Collected Short Fiction, page 541
“I landed in Soviet territory,” he began. “I was expecting to find the outsider hiding among the rulers of that tribe, but I failed.”
He saw the commander’s satisfaction, and lifted his head defiantly.
“I did penetrate the walled group of council huts called the Kremlin,” he went on quickly. “I found enough evidence of outside influence—even in the methods the present chief, Stalin, is using to crush the last spark of freedom from his own tribe.
“The guilty outsider was already gone, but I soon found clues to make me think he had left the Politburo to lead a resistance group. This small group is the only active opposition left. It operates deep inside the continent, where the police aren’t quite so alert as at the frontiers. It is organized around a few nuclear physicists, who are working furiously to build a hydrogen bomb—I thought one of them would surely be my man.”
“But he wasn’t.” The commander’s lips tightened oddly. “Plow did you find this underground group?”
“The first clues were the secret police reports of shortages at the plants where Stalin is trying to make fusion bombs—with processes his spies have stolen—for a surprise attack on the American tribe. With our methods, I was able to find the missing items and the men using them—but not the outsider.
“All the plotters are natives—most of them Communist party members, Red Army officers, and factory managers. They are furnishing the supplies. The physicists have set up a number of scattered, hidden laboratories. They are gathered now in a cave in the mountains of central Asia, ready to assemble their first hydrogen bomb.
“They plan to destroy the Kremlin with it. They hope to kill Stalin, the entire membership of the Politburo, and other key leaders. After the explosion, they intend to lead a general rebellion.”
Frowning, the commander shook his head. “I see no reason to regret the destruction of the Kremlin.”
“It is in no danger,” the lieutenant said grimly. “I was able to enter that cave and examine the incomplete fusion bomb. Its builders are natives, and they have made a fatal error. Unless their mistake is corrected, the bomb is certain to explode prematurely. It will wipe out the leadership of the resistance, and leave Stalin free to smash the American tribe with his own atomic attack.”
“Perhaps.” The commander shrugged impatiently. “But what can we do about it?”
“We can supply just one bit of essential information.” The lieutenant’s voice lifted resolutely. “I was preparing to do that—establishing myself as another nuclear physicist, a refugee of the German tribe—when your men arrested me.”
“Then they were just in time.” The commander nodded grimly. “These people invented their own atomic bombs, and we’ve no right to interfere. As for you, I’m afraid the charges against you must include attempted contravention of the Covenants.”
“But we must interfere,” the lieutenant insisted huskily. “Even though the atomic bomb may be a native product, the Soviet methods for its use are partly borrowed from outside. Isn’t that excuse enough?”
“It isn’t. One crime does not excuse another.”
“But I’m afraid the American tribe can’t survive an atomic attack conducted by outside methods.”
“Whatever happens, we can’t meddle again.” The commander’s black head thrust forward bleakly. “These people must stand or fall by their own efforts alone.”
“They’ll fall!” Forgetting that he was at attention, the lieutenant stepped anxiously forward. “Unless—”
“Attention!” The commander peered at him sternly. “You are relieved of. all duty at Sol Station, effective now. You will remain in your quarters, under arrest, until the next supply ship calls. You will return aboard it to Deriebola Base, to receive whatever discipline your dangerous misconduct requires.”
Trembling, he gulped and shook his head protestingly.
“In view of your youth and your intentions,” the commander continued, “I am going to recommend clemency. I hope your punishment will not be unduly severe. In any case, these people will have time to solve their atomic problems without your interference. Thirty-two years of relative time will pass before you dock. In that time, these people will either learn to live with atomic energy or else die by it.”
“But, sir—” he muttered hoarsely. “Please—”
“That is all,” the black man rapped. “Report to your quarters.”
He half turned and swung back again. His fists had clenched unconsciously. He wet his pale lips and caught his breath to speak.
“Silence!” the commander shouted. “Any further insubordination will prejudice my recommendation for clemency. You had better go quietly.”
He stood peering at the gaunt man, as if he hadn’t heard. His thin hands opened and shook and knotted again. Sweat broke out on his face. For a moment he was about to obey, but abrupt defiance checked him.
“I’m not going yet,” he whispered breathlessly, “because we’ve something else to talk about.” He saw the black hand sliding toward a button on the desk. “Don’t call anybody—unless you want the whole service to know you are the outsider!”
“I? The outsider?” The commander’s voice rose angrily. “You can’t frame me.”
Yet his face had turned a sickly gray, and his thin hand drew hack shaking before he had touched the button.
“I don’t need to frame you.” The lieutenant stood watching his symptoms of collapse with an uneasy elation. “I’ve facts to show that you began meddling illegally with the internal affairs of this planet nearly fifty years ago.”
“What facts?” he gasped faintly.
“The fact that no arrest was ever made.” The lieutenant stepped warily toward him. “Although that search would certainly have caught any outsider, except one of us.
“The fact that you were commanding the two-man patrol flier that discovered the cache of malignant viruses on Pluto—where you yourself had left them.
“The fact that you had already done undercover work on Sol III at that time—and no doubt collected the viruses there.
