‘Yes.’
‘Yet you announced it yourself eventually.’
‘Psychological pressures and some alcohol. It was too late for it to matter much and there was no troublemaker to magnify it.’
‘But you didn’t mention telepathy, except to deny it.’
‘You’re a persistent bastard.’
‘And the needle wavers each time the word is mentioned.’
Raft sighed, ‘If you had heard that guess made as often as I have! Even John used to talk as if the clone awareness was the beginning of some disgusting breakthrough. He was excited by it, but the idea frightens me as much as it does you. I am no telepath, nor is the clone telepathic.’
Parker tossed the detector back to Smith. ‘It could be true.’ He was exhausted, a man who had barked too long up a wrong tree. ‘But I don’t believe Heathcote blackmailed your way to the stars for the reasons shown in your journal; they aren’t enough, and there’s a margin note in Jackson’s handwriting to say he didn’t believe it either. If you quarrelled with Heathcote over the general direction of his work, you must have had words over his telepathy ideas also.’
‘We did.’
‘So that the lad he had loved like a father was becoming a damned nuisance. He wanted you out of the way, but not permanently; he wasn’t a killer.’
Facing the blaze of resentment Parker thought, He is more arrogant and inturned than any of us have guessed, but he was at a dead end and had obtained nothing. ‘Very well, telepathy is not involved.’ He started the car. ‘I’ll drop you back to the barrack.’
As the cathedral glowed across the windows, then vanished behind them, Raft reflected that, believe or scoff, religion remained the most central of historical forces, even for such a complex of faith and brutality as the grey beast driving him home. In irritation he planted a barb. ‘You’ve done some thinking about the effect of telepathy in a second-rate, spying, lying, self-righteous world of snivelling patriots.’
Parker did not rise to the insult, but said soberly, ‘It would mean the end of civilisation.’
‘So little? Think further. With only honesty left it would mean the end of humanity. After what you people have done with your second chance, would it matter?’
‘Don’t look down, Commander, but your spite is showing.’
‘But you don’t need telepathy; the damage is already done. Drugs, hypnotism, spy gadgets, computer records and Security ready to spring on any individuality that doesn’t toe the ethical line! You’ve got the lot. Telepathy would be only a refinement. You’re already in position to turn each other into mindless yea-sayers, and one of the true things history teaches is that what can be done, will be. Only that incredible ethic and the dumb devotion of Security has permitted rags of privacy to endure, and when privacy at last goes out – and it will – individuality goes with it. How is the world going to live with itself when the dam bursts and all the ethics go down the drain? It takes a strong mind to live naked. Could you?’
As the car rolled through the barrack gates the courtyard lights flashed in Parker’s face, limning him stark as peeled bone structure, and Raft saw that he had misjudged his man utterly. The man suffered! Raft cursed his clumsiness as he realised one thing after another: that Parker was an honest policeman, that he was a fully competent individual in a rapidly standardising world, and that the whole bitter speech had been wasted because Parker already knew it all and was deeply troubled for his world.
The words could not be recalled; in anger and intellectual arrogance he had further alienated the one man he should have tried to snare for a friend.
As though the speech had never been made, Parker said, ‘I want you to give Campion a message. Now. Even if you have to wake him. And it is to go to nobody else.’
‘Understood.’
‘This is the message: I know where Gangoil is, and I have not told the PM.’
Raft gripped the door handle, silent, stunned, until Parker said, ‘Tell him!’
‘How long have you known?’
‘For several hours. He will want to see me; I will wait for his authority to enter the barrack.’
Raft went, running, barely able to credit this turn of fortune; he understood these people, he realised, not at all.
Constable Smith watched him vanish across the courtyard. ‘I wouldn’t want that temper loosed on me. You should have seen the detector when he talked about that Fraser; the needle hit the stop and the line went nearly off the gauge. Yet he didn’t show all that much to the eye.’
