The Far Side of Evil

by Sylvia Engdahl

  He hesitated as if not quite sure how to proceed. He was leading up to something, I realized. Service supervisors don’t usually compliment you on your record; if it’s good, it speaks for itself, and in any case they have better ways of boosting your self-confidence.

  “Is it too good,” I asked, “to qualify me for a survey team?” An unwelcome thought had crossed my mind: The Service might want me to go right into graduate work. Not that I wasn’t planning to get an advanced degree eventually, for scholarship is important in the Service; we are, after all, anthropologists as well as field agents. But I had expected to wait until Evrek and I were ready to start a family, which wouldn’t be for some years after we were married.

  The Director smiled somewhat apologetically. “We—well, we have something rather special in mind for you,” he admitted. “We wouldn’t want your first regular assignment to be an anticlimax.”

  “Special? Not another intervention case?” I asked, astonished. As a rule, the Service doesn’t intervene in the affairs of Younglings, for the evolution of human races is a natural process that just can’t be tampered with. Only in the rare instance where a planet is in great danger—where it’s threatened by invasion, as Andrecia was, for example—do we step in; and even then our action has to be indirect.

  “No,” he told me, “not intervention, but something equally important.”

  Equally dangerous, too, I judged, from the buildup he was giving the job. Of course, all fieldwork is potentially dangerous. Whether or not we encounter overt hostility from the Younglings we are in contact with, our commitment to prevent disclosure at all costs can get us into some appalling fixes. We’re unarmed, after all, and we’re not allowed to use powers that would reveal our true origin.

  “We need an observer,” the Director went on. “Many observers, in fact, for we must have as many independent opinions as we can get.”

  “And you think I’m well suited to do this observing?”

  “In some respects you are ideally suited. In the first place, you bear enough physical resemblance to the Younglings involved to pass unnoticed among them.” That’s always a factor; Service people are of all races, and only a small percentage can disguise themselves as natives of any given planet.

  “More than that,” he went on, “you’re qualified by your unique background. You have proven yourself trustworthy under stress, yet you are still inexperienced enough to give us a fresh, unprejudiced report. Sometimes a beginner will spot something the experts miss.”

  There was a pause. I was well aware that he had not yet told me the whole story. All survey teams observe. That’s what they exist for, and it is not considered “special.” “There must be a catch,” I said. “It sounds too easy.”

  “Too easy,” he lashed out, “or too insignificant?”

  I blushed, caught off guard. They are good psychologists, the senior staff people; you cannot hide your feelings from them.

  The Director got up, abruptly, and walked toward the tall windows through which filtered white sunlight was streaming. “Our primary mission,” he mused, “is to add to knowledge, knowledge that may or may not have any sort of direct benefits. Slow accumulation of data, expedition after expedition, year after year—it’s not a very dramatic business. Rarely do tangible results show up, and when they do, their usefulness isn’t always apparent—”

  He broke off, turning back to me. “That’s the one thing that worries me about you, frankly. You got off to an unusual start. On Andrecia you were thrown into a situation where you could accomplish something immediate and concrete. I was speaking lightly, a moment ago, about not wanting your next job to be an anticlimax. It will be; your whole career may be anticlimactic in the sense that you may never again have such an opportunity. Are you prepared for that?”

  With a forced laugh I answered, “I guess I can do without any more opportunities to come so close to getting myself killed.”

  “More agents are killed in survey work than in spectacular rescue missions. Your mother, if I remember correctly—”

  “Of course. I just mean I haven’t any burning ambition to—to slay any more dragons.”

  “You too are speaking lightly. But I think you know what I’m talking about, Elana.”

  I knew. And I must confess that it was something that had bothered me on occasion, notably during one dreary exam week when it had seemed as if no future assignment could possibly be worth the grind. Common sense told me that I could scarcely expect to save any more planets from invaders! Yet I had joined the Service not only to see the universe but to make my life count for something.

  “Are you prepared for the fact that your work won’t always be exciting?” he repeated.

  I groped for words, then gave up and answered simply, “I am sworn.”

  “Touché.” His hand rose to the pendant that he wore, as do we all: the multifaceted Emblem. “You are sworn, so it doesn’t make a great deal of difference whether you’re prepared or not.”

  I didn’t reply. The cup, from which I had scarcely sipped, had grown cold in my hand. Settling himself again in the chair opposite me, the Director met my silence with a smile of sympathy and approval.

  “Forgive me for testing you,” he said. “I’ll be honest. Given a free hand, I would put you to a harder test. You have exceptional aptitude for the job we do, but you need more seasoning, more discipline, and I would see that you got it through a long apprenticeship in routine work.”

  Holding my breath, I did my best not to show apprehension. Such an assignment, I realized, was just the type the Service would be likely to pick for me. They wouldn’t send me on a grand tour of romantic worlds. Service supervisors operate on the theory that the rougher they make things for you, the more you will learn, and if you show promise, they sit up nights inventing ways to make life very rough indeed. The aim is not to break your spirit; actually, they want you to show initiative, even to rebel if you use good judgment about it—rebel against obstacles. The obstacles, if not automatically present, are arranged.

