Background Colour: -White- -NavajoWhite- -Wheat- -Beige- -AntiqueWhite- -LightGray- -Silver- -BurlyWood- -Tan- -Black- -Blue-
Text Colour: -Black- -Brown- -Blue- -Green- -Red- -Yellow- -White- -Orange- -Silver-
Note: in the Cold Victory collection, this story follows from “Quixote and the Windmill” and so Sandra Miesel’s interstitial comments lead on from there to here.
Introduction “The Troublemakers”
Perhaps the self-aware robot really was as much a victim as the displaced workers, but few humans cared to waste pity on its kind. Outbreaks of anti-robot rioting signalled growing public disenchantment with their automated Eden. Mankind does not live by bread—or citizen’s credit—alone; abundance may be harder to endure than scarcity.
A few malcontents booked passage on the first starship, the famous “slowboat to Centauri.” But whatever hopes they may have cherished of escaping social turmoil faded en route. Being human, they carried the trait for conflict within them like an uncorrectable genetic flaw.
— from Cold Victory
A bright dream, and an old one—the same dream which had lived in Pythias, Columbus, Ley, in hundreds and thousands of men and in man himself, and which now looked up to the stars.
Earth was subdued; the planets had been reached and found wanting; if the dream were not to die, the stars must come next. It was known that most of them must have planets, that the worlds which could hold man were numbered in the millions—but the nearest of them was more than a lifetime away. Man could not wait for the hypothetical faster-thanlight drive, which might never be found—nothing in physics indicated such a possibility, and if the vision of the frontier, which had become a cultural basic transcending questions of merely material usefulness, were not to wither and die, a start of some kind must be made.
The Pioneer, first of her class, was launched in 2126. A hundred and twenty-three years to Alpha Centauri—five or six generations, more than a long lifetime—but the dream would not be denied. . . .
— Enrico Yamatsu, Starward!
“Have you anything to say before your sentence is passed?”
Evan Friday looked around him, slowly, focusing on all the details which he might never see again. Guilty! After all his hopes, after the wrangling and the waiting and the throttled futile anger, guilty. It hadn’t even taken them long to decide; they’d debated perhaps half an hour before coming out with the verdict.
Guilty.
Behind him, the spectators had grown silent. There weren’t many of them here in person, though he knew that half the ship must be watching him through the telescreens. Mostly they were officer class, sitting stiff and uniformed in their chairs, regarding him out of carefully blanked faces. The benches reserved for crewfolk were almost empty—less color in the garments, more life in the expression, but a life that despised him and seemed to feel only a suppressed glee that one more officer had gotten what was coming to him.
There were five sitting before him, judge and jury in full uniform. Above them, the arching wall displayed a mural, a symbolic figure of Justice crowned with a wreath of stars. The woman-image was stately, but he thought with bitterness that the artist had gotten in a hint of sluttishness. Appropriate.
His eyes went back to the five who were the Captain’s Court. They were the rulers of the ship as well, the leaders and representatives of the major factions aboard. Three were officers pure and simple, with the bone-bred hauteur of their class—Astrogation, Administration, and Engineering. The fourth was Wilson, speaking for the crew, a big coarse man with the beefy hands of a laborer. He was getting fat, after five years of politics.
Captain Gómez was in the center. He was tall and lean, with a fine halo of white hair fringing his gaunt unmoving face. You couldn’t know what he was thinking; the loneliness of his post had reached into him during his forty-three years as master. A figurehead now, but impressive, and Friday licked his lips and drew himself up straighter. He was twenty-four years old, and had been schooled in the rigid manners of the Astro officer’s caste throughout all that time. Those habits held him up now. He was surprised at the steadiness of his tones:
“Yes, sir, I would like to say a few words.
“In the first place, I am not guilty. I have never so much as thought of bribery, sedition, or mutiny. There is nothing in my past record which would indicate anything of the sort. The evidence on which I have been convicted is the flimsiest tissue of fabrications, and several witnesses have committed perjury. I am surprised that this court even bothered of finding me guilty, and can only suppose that it is a frameup to cover someone else. However, there is little I can do about that now. My friends will continue to work for a reversal of this decision, and meanwhile I must accept it.
“Secondly, I would like to say that the fact of my being falsely accused is not strange. It is a part of the whole incredible pattern of mismanagement, selfishness, treachery, and venality which has perverted the great idea of this voyage. The Pioneer was to reach the stars. She carried all the hopes of Earth, ten years of labor and planning, an incredible money investment, and a mission of supreme importance. Eighty years later, what do we have? An unending succession of tyrannies, revolutions, tensions, hatreds, corruptions—all the social evils which Earth so painfully overcame, reborn between the stars. The goal has been forgotten in a ceaseless struggle for power which is used only to oppress. I have said this much before, in private. Presumably some right of free speech still exists, for I was not arrested on such charges. Therefore, I repeat it in public. Gentlemen and crew, I ask you to think what this will lead to. I ask you in what condition we will reach Centauri, if we do so at all. I ask you to consider who is responsible. I know it will prejudice my personal cause, but I make a solemn charge of my own: that two successive Captains have failed to exercise due authority, that the Captaincy has become a farce and a figurehead, that the officers have become a tyrant caste and the crew an ignorant mob. I tell the whole ship that something will have to be done, and soon, if the expedition is not to be a failure and a death trap.
“If this is sedition and mutiny, so be it!”
He finished formally: “Thank you, gentlemen.” The blood was hot in his face, he knew he was flushing and was angry with himself for it, he knew that he was shivering a little, and he knew that his words had been meaningless gibberish to the five men.
But the crew, and the better officers—?
Gómez cleared his throat, and spoke dryly: “I am sure idealism is creditable, especially in so young a man—provided that it is not a cover for something else, and that it is properly expressed. But there is also a tradition that junior officers should be seen and not heard, and that they are hardly prepared to govern a ship and seven thousand human beings. The court will remember your breach of discipline, Mr. Friday, in reviewing your case.”
He leaned forward. “You have been found guilty of crimes which are punishable by death or imprisonment. However, in view of the defendant’s youth and his previous good record, the court is disposed to leniency. Sentence is therefore passed that you shall be stripped of all title, honor, and privilege due to your rank, that your personal property shall be sequestered, and that you shall be reduced to a common crewman with assignment to the Engineering Section.
“Court dismissed.”
The judges rose and filed out. Friday shook his head, trying to clear it of a buzzing faintness, trying to ignore the eyes and the voices at his back. A police sergeant fell in on either side of him. He thrust away the arm which one extended, and walked out between them.
The gray coverall felt stiff and scratchy against his skin. They had given him two changes of clothing and a couple of dollars to last till payday, and that was all which remained to him now. He went centerward between the policemen, hardly noticing the walls and doors, shafts and faces.
The cops weren’t bad fellows. They had looked the other way while he said good-bye to his parents. His mother had cried but his father, drilled into the reserve expected of an officer, had only been able to wring his hand and mutter awkwardly: “You shouldn’t have spoken that way, Evan. It didn’t help matters. But we’ll keep working for you, and—and—good luck, my son.” With a sudden flaring of the old iron pride: “Whatever happens, and whatever they say, remember you are still an officer of Astrogation!”
That had hurt perhaps most of all, and at the same time it had held more comfort than anything else. An officer, an officer, an officer—before God, still an officer of Astro!
It embarrassed the policemen. He was their inferior now, a plain crewman to be kicked around and kept in order, but he was of the Friday blood and he kept the manners they were trained to salute. They didn’t know how to act.
One of them finally said, slowly and clumsily: “Look, you’re in for some trouble, I’m afraid. Can you fight?”
“I was taught self-defense, yes,” said Friday. Fitness was part of the code in all of Astro—which, after all, was composed exclusively of officers—as it was of only the upper ranks in Engineering and hardly at all in Administration. It belonged to the pattern; Astro was the smallest faction aboard, but it was the aristocracy of the aristocracy and at present it held the balance of power. “Why do you ask?”
“You’ll have quite a few slugfests. Crewmen don’t like officers, and when one gets kicked downstairs to them they take it out on him.”
“But—I never hurt anybody. Damn it, I’ve been their friend!”
“Can’t expect ‘em all to see it that way. But stand up to ‘em, be free and friendly—forget that manner of yours, remember you’re one of them now—and it’ll come out all right.”
“You mean you police permit brawling?”
“Not too much we can do about it, as long as riots don’t start. You can file a complaint with us if somebody beats you up, but I wouldn’t advise it. They’d never take you in then. Somebody might murder you.”
“I won’t come crawling to anybody,” said Friday with the stiffness of outrage. Underneath it was a horrible tightening in his throat.
“That’s what I said: you’ve got to quit talking that way. Crewmen aren’t a bad sort, but you can’t live with ‘em if you keep putting on airs. Just keep your mouth shut for awhile, till they get used to you.”
The three men went down unending corridors, shafts, and companionways. Gravity lightened as they approached the axis of the ship. From the numbers on doors, Friday judged that they were bound for Engineering Barracks Three, which lay aft of the main gyros and about halfway between axis and top deck, but pride wouldn’t allow him to ask if he was right.
They were well out of officer territory now. The halls were still clean, but somehow drabber and dingier; residential apartments were smaller and poorly furnished; shops, taverns, theaters and other public accommodations blinked neon signs at the opposite wall, fifteen feet away; the clangor of metalworking dinned faintly in the background. Crewfolk swarmed here and there, drab-clad for work or gaudy for pleasure, men and women and a horde of children. Most of the men wore close haircuts and short beards, in contrast to the clean-shaven officers, and they were noisy and pushing and not too clean.
Many of them looked after the policemen and cursed or spat. Friday felt unease crawling along his spine.
“Here we are.”
He stopped, and looked ahead of him with a certain panicky blurring in his eyes. The doorway, entrance to one of the barracks for unmarried workers, was like a cave. The other doors on that side of the corridor, as far as he could see, opened into the same racketing darkness; the opposite wall was mostly blank, with side halls and companionways widely spaced. Two or three men, shooting dice some way down the corridor, were looking up and he saw their faces harden.
“We could go in with you,” said one of the police apologetically, “but it’ll be better for you if we don’t. Good luck—Mr. Friday.”
“Thank you,” he said. His voice was husky.
He stood for a moment looking at the door. The crapshooters got up and started slowly toward him. He wondered if he should bolt in, decided against it, and managed a stiff nod as the strangers came up.
“How do you do?”
“What’s the trouble, jo?” The speaker was big and blocky and red-haired. “Been boozin’?”
“Nah.” Another man narrowed his eyes. “This’s that guy Friday. The one they broke today. They sent ’em down here.”
“Here? Friday? Well, I’ll be scuttered!” The first crewman bowed elaborately. “Howdedo, Mister Ensign Friday, howdedo an’ welcome to our humble ay-bode.”
“Mebbe we sh’d roll out a rug, huh?”
“How’d y’ like y’r eggs done, sir, sunny side up ’r turned?”
“Please,” said Friday, “I would like to find my bunk.” He recognized the condescending coldness in his voice too late.
“He’d like to find his bunk!” Someone grinned nastily. “Shall we show ’im, boys?”
