Jesting Pilot

by Henry Kuttner

  He struck his fist hard against the grayness; it was like striking rubber. Without warning the terror engulfed him. He could not hear himself screaming…

  Afterward, he wondered how an eternity could be compressed into one instant. His thoughts swung back to suicide.

  ****

  “Suicide?” Fleming said.

  Nehral’s mind was troubled. “Ecology fails,” he remarked. “I suppose the trouble is that the city’s a closed unit. We’re doing artificially what was a natural law six hundred years ago. But nature didn’t play favorites, as we’re doing. And nature used variables. Mutations, I mean. There weren’t any rules about introducing new pieces into the game—in fact, there weren’t any rules about not introducing new rules. But here in the city we’ve got to stick by the original rules and the original pieces. If Bill Norman kills himself, I don’t know what may happen.”

  “To us?”

  “To us, and, through us, to the citizens. Norman’s psychologist can’t help him; he’s a citizen, too. He doesn’t know—”

  “What was his problem, by the way? The psychologist’s, I mean. He told Norman he’d solved it by taking up psychology.”

  “Sadism. We took care of that easily enough. We aroused his interest in the study of psychology. His mental index was so high we couldn’t give him surgery; he needed a subtler intellectual release. But he’s thoroughly social and well-balanced now. The practice of psychology is the sublimation he needed, and he’s very competent. However, he’ll never get at the root of Norman’s trouble. Ecology fails,” he repeated. “The relationship between an organism and its environment—irreconcilable, in this case. Hallucinations! Norman doesn’t have hallucinations. Or even illusions. He simply has rational periods—luckily brief.”

  “It’s an abnormal ecology anyway.”

  “It had to be. The city is uninhabitable.”

  The city screamed! It was a microcosm, and it had to battle unimaginable stresses to maintain its efficiency. It was an outboard motor on a lifeboat. The storm rage. The motor strained, shrilled, sparked—screamed. The environment was so completely artificial that no normal technology could have kept the balance.

  Six hundred years ago the builders had studied and discarded plan after plan. The maximum diameter of a Barrier was five miles. The vulnerability increased according to the square of the diameter. And invulnerability was the main factor.

  The city had to be built and maintained as a self-sufficient unit within an impossibly small radius.

  Consider the problems. Self-sufficient. There were no pipe lines to outside. A civilization had to exist for an indefinite period in it’s own waste products. Steamships, spaceships, are not parallels. They have to make port and take in fresh supplies.

  This lifeboat would be at sea for much longer than six hundred years. And the citizens—the survivors—must be kept not only alive, but healthy physically and mentally.

  The smaller the area, the higher the concentration. The builders could make the necessary machines. They knew how to do that. But such machines had never been constructed before on the planet. Not in such concentration!

  Civilization is an artificial environment. With the machines that were necessary, the city became so artificial that nobody could live in it. The builders got their efficiency; they made the city so that it could exist indefinitely, supplying all the air, water, food and power required. The machines took care of that.

  But such machines!

  The energy required and released was slightly inconceivable. It had to be released, of course. And it was. In light and sound and radiation—within the five-mile area under the Barrier.

  Anyone living in the city would have developed a neurosis in two minutes, a psychosis in ten, and would have lived a little while longer than that. Thus the builders had an efficient city, but nobody could use it.

  There was one answer.

  Hypnosis.

  Everyone in the city was under hypnosis. It was selective telepathic hypnosis, with the so-called Monuments—powerful hypnopedic machines—as the control devices. The survivors in the lifeboat didn’t know there was a storm. They saw only placid water on which the boat drifted smoothly.

  The city screamed to deaf ears. No one had heard it for six hundred years. No one had felt the radiation or seen the blinding, shocking light that flashed through the city. The citizens could not, and the Controllers could not either, because they were blind and deaf and dumb, and lacking in certain other senses. They had their telepathy, their ESP, which enabled them to accomplish their task of steering the lifeboat. As for the citizens, their job was to survive.

  No one had heard the city screaming for six hundred years—except Bill Norman.

  “He has an inquiring mind,” Nehral said dryly. “Too inquiring. His problem’s an abstraction, as I’ve mentioned, and if he gets the right answer it’ll kill him. If he doesn’t, he’ll go insane. In either case, we’ll suffer, because we’re not conditioned to failure. The main hypnotic maxim implanted in our minds is that every citizen must survive. All right. You’ve got the facts now, Fleming. Does anything suggest itself?”

  “I don’t have all the facts. What’s Norman’s problem?”

  “He comes of dangerous stock,” Nehral answered indirectly. “Theologians and mathematicians. His mind is… a little too rational. As for his problem—well, Pilate asked the same question three thousand years ago, and I don’t recall his ever getting an answer. It’s a question that’s lain behind every bit of research since research first started.

  But the answer has never been fatal till now. Norman’s question is simply this—what is truth?”

  There was a pause. Nehral went on.

  “He hasn’t expressed it even to himself. He doesn’t know he’s asking that question. But we know; we have entree to his mind. That’s the question that he’s finding insoluble, and the problem that’s bringing him gradually out of control, out of his hypnosis. So far there’ve been only-flashes of realization. Split-second rational periods. Those are bad enough, for him. He’s heard and seen the city as it is—”

  Another pause. Fleming’s thoughts stilled. Nehral said:

  “It’s the only problem we can’t solve by hypnotic suggestion. We’ve tried. But it’s useless. Norman’s that remarkably rare person, someone who is looking for the truth.”

