Raft put his back to the door; no one was coming in until he had finished. He stated rather than asked, ‘You’ve seen the report!’ in a voice challenging Campion to comment on his own damnation. ‘Your shopkeepers must have been bloody expert to bug the stuff as fast as I ordered it.’
He had not been prepared for this minor item and could not take it seriously, but if the bugs had been detected honesty would cost nothing. ‘How did you find out?’
‘I was told.’
That was no minor item. Campion thought distractedly of renegade Techs, of Security penetrated by Gangoil. ‘By whom?’
He expected refusal to answer but not the question that came instead.
‘Do you care?’
It collapsed him back to contemplation of loyalty and double dealing and the unanswerable questions of honesty and intention. He said dully, ‘Yes, I care, but not in the way I did. Or not about the same things.’ He gazed blankly at Raft. ‘I think that’s it.’
Raft’s paternal feelings, indistinct at best, were in recess; a little of the waiting anger was released in jeering. ‘Do you care that I am probably to be kidnapped tomorrow?’ Campion’s head jerked. ‘You should. Wasn’t it the sort of play you let me loose for? Well, it will be with my connivance and how does that fit you?’
Campion replied automatically, ‘You’ll be protected; I’ll not have you endangered.’ The rest reached him slowly. ‘Your connivance? You want it?’ He shed his surprise, knowing why Raft wanted it. The starman had seen one side of the contest; now he wanted to see the other side, and choose. Campion also would like to see, without the blinkers of a lifetime, if it were not too late for that to be possible. But whatever he saw, he was not in a position to choose …
Was he not? It was an extraordinary and terrifying question, postulating nothing less than the rejection of Security and his whole past life. It was a fantasy question, of course.
But was it, was it?
Meanwhile Raft stared at him as at an idiot and he must make some effort.
‘How do you know about this? There was nothing in the surveillance report.’
‘The setup was put to me this afternoon right under your microphone’s listening ear.’
Somebody had been clever or somebody in Security had been stupid. But, of course – ‘The two boys! Trust the kids to come up with something impudent.’ Almost he admired them, but he asked anxiously, ‘Were they under hypno?’
‘Not so far as I could tell.’
‘At close quarters you couldn’t miss it – but they’re only little fish who’ll know no more than that useless clone. And remember that Gangoil wanted you dead.’
‘Not Gangoil, only The Lady. And fancy you remembering, after you sent me out bugged to the eyebrows as Albert the Bait.’
‘Nobody will kill you; there will be protection every minute.’
Raft used contempt as a hammer. ‘When a death is decided upon there is no protection. And why must it be Gangoil? There are other subversive elements on your ethical chessboard – such as the samizdat kids.’
‘The what?’
‘The kind who run underground newspapers because official versions don’t match the truth, or supposedly “uninteresting” items go unreported, or properly ethical explanations of bashings and criminality don’t satisfy some enquiring minds.’
‘The kids are always cutting up, but that’s an internal government matter; we can’t take an interest.’ And with that the matter of unrest among the youngsters fell into place with all the seething pieces of inner questioning; theirs was one of the points of view he must pursue more deeply than the cant phrase ‘generation gap’ allowed. What did they see that his training barred from his view?
‘You should.’ Raft jeering again. ‘They’re asking information about the ideas this kindergarten planet has forgotten, the facts and ideas your well-intentioned Ombudsmen censored out of sight so that only pretty thoughts should flower. They need a referee of their own, someone who wasn’t here for the rule-making and sees the game more clearly than the players can.’
Referee Albert? It was the sort of thing bright and pushing kids might dream up. Campion said, ‘You could be right,’ while his thinking stretched a long arm into speculation on problems of right and wrong, indoctrination and uncertainty … until Raft bent over him, asking, ‘What’s up with you? You aren’t with me.’
His anger had ebbed but Campion did not doubt it was at hand if required; Raft was that sort of player. And there was a note of enquiry under his jeering. ‘Have I got through at last? Has love-in-a-mist realised that you can’t run a world like a schoolroom?’ Campion looked at him through rising emotional exhaustion and the eyes inches from his own seemed at last to grasp something of his mental condition. Raft asked, roughly but reasonably, ‘What’s wrong?’
It was Campion’s moment to take a step in the dark but he did not know the way. He wanted to make clear his deep trouble but had never learned how to make appeals of any kind. In ignorance, feeling desperate and ashamed, he took the one course that could succeed, and said very simply because he knew no better, ‘Help me, Grandad.’
Raft’s face receded as he stood to full height, looking down at him with calculation and dawning approval and distrust and some other indefinable intensity, all kaleidoscopic and unhidden. He took Campion’s chin in his fingers and raised the immobilised Commissioner’s face to the light. ‘All right, son. If I can.’
It was unsentimental, a concession, not a capitulation.
Campion knew he was still on trial. He had achieved something intangible that he did not know how to use. He was unreasonably certain that Raft was uniquely placed to be his confidant, but – Why should consanguinity (and the sharing of blood was a damned silly distortion of fact) constitute a bond?