“The fact that you volunteered very promptly for numerous undercover missions to Sol III—you must have been the outside member of the Politburo, at the very time you were pretending to hunt yourself!
“The fact that you have stayed on at Sol Station long after you might have had some more desirable post—so that you could carry on your criminal aid to the Soviet tribe, in direct violation of the Covenants.”
The lieutenant paused to get his breath, grinning without mirth.
“Are those facts enough?” he rasped. “If they aren’t, I’ve others—enough to round out the picture. But I’m willing to forget them all, even now, if you will ask for a transfer to another station—and let me prevent that explosion.”
“I . . . I can’t—”
The words were choked and hopeless. The commander had slumped miserably at his desk, looking suddenly feeble and tired and very old. He rubbed at his eyes in a bewildered way, and then sat fumbling nervously with the psionic telephone and the other little objects before him.
“Make up your mind.” The lieutenant’s voice lifted sharply. “Unless you let me go back, I’ll report those facts. I believe you already know what it means, to be broken from the service and lost in time. Is that what you want?”
The black man twisted in his chair, almost as if in physical pain.
“My mind is made up.” Desperation shuddered in his voice. “And you aren’t going back.”
His shaking hand fell to the butt of his neutrionic pistol.
The lieutenant started forward and checked himself helplessly. Disarmed since his arrest, he stood empty-handed against that silent gun. His mind could already feel the freezing flash of it, which killed by transforming heat into impalpable neutrinos. This twisted monster, who had guided the blood-stained rulers of the Kremlin for thirty years, wouldn’t hesitate at one more murder.
“I’m still your superior,” the commander was rasping hoarsely. “I won’t tolerate—”
An orange light halted him, exploding in the crystal dome of the psionic telephone. A tiny voice called from the instrument, urgently:
“Lookout to commander!”
“Go ahead, Lookout.”
The orange signal faded, and the image of the Lookout’s head appeared in the dome, doll-sized but visibly excited.
“A hydrogen fusion explosion, commander!” his small voice cried. “It was apparently set off by a plutonium fission detonator, but the reaction was a thousand times more violent than the fission explosions we observed on Bikini.”
“Where—” the lieutenant whispered huskily.
The commander echoed, “Where did it happen?”
“In Central Asia, sir. Evidently the American atomic monopoly is broken. I think these savages are going to be showing us some action!”
The commander nodded heavily, and the crystal dome went clear again.
“So this is what you’ve done?” In his savage anger, the lieutenant forgot the neutrionic pistol, “You wouldn’t let me reveal just one fact to aid these people—but you have spent fifty years systematically corrupting and destroying them.”
The commander merely shook his head, as if overwhelmed with weariness and pain. His restless hand had risen from the gun.
“That was the blast I wanted to stop,” the lieutenant continued bitterly. “Now it has wiped out the last island of freedom in Soviet territory. In time, it will sweep human liberty from the planet.”
He paused to shake his head, with a puzzled scorn.
“What I can’t understand is why you did it,” he whispered harshly. “You have sacrificed your own career to stay on at this dull little post—for what?”
The commander straightened, breathing heavily. His sick eyes looked up for an instant, and fell back to the desk. Aimlessly, his nervous hands fumbled with the telephone. His grayish face twitched. He looked anguished and dangerous.
A new panic swept the lieutenant. He had seen the risk in his hasty accusations, but the pressure of that struggle for a planet had left him no time for caution. He was defenseless now. Watching the tortured man slowly draw the gun, he waited silently to die—and gasped with surprise when he saw the weapon pushed out toward him across the desk.
“Take it,” the commander’s dry voice rasped. “If you want to kill me, go ahead. It’s true I’ve broken the Covenants. My meddling has done ghastly damage, and I’m ready enough to pay for it. For your own sake, however, I think you had better let me explain the miscalculations that made me an unwilling partner of Stalin. Perhaps I can save you the same error.”.
The lieutenant moved to pick up the gun but thought better of it. He straightened, uneasily, frowning at the haggard man.
“Explain,” lie said, “if you can.”
“My blunder was the same one you have been trying to make.” The commander nodded with a weary regret. “I failed to understand the wisdom of the Covenants. I didn’t know that people can’t be helped.”
“I know they can’t,” the lieutenant whispered harshly. “Not by Stalinism!”
“Listen to me—please!”
The commander’s wounded voice was so moving that he nodded silently.
“This was my first station,” the broken man began. “I came here at about your age, brimming with your own blind eagerness to help these unfortunate people climb the difficult path to civilization.
“My tragic blundering began when an archaeologist arrived here on the supply ship from Denebola with permission from headquarters to make an undercover expedition to Sol III to look for the ruins of Atlantis. He expected to find them in Central Asia.
“He had to be accompanied by an officer trained in undercover work, and I volunteered to go with him—I was already interested in these people. When our preparations were complete, we were landed one night on the steppe near the large village of Kazan.
“We established identities as explorers from the American tribe, and spent several months at the village university, looking in vain for historical records of the Atlantean culture, before we went east to the site we were to excavate.
