6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

  Magee waited while Mother Johnston applied sterile packs to his wounds, and then said good-by. MacKinnon looked at Mother Johnston. She nodded.

  “I’m going with you,” he told the Fader.

  “What for? It will just double the risk.”

  “You’re in no fit shape to travel alone—stimulant or no stimulant.”

  “Nuts. I’d have to look after you.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  Magee shrugged his shoulders and capitulated.

  Mother Johnston wiped her perspiring face and kissed both of them.

  ~ * ~

  Until they were well out of town their progress reminded MacKinnon of their nightmare flight of the previous evening. Thereafter they continued to the north-northwest by a highway which ran toward the foothills, and left the highway only when necessary to avoid the sparse traffic. Once they were almost surprised by a police patrol car, equipped with black light and nearly invisible, but the Fader sensed it in time and they crouched behind a low wall at the side of the road.

  Dave inquired how he had known the patrol was near. Magee chuckled. “Damned if I know,” he said, “but I believe I could smell a cop staked out in a herd of goats.”

  The Fader talked less and less as the night progressed. His usually untroubled countenance became lined and old as the effect of the drug wore off. It seemed to Dave as if this unaccustomed expression gave him a clearer insight into the man’s character—that the mask of pain were his true face rather than the unworried features Magee habitually showed the world. He wondered for the nth time what the Fader had done to cause a court to adjudge him socially insane.

  This question was uppermost in his mind with respect to every person he met in Coventry. The answer was fairly obvious in most cases; their types of instability were gross and showed up at once. Mother Johnston had been an enigma until she had explained it herself. She had followed her husband into Coventry. Now that she was a widow she preferred to remain with the friends she knew and the customs and conditions she was adjusted to, rather than change for a possibly less pleasing environment.

  Magee sat down beside the road. “It’s no use, kid,” he admitted, “I can’t make it.”

  “The hell we can’t. I’ll carry you.”

  Magee grinned faintly.

  “No, I mean it,” Dave persisted. “How much farther is it?”

  “Matter of two or three miles, maybe.”

  “Climb aboard.” He took him pickaback and started on.

  The first few hundred yards were not too difficult; Magee was forty pounds lighter than Dave. After that the strain of the additional load began to tell. His arms cramped from supporting Magee’s knees; his arches complained at the weight and the unnatural load distribution; and his breathing was made difficult by the clasp of Magee’s arms around his neck.

  Two miles to go—maybe more. Let your weight fall forward and your foot must follow it, else you fall to the ground. It’s automatic—as automatic as pulling teeth. How long is a mile? Nothing in a rocketship, thirty seconds in a pleasure car, a ten-minute crawl in a steel snail, fifteen minutes to trained troops in good condition. How far is it with a man on your back, on a rough road, when you are tired to start with?

  Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet—a meaningless figure. But every step takes twenty-four inches off the total. The remainder is still incomprehensible—an infinity. Count them. Count them till you go crazy—till the figures speak themselves outside your head, and the jar!— jar!—jar! of your benumbed feet beats in your brain.

  His world closed in, lost its history and held no future. There was nothing, nothing at all but the torturing necessity of picking up his foot again and placing it forward. No feeling but the heartbreaking expenditure of will necessary to achieve that meaningless act.

  MacKinnon was brought suddenly to awareness when Magee’s arms relaxed from around his neck. He leaned forward and dropped to one knee to keep from spilling his burden, then eased it slowly to the ground. He thought for a moment that the Fader was dead—he could not locate his pulse, and the slack face and limp body were sufficiently corpselike, but he pressed an ear to Magee’s chest and heard with relief the steady flub-dub of the heart.

  He tied Magee’s wrists together with his handkerchief and forced his own head through, the encircled arms. But he was unable, in his exhausted condition, to wrestle the slack weight into position on his back.

  Fader regained consciousness while MacKinnon was struggling. His first words were, “Take it easy, Dave. What’s the trouble?”

  Dave explained. “Better untie my wrists,” advised the Fader, “I think I can walk for a while.”

  And walk he did, for nearly three hundred yards, before he was forced to give up again. “Look, Dave,” he said after he had partially recovered, “did you bring along any more of those pepper pills?”

  “Yes—but you can’t take any more. It would kill you.”

  “Yeah, I know—so they say. But that isn’t the idea—yet. I was going to suggest that you might take one.”

  “Why, of course! Good grief, Fader, but I’m dumb.”

  Magee seemed no heavier than a light coat, the morning star shone brighter, and his strength seemed inexhaustible. Even when they left the highway and started up the cart trail that led to the doctor’s home in the foothills, the going was tolerable and the burden not too great. MacKinnon knew that the drug burned the working tissue of his body long after his proper reserves were gone, and that it would take him days to recover from the reckless expenditure, but he did not mind. No price was too high to pay for the moment when he at last arrived at the gate of the doctor’s home—on his own two feet, his charge alive and conscious.

