"All we need to do is to turn in a triple-E Unfavorable on the planet, to shut off any use of Lithia as a way station or any other kind of general base for a whole century. At the same time, we can report separately to the UN Review Committee exactly what we do have in Lithia: a triple-A arsenal for the whole of Earth, for the whole commonwealth of planets we control! Only the decision becomes general administrative property back home; the tape is protected; it's an opportunity it'd be a crime to flub!"
"Against whom?" Ruiz-Sanchez said.
"Eh? You've lost me."
"Against whom are you stocking this arsenal? Why do we need a whole planet devoted to nothing but making fusion bombs?"
"The UN can use weapons," Cleaver said drily. "The time isn't very far gone since there were still a few restive nations on Earth, and it could come around again. Don't forget also that thermonuclear weapons last only a few years—they can't be stock-piled indefinitely, like fission bombs. The half-life of tritium is very short, and lithium-6 isn't very long-lived either. I suppose you wouldn't know anything about that. But take my word for it, the UN police would be glad to know that they could have access to a virtually inexhaustible stock of fusion bombs, and to hell with the shelf-life problem!
"Besides, if you've thought about it at all, you know as well as I do that this endless consolidation of peaceful planets can't go on forever. Sooner or later—well, what happens if the next planet we touch down on is a place like Earth? If it is, its inhabitants may fight, and fight like a planetful of madmen, to stay out of our frame of influence. Or what happens if the next planet we hit is an outpost for a whole federation, maybe bigger than ours? When that day comes—and it will, it's in the cards—we'll be damned glad if we're able to plaster the enemy from pole to pole with fusion bombs, and clean up the matter with as little loss of life as possible."
"On our side," Ruiz-Sanchez added.
"Is there any other side?"
"By golly, that makes sense to me," Agronski said. "Mike, what do you think?"
"I'm not sure yet," Michelis said. "Paul, I still don't understand why you thought it necessary to go through all the cloak-and-dagger maneuvers. You tell your story fairly enough now, and it has its merits, but you also admit you were going to trick the three of us into going along with you, if you could. Why? Couldn't you trust the force of your argument alone?"
"No," Cleaver said bluntly. "I've never been on a commission like this before, where there was no single, definite chairman, where there was deliberately an even number of members so that a split opinion couldn't be settled if it occurred-and where the voice of a man whose head is filled with Pecksniffian, irrelevant moral distinctions and three-thousand-year old metaphysics carries the same weight as the voice of a scientist."
"That's mighty loaded language, Paul," Michelis said.
"I know it. If it comes to that, I'll say here or anywhere that I think the Father is a hell of a fine biologist. I've seen him in operation, and they don't come any better—and for that matter he may have just finished saving my life, for all any of the rest of us can tell. That makes him a scientist like the rest of us—insofar as biology's a science."
"Thank you," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "With a little history in your education, Paul, you would also have known that the Jesuits were among the first explorers to enter China, and Paraguay, and the North American wilderness. Then it would have been no surprise to you to find me here."
"That may well be. However, it has nothing to do with the paradox as I see it. I remember once visiting the labs at Notre Dame, where they have a complete little world of germ-free animals and plants and have pulled I don't know how many physiological miracles out of the hat. I wondered then how a man goes about being as good a scientist as that, and a good Catholic at the same time—or any other kind of churchman. I wondered in which compartment in their brains they filed their religion, and in which their science. I'm still wondering."
"They're not compartmented," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "They are a single whole."
"So you said, when I brought this up before. That answers nothing; in fact, it convinced me that what I was planning to do was absolutely necessary. I didn't propose to take any chances on the compartments getting interconnected on Lithia. I had every intention of cutting the Father down to a point where his voice would be nearly ignored by the rest of you. That's why I undertook the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Maybe it was stupidly done—I suppose that it takes training to be a successful agent-provocateur and that I should have realized that."
Ruiz-Sanchez wondered what Cleaver's reaction would be when he found, as he would very shortly now, that his purpose would have been accomplished without his having to lift a finger. Of course the dedicated man of science, working for the greater glory of man, could anticipate nothing but failure; that was the fallibility of man. But would Cleaver be able to understand, through his ordeal, what had happened to Ruiz-Sanchez when he had discovered the fallibility of God? It seemed unlikely.
"But I'm not sorry I tried," Cleaver was saying. "I'm only sorry I failed."
VII
There was a short, painful hiatus.
“Is that it, then?” Michelis said.
“That’s it, Mike. Oh—one more thing. My vote, if anybody is still in any doubt about it, is to keep the planet closed. Take it from there.”
“Ramon,” Michelis said, “do you want to speak next? You’re certainly entitled to it, on a point of personal privilege. The air’s a mite murky at the moment, I’m afraid.”
“No, Mike. Let’s hear from you.”
“I’m not ready to speak yet either, unless the majority wants me to. Agronski, how about you?”
