Knowing it was a help. Davenant fought back toward sanity. He felt his heart pulsing with the words that rolled around him, he was frightened and joyous and enraged all at once, but it could be controlled. He licked his lips and wondered how long he would have to hold out.

  “Praise ye therefore the Lord, for His mercy endureth! Give thanks and rejoice that He made ye!”

  Hang on, boy, hang on, stay where you are.

  In the seething of the mob, it hardly seemed incongruous that the Angels should suddenly be tossing out plastibottles. One landed beside Davenant. He picked it up, unscrewed the cap, and tasted as the others were doing. It burned in his throat. A hundred and fifty proof at least!

  The music rose with a triumphant surge and thunder. He saw the nearest man turn, grunting, and snatch in a curiously blind way at a woman. She struggled for a moment, as if against some dying fragment of convention, then fell into his arms. He fumbled at the sleazy material of her dress, lifting it as he forced her toward the floor.

  So that’s their safety valve!

  A hand plucked at his. It felt hot, and wet with excitement. Turning, he saw another woman, pulling at him. Disordered hair streamed past a face which glistened with sweat and contorted with laughter.

  “C’mon, honey,” she said. “Le’s go.”

  He shivered and stiffened himself. “No—no, thanks,” he mumbled.

  Arms were around his neck. Even in low-gravity, her weight was dragging him down. “Y’re a new un,” she said. “C’mon, have some fun. It’s awright.”

  She felt soft and hot against him. Helplessly, he stared down the open neck of her dress. Her lips sought his, greedily. It was like an explosion inside him. He sank to his knees and she laughed and pushed her body against his.

  Wildly, he wanted to accept, nobody would know, and—and—Glancing around, he saw that the floor was littered with couples and that the younger Angels were leaping off the stage to join the party. There was a tightness in his throat and a hammering in his temples; he’d been a long time without a woman.

  No!

  He pulled himself free, shuddering. “Damn it, I’m an Engineer!” he gasped, more to himself than to her.

  “Wha’s the matter?” she demanded insistently.

  He thrust her away. “No!” he said harshly. “Go find someone else—”

  Ugliness crossed her face. “Y’ can’t, huh?”

  He wanted to show her otherwise, but only shook his head angrily. She laughed unpleasantly and moved off. It took him a full minute to recover his wits.

  Davenant looked up at the stage then. Weller was rising to go. Either he had superhuman self-control or, more likely, there was a heterodyning vibrator mounted near his seat. Custom had apparently required his presence, but—

  Suddenly he fell.

  His guards swarmed around him. Peering into the shadows Davenant saw half a dozen men under one of the high columns. They were dressed as commoners, but stood aloof. He pushed closer, recklessly, and saw Halleck among them.

  A machine-gun chattered from the wings. Other Hounds came into view, methodically mowing down Weller’s guards. They were in the majority, they operated with smooth coordination, and the whole fight was over inside a minute. The survivors withdrew, bearing their wounded.

  Halleck and his followers turned quietly and left the hall. Davenant made out the faces of at least two Cincs he had met. So several of them must have got together on this. A group conspiracy would be the only way, probably, to get past Weller’s defenses. Now the junta would install a new Cinc-one and—

  Few if any of the brawling crowd had noticed what went on. They were too busy with their own affairs.

  Davenant felt oddly light-headed. It must be the aftermath of the sonics. The only sensible thing to do was beat it back to the Engineers. He had no business mixing into this bloody mess which was Jovian politics, but his own impetus carried him along, his will gone.

  Two men on the stage were looking down at the bodies which littered it. One wore Cinc uniform, one was an Angel. Both were high-ranking, to judge by their insignia.

  Davenant got down on all fours and crawled toward the stage. The pairs and groups wallowing about him were cover of a sort. If he was noticed at all in the dim light he might be taken for a commoner. Or he might get a bullet in his skull.

  Near the stage, he lay prone and called on his mental training. He had a degree of conscious control over the involuntary functions, he could drop the sensory barriers and heighten perceptions as some hysterics do without volition. Just enough to hear what was being said—

  In Basic!

  The shock of that turned his muscles rigid. For a moment, there was darkness before his eyes. It faded, and he heard the Angel speaking:

  “So far, so good. But will Halleck be more manageable?”

  “I’ve been his mentor since he was a child,” answered the Cinc. “Consciously, of course, he distrusts me as much as does anyone else. But I’ve made it plain that I’m not after the highest rank, so he will listen to me, at least. And I know what buttons to push.”

  “We’ll have to proceed cautiously. A whole culture can’t be rushed into anything new.” With a note of grim humor: the Angel added, “We ought to know that by now!”

  “Of course, of course. But we’re doing all right. We’ve come a long way since Callisto. Pass the word around—conference at 1800 tomorrow. Arrange it as an ostensible discussion of policy with regard to these Engineers. Which it will be, in a way, though we want only our people in on it.”

  “All right. I’ll send you an official memorandum. Let’s go.” They walked off the stage. It was a long time before Davenant gathered himself together enough to leave.

  When he entered his quarters, Kruse looked up with a rather bleared expression. “What’s the matter, Hall? Seen a ghost?”

