"But, damn it, man," the King said explosively, "people and nations aren't rocks! We are thinking beings! We choose our actions, I tell you, and we need not—" At this point, he fell to coughing once more, which allowed Ari to speak without the discourtesy of interrupting.
"Individuals, of course," Ari said, "may behave in any number of unpredictable ways, the humanoid types especially, which is what makes them the most interesting races to study Metahistorically. I mean, there's not much challenge in working out what a race of sentient crystals is going to do, is there? They spend most of their time forming lattices; quite decorative, but not affording much scope for the Metahistorian, I can tell you. But this humanoid diversity, taken in the aggregate, adds up to complete determinism, if I may put it so. The courses of nations and of worlds may be charted with complete accuracy, as I have charted yours. You've got Russia here"—he tapped on the map with an extended forefinger—"Germany here,
Austria-Hungary there, France, Turkey and so on, and yourselves spread all over the place. Given everything I've gone into before, you're bound to have a most remarkable disaster, millions dead and ruins all over the place, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's what Metahistory shows quite clearly, and if it weren't so, it wouldn't be Metahistory, would it?"
The King looked pale and tired. "We have all told ourselves that it would not come to this," he said in a low voice, "that we could keep everything balanced somehow—that we could go on building ships and guns so that we should not have to use them, that our generals could devise cleverer and cleverer plans, that—"
"Well, that's one thing," Ari interrupted, careless of etiquette. "Generals and such. They've got an inherent error factor built in, you see. I mean, suppose you have two countries; you could call them A and B, to keep things clearer. Now, there's a dispute between them, and the generals on both sides make their plans. Now, assuming they're pretty nearly equally matched—otherwise they'd be silly to try a war, wouldn't they?—well, then, at least half the generals have got to be wrong."
"How is that?" the King said faintly.
"Well, obviously, each lot of generals, A's and B's, tells their government that their plans will work, or they wouldn't start up the war. And, as one side or the other loses, the generals on the losing side are proven wrong. It's usually worse than that," Ari went on reflectively, "as even the winning ones are quite often wrong about what will happen, how long the whole thing will take, and so on. You had that in South Africa, as I recall—won the war, but it was much harder than you expected, so your generals were half wrong, and the Boers' generals all wrong, which works out to about twenty-five-percent accuracy for the trade, if I have got my figures right. I don't think you'd be at all happy if your chauffeurs or your cooks got things correct only half the time or less, so that's the difficulty in working with generals, you see."
The King considered this proposition for some little time, then roused himself to say, "I had never thought of it quite like that. It makes a dreadful kind of sense, though I think that you people's brains must work rather differently from ours."
"Thank you, Your Majesty," Ari said, pleased with the compliment.
"It is a terrible prospect you show me," the King continued. "Terrible—and I fear that I cannot dismiss it. You confirm what I have begun to dread, and yet you offer no escape. . . ."
"Well, no, there isn't any," Ari said. "That's Metahistory for you."
The King chewed gloomily on his cigar. "If it must be so, it must. God grant I do not live to see it."
"That's about an even chance," Ari said, looking at him appraisingly. "If you were to get at it pretty quickly, as I recommend, which would serve your planet's people's ends as well as our own, as I have tried to make clear, you'd probably see it pretty well launched. If you and your fellow kings just let things drag on another couple of years or so, why, I'd have to agree that you'd probably be pretty well out of it."
"What!" the King shouted, rising to his feet, his aristocratic accent making the word come out nearly as "Vot!"
"Well, that coughing, and the way your face changes color. A moment ago, it was quite pale, and now you've got a nasty flush about the cheeks. From what I learned when Mr. Hearst's doctors looked us over, you people function about the same as we do, so I'd say your heart's in very bad shape. A year or so, that's about what you'd be safe in counting on."
King Edward's face was indeed now a most startling hue, more toward the purple side than the red; his eyes protruded even more than they had before, and he began to splutter at Ari, evidently an expression of anger. This changed into another bout of coughing, and he sank back into his chair, his massive body heaving as he tried to stem its force.
