Second, it was possible that Randil was wrong about the Service’s motives and yet right about there being a way for us to keep nuclear war from occurring, some way that no one else had thought of. Should that prove true, I would have to go along with him. I had committed myself, and though “defying every tradition in the book” wasn’t an appealing prospect, his estimation of me had been accurate enough. If we had a real chance of saving Toris, no personal renunciation would carry any weight with me; underneath I knew that I would do whatever needed doing.
But there was a third possibility, a possibility still more dismaying. Randil might be wrong on both counts, and he might refuse to admit it. He had said, after all, that he would go ahead with his plan with or without my help, and if in my judgment that plan could be harmful to Toris—well, I would be in a very difficult position. I was alone; I had no means of contacting my superiors. The Oath is specific in regard to your responsibility in such a case. It binds you to prevent the harm by any means open to you: if necessary, even by force. Force is contrary to the Federation’s principles, but where Younglings are endangered by a renegade agent, it is considered the lesser of two evils.
The morning was a dark one. I could not stick it out in the kitchen for more than a couple of hours; telling my supervisor that I felt ill—which was not far from the truth—I escaped and headed for the campus. Since I knew Randil’s class schedule, I was waiting for him when he came out of the lecture hall. We had to have a long, private discussion, and it could be held only while Kari was busy with her nurse’s aide job. I hated to think what could happen if someone who knew her saw us together, but it was a risk that couldn’t be avoided.
We sat on a bench in a secluded garden between two stone buildings. Clouds blanketed the sky, threatening rain, but none fell. From above them came the rumble of aircraft, carrying out one of the large-scale military exercises that had been all too common of late.
Randil was relieved that I had taken the initiative in meeting him; he had, after all, run quite a risk by confiding in me. “Did you think it through?” he asked eagerly.
“I thought. You’re mistaken, Randil. The Service would not stand by and observe a nuclear war that could be prevented; I’d stake my life on it.”
“And the lives of all the people on this planet?”
“Yes,” I declared with conviction; then, as clearly as I could, I told him why.
He wasn’t impressed. “Forgive me if I sound skeptical,” he said slowly. “I know your family is Service from way back, and I know that gives you a different slant than mine; but Elana, isn’t it possible that it could be a prejudiced slant? I’m not saying that your father would personally condone this setup—”
“I hope you’re not!” I exploded.
“Let me finish. I’m sure he wouldn’t; I know what kind of man he is. But he’s away on an expedition right now. Policy is made by the Council, in which he has only one vote. You can’t assume that his values are shared by all the others.”
“Yes, I can, because he knows the others and he knows what kind of people they are. But more than that, we all know. We’re sworn. We’ve been through investiture, and we’re aware of what it entails. Randil, you’ve said a lot about upholding the spirit of the Oath. Do you think you have a monopoly on that attitude? Don’t you realize that the Council is equally bound by it, that no member could support a policy that would let Toris be written off?”
“The Council’s composed of old people. Some of them haven’t been in the field for decades.”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“They have a stake in the results of the mission. There are scholars who’ve been waiting all their lives for a discovery like this; abstract theory means more to them than what happens to a particular race of Younglings. I admit that they must once have had what it takes to go through investiture, but—well, they’ve forgotten.”
“Oh, Randil. Are you going to forget when you’re old?”
I couldn’t budge him. Randil can be very stubborn, and that morning I began to realize it. Eventually, knowing that I had only a little while left in which to cover a great deal of ground, I tried a different tack. “Just why do you think that there is any feasible means of intervention?” I asked. “What could the Service do if it wanted to? What can we do, assuming that we’ve got to act alone?”
“But Elana,” he burst out, “it’s so obvious! That’s how I know that the decision not to implement it was deliberate.”
“I’m afraid it’s not obvious to me.”
He began to explain, and as I listened I felt sicker and sicker. There were only three things obvious about Randil’s plan: that it indeed involved violation of basic policies set forth in the Oath; that it also entailed an unjustifiable risk of backfiring; and that whatever the consequences to us both, I could not possibly support it.
*
Randil was stunned by Elana’s opposition to the action he suggested. To him it was very clear-cut. He knew, to be sure, that all interference in the affairs of Younglings was potentially harmful; but these people had the power—and, he feared, the inclination—to destroy themselves. Only during the Critical Stage was that possible, and the Service had never encountered a Critical Stage culture before. Surely agents who found themselves in such a culture were morally justified in establishing a new precedent. It would be—well, murder if they didn’t, just as much as if they were to burn all life off the face of Toris! He therefore felt no qualms about intervening.
The Service, he believed, would not forgive any such independent move. The Service’s primary mission was to gather knowledge, and in this case it was plainly buying that knowledge through the sacrifice of a race that would have died anyway if left alone. Perhaps that wasn’t murder to everyone, but in Randil’s estimation it was. He had thought Elana would see it the same way. Knowing of her infraction of the Oath on Andrecia, he hadn’t thought that she would be one to balk at defying orders; that was why he had tried to enlist her help.