“Sure,” Agronski said. “Speaking as a geologist, and also as an ordinary slob that doesn’t follow rarefied reasoning very well, I’m on Cleaver’s side. I don’t see anything either for or against the planet on any other grounds but Cleaver’s. It’s a fair planet as planets go, very quiet, not very rich in anything else we need—sure, that gchteht is marvelous stuff, but it’s strictly for the luxury trade—and not subject to any kind of trouble that I’ve been able to detect. It’d make a good way station, but so would lots of other worlds hereabouts.
“It’d also make a good arsenal, the way Cleaver defines the term. In every other category it’s as dull as ditch water, and it’s got plenty of that. The only other thing it can have to offer is titanium, which isn’t quite as scarce back home these days as Mike seems to think; and gem stones, particularly the semiprecious ones, which we can make at home without traveling fifty light-years to get them. I’d say, either set up a way station here and forget about the planet otherwise, or else handle the place as Cleaver suggested.”
“But which?” Ruiz-Sanchez asked.
“Well, which is more important, Father? Aren’t way stations a dime a dozen? Planets that can be used as thermonuclear labs, on the other hand, are rare—Lithia is the first one that can be used that way, at least in my experience. Why use a planet for a routine purpose if it’s unique? Why not apply Occam’s Razor—the law of parsimony? It works on every other scientific problem anybody’s ever tackled. It’s my bet that it’s the best tool to use on this one.”
“Occam’s Razor isn’t a natural law,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “It’s only a heuristic convenience—in short, a learning gimmick. And besides, Agronski, it calls for the simplest solution of the problem that will fit all the facts. You don’t have all the facts, not by a long shot.”
“All right, show me,” Agronski said piously. “I’ve got an open mind.”
“You vote to close the planet, then,” Michelis said.
“Sure. That’s what I was saying, wasn’t it, Mike?”
“I wanted to have it Yes or No for the tape,” Michelis said. “Ramon, I guess it’s up to us. Shall I speak first? I think I’m ready.”
“Of course, Mike.”
“Then,” Michelis said evenly, and without changing in the slightest his accustomed tone of grave impartiality,
“I’ll say that I think both of these gentlemen are fools, and calamitous fools at that because they’re supposed to be scientists. Paul, your maneuvers to set up a phony situation are perfectly beneath contempt, and I shan’t mention them again. I shan’t even appeal to have them cut from the tape, so you needn’t feel that you have to mend any fences with me. I’m looking solely at the purpose those maneuvers were supposed to serve, just as you asked me to do.”
Cleaver’s obvious self-satisfaction began to dim a little around the edges. He said, “Go ahead,” and wound the blanket a little bit tighter around his legs.
“Lithia is not even the beginning of an arsenal,” Michelis said. “Every piece of evidence you offered to prove that it might be is either a half-truth or the purest trash. Take cheap labor, for instance. With what will you pay the Lithians? They have no money, and they can’t be rewarded with goods. They have almost everything that they need, and they like the way they’re living right now—God knows they’re not even slightly jealous of the achievements we think make Earth great. They’d like to have space flight but, given a little time, they’ll get it by themselves; they have the Coupling ion-jet right now, and they won’t be needing the Haertel overdrive for another century.”
He looked around the gently rounded room, which was shining softly in the gaslight.
“And I don’t seem to see any place in here,” he said, “where a vacuum cleaner with forty-five patented attachments would find any work to do. How will you pay the Lithians to work in your thermonuclear plants?”
“With knowledge,” Cleaver said gruffly. “There’s a lot they’d like to know.”
“But what knowledge, Paul? The things they’d like to know are specifically the things you can’t tell them, if they’re to be valuable to you as a labor force. Are you going to teach them quantum mechanics? You can’t; that would be dangerous. Are you going to teach them nucleonics, or Hilbert space, or the Haertel scholium? Again, any one of those would enable them to learn other things you think dangerous. Are you going to teach them how to extract titanium from rutile, or how to accumulate enough iron to develop a science of electrodynamics, or how to pass from this Stone Age they’re living in now— this Pottery Age, I should say—into an Age of Plastics? Of course you aren’t. As a matter of fact, we don’t have a thing to offer them in that sense. It’d all be classified under the arrangement you propose—and they just wouldn’t work for us under those terms.”
“Offer them other terms,” Cleaver said shortly. “If necessary, tell them what they’re going to do, like it or lump it. It’d be easy enough to introduce a money system on this planet. You give a Snake a piece of paper that says it’s worth a dollar, and if he asks you just what makes it worth a dollar—well, the answer is, an honest day’s work.”
“And we put a machine pistol to his belly to emphasize the point,” Ruiz-Sanchez interjected.
“Do we make machine pistols for nothing? I never figured out what else they were good for. Either you point them at someone or you throw them away.”
“Item: slavery,” Michelis said. “That disposes, I think, of the argument of cheap labor. I won’t vote for slavery. Ramon won’t. Agronski?”
“No,” Agronski said uneasily. “But isn’t it a minor point?”
“The hell it is! It’s the reason why we’re here. We’re supposed to think of the welfare of the Lithians as well as of ourselves—otherwise this commission procedure would be a waste of time, of thought, of energy. If we want cheap labor, we can enslave any planet.”
