Master of Life and Death

VII

The next morning there was a crowd gathered before theCullenBuilding when Walton arrived.

There must have been at least a hundred people, fanning outward from a central focus. Walton stepped from the jet-bus and, with collar pulled up carefully to obscure as much of his face as possible, went to investigate.

A small red-faced man stood on a rickety chair against the side of the building. He was flanked by a pair of brass flagpoles, one bearing the American flag and the other the ensign of the United Nations. His voice was a biting rasp—probably, thought Walton, intensified, sharpened, and made more irritating by a harmonic modulator at his throat. An irritating voice put its message across twice as fast as a pleasant one.

He was shouting, “This is the place! Up here, in this building, that’s where they are! That’s where Popeek wastes our money!”

From the slant of the man’s words Walton instantly thought: Herschelite!

He repressed his anger and, for once, decided to stay and hear the extremist out. He had never really paid much attention to Herschelite propaganda—he had been exposed to little of it—and he realized that now, as head of Popeek, he owed it to himself to become familiar with the anti-Popeek arguments of both extremist factions —those who insisted Popeek was a tyranny, and the Herschelites, who thought it was too weak.

“This Popeek,” the little man said, accenting the awkwardness of the word. “You know what it is? It’s a stopgap. It’s a silly, soft-minded, half-hearted attempt at solving our problems. It’s a fake, a fraud, a phony!”

There was real passion behind the words. Walton distrusted small men with deep wells of passion; he no more enjoyed their company than he did that of a dynamo or an atomic pile. They were always threatening to explode.

The crowd was stirring restlessly. The Herschelite was getting to them, one way or another. Walton drew back nervously, not wanting to be recognized, and stationed himself at the fringe of the crowd.

“Some of you don’t like Popeek for this reason or that reason. But let me tell you something, friends… you’re wronger than they are! We’ve got to get tough with ourselves! We have to face the truth! Popeek is an unrealistic half-solution to man’s problems. Until we limit birth, establish rigid controls over who’s going to live and who isn’t, we—”

It was straight Herschelite propaganda, undiluted. Walton wasn’t surprised when someone in the audience interrupted, growling, “And who’s going to set those controls? You?”

“You trusted yourselves to Popeek, didn’t you? Why hesitate, then, to trust yourselves to Abel Herschel and his group of workers for the betterment and purification of mankind?”

Walton was almost limp with amazement. The Herschelite group was so much more drastic in its approach than Popeek that he wondered how they dared come out with those views in public. Animosity was high enough against Popeek; would the public accept a group more stringent yet?

The little man’s voice rose high. “Onward with the Herschelites! Mankind must move forward! The Equalization people represent the forces of decay and sloth!”

Walton turned to the man next to him and murmured, “But Herschel’s a fanatic. They’ll kill all of us in the name of mankind.”

The man looked puzzled; then, accepting the idea, he nodded. “Yeah, buddy. You know, you may have something there.”

That was all the spark needed. Walton edged away surreptitiously and watched it spread through the crowd, while the little man’s harangue grew more and more inflammatory.

Until a rock arced through the air from somewhere, whipped across the billowing UN flag, and cracked into the side of the building. That was the signal.

A hundred men and women converged on the little man on the battered chair.“We have to face the truth!” the harsh voice cried; then the flags were swept down, trampled on. Flagpoles fell, ringing metallically on the concrete; the chair toppled. The little man was lost beneath a tide of remorseless feet and arms.

A siren screamed.

“Cops!” Walton yelled from his vantage point some thirty feet away, and abruptly the crowd melted away in all directions, leaving Walton and the little man alone on the street. A security wagon drew up. Four men in gray uniforms sprang out.

“What’s been going on here? Who’s this man?” Then, seeing Walton, “Hey! Come over here!”

“Of course, officer.” Walton turned his collar down and drew near. He spotted the glare of a ubiquitous video camera and faced it squarely. “I’m Director Walton of Popeek,” he said loudly, into the camera. “I just arrived here a few minutes ago. I saw the whole thing.”

“Tell us about it, Mr. Walton,” the security man said.

“It was a Herschelite,” Walton gestured at the broken body crumpled against the ground. “He was delivering an inflammatory speech aimed against Popeek, with special reference to the late Director FitzMaugham and myself. I was about to summon you and end the disturbance, when the listeners became aware that the man was a Herschelite. When they understood what he was advocating, they—well, you see the result.”

“Thank you, sir. Terribly sorry we couldn’t have prevented it. Must be very unpleasant, Mr. Walton.”

“The man was asking for trouble,” Walton said. “Popeek represents the minds and hearts of the world. Herschel and his people seek to overthrow this order. I can’t condone violence of any sort, naturally, but”—he smiled into the camera—“Popeek is a sacred responsibility to me. Its enemies I must regard as blind and misguided people.”

He turned and entered the building, feeling pleased with himself. That sequence would be shown globally on the next news screenings; every newsblare in the world would be reporting his words.

Lee Percy would be proud of him. Without benefit either of rehearsal or phonemic engineering, Walton had delivered a rousing speech and turned a grisly incident into a major propaganda instrument.

