I saw a lot of people being interviewed, and naturally not many of them were assigned to my Unit. The depot handled about twenty people a day, four Units.
I’m ignoring those who weren’t assigned to my group. I soon forgot the others anyway. All of them, except Lorraine and Helen, got new names later. Perhaps it wasn’t worth while changing a name like Helen—there’s so many of them.
Helen would have been a very beautiful girl but for one thing. It was a big thing, though.
Her face was less alive than a face on a magazine cover. Her changes of expression were even deader. Smile: pull cheek muscles. Laugh: open mouth, oscillate vocal cords. Frown: corrugate forehead. A robot could have done it as well.
“What do you mean, are the cops after me?” she demanded. “Why should the cops be after me?”
“All that concerns us,” said the psychologist, “is how far they are after you.”
He was a good psychologist. He knew what to say to make contact.
Helen cooled down. “You mean you don’t care?”
“Not in the least. After you’re cleared you can’t possibly have criminal tendencies.”
“Why, you louse, are you suggesting I—”
“No, I’m not suggesting anything. How far after you are the cops?”
“A long way. But they might catch up,” Helen admitted. “Say, if clearing removes criminal tendencies, how come criminals can’t volunteer?”
“They can, after they’ve served their sentences. We’re not allowed to take criminals here as an alternative to prison. If we did, why, anybody could do anything he liked and volunteer for a Unit when he was caught, to avoid the jail sentence.”
“I get it,” said Helen. “Well, I’m in the dear.” She looked thoughtful. “I wonder what I’ll be like afterwards?”
“Wonderful,” said the psychologist “Thanks,” she said. “I guess you don’t mean it but thanks anyway.”
After Helen came Brent.
Brent was a young, healthy, handsome moron. Society had warped him, but even in his original state he couldn’t have been much of an asset to himself or anybody else.
“What good’s he going to be?” I asked, rather resenting Brent’s presence in my Unit. Lorraine, Dick and even Helen had all had something I could appreciate, but this big, good-looking idiot didn’t strike me as valuable material.
“You ought to know,” said the technician reprovingly, “that you can’t get anything done without a certain amount of stupidity and ignorance.”
I looked at him sharply, scenting sarcasm, but the only light where we were was from the room beyond, heavily filtered, and I couldn’t tell whether he meant what he said or not.
There was a long pause after Brent People were interviewed, but the psychologist never made the sign to warn us that the person being interviewed was a possible recruit for my Unit.
“May take a while,” the technician whispered. “It’s always toward the end that forming a Unit gets difficult. In the beginning anyone will do. It’s like putting five cakes in a box. The first four can be almost any size, but the last has to be just the right size and shape.”
“How about me?” I asked. “What am I?”
“The box,” said the technician.
I thought of asking why so comparatively little trouble was taken over the Unit Fathers, why all the Uniteers were thoroughly cleared and then trained for weeks, emerging as something in the order of supermen, while the Unit Father, theoretically at least the boss of the whole show, was just an ordinary human being, tested only briefly and given no psychological repair-work at all. However, I didn’t have to ask. I could guess.
People are still suspicious of the Units. They use them, but they don’t entirely trust them. There’s a flavor of inhumanity about the whole system. The public doesn’t like being at the mercy of people whose brains have been tampered with.
Hence the Unit Fathers—essentially ordinary human beings, in no way processed, cleared or otherwise mentally modified. A brake on the supernormal Uniteers. A safeguard. A token to show that ordinary people were the masters, Units the servants.
Our last member came in just before the depot closed. I noted the psychologist’s sign and leaned forward eagerly.
Ione was a snub-nosed, wistful, reckless, restless creature whom I liked at sight. I wondered why a girl like Ione should be volunteering for a Unit—at nineteen.
“I won’t be altogether different, will I?” she asked wistfully. “I like some things about the way I am now.”
“The saner people are when they come in here,” said the psychologist, “the less they change.”
“I don’t have to have my parents’ consent, do I?”
“Not now. That was changed a couple of years ago. Would your parents be against this?”
“My parents are against everything,” said lone with a brief flash of bitterness.
So that was it.
Ione was an unwanted child. And nineteen years after arriving unwanted she volunteered for a Unit. It made sense.
Lorraine and lone represented the two opposites who both landed up in Units quite often. The spoiled children, the children so protected from the world that when the world finally kicked them in the teeth it was an incredible, crippling shock. And the unwanted children, the children who had been brought up by indifferent parents and who had realized early that the love which other children took for granted was not for them. The first group over-confident, expecting too much of life. The second group expecting and finding too little.
Now that my Unit was complete I reviewed it mentally.
Lorraine, a girl who had always had everything she wanted, and let herself be broken to pieces the first time she wanted something and the world said no.
Dick, a man bored with a life in which things had come too easily and too early.
Helen, without moral sense or feminine warmth, hard as diamond.
Brent, bruised by a world in which everybody was quicker and cleverer than he was.
And lone, a girl who should have been loved and admired but had always been unwanted and resented.
