Raft said coldly, ‘Commissioner Campion seems to have recovered his sense of values, however.’
Colley shrugged. ‘But then, he’s some sort of a Raft, isn’t he?’
‘He has the family appreciation of facts without self-pity.’
‘I think we can do without open insult.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’ Point to Colley. Raft said as lightly as he could manage, ‘I am, you know, because I’ve come to beg help,’ and knew he sounded only impertinent.
‘To charm the opposition, put him in a position of doing you a favour?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And it will be something I can’t risk refusing?’
‘I don’t know that. It concerns the clone-brothers in the police cells. Or anywhere else for that matter, but the closer they are the worse it is.’
‘You feel them, a mile away?’
‘Acutely. They inhabit my food, my sleep, my thinking. I am in a sweat of conscious self-control the whole time; it’s a nagging sickness without let-up and I want to be freed of it.’
Colley told him with practicality, ‘Your awareness is vitally useful and may continue to be so, but we might think in terms of a hypno-therapy that can be reversed at will.’
‘No. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in a haze of drugs and suggestion.’
‘It could come to that. Your problem is one psychology knows nothing about.’
‘I’m not so sure. Jim Lindley had some ideas and I’d like them tested. Under deep question.’
‘The hell you would!’ Colley found nothing intrinsically frightening in deep question but he had never heard anyone actually request the experience; that Raft should do so conveyed something to him of the insupportable nature of the affliction. But need came before sympathy. ‘I’ll talk to Ian about it. Controller Parker may have need of your – talent – also.’
‘I’ve asked both. They say, go ahead.’ And so, of course, he had offended again.
Colley asked coldly, ‘Then why come to me?’
‘Ian insisted that you are the operative officer.’
If Colley was mollified he did not show it. ‘The therapists are worked to their limits with several hundred hypnoed kids in various states of residual shock as their post-commands are negated under question. Fitting you in could be difficult. I’ll let you know.’
‘Don’t call us; we’ll call you.’
‘Eh?’
‘Ignore it; it was meant as a joke.’
‘And the point?’
Damnation! And, oh, to hell with it. ‘It was a twentieth-century way of giving a brush-off.’
Colley stood, enraged. ‘We live on the fruits of twentieth-century stupidity and they’re bitter. To us, Commander, you are a barbarian – intelligent, even housebroken, but a barbarian. And I don’t care to have a barbarian challenge my good intentions. You will have your appointment tomorrow, even if it means setting urgent work aside and upsetting curricula to pacify your vanity. Time to be fixed. I repeat, I will let you know.’
Raft took his dismissal. From the door he said, ‘Thanks for the good intentions, but it’s as well to remember that civilisation is a comparative condition and that this barbarian thinks yours has a strong smell of decay, for all its extreme youth.’
Colley’s inclination was to go back on his given word, to let the bastard stew in his nauseous awareness. But he was a man of some quality, not given to letting anger rule sense; and sense, reviewing the exchange of humiliations, reminded him that this trusted adviser had displayed no uncertain animosity against the world he advised. It might be well to know more about Raft’s attitudes, and his request for question offered a perfect opportunity.
He called Psychlinic and arranged, over the venomous protests of harassed personnel, for Raft to be placed under deep question on the following morning. To his description of the awareness problem they listened stone-faced, knowing already more about it than he ever would though still not enough for the construction of better than cloudy theories. In his list of specific questions to which he needed answers they recognised familiar ground; the Acting Commissioner was more concerned with Raft’s mental processes than the state of his empathetic guts.
Cutting the connection, Colley went immediately to Campion, half expecting Raft there before him giving his version of the dialogue, but the starman had apparently not thought it worthwhile to seek tactical advantage with power. That Campion accepted his account as a display of temper-tantrum, better forgotten by grown men (although Campion would not himself forget it), soured him further.
Then Campion surprised him. He wished to be present, behind the one-way screen and unknown to Raft – bandages, immobility and all – to listen to the questioning.
Colley found such sessions irredeemably boring; what scuttled from under the turned-over stones in the backyards of men’s minds was mostly cliché. Campion, he concluded, might add questions of his own to the catalogue; he might desire to learn more of his antecedents, although few concerned themselves with such unproductive queries in an era when half the world had only doubtful knowledge of its parentage. For himself, he would be satisfied to receive his required information, neatly interpreted and summarised by a questioner who knew his job.
3
‘Just sixty hours home, if that’s the word for the place, and frustrated already into journal-writing. Officially dead, I can’t leave this damned barrack, but am beginning to wonder if this “dead” business fools anyone. Must speak to Ian about it.
‘In the meantime, what I have asked to have done tomorrow has me half-stupid with revulsion, but I must have treatment or live on the edge of physical and mental debility and unremitting nausea. I face it with gritted teeth and black resentment.
‘I have said something of this to Ian, but he is a man of his time and can’t share the feeling; that I feel as I do seems to him all the more reason for therapy.
