He tapped one finger a little on the table, to show Carolyn he was awake. The recorders would catch that, too, on their wire tape. A small panic touched him. He stared at the chessboards, pawn, knight, bishop, king; to save his life be could not remember the gambit, and whose move it was. He had a feeling that this exact situation had occurred before. He remembered—
His mind leaped on ahead, taking fire with its own irrational hysteria. He had to make the right move. It was vital. If he didn’t Carolyn would notice and suspect, or the recorders would, and he would be investigated and psych-checked and lose his post; there would be disgrace—
Stop it, he told himself frantically. Move any place. No, don’t do that. Carolyn knows your game. The records note any deviation from the norm. But do something!
His brain was empty. All he could feel was that flailing panic, and all he could sense was the silent terror far under his feet, the uranium pile that hovered below the critical mass, the incubus he guarded.
Something shifted, a soft rustle of motion, across the table, and the terror drained swiftly out of Breden. He knew, now, what it was he had feared.
He raised his eyes and looked at Carolyn Kohl. There was no cinder-edged hole marring her smooth forehead under the gray hair. A bulky, heavy-faced woman of sixty-eight, she lay back comfortably in her chair, sharp black eyes watching Breden through her contact lenses, her rather thick lips parted to show strikingly even white dentures. Though nearly seventy, she was still a top-flight nuclear physicist, and until lately had been better than Breden. But now she was slowing down a little, and Breden silently blessed that factor; if she had been sharper, she might have suspected something.
She was sharp, though. And Breden knew he could not go on with the game. He had to find an out. That wouldn’t be easy. There must be no deviations from his habit-patterns for the recorders to pounce on. The cool, soft light of the room was smothering.
The tension was growing again within him.
He thought of Margaret. But his wife’s familiar features blended, somehow, with the dark, placid, confident face of his brother Louis. And instantly all stability left him. It had always been that way, since he was old enough to understand that Louis was different, though not until years after that did he fully comprehend why his brother was a member of the strangest club that had ever existed on earth.
A club of the cursed and the blessed. The damned and the saved. And membership was strictly limited; it was so highly exclusive that you had to be born into it. You had to have been born within the effective limits of a chain reaction—not so close to the monstrous center that you disintegrated or were charred or died more slowly, with your flesh flaking off and your bones rotting, and not so far distant that your parents’ genes and chromosomes were unaltered. You had to have been in exactly the right place at the right time. It had only happened a few times since 1945, in Japan and New Mexico, and, some years later, in other localities, but the atomic explosions had salted humanity with a few very special specimens. Not supermen, although rumors were still highly popular about mysterious, omnipotent figures who stayed godlike in the background and moved humans like puppets. That was standard stuff in the television shows. The truth was less flamboyant, as usual. The mutants were a mixed breed. Some survived, but neither the best nor the worst. They were, however, better than humans in a number of ways. Not that they weren’t human themselves; it was semantically wrong to consider them alien. They were merely humans extended, just as Louis had been. As Louis was.
The old hatred and love and shame and fear flooded back, and Breden began to hear a totally imaginary throbbing from beneath his feet, the heartbeat of the uranium pile that was, in reality, simply a machine, waiting, latent and still, for its use to come. It was a symbol, nothing more. Its use had come. But that use would fail entirely if it ever reached critical mass.
It throbbed!
Its gigantic pulse crushed rhythmically into Breden’s brain!
For the first time in years he acted on impulse. He reached out at random and moved a knight on the nearest board. And, as he did so, he realized that he had made a serious mistake.
But nothing happened. Only the eyes of the recorders, watching from the walls, irretrievably photographed the blunder that did not jibe with Joseph Breden’s mental and habit patterns. It would never be ignored. Breden thought: I must think of an alibi. There’ll be questioning—
Carolyn said lazily, “What the devil’s the matter with you, Joe? Got a fixation or something?”
Breden said, “I guess you’ve licked me so often I’ve developed a chessboard death-wish.”
