Power

by Laurence M. Janifer

“How the Hell would I know?” Freddy was asking him in an injured nasal tenor. “I’ve been following you and Flintnose there. As if you never heard the name before.”

  “Now, show a little respect for a Councillor, there, Master Warrenton,” Turnbul said, and drew the expected profane explosion—over quickly, with little damaging fallout—from little Freddy. Five feet nine inches of blond, slightly overfed impatience—and perhaps, given another ten or fifteen years, a little feeling for his work to go with it. But one could not go round expecting miracles, Turnbul reminded himself with a sudden, heartening return of warmth; it would take fifteen hundred years, barring miracles, and miracles were distinctly not to be expected, no, sir. “Do you mean you haven’t heard anything at all from the rest of the crew?”

  “Oh, heard.” Freddy said. He half banged, half brushed at his forehead, apparently trying to put some of that falling-down blond hair of his back where it might once have belonged. “Oh, sure, if you mean that, I’ve heard a little, but it’s all second hand. I mean, you can only be in one place at a time—”

  “A vicious limitation,” Turnbul said; “we’ll see about getting it repealed the very next time somebody in the Dichtung owes us a favor. Nevertheless—”

  “All right,” Freddy said with an enormous, a magnificently resigned shrug, just as if he hadn’t meant all along to give in. “For what it’s worth: mutiny.” Turnbul blinked. Slowly he began the hunt through his pockets for the pipe he had probably left back at his Professional Gallery desk. “Mutiny?” he said. “What’s so special about that?” The question had, as far as he knew, no particular answer just then; but he felt, all the same, and for no assignable reason, the beginnings of a very cold wind at his back. If he had the answer, he asked himself, would he want it?

  Which was, of course, plain idiocy. “I don’t know why it’s special,” Freddy was saying. “But they seem to think it’s important—this once, anyhow. Holywen—IP Services, you know him—Holywen’s been talking to Gerris, and what I get through the intercom—”

  “Gerris?” Turnbul said, trying not to notice that what he was feeling was, for however brief a time, relief. “Gerris thinks everything’s important. Including, and most especially, Councillor of Church Order Floyd Waller Gerris. If that’s your source—”•

  “Now, did I say so?” Freddy asked in a clear, tense voice, holding Turnbul by the words and tone as they stood, a few feet ahead .of the others, near the end of the hallway. “Did I say that was my source? The intercom’s hooked into the crowd around Ford, too. And the Defense Councillor—Forman Alpha. It’s a mutiny. A mutiny. And they think it’s—important.” Just there, at the end, Freddy’s voice grew a little uncertain, as if he, too, had felt the stirrings of a cold reasonless wind.

  Turnbul shook his head. The pipe, wherever it was, wasn’t in his pockets. “And none of them has the slightest idea why?”

  “I don’t know what in Hell they think.” Freddy blew out his breath in an energetic imitation of sudden collapse. “But I know what they say. And that’s the word: mutiny. Now I leave it to you, Walter: isn’t that a little dramatic?”

  “It might be,” Turnbul said. “And—don’t say it— the privilege of sounding dramatic ought to be reserved for the representatives of the great news-gathering agencies and—”

  Baiting the boy was a sort of fun, but Freddy was beginning to be a little uneasy. “Don’t you ever take anything seriously?” he burst out, more tense than before.

  It deserved an honest answer. “Always. That’s why I sound as funny as I do.”

  But Freddy only shook his head, blond hair flying in a corona. “Now, that,” he said violently, “that, I just don’t understand

  “Give it time,” Turnbul told him.

  “But—oh, Hell, look: if this mutiny is something special, what could it be?” Freddy, leaning just then against the right-hand door (as usual, locked: it led to a circuitous passage returning to the Royal Apartments, where correspondents, except by very special appointment, were distinctly not welcome), spoke in an odd mixture of impatience and slow need. “Got any ideas? Any ideas at all?”

