Chapter V

Kerry became aware again of his surroundings very slowly. First there was light and air and the jab of a needle in his biceps. Then his eyes blinked open, and sunlight pierced them like another needle. There was a painful prickling in every part of his body and he groaned when he tried to move his feet. He was lying, without his coat and shoes, on a hospital bed, and a young man in a white jacket was standing beside him.

“You wake up again? Good.” He looked down at Kerry, chuckling. “What happened to you? A touch of the sun? Well, we’re all more or less crazy these days. I’m afraid you’ll be stiff and sore for a few days; those neuron-guns are no joke.”

He beckoned to a nurse, who brought a sterile tray. The interne rolled back Kerry’s sleeve, dabbed at it and jabbed him again with a needle.

Kerry’s lips were still stiff. He put up his hand and rubbed at them and managed to mumble, “What’s that?”

“Neurotone,” the interne said. “If you have much muscular pain, see your own doctor and get another shot.” He turned to someone just outside the door. “He’s all right now. He must have caught it right in the chest. Good thing you have a strong heart, Mr. Donalson. A man your age doesn’t want to take too many shocks like that.”

A policeman stood hesitant in the doorway. “Listen, Mister,” he said, “I’m sorry I had to shoot you, only don’t you _never_ run away when a policeman yells at you. You _know_ we can’t take chances with the Pharigs!”

“You needn’t apologize, Sergeant,” said another voice behind him.

Kerry, stooping to lace his shoes, straightened and swung his feet over the edge of the bed. He looked up at Commander Lal, who made a dismissing motion at the policeman.

“A guilty conscience is a very bad thing to have around a police station, Mr. Donalson,” said Commander Lal. “If you had waited for a minute you would have known there was no charge against you. And just to relieve your mind I may add that you will be perfectly free to leave here in half an hour. However, I must first request the favor of an interview.”

Downstairs in a small, windowless office, the commander took a seat behind a battered desk, obviously not his own, and gestured Kerry to a chair.

“Before we begin,” he said quietly, “I want to make one thing clear. Ben Thrusher was brought here at his own request--a statement which the members of your family can verify. At the last moment, I believe he didn’t want to make trouble for you by dying in your house.”

His eyes, dark and level and severe, met those of Kerry across the desk. “I assure you that you are in no personal danger,” he said. “On the other hand, it is absolutely imperative that we keep you from making--shall we say--irresponsible statements.”

The door to an inner office opened, and Lew Fallon, escorted by Night Police, came in. He looked a trifle rumpled and sinister, with a torn collar and the traces of a bloody nose, and he was accompanied by a man whose face Kerry dimly recognized before memory could put a name to him. He was Paul Chapman, the Australian rocketry expert who had dropped out of sight at the same time as Ben Thrusher. He was bandaged like Ben, and battered and toothless. But he was recognizable.

Commander Lal dropped a crumpled piece of paper on the desk. “I believe that you’ll want to reconsider before printing this,” he said.

Kerry did not need to look at it to know that it was the editorial and rough draft of the news story he had written. He crushed it in his hand.

Lew Fallon said bitterly, “I did the best I could, Mr. Donalson. Ben’s dead now. Like my Dad. And for what?”

“Be quiet, Lew,” said Doctor Chapman in a resonant voice which had a little of the same blurred quality as Ben’s, but was made sharper by an accent of authority. “We appreciate what you did for Ben. Only--”

“Only it was the wrong thing,” the commander interrupted. “We all appreciate it, and I, perhaps, most of all. But your mistaken kindness killed him, Fallon.”

He leaned forward slightly, and said, “I shall be perfectly frank with you, Mr. Donalson. If you were a farmer, or a plumber, or the manager of a cigar store, we would let you talk all you pleased, for we could be quite sure that no one would listen. We could always have you confined--briefly of course--in a mental institution, as a precaution against anyone believing you. Or at the worst--” he paused. “At the worst we could have you listed as--another Pharig casualty.”

Fallon burst out, “And they call this a free world!”

The commander ignored him. “There are laws against inciting to riot,” he said slowly, as if searching for the right words. “And you are in the peculiar position of having a large communications medium at your command. I assure you we would have no compunctions about invoking those laws against you. However, we hope such drastic action may not be necessary.

“At present, there are four other newspapers in your exact position. One in Buenos Aires, one in Dallas, Texas, one in Bombay and one in Sheffield, England. To the owners and editors of these newspapers, we have made the identical revelation we are making to you. Ben Thrusher was right. _There are no Pharigs._ There never were any.”

“So Ben was right,” Dr. Chapman repeated, looking hard at Kerry. “We’ve actually got a military dictatorship.”

Commander Lal said, “We had a military dictatorship after the Three Days’ War--or rather, we had two of them. The Asian Alliance--we freely admit it--were planning to use plague germs in the next war, and I don’t believe even your most rabid nationalists would deny that the Free Americas were making rocket-bombs with radiocobalt warheads. Atomic war is a lemming urge, and it would at least have remedied our worst problem--overpopulation. Natural resources were going fast. Coal and oil were virtually gone, and we had to save the heavy isotopes for space flight, or we’d never get off the earth, and die on a worn out planet.”

* * * * *

He shrugged heavily. “The Pharig invasion was a desperate expedient. The so-called military decision not to use H-bombs on the invaders was another. Actually, all the thermonuclear weapons had been dismantled to replace dwindling power resources until we could get workable solar power--and to conserve something for space flight.”

“If you were saving heavy metals for space flight,” Kerry asked bluntly, “why did the Earth United pigeonhole Ben Thrusher’s space drive?”

Dr. Chapman started to answer, but the commander asked bluntly, “Do you know what the birth rate is?”

