One and Wonder (2 page)

“One question, first.” Hudd's big mouth still smiled, but his red eyes were narrowed and dangerous. “The boys have brought me a rather disturbing report about some gadget you called an induction furnace. What's the truth about it?” “That's easy, Mr. Hudd.” Cameron's low voice seemed relieved. “Until our arrest, we were running routine assays of our metallurgical specimens from the Dark Star system. I built that little furnace just for convenience in fusing samples.”

“So? Hudd forgot to smile. His heavy, mottled face stiffened into a bleak mask of ruthless purpose. “The boys report that your assays were only a blind, intended to cover some secret experiment.”

Hudd paused, but Cameron said nothing. He merely stood waiting, his lean face grave enough, but an alarming hint of impersonal amusement in his eyes. Hudd went on:

“I believe it was a most peculiar furnace.” Hudd's voice was harsh with accusation. “The boys report that it consumed no current. They say it changed the metals fused in it—that buttons of pure iron, on spectrographic analysis, began to show yellow sodium lines.”

Hudd's great body heaved forward against the desk, ominously.

“What about that?”

Cameron nodded easily. Then fear dropped like a staggering burden upon me. For he grinned across the gleaming mahogany, and told Hudd more than he had ever admitted to the SBI, in all our months of intensive interrogation. “I was looking for something.”

For a moment, as he spoke, Cameron let down the shield of reserved and sardonic amusement that he carried against a world of totalitarian compulsion. For a moment his voice had a hard elation, terrible in its honesty.

“I was looking for—freedom.” His thin shoulders lifted, almost defiantly. “I thought I had found a new and simple technique for manipulating the cosmic stuff that sometimes we call matter and sometimes energy. I thought I had found the way out of the Atomic Age.”

His blue and deep-set eyes, for just that moment, held a stern radiance. Then his brief elation flowed away. His tall, emaciated frame bent to a burden of failure, and I saw the gray sickness of the prison on his haggard face.

“I was mistaken.” His voice went flat, with the dull admission of defeat. “The accidental contamination of pure specimens with spectroscopic traces of sodium is notoriously easy. I had already abandoned the experiment, before we were arrested.”

Hudd nodded his great shaggy head, unsurprised. “You're smart to tell the truth—and lucky that you failed.” His broad, blue-jowled face recovered its habitual political smile. “Now, I think you've had a lesson, Jim, and I'm going to give you another chance.” His voice turned savage again. “I don't mean another chance at treason—for you'll be watched, every minute.”

Cameron stood waiting. The defeated look was gone. His lean face was properly grave, but his keen blue eyes had a glint of amused expectancy.

“What's your trouble, Mr. Hudd?”

Hudd pushed the little golden head of Tyler away from him, across the opulent desk. Slowly shifting his great bulk, he leaned back in his wide chair, knitting his fingers so that his huge, black-haired hands cradled his paunch. Under the dark thick brows, his small eyes were red with fatigue and trouble.

“I suppose you noticed when we went from acceleration thrust to centrifugal, three days ago?” His rasping voice was dry and hurried. “Anyhow, we're back—on a temporary orbit twenty thousand miles from the moon.”

“And something’s wrong?” Cameron's voice, it seemed to me, had some faint undertone of malicious anticipation. But Hudd didn't seem to notice, for he was stating gravely:

“Something has happened to the Directorate!”

“Eh?” Cameron's veiled amusement vanished. “What?”

“Here are the facts.” Heavily, Hudd lurched forward against the desk again; his voice had a brittle snap. “We began calling Fort America weeks ago, from millions of miles at space. Our signals weren't answered. So far as we can determine, the moon has been abandoned.”

His bloodshot eyes looked haunted.

“We haven't tried to signal the earth—I want to keep the advantage of surprise, until we know the situation. But things have happened, even there.”

He reached, with a huge and hairy paw, for the little golden bust of Tyler and resumed his nervous drumming.

“But we've been listening, on every possible wave band. Of course, out here, we couldn't expect to get much. But we are in range of the great television propaganda stations of the Applied Semantics Authority—and they
are dead. All we have picked up are feeble clicks and squeals—scrambled radiophone signals, apparently, which our engineers can't unscramble.”

