“It’s the proper thing to do, isn’t it? And it really isn’t any trouble or risk.” I turned to Mr. Bonforte. “How about it, sir?”
“I would appreciate it very much.”
We went down the lift and through the silent, empty private quarters and on through my office and Penny’s. Beyond her door was bedlam. A stereo receiver, moved in for the purpose, was blasting at full gain, the floor was littered, and everybody was drinking, or smoking, or both. Even Jimmie Washington was holding a drink while he listened to the returns. He was not drinking it; he neither drank nor smoked. No doubt someone had handed it to him and he had kept it. Jimmie had a fine sense of fitness.
I made the rounds, with Rog at my side, thanked Jimmie warmly and very sincerely, and apologized that I was feeling tired. “I’m going up and spread the bones, Jimmie. Make my excuses to people, will you?”
“Yes, sir. You’ve got to take care of yourself, Mr. Minister.”
I went back up while Rog went on out into the public tunnels.
Penny shushed me with a finger to her lips when I came into the upper living room. Bonforte seemed to have dropped off to sleep and the receiver was muted down. Dak still sat in front of it, filling in figures on the big sheet against Rog’s return. Capek had not moved. He nodded and raised his glass to me.
I let Penny fix me a scotch and water, then stepped out into the bubble balcony. It was night both by clock and by fact and Earth was almost full, dazzling in a Tiffany spread of stars. I searched North America and tried to pick out the little dot I had left only weeks earlier, and tried to get my emotions straight.
After a while I came back in; night on Luna is rather overpowering. Rog returned a little later and sat back down at his work sheets without speaking. I noticed that Bonforte was awake again.
The critical returns were coming in now and everybody kept quiet, letting Rog with his pencil and Dak with his slide rule have peace to work. At long, long last Rog shoved his chair back. “That’s it, Chief,” he said without looking up. “We’re in. Majority not less than seven seats, probably nineteen, possibly over thirty.”
After a pause Bonforte said quietly, “You’re sure?”
“Positive. Penny, try another channel and see what we get.”
I went over and sat by Bonforte; I could not talk. He reached out and patted my hand in a fatherly way and we both watched the receiver. The first station Penny got said: “—doubt about it, folks; eight of the robot brains say yes, Curiac says maybe. The Expansionist Party has won a decisive——” She switched to another.
“—confirms his temporary post for another five years. Mr. Quiroga cannot be reached for a statement but his general manager in New Chicago admits that the present trend cannot be over——”
Rog got up and went to the phone; Penny muted the news down until nothing could be heard. The announcer continued mouthing; he was simply saying in different words what we already knew.
Rog came back; Penny turned up the gain. The announcer went on for a moment, then stopped, read something that was handed to him, and turned back with a broad grin. “Friends and fellow citizens, I now bring you for a statement the Supreme Minister!”
The picture changed to my victory speech.
I sat there luxuriating in it, with my feelings as mixed up as possible but all good, painfully good. I had done a job on the speech and I knew it; I looked tired, sweaty, and calmly triumphant. It sounded ad-lib.
I had just reached: “Let us go forward together, with freedom for all——” when I heard a noise behind me.
“Mr. Bonforte!” I said. “Doc! Doc! Come quickly!”
Mr. Bonforte was pawing at me with his right hand and trying very urgently to tell me something. But it was no use; his poor mouth failed him and his mighty indomitable will could not make the weak flesh obey.
I took him in my arms—then he went into Cheyne-Stokes breathing and quickly into termination.
They took his body back down in the lift, Dak and Capek together; I was no use to them. Rog came up and patted me on the shoulder, then he went away. Penny had followed the others down. Presently I went again out onto the balcony. I needed “fresh air” even though it was the same machine-pumped air as the living room. But it felt fresher.
They had killed him. His enemies had killed him as certainly as if they had put a knife in his ribs. Despite all that we had done, the risks we had taken, in the end they had murdered him. “Murder most foul”!
I felt dead inside me, numb with the shock. I had seen “myself ” die, I had again seen my father die. I knew then why they so rarely manage to save one of a pair of Siamese twins. I was empty.
I don’t know how long I stayed out there. Eventually I heard Rog’s voice behind me. “Chief?”
I turned. “Rog,” I said urgently, “don’t call me that. Please!”
“Chief,” he persisted, “you know what you have to do now? Don’t you?”
I felt dizzy and his face blurred. I did not know what he was talking about—I did not want to know what he was talking about.
“What do you mean?”
“Chief—one man dies—but the show goes on. You can’t quit now.”
My head ached and my eyes would not focus. He seemed to pull toward me and away while his voice drove on. “. . . robbed him of his chance to finish his work. So you’ve got to do it for him. You’ve got to make him live again!”
I shook my head and made a great effort to pull myself together and reply. “Rog, you don’t know what you are saying. It’s preposterous—ridiculous! I’m no statesman. I’m just a bloody actor! I make faces and make people laugh. That’s all I’m good for.”
To my own horror I heard myself say it in Bonforte’s voice.
Rog looked at me. “Seems to me you’ve done all right so far.”
