IMMORTALITY FOR SOME

by J. T. McIntosh

  Damn it, there was nothing wrong with the tests if only you used them with a grain of sense. Those three figures of Susan’s told a clear story—I.Q. 155, mechanical ability 139, VTC 198. Obviously she rated pretty high on intuition. There still wasn’t any way to test intuition directly, but like radium in pitchblende it could be inferred. If 141, 139 and 155 averaged out at 198, there was some radium around somewhere.

  Jennings, a mathematician and a scientist, was prepared to back Susan’s hunch about Benny. Not that he cared about Benny as a person. What interested him was the operation of the testing system.

  Back in his office he phoned a request to the Federal Rebirth Institute for Benny’s registered VTC rating. In fifteen minutes it came back: 31.

  When he saw that he caught his breath. His eyes glowed as he switched on his own auxiliary power supply and became a human bulldozer. There was something here that had to be investigated, something that wasn’t right.

  The VTC rating of 31 was impossible. Benny was a musical imbecile, true. The rest of the tests hadn’t shown him up as any kind of genius, either. But a VTC rating of 31 meant someone was unemployable—far below the capacity of a caretaker. There was something strange here. Something strange and exciting.

  Jennings sent for Benny again. He came at once. “You wanted me, Mr. Jennings?”

  “Yes, sit down there, Benny. I guess you wondered what that test this morning was for. The truth is, Susan Sonnenburg requested it. She didn’t say why, but my guess is she thought you’d rate Rebirth.”

  “I don’t,” said Benny simply. “And I’d rather not go into it again, if you don’t mind, Mr. Jennings.”

  “Just for curiosity,” Jennings said, “I found out your official VTC rating, Benny. It’s 31. Now that’s impossible. Take my word for it, it’s all wrong. Tell me, do you remember anything about that test?”

  “Not much. It was seventy years ago.”

  Jennings leaped to his feet. “If you really rated 31, Benny, you wouldn’t remember it was seventy years ago. You wouldn’t be able to calculate it was seventy years ago. Understand?”

  “If you say so, Mr. Jennings.”

  “What else do you remember about the test seventy years ago? Was there anything special about it? Were you sick, or anything?”

  “I don’t remember, Mr. Jennings.”

  “Would you like to do that test again?”

  “No, Mr. Jennings.”

  The blunt, unequivocal answer threw Jennings for a moment. “But, Benny, that rating’s all wrong. It must be. I can’t promise anything, of course, except that you must be a Jot higher than that. How much higher I don’t know.”

  The top ten per cent were those above 120. It was highly unlikely that Benny was anywhere near 120, and Jennings had no desire to raise the old man’s hopes, even with Susan Sonnenburg’s hunch to go on. But the test had to be carried out.

  “Look, Mr. Jennings,” said Benny appealingly. “All my life I’ve known Rebirth wasn’t for me. I’ve grown old knowing other people could look forward to it, but not me. Long ago I came to accept that. I’ve taken it for granted for so long I don’t want Rebirth—can you understand that?”

  “Well, you don’t have to have it. People aren’t forced to go for Rebirth, you know—unless their rating is so high that society just can’t afford to lose them. Benny, I want you to take the test just to set the record straight. Your VTC rating isn’t really 31, and never was. Suppose it’s 70… 100… even 110. Wouldn’t you like to know that—just so you won’t go on thinking you’re a no-good never-was?”

  Benny shrugged. “If you like, Mr. Jennings. Anything you say.”

  Later that day Jennings had the result. He stared at it incredulously. VTC, 30.

  He didn’t know what to say to Benny. Now that it had happened, now that there was no conceivable doubt, possible explanations suggested themselves to him.

  Just as Susan Sonnenburg could total more than the sum of her parts, Benny could total less. I.Q. 98. M.Q. 42. Mechanical ability, 116. Mathematical ability, 126—an incredibly high rating for a caretaker, that. Self-assertion, 41—just as incredibly low, that one. Memory, 110.

