Master of Life and Death

XI

The speech that night went over well… almost.

Walton watched the program in the privacy of his home, sprawled out on the foamweb sofa with a drink in one hand and the text of Percy’s shooting-script in the other. The giant screen that occupied nearly half of his one unbroken wall glowed in lifelike colors.

FitzMaugham’s career was traced with pomp and circumstance, done up in full glory: plenty of ringing trumpet flourishes, dozens of eye-appealing color groupings, much high-pitched, tense narrative. Percy had done his job skillfully. The show was punctuated by quotations from FitzMaugham’s classic book, Breathing Space and Sanity. Key government figures drifted in and out of the narrative webwork, orating sonorously. That pious fraud, M. Seymour Lanson, President of the United States, delivered a flowery speech; the old figurehead was an artist at his one function, speechmaking. Walton watched, spellbound. Lee Percy was a genius in his field; there was no denying that.

Finally, toward the end of the hour, the narrator said, “The work of Popeek goes on, though its lofty-minded creator lies dead at an assassin’s hand. Director FitzMaugham had chosen as his successor a young man schooled in the ideals of Popeek. Roy Walton, we know, will continue the noble task begun by D. F. FitzMaugham.”

For the second time that day Walton watched his own face appear on a video screen. He glanced down at the script in his hand and back up at the screen. Percy’s technicians had done a brilliant job. The Walton-image on the screen looked so real that the Walton on the couch almost believed he had actually delivered this speech— although he knew it had been cooked up out of some rearranged stills and a few brokendown phonemes with his voice characteristics.

It was a perfectly innocent speech. In humble tones he expressed his veneration for the late director, his hopes that he would be able to fill the void left by the death of FitzMaugham, his sense of Popeek as a sacred trust. Half-listening, Walton began to skim the script.

Startled, Walton looked down at the script. He didn’t remember having encountered any such lines on his first reading, and he couldn’t find them now. “This morning,” the pseudo-Walton on the screen went on, “we received contact from outer space! From a faster-than-light ship sent out over a year ago to explore our neighboring stars.

“News of this voyage has been withheld until now for security reasons. But it is my great pleasure to tell you tonight that the stars have at last been reached by man… A new world waits for us out there, lush, fertile, ready to be colonized by the brave pioneers of tomorrow!”

Walton stared aghast at the screen. His simulacrum had returned now to the script as prepared, but he barely listened.

He was thinking that Percy had let the cat out for sure. It was a totally unauthorized newsbreak. Numbly, Walton watched the program come to its end, and wondered what the repercussions would be once the public grasped all the implications.

He was awakened at 0600 by the chiming of his phone. Grumpily he climbed from bed, snapped on the receiver, switched the cutoff on the picture sender in order to hide his sleep-rumpled appearance, and said, “This is Walton. Yes?”

A picture formed on the screen: a heavily-tanned man in his late forties, stocky, hair close-cropped. “Sorry to roust you this way, old man. I’m McLeod.”

Walton came fully awake in an instant. “McLeod? Where are you?”

“Out on Long Island. I just pulled into the airport half a moment ago. Traveled all night after dumping the ship at Nairobi.”

“You made a good landing, I hope?”

“The best. The ship navigates like a bubble.” McLeod frowned worriedly. “They brought me the early-morning telefax while I was having breakfast. I couldn’t help reading all about the speech you made last night.”

“Oh. I—”

“Quite a crasher of a speech,” McLeod went on evenly. “But don’t you think it was a little premature of you to release word of my flight? I mean—”

“It was quite premature,” Walton said. “A member of my staff inserted that statement into my talk without my knowledge. He’ll be disciplined for it.”

A puzzled frown appeared on McLeod’s face. “But you made that speech with your own lips! How can you blame it on a member of your staff?”

“The science that can send a ship to Procyon and back within a year,” Walton said, “can also fake a speech. But I imagine we’ll be able to cover up the pre-release without too much trouble.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said McLeod. He shrugged apologetically. “You see, that planet’s there, all right. But it happens to be the property of alien beings who live on the next world. And they’re not so happy about having Earth come crashing into their system to colonize!”

