Planet in Peril Read online

  He heard the usual mounting purr, and looked up to see the TV screen on the wall coming to life. A middle-aged man at a desk. A desk bare of anything that might identify it. And the man wore no managerial badge.

  He was fat, red-faced, with a long thin nose and a remote sly look. He spoke with a slight lisp.

  "How are you, Official Grayner? Is there anything you need?”

  Charles said: “Yes. Water, a pain-killer, and an explanation. In that order, if it doesn’t inconvenience you.”

  The man nodded. He called, to someone out of camera range: “Water and neurasp for Official Grayner.” To Charles, he added: “You wouldn’t prefer brandy?”

  “Water will do.”

  “Let me introduce myself. My name is Ellecott.”

  “Of…?”

  Ellecot smiled; it was a dreamy unpleasant smile. “Don’t think I want to be awkward. But I would prefer it if you did not press that question—not right at the moment.”

  The door opened. Charles went across and took a flask of water and two neurasp pills from a tall silent man, again unidentifiable as to managerial. He nodded to the figure in the screen. “Excuse me.” While he was taking the pills and drinking from the flask, the door closed again.

  There was an almost immediate lifting of pain. Feeling a great deal more comfortable, Charles dragged the chair over to a position more directly facing the screen, and sat down.

  “You were saying?”

  Ellecott said: “Simply expressing a hope that you would not object to my retaining my incognito. In a delicate matter like this... I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  “I want to see Dinkuhl,” Charles said.

  Ellecott shrugged. “And if we haven’t got him?”

  “Then get him. He was standing just outside the door when I passed out. I can’t believe you would have left him behind to use the story on KF.”

  Ellecott shook his head with what seemed to be an attempt at roguishness. “We’ll have to see what we can do. I don’t know what’s happened about Dinkuhl, but I’ll try to find out for you. Like to have TV while you wait? You must find it boring in there.”

  There was one way of checking whether he was still on the North American continent, although he had no reason to think he wasn’t. He said casually:

  “Thank you. Red League will do. Unless you can get me KF?”

  “I believe,” Ellecott said, “that KF is temporarily off transmission. Red League coming up.”

  It was on the cards that Ellecott was telling the truth about KF—it was so much a one-man affair that Dinkuhl’s absence for more than twelve hours would probably knock it out. But in any case they would hardly have been likely to give him information that would tell him explicitly that he was or was not in the Detroit area. He found himself watching some sort of ceremony. On the screen serried ranks of men stood on a wide expanse of parade ground. At signals, blocks broke away and marched forward to salute the UC flag. That told him the date—November 21st. Graduation day. He watched the marching squads with something of nostalgia, something of pity. With the aid of Psycho and Med, their minds had been sifted, their psychoplans prepared. And so they advanced—Squads A and B destined for leadership, the administrators and rulers of the future—Squads C, D and E for research and development work—Squads F, G, H and I for foremen and generally supervisory jobs—and at the end all those other squads who were now embarking on an adult life of routine and security and Cosy Bright in steady doses. The workers. Charles watched the gaily-colored standard flap in a sharp northeasterly breeze. He had been a Squad D man. He wondered… Dinkuhl’s view that the managerial world was breaking down... could the explanation lie somehow in these neat military formations and the billowing flag?

  The screen clicked to emptiness, and then the emptiness gave way to Ellecott’s face again. Ellecott was still smiling.

  "Good news for you, Official Grayner. We’ve got Dinkuhl. We can arrange for you to be quartered with him for the period of your—for the period while we are fixing things up. We’re putting you into rather more comfortable quarters, too. I imagine you will be finding your present place on the cramped side.”

  Charles said warily: “That’s very good of you.”

  ‘Two of our men are coming along to collect you now. I know you will co-operate.”

  It was when, at the bidding of the two men, he climbed through the door into a peculiar tunnel-shaped passage that he realized what his surroundings were. The original cell, of course, should have put him on the track —the functional bareness, the door equidistant between floor and ceiling, the chair with straps and the hammock. Now the convoluting corridor, the evidence of bulkhead construction, and, above all, the handrails for maneuvering in non-gravity conditions, made things quite unmistakable. He was in a spaceship. A spaceship at rest, it was true, since gravity was the normal gravity, not the artificial variety, and there was nothing of the inevitable background vibration. But a spaceship nevertheless. He glanced at his two badgeless guardians with private satisfaction. So it was Interplanetary who had him.

  He recognized the room into which he was shown as one of the messrooms, converted hastily for his own and Dinkuhl’s accommodation. The fine seams in the walls were indicators of the presence of pop-out tables, and there was the hatch in one comer, through which food would normally arrive. The TV screens on facing walls were messroom style, too.

  A certain amount of odd furniture had been brought in, including, he was surprised and pleased to see, a bookcase. Dinkuhl was standing behind this with a book in his hand. He looked up when Charles came in, and waved.