It was a group of useless people, five men and women who had grappled with the world and with life and had failed.
Five failures—and they were going to blend into something new, wonderful and perfect.
I saw quite a lot of the clearing and re-training processes. I didn’t see A.D. again—he was being careful—and he didn’t see Lorraine. He had known he wouldn’t, of course. After the first day she wouldn’t have known him anyway.
The ordinary human being’s mind is an overgrown wilderness. There are beautiful flowers and trees in it, but none of the flowers are as tough as the weeds. The weeds tangle up huge areas and lurk in the shadows of the loveliest plants and shrubs. They suck most of the nourishment from the soil and often strangle the more delicate blooms. Sometimes when you look into such a jungle you can see nothing but weeds.
Psychiatry for centuries waged a hopeless war on the weeds. Psychiatrists could cut a weed down, but that was like trying to stop the sea with a cardboard box.
What could be done, however, was clear the wilderness and start again.
As a reversed current prevents permanent magnetism being stored in a piece of equipment, a certain artificial neural current could cancel out everything in a mind—not by painting over what was there already, but by balancing it, nullifying it, totally erasing it It was like re-recording on magnetic tape.
And the cleared mind was capable of wonderful things. It learned rapidly and correctly. No longer did it know that blond men hit you. Its calculations for the safety of the body it controlled weren’t biased by the command when there’s danger always jump left. It wasn’t necessary anymore for men to fall in love with every woman who reminded them of their mothers. When a particular pattern of light and shade fell on their eyes women no longer had sickening, blinding migraine.
All this wouldn’t have been much good if the weeds had been able to spring up rapidly a
gain.
They didn’t. The weeds of the mind gain strength with age. A weed could grow in a cleared mind, but it would be thirty years before it could take firm hold. And usually adults, unlike children, were able to recognize these weeds for what they were and pull them out easily, long before they became a danger.
The Units had grown out of this clearing process.
As mankind’s boundaries were set wider and wider, as technology and education and social science and economics and politics and the human span of life grew, as man outgrew the planets and moved out into the galaxy, the task of directing things became more and more difficult and complex.
More electronic brains were used every week, but getting the right answer from an electronic brain depended on punching the right buttons. Cybernetics helped to do things, it could never do them.
Hence the Units. Five cleared human beings, specially trained for a job and trained to work together, each to perform some function and trust the other four to do the rest could do things no electronic brain could do and no group of a thousand individuals could do.
You see, the Units never made mistakes. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. When they did things which turned out to be wrong, subsequent investigation showed that their decision had still been right. Essential information might have been missing. Immediate action might have been called for on a basis of guesswork. The choice might have been among half a dozen courses of action each of which was wrong. Or they might have done the thing too late. Units could make that kind of mistake—their timing could be wrong. But being reasonable, being 100 per cent sane, being complete, being trained, being a Unit, no Unit could be wrong if it tried.
The Unit Fathers were kind of team managers. Sometimes a Unit on its own was too refined an instrument for ordinary things like booking accommodation, getting on a train, or taking a day off. Leaving a Unit to attend to such things was like using a scalpel to cut bread.
It wasn’t just that a bread-knife could do the job as well. A bread-knife could do the job a whole lot better.
Hence, me, Unit Father—bread knife.
It took only three or four months to train a Unit. That included all the general information the Uniteers individually had to have about life. True, there were enormous gaps, but only gaps which could quickly and quite easily be filled.
At the end of three months my Unit and I were on a ship bound for Perry on.
2.
There is plenty of time to get to know people on spaceship trips. None of them are longer than about two months, but two months is a long time when you have nothing to do but eat and sleep.
On ocean trips at least you can play tennis and swim and lean on the rail. In a spaceship the most exciting game you can play is chess. Playing cards isn’t impossible, but the technique of handling metal cards and sliding them over the magnetized table destroys most players’ concentration.
We hadn’t really met socially before the trip. The five who made up the Unit proper had been trained to work with each other and I’d seen them all at every stage from birth to maturity, so to speak. Yet it was only on the Violin Song that we had time to sit together and get to know each other.
The first day out of New York I had morning coffee with Dick.
“Let’s get to business,” he said briskly. “As I understand it, we’re being sent to Perry on to arbitrate between the two main factions there. But the real reason is because Perryon might be the base of the Traders. That right?”
I was a little startled by this blunt statement In essence it was correct but when I’d been told about it the matter hadn’t been reduced to its essentials like this.
“Correct,” I said.
“If we find that’s so, that Perryon is the Traders’ base, what are we supposed to do about it?”
“Just ‘take appropriate action,’ ” I said.
Dick nodded. “Carte blanche. That’s good. Okay, I’m going to check on Perryon. I’ve got a dozen books. Be seeing you.”
He shot himself across the saloon, disdaining the handholds.
This, then, was the new, dynamic Dick, the brains of my Unit. A very single-minded young man.
