The Yellow Fraction Read online

  REX GORDON has also written!

  FIRST ON MARS

  FIRST TO THE STARS

  FIRST THROUGH TIME

  UTOPIA MINUS X

  The

  YELLOW FRACTION

  Rex Gordon

  AN ACE BOOK

  Ace Publishing Corporation

  1120 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, N.Y. 10036

  The Yellow Fraction

  Copyright ©, 1969

  by Rex Gordon All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Kelly Freas

  Printed in U.S.A.

  I

  Something had to happen, Len Thomas thought. Things were getting so tight that something had to happen soon.

  Len Thomas walked across the blue-tinged grass. There were two suns in the Arcon sky, but Len did not worry about that. It was more a feeling, a feeling that had been with him before this started. Yet the feeling was largely incoherent.

  Like falling over his own feet, for example.

  He looked as homely and ordinary as his name suggested, and he went into the glass-bubble part of the building, the top part of which looked like an inverted pyramid on a silver stalk, and he pushed his name-card recognition tag into the slot in the computer-director just inside the door.

  Arcon life. Arcon student life. How was it possible to see a brain that had grown up on Arcon? Worse than that, how was it possible for such a brain to see itself? Len didn’t. It was only sometimes that he even tried.

  He did what he had to do. Two loudspeakers on top of the building, speakers that had been whispering “Leonard Thomas report to Administration,” became silent when he put his nametag into the computer-director and it digested it. Outside through the glass, the blue-tinged grass, which must have been green once, but which was now definitely blue, lay dry and arid in the bright, double-spectrum light of the two suns.

  A crowd of other students was always leaving or entering the glass foyer. A screen on the computer-director came alight, thomas report to information, it said. Two girl students, passing along the line of office computers, said “Hello, Len,” as they went by.

  Our way is right, and all others wrong.

  How could any young man know anything but the planet, the civilization, that had given him birth? Who was going to start to question what everyone-who-ought-to-know-said? If other people in other places or at other times lived in different ways, then they were wrong, and that applied regardless of what their society was: sophisticated, civilized, or headhunting.

  A young male student took a little longer to pass. He looked at the computer-director screen. He glanced at Len, and then at the message that was still glowing as Len acknowledged it on the keyboard. He laughed in a voice that gave Len a considerable lack of pleasure. “What have you been doing?” he said. Len did not answer him.

  Len feared he knew what he had been doing but, in that case, so did the other student.

  Arcon was a pot about to boil. Len did not know why he felt that. Maybe it was him. Maybe it was what all young men felt, always. Or could it be what was felt by a foolish young man in trouble?

  He went down the ranks of office computers until he reached the one marked information office. He behaved differently there. It was not a popular computer. While most of the others had a student or two banging away at their keyboards, making dates with tutors, or filing their exercises, or explaining why they had not done their mathematics, the one with the information office sign was shunned as though it had a smell around it. Len treated it that way too.

  He typed his name on the keyboard and pushed his nametag into the slot to confirm it, and then stood back.

  It was possible that some nice kindly message might someday emerge from an Information Office computer, but if so that was something that had not happened to Len yet.

  What the I. O. computer usually said was something like “Male students should be out of girls’ rooms by 8 p.m.” or “Orphans are expected to make special efforts for longer living,” or something equally natural, which required an answer that would be found in the computer’s memory-banks.

  Len knew, and feared, that the computer could also exact penalties. He waited to see what would happen to him. The computer screen lit up. Thiomas Leonard, attend room 202b, immediate, it said. Len stared. He stood looking at the screen like someone already on a diet, looking at the pointer of a weighing machine that had just gone off the scale.

  The male student had wandered around the glass foyer of the Administration building. Apparently by accident, he was not far behind Len when the words appeared on the screen. He too looked at them with interest. “You seem to have had it, chum,” he said to Len. Then he walked off to where the other students were, to tell other people.

  They all looked at Len, too.

  It was not a bad analogy, a weighing-machine pointer going off the scale, when the Information Office computer referred its correspondent to Floor Twenty, as it was in the college’s case, for human intervention. Len suddenly saw the message change from blue to red, and he typed his confirmation hurriedly.

  He looked in the direction of the other students, then pointedly looked away again. He did not like the way they were watching him as he walked across the foyer to the central silver stalk that held up the building. The silver stalk was also the elevator shaft. In front of its smooth door, he pushed the button for an elevator to Floor Twenty. The door opened almost immediately, and closed behind him as he stepped into the small, airless elevator compartment.

  “The bastard,” Len said to himself as he rode up in the elevator. “The wealthy blue-nosed bastard.” He was reflecting on the student who was no doubt talking and laughing with the others he had gone to, who belonged to the Blue and Green fraternities. Len had not long to reflect on anything. The elevator door opened and he was contemplating a silent corridor with smooth doors and a deep well-fitted carpet.

