“Most psychiatrists never did use couches,” she responded in the same tone. “I’m not a psychiatrist, anyway. I’m a psychologist, which means I’m a doctor of philosophy, not medicine. Just relax.”
More people have been fired by just relaxing before a “mere” psychologist than by telling off the boss to his face, Haller noted to himself, but said nothing.
She shuffled some papers on her desk. No psychologist ever used a computer anywhere in their inner office, although the computer was vital in their work. It was tough to have a relaxing atmosphere with a terminal on the desk the subject couldn’t see or read.
“Toby, I’ll get right to the points I have to cover. You understand that what we say will be recorded for later evaluation?”
He nodded. “Go ahead.”
“All right. Do you understand just what this project is all about?”
“I understand it very well, I think. We’re going to take a pile of rock, in some distant solar system here, about the size of Titan and make it into the Garden of Eden so we can play with Flux and make Westrex richer and more powerful than it is without scaring the home folks.”
It didn’t faze her. “That’s the engineering side of it. We assume you knew that before you volunteered.”
He shrugged. “I’m an engineer. What did you expect?”
“Why you? What makes this appeal to you?”
He knew that he was being not only recorded but measured as well, probably at least partly through devices in the chair. They’d know, just by comparing the recording of the conversation with his physiological reactions, just whether or not he was putting them on and, if so, when.
“It’s the leading edge of science. I took up engineering because it fascinated me more than anything else. Either I go where the action is or I picked the wrong profession.”
She sighed. “That is the answer you expect us to want and it’s probably true as far as it goes, but that’s not the heart of the matter. You had the choice of doing experimental projects here, on Titan—the leading edge, as you said—or joining Project New Eden. That’s because you tested out so high in your profession and your past performance has been outstanding in your field. One is safe, with immediate rewards both monetarily and professionally. The other is an incredible risk. No human being has actually ever been broken down and transmitted through Flux. The process is uncertain with higher mammals now. You seem certain it will be solved.”
Again he shrugged. “If it’s not, we won’t go.”
“But if you do—this no longer becomes a job but a way of life, a colonization effort. The incredible expense of transmitting all this makes it very possible that you’ll be in this new world for many years, perhaps decades. By the time your own project makes it cheaper and easier, you’ll be an old man far removed from Earth society. What about family and friends?”
“I have a brother and a sister, as you well know, both of whom think I am bloody well insane to go for this. One is a sheep farmer and the other manages a ski resort. We’re not all that close. I’ll miss seeing them and my nieces and nephews, but I don’t feel that sense of familial commitment. My dad’s dead. Most of my friends have been professional, without any sense of lasting bonds, and some of them are about here someplace. I’ve generally been able to get along well and make new friendships where I’ve gone over the years. I like it that way.”
“Your father’s deceased, but your mother’s still alive.”
“That’s true,” he admitted, “and it’s the only tie I’ll miss, but you don’t know my mum. She’s old, and we knew we might never see each other again, but if she were younger and up to it, she’d have volunteered herself.”
Ikeba nodded to herself. She knew all this; it was merely a way to dance into the heart of the matter. “And you still haven’t really answered my question,” she noted. “All right— family, profession, support. Now, why are you really going? Is it the romance of it? The adventure? The pioneer spirit in the genes?”
He stared at her, realizing now what this was all about. In the hundreds of hours of this back on Earth they’d not been able to really peg him, neatly pigeonhole him as they had most of the others. They knew enough to see that they didn’t really know his guts, and they insisted on it. It was a price they demanded for a ticket outward bound.
He sighed. “All right. Yes, it’s all of those things. Certainly I’ve dreamed of this long before it was possible or anyone ever thought of it. Still, you’re right. Cutting the bonds to Mother Earth and its culture—and this is still Mother Earth, really—can be difficult to do for many people without some sort of religious-style fervor. I understand that. It’s not so for me. Laying aside the leading-edge business, and the romance, it’s a new start.”
“For yourself?”
“No. For people. We’ve made a mucking bloody mess of things over the past few centuries. We’re dead in the water, going nowhere if not out to the stars. Half the population or more is permanently on drugs. Robotics and automated agriculture on Earth and in orbit have eliminated the need of the human race to breed, and that was the only thing left for us even centuries ago. The so-called civilized world leaves their flats, goes down and draws their drug ration and their dole, and sits around in happy mindless joy with some three-dimensional wallscreen shows on all four walls. Some bread and booze and the technological circus and their drugs is all they need. They don’t produce, and they are managed by the drugs not to consume beyond what the system can support. Or they’re involved in some communal cult of the month, with weird rituals and brainwashing themselves into doing naturally what the drugs do for the rest so they can think of themselves as morally superior to the masses.
