He read the name and number, another guard checked him, and then the first guard would give the seemingly invariable verdict: Outside. "Outside" must mean out on to the radioactive surface of Phlegethon, Don thought.
Outside ... outside ... outside ... outside. Then Don, dripping and blinking weakly in the unaccustomed light, was brought up. The guard consulted his list.
"Haig, Don. P 4390 Ter. Out—wait a minute. No, this fellow goes upstairs. All the way. To Mulciber."
"He certainly doesn't look it," the guard who was waiting with the prod bolt said.
"I know, but that's what's on the list. Look here, you'd better put him in a cell and make him clean himself. He still stinks. And there's no telling how long Mulciber will wait before seeing him."
Don was led along a narrow angling corridor. He stumbled from weakness, and he still dripped. Behind him he could hear the guard with the invoice saying monotonously, "Outside ... outside."
They left the ship, went down a ramp, and entered a covered passage. Don caught a short glimpse of a clouded, smoky sky. Then they were in another corridor, one with rough concrete walls.
They stopped before a door with closely set bars. The guard unlocked it and fiddled with some sort of watch disk. The door swung open. The guard gave Don a push that sent him staggering into the cell.
"Wash yourself, fellow," he said through the bars. "Do a nice, thorough job. If you don't, we might have to correct you a bit."
Left alone, Don looked around him. The cell was tiny, with a bunk suspended from one side. A floor sink against the other wall must be where the guard had meant for him to wash himself.
Don undressed. He bathed thoroughly and rinsed out his filthy clothes. When he was quite clean, not before, he looked at Vulcan's doll.
She was still weeping. The little, perfect tears were still flowing down the little face. Was she weeping for Phyllis? No, not really. But for an instant, a second, it seemed to him that he saw a new tenderness in the little face.
The reality of the impression didn't matter. His heart that had been so overburdened and wild with grief was eased a little. Still naked, holding Vulcan's weeping doll in his hand, he lay down on the bunk and slept.
When he woke, something was different. He lay on the hard bunk and looked around the cell, trying to realize what it was. The cell had not changed; neither had the doll; and yet something was different. The difference, the change, was in himself.
He got up and put on his half-dry clothing. He sat down on the bunk again. The change was in how he felt about Phyllis's death.
Phyllis was dead. For all his rebellion, his fury, his bitterness, and his desperate unbelief—that was the fact, and nothing could change it. Whatever happened to him, whether he lived or died, he had lost Phyllis. Phyllis was dead.
She was dead, and the SSP had killed her. (For a moment he thought, "If I hadn't asked her to stay with me ..." and heard himself groan in anguish. The SSP had killed her indifferently, fortuitously, as they had killed others. But now that she was dead, her death had become a link in the chain.
It was a chain, he thought, that was still forging, and neither of its ends was visible. It went back into the past, it stretched onward into the future. One of its links was a struggle, and this struggle was still before him. Don Haig—he bit his lips—Don Haig must struggle with the SSP.
He waited in the cell for perhaps half a day. Nobody came to feed him, but he could get all the water he wanted from the tap in the cell. At last two guards, one with a prod-bolt, appeared. They opened the door of his cell.
"He's to have hand fetters," the senior officer said. He sniffed at Don. "He's cleaned himself, I see. These cerebrotonic types usually do. Still, we might ... Where's he going?"
"Topside, I think," said the other. He consulted a memorandum. "Yes, all the way, Mulciber."
"Oh. Then of course we can't. Too bad. Put the cuffs on him, Bates." Don's wrists were chained together with a heavy chain. "Come along, you," the officer said to him.
They went out into the corridor. For half a city block they walked along it; then they entered a reversed-grav shaft and went floating up.
The guard with the prod-bolt landed them at the ninth level. Don saw, through a window iris which had been left open, that it had grown dark outside. The smoky sky had turned a charcoal black. At the horizon it was striped by ascending lines of lurid red. Phlegethon's land masses, Don had heard, were ringed with volcanos that smoked continually.
