“It all comes from blind stubbornness,” declared Morgan. “As I have conclusively shown, a social integration along the psychological principles I have discovered would eliminate—”
And your trouble is, you want power, and too many people are still hunting a panacea, a final answer, thought Mandelbaum coldly. You sound intellectual, so they think you are; a certain class still wants a man on a white horse, but prefers him with a textbook under one arm. You and Lenin!
“Excuse me,” he said aloud. “What do you propose to do, Mr. North?”
“New York started as a port an’ it’ll be a port again before long. This time we wanna see that the workers that make the port go, get their fair share in governin’ it!”
In other words, you also want to be dictator. Aloud, thoughtfully: “There may be something in what you both say. But we can’t do everything at once, you know. It seems to me, though, like you two gentlemen are thinking along pretty parallel lines. Why don’t you get together and present a united front? Then I’d find it a lot easier to put your proposals before the council.”
Morgan’s pale cheeks flushed. “A band of sweaty human machines—”
North’s big fists doubled. “Watch y’r langwidge, sonny boy.”
“No, really,” said Mandelbaum. “You both want a better integrated government, don’t you? It seems to me—”
Hmmm. The same thought lit the two pairs of eyes. It had been shockingly easy to plant it. Together, perhaps, we could … and then afterward I can get rid of him—
There was more discussion, but it ended with North and Morgan going out together. Mandelbaum could almost read their contempt for him; hadn’t he ever heard of divide and rule?
Briefly, there was sadness in him. So far, people hadn’t really changed much. The wild-eyed dreamer simply built higher castles in the clouds; the hard-boiled racketeer had no vocabulary of ideas or concepts to rise above his own language of greed.
It wouldn’t last. Within months, there would be no more Norths and no more Morgans. The change in themselves, and in all mankind, would destroy their littleness. But meanwhile, they were dangerous animals and had to be dealt with.
He reached for the phone and called over the web operated for him alone. “Hullo, Bowers? How’re you doing?—Look, I’ve got the Dynapsychist and the rackets boss together. They’ll probably plan a sort of fake Popular Front, with the idea of getting seats on the council and then taking over the whole show by force—palace revolution, coup d’état, whatever you call it.—Yeh. Alert our agents in both parties. I’ll want complete reports. Then we want to use those agents to egg them on against each other. —Yeah, the alliance is as unstable as any I ever heard of. A little careful pushing, and they’ll bury the hatchet all right—in each other. Then when the militia has mopped up what’s left of the tong war, we can start our propaganda campaign in favor of common sense.—Sure, it’ll take some tricky timing, but we can swing it.—”
For a moment, as he laid the phone down, his face sagged with an old grief. He had just condemned some scores of people, most of whom were merely bewildered and misled, to death. But it couldn’t be helped. He had the life and freedom of several million human beings to save—the price was not exorbitant.
“Uneasy sits the butt that bears the boss,” he muttered, and looked at his appointment list. There was an hour yet before the representative from Albany arrived. That was going to be a hot one to handle. The city was breaking state and national laws every day—it had to—and the governor was outraged. He wanted to bring the whole state back under his own authority. It wasn’t an unreasonable wish, but the times weren’t ripe; and when they eventually were, the old forms of government would be no more important than the difference between Homoousian and Homoiousian. But it was going to take a lot of argument to convince the Albany man of that.
Meanwhile, though, he had an hour free. He hesitated for a split second between working on the new rationing system and on the plans for extending law and order to outer Jersey. Then he laid both aside in favor of the latest report on the water situation.
CHAPTER 10
THERE was a dimness in the laboratory which made the pulsing light at the machine’s heart stand out all the brighter, weirdly blue and restless between the coils and the impassive meter faces. Grunewald’s face was corpse-colored as he bent over it.
“Well,” he said unnecessarily, “that seems to be that.”
He flicked the main switch, and the electric hum whined and the light died. For a moment he stood thoughtfully regarding the anesthesized rat within the coils. Hairlike wires ran from its shaven body to the meters over which Johansson and Lewis stood.
Lewis nodded. “Neural rate jumps up again.” He touched the dials of the oscilloscope with finicking care. “And just about on the curve we predicted. You’ve generated an inhibitor field, all right.” There would be other tests to make, detailed study, but that could be left to assistants. The main problem was solved.
Grunewald reached in with thick, oddly delicate hands and took out the rat and began extracting the probes. “Poor little guy,” he murmured. “I wonder if we’re doing him a favor.”
Corinth, hunched moodily on a stool, looked up sharply.
“What use is intelligence to him?” pursued Grunewald. “It just makes him realize the horror of his own position. What use is it to any of us, in fact?”
“Would you go back, yourself?” asked Corinth.
“Yes.” Grunewald’s square blond face held a sudden defiance. “Yes, I would. It’s not good to think too much or too clearly.”
“Maybe,” whispered Corinth, “maybe you’ve got something there. The new civilization—not merely its technology, but its whole value system, all its dreams and hopes —will have to be built afresh, and that will take many generations. We’re savages now, with all the barrenness of the savage’s existence. Science isn’t the whole of life.”
