“The experiment has been going on for almost fifteen hundred years,” said Heym, “and it’s just starting to get under way. You can’t discontinue it now.”
“Can and will,” replied Goram, “if the situation seems to justify it. That’s what I’m going to find out.”
“But—one planet! One primitive planet! What sort of monsters do you think live there? I tell you, they’re people, as human as I—” Heym paused. He had meant to add—“and you,” but couldn’t quite bring himself to it. Goram seemed less than human, an atavistic remnant of screaming past ages, an ape in uniform. “—as I am,” finished Heym.
The hesitation seemed lost on Goram. The marshal stood regarding the psychologist out of sullen little black eyes, blocky form faintly stooped, long arms dangling, prognathous jaw thrust ahead of the broad flat-nosed countenance. The fluorotubes gleamed down on his shining shaven bullet skull. The black gold-braided uniform fitted him closely, a military neatness and precision that was in its way the most primitive characteristic of all.
He said in his hoarse bass: “So are the rebels. So are the barbarians and pirates. So are the serfs and slaves and criminals and insane. But it’s necessary to suppress all of them. If Station Seventeen represents a menace, it must be suppressed.”
“But what conceivable danger—One barbarian planet—under constant surveillance throughout its history! If that can menace an empire of a hundred thousand star systems, we’re not safe from anything!”
“We aren’t. For three thousand years of history, the Empire has been in danger. You have to live with it, as we soldiers do, to realize how ultimately unstable the stablest power in history really is. Oh, we can smash the peripheral barbarians. We can hold the Taranians and the Comi and Magellanics in check.” The marshal’s heavy-ridged eyes swept contemptuously up and down the scientist’s long weedy form. ‘‘I’m in no danger from you. I could break you with my bare hands. But a dozen viruses of Antaric plague, entering my body and multiplying, would paralyze me in agony and rot the flesh off my bones and probably empty this ship of life.”
The office quivered, ever so faintly. The muffled throb of the great engines was vibrant in its walls and floor and ceiling, in the huge ribs and plates of the hull, in guns that could incinerate a continent and the nerves and bones of the two thousand men manning that planetoidal mass. Monstrously the ship drove through a night of mind-cracking empty distances, outpacing light in her furious subdimensional quasivelocity, impregnable and invincible and inhuman in her arrogance. And a dozen blind half-living protein molecules could kill her.
Heym nodded stiffly. “I know what you mean,” he said. “After all”—deliberate snobbery edging his voice—“applied psychological science is the basis of the Empire. Military power is only one tool for—us.”
“As you will. But I am not a researcher’s tool, I belong to practical men, and they have decided this mission. If I report Station Seventeen potentially dangerous, they will order me to destroy it. If I decide it is already dangerous, I have the authority to order it destroyed myself.”
Heym kept his gaunt face impassive, but for a moment he felt physically ill. He looked across the sparsely furnished office at the marshal’s squat simian form, he saw the barely suppressed triumph-smile in the heavy coarse visage, and a wave of sick revulsion swept over him.
He thought wearily: Fifteen hundred years…patience, work, worry, heartbreak, and triumph and a gathering dawn…generation after generation, watching from the skies, learning, pouring their whole lives into the mighty project—As if I didn’t know the danger, the fear which is the foundation and the reason for the Empire…and here we have the first glimmerings of what may be a way out of the rattrap which history has become…and it’s now all dependent on him! On the whim of a two-legged animal which will strike out in blind fear to destroy whatever it doesn’t understand…or even understanding, will destroy just for the satisfaction of venting an inferiority complex, of watching better men squirm in pain.
Calmness came, a steadiness and an icy calculation. After all, he thought, he was a psychologist and Goram was a soldier. It should be possible for him to handle the creature, talk him over, deftly convince him that he himself wanted what Heym wanted and had in fact thought of it himself and had to argue the scientist into agreement.
Yet—slow, easy, careful. He, Sars Heym, was a research man, not a practicing psychotechnician. He wasn’t necessarily able to handle the blind brutal irrationality of man, any more than a physicist was ordinarily capable of solving an engineering problem. And so much depended on the outcome that…that—
Briefly, he sagged beneath the burden of responsibility. The load seemed for a dizzying instant too much to bear—unfair, unfair, to load one man with the weight of all the future. For Station Seventeen was the key to the next phase of history—of that Heym was certain. The history of man, his evolution—the whole universe seemed to open vertiginously before him, and he stood alone with the cosmos blazing on his shoulders.
He shook himself, as if to get rid of a clinging burden, and with a convulsive effort forced coolness on himself. Detached argument—well, he had used that often enough at Sol without convincing anyone who mattered. He could still use it on Goram, but not for itself, only as a means of flattery by appealing to reason—among other means.
Intolerable, to have to play sycophant to this—atavist—but there was too much at stake for pride to count.
“I understand your position, of course,” said Heym, “even if I do not agree. I am sure that a glance at our records will convince you there is no danger.”
“I’m not interested in records,” rasped the marshal. “I could have had all that transvised to me at Sol if I wanted to see it. But that’s the psychologists’ department. I want to make a personal inspection.”
“Very well. Though we could just as well have transvised the scenes revealed on the spy devices from our headquarters to Sol.”
“I’m not interested in telescreen images either. I want to land on the planet, see its people with my own eyes, hear them talk, watch them at work and play. There’s a feel to a race you can only get by direct observation.” Goram’s bulldog face thrust aggressively forward. “Oh, I know your fancy theories don’t include that—you just watch from afar and write it all down in mathematical symbols nobody can read without twenty years of study. But I’m a practical man, I’ve dealt with enough barbarians to have an instinct for them.”
Superstition! thought Heym bitterly. Typical primitive mind reaction—magnifying his own ignorant guesses and impulses into an “instinct”: No doubt he also believes hair turns gray from fear and drowned men always float face down. Behold the “practical man”!
It was surprisingly hard to lie, after a lifetime’s training in the honesty of science and the monastic community of observers at the station. But he said calmly enough: “Well, that’s very interesting, Marshal Goram. We’ve often noticed curious talents—precognition, telepathy, telekinesis, and the rest, appearing sporadically among people who have some use for them, but we’ve never been able to pin them down. It’s as if they were phenomena inaccessible to the ordinary scientific method. I see your point.”
And I flatter myself that’s good flattery—not too obviously in agreement, but still hinting that he’s some kind of superman.
“Haven’t you ever landed at all?” asked Goram.
“Oh, yes, fairly often—usually invisible, of course, but now and then making an open and even spectacular appearance to test the effects of seemingly supernatural manifestations. However, we can generally see quite enough through the strategically planted recording televisors and other spy devices.”
“You think,” grunted Goram. “But a planet is mighty big, I tell you. How do you know what they’re cooking up in places your gadgets don’t see?”
Heym was unable to keep all the weariness and disgust out of his voice. “Because history is a unity,” he said. “The whole can be inferred from the part, since the part belongs to the whole. Why should the only unwarlike people in the Galaxy suddenly start building weapons?”
“Oh, we don’t fear their military power—yet,” replied Goram. “I should think you, as a psychologist, would know what sort of a danger Station Seventeen represents—a danger that can wreck civilization. They can become a disrupting factor—the worst in all history.”
“Progress is disruption.”
“Maybe. But the Empire is based on stasis. It’s sacrificed progress for—survival.”
“True—but here we may have a clue to controlled progress, safe advancement. Even stasis isn’t safe, as we well know. It’s a poor makeshift, intended to keep civilization alive while something else is worked out. Well—we’re working it out at Station Seventeen.”
Coram grunted again, but remained silent.
* * *
Valgor’s Star lay a good hundred parsecs from Sol, not far from the Empire’s border though sufficiently within the garrisoned marches to be protected from barbarian raids. The early researchers, looking for an uninhabited Earth-like planet, had found the obscure GO-type sun far off the regular space lanes; an ancient planetographic expedition had stopped briefly there, recording that the third world was practically terrestrial, but this whole galactic sector was so isolated and unprofitable that there had been no further visits, and the old report lay for centuries in the Imperial files before the Psychotechnic Foundation resurrected it. The remoteness and unknownness were assets in any such project, and the fact that there were no aborigines requiring troublesome and costly extermination and eradication of all traces had been decisive.
