“A real priest’s hole!”
“Yeah, corny, ain’t it? This joint has more bolt holes than a rabbit’s nest—and booby-trapped, too. Too many gadgets, if you ask me.” He went back to his desk, opened a drawer, removed three film spools and dropped them in a pocket.
Gilead was about to go down the staircase; seeing the spools, he stopped. “Go ahead, Joe,” Baldwin said urgently. “You’re covered and outnumbered. With this raid showing up we wouldn’t have time to fiddle; we’ud just have to kill you.”
They stopped in a room well underground, another study much like the one above, though lacking sunlight and view. Baldwin said something in the odd language to the mike on the desk, was answered. Gilead experimented with the idea that the lingo might be reversed English, discarded the notion.
“As I was saying,” Baldwin went on, “if you are dead set on knowing all the answers—”
“Just a moment. What about this raid?”
“Just the government boys. They won’t be rough and not too thorough. Ma Garver can handle them. We won’t have to hurt anybody as long as they don’t use penetration radar.”
Gilead smiled wryly at the disparagement of his own former service. “And if they do?”
“That gimmick over there squeals like a pig, if it’s touched by penetration frequencies. Even then we’re safe against anything short of an A-bomb. They won’t do that; they want the films, not a hole in the ground. Which reminds me—here, catch.”
Gilead found himself suddenly in possession of the films which were at the root of the matter. He unspooled a few frames and made certain that they were indeed the right films. He sat still and considered how he might get off this limb and back to the ground without dropping the eggs. The speaker again uttered something; Baldwin did not answer it but said, “We won’t be down here long.”
“Bonn seems to have decided to check my report.” Some of his—former—comrades were upstairs. If he did Baldwin in, could he locate the inside control for the door?
“Bonn is a poor sort. He’ll check me—but not too thoroughly; I’m rich. He won’t check Mrs. Keithley at all; she’s too rich. He thinks with his political ambitions instead of his head. His late predecessor was a better man—he was one of us.”
Gilead’s tentative plans underwent an abrupt reversal. His oath had been to a government; his personal loyalty had been given to his former boss. “Prove that last remark and I shall be much interested.”
“No, you’ll come to learn that it’s true—if you still insist on knowing the answers. Through checking those films, Joe? Toss ’em back.”
Gilead did not do so. “I suppose you have made copies in any case?”
“Wasn’t necessary; I looked at them. Don’t get ideas, Joe; you’re washed up with the FBS, even if you brought the films and my head back on a platter. You slugged your boss—remember?”
Gilead remembered that he had not told Baldwin so. He began to believe that Baldwin did have men inside the FBS, whether his late bureau chief had been one of them or not.
“I would at least be allowed to resign with a clear record. I know Bonn—officially he would be happy to forget it.” He was simply stalling for time, waiting for Baldwin to offer an opening.
“Chuck them back, Joe. I don’t want to rassle. One of us might get killed—both of us, if you won the first round. You can’t prove your case, because I can prove I was home teasing the cat. I sold ’copters to two very respectable citizens at the exact time you would claim I was somewhere else.” He listened again to the speaker, answered it in the same gibberish.
Gilead’s mind evaluated his own tactical situation to the same answer that Baldwin had expressed. Not being given to wishful thinking he at once tossed the films to Baldwin.
“Thanks, Joe.” He went to a small oubliette set in the wall, switched it to full power, put the films in the hopper, waited a few seconds, and switched it off. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Gilead permitted his eyebrows to climb. “Kettle Belly, you’ve managed to surprise me.”
“How?”
“I thought you wanted to keep the nova effect as a means to power.”
“Nuts! Scalping a man is a hell of a poor way to cure him of dandruff. Joe, how much do you know about the nova effect?”
“Not much. I know it’s a sort of atom bomb powerful enough to scare the pants off anybody who gets to thinking about it.”
“It’s not a bomb. It’s not a weapon. It’s a means of destroying a planet and everything on it completely—by turning that planet into a nova. If that’s a weapon, military or political, then I’m Samson and you’re Delilah.
“But I’m not Samson,” he went on, “and I don’t propose to pull down the Temple—nor let anybody else do so. There are moral lice around who would do just that, if anybody tried to keep them from having their own way. Mrs. Keithley is one such. Your boyfriend Bonn is another such, if only he had the guts and the savvy—which he ain’t. I’m bent on frustrating such people. What do you know about ballistics, Joe?”
“Grammar school stuff.”
“Inexcusable ignorance.” The speaker sounded again; he answered it without breaking his flow. “The problem of three bodies still lacks a neat general solution, but there are several special solutions—the asteroids that chase Jupiter in Jupiter’s own orbit at the sixty degree position, for example. And there’s the straight-line solution—you’ve heard of the asteroid ‘Earth-Anti’?”
