RAIGMORE LAY IN THE SUNROOM AND LET HIS MIND TICK over idly, out of gear. Soon Alison would join him there. He was waiting, idle, content, nothing remaining to be done that he could do. He was happy.
But he still wished that the shadow which lurked in the back of his mind would disappear, or at least show its true shape.
There had been no notable sequel to the murder of Alison’s father. Brolley had been discharged after therapy, insignificant, harmless, an ordinary Brown using another name, only slightly bewildered by the inconsistencies of his life as he saw it. The case was closed on the discovery that Brolley, when he was In Test, had been handled by an inexperienced operator. A system is no more perfect than the people who administer it, and it was assumed that the operator in question hadn’t followed up something which would have been obvious to someone like Sally Morris. The bottom limit for Test operators was moved one step higher, and that was that.
Raigmore had another view, but he kept it to himself. Tests which weren’t quite perfect right at the top, however infallible they might be in the middle, were also liable to be not quite perfect right at the bottom, and that was where Brolley was. He wasn’t feeble-minded enough to be kept in an institution, but he certainly didn’t have the intelligence to perform the Tests properly. The Tests had failed to find the dormant compulsion which had been planted deep in him because Brolley simply couldn’t communicate.
Raigmore wondered what one could do with people like Brolley, ordinary humans like him. They were intelligent beings, after all — only they were so far behind everyone else that there was no niche in the world for them. The geniuses were one problem, the morons another. The Tests handled everyone else beautifully.
It was two weeks since Raigmore and Alison had returned from the cruise, and already Raigmore had repaid his debt to the bank. Alison concerned herself with personnel problems, which gave her something in common with Margo. But Margo had a job, and was expected to do it; Alison had none, only a hobby, an interest.
It could pay off, all the same. She had been given a job as soon as she came back, and had taken Raigmore along to help her to do it. An automobile factory in Detroit was going over to a new method of production. Their job was to regrade the whole personnel for the new conditions, find who could do what, who else would be needed, who had better be transferred to something else. They had worked hard for a week, learning and training, applying their unspecialized talent to the whole field. A mere psychologist could have done some of the job. A doctor could have done some of the rest. There would have been jobs for technicians, statisticians, engineers, electricians, executives and people with ordinary common sense. When Alison and Raigmore needed special knowledge they found someone who had it. For the rest they did everything themselves. And a job which would have taken an expensive special staff a month to do, with considerable loss in production, was handled smoothly in a week.
The Raigmores saved the firm concerned almost a million dollars. Their fee was fifty thousand. Everyone was satisfied.
Specialization had gone too far, then turned back. The stage had been reached where a man knew so much about so little that he often couldn’t do his own job well, because other things would persist in crossing it. Often, in such cases, mere intelligence, comparatively uninstructed, was better. Intelligent people had a lot of information and knew where to get the rest.
White Stars were intelligent people in excelsis. They had no blank spots, or they couldn’t be what they were. They tended to have more information, and more general information, at hand than anyone else. Without overspecializing, they were practically specialists in everything. So a White was always the best bet for any big, difficult job, if a White could be persuaded to do it. That wasn’t always easy, even with an open checkbook.
White Stars were the free agents of the world. In a sense, everyone was free — certainly freer than they had been under any other system. But the Tests system carried its obligations. The Browns were free — within bounds of convention, law and their own limitations. The Purples and Reds, still within the law, were free to gratify anything but destructive whims. The Yellows and Oranges might almost be said to be above the law. They were expected to do certain things and behave in a certain widely bounded way. But it was the way they would naturally follow. It was rare for anyone to say to a member of either group “Thou shalt not …”
White Circles and Crosses were the rulers, rulers who seldom had to make a real decision and say “This is right” or “This is wrong,” but rulers who ruled in explaining to the administrators. The real guiding hand of the world was the group authority of the lower Whites.