“No,” said Lewis. “But scientists—like artists of all kinds, I suppose—have by and large kept their sanity through the change because they had a purpose in life to start with, something outside themselves to which they could give all they had.” His plump face flashed with a tomcat grin. “Also, Pete, as an old sensualist I’m charmed with all the new possibilities. The art and music I used to swoon over have gone, yes, but I don’t appreciate good wine and cuisine the less; in fact, my perception is heightened, there are nuances I never suspected before.”
It had been a strange conversation, one of a few words and many gestures and facial expressions thrown into a simultaneous discussion of technical problems:
“Well,” Johansson had said, “we’ve got our inhibitor field. Now it’s up to you neurologists to study it in detail and find out just what we can expect to happen to life on Earth.”
“Uh-huh,” said Lewis. “I’m not working on that just now, though, except as a kibitzer. Bronzini and MacAndrews can handle it. I’m co-opting myself into the psychological department, which is not only more interesting but of more immediate practical importance. I’ll handle the neurological-cybernetic aspect of their work.”
“Our old psychology is almost useless,” nodded Corinth. “We’re changing too much to understand our own motivations any more. Why am I spending most of my time here, when maybe I should be home helping Sheila face her adjustment? I just can’t help myself, I have to explore this new field, but—To start afresh, on a rational basis, we’ll have to know something about the dynamics of man —As for me, I’m off this baby too, now that we’ve actually succeeded in generating a field. Rossman wants me to work on his spaceship project as soon as he can get it organized.”
“Spaceship—faster-than-light travel, eh?”
“That’s right. The principle uses an aspect of wave mechanics which wasn’t suspected before the change. We’ll generate a psi wave which—Never mind, I’ll explain it to you when you’ve gotten around to learning tensor analysis and matrix algebra. I’m collaborating with some others here
in drawing up plans for the thing, while we wait for the men and materials to start building. We should be able to go anywhere in the galaxy once we’ve got the ship.”
The two threads coalesced: “Running away from ourselves,” said Grunewald. “Running into space itself to escape.” For a moment the four men were silent, thinking.
Corinth got to his feet. “I’m going home,” he said harshly.
His mind was a labyrinth of interweaving thought chains as he went down the stairs. Mostly he was thinking of Sheila, but something whispered of Helga too, and there was a flow of diagrams and equations, a vision of chill immensity through which the Earth spun like a bit of dust. An oddly detached part of himself was coolly studying that web of thought, so that he could learn how it worked and train himself to handle his own potentialities.
Language: The men of the Institute, who knew each other, were involuntarily developing a new set of communication symbols, a subtle and powerful thing in which every gesture had meaning and the speeding brain of the listener, without conscious effort, filled in the gaps and grasped the many-leveled meaning. It was almost too efficient, you gave your inmost self away. The man of the future would likely go naked in soul as well as in body, and Corinth wasn’t sure he liked the prospect.
But then there was Sheila and himself; their mutual understanding made their talk unintelligible to an outsider. And there were a thousand, a million groups throughout the world, creating their own dialects on a basis of past experience which had not been shared with all humanity. Some arbitrary language for the whole world would have to be devised.
Telepathy? There could no longer be any doubt that it existed, in some people at least. Extrasensory perception would have to be investigated when things had quieted down. There was so much to do, and life was so terribly short!
Corinth shivered. Fear of personal extinction was supposed to be an adolescent reaction; but in a sense, all men were adolescents once more, on a new plane—no, children, babies.
Well, no doubt the biologists would within the next few years find some means of lengthening the lifespan, prolonging it for centuries perhaps. But was that ultimately desirable?
He came out on the street and located the automobile Rossman had provided for him. At least, he thought wryly as he entered it, the parking problem has been solved. No more traffic like there once was.
Eventually, no more New York. Big cities had no real economic justification. He came from a small town, and he had always loved mountains and forests and sea. Still, there was something about this brawling, frenetic, overcrowded, hard, inhuman, magnificent city whose absence would leave an empty spot in the world to come.
It was a hot night. His shirt stuck clammily to him, and the air seemed thick. Overhead, between the darkened buildings and the dead neon signs, heat lightning flickered palely and all the earth yearned for rain. His headlights cut a dull swath through the gummy blackness.
There were more cars abroad than there had been even a week ago. The city was just about tamed now; the gang war between Portmen and Dynapsychists, suppressed two weeks back, seemed to have been the last flare of violence. Rations were still short, but people were being put to work again and they’d all live.
Corinth pulled up in the parking lot behind his apartment and walked around to the front. The power ration authority had lately permitted this building to resume elevator service, which was a mercy. He hadn’t enjoyed climbing fifteen flights when electricity was really short.
I hope—He was thinking of Sheila, but he left the thought unfinished. She’d been getting thin, poor kid, and she didn’t sleep well and sometimes she woke with a dry scream in her throat and groped blindly for him. He wished his work didn’t take him away from her. She needed companionship badly. Maybe he could get her some kind of job to fill the hours.
When he came out on his floor, the hall was darkened save for a vague night light, but radiance streamed under his door. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was later than her usual bedtime. So she couldn’t sleep tonight, either.
