If it were the three of them, a commingling of the three of them, God help the original Jay Vickers when he was resurrected.
And the love he bore Ann Carter, the tenderness after the moonlight-and-roses years—what of that love now?
There could be no such love, he knew. You could not love a facet of yourself or let a facet of yourself love you.
Twice he had known love of a woman and twice it had been taken from him and now he was trapped with no other choice but to do the job that had been assigned him.
He had told Crawford that when he knew what was going on, he’d come back and talk to him and between the two of them they’d see if there was a compromise.
But there was no compromise now.
Not if his hunch was right.
And Flanders had said that hunch was a mutant way of reasoning, a more mature, more positive way of arriving at the answer to a problem. A method, Flanders had told him, that did away with the winding path of reason that the human race has used through all its formative years.
For the secret weapon was the old, old weapon of deliberate war, waged with mathematical cynicism and calculated precision.
How many wars, he wondered, could the human race survive? And the answer seemed to be: Just one more real war.
The mutants were the survival factor in the race of Man and now there was nothing left to him—neither Kathleen nor Ann, nor even, perhaps, the hope of personal humanity. He must work as best he could to carry forward the lone hope of the human race.
Someone tapped softly and politely at the door.
“Yes,” said Vickers. “Come on in.”
“Breakfast will be ready, sir,” said Hezekiah, “by the time you get dressed.”
XXXIX
FLANDERS was waiting for him in the dining room when Vickers came down the stairs.
“The others left,” said Flanders. “They had work to do. And you and I have plotting.”
Vickers did not answer. He pulled out a chair and sat down across from Flanders. The sunlight from the windows came down across Flanders’ shoulders and his head stood out against the window glass in bold relief, with the whiteness of his hair like a fuzzy halo. His clothes still were slightly shabby and his necktie had seen better days, but he still was neat and his face shone with the scrubbing he had given it.
“I see that Hezekiah found some clothes for you,” said Flanders. “I don’t know what we’d do without Hezekiah.”
“A pack of money, too. It was lying on the dresser with the shirt and tie. I didn’t take the time to count it, but there seem to be several thousand dollars.”
“Hezekiah thinks of everything.”
“But I don’t want several thousand dollars.”
“Go ahead,” said Flanders. “We’ve got bales of it.”
“Bales!”
“Certainly. We keep making it.”
“You mean you counterfeit it?”
“Oh, bless me, no,” said Flanders, “although it’s something we have often thought of. Another string to our bow, you might say.”
“You mean flood the normal world with counterfeit money?”
“It wouldn’t be counterfeit. We could duplicate the money exactly. Turn loose a hundred billion dollars of new money in the world and there’d be hell to pay.”
“I can see the point,” said Vickers. “I’m amazed you didn’t do it.”
Flanders looked sharply at him. “I have a feeling that you disapprove of us.”
“In some ways I do.”
HEZEKIAH brought in a tray with tall glasses of cold orange juice, plates of scrambled eggs and bacon, buttered toast, a jar of jam and a pot of coffee.
“Have you noticed,” asked the; robot, “how fine the morning is?”
“I have noticed that,” said! Vickers.
“The weather here is most unusually fine. Much finer, I am; told, than on the earth ahead.”
He served the food and left, out through the swinging door into the kitchen, where they could hear him moving about at his morning chores.
“We have been humane,” said Flanders, “as humane as possible. But we had a job to do and once in a while someone got his toes stepped on. It may be that we will have to get a little rougher now, because we are being pushed. If Crawford and his gang had just taken it a little easier, it would have worked out all right and we wouldn’t have had to hurt them or anyone else. Now it has to amount almost to revolution. Had we been given twenty years more, it would have been evolution. Given time, we would have taken over not only world industry and world finance, but world government as well, only they didn’t give us the time. The crisis came too soon.”
“What we need now,” said Vickers, “is a counter-crisis.”
“We set up dummy companies. We should have set up more, but we lacked the manpower. Given the manpower, we would have gone more extensively into the manufacture of certain basic gadgets. But we needed the little manpower we had at so many other places—at key points or to search for other mutants to enlist into our group.”
“There must be many mutants,” Vickers said.
“There are a number of them,” agreed Flanders, “but a large percentage of them are so entangled in the world and the affairs of the normal world that you can’t dislodge them. Take a mutant man married to a normal woman. You simply can’t break up a happy marriage. Say some of their children are mutants—what can you do about them? Not a thing. You simply watch and wait. When they grow up and go out on their own, you can approach them, but not until then.
“Take a banker or an industrialist upon whose shoulders rests an economic empire. Tell him he’s a mutant and he’ll laugh at you. He’s made his place in life. He’s satisfied. His loyalties are set to the pattern of the life he’s made and there’s nothing we can offer that will interest him.”
“You might try immortality,” suggested Vickers.
“We haven’t got immortality.”
“You should have attacked on the governmental level.”