"Dear me," Ari said, "I hope I haven't upset him."
"I believe you've upset us properly," I observed, watching the writhing monarch strive to catch his breath. "I shouldn't be surprised if he died right here and now, and I don't care to think what happens when two strangers are closeted with a King-Emperor and are later found with his corpse. Something tells me that the upshot would be regrettable."
"Well, we certainly don't want that," Ari said. "Let me see, did I bring—ah, yes, here they are." He drew a small metal container from a pocket of his costume.
"What have you got there?"
"Those things I take from time to time, you know. It's all very well for you young fellows to get along with the implants, and they do you very nicely, I'm sure; but I'm a bit older than you, and I'd start going wrong inside in all sorts of ways without a little extra treatment to clear out dead cells and other bits of rubbish. So I take one of these once a voyage or so, if I start feeling run-down, and it gets rid of everything that doesn't belong there."
"Will it work the same way on him?"
Ari looked at the King, whose face had darkened further and who now seemed scarcely able to breathe at all; his feet drummed on the carpet. "Well, if it doesn't, I can't see that he—or we—would be any worse off. Here, give me a hand."
I stood behind the feebly twitching King, holding his head steady, as Ari forced a capsule into his mouth. "Mmmm—wharyer . . . ?" I heard him mumble; he stiffened and then relaxed. I feared the worst, but as I went to stand beside Ari, I saw King Edward's face resume a more normal hue and his contorted features become smooth.
After a moment he sat upright in his chair, looked at us, and said, "Good Lord, what did you do? What was that? I haven't"—he placed a hand on his chest and took a deep breath—"been able to breathe that easily in years. And I don't feel that sort of pain right here . . ."
"Well, I'm sorry, Your Majesty," Ari said uneasily. "But you did seem to be in immediate trouble, and I thought I would try . . . That is, this is something the older fellows like me take along on these trips we go on; they sort of wash out accumulations of poisons and fats and things. They take a while before they're fully effective—"
"Do they?" said the King. "Do they? There is more of this effect to come, then?"
"If you've been having stiffnesses in the hands and elsewhere, as I expect might happen," Ari said, "you'll find that's a good bit less, or even all gone, in a day or so. The same thing with any problems about seeing and other senses, I should think."
"Indeed?" said the King. "Tell me, do you have another one or so of those you could spare? I feel tremendously fit right now, but it would be nice to have one or two on hand to use when this one wears off tomorrow or next week."
"Next year, more likely," Ari said. "That's going to go on working until it's undone all the stuff your system's accumulated over the last . . . however many years it may be. It'll take a while, even with all the smoking and food and such, to get it all back, if ever. But you might as well have a couple, certainly—here you are."
"Thank you." The King looked at the capsules in his palm, then back at Ari. "I am grateful, of course. But tell me, how is it that, just before my attack, when you were talking about my condition with such exemplary detachment, you did not think t
o suggest the use of one of these?"
"Well, we don't like to interfere, you know," Ari said, with some evident embarrassment. "We're trained not to do that, interfere with na—with persons on other planets. And especially when it's something like that, you know—a condition you've built up over the years. It's hard to know why you'd want it, of course; I certainly wouldn't, but if you hadn't, you wouldn't have done all the things that brought it on, would you? So it was really none of my business to do anything about it, but it really didn't set well to let you choke to death like that, as you seemed about to—turning purple and twitching and fighting for breath and—"
"Quite, quite," the King broke in testily. "The experience was sufficiently vivid in itself; I do not require that it be rehearsed for me."
