Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  There were babblings, but there was no other Corianis. Jack Bedell’s orders had been followed, and the other ship was gone. In fact, Bedell was the only man in the control-room who had any clear ideas. The quartermaster made the call, somehow numbly. Because he was bereft of all opinions, he used the form all ships use when coming in from space, to ask for clearance for descent.

  Now every man in the control room heard the astounded reply from below.

  “Corianis? You’re the Corianis? What the hell happened! You’re written off as lost in space! Come on down! Your coordinates are—Wait a minute!” They heard the voice calling excitedly, away from the microphone at the spaceport down below. “The Corianis is coming in! She’s not lost! She’s coming in! She’s coming in!”

  There was dead silence in the control-room. And Bedell said in an explanatory tone, with something like diffidence, “He’s surprised to hear from us. Naturally! This is our original time-track. In this sequence of events, we’ve been missing in space for almost three weeks. Our being in the other sequence was an unstable condition. We got into it because we ran into a mass of rock and metal out in emptiness. We couldn’t skip ahead or aside, but we couldn’t stay in contact with it long enough to be destroyed. So we skipped out of that sequence of events. When we hit the other Corianis, just now, it was the same thing in reverse. We didn’t belong in that sequence of events. So when we couldn’t skip past or to any side of it—why—we came back to our own universe.”

  He paused, and said painstakingly, “It’s very much like the old nursery rhyme, really. ‘There was a man in our town and he was wondrous wise. He jumped into a bramble bush, and scratched out both his eyes. And when he found his eyes were out, with all his might and main, he jumped into another bush, and scratched them in again.’ I’m explaining to you because they’ll have some trouble believing us.”

  XIII

  He was quite right. On Maninea they didn’t know anything about recent events. Rather, the recent events they knew about were quite different ones from those the passengers on the Corianis remembered. They were a different sequence.

  But things adjusted. The Planetary President resumed his office, with no competition. The Minister of State for Kholar had the shakes for several days, and then dignifiedly suggested that the trade-treaty under discussion be completed. It was. And the aides and assistants and secretaries, and the wives and nurses and children, were all congratulated for their .success in reaching port after their disaster in space.

  But Jack Bedell didn’t want any of it. Nor did Kathy. Bedell wanted to work out, at the Astrophysical Institute on Maninea, the mathematics and the new information derivable from his experience. He was offered living-quarters there, for his convenience. He conferred with Kathy. They went off for a honeymoon in the Leaning Hills district, and then settled down at the Institute for the time being.

  There was only one professional consequence for Bedell from the Corianis disaster. The Planetary President invited Bedell and Kathy to the Presidential palace, and gave him a medal—which he passed on to Kathy to wear if she felt like it. And then, while they were having luncheon, the President said, “Hm. We crashed into the other Corianis at full overdrive speed. We bounced back into our own time-line—our own sequence of events. But what happened to the other ship?”

  “Nothing,” said Bedell. “We didn’t hit it. We bounced to keep from hitting it. So they undoubtedly decided that we had run away. And that would be proof that we were the impostors. So the real you—and—everybody is received without question in the best human society again, and everybody’s satisfied.”

  “I—see,” said the President doubtfully.

  But he didn’t. Nor did anybody else. The Minister of Commerce had a bad case of nerves for some time after. So did others. And it is history that after the trade-treaty was concluded, it was a very white-faced group which boarded a space-ship to go back to Kholar, and it is history that none of them ever made another space-journey.

  But everything seemed to work out all right. Once, to be sure, Kathy brought up a subject Bedell hadn’t mentioned.

  “There was another you on Kholar,” she said uneasily, “and you said there was another me. And you wrote to the other you and suggested that—that he try to get acquainted with the other me…Do you suppose he did?”

  “Oh, I suppose so!” said Bedell abstractedly. “If I’d gotten a letter from him, saying something like that, I’d have looked up the girl.”

  Kathy grimaced. “What I’m pondering is—are they happy?”

  “Why not?” asked Bedell in surprise. “Why shouldn’t they be? They’re the same as us, aren’t they?” Then he said cautiously. “Mmmmm. We’ve been doing some computations at the Astrophysical Institute here, Kathy. We’re pretty sure that what happened to the Corianis by accident can be accomplished on purpose. There are some of us who want to take a small ship and ram a minor asteroid in overdrive and see what other sequence of events we can run into. We’ll be able to get back, of course!”

  Kathy drew a deep breath. She began to speak. She’d been a very shy person; she’d found it difficult to talk to anybody. But it was surprising how many things she found to say, without hesitation or delay or embarrassment, in telling her husband what she thought about that proposal.

  The Servant Problem

  William Tenn

  * * *

  This was the day of complete control…

  Garomma, the Servant of All, the World’s Drudge, the Slavey of Civilization, placed delicately scented fingertips to his face, closed his eyes and allowed himself to luxuriate in the sensation of ultimate power, absolute power, power such as no human being had even dared to dream of before this day.

