“Cathead is strangely quiet, Thomas. She is usually quite noisy and angry in times of change of administration. Do you believe this quiet presages a surrender, a mass exodus of Cathead men back to the Golden Life?”
“No, I do not. How could they surrender? The Cathead divergents have not had the benefits of being programmed for surrender. Besides, they enjoy seeing them suffer.”
“Who does? I don’t enjoy seeing them suffer.”
“Neither do I. That last phrase I said, Kingmaker, I didn’t say it. Somebody else said it out of my mouth. Oh, don’t be alarmed for me. I’m sane and sound. It is only a little thing that sometimes happens when I’m not paying attention to what I’m saying. But I’m not going to worry about the Cathead thing at all.”
“But it is the greatest worry of us rulers of Astrobe, Thomas. It is the one thing that spoils the serenity of our world. And you did make certain campaign promises that you would settle the Cathead affair, directly, and severely if need be.”
“I’ll find a smooth way of breaking those promises, Kingmaker. You treat me as an amateur at this game, but I’m not. I’ll settle the Cathead affair by considering it already settled. It is quiet. And you want it noisy again? It’s as though I had been told by a vast interior voice not to worry about the Cathead thing. It’s as though I had been told not to worry about anything whatsoever.
“The most successful Astrobe administration to date was a perpetual contrived calm before a storm that never came. I believe that I can manage the same thing here.”
“That is not quite what I had in mind for your role,” Kingmaker said, “but we will see how it works.”
It was all clear sailing over an ocean of good-feeling and cliche. There was no cloud in the sky now shadow over the grian-sun.
“We are not even sure that there is a sky, that there is a sun,” Kingmaker said. “But it doesn’t matter to the people, and it doesn’t matter to me. Who looks up any more?”
“The sun is a hole and not a body,” Thomas said. “It is not the symbol of round fullness but of burning emptiness—of Ouden. No, no! I didn’t say that. Another said it with my mouth.”
The vote for Thomas had been overwhelming. His friends had been solidly for him, and his real enemies had enveloped him with their extravagant support. The sensing machines gave him one of the clearest victories ever.
Even the hard-heads from Cathead and the Barrio did not disgrace this inauguration, as they had disgraced most of them for the last twenty years. They were silent, and with a queer look on their millions of faces. The poor lungers, the hard men of Cathead looked at each other and looked at their leaders. Their leaders looked at the ground as if they would find the answer in the dusty lanes or the broken pavements.
“We will not march now. In nine days we will march,” said Battersea, one of the leaders of Cathead. The other leaders and the great mass of poor people seemed to agree.
And Thomas was calm and confident in his mind. It was a most peculiar calm that obtained there. “It is an enforced calm,” he said to himself, “and not of my making. Could I break the calm, I’d be in a turmoil over it.”
Some little time past, in the final days of the campaign, Thomas had had a walking evening nightmare. It had been blotted from his mind, but there was a scrap of it unburied, and sometimes he could catch hold of that scrap and almost drag the nightmare back onto the scene. He came very near to recreating it a half dozen times. But the recreation was obstructed and distorted. It slipped, it twisted, it changed form, it faded. There were things in his mind that were shoving it out.
It had been a nightmare about those toy jump-jacks, the programmed mechanical men. In the nightmare these Programmed Persons were really running the worlds; and the human persons themselves had become so programmed and mechanical that it made no difference. But there was more to it than that. It involved the extinguishing of the worlds, the blotting out of all past time, so that nothing had ever been, so that nothing was now, so that nothing ever could be. And then it didn’t involve any such things. It was not the worlds that never happened; it was the nightmare that never happened.
It dropped out of his mind again. What had it been about? Thomas had a terrible headache from this, and near prostration of body. Then he took simple medication for it all, and the sickness faded, and so did the nightmare and the memory of it.
The job of World President was amazingly easy. Bills were drawn up, agreed on and submitted by the Lawmasters, the one hundred and one great minds (selected for their brilliant legal genius by the selecting machines) that did these things so expertly on Astrobe. There was, of course, a great volume of bills presented to the new president, for it was always the custom to throw them at him in great bunches initially. But they were easily handled.
Every bill could be analyzed by independent machine, interpreted and broken down, and the correct decision on it indicated automatically. Sometimes it seemed to Thomas that the decisions were indicated automatically to him in an interior manner also. And the decisions from both sources were always the same: Do pass. How can you go wrong when the answer is always yes?”
There was an additional reason for voting yes. A president of Astrobe who three times vetoed any proposal adopted by the Lawmasters was sentenced to death, no matter what form that proposal had been presented under.
Did that make the World President a balloon-head? By no means. His real job was to initiate the machinations that led to the bills, to consult and advise, to maintain and create a consensus. The business of approving the finished bills was a holdover from earlier times. Approval was supposed to be automatic.
The bills themselves, many of them would have baffled a Whitechapel lawyer.
Well, Thomas had been a Whitechapel lawyer in his basic life. He had a go at a few of the bills. He knew all about incongruous riders on bills, possibly more than the analyzing machines themselves knew. He had himself invented trick riders on bills. He read the bills minutely, to the disgust of his associates. But he passed many of the bills that he really did not wish to pass.
