by Five Odd
74
WHEN A.D. CALLED ME ON THE PHONE AND INVITED ME TO lunch I knew he wanted something. I'd known A.D. a long time, quite long enough to know when he was merely being friendly and when he had something up his sleeve.
A.D. Young was something in the U-A., a very important international octopus whose tentacles reached almost all the settlements in the galaxy. What he did in the organization I didn't know, but I suspected he was something more than a forty-five-year-old office boy. His approach smelled like he was offering me a job.
I was interested, because at the time I didn't have a job. And rd reached the age of being concerned over being out of work. Oh, I had the odd thousand or two in my bank account, and if I starved it would be the first time. It wasn't in that way I was worried.
The trouble is, as you get older you learn more, you get better at things, and you expect more out of life. I was the same age as A.D.—forty-five, unmarried, a high-grade executive with no executions scheduled. Twenty years since I'd been happy to take any job that was going at any salary, just for the hell of it, but now I'd got used to four good meals a day and various other things that demand a good fat five-figure income.
At the moment I had no income at all. I shouldn't have told Bentley what I thought of him. Or if I'd told him, I shouldn't have told him so he understood. Or if I'd told him so he understood I should have waited until I was in a position to fire him instead of having him fire me.
I think that makes my interest in A.D.'s proposition clear. I wasn't much interested in the LLA., not at the time. I was interested in anything paying not less than $30,000 a year.
When I saw him AD.came straight to the point. "I know you're free, Edgar,*' he said. "I checked. How about taking a job with the U.A.7"
"The U.A.r I said, as if I'd never heard of it before.
"Unit Authority," said A.D. helpfully.
"You've got the wrong number, AD.," I told him. Tm quite satisfied with myself as I am."
"I don't mean as a Uniteer. I mean as a Unit Father."
I liked the idea. It made AD.'s very good cigar taste even better. Unit Fathers were very important people. I'd get my $30,000.1 showed no sign of my interest, however.
"Don't bother to be coy," said A.D. "You get paid the same whether you need the job or not."
"I don't need the job," I retorted. "And what gives you the idea I'm so concerned about money?"
"Observation," said A.D. drily.
There was no answer to that so I didn't look for one. "What sort of job would my Unit be doing?" I asked cautiously. "And would it be here on Earth or in some Godforsaken hole at the other end of the galaxy?"
A.D. shook his head. "You don't get told that. Your Unit might be running a factory right here ... or it might be sent to Perryon."
"Perryon," I murmured. "That's certainly a God-forsaken hole, from what I've heard of it."
"I'm surprised you've heard of it"
"Oh, I know this and that," I said. "Know the alphabet and everything." But still I wasn't satisfied. Something still smelled. It wasn't necessarily a bad smell, just a smell.
"You've got something else in mind, A.D.," I said. "You never waste a stone on anything less than three birds. I like to know what I'm letting myself in for. Come on, give."
"You'd have to know anyway," said A.D., unperturbed. "I know you, Edgar. On the right you carry your wallet and on the left you carry your heart You never let one get the better of the other. I understand that You'll be a good Unit Father. You've got the right mixture of hard-headedness and humanity."
"I weep tears of gratitude," I said. "Now what's the build-up for?"
"My daughter," said A.D. quietly, "is volunteering for a Unit. Today." "What for?" I asked, astonished.
"That doesn't matter. What does matter is this—I can't stop her, and when she's a Uniteer she won't know who she was before. I may never see her again. I certainly won't be allowed to tell her I'm her father. I won't be able to do anything for her."
He paused. I didn't say anything.
"After Lorraine has volunteered for a Unit," A.D. went on, "she and I will be nothing to each other. I'll be able to pull strings to find out how she's getting on. I may be able to think of some excuse to meet her at the U-A. depot now and then. But that's all. Now do you understand?"
I nodded.
WIT | 77
"I won't see you very often either," A.D. said. "But at least 111 know you're looking after the Unit Lorraine will be in. That's something."
"Youll be able to swing that?" I asked curiously.
"Yes."
I paused, thinking it over. I didn't offer A.D. my sympathy. A.D. wasn't the kind of man who wanted or needed sympathy.
I had identified all the smells now. "That's the three birds," I ruminated. "One, your old friend is out of a job and you can give him one. Two, you need Unit Fathers anyway. Three, you want someone to keep an eye on Lorraine after she's a Uniteer."
"Four," said A.D., "you don't sell out. You know that if you spread it around that I told you where your Unit was going and fixed things so that my daughter was assigned to a Unit headed by a friend of mine, I'd be due for a bath in boiling oil. But youll keep it to yourself."
"Okay," I said. 'To all four."
"Youll do itr
"111 do it. My wallet has just persuaded my heart—or the other way round." So we went down to the Unit depot and I became a father.
That afternoon I watched my children coming in. Coining in, not being bom. It's time we dropped that metaphor.
I sat with a technician behind one-way glass and watched a psychologist interviewing people. I'd been interviewed too. I'd passed as a Unit Father, summa cum laude. They told me I should have been a Unit Father long ago. I told them I'd never happened to meet the right woman. They looked as if they'd heard that one before.
