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correlation between mint sauce and English spleen, for example, in the case of the loin chop). He will disclose in it why the Chinese, who have been so many for so long, eat prechopped food with chopsticks and always have rice.
    “Everyone knows,” his voice rose, “who Stephenson was and everyone honors him for his locomotive, his steam engine, but what is that banal relic next to artichokes, which will be with us forever? Vegetables do not age like technology…” The paleobotanist warmed even more to the subject. Was Stephenson risking his life when he put Watt’s steam engine on wheels? Did inventing the phonograph place Edison in mortal danger? They risked at most their families’ anger or bankruptcy. How unfair, that inventors of old-fashioned technology are all famous while no one even thinks about the great gastronomical inventors, or about raising a monument to the Unknown Chef as we do for the Unknown Soldier. And yet so many anonymous heroes fell in terrible agony after they made their brave experiments, with mushrooms, for example, where the only way of distinguishing poisonous from nonpoisonous is to eat and wait for the results.
    Why are the schoolbooks full of kings who became king for no other reason than that daddy was king? Why do children learn about Columbus, the discoverer of America who discovered it only by accident, on his way to India, while there’s not one word about the discoverer of the pickle? We could have managed without America, sooner or later America would have discovered itself, but not the pickle, and then there would have been nothing to sit on our plate beside a roast beef sandwich. No, gastronomy’s nameless heroes were more heroic than those who found a soldier’s death! A soldier had to charge the enemy trench or face a court-martial, but nobody ever forced a person to brave the danger of an unknown berry. Tarantoga’s cousin would like to see a commemorative tablet over the door of every restaurant, with the inscription MORTUI SUNT UT NOS BENE EDAMUS .
    The telephone rang. Tarantoga’s cousin handed me the receiver, saying it was for me. I was surprised, because no one knew about my return from the stars. It was someone from the office of the Secretary General of the UN. He had called Tarantoga for my address, and the cousin short-circuited the call, as it were, by giving the phone to me. Dr. Kakesut Wahatan, plenipotentiary extraordinaire and adviser on global security, wanted to see me as soon as possible. We made a date for the next day. I jotted the time into my notebook, having no idea what I was getting myself into. But I was glad for the call, because it had interrupted the flood of eloquence from Tarantoga’s cousin, who wanted to tell me next about spices and pepper. I took my leave, saying I had to go and promising (insincerely) that I’d drop in again soon.
    Tarantoga told me later that the primroses died: his cousin, in his paleobotanical-gastronomical fervor, forgot to water them. A common phenomenon: he who devotes himself to the general does not concern himself with the particular. Thus the meliorists who would make the whole world happy but have no time for an individual.
    I wasn’t told straight off that I would be asked to risk my neck for humanity by flying to the moon to see what those intelligent weapons were up to. Dr. Wahatan received me with smiles, coffee, and old cognac. He was Asian, a perfect Asian, because I learned nothing from him: he knew how to keep a secret. The Secretary General, he said, intended to read me, but being so very busy, he wondered if I could recommend the ten books I felt were the most important. Seemingly by coincidence, a couple of people dropped by and asked me for my autograph. It was hard to refuse. The talk turned naturally to robots, to the moon, but the moon mainly in its historical role: as a decoration in romantic literature. I learned much later that this was no normal conversation but a screening for security