Happiness: A Planet (3 page)

“Better than talking to a stupid tractor,” he jubilantly said.

Those were the last words that Halk Fint was heard to utter. Seconds later he started in panic as his ship shuddered under an impact. A massive electrical discharge then caused the small ship to explode.

In his office chair Munred Danporr reclined sideways on to his desk. Heels on the floor, his buttocks on the edge of his seat and his shoulders against the back of the chair, he consciously maintained his body in a straight line. With his limp arms hanging vertically, this was his thinking pose.

Munred Danporr was considered a handsome man. He was tall, had tightly curled hair, prominent facial bones and dark glittering deep-set eyes. As Departmental Director of XE2 he was responsible, not only for the station and its 300,000 inhabitants, but for all the substations within an eighteen thousand million kilometre radius of XE2. Those substations included three food platforms, four food processing plants, one antiquated smelter, two factories, three scientific substations and one inhabited planet. Within his Department was also one white dwarf and one yellow G star. One would have thought that such numerous responsibilities were sufficient for any one man; Munred Danporr, though, had ambitions.

Ambition was central to Munred’s character. His was a state of mind that had always required objectives. At school, and then at university, that objective had been, simply, to excel. And shone he indubitably had; and, having scholastically succeeded, he had cast about for a suitable vehicle for his adult ambitions.

His youthful ego would have preferred him to have entered the Legislature. Success there, however, depended on the notorious fickleness of the electorate and on his untested ability to make himself generally popular. He was, though, confident that he could charm a select few, such as an interviewing board. So he had decided on the safer, if less glamorous, next best thing, the Civil Service, which is better known to all and sundry simply as Service.

Munred Danporr was born and raised in this city. But he knew that if he remained in the city then he would never rise very high in Service, the upper ranks of Service being reserved for those with the widest experience. Service maintains that only those with the most comprehensive experience of our civilisation should be allowed to undertake the positions of highest responsibility. How can anyone, Service thinking goes, decide on the fate of others when they do not, at first hand, know of the lives of others? That wider experience, however, can only be gained by leaving the city and by taking some lowly Service position in one of the far off stations.

So Munred applied for, and was awarded, a post in the distant environs of the city’s authority. The post that he occupied, on that far off station, may have been lowly, his responsibilities quantitatively few, but the rank that he held was far higher than any he could have achieved in the city itself, even after five years assiduous labour.

Our civilisation has been described as a society of itinerants, travelling never to arrive, much like the universe we inhabit. Planet dwellers, however, in such a peripatetic society, are remarkable for their steadfastness. Rarely do they move even to other settlements upon their chosen planet.

Munred Danporr, though, was no planet dweller: he became one of Space’s itinerants, travelling to arrive at his point of departure; became in so doing a participant in one of mankind’s greatest exercises in futility, in a self-perpetuating folly, namely — the gaining of experience.

Those who have undergone the process being in the highest Service ranks, and solely because they themselves have survived the process, they lay great store by the mystique of experience and so promote only those who have similarly endured the time-consuming process, who in their turn promote only those who have the credentials of experience... when often all that is required to do their job is rational thought. However, experience being the measure of Service personnel, young Munred set out to acquire that experience.

From Sub-director of Hygiene on a small outstation, after a year Munred moved inward, towards the city, to become Sub-director of Transport on another small outstation. After a year there he moved to a larger outstation as Sub-director of Police Liaison and Communications. Every annual move brought him into contact with a different Service discipline. When he had acquired experience of all those disciplines, he began to be promoted.

First he was made Director of Welfare and Leisure on a small station; and moving ever inward, back towards the city, his annual moves eventually gave him experience as Departmental Sub-director. Then he was, as a Director, promoted to the larger stations, given ever greater responsibility; until he came to XE2 as Departmental Director with overall responsibility.

To the uninitiated it might seem, so assured was Munred Danporr’s advance, that he was a man of phenomenal intellectual capabilities. Practically all of the work in every Service discipline, though, is done by machine. All that Munred Danporr had to do was to not make mistakes. The machines called on him only to keep a watching brief and to deal with the unanticipated. And in all of his many positions he had been called on but twice, and the decisions he’d had to make had been so trivial that they are not worthy here of mention. The only other decisions he had been called on to make were those regarding personnel, seeking and interviewing replacements for substation Service staff, most of whom were technicians. And
there he either gave the most suitable person the job; or, in pursuit of his ambition, did someone with influence a favour. Politics was the name of that game.

Now ambition is a peculiar human trait. For instance Munred Danporr, at first, wanted only to excel, to be the best, to shine before his compatriots and his contemporaries. That same ambition, though, took him away from the very city where he wanted to excel, away from those very contemporaries and compatriots whom he wanted to outshine. Consequently, in his first few years of self-imposed exile from the city, knowing that his rival contemporaries and compatriots would likewise have dispersed, his ambition soon changed, became instead solely an overriding desire to work his way back to the city of his birth.

One could describe his ambition in purely conventional terms — that Munred aspired to a position of authority and prestige. Which of course would be true. But it would be more true to say that the whole of his ambition could be encapsulated in a vision he had of himself in the city. He saw himself, with his consort, rear view, unhurriedly mounting the transparent steps of a certain exclusive restaurant in this city.

Some among you might sneer at that dream, might perhaps denigrate the restaurant, might call those transparent steps tasteless in the extreme, might claim that its exclusivity is only its being expensive; but that does not invalidate the assertion that that vision of himself and his consort, slowly ascending those steps, as if they very much belonged, was not the ultimate driving force behind all his ambitions. Who is to say that many of the great characters of history were not driven by similar small dreams?

