The Yellow Fraction

by Rex Gordon

  indicated a chair, and said, “Would you like to sit down a little?” I caught an expression on his face which was not fear, but something more like interest.

  I decided that that room was bugged. It was what I would do in Lankowitz’ position, especially if I were playing a critical game for high stakes. I would not let him touch anything or sit down in the room where he evidently wished to stay. “We will go out onto your roof garden,” I said. I watched him, but he only looked at me again with that look of interest.

  “What do you want, Berkeley?” he said as he led the way. “I assume this is a private matter?”

  “We will arrange for you to stop the rocket.”

  He showed no emotion of understanding my intentions. “Ah,” he said. "Your homosexual attraction to that young man, Len Thomas. I had a report about that.”

  We were in the roof garden, which I did not know. There was a seat there, illuminated from the windows and by the parapet that lay beyond it. I would not let him sit on the seat since there might be a button concealed there somewhere that he could press. I motioned him to the parapet, resisting the desire to press the trigger or attack him physically as he went to it. I sat on the seat myself.

  There was no homosexual relationship between myself and Len Thomas. It was a figment of Gorlston’s mind. Yet such is the paperwork in the office that the- suggestion had only to appear and he had got a report on it.

  “I am disappointed in you, Berkeley,” he said, sitting down a little sideways on the parapet, with the city lights behind him. “Do you know I had a bad report on you from Pilsen? I took leave to disagree with it. Your work preparing the government papers for the rocket project was first class. I had my eye on you for the highest office. Our shortage of men with grasp and vision is such that I had even mentally placed you as my successor.”

  He took my breath away by the effrontery of his flattery in this situation. It was incredible that he should expect me to believe what he was saying, yet he said it in the calmest voice. I had only to press the trigger of the gun I held in my lap, with the spray-catch set at its lowest charge, to send him tumbling into the dark depths as his body stiffened. I could get away with it, too. When his body was found, the tiny mark on the skin that was all that would show would be lost in his massive injuries. No one would know how he came to fall from his roof garden at a time when he was alone.

  “Your loss of power in the party may be sooner than you think, Lankowitz.” My voice sharpened as I said it. “For five hundred years our people have worked for the day when men could move on and leave this planet, and now the opportunity has come, and what have you given us? A fraud.”

  I could see him examining my face in the half-light with what looked like curiosity as much as calm intentness.

  “Are you really interested, Berkeley, in what we might call the less personal aspects?”

  “Yes!” Without knowing why, I pointed the gun at him in an almost unconscious movement

  He slowly drew a breath. I believe he must have known how near he was to death at that point.

  “There never was a chance,” he told me after a moment when he must have discovered that he was still alive. “You have one disadvantage in this business, Berkeley—that you have never met General Koln. In the first interview I had with him I saw the kind of man he was. He arranged a trap for us, the only way he could demonstrate that the Information Office was run by Yellows.”

  I sat there not thinking, not believing, not even trying to understand it.

  How could I believe that Koln, whom I had heard of only as a crude and aggressive general, born in the provinces and not even properly acquainted with the capital, would have the cunning to make use of us?

  “You might have underestimated him, but I don’t think you would,” he said. “You would have realized as I did that you just could not place him as the kind of army man who would intrigue and plan, and invent an unlikely enemy for Arcon, and a rocket project, just to increase the army estimates. It was the kind of intrigue involving so much work and duplicity for so little, that only a very sophisticated person would undertake it. And his whole approach showed he was not that kind of man at all.”

  I sat looking past Lankowitz at the city lights. In my field of view I could see him picked out in silhouette against the lights. Without even looking at him, I could see if he made the slightest move.

  “You are telling me you did this for General Koln?” I said. “Let’s look at it, Lankowitz. Our party has been striving to send man into space again for five hundred years. By chance, because of an intriguing general, we get the opportunity to make a space-shot Now, I don’t know what plans you think General Koln has. But this isn’t a little thing for the party. Our whole aim is bound up in it You

  can’t pretend to have a space project, revitalize the party, rouse their enthusiasm by making them think we have achieved our aims at last, and then reveal it was just an intrigue, a fraud, to deceive an army general. If you do, the disillusion will sicken all our own ranks. You will destroy the party.”

  We were sitting looking not so much at one another as past one another, I at the city and he at the night behind me, and taking a little time about the things we said. I heard my own voice talking and wondered why it sounded as it did, moralizing and platitudinous, so that it was apparent that I was a man of only the middle rank, talking to C. Q. Lankowitz.

  “Is that it, Berkeley?” he asked me quietly. “Is that why you’ve come here?”

  He was a man who dealt with and could be expected to face the naked truth. I gave it to him.

  “No. If it were that, I would not have come here. I would have called the party Council. Maybe it is personal. I’ve been looking at your rocket plans, Lankowitz. The true ones, in your desk.”

  He made a sound like a sigh of understanding.

