The E. Hoffmann Price Fantasy & Science Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Crewmen seized a redheaded girl. She seemed duplicated and reduplicated time on end, as though she had become an animation of a strobe-light photo of a rapidly moving object.

  Gale shouted, and charged into the multiplication of figures. Another redhead popped up ahead of Corbin. She had a tire iron with which she slashed crazily, blindly. Corbin fired the projector again. That emptied it. He hurled it, and flung himself against Marcia.

  They lurched, rolled. He tore the tire iron from her hand, and heaved it at the bus bars.

  There was a blinding flash, a high tension arc, all green, a fierce and deadly green as the metal evaporated. Pellets of molten copper burned through his clothes and bit into his back. Circuit breakers pounded and thumped, but too late. From the computing room came the yells and footfalls of the statisticians.

  “Fire!”

  Insulation was burning. Transformer oil flared up and boiled over. The terrific backlash of inductance had not only broken down the insulation, but had started arcs which the oil could not quench.

  Blinded, and seeing only green and red and black spots which existed only in his tortured optic nerves, Corbin caught Marcia and got her to her feet. He knew his way without sight. “No fire this way,” he cried, and hustled her along. He kept moving until they stumbled into the chilly night air. Stampeding people ran into them, bowled them over, and raced on. Finally Corbin and Marcia stopped in the shelter of a boulder.

  “I can barely see,” he gasped. “Tell me.”

  “The whole building’s ablaze. I was facing the other way, so I wasn’t blinded. What happened?”

  Corbin had a good idea. It was so good that he kept it to himself, and answered, “There was a blank. I remember knocking you across the neutral space. That’s all I can call it. Neutral ground. Critical plane. Maybe it hadn’t any dimensions, but it seemed to have. It seemed to be the intersection of hyper-space and our space. Four-dimensional space cut by—I don’t know, maybe by a plane, maybe by a solid. They were about to grab you. You were going wild, doing a Chinese sword dance with the iron.”

  “I remembered to keep striking. The way you did with the leopard. I wonder where Les is? What happened to him? I saw him.”

  “Les?”

  “I saw him, for a glimpse. It was weird. Him, the resonator, the crewmen, the car, everything blending together. That girlfriend of yours—”

  “She jumped. Wonder you didn’t.”

  “I was too scared.”

  The fire equipment had not a chance. The main building was gutted. Corbin said, “I am in a tough spot now. How’ll I explain where I’ve been all this time? No matter what kind of yarn I dish out, it’ll land me in the booby hatch.”

  “Nobody’s had time to miss you, darling. You’re still off shift, you won’t be supposed to go on till—”

  “What’s that?”

  She made it clear to him that the thinning gloom, against which saguaros were beginning to make black figures, was the first dawn to follow the midnight clash with Gale. Corbin nodded, and said, “I might have known that time was as badly scrambled as everything else, and that the days in hyper-space would not jibe with the days on this side. Let’s get rid of these masquerade clothes. I’ll see you then. And hurry before it’s light enough for anyone, to see how we’re rigged out.”

  * * * *

  The first red flush was streaking the desert when he knocked at Marcia’s door. “I got home just in time to catch a phone call. Sally Blaine, one of the statisticians, told me all about it,” she said. “Guess how they’re explaining the destruction.”

  “I’ll need a handy story. The wilder theirs are, the easier it’ll be for me, just in case I do get on the carpet.”

  “A stolen Ford convertible is supposed to have crashed through the wall and made a short circuit.”

  “If it belongs to Henry Briggs, I know how it got there, but I’d as soon not discuss the matter.”

  “And they found the charred remains of a man,” Marcia continued.

  Corbin grimaced. “That’s more than I ever wished Gale, even during the worst of it. But how the devil could it have happened to him?”

  That evening, it was clearly established, by the lack of dental work, that the dead man could not be Lester Gale. And every other member of the staff had been accounted for except Gale.