  “Several,” Turnbul said truthfully. “But why should I hand them over to you, my boy? Admittedly, we both work for the same fine organization, but—”

  “Well, damn it, that’s the point,” Freddy said rapidly, forcefully. As if, Turnbul thought, he were already on the air, persuading his lazy audience; even the blown hair was a touch of the dramatic, the earnest. “I mean, if we weren’t both 1st News guys, do you think I’d even call you Walter? All this first-naming . . . it’s okay, I suppose. Anyhow, it’s the way things work around here—but you’ve been covering the Dichtung and the Council for twelve years, and who am I? I mean, what’s six months interplanet— even the five years before that, local and then planetary . . . look, you know what I mean, right? But you’ve got all the way to nineteen-thirty before you run into a deadline, and I’ve got to have something for the thirteen-ten stat, right under the gun. You know? So I thought, maybe, if you just happened to have an idea I could use—”

  Turnbul stuck his hand up and out, as if he were directing landing traffic, and the flow of words shut instantly off. It was a good trick to remember, he told himself, and found that he was grinning. Well, after all, who could help a grin now and again? Who could really, deep-down, even dislike little Freddy Warren-ton? Except, of course, virtually all of the Council and most of the Dichtung . . . but then, it usually took a while to get rid of the idea that a source of information and a target were necessarily the same thing, and Freddy seemed to be taking longer than usual to jettison that particular notion. But. . .

  But . . . which, he reflected sternly, got nobody anywhere. So:

  “Well? Suppose there was some blood? Suppose somebody got hurt?” Freddy, taking that one in, frowned for all of six seconds, and then, analysis apparently accomplished, rearranged his face to look astonished. Even his tone changed, growing higher-pitched, more uncertain:

  “You mean really hurt? In a mutiny?” He shook his head very slowly and solemnly. “Now how in Hell would that happen?”

  Tumbul suddenly found himself tired. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. “But it’s an idea. And it’s all yours.”

  “You mean you don’t think so,” Freddy said after virtually no consideration at all. “You mean you want me to go off on some silly trail while you—”

  “I mean,” Tumbul said with all the patient firmness of a very tired man, “that between now and nineteen-thirty I will undoubtedly dig out a few more ideas. I doubt if I’ll miss that one.” And then, irresistibly: “It’s the long careful process of analysis, after all, that distinguishes the true correspondent from the mere reporter, and—”

  Freddy, not understanding, said only, “Sure,” and then, pushing open the straight-ahead door with one long leaning arm: “Look, I’m in sort of a rush . . .”

  “Go ahead,” Turnbul said. “Go right ahead. Millions of subscribers await your every word.” The plastic corridor behind the door ran on for what looked, momentarily, like miles; then one got perspective, and began to see it as an actual four hundred feet. It curved after that and began to bristle, out of sight, with exits: into the Professional Gallery, the Contact Rooms, the Great Hall, and so forth; and at last it met the tourist groups and straggled, along with other corridors and staircases and slopes and lanes, out of the Imperial Popular Government Building complex and into actual open air. Millions of subscribers . . .

  “I know,” Freddy said, snaking round Turnbul and into the corridor. “Scary, isn’t it?” And the door slammed flat and shut.

  The open air . . . there were times when a man might almost forget there was such a thing.

  Well . . . he took a long silent breath and slapped at a pocket of his blouse; his intercom, the usual bone-conduction job, went on at once. Everybody’s rumors muttered to his skull, subvocal, scattered, and confused: Holywen, Devorias, Stein . . .

  Mutiny. That
much was certain in the first few seconds’ listening. On that much, everyone was agreed.

  But a mutiny that called for a special Council meeting—unannounced, unheralded, as rushed as the one he’d just waited out had been? A mutiny that called for...

  Well, he asked himself, for what?

  Blood?

  Leverett stifled a yawn and tried to go right on looking as if he were paying close attention and thinking statesmanlike, Dichtung-worthy thoughts. It wasn’t easy: Gaughlin, who had the floor due to a small attendance and a lack of immediate interest in anything else, sounded as if he were going to keep it for another two hours at the least, from eleven straight through to thirteen; and chairing the Dichtung might be an honor, rightly considered, but it was an honor that could let one in for some sad days, now and again. Ordinarily, for instance, the Dichtung Hall would be filling up slowly but with reassuring regularity—after all, it was the middle of the Spring Term, and activity tended toward a peak about then—but the word regarding

  Gaughlin had, undoubtedly, been passed round: the place was no better than a quarter full and had remained that way for altogether too long, altogether too long.

