Ryan smiles grimly. It's true, he thinks. People under stress usually start dealing with half a dozen surrogate issues, leaving the real issues completely untouched because they're too difficult to cope with. Like the man who lost the sixpence in the house but decided to look for it outside because the light was better and he would thus save his candles.
He adds in his log: And there's always some bloody messiah to answer their needs— someone whom they will follow blindly because they are too fearful to rely on their own good sense. It's like Don Quixote leading the Gadarene Swine!
Ryan chuckles aloud.
Leaders, fuhrers, duces, prophets, visionaries, gurus... For a hundred years the world was ruled by bad poets. A good politician is only something of a visionary-essentially he must be a man who sees the needs of people in practical and immediate terms and tries to do something about it. Visionaries are fine for inspiring people— but they are the worst choice as leaders—they attempt to impose their rather simple visions on an extremely complicated world! Why have politics and art become so mixed up together in the last hundred years? Why have bad artists been given nations as canvases on which to paint their tatty, sketchy, rubbish? Perhaps because politics, like religion before it, was dead as an effective force and something new had to be found. And art stood in until whatever it was turned up.
Will something turn up? It's hard to say. We'll probably never know on Munich 15040 if the world survives or not.
Thank God we had the initiative to get this ship on her way to the stars!
No more time for writing. Ryan puts the log-book away quickly and begins his regular check of the ship's nuclear drive, running a check on virtually every separate component.
He taught himself the procedure for running the ship. He was not trained as an astronaut. No one planned that he should be the man standing in the control cabin at that particular moment.
Until comparatively recently Ryan was, in fact, a business man.
A pretty successful business man.
As he does the routine checking, he thinks about himself before he even conceived the idea of travelling into space.
He sees himself, a strongly built man of forty, standing with his back to the vast plate glass window of his large, thickly carpeted office. His heavy, healthy face was pugnacious, his back was broad, his thick, stubby-fingered hands were clasped behind his back.
Where Ryan is now a monk—a man dedicated to his ship and his unconscious companions—a man charged, like a cleric in the Dark Ages, with preserving the knowledge and lives contained in this moving monastery—then he was a man almost perpetually in a state of combat.
Ten thousand years before he would have been a savage standing in front of his pack, hair bristling, teeth bared, bone club in hand.
Instead, Ryan had been a toymaker.
Not a kindly old peasant whittling puppets in a pretty little cottage. Ryan had owned a firm averaging a million pounds a year in profits, producing toy videophones, plastic hammers, miniature miracles of rocketry, talking life-size dolls, knee-high cars with automatic gear changes, genuine all electric cooking machines, real baaing sheep, things which jumped, sped, made noises and broke when their calculated life-span was over and were thrown secretly and with curses by parents into the rapid waste disposal units of cities all over the western world.
Ryan pressed the button which connected him with the office of his manager, Owen Powell.
Powell appeared on the screen. He was on his hands and knees on the office floor watching two dolls, three foot high, walk about the carpet. As he heard the buzz of the interoffice communicator he was saying to one of the dolls: 'Hello, Gwendolen.' As he said 'Hello, Ryan,' the doll replied, in a beautifully modulated voice, 'Hello, Owen.'
'That's the personalised doll you were talking about, is it?"
Ryan said.
"That's it.' Powell straightened up. 'I knew they could do it if they tried. Lovely, isn't she? The child voice-prints her in the shop on its birthday, say. After that she can give any one of twenty five responses to its questions—but only to the child. Imagine that— a doll which can speak, apparently intelligently, but only to you.
The kids go mad about it.'
'If the price 'is right,' Ryan said.
Powell was an enthusiast, a man who would really, if he had not had a twenty thousand pound a year job with Ryan, have been perfectly happy carving toys in an old peasant's hut. He looked disconcerted by Ryan's discouraging remark.
'Well, maybe we can get the price down to twenty pounds retail. What would you say to that?'
'Not bad.' Ryan deliberately gave Powell no encouragement.
Powell was a man who would work hard for a smile and stop working when you gave it, reasoned Ryan. Therefore it was better to smile seldom in his direction.
'Never mind all that now.' Ryan rubbed his eyebrows. 'There's plenty of time to get it right before Christmas when we'll try a few out, see how they go and produce a big line by spring for the following Christmas.'
Powell nodded. 'Agreed.'
'Now,' said Ryan, 'I want you to do two things for me. One— get in touch with the factory and tell Ames to use the Mark IV pin on the Queen of Dolls. Two—ring Davies and tell him we're stopping all deliveries until he pays.'
'He'll never keep going during August if we do that,' objected Powell. 'If we stop delivering, he'll have to close down, man.
We'll only get a fraction of what he owes us!'
'I don't care.' Ryan gestured dismissively. 'I'm not letting Davies get away with another ten thousand pounds worth of goods so that he'll pay us in the end, if we're lucky. I will not do business on that basis, That's final.'
'All right.' Powell shrugged. 'That's reasonable enough.'
'I think so.' Ryan broke the connection.
He reached into his desk and took out a bottle of green pills.
He poured water into a glass from an old-fashioned carafe on his immaculate desk. He swallowed the pills and put the glass down.
Unconsciously he resumed his stance, head jutting slightly forward, hands behind back. He had a decision to make.
Powell was a good manager.
A bit sloppy sometimes. Forgetful. But on the whole efficient.
He was not quarrelsome, like the ambitious Conroy, or withdrawn, like his last manager, Evers.
What he had mistaken at first for decent behaviour, respect for another man's privacy, had gone beyond reason in Evers.
When a manager refused to speak to the firm's managing director on the interoffice communicator—broke the connection consistently in fact—business became impossible.
Ryan could certainly respect his feelings, sympathise with them as it happened—so would any other self-respecting person. But facts were facts. You could not run a business without talking to other people. Strangers they might be, uncongenial they might be, but if you couldn't stand a brief conversation on the communicator, then you were no use to a firm.
Ryan reflected that he himself was finding it increasingly distasteful to get in touch with many of his key workers but, since it was that or go under, he forced himself to do so.
Powell was certainly a good manager.
Inventive and clever, too.
On the other hand, Ryan thought, he had come to hate him.
He was—childish. There was no other word for it. That open countenance, that smile, a smile which said that he would take to anybody who took to him. There was something doglike about it. Just pat him on the head and he would wag his tail to and fro, jump up and lick your face. Sickening, really, Ryan thought to himself. It made you feel sick to think about it. He had no reticences, no reserves. A man shouldn't be so friendly.