by Rex Gordon
“I don’t know why they sent a young woman to talk to us and inform us,” Ropotsky grumbled. “I would have preferred a man, maybe an astronomer, or someone who could be more technically exact and give us more accurate details.”
The group had a tendency to look to Lucinda for the
answer to anything like that, just as they looked to Ropotsky himself for matters related to organic chemistry, or to Sorensen to solve physics or engineering problems.
“I don’t think that was the idea,” Lucinda said. “The way they see it, we don’t have any alternative but to go up in the rocket, and if the people who operate the radio telescope and control the flight arrange it so we can’t get back, we’ll obviously have to make a landing. The reason they sent Mary Johnstone was because of the enthusiastic way she indoctrinated us. The Yellow Party must have decided that we had to be capable of carrying out dieir aims on another planet.”
Len knew what Lucinda meant: to turn them into Yellows. He looked at the water of the swimming pool. But they had been Yellows, or incipient ones, or they would not have been selected.
“As far as we are concerned,” Duncan said, looking upward at the sky, “whether we accept the Yellow doctrine will decide if we go in the rocket.”
They all looked around at the space school grounds and walls. Beyond them lay the desert. If they did not go in the rocket, the alternative was an escape attempt, which they knew they would have to plan in detail, but which would not necessarily be unsuccessful.
Any soldier knew that it was not the totality of power that mattered, but where it was applied and when. A soldier taken from behind could lose a spray-gun, and another could lose another. Vehicles, aircraft and airport guards were all subject to the same technique of the intense application of local power. But how did they stand with regard to the doctrine that, even if it was suppressed, was still the core of Arcon politics? It was a doctrine more sublime in its range, involving galaxies and stars and the eternity of time, than Len had ever suspected.
“It’s a big subject,” Salford said. He was looking across the waters of the pool at the space school gate where the sentries stood, and his dark face showed he was still thinking of his escape plans.
“Too big for us?” said Duncan. “When a woman like Mary Johnstone can master it?”
Len was to remember that morning when they discussed Yellow doctrine and recreated it by the pool. Sorensen was the first to say, “I’m for it.”
It was all right for him, Len thought. He was a hard-science man, a physicist as well as an engineer. Perhaps it came natural for him to base his personal conduct on a hypothesis that involved the universe, the stars and galaxies, from the cosmos itself down to the structure of the atom.
Sorensen and Vera sat by the pool with the sunlight reflecting from his gold head and her red one. Harold Sorensen’s blue eyes looked at them as though it was natural and inevitable to think of the primordial substance of the universe when deciding what to do at a given moment.
“The Yellows see us all as part of a universal process, a building up from the simplest of all things, the gas between the stars,” Harold said. “I like that. It’s dead against the usual view of the universe, which says it consists of entropy, a running-down, and that everything will be dead in time. Maybe,” he admitted, “it’s just that I’m a blind optimist.”
Duncan looked hard at Sorensen, as though he expected him to go on talking. “That’s all you can say to back the Yellows up?” he asked.
Len understood then what Duncan meant by a conference. They were there to give the Yellow doctrine a harder going-over than Mary Johnstone had ever given it. She had given them enthusiasm and emotion and a young woman’s drive, but that did not satisfy this group.
Sorensen’s eyes became cold blue depths as he looked back at Duncan. “No. It’s right. I mean it’s physically right,” he said. “The gas between the stars consists of the simplest element, pure hydrogen, one proton, one electron. Under the influence of gravity it condenses into the stars. By atomic fusion there, it builds up into helium, iron, and all the complex substances like uranium, with proton and neutron nuclei, and a cloud of electrons like them. The stars blow up and the material is scattered in space again when they reach the nova stage. It forms the planets. There is a power loss. But you are left with material of a higher structure.”
Looking at the gold head and blue eyes, Len thought that if you wanted hard reasons, Sorensen could be the land of man who would give them to you. Duncan looked around their group and along the edge of the pool until he came to Imantha.
“Imantha, you’re our chemist. How does that strike you?”
Imantha looked up at Duncan, then glanced at Salford. Salford was looking across the water at the gate in the walls and seemed to be thinking of escape plans. It was not easy for Imantha to go against Salford.
“All right,” she said. “You begin to get chemical reactions on planets. When things cool, the building-up process continues in terms of larger molecules. Acid rains washing material down to solvent seas and things like that. When you get lightning and solar radiation in methane and carbon dioxide atmospheres on planets in early stages you get molecules up to organic level.”
What are toe doing, Len thought, sitting here talking about galaxies and atoms and molecules? Surely nothing could be more remote from the problem they had before them.
After she had said her say, Imantha looked at Ropotsky. Everyone knew that Ropotsky was their biochemist.
Ropotsky looked up and looked around at them. He knew what they expected. Like Len he had heard the doctrine that was supposed to make sense of all things.
If it did, Len thought.