  ~ * ~

  MacKinnon was not allowed to see Magee for four days. In the meantime, he was encouraged to keep the routine of a semi-invalid himself in order to recover the twenty-five pounds he had lost in two days and two nights, and to make up for the heavy strain on his heart during the last night. A high caloric diet, sun baths, rest, and peaceful surroundings, plus his natural good health, caused him to regain weight and strength rapidly, but he “enjoyed ill health” exceedingly because of the companionship of the doctor himself—and Persephone.

  Persephone’s calendar age was fifteen. Dave never knew whether to think of her as much older or much younger. She had been born in Coventry, and had lived her short life in the house of the doctor, her mother having died in childbirth in that same house. She was completely childlike in many respects, being without experience in the civilized world Outside, and having had very little contact with the inhabitants of Coventry, except when she saw them as patients of the doctor. But she had been allowed to read unchecked from the library of a sophisticated and protean-minded man of science. MacKinnon was continually being surprised at the extent of her academic and scientific knowledge—much greater than his own. She made him feel as if he were conversing with some aged and omniscient matriarch, then she would come out with some naive conception of the outer world, and he would be brought up sharply with the realization that she was, in fact, an inexperienced child.

  He was mildly romantic about her. Not seriously, of course, in view of her barely nubile age, but she was pleasant to see, and he was hungry for feminine companionship. He was young enough himself to feel a continual interest in the delightful differences, mental and physical, between the male and the female of his species. The cock-bird strutted and preened his feathers.

  Consequently it was a blow to his pride as sharp as had been the sentence to Coventry to discover that she classed him with the other inhabitants of Coventry as a poor unfortunate who needed help and sympathy because he was not quite right in his head.

  He was furiously indignant, and for one whole day he sulked alone, but the human necessity for self-justification and approval forced him to seek her out and attempt to reason with her. He explained carefully, with complete emotional candor, the circumstances leading up to his trial an
d conviction, and embellished the account with his own philosophy, then awaited her approval.

  It was not forthcoming. “I don’t understand your viewpoint,” she said. “You did him a very real damage when you broke his nose, yet he had done you no damage of any sort. Apparently you expect me to approve that.”

  “But, Persephone,” he protested, “you ignore the fact that he called me a most insulting name.”

  “I don’t see the connection,” she said. “He made a noise with his mouth—a verbal label. If the condition designated by the verbal label does not apply to you, the noise is meaningless. If the noise is a label customarily used to designate a condition which is true in your case—if you are the thing that the noise refers to, you are neither more nor less that thing by reason of someone uttering the verbal label. In short, the noise has not damaged you.

  “But what you did to him was another matter entirely. You broke his nose. That is damage. In sheer self-protection, the rest of society must seek you out and determine whether or not you are so unstable as to be likely to damage someone else in the future. If you are, you must be treated or leave society—whichever you prefer.”

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he accused.

  “Crazy? Not the way you mean it. You haven’t paresis, or a brain tumor, or any other lesion that the doctor could find. But from the viewpoint of your semantic reactions you are as socially unsane as any fanatic witch burner.”

  “Come, now—that’s hardly just!”

  “What is justice?” She picked up the kitten she had been playing with. “I’m going in—it’s getting chilly.” And off she went, her bare feet noiseless in the grass.

  ~ * ~

  Had the science of semantics developed as rapidly as psychodynamics, and its implementing arts of propaganda and mob psychology, the United States might never have fallen into dictatorship, then been forced to undergo the Second Revolution. All of the scientific principles embodied in the Covenant which marked the end of the revolution were formulated as far back as the first quarter of the twentieth century.

  But the work of the pioneer semanticists, C. K. Ogden in England and Alfred Korzybski in the United States, were known to but a handful of students, whereas psycho-dynamics, under the impetus of repeated wars and the frenzy of high-pressure merchandising, progressed by leaps and bounds. It is true that the mathematical aspects of semantics, as developed by Albert Einstein, Eric T. Bell, and others, were well known, even popular, but the charlatans who practiced the pseudoscience of sociology refused to apply the methods of science to their monopoly.

  Semantics, “the meaning of meaning,” as Ogden expressed it, or “theory of evaluations” as Korzybski preferred to call it, gave a method for the first time of applying the scientific viewpoint and procedure to every act of everyday life. Because semantics dealt with spoken and written words as a determining aspect of human behavior, it was at first mistakenly thought by many to be concerned only with words and of interest only to professional word manipulators, such as advertising copywriters and professors of etymology. A handful of unorthodox psychiatrists alone attempted to apply it to personal human problems, but their work was swept away by the epidemic mass psychoses that destroyed Europe and returned the United States to the Dark Ages.