  The system isn’t as harsh as it sounds. If you’re a person who enjoys being challenged (and if you aren’t, you’ll never make it through the Academy entrance tests, let alone graduate), you don’t mind playing along. Besides. you discover that the things they put you through always make you feel good. They build you up, give you confidence. No doubt that would also apply to the kind of apprenticeship he had proposed, for your education doesn’t stop when you leave the Academy; but I had been hoping for a more intriguing post.

  “However,” the Director went on, “once again something unusual has come up, something of unquestioned significance. So I’m going to contradict nearly everything I just said and offer you an assignment that will probably finish the job of ruining you for anything routine and tame.”

  I let out a sigh of relief, and the anticipatory tingle I felt wasn’t at all unpleasant. He was saying, “I’m recruiting every agent who can halfway qualify, because it may involve the most important anthropological discovery of our era. No, don’t smile yet,” he put in quickly. “Not till you hear more about it. It won’t be an enjoyable assignment; if you accept, you’ll be plunged up to your neck in something very distressing.”

  “If I accept?”

  “This particular mission calls for volunteers,” he said quietly.

  There was no need for him to spell out the implications; while all field jobs are risky, some involve more risk than an agent is ordered to assume. But his strategy, of course, had been effective. Not that I was pushed into accepting; if there had been the slightest question about this being a job I would want, the offer wouldn’t have been made. Moreover, I could have turned it down. I don’t go along with the notion that people aren’t responsible for their own choices, or that they are somehow not “free” because something has affected the odds. The Director’s suggestion of routine work as the only available alternative was entirely sincere; he was not threatening me. And though he may have used shrewd psyc
hology to hook me, he went on to give me full warning.

  “Elana,” he said seriously, “the mission isn’t an easy one. As I told you, you’ll be sent in as an observer. The situation to be observed is, to say the least, explosive; that in itself entails hazards. But there’s something worse: You will be only an observer, and you won’t like what you see.”

  He had become very grave and, I felt, heavyhearted. We hadn’t communicated silently, for we didn’t know each other well enough to do so without need; yet since emotion heightens telepathic sensitivity, I grasped more than had been expressed in verbal form. “The Younglings you’ll deal with are in danger,” he said. “Once before you visited a world that was endangered—to save it. This world we have no power to save. Do you realize what that means?”

  I was beginning to, and it wasn’t a happy realization. When you’re in contact with Younglings, you begin to identify with them, care about them. Younglings are people. You feel just as strongly about them as if they were your own race; if you’re not a person who can do that, you are not selected to be a field agent. But it’s painful. You are vulnerable to all kinds of hurts.

  “It means that there are just three ways it can end,” he told me gently. “The danger may not materialize; in that case your personal peril, which will be great, will be all you have to worry about. On the other hand, these people may be wiped out, and if so”—he paused, his eyes meeting mine, then forged ahead—“you will either share their fate or stand by, helplessly, and watch it happen.”

  “Watch it happen? Will it be sudden?”

  “They are on the verge of a nuclear war, Elana.”

  *

  Before I go further, I must say something about Randil, for because I want to be entirely fair, I think that I shall tell this story from his viewpoint as well as from my own.

  This business of trying to look through someone else’s eyes is a thing in which I’ve had practice. I’ve been asked to do it with Younglings, as an exercise in understanding Youngling viewpoints, but there is no reason, I guess, why it can’t be done with a fellow agent. As I said, I want to be fair to Randil. I don’t know what he’ll say to justify himself if he ever gets back to the starship, but I think I know why he did what he did; perhaps in spite of all that’s happened, I would be the best person to speak on his behalf. After all, I too have sometimes questioned Service policy.

  And besides, I too know what it is like to be in love with a Youngling.

  Randil is in love with a Torisian girl named Kari. That’s not so astonishing. Kari is a lovable person, my closest friend here on Toris. We of the Service may be dedicated to our work, but underneath we have the same feelings everyone else has, and the Oath doesn’t bar us from human relationships. Well, Younglings are human. The fact that they are of younger species doesn’t put them below us as individuals, even though they don’t have the control of psychic powers that our more mature Federation species do. And when individuals know each other, like each other, it’s hardly extraordinary for them to fall in love.

  It’s hopeless, of course—between an agent and a Youngling, I mean. Hopeless because there is no future in it. The agent knows that from the beginning, but sometimes the Youngling doesn’t. I was spared such a situation; though the man I loved on Andrecia didn’t know my true identity, he was aware that I was not of his people and that I could not remain in his world. Randil hasn’t been spared it. Kari is sure that he’s going to ask her to marry him. Not that he has said or done anything to indicate it, but she can’t help sensing that his love for her is serious, for there is telepathic contact between them.

  Naturally, Kari doesn’t know that it’s telepathy. Younglings are unaware of their psychic powers and can’t use them under normal circumstances. They can’t communicate with each other except, rarely, in a most primitive and erratic fashion. But with us they can. It’s a matter not of “reading” minds but of silent conversation; and though we don’t converse with them deliberately, when you’re in love with somebody, it’s not easy to keep your thoughts strictly to yourself.

