by Chad Oliver
He lifted Conway’s wet body carefully to the bed and dressed the wound as well as he could with his first-aid box. Conway moaned once and his heartbeat remained faint. Quinton clenched his fists, the old hate trembling through his body.
If Pat died—
He sat down by the still figure on the bed, his gun in his hand, and listened to the shallow, fast breathing.
It was going to be a long night.
It was four o’clock in the morning when the doctor came, and he didn’t come with Bordie. He came with Carr Siringo.
“Bordie was delayed,” Siringo told Quinton, looking him in the eye as though daring him to challenge his word. “I had to come down this way anyhow, so I brought the doc.”
Quinton ignored the words and accepted the facts. “Thanks, Carr,” he said. “I won’t forget it.”
Siringo plopped himself down in the kitchen and insisted on talking about the significance of banded clothing on Meran. At first, it irritated Quinton, but then he calmed down and even became interested in the ideas Siringo was sparking off with such brilliant nonchalance. Quinton’s mind was sharp with early-morning clarity and he thrust and parried the rapier-like cuts from the short, bald man, trying grimly to hold his own.
It was after five when the doctor walked through the door and sat down on the kitchen table, and Quinton suddenly realized that Siringo had neatly and effectively been taking his mind off the still form in the next room. Quinton eyed him accusingly in the gray light of dawn, and Siringo returned his gaze imperturbably.
“Well, Doc?” Quinton asked.
The UNBAC doctor shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.
“You’d better get some sleep, son,” said Carr Siringo.
Robert Quinton hesitated, and abruptly discovered that he was exhausted. Something snapped way down deep, and told him he wasn’t as young as he once was. His throat was dry and his eyes burned. He nodded slowly, left the room, and turned in.
He didn’t look at the figure on the other bed.
Robert Quinton looked at the man sitting across from him and wanted to smash his face in. Instead, he smiled pleasantly.
“That’s it, Pond,” he said. “We’ve picked you for the job, and you can write your own ticket.”
Wiley Carruthers Pond made pyramids with his smooth hands and listened intently. He had iron-gray hair and an aristocratic, noble face. He was forty years old, was liked by small children and babies, spoke loud and often of his service to the people, and was a first-class heel.
“I’m not sure I understand you, Mr. Quinton,” he said.
“You don’t have to understand, Pond. All you have to do is sit in for four years and collect twenty thousand a year from us, plus your regular salary as Councilman. We’ll get you elected, and no strings attached.”
“It’s most irregular, Mr. Quinton,” Pond said, his eyes gleaming.
Quinton clenched his fists, thinking of Conway. He hated the guts of Wiley Carruthers Pond, a fact of no importance whatsoever. Pond had political connections in Galveston, and aside from that he didn’t matter. Donald Weston did.
“Well?” Quinton said.
“After all, Mr. Quinton, a Councilman. Then, you’re paying me—”
“Yes or no,” Quinton said, his eyes hard. “I haven’t got all day.”
Pond eyed him narrowly. “Of course,” he said, “my only interest is to help the people. If for some reason you feel that I could be of more service to them as a Councilman, then I must say that no position is too humble for service. No man can be too proud to serve, Mr. Quinton.”
“Yes or no,” Quinton repeated.
Pond leaned forward. “All I do is serve. and keep quiet, and collect twenty thousand a year, right? You’ll sign a contract assuring me that I won’t be asked to act in any way contrary to my principles?”
“Of course,” Quinton assured him. “You’re in no danger. Our interest begins and ends with getting you elected.”
Wiley Carruthers Pond stuck out his well-manicured hand. “It’s a deal,” he said. “May I say that I am grateful to you for your interest in the people of Galveston? It’s men like you, Mr. Quinton, who—”
Quinton cut it as short as he could. He had played this scene before, too many times with too many people, to take any pleasure in it. He came to terms in a hurry, and walked away by himself. He felt like he needed a good bath.
Pat Conway was still alive, but he couldn’t be moved. The doctor stayed on, and Quinton and Siringo played poker on the kitchen table.
That wasn’t the only game they played.
Money was no object, and the men from UNBAC knew their stuff. What little they didn’t know, Wiley Carruthers Pond and the local machine filled in with a vengeance.
Both Galveston papers announced Pond’s candidacy on their front pages, and printed flattering, smiling pictures. Both Galveston papers began to run his life story of unselfish service to the people of Galveston, climaxed now by his decision to serve in a minor capacity where he could directly and intimately help the little people. At the same time, editorials were printed about Donald Weston that painted him as an unscrupulous political schemer, unfit to represent the people of the City of Oleanders.
Whenever one turned on the tri-di, there was the beaming, hearty, trustworthy Wiley Carruthers Pond, indulging in heart-to-heart talks with the people. Viz phones rang all over the island, and the canned face and voice of Wiley Carruthers Pond assured the listeners that he was on their side, first, last, and always.
There was more, much more. There were whispering campaigns, clever and vicious political jokes, and slanted “news” stories. Weston’s tri-di talks were edited, and commentators “interpreted” them with cutting sarcasm.
