by Rex Gordon
But not all of the first settlers died at sixty, only those who had been younger than twenty when the starship landed. Others, who had been older then, lived to greater ages, and for a while that obscured the pattern.
The next generation, the first to be born on Arcon, began to die off at forty. That was when autopsies began to be held, and concern expressed. A lot of concern. It was something to do with the accumulation of salts in the body over a long period. But this first generation was not very scientific. It had been more important to teach trades and skills like fanning, and science could be kept and held safe in books. Besides, people at forty were pretty old anyway, by the ditch-digging and fanning standards of young people who had a lot of children.
As for the grandchildren, and the third and fourth generations, they tended to feel that if people died at forty, then that was the way life was.
VI
Revolt.
Could a young man, knowing so little, revolt against what he did know? Len was surprised to find himself in the elevator, going down again to the foyer of the Administration building.
He had expected that Gorlston would either clear him,
arrange a course of action for him, or arrest him then and there. Go to his college rooms, get his bags packed, and wait there, Gorlston had said. He might as well have told him to put his head in a guillotine and watch the knife descending.
Len thought it was a mistake on Gorlston’s part to free him and send him to his rooms alone. He thought that Gorlston had thought he would be obedient.
He went down the the glass foyer and emerged among the office computers and the crowd of students. He was tempted to rebel there. He thought of yelling to the crowd of students: “You know the Information Office? How they pretend to be for rightness and justice, and for the good of Arcon? Well, it’s a fraud.”
Len had a little sense. He was learning more.
The male student who had watched Len go up in the elevator was waiting there on his return. His expression was interested and anticipatory, and he ran his tongue across his lips a little.
“How did you get on, and what did they say to you?”
“No comment,” Len said, and walked straight toward the exit from the foyer.
The expression on the student’s face had made it clear to Len that there was no future addressing a crowd of students in the Administration glass-house. They would have listened. He could have climbed on a computer-desk and said it to them. He would have got his audience. They would have been enthralled when he described how Gorlston had tried to blackmail him into smearing Berkeley. But that did not mean they would do anything about it. Given the idea that Berkeley was a Yellow, they were liable to think that Gorlston had behaved in a natural way.
I don’t get it, Len thought as he went out of the glass portal and stood looking in both directions across the blue grass of the campus.
Maybe other people were more sophisticated than he was. He had been caught before by the way Arcon people were liable to talk about justice and free speech and democracy and similar ideals, and then, when something happened to make nonsense of their protestations, to go on in the same way but with a more cynical outlook. After being caught out on a limb, Len had come to the conclusion that they were all half-baked.
He could not see anyone keeping an eye on him on the campus, so he slipped away, not toward the students’ block where he was supposed to go, but toward the public streets.
It was not easy to know where to go, as soon as he had done that and was on the run from the Information Office. He was going to need help and friends, and if possible contact with the revolutionary forces of Arcon. If any. He kept his eyes open for men in gray suits and tried not to hurry too much as he made his way to the monorail stop where he could get transport to downtown Davis City. As far as he could see, he had not been followed from the college.
Downtown was the less well-to-do part of Davis City where his parents had lived before they died. Len did not know of any actual revolutionary forces there, but at least in theory it was where they ought to be. To get there was the first hurdle. At the monorail station, a man in a gray suit made a cross connection and got on the car in front of him. Len waited for the next train.
There was no law that Information Office men had to wear gray suits. They usually did. But a man in a gray suit was not necessarily an Information Officer. It was difficult.
Len was a little doubtful as the journey progressed. He left the broad campus and highly individual and expensive buildings of the better part of Davis City, and, as he saw the harbor front shacks and warehouses along the swamp-glades ahead, he wondered whether he was altogether wise to seek that part of the city. It was not that he did not know it, but much of what he thought was college theory.
The people in downtown Davis City lived mostly in shacks among the steaming creeks and, in theory, as Len knew, they owned nothing, and had nothing to sell except their daughters, and nothing to hire out except their bodies, provided, that was, that the bodies were sufficiently healthy to be worth hiring. In theory, Len knew, these were the people who ought to respond to a cry of “Workers of Arcon arise, you have nothing to lose but your chains.” It was just that Len was skeptical. He had to tell himself that when men had landed on Arcon they had all been free and equal, but now everything was owned by someone, while a lot of people owned nothing and did not seem to be able to get anything, either.
He got off the monorail car in the waterfront area and looked about him. The first thing he saw was an open tavern with sprawled drunks, spilled glasses, and broken furniture. For a moment he stopped and looked at it and thought that maybe it was not so much that a revolution was not needed on Arcon, as that the people who needed it did not seem capable of carrying it out—which was bad luck for him.
But he remembered his parents, who had been poor and sick but not drunk, and thought maybe what the people needed was help. College education was not necessarily an advantage, but he might try to give it.
