Short Fiction, Poul Anderson [simple e reader .TXT] 📗

or idly. The huge gyro-stabilized bulk did not move noticeably to the long Pacific swell. Pelican Station was the colony’s “downtown,” its shops and theaters and restaurants, service and entertainment.

Around it the water was indigo blue in the evening light, streaked with arabesques of foam, and he could hear waves rumble against the sheer walls. Overhead the sky was tall with a few clouds in the west turning aureate. The hovering gulls seemed cast in gold. A haziness in the darkened east betokened the southern California coastline. He breathed deeply, letting nerves and muscles and viscera relax, shutting off his mind and turning for a while into an organism that merely lived and was glad to live.

Dalgetty’s view in all directions was cut off by the other stations, the rising streamlined hulks which were Pacific Colony. A few airy flex-strung bridges had been completed to link them, but there was still an extensive boat traffic. To the south he could see a blackness on the water that was a sea ranch. His trained memory told him, in answer to a fleeting question, that according to the latest figures eighteen-point-three percent of the world’s food supply was now being derived from modified strains of seaweed. The percentage would increase rapidly, he knew.

Elsewhere were mineral-extracting plants, fishery bases, experimental and pure-research stations. Below the floating city, digging into the continental shelf, was the underwater settlement⁠—oil wells to supplement the industrial synthesizing process, mining, exploration in tanks to find new resources, a slow growth outward as men learned how to go deeper into cold and darkness and pressure. It was expensive but an overcrowded world had little choice.

Venus was already visible, low and pure on the dusking horizon. Dalgetty breathed the wet pungent sea-air into his lungs and thought with some pity of the men out there⁠—and on the Moon, on Mars, between worlds. They were doing a huge and heartbreaking job⁠—but he wondered if it were bigger and more meaningful than this work here in Earth’s oceans.

Or a few pages of scribbled equations, tossed into a desk drawer at the Institute. Enough. Dalgetty brought his mind to heel like a harshly trained dog. He was also here to work.

The forces he must encounter seemed monstrous. He was one man, alone against he knew not what kind of organization. He had to rescue one other man before⁠—well, before history was changed and spun off on the wrong course, the long downward path. He had his knowledge and abilities but they wouldn’t stop a bullet. Nor did they include education for this kind of warfare. War that was not war, politics that were not politics but a handful of scrawled equations and a bookful of slowly gathered data and a brainful of dreams.

Bancroft had Tighe⁠—somewhere. The Institute could not ask the government for help, even if to a large degree the Institute was the government. It could, perhaps, send Dalgetty a few men but it had no goon squads. And time was like a hound on his heels.

The sensitive man turned, suddenly aware of someone else. This was a middle-aged fellow, gaunt and gray-haired, with an intellectual cast of feature. He leaned on the rail and said quietly, “Nice evening, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Dalgetty. “Very nice.”

“It gives me a feeling of real accomplishment, this place,” said the stranger.

“How so?” asked Dalgetty, not unwilling to make conversation.

The man looked out over the sea and spoke softly as if to himself. “I’m fifty years old. I was born during World War Three and grew up with the famines and the mass insanities that followed. I saw fighting myself in Asia. I worried about a senselessly expanding population pressing on senselessly diminished resources. I saw an America that seemed equally divided between decadence and madness.

“And yet I can stand now and watch a world where we’ve got a functioning United Nations, where population increase is leveling off and democratic government spreading to country after country, where we’re conquering the seas and even going out to other planets. Things have changed since I was a boy but on the whole it’s been for the better.”

“Ah,” said Dalgetty, “a kindred spirit. Though I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple.”

The man arched his brows. “So you vote conservative?”

“The Labor Party is conservative,” said Dalgetty. “As proof of which it’s in coalition with the Republicans and the Neofederalists as well as some splinter groups. No, I don’t care if it stays in, or if the Conservatives prosper or the Liberals take over. The question is⁠—who shall control the group in power?”

“Its membership, I suppose,” said the man.

“But just who is its membership? You know as well as I do that the great failing of the American people has always been their lack of interest in politics.”

“What? Why, they vote, don’t they? What was the last percentage?”

“Eight-eight-point-three-seven. Sure they vote⁠—once the ticket has been presented to them. But how many of them have anything to do with nominating the candidates or writing the platforms? How many will actually take time out to work at it⁠—or even to write their Congressmen? ‘Ward heeler’ is still a term of contempt.

“All too often in our history the vote has been simply a matter of choosing between two well-oiled machines. A sufficiently clever and determined group can take over a party, keep the name and the slogans and in a few years do a complete behind-the-scenes volte-face.” Dalgetty’s words came fast, this was one facet of a task to which he had given his life.

“Two machines,” said the stranger, “or four or five as we’ve got now, are at least better than one.”

“Not if the same crowd controls all of them,” Dalgetty said grimly.

“But⁠—”

“ ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’ Better yet, join all sides. Then you can’t lose.”

“I don’t think that’s happened yet,” said the man.

“No it hasn’t,” said Dalgetty, “not in the United States, though in some other countries⁠—never mind. It’s still in process of happening, that’s all. The lines today are drawn not