Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (234 page)

The aircar began to descend. We were nearing our destination.

“What’s that got to do with me?” I said, at last.

“If you frustrate one of the Splinter Cultures, it can’t adapt on its own as full-spectrum man would do. It will die. And when the race breeds back to a whole, that valuable element will be lost to the race.”

“Maybe it’ll be no loss,” I said, softly in my turn.

“A vital loss,” said Padma. “And I can prove it. You, a full-spectrum man, have in you an element from every Splinter Culture. If you admit this you can identify even with those you want to destroy. I have evidence to show you. Will you look at it?”

The ship touched ground; the door beside me opened. I got out with Padma and found Kensie waiting.

I looked from Padma to Kensie, who stood with us and a head taller than I—two heads taller than OutBond. Kensie looked back down at me with no particular expression. His eyes were not the eyes of his twin brother—but just then, for some reason, I could not meet them.

“I’m a newsman,” I said. “Of course my mind is open.”

Padma turned and began walking toward the headquarters building. Kensie fell in with us and I think Janol and some of the others came along behind, though I didn’t look back to make sure. We went to the inner office where I first met Graeme—just Kensie, Padma and myself. There was a file folder on Graeme’s desk. He picked it up, extracted a photocopy of something and handed it to me as I came up to him.

I took it. There was no doubting its authenticity.

It was a memo from Eldest Bright, ranking elder of the joint government of Harmony and Association, to the Friendly War Chief at the Defense X Center, on Harmony. It was dated two months previously. It was on the single-molecule sheet, where the legend cannot be tampered with, or removed once it is on.

Be Informed, in God’s Name—

—That since it does seem the Lord’s Will that our Brothers on St. Marie make no success, it is ordered that henceforth no more replacements or personnel or supplies be sent them. For if our Captain does intend us the victory, surely we shall conquer without further expenditure. And if it be His will that we conquer not, then surely it would be an impiety to throw away the substance of God’s Churches in an attempt to frustrate that Will.

Be it further ordered that our Brothers on St. Marie be spared the knowledge that no further assistance is forthcoming, that they may bear witness to their faith in battle as ever, and, God’s Churches be undismayed. Heed this Command, in the Name of the Lord:

By order of he who is called…Bright

Eldest Among The Chosen

I looked up from the memo. Both Graeme and Padma were watching me.

“How’d you get hold of this?” I said. “No, of course you won’t tell
me.” The palms of my hands were suddenly sweating so that the slick material of the sheet in my fingers was slippery. I held it tightly, and talked fast to keep their eyes on my face. “But what about it? We already knew this, everybody knew Bright had abandoned them. This just proves it. Why even bother showing it to me?”

“I thought,” said Padma, “it might move you just a little. Perhaps enough to make you take a different view of things.”

I said, “I didn’t say that wasn’t possible. I tell you a Newsman keeps an open mind at all times. Of course,” I picked my words carefully, “if I could study it—”

“I’d hoped you’d take it with you,” said Padma.

“Hoped?”

“If you dig into it and really understand what Bright means there, you might understand all the Friendlies differently. You might change your mind about them.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “But—”

“Let me ask you to do that much,” said Padma. “Take the memo with you.”

I stood for a moment, with Padma facing me and Kensie looming behind him, then shrugged and put the memo in my pocket.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll take it back to my quarters and think about it—I’ve got a groundcar here somewhere, haven’t I?” And I looked at Kensie.

“Ten kilometers back,” said Kensie. “You wouldn’t get through anyway. We’re moving up for the assault and the Friendlies are maneuvering to meet us.”

“Take my aircar,” said Padma. “The Embassy flags on it will help.”

“All right,” I said.

We went out together toward the aircar. I passed Janol in the outer office and he met my eyes coldly. I did not blame him. We walked to the aircar and I got in.

“You can send the aircar back whenever you’re through with it,” said Padma, as I stepped in through the entrance section of its top. “It’s an Embassy loan to you, Tam. I won’t worry about it.”

“No,” I said. “You needn’t worry.”

I closed the section and touched the controls.

It was a dream of an aircar. It went up into the air as lightly as thought, and in a second I was two thousand feet up and well away from the spot. I made myself calm down, though, before I reached into my pocket and took the memo out.

I looked at it. My hand still trembled a little as I held it.

Here it was in my grasp at last. What I had been after from the start. And Padma himself had insisted I carry it away with me.

It was the lever, the Archimedes pry-bar which would move not one world but fourteen. And push the Friendly Peoples over the edge to extinction.

VI

They were waiting for me. They converged on the aircar as I landed it in the interior square of the Friendlies compound, all four of them with black rifles at the ready.

They were apparently the only ones left. Black seemed to have turned out every other man of his remnant of a battle unit. And these were all men I recognized, case-hardened veterans. One was the Groupman who had been in the office that first night when I had come back from the Exotic camp and stepped in to speak to Black, asking him if he ever ordered his men to kill prisoners. Another was a forty-year-old Force Leader, the lowest commissioned rank, but acting Major—just as Black, a Commandant, was acting as Expeditionary Field Commander —a position equivalent to Kensie Graeme’s. The other two soldiers were non-commissioned, but similar. I knew them all. Ultrafanatics. And they knew me.

We understood each other.

“I have to see the commandant,” I said, as I got out, before they could begin to question me.

“On what business?” said the Force Leader. “This aircar hath no business here. Nor thyself.”

I said, “I must see Commandant Black immediately. I wouldn’t be here in a car flying the flags of the Exotic Embassy if it wasn’t necessary.”

They could not take the chance that my reason for seeing Black wasn’t important, and I knew it. They argued a little, but I kept insisting I had to see the Commandant. Finally, the Force Leader took me across into the same outer office where I had always waited to see Black.