At an easy cruising speed, the battleship used three days going from Sol to Valgor’s Star. Sars Heym spent most of that time getting on the right side of Tamman Goram. It involved listening to endless dreary reminiscing of border warfare and the consummate ability required to rise from simple conscript to Imperial Marshal, but the price was small if it could save Station Seventeen.
“Nobody appreciates the border garrisons who hasn’t served in them,” declared Goram, “but I tell you, if it weren’t for them the Empire wouldn’t last a year. The barbarians would sweep in, the rival empires would gobble up all they could hold and go to war over the spoils, the Spirit alone knows what the Magellanics would do—but it wouldn’t be pleasant—and the whole structure would disintegrate—three thousand years of stability might as well never have been!”
A high official would be used to open flattery. Heym disagreed just enough to seem sincerely to agree on all important points. “We couldn’t do without the border patrols,” he said, “but it’s like any organism, requiring all its parts to live—we couldn’t dispense with internal police either, and certainly not with the psychotechnicians who are the government.”
“Spirit-damned bureaucrats,” snorted Goram. “Theoreticians—what do they know of real life? Why, d’you know, I saw three stellar systems lost once to the barbarians because we didn’t have enough power to stand them off. There was a horde of them, a dozen allied suns, and we had only three garrisoned planets. For months we begged—wrote to Antares and Sirius and Sol itself begging for a single Nova-class battleship. Just one, and we could have beaten off their fleet and carried the war to them. But no, it was ‘under consideration’ or ‘deferred for more urgent use’—three suns and a hundred thousand men lost because some soft-bellied psychotechnician mislaid a file.”
“Robot-checked files don’t get mislaid,” said Heym softly. “I have friends in administration, and I’ve seen them weep at some of the decisions they had to make. It isn’t easy to abandon an army to its fate—and yet the power that could have saved them is needed elsewhere, to drive off a larger invasion or to impress the Taranians or to take a star cluster of strategic value. The Empire has sacrificed a lot for sheer survival. Humanness in government is only one thing lost.”
“The rules! How can a general in the field keep track of every ship and turn in forms in quadruplicate on their condition?”
“He can’t. Probably a million units a year are lost in recording. And yet, the vast majority of such forms are filled out and do get to the appropriate center, are recorded in electronic code and put on instantly accessible file, mathematically coordinated with all other relevant information. When Grand Strategy wants an overall picture of the military situation, it has one right there. Military planning would be impossible otherwise.
“And it isn’t only in the military field,” argued Heym. “After all, you know the Empire isn’t interested in further expansion. It wants to keep civilization alive on the planets where it exists, and keep the nonhuman imperia out. Ever since the Founder, our military policy has been basically defensive—because we can’t handle more than we have. The border is always in a state of war and flux, but the Empire is at peace, inside the marches.
“Yet—how long would the Empire last, even assuming no hostile powers outside, without the most rigid form of psychotechnocratic government? There are roughly three times ten to the fourteenth power humans in the Solarian Empire. The nonhuman aborigines have been pretty thoroughly exterminated, assimilated as helots, or otherwise rendered harmless, but there are still all those humans, with all the terrific variations and conflicting desires inherent in man and intensified by radically different planetary and consequently social environments. Can you imagine a situation where three hundred trillion humans went their own uncoordinated ways—with atomic energy, biotoxic weapons, and interstellar spaceships to back up their conflicting demands?”
“Yes, I can,” said Goram, “because after all it has happened—for nearly a thousand years before the Empire, there was virtual anarchy. And”—he leaned forward, the hard black glitter of his eyes nailing Heym—“that’s why we can’t take chances, with this experiment of yours or anything else—anything at all. In the anarchic centuries, with a much smaller population, there was horror—many planets were blasted back to savagery, or wiped out altogether. Have you seen the dead worlds? Black cinders floating in space, some still radioactive, battlegrounds of the ancient wars. The human barbarians beyond the Imperial borders are remnants of that age—some of them have spaceships, even a technology matching our own, but they think only of destruction—if they ever got past the marches, they’d blast and loot and fight till nothing was left. Not to mention the nonhuman border barbarians, or the rival empires always watching their chance, or the Magellanics sweeping in every century or so with weapons such as we never imagined. Just let any disrupting factor shake the strength and unity of the Empire and see how long it could last.”
“I realize that,” said Heym coldly. “After all, I am a psychologist. I know fully what a desperate need the establishment of the Empire filled. But I also know that it’s a dead end—its purpose of ultimate satisfied stasis cannot be realized in a basically dynamic cosmos. Actually, Imperial totalitarianism is simply the result of Imperial ignorance of a better way. We can only find that better way through research, and the project at Station Seventeen is the most promising of all the Foundation’s work. Unless we find some way out of our dilemma, the Empire is doomed—sooner or later, something will happen and we’ll go under.”
Goram’s eyes narrowed. “That’s near lese majesty,” he murmured.
Heym laughed, and gave the marshal a carefully gauged you-and-I-know-better-don’t-we look. “The Imperium is tolerant of local gods,” he said, “but the divinity of the Emperor must be acknowledged and is taught in all schools. Why? Because a state church, with the temporal ruler as the material incarnation of the Spirit, is another hold on the imagination of the people, another guarantee of subservience. So are local garrisons, political indoctrination, state control of commerce and travel, careful psychotechnic preparation and supervision of amusements, rigid limitation of birth but complete sexual freedom as an outlet, early selection and training of all promising children for government service—with unlimited opportunities for advancement within the established framework—and every other thing we can possibly control. If you stop to think about it—the Empire is founded on mediocrity.”
“That’s as may be,” muttered Goram, “but in that case a planet full of geniuses becomes doubly dangerous.”
Heym went over to the wall of the officers’ lounge and touched a button. The telescreen sprang to life with a simulacrum of the outside view. An uncounted host of stars blazed against the infinite blackness, a swarming magnificent arrogance of unwinking hard jewels strewn across the impassive face of eternity. The Milky Way foamed around the sky, the misty nebulae and star clusters wheeled their remote godlike way around heaven, and the other galaxies flashed mysterious signals across the light-years and the centuries. As ever, the psychologist felt dwarfed and awed and numbed by the stupendous impact.
“It was a great dream,” he whispered. “There never was a higher dream than man’s conquest of the universe—and yet like so many visions it overleaped itself and shattered to bits on the rocks of reality—in this case, simple arithmetic defeated us. How to reconcile and coordinate a hundred thousand stars except by absolutism, by deliberate statism—by chaining ourselves to our own achievements? What other answer is there?”
He turned around to Goram. The soldier sat unmoving, face stone-hard, like a primitive idol. “We’re looking for a new way,” said Heym. “We think we’re finding it, at Station Seventeen. It’s the first hope in four thousand years.”
* * *
The planet might almost have been Earth, a great blue spheroid swinging majestically against the incredible spatial sky with a softly shining moon for companion. Auroras wavered over the ice-capped poles, and cloud masses blurred the greenish-brown continents. They were storms, those clouds, snow and rain and wind blowing out of a living heaven over broad fair fields and haughty mountains, and looking down from the sterile steel environment of the ship, remembering the world city sprawling over Earth and the cold hard mechanized pattern of all Imperial life, Heym felt a brief wistfulness. All at once, he envied his experimental animals, down there on the green young planet. Even if they were to be destroyed, they had been more fortunate than their masters.
But they wouldn’t be destroyed. They mustn’t be.
“Where is your observation post?” asked Goram.
“On an asteroid well away from here and rendered invisible.”
“Why not on the satellite? It’d be a lot closer.”
“Yes, but distance doesn’t mean anything to a transvisor. Also, if—when—the colonists learn the means of interplanetary travel, we’d have had to move off the Moon, while we can remain hidden indefinitely on the invisible planetoid.”
“I’d say ‘if’ rather than ‘when’,” amended Goram grimly. “It was your report that the inhabitants were experimenting with rockets that alarmed the rulers enough to order me here to see if it weren’t best simply to sterilize the planet.”
“I’ve told you before, there’s no need for alarm,” protested Heym. “What if the people do have a few rocketships? They have no reason to do more than visit the other worlds of this system, which aren’t habitable—certainly no reason to colonize, with their own planet still practically uninhabited. The present population is estimated at only some eight hundred million.”
