by Rex Gordon
Len did. Awkward and acute as his own position was, with a highly uncertain future, a prisoner in a cell, guarded by Berkeley, for the first time he saw something of the awful dilemma that surrounded all life on Arcon.
He even found time to be sorry not only for himself, but for everyone else, and the people of Arcon as a whole. It made it worse that he had not previously realized that there was a problem, far less such an intractable, obscure, but fatal one.
“You mean that in order to solve Arcon’s problems, or build a fleet of starships, we’d have to educate everyone to thirty-five?”
“Not everyone, Len. No civilization requires that all its people should be educated to quite the same age. It might do if we could educate the vast majority of the people to your age, say around twenty-two. Only a few would have to go on studying, and gaining experience, to thirty-five or forty. But that’s one of the troubles we’ve always had on Arcon. We’ve never had men who’ve been both well educated and experienced as administrators. All our early disasters on the planet, the ones that were blamed on Yellow sabotage, were due to that. We did fine as long as we were a low-grade farming community. It was when we began to try to run airlines, expand the power program and industrialize, that we found that people who had stopped learning at twenty, and since then had done things by guesswork and rule of thumb, weren’t up to it. Our administrators, appointed at thirty-five to jobs that on Earth would have been done by a man of sixty, were either ill-educated, or they were fully educated but inexperienced, reckless. That is the payoff balance law. A very primitive fanning community can exist even if the average age at death is twenty-five, as it was in some places on Earth at one time. To be industrialized to the point we’re at on Arcon requires a life-expectancy of at least forty years. But to be industrialized on the interplanetary and starship scale needs something more than we can achieve on Arcon, and so we’re stuck.”
Len looked at Berkeley, then shook his head to clear his brain, and then met Berkeley’s eyes.
“So the Yellows were right,” he said. “Far from this planet proving a piece of cake, as the Greens thought, or from man adapting to it as the Blues said, it’s proved a trap, and we can neither progress while on this planet, nor get off it.”
“That’s true, Len,” Berkeley replied a little thoughtfully. “Though of course we can’t admit it You know how it is. People like you may understand these things, if they are put to you and someone takes the trouble to go to considerable length about it, but it isn’t nice knowledge, and that’s one of the jobs of the Information Office: to keep it secret and ban the Yellows so they can’t go around saying 1 told you so,’ and stirring up the common people.”
“So that the Greens and Blues can keep their power,” Len said. “So that they won’t have any trouble with inconvenient things like facts, and can continue to rule and perpetuate their mistakes forever.”
“Be reasonable, Len,” Berkeley said. “You can see it isn’t like that. What good would it have done, after we were here, if the Greens and Blues had said, ‘Sorry, the situation’s hopeless; we were wrong and made a mistake, and this planet is a trap’? We’d never have built a civilization that way, or got as far as we have. There’s a lot to be said for the Greens and Blues. They didn’t give up when they saw their mistake. It was for the public good that they took steps to prevent the truth from coming out, and they acted like responsible people in relation to their mistake, and stayed right in there battling.”
Sitting up on his bunk, Len thought that Berkeley’s defense of the Greens and Blues, ingenious as it was, might well be used to excuse anyone covering up after any mistake at all. With his eye, he measured the distance between Berkeley and the door, and wondered if he could make a dash for it. The pain in his limbs was less, and he thought he could run now. But he remembered that Berkeley had said they were three floors down, and he could hardly expect to get out without meeting any guards at all, and to be laid out twice by a spray-gun charge within twenty-four hours might well be fatal.
“So why am I here?” he said, keeping talking.
“So I can tell you all this,” Berkeley said, raising his eyebrows as though it should be obvious. “In prison and under firm security is obviously the place to do it. Especially as the idea is that you don’t come out again unless you accept a suggestion I am going to put to you. I have news for you, Len. I am authorized to put it to you on behalf of the government and the security agencies. Len, we have a job for you.”
XI
The Shopping Lists of Mary Jean Smith:
Nightdresses 2 Bras 3
The blue dress or the green.
Panties ? (!)
Wedding gown fitting is at 2:30.
When phoning John, say I do hope
he knows what he’s doing, poor dear
(but don’t say it too much).
XII
From The Jottings of G. Berkeley:
Everyone can see me outside, but what am I like inside? Maybe these jottings will help me to know this.
I am a citizen of Davis City. By this I mean that I am not actually ambitious or mercenary. It is just that because I was born among the vertical blocks of the concrete waste of the capital, I behave as the city does. Our city authorities had no need to build upward either. We could have expanded into the desert. But because we are the planet’s first city we have a kind of style, and we build these towers and flyovers and parks and surely far-too-ostentatious bridges across the creeks. We don’t care if we impress the provincials, and are far too cynical to think we impress ourselves, so it must be one another.