Friday pushed himself free and went into the barracks.
It was gloomy inside, for a moment he was almost blind. Ventilators could not remove the haze of smoke and human sweat. Bunks lined the walls in two tiers, stretching enormously into a farther twilight. Pictures, mostly of nude women, were pasted on the walls, and the walls, and the floor, while not especially dirty or littered, was a mess of shoes, clothes, tables, and chairs. Most of the light came from a giant-size telescreen, filling one wall with its images—the mindless, tasteless sort of program intended for this class—and the air with its noise. Perhaps a hundred men off duty were in the room, sleeping, lounging, gambling, watching the show, most of them wearing little but shorts.
Friday had been “crewquartering” before with companions of his age and class, but he’d stuck to the bars and similar places; his knowledge of this aspect had been purely nominal. It was a sudden feeling of being caged, a retching claustrophobia, which brought him around to face the others. They had followed him in, and stood blocking the doorway.
“Hey, boys!” The shout rang and boomed through the hollow immensity of the room, skittered past the raucousness of the telescreen and shivered faintly in the metal walls. “Hey, look who we got! Come over here and meet Mister Friday!”
Eyes, two hundred eyes glittering out of smoke and dark, and nowhere to go, nowhere to go. They’re going to beat me up. They’re going to slug me, and I can’t get away from it, I’ll have to take it.
He raised his voice above the savage jeering as they pressed in: “Why do you think I was sent down here? Why did they want to get rid of me, up above? Because I wanted you people to have some rights. I never hurt a crewman yet. Damn it, I couldn’t have, I was always working with other officers.”
“Here’s your chance,” grunted somebody. “I’ll take him.”
They squabbled for awhile over the privilege, while two men held Friday’s arms. The big redhead who had first accosted him won.
“Let him go, boys,” he said. “Give him a chance to in-tro-juice himself proper like. I’m Sam Carter, Mr. Friday.” His teeth flashed white in the smoky dusk. “And I’m very pleased to meet you.”
“Chawmed, I am shu-ah,” cried a voice, anonymous in the roiling twilight.
Friday had learned the techniques of boxing, wrestling, and infighting in all gravities from zero to Earth. He had enjoyed it, and been considered better than average. But Carter outmassed him thirty pounds, and officers didn’t fight to hurt.
After awhile Friday lost fear, forgot pain, and wanted nothing in all the world but to smash that red grinning face into ruin. Up and down, in and out, around and around, slug, duck, guard, slug, jab, and the mob hooting and howling out of the shadows. Hit him, right cross to the jaw, left to the belly, oof!
It took Sam Carter a long time to knock him down for good, and the crewman was hardly able to stand, himself, when it was done. There wasn’t much cheering. A couple of men hauled Friday to a vacant bunk, and went back to whatever they had been doing before he came.
Slowly, Friday adjusted.
At first it was not quite real, it was a horror which could not have happened to him. He, Ensign Evan Friday, rising in Astro, minor social lion, all the ship before him—he, who meant to do something about correcting injustice when he had the power, but who knew he could wait and savor his own life, he just wasn’t the sort of person who was accused and condemned and degraded. Those things happened to others, actually guilty in the struggle for control, or to the heroes of books from the Earth he had never seen—they didn’t happen to him!
He came out of that daze into grinding nightmare. It took him days to recover from the beating he had had, and before he was quite well somebody else took him on, somebody whom he managed to defeat this time but who left him aching and hurt. Nevertheless, he was sent to work two watches after his arrival, and to the clumsiness of the recruit and the screaming of unaccustomed muscles his injuries were added.
Being ignorant of all shopwork, he was set to unskilled, heavy labor, jumping at everyone’s shout with boxes, machine parts, tools, metal beams. Low gravity helped somewhat, but not enough—they simply assumed he could lift that much more mass, without regard to its inertia. His bewildered awkwardness drew curses and pay dockings. The racket of the shops seemed to din in his head every time he tried to sleep, and he could never get all the grime out of his skin and clothes.
Without friends, money, or a decent suit, he stayed in the barracks when the others went out to drink, wench, or see a show. But somebody was always around with him, and the telescreen was never turned off. He thought he would go crazy before he learned how to ignore it, but he knew better than to protest.
The men stopped bullying him after awhile, since he was disconcertingly handy with his fists, but it took weeks before the practical jokes ended. Shortsheeting and tying water-soaked knots in clothing were all right; he’d done that to others when he was younger; but hiding his shoes, pouring water in his bed and paint in his hair, slipping physics into his food—childish, but a vicious sort of childishness that made him wonder why he had ever felt sorry for this class.
He used the public facilities, bed and board and bath, since he could not afford the private home which theoretically was his to rent. He joined the union, since no one ever failed to, though it galled him to pay money into Wilson’s war chest—Wilson, the parvenu, who wanted to run the officers that ran the ship! But otherwise he refused to conform, though it would have made things easier. He shaved, and kept his hair long, and fought to retain precision and restraint in his speech. He talked as little as possible to anyone, and spent most of his free time lying on his bunk thinking.
The loneliness was great. Sometimes, when he thought of his friends, when he remembered his quiet book-lined room, he wanted to cry. It was a closed world now. Crewmen simply didn’t go into officer territory except on business.
Well, they might get him cleared. Meanwhile, the best thing he could do was to improve his position.
He worked with machines now and then, and was a little surprised to discover he had a fair amount of innate ability. Books from the crew branch of the ship’s library taught him more, and presently he applied for promotion to machinist’s assistant. By now he was tolerated, though still disliked, and made a good enough showing on test to get the job. It meant a raise, better working conditions, and one step further. The next was to be a machinist himself, one of the all-around men who were troubleshooters and extempore inventors—that was one grade higher than foreman, a job he could bypass.
Before God, he thought, I’ll get back to officer if I have to work my way!
Theoretically, it was possible. But in practice there were only so many commissions to go around, and if you didn’t belong to the right families you didn’t get them.
He grew friendly with his immediate boss, a pleasant, older man who was not at all averse to letting him do most of the work and learn thereby. Gradually, he got onto drinking terms with a few others. They weren’t bad fellows, not entirely the sadistic savages he had imagined. They laughed more than the upper classes, and they often went to school in their spare time, or saved money to start a small business, in spite of the disadvantages under which tradesmen labored.
For that matter, crew conditions weren’t the slummish horror which sentimentalists had pictured. Folk were poor, but they had the basic necessities and a few of the comforts. Violence was not uncommon, but it was simply one facet of a life which, on the whole, was fairly secure. Indeed, perhaps its worst feature was dullness.
Still, if another of the minor wars which had torn the ship before broke out— Something was wrong. This wasn’t the way man should go out to the stars, high of heart and glad of soul. Somehow, the great dream had gone awry.
It was a major triumph when Friday met Sam Carter in a beer hall and they went on a small bat together. He found himself liking the big red-headed man. And Carter got into the habit of asking him endless questions—science, history, politics; an officer was supposed to know everything. Friday began to discover how deficient his own education was. He knew physics and mathematics well, had a fair grounding in some other sciences, and had been exposed all his life to the best of Earth’s art, literature, and music. But—what was this psychology, anyway? It was a scientific study of human behavior, yes, and it had advanced quite far on Earth by the time the ship left—but why had he never been taught anything but the barest smattering? For that matter, did anybody in the upper ranks ever speak of it?
That might be the reason why the ship’s great dream had snarled into a crazy welter of murderous petty politics. Sheer ignorant fumbling on the part of the leaders, even with the best intentions—and he knew many intentions were and had been bad—could have let matters degenerate. Only—why? It would have been so easy to include a few psychologists.
Unless—unless those psychologists had been eliminated early in the game, say at the end of that serene first decade of travel, by the power-hungry and the greedy. But then the whole foundation of his society was rottener than he had imagined. Then even his own class was founded on betrayal.
None of which, he reflected grimly, was going to be any help at all when the ship got to Centauri.
If it ever did!
Perhaps still another revolution was needed, a revolt of the dreamers to whom the voyage meant something. Only—only there’d been too many mutinies and gang wars already, and more were brewing with every passing watch. The officers were split along departmental lines—Astros, Engys, and Admys—and on questions of personal power and general policy. The common crewfolk were nominally represented by Wilson, but some demon seemed to stir them up against each other, workers with machines and on farms, plain deckhands, technicians of all kinds of grades, hating each other and rioting in the corridors. Then there were the chants and small manufacturers, fighting for a return to the old free enterprise system or, at least, a separate voice on the Council. There were the goons maintained by each faction, as well as by powerful individuals, bully gangs outnumbering the better-armed police, who were directly under the Captain. But the Captain was a puppet, giving the orders of whatever momentary group or men held the reins of effective power.
This ship isn’t going to Centauri, thought Friday. It’s going to Hell!
Time aboard the Pioneer was divided into the days of twenty-four hours, the weeks of seven and the years of three hundred sixty-five and a quarter days, which had prevailed on Earth. But except for a few annual festivals, there were no special holidays. Working shifts were staggered around the clock, and there was always a certain percentage of the shops and other public places open. For what meaning did time have? It was the movement of clock hands, the succession of meals and tasks and sleeps, the arbitrary marks on a calendar. In a skyless, weatherless, seasonless world, a world whose only dark came with the flicking of a light switch in a room, one hour was as good as another for anything. The economic setup was such that the standard thirty-hour work week provided the common crewman a living wage, and there was not enough work to do for overtime hours to be usual. Most people kept to such a schedule, and passed their leisure with whatever recreation was available and to their tastes. Some preferred to work only part time and to do something else for the rest of their money—one thought especially of the filles de joie who, though frowned on by the officer caste, were an accepted part of the crew world; and the arrogant goons were another instance. The tradesmen, independent artisans, artists, writers, and others who worked for themselves made their own hours. Some of these lived in officer territory, the pet of a patron or caterers to the entire area; most were in and of the commons.
Evan Friday wandered with a couple of friends—Sam Carter and a dark, slim, intense nineteen-year-old named John Lefebre—into Park Seven, not far aft of the main gyros. The workers were idle, a little bored, and Friday had wearied of spending too much time in the library. He had been reading a good deal, concentrating on the history of the ship and groping for the cause of its social breakdown, but it baffled him and he was still young.
He had realized with a little shock that he had been a crewman for almost six months. So long? Gods, but time went, day after day of sameness, days and weeks and months and years till the end of life and flaming oblivion in the energy converters. Time went, and he was caught in its stream and carried without will or strength. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever get back to the topdeck world. Increasingly it became dim, a dream flickering on the edge of reality, and only once in a while would its sharp remembrance bring him awake with a gasp of pain.
He had shaken down pretty well, he thought. He was accepted in the barracks, though his reserve still kept most of the men at a distance. But they called him “Doc” and referred arguments to his superior education. He was used to shop routine, learning fast and getting close to the promotion he wanted. Next step—superintendent—maybe! He had been invited to the apartments of crew families, and went out drinking or gambling or ballplaying with the others. It wasn’t too bad a life, really, and that was in a way the most horrible part of his situation.
