you, but I agree with you. But not because of your fancy psych profiles and emotional mathematics. A free people will not willingly move into a military township. Rod, are you a gambling man? I told you, I'll pay for the drinks. No, no, no. Would you take a 50-50 chance if the colony had a chance of working out? I guess so. It's better odds than I'd give at the moment. All right, you're on. Now, wait a minute. What are you talking about? Never mind. Here, look. I take three matches in my right hand. And that's all he said. I found out a week later what was going on when I was called on the carpet by General Carlson. As I understand it, this plan of Mr. Jameson's was smothered in your office because of professional jealousy. Mr. Jameson having no degree in psychology. Is that what he told you? Mr. Ergun, I'm very busy. I have a conference with Mr. Jameson in exactly seven minutes. I caught him later that afternoon. Now take it easy, Rod. That's the only way I could get all blood and sarsaparilla to snap at my bait. If he thought you were sitting on an idea, he was bound to grab it. You know he dry-docked me for six weeks. Go fishing. Have a good time. When you get back, I'll have my little swindle going full blast. That is exactly what I did. I went fishing. When I came back to work, I had to fight to get into the building. Hey, who are you pushing? I work in here. Yeah, line-bucker. What do you mean? You can watch your time like the rest of it. What's going on in there? What, are you kidding? This is the volunteer office. Where have you been? Volunteer for what? The Venus colony. Oh, no, no. That's a little office around on 43rd Street. Wake up, bud. They moved out of that office last week. You mean all these men are volunteering? Sure. Hey, you got a bottle on you? No. Anything. A little California seaweed juice, maybe. Ain't fuzzy. Are you a trained farmer? Do I look like a hayseed? Technician. Mechanic. Listen, buster, that's for marks, rubes, hex. I know how to take care of myself. Let the suckers push tractors around. You sure you ain't got a shot? No. Man, I can hardly wait till I get there. The nearest saloon? Venus, man, Venus. What are you going to do when you get there? I'm going to snag me all the clime, then let the crats roll in. I'm going to get me a year's supply of the best pre-war scotch, and I'm going to use it up in a week. They don't pay that kind of wages at the colony. Wages? That's for squared yarns. I'm going out for the hot stuff. You know what I mean? Radioactives? Well, the government assays don't show enough to make it worth shipping. That's what they want you to believe. I heard they got loads of big yous so rich, you got to wear a lead union suit to get in there. Don't you realize there's nothing but jungle up there and insects and spores and fungus? All right, all right. I know the story. That's to keep our suckers. Think of a mate, bud. Just look around. The smart money knows the truth. I'm getting in on the ground floor. Jamison, you irresponsible idiot. Rod, how are the fish? I know what you're doing and I won't put up with it. You've told those dupes down there they can get rich on Venus. Well, they're volunteering. I suppose you think if you get enough of them, you'll find what you want. But have you looked at them? Crooks, gangsters, bums, hobos, drunks, and I don't know what. They are a little picturesque, aren't they? You've got recruits all right, but what kind of a society are you going to start with them? Rod, Rod, you're not being just a teeny weeny bit snobbish, are you? Look, this isn't a joke. I don't care who goes as long as they meet some standards. But to make a decent place, you need decent people, morally clean and healthy. And to think this is a man I have seen playing stud poker. You've got a collection of bums and alcoholics and criminals. Probably half of them are wanted by the cops. You've got to stop. There wasn't a thing I could do. I issued a statement to the press and I got editorials attacking me for trying to keep the riches of Venus from the common man. Days passed, weeks. The training and screening compounds were jammed and the transports lifted from Coco Base on a tight schedule, a hundred men to a ship, not counting crew. People traveled miles to apply. They drifted in from every skid row around the world. Then the numbers decreased. Day by day, the get rich quick propaganda seemed to be losing its grip. About a year passed and the lines had dwindled down to about a steady five men a day. I went through my routines in a kind of daze, horrified at the tale history would write about the society that was recruited through my office. Then one day I met a man in a lunch room. He asked me the way to the recruiting office. We got to talking. That afternoon I found Jameson in the saloon and cornered him. Look, I take four lumps of sugar in my left hand and you try to guess which one was... Never mind. Just a little sporting proposition. I've had enough sporting propositions out of you. Jamie, I just talked to a recruit. How democratic of you. I'm not kidding. He was an engineer who tossed up a good job to go out to the colony. How nice. I did a little more checking. They changed. There are farmers with their families, school teachers, lawyers, doctors, and then two ex-colonists applied yesterday to go back. Guess which hand holds the... Listen, there is on the bar a pre-war bottle of scotch at $25 an ounce. I will buy you the whole bottle for an explanation. Oh, well, wait till I put the sugar back in the bowl. Jamie, how did you do it? Were we so far wrong with our charts and psycho math? Actually, you told me how to do it. Remember you said if there was a recently pioneered society around for you to test, you could set up your standards? Well, all you needed to do was duplicate the kind of person who settled America or Australia or California. As an historian, I knew what they were like and I knew what brought them. So I put out the same bait. In a pig's eye you did. How about freedom of religion, freedom from oppression? That had something to do with settling America, didn't it? Isn't that what brought people to this country? I saw that cesspool full of tramps you started with. If there was a Tom Painter or Ben Franklin among them, I'll eat a whole Rorschach series one inkblot at a time. Rod, you are no historian. Franklin was born here. Pain didn't come over in the first wave. Pioneers are not necessarily young, healthy, or moral. America wasn't founded only by pilgrims. They were actually a minority. We were settled by promoters, bonded servants, British convicts, pickpockets, thieves, French and Spanish pirates. They came here for gold or to beat a hangman's rope. That's the kind of person who settles a new land, misfits, drunkards, fugitives from justice, too sick in mind or body to make a go of it where they are. But what kind of society will they make out of it? What kind did the sweepings of nougat make out of America? After a while, they stop shooting each other down in the streets and civilization catches up with them. For one thing, they get married. And it's amazing what a civilizing influence a wife is. Won't they be a little sore? After all, you just worked the greatest hoax since... ...the immigrants came to America because they heard the streets were paid with gold. Well, I'll be going along myself soon. You? Yup. Now that they've got a colony going up there, they'll be making history. And besides, I understand there's a wide open gambling saloon at New Abilene on the Neo-Texas Peninsula. I'm anxious to try my luck on the wheel. I wonder if that pre-war bottle of scotch will stand the acceleration. Fred Collins again, and I'll be back with a word about X minus one in a moment. This is Bob Haynes speaking to you from somewhere in the Caribbean. I am aboard a UDT personnel landing craft. That's the underwater demolitions team. We are right now on our way out to rendezvous with the United States submarine Sea Lion. Monitor took you there. Some men go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Some people sit on top of flag poles. But we have a man by the name of Rajah Phillips from India who is buried alive right in the center of a furniture store here in Owensboro, Kentucky. And Monitor took you there. Big events, little events, offbeat events, comedy, music, music, and sports. They're all part of the top variety of entertainment. Monitor brings you all weekend long. This is Frank Blair inviting you to join us on Monitor every weekend and Friday nights too on most of these NBC stations. You have just heard X minus one presented by the National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine. Your announcer Fred Collins. X minus one was an NBC radio network production. There's excitement in the air at night and Nightline brings it to you. Here Nightline with Walter O'Keefe next on most of these NBC stations.