“Nevertheless, as soon as they have a whole system to move about in they’ll be dangerous. It’ll no longer be possible to keep track of everything of importance they may do. They’ll be stimulated by this success to perfect an interstellar drive—and even you will agree that that cannot be permitted. That engine may be developed without our knowledge, on some remote world of this system—and once even a few of them are running loose between the stars we’ll have no further control—and the results may well be catastrophic! Imagine a pure-bred line of geniuses allied with the barbarians!”
“I tell you, they’re not warlike. They haven’t had a single war in all their history.”
“Well, then they’ll try to innovate within the Empire, which would be just as bad if not worse. Certainly they won’t be satisfied with the status quo—yet that status quo means survival to us.”
“They can be co-ordinated. Good Spirit, we have plenty of geniuses in the Galaxy today! We couldn’t do without them. They are the very ones who run the Empire. Advancement is on a strict merit basis simply because we must have the best brains of mankind for the gigantic job of maintaining the social order.”
“Sure—everyone’s strictly brought up to accept the Empire, to identify its survival with its own. We have plenty of tame geniuses. But these are wild—a planetful of undomesticated intellects! If they can’t be tamed, they must be killed.”
“They can be,” insisted Heym. “Rather, they can become the leaders to get us out of status quo safely—if not directly, then indirectly through knowledge gained by observing them. Already administrative techniques have been improved, within the last five hundred or so years, because by watching unhampered intellect at work we have been able to derive more accurate psychomathematical expressions for the action of logic as a factor in society, A group in the Psychotechnic Foundation is working out a new theory of cerebration which may become the basis of a system of mind training doubling the efficiency of logical processes—just as semantic training has already increased mind power by applying it more effectively. But in order to develop and test that theory, as well as every other psychological research project, we must have empirical data such as the observation stations, above all Seventeen, furnish us. Without such new basic information, science comes to a standstill.”
“I’ve heard it all before,” said Goram wearily. “Now I want to go down there and look.”
“Very well. I’ll come along, of course. Do you wish to take anyone else?”
“Do I need to?”
“No, it’s perfectly safe.”
“Then I won’t. Meet me at Lifeboat Forty in half an hour.” Goram tramped off to give such orders as might be needed.
Heym stood for a while, chain smoking and looking out the visiplate at the silently rolling planet. Like an ominous moon, the warship swung in an orbit just beyond the atmosphere. For all its titanic mass, it was insignificant against the bulk of a world. Yet in guns and bombs and death-mists, gravitational beams and long-range disintegrators and mass-conversion torpedoes, in coagulative radiations and colloid-resonant generators, in the thousand hells man had made through all his tormented existence, lay the power to rip life off that surface and blanket the shuddering continents in smoke and flame and leave the blackened planet one great tomb under the indifferent stars.
No—no, that was wrong. The power did not lie in the ship, it was inert metal and will-less electronic intellect, a cosmic splinter that without man would spin darkly into eternity. The will, and hence the power, to destroy lay in men—in one man. One gorilla in uniform. One caveman holding a marshal’s baton. One pulsing mass of colloidal tissue, ultimately unstable, not even knowing its own desire.
Heym scowled and drew heavily on his cigarette. Goram had been soothed into comparative geniality, but his frantic notion of death as panacea was as strong as ever. The creature wasn’t even consistent—one moment talking philosophy of history as if he had brains, the next snarling his mindlessly destructive xenophobia. There was something wrong about Goram—though it might only be my own ignorance of practical psychology, thought Heym. As a research man I’m used to dealing with only one factor at a time. A situation in life is really too complex for me—I don’t have enough rules of thumb. I wish I’d brought a practicing technician along, say Kharva or Junn—they’d soon analyze the mental mechanism of our marshal and push the appropriate buttons.
The old sickening fear fell anew on him. What if, after all he should fail—what if fifteen hundred years of work were to be sponged out at the arbitrary whim of a superstition-ridden military moron? If I fail, the Empire fails with me—I know it. And it isn’t fair! I should have been told what I was being recalled to Sol for. I should have had a chance to prepare my arguments better. I should have been allowed to take a practical psycho along—but no, they obviously couldn’t permit me to do that or I’d have had everything my own way.
But couldn’t they see? Can’t they understand? Or has the worship of statism penetrated so deep that it’s like an instinct, a blind need for which everything else must be sacrificed?
He turned and went heavily toward his cabin to make ready.
* * *
Screened by an invisibility field, the lifeboat spiraled down toward the surface. Goram let the robopilot handle the vessel, and spent most of his time peering through a field-penetrating visiscope.
“Not much sign of habitation,” he said.
“No, I told you the population was still small,” replied Heym. “After all, only a few thousand were planted originally and the struggle for existence was as hard as with any savages for the first few centuries. Only lately has the population really begun growing.”
“And you say they have cities now—machines—civilization? It’s hard to believe.”
“Yes, it is. The whole result has been a triumphant confirmation of the psychotechnic theory of history, but nevertheless the sheer spectacular character of the success has awed us. I can understand it’s a little frightening. One naturally thinks a race which can go from naked savages to mechanized civilization in fifteen hundred years is somehow demonic. Yet they’re humans, fully as human as anyone else in the Galaxy, the same old Earthly stock as all men. They’ve simply enjoyed the advantage of freedom from stupidity.”
“How many stations are there?”
“About a hundred—planetary colonies, with colonists in ignorance of their own origin, where various special conditions are maintained. Different environments, for instance, or special human stocks. The progress of history is being observed on all of them, secretly, and invaluable data on mass-psychologic processes are thereby gained. But Seventeen has been by far the most fruitful.”
Goram wrinkled his low forehead. With concealed distaste, Heym thought how very like an ape he looked—throwback, atavist, cunning in his own narrow field but otherwise barely above moron level—typical militarist, the biped beast who had ridden mankind’s back like some nightmarish vampire through all history—except on the one planet of Valgor’s Star—
“I don’t quite see the point,” admitted the marshal. “Why spend all that time and money on creating artificial conditions that you’d never meet in real life?”
“It’s the scientific method,” said Heym, wondering at what elementary level he would have to begin his explanation. How stupid could one be and hold a marshal’s position? “The real world is an interaction of uncounted factors, constantly changing in relation to themselves and each other, far too vast and complex to be understood in its entirety. In order to find casual relationships, the scientist has to perform experiments in which he varies only one factor at a time, observing its effect—and, of course, running control experiments at the same time. From these data he infers similar relationships in the real world. By means of theoretical analysis of observed facts he can proceed to predict new phenomena—if these predictions are borne out by further observation, the theory is probably—though never certainly—right, and can be used as a guide in understanding and controlling the events of the real world.”
In spite of himself, Heym was warming up to his subject. After all, it was his whole life. He went on in a gathering rush of words:
“All the evidence shows that reality is not object but process. You yourself are not the same object as an instant ago—physicochemical-psychological changes, the very change of entropy which is ‘time,’ are all continuous. They are rapid in the case of an organism, slow in the case of a rock, say, but always continuous. The object is an abstraction, a set of constant characteristics of a process—more or less constant, I should say, since nothing is permanent, change, process, is always continuous. The grammatical distinction between noun and verb has misled us to think there is a corresponding distinction between what an object is and what it does—completely false, as a moment’s reflection will show.”
“Hm-m-m.” Gorman looked out the visiscope. The boat was sweeping over a broad plain, yellow with ripening grain. A few primitive villages, houses built of stone and wood and brick, were scattered over the great landscape, a peaceful scene, reminiscent of civilization’s dawn. “The planet looks backward enough,” grunted Goram dubiously.
“It is,” said Heym eagerly. “I assure you it is.”
“Well…you were saying—” Goram didn’t look at all sure of what Heym had been saying. “Get to the point.”
“Civilization—history, if you will —is a process like all else,” resumed the scientist. “A nation is not a concrete object, a giant man, a god or All-Father to whom one owes fanatical loyalty and unquestioning obedience. How much misery could have been prevented if men had seen that simple, common sense fact! A nation is part of a culture, and a culture is an interaction of certain peoples with themselves, their neighbors, and their ‘natural’ environment over a space-time region. When the process has lost its distinctive characteristics, its continuity of development, we say the culture is dead, but that is only a convenient figure of speech. Actually causality is indefinitely extended. We are still influenced by events that occurred in prehistoric ages.