They went down a long series of halls until finally one opened on the park. This was one of several such areas scattered through the ship, a great vaulted space half a mile on a side, floored with dirt and turf, covered with hedges and trees and fountains—a glimpse of old Earth, here in the steel immensity of the ship. There were ball courts and a swimming pool and hidden private places under fantastically huge low-gravity flowers. Not far from the boundary of grass were a couple of beer parlors—fun for all the family.
“Get up some volley ball?” asked Lefebre.
“Not yet,” yawned Friday. “Let’s sit for a while.” He went his words one better, by flopping full length on the grass. It was cool and moist and firm against his bare skin, with a faint pungency of mould which stirred vague wistful instincts in him. His eyes squinted up to the ceiling, where the illusion of blue sky and wandering clouds and a fiery globe of sun had been created.
Was Earth like this? he wondered. Had his grandparents spurned this for a prison of steel and energy, walled horizons and narrow rooms and an unknowable destiny which they would never see?
He closed his eyes and tried, as often before, to imagine Earth. He had been in the parks, he had seen all the films and read all the books and learned all the words, but still it wouldn’t come real. In spite of having ventured outside the ship a few times, he couldn’t quite imagine being under a sky which was not a roof, looking out to a horizon that hazed into blue distance, seeing a mountain or a sea. Words, pictures, images—a fantasy without meaning.
Rain, what was rain? Water spilling from the sky, sweet and cold and wet on his body, damp smell of earth and a misty wind blowing into his eyes—whenever he tried to imagine himself out in the rain, it was merely grotesque, not the thing of which the books wrote with such tenderness. Someday, when he was old, the ship would reach far Centauri and he might stand under a streaming heaven and see lightning, but he couldn’t think it now and he wondered if his old body would even like it.
It would take all the courage and purpose in the ship for men to adapt back to planetary life, the more so if the planet turned out to be very different than Earth.
What chance would a divided, tyrannized, corrupted mob have? What fantastic blindness had made Captain Petrie unable to see the spreading cancer and excise it? Or had he, like his successor Gómez, been merely the pawn and abettor of the greedy and the brutal? What had happened, back in the early
no. I’ve read the official log, remember, as well as other writings. And it was only eighty years ago, not time for many legends to form.”
“Well—what was so good then, anyway?” asked Carter.
“The ship was all one unit. Everybody had one great purpose, to get to Centauri, and everybody worked for it. There weren’t these social divisions that have grown up since, officers and men were almost like friends, anybody could reach the top on sheer merit, nobody was after himself or his little group above the ship. There wasn’t bribery, or fighting, or—oh, all the things which have happened ever since.
“Of course,” went on Friday thoughtfully, “there were a lot fewer people then, and they had more to do. Only about two hundred in all, men and women. You know the population’s supposed to build up and be at our maximum of ten thousand or so by the end of the trip. But we’re only around seven thousand now, that’d be a small town on Earth—damn it, there’s no reason for our splitting into castes and factions this way, it’s ridiculous. . . . Anyway, the ship was more or less of a skeleton inside, the idea was for the crew to complete work on it en route. That was so they could get started sooner, and have more to do. Good idea, and it took ten or twenty years at their easy pace.”
“We still have to make things,” said Carter. “What d’you think we’re doing in the shops, anyway?”
“Sure, sure. Machines wear out and have to be replaced, repairs are needed here and there, new machines and facilities are built, oh, we have a whole little industry that keeps the factory division of the Engy department busy. Then there are the men in the black gang, different deck hands and technicians—we don’t have the robot stuff we could make, there’s no need for it with plenty of human labor available. My point is, things have stabilized. There’s only so much work to be done these days, nearly all of it pure routine, so maybe people get bored. Maybe that’s one reason we fight each other.”
“The trouble started with capitalism,” said Lefebre. He had all the dogmatic conviction of his years. “I’ve been reading books too, Doc, and heard speeches, and been thinking for myself. Any ship is a natural communist state. There was no reason to let private people have the farms and the factories and the rec places. What happened? Companies got started, fought each other, op—oppressed the workers, who had to form unions in self-defense; the food processors won out over the producers and formed their own trust; while Engy slowly took over the industries. Then food and factories started fighting, trying to run the ship, trying to stir up each other’s workers—”
“So eventually the farms were collectivized, turned into one big food factory,” said Friday. “Isn’t that what you wanted? It hasn’t helped much.”
“The damage had already been done,” said Lefebre. “The idea of fighting over power had been planted. Only thing to do now is to socialize everything, put it under the Captain’s Council, and give the workers the main voice.”
Friday had argued with the boy before. There was a strong communist movement aboard, chiefly under Wilson’s leadership. That fat demagogue! A lot of say his precious workers would have if he got what he wants! Then there were the Guilds and their agitation for a return to the original petite-bourgeois system, their claim that the initial evil had been the formation of monopolies. And there were the officers, most of them obsessed by the aristocratic ideal, though to them it meant no more than the increase of personal authority and wealth.—
Friday’s upbringing prejudiced him in that direction. Damn it, a ship was not a politicking communism, neither was it a realm of little, short-sighted tradesmen. It was the rule of the best, the aristos, a hierarchy restrained by law and tradition and open on a competitive basis to anyone with ability. But it had to be an unquestioned rule, or you got the sort of anarchy which had prevailed aboard the Pioneer.
“To hell with it,” said Carter. “Let’s play some ball.”
They got up and strolled over to the courts. The park was, as usual, pretty well filled with crewfolk of all ages, sexes, and classes, generally dressed in the shorts which were the garb of Ordinary lounging. Except for the convenience of pockets, clothes were a superfluity when you weren’t on the job. Friday wondered how the arrivals at Centauri would stand a winter—another half mythical concept. Ship “weather” was a variation of temperature and ozone balance in the cycle long known to be most beneficial, but the change was so slow and between such narrow limits that it was unnoticeable. Winter—what was winter?
There were several other Engys sitting on the edge of the volley ball court, watching the game in progress with sour faces. “What’s the matter, jo?” asked Carter of one.
“Goddam farmers been there for two hours now.”
With an uneasy tingle along his spine, Friday noticed the characteristic green worn by workers in the food areas—hydroponic gardens, animal pens, and packing plants.
There were a lot of them, sitting some ways off and watching a game whose slowness made it clear that its purpose was to taunt the Engys by keeping the court occupied. Theoretically, the food and factory unions were subdivisions of Wilson’s crew-embracing Brotherhood of Workers. In practice, a feud had been going on for—how long, now? Ever since the early violence in the days of the monopolies. It was aggravated by differences in wages, working conditions, the thousand petty irritations of shipboard life. They hated each other’s guts.
“Something,” said Carter after a while, “oughta be done about this.”
He started forward with an unholy gleam in his eyes. Friday caught his arm. “For God’s sake, Sam, you aren’t going to fight like a bunch of children over the use of a ball park, are you?”
“Ain’t busted in a farmer’s teeth for him in a long time now,” muttered someone behind him.
Friday saw the men gathering into a loose knot. Blackjacks and knuckledusters were coming out of pockets, heavy-buckled belts were being slipped off. The greens, seeing trouble afoot, vented the mob-growl which is the signal for all wise men to start running, and drew themselves together.
Unthinking habit took over, officer’s training. Friday was dimly surprised to find himself sprinting out onto the court.
“Stop that!” he yelled. “Break it up!”
The players halted, one by one, and he met sullen eyes. “What’sa matter?”
“You’ve had your turn playing. Can’t you see a riot will start if you don’t come back now?”
Faces turned to faces, mouths split into the grin he remembered from his first hour as a crewman. “Well!” said somebody elaborately. “Well, well, well! Now isn’t that just a dirty crying shame?”
He saw the fist coming and rolled, taking it on his shoulder. His own flicked out, caught the green in the jaw; stepping in close, he let the other hand smack its way into the muscled stomach.
The rest closed in on him, and he saw the gray ranks pouring onto the court to his rescue, and the greens after them. With a stabbing sickness, he realized that his own attempt had fired off the riot. . . .
There was a swirl of bodies around him, impact and noise, metal flashing under the artificial sun. He slugged at short range, drowned in the shouting, frantic to get away. Taller than average he could look over the surging close-cropped heads and see more men on their way. The thing was growing.
Someone slapped at him with a blackjack. He caught the blow on an uplifted arm, numbing it in a crash of pain. Viciously, he kneed the man, yanked the weapon loose, and flailed the screaming face. A fist hit him in the side, he went down and the feet trampled over him. Gasping, he struggled erect, slugged out half blindly. The howling current bore him off without strength to fight it. Through a haze of sweat and panic, he saw knives gleaming.
“Back! Get out!”
The metal rod whistled around his head. He snarled incoherently and yanked it away. “I’m staying here,” he mumbled.
“Get out, get out!” The man was screaming, a small frail gray-haired man with two women behind him. “Get out, we don’t want you, you, you—rioter—”
Friday leaned against a counter, sobbing air into the harsh dryness of throat and lungs. A wave of dizziness passed through him, dark before his eyes and a distant roaring in his ears. No, no, that was the mob, screaming and thundering in the corridor outside.
A measure of strength returned. “I—not rioting—” he forced through his teeth. “Wait here—only wait here—”
“Why—father, he’s no crewman. He’s an officer—”
Friday let it pass. He found a chair and slumped into it, letting nerves and muscles recover. He noticed dimly that he had been slashed here and there, blood was pooling onto the floor, but it hadn’t started hurting much yet.
“Here, take this.”
The girl had brought him a glass of whiskey. He downed it in a grateful gulp, letting its vividness scorch down his gullet and run warmly along his veins. Awareness began to come back.
He had stumbled into a small shop, a poor and dingy place cluttered with tools and handicrafts. Plastics mostly, he noticed, with some woodwork and metal, the small ornaments and household objects still produced by private parties. Besides himself, there were the man and his wife, and the girl who must be their daughter. She was about nineteen or twenty, he thought in the back of his mind, a slim blonde without extraordinary looks but with a degree of aliveness in her which was unusual.
The shopkeeper had locked the door by now. Apparently the riot—and Friday—had swept this way with a speed that took him by surprise. He was close to tears. “They’ll start looting now,” he said. “They always do. And it isn’t a strong lock.”
“The police should be here soon,” said Friday.
“Not soon enough. I was looted once before. If it happens again, I’m ruined, I’ll have to take a crew job—”
“You’re hurt,” said the girl. “Here, wait a minute, I’ll get the kit.” Friday could barely hear her voice above the echoing din of the riot, but he watched her with pleasure.
Bodies surged against the plate window until its plastic shivered. A man was backed against it and another one swung a knife and opened his throat. Blood blurred the view, and the girl screamed and hid her face against Friday’s breast.
“I—I’m all right now,” she whispered presently. “Here, the bandages—”
He had to admire her. He still wanted to vomit.
The door shook. “They’re trying to batter it down! They want to get in before the police arrive! Oh, God—”
Friday took the metal bar and went over to the door. He felt a vicious glee which was not at all proper to an officer and a gentleman. “You should keep a gas gun handy,” he remarked.
“You know only officers weapons—but the bullies own— Oh, oh, help—”
The door broke under three brawny shoulders. Friday swung the improvised club with a whistle and a crack. The first man went down on that blow and did not move. The second, carrying a shaft of his own, raised it in guard. Friday, remembering his fencing, jabbed him in the belly and he screamed and stumbled back with his hands to the wound. The third one fled.