“Altogether, we were on Sol III nearly a year. We didn’t find Atlantis. If our interstellar civilization sprang from Sol III at all, I know it wasn’t born in the miserable mud huts we uncovered.
“The living natives we met were still wretched enough. Most of them had recently been owned, like the land, by a decaying aristocracy, and they were oppressed by the corrupt bureaucracy that surrounded the Czar—the autocratic hereditary chief of the tribe.
“I was as deeply disturbed as you would have been by the contrasts of squalid poverty and unearned wealth, and as painfully shocked by the cruel injustice we saw everywhere. I wanted to do something about it, and unfortunately I did.
“It happened while we were traveling across the Yenisei Valley on our way back to Kazan. Difficulties with the primitive transportation system delayed us in a frontier hamlet there, and I met a native who had the same desire to remedy those wrongs.
“I spent a whole night talking to him, at the filthy little inn. He was extraordinary enough, even then—a short vigorous man, with a powerful head. His commonplace features were brightened by piercing eyes. You seldom find a native—or an outsider, for that matter—with his energy and intelligence.
“He was then less than, thirty, but he had already dedicated his life to the liberation of the working class. He had been arrested and imprisoned for a year before his exile to that remote province, and his beloved older brother had been killed for activities against the Czar.
“That night—never really thinking what I was doing—I violated the Covenants. I was fascinated by the ability and earnestness of that young rebel, and moved by the drama of his unequal struggle for the freedom of his people.
“I failed to see the danger in him. He was full of a naive philosophy he called dialectic materialism, which forecast the fall of his oppressors and the rise of a classless society. Utter nonsense. That same battle for freedom has been repeated many million times, on several million planets, and it has never yet ended with the automatic withering away of classes and the state. Even with my own smattering of interstellar history, I could see the flaws in his philosophy and the fatal weakness in any plan of action based upon it.
“And I forgot myself. Not so far as to let that native rebel guess that I was an outsider, but I did tell him a few of the simplest general principles of war and revolution that I had learned at school. He seized upon the ideas with an eagerness that disturbed me a little, even then.
“He thanked me, when we left the inn at dawn, for a very stimulating conversation. The archaeologist and I went on to meet the flier, and he stayed to overwhelm his enemies with the weapons I had given him so carelessly—ideas more deadly than neutrionic bombs.”
The lieutenant whispered suddenly, “Was his name—”
“Lenin.” The commander nodded bleakly. “He is dead long ago, but those ideas are still alive. They are sweeping the planet like a conflagration.”
“My friends; in the cave were trying to put out that blaze with their hydrogen bomb,” the lieutenant said bitterly. “They could have succeeded, if you let me alone long enough to give them that: one hint.”
“I don’t think so.” The gaunt black man shrugged heavily. “I tried for many years to undo what I had done, and only made things worse.”
The lieutenant looked at him searchingly.
“So that was your business at the Kremlin?”
“I arranged to go back, by planting that cache of viruses on Pluto.” The commander nodded unhappily. “I borrowed the identities of men in the Kremlin to advocate moderation within the tribe and reconciliation with the peoples still free. But Stalin, the cynical chief who followed Lenin, merely used, those peaceful policies to screen his ruthless schemes for enslaving the whole planet.”
The haggard man sank wearily back in his chair.
“The lesson was hard,” he whispered, “but I learned it at last. Freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be earned. Even the best-meant efforts to grant it as a gift are commonly blighting.”
The lieutenant stood silent for a time, grappling with that idea.
“But suppose I had helped perfect that hydrogen bomb,” he protested at last. “Wouldn’t it have crushed Stalin?
“Only to set up some more monstrous enemy of freedom in his place,” the commander answered, “because your friends in the cave had already been contaminated with those ideas I gave Lenin. The absolute power of that weapon would have stricken then with absolute corruption. You can find a thousand examples of the process in interstellar history.”
“I’m not an historian.” The lieutenant caught himself staring at the gun on the desk, and looked up uncomfortably. “The plight of Sol III is already desperate,” he muttered. “I don’t see how anything could make it worse.”
“The outlook isn’t that black.” The tired man smiled faintly. “Not if the Covenants are faithfully enforced. In spite of all the harm I did that night, these people still have a reasonable chance to create a free civilization.”
“I don’t see how.”
“I think I do.” The commander nodded soberly. “I’ve been reading a good bit of history, since I began to see the wisdom of the Covenants, and I’m willing to risk a forecast for the future of Sol III.”
The lieutenant waited hopefully. “The free tribes of America have not yet been seriously corrupted by what I told Lenin that night,” the commander said. “They are equipped to detect this last explosion, and it should make them look to their own defenses. If they are stimulated to perfect a hydrogen bomb, it will be something of their own, which they can use without self-destruction.” The lieutenant stood watching the gun.
“I understand,” he whispered at last. He picked up the gun and returned it to the commander. “And I . . . I’m guilty, sir.”
“And you will make the same atonement I have made,” the stern man told him. “You will renounce civilization and your own career. You will stay on here to watch against the sort of men we used to be and to see that the Covenants are enforced.”