  “How much are you prepared to do for policy, Lankowitz?” My voice strained as I tried to keep it down, when I had to say it. “Twelve of our best people. Young people. In a rocket that can go nowhere. That has not the power to go anywhere.” I had to wait a moment before I could say the rest of it

  He said it for me.

  “And that can’t be landed."

  XLI

  The Shopping Lists of Mary Jean Smith:

  What have I got to complain of, when for a long time now I have known such happiness as there is to be found on Ancon?

  The blue dress.

  First examine what it reveals of the bones below the neck. He must not know.

  Shoes.

  Bag.

  It must just look as though I have bought a new outfit, not a dress to fit my shrinking body.

  Dinner—cold.

  Remember that I am liable to make mistakes in cooking.

  Drinks. Fruits. Nuts.

  The cyanide rat poison.

  XLII

  From The Jottings of G. Berkeley:

  He knew he was taking a risk when he sat calmly on the parapet and told me that the rocket could not be landed. He talked as though I would discuss it reasonably.

  “Let’s be careful about this,” he said. “What happens if you stop the rocket and expose it for what it is? That is the one way you will destroy the party. You must understand that. Contrary to what you said, if the rocket goes up and looks as though it is behaving normally, then no one will be the wiser. The party will believe we have made a successful space-shot, and will be willing to try again. It will be exactly the boost we need. It is your way, not mine, that will result in disillusion and tear us apart with internal factions.”

  I sat looking at his silhouette against the city lights with a sinking feeling. He was monstrous. He was inhuman. And yet how clear he was. There is something awful about it, when once in your life you find you are facing the clarity of a greater intellect I just began to understand what it was to try to talk and argue with C. Q. Lankowitz.

  I should have shot him. I should not have given him the chance to say a word, but I could not stop the roc
ket that way. “You can’t mean you did this deliberately?” I said.

  His face in the half-light examined me.

  “Pilsen warned me of your weakness, Berkeley. They are good faults—idealism and a tendency to think in too simple terms. People acquire sublety and balance by experience. What I saw you had was the good heart, the loyalty, the drive. Those things are irreplaceable.”

  He was sitting in judgment on me.

  I had the gun, yet he judged. He was right in what he said of me.

  It was as though during all my life in Arcon I had been talking to people who were unsophisticated, of a simple kind, while C. Q. Lankowitz was a man who saw everything objectively and from a great height. He was on a different level, a level I might attain to, but only if he was there to teach me.

  “You are talking about people’s hearts being in the right place when you are sending twelve young people to their deaths?” I said. Even then, I could not believe it.

  I could see him watching me, just silently asking me if it worried me if twelve strangers died. More people than that died in Davis City every hour or two, and neither I nor he nor anyone ever gave a thought to it.

  “It’s Len Thomas, isn’t it?”

  “If there is Len, there must be eleven others like him. We chose them as our best. I know! I had a hand in it.”

  “We had to do it that way, don’t you see?” he said. “The party, the whole party, had to believe in it and be convinced that we were getting somewhere near our dream at last. That was what it was for. We needed it, Berkeley. I think you know we did. The party was going down. People can’t strive ^endlessly for an ideal that they can’t achieve politically in neither their nor their children’s lifetimes.”

  He was not denying it. He never had. When I had walked in on him, to find him alone in the flat, and had told him I knew about the rocket, he had just accepted it. He who was the most expert and professional liar had not for his own life’s sake even attempted a denial.

  I felt the bitter dregs of my purpose to kill him grieve like gall.

  “Maybe I am too simple to accept this kind of thinking,” I said.

  He nodded. It was not something to argue about. Some people were like that; they were too simple.

  He spoke again in his calm way. While he was turned toward me on the parapet a little light fell on his face from the window of the flat, and I could see he was looking at me oddly. “We are the purveyors of a dream. Have you never understood that?”

  There was something incredible to me in his choice of language, and in the way that, in his position, he was admitting things.

  “Is that what you call it, our Yellow faith in the perfectibility of man—a dream? Is that how you and the leaders have always regarded it, something to sell and work with, an illusion maybe?”

  He was almost gentle. “It isn’t a fact, is it? At best it is a hope, about something in the future.”

  How had we got onto that discussion, to looking at things in that way? I was being given entry to the mind of C. Q. Lankowitz, and I listened almost compulsively, and with a sense of horror.

  “There was no dream about the way our people came from Earth to Arcon!” I was bitter. “They believed in the future of man and the universe alike, and they were unlike you. They went ahead and did it!”

  “But were they right?” he asked. With a small motion of one shoulder he indicated the Arcon night around us and the city that lay behind him.

  It was true that, apart from the emergence of different kinds of minds, minds like that of Len Thomas and C. Q. Lankowitz, I could see no advantage in man’s journey from Earth to Arcon.

  “We cheated, didn’t we, Berkeley?” he said. "We, the Yellow leaders, even when we left Earth? We told our people that men would have to evolve and grow better in a new environment. In fact, we are only becoming different. That is all that happens in new environments to living creatures. Only once in a thousand or a million times does a strain arise with advantages that are general. But we never made much of that point, did we? We let the people understand that their descendants would be better if they made one star-journey once.”

