“And you aren’t sorry?” Lucas asked softly.
“Not for anything, Peter.” And she knew as she said it that it was the truth.
There was a rustle.
Peter Lucas frowned at the man who stepped briskly through the yellow draperies. They fell into place behind him. This wasn’t Ryan.
This man had a clown’s face. It looked as though someone had taken hold of the upper lip and given a sharp tug downward, and the face had frozen. The upper lip was pendulous, and all the lines of the face seemed drawn down toward it. The man was slight, obviously in his fifties. His small blue eyes were shrewd and quick.
He stepped down off the dais and walked over to them. He rubbed his palms together with a dry, whispering sound, smiled at them and said, “How do you do, Ellen. And you, Peter. I happen to be Emery Ladu, the Chairman.”
Peter’s mind spun dizzily and focused on a book of his childhood. Alice in Wonderland.
This was the man. This was the calloused dictator who, with the help of his advisors, kept the world on a dead level of mediocrity. Dictatorship from afar has a touch of the grandiose about it. Close up, Ladu was a brisk little man with sharp blue eyes, a clown’s face and an air of trying hard to be charming.
In some odd way it made him more fearful.
Ladu wrinkled up his face. “This is why I never permit pictures,” he said gaily. “Wouldn’t want to frighten the public. It wouldn’t inspire the requisite awe, if they should know what I look like. My, you are a silent couple, aren’t you?”
“Whatever you want, get it over with and stop this cat-and-mousing around,” Lucas growled.
Ladu shrugged. “You see? Preconceived ideas. I can’t be anything but horrible, can I? My, how you people must hate me!”
“Certainly I hate you,” Lucas said. “You’re the one who thinks more of your comfort and power than the future of the race. You’re the one that can’t see the slow death of the world around you.”
Ladu pursed his lips, cocked his head on one side and stared at Lucas. Then he turned to Ellen and said, “Your friend illustrates the typical aberrations of the second-class mind.”
“What do you mean, second-class!” Lucas said loudly. Ladu had touched the focal point of pride, the pride in intellect that had kept him integrated throughout the lonely years.
“Just what I said, my dear boy. Just what I said. The best examinations that could be devised proved you to have a second-class mind that would adjust to close confinement and regimentation without losing a certain analytical and creative knack which is useful.”
Ladu turned his back on them, went over and stepped up on the dais and took the device from the table. “This,” he said, “I find to be very interesting. And for more than one reason. The achievement indicates that under close confinement you, probably through emotional stress, became a superior sort of second-class mind.”
“I resent your continual use of that word,” Lucas said. He managed to sneer. “You, I suppose, have a first-class mind?”
Ladu raised one eyebrow. “As a matter of fact, I have. But my talents are in a political and sociological direction.”
“Why are we here?” Ellen asked, her gray eyes narrowed.
“You are here because you constitute a new type of problem. Oh, we’ve had trouble over in the Bureau before. I get the reports. I seldom read them. Poor fat old Evan worries so much about his tremendous responsibilities.”
“New in what way?” Lucas asked, impatiently.
“Other devices have been manufactured in there, you know. Escape devices. Or merely little tools to express a vast resentment toward the established order. But nothing of any originality. Such as this.” He waved the device, replaced it on the table and came back to stand in front of them. He was frowning.
“Originality is supposed to be the ultimate sin in your neat little world, isn’t it?” Lucas asked.
Emery Ladu waved a hand toward the curved glass through which could be seen all of the New City. “To all the people out there it is the ultimate sin. But not to me.”
“You have the power. Why don’t you propagandize them? Why don’t you root out all this fantastic fear of progress?”
“There, my boy, is where a first-class mind can give you an answer. Because the administration of a static society is far easier than the administration of one where progress in one part of the world or another will give specific areas a temporary advantage. Temporary advantages lead to conflict, first on the economic and then on the military level. It is too difficult to cope with those potential focal points of disorder — and disaster.”
“Then, as I said before, you think only of your comfort and your position, and not of mankind.”
Ladu smiled sadly at Ellen. “You see how emotional the second-class mind can get?”
Before she could answer he walked away a few feet. When he turned he had a large gold coin in his hand. He showed it to them, enclosed it in his palm, waved his hand around a few times, then opened it. The coin was gone.
Lucas snorted. “A first-class childish trick.”
“Be still!” Ladu said. The good humor was gone from his voice. Suddenly he was a very impressive person, ruthlessness surprisingly visible in his face and attitude. The clown’s face was no longer funny.
“With a child you must use the explanations a child can follow,” he said. “Neither of you knows what happened to that coin. Why? Be-cause you were following the motion of my hand. It drew your eye because it was in motion.”
He held up the same hand, fist clenched. “This hand, you fool, represents the Bureau of Improvement. It is in motion. It is visible. It attracts the mind of the people. Forbidden talent under careful control. ‘Aha,’ they say. ‘Old Ladu will keep them under his thumb. Ladu feels as we do. Together we will protect ourselves.’ But Ladu knows, and they don’t, that the poor ineffectual Bureau of Improvement is staffed with second-class minds inside people with a high stability quotient.”
He began to pace back and forth. “You, Lucas, try to tell me — me — that time is short, that the earth grows barren, that nature weeds us out through the diminishing vigor of reproduction.”
He stopped in front of Lucas, leaned over and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Lucas, how much time would we have if we spent most of it trying to destroy the superstitious fear that was imbedded in the race by a hundred mushroom clouds of smoke? How much time would be left?”
Under the naked force of the man’s mind, Lucas shook his head stupidly. “What are you getting at?” he asked.
Ladu laughed. “I throw them a bone. I give them a gesture to watch. Here, my people, is the Bureau of Improvement. Yes, we are very progressive. We will let them do a little work for us — but carefully controlled, you understand.”
Ellen, her voice shaking, said, “Your hand was the Bureau. The coin was the first-class minds.”
“Of course!” he said. “Of course! Poor Peter never stopped to think what happened to them. He was too shocked to find out that he was not an apex, a pinnacle.”
The emotion faded out of his voice. He said soberly, “You have made a contribution, Lucas. You have earned yourself a promotion. I have been in contact with the personnel chief at the base.”
Lucas shook his head, as though by doing so he could clear it. “Base?”