Mal shook his head stubbornly. “I never heard of you,” he said. “What is this Underground of yours?”
“I’m about to tell you,” said Sorrel.
And so he did.
“Hopper,” said Sorrel, “you’ve heard how when the Quarantine was slapped on us humans that things sort of blew high wide and handsome for a while. Practically everybody had a different idea about what ought to be done about the Aliens penning us up in our own back yard. Right about then somebody either back on Earth or out on the stars somewhere must have sat down and put in some heavy thinking on how to lightning-rod all those emotional reactions so that they didn’t tear human society apart. Well, whoever did it, or maybe it was even more than one mind, came up with two fine let-off-steam-type organizations, being as you know the Archaist movement and the Neo-Taylorites. And things settled down. You either thought the Aliens were a good deal and thought along Neo-Taylorite lines; or you figured they weren’t and bought yourself a suit of armor and went Archaist.
“All fine and dandy for the first half century.
“Then, by God, whoever had done the original thinking began to notice that he’d overlooked something. The Archies and the Neos were all fine and good for ninety some per cent of the race, but there was a bit of a headache in the group remaining. Now, why was that, you ask.
“Well, I’ll tell you. In that last group were all the people who in normal times would be bumping their noses up against some kind of risky business. They would have been starting revolutions, exploring frontiers, going up in balloons, down in bathyscapes, or out in ships, losing themselves on mountain tops or away in jungles. They weren’t crackpots, you understand, like some of the Archies and the Neos, they just liked excitement and action in doing something that hadn’t been done before. They were the physical-first-and-mental-afterward boys; and there was no spot for them in the new setup. So what did you have?
He paused and waited, evidently for Mal to say something. Stubbornly, Mal let him wait.
“You had trouble, of course,” Sorrel said, finally. “Now it wasn’t that there weren’t plenty of things to be done on Earth and the planets that hadn’t been done there; or that there wasn’t plenty of unexplored territory out in the solar system to go take a look at. But for the type of mind I’m talking about, all that had been spoiled by the Aliens. Our kind got their kick out of doing what nobody else had done or could do. And while there was no direct evidence to the fact that the Aliens had explored our own system long ago, everybody knew they sure as heck could do it if they wanted to—and where was a poor, ordinary human to get any credit out of a situation like that?
“So we had the Gang Period—if you’ll remember your history of some years back—and general hell-raising by this minority I’m talking about; until, lo and behold, the first pellucite strike was made here on Venus.
“Then, what do you know? Three particular points became apparent almost at once. One—pellucite was valuable as hell to half a dozen worlds way down in the center of the Galaxy or some place equally remote. Two—it was so scattered that large company mining was impractical. Three—and top surprise—humans were the only ones who could handle it in the raw state with impunity. Well, kiss my Aunt Susie! said this particular little section of the population I’ve been talking about, but here’s something those Aliens can’t do! Me for Venus! And off it went.
“Result—New Dorado, the roughest, toughest, sweetest little old hell-raising hole in the Galaxy, by God. The same people that had been kicking around Earth getting into general trouble, came up here, sweated themselves white in the lowlands, drank themselves dizzy on the plateau and strutted around with their chests stuck out, looking each other in the eye and telling each other that, at last, by all that’s precious, they were somebody!”
Sorrel broke off and looked at his audience quizzically.
“Well—?” prompted Mal.
“Well, now, what do you think?” drawled Sorrel. Mal frowned at him.
“It looks to me like you’re building up to the accusation that the Aliens deliberately organized pellucite mining to keep one section of the human race busy.”
Sorrel said nothing, merely looked back at him with glittering eyes, an icy, savage humor flickering in their depths.
“But what—why would they want to do something like that?” said Mal.
“Maybe somebody asked them, you think?” replied Sorrel.
“Somebody?” echoed Mal. “But who—oh, I see.” He looked squarely at the other man. “You think the Company got it done.”