“The early students of culture were struck by the similarity of development of different civilizations, as if man went along one inevitable historic path. And in a way he did—because one thing leads to another. The expanding units of culture clash, there are ever fiercer wars, old fears and grudges intensify, economic breakdowns increase the misery, finally, and usually unwittingly and even unwillingly, one nation overcomes all others to protect itself and founds a ‘universal state’ which brings a certain peace of exhaustion but eventually decays and collapses of its own weaknesses or under the impact of alien invaders. That’s exactly what happened to mankind as a whole, when he exploded into the Galaxy—only this time the fearful scale and resources of the wars all but shattered the civilization; and the Solarian Empire, the passive rigidity solving the problems of the time of troubles by force, has lasted immensely longer than most preceding universal states, because its rulers have enough knowledge of mass-psychologic processes to have a certain control over them and all the power of a hundred thousand planetary systems to back their decisions.”
Goram looked a little dazed. “I still don’t see what this has to do with the Foundation and its stations,” he complained.
“Simply this,” said Heym, “that though history is a natural process, like anything else, it is peculiarly hard to understand and hence almost impossible to control. This is not only because of the very complex character of the interactions but because we ourselves are concerned in it—the observer is part of the phenomenon. And also, it had long been impossible to conduct controlled experiments in history and thus separate out causal factors and observe their unhindered working. On the basis of thousands of years of history as revealed—usually quite incompletely—by records and by archeology, and of extrapolations from individual and mob psychological knowledge, and whatever other data were available, the scientists of the period preceding the Empire worked out a semi-mathematical theory of history which gave some idea of the nature of the processes involved—causal factors and the manner of their action. This theory made possible qualitative predictions of the behavior of masses of men under certain conditions. Thus the early emperors knew what factors to vary in order to control their provinces. They could tell whether a certain measure might, say, precipitate a revolt, or just what phrasing to use in proclamations for the desired effect. If you want a man to do something for you, you don’t usually slap him in the face—it’s much more effective to appeal to his vanity or his prejudices, best of all to convince him it’s what he himself wants to do. But once in a while, a face slapping becomes necessary. Why, even today the barbarians are held at bay more by subtle psychological and economic pressures dividing them against each other and putting them in awe of us than by actual military might.”
An ocean rolled beneath the boat, gray and green, shaking its white mane out on the restless horizon. “Swing northeast,” said Heym. “The planet’s greatest city lies that way, on a large island.”
“Good. A city’s a good place to observe a people. Can we go around incognito?”
“Naturally. I know the language well enough to pass for a traveler from some other part of the world, There’s a lot of intercourse between continents. The cities are quite cosmopolitan.”
“Well—go on. You’ve still not explained why the station and all this rigmarole of secrecy.”
“I was laying the background,” said Heym, unable to keep all the tiredness out of his voice. Can I really talk this moron over? Can anyone? Reason is wasted on an ape. “It’s really very simple. The crude psychotechnology available made it possible for the early emperors to conquer most of the human-inhabited Galaxy, hold it together, and reach an uneasy truce with the Taranian and Comi Empires. Our military might can hold off the barbarians and the Magellanic raiders, and have sufficient power left over to police the three hundred trillion citizens.
“Yet our science is primitive. On that vast scale, it can only deal with the simplest possible situations. It’s all we can do to keep the Empire stable. If it should develop on the colossal scale of which it is capable and with all the unpredictable erraticism of the free human mind, It would simply run away from us. We have trouble enough keeping industry and commerce flowing smoothly when we know exactly how it should work. If we permitted free invention and progress, there’d be an industrial revolution every year—there is never a large proportion of discoverers, but with the present population the number would be immense. Our carefully evolved techniques of control would become obsolete, there’d be economic anarchy, conflict, suffering, individuals rising to power outside the present social framework and threatening the co-ordinating authority—with planet-smashing power to back both sides and all our enemies on the watch for a moment’s instability.
“That’s only one example. It applies to any field. Science, philosophy—we can control known religions, channel the impulses to safe directions—but a new religion, rousing discontent, containing unknown elements—a billion fanatics going to war—No! We have to keep status quo, which we understand, at the cost of an uncontrollable advance into the unknown.
“The Empire really exists only to simplify the psychotechnic problem of co-ordination. Enforcement of population stability—good, we don’t have to worry about controlling trillions of new births, there’s no land hunger. Stable industry, ossified physical science, state religion, totalitarian control of the entire life span—good, we know exactly what we’re dealing with and our decisions will be obeyed—imagine the situation if three hundred trillion people were free to do exactly as they pleased in the Galaxy! Subjugation of nonhuman aborigines, or outright extermination—good, we only have to deal with human-type minds and needs, which are complex enough, not with a million or a trillion psychologies and past histories as wildly different as the planets of origin. Heym shrugged. “Why go on? You know as well as I do that the Empire is only an answer to a problem of survival—not a good answer, but the best our limited knowledge can make.”
“Hah!” Goram’s exclamation was triumphant. “And you want to turn a world of unpredictable geniuses loose in that!”
“If I thought for an instant there was any danger of this people’s becoming a disrupting factor, I’d be the very first to advocate sterilization,” said Heym. “After all I want to live, too. But there’s nothing to fear. Instead, there is—hope.”
“What hope?” snorted Goram, “Personally, I can’t see what you want, anyway. For three thousand years, we’ve kept man satisfied. Who’d want to change it?”
Heym bit back his temper. “Aside from the fact that the contentment is like death,” he said, “history shows that universal states don’t endure forever. Sooner or later, we’ll face something that will overwhelm us. Unless we’ve evolved ourselves. But safe evolution is only possible when we know enough psychotechnics to keep the process orderly and peaceful—when our science is really quantitative. The Stations, and especially Seventeen, are giving us the information we must have to develop such a science.”
* * *
The island lay a few kilometers north of the great northern continent. A warm stream in the ocean made the climate equable, so that the land lay green in the gray immensity of sea, but polar air swept south with fog and rain and snow, storms roaring over the horizon and the sun stabbing bright lances down through a mightily stooping sky of restless clouds and galloping winds. Heym thought that the stimulating weather had as much to do as the favorable location along the northern trade routes with the islanders’ leadership in the planet’s civilization.
Many villages lay in the fields and valleys and on the edges of the forest that still filled the interior, but there was only one city, on an estuary not far from the southern coast. From the air, it was not impressive to one who had seen the world cities of Sol and Sirius and Antares, a sprawling collection of primitive, often thatch-roofed, dwellings that could hardly have housed more than a million, the narrow cobbled streets crowded with pedestrians and animal-drawn vehicles, the harbor where a few steam- or oil-driven vessels were all but lost in the throng of wind-powered ships, the almost prehistoric airport—but the place had the character, subtle and unmistakable, of a city, a community knowing of more than its own horizon inclosed and influencing events beyond the bounds of sight.
“Can we land without being detected?” inquired Goram.
Heym laughed. “An odd question for a military man to ask. This boat is so well screened that the finest instruments of the Imperial navy would have trouble locating us. Oh, yes, we observers have been landing from time to time all through the station’s history.”
“I must say the place looks backward enough,” said Coram dubiously. “The existence of cities is certainly evidence of crude transportation.”
“Well”—honesty forced Heym to argue—“not necessarily. The city, that is, the multi-purpose community, is one criterion of whether a society is civilized or merely barbaric, in the technical anthropological sense. It’s true that cities as definite centers disappeared on Earth after the Atomic Revolution, but that was simply because such closely spaced buildings were no longer necessary. In the sense of close relation to the rest of mankind and of resultant co-ordination, Earth’s people kept right on having cities. And today the older planets of the Empire have become so heavily populated that the crowded structures are reappearing—in effect, the whole world becomes one vast city. But I will agree that the particular stage of city evolution existing here on Seventeen is primitive.”
Goram set the boat down in a vacant field outside the community’s limits. “What now?” he asked
“Well, I suppose you’ll want to spend a time just walking around the place.” Heym fumbled in a bag. “I brought the proper equipment, clothes and money of the local type. Planetary type, that is—since a universal coinage was established at the same time as a common language was adopted for international use and nobody cares what sort of dress you wear.” He unfolded the brief summer garments, shorts and sandals and tunic of bleached and woven plant fiber. Funny thing,” he mused, “how man has always made a virtue of necessity. The lands threatened with foreign invasion came to glorify militarism and war. The people who had to work hard considered idleness disgraceful. Dwellers in a northern climate, who had to wear clothes, made nudity immoral. But our colonists here are free of that need for compensation and self-justification You can work, think, marry, eat, dress, whatever you want to do, just as you please, and if you aren’t stepping on someone else’s toes too hard nobody cares. Which indicates that intolerance is characteristic of stupidity, while the true intellectual is naturally inclined to live and let live.”