Twice more Don and his guards entered reversed-grav shafts and ascended. He thought, from the reduced pressure in his eardrums, that they must have gone quite high. Then they halted before a door which had sentinels on either side.
"Detention reporting to Administration," the guard with the prod-bolt said, saluting formally. "I am conveying a prisoner, Haig, Don, P 4390 Ter, to you for interrogation. Please sign." He held out a slip to the senior guard on the other side of the door.
"Administration taking possession of prisoner Haig, Don, P 4390 Ter," the administration man answered. He wrote his name on the requisition and added his thumb print. "Where's he for?"
"All the way up. M."
"Oh. Come along, Haig." A guard fell in on either side of Don. Once more they advanced along corridors.
His new custodians, Don saw, were men of a different stamp from those in Detention. The easy cruelty of the other men's faces had been replaced by a hawklike watchfulness. All emotion was under control, even sadism. These men would kill or punish only when reason or self-interest motivated them.
The corridors, the ascents seemed interminable. More than once Don stumbled with fatigue. The metal between his hands was oppressively heavy. They passed room after room filled with softly clicking tabulators. Once they went by a huge arched hall which contained nothing but cybernatic installations. Administration personnel—always armed, conspicuous in their exactly tailored dark blue uniforms—seemed no larger than ants as they moved among the machines tending them.
The corridors began to grow more luxurious. The hard-floor surface was replaced by a thick, mossy texture which Don, in his fatigue, found walking on difficult. The hard overhead lighting gave way to wall brackets with a soft rosy glow. At last Don and his guards stopped before a perfectly plain door of dark, polished wood. There were two guards on either side of it.
"Presenting Haig, Don, P 4390 Ter," one of Don's custodians said, saluting respectfully. "He's to see the chief."
"Oh. Yes." The polished door slid back. "Take him on in."
Don, with an Administration man on either side of him, walked into a very large room. One whole side of the room, from floor to ceiling, was glass. A desk and two chairs were dwarfed in it.
A man came around the desk toward them. Don's two guards saluted him reverentially. "The prisoner, sir," one of them said in a subdued voice.
This was Mulciber, the dreaded, powerful head of the SSP. Don looked at him with curiosity, and then with wild unbelief. He had seen Mulciber before. He recognized him.
Mulciber was Bendel, the man who had come to Fyon with the robot circus. Don could not be mistaken in the sagging, large-framed body, the pitted face, the light eyes. Mulciber—Mulciber was the man with hair on his tongue.
Chapter Thirteen — Mulciber
The guards had withdrawn to a discreet distance. "How do you do, Mr. Haig?" Mulciber said in Bendel's muffled voice. Don perceived, almost with astonishment, how much charm the man had.
"I see you have recognized me. Yes, I am Bendel, whom you saw with the circus on Fyon. I do not usually mingle myself so personally in the affairs of our organization, but the fact is I had a great curiosity to see what sort of cat's-paw my old antagonist had selected. Perhaps you do not realize it, Mr. Haig, but in fact you have been nothing but a cat's-paw from the day you found the doll on the beach."
Don said nothing. Mulciber indicated one of the chairs. "Won't you sit down, Mr. Haig? We might as well discuss your coming to Phlegethon at our ease."
>
Don was faint from hunger, but it seemed to him that he could not afford to surrender the slight moral advantage standing up would give him. "No, thank you," he said.
"I'll have to put you in a foot lock, then." Mulciber pressed a switch on his desk. Don felt an invisible weight close on his ankles. "That will be enough, I think," Mulciber said.
The head of the SSP seated himself in one of the chairs. For a moment he looked at Don in silence. Then he said, "I have had you brought here so I might ask you to give me the doll."
Here it was again—the same simplicity Mulciber, in his role of Bendel, had displayed. "Why do you want her?" Don asked.
"Because she is dangerous, even without the wings I made for her."
"Dangerous?" Don managed a laugh. "Ever since I found her, someone has been telling me she is dangerous. How? Why?"
