Genius

“The experiment has been going on for almost fifteen hundred years,” said Heym, “and it’s just starting to get under way. You can’t discontinue it now.”

“Can and will,” replied Goram, “if the situation seems to justify it. That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“But—one planet! One primitive planet! What sort of monsters do you think live there? I tell you, they’re people, as human as I—” Heym paused. He had meant to add—“and you,” but couldn’t quite bring himself to it. Goram seemed less than human, an atavistic remnant of screaming past ages, an ape in uniform. “—as I am,” finished Heym.

The hesitation seemed lost on Goram. The marshal stood regarding the psychologist out of sullen little black eyes, blocky form faintly stooped, long arms dangling, prognathous jaw thrust ahead of the broad flat-nosed countenance. The fluorotubes gleamed down on his shining shaven bullet skull. The black gold-braided uniform fitted him closely, a military neatness and precision that was in its way the most primitive characteristic of all.

He said in his hoarse bass: “So are the rebels. So are the barbarians and pirates. So are the serfs and slaves and criminals and insane. But it’s necessary to suppress all of them. If Station Seventeen represents a menace, it must be suppressed.”

“But what conceivable danger—One barbarian planet—under constant surveillance throughout its history! If that can menace an empire of a hundred thousand star systems, we’re not safe from anything!”

“We aren’t. For three thousand years of history, the Empire has been in danger. You have to live with it, as we soldiers do, to realize how ultimately unstable the stablest power in history really is. Oh, we can smash the peripheral barbarians. We can hold the Taranians and the Comi and Magellanics in check.” The marshal’s heavy-ridged eyes swept contemptuously up and down the scientist’s long weedy form. ‘‘I’m in no danger from you. I could break you with my bare hands. But a dozen viruses of Antaric plague, entering my body and multiplying, would paralyze me in agony and rot the flesh off my bones and probably empty this ship of life.”

The office quivered, ever so faintly. The muffled throb of the great engines was vibrant in its walls and floor and ceiling, in the huge ribs and plates of the hull, in guns that could incinerate a continent and the nerves and bones of the two thousand men manning that planetoidal mass. Monstrously the ship drove through a night of mind-cracking empty distances, outpacing light in her furious subdimensional quasivelocity, impregnable and invincible and inhuman in her arrogance. And a dozen blind half-living protein molecules could kill her.

Heym nodded stiffly. “I know what you mean,” he said. “After all”—deliberate snobbery edging his voice—“applied psychological science is the basis of the Empire. Military power is only one tool for—us.”

“As you will. But I am not a researcher’s tool, I belong to practical men, and they have decided this mission. If I report Station Seventeen potentially dangerous, they will order me to destroy it. If I decide it is already dangerous, I have the authority to order it destroyed myself.”