Time Enough for Love (4 page)

“How we found you is not the surprising part, Lazarus, but the fact that SecFor—the cops?—Yes, ‘cops’—that my cops took so long to identify you, then find you, and pick you up. A section chief lost his job over that. I don’t tolerate inefficiency.”

“So you busted him. Your business. But why? I reached Secundus from Out-Far, and I didn’t think I had left any back trail. Different everything since the last time I was in touch with the Families…as I bought my last rejuvenation on Supreme. Are the Families swapping data with Supreme these days?”

“Heavens, no, Lazarus, we won’t even give them a polite word. There is a strong minority among the Trustees who favor rubbing out Supreme, instead of simply maintaining embargo.”

“Well…if a nova bomb hit Supreme, I wouldn’t mourn more than thirty seconds. But I did have a reason for having the job done there, even though I had to pay high for forced cloning. But that’s another story. Son, how did you pick me up?”

“Sir, for the past seventy years there has been a general order out to try to find you, not just here but on every planet where the Families maintain offices. As to how—do you recall a forced inoculation for Reiber’s fever at Immigration?”

“Yes. I was annoyed, but it didn’t seem worthwhile to make a fuss; I knew I was headed for that flophouse. Ira, I’ve known that I was dying for quite some time. That was okay; I was ready for it. But I didn’t want to do it alone, out in space. Wanted human voices around me, and body odors. Childish of me. But I was pretty far gone by the time I grounded.”

“Lazarus, there is no such thing as Reiber’s fever. When a man grounds on Secundus and all routine identifications show null, ‘Reiber’s fever’ or some other nonexistent plague is used as an excuse to get a little tissue from him while injecting him with sterile neutral saline. You should never have been allowed to leave the skyport until your genetic pattern was identified.”

“So? What do you do when ten thousand immigrants arrive in one ship?”

“Herd them into detention barracks until we’ve checked them out. But that doesn’t happen often today with Old Home Terra in the sorry state it’s in. But you, Lazarus, arriving alone in a private yacht worth fifteen to twenty million crowns—”

“Make that ‘thirty.’”

“—worth thirty million crowns. How many men in the Galaxy can do that? Of those who can afford it, how many would choose to travel alone? The pattern should have set alarm bells ringing in the minds of all of them. Instead they took your tissue and accepted your statement that you would be staying at the Romulus hilton and let you go—and no doubt you had another identity before dark.”

“No doubt at all,” Lazarus agreed. “But your cops have run up the price on a good phony set of ID’s. If I hadn’t been too tired to bother, I would have forged my own. Safer. Was that how I was caught? Did you squeeze it out of the paper merchant?”

“No, we never found him. By the way, you might let me know who he is, so that—”

“And I might
not.
” Lazarus said sharply. “Not ratting on him was implicit in the bargain. It’s nothing to me how many of your rules he breaks. And—who knows?—I might need him again. Certainly someone will need his services, somebody just as anxious to avoid your busies as I was. Ira, no doubt you mean well but I don’t like setups where ID’s are necessary. I told myself centuries back to stay away from places crowded enough to require them, and mostly I’ve followed that rule. Should have followed it this time. But I didn’t expect to need
any
identification very long. Confound it. two more days and I would have been dead. I think. How did you catch me?”

“The hard way. Once I knew you were on planet I stirred things up; that section chief wasn’t the only unhappy man. But you disappeared in so simple a fashion that you battled the entire force. My security chief expressed the opinion that you had been killed and your body disposed of. I told him if that were the case, he had better start thinking about off-planet migration.”

“Make march! I want to know how I goofed.”

“I would not say that you goofed. Lazarus, since you managed to stay hidden with every cop and stoolie on this globe looking for you. But I felt certain that you had not been killed. Oh, we do have murders on Secundus, especially here in New Rome. But most are the commonplace husband-wife sort. We don’t have many for gain since I instituted a policy of making the punishment fit the crime and holding executions in the Colosseum. In any case I felt certain that a man who had survived more than two millennia would not let himself be killed in some dark alley.

