It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!... And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world beneath and around us, and the best intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The Hedonist threw his fist and felt the paralyzing shock go through it and up his arm. But in his shoulder he felt the solid impact of the fist against something that yielded. The secretary grunted and fell backward in a flurry of falling noises. There were shouts and groans and the clatter of feet.
But the Hedonist was too busy to listen to them, too busy even to enjoy the pleasure of striking back against the forces that had taken his life and his world and pulled them down together. He had swung on around, caught Beth, and pulled her through the door of the booth and into the shouting, milling crowd outside. There was laughter at first, as most of the patrons thought it was a joke, and then moans and screams and growing hysteria.
The darkness was absolute. They hadn’t left it when they left the booth. Someone had an interrupter focused on the whole area.
The Hedonist held tightly to Beth’s wrist and forced his way through the jostling, clutching, screaming crowd. He brought Beth close and yelled in her ear, “Are you all right?”
He could feel her head nod and then her lips were moving against his ear. “I can’t fight this mob,” she shouted. “You go ahead. I’ll steer from behind.”
“Where?” the Hedonist asked.
“Never mind! Quick! There’s no telling how long the darkness will last.”
The Hedonist hesitated, shrugged, and turned. He lowered his numbed shoulder and plunged into the squirming, clawing sea of humanity. She guided him with strong, sure movements of her hand. Fists bounced off his body and face and nails raked him, but he managed to get his partially paralyzed arm up in front of his face and forced his way onward, thankful for the first time that his body was big and strong.
It seemed as if the darkness had thickened, as if the night had arms and hands and feet to hold them back. The pressure increased and grew until, suddenly, it fell away before them and there was nothing.
The Hedonist reached with his foot and there were steps going down. He stumbled down them, dragging Beth behind. When they reached a level stretch again, the noise had faded in the distance, and they seemed to be alone. He brought Beth up beside him.
“What is this?” he demanded. “Where are we going? Who’s using the interrupter? Who—?”
“No time now,” she panted. “Come on. I’ll try to tell you as we escape.”
She led him through the darkness with a sure instinct. “The answer to most of your questions is, the Underground.”
It was a strange new word. The Hedonist let it tumble around in his mind, and everywhere it touched it summoned up an exotic image: men tampering with hedometers; people meeting in dark, hidden places to share their illicit passions of grief, pain, and sorrow; saboteurs spreading infections of gloom....
How could it have existed without his knowledge? “And you’re a part of it,” he said.
“Ever since I realized that what kept us apart was hedonics. Try to understand us! We aren’t troubled about the great mass of the people; they’re contented with what they have. We’re concerned with the few malcontents who find happiness impossible and get into trouble.”
She stopped. The Hedonist got an impression that there was something solid in front of them. In a moment he felt a sudden breath of cool air against his face. Beth led him down another flight of steps and into a straight, level passage.
“Then you aren’t trying to overthrow the Council?” he asked, puzzled.
“Of course not. What would be the point? We don’t want the responsibility for a world overpopulated with mediocrities. Let the Council have that. All we try to do is to rescue the few who are worth saving.”
With one step they came out of the darkness into the light. The Hedonist blinked at the brightness; the blindness wore off quickly. They were in a long, narrow passage lighted at infrequent intervals by bulbs in ceiling pits. The Hedonist could not see the end of it.
“Then you think hedonics is a failure?” he said.
The struggle through the mob had torn the red gown. Beth was trying, with only partial success, to hold it together. “No,” she said with great seriousness—and the Hedonist would have smiled at her youthful gravity if it hadn’t been so real. “For the great mass of the people, hedonics was a howling success. As a physiological and psychological discipline, it was a great step forward. But as a practical science, it was impossible. How many hedonists practiced it in those terms?”
The Hedonist looked blank.
“Very few,” Beth said soberly. “Those few tried and of them only you and one or two others really succeeded. That is why the Council had to get rid of you. The rest bowed before the impossibility and compromised with the world. To be a hedonist, a man would have to be a god—and men aren’t divine. Not yet. At least, not many of them.” She looked at him with warm, dark eyes.
The Hedonist felt them melt a cold spot deep down inside him; it had been there for a long time, so long that he had forgotten all about it. “So you rescue the malcontents. Before they go to the surgeon?”
“All we can, and we get most of them.”
“And then what?” the Hedonist asked, frowning.
Beth led the way up the few short steps. They came out into the night. The real night with the stars overhead.
“We bring them here,” she said.
The Hedonist looked up from her shadowed face. Across the broad field was a towering, pointed shape, reaching up toward space and freedom. “The planets!” he said suddenly. “Mars and Venus.”
“And Callisto and Ganymede,” Beth added. “We send them out to be colonists. They make good ones. They can work out their discontent against their environment instead of themselves. That’s the best therapy for them.
“And that’s where we’re going.”
