The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  Mallow nodded. “Of course. They’ll declare war, eventually, though I’m betting it’ll take another pair of years.”

  “With atomic ships?”

  “What do you think? Those three merchant ships we lost in their space sector weren’t knocked over with compressed-air pistols. Jael, they’re getting ships from the Empire itself. Don’t open your mouth like a fool. I said the Empire! It’s still there, you know. It may be gone here in the Periphery but in the Galactic centre it’s still very much alive. And one false move means that it, itself, may be on our neck. That’s why I must be mayor and high priest. I’m the only man who knows how to fight the crisis.”

  Jael swallowed dryly. “How? What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jael smiled uncertainly. “Really! All of that!”

  But Mallow’s answer was incisive. “When I’m boss of this Foundation, I’m going to do nothing. One hundred percent of nothing, and that is the secret of this crisis.”

  16

  Asper Argo, the Well-Beloved, Commdor of the Korellian Republic greeted his wife’s entry by a hangdog lowering of his scanty eyebrows. To her at least, his self-adopted epithet did not apply. Even he knew that.

  She said, in a voice as sleek as her hair and as cold as her eyes, “My gracious Lord, I understand, has finally come to a decision upon the fate of the Foundation upstarts.”

  “Indeed?” said the Commdor, sourly. “And what more does your versatile understanding embrace?”

  “Enough, my very noble husband. You had another of your vacillating consultations with your councillors. Fine advisors.” With infinite scorn, “A herd of palsied purblind idiots hugging their sterile profits close to their sunken chests in the face of my father’s displeasure.”

  “And who, my dear,” was the mild response, “is the excellent source from which your understanding understands all this?”

  The Commdora laughed shortly. “If I told you, my source would be more corpse than source.”

  “Well, you’ll have your own way, as always.” The Commdor shrugged and turned away. “And as for your father’s displeasure: I much fear me it extends to a niggardly refusal to supply more ships.”

  “More ships!” She blazed away, hotly, “And haven’t you five? Don’t deny it. I know you have five; and a sixth is promised.”

  “Promised for the last year.”

  “But one – just one – can blast that Foundation into stinking rubble. Just one! One, to sweep their little pygmy boats out of space.”

  “I couldn’t attack their planet, even with a dozen.”

  “And how long would their planet hold out with their trade ruined, and their cargoes of toys and trash destroyed?”

  “Those toys and trash mean money,” he sighed. “A good deal of money.”

  “But if you had the Foundation itself, would you not have all it contained? And if you had my father’s respect and gratitude, would you not have more than ever the Foundation could give you? It’s been three years – more – since that barbarian came with his magic sideshow. It’s long enough.”

  “My dear!” The Commdor turned and faced her. “I am growing old. I am weary. I lack the resilience to withstand your rattling mouth. You say you know that I have decided. Well, I have. It is over, and there is war between Korell and the Foundation.”

  “Well!” The Commdora’s figure expanded and her eyes sparkled. “You learned wisdom at last, though in your dotage. And now when you are master of this hinterland, you may be sufficiently respectable to be of some weight and importance in the Empire. For one thing, we might leave this barbarous world and attend the viceroy’s court. Indeed we might.”

  She swept out, with a smile, and a hand on her hip. Her hair gleamed in the light.

  The Commdor waited, and then said to the closed door, with malignance and hate, “And when I am master of what you call the hinterland, I may be sufficiently respectable to do without your father’s arrogance and his daughter’s tongue. Completely – with-out!”

  17

  The senior lieutenant of the Dark Nebula stared in horror at the visiplate.

  “Great Galloping Galaxies!” It should have been a howl, but it was a whisper instead, “What’s that?”

  It was a ship, but a whale to the Dark Nebula’s minnow; and on its side was the Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire. Every alarm on the ship yammered hysterically.

  The orders went out, and the Dark Nebula prepared to run if it could, and fight if it must – while down in the ultrawave room, a message stormed its way through hyperspace to the Foundation.

  Over and over again! Partly a plea for help, but mainly a warning of danger.

  18

  Hober Mallow shuffled his feet wearily as he leafed through the reports. Two years of the mayoralty had made him a bit more housebroken, a bit softer, a bit more patient – but it had not made him learn to like government reports and the mind-breaking officialese in which they were written.

  “How many ships did they get?” asked Jael.

  “Four trapped on the ground. Two unreported. All others accounted for and safe.” Mallow grunted. “We should have done better, but it’s just a scratch.”

  There was no answer and Mallow looked up. “Does anything worry you?”

  “I wish Sutt would get here,” was the almost irrelevant answer.

  “Ah, yes, and now we’ll hear another lecture on the home front.”

  “No, we won’t,” snapped Jael, “but you’re stubborn, Mallow. You may have worked out the foreign situation to the last detail but you’ve never given a care about what goes on here on the home planet.”

  “Well, that’s your job, isn’t it? What did I make you Minister of Education and Propaganda for?”

