The Journey of Joenes

by Robert Sheckley

  “Almost had us stopped,” said Dalton. “But then, consider how we worked to co-ordinate and stabilize the Beast’s movements! The poor thing lurched around the lab for weeks before we got that right.”

  “It killed old Duglaston of Neurology,” Ptolemy said sadly.

  “Accidents will happen,” Dalton said. “I’m glad we were able to tell Administration that Duglaston had gone on his sabbatical.”

  The professors seemed to have a thousand anecdotes about the building of the Beast. But Joenes impatiently broke into their reminiscences.

  “What I wanted to know,” Joenes said, “is why you built the Beast?”

  The professors had to think for a moment. They were separated by many years from the ecstatic days when they had first discovered the reasons for the Beast. But luckily, the reasons were all still there. After a slight pause, Blake said:

  “The Beast was necessary, Joenes. It or something exactly like it was needed for the success of Utopian Chorowait, and by extension, for the fulfillment of the future which Chorowait represents.”

  “I see,” Joenes said. “But why?”

  “It’s really terribly simple,” Blake said. “Consider a society like Chorowait, or any other society, and ask yourself what caused its dissolution. It’s a difficult question, and there really is no answer. But we can’t be content with that. Men do live in societies; it seems to be in their nature. Given that as a necessary condition, we wanted to build an ideal societal model at Chorowait. Since all societies are breaking down today, we wanted ours to be stable, and as equitable as possible within a framework of accepted democratic law. We also wanted a pleasant society, and a meaningful one. Do you agree that these are worthwhile ideals?”

  “Certainly,” Joenes said. “But the Beast—”

  “Yes, here is where the Beast comes in. The Beast, you see, is the implicit necessity upon which Chorowait rests.”

  Joenes looked confused, so Blake went on:

  “It’s actually a simple matter, and can be understood very readily. But first you must accept the need for stability, equitability within a framework of accepted law, and a meaning for existence. This you have accepted. Next you must accept the fact that no society can be made to operate on mere abstractions. When virtue goes unrewarded and vice is unpunished, men cease to believe, and their society falls apart. I’ll grant you that men need ideals; but they cannot sustain them in the valueless void of the present world. With horror men discovered how very far away the gods are, and how little difference anything makes.”

  “We will also grant you,” Manisfree said, “that the fault undoubtedly lies in the individual man himself. Even though he is a thinking being, he refuses to think. Though possessed of intelligence, he rarely employs it for his own betterment. Yes, Joenes, I think we can accept all that.”

  Joenes nodded, amazed at these points the professors had granted him.

  “So, given all that,” Blake said, “we now see the absolute necessity of the Beast.”

  Blake turned away as though everything had been said. But Dalton, more zealous, continued:

  “The Beast, my dear Joenes, is nothing less than Necessity personified. Today, with all mountains climbed and all oceans plumbed, with the planets within reach and the stars much too far away, with the gods gone and the state dissolving, what is there left? Man must pit his strength against something; we have provided the Beast for him. No longer must man dwell alone; the Beast is forever lurking nearby. No longer can man turn against himself in his idleness; he must be forever alert against the depredations of the Beast.”

  Manisfree said, “The Beast makes Chorowait society stable and cohesive. If the people did not work together, the Beast would kill them one by one. Only by the efforts of the entire populace of Chorowait is the Beast kept in reasonable check.”

  “It gives them a healthy respect for religion,” Dalton said. “One needs religion when the Beast is on the prowl.”

  “It destroys complacency,” Blake said. “No one could be complacent in the face of the Beast.”

  “Because of the Beast,” Manisfree said, “the community of Chorowait is happy, family-oriented, religious, close to the soil, and continually aware of the necessity for virtue.”

  Joenes asked, “What stops the Beast from simply destroying the entire community?”

  “Programming,” Dalton said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The Beast has been programmed, which is to say, certain information and responses have been built into its artificial brain. Needless to add, we took a great deal of care over that.”

