The Shield of Time

XIII

Gannoway’s home was a modest apartment in Queens, crowded by a wife and four children. But he had a study of his own which he assured his visitors was soundproof and free of electronic bugs; and his family had been sent out for the evening.

A tall, angular, somewhat Andrew Jackson-featured man, he closed the study door and stood considering the others. Koskinen shifted from foot to foot under that gaze, glanced out the window at the glittering sprawl of the night city, back again to the comfort of Vivienne beside him, and did not know what to say. When Gannoway broke the silence, it was Trembecki he addressed.

“You must have some reason for bringing me these outlaws, Jan, and you’re not the type to try to frame me. But I’d appreciate it if you’d end the suspense.”

“Outlaws?” Vivienne exclaimed. “Has the alarm been ’cast?”

“Yeah, an hour or so ago,” Gannoway said. “On the evening news. Names and photos, with a tape excerpt from Mr. Koskinen’s last phone call to the Bureau. You’re dangerous foreign agents, did you know?”

“Damn! I’d hoped for a little more time,” Trembecki said. “But evidently the Chinese job is completed. They’ll be after you now in full force, Pete.”

“What does MS really want you for?” Gannoway asked.

“That’s a long story,” Trembecki said. “You’ll hear it if.”

“I knew the Mars expedition had been taken into ‘protective custody,’ of course, and wondered why. I’m sorry about Nat’s boy.”

“Part of getting him back is to keep these kids free,” Trembecki said. “We have to hide them away for a period of time, a month or longer. You know every place Nat’s got will be checked, just because Dave’s arrest has made him a natural ally of theirs. Can you take care of them?”

“Here? Don’t make me laugh. And while I sympathize with anybody in that position, why should I jeopardize my family, as well as myself, on your account?”

“On your own account too,” Trembecki said. “Wouldn’t you like to get rid of Marcus? Pete, here, has a way to do so, if we can apply it.”

Gannoway’s features remained immobile, but the breath sucked sharply in between his lips. “Sit down and tell me.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word,” Trembecki answered. “We’ve had our differences now and then, you and Nat and I, but you know we aren’t doublecrossers.”

Gannoway shook his head. “Sorry. Your judgment of what’s right and proper might not square with mine. Besides, I couldn’t do a thing by myself. Others would be involved, who do not know you personally. They’d have to be convinced the risk was worth taking.”

“And that they’d have some say in the final settlement?”

“Well…yes. If you’ve got, let’s suppose, a gadget potent enough to overthrow Marcus and keep someone equally bad from succeeding him—” Gannoway gestured at the shield generator by Koskinen’s feet—“then it’s probably also able to accomplish other things.”

“The possibilities are big, all right,” Trembecki said. “We wouldn’t have turned to you if there’d been much choice in the matter. Nothing personal, Carse, but how far can we trust your associates?”

“All the way, provided you want the same as they do.”

“Which is what?”

“Read Quarks and find out. We’re simply followers of his.”

“So you say. But he wouldn’t be the first prophet in history whose teachings got twisted.”

“He’s still alive, you know, to keep us in line,” Gannoway said. “Professor emeritus at Columbia. I see him quite often.”

He sat brooding before he addressed Koskinen: “Look here, if you’re the one that this hullaballoo is about, you’re entitled to the deciding vote.

What do you think? Will you trust me without reservations, or would you rather go off and forget you ever saw me? In the latter case, I won’t fink on you, even though I’ll be in serious trouble if you’re caught and Pl’d. But I hope you’ll choose the first.”

“I—” Koskinen moistened his lips. “I don’t…that is, I’m so ignorant about everything on Earth, I can’t—”

Vivienne reached over to lay a hand on his. “He’s had a nasty time,” she said. “How’s he to know who his friends are?”

“We can’t sit long and argue,” Gannoway warned. “But…wait, I have a suggestion. Why not invite Quarles over so you can find out what Egalitarianism really is, and decide if it’s something you can honestly support?”

“Hey, we don’t want to let anyone else in on the fact that these people are with us,” Trembecki said.

