“I concur,” said the man sitting next to him. He wore a mask and spoke through a voice modifier, being a person of such public prominence, and besides this of such importance to the League, that his anonymity was deemed essential.
“The League is reeling under the Titans’ blows,” he said. “Nearly three hundred people arrested in the past few months. The antipodean networks are practically destroyed. If this continues I fear for our whole cause.”
The depression of the League members was palpable. The Chairman shuffled his feet and spoke more forcefully.
“There is less cause for alarm than many of you think,” he told them. “The reprisals are a sign of our growing strength, not of our weakness. Remember what a low ebb we were at twenty years ago – at one time the Panhumanic League was down to about fifty members.” He smiled ruefully. “Its very name was a joke. That was during the wars. But, after a long period of peace, we’ve been able to expand our activities and increase our influence. It was inevitable that there would be a Titan reaction to our successes.”
“That’s true,” the Kansorn Group Leader said. “Our only problem is how we’re going to meet it. Everything depends on our riding out the storm.”
The Chairman nodded. “And that brings me to the main item of our remaining business. At the last meeting it was suggested that League membership should be barred to people of mixed blood. The reason for this, you will remember, was to protect our public image” – he spoke as if the words were distasteful to him – “so that we should not be characterised, as we have been, as an organisation of ‘squalid freaks and sub-men’. I take it we have all considered the motion?”
“I’m against it,” answered one voice with passion. “It runs counter to all our ideals. It suggests that we too consider other subspecies of mankind to be inferior. We shouldn’t play the Titans’ racist game.”
“I’m for it,” said the member from Kansorn, “merely on the grounds of tactics, as stated.”
“How many of our people do have mixed blood?” Sobrie asked suddenly.
The Chairman answered. “The statistical department gives a figure of twenty per cent. A significant proportion – one which can give weight to anti-League propaganda.”
“Propaganda is the least of our worries,” grumbled the Kansorn Group Leader. “The Titan campaign against mixed blood is gathering pace, too. These half-breeds and octoroons give them a road leading right into the heart of the League. By moving against one, they move against the other.”
“These people also see the League as their protection,” Sobrie pointed out. “If we expel them, we can hardly count on their loyalty. We’ll be twice as exposed as before.”
“There’s another aspect to the business,” said the voice that had spoken previously. “Are we also to discontinue our contacts with the dev reservations?”
After a strained pause, the Chairman said: “We may, in any case, have to scale down our activities in the reservations. Titan supervision of these areas is so strict that they’re becoming weak points in our networks – a number of agents have been apprehended trying to pass in or out. Even the imprisoned peoples have become wary of our approaches. Many of them have given up all hope of freedom and merely want to be left to live as best they can.”
Several members snorted in disgust. The idea of any kind of future at the mercy of Titan hatreds, of Titan scientists and land-utilisation experts (always pressing to contract the already small areas “lost to True Man”) was, to their minds, ridiculous.
They turned to the masked man, whose opinion, despite his anonymity, carried great weight. He pondered.
“The benefits to be gained from such a drastic step would probably not be great enough to justify the defying of our principles,” he stated finally. “In the long run, it would do little to dispel the legend of the Dark Covenant.”
Yes, thought Sobrie Oblomot, the Dark Covenant: the incredibly subtle, fantastically detailed scheme to destroy True Man that had supposedly been created hundreds of years ago by the combined evil geniuses of all the deviant subspecies then extant. The League was fairly sure that no such document, nor any document or plan even vaguely approximating it, had ever existed. But the beliefs that had grown up around it were elaborate and fascinating, and they were encouraged by the Titanium Legions. Popular belief had it that the Panhumanic League itself was but part of one of the Covenant’s contingency plans, following the initial failure to exterminate True Man altogether and replace him by nature’s mistakes… by the Earth Mother’s mutants, sports and abortions.
It was the kind of inanity that made Sobrie Oblomot despair that the League could ever achieve its aim of bringing rationality to civilisation.
While the argument went on his thoughts returned – as they had returned every few moments since his hearing the news – to his brother Blare. Suicide, he thought bleakly. Gone in the glare of a fiery explosion when arrested by Titans. It would look fine in some annals after the battle was won, or on a monument in a better world. But here, in the squalor of an underground struggle, it seemed merely… bleak.
Blare had been an active member of the League for only a short time, and Sobrie was eaten up with guilt because it was he who had put his brother there. His hints, his persuasion, his appeals to reason, had won Blare over to the side of subversion. Not that it had been very difficult, but just the same Blare was too much of an ingenuous idealist, too much of a moral simpleton, to be successful in his work. Sobrie could see that clearly now. He shouldn’t have pushed him into it. It shouldn’t have been Blare who went up in that s-grenade. It should have been him, Sobrie.
The Chairman called an end to discussion and held a vote. The motion was narrowly defeated.
There was more discussion on tactics. It was decided to break up some groups and to scatter their members to various parts of the globe, where they were to remain inactive until further orders. The Chairman ended with a brief item.
“This is connected with your brother, Oblomot,” he said. “As you may know, he was working with Rond Heshke, the famous archaeologist, on the alien ruins at Hathar. It seems that on the night your brother died, Heshke was taken by the Titans as well.”
“I didn’t know he was connected with the League.” Sobrie frowned.
“He isn’t. As far as we know Heshke is an upright citizen who holds a certificate of racial purity. We’ve learned that he was taken to Cymbel and put on board a private rocket transport. We’re not sure, but we think the transport landed in the Sarn Desert.”
“So?” Sobrie stared at him.
“The Titans have a secret research establishment there,” the Chairman divulged. “They guard it so jealously that we haven’t been able to find out what goes on in the place. But the fact that Rond Heshke may now be on the staff would confirm that it’s connected with the alien interventionists in some way.”
“And the aliens are also of interest to us,” murmured Sobrie, nodding.
“Correct. We, as much as anyone else, would like to know who they were, where they came from, and what kind of beings they were. It’s possible that racial fanaticism on Earth results from the antagonism between man and the alien. If so, our psychologists say that fear of the alien will have to be rooted out before hatred of other subspecies dies away.”
Heads nodded. This theorem was known to them all. It did not, in fact, take a psychologist to be able to see it.
“I mention this only because we’d like more information, and it’s proving hard to obtain directly,” the Chairman ended airily. “Pass the word through your networks: does anyone know of any supplies being sent to the Sarn Desert? If so, what sort of supplies? By the way, the situation is made to look more interesting by the dramatic way Rond Heshke was suddenly picked up from Hathar.”