lift a finger to stop me, of course, because he’s a neo-Christian. But that’s what he thinks.”
“That’s the strength of the movement,” said Pietrasante. “They don’t stop anyone doing anything. They stand before the barrel of the gun, and they say ‘Shoot.’ And people don’t...sometimes. Most men with guns need an excuse to shoot, inside themselves. Even a petty criminal shooting an unarmed man in order to rob him needs to see his victim as an enemy, and himself as a potential victim. The neo-Christians, by attacking that assumption, are making the first constructive move against the socialization of violence that our poor little planet has seen in many years.”
“And a lot of them get shot,” said Alexander quietly. “Martyrs to the cause. Maybe the guys who kill them feel guilty as hell about it afterward, but they’re still dead. Dying for all mankind, they reckon, like Christ himself. But dying.”
“You think that may happen to your son?”
“Yes. I’m afraid that when I come back, in six or seven or ten years, I’m going to find Peter six feet under, because he stood in front of a gun and expressed his willingness to be shot...I don’t have the same confidence in the conscience of gunmen that you seem to have.”
“Would it make any difference,” asked the UN man quietly, “if you were here when it happened?”
“No,” said Alexander. “None at all.”
Pietrasante allowed a few minutes to pass, while he stared over the shoulder of the driver at the road ahead. Alexander looked sideways, his eyes not really focusing, letting the world become a blur as it whipped past the fast-moving car.
When the two men looked at one another again, they were ready to change gear, to turn their attention to problems of an entirely different order.
Pietrasante was carrying a number of files, which the other man had returned to him before the meeting with his son. Now he tapped the files with a stout forefinger, and said, “What do you think of Dr. Kilner’s observations?”
“How is Kilner?” countered Alexander.
“Still active,” said Pietrasante smoothly. “He wasn’t drummed out of the service. He’s in charge of a reclamation project.”
“The Sahara?”
“Farther east.” Pietrasante flashed a tiny smile as he said it. Alexander did not return it.
“You couldn’t expect him to be pleased by what he found,” said Alexander. “Five colonies—four making a somewhat precarious living, one dead. Kilner believed in the colonies. He went out looking to find healthy societies, expanding populations, happy people. Instead, he found people ready to spit in his face because they thought they’d been deserted, left to rot. He couldn’t live with the fact that they’d lost faith—that the contacts didn’t renew their hope and revitalize the dreams the original colonists set out with. He had a hard time. And he despaired. Lost his own faith...became a convert to the antis. I think I understand—but I also think he was wrong. He did help those colonies. He did renew their hope, in a practical sense. He shouldn’t have let their lack of gratitude get under his skin. It was no part of his job to be a hero. I still think he might have been all right if it hadn’t been for the dead world. But that’s what really knocked him down...it was too much, on top of everything else.”
“Suppose it had happened to you,” said Pietrasante.
Alexander looked the UN man full in the face, without any hesitancy in his manner. It was something he had not been able to do to his son. “It may yet happen,” he said. “I’m not going out wearing rose-tinted spectacles. If that’s what Kilner found, that’s what we’ll find. I’m not going out there with the same optimism that he carried. I’m not searching for a new Arcadia. But I won’t lose faith because I find the colonies struggling desperately to keep going and hating Earth because Earth has spent the best part of a century in a historical twilight zone when the whole space program died. We have to start again, now. We have to look to the future.”
Pietrasante met the steady gaze with an expression of infinite calm. There was not the least sign of approval in his manner.
“Setting aside Kilner’s personal reactions,” he said, “what do you deduce from his reports on the individual worlds? Why were the colonies failing? In the beginning, each one was set up under the assumption that it would succeed even without further contact with Earth. All the volunteers were warned that no meaningful support might be possible for many years—even the two hundred years which have elapsed in the most extreme cases. The colonies were expected to survive in spite of that. Where did our thinking go wrong? Why were the colonies not the way Kilner expected to find them?”
Alexander, slightly resentful of the interrogation, turned away briefly. “There was no single reason,” he said. “Even in the case of the colony that failed, there was no single thing that we could point to and say, ‘This was the cause. This is what we had not anticipated.’ It’s the whole class of problems—problems of co-adaptation between the life-systems. But these are problems which were bound to arise. And it’s in the period of time which had elapsed in the recontacted colonies that we might have expected these problems to emerge and reach a critical point. I can’t agree that the colonies Kilner helped would have failed utterly without him. They could have got past the crises on their own...things wouldn’t have continued to get worse. Kilner saved lives and he saved time, but I believe that some of the colonies, at least, were viable in any case.”
“I’m not at all sure that I agree with you,” said Pietrasante. “But my viewpoint is rather different from your own. Your interest is scientific, mine—I fear—has to be political as well. You see, these reports raise a good many questions with respect to the Daedalus project, and thus to the future of any new space program. It is not simply a matter of deciding whether any new colonies are to be set up, or even what needs to be done about those already in existence...though these decisions have to be made, and Kilner’s reports will be a powerful factor in influencing the decisions. There are more basic questions to be asked. Chief among them is this: Is the success or failure of any colony on an alien world primarily determined by biological factors or by social ones?
“As a biologist you are inclined to see the whole issue in terms of biological problems—the class of problems which you call co-adaptation. Here, as you say, Kilner helped the colonists...and, as you have also said, perhaps such problems would not have been insuperable even without expert help. But I am a diplomat, and I find in these reports evidence of another set of problems altogether: the problems experienced by human beings extracted from one set of historical circumstances and introduced into another which is totally alien—and you’ll appreciate, I’m sure, that I use the word ‘alien’ here in a rather different sense. The question I must ask is this: Can men environmentally adapted to the kind of society we have today—or had a hundred or two hundred years ago—readapt themselves and their social precepts to the kind of circumstances which they find on the colony worlds? You talk about biological adaptation, Alex, but I am thinking more of social adaptation. It is possible that in the ancient world there were many human societies which could have provided colonists capable of surviving on an alien world...the Cro-Magnons, the Kalahari bushmen, the pygmies of the Ituri forest...these people possessed cultures adapted to the business of survival without technology, without material possessions. But such cultures no longer exist. There is no man on Earth who lives now in a society without wealth and without the produce of technology. In making these men into colonists, are we not trying to turn back the cultural clock? Is this practical...and if not, how can we make it practical? Do you see what I mean?”
“I see,” said Alexander.
“In
