The Yellow Fraction

by Rex Gordon

  They had been there about an hour when a youngish woman came in. She had a sheaf of papers with her, and she looked at them and then went over to the window while they watched her. She examined the area outside the window, then stood looking at their soldier-servant. He looked at her, and then went out and closed the door behind him. Len and Lucinda were sitting together, and she touched his hand.

  The Information Officer, Len realized, and looked at the woman again. He had not seen a female Information Officer before. She had a competent, well-formed face, but an emotional look about the eyes that he had noticed in certain women. She went to a chair at a table, in a position near the center of the room. Her voice was firm.

  “Would one of you check the door and see that the soldier has gone away as he should have? I would like two more of you to sit by the window and watch the outside. Apart from that, you can gather around me.”

  They had not intended to do anything for an Information Office representative, except that she turned out to be a woman. Ropotsky went to the door, looked out, and closed it. Ed Creet and Sorensen moved to places by the window. Nothing was quite what they expected, inside the space school.

  “My name is Mary Johnstone,” she told them. “I am from the Information Office, but this will be news to you: I also am a Yellow. There is a very considerable amount you do not know yet. Let me tell you the most important things first. This space project is not what you think it is, nor what the army has told you. We control it, because we control the radio telescope, and our aims are Yellow aims.

  “As far as we are concerned, the army story about this project is just a convenient cover. We have no intention that you should spend your lives in a rocket flying to and from Vista. That is unnecessary, because you have been selected as a pioneer party who will go to found a new colony on a Vista planet, and not come back. This will allow us to send you out at maximum power on the outward journey. The journey will be a long one, but because you will be able to fly much closer to the speed of light, it will last only a year or two of your time.”

  It was something that was more of a shock to them than the colonel’s story had been. It was the opposite of everything they had been told before, and a quite new prospect, and Len saw even Lucinda looking at Mary Johnstone with parted lips and an astonished frown, while Duncan sat solidly staring.

  “Now,” Mary Johnstone said. “Let me begin to tell you what life is all about.”

  XXIX

  From The Jottings of G. Berkeley:

  I began these jottings five years ago at the inception of the rocket project. But it is only now, as it begins to work toward its culmination, that I can see it gradually becoming one of the major facts in my life. I begin to wonder what part I have played in it. For the first time, seeing it from Davis City, I begin to wonder what game it is that we are playing.

  I did not realize what was happening when Gorlston, the officer from the college where I operated as a history lecturer, came to my floor in the I. O. building.

  Betty, my secretary, put her head around my door and looked at the papers on my desk.

  “What is it, Betty?”

  It was out of the blue. After looking at the papers, she decided she could disturb me. “A Mr. Gorlston.”

  I had had no further business with Gorlston, and Len Thomas was gone.

  “Give me a minute, then show him in.”

  Something was a little out of line somewhere. I did not think much of it I try to be accessible, and people try to make use of me.

  I wondered if it was something to do with Len Thomas. Gorlston came in looking nervous and hangdog. I did not understand. Until then, I was under the impression that I knew everything.

  “Could I have a word with you, Captain Berkeley?” I could not see why he was so ill at ease, when he said it.

  “We know one another well enough for you to drop the ‘Captain,’ Gorlston.”

  I could see there was something wrong with him.

  He sat in my visitors chair looking at the switch on the desk before him. He obviously knew about those switches “I can only ask you,” he said. He looked up at my eyes. Soundlessly, his lips repeated, “I can only ask you.”

  I looked at him for a moment, then felt beneath the desk. I am not too happy myself about our electronic circuits. He saw it in my eyes. His own went quickly around the room again. “Is there anywhere else we can talk?”

  “It would do no good,” I told him. In my office, I could at least hope that I had got them all. There would be nowhere else where that would be true, and after what my landlord told me the other week, certainly not my home.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  I am making the attempt to remember exactly the words he used.

  “You know. You have interviewed people. It doesn’t help to wonder.”

  It was not himself he was nervous for. I could suddenly see that. He said, “I have a sister in Southeast Territory.”

  I felt the old twist. Anyone who has relatives, in our business, has hostages to fortune. “Connected with us?”

  “Married. To another officer.”

  I remember I sat looking at him, wondering if he was going to come out with it, and whether I would dig it out, if he made me do it.

  “You won’t help her by sitting there.”

  “All right. We have communications by private hand. A messenger.”

  “You got a letter to show me?”

  He shook his head. He had a letter. The microphones were off, but it was not for showing.

  He was involving me as well as himself. I should have put the microphone on again, and he knew it and I knew it. Unless I could be quite sure the desk was dead, we were both in trouble. He could see it made me angry.

  “Let’s go for a walk in the park,” he asked me.

  “You and I? What excuse do we have?” I told him the facts of life. “If we wanted to be conspicuous, that would be the way to do it, to go out for a private talk, outside this building.”