Goram struggled awkwardly and distastefully into the archaic garments. “How about weapons?” he asked.
“No need to carry them. No one does, except in places where wild animals might be dangerous. In fact, arms are about the only thing in which the colonists’ inventiveness has lagged. They never got past the bow and arrow. Aside from a few man-to-man duels in the early stages of their history, and now abandoned, they’ve never fought each other.”
“Impossible! Man is a fighting animal.”
Heym tried to find a reply which was not to obviously a slap at the whole military profession. “There’s been war on all our other colonies,” he said slowly, “and, of course, through all human history—yet there’s never been any real, logical reason for it. In fact, at one stage of prehistoric man, the late Neolithic, war seems to have been unknown—at least, no weapons were found buried with the men of that time. And your whole professional aim today is to maintain peace within the Empire, isn’t it?
“It takes only one to make a quarrel unless the other lacks all spirit to resist—and a people like these are obviously spirited, in fifteen hundred years they’ve explored their whole planet. But suppose neither side wants to fight. Whenever two tribes met, in the history of Station Seventeen, they were all too intelligent to suffer from xenophobia or other non-logical motivations to murder, and certainly they had no logical reason to fight. So they didn’t. It was as simple as that.”
Goram snorted, whether in disbelief or contempt Heym didn’t know. “Let’s go,” he said.
* * *
They stepped out of the boat and its invisibility screen into the field. Tall breeze-rippled grass tickled their bare legs, and the wind in their faces had the leashless wild exuberance and the heady scent of green growing life brought over the many kilometers of field and forest across which it had rushed—incredible, that pulsing warm vitality after the tanked sterility of the ship, of the Empire. And up in the blue cloud-fleeced sky a bird was singing, rising higher and ever higher toward the sun, drunk with wind and light.
The two men walked across the field to a road that led cityward. It was a narrow rutted brown track in the earth, and Goram snorted again. They walked along it. On a hill to the right stood a farm, a solid, substantial, contented-looking cluster of low tile-roofed stone buildings amid the open fields, and ahead on the horizon was the straggling misty line of the city. Otherwise they were alone.
“Are all your colonies this wild?” asked Goram.
“Just about,” said Heym, “though the environments are often radically different—everything from a planet that’s barely habitable desert to one that’s all jungle and swamp. That way, we can isolate the effects of environment. We even have one world equipped with complex robot-run cities, to see how untutored humans will react. There are three control stations, Earth-like planets where ordinary human types were left, and from them we’re getting valuable information on the path which terrestrial history actually took, we can test basic anthropological hypotheses and so on. Then there are a number of planets where different human types are planted—different races, different intelligence levels, and so on, to isolate the effects of heredity and see if there is any correlation of civilization with, say, physiology. But only here on Seventeen, populated exclusively by geniuses, has progress been rapid. All the other colonies are still in the stone ages or even lower, though there have been some unique responses made to severe environmental stimuli.”
“And you mean you just dumped your subjects down on all these worlds?”
“Crudely put, yes. For instance, before colonizing Seventeen we—that is, the Foundation—spent several generations breeding a pure genius strain of man. On Imperial orders, the Galaxy’s best brains were bred, and genetic control and selection were applied, until a stock had been developed whose members had only genius in the intellectual part of their heredity. Barring mutation or accident, both negligible, the people here and their children can only be geniuses. Then the few thousand adult end-products, who had naturally not been told what was in store for them, were seized and put under the action of memory erasers which left them able to walk and eat and little else. Then a couple of hundred were planted in each climatic region of this planet, near strategically placed invisible spy devices, and the observers sat back on their asteroid to see what would happen. That was fifteen hundred-odd years ago, but even in the forty or so years I’ve been in charge the change here has been very noticeable. In fact, on choosing the proper psychomathematical quantities to represent the various types of progress and plotting them against time, almost perfect exponential curves were obtained.”
“Sure. All progress, scientific progress anyway, is exponential.”
“Oh, no—quite the contrary. There are only a few sudden, brilliant, and—brief—periods of expansion in human history; long dreary dark ages intervene, and even the times of expansion are irregular. Nor has there ever been any real social progress made today as in the stone ages, law is based on force, though most of our force is the subtler psychotechnic kind—and even it is not essentially different from the taboo or priestcraft holding earlier cultures in check. I tell you, only on Seventeen has scientific progress been continuous, and only on Seventeen has there been any real social progress at all.”
Goram scowled. “So on that exponential advance, you can expect them to work out interplanetary travel in a matter of years,” he said. “They’ll know the principles of the star drive in a few more generations, and invent a faster-than-light engine almost at once. No—they aren’t safe!”
* * *
It was strange to walk through the narrow twisting streets and among the high archaic facades of a city which belonged to the almost forgotten past. To Goram, who must have visited uncivilized planets often, it could not be as queer as to Heym, and, also, the military mind would be too unimaginative to appreciate the situation. But even though Heym had spent the better part of his life watching this culture, it never failed to waken in him a dim feeling of dreamlike unreality.
Mere picturesqueness counted for a little, though the place was colorful enough. Along those cobbled ways went the traffic of a world. There were fantastic-looking beasts, variations of the horned ungulate genus which the colonists had early tamed to ride and load with their burdens, and still more exotic pets; and steering cautiously between them came trucks and passenger vehicles which for all their crudeness of material and principle had a cleanness of design, all the taut inherent beauty of the machine, that only Imperial mechanisms matched. More significant were the people.
There was nothing marking them out as obviously different. Many physical types were in evidence here, from the tall fair islanders to the stocky arctic dwellers or the sunburned southern folk; and costumes varied accordingly, though even strangers tended to wear some form of the light local summer dress. If perhaps a tendency toward higher foreheads and more clean-cut features than the Galactic average existed, it was not striking, and there was as wide deviation from it as could be found anywhere. The long hair of both sexes and the full beards worn by many men screened any intellectuality of appearance behind a hirsute veil associated with the peripheral barbarians.
No—the difference from any other world in the Galaxy was real and unmistakable, but it wasn’t physical. It was in the clear air of the city, where all chimneys were smokeless, and in the clean-swept streets. It was in the orderliness of traffic, easy movement without jostling and confusion. It was in the clean bodies and soft voices of the people, in the casually accepted equality of the sexes even at this primitive level of technology. It was negative, in the absence of slums and jails, and positive, in the presence of parks and schools and hospitals. There were no weapons or uniforms in sight, but many in the street carried books or wore chemical-stained smocks. There were no ranting orators, but a large group sat on the grass of one park and listened to a lecture on ornithology. Laughter was quiet, but there was more of it than Heym had heard elsewhere in the Empire.
Goram muttered once: “I seem to hear quite a few languages here.”
“Oh, yes,” replied Heym. “Each region naturally developed its own tongue and generally sticks to it for sentimental reasons and also because the thoughts of a people are best expressed in the speech they themselves developed. But as soon as contact between the lands became common, an international language was worked out and learned by all concerned. In fact, only about fifty years ago a completely new world language was adopted, one correct according to the newly established principles of semantics. That’s more than the Empire has yet done. We can talk Terrestrial safely enough, it’ll pass for some local dialect, and I can do the talking for both of us with the natives.”
“Still”—Goram scowled—“I don’t like it. Everybody here has a higher I.Q. than myself—that’s not right for a bunch of barbarians. I feel as if everyone was looking at me.”
“Most of them observe us, yes, geniuses being naturally observant,” said Heym. “But we aren’t conspicuous in any way. Our men have often been on the planet in person without attracting attention.”
“Didn’t you say you’d appeared openly?”
“Yes—a few times, some centuries back, we made the most awe inspiring possible descents, coming down through the air on gravibeams in luminous clothes and performing seeming miracles. You see, even the primitive tribes had shown no signs of organized religion beyond the usual magic rites which they soon outgrew. We wanted to see if god-worship couldn’t be induced.” Heym smiled wryly. “But after the generation which had actually seen us, there was no sign of our manifestation. I suppose the young, being of independent mind, simply refused to believe their elders’ wild stories. Not that the people are without religious sense. There is a high proportion of unbelievers, but there is also a large philosophical and even devotional literature. But nobody founds a school of thought, rather everybody reaches his own conclusions.”
