‘You haven’t yet proven that it’s worth the trouble of killing,’ said Novikov.
Larkin put in vindictively: ‘I know why it is. Because Mr. Svoboda’s only son is a Constitutionalist, that’s the reason. Because they broke up over the issue ten years ago and haven’t spoken since!’
Svoboda’s eyes turned quite pale. He held them on Larkin for a very long time. Larkin began to squirm, twisted a pencil in his fingers, looked away, looked back, and wiped sweat off his face.
Svoboda continued to stare. It grew very still in the room. In all the rooms, around the earth.
At the end, Svoboda sighed. I shall lay the detailed facts and analysis before you, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I shall prove that Constitutionalism has the seeds of social change in it: radical change. Do you want the Atomic Wars back again? Or even a bourgeoisie strong enough to try for a voice in government? That sounds less dramatic, but I assure you, the Guardians will be killed just as dead. Now in order to prove my contention, I shall begin with —’
2
The address which Theron Wolfe had given turned out to be on the fiftieth floor in a district once proud. Joshua Coffin could remember almost a century back, how this building had reared alone among trees and gardens, and only a dun cloud in the east bespoke the city. But now the city had engulfed it with mean plastic shells of tenement. In another generation, this would be Lowlevel.
‘However,’ said Wolfe, ‘I’lived here my whole life and gotten a sentimental attachment to the place.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Coffin was startled.
‘It might be hard for a spaceman to realize.’ Wolfe smiled. ‘Or for most better-to-do Citizens, as far as that goes. They are even more nomadic than you, First Officer. Generally you have to be of Guardian family, with an estate, or one of the nameless mass too poor to move anywhere, to strike roots nowadays. But I am a middle-class exception.’ He stroked his beard and added after a moment, sardonically: ‘Besides which, it would be hard to find a comparable apartment. You must realize that Earth’s population has doubled since you left.’
‘I know,’ said Coffin, more brusquely than he had intended.
‘But come in.’ Wolfe took his arm and led him off the terrace. They entered a living room archaic with broad windows, solid furniture, paneling which might be actual wood, shelves of books both folio and micro, a few age-cracked oil paintings. The merchant’s wife, plain and fifty-ish, bowed to her guest and went back to the kitchen. She actually cooked her own food? Coffin was irrationally touched.
‘Please sit down.’ Wolfe waved a hand at a worn, ugly chair. ‘An antique, but highly functional. Unless you prefer the modern fashion of sitting cross-legged on a cushion. Even Guardians are beginning to think it’s stylish.’ Horsehair rustled under Coffin’s weight. ‘Smoke?’
‘No, thank you.’ The spaceman realized his tone had been too prim and tried to rationalize. The habit isn’t common in my profession. Mass ratio, you know, approximately nine to one for an interstellar journey—’ He stopped. ‘Pardon me. I didn’t mean to talk shop.’
‘Oh, but I would much prefer you did. That’s why I invited you here, after catching your lecture.’ Wolfe took a cigarillo from the box for himself. ‘Drink?’
Coffin accepted a small glass of dry sherry. The genuine article, doubtless fabulously expensive. In a way it was a shame to waste it on Ms unappreciative palate. But the Lord had spoken plainly about the sin of idle self-indulgence.
He looked at Wolfe. The merchant was big, plump, still hearty in middle age, with a neat gray Van Dyke. The broadness of his face gave him a curious withdrawn look, as if a part of him always stood aside from the world and watched. He wore a formal robe over dress pajamas, but his feet were in slippers. He sat down, sipped, rolled smoke around his mouth, and said, ‘A shame so few people heard your lecture, First Officer. It was most interesting.’
‘I am not a very good speaker,’ said Coffin, correctly.
‘The subject matter, though. To think, a planet of Epsilon Eridani where man can live!’
Coffin felt a thickness of anger. Before he could stop himself, his tongue threw out: ‘You must be the thousandth person who has said I was at Epsilon Eridani. For your information, that star was visited decades ago, and has no planets of use to any Christian. It is e Eridani which the Ranger visited. I thought you heard my lecture.’