White Stars were — yes, it was the only way to put it — the gods of the race. In a sense they did nothing. They lived normal lives, or lives as near normal as they could, watching, waiting, sometimes suggesting, but usually merely keeping out of the way and letting others get on with the job, whatever the job was. The masses who had once thought Hever would be the next President had studied little history. It had seldom been necessary for any White Star to come out into the open. The President was a White Cross, as usual. He was a man named Harry Robertson, and if the lower ninety per cent of humanity cared to ask, they would be told that he was no more important than any other White Cross. But he was also no less.
Alison looked in, but stayed in the doorway. “Margo’s coming over,” she said.
“Why?” Raigmore asked bluntly.
“No particular reason. Well … there is a reason, of course. But wait till I change.” She let the door swing shut behind her.
It might seem, Raigmore thought, that it couldn’t be a perfect system in which the very best was wasted. For there was no co-ordinated effort to use the potential of the White Stars.
What was kept in reserve, however, wasn’t necessarily wasted. A world that functioned well didn’t often have to go to the temple of the gods. In fact, it almost never happened. But the gods were there if they were needed, and they were such gods that they didn’t waste in idleness. There was always something to do. One month it would be an automobile factory with a personnel problem. The next it would be an inexplicably high death rate somewhere. Another time it would be a ticklish political situation. Instead of being left to muddle through, on the old pattern, people could at least ask for White Star assistance. If it was really necessary, they generally got it.
White Stars could have been rich, but they weren’t. The next time the Raigmores did a job, they would probably turn most of their fee in to reduce taxation. People who hoarded money were people who felt insecure.
Alison came in with supple grace and sank beside Raigmore on the foam-rubber flooring. She began: “Margo said — ”
“Never mind Margo for a minute. Just because you’re my wife you needn’t stop kissing me when you come in.”
“Fool,” said Alison, but she kissed him.
“That’s better. It’s not that I enjoy it or anything like that, but I feel it’s my duty.”
Alison smiled. “I keep waiting for you to grow up.”
“I have. It’s just because I’m lying down that you don’t notice it. I’m much bigger when I stand up. What was this about Margo?”
“Just the usual. She rang about something unimportant. Something she didn’t need to ring me about. She seemed lonely. So I asked her to come over.”
Raigmore frowned. Margo and he were bound together by a lot of different things. He liked her, and Alison liked her. But she didn’t seem to be able to cut loose from him. He had hoped the break when he went on the cruise would make a difference, but it hadn’t. She had heroically managed not to write to him, and she was obviously trying to remember that he was Alison’s now, not hers — he had never been hers. She failed often, however, like an alcoholic trying not to drink and just having a little one, and then another little one.
Raigmore could understand it all right, and fortunately Alison could understand it too. It seemed natural to Alison that Margo should be in love with Raigmore.
Salter had got nowhere with Margo. There was only one thing really wrong with Salter from Margo’s point of view, but that was insuperable. He wasn’t Raigmore.
“You didn’t make her fall in love with you, Eldin, did you?” asked Alison quietly.
“No. In a way it wouldn’t be so bad if I had. I’d only have myself to blame, and I might be able to reverse the process. I wish she wouldn’t discourage Fred so much. There’s a little problem for you, White Star. Remove Margo’s affections from me, where they’re wasted and rather embarrassing, and set them on Fred, who would be highly delighted.”
Alison took him seriously. “I’ll see what I can do in a quiet way,” she said. Whites generally did everything in a quiet way.
Alison might be able to do something where Raigmore couldn’t. Margo admired her tremendously. Alison was all she wished she was herself.
They fell silent then, lying in the sun, and Raigmore tried to pursue his earlier line of thought. But something was wrong. It was nothing to do with Alison or Margo. It was just a hazy knowledge, a sudden hunch. He didn’t examine it. Hunches weren’t meant to be examined. You could use them, as you used a watch. A watch told you the time, and that was its sole purpose. If you began to examine it, to take it apart, it ceased to tell the time and became no longer a watch. It was only the parts of a watch.