Somehow Walton managed to hang onto his self-control, even with this staggering news crashing about him. “You’ve been in contact with these beings?” he asked.

McLeod nodded. “They have a translating gadget. We met them, yes.”

Walton moistened his lips. “I think there’s going to be trouble,” he said. “I think I may be out of a job, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Just thinking out loud,” Walton said. “Finish your breakfast and meet me at my office at 0900. We’ll talk this thing out then.”

Walton was in full command of himself by the time he reached the Cullen Building.

He had read the morning telefax and heard the news-blares: they all screamed the sum and essence of Walton’s speech of the previous night, and a few of the braver telefax outfits went as far as printing a resume of the entire speech, boiled down to Basic, of course, for benefit of that substantial segment of the reading public that was most comfortable while moving its lips. The one telefax outfit most outspokenly opposed to Popeek, Citizen, took great delight in giving the speech full play, and editorializing on a subsequent sheet against the “veil of security” hazing Popeek operations.

Walton read the Citizen editorial twice, savoring its painstaking simplicities of expression. Then he clipped it out neatly and shot it down the chute to public relations, marked Attention: Lee Percy.

“There’s a Mr. McLeod waiting to see you,” his secretary informed him. “He says he has an appointment.”

“Send him in,” Walton said. “And have Mr. Percy come up here also.”

While he waited for McLeod to arrive, Walton riffled through the rest of the telefax sheets. Some of them praised Popeek for having uncovered a new world; others damned it for having hidden news of the faster-than-light drive so long. Walton stacked them neatly in a heap at the edge of his desk.

In the bleak, dark hours of the morning, he had expected to be compelled to resign. Now, he realized, he could immeasurably strengthen his own position if he could control the flow of events and channel them properly.

The square figure of McLeod appeared on the screen. Walton admitted him.

“Sir. I’m McLeod.”

“Of course. Won’t you sit down?”

McLeod was tense, stiffly formal, very British in his reserve and general bearing. Walton gestured uneasily, trying to cut through the crackle of nervousness.

“We seem to have a mess on our hands,” he said. “But there’s no mess so messy we can’t muddle through it, eh?”

“If we have to, sir. But I can’t help feeling this could all have been avoided.”

“No. You’re wrong, McLeod. If it could have been avoided, it would have been avoided. The fact that some idiot in my public relations department gained access to my wire and found out you were returning is incontrovertible; it happened, despite precautions.”

“Mr. Percy to see you,” the annunciator said.

The angular figure of Lee Percy appeared on the screen. Walton told him to come in.

Percy looked frightened—terrified, Walton thought. He held a folded slip of paper loosely in one hand.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning, Lee.” Walton observed that the friendly Roy had changed to the formal salutation, sir. “Did you get the clipping I sent you?”

“Yes, sir.” Glumly.

“Lee, this is Leslie McLeod, chief of operations of our successful faster-than-light project. Colonel McLeod, I want you to meet Lee Percy. He’s the man who masterminded our little newsbreak last night.”

Percy flinched visibly. He stepped forward and laid his slip of paper on Walton’s desk. “I m-made a m-mistake last night,” he stammered. “I should never have released that break.”

“Damned right you shouldn’t have,” Walton agreed, carefully keeping any hint of severity from his voice. “You have us in considerable hot water, Lee. That planet isn’t ours for colonization, despite the enthusiasm with which I allegedly announced it last night. And you ought to be clever enough to realize it’s impossible to withdraw and deny good news once you’ve broken it.”

“The planet’s not ours? But—?”

“According to Colonel McLeod,” Walton said, “the planet is the property of intelligent alien beings who live on a neighboring world, and who no more care to have their system overrun by a pack of Earthmen than we would to have extrasolar aliens settle on Mars.”

“Sir, that sheet of paper…” Percy said in a choked voice. “It’s—it’s—”

Walton unfolded it. It was Percy’s resignation. He read the note carefully twice, smiled, and laid it down. Now was his time to be magnanimous.

