"Anyway, I'd like to know what's bothering Sammy," I said. "I'm curious to see him sober. I wonder what he wants."
Pat grunted cynically. "He wants a chance to see Mars, of course," she said. "Now that he's wakened up in a world in which he has only three days to live, he's coming to crawl on his belly in front of you."
I didn't like her to speak like that. One moment she had me on the point of giving her Marjory Powell's place. The next she confirmed my belief that that would be a mistake.
Perhaps I took my job too seriously. Perhaps I thought I really was a god.
6
I'd never have guessed in a hundred years why Sammy Hoggan wanted to see me. What had happened to him often happens to people after a hard drinking bout. Suddenly it is all over, they feel like hell, but their brains are ice-cold and emotionless. I've known scientists in such circumstances to come up suddenly, disinterestedly, with the answer to problems that had been bothering them for years.
He came in, walking carefully, as if his head was balanced on a single pin. He was a different Sammy. He looked at me, then at Pat, then back at me.
"I wonder if I should say what I came to say, he murmured.
"Let's hear it."
"Maybe I should keep it to myself, since it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone else. But it's a disturbing thought, and you might be able to settle it for me. If you can't, I think I'll go back to the rye, for another reason."
"Everybody's evasive," I complained. "Spit it out."
"Can I ask you a few questions?" He lowered himself carefully into a chair. "How long does it take to build a regular spaceship?"
"Nearly a year.
"How many people could the regular ships have taken off while there's still time?"
"I don't know. A few hundred. About one in five million people. What are you getting at?"
"Where's your life ship being built? Have you seen it?"
It should have been obvious what he was thinking, but I didn't see it. Pat did. She caught her breath and looked at Sammy with horror.
"At Detroit. With thousands of others. The whole place has been evacuated and made into a military reservation. Like Philadelphia and Phoenix and Birmingham and Berlin and Omsk and Adelaide. But you know about that. Yes, I've seen the lifeships. They won't be ready until a few hours before takeoff. No trials. Plenty of them won't get near Mars. Is that what you mean? It's not publicized, but anyone who knows the first thing about interplanetary flight can work that out for himself. So?"
"Suppose only one in five million people had a chance of life. What would have happened on Earth?"
"It's not a pleasant thought," I admitted. "That riot yesterday was nothing to what we'd have had, all day and every day, all over the world. But human beings are pretty ingenious when the heat's on. It didn't take long to draw up plans for ships that could be made in eight weeks, when it was really necessary. So what you're visualizing didn't happen."
"Yes," said Sammy quietly. "It didn't happen. Because, as you say, human beings can be pretty ingenious."
I saw at last what he meant, and laughed. He had had me worried.
"You mean that knowing what would happen if only one in five million people could be taken to safety, the high-ups instituted a hoax, to keep the world quiet," I said. "One in three hundred is different. It's an appreciable chance. People won't throw it away. They'll be very careful until they know they've lost it. That's it, isn't it?"
I laughed again. "If there were any real point in it," I went on, "I might begin to believe it. But where's the gain? What would it matter if people all over the world fought and pillaged and looted and murdered? It'll all be the same when the mercury shoots out of the top of all the thermometers."
"There might even be a point," said Sammy. "Who's going in the regular ships? Groups carefully selected -- not by pro tem lieutenants whose only qualification is that they know one end of a spaceship from the other. The real ships are taking the essential people, the equipment, the supplies -- "
"Naturally, when the lifeships are such a gamble."
"More natural still if none of the lifeships are expected to arrive. Perhaps not even to leave Earth. Don't you see what I'm afraid of? The high-up officials knew that if they told the truth everything would be chaos. Mobs would destroy the ships that wouldn't take them to Mars. They'd kill anyone suspected of being chosen to go. When a ship landed, anywhere, a million people would be swarming around it before the ports opened.
"Now see the way it is. The top officials of all governments can carefully, quietly select the people for the colonies, take them to the spaceports, and get them aboard the ships. There may be incidents, but people don't go wild for fear they might lose their chance of a place on a lifeship. See what a smart, hellish scheme it is? The people who are really going to Mars can prepare quietly, without being disturbed, while a third of the population of Earth is occupied building useless lifeships, and the other two thirds are busy behaving themselves and trying to catch some tinpot lieutenant's eye."