  Gaughlin, who had his own notions about revisions of the voting-rights statutes, was hardly the man to be deterred by the refusals and the crushing verdicts of four or five years; Gaughlin was what he would apparently always be, a man of principle. Briefly, Leverett wondered why the sort of people who called themselves “men of principle” were, nearly always, the most incredible bores as well, and decided that he had no answer, being distracted by the welcome sight of at least one new entrant in the Hall.

  Principle: it wasn’t, clearly, principle alone that created the bores; the Dichtung’s late arrival, old Norin, just back from Council and still dressed in the official white drop, was a living example of principle, one way or another, if ever Leverett had seen one, and Norin could hardly be classed with the bores. In fact, Leverett considered, a little boredom from Isidor Norin might almost, sometimes, in a way, be a relief.. . .

  But the people who called themselves principled . . . ah well: it was one way to avoid listening to Gaughlin, such silly mental chatter, but it petered out altogether too rapidly. Somehow, and after nearly no time at all, the overfull and over-rapid bass tones came through, and before long one was actually attempting to find sense in the stark, simple foolishness to which the man had apparently committed himself. . . .

  “If we trust the great people of our many and various districts ... if we trust the sovereign peoples of the inhabited worlds themselves—if, mind you, we have a real trust in them and not simply a form of words mouthed because it might garner a vote here or a step toward some new position there—”

  Now, anyone but Gaughlin, it was perfectly clear, would draw objections from six separate members regarding that last phrase or so; but Gaughlin could probably get away with calling Penn VII not only a hypocrite, as he had just done, but a degenerate cretin as well; and no one, Leverett told himself, was expected to object. Objections, one knew, only postponed the time of Gaughlin’s running out of wind; besides which, Leverett considered, it was entirely possible that those members of the Dichtung unhappily present were having better luck with the process of avoiding Gaughlin’s thick drone than the Dichtung’s poor overburdened Chairman.

  “—if we have that trust, gentlemen, then why don’t we show it? Why don’t we give to those sovereign peoples an authentic opportunity to show their sovereignty, to elect directly not only our revered Emperor—” Penn was apparently not to be called a cretin, Leverett noted without interest—“but the Council and even the Dichtung as well? Gentlemen, are we afraid of the results of that trust? If we are, gentlemen, I tell you frankly that we do not have that trust, and that we do not, in fact, really have any trustful feeling at all toward the great people of our peaceful Comity, though certainly we ought to have—yes, gentlemen, certainly we ought! But I will tell you why we deviate, gentlemen; I do not scruple to tell you why. It is because—”

  Not (Leverett thought, unable to restrain himself from a small sigh) that anyone needed to be told. First, of course, there was the impression that one had heard the speech four or five times before; and, second, there was probably not a member of the Dichtung, Gaughlin himself possibly excepted, who did, in the sense required, trust the people. The people, plainly, were not trustworthy.

  After all, Honorable Member (Leverett allowed himself the faint luxury of a silent reply), we do not trust the people because the people, Honorable Member, are not to be trusted. History provided enough lessons: one trusted free elections only up to a point, and a carefully hedged-about and defined point it was. The sovereign electors and masters of the world, as they were called (chiefly by Gaughlin)—in short, the general population—did, in all truth, usually know what was best for them; but they tended to know it six months, or fifteen years, too late. Therefore, Honorable Member, one puts on the brakes— one limits free elections, one creates appointive positions, one hedges votes of confidence about with rules, with regulations, with softeners of every blow—because human beings showed no discernible tendency to give up being human, to give up reacting slowly, to give up the imbalance between remarkable hindsight and'what sometimes appeared to be no foresight whatever; but that, being a bit complex at the best of times, was hardly Gaughlin’s way.