“No problem there,” Gannoway assured him. “He’s been blind for years. We’ll simply introduce you under different names.”

“Would he come over, just like that?” Koskinen asked.

“Probably. He’s alone in the world. I’ve had him here often for an evening’s chat.”

“I’ve been party to some strange negotiations,” Trembecki grumbled, “but making a lecture on sociology a beforehand requirement takes the pink sugar cake.”

“No. I think Mr. Gannoway’s right,” Koskinen said. “I, that is, maybe it’s hard for you to understand, but we’d have done this sort of thing on Mars, trying to get the wholeness of a situation. I mean, well, emotion is the largest part of it, and that’s not something you can put in a book like logic. It’s something that someone is feeling here-and-now. You have to encounter it directly.”

“I’ll call, then.” Gannoway left the room.

Trembecki shook his head. “I wish I’d had more to do with the Equals,” he muttered. “I’d have some notion, then, of the ins and outs of them, even their clandestine fraction. As matters are, I can only go by guess and feel. Might be a good idea to talk to the old man at that. Of course, he probably has no idea that an underground exists, but sometimes you can judge a tree by its roots.” He lit a cigarette and let it droop from his mouth. “Sometimes.”

Gannoway came back. “Everything’s fine. He’ll take a cab right away. I told him I had some people visiting, fresh from several years of engineering work abroad, who’d love to meet him.” He chuckled. “Oren Quarles is a saint, I suppose, but he has his human share of vanity.”

“Let’s get our yarns straight,” Trembecki said. “Aliases and such details.” They spent the interval of waiting in rehearsal. When Quarles arrived, they moved out to the living room.

The philosopher was a small man, but carried himself so erect that one scarcely noticed. A massive white-thatched head was framed in the thin cage of a “seeing eye,” whose reflected pulses enabled him to find his way around with fair ease. There was courtliness in the manner with which he shook hands, bowing over Vivienne’s, and accepted a glass of sherry. A while passed in the usual polite formulas. But he was not hard to steer onto the subject of his own ideas.

“To be frank,” he said, “I don’t like that name ‘Egalitarianism.’ For one thing, it’s uneuphonious—or should I say dysphonious?—and for another, it fixes a label. People are much too apt to identify the label with the bottle, no matter how much the contents may change. Look at what happened to concepts like Christianity and democracy.

“The latter is particularly relevant. Democracy came to be identified with freedom. That ain’t necessarily so, as de Tocqueville realized, and Jouvenel after him. If the popular will prevails unrestrained, then there is nothing government cannot do, and hence no limit to the degree of control which it can impose on the individual. Louis XIV daydreamed about conscription, but only the French Revolutionary government was actually able to institute it. Or, on a more mundane level, democratic communities tend to have a set of blue laws such as would never be imagined in an aristocracy or a monarchy. I really believe that the present-day liberalism about public morals and display—anything goes, they tell me, and what’s still technically illegal is winked at—I really think that stems directly from the decline of democracy: if only because it helps hide the more important freedoms which have been lost.”

“But we have a democracy still,” Koskinen blurted. “Don’t we?”

“In a way. We still elect our legislators and our principal executives. However, the percentage of the population that bothers to vote grows smaller every year. And that isn’t merely the result of poverty, poor education, and the rest, bad though things are in those regards. It reflects a general realization that the true government has become a set of bureaus: inevitably so, given the requirements of world empire. And these bureaus, in turn, are gradually becoming the private fiefs of those men strong and clever enough to get control of their machinery. Military Security is the most conspicuous example, but the others aren’t far behind in that line of evolution. If you want to do something in industry, science, communications, almost anything you care to name, you hardly ever deal with a Senator or a Congressman, trying to get laws passed that will favor you. Do you? No, you approach an agency in charge of administering and interpreting laws already passed.”

“Do you mean Congress is a rubber stamp?” Koskinen asked.