  Complete control. Complete…

  Except for one man. One single ambitious maverick of a man. One very useful man. Should he be strangled at his desk this afternoon, that was the question, or should he be allowed a few more days, a few more weeks, of heavily supervised usefulness? His treason, his plots, were unquestionably coming to a head. Well, Garomma would decide that later. At leisure.

  Meanwhile, in all other respects, with everyone else there was control. Control not only of men’s minds but of their glands as well. And those of their children.

  And, if Moddo’s estimates were correct, of their children’s children.

  “Yea,” Garomma muttered to himself, suddenly remembering a fragment of the oral text his peasant father had taught him years ago, “yea, unto the seventh generation.”

  What ancient book, burned in some long-ago educational fire, had that text come from, he wondered? His father would not be able to tell him, nor would any of his father’s friends and neighbors; they had all been wiped out after the Sixth District Peasant Uprising thirty years ago.

  An uprising of a type that could never possibly occur again. Not with complete control.

  Someone touched his knee gently, and his mind ceased its aimless foraging. Moddo. The Servant of Education, seated below him in the depths of the vehicle, gestured obsequiously at the transparent, missile-proof cupola that surrounded his leader down to the waist.

  “The people,” he stated in his peculiar half-stammer. “There. Outside.”

  Yes. They were rolling through the gates of the Hovel of Service and into the city proper. On both sides of the street and far into the furthest distance were shrieking crowds as black and dense and exuberant as ants on a piece of gray earthworm. Garomma, the Servant of All, could not be too obviously busy with his own thoughts; he was about to be viewed by those he served so mightily.

  He crossed his arms upon his chest and bowed to right and left in the little dome that rose like a tower from the squat black conveyance. Bow right, bow left, and do it humbly. Right, left—and humbly, humbly. Remember, you are the Servant of All.

  As the shrieks rose in volume, he caught a glimpse of Moddo nodding approval from beneath. Good old Moddo. This was his day of triumph as well. The achievement of complete control was
most thoroughly and peculiarly the achievement of the Servant of Education. Yet Moddo sat in heavy-shadowed anonymity behind the driver with Garomma’s personal bodyguards; sat and tasted his triumph only with his leader’s tongue—as he had for more than twenty-five years now.

  Fortunately for Moddo, such a taste was rich enough for his system. Unfortunately, there were others—one other at least—who required more…

  Garomma bowed to right and left and, as he bowed, looked curiously through the streaming webs of black-uniformed motorcycle police that surrounded his car. He looked at the people of Capital City, his people, his as everything and everyone on Earth was his. Jamming madly together on the sidewalks, they threw their arms wide as his car came abreast of them.

  “Serve us, Garomma,” they chanted. “Serve us! Serve us!”

  He observed their contorted faces, the foam that appeared at the mouth-corners of many, the half-shut eyes and ecstatic expressions, the swaying men, the writhing women, the occasional individual who collapsed in an unnoticed climax of happiness. And he bowed. With his arms crossed upon his chest, he bowed. Right and left. Humbly.

  Last week, when Moddo had requested his views on problems of ceremony and protocol relative to today’s parade, the Servant of Education had commented smugly on the unusually high incidence of mob hysteria expected when his chief’s face was seen. And Garomma had voiced a curiosity he’d been feeling for a long time.

  “What goes on in their minds when they see me, Moddo? I know they worship and get exhilarated and all that. But what precisely do you fellows call the emotion when you talk about it in the labs and places such as the Education Center?”

  The tall man slid his hand across his forehead in the gesture that long years had made thoroughly familiar to Garomnma.

  “They are experiencing a trigger release,” he said slowly, staring over Garomma’s shoulder as if he were working out the answer from the electronically pinpointed world map on the back wall. “All the tensions these people accumulate in their daily round of niggling little prohibitions and steady coercions, all the frustrations of ‘don’t do this and don’t do this, do that’ have been organized by the Service of Education to be released explosively the moment they see your picture or hear your voice.”

  “Trigger release. Hm! I’ve never thought of it quite that way.”

  Moddo held up a hand in rigid earnestness. “After all, you’re the one man whose life is supposedly spent in an abject obedience beyond anything they’ve ever known. The man who holds the—the intricate strands of the world’s coordination in his patient, unwearying fingers; the ultimate and hardest-worked employee; the—the scapegoat of the multitudes!”

  Garomma had grinned at Moddo’s scholarly eloquence. Now, however, as he observed his screaming folk from under submissive eyelids, he decided that the Servant of Education had been completely right.

  On the Great Seal of the World State was it not written: All Men Must Serve Somebody, But Only Garomma Is the Servant of All?

  Without him, they knew, and knew irrevocably, oceans would break through dikes and flood the land, infections would appear in men’s bodies and grow rapidly into pestilences that could decimate whole districts, essential services would break down so that an entire city could die of thirst in a week, and local officials would oppress the people and engage in lunatic wars of massacre with each other. Without him, without Garomma working day and night to keep everything running smoothly, to keep the titanic forces of nature and civilization under control. They knew, because these things happened whenever “Garomma was tired of serving.”