“So I assumed that you were alive, then asked myself, ‘If I were Lazarus Long, how would I go about hiding?’ I went into deep meditation and thought about it. Then I tried to retrace your steps, so far as we knew them. By the way—”

The Chairman Pro Tem threw back his shoulder cloak, took out a large sealed envelope, handed it to Lazarus. “Here is the item you left in a lockbox at Harriman Trust.”

Lazarus accepted it. “It’s been opened.”

“By me. Prematurely, I admit—but you addressed it to me. I have read it but no one else has. And now I will forget it. Except to say this: I am unsurprised that you left your wealth to the Families…but I was touched that you assigned your yacht to the personal use of the Chairman. That’s a sweet craft, Lazarus; I lust after it a bit. But not so much that I am anxious to inherit so quickly. But I undertook to explain why we need you—and let myself get sidetracked.”

“I’m in no rush, Ira. Are you?”

“
Me?
Sir, I have no duties more important than talking with the Senior. Besides, my staff runs this planet more efficiently if I don’t supervise them too closely.”

Lazarus nodded agreement. “That was always my system, the times I let myself get involved. Accept the whole load, then shove the work off on other people as fast as I could pick ‘em. Having any trouble with democrats these days?”

“‘Democrats’? Oh—you must mean ‘equalitarians.’ I thought at first you meant the Church of the Holy Democrat. We leave that church alone; they don’t meddle. There is an equalitarian movement every few years, certainly, under various names. The Freedom Party, the League of the Oppressed—names don’t matter as they all want to turn the rascals out, starting with me, and put their own rascals in. We never bother them; we simply infiltrate, then some night we round up the ringleaders and their families, and by daylight they are headed out as involuntary migrants. Transportees. ‘Living on Secundus is a privilege, not a right.’”

“You’re quoting me.”

“Of course. Your exact words from the contract under which you deeded Secundus to the Foundation. That there was to be no government on this planet other than such rules as the current chairman found necessary to maintain order. We’ve stuck to our agreement with you, Senior; I am sole boss until the Trustees see fit to replace me.”

“That’s what I intended,” Lazarus agreed. “But—Son, it’s your pidgin and I’ll never touch that gavel again—but I have doubts about the wisdom of getting rid of troublemakers. Every loaf needs yeast. A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill. Sheep. Pyramid builders at best, decadent savages at worst. You may be eliminating your creative one-tenth of one percent. Your yeast.”

“I’m afraid we are, Senior, and that’s one reason why we need you—”

“I said I won’t touch that gavel!”

“Will you hear me out, sir? You won’t be asked to, even though it is yours by ancient custom if you care to pick it up. But I could use advice—”

“I don’t give advice; people never take it.”

“Sorry. Perhaps just a chance to talk over my problems with a person more experienced than I am. About these troublemakers—We haven’t eliminated them in the old sense; they’re still alive, or most of them. Ostracizing a man to another planet is more satisfactory than killing him for the technical crime of treason; it gets rid of him without making his neighbors too indignant. Nor have we wasted him—them—as we are using them to conduct an experiment: All transportees are shipped to the same planet, Felicity. Do you happen to know it?”

“Not by that name.”

“I think you would have stumbled on it only by accident, sir; we have kept it out of public records in order to use it as a Botany Bay. It is not as good a planet as the name suggests, but it is a good one, roughly equivalent to Old Home Terra—Earth, I should say—before it was ruined, or much like Secundus when we settled here. It’s rough enough to test a man and eliminate weaklings, gentle enough to let a man raise a family if he has the guts to dig in and sweat.”

“Sounds like a good place; perhaps you should have hung onto it. Natives?”

“The proto-dominant race are quite fierce savages…if any are still alive. We don’t know, we don’t even maintain a liaison office there. This native race is neither intelligent enough to be civilized nor tractable enough to be enslaved. Perhaps they would have evolved and made it on their own, but they had the misfortune to encounter H. sapiens before they were ready for him. But that is not the experiment; the transportees are certain to win out over that competition, we do not send them empty-handed. But, Lazarus, these people believe that they can create ideal government by majority rule.”

Lazarus snorted.

“Perhaps they
can
, sir,” Weatheral persisted. “I don’t know that they cannot. That is the experiment.”

“Son, are you a fool? Oh, you can’t be, the Trustees wouldn’t keep you in office. But—How old did you say you are?”

