Educated? Enlightened? No, that still wasn't the precise turn of phrase he was after. He cogitated, and suddenly he had it.
Made more wise.
Yes. Yes, exactly. He had had his entire perspective on the world, the human condition, the universe, turned upside-down-and the new version was no less real than the traditional one. He was in the predicament of a savage shown a mirror for the first time, who has painfully to learn the truth that a man's right hand reflected in a mirror is his left.
But all that had been present in his mind while he was in Canada, arranging his onward journey to Russia with the aid and connivance, of the company whose representative he had nominally been during his time in the States. So now it had flashed back to his awareness in less than the blink of an eye, and Bratcheslavsky was still talking.
"Not only that, what's morel Not just a man with a talent we'd give our eye-teeth to controll But very likely Turpin too, who's been a mainstay of human survival for a quarter of a centuryl"
"But they don't suspect him of being an agent, do they?" Sheklov demanded. "Only of-uh-contact with subversives!"
"There's too damned good a chance of his being tried for treason." Curtly. "The Navy has jumped into the mess with both feet, and every corporation that's jealous of Energetics General is demanding a chance to take over the defence contracts, and all in all you never saw anything more like the Byzantine Empire in your life! I wouldn't bet against the possibility of the President being deposed, I swear I wouldn'tl"
..By an Army coup?"
"Yes, of course. It's inevitable, you know, once you let the armed forces take over key organs of your government. Simply because they can impose rigid discipline on their 'members, whereas the loose, inchoate mass of the public is uncontrollable, they're bound to wind up giving the orders. Didn't we come perilously close to it ourselves a couple of times? And it wasn't good judgment that saved us, only luckl"
Bratcheslavsky tore the. cigarette from his mouth and gave it a rearing glare; he had bitten completely through its cardboard tube. Tossing it into a sandbowl with an oath. he lit another.
"But surely, even if we do lose Turpin," Sheklov countered, "this process will bear out what Marxism has always prophesied: the dissolution of the capitalist state into a brutal internal power-struggle. There'll be so many factions we'll be able to feed in spies, saboteurs, subversives, anyone we choose. All we'll have to do is identify those of the competing parties that are prepared to sell out in order to do down their rivals. Ten years, of that; and America will never be a menace to the world again."
"You're an optimist there days!" Bratcheslavsky grunted.
"I have good reason. I found things over there I wasn't expecting, would have assumed not to exist. Admittedly, they are neither officially admitted nor properly understood, but they exist, and I'm here because they do."
He drew a deep breath.
"Lookl My stay there was measured in daysl I don't believe I could have run across what I did unless thesethese virtues and talents are widespread. Just considerl" He raised a finger. "First, I encountered someone with a talent we'd never imagined to be real, only it was real and I had proof. What's more, he . . . well, it's an unfashionable virtue, but it is one."
"Self-sacrifice," Bratcheslavsky said.
"Yes."
There was a long, cold pause. During it Sheklov felt himself carried back in space and time, to the train he had taken over the Canadian border on Danty's instructions. None of them had the mind to question his orders by that stage. No one had suspected the genuinepess of his Canadian passport; for him it had been easy. For Lora and Magda, somewhat harder . . . but there was a wellestablished underground railway into Canada, had been for over a generation, and it had been surprisingly simple to obtain advice and even a guide. (Of course he'd only heard the details afterwards.)
For Danty, though. .
He'd looked out of the train's window, and seen that car racing down one of the blocked stub-ends of dirt road heading north, and behind a mask of trees he'd seen that rose of flame. Just for a moment, a second or two.
Why? Why? Merely so as to ensure that when his train was checked by the border-guards, most of them would have been diverted to investigate the explosion? It was far too high a pricel
But he continued, raising another finger. "And I met Magda, who in spite of the stifling effects of public conformism had worked out, from the inside, the true historical analogies for her country's predicament. And"a third finger-"Lore, who behaved in this crazy manner and nonetheless was ready to abandon her. old life for good and all, simply because she'd discovered that her father had lied to her since she was born. That hatred of hypocrisy is a healthy sign .... Did you bring them out safely, by the way? I didn't hear."
"Yes, it was confirmed this morning. They wanted to stay in Canada, I'm afraid, but of course we couldn't allow that, not since they both knew about you and Turpin. But don't worry-we'll make them comfortable and take care of them."