FLANDERS shook his head.
“We did a little of it, but not much. With a thousand major posts in governments of the world, we would have won easily and quickly. But we didn’t have the thousand mutant diplomats to train. By various methods, we headed off crisis after crisis. The carbohydrates relieved a situation which would have led to war. Helping the West get the hydrogen bomb years ahead of time held off the East just when they were set to strike. But we weren’t strong enough and we didn’t have the time to carry out any well-defined long-range program, so we had to improvise. We introduced gadgets as the only quick way we knew to weaken the socio-economic system of Earth and, of course, that meant that sooner or later we would force Earth industry to band against us.”
“What else would you expect?” asked Vickers. “You interfere . . .”
“I suppose we do,” said Flanders. “The human race is our patient. It has a malignant growth. We are surgeons. It will be painful for the patient and there will be a period of convalescence, but at least the patient will live and I have the gravest doubts that the human race could survive another war.”
“But the high-handed methods you use!”
“Now wait a moment,” Flanders objected. “You think there must be other methods and I will agree, but all of them would be equally objectionable to humanity and the old human methods themselves have been discredited long ago. Men have shouted peace and there has been no peace. You would have us hold conferences? I ask you, my friend, what is the history of the conference?
“Or maybe we should go before the people, before the heads of government, and say to them we are the new mutations of the race and that our knowledge and our ability are greater than theirs and that they should turn all things over to us so we could bring the world to peace. What would happen then? I can tell you what would happen. They’d hate us and drive us out. So there is no choice for us. We must work underground. We must attack the key points. No other way will work.”
“WH
AT you say,” said Vickers, “may be true so far as the people are concerned, but how about the individual? How about the little fellow who gets socked in the teeth?”
“Asa Andrews was here this morning,” Flanders told him. “He said you’d been at his place and had disappeared and he was worried about what might have happened to you. But that is beside the point. What I want to ask you is, would you say that Asa Andrews was a happy man?”
“I’ve never seen anybody happier.”
“And yet,” said Flanders, “we interfered with him. We took away his job—the job he needed to feed his family and clothe them and keep a roof above their heads. He searched for jobs and could find none. When he finally came for help, we knew that we were the ones who cost him his job that forced him finally to be evicted, to stand in the street and not know where his family would lay their heads that night. We did all this and yet, in the end, he is a happy man. There are thousands of others throughout this earth who have thus been interfered with and now are happy people. Happy, I must insist, because of our interference.”
“You can’t claim,” Vickers contended, “that there is no price for this happiness. I don’t mean the loss of job, the bread of charity—but what comes afterward. You are settling them here on this earth in what you are pleased to call a pastoral-feudal stage, but the fancy name you call it can’t take away the fact that, in being settled here, they have lost many of the advantages of advanced civilization.”
“We have taken from them,” Flanders said, “little more than the knife with which to cut their own or their neighbor’s throat. Whatever else we’ve taken from them will in time be given back, in full measure and with fantastic interest. For it is our hope, Mr. Vickers, that in time to come they all will be like us, that eventually the entire race may have everything we have.
“We are not freaks, you understand-, but human beings, the next step in evolution. We’re just a step ahead of all the rest. To survive, Man had to change, had to mutate, had to become something more than what he was. We are only the first forerunners of that mutation of survival. And because we are the first, we must fight a delaying action. We must fight for the time that it will take for the rest of them to catch up with us. In us you see not one little group of privileged persons, but all of humanity.”
“Humanity,” said Vickers sourly, “seems to be taking a dim view of your delaying fight to save them. Up on that world of ours, they’re smashing gadget shops and hunting down the mutants and hanging them from lamp posts.”
“That’s where you come in,” Flanders pointed out.
VICKERS nodded. “You want me to stop Crawford.”
“You told me you could.”
“I had a hunch.”
“Your hunches, my friend, are more likely to be right than the most precise reasoning.”
“I will need some help,” said Vickers.
“Anything you say.”
“I want some of your pioneers—men like Asa Andrews—sent back to do some missionary work.”
“But we can’t do that,” protested Flanders.
“They’re in this fight, too,” said Vickers. “They can’t expect to sit back and not lift a finger.”
“Missionary work? You want them to go back to tell about these other worlds?”
“That is exactly what I want.”
“But no one would believe them. With the feeling running as it is on Earth, they would be mobbed and lynched.”
Vickers shook his head. “There is one group that would believe them—the Pretentionists. Don’t you see, the Pretentionists are fleeing from reality. They pretend to go back and live at the London of Pepys’ day, and to many other eras of the past, but even there they find certain restraining influences, certain encroachments upon their own free will and their security. But here there is complete freedom and security. Here they could go back to the simplicity, the uncomplicated living that they are yearning for. No matter how fantastic it might sound, the Pretentionists would embrace it.”
“You’re certain of this?” asked Flanders.
“Positive,” said Vickers.
“But that’s not all?”
