Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
“I’ll believe you.” He had to say it.
McHenry opened his drawer again and took out a yellow sheet. This was beginning to irritate the Lieutenant. Dr. McHenry beckoned the girl, who crossed to him, glanced at the paper, and then came to the Lieutenant. She sank to her knees before him, took both his hands, looked deep into his eyes. Holding him so—and her eyes seemed to be doing most of the holding—she pressed his hands down on the arms of his chair. There was a faint click and he looked down to find his wrists, his forearms and his thighs encircled by bands of silvery-gray mesh which flicked up and around and down into the chair again. “It’s all right,” the girl said before he could speak, could shout. “Try to relax, now.” She stood up, moved away.
The Lieutenant gazed disgustedly down at his trapped limbs. “And now it begins, I suppose.” He hoped his tone of disgust covered all of his terror.
“Nothing begins,” said Dr. McHenry. “It’s just time to tell you something, and we don’t want you to get hurt.” He looked at his wife, who said quietly, “We have a preserved sample of Leader Dorne’s tissue, taken when he was only eight days old. We’ve been able to reconstitute the DNA from it, and prepare enough synthetic DNA to flood his whole body. We are going to make him into a perfectly self-perpetuating organism. We will make him immortal.”
The Lieutenant yelled then, and leapt upward against the straps. And again. And again. He began to shout something with such force that the words could not be understood. Saliva flew; he bit his tongue; blood flew. The women ran to him, saying soothing nonsense words
as to a hurt child, wiping his wet and bloody mouth. Rachel McHenry bathed his temples and eyelids with a tissue drenched in something cool and medicinal. At last he was calm enough to be able to use words, though he still shouted. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve killed us all, and all the people to come. Oh, the armies and factories and farms will keep on going, and all the people in them, but they’ll be dead, all mankind will be dead because it can’t grow, it can’t change! Why didn’t you leave me alone? Why didn’t you let me kill him?” He sobbed; then he shouted again: “What’s in it for you? Haven’t you got enough medals and prizes already? What can Dorne do for you?” After that he began to curse. They let him. Dr. McHenry took another yellow sheet out of the drawer. When he looked at it, he smiled. He handed it to the girl, and the expressions which chased themselves over her face were a sight to see—surprise, laughter, and then an exquisite wave of pink. She returned to the chair and knelt before the prisoner, waiting. When he began to run down, she asked him gently, “Will you listen to me?” She had to repeat it before he could hear her; he slumped back and glared at her redly. She said patiently, “If I let you go, will you listen to me?”
Still he stared, and she sighed and took from a pocket the leather-mounted I.D. she had displayed in the stone room the profile of the Leader flanked by the two S’s. “This isn’t a real one. We made it. Don’t you see, we’re not on Dorne’s side—we’re on yours. You and I, all of us here—we want the same thing; we want an end to what Dorne has built.” She threw the I.D. back over her shoulder, a used-up thing. He followed it with his eyes, and then looked angrily at her again. “Why should I believe you?”
“Why did you believe I was in the SS? Just because I showed you that? What was I to do—explain all this to you, in the state you were in? Suppose I had—how far could I have gotten marching you out at gunpoint? They’d have caught us both, for sure. No, you had to leave by yourself, certain you were watched. The only thing that could make you do that was to believe the SS was on to you. Don’t you see—I had to do it this way?” She was pleading with him, and while fury and amazement circled around his confused mind, she reached up and removed the Dorne hat, and did something with
pins, clips.… Her hair cascaded down around her shoulders and back and breasts, such masses of red-gold hair as he had seldom seen, never touched—never in his stark, unswerving, purposeful life. “May I let you go now? Will you listen? Will you please listen?”
He nodded. Instantly she touched a control in the chair arm, and the restraints flickered out of sight. Rachel McHenry said, “I could maybe make you that cup of coffee now?” and somehow they all laughed—not heartily, just a little, but it cleared the air.
McHenry came round his desk and crossed to the chair where the girl still knelt, like a nymph under a waterfall, a red-gold light-fall. He carried one of his yellow papers with him. He said, “Think, now—think hard. Remember what I told you about Dorne’s patterns. He moved from religion to religion, then into politics, from one kind to another. He was looking for answers, he was looking for some law, some system that would be right for him, and finally, when he couldn’t find one, he made one.