‘Repression. He practises control; you heard him say so. He killed Fraser for insulting him, laughing at him. Nobody laughs at Albert or contradicts him or demeans him. Albert sees no need for God, he says, and we now know why.’
Smith began tentatively, ‘This telepathy business—’
‘Is not finished with. Mention it outside this car and I personally will kill you.’
5
Alice did not ask him in. ‘I’m going to bed, Jim.’
‘And I’m going to Melbourne Town.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Now.’
Her moment of disturbance was gratifying; she needed him, if only as a tetherstone. The door opened wider. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
He followed her in. ‘A meeting has been set up with Albert; we hope to bring him here, to show him Gangoil.’ This had no meaning for her; he had to explain, ‘A good word from him will be important; he has influence with Security.’
‘Influence with Ian? Nobody has; I don’t believe it.’
‘It seems Albert is his father. It’s a complex story.’
‘Ian isn’t old enough for that.’ She smiled with the crookedness which had invested all her reactions, not contempt but a wry acceptance. ‘But who can know what’s what any more? Stephen called biology the accursed science. And why should Raft save Gangoil? Because of this Heathcote?’
She had not met John and did not wish to; on Lindley’s description she had judged him a psychic cripple and a physical freak.
‘We have to present Gangoil in a fashion which will prevent its destruction.’
‘Prevent!’ She was incredulous. ‘They should bomb the mountain to dust, and everything in it. Myself included. When they know what is here—’
He grasped her wrists and sat her forcibly on the bed. ‘You don’t know what is here. I do and it is far more than your imagination can scratch at. Wrongly handled it may mean the end of everything we ever thought we knew about human beings; rightly handled it may be able to save them – may.’
‘Then let them destroy the beastly place.’
‘Knowledge doesn’t die. We have to absorb disasters, not pretend they haven’t happened.’
‘Let go.’ He was still holding her arms and began confusedly apologising. ‘Oh, shut up, Jim. I have to trust you to be right but I don’t really know what you are talking about. Are you coming back with Raft?’
‘Probably.’ He realised that now she had taken his hand.
‘I don’t want to be alone. Nobody here talks to us.’
‘They will from now on; David has put the word round. They need us now, so they’ll be nice; you’ll see in the morning.’
‘Just the same, come back.’
But if he had expected a kiss of farewell he was mistaken; she let go his hand and stepped away. He was reminded, however unintentionally, that despite an incident of weakness and ungallantly he was a father figure. At forty-six, in her universe he was old, old, old.
6
It did not begin as a friendly meeting. Security man and policeman refrained from glaring and clawing but the aura of mutual dislike smoked in the cool light of the ward.
As for Raft, he had changed, in the seconds needed for Parker’s message to shake out into meaning, from a man dealing with circumstances as they arose into one moving to a seen end. He had arrived where he had presciently visualised himself when, days earlier, Campion first asked his advice. Now he could begin to shape
events. This was a greater matter than simple star voyaging because he would be doing; the crossing to Barnard’s Star had been a thing done to him, but now he would do.
This new role was heady, needing study before he took the stage. He listened to the cautious opening dialogue of the featured players.
‘Where is Gangoil?’ Campion was winter cold, affronted by the existence of an organisation better equipped for certain operations than his own.
‘Not yet. That’s not the important thing.’ Parker glanced at Raft. ‘Didn’t you give the message correctly?’
‘I did. Ian, he hasn’t told the Prime Minister. That’s the thing.’
‘I understand that and am impressed. But he’ll tell me, and damned fast. This is the lion’s den, Parker.’
‘Miaow,’ said Parker. ‘I’ve taken the usual precautions – sealed envelope to the PM in the morning if I am not there to withhold it. You wouldn’t dare try to prevent that.’
Campion, brought down from soaring ideals to the realities of human encounter, capitulated without grace. ‘What do you want?’
‘To know your mind about Gangoil. What will you do with it?’
