Briefly, he sagged beneath the burden of responsibility. The load seemed for a dizzying instant too much to bear—unfair, unfair, to load one man with the weight of all the future. For Station Seventeen was the key to the next phase of history—of that Heym was certain. The history of man, his evolution—the whole universe seemed to open vertiginously before him, and he stood alone with the cosmos blazing on his shoulders.

  He shook himself, as if to get rid of a clinging burden, and with a convulsive effort forced coolness on himself. Detached argument—well, he had used that often enough at Sol without convincing anyone who mattered. He could still use it on Goram, but not for itself, only as a means of flattery by appealing to reason—among other means.

  Intolerable, to have to play sycophant to this—atavist—but there was too much at stake for pride to count.

  “I understand your position, of course,” said Heym, “even if I do not agree. I am sure that a glance at our records will convince you there is no danger.”

  “I’m not interested in records,” rasped the marshal. “I could have had all that transvised to me at Sol if I wanted to see it. But that’s the psychologists’ department. I want to make a personal inspection.”

  “Very well. Though we could just as well have transvised the scenes revealed on the spy devices from our headquarters to Sol.”

  “I’m not interested in telescreen images either. I want to land on the planet, see its people with my own eyes, hear them talk, watch them at work and play. There’s a feel to a race you can only get by direct observation.” Goram’s bulldog face thrust aggressively forward. “Oh, I know your fancy theories don’t include that—you just watch from afar and write it all down in mathematical symbols nobody can read without twenty years of study. But I’m a practical man, I’ve dealt with enough barbarians to have an instinct for them.”

  Superstition! thought Heym bitterly. Typical primitive mind reaction—magnifying his own ignorant guesses and impulses into an “instinct”: No doubt he also believes hair turns gray from fear and drowned men always float face down. Behold the “practical man”!

  It was surprisingly hard to lie, after a lifetime’s training in the honesty of science and the monastic community of observers at the station. But he said calmly enough: “Well, that’s very interesting, Marshal Goram. We’ve often noticed curious talents—precognition, telepathy, telekinesis, and the rest, appearing sporadically among people who have some use for them, but we’ve never been able to pin them down. It’s as if they were phenomena inaccessible to the ordinary scientific method. I see your point.”

  And I flatter myself that’s good flattery—not too obviously in agreement, but still hinting that he’s some kind of superman.

  “Haven’t you ever landed at all?” asked Goram.

  “Oh, yes, fairly often—usually invisible, of course, but now and then making an open and even spectacular appearance to test the effects of seemingly supernatural manifestations. However, we can generally see quite enough through the strategically planted recording televisors and other spy devices.”

  “You think,” grunted Goram. “But a planet is mighty big, I tell you. How do you know what they’re cooking up in places your gadgets don’t see?”

  Heym was unable to keep all the weariness and disgust out of his voice. “Because history is a unity,” he said. “The whole can be inferred from the part, since the part belongs to the whole. Why should the only unwarlike people in the Galaxy suddenly start building weapons?”

  “Oh, we don’t fear their military power—yet,” replied Goram. “I should think you, as a psychologist, would know what sort of a danger Station Seventeen represents—a danger that can wreck civilization. They can become a disrupting factor—the worst in all history.”

  “Progress is disruption.”

  “Maybe. But the Empire is based on stasis. It’s sacrificed progress for—survival.”

  “True—but here we may have a clue to controlled progress, safe advancement. Even stasis isn’t safe, as we well know. It’s a poor makeshift, intended to keep civilization alive while something else is worked out. Well—we’re working it out at Station Seventeen.”

  Coram grunted again, but remained silent.

