“If the dick don’t see us,” mumbled Robinson. “They got a mean dick in this place.”
“I’ll handle him, if it comes to that.” Tombak flexed stumpy strong fingers. Maybe a Galactic shouldn’t take sides, but there were some people whose faces he enjoyed altering. That storm trooper in Berlin two years ago, for instance, the lout who was kicking an inoffensive Jew around. Getting out of Germany had been like getting out of jail, and even riding the rods in the States was a welcome change.
“Be careful, Jim,” murmured Rose McGraw. She leaned against Tombak with a pathetic possessiveness.
In a better age, he thought, she would have been somebody’s contented housewife, minding the kids in suburbia, not tramping over a continent in a ragged print dress, rain in her hair, looking for work…any kind of work. Too late now, of course, at least till the war with Japan made jobs. But Randos had predicted Japan would not attack till early 1942, give or take six months, and he was usually right about such things. Almost six years to go. True, initially he had thought the Japanese would never fight, but contrary evidence piled up…
“Don’t worry about me,” said Tombak gruffly. He felt again the tugging sadness of the quasi-immortal. How many years on Earth, how many women, and with none of them could he stay more than a few months. They must not be taken off the road and fed, they must not be told the truth and comforted, Rose McGraw had to become a fading memory fast bound in misery and iron for the sake of her descendants a thousand years hence.
At least he had warned her. “I'm not a marrying man, I wont ever settle down”—Not till his tour of duty on Earth ended, another seventy-five years of it and then a hundred-year vacation and then another planet circling one of those stars blinking dimly overhead…Why had he ever gone into the Service?
“Think Roosevelt’s gonna win?” asked Robinson. He mispronounced the name.
“Sure, Landon hasn’t got a prayer.” The man with glasses spoke dogmatically; he had had some education once.
“I dunno, now. Old man Roosevelt, he’s for us, but how many of us stay in one place long enough to vote?”
“Enough,” said Tombak. He had no doubt of the election’s outcome. The New Deal under one name or another was foregone, once the Depression struck. Hoover himself had proposed essentially the same reforms. Randos had not even had to juggle the country—through propaganda, through carefully planted trains of events—to get FDR elected the first time. Tombak would be able to return from this trip and report that the changes were popular and that there was no immediate danger of American fascism or communism.
The main line of history, always the main line. Since the Rhineland debacle this year, war in Europe was not to be avoided, nor was war in the Pacific. Japanese pride and hunger had not been so small, a factor after all. Tombak’s mind slipped to the Washington office where Randos was manipulating senators and brain trusters.
“The important thing will be to keep the two wars separate. Russia will be neutral, because she has Japan to worry about, and Germany alone cannot conquer Britain. The United States, with British help, can defeat Japan in about five years while the European stalemate is established. Then and only then must Germany and Russia be goaded into war with each other…two totalitarianisms in a death struggle, weakening as they fight, with America armed from the Japanese war and ready to step in and break both of them. After that we can finally start building an Earth fit to live on.”
An Earth which had so far gone from bad to worse, reflected Tombak. He didn’t deny the bitter logic of Randos’ equations; but he wondered if it was going to develop that way in practice. Roosevelt, who would surely run for a third term, had strong emotional ties—he could not see England fight alone, and he could make the country agree with him. And Hitler, now…Tombak had seen Hitler speak, and met a lot of Nazis. A streak of nihilistic lunacy ran through that bunch. Against every sound military principle, they were entirely capable of attacking Russia; which would mean the emergence of the Soviet Union, necessarily aided by America, as a victorious world power.
Well…
“Wonder if we’re someday gonna find a steady job,” said someone in the night.
“Ought to have a guy like Hitler,” said another man. “No nonsense about him. He’d arrange things.”
“Arrange ‘em with a firing squad,” said Tombak sharply. “Drive men like Einstein out of the country. At that,” he added thoughtfully, “Hitler and his brown-shirted, brown-nosed bastards are doing us a favor. If this goes on, we’ll have more talent in this country, refugees, than anybody ever had before.”
