“There’s that psycho hospital across the way they’re still investigating; perhaps he’s in there.”
“With Brunos I to IV, no doubt. Never mind that for the moment Now. Procedures: penultimate phase. Removal of all ultimate confidence: severance of communication, total denial of prospective change, inculcation of ‘uniqueness syndrome, environment shown to be violable, unknowable crisis in prospect (food deprivation). I can understand that last bit. They don’t look starved, though.”
“Perhaps they’ve only just started them on it.”
“We’ll get them fed in a minute. Well, all this still beats me, James. Reactions. Little change. Responses poor. Accelerating impoverishment of emotional life and its vocabulary: compare portion of novel written by Myri VII with contributions of predecessors. Prognosis: further affective deterioration: catatonic apathy: failure of experiment. That’s a comfort, anyway. But what has all this got to do with fear elimination?
They stopped talking suddenly and Myri followed the direction of their gaze. A door had been opened and the man called Douglas was supervising the entry of a number of others, each supporting or carrying a human form wrapped in a blanket.
“This must be the lot from the tank,” Allen or James said.
Myri watched while those in the blankets were made as comfortable as possible on benches or on the floor. One of them, however, remained totally wrapped in his blanket and was being paid no attention.
“He’s had it has he?”
“Shock, I’m afraid.” Douglas’s voice was unsteady. “There was nothing we could do. Perhaps we shouldn’t have . . .”
Myri stooped and turned back the edge of the blanket What she saw was much stranger than anything she had experienced in the sphere. “What’s the matter with him?” she asked James.
“Matter with him? You can die of shock, you know.”
“I can do what?”
Myri, staring at James, was aware that his face had become distorted by a mixture of expressions. One of them was understanding: all the others were painful to look at. They were renderings of what she herself was feeling. Her vision darkened and she ran from the room, back the way they had come, down the steps, across the floor, back into the sphere.
James was unfamiliar with the arrangement of the rooms there and did not reach her until she had picked up the manuscript of the novel, hugged it to her chest with crossed arms and fallen on to her bed, her knees drawn up as far as they would go, her head lowered as it had been before her birth, an event of which she knew nothing.
She was still in the same position when, days later, somebody sat heavily down beside her. “Myri. You must know who this is. Open your eyes, Myri. Come out of there.”
After he had said this, in the same gentle voice, some hundreds of times, she did open her eyes a little. She was in a long, high room, and near her was a fat man with a pale skin. He reminded her of something to do with space and thinking. She screwed her eyes shut.
“Myri. I know you remember me. Open your eyes again.” She kept them shut while he wait on talking.
“Open your eyes. Straighten your body.”
She did not move.
“Straighten your body, Myri. I love you.”
Slowly her feet crept down the bed and her head lifted..
UNIT
J.T. McIntosh
This brilliant Scotsman first began writing for American publication in 1950, and has since had a sizable number of first-rate science fictions in our magazines. Oddly enough, though, “Unit” (one of his best creations) has never seen the American light before, having appeared previously in the British New Worlds in 1957, and nowhere else.
It is a pleasure to remedy that omission: for the story surely is one of the best in the parapsychological area, and specifically In the rarefied region which Theodore Sturgeon, in his classic More Than Human, defined as “homo gestalt.” This involves the creation of a complete “personality” out of the separate talents of a small, close-knit group of individuals.
The existence of the so-called “psi” talents, whether simple telepathy, or the more unlikely’ levitation, or something as sophisticated and complex as the fused personality of the multi-individual gestalt “man,” is still a matter of heated controversy among psychologists, with the enormous majority opting for the non-existence of such phenomena. However, in science fiction we can assume their reality, particularly since they make such lovely tales as the present one possible.
And who knows? It is always “possible” that there may be a sudden leap into this arcane and admittedly unlikely region of mind powers. The ancient alibi supporting such an assumption still holds: Try to imagine describing radio to Eighteenth Century Rationalists! Maybe the same this will turn out to be true about parapsychology and Twentieth Century Scientists.
1.
When A.D. call me on the phone and invited me to lunch I knew he wanted something. I’d known A.D. a long time, quite long enough to know when he was merely being friendly and when he had something up his sleeve.
A.D. Young was something in the U-A, a very important international octopus whose tentacles reached almost all the settlements in the galaxy. What he did in the organization I didn’t know, but I suspected he was something more than a forty-five-year-old office boy. His approach smelled like he was offering me a job.
I was interested, because at the time I didn’t have a job. And I’d reached the age of being concerned over being out of work. Oh, I had the odd thousand or two in my bank account, and if I starved it would be the first time. It wasn’t in that way I was worried.
The trouble is, as you get older you learn more, you get better at things, and you expect more out of life. I was the same age as A.D.—forty-five, unmarried, a high-grade executive with no executions scheduled. Twenty years since I’d been happy to take any job that was going at any salary, just for the hell of it, but now I’d got used to four good meals a day and various other things that demand a good fat five-figure income.
