Master of Life and Death

XIII

The bright light of the video cameras flooded the room. Percy had done a good job; there was a representative from every network, every telefax, every blare of any sort at all. The media had been corralled. Walton’s words would echo round the world.

He was seated behind his desk—seated, because he could shape his words more forcefully that way, and also because he was terribly tired. He smiled into the battery of cameras.

“Good evening,” he said. “I’m Roy Walton, speaking to you from the offices of the Bureau of Population Equalization. I’ve been director of Popeek for a little less than a week, now, and I’d like to make a report— a progress report, so to speak.

“We of Popeek regard ourselves as holding a mandate from you, the people. After all, it was the world-wide referendum last year that enabled the United Nations to put us into business. And I want to tell you how the work of Popeek is going.

“Our aim is to provide breathing space for human beings. The world is vastly overcrowded, with its seven billion people. Popeek’s job is to ease that overcrowded-ness, to equalize the population masses of the world so that the empty portions of the globe are filled up and the extremely overcrowded places thinned out a little. But this is only part of our job—the short-range, temporary part. We’re planning for the future here. We know we can’t keep shifting population from place to place on Earth; it won’t work forever. Eventually every square inch is going to be covered, and then where do we go?

“You know the answer. We go out. We reach for the stars. At present we have spaceships that can take us to the planets, but the planets aren’t suitable for human life. All right, we’ll make them suitable! At this very moment a team of engineers is on Venus, in that hot, dry, formaldehyde atmosphere, struggling to turn Venus into a world fit for oxygen-breathing human beings. They’ll do it, too—and when they’re done with Venus they’ll move on to Mars, to the Moon, perhaps to the big satellites of Jupiter and Saturn too. There’ll be a day when the solar system will be habitable from Mercury to Pluto—we hope.

“But even that is short-range,” Walton said pointedly. “There’ll be a day—it may be a hundred years from now, or a thousand, or ten thousand—when the entire solar system will be as crowded with humanity as Earth is today. We have to plan for that day, too. It’s the lack of planning on the part of our ancestors that’s made things so hard for us. We of Popeek don’t want to repeat the tragic mistakes of the past.

“My predecessor, the late Director FitzMaugham, was aware of this problem. He succeeded in gathering a group of scientists and technicians who developed a super space drive, a faster-than-light ship that can travel to the stars virtually instantaneously, instead of taking years to make the trip as our present ships would.

“The ship was built and sent out on an exploratory mission. Director FitzMaugham chose to keep this fact a secret. He was afraid of arousing false hopes in case the expedition should be a failure.

“The expedition was not a failure! Colonel Leslie McLeod and his men discovered a planet similar to Earth in the system of the star Procyon. I have seen photographs of New Earth, as they have named it, and I can tell you that it is a lovely planet… and one that will be receptive to our pioneers.”

Walton paused a moment before launching into the main subject of his talk.

“Unfortunately, there is a race of intelligent beings living on a neighboring planet of this world. Perhaps you have seen the misleading and inaccurate reports blared today to the effect that these people refuse to allow Earth to colonize in their system. Some of you have cried out for immediate war against these people, the Dirnans.

“I must confirm part of the story the telefax carried today: the Dirnans are definitely not anxious to have Earth set up a colony on a world adjoining theirs. We are strangers to them, and their reaction is understandable. After all, suppose a race of strange-looking creatures landed on Mars, and proceeded with wholesale colonization of our neighboring world? We’d be uneasy, to say the least.

“And so the Dirnans are uneasy. However, I’ve summoned a Dirnan ambassador—our first diplomatic contact with intelligent alien creatures!—and I hope he’ll be on Earth shortly. I plan to convince him that we’re peaceful, neighborly people, and that it will be to our mutual benefit to allow Earth colonization in the Procyon system.