‘Study it.’
‘Ah.’ Parker was pleased. ‘To what end?’
Campion was silent.
‘Come on, man! You must have some intention.’
‘None. That’s your answer. So far. Now you owe me one. Why have you come to me rather than the PM?’
Parker answered hurriedly, as if the words must be spoken before regret set in. ‘Because the world matters more than Australia. Because the Prime Minister is by his appointment committed to Australia rather than the world and is open to political pressures – and politicians regard your damnable ethic as something to be circumvented wherever possible. Because you are an honest man though your service is a dangerous anachronism.’
‘All that granted, including the last,’ here Parker started visibly, ‘what is your problem?’
Raft stood at the window, where the huge Shrine of Remembrance took on a dim glow under the rising moon. They had preserved it as a warning, had they? While Parker hesitated a second too long in his need for exact phrases, Raft-from-the-past took the future into his care and spoke for him.
‘The same as yours, Ian.’
The pseudo-Grecian mass squeezed down on the hill rather than surmounted it – the Pericleans would have been bored by its weight and lack of colour – but its sheer grinding bulk accorded with his sense of encroaching destiny, touching and reinforcing him as the cathedral had sparked grim exaltation in Parker. Knowing he had their attention he turned and spoke between rather than at them, a little flatly as if he dealt with facts needing no discussion.
‘You and the Ombudsmen have left national communities to govern themselves, keep their secrets, develop their affairs, and you’ve got your reward in nationalism, brutality and the greed for power. I suppose it couldn’t have been otherwise.’ He did not expect applause for platitudes, but they listened. ‘So Security was invented to keep the peace while the apostles and avatars worked something out. To men in a hurry it must have seemed a good idea, most idealistic, a sort of voice-from-a-cloud mystique. They trained operatives from childhood in ethical idealism. Did you know that, Controller?’
‘Suspected.’
‘Gave them every power except the power to intervene; left them able to deal only with international problems – an umbrella over the world with all the old bitcheries running loose beneath it. You both knew it but didn’t want to see, until Gangoil whipped it under your noses and Security was immobilised by its own ethic. Security was born useless but too powerful to be knocked out except by its own will. It requires boring from within.’
Campion’s eyes burned over a faint smile; Parker hunched forward, vulpine, to attack or defend.
‘Ian has decided that Security must be destroyed.’ He stopped; verbal bombshells should be brief.
Parker, artist in defusing, asked simply, ‘How?’
Campion came in as if cued. ‘Contact the youngster groups, using the Gangoil contacts. Then resign my commission, publicly, on the newscasts, and take up where the clone left off. Without the violence.’
‘Preaching sweetness and light? You?’ Parker began to laugh but in the corner of his vision caught Raft’s finger brushing at his lips and stopped.
Campion said mildly, ‘The kids seem to have liked it from the clone’s hypnoed agents. Albert has told me of the youngster groups of his day. Curious names—’
‘Dropouts, hipsters, bikies,’ Raft recited, staring at Parker. ‘And Jesus freaks.’
‘Freaks!’
‘Don’t choke; it meant enthusiasts, more or less. Ian is saying that the youngsters are ready for change – revolution if you like – and you must know it’s true. The current shit-sheet—’ Parker’s eye was speculative ‘—daysheet – lists seven cases of physical violence, serious violence, in twenty-four hours. All by youngsters. Repression bursting.’
Parker shrugged. ‘That’s not abnormal. There would be plenty more unreported. The kids always fight amongst themselves.’
‘And you think my era was cruel and violent! So it was, but that figure in a town this size would have represented a psychiatric epidemic. But you’ve grown up with it; you no longer know what “abnormal” is. Your kids are in ferment, superficially bound by the ethic and the promise of pie in the sky but rebelling against restriction every minute. It can’t hold for ever and Ian plans to catch it before it snaps. A new promise of something they can do will carry them as nothing else will because you’ve turned them all into child prodigies before they’ve discovered what their brains are for. And the twentieth-century experience is that what carried the kids today carries the world tomorrow. So what will you promise – a world for dropouts or a world for guerilla fighters? I suggest Jesus freaks, and I’m not joking.’