Raigmore and Alison looked in perfect harmony in their silence, but presently Alison sensed the difference.
“What is it?” she asked. “Someone walking on your grave?”
“Nothing,” he said. He knew at once that wouldn’t do. “Well, there is something. Alison, don’t you ever have hunches?”
“I used to,” she said. “But some of them were wrong. I decided they were too risky. I stopped acting on them. So they stopped coming.”
“I think you were wrong,” he said. “You shouldn’t have stopped acting on them.”
“Possibly. You’ve got a hunch now?”
“Yes. One I don’t like.”
She could have followed the line of the particular hunch, and he was ready to talk about it. But instead she moved from the particular to the general.
“What are they?” she mused. “Clairvoyance? Telepathy?”
“I doubt it. Just integration of too many factors for the steps to be remembered. An I.Q. 200 conclusion reached by an I.Q. 140 brain.”
She shook her head. “I won’t buy that. Low-power, unfocused telepathy seems more reasonable. Let me think about it.”
They fell into silence again, Alison lazily arranging all the data her mind contained on hunches, sifting it, reaching conclusions and building up theories.
Raigmore, on the other hand, went back to the particular from the general.
They were at the Hever house, and Gloria was around somewhere and knew where they were. If any information came in she would be with them in a few seconds. Someone would be listening to the radio. But possibly his hunch was about something so apparently trivial, though eventually significant, that no one would bother to tell Gloria or that she wouldn’t bother to tell them.
Margo came in quietly. She had changed; she greeted them a little awkwardly, dropped beside Alison and started talking to her. Her behavior wasn’t very much different from that of a million other girls in love with another girl’s man. She had to be near him; yet when she was near him she wished she hadn’t come.
Raigmore looked from Alison to Margo and back again, trying to drive his hunch from his consciousness. Alison could wear anything as if she was doing it a favor. Her plain white swim suit looked no more right or wrong on her than day dress or evening dress. It showed more of her perfect body, but other dress emphasized other points. Surveying Margo in a play suit, Raigmore decided she was best in evening dress. Only dressed as she had been when he first met her did she have anything comparable to the youthful magnificence of Alison.
He heard how adroitly Alison had turned the conversation to Fred, and noted with amusement and admiration how she was drawing Margo into saying anything good that was said about him. Alison said all the things that were on the debit side — how he wouldn’t stick to anything, that he wasn’t serious enough, that he was lazy. And Margo had to say that he never left anything until it was clear that the people he left doing it were going to finish it successfully; that he was serious enough about the things that mattered, that he never refused to take anything on when it was clear he ought to do it.
Soon Alison, with the ease and concealed art of the White Star, was even making a date with Margo on behalf of Salter. Raigmore was quite interested in the technique Alison was using with a woman who must be no stranger to that technique herself. Alison was handling Margo tactfully, sympathetically, as Margo must have handled scores of Browns and Purples.
But at the back of his mind was the realization that the date wouldn’t be kept.
When Gloria came in the two girls merely looked up at her lazily, relaxing in the soporific heat of the July sun. But Raigmore knew even without observing her agitation that this was what he’d been waiting for.
“Robertson is dead,” said Gloria bluntly. “Murdered. It was like your father, Alison. They have the man, and he seems to know as little as Brolley did.”
Margo screamed.
In another world, or in the same world at another time, the news wouldn’t have meant much. Robertson was the President of the United States, but he was only a man. If murder was a comparative commonplace, the murder of anyone, even a President, would just be an incident, no more.
But murder wasn’t a commonplace. The death of Banks, discovered, would have shaken a nation. Hever, then Robertson, meant purpose. It meant organization. It meant so much more than the mere death of two men.
Raigmore remembered the words spoken in a cabin on a luxury ship. They will come to give, not to take. Come to give what?
Murder?