  Gaughlin foresaw, somewhere in the regions of his vocabulary and quite possibly even in the actual regions of his actual mind, a day in which human beings were going to be all the fine things every Honorable Member had said they were since the beginning of the Comity. How such a reform was to be accomplished Gaughlin never mentioned—but that, clearly, was a detail. Meanwhile:

  “Honorable Members, I plead with you to take the course of sanity. For it is no more than simple sanity to agree that, if the peoples of the Comity are in the least trustworthy, if they have shown their mettle again and again, if—”

  Wait, Leverett told himself.

  He shut his eyes and set his memory to the track of the sixty seconds just passed. In that time, something had happened; no, he had seen something. . . .

  Wait.

  His eyes opened. Norin sat, still uniformed for Council, still as grim and sharp-beaked as ever before. But his face was a dead white, and his mouth worked very subtly, as if he were speaking only to himself, or to God. He’d come in ordinarily enough— or had he? Leverett was forced to ask himself; Gaughlin seemed to act as a fog not only to the ear but to all other senses as well; it was one more talent which

  Leverett felt the Dichtung might do well without— but the old man’s disturbance had grown as the seconds went by. Norin hadn’t looked so thoroughly shaken since. . . .

  Since, Leverett realized, the death of Penn VI, twenty years before, when Leverett had himself been no more than a youngster, stocked thoroughly with the most grandiloquent possible visions of the Dichtung; well, everyone had those, and, given time, they dissolved slowly into quite an honest reality . . .

  Watching Norin, Leverett told himself firmly that there was little time to waste: a Norin fresh from Council was clearly going to explode throughout the Hall. The question was, simply, How could such an explosion be timed? and (as corollary) How might it be muted, or at the very least directed? . . .

  A bundle of words without any hint of an answer, at least until Norin disclosed the source of his disturbance, or allowed Leverett sufficient room to predicate it; but a bundle which revealed to Leverett, without surprise but with a certain wryness, why he had been chairing the Dichtung for five years—and was likely to go on, he thought, until one’s eardrums wore thin with the constant pressure of speeches. . . . Whatever Norin had for him, it simply could not be that serious; for those with sensitive eyes and ears the really black news didn’t spring out of the empty air inside the Hall. There was always some warning, though perhaps not very much.

  And yet. . .

  Leverett, suddenly both tired and tense, signaled to old Wright
at the back of the Hall, and when Wright wandered sleepily up to the Chair asked him to get Norin’s attention; plainly and simply, Leverett was no longer sure that the explosion would be good enough to wait until Gaughlin was willing to give it the floor. Wright went sleepily, fatly back, and tapped the thin, rigid old man with a stubby hand.

  Norin looked round, then, as if he expected the summons to have come from the Palace Executioner; he listened, nodding, and then—all of this byplay beginning slowly to disturb Gaughlin, for whose peace of mind Leverett had no present time to spare—came himself cautiously to the Chair, and stood below it at Leverett’s left hand, white as marble, his mouth set in a line so solidly drawn nothing, as it seemed, could break it.

  “Well?”

  A bad beginning. Norin grimaced. “Not well,” he said. “Not well at all, Charlie.” And nothing more than that.

  Well, then, Leverett told himself, try again. The smallest matters seemed suddenly important, the folds of Norm’s drap, the tension of his eyes and brow. “Now, Isidor, it isn’t that bad,” Leverett said, attempting a little deliberate clumsiness. “It can’t be that bad.”

  Enclosed, dangerous, full of knowledge, Norin nodded at the gambit and accepted it: “All right.”

  And more silence. “Let’s not spar, Isidor,” Leverett said after a second or so. “I’m for you; you know that.”

  “I’m not at all certain that I do.” The eyes never changed, and the old body remained rigid, upright, waiting. Somewhere in the background Gaughlin was still traveling the lengthy, baroque curves of his speech:

  “. . . difficulty of creating a system which would effectually perform as all sensible men would want it to perform, and . . .” Leverett shut his mind to that, briefly cursing whatever had put him in the Chair— his own talents, the finger of Penn . . .

  “Try me, then,” he said at last.

  Norin stepped back, seeming to step even lower below the podium on which the Chair rested. “Not yet. Later. You’ll know.”