“Which is?”
“Where it comes from. Its chemical cousins are scattered far and wide in everything which grows or crawls on this planet’s face. I can’t even make a respectable guess as to whether it’s plant or animal. All I know is that it’s from someplace Wildeblood looked. I’ll search his survey reports for a suspicious hole, but I’ll lay odds I won’t find one. He’ll have covered his tracks perfectly.”
“And so,” said Karen, “the big question remains unanswered. So what have we got?”
“Not a lot,” I said. “Let’s see what Nathan can make of it. If anyone can make capital out of it, he can. One of Philip’s secrets is a secret no more, at any rate. And, of course, there is the general pragmatic point.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “we now know how to become emperors. Pick our planet, and we can take it over. We could even have one each, or maybe a little galactic empire.”
Pete’s mouth was open a little, though he knew it wasn’t serious.
“Let’s you and me invade Earth,” suggested Karen. “I have this plan, see, for setting the world to rights....”
“Not Earth,” I said, shaking my head sadly.
“Why not?”
“Problems of supply,” I said. “Also demand. Earth is suffering from a surfeit of puppet-strings already. It has to be a colony—a virgin colony. I doubt if we could take over this one at such a late stage, unless we actually took over Philip’s source of supply. Starting up our own factory in opposition would just lead to all-out war. We’d have to be there at the very beginning, just like James Wildeblood.”
“Wildeblood and Machiavelli and Alexander the Great,” muttered Karen.
“Wait a second,” said Pete. “That isn’t so funny, you know.”
“You mean you want to hitch yourself to a new colony and become a dictator?” I said, still not serious, though a little thought echoed in the back of my mind that it wasn’t so inconceivable, and if that was what he did want—or Karen, or Nathan—then maybe it wasn’t so funny....
But that wasn’t what he meant.
“No,” he said. “Not my scene. What I mean is: if, here and now, somebody started up in opposition to Philip...leading to all-out war. Why do you think the guy that gave you the drug wants to know where it comes from? Think for a minute.”
I thought. It didn’t really need a minute. It was obvious. Only sometimes, when your mind’s full and buzzing, you can overlook the obvious.
“If this drug is the secret of Philip’s power-base,” I said, returning to the safety of “if” because we were with reality again, “then any opposition, to be meaningful opposition, would need to know it. And once they did....”
We’d come to find out how the colony was doing, to give it a helping hand. We were supposed to be working in the interests of the whole population. But how do you do that? How do you work in everybody’s interest, when you find a divided society, masters and servants—controllers and controlled—at its crudest level, maybe pushers and junkies. How do you walk into the middle of a game of chess, or an all-in brawl and say: “Right, folks, we’re here to make things better for everyone.”
No wonder Philip was worried about us, and having us followed, and keeping his secrets. Our declared intention was to overcome any little problems the people might have...like, for instance, addiction to some local joy-juice. How was he to know how we’d react when we found out? Come to that, even I wasn’t sure how we were going to react when we found out. I knew how I felt, but what, if anything, was I going to do? And as for Nathan, I had my suspicions about which way his perverted thinking might run, but I couldn’t be sure.
The future was still hazy, but it seemed to me then that if I could find out where the drug came from—if I did—then there were three alternatives. We could pat Philip on the back, say: “Jolly good show, wonderful colony you’re building here,” and leave him to it. Or we could let the cat out of the bag and start a war. Or we could go to Philip and say: “Look here, old boy, we don’t quite approve of the way you go about things—how about giving up virtually everything you’ve got, just as a kindly gesture.” Three alternatives, take your pick. And while we were picking....
As Nathan said, there was something in the air. We were coming late into the game and they’d already begun to make their moves.
We sat around like the three wise monkeys, contemplating the ghastliness of it all. Then Karen said: “Where does your stupid number-code fit into all this?”
“I wish I knew,” I replied. I repeated it, for effect.
Not only were they making their moves...but they were making moves we didn’t even understand.
“Suppose. you’re right,” said Pete. “Suppose the whole damn colony is addicted to this stuff. Could you break the addiction? Could you, shall we say, restore the balance of nature.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s a party trick. But the point is—would they want me to? This stuff doesn’t constitute a hold because of the threat of withdrawal symptoms—it constitutes a hold because it has something to sell. It’s not the fact that they need it that constitutes the problem...it’s the fact that they want it. It must pack one hell of a belt if it let Wildeblood take over so completely so easily. The fight isn’t about whether they want the stuff or not but over who controls its production and distribution...their fight, that is. I’m not quite sure what our fight is about. Maybe we ought to be looking to break the addiction for good and all. Maybe we oughtn’t. You know the line Nathan will take.”
“The colony is successful,” said Karen, quoting what she presumed would be Nathan’s thinking. “Anything which has contributed to that success is ipso facto a Good Thing. J. Wildeblood, biochemist and dictator, gets a medal, and the drug gets a round of applause. Maybe he’s right. Don’t look at me like that, Alex. If the seeds of cynicism haven’t germinated in you yet it isn’t because they haven’t been planted. It’s because they fell among the weeds of idealism. You know the world isn’t perfect; you know we always have to settle for what we can get. If this is what we can get...isn’t it better than Dendra? Isn’t it better than Kilner’s colonies?”
The situation on Dendra had been pretty bad. The colonies that Kilner had recontacted on the first Daedalus mission had found more than their share of troubles. Pietrasante had told me that I had to share my authority with Nathan because his precious committees believed that the problems weren’t primarily ecological problems of co-adaptation but social problems of people not being able to form viable communities. Maybe from Pietrasante’s point of view—and Nathan’s—Wildeblood had found the answer. How to conquer a world...the operative word being “conquer”.
“Maybe I don’t have the stomach for this job,” I said. “I swallowed Dendra. Maybe I’ll even sit silently by while Nathan rigs the books on that one in the name of political convenience. But how many more do I have to swallow?”
They didn’t answer me.
Kilner, my predecessor, had returned to Earth a very bitter man. He had let his bitterness run over, and had turned in a report which said, none too subtly, that mankind wasn’t fit to go out to the stars, that the colonies couldn’t work and ought to be abandoned. I thought that no matter what happened I couldn’t follow the same intellectual course. I thought that my own faith in extraterrestrial expansion was utterly unshakable. Now, for the first time, I began to wonder. The kind of thing that I kept having to face wasn’t what I’d expected. I’m an ecologist, and ecological