The Yellow Fraction

by Rex Gordon

  LVII

  The diary:

  September 7,506 A. L.

  2:15 p.m.

  The crowd is on the march! I can see them in the television monitor while I make my speech. But are they listening? For some reason they are tilting their radios upward and looking at the sky with amazed expressions. 1 have not yet told them to march on the Senate building.

  2:30 p.m.

  Messages are arriving from the southern, the northern and eastern regions. The army is suddenly immensely popular. Our occupying troops are being received with welcomes. Why? Can my speech have had that effect already? But the producer has just told me not half of it went out. It was interrupted by a news announcement. How could that be? Everyone is looking at me. 1 have just been handed another sheaf of messages.

  Radio messages? Transmissions from the rocket? This is a hoax. They must broadcast that immediately.

  3:00 p.m.

  How did the Information Office succeed in this engineering? 1 am forced to think quickly. The whole planet is in turmoil. No one even knows the true position, and everything is rumor, hearsay, and stories no one can believe. One thing reported on the radio is that fighting has broken out between my desert troops and General Ilallah’s Swamp Corps. This cannot be true, except as some minor skirmish of envy somewhere, yet by reporting it the news services are liable to make it true.

  3:18 P.M.

  This is pure disaster. Unaware of the state of preparation we are in, and because they are aware of some failure of communications, the government has ordered all army units and reservists to report to their regular stations. This completely cuts across every order we have issued. I have reports of units on the move held up by roads crowded with people fleeing from the cities on the reported threat of a space invasion. In other places, our men are welcomed with open arms, but that too delays them. Now the government edict cuts across all our orders, and the result is chaos.

  3:42 p.m.

  The screen before me shows the leader of the Senate standing on the steps of the Senate building and haranguing an increasing crowd which completely blocks all roads and avenues in the vicinity. We were partly prepared for this, but not on this scale. This is a massive movement that seems engendered by some spontaneous instinct, and our troops, cut off by the crowd, and nominally engaged on crowd control, are getting contradictory orders. In the outskirts of the capital, and under the threat of invasion, our men are refusing to turn their arms on the common people, while in another section they are doing exactly that, but for the purposes of rape, or sacking shops, or looting.

  LVIII

  The Short History:

  The revolution on Arcon that threw the Blues out of power and brought in the Greens would have happened anyway, but it was not that. A revolution is different in kind. It denotes some deeper change, and in this connection it is interesting to note the alterations in the unseen substructure. ...

  LIX

  The Jottings:

  While the messengers brought out the slips of paper from the lines, Lankowitz and I sat on the terrace of the mansion at Parker s Knoll and listened to the radio and looked at the sky beyond the creek and tire jungle wall, where we expected the rocket to come down on the city like a flaming fireball.

  We did not even take action to stop the mad woman who had evaded the cordon and who wandered around the lawn below us, then sat in the middle and apparently intended to have a picnic meal there.

  “We must do something,” I said, looking at each message as the messengers brought them in. “The situation is fluid, and if we don’t do something, it will form itself.”

  But Lankowitz had stopped looking at the messages. “Do nothing,” he said. “Haven’t you learned anything yet? If you ever want to look foolish afterward, act first, in a time of crisis.”

  LX

  The diary:

  5:00 p.m.

  A general knows what it is when his army begins to slip from his hands like grains of sand that drain away between the fingers, when they fraternize with the people, or kill them, but in any event do not obey their orders. Why has it happened, I ask myself, and again, why?

  Is there something unknown in people, a romance, a desire to believe things, that is making people all over this planet believe against all sense and reason that they have an enemy in space out there? Or is there some desire, some senseless desire to go out into space, that began on Earth and has been latent here, so that the people only say they want to stay on Arcon, and build up the planet, and live the good life, while in their hearts they believe their destiny lies elsewhere, like the lemmings on Earth, who at certain seasons poured over cliffs to perish in the sea?

  I do not understand it. This event has revealed a planet’s madness. I see only the outward signs, the messages on my desk that come in from time to time. General Ilallah, suddenly and inexplicably, has issued a proclamation accusing me of a plot against the government and speaking of “unity in this hour of crisis." Our own agent, Pintopler 38239 - Z, has earned fame and self-importance by claiming that he saw “enemy vessels" on the radar screens at the time of the messages from Arcon One. There is no sense in these events, separated by a thousand miles of desert, and yet they make a pattern.

  I do not only have papers in my desk. I have my gun there now.

  Why have the people not believed in me, in my solid leadership?

  What else is there?

  I pick up my gun.

  LXI

  The Short History:

  At such times it is easy for observers to be misled by the crowds in the streets, the hysteria, the shouting and the looting, the extravagant gestures of the orators, and the behavior of the soldiers. The people themselves do not know what they want at such times. They are “against” what has gone before, moving spontaneously, and often, it seems, without reason, motivated by no more than the heat on a summer’s day. They do not know why they do what they do, except that they know that cracks have appeared in the fagade of the world as it has seemed around them. What they wait for is someone who will create the new form.