‘His attitude emphasises change and alienation. Today’s men don’t understand the reactions of an outmoded, impractical, emotion-guided intellect (the starship selectors should hear that, poor ghosts). I don’t suppose I understand theirs; I only suffer them.
‘The deep question business underlines the clash of attitudes.
‘It is certainly to be preferred to depth interrogation as we knew it – blood and bestialism. I am told that an expert questioner, properly briefed and knowing precisely the areas he wishes to plumb, can arrive at most of his material in a matter of minutes, asking exactly the right questions and framing them with the precision of meaning used in programming a computer.
‘ “Invasion of privacy” is meaningless to these people. I have put it to a few in the barrack and they feel that the concept does not apply to such interrogation. They can understand that it applied in my day, but we were barbarians who wrecked our/their world (it’s a marvel hearing them wriggle round saying this outright to my face) and they are different. The poor bastards actually think they have in some way become basically different.
‘They explain, as to an idiot child, that the practice is ultimately therapeutic although it has political aspects for both individual and state. But Security records are as sacrosanct as the old-time confessional – which shows how much they know of what could be done to the sanctity of the confessional. Not even a government, they tell me, can demand Security records because Security works outside governments, not for them.
‘I cover my cynicism because it rouses their resentment and their contempt for my barbarian conceptions, but I only wish their fantasy of love and goodwill had a chance of working. The Ombudsmen have had their day; they know it themselves. A new kind of preceptor is needed, one with more facts at command and fewer dreams to roll in. Then their Reconstruction can begin.
‘It seems that, after all, there is work for me here.’
He re-read the last line with a stirring of doubt. It was not the considered ending of his thought but more like an odd comment which had slipped to the pa
ge while his mental back was turned – a most odd comment from a mind whose immediate concern was simply to stay alert and alive.
He ran his pen through the line but did not forget it; he knew that the mind does not produce inconsequential oddities, that there is always a connection.
4
They took Campion, bed and all, to the basement Psychlinic and installed him in the ‘snoop-room’ with an earphone to relay sound and a throat microphone in case of need.
He felt no disloyalty or indecency in prying into the personality of one whose blood he believed he shared; he felt it logical to take the opportunity of discovering what this possible grandfather might be behind his stoic face. For him there were two Rafts, one a human figure whom he wished to like and respect, the other a puppet manipulated by circumstance and necessity. Deep question was for the puppet; his thought did not connect it with the man.
Campion could not have conceived that he suffered the eternal dichotomy of the dedicated, that Campion and the Commissioner were different people.
Raft’s expressed revulsion to the therapy he found irrational, and he felt to the man as he might to a child – protective and what he supposed the world called ‘fatherly’, which was a reversal of roles but seemed to fit the case. The men won’t hurt you, Son; remember, Daddy knows best.
In thinking so he was visited by a doubt, a generalised uncertainty, calling infallibility into question. For an instant of total clarity, involving all his senses, he was enclosed again in the tearing and screaming ambience of youngsters who would kill him while men with his own face struggled to preserve his life. All the decades of indoctrination could not explain or contain that event. It tilted his whole environment to display unfamiliar, contradictory vistas.
He wondered, with an odd feeling that this was not the first time he had wondered, if it was possible for quite literally everything a man believed to be wrong, for his whole life and ethic to be based on an unstable platform which could tumble him into unsuspected realities.
Through the snoop-glass he saw Raft enter and he steadied himself to observe and interpret. Certainties closed in. Days of inaction were disturbing and unsettling him; it was nothing more than that.
He knew it was much more than that.
On his way through the Psychlinic complex Raft was given an unintended glimpse into a waiting-room.
There were a dozen or so teenagers in there, and no dozen youngsters wait in silence, even if they are strangers to each other. These sat in dumb anguish, each one alone. A girl cried quietly, one boy shivered in psychic cold, two hid faces in hands, most stared ahead of them.
He knew who they must be, kids whose post-commands had been vitiated under question and who now knew what they had done on the landing field and in the barrack courtyard. They sat like the prematurely aged, horrified by unearned guilt, unable to accept what had been done to them, mentally unequipped against ruthlessness.
Psychlinic would clean them up, steady them. Psychlinic, Raft thought with an access of irritation, would wipe their noses and clean their dribbly chins; how like these sentimentally harsh idealists to set about returning the kids to the pattern without stopping to wonder if a few scars were not a necessary adjunct to maturity.
None of them took notice as he paused in the doorway, but his guide’s arm reached across him to pull the door to and urge him on.
At his own examination point he saw that laboratories throughout time and space are probably archetypal – at once functional and cluttered, austere and worked-in.
Two men waited for him, traditionally white-coated, one in his mid-twenties with an assistant of about nineteen. Their youth roused his innate distrust; all his outdated experience doubted young expertise.
He spoke resentfully to the older man. ‘Doctor Grierson?’
