But Philip was no fool, either. He thought fast on his feet. In fact, I think he’d been holding the card up his sleeve for a long time.
“The man responsible would have been brought to trial,” he said, smoothly. “But that may not be possible, now. Mr. Parrick tells me that you can help undo the work that he has done...can help to free the colony from its addiction to the drug.” The stress on “he” was careful, but firm.
There were no prizes for guessing who had been picked out to carry the can. I looked at the water, which was settling now. I couldn’t see the blood in it. The light was all wrong. Somewhere, he’d float up to the surface. Somewhere in the watery underworld. And then he’d sink again, carrying with him all the guilt, all the blame, all the sins, the sins of the fathers....
Leaving Philip stainless in the public eye. Not dishonored. He could pose as the savior of his people. Freeing them from the insidious ravages of the evil Zarnecki.
And we were going to help him.
I glanced at Cade, hoping that he might want to argue. But he was nursing his bruised back, and looking quite serene. There was even the ghost of a smile. The king’s right hand man was gone, and he was heir apparent.
I felt sick.
“In your own house,” I hissed, my voice catching because my teeth were gritting against the cold. “You’re going to pretend that he ran this operation on his own, beneath the cellars of your ancestral home?”
“I trusted him,” said Philip. His voice had an air of injured innocence about it. He was already playing his part. I listened to the echo crackling faintly like spitting fat.
“I’ll bet you did,” I said. “And suppose it was me that landed on top of the startled whaley? Suppose I was dead and he was standing here? Who’d be your scapegoat then?”
But I didn’t have to ask. Zarnecki had been the only candidate. If I were dead they’d just have hung one more crime on his neck. Then they’d have disposed of him. They wouldn’t have had to look far for a volunteer executioner. And Nathan.... Nathan would have stood by and watched. He’d have disapproved, of course. But needs must when the devil drives....
The devil was driving this one, all right. I wished that I could believe him.
Nathan was beside me now, offering a hand to help me. I was wet through and aching, but I refused the hand. I pointed past him, and lost control of my temper.
“Are you going to let him get away with this?” I yelled. “Are you going to help him get away scot-free?” The echoes danced and jangled, louder and more clamorous than before.
“It’s not our world, Alex,” said Nathan softly. “We aren’t the law here. He is. He can’t kill us now, but only because he knows that he needs us. And it’s not only him. They all need us, Alex. Every last one. Without our help, there’s going to be hell to pay here within the year. And it won’t be Philip who’ll pay. It will be the farmers and the fishermen. This way is the only way we’re going to be allowed to help them. We have to take it. It’s our job.”
“You’re a bastard,” I said.
He replied: “That doesn’t matter.”
I pointed again to the gray-clad, white-skinned specters, who were watching us with pale, bright, uncomprehending eyes—fascinated, but without any hint of understanding.
“Look at them, Nathan!” I whispered. “Doesn’t that mean anything? How many people...how many years?”
“We have to help them, Alex,” he said. “And this is the only way. The only way we can.”
I stood, shivering and silent.
“Let’s go,” he said. “You need a little help yourself.”
“Politics,” I said, “is the art of the attainable.”
“That’s right.”
“Kilner was right,” I told him. “If this is what it costs...if this is what it means, to colonize other worlds, to make the star-worlds ours, then we should stay at home, on Earth. We shouldn’t pollute the whole galaxy.”
“You don’t mean that,” he said. “And it won’t even make you feel better to say so. It’s not for us to take revenge, even if you take it upon yourself to judge, Philip is only one man. If we save him along with the rest of the people—well, that’s one more man saved. His power is subject to erosion now. He’ll lose it, by degrees. Whatever he’s guilty of, history will bury it. It doesn’t matter.”
Still refusing his help, I got back up to the door. Philip and the two servants stood aside to let me lead the way. Nathan and Cade followed. They didn’t lock the door or shoot home the bolt. It wasn’t necessary. The people in the caves weren’t prisoners any more. Not prisoners of that kind. Only prisoners of what they were and what, somehow, they’d have to be taught not to be. Now, they were only casualties. Casualties of a war that wouldn’t start, because we were going to prevent it.
It was all, I thought, as I set my foot on the first rung of the ladder whose full extent was now illuminated, one hell of a mess.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It took me a long time to decipher James Wildeblood’s message in full, when I finally did get the chance. But knowing, by now, most or all of the answers didn’t fully alleviate my curiosity. I wanted to follow the whole thing through to its bitter end.
There were no real surprises in the document. But there was little in it which gave any extra insight into the complex web of Wildeblood’s motives. Even at the end, the man himself remained rather enigmatic, and I was left groping in my imagination for a true understanding of his purposes and intentions.
First of all, the message gave directions as to how to descend from the house into the caves. It wasn’t detailed. With regard to pitfalls, all it said was “beware”. The whole thing, apart from the eccentric spelling, was difficult to follow because of its chopped language and lack of punctuation. There was little about it that was explicit.... Wildeblood was expecting a certain amount of initiative on the part of anyone who tried to make use of it.