I didn't see A.D. around the place. He was one of the men behind the scenes, apparently. He had certainly pulled the right strings, for Lorraine was the first person I saw interviewed.
I'd met Lorraine once or twice, usually when she was just on the point of dashing off somewhere. We were no more than names to each other.
In fact it was only when I had time for a long, steady stare at her, behind the glass in the U-A. depot, that I realized Lorraine was a beauty. She had the kind of face and figure that had to grow on you before you suddenly realized how lovely the girl was.
Her nose was too small and her forehead too high. She looked too flat until she got excited or angry, and then you saw that she had the usual dimensions after all.
"Now tell me, Miss Young," said the psychologist pleasantly, "just why are you here?"
"Do I have to tell you that?" Lorraine asked, biting her lip.
"No. But well find out anyway, in the tests."
She took another bite. Then she looked up suddenly, defiantly. "Well, if you must know," she said, "it's this or suicide."
She expected to shock the psychologist, but she should have known better. In the first place, he was a-good psychologist, and in the second, he saw scores of people every week who had come to volunteer for a Unit because it was that or suicide.
He nodded. "Why?" he asked simply.
"I've lost the man I'm in love with," she said.
He didn't look surprised or ask if it was that serious. Obviously it was that serious, or she wouldn't be here. He wasn't necessarily believing what she was saying anyway. It would all come out, as he'd already said, in the tests.
"We want volunteers, Miss Young," said the psychologist, "but we don't want people who have come here on impulse and will regret it later. If you—"
"I won't go back on it"
"It's not that. You can't. Are you sure that ... in three months' time, say, you'd still want to do this?"
"In three months' time," said Lorraine bitterly, "I wouldn't be around to volunteer for a Unit."
"When did this happen, Miss Young? I mean, how long have you—"
"We broke up tw
o weeks ago."
"That's a fair time," the psychologist admitted. "If you're quite sure, I can't refuse to accept you." "I'm quite sure."
After that came the preliminary testing, and I saw most of that too. It took a long time, and after a while the technician beside me went away and left me to watch alone. I was interested because it was Lorraine.
I wondered what A.D. was like as a father. Was it his fault that at twenty-two Lorraine felt her life was a wreck? Perhaps, I thought, if only because she'd been spoiled. She'd always had everything she wanted, and so it seemed like the end of the world when a man she wanted didn't want her.
I learned a lot about Lorraine as I watched her being tested by every conceivable psychological test—intelligence, stability, aptitude, personality, psychosomatic, word-association, everything I'd heard of and a few I hadn't
Then I realized, as I should have done long ago, that all this didn't matter. Lorraine as she was now was going to cease to exist in a few minutes or hours, and the Lorraine I was going to know would only begin to grow after that.
I got up and followed the technician. Lorraine was still doing the exhaustive psychological tests.
Though it was now late afternoon, the technician told me that rd see the completion of my Unit before the depot closed for the day. It was open until midnight and it did most of its business, so the technician told me, in the evening. People who meant to volunteer for a Unit on a certain day kept leaving it later and later until at last they had to go or leave it until the next day.
The next person I saw being interviewed was Dick Low-son. That wasn't his name, but it was the name he was given later, the name under which I knew him.
Men and women who join Units have to make a clean break with their previous life. They're usually given new names and sometimes even new faces. Lorraine's Christian name wasn't changed, for some reason, but her surname was. She became Lorraine Waterson—not that that matters.
Dick was a tall, thin man of about thirty, with hair going out like the tide. He was moody, dreamy, indifferent
"How would you describe your problem, yourself7n the psychologist asked.
Dick stared straight at us, gathering his thoughts. I moved uncomfortably. "He can't see us," the technician murmured. "He's just staring into space."
"How many people have you got behind that glass?" Dick asked. He shrugged and turned away. "Doesn't make any difference. Bring them in here if you like. How would I describe my problem—does that matter?"
"Yes," said the psychologist
Dick shrugged. "All right Til try to tell you. I was a boy wonder. Straight A's in every subject, and pretty good outside college too. Plenty of money from spare-time jobs, social success, girls ... I had six girls on a string when I was fifteen—wonder why I bothered. By the time I was twenty I'd done it all. For seven or eight years I did it all
over again, getting less and less fun out of it—making money, climbing on the next man's back, winning games, buying things, selling things, and reducing the number of virgins in the United States. Last three years I haven't bothered doing anything very much. Nothing seems worth while."
He sighed. "Now clean the slate and let me start over again."
The psychologist nodded. "Your IQ's very high," he commented.
"Sure. Ain't I lucky? Everybody wants to be smart. A fundamental error. If you're dumb, things are simple. The smarter you are, the more complicated things get. Are you going to make me dumb?"
"No. Youll be the brains of a Unit"
"Thanks for nothing."
"And youll like it"
"Good. What do I do now7" . The psychologist told him what to do now.
In the dark passageway I murmured: "That must be awful."
"What must be awful?" the technician asked.
"Having done everything before you're thirty."
"He hasn't done everything. He just thinks he has."
"Well, it must be awful to think you've done everything before you're thirty."