I don’t know what good it will do to keep these jottings.
As far as my progress in the Information Office goes, I look back on a wasted year. I have gone to the office in the morning and come back in the evening. Occasionally, though less often than I had to in the past, I have gone to some part of the city to interview some poor fool who has trembled at the thought that the Information Office is taking an interest in him. It is true that Pilsen is failing, but who likes to wait for dead men’s shoes?
Most people in the city measure their progress in life by their personal relationships with one another. Who is an I.O. officer of my rank supposed to have a relationship with? It can hardly be his “clients”; his subordinates are out of the question, and attempts to be friendly with his superiors would look like currying favor. There’s a young man I have dealings with ... It is better to confine myself to the office. I can’t help but see that Captain Pilsen, who hates me, is failing fast. His work in the office is often not done, unless it is done by me, and even his grip on security is relaxing, and I think the Commandant knows it. I hate to think of these things.
Now that there is a chance, if only a chance, that I may be appointed to Pilsen’s job, it is time I stopped thinking about office politics and thought more of grand strategy and general policy, for which I have a taste. I must try to feel again the wonder I first felt when I heard that the Yellows have a controlling interest in the Information Office, the very organization that is supposed to be engaged in suppressing Yellows.
It is a matter of history, but I still get troubled when I think of the subject with all its ironic turns and twists, which are political fortune. Two hundred years ago there was not the slightest chance that we could become almost part of the government, secure, salaried, and part of an organization whose every doing is cloaked with the magic word “security.” We were a tiny minority then, persecuted and defeated, outlawed and losing our members fast. Everyone had to suffer during the period of Great Disaster that hit our planet, but we had to endure the hatred of the people too. It was not only that people struggling for existence were sick of space adventures and Yellow Doctrines, but the Green and Blue parties had just put out the fatal smear, blaming us for their own mistakes by saying we were causing the disasters by our sabotage. How disastrous all this was. It should have finished us. Yet how ironic.
I wonder sometimes how many other gover
nments in the course of human history have made the same mistake? It must look so logical and attractive to many rulers, to set up an information office to defeat the opposition and act as a secret police above the law. Especially since the opposition was helpless; they could not go wrong.
There is a kind of grim inevitability about it. It has been seen countless times in history. How can the politicians not see that they have to become the prisoners and tools of the organization that supplies them with the information on which they act—an organization which they themselves have allowed to cloak its doing with that magic and fatal word “security”? There has never been a government yet, whether a dictatorship or a so-called nominal democracy, that, having set up an organization of our kind, has not found its actions guided, ultimately, into the most appalling mistakes, or into paths of action that have nothing to do with its own aims, but everything to do with the interests of the organization which it has itself created. The politicians themselves lose the power to check their information as they get it. The propaganda services, which are supposed to serve them, are used to fix the very elections by which the politicians attain their office. “Whoever runs the I.O. rules the world,” we say—except that he never needs to get elected, and the way he achieves his power is by a political struggle that is completely hidden.
It was that genius T. L. Lankowitz, ancestor of our present C. Q. Lankowitz, who first saw this, and who advanced thought on Arcon in the one branch it has excelled in, which is social science. One of the aims of my ambition in our office is to rise high enough in the hierarchy to be able to talk with C. Q. on equal terms and ask him what his ancestor was really like. We were utterly defeated and unpopular, I remember. The I. O. did not exist. The Disasters were happening and driving people out of the cities again and back to rural life, and in the climate of these times anyone expressing a Yellow opinion was tarred and feathered by a spontaneous outburst of the people against thought of any kind. It was then that T. L. Lankowitz, after presiding over the dismayed rump of our 289th Council, sent his communication to the Blue and Green leaders who formed the National Coalition government: “Defeated, and wishing to save our lives and those of our families, we are willing to admit our errors . . . prepared, in return for mercy at a public trial, to confess that the great disasters have been caused by our sabotage.” Then his courage in the dock, admitting to crimes it would have been impossible for us to have committed, yet somehow sounding convincing and more patriotic than the Blues and Greens!
It was his second stroke which showed his genius, his realization of the inevitable progression of events. Already he had persuaded the government to set up the Information Office, moved, he said, by the fears of a renegade, that the Yellows who had smeared their party at the trial in return for mercy would be assassinated by the Yellows still at large. The Disasters still went on, which was public proof that there were Yellows still at large, and no one could deny that Lankowitz and his group had most need to fear them, and the life-or-death incentive to round them up. No one hated or feared a revolutionary party more than a renegade who had left it, and so he moved himself and his group into a wing of the Information Office. It was hidden then, the ruthlessness with which he used his powers to kill off, arrest or accuse all the key men who opposed him, and so take control from inside. From defeat to power. Surely this is the most beautiful example of the genius of a man’s brain.
