The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 70

  “That way you can cover up for years.”

  “Yes,” Ulysses said. “Without any trouble.”

  “The leaders know, of course. The administrative people.”

  Ulysses shook his head. “We have told very few. The few that we can trust. Galactic Central knows, of course, but we’re a close-mouthed lot.”

  “Then why …”

  “Why should I be telling you. I know; I shouldn’t. I don’t know why I am. Yes, I guess I do. How does it feel, my friend, to sit as a compassionate confessor?”

  “You’re worried,” Enoch said. “I never thought I would see you worried.”

  “It’s a strange business,” Ulysses said. “The Talisman has been missing for several years or so. And no one knows about it—except Galactic Central and the—what would you call it?—the hierarchy, I suppose, the organization of mystics who takes care of the spiritual setup. And yet, even with no one knowing, the galaxy is beginning to show wear. It’s coming apart at the seams. In time to come, it may fall apart. As if the Talisman represented a force that all unknowingly held the races of the galaxy together, exerting its influence even when it remained unseen.”

  “But even if it’s lost, it’s somewhere,” Enoch pointed out. “It still would be exerting its influence. It couldn’t have been destroyed.”

  “You forget,” Ulysses reminded him, “that without its proper custodian, without its sensitive, it is inoperative. For it’s not the machine itself that does the trick. The machine merely acts as an intermediary between the sensitive and the spiritual force. It is an extension of the sensitive. It magnifies the capability of the sensitive and acts as a link of some sort. It enables the sensitive to perform his function.”

  “You feel that the loss of the Talisman has something to do with the situation here?”

  “The Earth station. Well, not directly, but it is typical. What is happening in regard to the station is symptomatic. It involves the sort of petty quarreling and mean bickering that has broken out through many sections of the galaxy. In the old days it would have been—what did you say, gentlemanly and on a plane of principles and ethics.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the soft sound that the wind made as it blew through the gable gingerbread.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ulysses said. “It is not your worry. I should not have told you. It was indiscreet to do so.”

  “You mean I shouldn’t pass it on. You can be sure I won’t.”

  “I know you won’t,” Ulysses said. “I never thought you would.”

  “You really think relations in the galaxy are deteriorating?”

  “Once,” Ulysses said, “the races all were bound together. There were differences, naturally, but these differences were bridged, sometimes rather artificially and not too satisfactorily, but with both sides striving to maintain the artificial bridging and generally succeeding. Because they wanted to, you see. There was a common purpose, the forging of a great cofraternity of all intelligences. We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques—that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than any race, alone, could hope of accomplishing. We had our troubles, certainly, and as I have said, our differences, but we were progressing. We brushed the small animosities and the petty differences underneath the rug and worked only on the big ones. We felt that if we could get the big ones settled, the small ones would become so small they would disappear. But it is becoming different now. There is a tendency to pull the pettiness from underneath the rug and blow it beyond its size, meanwhile letting the major and the important issues fall away.”

  “It sounds like Earth,” said Enoch.

  “In many ways,” Ulysses said. “In principle, although the circumstances would diverge immensely.”

  “You’ve been reading the papers I have been saving for you?”

  Ulysses nodded. “It doesn’t look too happy.”

  “It looks like war,” said Enoch bluntly.

  Ulysses stirred uneasily.

  “You don’t have wars,” said Enoch.

  “The galaxy, you mean. No, as we are set up now we don’t have wars.”

  “Too civilized?”

  “Stop being bitter,” Ulysses told him. “There has been a time or two when we came very close, but not in recent years. There are many races now in the cofraternity that in their formative years had a history of war.”

  “There is hope for us, then. It’s something you outgrow.”

  “In time, perhaps.”

  “But not a certainty?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say so.”

  “I’ve been working on a chart,” said Enoch. “Based on the Mizar system of statistics. The chart says there is going to be war.”

  “You don’t need the chart,” Ulysses said, “to tell you that.”

  “But there was something else. It was not just knowing if there’d be a war. I had hoped that the chart might show how to keep the peace. There must be a way. A formula, perhaps. If we could only think of it or know where to look or whom to ask or …”

  “There is a way,” Ulysses said, “to prevent a war.”

  “You mean you know …”

  “It’s a drastic measure. It only can be used as a last resort.”

  “And we’ve not reached that last resort?”

  “I think, perhaps, you have. The kind of war that Earth would fight could spell an end to thousands of years of advancement, could wipe out all the culture, everything but the feeble remnants of civilizations. It could, just possibly, eliminate most of the life upon the planet.”

  “This method of yours—it has been used?”

  “A few times.”

  “And worked?”

  “Oh, certainly. We’d not even consider it if it didn’t work.”