Yet she demurred. She seemed unconvinced that action would be of any use. Why? Wasn’t it known positively that the Torisians would be out of danger once they committed themselves irrevocably to the colonization of space? And wasn’t it evident that they could be led to do so if Federation agents were to assume positions of influence? There would be no disclosure involved; he and Elana would simply earn the reputation of “brilliant scientists” by revealing a small portion of the advanced knowledge that was theirs, as he had already begun to do in what he wrote for his university classes. In a little while they would become respected authorities to whom people would listen, and—backed by the telepathic influence they could exert—even become media celebrities who could easily sway world opinion. Perhaps Toris hadn’t even a little while to spare, but the chance was certainly worth taking.
“What possible harm could we do?” he demanded.
“That’s the whole point,” Elana said. “We don’t know what harm we could do, but it might be considerable. What are we here for, if not to gain insight into a process that’s so far a mystery to us? We can’t even begin to foresee the consequences—”
“Could they be worse than the consequences of doing nothing?”
“Maybe. And in any case, we’d invalidate all the data that is being collected. Any tampering at all would make whatever’s observed about key factors in the Critical Stage completely meaningless because our actions would be affecting those factors.”
He turned on her angrily. “I know that would be the official objection, but I didn’t expect it from you.”
“I wouldn’t care how much data we invalidated if we could be sure we were helping matters,” she retorted. “We can’t, though, because the data is the only thing that would tell us.”
Her argument didn’t hold water, Randil decided. The information being sought was concerned solely with why some civilizations didn’t pursue space technology when ready to do so; the fact that those who did attempt it were saved w
as indisputable. Nothing could totally destroy a human race that had colonized worlds beyond its own: not localized warfare, not epidemics, not starvation, not pollution or depletion of its mother planet—nothing! Not even a natural disaster such as a catastrophic meteor strike. And as for interplanetary warfare, never in the annals of the Service’s experience had that been reported. Peoples who were occupied with a bigger and more exciting challenge had no need to let off steam in such a primitive fashion.
Of course, fully independent colonies took many decades to establish. That was why the exploration of space and utilization of its energy and mineral resources had to be undertaken long before a people could comprehend the necessity for it. That was the place of global conflict in the scheme of things: it was the stimulus, the spur. When the need for an incentive was past, such conflict disappeared; so what could be wrong with eliminating that need artificially?
“It would be easier to speak out if we were in a Libertarian country,” he told Elana. “We’d be freer, and we’d get more publicity. I’d thought that one of us could try to escape over the border.”
“One of us? You mean me, don’t you? After all, there’s Kari.”
Randil avoided her eyes. He had indeed assumed that it would be logical for her to go and for him to stay, but originally this had been merely because he was already established at the University. He had evolved the whole plan before he’d even met Kari; his decision to act had been made the night Varned had left, in the heat of his anger at the dawning suspicion that the mission’s strategy had been formed in the best interests of Federation science rather than of Toris. If Elana wasn’t going to participate, the question of whether he himself should escape from Cerne was academic, for if he were caught crossing the border, there would be no one left to do what must be done. But supposing he were faced with a choice? Would he carry out the plan if it meant leaving Kari behind?
At first, renouncing his Service career had been a real sacrifice, and making up his mind to it had cost him much pain. Randil had been raised in an orbiting city circling a small planet far from the center of the galaxy; his family hadn’t been wealthy by Federation standards, and his dream of seeing more of the universe had seemed fantastic. He had applied to the Academy simply as a defiant gesture. His acceptance, which had astonished him, had opened the gates of longings he had scarcely been aware of; once fully awakened, his hunger to study the cultures of many worlds had become an urgent passion. The unsurpassed opportunities for scholarly research at Service Headquarters meant much to him, and the idea of staying on Toris forever—in circumstances even less satisfying than those to which he’d been born—was anything but inviting.
But something else had awakened in Randil during his Academy years; his consecration at investiture had been genuine, as his entrance tests had no doubt predicted it would be. He had taken the Oath in dead seriousness, and it was infuriating to think that others of more cosmopolitan backgrounds might not look at it quite so idealistically. Since defiant gestures still came naturally to him, the idea of voluntary martyrdom to the cause of saving a world held a certain attraction over and above his wholehearted desire to defend the Torisians.
And then he had started dating Kari, and things had gotten much more complicated.
He had not wanted to fall in love with Kari. It had never occurred to him that he might; he had dated plenty of women at the Academy who were far more beautiful than she as well as better suited to him in every way, and he’d had no interest in a permanent relationship with any one of them. That he should have grown to care so deeply for any woman, let alone a Youngling woman, was the biggest surprise of his life.