“Organic compounds too, on planets,” Ropotsky said. “Big molecules pick up new atoms that happen to fit their facets. Once started, they can only build up in a certain order, and when they reach a certain size, they split, and the halves drift off to begin to build again. It’s the same building up of higher organisms in biology. The same law applies to living structures, including us. That part of what she said is true, it seems to me. You begin with microscopic specks of life, and gradually run the gamut of all living things until you come to man.”
The sun was gradually becoming hotter on the bank and concrete by the pool, and Len saw the whole space crew sitting there turn and look at Ed Creet as though they knew what next was going to happen.
“The human brain is the largest unitary coherent molecular structure in the universe we know so far,” Ed Creet said. “A doctrine that connects the universe with us, in fact.”
Len remembered his training in communication theory, including cybernetics. Lucinda’s dark eyes were on him. “It’s not so much its size as its structure,” he said. “Its awareness and memory-banks. The state of its organization.”
Little Penny had sat so near to Duncan that she was almost in his lap as he lay on one elbow by her. Her eyes were round, with her apparently child-like innocence. She looked around at everyone as though trying to understand them. “As though the universe wanted to think,” she said. “It didn’t know what it was doing quite, but everything went the same way, until it made us.”
It was calm in their part of the space school grounds, and the chief instructor had gone into the central building and had not come out again. Len had continued to look at Lucinda’s dark eyes after he had said his word, and she had watched him, asking him if he knew what he was doing, if he was going along with what they were all saying.
“You know this is more like a religion than a political doctrine, don’t you?” she said in words that might have been meant for him alone.
Vera looked at Lucinda. Len was not sure what Vera’s specialty was. Considering her looks, it was something, like ecology or paleontology.
“You know it yourself, Lucinda. This isn’t an egocentric dogma. The same rules apply to development on any planet. Evolution is bound to progress to maximum, until you get one dominant species that runs out of compet
ition. Man got his maximum fulfillment on the perfect world of Earth. It’s just that on Arcon it happened to be the Arcon swamp-frog. Then evolution would stop at that point.”
Lucinda had looked away to Vera, and Len was left looking at her profile, seeing that she did know, and was not going to deny what was being said. Berkeley and his kind chose well, Len thought grimly. Choosing the rocket crew for the new planet, they chose our subjects so exactly that our knowledge is almost a trap for us, he thought.
They had known what they were doing. Mary Johnstone had not needed to shed a Yellow light on them. Her function had only been to put a match to a powder-train.
Salford looked away from the gate and turned his dark face to them. “So you were born to innumerable worlds,” he said. “All of them doomed when their suns blow up. A universe of strife and evolution, so some maximum creature can arise on each and reach its own fulfillment. Then what happens? The worlds die, and all that has happened is as though it had never been. All right. Unless. You say it.”
Duncan looked at Salford, and then at the company around the pool. The colonel and the chief instructor had come out of the central building by then, and were standing by the space school door, but no one took any notice of them. Duncan said, “All right. Which one of us is going to say it?”
He looked at Susan, their “pine” mathematician, who had not spoken yet.
When he looked, Susan was sitting by Ropotsky and looking at the ground. Then she looked up.
“It only makes sense,” she said, “if you assume that the process is going on, and must have a next step. We are creatures that have sense and reason, so why do we assume that the universe hasn’t? Or at least some aim, some blind drive, some purpose.”
For some reason she looked at Sorensen, who had started it, and whose blond hair was like her own.
“If there is, there’s something beautiful about the next step. The whole process is one of selection of structures that are more alive, of a higher form, and more aware.
On a planet, while it lasts, any creature can fulfill its own desires, its animal nature. But the habitable worlds are far apart, and there is no incentive for any creature seeking its own immediate advantage within its lifetime to leave its planet. Why should it? It has grown up perfectly adapted to one world. It has evolved on that world, and it can’t find anything better for it on any other.”
Susan looked away, at the rocket across the wall. “But suppose there were some creature so alive and so aware that it could see the universe as a whole and understand the universal purpose. That creature might decide, voluntarily and of its own accord, to fulfill that purpose. The purpose of the universe, you might say, would have become conscious. Because that creature would head outward, seeking new worlds, new evolution and new development. It would be self-selected when it set out. It would suffer selection and survival-of-the-fittest on every new world it came to. When it had learned to survive there, and built a civilization, and not until, it would be self-selected again as it set out for new worlds. Such a creature would populate the universe in time. It would be the universe in a form and structure so advanced that we can not imagine. At the time the power of the universe ran out, it would be complete, a cybernetic whole, in one total transformation.”
They sat on the bank by the pool in the space school, and Len noticed that the colonel and the chief instructor were coming toward them with a squad of soldiers, but none of them took much notice of that. Duncan was drawing two circles in the dust beside him.
A doctrine, a dogma, Len thought. The Yellow cosmos. “I want a vote,” Duncan said. “You can all find a pebble or some kind of token. Those of you who are for going into the rocket can throw it into this circle here, and those who are against can throw it into the other.”