They had been greens, which was something of a relief. Friday would have fought grays as willingly, but that could have been awkward for him later, if he were recognized.
He felt a return of the sick revulsion. God, God, God, what had become of the ship? Why did anyone ever feel sorry for these witless, lawless animals? What they needed was an officer caste, and—
He heard whistles blowing and the heart-stirring cadence of marching feet. The police had arrived. He shoved his green victim—unconscious or dead, he didn’t much care which—outside and closed the door. “Turn your fans on full,” he said. “They’ll be using gas.”
“Oh, you—” The older woman sought for words. “You were wonderful, sir.”
Friday preened himself, smiling at the girl, whose answering expression was quite dazzling. “Don’t ‘sir’ me, please,” he said, trying to find words which wouldn’t sound too story-book silly in retrospect. “I’m only an Engy at present, though I’ve no use for rioters of any class.” He bowed, falling back on the formal manners of topdeck. “Evan Friday, your servant, sir and ladies.”
They didn’t recognize the name, which disappointed him more than he thought it should. But he got their own names—William Johnson, wife Ingrid, daughter Elena—and an invitation to dinner next day.” He left feeling quite smug about the whole affair.
Paradoxically, the exhibition which had soured Friday on all crewmen led to his forming more friendships among them than ever before. Word spread that Doc had been in on the very start of the fight, been wounded, laid some undetermined but respectable number of greens low, and in general acquitted himself like a good Engy. Men struck up talk with him, bought him drinks, listened to his remarks—strange how warming a plain “hello” could be when he came to work. He was more than merely accepted, and in his solitude could not prevent himself from responding emotionally.
Training told him that an officer and a gentleman had no business associating with any of these—these mutineers. Prudence, a need of friends, and a growing shrewd realization that if he hoped to accomplish anything he would have to fit into the lower-deck milieu, made him reply in kind. He retained his eccentricities, haircut and shave and faint stiffness of manner, noticing that once his associates were used to these they marked him out, made him something of a leader.
His plans were vague. There had been no word from topside, no word at all, though he supposed his family was keeping track of him. Once, in a tavern, he had encountered a group of crewquartering young aristocrats, friends of his, and his sister among them; there had been an embarrassed exchange of greetings and he had left as soon as possible. The upper world was shut off. But if he could attain some prominence down here, get influential friends, money— Surely he couldn’t remain a crewman all his life! Such anticlimaxes just didn’t happen to Evan Friday.
He was doing a good deal of work in close collaboration with the superintendent of his shop. The intricacies of the job were resolving themselves; he could handle it. He began to speculate on ways of displacing his superior.
It did not occur to him that he might be pulling a dirty trick on another human being.
But something else was going on that distracted his attention. Strangers were dropping into the barracks, husky young men who, it became clear, were full-time attendants of Wilson—in less euphemistic language, his goons. They talked to various workers, bought drinks—recruited! Rumors buzzed around: there was a cache of weapons somewhere, there was this or that dastardly plot afoot which must be forestalled, there was to be a general strike for higher pay and better conditions of work and living. Certainly a young man could make extra money and have some fun by signing on as a part-time goon. You learned techniques of fighting, you drilled a little bit, you played athletic games and had occasional beer parties with old Tom Wilson footing the bill. It had been some time since the last pitched battle between goon squads, but by God, jo, those officers’ men were getting too big in the head, strutting around like they owned the ship, it might be time to scutter them a bit.
“They wanted me to join,” said Carter. “I told ’em no.”
“Good man!” said Friday.
Carter ran a big work-roughened hand through his red stubble. “I ain’t looking for trouble, Doc,” he said. “I’m saving to get married.” He scowled. “Only, well, maybe we will have to fight. Maybe we won’t get our rights no other way. And if they did fight, and win, and I wasn’t in on it, it’d look bad later on.”
“That’s the sort of gruff they’ve been feeding you, huh?”
“Well, Doc, you got a head on your shoulders. But—I dunno. I’ll have to think it over.”
Friday lay awake during many hours, wondering what was on the way. Certainly the other factions aboard knew what was going on—why did they allow it, then? Were they afraid to precipitate a general conflict? Or did they have plans of their own? Or did they think Wilson was merely bluffing?
What did the man want, anyway? He was on the Council already, wasn’t he?
Couldn’t they see—damn them, couldn’t they see that the ship was bigger than all their stupid ambitions, couldn’t they see that space was the great Enemy against which all souls aboard, all mankind had to unite?
A special meeting of the Brotherhood of Workers was called. Friday had only been to one union assembly before, out of a curiosity which was soon quenched by the incredible dullness of the proceedings. Men stood and haggled, hour after hour, over some infinitesimal point, they dozed through interminable speeches and reports, they took a whole watch to decide something that the Captain should have settled in one minute. He realized wryly that a major qualification of leadership was an infinite patience. And skill in maneuvering men, swapping favors, playing opponents off against each other, covering the operations that mattered with a blanket of parliamentary procedure and meaningless verbiage. But he had a notion that this meeting was one he should attend in person, not simply over a telescreen.
The hall was jammed, and the ventilators could not quite overcome the stink of sweating humanity. Friday wrinkled his aristocratic nose and pushed through to the section reserved for his grade, near the stage. He found a seat beside a friend with a similar job, and looked around the buzzing cavern. Faces, faces, faces, greens and grays intermingled, workmen all. In a moment of honesty, he had to admit that there was more variety and character in those faces than in the smooth soft countenance of the typical lower-bracket officer. These visages had been leaned down by a life-time of work, creased by squinting, dried by the hot wind of furnaces. He had gained considerable respect for manual skill; it took as much, in a way, to handle a lathe or a torch or a spraygun as to use slide rule and account book.
Only why should these complementary types be at war? They needed each other. Why couldn’t they see the fact?
Several men filed onstage, accompanied by goons whose similar clothes suggested uniforms. Friday’s mind wandered during the speech by the union’s nominal president. The usual platitudes. He woke up when Wilson came to the rostrum.
He had to admit the Councillor was a personality. His voice was a superbly versatile instrument, rolling and roaring and sinking to a caress, drawing forth anger and determination and laughter. And the gross body, pacing back and forth, did not suggest fat, it was tigerishly graceful; a dynamo turned within the man. In spite of himself, Friday was caught up in the fascination.
Wilson deplored the riot, scolded his followers, exhorted them to forget their petty differences in the great cause of the voyage. He said he was recruiting “attendant auxiliaries” from green and gray alike, and mixing them up in squads, so that they could learn to know each other. They were fellow workers, they simply happened to have different jobs, they needed each other and the ship needed both.
“You are the ship! We’ve got to eat. We’ve got to have power, heat and light and air, tools, maintenance. And nothing else. Everybody else aboard is riding on your backs.
“Who keeps the ship moving? Who’s pushing us to far Centauri? Not the officers’ corps, not the Guildsmen, not the doctors and lawyers and teachers and policemen. Not even you, my friends. We reached terminal velocity eighty years ago. Old Man Inertia is carrying us to our far home. Don’t let anybody claim credit for that, nobody but Almighty God.
“But we’ve got to eat on the way. We’ve got to have power to keep us alive, keep out the cold and the dark and the vacuum. Once landed, we’ll still need all those things, we’ll have to start farms and machine shops. We need you. You, green and gray, are the keel of this ship, and don’t you ever forget it!”
He went on, with a vast silence before him and no eye in the chamber leaving his face. The workers were one, they had to unite to see the ship through, their feuds were a hangover from the bad old days of unrestrained capitalism. He hinted broadly that certain elements kept the pot boiling, kept the workers divided among themselves lest they discover their true strength and speak up for their rights. He instilled the notion of cabals directed against the crewmen—“who make up more than six thousand people, out of seven thousand!”—and of plots to overthrow the Council, establish all-out officer rule and crush the workers underfoot.
“God, no!” cried Friday. He caught himself and relapsed into his seat, half blind with rage. His outburst had gone unnoticed in the rising tide of muttered anger.
Trying to control himself, he analyzed the speech as it went on. A wonderful piece of demagoguery, yes. Nothing in it that could really be called seditious—on the surface, merely an exhortation to end rioting and general lawlessness. No one was mentioned by name except the Guilds, who didn’t count anyway. No overt suggestion of violence was made. The Captain was always spoken of in respectful tones, the hint being that he was the unhappy prisoner of the plotters. A list of somewhat exaggerated grievances was given, but the ship’s articles provided for freedom of speech and assembly. Oh, yes, very lawful, very dignified—and just what was needed to incite mutiny!
At the end, the cheering went on for a good quarter-hour. Friday clamped his teeth together, feeling ill with fury. When the racket had subsided, Wilson called for the customary question period.
Friday jumped up on his seat. “Yes,” he shouted. “Yes, I have a question.”
“By all means, brother Friday,” said Wilson genially. So—he remembered.
“Are you preaching revolution,” yelled Friday, “or are you lying because you can’t help yourself?”
The silence was short and incredulous, then the howling began. Friday vaulted into the aisle and up onto the stage, too full of his rage to care what he was doing.
Wilson’s voice boomed from the loudspeakers, slowly fighting down the tumult: “Brother Friday does not agree with me, it seems. He has a right to be heard. Gentlemen, gentlemen, quiet please!” When the booing had died down a little: “Now, sir, what do you wish to say? This is a free assembly of free men. Speak up.”
“I say,” said Friday, “that you are a liar and a mutineer. Your talk has been a stew of meaningless words, false accusations, and invitations to rebellion. Shall I go down the list?”
“By all means,” smiled Wilson. “Brother Friday, you know, has a somewhat unusual background. I am sure his views are worth hearing.”
The laughter was savage.
“I hardly know where to begin,” said Friday.
“It is a little difficult, yes,” grinned Wilson. The laughter hooted forth again, overwhelming him, knotting his tongue. He twisted the words out, slowly and awkwardly:
“Just for a start, then, Mr. Wilson, you said that the greens and grays together are almost the entire ship. Six out of seven thousand, you said. Anyone who’s taken the trouble to read the latest census figures would know it’s not true. There are about a thousand men working in all the branches of Engineering under officers, and about five hundred in the food section. There are about three hundred in public service of one sort or another—police, teachers, lawyers and judges, administrative clerks, and so on. Guildsmen and other independents together make up perhaps seven hundred. The entire officers’ corps, including their families, add up to maybe five hundred. In short, out of some three thousand money-earning, working people aboard, greens and grays add up to half.
“I don’t include the four thousand others—housewives, children and aged.” With an essay at sarcasm: “Unless you want to enroll them in your goon squads too!” He turned to the assembly. “Fifteen hundred people in green and gray, to dictate to the other fifty-five hundred. Is that your precious democracy?”
“Boo! Boo! Throw ’im out! Spy! Blackleg! Boo!”
“You seem to be distorting my speech now,” said Wilson mildly. “But go ahead, if it amuses you.”