"Fine," Sheklov said dispiritedly, and stubbed his cigarette in the sandbowl. "Tell me something," he added after a moment. ."Why do you think Danty did it?"
"I can only guess," Bratcheslavsky said. "Still, it'll be an enlightened guess. I'm an old man, and I've been through so much in one lifetime I seem to have summed up whole generations of human experience. Not about the material world, but about the spiritual world. The material world is run by people like those"-he jerked his head at the door of the room, through which they were soon going to have to pass in order to explain something vitally significant to people who would have no conception of its true importance--"who are merely efficient. Good at ruling, good at directing, good at ordering other people about. That wasn't Danty's talent. His was for influencing people, encouraging them, not an engineer's talent, but an artist's."
"Yesl" Sheklov said, almost surprised.
"You envy him that gift, don't you?"
"I . . . Yes, I do."
"But it killed him at twenty-one." The words hung in the air like smoke. "And there's only one reasonable explanation. Thanks to the gift, he saw something ahead for him that would have been -intolerable."
"I-I guess so. But what?"
"I think you told me, didn't you? Something you heard
from his friend Magda. The prospect of endless years of fear, of expecting that one day he would sense a crisis coming that he was powerless to prevent."
"And he preferred not to be doomed by others," Sheklov said. "He chose to make his own decision about an end."
"But he left a precious legacy," Bratcheslavsky said He twisted around on his cushions and picked up a pile of shiny thick white cards, which he held out to Sheklov. Distracted, the younger man took them and turned them over.
They were a set of the pictures from the far-distant reaches of space, which he had so crudely copied for Danty to examine, and which he had so brilliantly and rapidly understood although scores, hundreds of experts had struggled vainly with them for years.
He said, "The ship has gone, hasn't it?"
"You mean arrived," Bratcheslavsky said with a sour l~
"Yes . "
Automatically, Sheklov was shuffling the pictures into the reverse of the standard order, meantime visualising himself, a few minutes from now, consciously imitating what Danty had done with those rough sketches in a roadside restaurant.
Born at the wrong end of time . . .
Oh, what could be wrong with this sick species, mankind, that it had taken Danty with his special, his im. probable talent to see the plain and obvious truth? De. formed by fear and suspicion, everybody's mind but his had read threats into these pictureat (He re-heard himself asking Tunpin, the morning of his arrival in the States, what might happen if New York were wiped off the map by a total-conversion reactions)
But the sign of the alien ship was reversed. What lay under his hand was the story of the evolution of mannot a threat that he would be driven back to the caves, but a promise that he would travel to the starsl He turned the pictures up one by one, like tarot cards: the caveman with his atone axe; the discovery of fire; that baffling plain disc, which now he realized was symbolic of the invention of the wheel, not the Earth wrapped in smoke and fallout; the release of nuclear power; the rocket, the
first crude spaceship; the view of Earth as the astronauts and cosmonauts saw it when they made their earliest voyages; the far-distant view of the sun from the orbit of Pluto; the contact made with the unthinkable, incredible, inconceivable ship from the far side of the fourdimensional curve of the cosmos. where matter was antimatter and time's arrow faced the other way . . . and last of all that wonderful sight that some man might one day contemplate: the whole galaxy, turning like a whirlpool of stars.
Might?
Would. That was the most astonishing thing of all. It might, take centuries to work out the philosophical implications of the last conclusion to be drawn from this inverted exponential curve of achievement, but for the time being at least, he, Vassily Sheklov, was content to accept it with the force of a poetic or religious truth.
We're going to make it.
Because this alien species could not have learned what -as the pictures proved-they knew about mankind from this meeting: the naked form of a primitive man, above all, waving a flint axe. It followed that they, in their past, had already grown familiar with human beings, in what was still the latter's future. This encounter, the first for man, was for the aliens the last.
No use. It turned his brain topsy-turvy to try to think about it. Leave it to the genius speculators, leave it to the philosophers and cosmogonists and metaphysicians. Right now, the problem was to try to convey some of his sense of certainty to people that Bratcheslavsky had dismissed as "merely efficient." How wonderful to know that the human race was not after all going to be destroyed because aliens triggered its own horrible armoury of murder-and how terrifying to know that it rested on his shoulders to convince the world . . .
For a brief instant he felt he knew exactly why Danty had chosen to destroy himself. And then there was a knock at the door, and someone was standing there, and the someone was saying, "The First Secretary and the Chinese Ambassador are waiting to receive you, so if you will come with me..."
