“Then why did you do it?”
“I left Earth when I was twenty-eight and came to the Arcturian System. I’ve been there ever since. This trip was to be my first vacation, my first visit back to Earth in all that time. I was going to stay on Earth for six months. The Kloros instead captured us and would have kept us interned indefinitely. But I couldn’t--I couldn’t let them stop me from traveling to Earth. No matter what the risk, I had to prevent their interference. It wasn’t love of woman, or fear, or hate, or idealism of any sort. It was stronger than any of those.”
He stopped, and stretched out a hand as though to caress the map on the wall.
“Mr. Stuart,” Mullen asked quietly, “haven’t you ever been homesick?”
---
There is a perennial question among readers as to whether the views contained in a story reflect the views of the author. The answer is, “Not necessarily--” And yet one ought to add another short phrase “--but usually.”
When I write a story in which opposing characters have opposing viewpoints, I do my best, insofar as it lies within my capabilities, to let each character express his own viewpoint honestly.
There are few people who, like Richard III in Shakespeare’s play, are willing to say: “since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these fair and well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain.”
No matter how villainous Tom may appear to Dick, Tom undoubtedly has arguments, quite sincerely felt, to prove to himself that he is not villainous at all. It is therefore quite ridiculous to have a villain act ostentatiously like a villain (unless you have the genius of a Shakespeare and can carry off anything--and I’m afraid I haven’t.)
Still, no matter how I try to be fair, and how I try to present each person’s views honestly, I cannot make myself be as convincing in presenting views that don’t appeal to me, as in presenting those that do. Besides, the general working out of my story usually proceeds as I want it to; the victory, in one way or another, tends to lie with those characters whom I particularly like. Even if the ending is tragic, the point of the story (1 hate to use the word “moral”) is usually one that satisfies me.
In short, if you ignore the fine details of any of my stories and consider it as a whole, I think you will find that the feeling it leaves with you is the feeling that I myself feel. It isn’t a matter of conscious propaganda; it’s just that I am a human being who feels something and who cannot help having that feeling show in the story.
But there are exceptions
In 1951, Mr. Raymond J. Healy, an anthologist of note, was planning a collection of original science fiction stories, and asked me to write one. He made only one specification. He wanted an upbeat story--something which, in my own more unsophisticated way, I called a “happy ending” story.
So I wrote a happy ending, but since I always try to beat the rules out of sheer bravado, I tried to write an unexpected happy ending, one in which the reader doesn’t find out till the very end what the happy ending really is.
It was only after I had successfully (1 think) managed this particular tour de force and had had the story published, that I realized that my interest in technique had for once blinded me to content. Somehow this particular story, “In a Good Cause--,” doesn’t quite reflect my own feelings.
Groff Conklin, the late perceptive science fiction critic, once said that he liked this story, even though he disagreed with its philosophy, and to my embarrassment, I find that that is exactly how I myself feel.
First appearance--New Tales of Space and Time, 1951. Copyright, 1951, by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
In a Good Cause--
In the Great Court, which stands as a patch of untouched peace among the fifty busy square miles devoted to the towering buildings that are the pulse beat of the United Worlds of the Galaxy, stands a statue.
It stands where it can look at the stars at night. There are other statues ringing the court, but this one stands in the center and alone.
It is not a very good statue. The face is too noble and lacks the lines of living. The brow is a shade too high, the nose a shade too symmetrical, the clothing a shade too carefully disposed. The whole bearing is by far too saintly to be true. One can suppose that the man in real life might have frowned at times, or hiccupped, but the statue seemed to insist that such imperfections were impossible.
All this, of course, is understandable overcompensation. The man had no statues raised to him while alive, and succeeding generations, with the advantage of hindsight, felt guilty.
The name on the pedestal reads “Richard Sayama Altmayer.” Underneath it is a short phrase and, vertically arranged, three dates. The phrase is: “In a good cause, there are no failures.” The three dates are June 17, 2755; September 5, 2788; December 32, 2800;--the years being counted in the usual manner of the period, that is, from the date of the first atomic explosion in 1945 of the ancient era.
None of those dates represents either his birth or death. They mark neither a date of marriage or of the accomplishment of some great deed or, indeed, of anything that the inhabitants of the United Worlds can remember with pleasure and pride. Rather, they are the final expression of the feeling of guilt.
Quite simply and plainly, they are the three dates upon which Richard Sayama Altmayer was sent to prison for his opinions.
1--June 17, 2755
At the age of twenty-two, certainly, Dick Altmayer was fully capable of feeling fury. His hair was as yet dark brown and he had not grown the mustache which, in later years, would be so characteristic of him. His nose was, of course, thin and high-bridged, but the contours of his face were youthful. It would only be later that the growing gauntness of his cheeks would convert that nose into the prominent landmark that it now is in the minds of trillions of school children.