“That’s the chunk of rock that is always on the other side of the Sun, where we never see it.”
“That’s right—only it ain’t there anymore. It’s been novaed.”
Gilead, normally immune to surprise, had been subjected to one too many. “Huh? I thought this nova effect was theory?”
“Nope. If you had had time to scan through the films you would have seen pictures of it. It’s a plutonium, lithium, and heavy water deal, with some flourishes we won’t discuss. It adds up to the match that can set afire a world. It did—a little world flared up and was gone.
“Nobody saw it happen. No one on Earth could see it, for it was behind the Sun. It couldn’t have been seen from Moon Colony; the Sun still blanked it off from there—visualize the geometry. All that ever saw it were a battery of cameras in a robot ship. All who knew about it were the scientists who rigged it—and all of them were with us, except the director. If he had been, too, you would never have been in this mix up.”
“Dr. Finnley?”
“Yep. A nice guy, but a mind like a pretzel. A ‘political’ scientist, second-rate ability. He doesn’t matter; our boys will ride herd on him until he’s pensioned off. But we couldn’t keep him from reporting and sending the films down. So I had to grab ’em and destroy them.”
“Why didn’t you simply save them? All other considerations aside, they are unique in science.”
“The human race doesn’t need that bit of science, not this millennium. I saved all that mattered, Joe—in my head.”
“You are your cousin Hartley, aren’t you?”
“Of course. But I’m also Kettle Belly Baldwin, and several other guys.”
“You can be Lady Godiva, for all of me.”
“As Hartley, I was entitled to those films, Joe. It was my project. I instigated it, through my boys.”
“I never credited Finnley with it. I’m not a physicist, but he obviously isn’t up to it.”
“Sure, sure. I was attempting to prove that an artificial nova could not be created; the political—the racial—importance of establishing the point is obvious. It backfired on me—so we had to go into emergency action.”
“Perhaps you should have left well enough alone.”
“No. It’s better to know the worst; now we can be alert for it, divert research away from it.” The speaker growled again; Baldwin went on, “There may be a divine destiny, Joe, unlikely as it seems, that makes really dangerous secrets too difficult to be broached until intelligence reaches the point where it
can cope with them—if said intelligence has the will and the good intentions. Ma Garver says to come up now.”
They headed for the stairs. “I’m surprised that you leave it up to an old gal like Ma to take charge during an emergency.”
“She’s competent, I assure you. But I was running things—you heard me.”
“Oh.”
They settled down again in the above-surface study. “I give you one more chance to back out, Joe. It doesn’t matter that you know all about the films, since they are gone and you can’t prove anything—but beyond that—you realize that if you come in with us, are told what is going on, you will be killed deader than a duck at the first suspicious move?”
Gilead did; he knew in fact that he was already beyond the point of no return. With the destruction of the films went his last chance of rehabilitating his former main persona. This gave him no worry; the matter was done. He had become aware that from the time he had admitted that he understood the first message this man had offered him concealed in a double deck of cards he had no longer been a free actor, his moves had been constrained by moves made by Baldwin. Yet there was no help for it; his future lay here or nowhere.
“I know it; go ahead.”
“I know what your mental reservations are, Joe; you are simply accepting risk; not promising loyalty.”
“Yes—but why are you considering taking a chance on me?”
Baldwin was more serious in manner than he usually allowed himself to be. “You’re an able man, Joe. You have the savvy and the moral courage to do what is reasonable in an odd situation rather than what is conventional.”
“That’s why you want me?”
“Partly that. Partly because I like the way you catch on to a new card game.” He grinned. “And even partly because Gail likes the way you behave with a colt.”
“Gail? What’s she got to do with it?”
“She reported on you to me about five minutes ago, during the raid.”
“Hmm—go ahead.”
“You’ve been warned.” For a moment Baldwin looked almost sheepish. “I want you to take what I say next at its face value, Joe—don’t laugh.”
“Okay.”
“You asked what I was. I’m sort of the executive secretary of this branch of an organization of supermen.”
“I thought so.”
“Eh? How long have you known?”
“Things added up. The card game, your reaction time. I knew it when you destroyed the films.”
“Joe, what is a superman?”
Gilead did not answer.
“Very well, let’s chuck the term,” Baldwin went on. “It’s been overused and misused and beat up until it has mostly comic connotations. I used it for shock value and I didn’t shock you. The term ‘supermen’ has come to have a fairytale meaning, conjuring up pictures of x-ray eyes, odd sense organs, double hearts, uncuttable skin, steel muscles—an adolescent’s dream of the dragon-killing hero. Tripe, of course. Joe, what is a man? What is man that makes him more than an animal? Settle that and we’ll take a crack at defining a superman—or New Man, homo novis, who must displace homo sapiens—is displacing him—because he is better able to survive than is homo sap. I’m not trying to define myself, I’ll leave it up to my associates and the inexorable processes of time as to whether or not I am a superman, a member of the new species of man—same test to apply to you.”