“Denied,” he said. “We need you on our team, Lee. I’m authorizing a ten percent pay-cut for one week, effective yesterday, but there’ll be no other penalty.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He’s crawling to me, Walton thought in amazement. He said, “Only don’t pull that stunt again, or I’ll not only fire you but blacklist you so hard you won’t be able to find work between here and Procyon. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay. Go back to your office and get to work. And no more publicity on this faster-than-light thing until I authorize it. No—cancel that. Get out a quick release, a followup on last night. A smoke screen, I mean. Cook up so much cloudy verbiage about the conquest of space that no one bothers to remember anything of what I said. And play down the colonization angle!”

“I get it, sir.” Percy grinned feebly.

“I doubt that,” Walton snapped. “When you have the release prepared, shoot it up here for my okay. And heaven help you if you deviate from the text I see by as much as a single comma!”

Percy practically backed out of the office.

“Why did you do that?” McLeod asked, puzzled.

“You mean, why did I let him off so lightly?”

McLeod nodded. “In the military,” he said, “we’d have a man shot for doing a thing like that.”

“This isn’t the military,” Walton said. “And even though the man behaved like a congenital idiot yesterday, that’s not enough evidence to push him into Happysleep. Besides, he knows his stuff. I can’t afford to discharge him.”

“Are public relations men that hard to come by?”

“No. But he’s a good one—and the prospect of having him desert to the other side frightens me. He’ll be forever grateful to me now. If I had fired him, he would’ve had half a dozen anti-Popeek articles in the Citizen before the week was out. And they’d ruin us.”

McLeod smiled appreciatively. “You handle your job well, Mr. Walton.”

“I have to,” Walton said. “The director of Popeek is paid to produce two or three miracles per hour. One gets used to it, after a while. Tell me about these aliens, Colonel McLeod.”

McLeod swung a briefcase to Walton’s desk and flipped the magneseal. He handed Walton a thick sheaf of glossy color photos.

“The first dozen or so are scenes of the planet,” McLeod explained. “It’s Procyon VIII—number eight out of sixteen, unless we missed a couple. We checked sixteen worlds in the system, anyway. Ten of ‘em were methane giants; we didn’t even bother to land. Two were ammonia supergiants, even less pleasant. Three small ones had no atmosphere at all worth speaking about, and were no more livable-looking than Mercury. And the remaining one was the one we call New Earth. Take a look, sir.”

Walton looked. The photos showed rolling hills covered with close-packed shrubbery, flowing rivers, a lovely sunrise. Several of the shots were of indigenous life—a wizened little four-handed monkey, a six-legged doglike thing, a toothy bird.

“Life runs to six limbs there,” Walton observed. “But how livable can this place be? Unless your photos are sour, that grass is blue … and the water’s peculiar looking, too. What sort of tests did you run?”

“It’s the light, sir. Procyon’s a double star; that faint companion gets up in the sky and does tricky things to the camera. That grass may look blue, but it’s a chlorophyll-based photosynthesizer all the same. And the water’s nothing but H₂O, even with that purple tinge.”

Walton nodded. “How about the atmosphere?”

“We were breathing it for a week, and no trouble. It’s pretty rich in oxygen—twenty-four percent. Gives you a bouncy feeling—just right for pioneers, I’d say.”

“You’ve prepared a full report on this place, haven’t you?”

“Of course. It’s right here.” McLeod started to reach for his briefcase.

“Not just yet,” Walton said. “I want to go through the rest of these snapshots.” He turned over one after another rapidly until he came to a photo that showed a strange blocky figure, four-armed, bright green in color. Its neckless head was encased in a sort of breathing mask fashioned from some transparent plastic. Three cold, brooding eyes peered outward.

“What’s this?” Walton asked.

“Oh, that.” McLeod attempted a cheerful grin. “That’s a Dirnan. They live on Procyon IX, one of the ammonia-giant planets. They’re the aliens who don’t want us there.”