“Thanks, Jimbo.” The wind almost drowned Speyer’s words.
“I’d ... I’d better go tell Laura.”
“Yeah.” Speyer squeezed Mackenzie’s shoulder. There were tears in the major’s eyes.
Mackenzie went out with parade-ground steps, ignoring Irwin: down the hall, down a stairway at its other end, past guarded doors where he returned salutes without really noticing, and so to his own quarters in the south wing.
His daughter had gone to sleep already. He took a lantern off its hook in his bleak little parlor, and entered her room. She had come back here while her husband was in San Francisco.
For a moment Mackenzie couldn’t quite remember why he had sent Tom there. He passed a hand over his stubbly scalp, as if to squeeze something out ... oh, yes, ostensibly to arrange for a new issue of uniforms; actually to get the boy out of the way until the political crisis had blown over. Tom was too honest for his own good, an admirer of Fallon and the Esper movement. His outspokenness had led to friction with his brother officers. They were mostly of bossman stock or from well-to-do protectee families.. The existing social order had been good to them. But Tom Danielis began as a fisher lad in a poverty-stricken village on the Mendocino coast. In spare moments he’d learned the three R’s from a local Esper; once literate, he joined the Army and earned a commission by sheer guts and brains. He had never forgotten that the Espers helped the poor and that Fallon promised to help the Espers ... Then, too, battle, glory, Reunification, Federal Democracy, those were heady dreams when yea were young.
Laura’s room was little changed since she left it to get married last year. And she had only been seventeen then. Objects survived which had belonged to a small person with pigtails and starched frocks—a teddy bear loved to shapelessness, a doll house her father had built, her mother’s picture drawn by a corporal who stopped a bullet at Salt Lake. Oh, God, how much she had come to look like her mother.
Dark hair streamed over a pillow turned gold by the light. Mackenzie shook her as gently as he was able. She awoke instantly, and he saw the terror within her.
“Dad! Anything about Tom?”
“He’s okay.” Mackenzie set the lantern on the floor and sat himself on the edge of the bed. Her fingers were cold where they caught at his hand.
“He isn’t,” she said. “I know you too well.”
“He’s not been hurt yet. I hope he won’t be.”
Mackenzie braced himself. Because she was a soldier’s daughter, he told her the truth in a few words; but he was not strong enough to look at her while he did. When he had finished, he sat dully listening to the rain.
“You’re going to revolt,” she whispered.
“I’m going to consult with SCHQ and follow my commanding officer’s orders,” Mackenzie said.
“You know what they’ll be ... once he knows you’ll back him.”
Mackettzie shrugged. His head had begun to ache. Hangover started already? He’d need a good deal more booze before he could sleep tonight No, no time for sleep—yes, there would be. Tomorrow would do to assemble the regiment in courtyard and address them from the breech of Black Hepzibah, as a Mackenzie of the Rolling Stones always addressed his men, and—. He found himself ludicrously recalling a day when he and Nora and this girl here had gone rowing on Lake Tahoe. The water was the color of Nora’s eyes, green and blue and with sunlight flimmering across the surface, but so clear you could see the rocks on the bottom; and Laura’s own little bottom had stuck straight in the air as she trailed her hands astern.
She sat thinking for a space before saying flatly: “I suppose you can’t be talked out of it.” He shook his head. “Well, can I leave tomorrow early, then?”
“Yes. I’ll get you a coach.”
“T-t-to hell with that. I’m better in the saddle than you are.”
“Okay. A couple of men to escort you, though.” Mackenzie drew a long breath. “Maybe you can persuade Tom—”
“No. I can’t. Please don’t ask me to, Dad.”
He gave her the last gift he could: “I wouldn’t want you to stay. That’d be shirking your own duty. Tell Tom I still think he’s the right man for you. Goodnight, duck.” It came out too fast, but he dared not delay. When she began to cry he must unfold her arms from his neck and depart the room.
“But I had not expected so much killing!”
“Nor I ... at this stage of things. There will be more yet, I am afraid, before the immediate purpose is achieved.”
“You told me—”
“I told you aour hopes, Mwfr. You know as well as I that the Great Science is only exact on the broadest scale of history. Individual events are subject to statistical fluctuation.”
“That is an easy way, is it not, to describe sentient beings dying in the mud?”
“You are new here. Theory is one thing, adjustment to practical necessities is another. Do you think it does not hurt me to see that happen which I myself have helped plan?”
“Oh, I know, I know. Which makes it no easier to live with my guilt.”
“To live with your responsibilities, you mean.”
“Your phrase.”
“No, this is not semantic trickery. The distinction is real. You have read reports and seen films, but I was here with the first expedition. And here I have been for more than two centuries. Their agony is no abstraction to me.”
“But it was different when we first discovered them; The aftermath of their nuclear wars was still so horribly present. That was when they needed us—the poor starveling anarchs—and we, we did nothing but observe.”
“Now you are hysterical. Could we come in blindly, ignorant of every last fact about them, and expect to be anything but one more disruptive. element? An element whose effects we ourselves would not have been able to predict. That would have been criminal indeed, like a surgeon who started to operate as soon as he met the patient, without so much as taking a case history. We had to let them their own way while we studied in secret. You have no idea how desperately hard we worked to gain information and understanding. That work goes on. It was only seventy years ago that we felt enough assurance to introduce the first new factor into this one selected society. As we continue to learn more, the plan will be adjusted. It may take us a thousand years to complete our, mission.”
“But meanwhile they have pulled themselves back out of the wreckage. They are finding their own answers to their problems. What right have we to—”
“I begin to wonder, Mwyr, what right you have to claim even the title of apprentice psychodynamician. Consider what their ‘answers’ actually amount to. Most of the planet is still in a state of barbarism. This continent has come farthest toward recovery, because of having the widest distribution of technical skills and equipment before the destruction. But what social structure has evolved? A jumble of quarrelsome successor states. A feudalism where the balances of political, military and economic power lies with a landed aristocracy, of all archaic things. A score of languages and subcultures developing along their own incompatible lines. A blind technology worship inherited from the ancestral society that, unchecked, will lead them in the end back to a machine civilization as demoniac as the one that tore itself apart three centuries ago. Are you distressed that a few hundred men have been killed because our own agents promoted a revolution which did not come off quite so smoothly as we hoped? Well, you have the word of the Great Science itself that, without our guidance, the totaled misery of this race through the next five thousand years would outweigh by three orders of magnitude whatever pain we are forced to inflict.”