«That’s as may be,» muttered Goram, «but in that case a planet full of geniuses becomes doubly dangerous.»
Heym went over to the wall of the officers’ lounge and touched a button. The telescreen sprang to life with a simulacrum of the outside view. An uncounted host of stars blazed against the infinite blackness, a swarming magnificent arrogance of unwinking hard jewels strewn across the impassive face of eternity. The Milky Way foamed around the sky, the misty nebulae and star clusters wheeled their remote godlike way around heaven, and the other galaxies flashed mysterious signals across the light-years and the centuries. As ever, the psychologist felt dwarfed and awed and numbed by the stupendous impact.
«It was a great dream,» he whispered. «There never was a higher dream than man’s conquest of the universe—and yet like so many visions it overleaped itself and shattered to bits on the rocks of reality—in this case, simple arithmetic defeated us. How to reconcile and coordinate a hundred thousand stars except by absolutism, by deliberate statism—by chaining ourselves to our own achievements? What other answer is there?»
He turned around to Goram. The soldier sat unmoving, face stone-hard, like a primitive idol. «We’re looking for a new way,» said Heym. «We think we’re finding it, at Station Seventeen. It’s the first hope in four thousand years.»
The planet might almost have been Earth, a great blue spheroid swinging majestically against the incredible spatial sky with a softly shining moon for companion. Auroras wavered over the ice-capped poles, and cloud masses blurred the greenish-brown continents. They were storms, those clouds, snow and rain and wind blowing out of a living heaven over broad fair fields and haughty mountains, and looking down from the sterile steel environment of the ship, remembering the world city sprawling over Earth and the cold hard mechanized pattern of all Imperial life, Heym felt a brief wistfulness. All at once, he envied his experimental animals, down there on the green young planet. Even if they were to be destroyed, they had been more fortunate than their masters.
But they wouldn’t be destroyed. They mustn’t be.
«Where is your observation post?» asked Goram.
«On an asteroid well away from here and rendered invisible.»
«Why not on the satellite? It’d be a lot closer.»
«Yes, but distance doesn’t mean anything to a transvisor. Also, if—when—the colonists learn the means of interplanetary travel, we’d have had to move off the Moon, while we can remain hidden indefinitely on the invisible planetoid.»
«I’d say ‘if’ rather than ‘when’,» amended Goram grimly. «It was your report that the inhabitants were experimenting with rockets that alarmed the rulers enough to order me here to see if it weren’t best simply to sterilize the planet.»
«I’ve told you before, there’s no need for alarm,» protested Heym. «What if the people do have a few rocketships? They have no reason to do more than visit the other worlds of this system, which aren’t habitable—certainly no reason to colonize, with their own planet still practically uninhabited. The present population is estimated at only some eight hundred million.»
«Nevertheless, as soon as they have a whole system to move about in they’ll be dangerous. It’ll no longer be possible to keep track of everything of importance they may do. They’ll be stimulated by this success to perfect an interstellar drive—and even you will agree that that cannot be permitted. That engine may be developed without our knowledge, on some remote world of this system—and once even a few of them are running loose between the stars we’ll have no further control—and the results may well be catastrophic! Imagine a pure-bred line of geniuses allied with the barbarians!»
«I tell you, they’re not warlike. They haven’t had a single war in all their history.»
«Well, then they’ll try to innovate within the Empire, which would be just as bad if not worse. Certainly they won’t be satisfied with the status quo—yet that status quo means survival to us.»
«They can be coordinated. Good Spirit, we have plenty of geniuses in the Galaxy today! We couldn’t do without them. They are the very ones who run the Empire. Advancement is on a strict merit basis simply because we must have the best brains of mankind for the gigantic job of maintaining the social order.»
«Sure—everyone’s strictly brought up to accept the Empire, to identify its survival with its own. We have plenty of tame geniuses. But these are wild—a planetful of undomesticated intellects! If they can’t be tamed, they must be killed.»
«They can be,» insisted Heym. «Rather, they can become the leaders to get us out of status quo safely—if not directly, then indirectly through knowledge gained by observing them. Already administrative techniques have been improved, within the last five hundred or so years, because by watching unhampered intellect at work we have been able to derive more accurate psychomathematical expressions for the action of logic as a factor in society, A group in the Psychotechnic Foundation is working out a new theory of cerebration which may become the basis of a system of mind training doubling the efficiency of logical processes—just as semantic training has already increased mind power by applying it more effectively. But in order to develop and test that theory, as well as every other psychological research project, we must have empirical data such as the observation stations, above all Seventeen, furnish us. Without such new basic information, science comes to a standstill.»
«I’ve heard it all before,» said Goram wearily. «Now I want to go down there and look.»
«Very well. I’ll come along, of course. Do you wish to take anyone else?»
«Do I need to?»
«No, it’s perfectly safe.»
«Then I won’t. Meet me at Lifeboat Forty in half an hour.» Goram tramped off to give such orders as might be needed.
Heym stood for a while, chain smoking and looking out the visiplate at the silently rolling planet. Like an ominous moon, the warship swung in an orbit just beyond the atmosphere. For all its titanic mass, it was insignificant against the bulk of a world. Yet in guns and bombs and death-mists, gravitational beams and long-range disintegrators and mass-conversion torpedoes, in coagulative radiations and colloid-resonant generators, in the thousand hells man had made through all his tormented existence, lay the power to rip life off that surface and blanket the shuddering continents in smoke and flame and leave the blackened planet one great tomb under the indifferent stars.
No—no, that was wrong. The power did not lie in the ship, it was inert metal and will-less electronic intellect, a cosmic splinter that without man would spin darkly into eternity. The will, and hence the power, to destroy lay in men—in one man. One gorilla in uniform. One caveman holding a marshal’s baton. One pulsing mass of colloidal tissue, ultimately unstable, not even knowing its own desire.
Heym scowled and drew heavily on his cigarette. Goram had been soothed into comparative geniality, but his frantic notion of death as panacea was as strong as ever. The creature wasn’t even consistent—one moment talking philosophy of history as if he had brains, the next snarling his mindlessly destructive xenophobia. There was something wrong about Goram—though it might only be my own ignorance of practical psychology, thought Heym. As a research man I’m used to dealing with only one factor at a time. A situation in life is really too complex for me—I don’t have enough rules of thumb. I wish I’d brought a practicing technician along, say Kharva or Junn—they’d soon analyze the mental mechanism of our marshal and push the appropriate buttons.