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For the secret weapon was the old, old weapon of deliberate war, waged with mathematical cynicism and calculated precision.
And how many wars, he wondered, could the human race survive? And the answer seemed to be: _Just one more real war_.
The mutants were the survival factor in the race of Man; and now there was nothing left to him, neither Kathleen nor A
Someone tapped at the door.
"Yes," said Vickers. "Come on in."
"Breakfast will be ready, sir," said Hezekiah, "by the time that you get dressed."
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
FLANDERS was waiting in the dining room when Vickers came down the stairs.
"The others left," said Flanders. "They had work to do. And you and I have plotting."
Vickers did not answer. He pulled out a chair and sat down across from Flanders. The sunlight from the windows came down across Flanders' shoulders and his head stood out against the window glass in bold relief, with the whiteness of his hair like a fuzzy halo. His clothes, Vickers saw, still were slightly shabby and his necktie has seen better days, but he still was neat and his face shone with the scrubbing he had given it.
"I see that Hezekiah found some clothes for you," said Flanders. "I don't know what we'd do without Hezekiah. He takes care of us."
"Money, too," said Vickers. "A pack of it was lying on the dresser with the shirt and tie. I didn't take the time to count it, but there'd seem to be several thousand dollars."
"Of course. Hezekiah thinks of everything."
"But I don't want several thousand dollars."
"Go ahead," said Flanders. "We've got bales of it."
"Bales of it!"
"Certainly. We keep making it."
"You mean you counterfeit it?"
"Oh, bless me, no," said Flanders. "Although it's something we have often thought of. Another string to our bow, you might say."
"You mean flood the normal world with counterfeit money?"
"It wouldn't be counterfeit. We could duplicate the money exactly. Turn loose a hundred billion dollars of new money in the world and there'd be hell to pay."
"I can see the point," said Vickers. "I'm amazed you didn't do it."
Flanders looked sharply at him. "I have a feeling that you disapprove of us."
"In some ways I do," said Vickers.
Hezekiah brought in a tray with tall glasses of cold orange juice, plates of scrambled eggs and bacon, buttered toast, a jar of jam and a pot of coffee.
"Good morning, sir," he said to Vickers.
"Good morning, Hezekiah."
"Have you noticed," asked the robot, "how fine the morning is?"
"I have noticed that," said Vickers.
"The weather here is most unusually fine," said Hezekiah. "Much finer, I am told, than on the Earth ahead."
He served the food and left, out through the swinging door the kitchen, where they could hear him moving about at his morning chores.
"We have been humane," said Flanders, "as humane as possible. But we had a job to do and once in a while someone got his toes stepped on. It may be that we will have to get a little rougher now, for we are being pushed. If Crawford and his gang had just taken it a little easier, it would have worked out all right and we wouldn't have had to hurt them or anyone. Ten years more and it would have been easier. Twenty years more and it would have been a cinch. But now it's neither sure nor easy. Now it has to amount almost to revolution. Had we been given twenty years, it would have been evolution.
"Given time and we would have taken over not only world industry and world finance, but world government as well, but they didn't give us the time. The crisis came too soon."
"What we need now," said Vickers, "is a countercrisis."
Flanders seemed not to have heard him. "We set up dummy companies," he continued. "We should have set up more, but we lacked the manpower to operate even the ones we did set up. Given the manpower, we would have set up a vast number of our companies, would have gone more extensively into the manufacture of certain basic gadgets. But we needed the little manpower we had at so many other places — at certain crisis points or to hunt down other mutants to enlist into our group."
"There must be many mutants," Vickers said.
"There are a number of them," agreed Flanders, "but a large percentage of them are so entangled in the world and the affairs of the normal world that you can't dislodge them. Take a mutant man married to a normal woman. You simply can't, in the name of humanity, break up a happy marriage. Say some of their children are mutants — what can you do about them? You can't do a thing about it. You simply watch and wait. When they grow up and go out on their own, you can approach them, but not before that time.
"Take a banker or an industrialist upon whose shoulders rest an economic empire. Tell him he's a mutant and he'll laugh at you. He's made his place in life; he's satisfied; whatever idealism or liberalism he may have had at one time has disappeared beneath the exterior of rugged individualism. His loyalties are set to the pattern of the life he's made and there's nothing we can offer that will interest him."
"You might try immortality," suggested Vickers.
"We haven't got immortality."
"You should have attacked on the governmental level."
Flanders shook his head. "We couldn't. We did a little of it, but not much. With a thousand major posts in the governments of the world, we would have turned the trick quickly and easily. But we didn't have the thousand mutants to train for government and diplomatic jobs.
"By various methods, we did head off crisis after crisis. The carbohydrates relieved a situation which would have led to war. Helping the West get the hydrogen bomb years ahead of time held off the East just when they were set to strike. But we weren't strong enough and we didn't have the time to carry out any well defined, long-range program, so we had to improvise. We introduced gadgets as the only quick way we knew to weaken the socio-economic system of the Earth and, of course, that meant that sooner or later we would force Earth's industry to band against us."
"What else would you expect?" asked Vickers. "You interfere…"
"I suppose we do," said Flanders. "Let's say, Vickers, that you were a surgeon and you had a patient suffering from cancer. To try to make the patient well, you would not hesitate to operate. You would be most zealous in your interference with the patient's body."
"I presume I would," said Vickers.
"The human race," said Flanders, "is our patient. It has a malignant growth. We are the surgeons. It will be painful for the patient and there will be a period of convalescence, but at least the patient will live and I have the gravest doubts that the human race could survive another war."
"But the high-handed methods that you use!"
"Now wait a moment," Flanders objected. "You think there must be other methods and I will agree, but all of them would be equally objectionable to humanity and the old human methods themselves have been discredited long ago. Men have shouted peace and preached the brotherhood of man and there has been no peace and only lip service to brotherhood. You would have us hold conferences? I ask you, my friend, what is the history of the conference?
"Or maybe we should go before the people, before the heads of government, and say to them we are the new mutations of the race and that our knowledge and our ability are greater than theirs and that they should turn all things over to us so we could bring the world to peace. What would happen then? I can tell you what would happen. They'd hate us and drive us out. So there is no choice for us. We must work underground. We must attack the key points. No other way will work."