Kerry didn’t. “I understood,” he remarked with sarcastic emphasis, “that it was a statistic that could give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

“Any development of a new frontier tends to raise the birth rate explosively. That’s fine. When we open the planets we’ll need a high birth rate. But after the Three Days’ War--you remember--the crime wave was so terrific that both the Americas and the Asian Alliance had to throw their whole armies into policing.

“With the high birth rate and scarce food supplies, most families couldn’t get along unless both parents worked. With neglected children--and too few schools and teachers--crime skyrocketed. The emergency--even a non-existent one from outer space--let us pass drastic laws which the public wouldn’t have accepted in peacetime. Food rationing. Conversion of luxury crops to food raising. The non-worker law for mothers of families. That was unpopular, but it did cut down juvenile crime!”

“And the curfew law,” Kerry said. “If there are no Pharigs, that’s tyranny.”

“You’re perfectly right,” the commander said. “But the Night Police drain off the unemployed population. It’s cheaper to pay them, as a civilian army, than to maintain prison systems and public welfare programs. If a man is unemployed or unemployable, he goes in the Night Police and it’s up to him and his intelligence whether he sweeps the streets or becomes responsible for the peace of a whole city.”

“So that was it!” Fallon muttered.

Commander Lal rose restlessly and paced the room. “The curfew lights--crimes were worked mostly in darkness--brought the crime rate down right away. Getting rid of unemployment and starvation took away all excuse for crimes. There are no more victims of society. The only criminals now are those who commit crimes of passion, and we don’t need to be sentimental about them any more. Most crime is prevented and the rest can be punished effectively. Attributing all crimes of violence to the Pharigs made crime, in the public eye, equivalent to saying inhuman or alien, and destroyed the superficial glamor around crime and violence.”

Dr. Chapman raised a hand and made the very protest that was on Kerry’s lips. “But in a free society, certainly man has inherent rights and freedoms.”

The commander looked tired. “Yes. But freedom exists only where there is elbowroom for a man to move without gouging his neighbor’s ribs. We just don’t have it on Earth any more. And all idealistic statements to the contrary, no honest man _needs_ that kind of freedom in these days.

“Men have short working hours and ample leisure. Any further freedom is license we can’t afford. We’ve had to keep the population fed and in order until we can find living space or a differential method of birth control. I mean by that, a way to lower the birth rate without also lowering the rate of intelligence-per-thousand.”

He looked at Kerry. “We could use your help.”

“To keep on hoaxing the people?”

“No, to un-hoax them, if that is an allowable expression.” Commander Lal returned to his seat. “The Pharig invasion is almost over. When we get out into space, it will be simply to stage a few mock battles and defeat them conclusively--and forever.”

Fallon demanded “But why not tell them the truth?”

The Indian propped his elbows on the desk. He seemed worn out with his long explanation. The blazing insignia of Earth United seemed a glaring anachronism on his austere frame.

“There is an Indian proverb,” he began slowly, “concerning the man who rode a tiger. He couldn’t stay on and he was afraid to get off. Now that we’re on the verge of leading the people of Earth out into space suppose we did reveal that the Pharig invasion was a hoax staged for our own purposes. Then suppose we met a _real_ alien race?”

“Good lord!” said Kerry.

“It’s entirely possible.”

Chapman said, “I suppose history must eventually look at the Pharig invasion as a kind of air-raid drill.”

“Yes,” the Indian agreed, “To see whether Earthmen were capable of putting aside their individual concerns and functioning as a united world.” With an apologetic smile he touched the insignia he wore.

Somehow to Kerry it seemed that the insignia was insignificant now and the man himself was the symbol of a greater power. Kerry slowly crumpled the editorial he still held in his hand, shredded it and dropped the pieces on the desk.

“You win, Commander.”

Fallon said, “But Ben--and my father. What about them?”

“Ben Thrusher was a martyr,” Commander Lal said. He looked sorrowful, almost shaken. “But he was a martyr only to a lie. Go and write that editorial over again, Donalson. Make it an obituary instead, and make it good. Ben Thrusher--and Doctor Fallon too--deserved it. Say, if you want to, that they gave their lives for space flight. It’s true and they ought to rest in peace. Because the discovery of space flight means the end of the Pharigs. I’m not in a mood to think up famous last words.”

_So even Ben’s death was to be converted to the sober uses of expediency._

“Maybe his own last words would do!” Kerry said bitterly. “‘They make a wilderness and call it peace!’”

The commander swung around. “Tacitus,” he said. “The words of a barbarian chief inciting his tribe to revolt against Rome. But Rome won, even though the barbarians sacked her. She kept peace, of a kind, until the very barbarians who destroyed her found time to repent and admire what they’d destroyed, and a few of them remembered enough to preserve what they could.

“Even the decadence of Rome was valuable in its way, and so are the curfew and Night Police. If they lasted, it would be genuine decadence. It’s almost over. The day of the barbarians and pioneers will begin again when the first rocket reaches Mars. But we’ve accomplished something.”

Lal pointed to the recruiting sign on the office wall, which Kerry and the others had taken so much for granted that they had not even noticed it.

AN EARTH DIVIDED
IS AN EARTH CONQUERED!

“That sign means something,” the commander said. “Even Ben Thrusher would have admitted that. Although he died fighting it.”

And Kerry left with the first lines of the obituary already ringing in his head: “A martyr to the desire for freedom, Benedict Thrusher, listed as a dead man for eight years, died today after wresting from the Pharigs the secret of the space drive that will mean their eventual extermination from Earth....”

And all the rest is written in history.

Transcriber’s Note:

This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, July 1956 (Vol. 5, No. 6). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies have been retained as printed.