“I don’t see how progress is possible then.”
You wouldn’t, thought Heym contemptuously, but he only smiled and said, “Apparently it is.”
An aircraft roared low overhead, and a wagon driver fought to control his suddenly panicky animals. Goram said: “The biggest paradox here is the anachronism. Sail ships and oilburners docked side by side, animal power in the same street with chemical engines, stone and wood houses with efficient smoke precipitators—how come?”
“It’s partly a matter of the extremely rapid progress,” declared Heym, “A new invention appears before the economy has become geared to it. There won’t be many machines until mass-production factories are set up to produce them in quantity, and that will have to wait till mechanical knowledge is sufficiently advanced to develop factories almost entirely automatic—for few if any geniuses could stand to work on an assembly line all day. Meanwhile, the people are in no hurry to advance their standard of living. Already they have sufficient food, clothing, and other necessities for all, as well as abundant free time—why strain themselves to go beyond that? This isn’t the first time a brilliantly creative civilization has existed without interest in material progress; I might cite the Hellenic phase of the ancient Classical culture on Earth as another case.”
Goram, who had obviously heard nothing and cared less about Hellenic culture, was silent for a while, then at last a blurted protest: “But they’re working on rockets!”
“Oh, yes—but there’s a difference: between exploration and exploitation. The social system here is unique, and doesn’t lend itself to imperialism. The Empire doesn’t have to fear Station Seventeen.”
“I’ve told you before I’m not worried about their military power,” snarled Goram.
Heym fell silent, for he felt the sudden sickening fear that the marshal might, without reason or provocation, decide to annihilate the colony—destroy it out of pure spite, pique with the psychologists and, their dominion over the soldiers, vent for a gathering wrath at the subconscious, frantically denied realization of his own basic inferiority to these barbarians. If he killed them, it would be proof, the militarists’ twisted proof, that he was superior after all.
With a growing desperation, Heym looked around at the people—the fortunate children of an open sky, quiet, glad, urbane, and strong with the unconquerable strength of intelligence. Here was truly Homo sapiens, man the wise—man who had plucked fire from the mouth of a volcano, far back in the lost ages of the ice, and started on a long journey into darkness. He had come far since then, but he had ended in a blind alley. Only here, on this one insignificant world of the countless millions swarming around the stars, only here was the old quest being renewed, the path of hope being trodden. Elsewhere lay only the sorry road of empire and death. Where the path of Station Seventeen led, Heym could not imagine. Unguessably far it went, out beyond the glittering stars his mind reeled at thought of the infinities open to mankind if he took the right turning.
The psychologist said, with desperation raw in his voice “Goram—Marshal Goram—surely you can see the experiment is harmless. More than that, it’s the most beneficial thing that has yet happened in all human history. Good Spirit, here’s hope for the Empire! A race which can progress as this has done can show us the way.”
“The Empire,” said Goram tightly, “isn’t interested in progress. It’s only interested in survival.”
“But—this is the way to survive. Every civilization—yes, every species—that quit advancing has become extinct.”
“I’m a practical man,” snapped Goram. “I’m not interested in crackpot schemes to save the universe.”
“What’s so practical about clinging to a system that in all history has consistently failed to work?” When the officer’s face remained cold and shut, Heym said with forced persuasiveness, “After all, in physical science the planet is still centuries behind us. In fact, strangely enough, though their advance in that branch of knowledge has been as extremely rapid as you can see, they have shown a proportionately greater concentration on biological and sociological work. I don’t know why, unless it is that genius is less afraid than mediocrity to study subjects which strike close to home. On Earth, astronomy, the most remote science, was the oldest, and psychiatry and sociology the youngest, but here all the sciences have got off to an even start. The mere absence of war is enough to show how far ahead of us these people are, and I could list any amount of supporting evidence. Their social system has achieved the miracle of combining progressiveness and stability. Just give the Foundation a chance to learn from them—or even, if they do work out an interstellar drive, give them a chance to teach us themselves, They’re the most reasonable race in the universe—they’ll be on the side of civilization, and even while overhauling it they’ll be better able to preserve it than we ourselves.”
“Let a bunch of barbarians take over the holy throne?” muttered Goram.
Heym closed his mouth, and gathering determination tightened his gaunt face. He looked around the pulsing city, and a vast tenderness and pity welled up in him—poor geniuses, poor helpless unwitting supermen—and answering it came a steely implacable resolve.
There was too much at stake to let his own personal fate matter. Certainly a mindlessly destructive atavist could not be allowed to block history. He would keep trying, he’d do his best to talk Goram over, because the alternative was fantastically risky for the station and against all his own training and principles—including elementary self-preservation.
But if he failed, if Goram remained obdurate, then he’d have to apply the same primitive methods as the soldier. Goram would have to die.
* * *
Rain clouds came out of the west with sunset, thunder rolling over the sky and a cool wet wind blowing from the sea. Goram and Heym finished a primitive but satisfying meal in a small restaurant and the psychologist said: “We’d better look for a place to stay tonight. Will you be in this city tomorrow?”
“Don’t know,” answered Goram curtly. He had been silent and withdrawn during the day’s tour of the metropolis. “I have to think over what I’ve seen today. It may be enough basis for a decision, or I may want to see more of the planet.”
“I’ll pay the score,” offered Heym. He fought to keep his voice and face blank. “And I’ll ask the waiter to recommend a tavern.”
He followed the man toward the kitchen. “Please,” he said in the common tongue, “I wish to pay the check.”
“Very well,” answered the native. He was a tall young fellow with the faintly weary eyes of a scholar—probably a student, thought Heym, doing his stint here and getting his education free. He took the few coins casually.
“And—is there a place to stay overnight near here?”
“Right down the street. Stranger, I take it?”
“Yes. From Caralla on business. Oh—one other thing.” It was a tremendous effort to meet that steady gaze. Heym was aware of his own clumsiness as he blurted the request: “I…uh…I’ve lost my knife and I need it to prepare some handicraft samples for display tomorrow. The stores are all closed now. I wonder if you have an extra one in the kitchen I could buy.”
“Why—” The native paused. For a vertiginous instant, Heym thought he was going to ask questions, and he braced himself as if to meet a physical impact. But on a world where crime was virtually unknown and lying hardly ever went beyond the usual polite social fibs, even so crude a fiction could get by. “Yes, I suppose we have,” said the waiter. “Here, I’ll get one.”
“No…I’ll come along…save you the trouble…choose one for my purpose if…uh…if you have several you can spare.” Heym stuck close to the waiter’s heels.
The kitchen was spotlessly clean, though it seemed incredible that cooking should still be done with fire. Heym chose a small sharp knife, wrapped it in a rag, and slipped it into his pocket. The waiter and chef refused his money. “Plenty where this one came from—a pleasure to help out a visitor.”
“What were you out there for?” asked Goram.
Heym licked stiff lips. “The waiter was new here himself and went to ask the cook about hotels.”
* * *
The first raindrops were falling as the two came out into the street. Lightning forked vividly overhead. Goram shuddered in the raw damp chill. “Foul place,” he muttered. “No weather control, not even a roof for the city—uncivilized.”
Heym made no reply, though he tried to unlock his jaws. The blade in his pocket seemed to have the weight of a world. He looked down from his stringy height at the soldier’s squat massiveness. I’ve never killed, he thought dully. I’ve never even fought, physically or mentally. I’m no match for him. It’ll have to be a sneak thrust from behind.
They entered the hotel. The clerk was reading a journal whose pages seemed purely mathematical symbols. He was probably a scientist of some kind in his main job. There was, luckily for Goram, no register to sign, the clerk merely nodded them casually toward their room.
“No system here,” muttered Goram. “How can they keep track of anybody without registry?”
“They don’t,” said Heym. “And they don’t have to.”
The room was large and airy and well furnished. “I’ve slept in worse, places,” said the soldier grudgingly. He flopped into a chair. “But it’s the first place where the hired help reads technical journals that I’ve seen.”
“The social order here is unique,” Heym repeated himself. “The colonists evolved through families, clans, tribes, kingdoms, and republics in a matter of centuries. Finally the most advanced countries worked out the present system, which was universally adopted when planetary government was established.”