At the moment I had no income at all. I shouldn’t have told Bentley what I thought of him. Or if I’d told him, I shouldn’t have told him so he understood. Or if I’d told him so he understood I should have waited until I was in a position to fire him instead of having him fire me.
I think that makes my interest in A.D.’s proposition clear. I wasn’t much interested in the U-A, not at the time. I was interested in anything paying not less than $30,000 a year.
When I saw him A.D. came straight to the pant. “I know you’re free, Edgar,” he said. “I checked. How about taking a job with the U-A?”
“The U-A?” I said, as if I’d never heard of it before.
“Unit Authority,” said A.D. helpfully.
“You’ve got the wrong number, A.D.,” I told him. “I’m quite satisfied with myself as I am.”
“I don’t mean as a Uniteer. I mean as a Unit Father.”
I liked the idea. It made A.D.’s very good cigar taste even better. Unit Fathers were very important people. I’d get my $30,000. I showed no sign of my interest, however.
“Don’t bother to be coy,” said A.D. “You get paid the same whether you need the job or not.”
“I don’t need the job,” I retorted. “And what gives you the idea I’m so concerned about money?”
“Observation,” said A.D. drily.
There was no answer to that so I didn’t look for one. “What sort of job would my Unit be doing?” I asked cautiously. “And would it be here on Earth or in some Godforsaken hole at the other end of the galaxy?”
A.D. shook his head. “You don’t get told that. Your Unit might be running a factory right here . . . or it might be sent to Perryon.”
“Perryon,” I murmured. “That’s certainly a God-forsaken hole, from what I’ve heard of it.”
“I’m surprised you’ve heard of it”
“Oh, I know this and that” I said. “Know the alphabet and everything.” But still I wasn’t satisfied. Something still smell
ed. It wasn’t necessarily a bad smell, just a smell.
“You’ve got something else in mind, A.D.,” I said. “You never waste a stone on anything less than three birds. I like to know what I’m letting myself in for. Come on, give.”
“You’d have to know anyway,” said A.D., unperturbed. “I know you, Edgar. On the right you carry your wallet and on the left you carry your heart. You never let one get the better of the other. I understand that. You’ll be a good Unit Father. You’ve got the right mixture of hard-headedness and humanity.”
“I weep tears of gratitude,” I said. “Now what’s the build-up for?”
“My daughter,” said A.D. quietly, “is volunteering for a Unit. Today.”
“What for?” I asked, astonished.
“That doesn’t matter. What does matter is this—I can’t stop her, and when she’s a Uniteer she won’t know who she was before. I may never see her again. I certainly won’t be allowed to tell her I’m her father. I won’t be able to do anything for her.”
He paused. I didn’t say anything.
“After Lorraine has volunteered for a Unit,” A.D. went on, “she and I will be nothing to each other. I’ll be able to pull strings to find out how she’s getting on. I may be able to think of some excuse to meet her at the U-A depot now and then. But that’s all. Now do you understand?”
I nodded.
“I won’t see you very often either” A.D. said. “But at least I’ll know you’re looking after the Unit Lorraine will be in. That’s something.”
“You’ll be able to swing that?” I asked curiously.
“Yes.”
I paused, thinking it over. I didn’t offer A.D. my sympathy. A.D. wasn’t the kind of man who wanted or needed sympathy.
I had identified all the smells now. “That’s the three birds,” I ruminated. “One, your old friend is out of a job and you can give him one. Two, you need Unit Fathers anyway. Three, you want someone to keep an eye on Lorraine after she’s a Uniteer.”
“Four,” said A.D., “you don’t sell out. You know that if you spread it around that I told you where your Unit was going and fixed things so that my daughter was assigned to a Unit headed by a friend of mine, I’d be due for a bath in boiling oil. But you’ll keep it to yourself.”
“Okay,” I said. “To all four.”
“You’ll do it.”
“I’ll do it. My wallet has just persuaded my heart—or the other way round.”
So we went down to the Unit depot and I became a father.
That afternoon I watched my children coming in. Coming in, not being born. It’s time we dropped that metaphor.
I sat with a technician behind one-way glass and watched a psychologist interviewing people. I’d been interviewed too. I’d passed as a Unit Father, summa cum laude. They told me I should have been a Unit Father long ago. I told them I’d never happened to meet the right woman. They looked as if they’d heard that one before.
I didn’t see A.D. around the place. He was one of the men behind the scenes, apparently. He had certainly pulled the right strings, for Lorraine was the first person I saw interviewed.
I’d met Lorraine once or twice, usually when she was just on the point of dashing off somewhere. We were no more than names to each other.
In fact it was only when I had time for a long, steady stare at her, behind the glass in the U-A depot, that I realized Lorraine was a beauty. She had the kind of face and figure that had to grow on you before you suddenly realized how lovely the girl was.
Her nose was too small and her forehead too high. She looked too flat until she got excited or angry, and then you saw that she had the usual dimensions after all.
“Now tell me, Miss Young,” said the psychologist pleasantly, “just why are you here?”
“Do I have to tell you that?” Lorraine asked, biting her lip.
