“And those three problems?”
“The obvious ones. How they use their growing knowledge of their own physiology and biochemistry, for healthy growth or for destruction. How they deal with their own evolutionary development, especially when the higher extrasensory powers begin to appear, as they always do. How they handle their first encounters with other intelligent creatures. Simple enough things, yet utterly crucial, because the solutions they find mold the pattern of their future”
The old one turned once again to scan the void of space around them. “That is why we came to this remote region in the first place: because intelligent life had appeared here and we had to know what solutions they found. With these people it has been easy. They’ve developed so very fast, for one thing; no other race in history has ever scrambled up as urgently as these people have. Which could make them all the more dangerous, of course, if they found the wrong solutions. In addition, they have always had a burgeoning curiosity about their own minds and bodies; and recently a single research organization, their so-called Hoffman Center, has been deeply involved in all three of the areas we have been watching. Useful, for vis. A single observation post from which we could follow all three lines of development.”
The Old One leaned back, smiling at his young companion. “So now the data is collected. Kadar will bring nothing new with him when he comes. Our tapes and records here already tell the whole story; perhaps you should review them again, while we wait. You might see then why our surveillance is over. And perhaps”—he paused, thinking once again of the three particular crises that he himself had witnessed among these Earthmen during his long centuries as Watcher here—“perhaps you will even see what the decision must ultimately be.”
Part One
The Martyr
Four and one-half hours after Martian sunset, the-last light in the Headquarters Building finally flicked out.
Carl Golden stamped his feet against the cold, blowing into his cupped hands to warm them as he pressed back into the shadow of the doorway across from Headquarters. The night air bit his nostrils and turned his breath into clouds of gray vapor in the semidarkness. The atmosphere screens surrounding the Ironstone Colony on Mars kept the oxygen in, all right, but they could never keep the biting cold out. After this long vigil he was chilled to the bone and bored to the point of screaming, but when the light at last went out across the way, boredom vanished and warm blood prickled through his shivering legs.
He slid back tight against the coarse black stone of the doorway, peering intently across the road into the gloom. Who had been staying so late? The girl, of course. He’d thought so, but wasn’t sure until he saw her coming out, heard the faint chink of keys as she pulled the heavy door down on its counterweights behind her and locked it. A quick glance left and right, and she started down the frosty road toward the lights of the colony.
Carl Golden waited until she was out of sight. No briefcase; good, good. That was one loophole he had thought of while he stood there freezing. Not that anybody took any work home around here, but there was always a chance. His heart pounded as he forced himself to wait ten minutes more; then, teeth chattering in the cold, he ducked swiftly across the dark road to the low, one-story building.
Through the window he could see the lobby call-board. All the lights were dark. Good, again—no one remained in the lower levels. Headquarters ran by routine, just like everything else in this god-forsaken hole. Utter, abysmal, trancelike routine. The girl had been a little later than usual, but that was because of the supply ship coming in tomorrow, no doubt. Reports to get ready, supply requisitions to fill out, personnel recommendations to complete—
— and the final reports on Armstrongs death. Mustn’t forget that, Carl. The real story, the absolute, factual truth, without any nonsense. The reports that would go, ultimately, to Walter Rinehart and to no one else, just as all the other important reports from the Ironstone Colony had been going for so many years. Only this time Walter Rinehart was in for a surprise.
Carl skirted the long, low building, clinging to the black shadows of the side wall. Halfway around he came to the supply chute, covered with a heavy moulded-stone cover.
Now?
It had to be now, and this was the only way; it had taken four endless months here for him to discover that. Four months of this ridiculous masquerade, made all the more idiotic by the fact that every soul in the colony had accepted him for exactly what he pretended to be, and never once challenged him; not even Terry Fisher, who habitually challenged everything and everybody, even when he was sober! But the four months of play-acting had told on Carl’s nerves; they showed in his reactions, in the hollows under his sharp brown eyes. The specter of a slip-up, an aroused suspicion, was always in his mind, and he knew that until he had the reports before his eyes, there was nothing Dan Fowler could do to save him if he betrayed himself. The night he’d left Earth, Dan had shaken his hand and said, “Remember, lad, I don’t know you. Sorry it’s got to be that way, but we can’t risk it now.” And they couldn’t, of course. Not until they knew, for certain, who had murdered Kenneth Armstrong.
They already knew why.
The utter stillness of the place reassured him; he hoisted up the chute cover, threw it high, and worked his long legs and body into the chute. It was a steep slide downwards; he held his breath for an instant, listening, then let go. Blackness engulfed him as the cover snapped closed behind him. He went down fast, struck hard and rolled. The chute opened into the commissary in the third deep-level of the building; the place was as black as the inside of a pocket He tested unbroken legs with a sigh of relief, then limped around crates and boxes in the darkness to the place where the door ought to be.
In the corridor beyond there was some light—dim phosphorescence from the Martian night-rock lining the walls and tiling the floor. Carl walked swiftly, aware of the deafening clack-clack of his heels on the ringing stone. At the end of the corridor he tried the heavy door.
It complained, but it gave. Carl sighed his relief. It had been a quick, imperfect job of jimmying the lock; he had left it looking so obviously tampered with that he’d worried about it all day. But then, why would anyone test it? Unless they suspected a snake in their midst—
Through the door he stepped into a black room again, started forward as the door swung shut behind him. Then somewhere a shoe scraped, the faintest rustle of sound. Carl froze. His own trouser leg? A trick of acoustics? He didn’t move a muscle.
Silence. Then: “Carl?”
His pocket light flickered around the room, revealing a secretary’s cubbyhole, a typewriter. It stopped on a pair of trouser legs, a body, slouched down in the soft plastifoam chair, a sleepy face, ruddy and bland, with a shock of sandy hair and quizzical eyebrows.
“Terry! What are you doing here in the dark?”
“Waiting for you, old boy.” The man leaned forward, grinning up at him. “You’re late, Carl. Should have made it sooner than this, sheems—seems to me.”
Carl’s light moved past the man in the chair to the floor. The bottle was standing there, barely half full. “You’re drunk,” he said.
“Course I’m drunk,” Terry Fisher laughed. “You think I was going to sober up after you left me at that bar tonight? No thanks, I’d rather be drunk, any day of the week, around this dump.”