Beyond This Horizon

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Too dangerous for you.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I do. Your life is very valuable, from my professional point of view.”

  “That? Hell’s delight—I thought I made it clear that there is no chance, simply none at all, of me co-operating in the genetic program.”

  “You did. But so long as you are alive and fertile, I am bound to take into account the possibility that you might change your mind. I can’t let you risk your life, therefore.”

  “Well! How are you going to stop me? You can’t coerce me—I know the law.”

  “No…no, it’s true that I can’t prevent you from risking your valuable life, but I can remove the danger, and shall. The members of the Survivors Club will be picked up at once.”

  “But, but—look, Claude. If you do that today, you haven’t a full case against them. The proper thing to do is to wait until we know all about them. Arresting this one group might mean that a hundred or a thousand others would simply take cover more thoroughly.”

  “I know that. It’s the chance the government will have to take. But we won’t risk your germ plasm.”

  Hamilton threw out his hands. “Damn it, Claude. This is blackmail. That’s what it is—blackmail! It’s sheer coercion.”

  “Not at all. I do not plan to do a thing…to you.”

  “But it is, just the same.”

  “Suppose we compromise.”

  “How?”

  “Your life is your own. If you want to lose it, playing Fearless Frank, you may. My interest is in your potentialities as an ancestor. My professional interest, that is. Personally, I like you and prefer that you live a long and happy life. But that’s beside the point. If you would deposit in the plasm bank a few million of your gametes, then I would be willing not to interfere.”

  “But that’s just what I was saying! You are trying to blackmail me into co-operating.”

  “Not so hasty. The life cells you leave with me would not be stirred into being without your consent. They would remain in escrow and you could break the escrow at will—unless you are killed in this adventure. In that case, I will use them to continue the genetic policy.”

  Hamilton sat down again. “Let’s get this straight. You wouldn’t touch them, if I don’t get knocked over. No tricks?”

  “No tricks.”

  “When it’s over, I can withdraw them. Still no tricks?”

  “Still no tricks.”

  “You wouldn’t frame me into a position where I would be darned near certain to be killed, I suppose? No, you wouldn’t do that. All right, I agree! I’ll bet my ability to stay alive when the shooting starts against your chance to use my deposit.”

  When Mordan returned to his office, he sent for his chief technician. He caused her to leave the building with him, found a suitable bit of neutral ground where there was no chance of being overheard—a bench in a deserted corner of North roofpark—and told her of his talk with Hamilton.

  “I suppose you told him that all this about the Survivors Club was no news to us.”

  “No,” Mordan said judiciously, “no, I can’t say that I did. He didn’t ask me.”

  “Mmmm… You know, chief, you are as crooked as a random incidence curve. A sophist.”

  “Why, Martha!” Nevertheless his eyes twinkled.

  “Oh, I’m not criticizing. You’ve talked him into a position whereby we stand a much better chance of getting on with the work. Just the same, you did it by letting him think that we didn’t already know all about this pipsqueak conspiracy.”

  “We don’t know ‘all about it,’ Martha. He’ll be useful. He has already dug up one significant fact. There is a leak in our own office.”

  “Um, yes. That’s why you dragged me away from the clinic. Well, there’ll be some changes made.”

  “Not too hastily. We’ll assume that you can trust any of the women. This scheme, by its nature, is masculine. Women are not a part of it and their interests aren’t considered. But be wary of the men on the staff. I think you had better handle the deposit of Hamilton’s plasm yourself—today. Better keep an eye on the women, though.”

  “I shall. Honest, chief, don’t you think you should have told him what he was getting into?”

  “You forget that it’s not my secret.”

  “No, I suppose not. Just the same, he’s much too good stock to risk in such games. Why do you think they recruited him?”

  “He thinks it’s because he’s a handy man with a gun and rich as well. But I think you have answered your own question—he’s star-line stock. He’s good breeding material. The ‘Survivors’ aren’t entirely fools.”

