Master Of Life And Death

by Robert Silverberg

  Walton frowned, gathered up most of his superfluous terraforming data, and deposited it in a file drawer. The status of the project, then, was uncertain: the terraformers were on Venus and presumably at work, but were yet to be heard from.

  The next Popeek project to tack down would be the faster-than-light spaceship drive. But after the mass of data Walton had just absorbed, he found himself hesitant to wade through another collection so soon.

  He realized that he was hungry for the sight of another human being. He had spent the whole morning alone, speaking to anonymous underlings via screen or annunciator, and requisitioning material from an even more impersonal computer. He wanted noise, life, people around him.

  He snapped on the annunciator. “I’m calling an immediate meeting of the Popeek section chiefs,” he said. “In my office, in half an hour—at 1230 sharp. Tell them to drop whatever they’re doing and come.”

  * * *

  Just before they started to arrive, Walton felt a sudden sick wave of tension sweep dizzyingly over him. He pulled open the top drawer of his new desk and reached for his tranquilizer tablets. He suffered a moment of shock and disorientation before he realized that this was FitzMaugham’s desk, not his own, and that FitzMaugham forswore all forms of sedation.

  Chuckling nervously, Walton drew out his wallet and extracted the extra benzolurethrin he carried for just such emergencies. He popped the lozenge into his mouth only a moment before the spare figure of Lee Percy, first of the section chiefs to arrive, appeared in the screener outside the door.

  “Roy? It’s me—Percy.”

  “I can see you. Come on in, Lee.”

  Percy was in charge of public relations for Popeek. He was a tall, angular man with thick corrugated features.

  After him came Teddy Schaunhaft, clinic coordinator; Pauline Medhurst, personnel director; Olaf Eglin, director of field agents; and Sue Llewellyn, Popeek’s comptroller.

  These five had constituted the central council of Popeek. Walton, as assistant administrator, had served as their coordinator, as well as handling population transfer and serving as a funnel for red tape. Above them all had been FitzMaugham, brooding over his charges like an untroubled Wotan; FitzMaugham had reserved for himself, aside from the task of general supervision, the special duties attendant on handling the terraforming and faster-than-light wings of Popeek.

  “I should have called you together much earlier than this,” Walton said when they were settled. “The shock, though, and the general confusion—”

  “We understand, Roy,” said Sue Llewellyn sympathetically. She was a chubby little “woman in her fifties, whose private life was reported to be incredibly at variance with her pleasantly domestic appearance. ”It’s been rough on all of us, but you were so close to Mr. FitzMaugham…“

  There was sympathetic clucking from various corners of the room. Walton said, “The period of mourning will have to be a brief one. What I’m suggesting is that business continue as usual, without a hitch.” He glanced at Eglin, the director of field agents. “Olaf, is there a man in your section capable of handling your job?”

  Eglin looked astonished for a moment, then mastered himself. “There must be five, at least. Walters, Lassen, Dominic—”

  “Skip the catalogue,” Walton told him. “Pick the man you think is best suited to replace you, and send his dossier up to me for approval.”

  “And where do I go?”

  “You take over my slot as assistant administrator. As director of field agents, you’re more familiar with the immediate problems of my old job than anyone else here.”

  Eglin preened himself smugly. Walton wondered if he had made an unwise choice; Eglin was competent enough, and would give forth one hundred percent effort at all times—but probably never the one hundred two percent a really great administrator could put out when necessary.

  Still, the post had to be filled at once, and Eglin could pick up the reins faster than any of the others,.

  Walton looked around. “Otherwise, activities of Popeek will continue as under Mr. FitzMaugham, without a hitch. Any questions?”

  Lee Percy raised an arm slowly. “Roy, I’ve got a problem I’d like to bring up here, as long as we’re all together. There’s a growing public sentiment that you and the late director were secretly Herschelites.” He chuckled apologetically. “I know it sounds silly, but I just report what I hear.”

