by Rex Gordon
I could see his dark eyes watching me as though he saw my idols falling.
“You mean that he had only that kind of courage to face the lynch-mobs?”
“He never faced the lynch-mobs. He was the kind of
second-man who comes in every political party or great religion. The man who uses, and makes a business, of a faith that was sincerely meant before him. You know what he did. He took us over to the government side. He took us into the Information Office, where the politicians in the know tolerate us. And do you know why they tolerate us? Because we are like the priesthood of an established church. They see us as like those Christians, preaching love and forgiveness of enemies, who used to bless the battleships and bombers, and crown the monarchs, and confirm their power. We are like the social-democrats, who paid lip-service to a revolutionary creed, but helped to maintain the established order. He gave us a function in the Arcon state. To identify, enroll, emasculate and, so they believe, mislead the active Yellows.”
What I could not see was how he could sit there and speak in those terms of the ruin of a once-mighty party that had at one time moved men across the cosmos.
“You are telling me that you, the pope of our religion, are an atheist, and therefore I should kill you.”
He did not hurry to answer me. He' seemed to contemplate it, as though it might be true.
“What I am saying is that they have only a limited validity, conditional and restricted and outworn, the things that you believed in. We Yellows are like those ancient priests who also sold better lives in another world. And it is only if you see this that you can start again at the beginning.”
I stared at the city, the lights in the darkness beyond the wall, in which I had lived and which I had thought I had understood. “Beginning? Just what beginning?”
He had to talk quickly then, before I pressed the trigger, but he did not seem to hurry.
“I told you that some man must stand up, and cross his heart, and tell an untruth boldly. It is what the leaders of the old religions did. They promised an afterlife, and do you think they were wrong to say that dream was possible? ‘Be good,’ you remember they told their people, ‘and believe in miracles.’ Be merciful, and yield to justice, truth and beauty, and you will find your reward in heaven. It was a lie, and do you think they didn’t know it, at least fifty percent of the time, at the time they said it?” His voice slowed down; he risked it “But see what happened.” He told me then.
“Sometimes, not always but sometimes, some justice or goodness or truth resulted. And this was on the savage planet Earth, remember. This was in a land where animal instincts were still unbridled, and where ‘natural’ life was ruthlessness, cruelty, and pure rapine. It was not those who had the truth that had the courage, you see, it was the liars. Whatever shifts they were forced to, to tell their lies, and whatever imagination they had to use to tell them. Because out of nothing came something. The beauty was not there, and then it was there. They inspired belief in the impossible, and then they got it, a very little.” I was startled to see tears in his eyes.
It was true I had not dreamed of such an excuse before.
I had not previously heard the virtue of the he expounded, on the grounds that it could be creative.
I wondered what kind of world he inhabited, and what kind of man he was, this person I saw in silhouette against the city lights. What cosmos was it, where the will entered deliberately into his objective view, and shaped the mental constructions that he carved in that darkness he called reality?
“You must understand these things.” He was persuasive.
“It’s not only because you may kill me that I am telling you the truth. It’s more that I don’t want not to leave anything behind me. I would have had to tell you all this sooner or later, since I see you as my successor.”
I could only believe he was lying. It was far too cheap and easy. I found it quite incredible.
“You think that is how to talk me out of your execution?” We were back from the depths of time again.
He laughed in my face. “We have often killed one another at the head of the Yellow Party.” Then he was serious. “Remember the General. I tell you again, he is not the man to try to use us for a little thing. Think, Berkeley. Think. Why did he offer a rocket project to the Yellow Party?” He watched me as he told me. “It could only be to expose us. And that in some dramatic way. To wait till we sent a rocket up, and then bring it down again maybe? It would be so easy for him to take over from us in the desert project. This is only a guess. If you ask me if I’ve proof, I haven’t. I have only the fact that if the rocket was produced, with an Arcon crew chosen by the Information Office getting out of it, it would be enough to cause the government to fall.
He was watching me with narrowed eyes and extremely closely. By then, he knew he had me.
“What was needed from the party point of view, Berkeley? A successful space-shot? One that would go away and land on a distant planet somewhere? Not all of that was necessary to serve the dream. The time of interstellar voyages is such that it was only necessary that it should go up, and not be heard of. It was gratuitous, it was also safer, when circumstances forced us that way, that it would have to be a rocket that would not fly anywhere and that could not be landed. It was not that we could do the other thing. We only did what we could to save the dream, the party.”
XLVII
What do we do now, after Salford has pointed out that it is impossible for anyone to land us, Len thought? Maybe a beast was dancing.
It was not a good analogy, but it was the best he could think of in space, looking at Lucinda as she stood by his couch, with a surround of black sky and stars around her. Irrelevantly he thought, There are too many stars.