“The rest of the world, as usual, scrapes by in primitive subsistence while corrupt governments let them do it. We could feed the bloody world three times over and make ’em all fat pigs, yet much of the world is still starving, thanks to politics. The human race is a dead duck. Doc, and that’s a fact.”
“Some of the governments you call corrupt and primitive believe that the only way to keep human values alive is to limit technology and maintain a level of struggle,” she noted, no emotion in her tone of voice. Still, it was clear he’d struck a nerve with her. Africa, after all, along with Asia, contained the bulk of such systems. “You must remember that this corporation is owned by eleven governments in common, including some you are putting down. Do you think they are hypocrites?”
“I’m sure they believe it—some of them. It doesn’t matter. By doing what they do they put themselves on the cult level, don’t they? I mean, if there’s no end to that, if technology can’t bail them out, then what are they ever going to have? They’re just willing their children and grandchildren and so on forever a set of static values and meaningless lives. Look—if they really believe in that rot, then what are they doing in a project like this that none of them can afford and all of them can barely afford together? No, we get out there, we design our own world our own way, and we do it again, only differently.”
“And if it winds up more or less the same?”
“It won’t wind up the same. Maybe just as bad, but totally different, I’ll wager. By the time that happens I’ll be dead and buried anyway. If it happens, then we go out some more and do it again and again. We keep going, because the frontier is the only thing other than war that makes us really grow and learn. Even this project’s being hastily assembled due to war.”
“But not our war,” she noted.
“Not now—but what’s the difference there too? When they pare down their surplus populations with their fights, they’ll settle before anybody really wins. It’s not a serious war, except for the folks killed in it. You and I know that there are ways around all the Borelli limits now. We’re back where we were centuries ago, able to wipe out the human race on a whim. But not quite where we were. We have self-contained satellites where millions are born, live, and die. The Russians have their Mars, the Chinese have most of the moon for all the good it does them, and we have Titan. Once we’re out there, though, they can push all their silly buttons, even wipe out the solar system, and the human race will survive and grow.”
“We never took you for a Utopian. Your ideals seem to be quite pragmatic, with only a general weakness in the direction of too blind a faith in technology.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, well, I’m too smart to be against technology and too sour on what it made humanity into to be blind on it. I don’t believe in uninventing the wheel. I don’t think it can be done anyway. When it’s time for something to be discovered and used, it’s there and you have to live with it and its consequences. Borelli didn’t uninvent nuclear weapons; he simply engineered a way to render them useless, in the process creating something almost as nasty and leading, I daresay, to today’s whatever it is that’s secret that can do the job even quicker and cleaner. The supply of Borellis isn’t infinite, and we can’t whip them up to order. The universe, however, is infinite. You avoid stagnation by always having a new frontier. You avoid mass annihilation that way too. You open up a frontier so vast, and you scatter folks so far and in so many places, that it can’t happen. Borelli bought us some time to do it. Now we do it, or we either stagnate or all die.”
She scribbled something on her pad, then asked. “What kind of world and society do you think the project will create?”
“Give me a chance! I just got here! But, to tell you the truth, I never really gave it much thought.”
“After all that you just said? I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. Whatever we build won’t be up to me. Oh, I’ll have my part in physically designing some corner of it, and I’ll help smooth the rough edges here and there, but it’ll be a team effort. Whatever it is, the chances are I won’t like it, but I’ll live with it. I’m an accommodating anarchist—a good company man in spite of it all. But it’ll be different, at least as long as I’m alive, and that’s enough.” He looked over at her. “Is that enough? Did I pass or fail?”
“It’s not up to me,” she told him. “I only wonder if you really understand what you are getting yourself into.”
4
GENESIS
Rembrandt van Haas always liked to meet and greet new people when they arrived, if, of course, he regarded them as his social peers. That meant a Ph.D. after your name, some prestigious past work, and a real feel for true science. There were only to be 112 men and women with Toby Haller’s job title, and they were vital and special to the project.
The director’s office was wide and spacious, with oak paneling and soft lighting. The chairs were plush, the art on the walls prints of classic paintings, and the shelves were full of reference books. It looked like the office of some major bank president on Earth, but for the model in the center of the room.
There was no way not to make it one’s immediate and undivided center of attention. It was a relief globe in ugly lead-gray of a very unappetizing-looking place, but a place that clearly was not even Titan.
Van Haas always enjoyed seeing first-timers suddenly divert from their anxiety at meeting him to that globe, and he had demoted or sent packing a number of people who hadn’t responded that way. Haller’s glowing, fascinated eyes passed the test, and he had some trouble snapping out of it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding slighlty flustered, “but I took one look there and—”
“I know, I know,” responded the director. “I often still gaze at it myself. Our little rock, with its seven percolators awaiting full placement and activation. Soon, now, though, young man. Very soon. You come on a most auspicious day.”