Pat was worried. I felt a great respect for her and Sammy. I knew -- I didn't know how, but I knew they were concerned, not for themselves, for neither expected to go to Mars, but for the duped millions who thought they had a chance when (according to Sammy's theory) they had none.
No use to point out that even if it were true there might be something to be said for that method of ensuring that as many as possible of the right people should be taken to the new colony. Pat and Sammy were overcome by the horror of a world kept quiet by a cruel lie. I couldn't see it quite the same way, though it concerned me more than them.
I put my arm around Pat's shoulders.
"I won't argue with your theory, Sammy," I said, "though I could. I'll just say this. When you got that idea -- had you ever been lower in your life? Weren't you miserable, in despair, half dead? Would you admit anything but the blackest, gloomiest thoughts?"
He grinned wryly. "You may have something there."
"Then suppose you get yourself feeling a little happier about things, and then have another look at this idea. It may look a little different."
"Pat wasn't feeling low," Sammy retorted. "And she seems to think there might be something in it."
"Pat thinks there's something in everything. On the surface she refuses to believe anything. But that often hides romanticism and imagination. And who said she isn't feeling low? She thinks she's made a mess of her life. She thinks she has no right to go to Mars. She wishes -- "
Pat jammed her hand against my mouth, hard. I caught her wrists and scuffled mildly with her. She seemed to feel better after that.
Even Sammy almost smiled.
7
While Sammy was still with us the phone rang. Pat took it. She seemed determined that everyone should know she was with me -- though what good that would do her I couldn't see. Quite the reverse. But people who set a lot of store on being honest and outspoken are often honest and outspoken when it does no good and a lot of harm.
The call was for Pat. She listened, slammed down the phone, and turned to us angrily. "Well, what do you know about that!"
"Nothing," said Sammy patiently, "until you tell us."
"That was my aunt. Somebody got into my room last night and destroyed everything -- clothes, books, furniture, letters. The whole shooting match. Imagine anyone doing a thing like that!"
Sammy took the practical view. "Their usefulness has only been shortened by a day or two, anyway," he remarked. "Why should you care?'
"But -- "
"It's just spite," I said. "Why be surprised, Pat? You're cynical about so many things -- it should be no shock that when people hate you they take any small revenge they can."
Pat grinned involuntarily. "No, it isn't really," she admitted. "And as Sammy says, it hardly matters now. But it's pretty petty, isn't it?"
"What an odd juxtaposition," Sammy murmured. "Pretty petty. Pretty petty. Pretty petty."
Pat said she was going over to
have a look around. I offered to take her, but surprisingly Sammy stood up and said he'd go with her. He put it neatly, using precisely the words that made any other arrangement impossible. In fact he cut me out. He must have been feeling a whole lot better than when he came in and talked despondency.
There was a knock on the door so soon after they had gone that I thought they had come back. I threw the door open casually, so sure it was Pat and Sammy that anyone else would have surprised me.
But I certainly didn't expect the melodrama of three masked men who brushed past me and shut the door.
I wasn't perturbed. Nothing could happen to me. I wouldn't have been so sure of one stranger, for individuals can be mad enough to kill the only man who can save them. But three -- they couldn't be as mad as that, in the same way, all at once.
"Now what?" I asked. "More particularly, why?"
They all carried guns. The leader drew his and gestured with it, like a schoolboy.
"We mean to go to Mars, Easson," he said, his voice deliberately muffled. "If you get that clear for a start, we'll understand each other better."
"Then you'd better get out before I recognize any of you," I told them. "Otherwise it's very sure none of you will."
"One of us is going to stick beside you until takeoff. We figure that'll make a difference. We -- "
His talking like a cowboy irritated me. For all I knew they might be kids playing a game.
"Get to hell out of here," I told diem, "before I tear your masks off. What kind of a fool do you think I am?"
Nobody moved. So I explained the obvious. "If I die, nobody from Simsville goes to Mars," I said, a little more patiently. "They won't send another lieutenant now. So that won't help you. If you stick beside me as you say, it can only last until we get to Detroit, and then we'll be split. You won't be able to do anything about that. Then I can have you thrown into a cell somewhere and that's that. If you get me to promise anything -- which would be very easy, for I'll say anything you like -- it will last only till I know I'm safe. Then the program's as before. Is that clear?"
I looked from one to another of them. "Okay," I said. "You know where the door is. You just came in.
