Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  So the probability was they would decide it was wisest to leave her alone as long as she didn’t disturb their plans. For her part, she would be very happy to leave them alone providing they didn’t start trying to run her life again. No doubt, they could have taught her what she wanted to know about psionics; but their price looked like more than she was willing to pay. And she didn’t seem to be doing too badly at teaching herself.

  The Federation of the Hub was a vast area, after all. Aside from occasional contacts with their mechanized spy network, there was no real reason, Telzey concluded, why she and the Psychology Service should ever run into each other again.

  Satisfied, she reached around for a couch cushion, placed it behind her neck, wriggled into a different position, laid her head back and closed her eyes. Might as well go on napping until Gilas and Gonwil arrived. On checking in here, she’d been told that float-ski conditions were perfect, so tomorrow should be a quite strenuous day . . .

  Abruptly, she found herself sitting bolt upright again, eyes wide open, while Chomir grumbled at her feet about all this shifting around.

  She had drifted straight back into the dream out of which the ComWeb had roused her twenty minutes before. It had been another dream about the Psionic Cop. He’d appeared almost completely faded out, hardly more than a transparent outline of what he’d been; and Telzey had informed him, perhaps a trifle smugly, that he might just as well vanish for good now. Since she’d let the Psychology Service know she could block out snoopers, there was no further point in his hanging around her.

  And the ghostly Cop had nodded very seriously, and said, “Yes, we were greatly pleased to discover you had been able to develop such an effective defensive measure, Miss Amberdon! It was one of the things we had to find out about you. You see, it will be necessary . . .”

  Telzey bit her lip uneasily, staring at the quietly dancing fire, listening to the soft moan of the snow winds over Tor Heights. An eerie little chill began to slide up and down her spine.

  It has been just a dream—probably! It didn’t have to mean anything.

  But supposing it hadn’t been just a dream . . .

  Necessary—what?

  CLEAN SLATE

  If you wipe off a cluttered blackboard, there is lots of room to imprint new information. Can a human brain be treated the same way? Can you make a superman if you start with a . . .

  DR. Eileen Randall put the telephone down, said to George Hair, “It will still be a few minutes, I’m afraid, Mr. Hair.” She smiled ruefully. “It’s very embarrassing that the Director of ACCED should have to let his own employer, the government’s Administrator of Education, wait to see him! But Dr. Curtice didn’t know you were coming until an hour ago, of course.”

  “I quite understand, Dr. Randall,” George Hair said politely. Eileen Randall, he thought, was not in the least embarrassed by the situation; and it was not the first time he had waited here to see Curtice. But her attitude interested him. She was belligerently loyal to Curtice, and her manner toward himself, on the other occasions they had met, had been one of cool hostility.

  Today, there was an air of excitment about her, and something else which had drawn Hair’s attention immediately. She was a lean, attractive, blackhaired woman in her thirties, normally quiet, certainly not given to coy ruefulness with visitors. But he would have said that during the fifteen minutes he had been here, Dr. Randall had been playing a game with him, at least from her point of view. Back of it was a new level of self-assurance. She felt, he decided, somewhat contemptuous of him today.

  It meant the ACCED group believed they had gained some very significant advantage against him . . .

  “What did you think of the dog?” she asked, smiling.

  “An amazing animal!” Hair said. “I would not have believed such a performance was possible. I’m taking it for granted, of course, that the uncanny intelligence it demonstrated in carrying out your instructions is again a result of combined SELAM and ACCED techniques . . . Or perhaps Dr. Curtice has developed an entirely new educational approach?”

  “New in the extent to which selective amnesia was carried in the dog, Mr. Hair,” Dr. Randall told him. “In this case, the memory impressions of every experience it had had since its birth were deleted from its brain before retraining began. The training methods otherwise were exactly the ones we have used on dogs for the past six years. The results, as you saw, go far beyond anything we have accomplished with animals before, due to the preliminary complete amnesia.”

  “Indeed?” Hair said. “I’m sure I’ve had the impression from Dr. Curtice that it was impossible to induce a complete and permanent amnesia by the use of instruments without actually destroying brain tissue.”

  Dr. Randall gave him a look of gleeful malice. “It was impossible until early this year, Mr. Hair! That’s when Dr. Curtice made the first full-scale tests of several new instruments he’s had under development for some time. It’s quite possible now.” She put her hand out to the telephone. “Should I call the main laboratory again? Of course, they will let us know as soon as he . . .

  “Of course,” George Hair said. “No, no need to call them again, Dr. Randall.” He smiled. “And it isn’t really necessary, you know, for you to entertain me while I’m waiting, although I appreciate your having taken the time for it. If there’s something else you should be doing, please don’t let the fact that I’m here interfere with your work.”

  THIS was, George Hair told himself, looking out of the fourth-story window of the ACCED Building at the river below, a bad situation. A very bad situation.

