by Ian Wallace
The dark man turned his questioning gaze to the second guard—who assented, not really remembering much.
For several minutes the dark man paced. Then he told the guards: “I shall think about this. Meanwhile, have the process proceed. Dismissed.”
The guards saluted and left—but not before I had transferred to the brain of the dark man, to read his inwardness.
Reduce it to essentials:
She concluded, and he accepted: play it with both gods. That would mean: If life is unjust, and there is no rewarding hereafter, be virtuous anyway.
If life is unjust, but there is a rewarding hereafter, be virtuous.
Hence: whether life is just or unjust, whether there is rewarding or no rewarding—no matter what, be virtuous.
What does that mean for Makrov?
The common golden rule for their two religions: love God, and love neighbor as self.
Wife and children are more than neighbors to him. Or even if they are only neighbors to him—love them as self, not more than self.
Key point, though: love God.
What does their god stand for?
But it is two gods. But they agreed to respect both. So I have to know what both gods stand for.
One way, his wife and children would count most, together with himself.
Another way, his wife and children would count most, more than himself.
A third way…
A phone rang, and he answered it. Barking voice: “Is all moving forward in the Makrov affair?”
“Affirmative, Führer.”
“Good. Out.” Click.
Where was I?
Loused-up thinking. Too many phones. Too much Fuhrer. Too much war. Did I pick the wrong horse?
Forget it. Stay with the Fuhrer-horse. Where was l? God, though, the Fuhrer is nuts…
Wonder what Priest and what Teacher I could talk to, in the hope of exegizing this Makrov-esoteric… .
By an adroit series of brain transfers, I managed to keep myself always in one of the Führer's minions most closely associated with the clinical details of Makrov’s psychosurgical adaptation, taking occasional side trips to follow what was being done with Meri and the children. It had all been meticulously articulated under personal direction by the dark man who limped.
Makrov’s abdomen was not opened, for this would have weakened him too much: instead, the procedure involved advanced techniques for working by remote control, visually and manually, inside the stomach from the esophagus. A thin section of the stomach lining was folded back; the tiny bomb was inserted and stitched firm; then the lining section was stitched over the bomb to guarantee solid anchorage. From this bomb, hair-fine antennae, instantly and specifically responsive to the acid that would be contained in the capsule to be placed under Makrov’s tongue, protruded to undulate gently in enzyme flow.
With Meri and the children, similar procedures were followed, utilizing this diabolical variant: the explosive charge in each bomb was tiny, barely sufficient to break a little vessel containing a virulent strain of cancer-inducing protein ironically developed among prisoners at Makrov’s concentration camp. The antennae were responsive not to acid but to high-frequency microwaves that could be produced by small equipment carried by selectmen among the Führer’s agents.
They were sure that the bomb in Makrov would work. They were not sure about the little cancer bombs in Meri and the children: this uncertainty was a source of mild amusement; the thing was regarded as a scientific experiment; and the current betting odds were long that the Meribombs and kinderbombs would be used, just for discovery’s sake, even if Makrov did bring off his assignment. All that was essential here was to make sure that Makrov believed the little bombs would work. And so they saw to it that Makrov witnessed the surgeries on his family before he was taken in for his own operation.
While the four patients were recovering, they were kept under sedation to facilitate hypnopaedia. Meri and the children were taught a simple lesson, mainly truth skillfully blurred: Makrov had been taken away from them two years earlier, they did not know whither, they supposed to a concentration camp; they had not seen him since, until their reunion in enemy Vania (scheduled for three days hence); they had been miserable; recently they had been under guard, but the guards had turned out to be Vanian agents rather than native Fustian troopers, and they had been told a week ago of their impending reunion in Vania.
Makrov’s lesson was far more complex, departing much farther from truth. He had indeed been taken to a concentration camp, but incredibly he had escaped—so the hypnopaedic story went. For the past year he had been working as an underground anti-Führer agent in bureaus at the very highest level in War Planning. Utilizing advanced bugging techniques that the underground had developed, Makrov (so he was taught) had been able to listen through walls; his custodial duties after high-level conferences had brought him into the conference rooms, and there an occasional obscurely marked map or a carelessly discarded sheet of carbon paper had regularly filled out the lacunae in what he had been wall-hearing. Against this background, Makrov was sleep-taught an involved, entirely plausible, and totally false version of the major war strategy that was to open up in a fortnight.
It was not intended that Makrov give himself time to tell this full story to the summit rulers. It was intended that he first chew on his little capsule. The story was insurance: he might have to start the story to gain their attention; he might be cross-questioned ahead of the summit conference as a precondition to being received at the conference; he certainly needed something plausible to tell his family—Meri and her high-ranking Vanian father—at the reunion in Vania.
Hypnopaedia for Makrov was accompanied by a specialized intravenous feeding. It physically built him up to an appearance of health which, although substandard for a storm trooper, was standard for a poor although highly trusted custodian and miles above concentration-camp standard.
Toward the end of the process, the dark limper turned up and conferred darkly with the presiding psychiatrist—into whose brain instantly I got.
