Chapter 7

The next morning there was a crowd gathered before the Cullen Building when Walton arrived.

There must have been at least a hundred people, fanning outward from a central focus. Walton stepped from the jetbus and, with collar pulled up carefully to obscure as much of his face as possible, went to investigate.

A small red-faced man stood on a rickety chair against the side of the building. He was flanked by a pair of brass flagpoles, one bearing the American flag and the other the ensign of the United Nations. His voice was a biting rasp--probably, thought Walton, intensified, sharpened, and made more irritating by a harmonic modulator at his throat. An irritating voice put its message across twice as fast as a pleasant one.

He was shouting, “This is the place! Up here, in this building, that’s where they are! That’s where Popeek wastes our money!”

From the slant of the man’s words Walton instantly thought: Herschelite!

He repressed his anger and, for once, decided to stay and hear the extremist out. He had never really paid much attention to Herschelite propaganda--he had been exposed to little of it--and he realized that now, as head of Popeek, he owed it to himself to become familiar with the anti-Popeek arguments of both extremist factions--those who insisted Popeek was a tyranny, and the Herschelites, who thought it was too weak.

“This Popeek,” the little man said, accenting the awkwardness of the word. “You know what it is? It’s a stopgap. It’s a silly, soft-minded, half-hearted attempt at solving our problems. It’s a fake, a fraud, a phony!”

There was real passion behind the words. Walton distrusted small men with deep wells of passion; he no more enjoyed their company than he did that of a dynamo or an atomic pile. They were always threatening to explode.

The crowd was stirring restlessly. The Herschelite was getting to them, one way or another. Walton drew back nervously, not wanting to be recognized, and stationed himself at the fringe of the crowd.

“Some of you don’t like Popeek for this reason or that reason. But let me tell you something, friends ... you’re wronger than they are! We’ve got to get tough with ourselves! We have to face the truth! Popeek is an unrealistic half-solution to man’s problems. Until we limit birth, establish rigid controls over who’s going to live and who isn’t, we--”

It was straight Herschelite propaganda, undiluted. Walton wasn’t surprised when someone in the audience interrupted, growling, “And who’s going to set those controls? You?”

“You trusted yourselves to Popeek, didn’t you? Why hesitate, then, to trust yourselves to Abel Herschel and his group of workers for the betterment and purification of mankind?”

Walton was almost limp with amazement. The Herschelite group was so much more drastic in its approach than Popeek that he wondered how they dared come out with these views in public. Animosity was high enough against Popeek; would the public accept a group more stringent yet?

The little man’s voice rose high. “Onward with the Herschelites! Mankind must move forward! The Equalization people represent the forces of decay and sloth!”

Walton turned to the man next to him and murmured, “But Herschel’s a fanatic. They’ll kill all of us in the name of mankind.”

The man looked puzzled; then, accepting the idea, he nodded. “Yeah, buddy. You know, you may have something there.”

That was all the spark needed. Walton edged away surreptitiously and watched it spread through the crowd, while the little man’s harangue grew more and more inflammatory.

Until a rock arced through the air from somewhere, whipped across the billowing UN flag, and cracked into the side of the building. That was the signal.

A hundred men and women converged on the little man on the battered chair. “We have to face the truth!“ the harsh voice cried; then the flags were swept down, trampled on. Flagpoles fell, ringing metallically on the concrete; the chair toppled. The little man was lost beneath a tide of remorseless feet and arms.

A siren screamed.

“Cops!” Walton yelled from his vantage point some thirty feet away, and abruptly the crowd melted away in all directions, leaving Walton and the little man alone on the street. A security wagon drew up. Four men in gray uniforms sprang out.

“What’s been going on here? Who’s this man?” Then, seeing Walton, “Hey! Come over here!”

“Of course, officer.” Walton turned his collar down and drew near. He spotted the glare of a ubiquitous video camera and faced it squarely. “I’m Director Walton of Popeek,” he said loudly, into the camera. “I just arrived here a few minutes ago. I saw the whole thing.”

“Tell us about it, Mr. Walton,” the security man said.

“It was a Herschelite.” Walton gestured at the broken body crumpled against the ground. “He was delivering an inflammatory speech aimed against Popeek, with special reference to the late Director FitzMaugham and myself. I was about to summon you and end the disturbance, when the listeners became aware that the man was a Herschelite. When they understood what he was advocating, they--well, you see the result.”

“Thank you, sir. Terribly sorry we couldn’t have prevented it. Must be very unpleasant, Mr. Walton.”

“The man was asking for trouble,” Walton said. “Popeek represents the minds and hearts of the world. Herschel and his people seek to overthrow this order. I can’t condone violence of any sort, naturally, but”--he smiled into the camera--”Popeek is a sacred responsibility to me. Its enemies I must regard as blind and misguided people.”

He turned and entered the building, feeling pleased with himself. That sequence would be shown globally on the next news screenings; every newsblare in the world would be reporting his words.

Lee Percy would be proud of him. Without benefit either of rehearsal or phonemic engineering, Walton had delivered a rousing speech and turned a grisly incident into a major propaganda instrument.

And more than that, Director FitzMaugham would have been proud of him.

But beneath the glow of pride, he was trembling. Yesterday he had saved a boy by a trifling alteration of his genetic record; today he had killed a man by sending a whispered accusation rustling through a mob.

Power. Popeek represented power, perhaps the greatest power in the world. That power would have to be channeled somehow, now that it had been unleashed.

The stack of papers relating to the superspeed space drive was still on his desk when he entered the office. He had had time yesterday to read through just some of the earliest; then, the pressure of routine had dragged him off to other duties.

Encouraged by FitzMaugham, the faster-than-light project had originated about a decade or so before. It stemmed from the fact that the ion-drive used for travel between planets had a top velocity, a limiting factor of about ninety thousand miles per second. At that rate, it would take some eighteen years for a scouting party to visit the closest star and report back ... not very efficient for a planet in a hurry to expand outward.