His mind told him that nothing could come of it, that it would be unfair to her to let anything come of it. His heart told him otherwise. When he was with her, he actually convinced himself that he might someday be free to marry her. When he kissed her, he was sure of it; only the fact that he was sworn kept him from acting on that assumption.
They often walked across the campus on their way home from the library, when the grass was damp and fragrant and the archaic streetlights shed pallid circles on the bricks beneath their feet, and the stars were only specks in the sky, deceptively faint and distant-seeming. Kari would look at him with a kind of wistfulness, expecting something he wanted desperately to give and yet must withhold without explanation; and he would find himself envying the men of Toris despite their narrow horizons and their despair and the all too real threat that hung over them.
So, gradually, the sacrifice had become no sacrifice at all; and Randil no longer knew whether he was capable of doing the sort of thing that had once seemed so magnificently heroic. Elana probably believed that he’d set himself against his heritage for Kari’s sake, and in a sense it was true, for Kari had become a symbol of all that was individual and appealing in her race, all that made Toris more than a cold entry in the Service’s files of examples-to-be-studied. Which had come first? he wondered. Did he love her because he had needed a symbol?
It didn’t matter anymore. Love couldn’t be explained; it could only be felt, and what he had come to feel for Kari was too powerful to be analyzed away. Nor could his determination to help Toris be altered. Randil was committed, one way or another, and nothing Elana said or did was going to change that.
*
The most frightening aspect of what Randil had in mind was that it was workable: that is, the practical side of it was. He proposed that he and I should set out to shape public opinion, and we could do it. Any agent could; that’s the prime reason for all the screening, all the testing, all the emphasis on dedication and self-sacrifice that accompanies investiture. A trained agent, armed with knowledge of mass psychology as well as of scientific discoveries centuries ahead of the local civilization’s, could become a very eminent person indeed in a Youngling society. With telepathically-enhanced charisma we could become world leaders, even dictators, if we wanted to; so the Service takes extreme care to select people who will not want to.
Had Randil been susceptible to the temptations of power, he would never have gotten into the Academy. He wasn’t; his aim was wholly unselfish. Nevertheless, it was in direct opposition to one of the most basic provisions of the Oath, second only to the ban on disclosure. We were sworn never to exert even the slightest influence on the development of a Youngling culture. Yet he planned to seek worldwide renown for his “farsighted” vision of this world’s future! He was correct enough in thinking he could accomplish this within a comparatively short time; if he worked at it, he would have no difficulty getting himself acclaimed as a genius. People would listen to him, all right, and if he came out strongly in favor of a major push into space…
There were all sorts of alarming ramifications. The Neo-Statists were not interested in space; they were interested in conquering the Libertarians, a fact that Randil didn’t fully appreciate. But so far it hadn’t occurred to them that there might be a connection between the two. If a famous scientist were inadvertently to reveal the military potential of a space program, they would undoubtedly establish such a program at once, and other nations would follow suit.
Sometimes a space race works out very well. Quite often, in fact, it is a vital factor in motivating a species to develop space-based technology. But we had no guarantee that it would work for Toris. On how many of those devastated worlds had a powerful dictatorship won the race?
“Randil,” I protested, “don’t you see that we’d be playing with fire? If we started to meddle, we’d be manipulating the very forces we’ve come to learn about! Do you really believe we’re so wise and noble that it’s up to us to save the Torisians from themselves, that the odds would be better for them under our management than under nature’s?”
“Nature is prodigal. In every species more young are born than survive to maturity, and by the same token a certain percentage of human races fail to survive. A percentage of Federation children would die, too, if we didn’t use our knowledge of medicine to save th
em.”
“Maybe so, but a doctor doesn’t experiment on a patient who’s likely to recover anyway!”
“He doesn’t sit back and watch a patient die for lack of treatment, either. Elana, haven’t you been watching the newscasts lately? Don’t you know the situation is liable to explode any time now?”
I got nowhere with him, either on that first day or in any of our subsequent discussions. My refusal to join his effort really surprised Randil, I think. It’s hard to convince someone that you’re sincere when you happen to be on the side of the established policy.
The warning I gave him didn’t help any. I knew it wouldn’t; I knew he would think me either cowardly or self-righteous, or both; yet I felt honor bound to go through with it. Randil, I began one evening in the silence of the library, you realize, don’t you, that if you do anything overt, anything that another agent finds out about and considers harmful, you’ll be stopped? Stopped by force, if necessary? The Service won’t let you endanger this world.
I know there’s that risk, he affirmed. You’ve never objected to risking your life among Younglings; is risking it by turning renegade so different? He stared at me, suddenly grasping the full import of my statement. Or by “the Service” do you mean yourself?
I’m sworn, Randil, I answered wretchedly, knowing I must make my position plain. I couldn’t allow Randil to presume an alliance between us that I might later be forced to betray.
The Far Side of Evil Page 12