"She is dangerous because she is a focus for a certain kind of mental force." Mulciber coughed and cleared his throat.
"Do you remember the story I told you when we met on Fyon?" he asked slowly. "The fact is, much of that story was true. It is true, for example, that there is a corrosive kind of life in the doll; I wonder that you have been in contact with her without harm for so long. And it is also true that our solar system, in its 200,000,000-year circuit around the galaxy, has reached a point in space where injurious radiations abound. But these radiations are dangerous, not to one or two individuals, but to the future of all human life.
"They are emitted, apparently, by the same suns that send out radio impulses. They are radiations which have a profound effect on human germ cells in the meiotic stage. Twenty years ago, when we started Program X, we thought we were on the trail of something. Now we are sure of it. Program X had been much criticized, I know." For a moment Mulciber's face changed, and Don saw the eagle strength in it. "Sometimes we have had to behave arbitrarily and cruelly. But we have been acting, throughout, to save mankind from a great if unrecognized danger: the danger of uncontrolled evolutionary change."
Don made a gesture. "You guessed it?" Mulciber asked. Once more he was smiling. "But I do not think, Mr. Haig, you can have any idea how great the peril is."
"Peril? No, I don't suppose I do. I don't see why change should be perilous."
Mulciber sighed, and then smiled. "At least half of mankind," he observed, "still makes an unconscious equation in its thinking, and assumes that change—any sort of change—is identical with progress. It is not so; and any student of the course of evolutionary history on Terra could tell you of change which has been regressive, change which has led to an ultimately fatal specialization, change which has been overadaptation to an ecological niche which no longer existed, or did not yet exist. It you could see some of the mutants—the abortive wings, flaccid, tumorlike lumps—the tentacles growing out of the wrists, boneless and rubbery—or even the extra, misplaced eyes ...
"Let me ask you one question, Mr. Haig. In your opinion, has mankind fully realized, as yet, the possibilities within its present stage of evolutionary development?"
Don thought of the baffled, baffling world in which he found himself. "No, I don't think so," he answered. "We don't use all we have."
Mulciber seemed pleased with the answer. "You are intelligent," he said. "How could we have realized our possibilities? They have not been in existence long enough. We have not had time.
"Now, about the doll. Even if she had never been created, some mutation would undoubtedly take place. There would not be so much of it that it could not be controlled. But as long as the doll, even without her wings—"
"What did you mean by 'the wings I made for her'?" Don interrupted him.
"What I said." Mulciber was unruffled. "She was designed to have wings. I made the wings she was designed to wear."
"As long as the doll exists, there is the certainty that an enormous amount of reradiation from the generalized human stock will occur. Her mental force, added to the impingement of purely physical energies, will cause the most radical mutation to take place. Its speed will be catastrophic. Its final goal no man can foresee. Humanity will have gone forward into the dark.
"I don't pretend that everything the SSP has done has been well done, but we have set ourselves against that. With all its imperfections and faults, mankind has achieved great things in the past. If there is time enough, its future will hold yet greater things. We want those achievements to be made. We don't want mankind to plunge over the cliff into the dark."
He halted. He said, "Mr. Haig, will you give me the doll?"
Don could not speak. His whole mental orientation was gone. If Mulciber was telling the truth ... if the SSP, for all its excesses, was basically benevolent ... then ... then ... (A remnant of caution said, "What did you expect him to tell you—that he is the head of an organization of power addicts, sadists, murderers?")
And it could be true. Everything that had happened to him could be explained—couldn't it?—in Mulciber's terms. Once Mulciber's premise was granted—that the evolutionary changes waiting humanity were destructive and dangerous—everything fell into place. The SSP, on Mulciber's own account, had been arbitrary and cruel sometimes, but those excesses could be justified. Omelets necessarily involve the breaking of eggs.
Don tried to remember facts, to weigh, analyze, compare. The story Kunitz had told him—Francine—Phyllis—his own experience. It was no use. His mind was whirling. It was like trying to catch minnows barehanded. His world was upside down. Or was he standing on his head?