There were a few notes on the extraction and purification process to which the spawn had to be subjected. Here, again, you really needed to be something of a chemist already to work out what was said. They were the sort of incomplete, abbreviated notes a man in a lab might make, in order that he might recall his procedure later, relying on a certain basic knowledge and familiarity with what was being done to be able to fill in the gaps.
It really wouldn’t have been much use to my nameless associate and his band of outlaws. They just wouldn’t have been able to make sense of it at all.
Finally, there were a couple of notes tacked on. One said that the use of the drug in the colony would have to be restricted or stopped if and when exploitation began to threaten the ecological balance of the sea. The other said that this enforcement would have to be imposed from outside, because the ruling group would not voluntarily relinquish a source of power and the colonists themselves would not voluntarily relinquish their habit. Corollary to this statement was the parenthetical remark that ignorance would prevent understanding—apparently referring to the fact that the nth generation colonists would not be in a position to know why it was imperative that use of the drug must be modified or abandoned.
Last of all there was another sentence, also tacked on to the second note, but to my mind somewhat separate from it. It simply said: Other sources must not be used.
This, too, would not have been comprehensible to anyone in the colony who had managed to decipher the message. No reason was given. The recipient was obviously expected to work it out for himself.
I did.
When I had, I began to suspect that just possibly that last sentence was the only essential part of the communication. There was no possible way I could be sure, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed that perhaps it made sense in terms of James Wildeblood’s probable priorities. He was, after all, a man of science.
He had obviously expected Earth to recontact the colony sooner. On what basis he had anticipated this, I’m not sure. The colonies were sent out on the understanding that the
y had to make it on their own, that no help could ever be guaranteed. But Wildeblood hadn’t believed that. He had thought that contact of a kind to be maintained. He hadn’t foreseen an eighty year moratorium on star flight.
James Wildeblood had obviously had doubts about the stuff of which colonists were made, and he knew as well as anyone the kinds of difficulty which would beset a small community trying to establish itself on an alien world. There was, I believe, more to his decision to take over the colony and determine its fortunes single-handed than the simple lust for power. He really believed that what he was doing was insuring the maximum probability of its success and that this end justified his means—means which even he probably considered foul rather than fair.
Perhaps he expected a contact before he died. But when none came, he prepared a little legacy. A letter addressed to someone from Earth...to a scientist from Earth. The difficulty was making sure that it would be delivered, and it was an almost insurmountable one. Even to give it a chance he had to take certain unorthodox steps. He had to arrange things so that no one in the colony could read it, and that to find out what it said they would have to consult someone who could...someone from Earth. He had to make sure that it would stay in existence, and for this reason he manufactured rumors about its possible purpose—rumors about its connection with the liberation of the people from tyrannic rule. These methods were not certain to work, but they had a chance, and, as things had turned out, they had just about (but only just) done the trick.
What Wildeblood had not anticipated was the fact that Earth had not the power to exercise any kind of authority over the colonies. We had not come armed with the power to compel the colonists to change their ways. But we were late, and we had arrived at a time when the means of persuasion were all set to come to hand, the exhaustion of the known supply.
One circumstance, and one alone, had permitted the story to reach the end that James Wildeblood had planned. That was the fact that his descendants had not found the alternative supply. They had not looked very hard. While the private and secret supply had been enough, they had stuck to it...simply because it had all the advantages associated with privacy and secrecy. Only when it was threatened had Philip and Zarnecki finally been prepared to face the difficulties attendant upon opening up a new supply, and they had been too slow.
They had, perhaps, sent out ships to other islands, to look for another set-up similar to the one James Wildeblood had found. They had not been fortunate. The odds were far too long. But they had not looked beyond that possibility. They had not thought of the other source—the real alternative.
The one that, to James Wildeblood’s mind, must not be used.
The drug was extracted from the spawn of Poseidon’s amphibians. The whaleys were most prolific in producing it, but they were not the only group of species which produced usable raw material. The smallest species, of course, did not produce enough for it to be worth exploiting them. But there were the intermediates...including the salamen.
The salamen not only offered a potential alternative, but the potential alternative. The only way to find another whaley breeding ground was to search for one—its discovery would have to be a matter of luck. But the salamen were intelligent. They could communicate. They knew where their breeding grounds were.
And if that thought had occurred to a man like Zarnecki, or a man like Philip Wildeblood....
James Wildeblood had done his best to see that it would not occur to them. He had never tried to make contact with the salamen, had initiated a policy of let well alone which had been carried on by all the generations that came after. They saw no reason to be interested in the salamen. There was no one in the colony with anything like Conrad’s priorities and interests.
James Wildeblood had had priorities somewhat akin to Conrad’s. He had been willing to dominate and exploit his fellow men, but he had not been willing to see that exploitation extended to the alien indigenes...not, that is, if he could help it.