  * * *

  Valgor’s Star lay a good hundred parsecs from Sol, not far from the Empire’s border though sufficiently within the garrisoned marches to be protected from barbarian raids. The early researchers, looking for an uninhabited Earth-like planet, had found the obscure GO-type sun far off the regular space lanes; an ancient planetographic expedition had stopped briefly there, recording that the third world was practically terrestrial, but this whole galactic sector was so isolated and unprofitable that there had been no further visits, and the old report lay for centuries in the Imperial files before the Psychotechnic Foundation resurrected it. The remoteness and unknownness were assets in any such project, and the fact that there were no aborigines requiring troublesome and costly extermination and eradication of all traces had been decisive.

  At an easy cruising speed, the battleship used three days going from Sol to Valgor’s Star. Sars Heym spent most of that time getting on the right side of Tamman Goram. It involved listening to endless dreary reminiscing of border warfare and the consummate ability required to rise from simple conscript to Imperial Marshal, but the price was small if it could save Station Seventeen.

  “Nobody appreciates the border garrisons who hasn’t served in them,” declared Goram, “but I tell you, if it weren’t for them the Empire wouldn’t last a year. The barbarians would sweep in, the rival empires would gobble up all they could hold and go to war over the spoils, the Spirit alone knows what the Magellanics would do—but it wouldn’t be pleasant—and the whole structure would disintegrate—three thousand years of stability might as well never have been!”

  A high official would be used to open flattery. Heym disagreed just enough to seem sincerely to agree on all important points. “We couldn’t do without the border patrols,” he said, “but it’s like any organism, requiring all its parts to live—we couldn’t dispense with internal police either, and certainly not with the psychotechnicians who are the government.”

  “Spirit-damned bureaucrats,” snorted Goram. “Theoreticians—what do they know of real life? Why, d’you know, I saw three stellar systems lost once to the barbarians because we didn’t have enough power to stand them off. There was a horde of them, a dozen allied suns, and we had only three garrisoned planets. For months we begged—wrote to Antares and Sirius and Sol itself begging for a single Nova-class battleship. Just one, and we could have beaten off their fleet and carried the war to them. But no, it was ‘under consideration’ or ‘deferred for more urgent use’—three suns and a hundred thousand men lost because some soft-bellied psychotechnician mislaid a file.”

  “Robot-checked files don’t get mislaid,” said Heym softly. “I have friends in administration, and I’ve seen them weep at some of the decisions they had to make. It isn’t easy to abandon an army to its fate—and yet the power that could have saved them is needed elsewhere, to drive off a larger invasion or to impress the Taranians or to take a star cluster of strategic value. The Empire has sacrificed a lot for sheer survival. Humanness in government is only one thing lost.”

  “The rules! How can a general in the field keep track of every ship and turn in forms in quadruplicate on their condition?”

  “He can’t. Probably a million units a year are lost in recording. And yet, the vast majority of such forms are filled out and do get to the appropriate center, are recorded in electronic code and put on instantly accessible file, mathematically coordinated with all other relevant information. When Grand Strategy wants an overall picture of the military situation, it has one right there. Military planning would be impossible otherwise.

  “And it isn’t only in the military field,” argued Heym. “After all, you know the Empire isn’t interested in further expansion. It wants to keep civilization alive on the planets where it exists, and keep the nonhuman imperia out. Ever since the Founder, our military policy has been basically defensive—because we can’t handle more than we have. The border is always in a state of war and flux, but the Empire is at peace, inside the marches.

  “Yet—how long would the Empire last, even assuming no hostile powers outside, without the most rigid form of psychotechnocratic government? There are roughly three times ten to the fourteenth power humans in the Solarian Empire. The nonhuman aborigines have been pretty thoroughly exterminated, assimilated as helots, or otherwise rendered harmless, but there are still all those humans, with all the terrific variations and conflicting desires inherent in man and intensified by radically different planetary and consequently social environments. Can you imagine a situation where three hundred trillion humans went their own uncoordinated ways—with atomic energy, biotoxic weapons, and interstellar spaceships to back up their conflicting demands?”

