The red-faced man frowned. 'It's a point,' he said grudgingly.
'Now I believe that if there are aliens here tonight they are not going to be in the middle of the crowd. They are going to be on the edges, trying to sneak away,' Ryan continued.
'That seems reasonable,' said James Henry. 'Let's get after them.'
Ryan led the way shouting with the rest.
'Aliens! Aliens! Stop the aliens. Get them now. Over there—in the streets!'
Pushing through the crowd was like trying to trudge through a quagmire. Every step, every breath Ryan took was painful.
Ryan led them, pace by pace, through the packed throng, up the steps into the National Gallery and, as the crowd thinned out in the galleries themselves, through a window at the back, through yards, over walls and car parks until they escaped the red-faced man and his friends and were finally in the moving mass of Oxford Street.
Only James Henry didn't seem aware of what Ryan had done.
As they reached Hyde Park he pulled at Ryan's torn coat.
'Hey! What are we supposed to be doing. I thought we were going after the aliens.'
'I know something about the aliens that wasn't mentioned tonight,' Ryan said.
'What?'
'I'll tell you when we get back to my place.'
When they finally reached Ryan's flat they were exhausted.
'What about the aliens, then?' James Henry asked as the door closed behind them.
"The worst aliens are the Patriots,' said Ryan. 'They are the most obvious of the anti-humans.'
Henry was puzzled. 'Surely not...'
Ryan took a deep breath and went to the drinks cabinet, began fixing drinks for them all as they sat panting in the chairs in the living room.
"The Patriots...' murmured Henry. 'I suppose it's just possible...'
Ryan handed him his drink. 'I thought,' he said, 'that the discoveries in Space would give us all a better perspective. Instead it seems that the perspective has been even more narrowed and distorted. Once people only feared other races, other nations, other groups with opposed or different interests. Now they fear everything. It's gone too far, Henry.'
'I'm still not with you,' James Henry said.
'Simply—paranoia. What is paranoia, Henry?'
'Being afraid of things—suspecting plots—all that stuff.'
'It can be defined more closely. It is an irrational fear, an irrational suspicion. Often it is in fact a refusal to face the real cause of one's anxiety, to invent causes because the true cause is either too disturbing, too frightening, too horrible to face or too difficult to cope with. That's what paranoia actually is, Henry.'
'So...?'
'So the Patriots have offered us a surrogate. They have offered us something to concentrate on that is nothing really to do with the true causes of the ills of Society. It's common enough. Hitler supplied it to the Germans in the form of the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Mc Carthy supplied it to the Americans in the form of the Communist Conspiracy. Even our own Enoch Powell supplied it in the form of the West Indian immigrants in the sixties and seventies. There are plenty of examples.'
James Henry frowned. 'You say they were wrong, eh? Well, I'm not so sure. We were right to get rid of the West Indians when we did. We were right to restrict jobs to Englishmen when we did.
You have to draw the line somewhere, Ryan.'
Ryan sighed. 'And what about these "aliens" from space, then?
Where do they fit in? What are they doing to the economy? They are an invention—a crude invention, at that—of the Patriots to describe anyone who is opposed to their insane schemes. Where do you think the term "witch-hunt" comes from, Henry?'
James Henry sipped his drink thoughtfully. 'Perhaps I did get a bit over-excited...'
Ryan patted him on the shoulder. 'We all are. It's the strain, the tension—and it is particularly the uncertainty. We don't know where we're going. We've no goals, because we can't rely on Society any longer. The Patriots offer certainty. And that's what we've got to find for ourselves.'
'You'd better explain,' John Ryan said from his chair. 'Have you got any suggestions?'
Ryan spread his hands. 'That was my suggestion. That we find a goal—a rational goal. Find a way out of this mess...'
And Ryan, now sitting at his desk in the great ship, reflects that it was that evening which was the turning point, that decision which brought him to where he is now, aboard the spaceship Hope Dempsey, heading towards Munich 15040, Barnard's Star, at point nine of c...
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There is no sound here in space. No light. No life. Only the dim glow of distant stars as the tiny craft moves, so slowly, through the great neutral blackness.
And Ryan, as he goes methodically about his duties, thinks with a heavy heart of the familiarity and warmth of his early years—of the births of his children, of studying their first schoolbooks, talking to his friends in the evenings at their flat, of his wife, now resting like some comfortable Sleeping Beauty, unaware of him in the fluids of her casket.
Just a pellet travelling through space, thinks Ryan. Nearly all the living tissue contained in the pellet is unconscious in the waters of the caskets. Once they had moved and acted. They had been happy, until the threats had become obvious, until life had become unbearable for them...
Ryan rubs his eyes and writes out his routine report. He underlines it in red, reads it into the machine, sits down again before the log book.
He writes: Another day has passed.
I am frightened, sometimes, that I am becoming too much of a vegetable. I am an active man by nature. I will need to be active when we land. I wonder if I have become too passive. Still, this is idle speculation...
His speculations were never idle, he reflects. The moment the problem was clearly seen, he began to think along positive lines.
The problem was straightforward: society was breaking down and death and destruction were becoming increasingly widespread. He wished to survive and he wished for his friends and family to survive. There was nowhere in the world that could any longer be considered a safe refuge. Nuclear war was bound to arise soon.
There had been only one answer: the stars. And there had been only one project for reaching the stars. Unmanned research craft had brought back evidence that there was a planetary system circling Barnard's Star and that two of those planets were in many respects similar to Earth.
The research project had been United Nations sponsored— the first important multilateral project between the Great Powers...
It had been a last attempt to draw the nations of the world together, to make them consider themselves one race.
Ryan shakes his head.
It had been too late, of course.
Ryan writes: ... I keep fit as best I can. An odd thought Just popped into my head. It gives some idea of how closely one has to watch oneself. It occurred to me that a way of keeping fit would be to wake one of the other men so that we could have sparring matches, play football or something like that. I began to see the 'sense' of this and began to rationalise it so that it seemed advantageous to all concerned to wake, say, my brother John. Or even one of the women... There are several ways of keeping fit and alert—getting exercise. Ridiculous, undisciplined ideas! It is just as well I keep the log. It helps me keep perspective.
He grins. A great way of cheating on old John. He'd never know...
He shudders.
Naturally, he couldn't...
There was Josephine, too. It would betray the whole ideal of the mission if he betrayed them...
I think I'll go and take a cold shower! He writes jokingly. He signs the book, underlines his entry in red, closes the book, puts it neatly away, gets up, makes a last check of the instruments, asks the computer a couple of routine questions, is satisfied by the answers, leaves the control cabin.