“No. But well find out anyway, in the tests.”
She took another bite. Then she looked up suddenly, defiantly. “Well, if you must know,” she said, “it’s this or suicide.”
She expected to shock the psychologist, but she should have known better. In the first place, he was a-good psychologist, and in the second, he saw scores of people every week who had come to volunteer for a Unit because it was that or suicide.
He nodded. “Why?” he asked simply.
“I’ve lost the man I’m in love with,” she said.
He didn’t look surprised or ask if it was that serious. Obviously it was that serious, or she wouldn’t be here. He wasn’t necessarily believing what she was saying anyway. It would all come out, as he’d already said, in the tests.
“We want volunteers, Miss Young,” said the psychologist, “but we don’t want people who have come here on impulse and will regret it later. If you—”
“I won’t go back on it”
“It’s not that. You can’t. Are you sure that . . . in three months’ time, say, you’d still want to do this?”
“In three months’ time,” said Lorraine bitterly, “I wouldn’t be around to volunteer for a Unit.”
“When did this happen, Miss Young? I mean, how long have you—”
“We broke up two weeks ago.”
“That’s a fair time,” the psychologist admitted. “If you’re quite sure, I can’t refuse to accept you.”
“I’m quite sure.”
After that came the preliminary testing, and I saw most of that too. It took a long time, and after a while the technician beside me went away and left me to watch alone. I was interested because it was Lorraine.
I wondered what A.D. was like as a father. Was it his fault that at twenty-two Lorraine felt her life was a wreck? Perhaps, I thought, if only because she’d been spoiled. She’d always had everything she wanted, and so it seemed like the end of the world when a man she wanted didn’t want her.
I learned a lot about Lorraine as I watched her being tested by every conceivable psychological test—intelligence, stability, aptitude, personality, psychosomatic, word-association, everything I’d heard of and a few I hadn’t Then I realized, as I should have done long ago, that all this didn’t matter. Lorraine as she was now was going to cease to exist in a few minutes or hours, and the Lorraine I was going to know would rally begin to grow after that.
I got up and followed the technician. Lorraine was still doing the exhaustive psychological tests.
Though it was now late afternoon, the technician told me that I’d see the completion of my Unit before the depot closed for the day. It was open until midnight and it did most of its business, so the technician told me, in the evening. People who meant to volunteer for a Unit on a certain day kept leaving it later and later until at last they had to go or leave it until the next day.
The next person I saw being interviewed was Dick Lowson. That wasn’t his name, but it was the name he was given later, the name under which I knew him.
Men and women who join Units have to make a clean break with their previous life. They’re usually given new names and sometimes even new faces. Lorraine’s Christian name wasn’t changed, for some reason, but her surname was. She became Lorraine Waterson—not that that matters.
Dick was a tall, thin man of about thirty, with hair going out like the tide. He was moody, dreamy, indifferent.
“How would you describe your problem, yourself?” the psychologist asked.
Dick stared straight at us, gathering his thoughts. I moved uncomfortably. “He can’t see us,” the technician murmured. “He’s just staring into space.”
“How many people have you got behind that glass?” Dick asked. He shrugged and turned away. “Doesn’t make any difference. Bring them in here if you like. How would I describe my problem—does that matter?”
“Yes,” said the psychologist.
Dick shrugged. “All right I’ll try to tell you. I was a boy wonder. Straight A’s in every subject, and pretty good outside college too. Plenty of money from spare-time jobs, social success, girls . . . I had
six girls on a string when I was fifteen—wonder why I bothered. By the time I was twenty I’d done it all. For seven or eight years I did it all over again, getting less and less fun out of it—making money, climbing on the next man’s back, winning games, buying things, selling things, and reducing the number of virgins in the United States. Last three years I haven’t bothered doing anything very much. Nothing seems worth while.”
He sighed. “Now clean the slate and let me start over again.”
The psychologist nodded. “Your IQ’s very high,” he commented.
“Sure. Ain’t I lucky? Everybody wants to be smart. A fundamental error. If you’re dumb, things are simple. The smarter you are, the more complicated things get. Are you going to make me dumb?”
“No. You’ll be the brains of a Unit.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
“And you’ll like it”
“Good. What do I do now?”
The psychologist told him what to do now.
In the dark passageway I murmured: “That must be awful.”
“What must be awful?” the technician asked.
“Having done everything before you’re thirty.”
“He hasn’t done everything. He just thinks he has.”
“Well, it must be awful to think you’ve done everything before you’re thirty.”
“Neurosis,” said the technician. “We’ll soon fix that”
“What exactly is this clearing process?”
“We just sponge everything off the brain. Experience, memories, language, neurosis—the lot. That Teaves capacity and damn little else. Then we can train them right”
“Sounds a bit inhuman.”
“Nonsense. Uniteers are happier, saner, and much more useful than anyone eke. Far more than you and me.”
“Then why don’t we go and volunteer?”
The technician grinned. “Why do Christians stay out of heaven as long as they can?”
Possible Tomorrows Page 9