  “Yes, I can,” said Goram, “because after all it has happened—for nearly a thousand years before the Empire, there was virtual anarchy. And”—he leaned forward, the hard black glitter of his eyes nailing Heym—“that’s why we can’t take chances, with this experiment of yours or anything else—anything at all. In the anarchic centuries, with a much smaller population, there was horror—many planets were blasted back to savagery, or wiped out altogether. Have you seen the dead worlds? Black cinders floating in space, some still radioactive, battlegrounds of the ancient wars. The human barbarians beyond the Imperial borders are remnants of that age—some of them have spaceships, even a technology matching our own, but they think only of destruction—if they ever got past the marches, they’d blast and loot and fight till nothing was left. Not to mention the nonhuman border barbarians, or the rival empires always watching their chance, or the Magellanics sweeping in every century or so with weapons such as we never imagined. Just let any disrupting factor shake the strength and unity of the Empire and see how long it could last.”

  “I realize that,” said Heym coldly. “After all, I am a psychologist. I know fully what a desperate need the establishment of the Empire filled. But I also know that it’s a dead end—its purpose of ultimate satisfied stasis cannot be realized in a basically dynamic cosmos. Actually, Imperial totalitarianism is simply the result of Imperial ignorance of a better way. We can only find that better way through research, and the project at Station Seventeen is the most promising of all the Foundation’s work. Unless we find some way out of our dilemma, the Empire is doomed—sooner or later, something will happen and we’ll go under.”

  Goram’s eyes narrowed. “That’s near lese majesty,” he murmured.

  Heym laughed, and gave the marshal a carefully gauged you-and-I-know-better-don’t-we look. “The Imperium is tolerant of local gods,” he said, “but the divinity of the Emperor must be acknowledged and is taught in all schools. Why? Because a state church, with the temporal ruler as the material incarnation of the Spirit, is another hold on the imagination of the people, another guarantee of subservience. So are local garrisons, political indoctrination, state control of commerce and travel, careful psychotechnic preparation and supervision of amusements, rigid limitation of birth but complete sexual freedom as an outlet, early selection and training of all promising children for government service—with unlimited opportunities for advancement within the established framework—and every other thing we can possibly control. If you stop to think about it—the Empire is founded on mediocrity.”

  “That’s as may be,” muttered Goram, “but in that case a planet full of geniuses becomes doubly dangerous.”

  Heym went over to the wall of the officers’ lounge and touched a button. The telescreen sprang to life with a simulacrum of the outside view. An uncounted host of stars blazed against the infinite blackness, a swarming magnificent arrogance of unwinking hard jewels strewn across the impassive face of eternity. The Milky Way foamed around the sky, the misty nebulae and star clusters wheeled their remote godlike way around heaven, and the other galaxies flashed mysterious signals across the light-years and the centuries. As ever, the psychologist felt dwarfed and awed and numbed by the stupendous impact.

  “It was a great dream,” he whispered. “There never was a higher dream than man’s conquest of the universe—and yet like so many visions it overleaped itself and shattered to bits on the rocks of reality—in this case, simple arithmetic defeated us. How to reconcile and coordinate a hundred thousand stars except by absolutism, by deliberate statism—by chaining ourselves to our own achievements? What other answer is there?”

  He turned around to Goram. The soldier sat unmoving, face stone-hard, like a primitive idol. “We’re looking for a new way,” said Heym. “We think we’re finding it, at Station Seventeen. It’s the first hope in four thousand years.”

  * * *

  The planet might almost have been Earth, a great blue spheroid swinging majestically against the incredible spatial sky with a softly shining moon for companion. Auroras wavered over the ice-capped poles, and cloud masses blurred the greenish-brown continents. They were storms, those clouds, snow and rain and wind blowing out of a living heaven over broad fair fields and haughty mountains, and looking down from the sterile steel environment of the ship, remembering the world city sprawling over Earth and the cold hard mechanized pattern of all Imperial life, Heym felt a brief wistfulness. All at once, he envied his experimental animals, down there on the green young planet. Even if they were to be destroyed, they had been more fortunate than their masters.

