“I did. Is civil war a detail?”
“In this case, Sir Tombak, yes.” Randos was holding back his temper with an effort that made him sweat. “A single English division could put it down in a month, if it broke out. But it would take all Britain’s and France’s manhood to stop Germany, and we’d have to drag in a dozen other countries to boot. The United States might get involved. And the USA is the main line after Europe, Sir Tombak. They have to be kept out of this mad-dog nationalism, to lead the world toward reason when their day comes.” He actually managed to show his teeth. “I’ll forgive you this time on grounds of ignorance. But hereafter submit your reports in properly written form. The next time you disturb me with a piddling detail like Ireland, you’ll go back to Sagittarius. Good day!”
He remembered to assume a meek look as he was opening the door.
There was a silence.
“Whoof!” said Tombak.
“Second the motion,” said Arken. “But I warned you.”
“Where’s the nearest pub? I need one.” Tombak prowled over to the window and looked gloomily down at the traffic. “Kalmagens was an artist.” he said, “and artists don’t worry about what is detail and what isn’t. They just naturally see the whole picture. This chap is a cookbook psycho technician.”
“He’s probably right, as far as he goes,” said Arken.
“Maybe. I dunno.” Tombak shrugged. “Got a suit of clothes here I can borrow? I told the doorman I was coming in to make a date with a beautiful girl, and I noticed a most nice little wench with a sort of roundheeled look at a typewriter out there. Don’t want to disappoint the old fellow.”
2.
Peter Mortensen was born north of the Danevirke, but after 1864 his people were reckoned German, and he was called up in 1914 like anyone else. Men died so fast on the eastern front that promotion was rapid, and by 1917 he was a captain. This did not happen without some investigation of his background—many Schleswig Danes were not overly glad of their new nationality—but Graf von Schlangengrab had checked personally on him and assured his superiors of his unquestionable loyalty. Indeed, the count took quite a fancy to this young man, got him transferred to Intelligence, and often used him on missions of the utmost importance.
Thus the official record, and in the twentieth century Anno Domini the record was more than the man—it was the man. A few rebellious souls considered this an invention of that supreme parodist, the Devil, for now the Flesh had become Word. To Galactics such as Vyndhorn Vargess and Sabor Tombak, it was convenient; records are more easily altered than memories, if you have the right gadgets. So Vargess became von Schlangengrab and Tombak called himself Peter Mortensen.
A thin, bitter rain blew across muddy fields, and the Prussian pines mumbled of spring. Out in the trenches to the west, it meant little more than fresh lice and fresh assaults, human meat going upright into the gape of machine guns. To the east, where Russia lay sundered, the spring of 1917 meant some kind of new birth. Tombak wondered what sort it would be.
He sat with a dozen men in a boxcar near the head of the sealed train. The thing was damp and chilly; they huddled around a stove. Their gray uniforms steamed. Beneath them, the wheels clicked on rain-slippery rails. Now and again the train whistled, shrill and lonesome noise across the graves of a thousand years of war.
Captain Mortensen was well liked by his men: none of this Junker stiffness for him. They held numbed hands toward the stove, rolled cigarettes, and talked among themselves. “Cold, it’s been a long time cold, and fuel so short. Sometimes I wonder what it ever felt like to be warm and dry.”
“Be colder than this in Russia, lad. I’ve been there, I know.”
“But no fighting this time, thank God. Only taking that funny little man toward St. Petersburg…Why the devils he so important, anyway? Hauled him clear from Switzerland in his own special train, on orders of General Ludendorff, no less, one runty Russian crank.”
“What say, Captain?” asked someone. “Are you allowed, now, to tell us why?”
Tombak shrugged, and the faces of peasants and laborers and students turned to him, lost between military caps and shoddy uniforms but briefly human again with simple curiosity. “Why, sir? Is he a secret agent of ours?”
