“Arbiter, you slew without provocation!” he snapped suddenly. “Why? I demand to know. You told Grenson he was wrong, but what need was there to murder him as well?”
“That question is outside your province. You are the President, yes, but you had me created for the undisputed adjudication of all matters capable of argument, for the carrying out of these adjudications afterwards. The only way to prevent a continued disobedience of commands is to kill! Grenson, in spite of my decision, was determined to work in spite of me. So he died. So it must always be with those who are defiant. Otherwise, the purpose of the Arbiter is lost.”
“But it’s barbarism!” President Doyle cried hoarsely. “The very thing I believed you’d stop!”
“I am not answerable to anybody for what I believe or think,” the Arbiter answered implacably.
“But suppose young Grenson had been right? Suppose he had touched the verge of unlocking fusion power? Think what it could have meant to us. We need that power. Earth’s stores of radioactive materials, petroleum, coal, and certain metals cannot last much longer. Supplies were drained to the uttermost in building and equipping the cities. Fusion power would solve many things at one bound. Even the economic transmutation of elements, a secret we desperately need to find. At the least you could have let Grenson go on experimenting.”
“Not in face of my decision. I acted as I saw best. So far as I am concerned the matter is finished.”
Doyle hesitated, staring at the thing bitterly, then with clenched fists he went slowly from the laboratory. Somewhere, he knew, something was wrong.
The treasured plans for security had gone utterly awry.
Very gradually it was forced on the adherents of scientific progress that the Arbiter was anything but what it was intended to be. Science became divided into two camps—the strugglers and the opposers, with Dodd as chief of the opposers.
Dodd, though a scientist, firmly believed in the inaccessibility of Nature’s inner secrets, and had neither vision nor tolerance. He was too content to accept science for what it was rather than for what it might become. In that very fact lay the seed of disaster; The camp of Science, divided against itself, began to show signs of decay.
Time and again the Arbiter was called in, and every time the verdict went to Horley Dodd and his party.
Baffled, sickened by the obvious breakdown in the scheme for universal peace, President Selby Doyle’s grip on things commenced to weaken. Already worn out with the cares of office, to which had been added crushing disappointment, the illness that preceded his demise was brief.
Officials were present round his deathbed—but officials were all they were, men who had served him because it had been their duty to serve. To the dying President there was only one face that represented loyalty and friendship, and it belonged to Carfax.
“Carfax; you must be President,” Doyle whispered. “As—as it is my final wish, you will be chosen. All around this bed are the men who will elect you. I have their promise. I think that I have—have been too lenient, but no such emotions will trouble you, Carfax. You are younger. You are an expert scientist. You must defeat this Arbiter, my friend. Find out why it has turned traitor! You promise?”
“I promise,” Carfax answered.
President Doyle relaxed and smiled. It was a smite that remained fixed. The President of the Earth was dead.
An hour later the assembled scientists, all of them leaders on the side of the Strugglers, filed into the main office to face their new President. They found Carfax at the great desk, coldly silent. He wailed until the group was fully assembled.
“Gentlemen, for seven years now we have been chained hand and foot by an invention of our own making—a metal dictator—and it bas betrayed us. We don’t know why, yet—but we do know that unless we defy this Arbiter, or find forces which can destroy it, we are a doomed people.”
Gascoyne shook his head.
“We cannot destroy it—at least not in the light of present scientific knowledge,” he said seriously. “We made the thing of a metal whose atoms interlock, remember. It is sealed forever. We made it foolproof—and to what end?”
“It is in our own hands to determine the end,” President Carfax retorted. “Unless we act, we’re finished. It is the very law of the Universe that there must be progress. Every day now brings us up against new difficulties. Sources of power are running low. New sources—intended for us by Nature—are barred, because the scientists that would develop them are prevented by this twelve-brained monstrosity. I tell you we must defeat it!”
Assured that he might be able to succeed, President Carfax went to work to prove his words. The Strugglers began anew the experiments that had been truncated by the death of Grenson.
They worked to within an ace of solving the secret of controllable fusion power. Carfax himself got far enough to extract a terrific amount of energy from a cube of copper. From incredibly small pieces of highly conducive metal he built up a model power plant, which, on a giant scale, would replace the already sadly worn and failing equipment from which the cities derived their light and power.
The other scientists explored different realms. Some reasoned out new methods of synthesis by which the fast waning supplies of oil and coal could be replaced. Another was convinced that he had transmutation of metals in his grip, with which the cities could be repaired as time went on. Yet another saw his chance of harnessing the waste energy of the sun on a large scale.
By degrees, under Carfax’s fine leadership, the determined scientists began to lay plans for the foundation of real Utopia.
Then the Arbiter struck! In a public speech it declared that the discoveries claimed, by President Vincent Carfax and his colleagues were nothing better than fancy. The Arbiter took sides with the Opposers and launched a small but savagely effective massacre against the Strugglers. In three days of desperate skirmish and slaughter Carfax and his followers were wiped out. Horley Dodd, leader of the Opposers, was killed too.
Not that it signified much. The Opposers were now in complete control, backed always by the implacable Arbiter.
Languid with victory, the Opposers lazily repaired the damage and then sat back to enjoy the comforts that Vincent Carfax had sworn were coming to an end. Apathy set in, born of lack of anything to accomplish. Even the Arbiter had nothing left to judge. The final vanquishing had shown to the Opposers that progress was a form of disease and entirely unnecessary. Better to relax and enjoy the fruits of labor.
The year 2048 passed away and was followed by a gap of somnolent, drifting years until 2060. Nothing had been accomplished, nothing done. Life was one great bliss of effortless satisfaction. The pioneers were lost in the mists of memory. Science, as an art; had ceased to be.
2060—2080—3000—and the Arbiter was still in faultless condition. Indeed it had been made indestructible.
Men and women died, children were born in limited members, grew up, each one knowing less of science than those before them. Astronomy, physics, mathematics? They were things the ancients had studied, said the history records. Somewhere in the smeared archives was the name of Selby Doyle.
Then in 3000 came the first warnings of the trouble Carfax had foreseen. The weather controlling machinery broke down, its central bearings worn out from continued inattention. In consequence the weather suddenly reverted to its former unreliable state and deluged whole continents of synthetic crops, destroyed a world’s food supply for a year.
Hurricanes tore across the world. Cities that were slow1y eroding through continued lack of repair eroded still more. That gray metal, so shiny at first, was cracking now, flaking under the continued onslaught of the elements.