After realizing all that, I had a better, and maybe kindlier, picture of James Wildeblood’s personality. I had a better idea of what made him tick. But the fact remained that all his ingenuity had been made necessary by his own actions. He tried to protect the salamen—but it had been him that exposed them to a terrible danger in the first place. All his desperate cunning had been directed toward the ultimate undoing of what he had, in the first place, done. Why, given his priorities, should he have put the salamen at risk in the first place?
You can answer that several ways. Maybe he wanted to give the colony every chance of success. Maybe he believed that if he hadn’t done what he did the venture would have failed. Maybe he anticipated Kilner’s findings—a host of colonies which had never surmounted their initial difficulties, but had been forced to fight a long, long battle against circumstance which they were always losing, never able to turn the corner that would put them on the right road. Maybe he believed very deeply and very sincerely in the colony project, and thought that any gamble was justifiable if it would only insure success.
That’s one way of looking at it. There’s another.
Maybe his own intellectual values, his sense of right and wrong, his concept of the universe outside and beyond himself stood in contrast to and in conflict with a deep-seated urge to win personal power. Men have an almost limitless capacity for hypocrisy, for doublethink, for the simultaneous maintenance of contradictory systems of thought which govern action. Maybe he was impelled to both the doing and the undoing by simultaneous forces he would not choose between or control. Maybe he wanted to keep his cake and eat it too.
Take your choice. I’ve never taken mine, because I’ve never felt sure enough to pretend that I could. One way or another, Wildeblood did what he did. If we were to call up his ghost and ask him, he’d tell us that the reality was the former case. And he’d certainly believe it But mightn’t that be just one more rationalization built to bridge the hypocritical doublethink of the second case?
We’ll never know. There’s no way we can. Even Wildeblood could never really know. He could never be sure of himself. I think that showed in what the cryptogram said, and the way it said it.
But one way or another, it worked. The problem, so far as it could be, was “solved.” I can’t say that I, personally, was happy with the solution. It left Philip in power, the crimes of his forefathers conveniently banished and buried. It left the system pretty much the way it was. To me, it was a repair job where what was really called for was a total replacement, but my opinions didn’t matter much in the scheme of things.
I did what I had to do.
The drug had to go. Completely. It wasn’t enough to free the colonists from dependence in the physiological sense. The drug had to be outlawed, made unattractive and useless. (Quite apart from our reasons, there was political expediency. If Philip was losing a means of exercising power over the people he wasn’t going to let that means be used by others. It had to be completely extinguished.)
What I did was to design a virus—a harmless thing that would become endemic in the colony, infecting every human body therein. Its sole function would be to act as a kind of extra chromosome, operating only one genetic faculty. It carried a blueprint for an enzymic antibody which would attack and break down a particular class of super-steroid molecules.
While the virus remained endemic—and it would sustain itself by normal processes of self-replication and infection—no one in the colony could ever get high on the drug again.
The drudge-work associated with the scheme consisted of helping the colony over its withdrawal symptoms. We controlled the release of the manufactured virus very carefully, limiting its rate of geographical spread. Because the colony was distributed over a whole chain of islands this wasn’t difficult. Thus we could handle the problem in stages, with the aid of a couple of specially-trained local medical “flying squads.”
It wasn’t pleasant and it wasn’t easy—for the colonists or for us. Getting people off an addicti
on bandwagon is always a touchy business. But we did it.
And while we did it, Philip’s publicity machine pronounced him a hero. He it was who was represented as freeing his people from a curse put upon them by evil conspirators led by Zarnecki. According to his propaganda the cryptogram became what rumor had always suggested that it was—a legacy from James Wildeblood to the colony, the means to free them from their curse. Unfortunately, the whole thing had been subverted by evil men.
I was sure that even if I’d been a village idiot I’d have been able to spot the load of lies for what it was. There were holes in the story you could drive a battleship through. But people have quite some capacity for believing what they’re told, even when it doesn’t make sense, provided that they’re told loud enough and often enough. They swallowed it.
The leader of the revolution, whose name I never did discover, didn’t end up in the mines. The new regime made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he switched sides. What his erstwhile friends thought about it, I can only conjecture. I stopped thinking of him as Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano would never have sold out. Only people without the essentials of heroism do that.
And people like me, perhaps, if I’m not already included in that description.
For myself, I believed that I hadn’t sold out very much. Sometimes it was easy to believe that, sometimes not. The people in the cave who had gathered the spawn and processed it and lived their lives entirely in darkness and by the feeble glow of electric lights were released. But they never could adapt fully to real life. I gave them what medical help I could, but it wasn’t entirely a medical problem. That was when it wasn’t so easy to believe. They would always be strangers, always fugitives, in their new world, and what kind of world is one “that hath such people in it”? Not brave, I think. Not brave at all.
But life, like or unlike politics, is the art of the attainable. It is what we can do, not what we ought to be able to do. The conditions in which we are permitted to exist are not ideal. Compromise, no matter how we may detest its individual cases, inevitably claims us, day by day, year by year. We have to do what we can within our limitations. And if we have done that, and succeeded, may we not believe that we are ahead of the game?
Wildeblood's Empire Page 16