And if somebody had the idea of gathering it into one place, what would all that embittered genius do to Randos’ plans?
Bob Robinson shrugged, indifference clothed in faded denim. “To hell with it. I think the stew’s about done.”
5.
Harban Randos’s eyes looked ready to leap out of their sockets. “No,” he whispered.
“Yes.” Usrek Arken slapped the papers down on the desk with a cannon-crack noise. “Winnis knows his physics, and Tombak and the others have gathered the essential facts for him to work on. They’re making an atomic bomb!”
Randos turned blindly away. Outside, Washington shimmered in the heat of midsummer, 1943. It was hard to believe that a war was being fought… the wrong war, with the issues irretrievably messed up, the Soviets fighting as allies of the democracies, Japan half shunted aside to make way for a Nazi defeat that would plant Russian troops in the middle of Europe…and meanwhile gnawing away at Nationalist China, weakening the nation for Communists who had made a truce which they weren’t respecting.
“They’re able to,” said Randos huskily.
Tombak nodded. “They’re going to,” he said.
“But they don’t need—”
“What has that got to do with anything? And after the uranium bomb comes the thermonuclear bomb and—Write with your own ticket.” Tombak spoke flatly, for he had come to like the people of Earth.
Randos passed a shaking hand over his face. “All right, all right. Any chance of sabotaging the project?”
“Not without tipping our hand. They’ve got this one watched, I tell you; we’ve not been able to get a single Galactic into the Manhattan District. We could blow up the works, of course…fake a German operation…but after the war, when they go through German records…”
“Vargess can handle the records.”
“He can’t handle the memories. Not the memories of thousands of people, intrinsically just as smart as you and I.” Tombak bit his pipestem and heard it crack. “Okay, Randos, you’re the boss. What do we do next?”
The chief sat down. For a moment he shuddered with the effort of self-control, then his body was again disciplined.
“It will be necessary to deal firmly with the Russians, force them to agree to a stronger United Nations Organization,” he said. “Churchill already understands that, and Roosevelt can be persuaded.
Between them, they can prepare their countries so that it’ll be politically feasible. The West is going to have a monopoly of nuclear weapons at the war’s end, which will be helpful…yes…
“Roosevelt is not a well man,” declared Tombak, “and I was in England only a month ago and can tell you the people aren’t satisfied. They admire Churchill, love him, but they’re going to want to experiment with another party—”
“Calculated risk,” said Randos. His confidence was returning. “Not too great.”
“Nevertheless,” said Tombak, “you’d better start right away to handpick those men’s successors and see they get exposed to the facts of life.”
“For Designer’s sake, leave me alone!” yelled Randos. “I can’t handle every miserable little detail!”
Rasnagarth Kri did not want to spend time interviewing a failure. It seemed as if each day brought a higher pile of work to him, more decisions to be made, a million new planets struggling toward an unperceived goal, and he had had to promise his wife he would s
top working nights.
Nevertheless, a favorite nephew is a favorite nephew.
He hooded his eyes until a glittering blankness looked across the desk at Harban Randos.
“We are fortunate,” he said, “that an experienced man of your race was available to take charge. For a while I actually considered breaking the rules and letting Earth know the facts immediately. But at this stage of their society, that would only be a slower damnation for them; extinction is more merciful. Whether or not the new man can rescue the planet remains to be seen. If he fails, the whole world is lost. At best, progress has been retarded two centuries, and millions of people are needlessly dead.”
Randos stiffened his lips, which had been vibrating, and answered tonelessly:
“Sir, you were getting my annual reports. If I was unsatisfactory, you should have recalled me years ago.”
“Every agent is allowed some mistakes,” Kri told him. “Psychodynamics is not an exact science. Furthermore, your reports, while quantitatively accurate, were qualitatively…lifeless. They conveyed nothing of the feel. Until the fact leaped out that nationalism and atomic energy had become contemporaneous, how could I judge?”
