The captain held the door open. “If you’ll just step right in, sir. General Klossig wants to see you at once.”
Towers passed through a small anteroom, and found himself before a desk stacked with papers. On the other side of the desk sat a powerfully built Centran in major-general’s uniform, irritably flipping through a report. On the desk was the nameplate: “H. Klossig, Overseer.”
“Ah-h,” rumbled Klossig, and loosened his collar with a furry hand. He slammed the report backhanded against the wall, where it hit with a sharp whack and fell to the floor. Without looking up, he reached out and jerked a fresh report from the nearest pile. He flipped through it. “Junk, junk, junk,” he muttered.
Towers hesitantly cleared his throat.
The general gave an automatic flip of his hand, and slung the report across the room into the fireplace. He jerked another from the pile, glanced at the title, and stiffened. He pressed the report flat on the desk, read for a few moments, and swore in a low voice. He looked up, furious.
Towers saluted, and reported his presence.
Klossig looked blank for an instant, then sprang to his feet. His face lit up. He reached across the desk and gripped Towers by the hand. “I’ve heard of your Special Effects Team!”
“Sir, I just have Independent Division III with me.”
“But you’re the ones with the motto, ‘We’ll Find a Way’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good enough. That’s just what I need.” Klossig waved a hand at the stack of reports. “The motto of these people is, ‘There is no way. It’s too hard. Let’s all jump off the cliff together.’ Here”—he snatched up the report he’d just been reading—”take a look at this. Read the heading, then look at that first sentence.”
Towers glanced at the heading, which read, “The Invariant Law of Growth and Decline.”
Towers frowned, and read the first sentence: “To all societies, as to all creatures, comes at last the realization that the knell of their greatness has sounded, and some outwardly small sign or omen reveals to them the irreversible nature of their imminent decline; just so, to we of the Integral Union, who perhaps with greater percipience than our forbears, and a wiser maturity, may accept as we must with undismayed resignation the portents of the disintegration of our society which are revealed to us by our experiences upon this planet.”
Towers had the sensation of being mentally treated with perfumed mustard gas.
“That,” said Klossig, “was written by a prominent sociopsychometrodiagnostician on the Planetary Integration staff. Read some more. It will give you a good idea of morale here. Morale is half my problem.”
Towers flipped back through the report. Phrases like “inevitable rise and decline,” “the dark forces of destiny,” “immutable laws of historical development,” “the hour of a culture’s foreordained passage into the limbo of the past,” flew at him like so many bats out of a cave. At the end came the summary: “And so, like all the societies of the past, at last we find ourselves before the fatal door. Not ours the choice to enter or refuse. Ours only to choose whether we shall go quietly, retaining for a time, perhaps, our dignity if not our power; for the implacable laws of historical development have laid down their verdict, and there can be no choice save to comply. We can determine not our fate, but only how we accept our fate. As it comes upon us, then, let us accept it humbly, with such of dignity as we can muster. For this is enough in the face of the immutable laws. It is enough. It is enough.”
Towers looked up, and took a breath of air. Leaving the report open to the summary, he handed it back to Klossig. Klossig glanced at the summary, read it, and changed color. He balanced the paper in his hand, as if undecided what he could do to it that would do it justice.
Towers said thoughtfully, “People like that sometimes found schools.”
Klossig nodded gloomily, and tossed the paper onto his desk. “He has already. But what can I do with him? To begin with, the fellow has a reputation. And he’s not basically bad-intentioned. He’s just cracking up under the strain of this planet. The attempt to get a solution to the problem has overloaded his circuits. If I come down on him as I could in the ordinary kind of situation, the whole Planetary Integration staff will resent it. How the devil do I shut him up, and break up his defeatist ideas, without tearing my organization apart in the process?”
Towers considered the question. “Would he still be competent to handle a simpler problem?”
“If it were reasonably straightforward? Yes.”
“Why not take him off your problems with the planet, and assign him to the problem of tracing down the causes of bad morale?”
Klossig blinked. For a moment, he stood with his chin in his hand, then suddenly he grinned. “You’ve got it. He’ll hang onto the problem till he traces down every cause of bad morale, and sooner or later he’ll discover amongst the causes certain reports written by associates of his. The associates will explain that they were only following his lead. But he will be immersed in the new problem and he will think that they are trying to saddle him with the blame for what they did. Then the sodium shot will really hit the lake. Excuse me just a moment.”
Klossig went outside, and Towers could hear him on some kind of personal intercom system, praising the scientist for his good work, and urging him to take on the problem of isolating individual causes of deterioration of morale. In the moments of comparative silence when Klossig was not speaking, Towers could hear a sound he hadn’t noticed before—a distant sound of almost continuous rifle fire from somewhere outside.
Then Klossig came back in. “That takes care of that,” he said. “But that’s just a drop in the bucket. Come on. There’s something out here you’ve got to see.”
Klossig led the way out, down the front steps of the headquarters building, and along a well-traveled walk toward a side of the wall that ran at right angles to that where the Centran soldiers had taken aim at Towers and Logan. As they walked, Klossig was saying, “The trouble with life, Towers, is that it presents an endless selection of choices between undesirable alternatives. For instance, if a man wishes to act sensibly, he should first understand the situation thoroughly. But, if he waits till he understands the situation thoroughly, the opportunity for action passes. The result is, we have to make a quick estimate of the most important factors, then act fast while we have the chance. This means we have to take certain elements of the situation for granted. Every now and then, this taking things for granted lands us in a mess. That’s what has happened on this planet.”
“How so?” said Towers.
Klossig paused at a strip of ground paved with crushed rock, glanced in both directions, and waited while a ground-car bounced past pulling a four-wheeled trailer filled with ammunition cans. Then he started forward, saying, “We assumed all humanoid races would develop the same way—from family to tribe to city to nation. From hunters to farmers to builders. It never dawned on us that we were taking for granted the basis of this process, which is poor adaptation of the race to its environment.”
“But that process of development is an adaptation of the race to its environment.”
“A roundabout adaptation. It presupposes the failure of more direct methods of adaptation. What do you suppose happens when a humanoid race is, for instance, so well-adapted to its environment that the search for food presents no problem?”
Klossig paused at the foot of the stairs that led to the top of the wall and glanced at Towers. “That’s not just a hypothetical question.”
“Well,” said Towers, after a moment’s hesitation, “it would certainly result in a terrific population growth. But the result would still be, sooner or later, that food would present a problem.”
Klossig started up the steps. “The trouble is, we’ve always taken it for granted that that problem would turn up sooner, not later. Assuming there is an abundance of food to begin with, what type of social organization will come about?”
Towers thought it over. “Unless there were some powerful predators to contend with, all that would really be needed would be the family, to care for small children.”
Klossig nodded. “But remember, if you have the mental picture of a family huddled in a cave in the middle of the wilderness, with another family squatting around a camp fire somewhere on the horizon, you are forgetting the abundance of food. What is going to happen as these families multiply with no restraint save that of occasional plagues and natural disasters?”