  Destruction had finished the project.

  It appeared unlikely that there would be sufficient millions available to replace it. Taking Marcia and his severance pay, Corbin, with a fine new disregard for security, proposed that honeymooning get top priority, with job hunting deferred until they both really needed a change of pace.

  And it was not until a long time thereafter that Corbin explained, “I was too rattled to tell, you, then and there, that that unknown man could not have been Lester Gale. Les was making a dive for the crewmen who had grabbed my red-headed girlfriend from hyper-space. Lani was about your build and color. He made the same mistake they did, I guess. That’s what saved you and me. They all closed in on him and her, thinking they had us.”

  He never did tell Marcia that he had deliberately flung the tire iron to short out the bus bars, and so close the gap before the crewmen could realize their mistake and come back to correct it. Marcia would have insisted that he had made the most of his chance to give Gale a career in hyper-space; and that he could as handily have cut the power by reaching for the switch.

  And Marcia would have been right. The one thing he had not counted on was the fire. Someone had chiseled on insulation.

  THE SEVEN SECURITIES

  Originally published in Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1952, under the pseudonym Hamlin Daly.

  Instead of having Walter Carson locked up in the Regional Psychopathic Center, with those others who had expressed the belief that a jet-cruiser could reach Jupiter—or even Saturn—and return, the Thought-Control Board sentenced him to recant in public. Such leniency was because of Flora, Carson’s wife.

  Stereotelevisors had been set up to broadcast the medieval ceremony. With hieratic gestures, inquisitors set the traditional dunce-cap on Carson’s head. Twelve men, armed with ancient Springfield rifles and wearing quaint, high-collared olive-drab uniforms of 1917, marched him from the administration building to a seven-hundred-year-old Cadillac phaeton. This was archaic pageantry; there was no thought of preventing escape. Patrol shells, hovering a yard above the pavement, covered the procession with force-projectors; these were needless.

  Carson, looking at the faces of the Standard Citizens who crowded against cables stretched waist high along the avenue, saw not one friend.

  He felt their hatred—the purely impersonal resentment of a Standard Citizen for any Ten-Percenter; it billowed, wave on wave, like something tangible. These were a well-fed people. At first glance, one would take them to be uniformly handsome; on second glance, it would be clear that they were quite too uniform, not in the details of their features, but their expressions. Though they had many outward semblances of individuality, they were thought-controlled by a central intelligence. This was because they liked it that way; it gave them a feeling of security.

  The ceremonial car crawled along. In response to thought-force projections the crowd reviled and jeered Carson, dutifully. It was, however, forbidden to throw rotten eggs, tomatoes, or pop-bottles; the original finish of the ceremonial car was not to be jeopardized.

  After thrice circling the plaza, the vehicle swung into the square, to halt at the foot of a truncated pyramid draped with the national colors. The guards herded Carson to the uppermost terrace; a brass band, whose instruments were normally kept on display in the Administration Museum, sounded off the national anthem.

  Then, when members of the curator’s staff had done going from musician to musician with swabs and spray guns, neutralizing saliva that might otherwise corrode the sacred relics, electronic organs pealed a
prodigious harmony. Vocalizers gave the words in pure, clear tones such as no human throat had ever achieved since that ancient day when the anthem had been composed. The crowd stood at attention as the electronic throat articulated, “…the land of the free, and the home of the brave…”

  Then silence.

  Taking a step forward, Carson began to recite what the Thought-Control Board had prescribed: “I am at last aware of the absurdity and the impossibility of my plans. I regret sincerely that, ever for an instant, I wished that I had been right. I am grateful to the Thought-Control Board for this opportunity to beg you, my friends, to avoid Wrong Thought.”

  He stood, head bowed, hands clasped before him.

  The deep, the mellow utterance of the vocalizer, whose timbre had been preserved from ancient times by those who knew that the then-living speaker’s voice could never in future ages be equaled, thereupon addressed the penitent: “Walter Carson, you will now recite the Scientists’ Creed.”

