Robert Heinlein - Expanded Universe

The President was determined that our sudden power should be used for the absolute minimum of maintaining peace in the world - the simple purpose of outlawing war and nothing else. It must not be used to protect American investments abroad, to coerce trade agreements, for any purpose but the simple abolition of mass killing.

There is no science of sociology. Perhaps there will be, some day, when a rigorous physics gives a finished science of colloidal chemistry and that leads in turn to a complete knowledge of biology, and from there to a definitive psychology. After that we may begin to know something about sociology and politics. Sometime around the year 5000 A. D., maybe - if the human race does not commit suicide before then.

Until then, there is only horse sense and rule of thumb and observational knowledge of probabilities. Manning and the President played by ear.

The treaties with Great Britain, Germany and the Eurasian Union, whereby we assumed the responsibility for world peace and at the same time guaranteed the contracting nations against our own misuse of power, were rushed through in the period of relief and goodwill that immediately followed the termination of the Four - Days War. We followed the precedents established by the Panama Canal treaties, the Suez Canal agreements, and the Philippine Independence policy.

But the purpose underneath was to commit future governments of the United States to an irrevocable benevolent policy.

The act to implement the treaties by creating the Commission of World Safety followed soon after, an Colonel Manning became Mr. Commissioner Manning. Commissioners had a life tenure and the intention was to create a body with the integrity, permanence and freedom from outside pressure p0sessed by the Supreme Court of the United State Since the treaties contemplated an eventual join trust, commissioners need not be American citizens and the oath they took was to preserve the peace of the world.

There was trouble getting the clause past the Congress! Every other similar oath had been to the Constitution of the United States.

Nevertheless the Commission was formed. It took charge of world aircraft, assumed jurisdiction over radioactives, natural and artificial, and commenced the long slow task of building up the Peace Patrol.

Manning envisioned a corps of world policemen, a aristocracy which, through selection and indoctrination, could be trusted with unlimited power over life of every man, every woman, every child on the face of the globe. For the power would be unlimited; the precautions necessary to insure the unbeatable weapon from getting loose in the world again made axiomatic that its custodians would wield power that is safe only in the hands of Deity. There would be none to guard those selfsame guardians. Their characters and the watch they kept on each other would be all that stood between the race and distaste For the first time in history, supreme political power was to be exerted with no possibility of checks an balances from the outside. Manning took up the task of perfecting it with a dragging subconscious conviction that it was too much for human nature.

The rest of the Commission was appointed, the names being sent to the Senate after long joint consideration by the President and Manning. The director of the Red Cross, an obscure little professor of history from Switzerland, Dr. Igor Rimski who had developed the Karst - Obre technique independently and whom the A. P. F. had discovered in prison after the dusting of Moscow - those three were the only foreigners. The rest of the list is well known.

Ridpath and his staff were of necessity the original technical crew of the Commission; United States Army and Navy pilots its first patrolmen. Not all of the pilots available were needed; their records were searched, their habits and associates investigated, their mental processes and emotional attitudes examined by the best psychological research methods available - which weren't good enough. Their final acceptance for the Patrol depended on two personal interviews, one with Manning, one with the President.

Manning told me that he depended more on the President's feeling for character than he did on all the association and reaction tests the psychologists could think up. "It's like the nose of a bloodhound," he said. "In his forty years of practical politics he has seen more phonies than you and I will ever see and each one was trying to sell him something. He can tell one in the dark."

The long - distance plan included the schools for the indoctrination of cadet patrolmen, schools that were to be open to youths of any race, color, or nationality, and from which they would go forth to guard the peace of every country but their own. To that country a man would never return during his service. They were to be a deliberately expatriated band of Janizanies, with an obligation only to the Commission and to the race, and welded together with a carefully nurtured esprit de corps.

It stood a chance of working. Had Manning been allowed twenty years without interruption, the original plan might have worked.

The President's running mate for reelection was the result of a political compromise. The candidate for Vice President was a confirmed isolationist who ha opposed the Peace Commission from the first, but was he or a party split in a year when the opposition was strong. The President sneaked back in but with greatly weakened Congress; only his power of vet twice prevented the repeal of the Peace Act. The Vic President did nothing to help him, although he did n publicly lead the insurrection. Manning revised h plans to complete the essential program by the end 1952, there being no way to predict the temper of the next administration.

We were both overworked and I was beginningIrealize that my health was gone. The cause was not to seek; a photographic film strapped next to my ski would cloud in twenty minutes. I was suffering from cumulative minimal radioactive poisoning. No well defined cancer that could be operated on, but a systemic deterioration of function and tissue. There was no help for it, and there was work to be done. I've a ways attributed it mainly to the week I spent sitting on those canisters before the raid on Berlin.

February 17, 1951. I missed the televue flash above the plane crash that killed the President because I was lying down in my apartment. Manning, by that time was requiring me to rest every afternoon after lunch though I was still on duty. I first heard about it from my secretary when I returned to my office, and at once hurried into Manning's office.

There was a curious unreality to that meeting. It seemed to me that we had slipped back to that day when I returned from England, the day that Estel Karst died. He looked up. "Hello, John," he said.

I put my hand on his shoulder. "Don't take it hard, chief," was all I could think of to say.

Forty - eight hours later came the message from the newly sworn - in President for Manning to report him. I took it in to him, an official dispatch which decoded. Manning read it, face impassive.

"Are you going, chief?" I asked.

"Eh? Why, certainly."

I went back into my office, and got my topcoat, gloves, and briefcase.

Manning looked up when I came back in. "Never mind, John," he said. "You're not going." I guess I must have looked stubborn, for he added, "You're not to go because there is work to do here. Wait a minute." He went to his safe, twiddled the dials, opened it and removed a sealed envelope which he threw on the desk between us. "Here are your orders. Get busy."

He went out as I was opening them. I read them through and got busy. There was little enough time.

The new President received Manning standing and in the company of several of his bodyguards and intimates. Manning recognized the senator who had led the movement to use the Patrol to recover expropriated holdings in South America and Rhodesia, as well as the chairman of the committee on aviation with whom he had had several unsatisfactory conferences in an attempt to work out a modus operandi for reinstituting commercial airlines.