Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

  They had the crowds behind them now. Ahead, the great metal gate of the Educational Center swung slowly open and his car rumbled inside. As the motorcycle policemen swung off their two-wheelers with a smart sidewise flourish, the armed guards of the Service of Education in their crisp white tunics came to attention. Garomma, helped nervously by Moddo, clambered out of the car just as the Center Band, backed by the Center Choir, swung into the roaring, thrilling credo of Humanity’s Hymn:

  Garomma works day and night,

  Garomma’s tasks are never light;

  Garomma lives in drudgery,

  For the sake of me, for the sake of thee…

  After five verses, protocol having been satisfied, the band began The Song of Education and the Assistant Servant of Education, a poised, well-bred young man, came down the steps of the building. His arm-spread and “Serve us, Garomma,” while perfunctory, was thoroughly correct. He stood to one side so that Garomma and Moddo could start up the steps and then swung in, straight-backed, behind them. The choirmaster held the song on a high, worshipping note.

  They walked through the great archway with its carved motto, All Must Learn from the Servant of All, and down the great central corridor of the immense building. The gray rags that Garomma and Moddo wore flapped about them. The walls were lined with minor employees chanting, “Serve us, Garomma. Serve us! Serve us! Serve us!”

  Not quite the insane fervor of the street mobs, Garomma reflected, but entirely satisfactory paroxysms nonetheless. He bowed and stole a glance at Moddo beside him. He barely restrained a smile. The Servant of Education looked as nervous, as uncertain as ever. Poor Moddo! He was just not meant for such a high position. He carried his tall, husky body with all the élan of a tired berry-picker. He looked like anything but the most important official in the establishment.

  And that was one of the things that made him indispensable. Moddo was just bright enough to know his own inadequacy. Without Garomma, he’d still be checking statistical abstracts for interesting discrepancies in some minor department of the Service of Education. He knew he wasn’t strong enough to stand by himself. Nor was he sufficiently outgoing to make useful alliances. And so Moddo, alone of all the Servants in the Cabinet, could be trusted completely.

  In response to Moddo’s diffident touch on his shoulder, he walked into the large room that had been so extravagantly prepared for him and climbed the little cloth-of-gold platform at one end. He sat down on the rough wooden stool at the top; a moment later, Moddo took the chair that was one step down, and the Assistant Servant of Education took the chair a further step below. The chief executives of the Educational Center, dressed in white tunics of the richest, most flowing cut, filed in slowly and stood before them. Garomma’s personal bodyguards lined up in front of the platform.

  And the ceremonies began. The ceremonies attendant upon complete control.

  First, the oldest official in the Service of Education recited the appropriate passages from the Oral Tradition. How every year, in every regime, far back almost to prehistoric democratic times, a psychometric sampling had been taken of elementary school graduating classes all over the world to determine exactly how successful the children’s political conditioning had been.

  How every year there had been an overwhelming majority disclosed which believed the current ruler was the very pivot of human welfare, the mainspring of daily life, and a small minority—five percent, seven percent, three percent—which had successfully resisted indoctrination and which, as adults, were to be carefully watched as potential sources of disaffection.

  How with the ascension of Garomma and his Servant of Education, Moddo, twenty-five years ago, a new era of intensive mass-conditioning, based on much more ambitious goals, had begun.

  The old man finished, bowed and moved back into the crowd. The Assistant Servant of Education rose and turned gracefully to face Garomma. He described these new goals which might be summed up in the phrase “complete control,” as opposed to previous administrations’ outdated satisfaction with 97 percent or 95 percent control, and discussed the new extensive fear mechanisms and stepped-up psychometric spot-checks in the earlier grades—by which they were to be achieved. These techniques had all been worked out by Moddo—“under the never-failing inspiration and constant guidance of Garomma, the Servant of All”—and had, in a few years, resulted in a sampling which showed the number of independent juvenile minds to be less than one percent. All others worshipped Garomma with every breath they took.

  Thereafter, progress had been slower. They had absorbed the most brilliant children with the new conditioning process, but had hit the hard bedrock of the essential deviates, the psychological misfits whose personal maladjustments made it impossible for them to accept the prevailing attitudes of their social milieu, whatever these attitudes should happen to be. Over the years, techniques of conditioning had been painfully worked out which enabled even misfits to fit into society in the one respect of Garomma-worship and, over the years, the samplings indicated the negative doctrinal responses to be receding in the direction of zero: .016 percent, .007 percent, .0002 percent.

  And this year. Well! The Assistant Servant of Education paused and took a deep breath. Five weeks ago, the Uniform Educational System of Earth had graduated a new crop of youngsters from the elementary schools. The customary planet-wide sampling had been taken on graduation day; collation and verification had just been completed. The results: negative response was zero to the very last decimal place! Control was complete.

  Spontaneous applause broke out in the room, applause in which even Garomma joined. Then he leaned forward and placed his hand paternally, possessively on Moddo’s head of unruly brown hair. At this unusual honor to their chief, the officials in the room cheered.

  Under the noise, Garomma took the opportunity to ask Moddo, “What does the population in general know about this? What exactly are you telling them?”