  The Covenant was the first scientific social document ever drawn up by a man, and due credit must be given to its principal author, Colonel Micah Novak, the same Novak who served as staff psychologist in the revolution. The revolutionists wished to establish in the United States the maximum personal liberty possible for every one. Given the data—the entire social matrix—how could they accomplish that?

  First they junked all previous concepts of justice. Examined semantically, justice has no referent—there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point and say, “This is justice.” Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any “noises” said about it will only add to confusion.

  But damage, physical or economic, could be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another, and laws were passed to anticipate such damage. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic, to some person, they declared to be legal.

  As they had abandoned the concept of justice, there could be no rational standards of punishment. Penology took its place with lycanthropy and other forgotten witchcrafts. Yet, since it was not practical to permit a probable source of danger to remain in the community, social offenders were examined and potential repeaters were given their choice of psychological readjustment, or of having society withdraw itself from them—Coventry.

  During the formulation of the Covenant, some assumed that the socially unsane would naturally be forced to undergo hospitalization for readjustment, particularly since current psychiatry was quite competent to cure all nonlesioned psychoses and cure or alleviate lesional psychoses, but Novak set his face against this and opposed it with all the power of his strong and subtle intellect. “Not so!” he argued. “The government must never again be permitted to tamper with the mind of any citizen without his consent, or else we set up a means of greater tyranny than we have ever experienced. Every man must be free to reject the Covenant, even if we think him insane!”

  The next time MacKinnon looked up Persephone he found her in a state of extreme agitation. His own wounded pride was forgotten at once. “Why, my dear,” he said, “whatever in the world is the matter?”

  Gradually he gathered that she had been present at a conversation between Magee and the doctor, and had heard, for the first time, of the impending military operations against the United States. He patted her hand. “So that’s all it is,” he observed in a relieved voice. “I thought something was wrong with you yourself.”

  “ ‘That’s all.’ David MacKinnon, do you mean to stand there and tell me that you knew about this and don’t consider it worth worrying about?”

  “Me? Why should I? Anyhow, what could I do?”

  “What could you do? You could go Outside and warn them—that’s what you. could do. As to why you should— Dave, you’re impossible!” She burst into tears and ran from the room.

  He stared after her, mouth open.

  Persephone did not appear at lunch. MacKinnon asked the doctor where she was.

  “Had her lunch,” the doctor told him between mouthfuls. “Started for the gateway.”

  “What! Why did you let her do that?”

  “Free agent. Wouldn’t have obeyed me, anyway. She’ll be all right.”

  Dave did not hear the last, being already out of the room, and running out of the house. He found her just backing her little monocycle runabout out of its shed. “Persephone!”

  “What do you want?” she asked with a frozen dignity beyond her years.

  “You mustn’t do this! That’s where the Fader got hurt!”

  “I am going. Please stand aside.”

  “Then I’m going with you.”

  “Why should you?”

  “To take care of you.”

  She sniffed. “As if anyone would dare to touch me.”

  There was a measure of truth in what she said. The doctor and every member of his household enjoyed a personal immunity unlike that of anyone else in Coventry. As a natural consequence of the set-up, Coventry had almost no competent medical men. The number of physicians who committed social damage was small. The proportion of such that declined psychiatric treatment was negligible, and this negligible remainder were almost sure to be unreliable bunglers in their profession. The doctor was a natural healer, in voluntary exile in order that he might enjoy the opportunity to practice his art in the richest available field. He cared nothing for dry research; what he wanted was patients that he might make well.

  He was above custom and above law. In the Free State the Liberator depended on him for insulin to hold his own death from diabetes at arm’s
length. In New America his beneficiaries were equally powerful. Even among the Angels of the Lord the Prophet himself accepted the dicta of the doctor without question.

  But MacKinnon was not satisfied. Some ignorant fool, he was afraid, might do the child some harm without realizing her protected status. He got no further chance to protest; she started the little runabout suddenly and forced him to jump out of its path. When he had recovered his balance she was far down the lane.

  Persephone was back in less than four hours. He had expected that; if a person as elusive as Fader had not been able to “reach the gate at night, it was not likely that a young girl could do so in daylight.

  His first feeling was one of simple relief, then he eagerly awaited an opportunity to speak to her. During her absence he had been turning over the situation in his mind. It was a foregone conclusion that she would fail; he wished to rehabilitate himself in her eyes; therefore, he would help her in the project nearest her heart—he himself would carry the warning to the Outside!