“It becomes odder and odder,” he said. “Someone else is thinking with my mind, someone else is talking with my voice, and now someone else is signing bills with my hand.”
He passed the Ninth Standardization Act with its curious riders. It sought to complete the standardization of the mind, as well as of the objects of the mind. Somebody was building higher and higher on this contrived foundation. “What curious cat-castles they do build!” he said. He passed it through, though wondering just what someone was up to, wondering also why he passed it at all.
He drew the teeth from a few other bills before sending them through. Somehow the teeth grew back into them by various enabling acts. He pulled fang after fang from the Compulsory Benignity Bill. That one went even beyond the Open Mind Act. “This is not the face of Benignity as I knew it,” he said.
The fangs grew back, tacked slyly onto other bills. It grew distasteful as the outlines of the building meant to be raised on this benignant foundation grew clearer.
Thomas wished that he could remember more of his waking nightmare of some time before.
And now there was a slim bill among many, but there sounded a warning in his mind about it. Possibly it was a warning from Rimrock the ansel. It was of the old The Killers are upon you! variety, but it was not in words. Thomas had just been very clever in spotting weird things in a series of bills and in taking exception to them. He had showboated his expertise and was quite proud of himself. But he wanted a rest from it now. He wanted these last bills for the day to slide through easily; and he was somewhat irritated by the warnings in his head.
So he barely spotted the joker in the Earth Severance Act; it was in a footnote to a footnote, as it were. But when he spotted it, he shook as though he had picked up a snake, thinking it to be a stick (his own phrase).
It was a simple clause
under the section Remnants. Well, it did outlaw all remnants of a thing that had once seemed important, so perhaps it belonged in the section Remnants, except that it had nothing to do with the Earth Severance Act. Thomas didn’t see much wrong with the phrase or proposition, except that it was completely out of place and a little unsavory in its arrogance. It wasn’t that he opposed the idea; it was just the utter presumption of the Lawmasters, or whoever, in setting it in here in a bill where it did not belong and in trying to slide it past him.
“They should call it the ‘Ban the Beyond Act,’” he said. Its very plausibility went against it. Why bother to enact such a thing? It wasn’t needed. There was no reason at all for it. But somebody had gone to the trouble of trying to slip it past him.
“Aye, they’d forbid the thing even to cast a shadow any longer,” he said. “Why should they so fear a shadow? The thing itself’s about dead. Give it its last minute. Why so avid to murder it, when already the heartbeat has nearly stopped?”
He cut the clause out of the bill. He felt apprehensive when he had done it. He had been cutting bigger things out of bigger bills all day, much of it for devilment, most of it out of curiosity, to see just what they would ride back in on the next day. He hadn’t been apprehensive about cutting up the bigger bills. He was worried because things were losing their proportion for him. He closed up shop for the day.
The next morning it was back as a rider to the Botch Bill, the first bill of the day. Somebody had been busy during the night finding a way to insert this into a bill that had no possible connection with it, a bill he had already scanned and which had been set over for only one minor clarification. Thomas surely wouldn’t have spotted it in the Botch Bill if it hadn’t been for a warning in his mind, an old Rimrock-like sort of warning: The Killers are upon you.
Thomas heard a distant ticking in his mind as though time were running out on him. This odd little recommendation was important to someone, and it began to have a gamier smell than mouse or mole could give.
He angrily vetoed the entire Botch Bill. There was something final about his act. He had felt himself the master. Now he felt himself out of his depth, and for one small phrase of indifferent meaning and no importance at all. He was whiting in the hands of the Programming Machines and the Programmed People. But he was president.
He closed up shop for that day. It was not yet eight o’clock in the morning. He hadn’t been in the suite for ten minutes.
“A King should not work all day like a knave. In particular, a King should not work on an inauspicious day.”
Kingmaker talked to Thomas privately about it that evening. Thomas would much rather have talked to Fabian Foreman about it, but Foreman hadn’t given the sign that he wanted to talk now, and in fact had dodged out of it the one time Thomas had approached him.
“Gallows-time will be time enough to talk,” he’d said, and he had winked at Thomas without humor. But there had been a thing deep in Foreman’s eyes, and another thing deeper, and a third thing deeper still.
So it must be a lecture from Kingmaker.
“It is all a question of neatness,” Cosmos Kingmaker said. “The Good Life cannot have any awkward element in it. There is really but one awkward element surviving (barely surviving), and it is that which we are cutting out. The Dream of Astrobe is Finalized Humanity. If anywhere there is a belief in a spook beyond, then the Dream will fail.”
“Finalized Humanity is a tricky phrase, Cosmos. It has two meanings. It can mean perfected humanity. Or it can mean terminated humanity.”
“No, it has only one meaning, Thomas. They are the two sides of the same thing. We, the People of the Dream, have raised ourselves from single-celled creatures, and from things still lower than the single cells. The Cosmic Thing is us. We are the Blessed of the ancients; we are the Saints. The Hereafter is here now, and we are in the middle of it. Don’t foul the nest, Thomas, don’t!