  He looked hangdog and despairing.

  Suddenly he said, “You told me that these special recruits like Thomas were going to be all right.”

  I had a dead feeling inside of me. It was there although I could not see what he was getting at. To say Thomas was “all right” was comparative. But he knew what the risks were of the space-shot to Vista, for I had told him. It could not be that.

  “You had better tell me what you know, or what you think you know.”

  He looked up at me. “Southeast Territory produced a candidate. He was the son of P. Vulmany.”

  “So?”

  “I said ‘was.’ He was chosen as we chose Thomas, but Vulmany withdrew him.”

  I thought about it. It was out of line. Solicitude for their own offspring, if by some mistake they had them, was not what I would have thought of as a characteristic of our high officials.

  “You told me we wanted our best youth,” he said. “That it was a privilege and the risks were worth it.”

  “Even so, it wouldn’t be an unnatural action for a doting father. Some parents don’t want their sons to take any risks, and no doubt Vulmany wanted his son to stay on this planet with him.”

  He looked at me as though he wanted to believe me. “You really think so?”

  “I’m sure of it. Have you any reason to doubt it?”

  “Only that Vulmany didn’t appear to mind his son going at first.” He touched his pocket, where I did not doubt his letter was. “Like you, he told people in the office that it was an honor and a privilege. Then he happened to have a long talk with C. Q. Lankowitz, on the long-distance scrambler telephone. He turned completely around after that. He not only had his son withdrawn, he had the office bum the record of the fact that he had been selected.”

  It was ugly. I could see how ugly better than Gorlston did, but I could not tell him that.

  “That’s nothing. Probably the boy’s mother had had time to put a word in. The phone call to Lankowitz was jus
t coincidental.”

  He looked at me gratefully. “You don’t know how it relieves my mind to hear you say that. I wouldn’t have liked Thomas to be involved in one of the things we sometimes do, but if you say it’s all right, it’s all right. I know you liked him too.”

  I knew then that it was not going to be the only time I would regret telling Gorlston that I liked Len Thomas.

  “You go back to the college and don’t think of it again. Take my word for it that nothing is going to happen to— what was his name?—Len, if we can help it.”

  He got up and left me.

  I began to walk up and down the office.

  P. Vulmany should never have let his son get into it. If he felt like that, he should have known, and stopped it in the early stages. Yet what was I thinking? Making a mountain out of a molehill of gossip told to me by a man like Gorlston? I should never even have listened to Gorlston. What I had been doing was listening to counter-information. I had committed a professional sin by opening up a private line of information inside the office.

  XXX

  From The Short History of Arcon:

  When we come to considering th6 role of the army in the rocket project, we should remember that the army command, and particularly the officers most involved, such as General Koln, Colonel Glasson, and Brigadier Ilallah of the Second Army Swamp Corps, had on their own account a peculiar view of history. It is a view that is not uncommon among army officers and the nobility of almost all human societies on every planet, and the basis of it is a kind of preconception about themselves: the idea that, in some strange way, they, who were most remote from them, nonetheless understood the common people.

  It would be interesting, but unhistorical, to explore the mental background of this odd belief. What we can note is that the view these people took of the ordinary people was, with some slight justification, that they were even simpler versions of themselves. That they shared the same ignorances and the same prejudices, in other words, and were anti-intellectual, having the same distrust of statistics, of science in so far as science exceeded the bounds of engineering and pure mechanics, and of the effect on communities of such difficult concepts as education and the payoff balance. Like the common people, the military minds saw the difficulties and disasters of life arising from the source to which they are always attributed in non-historical comment and lurid fiction, which is to say the machinations of evil men.

  It is in this light we must see the General’s dispositions of the September 6th and 7th, 506 A. L., for the rocket blast-off, his deployment of the Light Armored Corps near Davis City, and his assembly of the Parachute Regiment in Central Park for what was to be called army games. . . .

  XXXI

  The Shopping Lists of Mary Jean Smith:

  Fillet Steak, all the usual trimmings, for a healthy man?

  Imported freshwater bluefish, and something rare?

  Wine.

  What am I, f widow setting a trap for a younger man? Have I the heart to do it, when he is so good and kind?

  He has not .seen it, not the death of someone of his own generation, closely connected with him, and he does not know what it is to be so helpless. He does not know how important it is that all associations on this world of ours should always be with someone younger.

  XXXII

  Correspondence File

  From the Office of

  P. Vulmany.

  I.O. H.Q.

  Eastern Territory.

  July 3, 506 A. L.

  Dear Son,

  I must ask you not to cut yourself off from me. Naturally the things that have been happening to you have been inexplicable, but you cannot expect me to explain them fully to you, at least by letter.