  Think of the language of the government leaders before and after the change of government. The Blue leader said: “No responsible administrator of government finances could willingly countenance immoderate disposal of the planet’s substance, however excellent the claims of the biochemical lobby may be, and indefatigably as the government will pursue a solution to our environmental problems.” The Green leader might have said the same before the revolution. After it, he said:

  “We are men, and our men have guts. If the enemy comes here, we’ll blast them. But that isn’t enough. The road will be hard and tough, but we’ll go and get them. We die soon enough not to care if we die a little sooner.”

  No one can explain how the people of Arcon, when it seemed that they had finally and officially accepted the fact of their early deaths, began slowly and surely to overcome the problem. They had the science, the intelligence before. Yet the will only came when they were looking not at their central problem but at something else, as though to overcome the difficulties, they had first to look beyond the problem.

  LXII

  The last private jottings of G. Berkeley:

  I did not know how events were shaping. Sitting on the terrace of the mansion at Parker’s Knoll, I did not know that I was about to see, as my last lesson, the human frailty of C. Q. Lankowitz. In the unaccustomed sunlit silence of our emergency retreat, I watched the blue iridescent air above the city beyond the jungle, and the messengers came and went while Lankowitz expressed the opinion that it was the fact that there were six girls in the rocket which had somehow caught the hearts and imagination of the Arcon people and caused riots around the planet.

  “Surely not,” I said, looking at the mad woman on the lawn as I saw how important it was, before we issued a statement, to judge the people’s hearts and minds correctly. “What is moving them is fear, the fear of a space invasion.”

  "Who is she?’’ he said, seein
g me looking at the figure on the lawn.

  “Some woman who used to come here with her husband to use our lawn for picnics when the place was closed. They say she’s crazy.” I was surprised he gave her his attention.

  “Why haven’t the guards thrown her out?”

  “They have. She won’t tell them where the gap in the fence is, and when they throw her out she comes in again. She’s harmless.”

  “Call her up,” he said.

  I did not realize at first what he wanted of her. Then I saw that the fact of her supposed madness was irrelevant to him. Most people were mad in his eyes, and to him she was the one member of the innocent public available to prove his point.

  I went to the balustrade and called to her and waved.

  She could not be expected to understand the motives for which we called her. She picked up her picnic basket and her transistor radio and came across the lawn and up the steps toward us.

  “Who are you?” Lankowitz said in his friendly way, and waved her to the table.

  “Mary Jean Smith,” she said.

  She put her open lunch on the table, and her radio beside her, looking at us as though she expected us to provide a drink to go with her lunch, while a planet burned.

  Lankowitz indicated her radio. “What do you think of this space business?”

  She looked as though she did not understand for a moment, then said, “Those poor girls.”

  Lankowitz wanted to encourage her to open her heart to us and give us the public reaction. He picked up one of her sandwiches and began to nibble it to show we were all good friends together. She watched him as though she had never seen a man eat a sandwich before.

  “I put cyanide rat-poison in one of those this morning,” she said. “I was going to kill myself and this seemed a better place than my flat to do it.”

  Lankowitz stopped eating and put his hand to his throat. After a while he bent over the table, and his body made strange contortions.

  “No one comes to my flat now,” Mary Jean Smith explained to me. “I would sooner be found in the open air than in a closed flat”

  A messenger was coming out with a report slip. I sent him to get a doctor. Lankowitz was still dying, and I thought how inevitable it was that someone who knew everything, thought of everything, and allowed for everything, should fall over his own feet in some trivial mischance.

  While a little crowd came out to surround the body, I looked away over the creeks and the jungle wall to the air above the city. There were greater events that we were seeing than the descent of the rocket like a fireball, and all because Lankowitz had made that other mistake of sending up a rocket under radio control but with an electronics man inside it.

  I knew better then than to try to look after the Len Thomases of this or any other world within the cosmos, and I felt I was free from something. I turned around to seize control of the Information Office.

  “Take down this statement that we will issue now,” I told the clerks. “This Office confirms that for some time we have known that there was a threat from space to Arcon. The government accepts full responsibility for events, and is resigning because it has failed the Arcon people. The government in process of being formed is confident it can carry the war to Vista. You can add a note that our space heroes will be rescued by our first battle-cruisers on their way to Vista.”

  I looked at them blandly, and they stared at me. They knew as well as I did that a policy decision of that magnitude should be cleared with T. Chinn and P. Vulmany.

  Especially as the government had not said it would resign yet.

  But one of them had taken it down on his pad, and

  after looking silently at the others, he went to put it on the wires. “Go back to your work,” I told them.