  “You taught the Beast not to kill University professors?” Joenes said.

  “Well, yes,” Dalton answered. “We aren’t too proud of that, to tell you the truth. But we thought we might be necessary for a while.”

  “How else is the Beast programmed?” Joenes asked.

  “It is taught to seek out and destroy any ruler or ruling group of Chorowait people; next in priority to destroy the unvirtuous, and next to destroy any Chorowaitian. Because of that, any ruler must protect both himself and his people from the Beast. That in itself is quite enough to keep him out of mischief. But the ruler must also cooperate with the priesthood, without whose aid he is helpless. This serves as a decisive check to his powers.”

  “How can the priesthood help him?” Joenes asked.

  “You yourself saw the witch doctor in action,” Hanley said. “He and his assistants use certain substances that are gathered for them by the entire population of Chorowait. These, in proper combination, will turn the Beast back, since it is programmed to recognize and respond to the proper combination.”

  “Why can’t the ruler simply take the substances and their combination, turn the Beast back himself, and rule without a priesthood?” Joenes asked.

  “We took great care to preserve the separation between church and state,” Harris said. “There is no single combination, you see, that will serve for all times the Beast appears. Instead, a vast quantity of formulae must be calculated each day, using lunar and stellar cycles, and variables such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, and the like.”

  “These calculations must keep the priests very busy,” Joenes said.

  “Indeed they do,” Hanley said. “So busy that they have very little time in which to interfere with the affairs of the state. As a final safeguard against the possibility of a rich, complacent, and overweening priesthood, we have programmed a recurring random factor into the Beast. Against this nothing suffices, and the Beast will kill the witch doctor and no other. In that way, the witch doctor runs the same danger as does the ruler.”

  “But under those circumstances,” Joenes said, “why would anyone want to be a priest of ruler?”

  “Those are privileged positions,” Manisfree said. “And as you saw, the humblest villager also runs the risk of death from the Beast. Since this is the case, men with ability will always accept the greater danger in order to exercise power, to fight against the Beast, and to enjoy greater privileges.”

  “You can see the interlocking nature of all this,” Blake said. “Both the ruler and the witch doctor maintain their positions only through the support of the people. An unpopular ruler would have no men to help him against the Beast, and would quickly be killed. An unpopular witch doctor would not receive the vital substances he needs in order to check the Beast, which must be gathered by the efforts of the entire people. Thus, both the ruler and the witch doctor hold power by popular consent and approval and the Beast thus ensures a genuine democracy.”

  “There are some interesting sidelights on all this,” said Hanley of Anthropology. “I believe this is the first time in recorded history that the full range of magical artifacts has been objectively necessary for existence. And it is probably the first time there has ever been a creature on Earth that partook so closely of the supernatural.”

  “In view of the dangers,” Joenes said, “I don’t see why any of your volunteers s
tay on Chorowait Mountain.”

  “They stay because the community is good and purposeful,” Blake said, “and because they can fight against a palpable enemy instead of an unseen madman who works by perversity and kills through boredom.”

  “Some few of our volunteers had their doubts,” Dalton said. “They weren’t sure they could stick it out, even though we convinced them of the rightness of the thing. For the uncertain ones, Doctor Broign of Psychology was able to devise a simple operation on the frontal lobes of the brain. This operation didn’t harm them in any way, and did not destroy intelligence and initiative like the terrible lobotomies of the past. Instead, it simply wiped out all knowledge of a world outside of Chorowait. With that accomplished, they had no other place to go.”

  “Was that ethical?” Joenes asked.

  “They volunteered of their own free will,” Hanley said. “And all we took from them was a little worthless knowledge.”

  “We didn’t like to do it,” Blake said. “But the pioneer stage of any society is often marked by unusual problems. Luckily, our pioneer stage is almost at an end.”

  “It ceases,” Manisfree said, “when the Beast spawns.”

