Groff Conklin (ed)

by Five Odd

  Dick, a man bored with a life in which things had come too easily and too early.

  Helen, without moral sense or feminine warmth, hard as diamond.

  Brent, bruised by a world in which everybody was quicker and cleverer than he was.

  And lone, a girl who should have been loved and admired but had always been unwanted and resented.

  It was a group of useless people, five men and women who had grappled with the world and with life and had failed.

  Five failures—and they were going to blend into something new, wonderful and perfect.

  I saw quite a lot of the clearing and re-training processes. I didn't see A.D. again—he was being careful—and he didn't see Lorraine. He had known he wouldn't, of course. After the first day she wouldn't have known him anyway.

  The ordinary human being's mind is an overgrown wilderness. There are beautiful flowers and trees in it, but none of the flowers are as tough as the weeds. The weeds tangle up huge areas and lurk in the shadows of the loveliest plants and shrubs. They suck most of the nourishment from the soil and often strangle the more delicate blooms. Sometimes when you look into such a jungle you can see nothing but weeds.

  Psychiatry for centuries waged a hopeless war on the weeds. Psychiatrists could cut a weed down, but that was like trying to stop the sea with a cardboard box.

  What could be done, however, was clear the wilderness and start again.

  As a reversed current prevents permanent magnetism being stored in a piece of equipment, a certain artificial neural current could cancel out everything in a mind—not by painting over what was there already, but by balancing it, nullifying it, totally erasing it It was like re-recording on magnetic tape.

  And the cleared mind was capable of wonderful things. It learned rapidly and correctly. No longer did it know that blond men hit you. Its calculations for the safety of the body it controlled weren't biased by the command when there's danger always jump left. It wasn't necessary anymore for men to fall in love with every woman who reminded them of their mothers. When a particular pattern of light and shade fell on their eyes women no longer had sickening, blinding migraine.

  All this wouldn't have been much good if the weeds had been able to spring up rapidly again.

  They didn't. The weeds of the mind gain strength with age. A weed could grow in a cleared mind, but it would be thirty years before it could take firm hold. And usually adults, unlike children, were able to recognize these weeds for what they were and pull them out easily, long before they became a danger.

  The Units had grown out of this clearing process.

  As mankind's boundaries were set wider and wider, as technology and education and social science and economics and politics and the human span of life grew, as man outgrew the planets and moved out into the galaxy, the task of directing things became more and more difficult and complex.

  More electronic brains were used every week, but getting the right answer from an electronic brain depended on punching the right buttons. Cybernetics helped to do things, it could never do them.

  Hence the Units. Five cleared human beings, specially trained for a job and trained to work together, each to perform some function and trust the other four to do the rest, could do things no electronic brain could do and no group of a thousand individuals could do.

  You see, the Units never made mistakes. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn't. When they did things which turned out to be wrong, subsequent investigation showed that their decision had still been right. Essential information might have been missing. Immediate action might have been called for on a basis of guesswork. The choice might have been among half a dozen courses of action each of which was wrong. Or they might have done the thing too late. Units could make that kind of mistake—their timing could be wrong. But being reasonable, being 100 per cent sane, being complete, being trained, being a Unit, no Unit could be wrong if it tried.

  The Unit Fathers were kind of team managers. Sometimes a Unit on its own was too refined an instrument for ordinary things like booking accommodation, getting on a train, or taking a day off. Leaving a Unit to attend to such things was like using a scalpel to cut bread.

  It wasn't just that a bread-knife could do the job as welL A bread-knife could do the job a whole lot better.

  Hence, me, Unit Father—bread knife.

  It took only three or four months to train a Unit. That included all the general information the Uniteers individually had to have about life. True, there were enormous gaps, but only gaps which could quickly and quite easily be filled.

  At the end of three months my Unit and I were on a ship bound for Perry on.

  2.

  There is plenty of time to get to know people on spaceship trips. None of them are longer than about two months, but two months is a long time when you have nothing to do but eat and sleep.

  On ocean trips at least you can play tennis and swim and lean on the rail. In a spaceship the most exciting game you can play is chess. Playing cards isn't impossible, but the technique of handling metal cards and sliding them over the magnetized table destroys most players' concentration.

  We hadn't really met socially before the trip. The five who made up the Unit proper had been trained to work with each other and I'd seen them all at every stage from birth to maturity, so to speak. Yet it was only on the Violin Song that we had time to sit together and get to know each other.

  The first day out of New York I had morning coffee with Dick.

  "Let's get to business," he said briskly. "As I understand

  it, we're being sent to Perry on to arbitrate between the two main factions there. But the real reason is because Perryon might be the base of the Traders. That right?"

  I was a little startled by this blunt statement In essence it was correct but when I'd been told about it the matter hadn't been reduced to its essentials like this.

  "Correct," I said.

  "If we find that's so, that Perryon is the Traders' base, what are we supposed to do about it?"

  "Just 'take appropriate action,'" I said.

  Dick nodded. "Carte blanche. That's good. Okay, I'm going to check on Perryon. I've got a dozen books. Be seeing you."