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s a kind of democratic socialism—really the only logical form of government for a race of geniuses, at least until robots are developed. You see, the race needs an advanced civilization, with its technical advantages, in order to give the brilliant minds contact with each other and resources to carry out and propagate their ideas. Yet no high-grade mind should be put to the myriad routine and menial tasks essential to running a civilization, everything from garbage collection to government. The present set-up is a compromise, in which everyone puts in a small proportion of his time at those jobs. He can do manual work, or teach, or run a public-service enterprise like a farm or restaurant—whatever he wishes. And he can work steadily at it for a few years and then have all his needs taken care of for the rest of his life, or else put in a few hours a day, two or three, over a longer period of time. The result is that needs and a social surplus are available for all, as well as education, health services, entertainment, or whatever else is considered desirable. The planet could, in fact, do without money, but it’s more convenient to pay in cash than fill out credit slips.
“Incidentally, that’s probably one reason there’s no great interest in providing more material goods for all—it would mean that everyone would have to put in more time in the mines and factories and less on his chosen work. Which is apparently a price that genius is unwilling to pay. I don’t think there’ll be any great progress in applied science until the research project established some time back perfects the robots it’s set for a goal.”
“Uh-huh,” muttered Goram. “And just let them expand into the Galaxy and find we have such robots—left unproduced since the Imperial populace has to be kept busy—and see what they’ll do. They’d be able to wreck the whole set-up, just by inventing and distributing, and they’ll know it.”
“Can’t you credit them with being smart enough to see the reasons for maintaining the status quo?” asked Heym desperately. “They don’t want the barbarians on their necks any more than we do. They’ll help us maintain the Empire until they have developed a way to change conditions safely.”
“Maybe.” Goram’s mouth was tight. “Still, they’ll hold the balance of power, which is something no group except the Imperium can be permitted to do. Spirit! How do you even know they’ll be on our side? They may decide their best advantage lies with our rivals. Or they may be irritated with our having used them so cavalierly all these centuries.”
“They won’t hold grudges,” said Heym. “A genius doesn’t.”
“How do you know?” Goram sprang out of his chair and paced the floor. His voice rose almost to a shout. “You’ve said all along that the genius is naturally peaceful and tolerant and unselfish and every other of the milk-and-water virtues. Yet, your own history is against you all the way. Every great military leader has been a genius. There’ve been sadistic geniuses, and bigoted geniuses, and criminal geniuses—yes, insane geniuses! Why, every one of the hundred billion or so important men in the Imperial government is a genius—on our side—and more than half the barbarian chiefs are known to have genius intellect.” He swung a red and twisted face on the psychologist. “How do you know this is a planet of saints? Answer me that!”
Thunder roared in the fulgurous sky, rolling and booming between the rain-running streets. The single dim electric bulb in the room flickered. Wind whined around the corners of the building.
Heym took out a cigarette pack with fingers that shook. He held it out to Goram, who shook his heavy bullet head in angry refusal. The psychologist took time to bring one of the cylinders into his mouth and puff it into lighting. He drew smoke deeply into his lungs, fighting for steadiness.
It was his last real chance to convince Goram. If this failed, he’d just have to try to murder the soldier. If that attempt miscarried—oh, Spirit, then Station Seventeen and the Empire were doomed. But if he succeeded, well, he might be able to convince the Imperial police that it had been an accident, a runaway animal or something of the sort, or they might send him to the disintegration chamber for murder. In any case, there would be a faint hope that the next inspector would be a reasonable man.
He said slowly; “To explain the theory of historical progress, I’d have to give you a fairly long lecture.”
Goram sprawled back into his chair, crude and strong and arrogant. His little black eyes were drills, boring into the psychologist’s soul. “I’m listening,” he snapped.
“‘Well”—Heym walked up and down the floor, hands clasped behind his back—“it’s evident from a study of history that all progress is due to gifted individuals. Always, in every field, the talented or otherwise fortunate few have led and the mass has dumbly followed. A republic is the only form of state which even pretends to offer self-government, and as soon as the population becomes any size at all the people are again led by the nose, their rulers struggling for power with money and such means of mass hypnotism as news services and other propaganda machines. And all republics become dictatorships, in fact if not in name, within a few centuries at most. As for art and science and religion and the other creative fields, it is still more obviously the few who lead.
“The ordinary man is just plain stupid. Perhaps proper mind training could lift him above himself, but it’s never been tried. Meanwhile he remains immensely conservative, only occasional outbreaks of mindless hysteria engineered by some special group stirring him out of his routine. He follows, or rather he accepts what the creative or dominant minority does, but it is haltingly and unwillingly.
“Yet it is society as a whole which does. History is a mass action process. Gifted individuals start it off, but it is the huge mass of the social group which actually accomplishes the process. A new invention or a new land to colonize or a new philosophy or any other innovation would have no significance unless everybody eventually adopted or exploited or otherwise made use of it. And society as a whole is conservative, or perhaps I should say preservative. Civilization is ninety-nine percent habit, the use of past discoveries or the influence of past events. Against the immense conservatism of mankind in the mass, and in comparison to the tremendous accumulation of past accomplishment, the achievement of the individual genius or the small group is almost insignificant. It is not surprising that progress is slow and irregular and liable to stagnation or violent setbacks. The surprising thing is really that any event of significance can happen at all.”
Heym paused. Thunder snarled in the sky and the rain drummed on the windowpane with cold restless fingers. Goram stirred impatiently. “What are you leading up to?” he muttered.
“Simply this.” Heym’s hand fell into his pocket and closed on the smooth hard handle of the knife. Goram slumped in his chair, head lowered, staring sullenly at the floor. If the blade were driven in now, right into that bull neck, a paralyzing blow and then a swift slash across the jugular—
The intensity of the hatred welling up in him shocked Heym. He should be above the brutal level of his enemy. Yet—to see his blood spurt!
Steady—steady—That move of desperation might not be necessary.
“Two factors control the individual in society,” said Heym, and the detached calm of his voice was vaguely surprising to him. “They are only arbitrarily separable, being aspects of the same thing, but it’s convenient to take them up in turn.
“There is first the simple weight of social pressure. We all want to be approved by our fellows, within reasonable limits at least. The mores of the society, whatever they may be, are those of the individual. Only a psychopath would disregard them completely. Not only does society apply force on the nonconformist, but mere disapproval can be devastating. It takes a really brave—and somewhat neurotic—individual to be different in any important respect. Many have paid with their lives for innovating. So a genius will be hampered in making original contributions, and they are adopted only slowly. It usually takes a new idea many generations to become accepted. The astonishing rate of growth of science, back in the days when free research was permitted and even encouraged, indicates how rapid progress can be when there are no barriers.
“And, of course, this social pressure usually forces conformity even on reluctant individuals. A scientist may be naturally peaceful, for instance, but he will hardly ever refuse to engage in war research when so directed.
“The second hold of the mass on the individual is subtler and more effective. It is the mental conditioning induced by growing up in a society where certain conditions of living and rules of thought are accepted. A ‘born’ pacifist, growing up in a warlike culture, will generally accept war as part of the natural order of things. A man who might have been a complete skeptic in a science-based society will nearly always accept the gods of a theocracy if he has been brought up to believe in them. He may even become a priest and direct his logical talents toward elaborating the accepted theology—and help in the persecution of unbelievers. And so on. I needn’t go into detail. The power of social conditioning is unbelievable—combined with social pressure, it is almost insuperable.
“And—this is the important point—the rules and assumptions of a society are accepted and enforced by the mass—the overwhelming majority, shortsighted, conservative, hating and fearing all that is new and strange, wishing only to remain in whatever basic condition it has known from birth. The genius is forced into the straight-jacket of the mediocre man’s and the moron’s mentality. That he can expand any distance at all beyond his prison is a tribute to the supreme power of the high intellect.”
Heym looked out at the empty street. Rain blew wildly across its darkened surface. Lightning glared blindingly, almost in his eyes. His voice rose over the shattering thunder: “The Solarian Empire is nothing but the triumph of stupidity over intelligence. If every man could think for himself, we wouldn’t need an empire.”
“Watch yourself,” muttered Goram. “The ruling class has a certain latitude of speech, but don’t overstep it.” And more loudly: “What does this mean in the case of Station Seventeen?”