It was dirty, slimy, and ugly. It was the Big Leagues, and it made Quinton sick of himself and of the work he had to do.
It was rotten, clean through.
Robert Quinton paid out the easy money and talked with oily voices on the blacked-out viz phone. He got down in the dirt all day long, and at night he sat up and listened to Conway’s shallow, gasping breathing in the next bed.
He talked to his soul.
Somehow, he had never imagined that it would be like this.
Robert Quinton had been born in 1994.
That meant that the first space station had been built and the Moon had been reached twenty years before his birth. It meant that the inner planets had been touched and a tentative colony set up on Venus ten years before his birth.
That meant that the United Nations, after half a century of bitter ups and downs, had gradually absorbed enough power to make itself an authority to be reckoned with in world affairs. The United Nations, of course, was an inevitable product of space expansion.
That meant that before he ever drew a breath the great solar energy stations had largely supplanted atomic energy as a cheap power source, and had brought tropical areas into positions of new importance as vast natural hothouses for the cultivation of the necessary plants.
In 1990, a practical interstellar drive had been found—and promptly hushed up as being too dangerous a toy for a still-unstable planet to play with thoughtlessly. That was four years before Robert Quinton was born.
That same year, Robert Quinton, Sr., a cattle rancher in New Mexico, had met Anne Torneson, his future bride, at a stock show. The senior Quinton had been born in 1954, and his wife in 1958.
When Quinton was a child, he hadn’t been markedly different from other children of his age and time and place. He banged around the barn and got treed by a bull and watched the rockets flash by in the blue sky over his head. While the first genuine social science was coming to life after the ferreting out of the true interrelationships between psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics, young Bob Quinton was discovering how to pick up sleepy rattlesnakes by their tails and snap their heads off with a flick of his wrist—a practice not encouraged by his mother.
While Bob Quinton was losing sleep over traditional school
baseball games, a vitally important principle began to dominate scientific thought. It was quite simple. It had been around for a long time in medicine and elsewhere. It had been succinctly stated by an old general of the ’50s named Omar Bradley: “The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.”
The principle? It’s tough, if not impossible, to cure a cultural disease such as war—but you can prevent them before they ever happen.
Preventative medicine—applied to cultures.
It wasn’t that simple in practice; neat plans never are. Culture patterns had lagged desperately behind technological advances. In a world of atomic fission, politics were hardly out of the Feudal Ages. The course of civilization was still charted by “common sense” and “everybody knows” and “the natural way to do things.” There were no legal channels through which wars could be prevented in the only way they could be prevented—and legal changes were incredibly slow with nuclear clouds on the horizons, based as they were upon prior decisions going all the way back to the Roman Empire.
The scientists had the solution. Could they use it?
Their answer was, inevitably, a patchwork, makeshift system that operated undercover, in the shadows. They went to work, a selected few of them, to try to hold the world together until some sort of a balance was attained.
They were outlaws, of course. So was George Washington.
The survival probability curve, commonly known as the Snake, was developed by integrating the cybernetic computers with selected social data from all over the world. The curve was not designed to maintain the status quo, or to block progress in any form. It was not designed to “control” cultures or individuals in any particular direction. It was non-political, without preference for any one faction or system, whether conservative, liberal, or in-between.
The Snake was concerned with exactly one item: the survival of free civilization. It was designed solely to enable the world to last long enough to work out its own problems in its own way. When the curve nosed down, it did not mean simply that a change was coming; that didn’t matter. It meant that unless conditions were changed it was finis for Earth., Kaput.
The End.
The survival probability curve was built around one guiding principle: “Control” must be kept to an absolute minimum, and not utilized at all unless it were imperative for survival. All cultures must be allowed to develop in their own way, so long as they did not positively threaten the free existence of mankind. It was about as radical as the concept of liberty.
It was spraying the stagnant waters before the mosquitoes hatched.
Bob Quinton grew up exploring the forest preserves and the hills of New Mexico, wandering in the purple canyons and picking up beautifully chipped arrow points from the rocks. Had you asked him his problems, he would have wondered what was the matter with you. He wasn’t interested, and he had more important things on his mind.
But he was hooked, nevertheless. He was hooked from the day he found his first arrow point, read his first book, looked at the stars. He went fishing along the clean mountain streams, and he soaked up the sun. But new ideas were in the air—and Bob Quinton inevitably soaked up more than just Vitamin D.
By 2010, UN exploration ships had contacted Procyon and Centaurus. They had contacted four other systems as well—and the ships had never returned. The contacts were hushed up until a major war threatened between India and China, and then life on other worlds was announced.
Bob Quinton was fourteen years old.
The patchwork pattern of the self-styled “culture tinkers” took form. It took shape as UNBAC—the Business Advisory Council of the United Nations. BAC gave tips and planned developmental patterns for the commercial interests of Earth, and it got tax-free support funds. Most of UNBAC, the part that people saw, made itself extremely useful and had the reputation for being the only practical part of the UN.
The rest, the secret part, wasted its time on survival.
Bob Quinton went to college and majored in anthropology. He had fun and drank a lot of beer and married a classmate. The world was calm and pleasant for ten years, on the surface, and the belief was loudly proclaimed that a New Golden Age had arrived—the date of the first one being tactfully not mentioned.