  But they wouldn’t be destroyed. They mustn’t be.

  “Where is your observation post?” asked Goram.

  “On an asteroid well away from here and rendered invisible.”

  “Why not on the satellite? It’d be a lot closer.”

  “Yes, but distance doesn’t mean anything to a transvisor. Also, if—when—the colonists learn the means of interplanetary travel, we’d have had to move off the Moon, while we can remain hidden indefinitely on the invisible planetoid.”

  “I’d say ‘if’ rather than ‘when’,” amended Goram grimly. “It was your report that the inhabitants were experimenting with rockets that alarmed the rulers enough to order me here to see if it weren’t best simply to sterilize the planet.”

  “I’ve told you before, there’s no need for alarm,” protested Heym. “What if the people do have a few rocketships? They have no reason to do more than visit the other worlds of this system, which aren’t habitable—certainly no reason to colonize, with their own planet still practically uninhabited. The present population is estimated at only some eight hundred million.”

  “Nevertheless, as soon as they have a whole system to move about in they’ll be dangerous. It’ll no longer be possible to keep track of everything of importance they may do. They’ll be stimulated by this success to perfect an interstellar drive—and even you will agree that that cannot be permitted. That engine may be developed without our knowledge, on some remote world of this system—and once even a few of them are running loose between the stars we’ll have no further control—and the results may well be catastrophic! Imagine a pure-bred line of geniuses allied with the barbarians!”

  “I tell you, they’re not warlike. They haven’t had a single war in all their history.”

  “Well, then they’ll try to innovate within the Empire, which would be just as bad if not worse. Certainly they won’t be satisfied with the status quo—yet that status quo means survival to us.”

  “They can be co-ordinated. Good Spirit, we have plenty of geniuses in the Galaxy today! We couldn’t do without them. They are the very ones who run the Empire. Advancement is on a strict merit basis simply because we must have the best brains of mankind for the gigantic job of maintaining the social order.”

  “Sure—everyone’s strictly brought up to accept the Empire, to identify its survival with its own. We have plenty of tame geniuses. But these are wild—a planetful of undomesticated intellects! If they can’t be tamed, they must be killed.”

  “They can be,” insisted Heym. “Rather, they can become the leaders to get us out of status quo safely—if not directly, then indirectly through knowledge gained by observing them. Already administrative techniques have been improved, within the last five hundred or so years, because by watching unhampered intellect at work we have been able to derive more accurate psychomathematical expressions for the action of logic as a factor in society, A group in the Psychotechnic Foundation is working out a new theory of cerebration which may become the basis of a system of mind training doubling the efficiency of logical processes—just as semantic training has already increased mind power by applying it more effectively. But in order to develop and test that theory, as well as every other psychological research project, we must have empirical data such as the observation stations, above all Seventeen, furnish us. Without such new basic information, science comes to a standstill.”

  “I’ve heard it all before,” said Goram wearily. “Now I want to go down there and look.”

  “Very well. I’ll come along, of course. Do you wish to take anyone else?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “No, it’s perfectly safe.”

  “Then I won’t. Meet me at Lifeboat Forty in half an hour.” Goram tramped off to give such orders as might be needed.

  Heym stood for a while, chain smoking and looking out the visiplate at the silently rolling planet. Like an ominous moon, the warship swung in an orbit just beyond the atmosphere. For all its titanic mass, it was insignificant against the bulk of a world. Yet in guns and bombs and death-mists, gravitational beams and long-range disintegrators and mass-conversion torpedoes, in coagulative radiations and colloid-resonant generators, in the thousand hells man had made through all his tormented existence, lay the power to rip life off that surface and blanket the shuddering continents in smoke and flame and leave the blackened planet one great tomb under the indifferent stars.