  Moddo turned his nervous, large-jawed face around. “Mostly just that it’s a holiday. A lot of obscure stuff about you achieving complete control of the human environment all to the end of human betterment. Barely enough so that they can know it’s something you like and can rejoice with you.”

  “In their own slavery. I like that.” Garomma tasted the sweet flavor of unlimited rulership for a long moment. Then the taste went sour and he remembered. “Moddo, I want to take care of the Servant of Security matter this afternoon. We’ll go over it as soon as we start back.”

  The Servant of Education nodded. “I have a few thoughts. It’s not so simple, you know. There’s the problem of the successor.”

  “Yes. There’s always that. Well, maybe in a few more years, if we can sustain this sampling and spread the techniques to the maladjusted elements in the older adult population, we’ll be able to start dispensing with Security altogether.”

  “Maybe. Strongly set attitudes are much harder to adjust, though. And you’ll always need a security system in the top ranks of officialdom. But I’ll do the best—I’ll do the best I can.”

  Garomma nodded and sat back, satisfied. Moddo would always do his best. And on a purely routine level, that was pretty good. He raised a hand negligently. The cheering and the applause stopped. Another Education executive came forward to describe the sampling method in detail. The ceremony went on.

  This was the day of complete control…

  Moddo, the Servant of Education, the Ragged Teacher of Mankind, rubbed his aching forehead with huge, well-manicured fingers and allowed himself to luxuriate in the sensation of ultimate power, absolute power, power such as no human being had even dared to dream of before this day.

  Complete control. Complete…

  There was the one remaining problem of the successor to the Servant of Security. Garomma would want a decision from him as soon as they started back to the Hovel of Service; and he was nowhere near a decision. Either one of the two Assistant Servants of Security would be able to fill the job admirably, but that wasn’t
the question.

  The question was which one of the two men would be most likely to maintain at high pitch in Garomma the fears that Moddo had conditioned him to feel over a period of thirty years?

  That, so far as Moddo was concerned, was the whole function of the Servant of Security; to serve as primary punching bag for the Servant of All’s fear-ridden subconscious until such time as the mental conflicts reached a periodic crisis. Then, by removing the man around whom they had been trained to revolve, the pressure would be temporarily eased.

  It was a little like fishing, Moddo decided. You fed the fish extra line by killing off the Servant of Security, and then you reeled it in quietly, steadily, in the next few years by surreptitiously dropping hints about the manifest ambitions of his successor. Only you never wanted to land the fish. You merely wanted to keep it hooked and constantly under your control.

  The Servant of Education smiled an inch or two behind his face as he had trained himself to smile since early boyhood. Landing the fish? That would be the equivalent of becoming Servant of All himself. And what intelligent man could satisfy his lust for power with such an idiotic goal?

  No, leave that to his colleagues, the ragged high officials in the Hovel of Service, forever scheming and plotting, making alliances and counter-alliances. The Servant of Industry, the Servant of Agriculture, the Servant of Science and the rest of those highly important fools.

  To be the Servant of All meant being the target of plots, the very bull’s eye of attention. An able man in this society must inevitably recognize that power—no matter how veiled or disguised—was the only valid aim in life. And the Servant of All—veiled and disguised though he might be in a hundred humbling ways—was power incarnate.

  No. Far better to be known as the nervous, uncertain underling whose knees shook beneath the weight of responsibilities far beyond his abilities. Hadn’t he heard their contemptuous voices behind his back?

  “… Garomma’s administrative toy…”

  “… Garomma’s fool of a spiritual valet…”

  “… nothing but a footstool, a very ubiquitous footstool, mind you, but a footstool nonetheless on which rests Garomma’s mighty heel…”

  “… poor, colorless, jittery slob…”

  “… when Garomma sneezes, Moddo sniffles…”

  But from that menial, despised position, to be the real source of all policy, the maker and breaker of men, the de facto dictator of the human race…

  He brought his hand up once more and smoothed at his forehead. The headache was getting worse. And the official celebration of complete control was likely to take another hour yet. He should be able to steal away for twenty or thirty minutes with Loob the Healer, without getting Garomma too upset. The Servant of All had to be handled with special care at these crisis points. The jitters that had been induced in him were likely to become so overpowering that he might try to make a frantic decision for himself. And that possibility, while fantastically dim, must not be given a chance to develop. It was too dangerous.

  For a moment, Moddo listened to the young man in front of them rattle on about modes and means, skew curves and correlation coefficients, all the statistical jargon that concealed the brilliance of the psychological revolution that he, Moddo, had wrought. Yes, they would be there another hour yet.

  Thirty-five years ago, while doing his thesis in the Central Service of Education Post-Graduate Training School, he had found a magnificent nugget in the accumulated slag of several centuries of mass-conditioning statistics; the concept of individual application.

  For a long while, he had found the concept incredibly difficult to close with: when all your training has been directed toward the efficient handling of human attitudes in terms of millions, the consideration of one man’s attitudes and emotions is as slippery a proposition as an eel, freshly caught and moribundly energetic.