  We have had training. We are not in danger of inadvertent disclosure or anything like that. It is emotion that unconsciously leaks through. All psychic abilities—telepathy, psychokinesis, or whatever—are closely involved with emotion; the stronger your feelings, the more power you have. Randil hasn’t been able to conceal from Kari the fact that he would like to marry her, so she believes that it’s just a matter of time. He couldn’t tell her otherwise without jeopardizing his cover. I know how this is going to turn out. It is going to be very tragic for both of them.

  But it will not be the most tragic thing that has happened to Randil. The fact is, if nuclear war comes to Toris within the next few days, the bulk of the blame will rest squarely on his shoulders.

  *

  Younglings who are facing the prospect of a nuclear war believe that it’s a hideous thing, which of course it is. The sad part is that they think not merely that the war would be hideous if it occurred, but that they themselves, as a people, are to blame simply for having gotten themselves into a fix where they’re threatened by it. They might be a little more hopeful if they could read the histories of the Federation planets.

  I am not saying that the leaders who start such wars are not blameworthy. They are, and Toris has its share of them, if the one who has been conducting my interrogation is any sample. But Randil is not all wrong when he tells me that Younglings are peace-loving underneath. Most of them do want peace, and it’s too bad that they blame themselves for being related to the troublemakers.

  Randil, though, has not met my interrogator. He has not yet lost his illusions. He is used to Federation society, Federation standards, and he hasn’t had any previous dealings with Younglings. So he goes to the other extreme and declares that no one could possibly start a war on purpose. That’s a very dangerous assumption.

  The unfortunate fact is that all worlds go through a phase in which the possibility of nuclear war exists. It’s a well-known phase; it’s even got a name: the Critical Stage. Most planets get through it with their civilizations intact, the war and other fatal courses of action having been averted. Obviously, all the Federation worlds did, and we also know of some advanced Youngling peoples that are out of danger.

  A few, sadly, do not get through. I shall not describe what happens to them.

  What makes the difference? Why does one planet come safely through its Critical Stage and another planet fail? We don’t know. That’s what we’re here on Toris to find out.

  We know how it happens. We know what the turning point is. But we don’t know exactly why that point is or is not reached. And the reason we don’t is that we have no records from the worlds that have failed.

  If Toris fails, we will have records. That’s the whole purpose of this mission.

  The Director knew when he recruited me how hard that purpose would be for me to understand and accept—even harder than for most agents, because I had once been involved in a mission where action was taken. “We’ll try to stop it, won’t we?” I protested when he told me that we had no power to save Toris. “The war, I mean—we certainly won’t just wait!”

  “You know better, Elana,” the Director said regretfully. “Besides, I told you that this job would not involve intervention.”

  I hesitated, mustering my self-control, judging all the angles as I had been taught to do. “I suppose you’re going to tell me,” I said finally, “that it would be interference in their internal affairs. But surely, if it’s a choice between that and letting their whole civilization be wiped out—”

  “Elana,” he reminded me, “the hands-off policy isn’t arbitrary; it’s for the Younglings’ protection. In following it, we put their best interests first, as we are bound by the Oath to do.”

  Hotly I retorted, “And it would be in their best interests to let them blow up their planet while we sit back and take notes? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He was equally forceful, �
�I will be blunt. Yes, I’m saying exactly that. Think, Elana! You suggest that we should stop their war. We can’t stop it. We don’t know how. We don’t even know whether it’s going to materialize; and if it doesn’t, any tampering on our part would simply make matters worse.”

  It was true enough, I realized, that finding a way to help would be easier said than done. We couldn’t stop the war by force; though the Federation has powers far superior to anything possessed by Younglings, one thing we do know is that the use of force does more harm than good. We also know that we can’t reveal ourselves to Younglings without doing irreparable damage to the civilization involved. In the rare cases where we intervene, it is through a ruse of some kind, and that’s not always feasible.

  “We ought to at least make an attempt,” I persisted. “I know why meddling is forbidden: Younglings advance only through solving their own problems, and their development is thrown out of kilter if we try to solve any of their problems for them. But isn’t that pretty meaningless if they don’t survive long enough to go on developing?”

  “Of course. And the policy allows for that; it permits us to step in if we’re sure that nothing else can prevent extinction of the Youngling race. That isn’t the case here. Many worlds—most, in fact—manage to avert nuclear war on their own, and interference might very well reduce this one’s chances.”

  “Yet some don’t. Maybe nothing else can prevent these people’s extinction! Suppose we saw an opportunity to act safely, to do something that wouldn’t involve force or disclosure—would we break policy?”

  “Don’t torture yourself over a question that won’t arise,” he said gently. Leaning forward, he looked straight into my eyes. “It’s not an easy one to grapple with; don’t think that I haven’t had sleepless nights over it myself. But on this mission you are not going to face such a choice.”

  That seemed like evading the issue. I didn’t reply aloud, but silently I challenged him: How can you be sure? Am I to pretend not to see it if it comes?