The Best Made Plans by Everett B. Cole

Author:Everett B. Cole [Cole, Everett B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Short
ISBN: 9783849196868
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: TREDITION CLASSICS
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Heym stood for a while, chain smoking and looking out the visiplate at the silently rolling planet. Like an ominous moon, the warship swung in an orbit just beyond the atmosphere. For all its titanic mass, it was insignificant against the bulk of a world. Yet in guns and bombs and death-mists, gravitational beams and long-range disintegrators and mass-conversion torpedoes, in coagulative radiations and colloid-resonant generators, in the thousand hells man had made through all his tormented existence, lay the power to rip life off that surface and blanket the shuddering continents in smoke and flame and leave the blackened planet one great tomb under the indifferent stars.

No—no, that was wrong. The power did not lie in the ship, it was inert metal and will-less electronic intellect, a cosmic splinter that without man would spin darkly into eternity. The will, and hence the power, to destroy lay in men—in one man. One gorilla in uniform. One caveman holding a marshal's baton. One pulsing mass of colloidal tissue, ultimately unstable, not even knowing its own desire. Heym scowled and drew heavily on his cigarette. Goram had been soothed into comparative geniality, but his frantic notion of death as panacea was as strong as ever. The creature wasn't even consistent—one moment talking philosophy of history as if he had brains, the next snarling his mindlessly destructive xenophobia. There was something wrong about Goram— Though it might only be my own ignorance of practical psychology, thought Heym. As a research man, I'm used to dealing with only one factor at a time. A situation in life is really too complex for me—I don't have enough rules of thumb. I wish I'd brought a practicing technician along, say Kharva or Lunn—they'd soon analyze the mental mechanism of our marshal and push the appropriate buttons. The old sickening fear fell anew on him. What if, after all, he should fail—what if fifteen hundred years of work were to be sponged out at the arbitrary whim of a superstition-ridden military moron? If I fail, the Empire fails with me—I know it. And it isn't fair! I should have been told what I was being recalled to Sol for. I should have had a chance to prepare my arguments better. I should have been allowed to take a practical psycho along—but no, they obviously couldn't permit me to do that or I'd have had everything my own way.

But couldn't they see? Can't they understand? Or has the worship of statism penetrated so deep that it's like an instinct, a blind need for which everything else must be sacrificed?

He turned and went heavily toward his cabin to make ready.

Screened by an invisibility field, the lifeboat spiraled down toward the surface. Goram let the robo-pilot handle the vessel, and spent most of his time peering through a field-penetrating visiscope.

"Not much sign of habitation," he said.

"No, I told you the population was still small," replied Heym. "After, all, only a few thousand were planted originally and the struggle for existence was as hard as with any savages for the first few centuries.

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