“God damn it, man, it’s the ship I’m thinking about. I know there are plenty of abuses, I’m the victim of one myself—”
“Ah, yes, a pathetic fate,” said Wilson lugubriously. “He was forced by incredibly cruel people to come down among us and earn his living!”
The shouting and the booing and cursing and laughing drove Friday off the stage. He hadn’t a chance, he was beaten and routed; and he had been made ridiculous—which was much worse. He fled, sobbing in his throat, yelling at the silent corridors and damning the ship and the voyage and every stinking human aboard her. Then he found a bar and drank himself blind.
“I admire your courage,” said William Johnson, “but I must admit your discretion leaves something to be desired. You should have known you had no chance against a professional politician.”
“Now he tells me,” said Friday ruefully.
“I hope it hasn’t made things—difficult for you, Evan.” There was an anxiety in Elena’s voice which pleased him.
He shrugged. “I didn’t lose too many friends. But I lost a lot of standing.”
Oddly enough, his mind ran on, it had been Sam Carter who had defended him most stoutly in the barrack-room arguments, Sam who had beaten him up when he first arrived and now stood by him, though it meant damning Wilson. The fact was comforting, but puzzling. It was hard to realize that people just didn’t fit into the neat categories of tradition.
They were sitting in the Johnsons’ apartment, a small bright place where he had been a frequent guest of late. He had fallen into the habit of dropping in almost “daily,” for the merchant class had something to offer he had never looked to find on the lower levels, and something, besides, which was strange to the topdecks. The Johnsons and their associates were not the narrow-souled tradesmen their reputation among other classes insisted; they were, on the whole, people of quality and some little culture. If they had a major fault, he thought, it was a certain conservatism and timidity, a nostalgia for the “good old days” with which he could only partly sympathize. And they had their own tired clichés, meaningless words setting off automatic emotional responses—“free enterprise,” “progressivism,” “Radical”—but then, what class didn’t?
He found himself increasingly aware of Elena. She was pleasant to look at and talk to; the other lower-deck women had seemed meretricious or merely dull. And at the same time she had an enterprising sincerity and an, at times, startlingly realistic world-view which would be hard to find in officers’ women.
“And what do you expect to happen next?” asked Mrs. Johnson. The fact of Friday’s being from topdeck earned him an automatic respect among Guildsmen, who still wanted leaders. Their own agitation was simply for justice to themselves, and Friday had to admit their cause seemed reasonable.
“Trouble. Open fighting—there’ve been brawls almost every watch between the goons of the Brotherhood and those of the officers. Maybe mutiny.”
Johnson shuddered. He was bold enough in conversation, but physically timid. “I know,” he said. “And the laborers have been making difficulties for private shopowners too. They’ve been smashing up bars, especially, when they’re drunk.”
“Want to socialize liquor, eh?” Elena’s laugh was strangely merry. “Maybe we should call for a representative of the tavern-keepers on the Council.”
“Only a representative of all tradesmen,” said Johnson stiffy. To Friday: “We won’t stand for it much longer. The younger Guildsmen are forming protective associations.”
“Goons! Certainly not! Protect—”
“A goon by any other name would smell as sweet,” said Elena. “Why not call them by their right name? If we have to fight, we’ll need fighting units.”
“Not much good without weapons and training,” said Friday. “You have small machine shops here and there. You should start quietly making knives, knuckledusters, and so on, and exercise squads in their use. Wouldn’t take long to equip every man.”
“Why, you’re speaking sedition!” whispered Johnson. “That’s no better than Wilson.”
Friday flung out of his chair and paced the floor. “Why not?” he said angrily. “It’s not as if you meant aggression. The police can’t be everywhere, and in any case they’re under the control of whoever owns the Captain. At the moment, that happens to be an uneasy cabal of Engy and Astro officers, together with Wilson, who’s nominally their associate and actually trying to get the power from them. If the officers win, you may expect to see a rigid caste system imposed on all the ship. If Wilson wins, you’ll get a nominal communism which, if I’ve read any history at all, will rapidly become the same kind of dictatorship under different labels. Either way, the Guilds lose. You won’t have a voice in affairs till you’re strong enough to merit one.”
“Evan, I thought you were an officer,” said Elena, very softly. “I thought even now—”
“Of course I am! A ship has to have discipline and a hierarchy of authority, but that’s precisely what we haven’t got now. What I want to see is a strong captain with an officer corps made of the better existing elements—oh, such as my father, for instance, or Lieutenant Steinberg, or any of some hundred others. Most of the lower-echelon officers are decent and sincere men, Elena, they just haven’t got any effective voice in affairs; they take orders from the Captain without regard to the fact that he takes his orders from two or three warring cliques. And the holes left in the corps could be filled competitively from the lower ranks.”
“Ah—” Johnson cleared his throat shyly. “Pardon me, Evan, but wouldn’t there be the same tendency as before for rank to become hereditary?”
“Naturally, superior people tend to have superior children,” said Friday somewhat snobbishly. “But today, I admit, while there is still competitive examination for promotion, there is a certain favoritism in judging the results and few or no crewmen get the education needed to prepare for the tests.” He clenched his fists. “God, what a lot of reform we need!”
Elena came over and took his hand. “You know more about the ship than anyone in the Guilds, Evan,” she said. “Certainly your military knowledge is the best we can get. Will you be with us?”
He looked at, her for a long while, “What have I been saying?” he whispered. “What have I been saying?”
“Good things, Evan.”
“But—Bill, you’re right. I have been talking violence.” He smiled uncertainly. “I’ve been overworking my mouth lately, haven’t I?”
“You won’t help us—?”
“I don’t know. God, I don’t know! Taking the law into our own hands this way—it’s contrary to the articles, it’s contrary to everything I’ve ever believed.”
“But we have to do it, Evan,” she said urgently. “You advised it yourself, and you’re right.”
“Blast it, I’m still an Engy. I still have to live with my co-workers.”
“You could quit your job and come live with us. The Guilds would pay you a good wage just to get their protective squads organized.”
“So now I’m to become a paid goon!” he said bitterly.
“The time may come when the ship will need your goon squads.”
“I don’t know,” he said dully. With sudden vehemence: “Let me think! I’ve been kicked into a level I don’t understand, caught up in a business I don’t approve. My father told me, before they sent me away, that I was still an officer. And yet—let me think it over, will you?”
“Of course, Evan,” said Johnson.
He bade clumsy farewells and went out into the corridor and back toward his dwelling place, too preoccupied to notice the men who fell quietly in on either side of him. When one of them spoke, it was like a blow:
“This way, Friday.”
“Eh? Huh?” He stared at them. Wilson’s goons. “What the hell do you want?”
“We just want to take you to Mr. Wilson, jo. He wants to see you.’This way.”
An elevator took them up to officer level. Actually, thought a dim corner of Friday’s mind, the term should have been “down,” since they were increasing centrifugal “gravity;” but the notion of the upper classes living “upward” was too ingrained for usage to change, even though on any one level “down” meant the direction of acceleration. Silly business.
The whole expedition was a cosmic joke.
He had not been in this territory for half a year, and it jarred him with remembrance. He stayed between his escorts, looking directly ahead, trying not to see the familiar people who went by. It was doubtful if any of them looked closely enough to recognize him.
Wilson’s offices occupied a suite in the Administrative section, near the bows and just under the ship’s skin. Her screens made that area as safe as any other, and the fact that the pilot room and hence the captain’s quarters had to be directly in the bow on the axis of rotation—the only spot where there was an outside view except via telescreen—had dictated the placement of all officer areas nearby.
The inner office was a big one. Wilson had had it redecorated with murals which, in spite of their subjects—heroic laboring figures, for the most part—Friday had to admit were good. Indeed, these troubled decades had produced a lot of fine work.
He wrenched his attention to the man behind the great desk. Wilson sat easy and relaxed, puffing a king-sized cigar and studying some papers which he put aside when the newcomers entered. He rose courteously and smiled. “Please sit down, Mr. Friday,” he said.
The two goons took up motionless posts by the door. Friday edged himself nervously into a chair.
“You know Lieutenant Farrell, of course,” said Wilson.
Friday felt a shock at seeing the lean middle-aged man in officer’s uniform seated at Wilson’s right. Farrell—certainly he knew Farrell, the man had taught him basic science. Farrell had for years been a general assistant to Captain Gómez.
“I’m sorry to see you associated with this man, sir,” he said numbly.
“Quite a few officers are,” said Farrell gently. “After all, Mr. Wilson is a Councillor.”
“Have a cigar, Mr. Friday,” said Wilson.
“No, thanks. What did you want to see me about ?”
“Oh—several things. I wanted to apologize for the somewhat unfortunate result of the union meeting. You had a right to be heard, and it is a shame that some of the men got a little rowdy.”
You know damn well what made them that way, thought Friday.
“I liked your courage, even if it was misguided,” said Wilson. “You’re an able young man and honest. I’d like to have you on my side.”
Friday wished he had accepted the cigar. It would have been a cover for the silence that came from having no retort to make. Another little political trick. I’ll know better next time, if there is a next time.
“You seem to think I’m some kind of monster,” said Wilson. “Believe me, I have only the interests of the ship at heart. I think that we must be united in order to succeed in this voyage. But to achieve that union, we must have justice. You yourself, as a victim of the present system, ought to realize that.”
“We need leadership first,” said Friday slowly. “Good leadership, not political dictatorship.”
“There is no intention of setting one up,” said Farrell mildly. “Certainly you don’t think that officers will be replaced by commissars! Would I be in this movement if that were the case? No, we simply want to replace the corrupt and the incompetent, and to install a socio-economic system adapted to the peculiar needs of the expedition.”
“Nice words. But you’re building up a private army, and you’re planning mutiny.”
“I could get angry at that charge,” said Wilson. “Have I ever so much as suggested replacing the Captain? If the ship’s articles are to be amended, it will be by due process of law.”
“A rigged Council and a fixed election! Sure! Keep the Captain in his present job of figurehead!”
“Now it is you who are seditious. Look, Mr. Friday. I do believe you are innocent of the charges made against you, and I’d like to see you cleared and your rank restored. Promotion will be rapid for competent men, once things are running properly again. But these are tough times, and you can’t expect me to take all that trouble for an enemy.”
“So now you’re trying to bribe me. Why, for all I know it was you who framed me in the first place.”
Wilson’s carefully learned manners dropped from him. It was a plain Engy who spoke, with more than a trace of anger: “Look, jo, d’you think you’re so goddam important that it makes any difference what happens to you? You think I need you? I’m just trying to be fair, and give you a chance to get back where you were. You can be useful, sure, but you’re not fixed to do any harm. Especially if you got fired from your job.”
Friday stood up. “That’s enough,” he said. “Good-bye, Mr. Wilson.”
“Have it your way, jo. If you change your mind, you can come back in a day or two. But don’t be any later.”
“I wish, you would think it over,” said Farrell.
“Good-bye!” Friday stormed out of the office.
He cooled off on the trip back. Gods, talk about burning bridges! He didn’t belong anywhere now.
No—wait—the Guilds. He still didn’t much like the thought of espousing their cause—but where else in all the universe could he go?
He took a certain malicious pleasure in telling off his boss when he quit. Then he drew his time, collected his few belongings, and went back to William Johnson’s home.