He saw a lot of the world, and a lot of other worlds. He went up fast and he grew up fast. In some dimly-perceived but acute way, Bob Quinton felt that a lot of things depended on him, and upon men like him. He seldom talked about them, and when others did he usually felt uncomfortable and bored. The obvious didn’t need elaboration. But he felt them.
In the silence of space.
In the stars in the eyes of a child.
It should have been dashing, romantic. There should have been bands playing and medals and people cheering. It should have been a richly rewarding and pleasant life.
But it wasn’t.
It was tough and dirty and bitter.
So Robert Quinton worked on, in the late summer of 2034, in the island city of Galveston. Few people even knew he was there, and fewer still cared. He did things he hated and saw a friend cut down before his eyes.
He worked, fists clenched, a smile on his face. He worked, and when he was through the average citizen could not have told Wiley Carruthers Pond from Thomas Jefferson.
Or Donald Weston from the Devil.
They flew Conway, still alive, back to New Mexico Station and left Robert Quinton alone in his apartment. That same night, Jo Weston came to see him.
She walked in quietly, out of the darkness. She slipped off her light summer jacket and sat down in Quinton’s best chair. She crossed her astonishing legs and eyed him questioningly.
“Drink?” she asked, in a voice that was cold honey.
Quinton nodded, unsurprised. “Guess I owe you one or two,” he said. It wasn’t a particularly original remark, but he didn’t care. This, too, was a scene he had played too many times before. It was getting more than a little stale. He mixed her a stiff Scotch and soda, took one himself, and waited.
“I don’t understand you, Mr. Quinton,” Jo said finally.
“Call me Bob,” Quinton said.
Jo smiled, her teeth white and sharp. Her golden blond hair caught the soft highlights of the room and her blue eyes invited.
“You’re out to get my husband,” Jo said steadily. “Why?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quinton said. He looked into her frosted blue eyes. She knows, his mind whispered. She has to know. “Don’t lie to me, Bob,” Jo said softly. “Another drink?”
Quinton fixed it for her, and watched the slight flush creep up her smooth neck while she drank. A flush, he thought irrelevantly, is caused by blood. There was more blood right across from where she sat, just a dark spot on the rug now. Pat’s blood. Quinton lit a cigarette.
“Bob,” Jo whispered. “I want you to stop it.”
Quinton looked at her. “I love my wife,” he said evenly.
Jo stiffened, her smile vanishing. “Don’t play games, hero,” she said quietly. “I’m not kidding.”
“Neither am I,” Quinton said.
They stared at each other. Quinton would have bet a small fortune, had he had one, that Jo could have counted the times men had said no to her without using any fingers at all.
“I … I don’t understand,” she whispered. She began to cry, softly.
“That isn’t worthy of you, beautiful,” Quinton said. “It won’t work.”
The crying stopped.
“Fix me another drink, lover,” Jo said.
Quinton walked into the kitchen and mixed the drink. When he came back into the room he looked down the muzzle of a small pistol held in Jo’s white hand.
“You drink it, lover,” Jo said. “You’re going to need it.”
Quinton sat down and sipped at the Scotch. He didn’t say anything. He was calm, relaxed. He had played this scene before, too.
“You’re going to take the heat off,” Jo Weston said, the gun
steady in her hand. “You can play this little game any way you want to play it, but the pressure’s going to stop. You’re leaving town, hero—one way of the other.”
Quinton raised his eyebrows.
“You don’t think I’d kill you,” Jo said coldly.
She fired with startling quickness and a slug slammed past Quinton’s ear and buried itself in the chair. He jumped, spilling some of his drink He hadn’t expected that.
“I think you would,” he said, “if you could.”
The tiny Skippy from Quinton’s sleeve spring leaped into his right hand and he fired instantly, without seeming to aim. There was a light poof and Jo dropped her gun. Her hand had a sliver of silver needle though it. Her fingers were dead. She didn’t make a sound.
“Sorry, baby,” Quinton said, and meant it.
He went to her, scooped up the gun, and led her to the kitchen. He pulled out the needle with a practiced hand, washed the wound, and dressed it with the same kit he had used on Pat. Then he led her back into the living room.
Jo just looked at him, her blue eyes tight with pain.
“Here,” Quinton said, handing her the rest of the drink. “You’ll be able to use this.”
Jo tensed her slim figure, breathing hard. She smiled icily and threw the drink in his face. Then she turned on her heel and walked out the door.
Quinton wiped his dripping face with his handkerchief and watched her go. She hurried down the dark street alone, her heels clicking on the pavement. Her head was up, proudly.
A factor, Quinton thought, a number in an equation?
Or only a woman in love with her man?
Quinton watched her until she passed out of sight. She was both, of course—but that was words. What good were words?
He walked back into his apartment and closed the door.
When it was all over, Quinton didn’t wait for the final returns. The election itself hadn’t been too much of a problem—such things had been arranged on Earth long before UNBAC had come into being. Quinton didn’t bother with Pond; they were through with him, except for the money.