“Well, you sure are sharp,” said Sorrel, throwing a glance at the little miner. “Now, who would have thought he’d see through it that fast. Took us nearly twenty years ourselves, didn’t it, Jim?”
“But why would the Aliens do that for the Company?”
“They do business together, don’t they?” demanded Sorrel. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Sure, a favor. Why not?”
Mal looked doubtful.
“There’s no proof—” he began hesitantly. “Look, how much of a coincidence can you take?” broke in Sorrel. “There was only one trouble spot and it got taken care of, didn’t it? And not in any ordinary way.”
“Perhaps,” said Mal. “But there’s a difference between coincidences when they’re looked at from a small point of view or a large. Looked at from the point of view of Earth or from your own point of view as a member of a relatively small group or class, the odds against a pellucite discovery at that particular time and place were so astronomically big as to make the affair look fishy. Now, wait—” went on Mal, holding up his hand as Sorrel showed symptoms of interrupting—“I’ll even bring up something you haven’t, and that’s this business of our not knowing what they use pellucite for. We believe that it’s a petrified secretion—like amber—of some ages-extinct native Venusian vegetation—and that’s all we know. But what I’m trying to point out is first, that its very suspiciousness gives it a clean bill of health. If the Company and the Aliens deliberately intended to deceive everyone, why would they be so obvious about it? Add to that the fact I’m driving at, which is that when you’re dealing with the Federation, umpteen peoples and worlds, the law of averages makes this type of coincidence quite reasonable.”
“Oh, hell!” said Sorrel, disgust heavy in his tones. “It’s easy to sit there and carp. Do you want to hear the rest of this, or don’t you?”
“All right,” Mal shrugged. “Provisionally, I’ll accept the fact. Go on. What’s this got to do with your Underground?”
Sorrel told him.
The Company, instrumental in the spore-seeding that had begun to terraform Venus decades earlier, already had empty warehouses and a vacant base on the plateau when the pellucite boom began. Refurbished and staffed, these quickly became the supply center for the spate of eager prospectors, and no one gave that a second thought.
“Yeah, I was as itchy as anybody, back then—hell, I was only eighteen when I came out here on a work contract.” Sorrel paused, his face abstract for a moment. Margie’s face bore a sort of sad echo of Sorrel’s distant look, Mal noticed, suddenly. Margie had told him something of her father. Already an older man when news of the boom came to Earth, he had been one of those unable any longer to suppress their adventurous leanings. For him the adventure had been disastrous.
Sorrel was going on with his story, telling them how the sharper observers among the miners—and some of the company men, too—had slowly begun to realize that they had been supplied with no more than a large playground, in which their spirit of adventure could make all the mudpies they wanted.
“…The Company was subtle about it, sure, but once you put the pieces together its control could be seen easily. For one thing, the price the Company paid, as middleman, for pellucite was always rising or falling—in response to the Galactic market, they said. Meanwhile, though, the prices the Company was charging for supplies was also rising and falling; that was supposed to be in a ratio wit
h something called the ‘current operating cost index.’
“We began to get the idea of what was going on when we noticed that the two factors always managed to keep any one miner from making a really big fortune. Lots of guys made enough to let them go back to Earth for a life just below the luxury level. But no one, in almost three decades, ever managed to keep enough to put himself on a financial par with any of the group that control the Company. We decided to look into that—” said Sorrel.
The type of people drawn to the plateau were inclined by nature for action—particularly of the. dangerous sort. With a pool like this a sort of spy organization had been possible. Miners, ostensibly retiring to Earth, had infiltrated many facets of Earthside society. Among other things, they had kept their eyes open for similarly-inclined spirits, and gradually they built up an excellent network of men and women who watched all that happened in the System.