“Not yet. The final authority is still there, if Congress can be induced to use it. But that would require the repeal of a century’s legislation, all of which involved giving government more and more scope and, therefore, giving those who execute that legislation more and more power. This in turn derives from the basis on which democratic government claims legitimacy: the naked popular will. (Which, in practice, means the will of the most effective pressure groups.) The Founding Fathers were well aware of that tendency, and wrote restrictions into the Constitution, things that government could not do no matter how large a majority wished them done. Actually, this country began as a republic, not a pure democracy. But with the passage of time, many of those guarantees were re-interpreted almost out of existence. The states could no longer control their own internal policies, the individual could no longer bear arms…oh, everything happened from the best of motives, with the aim of correcting gross abuses, but the end result was the conversion of the republic to a curious cross between a democracy and an oligarchy. The evolution continues today, with the oligarchic element steadily gaining strength while the democratic one weakens.”

“I thought you favored world democracy,” Vivienne said, “but now you speak as if you don’t think it’s even a good idea for us.”

“Oh, on the contrary, my dear…I think the concept of liberty is one of the noblest and most ennobling which the mind of man has ever brought forth. But it is not identical with democracy, which is only one form of government.

“The problem is how to establish and guarantee liberty. Man is not capable of being an autonomous individual. If he tries to be, the heart goes out of him. He ends as a miserable, ulcer-ridden, futility-haunted nervous wreck. He needs to be part of a whole culture, with duties as well as privileges. But we libertarians feel that that belongingness should come from within, by his own free choice. He should not have to give more than he wishes, provided he does not take more than a share proportionate to his contribution. Then, too, we must face the fact that the poor we always have with us—the unlucky, the handicapped, the oppressed, yes, and their exploiters, who are also unfortunate—and of course there are those who are simply misguided. These must all be taken care of, or society grows sick and at last welcomes the sharp medicine of dictatorship. But the machinery that takes care of them must not grow too restrictive.

“With all its faults, the democratic republic was the best attempt thus far to solve the problem. It provided a governmental framework in which the ballot box was a permanent check on the arrogance of authority. It allowed the will of the majority to be expressed in action. But it also restrained that will, setting up as a moral absolute the rights of the individual and the community, on which no one could encroach for any reason.

“The trouble was that society changed. Transportation and communication improved until every community was the next door neighbor to every other one, and a mobile population felt no deep loyalty to any of them. Freed from local obligations, responsible only for his own well-being, the individual found that no one was responsible for him. He had to turn to government for whatever help he needed. This meant that government became ever larger and more firmly entrenched in every department of life. You can’t pass a Bill of Rights and expect it to take care of itself. To endure, it must have deep-rooted institutions to whose existence it is vital. Similarly, states’ rights became a farce when the states themselves ceased to be organic communities and became, instead, mere providers of local services—or, in cases like the old segregation laws, mere agents of a petty tyranny whose victims looked to the national government for relief. And, finally, the nuclear wars shattered morale as well as physical plant. The animal wish to survive overrode every traditional concept of international law. So we got the Protectorate: whose yoke will bear more heavily on us than on the client nations, as our society becomes increasingly Byzantine.

“Sometimes, though, good can come of evil. I think we have a chance, at this moment in history, to restore a true democratic republic on a firmer basis than any which has existed in the past. A world basis.”

“I beg your pardon,” Trembecki said, “but I’ve seen a fair amount of this planet, and that won’t work. Asians, Africans, even most Europeans and Latin Americans, they aren’t Yankees. They don’t think like you, want what you do, or care about what you think is important. The converse is also true, of course. That’s one reason the Protectorate is hated—it forces those peoples, to some extent, into an unnatural mold. You won’t make good democrats of them, ever, any more than they’ll make a good Moslem or Hindu or something out of you.”

Quarles smiled. “There have been occasional startling overnight changes in national character,” he said, “But I don’t count on any such thing. In fact, I wouldn’t want that to happen, the Americanization of the whole Earth. Not only would it impoverish the human race—think of losing all the rich potentialities in other cultures!—but it would make my pet scheme unfeasible.”

“Why, I should think it’s the only way you’ll ever get a real world government,” Koskinen said.

“A single world culture, where everybody agrees on at least the essential points.”