“No, I’d not say that.” Tombak rolled himself a cigarette, and a corporal struck a match for him. “But the matter’s quite simple. Kerensky has overthrown the Czar, you see, but wants to keep on fighting. This Ulyanov fellow has a good deal of influence, in spite of having been an exile for so long. Maybe he can come to power. If he does, he’ll make peace on any terms…which is to say, on German terms. Then we’ll no longer have an eastern front to worry about.” Tombak’s leathery face crinkled. “It seems worth trying, anyhow.”
“I see, I see…thank you, Captain…very clever…”
“My own chief, Graf von Schlangengrab, urged this policy on the General Staff,” confided Tombak. “The idea was his, and he talked them into it.” He always had to remember that he was Peter Morten-sen, doubly anxious to prove his Germanness because it had once been in doubt, and would therefore brag about the nobleman with whom he was so intimate.
What he did not add was that von Schlangengrab had been given the idea and told to execute it by a senior clerk in an English brokerage house, over an undetectable sub-radio hookup. This clerk, Mr. Harrison, had checked Galactic records on Ulyanov— whom Kalmagens had once met and investigated in London—and run a psychotechnic evaluation which gave the little revolutionary a surprising probability of success.
“Maybe then we can finish the war,” muttered a sergeant. “Dear God, it’s like it’s gone on forever, not so?”
“I can’t even remember too well what began it,” confessed a private.
“Well, boys—” Tombak inhaled the harsh wartime tobacco and leaned back in a confidential mood. “I’ll tell you my theory. The Irish began it.”
“Ach, you joke, Captain,” said the sergeant.
“Not at all. I have studied these things. In nineteen fourteen there was a great deal of international tension, if you remember. That same year the Home Rule bill was so badly handled that it alienated the Ulstermen, who were egged on by a group anxious to seize power. This caused the Catholic Irish to prepare for revolt. Fighting broke out in Dublin in July, and it seemed as if the British Isles were on the verge of civil war. Accordingly, our General Staff decided they need not be reckoned with for a while, and—”
-And the Sarajevo affair touched off the powder.
Germany moved in accordance with long-laid plans because she did not expect Britain to be able to fulfill her treaty obligations to Belgium. But Britain wangled a temporary Irish settlement and declared war. If the English had looked more formidable that year, the Germans would have been more conciliatory, and war could have been postponed and the Galactic plans for establishing a firm peace could have gone on toward their fruition.
“Captain!” The sergeant was shocked.
Tombak laughed. “I didn’t mean it subversively. Of course we had to fight against the Iron Ring. And we will conquer.”
Like Chaos we will. The war was dragging into a stalemate. Neither side could break the other, not when Russia had gone under.
If Russia did make peace, Randos had calculated, then the stalemate would be complete. Peace could be negotiated on a basis of exhaustion in another year, and America kept out of the mess.
Privately, Tombak doubted it. On paper the scheme looked fine: the quantities representing political tensions balanced out nicely. But he had lived in America some twenty years ago, and knew her for a country which would always follow an evangelist. Like Wilson—whose original nomination and election had hinged on an unusual chance. Randos assured him that the personality of the leader meant little…was a detail…but…
At any rate, the main immediate objective was to get Russia out of the war, so that she might evolve a reasonably civilized government for herself. Exactly how the surrender was to be achieved
was another detail, not important. This queer, bearded Ulyanov with the bookish diction and the Tartar face was the handiest tool for the job, a tool which could later be discarded in favor of the democrats.
The train hooted, clicking eastward with Ulyanov aboard.
His Party name was Lenin.
3.
Tombak had not been in New York for three decades. The town had changed a lot; everywhere he saw the signs of a feverish prosperity.
On other planets, in other centuries, he had watched the flowering and decay of a mercantile system, big business replacing free enterprise. For certain civilizations it was a necessary step in development, but he always thought of it as a retrogression, enthroned vulgarity grinding out the remnants of genuine culture, the Folk became the People.