And Raft was watching him quizzically, in the half-jovial fashion himself might offer to some youngster making a youthful mountain out of some molehill trouble. Offended pride saw it as Raft’s attitude not only to him but to his whole struggling era.
‘You continually question our values.’ He heard and resented the slight whine in his voice. ‘Now I’m having to question them also.’
From a man of his training that was a bombshell admission; reaction should have been instant and powerful; less had come close to breaking Colley. Raft only scratched ruminatively at an ear, leaving him speechless with the great clog of ideas and events to be sorted before they could cross his tongue. He needed help even to explain himself.
Raft asked, ‘Something has happened? Today?’
‘Not only today; it began before that.’ He explained painfully what Jackson had asked him of his certainties of this best of all possible worlds.
Raft commented unfeelingly, ‘It didn’t take much to set you rocking.’
‘From an Ombudsman – a world-builder throwing doubt on his creation – it shook me badly.’ He frowned as another aspect appeared. ‘Particularly because it was Jackson. I suppose there must have been—’ he had to search for unaccustomed words precisely fitting ‘—affection. A bond.’
‘They really did a job of training on you, didn’t they?’
He had not expected so swift a plunge through inessentials; he went on eagerly, ‘Did you know that the operative Techs, the decision makers, are all orphans, parents unknown or dead? We – I didn’t realise it but our training started when we were five or six and we grew up unquestioningly as a Security group.’ The frown reappeared briefly. ‘But I have no feeling of being apart from the rest of life. Should I?’
‘There was a saying attributed to the Jesuit priesthood: “Give us the child at six and he’s ours for life”. Or something like that.’
‘They may have been better at it, but my conditioning has been pierced and I’m lost.’ From a religious man the tone of the final word would have meant ‘damned’.
Raft leaned forward, projecting authority. ‘Or found. We don’t have to mumble it over like half-wits, so talk about today. What happene
d?’
Grandad was not interested in confessional, only in results. Grandad would make a good Tech, who would reward training by boring at the beams and joists until the structure of Security collapsed. And why not? No, no … too far, too fast. He said quickly, ‘Your transworld calls failed. You’ll get none of them.’
Bluntness earned only a shadow movement, a heightening of attention. And one word. ‘Why?’
‘Many reasons. For instance, Doctor Kulayev—’
‘Pete. What about him?’
‘The Kremlin has him.’
‘Kremlin? Wasn’t it destroyed during the Five Days?’
Yes, of course; it had been the name of a palace or fortress or some such. ‘The Kremlin is the Central Russian Committee of Political Interdependence. Most of European Russia split into a loose union of areas with the central district round old Moscow having a sort of spiritual hegemony.’
‘Communism was given to eating its children. What has it done to Pete?’
‘Not communism. The centres of communism are America in hard politics and, we think, China in an idealistic form. Russia returned to the cultist simplicity which was so strong before her revolution.’ He added uneasily, ‘The rest of the world isn’t much taken with Christianity, but you’ll know how intransigent a religious community can be.’
‘Meaning, how brutal.’
‘Yes. And that it tends to be centralist, all-powerful. The Kremlin controls everything within the state, including most strongly the sciences. They think Kulayev may have knowledge of the cloning procedure.’
‘He hasn’t.’
‘But they suspect, and with them that makes it fact until proven otherwise. And cloning is a crime – an intrusion upon the prerogatives of God. Kulayev has been under question.’
‘His ignorance would show up at once.’
Campion licked drying lips. ‘Not every country is technically advanced to the same level in the same direction. How could they be? The Kremlin’s psychology is – primitive.’
A frozen voice told him, ‘Go on.’
‘Doctor Kulayev collapsed under question; he is insane.’
‘Ah.’ A stillness. At last, ‘Can you get him out and cure him?’
‘Security cannot interfere on behalf of an individual unless he claims sanctuary.’
The unbelieving stare crucified Campion and all his organisation. Raft stepped back until a chair caught his legs, and sat heavily. ‘Tell me, did an Ombudsman set up that region?’
‘No Ombudsman ever set up any region; his function is only to guide for the best what is already there. Ombudsmen are human; they come in all colours of genius and error.’
‘They should be got rid of!’ Campion could only be silent before the sound of his own emerging belief, but Raft was not waiting on reply. ‘Ivan, then. Is he also under the protection of the Lord?’
‘His area is not under Kremlin hegemony. The message received is that he does not wish to speak to you, that after forty-two years there is nothing left to say.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Nor do we, but we have not been able to discover much. His home area has become allied with what once was Poland, and I think the Poles had some enmity against the Kremlin in your day. Does this make sense?’
‘Yes.’
‘They reacted vengefully against communism at the Collapse. And it seems Doctor Doronin was a staunch Marxist. I’m not sure what that meant—’
‘I am. Go on.’
‘Aside from any digging for suspected knowledge of the cloning procedures, we suspect he is being re-educated.’
‘Brainwashed.’
‘Was that your word? It’s expressive. The Poles are technically better at such things than the Kremlin; they are not hampered by the conviction that they know the will of God, and that leaves room for compassion. When Doronin reappears he will be unharmed but changed in his views.’
‘Induced changes were never permanent.’
‘Techniques have changed. He will conform or die.’
