Heshke blinked. “Don’t be ridiculous, Blare. There’s nothing to worry about. They’re checking up, that’s all. They’ve made an important find, and they want me to help them.… I shouldn’t really tell you anything, but hang it all, I don’t really know any more than you do. They’ve found an alien artifact and I gather they’re excited about it. Anyway, it entails a field trip. I don’t know where to, except that it’s probably somewhere in a dev reservation.”
Blare was frowning. “Really? Why only probably?”
“Well, there’s some danger involved. That’s all they would tell me.”
Blare grunted. “Dev reservations are pretty quiet places these days, you know, except for when the Titans go storming in. You may not be going to one.”
“Well, perhaps not. I just wanted to reassure you that there’s no purge coming, that’s all.”
“Thanks for your concern, Rond, but… I still think I’d better go. I got the impression this afternoon that something more is brewing. I don’t feel safe here any more.”
Heshke stared at him. “What on Earth are you talking about, Blare?”
The other moved uneasily and took a gulp of wine. The movements of his head cast grotesque shadows on the canvas of the tent, the lamp being set on the table beside them.
“I’d better be frank – hang it, I feel I can trust you, if no one else. You know my sympathies – you know there’s a political opposition. I think the Titans are on to me, and if so you know what the outlook will be if I hang around much longer.”
“On to you?” Heshke echoed uncomprehendingly. “But of course there’s a political opposition – there always is! It’s hardly a crime to belong to it. Not unless you mean…”
His voice trailed off. He had known Blare Oblomot for years. Like Heshke himself, he was one of the foremost experts in his field, though younger and less experienced. Heshke also knew of his contempt for the Titans, of his somewhat anarchistic-liberal views. But he had always put that down to a kind of freakish waywardness – no, not freakish, he corrected himself hastily; freakish was an unfortunate word – to a kind of charming and frivolous individuality. But not as a serious defiance of…
His thoughts, like his voice, trailed off.
Blare was speaking wryly. “There’s always a point where opposition becomes incompatible with good citizenship. What is legitimate, even if disapproved of, in peacetime becomes treasonable in a state of war. Figuratively speaking we’re still in a state of war. So there comes a time when one has to make a hard and cut decision. I made mine some time ago.” Blare rubbed the side of his face. Heshke noticed the fatigue in his eyes – did the Titans have that effect on him, too?
“Blare – you’re not telling me that you’re one of… them.”
Oblomot nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid so. I was pushed into it step by step, really, by the Titans themselves. Their grip has tightened, not relaxed, since the Deviant Wars. Their ideas have taken an even more intransigent form, so that even some thoughts would infringe the legal code today, if there was some way to monitor thoughts. So when you belong to a secret organisation pledged to fight the Titans by any means whatsoever and which believes the so-called deviants should be allowed a place in the world—”
“Blare! What are you saying!”
Oblomot shrugged again. “You see? Even you can’t approach a thought like that. And yet you like the Titans scarcely any more than I do.”
Heshke’s shoulders sagged. Here was his old friend Blare Oblomot confessing that he was a race traitor; that he was secretly a member of the despised underground that during the last war had actually helped the Amhraks. It just didn’t bear thinking about; his bewilderment was complete.
He forced himself to speak mildly, calmly. “One can make many criticisms of them, of course,” he said, “but the Titans aren’t the source of their ideology – they are merely its chief instrument. And that instrument is necessary, Blare. Earth has to be defended; so does the correct evolutionary lineage – I’m astounded if you can’t see that.”
“Defending Earth against an alien invader is one thing,” Oblomot rejoindered. “We haven’t had to do that – this civilisation hasn’t had to do that. It all happened centuries ago. As for the rest—” He shook his head sadly.
Although he felt he had had enough of arguing for one day, Heshke could hardly allow such wild contentions to pass unchallenged. “But it’s all part of the same thing!” he protested. “The blood that flows in the veins of the Titanium Legions is the same blood that flowed in the men who flung back the invader. The threat is the same, the task is the same – to have and to hold the planet Earth!”
He was, he knew, spouting Titan slogans, but that didn’t worry him. This was part of the creed he would never seriously have doubted.
But Oblomot merely looked sardonic. “The blood in the veins of the deviant species is the same, too. We’re all descended from Classical Man.”
“Yes, but —”
“I know what you’re going to say. That we alone carry the unchanged line of Classical Man and hence constitute True Man – the others are aberrations leading away from the ‘natural’ line of evolutionary development. Well, it is true that we’re closest to Classical Man, in physical characteristics, anyway. And probably in mental characteristics too, I grant you that.”
“Then there you are. That is what I’m saying.”
“Yes, but what does it mean? Just because we resemble an old type doesn’t mean that newer types are somehow wrong. I and my friends aren’t opposed to evolution, Rond. We’re trying to save evolution from being stopped, from being cut short – because that’s what the Titans are doing. Nature’s method is diversity – always to be radiating out into new forms. The Titans are destroying all new forms and imposing a rigid uniformity. Believe me, we’ll all be victims in the end.”
Heshke found these new ideas frightening. “The Titans believe the deviants were caused by an alien weapon that affected mankind’s genes,” he said.
“Yes, I’ve heard that type of theory before. Perhaps it’s true. Or perhaps it was one of our own weapons. But so what? All these mutation-inducing influences can do is speed up evolution, compressing into centuries what otherwise would have taken tens of millennia or longer. The subspecies we’ve been dutifully annihilating would have developed sooner or later anyway.”
There was an awkward silence. Heshke shook his head, sighing deeply.
“I still say only one race can occupy the Earth,” he said sombrely. “For heaven’s sake, how do you expect us to react to an all-out attack by the Lorenes?”
Oblomot nodded slowly. “In that particular case, I agree with you. The Lorenes were an even more aggressive species than we are; they had to be wiped out – they were a strain this planet just couldn’t afford. But we didn’t stop there, we went on to all the others. The Lorenes were a danger, yes – but the Amhraks?” He smiled. “No, Rond. And as for the Urukuri, they were scarcely able to put up a fight. As a matter of fact I think it’s stretching a point to call them a subspecies at all. They merely have exaggerated negroid characteristics and an exceptionally placid disposition.”
“Think of the dangers of miscegenation. Of our blood becoming contaminated with Urukuri or Amhrak blood.” Heshke shuddered slightly. “Imagine your daughter being raped by one. They have raped our women, you know.”