  There was an absence of people in the corridor, and the overhead lighting was soft and calm. When Len walked soundlessly on the carpet and knocked on the door marked 202b, he noticed that it, like the other doors, had no handle. Involuntarily, he took a breath while he waited.

  If anyone said “Come in” behind the door, he did not hear them, but the door opened of its own accord, and he faced a pleasant, calm room with a youngish man in a pale gray suit sitting at a large desk in front of a considerable downward-facing window which gave a view of the college. In front of the desk was an empty chair, and in answer to a gesture from the pale-faced, slightly overweight young man Len went to sit in it.

  The door closed behind him. Len did not see the man behind the desk press a button to close it, but perhaps he did, or maybe there was some other way of doing it.

  “Leonard Thomas?” the young man said. He had very clean white hands, and one of them rested on a file marked L. Thomas, which lay on the desk in front of him.

  “Yes, sir,” Len said, not knowing what to expect next.

  “It was you who organized that petition that has been circulating?” the man said with an appearance of frankness. “The one asking that the recent history lecturer, Gordon Berkeley, should be reinstated?” He used a cool tone.

  Len hesitated a fraction of a second. He thought of the student below, who had probably told how he had been approached to sign a petition, and by whom. “Yes, sir,” he said. He knew that that was it, then.

  The man on the other side of the desk continued to smile in an apparently friendly way. Len was not deceived by the friendliness. The man said, “My name is Gorlston.”

  “Yes, Mr. Gorlston,” Len said.

  “The lecturer Berkeley was dismissed by us,” the man called Gorlston remarked, as though it were an interesting fact that Len should know. “His l
ectures were politically unreliable. They had a Yellow taint.”

  By “us,” Mr. Gorlston evidently meant the Information Office. The remark about the Yellow taint of the lectures was enough to make that clear.

  Len was caught. He had been organizing a petition for Berkeley’s reinstatement. “They seemed perfectly good lectures to me, sir,” he said.

  Gorlston stopped smiling. He looked at Len as though Len had suddenly taken things onto a new level of seriousness. “Then maybe you are a Yellow too,” he said.

  Len’s eyes opened wider. “Oh no, sir. I’m not.”

  The conversation was beginning to progress the way such conversations had to progress on Arcon, paranoiacally.

  Gorlston looked at Len thoughtfully. He made a remark as though it were something a little delicate: “You are if I say so,” he said.

  Len looked down at the desk, thinking how true that was. He himself had never knowingly met a Yellow in his life. But then you could not expect a Yellow to say he was a Yellow. The Information Office would have removed him if he had done that. So only the Information Office knew who the Yellows were. It came around in a circle to the fact that if an Information Officer said Len was a Yellow, then Len was a Yellow.

  It was hard to think of anyone being a Yellow voluntarily.

  “If you are not a Yellow, how would you describe yourself?”

  “Loyal Arcon.”

  Did he think that was going to do any good?

  “Which party?”

  Len remembered Berkeley saying that you did not have to belong to the official parties to be a loyal citizen, but that was Berkeley, and look where it had got him.

  Gorlston was waiting.

  I haven’t quite made up my mind between the Greens and Blues.”

  He might as well give up now.

  Gorlston looked his opinion of a final year student who could not make up his mind between the Greens, who said that Arcon would be transformed into a green and pleasant land, and the Blues, who said that Arcon was a blue planet and man would have to adapt to it. Swamp-diggers made that choice, and little children waving flags as they followed the bands at the National Party conventions.

  Women, and girls who had just got the vote, and the mentally deficient who could only write a cross.

  “So,” said Gorlston.

  How could you be a loyal Arcon if *you were not prepared to do something by voting along one of the regular channels? What did you think you were going to do, figure something out for yourself that was better than the national leaders could?

  “Mr. Gorlston,” said Len.

  He had better say something. He had left it a little late as it was. How to do it without pleading and crawling was another matter. Maybe that was not possible.

  “I know I am in trouble over that petition,” he said simply. “How do I get out of it?”

  Gorlston stared at Len as though he thought he was kidding him. Maybe no one on Arcon had tried to be as simple as that with an Information Officer before.

  Then Gorlston’s eyes narrowed. Len had asked a question, and if Len wanted it like that, he could have it.

  “You can go back to the students you approached about the petition. You can tell them, for example, that you and Berkeley had a homosexual relationship.” Gorlston’s eyes went down to Len’s file on his desk. It was probably a complete file, which would tell him that since Len’s parents’ death he was completely dependent on the authorities for financial backing.

  “That’s why you wanted him reinstated,” Gorlston said.

  Len thought about it.

  Homosexuality was not popular on Arcon. After five hundred years of planetary history there were still traces of that pioneering morality that looked with horror on any kind of sexual deviation that did not result in children, but it was not exactly that.

  Maybe it was just staying something about Berkeley that was untrue.

  “I think you’re wrong, Mr. Gorlston,” Len said carefully.

