The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  “It is,” said Heym eagerly. “I assure you it is.”

  “Well … you were saying—” Goram didn’t look at all sure of what Heym had been saying. “Get to the point.”

  “The early students of culture were struck by the similarity of development of different civilizations, as if man went along one inevitable historic path. And in a way he did—because one thing leads to another. The expanding units of a culture clash, there are ever fiercer wars, old fears and grudges intensify, economic breakdowns increase the misery, finally, and usually unwittingly and even unwillingly, one nation overcomes all others to protect itself and found a ‘universal state’ which brings a certain peace of exhaustion but eventually decays and collapses of its own weaknesses or under the impact of alien invaders. That’s exactly what happened to mankind as a whole, when he exploded into the Galaxy—only this time the fearful scale and resources of the wars all but shattered the civilization; and the Solarian Empire, the passive rigidity solving the problems of the time of troubles by force, has lasted immensely longer than most preceding universal states, because its rulers have enough knowledge of mass-psychologic processes to have a certain control over them, and all the power of a hundred thousand planetary systems to back their decisions.”

  Goram looked a little dazed. “I still don’t see what this has to do with the Foundation and its stations,” he complained.

  “Simply this,” said Heym, “that though history is a natural process, like anything else, it is peculiarly hard to understand and hence almost impossible to control. This is not only because of the very complex character of the interactions but because we ourselves are concerned in it—the observer is part of the phenomenon. And also, it had long been impossible to conduct controlled experiments in history and thus separate out causal factors and observe their unhindered working. On the basis of thousands of years of history as revealed—usually quite incompletely—by records and by archeology, and of extrapolations from individual and mob psychological knowledge, and whatever other data were available, the scientists of the period preceding the Empire worked out a semi-mathematical theory of history which gave some idea of the nature of the processes involved causal factors and the manner of their action. This theory made possible qualitative predictions of the behavior of masses of men under certain conditions. Thus the early emperors knew what factors to vary in order to control their provinces. They could tell whether a certain measure might, say, precipitate a revolt, or just what phrasing to use in proclamations for the desired effect. If you want a man to do something for you, you don’t usually slap him in the face—it’s much more effective to appeal to his vanity or his prejudices, best of all to convince him it’s what he himself wants to do. But once in a while, a face slapping becomes necessary. Why, even today the barbarians are held at bay more by subtle psychological and economic pressures dividing them against each other and putting them in awe of us than by actual military might.”

  An ocean rolled beneath the boat, gray and green, showing white mane on the restless horizon. “Swing northeast,” said Heym. “The planet’s greatest city lies that way, on a large island.”

  “Good. A city’s a good place to observe a people. Can we go around incognito?”

  “Naturally. I know the language well enough to pass for a traveler from some other part of the world. There’s a lot of intercourse between continents. The cities are quite cosmopolitan.”

  “Well—go on. You’ve still not explained why the station and all this rigmarole of secrecy.”

  “I was laying the background,” said Heym, unable to keep all the tiredness out of his voice. Can I really talk this moron over? Can anyone? Reason is wasted on an ape. “It’s really very simple. The crude psychotechnology available made it possible for the early emperors to conquer most of the human-inhabited Galaxy, hold it together, and reach an uneasy truce with the Taranian and Comi Empires. Our military might can hold off the barbarians and the Magellanic raiders, and have sufficient power left over to police the three hundred trillion citizens.

  “Yet our science is primitive. On that vast scale, it can only deal with the simplest possible situations. It’s all we can do to keep the Empire stable. If it should develop, on the colossal scale of which it is capable and with all the unpredictable erraticness of the free human mind, it would simply run away from us. We have trouble enough keeping industry and commerce flowing smoothly when we know exactly how it should work. If we permitted free invention and progress, there’d be an industrial revolution every year—there is never a large proportion of discoverers, but with the present population the number would be immense. Our carefully evolved techniques of control would become obsolete; there’d be economic anarchy, conflict, suffering, individuals rising to power outside the present social framework and threatening the co-ordinating authority—with planet-smashing power to back both sides and all our enemies on the watch for a moment’s instability.

  “That’s only one example. It applies to any field. Science, philosophy—we can control known religions, channel the impulses to safe directions—but a new religion, rousing discontent, containing unknown elements—a billion fanatics going to war—No! We have to keep status quo, which we understand, at the cost of an uncontrollable advance into the unknown.

  “The Empire really exists only to simplify the psychotechnic problem of co-ordination. Enforcement of population stability—good, we don’t have to worry about controlling trillions of new births; there’s no land hunger. Stable industry, ossified physical science, state religion, totalitarian control of the entire life span—good, we know exactly what we’re dealing with and our decisions will be obeyed—imagine the situation if three hundred trillion people were free to do exactly as they pleased in the Galaxy!” Heym shrugged. “Why go on? You know as well as I do that the Empire is only an answer to a problem of survival—not a good answer, but the best our limited knowledge can make.”

  “Hah!” Goram’s exclamation was triumphant. “And you want to turn a world of unpredictable geniuses loose in that!”

