The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  Blinking a flashlight in code, the commander approached the deadline unmolested and was let through with Wyman at his heels. The goods, the raiders, the commander and Wyman were aboard a submarine by 2:35 and under way ten minutes later.

  After Commander Grinnel had exchanged congratulations with the sub commander, he presented Wyman.

  “A recruit. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, but he had a rather special motivation. He could be very useful.”

  The sub commander studied Wyman impersonally. “If he’s not a plant.”

  “I’ve used my ring. If you want to get it over with, we can test him and swear him in now.”

  They strapped him into a device that recorded pulse, perspiration, respiration, muscle-tension and brainwaves. A sweatered specialist came and mildly asked Wyman matter-of-fact questions about his surroundings while he calibrated the polygraph.

  Then came the pay-off. Wyman did not fail to note that the sub commander loosened his gun in his holster when the questioning began.

  “Name, age and origin?”

  “Max Wyman. Twenty-two. Buffalo Syndic Territory.”

  “Do you like the Syndic?”

  “I hate them.”

  “What are your feelings toward the North American Government?”

  “If it’s against the Syndic, I’m for it.”

  “Would you rob for the North American Government?”

  “I would.”

  “Would you kill for it?”

  “I would.”

  “Have you any reservations yet unstated in your answers?”

  “No.”

  It went on for an hour. The questions were re-phrased continuously; after each of Wyman’s firm answers, the sweatered technician gave a satisfied little nod. At last it ended and he was unstrapped from the device.

  Max was tired.

  The sub commander seemed a little awed as he got a small book and read from it: “Do you, Max Wyman, solemnly renounce all allegiances previously held by you and pledge your allegiance to the North American Government?”

  “I do,” the young man said fiercely.

  In a remote corner of his mind, for the first time in months, the bell ceased to ring, the pendulum to beat and the light to flash.

  Charles Orsino knew again who he was and what was his mission.

  CHAPTER VII

  It had begun when the girl led him through the conference room door. Naturally one had misgivings; naturally one didn’t speak up. But the vault-like door far downstairs was terrifying when it yawned before you and even more so when it closed behind you.

  “What is this place?” he demanded at last. “Who are you?”

  She said: “Psychology lab.”

  It produced on him the same effect that “alchemy section” or “Division of astrology” would have on a well-informed young man in 1950. He repeated flatly: “Psychology lab. If you don’t want to tell me, very well. I volunteered without strings.” Which should remind her that he was a sort of hero and should be treated with a certain amount of dignity and that she could save her corny jokes.

  “I meant it,” she said, fiddling busily with the locks of yet another vault-like door. “I’m a psychologist. I’m also by the way, Lee Falcaro—since you asked.”

  “The old man—Edward Falcaro’s line?” he asked.

  “Simon pure. He’s my father’s brother. Father’s down in Miami, handling the tracks and gaming in general.”

  The second big door opened on a brain-gray room whose air had a curiously dead feel to it. “Sit down,” she said, indicating a very unorthodox chair. He did, and found that the chair was the most comfortable piece of furniture he had ever known. Its contact with his body was so complete that it pressed nowhere, it poked nowhere. The girl studied dials in its back nevertheless and muttered something about adjusting it. He protested.

  “Nonsense,” she said decisively. She sat down herself in an ordinary seat. Charles shifted uneasily in his chair to find that it moved with him. Still no pressure, still no poking.

  “You’re wondering,” she began, “about the word ‘psychology’. It has a bad history and people have given it up as a bad job. It’s true that there isn’t pressure nowadays to study the human mind. People get along. In general what they want they get, without crippling effort. In your uncle Frank Taylor’s language, the Syndic is an appropriately-structured organization of high morale and wide public acceptance. In my language the Syndic is a father-image which does a good job of fathering. In good times, people aren’t introspective.

