Isaac Asimov - Utopia

Simcor Beddle was short and fat, but that description, while accurate, did not do him justice. There was nothing small or soft or flabby about him. It often seemed as if the sheer strength of his will added ten centimeters to his height. His face was pallid and round, but the skin was taut over his jaw. It was hard to know the exact color of his eyes were, but they were gimlet hard, jewel bright. His hair was jet-black, and he wore it combed straight back. He was wearing a subdued version of his usual military-style uniform. No decoration on it for a late-evening conversation in private, none of the epaulets or braid or ribbons or insignia he had worn at the rally. Just a dull black tunic and dull black trousers of military cut. But then, understatement often proved most effective.

“Yes, sir. Yes I do,” Gildern replied.

“I like to think so,” said Beddle. “And yet what good is it all if there is no chance for me to lead?” He moved forward in the seat, lifted his foot and looked down at it. “I’m like one of these boots. Look at them. Steel-toed, jet-black—they look as if they could kick in any door ever made. But what good is that if there is nothing for them to kick in? If I leave them unused for long enough, people will cease to believe I can use them. The Ironheads can last on appearances for only so long. We need something that can move us forward.”

“Your point is well taken, sir,” said Gildern. “You’re saying that recent history has not followed the pattern prescribed by our philosophy.”

The Ironhead philosophy was simplicity itself—the solution to every problem was more and better robots. Robots had liberated humanity—but not completely, because there were not enough robots. The basic product of robotic labor was human freedom. The more robots there were, and the more they worked, the more humans were free to follow other pursuits. Simcor Beddle believed—or at least had managed to convince himself, and quite a number of other people—that the whole terraforming crisis was a fraud, or at best nothing more than a convenient excuse for seizing robots from private citizens, and thus restricting their freedom.

Chanto Grieg’s original seizure of private robots for use in the terraforming project had been the single greatest recruitment tool in the history of the Ironheads. People had rushed to the Ironhead standard. The seizure seemed to be the fulfillment of every one of Simcor Beddle’s most dire warnings. It was the beginning of the end, the moment that would mark the collapse of Spacer civilization on Inferno, the next move in the Settler plot to take over the planet.

But when those disasters failed to materialize, many of the new recruits—and many of the old stalwarts—began to drift away from the organization. In the past half-decade, Alvar Kresh had done a better job of advancing Grieg’s program than Grieg himself had done. Kresh had delivered five years of good, solid government, five years of measurable, meaningful movement forward in the reterraforming project.

And, worst of all, people had discovered they could survive with fewer robots. The Ironheads could produce all the statistics they liked showing how the standard of living was falling, how incomes were on the decline, how levels of hygiene were declining while accident rates were on the increase. But somehow, none of it seemed to matter. There were certainly plenty of people grumbling over the situation, but they were not impassioned. They were, at least some of them, annoyed or frustrated. But they were not angry. And the Ironheads could not long survive without angry people.

“Quite right,” said Beddle. “Events have not followed our philosophy. We need things to start going wrong once again.” Beddle realized he had not put it quite right. He had better watch himself. That was the sort of gaffe that could have raised merry hell if he had made it in public. “No, more accurately, we need to make people see, once again, that things are going wrong now. We need some image, some symbol, some idea, to rally the masses once again.”

“And you think that Davlo Lentrall might be such a symbol?” Gildern asked. “Or, perhaps, that he might at least lead us to such a symbol?”

“I have not the faintest idea,” said Simcor Beddle. “But he represents a possibility, and we must pursue all such.”

“As you say, sir. We will keep up a discreet watch on our new friend.”

“Good,” said Beddle. “Now let us move on. What can you tell me about, ah, the other project you had underway?”

Gildern smiled, showing all his sharp-looking teeth. “It is a long-term project, of course. But we make slow, steady progress in our search, in spite of the roadblocks put in our way. The day will come when we can strike.”

Beddle smiled happily. “Excellent,” he said. “Excellent. When that day comes, I hope, and expect, brother Gildern, that our friends will never know what hit them.”

“With a little luck, sir, the New Law robots will not even survive long enough to realize they have been hit.”

Beddle laughed out loud, a brazen, harsh noise that clearly made Gildern uncomfortable. But that didn’t matter. And it was good to know that, even if Lentrall caused them all a major headache, there were other ways for the Ironheads to manufacture events.

TONYA WELTON FELT sick as she finished reading the SSS summary. She set down the datapad and looked toward the window. The sky was lightening. Night had turned to day while she read. They had gotten into his computer files. They had managed a preliminary analysis of what they had found. It would take a lot longer to confirm that Lentrall’s ideas could work—or even whether they were grounded in reality. But Tonya was already prepared to believe it. Lentrall was offering his plan in deadly earnest. And there was no doubt in her mind that “deadly” was a singularly appropriate description of what Lentrall had in mind. The Spacers of Utopia had no experience in these matters. They could not possibly understand the dangers involved. The slightest misstep, and they could easily wipe out the planet.

She would have to do something. If the Spacers were truly considering this mad thing, she was going to have to do something that would stop it before it began. But it would not do to act until she knew more. She would need a lot more information before she was ready to act. But if the information was on the level, it might well be too late to do anything about it by the time they were ready.

They would have to get ready for action now, not later. They would have to make contingency plans and hope they were never needed.

She reached for the phone.

CINTA MELLOY, COMMANDER of the SSS, sat up in bed and slapped at the audio-answer plate. “Melloy here,” she said.

“This is Welton,” a voice said from the middle of the air.

Cinta blinked and frowned. What the devil was she doing calling at this hour? “What can I do for you, ma’am?” she asked.

“Switch to security setting,” Welton said. There was a click, and then a roar of static.

Cinta punched her own security code into the answer plate and the static cleared. “I am on secure setting,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve just finished reading the preliminary reports from the computer tap on Lentrall. And I think we need to make contingency plans, in case we decide to look after Lentrall ourselves.”

Cinta frowned. She couldn’t have heard that right, or else she had misinterpreted. Welton couldn’t seriously be considering a snatch job. “Say again?” she asked.

“I said we might want Lentrall for ourselves. More accurately, we might want to keep him, and his work, from the Infernals, if only for a little while.”

“Madame Welton, that would be madness! Absolute madness! If he’s as important as you say—”