Oneness

  Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction May 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  ONENESS

  At that, you know the power to enforce the Golden Rule would make a terrible weapon!

  by JAMES H. SCHMITZ

  ILLUSTRATED BY LEO SUMMERS

  * * * * *

  Menesee felt excitement surge like a living tide about him as he camewith the other directors into the vast Tribunal Hall. Sixty years ago,inexcusable carelessness had deprived Earth of its first chance toobtain a true interstellar drive. Now, within a few hours, Earth, ormore specifically, the upper echelons of that great politicalorganization called the Machine which had controlled the affairs ofEarth for the past century and a half, should learn enough of thesecrets of the drive to insure that it would soon be in theirpossession.

  Menesee entered his box between those of Directors Cornelius andOjeda, immediately to the right of the Spokesman's Platform and withan excellent view of the prisoner. When Administrator Bradshaw andSpokesman Dorn had taken their places on the platform, Menesee seatedhimself, drawing the transcript of the day's proceedings towards him.However, instead of glancing over it at once, he spent some seconds ina study of the prisoner.

  The fellow appeared to be still young. He was a magnificent physicalspecimen, tall and strongly muscled, easily surpassing in this respectany of the hard-trained directors present. His face showed alertintelligence, giving no indication of the fact that for two of thethree days since his capture he had been drugged and subject toconstant hypnotic suggestion. He had given his name as Rainbolt,acknowledged freely that he was a member of the group of malcontentdeserters known in the records of the Machine as the Mars Convicts,but described himself as being a "missionary of Oneness" whose purposewas to bring the benefits of some of the principles of "Oneness" toEarth. He had refused to state whether he had any understanding of thestardrive by the use of which the Mars Convicts had made their massescape from the penal settlements of the Fourth Planet sixty yearsbefore, though the drive obviously had been employed in bringing himout of the depths of interstellar space to the Solar System and Earth.At the moment, while the significance of the bank of tortureinstruments on his right could hardly have escaped him, his expressionwas serious but not detectably concerned.

  "Here is an interesting point!" Director Ojeda's voice said onMenesee's right.

  Menesee glanced over at him. Ojeda was tapping the transcript with afinger.

  "This Rainbolt," he said, "hasn't slept since he was captured! Hestates, furthermore, that he has never slept since he became anadult--"

  Menesee frowned slightly, failing to see any great significance in thefact. That the fellow belonged to some curious cult which haddeveloped among the Mars Convicts following their flight from theSolar System was already known. Earth's science had methods ofinducing permanent sleeplessness but knew, too, that in most instancesthe condition eventually gave rise to very serious side effects whichmore than offset any advantages to be gained from it.

  He picked up his transcript, indicating that he did not wish to bedrawn into conversation. His eyes scanned quickly over the pages. Mostof it was information he already had. Rainbolt's ship had beendetected four days earlier, probing the outermost of the multipleglobes of force screens which had enclosed Earth for fifty years as adefense both against faster-than-light missiles and Mars Convictspies. The ship was alone. A procedure had been planned for such anevent, and it was now followed. The ship was permitted to penetratethe first two screens which were closed again behind it.

  Rainbolt's ship, for all its incredible speed, was then a prisoner.Unhurriedly, it was worked closer to Earth until it came within rangeof giant scanners. For an instant, a large section of its interior wasvisible to the instruments of the watchers on Earth; then the pictureblurred and vanished again. Presumably automatic anti-scanning deviceshad gone into action.

  The photographed view was disappointing in that it revealed no detailsof the engines or their instruments. It did show, however, that theship had been designed for the use of one man, and that it was neitherarmored or armed. Its hull was therefore bathed with paralytics, whichin theory should have left the pilot helpless, and ships of theMachine were then sent up to tow the interstellar captive down toEarth.

  At that point, the procedure collapsed. The ship was in atmospherewhen an escape capsule was suddenly ejected from it, which later wasfound to contain Rainbolt, alert and obviously not affected by theparalysis beams. A moment later, the ship itself became a cloud ofswiftly dissipating hot gas.

  The partial failure of the capture might have been unavoidable in anycase. But the manner in which it occurred still reflected very poorly,Menesee thought, on the thoroughness with which the plans had beenprepared. The directors who had been in charge of the operation wouldnot be dealt with lightly--

  He became aware suddenly that the proceedings of the day had begun andhastily put down the transcript.

  * * * * *

  Spokesman Dorn, the Machine's executive officer, sitting besideAdministrator Bradshaw at a transparent desk on the raised platform toMenesee's left, had enclosed the area about the prisoner with a soundblock and was giving a brief verbal resume of the background of thesituation. Few of the directors in the Tribunal Hall would have neededsuch information; but the matter was being carried on the GrandAssembly Circuit, and in hundreds of auditoriums on Earth the firstand second echelons of the officials of the Machine had gathered towitness the interrogation of the Mars Convict spy.

  The penal settlements on Mars had been established almost a centuryearlier, for the dual purpose of mining the mineral riches of theFourth Planet and of utilizing the talents of political dissidentswith a scientific background too valuable to be wasted in research andexperimental work considered either too dangerous to be conducted onEarth or requiring more space than could easily be made availablethere. One of these projects had been precisely the development ofmore efficient spacedrives to do away with the costly and tediousmanoeuverings required for travel even among the inner planets.

  Work of such importance, of course, was supposed to be carried outonly under close guard and under the direct supervision of reliableupper-echelon scientists of the Machine. Even allowing for criminalnegligence, the fact that the Mars Convicts were able to develop andtest their stardrive under such circumstances without being detectedsuggested that it could not be a complicated device. They did, at anyrate, develop it, armed themselves and the miners of the other penalsettlements and overwhelmed their guards in surprise attack. When thenext ship arrived from Earth, two giant ore carriers and a number ofsmaller guard ships had been outfitted with the drive, and the MarsConvicts had disappeared in them. Their speed was such that only thefaintest and briefest of disturbances had been registered on thetracking screens of space stations near Mars, the cause of whichremained unsuspected until the news came out.

  Anything which could have thrown any light on the nature of the drivenaturally had been destroyed by the deserters before they left; andthe few Machine scientists who had survived the fighting were unableto provide information though they were questioned intensively forseveral years before being executed. What it added up to was that someeighteen thousand sworn enemies of the Machine had disappeared intospace, equipped with an instrument of unknown type which plainly couldbe turned into one of the deadliest of all known weapons.

  The s
uperb organization of the Machine swung into action instantly tomeet the threat, though the situation became complicated by the factthat rumors of the manner in which the Mars Convicts had disappearedfiltered out to the politically dissatisfied on Earth and set off anunprecedented series of local uprisings which took over a decade toquell. In spite of such difficulties, the planet's economy was gearedover to the new task; and presently defenses were devised and beingconstructed which would stop missiles arriving at speeds greater thanthat of light. Simultaneously, the greatest research project inhistory had begun to investigate the possibilities of eitherduplicating the fantastic drive some scientific minds on Mars had comeupon--chiefly, it was concluded, by an improbable stroke of goodluck--or of matching its effects through a different approach. Sinceit had been demonstrated that it could be done, there was no questionthat in time the trained men of the Machine would achieve their goal.Then the armed might of the Machine would move into space to takecontrol of any