And more than that, Director FitzMaugham would have been proud of him.

But beneath the glow of pride, he was trembling. Yesterday he had saved a boy by a trifling alteration of his genetic record; today he had killed a man by sending a whispered accusation rustling through a mob.

Power. Popeek represented power, perhaps the greatest power in the world. That power would have to be channeled somehow, now that it had been unleashed.

The stack of papers relating to the superspeed space drive was still on his desk when he entered the office. He had had time yesterday to read through just some of the earliest; then, the pressure of routine had dragged him off to other duties.

Encouraged by FitzMaugham, the faster-than-light project had originated about a decade or so before. It stemmed from the fact that the ion-drive used for travel between planets had a top velocity, a limiting factor of about ninety thousand miles per second. At that rate, it would take some eighteen years for a scouting party to visit the closest star and report back… not very efficient for a planet in a hurry to expand outward.

A group of scientists had set to work developing a sub-space warp drive, one that would cut across the manifold of normal space and allow speeds above light velocity.

All the records were here: the preliminary trials, the budget allocations, the sketches and plans, the names of the researchers. Walton ploughed painstakingly through them, learning names, assimilating scientific data. It seemed that, while it was still in its early stages, FitzMaugham had nurtured the project along with money from his personal fortune.

For most of the morning Walton leafed through documents describing projected generators, types of hull material, specifications, speculations. It was nearly noon when he came across the neatly-typed note from Colonel Leslie McLeod, one of the military scientists in charge of the ultra-drive project. Walton read it through once, gasped, and read it again.

It was dated 14 June 2231, almost one year ago. It read:

It was followed by a note from FitzMaugham to McLeod, dated 15 June:

The file concluded with a final note from McLeod to the director, dated 19 June 2231:

Walton stared at the three notes for a moment, so shocked he was unable to react. So a faster-than-light drive was not merely a hoped-for dream, but an actuality —with the first scouting mission a year absent already!

He felt a new burst of admiration for FitzMaugham. What a marvelous old scoundrel he had been!

Faster-than-light achieved, and the terraforming group on Venus, and neither fact released to the public… or even specifically given to FitzMaugham’s own staff, his alleged confidants.

It had been shrewd of him, all right. He had made sure nothing could go wrong. If something happened to Lang and his crew on Venus—and it was quite possible, since word from them was a week overdue—it would be easy to say that the terraforming project was still in the planning stage. In the event of success, the excuse was that word of their progress had been withheld for “security reasons.”

And the same would apply to the space drive; if McLeod and his men vanished into the nether regions of interstellar space and never returned, FitzMaugham would not have had to answer for the failure of a project which, as far as the public knew, was still in the planning stage. It was a double-edged sword with the director controlling both edges.

The annunciator chimed. “Dr. Lamarre is here for his appointment with you, Mr. Walton.”

Walton was caught off guard. His mind raced furiously. Lamarre? Who the dickens —oh, that left-over appointment of FitzMaugham’s.

“Tell Dr. Lamarre I’ll be glad to see him in just a few minutes, please. I’ll buzz you when I’m ready.”

Hurriedly he gathered up the space-flight documents and jammed them in a file drawer near the data on terraforming. He surveyed his office; it looked neat, presentable. Glancing around, he made sure no stray documents were visible, documents which might reveal the truth about the space drive.

“Send in Dr. Lamarre,” he said.

Dr. Lamarre was a short, thin, pale individual, with an uncertain wave in his sandy hair and a slight stoop of his shoulders. He carried a large, black leather portfolio which seemed on the point of exploding.

“Mr. Walton?”

“That’s right. You’re Dr. Lamarre?”

The small man handed him an engraved business card.

Walton fingered the card uneasily and returned it to its owner. “Gerontologist? One who studies ways of increasing the human life-span?”

“Precisely.”

Walton frowned. “I presume you’ve had some previous dealings with the late Director FitzMaugham?”

Lamarre gaped. “You mean he didn’t tell you?”

“Director FitzMaugham shared very little information with his assistants, Dr. Lamarre. The suddenness of my elevation to this post gave me little time to explore his files. Would you mind filling me in on the background?”

“Of course.” Lamarre crossed his legs and squinted myopically across the desk at Walton. “To be brief, Mr. FitzMaugham first heard of my work fourteen years ago. Since that time, he’s supported my experiments with private grants of his own, public appropriations whenever possible, and lately with money supplied by Popeek. Naturally, because of the nature of my work I’ve shunned publicity. I completed my final tests last week, and was to have seen the director yesterday. But—”

“I know. I was busy going through Mr. FitzMaugham’s files when you called yesterday. I didn’t have time to see anyone.” Walton wished he had checked on this man Lamarre earlier. Apparently it was a private project of FitzMaugham’s and of some importance.

“May I ask what this ‘work’ of yours consists of?”

“Certainly. Mr. FitzMaugham expressed a hope that someday man’s life span might be infinitely extended. I’m happy to report that I have developed a simple technique which will provide just that.” The little man smiled in self-satisfaction. “In short,” he said, “what I have developed, in everyday terms, is immortality, Mr. Walton.”