  “It could be used on Earth?”

  “You could apply for its application.”

  “I?”

  “As a representative of the Earth. You could appear before Galactic Central and appeal for us to use it. As a member of your race, you could give testimony and you would be given a hearing. If there seemed to be merit in your plea, Central might name a group to investigate and then, upon the report of its findings, a decision would be made.”

  “You said I. Could anyone on Earth?”

  “Anyone who could gain a hearing. To gain a hearing, you must know about Galactic Central and you’re the only man of Earth who does. Besides, you’re a part of Galactic Central’s staff. You have served as a keeper for a long time. Your record has been good. We would listen to you.”

  “But one man alone! One man can’t speak for an entire race.”

  “You’re the only one of your race who is qualified.”

  “If I could consult some others of my race.”

  “You can’t. And even if you could, who would believe you?”

  “That’s true,” said Enoch.

  Of course it was. To him there was no longer any strangeness in the idea of a galactic cofraternity, of a transportation network that spread among the stars—a sense of wonder at times, but the strangeness had largely worn off. Although, he remembered, it had taken years. Years even with the physical evidence there before his eyes, before he could bring himself to a complete acceptance of it. But tell it to any other Earthman and it would sound like madness.

  “And this method?” he asked, almost afraid to ask it, braced to take the shock of whatever it might be.

  “Stupidity,” Ulysses said.

  Enoch gasped. “Stupidity? I don’t understand. We are stupid enough, in many ways, right now.”

  “You’re thinking of intellectual stupidity and there is plenty of that, not only on Earth, but throughout the gala
xy. What I am talking about is a mental incapacity. An inability to understand the science and the technique that makes possible the kind of war that Earth would fight. An inability to operate the machines that are necessary to fight that kind of war. Turning the people back to a mental position where they would not be able to comprehend the mechanical and technological and scientific advances they have made. Those who know would forget. Those who didn’t know could never learn. Back to the simplicity of the wheel and lever. That would make your kind of war impossible.”

  Enoch sat stiff and straight, unable to speak, gripped by an icy terror, while a million disconnected thoughts went chasing one another in a circle through his brain.

  “I told you it was drastic,” Ulysses said. “It has to be. War is something that costs a lot to stop. The price is high.”

  “I couldn’t!” Enoch said. “No one could.”

  “Perhaps you can’t. But consider this: If there is a war …”

  “I know. If there is a war, it could be worse. But it wouldn’t stop war. It’s not the kind of thing I had in mind. People still could fight, still could kill.”

  “With clubs,” said Ulysses. “Maybe bows and arrows. Rifles, so long as they still had rifles, and until they ran out of ammunition. Then they wouldn’t know how to make more powder or how to get the metal to make the bullets or even how to make the bullets. There might be fighting, but there’d be no holocaust. Cities would not be wiped out by nuclear warheads, for no one could fire a rocket or arm the warhead—perhaps wouldn’t even know what a rocket or a warhead was. Communications as you know them would be gone. All but the simplest transportation would be gone. War, except on a limited local scale, would be impossible.”

  “It would be terrible,” Enoch said.

  “So is war,” Ulysses said. “The choice is up to you.”

  “But how long?” asked Enoch. “How long would it last? We wouldn’t have to go back to stupidity forever?”

  “Several generations,” said Ulysses. “By that time the effect of—what shall we call it? the treatment?—would gradually begin wearing off. The people slowly would shake off their moronic state and begin their intellectual climb again. They’d be given, in effect, a second chance.”

  “They could,” said Enoch, “in a few generations after that arrive at exactly the same situation that we have today.”

  “Possibly. I wouldn’t expect it, though. Cultural development would be most unlikely to be entirely parallel. There’d be a chance that you’d have a better civilization and a more peaceful people.”

  “It’s too much for one man …”

  “Something hopeful,” Ulysses said, “that you might consider. The method is offered only to those races which seem to us to be worth the saving.”

  “You have to give me time,” said Enoch.

  But he knew there was no time.

  23

  A man would have a job and suddenly be unable to perform it. Nor could the men around him carry on their jobs. For they would not have the knowledge or the backgrounds to do the tasks that they had been doing. They might try, of course—they might keep on trying for a time, but perhaps for not too long. And because the jobs could not be done, the business or the corporation or factory or whatever it might be, would cease its operation. Although the going out of business would not be a formal nor a legal thing. It would simply stop. And not entirely because the jobs could not be done, because no one could muster the business sense to keep it operating, but also because the transportation and communications which made the business possible also would have stopped.