“Me?”
“You. You show disturbing symptoms of being homo novis, Joe, in a sloppy, ignorant, untrained fashion. Not likely, but you just might be one of the breed. Now—what is man? What is the one thing he can do better than animals which is so strong a survival factor that it outweighs all the things that animals of one sort or another can do much better than he can?”
“He can think.”
“I fed you that answer; no prize for it. Okay, you pass yourself off a man; let’s see you do something. What is the one possible conceivable factor—or factors, if you prefer—which the hypothetical superman could have, by mutation or magic or any means, and which could be added to this advantage which man already has and which has enabled him to dominate this planet against the unceasing opposition of a million other species of fauna? Some factor that would make the domination of man by his successor, as inevitable as your domination over a hound dog? Think, Joe. What is the necessary direction of evolution to the next dominant species?”
Gilead engaged in contemplation for what was for him a long time. There were so many lovely attributes that a man might have: to be able to see both like a telescope and microscope, to see the insides of things, to see throughout the spectrum, to have hearing of the same order, to be immune to disease, to grow a new arm or leg, to fly through the air without bothering with silly gadgets like helicopters or jets, to walk unharmed the ocean bottom, to work without tiring—
Yet the eagle could fly and he was nearly extinct, even though his eyesight was better than man’s. A dog has better smell and hearing; seals swim better, balance better, and furthermore can store oxygen. Rats can survive where men would starve or die of hardship; they are smart and pesky hard to kill. Rats could—
Wait! Could tougher, smarter rats displace man? No, it just wasn’t in them; too small a brain.
“To be able to think better,” Gilead answered almost instantly.
“Hand the man a cigar! Supermen are superthinkers; anything else is a side issue. I’ll allow the possibility of super-somethings which might exterminate or dominate mankind other than by outsmarting him in his own racket—thought. But I deny that it is possible for a man to conceive in discrete terms what such a super-something would be or how this something would win out. New Man will beat out homo sap in homo sap’s own specialty—rational thought, the ability to recognize data, store them, integrate them, evaluate correctly the result, and arrive at a correct decision. That is how man got to be champion; the creature who can do it better is the coming champion. Sure, there are other survival factors, good health, good sense organs, fast reflexes, but they aren’t even comparable, as the long, rough history of mankind has proved over and over—Marat in his bath, Roosevelt in his wheelchair, Caesar with his epilepsy and his bad stomach, Nelson with one eye and one arm, blind Milton; when the chips are down it’s brain that wins, not the body’s tools.”
“Stop a moment,” said Gilead. “How about E.S.P.?”
Baldwin shrugged. “I’m not sneering at extra-sensory perception any more than I would at exceptional eyesight—E.S.P. is not in the same league with the ability to think correctly. E.S.P. is a grab-bag name for the means other than the known sense organs by which the brain may gather data—but the trick that pays off with first prize is to make use of that data, to reason about it. If you would like a telepathic hook up to Shanghai, I can arrange it; we’ve got operators at both ends—but you can get whatever data you might happen to need from Shanghai by phone with less trouble, less chance of a bad connection, and less danger of somebody listening in. Telepaths can’t pick up a radio message; it’s not the same wave band.”
“What wave band is it?”
“Later, later. You’ve got a lot to learn.”
“I wasn’t thinking especially of telepathy. I was thinking of all parapsychological phenomena.”
“Same reasoning. Apportation would be nice, if telekinetics had gotten that far—which it ain’t. But a pick-up truck moves things handily enough. Television in the hands of an intelligent man counts for more than clairvoyance in a moron. Quit wasting my time, Joe.”
“Sorry.”
“We defined thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, ‘either-or’ logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer,
he can’t use any sort of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.
“For explanations of a universe that confuses him he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity.
“That is why there is always room at the top, why a man with just a leetle more on the ball can so easily become governor, millionaire, or college president—and why homo sap is sure to be displaced by New Man, because there is so much room for improvement and evolution never stops.
“Here and there among ordinary men is a rare individual who really thinks, can and does use logic in at least one field—he’s often as stupid as the rest outside his study or laboratory—but he can think, if he’s not disturbed or sick or frightened. This rare individual is responsible for all the progress made by the race; the others reluctantly adopt his results. Much as the ordinary man dislikes and distrusts and persecutes the process of thinking he is forced to accept the results occasionally, because thinking is efficient compared with his own mauderings. He may still plant his corn in the dark of the Moon but he will plant better corn developed by better men than he.
“Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masques himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; he is a pink monkey among brown monkeys—a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he is caught. The brown monkey’s instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.