«True—but here we may have a clue to controlled progress, safe advancement. Even stasis isn’t safe, as we well know. It’s a poor makeshift, intended to keep civilization alive while something else is worked out. Well—we’re working it out at Station Seventeen.»
Coram grunted again, but remained silent.
Valgor’s Star lay a good hundred parsecs from Sol, not far from the Empire’s border though sufficiently within the garrisoned marches to be protected from barbarian raids. The early researchers, looking for an uninhabited Earth-like planet, had found the obscure G0-type sun far off the regular space lanes; an ancient planetographic expedition had stopped briefly there, recording that the third world was practically terrestrial, but this whole galactic sector was so isolated and unprofitable that there had been no further visits, and the old report lay for centuries in the Imperial files before the Psychotechnic Foundation resurrected it. The remoteness and unknownness were assets in any such project, and the fact that there were no aborigines requiring troublesome and costly extermination and eradication of all traces had been decisive.
At an easy cruising speed, the battleship used three days going from Sol to Valgor’s Star. Sars Heym spent most of that time getting on the right side of Tamman Goram. It involved listening to endless dreary reminiscing of border warfare and the consummate ability required to rise from simple conscript to Imperial Marshal, but the price was small if it could save Station Seventeen.
«Nobody appreciates the border garrisons who hasn’t served in them,» declared Goram, «but I tell you, if it weren’t for them the Empire wouldn’t last a year. The barbarians would sweep in, the rival empires would gobble up all they could hold and go to war over the spoils, the Spirit alone knows what the Magellanics would do—but it wouldn’t be pleasant—and the whole structure would disintegrate—three thousand years of stability might as well never have been!»
A high official would be used to open flattery. Heym disagreed just enough to seem sincerely to agree on all important points. «We couldn’t do without the border patrols,» he said, «but it’s like any organism, requiring all its parts to live—we couldn’t dispense with internal police either, and certainly not with the psychotechnicians who are the government.»
«Spirit-damned bureaucrats,» snorted Goram. «Theoreticians—what do they know of real life? Why, d’you know, I saw three stellar systems lost once to the barbarians because we didn’t have enough power to stand them off. There was a horde of them, a dozen allied suns, and we had only three garrisoned planets. For months we begged—wrote to Antares and Sirius and Sol itself begging for a single Nova-class battleship. Just one, and we could have beaten off their fleet and carried the war to them. But no, it was ‘under consideration’ or ‘deferred for more urgent use’—three suns and a hundred thousand men lost because some soft-bellied psychotechnician mislaid a file.»
«Robot-checked files don’t get mislaid,» said Heym softly. «I have friends in administration, and I’ve seen them weep at some of the decisions they had to make. It isn’t easy to abandon an army to its fate—and yet the power that could have saved them is needed elsewhere, to drive off a larger invasion or to impress the Taranians or to take a star cluster of strategic value. The Empire has sacrificed a lot for sheer survival. Humanness in government is only one thing lost.»
«The rules! How can a general in the field keep track of every ship and turn in forms in quadruplicate on their condition?»
«He can’t. Probably a million units a year are lost in recording. And yet, the vast majority of such forms are filled out and do get to the appropriate center, are recorded in electronic code and put on instantly accessible file, mathematically coordinated with all other relevant information. When Grand Strategy wants an overall picture of the military situation, it has one right there. Military planning would be impossible otherwise.
«And it isn’t only in the military field,» argued Heym. «After all, you know the Empire isn’t interested in further expansion. It wants to keep civilization alive on the planets where it exists, and keep the nonhuman imperia out. Ever since the Founder, our military policy has been basically defensive—because we can’t handle more than we have. The border is always in a state of war and flux, but the Empire is at peace, inside the marches.
«Yet—how long would the Empire last, even assuming no hostile powers outside, without the most rigid form of psychotechnocratic government? There are roughly three times ten to the fourteenth power humans in the Solarian Empire. The nonhuman aborigines have been pretty thoroughly exterminated, assimilated as helots, or otherwise rendered harmless, but there are still all those humans, with all the terrific variations and conflicting desires inherent in man and intensified by radically different planetary and consequently social environments. Can you imagine a situation where three hundred trillion humans went their own uncoordinated ways—with atomic energy, biotoxic weapons, and interstellar spaceships to back up their conflicting demands?»
«Yes, I can,» said Goram, «because after all it has happened—for nearly a thousand years before the Empire, there was virtual anarchy. And»—he leaned forward, the hard black glitter of his eyes nailing Heym—«that’s why we can’t take chances, with this experiment of yours or anything else—anything at all. In the anarchic centuries, with a much smaller population, there was horror—many planets were blasted back to savagery, or wiped out altogether. Have you seen the dead worlds? Black cinders floating in space, some still radioactive, battlegrounds of the ancient wars. The human barbarians beyond the Imperial borders are remnants of that age—some of them have spaceships, even a technology matching our own, but they think only of destruction—if they ever got past the marches, they’d blast and loot and fight till nothing was left. Not to mention the nonhuman border barbarians, or the rival empires always watching their chance, or the Magellanics sweeping in every century or so with weapons such as we never imagined. Just let any disrupting factor shake the strength and unity of the Empire and see how long it could last.»
«I realize that,» said Heym coldly. «After all, I am a psychologist. I know fully what a desperate need the establishment of the Empire filled. But I also know that it’s a dead end—its purpose of ultimate satisfied stasis cannot be realized in a basically dynamic cosmos. Actually, Imperial totalitarianism is simply the result of Imperial ignorance of a better way. We can only find that better way through research, and the project at Station Seventeen is the most promising of all the Foundation’s work. Unless we find some way out of our dilemma, the Empire is doomed—sooner or later, something will happen and we’ll go under.»
Goram’s eyes narrowed. «That’s near lese majesty,» he murmured.
Heym laughed, and gave the marshal a carefully gauged you-and-I-know-better-don’t-we look. «The Imperium is tolerant of local gods,» he said, «but the divinity of the Emperor must be acknowledged and is taught in all schools. Why? Because a state church, with the temporal ruler as the material incarnation of the Spirit, is another hold on the imagination of the people, another guarantee of subservience. So are local garrisons, political indoctrination, state control of commerce and travel, careful psychotechnic preparation and supervision of amusements, rigid limitation of birth but complete sexual freedom as an outlet, early selection and training of all promising children for government service—with unlimited opportunities for advancement within the established framework—and every other thing we can possibly control. If you stop to think about it—the Empire is founded on mediocrity.»