Feel! Randos thought of Sabor Tombak. The smug, pipe-sucking pig! He hoped Tombak would be killed; plenty of chance for that, in the next fifty or a hundred years of Earth’s troubles.
No—he was doing the man an injustice. Tombak had simply been right. But Randos still couldn’t like him.
“I used the standard methods, sir,” he protested. “You have seen my computations. What else could I do?”
“Well—” Kri looked down at his desk. “That’s hard to answer. Let me just say that human nature is so complicated that we’ll never have a complete science of it. All we’ll ever be able to do mathematically is predict and guide the broad trends. But those trends are made up of millions of individual people and incidents. To pervert an old saying, in government we must be able to see the trees for the forest. It takes an artist to know how and when to use the equations, and how to supplement them with his own intuitive common sense. It takes not only a technician, but a poet to write a report that will let me know what is really going on.”
He raised his eyes again and said mildly: “You can’t be blamed for being neither an artist nor a poet. I gather you wish to remain in the Service?”
“Yes, sir.” Randos was not a quitter.
“Very well. I’m assigning you to a chief technicianship in my own evaluation center. Consider it a promotion, a reward for honest effort. At least, you’ll have higher rank and salary. You may go.”
Kri thought he heard a gasp of relief, but returned to his papers.
One might as well face truth. You can’t kick a favorite nephew anywhere but upstairs. The fellow might even make a good technical boss.
As for this planet called Earth, maybe the new man could salvage it. If not, well, it was only one planet.
Wars could not be fought were men psychologically unable to fight. An abolition of war, if such can be accomplished, will leave us with that potentiality of violence. How then shall we express it?
License
I landed at Wold-Chamberlain, on the edge of Twincity. It was mid-afternoon, but the air was mild; the summer here doesn’t really get started till about July, and this was early June. The usual taxis were waiting for rocket passengers, just inside the crimeless area. I walked down the line till I found one whose polished armor and obviously well-oiled gun turret indicated a driver who knew his business. He jumped to open the door for me: I was wearing my union badge, and we re supposed to be good tippers.
“YMCA,” I said, entering. In the summers I usually lived at the Y; it’s nothing fancy, but it’s cheap and clean and there are some pretty decent guys around. Most important, though, once inside you’re reasonably safe.
My cab nosed onto the fourth-level freeway and went on automatic. The driver leaned back and struck a cigarette. “Working?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
“You will be,” he predicted. “It’s been a lively year so far.” He jerked his thumb at the framed bootlegging and procurement licenses. “Business is good, you know. I wonder how come the crime rate jumps in boom times and drops in bad times. Sh’d think it’d be the other way around.”
“There are psychological reasons,” I told him. “You can explain part of it by pointing to all the money floating about—hectic atmosphere and so forth, high living, eat, drink, and be merry. In a slump, people have to think more about simply eating.”
“You don’t talk like a gangster,” he said.
“I’m only one in summer,” I admitted. “The rest of the year I’m working for my Ph.D. at Harvard. Got to pay my expenses somehow.”
He grew less friendly, associating me with college kids, I suppose. I didn’t bother explaining that my patty-raiding days were long past and that graduate students are still expected to earn their degrees. It had been fun once, but I think maturity consists largely in a shift of the pleasure principle. To me, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, there was delight in a psychodynamic equation and merely boredom in the thought of breaking down doors and toting a squealing coed into the bushes.
We passed a new school, steel and chrome and plastic leaping eighty stories into the sky. I noticed a gym class having some machine-gun practice on the playground. The range was pathetically overcrowded. Where the hell are they going to put all the new children?
“Y’ oughta be here in fall,” said the driver. “We got a great team this year.”
“I don’t care much for football, to tell the truth,” I replied. “I see enough bloodshed without paying to watch somebody’s face messed up with spiked knuckledusters.”