Parker had listened intently; now he grunted, ‘Brotherly love isn’t enough. I believe in it, and I know.’
‘Of course not. There has to be struggle.’
Parker wore a shoulder holster under his jacket and his production of the gun was drill fast. He let the muzzle watch a spot between them. ‘If,’ he said, ‘you propose to let the kids loose in a bloodbath, it can begin here and now. Speak cogently and to the point.’
(He seemed, to himself, to have been threatening all night. In fact he had never killed a human being; he thought he could but did not wish to find out.)
Raft protested, ‘We aren’t mad, you know.’
‘Of you I have reservations.’
That was unexpected and unfair and blindly angering, but it was as well to know the nature of the enemy. Again, Parker was a devious man who sprouted suspicions like thorns; also this could be a simple goading tactic, to be ignored.
He said evenly, trying not to sound as though he spoke through a polar frost, ‘We – Ian and I – offer something new: an intellectual enemy which cannot be destroyed but only out-thought – the problem of how to exist in a world where privacy is dead.’
Parker rested the gun on his knee. ‘A world,’ he suggested, ‘where deep question, however hedged with ethic and regulation, threatens the end of self-determination, and limit question can almost lift the soul intact from the body? Where epidermal hypno-drugs can enslave as fast as gloved hands can touch?’
Raft was exultant but Campion’s service pride still smarted. ‘What do you know about epidermals?’
‘That not only Gangoil has them; that Security’s questioners use them also.’ He waited until Campion nodded grudging admission. ‘I came here to be honest, Commissioner. No doubt you keep ears in the PM’s offices; I do. I also listen in this barrack.’
‘Prove that!’
Parker spoke straight into his eyes. ‘My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.’
Campion’s breath hissed. Raft looked interrogative, but Campion was intent on Parker; he had to ask, ‘What’s that about, Ian?’
Campion told
him softly, ‘A reference to an investigation which involved religious belief. The Controller is telling the truth about his surveillance ability, but perhaps it doesn’t matter much now. What matters is that we agree that the world will shortly become an impossible place for a free mind to dwell in.’
They were doing splendidly, Raft thought, coming of their free will to the crux designed for them. Then his self-satisfaction took a beating as Parker said, ‘I feel the Commander should leave us now.’
Campion’s eyes narrowed and Raft’s stillness was too patently a brake on fury at the insult.
‘For his own sake,’ Parker continued coolly. ‘You and I, Commissioner, must speak openly from now on. We are fairly safe from question by virtue of position; the Commander is not. It would be unreasonable to burden him with knowledge that any fool with a nose for a secret could relieve him of.’
‘More accurately,’ Raft said, ‘you have your own reasons for distrusting me and wish to discuss them with the Commissioner.’
‘Yes, but I thought you’d have more brains than to make an issue of it. Why feel insulted by facts?’
‘Ian!’
Campion said, ‘You’d better go, Albert. We can’t build anything on a clash of personalities.’
Two men struggled in him, one volcanically resentful of treacherous dismissal, one sanely observing Campion’s as the only possible decision. Those two did not yet see him as a key figure, the key figure, only themselves as arbitrators and designers and finally activators of the new Earth.
Yet, irretrievably tainted with the conceptions of their time, they could not succeed alone. They would need him. Parker would resist necessity (and from some corner of darkness squeaked the thought that Parker must some day be discarded) but Ian would come to him …
Best to leave with such good face as he might. He would have liked to know the location of Gangoil, but Ian would tell him later. And it was very likely that Peter or Joe would tell him in the morning.
He said goodnight but felt they scarcely noticed; they were already absorbed in revaluation of each other. From the door he made them notice him.
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