  Davenant drew a shaky breath. “Yes. In a way.” Lyell stood up. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—” Davenant looked at the floor, then up again to meet their eyes with a certain desperation. “I mean I’ve found out who really runs Ganymede.”

  “Oh. The service you went to? You mean the Angels are more powerful than they act?”

  Davenant shook his head. “Cincs and Angels are played off—manipulated. It’s the Psychotechs from Earth.”

  -5-

  Hubris, Nemsis, Ate. So the old Greeks summed up the rise and doom and fall of men. It is a formula which has gone through all history.

  Much partisan nonsense has been written about the Psychotechnic Institute. It was neither the only savior of a reeling civilization, nor the tyrant which strangled man’s right to be an individual. It was a band of men and women who for generations strove toward a high ideal, wrought mightily, and at the last—as might have been foreseen—encountered problems they could not solve. Somewhat as the medieval Church nurtured Western civilization, the Institute was a kind of placenta for Technic society. In both cases, an outgrown matrix was becoming constrictive and had to be broken, and in both cases the act of breaking threw men back temporarily to disorganization and unreason.

  The tragic flaw in the character of Institute personnel was only that they were human.

  Scientific method was first successfully applied to social processes in the nineteenth century, when statistics were used to accumulate and winnow data. The basic-theoretical approach was developed in the twentieth century along several lines of attack—games theory, communication theory, general semantics, the principle of least effort, and generalized epistemology.

  The original Psychotechnic Institute eventually absorbed all similar groups. Devoting itself to study, it came up with some fundamental equations describing human relations. The approach was that of field dynamics. Its discoveries about the psychometrics of the individual were of even greater ultimate importance, but centuries would pass before those bore full fruit.

  What counted around 1970 was a precise formulation of certain basic laws governing the action of groups. No one pretended that the science was perfect; it had to admit large probable errors. But it was immediately usable, and the world of 1970 badly needed a guide.

  Governments had long been relying on experts. It was only natural for them to continue doing so. As time went on, the Institute’s leaders foresaw the growth of their own power, but they did not snatch after it. It came to them of its own accord, because only they could formulate policies for a world still wounded and feverish, policies which had a reasonable hope of success.

  And so, step by step, came the economic recovery and improvement of all Earth through: The strengthening of world government; the slow withering of nationalism; education which, for the first time in centuries really fitted the needs of the individual and of his society; the gradual decline of population on an overcrowded planet; the effective conservation of natural resources; rational economics; sane penology; generally available psychiatric care; and critical thinking.

  It was not easy. There were setbacks, interminable debates, deadly undercover struggles—but the foundation was being laid.

  The reasons for the final breakdown of this progress were complex, but three main threads may be traced. First, there was a deep cultural resistance in a majority of Earth’s population. As Asia became more and more the economic center of the world, this unwillingness gained power. The road was, after all, long and hard, and it involved the scrapping of traditions which had existed since prehuman times. In many ways it went against animal instinct, and peoples without the technological bias of the West were inclined to draw the line somewhere and stick by it.

  Second, the bulk of humanity simply was not fitted to absorb the new attitudes. Cold rationality and a high degree of self-abnegation do not come naturally to ninety-nine percent of the race. Individual psychology suggested ways to get around this, but there was no way to recondition a billion and a half human creatures en mass.

  Third, there was mass unemployment on a scale never seen before, as computers, automatons, and semi-volitional machines replaced men on one continent after another. Not only the unskilled laborer, but his highly trained brother and the routine intellectual—clerk, recorder, librarian, local administrator, laboratory assistant, the expert, some thousands of professions—was no longer needed.

  The process took a long time to near completion, and there were many attempts to alleviate its effects, but nothing, not even the great emigration to Mars and Venus, was enough. At the nadir of the situation only some twenty-five percent of the adult population of Earth was even partially employed.

  Of course, no one starved, a citizen’s allowance was enough to assure living quite comfortably, but the genius class which could still work and get extra money for it was hated and envied. Yet the geniuses had to be paid, or not enough of them would have accepted the positions which still had to be filled by humans.

  It is not good for a society when most of its citizens have no vested interest in its smooth operation. The atmosphere of restlessness and despair tainted even the leaders.

  Out of all this rose Humanism, which amounted to a desire to restore a streamlined version of the entirely imaginary “good old days”. The Institute was shocked by the rapidity with which the movement grew. It was made the more dangerous by the general availability of superdielectrics, accumulators of fantastic capacity which could be charged from almost anything; cheap, simple energy sources for vehicles and weapons.

  The balance of military power was shifting away from central government and toward the small, fanatic group. It was no longer possible to enforce order.

  The Institute had had its own secret machinations before this. There was, for instance, the inoculation of a precalculated percentage of cost-free synthetic food supplements with chemical contraceptive, followed by specious public explanations of the falling birth rate. There was the quiet subversion of the most inflexible archaist organizations. There was much more, which had been deemed necessary but could not go through the process of democratic agreement.

  The new situation was ugly. Anti-robot riots; the lynching of technies and scientists; the election of intellectually corrupt representatives—lunacy was building up as rapidly and unnecessarily as—to quote a classic example—it did in the old world on Earth between World Wars II and III.