  “Oh ho! I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I still say it’s a damn shame to risk him in such business.”

  “Public custodians must not permit themselves the luxury of personal sentimentality, Martha. They have to take the long view.”

  “Hmmm… There is something a little terrifying about a man with too long a view.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “We don’t speak the same lingo”

  HAMILTON FELIX discovered that a conspirator can be a busy person, especially if he is also engaged in counter-conspiracy. He tried to present a convincing picture to McFee Norbert and his other associates in the Survivors Club of an enthusiastic neophyte, anxious in every way to promote the cause. Indoctrination classes, dull in themselves but required before advancement in the organization could be expected, took a good deal of time. He endured these patiently, trying his best to maintain actually the frame of mind of romantic acceptance during instruction, in order that his questions and reactions in general would arouse no suspicion.

  In addition to lessons in the principles of the New Order new members were assigned tasks to perform. Since the organization was ruled with an absolute from-the-top-down discipline, the reasons for the tasks were never explained nor were questions permitted. The assigned job might actually have significance to the conspiracy, or it might simply be a test, with every person concerned in the matter actually a brother clubmember. The recruit had no way of knowing.

  Hamilton saw what happened to one candidate who neglected to take the instruction seriously.

  He was tried in the presence of the chapter. Attendance on the part of junior members was compulsory. McFee Norbert acted as prosecutor and judge. The accused was not represented by spokesman, but was permitted to explain his actions.

  He had been directed to deliver in person a specific message to a specific person. This he had done, but recognizing the man to whom he had been sent as one he had seen at the club, he had revealed himself. “You had not been told that this man was one in whom you could confide?” McFee persisted.

  “No, but he—”

  “Answer me.”

  “No, I had not been told that.”

  McFee turned to the company present and smiled thinly. “You will note,” he stated, “that the accused had no means whatsoever of knowing the exact status of the man he was to contact. He might have been a brother we suspected and wished to test; he might have been a government operative we had unmasked; the accused might have been misled by a chance resemblance. The accused had no way of knowing. Fortunately the other man was none of these things, but was a loyal brother of superior rank.”

  He turned back to the accused. “Brother Hornby Willem, stand up.” The accused did so. He was unarmed.

  “What is the first principle of our doctrines?”

  “The Whole is greater than the parts.”

  “Correct. You will understand, then, why I find it necessary to dispense with you.”

  “But I didn’t—” He got no further. McFee burned him down where he stood.

  Hamilton was part of the task group which took the body and spirited it to a deserted corridor, then disposed it so that it would appear to have become deceased in an ordinary private duel, a matter of only statistical interest to police monitors. McFee commanded the group himself and earned Hamilton’s reluctant admiration for
the skill with which he handled the ticklish matter. Hamilton won McFee’s approval by the intelligent alacrity which he showed in carrying out his orders.

  “You are getting ahead fast, Hamilton,” he said to him when they had returned to the clubroom. “You’ll be up with me soon. By the way, what did you think of the object lesson?”

  “I don’t see what else you could have done,” Hamilton declared. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

  “‘You can’t make an—’ Say, that’s a good one!” McFee laughed and dug him in the ribs. “Did you make it up, or hear it somewhere?”

  Hamilton shrugged. He promised himself that he would cut off McFee’s ears for that dig in the ribs—after all this was over.

  He reported the matter in detail, through devious channels, to Mordan, including his own part as an accessory before and after the fact. Getting his reports to Mordan occupied a good portion of his time and thoughts. Neither of his secret lives could be permitted to show above water. His daily conduct had to conform, superficially, with his public persona; it was necessary to continue his social life as usual, see his agent when his affairs required it, be seen in public in his habitual manner. It is not necessary to enumerate the varied means by which he found safe channels of communication to Mordan in the midst of this pattern; the methods of intrigue have varied little through the millennia. One example will suffice; Mordan had provided him with a tube address to which (he maintained) messages might be safely sent. He dare not assume that it was safe to stat a letter over his own telephone, but he could and did assume that a public phone picked at random could be used for dictation recording. The spool containing his report would then be consigned at once to the anonymity of the postal system.