“Well, you’re certainly asking to be murdered,” she said, grimacing at the board. “No use playing this through. I’d have you in three moves. Want some coffee?”
Breden nodded. He lay back, weak with relief, exhausted from the long-maintained tension, but still knowing that he had to be wary. There was still a chance of retrieving his blunder. Carolyn, no psychologist, didn’t comprehend the significance of that inexcusable knight’s move, but the Controllers’ psychologists would know, or at least wonder and investigate. Not even the slightest shadow of a doubt must fall upon the guardians of the sunken ziggurat.
He studied Carolyn as she ordered coffee. Nearly seventy. A new thought came, and he was briefly shocked at himself. If he could throw suspicion on her, somehow, lay the blame for the lapse on her shoulders—
She was approaching the age when she would be no longer a perfectly functioning machine. She was, even now, the oldest of the technical crew. If he could make the responsibility hers, broach, somehow, a hint that the beginnings of senility were weakening her keenness—
He phrased a reply to a hypothetical question: I’ve been letting her win at chess. I felt sorry for her, a little. She used to be able to lick me easily, but not any more.
It would have to be subtler than that to convince the questioners. Yet the germ of the idea remained. Breden tried to put it away. He thought of his mutant brother again, and, as always, became conscious of his own weaknesses; but that brought its own cure. If he lost his job now, it would prove that Louis was the better man.
The thermobulbs of coffee popped into the analyzer, hesitated a moment while gadgets ascertained that no dynamite, uranium isotopes, or cyanide was being smuggled in, and then slid smoothly to the table. Breden turned his around till he found the right place and pushed in the sugar-cream lid. He watched it dissolve. Carolyn said something.
“Eh?”
“Margaret. Your wife. You remember. You married her, or has that slipped your mind? It’s no use trying to work out the right gambit now; the game’s over.”
Not the real game, Carrie.
He said, “Oh, I’m sorry. She’s up in the Rockies, near Denver. Thought the change of air might be good for her.”
“It’s her first baby, isn’t it?” Breden nodded. Carolyn sipped coffee and watched him over the rim.
“Cheer up,” she said abruptly. “I know what’s bothering you. But you’ve got the Mendelian law on your side.”
Another out?
Breden said, “I guess I’m a little worried, Carrie. My brother is a mutant.”
“But your parents weren’t,” Carolyn said. “Go see a good geneticist. Of course nothing new has been discovered for a hundred years; we can’t afford research in these times. But we certainly know enough about genes. How old is Louis, anyway?”
“Fifty-two. He’s twenty-two years older than I.”
“Well, good gracious,” Carolyn said, looking slightly like an indignant, though more sophisticated, Queen Victoria. “Even though your parents were exposed to the hard radiations—where was it?”
“The Hawaiian experiment in ninety-two.”
“Well! The gene-pattern trends back toward the norm. And in twenty-two years—! You can feel sure your parents were normal by the time you were conceived. There’s no question about Margaret’s heredity, is there?”
“Mutation? No.
No exposure. Her grandfather worked with X rays, but that was all.”
“X rays,” said Carolyn, with the scorn of one who worked with mesatrons and went on from there. “Your child won’t be a mutant. He can’t be.”
“Unless I disprove that empirically,” Breden said. “You’re talking theory. There’s been no independent research along those lines—along any lines—for a hundred years”—conscious suddenly of the watching recorders, he added—“which is a very lucky thing. It could happen that my parents were accidentally exposed again before I was born; they’d have been prone to the effect, after the first exposure.”
“You’re no mutant.”
“Might be latent in me. Recessive.”
“It’s impossible,” Carolyn said decisively. “And, at worse, you’d have a mutant child like Louis. He’s quite a big shot, isn’t he?”
“He is. His I.Q. is remarkable. He’s also got alcaptonuria. His blood hasn’t got the enzyme that takes care of alcapton through oxidation. He has one defective gene. When you do get a mutant, it upsets the apple cart, and while certain genes may be wonders for the I.Q. and so forth, there’s always the danger of a corresponding quirk somewhere. That’s why so few of the mutants lived. They were mostly freaks.”