  Nothing on the card lower than 41, rising through 126, and the VTC rating was 30. It could have been criminal, psychotic, antisocial tendencies that brought the figure down, but it wasn’t. The antisocial tendency figure was neutral.

  Jennings solved the problem of what to say to Benny by not seeing him at all. He merely sent down a note saying the new test confirmed the old one.

  Then he tried to do what Weygand had told him to do—forget Benny.

  Benny’s single-room apartment was twenty minutes’ walk from the Musicosmos Building. As he walked home, he was wondering whether to leave Musicosmos. He was cool, unalarmed. Unworried, he weighed the two sides of the question.

  On the one hand, once people started getting interested in you they usually went on until they found out altogether too much. On the other hand, if you stood your ground for once and brazened it out, all curiosity about you might be stilled forever and you’d be safe as you’d never been before. People didn’t look where they’d looked already. You wouldn’t know about that—you’d always run out when things got too hot.

  Just as he was deciding that this time he’d stay put as long as he could, he became aware that he was being followed.

  His steps didn’t falter. Who would follow him? Only someone who did not know too much about him. Anyone who knew more would be aware that he was simply walking home from Musicosmos, as he did every day, and that there wasn’t the slightest need to follow him.

  Maybe he’d made a mistake in that VTC test.

  Why had they tested him, anyway? He had thought it was merely something to do with Susan Sonnenburg, that she’d arranged a test under the impression that she was doing him a good turn. But if so, who was following him now? Susan was in the Rebirth Institute, and had long since ceased to know or care anything about Benny Rice.

  Deliberately passing the newsstand where he usually bought a paper, Benny acted as if he’d suddenly remembered it and went back for it. That gave him a chance to get a good look at the man tailing him. He was between thirty and forty and the most nondescript individual Benny had ever seen. Even looking straight at him Benny could hardly decide on any feature that might help to identify the man later. Catching Benny’s gaze, he stared back so indifferently that for a moment Benny thought he had been mistaken.

  But he hadn’t been mistaken, he realized. This man was a master at his job. He was so good that Benny wondered if he’d been allowed to realize that someone was following him, simply to see what he would do.

  No longer unworried, Benny made his plans in a flash. He had to go to his room, for his money was there, his escape money. But the last thing the detective following him would expect was that he would bounce out the moment he went in.

  Gone forever was the possibility of staying put and brazening it out. When top-grade detectives followed you around, it was too late to rely on the pretense that you were a dumb ancient caretaker, VTC 30. When top-grade detectives followed you around, you just weren’t a dumb ancient caretaker, VTC 30, and you’d never manage to convince anybody that you were. It didn’t matter who was employing the detective or why; once anybody got that far his goose was cooked.

  The detective wasn’t police, for the police would peep you with TTV. His best chance was to be far, far away before the cops became interested.

  He was on the run again.

  When Benny Rice didn’t appear at Musicosmos the next morning, the matter wasn’t sufficiently important for anyone to pay much attention. Certainly his nonappearance wasn’t reported to anybody as important as Weygand or Jennings.

  It was only when a woman came round making inquiries that the blank-eyed porter who took Benny’s place at the door linked the events of the last few days and called Jennings in the testing Department.

  “There’s a woman here asking about Benny, Mr. Jennings,�
�� he said. “You’ve had him up there a lot lately. I wondered if maybe—”

  “What do you mean, asking about Benny? Isn’t he there?”

  “No, he ain’t here. Ain’t been in all morning. I thought you—”

  “What’s the woman like? Old?”

  “No, young.” The porter, who had not been young for a long time, left it at that.

  “Send her up.”

  Jennings was surprised to meet a girl in her twenties who was obviously a professional beauty of one kind or another. She introduced herself as Marita Herbert.