The ‘assistant’ said, ‘I am Doctor Grierson and this is my assistant, Tech Playfair,’ and discomfited him completely.
He muttered, ‘Sorry,’ and the boy grinned at him, understanding perfectly the prejudice and rejection. ‘Sit down, Commander. In that one.’
Raft sat, curiously taking in the apparatus around him; only the rear-projection screen at eye level five feet before his face was a familiar item.
Grierson hoisted himself on to a bench, swinging his feet, very young and very sure of himself. ‘I know the general nature of your trouble and it could be largely psychosomatic. Your men Lindley and Doronin were not explicit about their ideas in any record we have but I can guess roughly at their conclusions. Perhaps they told them to you?’
‘No, but like you I can guess.’
‘Guess for me.’ Then, blinking like a schoolboy who realises dereliction of good manners, ‘Please.’
‘Well … the condition exists throughout the clone, so there is probably a physical basis. Genetic, I suppose.’
‘I can think of other possibilities. If it is wholly genetic we are up against some very special considerations of your role in the cloning experiment. Have you thought of that?’
‘Of course.’
‘And?’
‘Insufficient data.’
‘Try.’
‘Forget telepathy. There’s simply a knowledge of the presence of the clone-brothers.’
‘Empathy?’
‘None. Evidence says the others have a powerful brotherly bond while I have at least as powerful an antipathy to them. The rogue in the brood.’
‘Not necessarily. It could be the same faculty expressed in different form, conditioned by special experience. You had a basic experience denied the rest of the clone: you were involved in their first-consciousness trauma, but as an outsider.’
‘Yes.’
‘You were adult, complicated by experience and intelligence, not a bundle of receptors seeking emotional warmth. The clone-awareness may have pre-empted the role of the missing mother for them but have no such meaning for you. It’s an interesting speculation. Anyway, you reacted violently.’
‘With physical nausea.’
‘And self-loathing?’
(Campion thought that would not be easy to confess to, and a restless time passed before Raft managed an unwilling nod.)
‘Why, Commander?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you do, you do.’ (Campion recognised the beginning of dominance, of Grierson concentrating on himself the man’s emotional as well as intellectual attention.) ‘Since Doctor Lindley succeeded in overcoming your symbolic physical self-rejection, you must have recognised what he said as true.’
Raft said with difficulty, ‘He said I blamed myself for being—’ But he could not use the word without feeling a posturing idiot. And the Doctor-boy was hugely amused about it.
‘For being beautiful, Commander. For being a magnificent animal. And because you were still more impressive in the springtime aura of youth, Professor Heathcote fell clinically in love with you as the progenitor of the perfect clone. He wasn’t in fact homo, was he?’
‘No.’
‘And you thought the experiment abominable?’
‘It was exciting at first, but later I began to think of the implications.’
‘And that was when self-loathing began?’
‘I think so.’
‘Guilt for willingly involving yourself in a perversion of nature, with overtones of psychic rape? Manhood assaulted and misdirected?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And the other thing?’
‘What? Oh, I see. Some resentment of the circumstances of my upbringing; a feeling of being unfit to be the – father – of a new humanity.’
‘Most would be proud.’
Raft breathed deeply, wringing truth out of himself. ‘I am cold at heart; I don’t love, don’t warm much to a friend. Sex with a woman, yes, but no love, no affection. I had a daughter and never gave her a thought; when finally I met her she was an irritation to be put up with. I supposed the clone would be the same, monstrous inside.’
Grierson shook h
is head. ‘Cloning is emphatically a physical process; the simulacra would start out with identical psychological bases but would meet with various traumatic experiences in the formative years and shed many manifestations while acquiring others. Which is probably what happened and why you, not sharing their group experiences, are the odd man out. Did Lindley take you further than that?’
‘No.’
‘Sure?’
‘Quite sure. What more is there?’
Grierson whistled softly. ‘Then he’s a bloody good practitioner and I salute him. He broke your fixation by sheer argument without presenting the real basis. He’s good.’
‘Very.’
Grierson’s style changed abruptly. ‘And he was compassionate. He did it the difficult way rather than rouse further ghosts.’ A professional hardness – assumed, not yet grown into his personality – flattened his voice. ‘I am not compassionate. I am faced with a problem and the additional information is necessary. What lies behind your conviction that you are incapable of love or close friendship?’
‘Simple reality.’
‘Despite all evidence to the contrary?’
‘What evidence?’
‘You know perfectly well but you won’t face the reality of your condition; there would be confusions you don’t want to encounter. Commander, we are about to dig truth out of you and a whole lifetime of repression working round the clock will not prevent us.’
‘No?’ Anger expressed itself as contempt. ‘If I decide to walk out, do you feel you could stop me?’
‘Easily.’
He was already standing when Grierson said, ‘Sit down, Commander.’
He sat. Surprise held him a moment before he began again to surge to his feet.
Grierson’s command came without special emphasis, almost with boredom: ‘Sit down and don’t get up again.’
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