Geoffrey Stock was standing in the doorway, viewing the results of his friend’s fury. His round face and cold, steady eyes were there, but he had yet to put on the first of the military uniforms in which he was to spend the rest of his life.
He said, “Great Galaxy!”
Altmayer looked up. “Hello, Jeff.”
“What’s been happening, Dick? I thought your principles, pal, forbid destruction of any kind. Here’s a book-viewer that looks somewhat destroyed.” He picked up the pieces.
Altmayer said, “I was holding the viewer when my wave-receiver came through with an official message. You know which one, too.”
“I know. It happened to me, too. Where is it?”
“On the floor. I tore it off the spool as soon as it belched out at me. Wait, let’s dump it down the atom chute.”
“Hey, hold on. You can’t--”
“Why not?”
“Because you won’t accomplish anything. You’ll have to report.”
“And just why?”
“Don’t be an ass, Dick.”
“This is a matter of principle, by Space.”
“Oh, nuts! You can’t fight the whole planet.”
“I don’t intend to fight the whole planet; just the few who get us into wars.”
Stock shrugged. “That means the whole planet. That guff of yours of leaders tricking poor innocent people into fighting is just so much space-dust. Do you think that if a vote were taken the people wouldn’t be overwhelmingly in favor of fighting this fight?”
“That means nothing, Jeff. The government has control of--”
“The organs of propaganda. Yes, I know. I’ve listened to you often enough. But why not report, anyway?”
Altmayer turned away.
Stock said, “In the first place, you might not pass the physical examination.”
“I’d pass. I’ve been in Space.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. If the doctors let you hop a liner, that only means you don’t have a heart murmur or an aneurysm. For military duty aboard ship in Space you need much more than just that. How do you know you qualify?”
“Th
at’s a side issue, Jeff, and an insulting one. It’s not that I’m afraid to fight.”
“Do you think you can stop the war this way?”
“I wish I could,” Altmayer’s voice almost shook as he spoke. “It’s this idea I have that all mankind should be a single unit. There shouldn’t be wars or space-fleets armed only for destruction. The Galaxy stands ready to be opened to the united efforts of the human race. Instead, we have been factioned for nearly two thousand years, and we throw away all the Galaxy.”
Stock laughed, “We’re doing all right. There are more than eighty independent planetary systems.”
“And are we the only intelligences in the Galaxy?”
“Oh, the Diaboli, your particular devils,” and Stock put his fists to his temples and extended the two forefingers, waggling them.
“And yours, too, and everybody’s. They have a single government extending over more planets than all those occupied by our precious eighty independents.”
“Sure, and their nearest planet is only fifteen hundred light years away from Earth and they can’t live on oxygen planets anyway.”
Stock got out of his friendly mood. He said, curtly, “Look, I dropped by here to say that I was reporting for examination next week. Are you coming with me?”
“No.”
“You’re really determined.”
“I’m really determined.”
“You know you’ll accomplish nothing. There’ll be no great flame ignited on Earth. It will be no case of millions of young men being excited by your example into a no-war strike. You will simply be put in jail.”
“Well, then, jail it is.”
And jail it was. On June 17, 2755, of the atomic era, after a short trial in which Richard Sayama Altmayer refused to present any defense, he was sentenced to jail for the term of three years or for the duration of the war, whichever should be longer. He served a little over four years and two months, at which time the war ended in a definite though not shattering Santannian defeat. Earth gained complete control of certain disputed asteroids, various commercial advantages, and a limitation of the Santannian navy.
The combined human losses of the war were something over two thousand ships with, of course, most of their crews, and in addition, several millions of lives due to the bombardment of planetary surfaces from space. The fleets of the two contending powers had been sufficiently strong to restrict this bombardment to the outposts of their respective systems, so that the planets of Earth and Santanni, themselves, were little affected.
The war conclusively established Earth as the strongest single human military power.
Geoffrey Stock fought throughout the war, seeing action more than once and remaining whole in life and limb despite that. At the end of the war he had the rank of major. He took part in the first diplomatic mission sent out by Earth to the worlds of the Diaboli, and that was the first step in his expanding role in Earth’s military and political life.
2--September 5, 2788
They were the first Diaboli ever to have appeared on the surface of Earth itself. The projection posters and the newscasts of the Federalist party made that abundantly clear to any who were unaware of that. Over and over, they repeated the chronology of events.
It was toward the beginning of the century that human explorers first came across the Diaboli. They were intelligent and had discovered interstellar travel independently somewhat earlier than had the humans. Already the galactic volume of their dominions was greater than that which was human-occupied.
Regular diplomatic relationships between the Diaboli and the major human powers had begun twenty years earlier, immediately after the war between Santanni and Earth. At that time, outposts of Diaboli power were already within twenty light years of the outermost human centers. Their missions went everywhere, drawing trade treaties, obtaining concessions on unoccupied asteroids.
