He said in his hoarse bass: «So are the rebels. So are the barbarians and pirates. So are the serfs and slaves and criminals and insane. But it’s necessary to suppress all of them. If Station Seventeen represents a menace, it must be suppressed.»
«But what conceivable danger—One barbarian planet—under constant surveillance throughout its history! If that can menace an empire of a hundred thousand star systems, we’re not safe from anything!»
«We aren’t. For three thousand years of history, the Empire has been in danger. You have to live with it, as we soldiers do, to realize how ultimately unstable the stablest power in history really is. Oh, we can smash the peripheral barbarians. We can hold the Taranians and the Comi and Magellanics in check.» The marshal’s heavy-ridged eyes swept contemptuously up and down the scientist’s long weedy form. «I’m in no danger from you. I could break you with my bare hands. But a dozen viruses of Antaric plague, entering my body and multiplying, would paralyze me in agony and rot the flesh off my bones and probably empty this ship of life.»
The office quivered, ever so faintly. The muffled throb of the great engines was vibrant in its walls and floor and ceiling, in the huge ribs and plates of the hull, in guns that could incinerate a continent and the nerves and bones of the two thousand men manning that planetoidal mass. Monstrously the ship drove through a night of mind-cracking empty distances, outpacing light in her furious subdimensional quasivelocity, impregnable and invincible and inhuman in her arrogance. And a dozen blind half-living protein molecules could kill her.
Heym nodded stiffly. «I know what you mean,» he said. «After all»—deliberate snobbery edging his voice—«applied psychological science is the basis of the Empire. Military power is only one tool for—us.»
«As you will. But I am not a researcher’s tool, I belong to practical men, and they have decided this mission. If I report Station Seventeen potentially dangerous, they will order me to destroy it. If I decide it is already dangerous, I have the authority to order it destroyed myself.»
Heym kept his gaunt face impassive, but for a moment he felt physically ill. He looked across the sparsely furnished office at the marshal’s squat simian form, he saw the barely suppressed triumph-smile in the heavy coarse visage, and a wave of sick revulsion swept over him.
He thought wearily: Fifteen hundred years… patience, work, worry, heartbreak, and triumph and a gathering dawn… generation after generation, watching from the skies, learning, pouring their whole lives into the mighty project—As if I didn’t know the danger, the fear which is the foundation and the reason for the Empire… and here we have the first glimmerings of what may be a way out of the rattrap which history has become… and it’s now all dependent on him! On the whim of a two-legged animal which will strike out in blind fear to destroy whatever it doesn’t understand… or even understanding, will destroy just for the satisfaction of venting an inferiority complex, of watching better men squirm in pain.
Calmness came, a steadiness and an icy calculation. After all, he thought, he was a psychologist and Goram was a soldier. It should be possible for him to handle the creature, talk him over, deftly convince him that he himself wanted what Heym wanted and had in fact thought of it himself and had to argue the scientist into agreement.
Yet—slow, easy, careful. He, Sars Heym, was a research man, not a practicing psychotechnician. He wasn’t necessarily able to handle the blind brutal irrationality of man, any more than a physicist was ordinarily capable of solving an engineering problem. And so much depended on the outcome that… that—
Briefly, he sagged beneath the burden of responsibility. The load seemed for a dizzying instant too much to bear—unfair, unfair, to load one man with the weight of all the future. For Station Seventeen was the key to the next phase of history—of that Heym was certain. The history of man, his evolution—the whole universe seemed to open vertiginously before him, and he stood alone with the cosmos blazing on his shoulders.
He shook himself, as if to get rid of a clinging burden, and with a convulsive effort forced coolness on himself. Detached argument—well, he had used that often enough at Sol without convincing anyone who mattered. He could still use it on Goram, but not for itself, only as a means of flattery by appealing to reason—among other means.
Intolerable, to have to play sycophant to this—atavist—but there was too much at stake for pride to count.
«I understand your position, of course,» said Heym, «even if I do not agree. I am sure that a glance at our records will convince you there is no danger.»
«I’m not interested in records,» rasped the marshal. «I could have had all that transvised to me at Sol if I wanted to see it. But that’s the psychologists’ department. I want to make a personal inspection.»
«Very well. Though we could just as well have transvised the scenes revealed on the spy devices from our headquarters to Sol.»
«I’m not interested in telescreen images either. I want to land on the planet, see its people with my own eyes, hear them talk, watch them at work and play. There’s a feel to a race you can only get by direct observation.» Goram’s bulldog face thrust aggressively forward. «Oh, I know your fancy theories don’t include that—you just watch from afar and write it all down in mathematical symbols nobody can read without twenty years of study. But I’m a practical man, I’ve dealt with enough barbarians to have an instinct for them.»
Superstition! thought Heym bitterly. Typical primitive mind reaction—magnifying his own ignorant guesses and impulses into an «instinct»: No doubt he also believes hair turns gray from fear and drowned men always float face down. Behold the «practical man»!
It was surprisingly hard to lie, after a lifetime’s training in the honesty of science and the monastic community of observers at the station. But he said calmly enough: «Well, that’s very interesting, Marshal Goram. We’ve often noticed curious talents—precognition, telepathy, telekinesis, and the rest, appearing sporadically among people who have some use for them, but we’ve never been able to pin them down. It’s as if they were phenomena inaccessible to the ordinary scientific method. I see your point.»
And I flatter myself that’s good flattery—not too obviously in agreement, but still hinting that he’s some kind of superman.
«Haven’t you ever landed at all?» asked Goram.
«Oh, yes, fairly often—usually invisible, of course, but now and then making an open and even spectacular appearance to test the effects of seemingly supernatural manifestations. However, we can generally see quite enough through the strategically planted recording televisors and other spy devices.»
«You think,» grunted Goram. «But a planet is mighty big, I tell you. How do you know what they’re cooking up in places your gadgets don’t see?»
Heym was unable to keep all the weariness and disgust out of his voice. «Because history is a unity,» he said. «The whole can be inferred from the part, since the part belongs to the whole. Why should the only unwarlike people in the Galaxy suddenly start building weapons?»
«Oh, we don’t fear their military power—yet,» replied Goram. «I should think you, as a psychologist, would know what sort of a danger Station Seventeen represents—a danger that can wreck civilization. They can become a disrupting factor—the worst in all history.»
«Progress is disruption.»
«Maybe. But the Empire is based on stasis. It’s sacrificed progress for—survival.»