“But it is the pattern of that man to change. True, the changes came more and more slowly as he grew older, and true, too, that with a normal lifetime he would die before the next change could come. If he dies now, there will be no change. He has computers too, you know—and he has programmed them. He will no longer be kingpin—his computer will run the whole structure, and then there will be death for us all. Life itself is growth and change, and a society which does not grow and change is dead, and all the people in it, as you yourself said.
“Now we have given Dorne unlimited life, and because he is what he is, he will change this thing. Ultimately he will because he must—because he is Dorne and that is his pattern. Also, he has more power to bring about the changes than anyone else.
“All this will happen if he is immortal. He can’t be immortal as long as you are alive and free and determined to kill him. Can you understand me?”
The Lieutenant looked from one to another of them, and his eyes came to rest on the girl’s hair. Rachel McHenry murmured, “You have to find something else to live for.”
The young man rose from his big chair and moved slowly toward
the girl. Almost like a sleepwalker he raised his hand and gently touched her hair. The hand dropped away. He shook himself, then said to Rachel, “Maybe I could. Maybe I could, if …”
No one finished the sentence for him, but the girl smiled.
The Lieutenant put his hands to his face for a moment, then took them down, and now he could smile too, a little. “You’ve batted me around like a ping-pong ball,” he said a little shakily. “I’ve never felt so helpless in all my life. You people are out of my league.”
“No we’re not.” Dr. McHenry smiled. “But our friend in the corner is.” He pointed at the battered desk—and why should a Mark VII XT not look like a battered desk? “Don’t give us more credit than we deserve. Look at this.”
Words were typed on the yellow sheet: If killing Dorne is a conviction, keep him. If an obsession—kill him.
“Convictions yield to reason,” McHenry said gently. “Obsessions don’t. It was a close thing.”
The Lieutenant looked at that mass of red-gold and said, “Not really.” Nobody ever told him that the VII had instructed her to take it down, that it had followed every word spoken in that room. Nobody ever told him, either, because it never occurred to him to ask, why a pair of Fundamentalist parents would preserve every scrap of flesh cut away from themselves or their child; such folk believe they will be reassembled on Judgment day, actually and literally.
So it was by this means that Mankind overpowered Death and conquered Time, and took the stars.
We had to bury the pilot and Mr. Petrilli and the Stein kid, and by the time we were done with that we had to bury Rodney. It was a hell of a job for a bunch of kids but Miss Morin made us. The pilot had no face and not much head and Mr. Petrilli’s chest was all squashed and the Stein kid didn’t seem to have a mark on him, I guess he died of scare before the boat hit. Rodney screamed until Miss Morin gave him that stuff. After that he just lay there until he died. Also Miss Morin was hurt but nobody knew it at the time. She was up and around before anybody, after the crash, telling everybody what to do. She was always a great one for that. You want to be a probation officer, you be like that. Miss Morin, she was a probation officer before she was born, I bet when she was born she had that same set of lines around her mouth old maids get from sucking their own mouth instead of someone else’s.
After we planted the people we wanted to take it easy but she told off Fatty and Pam to drag out some food and set it up while Tommy and Hal and Flip had to get into the hold and bring out a crate. There was a lot of crates in there and most of them was triangles, full of panels for building dome houses, but it wasn’t just any crate she wanted, it was one special one. She give Tommy a paper with the special numbers wrote on it big, and they had to slide half a hundred crates in and out to look before they found the right one. They got it out and it was hard, with the ship tipped over that way and Flip getting under foot all the time. He was nine. Tom was fifteen, big. Hal was fourteen but not much bigger than Flip. The crate weighed about a hundred pounds.
We sat on the ground outside and ate except Miss Morin.