Weatheral answered quietly, “I am nineteen centuries your junior, sir; I will not dispute your opinion on anything. But
I
do not know through my own experience that this experiment will not work; I have never seen a government of the democratic type, even in the numerous times I have been off planet. I’ve simply read about them. From what I have read not one has ever been formed from a population all of whom believed in the democratic theory. So I don’t know.”

“Hmm.” Lazarus looked frustrated. “Ira, 1 was about to shove my own experience with such governments down your throat. But you’re right, this is a brand-new situation—and we
don’t
know. Oh, I have strong opinions, but a thousand reasoned opinions are never equal to one case of diving in and finding out. Galileo proved that and it may be the only certainty we have. Mmm…all the so-called democracies I’ve ever seen or heard of were either forced on the majority from above or grew up slowly from the plebs discovering that they could vote themselves bread-and-circuses—for a while, until the system broke down. I’m sorry I won’t see the outcome of your experiment. I suspect it will be the harshest tyranny imaginable; majority rule gives the ruthless strong man plenty of elbow room to oppress his fellows. But I don’t know. What’s
your
opinion?”

“The computers say—”

“Never mind computers. Ira, the most sophisticated machine the human mind can build has in it the limitations of the human mind. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I asked for
your
opinion.”

“Sir, I refuse to form an opinion; I lack sufficient data.”

“Hrrumph: You’re getting old, Son. To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer. You were telling me how you found me.”

“Yes, sir. That document, your will, made it clear that you expected to die soon. Then”—Weatheral paused and smiled wryly—“I had to ‘guess right without enough data.’ It took us two days to find the shop where you bought clothes to lower your apparent status—and to conform to local styles, I think. I suspect that you bought your false ID’s right after that.”

He paused; Lazarus made no comment; Weatheral continued: “Another half day to find the shop where you lowered your apparent status much farther, close to bottom—too far perhaps, as the shopkeeper remembered you, both because you paid cash and because you were buying secondhand clothes that were not as good even when new as the ones you were wearing. Oh, he pretended to accept your story about a ‘costume party’ and kept his mouth shut; his shop is a fence for stolen goods.”

“Of course,” agreed Lazarus. “I made sure he was on the crook before I bought from him. But you said he stayed zipped?”

“Until we stimulated his memory. A fence is in a difficult position, Lazarus; he has to have a permanent address. This can sometimes force him to be honest.”

“Oh, I wasn’t blaming dear old Uncle. The fault was mine; I let myself be conspicuous. I was tired, Ira, and feeling my years and let it rush me into doing a sloppy job. Even a hundred years back I would have done a more artistic job—I’ve always known that it is more difficult to lower your status convincingly than to raise it.”

“I don’t think you need feel ashamed of the job as a work of art, Senior; you had us baffled for almost three months.”

“Son, the world doesn’t pay off on a ‘good try.’ Go ahead.”

“Brute force then, Lazarus. That shop is in the worst part of the city; we put a cordon around the area and saturated it, thousands of men. But not for long; you were in the third fleabag we checked. I spotted you myself, I was with one of the raiding parties. Then your genetic pattern confirmed your identity.” Ira Weatheral smiled slightly. “But we were pouring new blood into you before the genetic analyzer reported your identity; you were in bad shape, sir.”

“I was like hell in bad shape; I was simply dying—and minding my own business, a practice you could emulate. Ira, do you realize what a dirty trick you have done me? A man ought not to have to die twice…and I was past the bad part and ready for the finale as easy as falling asleep. Then you butted in. I’ve never heard of rejuvenation being forced on anyone. If I had suspected that you had changed the rules, I would never have come near this planet. Now I have to go through it again. Either with the suicide switch—and suicide is an idea I’ve always despised—or the natural way. Which could now take a long time. Is my old blood still around? Stored?”

“I will inquire of the Clinic’s Director, sir.”

“Humph. That’s not an answer, so don’t bother to lie. You’ve put me in a dilemma, Ira. Even though I haven’t had the full treatment, I feel better than I’ve felt for forty years or more—which means either that I must again wait it out for many weary years—or use that switch when my body isn’t saying, ‘Time to adjourn.’ You meddling scoundrel, by what authority—no, you’ve got the authority. By what ethical principle did you interfere with my death?”