In fact, the conversation that was taking place was impossible. The way it seemed to him, it was impossible that they should hold a conversation at all after Salford had pointed out their situation. Penny and Susan, Duncan, Ropotsky, Harold Sorensen and all the rest were looking thoughtful. What they ought to be doing, he could not help feeling, was throwing fits of hysteria. Maybe it was because they kept their mouths shut that Salford was the only one so far to show himself as heated, and that did not make sense. Len had a vision of the twenty-four-legged beast, last seen sniffing the flowers, now taking a look at the universe from the better vantage point of space itself. Or am I mad? Len thought. 1 must be.
“You don’t understand,” Salford said, staring at them. “We are stuck in space, and it’s impossible we should land anywhere except as a crash or a streak of fire.”
Ropotsky looked solemn. It was an important subject. To them it was very important. They did not want to rush it.
Mad, Len thought, looking at the people in the control dome. Not only me, all of them. Or would they improve things by screaming?
“It’s what people said about going to the moon, once,” Sorensen said helpfully to Ropotsky.
Imantha looked strained. “Des just said it’s impossible for anyone to rescue us,” she said.
In the control dome of the spaceship, lost in space, not getting anywhere, and with no means to land, no one seemed to think that Salford had much reason for the excuse that Imantha made for him.
“Like someone has to say ‘impossible,’ so they can take a look at the problem, and see what it is, and start to solve it,” Ropotsky said to Sorensen.
Len thought: Not Lucinda.
She was going to say something. He could see the signs.
And he had always thought her a sensible person.
“You are right there, David. That’s how it works,” she said most carefully.
Maybe he had better look out of the glass of the dome at the star field, and think how infinite it was, Len thought. They would have him doing it next.
“Listen,” said Salford. “Or aren’t you listening? I’m talking sense.”
“Now, Des,” said Duncan. “Don’t interrupt people, when you can see that they are thinking.”
Collectively, that was. Not individually.
“How do you propose to get down onto a planet?” Salford said to Duncan. “Any planet, anywhere?” He too seemed affected. He was not talking violently anymore. He just wanted to know, anxiously.
Don’t answer that, Len thought. He got the idea. Don’t jump the gun. There was plenty of time for it.
In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, eternity.
“Not just any planet,” he said to Salford. “A Vista planet. That’s where we were going, isn’t it?”
Salford looked as though he had thought perhaps everyone else was mad, but not Len, and now Len was too.
“ ‘Impossible,’ ” Ed Creet said thoughtfully, as though trying out the word.
Lucinda looked at Len for a while. Then she sat down on the space on the couch that Len had made for her. Duncan seemed to think he was missing something, and draped his arm around Penny’s shoulder. Susan, with Ropotsky sitting beside her, put a sum through the ship’s computer.
“To get to Vista at our present rate of progress,” Susan said, “would take us two hundred and fifty-nine years, nine months.” She looked critically at the punched tape the computer produced. “That is, excluding the' landing we haven’t the means for.”
Ropotsky seemed to regard that as a helpful addition to the discussion, but perhaps he was prejudiced in Susan’s favor. No one else did.
Len wondered what Lucinda was doing. She was going to talk again, and he hoped it would be a little better.
“ ‘Impossible’ comes from the old style of human thinking,” Lucinda said to Ed Creet.
Ed looked interested.
“Traditional,” Lucinda explained. “They had several ways of thinking about things, you know, seven or eight. When they had run over them, and none of them worked, they used that word, ‘impossible.’ ”
“I see,” Ed said.
“Naturally, we wouldn’t do that,” Lucinda said.
Len did not know what everyone else was doing. He was sitting and looking at Lucinda, wondering what was inside her, and trying to decide, since it seemed an interesting question, what they would do.
“Different?” Ed said.
Lucinda shook her head over it. Apparently it was different. The spaceship, in Len’s estimation, covered another hundred miles or two.
He looked out at the stars and tried to pick out Arcon’s fellow planets and decide how long it would take them to get out of Arcon’s solar system. Duncan was looking around at the company of his crew as though he thought it was high time someone said something helpful.
It was true that they wanted to go carefully, but not so carefully as to stop altogether in a paralysis of space-fright.
“Suppose you explain to us, Lucinda,” Ed Creet said, “what other way we might think, I mean, supposing we aren’t going to think in the old way, that used to include ‘impossible.’ ”
Maybe Lucinda knew about it in her psycho-social training, Len thought. He was damned if he did.
“You see, if you say ‘impossible,’ it means you have preconceptions,” Lucinda said. “You lack faith, for one thing, and for another you are probably thinking in terms of superstitions. All history shows that. People were thinking in terms of superstitions or preconceptions when they said man couldn’t fly, or go to the moon or stars or such things.”
A psychoanalysis of linguistics, Len thought. He looked at the stars. Well, they had time for it. If they didn’t do it, they weren’t going to get anywhere any sooner.
“So you don’t have preconceptions?” Eliza Teen said hopefully.