His lowered voice echoed a baffled unease.

“The telescopes give us several puzzling hints. The forests have grown, since we left—the spread of green into the deserts might almost indicate a general climatic change. The haze of smoke is gone from the old industrial areas. Where several cities used to be, in the tropics, we can find only green jungle.”

“Very interesting,” Cameron murmured.

“Two landing parties were sent to earth in life-craft,” Hudd added grimly. “One was to land in Europe and the other in North America. Nothing has been heard from either, since they entered the ionosphere. They are twenty-four hours overdue.”

The solemn, baffled hush of his voice gave me an uncomfortable chill. It would be a terrible and ironic thing I thought, if we had come back from our long exile to find our own human kind somehow destroyed.

Hudd blinked at Cameron with shrewd weary eyes.

“Now, I'm sending out another party.” His voice turned decisive. “Captain Rory Doyle will be in command—under the advice of my liaison man, of course—and Doyle wants you two with him. You are taking off in two hours. Your first object will be to learn what happened to Fort America.”

Hudd put his great hands flat on the desk and came laboriously to his feet, puffing with the effort. For all his gross bulk, however, he made a towering figure, dynamic and impressive still. Shrewd and imperious, his small eyes burned into Cameron.

“You had better find out.” With a visible effort at control, he lowered his violent voice. “Your mission is important. I believe the Directorate has been overthrown, and I intend to restore it. I've got plutonium enough to smash the earth. The first necessity, however, is to learn what has happened. I believe you can anticipate the consequence to yourselves of failure.”

“I think we can, Mr. Hudd,” said Cameron.

My heart began to thump, with an excited and somewhat apprehensive expectation.

II

Life-craft 18 was a trim steel missile, lying snug in its berth-tube amidships of the
Great Director.
Eighty feet long and slim as a pencil, it had its own ion-drive, a regular crew of six, and plenty of additional space for our party.

Captain Rory Doyle met us at the valves. He was a big man, red-haired,
straight and handsome in the gray of the Atomic Service. Under party supervision, he and Cameron had rescued a scout ship sunk in a liquid nitrogen sea on the inner planet of the Dark Star. He was capable, fearless, and loyal to Hudd. Smiling, he welcomed us aboard his swift little craft.

His crew of able spacemen helped us stow our space armor, and made ready to launch. Our take-off time went by, while Doyle scowled at his wrist chronometer, keeping the valves open.

“Waiting for Victor Lord,” he muttered. “The Squaredealer.”

Only his impatient tone suggested any dislike for Squaredealers—and even that was indiscreet.

Lord came swaggering insolently aboard, twenty minutes late. He was a tiny man, very erect and precise in his gray uniform—with the gold squares of the Machine instead of the blazing atoms of the Service. He had tight brown skin over a hard narrow face, with heavy lids drooping over pale yellow eyes. His long black hair had a varnished slickness. Strutting between his two tall bodyguards, he looked like a peevish dwarf.

He didn't bother to return Doyle's correct salute.

“You know my status, Doyle.” His high, nasal voice was deliberately overbearing. “My duty here is to oversee your performance of this important mission. We'll have no trouble—if you just keep in mind that one word from me can break you.”

He paused to blink at Doyle, with a sleepy-lidded arrogance. Success in the Squaredeal Machine required brutality, and Lord, I knew, stood second only to Julian Hudd. Haughtily, he added:

“You may take off, now.”

“Yes, Mr. Lord.”

The Squaredealer's petulant insolence may have been nothing more than a compensation for his size, but still I didn't like him. His yellow eyes were shifty; his narrow forehead sloped and his nose was too big; his whole expression was one of vicious cunning.

Doyle turned quickly away, perhaps to conceal his own resentment. He ordered the valves closed and climbed the central ladder-well to his bridge. A warning-horn beeped, and we cast off.

In the acceleration-lounge, we hung weightless for a few seconds as we dropped away from the flagship; then the thrust of our own ion-drive forced us back into the cushions with a 2-G acceleration.

I turned in the padded seat to look back through a small port. Against the dead black of space, I glimpsed the enormous bright projectile-shapes of the
Great Director
and the
Valley Forge
—coupled nose-to-nose with a long cable, spinning slowly, like a toy binary to create an imitation gravity.