In the end, he gave up the attempt and stood silent. The thought of Phyllis came into his mind unbidden, of Phyllis as he had last seen her in the twilight, sinking down through the water that was red with her own blood. Phyllis had said, "They mustn't have the doll."
He understood suddenly that this was the struggle he had foreseen. This was the linking moment. Don said, "No. I won't give you the doll."
Mulciber was unperturbed. "Don't be hasty, Mr. Haig," he said. "This matter is much too important for you to decide quickly." He went over to the windowed side of the room and stood looking out at the sky, his hands clasped behind him. Without turning, he said, "I may tell you, Mr. Haig, that I believe we can take the doll from you in the event of your refusal. I am not quite sure. In any case, I should prefer to have your consent. Well?"
He turned from the window. "I have one more argument, Mr. Haig," he said slowly. "It can be compressed into one word, a word which has grown unfamiliar. War."
"War?" Don echoed. The word had made no impression. "I don't understand."
"The word has almost dropped from our vocabularies," Mulciber observed. Once more he smiled. "For three hundred years there has been no war. And yet it was once one of the most dreaded words.
"It is the fashion among you intellectuals, you readers, to sneer at the direct suggestion broadcasts, the synthetic or arranged childhoods, all the paraphernalia of the new psychology. You overlook the role all this has played in freeing us from the scourge of scourges. For three hundred years, there has been no war.
"In those three hundred years of peace, mankind that once was divided into a dozen rivulets has flowed into a mighty torrent. In our unity, we have colonized the planets. We have sent an expedition to Proxima. We may soon have the deep space drive.
"Yet that work can be undone. It was hard enough for us to keep the peace when we knew that all men were brothers. Even in our biological unity, it was hard. What will become of us when Homo alatus wars with Homo intelligens, and Homo thoraceus, tough-armored, with stout, stubby legs, battles with both? There will be war then, the old scourge more horrible. There will be nothing but, never anything but, war.
"In the end, the great, torrential river of human unity will have vanished. There will be a hundred jarring currents. They will lose themselves in swamps, be swallowed in sand or in cracked, stinking mud.
"Mr. Haig. Once more I ask you. Give me the doll."
This time Don answered without hesitation, almost without thought. "You say
you care for humanity. You're lying. There's nothing in you but hatred for it. You're full of hate and jealousy. No. I won't give you the doll."
Mulciber bowed his head in silence. Don thought his pitted skin had turned white. He went to his desk and said a few low words into a communication grill.
"You don't need to look so apprehensive, Haig," he said when he had finished with the message. He looked at Don and smiled mockingly. His eyes were bright. "We shan't kill you to take the doll away from you. The fact is, the tie between you and it has grown so strong by now that I have no idea what the result of severing it forcibly would be. And we shan't coerce or correct you, either, at least at present. A consent obtained by force would not destroy the field or weaken the tie."
There was a wait. Mulciber, at his desk, was printing something with isotype blocks. Don stood with sagging shoulders, looking at the length of chain between his hands.
He would resist, of course. (For a moment he thought hysterically: Who is Don Haig? What is he? What has he got to resist with?) He would resist the attempt to take Vulcan's doll from him. What would happen if the resistance succeeded—or failed—no, he wasn't going to think about that.
A buzzer sounded. Mulciber, without raising his head, pressed a stud. The outer door of the office opened. Two men came in.
They were dressed in the gray smocks of laboratory technicians. Behind them they were pulling an apparatus—Don had no idea what its proper name might be—mounted on runners like a sled.
They came over the carpet noiselessly and stopped in front of Mulciber, Their faces were as rigid as masks, and as impersonal. Yet it seemed to Haig that a spark of something—independence, perhaps—lurked in them. It was a quality he had seen in no other SSP face.
Mulciber, hardly looking up, said in his muffled voice, "You know what you are supposed to do. I trust you will succeed in it."
Agent of the Unknown Page 9