  “I’m familiar with the rumor,” Walton said. “And I don’t like it much, either. That’s the sort of stuff riots are made of.” The Herschelites were extremists who advocated wholesale sterilization of defectives, mandatory birth control, and half a dozen other stringent remedies for overpopulation.

  “What steps are you taking to counteract it?” Walton asked.

  “Well,” said Percy, “we’re preparing a memorial program for FitzMaugham which will intimate that he was murdered by the Hershelites, who hated him.”

  “Good. What’s the slant?”

  “That he was too easygoing, too humane. We build up the Herschelites as ultrareactionaries who intend to enforce their will on humanity if they get the chance, and imply FitzMaugham was fighting them tooth and nail. We close the show with some shots of you picking up the great man’s mantle, etcetera, etcetera. And a short speech from you affirming the basically humanitarian aims of Popeek.”

  Walton smiled approvingly and said, “I like it. When do you want me to do the speech?”

  “We won’t need you,” Percy told him. “We’ve got plenty of stock footage, and we can whip the speech out of some spare syllables you left around.”

  Walton frowned. Too many of the public speeches of the day were synthetic, created by skilled engineers who split words into their component phonemes and reassembled them in any shape they pleased. “Let me check through my speech before you put it over, at least.”

  “Will do. And we’ll squash this Herschelite thing right off the bat.”

  Pauline Medhurst squirmed uneasily in her chair. Walton caught the hint and recognized her.

  “Uh, Roy, I don’t know if this is the time or the place, but I got that transfer order of yours, the five doctors…”

  “You did? Good,” Walton said hurriedly. “Have you notified them yet?”

  “Yes. They seemed unhappy about it.”

  “Refer them to FitzMaugham’s book. Tell them they’re cogs in a mighty machine, working to save humanity. We can’t let personal considerations interfere, Pauline.”

  “If you could only explain why—”

  “Yeah,” interjected Schaunhaft, the clinic coordinator suddenly. “You cleaned out my whole morning lab shift down there. I was wondering—”

  Walton felt like a stag at bay. “Look,” he said firmly, cutting through the hubbub, “ I made the transfer. I had reasons for doing it. It’s your job to get the five men out where they’ve been assigned, and to get five new men in here at once. You’re not required to make explanations to them—nor I to you.”

  Sudden silence fell over the office. Walton hoped he had not been too forceful, and cast suspicion on his actions by his stiffness.

  “Whew!” Sue Llewellyn said. “You really mean business!”

  “I said we were going to run Popeek without a hitch,” Walton replied. “Just because you know my first name, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be as strong a director as FitzMaugham was.”

  Until the UN picks my successor, his mind added. Out loud he said, “Unless you have any further questions, I’ll ask you now to return to your respective sections.”

  He sat slumped at his desk after they were gone, trying to draw on some inner reserve of energy for the strength to go on.

  One day at the job, and he was tired, terribly tired. And it would be six weeks or more before the United Nations convened to choose the next director of Popeek.

  He didn’t know who that man would be. He expected they would offer the job to him, provided he did competent work during the interim; but, wearily, he saw he would
have to turn the offer down.

  It was not only that his nerves couldn’t handle the grinding daily tension of the job; he saw now what Fred might be up to, and it stung.

  What if his brother were to hold off exposing him until the moment the UN proffered its appointment…and then took that moment to reveal that the head of Popeek, far from being an iron-minded Herschelite, had actually been guilty of an irregularity that transgressed against one of Popeek’s own operations? He’d be finished. He’d be laughed out of public life for good—and probably prosecuted in the bargain—if Fred exposed him.

  And Fred was perfectly capable of doing just that.

  Walton saw himself spinning dizzily between conflicting alternatives. Keep the job and face his brother’s expose? Or resign, and vanish into anonymity? Neither choice seemed too appealing.

  Shrugging, he dragged himself out of his chair, determined to shroud his conflict behind the mask of work. He typed a request to Files, requisitioning data on the faster-than-light project.