“Oh, the Big Ten are using goggles now. No more blindings. Though there’s talk of legalizing switchblades…Here we are, doc.”
I got out on the ramp. The meter showed $250, which was not unreasonable, but I disliked adding the 25 per cent tip expected of me. People think a gangster sleeps on money mattresses. Well, he does get fat fees, but it’s sporadic work and he has heavy expenses too.
After I had been frisked and had checked my weapons—I told you the Y is safe—I went over to the desk. Joe Green was on duty and said hello. “How’s things back east?” he added.
“As usual,” I said.
“How about that airport bombing?”
“You know I only hold a job summers. I hear the unions and the cops between them got the bastards in a few days, but it was no affair of mine.” I said that because I didn’t care to make conversation; actually, I had been as outraged as anyone else. Unlicensed murder, and illegal weapons such as bombs—in this case, there were twenty innocent casualties—are an offense to every rule of human behavior. Without law, we might as well go back to the caves.
“What kind of place you want?” asked Green. “We’ve added a new wing: some nice three-room—”
“I’m trying to save money, for your information. Single with bath will do.”
“Okay. Two-seven-seven-three, then. Want a girl?”
“Not just yet, thanks. I want to take off my shoes and relax. When you get off, maybe we can go out for dinner and stuff.”
I picked up a fifth at the newsstand and looked for a book, but found nothing worth reading. I don’t care about their covers, but these impurgated editions annoy me; nobody has a right to put clinical descriptions into Romeo and Juliet or provide Captain Ahab with a mistress. Oh, well.
I took the elevator up, entered my place, and checked the meters. Local water ration was thirty gallons a day; Minnesota still has plenty. After the grimy east, it was going to be good to bathe daily. While the tub was filling, I took my fifth over for a look out the window. The downtown area is new and spectacular, from the austere lines of the Retailers’ Union skyscraper to the humorous fantasy of the Hamm’s Building, shaped like a beer bottle. But I was high enough to see the gray miles of housing projects reaching beyond the horizon. They had
expanded since last year, and I could understand why the cab driver had said this was a lively time. Unless we psychodynamicists come up with an answer, the curve of liveliness is going to keep on rising.
I didn’t call union HQ till I was cleaned up. The face in the screen was unfamiliar. “Hello, brother,” I said. “Charles Andrew Rheinbogen checking in.”
“Hello, brother Rheinbogen,” he said. “You’re playing in luck. All the boys out, and a large job just come.”
I sighed, having hoped for at least a day’s relaxation. But you don’t turn down an offer. “Okay, I’ll be right along. Only what happened to Sam?”
“Oh…brother Jeffreys, you mean? He got his a week ago.”
“Hey, he was too old for anything but switchboard work.”
“This was a private murder. Somebody cooled him for personal reasons.”
“Damn! I liked him. Anything we can do about it?”
” ’Fraid not. Advance notification of intent was filed, the deeds been registered, and the weregild will be paid on schedule.”
Well, he’d had a full life, and the union would look after his family. But I was going to miss Sam. He had lived through the Smashup as a young man and, unlike most, always been willing to talk about it. Some of his stories would curdle your plasma, but he had kept his sense of humor too.
I slipped on clean pajamas and shoes and went downstairs. In the lobby I bought a foodbar to keep going on; benzedrine I always carry. After getting my guns back, I took die slideway over to HQ on third-level Nicollet. The new operator had not lied about a big job. I was shown into the executive secretary’s office at once.
Tom Swanson is a very high-class labor chief, managing not only the local and its benefit funds, but also its banks, stores, factories, and other business. He hasn’t much formal education, but he looks like a middle-aged professor. Thats due to plastic surgery, when he decided a mild, scholarly face was disarming and therefore useful. He shook hands with me and introduced me to the client: “Mr. James Hardy, this is Mr. Rheinbogen…one of our best.”
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