In fact, the miners had built something very like a cadre for a revolutionary movement, with men and women of the sort who enjoy that sort of danger. Strangely, they were not so much like the kind of people who dream up revolutions, as they were like those who fight in them; and so for a number of years now they had been an organization without a real head, without a goal. All they had in mind was to try to find the truth in a situation they knew to be contrived. They only did it because it was the sort of dangerous work their kind needed to feel really alive—yet, without any clearly defined purpose at all, they had actually gone a long way.
“We know most of how things stand,” said Sorrel, earnestly speaking at last to Mal and Dirk and Margie, with the banter and half sneer of his earlier conversation forgotten. “Human society is sick—do you know that? Whatever the Company and the Aliens have been gaining from the Quarantine, the rest of us have been paying the price for. We just aren’t built to stagnate. Not us. There’s only two active outfits in the solar system today. One’s the Company and the other’s us. In the Company there’s maybe twelve to twenty thousand people who are pretty sure they know what they want and are out after it. In the Underground we’ve got up to a hundred thousand men and women who are alive and want to work, but right now are just marking time. But the rest of the race is boring itself to death. You know what the average character does back on Earth? He gets up at around nine in the morning. He goes to some piddling little job that he keeps more to satisfy his need for self-respect than to ensure him an income, which, one way or another with all these allowances and aids, he’d get anyway. He puts in two, three hours, then knocks off. He goes home. Or he goes out and runs around outdoors playing some kind of sport. He has his big meal of the day. He goes out and takes in some entertainment. Then he goes home and sleeps—sleeps late until nine the next morning.
“Fine—isn’t it? Ideal life for five years—maybe ten. Then what? Remember this is the average guy. He gets kind of tired of golf or tennis, or surf boarding—hell, you can’t play games all the time. He gets tired of shows and night clubs. He needs an interest. He’d like to find it in his work, but his work isn’t that important—or maybe it’s a job he has a sneaking suspicion could be handled just as well mechanically or electronically if somebody a little higher up wasn’t justifying his own job by keeping as many men under him as possible. So he gets bored. He gets deep bored. Too far for any kind of game or entertainment or play-work to pull him out of it. So he goes Archie or Neo—and becomes half a fanatic about it. Do you know the largest number of converts to either of those two outfits are men and women in their forties? It’s true.
“And what is he, once he’s put on either a tin suit or a yellow robe of peace?” demanded Sorrel. “I’ll tell you: He’d dead! Dead and pickled and coffined and buried. And anybody who kids himself differently is a fool and a liar.”
A little space of silence put a period to Sorrel’s words. For a moment it held the room; and then Dirk spoke up half belligerently.
“And what’ve you got to offer?” he said. “You say the Archaists are dead. What about your Underground? What do they do about the situation?”
Sorrel looked at him.
“Thank you, my friend,” he said, sliding back into accents of lazy insult. “The gentleman from the audience—” he went on, turning to Mal and Margie—“has just inquired what the Underground plans to do about the situation. Now, I’ll be honest with you honest folks. A year ago, I couldn’t have answered that question. Really answered it, I mean, instead of mouthing a lot of pretty words Archie and Neo style.
“The Aliens chased us home to stay until we could build an interstellar drive. The Company started honestly to look for it, but when they saw how good it was without one, they started backing the Neos and sabotaging their own men—yes, we know about that, too,” said Sorrel, grinning savagely at Mal. “You’d be surprised how many good men have been bought off, warned off, tricked off, or just plain gotten rid of.”
“You still haven’t answered me,” insisted Dirk.
“Oh, yes—what we aim to do. I’ll lay it on the line,” said Sorrel. “We want that drive of yours for ourselves alone. We want to take it and keep it quiet. We want to build our own ships and put the drive in them and go sneak a look at this Federation. And if we don’t like what we see, then one day the Aliens are going to wake up to find an OFF-LIMITS sign posted by Pluto, and a fleet of armed ships standing just behind it to make sure they read it clean and plain.”
He looked at them. He looked at Dirk, at Margie, at Mal.
“Catch?” he said.