  Locomotives could not be operated, nor could planes and ships, for there would be no one who would remember how to operate them. There would be men who at one time had possessed all the skills that had been necessary for their operation, but now the skills would have disappeared. There might be some who still would try, with tragic consequences. And there still might be a few who could vaguely remember how to operate the car or truck or bus, for they were simple things to run and it would be almost second nature for a man to drive them. But once they had broken down, there would be no one with the knowledge of mechanics to repair them and they’d not run again.

  In the space of a few hours’ time the human race would be stranded in a world where distance once again had come to be a factor. The world would grow the larger and the oceans would be barriers and a mile would be long once more. And in a few days’ time there would be a panic and a huddling and a fleeing and a desperation in the face of a situation that no one could comprehend.

  How long, Enoch wondered, would it take a city to use the last of the food stacked in its warehouses and then begin to starve? What would happen when electricity stopped flowing through the wires? How long, under a situation such as this, would a silly symbolic piece of paper or a minted coin still retain its value?

  Distribution would break down; commerce and industry would die; government would become a shadow, with neither the means nor the intelligence to keep it functioning; communications would cease; law and order would disintegrate; the world would sink into a new barbaric framework and would begin to slowly readjust. That readjustment would go on for years and in the process of it there would be death and pestilence and untold misery and despair. In time it would work out and the world would settle down to its new way of life, but in the process of shaking down there’d be many who would die and many others who would lose everything that had spelled out life for them and the purpose of that life.

  But would it, bad as it might be, be as bad as war?

  Many would die of cold and hunger and disease (for medicine would go the way of all the rest), but millions would not be annihilated in the fiery breath of nuclear reaction. There would be no poison dust raining from the skies and the waters still would be as pure and fresh as ever and the soil remain as fertile. There still would be a chance, once the initial phases of the change had passed, for the human race to go on living and rebuild society.

  If one were certain, Enoch told himself, that there would be a war, that war was inescapable, then the choice might not be hard to make. But there was always the possibility that the world could avoid war, that somehow a frail, thin peace could be preserved, and in such a case the desperate need of the galactic cure for war would be unnecessary. Before one could decide, he told himself, one must be sure; and how could one be sure? The chart lying in the desk drawer said there would be a war; many of the diplomats and observers felt that the upcoming peace conference might serve no other purpose than to trigger war. Yet there was no surety.

  And even if there were, Enoch asked himself, how could one man—one man, alone—take it upon himself to play the role of God for the entire race? By what right did one man make a decision that affected all the rest, all the billions of others? Could he, if he did, ever be able, in the years to come, to justify his choice?

  How could a man decide how bad war might be and, in comparison, how bad stupidity? The answer seemed to be he couldn’t. There was no way to measure possible disaster in either circumstance.

  After a time, perhaps, a choice either way could be rationalized. Given time, a conviction might develop that would enable a man to arrive at some sort of decision which, while it might not be entirely right, he nevertheless could square with his conscience.

  Enoch got to his feet and walked to the window. The sound of his footsteps echoed hollowly in the station. He looked at his watch and it was after midnight.

  There were races in the galaxy, he thought, who could reach a quick and right decision on almost any question, cutting straight across all the tangled lines of thought, guided by rules of logic that were more specific than anything the human race might have. That would be good, of course, in the sense that it made decision possible, but in arriving at decision would it not tend to minimize, perhaps ignore entirely, some of those very facets of the situation that might mean more to
the human race than the decision would itself?

  Enoch stood at the window and stared out across the moonlit fields that ran down to the dark line of the woods. The clouds had blown away and the night was peaceful. This particular spot, he thought, always would be peaceful, for it was off the beaten track, distant from any possible target in atomic war. Except for the remote possibility of some ancient and nonrecorded, long forgotten minor conflict in prehistoric days, no battle ever had been fought here or ever would be fought. And yet it would not escape the common fate of poisoned soil and water if the world should suddenly, in a fateful hour of fury, unleash the might of its awesome weapons. Then the skies would be filled with atomic ash, which would come sifting down, and it would make little difference where a man might be. Soon or late, the war would come to him, if not in a flash of monstrous energy, then in the snow of death falling from the skies.

  He walked from the window to the desk and gathered up the newspapers that had come in the morning mail and put them in a pile, noticing as he did so that Ulysses had forgotten to take with him the stack of papers which had been saved for him. Ulysses was upset, he told himself, or he’d not have forgotten the papers. God save us both, he thought; for we have our troubles.

  It had been a busy day. He had done no more, he realized, than read two or three of the stories in the Times, all touching on the calling of the conference. The day had been too full, too full of direful things.

  For a hundred years, he thought, things had gone all right. There had been the good moments and the bad, but by and large his life had gone on serenely and without alarming incident. Then today had dawned and all the serene years had come tumbling down all about his ears.