  He shot himself across the saloon, disdaining the handholds.

  This, then, was the new, dynamic Dick, the brains of my Unit. A very single-minded young man.

  He'd covered a lot in a few words. Officially we were going to Perryon as arbitrators. Perryon, like many another place at many another time, had a North-South squabble. My Unit-was taking the place of a governor, with all the governor's power and far more than the governor's responsibilities.

  Probably even if the question of the Traders hadn't arisen a Unit would have been sent to do this job. It was about time that Perryon, an impecunious, inhospitable, though climatically mild world, had its first Unit

  The Traders, or Free Traders, were smugglers.

  Before space travel was an accomplished fact it had always been assumed that if we ever did get to the planets and to other stars freight rates would be fantastically high. Why this was assumed isn't clear. The kind of ships we use cost nothing to run and not very much to service. Two months is a long run, most journeys taking less time. Hold space is nothing in the star lanes. It costs very little more to transport things between Earth and Arcturus than between Paris and New York. In some cases it actually costs less to move things light-years between worlds than a few hundred miles on Earth, depending on how much handling is needed.

  This led to difficulties. Newly-settled planets didn't bother to develop certain industries. It wasn't worth while when the products of New York, Berlin and London cost only a little more than they cost in New York, Berlin and London.

  This in turn led to economic chaos. Capital which was spent on the colonies didn't stay in the colonies, it came back to traders, not to the investors. Demand for many kinds of goods began to exceed the supply. Earth hadn't the space to expand any more; the colonies had, and
didn't use it.

  So heavy tariffs went on most goods being exported to the colonies. Not on newspapers, magazines, books, movies, phonograph records, but on washing-machines, cars, radio sets, furniture, typewriters clothes. The tariff wasn't imposed to protect local industries, it was imposed to force local industries to start

  A new balance was achieved.

  Then, of course, smuggling started. It was too easy. Anyone who had a ship could pack it full of, say, washing-machines and sell them at a profit of forty dollars per machine on some planet where the duty-protected washing-machines were expensive and not very good. Three thousand washing-machines at forty dollars' clear profit a time is $120,000. The expenses of the trip could be as low as fifteen thousand dollars.

  Any way you looked at it, the Traders were on to a good thing.

  The chances that Perryon was the Traders' base weren't high. But it was known they had to have a base somewhere, on some settled planet It was also known their base couldn't be Earth.

  With the kind of space travel we used, the only places anyone could get to were the places everyone could get to. It was as if all travel were by railroad—where the lines went any train could go. Where they didn't go, no train could go.

  Part of our job was to check Perryon—one of nearly fifty worlds on which the Traders' base might be.

  While I was still sitting there—I say sitting because that's easy to say, not because it's accurate—Lorraine came through, using the handholds. She carried a towel and a clean fallsuit, apparently on her way to have a bath.

  When she saw me, however, she pulled herself over beside me and strapped herself about the middle, fastening her towel on another strap.

  "Say, Edgar," she began. "You knew me before, didn't you?"

  "Before you volunteered for a Unit?" I asked. Obviously that was what she meant but I wanted time to consider my answer.

  "Yes. What was I like?"

  She meant, compared with what she was like now.

  I looked at her. Physically, of course, she was exactly the same, except perhaps that she was a shade more alert now than she had been before, a little easier and more assured in her manner, and held herself more proudly.

  Temperamentally she wasnt the same girl. She was serene now, but not serene-placid, more serene-enthusiastic. She had developed a sense of humor she had shown no sign of having before.

  "Don't act as if it were top secret information," she said. "It isn't. They'd have told me at the depot, but they'd have told me just what they wanted me to know. Why did I volunteer?"

  "You were going to commit suicide otherwise," I said. "No!" she exclaimed incredulously. "What for7" "A man."

  "Good God. I must have been crazy. They should have told me about that. Did you know the man?" "No."

  "Did you know me well?" "No."

  "You're not much help," Lorraine complained.

  "Uniteers aren't supposed to be interested in their previous history," I said.

  "Oh, I'm not desperate to know about mine," Lorraine remarked, shrugging her shoulders. "Only they might tell us a little more. Was I rich or poor, sociable or lonely, sought after or ignored? Did men write sonnets to me OT pretend not to see me in the street? Was I a good girl or a loose woman?"

  "Forget it," I said. "It doesn't matter."

  "No, I guess it doesn't," she agreed mildly. 'Tell me one thing, though. Which do you prefer—the girl I am now or the girl I was?"

  "The girl you are now," I said instantly.

  She smiled and unstrapped herself. "Well, that's something," she said, and pushed off with her feet

  I watched her fly gracefully out of the saloon. Some people think women look their best in spaceships. All the curves are high curves, with no gravity straining at pectoral, abdominal, gluteal and thigh muscles. On the other hand the fallsuit which is usually worn in space—a one-piece garment caught at wrists and ankles—is seldom glamorous.

  Thinking of fallsuits made me glance beside me. Lorraine had left her towel and clean suit behind.