And now they were on Earth itself. They were treated as equals and perhaps as more than equals by the rulers of the greatest center of human population in the Galaxy. The most damning statistic of all was the most loudly proclaimed by the Federalists. It was this: Although the number of living Diaboli was somewhat less than the total number of living humans, humanity had opened up not more than five new worlds to colonization in fifty years, while the Diaboli had begun the occupation of nearly five hundred.
“A hundred to one against us,” cried the Federalists, “because they are one political organization and we are a hundred.” But relatively few on Earth, and fewer in the Galaxy as a whole, paid attention to the Federalists and their demands for Galactic Union.
The crowds that lined the streets along which nearly daily the five Diaboli of the mission traveled from their specially conditioned suite in the best hotel of the city to the Secretariat of Defense were, by and large, not hostile. Most were merely curious, and more than a little revolted.
The Diaboli were not pleasant creatures to look at. They were larger and considerably more massive than Earthmen. They had four stubby legs set close together below and two flexibly-fingered arms above. Their skin was wrinkled and naked and they wore no clothing. Their broad, scaly faces wore no expressions capable of being read by Earthmen, and from flattened regions just above each large-pupilled eye there sprang short horns. It was these last that gave the creatures their names. At first they had been called devils, and later the politer Latin equivalent.
Each wore a pair of cylinders on its back from which flexible tubes extended to the nostrils; there they clamped on tightly. These were packed with soda-lime which absorbed the, to them, poisonous carbon dioxide from the air they breathed. Their own metabolism revolved about the reduction of sulfur and sometimes those foremost among the humans in the crowd caught a foul whiff of the hydrogen sulfide exhaled by the Diaboli.
The leader of the Federalists was in the crowd. He stood far back where he attracted no attention from the police who had roped off the avenues and who now maintained a watchful order on the little hoppers that could be maneuvered quickly through the thickest crowd. The Federalist leader was gaunt-faced, with a thin and prominently bridged nose and straight, graying hair.
He turned away, “I cannot bear to look at them.”
His companion was more philosophic. He said, “No uglier in spirit, at least, than some of our handsome officials. These creatures are at least true to their own.”
“You are sadly right. Are we entirely ready?”
“Entirely. There won’t be one of them alive to return to his world.”
“Good! I will remain here to give the signal.”
The Diaboli were talking as well. This fact could not be evident to any human, no matter how close. To be sure, they could communicate by making ordinary sounds to one another but that was not their method of choice. The skin between their horns could, by the actions of muscles which differed in their construction from any known to humans, vibrate rapidly. The tiny waves which were transmitted in this manner to the air were too rapid to be heard by the human ear and too delicate to be detected by any but the most sensitive of human instrumentation. At that time, in fact, humans remained unaware of this form of communication.
A vibration said, “Did you know that this is the planet of origin of the Two-legs?”
“No.” There was a chorus of such no’s, and then one particular vibration said, “Do you get that from the Two-leg communications you have been studying, queer one?”
“Because I study the communications? More of our people should do so instead of insisting so firmly on the complete worthlessness of Two-leg culture. For one thing, we are in a much better position to deal with the Two-legs if we know something about them. Their history is interesting in a horrible way. I am glad I brought myself to view their spools.”
“And yet,” came another vibration, “from our previous contacts with Two-legs, one would be certain that they did not know their planet of origin. Certainly there is no veneration of
this planet, Earth, or any memorial rites connected with it. Are you sure the information is correct?”
“Entirely so. The lack of ritual, and the fact that this planet is by no means a shrine, is perfectly understandable in the light of Two-leg history. The Two-legs on the other worlds would scarcely concede the honor. It would somehow lower the independent dignity of their own worlds.”
“I don’t quite understand.”
“Neither do I, exactly, but after several days of reading I think I catch a glimmer. It would seem that, originally, when interstellar travel was first discovered by the Two-legs, they lived under a single political unit.”
“Naturally.”
“Not for these Two-legs. This was an unusual stage in their history and did not last. After the colonies on the various worlds grew and came to reasonable maturity, their first interest was to break away from the mother world. The first in the series of interstellar wars among these Two-legs began then.”
“Horrible. Like cannibals.”
“Yes, isn’t it? My digestion has been upset for days. My cud is sour. In any case, the various colonies gained independence, so that now we have the situation of which we are well aware. All of the Two-leg kingdoms, republics, aristocracies, etc., are simply tiny clots of worlds, each consisting of a dominant world and a few subsidiaries which, in turn, are forever seeking their independence or being shifted from one dominant to another. This Earth is the strongest among them and yet less than a dozen worlds owe it allegiance.”
“Incredible that these creatures should be so blind to their own interests. Do they not have a tradition of the single government that existed when they consisted of but one world?”
“As I said that was unusual for them. The single government had existed only a few decades. Prior to that, this very planet itself was split into a number of subplanetary political units.”