  Moments later, the torrent began—rising from somewhere in the depths of the giant computer, rumbling upward through the conveyor system, moving onward toward the twenty-ninth floor and the office of Interim Director Walton.

  VII

  The next morning there was a crowd gathered before theCullenBuilding when Walton arrived.

  There must have been at least a hundred people, fanning outward from a central focus. Walton stepped from the jet-bus and, with collar pulled up carefully to obscure as much of his face as possible, went to investigate.

  A small red-faced man stood on a rickety chair against the side of the building. He was flanked by a pair of brass flagpoles, one bearing the American flag and the other the ensign of the United Nations. His voice was a biting rasp—probably, thought Walton, intensified, sharpened, and made more irritating by a harmonic modulator at his throat. An irritating voice put its message across twice as fast as a pleasant one.

  He was shouting, “This is the place! Up here, in this building, that’s where they are! That’s where Popeek wastes our money!”

  From the slant of the man’s words Walton instantly thought: Herschelite!

  He repressed his anger and, for once, decided to stay and hear the extremist out. He had never really paid much attention to Herschelite propaganda—he had been exposed to little of it—and he realized that now, as head of Popeek, he owed it to himself to become familiar with the anti-Popeek arguments of both extremist factions —those who insisted Popeek was a tyranny, and the Herschelites, who thought it was too weak.

  “This Popeek,” the little man said, accenting the awkwardness of the word. “You know what it is? It’s a stopgap. It’s a silly, soft-minded, half-hearted attempt at solving our problems. It’s a fake, a fraud, a phony!”

  There was real passion behind the words. Walton distrusted small men with deep wells of passion; he no more enjoyed their company than he did that of a dynamo or an atomic pile. They were always threatening to explode.

  The crowd was stirring restlessly. The Herschelite was getting to them, one way or another. Walton drew back nervously, not wanting to be recognized, and stationed himself at the fringe of the crowd.

  “Some of you don’t like Popeek for this reason or that reason. But let me tell you something, friends… you’re wronger than they are! We’ve got to get tough with ourselves! We have to face the truth! Popeek is an unrealistic half-solution to man’s problems. Until we limit birth, establish rigid controls over who’s going to live and who isn’t, we—”

  It was straight Herschelite propaganda, undiluted. Walton wasn’t surprised when someone in the audience interrupted, growling, “And who’s going to set those controls? You?”

  “You trusted yourselves to Popeek, didn’t you? Why hesitate, then, to trust yourselves to Abel Herschel and his group of workers for the betterment and purification of mankind?”

  Walton was almost limp with amazement. The Herschelite group was so much more drastic in its approach than Popeek that he wondered how they dared come out with those views in public. Animosity was high enough against Popeek; would the public accept a group more stringent yet?

  The little man’s voice rose high. “Onward with the Herschelites! Mankind must move forward! The Equalization people represent the forces of decay and sloth!”

  Walton turned to the man next to him and murmured, “But Herschel’s a fanatic. They’ll kill all of us in the name of mankind.”

  The man looked puzzled; then, accepting the idea, he nodded. “Yeah, buddy. You know, you may have something there.”

  That was all the spark needed. Walton edged away surreptitiously and watched it spread through the crowd, while the little man’s harangue grew more and more inflammatory.

  Until a rock arced through the air from somewhere, whipped across the billowing UN flag, and cracked into the side of the building. That was the signal.

  A hundred men and women converged on the little man on the battered chair.“We have to face the truth!” the harsh voice cried; then the flags were swept down, trampled on. Flagpoles fell, ringing metallically on the concrete; the chair toppled. The little man was lost beneath a tide of remorseless feet and arms.

  A siren screamed.

  “Cops!” Walton yelled from his vantage point some thirty feet away, and abruptly the crowd melted away in all directions, leaving Walton and the little man alone on the street. A security wagon drew up. Four men in gray uniforms sprang out.