“I have a hunch,” the limper was saying, “and I do not know how to express this hunch, but I know what must be done about it. You must implant in the minds of Makrov and his family a total inhibition against talking among themselves about religion. And if possible, you must go farther with Makrov: in him you must implant a total inhibition against even thinking about religion. Can you do this?”
My new host was doubtful—and I was not intervening. “With his family I can do it,” the psychiatrist intervened; “but with Makrov, it is like this. He seems simple, but his simplicity has a complex intellectual-emotional basis. He is used to developing selected inhibitions for himself, on intellectual grounding. If we were to implant anti-intellectual inhibition in him, his whole habit pattern would force him to fight it; and in the process, he could easily go psychotic—an outcome which would hardly foster the success of his assigned mission.”
The limper studied hard, glancing several times at his wristwatch. Presently he looked up. “In that case, I have another tactic for Makrov. He is in conflict about his wife’s god who teaches that life is a testing for hereafter and his own god who teaches that there is no hereafter and yet one must be virtuous. He feels that the first god seems wrong, because while considering Himself merciful He makes the testing too bitter; but at the same time Makrov feels that the second god seems wrong, because He demands virtue without future in a world which is unjust. Now tell me, Herr Doktor: if you were in this kind of conflict, what kind of synthesis would you arrive at?”
Promptly the psychiatrist replied: “I would become an atheist.”
“Exactly. And, as an atheist, if you loved your wife and children, what would you do if presented with the following dilemma: to murder three world leaders in a suicide action and thereby save your family; or to save the leaders and possibly yourself, thereby condemning your family to prolonged and miserable deaths?”
“Sir, I know th
at your question was not serious; because if it were serious, it would not be worth asking.”
“Exactly. Tell me, Doctor—in the mathematics of psychology, is this conclusion mathematically certain?”
“In the psychomechanics of a moderately strong ego which has deliberately built and therefore respects its own superego, this conclusion is the necessary resultant of the vectors entailed.”
“Then—overlooking your mix of psychologies—use what I have told you, and make him an atheist. Just incidentally, that will certainly keep him from wanting to talk religion with his family!”
There were four train transfers interspersed by three truck trips, all most private and undercover, entailing five changes of guard, mostly by night over a period of three days. It was all executed amid most extraordinary silence: the family interchanged few words, and few were exchanged with guards. At first, both children clung to their mother, who however pressed herself against Ben Makrov; somewhat later, the little girl clung to her father; later still, both children clung to their father, while their mother clung to all three.
By now, I was in Makrov. But I was finding little in the Makrov-mind except stuporous apathy. Still I had no notion what I must do with this man.
On the second night, while we jounced in a freight car on straw, there came a time when the children were asleep, and Meri crept close to Ben. His arm tightened about her thin shoulders. Presently his hand thrust a sleeve of her dirndl off her shoulder. At this instant, I disconnected; and I passed the rest of the night quietly musing with the aid of Makrov’s frontal brain area, pleased that the man and his wife seemed to be coming to life a little, distressed about the death which had been planted in them and in their children.
The last stage of the journey involved a compact limousine nosing through the foggy night-streets of Vania’s capital. The passengers were discharged at the servants’ entrance of a large old town house. A cadaverous nightcapped man whom Makrov scarcely remembered embraced Meri, his daughter, passed her to the nightgowned witchwife behind him, and shook hands with Makrov, uttering fuzzy throaty quarter-phrases. The children hung back: Makrov shepherded them in, and the door was closed hastily. A few moments later, Herr and Frau Makrov found themselves in parlor chairs, being plied with port, while the exhausted children drowsed feet to feet on a sofa.
Somewhat afterward, inhabiting Makrov I found myself in bed with Meri—in a great plush bed, in privacy. I was inclined to disconnect; but then I decided that this husband-wife relationship must be comprehended, now on the night which was at once its blessed reassertion and the eve of its possibly cataclysmic dissolution; and so I stayed in subjective rapport.
For a little while they lay somberly together, her hand in his, their shoulders touching. Then her bare feet came over and intertwined with his big feet. All four feet were bony. Like this they reclined for a while somberly, looking at the darkly invisible ceiling.
Makrov said: “I think we need to be naked.”
Instantly Meri shed her nightgown; rather more deliberately, Makrov got rid of his pajamas. Then again they lay back together on the bunched-up pillows, hand in hand, feet intertwining, naked together, gazing upward.
It was to be their last night together. Makrov knew this. Meri did not. Makrov could say nothing that might hint it. I could not clearly make out what kind of thing Makrov’s mind was framing: it was far more complex than flesh desire.
Releasing her hand, his hand slid behind her back, ran down her flank, grasped a protruding ilium. It squeezed the ilium, hugging her to him. Meri was totally submissive, ready to respond to his mood whatever it might be.
He told her: “I want to talk. All night. But I think they have done something to our minds, and so there is nothing that we can talk about.”
“You do not have to talk, Ben. We know.”
He frowned. “What do we know?”
“We know us.”
His frown deepened. “This is the thing, Meri. Tonight I want to know you intimately and totally. But I do not know any way to do this except by talking. I could caress you and come into you, and presently I will, but after we subside it will only be body to body and nerve to nerve, and not at all the soul-in-soul knowledge that we need now.”