I tried to change my voice, tried to gain control of the situation. “Rog, you’re upset. When you’ve calmed down you will see how ridiculous this is. You’re right; the show goes on. But not that way. The proper thing to do—the only thing to do—is for you yourself to move on up. The election is won; you’ve got your majority—now you take office and carry out the program.”
He looked at me and shook his head sadly. “I would if I could. I admit it. But I can’t. Chief, you remember those confounded executive committee meetings? You kept them in line. The whole coalition has been kept glued together by the personal force and leadership of one man. If you don’t follow through now, all that he lived for—and died for—will fall apart.”
I had no answering argument; he might be right—I had seen the wheels within wheels of politics in the past month and a half. “Rog, even if what you say is true, the solution you offer is impossible. We’ve barely managed to keep up this pretense by letting me be seen only under carefully stage-managed conditions—and we’ve just missed being caught out as it is. But to make it work week after week, month after month, even year after year, if I understand you—no, it couldn’t be done. It is impossible. I can’t do it!”
“You can!” He leaned toward me and said forcefully, “We’ve all talked it over and we know the hazards as well as you do. But you’ll have a chance to grow into it. Two weeks in space to start with—hell, a month if you want it! You’ll study all the time—his journals, his boyhood diaries, his scrapbooks, you’ll soak yourself in them. And we’ll all help you.”
I did not answer. He went on, “Look, Chief, you’ve learned that a political personality is not one man; it’s a team—it’s a team bound together by common purposes and common beliefs. We’ve lost our team captain and we’ve got to have another one. But the team is still there.”
Capek was out on the balcony; I had not seen him come out. I turned to him. “Are you for this too?”
“Yes.”
“It’s your duty,” Rog added.
Capek said slowly, “I won’t go that far. I hope you will do it. But, damn it, I won’t be your conscience. I believe in free will, frivolous as that may sound
from a medical man.” He turned to Clifton. “We had better leave him alone, Rog. He knows. Now it’s up to him.”
But, although they left, I was not to be alone just yet. Dak came out. To my relief and gratitude he did not call me “Chief.”
“Hello, Dak.”
“Howdy.” He was silent for a moment, smoking and looking out at the stars. Then he turned to me. “Old son, we’ve been through some things together. I know you now, and I’ll back you with a gun, or money, or fists any time, and never ask why. If you choose to drop out now, I won’t have a word of blame and I won’t think any the less of you. You’ve done a noble best.”
“Uh, thanks, Dak.”
“One more word and I’ll smoke out. Just remember this: if you decide you can’t do it, the foul scum who brainwashed him will win. In spite of everything they win.” He went inside.
I felt torn apart in my mind—then I gave way to sheer selfpity. It wasn’t fair! I had my own life to live. I was at the top of my powers, with my greatest professional triumphs still ahead of me. It wasn’t right to expect me to bury myself, perhaps for years, in the anonymity of another man’s role—while the public forgot me, producers and agents forgot me—would probably believe I was dead.
It wasn’t fair. It was too much to ask.
Presently I pulled out of it and for a time did not think. Mother Earth was still serene and beautiful and changeless in the sky; I wondered what the election-night celebrations there sounded like. Mars and Jupiter and Venus were all in sight, strung like prizes along the zodiac. Ganymede I could not see, of course, nor the lonely colony out on far Pluto.
“Worlds of Hope,” Bonforte had called them.
But he was dead. He was gone. They had taken away from him his birthright at its ripe fullness. He was dead.
And they had put it up to me to re-create him, make him live again.
Was I up to it? Could I possibly measure up to his noble standards? What would he want me to do? If he were in my place—what would Bonforte do? Again and again in the campaign I had asked myself: “What would Bonforte do?”
Someone moved behind me, I turned and saw Penny. I looked at her and said, “Did they send you out? Did you come to plead with me?”
“No.”
She added nothing and did not seem to expect me to answer, nor did we look at each other. The silence went on. At last I said, “Penny? If I try to do it—will you help?”
She turned suddenly toward me. “Yes. Oh yes, Chief! I’ll help!”
“Then I’ll try,” I said humbly.
I wrote all of the above twenty-five years ago to try to straighten out my own confusion. I tried to tell the truth and not spare myself because it was not meant to be read by anyone but myself and my therapist, Dr. Capek. It is strange, after a quarter of a century, to reread the foolish and emotional words of that young man. I remember him, yet I have trouble realizing that I was ever he. My wife Penelope claims that she remembers him better than I do—and that she never loved anyone else. So time changes us.
I find I can “remember” Bonforte’s early life better than I remember my actual life as that rather pathetic person, Lawrence Smith, or—as he liked to style himself—“The Great Lorenzo.” Does that make me insane? Schizophrenic, perhaps? If so, it is a necessary insanity for the role I have had to play, for in order to let Bonforte live again, that seedy actor had to be suppressed—completely.