  “Glad to see you, Charlie. They’ve already written me of as a big-mouthed recalcitrant so I will begin with a word or two of warning. Those TV screens may be blank, but don’t think they aren’t registering. And I know enough about modem microphones to be able to assure you that if you or I whisper loud enough for the other to hear, we are whispering loud enough for our friends to listen, too. That being so, I think they should be warned that we are taking the reasonable precaution of not discussing anything that in our view is likely to help them in any way.”

  Charles said: “Fair enough. How did they get you, by the way?”

  “Astarate—but a milder dose than you, I gather. At any rate I have been awake for a few hours, and I took it you were newly risen. They told me you had insisted on our being reunited before you answered any questions.”

  Charles watched Dinkuhl, trying to probe whatever might underlie the familiar sardonic friendliness. “I thought it a good idea.”

  Dinkuhl nodded. “Very sound. I can’t say what they planned to do with me—I was presumably picked up in the first place because I could hardly be left behind in the circumstances. But I take it I am dispensable. And that is something else that I think we must have out in the open, where we can see it as well as the eyes that watch, the ears that harken. To what extent are you to trust me? The fact that you asked to see me doesn’t signify, except insofar as it makes things easier for them —supposing I am on their side.”

  Charles grinned. “The company is welcome, anyway. You restore my morale, Hiram.”

  “And that, too, can work both ways. But this seems a good time to tackle a point that I imagine may have begun to worry you—the question of your own importance. You will have realized that quite a number of people are more interested than a little in the work that was being done at the UC laboratory where you had so short and eventful a stay. Humayun and the Koupals may not have been captured by the same managerial. There is no reason to assume they were, and if they weren’t, some of the apparent confusion in leaving Sara Koupal for a fortnight after Humayun’s apparent death is removed. Now, is there anything that still strikes you as odd?”

  Charles hesitated. Then: “The lab wasn’t particularly well protected. All Humayun’s reports were on file there. I admit I was a bit confused at first, but as soon as Sara explained what Humayun had been after, the pieces clicked together. Now these pe
ople who are showing such an interest in the whole business—I take it they must know what it is they are interested in. So in that case, why not simply pick up the reports? Why grab me?”

  “That,” Dinkuhl said, “is, of course, the crux of the matter. Why are you important—important enough to be treated with such circumspection by your own managerial, to be offered substantial aid and comfort by my own little group of subversives, and now to find yourself benevolently but firmly held as a prisoner by Interplanetary? The answer is: Your mind and its skills.”

  “I’m afraid that’s nonsense. Sixteen years of a routine lab job don’t make for indispensability. And it isn’t as though the problem is a particularly stiff one. I can’t see it offering insurmountable difficulties to anyone.”

  “Point one,” Dinkuhl said. “The sixteen years were an error. I’ll come back to that in a minute. Point two. I could show you a neat little problem in mike and camera handling which would leave you blank and wondering. It’s not an exceptionally difficult problem, but you wouldn’t get to first base on it, because you haven’t got the basic orientation. Problems look easy to those who can see a way of cracking them; if you haven’t the right kind of mind and the right kind of background, they’re insuperable.”

  Charles said tolerantly: “And I’m the blue-eyed boy— the only one who can crack the nut? An odd coincidence that there should have been three of us linked together— Humayun and Sara and myself.”

  “Humayun and Sara Koupal,” Dinkuhl said, “were Siraqis. In a way it was a coincidence that you should have been sent to take Humayun’s place, but the coincidence was a limited one only. Now we come back to the question of those sixteen years in routine research at Saginaw. The coincidence was that after P and M had made their blunder and routed you into D Squad at graduation—what a lot we all know about you, Charlie! —you should have been shoved, entirely by chance, into work on the substance, diamond, that Humayun was going to do big things with fifteen years later.”

  Dinkuhl glanced at him speculatively. “I wonder why you didn’t do anything big yourself?”

  Charles said: “My procedure was mapped out for me. As far as I can see, Humayun was given a free hand. It’s the only way you can hope to get anything valuable done.”

  “And, apart from Humayun, do you know of anyone who has been given a free hand in research?”

  “I only know Saginaw. There were no free hands there.”

  “There are no free hands anywhere, Charlie. But it wouldn’t matter a nickel if they were free, because they would not do anything. Yes, you might have done, but you were the exception—you were P and M’s prize error. If your psychoplan had been properly prepared you wouldn’t have been in research in the first place. You would have been fulfilling your rightful duties as an administrator. Along with Ledbetter and the rest of the boys.”

  Charles said: “I suppose so. You mean—”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you for a long time,” Dinkuhl said. “The managerial state is dead. And to a certain extent, killed by its merits. It evolved a neat system for picking out its better brains and giving them the plum jobs, but it broke its neck on a minor anomaly—that the plum jobs, whatever form of society you base your ideas on, are going to be the administrative jobs, the jobs involving power of men over men. Science doesn’t fit into that capitalism, it developed a hierarchy which meshed in with the real society around it. Scientists did their good work while they were young, and landed the plum jobs in later life.