“But this we have. We have lived together. We know”
“Do we? We know signs. But have our souls intermingled as our bodies have? A man needs more of a woman than just living with her.”
“A man like you, Ben. A man like you needs more than just living with her. A woman like me does not. Just living with you is knowing your soul directly.”
His hand tightened on her hip. “Do you know my soul well enough to know its ugliness? Do you know that I have an urge to overwhelm you, to outrage you? Does that seem like me?”
“Yes. It is all right.”
“Why?”
“It is what I want too.”
“Why?”
“If you were a sperm and I were an egg, you would viciously drive your whole self into me and annihilate yourself in the process of making me live. If your soul could come into my soul, again it would be like that. When your body comes into my body, if we put our whole souls into the thrill of the meaning, it is a little like that.”
“But not enough like that.”
“It is the nearest we adults can come to that. You told me yourself: nature considers us only as vehicles for the sperm and the egg that can wholly know each other—but without any dream. So we are impoverished—but we do our best, and we do have the dream. Here I am, Ben. I love you no matter what.”
I disconnected.
As the chugging launch brought Makrov across rough water to the battle wagon where the summit meeting was transpiring, I lost Makrov in my own subjective thrall. I, Pan, was being brought here: the waves were tossing me, the battle wagon was growing monstrous in front of me. …
The climb up the ladder was heroically wearying.
Heavily shepherded, I trudged many miles of hard steel deck.
Again I mounted an endless ladder.
I stood on a vast poop deck amid a vast crowd. Most of them were seated. I stood among my guards in the rear. Up front, not clearly descriable, the three heads of state sat on a slightly raised dais, surrounded by high-level aides, talking together, listening to testimony.
I felt the bomb ticking inside me, although I knew it did not tick. I felt the capsule throbbing beneath my tongue, although I knew it did not throb.
Somebody muttered to me: “The agenda are clicking right along—inside of ten minutes, you’ll be on.”
I was jolted back into my own identity when my host, Makrov, replied: “I’d like to see them clearly. Can you get me any closer?”
As someone took Makrov’s arm and steered him-and-me in, he and I simultaneously realized that the exchange had been in Fustian. But here in Vania! The implication was clear: a Fustian agent had got through; and if an agent of the Führer could get through to this superguarded ship rendezvous, why then with respect to Makrov’s family if he were to fail…
The three chiefs of state were now clearly visible: cherubic Vania center, suave but aging Columbia to his left, iron-hard Pirov to his right. They were listening to not-quite-audible testimony by a diplomat whose back was correct. Makrov saw no point in trying to hear; he would be signaled; and now, in quite possibly the last nine minutes of his existence, he had things to think about.
.…Of his existence! Nothing after! For now he accepted quite calmly his new atheism, wondering indeed why this perfectly logical conclusion had always been rejected by him before. True, his own religion had never encouraged ideas of life after death, although some Teachers hinted vaguely at the possibility; but life with Meri, who believed in it, had tended to sway him—and the notion is attractive to any self-respecting human ego. Now, in his atheism, the prospect had to be irrevocably dismissed. And that left him eight minutes of existence, for he was surely going through with it.
He excluded speculation about the ex
perience of ceasing-to-exist: they had already told him how it would be, and now he would simply wait and see. He was inhabiting a kind of dead emotional calm. There were many reasons for this. The two gods—or the two disputing sets of prophets of one god—had canceled each other out, and there was no god left and nothing to dispute about. The hell of two years in a concentration camp had taught him apathy even before he had been plucked out of the camp: death, probably horrible, had never been distant from him. Besides, his mind was made up; and worry is unsuitable in a settled state of affairs, especially during one’s last seven minutes.
Perhaps it would be suitable to review the ethical considerations that had settled him surely. Was it futile to consider ethics in a context of atheism? Makrov had never thought so, having known many thoughtful atheists and agnostics. If a man did not have rules to live by, especially in a society of other men, his life was meaningless. But in the context of atheism—which, coupled with the epistemic isolation of the egocentric predicament, left one not only devoid of an authoritative source of ethical dictation, but also without necessary confidence in any human credo—one was free, condemned indeed to freedom, for complete ethical self-determination. Some atheists, it was true, believed in a transcendental interhuman commune; but this belief, Makrov thought, was of their individual devising. The Führer believed that the stars had predestined him to rule the world at any necessary price of cruelty and slaughter: well, that was his ethos; and although Makrov’s was different, Makrov had to admit that the Führer's was atheistically tenable.
Meanwhile—during his lasts/* minutes—Makrov felt strengthened in his own ethos, with no god conflict to disrupt it. This ethos was, curiously, the Golden Rule that brought harmony between the oddly beautiful faith of his Meri and his own discarded faith which had initiated the teaching: love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Approaching this rule atheistically, Makrov felt that he had made only minor semantic modifications. With respect to the first part, he had substituted life-purpose for “God.” And with respect to the second part—admitting that every human is one’s neighbor, and at the same time comprehending now that tragedy and shipwreck are in one way or another the lot of every human—he had decided that one must simply assign priorities to one’s neighbor-love.