“You can’t help but have them,” Lucinda said. To Len’s eyes she looked thoughtful, as though trying to recall her training. “I think I know what you do about them. You examine them.”
“Personally, I have a lot of preconceptions,” Salford said. “That would take a little time.”
Who asked Salford to speak? They knew what to do: ignore him.
“Even so, it is rather a tall order,” Ropotsky said.
“We might try concentrating on the useful ones,” Sorensen said.
“I am not sure there are any useful preconceptions,” Lucinda said. “I forget the rule about that.”
Shame, Len thought, looking at his girl in the doomed star-dome. A broken reed.
“The productive ones, then,” Sorensen said.
Salford looked at them and space and said, “What are our preconceptions, anyway, useful or otherwise?” Len looked at him with surprise. If Salford was not careful, he was going to start making remarks that were almost useful.
“That this spaceship is doomed,” Imantha said.
Lucinda’s profile looked troubled as Len watched it a-gainst the stars. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t help feeling. I don’t see how we can get out of that.”
Or out of the spaceship either, Len thought, looking at the dark, invisible vacuum of space beyond the glass dome. Their captors would hardly have sent them up in the rocket if they were going to provide them with air-supply space-suits with helmets.
“Maybe we had better look at some other preconceptions,” he suggested.
“Such as we can’t get another spaceship,” Penny remarked innocently.
Len looked thoughtfully at innocent little Penny.
“Only Arcon could supply that,” Ropotsky said. “And Arcon won’t.”
“That’s a preconception,” Len said.
“Hell,” Ed Creet said. “You’d have to change Arcon to get them to send us another spaceship.”
It was not only Len. They all looked at Ed Creet then.
For some reason Len felt under his couch, where he had put his small transistors and the other items they had smuggled aboard the starship.
XLVIII
From The Short History of Arcon:
As well as the difference in mental attitudes, there is also the problem of what can be called the logic of physical circumstances. This is a thread running through the whole of human history which runs back into the nonorganic world and also stretches tenuously into the future. To pursue this line of reasoning, the physical, chemical and mechanical events are described as a chain of causation, while the human personalities involved are treated as though each were a true computer.
It is remarkable, when events are seen in this light, how circumstances seem to conspire, not in any random way, but positively to create the next stage of history. It is granted that there is an illusion about this. We deceive ourselves if we say how remarkable it was that when the universe consisted of a tenuous cloud of gas, and a very specific and mathematically exact force of gravity was required to make the stars, then it so happened that just that specific force of gravity was there, and no other cause or logic. The obvious answer is that had some other force been in operation, then some different universe would have been created. But the causation chains involved do sometimes seem to have been very long and strange.
Man could not have evolved on Earth, for example, except that the planet was stabilized, over an extremely long period, within a very narrow band of temperatures. The possible temperatures range from absolute zero to figures in the hundred thousands, yet for about a thousand million years Earth had to stay within the few degrees between the freezing point of water and less than halfway to its point of boiling. The atmosphere had first to be a methane mixture for life to start at all, and then to change itself to oxygen as plants developed. The solar radiation reaching the surface had first to be high, to start the molecular reactions, and then to decrease, so that the newly formed compounds could stabilize into living things. A layer of ozone had to appear in the upper atmosphere to reduce the radiation so that mutation would not occur too rapidly and species could develop. The hothouse climate of the carboniferous age had to persist for a long per
iod or the development of reptile life would have been impossible, yet when reptiles had developed to a certain point, the climate had to change so that an advantage could be given to the internal temperature-control system of the evolving mammals.
The solar radiation reaching the Earth had to fluctuate so that periods of rapid evolution, when new species were formed, could be succeeded by “quiet” ages when life forms could consolidate and engage in competition. At no time could the radiation rise that very small percentage which would have destroyed surface life altogether. Man had to be born into a wooded world so as to acquire his opposable thumb and fingers, and then a change had to take place to drive him from the trees so that he could acquire his upright posture. The ice ages were necessary, and just at the right time, so that he should be forced to use tools and fire, and make clothes of the skins of his prey for sheer survival. Too early, and he would not have been sufficiently developed to survive as a tool-making creature; too late, and he would have become too specialized in a fixed way of life and been incapable of the right adaptation. He had to conquer Earth completely in order ever to find himself in the position of being able to leave it for the stars, yet his history had to be such that he was
141
dissatisfied with peace and plenty when he got it: too much aggression, and man would have wiped himself out; too little and he would never have left his own solar system.
In view of circumstances like these, we should not be surprised that the planet man descended on was Arcon, where he found himself faced with a mental challenge of precisely the right kind to force him to take charge of his own destiny in the future. It was one coincidence added to so many other coincidences that it all but makes us believe in predestiny. But we must face the fact that so numerous are the stars in a galaxy, and so infinite the number of galaxies, that had these things not happened to man, they would certainly, in an infinity of time, have happened to some other creature, somewhere else.