  “Obviously to send me to an early and miserable grave, for all the co-operation you give me. For the last year, I’ve been deafening you with the rising danger of Sutt and his Religionists. What good will your plans be, if Sutt forces a special election and has you thrown out?”

  “None, I admit.”

  “And your speech last night just about handed the election to Sutt with a smile and a pat. Was there any necessity for being so frank?”

  “Isn’t there such a thing as stealing Sutt’s thunder?”

  “No,” said Jael, violently, “not the way you did it. You claim to have foreseen everything, and don’t explain why you traded with Korell to their exclusive benefit for three years. Your only plan of battle is to retire without a battle. You abandon all trade with the sectors of space near Korell. You openly proclaim a stalemate. You promise no offensive, even in the future. Galaxy, Mallow, what am I supposed to do with such a mess?”

  “It lacks glamour?”

  “It lacks mob emotion-appeal.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Mallow, wake up. You have two alternatives. Either you present the people with a dynamic foreign policy, whatever your private plans are, or you make some sort of compromise with Sutt.”

  Mallow said, “All right, if I’ve failed the first, let’s try the second. Sutt’s just arrived.”

  Sutt and Mallow had not met personally since the day of the trial, two years back. Neither detected any change in the other, except for that subtle atmosphere about each which made it quite evident that the roles of ruler and defier had changed.

  Sutt took his seat without shaking hands.

  Mallow offered a cigar and said, “Mind if Jael stays? He wants a compromise earnestly. He can act as mediator if tempers rise.”

  Sutt shrugged. “A compromise will be well for you. Upon another occasion I once asked you to state your terms. I presume the positions are reversed now.”

  “You presume correctly.”

  “Then these are my terms. You must abandon your blundering policy of economic bribery and trade in gadgetry, and return to the tested foreign policy of our fathers.”

  “You mean conquest by missionary?”

  “Exactly.”

  “
No compromise short of that?”

  “None.”

  “Um-m-m.” Mallow lit up very slowly, and inhaled the tip of his cigar into a bright glow. “In Hardin’s time, when conquest by missionary was new and radical, men like yourself opposed it. Now it is tried, tested, hallowed – everything a Jorane Sutt would find well. But, tell me, how would you get us out of our present mess?”

  “Your present mess. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Consider the question suitably modified.”

  “A strong offensive is indicated. The stalemate you seem to be satisfied with is fatal. It would be a confession of weakness to all the worlds of the Periphery, where the appearance of strength is all-important, and there’s not one vulture among them that wouldn’t join the assault for its share of the corpse. You ought to understand that. You’re from Smyrno, aren’t you?”

  Mallow passed over the significance of the remark. He said, “And if you beat Korell, what of the Empire? That is the real enemy.”

  Sutt’s narrow smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Oh, no, your records of your visit to Siwenna were complete. The viceroy of the Normannic Sector is interested in creating dissension in the Periphery for his own benefit, but only as a side issue. He isn’t going to stake everything on an expedition to the Galaxy’s rim when he has fifty hostile neighbors and an emperor to rebel against. I paraphrase your own words.”

  “Oh, yes he might, Sutt, if he thinks we’re strong enough to be dangerous. And he might think so, if we destroy Korell by the main force of frontal attack. We’d have to be considerably more subtle.”

  “As for instance—”

  Mallow leaned back. “Sutt, I’ll give you your chance. I don’t need you, but I can use you. So I’ll tell you what it’s all about, and then you can either join me and receive a place in a coalition cabinet, or you can play the martyr and rot in jail.”

  “Once before you tried that last trick.”

  “Not very hard, Sutt. The right time has only just come. Now listen.” Mallow’s eyes narrowed.

  “When I first landed on Korell,” he began, “I bribed the Commdor with the trinkets and gadgets that form the trader’s usual stock. At the start, that was meant only to get us entrance into a steel foundry. I had no plan further than that, but in that I succeeded. I got what I wanted. But it was only after my visit to the Empire that I first realized exactly what a weapon I could build that trade into.

  “This is a Seldon crisis we’re facing, Sutt, and Seldon crises are not solved by individuals but by historic forces. Hari Seldon, when he planned our course of future history, did not count on brilliant heroics but on the broad sweeps of economics and sociology. So the solutions to the various crises must be achieved by the forces that become available to us at the time.

  “In this case – trade!”

  Sutt raised his eyebrows skeptically and took advantage of the pause. “I hope I am not of subnormal intelligence, but the fact is that your vague lecture isn’t very illuminating.”

  “It will become so,” said Mallow. “Consider that until now the power of trade has been underestimated. It has been thought that it took a priesthood under our control to make it a powerful weapon. That is not so, and this is my contribution to the Galactic situation. Trade without priests! Trade alone! It is strong enough. Let us become very simple and specific. Korell is now at war with us. Consequently our trade with her has stopped. But – notice that I am making this as simple as a problem in addition – in the past three years she has based her economy more and more upon the atomic techniques which we have introduced and which only we can continue to supply. Now what do you suppose will happen once the tiny atomic generators begin failing, and one gadget after another goes out of commission?