  “If I thought for an instant there was any danger of this people’s becoming a disrupting factor, I’d be the very first to advocate sterilization,” said Heym. “After all, I want to live, too. But there’s nothing to fear. Instead, there is—hope.”

  “What hope?” snorted Goram. “Personally, I can’t see what you want, anyway. For three thousand years, we’ve kept man satisfied. Who’d want to change it?”

  Heym bit back his temper. “Aside from the fact that the contentment is like death,” he said, “history shows that universal states don’t endure forever. Sooner or later, we’ll face something that will overwhelm us. Unless we’ve evolved ourselves. But safe evolution is only possible when we know enough psychotechnics to keep the process orderly and peaceful—when our science is really quantitative. The Stations, and especially Seventeen, are giving us the information we must have to develop such a science.”

  The island lay a few kilometers north of the great northern continent. A warm stream in the ocean made the climate equable, so that the land lay green in the gray immensity of sea, but polar air swept south with fog and rain and snow, storms roaring over the horizon and the sun stabbing bright lances down through a mightily stooping sky of restless clouds and galloping winds. Heym thought that the stimulating weather had as much to do as the favorable location along the northern trade routes with the islanders’ leadership in the planet’s civilization.

  Many villages lay in the fields and valleys and on the edges of the forest that still filled the interior, but there was only one city, on an estuary not far from the southern coast. From the air, it was not impressive to one who had seen the world cities of Sol and Sirius and Antares, a sprawling collection of primitive, often thatch-roofed dwellings that could hardly have housed more than a million, the narrow cobbled streets crowded with pedestrians and animal-drawn vehicles, the harbor where a few steam- or oil-driven vessels were all but lost in the thron
g of wind-powered ships, the almost prehistoric airport— but the place had the character, subtle and unmistakable, of a city, a community knowing of more than its own horizon inclosed and influencing events beyond the bounds of sight.

  “Can we land without being detected?” inquired Goram.

  Heym laughed. “An odd question for a military man to ask. This boat is so well screened that the finest instruments of the Imperial navy would have trouble locating us. Oh, yes, we observers have been landing from time to time all through the station’s history.”

  “I must say the place looks backward enough,” said Goram dubiously. “The existence of cities is certainly evidence of crude transportation.”

  “Well”—honesty forced Heym to argue—“not necessarily. The city, that is, the multi-purpose community, is one criterion of whether a society is civilized or merely barbaric, in the technical anthropological sense. It’s true that cities as definite centers disappeared on Earth after the Atomic Revolution, but that was simply because such closely spaced buildings were no longer necessary. In the sense of close relation to the rest of mankind and of resultant co-ordination, Earth’s people kept right on having cities. And today the older planets of the Empire have become so heavily populated that the crowded structures are reappearing—in effect, the whole world becomes one vast city. But I will agree that the particular stage of city evolution existing here on Seventeen is primitive.”

  Goram set the boat down in a vacant field outside the community’s limits. “What now?” he asked.

  “Well, I suppose you’ll want to spend a time just walking around the place.” Heym fumbled in a bag. “I brought the proper equipment, clothes and money of the local type. Planetary type, that is— since a universal coinage was established at the same time as a common language was adopted for international use, and nobody cares what sort of dress you wear.” He unfolded the brief summer garments, shorts and sandals and tunic of bleached and woven plant fiber. “Funny thing,” he mused, “how man has always made a virtue of necessity. The lands threatened with foreign invasion came to glorify militarism and war. The people who had to work hard considered idleness disgraceful. Dwellers in a northern climate, who had to wear clothes, made nudity immoral. But our colonists here are free of that need for compensation and self-justification. You can work, think, many, eat, dress, whatever you want to do, just as you please, and if you aren’t stepping on someone else’s toes too hard nobody cares. Which indicates that intolerance is characteristic of stupidity, while the true intellectual is naturally inclined to live and let live.”

  Goram struggled awkwardly and distastefully into the archaic garments. “How about weapons?” he asked.

  “No need to carry them. No one does, except in places where wild animals might be dangerous. In fact, arms are about the only thing in which the colonists’ inventiveness has lagged. They never got past the bow and arrow. Aside from a few man-to-man duels in the early stages of their history, and now abandoned, they’ve never fought each other.”

  “Impossible! Man is a fighting animal.”

  Heym tried to find a reply which was not too obviously a slap at the whole military profession. “There’s been war on all our other colonies,” he said slowly, “and, of course, through all human history —yet there’s never been any real, logical reason for it. In fact, at one stage of prehistoric man, the late neolithic, war seems to have been unknown—at least, no weapons were found buried with the men of that time. And your whole professional aim today is to maintain peace within the Empire, isn’t it?

  “It takes only one to make a quarrel unless the other lacks all spirit to resist—and a people like these are obviously spirited, in fifteen hundred years they’ve explored their whole planet. But suppose neither side wants to fight. Whenever two tribes met, in the history of Station Seventeen, they were all too intelligent to suffer from xenophobia or other nonlogical motivations to murder, and certainly they had no logical reason to fight. So they didn’t. It was as simple as that.”