  Believe me, I do know the source of your resentment. It is true that the events you describe were a selection, and it is true that when you were selected I intervened to stop you. But you may well understand that I had my reasons, and when I tell you I do things for your own good, 1 think that you might consider it possible sometimes that I mean exactly that.

  I certainly would not contemplate telling you everything even if I could. It is sufficient to say what I have told you, that the rocket project is not what you think it is, and that from your own point of view, for you. to have been involved in it would have been a sheer disaster. As for envying the second man on the list, this Desmond Salford who has gone in place of you, you simply do not know what you are saying. You might as well envy a dying man.

  Make an effort to believe me, please. Burn this.

  Your far from doting father, Peter Vulmany.

  XXXIII

  The desert light was bright and the air still fresh when Len and Lucinda went out into the space school grounds. It was not only the difference of place, Len thought. It never could be an ordinary morning in anyone’s life, the day after they had first heard the Yellow Doctrine.

  He and Lucinda were first out of the central building, and they walked out across the parade ground area looking at the training sheds under the walls, and the place where the instructors were waiting for them, out in the open where the tower stood, and the centrifugal and flight-simulator machines. Len thought how things that normally required cover did not need any in that desert atmosphere. When they were away from the building, they turned and looked at the thin spire of the top of the rocket which stood against the blue of the sky above die wall.

  It gave Len a different feeling that day, after Mary Johnstone’s visit, from the one he had had when they first saw it across the desert, or after the colonel’s story. To Lucinda, as they stood looking, he said, “It’s strange how a thing like that, a rocket, begins to mean something.”

  Lucinda too looked at the rocket as though she had to keep some reserve about it, as though it were a thing that was tempting and, at the same time, frightening.

  “I suppose, like me, you only knew the Yellow idea partly, but not how wide it was, or how far it went.”

  “Worse than that,” Len confessed. “I thought I did know it, when in fact I didn’t know what it was all about.”

  He had not really understood what it meant before, that a doctrine or a political party should be suppressed. If there was only the opposition propaganda to reconstruct from, you thought you knew, but of course you failed. He noticed that an instructor by one of the training machines was waving to them to come over, but he did not mention that to Lucinda.

  Duncan and Penny, who had also come out, came toward them, with Sorensen and Vera following. “We have decided to hold a conference,” Duncan said. It sounded natural and inevitable after Mary Johnstone’s visit, the more so after a night to think about it. The twenty-four-legged creature that Len had envisaged would want to make up its collective mind. When Sorensen joined them, he said, “The instructors are waving to us.”

  “They will have to wait,” Duncan said, and looked to where Ropotsky and Susan and the rest were coming to join them.

  Even after the crash of the aircraft and their talk of escape plans, Len had not quite realized how unified they were becoming, or how impossible it was for an outsider to see it or understand it. After looking around the grounds, Vera pointed in the direction of the swimming pool, which had a concrete apron and bank where they could sit, away from the wall and clear of the instructors, and the whole party moved spontaneously in that direction.

  As they seated themselves, the chief instructor came up to them, looking hot after walking right across the grounds. He looked at them indignantly, clearly having no idea what was going on. “You have been allowed out to work,” he said. “Maybe you don’t understand. The work you do here is essential for your survival.”

  Len noticed that they waited for Duncan to speak. There was a natural authority about Duncan. It was not what Duncan said, nor did he necessarily consult with them before he said it. Duncan just said what he had said before. “We have decided to hold a conference.” When a thing was said by Duncan, it became so solid and rock-hard that even the chief in
structor could only stare at it.

  “The colonel is not going to allow you to hold conferences,” the chief instructor said.

  Duncan shook his head. That was obviously the colonel’s business. Meanwhile, they were going to hold a conference.

  The chief instructor opened his mouth, closed it, and decided to go off to the main building, presumably to find the colonel.

  “Won’t they send soldiers to us?” Eliza Teen said.

  No one seemed to think that very important, and Lucinda, who had seated herself on the bank by Len, said, “I don’t think they'd be that foolish.” It was obviously going to be difficult for the authorities to force their bodies into training, or their heads into learning if they did not want to take it, and even if the space school was in a state of paralysis, the colonel would have had to be extraordinarily unwise to make an issue of it immediately.

  They turned to the question of the rocket, which they could see above the wall, and what Mary Johnstone had told them the previous night, and whether it was believable or not that the Yellows had somehow taken over the whole rocket venture, including the radio telescope, which they could also partly see above the wall on the hillside. It took a considerable amount of faith to believe that the Yellows intended to fly them out to Vista in what for them would be a year or two, by using up all their fuel and power on the outward journey, and that they were in a position to know that there very likely was a pristine new planet at Vista which they would find inhabitable.

  While they sat in the sun and talked about it, Len thought that whoever operated the telescopes would know that Vista had planets, since that could be determined by irregularities of the stellar motion, but not that any were inhabitable. They were obviously going to have to take a number of chances.