  “There is, literally, no reason why my line of the family should have kept up a tradition of experimental psychology. Way, way back, old Amadeo Falcaro often consulted Professor Oscar Sternweiss of the Columbia University psychology faculty—he wasn’t as much of a dashing improvisor as the history books make him out to be. Eventually one of his daughters married one of Sternweiss’ sons and inherited the Sternweiss notebooks and library and apparatus. It became an irrational custom to keep it alive. When each academic school of psychology managed to prove that every other school of psychology was dead wrong and psychology collapsed as a science, the family tradition was unaffected; it stood outside the wrangling.

  “Now, you’re wondering what this has to do with trying to slip you into the Government.”

  “I am,” Charles said fervently. If she’d been a doll outside the Syndic, he would minutes ago have protested that all this was foolish and walked out. Since she was not only in the Syndic, but in the Falcaro line, he had no choice except to hear her babble and then walk out. It was all rot, psychology. Id, oversoul, mind-vectors, counseling, psychosomatics—rot from sick-minded old men. Everybody knew—

  “The Government, we know, uses deinhibiting drugs as a first screening of its recruits. As an infallible second screening, they use a physiological lie-detector based on the fact that telling a lie causes tensions in the liar’s body. We shall get around this by slipping you in as a young man who hates the Syndic for some valid reason—”

  “Confound it, you were just telling me that they can’t be fooled!”

  “We won’t fool them. You’ll be a young man who hates the Syndic. We’ll tear down your present personality a gray cell at a time. We’ll pump you full of Seconal every day for a quarter of a year.… We’ll obliterate your personality under a new one. We’ll bury Charles Orsino under a mountain of suggestions, compulsions and obsessions shoveled at you sixteen hours a day while you’re too groggy to resist. Naturally the supplanting personality will be neurotic, but that works in with the mission.”

  He struggled with a metaphysical concept, for the first time in his life. “But—but—how will I know I’m me?”

  “We think we can put a trigger on it. When you take the Government oath of allegiance, you should bounce back.”

  He did not fail to note a little twin groove between her brows that appeared when she said think and should. He knew that in a sense he was nearer death now than when Halloran’s bullet had been intercepted.

  “Are you staying with it?” she asked simply.

  Various factors entered into it. A life for the Syndic, as in the children’s history books. That one didn’t loom very large. But multiply it by it sounds like more fun than hot-rod polo, and that by this is going to raise my stock sky-high with the family and you had something. Somehow, under Lee Falcaro’s interested gaze, he neglected to divide it by if it works.

  “I’m staying with it,” he said.

  She grinned. “It won’t be too hard,” she said. “In the old days there would have been voting record, social security numbers, military service, addresses they could check on—hundreds of things. Now about all we have to fit you with is a name and a subjective life.”

  It began that spring day and went on into late fall.

  The ringing bell.

  Th
e flashing light.

  The wobbling pendulum.

  You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic.…

  * * * *

  Mom fried pork sausages in the morning, you loved the smell of pumpernickel from the bakery in Vesey Street.

  Mr. Watsisname the English teacher with the mustache wanted you to go to college—

  Nay, ye can not, though ye had Argus eyes,

  In abbeyes they haue so many suttyll spyes;

  For ones in the yere they have secret vvsytacyons,

  And yf ony prynce reforme.…

  —but the stockyard job was closer, they needed breakdown men—

  You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are—

  The ringing bell.

  The flashing light.

  The wobbling pendulum.

  And the pork sausages and the teacher with the mustache and poems you loved and

  page 24, paragraph 3, maximum speed on a live-cattle walkway is three miles per hour: older walkways hold this speed with reduction gears coupled to a standard 18-inch ehrenhafter unit. Standard practice in new construction calls for holding speed by direct drive from a specially-wound ehrenhafter. This places a special obligation in breakdown maintenance men, who must distinguish between the two types, carry two sets of wiring diagrams and a certain number of mutually-uninterchangeable parts, though good design principles hold these to a minimum. The main difference in the winding of a standard 18-incher and a lowspeed ehrenhafter rotor—

  Of course things are better now, Max Wyman, you owe a great debt to Jim Hogan, Father of the Buffalo Syndic, who fought for your freedom in the great old days, and to his descendants who are tirelessly working for your freedom and happiness.

