“That’s a lot of ifs” Bernard said.
“But they’re valid ones,” Clive protested. “If we’d minded our own business and expanded at a normal rate, none of this would have happened.”
“That’s pretty close to treason your man is talking,” Stone said quietly to Laurance.
“Let him talk,” the spaceman replied with a shrug. “We’ve listened to the Archons all along,, and where’s it getting us? Just back into the same muck of war that the Archonate was established to abolish, so…”
“Laurance!” Bernard snapped.
Laurance smiled. “So I’m talking treason too? All right—hang me on the tree next to Clive. But this will be Technarch McKenzie’s war we’ll be fighting, by the Hammer! And win or lose, it may bring the Archonate tumbling down.”
TEN
Laurance’s defiant words remained with Bernard as he boarded the ship and made his way to the passenger cabin to await blastoff. It was not often that you heard anyone openly expressing antagonism to the Archonate, especially when the outburst came from someone like Laurance. Bernard realized with surprise that the little interchange had jangled his nerves more than it had any right to do. We’re conditioned to love and respect the Archonate, he thought. And we don’t realize how deep that conditioning lies until someone rubs against it.
It was strange to think of criticizing the Archonate or a specific Archon. To do so was virtually to demonstrate an atavistic urge to return to the dreadful confusion of pre-Archonate days. And such a return, of course, was inconceivable.
The Archons had ruled Earth since the dim days of the early space age. The First Archonate had risen out of the nightmare anarchy of the twenty-second century; despairing of mankind, thirteen strong men and true had seized the reins of command and set things aright. Before the Archonate, mankind had been splintered into nations forever at each other’s throats, and the stars waited in vain. But Merriman’s invention of the transmat had made possible the rise of the Archonate, with Merriman himself as the First Technarch, five centuries gone. And man had yielded to oligarchic rule, and the Archons had goaded man to the stars.
And, training and choosing their own successors, the Archonate had endured, a continuing body holding supreme authority, by now almost sacred to Terrans of whatever planet. But Martin Bernard had studied medieval history; the pattern of the past argued that no empire sustained itself indefinitely. In time each made its fatal mistake, and gave way to a successor.
Was the cycle of the Archonate ended now, Bernard asked himself as he waited for blastoff? A month ago such a thought would never have occurred. But perhaps McKenzie—one of the greatest Technarchs since Merriman, all admitted—had overreached himself, had committed the sin the Greeks knew as hybris, by spurring man into breaking the bounds of the limiting velocity. McKenzie’s rash thrust into interstellar space now threatened to bring war down on Terra—war whose outcome might shatter the peace of five centuries and cast the Archonate into limbo with the other discarded rulers of man’s eight thousand years.
Nakamura entered the cabin. “Commander Laurance says he’s ready to go. Everybody cradled down for acceleration already?”
Here we go homeward like whipped curs, Bernard thought.
He checked the straps of his protective cradle. They were bound fast.
The signal came not much later. With landing jacks and stabilizing fins retracted, the XV-ftl sat poised in its meadow, while ten miles away unheeding aliens built their colony. A thunder of ions drove the ship upward, until the green planet dwindled and became nothing but a dot against the flaming backdrop of its nameless sun. Within the ship, Bernard lay back, his body involuntarily tensing against the push of three gravities as the XV-ftl sprang away from the planet below.
Time passed. The sociologist did not think; to think meant to rehearse the catalogue of their humiliation, to repeat silently the account of their treatment at the hands of Zagidh and Skrinri and haughty Vortakel. He waited, mindlessly hanging in a void, as the ship’s velocity increased with each continuing instant of acceleration.
Acceleration ceased at last. Velocity became constant. They could relax.
Peterszoon entered their cabin to inform them that the conversion to no-space was imminent. The big Hollander, taciturn as always, conveyed the bare information and left. Peterszoon had made it quite clear from the start that he had no interest in this journey, even less in the four passengers. He had been ordered by the Technarch to serve in the crew, and serve he did; but the Technarch’s orders said nothing about serving with a smile.
Some time later, the warning gong began to sound. Bernard went tense. They were entering the no space void, which meant that less than a day hence they would be landing on Earth. He found no joy in the thought of homecoming. In the ancient days, he thought, a messenger who bore bad news was killed on the spot. We won’t be as lucky. We’ll go on living—known for all time as the men who let ourselves be walked over by the Norglans.
Just before conversion came, Bernard turned to catch a final glimpse of the solar system behind them. They had not quite left the vicinity of Star NGCR 185143; it glimmered on the screen with an appreciable disk the apparent size of an iron five-credit piece, and dimly visible against its brightness were the dark dots of occulting planets. Then the cabin lights flickered and the screen winked into featureless grayness. Bernard felt the pang of separation from the universe he knew.
Conversion had been made.
Now there would be seventeen hours of unending waiting. Bernard found his cabinet and took out a slim book. His symmetrical existence of teaching and reading and brandy-sipping seemed infinitely distant now, but he hoped to recapture some of the ease he had known before being plunged into this nerve-draining mission. Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing …
Bernard sighed in frustration and let the book slip shut. It was no use; no use at all.
“What are you reading?” Dominici asked.
“Not are. Were. I can’t concentrate.”
“What was it, then?”
“Shakespeare. Medieval English poet.”
“Yes, yes, I’ve heard of Shakespeare!” Dominici said. “He was one of the really great ones, wasn’t he?”
Bernard smiled mechanically. “The greatest, some think. I’ve got a book of his sonnets here. But it’s no use, reading them. I keep remembering that Shakespeare’s dead twelve centuries; the face of Skrinri keeps getting between me and the page.”
“Hand it here,” Dominici said. “I’ve never read any of that old stuff. Maybe I’ll like it.”
Shrugging, Bernard gave him the book. Dominici opened it at random, and almost immediately began to scowl. He looked up after a moment.
“I can’t read it! Don’t tell me you’ve been reading him in the original? What is this, Greek? Sanskrit?”
“English,” Bernard said. “It’s a hobby of mine, studying old languages. But go ahead; look at each word, pronounce it phonetically if you can. Shakespeare’s English isn’t that far removed from modern-day Terran. It just looks strange. But that’s the direct ancestor of our own language, you know.”