“Good. What’s the slant?”
“That he was too easygoing, too humane. We build up the Herschelites as ultrareactionaries who intend to enforce their will on humanity if they get the chance, and imply FitzMaugham was fighting them tooth and nail. We close the show with some shots of you picking up the great man’s mantle, etcetera, etcetera. And a short speech from you affirming the basically humanitarian aims of Popeek.”
Walton smiled approvingly and said, “I like it. When do you want me to do the speech?”
“We won’t need you,” Percy told him. “We’ve got plenty of stock footage, and we can whip the speech out of some spare syllables you left around.”
Walton frowned. Too many of the public speeches of the day were synthetic, created by skilled engineers who split words into their component phonemes and reassembled them in any shape they pleased. “Let me check through my speech before you put it over, at least.”
“Will do. And we’ll squash this Herschelite thing right off the bat.”
Pauline Medhurst squirmed uneasily in her chair. Walton caught the hint and recognized her.
“Uh, Roy, I don’t know if this is the time or the place, but I got that transfer order of yours, the five doctors…”
“You did? Good,” Walton said hurriedly. “Have you notified them yet?”
“Yes. They seemed unhappy about it.”
“Refer them to FitzMaugham’s book. Tell them they’re cogs in a mighty machine, working to save humanity. We can’t let personal considerations interfere, Pauline.”
“If you could only explain why—”
“Yeah,” interjected Schaunhaft, the clinic coordinator suddenly. “You cleaned out my whole morning lab shift down there. I was wondering—”
Walton felt like a stag at bay. “Look,” he said firmly, cutting through the hubbub, “ I made the transfer. I had reasons for doing it. It’s your job to get the five men out where they’ve been assigned, and to get five new men in here at once. You’re not required to make explanations to them—nor I to you.”
Sudden silence fell over the office. Walton hoped he had not been too forceful, and cast suspicion on his actions by his stiffness.
“Whew!” Sue Llewellyn said. “You really mean business!”
“I said we were going to run Popeek without a hitch,” Walton replied. “Just because you know my first name, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be as strong a director as FitzMaugham was.”
Until the UN picks my successor, his mind added. Out loud he said, “Unless you have any further questions, I’ll ask you now to return to your respective sections.”
He sat slumped at his desk after they were gone, trying to draw on some inner reserve of energy for the strength to go on.
One day at the job, and he was tired, terribly tired. And it would be six weeks or more before the United Nations convened to choose the next director of Popeek.
He didn’t know who that man would be. He expected they would offer the job to him, provided he did competent work during the interim; but, wearily, he saw he would have to turn the offer down.
It was not only that his nerves couldn’t handle the grinding daily tension of the job; he saw now what Fred might be up to, and it stung.
What if his brother were to hold off exposing him until the moment the UN proffered its appointment…and then took that moment to reveal that the head of Popeek, far from being an iron-minded Herschelite, had actually been guilty of an irregularity that transgressed against one of Popeek’s own operations? He’d be finished. He’d be laughed out of public life for good—and probably prosecuted in the bargain—if Fred exposed him.
And Fred was perfectly capable of doing just that.
Walton saw himself spinning dizzily between conflicting alternatives. Keep the job and face his brother’s expose? Or resign, and vanish into anonymity? Neither choice seemed too appealing.
Shrugging, he dragged himself out of his chair, determined to shroud his conflict behind the mask of work. He typed a request to Files, requisitioning data on the faster-than-light project.
Moments later, the torrent began—rising from somewhere in the depths of the giant computer, rumbling upward through the conveyor system, moving onward toward the twenty-ninth floor and the office of Interim Director Walton.
VII
The next morning there was a crowd gathered before theCullenBuilding when Walton arrived.
There must have been at least a hundred people, fanning outward from a central focus. Walton stepped from the jet-bus and, with collar pulled up carefully to obscure as much of his face as possible, went to investigate.
A small red-faced man stood on a rickety chair against the side of the building. He was flanked by a pair of brass flagpoles, one bearing the American flag and the other the ensign of the United Nations. His voice was a biting rasp—probably, thought Walton, intensified, sharpened, and made more irritating by a harmonic modulator at his throat. An irritating voice put its message across twice as fast as a pleasant one.
He was shouting, “This is the place! Up here, in this building, that’s where they are! That’s where Popeek wastes our money!”
From the slant of the man’s words Walton instantly thought: Herschelite!
He repressed his anger and, for once, decided to stay and hear the extremist out. He had never really paid much attention to Herschelite propaganda—he had been exposed to little of it—and he realized that now, as head of Popeek, he owed it to himself to become familiar with the anti-Popeek arguments of both extremist factions —those who insisted Popeek was a tyranny, and the Herschelites, who thought it was too weak.
“This Popeek,” the little man said, accenting the awkwardness of the word. “You know what it is? It’s a stopgap. It’s a silly, soft-minded, half-hearted attempt at solving our problems. It’s a fake, a fraud, a phony!”
There was real passion behind the words. Walton distrusted small men with deep wells of passion; he no more enjoyed their company than he did that of a dynamo or an atomic pile. They were always threatening to explode.
The crowd was stirring restlessly. The Herschelite was getting to them, one way or another. Walton drew back nervously, not wanting to be recognized, and stationed himself at the fringe of the crowd.
“Some of you don’t like Popeek for this reason or that reason. But let me tell you something, friends… you’re wronger than they are! We’ve got to get tough with ourselves! We have to face the truth! Popeek is an unrealistic half-solution to man’s problems. Until we limit birth, establish rigid controls over who’s going to live and who isn’t, we—”
It was straight Herschelite propaganda, undiluted. Walton wasn’t surprised when someone in the audience interrupted, growling, “And who’s going to set those controls? You?”
“You trusted yourselves to Popeek, didn’t you? Why hesitate, then, to trust yourselves to Abel Herschel and his group of workers for the betterment and purification of mankind?”
Walton was almost limp with amazement. The Herschelite group was so much more drastic in its approach than Popeek that he wondered how they dared come out with those views in public. Animosity was high enough against Popeek; would the public accept a group more stringent yet?
The little man’s voice rose high. “Onward with the Herschelites! Mankind must move forward! The Equalization people represent the forces of decay and sloth!”
Walton turned to the man next to him and murmured, “But Herschel’s a fanatic. They’ll kill all of us in the name of mankind.”
The man looked puzzled; then, accepting the idea, he nodded. “Yeah, buddy. You know, you may have something there.”