“I’m going to need your help. If, while our alien guest is here, he discovers that some misguided Earthmen are demanding war with Dirna, he’s certainly not going to think of us as particularly desirable neighbors to welcome with open arms. I want to stress the importance of this. Sure, we can go to war with Dirna for possession of Procyon VIII. But why spread wholesale destruction on two worlds when we can probably achieve our goal peacefully?

“That’s all I have to say tonight, people of the world. I hope you’ll think about what I’ve told you. Popeek works twenty-four hours a day in your behalf, but we need your full cooperation if we’re going to achieve our aims and bring humanity to its full maturity. Thank you.”

The floodlights winked out suddenly, leaving Walton momentarily blinded. When he opened his eyes again he saw the cameramen moving their bulky apparatus out of the office quickly and efficiently. The regular programs had returned to the channels—the vapid dancing and joke-making, the terror shows, the kaleidowhirls.

Now that it was over, now that the tension was broken, Walton experienced a moment of bitter disillusionment. He had had high hopes for his speech, but had he really put it over? He wasn’t sure.

He glanced up. Lee Percy stood over him.

“Roy, can I say something?” Percy said diffidently.

“Go ahead,” Walton said.

“I don’t know how many millions I forked over to put you on the media tonight, but I know one thing—we threw a hell of a lot of money away.”

Walton sighed wearily. “Why do you say that?”

“That speech of yours,” Percy said, “was the speech of an amateur. You ought to let pros handle the big spiels, Roy.”

“I thought you liked the impromptu thing I did when they mobbed that Herschelite. How come no go tonight?”

Percy shook his head. “The speech you made outside the building was different. It had emotion; it had punch! But tonight you didn’t come across at all.”

“No?”

“I’d put money behind it.” Acidly Percy said, “You can’t win the public opinion by being reasonable. You gave a nice smooth speech. Bland… folksy. You laid everything on the line where they could see it.”

“And that’s wrong, is it?” Walton closed his eyes for a moment. “Why?”

“Because they won’t listen! You gave them a sermon when you should have been punching at them! Sweet reason! You can’t be sweet if you want to sell your product to seven billion morons!”

“Is that all they are?” Walton asked. “Just morons?”

Percy chuckled. “In the long run, yes. Give them their daily bread and their one room to live in, and they won’t give a damn what happens to the world. FitzMaugham sold them Popeek the way you’d sell a car without turbines. He hoodwinked them into buying something they hadn’t thought about or wanted.”

“They needed Popeek, whether they wanted it or not. No one needs a car without turbines.”

“Bad analogy, then,” Percy said. “But it’s true. They don’t care a blast about Popeek, except where it affects them. If you’d told them that these aliens would kill them all if they didn’t act nice, you’d have gotten across. But this sweetness and light business—oh, no, Roy. It just doesn’t work.”

“Is that all you have to tell me?” Walton asked.

“I guess so. I just wanted to show you where you had a big chance and muffed it. Where we could have helped you out if you’d let us. I don’t want you to think I’m being rude or critical, Roy; I’m just trying to be helpful.”

“Okay, Lee. Get out.”

“Huh?”

“Go away. Go sell ice to the Eskimos. Leave me alone, yes?”

“If that’s the way you want it. Hell, Roy, don’t brood over it. We can still fix things up before that alien gets here. We can put the content of tonight’s speech across so smoothly that they won’t even know we’re—”

“Get out!”

Percy skittered for the door. He paused and said, “You’re all wrought up, Roy. You ought to take a pill or something for your nerves.”

Well, he had his answer. An expert evaluation of the content and effect of his speech.

Dammit, he had tried to reach them. Percy said he hadn’t and Percy probably was right, little as Walton cared to admit the fact to himself.

But was Percy’s approach the only one? Did you have to lie to them, push them, treat them as seven billion morons?

Maybe. Right now billions of human beings—the same human beings Walton was expending so much energy to save—were staring at the kaleidowhirl programs on their videos. Their eyes were getting fixed, glassy. Their mouths were beginning to sag open, their cheeks to wobble, their lips to droop pendulously, as the hypnosis of the color patterns took effect.