“Louis gets along, doesn’t he?”
“Alcaptonuria isn’t serious. But suppose I have a child with phenylketonuria?”
“It sounds pretty bad,” Carolyn admitted. “Is it?”
“No, it just means that a certain acid in the blood isn’t changed—unfortunately, phenylketonurics are always imbeciles or idiots, too. The central nervous system is affected. They’re always mentally defective, Carrie.”
“I hope you haven’t told Margaret these cheerful little ideas of yours,” the woman said. “Even I know you’re all wrong.”
“It’s an occupational disease of potential parents. Ever since the first mutants were born, people started to worry if they were expecting a child. Oh, well. I guess you’re right. When the kid’s born, I’ll take a look at his medical charts and be able to relax.”
“Aren’t there any prenatal charts?”
“Sure. But . . . ah, forget it.” Carolyn studied him. “Why don’t you go and see Margaret?” she suggested. “She might be having similar ideas. Cheer her up.”
“She’s cheerful. A little peaked physically, but the Colorado air ought to help that. I am going to see her; tomorrow’s my last night here for a week.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I’m spending my time off in the Berkshires, with my grandchildren.” Carolyn sighed luxuriously. “I’m not going to do a thing but work my fool head off. I’m going to bake bread and make rhubarb pies. I’m going to dust and sweep and paint the furniture. I’m going to dig in the garden.”
“Good therapy,” Breden said, and Carolyn snorted.
“Joe, sometimes you irritate me. It’s fun! I wouldn’t like it as a steady diet, but I grew up in a midwest farmhouse, and I loved it. Ever eat fresh-baked bread?”
“No. Why bother? You can’t get refrigomeals—”
“Sure. A frozen Creole dinner is really something. Or a frozen Mandarin special. We never had those on the farm, and I couldn’t do without ’em now. But no quick-freezer can give you fresh-baked bread, either; it can’t give you the smell of it, which is half the pleasure. ‘I came across no wine more wonderful than thirst,’ ” Carolyn quoted.
Two men came into view on a visor screen—the relief crew. They said hello, while they stood in the entrance chamber and were thoroughly checked before admittance. Fingerprints, the rod-and-cone patterns of their eyes, respiration, pulse; traces of radioactivity on their clothes—a highly unlikely contingency, since nobody went near the forbidden sites of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hilo, the New Mexican danger area, or the few other scattered radiation radii. Dust samples were analyzed; the brain’s energy-pattern was recorded and checked; finally Sam Carse and Wilbur Fielding were discovered to be Sam Carse and Wilbur Fielding, and were admitted to the sanctum.
“Well, take over,” Carolyn said, getting up a little stiffly. “I guess Baby won’t explode tonight.”
And suddenly they were all quiet, listening, while four pairs of eyes moved with experienced swiftness across the faces of dial and gauge. But only Breden felt that dreadful, impossible pulse come up from below and vibrate through his body and shock against his brain.
Uranium Pile One.
If Archimedes had had this lever, he could have moved the world.
A voice from the wall said, “Breden, report to M. A. before you check out.”
No one commented; the reactions of Medical Administration were erratic and unpredictable. But Breden thought: I must get help! Somewhere—somehow—
First, though—there would be the matter of tricking Medical Administration.
III.
The only thing that could save Breden from having the veils ripped from his mind was the common phobia of all technicians, that he himself shared. Research men could think along experimental lines; they could scarcely help doing so or they wouldn’t have become researchers in the first place. But they didn’t do it in public. Implanted in their conscious was the idea of wrong-doing whenever they touched on independent research. It was contra bonos mores. Status quo was the ideal. A man who discovered how to draw free energy out of the air would have been suppressed, like the guinea pigs in “Alice,” had he been rash enough to announce his success. Guinea pigs, in fact, were not the popular little research controls they had once been.
