Short Fiction by Poul Anderson

Author:Poul Anderson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Inventors -- Fiction, Social change -- Fiction, Mars (Planet) -- Fiction, Swindlers and swindling -- Fiction, Longevity -- Fiction, Husband and wife -- Fiction, Immortality -- Fiction, Triton (Satellite) -- Fiction, Short stories, Science fiction, Man-woman relationships -- Fiction, Fantasy fiction, Martians -- Fiction, Massachusetts -- Fiction, Revolutionaries -- Fiction, Scientists -- Fiction, Journalists -- Fiction, Spy stories
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2019-12-23T21:45:58+00:00

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“You war against the sun­set-glow. The judg­ment fol­lows fast my lord!” quoted Dal­getty. He­ri­ots’ Ford was one of the few po­ems he liked. “Get­ting Ban­croft out of the way would be some­thing,” he added. “The way to fight Meade is not to at­tack him phys­i­cally but to change the con­di­tions un­der which he must work.”

“Change them to what?” Her eyes chal­lenged his. He no­ticed that there were small gold flecks in the gray. “What does the In­sti­tute want?”

“A sane world,” he replied.

“I’ve won­dered,” she said. “Maybe Ban­croft is more nearly right than you. Maybe I should be on his side af­ter all.”

“I take it you fa­vor lib­er­tar­ian gov­ern­ment,” he said. “In the past it’s al­ways bro­ken down sooner or later and the main rea­son has been that there aren’t enough peo­ple with the in­tel­li­gence, alert­ness and tough­ness to re­sist the in­evitable en­croach­ments of power on lib­erty.

“The In­sti­tute is try­ing to do two things—cre­ate such a cit­i­zenry and si­mul­ta­ne­ously to build up a so­ci­ety which it­self pro­duces men of that kind and re­in­forces those traits in them. It can be done, given time. Un­der ideal con­di­tions we es­ti­mate it would take about three hun­dred years for the whole world. Ac­tu­ally it’ll take longer.”

“But just what kind of per­son is needed?” Elena asked coldly. “Who de­cides it? You do. You’re just the same as all other re­form­ers, in­clud­ing Meade—hell bent to change the whole hu­man race over to your par­tic­u­lar ideal, whether they like it or not.”

“Oh, they’ll like it,” he smiled. “That’s part of the process.”

“It’s a worse tyranny than whips and barbed wire,” she snapped.

“You’ve never ex­pe­ri­enced those then.”

“You have got that knowl­edge,” she ac­cused. “You have the data and the equa­tions to be—so­ci­o­log­i­cal en­gi­neers.”

“In the­ory,” he said. “In prac­tice it isn’t that easy. The so­cial forces are so great that—well, we could be over­whelmed be­fore ac­com­plish­ing any­thing. And there are plenty of things we still don’t know. It will take decades, per­haps cen­turies, to work out a com­plete dy­nam­ics of man. We’re one step be­yond the politi­cian’s rule of thumb but not up to the point where we can use slide rules. We have to feel our way.”

“Nev­er­the­less,” she said, “you’ve got the be­gin­nings of a knowl­edge which re­veals the true struc­ture of so­ci­ety and the pro­cesses that make it. Given that knowl­edge man could in time build his own world-or­der the way he de­sired it, a sta­ble cul­ture that wouldn’t know the hor­rors of op­pres­sion or col­lapse. But you’ve hid­den away the very fact that such in­for­ma­tion ex­ists. You’re us­ing it in se­cret.”

“Be­cause we have to,” Dal­getty said. “If it were gen­er­ally known that we’re putting pres­sure on here and there and giv­ing ad­vice slanted just the way we de­sire, the whole thing would blow up in our faces. Peo­ple don’t like be­ing shoved around.”

“And still you’re do­ing it!” One hand dropped to her gun. “You, a clique of maybe a hun­dred men. …”

“More than that. You’d be sur­prised how many are with us.”

“You’ve de­cided you are the almighty ar­biters.

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