  “Sorry to trouble you, Mr. Jennings,” she said. “I’m interested In Benny Rice. I want to find him, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  Her smile didn’t go, but it froze a little. “Frankly, Mr. Jennings, I don’t see that that’s any concern of yours.”

  Jennings shrugged. “If you want me to help you find Benny, you’ll have to tell me something. I’m not in the slightest interested in your affairs, Miss Herbert. But I’m still very interested in Benny.”

  “Still?”

  “Why do you want to find him?”

  She shrugged ruefully, almost irritably. “I met him the other night. He’s three times my age, but he did things to me. I want to see him again. I have to. I even had a detective find him for me.”

  Jennings swallowed. “You’re in love with him?” he asked incredulously.

  “Not that. Not exactly. Can’t I want to see him again without being in love with him?”

  “You said you had a detective trace him. Didn’t you know where he lived?”

  “I only knew his name. The detective I hired found he worked here. They tell me he’s a caretaker, but that can’t be right.”

  “Why not, Miss Herbert?”

  “Well, the other night he was spending money like water.”

  “Perhaps he won it on a horse.”

  “Maybe, but— Well, he’s nice. Understanding. Clever, but not clever the way a professor is clever. Good at guessing. Educated. And he has taste.”

  Startled, Jennings said: “Many such men are caretakers.”

  “Are you kidding? Maybe you think I’m dumb, and wouldn’t know class when I see it? Look, Mr. Jennings, I want to see Benny Rice again because… well, in just a few hours he made me see things differently. He gave me back my self-respect, understand? I need him like some people need to go to church. Do you have the faintest idea what I’m talking about?”

  Jennings thought of Benny’s VTC rating: 30. He had given up too soon. Of course that figure was incredible, just as he had told Benny before the test. He wanted to think.

  “Leave your name and address, Miss Herbert. We’ll let you know about Benny once we’ve done some checking. We’ll send somebody to his apartment.”

  She shrugged. “You can save yourself the trouble. He isn’t there. Seems I know a heck of a lot more about him than you do.”

  “What do you know, Miss Herbert?”

  “I’ve told you. He isn’t at his apartment. Silver, the detective I hired, phoned me last night to tell me he’d just followed Benny to his apartment. Seems that while he was doing this, Benny was walking out. And nobody’s seen him since. That bright private eye of mine says he has some clues, but I’m not counting on it.”

  When she had gone, Jennings’ eyes were alive again.

  Somehow or other Benny had faked that VTC test. He must have, because the Benny Jennings knew bore little or no resemblance to the Benny whom Marita Herbert had met.

  In one way Benny had done an extraordinary job—any ordinary attempt to fool the test would show up like a sore thumb. In another way he had been astonishingly dense. Why should anyone who had the brains to fool the test and the testers be such an idiot as to get himself a rating of 30? If Benny merely wanted to hide, not to be noticed, he should have scored around 90 at least, perhaps 100. There could be nothing less remarkable than being average. Instead, he’d twice achieved a false rating which must puzzle everybody.

  Benny had never given any evidence of intelligence in the presence of Jennings, as he must have done with Marita and possibly with Susan Sonnenburg. Nevertheless, he had never managed to be dumb enough to fit a VTC 30 rating.

  Why should anyone pretend to be a useless moron when he wasn’t? Jennings could think of only one answer.

  The police were polite but unimpressed. However, Sergeant Basch came to see Jennings. He was a bright young man who looked as if he had no intention of being a sergeant for long.

  “I understand this man Rice has disappeared?” Basch said.

  “He went to his apartment last night as usual, but didn’t stay longer than five minutes. He hasn’t been seen since.”

  “I didn’t quite get what you meant about this test, Mr. Jennings. Why are you convinced that Rice faked it?”