  The professors paused for a moment of reverent silence.

  “You see,” Ptolemy said, “we went to considerable difficulty to make the Beast parthenogenetic. Thus, self-fertilizing, its unkillable spawn will quickly spread to neighboring communities. The offspring will not be programmed to stay within the confines of Chorowait Mountain, as the original Beast is. Instead, each will seek out and terrorize a community of its own.”

  “But other people will be helpless against them,” Joenes said.

  “Not for long. They will go to neighboring Chorowait for advice, and will learn the formulae for controlling their own particular Beast. In this way the communities of the future will be born, and will spread over the face of the earth.”

  “Nor do we plan to leave it simply at that,” Dalton said excitedly. “The Beast is all very well, but neither it nor its offspring are completely safe against man’s destructive ingenuity. Therefore we have obtained more government grants, and we are building other creations.”

  “We will fill the skies with mechanical vampires!” Ptolemy said.

  “Cleverly articulated zombies will walk the earth!” said Dalton.

  “Fantastic monsters will swim in the seas!” said Manisfree.

  “Mankind shall live among the fabulous creations it has always craved,” Hanley said. “The griffin and the unicorn, the monoceros and the martikora, the hippogriff and the monster rat, all of these and many others will live. Superstition and fear will replace superficiality and boredom; and there will be courage, too, in facing the djinn. There will be happiness when the unicorn lays his great head in a virgin’s lap, and joy when the Little People reward a virtuous man with a bag of gold! The greedy man will be infallibly punished by the coreophagi, and the lustful must beware of meeting the incarnate Aphrodite Pandemos. Man will no longer be alone in the universe, but will live with creatures as marvelous as himself. And he will live in accordance with the only rules his nature will accept—the rules that come from a supernatural made manifest upon the Earth!”

  Joenes looked at the professors, and their faces glowed with happiness. Seeing this, Joenes did not ask if the rest of the world, outside of Chorowait, wanted this reign of the fabulous, or if they should perhaps be consulted about it. Nor did Joenes state his own impression, that this reign of the fabulous would be nothing more than a quantity of man-made machines built to act like the products of men’s imaginations; instead of being divine and infallible, the machines would be merely mortal and prone to error, absurdly destructive, extremely irritating, and bound to be destroyed as soon as men had contrived the machinery to do so.

  But it was not entirely a regard for his colleagues’ feelings that stopped Joenes from saying these and other things. He also feared that such dedicated men might kill him if he showed a real spirit of dissent. Therefore he kept silent, and on the long ride back to the University he brooded on the difficulties of man’s existence.

  When they reached the University, Joenes decided that he would leave the cloistered life as soon as he possibly could.

  X

  HOW JOENES ENTERED THE GOVERNMENT

  (As told by Ma’aoa of Samoa)

  An opportunity to leave the University came the following week when a government recruiter visited the campus. This man’s name was Ollin, and his title was Under-secretary in Charge of Government Placement. He was a short man of perhaps fifty years, with close-cut white hair and a ruddy bulldog face. He gave an impression of dynamism and purpose that greatly affected Joenes.

  Under-secretary Ollin made a short speech to the faculty: “Most of you know me, so I won’t waste time with fancy words. I’ll just remind you that the government needs talented and dedicated men for its various services and agencies. My job is to find those men. Anyone interested can visit me in room 222 of Old Scarmuth, which Dean Fol has graciously allowed me to use.”

  Joenes went there, and Under-secretary Ollin greeted him heartily.

  “Take a seat,” Ollin said. “Smoke? Drink? Glad to see someone turn up. I thought all you eggheads here at Stephen’s Wood had your own plans for saving the world. Some sort of mechanical monster, isn’t it?”

  Joenes was amazed that Ollin knew about the Chorowait experiment.