Chapter Ten
For a long moment after Sorrel’s last words, no one said anything. For a space of time, Mal sat, letting the implications of the Underground man’s words sink in. When he roused himself, he became suddenly aware that all the others were looking at him. Margie, Dirk, Jim and Sorrel, they all sat silent, waiting for his response.
He exhaled a slow breath and turned to Sorrel. “Let me sleep on it,” he said.
Sorrel nodded, his swarthy face understanding. Then he rose and stepped over to the wall. He pressed a recessed stud, and a panel slid back revealing a force lift. He waited until the others had filed past him, then entered himself.
“If you want anything, just buzz,” he said, waving at the console of controls. Then the panel slid shut again, and Mal was alone.
He pressed his buzzing head between the palms of his two hands and tried to resolve his mental chaos into some kind of order. But it would not resolve. Ideas, plans, concepts and beliefs—the minute he approached them, they went bounding off into meaninglessness, or changed appearance so radically that he did not recognize them.
And eventually his tired body won its battle, and he slept.
He dreamed that he was talking to Peep.
“This is a dream, you know,” he kept reassuring the little Atakit.
“Of course, my young friend,” replied Peep agreeably, sitting up and looking like a grand-fatherly squirrel blown up to fairy-story dimensions.
“You’re really in your room on the Betsy,” continued Mal.
“So we are,” said Peep. And so indeed they were, as Mal recognized when he looked around him. It was a little shadowy and indistinct, but there was the neatly made-up bed that Peep had never bothered to sleep in, the chairs, the other furniture and the wall screen turned wide open to show a view of the stars, which Peep liked to sit and watch while contemplating some question of his philosophy .
“Now, look here, Peep,” said Mal. “You’re the cause of all this.”
“I?” replied Peep.
“Well, not you alone,” said Mal, finding himself growing confused again. “But your kind.”
“The Atakits, you mean?” offered Peep encouragingly.
“Not just the Atakits,” said Mal desperately. “All Aliens. No—I mean—”
“You mean,” said Peep firmly. “Everyone who isn’t human.”
“Well, I suppose I do,” replied Mal defensively. “All right—suppose I do. Suppose I take you as a representative of every in
telligence that isn’t human; and I ask you, ‘ What are your intentions with regard to the human race?'"
“I beg your pardon,” answered Peep. “But do we have to have intentions?”
“Why—” said Mal, astounded. “Of course— don’t you naturally?”
“Let me ask you something,” said Peep. “Speaking to you as a representative of all intelligences that are human, suppose I ask you, ‘ What are your intentions toward each individual race in what you humans call the Alien Federation? ’”
“Aha!” snapped Mal triumphantly. “But you see I can’t answer that because I don’t know each individual race in the Alien Federation.”
“True,” conceded Peep. “Well, then, what about we Atakits?”
Mal found himself uncomfortably at a loss for words.
“Well?” asked Peep.
Mal fished frantically in his mind for the answer he was sure was there. But no words came. He was aware of Peep floating nearer, as the room in his dream appeared to stretch and grow.
“Well?” cried Peep.
The room had become a huge and echoing hall of justice. Peep, grown enormously, towered over him. Somehow he had become dressed in a tall cocked hat and a resplendent uniform. Medals glittered on his chest and his voice rang out like a trumpet.
“Well?” thundered Peep. He loomed far over Mal’s head and his voice echoed up to the ceiling. “ As the right honorable and thoroughly accredited ambassador plenipotentiary from the ancient and established race of Atakits, I demand that you, Malcolm Fletcher, human, do now and for all time inform the universe of the intentions of the human race toward all other peoples now and henceforward until the end of physical time. And you shall speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God amen!”
Mal woke up in a cold sweat. He had a hard time getting back to sleep.
Chapter Eleven
When he woke up again, it was morning and someone’s hand on the bank of controls had turned the walls of the room back to transparency, so that he looked out over the smooth carpet of green moss to the Betsy and the jungle beyond. He blinked, stretched himself and sat up.
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