"Morgan isn't really big enough to be afraid of. He's a nuisance rather
than a real danger."
Leslie shook her head rather impatiently. "We've been through this already.
He's only a nuisance to you. But to Betty or Aileen, or anyone else weaker
than himself, he can certainly be a danger. How about Ritchie? Why is it
a mistake to hate him?"
"Nobody likes him, but he doesn't actually interfere with anyone. He hasn't
interfered with Aileen, or me, or you, or Sammy, or anyone else we know.
If he did it would be different. Why hate a man who leaves you alone,
who -- "
"You're talking nonsense, Bill," said Leslie warmly. "I suppose you'd say
if a man threatened you with a gun, that was nothing, that didn't matter,
until he shot you?"
I grinned. "That's hardly an exact parallel, is it, honey?"
"Maybe I'm not logical," retorted Leslie, "but I'd rather be right than
logical, any day. And I think I'm right about Ritchie, and that Aileen has
good reason . . . But one thing at a time. Let's go back to Morgan. You say
Aileen hasn't any reason to be afraid of him. Suppose you were Aileen.
Would you like to be Morgan's girl?"
"She doesn't have to be."
Leslie appealed to the heavens. "Look, Bill. Didn't you people realize
what you were doing when you abolished marriage?"
"What?"
"You were abolishing all sex crimes. There couldn't be any crime connected
with sex any more -- rape, adultery, bigamy -- "
"Hey, wait a minute. Assault's still a crime.
"Is it? Suppose Morgan just carries Aileen off, like a caveman. Who's
to stop him?"
I started to say something, but Leslie was in full cry. She very rarely
got worked up over anything. When she did, however, she could swamp
most people. She had quite enough intelligence to make all the right
points, when she cared to use it. I could just see her as Portia in the
trial scene.
"Betty doesn't matter," Leslie went on warmly, "since by abolishing marriage
you've abolished bigamy. Aileen would say it was assault, Morgan and Ritchie
would deny it. And who would Aileen appeal to? Ritchie's her PL. The council
wouldn't pay any attention. They haven't any sympathy for people who want to
stay single.
"So any time Ritchie decides to back Morgan, Aileen becomes Morgan's girl
whether she likes it or not. Use your imagination, Bill. Don't just say
it can't happen. It can. It will. Aileen's already asked to be transferred
to some other group, and been turned down. What now?"
"I told you," I said patiently, "that Aileen didn't have to be Morgan's
girl if she didn't want to, and I meant it. She can take Sammy instead."
"Say that again."
I did. Curiously, Leslie didn't seem to have thought of that. She hesitated
for a moment, put off her stroke. Then she murmured: "That's the first
sensible thing you've said."
Leslie had done us an injustice when she hinted that the lieutenants
didn't know what they were doing when they abolished marriage. We were
a people struggling to live, a people which must grow stronger and
bigger. We couldn't afford to be concerned about the moral niceties of
civilization. We weren't going to argue over bigamy, adultery, divorce,
remarriage, desertion, and all the rest of it.
The only thing that did still deserve some attention, we thought,
was the case where a man wanted a girl and the girl didn't want him,
or vice versa. Sex freedom was all very well, but it had to be freedom
for both. Laissez-faire isn't freedom -- it's freedom for the strong,
the determined, the persistent, and slavery for everyone else.
But someone pointed out that if A wanted B and B didn't want A, the answer
was for B to find someone else.
So the PLs were told to deal sternly with assault, but with that principle
in mind. In general, it was working very well. If someone, say, assaulted
Caroline Stowe (not that that was at all likely, but the law must
occasionally deal with hypothetical cases), and Caroline and John Stowe
demanded justice, the man concerned would be very, very sorry he'd done
it before the PLs concerned were finished with him. However, if some
proud, beautiful girl, used to having her own way and determined to keep
her figure the way it was, complained indignantly of assault, she was
liable to be asked if she had some other man in mind, and if she hadn't,
the offender was punished so mildly that he generally wasn't sorry at all.
I told Leslie some of this and she agreed that the lieutenants hadn't
been such fools after all.
"We can hardly allow people to wait around for years to fall in love,"
I said. "I don't expect Sammy and Aileen are in love, or anything like
it. This is a different kind of community from the one we left, and they
both have sense enough to realize it. If they don't dislike each other --
"
"I'm away ahead of you," said Leslie calmly. "We'll send them out tomorrow
night before it gets too cold, to hold hands and generally get acquainted.
You talk to Sammy first and I'll talk to Aileen. And maybe we can get the
Morrisons in the next room to move out to one of the new flats lower down,
more sheltered."
So after all this time of solitary grieving, drinking, hoping, fearing,
and working, Sammy found he had a girl. It was a queer, bittersweet
situation, the sort of thing that would naturally happen to Sammy.
For there was no pretense about it -- Aileen merely wanted a protector.
She still thought she might be forced in the end to take Morgan, and she
wanted to devalue herself, like a man gambling away a property because
he hated the people who were going to inherit it. She would live with
Sammy, but she told him -- in our room, before they went out -- with
somewhat unnecessary frankness, I thought:
"I don't pretend I'm going to love you, Sammy."
"That's all right," said Sammy with similar frankness, "I don't think
I'm going to love you either."
They laughed. "Well, anyway, you'll be better than Morgan," Aileen observed.
"If that's the best you can say for me," retorted Sammy, "I want a divorce."
They may have been more tender under the stars, when they went out to
get acquainted. I didn't see how they could help it. When they had gone,
I permitted myself for a moment to imagine myself in Sammy's place. . . .