  I threw back my head and laughed. That was supposed to be impossible. People who bad been cleared just didn't forget things. So this towel wasn't here. I was imagining things.

  I unstrapped Lorraine's things and myself and started after her.

  She was in the so-called bath when I reached the so-called bathroom. One bathroom was allocated to the six of us.

  If you want to make some money and be blessed by thousands of spaceship travellers, get busy and think up some satisfactory way of getting washed in free fall. The ordinary toilet functions aren't too badly catered for, but when it comes to taking a bath human Ingenuity so far hasn't distinguished itself.

  You could quite easily be sprayed by water, like a shower, but when the water bounces off you in all directions, and off the walls, and back again, how are you going to escape drowning? Water and air in space are the very devil. Surface tension is enough to keep droplets of water together, not enough to keep big globules in one piece. When you touch water it runs all over you.

  The only way to take a bath is this. You put on an air-mask and go into a tank full of water, with a complicated water-lock to enable you to get in and out without taking all the water in the tank with you.

  Lorraine was in the tank. Her discarded clothes hung from a strap. Apparently she hadn't remembered leaving her things with me.

  I left them on another strap and was just leaving when I heard a muffled tapping.

  I was puzzled. Why should Lorraine be tapping the inside of her tank? Unless she'd taken in with her something hard with which to do the tapping it must be quite painful, banging the inside of a metal tank with bare knuckles against water resistance.

  The tapping went on, insistent

  I tried the water-lock. Naturally it didn't move.

  I tapped back. There was a pause, then the tapping inside resumed, quicker and stronger.

  Not content with forgetting things, Lorraine seemed to have locked herself into a water-tank. I grinned again.

  Then I saw that the tank was locked on the outside.

  These tanks are like ordinary bathroom doors—they have a catch inside. But there was also a lock, used presumably

  90 | HVBODD

  when a tank was empty or out of order or being used for something else. Someone had locked Lorraine in.

  I looked in another bathroom. There was a key in the lock of its bath. I removed it, took it back and tried it on the lock of Lorraine's tank. It fitted.

  Lorraine came out dressed in an air-mask and grabbed her towel and fallsuit "Be a gentieman, Edgar," she said. "Retreat."

  "Why?" I asked. "Don't they remove all your inhibitions when they clear you?"

  "Yes," she said primly. "But you still have yours."

  "I'm not leaving you alone anyway," I said more soberly. "Someone's trying to kill you. And he might try again."

  Lorraine stared at me for a moment. After that she wasted no time in getting herself dried and into the fallsuit. Then we went in search of the rest of the Unit.

  This was the Unit's first job.

  They very soon reached the conclusion that my guess was right and that someone had really tried to kill Lorraine.

  The tiny facemask can manufacture air for about fifteen minutes. But for the accident of Lorraine leaving her towel behind no one would have gone near the bathroom for at least half an hour. At the end of that time someone would have asked "Where's Lorraine?" and after another quarter of an hour it would have been established that I'd seen her going to have a bath. We'd go looking for her, find the tank unlocked by this time, of course, with Lorraine drowned inside it. We'd have presumed that her mask was faulty.

  If Lorraine hadn't realized almost as soon as she got into the tank that she'd left her things behind, and tried to come out to go and get them, she wouldn't have discovered that she was locked in until Fd been and gone.

  The chances were altogether too much in favor of Lorraine being drowned for the incident to be a
nything but a carefully-planned attempt at murder.

  Dick left us for a while to get information and a passenger list from the captain. When he came back the Unit went to work again.

  I wasn't in this. I sat in the room and listened, but I couldn't help them and I didn't understand much of what was going on. Someone would begin to say something, then stop. Lorraine and Dick would speak at once. Brent would begin something, Helen would take it up, Dick would shake his

  head. Lorraine would look up suddenly, lone would interpret the look and for a moment they'd all be chattering excitedly.

  It didn't look at all impressive at first Then you realized that every time anybody stopped speaking, a whole process of thought had been followed out and discarded.

  You see ft happening sometimes with people who have quick minds and know each other very well. Someone begins to ask something, after a word or two another begins to answer, then the first speaker interrupts, satisfied.

  I once saw a class of bright schoolboys running a competitive quiz. One question and answer went like this:

  "A man asleep one night dreamed that—"

  "The answer is, how could he—"

  "That's right"

  The Unit worked like that They didn't have telepathy and they didnt need ft Language and knowledge of each other's processes of thought were enough.

  Dick had to do more talking than anybody else, because the others had much more difficulty in understanding what he was thinking than he had in understanding them. However, even Dick generally didnt have to say very much before the others grasped what he was driving at.

  Having reached the tentative conclusion that the most probable motive for the attempt to murder Lorraine was that the Traders did have Interests on Perryon and didn't want the Unit to investigate there, they turned their attention to the passenger list It contained quite a lot of information about the people on board. Nevertheless, I didn't think for a moment that the Unit would be able to establish the identity of the assassin just from that

  They thought so, however. They came up with three names and declared confidently that the assassin must be one of these three. They, didn't give their reasons. Then we went to see the captain again.