‘And you benevolent watchdogs can’t interfere. Christ, but what use are you!’
Campion dared not answer that; he was no longer sure his organisation had ever had a use. And Raft was leaping ahead of him. ‘And you let commie-hating Ewan Matthews go back to communist America!’
Campion shuddered. ‘New York Soviet claimed him and their right was legal.’
‘So long as it’s an internal matter any pack of bastards can do as they please!’
Campion heard himself uttering the indoctrinated litany: ‘People make their political choice and the ethic is non-interference unless mass right is infringed.’
‘Shit! Stop it! What happened to Ewan?’
‘He left on a New Yorker plane. The story is that over the Pacific he discovered he was going to a communist state and became violent and was shot for the safety of the crew and passengers. He was dead on arrival. It might be true.’
‘Or?’
‘He may be alive, being questioned about cloning. All of them will be intensely questioned about that.’
‘They know nothing. That leaves little Joe. What happened to him? Fell under a truck? Was eaten by lions?’
Campion answered wearily, ‘They say Streich was kidnapped, by persons and nationality unknown. As a biologist who lived so long with you he will be considered valuable property for any government.’
Raft spoke like a man leaping. ‘You can act on that. Violation of private rights.’
‘We are searching, but we think the kidnapping was a cover story, a devious beginning to keeping him out of sight. But the important matter remains here, with us.’ He burst out, ‘It was our own stupidity that let the cloning story on to the world’s newscasts. We didn’t anticipate the hunger in them all – the need to have the process for themselves. What do they want? Imperial power?’ He said miserably, ‘I suppose Stephen would have prevented it, covered it up, but he never had the chance. We’ve been very innocent, haven’t we, trusting to an ethic to overcome the savagery of men?’
‘What do you think the great religions were all about? Your Security is just another goddamned religious failure because you poor bastards were never given the chance to realise anything but your own holier-than-thou destinies. It doesn’t matter what you do now because the cloning process is a fact; discovered once it can and will be discovered again. You’re helpless.’
At last Campion was on surer ground. ‘Not if we locate Gangoil before Parker does. Bringing him in was a blunder, but it’s done now. If Security holds the process then Security can have it declared a prohibited activity and police it. And believe me we can police effectively when we have a free hand. If Parker finds them first, then the PM has it and we can do nothing until some connected activity infringes the rights of other nations.’
Raft’s contempt was a snarl. ‘What could your PM do with the knowledge? Create supermen? That’s what all these scrambling kidnappers and questioners have in mind – superman and super-specialised man. John, damn his stupidity, approached his work with reverence; he also meant to create supermen, but he was ready to stand aside and see the new race take over. These political power-grabbers will think they can build the new race in the laboratory and then control it. Tiger riders!’
That was the crux of the matter. Campion began to see what must be done for the best and it appalled him. He was afraid of what was needed and called on anger to force him towards it. ‘Save the prophecies! What is happening is happening now!’
The answer snapped back as if this moment had been awaited, as if Raft with his disruptions had been grooming him for it.
‘Security can preserve the status quo or let it evolve. It has the weaponry to take over the world and perhaps the prestige to make the move acceptable – for a while; that way it could control everything it feared and the sheep would love it. But there are wolves in the forest and they’ll chew your bones in the end. Alternatively, Security can dissolve itself and let the world g
o its way in blood and brutality and whatever beauty it can salvage when Nanny stops telling it what to like and dislike. And that’s probably what it wants when its conditioning wears thin.’
‘Back to the twentieth century!’
‘Further back. Because you’ve changed nothing, only confined the smell. Evolution doesn’t mean the survival of the nicest or the most moral or the prettiest – only the most adaptable. Man won’t kill himself off; his first try has failed but put the fear of holy hell into him. A little barbarism may be next in line – a Dark Age of high technology and moral ruin.’
‘Yes.’
Raft studied him. ‘I think you mean that.’
‘I do.’
‘But Security—’ He shook his head. ‘You people are too firmly settled; you won’t budge until the world destroys you.’
Campion chafed against his immobility; he needed gesture, emphasis, as he said, ‘This world can go to its useless end. But the youngsters, Albert, the kids …’
He began to talk of the ideas weltering in his mind and Raft listened with an incredulity that the man could have come so far in his perception in so short a time. He talked mainly of new powers newly directed to new beginnings until there seemed no end to his urge to clear and reshape and rebuild.
Suddenly it became too much. Raft, with all his pin-prickings come to a head, had more than enthusiasm on his hands; it was an outpouring of dammed-up fanaticism.
‘Ian, boy, I don’t want you dead! They’ll rack and burn you! Easy, easy, until you see clearly.’
Campion did not argue; Raft had said, ‘my beloved son’, and he saw the meaning fully. He did not care if he were for a time a little mad; there is a place for that too.
But Raft persisted; he had wanted to sow ideas, not to inaugurate a crusade.
Why then, Raft would have to stand by the results of his urgings. His mind was made up and he did not want to listen to reason just yet. He was glad when an interruption put an end to their talk.
The wall speaker announced Controller Parker downstairs, wishing to speak with Commander Raft.
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