  Goram snorted, whether in disbelief or contempt Heym didn’t know. “Let’s go,” he said.

  They stepped out of the boat and its invisibility screen into the field. Tall breeze-rippled grass tickled their bare legs, and the wind in their faces had the heady scent of green growing life brought over the many kilometers of field and forest across which it had rushed—incredible, that pulsing warm vitality after the tanked sterility of the ship, of the Empire. And up in the blue cloud-fleeced sky a bird was singing, rising higher and ever higher toward the sun, drunk with wind and light.

  The two men walked across the field to a road that led cityward. It was a narrow rutted brown track in the earth, and Goram snorted again. They walked along it. On a hill to the right stood a farm, a solid substantial, contented-looking cluster of low tile-roofed stone buildings amid the open fields, and ahead of the horizon was the straggling misty line of the city. Otherwise they were alone.

  “Are all your colonies this wild?” asked Goram.

  “Just about,” said Heym, “though the environments are often radically different—everything from a planet that’s barely habitable desert to one that’s all jungle and swamp. That way, we can isolate the effects of environment. We even have one world equipped with complex robot-run cities, to see how untutored humans will react. There are three control stations, Earth-like planets where ordinary human types were left, and from them we’re getting valuable information on the path which terrestrial history actually took; we can test basic anthropological hypotheses and so on. Then there are a number of planets where different human types are planted —different races, different intelligence levels, and so on, to isolate the effects of heredity and see if there is any correlation of civilization with, say physiology. But only here on Seventeen, populated exclusively by geniuses, has progress been rapid. All the other colonies are still in the stone ages or even lower, though there have been some unique responses made to severe environmental stimuli.”

  “And you mean you just dumped your subjects down on all these worlds?”

  “Crudely put, yes. For instance, before colonizing Seventeen we—that is, the Foundation—spent several generations breeding a pure genius strain of man. On Imperial orders, the Galaxy’s best brains were bred, and genetic control and selection were applied, until a stock had been developed whose members had only genius in the intellectual part of their heredity. Barring mutation or accident, both negligible, the people here and their children can only be geniuses. Then the few thousand adult end-products, who had naturally not been told what was in store for them, were seized and put under the action of memory erasers which left them able to walk and eat and little else. Then a couple of hundred were planted in each climatic region of this planet, near strategically placed invisible spy devices, and the observers sat back on their asteroid to see what would happen. That was fifteen hundred-odd years ago, but even in the forty or so years I’ve been in charge the change here has been very noticeable. In fact, on choosing the proper psychomathematical quantities to represent the various types of progress and plotting them against time, almost perfect exponential curves were obtained.”

  Goram scowled. “So on that exponential advance, you can expect them to work out interplanetary travel in a matter of years,” he said. “They’ll know the principles of the star drive in a few more generations, and invent a faster-than-light engine almost at once. No—they aren’t safe!”

  It was strange to walk through the narrow twisting streets and among the high archaic facades of a city which belonged to the almost forgotten past. To Goram, who must have visited uncivilized planets often, it could not be as queer as to Heym, and, also, the military mind would be too unimaginative to appreciate the situation. But even though Heym had spent the better part of his life watching this culture, it never failed to waken in him a dim feeling of dreamlike unreality.

  Mere picturesqueness counted for a little, though the place was colorful enough. Along those cobbled ways we
nt the traffic of a world. There were fantastic-looking beasts, variations of the horned ungulate genus which the colonists had early tamed to ride and load with their burdens, and still more exotic pets; and steering cautiously between them came trucks and passenger vehicles which for all their crudeness of material and principle had a cleanness of design, all the taut inherent beauty of the machine, that only Imperial mechanisms matched. More significant were the people.

  There was nothing marking them out as obviously different. Many physical types were in evidence here, from the tall fair islanders to the stocky arctic dwellers or the sun-burned southern folk; and costumes varied accordingly, though even strangers tended to wear some form of the light local summer dress. If perhaps a tendency toward higher foreheads and more clean-cut features than the Galactic average existed, it was not striking, and there was as wide deviation from it as could be found anywhere. The long hair of both sexes and the full beards worn by many men screened any intellectuality of appearance behind a hirsute veil associated with the peripheral barbarians.

  No—the difference from any other world in the Galaxy was real and unmistakable, but it wasn’t physical. It was in the clear air of the city, where all chimneys were smokeless, and in the clean-swept streets. It was in the orderliness of traffic, easy movement without jostling and confusion. It was in the clean bodies and soft voices of the people, in the casually accepted equality of the sexes even at this primitive level of technology. It was negative, in the absence of slums and jails, and positive, in the presence of parks and schools and hospitals. There were no weapons or uniforms in sight, but many in the street carried books or wore chemical-stained smocks. There were no ranting orators, but a large group sat on the grass of one park and listened to a lecture on ornithology. Laughter was quiet, but there was more of it than Heym had heard elsewhere in the Empire.