  “We keep our eyes open,” Ollin said. “It had us fooled at first because we thought it was just some gimmick for a monster movie. But now we know, and we’ve got FBI men on the case. Working undercover, they now make up one-third of the Chorowait group. We’re going to move as soon as we’ve collected sufficient evidence.”

  “The mechanical Beast may spawn soon,” Joenes said.

  “It’ll just give us more evidence,” Ollin said. “Anyhow, let’s direct our attention to you. I take it you’re interested in government service?”

  “I am. My name is Joenes, and I—”

  “I know all that,” Ollin said. He unlocked a large briefcase and removed a notebook.

  “Let me see,” he said, turning over the pages. “Joenes. Arrested in San Francisco for making an alleged subversive speech. Brought before a Congressional committee and judged an uncooperative and disrespectful witness, particularly in respect to your association with Arnold and Ronald Black, the twin Octagon spies. Tried by Oracle and given a ten-year suspended sentence. Spent a brief time in the Hollis Home for the Criminally Insane, then found employment at this University. During your time here you met daily with the founders of the Chorowait community.”

  Ollin closed the notebook and asked, “Is that more or less correct?”

  “More or less,” Joenes said, sensing the impossibility of argument or explanation. “I suppose my record renders me unfit for service in the government.”

  Ollin burst into hearty laughter. At last, wiping his eyes, he said, “Joenes, these surroundings must have made you a little soft in the head. There’s nothing so terrible in your record. Your San Francisco speech is merely alleged, not proved. Your disrespect of Congress shows a lively sense of personal responsibility much like that of our greatest Presidents. There is inherent loyalty in your refusal to speak of Arnold and Ronald Black even to save yourself. Your conversion from Communism is obvious; the FBI states that ever since your single misguided and naïve episode with the Blacks, you have steadfastly turned your back on the agents of international revolution. There is nothing shameful about your stay at the Hollis Home for the Criminally Insane; if you read the statistics, you would see that the majority of us need psychiatric care at some time or another. And there is nothing alarming about your association with Chorowait. Idealism can’t always be channelled in the ways the government would like it to be. Even though we plan to stamp out Chorowait, we must approve the lofty though impractical planning that went into it. We in government aren’t hypocrites, Joenes. We know that none of us is absolutely pure, and that
every man has done some little thing he isn’t exactly proud of. Judged in that way, you have really done nothing at all.”

  Joenes expressed his gratitude at the government’s attitude.

  “The man you can really thank,” Ollin said, “is Sean Feinstein. In his capacity as Special Assistant to the Presidential Assistant, he put forth these views about you. We made a careful study of your case, and decided that you were the sort of man we wanted in government.”

  “Am I really?” Joenes asked.

  “Past a doubt. We politicians are realists. We recognize the myriad problems that assail us today. To solve those problems we need the most daring, independent, fearless thinkers we can get. Nothing but the best will do, and no secondary considerations will stop us. We need men like you, Joenes. Will you enter the service of the government?”

  “I will!” Joenes cried, aflame with enthusiasm. “And I will try to live up to the faith that you and Sean Feinstein have in me.”

  “I knew you’d say that, Joenes,” Ollin said huskily. “They all do. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Sign here and here.”

  Ollin presented Joenes with a standard government contract, and Joenes signed. The Under-secretary put the paper in his briefcase and shook Joenes warmly by the hand.

  “Your position in the government starts as of this moment. Thank you, God bless you, and remember that we are all counting on you.”

  Ollin then started for the door, but Joenes called after him: “Wait! What is my job and where do I perform it?”

  “You’ll be notified,” Ollin said.

  “When? And by whom?”

  “I’m only a recruiter,” Ollin said. “What happens to the people I recruit is completely out of my jurisdiction. But don’t worry, your assignment will come through like clockwork. Remember that we’re counting on you. Now you must excuse me since I have a speaking engagement at Radcliffe.”

  Under-secretary Ollin left. Joenes was very excited about the possibilities before him, but a little skeptical about the speed with which the government would act.