  “What’s been going on here? Who’s this man?” Then, seeing Walton, “Hey! Come over here!”

  “Of course, officer.” Walton turned his collar down and drew near. He spotted the glare of a ubiquitous video camera and faced it squarely. “I’m Director Walton of Popeek,” he said loudly, into the camera. “I just arrived here a few minutes ago. I saw the whole thing.”

  “Tell us about it, Mr. Walton,” the security man said.

  “It was a Herschelite,” Walton gestured at the broken body crumpled against the ground. “He was delivering an inflammatory speech aimed against Popeek, with special reference to the late Director FitzMaugham and myself. I was about to summon you and end the disturbance, when the listeners became aware that the man was a Herschelite. When they understood what he was advocating, they—well, you see the result.”

  “Thank you, sir. Terribly sorry we couldn’t have prevented it. Must be very unpleasant, Mr. Walton.”

  “The man was asking for trouble,” Walton said. “Popeek represents the minds and hearts of the world. Herschel and his people seek to overthrow this order. I can’t condone violence of any sort, naturally, but”—he smiled into the camera—“Popeek is a sacred responsibility to me. Its enemies I must regard as blind and misguided people.”

  He turned and entered the building, feeling pleased with himself. That sequence would be shown globally on the next news screenings; every newsblare in the world would be reporting his words.

  Lee Percy would be proud of him. Without benefit either of rehearsal or phonemic engineering, Walton had delivered a rousing speech and turned a grisly incident into a major propaganda instrument.

  And more than that, Director FitzMaugham would have been proud of him.

  But beneath the glow of pride, he was trembling. Yesterday he had saved a boy by a trifling alteration of his genetic record; today he had killed a man by sending a whispered accusation rustling through a mob.

  Power. Popeek represented power, perhaps the greatest power in the world. That power would have to be channeled somehow, now that it had been unleashed.

  The stack of papers relating to the superspeed space drive was still on his desk when he entered the office. He had had time yesterday to read through just some of the earliest; then, the pressure of routine had dragged him off to other duties.

  Encouraged by FitzMaugham, the faster-than-light project had originated about a decade or so before. It stemmed from the fact that the ion-drive used for travel between planets had a top velocity, a
limiting factor of about ninety thousand miles per second. At that rate, it would take some eighteen years for a scouting party to visit the closest star and report back… not very efficient for a planet in a hurry to expand outward.

  A group of scientists had set to work developing a sub-space warp drive, one that would cut across the manifold of normal space and allow speeds above light velocity.

  All the records were here: the preliminary trials, the budget allocations, the sketches and plans, the names of the researchers. Walton ploughed painstakingly through them, learning names, assimilating scientific data. It seemed that, while it was still in its early stages, FitzMaugham had nurtured the project along with money from his personal fortune.

  For most of the morning Walton leafed through documents describing projected generators, types of hull material, specifications, speculations. It was nearly noon when he came across the neatly-typed note from Colonel Leslie McLeod, one of the military scientists in charge of the ultra-drive project. Walton read it through once, gasped, and read it again.

  It was dated 14 June 2231, almost one year ago. It read:

  My dear Mr. FitzMaugham:

  I’m sure it will gladden you to learn that we have at last achieved success in our endeavors. The X-72 passed its last tests splendidly, and we are ready to leave on the preliminary scouting flight at once.

  McLeod

  It was followed by a note from FitzMaugham to McLeod, dated 15 June:

  Dr. McLeod:

  All best wishes on your great adventure. I trust you’ll be departing, as usual, from the Nairobi base within the next few days. Please let me hear from you before departure.

  FitzM.

  The file concluded with a final note from McLeod to the director, dated 19 June 2231:

  My dear Mr. FitzMaugham:

  The X-72 will leave Nairobi in eleven hours, bound outward, manned by a crew of sixteen, including myself. The men are all impatient for the departure. I must offer my hearty thanks for the help you have given us over the past years, without which we would never have reached this step.