Earth, close beside them, was a huge ball of misty wonder. The twilight zone made a long crimson slash between the day-side and the night. Dull
greens and browns and blues were all patched with the dazzling white of storms.

All the hope and longing of twenty years burst over me when I saw the earth, in a sudden flood of choking emotion. My wet eyes blurred that splendid view. I sat grappling in vain with that shocking mystery of spreading forest, abandoned farmlands, and jungle-buried cities, until Victor Lord’s high nasal voice recalled me to the life-craft.

“Feather merchants, huh?” Sitting pygmy-like between his two husky guards, Lord turned condescendingly to Cameron. “But Hudd insisted you must come. Let's have your expert opinion.”

He stressed the adjective too strongly, but Cameron answered quietly, “I rather expect we'll find the ultimate result of what the old economists used to call the division of labor.”

At the time, I failed to see the real significance of the interchange that followed, though it proved the key to much that happened later. I was merely annoyed at Cameron, and increasingly alarmed, because his talk plainly angered Lord.

“Explain!” Lord rapped.

“If you like—though I'm afraid the historical principle runs counter to Squaredeal ideology.” Cameron was a little too grave. “Because I don't believe the Directorate was created by Tyler's unique statesmanship, or even by the emergent dictatorship of the common man. It was, I think, just one of the end-products of the division of labor.”

Lord blinked his beady eyes, apparently uncertain whether this was double-talk or high treason. I kicked Cameron's foot, vainly trying to keep him quiet.

“Explain yourself,” Lord commanded.

“Nothing to it,” Cameron said. “The division of labor was hailed as something wonderful—before its unpleasant final consequences came to light. One man made arrows, another hunted, and they both had more to eat. That was very fine, back in the stone age.”

Cameron stretched out his legs, cheerful and relaxed.

“But it went a little farther, in the modern world. Division of labor divided mankind, setting special interest against the common good. It made specialists in mining coal, in scientific research—even in political power, Mr. Lord. The specialists formed pressure groups, each fighting to advance its own class interest—with weapons incidentally created by that same division of labor.

“When specialists fight, the winners are apt to be the experts in war,” Cameron continued innocently. “Thus government becomes a function of military technology, which of course derives from the basic industrial technology. The prevailing form of government, therefore—dictatorship or
democracy—depends on the current status of the division of labor. That interesting relation of technology and politics was pointed out by the old philosopher, Silas McKinley.”

Lord’s sleepy eyes glittered suspiciously.

“He's forbidden! Where do you keep such pernicious literature?”

Cameron grinned. “Once I had permission to do some research in Mr. Hudd's very excellent library.”

“You're apt to suffer for the dangerous ideas you acquired there,” Lord commented acidly. “Now what's this nonsense, about technology and government?”

“Political power reflects military power,” Cameron cheerfully explained. “When war is fought with cheap, simple weapons, easy for the amateur to use, then the military importance of the ordinary citizen is reflected in his political freedom. Democracy in America was established by the flintlock and maintained by Colt's revolver.

“But democracy is always threatened by an increase in specialization, especially military specialization. When weapons are expensive and complicated, requiring a class of military experts, then the ordinary man can't defend his rights—and he therefore has no rights.

“Democracy was murdered, on a desert in New Mexico, in 1945. Already, for a hundred years, the increasing division of labor had been forcing it into slow decline. The same specialization that created the bomber and the tank had already reduced the free citizen to a pathetic little man at the mercy of the corporation manager, the union leader, and the party bureaucrat.

“The atom bomb was the end of freedom. Because it was the final limit of specialization. The most complicated and costly weapon ever, its production required a fantastically complex division of labor. Government followed the trend of technology, and totalitarian control destroyed the individual.” Sitting half upright in the long reclining chair, Cameron gave the little Squaredealer his wry, sardonic grin.

“Tyler thought he had conquered the world,” he concluded. “But really it was just division of labor that created the new technology of atomic war, and so destroyed the whole world's freedom. It was just the trend of specialization that made the Directorate and flung Tyler to the top of it—no more responsible than a pebble flung up by a wave.”