“There is an ancient allegory about mad creatures who broke out of our state of perfection, believing that there was something beyond. They fell forever into the void. Let not that happen to us!”
“I just had a black notion that the tags were mixed and that Golden Astrobe was the void,” Thomas said.
“Well, forget your black notions. And now we get politic about this. I myself do not see why it is important whether a dying thing live a little longer or die now. But the Programmed Persons among us say that it is important to them.”
“Aye, they have a timetable on the phasing of all things out, and it will not do for them to run behind. Forgive me, Kingmaker; that was another black notion of mine. I hardly know what I say.”
“If it is important to the Programmed Persons, but unimportant to us, then let us give in to them. They have given in to us so many times.”
“Have they honestly?” mused Thomas. “I have a feeling . . . I have a feeling that I’m in the middle of a fight. But it seems so small a thing to fight over that I’m full of doubt. But is it really so small a thing? It’s over the mixing of the tags again, you know. It is for me to decide whether the tags on ‘Everything’ and on ‘Nothing’ have been swapped, and whether I should forbid that they ever be righted.”
“No tags have been exchanged, Thomas. Everything is properly labeled on a proper world. If we do this thing, Old Earth will follow us; she follows us in everything now. So if we say that it is over with, then it is over with forever.
“And there is this, Thomas—you will sign the proposition tomorrow, or you will die the following day. There is a limit to what a World President can obstruct. A responsible bill or clause, passed three times by the Lawmasters, and vetoed three times by the president, means death for that president. Two vetoes is sometimes a grand or defiant gesture, though rather flamboyant, I think. Three vetoes is unheard of. Will you pass it?”
“What angered me was attempts to slip it through as blind riders to common bills.”
“It will be presented tomorrow as a bill of its own, clear and uncompromised. Will you sign it?”
“If it had been so presented the first time, I’d have signed it without question.”
“Yes, but will you sign it tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, Kingmaker. I stood, not long ago, on the top of Electric Mountain. I stood there in the middle of a thunder storm more intense than any I had thought possible. I traveled across a feral strip, and discovered that there are still a few Feral People. I saw creatures that made me believe that there really was, or had been, a Devil. I met a young man who was a One Day Emperor. I believe now that we may have a Nine Day King.”
“What are you talking about, Thomas? What of it? What has any of that to do with this matter?”
“I don’t know. It seems that it should have something to do with it. Remembering the High Thunder should make a difference in something.”
The Big Ones had Thomas up on the carpet the next morning: Kingmaker, Proctor, Foreman, Chezem, Pottscamp, Wottle, Northprophet.
But were not both Pottscamp and Northprophet creatures out of a forgotten nightmare? Well, can you afford to affront a man just because you have dreamed of him in an unfavorable light? What nightmare, anyhow?
“You’ll do one of two things, Thomas,” Proctor told him evenly. “You’ll sign the bill. Or you’ll die. You don’t seem to want to do the first. And I don’t think you like the second either.”
“Thomas, you have twice vetoed an innocuous item. Why?” Pottscamp asked.
There was something strange about Pottscamp that Thomas could not analyze. He knew the man well; and now he had the feeling that he hardly knew him at all.
“Spanish Devils! I don’t know why!” Thomas exploded. “I thought it innocuous also; I only resented the attempt to slip it by me in the dark. But I see now that it cannot be innocuous, if it was put in by stealth twice, and if you are all so excited over its veto. There’s an old man dying last night
and this morning, and perhaps he is already dead. So, let him die, and perhaps the thing has finally died with him. But you have no call to murder a thing on its death bed. Whether there be Things Beyond I do not know. Ye’d forbid the mind to consider them. I forbid the forbidding.”
“Thomas, the Metropolitan of Astrobe did die during the night,” Kingmaker said. “He died with all his followers around him—four of them. We murder nothing here which is living.”
“Thomas, trust us,” said Proctor. “At least trust Pottscamp here. Everybody on Astrobe trusts Pottscamp.”
“The man whose personal dishonesty nobody doubts,” Thomas sneered. Now why was he being so hard on so good a man as Pottscamp?
“Thomas, there isn’t one man in ten million on Astrobe or Earth who still believes,” said Kingmaker. “And last evening you told me that you yourself were no longer a believer.”
“That was last evening, Cosmos. In the mornings I sometimes believe a little.”
“It damages our relations with the Programmed to allow Beyond things to be believed in, even if only by one person,” Proctor said. “They want all this broken as a symbol. They insist upon it. This is one harmless point on which we can give ground. Now, here, it’s all in a bill by itself. Sign it!”
“Nine snakes in my head! I won’t!” Thomas shouted. “It is not just four madmen in Cathead you’d be outlawing. I found out about it only by accident, but there is a synagogue on Astrobe yet. It has between fifty and sixty members. There’s a mosque on Astrobe with thirteen members. There are several dozen of the old sects remaining, several of them with near a dozen members. There’s the green-robed monks of Saint Klingensmith still working in the feral strips. These are all good people, even if they are believers in outmoded things, and I see no reason to sentence them to death.”
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