  It was clear that Curtice intended to use the complete amnesia approach on human subjects next, and Eileen Randall would not have spoken and behaved as she had if the ACCED group weren’t already certain they had Wirt Sebert’s backing for their plan—possibly even Mallory’s.

  And he would have to voice his unequivocal opposition to it. He could not do anything else. ACCED had never served any useful purpose but that of a political tool and the purpose had been achieved at an inexcusable expense in distorted fives. When applied to human beings, it was a failure, a complete failure. And now the fact could no longer be covered up by new developments and accomplishments with dogs.

  Politically, of course, a promising new development in the program, if it could be presented in a convincing manner, was almost required now. It would be a very poor time to acknowledge failure openly. Governor Wingfield had been using rumors about ACCED as another means of weakening the Administration’s position and creating a general demand for new elections; and this year, for the first time in the fifteen years since the Takeover, the demand might grow too strong to be ignored. A public admission that the ACCED program had not produced, and could not produce, the results which had been expected of it might make the difference, as Wingfield understood very well.

  ACCED—accelerated education—had been Wirt Sebert’s idea to begin with. Or rather, many ideas for it had been around, but they had never been systematized, coordinated, or applied on a large scale; and Sebert had ordered all that done. After the Takeover, the need for a major evolution of the educational system was obvious. The working details of Earth’s civilization had become so complex that not enough people were able to understand them well enough to avoid continuous breakdowns. Immediate changes in simplifying organization, in centralizing communication had been made, which had helped. But they could not be expected to remedy matters indefinitely. What was needed in the long run was an army of highly trained men and women capable of grasping the multifactored problems of civilization as they arose, capable of intelligent interaction and of making the best possible use of one another’s skills and knowledge.

  ACCED was to have been the answer to that. Find the way, Wirt Sebert had said, to determine exactly what information was needed, what was essential, and then find the way to hammer it into young brains by the hundreds of thousands. Nothing less would do.

  So ACCED came into being. It was a pro
ject that caught the public’s imagination. For three years, a succession of people headed it. Then Richard Curtice was brought in, a man selected personally by Sebert; and Curtice quickly took charge.

  At that time, indications of weakness in the overall ACCED approach already were apparent to those conducting the project. George Hair didn’t know about them then. He was still Secretary of Finance—in his own mind and that of the public the second man of the Big Four, directly behind President Mallory. True, Wirt Sebert was Secretary of State, but Hair was the theorist, the man who had masterminded the Takeover which Mallory, Sebert, and Wingfield, men of action, had carried out. He was fully occupied with other matters, and ACCED was Sebert’s concern.

  Sebert, no doubt, had been aware of the difficulties. ACCED, in the form which had been settled on for the project, was based on the principle of reward and punishment; but reward and punishment were expressed by subtle emotional conditions of which the subject was barely conscious. Combined with this was a repetitive cramming technique, continuing without interruptions through sleep and waking periods. With few exceptions, the subjects were college and high school students, and the ACCED process was expected to accomplish the purpose for which it had been devised in them within four to five years.

  Throughout the first two years, extraordinary results of the process were reported regularly. They were still being reported during the third year, but no mention was made of the severe personality problems which had begun to develop among the subjects first exposed to ACCED.

  IT was at this point that Dr. Curtice was brought into the project, on Wirt Sebert’s instructions. Curtice was then in his late thirties, a man with a brilliant reputation as a psychiatric engineer. Within a year, he was ACCED’s director, had selected his own staff, and was engaged in the series of modifications in the project which, for the following decade, would keep the fact that ACCED was essentially a failure from becoming general knowledge. SELAM was Curtice’s development, had preceded his appointment to ACCED. He applied the selective amnesia machines immediately to the treatment of the waves of emotional problems arising among ACCED’s first host of recruits. In this, as George Hair learned later, SELAM was fairly effective, but at the expense of erasing so much of the ACCED-impressed information that the purpose of the project was lost.

  Dr. Curtice and his colleagues had decided meanwhile that the principal source of the troubles with ACCED was that the adolescent and postadolescent subjects first chosen for it already had established their individual personality patterns to a degree which limited the type of information which could be imposed on them by enforced learning processes without creating a destructive conflict. The maximum age level for the initiation of the ACCED approach therefore was reduced to twelve years; and within six months, the new phase of the project was underway on that basis, and on a greatly extended scale.

  Simultaneously, Curtice had introduced a third phase—the transfer of infants shortly after their birth to ACCED nurseries where training by selected technicians could be begun under conditions which were free of distorting influences of any kind. The last presently was announced as the most promising aspect of the ACCED project, the one which eventually would produce an integrated class of specialists capable of conducting the world’s economic affairs with the faultless dependability of a machine.

  The implication that the earlier phases were to be regarded as preliminary experiments attracted little immediate attention and was absorbed gradually and almost unnoticed by the public.

