The Tenth Planet (1973) by Edmund Cooper

Author:Edmund Cooper [Cooper, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780340205129
Publisher: Coronet Books
Published: 1976-06-30T21:00:00+00:00

19

TALBOT’S CREED WAS a strange, intense book. Written three thousand Earth years ago, it embodied the idea and ideals of the strange, intense man who had written it. As he read, Idris began to comprehend some of the pressures under which scientists like Manfrius de Skun worked.

Garfield Talbot had been a man of extremes—a living paradox. He had been an autocrat who gave lip-service to democracy, a pacifist who could ruthlessly blast out of space a vessel whose captain refused to colonise Minerva, a religious fanatic who was also a kind of Utopian communist, a man who hated the very science that enabled him to colonise a frozen planet six billion miles from the sun.

On the one hand, he believed that every human being had a God-given right to determine his own destiny: on the other hand, he regarded himself as being divinely chosen to lead the remnants of mankind towards a new era of spiritual grace.

Garfield Talbot was ‘democratically’ elected to be the first president of the first Five Cities Council. Theoretically, he took advice from his fellow councillors. Theoretically decisions were arrived at by a voting process. In practice, Talbot was an absolute ruler, a beneficent despot.

He had a larger-than-life personality, an almost mystical aura. Men were afraid of him, women were fascinated by him. During his long and active career, he sired—or acknowledged that he sired—fourteen children by eight women. Later, Idris learned that there were numerous people claiming direct patrilinear descent from Garfield Talbot in all the Five Cities. Most of them, not unnaturally, were the hard core of the Triple T party.

Part of Talbot’s attraction lay in the fact that he was incorruptible. He wanted nothing for himself—except power. He wore the tunic of a hydroponics labourer; lived in a small room that contained little but a cooking stove, a table and a bed; touched no alcoholic drinks and ate sparingly of the simplest foods.

He was, thought Idris, a sort of combination of Rasputin, Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Ghandi. If he had lived on Earth in the nineteenth or the twentieth century, he would undoubtedly have made himself master of a continent at the very least.

But he had led the exodus from a doomed Mars and made himself master of the colony he had established on this frozen planet at the perimeter of the solar system. Proportionally, his achievement was comparable to those of Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon. Perhaps it was greater, because Talbot’s Creed had survived as a political force for three thousand years.

There was no monetary system on Minerva. Talbot’s simple Utopianism had seen to that. Money, he believed, was a corrupting influence. It caused men to work not for the common good but for the material advantages that money would buy. Neither was there any ownership of property, apart from personal possessions. There were no laws of inheritance, and there were no privileges of birth. Even Talbot’s own children had been treated the same as all other children in the then small

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