  How could I express the bitterness with which I heard him?

  “Lankowitz, I know why you are saying this. It won’t work! You know I am going to kill you, and do you imagine you can destroy me utterly before you go?”

  The light reflected for a moment in the shadows of his eyes.

  “You are sure you won’t destroy yourself after I am gone, Berkeley? If you think that is my aim, you only have to press the trigger to kill me before you hear it.”

  I knew he was right. I had to kill him then to stop the process of my own disillusion. But that was it. He knew me.

  Can any man such as myself, who truly believes he knows and seeks to find the truth, refuse to hear it? He watched me sit there and knew he had me.

  “Berkeley,” he said, “think.”

  He knew that what I wished above anything was to stop doing that

  "To make sure that man would really win, and improve, and gain the universe, what would we have had to do?” he asked me. “I will tell you. We would have had to cast ourselves away on the planets of the stars in such numbers, and with such abandon, as our ancestors the fish were driven by predators onto countless shores, to gasp and flap. Nature is incredibly wasteful. You yourself have known that, but have you ever faced it? Think of those fish, our ancestors, the few of the millions coming ashore into shallow seas and onto mud-flats that did not die. What happened to them? They did not evolve into man directly, but into countless species of reptiles, birds and mammals. Yet again, out of all those infinite varieties, only one strain, man, is the one we now regard as having a chance to be successful. What we did was take a chance in a million, Berkeley. And that is the nearest thing to feeding on men’s dreams, and selling them a gross illusion.”

  He was destroying my illusions, and he knew it.

  Even before I had come into the Information Office, or learned that the Yellows were still a power on Arcon and that I was not alone, I was a man who had come to Yellow conclusions about my view of the. universe and life in general. The Information Office had sought me out, and taken me into itself after I had thought for myself about the development of the stars and the emergence of life and what it all meant I had known in my heart before men like Lankowitz got me that man had to go on someday, and up, to the farthest stars.

  Like Len and his companions, I thought bitterly, who must also have been ready to come to the romantic conclusions inherent in our life on Arcon and our age and time. It was a dream maybe, but if so it was a great dream, in my mind and many others, and I had always envisaged the people of Arcon, even if they did not know it, as living for it, despite themselves, and it was that which Lankowitz was destroying, somewhere deep inside me.

  XLIII

  Enclosed in the capsule in the nose cone of the rocket, Len thought that it would be better if they could see out But they went to their blast-off couches.

  They could not see out. It had been explained to them in the space school. It would be more comfortable for them, no doubt, to be able to see out across the desert before the blast-off, to see the hills and the last of Arcon’s endless lonely blue horizons, but a space capsule, the space capsule they were using, was a delicate precision instrument. They had a long time ahead in space to think of, and the control dome was almost all glass. It would not do to subject that to abrasion or heat, to say nothing of the chance of anything hitting it, until they were in the emptiness of space itself. That was why they had to start off on the space-shot blind.

  Len was not much concerned with the explanation. He merely made sure that Lucinda’s blast-off couch was ready, and that Lucinda was near it, and then went up the spiral stair to the control dome, illuminated artificially until the protective sheath came off, where Duncan as pilot, (whose pilot’s controls would not operate until they got halfway to Vista and a relay closed), and Salford and Susan and himself, m
ade up the control-deck crew.

  Lying down and fastening the straps, he looked at the clock that was one of the instruments in the dome above them, and at the others. Duncan had only been included in the flight because he was the one who, when they came to Vista, would have to make a landing. Salford was there as emergency second pilot because whatever else Salford was, he had the fastest reaction times. Susan was there as mathematical navigator, to operate the flight-deck’s small computer. “We are early strapping in,” Susan said, also looking at the clock, which showed five minutes to go to blast-off.

  The four of them knew one another too well to have much to say in that five minutes. They thought more of the crew scattered at stations throughout the ship. Len checked the navigational instruments and spoke into the phone at one-minute intervals.

  “One minute to go.” He adjusted die microphone to his mouth and the earpiece to his ear, and lay back at that point Through the ship, voices, including Lucinda’s, were telling him they were set at their blast-off stations.

  There was nothing anyone could do about it if they weren’t It had been very thoroughly explained to them that they were not in a position to delay the blast-off.

  “Start the one-second countdown, Len,” Duncan said.

  “If you can slip in a word to David, tell him it was nice to know him,” said Susan in a small voice.

  “Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve,” Len said.

  Blast-off came half a second late by the dock in the control dome.

  There was no physical sensation to begin with, except the noise, which reached them by some route before the heavier vibration that followed it That was when they missed being able to see out most, when the rocket scream started, and everything around them began to rock with thunder. There was no physical feeling of blast-off until the rocket had burned sufficient of its enormous load of fuel for the thrust to begin to be felt in terms of increasing acceleration.