  Carson responded, “I believe in the existence of e, in the method of Least Squares, and in the Theorem of Mean Values. I believe that the Mean Value is that value which is as likely as not to be exceeded. I believe in the Theory of Limits, and in the Infinite Series, and in the Thought-Control Board, world without end, amen.”

  The vocalizer said, “My friends. Walter Carson has paid his debt; he is not to be subjected to violence of ridicule. However, it is not compulsory to fraternize with him. You may disperse.”

  The guard went to the museum to surrender uniforms and weapons. The musicians followed. The crowd dispersed; Carson, ignored, went home alone, and afoot.

  * * * *

  He was medium-sized, neither slouching nor carrying himself erect. He had medium hair, and medium features, though these had a significant angularity. There was something non-uniform about the mouth and the deep-set eyes; instead of the petulance, the soft arrogance of the Standard Citizen, they signaled individuality. The very essence of being a Ten-Percenter was asserting—at least passively—his status as one of the un-secure, the un-protected, the self-sufficient. These unregimented ones, unguarded ones, were called Ten-Percenters because of their ancient relationship to the number of those in the majority group; there were fewer of them now, but the tag persisted.

  In return for freedom from thought-control, and freedom from compulsory security, the Ten-Percenter worked longer hours, and without observing any prescribed limit on his production or efficiency: and his group were so heavily taxed that they supported the Standard Citizen, whose un-holidays were no more than sufficient to give him an illusion of productivity—necessary for his mental tone and integrity. Inevitably, the Standard Citizen despised the Ten-Percenters whose creativeness and gluttony for work made the four-hour day and the two-day working week possible for the majority.

  But both sides felt that they were getting a bargain.

  Except for Flora, Carson would have been hustled off to that heavily-guarded spot in the badlands of the Dakotas, built as a permanent shelter for men who believed that by proper design of reactors, disintegrators and tubes, the standard space-jet could reach far beyond the established Martian cruising lanes; that Jupiter—and even Saturn—were attainable goals, in the round trip, not the one-way, no return, sense.

  Most of the inmates of the Center had been there so long that they babbled happily as they made little plastic models of generators and propulsion-tubes, or scribbled on the walls of their cells. Each had a set of equations and formulae for achieving better fuels, and more efficient fuel-disintegration. Modeling was considered a valuable occupational-therapy—though none were ever discharged as cured.

  One—a former space-admiral—neither scribbled nor made miniature jet-cruisers; he was in a straight jacket. A thought-inspector had caught him with drawings of a ship to reach trans-Neptunian planets, and the admiral, instead, of recanting, had shouted, “Damn it, it will work!”

  Carson, then a space-man down on his luck, had taken a job as guard at the Psychopathic Center. When he quit, he left with copies of the scribblings on the walls. That so many madmen agreed in principle had set him wondering as to the status of the Thought-Control Board.

  The Board concentrated on outstanding people. There was little effort directed toward culling what individualists—potential individualists—existed among the masses. The ninety-percent welcomed control; its final and supreme gift was freedom from the pains of thinking along unexplored paths. The individuals of this great majority had an intelligence—as far as mere intellect was concerned—so high that any mill-run specimen would have been rated a genius, in the twentieth century. There was merely aversion to facing any risk from use of that intelligence.

  Nor was there anything fancy about the Ten-Percenter’s I.Q.; the difference was in his attitude. He preferred his own mistakes, or the penalties thereof, to the well-being that came from another’s guidance; he had no fear of being underprivileged.

  The very pressure of regimented minds squeezed heretics into the open; spying was not necessary. The mechanized dullness of human robots goaded the Ten-Percenter, actual or potential, into self-assertion; the system had become automatic, over the centuries.