The food trust was overthrown largely from within—a general strike of its underpaid workers, accompanied by violence—but that overthrow was instigated by leading Engineers as a means of overcoming their food-producing rivals. The Engineers wanted a return to the small private farms of the first years—divide et impera—but the upper ranks of Administration favored socializing the producing, packing, and distributing establishments, since they would then be under effective control of the small but efficient Admy bureaucracy. After a good deal of intriguing, socialism won, and the Engineers found themselves faced with a new rival as powerful as the old.
Two years later, Captain Petrie died. Both Engineering and Administration nominated a hand-picked successor, ignoring the rule that the first mate should take the office. This was a young man, Juan Gómez, associated with the Astrogation Department. Astro, being a small and exclusively officer group, lacked the strength and support of the contending overlords; but it had the law on its side, together with a surprising adroitness at playing its enemies off against each other. Gómez was named.
For a few years there was relative quiet, except for clashes between various bully gangs hired by the overlords. The workers, green and gray, were increasingly restless, the younger generation of officers in all departments ever more arrogant and exclusive. In the forty-fifth year of the great voyage, open warfare broke out between the private forces of Engy and Admy over the exact extent of Admy jurisdiction—the latter had been using the ship’s internal law, which it was supposed to administer, as a means of aggrandizing its leaders. It was not what Earth’s bloody history would have considered a real war—the two sides lacked very effective weapons, and were small—but people were getting killed, property was damaged and vital services suspended. Astrogation rallied the police and neutral groups to suppress the fighting. The ship’s articles were amended, the most important respect being the transfer of police power from Administration to the Captaincy—in effect, to Astro. Administration didn’t like it, but the Engineers, on the old half-a-loaf principle, supported the measure. Astro began building up followers, money investments, and political connections.
Five years later the lower Engineering ranks, having failed to obtain satisfaction in any other way, resorted to violence. The revolt was suppressed, but concessions were made in a Captain’s Court which few officers liked.
Six years after that, Duncan, chief of Adminstration, attempted to seize the Captaincy in a coup d’etat which was defeated with the help of the Engineering bosses. Duncan and his immediate followers suffered the usual penalties of mutiny, but his power was left unbroken and passed to his successor. This was shown to be the work of Astro: in the sixty-first year, Admy and Astro together swung enough political power to break up officer ownership of factories and socialize them, and enough fighting strength to enforce the decree.
Some fifteen years passed without too much trouble as the ship adjusted to the new order of things. All important facilities were now under ship ownership and control, tracing back ultimately to the Captain and his Council. The old departmental divisions remained, but officers within them acted as individuals and their combinations were often across such party lines. Some wanted a return to the former state of affairs, but most were content to intrigue for control of this or that department of ship life—ultimately, the goal was to run the Council, from which all authority stemmed. A combine made up largely of Astro officers held the balance of power, but it was a constant battle of wits to maintain it. In this period began the first great outburst of characteristic ship forms of art, literature, and music, new departures which would have meant little to an Earthman but which answered a need born of space and loneliness and the great overriding purpose. In science, some first-rate work was done on deep-space astrophysics and the biological effects of cosmic radiation.
Meanwhile, however, the laboring classes demanded some voice in affairs. Unions were organized on a ship-wide basis and finally joined together in Wilson’s Brotherhood. At this time, too, the remaining independents—craftsmen, artisans, tailors, tavern-keepers, personal-service people, private lawyers, and their kind, including no few scientists and artists of one sort or another—began organizing the Guilds for mutual protection and advancement; but they had no way to win an effective voice.
Labor, however, could and did act. The great strike of 2201 broke the time of peace. On the principle that certain services were essential to the lives of everyone, the Council tried to break the stroke, and for several days a running war was fought up and down the corridors of the ship. The union was finally suppressed, but it won what amounted to a victory, a representative on the Council. The old-line officers were outraged, but Wilson set to work at once making alliances with the younger and more liberal ones.
His official program was frankly communistic. The large fortunes and followings of the highest officers were to be broken up, all property except the purely personal was to belong to the ship, plants were to be governed by workers’ councils. On the other hand, some kind of supreme heirarchy would still, obviously, be needed; and no doubt many of the ranking men who joined Wilson’s cause were animated by the thought of promotion. There were also a certain percentage of sincere idealists who were disgusted with the intriguing and corruption of the ship’s government, the unseemly brawling, private gangs, and the not yet overcome unfairness of a caste system.
Besides Wilson’s group, there were several others in high places, with schemes of their own. Certain men wanted to grab supreme power for themselves; others wished a return to this or that stage of previous ship’s history, say the good old days, when the Engineers virtually ran affairs, or to advance along certain lines that seemed desirable to them—such as, for instance, a frankly hereditary officer caste controlling all wealth and authority.
Gómez still had the chairmanship of the Council, the small but strong police force, and a solid following among conservative elements including the bulk of the officer’s corps and perhaps even a majority of the common. And Astro had the Captain. One suspected that McMurtrie, chief of that department, had the final say in matters, though no one outside of Astro knew for certain.
Only—how long could it continue? The ship was ready for another explosion. How long before it came?
Gods! thought Friday sick. Gods, what a history! What hell’s broth of a history!
He had about three weeks before the crisis broke, and had not thought he could go so long on as little sleep as he got.
There was first the matter of raising his troop. A call for volunteers at a special Guild meeting brought disappointing results. He and a few others had to go on personal recruiting tours, arguing and propagandizing and even applying certain subtle threats—social disapproval, boycotting, and whatever else could be hinted at obliquely enough not to antagonize. Some rather slippery sophistry got by at times, and Friday had to be careful to suppress his own uneasy doubts about his cause. The motto was always organization for defense, formation of a band which could help the regular police if they should need it, and he found it necessary to shout down the hotheads who had been his eagerest followers. He often had occasion to remember the ancient maxim that politics is the art of creating an equality of dissatisfaction.
He was helped by events. As the watches went by, disorder grew like a prairie fire. Hardly a “day” passed that the police were not called to stop a brawl between Wilson’s gangs and the goons of other factions, or to halt the wrecking and plundering of some shop. They were bewildered and angry men who came to Friday, they wanted to fight somebody—it didn’t much matter who.
“But what the glory is Wilson doing it for?” said Mrs. Johnson. “He’s only hurting his own cause. He should be calming them down, or he’ll turn all the ship against his people.”
“That,” said Friday with a bleak new insight, “is what he wants.”
Officially, of course, the Councillor deplored such lawlessness and called on all workers to desist. But his language was weak; it only turned strong when he cited the grievances which had driven them to such measures. Friday buckled down to training his gang.
He had no military knowledge except vague impressions from books, but then neither did anyone else who mattered. Only the police were allowed firearms, and his conditioning was too deep for him to consider manufacturing them. It would hardly have been practicable anyway. But the tools of the artisans could make the nasty implements of infighting. And it occurred to him further that pikes, axes, and even short swords were valuable under ship conditions. However clumsily wielded, they were still formidable. He thought of bows too, but experiment showed him that more practice would be needed than his men had time or patience for.
He worked three shifts each day, drilling those who could attend any one of them. Practice with weapons, practice in working as groups, practice at rough-and-tumble—it was all he could do, and he more than half expected his motley squads to break and run if it ever came to action. He had about two hundred all told, shopkeepers, artisans, personal-service men, office workers, intellectuals of all stripes; a soldier’s nightmare.
But after all, he consoled himself, it wasn’t really an army he was trying to organize. It was an association of ordinary peaceable men who had found it necessary to form their own auxiliary police force. That was all. He hoped to heaven that was all.
They used an empty storage space near zero-gravity as their armory. You could do weird and wonderful things at low-weight, once you got the hang of it. He tried to be as unobtrusive about his project as possible, and especially to keep secret the fact of his most lethal innovations. The police would most likely confiscate things like those, if they heard of them. All the rest of the ship needed to know was that the Guildsmen had started a protective association, and if the Brotherhood wanted to make a huge joke of it, so much the better.
Nevertheless, Friday was irrationally pleased when a few of his men got into a fight with some greens in a bar and beat the devil out of them.
He was catching an exhausted nap in Johnson’s apartment when Elena woke him with the news that the Brotherhood had mutinied.
“Oh, no!” he exclaimed. Sleep drained from him like water from a broken cup as he got to his feet.
“Yes,” she said tonelessly. “The intercom just announced a state of emergency, told all crewfolk to get home and stay there and not to take part in any violence on pain of being considered mutineers—what else can it mean?”
He heard the brazen voice again, roaring out of the corridor loudspeaker, and nodded. “But I’d like to see it done,” he said thinly. “The ship is six miles long and two miles in diameter. How does Wilson expect to take it over with a thousand men at best?”
“Seize the key points and the officers,” she flared. “How else?”
“But the police—he can’t hold any place against men with gas guns, firearms, grenades—”
“He must think he can! Are we going to sit here and do nothing?”
“Not much else we can do. That order to stay inside means us, too.”
“Evan Friday, what have you been organizing the Guildsmen for?”
“Get on the visiphone,” he said. “Call up everyone before somebody or other cuts off our communications. Tell them to stand by. But we can’t go rushing out blindly.”
She flushed him a smile. “That’s more like it, Evan!”
He looked out the door into the hall. Men, women, children, were running each way, shouting, witless with panic— This is revolution, he thought. You don’t know what’s happened, you don’t know who’s fighting or where the fighting is, you sit and wait and listen to the people going they don’t know where.
Presently Elena came to sit on the arm of his chair. “Where’s father and mother?” she asked, and he saw the hard-held strength of her breaking as immediate pressure lifted. “They said they were going to visit Halvorson’s; where are they—”
‘I don’t know,’ he bit out. “They must have taken refuge with someone. We’ll just have to wait here.”
“I couldn’t raise everybody,” she said. “A lot of lines were jammed. But some of them said they’d pass the word along by messengers.”
“Good! Good folk!” It was enormously heartening to know that some had remained brave and level-headed.
“I didn’t even try to call headquarters,” she said wryly. “But maybe we could offer the Captain our help.”
“Let’s see what happens first.” Friday pounded his knee with a white-knuckled fist. “It’s not that I’m scared to fight, Elena. In fact, I’m scared green to sit here and not fight. But we’d just blunder around, have no idea of where to go or what to do, probably get in the way of the police—”
The lights went out.
They sat for a moment in a blackness which was tangible. Elena choked a cry, and he heard the screaming of women out in the hall.
“Power cut off,” he said unnecessarily, trying to hold his voice steady. “Wait—hold still a minute.” He strained his ears into the darkness and could not hear the muted endless hum of the ventilators. “Yeah. Dead off.”
“Oh, Evan—if they hold the converters, they can threaten to destroy them—”
“Take more than they’ve got to do that, darling.” The word came unconsciously, unnoticed by either of them. “But if they can hold off for a long enough time, they can make things awfully tough for the rest of the ship.”
“It’s—been tried before, hasn’t it—?”
“Uh-huh, during the great strike. The police took the converters without difficulty and operated them till the trouble was over. So—if Wilson’s tried it again, he must think he can hold the engine section against attack. Or maybe—maybe he doesn’t expect an attack at all—”
“You mean the police are in his pay—no!”