Insane or not, I am aware that he once existed and that I was he. He was never a success as an actor, not really—though I think he was sometimes touched with the true madness. He made his final exit still perfectly in character; I have a yellowed newspaper clipping somewhere which states that he was “found dead” in a Jersey City hotel room from an overdose of sleeping pills—apparently taken in a fit of despondency, for his agent issued a statement that he had not had a part in several months. Personally, I feel that they need not have mentioned that about his being out of work; if not libelous, it was at least unkind. The date of the clipping proves, incidentally, that he could not have been in New Batavia, or anywhere else, during the campaign of ’15.
I suppose I should burn it.
But there is no one left alive today who knows the truth other than Dak and Penelope—except the men who murdered Bonforte’s body.
I have been in and out of office three times now and perhaps this term will be my last. I was knocked out the first time when we finally put the eetees—Venerians and Martians and Outer Jovians—into the Grand Assembly. But the nonhuman peoples are still there and I came back. The people will take a certain amount of reform, then they want a rest. But the reforms stay. People don’t really want change, any change at all—and xenophobia is very deep-rooted. But we progress, as we must—if we are to go out to the stars.
Again and again I have asked myself: “What would Bonforte do?” I am not sure that my answers have always been right (although I am sure that I am the best-read student in his works in the System). But I have tried to stay in character in his role. A long time ago someone—Voltaire?—someone said, “If Satan should ever replace God he would find it necessary to assume the attributes of Divinity.”
I have never regretted my lost profession. In a way, I have not lost it; Willem was right. There is other applause besides handclapping and there is always the warm glow of a good performance. I have tried, I suppose, to create the perfect work of art. Perhaps I have not fully succeeded—but I think my father would rate it as a “good performance.”
No, I do not regret it, even though I was happier then—at least I slept better. But there is solemn satisfaction in doing the best you can for eight billion people.
Perhaps their lives have no cosmic significance, but they have feelings. They can hurt.
THE STARS MY DESTINATION
Alfred Bester
To Truman M. Talley
Part 1
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Blake
Prologue
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying . . . but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it.
All the habitable worlds of the solar system were occupied. Three planets and eight satellites and eleven million million people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known, yet minds still yearned for other times, as always. The solar system seethed with activity . . . fighting, feeding, and breeding, learning the new technologies that spewed forth almost before the old had been mastered, girding itself for the first exploration of the far stars in deep space; but—
“Where are the new frontiers?” the Romantics cried, unaware that the frontier of the mind had opened in a laboratory on Callisto at the turn of the twenty-fourth century. A researcher named Jaunte set fire to his bench and himself (accidentally) and let out a yell for help with particular reference to a fire extinguisher. Who so surprised as Jaunte and his colleagues when he found himself standing alongside said extinguisher, seventy feet removed from his lab bench.
They put Jaunte out and went into the whys and wherefores of his instantaneous seventy-foot journey. Teleportation . . . the transportation of oneself through space by an effort of the mind alone . . . had long been a theoretic concept, and there were a few hundred badly documented proofs that it had happened in the past. This was the first time that it had ever taken place before professional observers.
They investigated the Jaunte Effect savagely. This was something too earth-shaking to handle with kid gloves, and Jaunte was anxious to make his name immortal. He made his will and said farewell to his friends. Jaunte knew he was going to die because his fellow researchers were determined to kill him, if necessary. There was no doubt about that.
Twelve psychologists, parapsych
ologists and neurometrists of varying specialization were called in as observers. The experimenters sealed Jaunte into an unbreakable crystal tank. They opened a water valve, feeding water into the tank, and let Jaunte watch them smash the valve handle. It was impossible to open the tank; it was impossible to stop the flow of water.
The theory was that if it had required the threat of death to goad Jaunte into teleporting himself in the first place, they’d damned well threaten him with death again. The tank filled quickly. The observers collected data with the tense precision of an eclipse camera crew. Jaunte began to drown. Then he was outside the tank, dripping and coughing explosively. He’d teleported again.
The experts examined and questioned him. They studied graphs and X-rays, neural patterns and body chemistry. They began to get an inkling of how Jaunte had teleported. On the technical grapevine (this had to be kept secret) they sent out a call for suicide volunteers. They were still in the primitive stage of teleportation; death was the only spur they knew.
They briefed the volunteers thoroughly. Jaunte lectured on what he had done and how he thought he had done it. Then they proceeded to murder the volunteers. They drowned them, hanged them, burned them; they invented new forms of slow and controlled death. There was never any doubt in any of the subjects that death was the object.
Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, and the agonies and remorse of their murderers would make a fascinating and horrible study, but that has no place in this history except to highlight the monstrosity of the times. Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, but 20 per cent jaunted. (The name became a word almost immediately.)
“Bring back the romantic age,” the Romantics pleaded, “when men could risk their lives in high adventure.”
The body of knowledge grew rapidly. By the first decade of the twenty-fourth century the principles of jaunting were established and the first school was opened by Charles Fort Jaunte himself, then fifty-seven, immortalized, and ashamed to admit that he had never dared jaunte again. But the primitive days were past; it was no longer necessary to threaten a man with death to make him teleport. They had learned how to teach man to recognize, discipline, and exploit yet another resource of his limitless mind.
American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Page 17