"It's bad enough," Ari went on, "that we're coming around to set you right on this war business—we're not supposed to do that, either—but interfering with what you've chosen to do to your own body, that's really fairly intrusive, and I can only say—"
"If you attempt to apologize for saving my life and restoring me to a state of health I have not enjoyed for years, perhaps decades," the King said, "I warn you that I shall be positively uncivil." He looked at us once more and shook his head slowly. "You people do indeed think differently from us. Be that as it may, I am in your debt. Your proposal that the nations of the world fling themselves at one another's throats in order to oblige you by some scientific advances that might result strikes me, I must tell you candidly, as repellently cold-blooded—although I admit our world can display some parallels—but I shall at least see that you get a chance to present it. You ought to see my nephew William next, the Kaiser. I believe he might be even more impressed by you than I am. William's an original thinker, for royalty, and I believe it might do him good to come up against minds even odder than his own. It should take no more than a day to make the arrangements for him to receive you, so you should plan on being in Berlin the day after tomorrow."
He rose, walked to the window, and leaned out. "I can smell the spring in the air, and the sea," he said. "It's a long time since I could do that . . . and the mountains—I can see them more clearly. It's as if I were young again. . . . Well, I shall set about advising my nephew that he is to receive some very curious visitors and would do well to listen most closely to what they have to say; I can't do better than that, can I, eh?"
The King summoned two aides, one of whom led us away to rejoin our friends. As we left his study, I heard him instruct the other to inform his guests that he would not join them on a proposed automobile outing that afternoon, and to advise Mrs. Keppel that he would be calling on her after lunch.
"Look here," I said as we walked down the corridor. "You told us all that about how oddly these emperors went on. I mean, the Kaiser and the ballet-skirted general, and so on—that all came into your Metahistorical predictions. How does that square with this business of them being more rational than Edison?"
"Metahistory is not your field of endeavor, my dear Raf," Ari said kindly. "Personality, which is infinitely variable, has nothing to do with the reasoning powers, which exist and function independently. I myself, while hail-fellow-well-met to a fault in my personal dealings, am yet a remorselessly logical intellectual machine when circumstances require me to fulfill my ordained function. Thus it is with these monarchs."
16
Wells was impressed by Ari's carefully edited account of our conversation with King Edward and his promise to arrange an interview with the Kaiser.
"You're artful, you are," he told us, "getting round the old boy like that. I should have thought he'd have had you flayed or something for passing yourself off as ambassadors."
"His Majesty is, naturally enough, a most reasonable man," Ari explained, "and so was able to deal with our problem reasonably. I expect it will be the same with the Kaiser."
"What a hope," Wells said. "Look here, I'd better go along to Berlin with you chaps. If you rub the Kaiser the wrong way, you're likely to end up in a fortress, and you'll want someone on hand to send you in a sausage now and then."
Oxford had collected a pile of journals during the motor outing and was going through them rapidly. "Nothing in yesterday's London papers," he observed. "And I don't make out anything about Edison or whatever the French might be for 'space' or 'astronauts' in the heads in today's French papers. So it looks as though Edison's keeping the lid on this. Very sensible of him, and a good thing for us. It'd be awkward, having the U.S. raising a hue and cry after us. I imagine he's thought better of the whole idea."
In spite of King Edward's expressed fondness for the resort, Biarritz was not a particularly interesting town, and a few strolls around it soon exhausted its attractions, at least for me. Thus, when Oxford, Dark and I were taking yet another walk along the promenade the next afternoon—Wells being busied with our travel arrangements, Ari with refining the details of what he proposed to tell the Kaiser, and Valmis with contemplating the significance of what Patterns were perceptible on the ceiling of his bedchamber—we welcomed the distraction provided by an automobile that drew up alongside us, the driver of which beckoned to us urgently.
He was, it appeared, in the business of taking tourists for trips into the countryside, and as the rate he mentioned seemed surprisingly reasonable and he spoke English fluently—I had not yet gone to the trouble of using the Communicator to equip myself with any other language, having been given to understand that any monarchs we might encounter would be well versed in our first native tongue—we agreed to his proposal and entered his vehicle.
We were soon out of the town and climbing a winding road into the hills. "I don't see that this is all that interesting," Dark said, looking about.
"There's a swell view from up ahead," the driver called back.
