Theme! (#3)

In “The Second Variety”, I think trust could be considered a theme.  Many different uses of it are apparent throughout the story, and it is ultimately the cause behind every action.

Most noticeably, we see many times where trust must be put in someone that would not normally be a first choice.  Firstly the Yanks, or rather, Major Hendricks has to trust that the note from the Russians wasn’t a trap, and that he wouldn’t be shot point blank when he arrived.  Later on he had to place trust in the three enemy soldiers he encountered once he crossed to their side.  In the end, he placed both his life, as well as the survival of mankind in general, in Tasso when he let her have the ship.

Then there was the manipulation of trust, of which The Third Variety, the “David” was a prime example.  A thirteen year old boy, clutching a teddy bear was enough to turn even the most careful of officers sympathetic: “It made too good a target…and the boy would slow him down…But if the boy were really all alone…”  We found out later that this is exactly the kind of trust in innocence that got hundreds of Russians killed.  Later, because they were really the only two people Hendricks could trust, he put his faith in the information that both Tasso and Klaus were giving him.  Once Tasso proved to him that Klaus was a machine, Hendricks began to put more and more faith in her, as he had been led to believe they had killed the last Variety, the Second one (Klaus).

Unfortunately, Hendricks incorrectly believed that the machines wouldn’t kill one another.  I had a sneaking suspicion once we met Tasso that she was a machine.  The thing that really gave it away to me was her repetitive questioning for cigarettes.  It seemed as though she were programmed with that commonplace tendency.  She manipulated him into trusting that she had to be human, and then betrayed him in the end when he told her how to get to the Moon Base.  I also had the idea that there were perhaps more Varieties, but the desperate situation in which Hendricks found himself had really left him without a choice.

In the end, the story really revolved around the theme of trust.  Machines began to lure humans in by getting them to trust them.  Often the only choice they had was to trust an enemy, and the trust they did put in others was betrayed.