He went on past a warehouse of a hover-barge transportation company, and along the quay above the ripesmelling mud of the hover-barge inlet, until he came to a shack proclaiming its one-room office and weatherboard to be die headquarters of the Davis City Downtown Dockers Union, C-branch. He knocked on the door and, since that produced no answer, he pushed it open and went in. “Hell, Joe,” he said to the man who was waking up inside.
The man, who was aged forty, which meant he was shortly going to die in the Arcon way, looked at him sourly. “Why, Len,” he said. “You left that college and got a good job yet? You come to give your father’s old mates a handout?”
What Len did not know, among the many things that any young man of Len’s age did not know on Arcon, was that he had been followed all the way in the course of his journey across Davis City. An unobtrusive man in a gray suit had been reading a newspaper in the far back corner of the monorail car, and while he was not the same man in a gray suit who had been passing the take-up point at just the time the train passed, he had nonetheless followed Len at a little distance. He was not in the least put out by the one-room shack. He looked at the sign on it, pulled a fine-printed book from his pocket and turned the pages, then, when he had found what he wanted, he be haved as though he knew the place, for he went around the back to listen.
Sure enough, around the back of the shack, there was a convenient place where a man could look as though he were doing nothing, or stand up against the wall, and hear, everything that went on inside through a crack in ill-fitting boards. It was not that the Information Office lacked technical know-how. It was just that their operatives were told to be reasonable, and not go around putting microphones where none were needed.
Inside, Len said, “I am in trouble,” and watched the old man called Joe cast a rheumy, swamp-fever eye at him.
Joe looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. “You take my advice,” he said. “You tell the girl to look after it herself. It’s her look-out.”
&n
bsp; “Not that kind of trouble,” Len said after thought. “Political trouble.”
Since there had not seemed to be a great deal of point in making his speech to the drunks and layabouts in the cafes along the waterfront, Len made it to Joe.
“I’ve been finding out things at college,” he said. “It seems to me that I’ve been living my life in a state of illusion until just recently, Joe. Do you really think that this planet of ours was founded by a group of refugees who were escaping from something dreadful on Earth lest worse befall them? I’ve come to doubt it. Our ancestors may have left Earth in a state of nobility, for high ideals. I don’t know what has gone wrong, but something has. I don’t know if it’s the Information Office or the Greens and Blues who are engaged in some sort of racket, but someone is. Who are the Yellow Party, and where are they? I need to know because I believe I’ve been declared a Yellow myself, and I’m going to be arrested.”
Joe listened. There was that about Joe. He had lived as long as anyone could on Arcon, and he would not have held his position as union branch secretary except that he was capable of listening.
He did not reply about the Yellow Party.
“I don’t know about high ideals,” Joe said. “But I’ve thought that myself about the Information Office and the political parties for years and years. Why, Len, for a dewy-eyed lad, you’re almost politically conscious.”
Len was disappointed that his revelations, and particularly the one that he was going to be arrested, and therefore surely ought to be taken seriously, did not have more effect on Joe.
“You’ve known them? But look, Joe, if you’ve known what I know, why haven’t you been arrested?”
Len did not know how things worked on Arcon.
“I haven’t had a college education,” Joe said. “Pm not supposed to be articulate.” Joe looked back on a wasted life. “Furthermore, I’ve never tried to rock the boat; haven’t you noticed that? You tell me how to get my dockers an extra three centicredits an hour, and that’s all they and I want.”
Len looked at Joe in a baffled way. In truth, he was having second thoughts now about the wisdom of having come to Joe. He might have known, he thought, just to look at the swampcreeks and downtown Davis City, that nothing of any wisdom or strength of purpose could ever come out of that. He began to march up and down Joe’s shack.
“We should rebel,” he said. “We should speak out fearlessly and tell the people all the truth. We should eliminate corruption in high places, and expose the political parties. Maybe we should take to arms, and strike down those who oppose us with our own right hands. Men should be comrades. They should be brothers to one another. We must have a program. We must subvert the police, and then the army. We must foment unrest, and bring your dockers out on strike immediately. But first we must arrange for my own safety. I shall have to arrange to stow away on a hover-barge. Can you fix that, Joe?”
Outside the shack, the man in the gray suit shook a small tape-recorder he had been holding up against the crack in the shack-wall. He looked at it critically and noted the time in his notebook, then marked the tape. It was enough, he thought. When they started preaching revolution, it was quite enough. You did not want to overdo it. He came around to the front door.
“I’m damned if I’m going to involve my dockers in some kind of college-student spree,” Joe said. “I’m due to get my pension if I can live for another three months, and believe me, I’m going to get it.”
The man in the gray suit came in.
“All right, Joe,” he said. “Just stand back a little. It won’t do you any good at all to get in this spray-gun’s line.”