  But after his thesis had been completed and accepted—the thesis on suggested techniques for the achievement of complete control which the previous administration had filed and forgotten—he had turned once more to the problem of individual conditioning.

  And in the next few years, while working at his dull job in the Applied Statistics Bureau of the Service of Education, he had addressed himself to the task of refining the individual from the group, or reducing the major to the minor.

  One thing became apparent. The younger your material, the easier your task—exactly as in mass-conditioning. But if you started with a child, it would be years before he would be able to operate effectively in the world on your behalf. And with a child you were faced with the constant counter-barrage of political conditioning which filled the early school years.

  What was needed was a young man who already had a place of sorts in the government, but who, for some reason or other, had a good deal of unrealized—and unconditioned—potential. Preferably, also, somebody whose background had created a personality with fears and desires of a type which could serve as adequate steering handles.

  Moddo began to work nights, going over the records of his office in search of that man. He had found two or three who looked good. That brilliant fellow in the Service of Transport, he reminisced, had seemed awfully interesting for a time. Then he had come across Garomma’s papers.

  And Garomma had been perfect. From the first. He was a directorial type, he was likable, he was clever—and he was very receptive.

  “I could learn an awful lot from you,” he had told Moddo shyly at their first meeting. “This is such a big complicated place—Capital Island. So much going on all the time. I get confused just thinking about it. But you were born here. You really seem to know your way around all the swamps and bogs and snakepits.”

  Due to sloppy work on the part of the Sixth District Conditioning Commissioner, Garomma’s home neighborhood had developed a surprising number of quasi-independent minds on all levels of intelligence. Most of them tended to revolution, especially after a decade of near-famine crops and exorbitant taxation. But Garomma had been ambitious; he had turned against his peasant background and entered the lower echelons of the Service of Security.

  This meant that when the Sixth District Peasant Uprising occurred, his usefulness in its immediate suppression had earned him a much higher place. More important, it had given him freedom from the surveillance and extra adult conditioning which a man of his suspicious family associations might normally have expected.

  It also meant that, once Moddo had maneuvered an introduction and created a friendship, he had at his disposal not only a rising star but a personality that was superb in its plasticity.

  A personality upon which he could laboriously create the impress of his own image.

  First, there had been that wonderful business of Garomma’s guilt about disobeying his father that had eventually led to his leaving the farm altogether—and later to his becoming an informer against his own family and neighbors. This guilt, which had resulted in fear and therefore hatred for everything associated with its original objects, was easy to redirect to the person of his superior, the Servant of Security, and make that the new father-image.

  Later, when Garomma had become Servant of All, he still retained—under Moddo’s tireless ministrations—the same guilt and the same omnipresent fear of punishment toward whoever was the reigning Head of Security. Which was necessary if he was not to realize that his real master was the large man who sat at his right hand, constantly looking nervous and uncertain…

  Then there had been education. And re-education. From the beginning, Moddo had realized the necessity of feeding Garomma’s petty peasant arrogance and had abased himself before it. He gave the other man the impression that the subversive thoughts he was now acquiring were of his own creation, even leading him to believe that he was domesticating Moddo—curious how the fellow never escaped from his agricultural origins even in his metaphors!—instead of the other way around.

  Because Moddo was now laying plans for a tremendous future, and he didn’t want
them upset some day by the cumulative resentment one may develop toward a master and teacher; on the contrary, he wanted the plans reinforced by the affection one feels toward a pet dog whose nuzzling dependence constantly feeds the ego and creates a more ferocious counter-dependence than the owner ever suspects.

  The shock that Garomma had exhibited when he began to realize that the Servant of All was actually the Dictator of All! Moddo almost smiled with his lips at the memory. Well, after all, when his own parents had suggested the idea years ago in the course of a private sailing trip they took together pursuant to his father’s duties as a minor official in the Service of Fisheries and Marine—hadn’t he been so upset that he’d let go of the tiller and vomited over the side? Losing your religion is a hard thing at any age, but it gets much harder as you get older.

  On the other hand, Moddo had lost not only his religion at the age of six, but also his parents. They had done too much loose talking to too many people under the incorrect assumption that the then Servant of Security was going to be lax forever.

  He rubbed his knuckles into the side of his head. This headache was one of the worst he’d had in days! He needed fifteen minutes at least—surely he could get away for fifteen minutes—with Loob. The Healer would set him up for the rest of the day, which, on all appearances, was going to be a tiring one. And he had to get away from Garomma, anyway, long enough to come to a clear-headed, personal decision on who was to be the next Servant of Security.

  Moddo, the Servant of Education, the Ragged Teacher of Mankind, took advantage of a pause between speakers to lean back and say to Garomma: “I have a few administrative matters to check here before we start back. May I be excused? It—it won’t take more than about twenty or twenty-five minutes.”

  Garomma scowled imperiously straight ahead. “Can’t they wait? This is your day as much as mine. I’d like to have you near me.”

  “I know that, Garomma, and I’m grateful for the need. But”—and now he touched the Servant of All’s knee in supplication—“I beg of you to let me attend to them. They are very pressing. One of them has to do—it has to do indirectly with the Servant of Security and may help you decide whether you want to dispense with him at this particular time.”