This was a brisk fall day, and he stepped merrily along through the crowds, a short, sunburned, broad-shouldered young man, outwardly distinguished only by a cheerful serenity. Nor was he essentially different inside. He was a fully human creature with human genes, who simply happened to have been born on another planet. His environment had affected him, balancing anabolism and catabolism so well that he had already lived two thousand years, training mind and body. But that didn’t show.
He turned off onto Wall Street and found the skyscraper he was looking for and went up to the sacrosanct top floor. The receptionist was female this time, and pretty. Woman suffrage had eased the team’s problems by allowing them to use their wives and girl friends more openly. For a moment he didn’t recognize her; the face had been changed. Then he nodded. “Hello, Yarra. Haven’t seen you since…good Designer, since the Paris Exposition!”
“We had fun,” she smiled dreamily. “Care to try it again?”
“Hmmm…yes, if you’ll get rid of that godawful bobbed hair and cylindrical silhouette.”
“Aren’t they terrible? Usrek ran a computation for me, and the Americans won’t return to a girl who looks like a girl for years.”
“I’ll get myself assigned back to Asia. Bali, for choice.” Tombak sighed reminiscently. “Just worked my way back from there—deckhand on a tramp steamer to San Francisco, followed a harvesting crew across the plains, did a hitch in a garage. Lots and lots of data, but I hope the boss doesn’t want it tabulated.”
“He will, Sabor, he will. Want to talk to him? He’s in the office now.”
“Might as well get it over with.”
“He’s not a bad sort, really. A basically decent fellow, and a whiz at psychomath. He tries hard.”
“Someday, though, he’ll have to learn that—Oh, all right.”
Tombak went through the door into the office of the president. It was Usrek Arken again, alias the financier Wolfe…a name chosen with malice aforethought, for wolf he was on Wall Street. But what chance did brokers and corporations, operating mostly by God and by guess, have against a million-year-old science of economics? Once Randos had decided England was declining as a world power, and become an American, Wolfe’s dazzling rise was a matter of a few years’ routine.
Arken was in conference with Randos, but both rose and bowed. The chief showed strain. His plumpness was being whittled away and the best total-organismic training could not suppress an occasional nervous jerk. But today he seemed genial. “Ah, Sir Tombak! I’m glad to see you back. I was afraid you’d run afoul of some Chinese war lord.”
“Damn near did. I was a foreign devil. If it hadn’t been for our Mongoloid agent in Sinkiang—well, that’s past.” Tombak got out his pipe. “Had a most enjoyable trip around the world, and got friendly with thousands of people, but of course out of touch with the big events. What’s been happening?”
“Business boom here in the States. That’s the main thing, so I’m concentrating on it. Tricky.”
Tombak frowned. “Pardon me, but why should the exact condition of business in one country be crucial?”
“Too many factors to explain in words,” said Randos. “I’d need psychodynamic tensors to convince you. But look at it this way…
“Let’s admit we bungled badly in ’fourteen and again in ’seventeen. We let the war break out, we let America get into it, and we underestimated Lenin. Instead of a republic, Russia has a dictatorship as ruthless as any in history, and paranoid to boot; nor can ye change that fact, even if the rules allowed us to assassinate Stalin. We hoped to salvage a kind of world order out of the mess; once American intervention was plainly unavoidable, we started the ’War to end war’ slogan and the League of Nations idea. Somehow, though, the USA was kept out of the League, which means it’s a farce unless we can get her into it.”
Thanks for the “we,” thought Tombak grimly. With the benefit of hindsight, he knew as well as Randos why the Russian revolution and the Versailles peace had gone awry. Lenin and Senator Lodge had been more capable than they had any right to be, and Wilson less so. That poor man had been no match for practical politicians, and had compounded the folly with his anachronistic dream of “self-determination.” (Clemenceau had passed the rational judgment on that idea: “Mon Dieu! Must every little language have a country of its own?”) But individual personalities had been brushed aside by Randos as “fluctuations, details, meaningless eddies on the current of great historical trends.”
The man wasn’t too stupid to see his own mistakes; but subconsciously, at least, he didn’t seem able to profit by them.