  Fleming said slowly, “He’s looking for the truth. But—does he have—to find it?”

  His thoughts raced into Nehral’s brain, flint against steel, and struck fire there.

  ****

  Three weeks later the psychologist pronounced Norman cured and he instantly married Mia. They went up to the Fifth Monument and held hands.

  “As long as you understand—” Norman said.

  “I’ll go with you,” she told him. “Anywhere.”

  “Well, it won’t be tomorrow. I was going at it the wrong way. Imagine trying to tunnel out through the Barrier! No. I’ll have to fight fire with fire. The Barrier’s the result of natural physical laws. There’s no secret about how it was created. But how to destroy it—that’s another thing entirely.”

  “They say it can’t be destroyed. Some day it’ll disappear, Bill.”

  “When? I’m not going to wait for that. It may take me years, because I’ll have to learn how to use my weapons. Years of study and practice and research. But I’ve got a purpose.”

  “You can’t become an expert nuclear physicist overnight.”

  He laughed and put his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t expect to. First things come first. First I’ll have to learn to be a good physicist. Ehrlich and Pasteur and Curie—they had a drive, a motivation. So have I, now. I know what I want. I want out.”

  “Bill, if you should fail—”

  “I expect to, at first. But in the end I won’t fail. I know what I want. Out!”

  She moved closer to him, and they were silent, looking down at the quiet, familiar friendliness of the city. I can stand it for a while, Norma
n thought. Especially with Mia. Now that the psychologist’s got rid of my trouble, I can settle down to work.

  Above them the rippling, soft light beat out from the great globe-atop the Monument.

  “Mia—”

  “Yes?”

  “I know what I want now.”

  ****

  “But he doesn’t know,” Fleming said.

  “That’s all right,” Nehral said cheerfully. “He never really knew what his problem was. You found the answer. Not the one he wanted, but the best one. Displacement, diversion, sublimation—the name doesn’t matter. It was the same treatment, basically, as turning sadistic tendencies into channels of beneficial surgery. We’ve given Norman his compromise. He still doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he’s been hypnotized into believing that he can find it outside the city. Put food on top of a wall, out of reach of a starving man, and you’ll get a neurosis. But if you give the man materials for building a ladder, his energy will be deflected into a productive channel. Norman will spend all his life in research, and probably make some valuable discoveries. He’s sane again. He’s under the preventive hypnosis. And he’ll die thinking there’s a way out.”

  “Through the Barrier? There isn’t.”

  “Of course there isn’t. But Norman could accept the hypnotic suggestion that there was a way, if only he could find it. We’ve given him the materials to build his ladder. He’ll fail and fail, but he’ll never really get discouraged. He’s looking for truth. We’ve told him he can find truth outside the Barrier, and that he can find a way out. He’s happy now. He’s stopped rocking the lifeboat.”

  “Truth…” Fleming said, and then, “Nehral—I’ve been wondering.”

  “What?”

  “Is there a Barrier?”

  Nehral said, “But the city’s survived! Nothing from outside has ever come through the Barrier—”

  “Suppose there isn’t a Barrier,” Fleming said. “How would the city look from outside? Like a… a furnace, perhaps. It’s uninhabitable. We can’t conceive of the real city, any more than the hypnotized citizens can. Would you walk into a furnace? Nehral, perhaps the city’s its own Barrier.”

  “But we sense the Barrier. The citizens see the Barrier—”

  “Do they? Do—we? Or is that part of the hypnosis too, a part we don’t know about? Nehral—I don’t know. There may be a Barrier, and it may disappear when its half-time is run. But suppose we just think there’s a Barrier?”

  “But—” Nehral said, and stopped. “That would mean—Norman might find a way out!”

  “I wonder if that was what the builders planned?” Fleming said.

  About the Author(s)

  Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) was an American author who was known for his literary prose and worked in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. Their work together spanned the 1940s and 1950s and most of the work was credited to pseudonyms, mainly Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O'Donnell. It has been stated that their collaboration was so intensive that, after a story was completed, it was often impossible for either Kuttner or Moore to recall who had written which portions. Among Kuttner's most popular work were the Gallegher stories, published under the Padgett name, about a man who invented hi-tech solutions to client problems (including an insufferably egomaniacal robot) when he was stinking drunk, only to be completely unable to remember exactly what he had built or why after sobering up.

  In 2007, New Line Cinema released a feature film loosely based on the Lewis Padgett short story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" under the title The Last Mimzy.

  Catherine Lucille Moore (January 24, 1911 – April 4, 1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, as C. L. Moore. She was one of the first women to write in the genre, and paved the way for many other female writers in speculative fiction. Moore met Henry Kuttner, also a science fiction writer, in 1936 when he wrote her a fan letter (mistakenly thinking that "C. L. Moore" was a man), and they married in 1940. Afterwards, almost all of their stories were written in collaboration under various pseudonyms, most commonly “Lewis Padgett”. (Another pseudonym, one Moore often employed for works that involved little or no collaboration, was "Lawrence O’Donnell". After Kuttner's death in 1958, Moore wrote almost no fiction and taught his writing course at the University of Southern California. She did write for a few television shows under her married name, but upon marrying Thomas Reggie (who was not a writer) in 1963, she ceased writing entirely. C. L. Moore died on April 4, 1987 at her home in Hollywood, California after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. C.L. Moores pseudonyms included: Lawrence O'Donnell , C. H. Liddell , Lewis Padgett , Catherine L. Moore

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