  And bow-happiness is a girl named Inge Klohbel now that you’re almost a man.

  You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory. You are Max Wyman of Buffalo Syndic Territory.

  And Inge Klohbel is why you put away the crazy dream of scholarship, for her lips and hair and eyes and legs mean more to you than anything, more than

  Later phonologic changes include palatal mutation; i.e., before cht and hs the diphthongs eo, io, which resulted from breaking, became ie (i, y) as in cneoht, chieht, and seox (x equalling hs), siex, six, syx.…

  the crazy dream of scholarship, what kind of a way is that to repay the Mob and

  The ringing bell.

  The flashing light.

  The wobbling pendulum.

  repay the Syndic and young Mike Hogan all over the neighborhood suddenly and Inge says he did stop and say hello but of course he was just being polite.

  so you hit the manuals hard and one day you go out on a breakdown call and none of the older men could figure out why the pump was on the blink; a roaring, chewing monster of a pump it was, sitting there like a dead husk and the cattlefeed backed up four miles to a storage tank in the suburbs and the steers in the yards bawling with hunger, and you traced the dead wire, you out with the spot-welder, a zip of blue flame and the pump began to chew again and you got the afternoon off.

  * * * *

  And there they were.

  Lee Falcaro: (Bending over the ‘muttering, twitching carcass) Adrenalin. Brighter picture and louder sound.

  Assistant: (Opening a pinch cock in the tube that enters the arm, increasing video contrast, increasing audio): He’s weakening.

  Lee Falcaro: (In a whisper) I know. I know. But this is IT.

  Assistant: (Inaudibly) You cold-blooded bitch.

  You are Max Wyman, you are Max Wyman, and you don’t know what to do about the Syndic that betrayed you, about the girl who betrayed you with the living representative of the Syndic, about the dream of scholarship that lies in ruins, the love that lies in ruins after how many promises and vows, the faith of twenty years that lies in ruins after how many declarations.

  The ringing bell.

  The flashing light.

  The wobbling pendulum.

  And a double whiskey with a beer chaser.

  Lee Falcaro: The alcohol. (It drips from a sterile graduate, trickles through the rubber tubing and into the arm of the mumbling, sweating carcass. The molecules mingle with the molecules of serum: In seconds they are washed against the cell-walls of the forebrain. The cell-walls their structure as the alcohol molecules bumble against them; the lattices of jelly that wall in the cytoplasm and nuclear jelly become thinner than they were. Streams of electrons that had coursed in familiar paths through chains of neurones find easier paths through the poison-thinned cell-walls. A “Memory” or an “Idea” or a “Hope” or a “Value” that was a configuration of neurones linked by electron streams vanishes when the electron streams find an easier way to flow a New “Memories,” “Ideas,” “Hopes” and “Values” that are configurations of neurones linked by electron streams are born.)

  Love and loyalty die, but not as if they had never been. Their ghosts remain, Max Wyman and you are haunted by them. They hound you from Buffalo to Erie, but there is no oblivion deep enough in the Mex joints, or in Tampa tequila or Pittsburgh zubrovka or New York gin.

  You tell incurious people who came to the place on the corner for a shot and some talk that you’re the best breakdown man that ever came out of Erie; you tell them women are no God-damn good, you tell them the Syndic—here you get sly and look around with drunken caution, lowering your voice—you tell them the Syndic’s no God-damned good, and you drunkenly recite poetry until they move away, puzzled and annoyed.

  Lee Falcaro: (Passing a weary hand across her forehead) well, he’s had it. Disconnect the tubes, give him a 48-hour stretch in bed and then get him on the street pointed towards Riveredge.

  Assistant: Does the apparatus go into dead storage?