  LXIII

  Seen from space, the stars showed no sign of their view of events on Arcon.

  “Success,” Len said.

  He looked at the small receiver they had made while they all sat and lay around in what might have been a temporary state of near-exhaustion. They were back on the couches and deck of the star dome, and the speaker of the receiver, which consisted of a telephone earpiece, made a thin piping sound. He switched it off. They knew now what was coming up from the newscasts of the planet away below them.

  Salford looked out at the dark sky and the star field. He might have been counting the stars and galaxies, the quasars and galactic clouds. The pilot’s console which had been in front of his couch had been dismantled in the course of their operations, and Salford did not say anything.

  “We know too much to be taken back to Arcon,” Ropotsky said. He looked at the tiny, silent bunch of wires as though it were speaking still. “They’re going to have to take us on to Vista. When, is a different matter. If it takes them three years to build a starship, the time-difference can’t make it less than a year in space for us.”

  A year in space was still a long time. Susan looked at her computer as though to work out the problem, then she stopped. To complete the radio network they had used the electronics of the computer too.

  They looked at the stars around the rim of the dome. The last thing they had done before they stopped work was to make a meal. It looked as though there was nothing to stop them from going to their cabins.

  Salford looked at Imantha. “It is our wedding night.”

  He was not the only man to look at his girl in that way, with a return of animation.

  “Not just yet, it isn’t,” Vera said to Sorensen.

  They sat still again. After a moment, they knew what they were waiting for. Len looked at Lucinda, and knew that everyone was looking in the same way.

  “Lucinda,” Duncan said.

  Len felt for her. He looked at her slender shoulders and the curve of her back and waist as she sat on the couch beside him. She was his and he wondered if he could help her.

  The chips were down now.

  ‘Was it true, Lucinda?” Ed Creet said like the first accuser. “That method of thinking you told us that did not include ‘impossible’?”

  “Or a psycho-social operation on us?” Eliza Teen said.

  The medical team had been thinking while they had been working.

  What did they want? Len thought. It had worked, hadn’t it? They had only to listen to the voices from the planet there below them.

  Salford spoke almost silently into space. “Pure luck,” he said. In the silence of space, they heard him.

  Lucinda was looking at the deck and looking defensive when Salford spoke. Her eyes came up to him. “We are a team,” she said. “Selected, all of us, by Yellows who believed in what they were doing, who were innocent of their leaders’ betrayal and did their best. Do you think any leaders, any time, anywhere, can affect that?” It was the voice of the social-psychologist speaking.

  Len thought of Berkeley and wandered if the word “innocent” could have been applied to him. In a way, he thought. In a distant way. But enough for what Lucinda said.

  “I think Lucinda is prevaricating,” Ropotsky said.

  The beast with twenty-four legs was not united now, it seemed to Len. It had different heads and different features. Maybe it only appeared sometimes or when they had to have it.

  Someone else broke the silence in the space dome. Len was surprised to hear Sorensen defend Lucinda.

  “It just happened because we found a way. to make it happen. Look at that universe out there around us.” Sorensen pointed through the star dome.

  “If you think you ever see and understand it, that is an illusion,” he said. “Your eyes see only a narrow band of wavelengths. Your whole life is just a flash of galactic time. What you know of all that is hypothesis based on guess and superstition. What you think you know is only something you tell yourself about the way you learned to do things. Everything happens like that, and this happens to be an isolated way that we found.”

  Len saw Lucinda look at Duncan across the deck with a glance of gratitude.

  To him?
Len thought.

  “Not isolated,” he said. “Get it right. Arcon presented men with a psycho-social and organizational problem. Lucinda’s branch of science happens to be the one that we produced because man came to Arcon. It represents the advance we have made.”

  Lucinda’s glance came around to him, and he knew he had not said enough, not half enough. It was true that something had happened, if not on Arcon then in the spaceship, that had something to do with communication and the structure of thought and man’s internal organization too. He wished he knew.

  Penny looked at Duncan and touched his hand. They were not going to grill Lucinda about how she did things, her look said, and Salford had been right when he had said it was their wedding night.

  Susan looked out over the edge of the dome from the couch where she sat with Ropotsky. “Some people could make a mistake about that kind of thing,” Susan said. It seemed she looked at distant worlds. “They might think that man could only improve physically, by mutation, like insects that have to be thrown away and die in droves for one advancement. But man improves with each problem he solves, and he will find one new problem with every new star.”

  Len wondered if anyone could be so foolish as to think that men would have to perish in millions now to make one new advancement. Even a computer, when it reached a certain level, could be taught to design new computers on a better mathematical frame than that. He did not think that any of the Yellow, intelligent fraction of humanity could fall for a mistake of that kind.

  While waiting to see if anyone else said anything, he looked in the retro-view mirror at Arcon’s disk, then away toward Vista and the stars beyond it.