This was humanity. They were busy forgetting all the things they had just been forced to listen to. All the big words, like mandate and eventually and wholesale destruction. Just so many harsh syllables to be wiped away by the soothing swirl of the colors.

And somewhere else, possibly, a poet named Prior was listening to his baby’s coughing and trying to write a poem—a poem that Walton and a few others would read excitedly, while the billions would ignore it.

Walton saw that Percy was dead right: Roy Walton could never have sold Popeek to the world. But FitzMaugham, that cagy, devious genius, did it. By waving his hands before the public and saying abracadabra, he he bamboozled them into approving Popeek before they knew what they were being sold.

It was a lousy trick, but FitzMaugham had realized that it had to be done. Someone had killed him for it, but it was too late by then.

And Walton saw that he had taken the wrong track by trying to be reasonable. Percy’s callous description of humanity as “seven billion morons” was uncomfortably close to the truth. Walton would have to make his appeal to a more subliminal level.

Perhaps, he thought, at the level of the kaleidowhirls, those endless patterns of colored light that were the main form of diversion for the Great Unwashed.

I’ll get to them, Walton promised himself. There can’t be any dignity or nobility in human life with everyone crammed into one sardine can. So I’ll treat them like the sardines they are, and hope I can turn them into the human beings they could be if they only had room.

He rose, turned out the light, prepared to leave. He wondered if the late Director FitzMaugham had ever faced an internal crisis of this sort, or whether FitzMaugham had known these truths innately from the start.

Probably, the latter was the case. FitzMaugham had been a genius, a sort of superman. But FitzMaugham was dead, and the man who carried on his work was no genius. He was only a mere man.

The reports started filtering in the next morning. It went much as Percy had predicted.

Citizenwas the most virulent. Under the sprawling headline, WHO’S KIDDING WHO? the telefax sheet wanted to know what the “mealy-mouthed” Popeek director was trying to tell the world on all media the night before. They weren’t sure, since Walton, according to Citizen, had been talking in “hifalutin prose picked on purpose to befuddle John Q. Public.” But their general impression was that Walton had proposed some sort of sellout to the Dirnans.

The sellout idea prevailed in most of the cheap telefax sheets.

“Behind a cloud of words, Popeek czar Walton is selling the world downstream to the greenskins,” said one paper. “His talk last night was strictly bunk. His holy-holy words and grim face were supposed to put over something, but we ain’t fooled—and don’t you be fooled either, friend!”

The video commentators were a little kinder, but not very. One called for a full investigation of the Earth-Dirna situation. Another wanted to know why Walton, an appointed official and not even a permanent one at that, had taken it upon himself to handle such high-power negotiations. The UN seemed a little worried about that, even though Ludwig had made a passionate speech insisting that negotiations with Dirna were part of Walton’s allotted responsibilities.

That touched off a new ruckus. “How much power does Walton have?” Citizen demanded in a later edition. “Is he the boss of the world? And if he is, who the devil is he anyway?”

That struck Walton harder than all the other blows. He had been gradually realizing that he did, in fact, control what amounted to dictatorial powers over the world. But he had not yet fully admitted it to himself, and it hurt to be accused of it publicly.

One thing was clear: his attempt at sincerity and clarity had been a total failure. The world was accustomed to subterfuge and verbal pyrotechnics, and when it didn’t get the expected commodity, it grew suspicious. Sincerity had no market value. By going before the public and making a direct appeal, Walton had aroused the suspicion that he had something hidden up his sleeve.

When Citizen’s third edition of the day openly screamed for war with Dirna, Walton realized the time had come to stop playing it clean. From now on, he would chart his course and head there at any cost.

He tore a sheet of paper from his memo pad and inscribed on it a brief motto:The ends justify the means!

With that as his guide, he was ready to get down to work.