Before the Hedonist could recover his breath, a broad-shouldered man, who towered above the Hedonist like the ship across the field, had stepped out of the shadows behind them. The Hedonist looked up at the dark, scowling, bearded face. He had never seen more obvious self-torment. He itched to treat the man. Devalue, he longed to say, and substitute.
“You got him, did you?” the man said in a rumbling voice.
“Yes, Captain.”
Captain. The association with the ship across the field was obvious.
“You helped us?” the Hedonist asked. “You’re the one I should thank?”
The man nodded gloomily. “Me and some of the boys.”
“I don’t understand how you could take over a fun house so easily—”
The captain shrugged his massive shoulders. “We own it. We own most of the Strip. We still need things out there”—he waved his hand toward the sky—“that Earth can give us—men and tools—and for that we need money. So we give the rabbits what they really want, and they give us what we need. Used to shanghai a few colonists out of the place, but we stopped that. They were no good; died off too quick.”
“Didn’t the Council object?”
“Fat lot of good that would do.” He chuckled at the idea. “They know what we could do if we took it in our minds to—and there’s nothing those fat rabbits could do to stop us. But we’d better be moving toward the ship. This might be the time the Council will decide to take a chance.”
“They don’t do anything about your aiding the escaped prisoners?”
“Why should they? Gets them off their hands, don’t it? That’s all they want. They’re happy to leave us alone. Someday, maybe, we’ll decide to come back and do something about the Council. Not now. We’re too busy.”
“Come on,” Beth urged.
The Hedonist looked back the way they had come. On the horizon were the dark towers of the Old City, and in front of them was the ghostly radiance of the crater. They seemed like mute fingers trying to warm themselves before a cold, deadly fire. Their silence and pathos overwhelmed him.
“I can’t,” he groaned. “I can’t go. I can’t leave Earth like this and go seek my own happiness.”
“But you can’t help Earth,” she pleaded. “There’s nothing you can do. You have to accept reality.”
The Hedonist was silent. Could he help? Could he overthrow the Council, all by himself? What was reality?
Deep down, he knew that he couldn’t do anything. The black spires on the horizon were not fingers but gravestones. No one can raise the dead.
“Earth is happy as it is, I suppose,” he said slowly. “It’s overcrowded. There’s no space left for modifying reality. Perhaps the self-discipline of hedonics demands too much. Maybe the only way to keep Earth from blowing apart from its own conflicting desires is the Council’s way.”
Beth watched him come painfully to the truth.
“All right,” the Hedonist said. “Let’s go.” They started walking across the starlit field. “I suppose you need hedonists on Venus.”
The captain stopped short. “Wait a minute,” he growled. “You got the wrong idea. We don’t want missionaries. We’re too busy to be happy. We’ve got a million things to do up there. We’ve got no use for any of your immorality.” He turned viciously toward Beth. “I thought you said—”
“He’ll be all right,” she said frantically. “I tell you he’ll be all right.” She tugged at the Hedonist’s arm.
Immorality, Captain? No, not immorality. The first truly moral society since man first began to congregate. The first society in which a man’s instinct didn’t conflict with the demands of society upon him.
Morality wasn’t everything, of course. It was a little like death, the end of struggle and conflict. In that sense life was immoral, an eternal fight against the leveling forces, and the immoral, criminal, lawbreaking part of humanity was out there on the planets and the moons of Jupiter, some day to be lifting an illicit hand toward the stars.
That was all very true, but to give it all up! To surrender all he had labored to learn and practice! It was like dying.
What was it the captain had said? We’re too busy to be happy. The Hedonist could see the truth of that. Happy men don’t make good colonists. To tame a planet, to remold a world, takes hungry men, angry men. They had to be discontented, and they had to stay discontented. Otherwise, the world turned on them and broke them.
Devaluation was no good. Suppression was no good. Substitution was no good. You can’t devalue the need for food. You can’t suppress the desire for breathable air. You can’t substitute for the necessities of shelter against the heat and the cold and the insects and the viruses....
“I suppose,” the Hedonist said, looking up, “that you could use a doctor. You need obstetricians and geriatricians, I guess. You have people who get sick, who break bones, who have babies, who grow old... I imagine the children need teachers....”
A slow, brilliant smile spread across the captain’s face. It reminded the Hedonist of the sun suddenly, joyfully breaking through the dark clouds. “Sure, Doc,” he said. “Come on. We’ve got a million things to do and only a few hundred years to do them in.”
So the Hedonist thought, his training would not be entirely wasted. His medical skill would be in great demand, and then there would be the children. There would be lots of children as humanity became prolific to populate a world. He would teach the children the hedonic disciplines without removing the angers that kept them alive. Hedonics wasn’t finished, after all. It was only a new, finer beginning.
He took Beth’s arm possessively, and they started walking toward the tall ship that would take them, without regret, from a world that, after the bitter ages, was going to be one hundred per cent happy.
A bright star hung just above the pointed nose of the ship. It was not Venus, but it was, perhaps, an omen.
There was a great deal to be said for the privilege of being just as unhappy as a man wanted to be.