from science fiction by
Poul Anderson

“Well”—Heym walked up and down the floor, hands clasped behind his back—“it’s evident from a study of history that all progress is due to gifted individuals. Always, in every field, the talented or otherwise fortunate few have led and the mass has dumbly followed. A republic is the only form of state which even pretends to offer self-government, and as soon as the population becomes any size at all the people are again led by the nose, their rulers struggling for power with money and such means of mass hypnotism as news services and other propaganda machines. And all republics become dictatorships, in fact if not in name, within a few centuries at most.”

“The power of social conditioning is unbelievable—combined with social pressure, it is almost insuperable.

“And—this is the important point—the rules and assumptions of a society are accepted and enforced by the mass—the overwhelming majority, shortsighted, conservative, hating and fearing all that is new and strange, wishing only to remain in whatever basic condition it has known from birth. The genius is forced into the strait-jacket of the mediocre man’s mentality.”

“And you can sit like my wife on an egg thinking beautiful thoughts!”

“The only beautiful concept I have right now is that all of a sudden the Prime Directive was repealed.”

“No chance of that, I’m afraid . . . not till a less bloodthirsty race than yours gets the leadership of the League.”

“Less? You mean more, don’t you? ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever may the Patrol or any unit thereof kill any intelligent being.’ If you do—” Alak made a rather horrible gesture. “Is that bloodthirsty?”

“Quite. Only a race with as gory a past as the Terrans would go to such extremes of reaction. [...] Now a Galmathian will run down a farstak in his native woods and jump on its back and make a nice lunch while it’s still running . . . but he wouldn’t be able to imagine coldbloodedly sterilizing an entire world, so he doesn’t have to ban himself from honest killing even in self-defense.” Drogs’ caterpillar body hunched itself over the telescope.

“Get thee behind me, Satan . . . and don’t push!”

“ ‘The craven dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once.’ ”

“Yeh. But you see, I’m a craven from way back. I much prefer a thousand synthetic deaths to one genuine case.”

Alak found a congenial earl and spent his time swapping dirty jokes. It is always astonishing how many of the classics are to be found among all mammalian species. This is less an argument for a prehistoric Galactic Empire than for the parallelism of great minds.

But then, we came of a nation which has long encouraged natural philosophy and improvement of all mechanic arts. I myself, in my short lifetime, had witnessed the replacement of the waterwheel in regions where there are few streams, by the modern form of windmill. The pendulum clock was invented the year before I was born. I had read many romances about the flying machines which no few men have tried to devise. Living at such a dizzy pace of progress, we Montalirians were well prepared to entertain still vaster concepts.

“Ah,” he crooned, “today Truth stood unveiled before me. Did you hear what the starman said? The three laws of planetary motion about a sun, and the one great law of attraction which explains them? Dear saints, that law can be put in a single short sentence, and yet the development will keep mathematicians busy for three hundred years!”

He stared past the flames, and the other fires around which the heathen men slept, and the jungle gloom, and the angry volcanic glow in heaven. I started to query him. “Leave be, lad,” grunted Etien. “Can ye nay tell when a man’s in love?”

“What land is this? What kingdom?”

“In sooth, fair knight, ye ask a question over which many scholars have cracked their heads and many warriors have cracked each other’s heads.”

What had he been fighting when he fought the Nazis but a resurgence of archaic horrors that civilized men had once believed were safely dead?

In this universe the wild folk of the Middle World might be trying to break down a corresponding painfully established order: to restore some primeval state where anything could happen. Decent humanity would, on the other hand, always want to strengthen and extend Law, safety, predictability.

“With every such advance, the realms of Law will grow weaker: not alone in numbers, but in spirit, for the near presence o’ Chaos must affect the good folk, turning them skittish, lawless, and inclined to devilments o’ their own.” Alianora shook her head, troubled. “As evil waxes, the very men who stand for good will in their fear use ever worse means o’ fighting, and thereby give evil a free beachhead.”

Holger thought of his own world, where Coventry had been avenged upon Cologne, and nodded.

“I have the answer,” said the terrifying voice. “ ’Tis not unlike the one that Thiazi baffled Grotnir with, five hundred winters agone. See you, mortal, a chicken is the human soul, and the road is life which must be crossed, from the ditch of birth to the ditch of death. On that road are many perils, not alone the ruts of toil and the mire of sin, but wagons of war and pestilence, drawn by the oxen of destruction; while overhead wheels that hawk hight Satan, ever ready to stoop. The chicken knows not why it crosses the road, save that it sees greener fields on the far side. It crosses because it must, even as we all must.”

He beamed smugly. Holger shook his head. “No, wrong again.”