The colonel, the instructor and the squad of soldiers had progressed halfway across the grounds toward them by the time the stones were in.
Looking at the objects in the circle, Len noticed that some of them were coins. Maybe the ones who threw them thought they would have no further use for coins.
Duncan too looked at the answer to his vote, then tossed in two more items for himself and Penny, and then got up. He looked across the pool “Two of you come with me,” he said, and set off around the pool to meet the instructor and the colonel.
Len began to get up, then saw that Sorensen and Ropotsky had already gone. He relaxed again. No doubt Duncan intended to tell the colonel that they were striking for better conditions, or over the food, or for a shade more freedom. He and Lucinda watched the parties meet on the far side of the pool and begin their parley. But they did not worry over negotiations which, though the colonel could not know it, could have only a single outcome.
“I’m glad you voted the same way as I did, Lucinda.”
“That’s not surprising, since everyone else did.”
“It will be all right. As you said before, a Vista world can’t be worse than being fugitives in an Arcon swamp-bog.”
On their side of the pool, the couples were talking and watching Colonel Glasson and the instructor, who appeared to be becoming heated. Len watched Lucinda frown, and wondered.
“They have only sent this one young woman to see us,” she said.
Len said, “So we might take a few precautions.”
Despite all their talk, looking at the sky, he became a little thoughtful.
XXXIV
From The Jottings of G. Berkeley:
Looking out of my office window at Davis City, I tried to feel at first as I had, that we were all reliable professional men working together, and that suspicions and gossip that came to me from a man like Gorlston deserved just the check and reassurance I had given him. A city has that effect. I watched people going about their business, and the traffic on the expressway, and I told myself that the very normality of the city meant that there could be nothing wrong at the top.
I spent a lot of time looking out of that window. I myself had prepared the government papers for the desert project. I had attended the Council meeting at which it had been first projected. A space project was what the party had worked for and believed in. It was absurd to think that there was anything wrong with it which I and people similar to myself did not know.
I remembered that, at the Council meeting, I and the Staff had been asked to withdraw while the Delegates considered their decision. Lankowitz, Vulmany and T. Chinn had had meetings since then, which I happened to know. I took the trouble to go through my papers relating to the rocket contracts. I had a considerable amount of material, but none of the key plans showing how the detailed items related together. The key plans were all in Lankowitz’ office.
When I thought of what I was going to do, I felt fear.
To ask questions would only draw attention to myself and my suspicions. The alternative was to find out. It took an effort to come to that conclusion. I told myself that I am a coward when acting on my own ideas, and a hero 'when acting on orders from the leadership, which means they are someone else’s.
I was worried about little things, such as that my office light would be seen burning late, high in the darkness above Davis City, and that someone might look up, examine the building as they would have to against the night sky, and say, “Why is he working late; what’s he got to keep him?” I was not as worried as I ought to have been about the interior of the building and the people departing along the corridors. When Betty, my secretary, came in, I said, “Look, you might as well go home now.” I indicated an innocuous file on my desk and said, “You can’t help me with this because it’s all Stage Three confidential.”
I waited until she had tidied the office before putting on her coat, as she always does. I judged my time to a nicety, and called out, “Betty!”
I could foresee the expression on her face as she opened my door again.
“There is something you can do for me. I shall want to consult the Stage Three index in the Commandant’s office. Will you find out for me if there�
��s anyone working late there?”
I knew there would be no one who intended to stay at that hour. C. Q. Lankowitz was out of town, as I had ascertained that afternoon before I took out the Stage Three file. Lt. Mary Johnstone was away at the space project, no doubt telling Len what life was all about. The last thing any of the regular staff would want to do would be stay on when they had a chance to go home early, and there would be no one of high rank to notice if they had an attack of virtue.
I could hear Betty on the phone in the other room. It was only a moment before she came back to me. “Ven Oborin and Cattie Fall were just locking up and setting the selecters. I told them to set them so that your key and mine will open the door and clear the alarms so you can reach the Index.”
The internal security of the I. O. building is such that no one can enter the Commandant’s section alone. Betty would have to come with me, use her key as well as mine in the door, and stand there watching as I went to the Index to see that I did not trip any of the internal alarms or touch any of the desks or papers. Even that was something that should have been done by Ven Oborin himself or Cattie, but I had guessed they would push it onto my department.
“Look, I am frightfully sorry about this, Betty.”
“Could we go now?” She was looking at her watch and I had told her she could go home. “If you only want me to help you to get whatever it is you wanted?”
“I’m sorry, Betty.” I indicated the file. “It may take me up to two hours to discover just what it is I do want”
She stood on one leg and looked bleak. She would sit in her outer office doing nothing for two hours that might easily become three, and not get home till midnight.
“I don’t want to suggest that you leave me your key,” I said.