  As he walked, vibration-impacts pounded Carson’s brain. These psychic waves were tuned to be the frequency of brain and nervous system. Whenever his vigilance lagged, or when he was weary, he was unable to exclude the incessant hammering of the thought-broadcast projected from standard recordings.

  “Freedom from want…freedom from fear…freedom from thought… The Nine Freedoms and the Seven Securities…”

  * * * *

  After quitting his position at the Psycho Center, Carson found work at the Venusian Spaceways Shops. Secretly, he made models.

  He was a quiet, likeable chap; he had ability, including the necessary and vital one of yessing the right people while thinking his own thoughts.

  Having graduated from the right school helped. What had done things for him, however, was marrying a pleasant, colorless, and distant relative of the ruling family.

  Flora was no prize; she was without even the charm which certain homely women have, and not homely enough to be cute. Yet, he found her kind, unobstrusive, unobnoxious—and grateful. Carson was promoted, and because of Flora’s family, the tax on Ten-Percenters was not levied as strictly as it would have been otherwise.

  His salary, thus unplundered, soon became large enough to enable Carson to support Flora on a scale equal to that of the Standard Citizen. Moreover, he was able to buy sufficient quantities of thorium, tantalum, and other controlled substances he needed, on the black market.

  Carson ended by proving what he had suspected long before quitting the job of guarding unorthodox admirals and space-men: that the problem of trans-Martian, perhaps even trans-Saturnian flight had been solved.

  Flora was not excited when he came home. “How was it, darling? Dreadful as you expected?”

  He shook his head. “I had it coming for running off with my big mouth; if it hadn’t been for you, I’d be halfway to Dakota now.”

  “But now you know better?” she asked, solicitously.

  Carson studied for a moment. “Yes, sugar, now I know better.”

  “I’m so glad,” Flora said, contentedly: her life would be more secure now.

  Of course, she had entirely missed Carson’s meaning; he knew a better way of putting his idea across, now. Several nights later, he was ready to test it; he would win, or face the blast of a disintegrator-squad. No comfortable cell, with nice, clean walls and lots of crayons for scribbling.

  He got a central-communications man thoroughly drunk on contraband Venusian brandy that was silky-smooth, innocuous-seeming, yet active as a brace of volcanoes. Taking the man’s identification-card and tool-kit, Carson made his way to the information-building. The outer guards passed him without question; once in the tall tower, he walked confidently and incons
picuously to the room where the night staff was at work.

  Some were preparing thought-tapes for projection; others were modulating the frequency. Graphic indicators showed the moment-by-moment datum-plane of public thought. Though much of the process was automatic, human selectivity was needed to pick from the stock of patterns that idea-equivalent to which members of the democracy would be most receptive, at a given period. The “fear” and “greed” motifs were the most infallible, though Terrestrial Democracy’s Superiority was a runner up.

  No one paid much attention to Carson when he stepped into a corner, knelt, and opened his tool-kit; he had his back to the staff-men. He took out a compact respirator, fitted it to his face, then opened the valve of the compressed-gas cylinder which occupied most of the kit. The whirr of instruments, and the hum of laminations which pervaded the office, masked the hissing of the anesthetic as it escaped; it was a propane derivative which had little warning odor, if any.

  The result was total blackout. Some crumpled in front of the instrument-panels; others went limp across their desks. A few slid from their chairs to sprawl like bundles of rags on the floor.

  Protected by the neutralizing-respirator, Carson set to work, preparing the tape which he would feed into the thought-vibration projectors, and which would simultaneously be broadcast orally.

  “Tran-Martian navigation is possible. The Administration prevents exploration beyond Mars because of fear that discovery of new sources of wealth and new standards of living would make you less dependent upon it for security. While the Venusians and Martians have been found to be inferior in their civilization, there is always the grave risk that further exploration would bring you in contact with people whose greater social advantages, higher order of security, more copious endowment of comfort, luxury, and convenience would make you discontented with the present hierarchy.