  IT was during the seventh year of the ACCED project that George Hair’s personal and political fortunes took a turn for which he was not in the least prepared. There had been a period of sharp conflict within the Administration, President Mallory and the Secretary of State opposing Oliver Wingfield, the perennial Vice President. Hair recognized the situation as the power struggle it essentially was. While his sympathies were largely with Mallory, he had attempted to mediate between the two groups without taking sides. But the men of action were not listening to Hair, the theorist, now. Eventually Wingfield was ousted from the government, though he had too strong and well-organized a following to be ousted from public life.

  And shortly afterwards, Mallory explained privately to George Hair that his failure to throw in his full influence against Wingfield had created so much hostility for him, particularly in Sebert’s group, that it was impossible to retain him as Secretary of Finance. Mallory made it clear that he still liked Hair as a person but agreed with Sebert that he should play no further major role in the Administration.

  It was a bad shock to Hair. Unlike Wingfield and the others, he had developed no personal organization to support him. He had, he realized now, taken it for granted that his continuing value as an overall planner was so obvious to Mallory and Wirt Sebert that nothing else could be needed to secure his position beside them. For a time, he considered retiring into private life; but in the end, he accepted the position of Administrator of Education offered him by Mallory, which included among other matters responsibility for the ACCED Project.

  Hair’s first encounter with Dr. Curtice left him more impressed by ACCED’s director than he had expected to be. He was aware that the project had been much less successful than was generally assumed to be the case, and his mental image of Curtice had been that of a glib operator who was willing to use appearances in place of facts to strengthen his position. But Curtice obviously had an immense enthusiasm for what he was doing, radiated self-assurance and confidence in ACCED’s final success to a degree which was difficult to resist. There was nothing in his manner to suggest that he resented Hair’s appointment as his superior; it was the attitude of Eileen Randall and, to a less extent, that of Dr. Longdon, Curtice’s two chief assistants, which made it clear from the start that Hair was, in fact, resented.

  There were also indications that Wirt Sebert was not pleased with the appointment; and Hair suspected there had been a touch of friendly malice in Mallory’s move—a reminder to Sebert that Mallory, although he had agreed to Hair’s ouster from Finance, was still the Big Man of the original Big Four. Hair himself had enough stubbornness in him to ignore Sebert’s continuing antagonism and the lack of cooperation he could expect from Sebert’s proteges in ACCED. He had been somewhat startled when his first survey of the new situation in which he found himself showed that other activities of the Department of Education were of no significance except as they pertained again to the ACCED project. Dr. Curtice evidently had been running the Department very much as he pleased in recent years. It seemed time, George Hair thought, to establish whether ACCED was worth anywhere near the support it was getting from the government.

  The Project was now in its seventh year. The initial experiment involving high school and college age groups was no longer mentioned and had almost dropped from the public mind. Hair’s check brought him the information that a considerable number of the original subjects were still undergoing remedial psychiatric treatment at ACCED institutions. The others had merged back into the population. It was clear that the ACCED process had not had a single lasting success in that group.

  Hair visited a number of the ACCED-run schools next where the process had been in use for the past three years. The age level here varied between ten and thirteen. He was shown records which indicated the ACCED students were far in advance of those to whom standard educational methods had been applied. The technicians assured him that, unlike their older predecessors, the present subjects were showing no undesirable emotional reactions to the process. Hair did not attempt to argue with the data given by their instruments. But he saw the children and did not like what he saw. They looked and acted, he thought, like small, worried grown-ups.

  His inspection of two of the nursery schools was made against Dr. Randall’s coldly bitter opposition: the appearance of a stranger among ACCED’s youngest experimental subjects was unscheduled and would therefore create a disturbance; nobody had been allowed there before. But Hair was quietly insi
stent. It turned into a somewhat eerie experience. The students were between two and four years old and physically looked healthy enough. They were, however, remarkably quiet. They seemed, Hair thought, slower than children at that age should be, though as a bachelor he admittedly hadn’t had much chance to study children that age.

  Then one of the taciturn attendants conducting him through the school caught his eye and indicated a chubby three-year-old squatting in a cubicle by himself, apparently assembling a miniature television set. Hair watched in amazement until the assembly was completed, tested, and found satisfactory; whereupon the small mechanic lay down beside the instrument and went to sleep.

  They had another trump card waiting for him. This was a girl, perhaps a year older, who informed Hair she understood he had been Secretary of Finance and wished to ask him some questions. The questions were extremely pertinent ones, and Hair found himself involved in a twenty-minute defense of the financial policies he had pursued during the twelve years he held the office. Then his inquisitor thanked him for his time and wandered off.

  ONE could not object to ACCED as an experiment, George Hair concluded. An approach capable of producing such remarkable results was worth pursuing, within sensible limitations. The trouble with ACCED was chiefly that it was neither regarded nor handled as a limited experiment. Curtice and his assistants seemed completely indifferent to the fact that by now the processes had been applied to well over fifty thousand cases, only a handful of which had been under their immediate supervision. The number was increasing annually; and if the second and third groups were to show delayed negative responses similar to those of the first, the damage might not become apparent for several more years but would then be enormously more significant than the development of a relatively few precocious geniuses.