“No, not really,” Quarles said. “At best, if it could happen, such a thing would only invite a repetition of our own recent past, this time on a planetary scale. But if you have, instead, a diversity of communities, each solid enough to survive as a going concern on a basis of equality with the others, while remaining too different from its fellows to merge with them, then would you not have what the United States began as—a genuine federalism?

“And would it not stimulate a revival of liberty? The atomic individual is at the mercy of government because he has no one to stand with him, no community of shared traditions, obligations, folkways. But within the framework of an entire world, a Mexican or Nigerian or Indian would not be atomic. He would have just that community, his own nation, whose survival as a distinct entity would require that it be a bulwark against the ex-actions of the central authority. And the same would be true of us Americans.”

“What sort of central authority?” Vivienne inquired.

“Well, war has to be prevented. That is the basic necessity, which the Protectorate does serve in its sorry fashion. My own suggestion is that there be a corps of planetary peacekeepers with limited but sufficient powers of inspection and arrest, and a monopoly of the most destructive weapons. (I had to spend an entire chapter defining those!) It should be under the direction of a world president, who’s elected by a bicameral world legislature—one Senator from each country and Congressmen according to franchised population.”

“Whoa!” Trembecki exclaimed. “You surely can’t mean to give every country equal representation. They tried that in the old UN, with results that you know. And a population basis is every bit as bad. It’d amount to turning the world over to the Chinese.”

“I said franchised population,” Quarles reminded him. “The requirements for a world-level vote would be such that only the civilized would be included. In fact, I think the multiple ballot is a good idea. Grant an additional world vote for meeting any of several qualifications, such as education above the minimum, real estate ownership, public service, and so on. That would weight the scale still more heavily in favor of reasonable policies. Of course, each country could make what electoral and governmental arrangements it wished within its own borders.”

“What else would the world government do?” Koskinen asked.

“Not too much, actually. It could operate in fields like health, conservation, and other politically safe matters. But the principle of internal sovereignty would have to be scrupulously respected. Not that we can continue to let the rich countries get richer while the poor get poorer. There will have to be some way of sharing the economic burden more equally—without merely shielding every community from the consequences of its own mismanagement. I’ve studied that problem too, in some detail, and concluded that to begin with America could finance an economic program by herself, for approximately what it now costs us to maintain the Protectorate. That would conciliate most of our present enemies, I’m sure. After the first decade, others can begin carrying their share of the load.”

“Too good to be true,” Trembecki said. “You can’t put countries off in neat little pigeonholes like that. They interact, change, merge, break up. And…not every war in history has been unjustified. Deaths, destruction, increased radiation background, and all, we’re still better off today for fighting the totalitarian than we’d be if we’d knuckled under.”

“Borders could be changed at any time by mutual agreement,” Quarles defended. “That’s included in the concept of internal sovereignty. As for the rise of oppressive governments, well, I would like to give the world authority one more power: power to enforce a new and basic human right. Any person not charged with certain specific crimes—the usual ones, but political heresy and other forms of dissent are excluded-any person may leave his country.”

“And will any other country take him in?”

“I’m certain that many would, if he really was departing to escape tyranny. It would be a cheap way of undermining the tyrant. To be sure, a cynical caudillo could charge his opponents with murder and clap them in jail, but you can’t do that very often if you’re unpopular or you’ll soon run out of jailers. It would become necessary to make oneself better liked.”

Quarles paused to sip from his glass. “You realize,” he said, “I haven’t any design for Utopia. This is going to be a violent and not very happy world for a long tune to come. That’s why I wish that ‘Egalitarianism’ label could have been avoided. It suggests that there is a cure-all. But on the other hand, if such aims are to be worked for, there has to be some kind of organization to do the work, and I suppose it must inevitably have some kind of name. I do think we can take action to right the most outstanding wrongs and start ourselves, above all, back toward being free men.”

The talk went on for several hours before Quarles bade them goodnight.

“Well?” said Gannoway eagerly, as soon as the door had closed.

“Good Lord,” Koskinen gasped, “yes!”