  What were the unpleasant interludes of their lives to the implacable dreary—but, oh, so essential!—toil of his? Here, in this slight, serious-looking man bowing humbly right and left, right and left, was not only the divinity that made it possible for Man to exist comfortably on Earth, but also the crystallization of all the sub-races that ever enabled an exploited people to feel that things could be worse, that relative to the societal muck beneath them, they were, in spite of their sufferings, as lords and monarchs in comparison.

  No wonder they stretched their arms frantically to him, the Servant of All, the World’s Drudge, the Slavey of Civilization, and screamed their triumphant demand with one breath, their fearful plea with the next: “Serve us, Garomma! Serve us, serve us, serve us!”

  Didn’t the docile sheep he had herded as a boy in the Sixth District mainland to the northwest, didn’t the sheep also feel that he was their servant as he led them and drove them to better pastures and cooler streams, as he protected them from enemies and removed pebbles from their feet, all to the end that their smoking flesh would taste better on his father’s table? But these so much more useful herds of two-legged, well-brained sheep were as thoroughly domesticated. And on the simple principle they’d absorbed that government was the servant of the people and the highest power in the government was the most abysmal servant.

  His sheep. He smiled at them paternally, possessively, as his special vehicle rolled along the howling, face-filled mile between the Hovel of Service and the Educational Center. His sheep. And these policemen on motorcycles, these policemen on foot whose arms were locked against the straining crowds every step of the way, these were his sheepdogs. Another kind of domesticated animal.

  That’s all he had been, thirty-three years ago, when he’d landed on this island fresh from a rural Service of Security training school to take his first government job as a policeman in Capital City. A clumsy, overexcited sheepdog. One of the least important sheepdogs of the previous regime’s Servant of All.

  But three years later, the peasant revolt in his own district had given him his chance. With his special knowledge of the issues involved as well as the identity of the real leaders, he’d been able to play an important role in crushing the rebellion. And then, his new and important place in the Service of Security had enabled him to meet promising youngsters in the other services—Moddo, particularly, the first and most useful human he had personally domesticated.

  With Moddo’s excellent administrative mind at his disposal, he had become an expert at the gracious art of political throat-cutting, so that when his superior made his bid for the highest office in the world, Garomma had been in the best possible position to sell him out and become the new Servant of Security. And from that point, with Moddo puffing along in his wake and working out the minutiae of strategy, it had been a matter of a few years before he had been able to celebrate his own successful bid in the sizzling wreckage of the preceding administration’s Hovel of Service.

  But the lesson he had taught the occupants of that blasted, projectile-ridden place he had determined never to forget himself. He couldn’t know how many Servants of Security before him had used their office to reach the mighty wooden stool of the Servant of All: after all, the history books, and all other books, were rewritten thoroughly at the beginning of every new regime; and the Oral Tradition, usually a good guide to the past if you could sift the facts out properly, was silent on this subject. It was obvious, however, that what he had done, another could do—that the Servant of Security was the logical, self-made heir to the Servant of All.

  And the trouble was you couldn’t do anything about the danger but be watchful.

  He remembered when his father had called him away from childhood games and led him out to the hills to tend the sheep. How he had hated the lonesome, tiresome work! The old man had realized it and, for once, had softened sufficiently to attempt an explanation.

  “You see, son, sheep are what they call domestic animals. So are dogs. Well, we can domesticate sheep and we can domesticate dogs to guard the sheep, but for a smart, wide-awake shepherd who’ll know what to do when something real unusual comes up and will be able to tell us about it, well, for that we need a man.”

  “Gee, Pa,” he had said, kicking disconsolately at the enormous shepherd’s crook they’d given him, “then why don’t you—whatdoyoucallit—domesticate a man?”

&nbs
p; His father had chuckled and then stared out heavily over the shaggy brow of the hill. “Well, there are people trying to do that, too, and they’re getting better at it all the time. The only trouble, once you’ve got him domesticated, he isn’t worth beans as a shepherd. He isn’t sharp and excited once he’s tamed. He isn’t interested enough to be any use at all.”

  That was the problem in a nutshell, Garomma reflected. The Servant of Security, by the very nature of his duties, could not be a domesticated animal.

  He had tried using sheepdogs at the head of Security; over and over again he had tried them. But they were always inadequate and had to be replaced by men. And—one year, three years, five years in office—men sooner or later struck for supreme power and had to be regretfully destroyed.

  As the current Servant of Security was about to be destroyed. The only trouble—the man was so damned useful! You had to time these things perfectly to get the maximum length of service from the rare, imaginative individual who filled the post to perfection and yet cut him down the moment the danger outweighed the value. And since, with the right man, the danger existed from the very start, you had to watch the scale carefully, unremittingly…

  Garomma sighed. This problem was the only annoyance in a world that had been virtually machined to give him pleasure. But it was, inevitably, a problem that was with him always, even in his dreams. Last night had been positively awful.

  Moddo touched his knee again to remind him that he was on exhibition. He shook himself and smiled his gratitude. One had to remember that dreams were only dreams.