And now Munred Danporr was but eighteen months away from his triumphant ascent of those steps. Local boy made good. A Departmental Directorship had become vacant on a station the other side of the city, thirty six thousand million kilometers and one year’s travail closer to it. Service rumour had it that there was one other serious competitor for the position, but she had marginally less experience than Munred. The position was his, if....

It was that ‘if’ that had Munred pensively reclining sideways on to his desk. He reclined sideways because he couldn’t bear to look at his desk screens. On one screen flashed the message, ‘Priority Happiness.’ In three days time that message would go to ‘Urgent Happiness’; and it was inconceivable that he should attend an interview for a vacant Departmental Directorship while he had an outstanding ‘Urgent’ in any one of his sub-departments.

The interviewing board would know that he had an ‘Urgent’ because
his ship would take that information with him. Nor did he dare, and he had desperately considered it in passing, tamper with the ship’s data. If his tinkerings were to be discovered later, and it was inevitable that they would be, such a scandal would have him ending his career in the far reaches of civilisation. Nor could he postpone this interview: a similar prestigious vacancy this close in might not occur for another year. If then.

Two weeks ago, on his return from lunch, the polite request to ‘Please Investigate Happiness’ had been flashing on one of his desk screens. He and his Sub had joked about it, and Munred had told his Sub to look into it.

In his turn the Sub-director, a small bald and anxious man, had delegated the task to the Director of Communications. Like the majority of Service personnel, both Munred and his Sub had early learnt that, as soon as one is in a position to do so, one delegates all work. Then, if the work proves to be of some use, one takes the credit for it. Should the work, however, prove to be unsatisfactory, one then upbraids one’s subordinates.

The following morning the Director of Communications had reported back to the Sub-director and the Sub-director had reported back to Munred. The machines on the planet Happiness, Munred was told, made regular reports by radio to XE2. Those radio reports were augmented by ship dispatches. If XE2’s machines heard nothing for a week from Happiness they were programmed to flash the message ‘Please Investigate Happiness.’ Happiness was, in its orbit at the time of these events, approximately 7½ days radio distance from XE2.

Munred had once been Sub-director of Substation Liaison, had had an inhabited planet within his Department. He therefore knew that any inhabited planet had more than one transmitter, that it was therefore unlikely to be an overall transmission failure on the planet. He therefore suspected that the fault might have nothing whatsoever to do with Happiness, but might lie in XE2’s own receivers; or, more drastically, that it might be the first distress symptom of a major machine fault on XE2. Which is a perfectly valid assumption to make when any machine starts behaving unusually.

Munred instructed the Director of Communications and the Hygeine Director to exhaustively investigate XE2’s machines. Both Directors reported back, after three days, that all machines were in perfect working order, all back up and fail-safe systems responding correctly. The Director of Communications told Munred that all receivers were faultlessly functioning, that radio messages had been received from three other substations within the last four days.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he concluded.

“Yes it is,” Munred told him. “Look.” On his central desk screen flashed the message ‘Please Investigate Happiness.’

Munred summoned to his presence the Directors of Transport and of Substation Liaison. The Director of Transport informed him that ordinarily there were few direct flights between Happiness and XE2. The last ship presumed to have left Happiness, bearing dates, had been bound for a processing plant within the city limits. By indirect linkage they would know of that ship’s safe arrival in three weeks time.

“That is,” the Director of Transport said, “if its itinerary wasn’t changed on Happiness. You know how it is. Normally we’d have heard about it on their transmission, or when the next ship called here.”

“When is the next ship due?”

“Here? From Happiness? One private flight provisionally booked. In twelve weeks.”

Munred asked the Director of Substation Liaison to tell him about Happiness.

“Three million inhabitants. No indigenous population. Forty eight percent surface area land, fifty percent sea, two percent permanent ice. Forty two percent of land under cultivation. Timber and fruit principal exports. Other crops domestic use. No manufactured goods. Three urban conurbations. Small. Eighty six ground transmitters. Sixteen satellites. Three continents therefore three semi-independent systems. Failure in all three extremely unlikely.”

“Mining?”

“None.”

“Anything unusual in their last communication?”

“No personal messages,” the Director of Transport said. “All machine language. Run of the mill stuff. Weather reports, crop evaluations... A request for current market prices. Since transmitted. No human agency involved.”

Munred sent for the Director of Police Liaison and requested that a police ship be sent to Happiness. The Director of Police Liaison uncomfortably informed Munred that there were no police ships available. XE2, like most stations its size, boasted but two police ships. The Inspector had taken one of those ships to investigate a fraud on one of the processing stations.

(The investigation into that fraud runs concurrently with the events to be related here. To give a blow by blow account of the prosecution of that fraud, although interesting in itself, would unnecessarily complicate this story. Suffice to say that throughout the subsequent events on Happiness the Inspector, the highest ranking police officer on XE2, was preoccupied elsewhere with his own detection work.)

The other police ship was on a regular patrol of outstations, would not return for another nine days. No-one knew when the Inspector’s ship was likely to return. Munred registered an official protest at the station being left without a police ship at his disposal.

During the following nine days the message on Munred’s central screen was updated to ‘Action Required Happiness.’

During those nine days Munred asked for any other message concerning Happiness to be directed to him. None came by either radio or by ship. Neither could any ship that had recently been to Happiness, within the last two months, be traced. But nothing unusual or sinister in that. Those ships could all, by now, be beyond all adjacent Departments; only where their paths crossed those of other ships bound for XE2 would XE2 learn of them.