‘Slip of my mind. Astronautics is so seldom discussed these days. Sorry.’ Wolfe was more urbane than contrite.
Coffin bowed his head, hot-cheeked. ‘No. I beg your pardon, sir. I was heedless and ill-mannered.’
‘Forget it,’ said Wolfe. ‘I believe I understand why you’re so tense. How long were you away, now? Eighty-seven years, of which five, plus watch time in space, were spent awake. It was the climax of your career, an experience such as is granted few men. Then you came back. Your home was gone, your kinfolk scattered, the people and mores changed almost beyond recognition. Worst of all, hardly a soul cares. You offer them a new world – the habitable planet men have dreamed of discovering for two centuries of space exploration – and they yawn at you when they do not jeer.’
Coffin sat quiet a while, twirling the sherry glass in his fingers. He was a long man with a jagged Yankee face under hair just starting to turn gray. He still affected snug-fitting tunic and trousers of black, knife-creased, with gold buttons bearing the American eagle. Even in the space service, such a uniform was ludicrously outdated.
‘Well,’ he said at last, struggling for words, ‘I expected a … a different world … when I came back. Naturally. But somehow I did not expect it would be different in this fashion. We, my companions and I, like every interstellar spaceman, we knew we had chosen a special way of life. But it was in the service of man, which is the service of God. We expected to return to the Astronautic Society, at least, our own spacemen’s nation within the nations – do you understand that? But the Society was so dwindled.9
Wolfe nodded. ‘Not many people realize it yet, First Officer,’ he said, ‘but space travel is dying.’
‘Why?’ mumbled Coffin. ‘What have we done, that this is visited upon us?’
‘We have eaten up our resources with the same abandon with which we have increased our numbers. So the Four Horsemen have ridden out on their predictable path. Exploration is becoming too costly.’
‘But – substitutes – new alloys, aluminum must still be abundant – thermonuclear energy, thermionic conversion, dielectric storage—’
‘Oh, yes.’ Wolfe blew a smoke ring. ‘Insufficient, though. Theoretically, we can supply unlimited amounts of fusion power. But there’s so little for that power to work on. Light metals and plastics can only do so much, then you need steel. Machines need oil. Well, lean ores can be processed, organics can be synthesized, and so forth. But at a steadily rising cost. And what you do produce has to be spread thinner each year: more people. Of course, there’s no longer any pretense at equal sharing. If we tried that, everybody would be down on Lowlevel. Instead, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The usual historic pattern, Egypt, Babylon, Rome, India, China, now the entire Earth. So the conscientious Guardian (there are more than you might think) doesn’t feel right about spending millions, which could be used to alleviate quite a bit of Citizen misery, on mere discovery. And the non-conscientious Guardian doesn’t give a damn.’
Coffin was startled. He looked hard at the other.
‘I have heard mention of something called, er, Constitutionalism,’ he said slowly. ‘Do you subscribe to the doctrine?’
‘More or less,’ admitted Wolfe. ‘Though that’s a rather gaudy name for a very simple thing, an ideal of seeing the world as it actually is and behaving accordingly. Anker never called his system anything in particular. But Laird was a rather gaudy man, and —’ He paused, smoked with the care of a thrifty person remembering what tobacco cost, and resumed: ‘You’re probably as much of a Constitutionalist, First Officer, as the average among us.’
&
nbsp; ‘I beg your pardon, no. It seems, from what I’ve heard, to be a pagan – a Gentile belief.’
‘But it isn’t a belief. That’s the whole point. We’re among the last holdouts against a rising tide of Faith. The masses, and lately even a few upper-levels, turn via mysticism and marijuana toward a more tolerable pseudo-existence. I prefer to inhabit the objective universe.’
Coffin grimaced. He had seen abominations. There was a smiling idol where the white church in which his father had preached once overlooked the sea.
He changed the subject: ‘But don’t the leaders, at least, understand that space travel is the only way to escape the economic trap? If Earth’s growing exhausted, we have an entire galaxy of planets.’