“How do we do that?” Agronski said. “There aren’t any other planets. I mean, none with intelligent life on them that we’ve hit so far. You can’t enslave a Martian sand crab.”
“Which brings up the point of our own welfare,” RuizSanchez said. “We’re supposed to be considering that, too. Do you know what it does to a people to be slave-owners? It kills them.”
“Lots of people have worked for money without calling it slavery,” Agronski said. “I don’t mind getting a pay check for what I do.”
“There is no money on Lithia,” Michelis said stonily. “If we introduce it here, we do so only by force. Forced labor is slavery. Q. E. D.”
Agronski was silent.
“Speak up,” Michelis said. “Is that true, or isn’t it?”
Agronski said, “I guess it is. Take it easy, Mike. There’s nothing to get mad about.”
“Cleaver?”
“Slavery’s just a swearword,” Cleaver said sullenly. “You’re deliberately clouding the issue.”
“Say that again.”
“Oh, hell. All right, Mike, I know you wouldn’t. But we could work out a fair pay scale somehow.”
“I’ll admit that the instant that you can demonstrate it to me,” Michelis said. He got up abruptly from his hassock, walked over to the sloping window sill, and sat down again, looking out into the rain-stippled darkness. He seemed to be more deeply troubled than Ruiz-Sanchez had ever before thought possible for him. The priest was astonished, as much at himself as at Michelis; the argument from money had never occurred to him, and Michelis had unknowingly put his finger on a doctrinal sore spot which Ruiz-Sanchez had never been able to reconcile with his own beliefs. He remembered the lines of poetry that had summed it up for him—lines written way back in the 1950’s:
The groggy old Church has gone toothless, No longer holds against neshek; the fat has covered their croziers. . .
Neshek was the lending of money at interest, once a sin called usury, for which Dante had put men into Hell. And now here was Mike, not a Christian at all, arguing that money itself was a form of slavery. It was, Ruiz-Sanchez discovered upon fingering it mentally once more, a very sore spot.
“In the meantime,” Michelis had resumed, “I’ll prosecute my own demonstration. What’s to be said, now, about this theory of automatic security that you’ve propounded, Paul? You think that the Lithians can’t learn the techniques they would need to be able to understand secret information and pass it on, and so they won’t have to be screened. There again, you’re wrong, as you’d have known if you’d bothered to study the Lithians even perfunctorily. The Lithians are highly intelligent, and they already have many of the clues they need. I’ve given them a hand toward pinning down magnetism, and they absorbed the material like magic and put it to work with enormous ingenuity.”
“So did I,” Ruiz-Sanchez said. “And I’ve suggested to them a technique for accumulating iron that should prove to be pretty powerful. I had only to suggest it, and they were already halfway down to the bottom of it and traveling fast. They can make the most of the smallest of clues.”
“If I were the UN I’d regard both actions as the plainest kind of treason,” Cleaver said harshly. “You’d better think again about using that key, Mike, on your own behalf—if it isn’t already too late. Isn’t it possible that the Snakes found out both items by themselves, and were only being polite to you?”
“Set me no traps,” Michelis said. “The tape is on and it stays on, by your own request. If you have any second thoughts, file them in your individual report, but don’t try to stampede me into hiding anything under the rug now, Paul. It won’t work.”
“That,” Cleaver said, “is what I get for trying to help.” “If that’s what you were trying to do, thanks. I’m not through, however. So far as the practical objective that you want to achieve is concerned, Paul, I think it’s just as useless as it is impossible. The fact that we have here a planet that’s especially rich in lithium doesn’t mean that we’re sitting on a bonanza, no matter what price per ton the metal commands back home.
“The fact of the matter is that you can’t ship lithium home. Its density is so low that you couldn’t send away more than a ton of it per shipload; by the time you got it to Earth, the shipping charges on it would more than outweigh the price you’d get for it on arrival. I should have thought that you’d know there’s lots of lithium on Earth’s own moon, too—and it isn’t economical to fly it
back to Earth even over that short a distance, less than a quarter of a million miles. Lithia is three hundred and fourteen trillion miles from Earth; that’s what fifty light-years comes to. Not even radium is worth carrying over a gap that great!
“No more would it be economical to ship from Earth to Lithia all the heavy equipment that would be needed to make use of lithium here. There’s no iron here for massive magnets. By the time you got your particle-accelerators and mass chromatographs and the rest of your needs to Lithia, you’d have cost the UN so much that no amount of locally available pegmatite could compensate for it. Isn’t that so, Agronski?”
“I’m no physicist,” Agronski said, frowning slightly. “But just getting the metal out of the ore and storing it would cost a fair sum, that’s a cinch. Raw lithium would burn like phosphorus in this atmosphere; you’d have to store it and work it under oil. That’s costly no matter how you look at it.”
Michelis looked from Cleaver to Agronski and back again.
“Exactly so,” he said. “And that’s only the beginning. In fact, the whole scheme is just a chimera.”
“Have you got a better one, Mike?” Cleaver said, very quietly.
American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 Page 47