Len was looking at the man in the gray suit, and at the object, the last item in an Information Office agent’s equipment, which the man was holding. Len went mad at that point. He could not claim afterward that he acted unthinkingly, or that he was surprised or shocked to find himself arrested. He took quite a long look at the man in the gray suit and then decided to rush him.
He was lying in a cell when he woke up.
A man he knew as Berkeley, a college history lecturer, was bending over him.
VII
From The Arcon Records:
Arcon lived by a balance of power.
No planet at that time lived as it did because of external forces. No impulsion from outside said a government had to be this or that. No compulsion said a government had to retain its form for five hundred years. Arcon was kept as it was by internal pressures.
Or maybe by the army.
The army was created before the Information. Office. The army dated right back to the time when separate settlements were set up on Arcon. The army was not meant to fight anyone. It was said, even at the time of the founding of the fighting army, that it was there to keep the peace. Communications had proved unusually difficult on the apparently innocent planet, and the army ran them.
So none of the separate settlements on Arcon became separate nations. Arcon remained a unified single-government planet, and that was the army.
Since there was the army, it was hard to see, from the army point of view, why the Information Office should exist at all. The Information Office quietly dealt with internal, and especially urban security, and arrested Yellows.
There was no unified command including both army and Information Office. Command was a matter of informing the government, or individuals within the government, and doing this or that. From the government, funds flowed downward, both ways. And the fact that the funds might flow more one way and less the other was one cause of the internal pressures.
A man called Davis, a descendent of the William Davis who founded Davis City, was crude about it. He said, “If what the government chooses to spend on security is a cake, then the chief aim in life of the Information Office and the army, and the substance of the reports each puts in to the government, is that it should get its slice, its share.”
William Davis’ descendent was unpopular. He died by falling out of a window, but no one knew quite how. But the balance of power on Arcon remained intact, and maybe, if the politicians kept both an army and an Information Office, it was to play the one against the other.
Such a stasis was always subject to little tremors.
On October 25, 502 A.L., such a tremor happened. It took the form of an interview, four years before the events that were to result from it, in the office of Commandant C. Q. Lankowitz, in the large but not conspicuous Information Office building of Davis City.
The Commandant had commanded the Information Office H.Q. and Capital Division for a few months by then. He was a spare, academic man, at an electronic desk, and the special occasion was what might be regarded as a courtesy call on him by a General J. Koln, newly appointed to the command of the Arcon First Army, also based in the capital area.
It was natural that the two men, who were strangers, should talk mostly in terms of civilities for a little time. Each knew that the other was a power in the land. The post of Commandant of the Information Office in the capital area was more than just a local command, and the General, sitting comfortably in the visitor’s chair across the desk from the Commandant, had a perfectly good office of his own in a building called the Hexagon, not many miles away.
“Since we are both relatively new to our posts,” the General said, looking around at the interior of an Information Office with interest, “it seemed to me reasonable to call on you to express the hope that we might avoid the friction that has characterized the relations between our offices in the past.”
What the General was looking around for was not very clear. It might have been hidden microphones.
“It was indeed unfortunate,” the Commandant said, “that your predecessor should have developed such a strong feeling that the Information Office had something to do with the Treasury insistence on cutting down on the army estimates.”
The two men looked at one another across the desk and understood one another.
The General said abruptly, with a
nother glance at the walls and window of the room, “Can we talk in here?”
The Commandant raised his eyebrows at the suggestion that anyone, no matter who he was, might not feel free to talk as he pleased in an Information Office.
“I mean talk,” the General said. “In your own interest what I have to say may not be something you would want on a public record.”
The Commandant reached across the desk and pushed a switch to off. Naturally he did not tell the General that the switch only switched the system of recording from a relatively open to a more private kind.
The Commandant himself spoke more freely when that was done. “General,” he said, “let’s face it.” He looked at his visitor more narrowly. “Now that Arcon is a more urban civilization, and the Information Office has such control of the cities, the possibilities of revolt grow less and less. Do you want me to talk frankly?”
“Do,” the General said.
“Then, since the Information Office now has such complete control, you must expect that the army estimates will go on being reduced. To put it bluntly,. you should count yourself lucky that no one has yet suggested that the army should be disbanded.”
The General went on sitting as he was, in an amicable way.
“Alternatively,” he said, “since the Yellows are no longer a force on Arcon, it might be the Information Office that could be disbanded.”
The Commandant shook his head. “Unlike the army, which has no visible opponent and no external enemy to Arcon in sight,” he said. “We go on arresting Yellows every day.”
“You are sure they are Yellows?” the General said. “And not just your political opponents?”
The Commandant looked again at the General, who was looking far more self-confident than he had a right to be.
“That is a treasonable suggestion.”
“I agree,” the General said with care and thought, “that it would be convenient if the army did have an external enemy against whom it could defend our state of Arcon.”