“Why, it’s a triumphant confirmation of the historical theory I was just explaining,” said Heym. “We’ve isolated pure genius from mediocrity and left it free to work out its own destiny. The result has even exceeded our predictions.
“Most of man’s history has been spent in the stone ages, because the savage is even more superstitious and conservative than the civilized man, whose culture does have a certain momentum. But the people of this planet had invented metallurgy and writing within a thousand years of the colony’s establishment. The essential difference was that there was progress made each generation, rather than every hundred or thousand generations. Every mind is creative, and every individual is willing to accept the ideas and work of every other.
“No doubt there are aggressive and conservative and selfish people born. But on this world the weight of social conditioning and social pressure is away from those tendencies, they don’t get a chance to develop themselves.
“Man’s brain is physically not qualitatively different from that of the other higher mammals. It has no feature not found in the brain of an ape, say. But the quantitative difference, in the relatively immense forebrain, leads to a qualitative difference of mental type. Man is sharply differentiated from the other animals by the power to make indefinite orders of abstraction. Hence progress is possible for him.
“It seems”—Heym’s voice rose over the whistle of wind—“that genius shows a similar qualitative distinction, due to quantitative difference, from mere human intelligence. The genius is basically a distinct type, just as the moron is on the other end of the scale. And here—on Seventeen—the new type has been set free.”
He turned around from the window. The voice of the storm seemed remote, lost in the tremendous silence that suddenly filled the room. Goram sat motionless, staring at the floor, and the slow seconds ticked away before he spoke.
“I don’t know—” he murmured. “I don’t know—”
Defeat and despair and a binding hatred rose into Heym’s throat, tasting of vomit. You don’t know! His mind screamed the thought, it seemed incredible that Goram should sprawl there, not moving, not hearing. No, you don’t know. Your sort never does, never has known anything but his own witless bestial desires, its own self-righteous rationalization of impulses that should have died with Smilodon. You’ll destroy Seventeen, in spite of all reason, in sheer perversity—and you’ll say you did it for the good of the Empire!
The knife seemed to spring of its own accord into his hand. He was lunging forward before he realized it. He saw the blade gleam down as if another man were wielding it. The blow shocked back into his muscles and for an instant his mind wavered, it wasn’t real—what am I doing?
No time to lose. Goram twisted around in his seat, yelling, grabbing for Heym. The knife was deep in his neck. Heym yanked at it—pull it loose, stick it in the throat, kill—
Something struck him from behind. The world shattered in a burst of stars, he crashed to the floor and rolled over. Through a haze of dizzy pain he saw men bending over Goram—men of the planet, rescuers for the monster who would annihilate them.
Words tumbled from the hotel clerk, anxious, shaken: “Are you hurt? Did you—Still, lie still, here comes a doctor—”
Pain curled Goram’s lips back from his teeth, but he muttered reply: “No…I’m all right…flesh wound—”
The doctor bent over his bloody form. “Deep,” he said, “but it missed the important veins. Here I’ll just pull it out—”
“Go ahead,” whispered Goram. “I’ve taken worse than this, though…I never expected it here.”
Heym lay on the floor while they worked over the soldier. His ringing, whirling head throbbed toward steadiness, and slowly, with so tremendous an impact that it overloaded his nerves and entered his consciousness without emotional shock, the realization grew.
Goram had spoken to the natives—in their own language.
A man bent over the psychologist “Are you all right?” he asked. “I’m sorry I had to hit you so hard. Here—drink this.”
Heym forced the liquid down his throat. It coursed fierily through his veins, he sat up with an arm supporting him about his waist and held his head in his hands.
Someone else spoke, the voice seemed to come from across an abyss: “Did he hear?”
“I’m afraid so.” Goram, his neck bandaged, spoke painfully. A rueful smile crossed his ugly face. “The excitement was too much for me, or I would have kept silent. This is going to be—inconvenient.”
The men of the planet helped Heym into a chair. He began to revive, and looked dazedly across at the man he had tried to kill. The others stood around the chairs, tall bearded men in barbaric dress, watching him with alertness and a strange pity.
“Yes,” said Tamman Goram very quietly, “the assistant Grand Marshal of the Solarian Empire is a native of Station Seventeen.”
“Who else?” whispered Heym. “How and why? I tried to kill you because I thought you meant to order the planet sterilized.”
“It was an act,” said Goram. “I meant to concede at last that the station was harmless and could be safely left to the Foundation’s observers. Coming from one who had apparently been strongly inclined to the opposite view, the statement would have been doubly convincing to Imperial officialdom. It was a powerful and suspicious minister who ordered the investigation, and I went to soothe his feelings. His successor will be one of our men, who will see that Station Seventeen drops into safe obscurity as an unimportant and generally unsuccessful experiment conducted by a few harmless cranks.”
“But…aren’t you…weren’t you—”
“Oh, yes. My history is perfectly genuine. I was planted as an obscure recruit in the border guards many years ago, and since then my rise has been strictly in accord with Imperial principles. All our men in the Empire will bear the most searching investigation. Sometimes they come from families which have lived several generations on Imperial planets. Our program of replacing key personnel with our men is planned centuries ahead of time, and succeeds by the simple fact that on the average, over long periods of time, they are so much more capable than anyone else.”
“How long—?”
“About five hundred years. You underestimated the capabilities of your experimental animals.” Goram rested for a moment, then asked, “If human intelligence is qualitatively different from animal intelligence, and genius is different from ordinary reasoning power—then tell me, what about the equivalent of geniuses in a world where the average man is a genius by the usual standards?”
“Pure genius strains kept right on evolving, more rapidly indeed than can be explained on any other basis than the existence of an orthogenetic factor in evolution. Super genius—give it a different name, call it transcendence, since it is a different quality—has capabilities which the ordinary mind can no more than comprehend than pure instinct can comprehend logic.
“Your spectacular god-revelations were not forgotten, they were treated discreetly. Later, when a theory of evolution was developed, it seemed strange that man, though obviously an animal, should have no apparent phylogenesis. The stories of the ‘gods,’ the theories of evolution and astronomy—we began to suspect the truth. With that suspicion, it was not hard for a transcendent to spot your masquerading psychologists. Kidnapping, questioning under drugs developed by psychiatry, and release of the prisoner with memory of his experience removed told us the rest. Later, disguised as other prisoners, with their knowledge, and his own intelligence to fill the gaps, one transcendent after another made his way to the observation asteroid—thence out into the Galaxy, where a little spying was sufficient to reveal the principles of the interstellar drive and the other mechanisms of the Empire.”
Heym murmured: “The whole planet has been—acting?”
“Yes.” Goram chuckled. “Rather fun for all concerned. You’d be surprised at the installations we have, out of spy-machine range. As soon as they are old enough to carry out the deception, our children are told the truth. It has actually made little difference to our lives except for those few million who are out in the Galaxy taking it over.”
“Taking…it…over?” Heym’s mind seemed to be turning over slowly, infinitely slowly and wearily.
“Of course.” A strange blend of sternness and sympathy overlay Goram’s harsh features. “One planet obviously cannot fight the Galaxy, nor do we wish to. Yet we cannot permit it to menace us. The only answer is—annexation.”
“And…then?”
“I’m sorry.” Goram’s voice came slowly, implacably, “but I’m afraid you overrated the good intentions of the pure genius strain. After all, Homo intelligens can no more be expected to serve Homo sapiens than early man to serve the apes.
“We’re taking over barbarians and Empire alike. After that, the Galaxy will do as we wish. Oh, we won’t be hard masters. Man may never know that he is being ruled from outside, and he will enter a period of peace and contentment such as he has never imagined.
“As for you—”
Heym realized with vague shock that he had not even wondered or cared what was to become of him personally.
“You are sympathetic to us—but your loyalty is to the Empire. You have thought of us only in relation to our usefulness to the Imperium. Perhaps we could trust you to keep our secret, perhaps not. We can’t take the risk. You might even release the truth inadvertently. Nor can we erase your memory of this—it would leave traces that an expert psychiatrist could detect, and all high officials undergo regular psychoanalytic checkups.
“I’ll just have to report you as accidentally killed on the planet.” Goram smiled. “I don’t think you’ll find life exile on this world, out of sight of the observers, uncongenial. And we might as well see about making your successor one of our men. It was about ready for that.”
He added thoughtfully: “In fact, the Galaxy may be ready for a new Solarian Emperor.”