  “I mean I think you’re wrong now because you were right earlier. It could be that I am a Yellow.”

  It was unpleasant to be a Yellow on Arcon. Len did not know just how unpleasant. He had not liked to imagine it.

  But it was not that; it was the stigma. It was being what being a Yellow meant, on Arcon. How could a man brought up on Arcon ever tell himself he was a Yellow?

  II

  Arcon was the thirty-seventh and only habitable planet of a binary star, and it pursued a Jong and irregular orbit around its solar system. It was this which had caused the men who had colonized it, five hundred years before, to retain the Earth-style calendar. A three-lifetime year was too long.

  It was interesting to know that this was one of the few things which could not be blamed on the Yellows.

  What Arcon was could be laid at the door of the founding fathers, who, out of the whole of space, had chosen it to live on. It was possible that they could be criticized, but like most men they could have made excuses.

  The truth was that the crew of the starship from Earth had been space-weary when they came to Arcon. It was no joke, after setting out to find a better world, to discover that most worlds, as average planets of average' stars, were red-hot rocks, or balls of frozen gas. Another world,, a diary said. We are beginning to get used to it now, this process of blasting down, then blasting up to speed again. Methane and ammonia, and the last cool-enough world was chlorine. ...

  They should have known what to expect. They did.

  While stars could be seen ahead for immense distances in space, at that time the planets could only be examined on arrival, when passing slowly through a solar system. In those days it was necessary to go from star to star, wondering increasingly if habitable worlds were less frequent than had been supposed.

  Star voyages were never simple things for the early pioneers. They set out from Earth and accelerated upward, toward the speed of light. That was straightforward enough. The stars ahead glowed bright blue, those astern became a dull red, and the universe shrank around them. There was nothing odd about these phenomena, which were the natural consequences of the Doppler effect and the mass-accretion of bodies traveling at near speed-of-light speeds, but those who were not good at mathematics, and who were not really at home with relativity, distrusted them on the grounds that they could not wholly understand them.

  It was the knowledge that after the first of those shifts, and just an ordinary few weeks’ passage through the diminished universe, that time passed at a different rate at home, and that everyone they knew was now dead, which somehow produced effects that were psychological. No one could say that star-travelers were actually guilty, or that they had exceeded their normal life-span in some cheating way, but, after a few such passages from star to star, during which time centuries were known to have rolled away at home, the psychological sensation was one of doom. It was not a reasoned thing. The fact remained that the next star would probably produce a habitable world, or perhaps the next. There were no grounds for thinking that they would wander forever, finding nowhere to land until they died of old age. But that was the way they felt about it.

  So when they did come out of the continuum, and arrived in the near vicinity of a star, to see a world like Arcon, with a blue-iridescent and slightly dazzling quality in its atmosphere, turning away below them, there was a kind of anguished impulse to land on it, to make the best of what they had got, to have done with the dread of space, and end the journey.

  It was not that the ancestors of Len and his people, who had populated and built a quite considerable civilization on Arcon in five hundred years, had been wholly reckless or unscientific. They would not have survived at all if they had been. It was just that, arriving at Arcon’s suns, and seeing Arcon below them, and when the first gross measurements proved favorable—gravity point nine of Earth, oxygen in the atmosphere, radiation at the surface at least such that they would not get cancer within hours of landing—a conviction and certainty grew in them that this wa
s the place, which was not easily upset by the later final details of spectroscopy.

  What actually happened among the crew and colonists, while their ship hung above the beautiful world below them, was, like so many things, a matter of unchangeable history by Len's time.

  After all, the colonists and crew, dividing into factions as the rumors reached them inside the metal walls and down the passageways of the town-sized starship, only thought they were arguing the immediate practical matter of whether to land or not. Since social psychology was still in its primitive state* they did not know they were laying down the foundations for political parties with their factions, or creating a human structure that would still run the world five hundred years later. They just evolved, quite naturally, three points of view.

  “Look,” one group said, arguing with the others in the corridors and public rooms while waiting for the final results from the scientists, “this is a well-equipped ship and colonial expedition. Be reasonable. In case of an emergency landing, we are equipped to deal with almost everything, provided the gravity and air is such that we can walk about and breathe. We must have confidence in ourselves. What we have to do is go down there, and show what we can do. We aren’t so superstitious as to expect ghouls in the night or bug-eyed monsters, and what we have to do, regardless of the final details, is to turn this world into a green and pleasant land for man to live on.”

  They were naturally known as the Green faction, when the question of landing was put to the final and infallible democratic procedure of the vote.

  The Blues said, “On the whole we agree with the Greens. That is, if we go on searching through space for perfection forever, we’ll never find it. But some of the scientists’ findings are pretty poor. They relate to the biochemical factors, and biochemistry is a very complicated science. So while we agree we should land on Arcon, we are a bit more cautious about it. The way we see it is that Arcon is a blue planet, and it will stay that way. But this we do say, that mankind will adapt to it.”