“I don’t know what I mean.” Friday groped to his feet, and his only emotion was a rising chill of anger. “But it’s time we found out. I’m going to get the men together.”
They located a flashlight and went down the corridors toward the armory. It was utterly black save where their own beam wavered, a smothering blackness in which Friday thought he could hardly breathe. That was nonsense; the air wouldn’t get foul for hours yet; but his heartbeat was frantic in his ears. People had retreated, the halls were almost empty—now and then another glow would bob out of the tunnel before them, a weirdly highlighted face. The elevators were dead; they used ringingly echoing companionways, down and down and down into the guts of the ship.
Silent ship, darkened ship; it was as if she were already dead, as if he and Elena were the last life aboard her, the last life in all the great hollow night between Sol and Centauri. Elena sobbed with relief when they came to the armory.
Friday had maintained a rotating watch there, sentries who challenged him in voices gone shrill with fear. Others were arriving, men and their families, the agreement being that in emergency this would be the rallying place. It was easily defensible, especially with the weapons stockpiled there.
Flashlights danced in the gloom, picking out faces and shimmering off metal, and the great sliding shadows flowed noiselessly around the thin beams. Friday shouted till the walls rang, calling the folk around him, seeking to allay the rising tide of hysteria.
“As soon as enough of us are here,” he said, “we’ll go out and see what we can do.”
“The hell you say!” exploded a voice from the murk. “We’ll stay here where we can defend ourselves!”
“Till the oxygen and the heat are gone? Would you rather choke and freeze?”
“They’ll reach some agreement before then. Wilson can’t let the whole ship die.”
“They’ll reach Wilson’s kind of agreement, if any. Something’s happened so the police can’t protect us any more. We’ll have to act for ourselves.”
“Go out and get killed in the dark? Not I, Mister!”
Friday had to resort to all the tactics of demagoguery—he was getting good at it, he thought—before the recalcitrants could be brought around. The agreement finally was that some men should stay to guard the women and children, while the rest would go out and—
And what? Friday did not dare admit that he had no idea. What, in all those miles of lightless tunnels and cave-like rooms, could they do?
There was an altercation at one of the doors. Friday went over to it and found a pair of pikemen thrusting back a shadowy and protesting group of men.
“Bunch of goddam workers want in,” explained one of the guards.
Friday shone his torch into the vague mass and picked out the battered red face of Carter. “Sam! What the hell—”
“Fine way to treat us. We only want to join your bunch, Doc.”
“Huh? I thought you were a Brotherhood man!”
“Yeah, but not a mutineer. I didn’t think Old Tom’d ever try anything like this—just thought we’d roughhouse it a bit with the topdeck goons and holler for our rights. But God, Doc, his men got guns!”
“What?”
“Fact. Ain’t too careful about using them, either. Me and some others that hadn’t joined the goons were given a last chance to do it or get brigged—a goon squad come into the barracks and told us. But we got the jump on ’em, and here’s my proof.” The light glimmered off the pistol in Carter’s fist. “We had a running fight to get down to low-weight, but others joined us on the way—some o’ the boys who’d signed on as goons but didn’t see mutiny, and others from here and there. They’ve took over the engine-section, Doc, and the gyros and the farms. There’s men here with me who was on duty when the goons came in and kicked ‘em out. Some of ’em had buddies who got shot for not moving fast enough. We wanna fight with you now, Doc!”
Numbly, Friday waved his sentries aside and let the workers file in. Gray and green, burly men with smoldering eyes, perhaps two score all told—a welcome addition, yes, but they were the heralds of evil tidings.
He let his watch sweep out another hour of darkness and restlessness and slowly rising temperature. Without regulation, the room was filled with animal heat of its occupants, the air was hot and foul. Later would come the cold.
Othets straggled in, one by one or in small groups, Guildsmen and some more of the laboring class. But there was no further news, and presently the influx ceased. It was time to strike out.
A count-off showed that he had a little over a hundred men ready to go. Go—where?
He decided to head for the upper levels. There should be his best chance of getting information—there, too, was the nerve center of the ship. If Wilson held her heart and lungs, her brain might still be accessible.
They went out, a hundred men armed with hand weapons of the oldest sort and a few scattered guns, daunted by the night and their loneliness. Silently, save for heavy breathing, they streamed down the corridors and along the companionways, only an occasional short flash of light revealing them. Friday drew on his memory of the ship’s plan, which every cadet was required to learn, to guide them well away from the key points which Wilson held. He didn’t want more fighting than he could avoid.
The ship was dark and still. Someone whimpered behind him, a little animal sound of fear.
They wound up the levels, feeling their bodies grow heavier, feeling the sweat on their skins and the bitter taste of panic in their mouths. Once in awhile someone ran before them, sandaled feet slapping down the tunnel and fading back into the thick silence.
“God,” whispered Carter. “What’s happened to the ship?”
His yoke was shaken, and Friday realized that the same despair was rising in him. It wouldn’t take many hours of night and stillness and creeping chill before everyone aboard capitulated, before the entire crew would be ready to assail anyone that still tried to resist. “Come on!” he said harshly.
They were in the upper levels when a flash gleamed far down the hall, someone nearing. Friday heard the sigh of tension behind him. If this was a mutineer gang, and. . . .
“Who goes?” The cry wavered in the dark. “Who is it?”
“Put up your hands,” shouted Friday. The echoes ran down the length of the corridor, jeering at him.
“Come close.”
It was a single man in Astro uniform. Friday recognized him—Ensign Vassily, secretary to Farrell. Farrell!
The gun was heavy in his fist. “What do you want?”
“Friday—Friday—” It was a sob. The flash-beam glistened off sweat and tears. “God, man, you’re here! We’ve been looking—”
“Looking! What for? Aren’t you with Wilson too?”
“Not now. The mutiny’s got out of hand. Wilson has the police trapped, Farrell can’t leave—he managed to send a few of us out, he knew of your gang— Friday, it’s up to you, you’ve got to save the ship!”
“Out of hand— What the devil are you talking about?”
“Wilson was too smart.” The boy’s breath sobbed in his throat. “He didn’t let any of his top chiefs in on his plans till it was too late. He—he started a riot down in Park Four, a big riot that brought out all the police force. Then his men—he’d gotten some firearms from a police officer that was with him, we didn’t know he had anyone in the police— His men came with machine guns and flame throwers. They’ve got the force bottled up in the park—and meanwhile they’ve taken over the rest of the ship!”
So that was it, thought Friday. Simple! You lured all your enemies into one of the park sections and then mounted guard over the half-dozen exits. A few men with weapons and gas masks could keep a thousand besieged until cold and darkness and choking air forced them to surrender.
“Where do you fit in?” He shook Vassily till the teeth rattled in the ensign’s jaws. “What do you mean, the mutiny’s out of hand? Did you engineer it yourself?”
“Farrell—the Captain— I do not know, Friday, so help me God I don’t know what it’s all about!”
With a sudden terrible conviction: “Gómez and Farrell framed me, didn’t they? They had me broken down to crewman!” When Vassily remained still, Friday cracked the pistol barrel against his head. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Uh—yes, no, I don’t know— Friday, you’ve got to help us! We’ve been searching the ship for you, running down all the corridors with Wilson’s men ready to shoot, you’re the last one who can help!”
“Help?” Carter’s laugh was bitter. “Spears and axes against guns ?”
“Most of Wilson’s men don’t have guns. He d-d-doesn’t want ’em to get out of hand, I guess. Just the ones holding in the police, and holding the k-key points—”
Friday’s mind began turning over with an abnormal speed and sureness. There wasn’t time to be afraid, not now, not when all the ship was darkened. “That means the rest of the ship’s weapons are still in the arsenal,” he said rapidly. “I suppose Wilson’s mounted guard over them?”
“I—I s-s-suppose so—”
Friday’s memories riffled through the plans of the ship. The police quarters were near the bows, with the arsenal behind them, just under the ship’s skin. Beyond that lay a boat blister, whose airlock offered an emergency exit—or entrance. Wilson’s guards would be inside the ship, though, in front of the doors leading into the police area. He hoped!
There were other blisters along the length of the ship, holding the boats which would land when the Pioneer had taken up an orbit around a planet. And there were spacesuits stored at each one.
“This way!” he said.
It was strange walking on the outside. Eyes accustomed to a narrowness of walls swam with vertigo in naked space. Centrifugal force threw blood into the head, the heart began to beat wildly and the body refused to believe that it was not hanging downward. You had to be careful how you stepped—if both magnetic shoes were off the hull at once, you would be thrown into space, you could go spinning out and out forever into the dark between the stars.
Above your feet was the mighty curve of the ship, dimly gleaming metal tilted at a crazy angle against the sky, elliptical horizon enclosing all the life in more than a light-year of emptiness. It rang faintly under human footfalls, and the suit was thick with your heartbeat and breathing, but over that lay the elemental silence. It was a silence which sucked and smothered, the stupendous quiet of vacuum reaching farther than a man could think, and the tiny noises of life were unnaturally loud against it.
Below was the turning sky, the constellations wheeling in fire and ice against a savage blackness, the chill glory of the Milky Way and the far green gleam of nebulae, hugeness, loneliness, and terror. The raw cold grandeur was like frost along the nerves; men felt sick and dizzy with the streaming of the stars.
Faint light glimmered off spacesuits and weapons as the troop made its slow way over the hull. About half the band had come out through four exits, and they clustered together for comfort against the hollow dark. Few words were spoken, but the harsh rasp of their breathing rattled in the helmet radios.
As they approached the bows, Friday could pick out the stabbing brilliance of Alpha Centauri—but Sol was lost somewhere in the thronging stars, nearly three light-years away. He found it hard to believe that the ship was rushing through space at fantastic velocity—no, it was motionless, it was lost forever between the stars.
And in the face of that immensity and that mission, he thought bitterly, men had nothing better to do than fight each other. With all the universe around them, they could not unite in a society which did not tear itself apart.
There was a certain cruel symbolism in the fact that it was Astrogation which had betrayed him—the men who steered between the worlds, dealing in rottenness and death. But after all, what else did those officers have to do? There were no planets between the suns, no orbital corrections to make—the department existed to keep alive the techniques and, meanwhile, to hold various posts connected with the general maintenance of the ship. And to stir up against each other men who should have been comrades—to break the innocent with lies, to provoke mutiny by injustice and intrigue, to infiltrate the revolts they themselves had created and control them for some senseless unknown purpose.
His jaws hurt with the clenching of his teeth. There was work to be done: enter the arsenal from outside, get the weapons, overcome the guards, then go on to Park and fall on Wilson’s men from behind so that the police could get out. Afterward it would be simple to clean up the rest of the mutineers; most likely they’d surrender at once when the police moved against them. But after that—after that—!
Evan Friday walked slowly toward the door. It was strange to be back topside. After the noise and fury and belly-knotting terror of battle, after the lights had gone on again and folk had returned shakenly to resume life—of necessity, there had been amnesty for all rebels save the ringleaders—after the quite undeserved but pleasant adulation of gray and green and Guild, there had been a polite note requesting his attendance on the Captain, and he had donned his shabby best and gone. And that was all there was to it.