‘That doesn’t help Earth much,’ said Wolfe. ‘Consider the problem of hauling minerals nine years from the nearest star, with a nine-to-one mass ratio. Or how much bottom do you think it would take to drain off population faster than it will be replaced here at home? Though Rustum were paradise – and you admit yourself, it has serious drawbacks from the human point of view – not many thousand people could go there to live.’
‘But the tradition would be kept alive,’ argued Coffin. ‘Even on Earth, the knowledge that there was a colony, a place where a man who found life here unendurable could go – wouldn’t that be valuable?’
‘No,’ said Wolfe bluntly. ‘The wage slave Citizen – sometimes, on Lowlevel, an actual slave, in spite of fancy doubletalk about contract – he can’t afford such an expensive passage. And why should the state pay his fare? It won’t lessen the number of mouths at home; it will only make the state that much poorer, in its efforts to fill those mouths. Nor is the Citizen himself interested, as a rule. Do you think an ignorant, superstitious child of crowds and pavements and machines can survive, plowing alien soil on an empty world? Do you think he even wants to try?’ He spread his hands. ‘As for the literate, technically minded class of people, those who could make a go of the project, why should they? They have it pretty good here.’
‘I was becoming aware of this,’ nodded Coffin.
Wolfe’s wide face drew into a grin. ‘Also – imagine this colony were, somehow, established. Would you want to go live there yourself?’
‘Good heavens, no!’ Coffin jerked upright.
‘Why not, since you’re so anxious that it be founded?’
‘Because … because I’m a spaceman. My life is interstellar exploration, not farming or mining. There wouldn’t be any spaceships operating out of Rustum for generations. The colonists will have too much else to do. I think such a colony would benefit mankind as a whole; from a selfish angle, I was hoping it would revive interest in space travel. But it’s not my line of work.’
‘Exactly. And I am a dealer in fabrics. And my neighbor Israel Stein thinks exploration is a glorious enterprise, but he himself teaches music. My friend John O’Malley is a protein chemist, who would certainly be useful as such on a new planet, and he goes skindiving and once he blew several years’ savings on a hunting trip; but his wife has ambitions for their children. And there are others who love their comfort, such as it is; or are afraid; or feel too deeply rooted; or name your own reason. All interested, all sympathetic to your idea, but let someone else do the work. The tiny handful of people you might get who are ready, willing, and able to go, are too few to finance the trip. Q.E.D.’
‘So it seems.’ Coffin stared into his empty glass.
‘But I’ve seen this much for myself,’ he said after a while, his words wrenched and slow. ‘I’ve been forced to realize my profession is on the way out. And it’s the only profession open to me. More important, the only one suitable for my children, if I ever have any. For I’d have to marry within the Society. I couldn’t find a decent home life anywhere else —’ He stopped.
‘I know,’ gibed Wolfe, not very sharply. ‘You beg my pardon. Never mind. Times change, and you are from out of time. I shall not dwell upon the fact that my oldest daughter is a Guardian’s mistress, nor raise your hair by remarking that this doesn’t trouble me in the least. Because there are some rather more significant changes on Earth in recent months, of which I do disapprove, and they are the main reason I invited you here tonight.’
Coffin looked up.’What?’
Wolfe cocked his head. ‘I believe dinner is about ready. Come, First Officer.’ He took his guest’s arm again. ‘Your lecture was admirably dry and factual, but I’d like a still more detailed description. What Rustum is like, what equipment would be needed to establish a colony of what minimum size, cost estimates … everything. I assume you would rather talk that kind of shop than make polite noises at me. Well, here’s your chance!’
3
Even among his admirers, there were many who would have been astonished to learn that Torvald Anker was still alive. They knew he was born a century ago and that he had never been rich enough to afford elaborate medical care; for he would give a pauper boy with intelligence the right to sit at his feet and question him that he refused a wealthy young dullard who offered good fees. So it seemed natural that he would have died.
His writings bore out that impression. The magnum opus, which men were yet debating, was now sixty years old. The last book, a small volume of essays, was published twenty years back, and had been another gentle anachronism, the style as easy and the thought as careful as if Earth still held a country or two where speech was free. Since then he had lived in his tiny house on the Sognefjord, avoiding the publicity which he had never courted. The district was a fragment of an older world, where a sparse population lived largely by individual effort, men spoke with deliberateness in a beautiful language and cared that their children be educated. Anker taught elementary school for a few hours a day, received food and housekeeping in return, and divided the rest of his time between a garden and a final book.