  Longcourt Phyllis took up much of his free time. He freely admitted that the woman intrigued him; he did not admit even to himself that she represented anything more than diversion to him. Nevertheless he was quite likely to be found waiting for her at the end of her working day. For she was a working woman—four hours a day, seven days a week, forty weeks a year, as a practical psycho-pediatrician in the Wallingford Infant Development Center.

  Her occupation disturbed him a little. Why anyone should voluntarily associate day after day with a mob of yelling, sticky little brats was beyond him. She seemed normal otherwise—normal but stimulating.

  He was too preoccupied to take much interest in the news of the world these days, which was why he did not follow the career of J. Darlington Smith, the “Man from the Past”, very closely. He was aware that Smith had been a news sensation for a few days, until crowded out by lunar field trials, and a report (erroneous) of intelligent life on Ganymede. The public soon filed him away with the duckbill platypus and the mummy of Rameses II—interesting relics of the past no doubt, but nothing to get excited about. It might have been different if his advent had been by means of the often discussed and theoretically impossible time-travel, but it was nothing of the sort—simply an odd case of suspended animation. A sight-sound record from the same period was just as interesting—if one were interested.

  Hamilton had seen him once, for a few minutes, in a newscast. He spoke with a barbarous accent and was dressed in his ancient costume, baggy pantaloons described by the interlocutor as “plus fours” and a shapeless knitted garment which covered his chest and arms.

  None of which prepared Hamilton for the reception of a stat relating to J. Darlington Smith.

  “Greetings,” it began, etc. etc. The gist of it was that the interlocutor appointed by the Institution as temporary guardian for Smith desired that Hamilton grant the favor of an hour of his no-doubt valuable time to Smith. No explanation.

  In his bemused frame of mind his first impulse was to ignore it. Then he recalled that such an act would not have fitted his former, pre-intrigue, conduct. He would have seen the barbarian, from sheer curiosity.

  Now was as good a time as any. He called the Institution, got hold of the interlocutor, and arranged for Smith to come to his apartment at once. As an afterthought he called Monroe-Alpha, he having remembered his friend’s romantic interest in Smith. He explained what was about to take place. “I thought you might like to meet your primitive hero.”

  “My hero? What do you mean?”

  “I thought you were telling me what a bucolic paradise he came from?”

  “Oh, that! Slight mistake in dates. Smith is from 1926. It seems that gadgeting was beginning to spoil the culture, even then.”

  “Then you wouldn’t be interested in seeing him?”

  “Oh, I think I would. It was a transition period. He may have seen something of the old culture with his own eyes. I’ll be over, but I may be a little late.”

  “Fine. Long life.” He cleared without waiting for a reply.

  Smith showed up promptly, alone. He was dressed, rather badly, in modern clothes, but was unarmed. “I’m John Darlington Smith,” he began.

  Hamilton hesitated for a moment at the sight of the brassard, then decided to treat him as an equal. Discrimination, he felt, under the circumstances would be sheer unkindness. “I am honored that you visit me, sir.”

  “Not at all. Awfully good of you, and so forth.”

  “I had expected that there would be someone with you.”

  “Oh, you mean my nursemaid.” He grinned boyishly. He was, Hamilton decided, perhaps ten years younger than Hamilton himself—discounting the years he had spent in stasis. “I’m beginning to manage the lingo all right, well enough to get around.”

  “I suppose so,” Hamilton agreed. “Both lingos are basically Anglic.”

  “It’s not so difficult. I wish lingo were the only trouble I have.”