"That fellow speaks pretty good American-style English for a Frenchman," Oxford remarked. "I suppose he's spent some time in the States."
The excellent view the driver had promised did not materialize. Instead, as we rounded a bend we saw a large closed automobile with pulled-down blinds drawn up at the side of the road, with its front parts opened to expose the engine; a man was bent over as if to examine its workings.
"Hey, I don't think we better stop," Oxford said as our own vehicle slowed. "I've heard there's lots of bandits in these hills, and this could be—"
"Got to stop and see if we can help," the driver answered. "Law of the road." He pulled up beside the other machine, and we got out. Dark went to peer into the engine over the shoulder of the man working on it, fascinated as always by mechanical details. Oxford and I, for want of anything better to do, joined him.
"Now, how does this thing work?" Dark asked the native, poking at some part with his writing tool. "What seems to be wrong? Is it this thing here? I can see that there might be something that's got loose—why don't I—"
At this point, we were startled by the noise of a car engine springing to life—quite obviously not that of the one we were examining. We turned—Dark exclaiming "Oh, damn!"—and saw the machine which had brought us to this spot moving rapidly down the road and soon vanishing around a curve.
"Here, what's all this about?" Dark said. "Why did he . . . "He stopped, noticing, as we all did, a handheld projectile weapon which the motorist had produced and was now pointing at us.
"I can explain that, gentlemen," a voice from behind us announced, and we turned once again. Stepping down from the interior of the car, and holding another, somewhat larger weapon, was Captain Thatcher, the Marine officer from whose custody we had escaped a week before.
"We're in the soup, I'd say," Oxford muttered gloomily.
"Into the car, you men," Thatcher said, gesturing with his weapon. Seeing no really practical alternative, we obliged him. He remained outside and called, "All right, Olson, crank her up and let's get going!"
"Been doing that, Captain, but damned if there really ain't something wrong with her!"
"Well, get it for God's sake fixed
fast! It can't be anything serious; you went over it before we started out." He turned toward us again.
"You fellows weren't as clever as you thought," he said. "That was a mighty nice dodge you thought up, all that gang and foreign stuff, but what ditched you was a fisherman out in the harbor—saw you changing from the car to the brewery truck. He didn't come ashore until 'way later that day, so the Pinkertons didn't get it out of him until it was too late to stop you from sailing. But we traced the truck to the pier—a cop there noticed it specially, 'cause Ostermaier's don't deal with the saloons around there, and he was wondering if something new like that mightn't mean some graft for him—and had a talk with the steamer line's passenger people. And don't you know, there was five passages bought at the last minute, so it seemed pretty clear what you'd done—and don't think Colonel Roosevelt ain't going to have some fancy explaining to do when he gets back from the Dark Continent, I want to tell you!
"Now, thanks to you folks, I had the signal honor of a personal interview with the President of the United States, and that don't come the way of a Marine captain very often. And Mr. Edison laid it out nice and clear. 'Captain,' he says to me, 'I don't hold one mistake against a man. So you've got your chance to go and get me these people—pick a couple of men to help you, anything you need. But get 'em back from where they've gone to. If you don't, why, that's another mistake, and that I do hold against a man. And the man I hold that mistake against is going to be personally supervising sanitary facilities in the Canal Zone for the rest of his hitch, at the lowest possible level.' So you can see I got a stake in bringing this off—and so does the President, I'll tell you; he got me and Olson and Dyer, him that drove you up here, over to France on a fast destroyer, boilers supercharged all the way. Docked ahead of the Pavonia and trailed you down here, and now, by God, I've got you! The important ones, anyway," he said, looking at us as though he found that hard to believe. "The President was mighty particular about you two, not so much about the others—and he's got some special treatment laid away for Mr. Lieutenant Colonel Oxford, here. My, he just didn't care at all for what you done, Colonel, and he means to let you know it. Hey, Olson!" he called. "Isn't that damn motor fixed yet?"
And Having Writ . . . Page 14