He felt no special emotion, it was drained from him and only a great quiet steadiness of purpose was left. It was no use hating anyone, they were all together in the ship and the ship was alone between the stars. But there was certain words he had to say.
The policeman at the door saluted him. “This way, please, sir,” he said.
So now it’s “sir” again. Do they think that can bribe me?
They went down a short hall and through an anteroom. The clerks looked up from their work with a vague apprehensiveness. Friday nodded to a man he had known a half a year ago—half a lifetime!—and at his escort’s gesture went alone through the inner door.
There were three men sitting at the great table in the Captain’s office—frail white-haired Gómez, lean gray Farrell, stocky dark McMurtrie. They rose as he entered, and he stood with straining military stiffness. He couldn’t help feeling naked without his uniform.
“How do you do, Ensign Friday.” Gómez’ old voice was hardly above a whisper. “Please be seated.”
He found a chair and watched them out of cold eyes. “You are mistaken, sir,” he answered. “I have no rank.”
“Yes, you do, or rather you will as soon as that miscarriage of justice has been taken care of.”
“Let us be plain with each other,” said Friday flatly. “I know that you are responsible for my conviction. I also know that you and your associates engineered the mutiny, and that Wilson was only a force of which you made use. The casualties of the whole affair were some thirty killed and fifty wounded. If you had not summoned me here I would have come myself to charge you with murder.”
There was pain in Gómez’ slow reply: “And you would be perfectly justified. But perhaps the charge should be modified to manslaughter. We did not intend that there should be any death, and it weighs more heavily on us than you can imagine. But as you also know, the business got out of control, Wilson succeeded far beyond our expectations, and only your timely intervention saved us. Fortunately, the plan does not call for putting the ship into such danger again.”
“I should hope not!” snapped Friday. “Before you go any further, perhaps I had better say, that I left the traditional sealed envelope containing all I know with a friend. If I don’t return soon, you may look for an unplanned uprising.”
“Oh, you are in no danger,” smiled Farrell. “It would hardly do for us to assault the next Captain.”
“I—you—what?”
Numbly, Friday heard the voice continue: “In about five years, I imagine, you will be ready to succeed Captain Gómez.”
He forced steadiness back, and there was a new anger in his reply: “Don’t you think you can buy me that way, or any other. The whole structure of ship society is wrong. Our history has been one succession of bunglings, injustices, and catastrophes. I am here to call for a complete overhauling. And the first item will be to clean out the rotten blood-suckers who claim to be the leaders.”
“Please, Mr. Friday,” said McMurtrie, a little irritably. “Spare the emotional language till you’ve heard a bit more. For your information, every major wrong this expedition suffered has been created deliberately by the leaders—because they’ve really had no choice in the matter.”
Friday glared at him. “You should know!” he spat. “You’ve run the whole dirty show, for twenty years this doddering fool has been your puppet, and—”
“I have not. The story goes, yes, that I am the power behind the throne. It’s true that I’ve worked hard to keep things going. And I took the blame, because the Captain cannot afford it. He must have, if not the respect, at least the grudging acquiescence of the ship. But Captain Gómez is a very strong and skillful gentleman, and the decisive voice has always been his.”
Friday shook his head. The maze of plot and counterplot, blinds and red herrings and interwoven cabals, was getting to be too much for him. “Why?” he asked dully. “What’s the reason been? This is the greatest adventure man has ever faced, and now you say you’ve deliberately perverted it. If you aren’t fiends and aren’t madmen—why?”
“Let me start from the beginning,” said Gómez.
He leaned back in his chair and half closed his eyes. “Psychology is a highly developed science these days,” he said gently, “though for reasons which will become obvious it has been largely suppressed aboard ship. A potential leader is quietly given some years of intensive training in the field, for use later on—as you will be given it. And among the thousands of men who worked ten or twenty years on Earth planning this voyage, there were many psychologists. They could foresee events with more precision than I can convey to you; but I hope my bare words will be convincing.
“Consider the Pioneer. Once on her way, she is a self-contained world. Everything we can possibly need to keep alive and comfortable is built into her. There is no weather, no disease, no crop failure, no earthquake, no outside invader, no new land to cultivate—nothing! A world potentially changeless! To be sure, for some twenty years the crew was still working on internal construction, but then that source of occupation and challenge was gone and there were still a hundred years or more of traveling left. A hundred years where a bare minimum of work would provide an excellent living for everyone.
“What is the crew going to do in those hundred years?”
For a moment Friday was taken aback at the question. The imbecile simplicity and the monstrous blindness of it held him dumb before he could answer: “Do? Why, God, man, the things that we have been doing, the worthwhile things that got accomplished in spite of all that went wrong. Science, music, the arts—”
McMurtrie gave him a scornful look. “What percentage of the population can keep amused that way?” he asked.
“Why—uh—ten per cent, maybe— But the rest— What’s your psychology for, anyway? I’ve read books from Earth, I know there were primitive cultures where people were content to live perfectly uneventful, routine lives for thousands of years at a time. You could have created such a culture within the ship.”
“And how fit would that culture be for the hardships and dangers of Alpha Centauri?” demanded Farrell.
“It’s a question of decadence,” said Gómez persuasively. “If you read your history, you’ll find that the decadent cultures, the ones without hope or enterprise or anything but puerile experimentation hiding a rockbound conservatism, have been those which lacked some great external purpose. They’ve been easier to live in, yes, until the decadence went so far that disintegration set in. The cultures which offered a man something to live for besides his own petty self—a crusade, a discovery, a dream of any kind, perhaps only the prospect of new land for settlement—have usually been violent, intolerant, unpleasant in one way or another, simply because everything else has been subordinated to the great purpose. I submit, as examples, Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, and nineteenth-century America, and ask you to compare them with, say, Imperial Rome or eighteenth-century Europe. You will also note that the greatest works of art and intellect were done in some of the most turbulent eras. As far as I can determine, the progress made aboard our ship has been rather because of than in spite of all our troubles.”
“But damn it, man, we have a mission!” exploded Friday. “We’re bound for far Centauri!”
“To be sure. That was the dream which sufficed the first generation. I don’t say that unrest is a necessary component of non-decadence, in fact my whole argument has been grossly oversimplified. There was little strife in the beginning, because there was the great goal to dwarf men’s petty differences.
“But what of the next generation, and the one after that, and the one after that, clear to Centauri? What was the goal to them but a vague thing in the background, an accepted part of everyday life—a thing which they would never see, or only see as very old people at best, a thing which had caused their lives to be spent in a cramped and sterile environment far from the green Earth? Don’t you think there would have been a certain amount of subconscious resentment? And don’t you think that the descendants of human stock deliberately chosen for energy, initiative, and general ability would have looked around for something worthwhile to do? And if nothing else is available, personal aggrandizement is a perfectly worthwhile goal.”
“Couldn’t—” Friday hesitated. The whole fiendish argument had a shattering conviction about it, and yet it seemed wrong and cruel. “Couldn’t there have been a static culture for the in-between generations, and a revival of the dynamic sort in the generation that will reach Centauri young?”
“Now you’re wallowing in wishful thinking,” said McMurtrie. “Cultures have momentum. They don’t change themselves overnight. Just tell me how you’d do all this, anyway.”
Friday was silent.
“Believe me, all this was foreseen, and the solution adopted, while admittedly not very good, was the best available,” said Farrell earnestly. “Conflict was inevitable. But if it could be controlled, properly directed, it could have great value, not only in keeping the dynamic society we will need at Centauri going, but also as a hard school for the unknown difficulties we will face then.
“Naturally, overt control is impossible. It has to be done indirectly—as far as possible, events simply have to take their natural course, with such men as know the secret and the techniques of psychology serving only as unnoticed guides.
“The initial setup was designed to cause a certain chain of development. The original small-scale private enterprises became monopolies in a very natural way, and their excesses provoked reactions, and so it has been throughout the history of the ship. Now and then things have gotten out of control, such as during the great strike, or the recent riots and mutiny, but by and large the plan has progressed in its ordained path—the path which, believe it or not, in the long run has produced the minimum possible unrest and conflict.
“Some men have striven for their own selfish ends, money or power—Wilson was one. We need their type for the plan, we offer it chances to develop—and at the same time, through the ultimate annihilating defeat of such men, we need the type out of our society. More men have responded in desirable ways.
“They have demanded justice for themselves, or for their class, or even—like yourself—for classes not their own, for the ship as a whole. Thus is born the type we ultimately want, the hard-headed fighting visionaries.”
“A hell of a way to get them,” said Friday disconsolately.
“The trouble with young idealists,” said Gómez dryly, “is that they expect all mankind to live up to their own impossibly high standards. When the human race obstinately keeps on being human, these young men, instead of revising their goals downward to something perhaps attainable, usually turn sour on their whole species. But man isn’t such a bad race, Friday. Give him a little time to evolve.
“As for you, I’d had my eye on you for a long time. You were able, intelligent, stubborn in your notions of right and wrong—all good qualities for a skipper if I do say so myself. You needed to be kicked out of a certain snobbishness and to learn practical politics. I arranged for you to be thrown into a milieu demanding such a development. If you’d failed, you’d have been exonerated in time and given some harmless sinecure. As it is, you’ve responded so well that we think you’re the best choice for the next Captain—the one who’ll reach Centauri!”
Friday said nothing. There seemed nothing to say.
“You’ll go back to lower decks for a while and lead the Guilds,” resumed Gómez. “They have a good claim now for a voice on the Council, having saved the ship and discovered their own strength. They’ll get it, after some difficulty and agitation. You’ll be cleared of the charges against you and restored to officer class with a higher rank, but remain Guild spokesman. In the course of time, the Guilds will build up power and ultimately join with Astro to oust the other factions from an effective voice. No violence, if it can be helped, but a restoration of mercantile economy. By then you should have learned enough psychology, practical and theoretical, to take over the Captaincy from me—which will, among other things, allay the old and perfectly correct suspicion that Astro has been quietly running the whole show all these years.
“Without going into detail on every planned event, there will be conditions aboard which, while actually quite tolerable, will contain enough social evil of one sort or another to call forth the best efforts of all men of good will, whether they know the great secret or not. Yes, we’ll give them their causes to fight for! And in the end their striving will succeed; the just and harmonious order of this voyage’s beginnings will be restored.
“It will be difficult, yes, it will take most of your lifespan. But the job should be completed by the time the ship is within four or five years of her goal. Then a satisfied and united humanity can begin making ready for the next great adventure.”
His voice trailed off, and he looked down at his desk with a blindness that spoke the continuing thought: The adventure I will never see.
“Are you game?” asked McMurtrie. “Do you want the job?”
“I—I’ll take it,” whispered Friday. “I’ll try.”
Gómez did not look up. It was as if he were seeing through the desk and the floor and the walls and corridors and hull, out to the loneliness between the stars.
Note: in the Cold Victory collection, the next story is “Holmgang” and so Sandra Miesel’s interstitial comments lead on from here to there.
(I’m skipping The Snows of Ganymede since I don’t have that story yet.)