  The Earth sections of the Union government were calling less and less on trained men, going back more and more to rule of thumb. Something had to be done! And the field equations did not indicate a solution.

  There is no reason to detail the increasingly frantic efforts of the Institute’s leaders to stop the avalanche. Some of their methods were actually unlawful, and when this was exposed the results were evil. The naval mutiny, the Humanist Revolution and seizure of power, the withdrawal of Earth from the Solar Union—these are matters of record.

  The Humanists soon found out, though, that they could not repeal history, could not abolish the technology on which men were now dependent. Mars and Venus backed the counter revolution. The shaky Regents were overthrown and the new government rejoined the Union—but the seeds of interplanetary rivalry and distrust had been sown.

  “Tame” Psychotechnians could not be dispensed with, but their powers were rigidly limited. The generations to come would be turbulent, one might call them the adolescence of Technic civilization—an age of trial and error for such men of good will as groped toward a new and better basis for living. An age of conflict and greed for the short-sighted majority. But an age with a peculiar hectic brilliance of its own.

  Analogies to post-Reformation Europe are tempting, but should not be drawn too closely.

  What is of interest now is that at the time of the Revolution some of the Institute chiefs and their followers decamped to save their own lives. They had managed to seize an ecological-unit spaceship—it was the old Starshine, in orbit around Earth after completing the third expedition to Neptune—and had taken it into outer space.

  No one knew why they did not go to Mars or Venus, as many of their colleagues did, nor was it known what had become of them.

  Mankind in general had too much else to think about to worry over a few hundred refugees.

  -6-

  “Politics,” Lyell said when Davenant told him what he had discovered. “We stay out of this.”

  “Even if there’s a—danger?” asked Yuan. “If the Psychotechs get this system organized just the way they want, it could well become a menace to the status quo.”

  “As a scientist of sorts, you ought to be pretty sympathetic to the Psychotechs,” retorted Lyell.

  “Maybe, maybe. We need their skills. Could be Earth’s made her biggest mistake to date in booting them out. On the other hand—I don’t know.” Yuan frowned unhappily.

  “I think I follow you,” said Yamagata. “Groups, organizations, tend to lose sight of their original purposes, don’t they? The means to an end become an end in themselves. Look, oh, say at the Christian Church. It started with a noble ideal, maybe the noblest man has ever seen, a universal brotherhood of love. After a few centuries, it was burning people alive for disputing its authority.”

  “That took longer than you think,” said Lyell. “But I won’t quibble. It may well be that Psychotech people have become embittered and fanatical. Their connivance in political murder today suggests it. Nevertheless, we don’t let on that we have any inkling they’re here. We proceed as usual, report the facts secretly to the Abbey, and let the Coordinator and Council decide what to do. If the Engineers don’t stay out of affairs such as this, they’ll end up as exactly the same kind of power-grabbing, intriguing bunch of crooks. Our job is to keep the scientific spirit alive. To reform planets, not people.”

  “Of course,” said Falkenhorst, “the Abbey will want more facts than just the bare statement that—”

  “Yes, yes. Keep your eyes open. But don’t go playing spy. You haven’t the training or aptitude, and the Cincs are experts.”

  “So are the Psychotechs,” observed Kruse. “You realize that everything we’ve said in Basic, fondly imagining no one understood it, is known to them.”

  “Uh-huh. From now on, we keep the wiper going permanently in here. Let them wonder why. Also, it’s about time we started demonstrating a few things we can do…”

  The announcement that Weller was dead and that Halleck was the new Cinc-one came toward the end of the holy time. An added twenty-four hours of circus was proclaimed to celebrate the accession. The Sergeants took it stolidly; they must be used to such sudden changes of masters.

  Davenant continued his fact-finding in the library, since he wanted to see which of the Angels normally there excused themselves to attend the special conference. It was a shock when Garson was among them. That fumbling, blushing, stammering nonentity?

  On second thought, it fitted. The Psychotechs weren’t interested in an outward show of power. They concentrated on getting into key subordinate positions—the men who gathered data and wrote reports, the men whose advice was valued by the policy makers. The Jovian rulers, a curiously innocent breed in spite of their mercilessness, could not be expected to know just how powerful the executive secretary of a committee was, for instance, especially if that man had the sense to be unobtrusive about it.

  This also would explain why Garson had so casually accepted the Engineers’ feats of instant comprehension and memorization during their studies. To him, that was the least part of mental training.

  But had he, then, invited Davenant to the service with the intention of having him witness the assassination? If so, why?

  While the Angel was absent the Engineer took the opportunity to look up the historical files. There wasn’t much about the original settlers of Callisto. They had merely claimed to be adherents of the outlawed Technic Party who had tried to establish themselves on the satellite and had failed because there weren’t enough skilled spacejacks among them.

  They had joined the Ganymedeans under an agreement which gave them all Angel status, permitted familiar contracts to remain in force, and left their big ship and their own personal property. That must have taken shrewd negotiation, but of course their leaders had been experts. Some had soon been given Cinc rank, and the younger generation among them was being raised in the orthodox Jovian manner.