She sat on the crate. That’s the way she was, she always stood or sat a little higher than everyone else, one of her tricks. She was full
of tricks. She was the most iron-handed hardmouthed cold-blooded old bitch ever lived. She was always around. She told us what to do and she was around to see it got done. There was other probation officers back on Earth had groups like us, overflow kids that didn’t fit in nowhere and got into trouble and they shipped them off to frontier planets where they could fight cold and heat and animals instead of other people and the “Great As Is” (well that was what they said they was doing, we always thought they was just finding some edge to dump us off); anyway, other probation officers made up stuff for their kids to do and then went off on their own and when they came back, if it wasn’t done they would put one or another of the kids in Detention or all of them. Miss Morin never did that, she was always around, she never went off on her own business, she had no business but us. She didn’t use Detention, she didn’t need it, she was a walking Detention all by herself. Also the other Probation Officers rode herd on a group until they was shipped out and then got theirselves another bunch. Not Miss Morin. When the day came for us to go, there she was, she’d fixed it to come along too. Nobody knew for sure what it would be like Outside, the only thing to look forward to was being away from your PO, and look at this, we had our PO right along with us.
So while we ate she made this speech. She said what we already knew, that there wasn’t no place for kids like us on Earth, we’d all had our chance to shape up and we didn’t, we were lucky to live in a time when there was frontier worlds where there could be a place for us, because in earlier times there wasn’t no place and we would of been calmed down by wiping out part of our brain and be fit to push a mop for life, and in a earlier time still we would of spent most of our time in like Detention but much worse, with bars on the windows. But now there was the Jump Drive and a way of space-bending, like if you put two dots on a paper a long way apart and then bend the paper so the dots are together, you could jump from one to the other without hardly moving, and in no time. So with the Jump Drive there was ships going to thirty or more brand-new worlds and more found all the time, with plenty of room for overflow people and plenty of work and room for the likes of us that was so much
trouble. This here was one of the new worlds, it was called Barrault and it was a dangerous place but it could be a good one if we got it tamed down. And we did not have to do it ourself, there was already a town called Cap Sidney.
Miss Morin went on to tell us more we already knew, like our boat crashed. Jump Drive ships don’t land no place, boats off them do. So when they turned our boat loose it come into Real Space in the middle of a magnetic storm and nothing worked right. The pilot done the best he could but without radio or radar or ground control he couldn’t do much. So he was dead and Mr. Petrilli and two of the kids, and that left Miss Morin and the five of us. The ship wouldn’t know we crashed, you don’t contact Jump Ships from Real Space because they ain’t in it. Also they wouldn’t know we’d crashed at Cap Sidney neither, they had no way of knowing when a boat would come unless they got told by the boat, which we didn’t do without no radio because of that storm.
So now Miss Morin come to the point which was what we had to do next. We had to eat all we could and sleep a lot and then in the morning start out for Cap Sidney. There would not be nobody looking for us and there was no sense hanging around by the wreck, it did not carry no more food and water than it needed for a few orbits, and more than half of that was lost in the crash.
She told us how to get to Cap Sidney. Go straight east—that meant walk into the sun all morning and keep the sun behind us all afternoon. Then we would come to a river, and we had to follow it downstream till we come to Cap Sidney. She made it sound real easy and I don’t know if any of us listened real hard.
But then she come to the part about the crate, and we listened to that all right, because she got off it and kneeled down on the ground and made her voice kind of whispery and talked about that crate as if it was full of the greatest treasure in all the world, any world. She said, “Back on Earth not one of you had a chance of growing up to be anything or have anything. Out here you have. Now, you weren’t to know this, but because of the crash, I’ll tell you. This crate is the greatest treasure known to man, but it has to be taken to the Preceptor at Cap Sidney before you can get your share. Don’t open it—you
would not understand what is in it if you did. And I want you to understand what I’m saying—this treasure is not for me or for the colony, it’s for you. It’s yours and nobody will cheat you out of it and nobody can take it away from you. But you have to get it to the Preceptor.”
I guess it was about this time we began to realize that Miss Morin wasn’t planning to go along with us. Nobody liked the old razor-back but the idea of getting away from her was a little bit spooky. We just weren’t used to it. We all got real quiet. Then she started to cough. She used to cough once in a while like that. She didn’t make almost no noise at all because she held a big handkerchief up tight against her nose and mouth, but it was like she was being hit by big fists the way it shook her. We just sat and waited it out like we always did. It lasted longer than usual and for a time she kneeled there with her head on the crate and the cloth up against her mouth. Nobody made a move to touch her. You did not touch Miss Morin. When she got up she stood up straight as ever. Pam saw something she did not tell about until later. Nobody else saw it.