  “But observe the managerial arrangements: a basic and largely disciplinary and conditioning training up to the point of graduation. Followed by specialization. Very efficient. Too efficient. Because to the managerial world it would seem pointless to train a man in the sciences unless he were going to spend the remainder of his life in those fields; and once he had been trained in a scientific discipline, then they made sure that he did that, and nothing else. You get it?”

  Charles said: “And now they will have to do something about it—about science, anyway?”

  “Now,” Dinkuhl said, “they are doing only one thing— scrambling for the means of domination that’s been tossed into the arena. What’s the answer? One will get it, or more than one will get it. If the former, you have your centralized world control. If the latter, you either have a smaller, tighter hierarchy, or else a bloody struggle which one may win. Give managerialism credit for political astuteness—I think they will arrange it peaceably in the long run.”

  “And then?”

  “Not much more than a century sees managerialism on the way out. I don’t know what comes next. Maybe the deluge.”

  “But why destroy, without having anything to offer?” “Some things need destroying. We should put them out of their misery.” Dinkuhl smiled. “That’s why I like you, Charlie. You’re the kind of time-bomb they can’t stop happening. You and Humayun and Sara Koupal.”

  “I can think of more comfortable roles to have.” Dinkuhl looked round for a moment, and then bent down and stubbed his cigarette out against the TV screen control panel.

  “Yes, you do have your personal situation to consider. Well, our Interplanetary friends, who have permitted me to get indignant at such length about the world at large, will presumably be coming through with a nice warm offer for you. You will understand that—could they be sure of knocking out Humayun and Sara Koupal as well—it might be more convenient for them simply to eliminate you. Shortsighted, but then, they are all incorrigibly myopic, as I have been trying to make clear. Well, they can’t. At the moment, anyway.”

  Dinkuhl glanced thoughtfully in the direction of the TV screen on the near wall. “It would be more cheering, of course, if you could eliminate the possibility that the hierarchy will be formed before the weapon materializes. From their point of view—Interplanetary and whoever hold the remaining two—that might be a simpler solution. It must have occurred to them. In that case you would all become dispens—”

  Dinkuhl broke off speaking. The TV screen was glowing into life. Dinkuhl chuckled.

  “I thought that might fetch them.”

  Ellecott’s expression, on the screen, was somewhat ruffled. He made an evident effort at self-control; the same thin smile on the same fat features.

  He said: “I may say that my remarks, unless otherwise specified, will be addressed to you, Official Grayner. You wanted to see Dinkuhl again, and your wishes rank very high on our priority list. It is quite true that you are now in the hands of Interplanetary. You are of very great importance, not only to us in Interplanetary, but to the whole world.”

  “Where are Humayun and Sara Koupal?” Charles asked.

  “We don’t know—yet. We have a good Contact Section, and they are working on it. It will be a help when we have you safely at Luna City. We can then allow the rumor that we have you to get around. That may bring in something.”

  "I am not impressed by the prospect of Luna City,” Charles said.

  "Luna City is our stronghold. We could withdraw our relatively small bases on the planet and destroy every major city within twenty-four hours, from the space stations. It has never been considered.”

  Dinkuhl murmured: ‘1 wonder if the fact that the other managerials keep Interplanetary’s vital supplies on rather a hand-to-mouth basis could have anything to do with that?”

  Ellecott ignored him. “We have long been perturbed by the trend of events, and we propose to use our influence to change them. But the immediate and urgent problem is the question of the diamond solar power-source. This can be used as a small portable but very powerful battery, as you know. It can also be used as a weapon, with some minor modifications. There are some managerials who would misuse such a power source and such a weapon. One of those may have either Humayun or Sara Koupal, or both. We need your help, Official Grayner, to enable us to keep abreast of this other, or others. With your help, we can maintain peace. Without it, there is the prospect of a confused and barbarous civil war, and perhaps at last of tyranny.
As far as your future status is concerned, it is proposed to confirm you as a Director of this managerial, and a member of the Board. You will be given a free hand in your work, in the first place on Luna City but before too long, we hope, under your own choice of conditions here on Earth. Once the present crisis has been got under control you will be in charge of scientific development—and it is inevitable, you understand, that Interplanetary will have risen to a commanding position among managerials by that time. I think our offer is a fair one, and not unattractive. I hope you will agree to accept it.”

  "And if I don’t?”

  Ellecott smiled. "As an academic point, we’ll consider that. You will still go to Luna City, of course, because in addition to our major concern of having you work for us, there is the minor concern of making sure you don’t work for anyone else.”

  They didn’t know where Sara was. Doubtless they would promise to get her if he were to co-operate; but they would be putting all their effort into the search for her and Humayun anyway, for their own purposes.

  Charles hesitated. Presumably it was always a good principle to stall an unpromising situation. “Any reason why I shouldn’t have time to consider things?”

  “As long as you like,” Ellecott said. He lifted his finger and looked at it. “Purely as a point of information, this ship blasts in three hours. But of course you will have the whole time of the journey to the Moon in which to think things over.”

  It was Ellecott’s blandness as much as anything else which irritated Charles. They were not going to be budged from the path they had laid out for themselves. And they were certain that, in the end, he would come round.