“We still have an excellent chance, though,” went on Randos. “I don’t quite like the methods we must use, but they’re the only available ones. Wall Street is rapidly becoming the financial capital of Earth, a trend which I have been strengthening. If finance can be maintained as the decisive power, within twenty years America will be the leader of the world. No one else will be able to move without her okay. Then the time will be psychologically ripe for Americans to get the idea of a new League, one with armed force to maintain the peace. The Soviets won’t stand a chance.”
Tombak scowled more deeply. “I can’t argue with your math, Sir Randos,” he answered slowly, “but I got a hunch…”
“Yes? Go on. You were sent around the world precisely so you could gather facts. If those facts contradict my theories, why, of course I’m wrong and we’ll have to look for a new approach.” Randos spoke magnanimously.
“Okay, buster, you asked for it,” said Tombak in English. He returned to Galactic: “The trouble is, these aren’t facts you can fit into mass-action equations. They’re a matter of, well, feel.
“Nationalism is rising in Asia. I talked with a Japanese officer in Shanghai…we’d gotten drunk together, and he was a fine fellow, and we loved each other like brothers, but he actually cried at the thought that someday he’d have to take potshots at me.”
“The Japanese have talked about war with the United States for fifty years,” snorted Randos. “They can’t win one.”
“But do they know that? To continue, though—people, Western people, don’t like the present form of society either. They can’t always say why, but you can tell they feel uprooted, uneasy…there’s nothing about an interlocking directorate to inspire loyalty, you know. The trade unions are growing. If capitalism goes bust, they’re going to grow almighty fast.”
“To be sure,” nodded Randos, unperturbed. “A healthy development, in the right time and place. But I’m here to see that capitalism does not, ah, go bust. Mass unemployment—You know yourself how unstable the Weimar Republic is. If depression is added to its troubles, dictatorship will come to Germany within five years.”
“If you ask me,” snapped Tombak, “we’ve got too bloody damn much confidence around. Too many people are playing the stock market. It has a hectic feel, somehow. They’d do better to save their money for an emergency.”
Randos smiled. “To be sure. I’ll admit the market is at a dangerous peak. In this month, it’s already shown some bad fluctuations. That’s why Wolfe is selling right now, heavily, to bring it down.”
Usrek Arken stirred. “And I continue to think. Sir Randos,�
� he muttered, “that it’ll cause a panic.”
“No, it won’t. I have proved, with the help of games theory, that—”
“Games theory presupposes that the players are rational,” murmured Tombak. “I have a nasty suspicion that nobody is.”
“Come, now,” chided Randos. “Of course nonrational elements enter in. But this civilization is in a highly cerebral stage.”
“What you ought to do,” snapped Tombak, “is get away from that computer of yours and go out and meet some Earthfolk.”
Frost congealed on Randos’ words: “That is your task, Sir Tombak. Please report your findings and stand by for further assignment. Now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m busy.”
Tombak swapped a glance with Arken and went out. He chatted for a while with Yarra and, silhouette or no, made a date for the next evening: Thursday, October 24, 1929.
4.
Now play the fife lowly and beat the drums slowly,
And play the dead march as you carry my pall.
Bring me white roses to lay on my coffin,
Roses to deaden the clods as they fall.
The flames jumped up, lighting their faces: grimy, unshaven, gaunted by wind and hunger, but American faces. Tombak thought he had fallen in love with America. A Galactic had no business playing favorites, and it was perfectly obvious that in another hundred years Earth’s power center would have shifted to Asia, but something in this country suited him. It still had elbow room, for both body and soul.
He finished the song and laid his guitar down as Bob Robinson gave the can of mulligan another stir. Far off, but coming along the rails near the hobo jungle, a train whistled. Tombak wondered how many times, how many places, he had heard that noise, and always it meant more lonesomeness.
“I looked at the schedule in the station.” A thin man with glasses jerked his thumb at the town, a mile away. “Be a freight stopping at midnight, we can hop that one.”
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