  Lee Falcaro: (Grimacing uncontrollably) No. Unfortunately, no.

  Assistant: (Inaudibly, as she plucks needle-tipped tubes from the carcass’ elbows) who’s the next sucker?

  CHAPTER VIII

  The submarine surfaced at dawn. Orsino had been assigned a bunk and, to his surprise, had fallen asleep almost at once. At eight in the morning, he was shaken awake by one of the men in caps.

  “Shift change,” the man explained laconically.

  Orsino started to say something polite and sleepy. The man grabbed his shoulder and rolled him onto the deck, snarling: “You going to argue?”

  Orsino’s reactions were geared to hot-rod polo—doing the split-second right thing after instinctively evaluating the roll of the ball, the ricochet of bullets, the probable tactics and strategy of the opposing four. They were not geared to a human being who behaved with the blind ferocity of an inanimate object. He just gawked at him from the deck, noting that the man had one hand on a sheath knife.

  “All right, buster,” the man said contemptuously, apparently deciding that Orsino would stay put. “Just don’t mess with the Guard.” He rolled into the bunk and gave a good imitation of a man asleep until Orsino worked his way through the crowded compartment and up a ladder to the deck.

  There was a heavy, gray over-cast. The submarine seemed to be planing the water; salt spray washed the shining deck. A gun crew was forward, drilling with a five-incher. The rasp of a petty-officer singing out the numbers mingled with the hiss and gurgle of the spray. Orsino leaned against the conning tower and tried to comb his thoughts out clean and straight.

  It wasn’t easy.

  He was Charles Orsino, very junior Syndic member, with all memories pertaining thereto.

  He was also, more dimly, Max Wyman with his memories. Now, able to stand outside of Wyman, he could recall how those memories had been implanted—down to the last stab of the last needle. He thought some very bitter thoughts about Lee Falcaro—and dropped them, snapping to attention as Commander Grinnel pulled himself through
the hatch. “Good morning, sir,” he said.

  The cold eyes drilled him. “Rest,” the commander said. “We don’t play it that way on a pigboat. I hear you had some trouble about your bunk.”

  Orsino shrugged uncomfortably.

  “Somebody should have told you,” the commander said. “The boat’s full of Guardsmen. They have a very high opinion of themselves—which is correct. They carried off the raid in good style. You don’t mess with Guards.”

  “What are they?” Orsino asked.

  Grinnel shrugged. “The usual elite,” he said. “Loman’s gang.” He noted Orsino’s blank look and smiled coldly. “Loman’s President of North America,” he said.

  “On shore,” Orsino hazarded, “we used to hear about somebody named Ben Miller.”

  “Obsolete information. Miller had the Marines behind him. Loman was Secretary of Defense. He beached the Marines and broke them up into guard detachments. Took away their heavy weapons. Meanwhile, he built up the Guard, very quietly—which, with the Secretary of Information behind him, he could do. About two years ago, he struck. The Marines who didn’t join the Guard were massacred. Miller had the sense to kill himself. The Veep and the Secretary of State resigned, but it didn’t save their necks. Loman assumed the Presidency automatically, of course, and had them shot. They were corrupt as hell anyway. They were owned body and soul by the southern bloc.”

  Two seamen appeared with a folding cot, followed by the sub commander. He was red-eyed with lack of sleep. “Set it there,” he told them, and sat heavily on the sagging canvas. “Morning, Grinnel,” he said with an effort. “Believe I’m getting too old for the pigboats. I want sun and air. Think you can use your influence at court to get me a corvette?” He bared his teeth to show it was a joke.

  Grinnel said, with a minimum smile: “If I had any influence, would I catch the cloak-and-dagger crap they sling at me?”

  The sub commander rolled back onto the cot and was instantly asleep, a muscle twitching the left side of his face every few seconds.

  Grinnel drew Orsino to the lee of the conning tower. “We’ll let him sleep,” he said. “Go tell that gun crew Commander Grinnel says they should lay below.”