  “The small household appliances go first. After half a year of this stalemate that you abhor, a woman’s atomic knife won’t work any more. Her stove begins failing. Her washer doesn’t do a good job. The temperature-humidity control in her house dies on a hot summer day. What happens?”

  He paused for an answer, and Sutt said calmly, “Nothing. People endure a good deal in war.”

  “Very true. They do. They’ll send their sons out in unlimited numbers to die horribly on broken spaceships. They’ll bear up under enemy bombardment, if it means they have to live on stale bread and foul water in caves half a mile deep. But it’s very hard to bear up under little things when the patriotic uplift of imminent danger is not present. It’s going to be a stalemate. There will be no casualties, no bombardments, no battles.

  “There will just be a knife that won’t cut, and a stove that won’t cook, and a house that freezes in the winter. It will be annoying and people will grumble.”

  Sutt said slowly, wonderingly, “Is that what you’re setting your hopes on, man? What do you expect? A housewives’ rebellion? A Jacquerie? A sudden uprising of butchers and grocers with their cleavers and bread-knives shouting ‘Give us back our Automatic Super-Kleeno Atomic Washing Machines!’?”

  “No, sir,” said Mallow, impatiently, “I do not. I expect, however, a general background of grumbling and dissatisfaction which will be seized on by more important figures later on.”

  “And what more important figures are these?”

  “The manufacturers, the factory owners, the industrialists of Korell. When two years of the stalemate have gone, the machines in the factories will, one by one, begin to fail. Those industries which we have changed from first to last with our new atomic gadgets will find themselves very suddenly ruined. The heavy industries will find themselves en masse and at a stroke the owners of nothing but scrap machinery that won’t work.”

  “The factories ran well enough before you came there, Mallow.”

  “Yes, Sutt, so they did – at about one-twentieth the profits, even if you leave out of consideration the cost of reconversion to the original pre-atomic state. With the industrialist and financier and the average man all against him, how long will the Commdor hold out?”

  “As long as he pleases, as soon as it occurs to him to get new atomic generators from the Empire.”

  And Mallow laughed joyously. “You’ve missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You’ve missed everything, and understood nothing. Look, man, the Empire can replace nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They’ve calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion.

  “But we – we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources – have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods – techniques and methods the Empire can’t follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any really vital scientific advance.

  “With all their atomic shields, large enough to protect a ship, a city, an entire world; they could never build one to protect a single man. To supply light and heat to a city, they have motors six stories high – I saw them – where ours could fit into this room. And when I told one of their atomic specialists that a lead container the size of a walnut contained an atomic generator, he almost choked with indignation on the spot.

  “Why, they don’t even understand their own colossi any longer. The machines work from generation to generation automatically, and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burnt out.

  “The whole war is a battle between those two systems; between the Empire and the Foundation; between the big and the little. To seize control of a world, they bribe with immense ships that can make war, but lack all economic significance. We, on the other hand, bribe with little things, useless in war, but vital to prosperity and profits.

  “A king, or a Commdor, will take the ships and even make war. Arbitrary rulers throughout history have bartered their subjects’ we
lfare for what they consider honor, and glory, and conquest. But it’s still the little things in life that count – and Asper Argo won’t stand up against the economic depression that will sweep all Korell in two or three years.”

  Sutt was at the window, his back to Mallow and Jael. It was early evening now, and the few stars that struggled feebly here at the very rim of the Galaxy sparked against the background of the misty, wispy Lens that included the remnants of that Empire, still vast, that fought against them.

  Sutt said, “No. You are not the man.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I mean I don’t trust you. You’re smooth-tongued. You befooled me properly when I thought I had you under proper care on your first trip to Korell. When I thought I had you cornered at the trial, you wormed your way out of it and into the mayor’s chair by demogoguery. There is nothing straight about you; no motive that hasn’t another behind it; no statement that hasn’t three meanings.

  “Suppose you were a traitor. Suppose your visit to the Empire had brought you a subsidy and a promise of power. Your actions would be precisely what they are now. You would bring about a war after having strengthened the enemy. You would force the Foundation into activity. And you would advance a plausible explanation of everything, one so plausible it would convince everyone.”

  “You mean there’ll be no compromise?” asked Mallow, gently.

  “I mean you must get out, by free will or force.”

  “I warned you of the only alternative to co-operation.”

  Jorane Sutt’s face congested with blood in a sudden access of emotion. “And I warn you, Hober Mallow of Smyrno, that if you arrest me, there will be no quarter. My men will stop nowhere in spreading the truth about you, and the common people of the Foundation will unite against their foreign ruler. They have a consciousness of destiny that a Smyrnian can never understand – and that consciousness will destroy you.”

  Hober Mallow said quietly to the two guards who had entered, “Take him away. He’s under arrest.”