“There is one thing more,” said Vickers. “If there were a sudden demand on the carbohydrates, could you meet it?”
“I think we could. We could reconvert our factories. The gadget business is shot now. To dispense carbohydrates, we’d have to set up a sort of black market system. If we went out in the open, Crawford and his crew would break it up.”
“At first, perhaps,” agreed Vickers. “But not for very long. Not when tens of thousands of people would be ready to fight him to get their carbohydrates.”
“When the carbohydrates are needed,” Flanders said, “they’ll be there.”
“THE Pretentionists will believe,” said Vickers. “They are ripe for belief, any kind of fantastic belief. To them it will be an imaginative crusade. Against a normal population, we might have no chance, but we have a great segment who have been driven to escape by the sickness of the world. All they need is a spark, a word—some sort of promise that there is a chance of real escape instead of the illusory escape they have been driven to. There will be many who will want to come to this second world. How fast can you bring them through?”
“As fast as they come.”
“I can count on that?”
“You can count on that.” Flanders lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know what you’re planning. I hope your hunch is right.”
“You said it was,” Vickers declared.
“You know what you’re going up against? You know what Crawford’s planning?”
“I think he’s planning war. He said it was a secret weapon. I’m convinced it’s war.”
“But war . . .”
“Let’s look at war,” said Vickers, “just a little differently than it ever has been looked at, just a little differently than the historians see it. Let’s see it as a business because war, in certain aspects, is just that. When a country goes to war, it means that labor and industry and resources are mobilized and controlled by governments. The businessman plays as important a part as does the military man. The banker and the industrialist are as much in the saddle as the general.
“Now let’s go one step further and imagine a war fought on strictly business lines—for the strictly business purpose of obtaining and retaining control in those very areas we are threatening. War would mean that the system of supply and demand would be suspended and that certain civilian items would cease to be manufactured and that the governments could crack down on anyone who would attempt to sell them . . .”
“Like cars, perhaps,” offered Flanders, “and lighters and even razor blades.”
“Exactly,” Vickers told him. “That way they could gain the time, for they need time as badly as we do. Upon military pretext they’d seize complete control of the world economy.”
“What you’re saying is that they plan to start war by agreement.”
“I’M convinced that’s it,” said Vickers. “They’d hold it to a minimum. Perhaps one bomb on New York in return for a bomb on Moscow and another on Chicago for one on Leningrad. You get the idea—a restricted war, a gentleman’s agreement. Just enough fighting to convince everyone that it was real.
“But phony as it might be, a lot of people would die and there’d always be the danger that someone would get sore and instead of one bomb on Moscow it might be two, or the other way around, or an admiral might get just a bit too enthusiastic and a bit too accurate.”
“It’s fantastic,” Flanders said.
“You forget that they are desperate men. They are fighting, every one of them, Russian and American, French and Pole and Czech, for the kind of life that Man has built upon the Earth. To them we must appear to be the most vicious enemy mankind’s ever faced. They are frightened stiff.”
“And you?” asked Flanders.
“I’d go back to old Earth, except that I lost the top. I don’t know where I lost it, but .
. .”
“You don’t need the top. That was just for novices. All you have to do is will yourself into the other world. Once you’ve done it, it’s a cinch.”
“If I need to get in touch with you?”
“Eb’s your man,” said Flanders. “Just get hold of him.”
“You’ll send Asa and the others back?”
“We will.”
Vickers rose and held out his hand.
“But,” said Flanders, “you don’t need to leave just yet. Sit down and have another cup of coffee.”
Vickers shook his head. “I’m anxious to get going.”
“The robots could get you back to New York in no time at all,” said Flanders. “You could return to old Earth from there.”
Vickers said, “I want time to think. I have to do some planning—hunching, you’d call it.”
“Buy a car,” advised Flanders. “Hezekiah left you enough cash to get one and have some left over. Eb will have more if you need it. It wouldn’t be safe to travel any other way. They’ll have traps set out for mutants. They’ll be watching all the time.”
“I’ll be careful,” Vickers promised.
XL
THE room was dusty and festooned with spider webs and its emptiness made it seem much larger than it was. The paper was peeling from the walls and the plaster cracks ran like jagged chains of lightning from the ceiling molding to the baseboard at the floor.
But one could see that at one time the peeling paper had been colorful, with garlands of little flowers and the larger figure of a Dresden shepherdess guarding woolly sheep and, beneath the film of dust, one knew the woodwork lay with some of the old wax still on it, ready to shine again when rescued from neglect.
Vickers turned slowly in the center of the room and he saw that the doors were where they had been and the windows, too, in that other room where he’d just risen from the chair after eating breakfast. But here the door to the kitchen stood open and the windows were dark with the shutters closed against them.
He took a step or two and he saw that he left footprints in the dust and the footprints started at the center of the room. There were no footprints leading from anywhere to the center of the room. The tracks just started there.
The Complete Serials Page 54