"Enjoying it, darling?" asked Leslie tartly. I hear I'm not the first man
to discover his wife is a telepath.
"I was just thinking," I said, "that on the whole I'd rather have you.
Shall I tell you why?"
"Yes, please," said Leslie.
Later she said: "As a matter of fact they've been darned lucky, both of
them. I don't know why either of them has been allowed to hang around
single for so long, waiting for us to rub their noses together. As for
the fact that they hardly know each other -- you always claimed that
you weren't in love with me, didn't you?"
"That," I said, "was when I was young and foolish."
Sammy and Aileen were as matter-of-fact about living together as they
had been about discussing it. The Morrisons didn't move, but another
couple near us did, and Sammy and Aileen moved in at once.
Aileen insisted on taking Sammy's name. "I don't like Hoggan much," she said,
"but I like it a lot better than Ritchie."
That was the first time she made any public admission of how she felt about
her father. We didn't follow it up, for she didn't invite discussion of
the subject.
Thereafter she insisted on people calling her Aileen Hoggan and always
called her father Ritchie, as if trying to pretend that there was no
connection between them.
But she wasn't allowed to leave 92. Ritchie was the PL, and PLs had
a lot of power -- quite apart from the extra strings Ritchie could pull.
Why Ritchie wanted to keep her in 92 wasn't clear. Apparently he said
nothing whatever about Sammy -- no comment, no congratulations, no protest.
He simply ignored the whole affair.
I still thought, so help me, that Ritchie was overrated. People kept
muttering about what a bad influence he was, how powerful he was becoming,
how essential it was to find some way of checking him.
Undoubtedly he was a bad influence, but how much did he really matter?
Not very much, I thought.
Which shows that even I didn't know everything.
7
It wasn't without reason that Leslie had said in those early days that
there was always something worse on the way. Whenever you were over the
hill -- there was another one in front of you.
But we couldn't really rail against Fate, for every time we should have
known about those hills. Every new thing we had to face was new only
because we hadn't thought of it -- not because we couldn't have known
about it.
We should have known about the sun, back on Earth, long before we did,
and we could have known; we knew some of it. We should have known that
the lifeships we made could only be space buggies, and that it would be a
labor of Hercules to get them safely to Mars. We should have known what
would happen when a cold, dead world, its inner fires all but out, was
suddenly and unevenly heated and thrown into climatic chaos. We should
have known that people couldn't get on without some kind of exchange,
and that our free, moneyless Utopia would soon be a glorious breeding
ground for power-mad economic emperors. We should have known that if
we had breezes and winds and gales we might any day have to withstand
a great storm which was the grandmother and grandfather of them all.
And we should have known, before they happened, about the murders.
It was easy, the way we lived, to murder anyone in the settlement. That was
demonstrated in one short, terrible week.
On Monday night Gregor Wolkoff, a member of 67, was found knifed outside
the main entrance to bachelors' hall. There was uproar and horror, certainly,
but nothing to what was to come. No real fear. It was a crime of passion,
obviously, and soon the killer would be found.
In fact, quite a few people I talked to stressed the utter stupidity
of the murder rather than anything else. How could anyone think for a
moment he could get away with such a crime, cooped up in a small space
with some eighteen thousand people, all of them watching for the faintest
sign of the killer's guilt?
One of the reasons why Wolkoff's death was taken so lightly was that by
all accounts it was no loss to the community. Some people, true, were
horrified by the very fact of murder, which we had all thought we had
left behind us. But most of the people who had known Wolkoff shrugged
and said he was capable of anything and there might have been strong
provocation. It might be a case of self-defense -- though if that was so,
we wondered, why was he stabbed in the back?
However, the situation changed completely after Wednesday night,
when Jean Martine was found in the shadows among the parked ships,
stabbed in the same way.
Jean Martine wasn't a member of a Iifeship crew at all. He had been
third navigator in one of the regular spaceships, and was of quite a
different type from Wolkoff. He was young, popular, good-looking. Nobody
knew anything against him. He had a girl, and no one knew of any other
love affairs.
Aileen came flying into our room soon after we heard about this second
murder, breathless, wild, and scared.
"Ritchie's behind this," she gasped. "What am I going to do?"
We couldn't get anything coherent out of her for quite a while. She was
obviously hysterical, and I wondered whether I should slap her. But there
are some girls you hesitate to slap, and Aileen, for me, was one of them.
Leslie tried to soothe her, but without much success.
Sammy came in, saw Aileen, and said mildly: "Thought you'd be here.
Aren't you supposed to be looking after Leslie? Seems she's looking
after you."
Whether Sammy's handling of the situation was good psychology or not,
it certainly had the desired effect. Aileen gulped and shook her head
to clear it.
"You think I'm crazy," she said. "You don't know Ritchie. I do."
"How do you know he's concerned?" I asked.
"Because I know him," she said bitterly.
It's a funny thing, but when people are hysterical, particularly women,
you discount what they say, even when, as in Aileen's case, you know
perfectly well they aren't given to hysteria. We said soothing things,
but if among them there was any admission that she was probably right,
it was merely because that seemed expedient.
Two days later everyone was saying that Ritchie was behind all three murders.
That third one did it. The man who died this time was PL Venters,
a known opponent of Ritchie, one he had never managed to pacify, involve,
or cow. And suddenly it became obvious that the three murders were a part
of some plan for power, and that the planner must be Ritchie. Now that
it was obvious, people remembered that Ritchie and Wolkoff had been seen
together a lot, and that Martine had spoken violently and tellingly against
Ritchie. They also pointed out that though Ritchie had provided himself
with an alibi for all three murders, Morgan Smith, his known ally,
had no alibi at all.