  “Like all personality tests,” said Jennings, “this one is empirical. It’s constantly being checked against facts, against other data and other results. And in the light of these it’s modified. This has been going on for a long time. We can even invert the test, sort of, and instead of saying ‘This man’s VTC is so-and-so, therefore he ought to be capable of such-and-such,’ we can say ‘This man does such-and-such, therefore his VTC must be so-and-so.’ Now Benny Rice hasn’t exactly been running Musicosmos, but even what he’s been doing here would need a rating of about 80.”

  “But the test shows 30.”

  “Yes.”

  “And therefore?”

  “Therefore there’s something funny about the test. Not the test itself or the way it was carried out, but the way Benny did it.”

  “I see. So you think—?”

  “That he has his own reasons for pretending to be useless and of no account. The obvious possibility is that he committed some kind of crime.”

  Basch shook his head. “There are no unsolved crimes, Mr. Jennings. You know that. Any criminals around, we know about.”

  “That’s if you established the crimes as crimes.”

  Basch was quite definite. “With transmitterless TV, crime has just about stopped,” he said. “Not crimes of passion, of course. Not crime on impulse. But crime for profit, yes. There just isn’t any profit.”

  “I don’t think you’ve seen the significant point in this affair, sergeant. Benny is over a hundred. And if he faked the test he had yesterday, he also faked the one he had seventy years ago.”

  “Maybe I’m just a dumb cop. I still don’t get it.”

  “If Benny had to cover up seventy years ago, the crime, if any, must have occurred before that.”

  Basch snapped his fingers. “Of course. You mean it was so long ago we didn’t have TTV?”

  “Not exactly, but certainly before the present position was established—when everybody knows that crime doesn’t pay, and doesn’t try to buck the odds.”

  Basch grinned boyishly. “If this old guy has got away with something for more than seventy years, I say good luck to him.”

  “That’s not the point, is it? Don’t you want to find out the truth? I do. I can’t understand how Benny got round those tests.”

  “Surely if you gave me the test, and I wanted a low rating for some reason, all I’d have to do would be answer most of the questions wrong?”

  “No. It’s not a straight yes-no questionnaire. The questions dovetail, and often in checking afterwards I have to take several answers together. Inconsistency shows up, and a deliberate attempt to fool the test would fail.”

  “But you’ve just said—”

  “There’s one way it could be done. I could do it, because I know the test—remember the answers.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Yes, because you don’t so much remember a lot of individual, meaningless answers as a pattern. You know the kind of relationships you’re supposed to be able to see, and the kind that are supposed to be beyond you. You know when to answer correctly, when to leave a blank space and when to write gibberish.”

  “That wou
ld take a pretty clever man, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  There was something significant in his glance, and once more light dawned on Busch. “You mean this Rice character rates Rebirth, but can’t collect because he’s pretending to be a moron?”

  “Exactly.”

  Basch became serious. “If you’re right—if there was a crime—it must be pretty serious. Nothing less than murder. Well, we’ll soon find out.”

  “How?”

  “Check back over Rice’s life and see if anybody around him ever died. Then check all the deaths to make sure they were what they seemed to be.”

  “Can you establish that now?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “How?”

  “In about a million ways. Suppose you shot me here and now. All the glass, metal, wood and plastic in the room would shiver and record the shot in their molecular structure. In ten years’ time it could be established that a shot was fired, and the date could be fixed within a month. Likewise, the fumes would settle, dust would cover that, and even when the place was cleaned there’d be strata, just like in rock, and a careful examination might uncover the gas deposit. Might—wouldn’t swear to that. Likewise, if I fell on the floor, that would make its record— ‘Course, for every fact we want about the incident we want, we find a thousand we don’t want about other incidents, other occasions—”

  “You mean, once you have reason to look in a place, you find out everything that ever happened there?”

  “Something like that. ‘Course, we have to interpret what we find.”

  “And you’re going to check back on Benny?”

  “Well, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Jennings wasn’t so sure now. He had nothing against old Benny, and there was something inhuman about a method of detection which could find out what had happened in a room years ago, even if all the people who had been present were dead—