On a morning in early summer, when dew had not quite left his roses, he entered the cottage. It was centuries old, with a red tile roof above ivied walls. From here a man could look down hundreds of meters, wind, sun, and stone, a patch of wildflowers, a single tree, until he saw cliff and cloud reflected in the fjord. Sometimes a gull sailed past the study window.
Anker sat down at his desk. For a moment he rested, chin in hand. The climb had been long, up from the water’s edge, and he had often been forced to stop for breath. His tall thin body had grown so frail he thought he could feel the sunshine streaming through. But it needed little sleep, and when the light nights came – the sky was like white roses, someone had written – he must go down to the fjord.
Well. He sighed, brushed an unruly lock off his forehead, and swiveled the ‘writer into position. The letter from young Hirayama was first on the correspondence pile. It was not very well written, but it had been written, with an immense desire to say, and that was what counted. Anker was not opposed to the visiphone as such, but quite apart from avoiding interruptions of thought, he had a duty not to own one. The young men must be forced to write if they wanted contact with him, because writing was as essential to the discipline of the mind as conversation, perhaps more so, and elsewhere it was a vanishing skill.
His fingers tapped the keys.
‘My dear Saburo,
Thank you for your confidence in me. I fear it is misplaced. What reputation I have has been gained largely by imitating Socrates. The longer I think upon matters, the more I believe that the touchstone is the epistemological question. How do we know what we know, and what is it we know? From this query a degree of enlightenment occasionally comes. Though I am not at all sure that enlightenment is very similar to wisdom.
‘However, I shall try to give definite answers to the problems you bring me, keeping always in mind that the only real answers are those a person finds for himself. But remember that these are; the opinions of one who has long shut himself away from modern reality. I think this has afforded a gain in perspective, but I look out of an old reality, now becoming quite alien, out of salt water and rowan trees and
huge winter nights, on the active human world. Surely you are far more competent to handle its practical details than I.
‘First, then, I do not recommend that you devote your life to philosophy, or to basic scientific research. ‘The time is out of joint,’ and there would be nothing for you but a sterile repetition of what other men have said and done. In this judgment I am guided by no Spenglerian mystique of an aged civilization, but by the very hard-headed observation of Donne that no man is an island. Be you never so gifted, you cannot work alone; the cross-fertilization of equally interested colleagues, the whole atmosphere, must be there, or originality becomes impossible. Doubtless the biological potential of a Periclean era or a Renaissance always exists: genetic statistics guarantees that. But social conditions must then determine the extent to which this potential is realized, and even the major forms of expression it takes. I hope I am not being a sour old man in thinking that the present age is as universally barren as the Rome of Commodus. These things happen.
‘But – second – you ask implicitly if something can be done to change this. In all frankness, I have never believed so. There may be theoretical ways, as it is theoretically possible to turn winter into summer by hastening the planet along its orbit. But practical limitations intervene. And it is just as well that mortal men with mortal vision do not have the power of destiny.
‘You seem to think that I was, on the contrary, once active in politics, a founder of the Constitutionalist movement. This is a popular fallacy. I had nothing to do with it, and never even met Laird. (He is rather a mysterious figure anyway, I gather, suddenly appearing without any background – presumably of Lowlevel birth, self-educated – and vanishing as completely after a decade. Murdered, perhaps?) He was an enthusiastic and understanding reader of mine, but made no attempt at personal contact. He said he was only applying my principles to a concrete situation. His phenomenal rise came after the suppression of the North American revolt and the abolition of the last pretense at a sovereign American government. A crushed, despairing socio-economic-ethnic group turned toward a leader who put their inchoate beliefs into sharp focus and offered them a practical set of rules to live by. Actually these rules amounted to little more than the traditional virtues of patience, courage, thrift, industry, with an interwoven scientific rationalism, but if it has heartened them in their comeback I am honored that Laird quoted me.
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