I faced Jamethon Black alone in the office.

He was putting on his battle harness, as I had seen Graeme putting on his earlier. On Graeme, the harness and the weapons it carried had looked like toys. On Jamethon’s slight frame they looked almost too heavy to bear.

“Mr. Olyn,” he said.

I walked across the room toward him, drawing the memo from my pocket as I came. He turned a little to face me, his fingers sealing the
locks on his harness, jingling slightly with his weapons and his harness as he turned.

“You’re taking the field against the Exotics,” I said.

He nodded. I had never been this close to him before. From across the room I would have believed he was holding his usual stony expression, but standing just a few feet from him now I saw the tired wraith of a smile touch the corners of his straight mouth in that dark, young face, for a second.

“That is my duty, Mr. Olyn.”

“Some duty,” I said. “When your superiors back on Harmony have already written you off their books.”

“I’ve already told you,” he said, calmly. “The Chosen are not betrayed in the Lord, one by another.”

“You’re sure of that?” I said.

Once more I saw that little ghost of a weary smile.

“It’s a subject, Mr. Olyn, on which I am more expert than you.”

* * * *

I looked into his eyes. They were exhausted but calm. I glanced aside at the desk where the picture of the church, the older man and woman and the young girl stood still.

“Your family?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“It seems to me you’d think of them in a time like this.”

“I think of them quite often.”

“But you’re going to go out and get yourself killed just the same.”

“Just the same,” he said.

“Sure!” I said. “You would!” I had come in calm and in control of myself. But now it was as if a cork had been pulled on all that had been inside me since Dave’s death. I began to shake. “Because that’s the kind of hypocrites you are—all of you Friendlies. You’re so lying, so rotten clear through with your own lies, if someone took them away from you there’d be nothing left. Would there? So you’d rather die now than admit committing suicide like this isn’t the most glorious thing in the universe. You’d rather die than admit you’re just as full of doubts as anyone else, just as afraid.”

I stepped right up to him. He did not move.

“Who’re you trying to fool?” I said. “Who? I see through you just like the people on all the other worlds do! I know you know what a mumbo-jumbo your United Churches are. I know you know the way of life you sing of through your nose so much isn’t what you claim it is. I know your Eldest Bright and his gang of narrow-minded old men are just a gang of world-hungry tyrants that don’t give a damn for religion or anything as long as they get what they want. I know you know it—and I’m going to make you admit it!”

And I shoved the memo under his nose.

“Read it!”

He took it from me. I stepped back from him, shaking badly as I watched him.

He studied it for a long minute, while I held my breath. His face did not change. Then handed it back to me.

“Can I give you a ride to meet Graeme?” I said. “We can get across the lines in the OutBond’s aircar. You can get the surrender over with before any shooting breaks out.”

He shook his head. He was looking at me in a particularly level way, with an expression I could not understand.

“What do you mean—no?”

“You’d better stay here,” he said. “Even with ambassadorial flags, that aircar may be shot at over the lines.” And he turned as if he would walk away from me, out the door.

“Where’re you going?” I shouted at him. I got in front of him and pushed the memo before his eyes again. “That’s real. You can’t close your eyes to that!”

* * * *

He stopped and looked at me. Then he reached out and took my wrist and put my arm and hand with the memo aside. His fingers were thin, but much stronger than I thought, so that I let the arm go down in front of him when I hadn’t intended to do so.

“I know it’s real. I’ll have to warn you not to interfere with me any more, Mr. Olyn. I’ve got to go now.” He stepped past me and walked toward the door.

“You’re a liar!” I shouted after him. He kept on going. I had to stop him. I grabbed the solidograph from his desk and smashed it on the floor.

He turned like a cat and looked at the broken pieces at my feet.

“That’s what you’re doing!” I shouted, pointing at them.

He came back without a word and squatted down and carefully gathered up the pieces, one by one. He put them into his pocket and got back to his feet, and raised his face at last to mine. And when I saw his eyes I stopped breathing.

“If my duty,” he said, in a low, controlled voice, “were not in this minute to—”

His voice stopped. I saw his eyes staring into me; and slowly I saw them change and the murder that was in them soften into something like wonder.

“Thou”—he said, softly—“Thou hast
no
faith?”

I had opened my mouth to speak. But what he said stopped me. I stood as if punched in the stomach, without the breath for words. He stared at me.

“What made you think,” he said, “that that memo would change my mind?”

“You read it!” I said. “Bright wrote you were a losing proposition here, so you weren’t to get any more help. And no one was to tell you for fear you might surrender if you knew.”

“Is that how you read it?” he said. “Like that?”

“How else? How else can you read it?”

“As it is written.” He stood straight facing me now and his eyes never moved from mine. “You have read it without faith, leaving out the Name and the will of the Lord. Eldest Bright wrote not that we were to be abandoned here—but that since our cause was sore tried, we be put in the hands of our Captain and our God. And further he wrote that we should not be told of this, that none here should be tempted to a vain and special seeking of the martyr’s crown. Look, Mr. Olyn. It’s down there in black and white.”

“But that’s not what he meant! That’s not what he meant!”

He shook his head. “Mr. Olyn, I can’t leave you in such delusion.”

I stared at him, for it was sympathy I saw in his face. For me.

“It’s your own blindness that deludes you,” he said. “You see nothing, and so believe no man can see. Our Lord is not just a name, but all things. That’s why we have no ornament in our churches, scorning any painted screen between us and our God. Listen to me, Mr. Olyn. Those churches themselves are but tabernacles of the earth. Our Elders and Leaders, though they are Chosen and Anointed, are still but mortal men. To none of these things or people do we hearken in our faith, but to the very voice of God within us.”