They went. As easily as that. I gave them credit for having realized before they came that that was probably what would happen. I couldn't really blame them for trying. I might have been weak enough and stupid enough to fall in with their plans. But it was a poor effort.
I'd had enough of my room. I went out to go to Henessy's. I saw the Stowes out with Jim and waved to them. They waved back tentatively. They belonged to the small group who still cared a great deal about what people would think. They didn't want anyone to say they were fawning on me, begging for what everyone wanted.
I saw Betty Glessor and Morgan Smith, who haven't been mentioned so far because I never thought of them. I had exchanged about ten words with them. But they were next on the list to the Powells.
That's what it came to in the end. The more I learned about people, the more likely they were to come off my list. Perhaps Smith was a drinker and a doper and a sadist and a killer -- I hadn't time to find out. I didn't know he was any of these things, so I could take him to Mars.
Tentatively I scratched out the Powells and marked in Smith and Glessor.
Still looking after them, I almost ran into Leslie. She had no job, now that school was closed. She grinned. I stopped, having nothing to say, but no reason to walk past her when she seemed to want to talk.
"What are you doing?" she asked -- a silly question if ever I heard one.
"Just killing time," I said.
"Like me to help you?"
"If you have any bright ideas."
She knew a little place down the valley I hadn't had a chance to see. She said it was a good place to think of when remembering Earth.
It was curious, I'd never thought of that. Perhaps because I'd lived in three country districts and four cities before I was ten, I had never felt any duty to any one place. I hadn't thought much about leaving Earth forever. I had realized vaguely that Harry Phillips would do so with a pang; but if everybody left on Earth was going to die, I was going to leave it without any regrets. What was Earth, anyway? Just a place. Define planets generically, and you had Mars and no loss on the deal that technology couldn't make up in a hundred years or so.
But as Leslie spoke I understood that no other planet would ever be made the same as Earth.
We stopped about two miles from Simsville, and there was no sign anywhere of mankind. Two hills folded in on us, hills thickly wooded. A stream meandered one way, then the other, in its search for lower ground. The clouds were very white and still against an almost tropical blue sky.
I found for the first time that though I had no eye for beauty I could let it sink in and something in me appreciated
Leslie was wearing a watered-silk blue dress, and I could appreciate that too. It darkened her fair hair. I had always liked blue and gold.
"I wish . . ." said Leslie.
We had sat down in the shade, and she was leaning forward, her legs drawn up in front of her, pulling at her ankles.
"What do you wish?" I asked obligingly.
She seemed to have forgotten. "Why was it done like this?" she demanded.
I was disappointed. I had hoped I was getting away from Simsville and my job and its responsibility.
"How can one person get to know over three thousand people in fourteen days?" she went on. "You know you can't. You haven't tried. Oh, I don't say you aren't conscientious. I think you are. If you could have arranged the method of selection, all over the world, how would you have done it?"
I shrugged. "Phone book, I guess."
"How do you mean?"
"Every three hundred and twenty-fifth name."
Leslie caught her breath as if I'd suggested setting fire to a cathedral. "You couldn't!" she exclaimed. "That would be horribly callous."
"Why? It would be fair."
"But this way . . . at least there's a chance. The good, the wise, the clever, the beautiful may come through . . ."
"For God's sake!" I ejaculated, shocked by her lack of understanding. "Do you think that's what we're supposed to do? Take all the crowned heads in our thousands of little arks and ignore the rabble? Intellectual or artistic snobbery is no better than social snobbery. If I had Beethoven and Michelangelo and Napoleon and Madame Curie and Shakespeare and Helen of Troy and St. Peter here in Simsville, do you think I'd pick them?"
"Wouldn't you?" She had lost her horror, and in its place was a vast surprise.
"Suppose I did, what would happen to John Doe? Sure, if Simsville had a genius, I'd consider him. There aren't too many geniuses. But when it's one out of three hundred, we're not going to blot out the average man and woman by taking only the people who would come out at the head of a competitive examination in something or other. I . . ."
I didn't have the eloquence I needed. I knew I was right. I wanted her to see it. But how could I tell her that outstanding people, after all, were only clever dogs that had learned new tricks, and that John Smith was worth quite as much to himself as Shakespeare?
"Let's talk of something else," I said helplessly. "Or better still, not talk at all."
She nodded, hesitated, and then with sudden resolution put her hand to her throat.
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