He’d covered a lot in a few words. Officially we were going to Perryon as arbitrators. Perryon, like many another place at many another time, had a North-South squabble. My Unit-was taking the place of a governor, with all the governor’s power and far more than the governor’s responsibilities.
Probably even if the question of the Traders hadn’t arisen a Unit would have been sent to do this job. It was about time that Perryon, an impecunious, inhospitable, though climatically mild world, had its first Unit.
The Traders, or Free Traders, were smugglers.
Before space travel was an accomplished fact it had always been assumed that if we ever did get to the planets and to other stars freight rates would be fantastically high. Why this was assumed isn’t clear. The kind of ships we use cost nothing to run and not very much to service. Two months is a long run, most journeys taking less time. Hold space is nothing in the star lanes. It costs very little more to transport things between Earth and Arcturus than between Paris and New York. In some cases it actually costs less to move things light-years between worlds than a few hundred miles on Earth, depending on how much handling is needed.
This led to difficulties. Newly-settled planets didn’t bother to develop certain industries. It wasn’t worthwhile when the products of New York, Berlin and London cost only a little more than they cost in New York, Berlin and London.
This in turn led to economic chaos. Capital which was spent on the colonies didn’t stay in the colonies, it came back to traders, not to the investors. Demand for many kinds of goods began to exceed the supply. Earth hadn’t the space to expand any more; the colonies had, and didn’t use it.
So heavy tariffs went on most goods being exported to the colonies. Not on newspapers, magazines, movies, phonograph records, but on washing-machines, cars, radio sets, furniture, typewriters clothes. The tariff wasn’t imposed to protect local industries, it was imposed to force local industries to start.
A new balance was achieved.
Then, of course, smuggling started. It was too easy. Anyone who had a ship could pack it full of, say, washing-machines and sell than at a profit of forty dollars per machine on some planet where the duty-protected washing-machines were expensive and not very good. Three thousand washing-machines at forty dollars’ clear profit a time is $120,000. The expenses of the trip could be as low as fifteen thousand dollars.
Any way you looked at it, the Traders were on to a good thing.
The chances that Perryon was the Traders’ base weren’t high. But it was known they had to have a base somewhere, on some settled planet It was also known their base couldn’t be Earth.
With the kind of space travel we used, the only places anyone could get to were the places everyone could get to. It was as if all travel were by railroad—where the lines went any train could go. Where they didn’t go, no train could go.
Part of our job was to check Perryon—one of nearly fifty worlds on which the Traders’ base might be.
While I was still sitting there—I say sitting because that’s easy to say, not because it’s accurate—Lorraine came through, using the handholds. She carried a towel and a clean fallsuit, apparently on her way to have a bath.
When she saw me, however, she pulled herself over beside me and strapped herself about the middle, fastening her towel on another strap.
“Say, Edgar,” she began. “You knew me before, didn’t you?”
“Before you volunteered for a Unit?” I asked. Obviously that was what she meant but I wanted time to consider my answer.
“Yes. What was I like?”
She meant compared with what she was like now.
I looked at her. Physically, of course, she was exactly the same, except perhaps that she was a shade more alert now than she had been before, a little easier and more assured in her manne
r, and held herself more proudly.
Temperamentally she wasn’t the same girl. She was serene now, but not serene-placid, more serene-enthusiastic. She had developed a sense of humor she had shown no sign of having before.
“Don’t act as if it were top secret information,” she said. “It isn’t. They’d have told me at the depot, but they’d have told me just what they wanted me to know. Why did I volunteer?”
“You were going to commit suicide otherwise,” I said.
“No!” she exclaimed incredulously. “What for?”
“A man.”
“Good God. I must have been crazy. They should have told me about that. Did you know the man?”
“No.”
“Did you know me well?”
“No.”
“You’re not much help,” Lorraine complained.
“Uniteers aren’t supposed to be interested in their previous history,” I said.
“Oh, I’m not desperate to know about mine,” Lorraine remarked, shrugging her shoulders. “Only they might tell us a little more. Was I rich or poor, sociable or lonely, sought after or ignored? Did men write sonnets to me to pretend not to see me in the street? Was I a good girl or a loose woman?”
“Forget it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“No, I guess it doesn’t,” she agreed mildly. ‘Tell me one thing, though. Which do you prefer—the girl I am now or the girl I was?”
“The girl you are now,” I said instantly.
She smiled and unstrapped herself. “Well, that’s something,” she said, and pushed off with her feet.
I watched her fly gracefully out of the saloon. Some people think women look their best in spaceships. All the curves are high curves, with no gravity straining at pectoral, abdominal, gluteal and thigh muscles. On the other hand the fallsuit which is usually worn in space—a one-piece garment caught at wrists and ankles—-is seldom glamorous.
Thinking of fallsuits made me glance beside me. Lorraine had left her towel and clean suit behind.
I threw back my head and laughed. That was supposed to be impossible. People who bad been cleared just didn’t forget things. So this towel wasn’t here. I was imagining things.
Possible Tomorrows Page 10