The Yellow Fraction

by Rex Gordon

  The Commandant looked at the General most carefully, wondering exactly what he was suggesting.

  The General withdrew a paper from the briefcase he had brought with him. “My predecessor,” he said, “expanded his military intelligence units.”

  “There is absolutely no need for that,” the Commandant said. “It is against government policy. Information and intelligence is strictly the province of the Information Office.”

  The General went on fingering the paper he had taken from his briefcase.

  “The Information Office has made such a good business out of catching Yellows that the army thought it would try too,” he said. “It was quite an interesting exercise. We had some of our men set up in civilian clothes, and aim to be captured by your Information Office, and other things.”

  For some reason, the Commandant did not respond at once. He ran his tongue across his lips and went on looking at the sheaf of papers in the General’s hands.

  The General watched him.

  “How is your internal security, Commandant?” he asked. “Have you ever thought, in the political climate of Arcon, and in view of there being nowhere else that was safe for them to go, there might be some Yellows actually inside the Information Office?”

  The suggestion that the General had just made, as everyone knew, was perfectly preposterous.

  The Information Office, that security arm of the Arcon administration, was employed specifically to counter and check and crush the Yellows. It arrested them every day. It interfered with people’s lives. It had people rejected when they applied for the highest jobs, on “security” grounds, and because they were not “safe” characters. The Information Office, on one or two notable occasions, had even been known to indict and accuse the highest politicians, who had later been removed from office.

  Yet there was the General, saying that there -might be Yellows actually inside the Information Office, and there was the Commandant, not saying anything, but sitting with an' air of caution, and a little rigidly, and looking at the paper in the General’s hands.

  The General passed across the paper. “It’s only a copy, of course,” were the words with which he accompanied it. Then, as though his courtesy call was over, he got up to leave the Commandant.

  He paused on the way out, and turned back to the desk again.

  “You have heard about the cake?” he said.

  “Cake?”

  He looked hard at the Commandant. “The cake of which

  our organizations both get slices.”

  “Yes.” After a moment, there was something almost luminous about the way the Commandant looked at the General, as though he understood him right down from what was inside his head to what was inside his trousers.

  “The solution to the problem of larger slices may be to obtain a larger cake.” The General, perhaps intentionally, looked upward at the ceiling. “It would be useful if Arcon had an external enemy,” he said.

  The Commandant’s gaze relaxed and became mild as the General’s eyes came down. He looked once again like someone who thought academically in terms of policies, Blue government, the chances of the Greens at the next election, the administration of a busy office, and kindred matters. He no longer appeared to notice the over-heavy innocence of the man before him.

  “Your suggestion will be attended to, General, and it is certainly of interest to us that we might avoid the friction.”

  The General went out, looking aggressive and pleased with himself, and Commandant C. Q. Lankowitz sat at his desk and thought for a while, with narrowed eyes.

  VIII

  From the diary of J. Adolf Koln

  July 9, 502 A.L.

  Since 1 have come into the capital, I have learned that I must make contacts with my opposite numbers in the Information Office. In a way, they are at once the colleagues and the competitors of the army, since they too are concerned with the security of the planet, but in some instances it is either them or us. This is a game played in kid gloves, and I am not used to it.

  July 13, 502 A.L.

  Something has happened. I have heard an atrocious story. It is too scandalous to be confided to this journal.

  July 25, 502 A.L.

  I have always thought the Information Office to be genuine. Even now I cannot believe otherwise. Yet what am I to think? I cannot believe that men can exist as they are, if what I have heard is true.

  July 29, 502 A.L.

  I feel I am reaching some kind of crisis. There is something abominable about going about the capital and hearing the scandal and all the gossip. Some of the politicians think that I know more than I already do, I think. Do they not understand that I would not behave as I do if I believed even a fraction of what I heard? It is their assumption that I am like them that leaves me defiled, and I am sick with the treachery of it.

  August 1, 502 A.L.

  I have solved the problem of my oath. It is true that this oath, required of all who hold a commission in the Arcon Army, pledges allegiance to the rightful government of Arcon, but this I am sure is purely nominal, and inserted by the politicians, while the true meaning is something deeper. My loyalty, 1 am convinced, is not to a group of politicians who are most unworthy. It is to the Arcon people.

  IX

  From the Information Office Headquarters File;

  Office of the

  District Captain,

  Anti-Yellow Division,

  Capital Area.

  July 30,205 A.L.

  The Commandant,

  Anti-Yellow Division.

  Dear Commandant Lankowitz,

  It is naturally with some reserve that, at your request, I made a character report on G. Berkeley, my own second-in-command in this district. Though I appreciate your remarks on my laxity, I still feel it is invidious for a captain to report on subordinates only one step down in our internal hierarchy.

  There is absolutely no doubt about the intelligence, enthusiasm and ability of Lieutenant G. Berkeley. My reservations relate rather to his romanticism and idealism, which, excellent as they are, make me feel that they may preclude him from higher office. It is very difficult to pin this down. A tendency to don disguises and do things himself when he feels they should be done well, instead of delegating work to others, is typical. I do not know why I feel that this man would be unreliable in higher office, but I do.