He tried the door, but it was locked and he rapped. He thought he heard a smothered scream from within, and knocked harder. She opened the door so violently that he almost fell inside.
“Pete, Pete, Pete!” She pressed herself to him with a shudder. With his arms about her, he felt how close the delicate ribs lay to her skin. The lamplight was harsh, filling the room, and oddly lusterless on her hair. When she lifted her face, he saw that it was wet.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. He spoke aloud, in the old manner, and his voice was suddenly wavering.
“Nerves.” She drew him inside and closed the door. In a nightgown and bathrobe she looked pathetically young, but there was something ancient in her eyes.
“Hot night to be wearing a robe,” he said, groping for expression.
“I feel cold.” Her lips trembled.
His own mouth fell into a harsh line, and he sat down in an easy chair and pulled her to his lap. She laid arms about him, hugging him to her, and he felt the shiver in her body.
“This is not good,” he said. “This is the worst attack you’ve had yet.”
“I don’t know what I’d have done if you’d been much longer about coming,” she said tonelessly.
They began to talk then, in the new interweaving of word and gesture, tone and silence and shared remembering, which was peculiarly theirs.
“I’ve been thinking too much,” she told him. “We all think too much these days.” (Help me, my dearest! I am going down in darkness and only you can rescue me.)
“You’ll have to get used to it,” he answered dully. (How can I help? My hands reach for you and close on emptiness.)
“You have strength—” she cried. “Give it to me!” (Nightmares each time I try to sleep. Waking, I see the world and man as a flickering in cold and nothingness, empty out to the edge of forever. I can’t endure that vision.)
Weariness, hopelessness: “I’m not strong,” he said. “I just keep going somehow. So must you.”
“Hold me close, Pete,” Father image, “hold me close,” she whimpered. Pressing to him as if he were a shield against the blackness outside and the darkness within and the things rising through it: “Don’t ever let me go!”
“Sheila,” he said. (Beloved: wife, mistress, comrade.) “Sheila, you’ve got to hang on. All this is just an increased power to think—to visualize, to handle data and the dreams you yourself have created. Nothing more.”
“But it is changing me!” The horror of death was in her now. She fought it with something like wistfulness: “—and where has our world gone? Where are our hopes and plans and togetherness?”
“We can’t bring them back,” he replied. Emptiness, irrevocability: “We have to make out with what we have now.”
“I know, I know—and I can’t!” Tears gleamed along her cheeks. “Oh, Pete, I’m crying more for you now,” (Maybe I won’t even go on loving you.) “than for me.”
He tried to stay cool. “Too far a retreat from reality is insanity. If you went mad—” Unthinkableness.
“I know, I know,” she said. “All too well, Pete. Hold me close.”
“And it doesn’t help you to know—” he said, and wondered if the engineers would ever be able to find the breaking strength of the human spirit. He felt very near to giving way.
CHAPTER 11
SUMMER waned as the planet turned toward winter. On a warm evening late in September, Mandelbaum sat by the window with Rossman, exchanging a few low-voiced words. The room was unlit, full of night. Far below them the city of Manhattan glowed with spots of radiance, not the frantic flash and glare of earlier days but the lights of a million homes. Overhead, there was a dull blue wash of luminance across the sky, flickering and glimmering on the edge of visibility. The Empire State Building was crowned with a burning sphere like a small sun come to rest, and the wandering air held a faint tingle of ozone. The two men sat quietly, resting, smoking the tobacco which had
again become minutely available, Mandelbaum’s pipe and Rossman’s cigarette like two ruddy eyes in the twilit room. They were waiting for death.
“Wife,” said Rossman with a note of gentle reproach. It could be rendered as: (I still don’t see why you wouldn’t tell your wife of this, and be with her tonight. It may be the last night of your lives.)
“Work, city, time,” and the immemorial shrug and the wistful tone: (We both have our work to do, she at the relief center and I here at the defense hub. We haven’t told the city either, you and I and the few others who know. It’s best not to do so, eh?) We couldn’t have evacuated them, there would have been no place for them to go and the fact of our attempting it would’ve been a tip-off to the enemy, an invitation to send the rockets immediately. Either we can save the city or we can’t; at the moment, there’s nothing anyone can do but wait and see if the defense works. (I wouldn’t worry my Liebchen—she’d worry on my account and the kids’ and grandchildren’s. No, let it happen, one way or the other. Still I do wish we could be together now, Sarah and I, the whole family—) Mandelbaum tamped his pipe with a horny thumb.
(The Brookhaven men think the field will stop the blast and radiation), implied Rossman. We’ve had them working secretly for the past month or more, anticipating an attack. The cities we think will be assailed are guarded now—we hope. (But it’s problematic. I wish we didn’t have to do it this way.)
“What other way?” We knew, from our spies and deductions, that the Soviets have developed their intercontinental atomic rockets, and that they’re desperate. Revolution at home, arms and aid being smuggled in to the insurgents from America. They’ll make a last-ditch attempt to wipe us out, and we believe the attack is due tonight. But if it fails, they’ve shot their bolt. It must have taken all their remaining resources to design and build those rockets. “Let them exhaust themselves against us, while the rebels take over their country. Dictatorship is done for.”
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