thinking might run, but I couldn’t be sure.
The future was still hazy, but it seemed to me then that if I could find out where the drug came from—if I did—then there were three alternatives. We could pat Philip on the back, say: “Jolly good show, wonderful colony you’re building here,” and leave him to it. Or we could let the cat out of the bag and start a war. Or we could go to Philip and say: “Look here, old boy, we don’t quite approve of the way you go about things—how about giving up virtually everything you’ve got, just as a kindly gesture.” Three alternatives, take your pick. And while we were picking....
As Nathan said, there was something in the air. We were coming late into the game and they’d already begun to make their moves.
We sat around like the three wise monkeys, contemplating the ghastliness of it all. Then Karen said: “Where does your stupid number-code fit into all this?”
“I wish I knew,” I replied. I repeated it, for effect.
Not only were they making their moves...but they were making moves we didn’t even understand.
“Suppose. you’re right,” said Pete. “Suppose the whole damn colony is addicted to this stuff. Could you break the addiction? Could you, shall we say, restore the balance of nature.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s a party trick. But the point is—would they want me to? This stuff doesn’t constitute a hold because of the threat of withdrawal symptoms—it constitutes a hold because it has something to sell. It’s not the fact that they need it that constitutes the problem...it’s the fact that they want it. It must pack one hell of a belt if it let Wildeblood take over so completely so easily. The fight isn’t about whether they want the stuff or not but over who controls its production and distribution...their fight, that is. I’m not quite sure what our fight is about. Maybe we ought to be looking to break the addiction for good and all. Maybe we oughtn’t. You know the line Nathan will take.”
“The colony is successful,” said Karen, quoting what she presumed would be Nathan’s thinking. “Anything which has contributed to that success is ipso facto a Good Thing. J. Wildeblood, biochemist and dictator, gets a medal, and the drug gets a round of applause. Maybe he’s right. Don’t look at me like that, Alex. If the seeds of cynicism haven’t germinated in you yet it isn’t because they haven’t been planted. It’s because they fell among the weeds of idealism. You know the world isn’t perfect; you know we always have to settle for what we can get. If this is what we can get...isn’t it better than Dendra? Isn’t it better than Kilner’s colonies?”
The situation on Dendra had been pretty bad. The colonies that Kilner had recontacted on the first Daedalus mission had found more than their share of troubles. Pietrasante had told me that I had to share my authority with Nathan because his precious committees believed that the problems weren’t primarily ecological problems of co-adaptation but social problems of people not being able to form viable communities. Maybe from Pietrasante’s point of view—and Nathan’s—Wildeblood had found the answer. How to conquer a world...the operative word being “conquer”.
“Maybe I don’t have the stomach for this job,” I said. “I swallowed Dendra. Maybe I’ll even sit silently by while Nathan rigs the books on that one in the name of political convenience. But how many more do I have to swallow?”
They didn’t answer me.
Kilner, my predecessor, had returned to Earth a very bitter man. He had let his bitterness run over, and had turned in a report which said, none too subtly, that mankind wasn’t fit to go out to the stars, that the colonies couldn’t work and ought to be abandoned. I thought that no matter what happened I couldn’t follow the same intellectual course. I thought that my own faith in extraterrestrial expansion was utterly unshakable. Now, for the first time, I began to wonder. The kind of thing that I kept having to face wasn’t what I’d expected. I’m an ecologist, and ecological problems have ready-made answers, involving harmony and balance. Nature red in tooth and claw, maybe, but flexible nature, manipulable nature. Genetic engineering had given us the means to find solutions to ecological problems. But social ecology was different. Behavioral engineering we not only didn’t have but didn’t want. The human being was still sacred. We still believed in evil. Me too. Me, perhaps, more than most.
“A moment ago,” I said, “I was joking. I said that we’d just discovered a recipe for empire. It was just a throwaway remark. But maybe it isn’t so ridiculous. Can we really have that much confidence in one another? How about Nathan? He’s a politician.... It’s the kind of power he deals in. If I find out where this drug comes from, and how to refine it...that’s power. I go ahead and do things like that—analyze things and find out where they come from—because I’m interested, because I want to know. But I shouldn’t shut my eyes to the fact that, seen through other eyes, what I’m doing is discovering potential sources of political power. Should I?”
“You’ve got your empire,” said Karen. “It’s in your head and in your lab. Pete has his...we’re sitting inside it. Nathan doesn’t want a world of his own, to manipulate and play with like a toy.”
“Wildeblood did,” I answered.
“And how about you?” The question came from Pete, and it was directed at Karen. It wasn’t the kind of question I could imagine Pete asking. Karen, yes...as a snide assault on somebody else’s vanity. But coming from Karen you could ignore a remark like that as so much froth. Aimed at Karen, from Pete, it was different. Maybe he’d taken uncharacteristic offence at her offhand dismissal of his own imperial limitations.
“I’ve got everything I need,” she replied, with some asperity.
Maybe it wasn’t true. But I knew that whatever she wanted, it wasn’t a Wildeblood set-up. She even found it inconceivable that Nathan should want such a thing, and I wasn’t so sure that I found that particular notion inconceivable.
But the argument wasn’t getting us anywhere. Turning it on one another was really only a way of turning it away from the real focal points: Wildeblood, Philip, and the guitar-playing Cyrano.
“There’s no point having a row,” I said. “We can have a much bigger and better one next time Nathan’s here. We very probably will. So let’s drop it now. I’m going back to work until Conrad checks in. Call me when he does, okay?”
Without any seeming effort, they cast the tension aside.
“Sure,” said Pete. “Don’t bleed yourself to death.”
“And don’t conjure up the devil by mistake,” added Karen.
I promised that I wouldn’t. But my propensity for metaphor couldn’t resist making me ask myself whether perhaps I already had.
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