It was likely, though, that a man discovering how to utilize free aerial energy would have forgotten his method as soon as he could. Unless strongly antisocial, he would have, instead, concentrated on perfecting some method to make independent research impossible. For status quo was the safety and the ideal and, by propagandized psychic implantation, the norm.
Civilization and technology had, in the middle of the twentieth century, approached the critical mass. Only the creation of the unified world government, with its practically unlimited powers, could have kept the global pile from beginning a fatal chain reaction. That was axiomatic.
So the technicians depended on safe axioms.
The patient is uneasy, apprehensive, insecure and fearful.
Dr. Hoag was a smiling little fat man. He said that they were getting a detailed report from Margaret’s clinical observers, with special reference to biology and genetics. “So that should relieve your mind about the danger of having a mutant baby,” he told Breden.
Three other psychiatrists regarded Breden thoughtfully. Breden said he knew it was illogical, but he couldn’t help worrying a little. He hoped it didn’t show in his work.
“You’re too good a man to lose,” Dr. Hoag said, glancing at a stack of cards and tapes on the desk before him. “Of course we can’t take chances—you know that. But this doesn’t look serious. You made a wrong move at chess. All we want to do is find out why.”
“Couldn’t it be an accident?”
“Nothing is an accident,” said one of the psychiatrists very wisely.
“Mm-m-m,” Dr. Hoag grunted. “This Wechsler test you just took, Breden—it’s not conclusive, but it’s indicative. So are these doodles of yours, and the association check-up. I know it’s natural for you to be worried about the uranium pile, but you’ve always compensated nicely till now.”
Breden waited. He had rigged the tests as much as he had dared. But he didn’t know whether or not he had managed to outguess the psychiatrists. This wasn’t the exhaustive check-up the Controllers supervised, or the arduous psych tests, with their mechanical detectors and their thoroughly efficient exhaustiveness. This was simply routine. At any rate, the psychiatrists thought so. They weren’t expecting real trouble. But if he’d given himself away in the tests, if they found out about his recurrent dream—!
Hoag said, “We’re agreed on the main point, though. I want you to listen to this closely. You play chess with Carolyn Kohl, You don’t want her to lose.
”
Breden frowned. “I don’t quite agree with that. It’s natural to want to win, isn’t it?”
“Normally. But in the past Carolyn Kohl has showed herself a far better chess player than you. Lately, these tests of yours show, you’ve found her easier to beat. But you haven’t won many games. Now why is that?”
“I don’t know,” Breden said politely.
“Because you haven’t let yourself win. You’d rather make an obviously fatal move for one of your own men than prove to yourself something you’ve been trying to ignore. The fact that Carolyn Kohl has become inefficient. She is sixty-eight years old. She is slowing down. The earliest beginnings of senility are beginning to affect her bran. And she holds one of the most responsible positions in the world. She guards the uranium pile.”
Breden said, “But . . . Carolyn—”
“Am I right?”
Breden didn’t answer.
Dr. Hoag said, “You know what depends on the safety of keeping this unit below CM. And critical mass is something you can’t play with. The physicists who are selected for this duty are very carefully chosen. And once a month they’re given a psych check. The efficiency of the organization must be perfect. If it isn’t, if the human factor fails at one point, there’s the danger of an atomic blast. And that can mean the end of civilization.”
It would. That, too, was axiomatic. That had been dinned in the ears of the world for a hundred years. Safety lay in only one thing; keeping the uranium piles and civilization below the critical mass.
“All right,” Hoag said, leaning back. “Naturally you’re afraid. You don’t dare let yourself realize that the human factor, represented by Carolyn Kohl, is failing. So you try to assure yourself that she’s not failing. The symbol is chess. As long as she can beat you at chess, you can feel safe in assuming that she’s not weakening. That explains your deviation from the norm. So. Now look at these.” He pushed a card and a tape toward Breden, who took them and looked inquiringly at the psychiatrist.
Collected Fiction Page 538