  Respectfully yours,

  M. Pilsen (Captain, Capital Area)

  X

  Understanding, while knowing nothing.

  Leaping to conclusions, even if they were the wrong ones. They were bound to be wrong, anyway. It was not a very good cell, but, to begin with, Len had only a hazy impression of it.

  “All right, ease up, Len,” Berkeley said. “Try uncurling your limbs a little. It’s painful, I know, but you really shouldn’t try to rush a spray-gun.”

  The man and the voice were known, but not the sense the things the voice said. The cell was ten feet by six, with toilet and white tiles, which made it look quite clean. The way it looked so uninviting could be the pain.

  “Where am I?” Len tried to say. “What happened?”

  Make sense of things if he could. He couldn’t.

  Berkeley did not try to answer two questions simultaneously, since Len’s speech was not back to normal yet.

  “You’re in I.O. headquarters,” he said in his new way. “Maybe I should say under I.O. headquarters. This cell, if I remember the way I came down here, is about three levels underground.”

  It was another feature of the cell. It had a light, but no window. Len became conscious of that. Instead of trying to stand up and do something, he concentrated on being conscious.

  “Mr. Berkeley,” he said.

  “Well, um, yes,” Berkeley said. “Mr. Berkeley.”

  Len opened his eyes wide. He even succeeded in sitting up a little. Perhaps it was not wise, but he stuck with it. He looked around him.

  “Mr. Berkeley,” Len said. “Why, they’ve put me in the same ce
ll with you.”

  Berkeley looked as though he would like to answer that, but he desisted. He seemed to think it was too complicated. He took a packet out of his pocket and handed Len an Arcon cigarette. Smoking was not wise on Arcon. It shortened your life by five years, and out of forty that was quite a proportion, but there were times when it was worth it.

  “Take it easy,” he said.

  Len repeated his former question. “What happened?”

  “You’ve been tested,” Berkeley said.

  “Tested?” Len thought he meant arrested.

  “You tried to change the world around you,” Berkeley said. “It wasn’t a very good attempt. I was a bit disappointed about that. Still, you did it, and since I forecast it, I’m glad to have been right about that.”

  Len took another look at the cell and Berkeley. There was something that was not quite right, even in wrongness.

  It was a cell, all right, and it was underground, but the door was open. Berkeley had a bath-sponge in his hand, which he had used to bathe Len’s face to bring him around, but since it was unlikely that prisoners were provided with bath-sponges in their cells, Berkeley must have got it from down the corridor. Also, Berkeley was wearing a gray suit.

  It was quite a high-class gray suit. It was a better gray suit than Gorlston. had worn, and it was a far better gray suit than the somewhat baggy and crushed one that the man who had Come into the shack had been wearing, though Len had only seen him momentarily, and had not been precisely interested in his clothes. All the same, it was a gray suit.

  “Mr. Berkeley,” Len said. “I somehow don’t think I’ve got this quite right.”

  “Tm fairly sure you haven’t,” Berkeley said. “Oh, well, we all make mistakes at times.”

  Len looked at the open door, and then at Berkeley. “I suppose you are a prisoner here?” he said.

  “No,” Berkeley said. “Not exactly. No. It’s not quite fair to put it like that You might say that I am the opposite.”

  Len took a little time thinking about the pins and needles which afflicted all his limbs, and also about what Berkeley could mean about being the opposite of a prisoner in the particular context in which he used it.

  “You are in the hands of the authorities,” Berkeley said encouragingly. “To be precise, and to put a finer point on it, if you think you can take it, me.”

  “I don’t get this,” Len said.

  Berkeley sighed. “I didn’t think you would.”

  But he dropped the sponge with some distaste, and seemed to think that Len was all right now, for he sat down

  on the bunk opposite him and made himself comfortable, as though he was going to stay for a little time.

  “Have I been arrested?” Len said.

  "You can put it that way. You can say you are under restraint. It will sound a little better.”

  “You mean I am a prisoner here?” Len looked at the open door. “And you are not?”

  “It will take too long to get at it the question and answer way,” Berkeley said. “Let’s have it out, shall we? You are my prisoner. I gave orders to Gorlston, and then to have you followed, and then, when you became violent, which I anticipated, to have you arrested.”

  It took Len a little time to think out what Berkeley had told him. For some reason it seemed to him particularly fateful and underhanded. After all, he had got into his present state in part because of Berkeley. He had defended Berkeley as far as he could against Gorlston, and then, when it came to the crunch, he had also been thinking of Berkeley when he had resisted being blackmailed into a smear.

  For a very ordinary student, with a pronounced but reasonably harmless aptitude for mathematics and electronics, fate seemed to be unusually unkind.

  “The world and our Arcon politics are the way I thought they were,” Len said. “Things aren’t less bad then I thought. They’re more so.”

  “I assume you are being philosophical,” Berkeley said. "Our planet is in a bad way. It always has been. I’D agree to that.” He added, “I’m a ranking I. O. officer.”