"Neurosis," said the technician. "Well soon fix that"
"What exactly is this clearing process?"
"We just sponge everything off the brain. Experience, memories, language, neurosis—the lot. That leaves capacity and damn little else. Then we can train them right"
"Sounds a bit inhuman."
"Nonsense. Uniteers are happier, saner, and much more useful than anyone eke. Far more than you and me."
"Then why don't we go and volunteer?"
The technician grinned. "Why do Christians stay out of heaven as long as they can?"
I saw a lot of people being interviewed, and naturally not many of them were assigned to my Unit. The depot handled about twenty people a day, four Units.
I'm ignoring those who weren't assigned to my group. I soon forgot the others anyway. All of them, except Lorraine and Helen, got new names later. Perhaps it wasn't worth while changing a name like Helen—there's so many of them.
Helen would have been a very beautiful girl but for one thing. It was a big thing, though.
Her face was less alive than a face on a magazine cover. Her changes of expression were even deader. Smile: pull cheek muscles. Laugh: open mouth, oscillate vocal cords. Frown: corrugate forehead. A robot could have done it as well.
"What do you mean, are the cops after me?" she demanded. "Why should the cops be after me?"
"All that concerns us," said the psychologist, "is how far they are after you."
He was a good psychologist. He knew what to say to make contact
Helen cooled down. "You mean you don't care?"
"Not in the least After you're cleared you can't possibly have criminal tendencies."
"Why, you louse, are you suggesting I—"
"No, I'm not suggesting anything. How far after you are the cops?"
"A long way. But they might catch up," Helen admitted. "Say, if clearing removes criminal tendencies, how come criminals can't volunteer?"
"They can, after they've served their sentences. We're not allowed to take criminals here as an alternative to prison. If we did, why, anybody could do anything he liked and volunteer for a Unit when he was caught to avoid the jail sentence."
"I get it" said Helen. "Well, I'm in the clear." She looked thoughtful. "I wonder what 111 be like afterwards?" "Wonderful," said the psychologist
"Thanks," she said. "I guess you don't mean it but thanks anyway."
After Helen came Brent
Brent was a young, healthy, handsome moron. Society had warped him, but even in his original state he couldn't have been much of an asset to himself or anybody else.
"What good's he going to be?" I asked, rather resenting Brent's presence in my Unit. Lorraine, Dick and even Helen had all had something I could appreciate, but this big, good-looking idiot didn't strike me as valuable material.
"You ought to know," said the technician reprovingly, "that you can't get anything done without a certain amount of stupidity and ignorance."
I looked at him sharply, scenting sarcasm, but the only light where we were was from the room beyond, heavily filtered, and I couldn't tell whether he meant what he said or not
There was a long pause after Brent People were interviewed, but the psychologist never made the sign to warn us that the person being interviewed was a possible recruit for my Unit.
"May take a while,'' the technician whispered. "It's always toward the end that forming a Unit gets difficult. In the beginning anyone will do. It's like putting five cakes in a box. The first four can be almost any size, but the last has to be just the right size and shape.*'
"How about me?" I asked. "What am I?"
"The box," said the technician.
I thought of asking why so comparatively little trouble was taken over the Unit Fathers, why all the Uniteers were thoroughly cleared and then trained for weeks, emerging as something in the order of supermen, while the Unit Father, theoretically at least the boss of the whole show, was just an ordinary human being, tested on
ly briefly and given no psychological repair-work at all. However, I didn't have to ask. I could guess.
People are still suspicious of the Units. They use them, but they don't entirely trust them. There's a flavor of inhumanity about the whole system. The public doesn't like being at the mercy of people whose brains have been tampered with.
Hence the Unit Fathers—essentially ordinary human beings, in no way processed, cleared or otherwise mentally modified. A brake on the supernormal Uniteers. A safeguard. A token to show that ordinary people were the masters, Units the servants.
Our last member came in just before the depot closed. I noted the psychologist's sign and leaned forward eagerly.
lone was a snub-nosed, wistful, reckless, restless creature whom I liked at sight. I wondered why a girl like lone should be volunteering for a Unit—at nineteen.
"I won't be altogether different, will IT" she asked wistfully. "I like some things about the way I am now."
"The saner people are when they come in here," said the psychologist, "the less they change."
"I don't have to have my parents' consent, do I?"
"Not now. That was changed a couple of years ago. Would your parents be against this?"
"My parents are against everything," said lone with a brief flash of bitterness. So that was it.
lone was an unwanted child. And nineteen years after arriving unwanted she volunteered for a Unit. It made sense.
Lorraine and lone represented the two opposites who both landed up in Units quite often. The spoiled children, the children so protected from the world that when the world finally kicked them in the teeth it was an incredible, crippling shock. And the unwanted children, the children who had been brought up by indifferent parents and who had realized early that the love which other children took for granted was not for them. The first group over-confident, expecting too much of life. The second group expecting and finding too little.
Now that my Unit was complete I reviewed it mentally.
Lorraine, a girl who had always had everything she wanted, and let herself be broken to pieces the first time she wanted something and the world said no.