Those days are past now, and we have moderated from our revolutionary fervor, but the thing I still admire about our organization is its expertise. High ideals are all very well, and indeed I have them, but what people everywhere admire most are the men who know what they are doing and get things done, like us, the true professionals.
XIII
Relieved as Len was to be offered a way out by taking a job, he was sure that if the work was attractive, Berkeley would not have found it necessary to put him in a cell before he offered it. It was good to have information, but it was also possible to pay a too-heavy price for it.
“Since I have come to the end of my college career, I think you can take it that I am looking for a job of some kind.”
“You’ll take it, then?”
“I think you might tell me what it is first.”
“It isn’t that kind of job, Len. It’s a kind you’ll have to pick up and learn about as you go along.”
Len looked at Berkeley and wondered if there was any alternative. Staying in the cell, he imagined. It was not exactly a choice to give him enthusiasm for his new work. He sat on the edge of his bunk, pondering.
“It’s a privilege to be offered this job, Len,” Berkeley said. “I won’t pretend there aren’t some risks attached to it, but just think for a moment of the trouble I’ve gone to in selecting you.”
Len had thought of it, and was not sure he liked it. What he felt was that he would have some freedom of action if he accepted Berkeley’s offer, and none if he stayed in the cell. He stood up.
“I’ll take it.”
Berkeley looked hard at him for a moment. He was not very convinced of Len’s sincerity, but did not make a point of it. There was momentarily something in Berkeley’s look that was like regret, as though he was thinking of something that might-have-been. But he was practical about Len’s acceptance, and motioned him to the door, looking at his watch as if keeping an expected schedule.
Len thought about aims and objectives as he preceded Berkeley out of the cell. In a way, he trusted Berkeley. He had been truthful when he had told Gorlston that on the whole he thought that Berkeley was, or could be, a good man. But he did not trust him too far. Life on Arcon, he thought as he went along the corridor and discovered that his cell was one of a row of cells, was not like that. He looked about him and discovered that the Information Office cells were surprisingly clean and antiseptic and efficient, with no signs of the torture he had once heard went on there, but they were nonetheless cells, and a place for secret incarceration under a considerable building, for all that.
He saw that he had been right in thinking that it would have been no good to beat Berkeley to the door and make a dash down the corridor. The whole thing was run on careful and evidently long-established lines that the people in the streets above could not suspect. “You want him out, Captain?” the guard at the end of the corridor said, and unlocked a gate that let them through to an elevator, where another man in uniform looked carefully at Berkeley before he took them to a higher floor.
I am going to be careful before I step out of line again on Arcon, Len thought. Then he found reason to doubt whether he would ever have the chance to step out of line again on Arcon. They emerged by a small room and a side door onto the ground floor and were stopped again at a barrier before they could reach the more public part. Pretty secretaries, men in gray suits, and some members of the public could be seen there, going about what looked like their ordinary but somewhat worrying business, in their normal way.
“You’ll have to sign for him, and I’m afraid you ought to take an escort, Captain,” a man at an office window said.
“He can’t get out of my car on the expressway.”
“There’s always the other end, sir.”
“He’ll be well taken care of there.”
Berkeley got his way, by rank, but had to sign a book and accept a personal responsibility for Len, and another armed guard was summoned to escort Len to Berkeley’s car in the parking lot and see him securely inside with the door closed before they started.
As they maneuvered onto the rack accelerator and were shot out onto the freeway, Len wondered, in view of what had happened, what elaborate precautions there were going to be at the other end.
It felt strangely different for him to ride in die car in the curving concrete and metal track and look out on the city with the sensation of it being so near and yet so far. How many times had he walked in those streets down there, not doing anything in particular, as a free and youthful citizen? It was almost, he thought as they shot around the spide
rframe of the business section, as though he would never do such a thing again. To be free and able to do nothing, he thought, looking at the crowds of busy people. They did not know how lucky they were. If they only exerted their freedom and stood still for a while, it might be the first step toward their doing anything.
“Where are we going?” he asked Berkeley.
“We’ll take the next left turn if this vehicle goes the way I set up the dial.”
It was not the way to the college. It led out into the desert, but although it was busy, with a constant train of vehicles whipping past on Len’s side, it was not the way to the civil airport. There was only one other place they could go, heading out of town in that direction, and Len confirmed it by noticing the number of dun-colored vehicles on the track once they were past the intersection, and the number of uniforms inside them.
“I always wondered why we needed a standing army on Arcon,” Len said. “Since we’ve never had a war that I have heard of.”
Looking at a hexagonal-shaped building that was rising out of the flatlands ahead, on the fringe of the city where it met the desert, Berkeley said, “It has its uses.” He did not deny that it was to the army headquarters that they were going.