  “Why?” Len said. “Why, why, why?”

  “It’s the payoff balance,” Berkeley said. “It might have been studied in any society. It could have been. But there’s been no cause before.”

  Len realized, with difficulty, that Berkeley was talking about the State of Arcon. It was not exactly the question Len had asked. What he had meant to ask was why Berkeley had appeared at his college as a pseudo history lecturer, misled him, attracted him with fine words, befriended him, deserted him, got him into trouble with Gorlston, had him followed, then had him knocked out with a spray-gun, and finally had him arrested and thrown into prison.

  It did not seem a logical procedure to Len. He could not make out why anyone should do it, regardless of who Berkeley was. But he was still remembering his state of mind just before he got knocked out with the spray-gun, and he saw even less cause to change it now than he had then. He decided to play it Berkeley’s way.

  “I know we had some interesting sociological discussions in die past, Mr. Berkeley, but do you mind explaining to me, among other things, what you mean by the ‘payoff balance’? I don’t think I’ve heard that term before.”

  Berkeley looked very serious.

  “The payoff balance,” he said, “is the difference between the length of a man’s useful working life, which obviously depends on how long he lives to work, and the length of the period of education which is necessary to fit him for that work. This may seem very difficult and abstract and irrelevant to you, Len. But for the past four hundred and fifty years, it has dictated virtually everything that has happened here on Arcon.”

  Len also looked serious. “Including what has happened to me?” he said.

  “It’s like this,” Berkeley said. "Our ancestors, when they arrived here on Arcon, didn’t know anything about the payoff balance. You wouldn’t expect them to, would you? It had not been studied. And besides, being farmers and constructional engineers, and pioneers generally, they were only concerned with two things. One was how they could live, which they did fairly well, having a virtually virgin planet to exploit, and the other was the awful and incomprehensible fact that they died at forty. You probably don’t understand the significance of that last fact, Len. You’re used to it, and were brought up with it, the idea that forty is the natural dying age for people. To our ancestors, though, it loomed as the largest and most incomprehensible fact in all their lives. What science and time they could spare, under the leadership of the Greens, was devoted to biochemistry, when they could afford biochemistry, and the attempt to solve the problem.

  “I’m not sure I altogether follow this,” Len said. “I find it difficult at the moment to concentrate my mind on what happened four hundred and fifty years ago. I’m thinking more of now.”

  What a way to begin an education.

  “Four hundred years ago,” Berkeley said. “Three hundred years ago. It amounts to the same thing. You see—and I’m sorry to have to acquaint you with this, Len—the problem is insoluble. Even now, after four hundred years of research, we still don’t know how the human Earth-bom metabolism of man can be reconciled with the biochemistry of Arcon. I can tell you how much we do know. We know that the problem arises because there are different characteristic compounds in the biological organisms in Arcon air and Arcon dust and water. It’s a bit more difficult than growing an acid-soil plant in a chalk and lime soil. And while you may think it should be easy for a chemist, the answer is that it would be if only one substance was involved or some simple thing. If it was just the water, for instance, then we could distill the water. Or if it was just the air, then we could wear face-masks. But unfortunately these compounds are not only in the air and water, but they are a natural part of die soil and the things we eat. It isn’t practicable to grow everything under artificial conditions, and if we did all the plants and beef would have to be given distilled water and be put in helmets too. It’s complicated, as you can see, and
the fact remains that the only way man could have lived fully on Arcon, to his natural three-score-years-and-ten, would have been to stay in a self-sustaining system, which is to say inside the spaceship.”

  Len was shocked by Berkeley’s description of the situation on Arcon, his home planet

  None of the books he had ever read, which dealt with the logistics of getting to new star-systems and other worlds, had told him anything about the true chemical and biochemical problems that man might encounter once he got there, and that his ancestors had encountered and put up with. He did not want to think of it.

  “Mr. Berkeley, what’s this got to do with the other thing you mentioned?” he said. “The whatever-it-was, the payoff balance?”

  “The connection is this, Len: Our forefathers, for five hundred years, have tried to solve the problem of making people on Arcon live longer than forty, and they have failed. So, naturally, they’ve thought from time to time in other terms. In Yellow Party terms, for example. If the only way to enable people to live a natural, full and lengthy life on Arcon would be to keep them in a spaceship, then why not put everyone in spaceships? Go off to another planet, in other words. But that is where our people have run up against a difficulty. After the original spaceship had been destroyed, it proved not so easy to put it together again or make a new one. And to make a whole fleet of star-ships, which was what would have been necessary after two or three generations, was quite beyond our powers. A very high technological civilization would be necessary to do a thing like that And a very high technological civilization means that people have to have a lengthy education. Do you know that on Earth, the people who built the great technological civilization there were all educated beyond the age of thirty? But of what use would it be to us, on Arcon, to educate our people, students like you, to the age of thirty-plus, which is what we’d have to do to make a civilization capable of building a fleet of starships, when you’ll all be dead by forty? If you think carefully of this for a little, you’ll see what I mean by the payoff balance.”