«Whoa, there!» Diaz bristled. «I resent that.»
«Please,» Rostock said. «I pass no moral judgments. For the sake of argument, at least, I can concede you the moral superiority, remarking only in parenthesis that Earth holds billions of people who not only fail to comprehend what you mean by freedom but would not like it if you gave it to them. The similarity I am talking about is technological. Both civilizations are based on the machine, with all the high organization and dynamism which this implies.»
«So?»
«So war is a necessity—Wait! I am not talking about ‘merchants of death,’ or ‘dictators needing an outside enemy,’ or whatever the current propaganda lines are. I mean that conflict is built into the culture. There must be an outlet for the destructive emotions generated in the mass of the people by the type of life they lead. A type of life for which evolution never designed them.
«Have you ever heard about L. F. Richardson? No? He was an Englishman in the last century, a Quaker, who hated war but, being a scientist, realized the phenomenon must be understood clinically before it can be eliminated. He performed some brilliant theoretical and statistical analyses which showed, for example, that the rate of deadly quarrels was nearly constant over the decades. There could be many small clashes or a few major ones, but the result was the same. Why were the United States and the Chinese Empire so peaceful during the nineteenth century? The answer is that they were not; they had their Civil War and Taiping Rebellion, which devastated them as much as required. I need not multiply examples. We can discuss this later in detail. I have carried Richardson’s work a good deal further and more rigorously. I say to you now only that civilized societies must have a certain rate of immolations.»
Diaz listened to silence for a minute before he said: «Well, I’ve sometimes thought the same. I suppose you mean we spacemen are the goats these days?»
«Exactly. War fought out here does not menace the planet. By our deaths we keep Earth alive.»
Rostock sighed. His mouth drooped. «Magic works, you know,» he said, «on the emotions of the people who practice it. If a primitive witch doctor told a storm to go away, the storm did not hear, but the tribe did and took heart. The ancient analogy to us, though, is the sacrificial king in the early agricultural societies; a god in mortal form, who was regularly slain so that the fields might bear fruit. This was not mere superstition. You must realize that. It worked—on the people. The rite was essential to the operation of their culture, to their sanity and hence to their survival.
«Today the machine age has developed its own sacrificial kings. We are the chosen of the race, the best it can offer. None gainsays us. We may have what we choose, pleasure, luxury, women, adulation—only not the simple pleasures of wife and child and hope, for we must die that the people may live.»
Again silence, unticlass="underline" «Do you seriously mean that’s why the war goes on?» Diaz breathed.
Rostock nodded.
«But nobody… I mean, people wouldn’t—»
«They do not reason these things out, of course. Traditions develop blindly. The ancient peasant did not elaborate logical reasons why the king must die. He merely knew this was so, and left the syllogism for modern anthropologists to expound. I did not see the process going on today until I had had the chance to… to become more perceptive than I had been,» Rostock said humbly.
Diaz couldn’t endure sitting any longer. He jumped to his feet. «Assuming you’re right,» he snapped, «and you may be, what of it? What can be done?»
«Much,» Rostock said. Calm descended on his face like a mask. «I am not being mystical about this, either. The sacrificial king has reappeared as the end product of a long chain of cause and effect. There is no reason inherent in natural law why this must be. Richardson was right in his basic hope, that when war becomes understood, as a phenomenon, it can be eliminated. This would naturally involve restructuring the entire terrestrial culture—gradually, subtly. Remember—» His hand shot out, seized Diaz’s shoulder and gripped painfully hard. «There is a new element in history today. Us. The kings. We are not like those who spend their lives under Earth’s sky. In some ways we are more, in other ways less, but always we are different. You and I are more akin to each other than to our planet-dwelling countrymen. Are we not?
«In the time and loneliness granted me, I have used all my new powers to think about this. Not only think; this is so much more than cold reason. I have tried to feel. To love what is, as the Buddhists say. I believe a nucleus of spacemen like us, slowly and secretly gathered, wishing the good of everyone on Earth and the harm of none, gifted with powers and insights they cannot really imagine at home—I believe we may accomplish something. If not us, then our sons. Men ought not to kill each other, when the stars are waiting.»
He let go, turned away and looked at the deck. «Of course,» he mumbled, «I, in my peculiar situation, must first destroy a number of your brothers.»
They had given Diaz a whole pack of cigarettes, an enormous treasure out here, before they locked him into his cubicle for the duration of the second engagement. He lay in harness, hearing clang and shout and engine roar through the vibrating bulkheads, stared at blackness, and smoked until his tongue was foul. Sometimes the Ho accelerated, mostly it ran free and he floated. Once a tremor went through the entire hull, near miss by a shaped charge. Doubtless gamma rays, ignoring the magnetic force screens, sleeted through the men and knocked another several months off their life expectancies. Not that that mattered; spacemen rarely lived long enough to worry about degenerative diseases. Diaz hardly noticed.
Rostock’s not lying. Why should he? What could he gain? He may be a nut, of course. But he doesn’t act like a nut either. He wants me to study his statistics and equations, satisfy myself that he’s right. And he must be damn sure I will be convinced, to tell me what he has.
How many are there like him? Few, I’m sure. The man-machine symbiosis is obviously new, or we’d’ve had some inkling ourselves. This is the first field trial of the system. I wonder if the others have reached the same conclusions as Rostock. No, he said he doubts that; their minds impressed him as being more deeply channeled than his. He’s a lucky accident.
Lucky? Now how can I tell? I’m only a man. I’ve never experienced an I. Q. of a thousand, or whatever the figure may be. A god’s purposes aren’t necessarily what a man would elect.
An eventual end to war? Well, other institutions had been ended, at least in the Western countries: judicial torture, chattel slavery, human sacrifice—no, wait, according to Rostock human sacrifice had been revived.
«But is our casualty rate high enough to fit your equations?» Diaz had argued. «Space forces aren’t as big as old-time armies. No country could afford that.»
«Other elements than death must be taken into account,» Rostock answered. «The enormous expense is one factor. Taxpaying is a form of symbolic self-mutilation. It also tends to direct civilian resentments and aggressions against their own governments, thus taking some pressure off international relations.
«Chiefly, though, there is the matter of emotional intensity. A spaceman does not simply die, he usually dies horribly; and that moment is the culmination of a long period under grisly conditions. His groundling brothers, administrative and service personnel, suffer vicariously: ‘sweat it out,’ as your idiom so well expresses the feeling. His kinfolk, friends, women, are likewise racked. When Adonis dies—or Osiris, Tammuz, Baldur, Christ, Tlaloc, whichever of his hundred names you choose—the people must in some degree share his agony. That is part of the sacrifice.»