  Hamilton was a little at a loss as to how to handle him. It was utterly inurbane to display interest in a stranger’s personal affairs, dangerous, if the stranger were an armed citizen. But this lad seemed to invite friendly interest. “What is troubling you, sir?”

  “Well, lots of things, hard to define. Everything is—different.”

  “Didn’t you expect things to be different?”

  “I didn’t expect anything. I didn’t expect to come to…to now.”

  “Eh? I understand that—never mind. Do you mean that you did not know that you were entering the ‘stasis’?”

  “I did and I didn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well… Listen, do you think you could stand a long story? I’ve told this story about forty-eleven times, and I know it doesn’t do any good to try to shorten it. They just don’t understand.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, I’d better go back a little. I graduated from Eastern U in the spring of ’26 and—”

  “You what?”

  “Oh, dear! You see in those days the schools—”

  “Sorry. Just tell it your own way. Anything I can’t pick up I’ll ask you about later.”

  “Maybe that would be better. I had a pretty good job offered to me, selling bonds—one of the best houses on the Street. I was pretty well known—All-American back two seasons.” Hamilton restrained himself, and made about four mental notes.

  “That’s an athletic honor,” Smith explained hastily. “You’ll understand. I don’t want you to think I was a football bum, though. To be sure the fraternity helped me a little, but I worked for every cent I got. Worked summers, too. And I studied. My major was Efficiency Engineering. I had a pretty thorough education in business, finance, economics, salesmanship. It’s true that I got my job because Grantland Rice picked me—I mean football helped a lot to make me well-known—but I was prepared to be an asset to any firm that hired me. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Oh, most certainly!”

  “It’s important, because it has a bearing on what happened afterwards. I wasn’t working on my second million but I was getting along. Things were slick enough. The night it happened I was celebrating a little—with reason. I had unloaded an allotment of South American Republics—”


  “Eh?”

  “Bonds. It seemed like a good time to throw a party. It was a Saturday night, so everybody started out with the dinner-dance at the country club. It was the usual thing. I looked over the flappers for a while, didn’t see one I wanted to dance with, and wandered into the locker room, looking for a drink. The attendant used to sell it to people he could trust.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Hamilton, and returned a moment later with glasses and refreshment.

  “Thanks. His gin was pure bathtub, but usually reliable. Maybe it wasn’t, that night. Or maybe I should have eaten dinner. Anyhow, I found myself listening to an argument that was going on in one end of the room. One of these parlor bolsheviks was holding forth—maybe you still have the type? Attack anything, just so long as it was respectable and decent.”

  Hamilton smiled.

  “You do, eh? He was one of ’em. Read nothing but the American Mercury and Jurgen and then knew it all. I’m not narrow-minded. I read those things, too, but I didn’t have to believe ’em. I read the Literary Digest, too, and the Times, something they would never do. To get on, he was panning the Administration and predicting that the whole country was about to go to the bow-wows…go to pieces. He didn’t like the Gold Standard, he didn’t like Wall Street, he thought we ought to write off the War Debts.

  “I could see that some of our better members were getting pretty sick of it, so I jumped in. ‘They hired the money, didn’t they,’ I told him.

  “He grinned at me—sneered I should say. ‘I suppose you voted for him.’

  “‘I certainly did,’ I answered, which was not strictly true; I hadn’t gotten around to registering, such things coming in the middle of the football season. But I wasn’t going to let him get away with sneering at Mr. Coolidge. ‘I suppose you voted for Davis.’

  “‘Not likely,’ he says. ‘I voted for Norman Thomas.’

  “Well, that burned me up. ‘See here,’ I said, ‘the proper place for people like you is in Red Russia. You’re probably an atheist, to boot. You have the advantage of living in the greater period in the history of the greatest country in history. We’ve got an Administration in Washington that understands business. We’re back to normalcy and we’re going to stay that way. We don’t need you rocking the boat. We are levelled off on a plateau of permanent prosperity. Take it from me—Don’t Sell America Short!’